All righty. Good afternoon, everybody. We're here with the CEO of Corebridge and the future CEO of Equitable, Marc Costantini, and as well as Chris Filiaggi, the interim CFO of Corebridge. Marc and Chris, thank you guys both for joining us. It's a privilege to have you guys here. A lot of exciting stuff going on. If we can start, Marc, on the subject of the merger. Corebridge merging with Equitable would create a full-scale retirement platform with a variety of complementary annuity products, broader distribution, as well as the capabilities from the AllianceBernstein. As we think about the merger, can you maybe help us think about the progress thus far, and where do you see the growth opportunities for annuities, Group Retirement, Institutional Markets, and a variety of other things? Thanks, Bob. It's great to be here, and great to be here with Chris obviously as well, and thanks for hosting us. It's very nice of you. How is it going so far? What I would say is that we announced the transaction at the end of March, call it two months ago, give or take. At the time when we announced it, we made, I would say, strong commitments, both firms obviously coming together. That first of all, from a leadership perspective, we would announce the first three layers of the organization by end of Q2, summer months type of thing. You may have seen that we announced the first layer, the layer of the executive team that will work alongside me in leading this company on a go-forward basis. That's been done, we're going through now what we call wave two of the process, that's in flight right now, we would expect over the coming weeks that wave would be communicated as well. I would say as we're going down these waves, there'll be more internal communications versus, let's say, my leadership team, which was communicated in a more public fashion. In concert with that, we committed to get going on the integration planning, I emphasize planning, given we operate very much as separate companies until the transaction comes to a close. We have an integration and transformation office that was set up. We have individuals from both companies that are leading those efforts, working alongside the people running the businesses on a daily basis. We're working towards all of the integration plans that would take place once we close later this year, at the end of the year. Tied to that, obviously all of our proxy's been filed. All our regulatory filings have been done, both domestically and internationally tied to, you mentioned AllianceBernstein. I think a number of them touched that. Our FINRA process is in flight. We continue to be, I would say, very opportunistic and optimistic, I should say, that we will close this transaction by the end of the year. In terms of synergies, I'll say just a couple of comments before maybe letting you ask a few more questions. I would say one of the attractive aspects of this transaction is it's not just an expense synergy kind of transaction as we bring together these two great firms. We did guide, we did share guidance about the expense synergies. We did say it was going to be accretive day one given the structure and the economics, it was going to be double-digit accretion going into 2029 on a run-rate basis. There's a lot of revenue synergies that are coming with this transaction. We communicated $90+ billion of assets coming to AllianceBernstein from the Corebridge side of the balance sheet. There's more to come there on the revenue side, on the growth side. It is definitely a growth story, and it's tied to serving more Americans and help them retire with confidence and dignity, basically. Got it. It's really a layer-by-layer, brick-by-brick type of process that is ongoing, but on time. Okay. That's very helpful. If we think about what you just said about synergy, if we think about product side, obviously both companies have very comprehensive annuity suites. Can you maybe help us think about what the product mix will like going forward? You're also having an Investor Day this year. It would be curious if you can give us a preview in terms of how you think about the low-hanging fruit opportunities on the revenue side, and what are the milestones you're looking at as well? Yeah. No, I appreciate you highlighting these revenue synergies because we haven't spoken details about them, and I'll still keep my comments at a high level pending that Investor Day that's going to happen in the second quarter of next year, more than likely. I would say in addition to the $90 billion of assets, and maybe we can double-click on the $90+ billion. Which will make AllianceBernstein a trillion-dollar platform, which otherwise would take them a number of years to get there given the nature of their activity. The $90 billion would come from both the on-balance sheet activity from Corebridge, let's say the $250+ billion of assets we have on our general account. Some of the what I call separate account are off-balance sheet assets we manage to some of our funding vehicles, whether it's a traditional variable annuity or group annuity contract or obviously other types of separate account products. It's a combination of those assets that will migrate to AllianceBernstein in time, but in time being in more the same timeline, I would say, as we would exercise against our expense synergies. That's value add for sure. Over and above that, one of the benefits of this transaction, and for those of you that have heard me speak before, I believe very strongly in world-class distribution, and I believe strongly in what attracted me to Corebridge in the first place is our world-class wholesale distribution, our very strong, I would say, work site distribution on the Group Retirement side, and obviously our very strong distribution on Institutional Markets side. We have a retail wealth management distribution that's about, we round it to about 1,000 individuals or so. I say all this because Equitable obviously has a very prominent and large and scale wealth management operation that has, let's say, 4,500, 4,600 individuals. We're going to combine the two. I say that because they sell a lot of proprietary products through that channel. Their RILA sales, for example, or a large share of their RILA sales, which have better economics, come from that channel. They sell fixed annuities and fixed index annuities, which Corebridge is a leading manufacturer in the industry, and we don't have access to that channel, and we will now after the merger. They do $2 billion to $3 billion of fixed annuities and fixed index annuities, which will be obviously available to the Corebridge balance sheet. That's another synergy. We manufacture and actively sell an index, a Universal Life product. That as well is a product that's popular on their platform there on their wealth management side. That's one that we'll be able to cross-sell. They have a VUL product, variable universal life product, and that product was on our design table, so we'll be able to obviously port that product to our distribution system on the corporate side. Those are just some of the kind of ideas. There's another revenue growth, I would say synergy and opportunity, which is with our partnership with Nippon Life. That Corebridge, Nippon owns, let's say, I'll round up to 27% of Corebridge, and they will own over 15% of the go-forward new Equitable. I say there's a revenue growth and a synergy because one of the attractive, I would say, activity of Equitable is through AllianceBernstein is their global footprint, and they're a very active player in that region, and they've got a great brand and distribution, and there'll be opportunity to partner with Nippon, potentially as obviously they look at the NewC o. As well for us to manufacture spread products for the local Japanese economy, which is reflating and has the need for similar products that we obviously manufacture here in our home country. Got it. Quite a bit to look forward to for the Investor Day. Maybe Chris, one for you. Obviously, we talked about expense synergy, and then one of the main drivers you're guiding to is the $500 million of expense synergy. Can you maybe provide some pacing in terms of the timing, when we're going to get there, how much is expected on year one versus, let's say, go forward to year two, year three post-close? Yeah, sure. Happy to shed some light on that. Maybe I want to start by reiterating that we think the $500 million expense synergy target is achievable. As we've done some of the pre-integration work, as Marc alluded to, I think that's reaffirmed our commitment and ability to make sure we can achieve the $500 million. When I think about how that's going to earn in, I would expect to earn in about 30% by the end of year one, 75% by the end of year two, and the rest of it should trickle in shortly thereafter. When I look across the broader areas of potential opportunities, I think we see a lot of different areas and opportunities to harmonize and synergize the expenses. First, if I look at the back office functions, there's room to consolidate back office functions. There's ability to rationalize vendor contracts and how we negotiate with vendors and face off with them. When we look at the IT landscape and we look across the systems, there are meaningful opportunities to consolidate and simplify the IT stack. Lastly, I would point to an area like real estate, where there's an ability to simplify the real estate footprint for both companies. Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you. Maybe here's another one, the way we think about it. If you look at the broader insurance market, the marriage between insurance and asset manager has really evolved over the last, call it 10, 15 years. In this post-merger environment, you would have three very strong brands, AllianceBernstein, BlackRock, and Blackstone. Can you maybe help us think about how you envision these partnerships evolve going forward? Yeah. That's a very good question, Bob. Maybe some context. At Corebridge, we have these strategic partnership with BlackRock and Blackstone, they're obviously very alive and vibrant. To give context, last year in 2025, we originated $55 billion of assets at Corebridge, which speaks to obviously the gross flows that we get on our retirement business. As well, as assets turn over. We could not have originated all of that by ourselves. A third of it was originated by our own obviously internal capabilities, a third was from BlackRock, and a third was from Blackstone. If you look at the combined NewCo, and if you, let's say, whether you do so practically when we close or you do so implicitly here, if you take our internal origination and you add that to AllianceBernstein, which will be obviously the affiliated manager of the firm, I would say in total, when you look across the platform, I could easily see upwards of $80+ billion that needs to be originated. I think a large part of that origination obviously will come from AllianceBernstein and our current origination capability, as I mentioned, but BlackRock and Blackstone will continue to be vibrant partners. I think there's a lot of silver lining there because they are world-class in what they do as well. We need to originate obviously from different sources, and they bring obviously differentiated capabilities and complementary capabilities to what's currently in place at AllianceBernstein and what we can only originate ourselves. It adds a layer as well. When you think about the origination, like they originate, then it comes to our general account kind of oversight. Lisa Longino, who's the Chief Investment Officer of Corebridge and will be the Chief Investment Officer of the NewCo, she has her own team, and we have our own risk appetite, whatever. There's another layer of underwriting before it hits our balance sheet, and then we'll have three world-class originators to help us serve Americans better. That's what we're here to do. We think there's a big plus and silver lining to this, as I said. One of the effect of the industry's evolution of this asset manager and life insurance is really the increasingly importance of VII as part of earnings. Maybe this one's to you, Chris, is that the industry seems to be posting below target VII returns for sometimes on and off. Can you maybe talk about how Corebridge is navigating these industry-wide headwinds, and then what is your long-term thinking and outlook when it comes to VII and then the structure of this going forward? Happy to share some thoughts there. For purposes of Q2, I think a lot of the conditions that we saw in the first quarter were seen repeat themselves in Q2. We see ongoing market volatility, we see uncertain geopolitical environments, we see disruptions in the SOFR and private credit space. All that contributes to near-term headwinds for the company. For purposes of Q2, my expectation is that our alternative returns are lower than what they were in 1Q. When I look at VII in total, I expect it to be roughly consistent with where we were for the first quarter. When we think about the full year results and what we should expect for the full year, we do expect on a full year basis, we come in somewhere in the 1%-2% range. That is of course below our long-term expectations, when we look at alternative assets in general, over the long term, they've generally returned over 10%. We still continue to believe that they're an appropriate asset class and a good fit for our ALM matching. They're very well-suited for long-dated liabilities like PRT and some of our other long-dated liabilities. Thank you for that. The other part of investment portfolio is really private credit. When we think about private credit headlines, obviously that has been an issue that's often discussed. If we think about the portfolio you have, can you maybe help us think about the risk that you see within private credit? Maybe also importantly, just a broader risk management framework, because it feels like every two years the industry's facing some type of asset concerns. Yeah, maybe just help us with both things here. I think where I would start, when we think about private credit, there are fundamentally more private companies than public companies, and there is a need for private companies to have debt financing. This is an area where insurers, including Corebridge, have had a long, successful track record lending to private companies. I don't foresee that changing. When we talk about private credit, what we're really talking about is what we would consider a middle market lending book. That's a $3.3 billion book on a $250 billion asset portfolio. It's a very small piece of the overall pie. When we think about SOFR in that middle market lending book, that's about less than $300 million of that $3.3 billion book. Again, a very small piece. All of those SOFR assets continue to perform. Middle market lending is also an area where we have very attractive risk-adjusted returns, and we feel very well compensated for the risk that we take. To the extent that losses do emerge in middle market lending, we expect that to play out over time, and we expect those to be yield adjustments, not fundamentally credit events. When I zoom out and I think about the entirety of our portfolio, we do routinely rigorously stress test the entirety of our investment portfolio. To the extent there were short-term headwinds from an RBC credit perspective, we expect that to recover in a reasonably short period of time. Got it. No, thank you. Marc, if we think about it from a business perspective, in the segments, Individual Retirement, you talked about the opportunities post-merger, but both fixed annuity, run on market have becoming more competitive over time. If you're thinking about the competitive landscape, are you seeing irrational behaviors from your competitors? How do you see the competitive landscape? Yeah. I'm curious your thoughts on that. Thank you, Bob. Okay, maybe some context. In 2025, I would say that both Equitable and Corebridge, if you add it together, originated on the individual side, Individual Retirement side. We have an Institutional Markets business, which I'll mention in a second here, but $45-ish billion of flows. That's a significant amount of flow. If you think about it, the market itself overall is, call it $450 billion-$500 billion or so, has significant tailwinds in terms of the demographic realities of the graying of America and the need for saving for retirement and some sort of guaranteed aspect of that, and as well, the decumulation or lifetime income that people need in retirement. I say all that because having the three products, the three products have three different client applications. What we often forget in these settings, and the insurance industry in general, I think, needs to focus more on communicating this is, hey, we are here to help Americans retire with confidence and dignity, and each American has a different need, and I would say risk appetite and personal financial situation that requires different types of savings vehicles to get there. From the fixed annuity, which has obviously a guaranteed kind of feature to it, to the RILA, which has more equity upside and acceptance of some downside, there's one of these products that fits their needs. First and foremost, it's like, let's get enough and world-class distribution on all aspects to get in front of the consumer through the advisor, where he or she would advise the end consumer about the right products and accumulation for their products. We feel the competitive nature of how we want to approach that is by differentiating the fact that we are one-stop shopping. If you like dealing with the new Equitable as we come together, you could buy all of the services that is needed for your client. Whereas when we think about it, if you're a financial advisor, how many stories can you learn? How many new business processes, how many wholesalers, how many service folks can you learn? The more you can do all of your business through one firm that you've come to respect and that obviously hold to their promises they're making, the better it will be. The competitive pressures are real, and the competitive pressures typically seep into the industry and the simpler designs. I think what we pride ourselves in is our ability to originate great assets, as we talked about before, but as well design and innovate in the solutions to the end consumer so that price doesn't become always the reason why people choose XYZ. There's the distribution, the service, the promise, as I said. Yes, there's always going to be competitors. I would say through the years, and I've been doing this for over 35 years, it's always been a competitive environment. It's a matter of what does the flavor of ice cream look like in the current format. I think our response to this, and my response to this is, if you look through various cycles you'll see that Corebridge and Equitable have always been in the top echelon of our markets because we matter to the distributors as much as obviously they matter to us. A lot of our products are bespoke into these different distribution channels. The other thing I would say is then we, and what I think investors should look at is, are we sound allocators of our capital to the highest return for our shareholders while serving the end consumer as best we can. This is where other distribution venues like Institutional Markets comes into play, where we'll do more FABN or GIC-like products, or we'll go into the PRT market, as Chris Filiaggi was saying, or we'll go into other markets where we feel the clearing price and the cost of the liabilities is such that our origination that we're getting gets the right risk return trade-offs. I know it's a long answer to your question, and all of those markets somewhat have their own competitive kind of energies or forces at play, and we feel that service distribution, managing complexity and delivering simplicity, and being easy to do business with will be a differentiator that will ultimately lead to companies such as our own not to have to compete on price always. Size and scale does matter. Yeah, size and scale matters, yeah. Especially since they come up with a new flavor ice cream all the time. Correct. Chris, maybe on that similar line of thinking. Maybe partially because competition spread compression has been an ongoing problem within the industry, could be partially because of that. Curious as how you think about managing the issue. The company reduces short-term sensitivity to rates by, call it 70%, 75% since 2024. As the combined entity, what are the actions do you think that are worth taking, or what are some of the things you're really paying attention to? Yeah. I think that's a great question. When we think about spread compression, people generally think of what's happening on the competitive landscape, and what we've generally seen is that when there's spread compression from competition, that tends to be low single-digit basis points. For us, the issue has historically been the floating rate assets. We've reduced our floating rate assets by 75% over the last two years. At this point, the 25 basis point change in SOFR is going to result in somewhere in a $20 million-$25 million impact to earnings, as we believe that's very manageable. When we think about base spread income for Individual Retirement and where we expect that to land, we still expect that to be within our guidance from earlier in the year. We still believe spreads will bottom out towards the bottom of 2026. When we look ahead to the combined company in NewCo, we see a lot more diversified sources of earnings across spread income, fee income, asset management, and underwriting. We see a lot of benefit and upside to the combined company in diversifying some of those sources of earnings. Got it. That's very helpful. Shifting a little bit to the Group Retirement business. Fee business now is becoming a more critical piece of the overall company for Corebridge. As you think about the post-merger environment, curious how you're really thinking about the fee business and how that fits into the future of the merged entity, the new Equitable, so to speak. Also, just curious how you think about flow and then how you think about the growth opportunities there as well. Yes. I would say maybe some color on Corebridge and us entering into this transaction. We, in our Group Retirement business, which is the main source of our fees for us, we sold our variable annuity business last year at quite attractive clearing price, and we've returned the capital to our shareholders, as you well know. The main driver of fee income for us is in that wealth management kind of activity in our Group Retirement business. We were going through, and are going through this pivot where we're taking traditional record keeping and investment in spread assets and moving it as we're penetrating that participant and the family household to fee kind of businesses. That's creating, I would say, a transition in the economics and the profile of that business. We are into it and have another 18, 24 months before we see that turning on. That is by itself as Corebridge. When you look at one of the attractive components of us coming together with Equitable, and there are many, but one of them is from the Corebridge perspective, this complements and augments the diversity, diversification of our balance sheet because the AllianceBernstein kind of revenue and earnings profile, which we talked about earlier, that we could cross-sell into our general account and off-balance sheet assets in terms of sourcing and origination. As well, this wealth management business that Equitable has and is very good. Equitable Advisors, obviously a top-notch advisor. If you combine those individuals and they can accelerate that transformation of our Group Retirement business, let alone bringing together the two Group Retirement platform and accessing more participants that way. That is how where we see the upside on that fee, and I strongly believe that having some balance and diversification in the revenue profile, the earnings profile, the capital base, the risk profile of the firm, both in spread businesses, fee businesses, and some of the, what I would call biometric insurance risk is very appealing for investors. Got it. It sounds like there is a lot of more things to come, right? More things to come. More things to come, yeah. Maybe also on the Institutional Markets Pension Risk Transfer has been lumpy, episodic, which is fairly normal. We're also expecting some level of activities picking up in the second half of this year. Can you maybe talk about Pension Risk Transfer opportunities 2026 and beyond? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Our Pension Risk Transfer business, which is part of our Institutional Markets business at Corebridge, has been a vibrant growth area for us. We're very active domestically here in the U.S., and we're active in the U.K. and some of the Funded Reinsurance type pension closeouts there. I would say both markets, and given where interest rates are, both plan fundings are pretty attractive. There's still a propensity for fiduciaries to look at closing out their obligations here to engaging in transactions such as a Pension Risk Transfer. We feel that there's, again, $40 billion, $50 billion-ish markets in both sources, as I said, and we are active participants there. As you mentioned, Bob, if you see our behavior in this market, we are selective. We go after a certain type of case, a certain profile of pensioners, and it ties to what I was saying earlier about the differentiating capabilities and history and knowledge we bring so that we don't compete purely on the payouts and the simpler liabilities. We feel it's a way to deploy our capital thoughtfully against the other places where we can get the right risk return profile. I would expect, and we've guided both Chris and I to our audiences that we expect to have a similar year this year to what we've had in the past, which is a $4 billion-$5 billion type of overall profile to that business. We have obviously an FABN and GIC on this side, on the Institutional Markets side. We see some activity build up in the second half of the year, and it will remain to be seen how it materializes for us, but that's kind of how we see the market right now. Oh, excellent. Maybe also the other one if we look at life insurance even though this is life insurance sector, I would say not everybody want life insurance business. If you think about the long-term role of life insurance within the combined company, can you maybe give us some thoughts into where does that fit going forward? Yeah. Our life business has attractive economics, and it's a business that I've said before in my six months here in observing the business and the economics and the distribution and the outlets and the target client that we could easily be double the size and I would welcome that because there's a natural hedge there between the mortality and the longevity we wrote and we write but more so than that, there's a need. There's a need for providing thoughtful life insurance at different stages of someone's life, and I think our distributors want to sell more of the Corebridge life insurance products. With Equitable, obviously, we'll have the variable universal life, as I said. More than anything else, to me, it's an investment in infrastructure and connectivity and the ease of doing business, which is without changing the product structure, the economics, we can drive volume by being easier to do business with and by being faster to do business with than by improving our service value proposition, which is where we're putting some of our investment dollars now. We are "bullish on the life business" at Corebridge, particularly in the segments we're in. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Obviously, this is not going to be a financial conference without talk about AI. Yeah, of course. If we think about you noted that the deployment of AI-powered digital agents will help servicing representatives and navigating complex Group Retirement plans, information, things of that nature. Can you maybe talk about your longer-term vision of how this AI phase will look like for the merged company, how you wish the combined entity will kind of evolve in terms of capability along with the technology itself? Yeah. Again, I'll speak for Corebridge more directly, but I think some of my comments apply across the merged company. We are behind in AI and digital and investment. The company has gone through this separation from AIG. Obviously, that's complete, that's behind us. Obviously, the focus and attention of my colleagues across the company were by successfully separating from AIG, which has been done. It took a two, three year, and it took the attention span, and you had to stand up a lot of functions and infrastructure to be, obviously, a self-standing public company, which successfully done. Obviously delivered on the guidance that was set out to all of the investors, quite proud of obviously what the company represents now and the number of customers and how we serve them. Tied to that, there's been less investment and focus on modernizing infrastructure, on digitizing, on AI deployment. We said that this year alone, we're going to spend another $50 million to $70 million on improving digitization technology and thoughtful investment in AI. Here's a few silver linings. I said all that. Last year, the firm did upwards of $35 billion to $40 billion of top line. Obviously, we delivered. Imagine what we could do if we're thoughtful here. The other silver lining, which is, I think, going to be obvious to the audience, is that it doesn't take a lot to catch up given the pace at which progress and advances are taking place. Sometime being a fast follower and deploying certain things puts you in a better light and a better focus and more efficiency. The last thing I'll say is that there's a fixed cost to all of this deployment and investment. If you look at the combined co, obviously operating leverage will be immense. We're going to spread that cost over a much larger expense platform. The other benefit, I would say, that sometime gets lost in some of our comments is that 100% of this operating leverage is in one country and one market. I say that because some companies have various activities across the world, and that's great, by the way. I'm not here criticizing that. However, as they deploy some of this, there's tailoring for each market. In our case, obviously, as we build and develop stuff, it's through one distribution channel, one market and whatever. I think we got a lot of benefits of scale there to be had to that fixed cost. We're going to deploy it thoughtfully to grow distribution, grow the ease of doing business, to obviously have advisors see us as the one-stop-shop to help identify more customers where the products and services we manufacture are good for them, and to make the experience as we onboard pleasurable and as we deliver our promises at the back end as well. All of the infrastructure in the middle, we will rely on third-party providers that will drive the efficiency and need to implement AI for them to deliver top-notch service, which is what people like ourselves and others will expect of them. Thank you for that. One thing you brought up is really one-stop-shop distribution. Yeah. Right. Equitable and Corebridge, I would make the argument, is brand of equal. Both are very recognizable. Yes. From that perspective, the decision was to pick the Equitable brand. Oh, yeah. Right. As you think about managing the potential distribution relationship or changes in distribution going forward, can you maybe help us think about that balance of how are you planning to do that, and what is really Corebridge's presence in the middle market and how that helps you as well from a distribution perspective? Yeah. Yes. Thank you. I mentioned the integration and transformation office. This is one of the items that is very high on their list to, as we come together towards year-end and we go to market as a merged company in the future, what products to what distribution and under what brand and how quickly and simplest thing like websites, email addresses, how a distributor, through which platform do you clear? Where does the liability end up? Those are all being worked on now. Thoughtfully, and I would say putting ourselves in the shoes of the end consumer plus the distributor first and how would those individuals and those firms like to interface with us, balanced with, obviously, the expense synergies that Chris was mentioning that are real and attainable that we feel strongly will create the operating leverage I just discussed in my prior remarks. I say all that because, in some respects, we want to move very fast, in some respects, we got to be thoughtful in how we do this. I would say that the selection of Equitable as the go-forward brand was not an easy decision for us at Corebridge, for obvious reasons. There was a lot of emotional attachment to this five-year-old brand, and I think it meant something to the employees, and it was very meaningful to our distributors and our customers. It is a five-year-old brand, and we're merging with 167-year-old brand household name as well, and with AllianceBernstein, obviously a world-class asset manager. It's only logical to pick that brand, but it's logical with your head, it's emotional with your heart. That's the brand ultimately that we have now. The one thing I will say is that there'll be a new release of the brand that will try to bring together, I would say, connotations of each firm into the new Equitable so that everybody can embrace the go-forward company and feel part of the family go forward, which is employees, communities, obviously distributors, and end consumers. More to look forward now. More to look forward to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're at time. Really appreciate you spending the time with us. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Bob. Yeah.