It's now time to begin the Daiichi Life Group CFO dialog. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today. Today's speakers are Mr. Taisuke Nishimura, our Managing Executive Officer and Group CFO, and Mr. Paul Wells, President and CFO of Protective Life Corporation. Today's event is being streamed online with simultaneous interpretation in Japanese and English. Regarding the agenda, Paul will first explain about Protective's strategy, followed by a panel discussion. After the panel discussion, we will take questions. Then Nishimura will provide a brief update on ESR, after which we'll take questions for that update. The total duration is expected to be up to one hour and 30 minutes. Please also note that an archived recording of today's event will be posted on our website at a later date. Now, we'll ask Paul to explain about Protective's strategy. Paul, please go ahead. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you. We appreciate Daiichi's support and partnership, and we recognize the importance of Protective's role in Daiichi's long-term growth ambitions. My goal today is to give you a concise update on where Protective is today, progress we have made, and the path we see to continued growth toward 2030. For clarity, I will not address all information included in my slides during this presentation, as we will get into much more detail during the question and answer session. On this first slide, I'd like to characterize the last few years as a period of deliberate repositioning for Protective. We have been actively reshaping the company so that the earnings profile, capital position, and operating model are better aligned with where we need to go. First, we have taken several strategic capital actions, including the sale of Concourse, the resolution reinsurance transaction, and the expansion of Protective Life Reinsurance in Bermuda. The purpose of these actions was to improve capital efficiency and reduce risk in areas that were not core to our future growth. Second, we have added scale and diversification through the acquisitions of Portfolio and Obsidian. Third, we have continued to evolve our investment strategy. Finally, cost efficiency remains a major focus. We have improved our expense efficiency, and that discipline gives us more capacity to invest in important areas of growth. All of these actions are a part of our strategy to improve the quality of earnings, improve capital efficiency, build scale, and position Protective to deliver sustained growth. Moving forward to the next slide. In the near term, our 2026 goals are very important because they show the progress that is already underway. Our 2030 goals that are shown here are ambitious, but they are not dependent on a single lever. They are driven by a combination of retail growth, investment strategy, operational efficiency, and disciplined acquisition execution. Moving forward to the next slide, we describe our strategy broadly as achieving competitive fitness. Within this broad strategy, we have four key pillars: cost efficiency, investment returns, strong product management, and capital utilization. We have seven individual focus areas, and they are intentionally a mix of business initiatives and enterprise enablers. On the business side, as examples, we are focused on protection growth and growing our Asset Protection Division profitably while integrating the Portfolio acquisition. In terms of enablers, we are optimizing our investment strategy and embedding operational excellence through data analytics and automation. We have a clear vision, a strong financial foundation, and scalable businesses to support our 2030 vision. We are now very focused on execution. Moving forward to the next slide, this slide provides a high-level overview of our four retail businesses. In protection, our focus is on accelerating earnings growth, improving profitability, and creating embedded value. In retirement, we continue to pursue a multi-year organic growth plan with fixed and variable annuities, along with bank and Company-Owned Life Insurance. In employee benefits, the opportunity is to accelerate and diversify growth, diversifying growth outside of the state of New York while also improving our expense ratio. Finally, with asset protection, the priority is improving our loss ratios, improving cost efficiency, and integration execution. Moving forward to the retail earnings growth, this provides a more detailed view of our path forward to 2030. You can see in the chart to the left, our pre-tax adjusted operating income is growing significantly for each of these three categories of businesses between 2025 and 2030. Retirement is the largest earnings contributor, with fixed annuities as the primary driver. As I mentioned earlier, our investment strategy is critical in supporting the competitiveness of our spread-based products. In the protection division, earnings are accelerating as the block continues to grow, and earnings outpace the cost of issuing new business. Term insurance is the primary earnings driver within the protection division. As you can see, the biggest step change is in our capital-light businesses. Portfolio doubles the size of the Asset Protection Division. We are also expecting that ongoing rate increases will continue to improve loss ratios on our legacy business. The ShelterPoint acquisition from 2024, our employee benefits division, we expect to see continued premium growth on paid leave products. Finally, the recently announced acquisition of Obsidian, which we expect to close later this year or early next year, will expand our presence in the P&C market with opportunities for further growth. The path to 2030 depends on disciplined execution across several growth drivers, as you can see detailed out on this slide. Moving forward to the next slide, as I mentioned previously, evolving our investment strategy continues to be a key area of focus. We have evolved the asset mix to improve risk-adjusted returns, including a prudent increase in private and less liquid assets. Importantly, we are pairing the evolution of our investments with enhanced risk management. This includes stronger exposure limits, credit surveillance, look-through monitoring for private assets, expanded liquidity monitoring, stress testing, and tighter concentration risk oversight. We have also continued to add outside asset managers. As you can see, we call out here currently 13 firms managing approximately $6 billion of our investment portfolio. We have also made a significant investment in an enterprise data platform called Aladdin Enterprise that will improve our portfolio management and liquidity oversight and broader ALM capabilities. It's important to note that while we are improving our investment competitiveness, we are doing it in a measured way to ensure ongoing risk management and business success. Moving forward to the next slide. This slide covers our two most recent acquisitions, Portfolio and Obsidian. Portfolio closed on January 1, 2026, and the strategic rationale behind this acquisition was to create a scaled business, combining with our legacy Asset Protection Division to create more modernized operations and a broader set of dealer wealth platforms. Over time, we expect this acquisition will increase earnings, ROE, and ESR. Obsidian was signed in April of 2026, and again, we expect it to close pending regulatory approval later this year or early next year. Obsidian is an opportunity for us to add another fee-based and short-tailed P&C business specializing in the Excess and Surplus or E&S market within the U.S. As with Portfolio, we expect over time, Obsidian will increase earnings, ROE, as well as our ESR. That concludes my prepared remarks for my presentation, and I think with that, we'll move into Q and A. Thank you very much. We would like to move to the panel discussion. Panel discussion, we would like to start. Nishimura-san will be the moderator for panel discussion. Please use the Zoom simultaneous interpretation functions. Nishimura-san, please go ahead. Before moving on to Q and A with participants, I want to go through eight questions from myself to you, to deepen the understanding on Protective strategy. Let me go on to question number one. What is the greatest challenge to achieving $1 billion operating income target for 2030, and what actions are you taking to address it? First, I would say we acknowledge that the $1 billion target is ambitious, but we certainly view the target as achievable. I would describe the primary challenges as three primary areas. First, the competitive dynamics within the fixed annuity and term insurance markets. Both of these markets are important to our growth and also very competitive. We are addressing these risks by pursuing expansion of our distribution sources and actively enhancing the underlying customer experience. Second, achieving planned growth in our capital-light businesses. As I discussed earlier, that is critical to our long-term plans towards 2030. We are addressing the risk of growth in these businesses through active monitoring of each business, investments in technology to improve our efficiency and customer experience, and also ensuring each business has the appropriate resources they need to properly grow. Third challenge I would mention are external or macro factors. This would include financial market conditions as well as regulatory risks, and we are actively addressing these risks through monitoring as well as scenario planning for each of our business units. Okay. Thank you, Paul. This is a follow-up on question number one, and the plan you showed today seems to be more favorable than prior year plan. What are the principal drivers of this step-up toward 2030, and how confident are you in achieving it? Yeah. I am going to talk through really three primary drivers of our increase that we have showed towards 2030. Maybe first I would say we have confidence in our plans. As I mentioned earlier, we have not just one, but multiple levers that are in place and being actively worked on to drive towards the performance that we have outlined. The first driver I would talk about is our recent acquisitions, that being ShelterPoint from late 2024 in the employee benefits space, Portfolio, which I just discussed, as well as Obsidian. Ultimately, all of those businesses, as they become more operational within the Protective platform, we expect to see significant growth. That growth really leveraging four key elements. One, we think there are a set of internal capabilities that Protective can bring as the owner of these businesses to help drive growth. One example of that is Obsidian. We expect will benefit from being part of a much larger, more diversified, and highly rated company like Protective. The second area of support for these businesses is synergies, and synergies both on the revenue side and the expense side. For example, on the expense side, we see opportunities to replace legacy technology resources with a more modernized set of technology platforms. The Portfolio acquisition we did earlier this year is a good example of that. On the revenue side, we also expect to see significant revenue synergies within the Asset Protection Division from the recent acquisition of Portfolio as well. The third supporting capability for the capital-light business growth is improved loss ratios in our legacy asset protection business. As we've commented previously, we have seen higher loss ratios over the last few years due to heightened inflation in the auto parts and labor, and we've progressively taken steps to increase those rates to improve loss ratios over time. The fourth supporting item I would mention for the capital-light businesses is external factors. I would mention two examples there. One, with our employee benefits business, we are seeing continued momentum with more states adding the mandatory paid leave products. The second example would be with Obsidian in the broader market growth that we're seeing in the E&S space. That's the capital-light businesses. I'll move now to the retirement division, which is another key area of growth, as I showed on the earlier slide. Our retirement division sales are continuing to grow, and that's again, been supported by our enhanced investment strategy, as well as we have an ability to continue to increase and maintain our market share in those markets over the coming years. Finally, our protection division earnings is a key driver of the growth towards 2030. That's primarily a function of our term insurance product and our sales levels there. We expect earnings will continue to increase as that term block grows and the earnings outpace the cost needed to issue new policies. In your explanation, annuity business is one of the key drivers to grow. How does Protective plan to grow annuity business while remaining competitive in a very crowded market? The annuity market, as you noted, is very competitive. I think it's important we start framing the opportunity here with our current market share and some of the recent initiatives that we've undertaken. Let me take a minute and walk through what I mean by that. Currently, we have a fairly small market share, even though our sales have grown significantly over the last three years. When we look back to 2023 up to 2026, we have seen a significant growth in sales. However, we started this path of growth at a relatively low level of account value. Even at current sales levels with no growth, we do see earnings momentum continuing on for several years. Secondly, with respect to the broader fixed annuity market, our market share is relatively small. It's approximately 1.1% for fixed annuities. It's approximately 2% for traditional variable annuities. As you can see, we have an opportunity to continue to increase our market share and potentially increase sales significantly over time as we take advantage of opportunities, including broader distribution, which is the last important point I will make on the fixed annuity business. Even though it's very competitive, there are some significant distribution channels that we do not participate in today that we think could be an opportunity for us to take advantage of over the next few years. Thank you, Paul. I understand you don't necessarily have to grow in terms of new business. You can grow in terms of in force, even though you maintain the current level of new business. Okay, next question number four is how do you assess the risks arising from the market environment and the investment portfolio, and how are those risks being managed? Maybe just to start as a reminder, our investment philosophy and strategy really has evolved over the last few years. More specifically, we have added several outside managers, as was described on the slide earlier. That has allowed us to shift our asset mix. We have expanded our allocation to private credit. However, we have done so in a diversified and prudent manner. In addition, we have repositioned our portfolio with six separate portfolio trades since 2023. Those trades have, on a cumulative basis, served to strengthen our overall capital, ALM, and also enhancing overall investment income returns. With respect to risk management around investments, we have undertaken a variety of measures to ensure that the evolution of our portfolio strategy is appropriately supported to optimize our overall risk-adjusted returns. A few of the measures we've taken, I'll just mention. I mentioned this earlier, but we are currently in the process of implementing what I would describe as a best-in-class centralized data platform, with one of the largest platform providers in the U.S. to improve our overall portfolio management, liquidity oversight, and ALM capabilities. We think that's a very important investment that we are putting in place that will give us a much stronger infrastructure as we grow the company and broaden the asset sources that we bring into the portfolio. The second measure I would mention is we are utilizing an enhanced investment risk framework. That framework includes stronger exposure limits, credit surveillance, look-through monitoring of our private assets, and then finally, we are strengthening our external manager due diligence and ongoing performance monitoring, including adding additional resources within that area. Okay. Yeah. I agree that enhancement in investment capabilities, frameworks, and also risk management, very key initiatives, not only Protective, but other groups who let us work together more tight. Let me switch to the next topic about capital- light business. Capital- light business are expected to make significant earnings contribution. How much of that contribution should be viewed as recurring and resilient, and which businesses are expected to be the largest contributors? First, I would say we expect all of the capital- light businesses to grow over the coming years. Each of them to contribute in a meaningful way to our earnings objectives. I will address each of the businesses separately because they each have some important supporting elements that I think are important to understand. First, Asset Protection Division or APD. The earnings from APD will ultimately be the majority of our capital- light earnings over this timeframe over the next five years, just due to its relative size today. For legacy APD, so our Asset Protection Division before the Portfolio acquisition, some of the key drivers there for growth, again, continued rate increases. We have done multiple rounds of rate increases on new business since 2023, and those are resulting in improved loss ratios as we see the premium become earned. That will take some time to work through the earnings as we earn those premiums over the next several years. In addition to the loss ratio improvement, we are expecting to see continued cost efficiencies. We've taken out a significant amount of cost in that business over the last few years, and we expect that to be an important driver as we move forward to continue to maintain our operating margins. For the recent Portfolio acquisition, as I alluded to earlier, we are anticipating some significant synergies, both in expense and revenue. I would just say we have a lot of integration efforts that are already underway with Portfolio, and we are expecting some significant expense synergies from a variety of departments, including IT, sales, and finance. Finally, I would say on Portfolio from a revenue perspective, we do think there is opportunity to capitalize on providing a broader range of products to the existing distribution within Portfolio. I will now move to Obsidian. As I mentioned earlier, this is really an entry point for Protective into the Excess and Surplus, or E&S, part of the P&C market. We are expecting revenue and earnings growth to be fairly significant over the next few years for a variety of reasons. First, the E&S market overall has been growing and showing strong trends over the last several years, and Obsidian's historical performance has been very consistent with that. So we expect, just based on the existing organic activity happening within Obsidian, there will be strong momentum in revenue growth. Secondarily, or additive to that, we think that Protective and Daiichi's ownership of Obsidian with a larger balance sheet, higher ratings, long-term owner will provide additional opportunities for growth in larger programs and will improve the overall earnings performance over time. Finally, the last capital-light business I will mention is our employee benefits business. As I discussed earlier, we are expecting to see continued premium growth there. More states are being added. We are adding new groups, and we also expect to see improved loss ratios in this business as well from what we saw in 2025 and so far in 2026. Thank you, Paul. So you have several sources of growth in capital-light business, and that contributes a lot to our 2030. In addition to 2030 outlook, also our 2026 forecast is very strong. What gives you confidence in 2026 outlook, and what are the key assumptions supporting it? There are several items driving our expected growth in 2026. There are four key ones I will mention. The Protection division first, we expect to see continued earnings growth from recent sales levels, so sales levels we have already achieved. We are also seeing a positive impact in the Protection business from higher yields. So we are reinvesting our new money at higher interest rates than our portfolio yield. That is particularly helpful for the Protection business as well as some of our older acquired businesses that are longer duration. In the Retirement division, as I mentioned earlier, we have good momentum in our fixed annuity business in particular, but we also have nice momentum from the relatively high levels of sales we have had over the last several years in our BOLI and COLI market. We see continued growth in spread income, and we've certainly seen that in the first half of this year. For our stable value division, our interest spreads have been a bit compressed over the last few years, but we anticipate spread improvement in 2026 versus 2025. Again, we are certainly seeing that through the first half of the year. The final point I would make on this question is if you just look at the performance we've had over the first six months of 2026, we are running ahead of our plan. To this point, we are seeing positive mortality along with favorable investment income, and so we feel very confident at this point in being able to achieve our 2026 forecasts. Thank you, Paul. That's encouraging. Switch the topic, how do you expect AI to reshape business models in the U.S. insurance industry and Protective? I tend to think about AI affecting our business in two broad ways. It's probably a little bit more than this, but I think it fits pretty nicely in these two broad categories, one being enhancing cost efficiency and then the second really around the customer experience. On the cost efficiency side, we're taking what I would call a combination approach, both from the top down as well as from the bottom up. What I mean by that, from the top down, we're really looking at what are the really significant processes we have where we think there could be a significant impact from AI. Two areas of particular focus there are our life underwriting process as well as our APD claims process. Those are areas that we think we could see some significant benefits over time, but will likely take more time to show up in our numbers given the complexity of those processes. On the bottoms up side, that's really all about getting a broad set of our people using AI and improving efficiency at a personal level. We have seen some nice benefits in terms of personal productivity. I'd say the most significant benefit we've seen achieved so far is in our software development area within our technology group, and we are seeing tangible savings there based on the additional automation we're able to put in place with technology we have. That's cost efficiency. I'll move now to the customer experience. We're very focused here on providing improved experiences for both our customers and distributors. We do have several pilot programs in place to pursue improvement in experiences. I would say we are taking a bit of a cautious approach here just to ensure that we appropriately handle all interactions with our customers as the capabilities of the underlying technology continue to improve. We anticipate that benefits from AI around customer experience will likely materialize more in the intermediate and long term. Okay, this is my last question to you in this panel. You are becoming CEO starting January 1, 2027. Congratulations, by the way. As you prepare to assume the role of CEO, could you share your aspiration for the company and key priorities you intend to pursue? Yes. I'll keep this relatively simple. I would just say my aspiration for Protective is to be a company that delivers sustainable growth, creates long-term value for Daiichi, and remains a trusted partner for all of our customers and distributors. To achieve those objectives, we're going to focus on three key priorities. First, serving our customers and distributors across all of our different businesses very well. We're going to maintain strong financial discipline. Lastly, really intentionally investing in our people and capabilities to support the broader enterprise growth. The last thing I would say is Protective has a strong foundation. We have a very strong foundation. We have a supportive owner in Daiichi. We have a very dedicated team, and my goal is to build on that foundation while also continuing to make very thoughtful decisions to prepare us and support the company's next phase of growth. Next, Nishimura will explain about regulatory ESR. Nishimura-san, please go ahead. Paul, thank you very much. I would like to add one point using this opportunity to update about this important topic. This is group regulatory ESR. As shown in this slide, at the end of March, we have the preliminary number that's 198%. We have already mentioned group regulatory ESR as the end of March 2026. This is slightly lower, but still we ensure sufficient financial soundness. We also have eligible capital and required capital here. There are difference in how we measure these numbers, and also there are requirements from regulators. For Protective, as Paul mentioned today, in regulatory ESR, we apply deduction and aggregation methods. This is the base of our regulatory ESR calculation. There are slight differences here. That is one difference we can mention here. For Protective, we have also internal ESR and also group regulatory ESR. There is a difference here, and that is also reflected in both eligible capital as well as required capital. That is the gist of this chart. There are some slight differences in how we measure the risk. We also have in internal ESR, we are looking at more adequate way to measure and reflect. We are using internal models rather than the regular model. Based on the market credit risk, we look at the treatment of the internal ratings, the discount rates, and equity risks. These factors differ. For mark-to-market risks, in internal ESR, we use some deductions in a portion of OCI. These differences in measurement methods and regulatory treatment are reflected in both eligible and required capitals, resulting in such gap between the levels. While the regulatory ESR is an indicator used to verify compliance with regulatory requirements, the internal ESR is an indicator we use to inform capital policy decisions. With regard to the group's capital policy, we are going to use group's internal ESR as we have done in the past. That is briefly from my side. Thank you very much.