All right. Good morning. Bonjour tout le monde. On behalf of iA Financial, it's a real pleasure to welcome you to our 2025 Investor Event. My name is Caroline Drouin. I am the Head of Investor Relations at iA. A few words on me. I am proud to have been working for iA for six years, a little over six years now, and I just recently transitioned into this role and leading the Investor Relations team. Coming from an actuarial background, I can tell you I've had the opportunity to take on different leadership roles, and I can tell you that this is by far the most exciting, the most dynamic transition that I've had. So it's wonderful to see you all here. This is our first in-person event since 2018.
The whole senior management team is excited to have the opportunity to connect with you in beautiful Toronto today. For those of you joining us online, a warm welcome. I'm going to quickly hit on a few housekeeping items. Behind me, you can see the agenda. We're going to kick off the day with an intro from our President and CEO, Denis Ricard. It will then be followed by our financial outlook presentation from our CFO. We have a great lineup of presenters also. We're going to then switch over and focus on the Canadian operations, and this Canadian panel will be followed by a Q&A session. Then we'll take a short break around midday. We'll reconvene after, and then we'll do a deep dive on our U.S. operations. This session too will be followed by a Q&A.
We will be wrapping at around noon with closing remarks from our President and CEO, and for those of you attending in person, we invite you to stay with us for a networking lunch. The whole senior management team is here today, so this will be a great opportunity for you to meet with them and connect with them. Okay, now, before we start, I do need to turn your attention to the next slide, this slide, so our comments today will include forward-looking statements that are based on material assumptions with risks and uncertainties, all of which are covered in our documents, and actual results may differ, so we encourage you to review our disclaimers. We also draw your attention to this slide and the notes on the non-IFRS financial measures, which are included in today's material.
Finally, all of our presentations, all of our videos and transcripts will be posted on our website under the Investor Relations section. So with that, then we're going to please welcome to this stage our President and CEO, Denis Ricard.
Thank you, Caroline. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, everyone. Okay, well, I'm introducing myself, Denis Ricard, President and CEO of iA Financial Group. I've worked for iA for the last 40 years, and I've had the privilege in my career. I've worked all my career there. I've had the privilege to have different roles, and in fact, I had to go back to my LinkedIn profile to count the number of roles that I had at iA, and because, you know, every four to five years, I would raise my hand and say, "Okay, what's next?" Because I want to learn more. I want to have a stretching mandate. This is part of our DNA at iA, by the way, so that you promote mobility within the organization, and so I have different roles. I am an actuary by background, but I've worked in marketing, IT.
I've led businesses like the dealer business in Canada, the insurance, Individual Insurance and Savings in Canada. And I've been the CEO since September 2018. And by the way, some of you, I mean, I started to know a lot among you here from 2004- 2010 when I was the CFO of the company. You might recall that period, 2008. It was a challenging period, as you remember. And so that was a great, great learning experience for me at the time. And so, by the way, the other thing that I checked in my LinkedIn was the, and I didn't realize that, is that the job or the role that I had the longest tenure at iA is this one. So every day I'm kind of having a, I'm setting a record for myself.
So, but by the way, be reassured. I'm not raising my hand with next, okay? So today I'm very thrilled to be with you. Thrilled because today the theme is the iA Way. It's ready for more. And you're going to hear it through all the presentations. You're going to hear all the heads of sectors talking about our growth story today. We have a great, great story. Now, as most of you know, we have outperformed the market over the last 25 years since we demutualized. And people are asking me sometimes, "How did you do it?" My simple answer is we do things differently. We're unique. This is the common thread of this day, the iA Way, the way that we are different. Each of the presenters is going to talk about how different we are vs the market.
The other thing that you're going to hear about today is about our U.S. business. We're going to spend a bit more time than in a normal, let's say, investor day, talking about the U.S. business, because I'm sure you want to know more about the U.S. business. You want to hear the passion of our leaders on the U.S. business. We have a great growth plan about the U.S. business. It's an area of growth for us going forward, and it's going to fuel the ROE expansion. This is very important. You're going to hear our leaders in the U.S. talking about their growth plan and how it's going to fuel the ROE expansion, and by this time, you already know that we've increased our ROE target from 15%+ to 17%+ by 2027, so let me, so let's talk about my presentation. I've got two parts.
The first part is about our performance, and those, I'm going to show you facts, okay? Not alternative facts. I'm going to show you actual facts, and the second part of my presentation is about the iA Way, our recipe of success, so today you're going to have some good idea of how we have performed and why we have performed so much in the past, so those are the two parts of my presentation, and at the end, I'll talk about the new guidance. We have a new guidance. We have some changes, so I'll talk about that and how confident we are in delivering on our new guidance, so, but let me start by talking about our, let's say, foundation. Let's talk about our purpose. Why does iA exist first? The purpose. It's for our clients to feel confident, to be confident and secure about their future.
And it's really what drives our employees on a daily basis, what makes them go the extra mile. And it's been lived through our values. We have four values. The first one is about client centricity, offering solutions to our clients with partnership with our distributors, obviously, because we value the advice. Second is about teamwork. More and more, there are transversal initiatives in the organization because more and more technology is taking place. We have multidisciplinary teams. So teamwork is essential for the success of the company. So it is a value at iA. The third one is learning agility. We want people that are curious. We want people that want to learn, want people to be agile. We want people that challenge the status quo. So that's what we call the learning organization.
It's part of the DNA of iA, being mobile also, as you'll see from all the leaders in this organization. And then finally, to provide the best value for our clients, best value for our shareholders, we have to execute perfectly our strategy. So operational efficiency, you're going to hear about that today as well. Very important for us. So that's the foundation of iA. Now let's talk about performance. And please pay attention to that slide. The way to look at it is really the shareholder return over a 25-year period since we demutualized. So the way to look at it is if you had invested CAD 100 in 2000, how much would it be worth today providing that dividends are being reinvested in the same vehicle? Well, if you invested in TSX, your CAD 100 would be worth CAD 278.
Not bad, but not great, provided that you were invested in equity, right? Well, if you had invested in lifecos, like let's say our peers, there are three of them, let's say that you've invested in the three, CAD 100, you would get a good return, 10.9% average return year after year. That's good. That's very good. Now, if you had invested CAD 100 at iA, you would have got CAD 3,000. That's an annual return of almost 15% on average. That's a stellar performance. It's not only good, it's not only excellent, it's stellar performance. That's how we have performed, and that's why I'm going to talk about the iA model, the iA Way today, the recipe for success. This is really the external view of iA. This is what the market thinks of iA. Now let's look at another metric, how we did outperform as well on the book value.
Book value growth is basically, you know, the accumulation of profit over time, and I included a dividend here, and I compare iA's performance with our peers, and why do I look at such a long period? We are in a long-term business. We are in a long-term business, so we have to look at it on a long-term basis. When we look at profitability, core ROE, there's always some noise, but when you look at book value growth, it's all inclusive, and if you look at iA vs our peers, we've definitely outperformed our peers during that period, and even at the transition to IFRS 17, let's not forget that iA did not, I mean, we did not decrease the book value at the transition, and what does that mean? It means that we did not have to reverse some of the profits that were accounted for.
So when I say that, and when we say that we are confident that we will increase the ROE to 17% by another 2%, I mean, it all comes from improvement in our operations. It all comes from the improvement in our operations. Now, what about growth of the business? So whether you look at it on a premium and deposit basis on the left side, or if you look at it on the asset growth on the right side, you can see that pretty much like 10% average growth over that period, again, stellar performance. Now let's look at Core EPS vs our target. So we've had targets for EPS growth over the last 10 years, 10%+ . We've delivered on the plus, basically. Whether you look at it on a 10-year basis, five-year basis, we've delivered average 12% in EPS growth.
When you look at the Core ROE, again, vs our guidance year after year, we have delivered on our promises. We've increased the ROE year after year thanks to the choices we made in terms of business mix, product mix, technological development, you know, investments, acquisition. We've delivered on our ROE expansion. Now we are prepared to move it even further up to 17%. We have definitely delivered on our promises. We are in a great spot because now we have CAD 1.4 billion of capital to deploy. We are generating from our operation CAD $650 million a year. That's capital to be deployed. We are at a great spot to grow going forward. This is going to fuel, and it is fueling, the ROE expansion of iA going forward.
Now, I've just spoken about the great performance that we had and the great spot that we're in right now. What about the future? Well, I talked about the why we exist, the purpose. Now let's talk about what we want to be. What we want to be is the leading financial institution that best combines the human and the digital experience. I mean, historically, we've been great on the human touch. We value the advice of our distributors, and we partner with them. And it's been quite successful, right? You've seen that. Today, we are enhancing it with technology. We've started that already. Since 2018, we've invested consistently and significantly in technology, and we are reaping the benefit. We have seen it live during the pandemic. It was very clear during the pandemic, and we'll continue doing that. And how are we going to do that?
How have we become that, you know, financial institution that is a leader in both human and digital? That's the iA Way. This has been our success so far, and we are consistently, continuously improving on our business model. There are, I mean, there are five elements here, and I'm going to quote an article from Michael Porter that he wrote 30 years ago. You might have read that article, "What is Strategy?" And just a sentence here. The essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in a system of activities that are much more difficult to match. Our system of activities is centered around the five elements here. It makes us unique. And it is, this is important. It is the combination of those five elements that are important. Each of these elements reinforcing the other elements.
Today, in the presentation, you're going to hear the management team describe how the iA Way applies into their business. I'll go through each of them just at a high level. First one is about the target markets. Where do we want to play? That's the where. We want to play in markets where we are or can be a leader. We obviously want to take advantage of the strength that we have, the synergies in between business. It starts with the businesses. You might have seen that triangle in the past. It's a bit different. I mean, we've changed a bit the format here. At the basis of it are the foundation businesses, the businesses where we are leaders, definitely. You're going to see it.
And where it's a bulk of the profit of the company, by the way, are those financial businesses, individual insurance and Wealth Management in Canada, the dealer business in Canada. And on the left side, all what we call the synergies business, businesses that, you know, have some synergies with the foundation business that strengthen the foundation businesses. And on the right side, we have the U.S. business where there is a, you know, a significant area for growth for iA going forward. None of our competitors have such a well-diversified business mix. And it has made us resilient through the economic cycle in the past. Each of these businesses is poised for growth, as you're going to see it today by the presenter. And on top of that, so this is a choice, you know, which business do we want to play?
And then within those businesses, we try to position ourselves such that we avoid as much as possible direct competition against the big, you know, the other major players in the industry. That's what we try to do. For example, in the Individual Insurance and Wealth business, we try to focus on the mass mid-market. Renée will talk about that. On the wealth management side, distribution, we're targeting the independent. Stephane will talk about that. On the U.S. Life, Joe will talk about the final expense business, a niche business where we are a leader in the U.S.. On the group side, we're targeting the mid-size employer, a place where we can have profitable growth. And in all these businesses, we're also trying to take advantage of some trends, like demographic trends. Immigration is one of them.
If you go to any sales meeting these days in our networks in Canada, I'm telling you, it's the United Nations. Okay, I go there all the time, and it's really the United Nations. And in the U.S., we are, and Joe will talk about it, we are focusing on the Spanish market as well. That is a growing market. So the target market is the first element of the equation of success of iA. And where does that leave us? It leaves us in a leadership position in Canada. Not going to spend too much time there because my colleagues will talk about it. And in the U.S., we are in a great spot. Great spot because we see significant growth opportunities in a market that is more fragmented than in the U.S..
And we are leveraging, and you're going to hear that, like Joe is going to talk about how we leverage the great success that American- Amicable had, leveraging iA's success. When we talk about synergies, that's what we're talking about. And we already have some leadership position in the markets we are in the U.S., but there is still a lot of space to go. In fact, that's interesting because with the acquisition of Vericity in the U.S., now we have more policies. We issue more policies per year than in Canada, where we are number one. And in the dealer space, our sales are twice the level of in Canada, where we are number one. So we are in a great spot. So that's number one. Second, about distribution. Distribution, three things to see here. First one is, why is distribution so important for us?
Our products are being sold. You don't wake up in the morning saying, "I'm going to buy a life insurance policy." So people do not know their needs. You need someone to make them understand that if something happens in their life in terms of protection, in case of death, disability, whatever, that, you know, there's a need for protection. So that's why the advice is so important. That's why distribution is so important. That's why broadening the scope of distribution is a factor of success for us. That's the first reason. That's the first thing. And we have strong conviction about distribution. Strong conviction. Distribution is a long-term business. Building relationships with distributors takes time. Takes time. And when you build those relationships, it lasts for a long time if you do a good job on the other elements, obviously. They all reinforce each other, right?
And the last thing I will say about distribution is that during economic cycles that are more difficult, it provides more resilience because human beings need to make a living, right? So if they have to work a bit harder to get their revenue, to get their sales, they're going to work a bit harder. So it provides some kind of resilience for our business model. So just give you some examples in the Individual Insurance and Wealth management space where I said that our target market is the, I mean, mass market, mid-market. The idea is to broaden the scope. We have from the most excited to the most independent type of distribution. We do, we have built relationships over decades with those distributors. On the wealth management side, I said that our target market or the independent distribution, well, guess what?
We are recruiting big-time those entrepreneurs that want to be in that model, Canadian dealer. A few years ago, we broadened the scope of our distribution, and now we are doing business with the OEMs, not only the dealers, but the OEMs. We have deals with them, so we're very much present also in the ethnic communities, as I mentioned, so you can see that being in the target markets and partnering with distributors in those target markets, you know, this brings some synergies and it strengthens each other of the two points. The third one is about products. Three things to see there. Because we are so close to distribution, we know, I mean, we know the needs of our clients through our distributors. We are in a great position to know their needs because we're close to distribution. Again, one aspect of the iA Way reinforces the other.
We also offer the full range of products in the markets that we're in. We try to offer more than one product to our client. And technology is an enabler today for that. You're going to hear about that today. And the last thing I will say about products is the way we manage risk. There is, in this company, financial acumen that is very, very strong. And I've seen it through my career. We have done product designs that sometimes are different from others, that meet the client's needs, but that manages the risks much better, much more appropriately. Now, the fourth one is technology. Today, I mean, we have to talk about technology. And it's really consistent with our ambition when I talk about human touch and technology being digital. And you're going to hear about it today.
I mean, all presenters are going to talk about technology, including AI, and we have invested significantly in technology since 2018. Not only have we invested in our platform for advisors, for the clients, for employees as well, but we're also testing some business models. We've invested in Surex. We've invested in Vericity. Those companies have a specialty in IT, in technology, special technology, digital marketing that we want to take advantage of. So that's part of this whole idea about reinforcing each of the elements here. It's a different distribution channel. Lastly, scalability, and scalability is about having the right system processes to be able to scale the business. The best example will be shown today by Joe in a U.S. business with the Vericity acquisition. A great job of conversion, very quick, under budget.
Same thing can apply to the wealth management side where we are recruiting big-time advisors and, you know, and one of the reasons is the technology there. I mean, they have all the tools that they need and we can offer them what they need to serve the clients. I'm just giving you at high level, obviously the levels are in the details, okay? At high level, I give you the recipe of success of iA. The one thing that I want you to remember is that each of these components reinforces the other in everything that we're doing. We're looking at this wheel and, okay, does that reinforce the whole iA Way? We are well positioned going forward. That takes decades to create.
If you want to copy that, it might sound simple here, but it's the day-to-day execution that makes the difference. And the performance that you've seen before is a testimony that this is, this is working. This is working. And so let me talk about now, because we are in a great spot in terms of capital deployment. It's a top priority. And the good news is that when you look, when you're going to hear about all the presenters today, we have the means for our ambition with the capital that I mentioned before. So I keep saying to my leaders in the different businesses, there's no constraint of capital. You can grow the business organically as you want in the current context, obviously with profitable sales. I mean, they know that. And we do that. And we invest in technology to improve our processes as well.
So organic growth is really the priority in terms of growth. And we've delivered on that. And you're going to hear the great growth plan of my leaders. Second is about acquisition. I'll talk about it in the next slide. And then we obviously increase dividends as we go, as profitability increases, and buying back shares opportunistically, like we did recently. So all of these elements will fuel the ROE expansion going forward. And in terms of acquisition, it has to fit the iA Way. It has to fit the wheel that I talked about. Strategically, it has to fit. It has to be accretive, obviously, on ROE, EPS. In the businesses that we are right now, in the business we are in now, we have been very successful in doing acquisitions since 2000. We've done 70 of them. We have a track record that is great.
We build businesses by acquisition. Just think about the Wealth Management business. We are saying that we grow organically, but we've bought a lot of organizations and we've integrated them. Dealer services, the same thing. So the 10% or the 12%, I should say, EPS growth, core EPS growth that I've shown before has been fueled by the result of acquisition as well. So we've been there, done that, right? We've been there, done that. We know how to do this. And I think also you know that in our organization, usually when we go into certain businesses, we do it prudently. Start smaller and then going bigger. So that's what we did in all the businesses we did, wealth management, Dealer Services, including in the U.S. .So the one thing to remember about acquisition, it has to reinforce one of the five elements of the iA Way.
So let me talk about the key financial targets. Two of them are unchanged. The 10% average annual average EPS growth, 10%+ , + is important, is unchanged. The dividend payout ratio is unchanged. We are increasing the organic generation of capital from 600- 650 this year. And we are increasing the ROE from 15%+ to 17%+ by 2027. And interestingly, Éric will go into more details, but it is important to understand because one of the questions you guys might ask me is, is this conservative or are you aggressive? Let me say this. To achieve the 17% by improving the U.S. business, because we've had some issues recently on the U.S. business, on the dealer side, I mean, with the pandemic and all the other macroeconomic factors, but now it's improving.
So by improving the U.S. business and by continuing improving the Canadian business as we know in the iA Way, we will achieve the 17%. In fact, we are very close to that right now. So we will achieve the 17%. Forget about the plus for the moment. Just by doing the improving in the U.S. and improving the Canadian business as we know how to do. To get the plus, plus, plus, it's really about deployment of capital. So for us, it's a top priority because we know, and we've done that in the past, that to get the plus on the 17%, we have to deploy capital properly in a disciplined way. We're not going to do stupid things. It's not in our DNA, but it's part of our strategy. It's part of our disciplined deployment of capital. We've been there. We've done that.
So that pretty much concludes my part. I come back at the end and you're going to see along all the presentations, you're going to hear about the iA Way. Each of these presenters will talk about the iA Way. So you're going to hear about the, first of all, with my CFO, we'll talk about the financial stuff. I don't know if you believe that we are conservative or not in our 17%, but maybe we'll have more from our CFO. And then we'll see the Canadian businesses. We'll have some presenters, Pierre, Renée, and Stephane, talking about the Canadian business. And as I said, we're going to spend a bit more time on the U.S. So we've got the full crowd of our U.S. leaders here, Sean, Joe, Melissa, and John, that will talk about the U.S. business after.
Very strong individuals, a lot of competencies, a lot of experience. In this crowd here, I mean, we had to do some choices, right? I mean, all my executives, they all wanted to be here, okay, and talk about their plan. And they're all very enthusiastic about their plan. But we had to make some choices. We could not have everyone here. But you'll have a chance at lunchtime or during the break to talk with my other executives that are present here. This time, it's not their turn, but maybe next time it's going to be their turn. Anyway, we tried to focus on the U.S. business today and also, obviously, on some of the Canadian business where we are leaders. With that said, I think I will leave it to Éric at this point. Over to you, Éric. Sorry about that.
Do you hear me? Do you hear me? It works. So, Denis, by the way, you almost make me feel like a sandbagger with your comment on the ROE in terms of prudence. So thanks for the introduction. Quickly, as mentioned.
I'm the middle one. Yours is, no, this isn't mine. This is yours.
So yeah, I'm Éric Jobin. I'm EVP, CFO, and Chief Actuary at iA Financial Group for a few years now, but I've been with the company for more than 25 years. Over that period, I took on, I inventoried the number of appointments also. I've taken about 10 roles or 10 mandates over that 25-year period plus at iA. As you may suspect, most of them were in the finance area. But when I looked, two of them stood out to be different that were great learning experiences to me.
The first one was an appointment with the acquisition team. I've been there for a couple of years. I had to enjoy the huge effort we did at the beginning with the wealth management growth and how we built that segment. So that was a great experience. And the second one that stood out is an appointment I had later on in the line of business to get closer to clients and now know how to service clients and, you know, move away from the glass tower down to earth by serving clients and feeling the heat. So that was a great, great learning experience. Today, I will start with a motivational quote. I have a few of them that I use in my leadership on a day-to-day basis. And one of them comes from Thomas Edison. Everybody knows Thomas Edison, right? He invented the light bulb.
Thomas Edison a long time ago said, "Vision without execution is hallucination." So my goal today is to show you that we are not hallucinating. So I will start with a quick look back. Denis talked about the highway. So I will show you the highway from the financial side. But there are two things today that I want to cover with you. First is our proven discipline and execution on delivering on our financial targets over the years. Very simple exercise to do, just a look back and you see that we've delivered. Second thing is that we are ready for new financial targets and raise the bar. So that's my second topic today. So speaking about the highway, I think I'm going to spend a bit more time on this slide because it's quite important.
It shows up the highlights from the finance and risk management perspective over the last many years. Denis talked about demonstration. I'm not going back that far on this slide, but just to show what's our, how do we work with finance at iA and what is our approach with respect to finance and risk management. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. The first one on the risk management, Denis, they talked about what we're different in product design. When I joined iA, in fact, 25 years ago, the first role I had was to price seg fund guarantees with very sophisticated pricing techniques. I know that our CRO is in the room, so close your ear, Philippe. You know that at the time, the computers were not as performant as of today. I needed horsepower on the computing side.
So I was waiting every day at the end of the day that everybody leaves. And then I was going around and setting up batch jobs on every computer to get as many results as possible. And Denis, at the time, as I remember, you were in the marketing area. So we worked extensively on this. And this was really unique because we started the seg fund guarantees by hedging the risk within the product. And that was quite important because we wanted to capture all the inherent risk of the guarantees. There were lots of things going on in the marketplace at the time. And we didn't want to go in those things. We wanted to be in control and avoid concentration risk or excessive policyholder behavior risk.
So we were really, we were going really deep in the analysis to make sure that our guarantees were sound. And later on, we introduced a few years later dynamic hedging that resulted in economic risk protection on top of that. But we started from hedging within the product. That was quite different. We didn't want just to take what the market was offering and say, "Okay, that's what we offer." We assessed the risk internally and decided to go one way. And today, Renée is building on that very strong foundation of risk management and sophisticated product design to grow our business in a sound manner. So that's example number one. Second example is the management of market risk. You may remember in the previous accounting regime that we had what we called additional protections on the balance sheet.
We always wanted to be ahead of the curve in terms of interest rate winds that were declining. We always had some additional protection to face the declining rates and manage it. Also, when you're in the business of long-term liabilities, you have to hold NFIs, non-fixed income instruments like stocks and real estate and so on. Those come with higher yield advantage, but they can bring in a bit more volatility on the financial performance. We had, again, there a special protection that covered the risk and helped us, you know, have more stable results over the years while holding those very high-yielding assets in our portfolios. I will say third example is gradually in the mid-10s, we started to shift away from high-guarantee product types, whether it's an individual insurance or segregated fund guarantee world.
We started to move away from higher guarantees to lower guarantees product. So those are just three examples of how what's our iA Way in the financial management of the company. So now happened IFRS 17. By the way, when I started to work, IFRS 17 was in preparation about 25 years. So it took a while to deliver, right? So that gave us a lot of time to anticipate and adjust and see what was coming with IFRS 17. So in that preparation, one of the key things that we've implemented is an improved methodology to manage our asset portfolio to maximize yield for the liabilities that we have for the long term. So that was a key element. And I will come back to this in a couple of slides.
As a result of all those actions in preparation of IFRS 17, Denis mentioned it, we were the only life co in Canada not to have a book value hit at transition because we were positioned in a prudent manner in our balance sheet and we had a seamless transition to IFRS 17. That said, on the following year, I must admit, I joined the financial area back in 2023 when we just implemented IFRS 17, and we had a couple of surprises. If you remember, the macroeconomic was a bit nasty in the first year of IFRS 17 with curve inversions and so on, so we realized that the interest rate sensitivity was slightly higher than we expected, so we worked relentlessly for about nine months to first understand where it was coming from and why was it diverting from our expectation and then fix it.
That was basically our approach in the following months to fix this interest rate sensitivity. And as a result, we were able to further reduce the interest rate sensitivity by 65% for parallel shift in interest rate. Okay, that's quite important because we still have some volatility. We cannot hedge against everything, but 65% reduction in one year for remaining interest rate sensitivity. It means now that we're close to zero for a 10 basis point. I think we're about CAD 0.4 million per 10 basis point now to core earnings. So very low level. So we're really comfortable with this level of interest rate sensitivity. So how has the hard work with managing finance resulted in terms of our earnings quality? Well, there's nothing better than facts. When we look at this, even if we have in mind core earnings, this is our true north, core earnings.
We want core earnings to be representative of future sustainable earnings, and we want reported to fluctuate around core earnings. This is our goal with the core earnings definition. When we look back, it's 10 years. A lot of things happened over the last 10 years, as you know. Guess what? Excluding acquisition-related items, reported earnings represent 96% of core earnings. 96%. We're getting to our goal with this. If we look a bit more in the recent future with IFRS 17, there's been volatility. We knew that even though IFRS 17, with what we did on hedging the interest rate exposure, we knew we would have remaining volatility. That number, the 96% in the last eight quarters or first eight quarters of IFRS 17 is equivalent to 90%, excluding acquisition-related items.
Very few data points and we're really close to where we want to be in terms of quality of earnings. Okay? That 90% has three out of eight quarters of reported earnings over core earnings in that short period of time. None of the other life cos have done that. None. The best is getting about the same, and once. We've achieved the best quality of our reported earnings to core in the last eight quarters. Now back on the investment portfolio and total portfolio management approach. I said we improved the methodology. In the past accounting regime, we used to do that approach at the line of business level. When we got in preparation for IFRS 17, we wanted to improve the approach. We saw an opportunity. In fact, IFRS 17 offered an opportunity to improve the methodology.
So we increased the approach or improved the approach to apply it at the company level and say, "We have liabilities to clients. Let's not just do optimal portfolio optimization by line of business. Let's take everything together and do the ALM at the company level." So that was what we improved at the transition and it resulted in us being able to reduce the interest rate sensitivity at the company level. So that's the primary goal. We basically improved the efficient frontier. We maximized the risk-reward. We improved the yield on our portfolio and we collect the benefit in comparison to our liabilities. But we're not only efficient with portfolio management and the other things. We're also efficient at expense management. In 2018, Pierre will talk about it later on.
We've accelerated IT investment in our lines of business because we needed an upgrade on the foundation, IT foundation of our lines of business. And this came along with a big increase in budget for many lines of business that resulted in an increase in expenses. But when we do those investments, we do them like we do an acquisition. We have a standalone business case that shows the cost and expected benefits for each of them. And we have a targeted return on those like we do for pricing purposes and other stuff. So we are in control of the cost and benefit related to those big investments. And as a way to further expand the expense scrutiny, in 2022, we've implemented in the organization what we call the operating leverage. That's an internal KPI that is very simple.
In fact, it comes from my past leadership role in managing a business sector. You know, you have to manage the growth and the growth of the business and the growth of expenses. So it came from that past, and the reality is that it's a very simple KPI that can be deployed anywhere in the organization, in any sector, and it's been deployed throughout the organization over the last two years, and guess what? We have been successful in achieving a 5%+ve operating leverage in 2024. It was above our internal goal or internal target, so excellent result in 2024, improving from 2022, and we aim to keep that improvement in the years to come in our plan. Operationally efficient also and disciplined on capital management. We have a very strong capital ratio. We have a lot of financial flexibility. We have 1.4 of capital available for deployment.
If you look at the strong organic capital generation, it has increased significantly over the last eight years, collecting the benefit of our disciplined approach at risk management and improving financial results. As a result, today, we shoot for CAD 650 million for 2025. Okay, sorry. Now let me sum up. I have shown a proven discipline to get that we have achieved our past promises of financial target. Now I will move on to why I'm confident about delivering the new financial targets. Let's start with EPS growth momentum. The foundation of our new 10%+ EPS growth is based on organic growth. We have a very strong foundation in many lines of business where we can grow and scale. That's the basis for our 10%. 6% is coming from that. 4% is coming from improvement in different areas, including the U.S..
I'm going to come back to this in a couple of minutes. Improvement in the U.S., maintain improvement on operational efficiency, additional NCIB, and so on, and the plus is coming from additional capital deployment activities. So this EPS comes in with sound capital management. When we look at our products, they are low guarantees type product for most of the lines of business that comes in with very low capital requirement, very high profitability, and we are keep building on the organic capital generation. If we look and move to the ROE now, if we look at where we were in 2024, you see at the bottom 15.9%. That's the number we disclosed last week as a result of the 2024 performance, 15.9%. If we carve out the excess capital that is, you know, yielding a lower rate, we're already at 17% if we carve out this excess capital.
If you look at the break between Canada and U.S., you see that our Canadian operations are yielding about 18%. The U.S., as expected, is at 8% for now. We're not happy with this 8%, but we're working on it. Behind that, there's a life part that is performing well. Joe will talk about it. Then we have the issues that we will fix and that my colleagues will talk about in a few minutes on the U.S. Dealer side. When I look at this slide, I see two great potentials. First, when I see the eight, I see a potential for improvement. The important is that we know and determine how to improve it. The second thing, if you look on the right of the chart, you see new business profitability.
The organic growth I was speaking about is in excess of that 17% target. On the ROE expansion now, where does it come from? It comes from our line of business with fundamental operations in Canada delivering most of it, about 75%, and the U.S. division delivering 25% of that improvement in the target ROE. On that, you will see in the middle of the graph that we assume only CAD 300 million deployment of organic capital generation per year. It's less than 50% of our organic capital generation. Now, if you sum up, you know, we have CAD 1.4 billion at the start. We say we invest CAD 300 million per year. So it means that there's uninvested capital, organic capital generation. If you sum up what's remaining, it means that in three years from now, we have CAD 2.5 billion of capital deployable.
And that capital deployable has the potential to deliver more than 17%. CAD 1 billion dollars being deployed increases the ROE by 1%. So in a nutshell, we have reasonable financial targets. We have a vision. We have a plan. We will execute the plan. We are not hallucinating. So on this, you know, you heard Denis talk about the highway. You heard me talk about the financial targets. Let's hear now about how it's going to play out in Canada. And I will invite Team Canada to come over the stage with the first speaker being Pierre.
Can you hear me? I was in it. Can you hear me well?
Now it's working.
Thank you. So good morning. My name is Pierre Miron. I am responsible for the growth of the Canadian business sector. I joined the company in the fall of 2018 when Denis was appointed CEO.
My responsibility at that time was to undertake the iA digital transformation. Previously, I worked nine years at the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec as Chief Operating Officer, having contributed to the financial turnaround during the financial crisis. If you remember that moment, I did. To be honest, I do. I was also responsible for the carry out, the digital transformation of the Caisse at that time. At the end, I was responsible for the globalization of the investment activities. You heard my colleagues quoting some authors. I'm not going to go down that path, but I'm going to talk about the deep conviction that I have. Personally, I'm deeply convinced that the companies in the financial sectors can be much more successful by an appropriate use of information technology and today's AI. That has motivated me for the last 30 years of my career.
And to be honest, the timing for joining this company was perfect. So I'm happy to provide you some highlights of the Canadian operation with my colleagues Renée and Stephane. They will be talking in a few moments. So we've achieved sustainable growth with a very diversified business portfolio. And because we do things differently, and I'll comment on it in a few moments. Distribution is a key differential strength. And that sets us apart. I mean, you'll see over the course of not only my presentation, but also of Renée and Stephane and the others if you have some questions. The last time we did this event was in 2021. It was a virtual investor event. And when we did it, we came up with this notion of investing heavily in this digital transformation program.
Our effective combination of human touch and technology has proved very profitable so far. We are continuing in this direction. Like I said, in Canada, we operate in five complementary and diversified business segments. This business model, honestly, is unique and difficult to compare with other peers. As we operate across the entire spectrum of wealth, saving and life insurance, sorry, life insurance product. On top of this, we add some synergies by bringing synergy with the other three business units, such as group business and retirement solution, the P&C division, and finally, the Dealer Services in Canada. Like I said, our comparable is difficult to establish, giving this unique and distinctive model.
A strength lies in the fact that depending on the up and down of the market, we are able to sustain our growth, given the fact that some business unit could face some headwinds. Denis, Éric will call that resiliency. The other thing I'd like to mention, and this is something that all the sectors have in common, which is the client. At the end, when we look at the client perspective, we're able to provide not only some services coming from each business unit, but also creating loyalty by adding additional products when it's applicable. Just think about our life insurance policyholders. They may need some insurance, some coverage for their home or auto protection, if you wish. Sorry about that. Sorry about my throat. I need to drink a lot. As mentioned, our two main sectors are individual life insurance and wealth management in Canada.
And the two leaders, Renée and Stephane, will cover this sector in a few moments and will provide an overview of the growth prospect in their presentation. However, when we look globally about all the sectors that we're in in Canada, there's some common thing that we need to talk about that leads us to a leading position. Individual life insurance, we're number one in the number of policies sold in Canada. Wealth management, we're number one of the sales of segregated funds in Canada, as well as where we have the biggest network of financial advisors in the wealth management space. On group business and retirement solution, our positioning in the mid-size markets is driving our growth significantly.
On the dealer side, Dealer Services side, we're number one in the province of Québec and number two in Canada, with a well-supported offering, not only with dealers, but now more and more with OEM by providing products that support their customers. And our P&C division in Québec has been growing at a rate of 11% year over year since 2020. What I can also mention, and you saw it during Éric's presentation, all of these businesses meet or exceed the target ROE in that sector, which is where we're proud of it.
When we look at the overall growth over the last five years from the life insurance, from insurance premium or asset under management or asset under administration on the wealth side, we've been able to grow the business by a factor between 9% and 10% year over years over the last five years, which is a great achievement. To meet these targets, and I'll go a little bit deeper than what Renée presented, Denis presented in the iA Way. I'd like to share with you the pillars of this growth that we call the iA Way. We know well the market in which we operate. That's the first thing. The first thing, we've talked about it, and we'll continue to talk about it because strength is at the heart of the growth strategy of this company, what we call distribution.
You'll see this more in depth with Renée's presentation in a few moments, but when I look at the characteristics of how we manage the distribution network, there's three common things that I'd like to comment on this. For each business that we're in, we have a dedicated team that is responsible to manage the sales performance and discuss with advisors and also with the owner of this network. We are deeply attentive to the needs of these advisors by providing tools, products that meet their needs, but also by giving them some training on the products and on new stuff that is coming in the market and making sure that we apply the regulatory framework that is applicable on each sector, and we recognize and reward performance.
The third thing that I'd like to think to talk about, and Denis described it, and we are very proud of this achievement so far, is our investment in technology to support the growth of these activities and our ability to scale those businesses that we're in, and finally, in that space, we're making significant progress in developing the customer experience, not only for improving the customer experience, but as a source of growth in this company. Because like I said, there's one thing in common with all the business that we're in, which is the client. So if we're able to develop this 360 view of the customer by bringing some tools, some technology, some AI, and to making sure that the offering will be much more relevant in the market, we strongly believe that that sector will become an important source of growth in this company.
You'll see that in Renée's and Stephane's presentation in a few moments. So before going into these presentations, I'd like to provide you a specific look at the three other businesses that we're in Canada, starting with the GBRS business, group business and retirement solutions. Over the last two years, 20% CAGR in that sector. In terms of target market, like Denis said, we've chosen to develop a specific offering in a mid-size market because we see that as an opportunity of growth, of significant future growth in this, what we call a fragmented market. It's not well tackled as far as we know.
Also, we invested in what we call the group benefit platforms, a piece of technology that allows the members, the employees of the members' company that we're in, not only to deal with group business, but also to expose the entire family of iA products in that sentence, in that space. So we believe that these investments and the progress that we're making in that business will put us in a situation where the growth will be there and that sector will set us apart. Moving on to the Dealer Services space. With a coverage of a network of more than 4,000 dealers in Canada, we distribute warranty and protection products, warranty and automobile protection products to their customers for the purchase of new and used cars.
Looking deeper in the gains that we have made in the OEM space, we've worked with Honda for the last 10 years, and we've won Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz over the last two years. We are continuing this deployment that we call distribution, but our expansion towards this OEM space because that's an important source of growth in the future. One out of four new cars being sold in Canada, they'll get an offer coming from iA in terms of the product that we offer. As mentioned, we are number one in Quebec, number two in Canada, and the two main players capture 85% of the overall market in that space in Canada. I’d like to draw your attention on the product segment because we are investing in running our offering.
In line with our one-stop shop mindset, we offer the widest range of life and asset protection products. As an example, you saw it recently, we've announced the acquisition of Global Warranty in terms of product expansion. In the used car market, for example, I don't know if you know the stats, but 60% of the car being sold in Canada are used cars. We are continuing this expansion as well. I want you to remember that we're not changing the list of products. We're just expanding the number of products, but we are expanding our distribution reach with new distribution channels that could be physical or digital as well. The last sector that I'd like to talk about is the P&C sectors that we call iA Auto and Home.
For those of you that reside in the province of Québec, you may have seen the advertising, right? Very powerful, to be honest. This sector has grown by a factor of 11% over the last five years, over and above the growth of the overall market, slightly over the overall growth of the sectors in the province of Quebec, so it means that we are increasing our market share in this sector, but what is interesting within our presence is that that gives us a direct access to the consumer, the client, and it fits perfectly with our vision. Sorry about that. It fits perfectly with our vision of maximizing customer experience and digital experience as well. We talked about this in terms of synergy. That's a strong source of synergy, this business, because we can source customers from our internal list of customers.
As you've seen in my presentation, we have more than 5.5 million clients within all the sectors in this company. More than that, despite the impact of the climatic events that occur, we can generate the expected value on both sides, the growth and profitability. We've learned how to adjust pricing to reflect this new reality. From a technology standpoint, this sector is combined with the efficient management tools for call centers with the ability to quote or to transact online. It's a perfect example of our ability, of our model of combining customer experience and technology. In 2021, when we did the same event, I told you that the company was willing to invest CAD 500 million about our digital transformation program with that plan. I'd like to say a few words about it.
So far, this program has proven to be very profitable. To recall it, it was based on three principles, four principles. The first one, the modernization of our business platform, enabling us to proceed to, let's say, increase our efficiency and to increase our business processes in order to scale our business. The development and deployment of sophisticated tools for our advisors and our clients, data enhancement, and tools for employees in this concept to work from anywhere. It seems obvious to tell you that, but it was before the pandemic that we decided to invest.
What I can say today about this program, it has allowed us to scale our business sectors with the volume of business we've encountered, optimize our administration, claim services, and customer services operation, attract and retain advisors in our distribution network by giving them tools that make their life easier and set us apart from the competition, integrate acquisition and capture associated synergies because of the scaling factors, get to know our advisors and clients better thanks to our data strategy, analytical models, and today's AI, the use of AI, and providing employees with the tools they need to work from anywhere and their talent wherever they go. Now that we've done this, it's like training for new muscle or a marathon runner. You get a taste for it, and you want to keep going on that pace, right?
As you saw in Denis and Éric's presentation, when we look ahead, we maintain our conviction that a portion of the company's available capital should be invested in organic development or technology. Therefore, for the past two years, we've invested between CAD 250 million and CAD 400 million annually. We're going to continue at the same pace with an even greater focus on supporting our growth and continue to be disciplined on delivering the benefits. More specifically, we will continue the modernization of our business platform, which contributes significantly to our operational efficiency. You have heard Éric talking about operational efficiency. One thing that we're looking at is to drive more and more this KPI in our respective market. We see that as a real competitive advantage when we think about straight-through processing, business process automation, and efficiency along the way.
The increasing use of data because that's basically an asset that we could leverage more and more today, the use of AI, the use of analytics models to be much more relevant on the offering on the market. We're going to continue to develop sophisticated tools for advisors and our clients in order to provide them a superior digital experience that will be powered by AI. I've now come in. Sorry about that. I've now come to the end of my remarks. To sum up, I'd like to come back to my two initial statements. Business model is unique. We've been able to achieve sustainable growth, and we are continuing in this direction. Distribution is a key enabler. I will say distribution, distribution, and distribution. Finally, technology to support our growth strategy. I'd like to conclude like this with this. You will agree with me.
There are still many opportunities for growth in Canada, and in that, not only organic, but also inorganic. We are deeply committed to capturing these opportunities in order to meet or exceed our targets. So thank you. I will now invite Renée to give you a more closer look at the individual sectors. Renée.
Thank you, Pierre, and good morning, everyone. My name is Renée Laflamme, and I am the Executive Vice President, Individual Insurance, Savings and Retirement. I have the big privilege of leading this big business that represents 60% or close to 60% of the profit of the organization. I am very proud of the team. I am very proud of our successes. You will hear me today say that we are number one in so many things. What I would like to share with you today is that we grow faster than the Canadian industry.
And we can elevate our performance by leveraging our competitive advantage that are distinctive to us. So today, what I would like you to remember from this presentation is that, number one, Individual Insurance Savings and Retirement, i.e., grows faster than the industry. Number two, we are the indisputable leader in the mass market, and we outperform the market in the mid-market. And number three, we have key strategic advantages that support our performance and our execution. Now, I've already said it. We're growing faster than the market. We are number one. Then you mentioned it before. We're number one in the number of policies sold in Canada. In fact, we issue 27% of all policies issued in Canada. Our closest competitor has a 10% market share. So in other words, we are issuing more than one policy out of four in Canada.
Not only are we number one, but we're also growing faster. When you look at the period of 2020 -2024, our growth in the number of policies sold is 5%, while our peers have a negative growth of 3.9%. When we look at our position based on total premium, we rank number four. But again, looking at the market, you see that over the 2020- 2024 period, we have an annual growth of 15%, while our peers have 6%. We are also the indisputable leader in the seg fund market. We've been number one in net sales since 2016. If you take that period again of 2020- 2024, we have gathered CAD 10.6 billion of net sales, while our peers are negative net sales.
We're number one in gross deposits since 2022, and we have grown our assets under management between 2020- 2024 by 15%, while our peers have grown at 1.3%. So all of this doesn't happen by luck. It does happen by design. And the first part of the design, the iA Way, is clearly defining our target market. So we are leading, again, as I said, in the mass market, and we are outperforming in the mid-market. Being number one in the number of policies sold is certainly a clear statement that we lead in the mass market. Being number one in gross deposit and saving is another testimony of us being number one in the mass market. When we look at the mid-market, well, the number speaks for itself.
We've been growing between 2020- 2024 at a rate of 31% in individual insurance and savings and 28% in savings. Those numbers speak for themselves, and we are confident that we can continue growing and outperforming the market, especially given the relationship that we have built over the years with our distribution networks. This strong performance comes with a strategy, and we have four strategic competitive advantages that support that performance. Number one, we are geared to scale. We can grow faster than our competition. Number two, we have unparalleled distribution reach, and that allows us to connect with the largest number of Canadians. Number three, we have a complete range of products so we can answer the needs of our clients and advisors. And number four, we have competitive digital tools and leading-edge technology.
And I am sure here that you will all agree this is of utmost importance going forward. So let's discuss those competitive advantages. We are geared to scale in our target market. Our operational excellence supports our growth. In individual insurance, I said it, we're number one in the number of policies sold. We issue 236,000 insurance policies in 2024. According to the LIMRA number, our closest competitor has issued less, more than half less than that. According to an independent industry survey, the cost of servicing the insured, on average, is CAD 16. Our cost is CAD 14 per policy. According to that same survey, the cost of issuing new business is CAD 482 per policy. Our cost is CAD 191. So not only can we handle volume, but we can do this profitably. In savings, we've processed 1.4 million transactions in 2024.
That really speaks to the robustness of our processes and our system. And we are also operating at a lower cost than average. We know that we can continue to grow. We all know that within the next 10 years, the retirement market will close to double. We can handle that volume. The clients will be interested in guaranteed product. They will be interested in the seg fund business where we offer a guarantee, but where the product also allows for an easy and fast estate settlement. In insurance, we have room to grow as well because 53% of Canadians either have no insurance or are in need of insurance. And this is why distribution is key. It is because we can reach out to those clients that are in need of advice, product, financial protection, and peace of mind. To grow individual insurance distribution is key.
And this is our second competitive advantage. We have unparalleled distribution reach. We do business through 33,000 active advisors. Now, not only do we want to grow this number of advisors, but we certainly want to support them in growing their own business. And this is the win-win approach. We grow in all our distribution network. In Québec, our career network now counts close to 3,000 advisors. We do business with dedicated MGAs all across Canada. We do business with independent MGAs, including the largest one like PPI that we own. And we also do business with the fastest-growing MGAs, those that are targeting the immigrant market. We are present in all the communities. Managing distribution is part of our DNA. It's the iA Way. We know that our business is a relationship business. And this relationship needs to be built over time.
And over a long time, it does not happen overnight. In fact, I am very proud to say that according to Environics Research Group, based on their advisor perception survey that they do annually, we rank number one in that for the fourth year in a row. So we have scale. We have distribution. We also have a wide and complete range of product. And this is the third competitive advantage. When an advisor comes to us, he knows he can find the product and the protection so that their client has the peace of mind. We're that one-stop shop for advisors and clients. When we build our product or improve our product, we're agile. We do this efficiently. As an example, we launched our new par product, and we are already number two in the number of par policies sold in Canada.
We're committed to long-term profitable growth and ROE expansion, and Éric mentioned it. Our new business is delivering an ROE superior to the targeted ROE, so recapping again, we have the scale to grow profitably. We have the distribution reach. We have the product. The fourth element is also critical, and it is technology, and I will take just a little bit more time on technology. We're very strategic about developing our ecosystem. First, we want to leverage the leading platforms available in the market, including the readily available AI. As an example, in our call center, we use Genesys. We use Salesforce as a CRM, and we are currently successfully implementing Oracle to modernize our back office in individual insurance. Second, we are also very strategic on the choice of the technology. We select the platform. We augment them. We include solutions.
We are very thoughtful about those choices. As an example, our underwriting process is automated using the FICO rule engine platform. We chose the FICO platform. We augment it. We put our predictive models on it with AI. Just in 2025, so just recently, we were awarded by FICO the 2025 Decision Making Award. Thirdly, well, sometimes we build in-house. We do that, namely, when we believe that we have a competitive advantage. Our EVO platform is a prime example of this. Our EVO platform is the individual insurance platform where our advisors produce their illustration and the application. EVO is, in fact, a competitive advantage in itself. There is no such thing as EVO available in the marketplace. Integrating technology is critical. When we do this, we have the business in mind and the business strategy in mind.
We have developed a unique end-to-end experience for both the client and the advisor. Thus, 54% of our policies are underwritten automatically, and we're aiming at getting to 80% in 2030. Our average placement time for a policy is 38% faster than the industry. 98% of all applications we receive are e-apps. And in savings, 85% of our processes are automated for new business, and we're aiming at getting to 100%. We keep improving all the time. As I'm wrapping up this presentation, we have that unique combination of competitive advantages and a clear target market, and this sets us apart. It is the iA Way that sets us apart to deliver year-over-year high performance. We're confident in our ability to continue to grow faster than the market.
In fact, we're aiming at growing our individual insurance between 5%-8% and savings between 8%-10% to 2030 to more than double our new business. We are determined to stay the leader in the mass market and to continue to outperform in the mid-market. We always aim at superior execution and superior ROE. I'd like to conclude in telling you that we're very confident in our ability to grow this market and continue to outperform the market. I would like to turn it over to my colleague Stephane to talk about wealth.
Thank you, Renée. Good morning, everybody. Great to be with you this morning. My name is Stephane Bourbonnais, and I serve as the Executive Vice President for iA Wealth. My business represents 15% of the profit of iA Financial.
So very excited to have the chance this morning to share with you our story, to share with you our journey. A little bit about me. I joined the organization four years ago after a long career in the banking sector, over 20 years leading and managing the Wealth Management division. I had the pleasure to cover it all, from practice management to asset management to running a full-service brokerage business to the private wealth management division. My entire career has been about building culture, building organization, growing sales. And I've always done it by bringing the best talent, by focusing on execution, and with a lot of passion. Passionate about the industry, passionate about the value of advice, passionate about helping Canadians achieve their life objectives, goals, and dreams.
So when I joined iA four years ago, it was clear to me that there was a growing need in the independent space, a growing need for advisors, a growing need for clients, and I thought at the time that iA and iA Wealth were best positioned to fill that opportunity and that need in the Canadian landscape, and I will talk to you about this. There were three key elements for me that stood out when I looked at the opportunity, and when you look at the Canadian space, there is an opportunity for us to make significant growth, and there are three key distinctive elements. It starts with our value proposition. You will see that we have a unique value proposition that defines who we are, and it's creating a competitive advantage to our organization. The second thing is the depth that we offer.
When we're looking at our investment that we've made in technology and our asset management space, supporting our advisors and clients. Last but not least, our scale. When you look at the number of advisors over the last 20 years that have trusted iA to join them and create a strong partnership, we have been able to build an unmatched level of advisors that are covering the Canadian market coast to coast. Based on those three things, we are uniquely positioned. We are setting ourselves apart from the competition, and we're also positioning ourselves for accelerated growth. Before diving a bit further on those three elements, I'd like to take a step back and just share with you what's the size of the prize in the Canadian space.
So if you look at the Canadian market, and that's a report that was published by Investor Economics in 2022, you see that the Canadian market is estimated to be a CAD 6.7 trillion market. That is poised to see growth and expand to CAD 11.2 trillion by 2032. First point. Second point, if you look at the 91%, there's an overwhelming 91% of the assets. So that's the CAD 10.2 trillion out of the CAD 11.2 trillion in 2022, sorry, that will be in the hands of the upscale and affluent client. And here, we define upscale client by clients and households with over CAD 500,000 and more. Why is this important? As wealth grows, so does the need for sophisticated advice, planning, and investment solutions. Three things that we're very well positioned to make sure we are offering to Canadians and advisors across the country. So two things to remember here.
If you look at the Canadian market, you are looking at a market that is substantial and poised for growth, and if you're looking at it from a client perspective, clients will be looking for the assistance of a professional to help them achieve their goal, as we believe that the need of advice will be at an all-time high for the years to come, and thanks to our unique value proposition, we are very well positioned to capture that growth, so let's talk about the value proposition. A lot of my colleagues have talked so far about the iA Way on how we do things differently here at iA, and this applies very much to iA Wealth. We have created a unique value proposition in the industry. We have created a brand that is now recognized by everybody in the industry.
I would say we've created our own space in the Canadian industry. If you look at this graph, you see us shining in that top right corner. We'd like to think that we offer the best of both worlds. What does that mean? Well, we offer the financial strength of a strong financial organization. It brings brand recognition. It brings resources. It brings capacity to invest. And that's important for clients because it brings them trust and peace of mind. On the other side, we offer a level of independence that is unmatched by the industry. Why is it important? Well, it means to our clients that they have access to an unbiased way of being served, getting access to the best product, the best solutions, and the best offering, driving an amazing client experience with our open architecture.
It also means for advisors that they get to build their business their way based on their vision, their value, and the target market that they're going after. And this offering has been extremely successful for us over the last few years, as we've been able to recruit bank advisors because they were looking for that freedom to operate and manage their business their way. But at the same time, it attracted smaller independent advisors to join us because they were craving for that capability that we've been able to invest in. So with this clear value proposition, we've been able to build unstoppable momentum. Let's look at the growth we've seen over the last five years. Annual growth rate. From a recruiting perspective and asset growth, we've grown our recruiting by 36% and our asset by 8.5%. And this has been highlighted by a record year in 2024.
Last year, our assets have grown by more than 20%. Obviously, we benefited from great markets, but our recruiting activity just turned to another gear. We've added close to CAD 6 billion in new money joining our organization through our recruiting activities. We've also added, through some acquisition that we did during the year, CAD 2.5 billion joined us through the acquisition. Our organic growth was driven by our entrepreneurial advisor, and from a manufacturing perspective, we've been able to add to our lineup and add in key partnerships that have helped us create a new momentum in Q4 in terms of growth and net sales, and while doing this, we've doubled down on our investment. Pierre Miron talked about the investment that we've made in technology, and iA Wealth was a great benefit of the investment that we've decided to make.
On the left side, you see the investment that we have made in our tools. We've more than doubled the investment that we've made, investing in leading digital tools and leading-edge technology. We had three key objectives with the investment we made: fuel our growth, drive a better client and advisor experience, and making sure we were building scale for our business to accept the growth that we are seeing in our business. On the right side, we've made significant investment as well on the asset management side, making sure we had a full lineup of products, platforms, and services to our advisors and our clients. When you're looking at this, let's be clear. They're not just the engine of investment solutions that we're proposing. They are what will drive our success, ensuring that we're able to provide quality product solutions to meet our clients' needs.
So over the last three years, the investments that we made in our business have allowed us to build for sustained growth and success. From my view and from the view of my team, we've got all the pieces of the puzzle to support our ambition for continued growth. And where would that growth come from? So our business is centered around two key functions. We've got distribution, and we've got manufacturing. On the distribution side, we've got two dealers, Investia, an MFDA dealer having CAD 69 billion in assets and over 1,800 advisors. We've got iA Private Wealth, full-service brokerage, over CAD 62 billion in assets and over 460 teams partnering up with us. And we've got Clarington, our manufacturing, with CAD 22 billion of assets and over 370,000 clients. I've shared with you at the beginning that we're contributing to 15% of iA's profit.
I would ask you here to pay attention to our distribution. Our distribution represents 70% of the profitability of our division. So our operating model is simple. We leverage distribution to make sure we're increasing our growth by recruiting advisors that bring organic growth, and then we enhance our margins and our client experience leveraging the capabilities that we have on the asset management side. I've talked about the fact that we add unmatched scale of advisors. If you look at this map in Canada, you will see that our distribution is very much aligned with the Canadian population. Our geographic reach spans across the nation. We are able to meet Canadians wherever they are in Canada. We are large in scale, but we are local in focus. And this is what makes us unique in our space. So to wrap things up, we are focused for more growth.
You've seen the iA Wheel in the other presentation so far, and you see it here on the bottom part. All the components of the iA Wheel, as Denis shared, are extremely important for iA, but in our business, it's all about distribution. There are five key elements that we're going to keep pushing to make sure we achieve the ambitious plan that we have, and it starts with our organic growth. To the entrepreneurial, business-minded advisors that we have, over 2,500 advisors, this organic growth will come from the relationship that they have in their own respective market. Obviously, advisor retention is at the core of what we do every day. We need to keep our advisors happy. We need to make sure they are ambassadors of the brand, and we're going to continue investing significantly in our capabilities that I've talked about.
The third point is about attracting business-minded advisors. That's the top right corner. It's not always comfortable to be there, but we know that those that are joining us are real entrepreneurs at heart, and this is what we want to partner up with. Manufacturing is a key part of what we do. We want to make sure that we continue to invest and expand and diversify our management capabilities to make sure we're always meeting our clients' needs, and last but not least, we are open for business. If there's an opportunity for us to look at a strategic partnership, either on the asset management side or on the distribution side, we're going to be looking at it as long as it fits with our core model.
So in conclusion, by leveraging our unique competitive advantage, our value proposition, our depth, our scale, by fostering advisor retention to create ambassadors within our group, by expanding asset management capabilities, and by seeking acquisition, we are set for accelerated growth for the years to come. Thank you very much, and I'll have Caroline.
Okay. Well, thank you to our first presenters. So we're going to go into the Q&A session, 15 minutes. We're going to take a few minutes, and I'm going to ask all the presenters to come on the stage. We also have the leaders from our other Canadian businesses sitting right here, so they're available to answer any questions. Those of you in the room, just simply raise your hand. We'll have somebody from our team come over with a mic.
For those of you online, if you have any questions, just write them in the chat, and somebody from our staff will read them out loud. Thank you.
Thanks, Lemar from Cormark. Maybe for Denis, you ended your presentation just by talking about how you felt the ROE target was a bit conservative: 16% in 2024, 17% by 2027, CAD 1.4 billion in excess capital, CAD 650 million in organic capital generation and positive operating leverage. So can you talk to me why 17%+ makes sense here? Like, what type of macroeconomic backdrop are you assuming? Or should we think about this as IAG just being overly conservative?
The short answer is yes. We've been prudent in any guidance we've provided in the past. And I think we laid out pretty clearly what were the conditions under which we could deliver on that 17%.
On our operations, everybody's working hard to improve the iA model. But certainly, the capital deployment is one key element also of that capital ROE expansion. I guess we are quite confident about our capabilities to deliver it. But capital deployment is also something that we'll see. We have the NCIB as an opportunity, but we're looking at acquisitions, depending on how the acquisition would be accretive. Sometimes, when you do an acquisition in the first year, you might have an ROE that it's a bit lower than your expected future ROE. So there are a lot of conditions that need to be met for us to meet that ROE target over time. But at the end of the day, we're quite confident we can deliver. We've done it in the past.
Can I just have one follow-up here?
Just on that, practically speaking, would you allow your organic capital for deployment to approach CAD 2.5 billion? Because that's a big, big number for a company like iA Financial Group.
No, that's a great point. I mean, it's the question I get all the time, and I mean, we are spending much more attention into the capital deployment. It's the number one priority in the organization. So we've done some acquisition recently, but we are speeding up on looking at acquisitions. But at the end of the day, we'll have to deploy it in a certain way. I mean, if we don't have any choice at the end, we'll probably return the capital back to the shareholder. That's not our first choice. Our first choice is really to grow organically, to grow by acquisition. We've done it in the past, but we'll see in the future.
Paul Holden, CIBC.
So follow-up question to that. I guess really it comes down to acquisitions. I think you've laid out a path on how you can get to something around a 20%+ ROE, but contingent on acquisitions. What's the binding constraint, would you say, on acquisitions right now? Right? You've laid out your framework for how you want to go about doing acquisitions. Is it price? Is it lack of targets? Like, what is it that's making?
When we do an acquisition, I think your question is, how do we price our acquisition versus our ROE target? Is that it?
No, my question is, how would you characterize the acquisition environment today?
How do we characterize what?
Yeah. Is it favorable? Is there a lack of targets? Is it too expensive?
Oh, okay, right now. Well, it's a great point. How do we source our acquisition? We're doing it two ways.
I would say that historically, we've done probably most of our acquisition by direct contacts with certain targets. But at the same time, we talk with bankers, obviously, because there are some companies that are on the book. I would say that we're still doing that. We are doing a lot of direct contacts. And we'll see over time that those take forever, sometimes years to unfold. But we also have the conversation with the bankers. I would say that in the various sectors we're in right now, let's say U.S. Dealer, we still need to see the price going to the reasonable level for us to invest in something significant at this point. And on the U.S. Life, it's case by case. There are so many of them that, and sometimes most of them, they don't fit with our strategy.
So I would say it's a mix of opportunities versus price.
And second question, Éric, you provided an interesting slide, I think, on risk management. And if I take that together, sort of the book value growth over time wasn't just 2020 where you outperformed the industry. It was also, I noticed, around that GFC period, right? So the risk management has worked historically. Maybe you can just give us a few examples of how risk management is differentiated for iA today versus peers.
Yeah, that's another good question. Of course, I mentioned that in the previous accounting regime, we were ahead of other peers in Canada in terms of doing the right things in terms of risk management to protect ourselves against macroeconomic variation for interest and so on.
With IFRS 17, we've implemented an approach to further increase risk management of the interest rate risk. Okay? That's one area that I say that we distinguish ourselves because we've brought this at another level to include and encompass all company assets and liabilities. I would say also that we maintained our goal toward a low-guarantee product. In terms of risk management, it definitely helped to get less exposure to product that comes in with macroeconomic risk. So that's another area, Paul, that I would say that we distinguish ourselves. And globally, when we look at everything, I talked about the way we manage the project internally and all the investment technology. I think it's a sound approach to make sure that we get what we expect from the lines of business and the different projects. So I would say that's another way to think about how we distinguish ourselves.
Yeah, I would say that I just want to add on this. The total portfolio methodology that we're using right now, to me, is really a great improvement we've done to manage interest rate risk, and you may have heard me in the past complaining or saying that IFRS 17 was not necessarily a good thing for the life cos because it would bring volatility and all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, when I look at the methodology that's being used to evaluate the liabilities of the life cos, I think we are in a better spot with IFRS 17 overall because I think we manage even better our risks. Whereas before, the interest rate risk was managed by sectors, by block of business. Now we have an overall approach for the organization.
So we are in a better spot than we used to be, I think.
Okay, it's Meny Grauman from Scotiabank. Just sticking on the topic of M&A, specifically in Canada, because I have a good sense of what you're looking for in the U.S., but in Canada, I thought it's not so clear what the targets are, specifically the ranking of the targets, specifically the strategic priorities in terms of M&A in Canada. I know there was a period back where you were very focused on distribution, but you made big strides there. So just give us, I was hoping you'd give us a better understanding of what the priorities in Canada are from an M&A perspective.
Yeah, well, I'll start, and then I'll ask probably Pierre to check in on this.
I would say that any business we're in, we are generating an ROE higher than our target, the new target, for all the businesses we're in in Canada. So we're looking at opportunity, whether they're bigger or they're smaller. We just did one a couple of weeks ago. We announced the Global Warranty sales, which is strengthening the iA Warranty, by the way, by increasing the reach of distribution and of products on the used car side. So in any, I mean, and also we are in distribution on the wealth management side. There are opportunities there to consolidate. Obviously, on the individual insurance space, it's maybe there might not be as many opportunities, but maybe Pierre. I don't want to take all the time here. Maybe you want to comment.
Yeah, I mean, there's a common word that needs to be understood in this acquisition strategy.
Our ability to scale it means our ability to integrate those companies in that model. A good example is the wealth. You remember last year, we've announced, I guess, in the beginning of the year, the acquisition of Laurentian Bank Wealth Management Division, right? It was strategic for us in terms of scaling our business, but also the integration that Stephane and his team went through was perfect. So this thing is quite important. Like Denis said, we're looking to expand all of those businesses in the same concept. And we do have an internal process. We have implemented what we call, not the sales process is well implemented in this company, but what we call the growth pipeline. And each leader has the responsibility to identify partnership or future acquisition in that sense.
Each leader is responsible to identify niche player, if you wish, or main player in that same concept of scaling our businesses. Now that the foundations are there, I mean, we needed to work on this since 2018, since we embarked into that digital program. We needed to put the foundation in place to make sure that the integration will be easier in the future. And that's basically what we have done so far. So ready to scale those businesses, right? Including, let's say, I would say, because the question may be asked, you're only present in the P&C space in the province of Québec. You've heard me about this notion of synergies that Denis talked about, right? This thing is very important. Yes, we have this referral program that exists. The most exciting product for us is P&C.
But because we do source client internally first, yes, we do have a distribution direct to consumer, but our ability to source internal customer is key. And the P&C model, the only thing that is common in the P&C for each province is the word P&C, but it varies from province to province. So over the last two years, we have acquired Surex. Surex is a P&C quoting system online that deals with many carriers, as you know. So we're learning in that process and how maybe to expand in that sense as well. I hope I answered your question.
Thank you.
Tom MacKinnon, BMO Capital Markets. Question for Éric. You had a slide that talked about your 10% core EPS growth objective, 6% organic growth, 4% organic growth initiatives. What's in each one of these buckets?
The organic growth initiatives has another suggestion saying that it's CAD 300 million in capital deployment annually. Is that consistent with this CAD 400 million investments in technology that Pierre is talking about? Just a little bit more color there. And then the 12% growth you've been getting, how much of that has been organic vs how much of that has been organic growth initiatives?
Yes, thank you. You want to start?
No, no, you want to start?
Okay, yeah. I'll say that the investment that Pierre talked about are embedded in the calculation, Tom. It's embedded in the different lines of business. And as we mentioned, technology cost is there to stay. So it's factored into our organic growth measures.
I think I covered the points earlier about how we get the additional growth on the organic side in terms of improving the U.S. division, keeping up the pace with operational efficiency and so on. So I think I covered it for that.
And just to add a word on this, the CAD 400 million, that's, I would say, the sweet spot that we found out in terms of our ability and capacity to execute on that. My dream will be to invest more than that, but honestly, I mean, at that pace, we are able to deliver the expected benefits. And that's really important related to what Éric just said.
Okay, so Pierre's CAD 400 million is embedded in both the organic growth and the 6% part and the 4% part. Okay. And the CAD 300 million that you said in this organic growth, is that some of that CAD 400 million? What's that stuff?
Oh, you're referring, I guess, to the CAD 300 million capital deployment? It's our base assumption here is that we will deploy that capital within NCIB. So it's just share buybacks on that CAD 300 million. And the thing on the CAD 400 million, I could help you clarify and see. It's not going P&L right from the start, right? There's an OpEx part that goes to P&L, and then there's a CapEx part that is capitalized on the balance sheet. So that's how it plays out in the bottom line numbers.
Okay, and then just as a follow-up, the 18% ROE you're getting in Canada, you do lots of different things in Canada. Can you split that 18% into insurance and wealth and maybe the group businesses? Or which one's higher and which one would be lower? Maybe that would be the.
So we don't disclose that right now.
That's the short answer.
Good morning, Gabriel Dechaine, National Bank. A couple of questions here. First, on the acquisition strategy, you talked about the path to ROE and EPS accretion. That's rational, of course. I'm wondering, do you also have a timeline when you're making an acquisition? You expect to hit your target ROE within three, five years kind of thing?
Yeah, I'd say it depends on the type of acquisition, Gabriel. We can categorize them in two big buckets. Some of the acquisitions are like more IAS, which is goodwill type acquisition, and those take a bit more time to deliver because there's an expense part and a kind of dilutive effect that is a bit higher at the beginning, but we have higher benefits over the long term. Aiming for the same target ROE on average for the investment horizon. So those are goodwill types.
So those tend to be a bit dilutive at the start, but we shoot for neutrality or accretiveness in the following two years, okay, on those. So that's the idea behind the acquisition type. And then for insurance type acquisition, like we've done last year with Vericity or the block of business of Vericity, those come in with working capital. So the accretiveness is way faster on those. We mentioned, yes, last year that for Vericity, we had a minor dilutive effect in the first year. That was related to the distribution arm mostly of the acquisition. The insurance block, normally pure insurance, is contributing positively to the earnings per share at the beginning, and the ROE is more stable for those acquisitions. So depending on the opportunity, it may emerge differently, but we shoot for the same target over the long term.
Okay, great.
Sorry if I missed this, but the ROE waterfall getting to the 17%+ , I think it's 50 or 60 basis points coming from the U.S., which is a smaller contributor to IAG overall. Is that the American- Amicable Life or the individual insurance business or the auto warranty business driving that? And if it's the latter or both, whatever, kind of sales environment does that contemplate for just warranty volumes, I guess, or industry sales of autos?
I have difficulty hearing you clearly. I guess your question is on the U.S. side, what's coming with the ROE that we've just grown?
What's boosting that ROE over the next few years? Is it the life side, the warranty side, and then specific to the warranty side, what kind of industry auto sales volumes are you assuming in there?
Yeah, the potential increase is coming from U.S. Dealer.
Joe will speak later on the U.S. Life, and the performance is already where we want it to be. And where the improvement in ROE globally will come from is U.S. Dealer. And my colleague John will speak about what he's going to do, and Sean as well, what he's going to do, what are they going to do to improve the ROE out there. But globally, we expect this to improve over 10% in the near future.
Yeah, actually, traditionally, when I look at the way we build the businesses at iA, there are three phases. Sean will talk about it. And so for American- Amicable, we are in the third phase. I mean, very high profitable, high growth. Whereas for Vericity and U.S. Dealer, we're more like in first or maybe second phase for one of them.
You'll see that in the presentation on the U.S. side after the break.
Okay, one last one, just on the buybacks. I mean, it's become a big feature of the capital story from IAG the last two, three years, I guess. Prior to that, basically non-existent. So this is simply a reflection of your business mix change and being capital light and all that stuff. So we can plug in 3% buybacks a year kind of thing and perpetuity?
Well, actually, you saw the slides from Éric, which showed the way that we generated excess capital year after year. It was pretty minimal 10 years ago and for whatever reasons. And so we've improved significantly on the ROE followed. And I think you're right. We should assume that going forward, unless we deploy it through acquisition, the level of buyback will be kind of sustainable.
I guess my Canadian colleagues here did a great presentation because we didn't have that many questions on the business itself. So congratulations.
Yes, all right. Good questions. Thank you. So we're going to break for 10 minutes. For those of you online, you're going to hear some music, but we'll be back in 10 minutes sharp. There's some coffee and snacks in the back. And if you have any questions you didn't get to ask, save them. We're going to have a second Q&A after the U.S. panel. Thank you. Okay. Hope you had a good break. Yes, thank you. Coming back to you, Steve. We're going to get started soon with the U.S. deep dive on our U.S. operations with our leadership team from the U.S. So. You're online? Okay, great.
All right. Second session.
So I'm going to kick off the U.S. section, but just a little bit about me. My name is Sean O'Brien. I joined iA 10 years ago with the purchase of CTL, which is now known as iA Auto Finance. Since then, I've had the opportunity to lead a number of businesses in iA. I started in the U.S. Dealer Services business, and then through COVID, I led the Wealth business where Stephane has now taken over. Where is Stephane? Over here. After that, I ran our group business a couple of years, which LP is now running. Where's LP? He's not here. Right at the back. Anyway. And I've been in my current role for about eight months as Chief Business Officer. I'm super happy and excited to share our story and to introduce my great team here.
So kicking off, there's kind of four key points, takeaways that you're going to come away with. The growth potential in the U.S. is strong. We're focused on some very high potential markets. We have a robust strategy, and we're using the iA Way. And in the U.S., it's the same iA Way as we use in Canada. We have a strong, experienced team, and again, you're going to get to meet them. And lastly, as Éric mentioned, the U.S. business is going to be a big contributor to ROE growth in iA. So next, I'm going to give you a little background on how we got into this business and sort of where we got there. So today, we're in two businesses. We're in individual insurance and Dealer Services. And why are we there? It's because of the deep expertise we have in Canada.
Both of these businesses were leaders in our space, and we've been there for many, many years, so once we established that we can export that expertise south, the U.S. was a natural choice, and Janine talked about the scale of the U.S. business. I mean, today in the U.S., we're kind of a smaller player. We're a leader in final expense, but as far as individual insurance, we're not huge. We're about number seven in the Dealer Services business. But in Canada, we're number one or two in both of those businesses, but we're doing more volume than that in the U.S., so it just shows you so small here, big in Canada, big opportunity to grow, so to me, that's part of the exciting platform about the U.S. Next slide.
Now that we've established where we want to be, Denis sort of mentioned this three-phase approach, and I quite like this approach. In phase one, which is our guiding principle, we look for businesses that can leverage iA's strengths. Once we find that business, then we really focus on strengthening the foundations of that business. And what we found so far is pricing, actuarial technology, but most importantly, deploying the iA way is how we sort of build out that business in phase II . Once we're comfortable that the foundation is strong, then we move into phase III. I love phase three. This is growth mode. This is where we start to expand distribution. We start adding products. We focus on efficiency. And as we have a platform that we're able to build on, then we can look at acquisition opportunities as well.
In phase III, this is where we also start to build out steady ROE growth. So with this framework in mind, let's just do a little bit of history. So how do we get in this business? And I think this will show you that the iA Way of doing things, kind of how it's played out over some time. About 15 years ago, my predecessor, Mike Stickney, was sent down to the U.S. in kind of a phase one build-out. We didn't have a business. Mike sort of was in Vancouver.
They said, "Go down to the U.S., find something for us." So after a couple of years sort of poking around, he found a fantastic, high-potential business in Waco, Texas, American Amicable, which had been there for many, many years, but really kind of needed a bit of expertise in pricing, actuarial, most importantly, some capital, and also the system on how to start to grow that business organically. So after about four years, Mike and the team and Joe really built this thing out, and it became a very steady growth platform. And you saw the numbers that we've had from that business. You'll see a bit more on it. But from 2015 on, AMM has delivered steady growth. And then once we got into that steady phase III growth, this past year, we added Vericity to the platform. So now we're into that acquisition synergy.
We're comfortable with the platform, and we're building on that book. So fun stage. Then you look at the bottom side, Dealer Services. This business, in 2018, we made our first full entry with the purchase of DAC. And DAC gave us some insight into the industry. It gave us some talent to the business and sort of got us comfortable with sort of what's happened in the U.S., and sort of we spent some time comparing it to Canada. Got comfortable with it. And in 2020, we made a purchase of IAS. And IAS is very much like what we've done in Canada for many, many years. Full spectrum program. We'll talk about that much more. That business is now also we've purchased it, and we've been in sort of phase two. And to be honest, this phase two has been a lot of work.
It's a business that we'll talk about, but it had some work that we needed to do that. But we'll get through that more. So let's take a look at these businesses. And we'll take a look at the U.S. Life insurance business. You can see our humble beginnings of $26 million in sales in 2010 when we bought the business to today, $227 million in sales with over 20% ROE. We are leaders in the final expense business in Canada. And so now as we started to build out this platform, as I mentioned, we've been actively looking for other opportunities and niches in the U.S. where we can build on it. And we came across this fantastic business, Vericity. And Vericity are experts in digital distribution. So they have an eFinancial, which is kind of the distribution arm of it.
It's blending sort of technology and people, and Melissa is going to talk a lot about that. With that, we brought in a fantastic team as well. Lots of talent. It was a quick fit, and you're going to hear more from Melissa on that. The other one that we did later last year, which was kind of an opportunistic acquisition, this is a block of final expense business came to market from Vericity. We picked it up. Joe's team sort of said, "Hey, we can onboard this and administer it quite quickly." And in under six months, fully integrated the book, accretive on day one, and we've been off and running. It was under budget. So again, showing the power of where we can go and what we've done in the last year. Let's flip over and look at the U.S. Dealer business.
And John's going to go into some good detail. We gave him longer than everybody else today because I think there's some real interest in this business. So he's going to go quite deep and get a little bit more so we can get some understanding of the F&I business. But I must say, like I said, it's been tough years. We purchased the business at the start of COVID. In the U.S., through COVID, U.S. vehicle sales went down substantially. Inflation started going up. Cost of claims was building. Interest rates went up. Consumers' ability to buy products in the business office was squeezed. So they're focused on buying a car, but they didn't have as much money to buy tire and rim and other products. So it was a bit of a tough time.
While that was going on, the business we purchased was operating with a number of different administration systems. So we took it on. We said, "Okay, we need to amalgamate these administration systems," which we started to do. Big work. Through that period, once we got through the mid, then we needed to redo the operations and get so they're all operating as one business. We've done that work. While we've been doing that, we've also been actively repricing the book. We've heard about that on some of the calls. This is a book that the price of claims has been going up, so we need to reprice it. We've been fixing the Ops, building up the technology, and repricing it. Good thing is, I'm happy to say, looking at 2025, we are now in phase III for this business.
That's why we're talking about confidently rebuilding the profitability and the ROE of this business in 2025 and beyond. So looking ahead, and you can see the iA Way and the wheel looking at the life insurance business, having a targeted market is key. And in the U.S. Life, we think it's very important that we know where we want to play. And the mass mid-market is clearly where there's an opportunity. It's underserved in the U.S., and we have experience in it. You'll also hear Joe talk about the Hispanic market. We have some great capabilities in our team in Waco. It's a growing market. It's an underserved market in the U.S., and we see some opportunity to grow in that area as well. Distribution, distribution, distribution is key. We're going to continue to expand on our existing distribution that we deal with.
We have a very strong relationship with IMOs in the U.S., but there are opportunities to bring in more IMOs, and we're also going to look at new innovative distribution methodologies like we did with eFinancial. You'll also hear from both Melissa and John about new products. In 2025, in particular, we have a number of new product launches planned, and that will be launched through our existing distribution market. So it's not a, "How are you going to get to market?" We know darn well how we're going to get to the market. They're asking for it, so we're building the products, and we're going to put them out there. Lastly, we're going to leverage and invest in technology. This is the technology that we across our U.S. Life platform. We have strong data, but more than that, we're a long way ahead of it in the Canadian space.
We're going to leverage what we've done in Canada to grow this platform in the U.S. U.S. Dealer, the future is pretty bright, I must say. Our target market is broad. We're looking at all new and used car buyers in the U.S., not unlike what we do in Canada. On the distribution side, there's significant opportunity to add dealers to this platform. So organic growth is going to be the real fuel, and this is what John's going to talk about. Adding dealers, both on the direct side and on the agent side, is going to be key. We're also going to start to explore other channels. We'll take a look at, in Canada, we're very successful on the OEM side. There could be some opportunities to look at the OEM channel in the U.S. as well.
Our integrated administration platform that we've really worked hard at will be key now for us building this business, and we'll open up opportunities to look at acquisitions as we can find a platform that we could integrate on top of our platform, then it would create some nice synergy. We're getting to the point now where we should be able to start looking at those types of opportunities. The U.S. Dealer business is fragmented. Not like Canada. Canada is pretty consolidated. In the U.S., there's a number of players, and John will talk about this, non-insured players, PE-owned players as well that we could eventually consolidate when we're ready. Last slide. Why am I so excited about this? Because we're deploying the iA Way. It's working. We're going to have some strong ROE growth. It's largely going to be driven by the dealer business.
Both businesses are now targeting greater than 10% annual growth, which will be, I think, is pretty exciting given the platforms we're in. So as I mentioned, your key takeaways will be we have a strong ROE contribution, we have a robust strategy, we have solid growth potential, and we have a fantastic leadership team that's in place to run with it. So next, I'm going to introduce that team. Start with Joe Dunlop. He's going to kick it off. He runs American Amicable, works out of beautiful Waco, Texas, and is one of the most experienced leaders in individual insurance in this business that we have. Melissa Balsan will be next. She joined us with the Vericity acquisition. She leads the eFinancial business, has deep expertise in digital distribution and marketing.
She's quickly found herself at home in iA to the point where she's wearing the iA blue, which is nice. And then lastly, John Laudenslager. John's the most recent addition to the team. He brings 40 years of experience specifically in the dealer business. Loves the space. He's passionate about it, and I'm super excited for him to talk about that more. But with that, I'll turn it over to Joe to talk about.
Thank you, Sean. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. I'm Joe Dunlop. I'm President of iA American and the American-Amicable Group of Companies. I've been with American-Amicable my entire career, almost 47 years, and I've served in a variety. That's right, 47, Éric. I've served in a variety of positions during that time, including 13 years as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President.
I've been the company president since 2015. So as Sean indicated just now, American Amicable has had a great deal of success since the acquisition by IA in 2010. In fact, I like to say the company is a really good example of an organization that has a lot of positive attributes, strong potential, but that was lacking one or two key ingredients in order to really be successful. So in our case, the encouragement to grow and the capital necessary to support that growth were certainly provided by IA, and that allowed us to move forward in a very, very substantial way. We've heard about the IA way. We have grown the IA way for sure. I want to deliver three key messages or takeaways today. One, we have had a very strong history of sales growth, and at the same time, we have grown our profit.
Everyone has talked about distribution so far on the stage. It's no different with us. It's all about distribution, and we have a long-standing continuous reputation of establishing and maintaining relationships with independent distribution. All of our distribution is independent today, and then finally, we have a really clear picture of the initiatives and the opportunities that we have before us in order to continue that growth into the future. Speaking of growth, let's take a quick look, a snapshot of our growth on two different measures. The graph on the left is the number of policies issued since 2010, the year of acquisition by iA. And you can see we've had a 12% annual growth rate in policies issued since that time with just over 191,000 last year. In fact, that number exceeded the year before by about 18%.
The company will actually reach the milestone of 1 million policies in force sometime early in the first quarter of next year. Our sales history since 2010 are on the right-hand side of the page. You can see we've had a CAGR, a compound annual growth rate of 16%. Our sales in 2010 were 26 million. They were 201 million last year. Prior to the acquisition by iA in 2010, our sales were relatively flat, primarily due to capital constraints. So the iA acquisition allowed us to move forward and grow our sales. Hopefully, you would agree in a very substantial way. We're proud of our track record of growth, both on sales and our profit, and we look forward to continuing that as we look forward. Today in the U.S., we operate in two different areas primarily.
Final expense, as Sean mentioned, and the simplified issue life insurance space as well. Final expense, as the name implies, is small whole life policies issued typically to seniors, average age 65 or so, with the intent of providing for final expenses such as funerals, although there's no requirement to do that. The average annual premium might be in the $1,000 range. The face amounts, again, as I mentioned, $10,000-$15,000, although we do issue larger cases from time to time. Simplified issue is more traditional life insurance, term insurance, maybe universal life. The face amounts are typically much higher, $150,000 or so, and we actually issue those products up to $500,000 today. The key for both of those areas in our business and dealing with independent distribution is underwriting at point of sale that's fast and convenient. It's very important.
It's like table stakes in our market today. We have developed over the years internally, so they're very cost-effective, point of sale underwriting tools that allow us to issue some applications immediately at point of sale. And those that aren't issued at point of sale, we typically issue those between 24 and 48 hours after reaching the home office. As Sean talked about, we're operating today in markets that are large and growing, and we're certainly positioned to take advantage of those markets as we move forward. We market today through IMOs or independent marketing organizations, and that's similar to an MGA or a general agency setup. These organizations can vary widely in size from one that has 15-20 agents under contract to some of the larger ones that literally have thousands of agents under contract and issue hundreds of millions of dollars in annualized premiums.
Some of these organizations are really big. This is where our reputation, our skills at building, establishing, maintaining these relationships with IMOs has been very important, and in essence, it's a firm part of our success up to this point. We're always recruiting. It's a day-to-day thing for us. Typically, we'll hire four to six or onboard four to six IMOs a year. That can vary from one year to the other, of course. I mentioned our point of sale digital tools, particularly in terms of underwriting, and that's a key component in attracting these IMOs and their agents as well in order to serve both the client and the agent and make it easier for the purchase experience.
The iA Way, we have really benefited from, wasn't that case in the first two or three years because we had to reestablish some things, including product pricing, and we have benefited in a great way from the iA Way in terms of product pricing, underwriting, and we've had a long history since then of staying in our lanes and being very disciplined in our product pricing and approach. Been a lot of talk about the U.S., and the U.S. is a very large market, as I think all of you know, some 340 million in population today. According to LIMRA, total sales in the U.S. of annualized life insurance premium were over $16 billion in 2024, $16.2 billion to be exact. So it's a really big, really big market.
There's no publicly available information for final expense sales by company in the U.S., but our sales in that market grew 22% last year. They've been growing substantially year over year, and we are confident through just market intelligence and what we know about our competition that we're definitely in the top three. In terms of the full U.S. market, all product lines, we rank number six in terms of whole life policies issued and number eight in terms of whole life annualized premium issued. Some of the statistics in the U.S., just really large markets, suggest that it's ripe for opportunity for those companies that are well positioned. Fully half of the people, much like in Canada, I think, half of the people in the U.S. have life insurance. Half of the people do not.
Of the 50% that have life insurance, a full one in four of those say they probably need more. Middle market in the U.S. is huge and growing. Less than 60% of households or almost 60% of households in the U.S. have an annual household income of 100,000 or less. So again, a huge middle market opportunity for the businesses that we're in. Just under approximately 50% of the households in the U.S., again, expressing the need for more life insurance, would experience financial hardship if the primary wage earner were to pass away. This hardship would occur in the first six months. And Sean talked about the Hispanic market in the U.S. It's a huge and growing segment of the U.S. population. In fact, it's some 65 million today.
It's important to note that in 2023, the Hispanic population growth in the U.S. accounted for a full 70% of the total U.S. population growth in that year. It's a market segment that's truly booming. We have, the company has certain strengths that will allow us to take advantage of those opportunities that we just talked about. We have an experienced home office team, home office management team, and our culture is we focus on providing quality service to agents and our clients. It's just in our DNA. It's just what we do. We have a long-term approach to management, product developing, and pricing. We've certainly benefited from iA's expertise in that arena. IMO retention is something that we have established a really good track record of. Most of our IMOs have been with us for a number of years.
In fact, our number one IMO has been with us over 20 years. So we have a really good history of retaining those IMOs and agents. We have a reputation. If you go to these sales meetings and talk to agents like I do quite a bit, they come up and say, "You guys are so easy to do business with." And it sounds kind of simple, but from an agent standpoint, it's actually very, very important. And we have a reputation as being able to be easy to do business with, simple, cost-effective point of sale underwriting tools that allow us to deliver quality service to both the customer and the agent. Low cost, we've had a long reputation of an efficient organization. Low cost, our unit cost would compare very favorably with our competition. That's just been our history over the years.
Again, iA has provided strong risk management, product development expertise, which has really catapulted us really to the next level. Truly the iA Way. So I want to kind of, we are positioned to deliver on several key initiatives that will allow us to continue our growth going forward. Expanding distribution, we're all about expanding distribution. It's very important. We're always recruiting new IMOs, but maybe more importantly, we have the opportunity to expand our share of our larger IMOs business. We have some situations today where we have some very large IMOs, and our percentage of their business is relatively small. So as we broaden our product portfolio, which I'll talk about in just a second, that will allow us to capture a much bigger share of their business. Sean and Denis both, I think, mentioned the Vericity Acquisition, Scalability, the iA Way.
We acquired that block of business, 115,000 policies, final expense and term, in the summer of last year and fully integrated and converted that business to our system the first weekend in November. For just a few months, we did it with home office staff and well under budget and in almost record time, if I can say that. So scalability is something that we are pretty good at. And we have a lot of experience in adding blocks of business to our system, and we have staff that are very good at that as well that allowed us to accomplish that in a really positive way. Strong pricing discipline, we talked about that two or three times. We have benefited from iA's expertise in that situation. And our core ROE today is well north of the target, including well north of the new target.
Enhanced digital experience. We're always working on our point of sale tools, particularly as we broaden our product portfolio, issue higher face amounts, more middle market activity. Hispanic market, huge, growing. We actually have several bilingual members in our home office. We have bilingual members of our sales team, and we have product presentations, agent training, all in Spanish. We actually have a really good reputation today of being able to execute in that market. I mentioned broadening the product portfolio. We are in the process of introducing both the participating whole life and an indexed universal life. In fact, we will have a soft pilot of the par product in two weeks. The indexed universal life should be in a couple of months.
Those products will allow us for sure to increase our sales in the middle market because we do business today with a number of large IMOs that are writing both of those products in a pretty high volume way. So as we said at the beginning, we have a strong track record of financial performance, and I think we're poised to continue that growth. You see that our sales target is 10%+ , and I think we've established this morning that that's a very reasonable objective for us to attain. So strong relationships with independent distribution, a disciplined approach to product development and pricing, and a clear picture of the initiatives and the opportunities that we have will allow us to move forward in a really big way. We're certainly ready for more. And thanks for your attention this morning.
Turn the program over to Melissa.
Thank you. All right.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Melissa Balsan. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Vericity and the President and Chief Operating Officer of eFinancial, which is the direct-to-consumer distribution side of our U.S. business. I've spent over 25 years in direct response marketing and direct-to-consumer digital and call center sales. Much of my experience has been in transformation and growth within insurance, plus verticals like online higher education and even vehicle service contracts. So today, I'm excited to introduce you to Vericity's capabilities and share a bit about our history and excite you about our growth potential. So the key takeaways from my presentation is that Vericity has best-in-class and scalable capabilities, which were built over many years of innovation.
Those capabilities allow us to meet the current and emerging needs of all U.S. consumers, which, combined with favorable competitive dynamics and increasing consumer demand, creates several pathways for Vericity to grow and achieve profitability. Let me introduce you to Vericity. Our competitive advantage is our combined life insurance, manufacturing, and distribution. Vericity is comprised of two entities, which allow consumers to buy fully online with the help of an agent or a hybrid of both. The first side is Fidelity Life, a protection-oriented life insurance carrier founded nearly 130 years ago. Fidelity Life is a leader in accelerated underwriting and specifically focuses on products not medically underwritten at point of sale. The combination of Fidelity Life's innovative product portfolio with eFinancial's digitally focused direct-to-consumer distribution enables us to truly serve the U.S. middle market, making it fast, easy, and affordable to obtain coverage.
We use machine learning and real-time decisioning data, both online and in the call center that's staffed by licensed agents all across the U.S. Our technology powers real-time approvals, enabling just under half of applicants who apply to Fidelity Life's flagship Rapid Decision Life product to receive an instant underwriting decision. What's better is 90% of those applicants get a decision within 24 hours. For consumers who are not approved for a Fidelity Life product at point of sale, we offer other options. eFinancial is licensed to sell top U.S. carriers and uses real-time data to offer a more suitable product if a Fidelity Life product is not a fit. This ensures that consumers are never left stranded during their shopping journey, and it delivers an experience that other carriers and direct-to-consumer brands with more restrictive underwriting simply cannot compete with.
Let's move on to Vericity's long history of innovation, which I like to think of in three chapters. The first chapter being the innovative thinking that we brought to the industry in our early years. Fidelity Life was one of the first to deliver some of the industry's earliest technological advances, including using pharmacy data for underwriting and offering a paperless dynamic application with eSignature capabilities. As you move along the timeline to 2007- 2015, we obtained several method patents for our product underwriting capabilities, and we're one of the first companies to use predictive analytics at point of sale. Our most recent history highlights our investments in data and technology, first with end-to-end software to manage all aspects of writing new business, and then from there, we launched our direct-to-consumer online sales platform and machine learning capabilities.
With that, we implemented predictive analytics and models across marketing, sales, underwriting, and many aspects of our operations. Today, we continue to invest in accelerated underwriting with advanced databases and APIs that make it fast, easy, and affordable for everyday Americans to obtain coverage no matter where they shop. Our unwavering focus on innovation has driven substantial business transformation over the past 20 years, and it's positioned Vericity as one of the few life insurance companies truly serving the middle market consumer. Before we move on, I must highlight the latest milestone in our timeline, i.e., the acquisition of our business. This is quite an exciting time for us because prior to being acquired by iA, we've maintained a conservative posture regarding our investments, only growing as quickly as our past capital constraints could allow.
Our ambition is now to leverage our capabilities and take our strengths offensively to take full advantage of the full market opportunities to grow, ultimately achieving scale and profitability as soon as possible. What's compelling about Vericity's model is our ability to serve all consumer needs, combining the human and digital experience. What you see on the top line is research from LIMRA reporting on how consumers say they prefer to shop. When asked how they prefer to research and buy life insurance, consumers' preferences vary by generation, and they span digital and traditional methods. For example, 44% of Americans prefer to buy in person with an agent, while 48% prefer to buy life insurance fully online or do their research online and buy direct over the phone, through the mail, or in chat.
To address the first group, Fidelity Life distributes its products through third-party brokers and agent-assisted digital platforms, and our licensed eFinancial call center agents serve the 24% of consumers who prefer to buy over the phone. But what's interesting about the 24% who say they prefer to buy fully online is that our experience shows there's a big difference in how consumers actually buy. We see consumers start their purchase online, and very few complete it online. Many get partway through the shopping journey and ultimately complete their application with the help of an agent. Now, we do expect fully online sales to grow as more digitally savvy consumers come into the market. So our digital purchase platform will appeal to that 24% who say they prefer to research and buy online.
But what's powerful is the combination of our digital purchase experience and our knowledgeable licensed agents who are available in our call center to assist consumers if they have questions while shopping online. This highly flexible sales model is Vericity's unique advantage in the U.S. market because it allows us to meet the consumer's needs far better than our competition, who may offer only one way to buy. A final point on this slide is that our affinity partnerships and our new worksite business enables us to reach that 8% of U.S. consumers who say they aren't actively searching the internet for life insurance options. With our flexible business model and highly relevant capabilities, Vericity is well positioned to meet all consumer needs and move at the speed of the market to capture more life insurance sales.
Now is a great time for Vericity to join the iA family as we have several competitive and market forces that are working in our favor. The first is that direct-to-consumer application volume at eFinancial has been outpacing the U.S. life insurance market. We've delivered double-digit growth while the industry has remained flat. Second, there's recent consolidation in the life insurance market that has reduced competition, creating opportunities for Vericity to capture more of the available share. Third, more than 1 million U.S. consumers say they need some or more life insurance coverage, and that includes nearly half of all millennial and Gen Z consumers. And then fourth, the voluntary worksite benefits market is a large established market with nearly $10 billion in annual sales.
Top carriers that are competing in that market have identified term life as a table stakes offering, and so that creates an opportunity for Fidelity Life's Lifetime Benefit Term product, which we first launched 15 years ago to serve this emerging opportunity for those top 20 U.S. carriers who are competing, and it will be one of our strategic growth areas. So now that you've learned Vericity operates where U.S. consumers are already shopping and has a wide range of flexible capabilities, it's easy to see that we have several pathways for growth. First, if we unpack the U.S. life insurance market, Vericity has a long history of serving the U.S. middle market through our direct-to-consumer brands and strategic partnerships. We'll grow here by selling accelerated underwritten products fully online with the help of an agent or a hybrid of both.
Beyond that, Vericity can address the need of the entire U.S. life insurance market by launching new products and distribution avenues for growth. One exciting opportunity is to deploy our APIs to power instant issue agent-assisted digital sales for traditional brokers. This model allows appointed brokers to retain ownership of their client relationship while accessing our underwriting processes to offer instant issue products face-to-face. Another opportunity is for Vericity to bring our unique products to the voluntary worksite benefit platforms to reach even more of the U.S. life insurance market. Now, these are just the pathways that are underway, and we will have many more opportunities for growth as we continue through our path of innovation in product, technology, and distribution. As we go forward, we have a strong plan to double our business within five years and unlock scale and profitability. There are four steps to that journey.
First, we'll invest to activate all of Vericity's capabilities and diversify into new lines of business to meet the diverse needs of the U.S. life insurance market. We'll invest to expand our proven and new sales channels and extend our positive operating leverage. Once we achieve scale, we'll achieve positive core profit, and then from there, continue that momentum to deliver double-digit annual sales growth over the next five years. So while Vericity is new to the IA family, our strategic growth initiatives tie perfectly to the proven IA way. Our strategic investments are concentrated in two areas: expanding our direct-to-consumer business and launching new offerings to diversify our growth. For our core business, shown in the top row of the slide, we'll follow the IA way of focusing on ripe target markets, leveraging technology, and pursuing distribution that offers long-term sustainable scale within our direct-to-consumer channels.
Vericity will invest in new avenues to reach the wide range of generations that are shopping in the life insurance market to deepen our penetration within the U.S. middle market. We'll also invest to evolve our technology to keep pace with emerging trends and retain our position as a leader in combining digital and human sales experiences. Finally, we'll lean into the proven partnership models to grow our new and existing strategic marketing alliances. Doing all of this, we'll unlock new consumers who are protection-oriented or are experiencing life events that correlate to life insurance purchase, or those who are simply open to a recommendation from a brand that they know and trust. These three investment areas will enable us to reach the 48% of consumers who will be shopping online or, you know, choose to shop online with the help of an agent or a hybrid of both.
Plus, we'll be able to access those 8% of consumers who aren't actively searching for life insurance options today. The bottom row represents how we'll use the iA Way to leverage product and technology to unlock new distribution channels and target markets that are available for scalable sales growth. One investment area includes leveraging our technology to offer product and processes as a service within the broker channel, powering agent-assisted digital sales of Fidelity Life's innovative instant issue product. This unlocks access to those 44% of consumers who say they prefer to buy life insurance in person but still value a fast, easy, and affordable option. Our second investment area involves leveraging Fidelity Life's 15 years of proven experience administering our Lifetime Benefit Term product.
We'll use this product, which has a method patent, to launch an internally managed voluntary worksite benefits line of business, and we'll partner with established carriers to bring it to the market of working individuals and employer groups. This endeavor will unlock access to those 8% of consumers who may not be actively searching for life insurance but are willing to consider and buy a product when presented an option from a trustworthy brand during their open enrollment period, so as you see that while we're new to the iA family, all of our growth investments and our integration efforts map perfectly to the iA Way. This gives us an even greater confidence in our success and our ability to deliver double-digit annual sales growth and substantially increase the size of our business within five years. Thank you, and now I'll introduce my colleague, John. Thank you. Thank you, Melissa.
Good morning. We're going to talk today about the U.S. Dealer business and how we are well positioned to grow. My name is John Laudenslager, and I'm responsible for the auto business in the U.S.. Excuse me. I've got 40 years in the automotive business, 17 in retail, five with the number two provider in the U.S., and 18 with the number one provider in the U.S.. In my former role, from 2014- 2023, we grew 5X to become the number one provider in the U.S.. We have experience and success in growing businesses exactly like iA American Warranty. Now, let's talk about some of the key takeaways hopefully you get today. One is we are a preferred partner offering a one-stop solution. We'll talk more about that throughout the presentation.
We do have a very robust and diversified business model that's supported by a strong cross-border risk management team. We're going to get into our diversified business model, and that's something that you'll hear as a trend today is our diversification. We'll also tell you how, why, and where we're positioned to grow. So we go to market as iA American Warranty. We have about 5% market share in a very fragmented market with well over 100 participants. We hold the number eight position of those + 100. Okay? 13% of the 17,000 new car dealers and 4% of the 130,000 used car dealers use one or more of our products. We are recognized throughout the industry for superior service, as evidenced by the Dealers' Choice Awards. As you can see, from 2022- 2024, it increased from seven to nine.
Now, we'll talk about our diversified business model, and again, that word diversification. We'll start with our products. We'll start with our products, and you can see we offer virtually any product a dealer could want and/or need. In the U.S., it all starts with the vehicle service contract. That is number one on every menu in the U.S. Okay? Diversification by vehicle type. Basically, what that is, it's our portfolio mix. And as you can see, it's 46% new cars, 52% used cars, 2% other. The other is our RV and power sports business, which we believe there's some opportunities in. But let's focus on the new car and used cars and why that's important. One, it protects us against concentration risk. In the event of, unfortunately, another COVID-type event, if a manufacturer goes on strike for some reason, we have parts issues.
We have a nice balance in our portfolio to offset that and weather that. The other thing it does is it helps our earning patterns. New car warranties, five to 10 years in the U.S. Used car warranties, three months to five years. So we have a nice balance there as the used car warranties are earned quicker. And our diversification out of distribution channels. We're going to talk more about this throughout the presentation and how we're uniquely positioned with this. But you can see in our dealer channels, 44%, agent 34%, and on around. And we like this balance. We do believe in the middle and the right columns, you're going to see that balance get even better over the next two years. A one-stop partner. What does that really mean? You know, it means that everything that we do goes toward the dealer and the consumer.
We don't sell one policy. That's why we have to align and solution everything to that dealer and consumer, and we do. Most of our products will either complement and/or enhance the manufacturer's warranties. And we'll talk more in the presentation about how strong our relationships are and what we're doing to strengthen them. Now, on the right, you'll see a host of our products that we offer, but I'm going to talk more about this on the next page, so to increase dealer performance and enhance partnership alignment, really to break that down in the simplest form, our solutions provide revenue, profit, and retention for our dealer partners. That's the three things that are always top of mind for dealers in the U.S. Okay? We're going to talk a little more about the relationships on the next few slides, so I'll move over to the solutions.
We can tailor our solutions to any size dealer. You could have one dealership, or you could have 100 rooftops, and we'll have multiple solutions for you. Enhancing our dealer agility, speed to market, this is all about investing in our systems over the last three years, creating a rapid and seamless experience, and creating an ease of doing business for our partners, and then the bottom one, at the end of the day, whether it's the U.S., Canada, or wherever, it's all about maximizing the profitability in the F&I department and retention and profit in their service departments for the dealers. As you move to the right, this is one of our very unique value propositions in the U.S.. We're one of less than a handful of providers in the U.S. that can provide all of these services.
As an example, the number two provider in the U.S. does not have an insurance company, so they have to go to people like us or others that have insurance companies to get their insurance. There are a number of large participants in the U.S. who don't have training or field support, so they could come to us. They don't have admin capabilities. They don't have the ability to create reinsurance formations. This uniquely positions us in the U.S. among all the Dealer Services providers. Now, what gets us there? We're going to talk about some ground floor activity, and this is where it all starts. We're going to talk about our training, our field support, and income development. And our training, as evidenced by the three Dealers' Choice Awards, we are a leader in the U.S. market. We're one of only a few that have a standalone state-of-the-art training facility.
We also have multiple training facilities across the U.S. We will go into dealers to do in-dealership training. We will take a room or a hotel room or a ballroom and have regional training. We will do whatever it takes to help our dealers and our partners. Everything on this slide is driven toward F&I performance and profitability, and it works for dealers of every size. We talk about our field support and income development. These are the people that are consistently going into the dealerships, working with the dealer in every area across those dealerships to create a trust and loyalty continuum with iA American Warranty Group. They're involved in the sales process, positioning the deals to go back to the F&I department. They'll work with the F&I department to make sure they're maximizing those opportunities, getting the right product blends and the right per vehicle retail.
They'll go to the service department to make sure that the claims are being submitted properly and adjudicated properly. And they also work with the back office to make sure the statements are correct, ready to submit on time so that the dealer can get paid and so that we can get paid. Next, again, we'll talk about diversified distribution channels. Again, you've heard this theme today. We're only one of a handful or less that participate across every one of these distribution channels. Most people will participate in one being the direct dealer channel or two, potentially the agent channel, but very few participate across all of them. We're going to focus more today on the dealer channel and the DAC third-party channel, the bookends on this slide, because we're convinced that they are our growth accelerators for 2025 and 2026.
Talk about the distribution model and how we earn, and this is, again, you can see the highlights there. The dealer channel, we maximize every revenue stream in that channel. On the DAC channel, the third-party administrator channel, that's a fee-based business, and it's a volume business. You not only drive millions of dollars through there, you drive 100s of millions of dollars through there with the right model. So that's a tremendous opportunity for us, potentially the most upside in the business in 2025 and 2026. We have a very solid base today. We will continue to solidify that base. We're going to have to because the growth that we're going to project through 2030. We have a very experienced leadership team. Combine that with the knowledge and the support of our Canadian colleagues, and we're very well positioned in that space.
We're going to be very, very focused and disciplined on execution of our growth strategy as well as our operational efficiencies. We've already talked about our contracts and that nice balance that we have. We do have a very strong risk model. 75% of our contracts are fully reinsured, and the funds are in a trust to assure payment of that. We've recently implemented a proactive risk management model where we have a green, yellow, red scenario. As an example, if a book of business is priced at 85%, if it gets to 80%, it will start to turn yellow. We're going to be proactive about managing this to not have to be reactive when it hits 85%. And then again, we're going to leverage the 25+ years of Canadian experience in Dealer Services. And when I say that, it's not only in the risk management.
I'm going to leverage every area that I can in the Canadian expertise that's going to benefit our business. I'm looking forward to working with Gwen on potential cross-border opportunities because I know they're there. That's what I did for a while in my prior role. Some trends in the market that we're seeing that are positive for our business. One, talk about the SAAR, Seasonally Adjusted Rate of New Car Sales in the U.S. for 2025 is 16.3 million. That's up 3% from 2024. We're seeing inflation receding, creating a better affordability model. If you look on the left of the slide, the higher vehicle inventory. Why is that there? Because it's important. It really contributes to what we do. Average day supply in the U.S. of autos on a dealer's lot is 75 days.
As a comparison, during COVID, it was zero to 20 days, depending on the manufacturer. Again, dealers don't want these cars on their lot. They're paying floor plan interest on them. So what are they doing? They're discounting them, highly discounting them. You combine that with OEM incentives and sub-unit rates, and you have a much more affordability model for the consumer. You also have a better opportunity to add our products on the financing of the deal. We're seeing increased interest and more confidence in extended warranties or VSCs in the U.S. Why? Cars are so expensive. Average payment is over $750. You have a high labor rate. You have high parts pricing. It's tough enough to have a $750 a month payment. Then you add a $1,000 repair on it, which is not unusual today.
Consumers would rather pay $40-$50 a month than have to pay $1,750 a month. Also, Sean alluded to it, fragmented and extended warranty market. We do believe in the next 12-24 months, you're going to see some potential strategic acquisitions hit the market. Now, we're going to talk about the iA Way, just like everyone has today. We'll start with our distribution. Told you earlier that we're going to be focused on the dealer channel and the DAC channel, the third-party administrator channel. Let me share with you why. That doesn't mean, by the way, that we're going to abandon or have any less focus on our agent channel or our national accounts channel. Okay? We think these two are growth accelerators. That's why we're going to be more focused on those. Excuse me.
So the reason for this is, one, I think there's tremendous opportunity to grow DAC, some of the reasons I told you before. Two, there's some market dynamics going on in the U.S. The number one and the number two provider in the U.S. have reduced their service levels, the small and midsize dealer and the small and midsize TPAs. That's really kind of the sweet spot that got them to where they are. They've just gotten so big that they're focused on the million-dollar-a-year accounts and up. Okay? So we believe, oh, by the way, two weeks ago, I sent an ad to my leadership team, and it was the number one provider in the U.S. advertising for a virtual district manager, a virtual district manager. They will not go into dealerships. They will not provide in-dealership service like we talked about earlier and all the value.
They're going to do everything by phone. Very different model. We believe, and we're convinced, that there's an opportunity in that segment to conquest a good portion of those dealers because they're simply not going to accept that type of service because they have not reduced any of their fees. They've simply reduced their service. Talk about the distribution channels. Again, very robust distribution channel, broad and robust product suite technology. We have to continue to invest in and enhance our technology. We have to do that in order to grow the way we anticipate growing to 2030. That will help us scale this business. So planning to target a 10% annual gross sales. We are confident that we can either meet and/or exceed that. We'll continue the momentum for our 2024 sales that were very good.
Again, we've talked a lot about distribution and how we strengthen our relationships and the focus that we're putting on specific channels. F&I environment, we talked about how that is becoming more positive for our products and for the consumer. Efficiencies, again, all about innovation and automation. Have to continue to invest and have to continue to enhance that. Going to leverage the Canadian operations anywhere and everywhere we can. They're probably going to get tired of me, but that's okay. Pricing, we're going to be very disciplined in our pricing. We're going to price it right from the beginning because as it begins, so it goes. We don't want to have to continue to have large price increases for our partners. That's not a formula for success.
So we're going to price it right from the beginning, and we're going to be very proactive in managing it through the product cycle. Expansion, we talked about that, and we do, again, we talked about acquisition. So I'm going to wrap it up with this. We're very confident that we can grow this business, and we're confident that we can meet and/or exceed our financial targets. Thank you.
Okay. Well, thank you to our U.S. presenters for this very comprehensive review of our U.S. operations. So we're going to go into a Q&A, second Q&A, and I'm sorry. We have 10 minutes for the Q&A. We will conclude the event at 12:00 P.M. with closing remarks from Denis. And for those of you in the room, of course, you're all invited to stay for lunch after the closing remarks.
So we can start.
Hello. Doug from Desjardins. So first question.
In the U.S. insurance market, Joe, or I guess Denis, you're going into the individual par and the index UL. Can you talk about the profit profile, the ROEs for that business, the risks, how you're managing that?
Sure. I can talk about that. In fact, we have priced those products similar to what I said earlier, both the par and the IUL. They are priced well north of our current ROE targets. And distributors that we do business with today, particularly on the index universal life, are writing large amounts of that business, primarily to the middle market in particular, some to the mass market, but most to the middle market. And we just see a huge opportunity there.
We have focused on very specific product descriptions, definitions, sales processes to be sure that we, because it is relatively new to our distribution, at least with us, not with other carriers.
Thank you.
Let's see. Yeah. I could add, Doug, on the risk management. We had a question earlier on risk management practices. We will hedge the equity index exposure with that product. So we will make sure that there's no downside connected with this product
. Okay. And just on the individual insurance life, you talked about 20% ROE. I assume that's excluding Vericity. And if that's the case, how long does it take to get Vericity up to that 20% level?
When you talk about Vericity, you refer to the whole entity, the distribution plus the Fidelity Life manufacturing? Well, I was just looking at the slide. You talked about individual insurance ROEs of 20%. Is that Vericity?
Is that income? It's the whole thing. That's the whole thing is inside that. So we said, remember, when we concluded the acquisition, we said that it would be dilutive on EPS shortly, and then it would start to be accretive. So I would say midterm we'll get to the target ROE that we are achieving.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom MacKinnon, BMO Capital. Joe, can you talk about some we've heard about Globe Life with some issues that they've had in terms of sales practices as they work down the mid-market or final expense market. What kind of sales practices do you have in place here that you could share with us that could make us comfortable that there shouldn't be any kind of issues with respect to the IMOs that you're distributing through?
Sure.
And that's always a main event for us that we have a long established history of being able to stay on the straight and narrow. Haven't had any material compliance issues at all. We do a significant amount of training. And actually, we take advantage of iA's strong risk management and compliance programs as well. In fact, our compliance program at our office there in Waco is very robust and very involved in the day-to-day processes. So we've been able to. Haven't had that as an experience. We make a big issue out of it with our distributors that we will do things the right way.
Great. And then how can you leverage the distribution that Vericity's brought in? Can you branch out into direct-to-consumer and utilize some of their practices for distribution?
That's maybe a potential item down the road.
We have not really addressed that up to this point. We've been focused on our distribution today, which is we've been successful with independent distribution, although I'm sure we'll have some opportunities to leverage some resources as we move forward.
Maybe Sean, do you want to talk about the fact that you have this group that is looking at opportunities?
Actually, tomorrow afternoon, the U.S. leaders we get together with start a U.S. growth committee. And really, we're starting to look at the U.S. Life platform as, okay, what do you have? What do you have? And what can we bring together? And what, as a company, should we be adding to the mix that would probably benefit one or the other? So there's kind of a the Vericity acquisition, we're still in the integration mode, bringing them in.
We're still tapping into our accounting finance teams, but I definitely think there will be an opportunity to leverage that platform and also Joe's products on the platform and vice versa. So we're on that journey.
And maybe, Tom, just before you go, you asked me the question at the break regarding the earnings growth from U.S. and Canada. And just for the benefit of everyone, the earnings growth, we said 10% plus. So how does it split between Canada and U.S.? The earnings growth in the U.S. is well above the 10% target for the U.S. operation. So it's a significant contributor to our earnings growth expected for 2027.
And a higher ROE as well.
Yeah, absolut ely. Increasing ROE.
Yeah. All right. Paul Holden, CIBC, one question on Dealer Services. We've already seen a good inflection in the sales numbers over the last few quarters.
Haven't seen an inflection yet in profitability. So given the investments you're making in the business, when would you expect net earnings to start reflecting higher for that business?
Great, Éric, you want to start? Or then John? Yeah, maybe you start.
I'll get to kick it off. Whoever it is. John mentioned it's a matter of operational efficiency. So getting some expense out of the business, repricing the business has been key and continuing to grow the business. And the profit's a mix of the premium fees we make and then the reserves that we're building as well. So it takes a bit of time sometimes. But it'll be a slow recovery, but you'll see it this year as it starts to come up. But it's not going to be a big jump up.
It's connected with the answer I just gave to Tom.
It's going to kick off gradually starting in 2025 and ramp up in 2026 and 2027. It's mostly coming from the U.S. Dealer. Some of the pricing adjustments we've made, you'll see start to hit in late 2025 into 2026 and 2027.
Yeah, and we work both, I mean, work on different initiatives. Pricing increase, as John just mentioned. There's also on the expense side, we're making some initiatives as well. So I mean, it's the combination of all the initiatives that we're making that gradually you're going to see in 2025 an improvement.
It's Meny from Scotiabank. This is a question for John just about cross-border opportunities. You mentioned that. So I'm just curious if you could expand on that. How big an opportunity is that?
From your perspective, being in the U.S. your entire career, what can the U.S. learn from Canada when it comes to this Dealer Services business in particular?
I think that you start with the OEM space, the manufacturer space, cross-border opportunities. Gwen and her team have a very strong position in that space. From my background, all of the business that I've managed outside of the U.S., 90% of that was OEM business. So I have a lot of relationships. I also know that they would prefer to have one carrier rather than multiple carriers. Okay? So I think we can work in that thing. There are also some dealer groups that work across borders as well. I think we have some opportunities on.
Just as a follow-up, I wanted to ask the tariff question again.
I know we talked about it on the call, but John, I wanted to get your perspective in terms of how you think about that risk and the potential for it's hard to know what to believe, but there's a scenario where the supply chain gets really problematic, and so how do you think about that risk when it comes to your business and the outlook there?
I agree with you. It's hard to figure it out, right? I would say this. That's when we talked about our balance of our portfolio. And we ran into this during COVID when new cars were extremely hard to get, sometimes impossible. So we like that balance of our portfolio. I'm not convinced at all that you're going to see the type of tariffs that have been thrown out there. I don't think it's beneficial to anyone. I think it's a negotiation.
And I think we'll get to a specific point. Thank you.
No more questions. We do have a question from the participants online. The next question comes from Mario Mendonca. And his question is as follows. What has changed over the last decade in the Canadian life insurance that allows for a 20% ROE? Is it all reduced capital requirements? Is it mixed business? Is it disciplined pricing or lower competition?
I can start, and I will complement Éric. I would think we know the answer, both of us.
I would say the first item and most important is the pricing discipline that started to take place around mid-2012 or 2014. So pricing discipline, lower guarantees trend, the industry discipline itself also in offering less risky guarantees. So that's another item. And just keep growing and scaling.
Yeah, we priced in the declining interest rates.
That's what the discipline part you're talking about. And I think also for specifically both for IE, I cannot talk for the others, but the introduction of the LICAT formula, the introduction of IFRS 17 at the end has also been a positive for IE. Thank you, Mario, for the question.
So I think we're done, right? Okay. So the conclusion? Okay. So are you okay here? So I guess you've heard today that we are ready for more. We are ready for more. Hopefully, we've been able to convince you that the IU has been a great success for us. We have the right strategy. We have the right people. We have the right system processes. And also, we've got the means for our ambition. We've got the capital. So with that said, I'd like to thank you. And thanks to all the presenters for today.
You have a chance to chat with us during the lunchtime. Thank you very much.