Morning everybody. Welcome.

My name is Dan Moyane. It's a pleasure and a privilege to welcome all of you here to the presentation of the interim financial results of the Momentum Group for the period ended 31 December 2025.

We're coming to you live from the company's offices in Centurion here in Tshwane. We welcome everybody who's joining us, especially online as well: the analysts, the investors, the shareholders, journalists as well, and of course employees of the group who can watch us live on BDTV Channel 412, that's on DStv.

We have a live webcast for you, corpcom.co.za/mg1903, which is today's date, the 19th of course of March 2026, that's mg19032026. Also live streaming to our employers on our e-Pulse platform.

The full results already available since this morning on the group's website, which is www.momentumgroupltd.co.za. Shortly, the Momentum Group CEO, that's Jeanette Marais, and the Group Finance Director, Risto Ketola, will present this set of results covering how the focused implementation of the group strategy is progressing and delivering.

You'll hear about how this disciplined execution of the strategy has produced the solid set of results, a brilliant performance for the period that's under review. As usual, at the end of the presentation, after they've concluded, we will have time to answer some questions from our analysts.

Let's welcome Jeanette with a warm round of applause.

Good morning, everyone. As Dan have said, thank you, Dan, a very warm welcome to our interim results presentation.

As he said, I would now say live from Risto's office in our Centurion head office. Poor Risto always have to vacate his office for about a week so that we can get this ready.

It really is a good day for the Momentum Group. We are presenting a strong set of results, and it has been made possible by very disciplined execution of our Impact Strategy across all of our business units and the resilience of our diversified portfolio.

In my presentation, I will start by highlighting some of the key financial takeouts from the interim results, after which, as always, I will zoom in on some of the delivery highlights from our Impact Strategy. Then of course, as always, Risto will spend quite a bit more time delving into the intricacy, the interesting numbers, and the higher-grade ones that is far beyond my ability to explain to anybody.

To start off, we delivered normalized headline earnings of R3.7 billion, up 8% on the prior period. This performance is the result of strong contributions across the group.

Three trends really boosted our performance. Firstly, underwriting activities remained at very high levels of profitability.

Every business involved in insurance underwriting performed really well, including short-term, life insurance, and health insurance. Secondly, rising markets and solid investment performance from our investment teams increased our assets under management and our asset-based fee income across savings and investment products.

Then lastly, good persistency further aided profits across all of our businesses. VNB declined by 15% to R238 million year-on-year.

Now, improving VNB remains a key focus area for us across all of our business units. It is the one area where we are falling short of the targets that we had set for ourselves.

We are seeing some positives. VNB increased by 25% from the previous six months, and it improved in all businesses, except Momentum Investments, where VNB was negatively affected by the market shift from guaranteed to living annuities.

However, we remain leaders in the IFA market for guaranteed annuities, and we maintained our position overall, and our market share position overall in this space. As the VNB contribution from guaranteed annuities keeps on reducing as sales volumes decrease, other businesses are starting to compensate.

It is worth mentioning that Metropolitan made a significant turnaround from negative R31 million to positive R16 million VNB. Interesting to note that the VNB peak that you see on the slide there of R389 million two years ago was also at the peak of life annuity new business sales.

I need to do a household thing. I don't have a timer, and it's going to be a problem if I take up all Risto's time.

If you could switch the timer on, I'll appreciate that. Our sales continue to increase, up by 11% to R43.3 billion.

Momentum Africa delivered the strongest increase of 28%, supported by good corporate protection business in Lesotho, Namibia, and Botswana, and increased retail flows in Namibia. This shows that the implementation of our new Africa operating model starting to deliver.

Momentum Corporate delivered 23% growth in sales, driven by FundsAtWork protection business. Momentum Investments increased their new business sales by 12%, driven by higher volumes on the Momentum Wealth platform.

Momentum Retail grew sales by 6%, supported by strong long-term savings business. The only business where we saw a decrease was in Metropolitan, where sales decreased by 13%.

This is aligned to the restructure of our distribution area that we've spoken about before, and I will talk specifically about Metropolitan distribution in a later slide. We are pleased to declare an interim dividend of 110 cents per ordinary share.

This is an increase of 29% on the interim dividend in the prior year. We are completing the current share buyback program, and at the moment no further capital has been allocated towards further share buybacks.

Then again a highlight, at this stage at 24%, we are already above the ROE target of 20%. Our high ROE is the result of good product mix and very disciplined capital allocation.

At 24%, our ROE remains one of the highest in the industry. As I said, Risto will shed more light on these numbers.

I'm now going to share some highlights on the progress that we've made with the execution of our Impact Strategy. You are very familiar by now with the six strategic objectives of our Impact Strategy.

Over the next slides, I will zoom in on unlocking the full potential of our businesses and on investing aggressively in advice to drive growth. Then I will also just spend a slide or two on updating you on our progress on our digital and our people strategic enablers.

We will provide a full strategy update for our business and for all of our business units at our capital markets day on the 2nd of June, please make a note of that. Invitations will follow very soon.

Unlocking the full potential of our businesses means that we boost our successful business units with more investment, and we fix our underperforming businesses through turnaround strategies. I am delighted to say that if you look back a year and a half ago, the businesses that we identified—Metropolitan, Momentum Insure, and Momentum Africa, where we wanted to implement our new operating model—are all in great shape.

Risto will talk about that a little bit more, but I can honestly say this morning in my first interview, the journalist asked me, 'What is your greatest focus area? What are you most worried about in your businesses?'

I had to say, 'Not much, except maybe for VNB.' I think that is really something that we can be very proud of.

Sorry, let me just go back. I think I'd like to highlight some of the developments and some of the positioning of our non-life businesses.

This morning I'm going to focus on Guardrisk and Momentum Insure, as well as Momentum Health. It is time that we demonstrate the scale and the strength of our combined non-life insurance businesses, Guardrisk and Momentum Insure.

If you look at the graph, viewed together, Momentum Group is the third-largest player with a 10.2% share of total non-life insurance revenue, and this shows that we rank firmly as a top-tier player in this space. These two businesses operate in complementary areas of the non-life market, which gives the group broad and diversified exposure across line segments and distribution channels.

Our portfolio is intentionally diversified from traditional personal and commercial insurance to more specialist, highly customized product solutions. We also benefit from a diversified margin mix that combines our traditional profits with fee-based administration income and investment income.

Rather than consolidating these two businesses and these two capabilities under one brand, we made a deliberate strategic choice to run each business as a focused and distinct model. This sharpens our execution, and it keeps both our units and both our CEOs of those businesses performing at what they do best.

Through our structure, I think we have the best of both worlds. Momentum Insure provides a strong traditional non-life foundation, while Guardrisk extends the group's reach into the fast-growing demand for partner-led, structured, and embedded insurance, where we expect to see further long-term growth.

Now for the other good news. You would have seen the news that Momentum Health has been selected as the preferred healthcare administration partner for Bonitas Medical Fund, and our implementation date is the 1st of June 2026.

Now, this deal represents a significant milestone for us that strategically and operationally reinforces our position as a credible, trusted partner in South Africa's evolving healthcare ecosystem. To give you an idea of the size of this deal in numbers.

Firstly, this is the biggest transfer of a medical scheme from one provider to another in the history of South Africa. It adds 370,000 families and 750,000 beneficiaries under our administration.

The addition of Bonitas makes Momentum Health the second-largest medical scheme underwriter and administrator in South Africa. The group's health families in South Africa have grown to 1.7 million and our beneficiaries to 3.6 million when we include our other non-scheme members like our leading Health4Me insurance solution.

Now, if we add the numbers and the members that we manage in the rest of Africa, our health business looks after more than 4 million beneficiaries. Then we touch the lives of more than 25 million beneficiaries when we include our partnership with Aditya Birla in India.

This slide, it's our brag slide, gives you an idea of the impact of the deal on the South African health administration landscape. Note, these numbers are the audited health industry numbers from 2024, and it excludes the health insurance market.

You'll see how we shifted into second place, growing our market share from 22% to 30% for lives under administration. The South African medical scheme administration market remains highly concentrated, with three administrators accounting for almost 90% of beneficiaries.

We are really excited to welcome the Bonitas Medical Scheme members to our family, and this deal really aligns with Momentum Health's purpose to provide more health for more people for less. Then to switch to advice.

Our focus on advice is one of the ways in which we drive future growth and differentiation for the group. As part of this strategic initiative, we invest in expanding our advice capability and our footprint, while using technology to empower advisors, improve the client experience, and strengthen our competitiveness across the full retail advice market.

We have now successfully implemented our Momentum advice ecosystem, from where we strategically guide the advice businesses of Momentum Financial Planning, our tied agency force, and Consult, our supplier-sponsored IFA network, and these are complemented by FinGlobal, our financial immigration specialists. Now, although these businesses have different FSPs, different brands, and different value propositions, they share the same advice culture and business principles of vertical integration and quality advice outcomes.

This not only increase our efficiencies, but it also improves the sustainability of our advice model. Sorry, let me just take a sip.

I'm too excited. The combined advisor base between these three businesses is now close to 1,000 if you add that up.

I think it's important to note that if you also add Metropolitan and Momentum Insure, the group's combined retail advisor base is now closer to 3,000. To focus on MFP, MFP has spent the last two years implemented their strengthened operating model and moving from the culture of a tied brokerage to that of a tied agency model.

Over the last six months, 89 89 new advisors, and they were also mostly new to industry, have joined us. The focus now shifts to acquiring experienced advisors over the next six months.

Advisors meeting the minimum production criteria improved from 29% a year ago to 52% over the last year, and this is really due to strengthened advisor accreditation and quality standards. The renewed vertical integration strategy in MFP is starting to gain traction, totaling R1.2 billion in net flows into Momentum solutions for the last six months, which is nine times more than a year ago at R130.7 million.

Consult has continued its positive trajectory in both footprint and revenue. Consult ended the half year on 476 advisors, and this includes 110 specialist short-term insurance advisors.

This does make Consult the second-biggest independent short-term advisory force in the country. Their focus remains on organic growth, which is complemented with a targeted inorganic growth strategy through the acquisition of larger advice firms in both the life insurance and investment segment.

Consult's focus is on growing their own fund solutions managed by Equilibrium, while also accelerating growth in the employee benefits and health businesses. Consult's fund solutions increased its assets by 36%, and their total assets under administration increased by 25% to R60 billion.

Momentum Distribution Services delivered another strong six-month performance, achieving 10% APE growth year-on-year, and they have maintained our position as the market leader in independent financial advisor distribution. In MDS, we segment our distribution strategy to meet the different needs of third-party networks, investment specialist advisors, and smaller IFAs.

Now, these investment specialists and small IFAs are central to our strategy, and they generate most of our new business. They are resilient entrepreneurial businesses, but industry pressures are putting them under strain.

To help them stay independent and continue to grow, we launched Momentum Advisor Partnerships two years ago. We support their businesses by giving them access to a full suite of corporate-level services, such as practice management support, compliance, skills development, professional indemnity insurance, and a lot more as part of the value proposition.

Adoption has been strong. We have grown from 164 advisors in December '24 to 350 in December 2025, a 113% increase in partnering advisors.

By the way, they pay for these services. These advisors have also grown their support for Momentum products, delivering a 47% year-on-year APE growth, and this really is a strategy that is working very, very well for us.

Then Metropolitan, as promised. Last year, we mentioned that as part of Metropolitan's five-point plan, the channel optimization and rationalization program at that point still required work.

This has now been embedded, and we are seeing strong sustained results that I'd like to share with you. As part of rationalization, we deliberately reduced advisor numbers to around 7,000 1,700, where optimization led to a more efficient and better-managed channel, which has also led to better-quality business.

Productivity remained strong, with advisors consistently writing more than four policies per week since the start of the financial year, and this was a direct result of the disciplined workforce management practices that we've now embedded. Persistency improved, with premium collection rates rising to 80%, up from 77%.

These gains reflect the impact of our AI-driven risk analytics and the broad adoption of flexible payment options for our clients. Advisor retention remained stable post-rationalization at 67%, compared to a budget or a target of 65%.

Stronger recruitment, improved advisor vesting, and consistent leadership focus on workforce management disciplines have supported this outcome. I think, importantly, Metropolitan sustained these improvements even as the recruitment started to resume, and this demonstrates that the foundations in place are robust and scalable as the channel start to grow again.

Then of course, the cost of distribution is also reduced as a result of these efficiencies. I will now share with you some of the progress that we've made on our digital enabler.

I know this is the one topic that everyone talks about all the time. For us, AI is no longer an emerging capability for the group.

It is already delivering measurable banked value for us. We currently have 60 active AI initiatives across the group, but these are focused mostly on risk mitigation, cost efficiency, and advisor enablement at scale.

These are not just experiments. Let me tell you about some of the successes that we've seen already.

In Metropolitan, we use machine learning, which is built on 37 behavioral and credit-related data indicators, to identify clients who are at risk of not paying their first premium. This improves our premium collection rates, and it avoids commission being paid on policies that then don't materialize.

In Myriad, AI improves quality assurance and risk control by transcribing and reviewing 100% of sales calls for Myriad Direct. When we did that manually, we only managed to screen about 10% of those calls due to the capacity that we had.

In health, AI reduced workload by automating the processing of more than 365 pages per month of handwritten forms. We also use AI capabilities for our clients' fitness assessments, monitoring or minimizing nurse and biokineticist costs for our healthier clients.

In Namibia, we've automated new business applications, and we're also working towards starting to expand the solution to claims and to other processes. In Momentum Investments, we use machine learning to extract and digitize data from handwritten forms, automating and validating the downstream capture of information.

In Momentum Retail, an AI-powered advisor assistant helps financial advisors quickly respond and resolve complex queries, thereby improving the response time to clients, and it's already freed up more than 1,400 hours of advisors' time. As you can see in our sales numbers, they've used it widely to sell more products.

I've highlighted seven of the 60 initiatives through which we already removing repetitive workload from our service teams. This also unlocks meaningful capacity for higher-value client support by our people.

In total, these seven initiatives have already given us R40 million in savings, with further savings to be unlocked as the other initiatives come on stream and of course also through these as we start to scale them. This is a real shift that we've seen in the value that we get from digital and AI, but it didn't happen by chance.

It's the result of a very deliberate approach that we have in four ways. Firstly, every AI initiative must be anchored in clear commercial and operational value, not pet projects.

We track the tangible financial impact of each case. We build reusable capabilities that can serve several areas in the group and that can scale.

We prioritize rapid proof of value, often within a single quarter. We will start a new initiative and kill it if we don't see that it has the value that we want.

I think, in summary, we have proof, we have capability, and we have a strategy that is already delivering results. The next step for us would be to continue scaling what works and to embed AI and intelligent automation as a compounding structural advantage for us as a group.

Then people. As AI and digital advance, I'm constantly reminded that our power lies in being human, connecting with our clients to build and protect their financial dreams, and we can only do that through our people.

It really is when the why, the what, and the how come together and align that incredible energy is unleashed. I believe that our culture behaviors enable employees to live our purpose and to execute and deliver on our strategy.

As we've seen, the tangible results of this already, our client metrics in most of our businesses have improved since the start of the Impact Strategy. To mention just two highlights, and I can assure you there are many, Metropolitan has consistently been winning Ask Afrika awards for the last five years in a row, and just last week Momentum Medical Scheme received the News24 Business Award for scheme of the year for the second year in a row.

It's not just because client outcomes is a competitive advantage, which I do believe it is, it's also because I have a personal obsession with how we show up for our clients every day. Getting this right becomes the real power and energy behind our business.

Optimizing every single action of every single employee through culture is not the soft stuff, it's actually the hard stuff, and I believe that it is also critical for our success. Because in the end, the numbers are what we're able to show you, but we are because of the culture that drives the behaviors that we need in our business.

To end off, we are very proud of our excellent earnings, as well as the quality of the earnings that we achieved. Our great sales numbers confirm that our advice strategy is working across the group.

The power of our federated business model was again demonstrated as each of our empowered and accountable businesses contribute as planned, or better. I've seen the incredible difference our deeply embedded purpose and culture behaviors can make to our ability to keep on delivering.

Even a strict focus on delivery and execution is multiplied when purpose, strategy, and culture behaviors come together. The thank-yous.

I want to thank our employees for the unstoppable energy, drive, and tenacity, and of course for how much you care about how you make our clients feel. Also, thank you to my executive team, who accepted unreasonable targets, and you are delivering on them.

Then lastly, to our board, thank you for all your support and wisdom, especially over the last year. Then lastly, to our financial advisors and our clients, thank you for trusting us with your financial dreams.

Thank you to all of you. I hand over to Risto.

Is the cameraman okay? Good.

Okay. Thank you, Jeanette.

I got the privilege of talking about our results. As per usual, we'll start with the key financial indicators.

Headline earnings up 8% to R3.7 billion. I think the reason why we're so excited about that is the actual underlying growth is better than 8% in my view.

In the current period, there's about R200 million of positive market variances. Previous period that number was probably closer to R600 million.

The underlying operational profit growth is probably closer to 25% year-on-year. That 25% growth maybe explains why we're so proud of this set of results.

On a per-share basis, the 8% becomes 12%, just reflecting the ongoing benefit of the buybacks. We are actually busy with the buyback still of the last billion rand tranche tranche announced last year.

Dividend per share up 29%. That's a combination of the 12% growth in EPS and the increase in the payout ratio from 33% to 40%.

Last year we updated our dividend policy to target a slightly higher payout ratio. I'm sure that's a welcome dividend by shareholders.

Then ROE, as Jeanette indicated, 24%, slightly down from last year, but still well above our internal target of 20%. Embedded value per share up 13% to R44.55.

Over that 12-month period, we also paid quite generous dividends, I think the ROEV, sort of 1 Jan to 31 December, is probably in the high teens, again a very good number over that 12-month period. Sales volumes are good at 11%.

As Jeanette indicated, VNB did decline by 15%, so that 11% growth, a lot of it is coming out of some of the lower-margin areas, our wealth platform, some corporate investment-only business. The 11% growth has maybe not been Well, we'll take it for sure, but in terms of product mix it was not optimal in terms of VNB, and that resulted in new business margin declining to 0.5%.

I will now talk about the the life businesses a little bit more. When I talk about each of them individually, I'll illustrate that all of them actually had good operating profit growth.

The reason why Momentum Retail is down for the period is that that's the one business that was quite heavily impacted by the sharp reduction in yields at the long end of the bond curve. Now, you must realize that in Momentum Retail, Myriad, the the sort of the affluent market protection product, is the main source of profits and cash flows, and a significant part of those cash flows are actually beyond year 25.

Makes it very difficult to hedge those cash flows, and as the yields came down, that liability increased without being able to hold hedging assets against them. That impact would have taken about R150 to R200 million of Momentum Retail's earnings.

There's a small negative impact in Metropolitan Life, also a life business, but remember their book runs off a lot quicker. There's a lot less cash flows sort of beyond year 20 25, the impact is proportionately smaller.

Momentum Investments, the big annuity book, that would have also been hurt by the lower yields, but we had exceptionally strong credit spreads. The credit spreads basically funded the loss we saw on the long-term yields, there was a net positive variance in in Investments.

When I get to Corporate, I'll talk about that there because it's it's a bit of a unique business. Starting with Mom Retail, you'll see approximately 10%, just over 10% growth in operating profit.

Some of the features in there are good persistency. In fact, good persistency is a theme across all our businesses.

Secondly, we continue to see very good alterations experience. This is where our existing clients buy up additional benefits from Momentum Retail.

I think in Metropolitan we also saw that, so generally once we get the clients in, we do get quite good I wouldn't call it cross-selling, but upselling to our existing clients in terms of additional cover, additional benefits, higher cover, and so on. We also had good mortality variance here.

If you look at our overall risk variance, I saw one of the analysts wrote that it was a bit lower than in the past. I think on the mortality side, it remains very strong.

Our disability experience was a bit weaker. Critical illness and disability was a bit lower than in the past.

Good operating results, and there you can see that big swing from positive investment returns to negatives, and that is really the the yield curve. Momentum Investments, nearly a doubling of operating profits.

Big part of that is the annuity book. There's a little interesting story in the annuity book where we continue to see good mortality variance on the annuity book.

This period was actually higher than the last year. There's two parts to it.

One of it is structural. We are just not seeing the mortality improvements at the advanced ages that we thought maybe 10 years ago.

Our in-force mortality in-force annuity book mortality tends to be pretty static over time rather than improving as expected years ago. Then the second one is a bit of a technicality, but it ties up to the earlier slides by Jeanette on on technology and AI.

Some of you might recall that Home Affairs dropped a bit of a bomb a year ago with the tenfold increase to proof of life checks. We actually stood back a little bit, took a bit of a slower approach to to that.

We have subsequently found a solution leveraging off one of the 60 AI projects to do those proof of life checks, we are actually doing more frequent checks on the liveliness of our clients, which has been beneficial for the annuity profits. Rising markets pretty obvious, but both the wealth platform and the asset management businesses' revenues are are AUM-driven, those are all both up sharply.

There was also a one-off let's call it expense reversal in the Investments business. We terminated a major technology project, which resulted in a a reversal of some of the expenses incurred, and that had a one-off benefit to earnings in the current period.

Lastly, we communicated about a year and a half ago that we're going to discontinue Momentum Money. That process is now largely complete.

There was about a R1 million loss in the current period from Momentum Money. It was R25 million in the previous six months.

Metropolitan Life. Jeanette did speak nicely of this business, but I I think I'll need to do the same again.

If I look at the improvement in operating profit here, very substantial. What I like about it, it's in every line item.

When I look at new business strain, sharply down. Why is it why is it down?

It's because we're actually selling better-quality business. In other words, we are not wasting commissions on new business capacity on issuing poor-quality business that never receives premiums.

That's one reason. The other one is as we had as we run a more efficient, leaner sales force, the management cost of that channel comes down quite significantly as well.

There's a number of factors that are leading to an instant earnings impact from the decision to actually focus that distribution force. It was a difficult decision 18 months ago when we decided to do that, but I think it's been a roaring success.

It's played out even better in terms of the trade-off in quality versus volume than we thought. We also continue to see good persistency here, good mortality, good disability experience, every variance line item is also a positive.

I I can't put I can't bet my life on it, but because of the good quality of new business we're writing now, I do expect the operational variance to remain positive for the time being. I think the impact of the better quality will be visible in the in-force profits in the coming years as well.

There was a very substantial migration of the what used to be called the mainframe platform onto what we call PDS. Substantial cost savings are starting to come through now in Metropolitan for that.

Momentum Corporate, earnings up slightly, but off a very high base. This is the one business that we've been saying that we're not sure if we can maintain the current level of profitability or at least grow from it going forward.

Yet again, there's some growth here. At the operating level, it is down maybe, I don't know, 6%, 708 to 667, but last year did have quite a large IBNR, incurred but not reported, reserve release.

If I look through that technicality, risk profitability is probably quite similar to last year. Continues to be robust both on disability and on group risk.

I think particularly in disability, people often think of group risk as quite a commoditized market. I do think the disability space has got a lot of unique features to it, and I think our disability management is market-leading, which explains the very good market share and stickiness of that book.

Here you'll see a little bit different. Investment variances are actually up.

Now, our ALM activities in Corporate, most of it actually relates to the pay claims and payment book. These are people claiming disability benefits.

That book tends to run off in sort of seven, eight years. It's not like the life book that runs over 40, 50 years.

In Duma's business, we have a lot less cash flows that are exposed to that very long end of the yield curve. It's more It's more the short and the medium part of the yield curve.

Secondly, those benefits are inflation-linked, the lower inflation actually is positive for the for the outflows that we model. Duma had a positive investment variance, unlike the other South African businesses.

Then Africa, we now report Africa as part of life insurance. You might recall that Namibia short-term has been moved to Guardrisk because there's quite a big alternative risk business in there, and health operations in Mozambique, Lesotho, and Botswana are now reported as part of health.

Africa is almost just life, it makes sense to report it as part of our core life operations. Earnings up sharply.

Also operating profits up nicely here. I think the country I do want to give a big shout-out to is Namibia.

Namibia went through quite a difficult time a few years ago, and the last two years we're seeing the actual client count starting to grow after a number of years of shrinking, and that has big benefits for things like unit costs and and margins on the business. Lesotho, I was there last week Friday.

Had some very nice hardbody chicken. Thank you.

That business, we continue to dominate the the Lesotho market, and they have landed some very good corporate business there. I think both Namibia and Lesotho sort of give them a tick.

Botswana is a lot harder. Most of us know that the macro environment in Botswana is under pressure because of the diamond industry, and we've been exposed to that as well.

Botswana is probably, I would describe it as close to a break-even business at this stage, whereas the other two markets are making substantial profits. Embedded profit, this is really the sum of the contractual service margin and the risk adjustment.

This is where Jeanette always says we start moving on to the second-year course. I think the easiest way of thinking of that R25.8 billion on the right there is it's really the amount of profit that we could have released if we had perfect fair value accounting, but because of accounting rules and allowance for risk, we have to hold back some of the profit rather than releasing it all upfront.

That R25.8 billion is like a store of future earnings. We call it embedded value.

Somebody might want to call it composite margin, as an example. Had good growth, 6% for the for the six months, if you annualize it, our embedded profits are growing well above inflation.

A good outcome. I think any mature life company that can grow at, let's say, 8% or 10% here is doing well.

In terms of the components, new business linked to the VNB, VNB is not at the levels we want to. It means new business is also not contributing enough to this compared to our own desires or expectations.

However, again, for the fifth time in a row, we have a very positive contribution at R1.4 billion from our in-force business. We tend to extract more value out of our in-force business than our actuarial assumptions, and that's been a consistent theme period after period.

Probably talks a little bit to that persistency and client satisfaction. We would like to get more clients in at better margins, but once they're here, they seem to stick and we're able to offer them, a offering of value, and it works for us as well.

It's really a good in-force story offsetting a little bit of a disappointing new business story. This gives you a little bit more detail.

As much as I would love to be here for another hour, I can't get into all of all of the blocks, but what you will note is that every business unit and every product line in every business unit showed growth here. The story about managing better outcomes on the in-force clients is a consistent feature across the group.

Now, a cynic might say we're just conservative. I would say maybe a little bit, but it's really about operational delivery more than anything else.

Maybe a few other things to note here. Myriad remains the biggest store of future profit in our group, very important product line for us.

Momentum Investments, that's the annuity book. Despite lower sales, the annuity CSM is still growing well above inflation, which sort of gives a reasonably good feeling about the future earnings from that business.

Then Metropolitan Life, that recovery in all the operational metrics also comes through as growth in CSM in all the product areas. A bit of a similar story, but a different lens.

This is the embedded value experience variances, and each of those bars is a different business units. Every business unit had a small positive mortality and morbidity profit.

That's good news. Persistency, alterations, everybody positive, except for Investments, and in Investments that was actually reduction to on fees to existing clients.

It was effectively a fee cut rather than clients leaving. Also note the very large Momentum Corporate number.

This is something that I sort of talk to Duma about once in a while that I don't think there's that much movement in the industry. The schemes seem to be quite sticky.

We're not getting that much VNB in, but I think our client exit levels are probably half what we would expect in a normal environment. I don't know, is it two-pot, is it something else?

Not much movement, and it's coming through nicely on the variance line for Corporate. Expenses are managed below or at budget.

We note in the in the results announcement that our expenses are up 3% for the year, which slightly below inflation. Then other obviously includes a number of different items.

If you add it all up, every business unit had a noticeable, some of them quite meaningful, positive variances. I sort of joked yesterday with Jeanette that, if I had to draw a picture to show what a good life company looks like, it will look a bit like this, you know.

It's it's very well managed compared to our own internal expectations and and and sort of operational metrics. On a on a theme of delivery, onerous contracts.

When we published the IFRS results first time two and a half years ago—Billy, when was it? Two years ago, two and a half years ago?—one of the one of the first things people asked us like, 'Why do you have so much onerous contracts?'

It was maybe a fair comment. It actually was a fair comment at the time.

Our new business mix has always been a mixture of some very profitable business and some loss-making business. One way of saying it is that maybe the level of cross-subsidization was too high.

We took note of that. We told investors we will work on it, and as you can see, we have made quite good headway in the last 12 months.

Momentum Investments, they redesigned their back-to-back annuity product, and Metropolitan Life has obviously, through the focus on the distribution efficiency, also reduced the onerous contracts meaningfully. A 40% reduction in 12 months is is is is meaningful, and it does illustrate that when we say we're going to do something, we tend to do it.

Lastly, I do think it brings our mix of onerous and non-onerous a bit more in line with what one would expect. Sales up 11%.

A big part of our sales comes from Momentum Investments, and those are up 12%. Now, a lot of that is the platform sales, unfortunately, on the next slide, it doesn't quite have the same impact on VNB.

Beyond that, decent growth in the other businesses. The only one that's down year-on-year is Metropolitan Life.

Like Jeanette mentioned, we're very happy with that outcome because the average number of agents, which also means your running costs, are down by 43%, but the productivity per remaining agent improved by a third. In fact, the sales impact is a bit less than we feared when we moved to this decision to to right-size the sales force.

Definitely a good outcome. Just on VNB, we're not going to pretend that the 238 is a good number because we don't think so, but this slide gives you a little bit of a flavor of just how big that impact of annuities is.

If you look in Momentum Investments, their VNB is down R100 million, and that is explained almost solely by the annuity volumes being down 30%, 32%, something like that. That R100 million is then offset by about R60 million of gains in other areas, particularly Metropolitan Life is showing a good trend in VNB, and that that upward slope should continue, and also small improvements in some of the other areas.

The the reduction in VNB is really a story of a single product line, and we have seen industry-wide decline in sales of those products. Let's talk about non-life.

I mentioned like 5 minutes ago that I think we are a well-run life company, but we we we're on line to make R1.5 billion in short-term this year, we also we we also quite a meaningful short-term player. Both Guardrisk and Momentum Insure, very high levels of profitability.

Part of it is the industry cycle, but I do think there's a bit more to it. Obviously on health, we are number two player in this industry at this stage, and profitability continues to grow.

I'll go into each of these one by one. Starting with Guardrisk, all three lines of revenue are up ahead of our internal expectations, that's for sure.

Fee income, this is still the majority of Guardrisk's revenues. Majority of Guardrisk activities is still running cell captive facilities for their clients.

Fee income is up 11%. That's a good outcome considering that our biggest client in Capitec left during the period.

The underlying growth is is strong. Underwriting profits up 31%, obviously helped in motor and property by the same claims trends in terms of weather weather and severity as on Momentum Insure, but I do want to point out that particularly on the property book, we actually did a lot of work ourselves to improve the quality of that book.

Then the gap cover business is an area where we have invested in over the last few years, and we're seeing good profits coming through. It's not only motor, it's also the commercial and corporate property and gap cover.

It was agreed by the group to move Namibia to Guardrisk because there's a big alternative risk business there, and Lawrence claimed that he could actually do something with it, and so far 79% Yeah, okay, I agree with you. Momentum Insure, like the other players who have reported so far, the claims environment has been favorable, a claims ratio of 48%.

It's an exceptional ratio. People forget that just two, three years ago, this industry was under pressure, and this cycle has gone from very weak to very strong very quickly and usually quickly.

The only only negative I can mention on this business, particularly now that they paid very good dividends three times in a row, is the expense ratio is too high at 39%. The gross written premium shrank by 2% as part of the focus on quality of business, and that has left the expense ratio a couple of percent above where we think it's realistic on a sustainable basis.

Good news here is that December, January, February, we're starting to see the book size stabilize at about 133,000 contracts or so. The number of new clients coming in is roughly the same as the number of clients going out, so that is starting to enable us to probably grow this business going forward at top line.

Momentum Health, this this business is is quite highly operationally geared, so that growth of membership and revenue does come through quite strongly on the bottom line. 5% growth in members, I think, is a good outcome if I, look at my general feel about what's happening in the medical scheme market.

We look after the Government Employees Medical Scheme. We're seeing a bit of growth in that scheme, that's helping.

We're also seeing very good growth in demand for products that are targeting sort of basic benefits or the lower-income products. Our own branded Momentum Health Scheme, I think, is also doing a little bit better than the average scheme, 5%, I don't know if it's market-leading, but it must be close in terms of membership growth.

Earnings are also aided, I mentioned operational gearing earlier, but Health4Me margins continue to be good. The insurance component of the business is is profitable.

Jeanette spoke about Bonitas coming on on 1 June. We are going to incur quite heavy investment before that.

In the next 3 months, we need to recruit and train 700-odd people. We are busy refurbishing a major office building of our own, luckily, in in Sandton.

We are rolling out a number of walk-in centers across the country. There's a substantial investment before 1 June.

That will impact health's earnings in the second half. It's a bit of a heads-up on that.

That said, we do think we can run Bonitas profitably going forward, it's an investment we're more than happy to make, but just don't expect 207 to double. If it does, I'll be very very pleased.

Okay. India incurred a small loss.

This is IFRS 17, slightly different to the India GAAP numbers you'll see from our partner. The trends continue, similar to the previous period, very strong top-line growth.

That 20% is in rands. In Indian rupees, it's closer to 40% growth.

Combined ratio improved a little bit, 113% to 112%. It could have improved a little bit more, but during the period we had a couple of interesting developments.

I'll mention one of them here. There were others.

I noticed some of the competitors also spoke about the new labor laws and things like that, but the change to the general sales tax had quite a big impact because a number of our expenses are taxable, and not being able to claim input credits put pressure on our expenses and our combined ratio. Obviously, we will take that into account in our products and pricing going forward, but we, it's impossible to pass that cost retrospectively to clients, it was a difficulty during the period.

Mentioning Momentum Services on this podium for the first time. This is a business we have in Mumbai.

It's our global capability center, that's what they like to call themselves. Now, we have 250 people in Mumbai who work for us.

They provide largely technology support for for our group. It makes a small profit because we have to have a transfer pricing by Indian law, but more importantly, gives us access to an almost unlimited pool of software and technology talent.

Often in India, you're talking about days to find a skill, not months. I think the value of this setup to our group is greater strategically than it is on the 13 million of bottom line.

I thought I'll just mention it because I think most people don't know of this angle in our business. Shareholders.

Shareholders is really a combination of returns on investments that don't belong to regulatory capital, offset by head office costs, which are always good value for money. Now, the decline in shareholders' results for the period, there was a substantial increase, R126 million increase, in VC fund losses.

Last six months, we had almost like a zero result on VC funds. This time, over R100 million loss.

It's a combination of some revaluations downwards, but also remember a lot of these are denominated in dollars and euros, there was quite a big FX impact on the VC portfolios. In terms of the shareholder costs themselves, they're down quite sharply year-on-year.

Last year, the consulting costs were elevated because of the performance optimization project that I'll talk about a little bit later. Okay.

Now that's the less technical part done. Now we get to capital management.

I want to talk about this a bit more than normal. This shows the Prudential Authority yield curve.

We have seen long yields according to the Prudential Authority decline by 700, 800 basis points. These are massive changes.

These are these are in the quantum of 1-in-200, 1-in-500. These are big, big changes in yields.

The reason why I make a big deal of it here is remember that the the premise of a required capital amount for an insurance company is effectively a series of stress tests. Some of those stress tests, like equities, is instantaneous to some degree, but many of them are projected 30, 40 years forward.

We would have to assume claims are higher for 30 years, people live longer for like next 40 years, expenses are higher forever. All those stress tests have to be PV'd back today.

These very low long-term yields in the PA curve increases the amount of those stress tests substantially. What is what actually happens is this: so on the left-hand side, you can see our solvency capital requirement.

This is the legal minimum capital, you could think, that we need to hold. It tends to grow very steadily in line with our business.

It jumped this time by 20%. It's really got to do with the fact that the yields came down, all those stress tests, the PV of the extra R100 million of claims in year 12 is now significantly higher than it would have been under the previous yield curve regime.

That R3.6 billion increase, remember that's 1x SCR. Now, we would never want to be at 1x.

Our chief risk officer would probably prefer a bit more than that. Let's say you take 3.6 x 1.5, that's R5 billion.

These are big jumps in required capital. I also for the first time giving you a bit more detail on the on on the on the right-hand side there about the composition of our SCR calc.

You'll see that majority of our risk is underwriting risk, not market risk. It might have come through in our presentation a few times today.

I think personally that we're a little bit more exposed to income streams relating to death claims, disability claims, short-term insurance, longevity. I think some of our competitors are maybe a little bit more market-driven, whereas our capital requirements and our earnings are largely coming from from insurance activities.

Remember, in those activities, the stress tests tend to be 30-, 40-year stress tests, maybe that also explains why our SCR might have jumped a bit more than we've seen on average in the industry, although I think everybody's has gone up quite a bit. Just to give you a bit of a flavor of that discounting, we're disclosing for the first time a little bit more of a breakdown of our required capital.

Our mortality required capital went from R1.7 billion to R2.6 billion. That growth is split half to do with the lower yields, i.e., discounting, and half is actually growth in our risk business.

If I look longevity, remember annuity book did not grow that much in the period, but our biggest risk in in annuities is people living very extended ages. Here we're discounting cash flows like 30, 40 years away.

Almost all of that increases is discounting. Very little actual business growth.

Similar expenses, probably 80% of the expense risk increases is just a discounting effect. That R3.6 billion I showed you earlier, I would say 75% of the increase is yield-related and and a quarter is related to our business growth.

These lower yields, they're not a big thing for our earnings because we actually run a very tight and active ALM. It's a big thing for our solvency capital because in the stress test, a lot of the cash flows are beyond the yield curve where you can actually actively hedge.

Secondly, and this is maybe for the connoisseurs, we actively hedge our IFRS balance sheet, not our solvency balance sheet. We're willing to take a bit more volatility on the solvency than we do on earnings.

Equity stress tests, I suppose our equity stress at R1.7 billion is quite small compared to our market cap and our other factors. Here again illustrating that at the moment we are stress testing for a 52% decline in equity markets over a 1 year.

Now the the the PA quite correctly, I think, has this anti-cyclical philosophy where once markets have run, maybe the market crash will be bigger than after it's fallen already. It makes sense.

At 52%, we're at the highest stress possible actually. Now, in Group Finance, sometimes we have a bit of energy to do things, and I had guys look yesterday, the biggest fall we ever seen in the South African JSE on a calendar year was in 1920, 30% decline.

Not 52%. Then somebody was even more ambitious and looked at daily data, and the biggest drawdown ever, not calendar year, but point-to-point, is 41% in the JSE.

So 52% is quite a big stress test that we we we're using. What does this all mean?

The reason I've given you a bit of a long story on capital is because our required capital went up, we agree actually with that view. We believe we want to hold more capital to back our solvency requirements going forward.

We have updated our required capital level from R11.6 billion to R16 billion. Now, if you go through the details, you'll see that our require our available capital on the on the on the regulatory basis is in excess of R30 billion, but remember, in that we always want to have a certain level of high-quality liquid assets, not investments in subsidiaries, not future profits, not receivables.

This high-quality asset pool, we have assessed our view of what we want to hold upwards. We think it's a prudent and the right thing to do at this time in the market.

This also explains, or you could you could word it other ways, is that we have reallocated our surplus capital into required capital. Also explains why we're not doing further buybacks at this stage.

We'll rather strengthen our SCR ratio and balance sheet at the at this point in time. This is cash flows.

Consistent with the previous view of strengthening the life company balance sheet, we have paid a dividend of R825 million. That's a lot of money, but it's R1 billion less than a year ago.

That R1 billion less coming to the HoldCo means that the cash flows coming into the head office is equal to the dividend requirement under the ordinary shares. There is no excess cash.

I think the decision not to do a buyback is consistent with both our desire to hold more capital and the fact that following from that, the dividends extracted from the subsidiaries is also not in excess of the dividend we're paying out. Dividend is good, but I'll talk a bit more about the right-hand table, which is the buybacks.

By December, we had done R439 million of buybacks. Yesterday, it was just under R800 million.

We are going to complete the R1 billion buyback we announced last year. It's gone a little bit slower because we're doing a structured program to optimize the price we're paying for the shares.

We will obviously then reassess any further buybacks at the next results like we do every 6 months. This shows you where our capital is deployed and the returns it generates.

Most businesses improve their return on capital over the time period, particularly Metropolitan Life and Mom Investments. I would also highlight Momentum Insure used to be well below the well, used to be slightly below the the target level of 20%, it's now above it, so that's great.

Also Africa steadily improving. I think the last time I looked a year ago, it was probably like a normalized ROE of 12%, now we're at like 18%, we're getting very close to the 20% hurdle rate.

Momentum Retail is the only business where ROE is a bit down. Consistent with the increase in required capital, we have also changed the view of where that capital goes.

Now with the lower yields, the business with the most increase is Momentum Retail, the the Myriad book. That has a bit of a negative impact on ROE.

It's still good, it's just not as high as it used to be. Other topical matters.

I think the yield curve and capital was the topical matter, I'll just talk about only one thing here. This is our performance optimization program.

You'll see that we have roughly doubled the amount of banked savings. Remember, the definition of a banked saving for us is a savings in place for 3 months continuously.

The big items to come through here, the biggest one was the Metropolitan policy system transfer, substantial savings going forward from that. Another another meaningful one is the human capital restructuring, we have re-looked at things that are done centrally versus in the business units leading to savings.

Then there's a broad range of business unit delivery. Looking forward to this next 6 months, I think we'll deliver quite a big chunk of that 452.

All four items mentioned there are very close to done or actually, no, are done. We may maybe just waiting for the 3-month proof period to to to finish.

Maybe I'll just mention that APN optimization, that's that's tech speak for data costs, mobile data costs. Prepaid, not quite, but Yeah, it's interesting.

I spoke to Rabe yesterday. We're going to save like millions a month by just re- renegotiating, rebuying our data for for our staff.

Part of that decision is that we're getting more and more people back into the office. It's actually having a noticeable impact on our data costs.

We always want people back in the office largely for cultural and and and delivery reasons, but there are some interesting second-order benefits in terms of like data costs and so on. Then just in conclusion, it's always good that me and Jeanette have a good overlap on conclusions, we don't see things differently.

It is an excellent earnings for 6 months. I mentioned earlier our view it is 25% rather than 8% at sort of operational level.

Strong liquidity and market risk management has been a big feature maybe more since year-end. Through this Iran situation in the last couple of weeks, we've been making and receiving daily, sort of collateral payments of a billion.

The mark-to-mark volatility on a fixed income book, equity book, has been humongous. BSM, well-oiled machine, running like a Rolls-Royce, Khanyisa.

Okay. I'm very comfortable with with what we're doing there, but it's it's been of great comfort the way that things have been run.

We continue to be well-positioned, I mentioned a few times now that I think we proportionately a bit more exposed to to mortality and and and short-term underwriting, well-positioned there. Profitable growth remains area of intense focus.

Sometimes joke that it's easy to grow fast, hand out R20 bills for R10. That's not the game we want to be in.

We want to show profitable growth, and that is really VNB growth. Then similar to Jeanette, I do want to congratulate all the employees.

I have the privilege to talk about our results. I can act like they're mine.

In reality, it's the 15,000 oaks and and ladies out there who actually make it happen, thank you very much for for the massive commitment and effort of the last 6 months again. Also thank you to our clients who entrust us with their money and and and their financial affairs, and the advisors who are our biggest partners.

Thank you, and I'll hand back to Dan.

Thank you very much, Risto. Please don't go too far.

There's a lot of questions here around solvency-related questions, which we'll get to. Can I ask you and Jeanette to come to the front as we begin the questions, Risto?

Jeanette, I've got a couple of questions for you. Maybe we'll start with you, and then you can have a seat, ma'am.

Thank you very much. Beautiful set of results.

Let's give them another round of applause. Very beautiful set of results.

Firstly, we have a question from Marius Strydom from Ashburton Investments saying, 'Jeanette, what is the potential impact of the Bonitas-Medscheme court action?'

We can't say that we didn't anticipate a question like that. Marius, thank you for the question.

Look, we know that we participated in a proper procurement process. We know the paces we were being put through, very detailed RFP submissions, supporting documentation, several presentations and engagements with the scheme, as well as a very comprehensive due diligence process.

I think what is maybe a little bit confusing about this is that it should be noted that this court case originates from concerns from Medscheme regarding two completely unrelated contracts that were awarded to two other providers in 2022 and 2024. It's not actually directly related to the scheme being awarded to us.

What makes it tricky is that they now argue that since CMS, the Council for Medical Schemes, is investigating this, that Bonitas should be prevented from awarding any other contract. Not absolutely directly related, but it is out there.

I think what is interesting at the moment is that Medscheme had to remove the application from the urgent court roll due to the judge president feeling that the case wasn't ready for hearing. All I can say, we have a little bit of time.

Risto shared that with you. We are going full steam ahead to make sure that on the 1st of June, we are ready to take on Bonitas and the Medscheme members.

Thank you very much, Jeanette. The second question for you now, it's about the wealth platform.

'Given that the termination of the wealth platform contract with FNZ, what is the plan now for the wealth platform?'

We have plans. I think we couldn't really ever share that openly, but we weren't entirely surprised about this ending up where it is because over time we got increasingly worried about late and sometimes lack of delivery.

On the one hand, in order to remain competitive, and you saw that our wealth platform still doing really, really well in terms of sales, we kept on developing new capabilities and especially market-facing capabilities for our advisors and our clients. That has actually helped us quite a bit in this case.

This transformation will continue. Very interesting, a system that 5 years ago when we started the project we thought was end-of-life, that software provider has now done a whole lot of things and it now seems that it's not dead.

It's maybe Lazarus. It's gotten out of the grave.

I think what is important is that we had a rethink on how to do this. We now going to go for far more agile development where we will have both focus on internal development as on top of that, as well as also sourcing the best providers for the best services from outside of the group.

It's almost a trend that changed in the last 4 years that it no longer makes sense to be completely dependent on only one provider. I think from that perspective, the team feels that they're in a better space than where they were.

All of their energy can now be spent on the development of our own platform, and in a way we kind of masters of our own destiny, which we believe in the end was actually a really good outcome for us.

Thank you.

Nothing more for me.

Nothing more for you. The rest is all about solvency this and solvency that for Risto.

That question there about the wealth platform was from Matthew Pouncett at Laurium Capital. Thank you very much, Matthew.

Baron Nkomo from JPMorgan, let's start off there. A couple of solvency-related questions, Risto.

Please bear with us with the time that we have. Baron wants to know, 'Given the broad drag from lower nominal yields and yield curve shifts, what actions are you taking the next 6 to 12 months to reduce earnings and capital sensitivity to rates, and what milestones should they be expecting?

What management actions might you be taking?'

No, thanks. I think on the earnings we'll do quite little.

I think we're comfortable with our earnings sensitivity. You would have noticed that in the R3.7 billion, we still had a positive market variance.

Within that market variance, the actual nominal yield movement was a negative R170, R180 million. The loss we took from nominal yields down is very modest in earnings, and it ties to my earlier point that we hedge earnings risk of interest rates.

We do not hedge the additional risk related to solvency. However, never waste a crisis.

That's a strong word. Never waste a lower than wanted solvency ratio.

There's a few things we're doing already. Now remember, historically we have always had quite high capital ratios.

We have now decided to look at one or two things that we could have always done that we haven't done. One of them is that historically we never allowed for a creation of a deferred tax asset in the stress scenarios.

We have made a very small ad hoc adjustment now, but I think the reality is that the DTA we could create in a stress scenario is larger than allowed for. It is quite common in the industry, I would say most people allow for a DTA in their stress calculations.

We're also looking at things like is our calculation methodology optimal? You might have heard of a thing called iterative risk margin where you can calculate your risk margin requirement as a iteration of the scenario.

We have never done that because we like to keep things simple and cheap in terms of calculations, but if there's a substantial capital benefit from having a iterative approach, we'll look at doing it. Then there's other things such as asset-liability management where many of you will know that we like to hold our shareholder capital at reasonably stable value assets, cash and floating-rate assets.

We might want to buy more bonds in our net asset value. That will then increase our interest rate exposure in the right direction to the solvency.

We think the impact on earnings volatility will be quite modest, but in the stress scenarios of substantial yield reductions, the additional NAV will actually be quite nice against the increase in SCR. As you can hear, there is already a project on the go, and yeah, it will lead to some benefits going forward.

Okay.

Solvency is important.

It's very important. Yes.

Matthew Pouncett from Laurium Capital, Risto, says, 'Thank you for the presentation. Congrats on the results.

What impact do the bond and equity movements during March have on your solvency?'

Good question. We have done some testing and point-in-time stuff over the last few weeks.

Obviously the decline in equity markets will have a small negative impact, but as I mentioned earlier, our equity exposure is quite small. We're not that equity-exposed, probably talking about limited investment guarantees in our book.

Rates increases is actually positive. The similar way that the sharp decline in your long bonds, the fact that the bonds have sold out during the increased risk environment, net-net we believe our solvency ratio is actually up through the war period.

Yeah.

Okay. Warwick Bam next from RMB Morgan Stanley says, 'Are you comfortable with your ALM matching dynamics, and do you have the ability to reprice your products if yields stay this low?'

Okay. That's a very topical question.

The one thing I want to add to Matthew before I forget is, I was thinking about it, one thing you must also remember, this is our 6-month results. When you do a balance sheet stress test, you get the full impact there, but we only had 6 months of retained earnings.

I think if we were reporting 12-month results, the reduction in solvency ratio would have been probably 0.05, 0.1 less. Matthew, just think about that a little bit.

ALM, I keep saying that we're very happy with the ALM outcomes on the things we want to match. Sometimes we choose not to hedge, and I don't think we're changing that.

In terms of ability to reprice, we definitely have a contractual right to reprice. Those decisions are very difficult because you need to take policyholder fairness, market reaction, everything into account.

We did an interesting exercise recently with Myriad. Yields have fallen sharply, but they're not that much lower than 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

Even though we have a contractual right to do so, we're debating a little bit how fair would it be to reprice when the yields went higher for 5, 10 years and now they come back for 5, 10 years? Obviously the guys who were sold business, let's say, 3, 4 years ago when yields were 14, we might have a stronger case in 5 or 10 years with them, but that's in the future.

We have a legal right to reprice. I think historically we have chosen not to use that right unless it's ironclad.

I think it also talks to maybe our attitude towards client-first in most cases. In every case.

We have to take shareholders into account as well. I'm here for the shareholders.

Risto, just bear with me for a couple of more questions. Saul Miller from Truffle Asset Management says, 'Cash generation from the SA Life was depressed versus the past.

Please elaborate. Is it SCR-related, or will it revert back?

What is sustainable?'

Sustainable is sort of closer to 1.5 every 6 months. Dividend we paid out of the Life Company was really the minimum we felt feasible to pay the desired group dividend.

We wanted to retain as much money in the LifeCo as possible. Now, obviously we will have retained earnings and a bit of relief in terms of the capital project by June, I would expect at year-end we can revert back to a normal level of dividends from the Life Company.

Okay. A couple of questions about India.

One from Michael Christelis at UBS, the other one from Sinovuyo Mvovo from SBG Securities. I'll just give them both to you at once and you could address them.

'Can you confirm if India is expected to be profitable from next year, and what further capital will be required from the group for this business?' Sinovuyo wants to know, 'The operating loss in India has widened.

Aside from the once-off gain in the prior period, are there headwinds in the Indian market preventing a break-even scenario?'

Okay. In fact our partner I think expects break-even in the current year on the India GAAP basis, I think next year confidence levels are high.

Now, obviously India GAAP is not exactly the same as IFRS 17. As the business grows and matures a little bit, the gap between IFRS 17 and India GAAP will close.

I do think that this year there's a good chance to be profitable also on IFRS 17, and next year I would say it's highly likely we are profitable under IFRS 17. That's a short answer to that.

In terms of the other one-offs, I sort of mentioned the impact of not being able to claim the input GST because of the tax changes. We also had some changes to labor laws in India.

There's also quite a bit of talk in India at the moment about cost of distribution, and maybe regulations might change around that. I think in the coming year, possible changes to commission levels is probably the biggest thing for investors to look.

Because if commissions are capped again, they were uncapped a couple of years ago, if they bring commission caps back, it might be beneficial long-term in my view, not everybody agrees, but in the short-term it will cause quite a bit of distraction because some of the channels might actually threaten or decide to not distribute. I think the Indian regulator is very active, and they're very policyholder protection-focused.

Neither of them is a bad thing, but it does mean that industry participants need to be on their toes. Every year there's quite a few things that change.

I think the two big ones last year was from a regulatory perspective was labor laws and tax. Also medical inflation, like in most of the world, is high.

Johann, I think it's 12%, 14% is the medical inflation in India over the last year, which is clearly higher than what we priced in when we sold the business.

We've got a couple of last Oh,

by the way, the capital, it's obviously dynamic, and it's a function of how much we're growing. I would say my best estimate for further capital injection over the next 2 years is about R700 million.

Yeah.

Okay. Got a couple of last questions from Marius Strydom.

By the way, just to note, Harry Botha has asked a very technical question, which I won't put to you now. I'm sure that can be addressed

later. Oh, break my heart.

No, that can be addressed later on, Risto. Marius Strydom from Ashburton Investments has got some interesting questions for you.

First, he's giving you and the team flowers. He says, 'Congratulations on a strong set of results, especially your industry-leading ROE, and thank you for your clean and useful disclosure.'

Okay? He wants to know, 'Can you please speak to the likely impact of Bonitas on health fee growth?

Will this exceed 28% increase in membership, and will this be delivered at a higher margin near-term and long-term?'

Yeah. It's a bit of a naughty question because we we would never disclose commercial matters at the at a individual client level.

I think particularly Bonitas and GEMS will be such big clients that it will be very dangerous to talk about commercials. What I will say, Marius, is we would not have bid unless we thought we could do it profitably.

I also mentioned that we're going to invest probably over R100 million over the next 3 months to to set up for Bonitas. We think the payback on that will be a very acceptable length.

We I think it's going to be a profitable contract. I I just can't It's not right to disclose what we think the profits will be.

Okay. Final question from Marius: 'What will the impact of negative imported inflation, vehicles and parts, be on the Insure motor book, and are you using strong underwriting performance to price more aggressively in pursuit of new business?

Is this not a clear opportunity to grow your book?' Okay.

Obviously the likelihood of inflation picking up is increased substantially, and both cars and home electronics are largely imported, we will definitely keep our eye on it. The current underwriting margins are so high.

Now, Brand's not here unfortunately. I think he's at the Cape Epic.

Okay. Yeah.

I think our margins are high is that we might respond a little bit slower than normal in terms of inflationary pressures on claims costs. The second part, which is being more aggressive to grow the book, it's interesting that they've done a few small experiments in Momentum Insure with different pricing strategies.

They're not seeing a massive impact in conversion rates from cutting prices a little bit or increasing them a little bit. Ultimately the efficiency of our sales activities, particularly in the direct space, is very much a function of the quality of the lead coming in.

It's not so much of a pricing matter as it is of generating more high-quality leads. Elasticity of demand is maybe a little bit less than one would guess.

I often say it's a pity we can't do similar experiments in life insurance or sort of be a bit more dynamic, but anyway.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Let's give him a round of applause. Risto, thank you for taking all those questions.

We appreciate it, and we also thank the analysts who put those questions to you. It's good to know that when people acknowledge the good work that you're doing as fellow analysts in terms of the kind of results and the disclosures that are being made in this transparent way, it's brilliant for the group, a brilliant set of results, and this is how we end our presentation.

Thank you again, Jeanette, and to Risto, and everybody else who's attending and those who took part virtually as well. This half-year is gone.

It's time now to put shoulder to the wheel for the next half-year, which is the next 6 months. All the best.

Thank you very much.