“Now looking ahead, we expect this momentum to continue going into the fourth quarter, and we expect to exceed full year sales guidance for '25.”

In context

“s well as the product enhancements, combine it with our distribution strength, that's really what's driving the strong growth that we see in both our channels, bancassurance as well as the face-to-face channel in Japan. Now when we look to the rest of Asia, sales there were up 39% year-over-year. And we're really seeing strong performance in Korea and China here. China sales were higher in the bancassurance channel, and that's really been driven by the fact that we've launched some new key bank partners as well as been able to penetrate existing bank partners. In Korea, we continue to deliver consistently strong performance. And here, we are showing strength in our U.S. dollar product sales as well as our one variable life product and in the face-to-face channels. So good results overall. Now looking ahead, we expect this momentum to continue going into the fourth quarter, and we expect to exceed full year sales guidance for '25. I hope that helps. Ryan Krueger: Great. And then just a quick one on expense seasonality. Can you -- I think you typically do have some expense seasonality in the fourth quarter. Can you give us any rough magnitude of what to expect there? Michel Khalaf: Yes. Ryan, it's Michel. Yes. Look, we are really pleased with the -- our direct expense ratio coming in well below the 12.1% that the target that we had set during the outlook. There is some seasonality, fourth quarter being somewhat higher than the first 3 quarters. But I would say that our expectation is that we will come in below the 12.1%, I would say, even well below the 1.1 at year-end. And 2 factors contributing to this, I will say. One is early this year, we had asked our teams, given the uncertain environment to tighten our belts”