Aegon N.V. (NYSE:AEG) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 17, 2023 3:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Hielke Hielkema - IR Officer

Lard Friese - CEO

Matthew Rider - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Baker - Citigroup

Michael Huttner - Berenberg

David Barma - Bank of America

Farquhar Murray - Autonomous Research

Iain Pearce - Exane

Nasib Ahmed - UBS

Ashik Musaddi - Morgan Stanley

Michele Ballatore - KBW

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Aegon First Half 2023 Results Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Hielke Hielkema, Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Hielke Hielkema

Thank you, operator, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call on Aegon's first half 2023 results. My name is Hielke Hielkema from Aegon Investor Relations team. With me today are Aegon's CEO, Lard Friese; and CFO, Matt Rider, who will take you through the highlights of the first half year, our financial results and the progress that we are making in the transformation of Aegon. After that, we will continue with a Q&A session.

Before we start, we would like to ask you to review our disclaimer on forward-looking statements, which you can find at the back of the presentation. And on that note, I will now give the floor to Lard.

Lard Friese

Thank you, Hielke, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate that you are joining us on today's call. Today, we present our results under the new IFRS 9 and 17 accounting standard for the first time. But first, let me run you through our strategic developments and commercial momentum. We have a lot to talk about.

So let's move to Slide #2 for the achievements in the first half of 2023. We have started the next chapter in Aegon's transformation delivering a successful Capital Markets Day in London in June. We closed the transaction with a.s.r. in July and have started the €1.5 billion share buyback program associated with the deal, which we expect to complete before the end of June 2024. In addition, we still intend to reduce our leverage by up to €700 million in the same time frame, and we'll update you on that when appropriate.

On the strategy front, we continue to take steps to transform our business. We have increased our financial stake in our Brazilian joint venture, we expanded our partnership with Nationwide Building Society in the U.K. and extended our asset management partnership with La Banque Postale in France. The sale of our remaining Central and Eastern European businesses have been closed, and we have announced the sale of our stake in our joint venture in India. We are now fully focused on 3 core markets, 3 growth markets and 1 global asset manager.