You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: We expect to file our Form 10-Q and post it on our website on or before August 6.
You'll find a reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures in the appendix.
Turning to slide 4, we reported operating earnings per share of $0.66, which represents 20% growth over the prior period, or 60% growth excluding significant items in both periods.
Sales activity remains strong and we have exceeded pre-pandemic levels in a number of areas.
Total Life and Health NAP was up 35% over the second quarter of 2020 and up 10% relative to 2019 levels.
Our results also benefited from ongoing deferral of medical care which boost our health margins, solid alternative investment performance, and continued share repurchase activity.
Premium collections remain strong in our underlying margins excluding COVID impacts performed well as expected.
Our capital and liquidity remain conservatively positioned.
We ended the quarter with an RBC ratio of 409% and $336 million in cash at the holding company while also returning $105 million to shareholders through a combination of share repurchases and dividends.
We continue to execute well against our strategic priorities, specifically, successfully implementing our strategic transformation that we initiated in January 2020, growing the business profitably, launching new products, and services, expanding to the right to slightly younger wealthier consumers within the middle-income market, and deploying excess capital to its highest and best use.
Turning to slide 5 and our growth scorecard: As was the case for 6 consecutive quarters prior to the pandemic, all 5 of our scorecard metrics were up year-over-year.
Life sales remained strong, fueled by continued momentum in both our direct to consumer and exclusive field agent channels.
Overall health sales were up almost 90% over the prior period which reflected the first full quarter of the pandemic when state home restrictions were first Instituted.
Total collected life and health premiums were up 1%.
This reflects continued solid growth in Life NAP and persistency of our customer base offset as expected by lower Medicare Supplement premiums.
Annuity collected premiums were up 42% year-over-year, relative to the second quarter of 2019 annuity collected premiums were up 1%.
Client assets in brokerage and advisory grew 33% year-over-year to $2.6 billion fueled by new accounts, which were up 13%, net client asset inflows and market value appreciation.
Sequentially client assets grew 8%.
Fee revenue was up 50% year-over-year to $31 million, reflecting growth in 3rd party sales, growth within our broker dealer, and registered investment advisor, and the inclusion of DirectPath results.
Turning to our Consumer division on Slide 6: We continue to leverage our cross-channel sales program.
Our hybrid sales and service model which blend virtual engagement with our local field, exclusive field agents has led to significant improvements in lead conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and sales product.
Life and health, sales were up 32% over the prior period, and 19% over the same period in 2019.
Life sales climbed 8% for the quarter to over $50 million reflecting the 6th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth.
Direct to consumer life sales were level with the record production in the prior period.
Life sales generated by our exclusive field agents were up 23% and comprised over 40% of our total life sales.
Leads from our direct to consumer business supported this growth.
Within our health product lines supplemental health and long-term care sales saw healthy growth over both the second quarter of 2020 and the second quarter of 2019.
These results benefited from initiatives that enable our products to be sold through multiple channels.
Our 3rd-party Medicare Advantage party sales were up 20% in the second quarter.
Medicare supplement sales remain challenged.
Med sales were up modestly over the first quarter.
However, as discussed in previous quarters, our market is experiencing a secular shift away from Medicare supplement and toward Medicare Advantage.
We continue to invest in both our Medicare supplement and Medicare Advantage offerings to ensure we are well positioned to meet our customers' needs and preferences.
Consistent with the first quarter, roughly 50% of our Consumer Division life and health sales were completed virtually.
Consumer selecting to engage virtually held steady, even as communities reopened and vaccination rates increase.
This is a profound change in how we connect with consumers and further validate the transformation we initiated in January of 2020.
It will continue to have significant implications for our business going forward.
Among other things, this change, expand our agents' ability to interact with customers across a broader geographic area.
As I mentioned annuity collected premiums were up 42% as compared to the prior year and up 1% versus 2019.
The number of new annuity accounts grew 16% and the average annuity policy size rose 14%.
Our portfolio of index annuity products continues to be well received by our middle market consumers.
Our recently launched guaranteed lifetime income annuity plus was a key contributor to our second quarter annuity sales growth.
Of course, we continue to maintain strict pricing discipline on our annuities to balance sales growth and profitability.
Participation rates and other terms are reviewed regularly to reflect current macro environment conditions.
Client assets and brokerage and advisory grew 33% year-over-year and 8% sequential to $2.6 billion in the second quarter.
Combined with our annuity account values, we now manage $12.7 billion of assets for our clients.
This has fundamentally shifted the relationship we have with our customer base.
Unlike some insurance products, which can be transactional in nature, investment products tend to create deeper and longer-lasting customer relationships.
We continue to reap the benefits of the shift in the agent recruiting strategy that we initiated several years ago.
We now rely more heavily on targeted recruiting approaches, including personal referrals.
This has periodically resulted in fewer new agent recruits.
However, the new agents we appoint are more likely to succeed and stay with us over time.
Relative to the year-ago period, our producing agent count increased 7%.
Sequentially, our producing agent count was down slightly but overall, our agent force remained stable.
Our securities licensed registered agent force was up 6%.
Improvements in agent productivity had became more important driver of our sales growth then agent count in recent quarters and we have significant runway for future growth.
Turning to slide 7 in our worksite Division: It looks like sales were up sharply in the second quarter as compared to the year-ago period.
We expect to approach 2019 sales levels when access to workplaces improves.
Ongoing pilots and programs to target new employer groups, offer new services, and capture new business continue to progress retention of our existing customers also remained strong with continued stable levels of employee persistency our producing agent count was up 15% year-over-year and 7% sequentially.
Recall that we slowed our agent recruiting during the pandemic due to workplace restrictions.
As a result agent count remains down nearly 40% from pre-COVID levels.
To help boost recruitment and support a return on to pre-COVID production levels, we are rolling out a field agent referral program.
This program is designed similarly to our successful Consumer Division program.
Relative to 2019 levels, our veteran agent count is up 7%.
Retention in productivity levels among our veteran agents who have been with us for more than 3 years remains very strong.
These agents have been the driving force behind our recent sales momentum and are expected to be instrumental in helping to rebuild our overall agent force.
Few revenue generated from our business is more than doubled in the quarter due to the DirectPath acquisition feedback has been strong surrounding the unique combination of products and services we can now bring to the worksite market.
We are realizing early cross sale successes between Web Benefits Design and DirectPath and the pipeline continues to grow.
Along with strong client retention, these business has also generated double-digit increases over both 2020 and 2019 in various metrics.
Turning to slide 8: Our robust free cash flow enabled us to return $105 million to shareholders in the second quarter, including $87 million in share buybacks.
We also raised our dividend 8% in May and 9 consecutive annual increase.
Our capital allocation strategy remains unchanged.
We intend to deploy 100% of our excess capital to its highest and best use over time.
While share repurchases form a critical component of our strategy, organic, and inorganic investments also play an important role.
Turning to the financial highlights on Slide 9: Operating earnings per share were up 20% year-over-year and up 60% excluding significant items.
The results for the quarter reflect solid underlying insurance margins, ongoing net favorable COVID related impacts, strong alternative investment performance, and continued disciplined capital management.
Over the last 4 quarters, we have deployed $337 million of excess capital on share repurchases reducing weighted average shares outstanding by 7%.
Return on equity improved 90 basis points in the 12 months ending June 30, 2021 compared to the prior year period.
The sum of expenses allocated to products and not allocated to products.
Excluding significant items increased by about $6 million sequentially driven by incentive compensation accrual adjustments related to earnings outperformance in the first half of the year.
The increase in expenses over the prior year period also reflects lower a management expenses in 2020 due to COVID related restrictions and the June 30, 2020 conclusion of a transition services agreement related to the long-term care reinsurance transaction completed in 2018.
In general, our expenses continue to reflect both expense discipline and operational efficiency on the one hand and continued targeted growth investments on the other hand.
Turning to slide 10: Insurance product margin in the second quarter was up $17 million or 8% excluding significant items.
Net COVID impacts were $21 million favorable in the quarter as compared to $6 million unfavorable in the prior year period.
Excluding COVID impacts, margins in the quarter remained solid and stable across the product portfolio.
The net favorable COVID impacts in the quarter reflect continued favorable claims experience in our healthcare products, particularly impacting Medicare supplement and long-term care due primarily to continued deferral of care.
This was partially offset by the unfavorable impact of COVID related mortality in our life products.
The favorable COVID impact in the quarter exceeded our expectations as the outlook that we provided on our April earnings call assume that healthcare claims would begin to normalize in the second quarter, including an initial spike in claims due to pent-up demand that did not materialize in the quarter.
Regarding our annuity margin, recall that in the second quarter of 2020, we saw a favorable mortality in our other annuities block unrelated to COVID, which translated to $10 million of positive impacts.
As we noted at the time, this resulted from a handful of terminations and large structured settlement policy, which we expect from time to time in this block, but not on a regular basis.
Turning to slide 11: Investment income allocated to products was essentially flat in the period as growth in the net liabilities and related assets was mostly offset by a decline in yield.
Investment income, not allocated to products, which is where the variable components of investment income flow through increased $40 million, reflecting a solid gain in the current period and our alternative investment portfolio and a loss on that portfolio in the prior year period.
Recall that we report our alternative investments on a 1/4 lag.
Our new money rate of 3.38% for the quarter was lower sequentially reflecting a continuation of our up in quality bias from the first quarter and continued spread tightening in general, partially offset by higher average underlying Treasury rate in the second quarter versus the first quarter.
Our new investments comprised $1.1 billion of assets, with an average rating of single A and an average duration of 16 years.
This higher level of new investment reflected reinvestment of maturing assets and a higher level of prepayment activity in the period.
Our new investments are summarized in more detail.
Turning to slide 12: At quarter end, our invested assets totaled $28 billion, up 8% year-over-year approximately 96% of our fixed maturity portfolio is investment grade rated with an average rating of single A. This allocation to single A rated holdings is up 200 basis points sequentially.
The BBB allocation comprised 39.4% of our fixed income maturities, down 140 basis points.
Both year-over-year and sequentially.
We are actively managing our BBB portfolio to optimize our risk-adjusted returns to the extent suitable and attractive opportunities develop, we may over time balance recent up an quality bias with a modest increase in allocation to alternatives asset-backed securities closed or investment grade emerging market security.
Turning to slide 13: We continue to generate strong free cash flow to the holding company in the sector with excess cash flow, $114 million or 128% of operating income for the quarter and $432 million or 119% of operating income on a trailing 12 month basis.
Turning to slide 14: At quarter end, our consolidated RBC ratio is 409%, which represents approximately $45 million of excess capital relative to the high end of our target range of 375% to 400%.
Our Holdco liquidity at quarter end was $336 million, which represents $186 million of excess capital relative to our target, minimum Holdco liquidity of $150 million.
Even after returning $105 million of capital to shareholders in the quarter, our excess capital grew by approximately $22 million from March 31 to June 30 of this year.
This primarily reflects the strength of our operating results in the quarter and the recent up in quality bias in our investment portfolio.
Turning to slide 15: While uncertainty related to COVID continues, we believe it is very unlikely that any future COVID scenario would cause our capital and liquidity to fall below our target levels.
For that reason, we are no longer running a formal adverse case scenario as we had been doing through the first quarter of this year.
Instead, we are updating a single base case scenario or forecast with upside and downside risks to that forecast.
In our most recent forecast, we expect a continuation of the sales momentum we've seen in the past 5 quarters, we expect a modest net favorable COVID related mortality and morbidity impact on our insurance product margin for the balance of 2021 and the modest net unfavorable impact in 2022.
This assumes that COVID deaths do not worsen in the second half of this year and that healthcare claims begin to normalize after a brief spike beginning in the 3rd quarter due to pent-up demand from deferral of care.
When and if a spike actually occurs and when our health product claims actually normalize is highly uncertain.
So far, we have seen some intra-quarter volatility in our health claims during the pandemic, but nothing that has persisted long enough to establish a trend.
On the mortality side impacting our life products, the number of COVID deaths we will see for the next several quarters is also uncertain, given the recent rise in infections largely from the Delta variant and the potential for material impacts from additional variants.
Certainly, one of the biggest risks to our forecast is how exactly COVID will evolve from here.
But again, we believe, however it evolves, it represents an earnings event for us, favorable or unfavorable, not the capital or liquidity of that.
Assuming no shift in interest rates, we expect net investment income allocated to product to remain relatively flat in this base forecast as growth in assets is offset by lower yields reflective of both the lower interest rate environment and are up in quality shift in asset allocation.
In general, we expect alternative investments to revert to a mean annualized return of between 7% and 8% at some point and over the long term, but the actual results will certainly be more variable with likely more upside potential than downside in the near term given the current economic outlook.
We expect fee income to be modestly favorable to the prior year as we grow our 3rd party Med Advantage distribution and improve the unit economics of that business.
Growth in web Benefits Design, earnings, and the inclusion of DirectPath will also contribute to fee income.
We expect the sum of our quarterly allocated and not allocated expenses tax significant items for balance of the year to be generally consistent with levels reported in the first quarter of this year, allowing for some quarterly volatility.
And finally as COVID related uncertainty diminishes which is certainly will at some point, we expect to manage our capital and liquidity closer to target levels, reducing our excess capital over time.
We are pleased with the healthy results we've generated this quarter and in the first half of the year.
The strength of our diversified business model and the steady execution of our strategic priorities and organizational transformation underpin that success.
The consumer division has met or exceeded pre-pandemic performance and our worksite Division is making meaningful progress.
As we enter the second half of the year, we remain squarely focused on maintaining our growth momentum, building upon our competitive advantages, and managing the business to optimize profitability, cash flows, and long-term value for our shareholders.
Please continue to take care of your health, including vaccinations for those that are eligible.

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q2 operating earnings per share $0.66.
qtrly total revenues $1,073.1 million versus $1,014.2 million.

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