Charlotte Rotary Club 25 Mar 2014 Eric Steigerwalt, President, MetLife

Well, good afternoon everyone. Thank you, Ron, I appreciate that. It's nice to be here. We got a packed house, I can see here. I'm going to take you through a little bit of who MetLife is. We're new to the area. We're going to have at least—and I got to be careful, we got any press in here? He follows me with that pen—1,300 jobs coming here to Charlotte. As I've said before publicly, I'm an advocate here. I got here in June. Our experience has been nothing short of spectacular. I mean, nothing short of spectacular. And thank you all in the room. I know many of you have had an opportunity to help us in some way, shape, or form, whether it was before we got here. I know we got some people from the chamber here who were spectacular in helping us understand what Charlotte had to offer, and so many others who have played a role in welcoming all of the employees that have come here. We certainly have people moving from around the United States down here to Charlotte, but the majority of the jobs—let's call it the 75% area—are locally sourced. So we're hiring a lot of people here. We've got 900 people over at the Valentine facility already, and we just got started. My goodness. How many applications have we gotten? 77,000. I mean, these are applications that we've processed. Obviously, it would be wonderful to hire more, but it's very exciting to see the response locally. About us, we do a very extensive onboarding, two and a half days when you come, and obviously it's targeted to people who are new to that life. Those moving from other areas kind of know the company, but brand new people in the Charlotte area, they don't know MetLife at all. I think they know we have a blimp. But it's spectacular. We get feedback from these things, and we put a ton of work into it. We got one back that said, 'I feel like I hit the employment lottery. Not only do I have a great job, but now I'm quite sure that I have a great job with a great company.' And that's pretty cool. It's very satisfying to be part of that. So let me walk you through just a couple of highlights of MetLife, and then we can hopefully have time for some questions. Let's see how we make this work. Oh my God, you got to put this slide in here again. This says that I might say forward-looking statements, and most of them won't be true. So you can thank your friendly lawyers for that one. Walter, are you in on that? Did you get yourself in on that slide too? No, it wasn't you. Okay. So here's some key facts. I can't stand behind a podium, I got to walk around. Oops, how did that happen? That's a really frightening slide. Established 1868, so we've been around a long time. We're 40th on the Fortune 500 list, and we've been there for quite a while as well. $454 billion general account that backs a lot of these insurance products, but the balance sheet is over $800 billion at this point, so it's a pretty big company and still growing. We're now in 47 countries. We came through the global financial crisis with flying colors, I'm happy to say, especially since at the time I was the treasurer, and if we didn't come through with flying colors, I wouldn't be here today. But we did come through with flying colors, and it allowed us to buy a pretty big chunk of AIG, one of their foreign businesses that they certainly would never have wanted to sell except, of course, they had issues of their own. That was a pretty spectacular opportunity for us, and that now has us as a true global company in 47 different countries. We have about 65,000 employees globally. Leading global provider of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs. Group life, group dental programs. Maybe some of you are in those. We serve about 60,000 group customers, including 90 of the Fortune 100. So we've been around for a long time. Our business model is proven, even through this global crisis, which for a very large financial services company was frankly a real test. We all do modeling, the rating agencies follow us and try to figure out what kind of credit score they should give us. We've got regulators. I think every regulator on the planet now in some way, shape, or form regulates us. But there's nothing better than testing it through a real crisis. It's one thing that the models say you'll be okay; it's another thing to make sure you actually will be okay. That's something that I know I and many of my colleagues will remember for the rest of our lives. If you think back to 2008 when Lehman Brothers went down, I think around the country no matter what business you worked in, it was scary. But if you were in a financial services business, I'll probably die young, but never mind. We have a very proud history. I could stand up here and talk about this for two hours. When the Titanic survivors came back to New York City, they ended up in the home office with MetLife. When the Twin Towers went down, we decided very quickly that we were not going to require death certificates; we were going to pay everybody. That feels really good standing up here representing this great company. Those are the moments when you say to yourself, I spend more time at my job than I do with my family, and it sure feels great to work for a company who would do something like that. That's why I feel great about what we've done here in Charlotte, to the point of moving my family and asking a couple of hundred other people to move their families down here. You do that when you work for a company that you can be proud of. We're very proud of this company, and frankly, we're very proud of what we're doing down here. I'll talk about that a little bit. Strong results. The global crisis is starting to fade, at least in my mind. I don't know where you all feel about where we are, but as we came out of that, we had some real growth opportunities and took advantage of them. You can see our operating earnings just in the 13 to 12 period, we're up 11%. So the company is doing quite well. This gives you a sense of the business that I run. The whole pie is MetLife, and in the green, the two slices are the US retail business that I run. You can see it's 36% of the company, so we're a big chunk of this company. Where this division goes is where MetLife goes, and geographically where this division is going is to Charlotte, North Carolina. This was not an expense play. Yes, it's nice to have lower real estate costs and maybe slightly cheaper labor costs than some of the other areas that we were in, but the real reason—and this is the speech that I gave to our board—the real reason that we're here is this division needed a makeover. It's the original division in MetLife, all the way back to the original MetLife debit agents. We had a little bit of an imbalance. We were a little bit too focused on the top line and needed to be a little bit more focused on the bottom line. That's been my job over the last couple of years to do that. I thought the best way to do that is to think about the culture of the division that we're in. My goal, our goal, was to redefine that culture. To do that, my leadership team and I felt we need to go somewhere else. We couldn't stay in New York or New Jersey or any of the metropolitan area. We needed a new home. We searched around the country, and we ended up with Charlotte. It has been a fantastic place to build a new culture. The culture of this city is fantastic. It's perfect for what we're trying to do. For those of you who don't know, this is actually the retail headquarters. I had to sign a document that actually said that, which means my management team, most of the management team is here. A lot of the broader leadership team is based here. It worked for us because the primary goal was to change that culture, not just from a financial perspective. I don't have time to go through all the rest of it unless you have some questions. For a division or a company that's doing something like this, my experience is this is the only way to go. You need a fresh start if you're going to materially change a culture, and that's what Charlotte is to us. Thanks for the welcome here. We really appreciate it. You can see here the kind of things that we're working on at MetLife in broad strokes. I'm up here in the upper left-hand side: refocus the US business. If you work in financial services companies, we have a lot of interest rate risk on the books. You think about what happened in the global crisis, you better make sure that balance sheet of yours is balanced. That's why they originally called it a balance sheet, by the way. Maybe we were just a touch out of balance. We were probably selling too many variable annuities. A wonderful product for our clients, but it puts a lot of interest rate risk on the book. I had to change our product mix around. We've done a lot of work on our distribution channels. All of that is being driven now out of Charlotte. We love all our employees. I have over 9,000 employees around the United States, and I truly love them all, but the culture emanates from here. As far as I'm concerned, that's only going to get better. The talent that we've been able to source here is fantastic. 77,000 applications. When we were thinking this through, what could happen, what are the things we got to be worried about, think about the labor pool, etc., nobody anticipated that kind of response. Nobody. We have people from California saying, 'I'm in. I will drive you. Give me a job. I'm driving to Charlotte. I'll move my family there. I want to be part of what you're doing.' It's spectacular to be part of it. We've had so many fantastic partners, as I said at the beginning. I just see Walter Price sitting here, and I can't help but thank him. How about if you stand up for one second, Walter? This is a guy who not only gives great credibility to his firm, Van Allen, but to everybody in Charlotte. Everybody who has that kind of sense of integrity, always there to help. That's what this is all about. Sorry, Walter, I had to do it, man. I apologize. I won't do it again. So we have pretty big businesses, as you can imagine, from some of those numbers. We have a huge agency force at this point; it sits at around 4,600 advisers. But we also sell a ton through third party, so we're truly a national division. Obviously, we're a global company, but just this division is national. We've got 55 agencies throughout the United States, and then we have huge third-party businesses. We're selling through banks, we're selling through brokerage firms, etc. After what we've gone through here over the last couple of years, I think we're pretty poised for growth, not only in this division but worldwide. I think you could see that from the numbers: 2013 to 2012, and you'll see similar results in 2014. Our location planning, as I said, I can't imagine a better place. We looked in a lot of places. We went to a place where they said, 'We're going to put in light rail,' and I said, 'Well, when are you going to do that?' They said, 'Well, we've been thinking about it.' I asked how long they've been thinking about it, and somebody said 15 years. Here you have it. Somebody asked me the other day, 'Are you annoyed about all the construction on 485?' I'm thrilled with the construction on 485. Why? Because it's progress. Progress, yes. Nobody likes the traffic, but it is progress. That's not happening in some other cities who are trying to welcome businesses but frankly aren't spending the money on infrastructure. You all are here, and that makes a big, big difference. So thank you. Why Charlotte? Because you're fantastic. There you go. The last thing before we can maybe take some questions if you have some: as Ron said, we're here to stay. We want to be part of the fabric of this community. We're involved in charity work from day one: Junior Achievement, Second Harvest, Valentine, YMCA. We sponsored, with our friends over at Wells Fargo, Itzhak Perlman coming to the Charlotte Symphony. Wow, was that spectacular to see a living legend sit in front of you and do what he can do with a violin. Last but not least, our associates are wildly enthusiastic about giving back to the community. As we just heard from the tree planting, it's not just money, it's their time. We held a couple of sessions where we were going to ask people what they would like to get involved in, and we set up 25 chairs, and 400 people came, every one of whom had their own idea of where we could put our resources, where we could spend time on the weekends helping out. So it's our pleasure to be here and to get involved in this community. If we have some questions, I'd certainly love to take them.