Jackson Financial Inc.JXNNYSE
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Operator: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Jackson Financial Inc. 3Q '25 Earnings Call. My name is Charlie, and I'll be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions] I'll now hand the call over to our host, Liz Werner, Head of Investor Relations, to begin. Liz, please go ahead.
Elizabeth Werner: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Jackson's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements are not guarantees of future performance or events and are based upon management's current expectations. Jackson's filings with the SEC provide details on important factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially. Except as required by law, Jackson is under no obligation to update any forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change. Today's remarks also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. The reconciliation of those measures to the most comparable U.S. GAAP figures is included in our earnings release, financial supplement and earnings presentation, all of which are available on the Investor Relations page of our website at investors.jackson.com. Presenting on today's call are our CEO, Laura Prieskorn; and our CFO, Don Cummings. Joining us in the room are our President of Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Chris Raub; our President of PPM, Craig Smith; and the Head of Asset Liability Management, Brian Walta. At this time, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Laura Prieskorn.
Laura Prieskorn: Thank you, Liz. Good morning, and thank you for joining our third quarter 2025 earnings call. I'll begin by reviewing the quarter's positive results, including strong sales growth and diversification, robust capital generation and consistent capital return to shareholders. Following my remarks, our CFO, Don Cummings, will discuss our financial performance in further detail. Beginning with Slide 3, Jackson's third quarter performance highlights our strong earnings diversification and healthy book of business. Adjusted operating earnings of $433 million increased over 20% from the year ago quarter, led by our Retail Annuities business. Retail Annuities continued to see significant growth and diversification from investment spread income as well as solid fee income from nearly $240 billion of separate account value. Retail annuity sales for the quarter reached their highest level since we became an independent company, exceeding $5 billion for the quarter, driven by growth in RILA and traditional variable annuities. Last quarter, we highlighted the launch of Jackson's Market Link Pro III and Market Link Pro Advisory III, which we refer to as RILA 3.0. The positive reception to RILA 3.0, combined with a robust RILA market resulted in record sales of $2 billion in the quarter, accounting for 38% of overall retail annuity sales. We expect RILA to remain a valuable source of growth, providing sustainable investment spread income and earnings diversification. Our RILA account balance approached $18 billion, a 21% increase from the second quarter and a 74% increase from the prior year. While the RILA market continues to evolve and grow, we believe our RILA 3.0 product offering provides advisers and their clients with a broad range of index and crediting options and a valuable range of protection levels. Jackson's long-held focus on product innovation and consumer choice has differentiated us and is highly valued by our distribution partners and their clients. Our RILA offerings continue to drive growth in the breadth and depth of our distribution. Since launching RILA 3.0 in May, we've added over 500 new advisers. Our new RILA relationship with JPMorgan Chase is one example of accelerating RILA sales through a valued partnership. Traditional variable annuities remain core to our business and accounted for over 1/2 of our third quarter retail annuity sales. Variable annuity sales increased 13% from the second quarter and 8% from a year ago. The growth of variable annuities sold without a lifetime benefit continued and sales increased 24% for the first nine months of 2025. Year-to-date, variable annuity sales without a living benefit accounted for 38% of Jackson's total variable annuity sales. Importantly, average variable annuity balances increased by $10 billion from the second quarter, supporting an increase in third quarter fee income of 8% quarter-over-quarter. Variable annuity net outflows improved from a year ago and were consistent with strong equity market performance. For the third quarter, strong investment performance exceeded the impact of net flows by over $7 billion. The diversity of Jackson's variable annuity fund offerings remains a valued feature and for the first nine months of 2025, separate account performance exceeded 13%. We continue to believe the asset growth potential, investment flexibility and guaranteed income provided by Jackson's traditional variable annuities meet a long-term need for millions of Americans retiring each year. This profitable book of business exhibits Jackson's thoughtful product design and disciplined risk management capabilities. Fixed and fixed index annuity sales reflect our opportunistic approach to pricing and have contributed to our sales diversification. Looking ahead, we expect our recent fixed index annuity launch will contribute to future sales growth. The Jackson Income Assurance Suite has an embedded guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit designed to meet consumer demand for income and protected growth. Jackson's fixed index products further expand our portfolio of annuity solutions, meeting a wide range of retirement planning goals for advisers and their clients. Complementing the growth of our business is the investment expertise and asset growth of our investment manager, PPM America. Last quarter, we highlighted PPM's additional investment capabilities, which support the competitiveness and profitability of our spread-based products in the market. We believe our disciplined approach to the market, combined with incremental yield provided by PPM investment capabilities position us well for future growth and profitability across spread-based annuity solutions. The profitability of our in-force business and capital generation resulted in continued free cash flow and capital distributions. Through the first three quarters of this year, free capital generation exceeded $1 billion and free cash flow was $719 million. Quarterly distributions to our holding company through the first nine months of this year have totaled $815 million. These strong results lead us to believe we are well positioned to maintain capital flexibility at our holding company and sustain future capital return to our common shareholders. We continue to return capital consistently and for the third quarter, returned $210 million, bringing our year-to-date capital return total to $657 million. Given this pace and our outlook for the fourth quarter, we expect to exceed our 2025 capital return target range of $700 million to $800 million. Since becoming an independent company, we have returned nearly $2.5 billion to common shareholders, exceeding our initial market capitalization. We believe that our balanced approach to capital management will continue to support Jackson's financial strength, ongoing investments in long-term growth and future capital return to shareholders. Turning to Slide 4. We began the fourth quarter with great momentum and are approaching the end of 2025 in a very strong position with respect to all our financial targets. I've already addressed capital return and would add that in September, our Board of Directors approved a $1 billion increase to our common share repurchase authorization. Yesterday, we announced our Board also approved a fourth quarter cash dividend of $0.80 per common share. We believe shareholder dividends underscore our outlook for long-term profitability and combined with share buyback, highlight our commitment to shareholder returns. Over the course of 2025, our strong capital generation resulted in a risk-based capital ratio that was consistently well above our targeted minimum level of 425%, and we ended the third quarter at an estimated 579%. In addition, at the end of the quarter, the cash and liquid securities position at our holding company was over $750 million. Our strong capital position, combined with holding company liquidity provides valuable capital flexibility. Jackson's resilient capital, effective hedging strategy and disciplined risk management have enabled us to navigate through periods of market uncertainty. In today's environment, we believe this experience is essential to maintaining long-term leadership in the annuity market. At this time, I'll turn it over to Don.
Don Cummings: Thank you, Laura. I'll begin on Slide 5 with our consolidated financial results for the third quarter. Adjusted operating earnings were $433 million, reflecting strong performance from our spread products, where earnings were supported by the continued expansion of our RILA fixed, fixed index annuities and institutional products. Additionally, strong equity markets in the quarter led to increased variable annuity assets under management, driving stronger fee income. Our high-quality, conservative investment portfolio supporting the spread product business is well positioned with diversification and strong credit quality, a theme throughout the portfolio. The exposure of our portfolio to commercial office loans and below investment-grade securities is less than 2% and 1%, respectively. Given recent headlines on asset quality, it is also important to note that our regional bank exposure is about 1% of our portfolio, and we have no material exposure to First Brands or Tricolor. Furthermore, our CLO portfolio remains highly rated and well diversified. Our spread product sales continue to benefit from enhanced asset sourcing capabilities at PPM America, which enabled recent new money allocation to certain higher-yielding asset classes, including emerging markets, residential home mortgages and investment-grade structured securities. We believe this modest shift in our new money asset allocation, combined with an attractive product lineup will allow Jackson to maintain a consistent and stable presence in the spread product marketplace. Before discussing notable items for the quarter, I want to highlight our strong performance in book value per common share. During the first nine months of the year, we returned $657 million of capital to shareholders, which has contributed to a modest decrease in adjusted book value since year-end. Importantly, our share repurchase activity reduced the diluted share count, driving a 6% increase in adjusted book value per share to $158.44. Additionally, our adjusted operating return on common equity for the first nine months of this year was 14%, up from 13% in the first nine months of last year. Slide 6 outlines the notable items included in adjusted operating earnings. Reported adjusted operating earnings per share was $6.16 for the current quarter. Adjusting for $0.04 of notable items and the difference in tax rates from our 15% guidance, adjusted operating earnings per share was $6.15 for the current quarter, up 27% from $4.86 in the prior year's third quarter. This improvement was primarily due to the growth in spread income noted earlier as well as a reduction in diluted share count from share repurchase activity. The only notable item for the current quarter was a $0.04 negative as limited partnership results came in slightly below our 10% long-term assumption. The prior year's third quarter included a larger $0.28 negative impact from this item. On Slide 7, we highlight the diverse and growing new business profile of our Retail Annuities segment, which achieved 2% growth over last year's strong third quarter and 22% growth from the second quarter of this year. Our RILA product suite delivered record sales of $2.1 billion, up 28% from the prior year's third quarter and 49% compared to the second quarter of this year. Since its launch in 2021, RILA assets under management have grown consistently, reaching a record high of nearly $18 billion at the end of the third quarter. As mentioned earlier, our spread product offerings were further supported by enhanced capabilities at PPM, resulting in $444 million in fixed and fixed index annuity sales for the third quarter. We are confident about the future growth potential of our spread business with strong early momentum from our recently launched fixed indexed annuity suite of products. Our sales mix continues to be capital efficient, which has provided flexibility to allocate additional capital to spread products as we focus on diversifying our business. We are pleased with the progress that we've made in building a well-diversified new business mix since becoming an independent public company, and we continue to explore opportunities to write higher levels of spread business on a capital-efficient basis. Turning to net flows. The sales we generated in RILA and other spread products translated to $2.3 billion of nonvariable annuity net flows in the third quarter. Variable annuity net outflows have been elevated in recent quarters, reflecting the moneyness profile of our book, the aging of policyholders and some larger past sales years coming out of the surrender period. On a year-to-date basis, our surrender rate was flat, even though strong equity market returns led to a higher surrender rate in the third quarter. These strong market returns also resulted in separate account investment performance of nearly $25 billion year-to-date, exceeding variable annuity net outflows by over $11 billion. This has driven variable annuity account value growth year-to-date and supported our strong levels of fee income. Slide 8 highlights pretax adjusted operating earnings across our business segments. In Retail Annuities, we benefited from a favorable environment for spread products and higher levels of fee income. Like an asset management business, retail annuity earnings are driven by the level of assets under management. Growing nonvariable annuity net flows and strong separate account returns have increased our average retail annuity AUM to $263 billion, up from year-end 2024. For the Institutional segment, pretax adjusted operating earnings were up from the third quarter of last year, reflecting higher spread income from our growing book of business. Our higher level of new business activity this year reflects strong demand for spread lending and our opportunistic approach in the institutional marketplace. Our Closed Block segment reported pretax adjusted operating earnings that were up from the third quarter of last year, primarily due to higher spread income. Earnings were down modestly on a sequential basis, reflecting higher levels of mortality. Slide 9 includes a waterfall comparison of our third quarter pretax adjusted operating earnings of $505 million to GAAP pretax income attributable to Jackson Financial of $57 million. The stability in our nonoperating results has significantly improved after moving to a more economic hedging approach in 2024, which has also contributed to our consistent capital generation. During the third quarter, our hedge results included a $14 million net loss on hedging instruments supporting our variable annuity and RILA businesses. This loss was primarily from equity hedges, reflecting S&P returns of about 8% during the quarter and gains on interest rate hedges resulting from lower long-term interest rates. Our RILA business continues to provide a natural offset to the equity risk of our variable annuity guarantees. This enhances our overall hedging efficiency as higher equity markets typically result in losses on our variable annuity hedges while resulting in gains for our RILA hedges. Changes in market risk benefits, or MRB, were driven in part by the same interest rate and equity market movements in the quarter, leading to a $226 million gain that more than offset the loss on our hedges. As a reminder, changes in the MRB relate primarily to our variable annuity business and include the impact of equity index implied volatility, which was a modest benefit during the quarter. Changes in implied volatility do not impact our Brooke Re MRB measurement since its modified GAAP methodology uses a fixed volatility assumption designed to promote balance sheet stability. The reserve and embedded derivative loss of $1.2 billion during the third quarter reflects increases in RILA reserves resulting from higher equity markets, which was largely offset by a gain on our RILA hedges. Net hedging results for variable annuities also reflect the highly diversified nature of our separate accounts, which can lead to differing performance relative to the market in periods where the returns of an index are driven by a subset of companies. This dynamic was at play in the current quarter with the underperformance of our separate accounts relative to certain hedging indices, leading to a modest net hedging loss. It is important to note that this dynamic plays out in both directions. And as a result, these impacts have tended to smooth out over time. In fact, this dynamic produced a modest benefit over the first half of this year. We believe these results underscore the effectiveness of our hedging program in supporting capital stability and proactively managing the economic risks of our business. Slide 10 provides a summary of Jackson's high-quality variable annuity business, which is differentiated in the marketplace, enabling us to outperform peers. In large part, our success can be attributed to our focusing on withdrawal benefits and avoiding more challenging guarantee features. Jackson also has long been a proponent of providing customers with investment freedom without forcing allocations or managed volatility funds. This approach is supported by a rigorous fund manager due diligence and oversight process to ensure a high correlation between separate account assets and the related benchmarks over time. The strong underlying fund performance benefits both our policyholders and Jackson. Prudent pricing and disciplined product design further mitigate risk and enable agile product launches and repricing actions as market conditions evolve. We believe our variable annuity products are highly valued in the marketplace, and we remain a consistent product provider for our distribution partners and their clients. The substantial cash flows generated by our large in-force block, combined with extensive policyholder experience data, enhance our risk management capabilities. By utilizing Brooke Re, we are able to further protect our book from market volatility and hedge more closely to the economics of our business. We believe our hedging performance has been proven through recent periods of financial market stress. Slide 11 provides context on how our high-quality variable annuity book and differentiated structure support our economic hedging approach. Brooke Re creates a structure for us to manage our profitable variable annuity block without the constraint of the cash surrender value floor, allowing us to align our hedging with the underlying economics of the guarantees. Specifically, we are focused on mitigating the impact of lower equity markets and interest rates on these liabilities. The result is well-protected variable annuity guarantees at Brooke Re and stable regulatory capital and distributable earnings at Jackson National Life, which has been evident in our strong free capital generation, free cash flow and capital return over the last seven quarters. This structure is beneficial for our management of the RILA business as well. Under this framework, RILA remains at JNL, separate from the variable annuity guarantees. The RILA business is managed and priced on a stand-alone basis with capital generation included in JNL's results. RILA and variable annuity guarantees have a natural equity offset with RILA exposed to upside equity risk and variable annuity guarantees exposed to downside equity risks. Variable annuity guarantees are reserved and capitalized on a stand-alone basis under our modified GAAP framework at Brooke Re and RILA is reserved and capitalized under the statutory regime at JNL without consideration of a diversification benefit. While there is no reserving or capital benefit of the offsetting equity risks, we are able to realize a hedging efficiency by netting them off through fully settled internal trades, leaving a reduced need for external equity hedging. Importantly, this benefit would continue even if RILA grew to the point of overtaking variable annuities from an equity risk perspective, simply shifting the external equity need from downside protection to upside protection. We believe this structure is a differentiator that highlights our consistent economic approach and the strong underlying performance of our book. We remain confident in the quality of our annuity business and our risk management capabilities. Slide 12 highlights our growing capital generation and free cash flow. Jackson adheres to an earn it, then pay it philosophy for capital return. This philosophy is built upon three pillars: the generation of free capital where we earn it, the creation of free cash flow where we pay it and ultimately, the return of capital to our common shareholders. After-tax statutory capital generation was $579 million in the third quarter. We believe this metric offers helpful insight into the underlying strength of our business and provides the foundation for making capital allocation decisions that balance future growth with the return of capital to shareholders. Free capital generation was $459 million in the quarter, reflecting the estimated change in required capital or CAL, resulting from our strong and diversified new business results during the quarter. Free capital generation totaled $1.1 billion in the first nine months of the year and $1.6 billion on a trailing 12-month basis. This pace is well above our $1 billion-plus expectation for the full year. Free cash flow was strong in the current quarter, once again illustrating the stability of our capital generation. In the third quarter, $250 million were distributed to the holding company. After covering expenses and other cash flow items, the resulting free cash flow at the holding company was $216 million in the quarter. Over the last 12 months, we've distributed nearly $1.1 billion to the holding company and generated free cash flow of nearly $1 billion. Based on Jackson's market capitalization at quarter end, we have produced a free cash flow yield of about 14% for the trailing 12 months. Although there are many factors that impact valuation, we believe this metric is a strong indicator of Jackson's value, and we will continue to pursue share repurchases while investing in the growth of our business. The outcome of our strong free capital generation and growing free cash flow allowed us to return $210 million to common shareholders in the quarter, up 37% from last year's third quarter on a per diluted share basis. On a trailing 12-month basis, we have returned $805 million, and we are on pace to exceed the top end of our full year capital return range. Jackson has now returned nearly $2.5 billion to common shareholders, exceeding our initial market capitalization as an independent public company. These results reinforce Jackson's robust capital generation profile and stable growing cash distributions, delivering enhanced value to our shareholders. Slide 13 summarizes our growing capital and liquidity position. The profitability of our in-force business, driven by fee income from our variable annuity base contract and growing spread-based earnings provided strong capital generation during the quarter. Our capital position and RBC ratio at Jackson National Life continues to be less sensitive to equity market movements with the Brooke Re structure. The main impact of equity market changes is on AUM and future capital generation rather than immediate changes in capital or RBC. This results in the earnings stream at Jackson National Life being like an asset management business. Consistent with our approach of taking smaller periodic distributions, we distributed $250 million to the holding company during the third quarter. After considering the impact of this distribution on our deferred tax assets, Jackson's total adjusted capital, or TAC, increased and ended the quarter at $5.6 billion. Our estimated RBC ratio ended the quarter at 579% and remains well above our minimum target of 425%. We believe Jackson is operating from a position of strength as we head into the end of the year. During the third quarter, Brooke Re continued to operate as expected. While equity was down modestly from the second quarter, Brooke Re's capitalization remains well above our internal risk management target that reflects a variety of detailed scenarios and our regulatory minimum operating capital level. During the quarter, there were no capital contributions to or distributions of capital from Brooke Re. Going forward, we will continue to manage Brooke Re on a self-sustaining basis given the long-term nature of its liabilities. Our holding company cash and highly liquid asset position at the end of the quarter was $751 million, which continues to be above our minimum buffer and provides substantial financial flexibility. This was up from $713 million in the second quarter of this year, reflecting operating company dividends and capital return to shareholders. Our third quarter results demonstrate strong positive momentum, bolstered by a robust balance sheet and rising capital and liquidity levels that firmly position us for continued success. I'll now turn the call back to Laura.
Laura Prieskorn: Thanks, Don. In September, we hit our four-year milestone as an independent company. During this time frame, we've worked hard to capture opportunities to grow profitably while diversifying our sales mix and earnings. Our third quarter results represent another period of excellent operational and financial accomplishments. As the end of the year approaches, we'll take time to reflect on our valued relationships with our distribution partners and their clients and continue our shared mission to help hard-working Americans protect and grow their retirement savings and income. Most importantly, we believe our accomplishments and ability to consistently deliver on our promises are only possible through the dedication and hard work of our associates. We are truly grateful for all they do at Jackson and in the communities we call home. At this time, I'll turn it over to the operator for your questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Ryan Krueger of KBW.
Ryan Krueger: My first question is on the actual to expected policyholder behavior. It has improved year-over-year, but it got more -- I guess, it increased in the third quarter from the recent run rate. Can you give some perspective on what's causing this? I assume it's still just higher lapses. And to what extent you may consider changing your dynamic lapse assumption given that this has been occurring for a few years consistently now?
Laura Prieskorn: Ryan, thanks for the question. I'll turn it to Don to respond.
Don Cummings: Ryan, yes. So just to give you a little bit of context on policyholder behavior and kind of the level of net outflows that we've been seeing on our variable annuity book. First of all, I think it's important to remember that our surrender rate is sort of an all-in surrender rate as we've talked about on prior calls. So if you decompose that 12% that we've seen on a year-to-date basis, it breaks down like about 7% of that is full surrenders. And then there's 4%, which are withdrawals, and that's just simply customers using the benefit that they purchase those products for and being able to generate income and retirement. And then the remaining 1% is related to death benefits. And I would highlight that just for the quarter, we did see a bit more a bit of an uptick in the surrender rate, primarily driven by the fact that equity markets were up, and that does tend to influence surrender activity because of the moneyness of the contracts. Just overall, the VA performance that we saw in the quarter, which was also driven by the higher equity markets was about $25 billion, and that well offset the level of net outflows that we're seeing. So in terms of how we think about that from our assumption setting process, first of all, we do take a very comprehensive look at our assumptions every year. We complete that work in the fourth quarter. And we're setting assumptions with the long-term nature of our liabilities in mind. So we do look at our recent experience, but we wouldn't take one or two quarters of experience and use that -- simply use that to set our long-term assumption, we would look at our experience over time. Having said that, we'll certainly look at the experience we've been seeing over the last couple of years as we update our assumptions in the fourth quarter. And we'll publish those results along with our overall fourth quarter results as well as our financial targets for 2026, and we look forward to being able to discuss that in February.
Ryan Krueger: One follow-up on that. I've heard some suggest that there has been some targeted efforts by distributors to roll older variable annuity contracts into other products when they've been out of the money and that may be contributing to the higher lapse rates beyond just the pure markets, but also may eventually dissipate once they kind of contacted all of their clients. Is that something -- do you agree with that? Is that something that you've seen at all impact the lapse rate?
Don Cummings: I would say, Ryan, it's primarily more driven by the market environment than specific activities that might take place.
Operator: Our next question comes from Suneet Kamath of Jefferies.
Suneet Kamath: Just wanted to ask a couple on capital. So first on the RBC target of $425 million. You've been traveling well north of that for a while. My math suggests that if you were to bring that to $425 million, it would be maybe $1.5 billion of excess could be released. I guess if $425 million is really the target, what needs to happen in order to bring your RBC back down to that level?
Don Cummings: Yes. Thanks for that question, Suneet. So yes, you're right. At the 425% target, we do have a substantial amount of excess capital at JNL. As we've talked about in the past, we expect that will come down over time rather than some sort of onetime outsized upstreaming of capital to the holding company. We believe that we are in a unique position to continue our efforts to diversify our book of business through focusing on more spread product sales, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks. And that obviously will assume a bit more capital than what we've historically been writing over the years, which is variable annuity business. And we've seen some of that over the course of this year. So we believe that we can both continue to grow our business through diversifying into more spread-type products as well as continuing to return significant levels of capital, but you'll see that ratio come down over time as opposed to one sizable transaction.
Suneet Kamath: Okay. And then I guess my second one is on the Closed Block segment that you have. I mean it doesn't get a lot of attention. We never get asked about it. I'm just curious what's the strategic value of having that? I know it's small, but also curious about how much capital is supporting those liabilities that are in that segment.
Don Cummings: Yes, good question. We obviously look at the Closed Block very frequently, and we're comfortable with the liabilities that are there. As you mentioned, it's not a huge portion of our balance sheet. However, we believe it does provide some balance to our overall general account structure and because there are some life liabilities in there, along with some annuities and other blocks of business that came about through some acquisitions that Jackson completed a number of years ago. So we do monitor the performance of that block closely. And to the extent we find opportunities to better leverage our capital, we would be prepared to take advantage of those.
Suneet Kamath: And how much capital is in that segment? Is it an amount?
Don Cummings: We don't break out the allocation of -- yes. We don't break out, Suneet, the allocation of our capital across the segments, but the liabilities are roughly about $20 billion.
Operator: Our next question comes from Tom Gallagher of Evercore.
Thomas Gallagher: Just a follow-up question on hedging. I heard the comment about how your RILA naturally hedges part of your VA guarantees, which lowers your need to buy the quantity of derivatives and hedges you need to buy. You have a peer out there, Brighthouse, that used to make the similar point. They eventually hit a limit and the company has struggled since they hit the limit. Now I'm sure there are differences between your book and their book. Your guarantees look far less risky quite candidly from my perspective. So that might be one of the reasons. But curious why you won't hit a limit and if you've spent any time thinking about what you're doing versus what Brighthouse is doing, just so you can at least clear up any confusion about why your program is fine.
Don Cummings: Yes. Tom, thanks for that question. Well, we have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, and we're very comfortable with the structure that we have in place. The new slide that we shared in the materials this quarter is intended to kind of help explain why we're different. And it really comes down to the fact that we have -- the VA guarantees are housed within Brooke. The RILA business is at J&L, and we're able to get this efficiency from a hedging perspective as we sort of offset the internal trades and then go out to the -- our derivative counterparties to purchase external hedges. The reason we're very comfortable that we won't have the issue that others have run into is because we don't have the guarantees and the RILA business being reserved for and hedged under a statutory framework, which I think was primarily the problem that you're referring to, which is the VM-21 construct. So we're very comfortable that even if the equity risk on RILA were to surpass the equity risk that we have on the VAs, then all that does is just shift the nature of our external hedging. It doesn't mean that we would have to suddenly put up some additional level of reserves.
Thomas Gallagher: Got you. That's super helpful and clear. Yes, that is. The -- just from a follow-up perspective, if there was any impact to the actuarial review to Ryan's question, would that likely show up in JNL or Brooke Re in terms of the -- any changes that we would see there?
Don Cummings: Yes. Well, as I mentioned, we're still working through our actuarial assumption review. But my expectation would be that we would see very minimal impacts at JNL. Any impact related to our VA business would be sort of below the line and a component of our MRB.
Operator: Our final question of today comes from Alex Scott of Barclays.
Taylor Scott: I just had a follow-up on the same kind of questioning that you just had from Tom and Ryan. So on the potential for an impact in Brooke Re, if there is an impact, do I take the comments that you made earlier in your script around the self-sustaining nature of the capital in Brooke Re to mean that based on what you're seeing at least as of today, regardless of how that actuarial review pans out, you don't feel like there's a risk that you would have to fund any capital into there. Is that a correct way of reading those comments earlier?
Don Cummings: Alex, yes, so my comments earlier were more long-term focus in that we do believe with -- given the nature of the guarantees in Brooke Re that over the long term that Brooke Re will actually generate capital and be self-sustaining. I don't want to get ahead of our -- the completion of our actuarial review work at this point. We'll certainly look at it. And as I said, when we report fourth quarter earnings and our 2026 financial targets, including our capital return targets for next year, we'll update you on the status of our -- or the impact of our actuarial review.
Taylor Scott: Understood. Okay. And then I also wanted to ask about potential reinsurance opportunities out there. I mean, I think on one hand, we're questioning you all about actuarial studies and so forth. I know on the other hand, you guys have expressed a lot of confidence about your ability to manage VAs. I mean are there opportunities out there that you're still considering and looking at around reinsurance of other blocks of business to take advantage of what you've built there?
Don Cummings: Yes. So we talked a little bit about this on last quarter's call, Alex. And we certainly believe that we have very good expertise in the VA space and with risk management and hedging. And so to the extent that there were high-quality variable annuity blocks that were available that we believe would be complementary to what we already have at Brooke Re, that would be something that we would consider. We do believe that some of the recent VA transactions that you've seen indicate there are some buyers that see value in high-quality VA blocks, and we would look to participate in that. That probably wouldn't be the highest priority on our list. I think if we were looking at some sort of transaction, we might want to look at opportunities to further accelerate all of the work that we've done since becoming an independent public company to diversify our book. And that could include reinsurance of potentially some life business or something along that line that would be complementary to the businesses that we already have. But we're certainly aware of what's going on in the marketplace and are monitoring those kinds of things closely.
Laura Prieskorn: I would just add that any growth opportunities that we were to explore or evaluate would be done in comparison to the value that we received from buying back our own shares.
Operator: We have no further questions registered on today's call. So I'll hand back over to Laura Prieskorn for any closing remarks.
Laura Prieskorn: Thank you all for your continued interest in Jackson. As you've heard this morning, our latest results represent another period of excellent operational accomplishments. We look forward to continuing the discussions and sharing our continued progress on our 2025 targets after the end of the fourth quarter. Thank you, and take care.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you so much for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.