Started, I'd ask everybody to hold on to any questions they might have, and we'll reserve a few minutes at the end of the presentation to address any audience Q&A. But very pleased to be hosting Power Corporation for fireside chat. Joining me today is Jeff Orr, CEO. So Jeff, thanks very much for joining us. And maybe just to help level set the audience, I'll turn it over to you for a few opening remarks for a brief overview of Power Corp and anything else you might want to add.
Sure. Well, first of all, I don't know who that James guy was from IGM you just had up there, but that's a tough act to follow. He's an impressive guy, I thought. I don't know about you. Just, you know, start. For a lot of you know my colleague Greg Tretiak. We announced last night that our chief financial officer had had a major medical issue on the weekend. We sent out a press release. So Greg was going to be on the sessions today, and he's going to be away for a while. I was with him last night. He's stable. He's in the hospital, and he will be through a process of recovery, and we'll see how that goes. But I say that because he knows so many people. He's been around the business for a while.
He's an amazing person, an amazing CFO, but an amazing person, and he's doing well, but he is definitely going to be out for a period of time, so I'll start with that message for those in the room that know Greg. You know, I've been talking for the last four years since we announced the reorganization. It's going to be four years in December where we said, we're changing tack. We're moving with a new strategy, financial services, not diversification, simplification. We're going to be out in front of the market on a consistent basis, and we have a very clear strategy to create value. And we've been out articulating that. And I've been talking for almost four years, looking forward, looking forward, looking forward.
I'm at a point right now where I'm just stopping and pausing and turning the view backwards and saying, when you go back over the last four years, we have significantly repositioned Power Corp and its major subsidiaries for much higher growth. And it's not small. We have significantly repositioned the business. And that's not to say there isn't a lot to do going forward. But if I go back to four years ago and I start with Great-West Lifeco alone, we had in the United States three businesses. The three businesses collectively on an annual basis were earning less than $200 million. And I fast forward four years ago, we've sold the insurance business. We've sold Putnam. We have acquired MassMutual, Pru, and Personal Capital.
We now have one business called Empower, which in the quarter that just ended earned $265 million, much more than the entire suite earned in an entire year. We earned in one quarter. It's 30% of Great-West Life's earnings. It's growing organically at double-digit rates, and it is in a market that continues to consolidate. And just that alone, Great-West Life is now one business, 30% in the United States and growing rapidly, and the other businesses are in much stronger shape. I can talk more about that. Great-West Life, which is 65% of Power Corp, significantly repositioned. For those of you who just heard James O'Sullivan talk about IGM, IGM is not the company that you knew five and ten years ago. It's got three remarkable businesses in wealth management, being IG Wealth, Rockefeller, and Wealthsimple.
And it's got three very strong, well-positioned businesses in asset management, being Mackenzie, China AMC, and Northleaf. And that position, that's 15% of our value. It is significantly repositioned for growth. And while at the Power Corp level, we've then got three other companies, which are excuse me, not three other companies, the other businesses that represent 20% of our gross asset value. And we are in a work in progress on surfacing value, realizing value, and simplifying. And that has we're halfway through that journey. The business is not what it was four years ago. So I'll spend most of my talk talking about going forward. But the first thing I want to say is we've got to step back and say we've made a ton of progress here. We're feeling very good about it. We're really encouraged by what we're doing and carrying on.
This will be the opening statement I make.
That's a great overview. It probably makes sense to start on Great-West, which constitutes the largest component of your NAV at the Power Corp level. As you alluded to, that entity has repositioned its U.S. business quite dramatically the past few years. Maybe you can help just sort of level set by just summarizing some of the work that's been done there. Then maybe give us some insight on how advanced you think those efforts are and how much there might be left to do on that front.
Yeah, that's great, so I already mentioned Empower, and I can't go too far without talking a little bit more about the opportunity, and then I'll touch very briefly on the other businesses. The Empower opportunity. Excuse me. The defined contribution business, which is in fact a pretty mature business, got 30-35 suppliers, is a tough business, and you'd say people come and say, isn't that really a difficult business in narrow margins and kind of maturing, and we go, we're counting on it. Because in effect, Fidelity and ourselves have the two large platforms that are significantly automated. We have better client experiences. We have lower costs, and we are growing organically from other players, and then other record keepers are exiting the market because they can't keep up with the cost of being technologically relevant in today's world, and fortunately, Fidelity is not in the acquisition business.
We've been in a prime position to make acquisitions. The defined contribution business itself is actually just a tool. We don't love recordkeeping. We happen to be good at it. It's actually a wealth management business we're making. It used to be that group plans were paper-based, and you dealt with the employer, and then you sent statements to the employee. In today's world, this is a digital relationship. The employer is just a key to 18 million individuals who are now interacting with digitally on a daily basis. The opportunity set is to yes, we make some money on recordkeeping. It is obviously there are product penetration opportunities. We are turning on advice for another 30 basis points or 40 basis points. You can have an advisory team with technology. There's held away assets that we're rolling in.
The big, big opportunity is that of the $1.4 trillion U.S. that we have on our platform with 18 million people, 6% or $85 billion a year comes out of plan as people retire or change opportunities. We were getting a very small portion of that to roll into our wealth management offering because we didn't have a great wealth management offering. We have significantly enhanced that capability with the acquisition of Personal Capital. Our strategy is to increase the 13% we were getting on rollover. Our best competitors are getting 50% and get that to 16%, which is where we are today, to get it to 18%, to get it to 22%, to get it to 26% over time. It's a lot of work.
If we manage to do that, and we have to prove that we can do that, but we're committed to it, it won't just be a DC opportunity. We're going to build a big wealth management. So I can't talk about Great-West without saying what we have in the United States here. And I don't think the market quite realizes it. Interestingly, the biggest shareholders at Power Corp and Great-West Life are some of the largest U.S. names that you would know. And they know the U.S. market pretty well. We spend a lot of time with them. They're believers in what we're doing. I think when you come into the Canadian scene, defined contribution, what's that? That's a group business, isn't it? Well, OK, that sounds interesting. We're very keen on it.
The other businesses at Great-West Life where we've got basically savings and some insurance business, which insurance is about 25% of our business overall, but it's really group plans and wealth management. We have solid single-digit growth across our Canadian, our European businesses. And those businesses, we continue to invest in them. And overall, Great-West is telling the market we're going to grow our earnings at 8%-10% a year over the next five years without further acquisitions. And we look at where the stock price is and where the analyst estimates are. And we go, there's still a lot of people going, well, we'll believe that when we see it, which is fine. We have to prove ourselves we're Okay with that. But we see the overall package as being a very interesting growth opportunity and strongly positioned with the U.S. being the lead.
That's the Great-West Life story.
OK, that's excellent. Now we just heard from James, but maybe shifting over to IGM very briefly, it'd be interesting to hear about how that investment fits into the Power complex, and maybe give us a little bit of an overview on how you view IGM through the lens of Power Corporation.
Yeah, so IGM has been in the group since the 1970s. It's obviously a core holding. It had been viewed as an asset manager for many years. And it was an integrated wealth asset manager that had positioned itself as an asset manager. But it's actually more of a wealth manager than it is an asset manager. And I mentioned just a few minutes ago what its brands are. Across the Power Group, I would say that and I'll come back to IG Wealth and IGM in a second. Across the group, we went through a period for 20 years up to the crash where we had really created great shareholder returns. It was acquisition-led. We were great at doing synergies, taking costs out. And then we felt pretty good about ourselves in 2007, having created like 22%, 23% TSRs for over 20 years. Then the crash came.
Great-West Life was the only major life company to keep its credit rating through the financial crisis globally of public companies. By 2012, we're kind of going, you know, we rock. We were fantastic in the up market. And we were rock solid because we're very risk-aware through the crisis. But we actually you know, everybody makes mistakes in life. And as a group, we had underinvested in technology. We had very thin leadership teams. We had pricing in many cases that was too high. So some of you would know, you know, if you'd gone 10 years ago, Investors Group, well, they sell those high-priced mutual funds, don't they? And that was the image of what it is. For those that just heard James, IG Wealth today, you wouldn't recognize it. I mean, the recruiting model is completely different. The product model is completely different.
The flows are not going into funds. There are some going into funds, but the net flows are going into wraps, very competitively priced. It continues to have the broad planning focus on investments, insurance, mortgages, the complete financial planning-led. It's really, really well-positioned for growth, notwithstanding a difficult environment that we're going through right now. By the way, difficult environment. Bankers are doing well with this. You know, money is flowing out of risk products, as you know right now, flowing into certificates of deposit, money market funds. And I want to say people say, do you get that? I have never bought a CD in my life. And in the last six months have bought a CD, sitting there with one-year money at 6%. I'm going, yeah, yeah, the bond market's going all over the place. What's happening with the equity markets? Hard landing.
I get it. Money is flowing out right now. But these businesses are well-positioned. And IGM is well-positioned. And we got hopefully, we've got a position here in Rockefeller, a fantastic business where we are also going to grow into the United States right now. And then Wealthsimple, you heard James talk about it. It's the business of the future. They're doing an amazing job. It's not going to drive earnings meaningfully in the short term, but over the medium to long term, it's a wonderful position. And our asset management businesses are very well-positioned as well. So I think IGM is itself well-positioned for growth.
You just heard James conclude by saying at their Investor Day, I think it's December 5th or 6th, I can't remember the date, you're going to see the theme of growth as well as meet all the leadership teams across the six different platforms. So very excited about that. That's 80%. We just talked about 80% of the Power Corp portfolio and also about 100% of the repeatable earnings of the portfolio. The other 20% is all that stuff, all that stuff that's NAV-based that creates erratic earnings and has got a lot of value in it. But people go and say, what is that? I don't even have time to look at all that. And so that can be part of our conversation as well as to what we're doing there.
For sure, and we'll get into that as well.
OK, great.
But maybe just shifting to the corporate development front for a moment. You know, when you look across your operating subs more broadly, there's been a lot of activity the last few years. Are there any missing pieces or capabilities that you might consider integrating via M&A? Or do you feel that you're already fairly well advanced in terms of what the roadmap that you had for those businesses?
Yeah, I mean, you're always looking at where you can strengthen. Competition has never stopped. Technology has never stopped. So there's a continual game. I think some of them we've addressed. I think when you looked at Canada Life in its Canadian market, we had a strong insurance franchise, a very strong group franchise, but had underinvested in wealth. They needed more scale. And we're looking to do that organically. There weren't many things to acquire. They had been knocking on James's door for a number of years to buy IPC. And when the Rockefeller opportunity came forward from both a capital point of view and from a bandwidth point of view, I think IGM and the team said, OK, we can't do everything at once here. And there was an opportunity to strengthen the wealth position in Canada Life.
And so I'm very excited, even though it kind of looks like aren't they just shuffling paper. I think that's going to work out well for Canada Life to strengthen their Canadian wealth. And I think it's going to allow IGM to focus on its biggest opportunities. You're always looking for other kind of fill-in capabilities. So we'll continue to do acquisitions to strengthen and to invest internally. But the biggest capital deployment opportunity across Great-West Life, I think, will be into Empower. That's the number one priority in terms of capital allocation. And at IGM, again, they've got six businesses. They're going to be opening wealth businesses, asset management. There may be opportunities. But building out in the United States, if we have the opportunity to do so, would be, I think, the highest priority from a capital allocation point of view.
That's great. Then staying on the M&A theme, maybe shifting from an external to an internal focus, there has been some movement of assets within the Power complex as well, most recently with IPC to Great-West and also IGM consolidating its interest in China AMC. I wouldn't ask you to formally announce any strategic plans in this setting. But as you endeavor to simplify the story for investors, do you see potential for further movement of assets within the complex over time?
I never want to say that we won't do that because we go with where the opportunities are. And each of those had a value creation opportunity behind them. China AMC, for example, where we're a majority investor everywhere we operate in the five countries we operate, except China, where we've not put a lot of our capital. But because of the relationships that the Desmarais has created going back to the late 1970s and our partnership with CITIC, we were able to acquire a 28% position in the second leading asset manager in China and a fantastic company. But when the first opportunity came by, we had said, well, we'd like to do that in IGM. CITIC and China AMC said there's a 10% block in 2011. And they said, well, you can't buy it in IGM. Power has got a QFII license.
We know IGM's part of you, but it's not happening. So we said, OK, we'll buy it at Power, of course. So when the second block came in 2017, by then, we had spent six years getting China AMC to know IGM. And they had done all the work. So when the second block came, then IGM was able to acquire it. We ended up with two. We have the stock in two places. So as part of the Power Corp, we're too complicated. We've got stuff all over the place. That was, let's put this in one place where the market can see it. And Mackenzie and the IGM organization are in a much better position to get the industrial synergies, the cooperation on product distribution than we could at Power Corp in any event where we don't have operating businesses there.
There's complete logic to that transaction, as I explained on IPC. And the other one that we did was in transferring Great-West Life's CAD 45 billion asset manager GLC to Mackenzie. And it was clear that GLC was lacking the scale in Canada to really continue to invest and to be competitive. And Mackenzie, with over CAD 240 billion in assets, was in a much better position to be efficient and effective. So all of those had economic logic to them. And I won't say we'll never do another one, that there won't ever be something else. But that's not our main focus. And I think you may hear we may do some of those. But the main focus is in building up Great-West Life, IGM, and adding to their capabilities where we can. And then the Power Corp part of the equation, which we can get to.
That's great, and maybe I'll ask a quick one on the alternative asset management business. You recently brought in a pair of sophisticated institutional investors as partners on the GP side at Sagard. What do ADQ and BMO bring to the table for Power, and can you help give us a little bit of color on what gave rise to that investment?
For sure. So I'm going to start by giving the context on it. Four years ago, or a little under four years ago, when we announced the strategy, we said we have all of these assets at Power Corp that were part of diversification. And some of those were investment platforms that were principally investing Power's money. Some of them had some outside capital. And some of them were standalone businesses like Lumenpulse and Lion Electric and whatnot. And we said the standalone businesses won't be part of the portfolio long term. And in fact, my expectation was on assets like Lumenpulse and Lion, we would have disposed of them or taken some money off the table. And ironically, we haven't. We've raised money other ways. And then I'll come back to that.
But then on the portfolios, the teams that we had, we said we're going to fund those and turn them into alternative asset management businesses. We're going to take the CAD 2 billion of seed capital we have and roll it. We're not putting any more in. And all the growth will come from third-party capital. And we're going to turn them into profitable alternative businesses. And we have a right to win, is the term that Paul Desmarais III likes to use from time to time because of the ability to attract talent, the capital we have in. We've got Canada Life looking for some of those strategies and some amazing teams. So that's the background to how we got here. So Sagard is now up to about CAD 18 billion in AUM. It's done an unbelievable job in fintech and in private equity and in real estate in the U.S.
It's got six strategies going. So the debate we continually have, the alternative asset management space is an attractive space. Our clients need it. Great-West Life needs it. But it's also a competitive space. And it is a space where institutions are starting to get pretty full up in terms of their allocations around the globe. High-net-worth clients, endowments, others still have some room to go. But it's getting. I wouldn't say it's mature. It's still growing. But it's getting tougher. And it's a tough fundraising environment. So the debate we have is, would we rather own a big part of a smaller company? Or would we rather own a smaller part of a bigger company? And now I'm going to answer your question. So ADQ, Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund comes in. Not just they have significant capital they want to deploy in Sagard's strategies.
They want a seat at the table. They want to be a GP. Just like when Canada Life sold Sagard, its U.S. real estate business, which they thought Sagard could do a lot better job at fundraising and attracting talent, they wanted a seat at the table. BMO is doing the same thing. We get capital. We get scale. In BMO's case, maybe we work on some distribution opportunities as well, as was the case with Canada Life distribution opportunities. Capital, growth, distribution. We sit there and we go, how much do we want to own of this? Do we want to own a majority of it? Do we want to keep growing through partnerships going forward and create a much bigger company and have more value? It is a value equation because this is about creating value.
It's about taking lots of good teams, seed capital, and saying, how can we maximize the value of this thing for the Power Corp shareholders? We'll continue to have that debate. We're just over control in Sagard. When you take management's incentives and you take what Canada Life, ADQ, and BMO own, Power owns more than 50%. But I just have a feeling, having been around the management team of Sagard for a while, they're going to be back soon with, have we got a deal for you? We got a new investor who's going to want to put in a few billion dollars. We're going to get to the next level. But by the way, they want 10% of the equity. We're going to be into it, OK. We're going to be into this discussion. Those are decisions for the future.
But that's the color around it. Okay. That's how we got to that transaction.
That's excellent. And another element to the strategy that you had articulated at the time of the reorganization back in 2019 was the monetization of the standalone businesses, which you alluded to earlier, and the reallocation of proceeds to shareholders through buybacks and other means. You made some progress there. But you do still retain an interest in a few businesses. And I think you had referenced Lion Electric and Lumenpulse. Can you just share with us what the roadmap looks like on that front and your general posture towards those investments?
For sure. So when we announced the strategy, I actually thought Lumenpulse and Lion and Bauer skates we still own Bauer skates . We didn't mention that one would have been like, those are obviously not financial services. So they would be things that we would look to dispose of. And we kind of trumpeted them a bit in December of 2019. And here we are, not quite four years later. And we still own all those positions. And it's because the market changed. Just like managing a portfolio, you don't manage it passively. You manage it actively. And you look at what environment you're in. COVID came. And Lumenpulse's business was kind of shredded. The opposite happened with Lion Electric. We had CAD 54 million in it. Then all of a sudden, EV went crazy. We took it public in a SPAC.
Our position was worth like CAD 1.8 billion, the CAD 54 million. You couldn't sell any at that point. Then, of course, it's all come back down to earth. Now Lion needed capital, which was difficult to raise. We like to joke, you're not going to throw Lion under the bus. I'm sorry. It's a terrible pun. We are long-term partners. We're going to do what's right for our value. We're going to support the businesses and the management teams. We'll eventually dispose of them. While that happened, we actually raised CAD 1.8 billion. We've sold CAD 1.8 billion of assets since we announced the transaction. We had CAD 300 million invested between ourselves and IGM in Wealthsimple. You heard James talk about the long-term future.
But when somebody came along in 2021, and we sold a small percentage of our interest for CAD 500 million. So the group is CAD 200 million to the good. And we still have up to a 48% position. That's part of it. But we did things like that to raise CAD 1.8 billion. And most of that was available for share buybacks. And some of that got reinvested into some of it was fund positions we reinvested in the capital and the platforms. So we are still on track. And I think ultimately, you'll see realization on values on those others. And it's just additional funding to do buybacks. And so let me talk about that part of the portfolio.
I think that when you look at GBL, which is 6% of the value, and then the companies that we just talked about, and the seed capital we have, when I talk to investors, they go, "That's all great. But I don't have time to look at it. I don't get it. I'm not going to do any EV valuations. And by the way, I don't get it." So the road we're on is that we are trying to dispose of some assets. We're trying to get the platforms to profitability so that they're producing net income and simplify the entire structure so that you can say we have these income streams coming from fees under management. And here's the seed capital supporting it. And that's it. And it's simple. And we're not there yet. We're on a journey to get there.
That means more dispositions and more scale, which is the ADQ question. Get these things to scale. What we own of it is a secondary issue. Get them to scale. In the meantime, we're trading at a 25% discount to NAV. So as we dispose of assets and we take in cash, we love what we own. We're going to. I'll buy stock at $0.75 on the dollar. I mean, that's clear what the priority is for capital for Power Corp. So we surface value, simplify, and use capital to buy shares back. That's the third piece, IGM, Great-West Life. Then at the Power Corp level, buy shares back. Unless IGM or Great-West Life have some big deal and they need us to put $500 million in, we've done that, I think, six times in the last 25 years.
We've supported them and their equity. That'll always take priority. But absent that, that's the story. And that leads to the value creation story. And if I can pull it together at that level, here's what I tell the board and what I tell investors. We have a value creation story that's around Great-West Life and IGM, who have really solid growth. I think James has said IGM is going to give medium-term guidance at their Investor Day as well. I don't know, James, if I can see you back there if you're still on that. Great-West Life has already done that. The market is still skeptical as to whether we're going to grow at 8%-10% at Great-West Life organically. And the analysts would say we're not. But we'll have to prove that. But we think we can.
And we think we can add to that through M&A. And yet the stocks are still trading at 10 or less than 10 times the forecast for next year, which are below what the company's guidances have been. So we think that the 80% is very well priced, has got good, strong organic growth, big strong diversified companies. We're financially prudent. We think we can just do well on the 80%. And then you've got at the Power Corp level, a confused kind of not quite sure what was there. We have the ability to surface value, simplify, and buy shares back at a big discount and narrow the discount over time. When I go to our board, I say we do a bad job of executing. We're low double digits TSRs over the next five years. We do a good job. We're up in the 20s, low 20s.
I love that range. And we're getting up every morning excited like mad to go and execute the strategy. That's, in a nutshell, what our strategy is. And the final piece is we've said we're going to be available to the market anytime they want to talk to us, which was a page turn from where we had been historically.
Yeah. That's a great way to tie it all together. I did promise a little bit of time at the end to address any audience Q&A. So I'll just pause very briefly to see if there's anything out there.
I'm sorry, my old friend Ian. I'm not the chair here.
One of the strengths of the group has been the ability to come in and buy great strategic assets here at points in time. Think about Lumenpulse. Think about Canada Life. Is there a risk that in this drive to shrink the NAV discount that you're actually putting capital out that you need? I mean, you made the point that you put CAD 500 million in, invested in the last 25 years.
Yeah.
500 million from Power.
I don't think so.
So the question for those who didn't hear it is, is there a risk as we sell assets at Power Corporation and we buy back the NAV that we won't be able to do strategic acquisitions the way we've done over the last three decades? And I think the answer is no. We're going to keep firepower at Power. And the companies themselves are very strongly financed. And we have big positions in them. We're at 70% all in in Great-West Life, 64% at IGM. We got down to 55% in IGM. I didn't notice. But we've been building our position back over the last 10 years. I think through the firepower we will keep and through those companies' ability to finance themselves. In our continued role at Power Corp, we play a role in strategy, leadership, and capital allocation, including big M&A deals. Okay?
That's the three things we try and keep Power Corp's focus on. We will continue to use M&A as a strong lever, and not only James and Great-West Life team, but I am out and continue to talking to business leaders in our industry around the States and where we operate, looking for additional opportunities, so M&A is going to continue. Strategic M&A is going to continue to be a part of the playbook, and we're not going to leave ourselves without resources, that's for sure, Ian.
I see the screen is flashing red. I know we've got over time. But just to keep everything moving on time, I think we'll hold the conversation there. But thanks so much for joining us, Jeff. That was an excellent discussion.
Thank you, Nik. Thank you. Thanks for being here.