All right, it is 3:00 P.M., so we'll jump into it here. First, I'd like to say welcome. So I've got Rick McKenney, CEO of Unum, Steve Zabel, CFO of Unum. Very much appreciate you all being here, and I'll jump right into it. So I'm starting a lot of these conversations with a broad strategy update, so I'd like to do the same here. With that, maybe you could update us on, you know, some of the key objectives that, that you have. I know you outlined some of those at your Investor Day, but, you know, what, what are you most focused on as, as you think through the next year or two?
Yeah, thanks, Alex. First of all, thanks for having us here at the Goldman conference. It's good to be here. I want to talk a little bit about strategy at Unum, and I think it's going to be consistent with what we've talked about. We have some really exciting things on the go as we're wrapping up 2023 and headed into 2024 around our strategy, and that's defined across our three major business lines. First, here in the U.S., our benefits business is coming off some very strong growth rates that we've seen. Third quarter was some of the best we've seen in several years. 6% premium growth.
When we think about the premium line and the strategy and connecting with customers to continue to grow that top line, you combine that with the benefit ratios we've seen over the course of last year, that are the best we've ever seen, particularly to our group disability business, but I think across the board, those loss ratios look very good. So the margin's very strong in our U.S. business. The growth rates, coming out of a different cycle, really look good, and we want to continue that as we wrap up 2023 and head into 2024. Think about our Colonial Life business, so a unique franchise that we have in terms of going to market, going to the street.
It's been one that coming out of the pandemic and some of the wakes that have come out of the pandemic, it's been a little bit slower growing and coming back, but we still feel very good about the franchise. In the last quarter, you know, we saw a 5% sales growth, 2% premium growth, and still very good margins in that business. So Colonial Life is a, is a franchise that we really like. We're investing in it. We think there's good digital capabilities to bring to those agents. Combine that with what we do in the home office, and so we see Colonial Life being a strong part of the franchise as we, as we head into 2024. And then our international business really had one of the best years it's had in quite some time.
You're seeing double-digit premium growth, good margins. We saw that, given the inflation they've had in the U.K., we actually saw even some outsized growth. But we think about the GBP 25 million a quarter type returns that we've seen, very happy with that. So our strategy is one of continuation, it's one of investing. We've been doing that over the last several years from a technology perspective. Doing a good job with our customers. Our customer service scores are at, at highs, and when we think about that, it's going to generate good premiums at good returns, continue to grow the, grow the franchise.
And so we do all that, recognizing that we do have a closed block that we're managing, and we can talk more about that, but it's all about that core business generating good cash flow and being able to return capital to shareholders while we continue to grow the business.
So, yeah, I mean, I do want to touch on the closed block in a little bit, but let's stay on Unum US. I mean, one of the things that stood out to me from the Investor Day was some of these technology initiatives and integration into some of the, you know, cloud-based platforms and so forth, that are out there and the growth that that was driving. Can you tell us a bit about what that experience was like in 2023? What is that giving you incremental when we think about, you know, top-line growth?
Yeah. So a couple fronts I'd put that on. One is what we like to talk about is HR Connect, which is what you're referencing in terms of the integration and the experience that both the employer feels in terms of our connectivity into their systems. Certainly, there's. It's an area that is a pain point for them, and they think about historical manual processes and reconciliations that have to happen. To be integrated there makes a difference, and we've seen some very good uptake with several of the larger human resource platform companies that we have out there. So happy about that. That will carry on into 2024. And the second would be on the leave management front.
So if you think of one of the biggest issues that human resource department have today, it's managing the proliferation of leaves. So when we think about the digital solutions that we bring to something we've been managing for over a decade, but now those digital capabilities are a differentiator. If we think about, particularly even in the larger cases, those capabilities are what they want to talk about when you come in, and making sure you've got the right solutions to help serve that. So across the board, our digital investments we've been making for the last several years and continue to make will be a differentiator for us in the marketplace.
So let's talk disability for a minute. It's, you know, had very favorable trends, you know, really over a longer period, but even more specifically recently. You know, what do you see as some of the underlying drivers of that? And, you know, is it going to find its way into pricing in a bigger way?
Yeah, I'll, I'll just give a little bit of history on our group disability performance from an underwriting perspective. Really, if you go back to pre-COVID, pre-pandemic, we've seen some improving recovery rates, and that—that's a real big driver of our profitability within that business, is really our professionals being able to get employees back to work after a disability. And so we, we saw really nice trends coming into the pandemic, where those recovery rates were improving. During COVID, we did see some volatility in our incidence, so more people that maybe were going on disability claims.
As we come out of the pandemic, though, that has really come back to the expectations that we have longer term, but at the same time, we've continued to see improvements in our recovery, and that's really our professionals setting expectations, setting plan of care with the individuals, and then getting them back to work, which is really what the employee, employer and the carrier all are driving for. If then you look at how that comes through our financial performance, we've been in the kind of mid- to low-60s for, you know, for quite a bit of the last, say, 12 months, but even in the last couple of quarters, our loss ratio has been down closer to 60%. And so we get asked the question a lot: What's the sustainability of that?
And how we think about it is the actual underwriting performance, we think is sustainable. Our professionals being able to get people back to work, levels of incidents, our ability to underwrite and price risk, we feel really, really good about and think that's sustainable. The question then becomes: What will the market bear competitively going forward? Other carriers are seeing, you know, different levels of performance in their blocks, and so that's obviously something we're looking at right now in the market. And that's the question of, will we eventually price that really good performance back into the product? And right now, we don't feel like that's necessary, and so we've given, we've given some views to the market just around...
We think we can hold these levels of loss ratio in the short term here, but we just need to see how the market reacts. The market's very rational right now. We're very happy as we're going through our 1/1 renewals and new business sales, just where the market is. And so we'll continue to monitor it, and clearly, we'll react to the market to be competitive if necessary.
Next, you talk about the growth trends in the voluntary and supplemental products. You know, I think that's been pretty notable, just as they've gotten more and more penetration. You know, anything you've seen around open enrollment or thoughts on, on how you'd expect that to trend into the future?
Yeah. So voluntary benefits has been a very strong line of business for both the Unum and Colonial Life, and so we've seen that. I think we came through the pandemic, particularly on the Unum side, recovered relatively quickly. It's more broker-driven, so it got to individuals. Now, it ultimately has to come through the enrollment, which takes a little bit more time to bring through, but we're very happy with the premium rates we've seen there. Colonial Life has mentioned a little bit slower, but I think that, we're very excited about the capabilities that they're bringing to market.
We think voluntary benefits is a key part of an overall benefits package when you think about it, and the pressures that individuals see across organizations as costs of healthcare go up, as the costs in their own lives go up, having that protection is really important. Being able to cover that at all sides of companies, from the very largest through our Unum platform, to the very smallest through our Colonial Life platform, we think is positive. So we expect that to continue to be a good growth part of the portfolio as we look out into 2024.
So over the last, I guess, handful of years, you've, you've had some products that, that you've expanded into. I think stop loss might have been one. The leave management, I think, has evolved, at least. I mean, are there, are there still areas where you see sort of, you know, you know, uncharted territory where you can go?
Yeah, so let me just talk about the two that you mentioned. When we think about it, we look at the employee and the employer experience and where we want to go. So I'd even take you back a little bit further, where when we actually added our dental business, going back, you know, several years ago now, because we thought that was a good part of the overall portfolio. As we talk to employers, that's what they're going to want to understand. So it's kind of one stop when it comes to all of those employee benefits across the board. That was really an important move for us. We're happy with how that has performed over the last several years.
You also mentioned stop loss, so we've, i t's although it's a little bit different than our core benefit offering, when you think of serving employers, we think that's something we can bring knowledge to. And so that's been a slower part of our business. We have wanted to make sure we got into that in a very reasonable way, and we've done that over the last several years. And so you can think across the spectrum of what they see, the last one I mentioned, which we think is very important. And it's not really a product as much as a service as on the leave management front. It is the biggest pain point for human resource departments today to manage the proliferation of leaves that are out there in the market.
So, us bringing the right digital tools, we've invested heavily in those, so it's not, in a sense, a product line. It's more a service combined with the offerings that we have out there today. But it's often talked about as we get into meetings and looking to bring our capabilities from a product and knowledge set. Adding leave management into that is a key part of that conversation. So, in terms of other things, we're always looking at what's evolving in the market today. That leave is a good example of something will evolve. We wanna be there to serve customers, and we have a team focused on specifically what are the solutions that employers are looking at, not so much on the product front, but more on the services front as we look out over the next several years.
So on Colonial, you know, that was a place where growth had maybe come back a little bit slower, and my understanding was it had a lot to do with face-to-face interaction and so forth. So, you know, as you all see what's going on with enrollment this year, I mean, are you seeing a more full reversal of that? Where are we with the recovery of, and really just getting back to the strong growth levels of Colonial?
Yeah, I can hit on that. And we love our Colonial franchise. It's been a very profitable business for the organization over the years. We used to have growth rates that were maybe in the high single digits pretty consistently. What we saw through COVID was really, there's two things that happen in an enrollment for a new employer. First of all, you need to get acceptance by the employer to actually go into their workplace and enroll their employees, and then you need to get acceptance by the employees to actually enroll in the different products. And so clearly, when we hit COVID, the face-to-face was more difficult.
We did have digital tools in place for more virtual types of enrollments, and our adoption rates really went up because clearly our agency force wanted to still get in front of small businesses and enroll their employees. So we saw adoption go up, and so what I'd say right now is there's a lot of flexibility for our agents to use different methods... to enroll, whether it's virtual, whether it's assisted, or whether it's still face-to-face. We see a combination of that being very important. The biggest thing for us, though, in addition to that technology, is we need to get more agents out there calling on potential customers. For this type of business, that is the most important thing. And so we kind of came through the COVID cycle, and then face-to-face, and these other methods for enrollment really came online.
But then what we also saw was there was a real fight for talent out there in the marketplace, and you'd see that across a lot of professions. That's what we saw, being able to get the right level of productive agents out there calling on potential customers. We've now seen momentum really build, and if you look at kind of quarter to quarter, our sales momentum as well as our premium growth momentum, we are building momentum. It's not as fast as maybe we would have liked to see, but we are very optimistic that as we go into 2024, we're moving in the right direction and the trends are there. Because, again, this is a very profitable business for us. The underwriting has also been very strong and consistent over the years.
So I have a, you know, bit of a regulatory question for you. There's this, you know, short duration insurance, regulation that I think also had some, you know, potential implications for supplemental health products. You know, does that impact anything in terms of product structure for you all, or the way that you distribute those products?
Yeah. So I think you're talking about the Tri-Agency exposure that it was put out earlier, asked for comment in the September timeframe. And it really was focused in another area of the market, which is short-term health insurance plans, and brought into it some of the products that we think are important and are very different than a health insurance plan. Some of our voluntary products that we bring out there to help people to fill gaps, as part of their overall protection needs. So we've actually certainly, the industry has come out to make sure that that doesn't get pulled into it, 'cause it was not the original intent of what was happening in that ruling. And so we're gonna have to see how that plays out.
Certainly, our voice has been heard with the Tri-Agency, and understanding why, how this is different, and how these are products and solutions that are really good for people of all different demographics across our country. And so we'll have to see how that plays out. Of course, over time, regardless of how it comes out, our products are always evolving and adapting to make sure we're out there protecting people at time of need. And so I wouldn't feel any differently about this, depending on what happens. But we're hopeful that, you know, rational heads will see that this is something that people really appreciate, need, and wanna continue to have access to.
Got it. So now, I did wanna move over to long-term care insurance. You know, clearly there were some changes that were made in the GAAP accounting this last quarter. So I have some more specific questions on LTC, but maybe first-
Yeah.
Wanted to see if there were any comments you wanted to make around, you know, the GAAP accounting changes that were made and just, you know, high level, how we should be thinking about how that relates to the cash flow of the underlying businesses?
Right. Yeah, just at the highest level, the accounting guidance, the LDTI acronym, requires all companies to look at all of their assumptions on an annual basis, or at least on an annual basis. So this past year, we went through that process, and it's really based on the experience that we've seen emerging and what the implications of that might be on our long-term assumptions. So probably a few just clarifying remarks on that. First of all, we did a review across the entire scope of our assumption set. We also did that review across our block of business, across all of our legal entities, so it was comprehensive across our entire LTC block.
There was one area that we made a decision to modify our assumption set, and it was around the prevalence of mortality for the most older ages within our active life block. So those people that are still healthy, but really predicting what their mortality experience would be once they reach the age of 80 and older. Historically, we haven't had a lot of experience for that cell just because-
Mm-hmm
... of the age of our block. Over the last few years, coming out of COVID, our assumption set has increased quite a bit throughout that period. I made a comment on our last earnings call that it, that it's increased over two times, just the amount of experience that we have in that cell. So we did make the decision to go ahead and make that change for our GAAP accounting assumptions, and we made that change, and you can see that it articulates itself in our third quarter earnings. The other thing, though, that requires you to do is step back and think about your statutory reserves, which we did, and we really have two major blocks within our statutory legal entity.
One is in our main company, and that's about 80% of our block. And we really, we made no changes to the assumption set that we used to set sufficiency for that reserve, so really no capital implications for our main subsidiary. But then we also looked at our New York subsidiary, and we did need to make some changes there. There's some specific things around how cash flow testing works, specifically in New York, and we made those changes. But if you step back and think about the capital requirements of this block of business, it's unchanged from the beginning of the year. We came into the year thinking that we were gonna have to deploy somewhere between $800 million and $900 million of capital to our long-term care business during the year. We thought it would all be in our main subsidiary.
It ended up we put $600 million into that subsidiary, but we're anticipating putting $200 million-$300 million in our New York company before the end of the year. But really, from a capital deployment strategy perspective, that remains consistent with what we've been talking about all year, and we do still feel confident going forward in not having to put any more capital in the foreseeable future behind this block of business. And so we feel very good about the financial flexibility we have, and what the prospects are going forward. And the other thing that I might just add when we think more broadly about financial flexibility and just kind of how the markets are viewing us, I'm not sure this got a lot of press, but we also recently were upgraded by Fitch.
That was announced shortly after our earnings call. And so we feel really good about them looking at our organization, looking at the financial strength of it, and going ahead and making that change to our credit rating. So very, very positive outcome of their review.
So I wanted to dig in a little more on the statutory piece of it. There's this Premium Deficiency Reserve, which maybe some high-level background might help for some folks out there that haven't followed it quite as close. But could you just remind us of, you know, what was phasing in in terms of that pre-Premium Deficiency Reserve and that higher funding level you mentioned for this year?
Right.
Where that sort of puts you at for year-end, but then also the impact of interest rates rolling in higher, and what that means for the funding of Fairwind.
Yeah, that's great. So just as a little bit of a history lesson, going back several years, we went through an examination from our main regulator. And as a result of that, there was prescribed assumptions that we used for certain of our liability assumptions that would have required us to increase our Premium Deficiency Reserve, which is really just the calculation of that reserve, pretty significantly. And what we worked out a phased-in approach to that, that would have been over seven years.
We're about three years into that phase-in period, and because of where rates have gone since the examination, improving, you know, considerably since that point in time in the, in the market, we've been able to really accelerate the recognition of that premium deficiency reserve into this year, and also then contributed capital to that subsidiary to be able to fund that recognition. And it resulted in us really contributing $600 million during the year, which was about $200 million-$300 million less than we thought we were going to have to contribute. The other thing that Alex noted is we, there's an assumption in there about how we handled the discount rate and kind of our new money assumption on free cash flow. That's based on a trailing three-year average of prevailing interest rates, so think prevailing 30-year treasury rates.
Well, those have improved quite a bit, and so that was part of the improvement in our view of the required capital during the year. But as that plays forward, and if rates stay where they are today, that position will continue to improve in 2024, and we think will provide some more capital flexibility, which within the subsidiary where that business is located. So feel really good about how the year's playing out. Gives us even more confidence with how we think about the lack of a need for capital contributions to support that business in the coming years as well.
So one of the other things I wanted to see if you could update us on was the hedging strategy within that entity. I mean, you spoke about the higher interest rates rolling in. I know you all have embarked on a strategy to, you know, sort of lock in some of those benefits of higher interest rates, make the block a little less sensitive to the macro. Where is that at?
Yeah, and just as background, it really ties into the conversation around how the discount rate works on our premium deficiency reserve. But really, when you talk about interest rate risk, that's really the risk of what rates we can invest future positive cash flows in, whether it's the differential in our liability, cash flows out and cash flows in from premiums, or it's just the rollover of our portfolio as investments remature. So it's just what we think we can put that money to work into the future. So there's a couple of ways that you can really protect yourself against downside risk of future future interest rates going down. One is to enter derivatives, and we have done that over the last year.
I think we've executed somewhere around $2.5 billion of notional Treasury forwards to lock in rates. And in essence, what that does is it looks at future positive cash flows, and it locks them in, what we'll invest those at effectively, based on the strike rate that we put the derivatives on. So we put on about $2.5 billion. We currently have just under $2 billion still outstanding, because as those go out around 7 years of anticipated positive cash flows, as we work our way through time, those will mature quarter to quarter. We'll invest the cash flows that become available to us, lock in that rate, and then we'll just expand the program and just keep rolling that in the future. So feel really good about how that's been performing for us.
The other thing we did, which effectively does the same thing, is in the third quarter, we looked at a piece of our portfolio that backs our long-term care liabilities, and we sold out of about $700 million of securities, investment grade and high yield bonds, backing the liability that has a maturity, let's say , two to five years. And so, in essence, when those matured, those cash flows would become available, and we'd have to invest those at whatever the rates were at that time. We went ahead and sold those and then invested the proceeds in current interest rates. So that's even a better structural way to take advantage of where rates are today. Also, given where rates were when we were able to execute, we increased the credit quality-...
of that part of our portfolio, and also had positive implications, although minimal, on the annual income that we'll get off of that part of the portfolio. So it was really a nice way for us to opportunistically take advantage of where rates are, get out of some short duration invested assets, and really lock in those rates. And we're really reinvesting them in securities that have maturities that are, I think, 20 years, 30 years out. So it locks us in for the next, you know, several decades.
So the next one I had for you is on going back to the main premium deficiency reserve. And I know at times you guys have spoken about some of the underlying assumptions that were required as part of that process as being more conservative than your base case. Could you talk a bit about the GAAP review, some of the new perspectives that you got out of the GAAP review, and how that compares to the conservative, you know, statutory requirement? You know, I'd assume, just based on the direction of the GAAP movement, it-
Right
... probably narrowed that. But, you know, how do you feel about that buffer? Do you still have that view?
Yeah. Yeah. So if I go back to the examination and some of the changes that we made to our assumption set within that premium deficiency reserve, which again, is about 80% of our long-term care block, there are really three things that were prescribed as far as how we would change our assumption set. One was around interest rates. We use more of a prospective view of what future interest rates would do. The state prescribed us to use this trailing three-year average. The other one was around morbidity improvement, and for the length of time that we incorporated that into our assumption set, we had incorporated into our best estimate for 20 years. They had us shorten that down to 10.
They agreed that our experience would indicate that we've seen morbidity improvement, and kept the annual rate the same, just shortened the duration of that. But then the third was this older age mortality issue. They required us to strengthen those reserves based on the available data that we had and the available data that was in the industry. So not to get into kind of the details of how they necessarily compare, but when we went through our revised view of our best estimate, it did not change our view of that Premium Deficiency Reserve. We still felt like they were sufficient based on this new best estimate view of older age mortality, and therefore, we made no changes to that assumption set and still believe that we have margin within that reserve.
And so, again, doesn't change our view of capital deployment needs behind that block, and we still feel really good about how the premium deficiency will progress as we get to the end of the year and into next year. And one thing, we've just really finalized our calculation of our expected year-end premium deficiency reserve. It's going to be right around $1.6 billion. That will be disclosed in our 10-K. And so that's a nice progression, based on some of the information that would have been disclosed historically around the size of the premium deficiency reserve. And again, we'll fully recognize that by the end of the year.
So one more on LTC before we move on from this topic. Could you describe the reinsurance appetite that's out there for LTC? We've obviously seen some of these PE-backed reinsurers express more interest outside of just fixed annuities. You know, will it make its way someday to LTC and give you all an opportunity to not have this conversation with me anymore?
Well, I think, Alex, when you look at it, you talked about the progression that's happened out there in terms of people's interest level in insurance liabilities and how that has changed and progressed over time. We've seen that in different markets. We actually did the same back in 2020. One of our individual disability blocks, we actually went through a reinsurance process with that as well. When we look to where we are today, I mean, I think we have been vocal that we're doing the work to be able to look at our blocks of business. And when I think about it, I think about different attributes that might be attractive to different reinsurers or private equity.
They can either have pieces which are more asset intensive, where they're able to take the cash flows that we've been talking about and put that to work, maybe in a different way than we have. They can look at the liabilities and believe that there's actually a margin there and sufficiency that they can actually look to, to reinsure those as well. Or they can look at duration, so they can think about the cohorts, how much time do they have before they are on claim, or even when they happen to be, are on claim. And so we're ready with all those different pieces to look at. How do we actually have someone, the buyer, in a sense, looking at what we would be selling and see that bid-ask spread in a reasonable spot?
So that appetite has gone through over the last several years. I think some people come into the market, some people may lose some interest in the market over time. We'll see that ebb and flow, but ultimately, we're looking to do a transaction in that business. Because as you said, it's just different than everything else we do. It's a c losed block, and so the more that we can do to actually take that out of the portfolio, let somebody else be managing that, putting their capital behind it, that's what we want to do. But it's going to take some time as we look at the dynamics of that business, and we look for that market to start to open up.
So as much focus as has been on the LTC in the past months, I mean, you know, I don't want to lose sight on the fact that these funding requirements that, that you've been, you know, really voluntarily contributing faster to over the last few years are subsiding as we, as we get into 2024. And so the capital management flexibility does significantly increase year-over-year, despite some of this recent noise. Could you talk about that a little bit, the confidence around the $500 million buyback? You know, other types of capital deployment you may look at, et cetera?
Yeah, so in the third quarter, we actually talked about it that it was a milestone event to be at the end of the funding of the PDR. Steve talked a bit about the calculations, but we've put hard capital in to back that up. And the third quarter was when we actually had fully funded the PDR. That's something we've done over the last several years. It's been a use of capital across the company at a time when over the last several years, we've been generating a significant amount of capital in our good returning businesses, and we see that persisting over time. So our actual capital positions, as we see them today, our RBC level in the third quarter was 470%. It's the highest level we've seen.
We see cash to holding company of $1.2 billion. We'll see those trend at year-end. They'll probably be a little bit lower RBC, a little bit higher on the cash side, as we upstream some of that money. So as we head into 2024, we're in a different spot, one that we've been, haven't been in, in for several years, and so we look forward to putting that money to work, first in driving our core business and the growth and the excitement that we have in terms of growing it organically over time. We're gonna continue to look at our dividends and what we've paid out there. We think it's important, to return some capital to shareholders that way.
Inorganic M&A is something we look at in terms of just growing the business faster, meaning smaller type acquisitions that we'd look at to bring that in, and then ultimately share repurchase. So, we've seen our share repurchase projections increase over the last 18 months. We were at $200 million going back 2 years ago. Actually, 18 months ago. We've increased that now to $300 million back in the spring of this year, and so we're looking forward to 2024, where our board has authorized us to buy back $500 million of our stock. So we've seen that as a good use of our capital and time, and so, you know, even in this last quarter, we've bought back our stock at opportune prices.
We'll look to the future and think our stock is a very good investment where it is. We certainly want to see it go up, but given the capital generation we have, share repurchase is a key part of that overall capital redeployment.
Got it. Maybe in the time we got left, I, I'd be interested to ask on the investment portfolio in particular, if there's any, you know, pivots, allocation changes-
Yep
... that you're considering. I think you mentioned at one point that you're even, you know, crystallizing losses in certain places where it made sense. Like, what, what's the strategy in investments for you?
Yeah, I would say by and large, our stated investment strategy it has not changed that much. What has happened during the pandemic, and it was less about the pandemic and more about where rates are, we saw a lot of folks call their bonds, specifically in our high yield investment portfolio. Our bond calls were pretty elevated for a period of time. In essence, what that's done is we've moved out. Our allocation has moved out of high yield, and we took the opportunity during some of the volatility to invest in our alternative asset portfolio. We think that that's a really good portfolio. We were able to increase our allocation there. But then we also like the yields that we're getting just around your, you know, your investment-grade corporate bonds.
So our high yield allocation has gone from something like 8% down to, I think we're approaching 3.5% right now, the portfolio. So we think that's a good move. It's not so much that we've changed our strategy, it's just that we're getting paid for the risk properly, and we've just seen, over the last several years, more opportunity to go places other than high yield. It doesn't mean that we wouldn't want to get back, you know, into that asset class, and obviously, we, we think we have a lot of room if we were to do that. But I would say, you know, we continue to just chop wood. You know, we're a credit shop. We've had a really, really good history of being able to pick credit, specifically in our, in our corporate investment-grade portfolio.
So far this year, we're seeing really good results. We actually have higher upgrades than we do downgrades in our portfolio, so we've seen credit grade migration actually go up over the last year. It doesn't have a big, you know, significant capital implication. No downgrades during the year, so, you know, it's kind of steady, steady as she goes. We really like the course that we've set, and we're gonna stay consistent to that going forward.
Got it. All right, well, we are at time, so-
Great
... thank you for-
Thank you, Alex.
Well played.
Thanks for having us in today. We appreciate it. Thanks, everybody.
Yeah, thanks, everybody.
... for joining us.
Yes. Yep.