We will jump right into it here. Thank you, everybody, everybody for being here. And a special thank you to Gary Bhojwani, CEO of CNO Financial, Paul McDonough, CFO of CNO Financial. Very much appreciated, your attendance. And so I'm kicking off a lot of these conversations with a broad strategy update type of question, and so I want to do the same with you all. Could you run through some of the key initiatives for your firm and, you know, some of the things you're most focused on as we think through, you know, the medium term? Yeah. W hen I try and explain or CNO Financial and what it is we focus on, there's really a handful of things I would point to that I think make us unique and really form critical parts of our strategy. The first is that we focus almost exclusively on the middle market. Different people have different definitions of this, but the vast majority of our clients have a net worth of well below $100,000. So our focus is the middle, middle market in the United States. I think the second thing that's a key part of our strategy and really makes us unique is the emphasis on distribution, and specifically what we do with distribution. We got very lucky on the timing of 1 critical issue. Right before the pandemic, in January of 2020, we decided to combine our consumer businesses. We had historically had our Bankers Life business, which is our captive market, captive career agent distribution, and Colonial Penn, which is a direct-to-consumer business, totally separate, a separate leadership and so on. Yeah. We brought those together in January of 2020, so right before the pandemic. As just... we'll talk about this later, but as 1 proof point to what that's done, literally now, a full 1/3 of the life insurance sales by our captive agents have emanated from leads that started out on the Colonial Penn side or the direct-to-consumer side. So bringing that business together and really combining the two, I think is a very unique thing, and it's a key part of our strategy in terms of how we approach the consumer. And when I talk about distribution, though, I think also the emphasis on that captive agent and what we refer to as the last mile. We're not trying to be the lowest cost provider. We're really focusing on the middle market, and the bulk of our clients are people that want someone to come sit at their kitchen table and talk to them about these products. So when I say emphasis on distribution, it's the combination of that last mile, along with the integration of the direct to consumer. And those things, I think, make us very unique. The third thing I would point to is the breadth of products. We're not trying to be a life company or an annuity company or a Med Supp company. We're not trying to be a product company per se. Whatever it is, within reason, that middle-market consumer needs, we want to provide that. What that's led us to, most of our products are manufactured, which is to say we take the balance sheet risk, but we actually have quite a few products, Med Advantage is a good example, where we strictly distribute it. We take the view that if it's in our wheelhouse, if it's in our expertise to talk about and the middle-market consumer wants it, if they, if they can benefit from it, we want to figure out how to deliver it, even if it means we don't manufacture it. It's really those, those 3 things I would point to: middle market, the way we approach distribution, and then the way we surround that middle-market consumer with a breadth of products and how those products interrelate with one another. Got it. That's very helpful. You want to talk a little bit about worksite? Sorry. Oh, yeah. Sorry, Paul made a good point. Everything I just said applies to the single largest portion of our business, which is our consumer business. Yeah. It represents about 80% of CNO Financial. There's also a worksite business, which represents 20% of our business, and we've made a handful of investments in recent years, 2 acquisitions in particular, where we can sell insurance products. We have a technology platform for the employers that we work with, and we have an advice and advocacy business. And so we've brought all of those together under a unified brand, Optavise, and are really pushing into that. So I guess that's one other aspect that is critical to CNO and understanding what makes CNO different, is this balance between consumer and worksite. Got it. Next, I wanted to touch on your agent distribution. Can you talk about the outlook for agent recruiting and maybe some of the initiatives that you have on that front? Sure. W e've had a few different approaches over the years. If you look back, at the company, call it 8-10 years ago, really, the philosophy was to appoint as many agents as possible, kind of create the biggest army possible. And over the years, we moved away from that, and in the last 3-5 years in particular, we really were emphasizing productivity and yield. And, productivity is obvious. I think everyone understands that. But by yield, historically, these numbers aren't precise, but, they're not too far off. We would appoint roughly 5,000-10,000 agents a year, and 3-4 years later, less than 300 of those agents are still with us. That's a really expensive model to keep going. What we wanted to do over the last 3-5 years was change that dynamic materially, and instead of appointing 5,000 or 10,000 agents a year, appoint 3,000-5,000 a year, but instead of having 300 of them still around a couple of years later, having 600 of them around. So really driving that yield up. And we've had a lot of success over the last couple of years on both fronts, on the yield and the productivity. Historically, in this business, because it's a commission-only business, higher unemployment causes more people to be willing to try a career like this. So when the economy starts to soften a little bit, we get a benefit from that in terms of our agent ranks. Sure. What we've done over the last few years to try and enhance the yield, we've implemented, I think, better and more refined referral programs, so there's some pre-qualification, if you will, that goes in before the agent gets appointed. We've implemented a better set of support mechanisms, financial and otherwise, training around the agents to try and improve that yield. Then probably the biggest thing, and the thing that's taken the most time, is creating the business in a way where there's a true career path for these agents. So as an example, in 2016, we started a broker-dealer. W e have a credible career path now for these folks that come in as insurance agents selling a product, where they can ultimately graduate to becoming financial advisors, and they can see what the benefit is, not only from a financial perspective, but just in terms of growing their own expertise and so on. So we've done a number of those things relative to the yield, the productivity, the career path. We've had very good success in the last few quarters. We're getting back to pre-pandemic levels in terms of our recruitment and our productivity, and we feel really good about the numbers we're seeing. And by the way, we're seeing those trends on both the consumer and the worksite side. We've seen some really good success on both sides in terms of recruiting new agents and getting them productive. Got it. Maybe pivoting over to the competitive environment across your health and life products, are you seeing any trends shift one way or the other there? How price-sensitive are your customers? Yeah, we're. F irst of all, we benefited, I think, during the pandemic, there was a heightened awareness, and interest from consumers in the life and health products, so we certainly benefited from that. We're, of course, not immune to competitive forces. There's a lot of competitors out there, but there are very few competitors that are focusing on the middle-market consumer. So by definition, our clients just don't have as many folks knocking on their door, trying to pitch them on these products. So we're somewhat insulated from that standpoint. And then, when you layer into it, on both our consumer and work side, we have a substantial portion of our business produced by captive agents. That's kind of another degree of insulation for us. So are we seeing competitive pressures? Of course, but the clients that we're going after aren't being called on by most of the other folks. Almost, not almost, but by definition, the business model is such that we're not trying to appeal to the consumer that wants the lowest price. There's plenty of other resources for them. We're trying to appeal to that middle-market consumer that wants someone to come into their kitchen table and sit with them and explain these products and provide an overall perspective. That's been the model. So those things all come together to somewhat insulate us. Yeah. Understood. Just around 4Q enrollment in the end of the year tends to be an important time for the sales process. Any, you know, color you might be able to provide on how that year-end is going? Yeah. F or the folks that aren't familiar, the annual enrollment period for Medicare is from October, I think, 15th till December 7th, so we're literally in the last week of it. The interesting thing, or maybe not so interesting, maybe it's common sense, there's really a big push in this last week. Something like 20% of the business gets sold in the last week. Wow! A lot of procrastinators out there. So we're right in the thick of it. It's difficult for me to say too much because we don't have the numbers yet, but I can tell you that we like what we're seeing so far. Got it. Okay. N ext, I'll turn to annuities. I was hoping you could discuss... You know, you already touched on the competitive environment a bit for your products, and so maybe, you know, maybe you can extrapolate on, like, the ways that you were able to avoid this competitive environment, particularly with the emergence of private equity-backed insurers and so forth, and some of these products, like fixed indexed annuities. Yeah. The vast majority of the private equity-backed annuity issues are working through independent distribution. And there's a very different structure in terms of incentives and commissions and so on, in terms of how independent distribution works and how captive distribution works. We frown upon, and in most instances, flat out disallow, our captive agents from moving a consumer from annuity A to annuity B, particularly if they're not out of the surrender period. So we have an extra layer of control that you don't find in some other distribution models. And sometimes that hurts us, right? Because we're not putting up new sales numbers the same way because we're not allowing replacements. We think that that's a better way to go for our business model. I've been on both sides of these issues. I've spent many years working with a company that ran independent distribution, so I'm familiar with the model. Each one has its own merits, but in our case, we have a different approach. We believe there, too, there's a certain amount of insulation that we have. And I would again point to the fact that if you look at many of the annuity writers, their average annuity sale is far larger than ours. Our average annuity is about $100,000. I'd be willing to bet most of these other folks working with independent distribution is probably closer to $250,000. So again, a very different type of consumer, very different needs, and very different distribution structure, control, and incentives. you touched on this a bit here, just in terms of liquidity risk and what we've seen with higher interest rates and some of the turnover that we've seen throughout the industry. How do you manage that duration risk? And, you know, sounds like there's some built-in protection as well. Yeah, to a large extent, that issue is really existent only in our annuity business. Right. Roughly 80% of our annuity book is still within surrender period. And then you layer into it the captive distribution, the extra controls that we have, all these other things. Do we see surrenders tick up slightly during periods of higher interest rates? Yes, we do, but it's within expectations and within the models that we have priced for. So we don't see it as a point of concern. It's a reality, and I think we have, relative to some others, relatively lower exposure. Makes sense. And then on the duration risk side of it, Alex, there's sort of 2 dynamics that mitigate that risk. The first is the fact that the fairly healthy net inflows result in a growing book, so we're able to kind of rebalance as needed pretty quickly. And then the second thing is, if you think about the breadth of our product portfolio and the breadth of durations across that product portfolio, there's sort of a natural hedge in terms of- Mm-hmm those durations. Got it. Okay. I want to shift gears a little over to Worksite Benefits. I thought maybe you could drill into the growth strategy a bit more there for us, and maybe also take us a bit deeper into the strategy to expand your footprint geographically. Sure. T he worksite business, let me first say, in general, we're very bullish on it, and we're bullish on it for a few simple reasons. Number 1, there's not that many other alternatives for consumers to get some of these needs met that a supplemental health policy, as an example, will provide, particularly when you're talking about a middle-market consumer. The government can't afford to provide some of these things, and most employers can't either. So we think there's an opportunity here in the worksite space where these products will continue to grow. So when you think broadly about worksite, it's important to try and identify what aspects of it you're going after. Historically, we've been focused on the insurance products, which we manufacture, and that continues for us in the worksite space. What we've added to that in recent years, we've always had the insurance manufacturer and the captive distribution. Those 2 things remain. We've added to that. Now we're distributing more products, just like on the consumer side, that we don't manufacture, if it makes sense. We also acquired a benefits technology company, a technology platform, and then we acquired a small enrollment and advocacy company. So we've brought all of these things together under the brand Optavise, and we're now able to go to our worksite clients with a more consolidated offering. Now, in full disclosure, I've been very pleased with the recovery post-pandemic of the insurance sales. We have now met or exceeded our pre-pandemic levels of insurance sales. The fee side of the business, some of the other things I talked about, the services and the technology, have been slower to recover, and we really are turning our attention to that here in 2024 to get that fee side of the business growing again at the same rate the insurance side is. But we have anecdotal evidence. I don't have the numbers to back it up yet, but we have anecdotal evidence in talking to our employer clients that this type of a consolidated offering is the differentiated capacity that they really want. So we're very excited about providing that. Hmm. You mentioned the acquisitions you've done in the worksite space. I thought maybe you could elaborate on that, what it's specifically enabled you to do within that business, and yeah, how the integration process has gone as well. Yeah, it was both of the businesses were acquired really with an eye towards giving this consolidated offering to be able to go to our worksite clients and say, "We can do more than just your insurance." So the technology platform, many of you may be familiar with a company called Workday, a big company where your benefits are administered. It's a platform that an employer can go to. We bought a company called Web Benefits, a much smaller version of that, that type of an offering. The other business we bought, DirectPath, they provide education and enrollment assistance. Big employers out there really want to outsource that. They want somebody that their employees can call, that feels like it's their company, that feels like it's ABC Manufacturer, that answers the phone and can talk to the employee about their benefits and give them the counsel and the advice and, and so on. So we brought those assets together. One of them we bought, I guess in hindsight, on the one hand, it was right around the time of the pandemic, so that made all this much harder. The flip side is, we were able to reflect that in the price. But it's, it's been slower coming than we would like, and we expect 2024 to really start to see a turn and have these businesses come together. And again, it's all about giving that consolidated offering to employers. Got it. Next on Bermuda, I wanted to, you know, maybe first have you just remind us of what's been done, and particularly for some of us that may not know, you know, the details as much. You know, there's the capital release piece of it, but what does it also do for just ongoing sales of annuities and growing the business? Sure. W e've set up a Bermuda captive. We shared on our Q3 earnings call that the company was licensed, that it was approved. What we've done since then is we closed on the initial treaty, closed just last Thursday. And that initial treaty cedes roughly $6.2 billion of the roughly $9 billion of fixed indexed annuity in force book to Bermuda in a Mod co structure. And then going forward, and that's as of 10/1, a 10/1 effective date. And then going forward, we'll cede 100% of the new business. We have some optionality around dialing that back if we so choose, but the expectation is that we cede 100%. So that's the starting point. We'll explore, you know, other products we may choose to cede to the Bermuda platform. We would have to get pre-approval for that, but that's something that we'll explore. As we talked about on the Q3 call, that initial treaty frees up about $150 million of capital that'll sit at the hold co as excess capital. We haven't really changed the way we think about how we deploy that excess capital, but it gives us optionality. So, you know, we could choose, for instance, on the new business, to get more competitive on pricing. There's not a huge need or, you know, sort of, compelling reason for us to do that, just because of where we compete. You know, as Gary talked about in the middle market, and through captive distribution, both of those things cause us to be less sort of price-focused. So that's basically what we've done and where we're headed and, you know, how we think about the capital efficiency that that structure allows us to participate in. The real, you know, sort of catalyst for us deciding to do this was to get ourselves in a level playing field with the many companies that you know, did this before us. That makes sense. You mentioned that you haven't changed anything about the way you think about deploying capital. Certainly, you do have more flexibility. Can you give us a taste of, you know, if you decided to, you know, go after opportunities, what some of those may be? If you think about how we've deployed it in the past, most of our excess capital on the margin has been deployed through share repurchase. So, you know, returning excess capital to shareholders, through share repurchase. We have done some acquisitions. Gary talked about the 2- Mm-hmm acquisitions in the worksite space. That's likely the size of a transaction that we might consider. We do have a corp dev team that's constantly looking for opportunities for us to create value by, you know, augmenting our organic growth with inorganic growth through acquisitions. I will say that, you know, with our stock and our peer group stock trading at sort of, you know, mid-70s as a% of book value, you know, share repurchase is a very compelling use of excess capital, and any acquisition has to sort of compete with that. Makes sense. Next, on the life business, could you describe the performance of the in-force and, you know, how things are shaping up from a endemic state standpoint, coming out of the pandemic? We've, you know, seen some peers have some pressure from old age mortality hiccups, and that kind of thing. Is there anything like that that you're seeing in your block? Yeah, I wouldn't say that we've experienced any hiccups. The book continues to perform well and reasonably stable in terms of the insurance product margin that it generates. We have seen, and we've included in our actuarial assumptions, a tick-up in mortality as compared to pre-COVID- Mm-hmm as COVID has transitioned into more of an endemic state, and we expect that will, you know, persist, for the foreseeable future. N ext on long-term care, there were some fireworks in 3Q from, you know, mainly 1 peer. Can you talk about the performance of your block? You know, what you're seeing in frequency trends coming away from the pandemic and, you know, maybe any other nuances that we should keep in mind about CNO's exposure to long-term care that may be differentiated? Sure. I'd say that the block has performed very well, you know, certainly through COVID, just because of the decrease in utilization of healthcare broadly. That's come back a bit, but it's still performing better than pre-COVID, when it was, you know, already performing well in terms of target returns. One thing I would really emphasize is that the profile of our book in the wake of the long-term care reinsurance transaction that we completed in the fall of 2018 is very different than virtually all of our peers, certainly those that experienced some, you know, some pressure during the third quarter. you know, the ways that it is different are primarily in the amount of inflation benefits and sort of the amount of benefits in terms of the benefit period. So let me just share some data to put that in perspective. With our new sales, 99% of what we sell has a benefit period of 2 years or less, and 90% of what we sell has a benefit period of a year or less, and less than 10% of everything we sell has any sort of inflation rider. So we offer it, but there's not much uptake on it. The in-force book, less than 25% has inflation benefits. Less than 3%- has lifetime benefits, and the 97%+ that does not have lifetime benefits has an average benefit period of a year and a half. So that profile makes us very different than most of our peers. And it's you know, the profile of business that we like. We like the economics. It's a product that serves a very important need for our target market at an affordable price. So we expect to continue to sell it. We actually just launched a new product this fall that's done very well. I guess the last 3 things I'd share in terms of the profile of the book is that the attained age of our book is about 75 years. That's very different. Mm-hmm. Since 2008, we've ceded 25% of the new business to a reinsurance company, highly rated, highly regarded. Tells us they'd be happy to take more of it if we would agree to that. We'd prefer to keep it because we like the business. Mm-hmm. So all in, you know, an important part of our product set and a business that's performed well. N ext on the topic, cash flow sort of increased in popularity in terms of metrics that investors look at with life insurance companies. Is there anything around the Bermuda deal that impacts cash conversion? And, you know, any thoughts you'd provide around, you know, your valuation and how you all internally think about the capital generation of the business? Sure. O n the margin, the Bermuda structure is more capital efficient, and therefore, you know, all else equal, should generate better free cash flow. And our business historically has generated very healthy free cash flow, sort of in absolute terms, as a percentage of operating income, as a ratio, and relative to our peers. And I think that the fundamental through dynamics of our business will always generate, you know, healthy levels of free cash flow, and, you know, that will translate to some amount of capital return, including some amount of share repurchase. Having said that, you know, as, as critically important as the cash flow dynamics of the business are, I think it's a little short-sighted to focus too much on the ratio, sort of in isolation. Because for us, it's, it's pretty easy to think about scenarios where we might take decisions that I think would enhance the long-term value creation of the business, but would reduce the free cash flow in the near term. Mm. I'll give you 2 examples. The first is if we took more risk on our assets. Since early 2019, we've had a very distinct up in quality bias, but that wasn't a strategic decision. You know, that wasn't, you know, we're going to do that from, you know, now and forevermore. It was really more of a tactical decision reflecting where we were seeing relative value as we put money to work. That could easily change, and, you know, if and when it does, we wouldn't hesitate to take more risk. That would consume more capital. I think that, you know, the decision to do that would be that there's more relative value there, and it's going to enhance value over the long term, generate more income on a risk-adjusted basis, but in the near term, would reduce free cash flow. The other thing that I hope happens, you know, we as a management team will help try to make this happen, is to accelerate organic growth. Gary talked a lot about recruiting and retaining agents and productivity of our agents. You know, that should translate to increased top line growth. If we accelerate that, we should get more operating leverage, which should allow us to translate more of the sales growth to earnings growth. Would certainly enhance value, but would erode free cash flow in the near term, all else equal. So I just offer that context as we talk about, you know, what free cash flow conversion, you know, should we think about? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a tough topic. I appreciate that. Yeah. On the investment portfolio, you mentioned it in passing there, and I know there was an up in quality trade for a while, but maybe you could just unpack, you know, what kind of credit performance are you seeing across your book right now? And are there any of those types of allocation decisions or shifts that you may be pursuing? Sure. Y ou know, the up in quality has positioned us well relative to any sort of recessionary economic conditions that may eventually happen. We've, you know, been predicting it, seems like, for the last 2 years, and there seems to be more of a narrative around a soft landing. But if there were, you know, more recessionary economic conditions, and that would translate to some amount of credit migration, we're well positioned, you know, certainly relative to where we would've been if we hadn't adopted this up in quality, and I think relative to many of our peers. Having said that, you know, we've got some exposure to commercial mortgage loans and to CMBS. We like how we're positioned there. It's performed well so far. I think this, you know, commercial real estate story has some legs on it. It'll take some time for, you know, sort of the repricing of that asset class to play through. But I think we're well positioned, and we've been sharing some data on those assets in our earnings call deck the last few quarters, which I think give credence to this, you know, position that I'm taking, that we're well positioned. Yeah, we fared pretty well through the regional banking crisis in the early part of this year. Actually saw that as an opportunity to buy some securities. You know, the spreads had gapped out. Our alts have performed sort of in line with the, with the benchmark, so, you know, great through most of 2020 and 2021 and half of 2022, and then not so great, for the H2 of last year and the H1 of this year. But sequentially improving, the third quarter generated a return of about 4.5%. So not, you know, where we'd like it to be or expected to be on average in the long term, which would be closer to, you know, 9%-9.5%. But, but moving in the right direction. I'm jumping around here a bit, but I want to go back to the topic of distribution. I do want to ask you about the Department of Labor rule that came out. I mean, I think it's less of a surprise this time around certainly than, you know, getting hit with it in 2016. But maybe you could still help us think through some of the things that are in that regulation and how it could impact your business, and I guess particularly the distribution of annuities. Yeah. A s you might imagine, myself and some of the other members of the CNO team are involved in various industry trade groups. As an example, I sit on the board of the American Council of Life Insurers. A variety of industry trade groups have really done a deep dive and I think have made a pretty well pretty credible case that this is deeply flawed regulation. I'm not sure if it's going to get implemented or not, and even if it does, I wouldn't rule out it being turned over, as we saw happen in the past. Yeah. I will tell you, it feels a little bit like a solution in search of a problem. Now, all of that said, your question was, "What could the potential impact to CNO Financial be?" And we've been very fortunate, I think. Again, pure luck. We started our broker-dealer, as an example, in 2016, when this was hanging over the industry. So when we built out our processes and some of our systems and how we approached these things, we had this in the back of our mind. So the short answer is, I don't expect... First, I don't expect it to go through as is, and if it does, I don't expect it to stay. But that's not an answer to your question. If it does all come to pass, I don't feel like it's going to have a materially adverse impact to our business in terms of the way it's set up, primarily because of the captive distribution, because of the relative recency of the establishment of the broker-dealer and how we approach these things anyway. Yeah. O ne more on the regulatory environment for you quickly. There was this proposal around short-duration insurance that I think included some things around supplemental health. Do you have any update around that? And, you know, does that have any impact just around product structure and some of the things you got to do- Sure to comply? Again, seems to me to be short-sighted in terms of a regulatory objective, because, you know, with all the high-deductible medical plans, these supplemental health products are, you know, sort of filling a hole at a price that, you know, people can afford and gives them, you know, some peace of mind as they think about, you know, how things may play out for their healthcare. Having said that, you know, it's hard to say what the final form of this might look like. I think it's probably not going to look like what's been originally proposed, because- Mm-hmm There's a lot of pushback from the industry. I would imagine there's some pushback from constituents. So it may become, you know, more of a political thing as well. Having said all that, if, you know, if it survived in its current form, it would mostly impact our hospital indemnity and our accident products inside of our supplemental health portfolio of products. And those 2 products represent about 20% of our supplemental health sales and about 10% of our total health product sales. So manageable. You know, we would have to make some tweaks in product design and so forth, but I think we could get through that and still, you know, serve our customers in a meaningful way. Great. Well, I think we're at time, so I will leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, everybody, for being here. Thank you. Thank you.