Globe Life Inc. (GL)
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Bank of America US Financials Conference

Feb 14, 2023

Speaker 4

We are live for I think this might be the last insurance meeting of the day, which I give everyone's effort, but I've been doing eight of these today, so you know, all that coffee matters. This is Globe Life. Really excited to have Co-Chief Executives Matt Darden, Frank Svoboda here, and CFO Tom Kalmbach from Globe Life. You know, I asked them earlier, I wanted to read about a lot of the wonderful things that they've accomplished in their careers, but they said, "No, no, we don't need the embellished bios." You're not getting a life story from these guys. You know, I guess just to start off, I don't think it's been one year yet since you guys became Co-Chief Executives.

Can you just talk about, you know, your new roles at the company and how your eyes have changed since you've ascended to the hot seat?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Do you want me to start? Well, we actually stepped into the role on January first, so we're about six weeks in.

Speaker 4

Mm-hmm.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

You know, we've had a really good transition with, you know, Gary Coleman and Larry Hutchison, who had been co-CEOs for a number of years. Both Matt and I have been around the organization for quite some time. I've been with the company for 20 years and stepped into the CFO role 10 years ago. Matt joined us, you know, he was, had exposure to the company many years ago in an auditor function, and then joined us as a chief strategy officer, you know,

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah, 2014.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

You know, we've been working together for a number of years on a lot of different initiatives across the organization, and, really working over the past year especially, really closely on a lot of transition type work and getting ready for this role. You know, as we think about, you know, as we got approached and really had the opportunity to think about whether we wanted to do this as a co-executive, you know, type role together, you know, we really, as we compared notes on how we think about the organization and, what we think about the overall strategy at Globe Life, you know, we figured out we're really well aligned on how we think.

We both really like, the position of the company and what we do, and thought we could really work well together and, you know, continue to move the company forward.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

The organization was set up that way just from Gary and Larry's tenure. It was very much little disruption to the management team. We're really focused on executing our strategy and having us both grow up there from an insider perspective is we know what makes Globe successful, and we're focused on how do we continue that growth and success in the future, and where do we need to invest to continue that trajectory.

Speaker 4

You know, it's not unheard of, but co-CEOs are rare. Of course, as you mentioned, Gary and Larry were co-CEOs before you.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Have you divided the portfolio? I mean, does it work for Globe Life?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Is the portfolio of what you're each working on different? How is that sort of managed?

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yes. It's structured, such that I focus really on sales and marketing and enablement there, and Frank's focused more on some of the back office, accounting, finance, investment areas. Very similar, not exactly the same, but similar to how Larry and Gary had that divided in the areas of focus. Then we come together, of course, on anything big or joint activities. This allows us to be a little bit more focused and closer to the operations and spend time down in the operations in addition to overall corporate matters.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah, I think that's the one thing that I like about the, you know, the setup in that it really allows us from an executive seat to have a little bit broader view of the organization. We've got some really good leaders, you know, at that next level that report to us. Really, as we thought about, you know, if we were trying to reorganize that creates a lot of, you know, a decent amount of disruption. We really do have, and as we're kind of thinking about it, we really think about everything that has to do with putting policies on the books and getting them there. Then once they're on the books, how do we, you know, fulfill that all the way through claim payments? So we've kind of split it that way.

As Matt said, around some of those key assets of the organization, from an HR perspective and IT, our legal, those type of things, we're, you know, making sure that we're managing, together.

Speaker 4

Well, imagine a company that's really reliant on face-to-face sales in order to sell a product, and then you have a pandemic come in that completely stops that. Imagine another situation where unemployment is at 70-year lows and the recruiting of people to do face-to-face sales may be harder than it's ever been because the war for talent. It seems like two completely opposite things that are at the core of the success of Globe Life are one after another impediments to how you've operated this business for a very long time. Can you talk about those two things happening in quick succession, what it means for the pipeline, what it means for sales recruitment-

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Sure.

Speaker 4

How you've been adapting?

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah, that is, we're very proud of our performance during the pandemic. As you had mentioned early on, you were dealing with lockdowns. A lot of our business is sold obviously face-to-face, some of that on the work site as well. What we were able to do very early on is pivot on our face-to-face sales into electronic format, so digital presentations, and we quickly moved the agent force into that mode. What that's benefited us is that even now, as we emerge out of the pandemic, we have that capability embedded in the organization. That's something that you saw from a consumer behavior change, is that consumers now are much more adept at working online, much more used to Zoom video calls, those kind of things.

It's a capability that has been beneficial to the organization that will continue and grow. Even as things have opened back up and the pandemic seems to wane, our agent force still does quite a bit on the sales side from that digital presentation. What we found is that we've been able to recruit different types of agents during that time frame, folks that may have a disability, as an example, or some single parents, those kind of things. They can do these sales from the comfort of their home, so to speak. It's providing opportunities where we're seeing different people come to the opportunity than may have been there in the past.

As far as, just recruiting in general in the current environment, I mean, we're very proud of pre-pandemic, we had about 11,000 agents in aggregate. We're closing in on 15,000 agents today.

Speaker 4

So they got-

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

$11,000.

Speaker 4

11-15.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

To 15.

Speaker 4

From 1920 to that.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Very strong.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Very strong growth during that time frame. We get a lot of questions around just how does the job market impact you? We've always recruited from all sources, and we're recruiting agents to an opportunity. That's a career opportunity where folks come in, learn the sales side of the business, but then quickly move up into management, and then ultimately the goal is to own their own agency someday. We're providing an opportunity where those that are looking for a different type of a position, they may have seen themselves in currently a, quote, "dead-end job." They have an opportunity to be more in control of their destiny and take that entrepreneurial activity, and we provide that opportunity in the sales and the training guidance.

Most of the agents that we recruit do not have insurance experience, and many of them don't even have sales experience. We've got methodology, processes, and people put in place that can, that can recruit from all different walks of life, all different sources, get them up training and selling during that time frame. The, you know, we get questions about the current environment, the unemployment. I mean, we had 8% agent growth in one of our agencies, 12% growth in another agency, both in 2022. We've got momentum carrying on into 2023. We feel very positive about where our agent growth is going and then how we grow our sales is just having more agents. That agent growth is just a leading indicator to the sales that are going to come.

Speaker 4

Maybe this question might be able to bring Tom in a little bit. I think in 1917, the Spanish flu hit for a couple of years, and we had COVID hit in 2020, a little over 100 years later. There's a lot of scientists and sociologists who are surprised it took 100 years for between major pandemics to hit the globe, and expect it should come by more frequently. Has there been any change to how the product is priced since the pandemic to include the risk that maybe once every 30 years we have a global pandemic? Two, it may be the opposite because we assume people with the most amount of comorbidities were the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe the remaining population lives longer.

How does it affect the price for the policies?

Tom Kalmbach
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Globe Life

You must know on that aspect.

I think it's been shorter than 100 years since our last pandemic. We've had.

Speaker 4

SARS.

Tom Kalmbach
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Globe Life

SARS, we've had HIV, we've had 1956 pandemic and the 1918 pandemic. We've had them along the way. I think we'll have them in the future. I think kind of the way that we think about it for our business is, you know, we sell basic protection products, mortality and supplemental health products. We are selling it to, you know, low to low middle income marketplace. The way we price them is we price them for strong margins. We produce strong margins, which can handle some of the volatility that comes along with a pandemic or fluctuations that we have from period to period. I think our experience and results through the pandemic actually really showcase that we continue to produce strong earnings.

We haven't really changed our pricing at this point in time. You know, we have headwinds and tailwinds and interest rates are helping us, and we'll continue to, you know, monitor our mortality experience. We have a very large in-force book of business, so we have quite a bit of data with regards to mortality that we can leverage from the past, and we continue to utilize that to kind of inform us as far as where we think mortality will go going forward. We will make changes. When we make changes, it really is kind of looking holistically at the overall environment and all the aspects that go into kind of pricing a life insurance or supplemental health product.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

I think the second part of your question as you think about, you know, where do we think that mortality is going and have we pulled forward a bunch of losses that would have happened? I think as we've talked about it internally, I think the jury is still out a little bit on that. I think it's a little bit too early to tell. Clearly there were certain susceptible portions of the population that, you know, died as a result of COVID and it's accelerated some of those. I think, you know, that there's at least a portion of the population that has

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Survived COVID. They may have developed some other types of ailments associated with having that. Maybe that's will have accelerated that. We clearly are seeing excess deaths as well from, you know, that we say are related to COVID that we're seeing, whether it be from a heart and even Alzheimer's and lung ailments and those type of things. Where all that kind of plays out over a period of time, I think we're a little bit early in that, and we're keeping an eye on that and seeing what those trends are, and how that impacts, you know, our overall book of business.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Frank, what I'd say is if it does emerge, right, if we did front-end some deaths and we have lower mortality going forward, we're in a position to benefit from that.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah. We're not anticipating that at the current time.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah.

Speaker 4

I, at the risk of repeating myself, as I said in the beginning of this already, so audience participation is welcome. Just so you know, you can always raise your hand, but, I got plenty of questions in case. Oh, we do have a question, by the way.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

I was wondering if you could talk about your view on reinsurance on the mortality side, if that's changed with the pandemic or if you're comfortable with it?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

You wanna touch on that, Tom?

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah. It really hasn't. We are not a big buyer of reinsurance. Occasionally, for when we might look at a financial reinsurance transaction from time to time, but as a pure risk transfer, purchase of reinsurance, we sell relatively low face amount policies. And then also kind of the large number of policies that we have, we have pretty stable results from period to period. We don't feel like we need to purchase reinsurance at given the market that we're in.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Given, you know, our average face across the organization is around 35,000. You know, depending on the distribution, our direct to consumer is a little bit lower than that and, you know, a little bit higher on the agencies. For the most part, the largest, with some exceptions, but, you know, typically 50,000 is the highest face that we're doing. We're not really as concerned as Tom said, with having the large numbers. I mean, we're selling roughly two million policies in a year. We're getting a really, a broad spread of that risk across a large number of folks.

Speaker 4

I might be wrong. I mean, so you can correct me when you talked earlier about strong adaptations made during the pandemic. Your sales were actually quite good during the pandemic. It might be because of the skill sets that you bring to bear, and that's clearly part of it. Also, I think people fear their own mortality, and that became a tailwind. If I look in 2022, towards the end of the year, it seems to me maybe, and I may be wrong, that these sales trends are decelerating and maybe the Liberty National speed of the business, potentially American Income Life. Am I reading into it? Are our sales then, is it based on very difficult comps year-over-year? Maybe I'm wrong about what's going on.

Maybe you can sort of path out sort of how you think the sales trends look there.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Sure. There's multiple different components, but you're right. Overall, the heightened awareness benefited all of our organization, particularly so in our direct to consumer channel. Just that awareness went up. People are at home, they're shopping online, significant sales growth in 2021 and 2022. You really have to look at the different agencies, and a lot of what's driving that is the momentum in our recruiting and our agent count. Those are gonna be leading indicators to what happens to sales thereafter. Fourth quarter was very strong for a couple of our distributions. Liberty on the life side had over 20% growth in Q4 compared to Q4 the prior year. A lot of that is same thing.

You look at the growth in that agent count throughout the year, that fourth quarter was really good. Family Heritage had over a 20% growth year as well. Family Heritage is our division that sells primarily supplemental health business. Early on in the pandemic, people are focused on the life side, maybe not so much on the health side, but their agent growth and recruiting has picked up, so they've got very good momentum going through the third and fourth quarter. We really look at this on more of a year-over-year basis than quarter-over-quarter because you are gonna get fluctuations. Comparison and comps may be part of the story, but you can just kind of see that momentum.

Overall, we've grown very well and very proud of where we've been over the last couple of years. We're predicting, or forecasting, high single digits or low double-digit growth in Family Heritage and in Liberty. Our agent count grew tremendously at American Income during the pandemic. We went from roughly 7,500 agents, and in five quarters we were over 10,000 agents in that agency. They're going through a period of digesting that growth and a little bit of retrenchment and then growing again here. Again, we anticipate agent growth in American Income for 2023, but have the sales about flat from 2022. There's just some difficult comps in the first two quarters of the year for 2022 for American Income.

For Family Heritage and Liberty, we're at high single-digit or low double-digit growth in both of those agencies. Again, we think we can grow, and we've got a history of growing our agent count in all different types of economic cycles, and that's really what's gonna drive the growth on the sales side.

Speaker 4

Then in direct to consumer, I mean, the sales seem similar to maybe 2019 levels to some extent. Did you pull forward a lot of sales maybe and that otherwise would have occurred in 2022 or how do you think that's shaping up?

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

I think direct to consumer really just benefited from that increase in awareness. I mean, our sales went up over 25% without any additional marketing spend during that time frame. You're right. Now in 2022, it's getting back to about 2019 levels, and we anticipate about the same for 2023. The significant change that's happened, though, is the shift in the mix of that business previously is roughly about 55% was from a digital channel. It's up to about 70% now. If you think about what's changed with consumer behavior is consumers are much more likely to go online, get more comfortable with that method, and that's part of the shift that we're seeing. The other thing is that we've deliberately scaled back some of our traditional circulation.

The cost of, as we might imagine, paper, postage, printing, all of those on the manual side of the house, the costs have gone up. We measure our profitability down at the marketing campaign level. For those marketing campaigns that were on the margin, we've scaled back our circulation. We continue to pivot and invest in the digital. It's a lower acquisition activity, but the mail and the direct-to-consumer side there also very much supports it all because those are still brand impressions. They still generate leads that we use in our agency. It all works together because what we do know is that a customer may ultimately buy through one channel but was first exposed to Globe Life in a different channel.

We've got a lot of sophistication and modeling around where should we invest across all our different channels to optimize total sales.

Speaker 4

Along those lines, it's, you know, channels versus products. When you think about the growth for the next five years, I'm sure you see opportunities in both life and supplemental health. Can you talk about, like, you know, the total addressable market, where things are under-penetrated, which products you see as, and which channels will dominate for the sort of growth story?

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Sure. We're focused on really that middle market, and there's a huge addressable market in there is that over 50% of that population doesn't have insurance, and another significant percent is underinsured. We feel like there's plenty opportunities in that market. It's really not a product issue in the form of we have the right products we believe for that market. They're looking for an affordable basic protection life product or basic protection supplemental health product. We really don't have designs on growing the organization by introducing new products or changing our product mix.

It's really that organic growth of being able to continue to invest in our agency and our agency force, grow that agent count, like I talked about earlier, about, you know, where we were from 2019 through 2022, and that's how we're going to continue to grow the sales of the company. We believe that there's continues to be a vast undertapped market here. We don't have a lot of competition. We go to market with exclusive agent force that they only represent us, only distribute our products. We're very much in control of managing the margins and the profitability of that. We like the products that we have because they're simple and easy to understand for the consumer. They're also simple and easy to understand for this agent recruiting process I talked about.

We recruit agents that don't have experience, and so the simpler and the more basic that product is, it's really easy from a training, onboarding a new agent perspective.

Speaker 4

All right. Can we talk about the asset portfolio? Matt, that's a pretty weak hand raise there. There you go. Go for it.

Matt Darden
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah. I would guess going from 11 - 15,000 agents might be one of the faster periods of growth in the company's history. I don't know if productivity and kind of vintaging of those folks you brought on is something to keep in mind as we think about kind of go forward premiums and sales growth trends. Thank you.

It is. I mean, traditionally, what we see is periods of high growth follow with a little bit of stagnation and flattening out and then periods of growth again. If you think about what's happening is when we onboard a lot of agents, they're new in the, in the business. They get up and experienced, and as they move into middle management, they're the ones that turn around and then recruit, train, and retain that next round of agents. It's very much it grows, plateaus, and grows again. That's why we really think it's important to look at agent count over an annual basis versus quarter to quarter because you're getting those fluctuations.

That's why American Income, as an example, grew tremendously in 2020 and 2021, and it's kind of flattened out here, and we anticipate growth again as we start getting that retrenchment. There's a little bit, because of that tremendous amount of growth, a little bit of attrition that was a little bit higher than what we normally experienced, even though we were still growing on the recruiting side, bringing new agents in. Really now it's about a focus on retention and retaining those agents that we've recruited so they can continue to grow in the future.

Speaker 4

All right. Can we pivot a little bit to the asset portfolio? I'm looking at some stats. Portfolio average rating A-minus, though over 50% of the portfolio is rated triple-B, very little below investment grade. Is that positioning? Is that generally the corporate sensibility about where you should be? How do you think about your positioning if there is a credit event in the future?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Sure. Yeah, you know, the triple-B space has been where Globe Life has really lived on from an investment perspective over a really long period of time. You know, it's really just our, you know, as Matt was kind of talking about the types of asset or types of policies that we sell, remember, are really long-dated fixed. You know, that's a fixed amount that we're, that we're insuring. You have, you know, fixed liabilities that are looking at when we sell a policy, you're looking at an amount that's going to be payable out there 20, 30, 40 years down the road.

From an investment policy perspective, we're looking to say, We need to invest in fixed rate, fixed maturity, obligations in order to give us the most surety of what are our future cash flows going to be to satisfy those future obligations. Historically, that's always been in that triple-B space is when we looked at, we're looking at what's a risk-adjusted, capital-adjusted return. We know with triple-Bs, we tend to have a little bit higher capital charge, but we make sure that we're getting paid for that versus if we were investing in a double-A or a single-A or whatever the case may be. To your point is that more recently, I mean, we've been higher on a triple-B side, and it's been coming down here over the last few years.

With 3% below investment grade and about 51% triple-Bs, I mean, the below investment grade is the lowest that we've had for, you know, I think this entire millennium. In a large part, you know, we don't go out and purchase. We only buy new investment-grade securities. Some of that's been that over the last probably seven quarters, we've really been where we've had up, you know, our upgrades have outpaced any kind of downgrades that we've had within the overall portfolios. Some of that's just been an improvement of the overall economic environment, organizations being able to refinance some of their debt at cheaper, you know, cheaper rates and that type of a thing. We have did take some opportunity during 2022 to reposition a portion of the portfolio.

We did take about $329 million and really had the opportunity just kind of way the marketplace had played out to take some of the bonds that we had invested in over the past years at some pretty low rates, reinvest them to get higher yields, and we also improved the overall quality, the, you know, improved the rating of the portfolio from that perspective and really kind of set us up, if you will, from to help positioning for any potential downturns that we might have. Of course, then with some of the higher ratings comes lower capital requirements as well. We felt it was a really good, you know, win-win for us.

You know, historically, you know, we're in for the long run and, you know, we generally feel really good about, you know, just the credit of triple-B's 'cause we have, we generate a significant amount of underwriting income and underwriting profits and statutory cash flows that, you know, we don't have to sell bonds to ever, you know, to pay a claim. We anticipate staying in the bonds that we invest in. We plan on staying there for the long duration. We invest in companies that we would expect to withstand multiple economic cycles over the course of time. We typically don't have to sell securities.

The improvement in overall quality is a, you know, little bit of this repositioning, but we're pretty comfortable with where we're at there and don't really anticipate any major changes in, you know, how that plays out. We, you know, still intend to invest a significant portion of our securities in or new money in, you know, that triple-B, A-minus, you know, type landscape.

Speaker 4

I mean, the intention is to hold the bonds to maturity, and they're on the balance sheet as such. Right now, you're sitting on a lot of unrealized losses, no capital charge. I mean, at the same time, you might have some gross capital gains on that portfolio and which creates an opportunity to maybe neutralize a gain with a loss. Is there any desire in the company to sort of take some loss-making bonds out of the portfolio, reinvest them at higher yields right now and move the interest rates prematurely?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah. I mean, we look at that from a making sure that it's from an economic perspective and that really makes sense. We will. That is a little bit of what we did here back in 2022. We did have some opportunity to generate some losses. We were able to, you know, carry those back from a tax perspective and recover some tax gains that we'd had in some prior years. Being able to get those immediate tax benefits kind of works into the economics as we think about does it make sense to do that? That's rare for us to do. We'll do that from time to time if the market, you know, kind of sets itself up for that.

Speaker 4

Do you rematch the duration of the instruments you sell, or do you buy long and just roll?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

In this particular case, given where just kind of rates had gone and this opportunity moving as quickly as rates have moved up, we did take some opportunity to extend, you know, our duration and the maturities out there a little bit. We're always very cognizant of looking at what is some of that asset liability matching, making sure that we're still, you know, properly matched from, you know, from an overall portfolio perspective.

Speaker 4

All right. Can we talk a little about the capital return sort of philosophy? Obviously, during the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty which changed the outlook a little bit for temporarily, but we're not in that period right now. Over a 10-year view rather than it's just reacting to what's going on, what's the philosophy of the company on how to return capital?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah. You know, we, you know, our first and foremost priority is invest in growing the business. We spend a significant amount of money each year to put new business on the books. You know, whether it be from a commissions perspective, you know, on the sales of new business from our marketing efforts on the direct-to-consumer side. Remember then that all of that kind of flows through statutory. All those acquisition expenses flow through statutory income. You know, after we've made sure that we're investing in those, investing in new technologies, everything else, you know, we look at that statutory income. We generate $400 million-$500 million of statutory income, you know, pretty much each and every year.

We'll look at distributing that up to the holding company, on an annual basis, make sure we have it up there. That gives us the flexibility to determine do we have capital needs at any one of our insurance companies. We have different insurance entities. You know, we may need one point in time to kind of shore up capital at one organization and maybe not all of them. If there's been, it gives us some opportunity if we have generated some capital losses or some, you know, some impairments on our bond portfolio, you know, that opportunity to kind of fill those holes.

If we don't have the need for, you know, capital or if there's not better investment alternatives for the organization, you know, we'll return that back to the shareholders, either in the form of, you know, dividends or buybacks. We do believe in having, you know, we don't have a really big dividend yield. Typically, you kind of look at the total cash flows that we've passed back to the out to our shareholders, probably about 15% or 20% of that return has been in the form of dividends. Historically, over a really long period of time, we kinda, it's kind of been our philosophy. We'll take the remaining cash flows, and historically have passed that back to the shareholders, you know, in the form of buybacks, so.

Speaker 4

I mean, obviously it's not necessarily one or the other, but is that backward-looking or is that forward-looking? Are you, like, looking at the year ahead, how much business you think you're generating, this is how much capital we need to hold for the year to come? Or at the end of a year, you say, "This is how much money we earned, and this is how much capital we used, the rest we can give back to the shareholder?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Tim, you know, a lot of it is, it's a little bit of both. You know, we're looking if there's some capital needs that we might have had from, you know, as a result of the year that just completed, then we'll hold that back and put that in as need be. You know, we do start off the year kind of having a pretty good sense of our new statutory income, and we'll look at our projections of what those capital needs are. We tend to pace out our buybacks over the course of the year, so we can see if there's any surprises that come up, if there's a turn in the bond market or something to that effect.

You know, we feel pretty comfortable over the course of the year, you know, passing that back out. We can shift gears if we needed to, you know, throughout the course of the year. We get a lot of questions around just our lower RBC levels, and we kind of manage to, you know, 300 and 320, and tends to be lower than a lot of our competitors. You know, we don't need the higher capital. It really fits with the types of products that we sell. You know, it's the stable, generally risk-averse products and investment portfolio that we have allow us to kind of manage capital at that level. We don't have to have the higher RBC for our ratings.

Knowing that we have that consistency of generating a new $400 million-$500 million of new capital each and every year, gives us great comfort that, again, we can pivot if we need to and move some of that back into the companies if we need to.

Speaker 4

I know that you comfortably think that your shares will be worth more in the future than they are today. That doesn't mean your ROIC calculation might not be different depending on when share repurchase makes sense or maybe a special dividend might be. How do you think about ROIC on share repurchases based on where it is at a given point in time?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

We always wanna make sure that the returns that we have on our buybacks are exceeding what we, you know, our cost of equity and cost of capital. We wanna make sure that they're positive from that perspective. We tend to then also really look at intrinsic value. What we have is an internal view of intrinsic model that we've been following since the eighties when our buyback program really started in full force. Taking a view on, you know, what we think our current book value, you know, is the value of that, along with, you know, present value of future profits as we.

Speaker 4

How is that tracked over time? If you start taking that 80, then you actually said, "Well, five years from now, here's what we think would..." Has it been a pretty consistent, the predictor of this intrinsic value model?

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

It has been pretty good over time. As we kind of think about our intrinsic value, there's been a pretty, you know, steady growth from our ability to continue to grow that book of business each and every year.

Speaker 4

Mm-hmm.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

We try to think of it in a, you know, in a fairly conservative manner. We are very cognizant, and we wanna be really careful that we aren't with the buybacks, buying back at share prices that we think are dilutive to our shareholders. There's been some times when we were, you know, over the years where we've had to think about it, at least the conversation came in on, does this continue to make sense? Does a special dividend or something to that effect take, you know, would that make more sense? We haven't reached the point to where we did do that. But-

Speaker 4

Right. There's a catch 22. If you pay a special dividend, it seems to signal that returning cash seems somehow a better value than finally the stock. I would point out, you know, we had on here earlier, you know, a couple high growth companies, and if you think about ROI, Progressive, American Financial Group, W. R. Berkley, a bunch of companies that have received high valuations that do periodically return very high special dividends, and the shareholder return over the long- term has been very, very attractive for shareholders. The problem is like there's a signal when you get off that buyback course and say that we're gonna do it this way-

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yep.

Speaker 4

that you're potentially judged for it overall.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Well, I appreciate the time up here. I'm glad that you've had good meeting sale. I hope that everyone had a chance to absorb everything and, having a good day. We got a couple more sessions, I think. There might be a cocktail party, which I know people like cocktail parties. Thank you very much for your time.

Frank Svoboda
Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Globe Life

You're welcome.

Speaker 4

I appreciate all your help, guys. Thank you, everybody from Globe Life.

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