Meeting's going to have a similar format to years past, but really that's about where the comparisons end. We would characterize the past 12 months of this company as being very busy and transformative. Our objective today is to provide you a very fulsome overview of the new Westaim. If we're successful, I believe you're going to share in the excitement of the Westaim board and management team. This is our agenda for today. I will make a few introductory comments, and after that, I'm going to invite several members of the senior leadership team to come to the podium to discuss their business. For our new investors, we thought it'd be helpful to provide you a quick time snapshot of Westaim over the past 16 years. As you can see, we've had a few chapters.
In 2009, our initial investment was JEVCO Insurance, a Montreal-based insurer with a large focus on nonstandard auto. A combination of a hard market, solid underwriting results, and redundant reserves attracted Intact Financial to acquire the business, providing Westaim shareholders a very good return. Your management team spent a better part of a year to find our next investment in Houston International Insurance Group, a specialty P&C insurer. Shortly thereafter, we completed a capital raise to fund a New York-based private credit firm, Arena Investors. Over the following few years, both businesses grew, they matured, and generated opportunities. HIGG became Skyward, and with new leadership, excellent operating performance, and a strong pricing environment, allowed Skyward to successfully IPO in January 2023. This new liquidity and expanded valuation provided Westaim an opportunity to realize attractive gains.
Alongside this activity, Arena's global platform and product line continued to expand, as did their AUM. Over the last few years, there has been an increasing appetite in private credit, and Arena's well-positioned to participate. We were fortunate to consider several opportunities to accelerate this growth. This brings us to the last box on the right and why we are all here today. On April 3rd of this year, Westaim closed our transaction with CC Capital to transform our Canadian domiciled holdco into a U.S.-based integrated insurance and asset management company. If we look back to last year's AGM, Westaim's cash balance was approximately $290 million as we had sold a large portion of our Skyward shares. Shareholders were anxious to learn of our plans for that cash and our go-forward strategy.
We acknowledged that all options were being considered: an aggressive buyback, a special dividend, a go-private, and should an opportunity arise to create a significant financial service business, the seven characteristics that we had embraced over the last 16 years would apply. If we take our report card from last year and really review what we said and what we did, while we completed the sale process of our Skyward shares, representing a 10-year IRR of just under 13% U.S. or 15% CAD. With Arena Investors achieving scale, the ongoing need for the FINCOs was no longer strategic. We commenced to monetize the FINCOs to apply the capital elsewhere. So far, in 2025, we have harvested approximately $15 million. We committed to accelerate Arena's AUM and demonstrate profitable operating leverage. Today, the AUM is through $4.4 billion. Returning capital shareholders.
Since September of 2021, when we made this commitment, we have canceled approximately 2.7 million shares. Year-to-date, our NCIB has purchased 136,000. However, the real reason and the real transformation event in 2024 was the announcement of CC Capital investing $250 million at $2,850 per share and pivoting the new Westaim to an integrated insurance and asset management company. On October 9th, Westaim announced our partnership with CC Capital, which, alongside their capital invest, really highlighted four key items. First, that the acquisition of Ceres Life will be led by Deanna Mulligan. The Ceres Life transaction is expected to provide Arena long-dated insurance assets, creating a path to $10 billion of AUM with Westaim's existing capital. Third, that the transaction was highly embraced, receiving 99.9% shareholder approval, and that Chinh Chu will serve as Westaim's executive director, leading a board of 11 directors.
This simple chart describes the new Westaim quite well. It is a flywheel engine platform that complements two compelling businesses to grow book value and produce attractive ROEs. The Westaim board unanimously endorsed this transaction, concluding that the CC Capital opportunity was unique. Their interest was to build a high-quality business with proven and accomplished leadership, and to do so economically and reputationally aligned. Combining Arena's platform and Investment expertise with Ceres Cloud Data Platform would create a very unique public company and allowing the Westaim shareholders to directly participate. Here, your leadership team is profiled, and everyone highlighted is here today and will be coming up to the podium. With my opening comments complete, it is my privilege to introduce the next speaker, Deanna Mulligan, CEO of Ceres Life.
Thank you, Cam. Welcome, everyone. It's really nice to meet you and great to be here. We started Ceres Life a little over a year ago. It was a piece of paper, a few of the people in this room, and me. In the last week, we have started to underwrite policies, and they're going through our system. As Cam said, it's been a very interesting and very exciting year. Just a little bit about what I'm going to talk about today. I'm sure you'll want to hear more about the strategy and the team. We have some slides on the market opportunity, ops, and technology, which I know a lot of you would like to see. I'll show a little bit of a video that gives a demo of our technology and then the outlook for the future.
For those of you who do not know about us, Ceres is an annuity company, first of all. We are only writing annuities. We believe we have significant market tailwinds due to the aging of the population. We will show a chart about that in a minute. Market volatility tends to actually increase demand for guaranteed income and annuities. We have been doing some research on this lately. Our business is underpinned by a highly scalable cloud-native technology platform. We are a serverless company. We are truly cloud-native. We have no legacy systems, no backbook, and we have integrated with our IMOs, and our system allows us to flexibly integrate with other distribution systems. We believe this technology gives us both market and cost advantages over the long term. We have integrated AI from day one, and we are planning to continue to do that in both processing and development.
We have committed distribution partners, Advisors Excel and Innovation Design Group, and they are providing us our first distribution platform, and we've been working closely with them. We will also look to partner with additional IMOs over time and plan to expand into other distribution channels in the longer term. We believe that our partnership with Arena provides us with differentiated asset management, and we have attracted a very talented and very insurance-experienced team who also have significant experience in technology. The team is very excited about the market opportunity. You will meet some of them in the video. We have a five-part value proposition, and the first part is really the $15 trillion market and business opportunity that's created by people retiring. Demand for annuities, retirement products, pension products is going to accelerate. It's been accelerating.
It will continue to accelerate in the next few years, and we'll show a chart about that in a minute. We believe we have a leading distribution partner in Advisors Excel and IDG, and we are looking to develop more of those. IDG has a long history with CC Capital, our partner, IDG and AE, and we're happy to be working with them. We believe our technology is a differentiator in several ways. First of all is operations. You'll see in the video that we have cut policy processing time significantly, and we've also been able, we believe, to increase customer service by the use of technology, and we think that over time we're going to have a significant cost advantage. Arena has deep investment capability, and they're insurance-specific, and my team and Arena and Dan's team at Arena spend a lot of time together.
We're excited about the possibilities of investing with Arena. Finally, we have a strong balance sheet and a risk culture. The people on our team have all come from large companies where they have been steeped in risk management, and obviously Westaim is as well, and we look forward to continuing that risk-focused culture. Here is the team. We have, in addition to me, Carrie Marlatt is in the back of the room. Carrie is our CFO. She is one of the people with significant insurance experience, both in investment banking and actually in the finance organization of several large insurance companies. We have Erik Askelsen, our Chief Legal Officer, who again has 25 years of legal experience, has worked with several large annuity companies. June Guan, our Chief Actuary, again, more than 20 years experience with three large insurance companies and so on through our team.
On the right, we have our CC Capital and Westaim partners. I will just point out Peggy Huang, our Chief Investment Officer, who just started with CC Capital two weeks ago and is already making a lot of difference with us. This is the annuities market, and this is one of the things that convinced us that now is a good time for us to be doing this. The yellow line is the growth of people who are age 65, so each stop on the line in a year is 65-year-olds, and you will see that from 2024 to 2035, the next 10 years, the number of people turning age 65 is going to increase. The bars, the stack bars, are basically annuity sales, and you can see that annuity sales have largely tracked the population of people turning age 65.
This is what makes us believe that there is still significant opportunity in the annuity marketplace, even though, as you'll see, the last few years have had increasing sales. This is just a little bit about Advisors Excel and IDG, our IMO partners. Together, Advisors Excel and IDG, who are two related companies, are the largest seller of annuities in the IMO channel. Again, we have been working very closely with them as we have developed our model. We will expand beyond IDG and AE into other IMO and non-IMO partners. On the left, you have the entire annuities channel. The black space is the IMO channel where we're playing now, and the blue space is the non-IMO channel, which, as you can see, is a big opportunity. Banks and broker-dealers are probably the two biggest opportunities there.
We are thinking about additional IMOs, banks, broker-dealers, registered investment advisors, and potentially, opportunistically, reinsurance, including both blocks and flow. Again, this is over a much longer term. A little bit more about our technology and our differentiated value proposition in technology. As I said earlier, we have no legacy constraints, no legacy systems. Designing a system, we started a year ago, and things have changed even in the last year. I was going to say today, but it is very dynamic in terms of what can be achieved. It is very exciting. One of the most interesting things I think about the technology we have built is it is very scalable, and we will talk some numbers about that later. We have a single source of truth when it comes to data.
We have one database that holds every single piece of data that comes into our system, and with that, we can do all kinds of, provide all kinds of interesting insights to our distributors, use those insights ourselves, and also provide really differentiated customer service. We have been using AI. You'll see some examples in our video of things where AI has helped us to automate and reduce a lot of manual processes, although we still have people manually checking things as they come out of the system. We wouldn't necessarily have to have that, but we do. Operational efficiencies, you'll hear some more about that in the video. The processors who are doing the work talk about what they're experiencing versus what they did in their previous jobs with legacy systems. A sometimes overlooked fact, we feel that we have better cyber defense being 100% in the cloud.
Being a serverless company dramatically reduced cyber risk. I would never say you can eliminate cyber risk, and nobody does that, but not having to worry about servers makes it simpler. We have built enterprise-grade security into the system. Of course, we continue to get better all the time. Cyber is one of those things where I do not think anybody can stand there and say it is perfect because we know that in the real world that is not true, but we are very, very cyber-conscious, cyber-risk-conscious. Now I am going to just play a little video where you can meet some of the people who work for Ceres, and they will talk about how they do their business every day. This is the 10th floor of this building you are looking at in Shelton, Connecticut, which is our operational headquarters.
We started Ceres literally from scratch, and we are unencumbered by legacy technology or by the old bureaucratic way of doing things. We want to use our technology to make insurance faster, simpler, more transparent, and use our partnership with Arena Investors to provide outstanding quality and risk management to our end customers.
There's a demographic shift underway. In fact, someone told me that 10,000 or 11,000 people turn 65 every day, many of whom do not have a really good plan for retirement or a way of thinking about it.
The problem that you see in a normal place is everybody dreams what is possible, but at the end of the day, you are never actually able to execute it. With a new system, something built up from scratch, not only is the art of the possible on the table, it is expected. If we give a legacy answer, "Oh, we are going to do something with email," we are very commonly told, "What is wrong with you? Do it correctly. Do it faster. Do it better. Do it stronger." You know, and that is incredibly attractive for technologists to work in.
Now, with all the technology and frankly, all the AI that can help us really parse huge amounts of data accurately and quickly, that way we have a better chance of getting the right solution to both our advisors and our end clients.
Because it's got a platform built from scratch, it's going to be able to react to the market and even push the market to new places. It's taking the insurance industry and saying, "Come along with the rest of the world.
In a legacy contact center, what you would typically see is it would not even just be one screen. We have six to seven functionalities all rolled together into this cloud-based program that we get to use every day. It would be multiple programs that we would need to use in order to operate the contact center from day to day.
Configuring our CRM with our knowledge management articles, utilizing AI to pull the articles for us, will be cutting our research time on the phone, via chat, via email, or SMS by two-thirds, which is huge in comparison.
In the annuity industry, there's what's called 1035 exchanges or transfers, and that's where you take an annuity from another carrier and you bring it to your company, and the customer fills out a form for that. Most legacy companies have whole teams. We don't have anybody doing that. We've automated that process completely where the packet is generated when the application comes in. Huge time savings.
We want to take an old idea, annuities, and give it a new spin with technology, customer service, and unbureaucratic, dare I say, fun approach to doing business.
That gives you a little flavor of what the system looks like. It was a little more easy to see, but our Chief Cyber Officer made us blur a lot of it at the last minute because he was worried about us showing too much of the system in person. I think you can sense in the video the excitement that people have about working on something new and serving customers in a new way. The people who work in the ops and customer service center you saw there at the end have significant experience with other systems, and they've actually had input in designing the one we have now.
Thinking about scaling the system, which is, I know, a question a lot of you have, this is a somewhat complicated chart, but if you look at the left, which is now, we are somewhere in the range of $30 million-$40 million a year in operating expenses, which is what we planned a little over a year ago when we were thinking about doing this. The black line that extends to the right on the chart from the $30 million-$40 million is our sort of best guess on how our operating expenses will scale as we hit, let's say, $10 billion or $20 billion in assets under management.
On the far right, you have a representation of legacy carriers of $50 billion of assets under management, and we did some research on what their costs are, their OpEx costs as basis points of assets, and we think it is about 50-90 basis points. Obviously, we cannot sit here and tell you what our expense levels are going to be at $10 billion of assets, but you did see in the video that the people who work in the ops center are saying things like, "This takes 50%-60% less time than what we were spending with legacy systems." We have other things that we can continue to work on in terms of continuing to reduce costs, continuing to automate, and that is our plan for the future.
Our technology and operations people are signed up to continuing to try to keep a very low run rate of expenses. This is our timeline. I guess in February and March of 2024, we started talking about doing this. Again, started with a piece of paper and a conversation, led to the acquisition of the ManhattanLife shell company, which is now Ceres Life, in February of 2025. That shell came with a handful of Medicare supplement policies that have been reinsured out and nothing else. In the last two weeks, as I said, we have been doing a soft launch in terms of writing employee policies. We are waiting for a significant number of states to come on board. We are achieving our name change and our state licenses state by state in the U.S. We have over 20 states right now.
Once we hit the high 30s to low 40s, we will probably do a more fulsome launch. It has been just over a year since the conversation with a piece of paper to where we are today. Thank you for your attention, and I am now going to introduce my colleague, Dan Zwirn, who is the CEO of Arena Investors.
Thanks very much, Deanna, and thank you all for coming today. We really are excited about being a part of creating this integrated alternative asset manager and fixed annuity player. From my perspective, we've been looking at this area and been involved in partnerships that anticipated this going back over 20 years, and to have a chance to be involved in it and create what this is going to become is exciting for me and my colleagues at Arena. Today, we're going to just walk through an introduction and reintroduction of Arena AIGH, which includes the entirety of our business, and we're going to talk about the way it's going to evolve as we approach this new integrated environment. We're going to talk about the macro environment and how it does or doesn't impact what we do and how it creates opportunities for us over time.
I think we're very excited about what the next decade or more will bring. We're going to speak about AI itself, our investment manager, our RIA, and the ways that we're encountering and positioning for this new kind of integrated set of capabilities. Fourth, we're going to talk about the way we form capital and the way we're planning to do so, leveraging the benefits from the involvement with Ceres. First, to talk about Arena Investors Group Holdings. That's a combination of Arena Investors, our asset manager, and Arena Institutional Services. These two always complement each other. We originally created AIS because we found opportunities to basically leverage our intellectual property across more than just our own assets. AI and AIS continually help each other and create more value.
We believe over time we're going to be able to achieve material scale in AI without sacrificing investment integrity, without becoming a source of branded beta. We think we're going to be able to capture operating leverage over time as we build out the capital for which we manage, as well as add to our service revenue from leveraging the intellectual property that we've aggregated. This will lead to us and our ability to create consistent and growing profitability over time. When we talk about AI, we want to focus on the fact that we have this incredible machine, so to speak. To remind some of those who've been following us for a while, ultimately, this was built on three main precepts. One was everything that one does within assets and yield in investing is cyclical.
We'd like to think that just private credit or just real estate credit or just this or just that are wonderful all the time, but the reality is we cycle back and forth, and having flexibility and creativity not only to pursue what does make sense, but avoid what doesn't is key for us. The second is proprietary sourcing infrastructure to go out and, while not taking on board the moral hazard attendant with the proverbial hammers that might see nails, create variable, cost-efficient, very aligned investment partnerships that allow us to get at the good stuff and avoid the bad stuff.
Third, to leverage a very extensive internal operational infrastructure that allows us to surveil and really proactively work and service our assets all the way up through workout, which inevitably occurs and is a part of doing what we do, as well as operationally improving our corporate property and structure finance assets in order to optimize value over time. This differentiated approach really sets us up to capture this opportunity. Up till now, we've been able to look and boil the ocean for any permutation, as we say, of industry, product, and geography, but not every cost of capital. There is a tremendous benefit from being able to provide financing and provide capital up and down the cost of capital spectrum. I think we've had questions where people say, "Well, you've done these kind of idiosyncratic alternative things.
What about the investment grade?" as if it is a kind of completely foreign and different thing. The opportunity set here is the integration of those two. If we are at 25-year tights in corporate IG, if we are going to go raise great annuity assets and just plow them into pure IG secondary market investments, the ROE will be challenged. The only way this industry moves now is through the creative leveraging of flexible sourcing infrastructure in order to find differentiated investment-grade applicable investments that systematically come at a premium to what otherwise can be found in the secondary markets for corporate and structure products IG. Talk a little bit about the environment. Since late 2021, one of the most employed investment strategies that we see out there is hope. It is not one that we have ever chosen to pursue.
is inevitably this notion, "Well, rates will save us." The reality was that we had really profligate monetary policy starting in the early 2010s, and it peaked in late 2021 when what was effectively the greatest asset bubble that has ever been was popped by some of the most profligate fiscal policy that we have had since World War II, and that has continued. From our perspective, what does that mean? Ultimately, it means that over time, we would expect to plan for and benefit from the continued combination of elevated rates and inflation. It does not really matter what party. The reality is capital is going to cost more, and the fiat is going to be worth less. How do we navigate that environment, take advantage of that environment?
We were fortunate even leading up to that bubble to have put in the work, the elbow grease per dollar deployed up till late 2021, not to expose ourself to a lot of those assets that are now crashing down. People frequently ask, "Why is there such a craze to do X, Y, and Z in private credit or otherwise? Why is it so compelling?" Sometimes it is. The reality is that there has never been more latency in the recognition of value diminution in private assets than there is today. Things have gone pretty swimmingly since late 2009, and the mechanisms by which people kind of delay the realization of value destruction have never been more innovative and creative.
The reality is over time, as we've seen initially in the growth area and then in funds and then in the GP-LP space more broadly, then commercial real estate, then corporate, and then structured, slowly but surely, as Buffett says and Graham says, the market is a weighing machine, not a voting machine. Water will always find its level. Value will always come through. It may take a while. It may pop out almost like pressing on a balloon. You do not mark private assets in one way. Suddenly, the LPs might start selling those units anyway at a discount. One way or another, value shows itself. With that in mind, we think about this notion of a barbell. There are places where this value diminution has already been exposed, and we want to run at that.
That is typically going to be opportunities for us more on the opportunistic side in our alternative space, whether that is idiosyncratic, more esoteric lending, whether that is going after busted real estate credit in Southern Europe, or the emerging enormous busted real estate opportunity that is coming in North America, or really going after what we see within the funds universe generally as legacy GPs start to think about how to optimize their assets, and there suddenly becomes a misalignment of interest between themselves and their LPs. On the left side of the barbell, there is a lot of opportunity out there because a lot of the competition in some of these areas that peaked in late 2021 receded. That is really where the kind of meat of the opportunity comes as we think about what we now call Arena Life & Annuity Solutions, ALAS, as we manage capital for insurers.
As an example, in lower middle market and non-sponsored cash flow lending, whether you're securitizing there or not, or whether you're lending to people who do it in structured solutions. In CRE lending, whether that is in transitional mortgages, three-year to five-year kind of funky or floating things, net lease, whether we're doing that in North America or significant countries in Western Europe and potentially Australia, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. Mostly in what is now with a defined three-letter term called ABF, asset-based finance, which we've been doing since before it was called asset-based finance going back 25 years. These are all the things that banks were supposed to do before we all realized that all of their assets and liabilities were technologically disrupted because demand deposits do not stick like they used to.
That means factoring and asset-based lending and equipment leasing and various forms of litigation finance, an endless assortment of different types of assets. Ultimately, what we're going to see over the next decade is everything that can be securitized will be securitized, not because people are prohibited and not because you're talking about taking equity risk and somehow manufacturing a debt coupon, but quite the opposite, because appropriate risk return has been systematically underappreciated within the kind of rated markets. There are great opportunities to exploit on behalf of Ceres policyholders for us. In AI, think about this as a big filter, almost like a woodchipper in some ways if you think about it.
Incomes, all the different assets leveraging our 50+ joint venture platforms all around the world, as well as now various folks that we can leverage on Wall Street in a way that we hadn't before. Through that comes really five general forms of collateral, very generically corporate, property, structured, and securities. And then we slice and dice, boil the ocean as it were to find optimized return of risk, and it finds a place.
Some of that stuff can find a place in multiple of our balance sheets across multi-strategy, excess capacity where we think there are more idiosyncratic high return opportunities that are bigger in total than what we can do within our multi-strat business, in stable income, in specific strategies that are lower octane but still great return of risk that can work for both insurers and non-insurers, and ultimately within ALAS where we can really optimize across whole balance sheets of insurers, really finding where both the absolute and the relative alpha is out there. That means across the spectrum, collateral is collateral, whether it is wrapped up in a loan, in a thing called an equity, in securities of all kinds, in LP instruments. Collateral is collateral. Value is value. We are always constantly comparing across all those areas and across the liquidity spectrum.
As Deanna mentioned, with the new staff that she's brought online, we have a really nuanced sense of what makes the most sense given the optimized return per unit of risk we're able to provide from a duration perspective, from a balance of liquidity that is necessary in order to best serve Ceres policyholders. Again, going back to that question, how are you going to do this IG stuff? It has applications in every one of our business units. We did bring in a 25-year plus Barron's- rated MD for corporate fixed income IG, who's been a great addition to the team as we've thought through the kind of mix of assets we want to deliver and complements one of our MDs who's going to manage our structured products business as well.
As you'll see, across securities and corporate and resources and infrastructure and real estate and all kinds of structured finance and our SLS and foreign businesses, there are applications here. You never know where the good stuff is. We think about it as kind of sending traps out into the water. We never know what traps are going to get filled when we pull them all back in. We can never assume anything other than looking at everything and saying, "Where's the best return per unit of risk per unit of duration, per unit of complexity that we can find for our investors?" There are a lot of things to choose from. We have experience over now two and a half, almost three decades across all this stuff.
We have been now, some of these asset types have cycled in and cycled out three plus times since I began doing them. There are always people who are the inevitable kind of hammers that only see nails at the top who love to do a certain thing, and they keep on doing it until it is over. Historically, we see, as an example, in Canada, Confed Life and others who said, "I have got to do a certain group of things, and that is what I am good at, so I will just keep doing it until it makes no sense whatsoever." That is not where we are going to be. We are going to compare across all of these products and say, "Where is the good stuff?" Because there are always some of them that are excellent. There are always some that are getting overheated, and we are going to be constantly comparing across.
We've done nearly 500, actually over 500 transactions in the last decade, one a week. That's a lot of originating. That's probably boiled from something like, oh, probably something close to several tens of thousands of possibilities across all of our teams and all of our joint ventures all around the world as we've boiled the ocean to find where the best stuff is. That leads directly to the opportunities that we're going to be leveraging as we deploy insurance assets. Again, reminding you of the joint ventures. These are pockets of idiosyncratic sourcing, analytical, or servicing capabilities, about 40% of which are directly applicable or directly adjacent and can source things related to IG Credit for us. We're very excited about leveraging them as they are to be leveraged. Again, the filter.
This is on the alternative side, but the same thing, as I said, goes for how we look at everything now. All of our teams are geared across the entire term structure of duration and capital cost to find where the best stuff is. On the AUM side, we talked about the four balance sheets, multi-strategy, ECF, stable income, and ALAS. We have a lot of work to do in forming capital. There are real innovations that are going to be happening here. Our multi-strategy business with the new assets, with Ceres giving us up to another $6 billion to get to $10 billion, the kind of relationships we can have with large-scale institutions on the multi-strategy side are really opened up for us, and we are excited to kind of pursue those.
In excess capacity, there's going to be a tremendous number of ways, not just through conventional investors, but actually through rated feeder structures in the securitization markets for us to form capital, leveraging the capabilities that we have on the origination side. On the stable income side, there are a lot of things that the investors want, and many different types of investors. There are insurers who want what I would call modified income plus type products that are very optimally able to be balance sheeted for insurers with a minimum of use of capital. There are more high net worth and retail investors who are saying, "Well, we like this private credit thing," the vast majority of which has come thus far in the form of BDCs and REITs. What is there in various forms of yield that leverage our capabilities in ABF?
What are the opportunities we have within real estate, both in that market as well as for our insurers on a product-specific basis? Finally, as I said, with ALAS, I think when I think about the Ceres opportunity, it's not just, "Well, let's just go directly originate assets." That's a great thing. Given the M&A and Fidelity Guaranty Life experience of our partners at CC, there are reinsurance opportunities. There are hybrid reinsurance and third-party asset management opportunities out there. There are a lot of sub-$10 billion legacy insurers that I think not only need help but want help, whether that is in optimizing asset management, forward flow, other kind of capital partnerships, or all the technological benefits that some people like Deanna and her team can deliver. As you see here, we just raised our third multi-strategy.
This is key not just for our alternatives business, but also in feeding ECFs and feeding stable income, and ultimately in providing opportunities that are highly complementary for the production of IG assets for our insurance customers. We have talked about the build of assets. We are going to be pursuing these across the board. There is a lot to do on the capital formation side. I think over the coming quarters, you are going to see us not only adding staff, but also various forms of agents and leverage through the securitization markets and retail distribution to aggregate capital. Finally, I wanted to introduce our new colleague, Chinh Chu, who is the Executive Chairman of Westaim now, as well as the founder of CC Capital. Thank you.
Thank you, Dan. First of all, thank you to all of the shareholders who are supporting us and who have supported the company to this stage. We are truly, truly excited about this transformation of Westaim. I would also like to thank Ian and Cam for being terrific stewards and leaders of the company. Thank you for selecting us partners in this journey. The journey here is to transform Westaim into Westaim 2.0, or Cam, you may say 3.0, into an integrated insurance and asset management company to create significant value for shareholders. It starts with a vision. It then goes on to strategy, and then it relies on execution. The vision is as described. We wanted to transform the company into an integrated insurance and asset management company. The strategy is important. The strategy starts and stops with people.
We're very proud of the team that has joined and will be joining Westaim, Arena, and Ceres. As you can see, Deanna Mulligan is a world-class insurance executive. She's a little bit of a unicorn, as we say, in that she has managed a very large insurance company, $85 billion at Guardian. She also has a unique tech focus, a unique vision for technology that aligns with us. We are creating something from a strategy standpoint that is absolutely unique. I'll get to that in a minute. Deanna has described it. We're also infusing the company with other executives such as Matt Skurbe, the former treasurer of Blackstone. If you think of Blackstone being a $150 billion + company and the number two person in the finance department, now a CFO of your company, that's a real coup.
We are very excited about what Matt's building. I'm not going to mention every executive here, but you can see from the boxes, each one of the boxes we have recruited, and we have, we think, world-class executive, especially for the size company we started. The strategy, I think, starts and stops with people. The next thing on the strategy is that how do you create competitive advantages that are sustainable both on the insurance side and on the asset management side? On the insurance side, Deanna has outlined the vision and what she's building on technology. This is world-class technology. Of the 500+ annuities company, I know of only one or two other that has anything close to what we have today. This is serverless. This is all based on the cloud. It provides incredible efficiency.
More than just efficiency, it really provides data for Deanna and her team to manage the business. It provides a direct link to our distributors, which is very important. It provides ease of use for the policyholders. Ultimately, it all ends up either in more profitability or you can use that advantage to offer better products. We are ultimately very focused on the policyholders, and it becomes a flywheel effect within our insurance company. It goes on to Dan's business, Arena, where instead of being an asset manager with a terrific track record, you now have permanent capital. The capital that comes from Ceres is long-term permanent capital for Dan's business, Arena, that becomes a flywheel effect because of the increased assets under management. You can recruit better executives. You can have better decision-making. You can have more infrastructure. Once again, you can generate superior returns.
That is especially buttressed by CC Capital. We obviously have a lot of experience in asset management. We obviously can bring a lot of resources to bear. This flywheel effect of Ceres and Arena and the competitive advantages that we are building and we have built and will build is very important. It starts with a vision. It then goes to strategy. I can go on to 10 other elements of strategy. The two key things today are people and sustainable competitive advantages. On the execution front, we are early days, obviously. We just closed the deal. We think that the execution has been terrific. The first policy has been issued in Ceres. This is not a vision or a dream anymore. We have the technology. It has been built and policies have been issued.
For Dan's business, in addition to the insurance capital, which will come in the second quarter of 2025, the Arena business has attained $500 million of additional outside capital. The AUM will continue to grow both internally through the flywheel effect and externally as well. You will see as we go along, the execution will become clear. We are very proud of the fact that the technology works. Policies have been issued. The executive has been hired, and we are starting to grow the AUM for Arena. Once again, the flywheel effect. All this means that it results in building value for you, the shareholders. We are also shareholders, so we are completely aligned. The one thing I just want to mention again is that at CC Capital, we view this as an integrated platform. This is not a portfolio company. This is an extension of CC Capital.
We have seconded our CFO, Matt. He's left CC Capital to become CFO of Arena and Westaim. We have a number of our executives, Doug and Rich, who spend more than half the time on this transaction. In the back of the room, we have a lot of our former employees at CC Capital that have gone over to Westaim. This is a very integrated approach. This is not a portfolio company. We're not looking at this for a two-year to three-year private equity investment. We're looking at this as a very long-term strategic hold for us. My background, as you may know, is I have a 25-year career at Blackstone before CC Capital, where I was Co-Head of Private Equity and on the firm's executive committee.
Part of what I did was try to figure out the permanent capital solutions and how to build businesses. We are very, very excited about this vision: integrated insurance company and asset manager. Strategy: having the best people and having competitive advantages that we'll create. Execution: we're starting, and it's a long way, but we're very, very excited about this. Thank you.
All right. Good morning, everybody. First, I just want to start by thanking everybody for taking the time this morning to get to know this next version of Westaim. As you can hear from the discussion this morning, we're all very excited about the opportunity ahead of us. Maybe if we can just advance the slides to the next set of Westaim slides. You have heard both Cam and Chinh talk about the flywheel effect. I think they did a good job of explaining that. What I really want to focus on on this slide is the cohesiveness of this team. You heard from Cam and the three different versions of Westaim that many of you have seen in the development of Westaim as a company.
This version of Westaim, as Cam has described it to me, is by far the best opportunity that he has seen in his time here to generate value for shareholders. We are very excited to get going on that opportunity. You heard from Deanna and the expertise that she brings on life insurance and annuities platforms, the very unique experience and expertise that she has, and the very differentiated strategy that we have around Ceres Life. That is all very exciting to us. You heard from Dan and how his Arena team is now pivoting their strategies to meet this moment and really focus on partnering with Deanna and Cam and I on developing a truly cohesive strategy here. Finally, you heard from Chinh and the expertise that he and the CC Capital team are bringing to this opportunity.
This is a playbook that they are very familiar with. They have a lot of expertise in developing platforms like this. They are fully engaged on building out this opportunity. Most importantly, I get to live this every day. It is really an honor and a pleasure for me. This team is fully aligned. Everybody is rowing in the same direction. The operation is truly integrated. Our offices are all kind of on the same block in New York City now. I can tell you on a daily basis, I am in meetings on the Ceres side, on the Arena side, on the Westaim side. We are all working as one cohesive team and really aligned around three key pillars of success. The first is making sure that we meet the needs of the policyholders.
We want to make sure that we're delivering them the safe and dependable annuity products that they need to meet their retirement goals. That is always part of our focus. We then want to make sure that we're focusing on the experience of our distribution partners. Again, we are developing a very differentiated product that's going to make it easier for them to do their jobs. We are really focused on solving the problems that they encounter every day dealing with some of the legacy process that exists in the marketplace today. Finally, we are laser-focused on maximizing value for our shareholders, making sure that we have an aligned strategy that, again, everybody is rowing in the same direction, that we're focusing on driving towards profitability, scale, and ultimately good returns, safe, stable returns for our investors. Moving to the next slide. I'm new to Westaim.
Cam and the continuing board members have been here for a while. Since 2009 and through the first two versions of Westaim, Cam and team have generated nearly 12 times the value that existed in the stock when they started. That equates to a CAGR in excess of 16%. As you can see by the chart, that outpaces both TSX returns as well as S&P 500 returns. As Cam has stated to me, this opportunity that we have at Westaim today, in his view, is the best opportunity that he has seen at Westaim. We really believe that the best is yet to come. We are very excited to get to work on that. Moving to the next slide. This one is where I get to be the boring finance guy and show you the balance sheet. This is a fairly stale balance sheet.
I'm going to do my best to roll it forward for you a little bit. A lot of this, pretty much all of this was included in our latest quarterly report. You can see, as of March 31st, we had a little over $500 million of total liabilities, shareholders' equity. Since this date, we closed the strategic transaction. That has added over $200 million of cash to our balance sheet. We've also received in proceeds from our Arena FINCOs and our monetization strategy on Arena FINCOs of over $14 million. We continue to be very focused on generating liquidity within that portfolio to provide the capital that we are going to use to put down into the insurance strategy.
We have also now invested $350 million down into Salem Group Partners, which is ultimately the parent holding structure of Ceres Life, to capitalize that business and continue funding its operations. We are poised and ready to go at this point. We have the capital that we need to build out the strategy. We pretty much have all the tools in place. We have made all the major investments that we need to make to get this platform operational. At this point, it is game time. We are all ready to go. We are excited to get out on the field and compete and bring home a win for our shareholders. With that, I am going to turn it back to Cam.
Thank you, Matt. We hope today's presentation has deepened everyone's understanding of Westaim's 3.0 transformation. Alongside a favorable environment, you've heard we've assembled a highly experienced and fully aligned management team to execute our stated goals and objectives. In CC, we truly have partnered with a transformational partner. Importantly, they are highly involved in all aspects of the business plan discussed with you today. In Ceres, Deanna walked you through how Ceres' cloud-native tech platform will create operational advantages. With the Advisors Excel partnership, their path to significant revenue growth is clear. Arena is ready, well-positioned with insurance expertise to manage significant material AUM. This growth will provide profitable operating leverage to this business. Lastly, the new Westaim. We are an integrated operating company focused on insurance and asset management.
Lastly, to fully underscore this material transaction and transformation, we will be announcing a new name and rebrand shortly. Please stay tuned for that. Again, thank you so much for your support. This concludes our formal part of the presentation, and we welcome your questions. Thank you. I'm going to start with the first one that someone's going to ask, which is about the SIB. In our October press release, we talked about the potential of issuing a significant shareholder issuer bid for up to $100 million. At the time, we guided that the ceiling that we would pay for that on a post-split adjusted basis was $3,150. Interestingly, we heard from a number of our shareholders who advocated that, "Why go through the expense?
On the unlikely event you're going to be able to buy much shares or many shares, so take the capital and invest it in the business. Through this period, we've been active in the NCIB, and we shared with you that year to date we have been able to acquire only 136,000 shares. Our current view is that we will continue with the SIB, but we're not going to incur the time or the expense with the current share price in excess of our contemplated level that we would anticipate even buying the shares. Is there anything else that I can address? Yes, sir.
Hi. [In IP] Developments. Congratulations. Great transaction.
Thank you.
I have a question for Deanna. You mentioned $30 million-$40 million in operating expenses. What level of sort of AUM do you need to get to to be breakeven? And roughly, when would you expect that?
Yes. Thank you for the question about $30 million - $40 million of operating expenses, which is our expense level right now, and then what we might need to break even. That depends on a lot of things: when we start, how many distribution partners we have, how many additional products we bring on, whether or not we do any reinsurance. I think you could think about it this way. We are in largely a spread business. The spread is about 200 basis points over the long term. We anticipate that our $30 million - $40 million—call it $40 million OpEx expense level—will take us several years. You saw the chart where we extended out that we believe our OpEx expenses will grow fairly slowly. That can give you some idea.
Yes, sir. At the back of the room.
Yes. I'm just wondering, with all—I didn't hear everything, but with all that's going on, will this dilute Westaim's shares?
Does this dilute Westaim's shares?
Yes.
No. I take the view that given the transaction we did and the value being created, we were creating immense value right out of the gate, being with the leadership of Deanna and Ceres, with the addition of CC and their capital. The path that we put forward to you today and the value that everyone has acquired their shares, we look at it as being accretive. I go back to the exercise that we talked about at last year's AGM. We considered all avenues to harvest the best value for stakeholders. That included a go-private special dividend buyback. By far, the board came to the unanimous conclusion that the transaction with CC was unique and would create a lot of value for all stakeholders involved.
Maybe I should have said, "Will you be issuing any new shares because of all that's going on?
Oh. Why don't I turn that to Chinh?
If you look at the cash on the company's balance sheet today relative to the market cap, it's approximately the same amount. What you're getting today as an investor is the people here, is the vision and the strategy and the execution for free on top of that. We think the stock is significantly undervalued. I think that's point number one. Point number two is today we have a lot of cash that we can use to execute our business plan. We do not need to issue additional shares today. In the future, as we grow our business, whether we need more capital for Deanna's business or we are using the additional cash for reinsurance or for M&A transactions, we will consider issuing more shares, but not immediately.
Thank you.
Obviously, we are shareholders as well. We want to do things in a very value-accretive way. We think of both the short term and the long term when we think about that because every time we issue shares, we are diluting everybody. The value creation associated with the new capital needs to be compelling.
David.
How are you thinking about a U.S. listing? What sort of metrics do you think you would have to get to make that appropriate? How are you thinking about it?
Yeah. It is certainly top of mind. It is clear for all purposes we are a U.S. company. We have now, as everyone is well aware, at the last year, December 31st, we moved to Delaware. Canadian assets-wise, we are really down to myself and an office space that matures in November. For all purposes, we are going to look to the U.S. market. It is going to take time to prepare. We recognize not only our shareholders are now in excess. Canadian shareholders post the CC Capital transaction are approximately 30%. The interests, the relationships, all aspects, you should expect that we will be migrating to either the NYSE or NASDAQ in the period of time when we are ready and compliant.
Greg Dean.
Just a question on LP feedback. Arena LP feedback. Now that this transaction is sort of done.
The question was, have any of our LPs provided us feedback on the transaction? I think the answer is uniformly positive. I think they understand that it gives us access to a level of resources that'll put us in a position to be that much better for them. Not only in terms of the funds we have already, but also in terms of being able to offer them other and complementary products.
Two of the largest outside LPs for Arena are, interestingly, firms that we know really well and we have a deep relationship with as well. I think that's all positive and enhancing.
I think of these guideposts this year on accelerating that third-party fundraising. I know Fund 3 closed recently. It seems like there was a co-investment component to that fundraiser that was captured in the fund size.
Yeah. As I said, I do not know. We are retooling and adding to our resources. Fundraising in the conventional sense of the kind of historic alternatives business is pretty narrow. There are now opportunities we are working on with our CC partners and outside agents that we can leverage that touch a lot more folks than we had before. It is not just, "Here is an institutional fund." There are much easier-to-scale applications of the investments we make already that both insurers and high-net-worth and retail-oriented investors want. As I mentioned, I think we are seeing as structured products investors on the insurance side, we are seeing people create entire yield-oriented funds solely from insurance investors. Meaning the insurance investors are doing what are called vertical slices. They are taking the senior, the middle sections, and the equity of what otherwise would have been purely a fundraising exercise.
I think we are going to—the kind of things that we do will provide absolute relative alpha that are very interesting to our peers in that space. There is a lot to do, but it takes time to get it all going. We are certainly well down that runway, and that will be a big part of the next 18 months for us.
I have two questions on the insurance side. The first is just historically, why have banks become less relevant as a distribution partner? That is the first question. The second question is, how high of a lift is it to raise $6 billion in premium? Is that a multi-year thing? I think we are just trying to think about how long it might take to get a respectable return on equity.
I think the first question, if I heard that correctly, is why are banks less of a factor in distribution?
Yeah. It's in your deck from—it's on the website in your investor relations.
I would not say that banks are less of a factor in distribution. At some point in the future, we may choose to use bank distribution. Our history is very short. So we do not have a history with banks. We have our IMO partner as our first distribution partner, and we will think about broadening distribution from there. Secondly, how long does it take to get to $6 billion? Is that $6 billion in AUM or $6 billion in sales?
Premium.
$6 billion in premium.
Cumulative premium. It's going to take a while. It's going to take a while. Again, I'm going back to what I said before. It kind of depends on how quickly we add other distribution systems, how quickly we grow within AE, how many additional annuity products we add, whether or not we decide to take on any reinsurance. It's not going to be this year. That's for sure.
I think the bank being a distribution source, I think that sentence should say is not a big factor today. I think in two years- three years, it could be very different as we grow. I think the most efficient way for us to grow today, distribution-wise, is through the IMO channel. I think they're the qualifier at the end here. We're not providing guidances, but typically, you want to start out with distribution in IMO, then you go to banks. It's not atypical to think about a $1 billion first-year distribution in terms of volume.
Isaac.
In terms of returns for the products you guys are targeting today, where do you think the industry sits, I guess, on FIA and the MIGA products? How do you think you'd be able to perform relative and why?
The question is, how does the industry sit on returns with the FIA and MIGA product, and how do we think we'll be able to perform relatively? The industry is about mid-teens IRR with MIGA and FIA. It depends on the FIA if you offer an income rider and whether or not it's reinsured. We will offer a FIA probably in this year or early next year. Right now, we're just offering a MIGA, and we fully expect that our IRRs are going to be similar to industry IRRs.
Okay. Again, thank you very much for attending and your interest. We look forward to communicating with you often. All of us are available for refreshments and conversation if you have a chance to stay and do so. Again, thank you very much.