Operator
Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the AXA first quarter 2026 activity indicators call.
At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session.
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I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Anu Venkataraman. Please go ahead.
Anu Venkataraman
Good morning and welcome to AXA's first quarter 2026 activity indicators call. Our Group CFO, Alban de Mailly Nesle, will walk you through the highlights, after which we'll be happy to take your questions.
Alban?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you, Anu. Good morning to all.
Thank you for joining the call today. Let me start with the key highlights.
As you saw, we have delivered a strong performance in the first quarter of '26. Total revenues increased by 6% to €38 billion, well-balanced across lines of business and geographies.
Our Solvency II ratio, at 211%, reflects the robustness of our balance sheet after the end of the grandfathering period of January 1st. In the quarter, the group's financial strength was further affirmed by the decision from S&P to upgrade its ratings from AA- to AA.
Let me now go through each line of business, highlighting what we expect for the year, starting with P&C. P&C revenues were up 4% with a healthy balance of volume growth and pricing in both commercial and personal lines.
In personal lines, revenues were up 7%, reflecting continued strong momentum across all geographies. We have delivered strong volume growth from expanding the customer base, with 1.2 million net new contracts in retail motor and household, particularly in France and Europe, in a favorable pricing environment with a 4% price effect over the period.
We expect pricing to remain conducive and continue to see good opportunities to grow. Commercial lines grew by 3% with both higher volumes and positive price effect.
At AXA XL Insurance, revenues grew by 2%, driven by volumes. In Q1, the renewal mix is skewed towards international business where pricing is holding up.
On the overall book, pricing is stable versus last year. We continued to actively manage the cycle, growing in the lines where pricing meets our return hurdles.
We grew volumes in property with the business remaining at high profitability levels, despite increased pricing pressure with rates on renewals decreasing by 4%. In casualty, pricing on renewals was up 4%, and there we are focused on customer retention and on maintaining our overall exposure.
Specialty lines also grew by 1% with stable pricing at good profitability levels. In financial lines, renewal rates decreased by -2.5%, and we continue to be highly selective.
Overall, pricing was stable in Q1. We believe we have room to grow AXA XL's earnings in 2026 through a combination of selective top-line growth combined with lower reinsurance prices, notably in property, active expense management, and higher investment yields.
In commercial lines, ex-XL, revenues were up by 4%. This was driven by good price dynamics in Europe and in France, with overall pricing at +3%.
We also delivered volume growth, particularly in France, while in the UK, market conditions are softer and we are disciplined on growth. Outside the UK, we expect the market to remain disciplined and to expand our margins as pricing is earned through.
Finally, in reinsurance, revenues were down by 7%. Renewal pricing was down 2%, a good outcome in the current market.
We remained disciplined, and therefore we have reduced volumes. On nat cat, group nat cat experience in the first quarter was slightly better than the prorated annual cat budget, with benign experience at AXA XL and despite losses in France from both Storm Nils and Goretti of €0.1 billion overall.
It's only the first quarter, we maintain our annual nat cat budget of 4.5 points of combined ratio for the year. Finally, let me just say a word on inflation.
We closely monitor it, obviously, and you know that most of our P&C contracts are annually renewable. That gives us the ability to adjust pricing based on market conditions.
In commercial lines, ex-XL, significant portion of our premiums have some direct or indirect indexation to inflation, and pricing conditions remain favorable. In XL, in casualty and to a lesser extent in financial lines, social inflation is decoupled from general inflation, and therefore the book that is mainly impacted by inflation is property, which represents less than 30% of the business and where underlying assets are revalued every year.
In retail, as you saw, pricing conditions remain favorable. I would also add that the context is much better than in 2022.
At that time, inflation had started before the Ukraine war and was compounded by it. Inflation will be impacted if the war in Iran lasts, but the impact is not immediate.
In summary, in P&C overall, with these Q1 results, we're confident in our ability to deliver top-line growth and margin improvement over the year. Now moving to life and health.
In life and health, premiums were up 8% to €16.5 billion, driven by strong performance. In the long-term business, premiums grew 9%, reflecting strong sales momentum across unit-linked, general account, and protection.
Revenues were up 6%, mainly driven by favorable price effects in health across geographies, as well as expansion in margins, including from the progressive recovery in Mexico, reflecting the actions we took to offset the VAT change. We had strong net flows at €2.7 billion versus 2.5 in Q1 '25, and as that will fuel growth in CSM and earnings over time.
Like in P&C, we remain confident in our ability to maintain this momentum. New business.
We grew new business CSM by 4% and notably more than 5% in life. This growth was driven by strong volumes in savings and protection with an 8% increase in PVNBP and good margins.
NBV was up 1% due to lower sales and adverse mix in our JVs in Thailand and China offsetting the growth in new business CSM. Moving on to Solvency II.
We continue to operate at a high Solvency II ratio that stands at 211% at the end of March. As on January 1st, our Solvency ratio was 215% following the end of the grandfathering period that represented a -10 points impact versus December 31st, 2025.
On top of this impact, our ratio was down 4 points in the first quarter of the year: +7 points from normalized capital generation, -6 points of the accrued foreseeable dividends and annual share buyback, and also -4 points from unfavorable impacts from financial markets, reflecting notably higher inflation expectations and increased volatility of both equity and interest rates. I remind you that we estimated the Solvency II revision benefit at 17 points increase in our Solvency II ratio, and that will come into effect next year.
Before moving to the Q&A, let me conclude on how AXA is positioned in the current environment. We are off to a strong start this year, consistent with our ambition.
We delivered strong growth in a conducive pricing environment in retail and commercial ex-XL P&C. We captured growth opportunities at AXA XL in lines where our return hurdles are met, and we have a very strong momentum in life and health.
That's the benefit of our diversified business model because, across lines of business and geographies, this model is built to deliver predictable earnings growth. In the current volatile environment, we have a strong balance sheet with a solid 211% Solvency II ratio, prudent reserving, and a disciplined asset allocation with high-quality assets and a low exposure to below-investment-grade private credit, on which we gave additional disclosure in our 2025 full year results presentation.
The strength of our balance sheet, as I said at the beginning, was recently reaffirmed by S&P's decision to upgrade our ratings from AA- to AA. All of this gives us confidence to deliver 2026 UEPS growth at the top end of our target range of 6% to 8% and to sustain growth beyond 2026.
I'm now happy to answer your questions.
Operator
Thank you. This is the conference operator.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone.
To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions.
Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from David Barma, Bank of America.
David Barma
Thanks for taking my questions. Firstly on commercial lines, please, on the volume growth.
Could you please explain where you see the opportunities to grow right now, and within that, if you could please touch on the appeal of the casualty space where it appears that the pricing is now starting to turn? Then linked to that, but on pricing, thanks for your comments in the introductions.
Are you seeing an inflection in pricing in US financial lines? Do you see a change in the attractiveness of the admitted versus the E&S market at this stage, which it appears we've been witnessing in the last few months?
Then lastly on personal lines, pricing was good again in Q1, but there are several markets where your data suggests you might be at or slightly below inflation levels. In the current macro context, do you think we might see a pickup in pricing across personal lines, even if investment income is also attractive?
Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you, David. Good morning.
Commercial lines, growth opportunities in casualty, that was your first question. We should always remember that half of our commercial lines business is ex-XL.
That's our European and French business mostly. There, we see good pricing, and with 3% on average, 3% increase.
We see room to grow there, except, as we said, in the UK, which is softer, and across all lines of business. I guess your question was more on the XL part.
On this, look, what we see is very clearly that in property, despite the fact that pricing is down by 4% overall, it's still very good business. Therefore, we have room to grow there.
Casualty, prices are up 4%. That's now slightly below the loss trend, but there again, we believe that given the current profitability, we can carry on growing.
Specialty is 20% probably of our XL book. There, pricing is broadly stable.
It might even increase depending on where the crisis in the Gulf goes, and it's profitable. We see also room to grow there.
On financial lines, that's where prices have been down for now a number of years, but we see some kind of bottoming out for the financial lines. Today, 74% of our business in financial lines is either flat or increasing in terms of pricing.
There's still a part which is decreasing, but I think at this stage, we see the end probably of that soft cycle. We need to be vigilant, disciplined, but on this, this is a place where we believe that over time we could grow again.
Then on pricing, I answered I think on financial lines. Then you say E&S.
E&S, it's both property and casualty, and it's both large and mid-market. Typically what you see in the admitted market, you see it in large property E&S in the sense that there is pressure on this.
The mid-market part resists better, and on the casualty side, you see the same as on the admitted business, which is still price increases, but a bit below loss trend. On personal lines, I'd say at this point, I wouldn't say that our pricing is below inflation.
I think first, inflation is slightly different than general inflation because you know that it's about spare parts, and labor, and so on, but it's very correlated obviously. We take measures year after year to contain that specific inflation.
At this stage, I believe that there is sufficient pricing to see margin expansion in personal lines this year. We'll see how inflation goes, but given the current context, it might well be that inflation would help that market to remain hard.
That's the way I would characterize it.
David Barma
Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Farooq Hanif at JPMorgan.
Farooq Hanif
Hi, everybody. Thanks very much.
Just to go back on volumes, if you take out Nobis and Prima, the overall volume growth looked like roughly 2% in 1Q, but if you take out those two, what was the growth? What do you think in percentage terms you could maintain going forward in 2026 and beyond?
My second question is on your updated thoughts on investment margin. At full year '25, you were quite bullish, particularly in P&C, around where that kind of investment result could expand.
I'm guessing you still remain confident. Has anything really changed there on your view?
The last point on nat cat versus reserve releases, you typically have managed periods of low nat cat with low reserve releases. Can you talk about what your attitude towards that is in 2026, given that you're saying you are really well-reserved?
Do you think you have to keep doing this, or do you think there's some possibility here of you being able to use some of your reserving surplus to support earnings in '26 and beyond? Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you, Farooq. On volumes, Nobis and Prima are primarily on retail.
I would say, I might not have the exact numbers, but we had 1.2 million of net new contracts, and they probably represented a fourth of this. You would still have between 900,000 and 1 million new contracts without those two companies.
On investment margin, yes, we're very confident. One word on Q1: In March, given the crisis, you saw spreads increase in public corporate bonds, and so we took advantage of that to accelerate a bit our investments of '26.
We did a bit more than a quarter in the first quarter, and so that gives us confidence that over this year, we will invest at the right level of return. No change compared to what we said last year.
On nat cat, look, I think what we said was that we would manage nat cat together with PYD and the discount benefit. We'll continue to do that around the 4.5% nat cat budget that we have.
At the end of the day, what we want is for those three elements taken together to be neutral on our earnings.
Farooq Hanif
Thank you. Just going back to volumes, in commercial specifically, it sounds like, from what you said, you're looking to grow more in property and in financial lines if that stabilizes further.
Is that the right way to think about it? Casualty a bit more flat, but growing in other areas?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Again, that's for XL specifically, I suppose. We want to grow our business anywhere where it makes sense, and the vast majority of our lines of business at XL meets their cost of capital.
What we are saying is, we want to grow. Then, as I said, the pricing is slightly below loss trend, we will offset that lower margin by the growth itself, but also by cost reduction and by investment income going forward.
That's how we plan to grow XL's earnings this year and in the coming years.
Farooq Hanif
Thank you very much.
Operator
The next question is from Michael Huttner, Berenberg.
Michael Huttner
Thanks a lot. I had two.
The first one is on the UK pricing, and the second one is on the benefit of low reinsurance costs. On the UK, I wonder if you could add a little bit more color to your comments.
It sounds as if the UK has got a black spot against it at the moment, but the data we're seeing here from ONS and other bits and pieces is that UK motor has turned. I just wondered if instead in retail, I think you've got a -0.9%, if we put a +1% or something, what would it do to your appetite for growth in the UK and maybe to pricing overall?
Then the second on reinsurance, you said thanks to low reinsurance, that's one of the drivers of your kind of multi-confidence on growing profits in commercial lines. Can you give us a feel for how big that benefit is, please?
Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
On UK pricing, and I think obviously we need to distinguish between commercial lines and motor or retail in general. Commercial lines is soft, but starting from a very profitable environment.
We want to be disciplined. We don't want to write business at a rate that wouldn't meet our cost of capital, and we see that the UK market is in commercial lines softer than what we see in Continental Europe.
On retail, we are growing our retail business in the UK, and it's not done by undercutting rates. It's because we have developed a number of partnerships, notably with Lloyds Bank in the UK, which is very successful and brings significant net new contracts.
Pricing, as you said, in retail motor is not bad as we speak, and we are growing our business. On the benefit of reinsurance, we don't disclose the amount, but it is somewhat material at group level because, as we didn't change our reinsurance programs in terms of attachment and detachment points last year for '26 versus '25, and therefore we are fully benefiting from the price decreases that we saw, and those price decreases were more than 20% in property cat.
Michael Huttner
Excellent. Cool.
Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Andrew Baker, Goldman Sachs.
Andrew Baker
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. First one on AXA XL: I think you mentioned first quarter more of a bias to international business renewals.
Should we expect a bit more pricing pressure to come through as we move through the year just from a sort of more US-heavy mix? Is there any other seasonality in pricing we should be aware of, for example, any quarters where you have more property renewals than other?
Then on your casualty comments, the fact I think you said pricing below loss cost trends, but still willing to grow, I hear what you're saying in terms of sort of volume and investment income, but given the uncertainty around loss cost trends and casualty specifically, I guess curious just what gives you that confidence to grow off these levels? Then finally, sorry, just on personal lines, growth in motor looked really strong, but it did look like there was a slowdown in non-motor.
Just curious sort of what drove that and how we should think about the growth in non-motor going forward. Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you, Andrew. Yes, you picked that comment on international business versus global correctly.
Yes, it might be that the pricing at XL, which was stable in Q1, entered slightly negative territory for the whole year. That being said, what you could also see is, to offset that geographic mix change, a change in some lines of business.
As I said, financial lines are probably bottoming out, and you might see a better momentum in those lines coming in the year. What we need to keep in mind is that it should be for the whole year broadly stable to slightly negative.
That's how we think about it. There is no further seasonality that I have in mind.
Clearly, Europe is mostly Q1, but at AXA XL Insurance, that's the only thing that we should have in mind. On casualty, you said that there is uncertainty on loss trends.
I wouldn't say that. The loss trends for casualty has been pretty stable in the sense that over the last 4, 5 years or even 6 or 7, the social inflation generally has been quite stable in the sense that the second derivative is nil.
We reserve on that basis, we price on that basis, and we don't see any reason now, be it in our numbers or in the global environment, that would lead us to think that the social inflation or the loss trend in casualty should increase. In personal lines non-motor, I would say there's no particular reason.
To be frank, I don't have a very specific explanation on this. I would just say that in France, we manage to have both volume and pricing, and in some countries, it's been a bit negative in volumes and a bit positive in some other countries.
There's no specific trend generally.
Andrew Baker
Really helpful. Thank you so much, Alban.
Operator
The next question is from William Hawkins, KBW.
William Hawkins
Hi, Alban. Thanks for taking my questions.
I've got a request and then a couple of questions appended. As poor old Anu knows, KBW's been doing a lot of work on admin expense leverage across the European insurers, and I hadn't appreciated till I did the work that you haven't disclosed divisional admin expenses since the conversion to IFRS 17.
Do you think you could provide more transparency when we get to the 1H '26 financial supplement, please? I'm hoping that's an easy ask.
Then related to that, in the context of what you said about EPS growth, when you're talking about expense management, do you ever envisage absolute admin expenses falling as a driver of earnings growth, or is it always going to be a relative game of saving and reinvestment for volume growth so it's the ratio that improves? Then secondly, please, when you're doing your own expense analysis across your business units, where do you think you're best-in-class, and where might you see meaningful improvement potential?
Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Sorry, on the last question, best-in-class in what dimension? Didn't pick that up.
William Hawkins
I guess however you would define it, but where you think that you've got an expense efficiency advantage over the rest of the market in any particular countries or any particular lines of business?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you. Sorry, I'm writing that down.
We hear you on the admin expenses. I think what we will do is in September when we present our plan for the next 3 years, then we will give you more detail on admin expenses by line of business.
On expense management, I think what we want to do, and that's very important for this year and for the next plan, is to carry on with strong organic growth. Strong organic growth means that you grow volumes, and if you grow volumes, you have to obviously manage those additional volumes.
Obviously automation, digitalization, AI will help. My answer is, given the strong ambition that we have in organic growth for top line, it's probably more of a relative game than a cost reduction in absolute terms.
That being said, obviously in places where we wouldn't have that strong organic growth because there is too much and too large of a price pressure, I'm thinking of XL Re, for instance, there you want to see price decrease—
William Hawkins
Expense decrease.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Yes, expense decrease, sorry. Then on the places where we believe we have strong expense advantage, there are a good number of countries where we are in quartile one.
That's how we measure our price competitiveness. We compare to others.
That would be typically France, which is normal given the size that we have, the scale in this market compared to others. You would have other countries such as Switzerland, you would have Italy, you would have Japan, bearing in mind that we are tier two in Japan, but we compare well.
Germany as well is a place where we've had significant efforts on costs and we compare well to the others.
William Hawkins
Excellent. Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Thomas Bateman, Mediobanca.
Thomas Bateman
Hi, good morning. Thanks very much for taking my questions.
Thanks for your comments on inflation, Alban. I was just wondering if you could give us a sense of where inflation might be emerging a little bit faster than other areas, or where you think inflation risk from the conflict in Iran could emerge elsewhere.
Just interested in the comments you made on solvency and where that could be coming through. The second question, I was just hoping you could give us an update on how the rollout of your mid-market US commercial business is going.
Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you, Thomas. On inflation, just a word on the solvency, because you referred to it.
On this, it's purely mechanical in the sense that the way it's done, we take into account the inflation curve that you see on public markets, and that's the input to our model. Irrespective of whether markets are right or wrong, if the inflation curve goes up, that has a negative impact on our solvency because you would project our expenses on the live side at a higher inflation rate.
Then on the core of your question, which is where we would see inflation emerge faster, I think it has to do with oil and how oil prices spread. At the end of the day, what you see in some industries is that people have trouble producing, and because energy is expensive, and they'd rather reduce their production than produce and not being able to sell it.
At this point, I think inflation might stop if the crisis stops in the next few days or weeks, but it might also be that it spreads everywhere, not only to plastics or fertilizers, because that's immediately dependent on oil price, but more generally on the fact that when you have to produce, I don't know, spare parts, the price of energy goes up, and therefore you would see price increases there. I'm not sure that I would see some specific sectors more affected than others.
I think it's more general. I also want to take that opportunity to say that, again, we were not in an inflationary environment at the beginning of this crisis as opposed to '22.
We've managed the previous crisis. The current environment is rather supportive in terms of price increases.
If anything, not hoping for it, but that's something that could help a softening market being less soft or becoming a bit harder. Obviously, it has some positive impacts on interest rates and therefore on our investment income.
Then on mid-market in the US, last year we grew that business more than 20%, and so we're happy with that. As it's something that we are starting, by definition, at the start, the growth is somewhat easy, but we are very happy with those developments.
That's a market which is less cyclical than the large commercial lines one, and therefore we are confident that we can further grow there.
Operator
The next question is from Andrew Crean, Autonomous Research.
Andrew Crean
Good morning. Three questions if I can.
Firstly on health, the premium growth has accelerated on stronger pricing. Could you talk a little bit about what your margin anticipation is from that action?
Secondly, does the potential if this war goes on for a significant travel disruption with lots of flights being canceled and people's holiday plans disrupted, would that have an impact on you within the transversal business? Thirdly, given the different rating environment in different areas, are you significantly changing the capital allocation to different divisions?
I'm thinking particularly you've made mention of reinsurance and of the UK market. Are you actually pulling capital back from these businesses to reallocate elsewhere?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you. Thank you, Andrew.
On health, two ways to answer your question. The first one is, you saw the price increases were a bit north of 8%.
Typical medical inflation is around 5% to 6%. That gives you an idea of margin increase.
The other way to think about it is on the very specific case of Mexico. That Mexico in 2025 cost us 90 bps of loss ratio for the whole health business, and we are planning to recover on those 90 bps between this year and potentially next year.
That's how I would answer your question. On travel, yes, we do have a travel insurance business in our transversal segment.
I can't remember exactly the percentage is probably a third or fourth of our assistance business. I'd say if at some point there is a significant increase in the crisis and flights are canceled, yes, that would have an impact, but it would be small because we sell policies for a given flight to a given traveler, and therefore we would change our underwriting immediately.
We might be caught up in at a given moment where flights that would be canceled, but that would not be worse than what we had in Q1 precisely when that kind of event occurred. It wouldn't be material.
On capital allocation, the way we think about it is obviously we allocate capital where we have a business that meets our cost of capital. What we tell our businesses is to get back to profitability at a level that meets our cost of capital, and in most of the cases, if not all, that means reducing our local exposure.
That's the way we reduce our allocation to some business. Clearly XL Re was an example because prices are down, even though you know that our combined ratio in XL Re was around 80% last year, but we want to keep that good level of profitability.
In the UK, you see some business in commercial lines that we believe are written by our competitors at a combined ratio above 100%. We don't want to play that game.
We wouldn't write that business, and that's why you see that our volumes have come down a bit, while stable overall in Europe, but because of the UK.
Andrew Crean
Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Fahad Changazi, Kepler Cheuvreux.
Fahad Changazi
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question.
Thank you for disclosure on life, health, new business on full year '25 assumptions. I was wondering, notwithstanding the updated actual financial assumptions you will do at H1, how do you see that new business CSM developing through the year?
If we do take into account FX and markets as where they are now, how do you see CSM ending up from beginning of the year to the end of the year? Finally, just to get for completeness on Solvency II, could you just isolate and tell us what the impact was from inflation curve and from the increased volatility in Q1?
Thank you very much.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Okay. On new business CSM, so as you saw, it was a bit more than 5% coming from life and slightly negative coming from health.
On the health side, it's mostly due to a product in Japan, health with unit-linked, that we stopped or significantly diminished, and so you should see that same kind of impact over the rest of the year as we compare to '25. On the live side, we believe that we have very strong momentum in terms of sales, and we don't see reasons why it should calm down in the next quarters.
PVNBP volumes, new business CSM on life should keep the same kind of growth more or less over the next quarters. On CSM itself, we said that we wanted to grow CSM as much as possible above 3%, so that's still the ambition that we have.
On Solvency II, I would say inflation must have cost us something like 1 point, and volatility on each of equity and interest rates, 1 point as well. So 2 points in total for volatility.
Sorry, there is also corporate spreads, 1 point from spreads, 2 points from volatility, 1 point from inflation.
Fahad Changazi
Thank you very much.
Operator
The next question is from Ian Pearce, BNP Paribas.
Ian Pearce
Hi, morning. Thanks for taking my questions.
It's just a follow-up on the life business and particularly on the new business margin. If you could just give us a little bit more color on sort of what's driven the decline in the new business margin year-on-year.
Is it just the mix effects in the JVs, or is there anything else to pull out? Do you expect that trend to reverse over the course of the year?
Also if there's any impact we should think about on new business margin from the movements in rates we've seen in the back end of the quarter and since quarter-end that could impact new business margins for the rest of the year. Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
The decrease in new business margin is primarily due to the two joint ventures that we have in China and in Thailand where business mix has not been as good in Q1 '26 as it was in Q1 '25. That explains the reason.
Now more broadly, when we think about new business contribution, and I call it that way for a reason, first, we focus even more on new business CSM than on new business value because new business CSM has a direct impact on our earnings. That's why I insisted on the 5% growth that we have on life new business CSM, because we're happy with that number.
More broadly, we want to grow our life business and our life earnings. At the end of the day, if it means that we should slightly reduce our margins because that would allow us to grow volumes more aggressively and therefore grow profits at the end of the day, that's fine with us.
In life in general, we meet our cost of capital and we more than meet it, it's a very, very profitable business, and therefore we can allow ourselves to have slightly lower margins to get more business and to grow our new business CSM.
Operator
The next question is from Michael Huttner, Berenberg.
Michael Huttner
This is an extraordinary call. It's Alban, I know you're always quite open, but you seem even more open than normal.
Leading question: the 21st of September, you're still holding some kind of event. Is this the spirit of today's answering questions where you're giving so much granularity?
I know it's not a real question, but there you go. Then the real question is, kind of opposite, everybody's worried about inflation.
I'm more thinking there's a benefit in terms of frequency. Is that what you're seeing?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
On your first comment, Michael, I would say there's nothing to hide. It's clear that our business is diverse, and it's normal for you to have questions which are very different.
On top of that, we have a volatile environment, happy to be helpful and answer your questions. On your real question, which was on
Michael Huttner
Frequency.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
At this stage, we don't see yet a benefit in frequency because you would probably need, and I'm not sure that you would really want it, but a longer-lasting crisis for people to use their cars less. Obviously, you see that on TV and in the news, but we don't see that yet in our numbers.
That might come.
Michael Huttner
May I ask, it's slightly different. I'm really sorry.
I'm not, but credit, do you remember in that lovely dinner, you said, "Oh, yeah, credit's actually could be an opportunity." Here you sounded and you gave this extra disclosure, et cetera, and I think you said you bought some more corporate bonds, et cetera.
Did you also buy more credit?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
In Q1, we bought less credit than we had planned for, precisely because the market was good on public credit. I should say we are very selective on our private credit investments, and at that point in time, I would say that we're selective to a point when the market, which is very dependent on M&A, because the credit that you buy are very often linked to M&A transactions, and you have fewer M&A transactions in Q1, also because of the crisis.
All that put together, it means that it's more difficult to source private credit at our level of requirement than it was to do that for public credit given the markets we had. The window on public credit closed, and as you saw, corporate spreads tightened and went back to where they were at the beginning of the year.
Michael Huttner
Brilliant. Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from William Hawkins, KBW.
William Hawkins
Hey, very sorry to come back, but if I don't ask now, you'll never tell me. Can you tell me what the numerator and denominator was of the Solvency ratio, please?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Yes. On the EOF, the numerator, it went down from 56.4 billion to 53.7, and the end of the grandfathering had an impact of -2.4 billion.
The denominator went up slightly from 25.2 to 25.5 billion.
William Hawkins
Super. Thank you, Alban.
Operator
The next question is from Pierre Chédeville, CIC Market Solutions.
Pierre Chédeville
Yes, good morning. Two questions from my side.
First, could you tell us the development of Nobis, the acquisition in Italy? Are you still observing very high growth there?
Second question, you did not mention or maybe I missed it, the impact of dollar on Q1, and how do you see it evolve in next quarters? Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
On Nobis, I would say that there's not much to report. It's developing according to our plan and we're happy.
I think in Italy, the acquisition which is more material and that's making a real difference is Prima. Prima is developing extremely well because in the first quarter, we don't book premiums—
Pierre Chédeville
Sorry, I wanted to talk about Prima, sorry. I made a confusion.
No,
Alban de Mailly Nesle
no, that's okay. Prima grew by 30% in the first quarter, we are very happy with the developments.
On the USD, there are two ways to think about. First, the dollar itself on average in Q1 was 1.17, and therefore it's very different from Q1 '25, but not very different from the full year 2025 where it ended at 1.17.
You see some ups and downs, but it's not material. What we do is that we have very slightly opened, but very, very slightly, opened our exposure to US dollar because in case of crisis, the US dollar strengthens, and we want to take advantage of that.
We're talking very, very limited amount. Then when we talk about earnings, you know that we don't hedge our earnings, and therefore, whatever change in the US dollar we have, positive or negative, would impact positively or negatively XL's and Hong Kong's earnings once translated in euro.
Pierre Chédeville
Thank you.
Operator
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone.
The next question is a follow-up from Michael Huttner, Berenberg.
Michael Huttner
It's really fishing here. Private equity, I think is that a topic still where the volumes are weak and so you have to kind of think, well, maybe it'll take a longer time to get the returns?
Alban de Mailly Nesle
To be simple, nothing has changed since last year. We plan to progressively reduce our exposure to private equity in our asset allocation, but very progressively over the next 3 to 4 years.
In terms of getting returns and getting cash out of private equity, what we do is obviously take the normal distribution from the funds, but we've also done some secondary transactions last year and the year before. We had a very good practice that we created at AXA IM and that now with BNP Paribas Asset Management, that helps us structure those secondary transactions.
One way or the other, we deal with that and we're not concerned.
Michael Huttner
Brilliant. Thank you very Oh, thank you.
Sorry, sorry. Thank you.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you.
Operator
Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.
Anu Venkataraman
Thank you very much for joining our call. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to AXA Investor Relations.
Have a good day. Bye.
Alban de Mailly Nesle
Thank you very much.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.
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