Aegon N.V. (NYSE:AEG) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 9, 2023 3:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Jan Willem Weidema - Head of Investor Relations

Lard Friese - Chief Executive Officer

Matt Rider - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Baker - Citi

David Barma - Bank of America

Michael Huttner - Berenberg

Nasib Ahmed - UBS

Steven Haywood - HSBC

Robin van den Broek - Mediobanca

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Aegon Fourth Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. At this time all participants’ are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jan Willem Weidema, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Jan Willem Weidema

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call on Aegon's Fourth Quarter 2022 Results. 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.

With me today are Aegon's CEO, Lard Friese; and CFO, Matt Rider, who will take you through the results for the fourth quarter and the progress we are making in the transformation of Aegon. After that, we will continue with our Q&A.

And on that note, I will give the floor to Lard.

Lard Friese

Thank you, Jan Willem, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate that you're joining us on today's call. I want to start by running you through our achievements on slide number two. The fourth quarter closes out a year in which we accelerated our transformation and the execution of our strategy. During the quarter, we announced a transaction to combine our Dutch businesses with a.s.r., which was a historic milestone for the company. We are very pleased that we have received broad-based support from our shareholders for this transaction at our AGM in January, and we continue to be on track to close the transaction in the second half of this year.

Despite challenging market circumstances, we also made significant progress in further strengthening our balance sheet and in improving our operating performance. At the 2020 Capital Markets Day, we launched our operational improvement plan with more than 1,100 initiatives, together with ambitious, but realistic savings and growth targets. The success of this program is evidenced by the fact that the benefit to our operating results has exceeded our target one-year ahead of schedule. This year's commercial results underscore the importance of offering a broad range of products to our customers.