F&G Annuities at Barclays Conference: Strategic Shift to Fee-Based Model

On Monday, 08 September 2025, F&G Annuities & Life Inc. (NYSE:FG) presented at the Barclays 23rd Annual Global Financial Services Conference. The company outlined its strategic shift towards a fee-based, capital-light model, emphasizing growth in Fixed Indexed Annuities (FIA) and Indexed Universal Life (IUL) products. While optimistic about its growth trajectory, the company acknowledged competitive pressures in the Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities (MYGA) market.

Key Takeaways

• F&G Annuities is transitioning to a fee-based model, focusing on FIA and IUL products.
• The company plans to expand through acquisitions and consolidation of distribution platforms.
• A sidecar arrangement with Blackstone provides $1 billion in capital support.
• F&G aims to reduce its expense ratio and capitalize on the Pension Risk Transfer (PRT) market.
• The company expressed frustration over its current ratings, feeling undervalued despite strong performance.

Financial Results

• F&G Annuities has doubled its assets under management (AUM) and earnings over the past six years.
• Owned distribution channels generate approximately $85 million in EBITDA.
• Capital efficiency is achieved with reduced capital requirements over time, supported by reinsurance strategies.
• The company issued $800 million in funding agreement back notes recently.
• Efforts are underway to reduce the expense ratio from 60 to 50, with ongoing quarterly improvements.

Operational Updates

• F&G owns four distribution platforms, including a traditional annuity IMO and an annuity expert wholesaler.
• The company has invested $700 million in distribution channels, yielding significant EBITDA.
• Core products include FIA, IUL, PRT, and Ryla, with annual repricing capabilities for FIA and IUL.

Future Outlook

• F&G plans to grow its FIA and IUL businesses and expand the PRT business, which is expected to show variable growth.
• The company is exploring opportunities to acquire additional distribution platforms and sub-agencies.
• F&G anticipates increased demand for annuity products over the next decade.
• The company is confident in meeting or exceeding its targets for AUM growth, reinsurance flows, and expense management.

Q&A Highlights

• The shift to an asset-light strategy may introduce cyclicality, but owned distribution and life insurance are less affected.
• F&G is favorable towards FIA products, while variable annuities face criticism for high expenses.
• Market volatility is managed through hedging strategies, with limited impact from interest rate fluctuations.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Barclays 23rd Annual Global Financial Services Conference:

Unidentified speaker: All right. We will go ahead and kick off the next session. First, I’d like to say thank you, everybody, for joining us. Chris Blunt, CEO of F&G Annuities & Life, Conor Murphy, CFO. I really appreciate you all being here. Really looking forward to the conversation. To kick it off, I wanted to start with a higher-level discussion of your strategy. You’ve talked about transforming F&G Annuities & Life into a more fee-based, capital-light business over time. I just wanted to get a feel for what are some of the key things you’re working on. What will that mix look like over time?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Sure. Yeah, I’ll start. I’m sure Conor’s going to want to jump in here. Good to see everybody. I would say traditionally the bulk of the growth of the last six years for F&G Annuities & Life, where we’ve kind of more than doubled AUM and our earnings, has come by making annuity sales and retaining them on our books, right? Holding those assets. Now with the launch of the sidecar with Blackstone and some of the reinsurance deals that we have put forth, we are moving towards a more capital-light model. That’s simply because the return on equity is meaningfully higher to write a piece of business and be more of a distribution company. We have also invested about $700 million in actually owning some distribution channels. We’ve bought a number of properties. Those are performing really well. It’s already throwing off about $85 million of EBITDA.

Lastly, we’ve got a middle market life insurance business, which is growing quite well. It’s one of our more profitable lines of business. I would say a bit of an evolution for us as we’ve come along this journey. The sidecar, $1 billion of committed capital, it seemed an appropriate time to really be more clear about what our intentions are as a company.

Unidentified speaker: Maybe we could dig a little more into the reinsurance and how are you using the flow of reinsurance to improve the capital efficiency, capital requirements for your growth? Can you kind of walk us through what it is that actually alleviates some of that capital-heavy nature of the business and so forth?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, I’ll just do the quick math. Conor can walk through the strategy and the different relationships we have in place. Right now, when we write a piece of business, keep it on our own balance sheet, you put up approximately 15% capital in year one. That drops down to 7.5% in the remaining years of the contract. In a reinsured sale, that’s 7.5% upfront, dropping down to zero. Technically, return on capital is unlimited years two through five or seven, depending on the tenure of the contract. It’s meaningfully accretive for us to be a distributor of premiums versus holding them on our balance sheet. Having said that, it’s not all or none. We’ll continue to hold assets on our balance sheet. We will retain some portion of the business. Conor, you probably talk about some of the other flow-related.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: I think for us too, if we think about it perhaps in terms of product priority, we have our core products, of which the most noteworthy on the annuity side is the Fixed Indexed Annuities, where we had a reinsurance arrangement in place, but it wasn’t a comprehensive one like what we’ve just added with the sidecar. Another core product for us is on the life side, our Indexed Universal Life Insurance product. We have our Pension Risk Transfer product, which we don’t reinsure, and we have Ryla, which is just emerging. It’s core, but it’s small. On the more opportunistic side, we have the Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities and the FABN. In four of those products, we’re a top 10 seller: Indexed Universal Life Insurance, Fixed Indexed Annuities, Pension Risk Transfer, Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities.

We had comprehensive reinsurance available on the Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities side, less so, as I said, on the Fixed Indexed Annuities. When we think about what we want to do, we would like to continue to write to grow our Fixed Indexed Annuities business day in, day out. We would like to do the same with our Indexed Universal Life Insurance business. We’ll grow our Pension Risk Transfer business, but that’ll be lumpier, right? As I said, Ryla is quite small. This gives us the ability now to really do as much Fixed Indexed Annuities as we want or as we’re comfortable with. At the same time, we’ll probably have a trade-off with the Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities side because we’re probably seeing, while we have a diverse and very well-established set of reinsurance partners there, their own dynamics are changing.

We have less certainty and clarity as to whether we’re going to get the returns we want in that space. We feel very comfortable that we can write the business at the spreads we want on the Fixed Indexed Annuities space. The last thought, which may provoke another question, is on the Fixed Indexed Annuities and the Indexed Universal Life Insurance, that’s business we get to reprice. We’re in the spread margin business. I would also argue we’re in the spread maintenance business. We get to do that with Indexed Universal Life Insurance. We get to do that with Fixed Indexed Annuities. On the Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities side, you’re writing mostly a three or a five, some seven-year product. You got to get it right at the start. You’re not repricing that along the way.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yep. I would just say the last, I think you mentioned, but the last source of liabilities would be funding agreement back notes. As we said the other day, we were active in the market and did about $800 million of funding agreement back notes last week.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that’s been a market that’s been pretty active. I definitely want to come back to that. While we’re still on the topic of being more capital-light, more fee-based, I wanted to come back to the capital raised earlier in the year. From what I can tell, it confused people a little bit from the standpoint of you have a company that’s talking about becoming more capital-efficient, more capital-light, but yet, you raised capital. Could you help us think through how that is going to be additive to what you’re doing, the ways you’ll deploy it to clear some of that up?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Sure. I would say the biggest driver of that is, as you may have recalled, earlier, I think it was maybe a year prior or so, F&G had put $250 million into F&G Annuities & Life in the form of a preferred investment. We always have opportunities to grow. It was less a we need capital as much as it was, hey, if we had even more capital, we could grow even faster. We were hopeful that we could do the sidecar, but there were no guarantees that you were going to be able to pull that off. They’re complex things to do. It had been in the works for about 18 months. The decision was made to extend it to third-party investors to sort of help with the float, add a little more float at the margin.

I would say the lesson learned from that is, yeah, no, it didn’t go over well. I think folks were surprised by the raise. Terms of execution weren’t what we were hoping to get out of that. Now, having said that, we were able to deploy it and deploy it at good return. We still feel good about that. Part of the sidecar announcement was to take a little bit of that risk off the table and say to folks, no, we’ve got plenty of sources of capital now. You shouldn’t expect us to be out in the capital markets raising money again anytime soon.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: You may have this perspective too. I think there was a fear maybe that we said we were doing it for capital raising purposes, but was there a challenge?

There wasn’t, but I think you can only allay those fears when you can actually replace them with a permanent solution or a more permanent solution like we did with the sidecar. Hopefully that’s been put to rest.

Unidentified speaker: It’s understood. As we think about capital redeployment, whether it’s capital that was raised or the capital you’re generating every day, what are your priorities for putting that to work? Is there enough organic growth, enough opportunity in your markets right now that you’ll be putting that to work organically?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, I would say from a pecking order of returns, obviously we love our own distribution business. Those returns are terrific. Those platforms that we already own are performing quite well. We do think over time there’s an opportunity to buy additional platforms. The bigger immediate opportunity is probably to roll up some sub-agencies underneath where you can buy some smaller players at very attractive multiples and consolidate them up into a bigger. That’s quite high on the list. With the sidecar, I would now say writing an FIA through the sidecar is extremely high return business for us. IUL, which Conor mentioned, is quite strong. We’ve got a lot of places to deploy capital right now.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, maybe just to play that a little further behind that, even retained Fixed Indexed Annuities, because we will do that. Then Pension Risk Transfer solutions, probably ahead of Multi-Year Guarantee Annuities. That’s probably the order.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yep.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. I wanted to dig into the own distribution next. I think it’s something that’s pretty unique about, you know, what you’ve done. It’s different. I want to make sure we dig into that a bit.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: There’s only so much disclosure that we get on it. Can you help us maybe think through some of the things that if we were analyzing the value of that business standalone, the people would care about, right? Like things like the organic growth of that business, what do the margins look like?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: What does the trajectory of it look like when you’re doing new buy, new purchases and bringing it together? What does the component of the integration look like? What does that all look like over time?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, 100%. I’ll start. We have four platforms today. Two are in the middle market/cultural market life distribution space. We just love that. They’re recruiting machines, great growth rates, super high margin business, clean business, you know, that’s fantastic. We want to continue to scale. We own what you might consider a traditional annuity IMO, but one that we think has some really unique competitive advantages and that would do well in even a pure fiduciary world. They have opportunities to grow and are growing at a really rapid clip. We own one that is more of an annuity expert where they are mostly wholesaling and providing expertise to larger financial services firms, but firms whose primary focus product is not annuities. It might be life insurance or something else. All a bit different, but all we think really, really fantastic businesses. I’ll start with what it’s not.

It’s not, oh, if we buy distribution, we can force F&G product down their throats. It doesn’t work that way. They’re totally separate teams. We want them to be successful. If the best way for them to be successful is to sell some annuities of a competitor of ours, that’s great. That just means my competitor is paying commission income to me, and that’s kind of a beautiful thing. Those businesses we like a great deal. When we underwrite them, the returns are fantastic, high teens, if not greater on those acquisitions, and that is without operational improvement. We have seen some operational improvements of getting some of the businesses to work together. If someone’s life-focused, we plug them into our annuity expert, we get higher annuity sales, and we’re effectively paying ourselves.

One of the classic things you would get from a private equity firm, but what we’re differentiating ourselves with is timeline and relationships. These are, in every case, firms who’ve been working with F&G for, in some cases, 20 plus years. They know us. We’re not strangers to them. We’ve got a longer term time horizon there. Very high growth rates, high margins. Private markets, these businesses have been trading at 14 times EBITDA. We feel good about what we own already. As I said, we’ve put in $700 million. It’s already throwing off about $85 million of EBITDA.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. That’s all really helpful. Can you remind us just on the ownership you have in some of those distributors, and any potential opportunities to increase those stakes over the next few years?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, so two are majority. One, we actually own 100% with an incentive plan for the management team. Another is 70%. One is 49%, but with a contractual right to take control in the future. The last is a 40% stake with more of a right of a first offer. I would say they’re either controlling stakes or a relatively clear path to control. I think there is an opportunity to take a bigger stake. As I said, an even bigger opportunity to provide capital for them to roll up some players underneath them.

Unidentified speaker: The next time I wanted to dive into retail annuities a bit more. One of the things that I guess we’re beginning to hear more consistently is just as the environment’s becoming a bit more competitive. I think some of the private equity-backed ones have talked about it recently. What are you seeing in your markets? Are you able to still get the kind of IRRs you’re looking for when we think through the different products like FIAs and MIGAs in particular?

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: I would say from where we compete on the FIA space, it’s still very consistent and very strong, and it remains at the top of the list. I think, which was why it was important, even retained FIA, we would value very highly. The reinsurance opportunity just helps to improve that even more. I would say just from our own perspective, we didn’t do a lot of MIGA in the first quarter. We actually did. I would say that we were kind of at the low end of our range in the first quarter and the high end of our range in the second quarter. You know, maybe those are kind of near-term bookends for us. I think that’s tougher definitely at the moment. There are more entrants, there’s more competition.

As I said to the reinsurance partners that we have, or they themselves, I think are weighing up the relative opportunities there as well. I think that’s probably where we’re seeing the most, that is where we’re seeing the most competition. The rest of it’s IUL, FIA less. PRT, we probably end up winning about one in four of our PRT bids. That will probably stay. The volume may change. Very often fourth quarters are just bigger volumes, for example. I will be there about, it’s not always price there too. It’s a little bit of ratings and so on.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, the only thing I’d add is we’re really a distributor of MIGA, right? We need reinsured demand to do that. A base MIGA return is not bad. It’s just we have better things to do with our capital. If a reinsurer wants it and wants to pay us an attractive ceding commission to source it, you know, it goes from like okay to good. We like allocating capital there. It’s also the easiest place for competitors to break into because it’s yield times ratings and brand name doesn’t really matter. FIAs are a completely different business, right? It’s the ultimate trust me product. Someone buys one of our contracts, they’re locked up for five, seven, maybe even 10 years. We can change the terms every single year. Your reputation matters. You get grilled on every in-force crediting decision you’ve made. Were you taking advantage of policyholders?

Were you, you know, doing the old bait and switch? That stuff matters. Service matters. Not screwing up the admin, paying your producers on time, relationships actually matter. That is a lot tougher. I think you’ve seen a lot of new entrants, they’ll come in, they’ll sell MIGA at sort of the low end of the independent producer channel, but it’s hard for them. It’s a long slog to get from that to, you know, selling FIAs to the top, you know, top distributors.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: I would say too, on MIGA, we’re kind of free agents. We don’t, it’s away from Blackstone. We can do it with whoever we want. We’re not captive. We don’t have our own asset manager or are owned by an asset manager. We can do it with whomever we want. I will say this, there is no shortage of potential partners all the time. There’s a constant number of folks showing up at the door going, "Hey, can we have a conversation about doing some flow business with you?" That is encouraging. Having said that, I’d say there’s a little tightening.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Any views on RILAs in particular? I mean, it’s just been such a booming part of annuities for the last handful of years. I’d be interested there too.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, I joke that we’re a bit player and I’m like the biggest cheerleader for Ryla, but we’ve just started. It’s taken a long time to sort of get ourselves on platforms. I think we’re on seven platforms now. We clearly misestimated how long it would take to get on these platforms. Once we’re on, the product’s getting traction. We have producers who sell our Fixed Indexed Annuities, who want to sell our Ryla. We just have to get approved on their broker-dealers. It’s not a product competitiveness issue. I think the category over time is going to be massive. I mean, now you are squarely competing in the world of mutual funds, right? In terms of the risk-reward trade-off, it’s a younger demographic generally that’s buying a Ryla. Yeah, we’re quite bullish on it.

Unidentified speaker: One of the other dynamics I wanted to ask about is just the massive amount of AUM and 401(k)s that’s sort of concentrated in the older cohorts and whether it peaks at 65 or whatever you want to call it. Is that occurring? What do you see unfolding here from a growth trajectory standpoint? How do we think about that relative to, I think, maybe uniquely strong growth that we’ve seen recently because rates came up and what would that trajectory look like in your view?

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: I was going to say you’re maybe the target audience for that.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Not that much more. I look, it’s massive. I say this all the time. You know, I’m a baby boomer. My friends are baby boomers. I mean, if you were all being honest and I polled you in the audience, you all have at least one 401(k) you forgot about sitting somewhere that you don’t pay a lot of attention to. The rollover business is just going to continue to boom for another 20 years. I mean, it’s just going to be, it’s massive. That’s a big opportunity. In-plan annuities, it’s going to take a while. I still think that’s more of an advice sale. I think most people are going to choose to roll their money and deal with whoever their favorite financial advisor is versus trying to bundle it into some combined solution in a plan.

If a small percentage of that happens, it’ll still be big numbers given the trillions that are sitting in qualified plans. We haven’t come close. I’ve said this before, there’s going to be more demand for these products than global capital to source it all in the next 10 years. I really believe that. I think you’re going to have mediocre companies who will do quite fine.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: The in-plan thing is interesting and I had a bit of a front row view of the BlackRock Equitable BrightHouse exercise. At a minimum, I think it’ll raise awareness. I think it’ll be good for the industry overall. I think it remains to be seen how that will compare with just the ability to buy an annuity when you’re ready to do so. I’m sure we have slightly different views on this. As a whole, I think it’s great. I think it’s a great addition. We’ll see how meaningful it becomes.

Unidentified speaker: Next, let’s go back to the Pension Risk Transfer market. I think it started off maybe a little slower for the industry. You guys, I think, actually had a decent sized transaction this last quarter. How is that market responding to some of this litigation that’s out there? Is that having any impact? The volatility? Would you expect a normal three, four Q seasonality to unfold here with more transactions?

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: Where we compete is in the $100 million to $1 billion stage. That’s not where Athene, Matt, and Prue are. We’re more where PacLife, Principal, BA, interestingly, and some others are. Within that space, first of all, we haven’t felt that kind of regulatory, external lawsuit-type pressure that others have had. I think it’s been a sensible market. It hasn’t changed very much. I would say that the pricing exercises that we were going through a year ago and what we’re doing today are very consistent. The same number of players. Ratings matter. Reputation matters. We have some old souls in this space. We don’t have a big Pension Risk Transfer team, but they’ve been around a long time. I think that’s important. They’re well trusted. They’ve been in the industry a long time before they came to us. There’s that, call it, reputation of the team and the corporate.

If we continue to do that, I don’t know if we’ll always be one in four as competition increases, but I think we’ll get our fair share of that. The returns are good. Honestly, there may be quarters where we just don’t write something and there’ll be others. I think the high watermark was fourth quarter of last year. I think we did maybe $2.25 billion roughly last year. I think we’re at sort of $750 million or something so far this year. I don’t think we’ll go from $2 billion to $4 billion in it anytime soon, but would I like to stay in this sort of range for this, at least for the near term and maybe grow a bit more from there? Absolutely.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: I think the competitive set’s been really consistent. Your best competitors are also your most rational competitors. You just don’t see stupid stuff in PRT, meaning these tend to be more established companies. It’s not that, you know, hey, someone hasn’t won a deal in three quarters, they’re going to go in aggressively. Sometimes we just let that deal go by the wayside, but at least we don’t see, we don’t see like stupid pricing. We’re like, how’s someone making money doing that? Which is good.

Unidentified speaker: I guess along the same line, for a while you guys were working towards better ratings for some of the agencies and so forth to get you into certain markets. Is that done at this point? Do you have access to all of the areas of the markets that you’d like to be involved in? Is there anything left to do there?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, I can’t say it constrains us, but it still pisses me off that we’re not—sorry, I’m allowed to say that. We think we’re a notch, we’re rated a notch lower than we should be. We think our clear peer group is one notch higher. All we can do is make our case to the rating agencies. They have to agree with us, and they have to go through their process. We run the business at the level we think we should be at, not where we’re being rated today. If you think about it, since we were last upgraded by a couple of the rating agencies, we’ve doubled our business. We’ve doubled the cash that comes off our block every year, and our sales capacity went from $3 billion to $15 billion.

You tell me, if there’s a stronger case for an upgrade, I’m not sure what it is, but I understand it. They have a process that they need to go through. Does it constrain us? I don’t think it constrains us.

Unidentified speaker: To echo that, as I kind of looked over the fence myself before coming in on April 1st, you know, when you look around, I don’t know that there’s another growth story like ours. I don’t know that there’s another positive flow story like ours. I don’t know if there’s a cleaner set of liabilities than ours as well. There really isn’t anything that would make somebody go, yeah, there’s some good stuff here, some gemstones here, but there’s a few, you know, a few dogs as well. That’s not the case. We will continue. We’re heading into rating agency season later this week, actually. We’ll bang that drum as hard as we dare.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: To be honest, if you said if we were upgraded tomorrow, would we double our sales plan or increase it by 20%? Not really. It would be most helpful probably in PRT.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, we took.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: We’d win a few more cases.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: There are instances where maybe we’ve been in a relative tie, but somebody who had a notch higher rating, they’re going to get that. Or maybe even had a slightly outside price, but yeah, they’ll take it. That’s understandable.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Really helpful. Next topic, alternative investments. I just wanted to touch on this in particular, the allocation to alternatives. On one hand, I know that the returns speak for themselves over a longer period of time. On the other hand, the volatility of earnings caused by having a higher allocation to alternatives relative to many of the companies I cover maybe undermines some of the potential unlock of value associated with becoming fee-based and more capital-light, right? How do you think about that trade-off and how should we expect that allocation to trend over time?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, it’s tricky. If you look at, I think, the Schedule BA assets, it’s a big number, but there’s a lot of credit residuals that sit on that. Our LP interests by 6% of the portfolio right now, roughly half of that, a little over half of that, is PE. That is simply a, yeah, it hasn’t been a good environment for realizations, right? I joked in an earlier meeting, John Gray’s excited, so I guess I’m excited. I hope we are starting to see a change. We’ll see more IPOs, more M&A activity. That would be a huge tailwind for us. We don’t plan on it. We run the business assuming that it could still be somewhat mediocre. That’s probably the biggest wild card. The rest of it is real estate.

If you look at the themes from Blackstone, it’s been warehouses, data centers, multifamily housing, these are good bets. It’s not the stuff that maybe people are more concerned about there, but you’ve got the same issue, assets need to trade for value to get realized. We go through a pretty laborious process every quarter where we have risk folks, we have folks outside of investments to try to get at, is the long-term assumption, which we target 10% on a huge broad pool of alts, if you will, is that still valid? We still feel that it is. We don’t have a vintage issue. We don’t have huge pockets within alts. Where it would probably benefit us the most, frankly, is not earnings. It would be capital, right? If you start doing tens versus sixes, that’s a positive contribution from a capital perspective.

Unidentified speaker: One quick follow-up I had. You guys break out the fixed income, and I know you have sort of this bucket that has the alts, and I think you mentioned credit residuals and some others. I just wanted to see if you could give a little bit more on, you know, what’s that portfolio? I think the longer-term assumption on that is close to a 10% to maybe, or somewhere, maybe not quite that high, but I think sometimes I get questions on it. I’m not always as well-versed in what’s in.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, we probably should, because if you take that of the $10 billion, it’s getting close to $10 billion, about $6 billion of it is debt-like. Yeah, and then I think maybe $3 billion is LPs, and then the residuals are probably another $1 billion. Yeah, we probably, a good takeaway, we probably could do a job of maybe helping understand that a fair amount of this is more predictable and might have, you know, there’s probably a bunch of stuff that’s in there that has maybe more of a 7% expectation that would maybe alleviate some of the concerns.

Unidentified speaker: Is that equity risk? Is it, you know, some kind of?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Not the way you think of equity risk, right? It’s a tranched-up loan, okay, that might have a blended return of, to Conor’s point, 6.5% or 7%. The equity residual piece could have a double-digit return associated with it, but it’s a smaller piece of that. Obviously, most of these things are amortizing, so it’s not a zero to 10 lottery at the end of six years or something like that.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Okay.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: It’s a good takeaway. I agree. We could provide more detail on what’s in there.

Unidentified speaker: Next, I wanted to get into some of the spread dynamics of your business as we think through that. We’ve heard, I think, some companies begin to talk more about, maybe the IRRs aren’t quite as good on new business as what we were getting during COVID or before COVID and so forth, and that there’s some spread compression out there associated with that. What are you seeing in your own business on that front?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: I’ll start. I would say retained business, we’ve seen some spread compression. It hasn’t been huge, but there’s been some spread compression. In our case, I think it’s been more than offset by the accretion we get from reinsurance. If you’re retaining every dollar, like if you’re owned by an asset manager, you’re not doing flow deals with your competitors, right? You’re keeping it all yourself. It’s also been offset by owned distribution margin because of some of the expense actions that we’ve taken. I think there’s a little bit of pressure at the core level, but we have some levers that perhaps some of our other competitors don’t have to offset that.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, I would add, we certainly are finding plenty of opportunity to write business at spreads that, again, we get to maintain on the IUL and the FIA because we have the ability to reprice the book every year. You can abuse it, you have to be a good partner and a good manager and a good customer manager. That gives us a lot of flexibility as well.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. Just to give you guys a heads up, I will open it up in a minute for questions. I’ll ask one more of my own, and then I’ll open it up to see if there’s any questions out there. Just to follow up on the spreads, I know there’s different dynamics out there. I think I can think of one company that maybe has called out market value adjustments. It’s something that’s kind of moving the crediting rates around a little bit. I think you all actually give probably the best disclosure around surrender fees and how that kind of influences things a little bit.

Is there any lagged nature to the crediting rate that we need to be aware of as we think through where you’re at today and sort of that trajectory to where you all have outlined you’ll get in your medium-term plan?

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: I’ll start. I don’t think so. If you go back to, we talked, just go back to the first quarter a little bit. Part of the conversation was, hey, your surrender income is done, and actually, so is your prepay income. I would view both of those as a positive, actually, right? I would rather retain the assets. I’d rather retain the book. It’s probably a little harder to get those assets again. On the business, yes, obviously view it as a make-whole provision, if you will. Our ability to take that and take the surrender charge, be made whole, and go write the business again tomorrow, that’s pretty strong for us. We feel pretty good there. Having said that, we got into the second quarter where we had a level of surrender fees more consistent with fourth quarter and third quarter of last year. They’d likely come down.

I would view that positively. I would like to have fewer surrenders. It’s just going to be something that’s going to move things around a little bit. I think in a quarter where it happens in isolation, and it’s expected, that’s probably fine. I think in the first quarter it happened alongside the prepay, alongside owned distribution who had invested more, alongside having a cash problem of having too much cash, which isn’t the worst cash problem to have, but there you go. We’ll see. I don’t think we’ll have this level. I wouldn’t project this level of surrender income for us for 2026 or 2025. Don’t ask me when. We might stay here for another three or four quarters, but beyond that, it’s hard to imagine we’ll stay quiet at that level. That’s okay. It’s just one level in this. We still have an expanding ROA journey.

We’ve been on that since the investor day a couple of years ago. That is an element. Taking our expense ratio from 60 to 50 this year, there’s a pretty good offset right there. By the way, we won’t stop at 50. We will continue to bring that down. I would like to bring it down at least a basis point every quarter from here.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: I would say if you go back and look at that five-year investor day target, which was not even two years ago, not quite two years ago, October of 2023, we said we’re going to increase AUM by 50%. We’re going to beat that handily. We said that we had upside from flow reinsurance. We’re already running ahead of that. Upside from owned distribution, we’re going to beat that number. Expenses, we’re going to obliterate that number in terms of progress on expense. Portfolio uplift, I think we will meet or beat that number from a spread perspective. Yeah, a little bit of spread compression in the core base spreads. I think we’ve more than offset from some of these other levers. If you go back to grow AUM by 50%, take spread from 110 to 133 to 155, I think we’re tracking really nicely on that.

The last one was ROE, and I think that’s moving in the right direction as well.

Unidentified speaker: Great. I’ll pass it to the audience. Is there anybody that’d like to ask one? All right.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: You have a couple.

Unidentified speaker: Who wants to go first?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: I’m going to go first.

Unidentified speaker: Please.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: I’m not the insurance expert in my group. I’m just here auditing this presentation. We do own names. Just a question about, you know, this idea that you’re going more asset-light, more fee-dependent. Given you’re not going to own those assets on the balance sheet, does that mean that you are more cyclical as a result of that because you’re more dependent on flow and fee generation on a year-by-year basis? Yeah, it’s great. It’s a great question. It would depend on where that dependency is. In owned distribution, the answer is no, you wouldn’t necessarily be any more or less cyclical, I guess, than you are today because that’s commission income, commission revenue that’s coming in through fees. Same thing for life insurance, middle market life insurance. Most of our margin there is admin fees. I’d give you the same answer, no.

Pure flow reinsurance, yes, appetite for flow reinsurance. I don’t know if I would call that cyclical. I think that’s going to be driven by a lot of things as to what drives flow reinsurance. The sidecar, the beauty of the sidecar, what differentiates it from traditional flow reinsurance is committed capital. It’s a $1 billion pot of capital. As long as we’re hitting our minimum return targets, we can take business, put it into the sidecar with a predetermined return for us as a carrier. I think you would say of the four levers, maybe one could make you a little more cyclical, but maybe not in the way that we’re thinking about it. If you give a different answer.

Unidentified speaker: That’s fair. That’s fair.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: You mentioned that there were in your competitors, not you, some bad assets or bad liabilities. Can you identify what are the bad assets and bad liabilities? From my group, from my limited knowledge of the insurance business, annuities is a bad business. It has a bad reputation, particularly from the fixed annuities business and some promises that were made that were overextended or a little too high for what they could actually achieve and ended in tears. I don’t think everyone’s gotten over that, but is that something that you have seen in other competitors or is that something that you have taken actions to prevent in your own business?

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: Let me be very careful here. What I would say is from the perspective of understanding a liability book, the hardest part to understand or predict the emergence of really would be the VA book, which we don’t have. We don’t have any VAs. I think variable annuities, yeah. I think within that space, there are disparate stories, but the products became more and more complicated and there were really sort of two theses, one of which I think hasn’t held out and one has. I think there was the, will consumers really take advantage of all the bells and whistles? I think that’s not really the case. There might be a few people on the planet who know how to do that, but the actual consumer behavior has been pretty much exactly what was expected.

I think they’ve just proven to be very expensive to hedge and very difficult to hedge, and that’s just been the challenge. Therefore, across the, I would say, the life and annuity industry, the annuity industry, those entities that are heavy variable annuity just have a, it’s a tougher valuation. It’s viewed as, let’s call them capital heavy, if you will. I think those that are less so enjoy better, and then you get into more fees and more asset management and all those things that move away from that.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, and I would just say in general, there aren’t a lot of critics of fixed annuities. I mean, honestly, even the government and the Department of Labor loves income annuities in particular. Where annuities get a bad rap or you get the, you know, Suze Orman, I would never own an annuity or whatever, generally directed at variable annuities as to where their IRR is, and it’s usually, it’s always about expense, and I’m not here to defend or assail whether variable annuities are a good product, but generally fixed annuities are not in that category. They’re pretty straightforward in terms of the value proposition. Actually, income annuities, you know, even the Department of Labor through three or four different administrations are big fans that, you know, people should be annuitizing some portion of their retirement assets.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: You mentioned that you could change the terms of contracts and things. Isn’t that something reputationally that the industry has suffered from? You have guaranteed 5%, well, maybe not 5%, or is this not really enforceable because Sally was named a different name than you thought they should be, that kind of thing.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, the quick answer is 100% if it’s abused. It’s always disclosed, like you can’t buy one of these contracts without it being disclosed in nine different places that those terms can change every year, and you need a business rationale to change them. Also, keep in mind, we’re not talking about like, oh, you thought you were going to get nine and now you’re going to get zero, right? It might be, hey, you thought your S&P return was capped at nine and this year it’s eight and a half or eight because there’s not enough option budget to buy you that, but in exchange for that, you’ve got a floor for zero. It’s not generally a source of angry consumers calling in.

If you were to try to abuse that, if you did the teaser rate and dropped it down to five, your distributors would eat you alive and you’d get thrown out that platform pretty quickly. I don’t walk around feeling like that’s an industry reputational thing.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: To that end, I’m assuming Fixed Indexed Annuities have to be hedged because you give them downside protection in those. Is that something that is at risk in terms of, you know, volumes or volatility? Also, just generally with interest rates falling, is that a risk for the business in terms of getting to the types of returns you need to?

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Yeah, great question. If you think about what we’re doing, we’re buying a collared option on the investor’s behalf. A traditional fixed annuity, you give us $100,000, we say you’re tied up for five years, we’re paying 5% tax deferred, five years from now we’re going to give you your money back. Index annuity, same drill. Instead of you paying 5% in cash, we’re going to take that 5% and we’re going to go buy a collared option on your behalf with a floor of zero, a participation in the S&P capped at 8.5%. I’m making it up right now. I don’t know what it would be today. I should know that. The answer is no.

We’re doing for you what you can’t do on your, what you could do on your own if you had a margin account and you were, you know, sophisticated enough to do options, you could put $95,000 in a bond portfolio and take $5,000 and buy a collared custom option. We’re doing it for you in a contract, and because it’s an annuity contract, you get tax deferral. It’s pretty straightforward from a hedging perspective, very different than what Conor mentioned with a variable annuity where you’re trying to both dynamically and statically hedge the S&P 500. That’s going to be at the point of sale. In other words, once we get premiums in, we get it invested, we don’t really care what happened to interest rates. If they come down, a new contract wouldn’t have a cap at 9%, it might have a cap at 7%.

The policyholder can either decide they’d rather do that than be in a money market at 2% or not. It depends on what the alternative returns are. We killed it when money market rates were 20 basis points and we were offering 2.5%. The actual, the relative extra value was greater than it is today. We like a steep yield curve because our competition is savings accounts and CDs. The fact that the industry’s turned it with an inverted yield curve that then became flat, that then became slightly steeped, a steepening yield curve would actually be really good for us.

Unidentified speaker: All right. I think I have to take the rest of the questions offline. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to the audience too.

Chris Blunt, CEO, F&G Annuities & Life: Awesome.

Conor Murphy, CFO, F&G Annuities & Life: Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.