All right. Good morning, everyone. I've already introduced myself a few times, so I'll do it one more time. Ryan Krueger from KBW, cover the life insurance sector. Pleased to have CNO Financial up here. Gary Bhojwani is the CEO and will be joining me on stage, and then also just wanna acknowledge, Paul McDonough, the CFO, is in the crowd, as well as Adam Auvil, Head of Investor Relations. But, you know, to start out, you held an Investor Day in New York about 18 months ago. Can you review the key messages that you gave at that Investor Day, and also what the company's progress has been since then?
Yeah. So first of all, thanks for having us, and thanks for pointing out I've got my two lifelines here, so if I get stuck. In terms of the Investor Day we had about 18 months ago, really the main reason we held that was we wanted to communicate to the market that we had reached a different point in our evolution. That we were really migrating to become more of a growth story. Prior to that, we had gone through a number of different things to kinda fix and focus the company, and we really wanted to signal that we were moving into a stage we should now be looked at as a growth story, and maybe just to jump ahead a little bit to the question you asked, and you know, how have we done?
I think the last eight quarters in particular have demonstrated that we've delivered against that thesis. But, but the other key message is, we think that we have a very different value proposition and a very different approach to the market, than many other folks in the space. And there are a handful of things that we believe, give us that distinction. First, we focus almost exclusively on the middle market. Our average consumer has a net worth far below $100,000, so that right there makes us, I think, very unique. Second, we have a mix, of business. We have two primary businesses, our consumer business and our worksite business, that are very different, but also serve, to diversify the company's, exposure and growth capabilities. Third, the product mix.
We have a mix of life products, like many other folks, life insurance, annuities, and so on. But we also manufacture and sell Medicare products, so that makes us very different in terms of how we access a household and then how we can build upon that, and then finally, our distribution capabilities. As I mentioned, we're broken up between consumer and worksite. Consumer represents about 80% of the company, and most of that business comes through a captive distribution channel. We have about 5,000 agents that sell only our products, so a very significant captive distribution. That doesn't make us so unique, but what does make us unique is the way we're structured, where we take our direct-to-consumer business, specifically Colonial Penn, we've been in that business for 60 years, and cons...
The direct-to-consumer business and the captive agents, they work harmoniously. Literally, roughly one-third of life insurance sales made last year by our captive agents emanated from leads that came out of our direct-to-consumer business. So these two businesses that in most organizations compete, the agents typically compete with the direct-to-consumer business. In our setup, they actually work together and feed one another. So those were the stories that we talked about at that Investor Day. And I've been very pleased with the numbers our teams have been able to put up since then.
Great. So in the consumer division, you mentioned the 5,000 captive agents. You've seen a pretty good rebound in the growth of the agent count over the last, you know, really since probably the beginning of 2023 . What has driven that rebound in... And also, I think a common question I get sometimes is just how sensitive is recruiting, you know, to, like, the overall economic environment?
Yeah, so I'll, I'll take that second question first. Our agents work on 100% commission, so they don't make a salary, and because of that, conventional wisdom says that when unemployment goes up, more people are willing to try a commission-only job, so conventional wisdom has held that when unemployment goes up, it's easier to recruit agents, and I think that continues to be true, but I would make one observation that's, that's a bit different for us, and I believe a reason why a rise in unemployment won't impact us the same way it has in the past, and that is that, very simply, it's not that we've stopped recruiting agents. The nature of our business is we always need to be recruiting. That will always be true.
But over the last five or six years, we've really de-emphasized recruiting and instead emphasized or prioritized productivity and retention of the agents. So we're recruiting fewer agents by design, but we've put in place support structures and other things to increase the likelihood that they stay with us and that they make a good living and are successful. And so those things have really fed off of one another. The better our productivity has been, the more money they've been making, the better has been our retention and less reliant we've been on recruiting new agents per se. So our agent counts have gone up, not because we're recruiting more agents. We're actually recruiting fewer ones, but the ones we're bringing in are having a greater success and sticking around longer.
And so if we look at the key ingredients that have enabled that, we've made significant changes in terms of how we source the agents. We're far more dependent today than we were, say, five years ago, on personal referrals. Second, we've changed the product mix in a way that really supports these newer agents that are coming in and selling protection products, and how they're partnering with some of our other longer-tenured agents. Third, in about 2016-2017 , we formed a broker-dealer, and today, roughly one in seven of our agents has a securities license. And so that has changed the career path. Instead of agents coming in and just being insurance salespeople for their career with us, they're actually moving on to become securities professionals, and there's a couple of great benefits from that.
One of the benefits is that, in that business, the income that they make is effectively an annuity. There's an annual income they make, as opposed to a one-time commission on a one-time product sale. So all of these things have come together to increase our productivity and therefore, increase our retention, and frankly, we expect that trend to continue. I think in our consumer business, we've posted now eight consecutive quarters of growth, and in our worksite business, ditto, our agents, agent counts and productivity, and so on, have grown very significantly.
Do you have any metrics, like how we should think about the to see the improvement in your productivity? Do you have any metrics you use to measure that?
We do, and we share that in our quarterly calls. Now, one thing I would point out, and I think it's really important to remember this, what constitutes an agent and productivity is not a GAAP-defined term. In other words, I can go out and appoint 5,000 agents tomorrow, but if they didn't sell anything, yeah, my agent force grew, but what did it - what did I really do? Or if I appoint 5,000 agents tomorrow, and they each sold one policy in the entire year, did that really count? So productivity and so on, those aren't GAAP-defined terms. Those will vary by each company. We have a very specific definition. We share that every quarter. We talk about the productivity, and we have seen that continue to grow in both of our businesses.
Shifting a little bit more to products for a second. You know, you've seen a good rebound in Medicare Supplement sales, but then you also sell third-party Medicare Advantage policies as well. So can you talk about your overall strategy for Medicare products and distribution? And then kinda what has driven this turnaround in Medicare Supplement over the last, you know, year and a half or so?
Yeah, so first, let me just make a general observation for people that may not be so familiar with this. There are really strict rules about when you sell a Medicare policy and the relationship you need to establish, and not cross-selling inappropriately, and so on. It's really important that when you sell a Medicare policy, you follow those rules. You can't have the same person in the same meeting pivot over to talking about XYZ product instead, so I wanna first say that, of course, we follow those rules very strictly, and we pay attention to that. Now, against that backdrop, I would point out that all of the products that a life insurer sells typically are discretionary: life insurance, long-term care, annuities, and so on. These are all not mandatory products. They're purely discretionary.
Medicare is the one thing that I would describe it as the closest thing to auto insurance in our space. Almost every American that is getting ready to retire or turning 65, they will at least look at Medicare, Medicare Supplement or Medicare Advantage. They will at least consider those. So those opportunities represent a fantastic way to build a relationship with a household, to build a relationship with an American consumer, and then again, following the appropriate rules at the appropriate time, also talk to them about things like annuities and life insurance, and so on. And that's one of the differences I talked about earlier, where I really want people to understand this is not a common thing in the life insurance space. Most life insurers don't manufacture and/or distribute Medicare products. We do.
That makes us different, and it gives us a different way to build a relationship and then expand upon that. So it's a really critical thing to understand, particularly when you're dealing with the middle-income American household. And in terms of why we've had success, we relaunched our Medicare Supplement product in 2022, and have had great reception from that, so we've been very pleased by that. And just a few years ago, we only represented a handful of companies on the Medicare Advantage space. Today, we represent 14 carriers. And again, for those of you that aren't familiar, think of Medicare Supplement as kind of a full coverage health insurance and Medicare Advantage as like a HMO plan. It provides most of the same things, but there are certain limitations around it. We manufacture and sell Medicare Supplement.
We only distribute Medicare Advantage. There's a network you need and other things that we think are too costly for a company our size to effectively manufacture Medicare Advantage, so we prefer to distribute it. We today have 14 carriers that we represent on the Medicare Advantage side, and we've seen our sales just absolutely explode, and I believe part of the reason we continue to be successful in that space is because we can talk to the consumer about all of their needs, not just one dimension, whether it's just Medicare or just life or just annuities. We can have a full well-rounded conversation with them, and we've been extremely pleased with how our Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement sales have performed. We've seen very substantial gains over the last couple of years.
Great. In long-term care, can you talk a little bit about the products that you currently sell? You know, I think it's not re-- it's a lot, I think you ca- actually, you call it short-term care. It's a lot different than probably people think about traditional long-term care. Can you give a little more perspective on the characteristics of the current product you sell? Also, you know, what's driven the-- you've seen pretty good demand for it lately.
Yeah. So, let's take a step back for a moment. The average American household, they need products like disability coverage and long-term care more than they need life insurance. Statistically speaking, the likelihood that they will run out of money is greater than the likelihood that they will die too soon. Most American families need long-term care, disability, and other long-term products like that, more than they need life insurance. So that's what's driving the need, that simple realization that they're very concerned about that. Now, in terms of in our case, long-term care, I think still in many quadrants, is thought of as a four-letter word.
For our American consumer, the people with $100,000 of net worth or less, this is a really important coverage, when someone in a household is reaching the end of their life, and they need this type of coverage. Now, the thing to remember about the policies that we sell today, it is called long-term care to be in compliance with what the regulators want us to call it. 90% of the policies we sell have a benefit period of one year or less. 99% have a benefit period of two years or less. So this is not the long-term care that people think about, that goes on, and on, and on, and frankly, got the industry in trouble. That's not what we sell for one very simple reason, our consumers can't afford that.
What they can afford is a much more targeted, finite type of long-term care coverage, that covers literally that last 12 months or so of a person's life, and it's very important and very valuable to them. We very much like the economic characteristics of this business. It serves a really critical need, and again, under the heading of really rounding out the protection needs of these middle-income American consumers, it's a really important piece of the puzzle. So we've seen great reception with it. We expect that to continue. There have even been some jurisdictions, some of you may be familiar, just in the last couple of years, the state of Washington created tax incentives that basically required their citizens to get it. Now, I don't know that all states are gonna do that.
We would love it if all states did that, but the reality is: government and society can't fund this need. It's a real need, and consumers need to take it on themselves. So whether it's through tax policy or people just having a better understanding, we expect the demand for these products to continue, and we've been very pleased with how they've worked so far.
Can you also just remind us of the risk profile and characteristics of the overall in-force long-term care business that you have? You know, you did some de-risking back, I think, in 2018. Just a quick update there.
Yeah. So what you're referring to is we did a reinsurance deal with Wilton Re back in 2018 . And let me provide a little bit of context on that. I joined the company in 2016 , and for those first two years, I don't think there was an earnings call or an investor meeting I took, where I didn't get asked about: When are you gonna de-risk the LTC? And I spent the first two years trying unsuccessfully to explain to our investors that our book was very different, that because of the more modest nature of the policies, and because of the attained age, and a bunch of other statistics I'll share with you in just a moment, we didn't need to do a deal like that.
But it was pretty clear from the investment community that we needed to in order to get the overhang off of our stock. So to be really blunt about it, even knowing what I know today, if I would have owned the company 100%, I would not have done that deal. We didn't need to do it. But it was the only way we were gonna get out from under this perception, so we did, I think, what even in hindsight, was a fair deal. I think Wilton Re got a fair deal, I think we got a fair deal. And so we did a reinsurance transaction. I would make one other point.
The very fact that we were able to transact, meaning that we were able to set a market- clearing price and do a deal, I would argue, is proof to the point that the risk was quantifiable, manageable, and measurable, and we haven't seen adverse charges come out since then. It's proof to the point that this was a manageable risk. You add to that the fact that much of the industry continues to suffer from this misperception or, in some cases, maybe it's a real perception, I don't know other people's book. But there haven't been a lot of other deals done since then. So I would argue that that's proof to the point that what we had was measurable and was not as bad as the market feared.
All of that said, if you take a look at the retained book, and this is the one part I've got the little stats in front of me, just to make sure I get them right. Of the book that we have left, less than 3% of the policies have lifetime benefits. The average non-lifetime benefit period is 1.4 years. So now I'm talking about that, the old book that we retained. The average attained age of those insured is 75 years, and remember, the older they are, the less risky this is. So that's a good thing, that the average attained age is that high. Less than 25% of these old retained policies have inflation benefits, and the earnings results have been quite good. We did the deal in 2018.
You've seen we haven't had to take any kind of crazy charges or had other problems. So we're very pleased with the transaction, we're pleased with having gotten out from under that overhang, but we like the economics of this business and particularly the products we're selling today, where the vast majority, 90%, have a benefit period of one year or less. We think it meets a critical need, and we think it's a good trade-off for us as the insurer and for our shareholders.
... Great. You mentioned this a little bit earlier, but can you just review more how your direct-to-consumer business interacts with your agent distribution? And then just also, you know, we talked a little bit about this on the second quarter call, but just to the extent that the election is having some near-term impact on that direct-to-consumer business.
Yeah, sure. So our direct-to-consumer business primarily comes in under Colonial Penn. And if you've ever seen late-night TV, you'll see commercials running. It used to be Alex Trebek; now we have other folks. We've been doing this for 60 years. I've been in the insurance business for 30 years, and I've never seen a business like this. We can dial up and down with our advertising. If you tell me how much we spent on advertising last quarter, I'll tell you within 5% what our sales will be this quarter. It is a really finely tuned machine. And the trick for us is optimizing the yield. We know exactly how many times the commercial runs, and between what hours, and in which jurisdictions, and so on and so forth.
As long as we don't pay above X dollars for those ads, we know what the yield is gonna be, we know what the sales are gonna be, and we know what the profit's gonna be. This is my third election cycle that I've been with CNO, and this election cycle is getting ready to follow the same exact pattern as the last two election cycles. During the election cycle, the cost of advertising goes way up. We dial back our advertising because we're not able to get the yield that we need. We see our top-line sales come down. After the election cycle, we dial the advertising back up, and we see the sales go back up again. So I, you know, I have no way of knowing for sure, but I would be willing to bet that this third time will be exactly the same way.
We'll dial back the advertising 'cause it's too expensive, and we can't get the yield, and then we'll dial it back up later. So that's the impact of the election cycle. Now, in terms of the interaction with our agent business, and as I said earlier, this is the part that I think is truly unique. We do a fair bit of advertising. We're shifting that advertising away from TV based on what's going on, just with the media environment in the United States, and roughly 25% of our sales today come from non-television type advertising, meaning online and so on.
So we continue to push through that, but we've been able to build a system where, when those calls come in or when the clicks come in, the people on the other end, the Colonial Penn employees, they of course have an incentive to wanna sell that consumer what they need and close that sale. But they also have an incentive where if they can't close the sale, or if the consumer they talk to actually needs a product that is different, or they need another product, we have set up a pretty seamless infrastructure where they're handing those leads off to our Bankers Life agents. And remember, we've got 5,000 agents around the country, and those Bankers Life agents then will go out as appropriate and have an in-person meeting with that consumer.
So that lead that was sourced either online or via television for our direct-to-consumer business, can be handed off or can be added to, with an in-person agent that can go sit at the kitchen table. And again, over the last couple of years since we've really implemented this, roughly one out of three of our life insurance sales, made by our Bankers Life agents, emanated from a D2 C type of lead. So we think there's a lot more traction in this. We think we can bring the same approach to some of the other products, such as Medicare. We very much like the idea of using our D2 C assets, our direct-to-consumer assets, to support and work with our agents.
In addition, I should point out long term, there are certain products that are sourced by our agents, where it's actually more efficient for them to turn around and hand it off the other way and have a D2 C interaction for certain types of Medicare products, and so on. So we're working on perfecting both the technology and the incentive structures, but we think there's a lot of opportunity here to bring the distribution seamless. And if you think about it from the standpoint of a consumer, when you order something on Nordstrom, you want the same experience, whether you bought it online or you went into the store, or what have you.
You want it to feel the same way, whether it was a face-to-face interaction or a virtual interaction, and that's what we're trying to replicate, and we think we can do that.
In your worksite business, you know, you took kind of an existing insurance business, you did a couple bolt-on acquisitions that added new capabilities, and I think you rolled it into one brand called Optavise. Can you talk a little bit about what this business includes at this point and how it's performing, and do you feel like you have all the capabilities now that you really need?
Yeah. So just to step back, so if you think about CNO, 80% of our business is our consumer business, and that's driven primarily by Bankers Life and Colonial Penn. So Bankers Life is the captive agent business, Colonial Penn is a direct-to-consumer business, and 20% of CNO is driven by our worksite business. Now, within the worksite business, we have really a handful of different unique capabilities. One, we manufacture certain products for the worksite space. Most of those are manufactured by our legal entity called Washington National. Two, we have within there a captive distribution force. We also work with independent agents, but we have our own captive agents.
And then we did two bolt-on acquisitions: one that gave us capabilities to provide a technology platform, and one that gave us capabilities to provide advice to employers and employees on which benefits to purchase. So the vision was to bring all four of those together and really be able to go to employers with this unified offering. We also think it's important to have more than just the consumer business from a diversification standpoint. If you think about what happened during COVID, in the case of COVID, people weren't going into the office, so our worksite business suffered, but our consumer business did well. There have been other times when the consumer business may be under pressure, but the worksite business will do well. So we like having this.
But in terms of the worksite business's performance, the insurance products we're selling and the captive insurance agents, they have been doing a fantastic job since coming out of COVID. Those two parts of the worksite business are doing absolutely great. We've had, you know, wonderful performance over the last 8-9 quarters. The part where we have not yet extracted enough potential or value from the potential is the advice business, the advocacy business, or the technology platform. Those two pieces have not been brought together with the rest of the worksite offering, and we need to get that right. So the acquisitions have not yet delivered to their full potential. We remain committed to doing that. We think it's still a good formula, and we think it gives us really a competitive edge.
We just, we gotta get better at the execution.
Got it. On your balance sheet, you know, when I look at your holding company liquidity and your RBC ratio, it would imply over $250 million of excess capital at this point above your targets. Can you talk about what your key priorities are for deploying excess capital going forward?
Yeah, we look, instead of being asked about long-term care every quarter, now we get asked about buybacks and what we're gonna do with all this capital. So,
It's a higher quality problem.
Yeah, trust me, I'd much rather have this conversation. You know, I'll give you an answer that isn't so different from the gentleman who was up here before me. You know, our stated position is to put the capital to its highest and best use. I think we've been quite disciplined in doing that. When the stock is trading, say, at 80% of book value, the math is really easy to do, and it's very hard to get other opportunities to come anywhere close to the kind of return you can get by buying your own stock when it's trading there.
As the stock approaches 100% of book value, we still think it's far below the intrinsic value, but it makes the math a little bit different, and it lets you look at other opportunities, potentially. I don't see us materially changing our approach to capital utilization. You know, I can tell you as I sit here today, it takes a lot to wanna get us to do something else that's got more risk to it. We did do two acquisitions that you as you referenced earlier, and they were bolt-on, and I think for a company our size, that's appropriate. I'm not. I'm much more gun-shy about doing something that's, quote, unquote, "transformative." I'm much more comfortable doing something smaller or continuing to look at buybacks as a viable option.
So maybe to summarize it, our approach is not going to change. Paul and I have, you know, been CEO, CFO, respectively for over five years now. So I think we've got a good track record, and I can just tell you that our approach and how we think about capital deployment has not changed.
Great. The company took some investment portfolio repositioning actions last quarter that improved your investment income and your yields. Is there more opportunity, do you think, going forward, to do further actions like that?
Yeah, look, I think one of the things that, that we benefit from because of our size, we have the ability to be more nimble. Our portfolio isn't so big where we end up having to buy the market. We don't have to do that. We've got a smaller portfolio. I think there are other opportunities like that. They may not be at the same magnitude, but I think at the margin, we do have those opportunities, and really that's a function of our size.
Shifting gears a little bit, you know, how do you feel about the expense structure of the company? And how are you going about balancing efficiency actions versus growth investments?
Yeah. I think about this issue kind of in a little bit of a historical context. The first thing we needed to do a few years ago was get the balance sheet and the capital right and de-risk the company. And once we achieved that, the next thing we needed to do was to get the sales engine going again, to get the company growing again. And we had a very nice track record going, and then COVID hit, so we navigated COVID like everybody else in our industry, and then we needed to get the sales engine going again. So we've done that now.
In the eight or nine quarters since COVID, we feel very good about the sales results we've been able to deliver, and so we feel like the growth engine is now humming, and so now it's time to turn our attention to optimization and efficiencies. We have not yet delivered the ROE that we know this business is capable of, so we're very focused on improving the ROE. We have a strong line of sight on what it will take to do that. There isn't one or two silver bullets, there's a handful of smaller actions that we believe we need to take, and again, there's many different types of things, but I'll give you an example of one, and this was actually quite difficult.
We just did this yesterday, so this is fresh news. Yesterday, we advised our employees that we would be eliminating a 180 jobs in order to position the company to better invest in certain automation capabilities, technology capabilities, and so on. Now, that's a gross number, a 180 as against 3,500 employees, so roughly 5% reduction at a gross level. Now, we are also adding back roughly seventy positions in certain technology positions, and what we really need to do is we need to continue to get more efficient, so we're taking out these 180 roles, primarily in the back office, and adding the 70 technology roles to make us more efficient, to let us deploy new technologies, to engage in more outsourcing.
That's one example of the types of things we're thinking about to really drive that ROE. So do I think we can continue to get more efficient? Yes, and yesterday's actions are one proof to that point. These are the types of things we need to continue to do to drive that ROE. We know we can get that ROE up, and we've got a line of sight on how to do it.
And it's that that's on the expense side, I guess. Any other things you'd point out as potential opportunities to contribute to ROE expansion going forward?
Yeah, I think, again, I wanna emphasize, there's not one or two things, there's a number of small things. Some of our investors may have seen that we recently launched a new operation in Bermuda. We think there's an opportunity there for us to continue to get more efficient. Now, it's important to time that and sequence that with the Bermuda Monetary Authority. You know, the regulator there has some really strict views about how they want companies to grow and expand, and so on. But we like our initial steps, we like the capital that that freed up, and we expect those types of things to continue.
I just want to circle back to the consumer division. You know, one strategy you've had also has been to move up a bit in-
Mm-hmm
...into within the middle market and sell more retirement type products like annuities, and as well as offer brokerage and advisory services. Can you talk about how that strategy's been going?
Yeah, we've been very pleased with that. I think I might have mentioned earlier in my comments, we created a broker-dealer about the time I joined the organization, 2016, 2017. Today, roughly one in six or seven of our agents has a securities license. We've seen, including annuities and the other assets that are held on the broker-dealer, we now have about $12 billion-$15 billion of our customers' assets, and in terms of moving upmarket, as one indication of that, three years ago, roughly our average annuity sale was about $100,000. Today, it's about $115,000. So we've seen a nice ability to continue to still staying focused on the middle market.
You know, we are not trying to compete with the other big guys and the affluent consumers. We very much wanna stay middle market and lower, but even within that, we think there's an opportunity to move that up a little bit, and we've been very pleased with what that's done. The reason, kinda strategically, if you think about the product portfolio we have, most of the products an average consumer would regard as an expense, right? A life insurance premium they pay annually, maybe a Medicare supplement that they pay monthly, long-term care. These are expenses. When you also have an annuity or other investments, you fundamentally change the relationship with that consumer. They now look at your company and the products you provide as an investment, as opposed to an expense.
If you simply have a Medicare policy, as an example, the consumer may decide, "I'm moving on to brand X 'cause they're cheaper," and just not take your phone calls anymore. But if part of your relationship includes an annuity or other assets, they're gonna take your call, and at least you have the opportunity to talk through them. So it fundamentally changes the relationship with the consumer, and of course, we love the economics, and we love what it does for the career path of our agents. It lets our agents move from being people that are purely insurance sales, to also becoming financial advisors and really developing a different type of income and relationship with the clients they serve. So we very much love that model and rounding that out.
And we've seen really good success for a company our size, and we feel very good about how that's been developing.
I'll see if there's any questions in the audience. All right, well, we're mostly out of time, so I wanted to turn it back to Gary and just see if you had any closing remarks that you'd like to make on the CNO story.
Sure. You know, I think to a large extent, I'd really like to key off of the message we wanted to convey during our Investor Day. The company is a growth story. We think we've got now eight or nine quarters of track record that prove that, and we think it's worth looking more closely at because of a handful of unique attributes. First, the exclusive focus on the middle market. There aren't a lot of companies down here that are going after these consumers. Our space, I won't say it's not competitive, it is, but it's a lot less competitive than the more affluent consumers and all the different companies that are chasing them. So that's very helpful to us.
The portfolio of products we have is unique and more well-rounded than you'll see in most places, and that helps us retain agents, helps us retain customers. It's important from that standpoint. It also helps us avoid some of the churn that you see with companies that only sell one product, where it's easier for a consumer to move around. The distribution, and we're just at the front end of this, of really bringing together captive agents and direct to consumer. We've got a lot more learnings that we think will happen over the next several years, but we think we're on the front end of something very unique. And then finally, the stability that comes from a mix of the work side and the consumer business, so we're not just reliant on one or the other.
The two play off of each other very well, and serve as hedges in certain instances. We think there's something here, and we like our odds.
All right. Well, great. Thanks. We're gonna wrap it up. Thank you, Gary, and the CNO team for attending.
Thank you.