TOMS Capital Investment Management ("TCIM"), one of the largest shareholders of Voya Financial, Inc. (NYSE:VOYA) ("Voya" of the "Company"), today issued the below statement following the Company's first quarter 2026 earnings call:
"As we recently expressed, Voya is one of the most compelling and undervalued franchises in financial services. Voya has outperformed peers in delivering consistent net inflows, recently surpassing $1 trillion in assets while prudently avoiding aggressive private credit risk. Our issue is not with Voya's franchise quality; we are investors because of it. Rather, our issue is with current management's lack of urgency as its stubbornness to change course has jarringly de-rated the multiple.
On yesterday's Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Heather Lavallee assured analysts and investors that there is ‘no daylight between the Board and management on the strategic path forward.' That is precisely the problem. Under the tenure of prior CEO Rod Martin, Voya had won credibility as a fresh spin-off from ING and drove multiple expansion by executing a series of divestitures to pivot from a capital-intensive life insurer to a capital-light retirement platform. Since Ms. Lavallee took over in ‘23, Voya's ‘strategic path forward' has been to burn that credibility with both its investor base and the research community. This has caused Voya to trade at a historically wider discount to core peers and counterintuitively even to its own multiple as a capital-intensive life insurer. Voya's three-year shareholder return ranks 14 out of 17 against Voya's self-selected proxy peer set – with two of the three names behind Voya being sub-$500 million market-cap businesses that bear little operational resemblance to a $1 trillion asset platform.
For this clear underperformance, Ms. Lavallee earned more than $16.2 million in total compensation over the course of 2025. CFO Michael Katz and Group CEO of Workplace Solutions, Jay Kaduson (who oversees the widely derided stop-loss business), each earned more than $7.5 million. This is not pay-for-performance; rather, this is disregard for shareholder value. That disregard was also clear to us during yesterday's earnings call, when respected sell-side analysts – who pressed on the multi-year valuation gap, the credibility of management's own asserted timeline on the stop-loss turnaround, and the lack of clarity around the path forward – were cut off before they could complete their questions. Instead of challenging management's disregard, this Board – under Non-Executive Chairperson Ruth Ann M. Gillis – has chosen to ratify it and is failing to do its part.
Therefore, when Ms. Lavallee spoke on yesterday's earnings call about Voya's 'unwavering focus on creating long-term shareholder value,' we remained unconvinced. More than three years into her tenure as CEO – a sufficiently long runway by any measure – we have yet to see this value. The repeated invocations of ‘long-term shareholder value' are meaningful only when accompanied by a credible plan to create it. We see no such plan, and based on how Voya has traded, nor does the market.
In response to a question on how Voya can correct its valuation, Ms. Lavallee stated, ‘It all comes down to execution.' We could not agree more. Hope is not a strategy. Voya's leaders must exercise their fiduciary duties and initiate a formal review of all strategic alternatives."
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Longacre Square
tcim@Longacresquare.com