And with that, I would like to introduce Andre Mousseau, our final speaker of the day, CEO of Sagicor Financial. Andre, very nice to see you as always.
Oh, thank you. Has someone turned this on? Yeah, they have. Okay.
I think you are live. You are on.
Okay, good. Where would you like to-
Maybe here.
Okay.
Bit more space, bit more spread out. Awesome. Andre, I'd love to start with maybe some comments from you, some thoughts on just the strategy and the multi-year move here on getting that ROE to your destination of 15%. Currently at 13%, you're looking at 14% next year and potentially the year afterwards, to get to that 15% target in 2028. Maybe just talk about that bridge and what are the levers. I don't know if you're able to quantify between U.S. growth or efficiencies in the Caribbean. Any other earnings drivers that you'd like to flag? How do you get from here to where you want to be?
Sure. I see some familiar faces here, some new ones. Thank you for sticking around for the last speaker of the day. It's appreciated. Very gracious. Just to catch people up, Sagicor Financial is an owner of a series of life insurance companies that we've consolidated over the last number of years. I'm the chief executive of the holding company. Our aim is to be good steward of those assets and enhance the ROE over time. What you were just talking about are the three things that we have talked about to enhance the ROE, where, as you say, we've been running about 13% from where the portfolio started in its current form, about three years ago, around a 10% ROE.
Those involve our three main holdings, which are a Canadian life insurance business, an American one, and a series of legacy assets in the Caribbean, which is where Sagicor started 185 some years ago. We have an initiative in each of those three areas to expand the return on equity. Our biggest asset, which is our Canadian life insurance company, which is branded as ivari, which used to be Transamerica Canada, is a reasonable size asset on its own. It's a 90-plus-year-old life insurer with a $10 billion balance sheet. It is a slow growth business as the Canadian kind of old-fashioned life insurance business is, low single digit growth in terms of policies. It has grown faster than that in the last three years since we've owned it because there's quite an element of an asset management business underneath.
As asset prices have gone, that business is earning substantially more than what it was when we bought it. It has a very conservatively managed balance sheet. We believe that we can get an extra 100 basis points-200 basis points of ROE for all of Sagicor out of redeploying that balance sheet along the way. More along the way that the big four insurers you heard speak, some of them earlier today, the way they do it. If you look on LinkedIn, you will see that we just brought on board a new SVP of investments who came from one of those big three or four companies.
We have put hard in guidance that we see 100 basis points-200 basis points, which round numbers means an extra $10 million-$20 million of ROE out of that lever, over the next two or three years. We stick by that. The second piece is our American business. We participate in the annuities space, which is kind of the modern evolution of the life insurance sector. This is the very similar business that Brookfield's gotten into over the last five years, the business that was kind of pioneered by Apollo through Athene, starting 15 years or so. We have a great little growing business in that sector. We have grown it over the last five years from about $2 billion to just about $7 billion balance sheet now. We see a continued opportunity to grow that business.
As we put more assets to work, just mechanically, the ROE will expand as we can grow gross margin faster than we grow the SG&A in that business. That business has a lot of great secular trends. Notwithstanding that it is a competitive space because it is so attractive, we have a good little spot in the distribution channel. We think we invest very well. We recently got a ratings agency upgrade for our U.S. operating company to A, which allows us to expand our distribution scope. We just hired a new president for that business who was a top executive at National Life, which is a U.S. mutual company that is 10 x the size of our insurer.
He has been on since May or June, and he is a former CFO, Chief Risk Officer, the perfect person to put the structure around which we can continue to grow that business. Again, high conviction on an extra point or two of ROE for the whole shooting match out of that. The last piece is Sagicor originally started from the Caribbean. It is a collection of assets in about 20 different countries. We announced in Q4 of last year that we were finally merging all of those entities into a single entity. That was announced in December. That transaction will close later this year or earlier next year. We are not waiting on that to have a full integration of those businesses that will allow us to benefit from twice the scale that they had individually. They operated, despite being under the same banner, in a pretty discreet manner.
One run out of Jamaica, 1,000 miles from the other one, run out of Barbados and Trinidad. Because we control all these assets, we are not waiting on the financial close of the transaction to put those businesses together. We have very high conviction around squeezing another 100 basis points - 200 basis points of ROE out of that. You add all that up. I have probably just told you that I think we can take it from 13% to somewhere between 16% and 19%. That is not where we are putting our guidance.
For a company that trades at a discount to book value, I do not think you have to believe that, but that is where, in order for it to be compelling, where it is today. That is where we have our internal targets, and that is where on balance of probabilities, I think we can take it.
Okay. Thanks for that very thoughtful answer. Curious about the 2026 being described as an investment year. You have got a lot of strategic initiatives going on. How does that sort of impact the ROE? Maybe the trajectory of the ROE. Is it fair to say that it is more back-loaded? If you hit your target in 2027, is it more so a second half of the year story?
Some of it will come in over time. Each of those three things have their own cadence. With the margin and the expansion out of the Caribbean, we will start to see that this year because we have made observable changes that will run through core earnings starting in Q4. The additional yield out of the Canadian balance sheet is something we have been working on already, but because of the depth of the Canadian debt capital markets, almost by definition, it takes time to shift asset allocation. It will take time to do so. In the U.S., we will expand our margins as the assets continue to grow. We just brought on a new CEO. New CEOs want to take some time, take stock, and then go and hire other people to go and execute on their plans. That is the natural cadence of things.
I do expect that over the coming quarters, we will add a little bit of SG&A to the US business. Then really be able to see that margin expansion kick out going forward.
Okay. For anyone who is not familiar with the Sagicor story, just the volatility of reported earnings, if you could maybe touch on that. I know there is a lot of investors that do not like volatility, but I think you have been clear in the past about looking at it from a longer-term perspective. It does tend to even out. Maybe just talk about that dynamic and then as a follow-up on that, is there anything that could change in terms of maybe capital-light businesses or the fee-based revenue that you generate that could sort of shift that or lessen to some extent that natural inherent volatility in your business?
I think the nature of life insurance, the way the accounting is done now, you are always going to see for us and for the Canadian peers, you are going to see some volatility in reported net income. That is why the Big Four really point towards core or whatever they individually call core. We do so as well. The nature of the business right now is if someone gives us $100 to manage, whether it is a Canadian universal life policy or an American annuity, we are going to have to hold order of magnitude $10 million of capital against that. We choose to invest that capital midterm. For a Canadian business, you could invest it in cash at 2.5%, or you could put it in the rest of your bond portfolio, even on a non-exciting basis at 5% or 6%.
If rates go up in a quarter, you have to mark it down. You are not taking any losses on those bonds. You are moving that income around over time. Our north star for our business is to compound book value over years. We have made a decision as shareholders, as directors, to accept some quarterly notional volatility, in return for getting better long-term returns over time. As to the transition that the other life insurance companies have made to asset-light businesses that can get to hitting a 20% ROE target, that may be something in the future, but we have so much value to create now just optimizing the assets that we have that we are keeping the eye on the ball with that.
Okay, thanks for that color. Maybe going back to the U.S., and you did mention the rating change that allows you to get more distribution. Can you maybe try to quantify that to some extent? What does it actually mean in practice? How much more distribution does it come with to have that step-up in the rating?
Going from A- to A puts you in kind of a different zip code in terms of who will deal with you. For example, in the U.S., banks in general will have a threshold around being an A as opposed to an A-, whereas independent agents, some will tolerate an A-, some will tolerate even a B+. The market is massive in terms of hundreds of billions of new annuities being written every year, but we've been addressing less than a quarter of it by only being in the independent channel. This will open up other opportunities, which every distributor set has its own microeconomy in terms of the competitive set. Banks tend to want simplicity. They tend to have lower tolerance than independent agents do for service missteps, which is good for us because we pride ourselves on service.
If we can get in with some of these banks where you're only competing against two or three other preferred providers instead of the independent agents that have evolved to some of them having dozens of these new annuity providers, we can get into a less competitive space on rate and see our margin expansion that way.
What's the timeline there in terms of just getting in front of these new distribution opportunities? How long does that take?
Oh, we're in front of them now.
You're in front.
The announcement's only a couple of weeks old.
Yep.
We saw it coming. We've been working on this for a couple of years as we've got the parent company rerated itself to investment grade. The timelines with banks are measured in months and quarters, not in days and weeks. It's something that we think will show some yield for us starting next year.
I did notice that the production in the quarter was, I think, down a little bit. You did mention some competitiveness that was heightened in the quarter, and now you've got this distribution dynamic. When you think about that 1 billion production number, just trying to get a sense of how much better it could get from here.
We take a very disciplined approach, kind of ROE, IRR approach to deploying capital. We would rather deploy $1 billion of assets at a 15% or 16% marginal ROE than 2X that at 10% or 11% or 12%. We are going to pick our spots. There was a moment in time in Q1 where you could observe, when there was a lot of noise around private credit, you could observe the competitive dynamic stepping back as a lot of the competitors looked to conserve capital, and we said, "Okay. There isn't a moment in time. There are some good weeks here. Let's make hay when the sun shines." I think order of magnitude to move beyond the $1 billion or so that we have been producing the last couple of years will really be helped by expanding the distribution, and that is why we have prioritized that.
Got it. Then maybe just on the legacy life block, you have been impacted by negative mortality. A couple of quarters ago. Just curious, just in terms of when you do that deep dive in Q3, what is a realistic range of outcomes on the reserving?
We look at all the assumptions every year. If we had a precise idea about something that was significant, we'd say it now. I think if you look at we have through the CSM, through the contractual service margin, over $1 billion worth of future profits that are there under actuarial assumptions, to which zero value is being ascribed to us in the public market. May that number move around a little bit? Yes. I don't see it fundamentally changing, either the unit economics of the business that we're writing now or the ROE targets going forward.
And then maybe switching to the Caribbean business with this whole transition, can you talk maybe a little bit about the synergy opportunity, whether on the costs or revenues? Anything you could sort of provide in terms of insights, your latest thoughts on that?
Yeah, I said in the preamble, I said in our guidance we see 100 basis points - 200 basis points. We're taking this, that translates round numbers into $10 million - $20 million a year annualized to us net. We wouldn't put numbers like that out there if we wouldn't have high confidence in it. We're in the middle of that project right now.
How does the 55% ownership of a separately listed vehicle, how does that impact how capital moves within the group, if at all?
It means that you. This is how it is with our Jamaican business now, where we own 49% of it, and it is a public company. With the Jamaican business that we own 49% of now, we take public dividends just like the other 51. Whereas with the 100% in the Southern Caribbean we own, we can take it when we want it. By wrapping it all together in a single public company, we will split the dividends with the minority interest. We will control that board. We will be able to make the decisions on how capital moves.
What about how it impacts just the cost base there? I know you have alluded to the uplift in the ROE and the dollar amount of what that means in earnings, but just on the cost side, is there anything that could maybe provide even more potential upside as you get efficiencies in the Caribbean through tech investments and-
I-
I know you are doing a lot. There is
Right. We could spend hours on the project underneath. There is the first order of combining leadership teams, and then you look at the different systems, and you say, "Okay, let us pick a system," or, "Let us pick a new one. Let us move everything. Single cloud provider, change everything." Then once that is done, then you look at process re-engineering under a single team. Then once those processes are in place, you have another wave where you say, "Okay, our processes are radically different. Can we retool the workforce?" Or do you simply let it go through attrition, or do you do something more fundamental? Those businesses are big legacy formerly mutual companies that have been doing the same, have had processes that have not been looked hard at for 30 or 40 years. There is a massive opportunity.
The workforce is engaged and enthusiastic and providing the best ideas for us on how to improve things. But when you pick a number and say, "Here are what the synergies are," if you're planning for the long term, you take your target, you divide by two, and then you probability weight that. So, when I say $10 million -$ 20 million, we have internal targets that are much higher than that.
Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Then on the Canada business, I wanted to ask about the Maple partnership, and that's obviously expanded recently. Just in terms of how that might be impacting, whether client experience or how it might help drive more sales.
Yeah.
Any thoughts on that? Because you've always alluded to the Canada business as being-
Yeah.
Sort of stable. It doesn't sound like there's too much going on, but clearly you've got some initiatives on the go.
Yeah.
That could move the needle.
The Canadian business, going back to generation, Transamerica was a big business that had a seg funds business and was selling a lot of term life. I would guess if you went through to all your families, at least a dozen of you somewhere have an old Transamerica policy somewhere in your family tree that you will benefit from at some point. Today, it is much more focused, and so the new business that we write is very heavily focused into the business that iA is also heavily focused in in Canada, which is the mid-market universal life business.
You are competing on service, you are competing on the terms you are offering, and then there is a little bit of bells and whistles in the policies. What you are talking about is we have introduced offering Maple, which is the virtual care provider kind of standard coming with the universal life policy.
We could talk about the basket case that Canadian healthcare is, but policyholders like it. It is a matter of educating the sales forces on how to work that into the sale. But so far so good.
Okay. Awesome. Thanks for that. Then just on capital and buybacks, your recent NCIB, I think it is for 9.2 million shares 7% of your outstanding shares, but there hasn't been too much activity. I know you're always trying to balance between buybacks because the stock is so cheap on a relative basis versus.
Yeah.
Others, and then the liquidity, or the less liquidity in your stock. What are your thoughts on where's your mindset right now, just given the size of the NCIB? It seems like you could do a lot more just given how cheap the stock is.
We set that out there so that we have the option to do so. If you like, we're super inexpensive now, but we were even less so when I got into this seat. Over a long period of time, we have in aggregate, net of new issuance, we've bought back the share count by about 10% over the last seven years. We take a discipline ROE based approach to that, and I think you can observe us when the stock gets at a certain point from book value, it's a no-brainer that the ROE is so much higher than what you could do organically that we do continue to participate in that. When we want the option that if the stock drew down, to be able to do that. But we still have good opportunity to deploy capital organically.
Excellent. Awesome. Maybe I'll just turn it back over to you, Andre, if you have any sort of key messages for investors that you want to tell them here. What should they know about the Sagicor story? Because it's still a not well understood story and-
Yeah. Correct.
A pretty deep value play that might entice a lot more investors than are currently in the stock.
I think we're a really interesting opportunity in that it's off the run enough, and not well known enough that there still is the chance to get in before the valuation is fully digested. I was a private equity guy. I used to do valuation for a living. I don't think anyone's looking at our stock and doing a perfect analysis that says you deserve exactly a 70% discount to your peers. I think we're just not very well known. We're the last presentation. We're out of time. What I would say is if anyone's interested, I'm very happy to go and do evangelist work and spend more time on any piece of the story.
Awesome. And with that, we'll end it here. Thank you, Andre, for your insights. Very helpful as usual and all the best in getting that story out there.
Yeah. Well, and same to you.
Yeah, for sure. We have a buy. Our price target's way higher than your current price.
Yeah, there you go. Perfect.
Yeah, I think it's a very interesting story as well. I agree. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Mac.
Andre, thanks very much. Pleasure. We do have a coup-