So that was a bit of a long-winded explanation, but hopefully, it gave you some perspective around why I came here, some of the things I learned at MPC and why I’m so excited about the future here at Voya.
Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Andrew Kligerman with Credit Suisse.
Andrew Kligerman: I’m trying to get a general feel for how you’re thinking about your capital going forward? So as I estimate post Benefitfocus acquisition, you probably have around $300 million of excess capital. So I’m wondering why not get to work earlier on the buyback given how cheap Voya stock is relative to peers? And along those same lines, M&A. You’ve done two material acquisitions last year? And how are you thinking about M&A going forward?
Heather Lavallee: Yes, Andrew, thanks for the question. It’s Heather. Don and I are going to tag team this one. I’m going to let him start on the capital, and I’ll finish on the M&A question.
Don Templin: Yes, Andrew, I think we would have been pretty clear when we entered into the transaction and announced the transaction with Benefitfocus that we were going to pause the share repurchases for the fourth quarter and that we were going to pause the share repurchases for the first quarter. We obviously delivered a very, very strong 2022. Our capital is in a very strong position. We’re very optimistic about our capital generation capability, cash generation capability in the first quarter. And that’s why we were able to, I think, so firmly and make the commitment that we would begin returning capital in the second quarter. I think pacing will depend a little bit on what happens economically and our actual cash generation in the first quarter, but we are really committed to returning to the repurchase of shares or the return of capital. And as I said, we’re also going to balance that with making sure that we’re managing appropriately our leverage ratio.
Heather Lavallee: Yes. And Andrew, if I can pick it up from there. If you just go back to, Don referenced the $8.5 billion, $8.7 billion of capital we’ve returned to shareholders since we’ve been a public company. If you just look at 2022 alone, the fact that we deployed $1.2 billion of capital and $750 million in share buybacks. I think that’s a strong result and certainly, capital management is going to continue to be a really important lever for us as we go forward to be able to increase our EPS in addition to revenue growth and margin expansion. So just to kind of add that on to Don’s point, but to your question specifically around M&A, and I’ll go back to what we talked about at our 2021 Investor Day. And we’ve said our approach to M&A has always been, it’s got to be strategic, it’s got to be additive, we want — we’ve always been very opportunistic in terms of how we’ve approached it and very, very selective.
So — and at the end of the day, we want to do something that is in the best interest of both customers and shareholders. So when we talked at Investor Day in 2021, we said that there were really three capabilities that we needed to fill. We talked about improving customer outcomes and experiences at the workplace, we talked about adding technology and data-oriented capabilities and then we also talked about in investment management, expanding international distribution and growth in privates and alternatives. And so if you look at what we have done with the acquisitions that we announced and then recently closed, we have executed on the M&A. We believe at this point, we’ve got — we’ve achieved scale, we have all the capabilities that we need to be able to grow.
