Manulife Financial Corporation (MFC) CFO Colin Simpson Hosts NBF Annual Financial Service Conference (Transcript)

Manulife Financial Corporation (NYSE:MFC) NBF Annual Financial Service Conference March 26, 2025 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Colin Simpson – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Gabriel Dechaine – National Bank Financial

Gabriel Dechaine

All right, welcome, everyone. I’d like to introduce to the stage Colin Simpson, Manulife’s Chief Financial Officer here for the second year in a row. Thanks for — I guess the last year wasn’t that bad. So, thanks for joining us today.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Gabriel Dechaine

Let’s start with the big picture ROE question, because every life insurance company in Canada anyway has been hiking their ROE targets. You started the trend, I guess, in Hong Kong last year. The difficulty for people like myself and others is understanding the building blocks to get from where you are and to that 18% plus. And to be simplistic, it’s like — I know you got to grow at 15% plus or whatever in Asia, but what else is there that can put some more tangibility, I guess, to that target?

Colin Simpson

Yes, Gabe. And good to be back. It’s an awesome conference, actually. We really enjoy the interactions with investors at the setting. It really is fantastic. So thanks to you at National Bank.

There’s no real secret source behind our ROE trajectory. If you look at where we’re growing the fastest, last year we grew earnings in our wealth and asset management business by 30%. Well, that’s generating a 27% ROE. We grew earnings in our Asian business by 27%, and that’s generating a 19% ROE. So if we continue to grow our fast — our high ROE businesses faster than our other two businesses which are effectively North American. We’ll naturally get an uplift in our ROE. So we went from a 15.9% ROE to a 16.4% ROE in one year. And if we continue that trajectory, we will