Great. Thank you, operator, and hello, everyone.

Thank you for joining us today to discuss Sagicor's first quarter 2026 results. Our disclosures are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.sagicor.com, which include a press release, financial statements, MD&A, and the supplemental information package containing core earnings, drivers of earnings, and additional disclosures.

A link to our live webcast is also available on our website. This conference call is open to the financial community, investors, the media, and the public, with a reminder that the Q&A period is reserved for financial research analysts.

I will begin by referring you to the cautionary language and disclaimers in our materials and public filings regarding the use of forward-looking statements and the use of non-IFRS financial measures and ratios, which may be mentioned as part of our remarks today. I would also like to remind the audience that the actual results regarding forward-looking information could differ materially, and please note that a detailed discussion of Sagicor's risk factors is provided in our MD&A, which is available on SEDAR+ and on our website.

A discussion of the assumptions underlying our expectations is provided in our filings and earnings releases. Unless otherwise noted, all dollar amounts referenced will be in US dollars, consistent with our reporting practice.

Joining me today is our President and CEO, Andre Mousseau; our Chief Financial Officer, Kathryn Jenkins; and Anthony Chandler, our Chief Controller. We'll begin with prepared remarks by Andre and Kathryn, followed by a Q&A session.

With that, I'll pass the call to our President and CEO, Andre Mousseau.

Thank you, George. Good morning, everybody.

Thank you for joining us to talk about our Q1 financials. I'd also like to acknowledge and thank our shareholders who joined us earlier this week in Barbados for our annual general meeting.

This is a bit of an unusual quarter because while so many of our strategic initiatives are trending in a very positive direction, in Q1 for the first time really in a couple of years, our core earnings were measurably softer than the core run rate of our business. Our core earnings to shareholders of $25 million included $8 million of negative core insurance experience, substantially all of which was due to mortality in our North American segments, which we often observe in our first quarter.

However, unlike last year where this was mitigated by insurance gains elsewhere in our system, this time it brought our core earnings below our best estimate of our run rate. Absent that mortality, we estimate that we would have hit a core ROE of approximately 13%.

We also observed some adverse mark-to-market movements across all of our segments as asset prices broadly declined globally in Q1, and as we're net long assets, that affected more than the revaluation of our liabilities. The majority of these negative marks are fixed income instruments, which continue to perform on a fundamental basis, meaning a dollar of foregone income in this quarter will mean a dollar of more income in later periods.

In addition, we took some charges in the Caribbean as we settle open issues and drive forward on our integration plans as we look to give our new public holding company that will hold all of our Caribbean assets the best start that it can have in 2027. Let's have Kathy give a detailed financial review of Q1, and then we can come back to me.

Kathy?

Thank you, Andre, and good morning, everyone. As Andre mentioned, Sagicor's first quarter 2026 core earnings to shareholders were $25 million.

The company's operating segments generated steady new business production, leading to solid new business CSM of $37 million. Core ROE was 9.9%.

When adjusted for core insurance experience losses, core ROE would have been approximately 13%, consistent with management's expectations. Reported net loss in Q1 was adversely affected by $49 million of market experience losses related to lower asset prices in the US and Canadian fixed income and equity markets.

This was partially offset by the mitigating impact of liability revaluations. Q1 was also affected by certain one-time charges related to our Sagicor Life segment as we prepare to merge our Caribbean subsidiaries.

Now I'll give you some more details on the segment financials. Sagicor Canada's core earnings to shareholders of $23 million for the quarter decreased 9% year-over-year, driven by insurance experience losses from higher than expected mortality.

Net loss to shareholders of $1 million for the quarter was lower than core earnings to shareholders due to unfavorable market-related impacts from higher interest rates and negative equity returns. New business CSM generated $10 million in the quarter, but net CSM decreased 2% quarter-over-quarter in US dollars to $557 million due to a devaluation of the Canadian dollar.

Sagicor Life USA's new business production of $298 million was another solid quarter of production and in line with management expectations. Core earnings to shareholders for the quarter of $5 million decreased year-over-year and were impacted by adverse mortality experience, similar to what we saw in Canada.

Also, like our Canadian segment, net loss to shareholders of $7 million for the quarter was lower than core earnings to shareholders due to adverse market experience from higher interest rates, partially offset by favorable changes in actuarial assumptions. Net CSM increased 5% quarter-over-quarter to $158 million.

Sagicor Jamaica achieved robust insurance sales resulting in 7% net premium growth year-over-year. Sagicor's share of Sagicor Jamaica's core earnings to shareholders of $10 million for the quarter was unchanged from year-over-year due to improved core net investment results from growth in loan and investment portfolios, offset by a modest amount of residual Hurricane Melissa-related experience recognized in the quarter.

Sagicor's share of Sagicor Jamaica's net income to shareholders of $6 million for the quarter was lower than core earnings to shareholders due to timing differences between the payment and recognition of asset tax throughout the year. Net CSM increased 2% to $298 million, driven by strong new business production.

Sagicor Life's core earnings to shareholders of $10 million for the quarter decreased 7% year-over-year as a result of favorable mortality experience in Q1 2025 that did not repeat this quarter. Net loss to shareholders of $11 million for the quarter was lower than core earnings to shareholders due to unfavorable mark-to-market impacts from interest rate movements and non-recurring reinsurance-related costs.

Net CSM was $268 million, an increase of 2% quarter-over-quarter driven by new business CSM of $8 million. At our Head Office, Other Operating Companies and Adjustments segment, core costs to shareholders were $22 million for Q1, consistent with the prior quarter.

Net costs to shareholders were also $22 million for Q1. Even having been through the noticeable asset price devaluations in the quarter, Sagicor remained well-capitalized in Q1.

The Group LICAT ratio was 134%, and our financial leverage ratio was 27.5%. Our book value per share was $7.18 in US dollars, or $10.01 Canadian.

Our deployable capital, or shareholders' equity plus net CSM to shareholders, was $2.1 billion, or $15.47 US per share, or $21.57 Canadian per share. We're also pleased to announce our 26th consecutive quarterly dividend to shareholders since we've been listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and second dividend at the higher level of US 7.5 cents per quarter, or 30 cents annualized.

On that note, I will hand back to Andre to close our prepared remarks.

Thank you, Kathy. I'm excited to talk about our strategic initiatives, but just to put a fine point on the financials piece, just as we had asked our investors not to annualize the $46 million of core net income that we delivered in Q2 last year to a 17% or 18% ROE run rate, we would advise against annualizing this quarter's $25 million figure.

We believe our true ROE run rate today is approximately 13%, and that really there's little long-term information value in the quarterly oscillation around that figure. Similarly, while we did have adverse market mortality in the quarter, our best estimate is that if Q2 closed today, the market volatility would be mildly positive in our favor.

We do continue to make excellent progress on our strategic initiatives to drive our return on equity expansion into 2027 and beyond. You'd have seen in April we were very pleased to announce the hiring of Eric Sandberg as president of our US subsidiary, which was an addition that we've been hit to get for a while.

Eric joined us from National Life where he was the CFO and chief risk officer. National Life is a $60-plus billion US insurer, top-10 annuity provider in the market.

Eric brings to us a lot of that expertise and discipline, and he's going to be laser-focused in helping to drive our US team to even faster growth than we've exhibited over the last five years. With the addition of Eric, our conviction on our US growth opportunities is as high as it's been since we launched our annuity strategy five or so years ago.

In the Caribbean, we're also making excellent progress, in this case towards merging our Caribbean businesses. While we believe that the transaction will close towards the end of the year due to all the approvals involved, we're hard at work now to reengineer our business processes, upgrade our technology stack, focus our vendor relationships, and redesign our entire organizational structure in anticipation of closing.

When completed, we will have radically transformed our businesses across the Caribbean, resulting in a better customer experience, which will solidify our competitive position, an improved employee experience, and significant margin enhancements. We do intend to incur some further costs in 2026 in anticipation of this merger, and all of these will be in service of a higher ROE going forward.

All of this gives us strong conviction on our growth prospects and the path ahead, which enables us to reiterate our 2027 and 2028 targets for 14% and 15% core returns on shareholders' equity respectively. With that, operator, ready to open the lines for any questions.

Hi, good morning. I got a couple questions.

Firstly, on the mortality experience in Canada, you're obviously flagging that. We're, what, a month and a half into Q2.

Have you seen any normalization of that trend or improvements suggesting that what we saw in Q1 is idiosyncratic?

Thanks, Gabe. We don't get our information quite as real-time as that on mortality as they roll in.

There tends to be a lag of several weeks. It would be too early to have a view on that.

As we have looked, particularly at the Canadian business, we've only owned it for two years. In each of the prior two years, we had negative mortality in Q1.

In 2024, it actually came back and was quite positive in Q2, while in 2025, Q2 was negative again. We still think that we're appropriately reserved, but just due to the size of the book, there's going to be some oscillation around that.

What segment would have been in? Like some more small number of high net worth, or more broad-based type cases?

It's pretty broad-based. Our book is large number of names, relatively smaller exposure, and we significantly reinsure it on a names basis.

Got it. Switching over to the US, it sounds like it was also mortality, but I was reading then the release and it sounded more like it was described as seasonal factors.

I'm just wondering what was meant by that, just for clarification.

Seasonal also means mortality in the US sense.

Flu season-type thing?

Yes, indeed, and this is something that is described and hotly debated among the insurance community. A lot of the primaries reinsure a lot of the mortality risk.

If you want to read about this, you can go to the reinsurers' disclosure, RGA for example, does talk about this effect. With the US, this again is the fourth year in a row where we've had negative mortality in Q1.

In two of the three years, we were quite positive in Q2 in the US. In 2023 and 2025, we had very positive emergence, and in 2024, which was backwards of what I just told you for Avari, the negative piece persisted into Q2.

Again, these are big numbers relative to our quarterly income statement. If you look at the overall liability profile, we think we're properly reserved, and we just see this as noise.

Yeah. Is there any way you can maybe address that in a line item sense that you have some patterns there, maybe it goes through the expected insurance earnings and then we have some sort of a seasonal expectation where Q1 is a low watermark typically for the year and it ramps up from there on out, as opposed to going through an experience line?

As a non-actuary, you'd love to do that because if you look at other principles, if you have one-time items, you kind of take it and you amortize it over the period. I think what we've been told is that the pretty black-and-white principle of IFRS 17 is that when you have insurance experience outside of market experience, you take it now.

You don't get to amortize it. If you go back and you look at the supplement and look at our insurance experience, you'll see that three years in a row, Q1 going back to 2023, three years in a row, Q1 was the lowest quarter.

Okay.

Last one, just on expenses. On the last call, I believe you were talking about this year being more of an investment year to ultimately get you to that mid-teens ROE target.

Did we see any of that this quarter? Does that go through your insurance earnings or there's the other opex, which was $112 million, but that's not really a core number, I don't think.

I don't know what the answer is to my own question, which is why I'm asking it.

Right. No, no.

Most of what we were referring to there, we believe is going to run through non-core. Not all of it will.

If you think about investments that we're making, we've just brought on a new executive to run our US business, so that's a definable cost that will start seeing running through core in the US business. If you look at the one-time reinsurance costs, which were non-core, for example, we had a small recapture of a piece of business that we moved to another reinsurer, which is net income accretive going forward, but you incur a bit of a cost upfront.

There was another long-standing issue out there with a reinsurer where we had a disagreement and we've taken a provision on what we believe will be the ultimate settlement, again, in an attempt to have that balance sheet be clean and pristine for 2027. That's what you saw in Q1.

Going forward throughout the year, as I said in my remarks, we're not waiting in particular on the Caribbean to do all of our restructuring work in terms of bringing the companies together. It's an unusual situation because ultimately we control both companies, even if the ownership is disproportionate.

We're able to get going on merger and integration earlier than what would be usual. Usually when you would merge by an entity, you kind of stuff the integration costs into the same quarter as closing.

Whereas, if we continue to move ahead of that, we may take through non-core some additional costs in 2026 that normally you would run through as just part of merging a business.

Okay. All right.

Thanks, and look forward to the next catch-up.

All right. Thank you.

Hey, good morning. Just sticking to the mortality, just wondering how would you characterize the magnitude this quarter?

I'm just trying to get a sense of is this as bad as it can get in terms of a single quarter of negative mortality experience? Then secondly, is there any way to minimize these types of quarters in future periods?

If if you look back at Q1 2024, the the mortality piece was the dispersion was different, but but it was it was quite it was quite similar in North America. It actually had a looking at SLI, it had other other negative experience, which was more around policyholder behavior.

Just looking if you look through at the supplement, 20 Q1 had had negative experience in each of the last three years. In two of those years, it had gone on to be in one of the years it had gone on to be net positive, and the other two, it had been it had been one was negative and one was just slightly negative.

All to say, this quarter seems to be at the at the edge, but not necessarily an outlier in terms of something that in terms of something that you would see, once a year. If you look back again at our supplement, last year in Q2, we had even more of this in terms of positive emergence of of $15 million or $16 million.

This this is volatility that that we do believe is a is a a feature of IFRS 17 as as opposed to being as opposed to being a bug in the system. That that applies equally to to the market volatility piece.

I I I talked about in in the in the prepared remarks that, we don't see much information value around it as long as the investments are are money good. It's just it's just net income moving moving through time, and and we feel very good about our investment portfolio.

With the market volatility, it would be possible to make a choice, and basically by completely taking any sort of market movement out of your assets backing capital, which would mean basically, taking your balance sheet in all your segments in your asset backing capital to cash, would would have, a couple-point reduction in your expected ROE going forward kind of indefinitely. Similarly, right now we we hedge away half of the equity exposure that we have that's kind of an output of our the asset management piece of our Canadian business.

We take a couple points of reduced ROE just on the basis of just on the basis of that hedge. If you hedge the other half, it would be another couple points of ROE.

We think that our North Star here is to generate the best risk-adjusted returns on equity to our shareholders over a long period of time, and we'd rather do so at a mid-teens core ROE and core compounding of value while accepting some of this market volatility than, have something in the in the high single digits that that had no no market volatility.

Thanks for that detail. Then maybe just a quick one on the buybacks.

Very minimal this quarter. Any updated thoughts on the buyback?

I know it's not a priority in terms of how you want to deploy capital, but just with the stock trading below book, any thoughts on maybe getting potentially a bit more aggressive on the buybacks?

Yeah. We have, as you've pointed out, we've lightened up on the repurchases just in the last couple of quarters as we have been trying to let the market develop a little bit more liquidity.

As you can see, the purchases are publicly disclosed, and we've had a little bit of a magic number around the days where the stock was below $9 a share, which hadn't happened much in Q1. While we're conscious of wanting to give the market the opportunity to develop more liquidity, the further we get from book value, the higher the ROE to all the shareholders as we buy it back.

Sitting here in our position, we're in a position to have quite a bit of conviction around our forward guidance. I think you could infer that the further that we get from book value, the more we're going to lean in to buybacks.

Appreciate the color. Thanks.

Hi, thank you. Good morning.

I have a couple questions, but I just wanted to revisit your answer to Mike's question on mortality. In your answer, you didn't discuss a couple of things I was hoping you would touch on.

The first is your risk appetite around adverse mortality and if that adverse mortality, the sensitivity tables you guys provide, if this kind of a quarter changes that. Then secondarily, you didn't touch on reinsurance, which is always available.

I'd presume in this market it's not pricing necessarily very well, given the past that you've just discussed. I wanted if you could just touch on if this kind of quarter kind of makes you sort of reassess your appetite for adverse mortality.

Then as an addendum to that, maybe, obviously, I think your ROE target must at some point and at some level bake into it adverse mortality on a seasonal basis. Sorry for that long-winded question, but I just really wanted to revisit it, Andre, in light of the quarter sort of played out.

Right. It's a good question, and, this is something that we talked about this week at in in the boardroom.

The the short answer is we're managing this basis on an annual and a longer-term basis. This does not change our appetite to assume the level of mortality risk that we have, and that mortality risk has been developed, through the risk appetite over the years, and we do, you can see in the line items, we do carry quite a bit of reinsurance on our book, and on the Canadian book in particular, because, it is a big old book of business that that's been developed with hundreds of thousands of of policies.

Our It's our view that our net mortality experience is not negative in aggregate. It just happens to be negative in Q1s.

If we were managing this business to nail annualized targets on a quarterly basis, you might have if that was your North Star, you might avail yourself of a little bit more reinsurance, and, that would that would cost you some some core earnings. We're not managing this basis this business on a on a quarterly basis.

We're managing this for the best long-term return on equity, and we think we are properly reinsured and adequately reserved.

Thank you for that. Just wanted to follow up on a couple of other questions.

First, what prompted the change to the discount rate for your liabilities? It's been unusual.

We don't hear that too often. I don't think the nature of the liabilities change much often.

If you can just discuss real quick why the discount curve changed for your liabilities. Oh,

the discount curves change every quarter. This is a function of IFRS 17.

If you think about the old world of IFRS 4, you would take your asset price movements, which are observable, and then you would almost have a picture cell through your liabilities to get them to match the asset price movement precisely, which is why you didn't see this market volatility unless you actually had an asset that went bad. When IFRS 17 decoupled the assets from the liabilities, it removed the explicit picture cell, but you're still required to revalue your liabilities using a discount curve every quarter that is informed by the market movements.

Whereas before it was explicit, you would just have your assets backing capital going up and down usually through OCI. Now you have your assets backing capital going up and down largely through the income statement, plus you have some tracking error where your actuaries have gone out in the US and calculated a liability curve.

In Canada, we have one that is prescribed for us every quarter. That revalues your liabilities as well.

As long as you have a net asset position because you have assets backing capital, you would expect your assets to be more volatile than your liabilities.

Maybe I misunderstood. I'm aware that liability curves change every quarter.

I thought it was the way you guys had made it sound in your written work that there was a change in maybe methodology, for example, that would have shifted the curve. That doesn't sound like that's the case, so.

In the US in particular where the curve is not prescribed, there was one small change in methodology this quarter where we added one of our asset classes that had been excluded before. As we had seen illiquid assets becoming a larger proportion of our portfolio, we said, "You know what?

Even though it's harder to calculate these because they're less observable than the public assets, they're getting to a material portion of the US balance sheet, we should take an estimate on that and put it into the calculation." We did do that in Q1.

I see. It's like a reference portfolio and it's got a wider credit spread.

Is that the right interpretation?

Yes, it is.

Great. Then so my last question, Andre, is clearly volatility hit this quarter.

That's fine. Should expect some sort of normalization.

The question for me is still a couple of things sort of still stand out. One is it does sound competitive in the US with crediting rates.

The question is, do you see that also as something that will ease into the future and maybe this year? And/or are you contemplating other changes like new products or so on to sort of improve maybe not just production, but also profitability?

Or am I reading too much into the competitive environment in the US?

The competitive environment is robust in the US, although I would say we had a pocket in time in Q1 where it appeared less so. A lot of our competitors in the annuity space are affiliated with some of the big private capital pools that have been going through their own private capital indigestion with respect to taking liabilities that allow for redemption.

In Q1, there was a pocket of time where rates and spreads went up and the competitive environment did not adjust to that. The spreads that we earned on our Q1 vintage were actually well above our targets.

I'd be cautious. I wouldn't say that's necessarily something that's going to persist.

I think if you look through in Q2 as spreads have come in, even as rates have gone up, that has mitigated itself somewhat. I do think that we want to continue to grow.

We're excited about the opportunity, and that was a big part of bringing in a dedicated leadership. He comes from a place that was writing three times as much annuities in a given year as we were under a broader product set than ours, which has been particularly focused on the MYGA product, the multi-year guaranteed annuity.

We would expect to drive forward with some further product diversification, and our goal is to grow that business faster than we've grown it over the last four or five years.

That's helpful. The pathway to the higher ROE is predominantly normalization of mortality from here plus continued growth in the US?

Roughly how would you characterize that sort of call it waterfall of improvement in ROE? Is it 90% mortality improvement or normalization and just 10% sort of growth in the business, or just give us a rough guideline of how we get back to your typical 13% to plus, I would say, ROE from here.

If you asked us for an estimate of Q2, the best estimate would still be in the zip code of that 13 number. That would, over the course of one quarter, be more or less 100% the reversion to the mean on mortality.

As we see the ROE growth potential into the mid-teens and pushing through that, it is evenly dispersed between the growth of the US balance sheet where we think on a marginal basis that we are adding assets at a high teens structured ROE, and just getting to economies of scale as gross margin grows faster than the SG&A, and so that's a portion of it. We think there's a meaningful uplift in the ROE of the combined Caribbean business going forward.

That is more or less an equal part to it over the next two years or so. We also think that there's the opportunity, haven't talked a lot on this call, but to take some of the thinking that we've done on asset allocation in our US business, adapt that to the Canadian balance sheet, which because of its size is quite tweaky, and we think there's a point or two in aggregate of ROE with that opportunity as well.

All of those things are not Q2 issues. This is why we're focusing on 2027 and 2028 as we tweak up the guidance beyond what our current best estimate is, which is around that 13% number.

Great. That's very helpful.

Thank you, Andre. Have a great long weekend.

All right, thank you. You, too.

Yeah. Hey, guys.

I think you touched on it quite a bit, but in terms of forecasting for future Q1s and the mortality that we've seen in Q1 for the last three years, is it not safe to be assuming that we'll see this kind of every Q1 and potentially the offset in Q2?

I think it would be, Trevor. If I was doing a quarterly forecast model, and I do focus myself internally on the annual numbers, but if I was putting together a forecast model for this company on a quarterly basis, I'd figure out what I wanted to do for the annual ROE, and then I would notch it down by some number for Q1, and I would actually notch each of Q2, Q3, and Q4 up proportionally and say the one thing we can observe with significance is that Q1 is the negative outlier, but then I would notch the other ones up.

Okay. That's fair.

Then in terms of I think you mentioned it in your pre-remarks, but kind of where the market sits today in terms of the mark-to-market, it's probably safe to assume that we see a bounce back in terms of that in Q2 given where things sit today?

It's quite easy to observe where things sit today, the equity piece of the volatility, right? I think the equity volatility was $10-ish million of negative in Q1, and equity levels are higher now than they were at the end of December.

We'd expect that, if it closed today, to reverse and more. Obviously that's subject to the whims of all the geopolitical and all that.

Fixed income's a little tougher because you can observe data points. Broadly, you would say fixed income maybe is flat to negative-ish, although our investments people might tell you something a little bit different based on some of our names.

If you asked for an estimate today, I would say that the positive piece from the equity would overwhelm the flatness of just very slight negativeness of fixed income.

Great. Then just lastly on the lingering impacts from Hurricane Melissa, do you think that's pretty much worked its way through and maybe what kind of I know you mentioned previously probably about a $5 million overall impact net of reinsurance, is that still kind of the right range?

Yeah. As we're taking our running tally, I think the provision and Kathy, if you're on, I think the provision to us this quarter was about $1.5 million, $1 million to $1.5 million, and the total is still less to us than $5 million.

Yes, that's correct. It's around a million, slightly less than $1 million actually for this quarter to Sagicor.

After tax. Right.

Right.

Okay. Still fairly minimal.

All right, appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you for joining the call today, everyone. That concludes today's Q1 2026 results call.

A replay of this call will be available for one month on our website, and a transcript will be posted as soon as available. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to any one of us.

With that, thanks again for your participation and interest today. Have a great day.