Our next presenter is MetLife. To my left, we have Michel Khalaf, President and CEO, and to the far side, we have John McCallion, CFO, and John Hall, Treasurer and Investor Relations, amongst other things, and in the front row as well as Charlie Douglas. I'll kick it off to you, Michel. We're about three years into the Next Horizon strategy now. Certainly included some surprises with the pandemic in the middle of it, but results have been strong despite that. Hoping you can give us an update on the strategy, what's been working well, and where do you see areas for further improvement at MetLife? Ryan, first let me start by thanking you for having us, and it's great to be back in person with a live audience and a very nice venue as well. Yeah, three years into Next Horizon. Really pleased with the progress we've made. We've talked about Next Horizon as being an all-weather strategy, and I think whereas we didn't have a pandemic in mind when we designed the strategy, I think Next Horizon's resilience, along with the clarity of purpose, because before we designed the strategy, we started with purpose. I think clarity of purpose was also very helpful to us in navigating what's been a challenging environment and delivering strong results. I think importantly, as we look forward, we feel good about how we're positioned, and we think that there are several areas that potentially differentiate MetLife. I'd like to mention a few of those, starting with our relentless focus on execution, and I think we've demonstrated since the launch of the strategy our ability to execute and deliver consistently. That's very important and if you consider the pandemic, from the onset of the pandemic through the end of last year, we paid $3 billion in COVID claims globally. Yet in 2021, we delivered record earnings of $8 billion and returned $6 billion to shareholders in share buybacks and dividends. I think that's testament not only to the resilience of the strategy, but how we've been executing as well. I think the other area that I would point to is diversification. Over several years, we've been reshaping our portfolio, and that started with my predecessor, certainly with the spinoff of our retail business. It's also continued since we launched Next Horizon. Think about the divestiture of our auto and home business, divesting Poland, Greece, Russia, and Hong Kong, and acquiring Versant Health and adding other capabilities to our group business as well. I think today we feel that we have a well-diversified portfolio of market-leading businesses and a portfolio, whether you think about it from a geography perspective or a line of business perspective, that can perform across a variety of environments. I think the pandemic was a demonstration of that in terms of some of the offsets that we had in our businesses from a top and bottom line perspective. The third area I would point to is responsible growth, because that was also an integral component to our strategy. We have seen over the course of the last three years and building actually on what we had done since 2014 onwards, we have seen how we have been deploying capital increasingly more efficiently in support of organic growth. We publish our VMB figures, as you know, and we can see there how our IRRs have improved while our payback periods have decreased. When we think about growth, if we look at our group business, in 2019 pre-pandemic, $18 billion in PFOs. We think we'll end this year at about $22 billion. By no means the pandemic years were lost years for us. We were able to grow that highly attractive business quite significantly. The same if we look at LatAm, for example, where we see our PFOs this year exceeding 2019 levels. Couple of more areas I would just touch on. One is the efficiency mindset, we've talked about not only getting to 12.3% direct expense ratio, but consistently coming under that. In a year where there are significant inflationary pressures, we continue to be committed to coming in at under 12.3, while freeing up capacity to make very important investments in our business to fuel our growth going forward. Lastly, I think we have a focus on cash and free cash flow generation. Again, I think we've built a track record there, including in how our capital management philosophy, which I dare to say is shareholder or investor friendly, and I think we've demonstrated that over the course of a number of quarters and years really. All in all, I think, all of these factors position us well to perform across economic cycles going forward. Great. Thanks. One of the targets you had laid out initially was a 12%-14% ROE, there's been some moving parts between variable investment income and pandemic impacts, but it does seem like your underlying ROE is starting to trend more towards the top half or the upper half of that range. Hoping to get an update on how you feel about that ROE range at this point. Yeah. We feel good. Just to echo Michel's comments, great to be here and great to see everyone in person. Thanks for having us, Ryan. When we set out that target of 12%-14%, similar to the comments that Michel has said before, what is a good target for us to sustain over a variety of different economic cycles? Certainly think we've had a good test of that over the last few years. As we kind of reflect back at, we're looking at just numbers recently between 2019 and 2021 for the three years, the average ROE has been around 13.9, reported or ex-notable. I think to your point, we have tended to be at the higher end of the range. Even if we were to adjust for some things that seemed a little excess in nature in terms of just performance, I think the core, I think it's fair to say. Look, reflecting back on that, I'd probably highlight three things and maybe I'll just repurpose some of the comments that Michel says that I think do translate into why that's happened. I think the first is, and I'll use kind of the three words that we typically use for our strategy. The first is around focus, and as Michel said before, how do we redeploy or deploy capital to its highest and best use, whether that's through organic growth in the products that we sell and we're constantly looking at, is this driving value for the customer as well as shareholder, as well as how we've shifted the portfolio. As Michel mentioned, we've sold some businesses that really can perform better at other firms, that have more value at other firms than they do for us. We can redeploy that capital in a better way. I think secondly is simplify, and how we've maintained that financial discipline when times are better. I won't even say good, but just even better than where they are. We got to do that because remember, this is not something where we're all in when it comes to a direct expense ratio. Whether it's one-time cost or whatever, we don't exclude anything. You have to build in capacity for those one-time costs and making sure you're disciplined throughout years. Then third is differentiate and kind of really focusing on delivering for the customers to go back to Michel's point around driving responsible and profitable growth. I think those three things in combination probably have accelerated where we are in the range relative to even when we laid out our strategy in 2019. We were thinking probably going to be at the lower end of the range. We even said with the sale of PNC might have a little bit of a headwind. I think the relentless focus on driving down strand ed costs and things like that have really helped us to probably outperform where we thought probably three years ago. Just to follow up on the expense commentary from both of you. You have been coming in below the 12.3% expense ratio target. Can you give any sense of what additional actions you've taken to do that? Then is that really still the target or do you think you can stay below it going forward? No, it's really still the target. Going back to, again, some of the points that Michel mentioned is opening. This is a target, but we're continuing to build capacity. We want to build more capacity to make more strategic investments so that we can fund future growth, fuel, accelerate growth, things like that. At the same time, you need to continue to build capacity to deal with the unexpected. I think wage inflation has been an unexpected at least a year ago this time. If we did not build the cushion in that we had, I don't know if we would be as confident, right? We have to do things in advance to prepare ourselves for situations like this. We think it's still a good target for us to at or below 12.3%. For the first half of this year, we've come in under 12%. You have to adjust that for some par cases that inflate revenue. We'll roughly call it 12%. We'll expect seasonality to kick in in the second half of the year. We'll have some higher expense ratios in the second half, but all in all, we expect full year to be at or below 12.3%. Shifting to Group Benefits, you touched on this a little bit, but can you discuss the current growth trends that you're seeing in the business as well as how the economic environment is impacting that? Sure. Again, really pleased with sort of the performance of our group business overall, the growth that we have seen. The second quarter, if you adjust for the impact from par policies, and we always do that, whether it sort of inflates the number or deflates it, then we're looking at 4.5% PFO growth year-on-year. We think we'll come in right at the midpoint of the 4%-6% range by year-end. This is a strong performance for two reasons. One is that we had Versant last year, which sort of added to our PFO. This is growth on top of a higher base. The other factor that's important is that 2021 was a record year for jumbo sales. A record sales year for us. There was a lot of jumbo activity in the market, and we won our fair share, if not more. For those reasons, coming in at the midpoint of the range we believe is a strong result. We see a few dynamics playing out. On the one hand, wage inflation is a tailwind for the industry as a whole. So is the war for talent, where I think employers are clearly focused on making sure that they have a benefit structure in place that is attractive, that appeals to their employees. I think the third area that's critical as well is scale matters in this business, and we referenced the importance of making investments, whether it's in digitizing the business or in meeting customer needs and expectations, or in making sure that we're well integrated to the entire benefits ecosystem that employers, our customers, depend on. I think that's an area that benefits us because we have the scale, and we have been making these investments on consistent basis year after year. Pleased with the growth that we are achieving this year, and we think that this momentum can continue into the future. From a macro environment perspective, the possibility of a recession would be a tailwind for the industry. However, a couple of comments I would make here. One is that no two recessions are the same. For example, we saw in 2020, post pandemic, where there were significant job losses that had minimal, if any, impact on our business. This is highly dependent on the industries that are impacted and the extent to which we see these job losses. The other thing I would say is that typically the line of business that is most impacted from a recession is the disability line of business, and that's about 8% of our block. Again, to some extent, that protects us in the event of a recession. All in all, we're pleased with the performance. The other thing I would point to is that our voluntary benefits have been growing at 20% year-on-year, and that's been a focus area for us. Again, pleased with the performance there. What's the current competitive environment like within Group Benefits? Then, I guess somewhat related to that, are you starting to incorporate either, I guess more of an endemic type of outlook into your pricing, or is the industry doing that? I would say the environment is competitive. In some instances, highly competitive, but not irrational. We have a long track record of pricing discipline. I would say also pricing transparency in terms of the communication that we have with our customers, with intermediaries when it comes to our pricing actions. I think that's been very helpful to us because we have been taking pricing action, factoring in sort of the near term impact from COVID in our pricing for life and disability. All in all, this has been received favorably in terms of our renewals continue to be strong. Our persistency is strong. Again, I think the key here is transparency, communicating with customers. We feel that through the action that we are taking, we are protecting our margins here. In your Retirement and Income Solutions business, you had pretty elevated growth in 2020. It slowed over the last 18 months or so. Can you talk about the dynamics that have driven that as well as your outlook for growth in that business going forward? Maybe I'll take that one. It's important, this business is a number of different products that we have market leading positions in, whether it's stable value, pension risk transfer, institutional income annuities, structured settlements, U.K. longevity reinsurance, which has actually been a new product that we've introduced recently and have done very well. For all of those products, we've tried to come up with a proxy for growth that has been liability exposures. For most of the products, it's directly off the balance sheet, so it avoids a non-GAAP measure. Like you said, for the last actually three years, they've been really elevated, the growth in those. It's a proxy. It's not perfect, because you can have, when you're taking things off the balance sheet, you can have things like accounting adjustments that don't drive earnings or results. That's what we actually saw in the second quarter. Our liability exposures, if you just took the total numbers, were down 3%. There's accounting adjustments in there that really had no earnings impact. If you kind of look underneath that, we had great growth in things like general account assets. We had about $8 billion of growth year-over-year. PRT has been really strong into last year and early part of this year. Stable value sales, again, going back to the diversification of the products we offer. You see market volatility rise, and all of a sudden you see some real strong growth in stable value with $6 billion of sales year-to-date through the second quarter. Like I said, U.K. longevity is a new product we've introduced, and just within the last year, we've grown the notional balances there $5 billion. Growth in that business has performed probably better than expected, quite honestly. Sometimes that metric can be a little misleading on a quarter or two. I think trend-wise, 2%-4% for liability exposures is still a good trend, but it's probably more of a trend metric than it is like a perfect metric one year to the next. Got it. Sticking with that business, I think I even asked this on the second quarter call, but I'll ask again. Let me guess, spreads. Yeah. You had a pretty big pickup in spreads in the second quarter. I'm just trying to, I guess, get a feel for kind of maybe how sustainable that is? Yeah in the short term, also as you move into 2023, are there certain things that could roll off? Sure. Yeah, no, it's a good question because things are changing pretty dynamically these days. We did see a nice pickup in XVII spreads, in the second quarter, I think we're at 103 basis points, about 14 basis points growth sequentially. As I mentioned on the call, one of the reasons for that is we saw just such a rise in LIBOR during the course of the quarter. I mentioned rising LIBOR at one point was a headwind, it can flip to a tailwind given we have some caps in place, and we said that's around the 2% mark. We saw a real big jump kind of in late May, early June, and that's continued to rise. LIBOR is at above 3.1% today. We're continuing to see some growth there. In addition, we had real estate assets probably perform better than we expected in the quarter, we would expect that to mitigate leading into the third quarter. Overall, as we look into this half of the year, the second half of the year, I think you'll hover around that level. As we move into next year, things should be pretty resilient. I think we'll give some more guidance as we get closer to the year because there'll be some shifts in some of those caps that are in the money and that are still on the books. Overall, I think you got that coupled with rising long-term rates, which migrate in over time. The business is in a good position right now. I guess, moving to Asia now. Can you talk about the outlook for growth there, also kind of maybe separate Japan from your non-Japan businesses? Sure. It's been a challenging environment in Asia. I would say the way that the pandemic has played out with the lockdowns and the impact that that's had on different parts of the region, and I really give our team a lot of credit for the way that they've sort of managed through this and continue to manage through it. In the second quarter, again, in a challenging environment, our sales grew by 5% in Japan, continuing strong momentum that we've seen really since the middle of last year. The rest of Asia, where we've had significant lockdowns in China and other markets, and we've also had the impacts of the stronger dollar on our FX sales in Korea. Sales there held steady. I think a few things that I would point to in terms of our franchise in Asia. I'll talk about Japan first. One, I think we've had strong execution on the ground, and diversification has been very helpful to us there, both from a product and a channel perspective, that's allowed us to pivot depending on sort of changes in the macro environment that we've seen. I would say that investments that we've made in digitizing our distribution in particular were helpful when Japan was going through significant lockdowns. The third area I would say that's been helpful to us is speed to market when it comes to product introductions, because we've made enhancements there, which has allowed us to roll out products much more quickly, and that's also been a factor in our ability to really perform better than market when it comes to sales there. The rest of Asia were sort of highly dependent on the lockdown situation. Some markets have performed well, others less so. We expect that as those lockdowns ease, we should see sort of a much better traction when it comes to our sales efforts there. I think the two variable for Asia are COVID and how that plays out over the next few months. The other one is the U.S. dollar. The yen is at, last I checked, 144, 145 today. That's clearly another factor there. Again, I think that from an execution perspective, from a momentum perspective, really pleased with how Asia is performing. You've seen pretty good growth in Latin America even during the pandemic, but especially over the last year or two. Can you give an update there and kind of what are the key drivers? We had pointed to the fact that from an underlying perspective, business perspective, the fundamentals continue to be strong in LatAm. Obviously, COVID had a very significant impact. I think since the beginning of the pandemic, we paid close to $1 billion in claims in Latin America, mostly in Mexico. What we've seen subsequent to that is what I would term a flight to quality, if you like, where companies that paid claims, we paid one in four claims in Mexico was paid by MetLife, and our services were uninterrupted throughout the pandemic. I think coming out of the pandemic, we're benefiting from that in terms of how we are perceived in the market. Also, there's heightened awareness to the importance of some of the products that we sell in LatAm as well. That's translating into strong sales. A very strong persistency. PFO grew at 20% in the second quarter. Half of that came from SPIA sales in Chile. That market was sort of maybe dormant for a while. It's come back to life, again, with the flight to quality, we're benefiting from that. Really good momentum there. From an earnings perspective, we pointed out in the second quarter that whereas we're very pleased with our earnings performance, there were a couple of factors that somewhat, I would say, maybe inflated the number. One, our market factors. Inflation in Chile and in Chile, that was about $60 million, I would say. Then underwriting contributed another $40 million. If you adjust for that, the performance is still quite strong. I think we continue to have good momentum. I think the recent results of the referendum in Chile, with the rejection of the proposed new constitution, I would say that signals probably a move towards more moderate policies. At least that's the expectation going forward. We'll have to see how that plays out, but we think that's potentially a positive. MetLife has been building a third-party asset management business for several years now. Can you give us an update on how that business is doing? Are you on track to reach the earnings targets that you had previously discussed? Yeah. We launched MetLife Investment Management or MIM 10 years ago in 2012. Really pleased with the growth that we've seen in that business. Just as a reminder, we focus on public fixed income, private capital and real estate. This is where we bring our expertise in terms of these asset classes. This is an institutional business, and it's a worldwide business as well. Our plan is to grow organically, and we've seen really good traction there. Back in 2017, we acquired Logan Circle Partners, which brought us a lot of expertise in the public fixed income space. That, I would say, transaction has probably exceeded our expectation in terms of what it's delivered for us. Whereas we continue to focus on organic growth, it's an active market from an M&A perspective as well. We are open to accelerating our growth if the right opportunity were to come along, if it fits strategically, culturally and financially makes sense for us. All in all, I think at the end of June, we were at about $170 billion in third-party assets under management at MIM. We're quite pleased with the progress that we're making in growing that business. Sticking with investments, private equity has gotten more attention lately. You've had really good performance in that, more volatility probably this year. How are you thinking about the private equity portfolio? Yeah. I think as Steven Goulart has said a few times on calls, look, we start with our asset liability management process. These are good fits to defease our liabilities, right? Use them in our entire process there. Look, the team has really developed a best-in-class capability there. Has performed extremely well of late. Is a great complement to the other investments that we have. It's a well-diversified product line for us and investment line for us. If you think just, it's LBOs, it's venture capital, it's infrastructure, mezzanine. It's diversified by geography, by fund. There's roughly 700 funds in there, 200 managers. Again, they've really set up a great platform. It goes through its own cycles, right? There's kind of the early stage of fundraising, middle stage of investing, and then the stage 3 of exits. Again, we think of this as a long-term asset class. It's an asset class that continues to produce cash flows back to us, right? If you think over the last six years, we've had roughly $10 billion of cash returned to us. It hasn't just been a mark-to-market phenomenon. These have been real realizations as well that have resulted in good cash flow back to the operating entity. I guess as there's some increased concern about a recession, some of the areas in your portfolio that come up sometimes be commercial mortgages, real estate equity. How are you thinking about those areas? I think maybe just tying it to the MIM comments. MIM was built out of the expertise that we've developed, whether it's private equity or some of these fixed income assets that we have, and commercial mortgages and real estate's another one of those. We have a little over $50 billion of investments there. High quality, 56% loan-to-value, 2.5 times debt service coverage ratio. Well-positioned I'd say, even if there is a kind of an upcoming recession. We had some tests of that back in 2020, where we saw some challenges in the retail and hotel space, where we had some requests for deferrals. We work with our strong partnership and sponsors there. Those deferrals have all been effectively paid back. Again, it's a great asset class that has a strong collateral behind it, strong coverage ratios, and one where we can work through loan modifications, if need be, to kind of weather any storm that could happen. I think 2020 is a good example. On the real estate equity side, we have above $12 billion of book value there, give or take, and another $7 billion of unrealized gains, is our estimate there. I think, again, a large cushion, if you will, should something transpire around a recession. Again, well diversified across office, multi-use, retail, hotel, industrial. We're very pleased. It's a great asset class for us for, again, matching long-term liabilities, for us to invest and receive a good stream of income that matches well with our ALM process. Met has done a number of dispositions, as you've discussed. An area that everyone always asks about, so I will also ask, is a potential reinsurance transaction in MetLife Holdings. Can you give an update on how you're thinking about that? Yeah. I think we'll probably repeat a lot of comments we've said before, right? We have about $150 billion of liabilities across life annuities and LTC, well-diversified, has a lot of natural offsets, a little bit back to the diversification comment earlier. Again, a great book in and of itself. One that our team is continuing to optimize, and as we said, we continue to take a third-party view. We have discussions with external parties. We know the market has evolved. I think in a good way. This would be a reinsurance transaction for us, so this is a partnership, we view it as opposed to a sale. I think it's good for the team to go through a process like that. It makes us better anyway. I think they're healthy discussions that continue to occur, and they've been happening for over a year. We've been very transparent about that, and if it's a right thing to do, we'll do it. If not, we're an expert in running this book off, and we can run it off as well. Probably just last one to wrap it up is on capital management and how you're prioritizing M&A buybacks and dividends at this point. Yeah, I think a top priority of ours is to make sure that we allocate capital to support organic growth at attractive IRRs and paybacks. We continue to do so. We think of M&A as a strategic capability. We are opportunistic. We have a globally consistent way of assessing M&A opportunities from a strategic fit perspective, whether any potential deal is accretive, whether it accelerates revenue growth in a business that we like, that we believe we're interested in continuing to grow and develop. Whether it clears a minimum risk-adjusted hurdle rate. We compare any M&A transaction to other potential uses of capital, including share buybacks. I should have mentioned when we were talking about MIM, because Steven Goulart will not forgive me if I don't, the recent deal that we announced on AIM, Affirmative Investment Management, which is a small deal, but it's one that adds what we believe is an important capability on the ESG front there, an ESG fixed income expert. Pleased with that. That's an example of where sort of a deal makes sense, in terms of adding a capability that we believe can help us further grow our business. We've said that after investing in organic growth and in the absence of accretive M&A, we will return excess capital to shareholders. We've defined that as cash and equivalents at the holding company above a liquidity buffer that we've set at $3 billion-$4 billion. We continue to be comfortable with that. I think we've built a track record of sort of in terms of how we return capital, especially in the wake of any major dispositions or divestitures. We did say that we had sort of our foot a bit on the gas in the first quarter of this year, just being opportunistic, given where we were trading, and that the pace would be modestly slower in the second half of the year. The philosophy has not changed in terms of our approach. Again, that's also part of what I was referenced earlier, in terms of sort of building this consistent track record, in terms of how we view capital management and how we execute on that. Right. Great. To your point on we don't really have sort of a preference in terms of buybacks or dividends. I think what we like to do or to have, is to have an attractive dividend yield that sort of grows over time. Again, there, I think since 2011, we've grown our dividend at a compound rate of 10%, including 4.2% that we announced back in April. That's a little bit also the philosophy or approach there. Thank you. We're going to end it there. Thanks a lot to Michel and John, and MetLife for attending. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.