Welcome to MetLife's 2024 Investor Day. Please welcome to the stage Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations, John Hall.
All right, all right. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Thank you very much. I have the pleasure of welcoming you to the iconic MetLife building and also thanking you for joining us for the rollout of our New Frontier strategy. I know it's a busy time of year. You've got a lot of demands on your time, so we really appreciate you being here with us. We've got a couple of housekeeping items to clear. First, the materials for today. You can find them on the Investor Relations portion of MetLife.com under the financial or the featured presentations banner. Okay. There are some forward-looking statements that we're going to be making today. The materials that we've posted have footnotes, reconciliations, and other disclosures that you should review at your leisure. So we have a fantastic program today.
It's going to start off with Michel introducing the New Frontier strategy, and that's going to be followed by deeper dives on each one of the strategic priorities that are associated with the New Frontier strategy. Following the presentation or during the presentation, we're going to have one break, okay, mid-morning. There will be a Q&A session at the close. Where's Tom? One question, one follow-up, please. At the end of the program, we're going to host a lunch. At lunch, all of our executive leadership team will be present, and they will be hosting tables, so you'll have the opportunity to mix and mingle with them at that point in time. We also have tech capability showcase booths outside during lunch. They're going to be manned with folks.
They will be featuring leading-edge customer-facing technologies that we're talking about today, and you'll have an opportunity to learn more about those at lunch, and there's more. There's more. We have a special guest at lunch, MetLife's ambassador to our pet insurance business, Snoopy will be here. He'll be signing autographs and taking selfies with anyone who wants him, so make sure you don't miss out on that. There will be some parting gifts at the end. Snoopy might be involved in the parting gifts as well, so make sure that you pick them up when the program's over. Thank you for your attention, and I am going to kick off the program with a short video, and then Michel will kick off the day.
At MetLife, we're guided by the power of one purpose, always with you building a more confident future. We live this every day through a culture of empowerment, customer care, and dedication to our communities because there's strength in making promises and keeping them. It's a simple act that's motivated our leadership across Group Benefits, insurance, Retirement Solutions, and asset management. Each powerful individually, but together sector-defining. This is the power of our unique business, built to anticipate opportunities and endure changing markets. From Mexico City to Tokyo, we're outpacing the market, harnessing tailwinds, and establishing ourselves in the category of one.
Living our purpose means embracing the opportunity ahead, a bold evolution of our strategy to drive a new frontier of growth and possibilities, a future that harnesses the power of one MetLife, our unparalleled scale, our strategic diversification, our innovative leading distribution, and our cutting-edge technology to deliver the best outcomes for all our stakeholders. This is the power of coming together with one purpose to create a category of one, always with you building a more confident future.
Great. Good morning, everyone, and let me also join in thanking you for being with us this morning. Also welcome those who are joining us virtually. It's five years to the day since we had our last Investor Day to launch our Next Horizon strategy, and I don't know if John Hall timed it perfectly to be five years to the day, but let's go with that. Five years ago, we also had a video to start the day, and at the time, the team had roped me into narrating that video. I thought I did such a wonderful job that I would get asked again. However, to my dismay, I discovered that they had found somebody that is far more talented than I, and that's Michael Roberts, our Chief Marketing Officer, so that was his voice narrating the video. He's a man of many talents.
Fortunately, for MetLife, one of his talents is that he's leading the marketing team to have a real impact when it comes to our business performance, and you'll hear more about that later during the day, so five years ago, when we launched Next Horizon, little did we know that the world was about to plunge into a global pandemic, that we would see a record low interest rate followed by a spike of 300 bps to 400 bp s in rates, and that would be followed by a bank liquidity crisis. Yet throughout challenges and volatility, we've spoken about MetLife's resilience and our ability to emerge from this situation in even stronger shape. I believe as we go through the day, you would agree that this has proven to be the case. While much has changed over the last five years, what hasn't changed is our purpose.
This is our North Star. This informs everything that we do and anchors our strategy. This is a slide that I show in practically every town hall that I have, and so do our leaders. These are not just words. These words mean a lot to our people. And this is how we deliver for our stakeholders. We will talk a lot today about what we have delivered and what we are committed to delivering over the next five years. But for us at MetLife, how we do it matters. And the way we do it is by activating this virtuous circle where, by delivering for our people, our customers, and our communities, we create long-term shareholder value. You know, I've always spoken about culture being such a key enabler to our strategy.
By delivering for our people with one of the best workplaces, we hear the feedback from our internal surveys. Our engagement scores are at the highest level they've ever been. But it's also nice to be recognized externally. And I'm extremely proud of the fact that this year we made our debut on Fortune's 25 Global Best Workplaces, and the debut was at number 13. I think this is a reflection of the culture we're building here at MetLife. And in a business that is so heavily reliant on talent, I think this is, again, a powerful reflection of the kind of workplace we are building here at MetLife. This feeds into our rising Net Promoter Scores. Over the five-year period, on average, we have increased our Net Promoter Scores in the major markets where we measure our NPS by 23 points.
This also is reflected in the billions of dollars that we pay in benefits. This virtual circle continues in our support for our communities. Last year, the MetLife Foundation reached $1 billion in giving. This year, over the five-year period, we provided $170 million in support to those communities. We're named, again, on America's Most Just Companies list for 2024. Together, these associated elements helped us, allowed us to deliver for our shareholders. During the past five years, Met shares achieved a TSR of more than 100%. This TSR beat the S&P 500 over the same period. What makes this all the more remarkable is the outsized impact that the Magnificent Seven tech companies have on the S&P 500, yet Met still outperformed. I also attribute our outperformance to the power of Met's business.
We are at scale, well-diversified from a product line of business and geography perspectives. We have leading positions in some of the most attractive markets around the globe. And from a bottom-line perspective, we generated in 2023 more adjusted earnings than any other publicly traded North American life insurer. Our current position of strength serves as testimony to the all-weather nature of Next Horizon. As we move forward, Next Horizon's interconnected foundational pillars of Focus, Simplify, and Differentiate are not going anywhere. These principles are now firmly embedded in our DNA. And these principles will continue to guide our stewardship of your capital going forward. Now, let me drill down a little bit on these three pillars, starting with focus. Focus guides us to deploy capital to its best and highest use.
I think this slide is a clear illustration of this principle and the balance that we've achieved in how we apply focus in the context of our business. You can see here that we deployed $16 billion in support of organic growth, and we've done so at increasing IRRs and lower paybacks. When it made strategic and financial sense, we grew some of the highest-value businesses via M&A. And our acquisition of Versant Health, which added a core capability to our group business, is an example of that. We also chose to divest certain non-core businesses. Auto & Home is a good example here. And we did so at opportune times and at attractive returns.
Let me say here that we're going to continue to look at our portfolio through the lens of strategic fit and whether a business or a market is achieving our minimum adjusted hurdle rate or has a path to achieving that, and we will continue to take action as appropriate. Through it all, we deployed significant capital. We returned significant capital to our shareholders, $22 billion, in the form of buybacks and dividends, and to put this figure into perspective, when we launched Next Horizon back in 2019, our market cap was roughly $45 billion, so during this period, we've returned roughly 50% of that market cap during the period. I think another proof point of how we activated the focus pillar is that despite the pandemic and macroeconomic and geopolitical ups and downs, we built a consistent track record of returning excess capital to shareholders deliberately and diligently.
I think few can say that. Our discipline is clearly evident, is also clearly evident in our strong and steady payout ratios. You can see that on this slide. With focus, we also said back in 2019 that we wanted to grow our capital-light businesses, and we have. You can see here that two of our highest-return businesses, Group Benefits and Latin America, grew earnings by 32% during the five-year period. Similarly, we said we wanted to accelerate the runoff of our capital-intensive legacy business, MetLife Holdings, and we did. We actively reduced our exposure through risk transfer, a combination of risk transfer and the natural runoff of that business. That's illustrated in the smaller contribution to earnings from MetLife Holdings, down 47% during the period, as well as the decline in our VA balances, 26% during the period.
I think that's all the more impressive given the growth in the S&P 500 during this period. For those who are insurance experts in the room and on the webcast, I would also point you to the fact that our living benefits in our VA business have declined significantly over this period as well. I think this speaks to the resilience of our business, the mix that we have, which prepares us to perform in good times as well as periods of undue stress. Let me now move to our Simplify pillar . Simplify is all about making life easier for our people so they can deliver more and better for our customers. This is about creating a seamless customer experience. This is also about us becoming a leaner and faster company through the adoption of an efficiency mindset.
As we talked about, we decided to move away from several expense programs that are hard to manage and even harder to measure, and we built an efficiency mindset into our culture. That's reflected in continuous sustainable unit cost improvement. We've seen the impact of this in our direct expense ratio, which is an important measure for us, down 80 bp s while absorbing the impact of divesting some lower expense ratio businesses such as Auto & Home. This is not by accident. This is down to our relentless execution, and this is down to the fact that we believe in controlling what we control, and we believe that our expense structure is certainly within our control. Equally important is the fact that we also drove down our unit cost to free up capacity to invest in our business.
I believe through the course of this day, you will see evidence of those investments and how they are helping us further drive our competitive advantage in many of our key markets. Differentiate our third pillar. I think here there's no better proof of differentiation than growing our businesses and taking market share. We've accomplished this responsibly during the Next Horizon period. All of our major businesses that we'll talk about today succeeded either in gaining share or in growing faster than the market. Where we're already number one, we widened the gap to our closest peer. We've taken some of the premier insurance franchises in the world, and we've made them even stronger. When we established Next Horizon, we made several challenging commitments. That was to measure ourselves and to hold ourselves accountable as well.
I know that there was some skepticism, including from some people in this room, in terms of our ability to deliver on these commitments. The good news is that we have. We said we were going to deliver a 12% to 14% ROE, which we upgraded to 13% to 15%. Check. We're delivering 15.1%. I will say this is despite the fact that our VII, variable investment income, continues to be below expectation. We said we would generate $20 billion of distributable cash over the five-year period. Check. We will deliver $21 billion. We said that we would create $1 billion in additional capacity to accelerate growth over the five-year period. Check. We will deliver $1.2 billion. We said what we would do, and we did what we said. There's a lot of ways to get there.
I go back to my point earlier about the how. The Met way is to balance risk and reward. This is enabled by our strong and robust risk management culture. We're a 156-year company. We're in it for the long run. We're not interested in taking undue risks or strategies that deploy undue risks that may result in wins today but losses tomorrow. That's not our way. We believe that diversification is our superpower. It is a key enabler to our all-weather performance. All in all, we've intentionally constructed a diversified platform to deliver long-term responsible growth and high returns. I have to say this is my favorite slide of the day. This clearly demonstrates that over the Next Horizon period, our returns are up, but our risk is down as measured by beta.
I think what's more impressive here is that on relative basis versus peers, Met generates higher returns while posting a lower beta. I think nothing better represents our superior value proposition than this: higher returns, lower risk. When we entered Next Horizon, we set out to develop into a stronger, more predictable company, and I believe we've achieved this through our consistent execution, and I think this deserves another check, so today, as we think through about the next iteration of our strategy, about a year ago, I gathered the team, and we started by looking at some of the key trends that we believe will be shaping our industry for years to come. You can see those trends on this slide.
These trends have helped inform our New Frontier strategy, starting with demographic shifts that are fueling demand for our products to the democratization of financial services, which is particularly evident in Latin America, but I believe a phenomenon that will play out across the globe in the coming years. This allows us to expand our reach when it comes to new customers, to the emerging tech landscape with new technologies such as AI. This is really shaping how we deliver for customers and also driving higher customer expectations to the convergence between insurance and asset management, which is, again, a positive for our retirement origination platforms and our asset management business, and a more favorable interest rate environment, which is driving demand for some of our products. These are all powerful tailwinds, and they helped inform our new strategy. Now, any good strategy needs a good name.
So one of the questions that I posed to the team at the time is, can you come up with a good name for us? And Next Horizon became a household name here at MetLife. Everywhere I go, not only do I see sort of visible signs of Next Horizon, but the way that people talk about Next Horizon is truly impressive. And I think that's the main reason why one of the questions that we have on our annual survey is how people feel about the company's direction. And that gets one of the highest scores on the survey. So we needed to come up with a name. And when people submitted some names, I put some of them through ChatGPT, of course. And I asked ChatGPT, can you sort of define these suggestions in a business context? New Frontier, in particular, resonated.
This is what ChatGPT came up with. New Frontier refers to areas of opportunity that a company can explore for growth and innovation, pushing beyond the status quo and taking calculated risks in search of significant competitive advantages and potentially high rewards. This sounded about right. We've built discipline around attractive returns and all-weather performance. Our track record gives us license to achieve higher growth, higher responsible growth. Let me be clear on that. We view New Frontier as a bold evolution of our strategy, not a departure from the tenets of Next Horizon. What's new in New Frontier is a stronger emphasis on growth. With New Frontier, we feel, we believe that we are starting from a position of strength. We are more front-footed, more able to play offense as opposed to defense.
We operate in attractive markets with large addressable profit pools, with deep competitive moats constructed carefully over time, and we're poised to capitalize on the tailwinds that I just referenced, drawing on our capacity to execute consistently. New Frontier delivers a unique value proposition with strong growth, attractive returns, and lower risk, not one or the other, but all three, so I wanted to drill down now in terms of our strategic priorities, and today is not going to be a region-by-region discussion about MetLife. What you get with MetLife is a complementary portfolio of businesses that are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the trends that I referenced earlier. Together, these priorities drive nearly 80% of adjusted earnings today and will fuel strong growth through New Frontier.
These priorities are: one, extending leadership in Group Benefits; two, capitalizing on our unique retirement platform; three, accelerating growth in asset management; and four, expanding in high-growth international markets. These priorities don't exist in isolation. They draw on and contribute to the collective strength of MetLife. Supporting these priorities are deep competitive moats that will be woven into today's presentations. I want to spend a minute on those. I can't emphasize enough the importance of scale. Even in markets with a low barrier to entry, there are significant barriers to scale. And today, I'm sure you will see the power of MetLife scale as we go through the presentations. Our diversification is unique, and it is intentional. It provides us with the optionality to play where we see growth opportunities while shielding us from having to play in competitive areas that can pressure returns. Distribution innovation is another competitive moat.
We see digital distribution in many parts of the world. I think you'll hear today about how our innovation on the distribution front is enabling us to reach new customers through examples that we will provide from our Brazil business and LatAm business, but as I said earlier, I believe this is a phenomenon that's going to play out over time in many parts of the world as well, and then customer expectations are on the rise, and technology plays a key role in enabling us to deliver on those rising customer expectations. Also, it's a key enabler in helping us drive efficiency across the company, and again, you'll hear more about that in today's presentations. What I want to emphasize here is that these moats are real. These are not aspirational. And if anything, we intend to widen those during the New Frontier period.
So let me now drill down on the four strategic priorities. The first one is extending our leadership and Group Benefits. And my consistent view has been that this is the most attractive segment of the U.S. life industry. Here, it is our conviction that scale, technology, and discipline will carry the day. And there's no question in my mind that Met is best positioned in the group benefit space. As you see here, we are three times the size of our nearest peer. We're number one and three times the size of our nearest peer. We are growing one and a half times faster than the market. And you can see also here the significant investments that we've made in this business over the Next Horizon period, close to $2 billion. And those investments are truly helping us further drive our competitive advantage in this business.
You'll see evidence of that in Ramy's presentation later this morning. We've added $6.5 billion premiums to this business during the Next Horizon period. That's the size of a top five player in this space. We often get the question, given your size, is that an impediment to your growth going forward? I think this $6.5 billion provides ample evidence that, if anything, our size is not an impediment. It's a catalyst to our growth in this business. For Met, this is a GDP plus-plus business. We grow in line with GDP, and then we supplement that growth with more employers, more products to existing employers, and by driving up take-up rates on employee-paid and voluntary products. We see a long runway for further growth in this business. As I said, you'll hear more about that from Ramy later this morning.
Our second strategic priority is capitalizing on our unique retirement platform. Today, we will shed light not only on the strength of our global retirement platform, but also the intentional decisions that we've made to focus on high return, I'm sorry, highly attractive segments of the market that play to our strength. I believe this is a differentiator, and it results in robust flow, predictable liabilities, and very strong risk-adjusted returns. Our platform is global in nature, draws on the sizable retirement opportunities in some of our most attractive markets, namely the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. As you can see here, over the past five years, we've taken close to $250 billion of retirement inflows in these markets, and there is underlying support in terms of further growth going forward. From Ramy, you'd hear about new avenues to expand liability origination in the U.S. and the U.K.
You'll hear a similar story from Lyndon when it comes to Japan. This triangle highlights the fact that our businesses don't exist in isolation. They complement each other. And that's especially the case when we're able to bring the full power of MetLife to bear. To bring this to life, our retirement platform drives steady inflows to our asset management business, MetLife Investment Management. By attracting additional third-party capital, one, we can capture a larger share of the global retirement pool. And two, we provide sticky AUM to MetLife Investment Management. As you can see from this triangle, the nature of the symbiotic relationship between the three, third-party capital, liability origination, and asset management, allows us to convert spread earnings to fee income, delivering a more capital-efficient business with higher returns for the enterprise.
Nothing illustrates this better than Chariot Re, which we are very excited to have launched yesterday with General Atlantic and Chubb as a lead investor. This is a blue-chip vehicle that, I believe, is a true differentiator. This is born out of our conviction that, whereas so far we've been able to generate sufficient capital to meet the demand that we've seen in the retirement area, we expect that demand to increase significantly in the coming years. And what this vehicle does, it provides us with optionality. Think of it as a strategic, important tool in our toolbox. So we're really excited about this new venture. And you'll hear much more about it from Adora later this morning. Our third strategic priority is to accelerate growth in asset management. And we're going to do this by leveraging our brand, scale, and expertise.
This is sort of the unveiling or the grand premiere for MIM today on this stage. And I think MIM is ready for prime time. We believe that we have a scaled asset manager. We're at an inflection point, which puts us on a path, an aspirational path, to achieve $1 trillion of AUM. And I want to assure all of you that I did not have to twist John McCallion's or Jude Driscoll's arm to come up with this $1 trillion figure. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it, by the way. So as I mentioned, and you can see here, MIM is an at-scale $600 billion asset manager of public fixed income, private credit, and real estate, with a very, very strong track record.
As I mentioned, a new dimension of New Frontier is that we want to make asset management a more prominent element in our overall business or component of our overall business. The plan is to accelerate growth and introduce MetLife Investment Management as a segment in 2025. As I said, we're at an inflection point with increasing demand for the type of fixed income and private market products that are managed by MIM. Importantly, growing MIM is accretive to MetLife. It generates capital light, fee earnings, enhances ROE, and adds to our free cash flow. John will go deeper into MIM later this morning. And finally, our fourth strategic pillar or priority is to expand further in high-growth international markets. Now, MetLife already generates 40% of our adjusted earnings from outside the U.S. And I think Met is truly differentiated in this regard.
I should know, I spent much of my early career building businesses outside the U.S. Our focus today is on several highly attractive growth markets: Mexico, India, China, and Brazil. Those are already valuable contributors today, but we believe they will be major contributors tomorrow. So why are we talking about these four markets? Well, they represent 40% of the world population and represent also $500 billion in annual life insurance premium. We're the largest life insurer in Mexico, and we see a path to continuing our growth trajectory there. Our partnership in India with one of the largest banks is fueling our growth in that market and, again, provides us with a trajectory for sustainable growth. Look, China is in a different place today than the China that we spoke about five years ago. China has had its economic challenges. The industry has been challenged as well.
But as you'll see later, we're continuing to perform strongly in China. And China is a self-funded business that's cash-generating. As a matter of fact, we have received a dividend from China for the last nine consecutive years. So we think of China as an important and valuable option on future growth. And in Brazil, a really exciting market for MetLife, we are innovating through digital distribution, which is driving our growth well above market. And we believe we are only scratching the surface when it comes to this growth trajectory there. So the bottom line is that we're not planting flags here. These are already established businesses that are extremely well-positioned for the future. And you'll hear more about them later today. So all this boils down to these commitments that we're making to you today. And as you heard from me earlier, our growth momentum is strong.
Our business is positioned to deliver attractive returns with all-weather performance. And we believe that our strategic priorities enable us to achieve higher aspirations. We've exceeded all our prior commitments. So now it's time to raise the bar and set new commitments that we will hold ourselves accountable for. You can see those commitments on the slide. We're introducing EPS as a new metric for MetLife. And we are committing to achieving double-digit EPS growth during the New Frontier period. This is up from 6% during Next Horizon. We are also committing to achieving a 15%-17% ROE, up from 12%-14% when we launched Next Horizon. And as I mentioned, we had updated that to 13%-15%, still a meaningful upgrade of 300 bp s from our Next Horizon target.
We are also committing to shaving another 100 bp s off of our direct expense ratio target, and again, I think this speaks to our ability to continue to control what we control and drive efficiency in the company, and last but not least, we are committing to $25 billion of free cash flow over the period, up from our $20 billion commitment during Next Horizon, so altogether, these commitments serve to quantify, I believe, MetLife's superior value proposition. In terms of my takeaways or the message that I want to leave you with this morning is that our team knows what success looks like and knows how to deliver it and is motivated and excited to do so. We are in a much different place compared to five years ago. We are much more able to play offense, to be front-footed compared to five years ago.
We operate in attractive markets with deep moats and strong tailwinds, and we're very well-positioned to deliver strong, responsible growth with higher returns and lower risk. Now, I'm going to turn it over to Ramy, Michael, and Missy so we can start to drill down into our key strategic priorities. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Michel. Thrilled to be with you this morning. To begin with, as Michel mentioned, we're going to discuss the first priority of our New Frontier strategy, which is all about extending our lead in Group Benefits. Joining me on stage are my colleagues, Michael Roberts. Michael moonlights as a tenor, by the way, and he's performed at the MetLife Stadium. And the fearless leader of our National Accounts business in group, Missy Plohr-Memming.
As you all know, Group Benefits is arguably the most attractive segment of the U.S. life insurance industry today. It's a segment that's characterized by high ROEs, competition that's largely rational, and secular trends which drive its growth. Now, what makes this market especially attractive for us is that employers place a high value in experiences here, their own experiences as HR decision-makers and HR departments, the experience of their employees. They care about service. They care about capabilities. They care about ease of doing business. So yes, price is important in this industry, but our value proposition here goes well beyond price. Our Group Benefits business is our flagship business and one where we stood here five years ago to the day and told you it's a focus area for MetLife, and that focus has delivered results.
This morning, we have one headline for you with respect to Group Benefits. We are the market leader in this business with unmatched scale, and we're best positioned to drive growth in our top and bottom lines over the New Frontier period. We have a high degree of conviction in our ability to do this, and I'm pretty sure by the end of this presentation, you're going to share that conviction with us, so let's dig in. I'm going to start by talking about the overall opportunities here and talk about some of the key forces which are driving the Group Benefits marketplace. Starting with employers, employers continue to see benefit as an important lever to attract and retain talent. More and more employers understand this. In fact, benefits tie to productivity, which is key for employers.
This is why year after year, when we survey employers, a full 60% of them tell us they're planning to offer more benefits over time. This is an expanding market, not a saturated one. Move over to the employee side of the equation. When you look at employees, research overwhelmingly tells you two things. Employees are underinsured and confused. Underinsurance is a real challenge today, be it when people purchase high-deductible medical plans with large copays or when their life coverage gives their young dependents only one year's worth of income. This protection gap is real. Now, having said that, there's another gap which we believe is equally large, and we call that the confusion gap. And the statistic which encapsulates this is right here on the slide. 50% of employees report feeling confused when choosing their benefits at open enrollment.
I do often tell our market research team that the other 50% are just too shy to tell us, and I will not embarrass anybody in this room for us to ask for a show of hands here, but you all get the point. And so while the protection gap is real and is widely recognized, we would argue that the confusion gap is widely ignored, and confusion leads to inaction and paralysis, and bridging that confusion gap is key to unlocking what we believe is a very large opportunity in this market, and in a few minutes, Michael will talk about how we're planning to attack that opportunity. Moving over to the channel, and the real big headline with respect to the channel here is that the channel in this industry is consolidating very rapidly.
When you look at the market share of our top 20 brokers that you see here in regional markets, the portion of the business they control is growing rapidly. A lot of this is driven by M&A activity that is set to continue. As the channel consolidates, these brokers consolidate the set of providers they place business with. And as the largest carrier in this industry with the deepest trading relationships, we are a primary beneficiary of this trend. And then last but not least, no discussion about the benefit landscape is complete without a discussion of the increasing complexity which employers have to deal with. Let me give you an example of that: state-based leave regulation. Let me give you some numbers around this. Back in 2019, 36 million workers in the U.S. were covered by some state leave. Since then, the number has more than doubled.
By 2027, it's going to exceed 100 million. We identified this as a key trend and focused our technology investments to position us as the partner of choice for employers in this space. Missy will give you more color on this in a few minutes. The complexity theme starts with leave but does not end there. This is why employers want to do more with fewer, a trend that also gives us an advantage as the largest carrier with the widest array of products in this industry. When you step back and look at this slide and look at our logo in the middle, there is a common thread here. We sat back and identified the key forces that are driving this industry and have a strategy that's turning them into tailwinds for us.
We have a business with unmatched scale that allows us to continue to invest in technology in a way that no other carrier can. In Group Benefits, scale begets scale. So let me translate what this opportunity means for MetLife. You heard Michel talking about this business as being a GDP++ business. There's another way to look at this, which is represented with the ovals here. Starting with our business, we stand here with an excess of $24 billion in premium. Many of you think of us as a National Accounts player, which is true. We've got $18 billion in that market. We've got a commanding market share of 25% in National Accounts. That's the size of our next four competitors combined. We're not all national, though.
We are the second largest player in regional markets with a total premium of $6 billion and an 8% market share in what is a highly fragmented market, a point I'm going to come back to later. The overall market we play in is about $150 billion. This is where we win more than we lose, gaining market share and continue to drive double-digit growth in our voluntary portfolio. The last two ovals here are talking about the total addressable market as we see it. So when you look at the trends that I spoke about, we see an additional $35 billion in that third oval, which is all about employers continuing to expand their benefit offerings. Think about that 60% statistic that I mentioned before and think about white space in terms of benefit offerings. The last oval here represents the most significant term.
This is all about greater employee participation. We do this really well today, which is why roughly about half of our premiums are actually paid for by employees. But our analysis shows that if we take our best practices in terms of bridging that confusion gap, we estimate the term here to stand at $100 billion, which is of equal magnitude to the entire market that we're competing in today, so this is not a stagnant market. It's a growing one, and it's one where the employer is both a customer but also an important channel that helps us address the protection needs at scale, so three charts to just ground our discussion with respect to our business today. The one on the left, this one is my personal favorite. It demonstrates our size relative to competitors. As Michel said, three times the size of the nearest competitor.
The middle chart shows you our leading position across the widest array of product categories in the industry. And coming back to the theme of doing more with fewer, when you have the best-in-class products across the entire range, you become the partner of choice for employers. And on the right, you see our growth here in the last five years. Despite being the largest, and we were the largest five years ago, we've outgrown this business two points above the peer average. In fact, we're often asked, how can MetLife, as the market leader, continue to outpace the industry growth? Our answer to this is very simple. This is an industry where you differentiate based on capabilities. And over time, having the ability to invest and deliver these capabilities continues to drive further differentiation and further space between you and competitors.
In a nutshell, we outgrow this industry precisely because we are the market leader. Our conviction in the future is also grounded in our performance. We added $6.5 billion of premium over the Next Horizon period. We added over $300 million of earnings, and we achieved this by being at the midpoint or below of our guidance ranges in every single year, absent the impact of the pandemic, so talk about underwriting discipline. Our growth in earnings has also absorbed the nearly $2 billion of investments, which Michel talked about, so if nothing else, that number, I hope, crystallizes the point with respect to unmatched scale that we have here, and then finally, we found opportunities to expand our capabilities and product offerings. We did that inorganically with Vision and Pet . Don't forget to take that selfie with Snoopy.
We also did that organically with strengthening some of our core capabilities that we'll talk about today. Our New Frontier will build on this track record with a clear sense of direction. We're focusing our growth both on the top line and the bottom line. In National Accounts, this is going to be all about deepening relationships with employers and driving greater employee participation. In regional business, we're adding more employers. We're bringing the full power of our product suite and National Accounts down market and capitalizing on the consolidation in that channel. We're also looking at our margins. Partly, we're going to expand those margins as we shift our mix of business towards voluntary and partly through driving greater efficiencies in the platform. I will walk through each of these in turn. Let's start with National Accounts.
This is a business where we have a track record of addressing the most complex needs of the largest employers in the United States. We serve 94 of the Fortune 100 companies. We pride ourselves on maintaining decade-long relationships with these customers. And between them, these customers allow us to serve 40 million eligible employees. You're going to add their family members to that number, too. Our growth here is driven by doing more with that established client base. You could see in the middle chart how we've increased our product coverage with these employers over time. You could also see there's a lot more room to grow with respect to deepening our relationships. These customers want to do more with fewer, which is why 80% of our sales in National Accounts are driven from existing customers.
Now, we're always looking to the future, and we're looking to address the most critical needs of these customers. And leave and absence, when we looked three or four years ago, emerged as one of those key needs. After major medical, this is the product that employers care most about. The chart on the right shows you the outcome of our focus and investments here. We have more than doubled the number of lives that we cover under our leave management program over the last five years, and we still see very strong momentum here. We are really excited about this opportunity. But what's really more important is that the market has given us a resounding endorsement. Perhaps no one is better equipped to give you more color on this than our fearless leader of our National Accounts, Missy Plohr-Memming.
Missy has been with MetLife for more than 30 years and has her finger on the pulse of this market. So Missy, I'll invite you to share with us your thoughts.
Thank you, Ramy. I am so excited and so incredibly proud to be here with you today and share our My Leave Navigator capabilities. This is just one part of our end-to-end leave administration solution that couples intuitive technology with the ability to handle customer-specific plans, all backed by deep integrations with payroll and benefit administration systems. This end-to-end capability is much more than just a digital solution and is one of the ways we are going to continue to outpace growth. Why does this matter? Across industries and at all of your firms, one in five employees will take a leave annually. Every employer we talk to is increasingly concerned about how to manage the prevalence of leaves, coupled with the rising complexity due to regulatory changes, as well as benefit administration needs like integration with payroll and human capital management systems.
Ramy already mentioned that we have seen a rise in state regulations around leaves. By 2027, over 100 million people will be covered under one of 25 unique state regulations. Because of this, leave administration will only get more complex, and the need to monitor compliance will only rise. So let me illustrate for you how this complexity has changed for both employees and the employer. If a mom went on maternity leave five years ago, she would have had two leaves. She would have had a federal family medical leave, which protected her job. And she would have had a short-term disability leave that protected all or a portion of her pay.
In 2024, if that same mom went on leave, she would now be facing five leaves: federal family medical leave, a short-term disability claim, a state-paid family medical leave, a company-paid parental leave, and a child bonding leave. For an employer, managing the complexity of coordinating these leaves and managing this process, both when they start and end and what's paid and what's unpaid, is highly complex, and most lack the expertise, the resources, and the technology to manage the process effectively and efficiently. We anticipated this challenge for our customers, which is why we invested in our My Leave Navigator capabilities, a proprietary technology that is part of our end-to-end leave administration solution that simplifies leave administration for our customers. This new capability streamlines complex plans through intuitive technology and deep integrations, all supported by compassionate experts who are there when employees need them.
This unique blend of a high-tech experience coupled with high-touch care has received outstanding feedback from clients, brokers, and employees. In fact, I had the pleasure of recently being with a Fortune 500 company who took their leave administration out to market, driven entirely by one of these new state plans. For this particular customer, that new state plan was a tipping point of complexity, and they went to market looking for a best-in-class partner. Within 48 hours of that meeting, we were notified that they intend to award us their leave administration, plus their insured long-term disability plan and their full suite of accident and health products. That 48-hour timeline for a jumbo client with material premium is unheard of. But what's even more impressive is what the client told us. They told us it was an incredibly easy decision because we brought forth a uniquely differentiated value proposition.
We demonstrated that we could handle their complex plans with easy-to-use technology, all backed by resources that seem to care so much and were clearly experts in this space. I am incredibly proud that we are capitalizing on this opportunity because our solution right now is timely. 42% of employers have not yet outsourced their leave administration, and virtually every employer has not yet made a decision about what to do with the the 26 plans. Because of this, we see the potential for this solution to drive our growth because it addresses a critical client issue that matters very deeply to their employees. Our research also shows that when leave administration is done right, it drives employee productivity and loyalty to the employer. We also know that clients want to do more with fewer.
In the large market, 98% of the time when we quote leave administration, we're quoting at least one additional product. In fact, leave administration has become the gateway to expanding our relationships across our full product portfolio. And for that reason, it will truly enable our growth. So please join me and a few of my colleagues after the session today for a demonstration of My Leave Navigator. And with that, I'll hand it back to Ramy.
Thank you, Missy. Just a moment of reflection here. To deliver remarkable customer experiences like this, you need to combine deep understanding of the employer, the employee, the product. You need to wrap the whole delivery with best-in-class technology and a human-centric design aspect that simplifies the complex. At MetLife, we do this really well, and we do it at scale. We bring together our business teams, our world-class technology teams, and talent and data teams headed by Bill Pappas, my esteemed colleague who's going to also be here with us for lunch, and an incredibly insightful and creative marketing team headed by Michael. Standing here today as a business leader, I can tell you when I see these agile teams come across disciplines and deliver capabilities like this, real magic happens at an enterprise and a global scale.
It's that same combination of product experts, technologists, and marketers that's also serving us really well when it comes to employee participation. Think about that $100 billion TAM that I talked about before. Let's look at our track record here. The chart on the left takes our voluntary book of business, rolls back the clock to 2019, and measures the participation rate for some of our voluntary products. Fast forward to today, and looking at those same employers, you see the steady rise in participation rates, so when you hear us talking about double-digit voluntary growth every year after year, this chart here is the underlying driver of that. We've done this well, client by client, raising awareness, consideration for our products and services, but as successful as we've been here, the average participation rate across our book is about 16%, and there's a wide range around that.
This is where we see the opportunity to scale and accelerate, and I will ask Michael Roberts to join me here and talk about how we're planning to do that and turbocharge these participation rates. Michael.
Great. Thanks a lot, Ramy. Hello, everybody. I just have to remark that nothing makes me more satisfied as a marketer than to have a direct and material impact on commercial outcomes. And you can see that on the left-hand side of this chart. We have marketing teams around the globe who are focused on enabling that above-market growth that we've been talking about here. But also, those marketing teams are working closely with our data and technology teams led by Bill Pappas to create these differentiated customer experiences that also contribute to that growth. And that's what we'll talk a little bit about for the next couple of minutes. Because here in the U.S., with 40 million eligible employees, we have a massive opportunity just within our current footprint.
So the growth and participation that Ramy talked about on the left-hand side of the slide is a result of deliberate work with and on behalf of employers and brokers to educate and advise employees on becoming better insured over that period of time. But we think that through the New Frontier period, we have an opportunity to keep that chart going up and to the right, but to actually make that curve steeper. Because employees are confused. But this confusion gap isn't the only thing that we are addressing. 50% of employees also say that they're not satisfied with the utilization of their benefits as well. So we've got both a confusion gap and a utilization gap. So what we've done is we've invested heavily in creating a powerful platform we call Upwise.
Upwise helps employers realize the ROI on their benefits plan by helping employees choose their benefits wisely and use them seamlessly. And this is not just about the benefits that we offer as MetLife. Upwise helps employees choose all of their benefits, including their major medical plan, and helps them use all of their benefits, including the myriad of point solutions that employers are now starting to offer. I think one of the best ways to understand this is to actually see a little bit of the experience. So let's roll a video.
Benefits are vital to employees and their families. And yet, according to a recent study, 53% of employees say they are confused about their benefits. MetLife's Upwise benefits engagement platform helps employers drive more clarity and utilization of benefits. Employees get the most value from their enrolled benefits and employer point solutions, which promotes employee well-being and satisfaction. Upwise simplifies benefit selection by using employee health, financial, and lifestyle data. It combines pre-existing information with employee input to guide decisions through AI and machine learning for major medical plan analysis. Upwise then delivers highly personalized benefit recommendations with accompanying rationale so employees can feel confident about their choices. The education and recommendations result in more engagement with voluntary coverages. While it's important for employees to choose the right coverages, it's equally important that they utilize their benefits throughout the year. Upwise personal nudges connect employees with benefits at relevant moments.
Upwise also offers the option to use permissioned medical claims data to drive an even higher level of personalization. Finally, Upwise provides a guided experience when an employee is going through a life event where multiple benefits may apply. With Upwise, we're providing the care employees want, and employers want to provide year-round. Not only do employees feel cared for and confident, but they are happier, healthier, and more productive. Welcome to the simplification of employee benefits. Welcome to Upwise.
So a few items of note. One, benefits decision support is not new. But what's different here is that this platform is customized to the unique nature of each employer's benefits plan and uses a significant amount of data and AI to personalize that experience. What is new here is this focus on utilization. The ability to have timely nudges to connect different parts of the benefits ecosystem solves a key problem for both employers and employees. And finally, this technology is exclusive to MetLife in the large employer space, and it's already deployed. We introduced this in October of 2023. By the end of this year, we will have nearly a million employees on the platform. And where we have deployed the platform for open enrollment this year, we've seen significant increases in participation in the voluntary benefits that we offer.
And so it's this uplift in voluntary participation, this uplift in employee-paid premium, which is the impact of replacing that 20 minutes of confusion that people have during the open enrollment process with a personalized experience to help people choose their benefits. It's this capability and enhancements to all of the other work that has kept that chart going up and to the right that gives us confidence that we can address that $100 million TAM that Ramy talked about. You can see more about this and My Leave Navigator after the close of this session during lunch at the Tech Expo booths in the other room. So thanks all, and I'll hand it back to Ramy.
Thank you, Michael. Up and to the right are the two words you should write after Michael's little speech here. So I'm going to turn now to the second pillar, regional markets. This is the market as we define it with 5,000 employees and below. Three drivers that will fuel our growth here. The left-hand side, you see our market share. We are the number two player here. This is a market that's fragmented. Products are often bundled. Employers want to do more with fewer. All good trends for us. Second are the channel dynamics, which I talked about. Significant consolidation with respect to the brokers who are growing faster and taking more market share. But another key part of the distribution system here are the benefit administrators and the human capital firms. Tighter integration with these firms creates competitive advantage. But remember, it takes two to integrate here.
So we're constantly investing to deepen our integrations here, prioritizing some of the major players that you see on the slide here. By the same token, these firms are also prioritizing who to integrate with. So just as we prioritize them, they prioritize us. Another example of how scale begets scale in this business. And then finally, in this market, there's just more white space. And the statistic that we come back to here is that three out of every employer here don't offer the full voluntary suite of products that we see upmarket. So stepping back from regional, looking at our positioning, looking at the fragmentation of the market, the consolidation of the channel gives us significant conviction and continued growth trajectory for us here. So we talked a lot about premium growth, but our eyes are focused on the top line and the bottom line of this business.
So I want to spend a minute and give you a color on what we mean by the bottom line and margin expansion. First, looking at the diversified portfolio here in our underwriting discipline. Our approach here starts and ends with our customers. We understand their needs and bring to them real differentiation in terms of capabilities, experiences, and the widest range of products. This is a value proposition that resonates with these customers. We also have a deep understanding of our customer's risk profile. So our underwriting approach, I would say our customer relationship approach here is to demonstrate value and earn the right to meet our twin objectives, which is hit our target margins over a cycle and while maintaining high persistency. Our track record here speaks for itself. Second column is the shift in our business mix.
We have grown our voluntary portfolio double-digit in every single year in the next horizon period, and we continue to be a leader in that space. And again, our track record here speaks for itself as we shift that composition of the portfolio. And then finally, the investments we're making in this business in terms of technology platforms and capabilities. These carry dual benefit. They help us differentiate and grow, but they also help us drive our unit costs down. And we're seeing those benefits across the entire chain of our value activities with technology, data, and AI helping us drive progress in ways that were just unimaginable a few years ago. And John McCallion will talk a bit more about this for the overall enterprise. So let me conclude here. You heard a lot from us today. You heard about the secular trends.
You heard about a track record and the consistency of that record. You got a bird's-eye view of our capabilities and how we're bringing the power of MetLife, our brand, our people, our resources to focus on this business, so the three final thoughts I would leave you with respect to extending our leadership in Group Benefits are first, we will maintain our underwriting discipline, so you should expect to see continued consistency in our results. Second, we have a long runway of growth here. This is partly due to the favorable tailwinds, but largely due to our unmatched scale in this business. Scale begets scale in Group Benefits, and then finally, the investments we're making, the mixed shift of our business will also help us to grow our top line while also growing our margins over the New Frontier period.
So with that, we're going to shift gears and conclude the Group Benefits section of this. Michel, Missy, thank you. And thank you. So we're going to talk about another, the second strategic priority of our New Frontier strategy, which is capitalizing on the unique retirement platforms that we have. And I'm pleased to invite Lyndon Oliver, who leads our business in Asia, and Adora Whitaker, who leads our M&A team, to join me on stage. So three major takeaways from this section. First, we've got a significant potential for growth across our retirement platforms. And that growth is underpinned by secular trends, which are here to stay. Second, we are focused on the segments of the retirement market, which play to our strengths. This is a phrase you're going to hear us say over and over again during the course of this presentation.
And third, the portions of the market we're focused on are material. In fact, we're anticipating growth that is of a large enough magnitude that requires us to enhance our capital flexibility. So I would encourage you, as we go through this presentation, to listen to the choices we're making in terms of where we play, how we play. In asset-intensive businesses, discipline is the name of the game. And you'll also see how we're bringing the global power of MetLife in a focused manner to create shareholder value against this opportunity. So let's jump in. The chart summarizes our size and scale. You see the significant inflows here across our global platforms over the last five years. And we stand here with $380 billion of retirement balances. I talked about finding growth in areas that play to our strengths.
So these strengths, these competitive advantages sit in three major areas. First, we have a diversified set of liability origination platforms. In Japan, as you'll hear from Lyndon, we have a leading retail franchise. In the U.S. and the U.K., our platforms are more institutional. These markets have their own distinct dynamics, shifting supply and demand patterns and competitive forces. So why is this a source of advantage for MetLife? The global and diversified footprint allows us to be dynamic in terms of our capital allocation. So put simply, from an enterprise perspective, we can tilt growth towards the most attractive opportunity that we see across our markets globally. Second, we are focused within those markets on segments that play to our strength. In retail, as Lyndon will also describe, this is often about brand, product suite, depth of distribution relationships.
In the institutional space, financial strength and flexibility play a key role for our customers and intermediaries. This is an important advantage because we're focused on opportunities where we can originate liabilities and win business without having to stretch our investment portfolios. And lastly, we have outstanding investment management capabilities that are well-tuned to the long duration of our retirement products. And our retirement products generate predictable long-duration balances, which are managed by MetLife Investment Management. So next, I will dive deeper into our U.S. and U.K. platforms, which are housed within our retirement and income solutions business, or RIS. This is a high-level snapshot of RIS. Two important takeaways from this slide. First, we're a market leader across every single one of these products, and we do this at scale, as you can see from the balances here. Second, our products within RIS are also diversified.
So to put a finer point on this, the demand patterns across these markets give us opportunities to grow across a range of economic environments. Let me give you an example. A few years ago, interest rates were low, equity markets were volatile. We saw significant growth in our stable value business. As rates rose, rather, the stable value growth moderated, and we began to see significant pickup in volumes in our annuity business. So how has RIS performed over the Next Horizon period? We have guided to 2% to 4% in terms of balance growth for this business. In aggregate, we were able to achieve a number that's closer to 5%, with our spread balances growing even faster. How did we do this? All of our products delivered.
In pension risk transfers, we made an explicit call on focusing on the jumbo end of the market here, a market which plays to our strengths. That focus paid off with more than $33 billion of sales over the Next Horizon period, and sales, which I must emphasize, were written at attractive ROEs. We also looked more globally, identified the U.K. pension market as an attractive one. We entered that market providing a longevity reinsurance solution. From a standing start, we grew that business to $26 billion in balances. This is a capital-light business for us with attractive returns. Coming out of the pandemic, we saw rapid growth in structured settlements. We rapidly scaled our administrative capabilities here and were able to take full advantage of the growth here with $3 billion of sales in 2023, and you'll see an equivalent number in 2024 coming through.
So as we look forward, we see the market forces creating more growth for us and more opportunities for us here. The left-hand side just encapsulates some basic figures on that PRT opportunity. The transfer of assets from the balance sheets of corporate defined benefit plans to the balance sheets of life insurance companies is a trend that's set to continue. The industrial logic for this is very compelling. Corporates want to exit the pension business and focus on their core business. This is why we see many corporates on their second or third round of de-risking here. The financial logic here is also very compelling. With these funding levels that you see here, large corporates have positioned their pension plans to exit by way of little or no additional cash contributions. So this is really becoming a question of when versus if.
Just to put this in context in terms of size, those numbers are not on the slide here. The entire life insurance industry general account stands today at nearly $6 trillion. So this is the general account of all U.S. life companies in the U.S. So these are assets which were gathered over time across all products. So you compare that number to $3.2 trillion of assets sitting in defined benefit plan, and you get a sense of the materiality of the opportunities as some of those assets begin to shift. The DB de-risking trend is not the only tailwind we see. We see corporates looking to de-risk other liabilities, such as retiree medical, retiree life obligations, and then DC plan participants continue to see capital preservation in their DC allocations where our stable value solutions come in.
And then finally, we could also continue to see interest in providing retirement income solutions in the workplace, a trend that is in its infancy, but will bode well for us over time. All of these are underpinned by demographics and higher interest rates. What demographics and higher interest rates do is they increase the demand, but they also make these products a lot more attractive to the buyer. Let's go to the New Frontier. We think there's a tremendous opportunity for us in retirement here. It's really about the combination of what we could do globally, our disciplined approach that's going to allow us to create shareholder value over time. You can distill our strategy in three pillars. First, we are taking full advantage of the market that we're in here today, staying disciplined in our pricing and risk posture.
We're finding new areas of growth, adjacencies. But again, the approach here comes with discipline. And we're also ensuring that we have the additional capital flexibility that we need to capitalize on those opportunities. So this is a critical corner of the triangle which Michel spoke to you about earlier, and Adora will elaborate on that piece in a few minutes. So let's talk about what this means for RIS. Three examples on this slide. I talked earlier about the jumbo PRT market. Two more points to make on that market. One is that the assets in this market are highly concentrated. In fact, 80% of that $3.2 trillion is sitting in jumbo plans with more than a billion dollars in assets.
And then two, if you're a plan sponsor or a plan fiduciary looking for an insurance solution, financial strength, flexibility, a long track record of being in this business really matters. In the U.K. market, the same dynamics which have fueled growth in the U.S. PRT market are also fueling growth in the U.K. PRT market. The dynamics here will continue to drive the need for longevity reinsurance solutions. Now, if you're a U.K. insurer looking to evaluate reinsurance partners, this may sound familiar. Financial strength, flexibility, a long track record, and underwriting also really matter. And then the column on the right shows you flows and structured settlements. We expect to see continued growth in this market with the macro trends that you see here. And here, connectivity, which is with a highly specialized distribution system, really, really matters.
Across all these areas where we play, we focus on areas that play to our strength. But we're also looking for growth in adjacent areas. Two such examples here. On the left, we are building on the success of the relationships we have with U.K. leading insurers in the longevity market and looking to serve the same insurers by offering them a full reinsurance solution inclusive of the asset component. This is what we call U.K.-funded reinsurance, and think of it as similar in nature to U.S. PRT. This is valuable for U.K. players as they also see continued demand from pension plans. Now, this is not aspirational. This is in the here and now. I'm pleased to tell you that our team yesterday signed our inaugural funded reinsurance deal with a U.K. leading insurer, and we look for further growth to come here.
On the right-hand side, you're also too familiar with the U.S. retail annuity market. As we looked at that market with the lens of deploying our competitive advantage, we're seeing that we can participate in this market on an institutional or reinsurance basis. This is also not aspirational. We have a number of opportunities at various degrees of maturity here, and you should expect to hear about those in the near future. Now, what is common across both of these opportunities is that our customers understand the value that MetLife brings to the table. They're looking to partner with us because of our financial strength, investment capabilities, liquidity, and capital flexibility. So this is exactly what we mean by focus and focusing on opportunities which play to our strength as MetLife. So let me pass the stage on to my colleague Lyndon, who's going to talk about platform in Japan.
Great. Thanks, Ramy. Look, as Ramy has said, Japan is a strong contributor to our retirement platform. But let me just take a step back and talk about our Japan business more broadly. Now, we've got 51 years in the Japanese market. We are the longest foreign operating player in the country. We've got a strong record across retirement. We've got a strong record across protection as well as A&H. In other words, we know this market. And what we've seen over the last few years is growth rates in Japan have lagged, but MetLife has been a consistent performer outpacing our peers. In fact, we have jumped in our market position to number four from number six back in 2019. So we know what it takes. It's strong distribution and product innovation. And these are our core strengths in Japan. Now, we have a unique distribution advantage.
We have a scaled and diversified footprint, and that gives us broad access to customers. We've got over 4,000 career agents. We've got 100,000 general agents, and we've got 100 different banking partners. We are an industry leader in all our channels, including being number one in the GA space. Now, when it comes to product, we've got a full range of solutions. In addition to retirement products, we've got like inheritance and accumulation. We've got a full suite of protection as well as A&H and health products. And we've got a differentiated FX product portfolio. And this over here, we leverage the global U.S. dollar expertise that we have at MetLife Investment Management. And we were the first to market with this product, and we've maintained our leadership position in the product. And more importantly, we continue to innovate in this space.
Now, you take all of this together, this positions us very well for the future as well as the changing environment that's happening in Japan. Now, we look ahead, and Japan is at a very different space today. It really is at an inflection point. And I've been in Asia over 20 years. I've lived in a lot of the markets, including Japan. And for most of that time, we've seen a low to no growth or a deflationary environment. And now what I see is a real significant shift that's underway. We see a shift that gives us an enormous opportunity, particularly when it comes to the retirement space. First, what we're seeing is stronger economic performance. We're seeing inflation in Japan, including wage inflation. We're seeing a robust equity market, and we're starting to see increased consumption.
Japan is starting to move out of this deflationary environment for the first time in decades. Second, we're seeing an aging population in Japan, and here we've got a widening retirement gap, and that's estimated to reach just over $6 trillion by the year 2050, so it's the combination of all of this that is driving the growing needs for retirement, savings, as well as health products. Now, the other trend we're seeing is also a shift in personal financial assets with cash today that's just under $8 trillion starting to move to other financial assets, and here, inflation is only accelerating this trend. For the first time in decades, holding money in cash is becoming punitive in Japan, and to be clear, we're seeing this money in motion right now. Since 2020, we've seen close to $500 billion move out of cash to other financial assets.
But still today, 51% of the assets in Japan are held in cash. So there's a long runway to go here. And the government is also encouraging this shift. They've provided new tax incentives to encourage people to start moving their cash. And all this adds up to an enormous opportunity that we have in Japan, and it's particularly in the attractive retirement market. We're starting to see money move from the sidelines and over the longer run into the investment and insurance products that MetLife has to offer. Now, in this environment, our core strengths, distribution and product innovation, our product portfolio position us very well to win. And here's why. We've got a well-established diversified distribution, and that allows us to provide solutions in asset accumulation, protection, inheritance, as well as estate planning.
And we can give this to consumers at all of their life stages and with a nationwide coverage. And as I mentioned, we've got leading positions in our career and general agency channel as well as in the bank channel. And all of this is supported by a strong and trusted brand. Second, we've got a history of product innovation, and we've got capabilities that are addressing the changing consumer needs. We're a market leader in the FX products, and we continue to expand our product range into single premium Japanese yen products. Now, with the rising interest rates in Japan, this segment is going to start to become a lot more attractive from a consumer perspective. So in short, we've got the right products. We've got the ability to deliver these products to the right people at the right time.
And this gives us a tremendous opportunity to expand on our liability origination. Today, Japan generates over $10 billion of retirement flows annually, and we know we can continue to accelerate this growth. Now, as Ramy and I have talked about, when you look at our retirement liability origination platforms across all our key markets in the U.S., in the U.K., and Japan, the opportunity we're faced with is really big. And there are very few insurers that can lay this claim for this kind of reach. And this shows what happens when we bring the full power of MetLife to bear. Now, with that as a backdrop, I'm going to hand things off to Adora, who will talk about our capital flexibility.
Thank you so much, Lyndon. Let's talk about capital flexibility. You've seen this triangle referenced throughout the morning, either directly on a slide or just on the top right corner. I will focus on the top, which Ramy called critical, that of capital, or as the slide calls it, capital as a force multiplier. I'll take you through why it matters, what we're doing, and what it means for MetLife. You heard from Michel earlier the differentiated elements of our diversified business model and the trends that are in front of us. You just heard from Ramy about RIS. We targeted 2%-4% growth in liability balances over Next Horizon. We delivered 5%. There's even more growth to be had as we expand liability origination not only here in the U.S., but across the Atlantic in the U.K.
From Lyndon, our leadership in Japan and the changing environment there, there's growth in Japan. All of this demand and growth, it needs capital. We do have a big balance sheet, and we do have solutions in place to capture this growth, but we've been thinking about expanding our toolkit and adding more capital flexibility to capture this growth beyond what we have capital allocated to on our balance sheet. I'm thrilled to finally get to talk about something we've been working on. I know that some of you saw the press release yesterday on Chariot Re, a new life and annuity insurer that's backed by third-party capital alongside our capital and that of General Atlantic. We are delighted to be partnering with General Atlantic, equally a pioneer and a leader in their space, specifically in growth investing.
but they're a believer in long-term value creation, thoughtfully managing risk consistent with MetLife's principles. Chariot is anticipated to launch with $10 billion of liabilities, and that's $10 billion of our in-force liabilities. And we'll continue to scale and grow as we capture these growth opportunities that we've talked about today. Assets will be managed by MetLife Investment Management and by General Atlantic. For us, on one hand, as this slide calls out, Chariot enhances capital flexibility and efficiency. It allows us to generate additional liability growth beyond our balance sheet capacity. You will then see this additional growth converted into high-value earnings from MetLife Investment Management, which for shareholders means we continue to grow capital-light earnings and deliver higher returns. but what also excites us and is not on the slide is that Chariot puts on full display the collective power of MetLife's strengths.
We are a global and diversified origination platform. You heard Ramy and you heard Lyndon talk about Asia, the U.S., and the U.K. We have a strong track record across cycles, over 150 years of doing so. We have industry-leading expertise in insurance asset management, which you'll hear from John McCallion a little bit. What you're consistently hearing from us this morning is that we are laser-focused on high-value segments that play to our strengths, and we are in attractive markets, and the trends are in our favor. We will leverage third-party capital to drive even more growth. Let me hand it over to John McCallion to talk about our third strategic priority.
Thank you, Adora. All right. Only a few more hours before our next break. So bear with me. So anyway, I think that's a great transition to our third priority here. And I think Adora just did an excellent job summarizing a really powerful retirement platform. How can we take that to help accelerate our third priority, which is to accelerate the growth of our asset management business? I think let me just start with we are one of the largest asset managers in the world. And we believe we can leverage our scale, our expertise, our experience to accelerate and drive growth over the next five years. We have a track record of delivering investment excellence. We have unique origination capabilities to serve our clients. And as such, we believe we're very well positioned to capture the current and emerging trends. There you go. A little delay.
So why is this a key priority for us? We believe we're at an inflection point that puts us on a path to one trillion of assets under management. It's a business with attractive fee-related earnings that we're focused on growing over the next five years. And as you think about MetLife Holdings running down and then our asset management becoming a more prominent mix of our business, the quality of earnings here at MetLife continue to improve. And this also helps to enhance returns for the firm. So you heard Michel said earlier that MetLife Investment Management is very well known in the market, but this is really the unveiling or debut today. And we plan to make this a segment in 2025. But the thing to take away here is that we're an already scaled top 25 asset manager with a 150+ year heritage.
And leveraging those unique capabilities, the performance, the scale, and the power of the firm, this business evolved from driving differentiated returns for MetLife's General Account for decades to a competitive third-party asset manager that we've built over the last 10+ years. And one thing that's really important is that this is with a team that understands and has navigated various economic cycles. I don't think every asset manager can say that today. This is a high-quality institutional investment engine. We have about 1,100 associates across 22 of our global offices, deep credit and real estate expertise, strong brand, collaborative investment, and focused team. And we believe this business is set for growth. We have over $600 billion of assets under management. We're based off of three verticals. So think public fixed income. We have a private credit investment arm, and we have a real estate platform.
Of the $609 billion you have here, $177 of that is with our non-affiliate institutional clients. So we manage money for leading asset owners across the globe. Think corporate, public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies both domestically and internationally, endowments, etc. And we take a similar approach that we do to manage our own money. Disciplined, long-term, deep in risk management and expertise to drive differentiated returns for our clients. So let me walk through each of these three in a little more detail in terms of our investment verticals. So let's start with public fixed income. This is a team-based fundamental credit platform, bond by bond, think bottoms-up strategy. So that compares differently than you may think about some of the macro players that are out there. Oftentimes, actually, we can be slotted in nicely as a supplement to that.
We don't really compete head-on all the time with the macro strategies. This team will target second or kind of think top half returns in any one year with the philosophy that over time, we look for longer-term performance, think the three, five, 10-year, and that will generally get you to top quartile. The left-hand side of this page will show you that 85% of our primary strategies have risk-adjusted returns in first quartile over a 10-year period. Then you see what happens as a result of investment excellence on the right-hand side. You can see that just investment excellence drives asset accumulation. It's pretty simple. You may know about this, actually. The other thing that's noteworthy is we've picked 2017. You say, "Why did we pick 2017?" That was the year that we acquired a top-notch platform, Logan Circle.
And we combined that platform with our own platform. And I think what this demonstrates is our ability to think about leveraging our strategic capability when it comes to M&A and corporate development to add platforms and where 1 + 1 can equal more than two. And you can see we've almost doubled, or I guess we effectively doubled assets over the seven-year period. So this is a platform with multi-decade investment excellence and track record and very much poised to capture the demand for given what higher rates are doing for fixed income products. And we think as curve steepens, that demand will continue. Now, let me turn to our private asset platform. And before I get into each of these, I thought I'd give you a little page here. It's probably my favorite page of this presentation. And because we have industry leadership positions.
Let me start on the top left. We are the largest infrastructure debt lender in the world. This is in a segment and two things. I actually heard something on the news today. One, clients are looking for exposure here. Two, as you all can kind of appreciate, there's a need for infrastructure investment. This is a great position to be in. We lend to century-old ports, to state-of-the-art data centers supported by the AI trend. We're truly global. Think 40% of our assets that we originate are from the U.S., another 40% Europe, and then 20% rest of world. A great team. Just last week, they were named Infrastructure Manager of the Year at the Insurance Investor Awards. If you move to the bottom left, this shows you our presence in the third-party asset management of insurance general accounts.
We're the largest private fixed income manager. Now, that includes our private credit platform as well as our real estate lending platform, which leads me to the top right. We are the number one or the largest real estate manager in the world based on Pensions & Investments' latest ranking. We're a leader in a very attractive asset class across equity, commercial mortgage loans, and agricultural loans, which leads me to the bottom right. We issued our first loan in 1917. We are the largest U.S. agricultural mortgage lender in the United States outside of government-sponsored entities. Think here that there's high barrier to entry to something like this. You need specialized understanding. Our relationships go generations. If you think about businesses being passed down to their next generation. Very hard to kind of just decide to enter. In summary, these industry leadership positions are unique.
They're competitive advantages, and they're in attractive sectors. And they give us the ability to drive relative value and attractive returns. Okay. Let me jump into the two segments in a little more detail. All right. Let's start with private credit. So we've been a private market lender for over 100 years, providing investments that offer attractive returns, offers portfolio diversification, and downside protection. And this is really a key differentiating platform for us that's in a great position to take advantage of the global shift and rise in non-bank lending. We have extensive relationships. Think borrowers, sponsors, intermediaries, key market participants that give us broad and diverse deal access. And that gives us direct and proprietary opportunities that are not widely available in the market. Now, private credit, those two words, they take many definitions these days. So let me define ours.
This includes our corporate private placement offering, which has been on our balance sheet for decades, includes infrastructure debt, as you just heard. By the way, if you add in, we acquired a firm a few years ago called Affirmative Investment Management, brought in sustainability capabilities. You tie those two things together. We just launched a European infrastructure transition strategy that's off to a great start, so again, just kind of thinking about adding capabilities. We have a private structured credit platform. Sorry about that. We have a residential home loan platform, and we have a middle market lending business, and the combination of all of those things, we've originated over $100 billion of assets over the last five years, and then if you think of the larger strategies that we have, we tend to be up in quality.
Our internal assessments, for the most part, there's some public ratings, but we would generally be around A3. Think that way, and then relative to comparable publics, we're generating excess spreads, and finally, and maybe most importantly, is when we're able to structure these in a strong way with strong financial covenants, leveraging our disciplined underwriting and knowledge of the sector, and allowing us to have strong performance, and you see that we've only had 3 bps of loss over the five-year period, so our pre-existing foothold here puts us in a great position to capture these emerging trends around non-bank lending. We're a large, long-term experienced lender here that drives excess spreads with low loss experience. Okay. Now, let me turn to real estate, and this platform has really benefited over the last 10+ years from MetLife Investment Management entering the third-party asset management business.
Since then, leveraging our century of experience, I like to say century, just seems fun. We've expanded on multiple fronts. We now have a deep and diverse capital base. We have a broad set of product offerings and our client base. Again, insurance companies, both domestic and internationally, sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds. So those are great examples. Those have put us in a position to be a premier preferred partner in this market. With our size, our scale, our expertise, it's something that very few can match. That gives us access to virtually all relevant transactions. If you go to the slide here, you can see that over the last five years, we've originated $96 billion of assets. Then the right-hand side starts to talk about our lending capabilities.
And if you think about our lending side, we focus lending on high-quality investments, borrowers with experience, and well-capitalized in institutional quality assets in large markets. Based on our internal rating assessment at origination, those would tend to be an A-quality type investment. They've generated over that time, on average, 174 bp s of excess spread. Then look, this sector has had some headwinds. If you think about what COVID has done, it's created a little bit of a cyclical downturn in this sector. Despite that, we perform well with only 7 bps loss. That can be very much comparable to what you would expect in an A-quality corporate bond. This is a platform that has a diverse client base, has high-quality investments, and we are a leading partner and provider to this space.
We generate excess spread, and we have differentiated performance, and particularly if you consider what's happened over the last several years in this market. Okay, and this positions us well to capture some powerful trends. And you've heard some of these already, and I'll just kind of hit on these quickly. One is, obviously, as I mentioned, the global shift that's occurring in the rise in non-bank lending. You all have realized and seen the growth in private credit over the last several years. We think that will continue to grow. Insurance providers are seeking third-party solution providers. I think you heard earlier from Missy that folks are looking to do more with fewer, and we think that's going to continue here as well. Also, the insurance assets have grown significantly over the last several years, probably 20+%. And we think there's a future growth path there as well.
Higher interest rates, tailwinds for our fixed income platform broadly, and we think as the curve steepens, that will continue to shift from cash into more fixed income-oriented products, and then lastly, I'll just highlight this is a fragmented industry, and I've had the opportunity to get closer to this space over the last 12+ months. I was familiar, but maybe not as familiar as I am now, and it's a fragmented industry, and scale matters here. You can start, but it's hard to keep going, and so the fragmentation will benefit major players like ourselves, so what does that mean for setting strategy? Our strategy will be built on those differentiating capabilities, thinking about those strong trends, thinking about how our scale and expertise can serve as a springboard to accelerate growth.
As I mentioned before, having spent a little more time close up and personal here in this industry, what I've really taken away from our team is there's a relentless focus on clients and thinking about being a solution provider, building trusted relationships over the long term. And so our strategy is centered around building differentiation for our clients, underpinned by being a top talent destination. To do that, you need a supportive culture. Actually, just earlier this week, we announced for the fourth consecutive year, we were named one of the best places to work in money management by Pensions & Investments magazine. So you need that. Obviously, this is a people's business. And we have the opportunity to expand in our core, build on that value proposition for our clients, and leverage our competitive advantages, which I'll talk more about over the next few slides. Okay.
This is a great example about leveraging the core. I'm going to just take a sip of water real quick. Okay. The insurance segment. We have a great leadership position here. We've driven differentiated returns for the MetLife General Account. We believe we can leverage that expertise to drive strategic and preferred relationships with our clients, and we believe that this is a client segment that will continue to grow, and you can see that on the left-hand side. Insurance assets, and particularly those insurers are interested in outsourcing further, we expect will continue to grow over the next five years or four years, I guess, if you use today's date. We also think we can move into places that we're not really big in today. For example, we don't have a lot of share in, say, P&C or the health component of this asset space.
We think we can add further there. We think we can add more growth out of our international opportunities, particularly Asia. So those are some. There's opportunities to grow with the growth here in the broader market. There's also opportunities for us to expand our client base, and we're coming from a position of strength here. We're well-positioned to capture this trend and be a strategic partner for our clients, and then second, as we said, we really want to strengthen our preferred provider position. We have a great position today, but that doesn't mean we can't get better. We want to think about adding complementary products to our advantage platform, continuing to think about how to enhance our offerings, and as I said before, clients are looking to do more with fewer. We want to be a client-driven solution, and that's important because not everyone can be that.
Some are more product-focused. It's just a different strategy. But we believe coming to a client, being able to talk about relative value and what suits them best, and being able to provide best-in-class across a spectrum of products across liquidity and risk, that's an advantage. But we want to continue to expand our offerings, think about adding complementary capabilities that are fit for purpose for our platform, and centering all of this around being a full-service provider to our clients. And then the third pillar is taking advantage of some unique competitive advantages, which I would reference as leveraging the power of MetLife. What we have, a lot of people want, is being part of MetLife in this industry. Scale matters. And we need to optimize and take advantage of this unique position that we have. We have liability origination capabilities.
You heard Adora talk about Chariot Re. That's another tool in the toolbox to help accelerate growth. We have capital. We have balance sheet. I have people come into my office quite often and ask for our balance sheet. We have a competitive advantage. So we need to take advantage of that, both for organic growth, thinking about new product innovation, as well as thinking strategically about complementary inorganic. And over time, we also think that actually, I'd say not even over time, but now we're well-positioned. As we add assets, we have operating leverage opportunity. We have a contemporary platform thanks to the investments that we've made over the years to, I guess I should say, esteemed partners here in technology, because I guess everyone else called you esteemed. But we're at an advantage, right?
The investments we've made in technology, because of our size and scale, puts us in position to drive operating leverage. So in summary, we're excited about what's ahead. We are a top 25 global leader in fixed income and real estate, and a long-tenured asset manager with an experienced team who has experience navigating various cycles over their career and known for delivering differentiated returns and investment excellence. MetLife's balance sheet, its brand, its infrastructure, its institutional relationships, that's another one that we have a great opportunity to leverage. Those are all competitive advantages for us. And you've combined that with the breadth, depth, and scale that we have, we're in a great position to capture the strong trends today and emerging to accelerate growth. So with that, you all get to take a little break.
We'll give you like 30 seconds if you want, but you'll get, I think, a 15-minute break. Yeah. 15 minutes promptly, John said. So we're going to lock the doors if you don't get back in time. All right. Thank you.
Our program will resume momentarily. Please take your seats.
All right, everybody. Thank you very much. I'd like to reconvene and start off with our next strategic priority: expanding in high-growth markets internationally. And I'll introduce Eric, Lyndon, and Naomi to take over. Thanks very much.
Great. Wow. Thank you. Thank you, John. It's great to be here. So earlier, Michel mentioned how our international markets are differentiating. Then Lyndon told us about the strength of our franchise in Japan. And now we will tell you why we're really excited about another core element of our global footprint. These are our high-growth international markets.
So today we will spotlight Mexico, China, India, and Brazil. These are all valuable contributors today, and we believe will become major contributors tomorrow. Together, they represent around 40% of the world's population, a quarter of the GDP. So both individually and collectively, they are relevant and large. India, as you all know, is the most populated country in the world. China, the second most populated country in the world that is emerging from the shadow of the pandemic. Mexico and Brazil, the largest economies in Latin America. And while the dynamics in each market are different, there is a very common thread to all. The middle class is growing faster than in more mature markets, and the insurance penetration is much lower. So in combination, these two factors create the perfect conditions for fast-growing insurance markets. So in summary, these markets are big, and they are growing fast.
Now, what differentiates us in these markets is that we are very well positioned to win. And this is key. Michel mentioned earlier, we are not planting flags. We have well-established, profitable, and very strong business with a very strong and solid track record. And as you will see, we also have very clear strategies to capture that growth momentum. So let's start first with Mexico. Mexico is the largest insurance market in Latin America. It is a market that has been growing over the past few years. Yet it has very low penetration levels combined with an increasing protection gap. Therefore, there's a lot of runway. So let's talk a second about our franchise in Mexico. So earlier, I mentioned these markets being valuable contributors today and becoming major contributors in the future. Now, Mexico kind of stands out in the sense that it is already a major contributor.
This is our third-largest business globally after the U.S. and Japan. We are the largest life insurance company in Mexico. We are serving over 13 million customers, and with over 20 years of presence in Mexico, we are deeply ingrained in the Mexican society. Just to give you a sense of that scale and impact, during the pandemic, we paid over or close to $1 billion of COVID claims. One out of four COVID claims in Mexico was paid by MetLife. Now, what's exciting about Mexico is that not only are we the leader, but we are also growing very fast, and we were able to grow both the top and bottom line around mid-teens while growing faster than the market and gaining market share. Now, think about our business in Mexico around two growth engines: the government business and the private business.
Our flagship worksite government business has long dominated the market, and there, our wide competitive moats have helped us both protect and grow that business, so switching to private, five years ago, when we embarked on the Next Horizon journey, we described to you our strategy to accelerate growth in private, and as you can see, we delivered. We doubled the size of private by adding over $1 billion of PFOs and growing twice as fast as the market in that space. Private now represents over 50% of our total business in Mexico. Now, looking forward, the even better news is that we have significant opportunity to keep growing in private. The market is very large, and at an 11% market share, we still have a lot of room for growth, and based on what we have accomplished, we see a path centered around three pillars.
We will continue to expand our agency footprint. We built an agency force of over 4,000 agents, and we will continue to grow. Second, we will leverage our dominant position in Group Benefits to expand and pursue opportunities in voluntary, and you heard Ramy tell us about the success we've had in the U.S., so leveraging some of that into Mexico, and third, we will scale our digital distribution and bancassurance capabilities. And I will touch upon that a little bit later when we talk about Brazil, so in summary, we know Mexico. We know how to grow in Mexico, and we are confident that our growth trajectory will continue, so in many ways, we can think about Mexico as a great template for other growth markets, so with that, we're going to switch continents.
We will go to Asia, and Lyndon will tell us more about our opportunities in India and China.
Great. Thanks, Eric. All right. Let's turn to India. Now, India is a very attractive market when you look at the macroeconomic environment, the demographics, and what's happening in the insurance space over there. India is the fifth-largest economy in the world. It's the fastest growing among the G20 today. It's projected to grow at 7% a year over the next few years. India's got the largest population in the world, and there's a growing middle class in India. And that middle class will represent almost 50% of the population by the year 2030. Now, when it comes to the insurance market, penetration continues to be low, with only 3% of the population covered today. And here we have the life market in India growing at almost 9% a year.
It's going to move from being the ninth-largest insurance market in the world today to being the fifth-largest by the year 2032. And in addition to all the favorable macro environment and the demographic conditions, these are all underpinned by a supportive regulatory environment. Now, like Japan, I have spent a lot of time in India, and we're really excited about this market and its long-term growth potential. With the economic growth, we also see the insurance market continuing to be a lot more attractive. And if you look at our business, we are well positioned in India. We are the leading foreign JV in partnership with Punjab National Bank. Now, Punjab National Bank is the second-largest state bank in India. It has access to over 117 million customers. And we have a profitable business in India, but we've also seen the value of this property grow.
We've seen our embedded value go to close to $900 million. That's an 11% CAGR over the last five years. All these positive growths and trends are reflected in the market multiples. We are seeing valuations of listed life insurance companies trading at 2.6 times embedded value. That's a five-year average. That implies over a $2 billion valuation for our company in India. Now, we're looking to fully participate in this market over the longer run. We've increased our ownership stake starting from 26% up to 49% over the last few years. Now, how do we plan on capitalizing on this opportunity? Our main focus is going to be our partnership with PNB. This is a bank that has a tremendous network and tremendous scale. We've already got a strong track record within PNB.
Over the course of our partnership, we're now in over 50% of the 10,000 branches that they have. That's a twofold increase from where we were back in 2019. And we've also more than doubled our customer penetration over that same period. And while we've made progress here, we're only just scratching the surface with this partnership. We now have the blueprint on how we're going to take this even further. We see an opportunity to expand in the branches, particularly when you look at the urban and the metro areas. They have the right target population for what we're looking at. And we feel that we can get to over 70% of the branches over the next five years. To date, we've only penetrated 1.5% of the PNB customer base. Sorry.
We'll continue to focus on increasing the number of branches, improving the productivity within those branches, and further investing ourselves to directly embed ourselves within the PNB technology. All this will get us to the higher customer penetration within PNB. And you take all these actions together, that will allow us to capitalize on the significant upside to continue to accelerate and grow the growth within our JV partnership. Now, let's go to China. We take a long-term view of the China market. Over the last five years, a lot has happened in China, particularly when you look at what was happening with COVID, all the lockdowns, as well as the economic conditions. The economy and the industry, the insurance market, are all in a very different place than they were five years ago. And despite all this, the opportunity in China remains significant.
China is the second-largest economy in the world with the second-largest life market in the world. It has an aging population. It's got a growing middle class. It's got a growing amount of wealth, and in the meantime, it continues to be an underpenetrated market with only 2% of the population covered today, and our business there is in a strong business position. And despite all these changing market conditions, we've continued to outpace the market. Here too, we've seen the value of our business grow significantly. We now have our embedded value in China at $3.3 billion, and this business has also generated cash consistently. We're one of the few foreign insurers in China that are paying dividends, and as Michel said, we've paid dividends for nine consecutive years, and over the last five years, we've paid almost $340 million in dividends.
The challenges are not going away in the short run, but we have a strong franchise there. We've got a strong agency distribution with an emerging bancassurance business. We've got a business that has outpaced the market. We've created value. It's self-funding its growth, and it's generating cash. China, what it gives us is a valuable option in the second-largest life insurance market in the world. Now, with that, let me take you back to LatAm and let Eric talk about Brazil.
All right. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Lyndon. So let's switch to Brazil. Brazil is one of the most exciting insurance markets in the world. It is the largest economy in Latin America. It has a sizable and rapidly growing insurance market. And if you think in terms of overall digital adoption, it is certainly a market that has leapfrogged several more advanced economies.
This disruption has created huge opportunities in insurance. It's created access to large and new value pools of customers. This is what Michel earlier on referenced to as the democratization of insurance. This is a very different Brazil than it used to be just five years ago. Everyone needs to have his favorite slides. This is my favorite slide. Why? Because this slide brings to life this story of disruption. It illustrates the magnitude and the speed of disruption in financial services. Historically, the banking sector was highly concentrated, with few mega banks dominating the market. The same really applied for the insurance industry. Now, native digital banks have totally disrupted both the banking and the insurance industries. They grew exponentially much, much faster than traditional banks.
To give you a sense, now 40% of all bank accounts in Brazil are with digital native banks, and this happened in just five years, so we were early movers. We were quick to capitalize on this trend. We invested in innovation, both in distribution and in technology. We became the ideal partners for these digital banks and broader ecosystems. Where you see the MetLife logo on the left-hand side of the slide, this represents the many partnerships we've been able to seal, giving us access to over 100 million new potential customers. As a result of all this, we are the fastest-growing life insurer, significantly outpacing the market with a 26% sales growth. We now serve over nine million customers. Three million of these were captured through what I mentioned earlier, the digital space. And now our digital distribution has really turbocharged our growth in Brazil.
This is really just the beginning. We're only getting started. The critical success factor of our success in Brazil has been our ability to innovate at speed with the mindset of a startup technology company. With that, I will now invite Naomi, our head of strategy and transformation for Latin America, to tell us about a unique, fully digital distribution platform for embedded insurance that we called MetLife Accelerator. MetLife Accelerator accelerated our growth in Brazil. We're now very excited to be able to deploy and scale these capabilities in the region and beyond. With that, Naomi.
Thanks, Eric. As we saw this disruption happening in the market, we proactively adapted to win in this new environment.
We put ourselves in the shoes of our partners, and we understood that what was critical for them was speed, the agility to test and to iterate, and seamless integration. So we made the investments in technology and in the team. Our advantage is that we saw the opportunity, and we knew that what was key to our success was to innovate at speed with the mindset of a startup technology company in order to deliver for our partners. And the result is a unique, innovative new platform that I'm so excited to bring you today, MetLife Accelerator. And everyone got a favorite slide, but apparently I'm extra special and I get a video. So we're going to watch a short video to bring this to life.
Welcome to MetLife Accelerator. The rise of new digital ecosystems is unlocking unprecedented market opportunities for value creation.
To thrive in this dynamic environment, we quickly adapted to understand the needs of our partners, focusing on rapid deployment, seamless integration, and the ability to test and iterate quickly. We created MetLife Accelerator, the flexible, fully digital solution that enables any business to offer personalized insurance protections embedded into existing customer experiences implemented in just days. MetLife Accelerator enables our partners to adopt and their customers to purchase and service our insurance solutions via mobile devices, providing a scalable, fully digital solution by embedding insurance directly into their customers' experiences. MetLife Accelerator delivers the protection needed exactly when and where it makes sense. MetLife Accelerator enhances customer engagement, creates new revenue streams, taps into new markets, generates value, and propels partners' business forward while driving growth. Welcome to the democratization of insurance in Latin America. Welcome to MetLife Accelerator.
Great.
Hopefully, that gave you a sense of the potential of MetLife Accelerator, so we launched just over a year ago, and we're already seeing great results. We're live in our three core markets of Mexico, Brazil, and Chile, with over 4 million in-force customers and 100 million in PFOs, and as we look forward, we see a really exciting path ahead. First, the disruption in financial services in Brazil that Eric just referenced is happening in Mexico as we speak, and second, outside of financial services, in industries such as retailers, telcos, and rapidly emerging digital marketplaces, the opportunity for embedded insurance distribution is phenomenal, and we already have partnerships in place giving us access to these new value pools. With MetLife Accelerator, we're ready to seize the opportunity across the region and across industries.
As you heard from Michel this morning, I think it's still morning, yeah, distribution innovation is a key enabler of our New Frontier strategy, and being a global company gives us a unique advantage to leverage these kinds of capabilities across LatAm and around the globe, so to learn more, as both Missy and Michael invited, please join us. We'll have some capability expo in the booth after the session. Okay, so let me wrap up this segment. Today, we spotlighted four high-growth international markets: Mexico, India, China, and Brazil, where we have leading differentiated businesses with significant runways for growth. These markets are supported by strong macro, demographic, and insurance trends. As Michel said, we are making our strong franchises even stronger with our growth outpacing the market, and as we look to the future, as Eric and Lyndon both shared, we're just getting started.
The combination of market dynamics, solid fundamentals, and differentiation through innovation positions these markets as major contributors for tomorrow. Thank you, and with that, I'll turn it back to John for a financial perspective on the day.
Great job. All right. Great job, Naomi, and Eric and Lyndon, so I will wrap up with a bit of financial perspective and summarize in a little more detail some of the enterprise financial metrics that Michel opened with. Let me just start with, we've been on a journey, and we're really excited about the foundation that we've built. We've shifted our business mix to perform well in a variety of economic environments. We've pushed returns up and risk down. The themes of growth, returns, and consistency, they were always central under Next Horizon, but they're evolving under New Frontier.
So we have the opportunity to lean into the growth pillar, to accelerate growth responsibly. I'll just emphasize the word as well, as Michel did, while also maintaining that discipline around delivering attractive returns through an all-weather performance. As Michel said, we built a strong foundation under Next Horizon. We strengthened our performance, leveraging focus, simplify, and differentiate. We built a discipline around allocating scarce resources. And this became a real theme for us as we thought through how we operate, in other words, discipline around allocating capital, including insurance capital, capital at the holding company, discipline around, and you've heard this a lot today, discipline how we think about operating expenses and that reinvestment as a scarce resource, and really being deliberate around how you allocate that to the highest and best use. And then ultimately, our people's time. It matters.
Michel will often say, "Strategy is about choices," and it is. It's about prioritization and making sure that we get the right teams behind the things that are most important to drive value. We were deliberate and de-risking, and ultimately relentlessly focused on execution that resulted in us exceeding our targets under Next Horizon, so as Michel said earlier, we had an ROE that started at 12% to 14%. We were doing so well, we decided to raise it to 13% to 15% during the course of our Next Horizon time period, and we believe we'll be at or above the top end of that range. We're on track to generate $21 billion of cumulative distributable cash. That was $20 billion when we started in Next Horizon, and we freed up $1.2 billion of reinvestment while also lowering our unit costs.
And so overall, this demonstrates the resilient business model that we have built over time. And this is also despite the uncertainty that we faced over the last five years. So that leads us to the next five years. And we believe we can leverage a strong foundation to deliver on New Frontier, which is a bold evolution of our strategy and value proposition. We have the opportunity to drive double-digit EPS growth, generate attractive returns, increasing our ROE to 15% to 17%, helped by our efficiency mindset, driving down unit costs, reducing our expense ratio target by 100 bp s over the five-year period, raising our cumulative cash, free cash flow from $20 billion to $25 billion+ . Now let me walk through each of these in a little more detail. Okay, let's start with growth. So we have the opportunity to lean into responsible growth.
We shifted our business mix. We have competitive advantages and moats in our markets, across our markets, I should say. And this will be led by healthy volume growth and coupled with margin expansion. And you heard this in a few places throughout. And this will support about, we view this as about 60% of that double-digit growth. The remaining will come through disciplined, consistent capital management, and that will remain a key tenet under a New Frontier, just like it was under Next Horizon. Shifting to attractive returns. So we get this question, or we have gotten this question over the year, like, "Why do you think you'll either have or you have seen rising returns here?" And I point out three things that have been supportive of higher returns.
One, we have strong, unlevered, and I would emphasize the word unlevered, IRRs on our new business, above our ROE currently and in our target. We've had a business mix shift, and it's continuing. So MetLife Holdings is running off. It is a lower ROE business. It's also been a headwind for us from growth perspective. We're also thinking about that we'll be shifting our business mix to include asset management over the five-year period. And so that will naturally just enhance returns as well. And then thirdly is efficiency mindset. And it's been just that. And yesterday we had a town hall because we weren't doing anything else, so we figured, "Why don't we throw that in?" So we had a town hall, and Eric, I think, appropriately said it nicely yesterday, "Efficiency mindset, it's not just an initiative.
It's part of our DNA." And this has been really powerful for us as a firm to think about how we build capacity so that we can build in more discretionary funding, let's say, for growth, and at the same time while lowering unit costs. And this is where we believe we can move from size to scale advantage. And I'll talk more about this on the next few slides because I'm going to go through each of these in a little more detail. So you've seen this slide before. This isn't a new one, but it's worth just reemphasizing. Simply put, the capital that we're deploying today generates more value, higher IRR with a lower payback period.
This is another one where this has not only been a really important financial metric for us, but culturally, this has been very powerful because what it did was we deployed a consistent metric globally that allowed everyone to be grounded in distributable cash flow, right, for their entities, for their geographies. And it empowered our leaders to think about how they can drive value, whether that's through product design, optimizing capital, unit costs. And that allowed them to run their business. And that was extremely powerful, and it's showing up here. And you can see that capital deployed from 2019 to 2023, roughly the same, yet our value of new business has increased by almost 50%. So very powerful metric, driving strong risk-adjusted returns. Second item. Our runoff, look, MetLife Holdings actually has strong free cash flow, but it is a lower ROE segment.
I'll talk about cash flow in a little bit, why we think it will maintain and be able to sustain the growth. It's becoming a smaller proportion of earnings. Michel mentioned earlier. Two broad reasons are the first two bullets. There's the natural runoff of the business. That's causing about 50% of that decline. Another 40% is from being opportunistic around a reinsurance transaction that we did a year-plus ago. As this continues to decline and higher returning business becomes a greater share, and we continue to see growth in Group Benefits in Latin America and across our retirement platform, including asset management, that should enhance returns as well. Then the third thing is efficiency mindset. We believe there's a significant opportunity ahead of us.
The power of our scale, and Michel had that on the slide earlier when he talked about the four priorities. On the right-hand side, there were the four competitive advantages, and we believe that power of scale is one of them. We also believe we have not fully realized it, and we believe that technology is going to play a greater role. I was at a conference. I think it was probably a little over a month ago, with Ramy and Todd Katz invited both of us to talk about what we're seeing in technology was a theme. The purpose was to emphasize to the brokers how much we're investing in these businesses, and we are. I see it because I see it on my allocation of expenses.
Then the question that someone asked me was, "So what's your most exciting initiative?" And my response was legacy modernization. And maybe five years ago, that would have been a little more of a pit in my stomach. But we're seeing real things now. You're starting to see that this is going to start to show up. And we're seeing it in some of the initiatives that are now coming out. And you'll see out there, that's also as a result of the foundational investments we've been making that haven't always kind of showed up for everyone. They're now starting to show the benefits. And this is where everyone, and by the way, we're not unique here. So I don't want to pretend like everyone else is that we're the only ones doing this. The difference, though, is we have size. And this is where size becomes a scale advantage.
Another thing I would highlight, we've been on this multi-year journey too of thinking about process-by-process reengineering. And what we're now seeing and thinking about the next five years and why do we believe unit costs will continue to go down and we can still add discretionary funding for reinvestment is we're also injecting that with new technology, including AI. And we're seeing that start to serve as a force multiplier towards productivity gains. And we believe that we should get about 20% of productivity gains across those processes. So if we can drive productivity gains, we can improve margins, and then we can use the discretionary funding to drive growth and drive differentiation. Okay, let me turn to all-weather performance. And when we think about all-weather performance, you need to talk about the investment portfolio in this industry.
John, I think, is the one that came up with this. Michel has quoted it as well, but we've said diversification is a superpower of ours. And that wouldn't be included here, right? We have the ability, and Ramy mentioned this earlier, because of our other competitive advantages, we can maintain and lean into the strategies and the asset capabilities that we know best. We can maintain diversification, and this generates a high-quality, well-diversified asset class by geography, by positions in order to manage through stressed environments. And our Chief Investment Officer for the balance sheet and the General Account, he always likes to say, "There's no substitute for diversification as a risk mitigant." And we have it. And this helps to generate an all-weather portfolio along with a disciplined approach to ALM, a disciplined approach to underwriting, and then wrap all that with risk management.
Then couple that with the specialized asset class expertise we have in MetLife Investment Management suited for insurance companies, and this allows us to generate higher returns without having to stretch on the risk spectrum. The other area I'd highlight, and this isn't a new concept, but it is important as we think about all-weather. It's just, again, going back to the discipline and the relentless focus on deploying capital to its highest and best use, and that will continue under New Frontier. It starts with looking at the capital of our new business, which you saw an earlier slide on, and being relentlessly focused on that, then once you've done that and you have, I'll say, freed up capital to think about where to allocate, we would consider strategic M&A. We believe that's a core competitive advantage for us.
We'll obviously think about that in the concept of complementary, strategic, accretive to our business, evaluated relative to other uses of capital. Then after that, we believe, and we'll continue to believe, that excess capital belongs to the shareholders through share repurchases and dividend per share growth. That leads us to thinking about all-weather when it comes to cash. Maybe ultimately it comes down to sustainable growth in cash when you think all-weather. This is core to what we think about as a superior value proposition. We're backed by a diversified set of market-leading businesses with competitive advantages and moats set in attractive, addressable profit pools underpinned by disciplined risk management. That leads to a resilient business model built to drive sustainable growth and free cash flow and shareholder value. In summary, we're excited about what's ahead. We've beat our Next Horizon commitments.
This laid the foundation and built the confidence for us to increase our targets under New Frontier. We're confident in our ability to deliver on our commitments to accelerate responsible growth, deliver attractive returns through an all-weather performance, and ultimately deliver a superior value proposition. All right, thank you. We're going to shift to Q&A, and I think I'm going to hand it to John to orchestrate this and moderate.
So Michel, we can have you come up to the stage. I'm just going to select folks, not at random, but. All right. I'm going to start over here with Sunit.
Thanks, Mark.
Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, John. Sunit coming from Jefferies. So first on asset management, you talked about the $1 trillion AUM target. Can you talk about how M&A plays into achieving that goal? And then I know we're going to get a better sense next year, but just any rough sense of how much earnings that business is generating today?
Yeah. I'm on. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes, we'll give you a rough sense next year. But I'll come back to that and maybe help you. But on the trillion, as I said, I would say we're on a path to a trillion. It will be organic and complementary inorganic. So we do believe, going back to the trends in this industry, that it is a fragmented industry. And growth is an and. It's organic and inorganic. But I would stress complementary. We're not thinking about transformational-type things here. And I think we would apply the discipline that you've seen from us over the years. I think for purposes of modeling, to help with all of that, to avoid any more modeling questions on asset management, what I would suggest is you because asset management's in our numbers today.
But my suggestion is just you model the current state, the current segments, and then next year we will provide you very easy-to-understand detail to adjust your models. How's that?
Okay.
Was it good or?
No.
It was fine. Second question is just on Chariot. What is the appetite for using that vehicle for your own in-force derisking actions? And is there any limitations in terms of what types of business can go into there?
Yeah. I mean, I'll go back to what I said earlier in terms of sort of the optionality that we're building here, and that's really predicated on the fact that we think demand might or is anticipated to exceed our capital generation capabilities, so it makes sense for us to have the flexibility that Chariot offers us, so that's the main driver here. This is not sort of a vehicle that is intended sort of to aid in our derisking efforts. That's not the main objective here. Like I said, it's more to allow us to capture some of the growth that we see in the horizon.
Great.
Tom.
Thanks. Tom Gallagher, Evercore ISI. First question is on the 6%+ organic growth. How do we disaggregate top line and margin expansion?
It will be both, but primarily top line. But on the margin expansion, it will depend on business, clearly. I mean, you heard Ramy mentioned it earlier around group. That would be a natural place for that. But obviously, we have other businesses that are more spread-oriented. So it'll be business-dependent. I was anticipating your question. I didn't come up with it. I don't want to give a number, but I'd say the majority of it would be volume growth, and then they'll be supplemented by margin expansion.
Gotcha. And then I guess my follow-up is just on the disclosure that you have 94 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies as a client. And then you show you have 25% market share of Jumbo. I guess of the Fortune 100, you have 94% market share. Now, I presume that's not exactly right because you probably have pieces of business from the top 94. But can you talk a little bit about competitive market dynamics? If you have that much concentration among the largest competitors, are competitors going after that business? You don't seem to lose much of it. What do you got to do to maintain it? How do we think about that as a risk, but then as an opportunity? And how much of that do you actually have market share?
Because to me, 94 of 100 implies much more market share than 25, but maybe you can help think through that.
Sure. Maybe let me take that. So just to maybe baseline the numbers, what we define as National Accounts are employers with 5,000 and more employees. So that's a much wider spectrum than the Fortune 100 companies. So just think about that 25% encompassing essentially large employers with that 5,000 cutoff. With respect to that segment that we serve, we showed you our product density, right? It's been creeping up over time, somewhere between two and three. And in some cases, we've got a lot more. In some cases, we've just got an anchor product that we're expanding from. But you also saw that on average, these employers offer 12. And we're kind of getting the two or three from that 12. So the opportunity here for us is to, one, keep them, which we have been doing. Our persistency in that segment is 90%+ .
The way we do that is with service, with technology, with deep integrations, and with competitive price, but one that is fair, right? So we have a target margin. We don't get too greedy, and we don't get too aggressive. We are in the middle and balanced in terms of our approach to pricing, and the track record here is to keep the customers' price fairly, serve them really well, and over time, we continue to grow market share and deepen the relationships, so that's why the other percentage here that you should look at is that 80%. 80% of our sales in National Accounts are coming from those existing customers that we have, and then the last point is I think about growth here. A lot of our growth is not competing against others here. It is going after participation.
So think about that 40 million eligible numbers sitting in National Accounts, and we're driving greater participation by going after that wide space when we're not competing against another competitor here. We're just having our installed product set being driven into the working population with ever higher participation rates.
Just on competition.
Is it real because if 94 of the top 100 are with MET, it seems like an incredible moat. I'm just wondering, is there any real threat of losing any of those jumbo accounts?
Look, I mean, this is a competitive market, and nobody is complacent here, so we know we have to earn the trust of these customers each and every year. As you say, the more you go upmarket, the narrower the competitor set is because you need that scale, you need that capability. These are sophisticated employers, and so we think all of that plays to our strength, but we're not complacent about this. We're always looking to stay ahead of the curve, but the competitor set does narrow the further upmarket you go in Group Benefits.
Okay. Our next question will come from Stephen Gabios.
Thanks, John. Steven Gavios , Jennison Associates. I'm wondering if you can help us with the 6% growth that you've targeted for the next several years, just to give us some of the building blocks of how you get there. Obviously, it'll vary over time and by business. But as you think about how you expect to achieve that result over the next few years, what are the key pieces to it? What are the detractors? What are the better than the six? What are the below the six? How do those pieces come together?
Great question. Well, the way to go through this, let me start at a high level. We've been probably running closer to a four-to-five growth rate for the last several years. But masking that has been that we have a declining business, which was fairly large, but is shrinking, which is MetLife Holdings. So in a way, my answer, which is not a great and I'm not sure you're going to be satisfied with it, is that it's really consistency with what we've been doing. So there's nothing that is in there that is far-reaching. What's happening is, though, that you're having a much less proportion of the runoff business as a portion of your growth or headwind to your growth. That's probably the easiest way to put it.
So as a result, it goes back to a lot of the things that you would have heard us say across our business mix. Hopefully, that helps there.
Okay. I'm going to move to the other side of the room, and Ryan Kruger in the back row there.
Thanks, Ryan Kruger, KBW. My first question was on in retirement, can you expand a little bit on just how meaningful you see the opportunity to add the UK-funded reinsurance or UK-funded pension risk transfer along with retail annuity reinsurance?
Sure, Ryan. So look, the U.K. PRT market in terms of the primary market is about a $50 billion market. So similar in size to the U.S. market in terms of flows. You saw the number in terms of the size of DB assets there. The size of DB assets relative to the capital base of U.K. life companies is actually much higher than it is in the U.S. So we see the primary market continuing to expand. And there you get almost a levered effect because when you have big expansion in the primary market, the capital capacity of the local players becomes constrained, and their need for reinsurance increases, right? So if you look at the reinsurance numbers in that market, they're running in the $10 billion range every year. And as the primary market continues to grow, we find reinsurance to become more and more prevalent, right?
This is not just about capital. A lot of it is about credit origination because you want to take these assets and invest them in privates and other higher-yielding assets that kind of capitalize on the liquidity of the liabilities. So it's a combination of things. And it's about counterparty, right? The U.K. regulator is very focused on this market, and we're participating in it in a way that is using our major balance sheets here to run the business on it. For the retail annuity, we are focused on portions of it. We're focused on the simpler end of the product spectrum. We are focused on ones where we see the cost of funding or the cost of originating that liability to be attractive. And we're focused on a handful of players that value what we bring to the table. And that's kind of the focus here.
And more to come on that, but we see good prospects here in the U.S. being able to enter that profit pool in a way that is meaningful for us, but again, without having to stretch on the investment side or the crediting rate to do that.
Thanks. And then I had a question on the expense ratio. I believe it's improved about 30 bp s over the last five years. I guess when you think about the 100 bp s over the next five years, what are the big differences that's allowing you to extract greater expense synergies? Is it more that you have accelerating top line and there's operating leverage, or is it more that you see more, I guess, efficiency opportunities now?
Yeah. I believe that over the last five, it's probably 60.
It's more than 30, yeah.
Because LDTI changed a little bit of the math. But if you were to normalize for all that, it's probably 60 bp s. And you're referencing change in target, right? And then we're saying the new target will change 100 bp s from there. Yes. It's both. It is a function. Growth is a component of that. And our view is it's growing revenues faster than expenses. That will be a driver. On top of it, though, we see the productivity gains occurring as well as a result of that process-by-process reengineering now becoming a more mature capability of ours, coupled with the injection of AI and other technology tools. And we're seeing that really begin to ramp up. So we see that as a differentiator in the next five years.
Thank you.
All right. Wes, please.
Hi. Thanks. Wes Carmichael, Autonomous Research. First question on variable investment income. It's been a bit of a drag recently. Maybe it continues into 2025. But when we think about the targets for ROE and EPS growth, how are you guys contemplating VII?
Yeah. We are assuming VII reverts to something better than where we are today. It doesn't have to get back to, say, long historical trends of mid-teens that we saw over the, call it the lower forever environment. But it does need to get back to a more attractive returning asset, let's say, call it at least double digits, right? So I would say double digits is contemplated, but it's not requiring 15% in that one. Two, we are assuming that, and I've mentioned this before, given higher rates, that relatively speaking to the total portfolio allocation, there will be a reduction in allocation over time and moving to higher yielding credit-type strategies. So it will still be a core portion of our balance sheet, but maybe in this environment, slightly less in terms of allocation.
Since you said VII, I would just highlight, since we're here in fourth quarter, there's no change from what I said at the third quarter. We still believe midpoint of the second and third quarter is what we're expecting to see. I just thought it'd help everyone as they think through their next few weeks and stuff, so.
No, thank you.
You're welcome.
Second question on U.S. pension risk transfer. It's been pretty consistent in annual volumes, around $40 to $50 billion. But you look at funded ratios. Do you see this accelerating going forward? Can it grow meaningfully from a $40-$50 billion dollar level?
Yeah. I mean, look, there is a, call it a part of the market that's more slow and steady if you go down market. But this is lumpy, right? So if you start looking at that league table of large plans, you've got some very big ones out there. In any given year, any one of those plans could just change the volume significantly. So you could see a year where you could go 20%-30% higher than that, and you could see a year where it's a bit below that. But we're in this for the next 5-10 years. And so that trend, right, and you think about the capacity that's needed to absorb that, that's where we see this as a very long-term trend for us, and it's going to drive continued growth.
But certainly, the jumbo end of the market is always going to be lumpy.
Great. Next, we're going to go to the far reaches of the room over to Andrew Kligerman.
Yeah. Andrew Kligerman, TD. So I'm looking at the 15%-17% ROE. Very impressive. John's presentation on the walk is quite clear. But then you think about the downside potential. Interest rates, equity markets could come in, Group Benefits could get more competitive, regulations. And that's a big move in the ROE target. So what gave you the confidence to go up 200 bp s instead of 100 bps?
I mean, if you think about. Huh? Very uplifting.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you.
Andrew, if you think about sort of where we're running at currently, we're at 15.1, and that's with VII below expectations. With normalized VII, we're probably in the 16 range, I would say. We've been building up to that. I think John walked you through sort of the components of how we get there. We feel confident. I mean, this is not predicated on a rosy picture. We never sort of assumed that. We're not assuming also a worst-case scenario. But I think with the diversification that we have, with all the things, the resilience that we've built over the years, we feel comfortable and confident in the 15-17 target.
The other thing I would add is we're also assuming another unit cost reduction over the period, right? So there's enough, and Michel, I can't remember if you mentioned it or not, but you have before, just our journey in Next Horizon, I mean, we had a plan. We didn't achieve it through the exact plan we had, right? So you build optionality into your business. The diversified resilient business model, that's what we try to build so that we have the ability to manage environments. And I think there's enough tools there that allow us and give us the confidence as well.
The second question is around the Group Benefits. Excellent strategies in national and retail. Would you ever get into the small markets in a meaningful way? Would you acquire? Why isn't that part of the strategy now?
Romney's getting plenty of exercise.
All right. Thank you, Andrew.
So look, we showed you statistics in terms of premiums of market share across employers from 2 to 5,000, right? So you could take that market and subdivide it even more if you want. Across that entire market that we call regional, you saw what number? Two. You saw our market share. If you start dividing it in pieces, you can go to the micro end of the market, call it employers with 100 or fewer. The fragmentation there is even higher. So you get market shares that are in the 3%-4% as opposed to the 8%-10% in terms of the leading players. And we are in that market today, and we're attacking it in a very different way. We're attacking it with a much more digital offering, far more streamlined. You're talking about much higher volumes of quotes there. That's entirely digitized.
We're also attacking it with more technology and AI. You don't want your underwriters touching emails or turning the business there. You want it to be all straight-through processing. So certainly, part of the overall regional growth story is growth in that micro end of the market that's below 100. But each segment has its different distribution dynamics and a different operating model that we're attacking it. So we are in that market, and we expect to see nice growth there too as well.
Would you acquire to get even bigger?
Look, in this market and in this business, we don't need to acquire anything. I mean, we've got the broader set of capabilities. We've got broad distribution, excellent relationship with brokers. So it's not something that we're missing a capability, I would say. And we feel really good about our ability to kind of get growth there organically and continue to drive that forward.
We're going to stay in the far reaches of the room with Jimmy.
Hi, Jimmy Bhullar from J.P. Morgan. I had a question first on the dental business. Margins this year have been weak. Maybe you could talk about what's been driving that, and are you assuming that that normalizes with repricing next year, or is that a longer fix because we've seen sort of elevated usage across some medical and non-medical products?
Hey, Jimmy. It's Romney here. I'm going to go to this side of the room so I can see you. So look, the short answer in terms of our margins is that we price about 80% of the business every year. So we are right now basically on track to hit our target margins for the one-to-one business that we have. What drove the margin compression? This is a business that has inflation in it, and there's been some inflation in terms of cost of care. We've generally been anticipating that, and we've priced for it. What has also happened in that market is utilization levels coming out of the pandemic were much lower. And we essentially projected those to come back to pre-pandemic levels. They happened a bit sooner, as in a couple of quarters sooner. So that pressured some of the margin in the last couple of quarters.
But our assumptions on a go-forward basis as of one-to-one are basically pre-pandemic utilization coupled with kind of a mid-of-the-way inflationary trends on the claim side. But net net, we're essentially going to be back in target one-to-one next year. So again, this is the kind of dynamic where if you have good persistency, you've got good risk management in terms of not giving long-dated guarantees, you're able to essentially, once you see a cycle slightly moved against you, you can essentially get back to margin in what is a very short period of time.
On the 94 out of 100 that you mentioned, just for clarity, that's having one product. There could be many other companies that have a decent number of benefits through those companies, right?
That is correct, which is why we showed you the product density there, and we showed you that there's plenty of growth beyond that. But I would say having products that are like absence and leave, where we've been expanding our market share, that's a real gateway product because we want to cater to the employer and what they care most about, and then use that in a way to bridge and give ourselves license to do more with that employer.
Maybe for Michel, you've made dispositions over time of some of the businesses that are non-core. Is most of that done, or are there still other businesses outside of MetLife Holdings that at the right price you'd consider exiting?
Yeah. I think you never say never, basically. But I would also say that a lot of the heavy lifting is probably behind us. But we're going to continue to look at our portfolio through the lens that I described earlier. And if something made sense in terms of strategic fit, what we're sort of achieving from a risk-adjusted hurdle rate perspective, we're going to continue to sort of factor that into our thinking.
Great. Next, we'll go to John.
Thank you for the opportunity. John Barnidge from Piper Sandler. I'm trying to think about better linking Group Benefits, retirement with your asset management capabilities. And you've got 25% market share in Group Benefits, 80% in regional businesses. Given the opportunity to grow the regional businesses, how do you view that opportunity to also grow pension risk transfer with those customers as well at the same time?
I mean, go ahead. Yeah, sure.
These tend to be very different channels and very different decision-makers. So when you think about PRT deals, you're tend to be talking to the CFO of the business. Very financially oriented deals. Very strong role that independent fiduciaries play in that space. You shift to the benefits space, you're tend to be talking to the CHRO, and it's much more employee HR-driven, where these two businesses intersect in some of the retiree populations. I talked about retiree medical, retiree life obligations. In some cases, we are the life insurer for the retiree population, and the plan sponsors or the corporates want to essentially exit out of the risk and move it over to a funded basis. So we see some intersection there around the retiree population, but aside from that, very different channels and very different decision-makers, especially at the jumbo end of the market.
Great. Thank you. And then on your comments about expansion and paid family leave, how much additional expansion do you anticipate domestically over the next five years as compared to the existing that we came off of? Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, you saw the statistics. So you're seeing very, very rapid expansion of state-based leaves, and you're seeing a lot of employers playing catch-up, right? And in many cases, there comes a tipping point where the complexity, the technology needed, the compliance requirements, frankly, the need to ensure that their employees have frictionless experiences becomes really important. And employers will say, "I don't want to be in this business. I want someone else who can do it and do it professionally." So this is one area and one trend where if you just looked at it in terms of number of lives, we've doubled it in the last five years. And so we're going to continue to see really good growth there.
Disability in aggregate is low double digits in terms of our PFO composition, but certainly some of those trends are baked into our kind of conviction with respect to further growth in our business in aggregate.
I believe Elise has a question.
Thanks. Elyse Greenspan, Wells Fargo. John, during your presentation on investment management, you highlighted private credit as a growth avenue. As you think about M&A helping to get towards the 10 trillion target, how do you think about.
1 trillion.
Sorry.
Don't try to.
I'm even better than you.
Sorry.
Don't give this guy any ideas. That's all I need.
As you think about getting towards that target, do you envision yourselves buying an asset on the private credit side?
As I said, this is an industry and this is a business where we will be organic and complementary in organic as a growth strategy, and probably the business that in terms of allocating time and Adora's time and others, right, it probably takes up a lot of time because there's a heavy business development aspect to this business because of its fragmentation, so we spend probably the most of our time talking to people. Obviously, our hit rates are pretty low, as you know, but this is where you would be if something is strategic, has a good cultural fit, can be accretive to the firm, and is complementary to who we are, right? We're not looking to change who we are, but complementary to our strengths, then we would consider that.
And I would just add, Elise, that the reason we said aspiration on a path to $1 trillion is also because we don't necessarily want to set a specific time frame on this. I think we have a really good path in terms of organic growth to continue to grow this business meaningfully or asset management meaningfully. It's not a business yet. But we're open to complementing that with non-transformational type adjacencies, complementary capabilities, which might actually accelerate sort of our path to that aspiration.
It's a business, not a segment. You caught yourself.
Oh, business.
Yeah, I know you're catching yourself on, but just for.
We have lawyers here, so.
You're only on 10% EPS world target, right? 6% organic, and then 4% capital management. Would M&A be within the capital management piece or a transactions additive to the 10% in a kind of separate component?
Yes. I mean, I'm not so sure that's how we really contemplate it, but it is excess capital, and that would be contemplated in that additional 40%. But like we said, it hasn't been. This is one where we look for strategic, opportunistic time. It's not going to be. We're not doing M&A all the time, right? We're being thoughtful. We don't need it. I think that's important, actually. None of our businesses really need it to deliver, but just as we always have been, we want to be opportunistic, and if there's something that makes a lot of sense that it can accelerate our situation, then we would look at it.
Okay. Alex.
Hi, Alex Scott from Barclays. First question I had is coming back to investment management. And just thinking through the organic piece of the growth, what needs to be done around distribution, if anything, to build that out to hit the kind of targets that you're thinking? And I'd also just be interested in your views on leadership. As CFO, you've got a lot going on too. I mean, is there an anticipation that you'll have leadership come in for this new segment?
He's here today. So yes, we named Jude Driscoll as President of our MetLife Investment Management. He was the President of Logan Circle when we acquired them, recently named in September, beginning of September. He's over there. If you catch him, you'll be able to. He's quick. He might get out of here quick, so. And he has had a long track record in building businesses with President, CEO of Delaware Investments. Just an excellent breadth in this industry, understanding what it takes to build a business. So I'm very excited, given your points you just raised about MIM, to have him in place. And we're going to continue to look for ways to accelerate growth there. And I think your earlier question around what does it need distributionally, everything, right?
We're going to look at all things, but we're going to be focused, just like we are on the rest of the firm, thinking about what are our priorities, who are we, what makes sense, and be deliberate in our allocation of scarce resources.
Got it. Next question I had is on Japan. Some of your peers have talked about the ESR, capital requirements, longer duration businesses, the need for reinsurance, that kind of thing. How does that play into some of your growth ambitions that you talked about in Japan and just the accumulation focus of your product?
Yeah. And we've gotten this question before. So from our perspective, and I know there's different kind of perspectives out there. From our perspective, it is, one, this is an economic framework which aligns to how we have always thought about our businesses. So we've always had to look at the local statutory requirements as well as the economic requirements as well as GAAP, right? So the three are always considered. But economic has always been a framework that we've utilized. So whenever jurisdictions are changing to a more economic framework, we tend to be positive around that. And ESR has a few things here and there that we would argue need to be refined. But even if they don't get refined, we're okay. And we would say that our business plans are uninterrupted from the change from SMR to ESR.
Okay. We'll take our last question, and I'll remind folks that we do have everybody at lunch, so you'll be able to follow up. But our last question will come from someone behind the pillar.
Hi. Oh, I'm John, TCW. Just a quick question about if you're contemplating migrating some of the digital platforms to other markets. So for example, the MetLife Accelerator, would that be possible to be launched in India or other countries? And if a digital partner and/or digital penetration is a prerequisite before you could do so. And then on the risk side, I'm curious if the application has sufficient ability to provide the full disclosures to what could be a fairly complex product and if there's any issues with lapse rates or litigation to try to sell insurance through an application.
Yeah. I would say yes and yes, so in terms of reusability, this is something that we always look at when we develop new technology, so we try to build technology based on the needs of a specific market, but also taking into account the fact that we don't want to replicate it in every single market. We want to try to the extent possible. Obviously, you would still need to customize it in terms of in each market, but as a platform, you want to be able to reuse it. And that's how we were able to, for example, with Accelerator, we deployed it in Brazil, and now we're deploying it in both Mexico and Chile, and we have the ability to take it to other markets as well.
On the other part of your question is clearly responsibly using any technology, especially in the age of AI. We talk about risk management. That's part of our risk management culture as well. We've published our responsible use of AI policy. It's on our website. So that's always taken into consideration whenever we build a technology sort of that deploys some digital capabilities interacting with customers and distributors.
Great. Well, thank you very much. That's going to bring us to Michel, and he's going to bring us home.
All right. Thanks. So thank you for hanging in there. I know we packed a lot into the last few hours, but hopefully, we gave you a good sense in terms of why we feel confident in delivering on the commitments that we've made here. And more than just the what, hopefully, we also gave you a good sense of how we intend to deliver on these commitments. And I hope also you got a sense of this is an exciting time for our company. It really is. And we feel that excitement. Part of the excitement I feel is due to the fact that I get to work with an amazing team. These are truly amazing leaders. I have the honor, the privilege, the pleasure to work with them. This team is highly, highly committed, passionate about delivering on the commitments that we made to all of you.
So I hope that's also part of the message that you take away from our session here today. And to close out, I would say that we really believe that we're in a different place today compared to five years ago. We've demonstrated a track record through consistent execution. We're entering an exciting New Frontier of growth. We're in highly attractive markets. We're in the markets we want to be in. We have deep competitive advantages and strong tailwinds that support our growth trajectory. And we are well-positioned, confident in how we're positioned to deliver growth, attractive returns with lower risk. I think that's our value proposition. It is our view that it is a superior value proposition. And with that, thank you again. I want to invite you to join me for lunch.
If you have the time, also please visit our tech expo where you get a better sense of some of the capabilities that we touched on during today's sessions. Thanks, everyone.