Okay. Are we, are we live? Excellent. Well, it's a great pleasure to have here with us, Equitable CFO, Robin Raju. I will get started on the Q&A, and then we'll open it up toward the end for questions. Robin, maybe you could just quickly give an overview of the growth and return outlook for Equitable, and then I'll dive into a few of the segments.
Sure. Thanks for having me, Andrew. Great to be here in Miami as well, after the Chiefs Super Bowl win. I'm sure everybody stayed up and watched that. It was a good game. Just, if anyone's new to the company, I just wanna give just quick overview, Equitable Holdings, who we are. Equitable Holdings is comprised of three unique subsidiaries. Our retirement business, which is focused on the U.S. retirement opportunity. We're number one in leadership positions in the markets that we operate in on those businesses. It's about $200 billion of assets on the retirement side. We own 62% of AllianceBernstein, that's our asset management subsidiary. They have over $650 billion of AUM, leading global asset manager, and unique synergies between those two operating companies.
Our third subsidiary is our distribution business, that's Equitable Advisors. It's 4,300 advisors that service and provide advice to Americans all over the U.S. I think if I took a step back, maybe there are three things that I'd wanna leave with you. One is; 2022, we had strong resilience that came through in our results. We reported $2 billion of operating earnings, $2.2 billion on a non-GAAP basis, and that's amidst the market backdrop, with 20% equities down, bond returns down 13%, and the average client losing 16% in their retirement account. If they're with Equitable Holdings in one of our all-weather product portfolios, they would've lost zero in 2022; and had all the upsides from our products that we provide.
The value proposition that we offer our clients has ridden really strongly, and we've seen that momentum through to our $10 billion of inflows. Within that $10 billion, about $4 billion was in our core retirement business. That's where we're a leader with our RILA product, our SCS product. We had record sales last year. We've generated a record value of new business from the higher interest rate environment as well. Within that retirement business, we completed our general account rebalancing program one year in advance. We achieved $180 million a year in advance, which we told in the market. We're benefiting quite a bit from the solutions that we offer to clients, but also from the strong interest rates increasing our margins in that business quite a bit.
In our wealth management business, we had four and a half billion of net inflows in the year. Strong productivity generated about $85 million in cash flows. We're excited to break that out going forward. In our asset management business, AB had $900 million of positive net flows, excluding some low-fee AXA redemptions. AB's story and their momentum have been tremendous. Seth and the team have done a fabulous job in managing that business across the board. We have $56 billion in private markets or private alternative platforms now, growing significantly. Our fee rate has been up 3% year-over-year. Organic growth continues. AB's going against the grind on the asset management standpoint with higher fee rates. It's a function of the mix of their business towards alternatives.
The last point I would leave with you is, going forward, Equitable remains well-positioned to provide value upside for our investors. We're going to generate $1.3 billion of free cash flow in 2023. That'll help, but support our new LDTI payout ratio of 55%-65%. Strong cash flow generation again. We're also gonna provide enhanced disclosures for investors to better value our business. We're gonna break out our core retirement business, that's our more spread-oriented products. We're also gonna break out our wealth management business, which currently sits in corporate and other, to provide investors more visibility on two growth areas for Equitable that's growing earnings and cash flows at a faster rate compared to the rest of the business.
That'll come together with an investor day we'll hold in May, this year, where we'll provide more insight into how we're driving free cash flow going forward, so investors can better value the business. Andrew, that's the overview I wanted to provide.
Great overview.
Hopefully that's helpful.
It's a great overview. Maybe I'll touch a little bit on the three key segments. Individual retirement. Robin, maybe talk a little bit about earnings growth over the long term. Along with that, you've got this phenomenal Registered Index-Linked Annuity, the SCS product. How do you see that driving growth? You know, could you pivot into another product? Two questions, long term and SCS.
Sure. The, the long-term prospects of that individual retirement business are tremendous. 11,000 Americans retire every day. It's a $30 trillion retirement market, and it's growing 30% by 2030. I mean, if you look at those stats on a piece of paper, that's the market you wanna be in. It's a fast-growing market that we serve. Our differentiator is our distribution. We differentiate through Equitable Advisors that enables us to manage volume and mix so we can create the most amount of value for shareholders. As you see that core business, as we split that out, that'll enable us to continue to show you how we're growing earnings and cash flows over the near, medium, and long term as a result.
That business certainly benefits from the higher interest rate environment, both in the value proposition and the demand that that creates for clients, but also in the yields that we pick up in a general account. We're investing almost 5% in new money yields, as we enter the yield, and that'll translate into future earnings growth for our clients. The proof point of that differentiation in that market is if you look at our total business and our individual retirement, we grew sales 5% year-over-year. If you compare that to the market, RILA and total VA sales were down 20%-30%. We really bucked the trend, and that's because of the distribution that we have. To your question on products, we have differentiated products. We call it an all-weather product portfolio today.
We can shift depending on consumer demand and the market environment. We offer buffered annuities, we offer guaranteed income, and then we offer tax-efficient distribution vehicles. Those are the three main product categories. Depending on demand from advisors or consumers, they will be available for them as we continue to go forward. You know, where we're differentiated, though, and this is really innovation. Equitable was one of the first to create the variable universal life policies, variable annuities, and then the RILA product in 2010. We really pride ourselves on innovation. We're always ahead of the market in that category, and we want to continue to be as consumer demand and preferences always evolve as we go forward.
If there's something new, you'll be innovating on it. No interest in the FIA product?
You know, the FIA market compared to where we play, it's a crowded space, over 40 different distributors in that market. You're rushing for yield or to credit everything you get to the policy holder to compete in across the board. Versus where we play, we can differentiate through our distribution, and it's a much more profitable part of the market. If you look at where the biggest profit pools are in the market, we need to sell 3-5 times the amount of volume in an FAA product today.
Oh.
to get the same amount of margin that we get in an SCS product. It's just not worth it for us, considering the margin, the margin dynamics, and the profit pool and the retirement market that we see today.
Makes a lot of sense. Let me shift over to the group retirement business. You did a quarter of earnings at about $115 million. That's versus, you know. There were basically two quarters in that range, and that's versus close to $140 million in the second quarter. I suspect that that's mostly due to the equity markets coming off. Should we think about that as a run rate number? Is there anything in the equation that we should think about otherwise?
Sure. The 115, if you take a look at that business, the sensitivity is purely fee rate because it's a capital-light business. We generate earnings from the fees in those client accounts across the board. If you looked at the average account balance or the average AUM balance for the fourth quarter, that's where that 115 comes from in terms of earnings. If that average account balance stayed the same, the 115 number is still good, but it's gonna go up or down, just related towards equity markets and fees. The other little nuance that we have, is the way we normalize alternative returns. Historically, what we've done in normalization; we use a corridor of 5%-15%. If alts are at 0, we'll normalize to 5. If alts are 20, we'll normalize to 15.
The reason we use that corridor is because our alternative books is pretty well diversified between real estate, some growth equity, credit. As a result, it's not good to just say 10%. We give a range of 5%-15%, so that can move that normalized number around a bit as well. I think 115 where we are, and plus there'll be some higher amortization under LDTI as well when we come up with our LDTI financials. The core business is 115 as of the fourth quarter.
Makes a lot of sense. Robin, how should we think about the long-term growth potential of this business, and how is the SECURE Act 2.0 helping it?
Sure. Within group retirement, there are two core pieces I'd highlight. We're number one in the K-12 market. That's where we service over 800,000 teachers across America, and we have 1,300 dedicated advisors who are dedicated to working with teachers in that market for us. Not everybody has people on the ground, and you need people on the ground because it's an individual sale within the K-12 market. It's not like a 401(k) plan that's RFP'd. It's an individual sale. You need an advisor on the ground. That's probably. We're number one in that market today. That's probably a 3% type, you know, growth over time as we continue to expand in that marketplace. The second area that we announced this year is our institutional channel.
That's where we're really excited about the long-term prospects. That really benefited from the SECURE Act 1.0. I'll get to 2.0, 1.0 that was passed last year. What SECURE Act 1.0 did, it enabled in-plan guarantees to be the default option in a 401(k) account. What that does is that it provides ERISA protection for plan fiduciaries when putting an in-plan guarantee in their account, which they didn't have before. We're really fortunate. We partner with AB. AB's been in that space for 10 years. They celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2022. Last year, AB won a $10 billion plan within their in-plan guarantee space, and Equitable benefited with an $800 million income allocation that you saw in the group retirement business.
That's one testament of the synergies within that business. We also have announced a partnership with BlackRock, where we're partnered with BlackRock, and we customized a solution with them to help service their target date funds and their retirement plans. If you think about where the market's going, what everybody's trying to solve for is decumulation in the retirement space. This is an untapped opportunity and a place where you can operate with margin in the large 401(k) market. We've partnered now with AllianceBernstein and BlackRock to... We think we have two winning partners to win in that space. Now, that's not gonna translate into huge earnings over the next, you know, couple of years, but over the long term, we think that's a great area for us to operate in and differentiate in with the right asset management partnerships.
2.0 adds another element to it?
The great thing about 1.0 and 2.0, it's the only thing people in Washington can agree on. It passed, like, full bipartisan across. Why is that good is because it just promotes more retirement and accessibility for retirement for retirees. 2.0, the major changes were auto-enrollment for folks, increasing the age of RMDs that people can have, and then auto-escalation, meaning automatic increases in planning as well. What does it mean? At the end of the day, it's all everybody in Washington, everybody in the U.S. is opening up access to the 401 market to more people and making it easier. I fully expect there to be a 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, because that's where the space is going. It's a huge market.
It's a huge need, that even everybody in Washington can agree, the more we can make this easier, the better we prepare people for retirement. We're really excited where regulation is going in that space.
A lot of good trends there. AllianceBernstein, you talked about being net positive in flows last year, a very tough year for the industry. Maybe a little color about what AllianceBernstein is doing in the alternatives area and how that's a big growth opportunity for them.
Yeah. We just linked to the synergies between Equitable and AllianceBernstein. It started Equitable seeded AllianceBernstein's alternative portfolio with about $4 billion of seed capital in 2014 to 2015. AB was able to take that and grow it 4x-5x with third-party money, and same time, they're able to recruit teams because they know Equitable is gonna give them money to manage right off the gate. It's a great value proposition for EQH shareholders because the general account gets a better yield and a better risk-adjusted return. At the same time, AllianceBernstein can grow its alts business and enhance their overall product proposition. That's helped AllianceBernstein. We've also completed our first acquisition since we had the IPO with last year with the CarVal acquisition.
CarVal Investors came and was attracted to AllianceBernstein because they knew Equitable was gonna commit capital towards the platform as well. It helped differentiated AllianceBernstein in winning that deal. As a result, the platform is now over $50 billion, and that enables AllianceBernstein to buck this trend and to shift product mix to a higher fee rate across the board. We've seen great prospects. Since we announced the CarVal transaction, they've already had $2 billion of committed flows to them as well. Great prospects.
The business is growing, and we think AB can really differentiate from a lot of the traditional asset managers in this space by having more alternatives on their platform and direct origination because we think not only insurers but also pension players, et cetera, direct origination is gonna help differentiate AB from a lot of other players in the marketplace.
They're doing some awesome stuff. I think I'll throw this question out just 'cause it's been a while since it's been asked. About one or two years ago, repeatedly, everybody was asking, do you go with AllianceBernstein? Is there any development there in terms of your ownership stake? Is it now about 62?
Yeah. It's about 62% now because we used a small percentage in the CarVal acquisition as is a way to do the transaction on a neutral basis for EQH shareholders and now accretive. Look, when you think of our business model, retirement, asset management, and advice, we love those three stools of the model. All three are performing really great. Again, I mean, Seth and the team have done a tremendous job there. They have margin levers to go forward with the announcement of Bernstein Research and also their Nashville move. Even though, look, they're not immune to the market, they've had some short-term performance across fixed income and equity, but over the long term, fixed income and equity on a five-year basis is outperforming peers on 70% of their AUM.
Good long-term results and differentiated positioning in Asia. We really love the business at the end of the day. The cash flows are tremendous for EQH shareholders, and if we can get cash flows from AllianceBernstein and use that to buy back EQH stock at a lower multiple, it creates value for shareholders.
Got it. Maybe the hot topic of du jour with Equitable are these, non-New York policies in the, individual segment that you want to separate out. Robin, maybe give us a little bit more detail on exactly how that's gonna work, and then if possible, maybe timing. What are you thinking on timing?
Sure. In 2022, we were really focused on resolving the redundant reserves of Regulation 213. That's a New York specific regulation that was put in place. We took care of that in 2022, it forced us to look in the future and how do we wanna set up our capital structure. What we started working on is a plan where we separate our policies between New York and non-New York. That's not just individual retirement, that's across our businesses across the board. We really wanna operate with all of our business that covers the 49 other states outside of New York and the New York business solely in New York across the board.
The reason why we do that, if you can have your capital structure split between New York and non-New York, the dividends that you can get from your subsidiaries; becomes more transparent. Right now in our New York entity, there's a complicated uneconomic dividend formula, and that's historically led us to take two dividends out one year, 0 dividends out another year, and it provides angst amongst investors. If we had most of that business outside of New York, it's really just an RBC- type formula. If your RBC is X, you know you can take out the difference between what you need to hold on a minimum basis. It provides more visibility in cash flows. Where I get asked the question a lot is Okay, does that lead you to do another VA transaction across the board?
Certainly, if we do that provides optionality for us to do another transaction in the future. The primary goal is to really separate those policies and give us better visibility on the dividends that we see across the board. Reminder, the legacy VA for us now is only 18% of the AUM, runs off $2 billion-$3 billion. It's well reserved for; kicks up cash and earnings. To do another deal, given the size of that right now, we need to make sure it's accretive to shareholders and that it is worth the value.
How's the process going? I mean, do you think that at some point this year you'll have segmented the New York, non-New York pieces?
We hope so. We're doing the work. It's a lot of operational work to separate the policies, their regulator approvals, mail outs to consumers. There's a lot of work that we're currently scoping out and planning. We started that work late in the fourth quarter, and we continue to do some of that planning work so that we can try to execute this in 2023.
Robin, do you get the sense that there is interest on the part of acquirers for a block at this stage? I know post the Equitable deal, when the markets came down quite a bit, the appetite, the bid-ask kind of widened a bit. Is there interest out there or the-?
I think there's certainly the private markets certainly still have interest, for insurance liabilities across the board. You see that across any company and certainly for Equitable. I think the key for variable annuities, just to keep in mind, private players wanna manage general account assets. You need blocks that are really deep into money that have reserves that they can use to invest in at a higher yield. If you have a block that doesn't have any moneyness, to it, meaning you don't have a lot of general accounts associated with it, and it's just separate account fees, it's less attractive to a private buyer in that space 'cause they're not investing the money at a higher yield across the board.
I see.
I think that's what really drives the buyer universe, and it's very specific by policy, but there's certainly a lot of money out there to be invested in the insurance space.
The last part before I open it up to everyone. You mentioned dividends being important. It seems like a much more efficient way to do business going forward. Isn't there a redundancy in the reserves in New York? Once you separate, could there be a capital unlocking event? Any detail would be great.
Sure. I think one thing to keep in mind is when you separate policies, you also lose some diversification benefits as well, because when you have everything together, the good thing is you get a lot of diversification benefits. If you're exposed to uneconomic regulation, you don't want to have that exposure at the end of the day. When you separate policies, you do have diversification. Some diversification benefits were lost. Redundant reserves, those should be released over time, but not right away because you have the diversification benefits that you need to keep in tack as well. When we separate the policies, we fully expect both entities to be capitalized appropriately. We'll still have the capital flexibility with the $2 billion of cash with the whole co.
You know, next year is $1.3 billion, or this year is $1.3 billion of cash, free cash flow that we expect to generate.
The diversification benefit is what kind of neutralizes that.
Yeah. At times zero, I would say. At times zero, you get some diversification benefits lost. Over time, there should be capital release.
There will be a redundancy factor.
Yeah.
Okay. Maybe a year or two out, we'll notice it, you think?
We'll have to wait and see. We're still doing that operational work-
Great
On the planning.
We got a nice group out here. Happy to take questions. Anybody? Brad?
Hi. You were talking about interest rates and how that was a nice tailwind for you in 2022. Maybe give an update on, you know, where we are with rates. Is it gonna be a continuing benefit at the levels that they're at? Maybe talk a little bit about the inverted yield curve. Does that matter to you? Is that a negative or a neutral? Because seemingly, it might be an inverted yield curve for a while. Thanks.
Sure. Thanks for your question, Brad. I appreciate you asking about interest rates because I do think there's a misconception out there that Equitable doesn't benefit from interest rates at all. A big reason for that is because we don't take open exposures on our balance sheet. We don't wanna put in at-risk policyholder or shareholder money on our balance sheet by picking some arbitrary interest rate. We neutralize the guarantee exposure on our balance sheet as it relates to interest rate. We do benefit from interest rates. Three ways I would highlight. One is with new money yields now, we're investing at 5% yield. That translates into higher investment income as you move forward. Second is our product portfolio.
At this time, products are more attractive to clients, and they're at a higher margin for shareholders at the end of the day. 2022, we continue this in 2023, we had the highest margins we've ever seen since IPO and the highest amount of sales and flows. It's a win-win for consumers and shareholders. Third, we do have a floating rate exposure book that benefits when interest rates are high. We saw that benefit come through in the fourth quarter. It was about $25 million run rate of impact on an ongoing basis. That's another area where we benefit in the portfolio as well.
We don't take balance sheet risks, but we fundamentally benefit from interest rates in those three concrete ways. The yield curve, I would kind of say it's sort of neutral for us because you have offsets from higher up front, lower long term, so it's somewhat neutral.
Yeah. You touched on the alternatives when you talked about what was going on over at AB. Can you flesh out a little bit more what you think is gonna happen kind of longer term, with alternatives and getting more, maybe regulatory freedom for that to be part of 401(k)s? Like, how do you see that kind of developing?
Yeah. Look, I think alternatives as an asset class are here to stay. You know, alternatives used to... It's important to define what alternatives is, because I think the average person probably thinks alternatives are a high- risk growth equity portfolio. The way we think of alternatives and the way you'll probably understand it as well, it's really private origination that basically you can get an illiquidity premium that you can either share with consumers or retirees. We're really focused on trying to get some of AB's products within our high net worth channel at AllianceBernstein, but also in our wealth management business, 'cause that's a differentiator if we can start offering private offerings to that business across the board.
I think over time, as we look, with the SECURE Act and the enhancements, you know, you can easily see more alternatives become, you know, a well-known name in retirement accounts as well.
A little quiet group out here. Should I jump in with a quick question about capital? Robin, you're very well capitalized with about $2 billion at the hold co as of the end of the year. I think your kinda target is a buffer of about a half a billion, and you're very well capitalized from an RBC standpoint. You've upped your target post-LDTI to 55%-65% payout. That's really solid. The question I often get from some of the more proactive investors, I guess, is why not bump it up higher? You've got a lot of excess capital. Why not ramp it up?
Yeah. You know, one of the key things for Equitable, and you should always take away, is we're gonna be consistent and stable and always wanna make sure we're in a position to take, deliver capital return to shareholders. We've done that since IPO. If you take a step back, we returned $6 billion of capital since our IPO. That's more than 50% of our IPO market cap. We've never once stopped our buyback program despite different market cycles, a health pandemic, et cetera. That translated to 120% free cash flow per share for shareholders. We certainly returned a lot of capital to shareholders, and we'll continue to do so 'cause the way we look at it now, it's the best return for shareholders.
At this point in time, though, you also wanna make sure you're being prudent and cognizant of the market environment around you. You know, some think it may be a recession. We certainly see credit risk in the environment today. We wanna be prudent to how we manage that capital. You know, I'd rather have more capital at my hold co today than, you know, be looking out in the market to try to raise capital at this time. I'm really happy with the position that we're in. We've benefited from our economic management. Look, at the end of the day, we're not gonna sit here with $2 billion of cash at the hold co forever at the end. With the market where it is right now, we think it is the prudent thing to do.
Over time, we'll look for ways to efficiently return capital to shareholders.
Terrific. Maybe along the same lines, just thinking about M&A, Robin. You did that CarVal acquisition with stock as opposed to cash. You've talked a little bit about wealth management, I think group benefits. What's on the horizon potentially out there in terms of M&A? Maybe think about size also. How are you thinking about that?
Sure. M&A at Equitable, there's a high hurdle to do M&A, from where we trade today and the value that we can give to shareholders from buybacks. M&A does have a high hurdle. We look at M&A all the time, but the hurdle rate is certainly high. The CarVal acquisition worked out great because we're able to put that into AllianceBernstein, use some equity, and it was neutral for EQH shareholders at day one and accretive shortly thereafter. Those type of acquisitions, those are good. We also did a tuck-in acquisition last year in our wealth management business with Penn Investment Advisors. It was about $600 million of AUA for a small amount. Something that was small but helped grow the business as a tuck-in acquisition, that's something we look at.
Look, we're never gonna be the company that pays 20-30 times for something. It's just not good use of shareholder capital when buybacks have such a high hurdle rate. We will be active. We'll look in the market, but, you know, expect us to be disciplined as you've seen from the previous transactions.
Okay. It seems a little bit quiet. Anybody in the audience that I missed here? Got the bright light coming in. Okay. Well, I'm also keenly interested in this protection business that you have. Today, Robin, I would say individual life is 95%+ of the earnings there. You do have this interesting employee benefits business, and last quarter, you noted 22% year-over-year growth in lives covered and 36% growth in premiums. How is that business growing right now? What are you thinking about there?
Sure. We're focused on the SME space in the employee benefits business, the smaller end of the marketplace. That's where it's an edge for us because we can service small businesses along with some of our COLI products on the life side as well, and small 401. It's a part of our overall small business offerings that we have. We've started that business from the ground up, and we're really excited for the growth prospects. We've now had 722,000 lives covered. We've grown quite a bit across the board, but still not break even yet. Break even will come through in a few years, and then hopefully from there, we'll be able to grow earnings more. It's a good solid business.
It helps our overall small business offering to clients, but not sizable yet, Andrew. M&A is expensive in that space. We'll continue to be disciplined, drive profitable new business and grow that along with our overall small business offering.
Yeah, it sounds really exciting just in terms of the share you must be picking up. This could be a material business-
It's okay.
...in 5, 10 years.
Within our horizon, what I call the horizon two bucket, for us, it's the biggest business for us that's growing the fastest is our wealth management business. This is not far behind that, but our wealth management business is probably the area where we're most excited about because we see $100 million of cash today, and so we can see that growing even more. That's almost doubled from our IPO in a short period of time. That along then with EB, those are two great horizon two businesses that we can accelerate. Alternatives, you've seen us do it with CarVal in a smart way as well.
The advisor piece is $100 million in cash flows you mentioned. How many advisors? Over 4,000?
Yeah, 4,300 advisors. I think the exact number in 2022 is $85 million in cash flow. There's $72 billion in AUA. It was about $45 million in cash flow when we IPOed, so now $85 million. Nearly almost doubling in cash flow. Next year, when we break that out as a segment, that's gonna be an important part on how we talk about the market, because that's gonna be a much faster growing part of our business and should generate a higher multiple as a result. You know, that business, our Equitable Advisors, brought in $10 billion of premiums into the retirement business and wealth business this year and $4.5 billion of net flows at almost a 5% organic growth rate. The productivity is fantastic.
We've been able to manage that in a cost-efficient way, where now we're generating good, solid earnings, and we're excited about breaking it out as a segment in 2023.
Another huge benefit is the relationship with Equitable on product offerings. Really interesting. This is the kind of... I don't know. How do I say it? It's like the elephant in the room question that I'm feeling with Equitable over the last year. I mean, I think what you just discussed it's an outstanding story. I mean, your businesses are excellent, you're performing well, and the stock still trades under less than 5 times 2024 earnings, which it's just... What is it, Robin, that you think, 'cause you talk to a lot of investors, what are they not understanding? What might they be misperceiving? Maybe you could help color that in, because I can't figure it out anymore.
You know, it's not my job to do valuation work, but I'll trust that our investors do. I, you know, if I had to think, what are people not giving Equitable credit for? It's, it's probably the strength. It's gotta be the strength of our retirement business at the end of the day. We hope that the enhanced disclosure and breaking out our core retirement business as a segment in 2023 will provide more transparency for shareholders to give that bi-business a better multiple at the end of the day. That business generates lots of cash, and there's stable cash that's generated. That along with AB, supported that $6 billion of cash return that I mentioned earlier. The franchise is great.
The one benefit I would say is, as we continue to buy back stock in a disciplined manner, that alone creates accretion to shareholders across the board. If you think since IPO, we've reduced our share count by 30%. It's a pretty big number at the end of the day.
It's a lot.
We've grown cash flows by 30%. That retirement business is a big chunk of that, along with AllianceBernstein. I think we have to, you know, continue to enhance disclosure on that business, give investors more transparency so that they can better value that business. As I mentioned earlier, the legacy VA is a small part and runs off at the end of the day, but it's as if that core retirement business doesn't get the credit that I think it deserves from investors. Over the long term, as you all know, our TSR has been very strong compared to peers. We've outperformed peers almost on a 2x basis.
I think if you look since IPO on every calendar year, at least four out of the five calendar years, we've outperformed the S&P 500 as well. Again, performance has been good. Do I think there's value upside? Yeah, I think there's value upside through better value in the growth in our retirement business, and the synergies between Equitable and AB are really strong and powerful for us going forward.
You just touched on the fact that the legacy product, you know, is small, and I think earlier you said it was 18%. When we think about these Registered Index-Linked Annuities, which is the bulk of individual and I think about it as a very efficiently hedged product. Do you feel like the control over breakage in that product versus a legacy product is very strong? You know, that would be something investors should appreciate.
The RILA product, it's a fantastic product for consumers and shareholders. It's perfectly ALM matched. It's purely a spread product. It gets repriced every two weeks in the market. There's no hedging breakage or efficiency hedging. It's repriced every two weeks. We get the money, and we invest, and we earn a spread. It's a spread product at the end of the day, but it's not getting even a spread product valuation. We hope that with enhanced disclosure, we'll be able to do that for shareholders at the end. A customer retiree lost 16% in their retirement account in 2022. If they bought our number one selling RILA product, they would've lost nothing and had all the upside retained for them.
It's a really strong value proposition for clients, and then for shareholders, it generates strong IRRs and record value of new business for us in 2022, benefiting from higher interest rates. It's a great market. It's a fantastic market for shareholders and for clients.
Yeah. I think you've hit on it. That's what people are missing. We are down to our last 28 seconds. I'm looking out there. I think people are so impressed that they can't even think of a question. Robin, thank you so much for the time. I meant that. Thanks so much for the time. I really appreciated it and great. Hope everybody has a great day.
Thank you, Andrew, and thank you everyone for joining. Appreciate it.
Thank you.