Both our Retirement and Annuities businesses have improved their returns while also meeting important client needs. In Retirement, we serve nearly 5 million plan participants and work closely with our institutional clients to help them and their employees with their retirement readiness needs. In support of this, we focus on providing holistic solutions that can help plan participants become more confident about achieving their goals and, importantly, understand how savings translate into monthly retirement income. Similarly, our Annuities business continues to profitably grow by introducing new products and expanding distribution. Through Retirement Solutions, we not only help our customers accumulate, protect and distribute their assets, we also help them become retirement ready — both financially and emotionally.

With a focus on being a reliable partner committed to reliable investing, our asset management platform spans fixed income, equities and multi-asset strategies and solutions. At year-end 2014, 97%, 59% and 98% of our fixed income assets, equity assets, and multi-asset strategies and solutions, respectively, outperformed benchmark or peer median returns on a 5-year basis¹. To continue our momentum, we are investing in the business for further growth. These include investments in new products and distribution, such as expanding our efforts to meet the long-term investment needs of insurance companies by helping them manage their general accounts.

For example, we are investing in new features in our suite of universal life insurance offerings to ensure we can offer a valuable financial protection product while also achieving better returns.
We are also focused on capital initiatives that can improve returns on our existing book of business. At the workplace, our Employee Benefits business continues to achieve profitable growth while also providing valuable group life, stop loss and voluntary benefits.