Voya Financial to Stop Selling Individual Life Insurance

Voya Financial has announced financial results for the third quarter of 2018.

“During the third quarter, we continued to make strong progress on our 2018 priorities. Our commitment to achieving our growth plans this year was demonstrated in the third quarter by positive net flows in both Retirement and Investment Management and an increase in annualized in-force premiums in Employee Benefits. We also generated strong bottom-line results. Excluding the negative impact of DAC/VOBA and other intangibles unlocking and the benefit of prepayment fees and alternative investment income above our long-term expectations, normalized third-quarter 2018 adjusted operating earnings were $1.34 per diluted share, after-tax. This demonstrates our commitment to improving our adjusted operating earnings per share to reach $1.30 to $1.40 per share by the end of the second quarter of 2019.

“In addition to organic growth, we continued to execute on our capital initiatives as we repurchased $250 million of common stock in the third quarter. We also received an additional share repurchase authorization of $500 million from the board of directors, which will enable us to continue to deliver further shareholder value through share repurchases. Finally, we continued to focus on achieving cost savings and began to take actions to lower our debt-to-capital ratio by the end of this year.

“We are looking forward to our upcoming Investor Day on Nov. 13, when we’ll share our long-term growth plans and opportunities to build upon the profitable growth we’ve achieved over the past several years, generate further shareholder value, expand our relationships with our customers, and achieve our vision to be America’s Retirement Company.

– Rodney O. Martin, Jr., chairman and CEO, Voya Financial.

Voya also announced that the company has concluded the strategic review of its Individual Life business. The company will cease all new sales of individual life insurance on Dec. 31, 2018 and retain the in-force block of policies .

“Following the sale of substantially all of our individual annuities businesses earlier this year, we conducted a thorough review of our Individual Life business to determine the best path forward. We carefully considered our broader, go-forward strategy of largely focusing on the workplace and institutional clients, analyzed the options available to us, and concluded that ceasing new sales aligns with our plans to focus on our higher-growth, higher-return, capital-light businesses: Retirement, Investment Management and Employee Benefits .

“Further, continuing to own the in-force block will benefit shareholders in that it will provide earnings and capital diversification and generate higher free cash flows. Specifically, we expect our Individual Life business to increase free cash flow conversion to 70% to 80% and generate meaningful free cash flow of at least $1 billion over the next five to six years.

“Voya will continue to be good stewards of shareholder capital. As we have over the past several years, we will continue to explore and pursue opportunities to maximize the value of our in-force life insurance business. – Martin.