Good afternoon. This is the CarlsGO Conference operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Generali Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Fabio Cleva, Head of Investor and Rating Agencies Relations. Please go ahead, sir. Hello everyone, and thanks for dialing in to our call. Today with us, we have our Group CEO, Philippe Donnet, and the CEO of Generali Investments Holding, Woody Bradford, who will present the agreement we have announced this morning. After the presentation, Philippe and Woody, together with our Group CFO, Cristiano Borean, will take your questions during the Q&A session. Philippe, over to you. Thank you, Fabio. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are very excited to be with you for this major announcement. We are delighted to announce that Generali and BPCE have signed a memorandum of understanding to create a 50/50 joint venture between our respective asset management operations, Generali Investments Holding for us, and Natixis Investment Managers for them. By combining our powers with EUR 1.9 trillion of combined asset under management, we would be the leader in asset management in Europe by revenues and a top 10 global player. Bringing together our asset management operations presents a unique opportunity to build on our strong roots to serve the constantly evolving needs of our customers. We have a short presentation on the proposed transaction and the opportunities it would bring. Woody Bradford, who is our CEO of Generali Investments Holding, and also the CEO of Conning, and who would become the CEO of the new entity, will take you through it. We will also have some time to take your questions at the end of the presentation. Before leaving the floor to Woody, I would like to briefly talk about Generali's asset management journey. Asset management is and has been a key priority for Generali since 2016. From the beginning, the objective has been to create an effective platform with broad reach and capabilities to best serve our clients. We launched our first asset management strategy in 2017, before outlining our plans to develop a global platform as part of our Generali 2021 strategy, which we presented in 2018. We built our strong European base, expanded our affiliate strategy, and invested in distribution. In the following plan, Lifetime Partner 24: Driving Growth, we focused on driving further diversification and integration, expanding our private asset capabilities and our distribution to build scale and generate additional third-party revenues. Thanks to the Group's strong capital position, we then explored external growth initiatives that would boost our product and distribution capabilities and accelerate third-party growth. We established Generali Investments Holding to better focus on delivering world-class performance and service to existing clients, while continuing to grow the business with global third-party clients. In July 2023, we announced the acquisition of Conning and its affiliates and the creation of a long-term partnership with Cathay Life. This deal further enhanced our asset management capabilities, strengthened our footprint in the key U.S. and Asian markets, and created the platform to deliver on our broader asset management strategic ambitions. Last week, we acquired a majority stake in MGG, the U.S. Private direct lending investment firm, to even better meet the evolving needs of our clients, including, of course, our own insurance companies. In conclusion, we moved from not having an asset management strategy in 2016 to building something that today allows us to co-create Europe's largest asset management business. I am proud of our achievement and would like to thank all our people for their dedication and commitment. This proposed partnership between Generali Investments Holding and Natixis Investment Managers would take us to the next level, creating a truly global asset management platform, a platform with leading positions and critical scale in both Europe and North America, a platform that is ideally placed to further scale the third-party business in Europe, North America, and regions with attractive growth potential in Asia, a platform that builds on a global distribution network with a strong centralized platform complemented by local presence and multi-channel partnerships. That's all from me at this stage. I'm now handing over to Woody to take you through this exciting transaction and its opportunities in more detail. Thank you. Thank you, Philippe. Appreciate that. Good day to everybody on the call today. Thank you for taking the time this afternoon to be with us and for your interest in our news and our development today. I'll start with some basic facts on the transaction that are listed on page two. Most of this, I'm sure you've read and studied well at this point, but the combination of our two businesses will create a EUR 1.9 trillion asset manager, which, as Philippe noted, will be one of the top 10 players in the asset management global marketplace today and the largest asset manager by revenues in Europe. In fact, it's a somewhat transformational landmark opportunity to redefine asset management in the European landscape in a way that others have not been able to do successfully to date. This partnership would be created in a way that would have two long-term shareholders with a shared vision of the asset management industry that we are facing together and how to approach it. We have a common view of industry trends, both headwinds and tailwinds that support the business. We have a common view of client needs and changing client needs and client appetites. We understand the importance, the critical importance of investment talent to take good care of clients' money, and we agree on a common business model to deploy that talent to help clients achieve their financial objectives and to attract and retain talent to do that successfully over time and to grow the business. The partnership is one that represents equal ownership, equal governance, and equal board representation, and I'll spend a moment on governance before leaving this page. The team is supported by a highly experienced and talented set of investment professionals across the complex and a management team with substantial experience in the business. I'll come back to it. I've spent quite a lot of time with Philippe Setbon over the last number of months. Interestingly, at one point in his career, he was a Generali employee. For the effect of the shared DNA and common understanding of each other's businesses, it's helped us quite a lot. With respect to governance, before I leave this page, this is a co-controlled partnership. The board would be an equal mix of representatives appointed by Generali and by our partner, with three independent directors and the named Chief Executive being the additional director who would be recused for certain matters where he would represent a conflict of interest. We've spent a lot of time with our partners defining decision processes to make sure that there's an appropriate delegation of powers to the management to run and operate a co-controlled business so we wouldn't find ourselves stuck on day-to-day or month-to-month or quarter decisions, but really leaving strategic decisions to the shareholders to make, but leaving operating decisions to the management. Additionally, we agree very strongly on the critical importance of a powerful centralized risk and compliance oversight system. It's critically important in a multi-affiliate model to have such a system and to have it be very effective across the entire complex, and it's one of the points we absolutely agree on. Next page, please. Page three. We've got a highly supportive set of shareholders for this business. You almost couldn't pick a better set of shareholders to have behind an asset management company. Many of you, I think probably all of you know about how many asset management companies and insurance companies are trying to tie up to create synergies and help one another. And fortunately, our business going forward is backed by two powerful and well-respected European bank and insurance company enterprises and a strong, well-capitalized Asian partner as a client and as a distribution agent for us in the Asia-Pacific market. We've together agreed on a long-term partnership in asset management that will last at least 15 years and hopefully much, much longer than that. We've, through that arrangement, created a powerful alignment of interests to distribute each other's products across our networks in a preferred partnership framework, unit-linked bank networks, other types of products across our networks. Generali also, as you, I'm sure, read, has committed to provide at least $15 billion of seed capital for deployment over the next five years. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of seed capital, which has become very common across the asset management industry. There are many examples just in the last two years of insurance companies and asset managers partnering up to provide seed capital to accelerate private markets businesses. This EUR 15 billion scale is a substantial size increase compared to what's been seen in the marketplace, only possible because of the tremendous scale of Generali's insurance balance sheet business. This seed and acceleration capital is a critical driver for our business going forward. Of course, any seed and acceleration capital that we deploy will be completely consistent with the insurance company's strategic asset allocation decisions, which are liability-driven. It'll fit in the investment guidelines of the insurance companies, and it'll fit the risk tolerance of the insurance companies. But the good news is institutions around the world are looking for the same types of exposures that the insurance general account is. So there's some real synergy providing attractive private asset product to our owners and to our clients on a go-forward basis. Page four talks about some of the highlights of the transaction. We do think there's a compelling industrial logic to the combination. We'll have strong positions in Europe and in North America. And I think a real growth imperative and growth opportunity in many of the Asia-Pacific markets as we go forward. We will have more scale, we'll be a more diversified business as we go forward. But importantly, we'll have the unique combination for a multi-affiliate business to have a powerful centralized distribution network and very sizable seed capital commitments, which we think will create tremendous opportunities for our businesses, for our teams, and align our interests with our clients. Page five highlights some of the statistics. I won't spend much time on this other than to say we'll be big and we'll be amongst the leaders once we conclude this. Of course, through great performance and generating positive third-party net flows, that's how we'll stay there. But this will be the starting point for the business that we create going forward. On page six, we outline some of the elements that we think are critical to us being positioned for success going forward. And I think where I'll start and end on this page is to mention the critical importance of creating value for clients. On this chart, it's actually shown a little bit off to the lower right, but it should actually be at the center. It's the thing that matters most. And if people have asked me in the last 16 hours, what are my most important priorities now? And after we close, numbers one, two, and three are delivering differentiated and superior investment results for our clients, and then supporting that with great service and doing that for a good value. And if we can do that, we'll have a very successful franchise. But in the industry today, you have to do a lot more than that. With the combined business, we have proven investment capabilities across insurance and pension with high conviction active strategies and a number of private market strategies today that we expect we'll be able to grow successfully together over time. We have been able to consistently meet or exceed our clients' investment needs and expectations across the combined complex historically, but our scale allows us to compete with the leaders with investments in data and technology in a way that smaller firms are not able to do. I've mentioned the $15 billion of seed and acceleration capital in the first five years. Of course, that's a minimum, but that's the level that we will start with going forward and has been very consistent with the amount of money that we've deployed as seed capital over time. If you look back through the other announcements that firms have made and what competitive announcements have been about seed capital, I just want to reiterate the critical importance of the size of the EUR 15 billion of seed capital and what that allows us to do as a management team with our affiliates and for our clients on a go-forward basis. In addition, the new platform benefits from a very strong distribution network around the world. I want to just mention that we've got 23 offices operating outside the United States with this combined entity. Depending on how you count, eight to 10 offices in the Asia-Pacific region, clients in the region are a real presence on which to build sales activities and service activities for clients around the world. When you put all of those pieces together, I think it's a very attractive value proposition as a partner to sophisticated asset owners who are now being much more discriminating in their choices about who they pick to do business with. They want more capabilities, they want better service, they want to be data-enabled, and they want all that for a fair price. This collection of activities allows us to compete on that basis going forward. Page seven provides a map of our investment capabilities together across a range of asset classes, and as you all know, the range of asset classes that sophisticated asset owners are choosing from today is much more granular than the simplified chart that's shown on this page, but it gives you a sense of where we are as a firm and how we're positioned on a go-forward basis. We have been thinking about the business in three different categories of offerings. In the middle left, we talk about the large global insurance asset management set of capabilities. This is our biggest set of businesses, as has been mentioned and was noted in the materials. We will be the largest, one of the largest, the largest insurance asset manager in the world on a pro forma basis when these activities are combined. We think our ability to provide sophisticated solutions to insurance companies and pension plans on a global basis will be best in class with others who compete in this space. We have a number of strong performing, and I mean strong performing for their clients and commercially conviction liquid businesses, traditional liquid asset classes, which you might think compete with passive strategies. Today, to compete in that space, you must have a differentiated offering and a specialized offering. And we're very focused on our platforms in that area that do have those capabilities. And lastly, real and private assets, which has been a tremendous area of interest and focus by asset owners. It's been a tremendous area of growth for many alternative asset managers. It's been one of the principal objectives for many alternative asset managers and partnering up with life insurance companies to build these businesses that can create tremendous value for clients and, if operated correctly, can create tremendous value for owners. Building these businesses does take a little more time. Building private asset offerings, raising private asset vehicles, managing them, deploying the capital back to investors is slower than raising a liquid mutual fund. But as I think you all know, the potential economics for being successful in that business are quite material. And our ability to do that with the support of the seed capital is a tremendous source of competitive advantage. I would mention here that we haven't been waiting for today to do this. You may have noticed last week that we also announced the acquisition of a firm called MGG, which is a specialized private credit manager in the United States that we are acquiring 77% of that we expect to close this year. That is a differentiated business. It's non-sponsored lending in the United States. And that's a space in particular that has not become commoditized like other forms of private debt have over the course of recent years. And also, our infrastructure debt business in Infranity, which has been very successful in Europe, over EUR 10 billion of assets from a standing start a few years ago, recently announced the opening of our U.S. office and plans to expand in the United States. That happened in November, December timeframe. So we haven't been waiting, and I think that's good evidence of our ability to focus on building private asset businesses and deploy existing seed capital to build those private asset businesses. Page eight gives you a snapshot of the mix by asset class, by client type, and by geography of the business on a pro forma basis. You will see that we will still remain on the left side of this chart, principally a fixed income business. Certainly, on a combined basis, we will have a larger exposure to equities than we did before the transaction, but still on a pro forma basis, that number is still south of 25%. The mix by client types, we've mentioned a couple of times on this call, and we've said it in writing, the importance of the insurance and pension assets and business, that matches very well with the fixed income exposure. If you look at the balance sheets of insurance companies, the vast majority of that is fixed income. So that fits, and that makes sense. But importantly for us in this middle pie chart, retail and wholesale, our partner in the joint venture going forward has a very substantial presence in the U.S. retail marketplace. Their distribution network is highly respected, highly effective, staffed by extremely experienced individuals who've delivered tremendous value for their clients. This is nearly 400 professionals in the U.S. distribution network covering banks, broker dealers, financial planners, retirement plans. It's an extraordinary distribution network and one that has really successfully supported the growth and the buildup of some iconic brands in their system: Loomis Sayles, Harris Associates, AEW. These are tremendous assets in the U.S. asset management marketplace and ones that we're going to be proud to have in our family of companies on a go-forward basis. I talked a little bit about distribution, but I want to spend a little bit more talking about the entire network, not just the U.S. network. Page nine provides some facts on that distribution network. You can see that we're covering more than 25 countries with our operations, and we'll have sales coverage and offices that exceed 60 on a go-forward basis. We've talked quite a bit in some of the written materials about how the principal operational centers of this enterprise will be in Italy and in France and in the United States. But I think it's critical to acknowledge that we will have very substantial investment, sales, and service centers in many, many geographies around the world. In fact, in the Asia-Pacific region, we have eight functioning offices, nine functioning offices on a go-forward basis, and I think tremendous opportunities in Japan, Australia, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, some directly with our new partners, some through our existing capabilities, and some with the support of Cathay Life Insurance Company in Taiwan as well. I also think that we will have a tremendous opportunity to leverage the retail and high net worth networks of Generali and BPCE going forward. I think that the two distribution systems that we bring are actually quite synergistic, and they complement each other. Generali Investments has a wonderful network across Southern Europe with embedded centralized distribution. That's not as strong in their network. They cover Northern Europe extremely well. I've mentioned Natixis's U.S. distribution capabilities, which are extraordinary, which our affiliates in that marketplace are quite excited to work through and get to know extremely well, and in Asia, we've got a nice presence there, but to some degree, given the growth in that marketplace, it's a bit of a whiteboard for us going forward. Our distribution network is a true global operation. We'll have 400 sales and marketing employees outside the United States working from over 60 offices in 25 countries. That's a hard thing to replicate and something that would have been extremely difficult for us to contemplate building on our own in our standalone business plan. We think that the potential financially is very attractive in this transaction. Page 10 outlines some numbers. These are 2023 figures, and they're in euros. What's been widely publicized is the asset figures. The last number we checked were contributing around EUR 630 billion. Of course, these numbers move around from time to time, and the Natixis last numbers that we looked at were closer to 1.3 than 1.2, and that leads you to the EUR 1.9 trillion figure that you've seen in the press releases in the comments earlier. You can see the revenue lines where the fee margins are not that much different in the two businesses for most of the asset classes. They do have more specialty asset classes, which leads them to a higher fee margin. But generally, in the core offerings, the fee margins are very much the same. You see the bottom line, the adjusted net income figures. Again, these are 2023 estimates or actuals for the two businesses. And when you see those two figures combined, you end up with a 50/50 joint venture, but only because of the value of the seed capital that we're contributing. That's the substantial item that closes the gap between our earnings profile and their earnings profile. It's not uncommon in the business today to see seed capital be valued by asset management partners in the marketplace. It's underpinned many of the opportunities that life insurance companies and alternative managers have capitalized on together. I think it's a critical element of why we've been able to achieve the partnership in a structure that we have today. The combined platform, even after that transaction, does have synergies. We've tried to be extremely prudent and thoughtful and realistic about what we could achieve in the multi-affiliate model with our synergies. The numbers here are EUR 140 million of cost synergies and EUR 40 million of revenue synergies. The EUR 170 million of cost synergies is based off of an addressable cost base that we've estimated about a 10% cost. That is in line, we believe, with other transactions that have had centralized asset management firms. We've actually tried to be extremely realistic and cautious about what the cost synergies would be with different affiliates, rather than pulling a number out of the air and trying to tell everybody how great it is. We've really built this bottom up on an addressable basis to get to a number we felt very confident that we could achieve. Of course, we have scenarios around this that could be potentially more, but this is our base case today. And we've estimated revenue synergies, and these revenue synergies are also net of potential negative revenue synergies. For example, we've made some estimates about the slowing of client pipeline commitments during the period between now and closing that we think is a realistic set of assumptions. So we've not been over-aggressive at all about our sales synergies. And we have left out the benefit of the seed capital. And lots of people could make lots of assumptions about what the value is with revenue synergies from $15 billion of seed capital. We would argue that it's very material, and it is not included in this number that we've presented today. Some of the synergies also come with our ability to avoid making expenditures that we would otherwise had to make in our own plan in building up our own distribution. We've thought hard about the execution risk of managing this as well in a multi-affiliate model, and with lots of help from some outside advisors and lots of time working together closely with the management team of our counterpart, mapped out a fairly detailed three-year integration plan, identifying costs to achieve the synergies, where we would have to make investments in technology and in data to deliver the value and deliver the benefits that would be necessary, how long it takes to renegotiate purchase contracts with outside data vendors and others. So we've tried to be very realistic about generating a plan going forward that we feel is minimally achievable. We've also spent quite a bit of time, and I think partly because of the benefit of clarity about leadership roles between the Chief Executive and the Deputy Chief Executive, articulating for each other a target operating model for the combined business, which we have a high degree of clarity about today. That work all has to be validated after the consultation period that we are entering now and between signing and closing. But I can tell you I feel very confident, and I know that my counterpart, at Natixis, feels very confident in these numbers that we've presented. Page 12 outlines benefits to stakeholders in this transaction. And I mentioned the critical importance of clients before, and that's where I start on all of these conversations, because if we do well for clients, we have a good chance of making everything else work. And so for clients, making sure that we don't make changes to successful investment processes to make sure we don't disrupt strong-performing, profitable-growing affiliates, but rather we support them with more distribution and with seed capital. But we have a broadened set of investment capabilities, a broadened range that we can help clients solve their investment objectives with after this transaction. And we're at a scale that we can make investments in technology to improve the client experience at a level of the best in the business. For our affiliates, we offer them, as I said, seed capital and distribution support. We will require, obviously, important risk controls and compliance controls, but that's the standard today at Natixis and at Generali. So that shouldn't be a big change. For our employees, the opportunity to grow in a larger platform and to be proud of being a part of a large, successful, growing platform, we believe, is an attractive value proposition for our people and our teams. And then for our investors, a diversified platform of industry-leading brands and managers with best-in-class performance and service for insurance companies and pension plans, and a plan to deliver value creation for our clients and for our teams and for our shareholders over time is obviously a very high priority for us. Let me wrap on page 13 by just reiterating some of the points that we started with. We're creating a global asset management leader here. It's a European champion, but a global leader. That is a landmark transaction to change how asset management in Europe operates and can compete on a global stage. We'll have a leading insurance and pension asset manager around the world. We have very sizable seed capital commitments to accelerate and support the growth of our private asset businesses. We'll have global and broad distribution capabilities, especially in the important U.S. market, and we will implement a robust governance framework with an experienced leadership team that has great clarity about what the shareholders want us to accomplish. Let me conclude my remarks and turn it over to you, Philippe. Thank you, Woody. Before we take your questions, a few closing remarks from me. This purposeful transaction reinforces our strategic commitment to building a global asset management platform, and the opportunity is much bigger when you consider it within Generali's wider group vision as a lifetime partner. We are a market-leading insurance business, a well-capitalized, technically excellent life and P&C insurance underwriter. We are protecting our customers while addressing evolving and increasingly complex needs. We are also generating a large pool of long-dated, high-quality liabilities, providing steady inflows and investment firepower to our asset management business. By creating a truly global asset management platform, we can offer diversified investment solutions in private and public markets, delivering differentiated risk-adjusted returns. This also allows us to increasingly attract third-party net flows. By bringing together the best of insurance and the best of asset management, we will deliver excellence to our customers through integrated offerings and value-adding services whilst leveraging on our unique agent and advisor distribution network. For all these reasons and many more, we are fully convinced of the strong value creation potential for all stakeholders from this proposed partnership. I am immensely proud of our employees and affiliates' hard work since the launch of Generali's asset management business seven years ago. This proposed partnership will take us to the next level. Together with our management team, I look forward to presenting the new strategic plan for our global and diversified group at our investor day in Venice next week, exactly next Thursday. Thank you. We are now ready for Q&A. This is the conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touch-tone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. We kindly ask to use handsets when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from Andrew Baker of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Great. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is just on the EUR 15 billion committed seed capital. Can you just help put this in perspective in terms of how much of your investment portfolio you're reinvesting each year, how much you've been allocating to affiliates in recent years, and then maybe if you're able to give us a sense of the potential upside that you highlight in the revenue synergies that aren't included in the target, that would be really helpful, and then the second one is on the cost synergies, so I can see on slide 10 the EUR 170 million and the 10% addressable cost base. If I look at slide 9, though, you've got the 74% cost-income ratio on a pro forma basis on the EUR 4.1 billion revenue. It looks a lot higher in terms of a total cost base. So just curious if you can help me bridge between the addressable cost base and the total cost base. Thank you. Thank you very much, Andrew. The first question is for Cristiano, and of course, Woody, feel free to comment, while the second question on the synergies is for Woody. Good afternoon, Andrew. So speaking about the seed capital commitment, this is something for us being normal since the inception of this strategy seven years ago. Just to give you, let's say, a range of yearly reinvestment amount that Generali Group put to work between the general account number, both of life, non-life, and the shareholder money, we are talking about EUR 25-30 billion on a yearly basis to be reinvested. The amount here, which could be averaged out of EUR 3 billion per year, is exactly consistent with what was, if not even less, than what has been deployed in the last years. By the way, I remind you that in the last year, we also experienced a year with negative outflows where we were, in any case, deploying more than this on a run rate basis. This is, I think, the right palette. I hand over to Woody to complete on the revenue synergy upside. On the revenue synergy upside, if you look at private markets assets and typical fee ranges for private markets assets, it's not unusual to see private credit funds and strategies that are priced anywhere between 75 basis points and 150 basis points, and they often have a carried interest element. Of course, carried interest elements don't play out for some period of time. Infrastructure products, debt in particular, tend to be lower. They tend to be in the less than 100 basis points on average fee range. Private equity typically is in the 1%-2% with a 20% carried interest, although there's been some pressure in those industries with co-investment, I think, over time, and real estate runs the gamut depending on whether it's debt or equity and whether it's value-added or traditional. So there's a whole range of possible outcomes when it comes to the revenues that you might associate with private asset allocations going forward. We do assume that the marginal margins on some of those are fairly attractive as well, consistent with how alternative investment firms have been set up. It really depends to some degree on where we see demand in the marketplace and where our asset allocation goes, how we weight real estate debt, infrastructure debt versus private credit versus private equity as we go forward. The second part of the question, I think, had to do with the addressable cost base, Andrew. The overall cost base is around EUR 3.2 billion. We have estimated that around 53% of that is addressable. The reason we did that is we wanted to carve out the affiliates that were strong-growing and highly profitable affiliates. We didn't think it was realistic to apply a number across everything. We were looking a lot more in areas that were overhead control functions, centralized capital expenditures like technology, data. And we both have two very large LDI and insurance businesses where I think there'll be opportunities over time for cost deferral and cost avoidance as well. So hence, applying it just on that 53% and not on the entire cost base. Hope that answers your question. Very clear. Thank you both. Next question, please. The next question is from William Hawkins of KBW. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you very much. I guess maybe with reference to slide 7, where more specifically do you feel excited about revenue inflows sort of taking off across all these different asset strategies? I mean, you talk very clearly about private markets, so I get that. But are there other areas that you'd want to be highlighting as particular opportunities for growth? And then secondly, can you help me sort of think about what you will gauge as a successful level of net flows for this combined entity? I'm not quite sure what the history has been and how you're thinking about net flows over time. And I guess within that, clearly, you've got these new strategies that are great, but maybe the insurance businesses and the LDI stuff you talked about, they could be more structurally in outflow mode. So I'm just trying to get a feel for what you think should be the gauge of flow for this business. And then lastly, thank you. You've already kind of touched on this, but I'm just thinking about the outlook for the fee margins and cost-income ratios on slide 10. Again, given what you said about private market business, should we be comfortable that fee margins are rising over time, or will competitive pressures be offsetting that? And the synergies you talked about, that would only be knocking, I think, about four points off that 74% cost-income ratio, which would still be a lot higher than where Generali's been historically. So as you kind of alluded to in the discussion, should we be assuming that you can get that 70% down a lot further, or is it going to be a sticky nu mber? Thank you for that. Thank you very much, William. Both questions are for Woody. So thanks, William. I appreciate the questions. So I'll try to take them in the order. There's a lot there, so let me try to see if I can get it all. Page 7, where do I see the growth? Actually, both businesses had a very strong second half of last year with net flows positive across the businesses, which was great. So I think we enter 2025 with positive flows and the momentum behind us. I think that there's great opportunities for us in the pension and insurance business in particular. Those tend to be larger blocks of business that are much lower fee. So having a very efficient platform to go compete for those large low-fee businesses is critically important. I can see asset growth there being very substantial, and our ability to actually make it generate profits is incumbent on us having an extremely efficient operation. The private markets businesses, I think, are tremendous growth levers for us where there's demand in the marketplace. Every survey that I see, vast majority of surveys that I see of client interest and client appetite, real estate has not been in high demand lately because of the crisis we've been through in the last two or three years, but there was a tremendous rotation to private credit, and private credit has exploded away from typical broadly syndicated private credit loans to a number of other specialty asset classes. Non-sponsored business will be in with MGG, asset-backed private credit that we're entering through our Aperture business and others. So I see the private credit opportunities as a tremendous growth area, and infrastructure in particular is the last one because many clients that I talk to are very interested in shifting their private debt allocations over to infrastructure in particular. That was the first question. The second question that you asked about was a successful net flow target. It's obviously not something that we have a target for at all. We expect it to be positive, for sure. That's the first measure of a healthy asset management business: a positive third-party net flow business, and that's the expectation. My teams know and our business know that our expectation is to deliver profitable growth in our businesses. Now, of course, there are times when asset classes are not in favor, but a healthy business will generate positive net flows as a percent of assets that can vary widely based on market conditions. I don't think we have a target that we've disclosed for net flows. Fee margins and fee pressure. It's no secret that in traditional asset classes, there is fee pressure. In traditional asset classes, passive has put pressure on a lot of traditional offerings in particular. Most of that's happened in equity businesses, not in fixed-income businesses. Managing passive strategies in the fixed-income markets, as I'm sure you know, William, is very different than in the equity markets. But private markets is a place where we're seeing growth, and I think that has the ability to at least offset, if not enhance, our overall fee margin as we go forward with the collection of the business. And the last point you based was about the cost-income ratio. And over time, we're expecting to get to a cost-income ratio that's for the combined business into the 60s and trending toward a 60% objective over time. Super. Thank you. You're welcome. Next question, please. The next question is from Michael Huttner of Berenberg. Please go ahead. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I had three questions. One is China. I mean, you mentioned Cathay, but I think the China Generali, China assets are not here, so I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that. The second is you mentioned many times the value of seed capital and how unique it is, etc., and you've addressed some of it, but I just wonder if you can give us a flavor of what peers do in terms of seed capital and how you evaluate it. I don't know, just out of interest, and then the last question is a really simple one. How much dividend will NewCo pay, and when will it start? Thank you. Thank you all very much. Michael, the first and th ird question are for Cristiano, while the second one on the seed capital is for Woody. Hi, Michael. Talking about China, as you know, we have two capabilities to generate profit in China from the asset management business. The first one is Guotai. We have a 30% minority share there, and we are earning recurrently, and this is accounted through the equity method, a good and growing yearly return, even in the last years in China. This is a positive and stably growing business. On the Generali China asset management business, this is a setup made in joint venture with our partner in China, which is the CNPC business, and we are operating together to manage the asset both of our companies and of third-party Chinese companies. This is taken out since inception from both transactions recently announced, both the Conning acquisition as well as the Natixis Investment Managers one. It is taken out, but it is accounted in our numbers when you see the asset management total contribution. On the third, since before instead of going back and forth, first of all, the dividend effect, allow me to explain also the earnings accretion effect because I think some clarity has to be made out of that. First of all, you don't need to be a CFO to get the point that without any CTA, without any seed capital commitment, and without any preferred dividend price adjustment mechanism inside, you start day zero with an accretive earnings profile. On top of that, when you do all the things we said before, you get after deploying the full synergies, prudent synergies that Woody was showing you, you get to a 2%-3% earnings per share accretion for Generali Group side out of this business. This is a very important starting point. Having said that, there is for sure a kind of J-curve equivalent effect of all happening after simply merging together and doing nothing else, not even the price adjustment. There are effects which are constraining the full recognition in the earnings and hence in the dividend, which are basically the price adjustment mechanism of the preferred dividend, which is for the first two years, 2026 and 2027, allocated to our partner. I recall this is a specific feature created also to manage the contribution that the group is giving into this joint venture of MGG business. It is temporary in nature, and this appears then, and together with that has another element of cash coming back to Generali Group, which is the repayment of basically EUR 230 million, which is 17.5% of the outstanding debt, which is coming down with MGG, which is then contributing as value only as 25% of his transaction value. This mechanism allows us also to have temporary protection from the signing to the closing and the running of the first part of the business on deviation from what is projected on both sides. And it is, I think, complicated. I'm trying to explain it, but to make you understanding this is quite important. As a bottom line, especially focusing on next week's discussion where you will ask me about cash, for sure you have to expect that the first two years, the effect of all these taken together is not material from this point apart from what Generali Group will have to pay as M&A cost, success fee cost, and retention plan, which are affecting our total remittance capacity over the three years, 2025, 2027 from the group by something around EUR 100 million. Going after that, especially at the run rate, I remind you that we are growing this 2%-3% earnings accretion, which is more than EUR 100 million. I would say it's closer to the 150 to 100 million run rate increase after all these effects, which with the agreement of the parties in the capital management policy of the GV will be maximized to be dividended up to the shareholders. I hope that's complete. Brilliant. That's really complete. Thank you. And I think the second one was on seed. Yeah. Hi, this is Woody. I'll take that one. Thanks, Michael. So there's a number of examples of the value of seed capital in M&A transactions. I don't think there's been a lot published about. Here's the value of a dollar of seed capital. I think every one of those transactions is very bespoke and very customized, and you make your own assumptions about how seed capital fills a valuation differential in earnings. You can make your own assumptions about how that's done here based on what Cristiano just said to you. But I can cite a few examples just from 2024, Wendel committing $1 billion to Monroe Capital for their investment strategies in October, Guardian committing $5 billion to HPS in August of last year to support their partnership going forward, Brookfield and Castlelake, $1.5 billion, Daiichi Life and Canyon Partners, $1.3 billion of seed capital. These are just a few examples from the last 12 months of where seed capital has been an element in an M&A transaction or a partnership of some sort, and there is some value. And again, it's hard to ascribe it. There's no bespoke dollar amount that's attributed to it because the seed capital can have different agendas and be deployed at different paces. But we can see and hope that that $15 billion is recognized as a substantial reason why the economics that Cristiano explained are the reason we're starting the business so strong before we consider synergies. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Next question, please. The next question is from Farquhar Murray of Autonomous Research. Please go ahead. Afternoon, all. Thanks for your time. Just three questions from me. Firstly, turning to the revenue synergies of EUR 40 million, I just wondered if you could split out how much of that relates to internalizing mandates as compared to kind of growth and distribution ambitions. And with regards to internalizing mandates, how much AUM is that expected to bring, and is there a kind of a timeline around that as mandates come to an end? Secondly, with regards to the seed capital, should we see that as a re-risking of the existing general account if we think of the insurance earnings level, and what's the nature of the reallocation going on there? And then finally, perhaps more strategically, hopefully you had a run of deals at GIH, Conning, MGG, and now this. Can we now expect a pause in deal-making, or are you busy enough from here? Thanks. Thank you very much, Farquhar. The first question is for Woody. The second question on the general account is for Cristiano, while the third one on the outlook for deal-making is for Philippe. Great. So with respect to the revenue synergies that we've included, I would say that just at a high level, roughly a quarter of that is internalization, and I would say that the balance is about equally split between cross-selling into existing channels and sales to new third-party clients. So it's actually a mix of all of those things, and it's actually net of revenue synergies that we've assumed in the first 12-18 months given the long timeframe to close. So we've actually adjusted it for that as we've gone forward. And maybe I'll continue with the seed capital, Cristiano, and you can jump in. The allocation of the capital in the asset allocation for the General Account, as I said in my earlier remarks, is driven by the liability profile of the insurance businesses, and the SAA is built to match to that, and from that, there's an asset allocation. Historically, Generali has deployed in the last number of years a substantial amount of capital to outside private asset managers. A part of the economic benefit of the seed will be using seed capital in similar strategies that we currently give to well-recognized outside private asset managers and deploying that to our current teams so we can actually operate within the existing strategic asset allocation and risk tolerance with the new deployments. Yeah. And to continue on the topic, so it is a story which starts off a starting point of Generali much lower versus all our peers in the amount of, let's say, private asset in the balance sheet. So we were basically half of the size in specific private classes. I was talking, for example, of private credit compared to our peers. So please keep into account a very important concept. The asset allocation strategic is made consistently with the investment mind that the group is giving to the companies. Okay? What is important is that the group in these last years always focused on the risk-adjusted return profile of our investment. And on that, as you will hear from, we have delivered and we will deliver, and this is an area of focus. You have seen how we grew our risk-adjusted capacity to deliver earnings, and this is part of the strategy to diversify investment base, accrete the return on the funds, manage higher value on the longer term within the risk budget, within the target operating range without altering it. This is also enabled by our increasing capacity to generate capital from the business, so the so-called normalized capital generation, which allows us also to deploy this because part of our solvency, I always told the market, is intangible, and that intangible component allows for a better increase of profit from allocation of investment because we have that as a way to increase the earnings within the target operating range and always in a risk-adjusted form, which is increasing for the group. I will take the third one. I think you can reasonably expect a pause on this, and by the way, we're expecting a pause as well. You can believe me. Last year, in April, we closed the Conning deal. Three days ago, we signed the MGG deal, and yesterday, we signed the memorandum of understanding for the Generali-Natixis deal. So it's obviously a lot. We are now completely focused on making the good things happen between signing and closing first, and then we will be fully focused on the execution, which means on the integration of MGG, the combination between Natixis and Generali Investments Holding. There is a lot to do, and I can assure you that Woody will be fully focused on the execution. The priority will be about the performance, the investment performance, and the sales. Okay. Many thanks for that. For any further questions, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question is a follow-up from Michael Huttner of Berenberg. Please go ahead. I appreciate. I have two questions. The first one is on complexity, and the second one is how do we value this because you've created an asset, so on the complexity, well, obviously, there's been multiple deals, as you say, multi-affiliates. There's lots and lots and lots of moving parts to this, so I know you've described and you've said you've created blueprints for all the various aspects and bottom-up and everything, but can you give us a little bit of a feel for how many crises you expect every day going forward or some kind of measure that this is actually manageable because it is very, very large, and the second question is, how much is it worth? And I know you said, well, you can gross up the seed capital, but I'm very good at grossing stuff up. I tend to get the wrong answer after this, and I just wondered if maybe you can get us a feel for if you were to if an outsider came, how much would they pay for this? Thank you. So I'll start with the complexity. This is Woody. I'll start with the complexity question, and it is two large organizations with multiple operations. I would say that the way you deal with complexity is planning, and you made a comment about how many crises to deal with. The crises that I think we'll be dealing with are market challenges. Those are the ones that will be the ones we won't be able to plan for and we'll have to respond to, and that's what we do every day for the benefit of our clients. The rest, I believe you can actually plan effectively around, and one of the benefits of a very long time from today to the day we close is it gives us an enormous amount of time to get very granular in the execution plan against what we have to manage. I think it's equally critical to have strong governance and information flows from the affiliates to the businesses. These are not venture capital stakes where you put the money in and hope it turns out okay. You have to manage and oversee these businesses with strong information flows. You need very data-rich risk management systems. You need clearly implemented compliance oversight programs, and with that, you can avoid your worst crises of operations and focus on dealing with client demands and deal with market circumstances. I think that we will assemble and deploy in the early years of this, and we've assumed in our costs to achieve the synergies, very specifically a large implementation and operating team to oversee the work that we're going to be doing together. I think that's the critical path for us to be able to achieve what we want. The good news is that between the two different organizations, we already have outstanding risk and compliance systems, and we've already got world-class affiliates and businesses and brands that are doing business with some of the most challenging institutional investors on the planet. So I think we start from a very good position before we launch this. Thank you. And Michael, on the last part, how much is it worth for this seed capital? It is important to see which side because if it is before the transaction, it is worth for our partner in developing the value we can create together. So for us, it's a big help in the value gap starting from the run rate lower earnings point. So it helps filling in a material way the gap. But close, so we are talking about the mid-high triple-digit value. It is clearly difficult to evaluate on a run rate basis because it is depending on the mix of public versus private market on how much we can leverage. But really, I think from what we, at least personally as a CFO, I took as a lesson from what happened in this partnership and also in the evaluation of it, it is a very clear signal of the power of what in the past, as insurer, we were looking for many years ago doing bancassurance, searching for the distribution. This is a kind of asset assurance new way to look at it because it is creating exactly the possibility to leverage on the distribution capacity. Speaking about the point of also not investing in building from scratch distribution, also for me, this is a cost avoidance element quite important when we evaluate yearly the painful discussion on the budget where I have to make my role to see how things are controlled because this creates more value starting from day zero on a distribution which is already existing instead of spending a lot of time creating the brand, the value, and the knowledge and the track record on something which is started from scratch. So this is, in a certain sense, an accelerator to that, and the cost avoidance component, even though you don't see it, I think it is material from the point of view of going forward. Brilliant. Thank you. Mr. Cleva, there are no more questions registered at this time. Thank you very much, Operator, and thanks very much for dialing in the call. IR team remains at your disposal for any follow-up, and we look forward to welcome many of you in Venice next week on January the 30th for our Investor Day. Goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your telephones. Thank you.