Mr. Kevin Strain, welcome to the stage. For those of you who don't know, Kevin is the President and CEO of Sun Life Financial. Welcome back. Well, thanks, Gabe. It's- Gabe and I have known each other a long, long time, so. Yeah. Too long maybe. You know, let's start with the year in review. Yeah Type of question. 2025 ended on a strong note. Q4 was a very good quarter, in particular 'cause of some of the improvement in that U.S. Stop-Loss business. Yeah. If we look back on the year, what, you know, what did you learn about the business, and was there anything you felt could've been done differently? Yeah. I don't even think it was just a good close to the year. It was a good year in total. If you step back and look at our earnings per share growth was 12%. Mm-hmm. We have a target of 10%. The ROE was just over 18%, which is tracking well to our 20% ROE target. We've got some significant new leadership positions in P&L roles. Manjit Singh's running Asia now. Asia had a really strong year last year, and I think he's making a big difference there. Jessica Tan, we brought in to run Canada, and Canada had a fantastic year. Ted Maloney at MFS, and we announced Sunny coming in at SLC, and we announced Tom Murphy in his new role over asset management, and then David Healy in United States. I feel like we took a big step getting the leadership team set. We saw Canada, Asia do really well. SOC for the year hit its investor rate target we had put forward five years ago, which was 235. We were just over 240. MFS had a tough year for flows, but a decent year for income, and of course cash flow back to us. Then the U.S. was a bit more volatile. Clearly, the structural change to the U.S. healthcare system had impacts, and it had impacts in different quarters. The Stop-Loss business was pretty good for the full year, and I'm pleased with the bounce back it had from 2024, in particular 2024 where it had a bad quarter. Then on the dental business, we also saw some volatility there, and I think David's doing the right things to build that out. You had... This is life, right? It's part of having a broad-based, resilient business that's half asset management roughly and a little less than half, but have a goal of half asset management, half insurance, global in nat ure. Some of the businesses over-performed and some of them didn't. We did see some quarters where we had some volatility. In particular, I think last year we started to see the shaping up of how the U.S. healthcare system, and in particular Medicare and Medicaid Mm-hmm We were going to perform. We've reset our goal. You would've heard us talk on an investor call, and we sort of pulled that back of hitting $5 billion in premium, 5% margin, so a goal of $250 million for the dental business. When we had set that goal, we were thinking that state business might be 75% of that goal, and commercial might be 25%. You know, the state business, I think, is gonna have persistent challenges. I think the U.S. healthcare system in many ways probably had to go through some adjustment. As we step back and think about our goal for that business, you know, we still have a goal of $5 billion in premium. It may take a little bit longer than what we were expecting. I would like to see the state business, Medicare/Medicaid business be more like half of that. I think that half, I mean, one of the learnings is that half isn't gonna reach 5% margins. The pressure that's there is gonna hold that margin down below 5%, and we need to take steps to build out the commercial business to grow that, to grow that, because we know the commercial business. It's very competitive business as well. Mm-hmm But it will make more than 5%. If we can get to $5 billion combined. Today we sit at just under $3 billion in premium. Almost $2.5 billion is state, and $500 million is commercial. I've really given David the ability to say, David Healy in the U.S., to say, "Listen, that $2.5 billion, don't worry about growing it. Leave it about half of the $5 billion we need, but optimize it. Try to find the states who wanna partner, the states who wanna recognize the good role we're doing, the states where we can create the most efficiency and can get us close to the 5%, and concentrate your other efforts on building out the commercial. I think we learned a lot about where the Medicaid business was going and how to optimize that, but we also learned the importance of this diversified business to deliver- Mm-hmm that 12% growth and that 18.3% ROE. I think overall it was a strong year. It had some volatility quarter to quarter. We know what that volatility was driven by, and we're taking steps to fix that. I should've prefaced that, the question, with you know, it was a tough year, but you still had a you know. Good, good result. Yeah. ... pushing 20% ROE. You can put it in your report. The dental business, let's talk a bit about the nature of that. You know, I'll admit we're learning as we go a little bit about this business. You talk about, you know, giving David the mandate to focus on, you know, the state businesses that make more sense where there's more- Right. One element of that is some of your business with the states is intermediated, some of it's direct. Yeah, yeah. Is it doing more of that direct business or what else? Probably that, but some other stuff? I think when you think about the state business, it's gonna be a combination of things. Okay. If the intermediary again wants to recognize the job we're doing and have margins that we think are sustainable and proper, then we'll work with the intermediary. That is hard for them right now because you can see the pressure that the healthcare companies are under. It would lead you to more conversations that are direct to the states. But the beauty is we know there's growth opportunities out there, and we know that there are states that want to work the way we want to work, and David doesn't have to be overly aggressive to get those, right? 'Cause he's already at 2.5. We're not saying grow that. We're saying optimize it. Right. I think that that's a powerful tool. If you're running a business and your boss says, "Optimize versus grow," you do different things, and I think it's a powerful tool. You know, there's a... David's the perfect guy to run this. He ran the employee benefits business, so he knows the commercial side. He ran operations and IT. I mean, it's 32 million Medicaid/Medicare members. It's a massive operations business, and he ran the dental business for a year and a half. I really like the way he's stepping into this. It's really about making the right strategic and operational choices. We've given him a big, powerful tool on the state side. He's got a lot to do to build out the commercial side. Because of his background and his success he had in employee benefits and the knowledge he has from running dental, I think he's well positioned to create that success. We're gonna give him time to do it on a sustainable basis, so it's gonna take a number of years. I mean, like I said, it sits at $500 million. Mm-hmm. In essence, it's gotta grow significantly, but that is a big space. We also gotta recognize that there's big competitors there that also wanna keep their market share. We know all the brokers. We know many of the sponsors. We do other benefits for them. To be fair to the DentaQuest business, it's brought a lot of tools we can use to sell. It's brought dental networks. It's brought a lot of dental knowledge that we can use to sell to the commercial side. Just the last one on dental 'cause we got a few to go through, but when you say optimize, one of the things I think of, it's a group product, is claims management. Does that- Claim, claims management. Yeah, yeah. Is that a thing that, in dental? You know, yeah. That's exactly right. Claims management and how we interact with the states. Oh, okay. Eventually how we interact with more and more plan sponsors. That's exactly right. It's part of a digital transformation for that business. Okay, moving to the other part of that U.S. business, the Stop-Loss, things have gotten better. Now you've got another round of repricing that kicked in- Yeah ... on 2/3 of the book, I guess, on January 1. Is growth sorta locked in this year for Stop-Loss? I think Stop-Loss. We've gone through two consecutive years of very significant price increases, a 14%- Yeah a 17%. We continue to run roughly mid-70s claims, and we continue to run at profit margins that are in excess of what we've given for the total employee benefits which was 7%. We had the issue in 2024 which came through in the fourth quarter. Even after that issue in 2024, for the full year, the Stop-Loss business ran in the mid-70s. So we've consistently performed there. We have scale. We have data. We've added capabilities on top of it to help manage it like PinnacleCare, so we've added this capability for people who are going through a significant health event to manage and navigate the U.S. healthcare system. I feel pretty confident. We sold a record number January 1 this year of business that we just gone through 31% pricing and. Mm-hmm Claims adjustment increase, so significant increase. In fact, we were getting so much volume that we were able to even be choosy at the end 'cause we thought, "You know what? This is maybe even bigger than we want to." We were more selective at the end even. We thought we were getting it. We added some. All things being equal, you would expect this to be a pretty good year based on that. You know, historically, you know, it created a lot of noise for us for two reasons. One, the fourth quarter of 2024 looked really bad, you know, you had first quarter that was hitting our margin, so I said slightly north of Mm-hmm ... of 7%. Second quarter we were hitting our margin. Third quarter we were hitting our margin, and then fourth quarter, right at the end of the year, we had a lot of severity that dropped us below our margin, but still close to the margin for the full year. It basically wiped out all the profit in the fourth quarter. The year looked fine. Mm-hmm The fourth quarter didn't. At the same time, some of our competitors were having issues, so it's become a bit. It's not quite even resonating with me sometimes when I hear the amount of issue that people have and the amount of time it takes on the call. Like, we've done this business for 40 years. We've seen price increases for healthcare running up for as long as I've been on the executive team which is close to 15 years, and we are able to reprice for that. I think that business, I know that competitors are having issues, but when you have expertise, when you have scale, and we've shown, we've demonstrated for many years the ability to run this at a in a proper way. In fact, we took some heat off sales in 2024 when we saw. Yeah We would've saw that Q1 2025 was a lower sales year because we saw what was happening. I think we're well-positioned this year, and you know, the world changes fast these days, so things can change fast, but we feel like we're well-positioned. You said that you got, you know, lots of volume. I don't know if you said record, but lots of volume in Stop-Loss. Lots of volume. Yeah. What was driving that? 'Cause it seems like, I think competitors were having to price up more. Yeah ... than we were. If you were a competitor, some of our competitors were mid-nineties. We're mid-seventies. Mm-hmm. If we're increasing by 17%, then they should be increasing by probably 37%, right? I think that brokers knew us, they've seen us. Sponsors knew us, they've seen us. We were able to sort of manage that price increase a little bit differently probably than some competitors of that broad scale. We've even heard there was a reinsurance company that was looking to come in, and they decided not to. Like, if you don't have scale and the expertise, you probably shouldn't be in the business. High level for the U.S., and if we group all the group businesses together, if I look over the past few years, there's been a lot of fluctuations, the post-COVID phase where claims- Yeah you know, disappeared. Not exactly, but claims were quite low. Quite low, yeah. ROEs went into the mid-teens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Last year or so, you know, we've been in the low teens. What's a sustainable ROE for that business? You know, I think driving towards that business and the growth in the earnings should grow the ROE, and it should be an important part of us getting closer to our 20%. I would see ROE in that business being, 'cause it's a light capital user. Yeah. It should grow alongside the earnings into the higher teen sort of thing. It should be part of that getting to the 20% is seeing that growth. Got it. Asset management business, there's you know a lot of stories in there. MFS is the mature one. It's been in outflows for a long time, but it's all very cash generative. I've always looked at you know MFS as having this secular challenge, but you've planted a bunch of seeds that are saplings now on the SLC side. Is the vision to have as MFS you know my words but slowly declines whatever, and SLC will offset that? One, we don't see MFS declining. Those are my words. I think MFS is gonna grow. If you step back, we are an asset management and an insurance company. You had Nick up here from Brookfield right before this. We compete with Brookfield on the asset management side. We're an asset management and insurance company. We think that being a full service asset management company across public equities and public fixed income, which is primarily MFS for us, and through the alternative asset management classes, creates the strongest asset management business. We sit at CAD 1.6 trillion in assets under management, and different cycles are gonna hit at different times. I think public equity and public fixed income isn't always gonna be in a down cycle. It's been a long down cycle for flows, but things will change over time. The alts have been in a high. I think having both is really good. Today, the bulk of our income comes from MFS, but SLC is gonna grow at 20% CAGR. We've talked about that, and that's over time, we're gonna see that become a bigger and bigger piece. I can see us deploying some capital into bolt-ons as well in SLC. I don't think we need to do big capabilities, but there's bolt-on capabilities we could add. Yeah. MFS, we're not gonna be doing M&A. They're not interested in doing M&A. We're not interested in having them do M&A, so we're perfectly aligned. I do think you'll see MFS grow, and when cycles are different, you're gonna see that happen. They're good money managers. They know how to manage money. Their clients understand what they're doing. There's been a trend the last 10 years for sure, five years, but these trends change, and I think having an asset management business that crosses all of those things is really important. We also sometimes forget that we're a massive wealth management business. In Canada, our DC GRS business has CAD 175 billion in assets under management. We're one of the larger MPF players in Hong Kong. We have most of our business we write in Asia is wealth business. We have opportunities to use our wealth management even more to align with our asset management business. That part, that's part of Tom's role is to find ways to Right unlock more of that. You know, I see MFS as being in a critical piece of our overall asset management strategy. Sometimes people say, "Well, they're only doing public equities and public fixed income." I say, "Yeah, that's their job." Our job is to diversify that, and that's what we've done with SLC. I think that the two balance each other, and I think having Tom at the top really unlocks that for us. You touched upon Canada and Asia. I wanna get into that, but before doing so, SLC, just to wrap it up, the buyouts of BGO- Yeah and Crescent are taking place. Soon soon, imminently. Soon. How's that- Imminently. Is there anything- You know, it's It's a matter of course type of thing or? The deals have been structured since we did the deal. We always knew that we would buy a certain percentage. There'd be earn-outs. The earn-out ratios were set. They were based on performance. Of course, there's always little negotiations when you get to EBITDA performance with an asset manager. Should this expense be included or should this one not? That's what they've been working through, but that's all at the edges. We're close. It'll roughly align with what we've talked about this, what we had in the put call. The put call will be paid for by the debt that we already issued. Right. You know, the accounting now is, I'm gonna say, a little bit strange because it all happens at the time of when we did the transaction. That's when all the goodwill is set up. It's set up for the full amount. You set up the put call. I think that's all pretty straightforward. We also really believe that in asset management, particularly in alts, that management needs to own a significant percentage of the company. We talked about that on the call last time. Part of what we're doing is getting ready to structure that, to set the leadership team. Because if you're buying alternative asset management, we have $260 billion in third-party money. If you're buying the company and you don't have the right leadership team, it can be very painful. Setting up the management equity plan, and we expect management to own 20%-25%. Setting that up, establishing it, getting buy-in from management. There's three ways they're getting that management equity plan. The founders are rolling some of their share ownership into the SLC, which we think is great. It's an indication that the founders are saying, "We still think this is gonna grow, and you're taking the right steps." We did stock grants for critical people, and then we've created a equity program that management could buy into. It's a leverage program, but the management could buy into it, and that's how we're gonna get to the 20%-25%. We think that that's really important, having the right team there, having the right investment capabilities, but having the right leadership capabilities will drive that business forward. Now, the Canadian component of the questions. Yeah ... and I think about, you know, as more of a macro-sensitive, business that, you know, we have a stalled job Yeah ... growth in Canada. I don't know if you have much in the way of public employee plans. I shouldn't say that publicly. You know, are these challenges, you know, gonna stall growth in that business? Like how or how do you grow in that type of environment? Right I guess is another way of asking. We used to have a very big public health services plan that you might have- Yeah seen in the newspaper that one of our competitors took. You know, it's. Of course we're gonna get impact. If there's a slowdown in the economy, that means that there's less people working, anybody in the employee benefits space is gonna get hit by that. If you look at the employee benefits space in Canada, we're just under 25%, but that's about the same place that Manulife and Great-West Life are. When it comes to GRS, we're closer to 40%. We are gonna get impact. Now, the GRS business, and a little bit on the employee benefits business, we do keep a significant amount of rollovers. So when people leave those plans and their assets, and that's actually really good business for us, so there's a bit of a inherent offset there. You know, if there's less people working, you're gonna have less revenue, and it's gonna be aligned to what everybody else has. Now, over the long term, will there be less people working through AI? Probably. Will there be new jobs that come up? Yes. I think aligning to some of those new industries and thinking about where those opportunities are gonna be is actually really good. We've been talking about where those are coming, national defense or Arctic or whatever it might be. Like how do you line up to some of those changes that are coming? I actually think the Canadian industry in general runs a very good employee benefits and GRS business. You know, we have good technology. We have good ability to take rollovers, and I do think the Canadian economy will be resilient. I think there'll be hits, but there'll also be opportunities. Asia, we can spend more time on that, but we have to be cognizant of time. Yes. The Asia business, if I go back to, I don't know, 15 years or so ago, it was not a business we thought of too much as it relates to Sun Life because it was five- I remember that. 5% of earnings. Yeah brought it up to 10%, 15% of the company's earnings, and oh, we start caring about it. In the past year we've seen the ROE you know increase a couple hundred basis points. Are you know are we at an inflection point for Asia? By the way, he was running it. But Well, you know, Now Manjit is, of course. Yeah. No, Manjit's doing a great job. You know, we've. Well, I'll tell you a quick story because we're running out of time, but I'll try to tell this quickly. When I moved to Asia, we were CAD 100 million in income. We're close to CAD 900 million today. I met with all of the key competitors. One of the big competitors said to me, "Listen, there's only gonna be five regional players. Prudential, AIA." So you know which one he came from. "Prudential, AIA, Manulife are gonna be three. They're big players. I don't know about you guys. I don't know about anybody else. You, Kevin, you need to decide whether you're gonna be a big player or not." I remember thinking, "That's very direct, but he's not wrong." There's not enough there for. There's 30 companies in Hong Kong. I could walk around the block and bump into every insurance company in the world, but there's only four or five that are doing really well. We made that commitment, and Dean made it with me, to make that leap, and making that leap was really important to us to create scale. We're doing fantastically in Hong Kong, in India. We have scale in the Philippines. We have scale in our networks. We've built out this ability to build scale in all of our markets by having bancassurance, agency, brokerage, and some digital in every market. We have the ability to get scale. Manjit calls them four scaling markets, which are the other four markets. We have scale in these four, and we're in the right places, right? I think we have that ability to really drive that forward. It should be an important part of our overall company ROE growth by growing the earnings alongside of it. Yeah. Like what we saw in 2025, then, you know. It's a step in that direction. Yeah. Yeah What about, you know, the M&A question? Right. You've been pretty public about well, there's not much in Canada to buy. Well, maybe not many opportunities in Asia. In the U.S., you wanna get the DentaQuest sorted out before- Yeah doing anything big. However, something in Asia might become available or might be available. I'm wondering, you know, what Yeah. I think, you know, our focus is really on the business we already. We think we're in the right places. We have good mix of businesses. We have chance for organic growth. I wanna see the team take those steps forward on organic growth. We know our shareholders value the buyback, and I think a strong, sustainable buyback program that contributes to earnings growth each year, you know, we can get 0.5%-2% earnings growth from the buyback, and I think that's important for us to do, which then starts to limit the M&A opportunity to more bolt-ons. Mm-hmm. Honestly, I could see some places, some bolt-ons in Asia, and bolt-on for me would be under CAD 500 million. Some bolt-ons in Asia that might make sense or some bolt-ons in SLC that might make sense, but we'd also be careful for that because I do think sustaining that, creating that sustainable buyback picture, which we've done the last few years and which we intend to continue to do, is actually valuable for our shareholder base, and it's valuable for the way we run the business, and it's valuable discipline for the business. Same way we look at the dividend growth, right? Right. I think that's increasingly how we look at it. All right, Kevin, we're slightly into overtime. Thank you. Don't regr et a thing. Thank you. Great update, and I look forward to the next time. Good. Thank you. We do this. Thank you, guys.