Unum Group (UNM)
NYSE: UNM · Real-Time Price · USD
93.07
-1.00 (-1.06%)
At close: Sep 9, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT
93.07
0.00 (0.00%)
Pre-market: Sep 10, 2026, 7:38 AM EDT
← View all transcripts

KBW Insurance Conference 2026

Sep 9, 2026

Summary

Strong sales growth, robust capital generation, and ongoing technology investments are driving performance, with repricing efforts underway in the U.K. and PFML segments. Long-term care risk is being reduced through reinsurance, and capital deployment remains focused on organic growth, select acquisitions, and shareholder returns.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Afternoon. We're going to get started with the next session. Great to have Unum with us today. Up on stage with me is Rick McKenney, President and CEO. Maybe just start with some opening comments on how you view Unum's performance in the first half of the year and how the company is positioned in the back half of this year and into 2027.

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Certainly. Thanks, Ryan. Good to be here with everyone. Appreciate everybody in person or following us on the webcast. For Unum, it's been a continuation of a good year, and I really will dimension that on multiple fronts. One is we always start with the core business, and being in the employee benefits space at the work site, the business continues to still do well dimensionally across the board. When we think about it, our group benefits business is a leading franchise, and we've been very happy how that's performed over the course of the year. We've seen some good sales growth. I think that through the first half of the year, we saw our U.S. business growing kind of in the teens. Really good to see our Colonial Life business catching more pace in terms of what it does. Our U.S. business doing well.

Top-line margins are still pretty good. There's some dynamics underlying that, but in aggregate, still doing very well. Our U.K. business, doing well, but some work to do there on our U.K. business as we reprice the book a little bit. It's something we know how to do, and we'll certainly get on that. But in aggregate, the company doing well. I think we talked about, even for the rest of the year, being within a range of $8.60-$8.90. So that's kind of right in line what we talked about going into the year. Capital generation, still very good, what we see across the company, and so very happy about that.

Of course, we need to talk about long-term care, and we've continued to reduce the risk across that block, one, organically, from this year, coming out of some actions we took late last year, and then announced a transaction in the July timeframe of reducing risk through reinsurance. So all those things good. I think we continue to be in a very good spot. Looking forward to growing through the rest of the year. Clearly, a lot of things happen in our business in third and fourth quarter that we're focused on, but those will be important as we go into 2027. So I think overall, Ryan, very happy about where we are, but always work to do and always opportunity ahead of us.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

All right. Let's dig into the Unum US business a bit more, starting more on the growth side. You've mentioned it a little bit, but can you talk about the sales and trends that you're seeing as well as premium persistency at this point?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. I'll start with your last point, which is the premium persistency has been very strong. In a business that has high returns for us, we've been able to keep a significant amount of that on the books. The thing that we'll talk about overall, which drives sales, which drives persistency, are the digital connections that we continue to make. If you think about 70% of our U.S. business has some type of digital connection that's been added since 2023. We're very happy about that. Those capabilities are critical as we think about the connections with customers, the ability to have that business persist, get high returns, and continue to deliver for our customers overall.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

This is, yeah, somewhat related, I guess, to what you just mentioned, but can you talk about some of the technology investments you've been making in recent years? I constantly hear from companies in the group benefits market how you need to keep reinvesting in technology and improving the customer experience, how you feel Unum is at where you're at in both also in terms of how it compares to some of your competitors?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah, we would echo those same comments. I think we started some of those comments in talking about how we want to connect with our customers with good digital capabilities. Think about embedding that in terms of what the process within the customer looks like. We talk about that as Unum HR Connect, would be one digital connection that we've been investing in for seven or eight years now, so we've been at it for a while. Always iterating, always getting better, making things simpler for our customer would be one piece of digital, and we'll continue to invest in that. Just like any good piece of technology, you can always improve it, always make things better, and we've been doing that in concert with our customers. It's not just that, it's across the board.

Leave management's another piece where we've invested significantly over the last seven or eight years, and that has really paid off. Leave management has become a big differentiator in our market today. It's a basis of competition. Because we were early in that game, I think we have iterated faster than a number of our competitors. It is something we always have to keep investing in. That'd be across our U.S. business, really good in our Colonial Life business, which is an agency-driven business. What we do with Agent Assist, think about the systems that an agency force would use. The investments there have continued to pay off, and we've seen good momentum in Colonial Life. Even in the U.K., what we've done with some partnerships we've had there, embedding new services within the product lines we have.

Technology is a big piece of it, and so we've continued to invest in it. It's not a new thing. It's not a new step function. It's been just a continual investment over a longer period of time. I think the team has done a good job of iterating new and developing areas and then always thinking about what the future looks like.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

I think going back a few years ago, it seemed like you were maybe making some heavier investments, and you did see some uptick in your expense ratio. It seems like it started to stabilize from here. But where are you at kind of in the evolution? I'm sure there's always ongoing investments, but where are you at in the evolution of some of these larger initiatives?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. I think we did see our expense ratio come up coming out of the pandemic. There's a couple of things we highlighted there. One is the technology we're investing in. It was a little bit heavier, but not that much. The other was investment in our people. You would have seen that across the board. I think just given that environment we saw in 2022 and that timeframe, we did see an increase in the cost for some of our people. The combination of those two, we've seen that flatten out, even get a little bit better, and so we manage our expense ratio pretty tightly. We would expect to see that slowly improving over time while still making very significant technology investments. It's not because we're slowing the investment, it's just as we burn that in and continue to work through productivity across the company.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

When you, this is more of a Unum US question, but, although I guess we could expand it to the other areas, too, but how would you characterize the current competitive conditions in the market today?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. The U.S. side, always competitive, right? I think that we don't look for a competition going away. I think one of the things about our space is it's pretty clear it's a good place to compete in. The margins are high. Others see that, and others have participated in that. All we look for is having a rationally competitive environment. We've had periods of time in the past, which was a little bit more irrational. Some of those players that were more on the irrational front have left the industry, which has been a good thing. But the players that are there today are there for the longer term. So we'll compete based on capabilities, based on relationships, based on price to some degree, but it's not just price.

As long as we see that overall, we think that's a good environment for our customers. I think about that more macro perspective customers, because they don't want to see radically different prices year-in and year-out. They like to see that stability. We can deliver that, and our competitors hopefully will deliver the same.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Have you seen much change in the environment over the last year or so? Would you say it's pretty stable?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

I would say, I think that there's always case by case. There's plenty of competition around that, because we're all trying to grow our businesses. But I think it's within a range of stability that we have out there. I expect we'd hear that from some of our competitors as well. We will compete hard day in and day out, but I think, overall, we will win our share, based on the capabilities we deliver, the relationships we've had over time, and just the knowhow that Unum has in this space. This is all we do. I think that we have a great team to execute on that front.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

I wanted to shift to underwriting experience in Unum US and really start with group disability. You'd come into the year expecting a 62%-64% benefit ratio. It's 65% in the first half of the year, so a little bit above that. Can you unpack some of the drivers of what drove that and how you're thinking about the outlook for the rest of the year?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Sure. I think what we've said, for the rest of the year, we expect a similar level of what we see. I think unpacking that, we did a fair bit of that in the second quarter, talking about looking at the different pieces between our Long Term Disability, Short Term Disability, and PFML. I think we highlighted that our in PFML, Paid Family and Medical Leave, we highlighted that that's a place which is not performing to our expectations, and it's a place that we will reprice over the next year. That's caused some of the elevation that we've seen over the course of last year, something we'll get after from a pricing perspective. We've said over the longer term, which we've said 65% is a good number longer term, that's what we'll be working towards.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

It would be helpful if we could just step back in Paid Family Medical Leave or PFML is a generally newer product. Get a little background on it and how you're viewing that market?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. This goes back a long ways in terms of administration of Paid Family Medical Leave. It goes all the way back to the Family and Medical Leave Act 30 years ago. What companies are looking for is to help them with the administration of leaves. You really saw, and we've been at this for a long time, and we would've talked about this going back, like I said, last 8 + years ago, we could see this coming. What you came out of the pandemic is a lot more focus on leaves. When I think about that, you think about an employee base, the type of leaves that their employees are expecting now, some of them have been just evolution of employers.

You think about what used to be a maternity leave is now a bonding leave, which includes both mothers and fathers in that process, or somebody that's adopted a new child. It's all expanded in that area. There's also caregiver leave. Think about taking care of a parent over a period of time through something. I just gave you two examples. Now there's 10 in employers. The complexity of that has gone very up, kind of a straight up kind of thing. You've also seen, with that complexity, is different state by state. That's where some of the complexity comes in. Every state is different in terms of what it has out there. Now, take across roughly 14, 15 states today that have a mandated paid family leave, PFML, as we talk about it. That's gone state by state as it has evolved.

We've added a couple over the last couple of years. Each state will dictate what the leaves are that they expect employers to provide. Companies like ours will administer those. We'll work with an employer to administer that. You've seen that evolve over time, the prices that we charge over that. Where that's come out over the last couple of years and why we talked about it more is, one, it's more prevalent, but it's still a minority of the states that have this, but it's more prevalent. Our ability to do that is based on the technology we have, the knowledge we have, the history we have to make sure we can do a good job for our customers.

In the last year, we brought on some states that were kind of, you don't really know exactly what the pricing or the experience will look like. Some of the states have had less good performance over the course of the last year or two. Now we'll have to price for that. That's the process you go through. These are generally one-year products. When you see experience at an employer, what they've got, you come back and you reprice for those levels. Although it's been a little bit elevated to date, that's something we can rectify and address with customers, doing so in a very thoughtful way, because it is important to them to have somebody take care of this for them. Anyway, it's a bigger topic.

It's something we've been involved with for a long period of time and helping to educate in the industry. It's ultimately a good thing for an employer to do this because it is complex, and we can actually manage some of that complexity for them.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

When you think about the longer-term expectation for the group disability benefit ratio, you've talked about the 65% steady state. I think some people still say it was 70% + before the pandemic. I guess what gives you confidence that you can maintain it at 65 and really hold the line there?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. You'd have to go back over a longer period of time thinking about what the trend has looked like there. Certainly, we saw levels come down around Long Term Disability that got down into the high 50s, which we said at that time was too low. It's come back up now, right around that mid-60s level. Different than what it would have been if you went back a decade ago, is you've seen a lot of change in terms of the ability to get people back to work over a period of time. The recovery rates, as we talked, somebody goes out on disability, the recovery rates are dramatically different than they were a decade ago. That can be for a few reasons. One is our knowledge, two, accommodations that employers provide.

Three, even just the medical process is different in terms of people's ability to recover from certain things can be different. All those things feed into that over a period of time. We have seen better experience. Then you get back to the competitive environment and say, okay, will competition take that away? The dynamics there have changed as well. Now it is more about the services that you provide, the connectivity that you have today. The pricing dynamic, because you have a broader portfolio, may not change that dramatically. That is our view of where we have it today. We still lead in that space. We want to continue to be a leader around disability management, but we want to do the overall portfolio in a very reasonable way.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

On group life, things have kind of been going, I guess, the opposite trend, which is experience has been very favorable lately for you and the entire industry. Are you at this point optimistic that this can continue, at least in the near term? At what point do you think could there be pressure to potentially pass through some of this into pricing, given how favorable the margins are?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

We have seen very good results in our life space. I think as you say, the industry has been good on that front as well. It gets back to the packaging, when you think about overall, and so how quickly does that price go back to the market? You asked about the near term. We have kind of said it will look similar to what it looked like for the first half of the year, I think, which is kind of in the high 60s, 66, 67, something like that. Lower than our expectation, which would have been right around 70% loss ratio. I think that it gets back to the overall bundling, the packaging of the different products in terms of why necessarily the price will not just find a new level of where it is today. We are happy about where it is.

We have not really kind of projected out beyond this year. But we continue to be very happy with how our group life business is performing.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

And then maybe moving into Colonial Life. Your premiums growth has improved to about 3%. Do you still think that is a higher growth business than that longer term? And then what are some of the key things that need to happen to accelerate growth from here?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. We are very excited about our Colonial Life business, and we have been. Colonial Life, it is an agency-driven force, and so they are selling mostly voluntary products, simple products at the employer, ranging in sizes from very small customers to kind of that 2,000 employee level. So it is a really good place to get reach into the market because these are people that may not be served as benefit plans anywhere else. Colonial Life is a very good business model. It was more impacted by COVID, and we are still talking about that because we had both what was happening from an overall at the workplace type impacts. For Colonial Life, which is an agency-driven force, we also had some challenges kind of in that next wave, 2023, I am sorry, 2022 area, where our recruiting of our agents was not as good as it could be.

All that is kind of we are working through a momentum right now. You would have seen 6% growth last quarter in sales at very high returns, and so we really like that business, and we would like it to be a higher growth business. It is about getting feet on the street, giving them the right technology, getting the reach that we have out there today, and so we are very optimistic about Colonial Life, but it is one of building very strong fundamentals in that business, which the team is doing a good job of seeing good momentum.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Can you talk a little just about how Colonial interacts with Unum US and the voluntary business that Unum US has, and how you avoid channel conflict between the two divisions?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Certainly. I think it's one thing we've been working on for a very long time, and I think we're in a better spot now than we've ever been with how they would work together. I think our Colonial Life agents now understand where they can bring our Unum product set to solve certain needs that we have out there. We actually are doing that more today than we ever have. But I think there's a fundamental different value proposition that's brought to the employer. If you think about Colonial Life, I mentioned it's an agency force. They'll do the enrollment for the employer, whereas the Unum side is much more of an electronic delivery, a little bit larger case, working through a broker. It's just a very different delivery model.

Depending on what the employer is looking for, we'll be happy to have them have Colonial Life if they want that higher level enrollment experience or on the Unum side, bringing some of that connective technology we've talked about. The channel conflict is actually not that high. We want to compete, we want to be there. But I think when there is the opportunity to bring both or have the employer choose, we want to bring the best of both out there as well, and we've seen more of that over the last couple of years than we have in my time at the company.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

I guess shifting to the U.K., you mentioned this initially that there's some work to do to improve the underwriting. What have you been seeing that has gone worse than you expected? What's the timeframe that you think you can fix it?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. First of all, the U.K. business is a tremendous franchise, even at these levels, has been for a long period of time. We have a leading market position over there, particularly around group income protection, which is akin to what we have in the U.S. around Long Term Disability, leading market position. We're going to be ahead of the market in terms of what these things look like, and that gives us the ability to price for it differently. Some of the results we've seen this year, if you go back a couple of years, very high returns. We've seen that come down. Still be a decent return. When you think about it's still low teens type returns on this product set, but we think they can be higher. That's the repricing process we're going through right now with the U.K. Eyes wide open.

The team is focused on it. We think we know where there are spots that we can work on that, and they will do that over the course of the next year or 2 as we work through a repricing process.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Are the rate guarantees in the U.K. typically in that one to two-year range?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

It looks similar to what we have in the U.S. It will take one to two , and it might even go longer than that, but usually a one to two -year repricing cycle. It will look similar to what we have seen in pricing cycles here in the U.S., but the team is on it. We bring great capabilities. Customer service is fantastic. What we have from those other services we provide good. This is just a pricing process we are going to go through.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

How does the— Maybe it is impacted a little bit by the pricing, but how does the growth outlook look in the U.K. business?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

The U.K. has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of years. I would broaden out a little bit to our international. Our Polish business has also done very well over the last several years, so we continue to expect good growth coming out of them. New products that they have launched over the course of the last year, new capabilities they are delivering to employers are out there. We will have to make sure the price is right through that process, but in a rational market, that should work its way through. We will have to see what that looks like as we go into kind of outlook for next year from an overall growth perspective. But the underlying fundamentals of the company and the business is still very good.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Shifting to long-term care. You did the second reinsurance transaction in July. Maybe you could step back and talk a little bit about how you feel about where the company is at and how you have kind of positioned the long-term care experience as you have gradually been de-risking it over time?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. It has been a longer-term story. Another transaction which we have not closed on, so we still have to make sure we close on the transaction we announced back in July. It really goes back a few years in terms of addressing the exposure. Many years we have been taking price so we can increase the prices on this business. We have been doing that going back 10, 15 years, increasing the price, and we have gotten over $5 billion of price value over that period of time. That is underlying. It continues. It is something we continue to work on. The second is back in 2023, we put more capital behind our Fairwind business. If you recall back in that period of time, we put a lot of capital in there and said we are not going to put any more capital behind this business.

We made that statement back then and we feel that way still today. The advent of what we have had from a reinsurance perspective has been able to de-risk what we have had there as well. Transaction one, going back a couple of years ago for some of our older lives that we had in our individual block there, and then this transaction, all of the individual lives, the remainder of the individual lives that we have had in our Fairwind entity that we have been able to take out once we close here, and thinking about that. Feel really good about the de-risking on that process. Even in the third quarter of last year, we also announced not admitting new lives onto group cases.

That de-risking process, which is more of an organic process, is something that in the first half of the year, we've seen 10% of the cases out there lapse. That's a positive because I think when you think about cases lapsing, employers lapsing, employees can still have the coverage if they so choose, but that decision point is then made at that point in time. So another thing that we've de-risked over time. That's still playing its way out today, so we're going to have to see where that goes. But once again, this has been a focus of the company for many years now, and we're actually seeing it's actually starting to look very different than it did a year ago. I'd also say that to take you back, I mentioned the capital we put behind the business.

I think we talked about not needing capital there and $2 billion of protections that we have behind the block of business. After this reinsurance transaction, where the block is a lot smaller, we'll still have close to $2 billion of protections in our Fairwind entity. So we've managed the business over time. Very happy about the reinsurance transactions, but I think it's been bigger than that in terms of the work the team has done to de-risk that block of business.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Yeah, I wanted to come back to the group LTC organic lapses that are occurring. I guess why do you think that the lapse rates are kind of being elevated as you've made this change to not admitting new lives? Then do you still think there could be a lot more of this? I guess we've gone through one probably cycle of it so far.

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Do you feel like there's probably going to be more of this in the future?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Sure. Just to give you the time frame, we announced that third quarter of last year, but it wasn't really effective till February 1st. We've only gone through kind of, I'll say, a half-year cycle on that. You'd have to ask the employer on why they choose to lapse the coverage. One, they may not have really appreciated what they had. They thought about their employee base. The second thing is now they're going to have two groups in their business. Those are the historical employees which will have group long-term care. The new employees will not. There is an administration process that has got to rectify that. You'd have to kind of go case by case in terms of what that looks like. We'll just continue.

That would be speculative as we go through that, but those customers will still have to make the evaluation of whether it makes sense for their employee base knowing that we'll be able to take care of their customers once they make that choice.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Then sticking with Group LTC, I think the characteristics of the risk profile itself seems less risky in some ways than an individual. It's also very young, and as a result, we just haven't seen any reinsurance transactions in the entire market that have involved Group LTC. I guess, what's your optimism? Anything you can share on level of interest from counterparties on the remaining Group LTC exposure, and do you feel like there are going to be opportunities to do reinsurance there?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. There's still interest out there, and after our second transaction, there's still interest in other counterparties we're talking to on that front. The group, as you say, there's two elements to the group. One is the underlying risk is very different in terms of the benefit per day, the amount that has inflation protection, the amount that actually has different levels of benefit on a per day basis. It is a much lower risk profile. These products are very different. The other piece is they were distributed at the workplace. Oftentimes, the employer chose to bring that into the workplace as an employee who chose or an individual who chose to do that across the table. Just very different dynamics. You also raised the right point, which is these are generally younger.

Because they were done at the workplace up until recently, you're going to have a younger profile. You've got to just work through those dynamics about what that looks like. I think the important thing is, one, you say there's been no group transactions. There's not that many folks out there that were group carriers, right? There's a limited universe of people that offered this in the first place. The second piece is, over time, we're able to tranche different pieces in terms of different ages, what things look like, and I think that that's a dynamic you've always got to think about. That goes back a couple of years, where we started to be able to look kind of on a by policy basis almost, in terms of what the reinsurance looked like.

That's how we were able to separate transaction one from transaction two, and how we'd be thinking about the next transactions around the group side. Nothing precludes us. Those dynamics you talked about, different counterparties will think about it differently in terms of the lower risk profile versus the younger, and you've just got to find the right counterparty, both on the liability side as well as the asset management side that wants to take that risk on. It's going to be a process we're going to continue.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

It's a related question, but somewhat different. There have been a lot of individual LTC transactions, you included. The rest of your individual LTC exposure, I think, is mostly out of a New York subsidiary. Can you just help us understand, is that a major impediment or do you feel like you can get past that, and how does that affect the discussions for future transactions?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah, it's a good question. We talk about that as being part of our PLA, Provident Life and Accident . We have actually reinsured that internally. It's sitting in that entity today, and that's just going to be worked through from a reinsurance with a counterparty. You're right that those were originally initiated out of a New York domiciliary we have. We talked about it as First Unum historically. It's now in a different entity, and those will just be part of the conversations in terms of how we will work through something like that.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Can you talk a little bit about Unum's free cash flow profile at this point and then what your capital deployment priorities are?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. So cash flow has been strong at the company. That continues. I think our product set that we have out there today continues to be good from an overall cash flow perspective. We've seen that through the first half of the year and still feel good about that. What we're doing this year is from an overall priority perspective, number 1 is the good core organic growth, right? Making sure we're putting the right capital behind that business. We've been doing that pretty consistently, and it's not overly capital consumptive. So we'll continue to do that. The second is inorganic. What are the acquisitions that we want to do to build out our book of business? We'll put capital there.

I think that when we think about that, it's more around how we build out capabilities and enhance our ability to grow the company has been where we've been focused. We did an acquisition last summer, Beanstalk Benefits, those type of things, which are the ability to grow a little bit faster, so we'll continue to do that. Then we think about returning capital to our shareholders. So this year, our plan is to return roughly $1.3 billion of capital to shareholders, $300 million in dividends, another $1 billion in share repurchase, and I think we're tracking through that for the first half of the year. We're a little bit ahead of that on the first half of the year in terms of the share buybacks we've had and the dividends we paid out. So we'll continue to do that as well.

But the capital, go back to the generation, it's very, very strong, and we're able to have choices around what we want to do with the distribution of that, growing the company, and then returning to shareholders when it makes sense.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

I guess when it comes to inorganic, like you said, you've mostly either done things that add capabilities or you entered Poland. Are there any other either geographies you'd like to be in or product areas you feel like Unum wants to expand in that would be harder to do organically?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. I'd start with the product, and I think we've got the product set that we want, at least what employers are looking for today, and we always want to be reactive to what employers are looking for. But the product set we have today is pretty full. It's actually much more about the connectivity, the type of distribution. How do we think about that? Beanstalk Benefits would be the kind of example we talk about there. You mentioned Poland, that was 2018, which we bought our Polish business. Very happy about the growth rate we've seen there. But when we think about other geographies we'd want to be into, I think we're very happy about being in the U.K. and Poland. We'd want to continue to build those out, to scale those up, and so I wouldn't add any more to that list at the moment.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Then, I guess going back to growth in Unum US, I don't know if it's too early to talk about this, but you get towards the end of the year, it's a big renewal season. You have bigger sales towards the end of the year. Any color you can give us at this point on how things are starting to look as we get into that year-end process?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Too early to talk about that, Ryan. You called that right. I think it's something like we just focus on what are the capabilities we're good at and how do we compete. First half of the year is a good example. Although it is smaller quarters in the fourth quarter, I think we did a very good job of competing in the first couple of quarters, and our team's out there working hard. But it's too early to talk about what the back half of the year is going to look like.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Are there any questions in the audience for Unum? Wait, hold on for a moment.

Speaker 3

Rick, I think Ryan asked about the group disability benefit ratio. I think you mentioned long term your target's 65, but usually targets are averages and you have highs. The pricing and just the persistency and where we are with claims, it stops at 65 or could go a little farther but 65 is still the long-term average?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah, I think what we've said is 65 is the long-term average. Even if you look at the second quarter, it's a little bit higher than that. So I think it was a 65.8, if I have that right. So it can fluctuate around that, but 65 is more the long-term average that we would see over that. What I mean long-term, it's kind of an annual type thing as opposed to you'll see quarterly volatility that we'll see over time.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Could you talk about the impact of the GLP-1 drugs on your supplemental benefits business, particularly on the non-life side? The life impact's more obvious, but maybe talk about what it means for the health type products. What does all the turbulence at the managed care companies competitive perspective, is that a good thing for you or what is it for Unum?

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah. Maybe I'll start. Talk about the GLP-1 first. When you think about the GLP impacts, we haven't really talked about it too much in terms of the impact that it might have on our life book of business. That's still the question for us today. Most of our policies are under the age of 65, younger, so what are the impacts that GLP-1 will have on that? We haven't really talked too much about the impact of that. But when you think across our book of business, a healthier population, which I'd say the impacts of GLP-1 in weight loss reduction make for a healthier population is a good thing overall. When you ask about the other products in the voluntary suite that we have today, life is one of those that we put in our voluntary suite today.

Accident policy is not an impact. Hospital Indemnity is one which is much more of a care coverage. It's not really GLP related. I'm not sure there's much impact the GLP is to much of our portfolio that we see out there. There's some disability policies in there, accident, sickness type policies, but GLP is less of an impact on our voluntary business. They're smaller policies, they're simpler policies that really trigger based on different activities that might happen. Your second piece, the managed care companies. One of the things that you look back over time is managed care companies were in our space. Today, they are not out there today. They were writing disability and others, so I don't think there's much of an impact in the disruption that you see there.

Speaker 3

I thought they were trying to do more on the voluntary benefits side, though.

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Yeah, you will see them as competitors on the voluntary benefits side, but it is usually akin to what they are doing across their broader. I do not see them as the major competitor in the space, although they will participate in what they do there as well. They had a history of being in our business, but they did actually get out of our business, most of them through disposition of the type of products which are kind of our core businesses they provide out there, setting aside that some of them are still doing some voluntary benefit products.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

Any other further questions? All right. I think we will wrap it up here. Thank you very much to Rick.

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Krueger
Equity Research Analyst, KBW

And the Unum team.

Rick McKenney
President and CEO, Unum Group

Thanks for everybody being here.