Equitable at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, Equitable Holdings Inc. (NYSE:EQH) presented at the Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference 2025. The company outlined its strategic progress since its 2023 Investor Day, focusing on defending core businesses and exploring new growth areas. While Equitable is on track with its financial targets, challenges such as mortality impacts remain.

Key Takeaways

• Equitable aims to grow cash flows from $1.3 billion in 2023 to $2 billion by 2027.
• The company increased its stake in AllianceBernstein to 69% using proceeds from the RGA transaction.
• Equitable plans to reduce mortality volatility by 75% through strategic changes.
• Wealth management assets have grown significantly, with a 12% organic growth rate over the last year.
• The company is confident in achieving its 2024 cash flow guidance of $1.6-1.7 billion.

Financial Results

• Free Cash Flow: Target to increase from $1.3 billion in 2023 to $2 billion by 2027. The 2024 guidance is set at $1.6-1.7 billion.
• Payout Ratio: Achieved 68% over nine quarters, targeting 60-70%.
• Earnings Per Share (EPS): Achieved 12% growth over two years, aiming for 12-15% growth.
• AllianceBernstein Stake: Increased from 62% to 69% with an $800 million investment.
• Expense Efficiency: $100 million achieved towards a $150 million target by 2027.

Operational Updates

• Retirement Market: $600 billion in assets transitioning from 401(k) plans, with $7 billion in net flows over the past year.
• Buffered Annuity Market: Grew to $65 billion last year, with Equitable holding a 20% market share.
• In-Plan Guarantees: Received $600 million in inflows from BlackRock last year.
• Wealth Management: Assets under administration grew from $40 billion in 2018 to over $100 billion today.

Future Outlook

• Cash Flow Generation: Confident in meeting 2024 cash flow targets, leveraging expense efficiency and private credit deployment.
• Asset and Wealth Management: Expected to contribute 55-60% of cash flow by 2027.
• Capital Deployment: Plans to use remaining RGA transaction proceeds for debt repayment, share buybacks, and growth investments.

Q&A Highlights

• RGA Transaction: Key strategic move away from traditional life insurance, unlocking $2 billion of capital.
• Private Markets: Focus on high-grade private credit, avoiding below-investment grade areas.
• Share Repurchases: Additional repurchases planned beyond the $500 million already committed.

For a deeper dive into Equitable’s strategic initiatives and financial performance, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference 2025:

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: There you go. Okay. Alright. Good morning, everybody. Before we get started, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure websites at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosure.

Taking photographs and use of recording devices is also not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. So with that out of the way, so we’re privileged to have Robin Roger, the CFO of Equitable, here with us today. So maybe let’s just dive right in. So of all, thank you for being here with us.

On your Investor Day several years ago, right, you outlined a broader strategy with the goal for the next five years. And you made quite a bit of progress along the way already, despite the fact that market isn’t smooth at all. So can you maybe talk about how your position going forward based on the Investor Day goals you laid out and if there’s any additional we can achieve.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: No. Thanks, Bob. Thanks for having me. Look forward to the discussion today. So in May 2023, we had our Investor Day as a public company.

And we really laid out a growth strategy to the market. It was about defending and growing our core businesses, which was retirement and asset management. It was seeding future businesses like in plan guarantees and emerging markets. That was the horizon. And then it was really scaling our wealth management and private credit capabilities.

Those were the three pieces of our Investor Day strategy that we wanted to go out to the market. But it was really growth strategy. That’s what pinned it, number one. The output of strategy that we’ve communicated to the market was three main financial metrics. One was to grow cash flows from $1,300,000,000 to $2,000,000,000 by 2027.

was to grow our increase our payout ratio to 60% to 70%. That was 40% to 60% when we IPO ed the company in 2018. And the was to grow earnings per share to 12% to 15%. Those we thought were compelling financial targets to go out to the market with. So how are we progressing versus those targets?

Obviously, never go in a direction that you expect when you set these things. You have to be nimble and agile. From a cash flow perspective, that’s the most important metric that we’re focused on internally, the $2,000,000,000 by 2027. The year out, when we started at 1,300,000,000.0 we said we’re going to grow to 1,400,000,000.0 to 1,500,000,000.0 We hit the higher end of that range. This year, we said we’re going to signal 1,600,000,000.0 to $1,700,000,000 and we believe we have the levers in place to and we have visibility into $2,000,000,000 of cash flows for 2027 really coming from the work that we’re doing into growth, expense efficiency, picking up net investment income yield and also decreasing the capital allocated to our legacy businesses overall.

The metric was the 60 to 70% payout ratio. I think that’s pretty clear through nine quarters we’ve achieved 68% of that. And the metric was 12% to 15% EPS. Through the two years of the plan, we achieved 12% earnings per share growth. In the first quarter and year to date, we did see some adverse mortality, which took away a little bit from that.

But if you exclude the mortality, given we have the RGA transaction that have reduced that by 75% going forward, we’d still be at that 12% number. So in total, we’re executing and we’re focused on executing against that plan, and we feel confident in achieving those growth ambitions that we laid out at Investor Day.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: That actually is a nice segue into the RGA and life transaction. That should free about $2,000,000,000 of capital and really enhance the rest of your segments. As we continue to think about growth and earnings mix going forward, your aspiration at some point is fiftyfifty balance between the annuities and sorry, the retirement, investment management, and wealth management. But curious of your thoughts on the path going forward. And then how what will be the levers that you need to pull to eventually achieve that?

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Sure. So on the RGA transaction. That was both strategically and financially important for us. Strategically because it signaled us moving away from traditional life insurance, which was a low return business for us and volatile as many of our investors have seen over the years. And then also redeploying and going into higher growth businesses like asset and wealth was a big piece of it.

So within the RGA transaction, we unlocked $2,000,000,000 of capital and we gave up $100,000,000 of life With that, we’ve invested in increasing our ownership stake at AllianceBernstein from 62% to 69% or about $800,000,000 of those proceeds we used to do that. And we’ve also committed to use those remaining proceeds in a way that’s accretive for shareholders going forward. The asset and wealth businesses for us are the fastest growing parts of our segment. By 2027, about a of our earnings are going to come from asset and wealth management and the remainder from our retirement businesses. Part of that is due to the capital allocation and increased stake in AllianceBernstein.

Also in 2027, we’re going to go to about 50% to 60% of our cash flow is coming from asset and wealth businesses. So if you look from IPO, that was about 17%. So we made a significant shift in increasing the asset and wealth management contribution in both earnings and cash flows and we’d expect that to continue going forward. We don’t have like precise targets on the board to say we want to be X percent this, X percent that. In reality, we really like all three of the businesses that we’re in retirement, asset, and wealth management.

And we want to go for all three. But naturally, asset and wealth are faster growing. So over time, those should be a higher contributor to our overall mix.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: Right. And that business mix shift so far actually you didn’t sacrifice anything for it either. Fact, there’s a lot of incremental.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Yeah, look, I think that business mix has put us into faster growing markets, higher multiple markets, and better returns for shareholders.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: Yes. Which is actually quite interesting, right, because you have this integrated flywheel that essentially you have set up. It’s the ability to really leverage your dominant position in annuities and really expand into the more durable asset retirement and wealth management businesses overall. And then from that perspective, are there anything within that that you think is incrementally interesting, that is could have much higher like a potential or something that you are very excited about going forward?

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Well, we’re super excited about this flywheel effect that we now have coming in our business. It’s really amplifying the returns overall. And as you said, we have an integrated business model and we’re one the few with that unique business model pairing asset wealth and retirement businesses together. So for example, the retirement market, as you know, at the highest level is the most important part of our investment thesis. You have to believe in the retirement market and the prospects of that in The U.

S. There are 4,000,000 Americans turning 65 this year. There’s also $600,000,000,000 of assets in motions coming out of four zero one plans into retirement and retirees. Our individual retirement business over the last twelve months has a $7,000,000,000 in net flows. That’s an 8% organic growth rate.

So we’re capturing that opportunity. But also that opportunity also from within the retirement business links to asset and wealth. In individual retirement, about 35% of our distribution sales come from equitable advisors and in group retirement it’s about 90%. So we’re capturing a distribution margin there. We take those assets and they’re primarily invested into AllianceBernstein.

So that’s leading to positive net flows in AllianceBernstein. So we’re getting sales in through our retirement opportunity and that’s benefiting all aspects of that business. Now to the flywheel effect that you spoke about, that flywheel effect also means that when we invest in AllianceBernstein, they’re generating an attractive investment yield for our products. That means we can offer more attractive solutions for clients and then get more flows. And so it kind of replicates across the board.

So the flywheel effect is working very well right now. We feel quite good about it. Maybe a few examples on that. The one I would give you with the benefits of having this integrated asset and retirement business is AllianceBernstein’s ability to attract teams. So late last year, we hired a private ABS team that came to AllianceBernstein and part of the reason they came is because they were getting assets day one.

Normally when you do a team list out, you come into a company then you spend the year fundraising. We were able to put money to work with that team on day one across and that’s able to attract and build new private credit capabilities. That private ABS gives us an attractive yield and they’re already starting to attract party mandates with that private ABS team. So the assets that Equitable contribute is very important to the strategy at AllianceBernstein. The example I would give you is the Ruby Re sidecar investment that we made last year.

That was a strategic investment that Equitable and AllianceBernstein made. It gives AB about $1,000,000,000 in private credit mandates. AB cannot do that without Equitable’s balance sheet and insurance expertise to help underwrite that deal. So the flywheel effect keeps coming. Emerging in the future, we could see the potential of offering private credit into retirement accounts and also into our Equitable Advisors wealth management platform.

So it will continue to evolve going forward and we feel that this gives us a competitive edge having asset management and retirement together in the marketplace.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: So there’s really a compounding effect. And then you’ll have that new business coming up as well. That’s quite a bit of That’s pretty impressive. So maybe if we focus on the retirement a little bit here, right, like current market environment is quite interesting. We had a volatile March and volatile April.

But you’ve always maintained that buffered annuity products are really designed for volatilities like this. So, is this something that currently customers are gravitating towards? Can you maybe talk about where we’re going with the buffered annuity side of things and also what the competitive positioning and the overall market environment is looks like so far?

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Sure. So again, just taking a step at the retirement market, there’s and we have $600,000,000,000 of assets in motion, right? So that’s a big piece. Retirees need to have equity exposure. So they want protected equity solutions in their business or in their portfolio overall.

If you get out of equities, you’re not going to have enough in retirement. And Rylie’s provide that offering for retirees. So that is a compelling proposition. In periods of volatility like you saw in April, that actually resonates even better. If you look in the depths of April, the market was down 15%.

If they bought one of our buffered annuities, our client would be down zero because they would have been protected on the 20% and with the upside participation. So times like April and volatility actually amplified a Ryla story for clients and for advisors. So we saw momentum continue to progress well in the month of April and so we feel good about that. From a competition standpoint, competition is good in my mind. We owned we used to have 100% share of the RILEY market, but it’s very small.

Now we have 20% market share. We’re still number one, but the market was 65,000,000,000 last year. That was a 40% increase year over year. So it’s a pretty significant market. It’s fast growing and that’s benefiting from competition because competition is coming in.

They’re seeing it’s a simple client story and they can make an investment spread. Now with these spread products, when you get into the market, there are three ways you need to there are three capabilities you need to have to win. One, you need a low cost of funds. you need to generate an attractive investment yield. And you need a good expense discipline and then a good expense place.

If you look at Equitable, we have one of the lowest cost of funds in the industry in the private market. Why? It’s because of our distribution edge in Equitable Advisors. That means we can have a higher margin when products are sold through Equitable Advisors, which is the low cost of funds. So that’s an edge we have.

On the investment yield side, we’re able to get competitive yield through AllianceBernstein. That keeps us in the market through their build out of their private credit capabilities on it. And from an expense side, as benchmarked by McKinsey, we’re in the quartile of expense. So generally you need one or two of those capabilities to have a long term sustainable edge. I think Equitable we can say at least has two of those and we’re very competitive on the investment yield side as well.

So we believe that sets us up for the long term run-in the RILE market. And look, the RILE market is still in the early innings. This tailwind in demographics in the retirement market is just continuing. I mentioned that 4,000,000 Americans turning 65 this year, there’s also 4,000,000 turning 35. So this isn’t something that’s going to stop here in the near term.

This will continue and we feel we have an edge in the Rylo market given our capabilities and the flywheel that we have going.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: So and essentially those three points all should support very long term durable earnings growth as well. So one thing you’ve mentioned in the past was about the future growth around the four zero one business and as well as

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: the emerging asset market, right? So can you maybe talk about the opportunities in the four zero one business here as well? Sure. So as part of the strategy that we laid out in Investor Day, the leg was seeding for future growth and that goes to in plan guarantees. This is very exciting for us.

One, it’s aligned to our mission and providing income solutions for retirees, but it’s a brand new market in many ways for us. The four zero one market in The U. S. Is an $8,000,000,000,000 market and annuities today have less than 1% of share in that market. So it’s a huge opportunity for us overall.

Within plan guarantees, we have three partnerships in there. AllianceBernstein was actually to market over ten years ago. We have partnerships with BlackRock and JPMorgan. There’s huge demand for these products over time and the Congress through the Secure Act, we’ve had bipartisan passing of Secure Act that has actually progressed workplace retirement planning solutions for retirees. So the tailwind in multiple aspects continues to add in plan guarantees in.

We received $600,000,000 of inflows from Alliance from BlackRock last year. We’re going to get $250,000,000 in the second quarter. So that’s going to be lumpy in size but this is very early innings and in the future it’s just a brand new market for us. For example, today when we sell individual annuities, you have to go through an advisor because really it’s for massive clients that leverage advisors. Going forward, if implant guarantees can be a bigger part of four zero one solutions, it opens us up to the middle market client potentially.

And that’s a brand new market on top of the individual market that we have today. So we’re super excited about this market, but it aligns well with the mission of providing income solutions in retirees. And we believe with the partnerships we have now and which we’ll continue to expand, we’re in a position to win.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: And would you say that this particular business would be a bigger piece of your overall business mix

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: in your view? Yes, over time. I mean, right, it’s not we don’t need any this business for our 2027 financial targets, to be clear. It’s not embedded in that. But post-twenty twenty seven, as part of our strategy, it’s certainly something that we want to accelerate and have a bigger side be a bigger part of.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: Sure. That’s certainly helpful. So maybe pivot a little bit to the wealth management side. You’re you’re seeing some very strong net inflows kinda like you said before. And adviser productivity is is also increasing by about high single digit.

So in as as as far as you’re attracting advisers, as we’re looking at the next step in scaling the business, what are the key aspects that allows you, to really win in an increasingly competitive environment here because it feels like everyone is really focused on this segment as well.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Yes. So taking a step back though, we’re a top 10 independent broker dealer in The United States. We have 4,500 equitable advisors and we focused on increasing productivity of that group over time. So we feel that we’re at size there. You’ve seen that come through in terms of results.

When we IPO ed in 2018, had $40,000,000,000 in assets under administration, thanks to organic growth, but also equity markets, we’re over $100,000,000,000 today. That wealth management business had a 12% organic growth rate over the last twelve months. That’s best in class by some measures in terms of organic growth. Why? Because we’re offering both retirement solutions and wealth management solutions and they’re benefiting from the tailwind in both of those markets as well.

As far as growth going forward in that market, we’re really excited. Early this year, we had the head of Ameriprise’s experience higher program come to Equitable and he’s now going to build an experience higher program for us that’s more competitive in the marketplace. We view experience hires as something in between of organic and inorganic growth. It’s a little bit of a sweet spot for us and having that capability coming from someone that’s done it for ten years plus at a company like Ameriprise, we think is really going to accelerate our growth pattern in terms of the number of experience hires we have. This program has a short payback period and very good IRR.

We’ll also look at over time if bolt on small acquisitions make sense. Those are very expensive in the wealth space as many of you know, but if we can make them make sense and be accretive, that’s something we’ll look at as well. So we think the combination of our organic growth strategy, which as you see is executing well, now supplementing with experienced hires, We’ll continue to accelerate our growth strategy there. And we always had the potential for bolt on acquisitions, if it makes sense. Got it.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: No, that’s very helpful. It’s interesting, because I think last year, about half of your cash flow came from investment management and wealth management. And as we look at the additional initiatives and growth trajectories you have, I feel it should be confident that you can do more than half going is that right? I don’t to put words around it.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Well, I think I said, as I said earlier in 2027, just naturally with the increased investment moving from life to asset management with the increased investment in AllianceBernstein, that number is going to be 55% to 60% by 2027. And then as those businesses continue to grow, as AB continues to grow with its private credit capabilities, wealth management continues to accelerate growth, it should be a bigger portion over time.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: Right. For sure. So maybe moving to the asset management side, right, like you’re currently 69 ownership of AllianceBernstein. On the earnings call you talked about, there’s really no near term plans to increase the stake. But are there any other M and A opportunities outside of AllianceBernstein that can expand your asset management footprint.

Is that something you’ve ever considered? Sure.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: So at AllianceBernstein, we’ve increased our stakes from 62% to 69%. So we bought 20,000,000 units at $38.5 At this point in time, I don’t see our stake changing materially at AllianceBernstein there. We do like having a public float at AllianceBernstein. The employees enjoy having it. That’s how they’re compensated.

We can use that public float for acquisitions like we’ve previously done. And then we also benefit from allowing in buy side and sell side to some of the parts valuation there as well. So we like the stake where it is now and I don’t see that changing meaningfully here in the short term. From an acquisition side at AllianceBernstein, we built out a lot of the private capabilities that we need at AllianceBernstein to date on it. If you look, we have middle market lending, we have private placement, we have residential loans, we have commercial mortgages, we have NAV loans and we have a private ABS team that we just joined.

So we have a lot of the capabilities that we need today to support the liabilities that we have. What we don’t have, we don’t have private equity, we don’t have real estate equity and we don’t have infrastructure. But those don’t specifically meet the liability needs that we have anyway. So it’s not really a core capability that we look to acquire. And anything that we did do at AllianceBernstein or even on the wealth management side, we look to be accretive on an earnings per share basis.

So if we can grow either in private credit, increase our scale there or on wealth management, whether it be Equitable Advisors or the private wealth business at Bernstein, we’d look for it to be accretive over time, but that’s areas of acquisitions for us that we’d look at.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: Got it. No, that’s certainly very helpful. So you mentioned private markets, this is something you’ve been putting a lot more emphasis on. Maybe like, can you give us a little bit more details on the environment here and how you think Equitable’s positioning will evolve over time just from that marketplace?

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Sure. So the private markets has expanded significantly by 02/1930, expected to be about almost $40,000,000,000,000 That ranges from asset classes like music royalties to aviation financing. But those are all things that fit the need for insurance companies. There is a sticky liability there was a sticky asset classes that we benefit from having the liquidity premium because we have sticky liabilities to go with it. So we think the combination of private credit and insurance is here to stay and the liability support them at least from what equitable underwrites as well.

But the flywheel model gives us an edge in acquiring those capabilities. If you look over time, we’ve expanded our capabilities in private credit through M and A. We’ve done that through the Carvel acquisition. We’ve done team lift outs, the private ABS transaction that I talked about earlier. And then we’ve also moved into adjacent markets.

So our middle market lending team created an NAV loan capability and that’s attracted party capital as well. All this is a function of Equitable and the retirement business being able to see those capabilities at AllianceBernstein. So the Carvel team comes, they know they’re getting $750,000,000 of assets. When they came over, we deployed over $1,000,000,000 to them to date. The private ABS team comes, they know they have assets day one.

The NAV loans are created, they know they have assets to support from Equitable. In addition, now, AB is now really getting that party value in place as they’re winning party mandates on some of those propositions as well from both insurance companies and other institutions as well. So it’s a huge market. It’s a growing market. And we think we have the capabilities.

And that flywheel really cements our positioning there. For sure.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: So with the opportunities in the private market, obviously, some investors have voiced concern for maybe the entire industry is growing too fast. Are there any areas within private markets that you feel might you might have to either keep an eye out for or maybe to avoid completely? Just curious is your view on the risk aspect of this market.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Look, I think we’re fortunate through our ownership and of AllianceBernstein. We’re able to partner very closely when we go into new asset classes like private credit. So we get hand view of the underwriting that occurs. That’s very different than when if we just hired AllianceBernstein for a party mandate where you may have an IMA guidelines, but you’re not getting a sense of who the teams are and the underwriting that occurs. So I think that gives us an edge in assessing risk within that.

That being said, Equitable still has a conservative posture toward its general account. We always stay on the higher grade elements of private credit as well. We stay away from below investment grade. And below investment grade is an area that hasn’t been tested very well and that’s an area that I would be cautious of. Now private credit has a short history, and there’s not a lot of losses in that short history.

But over time, when credit events come, losses could emerge. And so I would stay away from the below investment grade area. That’s not a place where Equitable really has an edge in.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: Okay. No, that’s very helpful there. So maybe if we think about the guidance, right, on free cash flow, first quarter earnings call, you indicated that given market volatility as previously, your free cash flow might come in at the lower end of the 2025 guidance. But the market has kind of moved since, and the rest of your business is obviously holding up very well. You talked about the past, the $2,000,000,000 free cash flow generation.

Curious as to what like your view on that 1,600,000,000.0 to $1,700,000,000 for 2025, specifically just for this year for now. Sure.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: No, so we feel comfortable with the 1,600,000,000.0 to $1,700,000,000 guide. Markets have rebounded. The underlying assumption in the 1,600,000,000.0 to $1,700,000,000 guide that we gave this year is a 2% equity market assumption every quarter. So it looks like equities are coming back. So that brings us to even be more comfortable to what 1,600,000,000.0 to $1,700,000,000 guide that we have there.

I think going forward, if equity markets deviated on the negative side, we also have levers in place. We have a big expense efficiency program as well. It’s targeting $150,000,000 by 2027. We’ve achieved about $100,000,000 of that to date. So we have 50,000,000 remaining that we have line of sight in, but we can easily accelerate that if needed to achieve our targets that we have.

We’ve also progressed quite well in deploying our private credit commitment to AllianceBernstein. We deployed about $14,000,000,000 of the $20,000,000,000 commitment that picks up yield as well. So I think we have levers to manage in different environments. And as you’ve seen since our IPO, we’re laser focused on executing and hitting our financial targets that we put out to the market. And so we feel quite comfortable with that.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: And with that, how about the expectation for alternative investment return? Obviously, second quarter will have some volatility due to what happened in the marketplace. But just curious is about looking beyond second quarter, should we see a much smoother trend into rest of the year for alternative investments?

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Yes. So the past two quarters, we had about a 5% to 6% annualized return on VII. I’d expect that to be the same in the second quarter. Going forward, what’s really going to drive it is transaction activity. We’re starting to hear from some, you told me a little bit earlier, but really it’s whether it’s more IPOs, M and A and real estate transaction activity will really get us back to that longer term target of 8% to 12% going forward.

I think as the first half with uncertainty in the macro environment, we haven’t seen much so far in the first half. But hopefully as that there’s more certainty in the macro environment that will be more certain going forward. Got it.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: No, that’s helpful. One other item would be the way we think about mortality, right? So you obviously have the RGA transaction coming up. But assuming that closes soon actually, what how should we think about just mortality in general? We’ve had some large mortality impacts previously, but as that transaction becomes history, should we just really think about a much smoother earnings from that perspective?

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Sure. So we continue to see mortality being adverse in a few ways in our business. One, we have concentrated policies in larger face amounts and older ages. And so in the first quarter, we have seen we saw in the first quarter higher claims and we saw that continue in the second quarter to date as well. So we’re seeing some adverse mortality relative to our budget here in the second quarter.

Now we see also from the CDC data that the flu has lingered longer and came into April as well. So that may be a contributing factor to the higher mortality that we’re seeing in the month and so the quarter to date. The area that we’re seeing is a little bit more unique. We did have a vendor issue that we looked at in our COLI business, that’s small businesses, and that had claims of approximately $50,000,000 for claims that happened out of period. So those are claims from prior periods that we went out and we found due to a vendor issue that we had.

And so now we’ve identified and we’ll have that as well. So in total, if you put that together, our latest forecast for Protection Solutions would be a loss of about $40,000,000 for the second quarter. Now the good news is we have the RGA transaction and that’s scheduled to close in the second quarter. So that will reduce 75% of the mortality volatility going forward. And we still feel good about the 1,600,000,000.0 and $1,700,000,000 cash generation that we laid out for the year.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: No, that’s good color. So maybe a last point on capitals, right? So thinking beyond the reinsurance transaction, thinking beyond what just has happened in the market, you mentioned the potential for additional share repurchase above the $500,000,000 So curious about the progress on this. Does it it feels like the balance sheet is incredibly strong in this environment, which leaves you more option for a capital deployment, it feels like. So maybe just curious of your thoughts on that.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Sure. So with the RGA transaction, as I mentioned earlier, 2,000,000,000 of value that we created through that transaction. We deployed $800,000,000 in investment in AllianceBernstein and we are committed to an additional $500,000,000 of share buybacks on top of the 60% to 70% payout ratio. So that leaves about $1,000,000,000 remaining. Now it’s not a bad situation to have $1,000,000,000 of extra capital, especially in these volatile market environments.

But as long as markets stabilize, our intent is to fully deploy the full $2,000,000,000 of proceeds. You’d expect us to look at some debt repayment. We’d also look at share buybacks on top of what we’ve already promised and investing into future growth is compelling for us, especially with the growth we see in the different markets we’re in. But more importantly, this allows us to be offensive. If markets turned on us, we have a lot of capital and we’re sitting pretty good and to be offensive as well with that capital.

But I’d expect the combination of debt repayment, share buybacks and investment for future growth as part of the remaining use of the proceeds.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: A pretty enviable position to be in.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Yes, quite happy to be in this position rather than other positions you could be.

Bob, Morgan Stanley Sales Representative, Morgan Stanley: For sure. We have a couple more minutes left, I’ll leave questions on the floor if there are any. If not, then well, Robin, really appreciate your time here. It’s certainly enlightening. So thank you very much.

Robin Roger, CFO, Equitable: Thanks very much for having me. Thank you, Bob. Appreciate it.

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