We'll go ahead and get started here. I've got F&G Annuities for you all. First, I'd like to thank Conor Murphy, CEO and President, Mike Bailey, CFO, and Leena-
Punjabi.
-sorry, Punjabi. My apologies. CIO. We've got the whole crew here. Should be a good session. I wanted to kick it off with more of a broad question about the strategy. Starting off with the big picture, you've laid out intentions to align the business model to be less capital intensive and more fee-based over time. Can you frame where you are in that transition today, and some of the things that you're leaning into to further the shift?
Yeah. Absolutely. I'd love to. First of all, just thank you for having us. Thank you for the support. Yeah. While F&G has been around for a long time, F&G has been around since the 1950s, in many respects, the F&G that exists today has had about an eight or nine-year journey. In that time, we've grown very significantly from being predominantly a fixed indexed annuity distributed through independent distribution to being much more multifaceted across life and annuities. But I would argue that we were, yeah, we were largely a spread business. We hadn't evolved to where we were doing segment reporting. But this year-end, we did at least take a step in that direction by highlighting that, for example, back in 2022, we were virtually all spread.
By 2025, 15% of our earnings had come from fee businesses on the life side, on the reinsurance side, and on our own distribution ownership business. That just by virtue of the three-year plan, 2025. By 2028, we expect it to be at 25%, which I think is very achievable. Obviously, you have a lot of levers where you can make that number bigger or smaller as you see fit. At the same time, it's been pretty fast-growing. Over the last handful of years, we've gone from about $25 billion of gross AUM to $75 billion , about $55 billion of that retained. Yeah, so it's been fast growth. It's been an AUM focus with an ROA expansion story that we largely achieved and an ROE story that's continuing to evolve.
Got it. Okay. Very helpful. Next one on competition. Can you talk about the competitive environment a bit specifically for some of the spread products? How do you balance the discipline versus profitable growth, and what are the things we should be focused on?
So it differs at the moment by product to some extent, by distribution opportunity as well. Maybe running through them, the FIA space, I would argue remains very healthy. We had a particularly strong first half of the year. We were up about 4%. I think the industry was down 5%. But I would say that broadly speaking, it is an area of the market that has done well pretty consistently. And perhaps in any individual quarter, you might see a bit of a change in league tables about how somebody, or even over the course of a year, how it may have moved around. But we just had this conversation with the board, actually, when we were looking back over five years. 70% of the business is written by 10 companies, and it is basically everybody's. It all shakes out.
Everybody's basically done the same over the last five years. I would say everybody's up 15%-20%. But it is a little tight. I would say that 2025 was a little less profitable than 2024. I would say 2026 so far has been somewhere in the middle. Switching over to RILAs. We were newer to the buffered annuity space. For us, it has been a great growth but off a small base. So we are very happy with everything in that space right now. In fact, we have written as much RILA already this yea, that we wrote all of last year. But admittedly, off a smaller base. So that has been pretty good. Switching over. Maybe staying within on the MYGA space, we have de-emphasized that pretty significantly for us, and that has just been a capital allocation return trade for us.
It ebbs and flows, second quarter of last year, we wrote a lot because it was a great spread opportunity and a great reinsurance opportunity. We reinsured 90% of our MYGAs. But at the moment, we are seeing better opportunities elsewhere. And in fact, as you know, we did probably an outsized level of buybacks for our company in the second quarter, and it was capital that we did not use on MYGAs, that we used on the buybacks. So we see the MYGA space as remaining very competitive. So we are just not seeing the returns there to write very much of it at the moment. We are still writing some. We are still in the space, and we will ratchet that up and down as the opportunities arise. On the life side, still seeing a lot of attractiveness with the IUL space.
Again, a lot of how we distribute through the independent distribution organizations, we are really focused on Middle America and multicultural America. That has been strong. We are number six in FIA, number six in IUL, but that is on premium dollars. We are actually number three on policies. We are selling on average smaller face amount policies, probably a little under $250,000. That is maybe $1,200- $1,500 a year in annual premium. We are seeing smaller dollars from a premium point of view. Middle America is less able to afford a policy in 2026 than they could in 2025. That is interesting. Similar policy count, but dollars are down a little bit. On the pension side, the PRT space is interesting. You tend to see less in the first half of the year. You see more in the third quarter, more again in the fourth.
We wrote $500 million or $600 million in the first half of the year, which was probably about what we thought we would do. I would say we kind of got our fair share. We end up writing about one in every four or five of the opportunities we bid on. But that was pretty modest. Maybe from an overall industry, I think we see some of the bigger carriers coming on market a little bit. We do not participate in the above billion-dollar space. We are more in the $100 million to $600 million-$700 million. Certainly some of that competitiveness, I would say we have seen some of the big mutuals come back to that space that we have not seen for a while. Good space, but yeah, definitely increased competition there. We will see how the second half of the year plays out.
These pension plans are much more well-funded than they had been previously as well. So it might not be quite as robust as it has been in the last couple of years. It is core for us, but we are not trying to grow that the way that we are. On life and FIA, we would like to write at least as much as we did in the equivalent quarter of the prior year.
Yeah.
On PRT, we are trying to write roughly the same, call it $1 billion-$1.5 billion a year, given the size of our balance sheet.
Got it.
The last piece, just FABN- type stuff, that was very good late last year and the beginning of 2026. Just private credit concerns and other things have capped that out. So we have stayed on the sidelines there a little bit.
Makes sense. Next topic. We have seen a couple of your larger competitors that have merged. Your prior firm, even.
So, wanted to ask about that and just how important is operational scale in this industry. Do you all feel like you are positioned well to compete just with the backdrop of some of the peers becoming much more consolidated?
All right. Maybe I'll go first, but then we'll-
Sure.
-bring Mike in here as well. It's very important, but I think it's not just about scale. We are very much in the relationship business, and for us too, because so much of our business is in the independent distribution space, those are not contractual relationships. They might've been decades ago, but they're really an earned relationship that how well you show up for both of your clients, both the, call-it-the-advisory-client and the consumer- client, is really, really important. You clearly, from a pure operational service perspective, we're very focused on that. But also remember, in the FIA and IUL space, those are policies that get repriced every year. So we talk about being in the spread margin, but you've heard me say this before, really in the spread maintenance business, and that's a balancing act.
You've got to do the right thing in terms of the company and the invest, sorry, the company, the advisor, and the shareholder. I think we show up very well there, and we focus very hard on that. Lots of these companies have a choice who they. They all have a choice who they do business with. Everybody does business with multiple carriers. I don't think anybody has a monopoly, but we have to manage that pretty carefully. At the same time, we've grown very quickly, so we did look to improve our expense base from a ratio perspective. We've gone from 60 basis points at the beginning of 2025. We have a target of getting down to 45 basis points as an expense ratio by the end of next year. We went 60 basis points - 50 basis points last year. We were at 47 basis points in the middle of the year.
I would say that's ahead of plan.
Yeah.
It won't necessarily keep going quite so consistently, but we will get there. I think that's helpful from all sorts of reasons, including the AOCI. I think for us, it's about doing your business very well, spending your dollars well, because the competitiveness, don't get me wrong, the competitiveness is tough, and you have to have that lever as well. It would be hard without it. You're balancing the, call it the investing opportunity, with the expense part of it, and then just being able to maintain that core spread, I think, is really important. Broadly, in the industry, obviously, we've got something very big happening with Equitable and Corebridge, but maybe not a lot outside of that.
I'll just add, I think I'll echo some of Conor's comments. I think that it's a competitive space, and so efficiency is critically important. Some, my former employer included, and I say this fully respectfully of both sides, they've decided to look for those efficiencies in the form of scale in terms of an acquisition or not. I'm sure they will deliver on that. For us, we're a smaller and more nimble organization. As such, we have the ability to execute on efficiency initiatives and automation initiatives at a rapid pace and in an efficient manner. I think that those are just kind of given the position of Corebridge-Equitable, those larger firms. They took a particular approach. We took a particular approach that we take a particular approach which we feel confident in.
I guess it's just a different way of saying there are different ways to achieve that operating efficiency.
I think just to underscore one thing what Mike said, we are a great sized company, right? We're, as I mentioned, top six in FIA, IUL, PRT. I think we're the only top 10 FIA writer that doesn't own or isn't owned by an asset manager. We sort of joke internally we're all refugees from bigger companies. It feels great because we can be very reactive. It's not cumbersome for us to move quickly in the marketplace. I think that's important as well, right? Everything happens so quickly in terms of just, half the annuity products sold out there are replacement products, too. You've got to be in lockstep with everybody else. Having said that, if you go out and do something incredibly unique, it gets copied very, very quickly. Good balancing act.
Yep. Okay.
Next topic was on the ROA. If I rewind back to the Investor Day you guys did some time ago, there is a medium-term range that was put out. I think it was 133 basis points , 155 basis points , if I am not mistaken. Can you talk a bit about how you are tracking? I think you made some comments earlier on this as well, but what are the different things that are moving the ROA around? How do you think it is tracking relative to that? Do you have any kind of update to that range?
I will tee Leena up here a little bit. Going back to, that was from our Investor Day metrics a few years ago, and ROA expansion that was partly coming from the investment side, partly coming from the scale side. We have talked a little bit about ROA, ROE, AUM, I think were the key metrics from that time. I would argue AUM maintains a very key metric, both gross and net. On the ROA, we talk about it being a little more corridor. We are probably closer to that 120 basis points range at the moment. I think we are running 119 basis points over the last trailing 12 months.
Sure.
One of the elements that had contributed on the positive side, but may not necessarily stay that high, is just the level of surrenders in the industry. Which is an important one to call out because we are agnostic about surrenders. We are just as happy to keep the business on the books. Again, back to being able to maintain the spread, and as it happens, if the business is surrendered, we can take that capital and reinvest it on a very similar basis. But it is hard to imagine the level of surrenders, and therefore the level of surrender fee income will stay this hard for very long. It may for several quarters. I am not sure it will for several years, but we will see with rates.
Sure.
Obviously, it will be an interesting week to see where rates come out. Prepayments, we probably have seen those. We would rather not have them because they talk about make-whole provisions, but they are seldom make-whole , they are partial.
Yeah.
Those have really dissipated, so that is helpful. We are seeing a very low level of prepay. You always have a little bit, but we are seeing a low level of prepayments. I think that is a good thing. Scale will continue to be a positive thing. The interesting thing is that the investment opportunities remain, but you really have to look at everything on a capital-adjusted basis. That, I think, is a constant in everything. It seems like there is an awful lot of wins around that as well. With that, let me just invite Leena into this piece.
Yeah, Conor, you covered it really well. We have made a lot of progress on the investment portfolio to add margin the last three years. I would say some of it was taken back by the prepayments that Conor referred to because those were spready CLOs that we had acquired back when spreads were pretty high, in 2018 specifically. As those paid off, we did earn quite a bit of prepayment income, but those have slowed down, so now our efforts to add margin in the portfolio should be more pronounced going forward.
Got it. One of the other things you have referenced is the focus on ROE as well.
Yeah.
And I think things have maybe evolved too since the last time we had this Investor Day. So I appreciate that maybe ROA is not the only way to look at it, right? It's ROE, and you're talking about these fee-based businesses. So are there levers to ROE that go beyond-
Yeah.
-just what we're seeing in the ROA, and what are those?
Well, I think a lot of it will. So at the core of the shift to being more capital light, more fee based, is the reinsurance opportunity. So at this stage, we reinsure about 90% of the MYGAs and about 50% of the FIAs. Now, within the FIA space, roughly we do about as much income as accumulation. On the income side, we have very noteworthy reinsurance partners. We just done a large one in July. On the accumulation side, we have a sidecar. Well, it's about a year old now, sidecar with Blackstone. So those, I think, are opportunities, real expansion opportunities for us as well. So it's relatively new that we've gotten to this, call it 50% level. There's no limitation on it. I think there's every likelihood we will reinsure more. It's a nice diversifier to Blackstone. So the Blackstone IMA applies to the retained assets.
But the reinsured assets, back to the point of being the only one of the top 10 FIA writers that isn't owned by or own their own asset management firm. There are lots of companies who want to reinsure that business with us for their own reasons, and that works very well. So the beauty about this is when you write and retain business, I think everybody probably knows this, you've got a pretty high capital charge on the investment side, and an annual charge on the capital side, a one-time charge on the insurance side. When you're reinsuring it, you're getting the capital charge refunded, so you just have the insurance charge for the first year. So, after year one, you have an income stream, the fees from the reinsurance, with no capital against it.
Yeah.
That's a great piece of ROE expansion. ROE, just to frame it for folks, we're at about 11%-12% right now with a target of 13%-14% that we are very focused on, and we should be able to continue to grow that. That's a big part of it. Then just to kind of round that out, we don't reinsure the PRT business, for example, and we're up to almost at $9 billion in assets there. We don't reinsure the life business, nor indeed the RILA, but it isn't big enough. There are lots of people in the industry who are exploring RILA and PRT reinsurance as well. We watch that kind of interestingly and see what might come of that.
Got it. Okay. That's all very helpful. I'm going to jump around a little bit. I'm going to come back to some of the growth items and questions on the products. I wanted to go to Leena and ask on private credit. There's a ton of investor focus on this still, as you can imagine. Can you talk just about the importance of it in the new money that you're putting to work, and why it's an attractive asset class for F&G?
Yeah, absolutely. Just to set the stage, private credit, to us, is anything that is illiquid. But for the purpose of this discussion, I'll just focus on middle- market lending and asset-backed lending. Within those buckets, we think about it in three categories. The first one being asset classes that insurance companies have been doing for a long time, like middle market lending. They've been on insurance balance sheets for a long time. Then the middle bucket is asset classes that have been on institutional balance sheets for a long time, so for example, the banking channel, but are new to insurance balance sheets. A lot of the collateral that we invest in through asset-backed lending is new to insurance balance sheets. Then there's a third bucket, which is just new, right? It's not been invested in before. Things like buy now, pay later loans.
The reason I break it out this way is that we invest in the first and second bucket, but we stay away from the last bucket because for the first two buckets, there is real observable history and data that you can look at and see how those assets have performed during downturns. You can see what the downside risk is and what you would want to get paid for that. In the third bucket, you don't get to do that, so we stay away from it. Just want to make that distinction. Then we find it very attractive. When you diversify your book between public and private assets, you're by design diversifying across issuers, and so you're taking less idiosyncratic risk. Now, yes, there is more complexity with some of these private assets because they are structured.
But as long as you have the infrastructure to understand that complexity and price it, which we do with our asset manager, Blackstone. They manage over a trillion dollars of assets, and that entire ecosystem is built to tackle this complexity, understand it, take advantage of it, and earn a premium as a result of it. So, we like the complexity premium, we like the illiquidity premium. We do a lot of analysis on the illiquidity side to make sure that even in a stress scenario, we have ample liquidity in our public investment grade book to meet our liabilities. So, very comfortable with the illiquidity risk we are taking and like to earn the premium over there. So, it's important to our book. And with Blackstone as our partner, we do it in a very sensible way and a conservative way.
And then if I may, these are not small companies.
Yeah.
I think that's important.
That's a good point, Conor. The first quarter earnings disclosures, we have a quarterly investor presentation that we also put out, and with the first quarter one, we added some slides on private credit, basically middle market lending and asset-backed funding, and added more disclosures to provide more transparency and more granularity as to what that portfolio is. So if you haven't looked at it, look at it. And to Conor's point, within the middle market lending book, which is what most people are concerned about, the vast majority of it is investment grade at 91%. There's only $500 million of it, which is below investment grade. Our experience so far has been really good. We've had more upgrades, pretty much zero downgrades, known accruals are very minimal, and these are large companies that we are lending to. So with EBITDA around $200 million plus.
Very happy with performance there.
Great. Before we leave investments, I did want to ask about just the regulatory environment. Are there any things we should have top of mind? I am just getting the question a lot because of some of the headlines about basketball teams getting sold and so forth.
Okay.
Maybe if you could just make a quick comment on the regulatory environment and how you see that unfolding.
Yeah. You really asked two questions there. The regulatory environment is different from the basketball environment.
Yeah.
But on the regulatory front, there have been some changes, increased capital charges on CLOs, which we put out a disclosure, that the impact to us is going to be approximately 10 points of RBC. With more management actions, we hope to drive it down even more. But very manageable even with the 10 points. There are more initiatives underway, like they're looking at residential mortgage loans, and RSAT assets, et cetera. But it doesn't impact us as much on the RSAT side because they're looking at it, from what I understand, only where you're hedging spread risk, credit spread risk. We don't do that. We are more doing it for interest rate risk. So nothing over there. On the RML side, they're looking at RMLs that are more commercial in nature, so similar to CMOs.
And that could increase capital charges on the margin for residential mortgage loans. We do have a meaningful allocation there, but it's going to be minor because CMOs are also pretty attractive on a capital-adjusted basis. With RMLs yielding more than CMOs, they are still attractive on a capital-adjusted basis. So on the margin, asset allocation will change as the capital-adjusted yields change. The optimizer takes assets differently, but not meaningful or not something we are concerned about. On the basketball environment, I guess you're referring to the whole Guggenheim, Mark Walter. I mean, not to name names, but I just want to clarify that we don't have any asset manager ownership. So Blackstone does not own any part of F&G. So there is zero affiliation over there. There is robust governance around our asset management.
The F&G investment team and risk team set the strategy as well as the risk limits within which Blackstone manages the assets. There is a lot of oversight and full transparency around the asset management.
Great. I just want to go back for a sec. The CLO is an interesting example, right? So why did we have CLOs in our portfolio? It's a really good asset class as an alternative to cash. When the changes came during the year, they were lower for anything above triple B and starting at triple B, and below it got higher. We have a lot of triple Bs, so that's where the 10 basis points came from. But it made a lot of sense for us. It was a very good asset class for us. So you're also dealing with them, th ey're great investments. They're fully liquid. There are lots of folks within and external from the insurance space, like the idea of trading out of them and taking it off doesn't make a lot of sense because you've used them to price your book, et cetera.
We will navigate that. Ten points does not really matter to us. It was an intentional profit. Some of it, when the NAIC sit down with the American Academy of Actuaries and work things out, generally good things happen. Some overflow from that that maybe was maybe a little, I do not know, just when the actuaries are involved, I am looking at Mike's white eyes, that generally in my head this will be a good thing. Leena is right. At every stage, even heading into next year's planning, you are looking at a capital adjusted and trying to anticipate where the shifts will be a little bit because competitiveness and pricing is tight. Investing, it is no longer and we are limited as to where you can have certain asset classes, obviously, like everybody would be.
When there is a higher capital charge associated, you really have to take that into consideration as well.
Yep. Okay. Jumping around a bit here, but I wanted to touch on Peak Altitude. I know you guys are exploring different alternatives for that business, potentially. Can you take us through what that could look like and how do you approach maximizing shareholder value in this?
Okay. Refer back to that. Really quickly, Peak Altitude is, over the last number of years, we have invested in some of our independent distribution partners, or what we now refer to as own distribution. We have invested about $700 million in four entities. We own them at different levels of ownership. We have got 100%, a 70%, a 49%, and a 40%. For the 49% and 40%, a clear path to majority, and it generates about $80 million-$85 million of EBITDA. We love that business. What we would like to do, ideally, and we will see how this plays out, but I think the example we have cited is having a partner who would invest alongside us. We would rather own half as much of an entity twice as big, if you will, just to be simplistic.
It has no debt of its own, so someone who would be able to continue to invest alongside us, take on some debt, perhaps, if they wanted to do that. Those entities, the opportunity to bring them to larger ownership, and they themselves are rolling up entities underneath. It is not about Peak going from 4 : 5 to 6 : 7. It is really those four continuing to grow. There are other structures. We have distribution partners who would buy the business, I think, tomorrow, but we would like to continue to share in the upside, hence, that sort of idealistic world of 51/49 has some advantages for Mike on the accounting side because we sell about 30% of our life business and 10% of our annuity business through those entities, so some of that gets consolidated away. 49% would clear that. We are right in the middle of it.
If other structures come along that make more economic sense, we will weigh that out, which is sort of important, and you know this as well as I do. From a valuation perspective, I can sit here and tell you all the reasons we are a great company, but I think from a stock perspective, I think perhaps the whole industry is perhaps underperforming. I would certainly put our square in that category as well. So roughly speaking, we are trading at about $3 billion. We have a book value of $6 billion, and we can debate elements of it. But I think similarly, from our perspective, certainly, if we look at our segments and apply the average multiples that others in the industry would have, I think we would have a number back in that $6 billion range.
If we look at our internal cash flow trend testing and the present value of the distributable earnings across the blocks of business, we would get to the same, call it, $6 billion type number. So part of it is just how do we unlock and bring a tangibility to some of that valuation, and Peak is part of it. It is logical to think that if we turn some of that into cash, it is hard to trade cash at $0.50 on the dollar. Maybe not impossible. We will find out. But that seems to be a good step for us.
Yep. No, that makes sense. I want to circle back on sales. FIAs is a place where you guys sound pretty optimistic on the market. Can you talk a bit about that and some of the things you are doing from a distribution standpoint to drive sales?
Yes. We've had a good start to the year, and that momentum is continuing. We feel good. I think it's important. Pricing has remained, I think, fairly rational. I should be slightly careful. My crystal ball here is a couple of months, right? I've got a pretty good sense of the next couple of months. It's hard for me to go much beyond that.
Sure.
We talk about having core retail products. It's probably the most core because it drives a big part of our stuff. We continue to feel very good there. As I mentioned, maybe at the outset, it's probably a little tighter in the couple of dozen financial institutions and broker-dealer spaces that we play in. Yeah, that feels like it will hold up. I think we touched on some of it. IUL feels like it will as well. PRT remains to be seen. I think the level of rider remains very robust for everybody. I'm sure the big players are jockeying for their own individual relative share. Then we'll see. Some of the noise in the industry at the moment, if I can go there carefully, will probably create some opportunities. Some folks will be able to sell less, and some will have to pick up.
I'm not sure it'll move the dial that notably over the long term. Back to my comment at the beginning about how top 10 riders ride about 70% of this business on average over a longer period anyway. So yeah, we feel really good. We're in a good capital position for it. We'd like the alternative portfolio to do a little better, I'll be honest. I mean, that would-
Sure.
-give us even more capital flexibility. But we'll get there. We have an expectation we'll get there. Did I answer your follow-up?
Yeah. No, you did. Maybe I want to follow up just on the point you mentioned on disruption in the market. Obviously, there's a big player being acquired. There's a couple companies that are merging, so it's not any one specifically even that you got to comment on. But there's things moving around. Are you seeing meaningful opportunities? Are there opportunities to get shelf space for things like that as people have to diversify?
Yes. But specifically for us, the one being acquired, I think most of us probably sit here, and we hope it closes for the industry. I'll put it that way.
We're rooting for that.
Yeah, we're all rooting for that. Interestingly, the Corebridge-Equitable merger doesn't really impact us too much. Even though they're very, and will be an even bigger, player in the space, we don't actually trip over each other too much. So I don't see that as being very meaningful for us. The perspective that a Delaware Life may lose a couple of distribution partners, a couple have said that they are pausing, whether it's concerns around Delaware Life or the regulatory or the rating agency perspective on it. Sure. In the near term, might that make a little bit of a difference? Yeah. But again, I think we can ride. Honestly, for us, it's a risk-adjusted capital balance. I wouldn't suggest we can write as much IUL or FIA as we want, but at margins we like, we can write plenty.
Yeah.
I don't feel restrained or limited there. Part of that too is we're not in that very wealthy segment of the population. There's a lot of need in middle America and multicultural America for IUL and FIA. That's why RILA was good for us as well. We're not competing with the big players. We're selling RILAs to people who are buying their first annuity product. That's the beauty of it. It's a great product for that.
Yeah.
We feel pretty partially or quite notably insulated from a lot of that, which is helpful.
Helpful. Look, I wanted to come back to capital management. I know you commented a little bit about it already. You've potentially got flexibility coming in from Peak. You mentioned the valuation where it's sitting, and makes it fairly attractive. You've also been shifting towards more flow reinsurance and reinsurance in general. All of that could allow you to ramp it up if you wanted, is my guess. But what does that look like? How do you decide on the trade-offs between taking advantage of cheap stock versus the long-term growth strategy and so forth?
I'll separate it a little bit, and I'll go deeper into anything that's helpful for you. In terms of what I would describe as the daily capital management, right? The in-force produces a lot of capital, which, for the most part, we're using to service debt, pay what is a very healthy dividend relative to the stock price.
And then continue to write about $12 billion - $13 billion of business a year. Now, we did buybacks to some extent this year, and that is always a tool available to us. I am both optimistic and pessimistic in capital planning. Optimistic because of how everything is progressing. I have to be slightly careful of the alt portfolio yielding, call it 7% instead of 12% on $4 billion. That is a couple of hundred million a year, and we are 3.5 years into subdued alt returns. So going to have to have a little bit of a lens as to if that continues. Obviously the alt portfolio, and our longer-term return, has been closer to 10%, and we have expectations that that will come through. But that is a lot of capital, or we are waiting for a lot of capital, depending on your perspective on that.
I think the piece that gets interesting, though, is there is a lot of capital in the in-force. We have grown from $25 billion to $ 55 billion retained. Peak is an example of taking, which you might, by comparison, argue is a piece of in-force and turning some of that into capital. Those are the tools that have been available to us, but that we have not executed on. That is part of the just weighing up what the courses of action are. We have an awful lot of opportunity that we can avail our back to. It is hard to we can trade it at $0.50 when its cash is different. Yeah, lots of leverage there. We will see where we go.
Okay. Maybe we could leave it with your valuation where it is. What do you think is the biggest misconception? What would you urge people to consider about your stock that you think is not being perceived correctly?
Well, everybody will have their own views. But I would start with, I think, the fact that we are such a clean, simple book. That was a big part of what attracted me to the company. I was like, "This is a book of very simple FIA, IUL, PRT, 1 million American customers on the insurance side and 150,000 pensioners." It is really simple. There is no legacy VA, ULSG, long-term care, disability, or anything like that. For a company of our size, and we type gross AUM growth, we do not have the outflows. Almost every major company has either an underappreciated business or a damaged business, right? We can all argue this, right?
Yeah.
We are in the underappreciated category. There is nothing damaged. That is part of it. At the end of the day, the tangible cash that exists within that in force, I think, is probably the thing that is the most underappreciated. I can sit here and talk how great the team or the culture or anything like that, and all of that will help us grow very well from here. But in terms of the actual value in book, you can talk about this earlier, we have gone from $25 billion to $ 55 billion . We could go right back down to $25 billion and do it all over again. There is nothing to prevent us from doing that. So I think that is where the real opportunities potentially lie. But we will navigate all of that.
Great. Well, thanks very much for-
Thank you for having me.
-being with us today.
Yeah, of course.
Thanks, everybody in the audience.
All right. Thank you.