All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Geoff Kwan. I'm the analyst here at RBC Capital Markets that covers Power Corporation of Canada. From the company, I'm very happy to have with us, Jeff Orr, who's the President and CEO. I know that there are some familiar faces, some that may be kind of newer to the story. So, Jeff, I thought maybe to start off with is maybe just to give a little bit of a quick overview of Power Corporation, where we are today, kind of state of the nation sort of thing. Okay, Geoff, thank you and welcome, everybody. Thanks to RBC for hosting us here today, Geoff, for you and your colleagues. Power Corporation is known to some of you, but to others it'll be a new name. So I will spend a few minutes just setting the stage as to who we are, and in a very simple way, we are a company that is public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, controlled by an entrepreneurial family at the top, the Desmarais family. Paul Desmarais bought control of Power Corporation in 1968, passed the reins in 1996 to his two sons, who are still the two controlling shareholders, and they each have children in the business who are active in managing some of the businesses that are at Power Corporation, so we're into the third generation. And so what flows from that is, while we own very, very large businesses, we're also a very long-term oriented company. I'll describe a little bit of our history, and then I'll talk about what we are, and then maybe pass it back to you, and we'll talk about value creation and strategies. So the history was Power was virtually like a closed-end fund when Paul Desmarais took it over in 1968. He switched it into focusing on a smaller number of investments, and it became a classic conglomerate in the 1970s and in the 1980s. Made a number of investments in financial services, bought Great-West Lifeco, and bought Investors Group, which was the Canadian sister company to Investors Diversified Services out of Minneapolis, which became American Express Advisors, now Ameriprise. So we own the Canadian sister company to Ameriprise, called now IG Wealth Management. Through the mid-1990s up until the financial crisis, the financial services business just exploded. We acquired basically everything that moved in Canada and insurance and in the fund business, and we ended up becoming overwhelmingly financial services. The success track record at that point, Barron's ran an article in 2007 saying, "These guys are the Berkshire Hathaways of the north, only more successful," because by the time the crisis came, we had 20-year TSRs, total shareholder returns of 22%-23% at Power Corporation, same thing at Great-West, our biggest sub. So we had this amazing roll-up of 20 years of buying companies who were very M&A focused, and financial services ended up, as I said, being 80% of the business. Financial crisis comes, and we're rock solid because one of the things we do is risk management, risk management, risk management. We have a family with most of their net worth tied into financial services. Don't blow the place up. So the crisis comes, Great-West Lifeco keeps its AA credit rating. We think the only major life company that didn't get publicly traded, life company that didn't get downgraded through the crisis. So we're kind of superstars by the time the crisis is over. We were great in the upheavals, and we were fantastic through the crisis. I'm speed dating here because we've got 30 minutes. Sorry about this. We end up going, but we weren't perfect. We realized in kind of 2012, 2013, we had kind of squeezed too tight on costs. We had not invested in technology. Digital was coming, and we ended up going through a period where for about five, six years, we really had to reinvest in our businesses. Our profits started to go sideways. Our multiple started to come down. By 2018, 2019, people were starting to throw tomatoes at us saying, "Oh, you guys don't care about shareholder value." And so we're like, "Us, what are you talking about? Are you talking to us? We're not doing well." So we ended up, you know, we care a lot about that. We spent a lot of time as to what are we doing, what we need to do differently, and what we don't need to change. And we did, in the very end of 2019, so a little over three years ago, decide to make a number of changes to what we were doing to make it more shareholder friendly to the public shareholders, not just to the Desmarais family. And in doing that, we decided we were going to do a bunch of things. We were going to, first of all, focus on financial services only. We had about 80% of the business of Power Corporation is in three public companies that we own: Great-West Lifeco, IGM, and GBL, which is the biggest holding, second biggest holding company in Europe, which we control with the Frère family. By the way, the market cap of those companies is about CAD 60 billion. So we are managing and controlling about CAD 60 billion in market cap companies. By the time it gets up to Power Corporation, when you've got minority interests in there and a discount, it's about CAD 25 billion as the market cap of Power Corporation, but we manage much bigger businesses than that. So those three businesses were basically the key drivers of profitability, and they're about 80% of our value. The other 20% is up at Power Corporation, and it was not financial services, diversified across a broad range of platforms and businesses, most of it NAV basis when our public subs are mostly earnings. The market was telling us, "We don't know what you own. They might be good businesses, but we're not going to spend our time trying to understand it, and they may be greater than they may not be, but we don't want them." Our discount to our net asset value, which had been very tight back in the early 2000s, gapped out to about 35%. Back to end of 2019, we said, "Okay, we're changing things. We're going to focus on financial services only. Anything that's non-financial services won't be here in five, six years. We're not going to do a fire sale. We're not going to pull the rug out from partners that we've partnered with to say we're going to build your electric bus company or we're going to build your lighting company. We'll honor our commitments, but over time, we're taking capital out." We have all these investment platforms at Power. We're going to fund those with third-party capital and build alternative asset management businesses because we've got great teams, and if we can fund them with third-party capital and make profits as an asset manager, we'll do that because our subs, Great-West Life and IGM, need those products. And so we got some synergies there. And if we don't succeed at that, we'll ultimately sell all those businesses as well. But what we're going to have in five years at Power will be a smaller, simpler business in financial services. And then we're going to continue with the public companies to reorient those businesses towards growth. And I can talk a lot more about what we're doing because that still is the main action. So simplify financial services, not diversification, and then at the same time, simplify our structures. So we had six companies that were public. We merged Power Financial and Power Corporation. We had two holding companies in Europe. We merged them. Sometimes we had cross-ownerships of companies. We're undoing that, simplifying the structure, simplifying what we do, and go out and talk to the market much more than we had done in the past. At At that time, so that's where we've been for three years. We got the discount down to about from 35% down to 17%, still not where it was trading historically. It's gapped up a little bit in the last few months, but it kind of waves on its way down. So that's one of the value drivers I can talk about. It's not the most significant value driver, but it's one of the value drivers. Maybe stop there. I've said a lot. I've thrown a lot at people. So it's a financial services business, bottom line. No, thanks for that, Jeff. And maybe we can go into some of those businesses, go a little bit more detail what you're talking about. And let's start off with Great-West Lifeco. Obviously, a lot of changes that we've seen there operationally, organically, as well as acquisitions. You know, kind of talk about where it is today, how you kind of take a look at the outlook both organically through acquisition, and obviously there's certain parts of your business that you've been going quite significantly, like on the Empower side. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. So I should have said in my brief intro that was too brief that Great-West Lifeco and IGM, basically those businesses are in, they help people save and they provide insurance. And we do it through financial advisors on the individual side, and we do it through employers. We have two main channels. Increasingly, there's a digital channel, but through advisors and through employers. And we're in Canada, the United States, the U.K., Ireland, and Germany. And we have a, through our partnership with CITIC, we have 28% of the biggest asset manager in China. So we've got, that's basically where we're positioned. So insurance investments through two channels. The businesses at Great-West Lifeco have been really quite, I would say, streamlined in the last several years. But what we are doing is, I would say, shifting where the capital mix is into higher growth businesses. And this just gives an example of the long-term nature. The biggest thing going on at Great-West is what we are building at Empower. And Empower is now the second largest defined contribution business in the United States. We have 17.5 million Americans that we manage their 401(k) plans for. That's second to Fidelity, who would be somewhere around 22-23. They don't break out their DB versus DC, so that's our guess. And you got Principal at nine, and you got Voya at six, and then you're down from there. Okay, so we're by far the largest. We actually set out that strategy in 2005 and 2006 and said, "This business is going to consolidate. We're good at M&A. We're going to roll this up." The strategy there, and I do want to talk about this. This is the most important thing we've got going, as I said, at the group. The strategy there is we have believed for some time that the 50 record keepers that existed. Most of them got into business to sell product, either mutual fund companies trying to sell mutual funds or insurance companies trying to sell annuities. And therefore, they went out to an employer and said, "We'll manage your plan." They gave away the record keeping, for the most part, really bad at it, and they sell the product. All of a sudden, the product penetration is no longer there because of passive and because of heightened fiduciary duties. So they kind of can't get any further. In a digital world, the cost of providing the service that people now expect, and you go and do your plane reservation in the taxi, but you're trying to get your 401(k) balance and you get a paper copy in two weeks, was kind of where the industry was two weeks ago, 10 years ago. They can't afford to keep up on it, so they're getting out and becoming investment-only providers. We are good at record keeping. We make money at record keeping, but we actually are not building a record keeping business. We're using it as a tool to build a wealth management business in the DC plan and on the flows that are coming out of the back end of it, so we have, first of all, built a big business. We spent $8 billion in the 12 months here in 2020 and 2021 buying MassMutual's business, Pru's business, and Personal Capital, which is a digital startup that we were funding that has about 2 million-2.5 million Americans on it on a freemium model that they convert into individual wealth managed accounts, average balance about $600,000-$650,000, which is an advised model at 80 basis points. You get incredible aggregation, so we bought that business, took all those tools, and have put them into the Empower business, the DC business, and that came in about six months ago, and the business we're building at Empower is basically we use record keeping, but what we're really doing is providing advice. People turn on advice within the DC plan. We do have product penetration. We're about 11%-12% of our products. That's miles away from the others. And then we roll. Our big play is to roll the assets when they roll out of a plan. So about $80-$90 billion comes out of plan every year. People retire; they change employers. And we have built, using Personal Capital tools, a wealth management business. We're getting about 16% of the rollover. We were at 11% two years ago. Fidelity is over 50%. But people running our businesses are all ex-Fidelity people. Bob Reynolds came in through Putnam that we acquired about 15 years ago. And he's brought in; they're all Fidelity people running the business. So we're getting the rollover up and building a wealth management business, and we have already a very big DC business. It's making, in Canadian dollars, about CAD 800 million this year out of Great-West Lifeco. They made CAD 3.2 billion last year. I won't give a forecast because they haven't given an overall forecast, but this will be 35% of Great- West Life's earnings within a few years. And that's assuming we don't make any other acquisitions, which we intend to make. So the biggest thing going on at Great- West Life is a real much bigger focus on the U.S. market and building a wealth management business around our very, very large DC business. Maybe I can stop there for a second. Perfect. And maybe next we can talk about IGM Financial, which also there has been huge transformation over the past decade. IG Wealth transforming and really moving into the high net worth space. Mackenzie having a significant turnaround from where it was a decade ago. Maybe talk about where we are today. I mean, the transformation seems kind of done from my perspective. Wanted to get your thought on that also too going forward. Do we see more M&A coming out of them and what we can maybe expect? Yeah. So if Great- West Life is the biggest piece, IGM is the second piece. The IGM is mostly a wealth manager, but also an asset manager as well. IG Wealth is Investors Group. That's the old sister company to Ameriprise that I was talking about. It's gone through seven, eight years of real transformation, and it's got its foot really on its front foot right now in terms of flows that are coming in. 2022 wasn't a great year to validate flows into wealth businesses. Obviously, the market has been a little shaky right now. A lot of products going into deposit products at the banks, but the business has got great momentum. The asset management side of that business, we consolidated all our Canadian asset management businesses into Mackenzie. It's about CAD 220-240 billion of AUM right now. So it would be in the Canadian market. If you survey advisors behind Fidelity, would be the second largest, second most popular firm. CI is a big player up there and would have more assets than us, and it is a significant competitor. But so lots of momentum there. We have then also consolidated our 28% in China Asset Management at IGM. We had some of it in Power, some of it in IGM. That was part of the simplification I talked about. So we've got a business that's worth. We paid about. It's currently valued about $2.3 billion, but we actually, IGM owns more of the Chinese asset management business than any other investor in the world. That sounds like a pretty strong statement, right? But I haven't done the math in two years, so if I'm not right, but we went through and took all of the U.S. players, all the foreign players, what did they own in China, how much did they own, times their AUM. And our 28% of China Asset Management, we have more AUM in China than anybody else, and it's all sitting now in IGM. And they also bought Northleaf, an alternative manager with about 20 billion under management that they're plugging into their product. So IGM's portfolio is much higher growth than it was five years ago. We've shifted into higher growth businesses. You asked about acquisitions, looking to create a bigger presence in the high net worth, ultra high net worth business in Canada. And love if IGM could find a way into the wealth management business in the U.S. IGM did the initial. We had a whole fintech strategy we launched in 2015, and part of that, IGM went out and bought 22% of Personal Capital through three VC rounds, put about $145 million into it. The other 78% of the shareholders about two years ago said, "Time out. We're putting the thing for sale. We don't want you to creep into a position of control." And it got into an auction, and some of the big U.S. institutions were looking at it for the tools that it had to import under their platform. IGM couldn't play at that game. They didn't have a U.S. platform, didn't have those synergies. So they bowed out, but fortunately we had Empower, and Empower went in and bought Personal Capital, as I said earlier in my remarks, and pulled the plug. But IGM was saying, "We want to have a U.S. presence in wealth management if we can. We spent a few years trying to do this. We made a profit, but we didn't end up with what we wanted." So IGM would like to get into the U.S. market if the right opportunity comes. So high net worth in Canada, and if they could ever find a way into the U.S. market, that would be something else that IGM would look to. Got it. You also have at Power this building up this third-party asset management platform. You got roughly, I think, 15-ish billion in AUM through your two platforms, Sagard and Power Sustainable, covering a bunch of different asset classes. When you take a look at where it is today and where you want to take it going forward, are there certain asset classes that you'd like to be in that you're not in right now? And would that be something you could do organically, or is that something you may have to acquire teams or acquire firms that kind of specialize in those areas? Yeah, I think that we would be looking to build out in the spaces that are adjacent to what we have, which is energy infrastructure, fintech, private credit, private equity. It's a European private equity business and a Canadian private equity business. And then we have a Chinese, we got a Chinese license to run Chinese equities in 2005. So we've got about $1 billion of Power's money invested in, it was a part of a diversification strategy invested in our China strategy away from CMAC that we're trying to bring third-party investors in. We would be looking to buy, to bring in, excuse me, strategies that are adjacent to those sectors as much as we can to get the economies of scale. We are not profitable in these businesses yet. One of them is at break-even. The other one's a few years away. Every time you add a new strategy that's in a new sector, you go through a J- curve where you lose money for two or three years. So we would like as much as possible to build around energy. So we have, right now we have a $1 billion energy equity infrastructure fund, windmills and solar that we have about $400 million of the seed. We've got outsiders for $600 million. So we're looking to add debt capability to complement our equity capability. That would be an example of a complementary adjacency. So that's what we're doing there, trying to get those businesses to profitability. I don't want to oversell what the alternative asset management businesses will mean to our future because I don't know whether they're going to be something really big or they're going to turn out to be something okay. I am like, that's not a fair answer. What we had was a bunch of great teams with our capital in it, and we said, "We've got great track records. Can't we turn this into something where we could make some money at it, create some value?" By the way, Great-West Life and IGM and Empower and IG Wealth Management and Irish Life and Canada Life in the UK, these businesses need all for their clients, and they're not going to get them all from us at Power Corp, but there's a synergy there. We could supply them with that. So we're going to try and make these businesses profitable. And if we make a go of it, do we sell them? Do we end up diluting down to a minority position? Do they end up being long-term? You know, I think the story's too soon on that. Yep. It's interesting. It's good. We're going to create some value, but that's not what's going to create the most value. And so I didn't go through that part, and I do need to go through. I mean, what the value creation story here is threefold. 80% of the value is in the public companies. So that's where we spend 80% of our time. So Great-West Lifeco IGM are the big parts of that, and we think the market is not appreciating the growth that we have organically. The proof will be in the pudding, but we think we'll grow earnings and we will potentially get our multiples up a turn or two. It doesn't have to happen, but we hope that would happen. We will continue to drive M&A growth that will augment that. And Great-West Lifeco said we can grow 8%-10% EPS without further acquisitions. It's trading at a very low multiple. We think there's upside in that 80%, and up at Power Corp, clean the business up, take the capital we have from selling the businesses that are non-financial services, do share buybacks, and narrow the discount back down to the single digits. It was at 35. We got it to 17. You look at all of that, you got total shareholder returns in the low double digits to somewhere in the 20s, depending on how we execute. At least that's our internal plans for the next four or five years, so that's the value creation story that we have there, and that's what we've been executing, and then go out and talk to the market. We did not talk to the market, and the fact that we multi-brand, okay, we're big. Like we have, you didn't know we had 17.5 million Americans as our clients. We have 12-13 million Canadians out of 39 million. We have a third of the Canadian population. We have 40% of Ireland. We're the largest group business in the United Kingdom. People have no idea because we're Empower, we're Putnam, we're PanAgora, we're Investors Group, we're Mackenzie, we're Wealthsimple in Canada, we're Irish Life, like we're China Asset Management. People have, and then we're Power at the top. Who the hell are these people anyways? We never heard of them. We're actually really very big businesses, and we are therefore trying to communicate more frequently because people don't know who they have. They've never heard of us, basically. We're the biggest company they've never heard of. I mean, we do have a little bit of time, but there are two things I do want to touch on at the very least before we get going. The next one is, when you were talking about in your alternative platform, is on the fintech side through Portage Ventures. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that in terms of what you're seeing in the fintech space that you think could be interesting for the financial services industry over the coming years. And obviously, the tie-in is within the Power family and the ability to add value within the platforms. Yeah, I don't pretend to know. That's a great question that I can't answer very well. That's what I should have said. I don't pretend to have kind of the magic, this is the one that's going to break it, okay? Our strategy in fintech was that in 2015, we had these large companies and we were afraid of disruption because we knew fintech was going to disrupt everybody, and we didn't know how we were going to be able to attract talent into our kind of large insurance or wealth management businesses. We said, "Hey, we've got this entrepreneurial family at the top of Power. We can do it at Power," so we went out and we attracted a bunch of investors, put our own capital in, and we had Canada Life and IG invest in it. We invited everybody else to invest, and we ended up creating all these successful companies. And then we engaged with all of our limited partners, including our companies, and now those products are throughout our businesses. But more importantly, our management teams seven years later are much more on top of disruption than they were, and that was our goal. In the process, we made a couple of big bets. I mentioned Personal Capital, but we also funded a company in Canada called Wealthsimple, which, think of Betterment in the U.S., but it is much bigger in its footprint. We put CAD 300 million into it. In 2021, fintech was going nuts. It had a $5 billion valuation. We sold CAD 500 million of our position in a funding round with a lot of very strong institutional investors. We were net to the good about CAD 200 million in our pocket, and we still own 43%-48% of the business, depending on how the... This one has been, they don't all work out that way, okay? But this one has been pretty good, and our timing was great. That's a business we own, and it's a big brand in Canada right now. I think it's about 1.5-1.6 million Canadians, most of them under the age of 30, or around 30. Two of my kids are, I didn't even know they had accounts with it. These guys aren't that bad. I didn't know that. That's been, but so I'll talk about what we did in fintech, but I do not have the silver bullet on what's the next emerging trend. I just know if you're not digitalizing everything you're doing that you can digitalize, you're going to be struggling big time 10 years from now because just if you look at where consumer trends are going, where demographics, people are retiring, labor costs. If you're not digitalizing everything, and that's going to continue to drive financial services. And so what's, and I can talk about data and AI, but I think I'll sound like many other people that have heard up. We'll have already heard the pitches. Maybe if I can ask one last question here, and I don't know if they need to take any questions from the audience, but just on valuation. Talked about it. I mean, it's trading low 30s. You collapsed structure down to high teens. We're kind of in the mid-20s now. Like what do you think kind of you need to do to maybe help nudge that discount lower over time? One thing long-term and the other one is kind of more of a cyclical factor. Simplifying what we own at Power Corp so that people understand it will be the biggest factor that will lower the discount. And because 85% of the public float of Power Corp is in the public market, the Desmarais own 15%. We have a bigger float than our public subs, even though they're big companies. So there's a reason for people to buy Power Corp. I'm not selling against IGM or Great-West. It's just that people will tend to want to move in. And our biggest shareholders outside of the Desmarais are some three extra big, some of the big large U.S. fund companies that you would fund institutional and fund investors that you would know. So people like liquidity. So there's a natural reason for them to buy Power. That should narrow the simplifying, and our liquidity will narrow the discount. What tends to happen is when everybody's clamoring to buy our shares because they want exposure to our sector, they like what we're doing, our stock tends to go up and our discount tends to narrow. And when all of a sudden the stock markets are weak and everyone's going, "Oh, we don't know what's going to happen in the insurance sector or the wealth sector," and they're looking to get out, we tend to gap out a little bit because we're a proxy for our public subs. So simplify is the long-term. And then in the last year, it's gapped out a bit because our people haven't wanted exposure to companies that have a lot of exposure to the markets and market fees. So we've been selling down in our subs and the discounts broadened out. I'm pretty comfortable we're going to; we've got a path to narrow the discount. The discount is our cost base at Power Corp. We spend about CAD 150 million-CAD 160 million a year on running Power Corp. It's about the net present value of that. That's about 3% of our gross asset value. I can say, "Okay, we should have a discount of 3%." I don't get the other 20. I'm on a mission to try and get that into at least single digits. But that's just the; that is additional value. What is really going to drive it is our success in the 80% that's within the public companies. That is, again, I want to reemphasize where we spend most of our time. Perfect. I know we've got maybe a minute left. I don't know if there was anyone that wanted to try and sneak in a quick question. I think we got one right up here. Am I speaking? Okay. The second part of your IGM, they missed the passive investment thing. What's the momentum that you're talking about that they're doing well now? So I didn't say they missed the passive investment thing. Yeah. So there is passive as a funny business, right? There's three big passive providers in the world, and that's an oligopoly that, yes, they've created a lot of disruption to active players, but it's not like there's an opportunity for active players to go after passive. The impetus for growth on IG Wealth is that we simply had gone too long with an old business model, and we realized that about seven or eight years ago. So we took our pricing down. We changed our training model. We had a smaller, lesser number of advisors, far fewer advisors, higher quality, dropped the prices, went from selling mutual funds to securities wraps into open platforms, unbundled commissions. We did everything we should have done maybe a few years earlier. And while we did that, IG was earning about. I'm looking at Greg, who's the CFO of Power and also the. It was CAD 700 million in earnings, profitable business. We went sideways for like seven, eight years on profitability, and we're now into big. We're into net flows, and we have got our pricing very competitive, and we're getting much more clients that are higher net worth than we were previously. It was more kind of an affluent and mass affluent and much more competitive. So we've got growth in IG Wealth. That's simply what I'm saying. And the market doesn't quite get that yet. They just think of it as the old investors group. The IGM story, which is the public company that owns IG Wealth, has also retooled Mackenzie, brought in CMAC, which we think China is going to be notwithstanding what people are talking about in China and the issues that are going on right now, we think is a good long-term growth play. Bought Northleaf, which is growing quickly in alternative. So the portfolio of IGM has got a lot more growth in it than it did, say, three, four years ago. We don't think the market is quite caught up to that in part because they don't want to buy investment firms right now because where's the market going? That's all. Unfortunately, we've run out of time, but Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Geoff. That's going to conclude the session. Okay, great. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks. Thanks.