We're back. Thank you for joining us one more time. This is the Prudential session we have here. We're joined by CEO, Charlie Lowrey, Chairman and CEO. Just to give you a brief reminder, Charlie is Chairman and CEO. Prior to assuming the current role, he was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer in the international businesses. He was also Chief Operating Officer of U.S. businesses. He was CEO of PGIM, the investment arm. He also was the CEO of the real estate business earlier. I think there's not a business, it feels like, that Charlie didn't have a hand in, so he knows it better than anybody else. We're really pleased to have him here. We're going to hop into questions. I just want to say before we start, is there anything you want to say as a preamble, Charlie?
Sure, Josh, thank you very much for having us today. We really appreciate the forum. If I might, before you get into questions, if I could just sort of set the context of where we've been and where we're going very quickly. 2021 was a pivotal year for Prudential. We've made significant progress in becoming a higher growth, less market sensitive, and more nimble company. We have really been focusing on three areas. One is our financial performance, the second is the execution of our transformation, which we're going through, and the third is having a disciplined and balanced approach to the redeployment of capital. Just going through those very quickly. In terms of performance, we had record operating earnings for the year in 2021. The underlying earnings power of our businesses has increased by 9% year-over-year.
In terms of the three pillars of the transformation, which by this time you probably know well, one is the product repricings and product pivots, where we're providing solutions that meet customer needs while also creating an attractive investor proposition. Our product pivots have worked really well. You can look towards FlexGuard, our buffered annuity product, which had sales of over $6 billion in 2021. That's while we have continued to exercise real pricing discipline. We also, you saw in individual life, the sales in individual life, they continued both to be strong and to show the product pivot strategy into higher variable life sales. That's the first part of the transformation, is the product pivots and repricing. The second is the cost savings program, where we've been expanding our market reach and creating better customer and client experiences through process improvements and efficiency initiatives.
We're on track to reach our $750 million cost savings objective. We stated in the fourth quarter that we achieved $635 million of run rate savings at the end of 2021. The third part of our transformation is the repositioning of our business mix. We're making progress there in terms of generating substantial long-term growth and reducing market sensitivity. You saw that last year when we reached agreement to sell our full-service retirement business and a block of our variable annuities business, both of which we anticipate will close in the first half of this year. We closed on the sale of our Taiwan business on the heels of our Korean insurance business. We're taking those proceeds. We will invest them in our businesses both organically and inorganically. In inorganically, we are thoughtfully redeploying our capital in a disciplined and programmatic way.
We're expanding our capabilities in PGIM. You saw a couple of acquisitions last year with Montana Capital Partners, which is a private equity secondary manager that expands PGIM's already robust alternatives capabilities, and a company called Green Harvest, which is a managed account platform providing customized solutions for high net worth investors. On the international side, on the other hand, you saw us expand our presence in emerging markets in Kenya through the acquisition of a minority interest in a company called ICEA LION. Finally, the third part of the strategy is to be prudent stewards of capital. You saw that as we continued to balance investing in the businesses with returning capital to our investors. In fact, in 2021, we returned $4.3 billion of capital to shareholders, which was a record high level.
We increased our dividend beginning in the first quarter of 2022 for the 14th consecutive year. Finally, we reduced debt by $1.3 billion. That's where we've been. Just quickly looking ahead to 2022, we plan to capitalize on the momentum of our, what I'll call our kind of foundational work in 2021. As we look ahead, we'll continue to focus on the same three items we focused on in 2021, which is our financial performance, our transformation, and the redeployment of capital. We'll also focus on growth, and we'll focus on growth in three areas, with the goal of being a global leader and expanding access to investing, insurance, and retirement security.
Those three areas are we want to continue to invest in growth businesses and markets, we want to deliver industry-leading customer experiences, and finally, we want to create the next generation of financial solutions. You can think of it very simply as we'll look at growth, we'll concentrate on customers, and we'll provide meaningful solutions. With that as sort of background and context, I turn it over to you.
Well, great. Well, thank you. I have a bunch of questions for you, and you touched upon some of the others. Maybe we can dig in a little further. You talked about the acquisitions you made and whatnot, but what are the strategic priorities that you're choosing when you want to make those acquisitions? What kind of ROI hurdles do you need to see over what timeline to make it valuable for you?
Sure. We are focused, Josh, as you said, on programmatic acquisition opportunities to add both capabilities and scale in asset management, also deepen our presence in emerging markets, increasing the scale again in our existing businesses in the regions in which we are already operating. Within PGIM, we've leaned into areas with higher growth and higher fee markets. In terms of product, we're looking to continue to build on our already strong alternatives business. We have a $240 billion alternatives business now, and we made acquisitions, as we said, last year that augment that. We're also looking at the areas of real assets. In terms of our international businesses, in PGIM, we'll look to increase the scale and capabilities in markets that we're already in, both in terms of distribution and product.
We'll also look for opportunities to expand PGIM's franchise in Europe and Asia. Finally, in emerging markets, we're focused on creating carefully selected portfolios of businesses in regions where we already have operations. You've seen us do that in Africa, you've seen us do it in Latin America, where we can add to both our scale and our capabilities. Those are examples of what we plan to do in terms of M&A. I'll just end by saying that we continue to be very disciplined in reviewing the potential acquisitions. If we don't have opportunities that meet our strategic and financial criteria, then we'll return the excess capital to shareholders, as we did in 2021, when we increased our share repurchases by $1 billion, which was in addition to our $1.5 billion authorization for the calendar year.
In terms of specifically your question about metrics, we'll look at both strategic and financial metrics and weigh both of those as we think about looking at current return versus growth versus buybacks.
That, I guess, dovetails into the capital return question. You have a plan to return $11 billion of capital to shareholders by 2023. I just want to confirm that's regardless of the M&A opportunity landscape pretty much. I guess something could happen, but the plan is $11 billion. There also might be M&A on top of that. That's a correct assumption?
Yes, that is a correct assumption. Obviously, you've seen us in the past, we have stopped buybacks if there was a particular opportunity. At this point, what we've said is we plan to return $11 billion in capital to shareholders through 2023.
In part, the earlier part of that shareholder return strategy has been helped a little by some asset sales and some monetizing of some opportunities. Of course, you're also trying to increase free cash flow conversion of your capital. Can we talk about the why of that and when we exit 2023, what you think the normalized free cash flow conversion as a percentage of earnings is going to be?
Sure. We've had a very consistent approach to capital management, and we're going to continue with that approach. Our businesses have generated free cash flow of about 65%, plus or minus in any given year, of our operating earnings. That's on average over time, and we feel comfortable with that level going forward. We do expect about $4 billion of proceeds from the sale of full-service retirement business and a block of our variable annuities in the first half of 2022. We feel very good about our capital position, our liquidity, and our flexibility going forward, and believe that we're well positioned, to your point, of meeting our objective of returning the $11 billion to shareholders between 2021 and 2023. That 65%, we're going to keep to that number.
Of course, a part of that, to deliver those results, you have a cost savings plan that you announced back in 2018, where you intend to get $750 million of annual cost savings by 2023. When I look at the schedule, it seems like you're ahead of plan. Of course, when you set that plan, you didn't know COVID was coming, and there are changes to how you do business post-COVID. Is there another leg to the cost savings plan that, A, are you ahead of schedule because there's another leg? Can we comfortably exceed that number? Things are different than they were in 2018.
Yeah, you bet. You bet. Just look at us right now, talking to our computers. We've made excellent progress in gaining efficiencies and lower costs with our program. Also, the important thing is building capabilities on an accelerated basis relative to our initial targets, right? We were able to accelerate. We were able to expand from 500 to 750, and we were able to accelerate the time in which we will achieve that number. We're on track to achieve $750 million by 2023. The important part to, I think, your question is that we've begun to institutionalize the capabilities and develop a continuous improvement mindset across the company. That's really important because we plan to maintain this discipline to drive further savings, better employee and customer experiences, and growth going forward.
For right now, this moment, we are laser focused on achieving our $750 million of cost savings by 2023. We'll then see the further institutionalization, if you will, of the cost savings mentality as we go forward, and the mentality of a continuous improvement.
Let's go into some of the businesses. I think one of the bigger headlines from the past couple of years is the decision to exit the VA market. I'm curious, is Prudential's decision to stop selling traditional VAs a pause as opposed to being a exit? How long have you been contemplating it, and what was the tipping point, I guess? You obviously said a lot in support of VAs over the years, and in the end decided it wasn't the right thing.
We said a lot in support of VAs and VAs with living benefit guarantees. There are different kinds of VAs, as you well know. While our legacy annuities block is a high ROE business that generates strong cash flow and is well hedged and well capitalized, what we've come to realize, Josh, is that we don't believe the public market valuation for the business is what it should be. Despite our entreaties to the market, if you will, that we have a good business, it just isn't valued in the same way as in the private markets. At the end of 2020, the market environment made it challenging for us to offer variable annuities with living benefits at rates that delivered good shareholder returns while also providing value to our customers. It was just the interest rate environment was too low.
Reflecting on the market environment and the public market valuation, right. We began to pivot our products to deliver customer and shareholder value across all economic environments, so as a way of getting less market sensitive. We ceased all sales of traditional variable annuities with living benefit guarantees, and we announced the sale of PALAC, the PALAC legal entity, which included $31 billion of traditional variable annuities with guaranteed living benefits, representing about 20% of our in-force block. Instead, as you know, we launched the new solutions, our buffered annuity product, FlexGuard, which has less market sensitivity. We think the improved market conditions, we don't think, we have the view that improved market conditions wouldn't result in the re-engagement of the traditional VA with living benefit guarantees if we still believe that the public market valuation for the business would be negatively impacted.
We have no reason to think that it wouldn't be at this point. It's a pause, but it could be a very, very long pause as we go through that or a permanent pause as we transfer or pivot the business to less market sensitive products like FlexGuard and FlexGuard Income.
Makes sense. Let's talk about pension risk transfer a little bit. Obviously, you're one of the key players in that market. I've asked this question a few times. I have to learn it better, I suppose, but how are PRT deals won outside of price, and what capabilities does Prudential bear that are different from top-tier competitors? Obviously, there's a number of good competitors in the market, but what would you say that Prudential has that sets them apart?
You are correct. We are the leader in the PRT market, and what we have seen, and what I've personally seen, is outside of price, transactions are won on a number of criteria: a brand, financial strength, ability to execute, and the ability to innovate and develop creative solutions. They have to be in the ballpark of pricing. This isn't a 10% difference. At the margin, we have won transactions where we have not been the best price. As a pioneer in the PRT market, we'll continue to benefit, I believe strongly, and I've seen from our reputation and our capabilities, specifically in the large case market. Right. That is incredibly important as we look forward. We actually have done the first, the second, and the fourth largest deals in PRT history.
As a result, we have experience and a track record, which is very attractive to institutions that are thinking about doing this. Despite of the increase in competition, we'll continue to be disciplined with underwriting and pricing as we have been, but we expect to win our fair share of transactions at economics consistent with our financial objectives. In terms of the market itself, we think it's going to be a robust market going forward given the funding level of the pension plans of the institutions and also the volatility in the market, which creates a certain sense of urgency to transact. We think this will be a strong year for PRT.
Let's switch to PGIM for a bit. It's outstanding performance. You've been fund flow positive 18 out of 19 years in a row. The performance of the funds in aggregate are outstanding. I don't know what better advertising you need, but I do see that if you look at 2009 to 2013, a period of very high credit volatility, inflows into PGIM's accounts were far, far stronger than they were in the subsequent years. They've been positive, but it seemed like a huge growth period for PGIM in that post-financial crisis, Eurozone crisis period. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I'm wondering if there's certain macro and global events that make investors more prone to want the type of investment strategies that PGIM has to offer?
As maybe we're at the end of a 40-year bull market for bonds here, is that a market where PGIM is going to say, "Hey, we have some strategies for you that are going to be great in this next leg of what's going to happen next?
I think we have strategies, and I think we have been developing over time a whole series of strategies to be able to compete in a very different environment. PGIM has a proven track record to succeed in a variety of different environments. We've increased that ability based on a diversified suite of strategies and continued investment in global distribution capabilities, global multi-asset, long duration, short duration. Over the past five years, 10 years, we've built out our global capabilities, and we've built out our strategic capabilities as an example. You look at fixed income, we have a broad section of public and private fixed income products, including shorter duration, floating rate strategies, relative value, multi-sector strategies. We can really compete in a variety of different markets.
If you look at sort of an inflationary market, we have one of the largest real estate asset management platforms in the world in terms of both mortgages and equities, and we'll be able to compete there very well. As an overall asset manager and within specific asset classes, we believe we're well positioned on a variety of different economic scenarios to whatever those scenarios turn out to be.
All right. Let's move on to Group a little bit. I think, this is a greatly consolidating business. You see a lot of businesses acquiring new capabilities to add items to their shelves to make, I guess, more relevant with their customers over time. Obviously, you're a substantial player in that market. How do you feel your role as Prudential is in the consolidation of that market, and do you have the right product suite at this moment to be highly competitive?
We think we are highly competitive, and we continue to believe the workplace is a great place to grow because of the reach and access that it provides to expand our addressable market, which is really part of our purpose, and bring more solutions to more people. We've been executing on a strategy in our Group business, which very consistently over the past five years, to grow in certain spots and leverage our financial wellness capabilities. We have a leadership position in national accounts, and we've been growing into premier and association segments. We're also focused on expanding our disability block and our voluntary capabilities in the middle market. We have a strategy, and we've been executing on that strategy, and it's working well.
All right. Let's move on to Assurance IQ. I think the idea in my mind, maybe you're going to sort of disabuse me a little bit, is that when you bought it, you would be able to push Prudential product through that digital platform. Obviously, growth hasn't been as strong as you want. Maybe that's in the future. I guess there's two questions. One is, how do you compete to get on digital platforms you don't own? To what extent is the Assurance IQ control over products that you don't manufacture yourself? How does that sort of work in terms of providing that platform, selling Prudential products versus non-Prudential products?
We feel very good about the strategic merits of Assurance IQ and the role it plays in expanding our addressable market by increasing access to more customers, which, again, is totally aligned to our purpose, and also expanding our mix of fee-based earnings. The premise for the acquisition of Assurance IQ is absolutely, in our minds, sound and is sort of increasing as we go forward. We've always thought of it as an open architecture platform. Yes, we would put some of our products on it, but it would also sell other folks' products, both in terms of insurance and other things, as well as P&C and other areas.
We view it holistically as almost an ecosystem, where we would bring in customers, and they will be able to purchase a variety of products as we go forward, some of which would be ours and some of which would come from other providers. That's completely consistent with how we considered Assurance IQ from the beginning.
Do you find that uptake of Prudential products sold on Assurance IQ is higher than uptake on competitor digital platforms where Prudential also holds shelf space?
Not necessarily. Again, Assurance IQ has a variety of different products. As we look to develop products, we think we will compete effectively on the platform, and look forward to doing that. It is an open architecture platform, one in which we can sell an increasing number of Prudential products over time, particularly life insurance. It is fully open architecture as it needs to be to gain customer credibility.
On the international businesses, I think that people have generally a strong grasp of what you're selling in Japan. When it comes to some of the other businesses, certainly the emerging market businesses, I think there's less detail on the products. Can we talk about what you're selling in Latin America, China, Southeast Asia, Africa? Who the target customer is? What products are you successful in? To the extent I know that in the U.S. and in Japan, obviously, the Prudential brand name is powerful. Does it have that same kind of brand recognition in these other countries?
It does indeed, as importantly, in some of the countries in which we have partnerships, our partners have a very strong brand name. Our international growth strategy, just taking a step back from it, really focuses on expanding in select high growth markets and emerging markets. We're not going to be everywhere. We don't want to be everywhere. While investing, we also want to invest in our existing businesses that we have to extend our leadership position in Latin America as a multi-channel distributor and a product innovator. In Brazil, we sell life insurance, but we also sell it through the group insurance, and we sell bank insurance, so through the bank insurance channel. There are a variety of ways in which we sell our product there. We're strengthening our footprint in the Asian market with investments in organic growth and bolt-on acquisitions.
We're investing in market leaders in Africa through partnerships, starting with a minority position and then gaining a path to majority ownership over time in the companies in which we invest. That's our strategy for where we want to operate. It would be Asia, it would be Latin America, and it would be Africa. We tailor our products according to the markets and the opportunities we see there.
Changing gears, can we talk about ESG a little bit and what Prudential is doing to deliver on ESG commitments? I guess you can sort of talk about that in terms of purpose.
Oh, absolutely. This is an area we all have tremendous passion in, especially Prudential with its purpose. We've made, in 2021, several significant enhancements to our environmental, social, and governance framework during the year, building upon our long-standing commitment of sustainability. Let me just give you a couple of quick examples. I'll start with E, where on the environmental side, we committed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, carbon neutral by 2040 across our primary global home office operations. On the social front, we're completely committed to the communities in which we live and work. The Prudential Foundation hit a wonderful milestone last year, which was it surpassed $1 billion in grants since it was formed to partners primarily focused on eliminating barriers to financial and social mobility around the world.
We hit another $1 billion mark just before the pandemic where our impact investing portfolio exceeded $1 billion as well. We have one of the largest impact investing portfolios, I think, in the country. On the governance front, our commitment to diversity and inclusion begins at the top, and over 80% of our independent directors are diverse. It also extends to our employees, and last year, we expanded our policy of tying executive compensation more closely to achieve diverse representation targets. We started that in 2017, long before 2020, with a first three-year target ending in 2020, and then we renewed it again. Finally, we increased our transparency by publishing our EEO-1 data and our pay equity data in our ESG report. We believe in transparency.
We're committed to the social programs we have, which are many, and we have, we think, made significant commitments on the environmental side. The last thing I would say is that we know ESG challenges or issues are deeply connected to the financial challenges of our stakeholders, everyone including the investors, the employees, the customers, and the communities in which we live and work. We're absolutely committed to delivering sustainable long-term outcomes on their behalf. This is an area we have a lot of passion around, and I think we've made tremendous progress on over the decades, frankly.
On sustainability, the Prudential brand is one of the great insurance brands and investing brands in the world. Obviously, things are changing with the pandemic in terms of how people work and how you feel part of a team. What sort of thoughts have gone into sustaining the brand for your employees and whatnot? Are young people feeling tuned in when they come to work at Prudential during the pandemic, as remote work becomes a bigger part of how you do your business? Is there a confidence that you know how to keep employees motivated and feeling relevant and part of a large organization?
We believe we do, and we've made great strides, I think, in onboarding. We've all learned during the pandemic, right, how to work remotely and how to sustain culture during a pandemic. We have increased significantly the onboarding of employees, whether they're young employees, mid-career employees, et cetera, and to inculcate them in the culture. You do that in a couple of ways. You have a lot of onboarding material to teach them about Prudential, you also have them interact with as many people as possible, obviously now in a remote environment. As we come back to work, cultural integration is going to be a big part of why people come back to the office. Right. There's sort of three reasons. There's culture, there's innovation, and there's learning. Learning from your colleagues.
Having young people sit down next to you and learn through osmosis as to what you do. All three of those aspects of returning to work are incredibly important. The other thing that's really important is being able to convey to employees where we're going, which is why the direction we've set out beyond the transformation, the direction of growth that we've set out is so important, so that employees understand why they're working hard and what they're working towards, and why their work is meaningful towards the goal and the direction in which we're headed.
The combination of increasing the onboarding, making sure that people come back into the office is going to be really important, having the context by which they understand their work, and what they do and why that's important, are all part of making sure that people will stay through and have a great career.
Well, I hope so. That's what I hope for a lot of businesses and a lot of people. Hopefully we have a seamless year and everybody finds magic balance.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you for your time, Charlie. It's been educational, and I really appreciate your patience in doing this online and we're going to do it in person next year, so be ready.
I absolutely look forward to it, and thanks for the opportunity.
Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.
You too. See you.