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Voya Financial NYSE: VOYA used its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call to highlight a year of what management described as outperformance across its three core businesses—Retirement, Investment Management, and Employee Benefits—while also addressing heightened investor attention on Stop Loss reserving and pricing.
2025 results: earnings growth, cash generation, and $1 trillion in assets
Chief Executive Officer Heather Lavallee said 2025 delivered “strong financial and commercial results that exceeded our targets and accelerated our growth strategy.” She pointed to more than $1 billion of full-year pre-tax adjusted operating earnings, $775 million of excess cash generated, and a milestone in scale, with combined retirement and investment management assets surpassing $1 trillion.
Chief Financial Officer Mike Katz provided additional detail, saying pre-tax adjusted operating earnings were more than $1 billion, up $168 million versus the prior year, while earnings per share rose 22% to $8.85. Fourth-quarter EPS was $1.94, up 39% year-over-year. Katz attributed the results to “management action throughout the year” across commercial execution, the OneAmerica integration, and margin improvement in employee benefits.
Excess capital generation totaled about $775 million for 2025, including roughly $175 million in the fourth quarter, exceeding a $700 million target. Katz said adjusted return on equity expanded by more than 200 basis points to 18.6%.
Retirement: record defined contribution flows and OneAmerica integration
Management described Retirement as an “exceptional year” commercially and financially. Katz said the Retirement business generated nearly $1 billion of adjusted operating earnings on a standalone basis, up 17% from 2024, including $255 million in the fourth quarter. He said earnings growth was driven primarily by higher fee-based revenue, which exceeded $1.4 billion for the year, and said commercial momentum and OneAmerica contributed to a 21% year-over-year increase in fee-based revenue.
On flows, Lavallee said defined contribution (DC) net flows surpassed $28 billion in 2025, the highest in the company’s history, while participant accounts were “fast approaching 10 million.” Katz added Voya also added $60 billion of assets from OneAmerica, helping total DC assets rise about 30% to approximately $730 billion at year-end.
Looking to 2026, Katz said he expects “meaningful” DC net inflows, supported by plans expected to fund in the back half of the year. Workplace Solutions CEO Jay Kaduson also said the company expects flows to remain strong in 2026 and described plan RFP activity as growing at a “healthy and consistent pace.”
Lavallee also highlighted Wealth Management as a “high-margin growth engine,” noting it generated over $200 million in net revenues in 2025.
Investment Management: record net revenue and above-target organic growth
In Investment Management, Lavallee said the company delivered record results in 2025, including record annual net revenue of $1 billion and 4.8% organic growth, above its long-term target. She said the platform is positioned in growth areas such as private assets, insurance asset management, and intermediary expansion with actively managed ETFs, and characterized the third-party insurance channel as a “clear competitive advantage.”
Katz said net revenues exceeded $1 billion in 2025, with both institutional and retail revenues up year-over-year, and adjusted operating earnings of $226 million. He also noted $35 million of performance fees in the fourth quarter. Katz said full-year flows were about $15 billion and were broad-based across channels and strategies.
Investment Management CEO Matt Toms said the company’s long-term view remains “2%+ organic growth,” while noting momentum has allowed it to run above that level. He said the firm expects the first quarter of 2026 to be positive with “good breadth” and reiterated that insurance-channel fixed income—public and private—remains a key driver, alongside U.S. institutional demand (including target date offerings tied to the retirement franchise) and international income and growth equities.
Employee Benefits: margin recovery, Stop Loss actions, and a new leave offering
Employee Benefits was a central focus in the Q&A, particularly Stop Loss. Katz said adjusted operating earnings for Employee Benefits were $152 million in 2025, improving from $40 million in the prior year. In Group Life, he said full-year loss ratios were at the low end of the 77%–80% target range, including favorable fourth-quarter experience driven by better-than-expected claim frequency and severity. In Voluntary, Katz said full-year loss ratios were around 50%, consistent with the company’s plan to “drive enhanced value” for customers; he later said the outlook is for a “modest increase” in voluntary loss ratios while keeping net margins intact through efficiency efforts.
Stop Loss showed improvement but also prompted a fourth-quarter reserve increase. Katz said reported full-year Stop Loss loss ratios improved by 10 points, from 94% to 84%, reflecting in part a $37 million reserve increase in the fourth quarter. He said claims experience on the January 2025 book is developing “modestly better” than the prior year, but emphasized the importance of being “on the higher end of that best estimate range” of outcomes given a wider-than-normal distribution in the current healthcare backdrop. In response to questions about what changed, management emphasized timing in claims reporting and the increased uncertainty in the market.
Executives cited higher frequency of cancer claims, including at younger ages, and higher severity tied to cell and gene therapy. Lavallee compared the reserving uncertainty to a “hurricane trajectory” in which the range narrows with time as more data becomes available. Katz said the credibility of January cohorts rises substantially in the first quarter, which is why reserving decisions cluster around year-end and early-year development.
For the January 2026 Stop Loss business, Katz said the company achieved an average net effective rate increase of 24%, above the 21% increase achieved the prior year, and said it was able to maintain enforced premiums. He also said RFP volumes are rising as employers seek more certainty in medical spend, giving the company “more opportunities to select our risks.” Management reiterated it expects further margin expansion in Employee Benefits in 2026, while also stating it is not “declaring victory” on Stop Loss and will continue to update investors as the 2025 book develops.
Kaduson said Voya successfully launched its Integrated Leave and Disability Claim Solution in January and expects it to contribute revenue through 2026. He said more than 50% of Group Life, disability, and supplemental health RFPs for 1/1/2026 were bundled with leave, adding that clients and brokers are emphasizing leave administration as a key capability.
Capital deployment and 2026 priorities
On capital return, Katz said the company plans to repurchase $150 million of shares in the first quarter of 2026 and expects to do the same in the second quarter, subject to macro conditions. He said, in the near term, share repurchases are the “best use” of capital.
Lavallee said 2026 priorities include growing excess cash generation, maintaining balance sheet strength and capital flexibility, sustaining commercial momentum in retirement and investment management, and further improving Employee Benefits margins. On M&A, she said retirement remains in “secular consolidation,” Voya is viewed as a natural buyer, and the company is assessing opportunities, but it has a “high bar” given the current value it sees in buybacks. She also said potential retirement roll-ups would not necessarily take Voya “off track” from returning capital to shareholders.
Management repeatedly framed 2025 as evidence of execution across an integrated model, while acknowledging that Stop Loss remains the most closely watched variable as the company enters 2026.
About Voya Financial NYSE: VOYA
Voya Financial, Inc NYSE: VOYA is a financial services company headquartered in New York City, focused on helping Americans plan, invest and protect their savings. The company traces its roots to the U.S. operations of ING Group, which were spun off in 2013 and rebranded as Voya Financial in 2014. Voya’s operations are built around a customer-centric approach, drawing on decades of experience in retirement planning and risk management to serve both individual and institutional clients.
Voya’s core business activities span three key segments: Retirement, Investment Management and Employee Benefits.
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