Go ahead and get here. I guess first I just want to thank everybody for joining us, both in person and virtually. Thank you. Here with us, we've got Rod Martin, Chairman and CEO of Voya, Mike Smith, Vice Chairman and CFO of Voya, and Christine Hurtsellers, CEO of Voya Investment Management. Thank you all for being here. Very much appreciated. To the format, I'll power away with questions. At the end, we will take probably a couple from the audience and maybe one if there's any. They come in virtually. I've got that covered. We'll save about five minutes at the end for that. Maybe jumping into it. I thought we could first start with the growth strategy that you all rolled out at the recent Investor Day. Thought maybe you could take us through some of the most impactful drivers that you see fueling the growth at Voya. Sure. I'll start. We'll toggle back and forth as usual. Again, thank you for being here. It's good to actually physically be with some people doing these things. Alex, on the growth strategy, we talked about a number of fundamental things that I think is very worthy of repeating, and one is we're expecting 12%-17% EPS growth organically. Let's unpack that a little bit and get under those numbers. We talked about sharing both revenue growth and margin numbers. We went back and by way of example, with our retirement business, recast what the margin was from the point in time we've been a public company until now to just give more disclosure on that. We're a much simpler company today, and we felt we needed to begin to show the company in that way as a consequence and outcome of what we've divested over the last period of time. One of the things I'm most excited about for the team, for Voya, for myself, is 100% of our energy is on growing the company. We are completely done with all of the activities in de-risking the company, and it just feels really good to be there. Operating margin, revenue. Mike, feel free to jump in. Yeah. Look, I think the EPS growth will be driven by that. Certainly also expense management. I think we've demonstrated through the divestitures and ability to remove costs. That's a muscle we've built that we intend to keep, and use that to either bring additional benefit to the bottom line if we need to, or redeploy those funds for other more productive investments to further our growth. Also capital management is going to be a big part of our ability to grow EPS. It is actually the single biggest contributor to the 12%-17%. We've got a long track record of returning capital to shareholders with nearly $8 billion since becoming a public company, which is well in excess of our market cap at the time we spun out from ING. It continues to be an important consideration to us as we go forward. Always focused, though, on using that capital in the best possible way for creating long-term shareholder value. Alex, one more thing I'd add that we talked about at Investor Day, just to add a little more dimension to it. We talked about a number of new initiatives that if you think about planting seeds for future growth, that 12%-17% is not dependent on any of those initiatives explicitly. We've been doing the same thing over the last 3 years, and you'll hear from Christine and from us today, those seeds that we planted and how they're beginning to really contribute to the company. Fully organic growth and those new initiatives are simply directional to inform you how we're thinking about it, where we're focused. That 12%-17% is based on the fully organic continuing to execute the 100% of our energy around that. Got it. Okay. Maybe if we could spend some time on those initiatives, it sounds like it could be incremental over time. Could we dig into the strategy of attacking the Health and Wealth Solutions and maybe just help us think through what are some of the tangible things that are being done there and when it'll start to take form. Sure. I want to be clear, they will be important over time. It's just not fully dependent on that right now. Here's what we're hearing from a combination of employers, the consultant advisory community, and the employee. Healthcare costs are going up at multiples of GDP growth. Employers are keenly focused on making sure their employees are valuing their benefit package, broadly defined, understand it, and they're offering the most flexible package they can. Advisors are beginning to see this. We're hearing from the customer, "I need to make the best decisions because I'm generally picking a high deductible healthcare plan." There are gaps that that creates. We've, with our supplemental benefits, offering some really good solutions to that. For the first time in a long time, I think contributed by the pandemic, I think people have truly reevaluated their work-life balance. Most companies, not all, most companies are moving to some form of flexible schedule or hybrid schedule. Employers are wanting to retain their talented people, attract their talented people. I'll use Voya as an example. We've adopted a hybrid schedule. We're no longer geographic dependent. If the talent happens to be in a city where we're not in, and he or she is the best candidate, we're welcoming them onboard. It's a combination of those things where it's a moment in time. I think we would have got there anyway. I really think we moved forward three or four years in people reevaluating those things. The questions that are being asked by the employer, the employee, and the advisory community is certainly agile enough to say Something's changed. How do we get in the middle of that? We're being brought into that conversation by the customers. We're fundamentally a B2C company. This is a movement we're seeing. We want to be at that intersection. Maybe just going along with similar questioning. When I think about connecting some of your businesses and having services provided to customers across them, I think historically you've seen that more prevalent in sort of the smaller sized accounts. I'd just be interested in hearing about what part of the market you're in. Does this strategy involve sort of going up or down market in any way? I think it will evolve. Again, historically, if you think about a 401 plan, regardless of size of market, that was largely a singular distribution group. It might be different based on the size of the market focused on that. For the healthcare, it might be a completely different group within the company making that decision. The supplemental benefits, perhaps even more. The asks from these groups are causing this to come more together, and it's certainly happening more if you did in what, earlier into the market. I think it's going to happen at all ends of the market, because people need to understand they're not just making a 401 decision. They're making an HSA decision. They're making a high deductible healthcare decision. They're making a voluntary enrollment decision. When you have a two-income household, which most are, they want to make sure they understand, am I leveraging the benefits and the subsidy the company's providing in the maximum way for their family with both companies. It requires focus. It requires leaning into it in a way that's different. I think people are looking at it differently. The next question, you guys get this a lot. I thought I'd ask about capital management. Maybe you could take us through your excess position, the way you think about deploying that capital over time. Sure. We were at the end of the third quarter on a pro forma basis at about $1.5 billion in excess capital. That was pro forma for a $400 million debt extinguishment that we are executing during the fourth quarter. That brings our total capital actions that we've taken up to that point of over $1.3 billion we would have had. We signaled that we would do roughly $300 million more of share buyback at least in the fourth quarter. That is total capital actions for 2021 would be $1.6 billion or more that we would expect. That is consistent with our track record from the time we became a public company where we returned over $8 billion of capital to shareholders as I said earlier. Nothing is new or different. In our Investor Day, we tried to reiterate that. That we continue to view that as an important part, a important tool for us to deploy in managing shareholder value and driving that going forward. We did recently also announce a modest increase to the dividend. We intend to try to aim at a 1% yield. The last kind of leg of the stool of capital management is M&A. We've been open, and we continue to share that we're open. We're very focused on accretion as a key measure of success as well as strong strategic fit. Again, it's always been for us, I'll repeat, that accretion is relative to share buyback, not just absolute accretion, but is it a better use of capital to do this deal? One thing that was new at our Investor Day from those of you who followed us, because in the past, we had said that the accretion needed to happen over 24 months, that it needed to be completed by the end of that period. What we've shared is that continues to be important, but for smaller opportunities particularly, it may take a bit longer just given the nature of those opportunities. We don't want to forego opportunities that would actually generate a lot of long-term shareholder value just for the lack of it being maybe 30 months or 36 months. We're creating a little more flexibility for ourselves. That is not to signal in any way a decrease in the discipline or the focus on driving shareholder value. That remains paramount to us. I think our track record amply supports that. The next question I have for you all is in Wealth Solutions, I think it's a competitive business. It's no secret. There's always sort of the pressures of fees and competition for winning business. At the recent Investor Day, there was some conversation of some things that may mitigate some of that, I think it was sort of referred to as alternative revenue sources that could help there. I'd just be interested if you could shed any more light on what some of those are and how we should think through that. Sure. Well, I'd start with just fundamentally managing the block to be profitable and be focused on that. If you look at our track record since IPO, our margin has been between 33%-36% of operating revenue. We've maintained that, and I think that's very counter the narrative in the retirement business, which is it's perceived as this business under pressure. That's only because fees have been coming down on a basis point basis. We've been able to manage our expenses and the block so that in total, we've kept in that range, and we expect to stay in that range going forward. We've done that by managing expenses with discipline, by being very focused on the discipline around the pricing. We've taken action on our block over the last seven or eight years to reduce or eliminate unprofitable clients and/or change the nature of those relationships to become more profitable. That'll continue to be a very important focus. As your question alludes to, Alex, I think there are new ways for us or new products to bring to bear such as managed account opportunities that can be brought to certain clients that have a new revenue source, I guess, is a way to think about that, and that would be incremental. We'll continue to look for other ways to bring new services to bear that we can collect fees for. We'll focus on managing that margin. I think in the retirement business, people forget that there's not just a revenue question, there's also an expense question. We're continuing to take advantage of the investment we've made in continuous improvement capabilities to drive out excess capacity or wasted action. I think we've been pretty successful, and I expect this to continue a bit. The other piece I'd add, we've talked about this before, and I suspect most of you are aware. If you look at the top 10 players in broadly what we call wealth and retirement space. Ten years ago, they had about 50% of the AUM. Today, it's 75%. We're fifth or so in that mix. The market is quite efficient at distributing that business around those top five or six players for lots of reasons that are probably highly sensible. The top five to 10 players have been growing quite nicely. There are 50 other players that are in the market and probably very challenged in terms of the effectiveness of their book of business. What will happen with that, we'll see. If you think about the diversity of how that business is awarded through the RFP process, we feel we've been gaining share over this period of time. We've added 2 million new participants organically over the last few years. We serve in a variety of markets, and we think the distribution platform we have is a real advantage. I think we're going to continue to grow in the way we are, and I think the margin will be in the range that we talked about, which is higher than most. Got it. Thank you. Next one I had to you is on the new accounting that's coming in 2023. I think you all have shed a lot of the businesses that are sort of in the bullseye of this accounting regime. I thought maybe you could still spend a moment there to help us think through what parts of the business you have are so impacted and if there are any other thoughts you can share. Thank you for the question. As you said, we've shed the businesses that are largely going to drive, I think, the potential for big adjustments that will occur. Those of you who follow the industry, after I pronounce some changes are a bit ahead of everyone else. I think the majority of the industry will be probably into 2022 before they're sharing some of those impacts. For us, I'm expecting it to be pretty small as a consequence of those actions that we've taken. We haven't given direction in terms of absolute magnitude or the sign in terms of the book value impact. It will certainly simplify things for us. DAC unlocking, which is kind of the bane of many people's existence, is going away, right? DAC will become easier to understand, and there won't be these one-time charges that in the insurance industry and for us comes through mostly in the third quarter. We have some annuity business that will have a modest effect. There will also be some effect on the reinsured portion of the life business that we've moved on, but more to come on that when we get to the place. This is really complicated, and there's a lot of work to be done, and especially to do it in a way that's well controlled and manageable going forward. It'll take us a little more time before we get to those numbers. The next one I have is on the investment management system, maybe for Christine. I'd just be interested if you could help us think through some of the growth objectives you have and some of the areas you're specifically focused on. Yes, certainly, Alex. Some of the key things that we're really working on would be expanding our private and alternatives offerings on the market. Why is that? A couple of reasons. Just generally, the world seems to really feel like they have too much liquidity on balance sheet and that they see better opportunities there across all client bases. Specifically, we have a very formidable group of insurance companies that we are very proud to call our partners and our clients. They, particularly in this low rate environment, given that they have long-tenured liabilities, continue to look to us. What are some examples of some things that we're working on? We are working on two commercial real estate trust set ups. One will be oriented around green and impact investing, which people are very interested in. We continue to work on more of a higher return security-type offering. Just as a couple of examples. Again, it's bringing those differentiated products that are going to drive higher fee products as well as within our general alternatives business, something of the very small, little quiet engine in the background that we're really very optimistic to monetize, which is selling private asset classes to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals. As an example, we have a fund in our secondary private equity business that we have called Pomona, and that thing has over seven years of a track record. We offer consults to groups. We've learned a lot of lessons over time. We've added five new distribution of people in our ecosystem last year in what you would call intermediary to know how to sell that. We've got that fund on the finish line of two really large platforms in the U.S. to adopt. What are we doing concisely? We're continuing to drive alpha and client experience, but we are focusing our investments more on those private markets both institutionally for insurance companies as well as retail. Alex, if I could just build on the point that Christine made, and maybe have her expand it. We started green shoots five, six years ago, offering these capabilities to other insurance companies. Today you have 47 insurance companies. Growing. The number and frankly the mandates or the solutions they're seeking and the capability of offering those solutions. Again, another example of investments we made organically in the business, that if you look three, five years into it, which is where we are now, substantial, as we did with the supplemental benefit business. That was organic a dozen years ago. Mike played a very large role in getting that focused, and now we're a top four or five player in the marketplace. Again, organic. Thanks for all that. Maybe shifting gears back onto Wealth Solutions for a moment. I was just interested if you could provide any commentary on the outlook for flows there. What you think about growth and how much of it comes to the net flows. Look, I think we feel like there continues to be a robust expectation for growth in retirement going forward-- in Wealth Solutions. Actually, no, I've done it. In the wealth business going forward, right? We guided to continued substantial growth in recurring deposits. I think that's going to continue. That I think is the underlying indicator of health of that business, is that those are the flows that come in week after week out of paychecks as people are cutting. If that's growing around 10% to 12%, I think that just shows the fundamental strength of the underlying platform. We also have a robust RFP pipeline coming through from both our full service and our record-keeping business, where the full service business is up mid-teens year-over-year in terms of the number of RFPs we've seen. We saw in the third quarter, continue to think that the activity there will likely continue to be strong. 2020 was probably not as depressed as you might think in terms of activity, but there was a small drop. Also, we're seeing kind of a return to a really healthy pipeline there. On the record-keeping side, also see good growth. That tends to be a little more chunky. Full service is smaller cases. It tends to have a nice kind of level of flow, although that can be a little bit chunky. Record-keeping comes in big chunks sometimes. We've won $20 billion-$25 billion clients in a given quarter, so that can create a degree of discontinuity, if you will. We feel good about the overall positioning there and where we see it growing. That is going to drive the, along with a couple other factors, going to be a big part of how we drive revenue growth and maintain margins, right? That's going to be the story for Wealth, is growing revenue 2%-4% while maintaining margin. I think that's going to be a big player that's going to have a meaningful impact on Voya earnings overall. Maybe moving to the group business, or Health Solutions I should say. What are the impacts from thinking through the labor market, wage growth? There seems to be some tailwinds at your back. I'll get to COVID-19 impacts on group plans and so forth in my next question, maybe to focus on some of those tailwinds in group. What is the environment for you guys there, and how does that impact things? Well, look, I think the employment market, the amount of competition for workers only applies to our benefit, right? Because we think that employers will continue to want to use their benefit packages to attract and retain employees. Rod talked earlier about high deductible healthcare plans and voluntary benefits. There's still plenty of employers that are introducing those or have recently introduced a high deductible health plan that don't have voluntary benefits or don't have the full suite of benefits. We continue to see meaningful portions of our voluntary sales are in brand new opportunities where we're not replacing another carrier, we actually are the first to offer that kind of product within that environment. Those opportunities remain a substantial portion. I think it's in the neighborhood of 40% of our sales are brand new. All sizes of the market. Yeah. As someone who's been in the insurance industry a long time, being the brand new, having something brand new that no one has had before is a rare opportunity. That's why the voluntary business, one of the main reasons the voluntary business has been growing 15%-20% a year for the last several years, right? I think the theme here throughout has been that I think employers are recognizing the value of benefits, the value of creating a more comprehensive offering to employees. I think employees are going to continue to demand that as they get more used to integrated offerings in other parts of their lives. They're looking at this benefits thing and saying, "This is not always all that helpful." I think that's where the opportunity for us is, as a uniquely positioned health and wealth provider to bring that story together to create better outcomes for employees, which will then create better opportunities and outcomes for employers. I think the current environment is only a positive to that. I think that the change in the market over the last couple of years is the ask from the customer. Help me make better informed decisions because it's complicated. We kid about this, but it's real. People generally spend more time weekly picking their Netflix selection than they do their annual enrollment. What did I do last year? Ditto. Move forward. That's probably not maximizing what's being made available to them and helping them make the best choices. That's the real difference that we see in the marketplace. Got it. Maybe next if you could just comment on sort of the COVID-19 impacts, the effects maybe from a mortality standpoint, from a disability standpoint, in the group business and if you have any thoughts on kind of repricing, the need to kind of start going through that process. The impact for us has primarily been on the group life side. We don't have disability. We write disability, but we reinsure it 100%, so we don't have any of that risk on our balance sheet. Our guidance has been that we will be between $1 million and $2 million in claims for every 10,000 U.S. deaths. I think the ongoing development of the pandemic and the last Delta wave and then whatever's going to come, I think makes it very difficult for anyone to try and predict how many U.S. deaths are going to be from COVID over the balance of this year as well as into 2022. We're simply going to stick to the we think we'll be in that range. I think given recent experience and what we've seen in terms of the shift in the proportion of deaths that are more working age, I think we're probably going to be to the higher end of that range. Based on what you see in terms of the CDC results and overall deaths, you can probably try to at least get a sense of what the expectation will be. If you choose to try and predict what COVID is going to do over the next three or four quarters, then you can certainly just translate it. I think it's difficult to see how it's going to ultimately unfold. In terms of pricing, Alex, given the uncertainty around it and given the nature of the relationships we have, we tend to write group life in larger clients with more three, five-year guarantees. We don't really see this as a significant pricing issue per se. For us, it's been very manageable. We've had, I think, $85 million of claims over the last rolling 12-month basis as of the end of the third quarter. We still had a very solid year from a Health Solutions results standpoint. I think we continue to feel like we're in a pretty good position there. Great. Next question I have is on succession planning. I thought I'd open that up to you, Rod, if you have any thoughts on just how that process is going. Sure. Happy again to just kind of reground people. We announced in the first quarter of 2021 that I was extending my employment agreement happily through the end of 2022, and that we've been engaged in and will continue to be engaged in what I think is a very thoughtful and orderly succession process through 2022. It is my intention to retire at the end of 2022 as the CEO. There will be a new CEO of Voya. It's given the board, it's given me even more time to work with a team that's done, I think, such a good job in executing over the last few years to help make that decision. There's no change in that, but I think a number of people have maybe thought or wanted or expected an announcement earlier in the year. We're going to take advantage of the year. In terms of the big picture, there's no change in the approach or the philosophy. I think the company is ready for that. It is time to pass the baton. I'm thrilled to have been part of what we've done over the 10 years and very much appreciative of being part of setting the stage for this plan. Mike and the team have spent the last two years with the board with COVID, working very heavily on the three-year plan we just introduced. I'll be here for the first full year of that. I think you're just going to see a continuation of what we've executed. Okay. At this point, maybe we'll open it up if there are any questions from the audience. I can keep firing away here. As you think through some of the efficiencies and so forth that you're planning on taking out and investing in the business, maybe you could help us think through some of the areas of investment as well as have some of that lead to kind of further efficiency in the margins. Maybe Christine will start, and then Mike will go through the other business. Yeah. Certainly. As far as the areas of investment within the team, some of the things that we continue to do is add origination capacity, loan officers, and investors in commercial real estate as one example. We have more demand in an unfunded pipeline. Our constraint is just the human beings to underwrite the loans and get the money to work. Continuing to organically think about where can we add capacity into private markets. To give an example, about two and a half, three years ago, we did a team lift out of a infrastructure debt team that focuses on renewables. We finally got two debt funds. First funds are not the easiest thing to get off the ground. We did it, and then we actually closed some funds this year in 2021, and that was all organic. Behind the scenes, we continue to drive towards expansion of efficiencies and margins, but we also have to invest back in the business. Another key area too that we are investing our money in is ESG. It's talked a lot about in the industry, but I would tell you that I was a little concerned that we were behind the eight ball a little bit here. We have been very judicious. We've invested quite a bit, and we're actually now leading from my view when we engage clients, including in Europe, as we do things. I think that's going to continue to matter more and more. I know the market's talking about it a lot, but I will tell you we're getting so many inbounds, the bar is higher, and not only are they asking you certain things for environmental disclosures, they're very engaged around diversity, equity, and inclusion and what you're doing with the S, what your employees are saying about you. I am just so excited and thankful to be part of Voya, under this team's leadership, all the work before it was a thing. We were out there, if you look at our old decks before anybody really cared, we were talking about our people, our ethics. Just a quick little story, I'll never forget, a very large global consultant, one of the largest, about six years ago, I said, "Why aren't you asking me about diversity in one of those silos?" They didn't care. Today, every single person cares about what you're doing with these people. Yeah. Alex, if I could just build on that just a little bit. The other part, it kind of gets back to the same focus on where do we see difference in the marketplace with what the customer is asking, what the intermediaries are asking, what the companies are asking. From an ESG perspective, we were addressing that largely within the three businesses that we had, but we weren't packaging it necessarily in aggregate, that's exactly what we needed to do. Christine happens to be the senior leader that raised her hand and said, "Let me help coordinate this across Voya." What we found is there was a lot going on that other groups understood. When we offer that, this is the AI of the marketplace, looking at what a company says and what then the real results of the company is. The bar has been raised, we've been, fortunately, one of the early leaders in this, but we need to keep leaning in to go there. They're asking for the whole company. They're not just asking what does investment management look like or what does the retirement platform look like. It's what does Voya look like? We've been very fortunate to be in Barron's, by way of example, the highest-ranked financial services company for the three years that they've done this. It matters. Christine, we've been talking about, we can't name the company, but we just got a mandate. That we won that was pretty substantial and solely based on this. Oh, absolutely. Again, it goes to clients and due diligence. We did win a well over $1 billion credit mandate with one of the leading technology companies in the world. When we were doing the due diligence, they asked us very deep questions. We spent an hour and a half on ESG and diversity and inclusion with me. They wanted to sit down with the CEO of the business. When we walked away, they said, "We feel like we're looking in the mirror." That was really gratifying. It's a commoditized business in many respects in certain sectors that we operate, when it comes down to the finals, you can be against three people that we have top decile investment grade credit returns over multiple years, right? There are great competitors out there, at the end, it's that engagement and that touch point that really matters and sets us apart in these times. All right. Well, it looks like we're at time, we will stop there. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.