Alignvest Acquisition II Corp

TSX:SFC

Good morning. My name is Constantine and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Sagicor Financial Company's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

Mr. George Sipsis, EVP, Corporate Development and Capital Markets, you may begin your conference.

Great. Thank you, operator, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Sagicor's Fourth Quarter and full year 2024 results. I'd like to highlight our disclosures are available under the Investor Relations tab on our website at sagicor.com, which includes a press release, financial statements, MD&A, our annual information form, along with the unaudited supplemental information package containing core earnings, drivers of earnings and additional disclosures. The link to our live webcast is available on our website, and a replay will be available.

This conference call is open to the financial community, investors, the media and the public with a reminder that the Q&A period is reserved for financial research analysts. I will proceed to refer you to the cautionary language and disclaimers in our materials and public filings regarding the use of forward-looking statements and the use of non-IFRS financial measures and ratios, which may be mentioned as part of our remarks today.

I would also like to remind the audience that actual results regarding forward-looking information could differ materially. And please note that a detailed discussion of Sagicor's risk factors is provided in our MD&A, which is available on SEDAR+ and on our website. A discussion of the assumptions underlying our expectations is provided in our filings and earnings releases. Unless otherwise noted, all dollar amounts referenced will be in U.S. dollars, consistent with our reporting practice.

Joining me today is our President and CEO, Andre Mousseau; our Chief Financial Officer, Kathy Jenkins; and Anthony Chandler, our Chief Controller. We'll begin with prepared remarks by Andre and Kathy, followed by a Q&A session.

With that, I will pass the call on to our President and CEO, Andre Mousseau.

Thank you, George, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. It is our pleasure to discuss another solid quarter to end 2024. In our first full year of earnings, including our Canadian segment, we recorded core earnings to shareholders consistent with our guidance and reported net income to shareholders in excess of our core earnings. Our annualized core return on equity in Q4 shows our potential for further earnings growth, both in 2025 and beyond in the medium term.

We continue to make meaningful progress on our strategic initiatives, including collaboration between our operating segments, refreshing our technology and improving our access too and cost of capital, all with the aim to reduce costs, drive growth and ultimately expand our return on shareholders' equity.

I'll now hand the call over to our CFO, Kathy Jenkins, to discuss our consolidated and individual segment results. Kathy?

Thank you, Andre, and good morning, everyone. As Andre mentioned, we are reporting a strong fourth quarter to cap off a solid year. For Q4, core earnings to shareholders was up 28% from 2023 to $28 million, and net income to shareholders was $52 million. For full year 2024, Sagicor's net income to shareholders was $98 million and core earnings to shareholders was $91 million, exceeding management's revised guidance from Q2 2024 of $80 million to $90 million. Revenues were $3.1 billion for the year compared to $2.5 billion for last year. New business CSM of $166 million was within the revised guidance from Q2 of $160 million to $180 million net of reinsurance. Our total net income for the year came in slightly ahead of core as we saw some positive asset price emergence in the fourth quarter.

Now I will give you some more detail on the segment financials. Sagicor Canada's sales production of $18 million in the quarter and $70 million for the year was consistent with management expectations, resulting in new business CSM of $12 million for the quarter and $46 million for the year. Core earnings to shareholders of $25 million for the quarter increased $3 million or 16% from the same quarter in prior year, reflecting an increase in expected investment earnings that was partially offset by unfavorable mortality experience.

Net income to shareholders of $8 million for the quarter was lower than core earnings to shareholders due to unfavorable market-related impacts, primarily from higher risk-free rates on surplus assets. Net CSM ended the year at $535 million, which was a slight decrease quarter-over-quarter, resulting from changes in assumptions and unfavorable currency impact that was offset by organic CSM growth.

Sagicor Life USA generated $152 million of new business production for the quarter and $894 million for the year. The level of production in Q4 was lower than our targeted annualized run rate, and we know today, 10 weeks into Q1, that our production in the first quarter of 2025 is going to be over $300 million. We believe that we may still see quarterly volatility in the production due to the size and competitive environment, but measured in aggregate over years, we believe we will be able to meet our growth targets, albeit in a bit of a volatile manner.

In the meantime, core earnings to shareholders this quarter for the segment of $11 million increased $1 million or 12% from the same quarter in the prior year, driven by higher net investment income on the growing investment portfolio. Net income to shareholders was $42 million for the quarter and was higher than core earnings to shareholders due to market-related impacts, including gains on equity investments and favorable tax recoveries. Net CSM decreased by $11 million to $155 million quarter-over-quarter due to basis changes from the previous quarter, lower volume of premiums written in Q4 and the impact of the introduction of a new and reinsurance agreement.

Sagicor Jamaica capped off a lower-than-expected year with a soft fourth quarter. Sagicor's share of Sagicor Jamaica's core earnings to shareholders of $8 million for the quarter declined from $13 million for the same period in the prior year due to unfavorable experience and the impact of rising interest rates, offset by improved margins on core noninsurance activities and lower financing costs.

Our share of reported net income to shareholders of $10 million this quarter declined from $17.3 million the same period in the prior year due to marginally lower results from the long-term insurance and Commercial Banking division. However, we see signs of reversion to historical performance in 2025 with strong net premium growth across all business lines and improved margins from repricing of group health products.

Commercial Banking division continued its year-over-year growth trend in profit as a result of higher net investment income and fees and the Investment Banking division reversed the prior year's unrealized capital losses, leading to a meaningful improvement in profit. Net CSM of $282 million increased 2% quarter-over-quarter as strong new business CSM of $15 million was offset by changes in assumption.

Sagicor Life core earnings to shareholders of $6 million for the quarter increased 21% over Q4 2023, reflecting improved profitability from short-term and long-term businesses from repricing and product offering adjustments and improved insurance experience and lower incidence of onerous contracts in the long-term business. Net income to shareholders of $12 million for the quarter was higher than core earnings to shareholders, primarily due to positive market experience. In 2024, core earnings to shareholders was $26 million and net income to shareholders was $39 million. Net CSM was $248 million, increasing from $244 million at the end of September 2024 due to growth in organic CSM of $7 million, driven by strong new business sales, partially offset by changes in actuarial assumptions of $4 million.

Returning to the consolidated picture. Sagicor remained well capitalized in Q4. The group LICAT ratio was 139%, which improved by 3 percentage points year-over-year, and our financial leverage ratio was 27.3%. Our access to capital further improved in the fourth quarter through raising a CAD 200 million term loan facility, which was used to repay the balance of the more expensive U.S. dollar debt used to acquire ivari, improving both our cost of capital and improving our natural hedge against ivari's net asset position in Canadian dollars. Our book value per share finished the quarter at USD 7.08 or CAD 10.19. Our deployable capital or shareholders' equity plus net CSM to shareholders was $2 billion or USD 15.02 per share or CAD 21.61 per share.

I will now provide an update to our guidance on key measures. We expect core basic EPS for 2025 to be approximately between $0.74 to $0.80 per share. This translates to approximately $100 million to $108 million of expected core earnings to shareholders. That represents 14% to 23% growth on a per share basis and 15% to 24% growth on an absolute constant currency basis. New business CSM is expected to be between $180 million to $200 million. Our 2026 target for core earnings to shareholders growth is 10% plus growth beyond 2025 levels. And thereafter, we project a target core return on shareholders' equity over the medium term of 13% plus and targeted core dividend payout ratio over the medium term of 30% to 40%.

With that, I hand it back to Andre.

Thank you very much, Kathy. Beyond our strong financial results, we continue to be excited about our prospects for 2025 and beyond. Our internal initiatives, all of which are geared to generate strong, sustainable return on equity growth are showing measurable progress. We continue to grow our asset base in our U.S. business and will accelerate and intend to accelerate this in 2025. We believe this will continue to offer a robust growth opportunity and deliver to us very high marginal returns on our capital.

Our operating segments are working better than ever together to drive technological change and efficiencies that will allow us to cement our business where we have large market shares and continue to grow efficiently where we're relatively small. And our balance sheet management is incrementally improving our cost of capital. With these initiatives, we believe we can target a 13% or better return on shareholders' equity towards the end of our 3-year planning cycle.

We are very pleased to be able to deliver this growth while accelerating our return of capital to shareholders. We repurchased 3 million shares in 2024 at a significant discount to book value, which contributed to a 4% net reduction in our share count through the year. This helped drive our book value per share higher than the rate of our retained earnings.

Our increased projected core earnings, our robust capitalization and liquidity and the reduced share count are all enabling us to provide our shareholders with a meaningful increase in our quarterly dividend. At this payment level, we anticipate we'll be at approximately the midpoint of our 30% to 40% target core dividend payout ratio for 2025.

And while economic uncertainty may cloud certain macroeconomic variables, we believe our core initiatives will enable us to continue to grow our return on shareholders' equity. And I'm excited about coming out of our quiet period to get back out and talk to some of our new shareholders who've had a good run so far and to communicate that we believe that there's a lot more good news to come.

So with that, George, I think we're ready to start the Q&A period.

Yes, we are. Operator, please open the lines for questions.

Your first question comes from the line of Meny Grauman from Scotiabank?

Just a few questions. One, you talked about lower-than-expected production in the U.S., I think also for the quarter, but for the year as a whole. And you talk about the impact of rate volatility on that. So I'm just wondering if you could flesh that out a little more in terms of the impact of rate volatility on competition. I'm trying to understand sort of what you're getting at there in terms of rate volatility and how that impacted the production.

Right. So thanks, Meny. So maybe I'll take a little step back and talk about what we're trying to achieve because we see the variability of production of our U.S. business as a feature of our business model as opposed to a bug, so to speak. What we're trying to do is, over the next 3 or 4 years, grow our balance sheet towards $10 billion in the U.S. and to do that at the best risk-adjusted spreads that we can. And so we are nimble when we do that. And we are -- because of the size of the market, we are able to throttle production quite significantly from one week to the next.

And so we're constantly making judgments on whether the risk-adjusted spread is favorable relative to other times that we're able to generate that production because when we take this business onto our books, we're going to be investing the capital right up to the duration to match the liability, and we're going to take profit off that spread for the next 5 years, if it's a 5-year annuity. So if you look back over the last 2 or 3 years, our production has oscillated between -- with a significant degree of variability from things in the mid-hundreds in a quarter to up towards $400 million in any given quarter.

And we think the ability to pick our spots adds in aggregate 10 to 30 basis points of additional spread compared to if we just targeted keeping production flat every month and every quarter. And so if you're looking to bring on $1 billion of new annuities in a given year, that extra 10 to 30 basis points is $1 million to $3 million of pretax income a year, every year for the 5 years that you have those products. And once you get into -- towards the $10 billion balance sheet and add that all up, it starts to be really material amounts of net income. So it's all a way of saying that we're deliberately picking our spots.

And so the spread is a function of where we can invest, which itself is a function of our sourcing of base rates and of credit spreads. And then it's also a function of the crediting rates that you need to be in the market and to be competitive. And the specific thing that happened in Q4 was there was a moment in time where certain markets were priced to perfection in terms of the impending regime change and early days of the regime change in the United States and a soft landing and equity markets anticipating to go up forever. And our adjudication at the time was that the spreads weren't as good as they would be in following quarters. And so we backed off on the throttle and ended up with lower production.

Now we've disclosed in our -- in Kathy's comments that, that trend has reversed itself because we see a much more positive spread environment that has come with, let's say, the market's decoupling of the thesis of the economy being pricing in perfection. And we've seen a better rate environment. And so we can sit here today 10 weeks into the quarter and know that we've got more than $300 million that's going to close in Q1. So we see this as deliberate.

I said in my comments that we intend to accelerate the growth of our U.S. business. And so what I would say to you and to our investors is we intend to put more than $1 billion of new business on our books in 2025. And thinking about ourselves as shareholders, we're going to put that production in where we see the best economics. And so we intend for that production to be a bit variable quarter-over-quarter. So we may show up with $350 million to $400 million of production in Q1, and we may show up with meaningfully less than that in Q2 if it turns out that, that is where that's the optimal thing for our long-term economics.

So just to kind of make sure I understand what you're saying, are you saying that you're willing to trade off -- like you're basically willing to trade off volume for profit? Or it's more just -- it's just -- the message really is more just about expect volatility in the sales numbers on a quarter-to-quarter basis, and it could be quite extreme depending on the circumstances.

We have aggregate targets. So what we're willing to trade off is volatility for excess spread. And so what I'm telling you is that we believe that by accepting that one quarter, it may be $150 million and another quarter, it may be $400 million, we believe we can generate better spreads than if we just said we're going to aim for $250 million to $275 million every quarter. And so we still -- as you draw a line through our production, we expect that line to trend up, and you can look at this as an average on 4 or 6-quarter rolling basis. We would intend for that to tick up because we intend to put more than $1 billion of volume on in aggregate in 2025 and beyond. We're just saying that we think it's in the best interest of our shareholders for us to pick our spots and for the production to be a bit volatile quarter-over-quarter.

Understood. And then maybe as a follow-up, just connecting it to the bigger picture. I mean, we are in a very volatile environment in terms of economic expectations and rates. And so I think you're acknowledging that, I mean, beyond the volatility in your sales numbers, the actual volatility out in the market. And so the question is that volatility -- you're acknowledging that volatility, but at the same time, you seem to be pretty certain about over $1 billion in production in the U.S. Your financial targets for 2025 are strong and pretty clear. So what gives you that confidence in those targets given the environment that we're in?

So with -- first in the U.S. annuities market, there are a couple of things that are going on. First thing is we see equity volatility as positive for the fixed annuities space in that. The annuity -- the fixed annuities market is big and robust, but the true addressable market is all retiree savings in effect. And so the substitutes for that can involve products that -- like mutual funds or other ways to access equity that don't have the same certainty that a fixed annuity has.

And so when you see a meaningful drawdown in the equity markets when -- as we're experiencing, I don't know, today, but over the last couple of weeks, it reminds the addressable market that equity markets don't go up in a straight line. And if you think about that, the equity volatility that started at the start of COVID back in 2020 went a long way to kickstarting the big growth in the annuities market going back 5 years ago.

And then the investing environment is a good one for spread investors right now. We play in a spot in the credit stack that is overwhelmingly investment grade, and we continue to have confidence in how our portfolio will work out. And so we have good confidence on the robustness of investing and the demographic trends that are driving the annuities market with the baby boomers reaching retirement age continues to persist.

More broadly, when we talk about confidence about continuing to deliver earnings growth, we've got a view around the strategic initiatives that we have talked about or that I talked about earlier in the call. So there's a little bit of reversion to the mean, we believe, after a tough couple of years for our Caribbean businesses, and we're seeing green shoots on that. And where we've got more torque on our financial statements in our Canadian and U.S. business just because of the size of the assets, we've got a good idea where some of that margin expansion comes from as we work to drive efficiencies in those businesses.

Got it. And maybe just a final question, just in the earnings release, your commentary upfront, there's talk about technology refresh. And I'm just wondering if that is baked into guidance for '25, '26? Or could that be something that is sort of a headwind to these targets? And so I just want to clarify that.

So the cost of it are baked into the guidance. When we talk about getting through a 13% ROE, and we have internal targets that are higher than that. That is getting out into 2027 and beyond and is starting to see the effects of -- or would be seeing the effects of some of the investments that we're making in 2025 and 2026.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Reynolds from Acumen Capital.

I was just curious about the primary drivers of your expected growth in new business CSM from that $166 million level this year to the $180 million to $200 million next year and 10% beyond. Just maybe if you could just touch on what the primary drivers of that is.

The big one would be accelerated production in our U.S. business. So we had, Kathy, about $850 million thereabouts of new business production in the U.S. this year, and we're targeting through $1 billion for 2025. So I think mechanically, that's mostly it. I don't think we're projecting meaningfully different margins. Our Canadian and Caribbean businesses continue to generate net CSM in excess of what they're replacing, and so they continue to grow as well.

Okay. And then as you look at that, the longer-term ROE target, I was just wondering how we should think about that growth towards that target? Is it expected to be a fairly linear growth towards that? Or how that plays out over the next few years in your eyes?

Yes. The progression is more linear than not. And it's a combination of the organic growth that the businesses naturally generate with accelerate with continuing to have the U.S. being a bigger proportion of our earnings with then the overlay of our other strategic initiatives to improve cost structure and improve the cost of funding of our balance sheet. So as we're looking out to 2027, that's where we start to get into the range of that -- in the range of that medium-term guidance. We wouldn't want to put a hard number around our 2027 earnings. It's a little early for that, but that's how we're planning.

Okay. Great. And then just, I guess, to touch on those cost reductions that you guys are targeting, where do you kind of sit in terms of those targets? And what's the sort of time frame for those cost reductions? And where are they coming from?

It's throughout all of the segments, the operating segments and head office. And so there's quite a list of initiatives bringing together procurement policies as an example, having the businesses on common technology platforms that allows us to bring down the cost of technology and eventually let the units work together to service each other, which can lower our cost of delivery and allow our people as we upgrade the technology to be deployed on in value-add initiatives as opposed to manual and administrative ones.

Okay. Great. And then just a last quick one. Obviously, bought back quite a bit of stock last year. Maybe just what the plans look like in terms of share buybacks moving forward?

So we intend to keep our normal course issuer bid active. Now I think we -- as we've gone and accelerated our engagement with the equity market, one of the things that has -- one of the things that has resonated with some of our new investors is the dividend stream and growing the dividend. And so if you look at what we've done with the dividend, we've increased it 12.5% and maybe starting to tilt the return of capital towards dividends as opposed to buying back so much stock every year.

One of the other comments we hear from investors is they'd love to see more liquidity in the stock, and we don't necessarily want to be competing buying what's out there for sale. We reserve the right if the stock reverts to even wider discounts to fundamental value to lean back in. But we've started to see green shoots of a market develop. And so one of the things we want to do is to provide our investors the ability to anticipate not only a robust dividend, but that's going to grow year-over-year as we -- if we can grow our -- grow our net income.

So it's all to say, please. I'd rather you not model in us shrinking our share base by 4% every year, but we're still going to keep it open.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from the line of Darko Mihelic from RBC Capital.

I just have a couple of modeling questions. It should be pretty brief. The first question is for Canada. When I look at the expected investment earnings of $30 million for the quarter, substantially better than last year and last quarter. Presumably, you're making some changes with your investment portfolio. I'm just curious, is $30 million a good quarterly run rate to assume for Canada for 2025, [ sir ].

So we just have Kathy flipping through to the supplement here. I think if we're going to get into drivers of earnings modeling on this individual question, Kathy, do you think it'd be better to do this in a holistic form with the analysts?

I think so.

So can we defer on that, Darko?

Yes, sure, no problem. Another question then for the head office corporate, what's the I think [indiscernible] a very big jump in stock price very late in December. Was that mark-to-market included in that results? And since then, I think the news has come out that Playa is being purchased by. So maybe you can -- that's actually in the quarter here and the expected earnings for that segment?

Right. So you're correct. So we owned our and still do 11 million shares of Playa. And so we mark those to market mostly through noncore income. And so they announced a strategic process the night before, the night before Christmas and the stock went up and then they announced a definitive transaction in Q1. So we marked it to market at the end of December. And now that there's certainty around it, there's a little bit more gain in Q1. And our shares were kind of distributed throughout the organization throughout the different segments.

So Kathy, do you want to break that down?

Yes. So this quarter, we had after-tax gain of $43.9 million on our Playa shares. So $36.8 million in the U.S., $2.7 million in head office and $4.4 million in our SLI segment.

Okay. And sorry, and that -- just to be clear, that's excluded from core earnings? Or is that included in core earnings?

That's excluded from core earnings.

Okay. And the rationale for splitting it into the segments is?

We were just using as an asset to back capital in a couple of different spots. So it was basically -- you can use a small proportion of equities to back capital. And so we had some of it in the U.S. company and some of it in Bermuda for the benefit of both SLI and the U.S. through our internal reinsurance company. So that will emerge in Q1 with a little bit more of a gain, probably in aggregate about another $10 million. And then that will just turn into cash that we can deploy. And so out of that, we'll get a bit of a capital bump because we have lower capital charges on nonequity than we do on equity. So there'll be -- there's -- in the background, it frees up some capital and liquidity for us as well. So in aggregate, our share ownership of Playa has been a very successful adventure.

Okay. And so since most of it was put into the U.S., presumably there is where you get the biggest impact for capital, correct?

Yes, correct. And so that's one of the things that helps us with reaccelerating growth in the U.S. is we have had a bit of a capital windfall. And so we can grow the business faster without capital injections because of how that's worked through.

Okay. That's very helpful. And then maybe just as well, while we're sticking with that segment, you do mention that you get about $12 million of savings in interest costs because of all the, let's call it, financial management of debt. Is there any more in the pipeline? Or should I just consider now for that segment to just lower that financing cost? Or is there more, Andre, that's on the way? Or do you think there's more? Maybe rephrase it that way.

We have now, as of Q4, replaced the expense of debt, right? Like it was worth it to pay double-digit interest rates to be able to get the Canadian acquisition across the line, but that's all been refinanced. So as we grow, we wouldn't put -- we may put more debt on the books just to manage our debt to cap closer to our target in the high 20s, but that will be incremental debt as opposed to replacement debt.

And if you look at where we're putting new debt on the books in and around 6%, it kind of -- it matches our overall cost of debt funding because the old bonds that we had from back when we were sub-investment grade in the international market were done in such a radically different interest rate environment that the cost of debt is about the same.

Okay. Okay. That's helpful. And then maybe if we're going to have just a follow-up call on Canada, just my other modeling question was on the CSM for Sagicor Life USA. So maybe we can just -- that's also just another nitty-gritty question that we could probably take offline.

Yes. The CSM in Q4 was a little funny because some of the CSM goes away to the reinsurers, and we did all of our U.S. reinsurance in Q4. And so the new business CSM was not proportional to production in Q4 for the U.S., but we can talk more about that in kind of a modeling session.

Your last question is a follow-up from Meny Grauman from Scotiabank.

Just about 2025 targets. I think in the past, you've been able to give us some guidance in terms of segments. So just wondering if you're able to do that on a segment basis in terms of what to expect in 2025. If you could break it down by the segment, that would be helpful.

We're choosing not to do that right now. And so if you look at what we did this year, we had initial guidance and then we updated it. And so at some point during Q2, I think we'll refresh the guidance and we'll include segment guidance along with that. And so that's the plan for now.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call over to Mr. George Sipsis for closing comments. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. A reminder, a replay of this call will be available for 1 month on our website, and a transcript will be posted as soon as available. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to any one of us. With that, thanks again for your participation and interest today. Have a great weekend, everyone.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.