Hello everyone and welcome to At Barrens. I'm Andy Surwer and welcome to our guest, Roy Gory, CEO of Manulife.

Roy, nice to see you. Great to see you and thanks for having me.

So tell us about Manulife. It's the big Canadian financial services company based in the insurance business, but

now you do a lot of different stuff.

Talk to us.

We do.

We are a top 10 global insurer, but we also do wealth and asset management.

We've operated for more than 130 years in Canada, but our business footprint actually spans

across three broad geographies, Canada, the US and Asia.

We have a small presence in Europe.

And a big part of our focus has been on obviously growing our business but also transforming our franchise.

Since 2017, we really went on this big mission to become the most digital customer-centric company in our industry, but we also knew that we had to de-risk our business and improve the returns.

And that's what we've been focused on, and I'm sure you're going to want to talk about that in a little bit more detail.

But it's really culminated in 2023 being a milestone year for us, delivering really strong operating performers,

but also at the same time, you know,

really transacting on some big strategic moves that really changed our business footprint.

Yeah, in fact, I do want to ask you more about that, but life is still in the company

name.

So is life insurance a core part of your business?

And how is that business?

Yeah, life insurance is a big part of our franchise and yes, that business has been performing

you know really very well.

...