Morning. My name is Cam MacDonald, and welcome to the Aventus Annual Investor Day of 2026. We have a really good turnout here in New York, and we welcome a larger audience joining us virtually. Thank you all for taking the time to learn about your company. Many of the Aventus directors are with us here today. If I may, I would like to warmly acknowledge Deanna Mulligan, our Founding CEO and Strategic Advisor of Ceres Life. I would like to start the meeting by thanking everyone at Aventus, Ceres, CCaventus, and CC Capital for all their efforts in the past 18 months. There has been a tremendous amount of work accomplished during this past period. Much of it is not yet evident to the shareholders nor in our reported results. However, as a team, we stand before you confident that the Aventus platform is now positioned to participate and capture significant profitable growth, and our goal today is that the presentation from the management teams will provide you insight for our conviction. In keeping with past years, today's agenda will include presentations from all the management teams from Ceres, CCaventus, Aventus, and CC Capital. Thereafter, I will return to the podium, providing closing comments and welcome all the questions you may have. In our 2025 annual letter, which was released this past March, we highlighted six strategic positions and priorities for our year. Many have been achieved, on track, or in progress. As a reminder, they were: continue to scale Ceres Life annuity sales. Erik Askelsen will have something to say on this subject. Materially grow CCaventus AUM. Andrew Rabinowitz will have a lot to say about this. Pursue strategic opportunities. We completed a $25 million minority investment in Insignia Financial Group of CC Capital, and Chinh will provide brief comments on that from an update perspective. Rigorous capital allocation, supporting growth and new opportunities while maintaining financial flexibility. Preparing for a U.S. listing. Matt Skurbe will speak to this. Lastly, rebranding Westaim. As you now know, this past Monday, we unveiled our new name, Aventus Capital, which embodies the evolution of your company as an integrated insurance and asset management company. This slide captures the Aventus platform today. Two unique businesses that are well-positioned, growing with a favorable market environment, and importantly, led by proven best-in-class management teams that embrace a client-first culture and integrity. Here are today's speakers, and it's my pleasure to introduce Erik Askelsen, Acting CEO and President of Ceres Life. Erik? Thank you, Cam. As Cam said, I'm Erik Askelsen, President and Acting CEO of Ceres Life. I do want to take a second, though, to acknowledge Deanna. Deanna was our Founding CEO, a tremendous leader. On behalf of the Ceres team, Deanna, we appreciate everything you've done. One of the things that Cam didn't mention is that Deanna was also our first policyholder. While we always take care of our policyholders and we give them great service, I've told the team, because I'm going to be talking to Deanna as our Strategic Advisor, that they better take extra good care of Deanna. It was a little over a year ago in June 2025 when Deanna last spoke to investors about Ceres vision and strategic plans at Investor Day. Let me get to the right spot. At that point in time, we had sold a handful of annuities to employees as a proof point that we were ready to go to market, and we were planning the official launch of our MYGA product with our distributors, which occurred just a little over a year ago in September 2025. Today, I am going to talk about three things: our strategy and leadership, our market opportunity and positioning, including the significant strides we have made over the last year building on our distribution and demonstrating a differentiated and valuable experience for our distributors, and I am also going to talk about how our technology provides a competitive advantage. What I hope you will take from my remarks is an appreciation that we have delivered in spades what we committed to do in our first year in the market, and I hope that you will have an understanding of the value of the asset we have built through our forward-leaning approach to technology. We believe we have built what I refer to as a powerful liability origination engine that is highly scalable, nimble, and provides a digitally differentiated experience to distributors and policyholders that will return outsized value to all of our stakeholders, but particularly to you, our shareholders. Before I get started, though, I would like you to hear directly from the Ceres team about what our mission is. Ceres Life is a new AI and cloud-native insurance company that issues fixed and fixed index annuities. We are not a startup. We started up. We are a growing annuity carrier that is safe, sound, and secure. The start of Ceres Life Insurance Company came from the desire to really be able to serve customers and agents in a deeper, better, more flexible way. What is remarkable is not just the scale, it's the speed at which we got here. We're moving faster because we own our own stack, and we automated the work that other companies still do by hand. Speed for us is an economic weapon. We can add and scale business in a manner that our competitors cannot without losing costs. We want people to lean into technology. We want them to embrace technology. We want them to embrace change, and that's a culture that's very important to us. Every person here knows the mission that they're serving, and they can see their work in the hands of real agents and real clients. We have issued over 2,500 policies to date. Our distribution, our agents, our clients, they really notice doing business with us is different than doing business with some other insurance company. AI is an integral part of how we build, how we automate, and ultimately how we operate the business. The result is not just that we move faster, but that every improvement makes the next improvement easier. We can build portals, we can build automations much more quickly than any of our competitors. That provides a huge advantage. We've been able to attract talent, people from really deep industry insurance backgrounds who share our vision and are really willing to look forward and change the way they work. What really makes people want to do business with you is the people, the relationships, the trust, and that's critical for us. We're blending modern technology with old school service. I know you probably can't believe it, but those aren't paid actors. Those are our people talking about us and what we do. We're proud of the team, and we really wanted to give you the chance for them to talk to you in their own words. I want to add some additional thoughts of a little bit about our strategy in addition to the words that you heard from our team. In terms of our strategy, we think about it in terms of five pillars. We're tech forward. You heard this on the video. We embrace technology because we believe it's our differentiator. Unlike other companies, we own our own tech, including our admin platform, and I'll talk more about this later because it's a big deal. We are also highly customer and agent centric in delivering products and services to our policyholders and distribution. We seek to provide a digital experience that is expected in an era of the Amazonification of digital services. To that end, our platform allows us to flex to different IMO and agent business models, which is essential to compete for shelf space in a competitive annuity landscape. The same is true for the digital experience that is expected of our policyholders, and that's what we aim to provide. Three, we seek to operate with an appropriate level of prudence. Ceres is not going to grow just for the sake of growth's sake, and we're not going to chase volumes at the sake of shareholder returns. Instead, we are capturing market share through strong distribution relationships. Four, we seek to build our business organically. We built a powerful liability origination engine, which allows us to issue annuity contracts directly to consumers at scale. We believe also as we move forward, this capability will create opportunities for us to partner with other carriers, reinsurers, and investors who seek to participate in the annuity market, but who don't have the retail capabilities that we do. We think this creates additional earnings capabilities for us. Five, we operate with the long term in mind. Insurance is a long game. The products we issue are long term promises, and we have to run the business with that in mind. I've heard Chinh say many times that CC Capital views Ceres and insurance as a long term value proposition. The capital that we have is permanent and Ceres is not a portfolio company, and that's to operate for the long term. I want to briefly mention our leadership team, which is a Ceres strength. You heard from some of them in the video. I won't go deep into everyone on the page here, but I want to call your attention to the years and prior experience of the Ceres leadership team. We've been able to recruit a strong and motivated and experienced team, and this has been recognized by our stakeholders, our distributors, rating agencies, and regulators alike. The other point I would make is, other than Deanna's transition to a strategic advisor, we've had no change at the top. This is the same team Deanna spoke about over a year ago at the last Investor Day. It's a team committed to the mission. I know Deanna's transition into a strategic advisor, that is a big event, but the fortunate thing about that is I get to spend a lot of time, I still get the benefit of Deanna's thoughts, and I really value the relationship with her. Lastly, I won't say much about the CC Capital and Aventus team. You're going to be hearing from them directly today. I would point out that Ceres benefits from their leadership and their expertise. We work collaboratively together and appreciate the support we receive from the broader organization. This is our board. The faces start to look familiar. I'm just going to hit one high point here. This year, we added Marilyn Hirsch as an independent Director at Ceres. Marilyn is the Treasurer and Chief Investment Officer of UnitedHealth Group, and she spent a number of years at Allstate in their insurance business. She has deep insurance and asset management knowledge. We've appreciated the perspective she has brought to us in her short time so far, and we're excited that she's joined us. I'm going to shift now to talk about our market positioning and success entering the annuity market over the last year. In our first year in the market, we've established a strong position in the IMO channel and with our target customers. First, we continue to see the annuity space as an attractive market and business opportunity. The industry has talked about the silver tsunami for a number of years, but we're clearly seeing the transition of the baby boomers into retirement. They have a focus on how to ensure they don't outlive their retirement savings. The annuity products we sell are an integral solution for them, and this market is a growing one. Second, this year, we've had great success establishing our distribution force. We launched with six IMOs, which was a greater number of IMOs than we actually expected. We've onboarded over 1,700 writing agents who are out selling our policies to consumers in the market. We're in the process of deepening our relationship with these distribution folks. Third, our success building our distribution is largely the result of our technology, which is a major differentiator for us. Agents like our proprietary EF tool, which minimizes incomplete applications and rework for them, making our agents more efficient. The less time agents have to talk to us, the more time they have to go out and sell and service their clients. That's a win-win for all of us. They also like our proprietary portals that allow them to see the business they have written as it progresses, and we've been able to customize the experiences of our key IMOs and large agents who expect their carrier partners to be flexible. We're unique in this because of our tech. Our partners also appreciate the deep investment capabilities brought to us through CC Capital and CCaventus. CCaventus brings us differentiated capabilities across various credit products through its sourcing network. They have also brought on BlackRock to help source longer duration assets tailored to the liabilities we write. This diversified platform is tailored to the needs of an insurance company balance sheet like ours. Finally, we've demonstrated financial flexibility and a culture of risk management. We're managing to an A level of capital, which is important to our distributors, and we have access to committed capital from Aventus. Our distributors have embraced our story. They want to grow with us, and this distribution platform that we've built is a powerful asset. From a product shelf perspective, we started with our MYGA in 2025 and launched two FIA annuities in February 2026. One of our FIAs is focused on the accumulation of assets, and one is focused on providing guaranteed retirement income to people who are trying to meet their needs in retirement. This fixed annuity product suite provides us with the core products to target the market we seek to serve: consumers focused on retirement savings and income certainty. One additional point to make on this slide that's related to our product suite, we partnered with Innovation Design Group, a product development shop led by Jordan Canfield. Jordan and I have known each other for a long time from back in our Aviva and Athene days. IDG has helped us to build this product suite, helped us tailor it to our distribution and our target customers. They've been a great partner, and they provided valuable market insight to us. We think our target market is a large opportunity. We continue to see the retirement market because there's a continued and a growing demand for MYGA and FIA products like ours. The graph you see here shows the correlation between the number of people in the retirement phase of life, those that have reached 65 or beyond, and the volume of MYGA and FIA products that have been sold in the last few years. As the retirement population has grown, so too has the annuity market generally. As you can see in the more recent years, MYGA and FIA products make up a greater proportion of the total annuity sales that are occurring in the market. Because of these retirement demographics, we expect this growth in the market to continue for a significant period of time, and it's where we want to compete for retirement savings dollars. I already mentioned our success onboarding six IMOs and 1,700 agents. Pardon me for saying that a couple of times. This slide lists who those IMOs are. Advisors Excel, on the left side of the slide, is the largest IMO in the industry, and they control a major portion of the volumes that are done in the independent channel. We have a great relationship with Advisors Excel, primarily because they have known Chinh and the CC Capital team for a long time. We're also very proud of the five other IMOs that we've brought on who decided to do business with us from the start. Much of our success in bringing on these IMOs initially was because they were very familiar with CC Capital and CC Capital's prior experience and reputation in the annuity industry, so that was very helpful as we brought these partners on. That's not the end of the story. While CC Capital's relationships and reputation may have helped us onboard our IMOs, we believe we've earned their continued business by demonstrating that we're faster and easier to do business with. To that point, on the top left, I'm not going to bore you with the details, but what those stats are really saying simply is that we issue policies faster than our competitors. When we can close out an agent's annuity sale more quickly, everyone appreciates that, the agents, the IMOs, and policyholders. On that bottom line, we pay agents quickly, within a day of issuing the policy. You might be surprised, but agents, they really do want to get paid, and they want to get paid quickly. It's a really big thing. So it's one of the things that we focused on in the service that we're providing to them. On the right, the chart reflects the timing of when we onboarded our 1,700 agents. As you can see, new writing agents have continued to join us along our journey, and that wouldn't occur if they were not having the quality experience with us that they are. One of the things you heard me say on the video was a reference to old school service. You might be asking yourself, what does that mean in such a tech-forward company? We have built our platform with the expectation that you don't need to call us to do business with us. Agents and policyholders can do most of the things that they want to digitally. But we know that some people want to talk to a live person. When they call, we answer fast. We answer within 15 seconds, and we make sure that our people are able to answer the questions when people call us quickly and the first time. We believe this is a powerful blend of technology and personal connection with the people we serve. What is the evidence of our IMO partners and agents doing more business with Ceres? It is the volume of business we have done in our first year that we have been out in the market. Since our MYGA launch in September 2025, we have processed $690 million of issued and pending annuity premium. That is a significant number for a company that is in this maturity curve that we are in. We view this as great success, showing the market power of the retail franchise we built for all the reasons that I have talked about. As we look forward to our second year, we are taking active steps to continue to grow our distribution footprint. We are going deeper with our IMOs in terms of getting to know them. We are turning the first cases that agents write with us into subsequent cases and continued business. We are building the awareness of our products and our story through social media and LinkedIn campaigns. We are adding capabilities that agents expect of a carrier, and we are doing so in a digital experience that they really appreciate that is top of the market. We are continuing to add features and additional products to our product suite to continue to grow in this space. Finally, we are working to be a thought leader in the industry through leading research. I have referenced our tech throughout this presentation, but I want to go deeper. I want to go deeper on it because it is the genesis for what makes us believe that we have a unique proposition to our stakeholders. Over Ceres' two-year life cycle so far, we have essentially iterated our technology in what I will refer to as three generations of development. Generation 1.0 was what we launched our MYGA on in 2025. At that point in time, we utilized a vendor partner system as our admin platform, and we ourselves focused on our proprietary e-application and distribution portals to differentiate ourselves. While our launch was successful, it became apparent to us leading up to it that it was much harder to control our delivery outcomes when we did not own the administration platform. For that reason, we made what I believe was a forward-leaning tech decision consistent with our culture to build our own proprietary admin system on which to launch our FIA business in February of 2026. Our tech and business teams developed our own platform in less than six months, which was made possible by our AI and cloud-native architecture and our committed team. It was an amazing amount of work in a short period of time, and that was Ceres Gen 2.0. Building your own administration platform in this period of time is really quite a feat. If you spent time in legacy organizations with legacy tech, legacy insurers, it is almost unfathomable to do that. That shows building an insurance company from scratch, what power we have to do the work that we need to do. What you're seeing on this page now, this schematic, it's a visual depiction of the third generation of Ceres, what we call CeresNexus. CeresNexus is an autonomous insurance operating platform that incorporates a suite of agentic capabilities into our operation. The blue circles represent various agentic capabilities that have been built and integrated into our system and are in various stages of full deployment. The gray circles represent additional agentic capabilities that are in various design and build phases. It's really impossible to fully explain Generation 3.0 to you in the short time that we have, but I want to pick one of these blue circles to highlight. The blue circle on the right has the name Opus. In administering the issuance of an insurance policy, there are a number of manual stages that require a human to perform certain administrative steps to move an application through the pipeline. Did the money come in? Was it the right amount of money? Do we have all the suitability information that's needed to make a decision, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Many of these steps require a person to look at the application, hit a keyboard every time to move it along the process. Opus, however, is an AI agent that works around the clock. It doesn't get tired, and it performs a long list of checks and rules and autonomously moves an application through our system, flagging it for human review if an issue or action is needed. Right now, almost all applications require human intervention to address various issues as they progress through the process. With Opus, once fully deployed, we expect that the agentic capabilities will be able to handle 85% of the processing without that intervention. You might ask, "Okay, so why can't you get to 100% automation with all the fancy tech that you have?" We are a regulated business, and AI is still new. Regulators expect humans to make certain decisions and oversee the platform and the process. We're building out our AI processes so that our people make the final decisions in these key situations. We're putting humans in the loop where they are expected to be. This type of prudent automation with CeresNexus will allow us to grow our business to significant scale without headcount additions. This platform gives us the power to control our own destiny. I don't mean to be dramatic about that, but it's our code. We own it, we control it, we can change it, and it gives us the ability to control our cost. As we sit today, we've grown our premiums significantly in the last year without adding admin costs or people, and that was with our Generation 2.0. With the capabilities of CeresNexus and our targeted 85% throughput, we expect to be able to scale even more to $10 billion of AUM at our current expense run rate. Why is that? We leverage AI to develop and deploy our code. We don't pay vendors for software, it's our key software. System changes can be requested in plain English and converted to code in the same day. Our variable expense does not grow with policy volumes because we own the platform on which our annuities are being administered. We efficiently, because of those things, can manage our headcount cost. There's one other stat I want to share on this point of efficiency. One of those agentic capabilities on the prior page is AI-leveraged code development, a core capability of ours. Tom Olds, where are you at? There's Tom. Tom Olds, he is our Chief Innovation and Technology, Head of Technology. He was here at the start when Deanna was here. He is the mastermind behind what we're doing on our platform. Tom has been measuring how quickly we develop and deploy code since we started two years ago. In that time, he has demonstrated that our development velocity is 47 times what it was when we started this journey two years ago. This is what has allowed us to do so much in a relatively short period of time in terms of iterating on our platform. In addition to efficiencies, our platform gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace as well. Insurance agents like us because applications come in right the first time because of how we've designed it. They want to do carriers, as I've said before, that make them efficient. Our capabilities also allow us to make product changes and develop and launch new products and features in weeks rather than months. I can't overstate how important this is, particularly given the competition in the annuity marketplace has increased. If a carrier has to rely on a TPA or a vendor partner, it has to schedule its launches on somebody else's timeline, where it has to sit down and scope out and price and write an SOW about the work that the vendor's going to do. What do we do at Ceres? We call Tom and say, "Okay, we need to make some changes," and he can get after the code the next day. No, he can actually get after it the same day with his team. That's a big advantage. With us, we're not stitching various components together. This is our platform. It allows us to create a seamless experience for our policyholders and distributors. This is why we think we're such a unique proposition in this space. To conclude, we believe Ceres has delivered in two years what we set out to do and what we talked to you, our investors, about last year. In two years, we've built a fully operational tech-forward carrier from scratch, and we've processed a lot of business through our platform. We're well-positioned to continue to deliver for our stakeholders, especially for you, our shareholders. I want to thank you very much. We appreciate your attention today and your interest in Aventus and the Ceres story. Next, I'd like to introduce Andrew Rabinowitz, the CEO of CCaventus. Okay, maybe I'm going to introduce him. There he is. Right here. Andrew, Cameron texted me to make sure I went to the event. I forgot my notes. Don't worry. Well, it says something about me. I have a unique personality. I want to first say thank you. I saw people I've known from college, people that were my partners at Marathon, new partners, old partners. It's just very gratifying to see everyone, and I know a bunch of people on Zoom, too, so thank you. See if I get this right. Okay, good. This is our current AUM, and our current where we sit deployed. Over the last 12 months, Matt will correct me if I am wrong. We are up about a billion dollars year-over-year plus or minus with commitments. A lot has gone into our private credit business. As we will talk about, it is going into a couple of our newer businesses and there is more to come on the landscape, which we will show later in the slides. You have learned a lot about Ceres, amazing firm. We are at CCaventus. we are the asset manager, and it rolls into Westaim, which rolls into CC Capital. It is an integrated platform. I would say this model works. I had the benefit of working, sitting next to Josh Harris as a senior Partner, Co-Founder of Apollo. I learned and saw what they did at Apollo and at 26North, and then the same thing with Chinh and Rich and others that were at Blackstone. This integrated platform has proven to be successful. The information flow, the idea generation, the synergies. We are trying to replicate that. When I joined, I was asked by the board, "What is the vision? How do we expect to grow?" I came up with this chart. It had a little bit more detail, but we have made it simpler. If you look at the best asset managers, it is really an integrated, or best credit managers, I should say. It is really an integrated platform between three business lines, in my opinion. First, you have things, we will call it private credit. We will talk about our private credit business. Private credit means something different to everyone. If you Google private credit, and I spoke 45 minutes about this a few months ago, you can get numbers from 1.7 trillion to 40 trillion. So what is private credit? For us right now, it is really focused on structured credit and real estate. First lien, top of the capital stack, secure, recession resilient, and we will show some of the things we are doing. The second is capital markets, things that are tied to Wall Street. My former partner, Andrew Brady, who is here somewhere, I saw him here before, there he is, has joined us. We were partners for 18 years, and we are building a CLO business, which is capital markets, and then we are building a rated feeder business. We will explain why the rated feeder business, but it is tied to things that are tied to capital markets. I do have, I see Catherine right there, so I have to say thank you, Catherine, for all your help on the rated feeder. Lastly, long only. Long only could be ETFs, it could be UCITS, it could be index-based products. My former partner, Gabby Spiegel, sitting over there, he was the brainstorm behind one of the greatest emerging market bond index outperformance funds. I learned a lot from Gabby. I hate to say it, Gabby, I may take your playbook and redo it here a bit, but after being your partner for 20 years. Anyway, it could be structured credit, it could be emerging market credit, and it could be corporate credit. I am a big believer in committees. My entire career, all my mentors were committees. I took a quote from Steve Jobs, which I liked, which says, "Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people." One of the first things I did when I started as president at the time was create these committee structures. You can see what committees we have. I would say what's also important is it's not just the senior leadership who are on the committees. It goes up and down the firm. So from someone four years out of university to someone who's been in practice for 40 years. I think it's important to get new ideas. one plus one does equal three, and so we have a committee structure. I'd also say that in every committee, I believe, yes, every committee, there's someone from CC Capital on it. When I mess up, Doug is sure to point out how I've made 15 mistakes. So thank you, Doug. That's just my way of saying thank you for our friendship. This page I only put up because Rich requested that I show a picture of him in the deck. So this is Rich. Your high school picture looks great, so thank you, Rich. Just kidding, Rich. This is our management committee. The management committee, as you can tell, I'm a little bit unique, as my mom would say. The management committee is the group that's tasked with running the firm. There's not one person running the firm at all. All decisions at the management committee go back up to the Westaim board and CC Capital. So we're fortunate that we have five of us that meet weekly to discuss the things that we think are important. Our macro. When I started to want to do the macro, I forgot who said it to me. Was it you, Cam, or someone that said, "Why are you doing the macro?" Macro is so important. When I was at 26North, I ran the macro for Josh. Macro helps you. It doesn't make you make decisions, but it helps make informed decisions, and it helps you think about maybe sectors you want to avoid or things you want to lean into. So we've created a macro committee here that's run. I decided not to do it again. It's a lot of work, but our chief risk officer has taken over that task. We try to meet monthly. It's also a great way to build culture by having junior and senior people. The late Charlie Munger said, "Microeconomics is what we do. Macroeconomics is what we tolerate." Now some thoughts on the macro. I did take some notes, so I didn't mess this up. GDP is strong. You can see from the, depending on your perspective, the GDP is going from 2.2%-2.7%. If you read most economists, they say there's a probability of recession of 25%. I personally have that higher. Actually, the numbers range from 10%-15% to 30%. I actually think it's 1/3. Why do I think that? Well, one, there's a heavy reliance on one sector, so the economy's really growing based on AI and tech. Two, energy costs are high. Anyone who drives can tell you that gas is up 34% year-over-year. Next is consumer spending is 70% of our GDP, and I'll go through consumer sentiment in a second. The reasons why unemployment. Why we may not dip into recession is you can see the unemployment rate is holding strong. The national debt, although I seem to be worried about it, and anyone who comes from the county background seems to worry about it, others don't. It's sort of a mixed message. On consumer sentiment, on the next slide, you can see where we are right now. We're currently at 51.7, which is the second lowest on record. If consumers are worried, and obviously a lot of it has to do with energy costs and inflation, there's some probability that we go into recession again. I have it at 33%. That will impact what sectors we may want to go into. Crude oil, a lot of talk about crude oil. We've been here before. There's at least six times that I could find that we've been over $100. In July of 2008, when China had energy demands. In 2011, Arab and Iran sanctions. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and twice this year. On, I guess, your left. You can see how much our economy is growing based on sectors. If you look at AI and infrastructure, $7.6 trillion, that's the total GDP of Japan and France. It is very heavily weighted to one sector, which is reasons to be cautious. As far as GDP projections, I've studied a lot of numbers. U.S. currently call it 2.1-2.2, projected to be 2.4 next year. Europe is 0.8, projected to be 1.1 next year. U.K., 1.2, unchanged next year. Emerging markets, 4.6, pretty much unchanged next year. Japan, 0.8, pretty much unchanged next year. What's interesting, though, is if you look at CPI inflation numbers, and I think I have Yeah, CPI inflation numbers. Everyone has CPI inflation numbers coming down, which would then tell you, predict that there's probably more Fed hikes. U.S., 3.2 heading to 2.4 year-over-year next year. 2.8 to 1.9 for Europe. 3.1 to 2.6 for the U.K. 3.1 to 2.7 for emerging markets. 1.9 to 1.7. We'll continue to see the global governments try to reduce inflation by raising rates, is what that sort of tells me. I'm not going to talk about tariffs except there's so much talk about it. Obviously, tariffs play into any conversation we have, and we talk about that at our macro. I talked about unemployment. If you look at the global employment numbers, I have that just handy real quick. 4.1 for the U.S., 6.1 for Europe. LATAM is at 5.3, Asia is at 4.1. When you look at projections over the next 12 months, they're steady, which tells you that the GDPs should be positive based on what we've talked about before. Office vacancy. We have a big real estate group. We raised a lot of money for real estate this year. When we look at office vacancies, right now we're at 17.7%, as the chart shows. Average per square foot is around $36. I looked at it 10 years ago, the office vacancy was 13%, and it was $25 per square foot. That is misleading because someone would tell me, "Well, that is 10 years ago. It is inflation." At an inflation-adjusted number, it is $34 per square foot. It is basically unchanged. What that tells us is offices are regional, and you have to be very thoughtful about where you invest. You just cannot throw a dart against the board because although it is 17.7 across the U.S., there are obviously pockets of the U.S. doing much, much better. Austin, Nashville, Florida, across Florida. It is regional, and our team is very focused on the regional. I am looking at Peter right now. He is waving me and saying, okay, I think, and smiling. On housing. Look, housing is flat, and housing makes sense that it is flat. Where was mortgage rates 10 years ago as a 30-year fixed? It was at 3.4%. Right now, it just closed at 7%. I decided for a little game. Doug has a house in Montana, and he talks about his house in Montana, and I talked about how housing is regional. I was curious for myself, and hopefully anyone else is, and we can play a game if you would like, is what houses are quickest to sell, on the market is the shortest amount of time, and what houses are the slowest to longest on the market. Anyone want to take a guess on what housing is quickest, the top four or five that I have here? I think they are over $10 million. Oh, sorry. By region. Sorry. Montclair. Which one? Montclair. Oh, did you say Jersey? Montclair is Jersey. Okay. I'll just go, not cities or region, but all right. Let's do the fastest to sell. Massachusetts, average day on the market, 39. Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, and Ohio. So those are quick. So those are places that make sense. Slowest to sell. The slowest, longest time to sell a house is actually in Montana, 121 days. Doug, hopefully, you don't need liquidity, and if you do, rates are high. Followed by Hawaii, Vermont, and South Carolina. The reason why I bring this up is just that, again, we're very focused on state by state. It's not let's just be an index, and that's how we're going to outperform. CLOs. Really excited about the business. I think the first thing I said to Cam, Chinh, Doug, and Rich when I joined was, "I want to build a CLO business." I don't know if Menez is listening, but Menez, thank you, because he was the one who was like, "Yes, I agree." So thank you, Menez. CLOs, look, we've seen the power of CLOs at Marathon when we were there. Andrew and I built a multi-billion-dollar business together back 2004. We think we can do that again. We're building a team that we're really excited about. CLOs make a lot of sense. I'll explain why. Just to give you where spreads are, because that question comes up all the time. Where are CLO spreads, AAAs. Andrew, thank you for the research. 120 -1 50 is what he tells me on AAAs. AAs, 150 - 190. As, 190 - 250. BBBs, 280 - 340. BBs, 500 - 600. You could see that's a pretty nice spread versus where IG corporates are trading at 5.5%. Issuance is down. That's a good thing for us, meaning less CLOs are getting issued. Why? I think there's a challenge raising equity, and doesn't make sense to us because we actually love the CLO equity, and I'll explain why in a little bit. This is my last macro slide, so hopefully I'm doing okay on time. Look, the private market has exploded. I talked a little bit about it. Why? Regulation. Banks have pulled out. According to, let me get the right source, National Bureau of Economic Research, 25% of direct lending is coming from banks right now. They just pulled out because of Basel III and everything, Dodd-Frank. Two, returns. Returns have been good. Depending on what you invest in, private credit, high single digits to low to mid-teens. It is uncorrelated. You do not have the mark-to-market risk. A lot of clients that are worried about some of the volatility in their portfolio, it helps with that. Okay, here is our investment ideas. Oh, this is the team. Hi, team. CLO equity. CLOs, sorry. CLOs. Why do we love CLOs? In 2009, which many of us lived through, corporate defaults globally were down 9.6%, but CLOs actually held up well. It really, really did. We lived through the storm. I tried to understand why. I looked back at that time, came up with a few reasons. One, the reinvestment. When loans traded off in the fourth quarter of 2008, specifically to $0.60 or $0.70 on the dollar, what did smart CLO managers do, like Andrew Brady? He bought it because he is like, "Look, this is first lien paper. If I can get top quality managers at $0.60 on the dollar, it is going to pay back at par. Let us buy it." They bought things at deep discounts, and it generated attractive returns. We plan to do that again. Right, Andrew? Yeah, he is smiling, too. Two, there are interest rate floors. When rates go down to zero, and everyone was like, "Rates never get down to zero." Yes, they do. They were just at zero March of 2022, so not that long ago. CLOs have floors, typically 100 basis points. You could have a premium when you invest in CLOs because of the interest rate floor. Three, when things go south, if we have a recession, there is an OC test, over-collateralization test, that says you cannot distribute to the equity. What do smart CLO managers do? They either de-lever the vehicle or they buy things that are trading at a discount. That is how you can outperform. I am not sure if I am allowed to quote Andrew's or our CLO business returns historically, so I am not. There is a Fish report that if anyone wants, just email me, and I will send it to you. It is very attractive. Okay, what is next? The other thing I just want to mention on CLOs real quick is low correlation to the S&P. According to Wellington, it is only 0.37. The quarterly distributions are great. We already talked about first liens. On CRE debt, we do a lot of different things in CRE debt. The one that we are super excited about is anything that is first lien. First lien right now is paying us 8%-10% unlevered. IG, again, is paying about 5%, 5.5%. If you look at where long-term rates are right now, it is at a 19-year high. Right now, if companies need to refinance, it is hard, which means they are going to be looking for alternative places to refinance, AKA us. Peter, you brought business cards, right? Yeah. Perfect. There is a wall of maturities. Thank you, Peter, for pulling these numbers for me. In 2026, the wall of maturity this year is $875 billion. Next year, it is $1.2 trillion. Historically, the number is $350 billion, which means there is a lot of opportunity for us to invest. Right now, when borrowers look to refinance, they are paying a premium, call it about 150 basis points-250 basis points because of the wall of maturity, because interest rates are high, because banks have left the business. Corporate securities. These are the sectors we are focused on. Things I just want to point out is stable cash flow, low leverage, reputable management. We have some competitive advantages. Based on our network, we are investing in 482 private placements. They give us another, call it, 60 basis points-80 basis points additional return. We work very closely with Ceres Life on this business. I do not know if Peggy is still here, but with Peggy as well. It helps sort of that integrated platform, having this business under Michael gives us an advantage to be able to see where the IG market is and where private placements are. On the private credit sector, I looked at where are people allocating capital. Where is the growth in private sector? No surprise, 25%-30% is in software, 20% in healthcare. Love healthcare. Recession resilient. Business servicing is 15%-20%. Infrastructure line lending, love infrastructure, is 10%. Outside that, there is ABF, which includes aircraft leasing, equipment leasing, and real estate. We are doing equipment leasing and real estate, which we are excited about. The other thing. Can I go? I cannot go back on the slide. I apologize. It is just first time using this one. The one thing I would say about ABF, which is run by Victor, and we'll talk about the vehicles we're doing that, is, one, the short duration. Typically, the loans are short duration. They are first lien, highly diversified. You get a complexity premium because you have to originate these loans, and they are locally based. You get a complexity premium, which we like a lot. What is a PIPE? I have a bad joke and I am not going to use it. I am sure you can figure out which one it is. Something that goes underground, ha-ha. Thank you, Cam, for laughing. Private securities that really small cap companies use when they need capital, and they do not want to go through the public markets. What we do. They typically trade at a discount. For us, it is typically 10%. What is unique about the way we approach our PIPEs, led by Shavit and Yoav, is we get a lot of warrants. A lot of warrants, I mean, like 25%+. The average, the PIPE flow, 1990 at $1.3 billion. 2026, $28 billion. Currently, $68 billion. Average returns. I looked up what the average return were PIPEs over the last 20 years, 12.1%-19.7%. Again, I cannot talk about our returns, but do you think I would mention these return ratios if we did not do a little better? Shh. We have extended the return on our PIPEs. The three sectors we are focusing on is tech, life science, and energy and infrastructure. All right, now to the question I get from Cam every day. "How are we going to build this thing, Andrew?" I get this from him every day. If he does not ask me, Rich asks me. If Rich doesn't ask me, Doug asks me. If Doug doesn't ask me, Chinh asks me. If Chinh doesn't ask me, someone on the board asks me. This is how we are going to get there. Let's start with strategic partnerships. I have to be careful what I say here, but we are on the one-yard line on signing, or whatever, red zone, on signing a strategic partnership with a global investment bank, that we think will be, over time, transformative in the structured credit space. Very excited about that. I have been working on this for many, many, many, many months. Excited to have the partnership with them, with CC Capital and with Aventus. Two of the various funds. In every business I described, there is typically a fund attached to it. For CLOs, we will be raising CLO equity. We already have commitments on that. We have the real estate debt fund. We have a multi-strat structured ABF fund. There are some other things that we are working on in the pipeline. In those businesses, we have raised, as I mentioned, about a billion dollars. We have to put the money to work though, but we have raised about a billion dollars. CLOs, we have done our first warehouse with Goldman. We are about to sign with Natixis and do our second warehouse sometime either this week or next. We plan to issue our first CLO this year, second CLO first quarter next year, and we will be off and running on CLOs. The plan is to do two or three CLOs a year. We will not be a serial issuer. We will try to outperform. I think we believe right now our equity returns to CLOs are about 13%-15%, 13%-16%. Very excited about that business. We plan to grow it to an $8 billion-$10 billion business as we have in the past. Rated feeders. Why are rated feeders great? First of all, they are super capital efficient. What do I mean by that? If you look at an insurance company that invests in private credit, their capital charge is 30%-40%. Wow. If they invest in a single A or triple B. You guys are talking. Did I say something about the strategic partnership? That is our lawyer who is working on the strategic partnership. I am like, did I say something I shouldn't have? I am okay, Omar? All right. Thank God. Phew. I didn't want to get thrown out of here and Cam would have to find another speaker. Anyway, 30%-40% in capital charge for rated feeders. If you invest in a rated feeder. I am sorry, if you invest in private credit. If you invest in the rated feeders, though, triple Bs or single As, it goes down to 1%-3%. You own the same asset at 1%-3% versus 30%-40% if you own the asset outright. Insurance companies are very excited about talking to us. We have a team. We expect to close our first rated feeder this year, and we have a second one on the way. I am just looking at Kat to make sure she agrees. She agrees. Perfect. Next bit. That will be. The first rated feeder will be about $300 million. I should have mentioned this. The first CLO should be about $400 million. The various funds, I mentioned a billion. Strategic partnership, I cannot talk more about it, but we will talk about it more later. The second rated feeder will be about $300 million-$400 million next year. ETFs and UCITS. I have a good idea every 10 years. This is my first good idea. My last good idea is I told Mike Minikin at Bear Stearns that they were in trouble in 2007. Then he went on Bloomberg saying, "Andrew Rabinowitz was the first person to tell us we were in trouble in 2007." This is my second good idea. It took 20 years to have my second good idea. Credit ETFs. I love credit. The ETF market is $23 trillion. It was $3.5 trillion 10 years ago. 10% of the $23 trillion is in fixed income. Less than 10 basis points is in ABS. Ideally, we can create an ABS ETF that will really crush it. I have talked to two strategic partners that want to work with us. Obviously, a lot has to happen between the idea of wanting to work with us and actually working with us. There is a path forward, we believe. We have hired. Where is Majid? I saw him here before. There he is. He went to a school no one has ever heard of in engineering called, I think it was called Stanford. Yes. It is a small school up in California that no one knows. He is helping design it with Doug and myself and a bunch of other people. We hope to have an ETF probably sometime early next year. We are super excited about that. Usage, we have a global bank that wants to partner with us on UCITS, similar concepts. Then emerging markets. I mentioned my old partner. I am smiling at him right now. I love him to death. Sorry. I know it is being recorded, but I still love him to death. I am heading down to Brazil next week. We have been talking to one of the largest and most prestigious firms, in my opinion, in Brazil that want to partner with us. We are trying to work out some details. We hope to have an announcement on something in EM in the coming weeks or months. Hopefully weeks. We are super excited about EM, and that will be the integrated platform that we talked about. That could be really sizable. Marathon, I believe you built. What is the number? 8 billion? 7 billion? 7 billion from scratch. Hopefully we can duplicate that again. One of the other strategic partnerships I did not talk about is Wilshire. Jason Hubschman. Thank you for putting on a jacket for our sake. No, I am kidding. You look great. Who is Wilshire? Well, if you do not know Wilshire, you should. It is like you do not know Coca-Cola, but they advise on $1.3 trillion of assets. They have partnered with Apollo, Brookfield, and Bridgewater. I was saying to myself yesterday, I was like, "Why are they partnering with us, CCaventus?" It came to me. You needed to tell everyone that ABC. Exactly. You know my joke. You did not even talk about ABC. That is how you got CCaventus. The idea I had pitched them, and Jason and I go way back, so we are friends, is it would be really interesting for public pensions if you could do a multi-manager, multi-sector platform where a public pension plan who is understaffed can allocate to aircraft leasing, ABF, convertible debt, PIPE, IG, CLOs, real estate, whatever the case may be. I'm not suggesting we can do all that because I am definitely not. But what I said is, what if we could do a portion of that? What if we could do 1/3 or 40% of that? And then Wilshire picks because they're the best in the business. The other 65 or whatever the number is, 70% of the best managers who could do convertible debt or emerging market debt or whatever that is. We have I can't use the word best of the best, but really, really strong multi-strat, multi-credit managers. Wilshire has agreed, and as you can see from that step chart that you ask me about all the time, like how are we getting to $25 billion. I did think of a quote for that too, Cam. It's Henry Kissinger, because we're working hard, man. Really working hard. My wife is like, "I never see you anymore. I gave up golf." The quote that he had that resonates with me the most is he said, Henry Kissinger said, "There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full." With that, Jason, can you come up, and we'll talk a little bit about what we're trying to build together. Amanda, thank you for these questions. If they're not good, they should blame you. The other thing, I'll just add a note before I get into the thing, is one thing that they always said to me in my career is I never take credit for anything, so that's why I'm shouting out everyone, so I apologize. Good job. Thank you. Look, Jason, I'm not going to introduce Jason. Jason's amazing. I love him. He's brilliant. But Jason, can you give your bio? Which I could do, but you'd do a better job. Sure. Nice to meet everyone. I am the Co-Chief Operating Officer for Wilshire. I also co-lead our liquid alternatives business. Started my career as a lawyer. Don't hold that against me. I have had positions at large investment banks and asset managers, always on the alternatives side. A little bit more product-focused, so consider myself a bit of a product wonk, putting things together. Really helping to deliver investment streams to clients in a diversified portfolio and diversified packaging. Thank you. Can we talk a little bit about Wilshire? Who are they, what they do, how they have grown, how they have become- Yeah. People may historically think of Wilshire as a consultant, but really we are a diversified investment solutions partner to clients. We do have a legacy consulting business that exists, but also we are very large in wealth and retirement, so we help manage portfolio allocation models for the wealth channel. We also are the largest provider of small fiduciary services to small and micro 401 plans. Those two businesses are very much based upon investment capabilities, fiduciary expertise, as well as technology scale. We touch over 68,000 individual pension plans, not even pension participants. We manage things in a fiduciary manner, again, through scale. Similarly, on the model side, we have over $100 billion of asset allocation models that we offer out through the wealth and intermediary space. Again, delivering scale. In the alternative space, this is really where the work with Aventus comes into play, we help allocators as well as pools of capital allocate to the best alpha streams. We sit in the middle and help allocators with portfolio allocation, manager selection, and portfolio structuring. We have about $45 billion of assets in the alternative space. About $5 billion of that is in private markets, and the remainder is in our liquid space. There we do things that are a little bit unique. Not only do we do manager selection, portfolio construction, but we implement using our managed account platform, which really is designed to create a multi-strat for our clients and really delivering the benefits of that approach via transparency, liquidity control, capital financing, and customization and risk. That is really the platform that we are talking about kind of melding with the investment return streams from Andrew and the team. About, I don't know, 15 years ago in the asset. There is a question coming, I promise. But 15 years ago, the asset management, you noticed there was a convergence, right? Hedge funds were trying to get into private credit. Private credit managers were trying to get into private equity. Private equity was trying to get into long only. You had these. If you saw the shift earlier, which luckily we did, 20 years ago. That was the model that if you pivoted before or right after the Great Recession, you were successful. That is the model we are building here, right? With those three pillars of long-only private credit and capital markets, right? Same exact model because it is a proven winner. Consultants, though, have gone different paths, right? Some have stayed traditional consultants, others have opened up CIO offices. It is not as clear to me where the puck is going in consulting. Where do you see the puck going? Yeah. I would like to think that we started that journey a couple of years ago. Which is thinking what we do best, which is, again, as I said, really helping pools of capital allocate their risk to best-of-breed managers. How can we apply that idea beyond just consultants. That is, I think, where people are going. It is for consultants looking to provide their expertise to different asset streams and different client types to convert from, I would say, consulting-based revenues to more asset-based fees. Really trying to deliver asset management returns and expertise to their clients, as opposed to just being viewed as a consultant. We think that goes along with the macro theme of large allocators wanting to lean into partnerships. They are not really looking to have many more relationships. They are looking to get more out of the relationships that they already have. We think our role as a trusted consultant puts us in a pole position to help essentially diversify our work stream cross-sell, to use a term, with these types of clients. That's what we've been leaning into over the last couple of years. Thank you. Now I'm going off script, which you knew I would do anyway. Sorry. Surprised it took this long. One of the things that I've always believed is you have a new business committee, which we have, right? Anytime we have an idea, the question is, what's our competitive edge? Why us, right? What do we bring that is really not in the market? Why can we do a better job than whatever's out there, right? When you think about the partnership that we're looking to do with Wilshire, when you think about portfolio construction and how you put the pieces together of what maybe we do well versus others, have you thought about that portfolio construction? Yeah. If you think about it in simple terms, we're thinking about a 40-40-20 type of portfolio. About 40% of the assets are going to be allocated to some of the strategies that Andrew talked about today, really CCaventus-led. 40% going to be diversifying credit-based strategies, a little bit more liquid, a little bit more CUSIP based to provide some ballast and as well as some potential equity macro hedging within the portfolio. Then that additional 20% is going to be something that we can collectively be much more tactical with. We could do that to, A, take advantage of investment opportunities and scale up in terms of seeking out return. But similarly, in a somewhat uncertain environment, be more risk-aware and move with respect to risk. So one, it is the investment platform that you guys have and are building. That's, A, frankly, the biggest driver. Then also looking at the asset classes that you guys are participating in, it's not just the investment side. It's how you're servicing those assets, how you're managing the risk associated with the liquidity that is in some of these, some of the more idiosyncratic risks. As we've learned more about the CCaventus team, not only the investment side but the risk management, the operation side, it really is top-notch from all of those different dynamics. So that's one of the things that we really love about what you guys bring. But also at the same time, we think the benefits of adding diversifying return streams will benefit the end client. That's where we think we have a good expertise. Couple that with that platform implementation layer that we talked about. We're not creating a fund to fund. We're creating a true multi-strat portfolio whereby we are going to have full transparency and control over all of the underlying instruments on the third-party side. So that gives us the ability to, A, manage risk much better and more dynamically. Also provide potentially enhanced liquidity because we can control these assets. But also as we make investment decisions, that information is going to be part of the investment process, real-time, granular to help deliver better investment returns. I'm guessing we're over time based upon the- No. I was asking how much time was left because at most conferences, they give you like a clock or a countdown, or people yawn when I speak. That's usually my indication. I don't find that to be the case. That's usually my, but there's no, I'm on a budget. We want to get Aventus to be, when it gets to $25 billion, they'll give me a clock. There's a good. But now I have to look at Cam and say, how much time do we have left? Five minutes. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Amber. All right. Let's ask this. You talk to a lot of pension plans, corporate and public. Yeah. We saw the growth of private credit market, how it's exploded. I think it was 13% off memory on K on average. Where do you see them allocating? Are they pulling back from private credit? Are they allocating to private credit? A lot of people have a view on an S&P, including mine, which is it's trading, obviously all-time highs. It's tight. Yeah. Where are they redirecting capital, and how does that impact what we're trying to build? It has an impact. One of the things that we've seen is the search for more diversification. As large allocators have gotten more and more concentrated with respect to private equity, private credit, and the illiquid side, we've seen a bit of a renaissance on, let's say, the hedge fund side, which is really a bit more traded asset, a little bit more liquid. That's A. B is, like I said before, Andrew mentioned, there's tons of different return streams that are available to these allocators with shrinking staffs. The ability to navigate that. They are looking for partners who have the investment expertise to do that, which is a trend that we are definitely capitalizing on. I think that goes to the impetus that you had around this idea, which is, A, you do a lot of things really well, but to build a diversified single ticket, if you will, investment, you need more. That's, I think, where we come in. Also then, with that diversification, we're allowing these partners to lever into and lean into us much more so from a portfolio construction as opposed to a single strategy, a single theme. That's something that, again, a bit of a macro theme that we are seeing with our clients that I think this product and our partnership really spots into very nicely. It's really an honor to have Jason. I know we have time for one or two more questions, but again, it's off-script, I apologize. I have more questions, but does anyone in the audience have a question for Wilshire? It's rare that some of his ilk and seniority would come speak us. Any questions in the audience for Wilshire or for the industry? Please. The question for the video, yes. The question for the video is, for these JVs or strategic partnerships, do you own it? Do you partner? What's the strategy going forward? Is that a fair summary for the people on the video? Look, I've been fortunate in my career to work at, I'd say two, probably three firms that I've helped grow. 26North, where I was a senior partner or president or whatever, or co-CEO at the time, at different times. Strategic partnerships make the difference. To own them, to do that, no. I think, glad to work with them because they just make. Partnership is critical. Be good partners. If I had to come up with a philosophy, good partners and build good partnerships. Jason, you want to add on that? Just maybe a little bit of a pivot, which is when you look at it as like, what are the other things that our partners are bringing beyond just, let's say, the investments? Origination is one area, but I think what CCaventus is doing with respect to Aventus, with Ceres, with that market information, with the top-down support that is being given and the growth, that is frankly just as, if not more valuable than just saying, "Okay, they have an origination platform or they don't." This more broad kind of growth plan is, again, something that strategically we are very, very big believers in and happy to partner with the team on. I'll just close real quick is, look, I can't tell you for certain we're going to get to $25 billion. Obviously, I can't say that. As Keith said, I've been part of two firms that I helped get there too. But we have a plan to get there between strategic partnerships, between the products we talked about, between the amazing partner with Wilshire, and other ones that we'll plan to disclose in the coming weeks. We definitely have an outline of going from A to B, and we have a clear vision to get there. I can assure all the shareholders, the people in this room, the people listening, that the team is working incredibly hard to get us to where we want to get to. Whether it's in portfolio management, asset management, operations, accounting, IR/BD, compliance. We're working around the clock because we all are motivated by getting to where we want our ultimate goal. Everyone's rowing at the same direction in a really positive way. So to my colleagues at CCaventus, formerly Arena, thank you because it's not a one-person thing show. It's all of us together. So thank you so much. To CC Capital and to Ceres Life, thank you for the partnership. Of course, thank you to what was Westaim, to CCaventus and Cam for your leadership and partnership. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I drew the short straw here and have to follow up Andrew's energy. Unfortunately, he used up our allotment of jokes, so there's not much left for Nikita and I. I would like to thank everyone in the room and on the webcast for your continued support of Aventus. We do not take this for granted. We are very excited for our rebranding of Westaim to Aventus and Arena to CCaventus. This is a clear indication of the hard work we have put into restructuring the platform and the new dawn for the business that is now at our doorstep. It has helped us to re-energize our employee base for this new era, and the team is now ready to fly. To our shareholders, I want to assure you that we are laser-focused on protecting shareholder value and achieving strong compounded annual returns. We understand that our recent financial report has raised some questions, particularly with respect to insurance accounting under IFRS. Nikita is going to speak in more detail on this point and will provide you today with an IFRS to U.S. GAAP comparison that should help bring some clarity to those questions. Starting with Q3 reporting and onwards, we intend to add quarterly supplemental schedules on our website for key certain U.S. GAAP metrics reconciled to analogous IFRS measures to help bridge this gap for our investors going forward. To our employees, I want to thank you for your hard work, your dedication, passion, energy, and talents that you bring to Aventus, CCaventus, and Ceres Life every single day. We are on a great adventure together, and I couldn't be prouder to be taking this journey with this incredible team. To our business partners and other stakeholders, many of you are in the room. Thank you so much for coming out. We couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead for us, and we look forward to partnering with you as we look to accelerate growth on our platform. I wear several different hats on the Aventus platform, including my roles as President and COO of the overall company, board member, and Audit Committee Chair of Ceres, and COO of CCaventus. These roles give me a fairly unique 360-degree view across the platform, and I would like to share some of those perspectives with you today. I think I hit that button too many times. I apologize. If it's possible to roll it back to the first slide. Thank you. We have spoken a lot about the flywheel effect from the integration of our insurance and asset management business. Indeed, that is really starting to take hold with over $ 300 million of new AUM to Aventus from the policy premiums taken in by Ceres since the transaction closed. This is only part of the asset management story, as you heard a lot of that from Andrew. Much of my time has been spent on the restructuring of our asset management business. While the results haven't quite shown it yet, there has been a tremendous amount of groundwork laid in retooling the business, and we are now poised to accelerate growth. Andrew and I have operated as true business partners in this endeavor since he joined the firm in December. There's nobody I would rather be on this ride with. Andrew brings, as you saw today, insatiable energy to the office, and it has breathed new life into our very capable team. We have a shared vision and grand ambitions for what this platform can become. We're going to have a lot of fun building out this platform with our team, many of whom are in the room today. As Andrew walked you through in his presentation, there are many value levers that we are pulling in CCaventus to drive growth. We're developing top-tier strategic relationships with Wilshire and with the investment banking JV opportunity that he spoke about that we hope to announce here soon. We're engaged in late-stage dialogue with top-tier asset allocators about potential allocations into our strategies. We are innovating on the product side with a compelling commercial mortgage lending fund that is expected to launch in Q4, the ABL rated feeder strategy that we're also targeting for Q4, Q1 launch. We anticipate that AUM from Ceres will actually be a minority of the overall new capital that will come into the asset management platform in 2027 and beyond. On the insurance front, I've been involved in the Ceres Life platform since the very beginning, partnering with Deanna when we only had a handful of people for this new insurance venture that would eventually become known as Ceres Life. I want to thank Deanna for her sage leadership through the development, launch, and early operations of Ceres Life. It was a distinct honor and privilege to work so closely with Deanna over the past couple of years. I'm thrilled that she will continue to be a resource as a strategic advisor to Erik, the Ceres team, and Aventus more broadly. I'm very pleased that Erik is now at the helm of Ceres Life. Erik is a stoic leader and a steady presence for the team as they enter this next phase of significant growth and maturity of the platform. I worked very closely with Erik since he joined Ceres Life. I believe he is capable, poised, and ready to lead the Ceres team into this exciting next phase of development and growth. I think you got to see a lot of that today. The idea that we always had for Ceres was to create something that was truly differentiated in the market, starting with a blank sheet of paper and building it right from the ground up. No technology debt, no legacy balance sheet to contend with, and Ceres has truly achieved that. The platform they've created is quite impressive. Truly AI native with most processes fully automated and humans left to deal with the decisions and interactions that truly matter from a risk and policyholder perspective. They've demonstrated an ability to scale very quickly and efficiently, handling interactions with over 1,700 agents, as Erik noted before, and handling thousands of new policy applications during this year with their existing staff. They are exceeding industry standards on every operational metric that we track closely, including call center wait times, initial application reviews, time to issue, client satisfaction, and commission processing. The technology is receiving rave reviews from agents on the ease and timeliness of processing. Ceres Life is delivering on their promise for accelerated growth. As you heard from Erik, we now have six IMO distribution channels in place with our Advisors Excel strategic relationship leading the pack. We have $690 million of premiums that have been issued or are pending inception to date, with over $600 million just this year. The engine is now firing on all cylinders and is well positioned to ramp substantially from here. Since we closed the strategic transaction with CC Capital in April 2025, we have been hard at work to retool and restructure the legacy asset management platform to prepare for this next generation of what we now call Aventus. I have to admit, the amount of retooling that was required was more extensive than I had expected coming into the role. We closed the Singapore office, given heavy cost burden in that region relative to the AUM and investment opportunities that we saw there. We ceased operations of what was called Questar Consulting Group, which was tasked with providing outsourced management staffing, mainly C-suite level for mainly our portfolio companies. We exited subscale JV partnerships and non-core business lines, reducing costs and simplifying our structure. We completely revamped our valuation process, moving from individualized Excel-based models to standardized Python-based models for similar assets. This has greatly improved our consistency and auditability of our valuation models, while saving over $1 million in third-party costs for our investors. Let me repeat that. Saved over $1 million of cost for our investors. While we have reduced headcount by more than a net 30% outside of India or north of 40%, excluding the impact of new hires focused on new business activity, producing run rate cost savings of approximately $17 million this year. We believe we have done so in a way that does not materially impact our ability to service existing clients and build for the future. In fact, we have improved capabilities in several existing areas, including real estate and structured products. As I mentioned before, we are preparing for the launch of these two new funds, one focused on commercial mortgage lending and one focused on asset-based lending. That is just the beginning. As Andrew mentioned, we launched our new CLO business and are now actively investing our first warehouse, and the second one is soon to come online. We substantially improved our knowledge of NAIC statutory and risk-based capital frameworks to improve our service to Ceres and other insurance-focused clients. We are working on implementing new technologies, including a new treasury and loan system, and also deepening our leverage of AI-enabled solutions to improve operational efficiency. While we still have much work ahead of us, we believe at this point we are substantially complete with our restructuring efforts, and we have the right team in place that will allow us to build for the future. Just pivoting here a little bit. We often get questions about our progress on FinCo monetization, so I would like to provide an update there. While there are nearly 100 positions within the FinCo portfolios, less than 20 positions make up nearly 80% of our portfolio value. FinCos generally participate in allocations of investments that are also held within other legacy Arena funds. The investments in the portfolio are generally illiquid. Many are equity or equity-like, including foreclosures, non-performing loans, real estate-owned positions. We are continuing to chip away at realizations, and this has now started to accelerate in Q3. Based on our current projections, we expect approximately half of the existing portfolio to liquidate by the end of 2027, another 30%, or 80% total, by the end of 2028, and the remaining 20%, we expect to have a longer tail, could extend to 2031 or beyond. Please keep in mind that it's very difficult to predict with certainty the timing of exits for illiquid investments, and so the numbers I provided here are our best estimates as we stand here today. We are exploring alternatives that could accelerate liquidity, such as continuation vehicles, sale of the fund interest to secondaries markets or other capital market solutions. These options usually come at discounts to current NAV. No decisions have been made on this front, and we will ultimately be driven by what we believe is in the best interest of our investors when deciding on any liquidity alternatives. Finally, I just want to provide everyone with an update on our preparations for a U.S. listing. We often get questions about this from investors. First, for a public service announcement. To be very clear, nothing in this discussion should be construed as an offering of securities, and we are making no attempts here to market our securities for U.S. markets. This is simply a process update on preparedness for a potential U.S. listing. We have been consistent in saying that we plan to be operationally ready to pursue a listing in the U.S. by the end of 2026, and we are generally on track to complete our operational readiness in that timeframe. Operational readiness mainly means the following four things. One, we've prepared and have audits of U.S. GAAP financial statements for at least the past three years of operations. Two, we have performed a SOX compliance assessment of our internal control environment and can attest that we have reasonable controls in place that would satisfy SOX requirements for a U.S. public company. Three, we have reporting capabilities in place to support the quarterly reporting cadence for 10-Q and 10-K filings that will comply with SEC reporting standards. Four, we have evaluated and lined up our legal counsel and financial advisors that we would intend to use for a potential U.S. listing. The actual timing of if or when, I need to say if or when we pursue a U.S. listing will depend on a variety of factors beyond operational readiness. No timetable has been established at this point for if or when we would decide to pursue it. With that said, Nikita and the finance team have done a lot of great work on getting us operationally ready, which we'll cover in her discussion. With that, I'll turn it over to Nikita. Thank you. All right. Thank you, everyone, and thanks, Matt. I'd like to just welcome you all again, and thank you for welcoming me. I joined in April of this year, really for two reasons. The first was I was really impressed with what this team has built in such a short amount of time with the tremendous backing of CC Capital. I also share a view with the team that we really are at an inflection point as a company. We are scaling for future growth, and this is our time. My responsibility, along with the broader finance team, is to ensure that our reporting and financial discipline stays in step with the business as it scales. Within our asset management segment, as Matt has touched upon, we've done significant retooling within the business with an emphasis on building a segment that will scale AUM and product offerings without adding significant incremental costs. As a leadership team, we have set the target to obtain profitability within this segment by the end of 2027, with meaningful bottom-line growth thereafter. Turning to the insurance segment, our key objective here is economic profitability, earning meaningful spread above the crediting rates on the products we offer. The accounting framework does impact how this shows up in our financial statements, but it does not change our objective as a business. In the three quarters that we have written policies, we've attained over $ 690 million of premium issued and pending, with over $ 459 million of invested assets as of August 31st, 2026. As we continue to scale our MYGA and FIA issuance on our next generation platform, near term earnings and book value will continue to stay under pressure. This will moderate as the book seasons. We'll go into greater detail shortly on how to interpret these IFRS results for our insurance segment. But the most important takeaway when looking at this is that economically, the returns, regardless of the accounting framework, are the same. The difference just comes down to timing as to when we can recognize these returns in our financial statements. All right. There are several structural differences in components when we look at reserving between IFRS and GAAP. This slide can be used as a reference when going through the following example that we'll do. But there's really just two key takeaways to look at on this slide without us needing to become actuaries. Number one is how commissions are treated under the standards. IFRS does not allow commissions to be capitalized as an asset, which means the commissions on every policy we write for IFRS goes straight to the P&L and hits the bottom line. GAAP allows these assets to be capitalized as deferred acquisition costs, which are then amortized over the life of the policy. The second relates to risk adjustments, which are a component of the discount rates on the liability side. IFRS requires the insurance liability to be padded for an element of incremental non-financial risk and does not allow the issuer to assume it will achieve returns higher than a mandated rate, which may result in a higher liability recognized on issuance of a policy. GAAP takes a much more standardized approach to this by allowing the liabilities to be discountanced fairly uniformly. However, there still can be differences in practice among issuers. Our FIA contracts can create some noise having to do with the guaranteed living withdrawal benefit that goes on top of some of them. This we can see under U.S. GAAP, less so under IFRS. The rider itself allows for the policyholder to withdraw a set amount from their contract every year in perpetuity, even if the contract balance is zero. For purposes of the accounting today, we are just going to set this one to the side, and we can go through that further when we formally are in the U.S. GAAP reporting framework. If that concept does not impact the IFRS. Now I get to put my teacher hat on, which my team can attest is my favorite role to have in a finance organization, and we can go through a sample Ceres Life FIA policy that we would issue. Let's say we issue a $100,000 FIA policy with a GLWB rider. On day one, we would receive a single premium of approximately $100,000, less $10,000 worth of commissions and expenses. The net $90,000 would then be invested by Peggy and her team in accordance with the strategic asset allocation policy, with which we target to earn an expected return of at least 8% annually. Tying this first concept, we covered DAC. GAAP would allow us to recognize this $10,000 as an asset on our balance sheet. Under IFRS, this goes directly to the P&L as an expense on day one. Secondly, relating to the GLWB rider, GAAP allows us to recognize an asset for this and an equal and offsetting liability. IFRS does not recognize this concept within the recognition of the asset or the liability. The second concept relating to risk adjustments and discount rates, on IFRS, the day one liability equals the discounted cash flows plus a non-financial risk adjustment. Under GAAP, it's much simpler. It's the value of the policy on day one plus the value of the GLWB rider. You can see from day one reporting, IFRS were in a net loss position purely based on the DAC commissions that we have paid and the best estimate liability. Whereas on IFRS, everything is recognized on the balance sheet and released over the life of the contract. This is just how the accounting works. It's not unique to Aventus or Ceres as a company. This next slide sort of zooms out and looks at how this policy's profitability would emerge over time under both reporting frameworks. IFRS is the green line, GAAP is the blue line. You can see from day one, IFRS starts in a net loss position, whereas GAAP starts at zero. GAAP's profits emerge subsequently as our premiums were invested and then earn a higher return than the crediting rates. Whereas IFRS, which has a much more liability-focused model, does not report a profit until year five. A quick clarification as we look at box 4 in the top right-hand corner, just want to make sure these numbers don't get conflated. The 6.3% break even yield is our asset side hurdle rate that we need to at least earn on our invested assets to cover the cost of the liability. The 5.1% that we apply under IFRS is a liability discount rate, not a target return. What drives the five years to profitability is largely that we need to earn out of the day one commissions and risk adjustment from day one. If we take a look back and how the policies behave over time, the standards ultimately converge with identical profitability of approximately $180,000. We have a similar concept of this for MYGAs, which is attached in the materials as an appendix. The key difference there is that there is no GLWB rider, and because there are usually lower commissions on that type of product, the profitability for us at scale emerges around year four under IFRS. This next slide sort of takes a step back and then goes, all right. We've seen an example. What does this mean to our results as a whole? If we move from left to right, what we've done is done a bridge of our equity or book value, and then our P&L. Starting from our IFRS book value on the far left, you can see the main adjustments to get us from IFRS to GAAP really relate to the reversal of that cumulative day one loss on the insurance reserve side, and then a few small policy adjustments between IFRS and GAAP. Looking at the P&L side, you can see that the main difference, we go from $114 million net loss to a $49.6 million loss, largely again, due to that release of the insurance reserve loss. Looking at our book value, which I know is a metric a lot of us focus on, we go from a book value of about $16.77 a share for IFRS to $18.93 a share under GAAP. This is something I find very helpful when I'm looking at our results and comparing them to our peers, and we'll be publishing something in a similar form going from 3Q forwards, that'll be available on our website for investors to look at, that hopefully will help sort of make a little bit more sense and get rid of the accounting noise in our financial statements. This positions us pretty well for the last topic that Matt had teed up relating to our potential U.S. listing. Producing timely and accurate financial results remains a key focus of the finance organization. We have been preparing IFRS and GAAP results in parallel for our segments, which ultimately will reduce the uplift efforts that will be required when preparing the initial registration statement. We've also been investing in our talent, building out our FP&A, external reporting, and SOX reporting so that we will be ready with a goal of being SOX 404 ready within the next 12 months. We've also completed all the necessary corporate and tax restructuring needed to be a U.S. registrant. This work is all being done well in advance of a potential U.S. listing, and we're doing it in the open with our friends, with our employees, and being fully transparent with our investor base. From past experience in doing these kinds of listings, the financial reporting readiness ends up being a very big drag on the transaction closing, and it's one that's well within management's control, which is why we're bringing this all to the forefront. We're clearing this constraint now rather than having it hold up the transaction later. Our priorities from here, fairly straightforward. Publishing our quarterly IFRS to U.S. GAAP bridge, working towards SOX 404 readiness, and continuing to make strides on supporting the business as it grows and scales. I will now turn the presentation over to Chinh, Aventus chairman and founder of CC Capital, for some remarks. Good morning. As you know, we invested in the company about 18 months ago, and CC Capital today owns about 36% of the company. I think the most important, let me just click this. The most important message here is that we remain very committed, and we have invested, not only the capital, but really our human resources and our technology and our know-how, and it is a foundational piece of what we do at CC Capital. We remain very excited in this story. We remain very excited in the execution of this. As you know, the thesis was we have a differentiated starting point with Westaim. We then bring a proven playbook of asset management and insurance and meld it together, and then we bring our capabilities to accelerate the growth. The execution on this has been the key is to build out the insurance platform and the technology. We are very pleased with the technology Ceres. It is launched, it has terrific reception, and the technology is truly differentiated and world-class. We believe within the insurance sector, there is less than a handful of companies that have this technology that we have today. The repositioning of Arena, which is now Aventus, has been a heavier lift than we thought. We are going to be very frank with that. It has been a heavier lift. We had to reposition a number of different strategies. We have done a good job, we think, of hiring the best management team, and the repositioning has now been completed at Arena. The key here is to build something that is enduring and differentiated and position for growth thereafter. So where are we today? We think the most important thing is people. Andrew is absolutely terrific, and he has hired a number of different managers, and part of what we do is you have to have the right people in the right place. It starts with Andrew, but as you can see, you have Matt Skurbe, you have a number of different people at the key positions, and that is the most important thing. The insurance scaling will take place over the next two years. You are going to measure this company by two facts over the next two years. What is the assets under management under Aventus, and what is the number of policies that we issue profitably under Ceres? Those are two very tangible measures. A lot of the complexities of accounting for the insurance that we went through, I think will sort itself out over time, and really, it's all about scaling to profitability. Over the next few years, we're going to be very focused on growing the asset management function. I think Andrew alluded to some of the things we're doing, including a potential deal that we have in the pipeline that's very exciting. Then on the insurance side, how fast will the policies grow profitably? We at CC Capital will continue to put all of our efforts into this. I think about 1/3 of our firm is involved in this endeavor, and we'll continue to dedicate our time. We thank you very much for your support and really appreciate you being here. Well, thank you, everyone. Hopefully, you've taken a lot out. That was a lot of information. The presentation will be memorialized on our website. At this point, we wanted to open up for all your questions, both here in person and virtually. With that, the mic is yours, and we welcome any questions. Yes, sir. Yeah. Based on what we've seen, conservative assumptions, we look like we're going to be profitable in 2027. I can't promise that, obviously, but just based on the assumptions that we've worked on together. That includes the strategic partnership. We've alluded to the CLOs doing one CLO at the end of the year, one CLO next year, getting the rated feeder done. Like I mentioned, we took in a billion dollars of capital. We're working some LPs on the phone and one or two placement agents that we're working with, which are really contingency-based, which is great alignment from our perspective that they get paid if we do well. They have a lot of faith, shown a lot of interest. We just signed up an account this week for $ 25 million. The interest is there. We're using very conservative assumptions. There's so much more that we want to do. As I mentioned, I'm heading out to LATAM, and there's a strategic partnership that we're super excited about. I mentioned the ETF business, and if all that hits, you have UCITS business. If all that hits, Then we're really excited about the future. But just the baseline of what we think can hit. The other thing that Matt and I and the CC Capital and Aventus team has done is take a hard look at people, right? We've made some hard decisions. We've right-sized the firm, in our opinion. We've promoted from within, and we've also brought in some top talent. Repositioning the firm, right-sizing the firm, getting the costs under what we think is appropriate is a process. Now, do you see the results today? No, because we just went through a RIF, I think my first week as CEO. You want to treat people right. You want to do the right thing by people, make sure they have severance, make sure they're taken care of, make sure their families are taken care of. The financial lift, as you would say, takes two, three, four months. But I think Matt and I are very confident about where the firm's headed. Yes. What are the constraints on the insurance side for growth, whether it's the credit rating upgrade or raising firm capital or the equity market continues to go up again? What is the thing that could lead this to be at a slower path? Yeah. We think that we really do believe this, that we have built a very powerful distribution engine with the partnerships that we've secured. The rating upgrade, I don't think if we're in the IMO channel is going to prevent us from getting the volumes. That will be a headwind if we want to move into firm distribution, banks and broker-dealers. But right now, with the IMO partners that we have, we think we have a solid path, the amount of growth that we want. Capital is always something that we have to manage. The product that we're writing right now is the income product. It's capital intensive, and that's because it's got guarantees in the product. But when you're a newer carrier, distribution likes to sell that product because it's certain what they get out of it. It's a little bit of a we have to pay to play in that space. So capital is one of the things that we have to think about. And Cam wants to make sure that when we're writing the business, we're doing it in a way that is accretive to shareholders. So that's probably the biggest focus. I'd say that's the primary constraint. We have to continue to service the business well. So as we grow, we can't let service slip. We can process a lot of business through the platform that we've built, but we still have to continue to make sure that the service is high quality. Thanks. A question I get every now and then, and we referenced it early on, is our strategic investment in Insignia. Earlier this year, alongside CC Capital, we did a $25 million investment. Chinh, maybe I could call on you to provide a few brief comments on that position. Sure. The $25 million investment that Westaim made in Insignia was for two purposes. One, obviously, you have to believe it's a great investment, pure and simple, and it's going to generate great returns. The second is strategic, given that Insignia is one of the major LPs in Westaim, and we want to further that relationship in terms of more capital eventually coming to Aventus. On the first, I do not know if I can talk about this, Doug, but suffice it to say that the company is doing very well. In the first quarter, I am trying to look at Doug and see what I can say and what I cannot say. Within the first few months of the closing of Insignia, the value will be marked up very significantly. I.e., the value to Westaim, we cannot say the number right now, but it is going to be marked up very significantly by all of the investors in Insignia. I think Westaim will recognize a big gain in the first quarter. Looking at Doug, I cannot tell you the number, but it is a nice number. Then in terms of strategic ties, there are several conversations going on right now. It will take a few more months, maybe at the end of the year or early next year, in terms of additional strategic links between the two company, i.e., benefiting Westaim. Thank you. So far, so good. Very good. Thanks, Chinh. Jack. Maybe for Ceres, could you talk about using the U.S. GAAP book value metric? What do you guys project book value coming back up versus the investment mode? Then when you guys report just going forward for future use of that metric as you report going forward? Yes. On the reporting side, the goal would be that we will publish those as a supplement in line with the IFRS reporting results. They should come out similar cadence. In terms of book value going up, it is driven by two things. One is the P&L movement, as well as how much business we are writing. We always joke, if we wanted a high book value, we could just stop growing the insurance segment. That obviously counterintuitive, we do not want to do that. In terms of book value accretion, I think we are really looking at the profitability of the asset management segment and being able to return capital there. It has been loss-making to date, and so that is when we look at that bridge of that $40 million loss, a big chunk of that is really lost in the asset management business. By right-sizing that, we're already positioning the capital. Then on the insurance side, we looked at that chart that shows the economic profitability over time. As we invest more of the premiums into higher yielding assets, it'll start naturally rebuilding upon itself. I think it's going to take time. It really depends on the pace of growth of the insurance segment, as well as if we look at reinsurance, that automatically increases your book value because you're taking that liability off your books. It's a little bit cleaner path forward on the asset management side. Insurance is a few more variables. Yes. Erik, I was wondering if you could comment. Last year at the Investor Day, there was comments about OpEx being in the $30 million-$40 million range. Obviously, we're annualizing well ahead of that. I'm trying to get a sense of what the right level is going forward, especially with scale, and then understanding pacing of building out the premium. Yeah. From an expense perspective, I'd re-listen to what Deanna said last year. When you look at what we did, when I talked today about we made the pivot to build our own platform, we thought that was a critical strategic advantage for us. Really important to own that platform because it also allows us to take out variable expense as we grow. We did have to invest to do that. I think the number we reported was $33 million in expense, second quarter. There's a number of adjustments to take out things that we don't consider that should be in that number. We're running a little bit higher. Because of the investment we made in the business to own the platform, we think over time we'll normalize back down to that 40-ish range as we move forward in the business. We really do believe we have the power to scale. In terms of talking about if we needed to grow the business, where we'd have to spend would be on a distribution force to get out and go after the business. If we really sought to grow faster, that would be a little bit more OpEx on that expense side. But we think we're going to moderate back to what Deanna talked about last year. One of the questions I get is currently Aventus has one analyst that provides coverage on the name, and the timing of Aventus in bringing up the name this Monday. Full truth, we have had this name in the hopper for many months. We wanted to announce it when we felt we were in a position of now the work has been done, the heavy lifting of the restructuring has been done, and now, as you have heard today, we believe we are in a position where the go forward is going to be in a position of strength from strength on our path along growth. In doing that, you can see today we had a pretty good audience, and a lot of that is thanks to Andrew and the CC folks. We extended invitations to more than just our current shareholders. It is now time we want to expand. We want people to know about us, and we are going to lean in our efforts now not only to the financial community but to expand our shareholder base, which will include U.S. analysts, allocators. On a go-forward basis, we are certainly branching off from our Toronto roots. We are all New York-based, U.S.-based. We are going to be a U.S.-listed company, and we are going to put in the effort now ahead of that listing to get people aware of who we are, what we are going to do, and what we are going to become. Are there any other questions, both locally or virtually? Yes. I will ask a slightly annoying question maybe to you. If you look at the investment arm, the returns over a very long period in New York on a straight basis have not been great, right? How does it work? I understand you have a new team, but to build a whole new investment arm, attract capital, attract partners, how are you able to do that with a track record that has been okay but not significant? That is the challenge. Do you mean on the asset management side? Yeah. Okay. I'll take that. Sure. First, the first thing we did when I joined 8 months ago was like anyone would do this, is look at the strategies that performed well and look at the strategies that were underperforming, right? Because a lot of the businesses you're referencing, they were all combined. They weren't individual. For example, real estate performed well in the U.S. Litigation finance, let's use an example, not as well, or New Zealand real estate, not as well. So you ask yourself, what's your competitive edge, which is what I said before, in New Zealand real estate being here in New York, right? I'm giving you my opinion, nothing. Now, you could have it if you have strategic partnerships, but there's no real competitive advantage. The first thing we did was we eliminated business lines that we think were underperforming. So I mentioned the RIF. Some of the RIFs were just closing underperforming business lines, making hard decisions. The second thing is attracting the best talent. So I've mentioned a few people before, my former partner, Andrew Brady, there's someone who's in this room who will be joining us in the coming weeks, who's a world-class person. But a bunch of people that we've added to the team, a woman named Helen and whatever. So when you attract people that other firms want and they want to come work with us, or when people hear that you have these strategic partnerships that will show you product basically exclusive to you or incentivize to show you product, let me rephrase it, to you. They're like, "Wait, what are you guys doing that's differently? You're not a behemoth. You're a speedboat, so you can operate efficiently. You're hiring incredible talent. You're making the tough decisions by eliminating business lines that have underperformed. You're keeping the businesses that have outperformed. You're building an integrated platform." Which, to Chinh's point earlier, the integration, the 1 + 1 = 3 model always works. I mean, it always does. So when people hear the story, they're like, "Wait, this is interesting." Now, the one last thing I'd say is partnership. What do I mean by partnership? I've said in a UI conference in front of probably 1,000 people 20 years ago that fees in asset management are too high. I believe this for 20 years. Now, after the Great Recession, people caught on to that. So when you look at our fees, there's great alignment. When you look at the partnership, if we need to go down to a public pension plan and look at their risk systems, Matt and I are getting on a plane and looking at their risk systems. It is not just about taking in capital. If people want our macro perspective, we will give it. If people want us to analyze their data, like how they report data, we will do that. That has been our philosophy, at least. I have been in this business for 33, 34 years. That has been the philosophy of CC Capital. That has been the philosophy of everyone I have gotten to work with, where it is not just take my money and leave. I think the message is different. We are attracting capital, we are attracting partners, we are making hard decisions, and I cannot tell you performance is going to be better. But I believe because we have a lot of smart people in the room, the probability that performance will be better is higher. I actually really appreciate your question. It is a hard-hitting question, and we ask the same questions when we conducted due diligence. Matt and I and Doug took a look at the performance of Arena, and it was quite spotty. In fact, overall, it was poor. That is the point you are making. But when you bifurcate and you take out some of the key strategies, including real estate, we have some hidden gems in there. How are we getting increased AUM? How are people trusting us? It comes down to number one, Andrew, the new leadership, and number two, we think we contribute a little bit to that as well with our credibility. It is really a hard lift. That is what I was talking about, the repositioning. What we are doing is we are eliminating all the riffraff that our smallest strategies have not performed well. New Zealand real estate. We should not be in New Zealand real estate. China does not perform well, we have no competitive advantage. We are replacing those strategies with things that are scalable, that inherently have good returns. CLOs inherently have good returns. If you take a look at the industry, over a decade, terrific returns. We think we can do better than the standard returns, and we think it is scalable. We think we have the right management team to do that, and that is what we are doing. We are changing that mix of asset management to things that are scalable with good returns, and that we are populating it with great leaders underneath Andrew. But really, it is a little bit on faith right now when people are giving us capital, which, as you can see, the momentum is terrific. We have $1 billion in new capital. It's because of the new management team, led by Andrew, and because of CC Capital. It's a great question. Yeah. If I could just add a little bit to that. What I would say is complexity and optionality come at a cost. When you layer that cost onto subscale AUM, subscale strategies, the impact on net returns is quite profound. I think looking at the legacy business, there was a lot of optionality built into the business. We had 70 different JV partnerships, all have separate vehicles, separate audits that have to get attached to that. You have the Singapore platform, Irish decks. There's just a lot of complexity built into the overall structure. You're putting that against $2.5 billion of fee earning AUM, but a lot of those strategies, if you look at the fund structures, it's a $100 million fund here, a $50 million fund there. It costs almost the same amount of money to run a $50 million fund versus a $10 billion fund. You still need fund docs. You still need to do all of those things for your investors. I think the key for us is we're looking at scale opportunities, and we're looking at simplifying the product offering and the optionality within the business. Jason. What is your [audio distortion] I cannot speak for what happened before I got there. I have been fortunate in my career. If you look at who has trained me, it is Paul Roth, who co-founded Schulte Roth & Zabel. It is the global head of EY's asset management practice. It is Tom Hill, who ran Fans Alt. It is Josh Harris. It is now a new man. Chinh does not want to be my mentor. He opted out, but I made him mentor me now. It is Chinh Chu. You are blessed now. Chinh and I have one thing that we joke about, and it is in all seriousness, that we are both street kids from Queens. Nothing was given to either one of us. I had a scholarship. He had a scholarship. We have been both working hard. When you come up with that upbringing, I would say, you have a certain edge of just be brutally honest, no BS, have a clear mind, and if you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, do it in a very respectful and professional way. Before I came in, Matt and CC Capital was already getting rid of a lot of the JVs that he described. When I came in, I really focused on the strategies with Matt and the CC team. It just was clear to me. When you are a PM or a CIO or a senior trader, you always think things are going to get better. Not comment on anyone, just in general. They always think the tide is going to turn because they believe in their positions, and sometimes you just need someone new to come in to just have a fresh set of numbers and no legacy emotion to it and just say, "This makes sense now." As I said in my presentation, the first thing I ask before we do any business, the first question I ask is, what is our competitive advantage? Second question is, how big is the market? Is it a $500 million market or ETFs is a trillion-dollar plus market. We all came to consensus. The last thing I would say is when you have the committee structures that I discussed before, you get a lot of smart people in the room, and once you start to say something or think something, someone will think of five things that you missed, and then before you know it becomes super collaborative and the decisions become crystal clear. Just curious, has there been any change to the revenue split at Aventus with the recent departure or are there any charges that we should expect down the road related to it? No, the revenue it stays the same. As of now, we're not expecting any. Okay. Are there new members of Bernard Partners then? If not, that's That's a bit of a complicated question. Bernard Partners, the old Bernard Partners, there was a 45% participation. What you should expect is that that is going to stay in place and be distributed among the current leadership team. Isaac? Billy. Andrew, the question was- Yeah, I heard. I had the chart, Matt. We didn't include the chart that Matt wanted. We didn't include the chart that we wanted to include. Do you have that pie chart that we were going through, Andy? Not Andy. Yeah, I got it. Never mind. It's about 70% in private credit plus approximately 30% in either funds of one, like we have a new fund of one or co-invest, like specific opportunities that they want to invest in, plus or minus. I'm not including, now, of that, we have about 10% coming from Ceres. So that's in a fund of one. That being said, yesterday, I was with a large insurance company that threw out a number that could be substantial of giving us capital. So, I think we're hitting all the right notes, and we're thinking about products differently. One thing that we worked on closely with CC Capital and Peggy and her team and our team was, when you have real estate, can you have better capital relief treatment for insurance companies? Like I talked about the capital relief on Rated Feeder, same thing with real estate. We came up with something that we think is a creative solution. So most of the money's been raised through the insurance channels. We're having great dialogue with the insurance companies. It's about 70% PC and 30% managed accounts, funds of one co-invest. We have the exact data we could send you because Matt, we put together a slide that didn't make it into the deck. Okay. Yes. Just a quick follow-up on that further question on the CEDA. If you look at a U.S. listing, are you able to— How does that book value raising, how does that change as you come into GAAP accounting as opposed to the book value kind of flow state that a company wants it to be longer? Yeah. the question was, how does the GAAP accounting look as a U.S. registrant? We would most likely be an emerging growth company, which means we would need two years of historical financials. Theoretically, hypothetically, if we were to do a U.S. listing, I'm caveating it a ton. Let's say we go in 2027, that means we would need 2025 and 2026 financial statements. What we would see is day one of 2025, so 1/1/2025, and all the business going forward gets recast. We started writing meaningful premiums in, I'd say, Q1 of this year. You'll just start seeing it naturally flow through as if we had been a U.S. registrant the whole time. the book value should stay pretty stable. You won't see a one-time pop lift because of that. But the two things that I'm sure- Yeah. This somewhere else you have, but there's a pretty significant drag on GAAP for us from the treatment. But it sounds like- It would be as if that never was there. That's what I was. Correct. Thank you. Just in terms of the IFRS book value, that would be on day one, there would be that particular reversal that would then change. Exactly. That will be completely reversed. Yeah. So all the financial reporting would be submitted in U.S. GAAP, so it just gets recast. David. Two questions. Erik, one of the things that didn't come through the video as far as the actions and then just like new groups I hadn't heard about, a few different things. The BlackRock relationship, what is that spend? You mean the BlackRock? The BlackRock with Ceres, I think. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Okay. You want to- Yeah, just in terms of- Our IG business. The BlackRock relationship, it is really focused on corporate IG. This was a strategy that we were looking at early on. There was some early thought about building out our own corporate IG capabilities internally. We do have some of that in terms of an overlay and can do direct trading as well. When you think about trying to build out a full-scale business on corporate IG, there is a lot that goes into that. Credit research teams that you need, obviously, trading and settlement, we have those capabilities. To provide a service at the scale of a very large asset manager that focuses on corporate IG, there is a lot that goes into building out teams that can manage that. They sell their services for a few basis points. When we looked at trying to build that out for ourselves, there's no way that we could compete at our size. So we made a strategic decision to sub-advise that. With that said, it is a highly customized strategy. We have C-suite level information. Michael's on the phone with them daily. I'm on the phone with them weekly, and they manage the portfolio to our spec. It's just a sub-advisory relationship. With the CLO business, though, we've obviously adding to our IG capabilities. So it makes sense from a bottom-line perspective, but over time, we'll continue to revisit that. In terms of your question about me as the acting CEO, it's interesting. I think that all CEOs are acting. They're always serving at the pleasure of the board. We have board members here, so maybe they can answer the question. But the way I'm approaching the job is, I'm doing everything that I need to do. I've been told, the message has been clear to me from Chinh and the rest of the board that I need to take the steps that I need to take, change the business if there's a need to change it. So I'm acting like I've got the job. But the board will make that decision. So I'll let anybody else who wants to comment on make it. But I do feel confident, and I do really appreciate the opportunity to do this. I think we have a great future ahead of us, whether I'm the CEO or not. Thank you. Okay. Oh, we've got one more in the back. As you guys grow the venture side of the business with Aventus Share, what's the economics of it? It's an integrated partnership between Aventus, CC Capital and CCaventus. There's collaboration both on information and idea sharing, and collaboration also on economics. Will there be any changes to growth going forward? That's going to be a board decision. That's really going to be a board decision. But right now, nothing, as far as I know. Cam, correct me if I'm wrong, nothing has changed on the board. Yeah, no. We're going to be very cognizant, though, on how opportunities come across, and we want everyone to be economically aligned and recognize their efforts and what's going to drive the best value for stakeholders. The best way to do that is to make those that are producing and driving activity and AUM and all the net income, that we want them to be compensated and recognized. Another quick one. Andrew, you guys gave a goal of $10 billion-$25 billion in venture. Is there a similar goal in the private business? I didn't quite hear the question. The question was, Andrew's got goals of $25 billion of AUM. What is Ceres objective? The objective for us is to manage the capital efficiently. It returns to shareholders that they expect. When I said in the presentation today, we're going to pursue growth prudently. The run rate that we're running at this year, I think is probably where we're going to be at as we think about the business as our target for the future year. I think we've got the ability, if it makes sense, if we find the right partnerships, and there's other things that we're looking at. There's a lot of capital that's flowing into this space. There is an opportunity, we think, to basically look at reinsurance as an opportunity, whereas we could continue to grow our retail side, do it with someone else's capital. We would sell and retain business that fits the assets that we can originate. We're looking at this, and that's how we're thinking about that in future periods. Insurance growth cannot be untethered. It needs to account for capital, equity capital, and it also needs to be accounted for what the returns are in the market. We're going to be very monitoring at a very dynamic basis regarding growth. You want to grow, but you want to grow prudently with profitability, and you want to have capital attached to it. That's why it's harder to answer that question because the market is fluctuating. Okay. Well, that concludes our presentation. Thank you very much. For those that are able, we've got lots of refreshments, and everyone at this table in here will be around and welcome any further dialogue. Thank you.