All right. We are going to get going with our next session. I have F&G up here on stage with me. I will make introductions. Conor Murphy, directly next to me, Chief Executive Officer and President. Mike Bailey, CFO, who recently joined a few months ago.
Six weeks ago.
Six weeks ago. Leena Punjabi is the Chief Investment Officer. I am going to start with Conor. You recently took over as Chief Executive Officer of the company at the end of June after you had joined F&G as Chief Financial Officer about 18 months ago.
Right.
I wanted to just start by having you discuss what your strategic priorities for F&G are moving forward.
All right, well, thank you, and thanks for having us. Delighted to be here. I had the opportunity to be here with you last year with Chris Blunt, who recently shifted his role. I would say there's a fair amount of continuity to what we're doing. Growth and momentum are a couple of words that come to mind. We have been, I think, a little bit of an exceptional growth story for larger life and annuity companies. We've been able to grow the gross AUM every single quarter, the net AUM every quarter but last quarter, and that was just because we had sold the Bermuda business. Otherwise, both of those continue to be metrics that we remain focused on. At the same time, we're an ROE expansion story, and leveraging reinsurance is helping us do that.
At this stage in our evolution, and we can talk about, we've been around in one form or another since the 1950s, but really I'm talking about the F&G that's existed over the last eight years since FNF and Blackstone and others and Chris Blunt. In that time, we had evolved. We hadn't quite gotten to the segment reporting part, but at year-end, we talked about the continued shift to being more capital light, more fee based, and disclosed that the fee composition of earnings had grown from almost nothing a few years ago, if you really fully allocated expenses to about 15% year-end 2025, with an expectation just by virtue of the three-year plan that we had done at year-end 2025, that it would be at about 25% in 2028.
I would view that as a pretty easy 25%, very achievable, and obviously you can get there faster with more reinsurance, or you optimize or you prioritize fee businesses over spread businesses. That's been a continuation. I think you've heard us in recent quarters too, a lot of the focus has been on core. Core retail has continued to be arguably every quarter is better than the equivalent quarter of the year before. So that's the IUL, the FIA. Those are meaningful businesses for us. RILA's newer for us. FIA and IUL were a top 10 business, probably top six-ish. We were a later entrant to the RILA space, but that's been noteworthy for us as well. Then PRT, we've been in for about five years. That's also become a top. We're about number seven, number eight. Meaningful for us as well, so call that core institutional.
At the same time, we've shied away from the MYGA space, FABN, opportunistic, more so late last year, early this year than perhaps currently. Then I'm sure we'll get into it. We have the own distribution business with Peak as well. Yeah, a lot of continued momentum. I would say underneath the covers, it's stability in revenue growth, stability in earnings insofar as you can. The surrenders are obviously a little bit out of our control. The ALTs portfolio is underperforming, I think probably in line with pretty much everybody else, if you haven't denied. Everything else, though, is very predictable, and hitting our marks.
The last part of it, I would say, is under the covers too, the core spread, right? You have heard me say I would argue we're not really in the spread margin business, we're in the spread maintenance business. That is part of the reason we really favor the FIA and IUL because we are repricing that every year. That balancing act is a very thorough process within the company and one that we manage well. Pricing, new business, rate setting, rate renewals, all of that, all much of the same. We are adding good value every day.
I wanted to delve into the reinsurance strategy more, which is part of the way you are increasing fee income and being more capital light. I guess, can you review what products you are reinsuring versus retaining at this point on an ongoing basis? On the reinsured business, just how the economics are actually flowing through for fee income to F&G.
Yeah, sure. It has and continues to be an expansion. It began mostly with the MYGA products. Those we heavily reinsure up to about 90% with a couple of noteworthy partners that we disclose that we can talk about. We have expanded the FIA reinsurance, and broadly speaking, we are targeting about 50% on FIA. About half of our FIA is income based, and about half of it is accumulation based. On the income base, we have got a couple of noteworthy reinsurance partners there as well. They all pay ceding commissions and cover some expenses. When we talk about fee businesses, it is the Peak business that is fee business, it is the flow reinsurance ceding commission business, and then you would bifurcate the life between fee and spread. Those are what we are talking about.
On the accum side of FIA, though, that is where we have the relatively new, well, it is about a year old now, sidecar with Blackstone. That is predominantly, call it the capital provider there. At this point in time, we have not done more on the FIA. We could. We have not done anything with PRT. There has obviously been some interest around that. We just have not felt the need to necessarily, but we would consider that. Nor have we done anything with IUL, and the RILA is just not big enough yet to consider doing that. An expansion. At the same time, even just going back over the last five years, five years ago on a retained basis, we have grown to $75 billion gross, $55 billion retained. Five years ago, I think we were at $25 billion.
Part of that expansion has come from selling, other than RILA, similar products, but in narrower scope, own distribution, if you will. We now have a couple of dozen broker-dealer and financial institution partners as well, so there is an expansion there. That is where we are, but I would be inclined to think probably more reinsurance from here than less. Another element that I think is noteworthy, of the sizable players, there are not many that are not either owned by an asset manager or own an asset manager.
I would argue I think we are a reinsurer of choice for a lot of folks, for whom they can then obviously take advantage of their own asset management partnerships or structures to avail of that, whereas we do not. It is a nice diversifier from Blackstone. Obviously, anything in art that we retain, almost all of that, Leena can get into it, the vast majority of that is managed with Blackstone. But anything, obviously, that we reinsure on a flow basis is someone else's, which I think works well for a lot of people as well.
On growth, how are you thinking about the growth of your total AUM before reinsurance compared to the growth you would expect in your retained AUM after reinsurance, given the reinsurance strategy you have now?
Yeah. It is the continued growth momentum. We probably grow 8% on a growth basis a year, or call it $6 billion. I would expect that to grow pretty consistently every year for me, every quarter and every year. The retained numbers, obviously, if you just take, well, less of an emphasis on MYGA, but it might be half that. But I would still expect that $2 billion- $3 billion every year on that as well. I would expect that that would continue. The ROAs will probably be a bit corridor-bound for all sorts of different reasons. There are so many components to that. But you should see an ROE expansion by virtue of the impact of the flow business coming through. We have been focused on the scale optimization as well, bringing down the expense ratio, etc. , and I think that will be meaningful, too.
Okay. And then Peak Altitude. You announced-
Yes.
...a few months ago you were going to explore strategic alternatives. Chris Blunt is still leading that business.
Yes.
I guess maybe just to start, what was the reason that led to the decision to explore strategic alternatives for this business?
Let me take a step back a little bit and talk about maybe why we were in the Peak Altitude business or how it came to be. While in many ways we've been in this iteration of F&G might be considered eight-ish years old, the relationships go back decades and more than that. And we have senior employees who've been with us for a quarter of a century or more. One of whom is the President of Peak, John Phelps, who works alongside Chris. And the backstory would be several of the entities where you have an own distribution business with several founders for whom perhaps their runway has gotten a little short and they're interested, or maybe two out of three are interested in getting out, and one would like to stay.
And where we get very interested is where we have a founding partner who wants to spend another five, seven, 10 years in this business. Respectfully, I think a choice for them would be to sell to private equity, and I think as a general rule, many of them felt they would rather work with a partner they've known for 25 years. We were approached a number of times over the last half a dozen years or so to see whether we would take a stake in these entities. We've focused on predominantly four of them. Two of them, I would say, are life businesses, two are annuity businesses. We own them in various sizes. We have 100% and a 49% on the life side, a 70% and a 40% on the annuity side. Importantly, the 49 and 40 have a path to majority.
Those entities collectively, on that basis, they earn around $80 million, $85 million of EBITDA. We've also funded, so we've put about $700 million in, but we've funded some of that through debt at the holding company. So Peak itself has no debt. For us, the growth opportunity for those entities, we view it as very significant for what's literally right in front of their face. Increasing the investments higher to get bigger stakes in the four. They themselves are rolling up businesses underneath, and that's a playbook that we know well. It's one that the FNF team and Bill Foley knows well, and makes a lot of sense. So it's not about adding other entities, it's about getting the most out of these entities. From our perspective, we've begun a process, and it's hard to say for sure.
The entities or the enterprises who show up with interest, as we'll find out here in short order, in due course. We've talked about we would certainly appreciate a structure where we could continue to participate in the upside. So something like where somebody might have a 51%-49% split. I would rather own half of an entity that was twice as big and have someone partner with deep pockets. It wouldn't probably typically be another insurance company. It might be just more of an investment entity. Continue to invest, grow the EBITDA, grow our share of that, grow with them.
Similarly, we have other distribution partners who might be interested, but they probably wouldn't want us to remain as a minority. Again, I'd like to continue to participate in the upside of this. About 30% of our life sales come from these entities, about 10% of our annuity sales, which is noteworthy. So we know the businesses well. We like them. We've known them for a long time. So that's the expectation. Perhaps the silver lining a little bit is some of those entities, the accounting, GAAP accounting isn't wonderful because of the ownership stakes that we have. 49% would just be cleaner. Pound for pound, you'd be reflecting the valued ownership in the businesses. So that's all. But it's a balancing act. You have your regular distribution partners, and you've got to balance everybody's needs here.
I guess maybe you talked about the path to 25% fee income, I believe. I guess how does what you end up doing with Peak Altitude affect that? Because I assume if you sell 51% of it, that's going to lower your fee income, but then you're also growing the reinsurance business.
Right. Yeah, but I would also expect that. Maybe that's why my preferred path would be to continue to retain roughly half interest, and we would continue to invest. We might I wouldn't want to necessarily take on more debt at F&G to do that, but I'd be more than willing to reinvest the dividend. Like today, the dividends from Peak that we receive service the debt to some extent, right? I'd be more than happy to continue to just reinvest in that, have Peak bring on some debt, grow that way, and just participate in the upside of that growth.
Okay.
You'd get there in a different way. But you're right. I think the life business, we're the number six writer of IUL in terms of premium, but we're actually the number three in terms of policy count. So we're continuing to see good growth there. So that's an expansion we would expect to continue. Then, like I said, the reinsurance, it's really up to us. I mean, we could write more business, reinsure it more heavily. I should acknowledge our partners' appetites can change. I mean, that's one of the advantages of having the sidecar is it's a bit, you know what you're getting day in, day out. But I would balance that with we have so far had no shortage of noteworthy entities who want to continue to be reinsurance partners with us. Yeah, maybe more of that. It's a nice position to be in where you can pick and choose.
Maybe shifting to the retail annuity market and competitive conditions, could you discuss your view of the competitive conditions currently in the market and also, and differentiate between MYGA, FIA. I guess maybe mostly those, but you are a newer entrant in RILA too. If you want to touch on RILA, but-
Yeah.
...to what extent you've seen changes, I guess, in the environment competitively over the last year or so?
Okay. It's pretty different in our space in each one. MYGA, almost since I joined, we have talked about differentiating between core and opportunistic, and MYGA has stayed very much in the opportunistic. To be clear, we are still in the MYGA space, but we're picking our spots. In fact, second quarter of last year, we did write a fair amount of MYGAs, and that made a lot of sense for us at the time. But since then, I think we've now had four quarters in a row with a reduced level of MYGA. In the second quarter, for example, we looked at the marketplace, and one of the decisions we made is we'll sell less MYGA, and we did, for us, a reasonably large amount of buybacks. But that was almost like a straight capital trade.
The capital for the buybacks was the capital we didn't spend on the MYGAs. MYGA's interesting, and everybody will give you their own view. From our perspective, I think a lot of the space is maybe the entities that are owned by an asset manager or the mutuals. There aren't too many large-ish or large public life and annuity entities. There are some, and we know them well. He's smiling because he just left one of them. So there's that. But relatively speaking, we haven't seen the returns to write as much. We're still writing them, but not as much. Obviously then you've got the what's the appetite for your flow partner, because sometimes it's a decent MYGA with a great return on the ceding commission. Sometimes one or other of those numbers can go up or down, and you play it out.
But it's been a relative choice, right? Choice you'd be careful. FIA for us, it has been competitive as well, but honestly, we've been able to write FIA at a consistent return. I would say in 2025 it was probably a little tighter than 2024. First half of 2026, it's probably somewhere in between. So is it competitive? Yeah. In any individual quarter, or even over 12 months, if you looked at the top 10 writers, the ranking table can shift a lot within a year. But you look over five years, Ryan, it's hardly shifted at all. It's the same 10 folks who've written 70% of the business, and that includes us as well.
I think we would sit here and go, "Yeah, we've written 15%-20% more in that timeframe." I think everybody else, if you really leveled it all out, I think we'd all be very similar. Now, we like that space very much, but the other thing for us too is, I mentioned we do sell in a couple of a dozen broker-dealer financial institutions, but we sell an awful lot in the own distribution space, and it's a different space. Again, it's middle America, it's multicultural America. It's not as competitive. It's more of a relationship business there, at the advisor level, at the firm level. So I think that probably dampens the impact of the competitiveness a little bit. Then shifting to RILA, I personally like the RILA space a lot.
I think it's a great first annuity product for a lot of people, certainly the first annuity product I bought. You know where I came from, obviously. I spent a lot of my career at MetLife and Brighthouse and familiar with the space. We were later to the party. I think there were probably more than 20, maybe 25 players in the space by the time we came in. For us, it is still smaller compared. It's not the others, as I mentioned, we're top six-ish in PRT, IUL, FIA. RILA, we're in the teens. Probably in the higher teens. Having said that, we've already written more RILA this year than all of last year. Not huge numbers yet, but the momentum is wonderful. We'll continue to focus on that. So I like the product very much. Yes, there's more competitiveness there, but remember, we weren't a VA shop.
One of the nice things about us is we don't have any legacy liabilities that are complicated. There's no VA, ULSG, LTC, disability, anything like that. We're not trying to replace VA business with RILA business. We're just adding RILA to the portfolio. Again, for that middle America, multicultural America, for whom they're maybe getting introduced to the product for the first time, I think there's a lot of appetite. So where we compete, I think we'll grow nicely. It is absolutely core for us. It's just not that big yet, but it will get there, I think, probably easier than anything else.
A few different follow-ups on all this.
Please. Mm-hmm.
One would just be on MYGA. Given that you reinsure 90% of it to partners, is the amount of volumes of RILA that you write mostly contingent on the pricing of the reinsurance partners, given that you don't retain much of it? I guess, how do you actually go about that? Are you making the decision first and then you find the partners, or is it the opposite? The partners tell you what the pricing is, and then you decide if you want to write MYGA.
There are two parts to that. It is a hand in glove together, literally hand in hand. We know on an ongoing basis what everybody's appetite, what the rates are, if you will, what the ceding commission. It is a decision at every stage, knowing what the economic commitment from the other side is. That is part of it. But part of it with MYGA, too, is some of the places that we sell, you have to show up with some MYGA as well.
Yeah.
I have heard another industry executive refer to it as the gateway drug, right? And I understand what that means, right? There are some places where if you are looking to sell FIA, you are selling some MYGA as well. And that is a bit of a balancing act as well.
Then on FIA, I do not know how many years ago, but you used to almost solely sell through IMOs, I think.
That is right.
You've been expanding into financial institutions and-
Yeah.
...other distributors. Where are you at? You are also, I think, just talking that in some cases, IMOs are-
I'm really sorry.
No worries. But yeah, I guess just any context on how the mix for FIAs has evolved with distribution, and is it an ongoing priority to continue to diversify the distribution there?
It is, but the competition is tougher in the financial institution part.
Okay.
That is what you have to weigh up. The nice thing for us, too, is we are not selling a single FIA product. We have a number of products, some that cater more to the owned distribution, some to the financial institutions and broker-dealers. If you bifurcated it, I would say income is probably a little easier at the moment than accumulation, and owned distribution is a little easier than financial institution. Having the diversification is helpful. That can shift on a dime, but that is probably Q2 2026 is what I would say.
Okay. On PRT,
Yeah.
I mean, for really the whole industry, it has been a bit quieter so far, at least in the first half of the year. Or at least for a lot of the companies.
Yeah.
I guess why do you think that is, and then how does your pipeline look as we go forward?
Okay. That's been interesting for us. We write about $1.5 billion-$2 billion a year at this stage, have done over the last couple of years. On the core retail, we're always trying to write maybe a little more than we have in the equivalent quarter of the prior year, assuming that the economic environment is there to do that, and there's some flexibility around that. With PRT, we're probably trying to write about the same. I'm not really trying to write more PRT business, given our ratings, the size of our balance sheet. That's probably about a decent amount for us, and we compete largely in the $100 million- $600 million, $700 million, $800 million. We're not in the big, big leagues.
Yeah.
The $1 billion+ where some of the large players are. I actually like the smaller, but it depends on the business. If it's a nice, clean, easy to operate piece of business, smaller is great. If it's complicated, it's almost not worth it. I would say over the last couple of years, you show up, you bid for this business, and we probably win about one in every four or five bids. In the first half of the year, I think in Q1, we only saw three deals. We wrote one of them. I would say we saw on the other two, I would say a noteworthy name, pretty aggressive, and a big name who came down to a lower level. That's interesting. I think Q2 was also a bit quiet, not a lot of bids. We won our fair share. It was fine.
You see a modest Q1, Q2, you see more in Q3, and even more in Q4. Q3, it's probably a bit less than other Q3s. There's certainly some out there. I notice more mutual presence. Some of the big mutuals who have been reasonably quiet in the space recently are showing up again. That's interesting. That'll make it, that will just add to the competitiveness. I think we'll get our fair share. It might end up being closer to $1 billion and $1.5 billion, something like that. The nice thing for us, though, is because we're established at this stage, a number of these deals are from big entities that parse them out in individual components.
We're at the stage now where I can think of at least one large American company where we've done four deals with the same company, and we show up well from a, call it an operational perspective. Again, you're looking after policyholders or pensioners. We probably punch above our weight there. But occasionally you'll lose in a tie because a very large, very highly rated entity will be picked ahead of you. I love the business.
I think it's great. It's predictable. I like the mortality level of it. It can bounce around a little bit. I did mention in the second quarter earnings call we had a little bit of that. But overall, the book, if you look back and go, well, what were your expectations and how is it turning out? Look, it's pretty easy. I shouldn't say easy. It's pretty predictable. You don't get a lot of surprises. The range of outcomes is pretty narrow, which is a good thing. It's a comfortable business to write. Maybe that's a better way to say it.
IUL, I feel like it's not discussed as much with your company, but I think it does have strategic importance. Can you talk a little bit about more on how you compete in that market, and how meaningful is it financially to the company?
Well, it's interesting. You can speak to this even better than I can, but one of the nuances, if you will, of GAAP accounting is we throw numbers together where we have life premiums and annuity deposits, which makes a little sense, right? When you actually look under the cover, we have about 1 million customers, roughly, and in terms of the big businesses, half a million of them are annuitants and half a million of them are life IUL. We have as many, actually slightly more, life customers as we have annuity customers, and the economics in terms of returns are comparable. In fact, they're probably better on the life side. That's a big part of how we look at it.
What is interesting in terms of this year, I think we are number six in IUL in dollars, but number three in policies, back to Middle America, multicultural America. I will not sit here and tell you everything is perfect, I would say our numbers there are down a little. It is not because we are writing fewer policies, it is because those policyholders cannot afford the same average premium. Our average policy is a little under $250,000. You are talking premiums in the $1,250-$1,500 range. We are seeing a bit of a shift in just the affordability for those customers to buy. It is very often the first life policy they buy. I think we are seeing an economic impact on IUL, not a competitive impact, which is very different from what we just talked about on the FIA side, but it is an interesting one.
I think maybe shifting more to profitability. You laid out some targets towards the end of 2023.
Yeah.
I think over the last 12 months, if we normalize for alts and some expense items, your ROA, I believe, is 119 basis points, and your ROE, I think, is 11%, both over the trailing 12 months. How are you thinking about the progress towards the medium-term targets that you had laid out, and what would be the key upside drivers you would expect from here?
Yeah, it is interesting. The metrics were laid out a few years ago, as you said. The AUM metric would very much still be intact. We are on a nice path to get to $100 billion here in a few years. That is noteworthy. The ROA, I have said this over the last few quarters, I think will be somewhat corridor bind here. If you get into the components, we definitely benefited from some expansion on the investment portfolio, which Leena can get into. That is real, and that will remain. Surrenders have been higher. That is fine. I am agnostic on surrenders, honestly. I can replace the business on broadly economic terms as I keep it, back to this whole spread maintenance thing. But it is hard to imagine that the level of surrenders will stay this high for several years. It might for several quarters.
I don't know if it will for several years. That's okay. That's kind of a watch for me, but it'll impact the ROA math. Balancing that on the other side, we've had our shift in the expense scale. We've gone from an expense ratio of 60 basis points at year-end 2024. We brought it down to 50 by year-end 2025, and we're on a path to 45. We said we would get to $45 billion by the end of next year, but we got to $47 billion already this year. It can move a little bit, but we're ahead of progress, I would say, on that. I think that'll be a bit more range bind, and it's hard to predict exactly spreads and all of the other pieces that go with that.
The ROE, yeah, I think the target is 14%, and I think, yeah, we bounce around a little bit, but we're sort of in that 11%- 12% range. That is an expectation that you should hold us to task for, that we do that. That's a very key focus of ours. I should probably acknowledge there was probably a multiple in those metrics as well that we haven't achieved, and that's moved around a little bit. That's obviously a lot harder to control. Yeah, for me, I think that, yeah, range bind ROA, expand the ROE, continue the growth momentum. We didn't have a capital light or fee element, so I would add that.
Yeah, and underscoring all of that is keep the core retail momentum going. I have profitability margins to maintain. That's true, and we will do that. But also, we're capital self-sufficient, and I think that's important. That wasn't maybe a metric three years ago, but I think it's a very important one for everybody, probably one for all of us, everyone in this room, they want to know that we can do this. That's important as well. I think we have more metrics. They're just not quite the same.
Yeah. I guess maybe to summarize, it sounds like maybe the ROA is more range bound, but you still feel like you'll get ROE expansion from the shift towards more capital light business.
Absolutely. Yes.
You just mentioned it, so maybe we will go into capital generation. Just what is your view of organic capital generation for the company after you fund the retained business growth at this point?
Roughly speaking, we spend about $1 billion on riding this level of business. Maybe a little less. The debt service is about $150 million. The dividends are about $150 million. The crazy part when the stock gets low is you are comparing yourself with money market funds. It is a heck of a yield. I wish it were not so, but it is. As I mentioned, we have made the decision in the second quarter to take some of that capital towards buybacks. I put that in the opportunistic category as well. For us, if we want to ride a lot more, and I am not sure we would, with less MYGA, less opportunity maybe for FABN in the near term. PRT, we may end up riding less just circumstantially. That gives us maybe arguably more flexibility.
To do meaningful more RILA, FIA, IUL, then we would have to weigh up, okay, are we taking from something else? Two things. Are we taking from something else? Are you reinsuring more? I should also acknowledge, we are doing all of this with our alternative portfolio is about $4 billion. It is about 8% of our portfolio. For the last three and a half years, it is probably been yielding seven-ish compared with a long-term expectation of 12. Five points on $4 billion, that is $200 million.
You are three and a half years in, and I am not sure. Those numbers add up as well. Obviously, all of that coming through or coming true, depending on which way you want to look at it, makes a very significant change to the capital. I have to have a lens of, if that takes a while longer, then obviously we've got to keep the engine going as well. That's kind of the unknown, and I have both an optimistic and a conservative lens on that in terms of managing the company.
Well, maybe Leena can get into this a little bit, but pretty much everyone has had somewhat below plan alts for the last few years, but I think you've also talked a little bit about some vintage considerations too, for your portfolio. Can you touch on that a bit?
Yeah. So, like Conor said the alts portfolio is about $4 billion. $3 billion is LPs and a little over $1 billion is about residuals. The structural thing that is impacting our performance is that our LP portfolio is very young, and the returns for a typical LP drawdown portfolio sort of emerge and pick up in the mid to late stages. So we did analysis earlier this year. We looked back at how equity LPs had done historically, and if you think of the lifetime of an LP fund as 15 years, and you break it down into three five year stages, so early stage, mid stage, and late stage, the way the returns emerges in the past, first five years, it was around 6%.
If you expand that to first 10 years, it was around 10%, and if you extend that to the entire lifetime, 15 years, then it was 15%. So 85% of our portfolio is in the early to mid stage, and that's really what is dampening down our returns. So it's expected. To add to that, there is some macro impact as well as M&A activity has slowed down, so that impacts realizations. But it's really the structural piece that is impacting our performance. We don't own a lot of real estate. It's mostly in equity LPs, and our peers, on the other hand, do own a lot of real estate, and real estate has been sort of under pressure for a while. So that's impacting their performance, but that's not what's impacting ours.
If I were to exclude alts, can you also talk about how the rest of the investment portfolio is performing, maybe both credit and in returns?
Yeah, absolutely. The portfolio is very well diversified and aligned with our liability profile. About 97% of the retained fixed income portfolio is investment grade, and it's done really well. So second quarter, our core fixed income yield was 4.91%, which was 14 basis points above the prior quarter and 8 basis points above the prior year. So the yield is emerging nicely, and in terms of credit-related impairments, which would tell you how it's performed, the trailing five years, it's been 6 basis points, which is half of where the industry average is. So credit-related impairments, which sort of tell you performance, has been really, really good for us.
But that's not an accident. Leena and the team have done a fair amount of weeding and-
Yeah.
...revising the portfolio over the last several years.
Yeah. Post-COVID, just given, and even prior to that, retail real estate was under pressure. Post-COVID, office real estate was under pressure. We had the regional banking crisis, so banking was under pressure. Through all of this, thankfully for us, our real estate exposures were more liquid. We had more in CMBS versus CMLs. We were able to rotate out of where we thought there was true fundamental deterioration as a result of COVID. That has really helped us in terms of performance. We did about over $3 billion of repositionings over the last five years, which increased the portfolio quality, which has also meant that our impairments have been much better than the industry.
We have done a lot on the disclosures. We sat down in the early spring with our big credit investors, said, "What would you want to see about our portfolio?" A lot of it was details on middle market. We have added a whole host of disclosures with that. I can honestly tell you, every single thing they asked for, unless it was nonsensical, and I cannot even think of any of it was, we were like, "Sure." There was nothing that I would have been uncomfortable or any of us would have been uncomfortable disclosing, and we have done all of that. I think that has helped a lot. Obviously, outside factors can raise due concerns, but certainly in terms of private credit or middle market lending or anything like that, we have really tried to tackle everything head on. Blackstone, they have been a great partner for us.
We are almost out of time, but I just wanted to touch on one final thing I am sure people are curious about, which is if you do sell part of the stake in the owned distribution businesses, what would be your capital priorities as for the freed-up capital?
Well, I have to be careful, obviously that is a board decision. I think it would be a nice balancing act. The three logical places you would consider, would you pay down a little bit of debt? Maybe. We do not have anything actually coming due for another 18 months or so. Would you at least maybe align a piece? Maybe. That is maybe the less attractive of the three. What do you want to do from an investment. What are the opportunities to invest the capital right up? Obviously, I expect the board would weigh up the advantages of a, call it an off-cycle dividend type thing, which sort of makes sense for us, right?
If I may, I know we are right at the end, but we have a valuable book that I am not sure is being reflected in the company, right? We are trading at half of book value. If you did a sum of the parts evaluation from our organization or an intrinsic value of cash flows, I think you'd come up with numbers that are broadly close to that book value basis. The question is, well, okay, if part of this is you can take something that is underappreciated today, if you turn it into cash, it's pretty hard to value it at $0.50 on the dollar when it's cash.
Yeah.
A lot of food for thought there, but that's part of the logic here.
Excellent. All right. Well, we're out of time, so we're going to wrap it up.
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks, Conor, and the F&G team.
Thank you.
All right. Excellent.