Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us in person and online. My name is Mike Ward. I'm at UBS, and I'm happy to have Rick McKenney, President and CEO of Unum Group. Rick, I was actually just looking at it, it's almost your 10-year anniversary as CEO. Pretty close. That's right. That's right. Well, congrats. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. So, I figured we could sort of start with the key drivers of your outlook looking forward and what potential tailwinds or headwinds, and what you're most excited about. Certainly. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate being here today. Thanks to UBS and to you for hosting us. It's been a good day today. Appreciate the folks in the room and online. Just talk about our business. We actually released our earnings last week and did so, gave an outlook for the course of 2025. I think we start with the expectations for 2025 that we're going to generate earnings per share growth in between 8%-12%. So we're happy with that. I think that's underpinned by a good, strong top line with our premium growth in the range of 4%-7%, looking to maintain margins throughout the business, and then end the year as well with a very strong exit capital position. So we're very happy with pulling that all together to bring that out to talk to our investors and shareholders about where we are and the continued trajectory we've had of growth for the company over the last several years. When you think about the headwinds and the tailwinds, I mean, I'd start with the tailwinds of the momentum we saw coming out of the Q4, very strong sales results that we saw in our core group businesses, given the capabilities that we have across the board. So resonating with our customers, very excited about that tailwind. From a macro perspective, I think we mentioned we still feel very good about the environment around us, whether that ranges from the employment picture that we see out there, wage growth that we see across our customer base, the interest rate environment that we've seen, and we think about the 10 and 30-year Treasury investing behind our block of business. So we feel very good about the macro picture coming into the year. And so we'll look forward to a strong year. And you talked about headwinds. We really think the headwinds that we have are very much in our control, and that's about the execution of the growth trajectory that we see. So we feel good about it. We don't see anything on the horizon to slow us down, but we've got a lot of work to do to make sure we can maintain a good leading position, take good care of our customers, and continue to see Unum grow as we have seen over the last several years. Great. So thinking about whether it's mortality or the solid margins and disability that you've been experiencing, I'm wondering if you could help us just understand what gives you confidence in the sustainability of those trends. Yeah. I take those two pieces of business over the last several years, and so a lot of this is coming out of the pandemic. We saw good recoveries in each of those business lines. These are businesses we've written for many decades looking backwards, and so the pandemic was clearly a challenging time, but coming out of that, we saw some very good returns, starting with our group disability business. Throughout time, really, we've been seeing good improvements in our recovery rates, and that's about getting people back to work once they've gone out on a disability claim is getting them back to work. People want to get back to work, and helping them to do so in the right time frame was important, so we've been doing a good job with that from the recovery perspective. When we're going through the pandemic, we saw a little bit of clouding that happened with incidence rates, just given some of the noise, both in the short-term and long-term disability side, and as we saw those clouds clear in the last couple of years, we saw some very good returns across our group disability lines of business, and so we talk about that in terms of loss ratios that dipped into the 60 and a little bit below over the couple of quarters, and as we ended the year right around those levels, we feel really strongly about the margins that we have generated, and all throughout that time, taking really good care of our customers as well. The question is, as those good returns have happened, and we do live in a competitive market that we have out there today, can those sustain, and how will those return? I don't think that we think the return will be from a higher level of incidence or not doing the great job on recoveries that we do. It'll be how the market prices in that good performance. Now, some of our competitors have had good performance similar to ours, not holistically true. I think it's been mixed in some others of our competitors, and so we'll have to see how that happens over the course of the next quarters and years, but we still feel very good about the margins that we've obtained, the discipline we've had in pricing our business, and continuing to grow our top line at a reasonable rate, so that's kind of the disability story. Feel very good about it. I mean, just to let everyone know, we've been the leader in disability for several decades. We continue on that path. And that knowledge, that database, that know-how allows us to have some competitive advantage on that front. We also saw a similar trend in our group life insurance space here, particularly over the last year. We had a very strong set of returns in 2024 in our group life business. Group life is an area that, once again, we write very well as part of the overall package, but it's one that we saw levels of loss ratios below what we expect. So we saw loss ratios kind of in the 60s, the mid to high 60s over the course of the year. We actually have said we expect that to be right around 70 from a planning horizon. So although we think we'll give a little bit of that margin back, it's still at very, very high returns. So we're happy about kind of the large two businesses that we have on the group side, both on the disability and the life side, good margins. Like I say, we expect to maintain those margins. We'll have to be competitive in the market, but we still feel good about our positioning and the other things that we bring to that space that allow us to continue to grow at the rates that we want to. Great. Probably a good segue question, but thinking about recent renewals and Q4 sales, where was the incremental focus versus prior years? Was it the product line, price, or technology when it comes to consumers renewing or when you went into new business? Yeah. The Q4 sales, we saw some very good results, as I mentioned, and I think that when you think about going to customers today and think about the employer, you've got to bring all of those capabilities. One, you've got to be doing it at a reasonable price, so price still very much matters in the competitive landscape that we're in today, but it's more than that. It's how you actually bring to an employer the capabilities they want to, one, make their lives easier in terms of administration and the digital capabilities they have today, and then also to make sure that you're able to serve their customers in a robust way. I think that those digital capabilities, that know-how that we bring to the table today to administer kind of the traditional life group life, group disability products, and then weaving into that our absence management products have become critical to that buying decision. So it's more than just the price. I think it's also that know-how, that capability, and as you mentioned, the digital capabilities that we can bring today will help bring those cases on board. We certainly saw that in the Q4, and we look forward in 2025 to continuing to invest in those capabilities to make the ease at which we do business and the customer service aspect, the CSAT aspect, even stronger. So maybe sort of pivoting somewhat similar question, but on the smaller end of the market, we've heard from a number of your peers that they are interested in looking and going down market. So I'm sort of wondering what that has done. Have you seen an impact on the competitive dynamic in that regard? And then you've spoken to how you maintain your edge, right, the absence management and the full suite technology and everything. But specifically, as peers are going down market, have you seen any changes? Yeah. Just to give everybody some clarity about when we're talking about the different market sizes. So there are a couple of markets out there. One, and it's not any particular dimensioning, but if you think about the number of people at an employer, usually is a good determinant of how that case will behave. And if you think about it, it's very clear because the ability of human resources within that company to support these benefits decision, it usually is denoted a little bit by size. It can be by type of industry. So when you think about the large case players that we have out there, we compete very well in that space today with the capabilities that I just referenced, the absence management that we do today, the leave management capabilities, the connectivity that we have with those employers. We do a good job on that front. In the mid case, it's a little bit different. It's a bit of stability and pricing and the relationships that we have, the breadth that we bring to the market today. Once again, it's digital connectivity to those employers to make their lives easier, and that will range all the way down to the very small case, which we can serve both through our broker network and what we have from the Unum side, but also have a Colonial Life agency force that can get to the very smallest of cases and do a good job anywhere up to the 500-people type organizations bringing a different value proposition. I tell you all that to say we have the breadth of delivery that we have across the board. It actually works very well for us. And so you'll see our competitors that actually usually have had more of a specialty in one of those particular areas looking to get into other pieces of that value proposition with different size employers. That can be true of people that are in the mid case trying to move up into larger cases. But as you referenced, Mike, it's also the large case players that are moving down into the mid market. I think that's a dynamic that's always been true. The capabilities required are slightly different. The know-how is a little bit different. But this is a very good business. So we're not surprised that people want to actually explore other areas. But we think we have differentiated capabilities for all size employers, a history of doing so, relationships to do so. And so we feel very good about our positioning that we have there today. Great. Maybe you don't get that many questions on it, but dental and vision is topical for some of your peers lately. I believe you would like to grow that business. Curious how you weigh that ambition against what you're seeing in terms of the experience in that product line industry-wide relative to price trends too. It's absolutely true. So dental and vision is a business that we entered into through acquisition going back, I guess it's been about eight years ago now. And that's a business we think we should be bigger in. So we've actually been working our way up in share in that business, doing so in a disciplined way. And so we'd like to see dental and vision be a bigger part of our business over time. You talk about the near-term dynamics that we're seeing in the industry. Quite honestly, we're too small to feel a lot of the dynamics you're seeing from some of our larger competitors there. But from our perspective, it's about growth. And so how do we actually continue to build out that position across our dental and vision space, bringing that whole portfolio of products to our customers at all sizes of customers, from the smallest customers to the largest? It's a place we want to be. We want to have a bigger place there. In terms of the dynamics today, I can't give a lot of insight on that given our relative size. But certainly, from think of serving customers today, dental and vision is a product line within a customer. It's got very high need and perceived value among the employee base. And we want to make sure we're there to participate that at the scale and at the level we do across the other lines of business that we provide. Maybe just thinking about dental and vision, is it more maybe on the smaller case side where you utilize that almost to its a must-have, so I understand for the smaller end. Is that sort of like a selling point when you're getting a new relationship in the small case market, or is that not where you get most of this? Yeah. There's two things that happen there. One is it is an entry point because everyone is looking for that type of capability. And so bringing that, whether it's employer-paid or employee-paid, bringing that, and also through our Colonial Life sales force or through our Unum sales force, that is an important product there. I think what we found when we acquired the company and knowing it's also bringing the entire portfolio. So when you go into a smaller case, they don't want to deal with multiple carriers. Their business, their number of employees is too small. So you've got to have the entire package. And so we have benefited from having all those capabilities in one stop and bringing the same level of quality of service to our customers and doing so for dental and vision as part of the overall portfolio of the life, the group disability, what we have from voluntary benefits, and then dental and vision being part of that. That's been something that's resonated with our customers over the past couple of years. Great. Any questions in the audience? Keep going. So leave or absence management. You guys have been investing in that business for some time. We were debating this. It's certainly come up as an area of investment for others in the industry. Curious, have you seen any change in the competitive dynamic for that line? And how do you differentiate yourself with that specific line? Sure. Our absence business, I mean, absence management is something we've been in for several decades, so it started with the Family Medical Leave Act, and so we've been administering that on behalf of our customers for a long period of time. I think it's come to the forefront over the last several years. Given the complexity that you have out there with the number of leaves times the difference by every state, it's a challenge for employers to actually be able to handle, especially a multi-state employer out there to handle these different leave types that we have, and so we wanted to be part of that solution, so we invested pretty heavily going back to even 2018 with an acquisition of a company called LeaveLogic. We've appended to that build-out of the different platform we have today. We talk about it as Total Leave. And being able to bring that to employers as part of the whole package, we don't sell it standalone. We sell it as part of the overall offering that we have with employers. It's a need that they have, and we think that we can do a good job of it given the breadth, the scale, and just our overall underpinnings. It has proven to be a challenging business for the industry as a whole with a lot of the change that's happened, even more so post-pandemic. But given our lead and the investments that we made, we feel like we can actually be a market leader in that front. But it is part of the competitive positioning that all of our competitors need to have as part of the overall portfolio to serve the employer. The demand from an employer to make sure we're taking care of that is getting higher and higher. And so we've actually done a good job of staying at the forefront of that. Part of it's given our history, our knowledge, but now also even more so technology that we bring and the empathy that our team brings as somebody's going through in a leave management process, which could be a really exciting process for them or it could be a more challenging process. We want to make sure we bring that human touch as well. Great. So question around stop loss, which I know you guys are no longer in that business, but it's an area of challenge for some of your peers. But I'm wondering if there's any read-throughs that you can think of in terms of health outcomes for the population that is occurring in the last several quarters. Are you seeing any influence or impact in voluntary benefits or group benefits overall, or do you think maybe we could start seeing an impact from those underlying dynamics? Yeah. So let me start a little bit with our decision to exit the Stop Loss business, which we did in the Q3 of last year. That was a business we had been running for several years. We started it on an organic basis, de novo build that we had today. And so it was going fine, but I think what we learned is we would have needed to be much bigger than to run that business. And so that was a learning. We had some good learnings along the way, but ultimately, if we don't think we can operate at the scale and the knowledge we have, we're going to not be in the business. That was our choice we made around Stop Loss. Your question is around the underpinnings of what you learn as part of that and what are the dynamics from a health perspective that could come into some of our other product lines. And I'll tell you the knowledge base that we generated there was really quite different than a lot of what we see in the voluntary benefit side. And just to give you that sense, our voluntary products are usually smaller benefit levels, and they're an indemnity-based one-time payout based on a triggering event. You could think of an accident. You could think of an admission to a hospital, what it might be. And so you don't get into the depths of what their actual underlying chronic situation might be. It's just the fact that they had that trigger. So, I wouldn't make any causal type linkages between what's happening from a healthcare, what people are seeing there relative to what's happening from voluntary benefits. It's still a very good product line overall, voluntary benefits, once again triggered by an event that would cause someone financial hardship, and we want to be there to help them pay for that. Okay. Maybe turning to capital. You did $1 billion of buybacks last year. Wondering if you could walk us through the drivers of your projection to be well above your targeted capital metrics for 2025. And if M&A were a consideration, what that could hypothetically look like? Sure. So the way we ended 2024 in a very strong capital position, so you think about cash that we had at our holding company of around $2 billion, so rated level, we think about it from a needs perspective ongoing, or at least what we want to hold back is about $500 million of that, which is a one year of both dividends and debt service. That's just kind of our buffer we maintain, so significant excess that we have at the holding company. Our underlying insurance company is also in a very strong position into the year at 430% RBC. Our targets are around 350%, so also excess capital that we have there, and then leverage capacity as we looked over the course of the year, continuing to build out leverage capacity as we look forward. So when you think about our capital generation, so think about 2025, our capital generation still very, very strong, the capital being generated from our underlying statutory entities through just pure earnings. What we see overall from some of our fee structures, which are also sources, overall our free cash flow we see is $1.3 billion-$1.6 billion over the course of the year. We'll use some of that to actually look to continue to grow the company and pay our dividends, which we've increased at a good clip over the last several years. Last year, we increased our dividend 15%. And then we'll look to do M&A and grow the business. You asked about the M&A dynamic. And so we're looking to add on capabilities through M&A that allow us to do all those things I was mentioning earlier, faster, better, more connected with our customers. Those are the capabilities we look at, which is both from a distribution and a connectivity within our digital footprint. That's where we're looking to acquire. I mentioned LeaveLogic, t hat's a good example we did several years ago, a capability that we can buy and build faster than we can build it internally. And so that's a good place to continue on the M&A front. And we've said for the course of 2025, we will actually look to buy back stock in the range of $500 million-$1 billion, giving ourselves some flexibility in terms of what we see over the course of the year. But even after we've done all of that, still entering 2025 in a very, very strong capital position. So the underlying cash flow generation of our business has been very good. A real difference is in 2023, we actually funded up our Long-Term Care business and put capital behind that, saying we're not going to need more capital behind that business. So now the cash and capital we generate today is free cash flow available for all those uses to grow the company, or if we do not find the uses to grow the company is to buy back our shares, and that's what you'll see over the course of 2025. Great. Just tangential off the M&A topic or internationally, do you have any ambitions to explore other geographies? Right. Maybe you could update us on Poland, right? Is that something that you might consider or not so much? Yeah. So we have two international operations. So one is in the U.K.. Our U.K. business does things very similar to all the things I talked about here in the U.S. So they're there at time of need in the U.K., group income protection that they provide for in the U.K., group life insurance that they have, dental business and critical illness are their main product sets and their protections. They do so in a digital way. So we use something called Help@h and, which is actually something we connect with our products, which helps people think about it as similar in the U.S. to a Teladoc type thing. That's a capability we deliver to our employee base, our customer bases in the U.K.. It's been very effective. And then our Polish business is one that we acquired going back about, I guess, about six years ago. That's a business that we thought looked very good for us because they also, similar to what we have in the U.S. and the U.K., distribute product through the workplace. So unlike many places in the world, Poland is a place where you actually get protection products at the workplace as well. We thought there was great synergy there. That's been just a tremendous business for us from a growth perspective. Both of those businesses, we really like the opportunity they have in front of us. We want to grow them faster. And so you ask about the M&A capabilities and desires internationally, that's where it is. That's where we'd like to acquire. How do we build scale within those two geographies looking forward? And then somewhere down the line, we think about other international operations, but that is not on the forefront right now. It's really building out scale in the U.K. and in Poland. Got it. Long-term care, your favorite subject, I'm sure. Just curious if you can comment sort of on your outlook for incidence trends. I think they sort of leveled off in the Q4, but the claim experience and the impact from incidence, how is that factored into your outlook for this year? Sure. When you talk about incidence, so this is really the dynamics we had coming out of the pandemic where we saw incidence really come down quite a bit through that period of time from a Long-Term Care perspective. We saw it actually trend up. And so I think we would have talked about at the beginning of last year, talking about incidence trends that are above what we expected. So we talked about over the course of the year that we expected those higher incidence levels, people going out on claim to come down over the course of the year. And we certainly saw that over the first three quarters of the year. The Q4, we saw that trend slow. So it didn't reverse, but it actually slowed in terms of the decreasing level of incidence. And so that's something we were keeping an eye on from what our expectations are. Nothing that we're overly concerned about from a long-term perspective and how we factor that in even to this year's planning, but it's something that we need to watch. And I think we've been very open about talking about where that sits. And we'd like to see that incidence level come down a little bit, but we'll see how that trend line looks. Keeping on the Long-Term Care topic, risk transfer, curious if you can provide us sort of your latest view on that market? There's been more activity, which is good to see. But yeah, any thoughts on that? Yeah, so to give the context for people, Long-Term Care is a business that we wrote in the late 1990s into the 2000s. We've been out of that business for approximately the last 15 years, and so as you look at that book of business, it's one that's very different than all the other lines of business I've been talking about. It's a business that we really don't want to be continuing to. We'll administer it, but we don't want to be on risk for that business because it's just so different and adds, I think, confusion to our investor base, so we want to be off that risk. And I think what you've seen in the last several years, we've been very clear to say we're going to do the work to be ready, to prepare, to actually transact, to transfer risk to another party over the course of the year. The good thing that we saw is that a transaction happened just over a year ago. So 14 months ago, we saw another transaction happen with another carrier. That's a good thing. And what we saw in that was actually a little bit difference in the technology of reinsurance where they brought together an asset manager as well as the biometric risk. And so bringing all that together provides more opportunity. That was a good thing to see. And then another transaction that happened towards the end of last year, continuing to develop what the opportunities are to transfer risk. Our team has done a really good job of parsing the risk. When we talk about risk transfer for Long-Term Care, given its size, it probably won't happen all at one time. It's going to be parsed into the right ways so that a buyer would actually have interest in it. I think that's important is that you actually can find what a buyer is looking for, whether they're looking for asset intensity, whether they're looking at biometric risk, all those different things. We can parse the block in many different ways to meet those buyers' needs. The advent of, or not advent, but the bringing together of asset management and biometric reinsurance, good thing. Seeing more activity in the market, good thing. I think, as we've always said, time is also a good thing. As you can start to see more development actually in this line of business behind the claims curves, behind incidence levels, all those things, it allows buyers and sellers to agree to terms that would be good. And so the last thing we'd always said is this is hard to do, and that's why it hasn't been done very frequently. And so we'll work hard at it, but there's no predictions about having success in that risk transfer. But it is a strategic imperative of ours that over the coming years that we will look to be out of that risk business. And we have the capital and the wherewithal to continue to move through that. But I think that that's something that we want to do. And I know we've sort of touched on this before, but to what extent do you think that the prevailing level of interest rates influences those discussions? We think that it doesn't have too much influence. There's already a fair amount of assets behind this line of business. And so we think about that as interest rates move sort of the value of those. And so that all kind of offsets. I think if anything, in a higher interest rate environment, people feel a little bit more bullish about it. So it's not necessarily the math of what's happening behind a transaction, but I think people see more opportunities that may have out there. But I don't think it's as impactful. I think the bigger thing is the agreement on what the liabilities look like, how much we're going to have from an incidence perspective, how people will go on claim, what the ultimate mortality will look like, all those things. Those are the more important things that two parties come together on. Okay. Any questions in the audience or online? Actually, the iPad is dead, so only in the room questions. All right. So maybe on just mortality and morbidity overall, there's lots of exciting medical advancements happening post-pandemic or just in general, right? GLP-1s is one, but also Alzheimer's, which is uniquely impactful for some of the businesses that you're in. Wondering if you have a view on some of these advancements. We'll sometimes see over the years headlines around Alzheimer's and whatnot, but your view on those advancements and how they maybe are impacting or could impact both your core business and Long-Term Care. Sure. I think actually you look at the different developments that are happening on many fronts. I even go back years we think about the developments that happen on cancer fronts and people who are actually able to get back to work faster given the types of ability they've had to avail themselves of different drugs. It's been an impact on our business more so over a longer period of time in terms of returning people to work. When you talk about the latest things that we're talking about today, whether it's GLPs or Alzheimer's, I think those are a little bit longer term. I think if you take GLPs and the reduction of obesity that you have across the U.S. population, particularly, I think that's a good thing. It allows on many different fronts to help people live a healthier life. We'll see that. This is nothing that I would bake into a 2025 return. These are longer-term trends that are good to see a healthier population. The same would be true around Alzheimer's. Some of the developments they've had around Alzheimer's drugs have ebbed and flowed over the last even decade in terms of what it is. I think that there is a positive. If you think about our Long-Term Care business, roughly 30%, a little bit more than that are actually cognitive claims. When you think about people that need Long-Term Care for an extended duration, cognitive is a big piece of that. If that can be worked on through Alzheimer's treatments, I think that's ultimately a good thing. These are longer-term trends. We don't like to bake them in, but a healthier population through GLPs and a lot of other new medications that are out there and then Alzheimer's treatment, all generally good longer term, but I think it will take a while for those to play out. Great. Well, that was actually the last question. So I don't know if you have any final remarks? It's a good list of questions, Mike. I appreciate you taking us through it. Like I say, I appreciate being here at the UBS conference and meeting directly with investors. It's always helpful to get what's on your mind. We'll continue to be out there talking to investors over the coming months, but we do appreciate your support and look forward to the last advertisement for take a good look at Unum Group. We think we have a lot of good things going on across the company on a multi-year trend. And so please do take a good look at that. Thanks for having us today. Thank you, everyone.