Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our full year results presentation. I'll start with a quick update on our 2025 performance and how Aviva will deliver today and for the future, before Charlotte takes you through the results.

Then we'll open for questions. Let me begin with the key messages.

Aviva has delivered another outstanding set of results in 2025, extending our multi-year track record of delivery. We have achieved our 2026 targets a full year early and have now raised our ambitions.

We have enormous potential to go even further for the longer term. We are set up to make the most of the opportunities across the market, whether that's with artificial intelligence as technology changes the game, general insurance as the importance of scale and brand grows, wealth as the market expands with regulatory tailwinds, or in retirement for the next wave of pensioners as the UK ages.

I'll cover some of these in more detail later. Let's get into the numbers, which include the 6-month contribution from Direct Line.

As you can see, it's been a great year. Operating profit rose 25%.

IFRS return on equity increased, and cash and capital generation are growing. We now have over 25 million customers and an opportunity to serve even more of their needs, with over 7 million of those customers being multi-product holders.

Operating EPS growth is well into double digits. Today, we are announcing a final dividend of 26.2 pence per share, up 10% year-on-year.

We are resuming the share buyback, now at a higher level of £350 million. Every business contributed to these results.

In General Insurance, premiums are up 18%. We are now approaching the sub-94 combined ratio ambition, and we are already achieving this in our UK business.

In Wealth, we are extending our number 1 position with over £230 billion of assets, and we are growing, with record net flows of almost £11 billion. In Protection, we have improved margins and are nearing completion of the AIG Protection integration program.

In Health, we have grown in-force premiums by double digits with a low-90s combined ratio. In Retirement, we have written £4.6 billion of bulk annuities at attractive returns, supported by real asset origination in Aviva Investors.

Turning now to targets. As I've said, today's results mean that we have already delivered our 2026 targets.

This is a fantastic achievement, and I'm really proud of Aviva's performance. I want to thank the whole Aviva team for their hard work.

In November, we set new three-year targets across operating EPS, IFRS return on equity, and cash remittances. These now include Direct Line and better reflect our trajectory as a diversified, capital-light business.

Charlotte will cover more details on the numbers shortly. Now, I'd like to talk about Aviva's longer-term potential.

This has been a journey where we have driven sustained growth, served more customers, and stepped up for shareholders year in and year out. We continue to create longer-term value with smart strategic M&A, resulting in today where we are the UK's only diversified insurer with a clear strategy that is delivering results.

Our focus is now on hitting the new targets, further accelerating beyond 75% capital-light, and realizing the full benefit of Direct Line. This is just the next step in our journey.

There is more long-term potential beyond this three-year time horizon. Clearly, we are set up to capitalize on a range of opportunities across all our markets, but I'll prioritize three of these today.

First, how we outperform right through the cycle in General Insurance; secondly, why we are uniquely positioned to lead in Wealth; and thirdly, how we are using artificial intelligence to shape the future of Aviva. Supporting all of this is one constant: our leading customer franchise and preeminent brand.

Let's start with General Insurance. This is, and always will be, a cyclical market.

After more than 325 years in the industry, we know how to navigate cycles. We have been through disruption time and time again.

Direct Line changed the industry by selling directly over the phone. Price comparison websites then reshaped the market.

Now we have generative AI, with autonomous vehicles to come. Through all of these changes, Aviva continues to deliver, bringing in fantastic people, launching innovative products like Aviva Zero, expanding distribution onto PCWs and through Lloyd's, and so much more.

We have tripled profits over the last 5 years. The UK is the most competitive insurance market in the world, with high regulatory barriers to entry.

Aviva is the standout number 1 insurer here and the only player operating at scale across personal and commercial lines. We have always adapted, and we will keep adapting.

When we acquired Direct Line, we knew that market conditions would continue to evolve, and the same is true when we set our new group targets. We also knew that Aviva has the scale, discipline, technical expertise, proprietary data, brand strength, and diversified group model to grow profitably.

There's plenty of room to grow: unlocking value from Direct Line, expanding partnerships, scaling SME in Canada, building out our Lloyd's presence, not to mention the opportunity with our 25 million customers. The market will keep changing, and that's exactly why we invest in innovation.

We are ahead on EVs, telematics, automation, and AI, and we'll stay ahead. Our portfolio is built to deliver performance for years and decades to come.

Looking first at personal lines in the UK, Owen and the team have a track record of outperformance, delivering profitable growth through COVID, periods of high inflation, and pricing practices where many others struggled. Though the market is challenging today, we are still writing at target margins.

It is not by chance that we have been able to do this. Our scale is unrivaled, with breadth across distribution and game-changing amounts of proprietary data.

We have the only wholly owned repair network in the UK, which saves us around £500 per repair. We have huge potential with Direct Line, not just with the cost synergies, but growth headroom with leading brands and new products such as pet, Green Flag rescue, and micro SME.

Turning now to commercial lines, where it's a similar story. We are successfully navigating tougher conditions.

We have built up our pricing strengths, and we are able to quote above the technical prices in our models. Putting margins first has always been our priority, and that's why we have delivered consistent profits year after year.

We have unique strengths to win in this market, let me just highlight a few. We are a leader in SME and mid-market, and these segments are more resilient.

We have first-class underwriting with strength across motor fleet and liability, we are very well positioned for any future shift with autonomous vehicles. With access to Lloyd's through Probitas, we can tap into a wide range of attractive lines, having launched eight since the acquisition.

This now includes high-net-worth, which is complementary to our already leading proposition here. Across both commercial lines and personal lines, we are well set up for success today and in the future.

Moving to Wealth, which is a huge opportunity for us. There are £2.7 trillion worth of assets today, growing at double digits, and the market is set to surpass £4 trillion by 2030.

This strong growth is underpinned by clear structural trends and regulatory tailwinds. At Aviva, we have leading workplace and adviser platform businesses, and we are leveraging advice capabilities in Succession Wealth and scaling fast in Direct Wealth.

We have built a competitive edge that no one else can match. We have a leading customer franchise with a significant affluent opportunity.

Our holistic offering and trusted brand means that we can support customers throughout their lifetime. We've always invested in our platform, which is ranked by Defaqto as the number 1 in the market.

Our modern technology platform brings scale benefits, and of course, we have leading investment solutions with Aviva Investors. The performance of our Wealth business is testament to all of this.

Since 2022, we have grown assets faster than the market, and we have improved margins at the same time. In Workplace, our profit margin is up by almost 2 points over the last 2 years, which makes this business a key driver of growth and a major contributor to our profits.

We are on track for our £280 million wealth profit ambition in 2027. The importance of Wealth within our portfolio is growing.

It is fast approaching 10% of our group earnings, further increasing our share of attractive fee-based income. The longer opportunity here is even more exciting.

Take Workplace. It is a highly attractive market, which has grown fourfold over the past decade, and with a constant flow of employer and employee contributions, it is expected to triple over the next decade.

This growth is not only strong, but it is also very resilient. Aviva has an incredible track record here, and we're accelerating.

The business is a genuine growth engine, with 1,500 scheme wins over the last 3 years and a near 100% retention. We are very pleased to now be the sole administration partner for the Mercer Master Trust, expected to bring around £8 billion worth of assets over the next 12 to 18 months.

The strength of our proposition is powered by leading Aviva Investors default funds, and we recently launched our My Future Vision fund, which gives customers access to private markets and reinforces our commitment to the Mansion House Compact. When you bring together our Workplace, Direct Wealth, and advice businesses, you get a truly unique wealth offering.

We are able to retain and serve customers from their very first job all the way through to their retirement. We are tapping into 4.5 million affluent customers who hold more than £1 trillion worth of assets.

We're also leveraging technology and innovation to deliver advice and guidance at scale. Targeted support is a huge opportunity for us.

This is a new service that sits between guidance and full financial advice, and it will allow us to offer easy-to-access support to so many more people. Our first journeys here will focus on how people save for their pensions, launching around the middle of this year.

There's still so much more to share on the Wealth business, we will do a deeper dive at the next In Focus session, which will be in Q4 this year. Finally, turning to artificial intelligence.

We know that this is going to be transformational, and here at Aviva, we have a greater opportunity than most. For any opportunity that you have seen in the media—and there's been quite a few recently—there are key enablers that you actually need to drive the value.

It is not enough to just have the technology. You need access to millions of customers, the ability to deploy and reuse at scale, capacity to invest, and most importantly, proprietary customer and claims data.

Aviva has all of these in spades, and our diversified model is more resilient for any disruption. This technology isn't new to us either.

We have been using traditional AI capabilities for over a decade now. In fact, over 98% of retail business in UK personal lines is priced with machine learning, and we have been training over 150 machine learning models in claims with our own data for years.

Generative AI and agentic are just the next steps on this journey. Because of our targeted investments in technology and talent, we already have many of the AI-ready foundations in place, we are well positioned for this shift.

We have built an in-house platform to deliver use cases at speed, and we are already seeing tangible benefits. We have halved the time taken to review each case in medical underwriting, and we have also reduced call wrap times by 20% for customer service agents in Direct Wealth, which we're now rolling out more broadly in IW&R.

All of our colleagues have access to AI tools, and we continue to enhance and streamline all of our data. We are proud of what we've achieved so far, but we are aiming much higher, and always balancing ambition with pragmatism.

Our focus now is on prioritizing progressively bigger end-to-end opportunities where AI can transform areas like customer engagement and distribution, underwriting and claims, right through to back-office operations. This is the kind of change that will shape Aviva's future, and some of this is closer than you think.

Let me give you an example in UK General Insurance claims. We have already saved nearly £100 million through our claims transformation, and agentic has the potential to unlock much more.

Over the next few months, we will be testing an AI-enabled claims agent built in-house and launching later this year. This will enable us to handle simple claims from start to finish without human support.

The best part is that it is voice-enabled. Most claims begin on the phone, this will be transformative for customers, delivering faster, clearer, and more consistent outcomes.

Finally, I'm delighted to announce our partnership with OpenAI, which is a really important step for us. Combining OpenAI's cutting-edge capabilities with our expertise and data will help us to deliver powerful AI solutions for our customers and our colleagues.

There's a lot more to come, and we'll share more with you at our half-year results in August. Now, I'll finish with what brings all of this together: Aviva's powerful, unique model.

We have diversification and growth advantage, with market-leading positions and a majority capital-light portfolio. We have a customer advantage, with almost 22 million UK customers and a leading brand.

We have a scale, technology, and data advantage, including the opportunity that AI brings. All of this gives us real confidence for the future over the next 3 years and well beyond.

With that, I'm going to hand over to Charlotte, who's going to take you through the results in more detail.

Thanks, Amanda, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be here for another full year results presentation.

2025 was a strong year for Aviva, once again, as we continued our growth momentum. Operating profit was up 25% to £2.2 billion, which translated to an EPS of 56 pence and a return on equity of 17.5%.

Cash remittances were up 4% to £2.1 billion, and this excludes the funding for Direct Line, which is reported separately. Solvency of 180% is at the top end of our working range, supported by £2.3 billion of own funds generation, or OFG, the solvency measure of operating performance.

In November, we said we were on track to meet our 2026 group targets a year early, and I'm pleased to confirm that we have achieved that. We exceeded our £2 billion operating profit target before the contribution from Direct Line.

The group total of £2.2 billion is in line with November's guidance. We comfortably achieved our OFG target a year early and are ahead of schedule on our cash remittances target.

This demonstrates the grip we have on performance management, to actively manage through the cycle and outperform peers. Given our excellent progress, we set new and ambitious three-year targets in November, reflecting the shape of our group today and our plans for the next 3 years.

These targets allow better comparability with peers, align with our capital management framework, and support our plans to grow in capital-light businesses. These targets are ambitious and achievable.

They take into account the outlook for each business, including good visibility of where we are in the cycle. We're targeting an 11% operating EPS CAGR from 2025 through to 2028.

This reflects the operating earnings growth and share count reduction from regular and sustainable capital returns. Our 2025 EPS of 56 pence is ahead of the 55 pence baseline that we set in November, as the last few weeks of the year saw more benign weather than expected.

Now, we're not assuming this favorable weather repeats, the 11% target is from the 55 pence baseline and builds to around 75 pence by 2028. We're really confident in our plans to drive progressive earnings across the group, and combined with share buybacks, we're well placed to achieve this and our other group targets.

I'll now unpack the group results in a bit more detail, starting with General Insurance, which was 56% of business unit operating profit. Top-line growth has been an impressive 14% over recent years, and margin has improved, too, with the combined ratio better by 1.6 points.

The investment return has grown in line with the portfolio, all of which together means operating profit has grown to almost £1.5 billion. In the UK and Ireland, premiums grew 27%.

A large component of this was the addition of Direct Line, reported as part of UK personal lines where we saw 50% premium increase. Commercial lines premiums grew 7% as we build GCS, integrate Probitas, and leverage the strength of our SME and mid-market propositions.

The combined ratio in the UK for both commercial and personal lines is a strong 93.9%. This was a 1-point improvement, reflecting the earn-through of pricing and some favorable weather.

In commercial lines, positive prior development was more than offset by elevated large losses in the current year. Including Ireland, COR was 94.1%, reflecting the impact of Storm Owen back in Q1.

Overall, operating profit for UK and Ireland grew 52% to over £1 billion. Now, in 2026, growth will benefit from a full year of premiums from Direct Line.

Now, looking at the UK and Ireland business as a whole, we expect to deliver a 2026 combined ratio of better than 94%, subject, of course, to normal weather patterns. We come from a position of strength, with good rate adequacy, and relative to the softer market, we have held rate.

We leverage the strength of our brand, scale, pricing sophistication, proprietary data, and diversification. We have extensive experience in managing pricing cycles and disruption.

We're really well placed to navigate the current conditions. Premiums in Canada up 2% in constant currency.

The Canadian market is at a different stage in the pricing cycle compared to the UK, and so personal lines grew as we secured pricing increases across property and auto, maintaining strong retention. This was offset by some portfolio actions taken in commercial lines that I covered at the half year.

The undiscounted COR was almost 3 points better, largely reflecting weather experience which was broadly in line with our budget, compared with the elevated cat activity in 2024. There was improved large loss experience compared to '24, as well as pricing actions earning through.

Investment income was marginally down, but operating profit was up 49% to £408 million. For 2026, we expect to deliver a combined ratio approaching 94% for Canada.

The personal lines rating environment remains supportive, with further pricing increases expected. In commercial lines, though, the dynamics are similar to the UK, with softer conditions that vary line by line.

Across the portfolio, we will navigate the cycle with discipline. Now moving to insurance, wealth, and retirement, and starting with the insurance businesses, Health and Protection.

Demand for health has been affected by cost-of-living pressures for consumers and small businesses reprioritizing spend to absorb the national insurance changes. Despite this, in-force premiums were up 12%, and we maintained a low-90s COR.

Operating profit was up 9% as the business grows in line with our ambition. Now, as expected and in line with the first 9 months, Protection sales were lower following the consolidation of AIG and Aviva propositions back in August 2024.

Margins have improved by 90 basis points as we reprice the business, and all of this is in line with our integration plans. Operating profit was up 97% as we had some adverse assumption changes back in 2024, and in '25, we recognized the one-time integration benefit following the legal transfer of business acquired from AIG.

Now moving to Wealth. Workplace net flows were up 6% as member contributions grew and we onboarded new schemes.

The resilience of this business is demonstrated by the impressive £1 billion of regular monthly contributions. Our adviser platform performed strongly, with flows up 11% despite elevated outflows around the time of the UK budget.

In our direct business, the customer base grew by almost a third to over 100,000, and we're continuing to invest in developing the proposition. Wealth operating profit was up 36%, with operating margin improving by 1.1 basis points as the business grows and leverages the cost base.

Operating profit as a portion of revenue is 23%, up 4 points. As Amanda mentioned, we are on track to meet our near-term ambitions.

Beyond that, the opportunity is even more exciting for the group's long-term growth. We have a strong brand proposition and scale from which to build.

We anticipate further improvements in operating margin and profit progression. In Retirement, we wrote a more typical £4.6 billion of BPA following an elevated 2024.

Importantly, Aviva Investors originated £3.5 billion of real assets to support the business. Now, this is an increasingly competitive market, and our team has continued to trade well and with discipline.

We achieved a mid-teens IRR, well above our low-teens guidance, and the business has been written at relatively low strain. Individual annuity sales were up 19% to £1.6 billion, our highest level since 2015 pension reforms, supported by a new product launch.

Operating profit was 5% lower as higher releases from the contractual service margin were offset by a lower investment result. We expect to remain active this year in Retirement and will be disciplined in the competitive environment.

Now turning to cost and efficiency. The ratios are broadly stable despite the temporary uplift effects from acquisitions and new partnerships.

Across the group, we continue to invest in exciting growth and productivity initiatives, including the use of AI and in automation. We expect this investment to drive efficiencies in each of our businesses.

It will improve operating leverage and unlock significant long-term value from our extensive customer base and proprietary data. Now, the application of our consistent capital allocation framework is a critical part of what we do to optimize our diversified group.

This slide summarizes how we think about performance and financial strength and what that means for uses of capital. We continue to build sustainable growth in earnings and cash and work to maintain our balance sheet strength.

We grow the regular dividends, we invest in the business for growth and efficiency, and we return capital to shareholders. Nothing here is new, but it's important that you see we do this really well.

As an example of the framework in action, I'll pause for a moment on solvency. One of the advantages of the model we have built is proactive balance sheet management.

A year ago, our cover ratio was 203% as we prepared to complete the Direct Line transaction. This used 31 points of capital ahead of the realization of the capital synergies.

We've delivered elevated management actions of 11 points and accelerated 3 points of Direct Line synergies by temporarily moving the business to standard formula. This has supported building solvency back up to 180%.

The underlying capital generation of 16 points includes a couple of points of favorable one-offs, including positive weather and reinsurance pricing impacts, which we can't assume will repeat, but we do expect to unlock the remainder of the Direct Line synergies. Specifically, we're on track to deliver at least £350 million, or 7 points of solvency, around the end of this year.

Looking forward, we expect a progressive build of operating capital generation of around 20 points in 2027. This assumes normal levels of management actions of around 200 points, and depending on whether these impact own funds or SCR or both, this translates to between 2 and 4 points of solvency.

This level of capital generation will continue to grow and provides headroom in excess of the annual dividend and regular buyback. Now moving to a few words on Direct Line.

The integration continues to progress well and at speed. We have successfully implemented our pricing models into Direct Line, with an improvement in written CORs in the fourth quarter.

We've made excellent progress on the Direct Line branded PCW sales, doubling the number of policies in Q3 and almost doubling them again in Q4. We've transferred £2.9 billion of assets to Aviva Investors, with more to come.

We've made good progress rationalizing two office locations and three motor repair sites. We're progressing on removing duplicate roles and have an incredibly strong leadership team in place with a proven track record.

All of this is enabling us to deliver material financial benefits. In November, you'll remember we uplifted our cost savings ambition to £225 million and confirmed Direct Line's own cost program of £100 million had been achieved.

We have delivered the first £50 million of cost savings in the second half of 2025. This will fully earn through in 2026 and contributed around £10 million to operating profit in 2025.

We expect to deliver the remaining £175 million of savings fairly evenly over the next 3 years. We're also investing around £50 million to unlock claims cost benefits of at least £50 million each year.

All the work on the acquisition balance sheet has now been completed. Now, I'll briefly cover the delivery of our commitments on dividends.

Today, we've announced the final dividend of 26.2 pence, giving a total dividend of 39.3 pence, a 10% increase on 2024. This includes the regular dividend growth plus the 5% uplift we promised following the acquisition of Direct Line.

We've also resumed the buyback, launching a new £350 million program, increased to reflect the higher share count. As we go forward, our consistent dividend policy of mid-single-digit increases in the cash cost of the dividends builds from this higher point.

Combined with the resumption of the regular buyback, this will deliver a higher progressive DPS development. To summarize, 2025 was another great year for Aviva, and the outlook for '26 and beyond is positive.

Our diversified business model and the addition of Direct Line leaves us well placed to continue our track record of growth and earnings momentum. We will continue to invest in data, customer engagement, and operating efficiency, ensuring we keep winning in an ever-changing world.

Of course, we will maintain a firm grip on performance management across the group. All of this gives us great confidence in delivering the ambitious targets we have set and the future beyond that time frame.

With that, I'll hand back to Amanda.

Thanks, Charlotte. Before we move to Q&A, let me conclude with the key points.

We have real momentum, and we are building on it every single year. 2025 extends our track record of strong, profitable growth.

We have already delivered another set of targets, and we are driving towards the raised ambitions that we have set for our next chapter. Aviva is in a stronger position than ever, and this isn't just a strong position for the next few years.

Aviva is uniquely placed for longer-term success. Here is why.

We are the UK's national champion and the only diversified insurer. We are accelerating capital-light and unlocking higher returns.

We have an outstanding customer franchise of more than 25 million customers globally. We are the UK's most trusted insurance brand.

We have proprietary data at scale, driving better pricing, better risk selection, and better customer outcomes. All of this fuels our superior returns for shareholders, with strong and sustainable earnings growth and attractive dividend and regular share buyback.

These strengths, and many more, give me deep confidence that we will unlock the full potential of Aviva in the years ahead. Thank you for listening.

Let's move to your questions.

Hi, it's Andrew Baker, Goldman Sachs. Thank you for taking my questions.

First one, I guess, on your '26 combined ratio guidance. If I look UK and Ireland, I think the underlying is about 96.7% in 2025, quite a jump to get to less than 94%.

Can you just help us with the bridge there? Then similarly on Canada, how do you get from sort of the 96.5% underlying to approaching the 94% that you've highlighted?

Then secondly, I can see out of the slide in the appendix, giving a bit more detail on autonomous vehicles. Are you able just to give us sort of your view on maybe the timing here, opportunities, threats, and I guess, ultimately, how you think Aviva's positioned to win in this market?

Thank you.

Charlotte, do you want to take the first one? I'll take the first one.

Thanks, Andrew. Look, I'll start by saying we're very pleased with the COR of 94.6% for the group.

Underlying COR has increased across the group from 1.4% to 96.7%, but I'm very comfortable with the position, let me try and explain. In Canada, we've seen about 0.7 of improvement in the underlying as we've seen price increases earn through and we've seen auto theft trends improve.

We see having put around 10% through in personal lines and those trends continuing, we can see the continued trend towards the sort of approaching 94%. We took those portfolio actions in the commercial book, again, some of that profitability will improve as a result of that, already coming through in the second half, but you'll get a full-year effect of that.

In the UK, yeah, the underlying COR I've got is 96.3%, but in there, you've got some elevated commercial lines large loss experience which was kind of in the second half. Just as I won't assume weather is better than long-term averages and I don't assume prior year development coming through, I also assume that large losses will be at a kind of regular loss loadings.

When you look at the nature of the large losses, they were idiosyncratic in nature, they were good underwriting decisions, just a bit of bad luck. Again, I wouldn't assume they repeat.

Now, they were about 1.7 points higher than the long-term averages or the loadings that we set. If I take that off the 96.3%, you can see that's already quite a lot of an improvement.

Then I've got Direct Line coming in in the second half. It's still not at the performance level we would want it to be, it's got a negative impact in the second half.

As we see that earning through and we see more of the cost synergies come through, then again, that will drive a lot of the improvement. We have the plans and we've got the good line of sight to the guidance we've given.

On autonomous vehicles, yeah, we did put the slides in the deck because we sort of thought that there might be one or two questions on it. There's obviously been a lot of media activity on this in the last couple of weeks.

You've seen sort of two extremes of that, really, everything's doomsday scenario, to the sort of major manufacturers coming out only last week and saying that they've abandoned their Level 3 driving system plans. I think that we've got to just manage some of the noise that sits around the topic.

Now on saying that, we do recognize that this will bring a change in the market, and just the same as, I think, we've adapted to hybrid vehicles, to electric vehicles, pricing sophistication, now generative AI, I think we sort of feel very ready for this. Our view is, we've looked at the WEF analysis and the BCG analysis, and we would concur that the widespread adoption is not expected until the 2040s.

Even then, I think, if you think about the upgrading of the car park globally is going to cost trillions of dollars. I don't think we should just underestimate even that an average car price today versus what it costs to have a fully autonomous vehicle, you're talking about tens of thousands of costs difference.

I think you sort of have to balance that. When it comes to it, who's going to win in this autonomous vehicle world?

I think first of all, this is the most competitive market in the world, as I said in the presentation, I would bank on the UK being able to deal with this. As Aviva, we have deep understanding of vehicle technology, we are the number 1 insurer for EVs today.

We have our own repair network, the feedback loop in terms of that repair is going to be important. We're one of three telematics players in the market.

We've got about 3 billion miles of telematics data since that product was first offered. By the 2040s, you can imagine we're going to have a lot more data, all of that data will matter.

I think ultimately, you're never going to have this as being a pure commercial lines product, because at some point, the vehicle may get stolen, and I don't think that the vehicle manufacturer is going to take responsibility for that. There will be times when the vehicle is being driven in difficult driving conditions, on country roads, where it's not going to be fully autonomous.

What you're going to need is this balance between personal lines and commercial lines. I would put Aviva out there to be able to deal with that as probably the only player in the UK today that actually can.

I think we have to be circumspect about it. We have to recognize that the market will change, but I think genuinely we are thinking, it's a good way off, but we thought we'd put the slide in because we thought you may be interested.

Hi, thank you very much. Just one numbers question and one non-numbers question.

On the numbers, I noticed your investment income in General Insurance was up quite a lot, certainly compared to what I expected. Is that a sustainable level, and will the margin with the unwind of the discount as well, can we expect that to sort of be a sustainable level that might grow from here?

Then secondly, on going back to AI, there's also been a lot of kind of wild scenarios about how Wealth will be affected by AI and how distribution will be killed and margins will disappear, and yeah, lots of doomsday stuff on that, too. What are your thoughts on Wealth, particularly around targeted advice and how you could use Gen AI to advantage?

Thank you.

I think nothing particularly to call out on the investment income. It is obviously affected by having the Direct Line portfolio, but the rates that we're earning is pretty consistent, LTR is a percentage of average assets aligned to the prior at 4.2%.

Nothing untoward or nothing particularly to call out in the investment income. No.

Okay. On AI, in Wealth specifically, but I think more broadly.

If we think about the investment that needs to go into AI, and how you will reuse that across the business, I think if you think about Aviva, if you think just even on claims summarization, we've taken things for motor that we will apply to home, to travel, to health, to protection, to various other areas. If you think about the investment spread across the business, we feel that we're in a good position to be able to sort of get more maximum use and maybe keep more of the benefit of that, and not pass all of that on in a competitive environment.

On Wealth specifically, if we think about this new term of the moat, which is obviously new to all of us, the AI moat, what is Aviva's AI moat? I think I would say that one of the biggest moats that we have is our workplace pension business.

Why is that the case? Because it is basically connected to employer, employee, and provider, and effectively with 4.5 million workplace pension customers, with the data that we have on those customers, we know what they are saving, and the ability for us to be able to use AI and all the other data that we may have on them from things like motor, home, and everything else to be able to provide a more personalized proposition via targeted support or simplified advice or going right through to sort of the full-fat advice, I think that we're in a really good position to be able to capitalize on that.

I think we've seen disintermediation in many places before. Take price comparison websites.

That massively transformed the motor market and disintermediated to almost a whole extent where today 95% of quotes come that way. As a mass affluent player, we're in a perfect position to be able to manage that, any potential disintermediation.

I still believe that advice will be there. I just think that the advisers will be given better information, more support, and they'll spend more of their time with the customers where the customers want that face-to-face advice.

I think for those many people, 91% of the population today that don't take advice, AI will facilitate the ability to be able to do that, and mean that they will get better guidance. You've got 12.5 million people in the UK today that do not save enough for their retirement.

I think it gives a real opportunity to be able to do that. I would say we're bordering on the sort of excited end of the scale in terms of the opportunity that that provides Aviva.

Thank you. Larissa van Deventer from Barclays.

Three quick ones on my side. The first one just on Canadian commercial, is the culling now done, or should we expect some of that to linger into 2026?

On the life value of new business, if you could please give us a little bit more color on what drove the decline and how we should think about margin evolution going forward, basically was to separate the one-offs from any structural change that you may see? The last one on Workplace, you've been very positive on this for some time.

What needs to happen for you to meet your targets? Specifically on that, how do you see margin or potential margin compression in that space?

Thank you.

I'll pick up one and three and then hand over to Charlotte on the margins bit of three. On the Canadian portfolio remediation, yes, that is largely done.

I think if we think about Canada, we really see a big opportunity there to improve the performance of the Canadian business. I think there's a number of areas, a push out in terms of SME, a move more from Ontario or move as well as into Quebec, where we're not largely represented in Quebec today.

We've got big partnerships with Loblaw and RBC, which we will be capitalizing on. I think the Canadian business has made some really strong improvements that they will continue to build on over the coming period, and that's why Charlotte was able to give the guidance that she wanted to there.

On the life VNB, Charlotte, and then come back on Workplace?

I suppose there's a couple of things. In general, there's an element coming down because of the retirement levels of the VNB, BPA volumes being less.

Then we've got a slightly stranger effect coming through in Wealth in the fourth quarter, and that's allowing for some assumption changes which kind of are relevant for the whole year, but they come through in the fourth quarter. There's a little bit on retirement margin and a little bit on Wealth, but I would encourage you on Wealth to always look at the flows and the operating margin, and how we're improving the operating leverage there, and therefore the opportunities on the profitability.

The VNB metric isn't that applicable, but we give it so that you can see the overall IW&R level.

On Workplace, what gives me the confidence here? I think the progress that has been made, even when you've got to look at the sort of progress towards the £280 million ambition, and that is primarily driven by the contribution from the adviser platform and the Workplace business.

Workplace AUM is up 19% to £153 billion, strong new business and growing member contributions, net flows of £7 billion, so that's 6% of AUM. We're getting regular billion pounds member contributions every month.

We talked about the new scheme wins, the win rate of 75%, which I think is pretty impressive. We've got a very positive outlook on Workplace.

We announced the new deal this morning with the Mercer transfer, that's £8 billion being transferred in over the next 12 to 18 months, I think the team are doing exceptionally well here. On the margins, Charlotte, do you just want to comment on Workplace margins?

Sorry, yes. On Workplace margins, we have shown the improvement in the operating margin.

If I look at it at the overall Wealth level, it's gone from about 7% to 8.1%. If I look at Workplace, which is not then so much diluted by some of the investment that we're spending, it's improved from about 10.7% to 11.5%.

All the pressure that you constantly always expect on the revenue margin level, which continues to be there, we're compensating by the scale that we have, the operating leverage that that drives, and that keeps going forward. We also gave you a stat on sort of the expense margin as well, which is sort of like the inverse of a cost income ratio.

Again, that's showing an improvement to 25% now for the whole Wealth business. I think we've got to keep on it.

We've got to make sure that we're protecting as much of the revenue margin as we can, and we do that through being competitive. We have to be competitive, but then there's a lot of incremental contributions into Workplace that sometimes attract a slightly higher margin per item.

We have to keep mind on that, but the real driver is making sure that the operating leverage continues to build.

and then please Tom. Hello, it's Andrew Crean, Autonomous.

Could you talk a little bit about Direct Line's premiums and your retentions there? Is that working out the way you planned as you renew business?

Secondly, I notice the CSM, the net flow is negative to the tune of about 2%. Is that something which you think will continue in the long term?

I.e., that your releases will be more than your expected return and new business? Then can you talk about UK retail pricing?

What's happening in the market in terms of rates and how you see rates going over this year?

Okay. Shall I pick up

UK pricing first,

and then

I'll come back to yours?

Yeah. Yeah.

We're not going to break down the individual brands, Andrew, in terms of policy count or retentions, because we don't do that for Quote Me Happy, for Aviva Zero, and everything else. What I would say is that I think we are incredibly pleased with the Direct Line deal.

Actually, one of the real strengths in the Direct Line portfolio is the retention and their ability to retain. We were with some of the teams earlier this week where the marketing team particularly were commenting on the strength of the talent within the team around retention, we feel very good that the team is set up to do that.

On the pricing of the portfolio, on motor, which I assume is the sort of where you're heading. What do we think about this?

We always give you the numbers, bear with me just a second. If we think about our performance in 2025 on personal lines motor new business, we were up about 1% on rate.

I think the Pearson Ham data was showing rate down minus 11%. On home, we were sort of broadly flat, I think, on new business, and we were up about 8% on rate for home.

I think that shows really good discipline, and I think what it shows is us using our different distribution channels effectively. Obviously we've got the Nationwide deal which has come in for travel and home, and that will build over the course of this year.

In terms of what we see going forward, I think that obviously we see inflation in a sort of mid-single digits. Charlotte talked about us guiding to our overall 94%, so that will give you confidence hopefully that we will be disciplined, and we do see that the rates are starting to flatten out.

I think the competitors are saying the same thing. You saw the ABI data come through just a few weeks before.

We believe that it is time to start increasing the rates, and we will be very disciplined about how we do that in what is obviously still a competitive market. Then

on the CSM, if I look at it excluding Heritage, it's pretty stable at six just under £6.5 billion. Obviously with a lower volume of BPA, you've got a smaller amount of that new business CSM going in.

Then my interest accretion, that's a little bit higher because we had the higher opening CSM, because of the business written back in 2024, and that was written at higher rates than the portfolio average, so that's kind of driving that. Then, experience variances were broadly neutral, whereas the previous year they'd been a bit positive, and assumption changes are relatively minimal across the both.

When I look at the release, it's a bit higher because my starting point is higher. Now if I put Heritage back in there because that's got no new business and it's can only coming out, then the reduction is down to 7.7% from 7.768%, it's pretty marginal.

When I look at the percentage, the release is 10.3%, again, that's slightly higher than the previous year, which was 10.1%, but that sort of level is expected to repeat, but again, it will depend a little bit on mix and volumes of new business written. I think it's always important to remember this is the capital-intense part of the portfolio, and it's throwing off of cash that we're investing in Wealth and Health, and obviously Protection is within the CSM.

It's stable to level, and obviously will be impacted by how much annuity business we write in every year. Again, it's only part of the picture for IW&R.

Dominic O'Mahony, BNP Paribas. Three questions, if that's all right.

Just one clarification on the Mercer flow piece. If I've understood that correctly, is that just straight £8 billion to the flows, sort of over and above what you would get normally?

Maybe if you could just expand on that, that sounds very helpful. Second question, just to come back on the investment income.

I think opening yields presumably are lower than 12 months ago. Could you just speak to Well, firstly, whether that's actually right for your portfolio, but also whether that's a headwind to investment income across different business lines, and/or discounting, and/or whether there's anything you could do to offset that?

Then the third question, just on the capital generation, OCG underlying, much stronger than I was expecting with in particular, the SCR growth is interesting, because I think it was ever so slightly negative in the second half, as in a release. Is that the reinsurance change that you referred to, Charlotte?

I wonder if you might just expand on why the SCR dynamic within the OCG is so benign.

I'll answer the first one, which is a very straightforward yes. Then I leave Charlotte to answer the two difficult ones.

Look,

I think just trying to

think

how best

to answer your question. Look, We're at 180 Now I'm struggling with your number.

187%, what are you With Direct Line coming through, 7 points. Oh, I see.

Okay. The way I think you need to think about it is we gave guidance for '27 of 20 points.

I am going to get to your question, but let me just set the scene how I see it. For 2027, I'm giving guidance of 20 points, and that comes from the sort of 12 that we've had in the past, which is kind of like the one a month of regular underlying OCG, plus about 3 points coming from Direct Line.

We had about a point and a half, which is just the regular performance of Direct Line, we had about point and a half in the latter part of second half of the year.

If I take the 12 plus the 3 that's coming from Direct Line, then I think of the business improvements, I'm getting to an underlying of about 17 points, and management actions on a recurring basis will be about 3. That gets me to the 20.

That's kind of 2027, that's looking beyond when the Direct Line synergy benefits come through. At that point, dividends are probably about 14 points, and buybacks is about 4.

So 20 versus 18 just kind of gives me a couple of points of headroom. '26 is a complicated year because you've kind of got a higher SCR going into the year.

I would definitely expect that the underlying generation will continue to

improve, but we

will be focusing

hugely on getting the 7 points of synergies coming out of Direct Line, and then, kind of that will then drive the SCR down. Obviously, all the time, there's new business growth, which is driving the SCR up, each year, the same number of points is leading to more pound notes in terms of capital generation.

When I think of just the near term, we've got dividends and buybacks to come out, my 180% will go down. I've also got a few debt instruments that are previously grandfathered instruments that are stopping.

I've got some drags on capital coming from that. I'm not sure I would give the pro forma, and I really don't want to give guidance for '26 because it's quite a complicated year, but what the 20 points looking through that to '27 is, I think, important for modeling.

It is a step up from '25 when you think of, obviously, we had extremely high levels of management actions, but that aside, it is a step up on that. On bulks, first of all, I think your clear question was, why do we do it?

We're actually quite good at it. We've been doing it for very long time.

We are delivering results that are sort of mid-teens IRRs, I think that's pretty good return. It is a significant contributor to the cash and the dividend paying of the group.

What we've always said is that the role of bulks is to sort of stay like this, whilst the capital-light businesses go like this. We've never said that bulks don't play an important role.

We're confident in the business. We've written £4.6 billion of deals across 86 deals.

Yes, it's competitive, but our IRRs are attractive. We've got a really strong proposition called Clarity, which is the smaller deals, which we've sort of launched over the last couple of years.

We've got a very experienced team, and yes, there are new competitors in the market. What you have to do when that happens is you have to sit back, you have to make sure that you are disciplined, and you allow them to do what they will do.

It's not easy in this market, from a regulatory perspective, making sure that you are disciplined to do this well. We will watch how that plays out, but we would still say that our £15 billion to £20 billion sort of guidance for 2025 to 2027 is there.

The other thing I would say is that on individual annuities, which is part of this business, the sales are up 19%, and in our guided retirement proposition, which has got, how do people drawdown, how do they retire, that individual annuity plays a really important role, as does equity release. I think you have to look at the combination effect of bulks, of individual annuities, of equity release.

I think that, yes, it will be competitive, and we will maintain discipline. I've said that about every line of business, and I think that's going to be the way that we will play this.

We've got a scale position today, and we will make sure that we manage this business for profit. That's mine and Charlotte's role, and the team are all completely aligned with that.

On Canada? PYD, first half, second half, reserving, we definitely had a positive impact on COR from PYD, that's in the disclosures, and it was kind of actually across all the markets.

I'm not going to go into the detail of reserving, but we had some larger losses as I talked about before. We will reserve adequately for those.

As we've looked through, again, best estimate reserving across the place, but there have been some areas that we've strengthened reserves here and there, but nothing major to call out.

Good morning, Mandeep Jagpal, RBC Capital Markets. Two questions for me, please, both on Life.

Firstly, given the fixed income market conditions, how have you invested your annuity premiums you received in 2025 versus your target allocation, and does the current allocation create an opportunity for more management actions or margin enhancement in the future? Then on the Retirement IFRS earnings in the appendix on slide 56, it looks like experience variances, the line there was quite negative for both operating profit and CSM.

Could you provide some color on what drove that negative line? Is there anything to call out here in terms of changing trends in longevity, mortality in the UK post the COVID period?

Right. Okay.

The first question was on the mix of assets supporting the Retirement business. In general, we've continued to keep a low reliance on corporate bonds in the low-spread environment, so that's meant that we've largely written at a relatively low capital spread.

When I look at the mix between liquids and illiquids, it's still kind of around the target mix that we have, which is a little over 50% in the illiquids. We've kind of achieved that.

The £3.5 billion of real assets gathered by AI have contributed to that. Obviously, that would be more than 50%, some of that is then actually in a warehouse ready for deals that we do this year, and a portion of that has been an element of back book activity as well.

That's roughly the mix there. We constantly look at what rebalancing we can do for the back book as part of the overall ALM.

The spreads, as I say, in corporate bonds has meant that we haven't allocated as much there, we've still got a higher allocation of gilts. On your second question, which was Retirement IFRS 17, yeah.

Look, I think what we've got in Retirement is historically we've ended up with a little bit of new business, which is slightly unintuitive for the Retirement business, because normally when you write Retirement business, it all goes into the CSM. In the last few years, we've ended up with a bit of benefit, and that's because the way it's allocated to the CSM is based on the target asset mix at the time and the pricing thereof.

If by the time you actually transact, it's slightly different, then that will drive a new business line. This year, we haven't got that repeating, which is more likely what you would expect from IFRS 17, but in the past, we've ended up with a little bit of new business coming through.

In terms of assumption changes, they were honestly relatively benign, and then you've kind of got experience variance effects. We has more coming out of the CSM because we started with a bigger position.

Then the investment return was a little bit lower, and that is because we use a one-year rate to derive the expected return, and we saw a slightly bigger discount unwind than that from the higher opening CSM. There's a few mixed pieces going up and down, but overall, that is a function of IFRS 17.

longevity. What was your question on longevity?

Asking if any changes, any trends. On longevity, what I would say there is we have moved to the latest tables.

We have reflected essentially CMI 24. Moving from CMI 23 to 24 hasn't led to a big release or anything.

We continue to apply a zero weighting to '22 and '23, and instead of that, we apply a sort of temporary uplift for the mortality rates in the pandemic drivers, things like the COVID and the NHS pressures. As we kind of look forward, and we assume that will run off over a 10-year period, but we keep that under review.

We then retain our long-term improvement rate, we assume that continues to improve. Longevity still continues to improve, but tapers sort of once people are in that 85-plus age bracket.

We generally have greater mortality improvements than we see in the general population, that's a function of our portfolio. We are assuming greater mortality improvements than the population more generally.

That will include, but not exclusively, factors such as weight-loss drugs and other sort of improvements in medical experience. We are still having an assumption that longevity is improving.

Hi, good morning. Thomas Bateman from Mediobanca.

Just a question on Wealth. It's a bit of a fluffy question, but obviously, the £280 million guidance for I think it's 2027 is really good in Wealth, quite a big jump from where we are.

Could you just break us down? I think it's investment spend, but there's quite a big jump there.

Is it just that? More generally, when you talk about Wealth, it always seems so fantastic, like the win rate is really good.

How are you tracking versus that longer-term £500 million guidance, I think it was 2030 or something? Second question, again on AI.

I hear everything else you're saying on the group impact, but you haven't talked much about cost impact on AI. Is that something that we could expect to hear more from you in the long term in terms of cost savings?

Third question, just very quickly, on the new lines of business at Probitas, what's the contribution from them?

Okay. I can pick up one and three, and Charlotte will pick up two.

Yeah.

On Wealth, on the two the £280 million. I think if we sort of go back to the In Focus session that Doug did, I don't know when it was, 2 years ago now, we talked then about the fact that getting to the £280 million would be primarily driven by the two big lines of business which is the Workplace business and the adviser platform, and that we would be investing in the Direct Wealth.

The biggest investment was in 2024, then there was more investment in 2025, and then that will drop out or become more normalized. I won't say drop out because you're always going to be investing in the business as we move forward.

There is an investment drag, yes. Obviously we've had some success in Direct Wealth, we've now got 100,000 customers, we've built the platform, we've put proposition onto that platform, and so we see some real traction in that business.

I think we've always said that the benefit from Direct Wealth comes after this £280 million ambition. Are we confident about the continued growth of Wealth post the £280 million?

Absolutely. Because we can see that the workplace engine continues to grow.

I feel like I'm sort of going to bore you to death on this, but it is quite important. Today that market is £760 billion.

It will be £1.3 trillion by 2030, and I'm going to make a number, it's £2 trillion by 2035 or something like that, and I'm looking to the team to nod to say that that is the right number. As we have close on 25% market share there, and we're retaining a high level, and you've seen the benefits of the operating margin improvements, we've invested in the technology platform, Doug talked about that when he presented, we're on modern technology.

We're sort of built for this business to just keep growing and growing efficiently, and then you've got some of the tailwinds coming from the regulatory environment. I'm super positive because it's a growing market, we're really good at it, we've got the sort of AI opportunity, and 4.5 million current members, and we're winning schemes like the Mercer scheme, I feel very good about that.

What was the second question? Second question was AI and cost benefits, etc.

I think it's very hard to put a specific cost benefit on this yet. Obviously, when we are thinking about it, and what's already embedded in our numbers, I think on one of my slides, I talked about, as an annual BAU spending on growth, efficiency, and customer change initiatives, we have about £450 million that's embedded in the business plans for the markets and the functions, and it's separate to the I&R spend that we have and regulatory-driven stuff.

It's a wide range of investment in our business, and that's a recurring amount that's been going on for a number of years. As part of the planning cycle, we work through how we're going to spend that money, and some of the projects are multi-year.

You've heard us talk about things like the development of the app, the single source of the customer data, the work on Direct Wealth, some of it is automation, some of it is AI. You've heard us talk about claims summarization, which takes call hold time down by 50%.

You've heard us talk about the large language models that we're developing that enables protection underwriting to be done with automated reading of many doctors' notes. All of that is driving productivity, and each time we spend money on those initiatives, there's a business case that's put forward that has benefits, and that's how we allocate all of the change money across the group.

This is no different. To the extent that we've got those activities in flight and they're driving benefits to the business, they are a part of the improvements that will drive us to those EPS targets.

That's real, and that's built into all our numbers. As we start talking about some of the more advanced things that are still at an early stage, such as the Gen AI agents or agentic agents, and where they will drive benefit, they're probably benefits beyond the planned time horizon, they're not so incorporated in the targets that we have.

They are partly funded, and as the business case is build, we will start to think through how much of that annual budget is allocated in that direction. I think it's very dynamic.

What I'm trying to say is, yes, where it's real and tangible and we can put our arms around it, it's both funded and it's included in the benefits that are in the numbers that you can see. Where it's more early stage and it's likely to leave benefits longer term, then it's outside of the target range.

People have talked around 15% to 20% of savings, and you can sort of begin to imagine how that might come. Now, some of that will be in the work we do with outsourcers, because a lot of the work that we have with outsourcers is the real mechanical stuff that we would look to automate and drive savings there.

Some of it will come in the way we deal with those third parties as well. It's a multiple range of things.

What I'm trying to do is give you assurance that it's normal course for us to be investing, have business cases, reflect those in the numbers, and deliver. On Probitas, obviously we are benefiting from the greater access to markets with the eight lines of business.

Illustratively for 2025, we wrote about £73 million worth of new business that neither Probitas on their own or Aviva's GCS would have written without that previously. I think we are showing progress, but here I would say again, it's about discipline in the current market environment.

We've got those lines of business. We're not just going to write for the sake of top line, we will write profitable business.

Hi, thank you. Nasib Ahmed from UBS.

Firstly on capital management, I think pro forma, you're at 187% plus on the solvency. You're above the holding company cash of a billion.

Charlotte, you were saying you're generating solvency above the dividend and the share buyback, and similarly on the cash remittances, if I roll that forward, you're generating more cash than you need. What is the binding constraint on distributable cash?

Is it leverage where you're kind of around 30%? Secondly, on bulk annuities, it seems like the second half last year was very competitive and probably getting more competitive with the transactions that are probably going to close this year.

Why are you still in this market given your focus on capital-light? Then thirdly, on PYD, first half versus second half, seems like you've done some reserve strengthening in the second half, both in Canada and UK.

If you can talk a little bit about that.

I'll let Charlotte do one, I'll do two, and she can do three. Look, I think just trying to think how best to answer your question.

Look, we're at 180. Now I'm struggling with your number.

187%, what are you

With Direct Line coming through, 7 points.

Oh, I see.

Okay. The way I think you need to think about it is we gave guidance for '27 of 20 points.

I am going to get to your question, but let me just set the scene how I see it. For 2027, I'm giving guidance of 20 points, and that comes from the sort of 12 that we've had in the past, which is kind of like the one a month of regular underlying OCG, plus about 3 points coming from Direct Line.

We had about a point and a half, which is just the regular performance of Direct Line, we had about point and a half in the latter part of second half of the year. If I take the 12 plus the 3 that's coming from Direct Line, then I think of the business improvements, I'm getting to an underlying of about 17 points, and management actions on a recurring basis will be about 3.

That gets me to the 20. That's kind of 2027, that's looking beyond when the Direct Line synergy benefits come through.

At that point, dividends are probably about 14 points, and buybacks is about 4. So 20 versus 18 just kind of gives me a couple of points of headroom.

'26 is a complicated year because you've kind of got a higher SCR going into the year. I would definitely expect that the underlying generation will continue to improve, but we will be focusing hugely on getting the 7 points of synergies coming out of Direct Line, and then kind of that will then drive the SCR down.

Obviously, all the time, there's new business growth, which is driving the SCR up, each year, the same number of points is leading to more pound notes in terms of capital generation. When I think of just the near term, we've got dividends and buybacks to come out, my 180% will go down.

I've also got a few debt instruments that are previously grandfathered instruments that are stopping. I've got some drags on capital coming from that.

I'm not sure I would give the pro forma, and I really don't want to give guidance for '26 because it's quite a complicated year, but what the 20 points looking through that to '27 is, I think, important for modeling. It is a step up from '25 when you think of, obviously, we had extremely high levels of management actions, but that aside, it is a step up on that.

On bulks, first of all, I think your clear question was, why do we do it? We're actually quite good at it.

We've been doing it for very long time. We are delivering results that are sort of mid-teens IRRs, I think that's pretty good return.

It is a significant contributor to the cash and the dividend paying of the group. What we've always said is that the role of bulks is to sort of stay like this, whilst the capital-light businesses go like this.

We've never said that bulks don't play an important role. We're confident in the business.

We've written £4.6 billion of deals across 86 deals. Yes, it's competitive, but our IRRs are attractive.

We've got a really strong proposition called Clarity, which is the smaller deals, which we've sort of launched over the last couple of years. We've got a very experienced team, and yes, there are new competitors in the market.

What you have to do when that happens is you have to sit back, you have to make sure that you are disciplined, and you allow them to do what they will do. It's not easy in this market, from a regulatory perspective, making sure that you are disciplined to do this well.

We will watch how that plays out, but we would still say that our £15 billion to £20 billion sort of guidance for 2025 to 2027 is there. The other thing I would say is that on individual annuities, which is part of this business, the sales are up 19%, and in our guided retirement proposition, which has got how do people drawdown, how do they retire, that individual annuity plays a really important role, as does equity release.

I think you have to look at the combination effect of bulks, of individual annuities, of equity release. I think that, yes, it will be competitive, and we will maintain discipline.

I've said that about every line of business, and I think that that's going to be the way that we will play this. We've got a scale position today, and we will make sure that we manage this business for profit.

That's mine and Charlotte's role, and the team are all completely aligned with that. On Canada?

PYD, first half, second half, reserving, we definitely had a positive impact on COR from PYD, that's in the disclosures, and it was kind of actually across all the markets. I'm not going to go into the detail of reserving, but we had some larger losses as I talked about before.

We will reserve adequately for those. As we've looked through, again, best estimate reserving across the place, but there have been some areas that we've strengthened reserves here and there, but nothing major to call out.

Thank you. William from KBW.

Hopefully, I'll be quick for the others. Thank you for providing more financial information in Excel format.

I know it's a really small point, but it is really helpful, thank you. Two questions.

It feels like ancient history, but can you just go back to the life insurance stress test and just tell us, did you learn anything that you thought was commercially helpful for your business or your understanding of the market? Then secondly, a lot of talk today about the 94% combined ratio for 2026.

What's your feeling about the long-term sustainability of underwriting margins? Is this a ratio that can keep improving because of the great stuff of AI and how you can keep growing the business because you've got amazing diversification, or is this still a cyclical business and so at some point combined ratios have to be poorer?

I'm not clear about sort of the long-term view on that. Thank you.

Shall I take life stress test? Look, I think the life stress test was, as you say, somewhat ancient history at this stage, but it was back in December, November, December, when it was reported.

I think it did provided some helpful reassurance that the sector is well capitalized and can deal with reasonably severe stresses, and but it was done at entity level, it wasn't kind of group level, but nonetheless, the individual and the collective disclosure and the confirmation from the PRA that the framework is working well and they see the sector is resilient, I think was a net positive to come out of what was a lot of hard work. I don't think anything specific.

More specific than that, partly because we do a lot of stress and scenario tests anyway. We work through that, and for us, it is important how the group behaves overall.

Neutral to helpful, I suppose.

On the 94% COR, I think we have to congratulate the UK team for getting to 93.9% in a very sort of competitive and dynamic environment. You asked, is insurance going to be still cyclical?

My bet on this having done 35 years is I think it probably is going to continue to be cyclical. I think the winners that come out of that cyclicality, if that's the right word, are those that are constantly looking at the cost and looking at the innovation within the business, making sure that you have pricing discipline, you're able to sort of flex according to the market.

The investment in AI, in machine learning, we know that makes a massive difference to our ability to be able to price in a sophisticated way. In a competitive environment, you're always going to be giving some of that back.

It's a bit like an arms race. You will invest in something, you will have a forged tool, or you're not getting rid of that fraudster, what you're doing is pushing that fraudster somewhere else.

They'll keep trying, you have to keep going. I would say in the UK market particularly, as I think the most competitive market, I would say that we will be aiming for that 94%, which we've said, I think, for the last 4, 5 years.

Weather aside, that's where we're aiming. Obviously, we would constantly be looking to improve all of the time, but you also have to recognize cyclicality and the competitive nature of the market.

I think we are set up to win because of our scale, because of our supply chain, and because of all of the data that we have and the sophistication that we have within the business. On that, I'm conscious that you have other places that you might need to get to.

Just want to thank you very much for your questions. Obviously, we're around if there are any follow-up questions.

Apologies that we couldn't get to absolutely everybody.

We have the brunch next Friday.

We have the brunch next Friday with Charlotte, and which I'm sure you will deeply enjoy and you'll be able to ask her all the very detailed questions on appendices and everything else. Thank you very much.