Prudential Financial, Inc. KBW Insurance Conference 2026

Oh, there's a good bit that's underway and changing, and hopefully everyone had a chance to listen to our call. It's very simple and straightforward. There's four main strategic priorities. The first is narrowing our geographic footprint in our insurance businesses. I'm a huge believer in focus, and my team and I believe that Prudential had become, my words, spread too thinly. We think it's really important to focus talent, focus capital, focus investment, if you're going to be successful. So we are narrowing our retirement and insurance business footprint. We're currently in over a dozen markets. That'll be about half of that. In the process, raising well north of $3 billion as we exit those markets. We already have good momentum on that process. I've been asked about that announcement.

Said, "Well, we wouldn't have talked about it if we didn't have some momentum already in that regard." But narrowing the footprint isn't the objective or the goal, right? It's the enabler of what we can then do, which is really the second priority. I'm a big believer is pick the businesses that you believe that you could compete and win in, and be a top-tier player. Because no matter the industry, the top-tier players get the lion's share of the profitability, get the lion's share of the growth, from a growth rate perspective.

We believe that our global retirement, global asset management, and what we call our select protection businesses, so life in the U.S. and Japan, and group insurance in the U.S., are businesses that we have the right set of capabilities that when we continue to invest in them, that we will be a top-tier player, and get those rewards. Our goal, as we've said, is to be category leaders in those businesses. The third priority is about optimizing our capital deployment. There's really two aspects of this. The first aspect, and this is a change, a difference is we've taken a much more top-down oriented approach to capital deployment. We have every intention to be, my words, just excellent capital allocators to make sure that every dollar of capital that gets allocated produces a very strong return above the cost of capital.

The other part of the third priority is shifting the mix of the business. It is really important when you have a set of businesses that are capital heavy, and our asset intensive insurance businesses are, that you have the right mix of capital light businesses. The capital light businesses are, you should think of group insurance and asset management. Then finally, all that fueled by a change in the operating model, priority four, which many people sort of digest down to just expense reduction, but it's broader than just expense reduction. We are really changing how we operate so that we're simpler, we're faster, we're more decisive, and as an outcome, we're taking out a significant amount of cost from the organization, $750 million between now and the end of 2028.

Those four priorities, we believe, will let us exceed our potential, and I've been pretty upfront that that is the goal, is to really take this to the next level.

Yeah. So, the words I use on this, Ryan, is I've widened the aperture from what the previous strategy and previous team was aimed at. We used to be very focused on just asset management and very focused on only what I would call programmatic small to medium size acquisitions in the asset management space. So first and foremost, when I say widen the aperture, there's now three different areas that we are looking at inorganic opportunities. First is asset management, second is group insurance, and third is select opportunities to expand our retirement footprint in the U.K. Maybe let me take each of those. On the asset management side, we've again widened. We're certainly still looking at programmatic type acquisitions. Those would likely be if we do single asset class that are high multiple acquisitions, because candidly, it would be too dilutive to do very large scale things.

You could think of maybe infrastructure equity as an example of that. Those are still on the list of potentials, but we've also begun looking at more cross-asset class, broader platform that when combined with our asset management business, could produce better, stronger expense and revenue synergies. With a particular focus, obviously, on private alternatives as the higher margin, higher growth areas, and private credit, given the connection back to the balance sheet. So that's asset management. Group insurance, we have a very strong national account group insurance business, mostly up market, mostly life and disability. There's a great opportunity, given the set of capabilities we have, to look to continue our product diversification. And typical next set of products would be dental and vision, as an example. But also to continue to strengthen our downmarket capability.

And when I say downmarket, you have to always specify, because that's different depending on the company. We're really strong in employers that have 1,000-plus employees, so really getting down below that. Then finally, selectively looking to expand our retirement capabilities in the U.K. I'm a big believer in say what you're going to do and then do it. You've already seen us do that. We talked about it in August, but you've already seen us do the deal with Standard Life and CVC as partners expanding into the BPA market. The important part of that deal is that it brings a new, large, sizable client to PGIM for us to manage high-fee, high-margin products like asset-backed finance, commercial loans, and direct lending. But that's the set of things that we're really focused on.

Yeah. I'm always very upfront of the sequencing of this is a complex thing. But it is an intentional sequenced capital rotation. I think the first thing that needs to be understood is you don't sell businesses and then start a process of buying businesses, because these processes are year-long, 2-year-long type processes. So it is a safe assumption that we have both processes in flight. Part of widening the aperture on the acquisition side is that gives us an ability to get more at bats, to get more looks at platforms, and to, over time, match capital sources and capital uses. But safe to assume that we're doing both simultaneously, and we don't have an intention of raising a bunch of capital and then sitting on it, because that's not a great answer for anybody.