Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Great-West Lifeco management team, I'd like to welcome you here to our 2023 Investor Day. My name is David Simmonds. I'm the Chief Communications and Sustainability Officer here at Great-West Lifeco. As we begin our session, I'd like to take a moment to recognize that we're gathered in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This gathering place is now home to many diverse First Nation, Inuit, and Métis people. We acknowledge the Dish With One Spoon covenant, a treaty whose spirit is one based in collective stewardship and sharing of land and resources, and one which extends to all nations now living in present-day Toronto. We're grateful to be gathered here.
Ahead of today's formal presentations, I'd like to remind participants in the room that the session will be webcast and archived on our website. During the Q&A, if you'd like to ask questions, we will have microphones in the room. Just signal us with your hand, and we'll ask that you say your name, where you're from, and then ask your question. Finally, I'd like you to join me in turning your cell phones off or putting them on mute for the duration of the conference. In our remarks today, we may make statements containing forward-looking information or non-IFRS financial measures. Please refer to the cautionary notes on the screen behind me, which can also be found in the Lifeco annual report on our website.
I'd now like to turn the session over to Paul Mahon, President and CEO, Great-West Lifeco, to begin the conference.
Thank you, David. Some of you may have noticed I was hobbling up on the stage. I'd love to tell you it happened when I was kickboxing, but it did not. It occurred at my son's wedding on Saturday night as I was running for the dance floor and decided to trip, so I missed that dance. In any event, I'm so glad to be here. It's fantastic that we're here in person, so good morning to everyone. You know, the last time we held a session like this, it was in the midst of COVID, so we did it fully virtually. At the time, you know, it was one of those things that we did for safety. It is so good to have people here in place today in the room making connections.
I think human connections are so important, so we welcome all of you. We also welcome all who are attending virtually. At our last investor day, we focused on how we were reshaping Empower in the United States. We had just announced two transactions, two large transactions, the Personal Capital and MassMutual acquisitions. We also unveiled medium-term financial objectives for the first time at that conference. Those objectives included EPS growth, return on equity, and strong and stable dividends. We actually expressed, at the time, confidence in meeting those objectives, and we have done so since then, driven by disciplined execution of our strategies. We've continued to reshape our business through M&A and organic investments, with a focus on positioning our companies to deliver strong long-term performance. As you can see from the agenda, following my, and if we can move to the agenda.
Perfect, thank you. As you can see from the agenda, following my remarks, Garry MacNicholas will provide an update on financial performance, Raman Srivastava will provide an update on investment and asset management. We will then take questions related to our three presentations before we take a short break. Following the break, our segment leaders, Jeff Macoun, David Harney, and Ed Murphy, will lead updates on their business strategies with a primary focus on wealth management growth strategies. Joining Jeff will be Fabrice Morin, who is responsible for wealth management in our Canadian segment, and joining Ed will be Carol Waddell, who's responsible for Empower Personal Wealth. We will close the morning with a second Q&A session, with plans to wrap up shortly after noon, when lunch will be available. Let's get on with the presentation content.
As you know, we've been delivering medium-term performance in line with our objectives, and we're confident that these are the right objectives going forward. In our presentations today, we will focus on two main themes. The first, how we've been repositioning our portfolio to drive strong and sustained performance for our stakeholders. Second, how we are executing on clear strategies in our operating segments to meet customers' evolving wealth management needs, backed by advice-centered solutions and access to strong asset management. Our work at the portfolio level has been guided by a set of capital allocation priorities, establishing and extending market leadership positions that give us the scale and reach to serve a broad range of customer needs, supported by strong brands.
Increasing our focus in areas that present the greatest opportunity for capital-light growth and acquiring and investing in capabilities needed to serve the evolving wealth management needs of customers in the markets where we operate. You'll see over the course of the morning, these strategies build off of our existing market positions by leveraging the relationships we've established with customers and advisors, and using digitally enabled advice to meet their changing and often underserved needs. Through our focused strategic planning and disciplined execution, we've positioned the company for its next phase of growth. Over the last five years, we've significantly repositioned our portfolio to deliver against our strategy and growth ambitions. On the right-hand chart, you can see the change in the mix of base earnings by segment, with highlights the impact of M&A and organic growth.
In the next few minutes, I'll touch on specific actions we've taken across the business segments aligned with our capital allocation priorities. These actions include acquisitions that enabled both scale and reach in the markets where we see consolidation and organic growth opportunities, acquisitions that focused on adding strategic capabilities that will support medium and long-term growth, and dispositions and other actions that have unlocked value and allowed us to focus on leadership and growth opportunities. Looking back, Lifeco was able to build scale and leadership in individual insurance, group benefits, and retirement as we participated in consolidation of the Canadian insurance industry. In a similar fashion, we achieved scale and leadership in Ireland through the acquisition of Irish Life. More recently, we've deployed significant capital in the U.S. to build scale and leadership in the consolidating U.S. retirement market.
These leadership positions also represent the foundation for what we see as significant wealth management organic growth opportunities. This includes both opportunities to provide personal wealth management solutions to the millions of customers we serve through the workplace, plus opportunities to better serve independent advisors and their clients' wealth management needs. The question you might be asking is, why personal wealth management and why now? Garry will talk about the economics and capital requirements of the wealth business and how they offer both strong growth potential and attractive diversification across our portfolio. Most importantly, we are uniquely well-positioned to serve the evolving and, in many cases, underserved wealth management needs of existing and potential customers across our businesses. This slide illustrates how our net earnings changed over the last 5 years.
While it's higher growth than our base earnings, we believe base earnings is a better indicator of business growth and value creation. One of the fundamental beliefs of our company is the value of advice in helping customers achieve their financial goals and ambitions. Research shows that households that stayed on track with the help of an advisor ended up more than two times better off than those without an advisor. That's why, for decades, we've invested in advisor development as well as technology and infrastructure to support the important work that advisors do. At the same time, we face the reality of an aging population who are seeking advice and solutions for their future, but with most pre-retirees worried about their preparedness for retirement.
We understand these challenges and are increasingly focused on strategies that can deliver greater access to advice and solutions supported by technology. Turning to our portfolio repositioning by segment, our Canadian business remains our largest, with diversified leadership positions and strong fundamentals. In 2020, we created greater focus in Canada with the amalgamation of our 3 historic brands into a single company with a new brand identity of Canada Life. This was an important value unlock as we look to increasingly serve customers with digitally enabled solutions. We also took action to strengthen our wealth management channels' access to asset management solutions through the sale of our Canadian asset manager, GLC, to Mackenzie Financial. Our strategic partnership with Mackenzie provides for more diversified and competitive asset management solutions to support our channels.
In the last 3 months, we've announced two wealth management acquisitions in Canada that provide both scale and capabilities to support our wealth management growth ambitions. Our Canadian president, Jeff Macoun and Fabrice Morin, will speak more to these actions and our wealth vision immediately after the break. In Europe, we have 3 businesses across the U.K., Ireland, and Germany. Our business model in each country recognizes our regional strengths and the unique dynamics in each of the markets they operate in. In the U.K., where we have notable strengths in providing retirement income solutions, we added scale and extended our capabilities with the 2018 acquisition of Retirement Advantage. Of note, Retirement Advantage positioned us with an equity release mortgage offering, allowing our U.K. customers to fund their retirement by unlocking value in their homes.
Our 2013 acquisition of Irish Life positioned us as a leader across the insurance and pension markets in Ireland. As a leader, Irish Life has worked hard to create an increasingly digitized and connected customer experience. Irish Life has also built up its position in the health market through organic and acquisition growth. More recently, the Irish Life team have been developing and launching strategies where they can participate in the growing and underserved wealth management market in Ireland. David Harney, our president in Europe, will provide more detail on three strategies where Irish Life is working to reach and serve more customers' wealth management needs in Ireland. In the U.S., we've significantly repositioned our portfolio over the last five years with a focus on areas where we can build leadership positions with both scale advantage and organic growth opportunities....
The 2019 divestiture of our individual insurance business recognized that we were not well positioned to grow, and the capital backing those businesses could be deployed in more value-creating ways. While the capital it freed up allowed us to return CAD 2 billion to shareholders through the 2019 substantial issuer bid, it also allowed our management team to focus their efforts on the retirement market that was expected to consolidate. Most recently, we announced the sale of Putnam Investments to Franklin Templeton in a deal that positions Putnam, the Putnam team, I should say, and customer base, as part of a leading and diversified asset management firm. It also unlocks the value of Putnam and gives us an at-scale asset manager that will help drive value for our clients and shareholders through an asset management services partnership.
Since launching Empower in 2014, we've shared lots of insight into the steps we've taken through M&A and performance-fueled organic investments to build our leadership position in the retirement market. The three retirement acquisitions noted here each offered scale benefits, including expense and revenue synergies. More importantly, the growth has positioned Empower with more than 18 million plan participant relationships, many who are representative of the stats we shared earlier regarding retirement readiness and the need for personal advice and solutions. This is one of the significant growth opportunities at Lifeco. As you'll hear from Ed Murphy, our CEO for Empower, and Carol Waddell, who heads our Empower Personal Wealth, we have the client base and the capabilities to drive significant wealth management growth by serving the personal wealth needs of Empower participants. 2023 has been a big year for us.
We were one of the first insurers across the world to report under the new IFRS 17 insurance contract accounting standard. We negotiated and announced a number of strategic transactions that will reposition our portfolio and prepare us for our next phase of growth. We've done all this while celebrating Canada Life's 175th anniversary. In the first quarter, we veiled our three value drivers for the company: workplace solutions, wealth and asset management, and insurance and risk solutions. These value drivers provide investors with greater clarity on our strategy and a clear picture of our business focus in each segment. Our workplace solutions and our insurance and risk solutions businesses are well positioned and will continue to drive significant value for our company and investors. In wealth and asset management, we have significant opportunity to drive growth and value.
Just as importantly, this represents an important opportunity for our operating companies to respond to the changing and often unmet wealth management needs of people across our markets. As we think about business growth, we know our long-term success only works if we're creating sustainable value for all stakeholders. That is why we remain focused on building stronger, more inclusive, and financially secure futures. While creating value for our customers and shareholders remains our core focus, we have a clear understanding of our responsibility to a broader range of stakeholders. That's why we're investing in future generations with a comprehensive ESG strategy, including significant investments in renewable energy infrastructure. We know that our company must reflect the communities it serves. This is a business imperative to ensure we remain relevant in an evolving world with an evolving customer base.
We also have a social imperative to address the systemic exclusion in our societies of people because of gender, race, sexual orientation, or identity. We also recognize that we need to take action together with other stakeholders to address the causes and impacts of climate change. These aren't actions that we think about as separate or apart from the business, but rather, they're increasingly a part of how we do business each and every day. As we're getting underway this morning, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us. We're excited to share with you the opportunities we see ahead to grow our personal wealth businesses and drive value for customers and shareholders, I'm looking forward to your questions and the discussions that we'll have.
With that, I'm going to invite Garry MacNicholas to come to the podium to provide a financial overview for us. Garry?
Not a good day to trip up the boss. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. It's great to see so many people actually live in person, and some of you I'm actually meeting for the first time, even though we've met by video, and others seeing for the first time in years. What a few years it has been. Obviously, there's been a global pandemic, a devastating war, rapid inflation, and all this along with this is soaring interest rates, a lot of market volatility. Not to mention, for some of us in the room, it was a particularly challenging, a major accounting regime change as well. Through this turmoil, though, we have actually made excellent progress.
We've been delivering on our medium-term financial objectives that we first set out at a virtual investor day two years ago now, at our previous one, focused on Empower and our targets. We've remained committed to these objectives through the transition to IFRS 17 and continue to be confident in our ability to deliver against them. This year, along with the accounting transition, we introduced value drivers, that's a framework to describe our strategies at a Lifeco portfolio level, strategies that go across our operating segments. I'll touch on these and the role that they play in the portfolio a little later. In keeping with the theme today, we'll focus a little more on the wealth and asset management value driver.
As Paul described, and our segment presidents will elaborate later on, we've seen growth in this area achieve both organically and through M&A, and we expect that growth to continue, and which will shift our portfolio over time as wealth and asset management becomes a larger and larger contributor to Lifeco overall. This slide illustrates Lifeco's performance over the last five years. Over this time period, Lifeco has delivered annualized base earnings per share growth of just under 9%. This has been supported in a number of ways, a number of areas. First, organic growth. There's very solid organic growth across all the segments by acquisitions that drive leadership positions in key areas, by divestitures of non-core businesses to simplify and focus our operations, and by investments in business extensions and in transformations to improve efficiencies.
All this has been delivered against the backdrop of a very challenging macro environment. In addition to the performance on the earnings per share, and it's through our resilient business, we've had a very steady and progressive increase in our dividends, with compound annual dividend growth of 6% during this period. We also recognize that we've deployed significant capital recently, and there's work to be done to continue to drive growth and improve the ROEs from that base. That's a lot of what we're here to talk about today, is how we're going to drive that growth going forward. On this next slide, we set out a reminder of our medium-term financial objectives.
On average, over the medium term, Lifeco is striving to grow base earnings per share by at least 8%-10% per annum. This objective is supported by organic growth and extension investments in our market-leading Canadian, U.S., and European franchises. It's also supported by harvesting the benefits of expense and revenue synergies from recent acquisitions, and it will be supported by making further strategic capital investments as opportunities arise. Our base ROE objective is now 16%-17%, reflecting the increase on transition to IFRS 17. Strong and stable returns for our diversified portfolio and an increasing focus on more capital-light businesses, like wealth and asset management, will help us deliver against this objective. Base ROE at 15.7% was just under our target range on an IFRS 17 basis in 2022.
As noted earlier, we've increased our base ROE target, and we announced this earlier this year, by 2% to reflect the transition to IFRS 17. We're just showing the 1-year figure here against that updated target, since there are no applicable IFRS 17 figures going back for the prior years. Our target dividend payout ratio is 45%-55% of base earnings. The highly cash generative nature of our businesses supports a progressive dividend policy aligned with expected earnings growth. We are a little above our target dividend payout ratio range currently, and although we are comfortable with that, we are planning and will work towards getting back into our range over time.
We remain confident in our ability to achieve these medium-term objectives with strong and consistent performance, supported by Lifeco's repositioned portfolio and a focus on our three value drivers. As you saw in our first quarter results presentation, we've been enhancing our reporting and disclosures to provide greater clarity and transparency on how we're executing against our strategies and what our growth aspirations are across the company. One enhancement was framing the Lifeco strategy at a Lifeco level, strategies that cut across our operating segments. We did this by introducing the three key value drivers: Workplace Solutions, Wealth and Asset Management, and Insurance and Risk Solutions. This grid sets out at a high level how the major business units in each segment align with these value drivers.
This is designed to provide a better view at the Lifeco level of the scope, scale, and growth opportunities in each of these areas. One specific call-out here, I know this is a little different than some of our peers, is our workplace category includes workplace retirement businesses such as Empower Defined Contribution and Group Retirement in Canada and Europe. Today, our focus is on the wealth and asset management value driver and the significant opportunity it presents for the company. Before drilling down further, I've set out here how our value drivers play complementary roles in the portfolio, the chart shows the relative contribution of each across four key attributes, while also highlighting the benefits of diversification.
Workplace Solutions, which includes Empower and our group businesses, both Life and Health and the Retirement businesses in Canada and Europe, it checks all the boxes. It's highly cash generative. It's generally capital light, it delivers steady returns, and it has good organic growth potential, given first, our leadership positions in the markets that we operate in, and an opportunity to extend plan participant relationships and into lifetime customer relationships. Second, go on to the right-hand side, we see insurance and risk solutions, which includes the insurance and annuities in Canada and Europe, as well as our reinsurance business. Typically, these are more capital-intensive businesses, but deliver stable returns and, again, are cash generative. While we expect growth in these areas, we would be targeting lower growth here, overall for this value driver than we would in the other areas.
We are generally in more mature markets, we continue to prioritize pricing discipline to ensure that we're getting the appropriate risk-return trade-off in these businesses. I should also note here, when I'm referring to capital light and capital intensity, the context is primarily the regulatory capital required to support organic growth. In a more capital-intensive business, the incremental growth that you achieve requires proportionate regulatory capital, whereas for our capital lighter businesses, the organic growth requires little, if any, additional regulatory capital. As my colleagues will outline today, the wealth and asset management is becoming an increasingly important growth driver in the Lifeco portfolio. While the asset-based fees will add sensitivity market levels, and you'll see that reflected on the chart, the growth here, again, tends to be very capital light.
With the newly informed Empower Personal Wealth in the U.S. and the recent acquisitions to drive scale and reach in the wealth space in both Canada and Europe, we are targeting greater growth in this area. There's a significant opportunity for wealth and asset management to become an increasingly large contributor to the Lifeco growth story overall. This next chart showcases the strong growth that we've seen in assets under administration across our wealth and asset management businesses over the last five years. We've seen solid performances across each of the segments, with organic growth and acquisitions contributing overall to a compound growth rate of 12%, and assets reaching CAD 218 billion at the end of 2022.
Net flows in 2022 totaled CAD 22 billion, a lot of twenty-twos in there, with strong growth at Empower, including about $8 billion with the retail block acquired from Prudential. Canada's net flows were impacted by a challenging year in the markets, although these results are not out of line in general with how the industry in Canada experienced flows last year. We are taking action, including recent investments, to turn this around in Canada, you'll hear more about that later in the session. Europe continued to see steady net inflows as it has for a number of years. This slide shows wealth and asset management's contribution to 2022 base earnings, as well as how that splits out by reporting segment.
Note, we've excluded Putnam from these charts, and that's really to provide a more clear picture of the go-forward businesses and the mix. On the left, wealth and asset management, you'll see it's currently the smallest contributor to the Lifeco base earnings at about 15%. While it's long been an important part of our more mature businesses, like in Canada and Ireland, where we have leading franchises, you know, across the various business lines, it's only a more recent extension in the U.S., and of course, it does not come into play in the capital and risk solution segment at all. On the right, you can see the wealth and asset management base earnings by segment. Here, Canada and Europe, again, these are with their more mature positions, these are the larger contributors at the Lifeco level.
With outsized growth, though, being targeted in the U.S. segment as we continue to extend plan participant relationships and grow Personal Wealth and Empower. Carol will be talking more about that later on. Just lastly here, final slide. This section will outline how we'd expect the business mix by value driver to evolve over the next few years, as given the different growth rates we're targeting from each of the value drivers. We'd expect the mix of base earnings to shift noticeably over this period. We are targeting, as I mentioned earlier, we're targeting lower growth overall in the insurance and risk solutions businesses, which will result in each share of the mix declining over time.
On the other hand, we're targeting much higher growth in wealth and asset management, looking to at least double earnings in base earnings in this area by 2027 to over CAD 1 billion. That would then represent somewhere in the region of 20% of Lifeco's total, depending, of course, on how all the other growth rates play out. Yes, we're certainly looking for wealth and asset management to be a key driver for Lifeco. My colleagues are here to tell you more about how we're going to be going about doing just that. Now I'll turn the podium over to Raman Srivastava for an update on asset management. Raman?
Good morning, everyone. I thought I let Garry off the hook. I think he just used my single name, first name, but he went with the last name, so well done. Well done. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us here, and I'll echo Garry and Paul's comments. Great to see everyone in person. I'm happy to talk to you a little bit about asset management. I mean, to say that we've been busy in asset management over the past number of years, I think is an understatement. I think we've made a lot of progress, and excited to share with you how we've gone about doing that. The way I describe our work, I guess, over the past few years in asset management, I describe it as a bit of a journey....
The journey has really been to try and establish leadership positions across our asset management companies in the areas in which we invest. Why do we do that? We do that because we want to try and establish strong investment performance across a breadth of capabilities, different regions, in support of not only our insurance general account, but also, to provide solutions for all of our clients. As we've traveled along this journey, we've done a couple things. You know, one of the things we've done is we've established some key strategic partnerships. The reason we've established these key partnerships, you know, one of the reasons might be to establish scale. There are certain markets where we felt we've been needed to establish scale in order to provide, you know, strong investment capabilities.
've established some of these partnerships to access parts of the market, for example, in the growing alternatives market, where we didn't have existing in-house capabilities. Again, what this does is it gives us opportunities to add. It might be increased yield, it might be better returns, or it might be diversification amongst or against our existing strategies that we currently have in-house. If you think about asset management, we believe it's a value driver in and of itself. But if you think about the value drivers that Paul and Garry mentioned in their comments, whether it be workplace solutions or insurance solutions, of course, asset management also supports those, and of course, wealth as well, which is the main focus of today's discussion
What I thought I would do over the course of the next 10 to 15 minutes is really 3 things. One is I'd like to just take you through the journey that we've been on and what we've been doing in order to get to where we are today and where we currently sit today at Lifeco with respect to asset management. I'll give you a bit of a lay of the land as to how we look today. What does asset management look like today at Great-West Lifeco? Then because today we are focused on wealth management, let me give you a few examples of how we're actually using some of our investment capabilities in solutions across our wealth shelf today, and maybe a bit of a flavor of where we might be going.
It is nice to do this in person. We have these quarterly analyst calls, and on these quarterly analyst calls, you know, we get these questions, and often the questions are voices in the air. It's actually nice to be able to put faces to the voices that we hear, and I look forward to doing that later on. One of the things that we often get questions on, not every meeting, but often during the analyst meetings, we get a question on asset management. You know, what's your strategy with respect to asset management? What are you doing in asset management?
I think one of the messages that we've been consistent on is we feel that in certain areas, one of the ways to unlock value is to achieve scale in certain markets, where we participate in asset management. What have we done? In 2020, we vended in GLC, which is a Canadian asset manager, into Mackenzie. Mackenzie is one of the largest asset managers in Canada. They invest across a breadth of capabilities, and what this has done is it allowed Canada Life to access an at-scale manager within the domestic region. Similarly, and very recently in the U.S., we announced a transaction where we sold or an agreement to sell Putnam Investments into Franklin Templeton. Now, this does, we believe, 2 things for us.
One is it unlocks value at Putnam via scale transaction. The second thing it does is it allows us to access the capabilities that Franklin Templeton has as one of the leading asset managers globally. While we've been doing this and looking to achieve scale in certain of the markets, we've also been investing in our asset managers, which currently have leading positions in either the regions at which they operate or the types of strategies in which they operate, and those are listed on the right-hand side of the slide here. Let me give you some examples. Irish Life Investment Managers, or ILIM, as it's noted here on the board, they are the leader in Ireland with respect to life insurance and pension asset management.
They have well over EUR 100 billion in assets under management. Another example of a leading asset manager is GWL Realty Advisors, or GWLRA. GWLRA is a Canadian-based direct real estate investment company, close to $20 billion in AUM, providing solutions for us and our clients across Canada, primarily Canada. Another example which is listed on the screen would be PanAgora. PanAgora is a leading quantitative investment manager. They provide solutions in quantitative equity, multi-asset solutions. They're a global leader in quantitative investing, close to EUR 60 billion in assets under management. We've been really doing two things.
We've been looking for scale in markets, in traditional asset management markets, where we believe we needed scale in order to provide the right solutions to our clients, and then we've been building on the leadership positions we currently have within our asset managers listed here. The other thing we've been recognizing in the world of asset management is where we can grow, and we need to expand and continue to grow the asset management capabilities that we have either controlled in-house or that we can access via our strategic partners. One of the things we've been doing over the past few years is we've been accessing the alternatives market, which is a growing market, through strategic partnerships with some key partners. Some examples.
In 2020, we established a partnership through minority equity interest in Northleaf Capital. Northleaf is a leading global private markets firm. They have roughly $30 billion in assets under management, and they operate in the mid-market space within the private investing world, specifically three main verticals: private credit, private equity, and infrastructure equity. More recently, in 2021, we entered into a strategic relationship and partnership with Sagard. Sagard Holdings is also a multi-asset in alternative investment manager. They also invest in the mid-market, more non-sponsor, through a number of verticals, including venture capital, private credit, and some niche areas such as U.S. real estate and healthcare royalties, to name a few.
More recently, through our transaction with Franklin Templeton, Franklin's been investing quite heavily in their alternative investment managers, and we believe this is just another strategic partner for us to have building blocks that we can use to provide comprehensive investment solutions across the board to all of our clients. If you think about what we've been on in this journey to expand our alternative investment management capabilities, we've, in some cases, achieved them via, you know, minority positions or strategic partnerships with outside partners, and those complement very well what we've been doing internally. We have internally capabilities in real estate in Canada, in Europe. We have internal capabilities in the private markets with respect to senior private debt, commercial mortgage lending, et cetera.
We believe a comprehensive platform with respect to private markets and alternative assets. If you step back and think about it, you know, where have we... That's where we've been. These are some of the things we've been doing to get to where we are today, and the slide here shows you a snapshot of where we are today within asset management at Lifeco. And I, you know, I call out three things here. One is on the left-hand side, you can see that we have an at-scale general account. We have a general account which has over CAD 225 billion of assets. You can see it's got significant assets, not just in Canada, but in the U.S., as well as in Europe and reinsurance.
What this allows us to do, given the size of this general account, is to get strong access to not just the public markets, but also, a large presence in the private markets, whether it be the private senior debt market, commercial mortgage lending, et cetera. If you look at what we've been doing in terms of investing in our at scale or leadership positions in asset management that I was mentioning earlier, in aggregate, where we have majority-held asset management companies, this is a large capability as well. In aggregate, over CAD 300 billion of assets under management. Again, different specific asset classes that or strategies that these managers employ in very specific regions and quite complementary.
What we've done then is we've complemented both our insurance general account and our majority-held asset management positions with strategic partnerships across a number of different partners, which I was mentioning earlier. When you step back and look at it, I think of it as, you know, really quite exciting. We have a large at-scale general account. We have a collection of asset managers, which are providing solutions to clients, increasingly, not only in our wealth channels, but other channels. Then we've complemented them with minority positions, to fully offer the full suite of investment management and asset management capabilities.
With that, let me give you a little bit of a taste as to how we've been using these asset management, investment management capabilities in our product suite, with a particular focus on wealth, because today we're here to talk about wealth. Let me give you a few examples. I won't go through all the examples listed on the page, but I'll highlight a couple. The first I'd like to highlight is ILIM, which is the top one there. ILIM is again one of Ireland's leading asset managers, strong presence on the Irish Life shelf, and one of the innovative products that we developed at ILIM is a product called Multi-Asset Portfolio Solutions, or MAPS.
We, you know, we use a lot of acronyms here, MAPS is the acronym we use for this particular product. This has been a tremendous success in the Irish market. It's specific strategies which target particular risk profiles, depending on the client need and portfolio construction desire. That's one example of an asset manager providing an innovative solution within a domestic market. Another example I'll highlight is Great-West Life Realty Advisors. Again, Great-West Life Realty Advisors, Canadian real estate manager, long-standing presence in the market, and offers a direct real estate product in Canada and has been a long-standing offering, one of the largest real estate funds in Canada for Canada Life, serving both our group and individual clients.
Another example, a more recent example, is the one second from the bottom there, which is products that we've stood up as part of our multi-asset solutions within Canada Life, which have now been able to use, as building blocks, a private credit strategy run by Northleaf and a real estate strategy in the U.S. run via Sagard. To me, this is actually quite exciting.
If you think about it, these are non-traditional or alternative strategies in the private markets, which are now new building blocks to provide, you know, as we think about providing solutions for different customers and clients across Canada, in this example, these are new strategies that, say, 10 years ago, we didn't have as building blocks within the product suite or capability set that we now do to provide more comprehensive solutions. I think this is a, we hope, a taste of things to come, because as we broaden our asset capabilities, we think we should be able to provide a lot more in terms of customer solutions across the broad product suite.
Just to wrap up, and recap, we have been aiming over the number of years to establish leading asset management positions, and in some cases, in our traditional asset managers, achieving that via scale and transactions that provide that scale.
... we have grown our asset management capabilities via strategic partnerships, in particular, to access parts of the alternatives markets where we, you know, look to continue to expand what we're able to do. We provide solutions across the board, you know, across all of our value drivers, but in particular, I'm really excited about the opportunities within the wealth channel to utilize these investments as we look ahead. So I appreciate the time and attention that you've all given, and I think what we're gonna do now is transition to a Q&A session. I will invite Paul and Garry back up on the stage, and happy to take your questions.
Well done. Thanks.
I'll go here.
Yeah.
When we were getting organized for the day, we had to decide whether we were gonna leave it to a single Q&A at the end of the day, or whether we kind of break it up a bit, and we figured everybody might need a little personal time and break at some point. Might be a good opportunity to position some questions, Q&A now. Having said that, I suspect, you know, as we get through the day and as we go through the various cycles through the Canadian operations, the U.S. operations, and the European, things will come together a bit more. I think the you know, how we're playing asset management in the context of wealth management will become a bit more clear when you have more detail on that.
We thought it would be good to take a bit of a pulse check now and take questions relative to any of the portfolio repositioning we've been doing, any of the financials that Garry shared, and as well, a bit of the asset management background, 'cause there has been a lot going on in asset management. With that, we have some microphones in the room and potential questions. Just a reminder, if you could, your name and where you're from, and hopefully where you're from is more business as opposed to the town you were born in. Whichever feels right to you.
Good morning. Meny Grauman
Meny
Scotiabank. Garry, on slide 23, you're showing how you're targeting higher growth from wealth and asset management out to 2027. The first question is just, obviously, there's a market and rate environment over those years. What are you assuming from a macro perspective from market and the rate environment as you get to those numbers in 2027?
Sure. Generally, I call it, sometimes you refer to as a happy path, a relatively benign market environment, fairly steady growth in equities, or probably price movements in the sort of, you know, 5-6% range, with a couple of % extra for dividends. You get some equity, there will be some underlying equity growth there. Nothing spectacular. I think interest rates, we generally assume relatively level, there's it's not gonna be a huge driver, the interest rate movement in that business. It is, the market driving underneath it is that in that sort of 6% price growth range.
Yeah. I think one of the challenges right now as you're trying to forecast growth, is we've gone through such a period of volatility. When you think about 2022, which was an unbelievable period for us to actually kind of show how IFRS 17, you know, the transition will play out, right? With this movement in interest rates and the volatility in equity markets. You know, for the purposes of trying to forecast going forward or have a view going forward on what the, what the potential is, you've got to pick something that's relatively stable. Having said that, our job then is to manage within unstable environments, 'cause that's what we're paid to do.
It's a good segue in terms of instability. Question about the volatility of earnings going forward. I mean, you highlighted, obviously, that, you know, the wealth and asset management business has a more volatile earnings structure than the other key value drivers that you have. As that growth rate ramps up on the wealth and asset management business, do you expect... Should investors be prepared for more earnings volatility from Great-West Life over the next five years?
Yeah, I'll, I can take a start, Paul, on, that.
Yep.
Point out a couple of things. First off, as you can see from that chart, it's not up there now, but the chart would have been a move- And the Lifeco portfolio over that period, it's moving from a, say, a 15% on wealth and asset management to a 20%. It's not a 15 to an 80 or something major like that. It's not, it's not gonna have a dramatic difference in the overall volatility. That it's not gonna move it that much. The other thing I'd like to point out, and I think you'll see it when we get into the Empower section, as one example, is that the source of fees for the wealth and asset management business is not all asset related.
I called that out because, obviously, asset-based fees are one aspect of the wealth businesses for sure, and that will have some impact, but there are other sources of fee revenues in our various businesses. So you'll get a mix of different types of fees coming in. Yeah, it'll be a higher percentage. There will be a little more of that asset market level sensitivity on the fees, and we'll call that out as we have done quarter to quarter. As Paul said earlier, our job is to manage through the various market cycles. There'll be some years where you're winning a bit on that, and some years. I think '21 and '22 are really good examples of winning a bit and then losing a bit.
A bit.
A bit.
A bit, yeah.
It will move around, but, again, there's not a dramatic shift in the overall level at Lifeco for volatility.
Yeah, it's, you know, as Garry MacNicholas said, we would expect a modest increase in volatility, but the trade-off there is, you know, can we drive more growth? At the end of the day, it's about our business and our customers and where are their unmet needs, and where do we have strengths and capabilities to drive value creation for them and ultimately for our shareholders. You know, a bit more volatility relative to meeting those fundamental unmet needs, we think is an opportunity worth going after.
Thank you.
It's Tom MacKinnon, BMO Capital Markets. This presentation seems to be about value drivers, but I think everybody kind of looks at the company as a series of segments. I'm sure you manage the business that way. Are you trying to remanage your business in a different way? Because it's difficult for us to extrapolate something from this because we really just kind of model everything within the various segments that I assume that you report under. Are you gonna drive towards redoing the way you're going to manage your business and to report your business? Because, even when we look at, this is only 20% of Empower that's gonna be presented here. It's just my initial reaction was.
Yep.
I thought it would've been the fact that you have all your group retirement business, not really part of wealth, means, this is just a small piece of the business. It's pieces of some of the other wealth businesses or pieces of some of the other segments that kind of makes it difficult for us to take away something that we can constructively model with respect to this. I'm only just speaking some of my initial reaction here.
Yeah.
Sorry about that.
Good question, Tom. I'll start off with that one.
Yeah.
If you... I think you're making a good point if you think about the way we've reported on our business and run our business. We tend to run it in separate regional segments, and each of those segments having different mixes of business and different, you know, areas of focus, let's say, relative to the value drivers. As we think about capital allocation, you've got to go to kind of where are the strengths and where are the opportunities, and as we're trying to think about, you know, not only describing our business externally, but also thinking about the relative trade-offs we'll make at a portfolio level. The trade-offs, and it's the trade-offs around those things that Garry talked about, right? Like, it's the trade-off between cash generation, the trade-off between capital light, the trade-off between growth.
We're using that more and more as a frame to make those trade-off decisions. I would say that we have a job to do, working with you, working with all our investors, to help provide greater insight into those trade-offs that we're making as we look ahead in the business. I would say we're gonna try and do two things for you. Number one, continue to actually describe the businesses regionally, why they make sense, you know, the actions we're taking to win in market. Also an overlay of the value drivers to say, "As we're making trade-offs, why are we making that choice? Why do we make a choice to, you know, invest more in, you know, retirement businesses?" Well, it's some fundamentals. As we look at our businesses, you know, we kind of...
We're operating in Western markets right now with kind of a relatively similar regulatory framework. You know, while it's not all exactly the same types of tax regimes, they're broadly the same, and we actually do believe that we can actually get a lot of synergies across the businesses. When we think about retirement capabilities, you know, and what we learn through either directly through Empower, how do we leverage that into Irish Life? What we learn through Personal Capital, how do we actually leverage some of those models and some of those, at a minimum, the intellectual properties, to actually put them into other businesses? Tom, it's a good challenge for us, and it's our job to use both those mechanisms to help you understand our business better.
We're not asking you to change your models, but we also want to be able to provide more insight as to our capital allocation and why we're making these decisions. Garry, anything else to add?
Yeah, I think I'd just point out, we're not planning on changing our reporting segments. I mean, we're organized that way in terms of management structure, and our reporting will continue that way. I think you've hit it, well, the value drivers is a way to articulate the strategies that go across Lifeco. Certainly in a lot of conversations, we say, oh, you know, "What business is Lifeco in?" You say, "Well, we're in these countries." Then, "Oh, well, you're in Europe. Oh, what do you do there?" "Well, we're in these countries." So it takes several layers before you actually get into what businesses we're about, so this was a way to articulate those high-level strategies and obviously drive...
Yeah
capital allocation.
We also had interesting debate as to where should group retirement show up, right? Like, is it a wealth management business? In fact, it is a wealth management business, like, much like our pensions business in Germany, where we're helping people save for retirement. At the end of the day, we think about our ability to execute and win in markets is not just driven by products. We actually think the way we achieve customer relationships, the way we drive value, is this disciplined approach to the workplace, the disciplined approach to technology, the disciplined approach to advice. That's frankly way more important than the underlying product that flows through that. The underlying product, to a large extent, can be quite commoditized. You can access them through partnerships and the like.
The value creation really is more about customer capture, customer relationship, and building. We think it's an important way for us to describe those types of businesses, both group life and health and group retirement, and it's a choice we made. We debated it, we chose a path, and that's the way we tend to think about the way we'll capture value.
Just as a follow-up on that, is the rollover business... Like, if a participant, if you get a rollover, does that go into the wealth...?
That will-
asset management?
That will drive into the Personal Wealth business.
Yeah.
Carol will talk about that. When you think about it, when people are in the business, interestingly, at Empower, one of the things that Carol will share is that if you're sitting in the Empower business, and you have a plan-sponsored solution, right? 401(k), just like a group RRSP here in Canada, that is going to be part of the group business. When we establish a one-to-one relationship, just like an advisor would establish a one-to-one relationship, when we do that through, let's say, a hybrid digital channel with an advisor there, that will be wealth management. Probably the broad way to think about it is, when we think of people and the relationships we have through the collective employer relationship or sponsor relationship, call it, as opposed to a one-to-one relationship, that's where wealth management fits in.
Thanks, Tom.
Thanks. Paul Holden, CIBC. Two questions for you. First one is, in terms of trade-offs and growth in wealth and asset management, I think it's obvious it is capital light, but it tends to be a more expense-heavy business. Maybe you can talk a little bit about expense management, particularly in the context of the experience of Putnam over the last 15 years, where Personal Capital is in terms of its maturation and profitability as well.
Well, I'll start off just at a high level, and then I'll let Garry go to sort of what's the discipline we can apply there. I think one of the things we, that Raman pointed to is that, absent scale, in asset management in particular, it's a tough go, right? You've got to have scale to actually, you know, spread your costs out, and we were lacking scale in Putnam. Notwithstanding that, unbelievable performance for the end client. Really good, you know, capabilities, and frankly, Franklin Templeton, no pun intended, saw that as a great opportunity to sort of take advantage of those capabilities and embed them in their scale platform.
I do think, though, when we think about wealth management, I think scale is critically important to actually spread your costs out, because you know, as Garry said, each incremental piece of business doesn't require, you know, more regulatory capital, but you've got to be there with technology. You've got to be there with, you know, supports for the advisor, and that doesn't come, you know, without any expense. We needed scale. If you think about where Canada's at, and I think you'll see a great chart today, in the independent wealth market in Canada, our vision was, if we're gonna actually really be strong there, you must have scale to be able to spread out your costs, and I think it's one of the things that Fabrice will point out. Same thing with Empower.
I mean, when we think about Empower and what the opportunity is off of that broad platform in terms of retail, it has to be a scale play for us. Personal Capital on its own, if you think about their cost of acquisition, and I think, Carol can touch on this, great question for her later on, but their cost of acquisition, pretty high relative to, you know, the scale they have in terms of AUM. Take those same Personal Capital capabilities and deploy them into the 18 million participant relationship and start to drive some of those relationships into a retail space, you're now talking about scale, the benefits of scale, being able to spread those costs out. It does take discipline. There's 2 ways to get it.
You can cut costs, which we have to be disciplined around that. You have to drive the scale. Our focus is on growth. You know, cutting, you can't cut your costs all the way to long-term success. You've got to find that right balance. Garry?
Yeah, I think I'd just add a couple comments to it. Certainly, you mentioned expenses from being important in the wealth businesses, and I certainly agree. A couple of notes there. One is, I'd say expenses are very important across all of our businesses. I see Jeff Poulin here. I might make a small exception for reinsurance, where it's very much a risk-based, just leveraging, you know, a smaller group of highly skilled professionals there. Generally speaking, like, if you look at the group life and health businesses, group retirement, where all, and even our insurance operations, expenses and expense management is really important across all of those, and scale, as Paul's mentioned.
We do have a, you know, quite a rigorous expense discipline within the group, and I don't get many Christmas cards because of that, I'm sure. That's why. It is something that's important across all the businesses. A bit of a knock-on to that discipline, and we talked earlier, Meny was asking about, you know, the bit more market sensitivity. There will be years where the markets really take off, and you'll have a lot of revenue coming in. You have to have a lot of discipline not to spend that new revenue, because it can evaporate the following year. 2021 and '22, another good example of that.
The discipline has to go through the cycles as well, because your expenses do not move quite as the same way. When we get into wealth businesses, the expenses are not as sensitive to the market level, so we've got to have discipline on a couple of levels there.
My second question is with respect to capital deployment, right? Higher proportion of capital-light business, higher ROE, needs to be generating more organic capital. I want to think about this from the sort of the all-company level, not just what you're presenting today, but how are you thinking about that capital deployment opportunity, going forward?
Yeah, again, I'll start off, if you want to sort of fix things up once I'm done. You know, from the standpoint of capital allocation, I want to make it clear that, you know, while we said we believe wealth and asset management will grow the fastest, we still fundamentally believe that in our group businesses, whether it's group retirement or group benefits, we want to be seeing strong growth, probably strong growth kind of in line with our overall growth objective. Our expectation would be growth in our insurance and risk solutions, but not as high growth. What that suggests is that, you know, how much of your capital will be deployed into what I would call organic growth, and how much of your capital will be deployed into potentially more inorganic growth?
To the extent that we're deploying less regulatory capital, you know, trying to drive strong growth, let's say, in a bulk annuity or a pension risk transfer environment, and, you know, sort of saving that capital, you know, in terms of building up war chest, what that then suggests is that that gives us opportunities to look at transactions, potential transactions, that are gonna allow us to unlock more value and more growth. If I think about that from the standpoint of Canada, probably two years ago, nobody thought that. You know, everybody would have thought Canada's at scale, and they're not gonna be deploying more capital at this point in time. You see us actually making the transactions, whether it was the IPC one or the Value Partners transaction last week.
That was purposeful from the standpoint that we said. We have a solid position on wealth management, but we think there's greater value unlocked that's gonna drive more value if we deploy more capital into that. There's an example of stated goal of a stronger wealth management business and deploying capital there. If I think about, you know, broader market consolidation opportunities, not a lot of consolidation opportunities remaining probably in Canada. Lots of consolidation opportunity we look to as we look to the U.S., so that's whether that's the group retirement space or the wealth space. The wealth space is pretty broad, too, right?
We've kind of gone the routes of hybrid digital, but there's other opportunities we could do to broaden that out, and as well in Europe when we look at the actions that Irish Life has been taking. Probably think about less regulatory capital put up for growth in terms of underlying risk-based things, saving up sort of firepower, and thinking about deploying into those spaces of the group businesses and the wealth businesses that will unlock growth and value. Anything else, Garry?
Just to add on the, on the insurance and risk solutions, which is where you would have more, greater capital intensity, at a, at a more modest growth rate, it's largely self-funding, 'cause you've got the maturing book of business that's releasing regulatory capital, and you're just adding the new business on. It's not actually a large, regulatory capital burden, even if it is a modestly growing business, which is, as I say, we're targeting, a little lower growth there. Still, we're truly, that's emphasizing we're in mature markets, and we're emphasizing pricing discipline over high growth.
Yeah.
It does fund a lot of its own capital. That's the one thing I'd add.
To make, again, want to make it clear, though, you know, we will use pricing discipline, but if we see opportunity, we will go for that opportunity. When I look at Jeff Poulin's business, the, you know, the capital and risk solutions reinsurance business, they've got really strong capabilities. We've identified new opportunities in Japan, more recently in Israel. We're seeing opportunities to work with those, you know, in those markets with counterparties. If there's opportunity, we will deploy capital, but we want to just make sure that we've got really good discipline. As we think about it, you know, overall, writ large across the portfolio, we do believe that there will be higher growth in wealth and asset management and in those group, workplace businesses than we do with those risk opportunities.
Thank you. Nigel D'Souza from Veritas Investment Research. I want to touch on, I guess, the demographic trend that I fully understand, which is the need to service retirees. What I didn't hear from you is in terms of a new demographic trend that we're seeing, which is a high level of immigration in Canada. I understand the retiree side, we've had other FIs point to immigration or new immigrants as an important acquisition channel to fuel client growth. How does that new demographic trend, specifically for Canada, fit within your longer term view for Great-West Life?
Good question. You know what I mean, I've read articles saying, you know, is Canada gonna target being a population of 90 million? I think we just surpassed 40 million. It was amazing. I was still referring to it as 37, and I must have missed the memo somewhere along the way when we, as we surpassed 40 million. As you pointed out, on the back of really strong immigration, I fundamentally believe Canada's success and future will be, you know, driven to a large extent by immigration.
I actually really like where we're at in our businesses in Canada, in particular, you know, Jeff Macoun and Fabrice Morin could speak to this one a bit more, but our workplace businesses, you know, where we touch Canadians and support Canadians through broad range of workplace solutions, whether that's group life and health or the retirement space, is probably our greatest opportunity to really have that reach and that capacity to establish more and deeper relationships with Canadians, especially with new Canadians. Similarly to that, we've launched the Freedom Channel, which is part of the group channel in Canada, where we're providing people with additional, you know, more curated individual solutions, again, leveraging digital capabilities, more telephone-based advice. I think that's one approach to it.
The second approach to it is, you know, our remaining and continuing commitment to the advisor channel in Canada, and an advisor channel that looks more and more like Canada. I was not joking, but I was stating to someone more recently, you know, I remembered, if I think back to the cafeteria in our building when I was, you know, starting out my career, the cafeteria looked a lot like me. When I think about our cafeteria five years ago, and I'm gonna call that pre-pandemic, 'cause I realize it's only been three years, but the cafeteria was starting to change. More recently, when I walk into our cafeterias, whether it's London, whether it's Toronto, Winnipeg, wherever, we look like Canada, and Canada is a very, very diverse place. We have to change our...
You know, if you think about diversity, inclusiveness being relevant to customers, it can't be just, you know, your workplace people that are, you know, in your contact centers or providing service or doing those. It's got to be your advisor channels. We're working hard to have our advisor channels change and evolve, to become, to look and feel more like Canadians, so that Canadians feel welcome and served and feel like they can be connected with us as a company. It's hard work. That slide that talked about, you know, diversity in senior management or diversity in our board, that's great, diversity has to be there on the front lines, whether it's advisors or whether it's our service people.
It's a good call-out, and as a matter of fact, I think it's something that's missing on that slide, because it's fundamental to us being relevant. It was called out a bit on that, you know, on the corporate purpose slide, but it's a good call-out, Nigel. I appreciate you... You're making that point for us.
I had one point there.
Yeah.
I think the other thing I'd add to that, you know, I agree with everything you said. The other thing I would add is the way you reach immigrants and the power of technology can be quite impactful here. The traditional, if you will, way of providing advice, obviously, we believe a lot in the value of advice. I think that the traditional way of sitting across the desk from an advisor doesn't necessarily always work for, you know, a new immigrant family to the country. I think being able to access and provide advice digitally, is an enabler to be able to access and support, and provide advice to a lot more of the newly immigrated to Canada.
Great. My second question was circling back to wealth and, you know, the point about at-scale economics, it seems to, you know, there seems to be a variation in the level of AUM by investment manager, at which point you can achieve those at-scale economics. Why is... Like, what drives that variation in AUM? Even in the Putnam transaction, you retained a piece that's already at scale, and how does that inform your decision of whether you want to partner or whether you want to invest to build out the AUM?
Sure, good question. I think, and when we use AUM or assets under management as a high-level number, the reality is there isn't a number per se. It depends very much on the particular strategy that's being deployed. For example, you may have a alternatives or private markets manager with a lower AUM, which still may be considered to be, you know, a leader or at scale because of the nature of that business and the way it works versus, say, a passive manager, where the fees are much lower. There, in order to achieve the same level of scale, you need a much larger AUM. The AUM metric is not the best metric. It's one of many.
The way we think about achieving scale or leadership is, when you have a position where you're able to efficiently operate the business, sustainably, over the long term, somewhat related to AUM, but AUM isn't, by any means, the primary metric there.
The other point I might make is it also depends on the market you're operating in as well. If you think about in Ireland, Aviva's a big player in Ireland if you think about the scale there. If you took Aviva, and you said, "Okay, now operate in the U.S. with that scale," it would be tougher, right?
Right.
The competitive environment, the competitive dynamic, and recognizing that asset management, you know, broadly, you might say, is global, it's still hand-to-hand combat in the markets where you're in, and it's about brand, it's about connectedness, whether it's with institutions or clients through our MAPS program. I would say those two things, you know.
Yeah
you know, a specialty manager is not gonna require the same skill as a passive or a, say, a traditional. If you're operating in a market of, you know, 5 to 6 million people as opposed to a market of 350 million, scale is gonna matter there. Those would be those two dynamics I would say that would drive that.
Last question, IFRS 17, I know it's new. We just transitioned this year. It doesn't impact the economics of the business, but it does impact the accounting, there is a capital impact on LICAT. From your point of view, did IFRS 17 at all move the needle in any capacity in how you think about capital allocation or business segment growth targets or have any impact at all? You know, there is an accounting impact, but the economics hasn't changed. Just wondering if that impacted your thinking.
The short answer is not in a material way. I mean, obviously, we, you know, we're updating our planning, but the operation of the CSM has a little bit of an impact on cash generation, but because our businesses are quite mature, it tends not to be a material impact. Really, and the rest of the business, let's say, the capital, we, you know, there was a small uptick, but it's not a major change, but it was a positive change, so there's a little more available capital. It really didn't have a material impact on how we think about capital allocation going forward. It, you know, it shines a spotlight on certain types of businesses, the longer tail, shorter tail.
Little bit on the volatility.
Yeah
... mindful of the, on the volatility side. That's one where, you know, the increased market sensitivity. Now, obviously, we can tackle that through... We can obviously observe. We can also work with our ALM teams to help manage that volatility, but that is an area that we looked at in terms of overall volatilities a little bit there, but not overall capital allocation.
Yeah. Yeah. I would say, had we not done the hard work on ALM to think about, you know, the long, the long-tail liabilities that you can't really match with, you know, fixed income, had we not done the hard work on that, we might have been living with far more, too much volatility, and then it would be sort of unpleasant, and it would be hard to actually operate your business on an ongoing basis. I think ALM choices. Having said that, I do think IFRS 17 and IFRS 9, you know, now the way we're reporting, and we're thinking about these, in these value drivers, and to Tom's point, you know, that's the other reason for this.
Like, these are kind of, they're accounted for in different ways, so we're trying to describe them in those ways. I think it's more transparent. Over time, I think it is going to provide more insight to investors, and I think it will be better. It will, right now, you know, maybe a little bit of pain in transition, but I think it's gonna be better for investors long term.
Thank you.
Any remaining questions? I think we've got 42 seconds, there's a little clock here that's telling us that. Actually, it was funny, you know, I finished 3 minutes early. Garry was 10 minutes early. Raman you were locked in. You were right on time, 15 minutes exactly. We've been able to use this time. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take a short break now. How long are we scheduled for break? 15 minutes now, we're gonna come back into the room, we're gonna have a great opportunity to hear from Canada, Europe, and US leadership. Thanks very much.
Please welcome to the stage, Jeff and Fabrice.
Welcome back! I can still hear music. I can talk to music. We'll just wait till that music goes off. We could do a little team song here. We've been practicing at Canada Life. I'm just checking the back. Should we proceed with that music on or wait? Wait one minute. This isn't fair. The clock is moving. I usually need a lot of time. Look at that, it's just bearing down on us. Yes! How about a big hand there? Someone at the back did that. Thank you. These three guys went in a bar. Nope. Now, there's a Canada Life hat up for grabs here. Can anyone name the artist? There we go. Thank you.
Well, welcome back, we thought we'd play that little music for a little fun there, just to get things going here. Welcome, everyone, and good morning. Fabrice and I are pleased, everybody should know that the times were put back on the clock there, we're excited about that. We're excited to share in the next 25 minutes, to share an in-depth look at some of the strengths and opportunities in our Canadian business that will create value for our key stakeholders. We offer a leading platform for advisors across the workplace, in wealth and insurance, and we have a very strong presence, Paul and Garry talked about it this morning, and conviction in the growing independent advisor segment.
Simply put, we believe we have a major growth opportunity in individual wealth, in our recently announced transactions with Investment Planning Counsel and Value Partners signal our commitment to growing in this segment. We'll create value through three key drivers: one, leading access for advisors. Two, a full spectrum of advice solutions. Three, the best support for advisor succession and continuity of advice. We have a trusted brand and a special franchise in Canada. Brand Finance ranks Canada Life as the second strongest brand in the country, and we were the first insurance company ever to jump into the top five. Our reach across the country is wide, with a significant number of customer and advisor relationships. In short, we really believe that our Canadian business is strong and positioned for strong growth.
We have an extremely strong franchise in Canada and several competitive advantages that distinguish us from our competitors in the marketplace. You know, since bringing together our three brands as one, Canada Life in 2019, we have seen market-leading growth in our brand familiarity. In fact, we've been called the fastest growing brand in Canada. We now serve 1 in 3 Canadians, and we're building on these relationships by providing our customers with the advice and the solutions they need to support their financial, physical, and mental well-being. You know, more employers turn to us than anyone else in Canada. Simply put, we lead the market. We have deep, deep-rooted relationships with advisors across the country, and we're building on that by offering a leading platform for advisors in the marketplace.
We have a track record of delivering strong financial results for our shareholders, with net earnings of CAD 1.4 billion and base earnings of CAD 1.2 billion, along with a Net ROE of 21.2% and base ROE of more than 17% last year. We have over 11,000 employees across Canada servicing our customers every day, with high employee engagement scores at over 84%. You know, we've built strong relationships with 16,000 advisors from coast to coast to coast. We also strive to be a socially responsible company and make a positive impact in everything we do. In 2022, we contributed over CAD 11 million to Canadian communities. That's just a short snapshot of our position of strength. Let's talk about how we're driving value.
As Paul and Garry shared earlier, we have three main value drivers in our business: workplace solutions, individual wealth, and insurance solutions. Going deeper on workplace solutions, we have an industry-leading market share of 22% for life and health plans. Soon to be number 1 when we go live July 1 with the Public Service Health Care Plan next month, we're well on track to doing a great job there. In group wealth, we are number 1 for employers below 500 members and overall have a 19% share in the market and CAD 62 billion in assets under administration. This adds up to more than 11 million relationships with our plan members and their dependents. In 2022, Workplace contributed CAD 630 million in base earnings for Canada Life.
Shifting to insurance solutions, where we serve over 2 million Canadians, we have CAD 6 billion of in-force premium and the largest number 1 in par fund in Canada with more than CAD 50 billion in assets. Insurance solutions drove CAD 350 million in base earnings in 2022. We are a leader in the marketplace and recognized for our deep advisor support. As you can see, both workplace and insurance solutions are great strengths for us at Canada Life. The focus, though, for the remaining of our portion of this presentation will be on individual wealth, which in 2022 drove CAD 200 million in base earnings for us. With the combined strength of our recently announced acquisitions, we will serve over 800,000 clients and hold CAD 89 billion in assets under administration.
As you've heard, across these three value drivers, we have 16,000 advisors doing business with us, including 6,000 advisors with whom we have a direct relationship with high affinity. Our growth in individual wealth will capitalize on our strengths in advisor relationships. We have simply a tremendous growth opportunity in the independent financial space. This segment has grown nearly 8% annually over the last five years to over $731 billion. With our acquisitions, Canada Life, and a 12% pro forma share, has a 12% pro forma share of this market. More importantly, we have strong conviction behind our ability to grow this market for several reasons. One, the market is evolving more increasingly towards platform-led managed solutions. Secondly, there's lots of money in motion driven by client demographics.
There was a question earlier about this in the previous session, such as intergenerational and interspousal wealth transfer. Finally, we are one of the few who can offer advisors integrated solutions with one partner across wealth, insurance, and benefits. You know, with a leading advisor platform, we believe we can drive further growth and scale our business. We believe in the value of advice and driving positive outcomes for our clients. Research shows that clients who work with financial advisors enjoy greater net worth and investable assets than those who do not. In fact, over a 15-year period, Canadians with advice saw their assets grow by 131% more than those without advice. With IPC and Value Partners, we're building on our strong Canadian franchise with a growing personal wealth business.
You know, we've been a market leader in segregated fund assets and sales for some time, with CAD 200 million in individual wealth base earnings in 2022. As we accelerate our wealth strategy with IPC and Value Partners, this will enable us to scale and extend our capabilities even further. The addition of IPC and Value Partners to our seg fund and mutual fund assets takes our market presence, as you can see on the display, to CAD 89 billion, making us one of the top non-bank wealth providers in the country. As we look to the future, we are well positioned for extreme strong organic growth. Now I'll invite Fabrice Morin, our Executive Vice President, Individual Wealth and Insurance Solutions, to take us into more detail on our wealth strategy. Fabrice?
Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. We have three pillars that will enable our growth in individual wealth management in Canada. I'll describe them at a high level here. I'll expand on them on the following pages. First, it's about leading access and being a destination for advisors. We will be the top destination for independent advisors in Canada, including those with mixed book practices, where Canada Life can really provide value across all lines of business of wealth management, insurance, and benefits. Second, it's about offering a full spectrum of advice, solutions, and capabilities. We'll equip advisors to serve individuals and business owners with end-to-end solution, including a private wealth offering that enables these clients and advisors to move up market seamlessly. Lastly, we'll support advisor successions when continuity of advice across the customer spectrum.
That means continuing to support traditional advisor succession when books transfer from an independent advisor to another, also acquire business for retiring advisors when it makes sense. At the same time, continue to profitably serve the mass affluent and the mid-market client segment with scalable digital advice model that we've developed over the past years. First, let's talk about access. We have the breadth of individual wealth across multiple brands based on a recently announced acquisition. First, Canada Life and our securities dealer, Quadrus. Second, Investment Planning Counsel, recently announced acquisition. Value Partners, other recently announced acquisition. Financial Horizons, an MGA that we've been owning for a number of years, which is active in life insurance, but also in the seg fund market. Lastly, relationships through MGAs and national accounts.
Each of these platforms has strong leadership and valuable position in their respective markets. Together, this adds up to 16,000 advisor relationships, including 6,000 direct relationships on the platforms that we directly own, the first four on this page. Scale is really important in the wealth business, and therefore, our vision is, over time, an integrated experience, where these channels will come together and will leverage the best platform, the best technology, the best dealer, offering all business models into one partnership. Next, let's talk about the solutions we offer on these platforms. We're building a comprehensive set of solutions that cater to our clients across the wealth spectrum in a range of complexity.
Participating in portfolio construction is really important in the wealth management business as it is structured in Canada, it is our intent to have a significant role to play into portfolio construction across all these platforms. Prior to the announced acquisition of IPC and Value Partners, Canada Life is really in the business of mutual fund and seg fund products, both standalone funds and managed solution, offered securities on an accommodation platform. In our fund products, we've got a leadership position. We have where we've got the second highest number of FundGrade A+ awards for 2023 on our fund platform. The addition of Value Partners and Investment Planning Council just reinforces that on the fund side. Investment Planning Council has 26% of their funds rated 4 and 5-star Morningstar.
Value Partners has had FundGrade A+ awards for five of the past six years. In addition to this, these two announced acquisition really give us access to new capabilities as it relates to portfolio construction. These acquisitions enable us to extend into high net worth, including IPC Private Wealth, an IIROC registered dealer, discretionary portfolio management model, which we didn't have before. IPC One, a turnkey asset management platform for advisors to provide discretionary portfolio management services directly. Finally, Value Partners Investment Counsel, an investment counselor portfolio manager model with a focus on end-to-end high net worth managed solution. With these platforms, we can offer the full spectrum to independent advisors working with us. Across our channels, we will leverage best-in-class digital and technology capabilities, including players like Conquest, a planning tool, and CapIntel, a sales enablement tool.
These are just a couple of examples to show that we support our advisors with planning, portfolio management, sales enablement, and other critical activities, taking the best technologies that are out there in the Canadian market. With our expanded scale, our intent is to continue to invest in integrated technology for independent advisors in Canada, to make it easy and seamless for them to serve their clients and do business with Canada Life. Let's talk about succession and continuity of advice, which is the third pillar I mentioned earlier. Advisor succession and continuity of advice is about supporting and extending the relationship that we have with clients. This is important because about 30% of assets under administration in Canada in the independent advisor segments are with advisors who are more than 65 years of age.
There's a succession plan that needs to be built. We will continue to support the traditional succession model, books of business transferring from an advisor to another, independent advisor to another, and clients being well served that way. We will also extend our offering in the advisor succession market in two different ways. First, our full book acquisition model enables retiring advisors to sell their business gradually and transition out of the business while ensuring continuity of advice and minimal disruption for clients and staff. Second, we've been building this in Canada Life over the past couple of years, our partial book acquisition model is about right-sizing advice and enabling advisors to transition a part of their book of business to focus on the client segment that is more consistent with their practice.
This allows them to focus on growing the business, while ensuring continuity of advice for other clients that they currently serve. The flexibility is another reason why advisors will continue to choose Canada Life, as they care about the future of their business, and they care about the advice continuity for their clients. Now let's talk about how this all comes together and turns into value for us. We believe that we can create incremental value in our individual wealth business through a combination of levers. It's the three pillars I've talked about earlier. I think that's on the next slide. First, asset growth, which will give us scale, which is increasingly important in the business, and the scale will continue through net flows and equity market performance.
Second, solution penetration, which is a really important lever economically in this business, which will increase our margin on AUA, both through proprietary products, but also through some of the platforms that I've talked about earlier, about participating into the asset management activities with the advisors in the client accounts. Lastly, succession will bring us further return opportunities and continuity of client relationship. It's really the addition of these three levers that will contribute to our value creation story. These levers are all connected and reinforce one another. Scale will in turn provide us operating leverage to combat fee compression, which is a reality in this business.
When we deliver on the value, we, building on our recent transactions, we will enhance our wealth strategy to better serve our clients, to offer a better platform for our advisors, and all stakeholders will benefit, including our shareholders. This is how the individual wealth business of the Canadian segment will contribute to Lifeco's higher growth aspiration for individual wealth and asset management overall, and further strengthens our position as a leading non-bank player in the individual wealth management space in Canada. I'll pass it back to Jeff.
Thank you, Fabrice. Let us recap. We have three key pillars that will enable our growth: leading access for advisors, advised solutions, and advisor succession and continuity of advice. We're starting from a position of strength, with significant reach across the independent advisor segment through multiple brands and 16,000 advisor relationships, of which 6,000 which are direct with high affinity. We offer a spectrum of advice, solutions, and capabilities catering to clients' varying needs of complexity, supported by leading technology to enable delivery of the best in client experiences. As Fabrice mentioned, we're focused on advisor succession and continuity of advice through scalable advice models and transition support for advisors entering retirement. To conclude, we have a strong business that is positioned for growth.
We have leadership, we have scale, a leading platform for advisors, a soon-to-be number one share in workplace solutions, a leading insurance solutions business, as we focused on today, a significant growth engine opportunity in individual wealth. Finally, we have the strength of a trusted brand in Canada Life. We believe it's a winning strategy that will make a difference for Canadians and grow our Canadian franchise. Next, I'm pleased to invite up David Harney, President and Chief Operating Officer, Europe. David?
Thank you, Jeff, Good morning, everybody. I'm David Harney, I run the European operations for Great-West Lifeco. Europe is a strategically important segment for Great-West Lifeco. We have a well-diversified portfolio and are well aligned to growth opportunities in Europe. We have mature, trusted, and respected brands that serve almost 6 million customers in Europe. The wealth in Europe and the demographics in Europe mean that there is strong demand for our insurance, workplace, and wealth solution products. We are very excited as a North American company and proud of our success in Europe. We are confident that we can leverage our distribution reach and workplace scale to expand in the fast-growing wealth and retirement markets. As I said, we have strong leadership positions and trusted brands in our countries in Europe.
In Ireland, we serve almost 2 million customers and have 6,000 employer relationships. We are the number one provider of workplace retirement and risk benefits. We are the number one provider of individual annuity and bulk annuity products. We hold leading market positions in other insurance solutions products in Ireland. In the U.K., we serve almost 3.5 million customers and have 27,000 employer relationships. We are the number one provider of group life and group income protection products. We are a leading player in the individual annuity market. We are investing to grow our capabilities in the fast-growing and bulk annuity market. In Germany, with over 0.5 million customers, our business in the broker market is growing rapidly. We have increased our position from 14th in the broker market in 2014 to 7th in 2022.
Lastly, in the Irish wealth and asset management segment, which will be the focus of my discussion on Europe this morning, as I said, Irish Life is the number one brand in retirement savings in Ireland, and we are also the leading asset management provider in Ireland, with over EUR 100 billion or CAD 170 billion invested through our ILIM and Setanta investment companies. To Ireland. Ireland is the most dynamic economy in Europe. The Irish economy grew by 8.2% in 2022 alone and will see further high growth in 2023 and 2024. Ireland's economic success means that we've seen a rapid increase in household income and household wealth over the last decade.
Ireland is already one of the wealthiest economies in Europe. The number of people with assets over EUR 1 million is forecast to quadruple from 2022 to 2025. Wealth is built over generations, and the relative recency of Ireland's economic success means that the burgeoning wealth market in Ireland is underserved by international wealth standards. There are only a small number of existing wealth players in Ireland, and this creates an exciting growth opportunity for us in Ireland, which I'll return to in a few minutes. Looking to Ireland as a whole, we have the existing distribution reach and capability set to continue to dominate in the mass market and mass affluent market segments, and also new capabilities now to win in the fast-growing affluent market segment.
Our enterprise as a whole in Ireland faces the business through our workplace solutions, our digital platforms, our bank partners, our independent financial advisors, and now also through our new advisory solutions. Our presence in the mass market and mass affluent market will be enhanced by the launch of AIB Life, our new joint venture with AIB, Ireland's largest bank. AIB Life will provide financial planning, retirement saving, investment, and life insurance products to AIB customers. Our new presence in the affluent market in Ireland will be served by our new brand, Unio, formed from the amalgamation of 3 existing companies, which I'll return to in a few moments. The next few slides now will cover our workplace strength in Irish Life, the market opportunity for AIB Life, and also the market opportunity for Unio. To Irish Life and our presence in the workplace first.
Irish Life enjoys an amazing position in the workplace in Ireland. We are partner to 27 of the 30 largest multinational firms in Ireland, who are global leaders in technology, pharma, and financial services. We also have relationships with 7 of the 10 largest domestic firms in Ireland. These are fantastic relationships and give us unrivaled reach to the working population in Ireland. We have been very successful at building both in-person and digital advice capabilities to serve employees in these client firms. We've been very successful at providing individual wealth propositions that supplement employer-sponsored benefits, and also providing to and through retirement planning services that sustain these customer relationships beyond retirement. Now with the launch of Unio, which I said I'll return to in a few moments, we will provide wealth advisory services to the C-suite executives of these client firms.
To AIB Life, AIB is the largest bank in Ireland with over 3 million customer relationships. 77% of AIB's customer base is digitally active with the bank. These engagements are very frequent. There are almost 1 million digital engagements with the bank every day. This active customer base has a very strong demand for financial planning, retirement saving, investment, and life insurance products. These products will now be provided by AIB Life to these AIB customers. AIB Life replaces our existing distribution agreement with AIB. We are very excited by the growth potential of this new company. Both ourselves and AIB have very strong growth ambitions for this company. We expect AIB Life to capture 10% market share of the entire life market in the next 5 years.
We are also very excited by the launch of our new brand, Unio, to serve customers in the affluent wealth segment. Unio, as I said, has been formed by the amalgamation of three existing companies in Ireland, namely Invesco, APT, and Acumen & Trust. Unio starts with a strong team of 300 people and has a deep pool of expertise and existing capabilities. It also has a very strong culture of enduring client relationships. Unio already manages assets of EUR 14 billion on behalf of personal and institutional clients. As I've said, because of the relative recent economic success in Ireland, there are only a small number of existing wealth players in Ireland. Unio already has the scale and capability to compete with these existing players. We expect to double the assets managed on behalf of personal clients by 2027.
As I've said, Unio starts from a very strong existing base. Unio will provide services to customers in the affluent market segment, with investable assets between EUR 1 million and EUR 10 million. Unio will study the trends and the global wealth asset management market, namely advisor proposition, digital engagement based on data insights, investment returns that respect economical or ecological and environmental concerns, and also creating a community where clients can share, learn, and grow. We are very excited about the market opportunity in Unio. Our goal is to make Unio the leading provider of wealth advisory services in Ireland, and we are confident of achieving this position within the next 5 years. Finally, to wrap up for Ireland, as I said, Irish Life has leading positions in our core markets in Ireland.
The investments I talked about this morning means we will continue to dominate in the mass market and mass affluent segments, and in particular, the new investments I talked about this morning means that we will win new share in the fast-growing affluent market. To finally recap for Europe, we will continue to invest in our leading positions in Europe to leverage our scale, distribution reach, and trusted brands. The population demographics in Europe and wealth in Europe means that we will continue to see very strong demand for our workplace insurance and wealth solution products. We are very proud of our position, as I've said, in Europe, and we are confident that the investments I discussed today in Ireland will strengthen our diversified portfolio in Europe and also position us for further high growth in Europe. Thank you.
Okay, I will now call on a fellow Irishman, Mr. Murphy, to present on the U.S. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. It's kind of ironic that I actually have the Irish flag on today. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to meet many of you for the first time, Ed Murphy. It's great to be here. Joining me this morning is Carol Waddell, who heads up our personal wealth arm, and you'll hear from her in a couple minutes. Despite our brief history, over the last several years, we've demonstrated an ability to grow revenue and earnings, and we're very confident we can continue on that path. This morning, there are a couple of things that we wanna share with you. First, we wanna tell the Empower story in the brief time that we have. Secondly, we wanna highlight the markets in which we compete.
Wanna share the go-to-market strategy, talk a little bit about our value proposition, how we win in the market. Lastly, we'll get into some components around revenue and profitability. Let me just start with, first of all, the top of the slide, Empower What's Next. This is our advertising campaign that we launched in 2023. We have a strong presence on traditional media as we look to build brand connection with the end user. As you can see, there are two markets that we compete in. The first is the B2B, the institutional workplace solutions market that Paul outlined. The second is the wealth management space. In the B2B space, we serve about 61,000 institutions across corporate, government, and not-for-profit, and serve about 18 million participants in those markets.
We're the number one provider of services to governments in the U.S. We do business with 26 of the 50 states. We're number one in the Taft-Hartley space or the union market in the U.S. We serve all segments of the corporate market, from small employers and emerging startups, five-employee businesses, all the way up to companies with 300,000 employees. Taken together, we're the number two player in the defined contribution space in the U.S., and we're the fastest grower. Business-to-consumer, Empower Personal Wealth, was effectively started back in 2015, when we recognized that billions of dollars are transitioning from our institutional platform because people are changing jobs or they're retiring.
We wanted to build the capability to be able to serve those customers for life, and that was the Retirement Solutions Group, and Carol was our first leader of that group. Today, under the brand Empower Personal Wealth, which includes the Personal Capital acquisition, we now serve 500,000 customers in $60 billion in assets under management, assets under administration in that business. We think this is a significant growth opportunity for us. Part of what we're trying to accomplish is to make sure that those 18 million Americans that are on our platform understand the full breadth and capabilities of Empower, that our offering transcends institutional retirement, where we can serve them for life in the personal wealth space.
Some of the other key data points with regard to Empower, obviously founded in 2014, an amalgamation of the Putnam Retirement, combined with Denver's Great-West Retirement Services, and then the subsequent acquisition of JP Morgan retirement business in 2015. That was a foundational transaction for us. It really put us on the map, given the success that we had in integrating those clients and establishing credibility with the intermediary community and the consultants. We've built that trust now over the last 8 years. It's a very labor-intensive business because we do serve 61,000 institutions and 18 million Americans, so we have grown our domestic headcount. We have an operation in Bangalore, India. We have a captive there with about 2,300 associates. Ops, tech, essentially, all of our functions have representation in India.
It's been a tremendous asset and competitive advantage for us. $1.4 trillion on our platform. As I mentioned earlier, we've been investing quite a bit in the brand, and you can see some of the strategic decisions that we've made there. One of the challenges that we have is we need to increase both our aided and unaided awareness. We're about half of what Fidelity's awareness is, about half of what Schwab's is. I will say in the last two years, we've really started to move the needle on this. This is a big focus for us, as we want to build trust, connectivity, and credibility with the end user. This was touched on earlier by Paul and Garry, but we've been very busy over the last three years with three significant acquisitions, highly complex, but all have gone exceedingly well.
The retirement business of MassMutual, the retirement business of Prudential, and of course, the Personal Capital acquisition, which is really the platform and the capabilities that's driving our Empower Personal Wealth business. As we think about our vision, it's really around transforming financial lives through advice, people, and technology. Recordkeeping and administration, and processing loans, and the like, that's table stakes. We're all about transforming people's lives, and our mission is very clear. It's to empower financial freedom for all. We don't discriminate. We know that customers that have $30,000 in investable assets need help, want advice, value the role an advisor or an intermediary can play, just as the high net worth and the mass affluent do.
We have built a product and service capability to serve these distinct segments. We're making really good progress if you look at the growth trajectory that we're on and what we will experience this year in gross sales in this business. Go-to-market strategy, I touched on this a little bit at the beginning, but in that institutional retirement space, we're a significant player there. We basically compete in all markets. It's a $9 trillion market. You look at the compound annual growth rate, you say, "Doesn't look like a real attractive market. There's not a lot of growth." Well, what's happening is the subscale players are losing out to the scale players.
It's a takeaway game, and we have a very compelling value proposition, and that's why our inclusion rates and opportunities is very high, and our win rates across all the segments is exceedingly high. As we noted earlier, we've participated in several transactions, and I think the consolidation trend in the defined contribution space in the U.S. is going to continue. It's likely going to accelerate, and I think Empower is uniquely positioned as a skilled and adept M&A entity to be able to participate opportunistically where it makes sense for us. When you think about those 18 million lives that I talked about, one of the things that we want to do, we have great information and insight on those customers.
To the extent that we can introduce them to capabilities that we have while they're an in-plan participant, before they make a life decision, like changing jobs or retiring, and build that trust and credibility with them, we think we can win the day. Whether you call it cross-selling or whether you call it marketing services and capabilities to those customers, we think that represents a significant opportunity for us, and we've had, frankly, very good success in doing that. We also, as I mentioned earlier, we have the money in motion on our platform. Carol will talk about this, but roughly around 6% of assets under administration is in motion every year. There's roughly $80 billion-$90 billion of money in motion.
Today, both on an absolute basis and on a percentage basis, we're the number one recipient of all the providers in the marketplace. We think we can perform better. We think we can scale that to higher levels. Lastly, we do market direct to what I would call the unaffiliated market, prospects in the marketplace, through our advertising, through direct mail, through referrals. Think about that as the legacy Personal Capital business. We've incorporated that into Empower Personal Wealth, and we're pursuing that channel as well. How does Empower make money? This is a breakdown of the revenue. You can see it's heavily dependent on workplace solutions at roughly 85% of revenue, personal wealth at 15%. I think over time, you'll see these numbers shift a bit. You can see the component parts.
One of the things that we've been very focused on in the last few years is diversify the revenue stream. To not be as dependent, if you will, on asset-based fees and the swings and the volatility in the markets, and we've made really good progress there. You can see the breakdown both in the workplace solutions business and in personal wealth between asset-based fees, managed account, non-asset-based fees. We have many clients on the institutional side that just pay us a per head record-keeping fee as opposed to asset-based fees, which tend to be more common in the smaller end of the market. Consistent history of growth, these are just some key metrics that show on a trended basis what we've been experiencing. Assets under administration have grown very nicely over the last several years.
You can see individual relationships, revenue, of course, at a 23% CAGR, and then base earnings. I would note that this obviously includes inorganic, it includes those strategic acquisitions, but the point I'd like to make to you is on the institutional side, on the defined contribution side, organically, we are growing and have consistently grown at 2.5-3 times the rate of the market, as measured by net participant growth. We're taking share away from weaker competitors, and our retention remains very strong. In fact, in all the market segments that we compete, we have exceedingly high Net Promoter Score, which leads to client loyalty, higher retention, and higher duration of those customer relationships. This slide, I think, really underscores both the problem and conversely, the opportunity.
67% of people are unsatisfied with their personal financial health in the U.S., and we have a statistically viable sample. We have 18 million customers. We understand their behaviors, we track their behaviors, we know what their tendencies are, we know the value they place on advice, we know the value they place on a digital human capital capability coming together, and that's really what we've been focused on. You can see some of these key statistics here. We think we're uniquely positioned, uniquely positioned with an installed base of 18 million customers and growing, to be able to provide real value to all those market segments, whether it's mass market, mass affluent, or high net worth.
At the center of our value proposition is, as I said, this combination of a very intuitive, user-friendly, outcome-oriented digital experience that we acquired through Personal Capital. We've taken this capability, we've embedded it into our institutional business. All 18 million of our customers have access to this dashboard, this dashboard captures both existing assets that we custody and also outside assets to the extent that they allow us access. We look at it both on the asset side and the liability side of the personal balance sheet. What we're doing is bringing this together in a way that's holistic and seamless, in a way that I think very few competitors have been able to achieve.
This has really helped us get a lot of traction, not just in the defined contribution space, but obviously, this powers our Empower Personal Wealth offering as well. We marry that with access to an advisor. These are Empower advisors that are registered, that are trained, that are effectively acting as fiduciaries. Just a couple comments on workplace solutions. This just sort of highlights a lot of what I talked about. You can see on the x-axis, Empower is experiencing really strong net participant growth, and then our assets under administration have grown exponentially as well. Again, acquisitions included here, also the organic growth. I would note the chart on the far right, because I think this underscores the point I was making earlier.
This market is continuing to consolidate, where the top three, top five players are garnering a disproportionate amount of share. In part because it's, as I said earlier, it's a very labor-intensive business, but it's also capital-intensive, not from a regulatory standpoint, but in terms of technology, in terms of people, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of security, and the subscale players, frankly, just struggle being able to compete. Again, we think we can continue this path of really strong organic growth. Keep in mind, this institutional platform and that installed base of customers is effectively fueling what we think we can accomplish on the personal wealth side. We want to continue to grow both market segments. This just highlights the offering and where we see the growth.
In some of these markets, like health savings accounts, managed accounts, which is basically an advice offering, the IRA rollover opportunity that Carol will speak to, those are all really solid growth markets in which we compete. What we're seeing in the U.S. is sort of an intersection between health, wealth, and retirement. All of these elements coming together in a way that's thoughtful, comprehensive, holistic for the end user, and that's really where we're focused as a company. With that, I'll ask Carol to come up and provide an update on Empower Personal Wealth.
Well, good afternoon. I'm very excited to be able to talk to you a little bit about Empower's Personal Wealth business. As we look at the marketplace, we really have two unique advantages and opportunities to participate in the U.S. wealth management business. First and foremost, Ed spent a lot of time talking about the fact that we have 18 million retirement plan investors. Two unique opportunities come up within that realm in and of itself. With those 18 million investors, 6% of them, roughly, are terminating employment each year. Either they're changing jobs or they're entering into retirement, that provides us with an opportunity to talk about alternatives for investing those assets as they move on, namely in the form of a rollover IRA.
Secondly, if you think about all the people that are currently participating in one of their retirement plans, we know for every dollar they have in the plan, they're likely to have $4-$5 outside of the retirement plan. That enables us to really expand relationships with individuals and offer them the opportunity to consolidate and simplify their financial lives by bringing all of that to Empower and seeing it in their dashboard. Secondly, is the opportunity that we really acquired through Personal Capital. They had a very strong direct-to-consumer business. You can see here that 3.4 million investors are actually using that dashboard.
We have the dashboard embedded in our workplace business, and we also have the dashboard as a tool that's available for free for the U.S. market, that $30 trillion market, to be able to monitor and track the performance of their accounts over time. That also provides us with the opportunity to look deeper into those individuals' portfolios and identify who might be good candidates for our wealth management business. Again, we're competing in that rollover market, the ability to have a second relationship with a workplace retirement plan participant, and the ability to acquire new customers through the direct-to-consumer channel. All of these have very large markets to operate in. All of them serve as a huge opportunity for us going forward. What's common across each of these segments is our value prop.
In every single segment that we operate in, we have the dashboard, where, again, we're gathering and providing a comprehensive view of somebody's financial situation, and we have the ability to marry that with the access to an Empower advisor, who can help them navigate some of these challenging situations and opportunities. As we look forward, the increase in investment in our brand starts to increase awareness and acknowledge the broader capabilities we have in terms of products and solutions, and I'm going to share some insight into what that looks like in a minute. First, let's step back and take a look at the overall retirement market in the U.S. This is a significant market.
This is just the retirement space. If you look at the IRA in and of itself, it is the single largest pocket of opportunity of retirement assets in the U.S. It is also the fastest-growing segment within the U.S. We're doing really quite well in this segment as we looked at how we're doing in terms of capturing some of those rollovers as a share of all the other providers. Ed mentioned that we win in every single balance segment. I think importantly, that win rate is continuing to increase over time. Over this five-year period, you can see that it improved by more than 31%.
We can attribute quite a bit of that, over the last two years in particular, to some of the capabilities that we acquired from Personal Capital, the dashboard, the financial wellness planning tools, the advisory experience, our planning experience, and even the major investment we have in marketing. Quite a bit of momentum in a very, very large market segment, and we think, just given the recent boost, that we'll continue to see that type of increase in performance. As we look at the overall solutions available, we talked about the dashboard being the centerpiece to individuals, where they really start to get their arms around all of their assets, all of their liabilities, or what I like to often say is, how much they own and how much they owe.
That is coupled with the ability to work with an Empower advisor, and the advisor sits down and helps them make sense of what that comprehensive picture looks like. They talk about the needs that the individuals have, not only for themselves, but also for their families. They talk about their broader financial goals, and they often offer solutions to address some of those goals, which are outlined here. You can see we have a variety of investment accounts, retirement accounts. We have a high net worth solution for individuals with $5 million or more in assets, where they actually even have access to private equity, so we can highly customize solutions for those individuals. We have security solutions. We find as people's assets increase, they're not only concerned about the loss of their identity and their passwords, but also their assets.
We have specialists in healthcare and estate planning and tax. Then we've also have partnerships that enable us to deliver lower rate solutions for cards, for loans, and we even have Empower Personal Cash, which is a high-yield savings account. This is what the solution set looks like today. We're only six months into our combined journey as an Empower Personal Wealth business, but we think we have a very strong foundation to grow upon and meet the broader financial needs of our customers. If you think about how we've been doing over time, you can see a pretty significant CAGR here. This is the combination of both Personal Capital and Empower's Personal Wealth business. It wasn't until 2020 that we acquired the business and just six months ago formed Empower Personal Wealth.
You can see whether we're looking at assets or clients, it's been a nice, steady rate of growth, really healthy rate of growth over time. Again, given the investments in current capabilities or most recent capabilities for our customers, we expect that trend to continue to accelerate. That is a quick summary of the Empower Personal Wealth business. I would say overall, to summarize the comments that Ed and I have shared today, that there is an enormous opportunity in the U.S. market. Whether we're looking at the organic growth of the business historically or the inorganic growth through some of the recent acquisitions, we're really competing at an increasing pace in a very, very large market. The synergies between our workplace business and our personal wealth business are really remarkable.
It's not just about how do you know, originate a customer in the workplace space and continue to grow and retain that relationship over time, but it's really the ability to deliver on our mission of empowering financial freedom for all by capitalizing on our core record-keeping business or retirement business, and then supplementing all the products and services we have in our personal wealth business to further address that customer opportunity. The product offering we articulated today, so you have this incredibly holistic dashboard that is very integrated in our planning experience, our advisory experience, our marketing experience, and then shared with an advisor who can actually navigate that same view at all times with the individual, will be hard for competitors to replicate, and we've made that investment in a rapid manner.
We'll continue to be investing in a household brand. We don't have the common brand awareness that some of our key competitors that have been in this marketplace for hundreds of years have, but we've made great strides already in 2023 alone. We think, just given some of the experience we've had, and positive outcomes we've demonstrated on the acquisition front, that that continued consolidation will take place, and we will participate where there is value for the organization to either scale or bring additional capabilities. With that is a summary. Thank you for your time, and I think we're gonna take a couple of minutes to prepare for Q&A and transition the podium off the stage.
Nice job.
Thank you.
Good. Can you hear me? While we're just finishing up, getting that out of the way, and by the way, that's okay. Perfect.
Get some music.
Yeah, we get a little music playing. Do not turn on the music 'cause apparently we can't. It's not easily turned off. You know, since we came back from the break, you've had an opportunity to hear from, you know, the three segments, the leadership group teams in each of the segments. A reminder, we made the decision today to provide you with this deeper dive on wealth and asset management, wealth management in particular, over the last hour or so. We're gonna open it up to Q&A. Obviously, you're gonna have, you know, questions for the segment leaders. You may have some questions, additional questions for Garry and I. We'll just take it away. We've got about 20-25 minutes. Over to you. We've got one up in front here. Meny?
It's Meny from Scotiabank. Ed and Carol, you talked about brand awareness, lagging competitors, and you're investing in marketing. Just a question of if you give us some sort of sense of scale of how much investment this will require and maybe some sort of gauge of metrics. It sounds like it's an important part of the strategy to build this brand awareness that's gonna drive the consumer awareness and the growth here. How much of an expense increase are we likely to see? Is there a period here where expenses have to be elevated as you build that brand awareness?
Yeah.
I'll go ahead.
Let me take it first. When we think about traditional advertising, all of our advertising has a call to action. In some ways, yes, we're branding the company, but we're also trying to drive activity and lead generation. That's first and foremost. The other thing I would say is, a lot of the opportunity, as we highlighted, is coming from that installed base of business. As we promote our capabilities, there are other ways to promote it that's not tremendously expensive, that highlights who we are and how we can serve them. Yes, we're gonna advertise, but we're also communicating to those 18 million customers because we have relationships, to make sure that they're aware of our full capabilities. This year, for example, we spent roughly about... We'll spend roughly about CAD 20 million in advertising.
which is up from about $7 million last year. I think what we're constantly doing is evaluating, you know, the ROI associated with that. Are we moving the needle on some of those key metrics? Are we seeing top of the funnel increase as a result of these efforts? Then we can figure out the best way to deploy those dollars. That's sort of the way we're thinking about it.
Carol?
Yeah, I was gonna say that I think that really sums it up pretty well. You know, we're certainly investing a little bit more in brand awareness right now than performance marketing or not more than, but we're spending a share of it. Over time, as that brand becomes more well known, you know, we'll obviously be pivoting some of the marketing spend back to performance marketing.
Yeah, I would say that even if you look, whether it's talking about Irish Life or Canada Life or Empower, one of the things is this installed base that you start with. We're not what we're not trying to do, like a digital startup or, you know, like Personal Capital was trying to do, which was create awareness and, you know, your cost per, you know, lead was quite high. Our relative cost per lead, if you were to compare what we do with a startup or a business that's trying to grow sort of purely organically, very much lower. That's one of the things that we track in terms of what is really the cost of a lead generation when you're dealing with an installed base, large installed base of customers.
I think that's a good follow-up. In terms of that install base, how do you define success in terms of capturing a bigger share of that install base? Is there a specific percentage every year that you're looking to achieve?
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear the last part of your question.
Just how do we define success around the money?
Uh-
particularly around the money in motion, I think is what you-
Sure.
Yeah, rollover capture.
Yes.
Okay.
If we're looking at assets that roll off the platform, it's about $80 billion this year we're projecting. We look at our capture rate of all the assets that are rolling over to a provider, what share do we get? In every single asset segment across our business, we get the largest share. Over the most recent five years, we've seen a pretty significant increase of about 30%, 31% in that capture rate. We're always looking at, as we're making investments in product, in brand, in even our advisor capabilities, how are we moving the dial in terms of rollover capture?
It's also, Meny, it's also an asset consolidation play because part of what we do is, yes, there's an event, and there's money in motion. As a fiduciary, we have a conversation with them to understand what their total financial situation looks like, right? To the extent that we can help them with outside assets, is there a consolidation play where they would look to roll other IRA accounts together and consolidate with Empower? That's part of our process. The other thing I would say, and we didn't talk about this today, but we have the ability to advise on held away assets. For example, we could be working with a customer that might be employed at XYZ company, and they have a 401 with that XYZ company. It's not being record-kept by Empower, but they have a need for advice.
They're not sure what to do with their 401. We can provide an advisory role. We play an advisory role there. We get paid for that. That's a business that's... We didn't talk about it today. It's a nice, growing business for us, a little over $3 billion in assets right now.
Yeah, we don't have to custody the assets to actually actively manage that portfolio off-platform.
Yeah, you know, there's multiple layers here. The, you know, one of the things that Canada's been working on and Empower as well is, first of all, you gotta know who you're talking to. You gotta have a digital connection with them. You've gotta have email addresses. They've gotta be working with you, and you have that relationship. First, do they know you? There is very often employer consent that you have to deal with, and the majority of employers, when they see value, are gonna provide consent. Ultimately, it's your capture rate after that. Those are all the things we're tracking across our businesses, making sure that we're creating the digital connections. We're winning employer consent because we're doing the right thing for their individuals, especially with our open architecture solutions.
Ultimately, we're getting the capture, and we're seeing that capture rate. There's still a lot of top end there and opportunity for us, though, and that's what we're really starting to track more deeply now going forward.
Thank you.
Thanks. Tom MacKinnon, BMO Capital. On Empower Personal Wealth or Personal Wealth, yeah, this is the... I always thought the Personal Capital was sort of a bit of a digital tool, and it was for do-it-yourselfers as they kind of rolled over. Now I'm hearing more about Empower advisors. You know, you think of... If you look at the advisors you have in Canada, that's, you know, they're running independent books and et cetera, and they're not dealing with them always digitally. How does the Empower advisor get in contact? Is that just someone who's in touch with the Personal Capital tool, if you will, and needs to have a little bit more advice, and so they call a number from there? Is that what an Empower advisor is, or...
Talk about how many you have and what your plans are 'cause that seems to be a bit more of a touch point than this digital connection that I always thought it was.
Sure, yeah.
Mm
... about 1,100 individual advisors that work with direct-to-consumer prospective clients, as well as our workplace, you know, individuals that are rolling over and/or looking to consolidate outside accounts. I would say, just to reflect back on your comment around Personal Capital being more of a digital or robo player, they were actually always a hybrid provider in the marketplace. The business originates digitally, where people actually come to the site, they use our free dashboard, they enter their outside assets, and then we actually use that to reach out through one of our advisors and provide them with a portfolio analysis of what that combined portfolio looks like today and what it could look like if it was invested appropriately. That is the opportunity to retain and manage that relationship over time.
Yeah, we've brought those Personal Capital advisors into Empower.
... we've expanded that. Frankly, they've adopted our metrics and our ratios, which are a little bit different than theirs. Over time, you know, whether it's the mass market segment, which has a different ratio versus high net worth, you know, we'll build that out as we continue to expand the customer base.
It's, you might wanna talk about the messaging engine, part of, what Personal Capital is, because there was hybrid digital advice, but, you know, there's millions of people. It's sort of who are you gonna talk to and how do you create warm leads? Maybe you can comment on that.
Absolutely. Just to close off the importance of advisor, about 97% of our business, like as we acquire new customers, are through advisors. Very few actually open their accounts just digitally. I think that's a very, very important piece. To Paul's point, another one of the really exceptional capabilities we got through this acquisition was what we refer to as the Empower Communications Engine, and it basically mines data and identifies the next best message to send to individuals, and then does that through a certain cadence, right? We've increased our cadence of outreach, and it actually leverages text, email, print, and tees up on a contact for our advisors to provide individuals with an outreach that marry up with those communications.
It's an incredibly robust outreach system that we've built into this as well.
The other thing I would just add, Tom, on the direct-to-consumer channel, we have what's called our house file. We have over 3 million Americans today that are using the freemium model. They effectively see real value in the tools, in the dashboard, and they're using that for free. Over time, you know, we cultivate and develop those relationships. Ultimately, about 40% of our new business comes from what we call that house file, and the other 60% would just come from a response to a direct mail, to a referral, to a TV ad that they might see.
One of the things is, that Carol and the team are looking at is, you know, we've got, you know, this 3 million customers that are very, very loyal, that are using this freemium model, other opportunities to think differently about how we ration those services, what we make available, what we don't make available. Lots of things that we're looking at from a strategic perspective there.
One thing I might add is that, you know, what Empower is doing is similarly being affected in Canada and at Irish Life. Interestingly, the leader of our group retirement business, this goes back many years ago, probably, nine years ago, actually visited Personal Capital and tried to recreate what Personal Capital was doing using Yodlee. Yodlee is an aggregation engine, use it in our Canadian model. Never really took. It was sort of too early, probably, relative to where consumers were at. Our Next Step program in Canada, you might want to comment on that, Jeff or Fabrice.
Sure. Well, I would just add that the discussion started with brand. A little-known fact about the brand in Canada is which impacts our rollover strategy. You know, prior to 2019, we had three strong brands: Great-West Life, Canada Life, and London Life. As far as a rollover strategy, it was difficult when you were to marketing with individual products, all the different brands. A little-known fact is, when we moved to that one brand and our familiarity and propensity to buy has grown significantly, similar to what Carol talked about, as we have our licensed advisors, Canada Life, on our proactive retail program, doing similar things, whether it be on life and health or retirement.
They have this opportunity then under one common brand, to market and sell, whether it be individual life products, retirement products, disability products, CI, et cetera, et cetera. It's been a growth engine. When you get behind our financials, the growth engine, particularly on the workplace, is significant in terms of the aspirations we have in growing that. As we mentioned in our presentation, we have 1 in 3 Canadians, over CAD 11.5 million of Canadians on our workplace, and what a huge opportunity and pipeline for us as people roll out of both the retirement plans and the life and health plans to consistently talk to on a daily basis.
Yeah, just as a follow-up on the Canadian side, I mean, you had success when you went to one brand, where you talked about the success you had when you were one brand, when you had like, I don't know, you could probably even throw Freedom 55 as another brand that you had with London Life and Great-West Life and Canada Life. Now, you got all these brands on the wealth side. Is there any talk about? Do you wanna maintain? What's the strength of maintaining separate brands, or is there?
Sure.
Is, you wanna roll into one brand on the wealth side here?
Perhaps I'll start there, Tom and Fabrice, may add a comment there. You are right, we did come from a history of 3 very successful brands: the London, Great-West in Canada, and branding under the Canada Life. Certainly, on our aspirations on the wealth side, and you know, we see moving to a single platform over time, 3 years or so. You know, we've been able to align ourself with some pretty significant brands, whether it be Value Partners or IPC. In the short term, we certainly don't see moving to a single brand, and we'll have to determine how that works. You know, Fabrice, did you want to add to that at all?
Exactly to your point, Jeff, as you mentioned, it will go with technology, it will go with value position. We will start by creating the right bridges between these platforms so that advisors and their clients can move, to the platform and offering of best choice, and that's happening very quickly, after close of these acquisitions. Over time, we will evolve to the right technology and the right brand, which will be linked with it. Wanna make sure it's done on the best terms for advisors and on the best terms for client, not imposing a conversion of brand or a conversion of technology, if it's not for a significant win or upgrade.
We will see that these brands in the market, which have value, and they have a strong value position in their respective segments, and over time, we can expect some of them to converge.
Yeah. I mean, the convergence is a natural outcome. One of the other limitations, you see this with other institutions that have multiple wealth acquisitions they've kept separate, because you had to operate with a separate MFDA platform, a separate IIROC platform, now with the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, CIRO?
CIRO.
CIRO, there you go.
You did well.
New, new acronym for everybody. You will see convergence, right? That means it gives you the facility to actually think about a more integrated platform where people can move, as opposed to today, if you're not on an MFDA platform, and you wanna contemplate IIROC, you leave. You have to fundamentally take all your clients, move them away, convert them over. What we wanna do is wait for technology and regulation over the next couple of years to create the opportunity for us to then leverage common brand. That's, that's the play going forward.
Thanks, Paul Holden, CIBC. Question related to Canada. A lot of the comparisons you provided were versus other independents, but clearly, the banks are big players in the wealth space in Canada. Wondering how you're thinking about competing against the banks, or really is the message you're thinking about competing against other independents, and that's where the market share opportunity is?
Well, I'm gonna let Fabrice and Jeff talk, you know, the banks are obviously strong, you know, competitors relative to their branch networks and their own IIROC dealers. I'd say we're competing for Canadians. Like, we are working to serve Canadians, and we have access through the independent channel. The independent channel serves a lot of Canadians, a lot of Canadian business owners, and a lot of Canadians who are looking for estate planning. We look at that, and we say it's the channel where we've got relevance and the channel where we can actually fundamentally serve Canadians well. I think we can actually do better than banks in a lot of ways if we are thinking about business transition, business owners, and the like, I'll let Jeff and Fabrice speak to that.
I would say that we strongly believe in the value of the independent advisor channel in Canada. This is a channel that's different from the bank branch channel. It's a channel that's different from the bank brokerage channel. It's a channel that's different from the direct brokerage or direct investment channel. It's a channel that has consistently grown in the Canadian market. It's a channel that continues to offer a very attractive value position. In fact, we see the evolution of the regulation as one positive factor for this channel. There will be entrepreneurial advisors who wanna hold themselves out as independent and manage their own business, in some cases, across a variety of products, wealth, insurance, benefits. We support them across these products.
When we look at other markets like the U.S., that independent channel, the RIA channel in the U.S., is larger in proportion than it is in Canada. It's catering to higher net worth, and we believe that some of the regulatory changes will be a positive contributor to this channel. We're committed to this channel, and we've got scale in this channel.
The only other thing I'd say, Paul, on that, and we touched on it in our presentation, and that is, we're coming from a real position of dominance in the workplace, and a dominant position on the insurance. There's such a growth opportunity for us on the individual wealth space. In terms of competing, we, the independent space is growing quickly, and in addition to that, the platforms that we've been able to align ourselves with IPC and Value Partners, the products and services, the investment management opportunities that we have, the brands of those are very strong brands that we obtain. We think the combination of that will allow us to propel and supported by strong support within the organization. We think that we like our chances in terms of growth versus the banks.
As Fabrice said, and Paul have mentioned, advice, advice. This is all about advice with Canadians in terms of needing that, and we think we're well positioned with the advisor group within those portfolios to grow.
Yeah, the last thing I'd say is that being a part of the succession conversation with advisors is critically important. I think Fabrice referenced, you know, the percentage that are over age 65. Broadly speaking, we've remained committed to the advisor channels in a lot of the markets where we operate, and I think we actually have the right to work with them. You know, we've sort of earned the right to work with them.
Yeah
- on succession, and I think being part of those succession conversations is part of the real potential for value creation and serving customers really well, that we wouldn't be doing if we were trying to think of ourselves more like a bank. We think of ourselves as someone who's serving advisors and we will win working with advisors.
There's been a lot of talk about scale today and the advantages of having scale, and you've kind of talked about, I guess, the three different geographies in which you operate. Are there scale advantages or other advantages associated with operating across three geographies?
Yeah. You know, I referenced this a little bit earlier. You know, we're in common businesses in some markets, so if I think about the retirement space, whether it be Canadian, U.S., European, you know, we play actively in group retirement in 3 markets. We're starting to grow a bit of a group retirement business in Germany, and I think leveraging intellectual property, leveraging capabilities, sharing insights, has really served us well. As a matter of fact, I think Ireland stole the brand Empower from Empower a few years ago. Or shouldn't have stole. They worked together.
We merged.
They reached an agreement on leveraging the brand. I do think there's opportunities to leverage some of those capabilities. I think being in different markets that have different levels of maturity or already consolidated is good as well. You learn. You know, a lot of the moves that Empower is now making in terms of, you know, consolidating the market we've learned from in terms of consolidating the Canadian market. Broadly speaking, the more businesses become digitized. The more you can carry over that intellectual property from market to market, I think the stronger you can be.
I mean, one I would just call out is India.
Good point.
I referenced, you know, Empower established. You know, we decided to establish our own captive there in 2015 versus an outsourced relationship. We have the same management team that opened that office in 2015, all still with us. Tremendous continuity. That's become a center of excellence for Lifeco. Other parts of the Lifeco organization now is leveraging that capability and that asset. It's been amazing for us 'cause it really allows us to process 24 hours a day. It took some time, but basically, all of the functions across Empower essentially have people in Bangalore, whether it's internal audit, risk, compliance, finance.
Yeah. Jeff, you might talk about the experience in group right now.
Yeah, we've certainly Ed's been quite good to us on that. You know, we are also established now in Bangalore and working with Ed and his team, and we've gone from no one working there to we'll be close to 500 over the next 12 months in our benefit payment office. When you think about taking on the federal government plan as an example, we're not paying the claims out of India, but in order for us to take on 1.5 million additional Canadians, the working with Bangalore and the service and the ability to pay claims quickly and fastly access to resources has been a huge game changer for us, and we'll continue to grow that on other parts of the Canadian franchise.
Yeah. I think the other area is on asset management. You know, Raman talked about our partnerships with Northleaf, Sagard, and even Power Sustainable. They'll be used right across the group, and so it will be a great help for us in Europe now as we launch Unio in Ireland. The management of the general accounts, we're seeing move to a more global, basis as well. The asset sourcing for the general accounts across all of the different regions is very similar. Yeah.
Yeah, I would say that, you know, completely lost sight of that one 'cause we've been talking about it for a while, is that we used to think of assets and liabilities as regional pools and regional activities. We now view assets really are global. We access them globally, and then we have liability pools, and we try and optimize through what we call strategic asset allocation, and it's something that's becoming more and more centralized so we can optimize. That was a key part of IFRS 17. If we had sort of kept ourselves singularly focused on in-market assets, you would have been really constrained in terms of the way to optimize your balance sheet. Do you have any other questions? Well, you know what?
Everybody, this is going so beautifully accordingly to plan 'cause it said that I was supposed to close. Oh, do I see a question? Supposed to close at 12:00 P.M. today. There is lunch here, before we get there, I wanna thank all of you for being here. You know, through my interactions with people, through the breaks, it's amazing how people really, I think, have been thirsting. Maybe we didn't realize the importance of human connection, once you start to make those human connections, you start to meet people, you start to meet our management team, we start to see you in real life, it's so much more powerful. I do wanna thank people who've come out, who've, you know, come to see us today.
This is a really, really important forum from our perspective, to be able to tell our story. Stepping back to the story today, we did talk about the value drivers. We talked about the workplace, we talked about insurance, we talked about wealth. I just wanna make it really clear, we went deep on wealth today, not because this is our only growth opportunity. You've heard about the scale and the success of Empower. You've heard about the scale of, you know, our group business here in Canada, the scale of our business, our group businesses in Europe, where, you know, 3.7 million customer relationships comes from the scale of that workplace business in the UK, for example. The workplace business is fundamental part of our future as well.
It's fundamental because it not only, recognizes us being a scale player who can serve, you know, millions of customers, it also represents relationships that we can really nurture and develop over time to actually create lifetime relationships. We see that as fundamental. If I go back to insurance and risk solutions, that is a foundational business that we've been at for, in Canada, 175 years. We fundamentally believe in the value of it, but we believe the way you need to be in that business is with discipline. You have to have discipline around your capital allocation. You have to be really focused on your pricing. You have to be focused on the risk, and we have expertise there.
If you get a chance, you know, we need to take a chance to profile Jeff and his team at some point in time, because the depth of expertise we have as we capture that market and approach that market is significant. We're excited about all of those value drivers. We like our historical strength and the foundational strength of the insurance enterprise. We like our scale and our reach that we have in our workplace businesses, and we're really excited about wealth management. That was our message for you today, and I fundamentally appreciate the time you taking the time to be with us. We're gonna spend some time now in the foyer, and we're all gonna be mingling, and we look forward to taking any one-on-one questions, but we also look forward to connecting with you.
I guess it will be over the phone or digitally in August when we, when we get to the end of the second quarter. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Finally, thank you to my colleagues. I should have thanked you guys, who all, along with you, many of them got on planes, flew overseas to come here to spend time. I think it's highly valuable. Please take advantage of them being here. Thank you.