Aegon Ltd. (NYSE:AEG) Q4 2023 Results Conference Call March 1, 2024 4:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Yves Cormier - 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
Nasib Ahmed - UBS
Farquhar Murray - Autonomous
Ashik Musaddi - Morgan Stanley
Henry Heathfield - Morningstar
Steven Haywood - HSBC

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Aegon Second 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, Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Yves Cormier

Thank you, operator, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call on Aegon's second half year 2023 results. My name is Yves Cormier, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Aegon's CEO, Lard Friese; and CFO, Matt Rider, to take you through the highlights of the year, our financial results and the progress 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

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. I will run you through our strategic and commercial developments before handing over to Matt, who will run through the financial results in more detail.

Let's move to Slide number 2 to review our achievements in the second half of 2023. 2023 was another important transformational year for Aegon.

During the year, we completed the transaction with ASR, initiated a significant share buyback program, reduced our gross financial leverage, presented our ambitions for the coming years at our Capital Markets Day last June and moved our legal set-up to Bermuda. At the same time, we have remained laser-focused on improving returns from our businesses and generating value for shareholders, which we will continue to do.

The second half of 2023 saw Aegon maintained commercial momentum, mainly driven by the strong performance of our U.S. business. We have exceeded our financial commitments for 2023 and remain committed to our targets for 2025. I'm very proud of everything the teams have achieved in 2023, and I'm grateful for all of their hard work during the year. We will continue to work hard executing our strategy in 2024 and I am optimistic about our prospects.