The Westaim Corporation (WED) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. My name is Cam McDonald, and welcome to the Aventus Annual Investor Day of 2026. We have a really good turnout here in New York. And we welcome a larger audience joining us virtually. So thank you all for taking the time to learn about your company. Many of the Aventus directors are with us here today, but if I may, I would like to warmly acknowledge Deanna Mulligan, our founding CEO and Strategic Adviser of Series Life. I would like to start the meeting by thanking everyone at Aventus, Seres, Coventus, and CC Capital for all their efforts in the past 18 months. There has been a tremendous amount of work accomplished through this past period. Much of it is not yet evident to the shareholders nor in our reported results. However, as a team, we stand before you, confident that the Aventus platform is now positioned to participate and capture significant profitable growth and our goal today is that the presentation from the management teams will provide you insight for our conviction. In keeping with past years, today's agenda will include presentations from all the management teams from Ceres, CCaventus, Aventus and CC Capital, Thereafter, I will return to the podium, providing closing comments and welcome all the questions you may have. In our 2025 annual letter, which was released this past March, we highlighted 6 strategic positions and priorities for our year. Many have been achieved, on track or in progress. As a reminder, they were: continue to scale Series Life annuity sales. Eric Osklen will have something to say on this subject. Materially grow CCaventus AUM. And Robinson will have a lot to say about this, pursue strategic opportunities. We completed a $25 million minority investment in Signe Financial Group of CC Capital, and Tim will provide brief comments on that from an update perspective. Rigorous capital allocation. supporting growth and new opportunities while maintaining financial flexibility, preparing for a U.S. listing. Matt Skirby will speak to this. And lastly, rebranding Westin. As you now know, this past Monday, we have billed our new name of Aventus Capital, which embodies the evolution of your company as an integrated insurance and asset management company. This slide captures the Aventus platform today, 2 unique businesses that are well positioned, growing with a favorable market environment and importantly, led by proven best-in-class management teams that embrace a client-first culture and integrity. So here are today's speakers and it's my pleasure to introduce Eric Askelsen, acting CEO and President of Series Life. Eric.

Thank you, Cam. As Cam said, I'm Eric Askelsen, President and Acting CEO of Series Life. I do want to take a second, though, to acknowledge Deanna. Deanna was our founding CEO, a tremendous leader. On behalf of the Ceres team, Dana, we appreciate everything you've done. One of the things that Kim didn't mention is that Diana was also our first policyholder. So while we always take care of our policyholders and we give them great service, I've told the team because I'm going to be talking to Deanna as our strategic adviser is that they better take extra good care of Deanna. So anyway. So it was a little over a year ago in June 2025 when Deanna last spoke to investors about Ceres vision and strategic plans at Investor Day. -- may get to the right spot. So at that point in time, we have sold a handful of annuities to employees as a proof point that we are ready to go to market -- and we are planning the official launch of our MYGA product with our distributors, which occurred just a little over a year ago in September 2025. Today, I'm going to talk about 3 things: our strategy and leadership our market opportunity and positioning, including the significant strides we've made over the last year, building on our distribution and demonstrating a differentiated and valuable experience for our distributors and I'm also going to talk about how our technology provides a competitive advantage. What I hope you'll take from my remarks is an appreciation that we've delivered in spades, what we committed to do in our first year in the market -- and I hope that you'll have an understanding of the value of the asset we built through our forward-leaning approach to technology. We believe we've built what I refer to as a powerful liability origination engine that is highly scalable, nimble and provides a digitally differentiated experience to distributors and policyholders that will return outsized value to all of our stakeholders, but particularly to you, our shareholders. Before I get started though, I would like you to hear directly from the Ceres team about what our mission is. [Presentation]

I know you probably can't believe it, but those aren't paid actors. Those are our people talking about us and what we do. So we're proud of the team, and we really wanted to give you a chance for them to talk to you in their own words. So I want to add some additional thoughts of a little bit about our strategy in addition to the words that you heard from our team. In terms of our strategy, we think about it in terms of 5 pillars. With Tech Ford, you heard this on the video. We embrace technology because we believe it's our differentiator -- and unlike other companies, we own our own tech, including our admin platform, and I'll talk more about this later because it's a big deal. We are also highly customer and agent-centric and delivering products and services to our policyholders and distribution, we seek to provide a digital experience that is expected in an era of the Amazonification of digital services. To that end, our platform allows us to flex to different IMO and agent business models, which is essential to compete for shelf space in a competitive a new landscape. The same is true for the digital experience that is expected of our policyholders, and that's what we aim to provide. Three, we seek to operate with an appropriate level of prudence. Ceres is not going to grow just for the sake of growth sake. -- and we're not going to chase volumes at the sake of shareholder returns. Instead, we are capturing market share through strong distribution relationships. Four, we seek to build our business organically, we built a powerful liability origination engine, which allows us to issue annuity contracts directly to consumers at scale. We believe also, as we move forward, this capability will create opportunities for us to partner with other carriers reinsurers and investors who seek to participate in the annuity market, but who don't have the retail capabilities that we do, and we think this creates additional earnings capabilities for us. Five, we operate with the long term in mind. Insurance is a long game. The products we issue are long-term promises, and we have to run the business with that in mind. I've heard him say many times that CC Capital View Ceres and insurance has a long-term value proposition. The capital that we have is permanent and Ceres is not a portfolio company and that's operate for the long term. I want to briefly mention our leadership team, which is a serious strength. You heard from some of them in the video I won't go deep into everyone on the page here, but I want to call your attention to the years and prior experience of the Ceres leadership team. We've been able to recruit a strong and motivated and experienced team, and this has been recognized by our stakeholders, our distributors, rating agencies and regulators alike. So the other point I would make is other than Deanna's transitioned to a strategic adviser, we've had no change at the top. This is the same team Deanna spoke about over a year ago at the last Investor Day. It's a team committed to the mission and I know Deanna's transitioned into a strategic adviser. That is a big event. But the fortunate thing about that is I get to spend a lot of time. I still get the benefit of Deanna's thoughts and I really value the relationship with her. Lastly, I won't say much about the CC Capital and Aventus team you're going to be hearing from them directly today, but I would point out that Series benefits from their leadership and their expertise we work collaboratively together and appreciate the support we received from the broader organization. So this is our Board, the faces start to look familiar. I'm just going to hit on high point here -- this year, we added Marilyn Hirsch as an independent director at Ceres. Marilyn is the Treasurer and Chief Investment Officer of UnitedHealth and she spent a number of years at Allstate in their insurance business. She has deep insurance and asset management knowledge, we've appreciated the perspective she has brought to us in her short time so far, and we're excited that she's joined us. I'm going to shift now to talk about our market positioning and success entering the annuity market over the last year. In our first year in the market, we've established a strong position in the IMO channel and with our target customers. First, we continue to see the annuity space as an attractive market and business opportunity. The industry has talked about the Silver [indiscernible] for a number of years, but we're clearly seeing the transition of the baby boomers into retirement. They have a focus on how to ensure they don't outlive their retirement savings. The annuity products we sell are an integral solution for them, and this market is a growing one. Second, this year, we've had great success establishing our distribution force. We launched with 6 IMOs, which was a greater number of IMOs than we actually expected. And we've onboarded over 1,700 writing agents who are out selling our policies to consumers in the market, and we're in the process of deepening our relationship with these distribution folks. Third, our success building our distribution is largely the result of our technology, which is a major differentiator for us. Agents like a proprietary EAF tool, which minimizes incomplete applications and rework for them. making our agents more efficient and the less time agents have to talk to us, the more time they have to go out and sell and service their clients, and that's a win-win for all of us. They also like our proprietary portals that allow them to see the business they have written as it progresses. And we've been able to customize the experiences of our key IMOs and large agents who expect their carrier partners to be flexible. We're unique in this because of our tech. Our partners also appreciate the deep investment capabilities brought to us through CC Capital and CCaventus. CCaventus brings us differentiated capabilities across various credit products through its sourcing network. They have also brought on BlackRock to help source longer-duration assets tailored to the liabilities we write. This diversified platform is tailored to the needs of an insurance company balance sheet like ours. Finally, we've demonstrated financial flexibility and a culture of risk management. We're managing to an A level of capital, which is important to our distributors, and we have access to committed capital from Aventus. Our distributors have embraced our story. They want to grow with us and this distribution platform that we've built is a powerful asset. From a product shelf perspective, we started with our MYGA in 2025 and launched 2 FIA annuities in February 2026. One of our views is focused on the accumulation of assets and 1 is focused on providing guaranteed retirement income to people who are trying to meet their needs in retirement. This fixed annuity product suite provides us with the core products to target the market we seek to serve, consumers focus on retirement savings and income certainty. One additional point to make on this slide that's related to our product suite. We partnered with Innovation Design Group a product development shop led by Jordan Canfield. Jordan and I have known each other for a long time from back in our [ Viva in Athene ] days. IDG has helped us to build this product suite helped us tailor it to our distribution and our target customers. They've been a great partner, and they provided valuable market insight to us. We think our target market is a large opportunity. We continue to see retirement market because there's a continued and growing demand for MYGA and FIA products like ours. The graph you see here shows the correlation between the number of people in the retirement phase of life, those that have reached 65 or beyond and the volume of MYGA and FIA products that have been sold in the last few years, as the retirement population has grown, so too has the annuity market generally. And as you can see in the more recent years, MYGA and FIA products make up a greater proportion of the total annuity sales that are occurring in the market. Because of these retirement demographics, we expect this growth in the market to continue for a significant period of time, and it's where we want to compete for retirement savings dollars. I already mentioned our success onboarding 6 IMOs and 1,700 agents, pardon me for saying that a couple of times. This slide lists who those IMOs are. Advisers Excel on the left side of the slide is the largest IMO in the industry, and they control a major portion of the volumes that are done in the independent channel. We have a great relationship with Advisors Excel primarily because they have known Chinh and the CC Capital team for a long time. We're also very proud of the 5 other IMOs that we brought on, who decided to do business with us from the start. Much of our success in bringing on these IMOs initially was because they were very familiar with CC Capital, and CC Capital's prior experience and reputation in the annuity industry. So that was very helpful as we brought these partners on. But that's not the end of the story. While CC Capital relationships and reputation may have helped us onboard our IMOs, we believe we've earned their continued business by demonstrating that we're faster and easier to do business with. To that point, on the top left, I'm not going to bore you with the details, but what those stats are really saying simply is that we issue policies faster than our competitors and when we can close out an agent's annuity sale more quickly, everyone appreciates that, the agents, the IMOs and policyholders. And on that bottom line, we pay agents quickly. within a day of issuing the policy. You might be surprised, but agents they really do want to get paid and they want to get paid quickly. It's a really big thing. So it's one of the things that we focused on and the service that we're providing to them. On the right, the chart reflects the timing of when we onboarded our 1,700 agents. As you can see, new writing agents have continued to join us along our journey, and that wouldn't occur if they were not having the quality experience with us that they are. One of the things you heard me say on the video was a reference to old school service. And you might be asking yourself, what does that mean in such a tech-forward company while we have built our platform with the expectation that you don't need to call us to do business with us, agents and policyholders can do most of the things that they want to digitally but we know that some people want to talk to a live person. And when they call, we answer fast. We answer within 15 seconds, and we make sure that our people are able to answer the questions when people call us quickly in the first time. We believe this is a powerful blend of technology and personal connection with the people we serve. And what's the evidence of our IMO partners and agents doing more business with Ceres. It's the volume of business we've done in our first year that we've been out in the market since our MYGA launch in September 25, and we have processed $690 million of issued and pending annuity premium. And that's a significant number for a company that's in its maturity curve that we are in. We view this as great success showing the market power of the retail franchise we built for all the reasons that I've talked about. And as we look forward to our second year, we're taking active steps to continue to grow our distribution footprint. We're going deeper with our IMOs in terms of getting to know them. We're turning the first cases that agents write with us into subsequent cases and continued business. We're building the awareness of our products and our story through social media and LinkedIn campaigns. We're adding capabilities that agents expect of a carrier, and we're doing so in a digital experience that they really appreciate this top of the market. And we're continuing to add features and additional products to our product suite to continue to grow in this space. And finally, we're working to be a thought leader in the industry through leading research. I've referenced our tech throughout this presentation, but I want to go deeper I want to go deeper on it because it's the genesis for what makes us believe that we have a unique proposition to our stakeholders. Over Ceres, a 2-year life cycle so far -- we've essentially iterated our technology in what I'll refer to as 3 generations of development. Generation 1.0 was what we launched Amiga on in 2025. At that point in time, we utilized a vendor partner system as our admin platform, and we are self focused on our proprietary e-application and distribution portals to differentiate ourselves. While our launch was successful, it became apparent to us leading up to it, that it was much harder to control our delivery outcomes when we didn't own the administration platform. For that reason, we made what I believe was a forward-leaning tech decision consistent with our culture to build our own proprietary admin system on which to launch our FIA business in February of 2026. Our tech and business teams developed our own platform in less than 6 months, which was made possible by our AI and cloud native architecture and our committed team. It was an amazing amount of work in a short period of time, and that was Ceres Gen 2.0 and and building your own administration platform in this period of time is really quite upbeat. If you spent time in legacy organizations with legacy tech, legacy insurers, it's very, very -- it's almost unfathomable to do that. But that shows building the insurance company from scratch, what power we have to do the work that we need to do. What you're seeing on this page now this schematic, it's a visual depiction of the third generation of Ceres, what we call Ceres Nexus. Ceres Nexus is an autonomous insurance operating platform that incorporates a suite of agentic capabilities into our operation. The blue circles represent various identic capabilities that have been built and integrated into our system and are in various stages of full deployment. The gray circles represent additional agentic capabilities that are in various design or build phases. It's really impossible to fully explain Generation 3.0 to in the short time that we have. But I want to pick one of these blue circles to highlight. The blue circle on the right has the name OPUS. In administering the issuance of an insurance policy, there are a number of manual stages that require a human to perform certain administrative steps to move an application through the pipeline. Did the money come in? Was it the right amount of money? Do we have all the suitability information that's needed to make a decision, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Many of these steps require a person to look at the application, hit a key bird every time to move it along the process. OPUS, however, is an AI agent that works around the clock. It doesn't get tired and it performs a long list of checks and rules and autonomously moves an application through our system, flagging it for human review if an issue or action is needed. Right now, almost all applications require human intervention to address various issues as they progress through the process. With OPUS, once fully deployed, we expect that the Agentic capabilities will be able to handle 85% of the processing without that intervention. You might ask, "Okay, so why can't you get to 100% automation with all the Fantitech that you have. " We are a regulated business and AI is still new. Regulators expect humans to make certain decisions and oversee the platform and the process, we're building out our AI processes so that our people make the final decisions in these key situations, we're putting humans in the loop where they are expected to be. This type of prudent automation with Ceres Nexus will allow us to grow our business through significant scale without headcount additions. This platform gives us the power to control our own destiny. I don't mean to be dramatic about that, but it's our code. We own it. We control it. We can change it. and it gives us the ability to control our cost. As we sit today, we've grown our premium significantly in the last year without adding admin costs or people, and that was with our Generation 2.0 and with the capabilities of Ceres Nexus and our targeted 85% throughput, we expect to be able to scale even more to $10 billion of AUM at our current expense run rate. And what -- why is that? We leverage AI to develop and deploy our code. We don't pay vendors for software, our key software. System changes can be requested in plain English and converted to code in the same day and our variable expense does not grow with policy volumes because we own the platform on which our annuities are being administered. And we have [ fashion ] may because of those things can manage our headcount cost. There's one other stat I want to share on this point of efficiency. One of those agentic capabilities on the prior page is AI leverage code development, a core capability of ours. Tom holds where are you at? Here's Tom. So Tom hold -- he is our Chief Innovation and Technology Head of Technology. He was here at the start with when Deanna is here. So -- he is the mastermind behind what we're doing on our platform. And Tom has been measuring how quickly we develop and deploy code since we started 2 years ago. In that time, he has demonstrated that our development velocity is 47x what it was when we started this journey 2 years ago. This is what has allowed us to do so much in a relatively short period of time in terms of iterating on our platform. In addition to efficiencies our platform gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace as well. Insurance agents like us because applications come in, right the first time because of how we've designed it. They want to do carriers, as I've said before that make them efficient. But our capabilities also allow us to make product changes and develop and launch new products and features in weeks rather than months. I can't overstate how important this is, particularly given the competition in the annuity marketplace has increased. If a carrier has to rely on a TPA or a vendor partner it has to schedule its launches on somebody else's time line where it has to sit down and scope out and price and write an SOW about the work that the vendor is going to do. What do we do at Ceres. We call Tom and say, okay, we need to do -- we need to make some changes, and he can get after the code the next day. Now he can actually get after it the same day with his team. So that's a big advantage. And with us, we're not stitching various components together. This is our platform. It allows us to create a seamless experience for our policyholders and distributors. This is why we think we're such a unique proposition in this space. So to conclude, we believe Ceres has delivered 2 years what we set out to do and what we talk to you, our investors about last year. In 2 years, we built a fully operational, tech forward carrier from scratch, and we processed a lot of business through our platform, and we're well positioned to continue to deliver for our stakeholders, especially for you, our shareholders. I want to thank you very much. We appreciate your attention today and your interest in Aventus and the Ceres story. Next, I'd like to introduce Andrew Rabinowitz, the CEO of CCaventus Okay. Maybe I'm going to introduce him.

There is and a make sure with the need of [indiscernible]. I want to first say thank you. I saw people I've known from college, people without one of my partners at Marathon new partners, all partners, it's just very gratifying to see everyone, and I know a bunch of people on Zoom 2. So thank you. See if I get this right. Okay. Good. So this is our current AUM and our current -- where we sit deployed. Over the last 12 months, Matt, correct me if I'm wrong, we're up about $1 billion year-over-year plus or minus with commitments. And a lot has gone into our private credit business. But as we'll talk about, it's going into a couple of our newer businesses, and there's more to come on the landscape, which I'll show later in the slides. You've learned a lot about Seres, amazing firm. We're CCaventus with the asset manager, it rolls into West Aim, which rolls into CC Capital. So it's an integrated platform. I would say this model works I had the benefit of working sitting next to Josh Harris as a senior partner, Co-Founder Apollo, and I saw learned and saw what they did at Apollo and the 26 North and then the same thing with Chinh and Rich and others that were at Blackstone this integrated platform has proven to be successful that information flow, the idea generation, the synergies. And so we're trying to replicate that. So when I joined, I was asked by the Board was -- what's the vision? Well, how do we expect to grow and I came up with this chart, a little bit had more, a little bit more detail, but we've made it simpler. And if you look at the best asset managers, it's really an integrated -- or best credit managers, I should say. It's really an integrated platform between 3 business lines, in my opinion, first, you have things, we'll call it, private credit. We'll talk about our private credit business. Private credit means something different to everyone. If you Google private credit, and I spoke 45 minutes about this a few months ago, is you can get numbers from $1.7 trillion to $40 trillion. So what is private credit? For us right now, it's really focused on structured credit and real estate. First lien, top of the capital stack, secure recession resilient, and we'll show some of the things we're doing. The second is capital markets, things that are tied to Wall Street. So my former part, Andrew Brady, who is here somewhere, I saw him here before there he is, has joined us. We were partners for 18 years. And we're building a CLO business, which is capital markets, and then we're building a rate to-free business, and we'll explain why the rate-free business. But it's tied to things that are tied to the capital markets. I do have to see Katherine right there. So I have to say thank you, Catherine, for you hope on the rate of feeder. And then lastly, long only. Long on could be ETFs. It could be us, it could be index-based products. My former partner, Gabby Spiegel, sitting over there. He was the brainstorm behind 1 of the greatest emerging market bond index outperformance funds and I learned a lot from Gabby. So I hate to say, Gabby may take your playbook and redo it here a bit, but after being your partner for 20 years. But anyway, it could be structured credit, it could be emerging market credit, and it could be corporate credit. I'm a big believer in committees. I was -- my entire career, all my mentors were committees. I took a quote from Steve Jobs, which I liked, which says great things in business were never done by 1 person. -- they're done by a team of people. And 1 of the first things we did -- I did when I started as President at the time was to create these committee structures. You can see what committees we have I would say what's also important is it's not just the senior leadership who are on the committees. It goes up and down the firm. So from someone 4 years out of university to someone who's been in practice for 40 years. I think it's important to get new ideas 1 plus 1 does equal 3. And so we have a committee structure. And I'd also say that in every committee, I believe, yes, every committee, there's someone from CC Capital on it. So when I mess up, Doug, is sure to point out how I've made 15 mistakes. So thank you, Doug. That's just my way of saying thank you for our friendship. This page only put up because Rich requested that I show a picture of him in the deck. So this is Rich your high school picture looks great. So thank you, Rich. Just kidding Ridge. This is our management committee. The management committee, as you could tell, I'm a little bit unique as my mom would say. The management committee is a group that's in task with running the firm. There's not one person running the firm at all. All decisions at the management committee go back up to the Westin board and CC Capital -- and so we're fortunate that we have 5 of us that meet weekly to discuss the things that we think are important. Our macro. So when I started to want to do the macro, I forgot who said it to me, was it you came or someone that said, why are you doing the macro? And macro is so important. When I was at 26 North, I ran the macro for Josh. And macro helps you -- it doesn't make you make decisions, but it helps make informative decisions and it helps you think about maybe sectors you want to avoid or things you want to lean into. And so we've created a macro committee here. It's run -- I decided not to do it again. It's a lot of work, but our Chief Risk Officer has taken over that task. -- and we try to meet monthly and also a great way to build culture by having junior and senior people. So the late Charlie Manger said, microeconomics is what we do. macroeconomics is what we tolerate. So now some thoughts on the macro. I did take some notes, so I didn't mess this up. So GDP is strong. You can see from -- depending on your perspective, the GDP is going from 2.2% to 2.7%. If you read most economists, they say there's a probability recession of I personally have that higher. Actually, the numbers anywhere from 15% or 10% to 15% to 30%, I actually think it's a 1/3. Why do I think that? Well, one, there's a heavy reliance on 1 sector. So the economy is really growing based on AI and tech Two, energy costs are high. Anyone who drives can tell you that gas is up 34% year-over-year. Next is consumer spending is 70% of our GDP, and I'll go through consumer sentiment in a second. But the reasons why -- why we may not dip in a recession, as you can see the unemployment rate is holding strong and the national debt, although I seem to be worried about it and anyone who comes from the accounting backward, he's to worry about it, others don't. But it's sort of a mixed message. On consumer sentiment on the next slide, -- you can see where we are right now. We're currently at 51.7%, which is the second lowest on record. So if consumers are worried and obviously, a lot of it has to do with energy cost and inflation, there's some probability that we go into recession, again, I have 33%. And that will impact what sectors we may want to go into. Crude oil and a lot of talk about crude oil. We've been here before. There's at least 6 times that I can find that we've been over 100% in July of '08 when China had energy demand. in 2011, Arabian sanctions, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and twice this year. And then on -- I guess, your left, you can see how demands how much our economy is growing based on sectors. And if you look at AI and infrastructure at 7.6 trillion, that's the total GDP of Japan on France. So it is very heavily weighted to 1 sector, which is reasons to be cautious. As far as GDP projections, I've studied a lot of numbers. U.S. currently, call it, 2.1, 2.2, projected to be 2.4% next year. Europe is 0.8 projected to be 1.1% next year. U.K., 1.2 unchanged next year. Emerging markets 4.6 million pretty much unchanged next year. Japan, 0.8% pretty much unchanged next year. What's interesting though is if you look at CPI inflation numbers, and I think I have CPI inflation numbers, -- everyone has CPI inflation numbers coming down, which would then tell you predict that there's probably more Fed hikes. U.S. 3.2 heading to 2.4% year-over-year next year, 2.8% to 1.9 for Europe, 3.1% to 2.6 for the U.K., 3.1 to 2.7 for emerging markets and 1.9% to 1.7%. You'll continue to see the global governments try to reduce inflation by raising rates is what that sort of tells me. I'm not going to talk about tariffs except because there's so much talk about it. But obviously, tariffs play into any conversation we have, and we talk about that at our macro. Okay. I talked about unemployment. There's not a lot of new -- there's not a lot of -- if you look at the global employment numbers, I have that just hand you real quick, 4.1% for the U.S., 6.1% for Europe. LATAM is a 5.3 to 4.1%. So when you look at projections over the next 12 months, they're steady, which tells you that the GDPs should be positive based on what we've talked about before, office vacancy. So we have a big real estate group. We raised a lot of money for real estate. This year. And so when we look at office vacancies, right now, at 17.7% as the torches, average per square foot is around $36. I looked at it 10 years ago, the office vacancy was 13% and it was $25 per square foot, but that's misleading because someone would tell me, well, that's 10 years ago, it's inflation. And so an inflation-adjusted number is $34 per square foot, so basically unchanged, what that tells us is how office is a regional and you have to be very thoughtful about where you invest. You just can't do a dart against the Board because although it's 17.7% across the U.S., there's obviously pockets of the U.S. that are doing much, much better Austin, Nashville, Florida, across Florida. And so it's regional and our team is very focused on the region. I'm looking at Peter right now. So he's waving me and saying, okay, I think I'm smiling. On housing, look, housing is flat and housing makes sense as flat. Where was mortgage rates 10 years ago with the 30-year fixed, it was at 3.4% right now. It's close -- it just closed at 7%. I decided for a little game, Doug has a house in Montana, and he talks about his house of Montana. And I talked about how housing is regional. So I was curious for myself and hopefully, anyone else is, and we can play a game, if you like, is one house is our quickest to sell, like on the market is the shortest amount of time and what houses are the slowest the longest on the market and I want to take a guess on what housing is quickest, the top 4 or 5 that I have here. Sorry, by region. -- by region. Sorry. Which one? Well, you say Jersey. Moncler. Okay. I'll just go not cities but all right. So let's do the fastest to sell. Massachusetts average on the market 39, Word Island, Connecticut, Michigan and Ohio. So those are quick. So those are places that make sense. Slow as to sell, the slowest, longest time to sell a house is actually in Montana, 121 days. Doug, hopefully, you don't need liquidity and if you do rates are high, followed by Hawaii, Vermont and South Carolina. The reason why I just -- I bring this up is just that, again, we're very focused on state by state. It's not let's just be an index, and that's how we're going to outperform. CLOs. Really excited about the business. I think the first thing I said to KMC, Doug and Rich when I joined was I want to build the CLO business. And I don't know if Medicis listening, but menus thank you because he was the one who was like, yes, I agree. So thank you, Minis. CLOs, look, we've seen the power of CLOs and Marathon when we were there, Andrew and I built a multibillion dollar business together back in 2004. We think we can do that again. And we're building a team that we're really excited about. CLOs make a lot of sense. I'll explain why, just to give you where spreads are because that question comes up all the time. We're a CLO spreads AAAs. And you thank you for the research. 120 to 150 is what he tells me on AAAs. AA is 150 to 190 single age, 190 to 250,000,340 and Bs 500, 600. You can see that's a pretty nice spread versus where IG corporates are trading at 5.5%. Issuance is down. That's a good thing for us, meaning less CLOs are getting getting issued. Why? I think there's a challenge raising equity and doesn't make sense to us because we actually love the CLO equity and I'll explain why in a little bit. This is my last macro slide. So hopefully, I'm doing okay on time. Look, the private market has exploded. I've talked a little bit about it why regulation banks have pulled out. According to -- let me get the right source, National Bureau of Economic Research, 35% of direct lending is coming from banks right now. They just pulled out because of Basel III and everything we know Dodd-Frank. Two, returns, returns have been good. Depending on what you invested in private credit, high single digits to low to mid-teens. It's uncorrelated. You don't have the mark-to-market risk. So a lot of clients that are worried about sort of the volatility in their portfolio, it helps with that. Okay. Here's our investment ideas. This is a team, CLO equity, CLO sorry, CLO. Why do we love CLOs? So in 2009, which many of us lived through, corporate defaults globally were down 9.6% and but CLO has actually held up well. It really, really did. We lived through the storm. And we try to understand -- try to understand why I look back at that time, came up with a few reasons. One, the reinvestment. When loans traded off in the fourth quarter of a specifically to $0.60 or $0.70 on the dollar. What does smart CLO managers do like Andrew Brady, he bought it because he was like, "Look, this is first lien paper. If I can get top quality managers at $0.60 on the dollar that's going to pay back at par. Let's buy it. So they bought things at deep discounts and it generated attractive returns. We plan to do that again, right, Andrew? He's smiling to. Two, there's interest rate forwards. So when rates go down to 0, and it was like rates never get down to 0. Yes, they do. They were just 0 March of 2022, so not that long ago. CLOs typically 100 basis points. So you could have a premium when you invest in CLS because of the interest rate floor in the, when things go south, if we have a recession, there's an OC test over collateralization test, that says, you can't distribute to the equity. So what does Smart CLO managers do? They either delever the vehicle or they buy things that are trading at a discount. So that's how you can outperform I'm not sure if I'm allowed to crow Andrew's our CLO business returns historically. So I'm not. But there is a phish report that if anyone wants to just e-mail me and I'll send it to you. It's very attractive. Okay. What's next? The other thing I just want to mention on CLOs real quick. It's a little correlation to the S&P. It's calling to Wellington is only 0.37 and the quarterly distributions are great. We already talked about first lien. On CRE debt, we do a lot of different things in CRE debt. The one that we're super excited about is anything that's first lien. First lien right now is paying us 8% to 10% unlevered. IG again, is paying about 5%, 5.5%. If you look at where long-term rates are right now, it's at a 19-year high. So right now, if companies need to refinance, it's hard, which means they're going to be looking for alternative places to refinance AKS. Peter, you brought business cards, right?. Perfect. So -- and then there's a wall of maturities. And thank you, Peter, for pulling these numbers for me. In 2026, the war maturity this year is $875 billion. Next year, it's $1.2 trillion. And historically, the number is $350 billion, which means there's a lot of opportunity for us to invest. And right now, when we look to refinance when bars look to refinance, they're paying a premium, call it, 150 to 250 basis points because of the law maturity because interest rates are high because banks have left the business. Corporate securities. So these are the sectors we're focused on. Things I just want to point out is stable cash flow, low leverage, reputable management -- we have some competitive advantages. We believe, based on our network, we're investing in 42 private placements. They give us another, call it, 60 to 80 basis points additional return. We worked very closely with Series Life on this business, and I don't know if Peggy's still here, but with PEG as well. So it helps sort of that integrated platform having this business under Michael gives us an advantage to be able to see where the IG market is and where private placements are Okay. So on the private -- the PC -- we call it PC, private credit sector. I looked at where people are allocating capital, where is the growth in private sector. No surprise, 25% to 30% is in software, 20% in health care, love health care, recession resilient. Business servicing is 15% to 20% and infrastructure lending, love infrastructure is 10%. Outside that, there's ABF, which includes aircraft leasing, equipment leasing and real estate. We're doing equipment leasing and real estate, which which we're excited about. The other thing -- can I -- I can't go back on the slide, I apologize. So just it's the first time using this one. The 1 thing I would say about ABF, which is run by Victor, and we'll talk about the vehicles we're doing that is: one, the short duration, typically, the loan is short duration, they're first lien, highly diversified and you get a complexity premium because you have to originate these loans and you have -- they're locally based, you get a complexity premium, which you like a lot Okay. What is the pipe? I have a bad job, but I'm not going to use it. I'm sure you can figure out which one it is. It's something that goes on the ground Haha. Anyway -- thank you, Kim, for laughing. Anyway, pipe security is that really small cap companies use when they need capital and they don't want to go through the public markets. What we do, and they typically trade at discount. For us, it's simply 10%. What's unique about the way we approach pipes led by Shahin and Yoav is we get a lot of warrants and a lot of are, I mean like 25% plus. The average -- the pipe flow, 199.3 billion $28 billion, currently $68 billion. Average returns, I looked up at the average term of pipes over the last 20 years, 12.1% to 19.7%. Again, I can't talk about our returns -- but do you think I would mention these return ratios if we didn't do a little better? And we could send to return on our pipes. 3 sectors we're focusing on is tech, life science and energy and infrastructure. All right. Now to the question I get from Cam every day. How are we going to build this thing, Andrew? I get this little every day. And if he doesn't ask me, Rich ask me, for cost ask me. Doug ask me, Doug doesn't ask me Chinh me, if Chinh doesn't ask me, someone on the board asked me. So this is how we're going to get there. So let's start with strategic partnerships. I have to be careful what I say here, but we are on the 1-yard line on signing or whatever, red zone on signing a strategic partnership with a global investment bank that we think will be over time, transformative in the structured credit space. So very excited about that. I've been working on this for many, many, many months. and excited to have the partnership with them with CC Capital and with Aventus. Two, the various funds. So in every business I described, there's typically a fund attach for CLOs we'll be raising CLO equity. We already have commitments on that. We have the real estate debt fund. We have a multi-strat structured ABF fund. And there are some other things that we're working on in the pipeline. But in those businesses, we've raised, as I mentioned, about $1 billion. We have to put the money to work still, but we've raised about $1 billion. CLOs. We've done our first warehouse with Goldman. We're about to sign is and do our second warehouse sometime either this week or next. We plan to issue our first sale this year, second CLO first quarter next year, and we'll be off and running on CLOs. The plan is to do 2 or 3 CLOs a year. We will not be a serial issuer -- we'll try to outperform I think, right, we believe right now, our cuereturns and CLOs are about 13% to 15%, 13% to 16%. But very excited about that business. We plan to grow it to an $8 billion to $10 billion business as we had in the past. -- rate of feeders, why rate of fee is great. First of all, there's super capital-efficient. What do I mean by that? If you look at an insurance company that invests in private credit, their capital charge is 30% to 40%, Wow. -- if they invest in a single A or BBB, you guys are talking to, I say something about the strategic partnerships, that's our lawyer who's working on the strategic partnership. So I'm like, did I say something sun I'm okay, Omar -- thank I don't want to get done out here and can we find another speaker. Anyway, to capital in capital charge for rated fears. But if you invest in a rate of fee -- I'm sorry, if you invest in private credit, if you invest in a rate of feeder though, BBBs or single, it goes down to 1% to 3%. You own the same asset at 1% to 3% versus 30% to 40% if you own the asset rate. So insurance companies are very excited about talking to us. We have a team. We expect to close our first rate of feed this year. and we have a second 1 on the way. I'm just looking at CAT to make sure she agree, she agrees perfect. Next business. And that will be -- the first rate of free will be about $300 million. The first -- I should have mentioned this, the first GLO should be about $400 million, the various funds. I mentioned the $1 billion strategic partnership, I can't talk more about it, but it's -- we'll talk about it more later. And the second rate of feed will be about $30 million or $400 million next year. use. All right. I have a good idea every 10 years. This is my first good idea. My last good idea is I told Mike Ministers that they were in trouble in 2007. And then he went on Bloomberg and saying, Andy Robbins, is the first person to tell us we're in trouble in 2007. So this is my second good idea to -- it took 20 years to have my second there. credit ETFs, credit ETFs, I love credit. The ETF market is $23 trillion. It was $3.5 trillion 10 years ago. of the $23 trillion is in fixed income, less than 1% -- less -- excuse me, less than 10 basis points. is in ABS. I think we can create an ABS ETF that will really crush it. I've talked to 2 strategic partners. They want to work with us. Obviously, a lot has to happen between the idea of wanting to work with us and actually work with us. But there's a path forward, we believe, -- and we've hired [ Wisma Dev, ] I saw him here before, Darius went to a school, no one's ever heard of an engineering call. I think it was called Stanford Yes. So it's a small school up in California that no 1 knows. And he's helping design it with Doug and myself and a bunch of other people. And we hope to have an ETF probably sometime early next year. So we're super excited about that. since we have a global bank that wants to partner with us on using similar concept. And then emerging markets, I mentioned my part, and I'm smiling at them right now. I love them to death. -- sorry. I know it's being recorded, but I still love them to death. And I'm heading down to Brazil next week. We've been talking to one of the largest and most prestigious firms in my opinion, in Brazil that want to partner with us, and we're trying to work out some details. And so we hope to have an announcement on something in EM in the coming weeks or months, both weeks. So we're super excited about EM, and that will be the integrated platform that we talked about. And that could be really sizable. At Maritime, I believe we built the number $8 billion, $7 billion billion $7 billion from scratch. So hopefully, we can duplicate that again. Okay. One of the other strategic partnerships I didn't talk about is Wilshire Jason Smile Look, thank you for putting on the Jack in first at no kidding. You look great. Who is Wilshire. Well, if you don't know Moshe, you should. It's like you don't know Coca-Cola, but it's -- they advised on $1.3 trillion of assets. They -- they partnered with Apollo, let me go Apollo, Brookfield and Bridgewater. And so I was saying to myself, yes, I was like why are they partnering with us, CCaventus?" and it came to me. you needed to tell everyone that ABC, exactly. -- exactly, you know my joke. You did we talk about ABC. So that's how you got CCaventus. And so the idea I had pitched them and Jason and I go way back to we're friends is would be really interesting for public pensions, if you could do a multi-manager multisector platform where a public pension plan who is under staff can allocate to aircraft leasing, ABF, convertible debt, pipes, IG CLOs, whatever the real estate, whatever the case may be. So I'm not suggesting we could do all that because I definitely not. But what we -- what I said is what if we could do a portion of that, what if we could do 1/3 or 40% of that? And then Wilsorpicks because they're the best in the business. the other 65 or whatever the number, 70% of the best managers who could do convertible debt or emerging market or whatever that is. And so that we have -- I can't use the word best of best but really, really strong multicredit managers. And so Wilshire's agreed. And as you can see from that step chart that you asked me about all the time like how we're getting to $25 billion. I did think of a quote for that too, Cam. And it's Henry Kissinger, because we're working hard, man. Really working hard. My wife was like, I never see you anymore. I gave up golf. So the quote that he had that resonates with me the most is he said, Henry Kisner said, there cannot be a crisis next week my schedule is already full. With that, Jason, can you come up and we'll talk a little bit about what we're trying to build together.

Okay. Amanda, thank you for these questions. If they're not good, they should blame you. anyway. The other thing I'll just anecdote before I get into things is 1 thing that they always said to me in my careers. I never take credit for any thing. So that's why I'm shouting out everyone, so I apologize. Good job. Thank you. All right. Look, Jason, I'm not going to net Jason. Jason is amazing. I love him. He's brilliant. But Jason, can you give you a bio, which I could do, but you do a better job.

Sure. Nice to me, everyone. I'm the Co-Chief Operating Officer for Wilshire I also co-lead our liquid alternatives business. I started my career as a lawyer, don't hold that against me and have had positions at large investment banks and asset managers always on the alternative side, a little bit more product focused. So conserve myself a bit of a product walk, putting things together, really helping to deliver investment streams to clients and a diversified portfolio and diversified packaging.

And can we talk like Talk a little bit about Wilshire, like who are they, what they do, how they've grown, how they become

Yes. People may historically think of Wilshire as a consultant. But really, we are a diversified investment solutions partner to clients -- so we do have a legacy consulting business that exists, but also we are very large in wealth and retirement. So we help manage portfolio allocation models for the wealth channel. We also are the largest provider of small fiduciary services to small and micro 401(k) plans. And those 2 businesses are very much based upon investment capabilities. fiduciary expertise as well as technology and scale. We touch over 68,000 individual pension plans, not even pension participants, and we manage things in a fiduciary manner, again, through scale. Similarly, on the model side, we have over $100 billion of asset allocation models that we offer out through the wealth and intermediary space, again, delivering scale. In the alternative space, and this is really where the work with CCaventus comes into play, we help allocators as well as pools of capital allocated to the best offstreams. We sit in the middle and help allocators with portfolio allocation, manager selection and portfolio structuring. We've got about $45 billion of assets in the alternative space. about $5 billion of that is in private markets, and the remainder is in our liquid space. And there, we do things that are a little bit unique not only do we do manager selection, portfolio construction, but we implement using our managed account platform, which really is designed to create a multi-strat for our clients and really delivering the benefits of that approach, be it transparency, liquidity control, capital financing and customization and risk and that's really the platform that we're talking about kind of melding with the investment return streams from Andrew and the team.

About, I don't know, 15 years ago in the asset -- there's a question coming I promise. But in 15 years ago, the asset management, you noticed there was a convergence, right? hedge funds, we're trying to get into private credit. Private cadet managers were trying to get into private equity. Private equity is trying to get into long only. And you had these -- and if you saw the shift earlier, which luckily we did 20 years ago, that was the model that if you pivoted before or right after the -- great Recession, you were successful. And that's the model we're building here, right, with those 3 pillars of long-only private credit and capital markets, right, same exact model because it's a proven it's a proven winner. Consultants have gone different paths, right? Some of stational consultants, others have opened up in CIO offices. So where do you -- it's not as clear to me where the puck is going in consulting. So where do you see the puck going.

Yes. I'd like to think that we started that journey a couple of years ago, which is thinking what we do best, which is, again, as I said, really helping pools of capital allocate their risk to best-of-breed managers and how can we apply that idea beyond just consultants. And that's, I think, where people are going. It's for consultants, looking to provide their expertise to different asset streams and different client types to convert from, I would say, consulting-based revenues to more asset-based fees and really trying to deliver asset management returns and expertise to their clients as opposed to just being viewed as a consultant. We think that goes along with the kind of macro theme of large allocators wanting to lean into partnerships. They're not really looking to have many, many more relationships. They're looking to get more out of the relationships that they already have. And we think our kind of role as a trusted consultant puts us in a pole position to help essentially diversify our work stream, cross-sell to use a term with these types of clients, and that's what we've been leaning into over the last couple of years.

Thank you. So I'm going off script, but you knew I would do anyway, sorry. I suppose I took this 1 -- the -- so one of the things that I've always believed is you have a new business committee, which we have, right? And tell me have an idea -- the question is like what's our competitive advantage? Like why us, right? Like what do we bring that is already not in the market? And why can we do a better job than whatever is out there, right? And so when you think about the partnership that we're looking to do with Wilshire, when you think about like portfolio construction and how you put the pieces together of what maybe we do well versus others? Like have you thought about that portfolio construction?

Yes. So if you think about it in simple terms, we're thinking about a 40-40-20 type of portfolio. About 40% of the assets going to be allocated to some of the strategies that Andrew talked about today, really comment this lead, 40% going to be diversifying credit-based strategies a little bit more liquid a little bit more CUSIP-based to provide some ballast and as well as some potential equity macro hedging within the portfolio. And then that additional 20% is going to be something that we can collectively be much more tactical with. And we could do that to to, a, take advantage of investment opportunities and kind of scale up in terms of seeking out return. But similarly, in a somewhat uncertain environment, be more risk aware and move with respect to risk. So one, it is the investment platform that you guys have and are building. That's a, frankly, the biggest driver. But then also looking at the asset classes, that you guys are participating in, it's not just the investment side. It's how you're servicing those assets, how you're managing the risk associated with the liquidity that is in some of these, some of the more idiosyncratic risks and as we've learned more about the CCaventus team, not only the investment side, but the risk management, the operations side, it really is kind of top-notch from all of those different dynamics. So that's kind of one of the things that we really love about what you guys bring, but also at the same time, we think the benefits of adding diversifying return streams will benefit the end client. And that's where we think we have a good expertise couple that with that platform implementation layer that we talked about, we're not creating a fund of funds. We're creating a true multi-strat portfolio. whereby we are going to have full transparency and control over all of the underlying instruments on the third-party side. So that gives us the ability to, a, manage risk much, much better and more dynamically. -- also provide potentially enhanced liquidity because we can control these assets. But also as we make investment decisions, that information is going to be part of the investment process. real time, granular to help deliver better investment returns. And I'm guessing we're over time based upon the

I was asking how much on was because at most conferences to give you like a cloud little lawn or people yawn when I speak -- so that's usually a

The case that's usually in, but there's no a lot of budget. We want to get events to be -- when it gets to $25 billion, they'll give me a clock. -- now I have to look at CAM and say how much time do we have left?

Five minutes. All right. Thank -- thank you, Albert. All right. So let's let's ask this. So your -- where do you think -- okay, so now you talk to a lot of pension plans, corporate and public -- is there a certain -- we saw the growth of our private credit market, how it's exploited. I think it was 13% of memory on CAGR on average. Where do you see them allocating? Are they pulling back from private car, are they allocating to private credit? Are they A lot of people have a view on an S&P including mine, which is it's trading at obviously all-time is. It's tight. Where are they redirecting capital? And how does that impact what we're trying to build.

It has an impact. And one of the things that we've seen is the search for more diversification as large allocators have gotten more and more concentrated with respect to private equity, private credit and the illiquid side, we've bit of a renaissance on, let's say, the hedge fund side, which is really a bit more kind of traded assets, a little bit more liquid. And that's a B is, like I said before, and Andrew mentioned, there's tons of different return streams that are available to these allocators with shrinking staff the ability to navigate that. They are looking for partners who have the investment expertise to do that, which is a trend that we are definitely capitalizing on -- but I think that goes to the impetus that you had around this idea, which is, a, you do a lot of things really well. But to build a diversified single ticket, if you will, investment, you need more. And that's, I think, where we come in. And also then with that diversification, we're allowing these partners to lever into and lean into us much more so from a portfolio construction as opposed to a single strategy, a single theme. And that's something that, again, a bit of a macro theme that we are seeing with our clients. But I think this product and our partnership really slots into very nicely.

So it's really an honor Jason. I know we have time for 1 or 2 more questions, but I -- it's not -- in it's script, I apologize. But does anyone -- I have more questions, but does anyone in the audience have a question for oster because it's rare that some of his Elk and Senior would come speak to us. So any questions in the audience for Wilshire or the industry? Please. So the question for the video yes. The question for the video is for these JVs or strategic partnerships. Do you own it? Do you partner? What's the strategy going for? Is that a fair summary for the people on video? Look, I've been fortunate in my career to work at, I'd say 2 -- well, probably 3 firms that we -- I've helped grow all and 26 North, where a senior partner or a President or whatever or co-CEO at the time at different tunnels. And strategic partnerships make the difference. [indiscernible] I that. To work with them because Partnership is critical. Be good partners. That's sort of -- so if I had to come up with a philosophy good partners and build the good partnerships. Maybe you want to add on it.

Just maybe a little bit of a pivot, which is when you kind of look at it is like where -- what are the other things that our partners are bringing beyond just, let's say, the investments and origination is 1 area. But I think what Cavendisis doing with respect to Aventus, with Ceres, with that market information with the top-down support that's being given in the growth, like that is, frankly, just as, if not more valuable than just saying like, okay, they have an origination platform or they don't. This more broad kind of growth plan is, again, something that strategically we are very, very big believers and and happy to partner with the team on.

And I'll just close real quick is -- look, I can't tell you for certain we're going to get to $25 billion. Obviously, I can't say that I could say I've been part of 2 firms that I hope get there, too. But we have a plan to get there between strategic partnerships between the products we talked about between the amazing partnership with Wilshire and other ones that we'll plan to disclose in the coming weeks. And we definitely have an outline of -- from going from A to B, and we have a clear vision to get there. And I can assure all the shareholders, the people in this room and people listening that the team is working incredibly hard to get us to where we want to get to, whether it's in portfolio management, asset management, operations, accounting, IR BD compliance. We're working around the clock because we all are motivated by getting to where we want our ultimate goal, and everyone is growing at the same direction in a really positive way. So to my colleagues, it's CCaventus, formal Arena, thank you because it's not a one-person think show. It's all of us together. So thank you so much. And to CC Capital and to Ceres Life. Thank you for the partnership. And of course, thank you to what was West an to Covenas and Cam for your leadership and partnership.

Good morning, everybody. I drew the short straw here and have to follow up Andrew's energy. Unfortunately, he used up our allotment of jokes, so there's not much left for Nikita and I. I'd like to thank everyone in the room and on the webcast for your continued support of Aventus. We do not take this for granted. We are very excited for our rebranding of West Aim to Aventus and arena to Coventus, this is a clear indication of the hard work we've put into restructuring the platform and the new dawn for the business that is now at our doorstep. It has helped us to reenergize our employee base for this new era and the team is now ready to fly. To our shareholders, I want to assure you that we are laser focused on protecting shareholder value and achieving strong compounded annual returns. We understand that our recent financial report has raised some questions, particularly with respect to insurance accounting under IFRS. Nikita is going to speak in more detail on this point and we'll provide you today with an IFRS to U.S. GAAP comparison that should help bring some clarity to those questions. Starting with Q3 reporting and onwards, we intend to add quarterly supplemental schedules on our website for key certain U.S. GAAP metrics reconciled to analogous IFRS measures to help bridge this gap for our investors going forward. To our employees, I want to thank you for your hard work, your dedication, passion, energy and talent that you bring to Aventus, CCaventus and Ceres life every single day. We are at a great adventure together, and I couldn't be prouder to be taking this journey with this incredible team. So our business partners and other stakeholders, many of you are in the room, thank you so much for coming out. We couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead for us, and we look forward to partnering with you as we look to accelerate growth on our platform. I wear several different hats on the Aventus platform including my roles as President and COO of the overall company, Board member and Audit Committee Chair of Seale; and COO of Covent -- these roles give me a fairly unique 360-degree view across the platform, and I'd like to share some of those perspectives with you today. I think I hit that button too many times. I apologize. If it's possible to roll it back to the first slide. Thank you. We've spoken a lot about the flywheel effect from the integration of our insurance and asset management business. And indeed, that is really starting to take hold -- with over $300 million of new AUM to Aventus from the policy premiums taken in by series since the transaction closed. But this is only part of the asset management story as you heard a lot of that from Andrew. Much of my time has been spent on the restructuring of our asset management business. While the results haven't quite shown it yet, there has been a tremendous amount of groundwork laid in retooling the business and we are now poised to accelerate growth. Andrew and I have operated as true business partners in this endeavor since he joined the firm in December. There's nobody I'd rather be on this ride with Andrew brings, as you saw today, insatiable energy to the office, and it is bring new life into our very capable team. We have a shared vision and grand ambitions for what this platform can become. And we're going to have a lot of fun building out this platform with our team, many of whom are in the room today. As Andrew walked you through in his presentation, there are many value levers that we are pulling in CCaventus to drive growth. We're developing top-tier strategic relationships with Wilshire. And with the investment banking JV opportunity that he spoke about that we hope to announce here soon. We're engaged in a late-stage dialogue with top-tier asset allocators about potential allocations into our strategies. And we are innovating on the product side with a compelling commercial mortgage lending fund that is expected to launch in Q4, the ABL rated feeder strategy that we're also targeting for Q4, Q1 launch. And we anticipate that AUM from Ceres will actually be a minority of the overall new capital that will come into the asset management platform in 2027 and beyond. On the insurance front, I've been involved in the Ceres Life platform since the very beginning, partnering with Deanna, when we only had a handful of people for this new insurance venture that would eventually become known as Ceres Life. I want to thank Deanna for her sage leadership through the development, launch and early operations of Series Life. It was a distinct honor and privilege to work so closely with Deanna over the past couple of years. And I'm thrilled that she will be -- continue to be a resource as a strategic adviser to Eric, the Seres team and Aventus more broadly. I'm very pleased that Erik is now at the helm of Series Life. Erik is a stoic leader and a steady presence for the team as they enter this next phase of significant growth and maturity of the platform. I worked very closely with Erik since he joined Ceres Life. And I believe he is capable, poised and ready to lead the Ceres team into this exciting next phase of development and growth. I think you've got to see a lot of that today. The idea that we always had for Ceres was to create something that was truly differentiated in the market, starting with a blank sheet of paper and building it right from the ground up. No technology debt, no legacy balance sheet to contend with, and Ceres has truly achieved that. The platform they've created is quite impressive. Truly AI native with most processes fully automated and humans left to deal with the decisions and interactions that truly matter from a risk and policyholder perspective. They've demonstrated an ability to scale very quickly and efficiently, handling interactions with over 1,700 agents as Erik noted before, and handling thousands of new policy applications during this year with their existing staff. They are exceeding industry standards on every operational metric that we track closely, including call center wait times initial application reviews, time to issue, client satisfaction and commission processing. The technology is receiving rave reviews from agents on the ease and timeliness of processing. And Ceres Life is delivering on their promise for accelerated growth. As you heard from Eric, we now have 6 IMO distribution channels in place with our advisers Excel strategic relationship leading the pack. We have $690 million of premiums that have been issued or pending inception to date with over $600 million just this year. The engine is now firing on all cylinders and is well positioned to ramp substantially from here. Since we closed the strategic transaction with CC Capital in April 2025, we've been hard at work to retool and restructure the legacy asset management platform to prepare for this next generation of what we now call Aventus. I have to admit the amount of retooling that was required was more extensive than I had expected coming into the role. We closed the Singapore office given heavy cost burden in that region relative to the AUM and investment opportunities that we saw there. We ceased operations of what was called Questar Consulting Group, which was tasked with providing outsourced management staffing, mainly C-suite level for mainly our portfolio companies. We exited subscale JV partnerships and noncore business lines, reducing costs and simplifying our structure. And we completely revamped our valuation process moving from individualized Excel-based models to standardize Python-based models for similar assets. This has greatly improved our consistency and auditability of our valuation models -- while saving over $1 million in third-party costs for our investors. Let me repeat that, saved over $1 million of cost for our investors. While we have reduced headcount by more than a net 30% outside of India or north of 40%, excluding the impact of new hires focused on new business activity. Producing run rate cost savings of approximately $17 million this year. We believe we have done so in a way that does not materially impact our ability to service existing clients and build for the future. In fact, we have improved capabilities in several existing areas, including real estate and structured products. We -- as I mentioned before, we're preparing for the launch of these 2 new funds 1 focused on commercial mortgage lending and one focused on asset-based lending, and that's just the beginning. As Andrew mentioned, we launched our new CLO business and we're now actively investing our first warehouse and the second one is soon to come online. We substantially improved our knowledge of NAIC statutory and risk-based capital frameworks to improve our service to Ceres and other insurance-focused clients. We're working on implementing new technologies, including a new treasury and loan system. And also deepening our leverage of AI-enabled solutions to improve operational efficiency. While we still have much work ahead of us, we believe at this point, we are substantially complete with our restructuring efforts, and we have the right team in place that will allow us to build for the future -- so we -- just pivoting here a little bit. We often get questions about our progress on FinCo monetization, so I'd like to provide an update there. While there are nearly 100 positions within the FinCo portfolios, less than 20 positions make up nearly 80% of our portfolio value. Fincos are generally participate in allocations of investments that are also held within other legacy arena funds. The investments in the portfolio are generally illiquid. Many are equity or equity-like including foreclosures, nonperforming loans, real estate owned positions. We're continuing to chip away at realizations and this has now started to accelerate in Q3. Based on our current projections, we expect approximately half of the existing portfolio to liquidate by the end of 2027. And another 30% or 80% total by the end of 2028. And the remaining 20%, we expect to have a longer tail could extend to 2031 or beyond. Please keep in mind that is -- it's very difficult to predict with certainty the timing of exits for illiquid investments. And so the numbers I provided here are our best estimates as we stand here today. We are exploring alternatives that could accelerate liquidity, such as continuation vehicles, sales of fund interest to secondaries markets or other capital market solutions, but these options usually come at discounts to current NAV. No decisions have been made on this front, and we will ultimately be driven by what we believe is in the best interest of our investors when deciding on any liquidity alternatives. Okay. And finally, I just want to provide everyone with an update on our preparations for a U.S. listing. We often get questions about this from investors. First, for a public service announcement, to be very clear, nothing in this discussion should be construed as an offering of securities, and we are making no attempt here to market our securities for U.S. markets. This is simply a process update on preparedness for a potential U.S. listing. We have been consistent in saying that we plan to be operationally ready to pursue a U.S. listing in the U.S. by the end of 2026, and we are generally on track to complete our operational readiness in that time frame. Operational readiness mainly means the following 4 things: one, we've prepared and have audits of U.S. GAAP financial statements for at least the past 3 years of operations; two, we have SOX-compliant assessment of our internal control environment and can attest that we have reasonable controls in place that would satisfy SOX requirements for a U.S. public company; three, we have reporting capabilities in place to support the quarterly reporting cadence for 10-Q and 10-K filings that will comply with SEC reporting standards. And four, we have evaluated and lined up our legal counsel and financial advisers that we would intend to use for a potential U.S. listing. The actual timing of for when I need to say if or when we pursue a U.S. listing will depend on a variety of factors beyond operational readiness and no timetable has been established at this point for when we would decide to -- with that said, Nikita and the finance team have done a lot of great work on getting us operationally ready, which we'll cover in her discussion. And with that, I'll turn it over to Nikita.

All right. Great. Thank you, everyone. Matt. So I'd like to welcome you all again, and thank you for welcoming me. I joined in April of this year, really for 2 reasons. The first was I was really impressed with what this team has built in such a short amount of time with the tremendous backing of CC Capital. I also have a shared view with the team that we really are at an inflection point as a company. We are scaling for future growth, and this is our time. My responsibility, along with the broader finance team is to ensure that our reporting and financial discipline stays in step with the business as it scales. Within our Asset Management segment, as Matt has touched upon, we've done significant retooling within the business with an emphasis on building a segment that will scale its AUM and product offerings without adding significant incremental costs. As a leadership team, we have set the target to obtain profitability within this segment by the end of 2027, and with meaningful bottom line growth thereafter. Turning to the insurance segment. Our key objective here is economic profitability, earning meaningful spread above the crediting rates on the products we offer. The accounting framework does impact how this shows up in our financial statements, but it does not change our objective as a business. In the 3 quarters that we have written policies, we've attained over $690 million of premium issued and pending with over $459 million of invested assets as of August 31, 2026. As we continue to scale our MYGA and FIA issuance on our next-generation platform, near-term earnings and book value will continue to stay under pressure. This will moderate as the book seasons. We'll go into greater detail shortly on how to interpret these IFRS results for our insurance segment. But the most important takeaway when looking at this is that economically, the returns regardless of the accounting framework are the same. The difference comes down to timing as to when we can recognize these returns in our financial statements. All right. So there are several structural differences and components when we look at reserving between IFRS and GAAP and this slide can be used as a reference when going through the following example that we'll do. But there's really just 2 key takeaways to look at on this slide without us needing to become actuated. Number 1 is how commissions are treated under the standards. IFRS does not allow commissions to be capitalized as an asset, which means the commissions on every policy we write for IFRS and goes straight to the P&L and hits the bottom line. GAAP allows these assets to be capitalized as deferred acquisition costs, which I then amortize over the life of the policy. The second relates to risk adjustments, which are a component of the discount rates on the liability side. IFRS requires the insurance liability to be padded for an element of incremental nonfinancial risk and does not allow the issuer to assume it will achieve returns higher than a mandated rate, which may result in a higher liability recognized on issuance of a policy. GAAP takes a much more standardized approach to this by allowing the liabilities to be discounted fairly uniformly. However, there still can be differences in practice among issuers. So our FIA contracts can create some noise having to do with the guaranteed living withdrawal benefit that goes on top of some of them. And this will -- we can see under U.S. GAAP less so under IFRS. The rider itself allows for the policyholder to withdraw a set amount from their contract every year in perpetuity even if the contract balance is zero. But for purposes of the accounting today, we're just going to set this one to the side, and we can go through that further when we formally are in the U.S. GAAP reporting framework, if that concept does not impact the IFRS accounting. All right. So now I get to put my teacher hat on, which my team can attest is my favorite role to have in a finance organization. And we can go through a sample Ceres life, graybar policy that we would issue. So let's say we issue a $100,000 field policy with a GLWB rider. On day 1, we would receive a single premium of approximately $100,000 less $10,000 worth of commissions and expenses. The net 90,000 would then be invested by Peggy and her team in accordance with the strategic asset allocation policy, which we target to earn an expected return of at least 8% annually. Tying this first concept, we covered DAC. GAAP would allow us to recognize this $10,000 as an asset on our balance sheet. Under IFRS, this goes directly to the P&L and expense on day 1. Secondly, relating to the GLWB rider, GAAP allows us to recognize an asset for this and an equal and offsetting liability. IFRS does not recognize this concept within the recognition of the asset or the liability. The second concept relating to risk adjustments and discount rates on IFRS -- the day 1 liability equals the discounted cash flows plus a nonfinancial risk adjustment. Under GAAP, it's much simpler. It's the value of the policy on day 1 plus the value of the GLWB rider. So you can see from day 1 reporting, IFRS, we're in a net loss position purely based on the DAC commissions that we have paid and the best estimate liability. Whereas on IFRS, everything is recognized on the balance sheet and released over the life of the contract. And this is just how the accounting works. It's not unique to Aventus or series as a company. So this next slide sort of zooms out and looks at how this policy's profitability would emerge over time under both reporting frameworks. IFRS is the green line, Gap is the blue line. You can see from day 1, IFRS starts in a net loss position, whereas GAAP starts at 0 Gas profits emerge subsequently as our premiums were invested and then earn a higher return than the crediting rate, whereas IFRS, which has a much more liability focused model does not report a profit until year 5. We -- so a quick clarification as we look at Box 4 in the top right-hand corner, I just want to make sure these numbers don't get completed. The 6.3% breakeven yield is our asset side hurdle rate that we need to at least earn on our invested assets to cover the cost of the liability. The 5.1% that we apply under IFRS is a liability discount rate, not a target return. So what drives this 5 years to profitability is largely that we need to earn out of the day 1 commissions and risk adjustment from day 1. So -- but if we take a look back on how the policies behave over time, the standards ultimately converge with identical profitability of approximately $180,000. We have a similar concept of this for IGA, which is attached in the materials as an appendix. The key difference there is that there is no GLWB rider and because there are usually lower commissions on that type of product. the profitability for us at scale emerges around year 4 under IFRS. This next slide sort of takes a step back and then goes, all right, we've seen an example, what does this mean to our results as a whole, so if we move from left to right, what we've done has been a bridge of our equity or book value and then our P&L. Starting from our IFRS book value on the far left, you can see the main adjustments to get us from IFRS to GAAP really relate to the reversal of that cumulative day 1 loss on the insurance reserve side and then a few small policy adjustments between IFRS and GAAP. Looking at the P&L side, you can see that the main difference, we go from $114 million net loss to a $49.6 million loss, largely again due to that release of the reserve lot. So looking at our book value, which I know is a metric a lot of us focus on. We go from a book value of about $16.77 a share per IFRS to $18.93 a share under GAAP. So this is something I find very helpful when I'm looking at our results and comparing them to our peers. And so we'll be publishing something in a similar form going from 3Q forward that will be available on our website for investors to look at that hopefully will help sort of make a little bit more sense and get rid of the accounting noise in our financial statement. And this positions us pretty well for the last topic that Matt had teed up relating to our potential U.S. listing. So producing timely and accurate financial results remains a key focus of the finance organization. We have been preparing IFRS and GAAP results in parallel for our segments which ultimately will reduce the uplift efforts that will be required when preparing the initial registration statement. We've also been investing in our talent, building out our FP&A, external reporting and SOX reporting so that we ready with the goal of being SOX44A-ready within the next 12 months. We've also completed all the necessary corporate and tax restructuring needed to be a U.S. registrant. This work is all being done well in advance of a potential list listing, and we're doing it in the open with our employees and being fully transparent with our investor base. From past experience in doing these kinds of listings, the financial reporting readiness ends up being a very big drag on the transaction closing. And it's one that's well within management control, which is why we're bringing this all to the forefront. We're clearing this constraint now rather than having it hold up a transaction leader, our priorities from here fairly straightforward, publishing our quarterly IFRS to GAAP bridge working towards SOX44 readiness and continuing to make strides on supporting the business as it grows and scales. I'll now turn the presentation over to Chinh, Aventus Chairman and Founder of CC Capital for some remarks.

Good morning. As you know, we invested in the company about 18 months ago, and CC Capital today owns about 36% of the company. I think the most important, let me just flip this. The most important message here is that we are -- remain very, very committed and we have invested not only the capital, but really our human resources and our technology and our know-how and it is a foundational piece of what we do at CC Capital. We remain very excited in the story. We remain very excited in the execution of this. And as you know, it was -- the thesis was we have a differentiated starting point with West Aid -- we then bring a proven playbook of asset management and insurance and melded together, and then we bring our capabilities to accelerate the growth. the execution on this has been the key is to build out the insurance platform and the technology. And we're very pleased with technology series. It's launched. It has terrific reception and the technology is truly differentiated in world class. We believe within the insurance sector, there's less than a handful of companies that have this technology that we have today. The repositioning of Arena, which is now, as you know, Aventus has been a heavier lift than we thought. So we're going to be very frank with that. It has been a heavier lift. We had to reposition a number of different strategies. We've done a good job, we think, of hiring the best management team and the repositioning has now been completed at Arena. And the key here is to build something that's enduring and differentiate it and position for growth there afterwards. So where are we today? We think the most important thing is people. Andrew is absolutely terrific, and he has hired a number of different managers. And part of what we do is you have to have the right people in the right place. And it starts with Andrew. But as you can see, you have met scurby, you have a number of different people at the key positions, and that's the most important thing. The insurance scaling will take place over the next 2 years. You're going to measure this company by 2 facts over the next 2 years. what is the assets under management on the Ventas -- and what is the number of policies we issue profitably under series. Those are very 2 very tangible measures. A lot of the complexities of accounting for the insurance that we went through. I think we'll sort itself out over time. And really, it's all about scaling to profitability. So over the next few years, we're going to be very focused on growing the asset management function and I think Andrew alluded to some of the things we're doing, including a potential deal that we have in the pipeline that's very exciting. And then on the insurance side, how fast would the policies grow profitably. We at CC Capital will continue to put all of our efforts into this. I think about 1/3 of our firm is involved in this endeavor, and we'll continue to dedicate our time. We thank you very much for your support, and I really appreciate you being here.

Well, thank you, everyone. Hopefully, you've taken a lot out. There was a lot of information. The presentation will be memorialized on our website. But at this point, we wanted to open up for all your questions, both here in person and virtually. So with that, the mic is yours, and we welcome any questions.

Yes. I mean based on what we've seen conservative assumptions, we look like we're going to be profitable in 2027. I can't promise that, obviously, but just based on the assumptions that we've worked on together. That includes the strategic partnership. We know what we've alluded to the CLOs, doing 1 CLO at the end of the year, 1 CLO next year, getting the rate of feeder done. Like I mentioned, we took in $1 billion of capital. We're working some of LPs are on the phone and some 1 or 2 placement agents that we're working with, which are really contingency based, which great alignment from from our perspective that they get paid if we do well. They have a lot of they've shown a lot of interest. We just signed up an account like this week for million. So like the interest is there. So we're using very conservative assumptions. There's so much more that we want to do. As I mentioned, I'm heading out to a LatAm and there's a strategic partnership that we're super excited about. -- mentioned ETF business. And if all that hits the UCP business, if all that hits, then we're really, really excited the future. But just the baseline of what we think can hit. The other thing that Matt and I and the CC Capital Aventus team has done is take a hard look at people, right? And we've made some hard decisions -- we've rightsized the firm, in our opinion. We've promoted from within, and we've also brought in some top talent. And so repositioning from rightsizing the firm, getting the costs under what we think is appropriate process. Now do you see the results say No, because we just went through a RIF. I think my first week as CEO and you want to treat people right, you want to do the right thing by people, make sure they have severance, make sure they're taking care of make sure their families are taken care of. So the financial lift, as you would say, would take 3 or 2, 3, 4 months. But I think Matt and I are very confident about where the firm is heading.

Yes, for upgrade or capital organic market.

Yes. It's -- we think that we really do believe this that we have built a very powerful distribution engine with a partnership that we've secured. The rating upgrade, I don't think if we the IMO channel is going to prevent us from getting the volumes. That will be a headwind if we want to move into firm distribution banks and broker-dealers. But right now, with the IMO partners that we have, we think we have path to the amount of growth that we want. Capital is always something that we have to manage. The product that we're writing right now is the income product. It's a intensive, and that's because it's got guarantees in the product. But when you're a newer carrier distribution likes to sell that product because it's certain of what they get out of it. So it's a little bit of a we have to pay to play in that space. So capital is one of the things we have to think about Kim wants to make sure that when we're right in the business, we're doing it in a way that is accretive to shareholders. So that's probably the biggest focus I'd say that's the primary constraint. We have to continue to service the business well. So as we grow, we can't let service it. We can process a lot of business through the platform that we've built, but we still have to continue to make sure that the service is high quality.

Thanks,. A question when I get every now and then, and we referenced it early on is our strategic investment in Insignia earlier this year, alongside CC Capital, we did a $25 million investment -- and Chad, maybe I could call on you to provide a few brief comments on that position.

Sure. The $25 million investment that West made in Signia was for 2 purposes. One, Obviously, you have to believe it's a great investment, pure and simple, and it's going to generate great returns. And the second is strategic, given that Insignia is 1 of the major in West, we want to further that relationship in terms of more capital eventually coming to Aventus. On the first, I don't know if I can talk about this, Doug, but suffice it to say, that the company is doing very well. And in the first quarter, the -- I'm trying to look at dog and see what I can say and what I can't say. Within the first few months, the closing of Insignia, the value will be marked up very significantly, i.e., the value to Westaim, we can't say the number right now, but it's going to more very significantly by all of the investors in Cigna. So I think Westaim will recognize a big gain in the first quarter. Looking at that, I can't tell you the number, but nice number. And then in terms of strategic ties, there are several conversations going on right now. It will take a few more months, maybe at the end of the year or early next year in terms of additional strategic links between the 2 companies, i.e., benefiting Westaim.

So so far, so good. Very good, actually.