F&G Annuities & Life, Inc. KBW Insurance Conference 2026

Six weeks ago. Six weeks ago.

All right, well, thank you, and thanks for having us. Delighted to be here. I had the opportunity to be here with you last year with Chris Blunt, who recently shifted his role. I would say there's a fair amount of continuity to what we're doing. Growth and momentum are a couple of words that come to mind. We have been, I think, a little bit of an exceptional growth story for larger life and annuity companies. We've been able to grow the gross AUM every single quarter, the net AUM every quarter but last quarter, and that was just because we had sold the Bermuda business. Otherwise, both of those continue to be metrics that we remain focused on. At the same time, we're an ROE expansion story, and leveraging reinsurance is helping us do that.

At this stage in our evolution, and we can talk about, we've been around in one form or another since the 1950s, but really I'm talking about the F&G that's existed over the last 8 years since FNF and Blackstone and others and Chris Blunt. In that time, we had evolved. We hadn't quite gotten to the segment reporting part, but at year-end, we talked about the continued shift to being more capital light, more fee based, and disclosed that the fee composition of earnings had grown from almost nothing a few years ago, if you really fully allocated expenses to about 15% year-end 2025, with an expectation just by virtue of the 3-year plan that we had done at year-end 2025, that it would be at about 25% in 2028.

I would view that as a pretty easy 25%, very achievable, and obviously you can get there faster with more reinsurance, or you optimize or you prioritize fee businesses over spread businesses. That's been a continuation. I think you've heard us in recent quarters too, a lot of the focus has been on core. Core retail has continued to be arguably every quarter is better than the equivalent quarter of the year before. So that's the IUL, the FIA. Those are meaningful businesses for us. RILA's newer for us. FIA and IUL were a top 10 business, probably top 6-ish. We were a later entrant to the RILA space, but that's been noteworthy for us as well. Then PRT, we've been in for about 5 years. That's also become a top. We're about number 7, number 8. Meaningful for us as well, so call that core institutional.

At the same time, we've shied away from the MYGA space, FABN, opportunistic, more so late last year, early this year than perhaps currently. Then I'm sure we'll get into it. We have the own distribution business with Peak as well. Yeah, a lot of continued momentum. I would say underneath the covers, it's stability in revenue growth, stability in earnings insofar as you can. The surrenders are obviously a little bit out of our control. The ALTs portfolio is underperforming, I think probably in line with pretty much everybody else, if you haven't denied. Everything else, though, is very predictable, and hitting our marks. The last part of it, I would say, is under the covers too, the core spread, right? You have heard me say I would argue we're not really in the spread margin business, we're in the spread maintenance business.

That is part of the reason we really favor the FIA and IUL because we are repricing that every year. That balancing act is a very thorough process within the company and one that we manage well. Pricing, new business, rate setting, rate renewals, all of that, all much of the same. We are adding good value every day.

Yeah, sure. It has and continues to be an expansion. It began mostly with the MYGA products. Those we heavily reinsure up to about 90% with a couple of noteworthy partners that we disclose that we can talk about. We have expanded the FIA reinsurance, and broadly speaking, we are targeting about 50% on FIA. About half of our FIA is income based, and about half of it is accumulation based. On the income base, we have got a couple of noteworthy reinsurance partners there as well. They all pay ceding commissions and cover some expenses. When we talk about fee businesses, it is the Peak business that is fee business, it is the flow reinsurance ceding commission business, and then you would bifurcate the life between fee and spread. Those are what we are talking about.

On the accum side of FIA, though, that is where we have the relatively new, well, it is about a year old now, sidecar with Blackstone. That is predominantly, call it the capital provider there. At this point in time, we have not done more on the FIA. We could. We have not done anything with PRT. There has obviously been some interest around that. We just have not felt the need to necessarily, but we would consider that. Nor have we done anything with IUL, and the RILA is just not big enough yet to consider doing that. An expansion. At the same time, even just going back over the last five years, five years ago on a retained basis, we have grown to $75 billion gross, $55 retained. Five years ago, I think we were at $25.

Part of that expansion has come from selling, other than RILA, similar products, but in narrower scope, own distribution, if you will. We now have a couple of dozen broker-dealer and financial institution partners as well, so there is an expansion there. That is where we are, but I would be inclined to think probably more reinsurance from here than less. Another element that I think is noteworthy, of the sizable players, there are not many that are not either owned by an asset manager or own an asset manager. I would argue I think we are a reinsurer of choice for a lot of folks, for whom they can then obviously take advantage of their own asset management partnerships or structures to avail of that, whereas we do not. It is a nice diversifier from Blackstone.

Obviously, anything in art that we retain, almost all of that, Leena can get into it, the vast majority of that is managed with Blackstone. But anything, obviously, that we reinsure on a flow basis is someone else's, which I think works well for a lot of people as well.