Principal Financial Group, Inc. (PFG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome back to the Bank of America Financial Services Conference. If you're joining us, you're in the Principal Financial slot of the experience. We're really excited to have Amy Friedrich, who is the Head of U.S. Insurance at Principal. And we also have Humphrey Lee, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development and whatnot. And let me do a little background information. So Amy has been with Principal since 2000. It's a real life or you are going on…

That doesn't even make me nearly the longest life or...

Formally, you ran the Group Benefits business beginning in '08, I believe, including oversight of individual disability, you're active in the United Way. And Humphrey, who is a formidable competitor for many years Dowling & Partners, and he chose to hang up the gloves and have one by recommended stock on this platform, and we're really pleased to have both Amy and Humphrey here. And so thank you. And if there's any questions at any point in the -- my Q&A, feel free to raise your hand, I don't stand in a ceremony. But unless there's that -- let's get started.

You bet. Let's go.

So let's talk about Group Benefits a little bit. Where is the sweet spot for Principal…

I don't know what progress...

This is a sweet spot for Principal in terms of the customer size. But where can you go and where the opportunities stretching outside of your core competency?

Sure. So when I think of the Group Benefits business, we basically would say, our core marketing group benefits is any employer that has less than 200 employees. So we do a pretty reasonable cut at 200 employees. That doesn't mean we don't have companies in our portfolio that are in more of that mid-market, but you won't find a lot of jumbo business in our portfolio. Our average size of an employer that we provide benefits and services to, though, is about 40 lives. So they have about 40 people that they employ. And that is definitely a sweet spot. We feel very comfortable that our capabilities can move up into 100, 150, 200 life. So that's kind of mid-market for us in our terminology.

And your reliance on brokers and consultants in order distributing that, can you talk a little bit about how the distribution relationship goes with them?

Sure. Sure. So we -- the smaller you are in terms of an employer, the more you statistically just rely on an employer -- on a broker adviser to give you advice. So they're usually getting a process where that broker adviser has a really heavy role not just in recommending who they use, but actually staying attached on an ongoing basis on -- they might even be helping with the amendment or ongoing record keeping. That broker adviser stays very close to that small business. So we have wholesalers pointed out towards that marketplace who work with, I would say, 10 years ago, we had a lot of mom-and-pop shops, so all around the United States. We don't really have a lot of geographic concentration. Some people think because we're an Iowa-based company, we'd have a lot of Midwest concentration. We do a lot of nice business on the East Coast, a lot on the West Coast, a lot in Texas, a lot in Florida. We really do have a national footprint. But we used to use probably not the national names but more of the regional or mom-and-pop. A lot of those mom-and-pop shops have turned into a relationship with other consolidated groups now. So you think of more a hub, OneDigital. There's been some acquisition happening in that space. Those people that have stayed focused on that small and mid-market that have done more consolidating, we have really strong relationships with nearly all of those distributors.

And then so the relation with the distributors, to what extent do the end customer -- not even the employees, but the employers themselves, do they associate their relationship with Principal itself or the distribution such that you become embedded in how they do their business?

Yes. It's a fair question. We -- they think of the benefits kind of broker as kind of the first stop. Now what I would say is, we have a lot of really high utilization products. So when we look at those high utilization products, those are going to be like dental, vision, short-term disability and the dental is going to come with like a dental card. So it will have a dental card with it that they'll understand that Principal is that key relationship point. What I think is different for us, though, is we don't just necessarily sit on a spreadsheet and run a rate. We actually have ongoing communication. So for example, one of our key distributors just held their national sales conference. I was on stage with them, talking to the CEO because they look at us as a technology partner. They look at us as, if we're going to do better APIs and build that together with each other, let's both get some economic value out of that. So there's a real partnership that happens with those distributors, and then they translate that to saying Principal is going to have your claim covered. Principal is going to have your additional coverages and I'm going to recommend those additional coverages. So we get really nice connectivity with the distributors that passes on to the business owner.

Earlier today, we had MetLife sitting in the same chair as you're sitting in right now. Obviously, a formidable competitor in the jumbo market with clients 5,000 lives and higher. Can you talk a little bit about the difference in customer care in the 100 to 200 type employer group versus -- we don't see MetLife coming into your customer base and you're not going there. I mean, is it -- there's a lot of small employers all over the country could be really right. What are you doing differently than it takes a different skill set to appeal to the sort of that customer base?

Yes. So MetLife, by the way, great industry partner, when we've got an industry issue, MetLife is always there, advocating for things and that employee benefits from. So I have a ton of respect for what MetLife does. Factually, the way you do underwriting, the way you do relationship management, the way you even do product design and reporting is nearly completely different for a jumbo case versus a case that has 50 people who work for them. Those employers who have 50 people, they don't have an HR department. Almost anything that Met has built, built a pipe too, build a relationship management function too, even build some of the underwriting based on the prior experience, those things all depend on an HR department. So what we would say is, we've taken that space where there's not an HR department or if there is an HR department, they certainly haven't grown to the point where they have a benefits expert and an enterprise HR system that they put in place. So when we're connecting our infrastructure, our technology, our ongoing administration, we're prioritizing things like that business owner can't possibly deal with 6 bills for 6 different coverages. So it's basic things like one bill. It's basic things like we've got, if the broker is using a technology and there's a broker intermediated technology, we're connected via APIs to those broker intermediated technologies. So that if they got an address change, they put it in, they don't have to put it in with us, with this one, with someone else, they put it in one-time, and we're doing real-time data exchange. So we've built our relationship with the broker adviser and the end business owner without an HR department. It also means that there's some natural moats then. So what you built to service someone who has 10,000 employees is not at all what you would build for someone who has 10 or 15 or 20 employees. And so we have some natural spaces in the marketplace that I think are serving us well. The last point I would mention is, if you're a MetLife when you're winning and losing in that jumbo space, you're doing it all through takeover. It is a fully penetrated marketplace. Everyone has those benefits. When we're winning or losing in the small case market, we're doing it often with actual new market production. So only about 50% of the employers in that space currently offer a benefit, that is the benefits that we offer. So when you truly have the ability to both capture from competitors, add additional coverages because they don't have it yet or add a coverage for the very first time, that gives us levers that are probably a little bit different than you see in the large market.

Now I think about employers 200 under, if I want to compare life, disability, dental, how well penetrated are these basic coverages? Like in my mind, and I feel like -- life and disability seems like the core, obviously, Principal is a great dental business and like -- but it seems like a later-stage offering for an employer, they offer. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe -- penetration rate.

I think, you're wrong. Should I tell you you're wrong?

Yes, please do. Please do.

Okay. So the -- I'm going to call them the consumable coverages. If you're putting -- a lot of times small businesses are putting that in place because they feel sort of paternalistically they want to take care of their employees. So if they're doing that, a lot of times, they do lead with a life and a disability benefit. But if they're doing it in response to their employees are asking for it, employees are often asking for dental and vision. So dental, vision, accident, critical illness, employees tend to hear about those, and they tend to be really highly consumable, like the minute you have the benefit, you have an ability to use it. So we would actually -- again, we don't really have a preference on how the relationship starts. We have a preference on where it ends up with us, but we don't really have a preference on where it starts. If it's employee-driven requests, dental or vision is the first one placed. If it is employer taking care of their employees, often life and disability are the first one place.

And where do you think the market is in terms of penetration among mid- to small employers about with each of these products, they are offering to you?

Dental is probably still the most highly penetrated, because again, it's a product that gets asked for. Like when you go from employer to employer, they'll ask, do I have dental coverage? But when you look at life like group life and group disability, whether it's short-term disability or long-term disability, if you look at employers that have fewer than like 100 employees, you're probably still only looking at 40% of them have that coverage available. So there's still a lot of green space in terms of open market, but you do have to figure out how you get your distribution there, how you use your technology to make it efficient and how you get the business owners to understand the value it will provide. Now the last 2 years have been -- when there's a war for talent, it's a great environment to make the argument for group benefits. So we're finding as much fertile ground in that group benefits argument as we've had in a decade.

So I mean -- and you can offspring. When you acquired First Dental in 2012, remember that Principal going nationwide in some ways. You added California to the repertory. And so if I look over that decade long period, and says, you are in -- correct me, dental vision growing at a 7.2% CAGR, group disability growing at 7.9% CAGR, group life growing at a 4.5%. If I'm trying to figure out how much of that is market penetration? How much of that is rate? And maybe the life lags because the interest rate environment has been so low, so the value of those products has accrued less. Why is -- I guess, surprisingly disability the fastest growing of these products?

Yes. So part of that is a little bit a function of our supplement. So our supplement has a group disability line in it, which is where you're appropriately taking your growth rate. Actually, accident and critical illness, we've introduced those 2 products in the last 3 to 4 years. Those flow up through our disability line. So when you take accident and critical illness and by the way, we're introducing hospital indemnity as well, when you take those -- I'm going to call them worksite products. When you take those worksite products back out of the group disability line, it's actually closer to kind of that dental growth rate. So I would say, dental and vision have been -- dental vision and the disability have been growing at kind of similar rate, group life probably has been growing a little bit more, I'm going to call it, it through amendments or amended coverage. So here's a great example. When you're in the small market, a lot of small businesses will start with a flat benefit, maybe even just 10,000. So that means you have a 10,000 life -- $10,000 coverage benefit. You're counted as being covered at that point. So you've got a coverage in place. When you're growing that, moving up to a flat benefit of 25 or a flat benefit of 50, that counts towards your new sales a little more incrementally in terms of your premium growth, but it's really nice premium growth on some of the existing cases that we already have. So group life tends to get some base coverage in place and then do additional things. You tend to -- when you put dental in, you put dental in. When you put vision in, you put vision in and you don't necessarily make planned design changes on top of that.

So changing gears a little bit. I'm an over-insured person. I got so much whole life insurance, like, I don't know, probably made a mistake somewhere, but…

You have whole life insurance, okay. We'll talk about that later.

And so pay is consistent, I know what's happening. I know what's growing. I'm worth more dead than alive. It's perfect for my kids. We love it. And naturally over 10% of population is an easy target. And so one day, I called the insurance and I said, price me out an individual disability policy. I have some individual disability with work, it's not a lot, but I don't know if I have the job and maybe I want to get something more permanent. And when I saw the price as someone who was absolutely to pay the…

You said, yes, I'm buying it to them.

There's no way in hell, everybody dies and not everybody gets to say, well, I can't believe this product cost that's much money. Has the industry done a bad job educating people? I think I'm an easy sell, [indiscernible] you could have gotten to buy it and I don't buy it at all. What is the disconnect here between the value provided by disability insurance and the fact that I can't see it?

That's an interesting question. So let me take you through just sort of the -- maybe some of the incident stats and place it in the framework of working population because a lot of -- okay, obviously, individual life policies. If you want to keep them in force, if they have the account value, again, it depends on how you constructed that policy. But there's many people who have needed that individual life coverage through their life while they've had a family at home, while they've had a mortgage, while they've had things that they needed to make sure that their beneficiaries or heirs could pay off. If you're not using it for kind of complex estate planning or tax planning purposes, there are a lot of people buy the end of their life, who've made the decision. Again, they know what they're doing. They've appropriately made that where they don't have life insurance by the time they could actually get the benefit. Disability is one of those that the likely -- it only applies when you have an income essentially. So it's limited to when you have an income. And it is limited to when you have an income and it's limited then to kind of your working age population. So the incident amount of disability at working age population versus the incidents amount for like a group life policy, it's actually higher for individual disability. So it is a -- you can use that everyone is going to die, not everyone's going to come disabled. It's actually more likely that you're going -- in your working age population that you're going to have an accident and need time away from work where your income is protected as opposed to have a death event during your working years. So the incident rates are actually different and the way Principal uses that is that Principal has done mostly for our individual disability. We actually aren't in the -- no offense, but you're not our core market. So we would not be thinking that retail sale is really where we use our individual disability product. We use it as more of a business product. So if we've worked with an architectural firm and there's maybe 4 of the chief -- the primary architects of the firm, and they've got a group disability coverage that's doing a nice protection coverage for the staff or other workers, but it doesn't give them the protection coverage, we would have like a multi-life policy for individual disability that would place on top of that or we'd have actual business owner products that would maybe take care of the overhead expense or those types of business owner disability events. So our coverage in general tends to be a little different than the industry rather than just that sheer retail day-to-day fighting to argue someone should get disability insurance. I assume it's -- like, of course, you're trying to make profit of it, but fairly priced. It doesn't seem fairly priced. I don't know. I will die. I mean I may become disabled, but the portable insurance is important from life insurance I guess, portable disability didn't seem, likely, I don't know, we'll see, hopefully, it will become disabled.

I'll keep tracking your incidents rate.

I'll let you know.

Okay. All right. So let's talk about a little more on benefits as my own, I was just price shopping there, by the way. So in terms of thinking about…

By the way, you should get disability insurance if anyone's depending on your income. But we can talk about that later as well.

All right. I have some just important for disability. Great. So among the growth opportunity within both the employer and at the employee level, how many employers are only at one product with principal and can be upsold to 2 or 3? And how many employers have multiple products that the employee has only bought one principal product such that you have a captive audience for growth that just needs to be tweaked a little bit to energize that?

Yes. So when we deconstruct our block, most of the employers that we're working with are offering multiple benefits. So we sit between 2.7 and 3 point coverages, whether you're talking about an in-force case or a new sale case. So they have 2 or 3 coverages. The most common profile that we have is an employer paid, 100% employer paid coverage, complemented by one voluntary coverage. So that's the most common kind of profile we have. So one or more of the coverage is -- if they have 3, as an example, in terms of our in-force block, the most common profile is probably 2 of them are employer paid and one of them is made available on a voluntary basis. We don't -- at any given point, we might have 20% of our block sitting with one coverage at any kind of -- at any given point. What we tend to find though is by year 3, by year 4, by year 5, that one has changed to 2. That 2 has changed to 3. We specifically have an account management force and an in-force management process that we look to increase future sales.

And again, we want to do it appropriately with the [indiscernible] but if they don't have some of those base benefits, we're going to be talking to them about it at the next renewal and the next renewal. And by the way, we're usually back every year talking to them because the vast majority of our block is 1-year term -- 1-year renewable. We don't tend to do a lot of multi-year rate guarantees.

And generally speaking, so if I go for that renewal season. And in year x, it looks like this, and there's a bunch of different brands and probably 1 product for each brand and 1 brand for each product. And it could be multiple principal products, but it's not. In the next year, is it -- obviously, they're happy with your service? Is it price? Like how do you displace a carrier who is selling the exact same product you are? What causes that switch to get them incrementally, say we have -- Principal is providing multiple products to us, instead of going to a different vendor for each? Number one, keep in mind, going back to sort of core premise, most of our smaller employers don't have an HR department. So the likelihood of them having made a decision to have 1 coverage over here and 1 coverage over here and 1 coverage over here is not quite as likely as mid…

Maybe the distributor made that decision?

Right. So they tend to try to bundle right from the beginning, if that's appropriate for that business owner. But when we win on our products, you'd like to say the pricing and the product design were so much more compelling. There's a lot of commonality in the pricing and the product design, where we have found our sweet spot tends to be what we can do on the administrative capabilities. So I know it sounds basic, but 1 bill -- there's a ton of people probably in your coverage universe for employee benefits that don't deliver 1 bill. So for the last, I think, 8 years, 7 years, any new product or any product enhancements that we have done, we have made it. So that before we release it out in the marketplace, we have to be able to deliver it on that same bill. So whether it's a voluntary coverage being paid for by the employee or an employer paid coverage, we want it producing on 1 bill. So that means you actually have to have a hierarchy. Like you have to know the employer has employees and you can do hierarchy-based billing. That type of capability when it's not well understood, it gets delivered to the office manager or the business owner, their first call is either to us or to the broker adviser. So what the broker adviser knows is, if we can increase the ease of doing business, the likelihood they'll recommend us again on fairly like pricing and product is really high. That's how we win a lot of the times.

This might be opportunity to bring Humphrey a little bit to…

Yes, that would be a great. He is sort of eye candy of your business line.

Yes, of course, of course. So I'd say -- so it's the same question told 2 different ways. How do the insurance businesses at Principal, bring the whole firm to bear on what they can offer customers or vice versa, how does the rest of the firm bring the insurance offerings of the firm to be a one facing type organization that helps an integrated approach into satisfying client needs?

The thing when you look back at the strategic review that we did, one thing that we're focusing on is how we go-to-market, go to the employer, go to the business owners with an integrated model and then focusing on ease of doing business. Oftentimes, from USI's perspective, the specialty benefit products helped solve a protection problem for an employer, for the employees. At the same time, from the retirement solution perspective, again, helping them solve their business needs. Then on the -- from an insurance -- the life insurance side, that also funnel through into the general account of an asset management perspective, the non-qualified products that we offer through the life insurance solutions factor into the retirement piece because, again, we are a total retirement solution provider, so whether that your 401(k) defined benefit ease up, pension risk transfer, non-qualify. We provide these solutions for them to manage the business owners' needs. So I think that's how we come to market with that kind of integrated model to solve their problems.

What we're also seeing is that probably 10 years ago, there weren't a lot of distributors that again, I told you, it was kind of a lot of mom-and-pop, a lot of smaller kind of regional or local market players as consolidation has increased, what we're finding is more of those distributor relationships have a really healthy thriving, I'm going to call it like sort of retirement practice. They also have a healthy group benefits or employee benefits practice. Those places then where we can start to do things like build common experiences, build common technology. Those have been good points that have made a difference in terms of Principal. I think the piece that Humphrey mentioned there too is -- there's not -- I think there's a thought that our life insurance business just kind of sits out there with that business focus. 50% of it, I'm responsible for Principal for the non-qualified business. So that non-qualified deferred comp business is mine to own and manage to help the retirement business grow. And so it's one of the pillars of the retirement business. And when we put any new non-qualified deferred comp plan in place, about half the time, it's funded by a life insurance product. So that life insurance interconnectivity with that business owner that we've done consulting with is really high, even though it's coming from not a group product, but an individual product.

So we got like -- let's say, our retirement business and is the -- bringing the whole firm approach, is that going to the distributor -- or I mean, of course, it may be involves or the controller at some company with 82 employees that we're bringing the whole firm to that person. It might be one to some of both, but are the same people who are distributing group benefits also helping distribute a retirement plan for the customer.

The licensing is completely different. So the same person carrying dual licensing doesn't happen as much as the firm has relationships in distribution, relationships in retirement and relationships in group benefits. So it's more that it gets pulled together at that firm level. And I would say what we probably work with as much as the broker and intermediary is we work with directly with the business owners. So when we're doing things talking with the business owner and often, it's the broker consultant, who trust us enough to say, we're just going to let Principal come in and do some consulting with you. So we're going to do things like an informal business valuation. We're going to help them understand what their business is worth. We're going to look at the structure of their company. Is it a family-held company? Is an S-Corp? What kind of structure -- what kind of tax implications are you wanting to look at? If you don't have a transfer of business succession plan in your family, no one from your family wants to do that, maybe you could look at an ESOP, which again is going to be back to the retirement side of the house, maybe you can look at employee stock option purchase plan so that you can transfer some of that ownership of the company. That's the type of consulting that an intermediary has often given us a door to move in. And when we do that type of consulting, year 3, year 4, year 5, they tend to be repeat purchasers from Principal, and we like that. When we made the strategic decision to move away from the retail life, sales, just the pure retail life insurance sales. One of the reasons we made that decision was because when we looked at year 3, 4, 5, 6, those relationships translating that retail life insurance sale only translated to another relationship with Principal about 12% of the time. If it started with a business sale, it translated at about 50% conversion. So we like our go-forward business strategy in terms of the interconnectivity.

Let's talk a little bit about underwriting. How is -- has COVID made any changes? I mean, there's -- so there's 2 different schools of thoughts. So one is that -- the -- I think the -- I was talking to the globe may sort of correct me, but I don't have the exactly wrong. Spanish flu of 1918 was replaced by 1917, just like COVID-19, just like '20 and 1 year off -- once every 100 years, no, no, no, there were SARS or something happened in 1956, I know there was SARS. But we had a multi-million dollar depth endemic once in 100 years, but maybe some people thought that we were surprised. We had not had a pandemic -- there's a lot of sociology out there say, it's like a once every 30-year type thing. But God, I hope it's not once every 30 years. But…

I don't want to do this again.

I don't want to do this?

Yes, I don't want to do this again.

But on the one hand sort of, to what extent is the experience of semi irregularly occurring pandemic in the pricing? Or is there a different price now on the other hand, there is the argument that, well, it affected people with comorbidity. And the remaining populations probably on average a little bit healthier than the pre-COVID population, you have long -- I mean how has -- have we made changes to underwriting? Should we be making changes to underwriting?

Yes. So boy, you could -- our underwriters and actuaries could like talk about this like get them in a room and it's 6 days later and they haven't agreed on anything. So what I would say is, we know that our pandemic, we did stress testing and scenario testing exercises. And we always had a pandemic scenario in that. I would say, the usefulness of that pandemic scenario in this realized scenario was limited. So let's just be honest that our planning on that was fairly limited. Here are some things I'm seeing, and they make a difference in how we think about risk, how we think about pricing and how we think about underwriting. One of them is, I do think, we're seeing some evidence that of -- I'm going to -- it's not going to sound very sympathetic, but can it carry forward death. So those deaths that we pulled forward that we're going to have -- they were older age population, they maybe had some conditions anyway that was going to mean that they were probably closer to the span of their life span than they were further away. I know. So we've pulled some of those forward. At the same time, we've seen delayed care. So we've seen some instance of delayed care. So we're seeing a little bunchiness in terms of what we see there. What I would argue, though, one of the pieces that's just starting to emerge, and I think it's really interesting in a coverage like group disability is the ability to put out there tools that help people be really productive, whether they're tools that could help visually impaired learners, again, when everyone was doing everything remotely. There were tools that helped visual impaired. There were tools that help hearing impaired. There were tools that made handicap accessibility not as obvious. There were things that allowed technology so that you could contribute remotely, you could attach files on to -- and everyone's phone or computer has those technologies. There is, in my mind, some emerging trends and evidence that would say, an ability for someone to work outside of a crowded workspace in a hybrid or fully remote setting with very accessible accommodation tools is probably helping return to work. It's probably meaning that someone didn't necessarily have to -- if they're immunocompromised to begin with, they didn't have to go back into the workforce and suffer the consequences of a disability on that. So I think hybrid and remote work is might be changing some of the underlying long-term fundamentals of what we assume on some of our group disability incidents, return to work assumption. So I think the response to COVID, which is hybrid remote working, technology -- rapid technology infusion for the workforce has really yet to be seen in terms of what that could do to some of our underwriting assumptions for something like disability.

And so -- but as of yet, the underwriting has not changed?

It really has not fundamentally changed.

Okay. And at what point, I mean we talk about it, I'm a property and cash guy, I trade and you learn something in a given year and you change everything and you may change it back to us. Everyone is moving those assumptions around all the time. How long does it take for information to happen on a mortality table or disability table before you think it's appropriate to take action?

So individual companies rarely take action. We use great trade groups like Society of Actuaries, do studies, make recommendations. Our reinsurers tend to see full populations as opposed to just our own insured populations. So I would say, industry groups, industry consulting studies, as coupled with reinsurance studies are the things that, over time, tend to move an insurer to change their pricing.

Along those lines, so I guess in the first year of the pandemic, we saw a huge surge in retail life sales. So that's something people were really worried about it. And maybe they got in at a good price, because the mortality tables weren't changed. So I think some people were able to arb that out a little ways. Also, on the employer side, consultants and distributors were not welcome on-premises of employers during that time. And the ability to plead your case for -- was delayed probably in terms of what you can do for the company? We're at the sales cycle shaking out right now? And is -- have we back where we were? Have we pulled forward some sales into the past that -- what do you think about the sales cycle from here?

We're pretty much back to where we were in terms of access and information. I would say, we might even be a little better equipped. I think our salespeople are better equipped to do remote work. They have more options on how they can communicate. If we needed, if we -- there were still some pockets of our business where we were lying, especially in the small business market on paper with brokers and advisers being some of the last hold-outs. I think COVID has shifted everybody to sort of an electronic standard. So I think that electronic standard is making us more efficient with things like delivery of materials, e-signatures. So the adoption of those things is probably accelerating some portions of the sales process. So I would put the sales process back on par to even slightly faster or ahead of what we were doing prior to COVID.

And the hiring of individuals who can help or facilitate those relationships, is the staffing of your distribution force larger than it was pre-COVID, about the same size? Is the tenure of the people who are doing this?

So I'm going to speak less for the industry and more just for Principal here. Okay. For Principal, our tenure is as long as it's ever been. So we have highly tenured, highly experienced professionals. And when I looked last week, we literally had one opening on sales. In the time I've owned responsibility for the business, I've never been as fully staffed as we are right now. My belief is that Principal is an employer of choice and the group benefits marketplace. We're seeing us having good tools, good future progress and very few changes that have happened that maybe there's other changes around the industry that are happening a little more, so sort of steady state and attractive steady state. So I feel really good.

And I presume pretty good benefits would my guess?

They're excellent benefits. Exactly. I mean, good competitive pay and awesome benefits, and I like to believe a culture that's pretty purpose-driven.

And just actually, so I never thought about asking, Principal as an employee do I have access to all principal benefits -- what is the experience -- obviously, you're not a small employer.

We're not jump…

Sorry, but you -- but I assume that you are the -- wherever possible the facility of your own.

Small story, I am, in fact, a vendor for Principal's HR department. So I have to kind of put up a wall when I'm there as the vendor, but they kept asking us if they could have access to our critical illness and accident products, and we held them off for years because we weren't sure the experience, the reporting, the types of things that we could provide for a large case like Principal was going to meet their needs. So we held them off for 2 or 3 years, and they actually just put it in production this year, and we're comfortable with how that's going.

Humphrey, better benefits than talent?

No comments.

No comments. The answer is yes, Humphrey. It's just simply, yes.

All right. Well, I want to thank Amy and Humphrey for the time we spent together. I hope you've had a good day. I hope you've all had a good day. Access is going to be next, but you have a little bit of a break. And thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Great.