Unum Group KBW Insurance Conference 2026

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.

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 US 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.

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 7 or 8 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.

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.