Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Good morning everyone, and welcome and thank you for joining us as we review Admiral 2025 year-end results. Today we'll be announcing another remarkable year of financial results and strategic progress.
I will start with the key highlights before handing over to Geraint on the financials and to Alistair on UK insurance and Costi on Europe. I will then come back to reflect on what we have achieved over the last 5 years and finally explain how the evolution of our strategy positions us to create even more value in the years ahead.
Let's start with the main achievement for 2025. We delivered record profit of £958 million.
This was up 16% year-on-year, reflecting discipline, execution, and growth across the group. 2025 also marked exciting progress across data, technology, and AI, and the evolution of our motor proposition, including the acquisition of Flock, subject to regulatory approval.
Today we'll also outline the evolution of our group strategy. This strategy builds on very strong platform, a more diversified customer base, and the competitive advantage we already have to deliver higher long-term value for all our stakeholders.
will also cover our new capital distribution framework, including share buybacks. Geraint will take you through that later.
More in detail, as already mentioned, 2025 was a year of records. Our customer base increased 7%, while we continue delivering strong customer outcomes with a group Net Promoter Score over 50.
Group profit reached a new high, driven by record UK motor profit, passing now the bar of £1 billion, following another record year in 2024. This was achieved in a challenging market environment, thanks to positive evolution of recent years and continued underwriting discipline across the cycle.
Importantly, this was not just a UK motor story. All parts of the group contributed.
In the UK, other personal lines, Admiral Money combined, delivered a profit of £88 million. Europe also performed strongly, with a fast return to profitability in Italy and great results in France, which Costi will cover shortly.
2025 was also a year of strong shareholder returns, supported by 7% increase in dividend per share, a very strong capital position with a solvency ratio of 193%, and another stellar return on equity of 53%. Beyond the financial results, 2025 marked an acceleration in our strategic progress.
We are pleased with our rapid advancement on artificial intelligence, particularly with the value delivered by machine learning models and the new GenAI Center of Excellence to scale priority use case, train our people, and provide them with right tools. We're managing more than 150 GenAI initiative across the group, including support to over 4,000 colleagues, some agentic models with promising initial results, and more potential to come.
Selling more products to our existing customers remains a key growth driver, with our multi-risk customer now exceeding 1.6 million. Across Europe, we continue to evolve our broker propositions with stronger segmentation and more customized offering, driving better margin, as Costi will explain later.
We also continue to innovate in motor. An example is our partnership with Octopus that positions us well in the fast-growing salary sacrifice scheme for electric vehicles, with a tailored risk-based proposition aligned with our ambition to support customer in making greener choices.
In Admiral Money, completing our first forward-flow deal was an important milestone as it open up a more capital-efficient growth path and support higher returns and lower volatility. On M&A, the integration of More Than is now fully completed and contributed positively.
Elephant disposal is also completed. Finally, early this year we announced our intention to acquire Flock, a company we had invested in since 2024.
Flock offers a telemetry-based fleet proposition with an effective feedback loop to improve safety and performance. It's an excellent strategic fit with our UK motor expertise, with promising underwriting and claims synergies, and closely aligned with our joint ambition to improve safety on the roads.
By combining Admiral strengths with Flock technology, we see an opportunity to develop a differentiated fleet business in an underserved market. In summary, 2025 was a record year for Admiral, with strong profits, customer growth, and progress in technology and strategy.
Now, before handing over to Geraint, I want to take a moment because this will be the last time that he joins me on stage to present results. I think it's fair to say that the strength and discipline of the performance you're about to hear are a good reflection of his leadership, his judgment, and his consistency over the last 12 years as CFO, a period during which Admiral tripled its turnover and grew profit from £350 million to almost £1 billion.
Please join me to congratulate Rachel, who is here with us today and will succeed to Geraint, bringing deep knowledge of Admiral, a strong track record within the group, and a great skill set for the role. Thank you, Geraint, and congratulations, Rachel.
Geraint Jones
Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
12 years have not been found out. One last time, let me talk you through the main drivers of an excellent 2025 results.
Lots of positives, lots of good milestones. I'll cover the UK motor loss ratios, the dividends, strong capital position, and as Milena mentioned, I'll talk you through the change in the approach to capital return that we've announced today.
To start with, though, let's look at the component parts of the group profits and the main ratios. The group combined ratio was very positive again at 80%.
That was three points higher than 2024, though the impact of Ogden accounted for around two points of that difference, in reality only a very small change. That in turn is made up of a slightly improved expense ratio and a slightly higher loss ratio, the latter as expected due to the higher loss ratio 2025 underwriting year in the UK motor having an impact.
On to the results, then. In UK insurance, overall profit was £1.1 billion.
That's £110 million higher than 2024, including Ogden, or £180 million pounds higher if Ogden is excluded, very big increase. UK motor results I'll cover shortly, but the result there was record profit, just over a billion.
We're very pleased with a really strong year for the UK other personal lines, home insurance, travel, and pet insurance, all profitable, strong growth, and the combined profit there of £62 million was nearly treble 2024's result. In Europe, we're reporting a much better result, improving by nearly £30 million versus 2024.
We see growth and higher profits in France, small loss in Spain, impacted by new reinsurance arrangements, and a recovery to profit in Italy. Good to see that happen so swiftly.
Worth reminding that we continue to hold prudent, booked reserves in Europe in the upper end of our range, and the best estimates are also conservative. Admiral Money had a great year.
Profit was double 2024's, benefiting firstly from good growth in the balance sheet, but also, as we talked about at the 2025 half year, from profit generated from selling some back-book loans in the first half and selling newly originated loans which don't hit Admiral's balance sheet. That will be a continuing and we think attractive feature of the Admiral Money business model.
We continue to see good margins on the unsecured loans business, which makes up the big majority of the balances, but the results from car finance, which was relaunched in late 2024, are also encouraging. Credit loss experience remains very solid, and we hold an appropriately prudent provision for losses.
There are some other comments on the page which cover the movement in the share scheme costs and the other line, and you've got the usual extra information in the back of the pack. All in all, group profit was up 16%, or 28% if you exclude the impact of Ogden on both years.
Let's take a look at the very impressive UK motor results. This is a summarized income statement plus some of the key ratios and some commentary.
Both years include the impact of the Ogden discount rate change, and so some of those year-on-year comparisons you see look a little less strong than they really are. We show the pounds and the percentage impacts of Ogden in the table.
Starting with the top line. Customer numbers increased by 2% year-on-year, 50,000 added in the first half and around 80,000 in the second half, 1% increases half on half.
As Alistair will talk a bit more about later, we reduced our prices in H1 last year, and hence average premiums have fallen. Despite our bigger portfolio, turnover was down by 7%, as the team took a disciplined approach in the competitive UK market and reflecting the claims trends that we were seeing.
As a result of the reduced premiums and continued claims inflation, the current-year loss ratio for '25 is three points higher than '24. Of course we also don't see quite the same positive impact of Ogden in '25 than we did last year, and those two items are the main drivers of the higher combined ratio you see at the bottom, which was as we expected.
The underwriting result improved by around £40 million, with higher earned premiums and a much lower reinsurance charge offsetting the higher net claims cost. You'll remember that we had much more limited quota share recovery assets coming into 2025, and we see a similar picture as we exit 2025, too.
Net investment income was higher, up to a record level, due mainly to higher invested assets at a similar rate of return. Profit commission was notably higher, as we've started now to recognize income on the high profitability 2024 underwriting year, though we still haven't yet recognized income on '21 to '23 or on 2025.
We do expect to see revenue coming through on '21 and '25 very soon. I already mentioned the main drivers of the higher combined ratio we see at the bottom, but within that mix reserve releases were 10% year-on-year, basically the same like-for-like.
Next up, we'll take a quick look at the main UK motor loss ratios, which, as always, are a key driver of this result. The chart shows the UK motor discounted booked loss ratios, and there are generally positive and consistent messages to report here.
We see continued strong improvements in '23 and especially on '24 over the last year. 2024 is clearly a very good margin year on a very large premium base.
In 2025, we see burn cost inflation around mid single digits level, and that's a small improvement in H2 versus where we saw things at the half-year point. The first discounted booked loss ratio for '25 is at 78, that's seven points up versus '24 at its equivalent point, and that's again basically in line with our expectation.
On an undiscounted basis, 2025 is 85%, compared to 77% for '24. Now we expect '25 will be a good, profitable year.
You can see it looks healthy on the chart at the 12-month point, and it should develop positively from here, though obviously won't end as profitably as 2024. We maintained very high reserve strength, very close to the maximum percentile, and we expect that will reduce a bit further in 2026 towards the middle of our range.
Overall on claims, positive experience in line with our expectations, usual trends, and there's more information in the back of the document. Moving now to look at the capital position.
This is the bridge of the solvency ratio from half-year to full-year '25. Couple of observations.
Firstly, the capital generation in the second half is largely offset by the final dividend. Secondly, due mainly to pretty flat revenue in '25 versus '24, we see a much smaller change in the capital requirement in '25 than we did in '24, and particularly in the second half.
Then the change in the capital requirement and the other items in the middle almost cancel each other out, leaving the group with a healthy, very healthy, almost flat ratio of 193%. Short update on the internal model.
Lots of hard work by our team as usual over the past few months since we last updated you. We now expect to make our application for approval shortly.
Post-approval, we'll target solvency coverage in the 150 to 170% range, probably at the upper end, in part to give us flexibility for smaller M&A opportunities. We'll give more information on the post-model approval capital position at the appropriate time.
Speaking of M&A briefly, Milena mentioned earlier the Flock acquisition. As we said in the press release, if that gets regulatory approval and completes in the second quarter, we estimate the impact on solvency will be a bit less than 10 percentage points and is therefore largely absorbed by the strong position.
Next up is the dividend. These are the details of the dividends split between interim and final.
For 2024, we call out the impact of the Ogden change, which was obviously significant on the dividend for last year. The proposed final dividend is 90p per share.
That brings the total for the year to 205 pence, over £620 million, and that's 7% higher than 2024's. The difference in the payout ratios year-on-year is due to us starting to use capital to purchase shares for the share schemes, which we said back in August would start in the second half of '25.
You'll remember that historically we issued new shares each year for those share schemes rather than purchase in the market, but we haven't done that since 2023. In the fourth quarter of last year, the trust bought about a million shares for just over £30 million pounds.
The capital that we used for dividend and the share scheme purchases equated to basically the same percentage of earnings across both years, close to the 90% level. In 2026, we expect the trust will buy around 3 million shares.
Next up, we'll cover the change in the capital return approach. On the left, we show a summary of our capital allocation framework.
Milena will talk a bit more about point one later, which covers how we allocate capital to our businesses. We're generally comfortable that around 10% of earnings is a fair guide of what we need to retain to fund and invest in growth, and that's meant an average dividend payout over the last 5 or 6 years of 90%.
Step two, we know the importance of strong cash returns to our shareholders, the ordinary dividend remains at 65% of earnings. Step three, as just mentioned, we purchase shares for the share plans.
Step four, not finally, using some surplus capital is an option for funding M&A. Then that leaves the surplus capital, and that's what's changing today.
Historically, as we've returned this to shareholders in the form of special dividends. From the interim 2026 dividend, we'll change that step five to be either buyback and cancel shares or pay a special dividend, depending on what the board believes is the best option.
For 2026, subject to regulatory approval, we expect to buy shares at the interim and final dividend dates. The 90% guidance we've given out over the past few years to cover the ordinary plus the special or buyback plus the share schemes purchase should generally hold moving forward.
Then one final slide from me to sum up. Looking back on 2025, clearly it was a really strong year: record profits, record returns to shareholders, lots of positive results and developments across the group.
For UK other personal lines and Admiral Money, great results. Strong and swift turnaround in Europe.
Progress on the internal model. Very pleasing stuff.
Looking ahead, a few comments on what we might expect in 2026. On growth, in summary we plan to grow everywhere.
That's obviously subject to how the markets develop, in particular when prices in UK motor start to increase. For turnover, I'd expect a bit more growth in '26 than we saw in '25.
In general, of course we expect faster growth from the newer businesses: UK other personal lines, Admiral Money, and Europe. Then a few comments in respect to the group profit.
Firstly, obviously we will see more of an impact of a less profitable '25 underwriting year feeding into the 2026 results. We will still benefit from good releases and profit commission coming through on 2024 and '23 and some of the earlier years, too.
Secondly, we project continued improvements in the results in aggregate for the newer businesses that we've talked about. Finally, we expect group profit in '26 to be quite flat versus '25 after a really very strong last couple of years where profits have more than doubled.
All those comments, of course, subject to the usual caveats on markets, geopolitics, war, and weather. That's it from me.
I shall hand you to Alistair now to talk to us about UK insurance.
Alistair Hargreaves
Thank you, Geraint. Good morning.
I'm very pleased to take through an excellent set of UK insurance results. 2025 has been a record year across all our lines of business, underpinned by disciplined execution, customer-centricity, and strong operational delivery.
Starting with the headlines. Customer numbers reached 9.6 million, up 9% year-on-year, with strong contributions from motor, household, travel, and pet.
We delivered £5 billion of turnover and £1.1 billion of profit, passing the £1 billion profit milestone for the first time. We continue to deliver competitive prices, great service, and good customer outcomes, which is recognized in customer feedback.
We remain number one on Trustpilot and achieve an NPS over 55. Importantly, 1.6 million customers now hold two or more products with us, a 14% increase year-on-year.
Customers buying more products gives us better data to improve risk selection for all products, is a driver of our retention advantage in motor, and growth in new lines of business, overall an efficient source of growth that contributes to improved expense ratios. Recent announcements are leading to a more predictable regulatory landscape.
Outcomes from the Motor Insurance Taskforce and premium finance review were in line with expectations, and the home and travel claims handling review is now complete and we have no significant concerns. Let's turn to the motor market.
Starting with claims trends, frequency was largely flat following the marked decline we saw in 2024, and severity has returned to more normal mid single digit levels. Our expectation is that these trends continue, but the current macro environment introduces some uncertainty.
The graph on the left shows a dark line for claims burn costs. Claims burn costs increased steeply through 2022 and then continue to increase, but more modestly.
The light line for market average premiums shows a lagging response to claims costs, increasing rapidly in 2023, outpacing claims costs, and then declining. Both lines are indexed to 2021, and you see they cross in 2025 as increases in claims costs now exceed increases in premiums over the period.
Let's focus on recent market prices. On the right, you see prices continue to decline through the second half of 2025, though at a slower rate than in the first half.
We estimate average premiums declined by around 10% in 2025, broadly in line with movements reflected in ABI data. Since the start of '26, market prices are relatively flat, with some differences in strategy between market participants.
Market prices need to increase imminently. EY forecasts a motor market combined ratio of 111% for 2026.
This is on an earned basis and EY assume price increases through 2026, delays in market price increases will put more pressure on this 2026 market combined ratio. Turning to Admiral UK Motor.
In 2025, we focused on disciplined cycle management and maintaining our strong advantage in pricing, claims, and customer retention. In 2025, we reduced rates by around half as much as the market.
All the decreases were in H1. In H2, our prices were broadly flat.
The left-hand graph shows that this led to a decline in new business market share in the second half of '25. Lower new business was more than offset by strong retention, resulting in modest policy growth, though lower average premiums resulted in a drop in turnover.
In 2026, we've started increasing premiums, with low single-digit increases at the start of the year to reflect the claims outlook and maintain good written margins. Taking a longer view, our disciplined approach results in varying growth through the cycle, but maximizes value and growth over the medium term.
The graph on the right shows our year-on-year vehicle growth rate in blue, in yellow is our written loss ratio. Our loss ratio is consistently better than the market, but still fluctuates within a range due to the cycle.
We respond quickly to claims trends even if it results in slower growth in the short term. It then enables us to grow quickly when loss ratios are low, for example, by 15% in 2024.
Since the start of 2020, our vehicles covered has grown at a CAGR of 5% and with an average combined ratio advantage of around 20% versus the market. We continue to invest in strengthening our pricing and claims capabilities, including embracing predictive AI and GenAI, which Milena will talk more about.
Electric vehicles is a great example of our pricing and claims focus. We lead in this growing segment, we're very competitive whilst delivering comparable loss ratios to high levels of repairability.
Our overall approach is to be disciplined and grow when the time is right, whilst focusing on driving advantage in pricing, claims, and customer retention. We're confident this will result in growth and maximizing value over the medium term.
Let's move to our other UK insurance lines, where we've had an outstanding year. We welcomed 650,000 new customers, year-on-year growth of 21%, and trebled profits across household, travel, and pet.
In household, market premiums softened further and subsidence claims were elevated in the second half of the year. Our own pricing remained more disciplined than the market and weather-adjusted loss ratios improved by about two percentage points.
This, combined with top-line growth, meant that although prior-year reserve releases normalized from the 2024 exceptional levels, we still delivered a record household profit. The More Than integration is complete, with around 380,000 home and pet customers transferred successfully.
This has accelerated growth and enhanced capability, particularly in pet. Travel grew customers by 29% and continued its positive profit trajectory.
Pet grew even faster and reached breakeven just 3 years after launch. All three lines are now profitable, with clear momentum and strong positions across their markets.
In summary, in 2025, we've delivered record profits, but in addition, motor remains disciplined and well positioned ahead of the market pricing increases expected in 2026. Household, travel, and pet are performing extremely well, with growing scale and margin, and customer satisfaction and retention are excellent, with more customers choosing to buy more products from us.
We enter 2026 with confidence that we'll continue to deliver sustainable, profitable growth over the medium term. Milena will talk more about this shortly.
Now I'll hand over to Costi for Europe.
Costi Moretti
Thank you, Al, and good morning, everyone. For our European operations, 2025 has been a year of consolidation.
We have directed our efforts towards strengthening the operational core across our three markets, focusing on the fundamentals of discipline and optimization. It has been a positive period where we have made good progress on our strategy, providing a positive contribution to the group's ongoing diversification efforts.
Moving to the financial results. The headline for the year is a return to combined profitability across the region.
The business delivered €39 million Europe motor profit on a whole account basis, of which €11 million is the Admiral share. Going back to the business performance, we closed 2025 with a good combined ratio of 94%.
While this represents a significant year-on-year improvement of over 10 points, it is important to look at the individual market dynamics. In Italy, with ConTe, we have reached a small profit, which is a €30 million recovery from the previous year.
This significant recovery was driven by strong actions taken on the expenses and a deliberate and disciplined pruning of the portfolio. We made the conscious decision to prioritize technical margins over volumes, leading to an expected vehicle-in-force reduction.
With the business now on a more stable footing, we are in a position to look toward growth, always keeping the focus on its underwriting quality. Moving to Spain, where Admiral Seguros reported results includes about €8 million of one-off accounting impact related to a change in the reinsurance structure.
Going forward, we have established new multi-year and large reinsurance arrangements at a European level with our historical partners. Effective from 2026, these agreements aim to improve capital efficiency and provide greater stability to our results.
Excluding this specific item, the Spanish business is nearing breakeven. This is supported by the direct business, which provides a positive contribution to the results, while our diversification initiatives with ING Bank and brokers are showing very encouraging improvements while scaling up.
Closing with France, where L'olivier has had a very strong year. We achieved double-digit growth in both turnover and profit, with results reaching €16 million profit, and we surpassed half million customers.
This performance demonstrates that L'olivier is successfully applying the Admiral model, maintaining a strong combined ratio advantage versus the market while driving growth through digital channels. Let's move to review our strategic progress, starting from the shift in distribution.
We have focused heavily on our new brokers proposition in Italy and Spain. As the business mix indicates, we have moved away from an initial test-and-learn proposition toward this new one, which focuses on building long-term relationships with the intermediaries and also targets better risk segments and higher-margin business in line with our expectations.
The early metrics from this shift are positive and provide a solid foundation. We're seeing solid improvement compared to our older book across all the key metrics, like higher income per policy, lower frequency, and lower cost per claim.
These improved fundamentals have contributed to a nine-point reduction in the overall loss ratio. While there is still more work to do, we expect these benefits to continue as more growth will come and the new proposition mature.
In France, we are continuing to diversify through our household insurance product. We now cover over 100,000 risks, a 25% increase versus last year, which provides a meaningful second pillar to our French operation.
Regarding efficiency, we have managed to steadily reduce the European motor expense ratio by seven points since 2022. This has been a necessary step to remain competitive.
Even in Italy, despite the reduction in turnover, we improved the expense ratio by one point through automation and more streamlined digital customer experience. These operational improvements are also supported by our new common data platform, which is now operational across the three countries.
This asset allows us to deploy data features and machine learning models across border with greater technical agility and quality, which is essential for maintaining our edge in a rapidly evolving market. To wrap up, we're very pleased by the progress made this year.
Our European operations have reached combined profitability, giving us confidence in their future contribution to group's broader diversification strategy. Our objective moving forward is to leverage this stability to increase our scale and enhance our earnings.
We have the right expertise, a solid data and technological framework, and a disciplined path ahead. Thank you.
Now hand over to Milena to talk more about the group strategy.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Thank you, Costi. As you just heard, 2025 was an excellent year across the group.
Now I would like to take a moment and step back with you and see what we have accomplished over the last 5 years. In 2020, we announced our 5-year group strategy based on three pillar: business diversification, Admiral 2.0, and motor evolution.
Today we're extremely proud of what we achieved in this timeframe. First, remarkable growth, with turnover up nearly 90% and group premium and profit almost 60%.
We returned overall £3.2 billion to our shareholders. Second, we diversified the group, with more than 50% of customer now coming from other lines of business or geographies and contributing close to £100 million of profit.
In addition, we developed new business such as pet insurance in the UK, commercial insurance in the UK also, household insurance in France, and we extend our addressable target market with UK commercial insurance as just mentioned in B2B to C, in B2B, and B2B2C in Europe by opening up the broker distribution channel. Third, we refocused our portfolio.
We exit all of our price comparison site and the US insurance business to concentrate on the growth opportunities we have in UK and in continental Europe. The acquisition of More Than and of Flock are instrumental to strengthen our product diversification in the UK.
Fourth, we overachieved our Admiral 2.0 ambition with cloud migration, new data platform, tech stack renewal, hybrid working, scale agile delivery, predictive AI excellent at scale, and enhancement of our multi-product offer. Fifth, we made further progress in our motor proposition, including market leadership in EV, as Alistair mentioned, growing telematic product, fast-growing subscription model, and short-term insurance with our brand for the youngest, Veygo.
Last, but most important, throughout this period we maintained our historical and quite unique strengths: more than 20-point combined ratio advantage versus market in our core business, a unique 30-point delta return on equity versus market, a group NPS above 50, and legendary Great Place to Work status. Back to nowadays, where this leave us.
Our current market present very significant growth opportunities. They are large, attractive, growing, with a combined size of around £130 billion.
Today, our market share across many of this market remains relatively modest, and this leave us substantial headroom to grow. We're continuing evolving our offering to unlock further opportunity.
In lending, with the first forward-flow deal and a new car finance product; in Europe, extending our distribution and product lines. Commercial insurance and SME are also good opportunity to provide strong proposition to large underserved market, experiencing similar trends to personal lines 20 years ago, with more digitalization, pricing sophistication, and automation, where we can deploy our competitive advantage.
Organic growth in all this segment will be driven by market-leading expertise in price comparison site and digital distribution, channel that are growing faster than the rest of the market; cross-selling and higher retention; and increasing economies of scale; and fourth, automation and synergies across the group. Our plan is based on organic growth, but we will consider opportunities for selective, accretive acquisitions to accelerate diversification.
Importantly, this diversification also reduced over time our exposure to any single market cycle, making Admiral more resilient in time. Having delivered on our strategy, we now look forward, starting with the market context that is fast evolving, but also presenting very interesting opportunities and tailwinds.
The UK motor market cycle in motor is expected to turn, and the regulatory environment is expected to be more predictable, as Alistair commented before. Market consolidation could create more rational dynamics overall.
More importantly, the rapid evolution of AI and GenAI represents a major opportunity for us. Predictive AI is becoming the key driver of underwriting differentiation, and we already have 12-point of loss ratio advantage versus market, and this is a big driver of it.
GenAI and automation offer efficiency potential of up to 30% in the long term for customer service area, and may also disrupt distribution and proposition in the long run. What is interesting to us is also the potential to accelerate transition to direct distribution in markets where direct has more room to grow.
Another major trend is the advancement of car technology, another key pillar of our strategy since 2020, motor evolution. In the short to medium term, the most impactful change will be the shift to electric vehicles, expected to reach around 80% of new car sales by 2030, where we already have underwriting and market share leadership, as Alistair commented before.
This is followed by an increase penetration of advanced safety systems. These technologies have a positive impact on collision frequency, but this has been so far more than offset by an increase in severity.
As for EV, our scale and sophisticated pricing approach results in a competitive advantage. In the long run, we expect autonomous vehicles, now in their infancy, to grow in share and reach a point where frequency decrease will not be anymore offset by severity.
For this to happen, we need to see technology, customer appetite, regulation, infrastructure, all to further develop across countries. It would take anyhow a long time to scale, with higher level autonomy expected to represent around 4% of the car park by 2035, and the overall market premiums expected to be continued to grow for at least 20 years, supported by number of cars on the road and the mix.
We remain very close to this evolution, having, for example, underwritten Wayve, an autonomous vehicles player in the UK, since 2018. As AI and mobility trends evolve, our view is that the key winning factor will remain: sophisticated data-driven decision-making, scale and a lot of good quality data at scale, an entrepreneurial mindset consistently looking for opportunity to innovate, and cost efficiency.
Those are all area where Admiral has a structural advantage, including 8-point expense ratio delta versus market. Overall, we are strongly positioned to leverage those key trends.
Now, let me introduce our evolved strategy framework. This is not a discontinuity in our strategy.
It's an inflection point where we start compounding what we have already built: a more diversified business, stronger platforms, and proven competitive advantage. The focus is now making those strengths reinforce each other and more deliberately over time.
I think about this strategy with a set of reinforcing layers. Each layer supports the next, and within each layer, the benefit compound as the business grows.
The outer layer of our strategy is where we compound performance. Our first pillar is scale selectively and profitably, and is about translating diversification into sustainable growth and accelerate margin in our newer lines of business as they mature.
The middle layer is where we compound capabilities. Our second pillar is future-proof our competitive advantage, and is about leveraging on the strong capability we have built in data and technology and the multi-product benefits to improve customer lifetime value and our structural edge.
At the core, at the center, we're compounding our foundations. Our third pillar is amplify the Admiral DNA, and this is to ensure that our culture, our talent, the innovation, and the impact continue to evolve, providing stability and long-term direction and resilience as we grow.
The pillars are interconnected. Stronger foundations are a driver of stronger capability, and in turn this are enabler of stronger performance.
Let me now walk you through each of this pillar in more detail and explain what we intend to prioritize and what we aim to deliver for each. First pillar, scaling selectively and profitably.
We have a clear ambition to continue to scale all our business, while increasing margins in our newer lines. In UK motor, we'll continue to grow as we have done in every cycle since Admiral was founded, with discipline and at the right time, as Alistair illustrated earlier.
We'll continue to invest to maintain our market-leading margins. In other lines of business, UK personal lines, Admiral Money, and Europe, we will continue to grow and at a faster pace of motor, on average, generating greater economy of scale and higher margins.
A key focus will be transferring our underwriting and claims strengths from UK motor into other products and geography, as well as creating more cost synergies across the group and leverage the benefit of multi-risk ownership. Overall, we expect to deliver a strong revenue growth everywhere, including reaching top three position in other insurance personal lines in the UK, and substantially higher margin for those business combined, more than doubling profit by 2028, and more profitable growth thereafter.
Finally, we'll continue to develop our new and still small UK commercial insurance business, building a stronger SME proposition, and growing commercial motor, starting with the integration of Flock. Now let's move to the capabilities that are the key enabler of the growth ambition that we just discussed.
It's a virtuous circle that starts from our structural strength in data, customer focus, and speed, with the objective to increase customer lifetime value. With higher customer lifetime value, we create optionality, the flexibility to reinvest in this capabilities, or to invest in growth, or to retain margins.
On the left side of the slide, we see how this focus translate into better underwriting results and efficiency. We'll continue to extend our advanced predictive AI capability, including increasing both the quality and the velocity of pricing across all the lines of business and geography beyond motor.
We'll also increasingly leverage on connected vehicle data and predictive AI beyond underwriting into customer base management. This predictive AI model already deliver over £100 million of incremental loss ratio value, and we expect this to continue over time.
At the same time, we see good potential from generative AI to improve customer engagement, to increase productivity in technology and service area, and in particular to improve speed of settlement, that is great for customer, and in addition correlates with lower cost of claims. It's a win-win.
Combined with further automation and continued cost discipline, we expect more than £100 million of annual efficiency benefit by 2028, that, as I said before, we may decide to reinvest in existing capability. On the right side of the slide, we look at our customers.
We are strengthening a mobile-first digital end-to-end experience, multi-product ownership, and retention, which is already above market and with further benefit for multi-product customers retaining around 5 points better than the rest. Lower expense ratio, higher retention, and multi-product ownership are key driver of higher customer lifetime value.
As mentioned, this creates optionality, but also a more resilience to long-term market trends, margin pressures, and volatility. Moving to the third pillar, amplifying Admiral DNA.
This is what make Admiral Admiral and different. It's our culture, it's our approach, and it's something we are deeply proud of.
As the environment evolve, we are focused on ensuring that our DNA evolves, too, starting with our people, through reskilling, developing internal talent, and strengthening diversity and mobility across the group. We had this year so many example of senior leader moving across different area and geography, including the new CEO of Veygo, new Head of Claims, new Group Data Officer, new Head of Data and Tech in Europe, and this internal mobility allow us to get different perspective and cross-fertilization from one side, but also continuity and cultural fit from the other.
Another strong feature of Admiral culture is relentless curiosity and innovation, and we'll continue to evolve our products and innovate for our customers. We focus on offering competitive price, inclusive product, affordable product, including for non-standard risks.
Safety and sustainability are central in our product proposition, whether through fleet safety proposition like Flock, or through EV, electric vehicle leadership, or initiatives around flood prevention. We also want to increase our positive impact on communities, investing around 1% of profit into community initiatives, with focus on employability and climate resilience.
We are proud of the 45,000 volunteer hours delivered by our colleague in 2025, and remain committed to our net zero ambition by 2040. That was the third pillar of our strategy.
Our strategy is also support by a simple and disciplined capital management framework that is designed to increase value over time. How we allocate capital to our operation.
In UK insurance, we focus on optimizing returns over the medium term, as we always done, targeting consistently high return on equity, with no structural capital constraints. In other lines, we invest to support growth and margin expansions, where financial hurdles are met or expected to be met in the near term.
In newer areas, like commercial, for example, we allocate capital to R&D and early-stage investment, while requiring a clear right to win and scalability in the medium to long term. A key structural advantage is our capital efficiency reinsurance model, and this is a competitive advantage that is quite difficult to replicate as it stand, as it is built over more than 20 years of strong track record.
Geraint already talked you through the other steps of our framework, including the introduction of buyback as additional way to return surplus to our shareholders. Selective M&A remain an opportunistic tool to accelerate growth, especially on other personal lines in UK and in Europe, only where our financial hurdles are met.
In this slide, next slide, we bring all of it together. Our strategy and capital management framework designed to deliver strong value for our customer and shareholders.
We already deliver strong earnings growth, exceptional return, and resilience through the cycle, with a 7.6 EPS CAGR over the last 5 years. Looking forward, our ambition is to sustain and build on that performance by scaling what already works: disciplined grow in UK motor, faster growth and margin expansions in other lines, and continued optionality from capability improvements.
Our model is quite unique in the sector, delivering at the same time strong returns, growth, and exceptional capital efficiency. Importantly, this is about quality of growth as much as quantity, retaining our competitive advantage, our capital discipline, and our culture that underpins them.
In short, we believe we can continue to deliver higher returns sustainably, while staying true to what makes Admiral different. Conclusion, to sum up: 2025 was record year for Admiral: record profits, record dividends, and strong customer growth, delivered through discipline in UK motor and increasingly diversified contribution across the group.
Second, we have fully delivered our 2020-2025 strategy. Admiral today is resilient and more diversified, with proven competitive advantage that are difficult to replicate.
Third, looking ahead to 2026, while UK motor market remains competitive, we expect price to increase. Admiral is well positioned to perform strongly and remain disciplined and resilient through the cycle.
Fourth, we have evolved our strategy to compound those trends, not change direction, but raising ambition while staying disciplined. We have strengthened our capital management framework, adding buybacks alongside dividends, while maintaining a very strong balance sheet and flexibility to invest.
We remain confident on our trajectory, on our ability to leverage market trends, and continue to deliver even greater value to our customer and to our shareholders for the long term. Thank you very much for listening, and now we're ready to take questions.
Please try to limit to one or two each, and press the button when you speak. I think first one I saw is...
Darius Satkauskas
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions.
Darius Satkauskas, KBW. The first question is sort of a statement and a question.
Appreciate the update to the capital return policy, introduction of opportunistic buyback. I think one of the challenges with having an opportunistic buyback rather than the program is that when you do it, it's great; when you don't, it sort of signals to the market that management thinks the shares may be expensive.
How are you going to deal with that challenge, and are there any hurdle rates you'd like us you'd like to point to for us to sort of gauge, how you think about when we should expect buybacks and when not? The second question is, your Flock acquisition, where do you think you are in positioning for the potential liability shift to commercial from from personal among your competitors, and and who do you think is going to determine the winner in the future?
Is there a risk that a company like Allianz with the huge balance sheet simply takes the entire market in commercial auto insurance, or do you think Admiral can appropriately compete, 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line? Thank you.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Geraint, you'll take the first one, and I'll take the second?
Geraint Jones
Buybacks, that'll be based on what the board assesses is the right thing to do to try and deliver the max return for shareholders over the medium to long term. I don't, certainly for the foreseeable future, expect it to be dip in, dip out.
We'd expect to be doing it at the 2026, and the company will give an update on that at least annually, I suspect, as we move forward. I hear your point on opportunistic versus steady.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Your second question is about Flock and commercial insurance. There are a few reason why we're interested in this market.
It's attractive, it's in the long market, but it's also a market where we see we can deploy a lot of our strengths. Fleet market is very competitive, you do need to be a very good underwriter.
Our claims and pricing strength can be transfer across nicely. We also think it's a market that will be disrupted, and that's why we didn't want to really enter in the traditional way, but just focus on a proposition that we think is fit for the future, is the type of business is going to grow in the future.
It's telemetry-based, there's a lot of data from a lot of driving data, a sector in which we have already developed strong competence to very large and growing telematic portfolio in personal lines, is an interesting proposition because there is a strong feedback loop to driver to increase safety, to increase performance. I would say it's also a building block for car of the future.
The more the car become embed safety features and become autonomous, the more this type of skill set, data-driven pricing and underwriting and a feedback loop, is important. For us, it's a very interesting way to create and to develop a business that is interesting per se, but is also a way into the future.
I think it's a competitive market when you do it in the right way, and with a proposition that is future fit, that's our ambition there. We think the mix of Flock's skill, technology, and proposition, and Admiral amount of data, strength in pricing, data-driven pricing, sophisticated telematic, and also very strong claims management really can create something unique.
Sorry, I'm going to go in order. One, two...
Ivan Bokhmat
Hi, thank you. It's Ivan Bokhmat from Barclays.
My first question would be on the strategy into 2030. I just want to clarify perhaps that I interpret it correctly.
The slide that shows your 8% CAGR in the past 5 years, you're saying that you're trying to achieve that same growth into 2030, so as a statement, maybe you could just confirm that. Secondly, on the trajectory of those earnings, as far as I understand, for 2026, you're talking about flattish numbers, and then it would imply more of a hockey stick trajectory in later years.
Perhaps you could just talk a little bit about how this trajectory might look like, where the acceleration will come, and maybe specifically on the UK motor, that cyclical target where you would grow 5% through the cycle over time. When will that time frame apply in this particular case?
Maybe one final small question, the partial internal model, if you apply imminently, do you think you'll get the regulatory approval by year-end, and what does it mean for some extra capital decisions? Thanks.
Yeah.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
I think what we're saying here is three things. As we normally don't give very precise guidance on long-term or medium-term earnings.
What we're saying is that there are two very clear avenue for growth and profitable growth in the future. Our core market, that is UK motor, is a market where we have market-leading business, we expect to continue to grow across the cycle, we'll continue to do at the right time and with the right choice and the discipline around pricing.
We will continue, as we've done in every single cycle since Admiral was founded, we'll continue to grow our UK business from a larger base and retaining very, very strong margin. We also have another leg, that is our other lines of business, personal lines in UK insurance, Europe, and Money, and we're planning to grow across all of them distinctively and also increase margin for those business combined.
If you take those two things together, we expect to increase a shareholder returns over time, without having necessarily put a specific date, because there will still be some cyclicality. The other observation is, with increased contribution from other lines, although there will still be motor cyclicality to impact our results, we think we are gradually, over time, reducing the dependence on a single cycle.
That's the key message.
Geraint Jones
On the internal model, we do expect to submit our application for approval shortly. The timeline for review of that is not fixed.
As you can imagine, it's not a short read. I think we'd update on the outcome of that at the appropriate time rather than comment on how long we expect it to take.
If and when it's approved, you can be sure we'll be trying to use it around the business to optimize and things like that. Again, we'll talk about that at the right time.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Sorry, you mentioned something also about the shape. As I was saying, there is cyclicality in the market, so as Geraint suggested, we do see a different path across the next few years.
We'll grow through the cycle, but next year may have a different impact on our growth ambition than the year after that. That's that, but that's very normal.
That's what we've done in the past, as you've seen the slide that Alistair projected. We tend to grow when it's the right time, when underwriting margin are healthier, and we'll continue to do so.
Sorry, then I think Will, yeah.
Ben Cohen
Thank you. I'm Ben Cohen at RBC.
I just wanted to ask a few things on the UK motor business. Firstly, would your central assumption be that you would be able to match claims inflation through the course of 2026?
Could you make a comment as to what you've seen in the market reaction as you've tried to put through or you have put through some price increases at the beginning of the year? The third element, could you just remind us what happened to claims inflation in motor kind of post the Ukraine-Russia invasion, just to maybe give some sort of comparison with maybe where we are now in terms of the situation in the Middle East?
Thank you.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
I'll take the first, and Alistair.
Alistair Hargreaves
Sure. In terms of managing through the cycle in 2026, we're expecting claims inflation, as I mentioned, to be towards more normal levels, mid single digits.
We'll be looking at that. We'll be looking at elasticity within the market.
We'll be thinking about average premiums and continuing to price with discipline. As you saw in 2025, we did that, and, as Geraint said, we're very happy with the profitability on that year.
It's not as strong as '24, but it's still strong, so that will be the same approach that we'll take into 2026. As Milena reiterated, we think that's the right approach to optimizing both value and growth over the medium term.
Far, in terms of market at the start of this year, we're seeing different strategies from different players, but broadly speaking, I'd say that market premiums have been relatively flat. As I say, we've started to increase our prices at the start of the year.
In terms of claims inflation post the Russian invasion, and there was a lot of disruption to the supply chain, and that was one of the impacts that caused higher parts, vehicle inflation, as well as supply chain constraints. We don't think it's a direct parallel to what we're seeing at the moment in terms of the disruption that we're seeing at the moment is more about oil and fuel prices, not directly related.
I think, as you were inferring, the geopolitical instability increases the risk of that, so that's something we'll be watching very carefully through our supply chain.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Next, Will.
Will Hardcastle
Thank you. Will Hardcastle, UBS.
I'm going to embarrass you, Geraint. Thanks very much for all the help over your years.
It's been some journey in the current role. I've always really enjoyed our interactions, some of them quite lively, but you've always been really helpful, good luck for future endeavors, including the Admiral roles.
Next, on to the questions. I'll ask you a tough one now.
You booked 2025 undiscounted booked loss ratio at the 78, or 85 undiscounted. That's an average number, I'm assuming the exit was slightly worse given the shape of the pricing last year.
I guess pre-pricing and excess of inflation, pre-percentile shifts, where's the starting point essentially for that '26, how much worse than the 85 should we be thinking? Then moving on to something a bit bigger picture, doubling of the non-UK motor business.
It's quite non-Admiral to give a target like this. I'm sort of intrigued as to the thinking behind, it must imply a lot of confidence behind it.
Does it imply any slowdown at all of top line and sort of extraction of the benefits you put through, or is this just a better hope and a direction of travel from here? Thank you.
Alistair Hargreaves
The first one was about the exit loss ratio. As you pointed out, the undiscounted booked loss ratio is at 85.
It's higher obviously than '24, that was an exceptional year, but it's not unusual if you look back at previous years, hence the comments about good profitability. As I said, we've managed rates through the year, paying very close eye on claims trends, and in the second half we were flat.
I think that means that the exit loss ratio was slightly higher than the overall, but not significantly so. As I also mentioned, as we started in '26, we made some adjustments to price to make sure that our starting point in '26 was in the right place.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
The second point is about confidence about the other line of business. It's a mix of two things.
Is the momentum. If you look at where we are, momentum and maturity, if you want, of some of our other lines of business.
We had fantastic 2025, doubling profit in Admiral Money, strong recovery in Europe and return to profitability with confidence in the prospect and the future, and other lines of insurance in the UK also deliver a stellar year. I think we are reach a maturity in those areas that allow us to continue to grow and increase margin over times.
Is also, I would say, a reflection of our strategy, because the strategy is also very much about compounding. What I mean is that we have a few things we're focusing a lot on is our proposition to multi-customers, very important, because customer with more risk have better retention, have better loss ratio, have better NPS, tend to be happier and stick longer, with better results and also better experience for them.
I think there is momentum in terms of the multi. Our journey to multi-products started probably later than some other players in the market, because historically we were very much a UK motor story.
As this business grow, there's a lot of potential there. That's a very interesting opportunity.
Also transferring some of the strength in predictive AI, for example, across all the business is also another big driver of value. If you merge those two things, plus economy of scale, plus potential benefit, we do see a momentum that will allow us to both continue growing and deliver more profit.
I think it's really very much a reflection of our strategy and a bit of the switch of focus from growing individual business that are stand-alone interesting to really compound the benefits. It's just meant to be that over time.
We'll continue to be disciplined, we follow cyclicalities. There is cyclicality in the UK household market, that will take into account, but we do think we can achieve both growth and higher margin.
Thomas Bateman
Hi, morning all. Thomas Bateman from Mediobanca.
Just a quick question on the reserving. I was surprised to see the PYD quite low, but then the risk adjustment percentile come down.
Could you just explain how that's working? The second question is, actually a follow-up to Will's on, I guess, on Europe.
I take your point that Spain's breakeven now, but I guess you have been working on that for a while and there is more confidence there. You alluded to AI platforms, etc.
Have you been able to launch on any of those AI platforms, either in the UK or in Europe yet?
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Do you want to take the risk adjustment? Costi, maybe briefly comment on the confidence in Europe and Spain, and I will pick up maybe on the AI.
Alistair Hargreaves
Actually, Thomas, if you split out the Ogden impact on last year and compare year-on-year, you get the same percentage, fairly strong level of releases coming through year-on-year. The percentile was really elevated, slightly down, I wouldn't say that we've notably dropped the risk adjustment strength.
This is very strong set of reserves and continued pretty consistent releases coming through, basically in line, I think, with what we've guided sort of in that kind of 10-ish range over the past couple of years,
Thomas Bateman
so. On Europe and then on the AI point.
Basically, yes, as Milena mentioned, there is good level of confidence. It's a large opportunity where we are making very good progress on several fronts.
What is giving to us the confidence is that we are keep trading at very good margins on the direct business, and we are seeing very good progress coming from the distribution diversification initiatives, which will help us to target much larger opportunities. Once also those initiatives will turn into profitable ones in the medium term, we expect our overall margins to expand.
In addition to that, we expect more efficient reinsurance agreements to provide benefit in the medium to longer term. Clearly, there is also an element about the competitiveness on the expense side and on the efficiency, and also there making good progress, and we are testing also some more advanced GenAI tools and models.
On this front is more early days, but early signs are very promising.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
I think more in general on AI, there is a lot of opportunities, and a lot of this is focused on improving efficiency internally. It's about improving automation, increasing speed of service in the customer, and so forth.
I guess your question was more referred to the distribution element, how customer interact and choose insurance. If you think about Admiral, from very early stage, we've always been a bit of a forefront of disruption in distribution, and we were among the first direct player in the market in the UK.
We were the first to have an internet-only brand, elephant.co.uk. We were the first to invent price comparison site with confused.com, and so forth.
It's obviously something that, as you may imagine, we're working very close to price comparison site as they may embed more GenAI technology in their way of interacting to customer, and distribution, and adapting our website. We also have interesting pilot in part of the business, like GenAI-embedded chatbot in Veygo, and other initiatives across the group.
It's something we're very, very close. Now, if you ask me, do you think this is going to be a very big disruption in UK motor in the short term, I personal don't think it's the case.
I think there will be different way of interacting with the customer, but the value proposition to a customer, how much you can save by shopping on price comparison site on motor insurance, is huge, is hundreds of pounds sometimes. I don't think it's going to be the first market where we see a lot of change.
I think it's early to say. Everything is very nascent at this stage, but I think there are markets where there could be an acceleration to direct, and that could be the one where customer are more used to speak with an intermediary, for example, it can be commercial lines, can be Europe, where direct is not big.
At this stage, it's very early to say. As for us, we try to be close to everything, work, and progress on all the fronts at the same time.
I think we had one, two, and three, yes.
Carl Lofthagen
Hi, Carlotta Oggioni from Berenberg. Just the first one on the UK home book.
I think we've seen kind of continued expense ratio improvements as you've gained scale, and you're now running the business at a combined ratio in sort of the mid-80s. Is that sort of the level that you're sort of happy with, or are you willing to trade some margin to take market share, as you've kind of said you want to be a top three player?
Then the second question is just a clarification on the share count development. I think if I just look at the basic share count, which decreased by 5 million from 306 to 301 million in H2, but diluted went up 1 million.
Presumably, the shares you're buying back for the share scheme shouldn't impact the share count. Just I guess for modeling purposes.
How should we kind of think about that excluding sort of any sort of additional buybacks, etc.? Thank you.
Alistair Hargreaves
On the household expense ratio, we've had an advantage in terms of expense ratio for household for some time, but as you highlight, it's an area of focus. As the book grows and we get more renewals customers, that helps in terms of expense ratio, but we're also focused on driving improvements.
For example, Milena talked about how we can use GenAI for both customer experience and efficiency, those are areas of focus. In terms of the combined ratio range, we think about household similar to motor, where it's about optimizing for value over the medium term.
As you're alluding to, we're a bit more biased towards growth on household than margin. I think the 80 is good.
I think we talked a bit about a range when we did the deep dive, we're not sort of sticking to a specific target, but we'll do that in optimizing for value and growth over the medium term.
Geraint Jones
On share count, Carl, if you look at in the back of our accounts, in note 12, you've got the number of shares that are in issue every year. It's been 306 million odd for a couple of years since we stopped diluting for the share plans.
The 301 million is actually the number that's used in the EPS, and that excludes some of those shares that are held in the trust. The share purchases for the share plans are just the number of shares that are in issue, obviously.
They'll go to employees. The share buyback and cancel obviously that will reduce the number of shares in issue.
The purchase for the share plans doesn't change the number of shares, buybacks obviously will.
Derald Goh
Hey, it's Derald Goh from Jefferies. Two big picture questions, if I may, please.
Sort of 4% sort of AV penetration rate by 2035, that's an interesting number. I'm just keen to hear what are the main variables that might sway that number, essentially how prudent is that 4%, and maybe if you could also say, what were your projections 10 years ago, how does that 4% compare to what you had 10 years ago, let's say.
Then secondly, going back to distribution, you mentioned as potential to disrupt there. Maybe could you speak to your past experiences?
I know you've been trying to push PCWs outside the UK, some places more successful than others. What might be different this time that would allow you to be more successful, whether it's AI or changes in customer behaviors and what not?
Thank you.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
AV, this is referred to relatively common forecast that have been out, like the World Economic Forum and a lot of other organization, and I think the number is quite aligned. You may look at car sales in terms of car park is 4%, because there is quite a lag time from new sales to fit into car park.
The medium age of a car in UK is 16, and probably the average is 11 years, it takes time as the new model get released. I think you're absolutely right, it's still very much of an estimate, and there are a lot of influencing factor.
You need to get first of all regulation in place, infrastructure in place, technology and investment in place, and customer appetite in place. There are a lot of things that can contribute and can go both direction.
If we don't see the simultaneous of development of all these four areas, it's difficult to imagine a world in which people will really freely just use autonomous car on the road. I cannot tell if it's prudent or not, but I would say this is really I think everybody agrees that it takes some times, both because there are some hurdles and because there is time for the car park to evolve.
I think also take the chance to remind that this is about L3 and plus. L3 basically means when the driver can take the eyes off of the wheel, but still need to get in 10 seconds.
It's not really full of benefit of AV in terms of, for example, liability shift, and so forth. Anyway, it's very nascent now.
You ask me how this was versus 10 years ago, I think this is a story that we see in all the technology disruption. If I go back 10 years, this was supposed to be earlier.
What happened is that this projection tend to shift. If you ask me how it was compared to a few years back, like maybe 3, 4, what I would say is not very different, but we see a slightly later adoption, but probably faster.
It's very often happen with every technology, no, that it takes longer, longer, longer, but then it can be more. It's difficult to say, honestly, it's very, very early stage, and the UK is a bit behind the US in terms of regulation and so forth.
Second question was on distribution. I don't know, Costi, do you want to kick it off on...
Costi Moretti
Yes, on distribution, the European markets, as are very different. When we started our businesses a few years ago, I think direct was about 5%.
Now on average is getting closer to 20%, between 15 and 20%, direct is still growing. Therefore, if a more AI-driven disruption would happen, we would say that being a leading player in those market that would put us in a nice place.
At the same time, price comparisons, you're right, we tried to educate the market and to push more digital growth to accelerate. It didn't happen at the speed we expected, and at the moment, as I said, direct is still growing, price comparisons are doing nicely, but not at a super-fast speed.
At the same time, traditional are still a very important channel, which predominantly is the main channel, which is linked why we decided a while ago to start to diversify the distribution. On how to win and how we can be confident, basically because the right to wins are exactly the same of direct, risk selection, customer experience, and lean operations.
The moment you demonstrate that you can replicate those, then you can win in that market. Our results that are coming through are making us confident more and more that we can achieve this.
Andreas van Embden
Andreas van Embden with Peel Hunt. Two questions, please.
First one is on ancillary sales. I saw that the average sort of revenue per vehicle in the UK has come down from £76 to £71.
Just wondered what your outlook is for this in '26 and '27, particularly not only on the installment income, because as soon as you've lowered your APRs, which has brought down the average premium per policy there or per vehicle there, but also on the other ancillary sales, whether you're seeing any pressure on those fees and commissions. Thank you.
On the second question is on price velocity. I think you mentioned that.
I just wondered what you exactly meant by that in the UK, and whether extending it means changing pricing more. I don't know whether you do intraday pricing or not in the UK, but whether that velocity, by how much could you extend it, and how important is that to maintain your competitive position, particularly through PCWs in the UK as the market become more competitive?
Thank you.
Geraint Jones
I'll take the first one. As you mentioned, the main driver of the change in other revenue is premium finance.
It's worth noting that there's two impacts there. We did reduce our APR through 2025 in line with the cost of funds, but also we saw our average premiums coming down through the year, so that also impacts on that other revenue per vehicle.
In terms of our APRs, they're very competitive at the moment, not necessarily anticipating any changes, but we'll continue to assess for their fair value on that product. In terms of average premiums, as we've said, we're expecting the market to turn and we're increasing our premiums, so that will flow through as well.
I don't think there's anything else of significant note to call out on other revenue.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
On the price velocity, I think if we step back just a few years back, a lot of the pricing was done through SAS or Excel, and we could put price change in production overnight. Basically have a meeting, few of us, me, Al, and Geraint, and decide and make change almost overnight.
That is still the case, and I think is an advantage, and I think is really rooted in the culture and the closeness of the management team to pricing, to claims trend, and the relevance that we give to loss ratio all around Admiral. Our pricing is more and more based on machine learning and predictive AI models, and this, of course, is not something that you change overnight, because it's more complex, require more technology, the process to upgrade, renew the model just takes longer.
We've done a lot of work in the last year or two to really bring this time from ideation to change in production much shorter and shorter. I think there is still a bit we can go for, and so we're very close.
I think we have a strong capability, more than 120 models in place, £100 million of loss ratio improvement analysis. We start from a good point, but I think there is more we can go to increase this even more.
The biggest opportunity, in my mind, is to extend this also more and to extend this trend more into other lines of business. That's where I see the excitement, and to do that, we appointed this year new Group CDO.
She did a great job in Europe to set up a new data platform, and she came over actually a couple of months ago, and she's going to help to increase even more this ability. I think we're already in a very strong position, but more to go.
We're very keen to be as fast as we can.
Operator
Right. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question on the phone line, please press *1 and 1. The question comes from the line of Ashik Gosalia from Goldman Sachs.
Please go ahead.
Vash Gosalia
Hi, hopefully you can hear me. Apologies for not being there in person.
I have two questions, please. The first one is just on something you mentioned on your 2026 profitability.
If I heard you correctly, you said you plan to move to the middle of your confidence interval through 2026, and you've obviously also said you expect flattish profitability. Can I read that as your earnings in 2026 actually being supported by PYD just to offset some of the weakness in UK motor, and any sort of color as to how or why that might be different would be really helpful.
The second question, a slightly longer-term or big picture question. You've obviously sort of alluded to you having a lot of sort of advantage on the cost ratio front, and you can obviously leverage AI and GenAI to improve that.
I'm just trying to think, if the technology essentially democratizes the use of AI, wouldn't that allow your competitors to actually gain advantage quicker and narrow the gap to you? Any sort of color, comment on that would be helpful as well.
Thank you.
Geraint Jones
We would expect to start to reduce our risk adjustment percentile from its current near-max level towards the middle of the range during 2026. I would reject your assertion of weak UK motor.
I think UK motor profitability for '25 is strong, but slightly less strong than the extremely strong 2024, we think there is good profitability to come on 2025, and obviously that starts to feed into the accounts in 2026. PYD and reserve releases are a constant feature of our income statement and profitability, but you are right to expect, as we've reduced the risk adjustment to some extent, obviously that contributes to profitability in 2026 versus 2025.
If you do the mix, flat profitability, but higher profits from other lines of business means slightly lower profits from UK motor, but from a very high start point, so. I think, Vash, I think that was the nature of the question, right?
Vash Gosalia
Yes, and apologies if I said weak profitability. I meant more direction-wise, but yes, you've answered my question.
Thank you.
Geraint Jones
No offense taken.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
On the second point, it's a very good question. I think every technological evolution, data evolution, and if you think about digitalization, automation, migration to cloud, more and more technology, it becomes more and more a commodity itself, but the way technology is implemented is very differentiating, and it becomes more so as we move along.
A big decision on AI is how you do it, a big driver how much this is adopted. You can deploy GenAI tool to have all the organization, but how much is adopted, how is adopted is a massive driver of how much efficiency benefit you can drive.
I think we start in a great situation, because we definitely have very strong culture, very transparent, and people with good expertise that are really, really keen to do what is right for the business. Governance is another differentiating factor: how you govern what you put in place and how you make sure that is solid, is stable, how make sure that the model learn over time.
I think an appetite for innovation bottom-up as well as top-down is also very important. I think a lot of the element that plays here are a culture and also the ability to do it faster, better, and cheaper than others.
It's still early to say, but I think we are well positioned to achieve that.
Vash Gosalia
Got it. Thank you.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Good. We have last question.
Hi.
Shanti Kang
Hi, it's Shanti from Bank of America. You just touched a bit earlier when we talked about the internal model and how that could give you a bit of flexibility for M&A.
Historically, I guess, you guys have partnered with names via pioneer or you've had a relationship with existing names before you would kind of move forward with an M&A transaction. What kind of skill sets or regions, if you were looking at that, would you be thinking of?
Thanks.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
It's the last question. Do you want to take it?
Your last presentation.
Geraint Jones
Sounds like I've explained things badly. I wasn't really referring to the internal model coming in giving us more firepower for M&A necessarily.
I understand the point of the question, but I think funding small M&A through retained profitability is one of the options I would talk about, but you should cover M&A and where M&A might play a part, I think.
Milena Mondini de Focatiis
Yeah. As I said, our history of successful organic growth, and we're excited about the plan we have on growing organically.
We look into opportunity mainly to accelerate diversification, I would say, so, as we've done with Flock or as we've done with More Than, we'll look at accelerated diversification in other lines of business in insurance in the UK or in Europe where we need more scale. We stay open, look and see, but also very, very focus on our organic growth plan and consider different option on how to eventually tackle the challenge.
Thank you very much. Thank you for your question, and thank you for your time, and we'll be around a few minutes if that can help.
Thanks a lot.
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