All right. We are going to get started. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Ryan Krueger from KBW. Excited to have CNO Financial with us today. Up on stage with me is Gary Bhojwani, CEO of the company. I also want to acknowledge Paul McDonough, the CFO, and Adam Auvil from investor relations in the audience. Just to kick it off, I think it is clear that CNO has made a lot of progress in recent years, improving growth metrics and also expanding your returns. I was hoping you could just start by discussing how you feel about where the company is at at this point and where it is headed over the next several years from here.
Okay. Ryan, thanks for having us and thanks for the question. When I look at the performance of the stock, and I look at the sales, and I look at the employee retention and customer satisfaction scores and so on, we feel really good about where we are at. But I am the CEO, and I am biased, and I still think we are underpriced, and I still think we have tons of potential. The lawyers get nervous when I say that, but it is the way I feel. We have benefited from a number of things, not the least of which is the demographic that we serve. There is a handful of things that make CNO really unique, and one of them is that we focus exclusively on the middle market. We define that as customers that have an average net worth of $100,000 or less.
We are focusing on middle America, and the reality is that that represents, depending on who you believe, somewhere around 60% or 70% of the population in the U.S. There is nobody else out there that has a full suite of products and does all the things that we do that is focused on that segment. Most of the people in our business, understandably, are focused on the affluent that have $1 million or $2 million or $5 million to spend or invest. That is just not where we are focused. That demographic continues to have significant needs. People should remember that there are 11,000 Americans retiring every day, and often times that is when the relationships with our customers start. When they are getting ready for retirement or they have retired. They are turning 65, and they need to think about things like Medicare.
That is another thing that makes us unique is we are one of the few life insurers that also sells Medicare. We start the relationship oftentimes with something like a Medicare Supplement product, and then that goes on into other things. I should also mention there are some really specific rules about starting relationships with health related products and then moving into other things. We of course, follow all those rules. But the reality is that we have a significant opportunity because of that demographic, because of how many of them are turning 65 every day, and the fact that there are so few alternatives. We have a great team of people that have really been able to turn those opportunities into results.
Great. CNO has a consumer division and a worksite division. I am going to start on the consumer side, where you partly sell products through captive agents. You have had good success, I think 14 straight quarters now of growth in the agent count within your consumer business. Can you talk about some of the things that has been driving that success and also how you are thinking about the ongoing momentum from here?
Yeah. Just a couple of pieces of information to supplement what you said. You are correct that we have consumer and worksite. Our consumer business makes up about 80% of the company, and as the name implies, that is where we go out and talk to retail individuals. In our worksite business, that is about 20% of the company, and that is where we talk to employers and get access to employees that way. One of the biggest challenges in this business is the agents and how to manage them and grow them and so on. As a side note, I really think this is one of the things that the industry has gotten wrong over the years. I think as an industry, we have lost sight of the fact that when you control distribution, you have a much greater ability to control your future.
We have stayed very committed to having an agent force that is captive, that sells only our products, and the majority of our agents eat what they kill. Which is to say they are not W2 employees, they are independent contractors, and they make a living by selling products, and if they do not sell anything, they do not make a living. It is a very tough model to make sure you get right. We have shown consistent growth, and when you think about building an agent force, I think you have to break it down in a really simple way, or at least we do. First, you have to think about what it takes to attract those agents, how you bring them in, and then you need to think about what it takes to keep them. In terms of attracting them, we have been extremely fortunate.
We are different than many other companies in that our agents, when they join us, they join us as a full-time. It is not that they are a part-time teacher and a part-time selling our stuff. They are full-time with us. Half of our agents are millennials, and half are women. Those three things right there make us very different than the usual model. In terms of making sure we bring in the right folks, we have done a lot of things over the last several years to ensure that we are appealing to the types of people that are most likely to succeed. And we have found that one of our best sources are referrals. Now, I know that sounds really obvious, but the agents that have been with us for 3-5 years and are really successful, the candidates that they suggest join us are the ones where we have the best retention.
We've focused a lot on that. We've focused a lot on creating training and compensation and support structures that appeal to those folks. Once you get them in, you've got to give them a career path that appeals to them. A decade ago, we started our own broker-dealer, and we're really trying to position our agents. They come in by starting out and learning the business, selling basic protection products, whether that's Med Supp or life or what have you. Ultimately, the goal for the smarter ones, for the ones that want to stick around and make a career out of this is to be able to become financial advisors and create an annuity of income, if you will, a regular stream of income.
The combination of tweaking the types of folks we go after to join us, along with the enhancements we've made to make the career path compelling, has really worked nicely. The stats you've provided on both our work side and our consumer side, we've had really good luck. Also having a captive distribution force gives us much more control over our destiny. We feel very good about that. We're very pleased with the agents we've brought on. We think they've done a wonderful job and really delivered some very nice results.
There's obviously the number of agents, and then there's the productivity of the agents, and I know growing productivity has also been a key priority, and seems like you've had good success there as well. Can you talk a little bit more about the types of things you've been doing to increase productivity, how technology is playing a role in all of that, and just the overall progress there?
Sure. First, a general comment. If you forced me to pick between growing agent count and growing productivity, I'd pick productivity. If I could only pick one, I'd pick that. That's way more important. Our sales and net income results have grown better than our agent count has, so by definition, our productivity has consistently gone up. That effort to focus on productivity has really yielded results, and I think will continue to do so. Now the magic happens, of course, when you do both, when you grow the absolute number of agents and the average productivity of each of those. If you can do both at the same time, that's really where you see the results kick in, and that's what we've been fortunate enough to do these last several quarters.
In terms of how you grow productivity, first of all, you have to make sure you are retaining them. Back to my earlier comments, if your agents are a revolving door, it is almost impossible to grow productivity. First you have to make sure you keep them. Then you have to give them more tools with technology. You have to give them a product pipeline that is diversified, so if they start out a relationship with a customer talking about product A, they need to be able to also have product B, C, and D that is viable, that is targeted for that consumer. So you have to give them that portfolio, you have to show them the career path where they can build an income.
You have also got to do other things that sound really simplistic, but instant underwriting, being able to give the agent tools so that when they are sitting in front of the customer, they can actually respond on the spot and say, "Yes, we can bind this policy," or do whatever it is, and really have the customer follow through while they are in the mental place to do so. So it has been a variety of different things. Like many of the other things that have yielded results for CNO, I cannot point to one or two things we have done. I can point to 100 little things we have done, each one of which has added on and helped us build this model. But those are the types of things we have worked on.
I understand that your model is a little bit different. You have a broader product mix, but there are some other life insurers that do focus on the middle income market, more with protection oriented products only. But some of them have cited some level of sales and persistency headwinds due to cost of living pressures on middle-income America, and it does not seem like you have really seen that much, but can you talk about what you have seen? If you have not seen it, why you think that is?
Yeah. We are of course not immune to this. Almost all the products we sell are discretionary in nature. They do not have to buy them. There is no requirement. It is not like auto insurance. The closest thing we have to auto insurance in our business is Medicare Supplement or Medicare Advantage. Virtually every American that is turning 65 and/or getting ready to retire will at least look at Medicare Supplement and Medicare Advantage because they are getting off of their employer's health plan, and they have to figure out how they are going to cover those exposures. So one of the many things that makes us unique, a lot of life insurers, you are right, they say they focus on middle-income America, but they do not have the breadth of the portfolio, and in particular, they do not have that Medicare related product. We see so many of our relationships start there.
For roughly every three Med Supp policies we sell, at least one of those results in some type of a cross sell where we're building that relationship. That really helps us. If you're a consumer that either has just retired or is thinking about retiring, chances are you're making that decision whether the inflation rate is at 4% or 10%, meaning you've made a decision to leave your employer, or your employer has asked you to leave or whatever's going on. You've got to do those things regardless of what's going on in the bigger economy. We've been fairly insulated from some of these pressures. I don't want to say it's absolute because of course it's not.
You make that decision to leave and to retire regardless of what's going on with the economy, and then you have to prepare for that, and that has benefited us and therefore insulated us from some of these pressures. I see no reason why that won't continue.
I guess related, but a little separate, how do you view the actual economic sensitivity of recruiting and retaining agents?
Historically, because these are commission only jobs, the traditional wisdom has been when unemployment goes up, more people are willing to try a commission only job or lifestyle. Historically, higher unemployment has benefited us. We haven't seen as much fluctuation because we fundamentally changed the types of agents we're trying to recruit and how we go after them, to my earlier point about referrals and so on. That has really put us in a different place, and most people would be surprised to learn, I talk about how half of our agents are millennials and half are female. Almost all of our agents that we bring into the company, they've never sold insurance. We really look for people that have a customer service orientation, that think about customers in the way that we want. Frankly, we have better luck when they don't have insurance experience.
We don't want people to unlearn another organization's habits. We want to teach them the way we want to teach them in terms of how to service our customer base, and so on. Some of the macroeconomic conditions that have influenced agents elsewhere, we haven't been as impacted by that. And there, too, I don't see any reason why that won't continue.
Within consumer, the other area or way you sell business is through a direct-to-consumer operation, and you've been shifting significantly away from television advertisements to digital and other sources.
Right.
I think at the same time, there's been a lot of changes to digital advertising lately with the use of AI and other things like that. Give us an update on your direct-to-consumer business and how you're navigating all this change.
Sure. When I joined the company about a decade ago, almost all of our direct-to-consumer business emanated from our television advertising. Colonial Penn is one of our companies in our portfolio, and it used to be you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing a commercial with Alex Trebek talking about Colonial Penn. And he, by the way, did a wonderful job for us. He was just a wonderful human being and did great for us. But things have changed. When I was growing up, when you watched TV, it was ABC, CBS, NBC, or later on, Fox. It was one of four channels, it was live television, and you saw all sorts of advertisements. Today, when my wife and I watch TV, there's XYZ show on Hulu or Amazon Prime or HBO Max or whatever the streaming service is. We don't watch ads anymore.
The closest I come to advertising is during the day, I have CNBC running in the background, and "Squawk Box" is going on, but it's on mute and there's advertisements. That's the closest I get exposed to ads anymore, and I don't think we're that different. I think the vast majority of people out there, they're regularly watching television in an on-demand way, so you can't rely on Alex Trebek anymore and that type of advertising. So we've shifted to be much more focused with our direct-to-consumer business on other types of digital advertising, and we disclosed in our Q2 results that 70% of our D2C sales actually emanated from non-television advertising sources, some type of social media, online, and so on. I think that trend's only going to continue. 30% is still a big number.
We can't walk away from the television stuff, and we're constantly refining this balance. We've got a pretty sophisticated model internally where we track the advertising cost and the yield, meaning how many people call in and how many people we ultimately sell from those incoming calls. We know that if the advertising costs more than X dollars, it's not going to work. It's got to cost Y dollars or less in order to make the model work. We're pretty disciplined about that. But I think that television advertising will continue to go down. That will be, I think, ultimately to our benefit. There's also an interesting thing here, in terms of how the accounting works. Television advertising is very expensive, and under accounting rules, you can't capitalize it.
It makes the numbers look screwy because you take 100% of that very expensive television advertising up front, but you recognize the revenue over time. So it doesn't break my heart that we're also moving away from TV, but we're still learning how to do that, and it's going to take a little time to get it right, but we're pleased so far with the results.
You talked a little bit about Medicare, and how it's a product that you often lead with. CNO underwrites Medicare Supplement, and you sell third-party Medicare Advantage products. In the last two or three years, there's been a major resurgence in Medicare Supplement sales at CNO. To what extent do you think that is being driven more by a shift back in consumer preference, and to what extent do you think that's somewhat company specific?
I think it's a combination. It would be hard for me to parse them out precisely. But in general, for the last decade, we saw more consumers preferring Medicare Advantage over Med Supp. We made a choice a long time ago not to manufacture Med Advantage and instead to keep focused on manufacturing Med Supp. The economics internally for us are such that we're frankly indifferent. If a consumer needs Med Advantage more than they need Med Supp, sell them Med Advantage. It's a third-party company, UnitedHealth , Humana, whoever. We sell their products, we collect a commission. Economically, we're indifferent because remember, while the absolute revenue dollars may be lower, we don't have the risk and the capital we're tying up because we're not a manufacturer of that product. So the distribution income drops to the bottom line.
Economically, we've set it up so that we're indifferent, so our agents know that they can sell whatever makes the most sense for the consumer. In more recent years, the economics got out of whack for the companies that were manufacturing Medicare Advantage, primarily because their benefit offerings and their inducements just got too rich. As the government subsidies change, they've had to reel those in, which has pushed more consumers back to Med Supp. At the end of the day, we're indifferent to that from an economic standpoint. I like the idea that the consumers are coming back and buying things that we manufacture and distribute. Our cross-sell ratio tends to be a little bit better on the Med Supp than it is on the Med Advantage. But I think that will continue.
The reason I say it's difficult to parse is on the one hand, the trend that I just talked about, everyone has benefited from. But if you look at our Medicare Supplement growth rates, they've been better than most of the other consumers. So I think that has something to do with the way we're going to market as well. It's a combination of the two things. We're happy to take the benefit, regardless of whether it's us or the market. We're pleased with the result.
I guess just with the big increase in sales of Med Supp, how do you ensure that you maintain your target margins?
Yeah. We've been doing this a long time. We've got a good track record of understanding it. One of the things I always tell our investors, of all the products we write, Med Supp is the one you should worry the least about. We get to reprice that every year, as compared to a life product or another product with a 20 or 30-year liability duration. I do not get to reprice those every year. The Med Supp, if we screw something up, we get to fix it within a year, and we've got a pretty good track record of doing that. You can look at what our underwriting results have been and our historic margin have been as proof to the point that we generally price this properly, and we are able to get the right return, and the right results.
Yeah. I guess one other thing that might be useful to discuss is just the differences between the Medicare Advantage and Med Supp products, because sometimes we see a health insurer that has some issue with Medicare Advantage. People get concerned about how that is going to affect Med Supp. Usually, it does not actually have an impact because it is not the same product.
It is a very different product. There are a number of differences, and maybe if I keep this at a high level, think of Med Supp as your traditional health insurance, okay? No matter what doctor you go to, no matter where you are in the country, no matter what. Medicare Advantage, think of more like an HMO. Certain geographies, certain healthcare providers, and so on. That is one big difference. The government created Medicare Advantage as a means of letting private industry participate in this, and so there are differences. Now, all of these policies, Med Supp and Medicare Advantage, they vary by county in the United States The benefit levels, what network you can go to, all these sort of things. You really have to understand and know what you are buying, and this, frankly, is what helps us.
Because part of our philosophy is to have that controlled distribution that goes into the homes and really explains things. The increased complexity actually makes our people that much more valuable and that much more necessary. They are two very different things, and you can see a given insurer. If you have an insurer that manufactures both, as you pointed out, they can have different results between the two because they are different coverages and they appeal to different populations.
Moving to the retirement side of your business, in annuities in particular, the annuity market has grown a lot. It's gotten a lot more competitive, but you have your own captive distribution. How much annuity competition do you actually run into? Or is really the growth constraint more just your ability to find and grow the agents and people that want to buy the products?
If you look at the annuity market as a whole, it's extremely competitive. There have been a slew of new entrants and very well-heeled new entrants, people with a lot of money. They've come in primarily because it's a really cheap source of funds for asset managers. The thesis is, go buy an annuity company, take those assets, invest them, increase the yield by 50 or 100 bps, and it's a lot cheaper for an asset manager to do that than to try and source the funds through traditional asset management means. That's been the reason you've seen so many new entrants and so many new offerings and how much more competitive the products have gotten. I spent a little over a decade running the top FIA writer. I understand that side of the business.
But most of those clients, their net worth is higher than the customers we go after. Our average annuity sale is about $140,000 right now. Most of those annuities are well into the seven figures. It's a very different market set, and frankly, most of those distributors aren't calling on our customers. Nine out of 10 of the customers that we talk to about an annuity, the decision is not whether to buy brand X and brand Y. The decision is, should we buy your annuity, or should we leave it in a CD? Should we buy your annuity, or should we leave it in our money market? There's been tremendous annuity competition, but not in our space, and it's one of the many reasons that I absolutely love the business that we operate in.
It's just really hard to get down here and compete in the middle market if you don't already have a developed foothold.
The other part of the retirement business at CNO has been the brokerage and advisory operation, which is, I guess it's not completely new anymore, but it's newer than some of your other product categories. Can you give us an update on how that build-out has been going? At what point do you think that could become a more noticeable earnings contributor to the company?
Well, it's definitely a very significant contributor already. Not necessarily in terms of earnings, but in terms of strategy. What do I mean by that? We started our broker-dealer a decade ago. As of the second quarter, the numbers we released, including the annuity business that runs through there, we have $19 billion of assets. Again, started in 2016, and it grew 24% in the second quarter. It's really important in terms of being able to change the relationship with the client and with distribution. What does that mean? I started out as an entry-level insurance agent.
When you sell an insurance policy to a customer, be it life or long-term care or whatever it is, and they decide they don't want it anymore, or they decide they're going to move from you to brand X, they can simply stop paying the premium and never talk to you again. If they entrust you with their assets, they buy an annuity with you, or they invest money with you, it fundamentally changes the relationship. Even if they're going to move away from you, they're going to take that last meeting or that last call because you got a chunk of their assets. It also philosophically changes the relationship. When you simply sell a life insurance policy or a health insurance policy, you are an expense. What do we do with expenses? We minimize them.
If you have a relationship with a customer where they invest money with you or they have an annuity with you, now you are an investment. What do you do with investments? You try and maximize those. It fundamentally changes the relationship. Even if you told me our broker-dealer wasn't going to yield any kind of income and just break even, I'd still say do it. Now it turns a profit for us. We're very pleased with it. We will continue to grow it. The other reason I feel that it's very important, it gives our captive distribution that career path I talked about. It lets them go from selling commission products, where they get a one-time income or a short trail, to developing a relationship with clients where they are truly an advisor and they have a lifetime of income that they can make.
It does a lot of different things for us. The finances are, of course, important, but the bigger things are what it lets us do in terms of changing the customer relationship and giving our captive distribution a career path that they cannot replicate elsewhere.
Moving to the worksite division, you have had a really good run of growth there. Both sales, premiums have been increasing. Can you unpack some of the key drivers that has led to this success and what needs to happen for it to continue?
Sure. Just like our consumer business, we have a wonderful leadership team in the worksite business. They have done a great job tapping into employers. If you look at what has been happening with employers, in order to manage the health insurance costs, because we all know healthcare costs have been going up roughly 6%-8% a year. In order to manage that, employers have been changing the profile of the health insurance that they offer to their employees. But the exposure has not gone away, so employers want to help their employees get supplemental health coverages and other coverages. We have been able to capitalize on a broader demographic trend that has been happening with employers. We focus on relatively small employers. We have some exceptions to that, but that is generally who we focus on, and we focus on employers that tend to employ middle-income Americans.
These are people, unions, these are people that are working with their hands. We have been able to give a product offering that really has made a difference and capitalized on this trend. We have also benefited from geographic expansion. On the consumer side, we have about 5,000 exclusive agents. On the worksite side, we have about 800. We have a lot more part of the country that we have not yet tapped into, so that has helped. We have also been able to take our existing employer relationships and offer them multiple other products. All of that has come together to give us a really nice tailwind where we continue to grow that worksite business.
You've done some M&A, some divestitures in the worksite business over time. Do you feel like you have all the capabilities you need at this point, or are there other things you'd still consider acquiring to further build out?
That was a very charitable description. We did two acquisitions on the worksite side, and they were both mistakes. We undid them. We do have, I think, the key priorities that we need, and I would simply point to the growth of the agents and the growth in the sales as proof to the point. Clearly, something's working there with the numbers that we've put up and continue to grow.
You, as a company, announced a technology modernization initiative, I think it was last year. Can you talk about what that is designed to do and what you expect the benefits from that to be for the company?
Yeah. It's a three-year program. We've publicly stated that we're going to spend about $170 million. The way I would describe it is, this is the biggest amount of money that I am the least excited about. The analogy I would give you is, imagine if you had to put a new foundation under your house. Nobody sees it. It probably is not going to drive your resale value. But if you don't have a good foundation under your house, you can't add on other things. You can't make the house nicer. What we found ourselves faced with is many of the foundational systems within CNO were, frankly, obsolete or approaching obsolescence. My fear, even if they continue to work fine, what happens when one of them breaks and the last COBOL programmer retired 25 years ago? What do you do?
We're having to spend all this money. By the way, the vast majority of insurance companies out there have this problem. We have the luxury of being in a place where we're growing nicely, we have good cash flow, and it made sense to take this on now. We made a decision, and we're on track right now. Now, it's still early. I want to emphasize we're still, I don't know, in the third inning. It won't be till the end of 2028 whether we know we really pulled this off. Based on what we know today, we're going to spend $170 million. It's not one big system. It's about a dozen different smaller systems underneath that we're going to modernize, replace, get rid of, whatever.
When it's all done, I'll get the joy of pointing to something and saying, "See?" There'll be nothing tangible to show for it, but what the real benefit will be is that those new technologies, the new self-service things, all the other things that modern consumers expect, we will now be able to put onto these systems. It won't be an immediate benefit, but it'll set us up to continue the growth trajectory at the end of 2028 and really build on this.
Got it. Moving to ROE, you had guided to 200 basis points of ROE expansion by 2027, which would get you a 12% ROE. You're already above the 12% ROE this year, and you've already communicated that you'll give us an update next year, so I'm not going to ask you for the update now, unless you want to tell us right now. I'll take it.
I don't.
But it would be helpful to understand what has gone better than you expected that has led to you outperforming the guidance that you had given, and what are the potential building blocks to lead to further ROE expansion?
Yeah. So what we did was, in 2025, we took our 2024 run rate of approximately 10%, and we initially said in 3 years we would improve it by 150 basis points. We were running ahead of schedule, so a year later we said, "No, we're going to improve it by 200 basis points." And then this year it turns out we're running better than that as well. So we had committed to a revised improved target, if you will, of 200 basis points by 2027, and we've already exceeded that. So we are going to come out in 2027 with a revised target. It won't be before then. We haven't yet made a decision if we'll give a 2-year target or a 3-year target. We've got some things that we need to work through. But we will be higher than that.
And at a high level, what we've guided to is our ambition for ourselves is to perform at a top quartile level. And that would suggest that we would get to the mid-teens. Exactly what timeframe and what commitments we want to make, we haven't sorted through all that yet. I have this bias. Well, first of all, I hate providing guidance, period. But once we do provide guidance, I really have a bias against revisiting it too much because to me it seems to take away the whole point of long-term guidance if you revise it every quarter. That's not long-term guidance then. So we have some work to do, but we expect to get, the ambition is to get into that top quartile.
In terms of the things that we've benefited from, a lot like the other things I've talked about, there's not one or two things I can point to. There's 100 little things I would point to. Everything from greater capital efficiency, to better sales results, to managing expenses, to using technology. All the things you would expect a good and growing business to do, we've been able to benefit from, and in many cases, we've benefited more than we thought we would.
Then I guess as you've grown, you've increased growth, your returns have increased, and this has all helped your stock perform quite well over the last few years. I think the natural question is what's next? I guess in your opinion from here, what are the key things that need to happen at CNO to continue to grow the valuation of the company?
Look, I have a bias right now that capital and ideas are commodities. In the world we live in, if you look at technology and all these things, there's not some great new idea in our mature business that we're going to come up with. I believe that the real differentiator is execution. I really think that long term, that's what separates the companies that will long term be successful versus not. The way I think about execution is a very simple thing. If you break your business down into what the key tasks are, each one of those, you just got to find a way to do each one just 1% better every quarter, every month, every year, whatever's relevant. Just take each little thing. Each thing has got to get a little bit better, a little bit more efficient, a little bit more customer friendly.
That's the philosophy we've brought to this. There hasn't been one or two big things. There's been hundreds of little things. Now, we've also benefited from the fact that we've got a consumer demographic that's just a huge tailwind. There's a lot of customers that need what we do, and we're really well positioned for that. But I think that our ROE can continue to grow. I think our efficiency will continue to grow. I think our top line will continue to grow. And it's simply by taking every little thing and just making it a little bit better.
Are there any questions from the audience? All right. Well, we're almost out of time, so maybe just before we wrap up, I guess, are there any final comments or messages you'd like to leave the audience with about the company?
Yeah. First of all, thank you for the time, thank you for the questions. I think there's a handful of key things, and we try and cover this in our own internal meetings as well as our earnings calls. There's a handful of things that make CNO very different, and lots of companies can say any one or two of these things. Virtually none can say all of these things. First, that focus on middle income America. That's all we do. That has a benefit in terms of it's not as competitive down here. There's not as many people calling on our clients. It also doesn't cause us to have this crazy pressure that some people in this industry have, where there's so many people they're competing with, they have to take investment risk and do other crazy things to offer the richest possible product.
We offer a fair product to a consumer that understands and appreciates it, middle of the road, lot less competitive pressure. Second, we use a lot of technology, but we use the technology to enhance the distribution that we have. We think a key differentiator is what we refer to as that last mile of distribution, where our controlled captive distribution goes into the consumer's household, builds a relationship, talks to them, helps them understand these complex things. I do this stuff for a living, and I couldn't explain Medicare Supplement to my dad. Okay? So I had to have somebody else come in. This is complex stuff. It varies by county. It's not easy. You need somebody to explain it to you, and part of our differentiation is that last mile. Third, product mix. The best way to point to why this was an advantage.
In COVID, when everybody's mortality results, including ours, were challenged, our morbidity results were much better. We were able to offset. Where life insurance was getting beat up, our health insurance was doing better. We've got a very nice mix of long tail, short tail, of morbidity and mortality. That combination, especially for a company of our size, is quite unique. Finally, I talk about how we get access to the consumer. If you look at our direct-to-consumer results, if you look at how we use Medicare to open the relationship for these other products, if you look at the fact that we formed a broker deal. There's a lot of different things we're doing to surround that customer, and it's not just about product, it's also about the services and all of the things that means to keeping those agents that we get.
I think when you look at that combination, it's a very unique company. I'm thrilled to death that investors are seeing over the last several years, we've had a very nice return. I hope that continues. I think the future's really bright, and if anything, I continue to believe we're undervalued.
Excellent. We are going to wrap up there. Thanks to CNO and Gary and the team.
Thanks, Ryan.