Sun Life Financial CEO Dean Connor said yesterday that the company is still looking for more acquisitions—on the condition that the acquisitions will help Sun Life meet its return on equity target of 12-14%.
“We continue to look for opportunities,” Connor said during the Scotiabank Financials Summit in Toronto. “We think we have the bandwidth to do more.”
“The bar continues to be high,” he added. “Our hurdle rates for M&A continue to fit with the 12-14% RoE targets we put out for the company. We have not lowered our hurdle rates.”
For the past three years, Sun Life took an aggressive approach to acquisitions, snapping up insurance carriers particularly in seven Asian markets such as China, Hong Kong, India and the Philippines. The company is hoping to tap into the region’s growing middle class.
“These are huge markets,” Connor told
Reuters in an interview last August. “The seven markets together comprise something like half the world’s population so job one is to get bigger in the markets we’re already in.”
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