Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Medibank Private Limited Half-Year 2023 Results Investor and Analyst Teleconference. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. David Koczkar. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Medibank 2023 Half-Year Financial Results Presentation. I'll begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia, their connections to land, sea, and community. I join you today from Naarm, the home of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung peoples. I pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. I extend my respect to all elders on the lands on which we work and live. I'm joined by our executive leadership team, including our Group Executive, CFO, and Group Strategy, Mark Rogers. I'm pleased to share with you the performance of Medibank over the half-year.
Today, we've delivered a solid result, driven by our commitment to support our customers. It is this focus that continues to drive our business and inform the decisions that we make. It is this focus on our customers that also drove our response to the cybercrime event. We recognize the significant impact the cybercrime had on our customers, and we will continue to support them through our cyber response support program. While we did see some impacts to policyholder growth in the second quarter, we are seeing positive signs of recovery and steady performance in Medibank Health despite the external environment.
What I'm most proud of over the last six months is our ability to respond to the challenges put in front of us. You know, whether it be COVID, inflation or cost of living pressures, and of course, the cybercrime event, our values and our focus on our customers and our people enables us to respond. While there is always more work to do, we will emerge stronger from these challenges. Today, I'll take you through the key highlights of the result. I'll also share our short-term focus on regaining momentum in our core resident business and on how our growth strategy remains the same, to play our role in sustaining healthcare in Australia by continuing to expand in health.
After this, I'll hand over to Mark, who will discuss our financial performance as well as share how we are positioned for growth as we manage inflation. Then I will provide an update on our outlook, and then we'll take your questions. Starting on slide five. To begin, I'll touch briefly on our half-year 2023 focus and highlights. The cybercrime was an unprecedented event, and I will go into some detail shortly. What I'm most proud of is how our people came together and how our focus on our customers never wavered. We put in place a comprehensive cyber response support program for our customers.
It further enhanced our security environment. We've responded to more than 60,000 customer calls and provided almost 13,000 health and wellbeing, identity protection, and monitoring support interactions for our customers. We've continued to meet our commitment to not profit from COVID, with our customer support now topping a record AUD 1 billion, which is the largest financial giveback from any Australian health insurer so far. With inflation and interest rates continuing to rise, we know many Australian household budgets are under pressure, which is why we worked hard to deliver our lowest premium increase in 22 years earlier this month.
We also deferred the increase for two months, which is in addition to the AUD 207 million cashback our customers will receive in May as part of the giveback program. Our No Gap network now extends to 27 hospitals across the country, and we've seen a 300% growth in No Gap procedures compared to the prior period. Our Members' Choice Advantage network continues to deliver immediate savings to household budgets. This half, our customers have saved around AUD 12 million in out-of-pocket costs through this network, which forms one of the largest health provider networks in the country, and it remains a key differentiator for our customer offering.
We also continue to focus on preventative health with our Live Better rewards enrollments up 52% compared to the prior period. Almost 25% of Medibank customers admitted to hospital received personalized health support via our health concierge program. We delivered around 1.3 million virtual health interactions to our customers and the community. To our financial results on slide six. Over the past 12 months, our resident policyholder growth numbers increased by almost 35,000. With the loss of almost 13,000 policyholders since the cybercrime event, growth over the six-month period has been more subdued, with policyholders up 1,700.
This result is in part due to the majority of marketing and other acquisition activity stopping as a result of the cybercrime. The impact of the cybercrime was mostly contained within our resident Health Insurance business in the second quarter, with other parts of our business continuing to perform well. A standout over the six-month period has been the significant growth in our non-resident business, which grew by 33,400 policy units or 17%. With resumption of travel helping accelerate recovery and grow this market, we continue to focus on growing share in this segment. Pleasingly, our Health Insurance operating profit increased by 8.7% to AUD 305.2 million.
As we continue to reposition Medibank Health in the post-COVID environment, segment profit dropped 4.3% to AUD 24.6 million, largely due to slower than expected volume recovery in the Home Care business and the end of our 1800RESPECT and Beyond Blue contracts. On a continuing basis, the segment growth rate was 7.4%. We've reported a AUD 55.9 million net investment income up AUD 25 million, which reflects the benefits of high interest rates and narrowing credit spreads. This was offset by AUD 26.2 million in non-recurring cybercrime costs, which in the full-year we expect to be AUD 40 million-AUD 45 million.
Group NPAT was up 5.9% to AUD 233.3 million. Lastly, the board has determined we will pay an interim fully franked ordinary dividend of AUD 0.063 per share. Now to slide seven. Today, we're able to share with you the outcomes of our ongoing investigations into how the cybercrime event occurred. This includes that the Medibank username and password used by a third-party IT service provider was stolen and used across our network. The criminal was able to access our network through a misconfigured firewall, and the criminal obtained further usernames and passwords to gain access to a number of our systems, and their access was not contained.
As you would expect, our immediate focus was to support our customers and to secure our environment, to close down the attack path, and that is what we've done. Since the time of this event, we have been focused on how we can best support our customers. As you know, we launched our cyber response support program for our customers, which includes mental health and well-being support, identity protection, and financial hardship measures. We extended call center hours, and we increased our customer support team by more than 300 people and redeployed our resources on our phone and messaging channels to support our customers.
In November, we added two-factor authentication for inbound calls to our contact centers to increase the level of security for our customers when they call for support. From a technology perspective, we have bolstered existing monitoring, added further detection and forensics capability across the Medibank system and network, and have scaled up analytical support by specialist third parties. Additionally, we have ensured firewall authentication is fully configured across our whole network. In December, we completed Operation Safeguard, which saw us take our systems offline to further strengthen and enhance security protections and implement a program of further tactical activities, including those recommended by our specialist third parties.
The external review by Deloitte is ongoing. There is no doubt in my mind that we are in an arms race on cybercrime, and the rules are changing every day. That's the new world we are operating in. We now defend more than 18 million perimeter attacks a day. Given this ever-changing cyber landscape, our focus going forward will be on continuing to support our customers and ensuring they have confidence in the protection of their data. We will continue to strengthen our security environment and enhance the security literacy of all our users and reinforce that security is everyone's business.
We will continue to evolve our approach to data management, particularly in light of impending reforms of the Privacy Act and changing community expectations. Turning to slide eight. The cybercrime was a significant event, and as you'd expect, it impacted our policyholder growth in the second quarter of the year. With the resumption of more normal business operations at the start of January, there are promising early signs of regaining momentum in the second half of FY 2023. Last month, net resident policyholder loss slowed to around 1,100, while this month, up to 18th February, we have seen net growth of 200. Acquisition is improving for both brands.
The cybercrime is no longer the top reason for people choosing to leave us, and in January, switching intent had returned to pre-cyber levels. Notwithstanding the impact of the cybercrime event, customers continued to choose our health and well-being solutions and take out additional life, pet, or Travel Insurance policies with us, a good sign of their underlying trust in us. Advocacy levels have recently rebounded, although we have still some work to do to return to the high levels we achieved in FY 2022. These early signs give us confidence of re-regaining our growth momentum in the core resident business, which will be further supported as we reinstate our marketing and retention activities this month.
We're also continuing to focus on looking after our people who have shown incredible fortitude over the last six months. They tell us they felt well supported and informed and remain strongly committed to our customers and to our vision. On to slide nine. Australians continue to put their health and wellbeing first. The industry has now experienced nine consecutive quarters of growth to September 2022. A record 14.37 million Australians now have private health cover. Retention rates remained relatively stable and above pre-COVID levels, with growing numbers of younger adults and those taking out cover for the first time joining the industry. Importantly, this is taking pressure off public hospitals still recovering from the impacts of COVID.
Supported by low unemployment, increasing waiting lists in the public health system and reforms targeting younger people, we anticipate the resident market will continue to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate. Despite the economic conditions and increasing interest rates, the impact is yet to be felt in the private Health Insurance industry. It is important as an industry that we continue a longer-term focus on affordability, which is why we continue to work with the Australian government on key reforms, including prosthesis reform. While we've seen some early signs of savings being realized, there remains a lot more work to be done on reforms that improve affordability and reduce waste in the system.
In the non-resident market, there are strong signs of recovery. International student arrivals are rebounding strongly. We expect further acceleration given China's recent announcement that students must study abroad to achieve their accreditation, suggesting this market will return to pre-COVID levels within 12 months. With working visas back to pre-COVID levels, supported by government policies to address skills shortages and with visitor numbers also increasing, we forecast a return to pre-pandemic levels within 12-24 months for these segments. On to slide 10. When you look around the world, there are four clear mega trends in health. We continue to shape our strategy to respond to them.
The consumerization of health is shifting the focus to personalized and connected experiences, with technology playing a critical role. We're building deeper relationships with our almost four million customers that go beyond the traditional Health Insurance, improving choice and health literacy, and connecting people with communities as we work to empower our customers to manage their health and wellbeing. The growing prevalence of people with chronic health conditions and the potentially avoidable impact that this has on health systems requires a shift to prevention. As preventative health spending is expected to more than double by 2030 in Australia, we are supporting GP-led proactive care through our investment in Myhealth and working to make Live Better an integral part of our customers' lives with relevant prevention programs accessible to all.
The ability to provide quality care that gives patients and providers greater choice and value is leading to the rise of new care settings. While Australia still lags behind many other countries, we are making good progress on our virtual care, short stay, and Home Care offerings, increasing the accessibility of these new care options. Finally, the move to outcome-based care stems from the need for care to be more coordinated and funding better aligned to health outcomes, as highlighted by the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report. We're building on our partner and provider networks to develop more integrated care options and develop connected experiences across triage, primary acute care that have a greater focus on patient outcomes, experiences, and value.
We have strong foundations in response to these mega trends, and our aspirations for each are aligned to our vision to create the best health and wellbeing for Australia. Now on to slide 11. We know that our strategy has been the driving force behind our performance over many years, and that is the right one for our customers and our business. Given the recent cybercrime event and the changes in the external environment, we've reprioritized some activities in the short term to regain growth momentum in our core resident business and to accelerate our repositioning of Medibank Health. Ultimately, our strategy to grow as a health company and the pillars that contribute to this have not changed.
I'll now talk in more detail about the contribution of each pillar to our strategy, looking back over the past six months and ahead for the remainder of FY 2023. Now on to slide 12. We continue to reflect deeply upon the cybercrime's impact on our customers and apply the lessons we have learned. Our determination to deliver for our customers has only been strengthened by the events of last year. Our investments to improve our customer experience enabled us to quickly adapt our processes and divert resources to support our customers through the cybercrime. As mentioned earlier, we will also continue to evolve our approach to data management for all our customers, implementing lessons from the cybercrime event.
Engagement with our digital channels continued to grow. As we further simplified processes, online claims increased 29% and self-service interactions were up 24%, while more than 40% of ahm's new customers joined online. Our ongoing integration of Live Better into the MyMedibank app saw almost two-thirds of new Live Better members joining via the app, which we continue to enhance with the development of Home for Health, connecting our healthcare offerings seamlessly for our customers. As you would expect, customer advocacy, as measured by service NPS was impacted by the cybercrime event. However, our scores remain above the benchmarks we set for the full-year.
For the full-year, this milestone remains the same. Our people remain strongly committed to our vision and to our customers, we remain above benchmark with high levels of employee efficacy. When it comes to our community, we are making good progress on our sustainability commitments, including our ongoing transition to 100% renewable energy, community programs including parkrun and addressing loneliness, and our procurement spend with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses. Turning to slide 13.
Our unique dual brand strategy aims to provide customers with products and services that deliver more choice, more health and wellbeing support, and especially more value as financial pressures continue to mount for many households. Most of our new joins were younger customers and those new to industry, continuing the trend of the last few years. This half, we have won or renewed 130 corporate accounts. We delivered health and wellbeing programs to more than 143 corporates and grew our online GP service for international students by almost 200%. We've also seen significant growth in the proportion of customers taking out additional life, travel and pet, and car and home insurance, up 63%.
Saw stronger retention amongst those who had multiple policies or who were engaged with Live Better, highlighting the value of our strategy to deepen our relationship with our customers through diversified products and services. Live Better remains a strong differentiator for the Medibank brand, attracting new customers and engaging them in their health and wellbeing journey. It's also delivering more value for our customers. In the last half, we expanded the range and doubled the number of providers where members can earn Live Better reward points. To date, customers have redeemed around AUD 16 million in rewards. The strength and breadth of our provider and partner networks continues to be a key enabler of our differentiation strategy.
We successfully negotiated 44 hospital funding agreements this half, collaborating with a number of hospital partners on initiatives that create mutual value for our customers and hospitals. This represents 26% of our current hospital agreements. While we haven't got the December data in yet, we expect to have lost market share over the last quarter as a result of the cybercrime. Given the cybercrime has impacted policyholder growth, we are updating our milestone. By the end of the year, we expect to be in a strong position with the momentum we saw in the first quarter. We will then look to achieve a three-year market share growth of between 25 and 75 basis points consistent with our existing milestone.
When it comes to our Health Insurance productivity milestone, we are now aiming to deliver AUD 30 million in savings between FY 2023 to FY 2025, including AUD 10 million in this financial year. To slide 14. Australia has a great healthcare system, but it needs to keep evolving. Driving innovation in health to give customers greater access, choice, and control over their health is where we can and are playing a meaningful role. Our expansion in health also provides us with the ability to bring benefits back to our customers and deliver them more value.
Almost 1/3 of Medibank patients undergoing joint replacements are now choosing to have rehab at home. Our No Gap network has doubled in size. We are also supporting more customers to manage their health and wellbeing, increasing enrollments out in our preventative programs by 6% and growing both the membership of and engagement with Live Better, which is on track to achieve 670,000 members by July. We are also on track to achieve our health and wellbeing milestones, which remain unchanged. Through Amplar Health, we're also working to reduce pressures on hospitals and strengthen both the public and private health systems. Our investment in Myhealth, supports the crucial role GP-led care plays, particularly in preventative health.
With 107 primary care clinics, Myhealth is well-positioned to play a larger role in coordinated proactive prevention in line with the recommendations of the Medicare Taskforce. Further enhancing this is the growth of Medinet's virtual practice platform for GPs, which is supporting our ambition to scale our virtual health offering while meeting the needs of our customers and the broader community. Recent investments are also supporting our expansion into health and to progress our development of the new care settings, which are critical in providing our customers with greater access, choice, and control of their health.
This month, a new orthopedic theater was completed at East Sydney Private Hospital to deliver short-stay surgery and support the public system with 20% of surgeries now helping reduce public waiting lists. We expect the world-class orthopedic surgical center at Macquarie University Hospital in Sydney and Adeney Private Hospital in Melbourne to open mid-next year. The challenges in the public system are real, with ambulance ramping at emergency departments, increasing elective surgery waiting lists, and a stretched primary care system. In support, our joint venture with Calvary in South Australia, the South Australia Health MyHome Hospital service, had a significant increase in referrals this half.
More than 2,600 patients were admitted. We saw a 76% increase in virtual bed capacity compared to the first half in FY 2022. This service is one of the first in Australia receiving referrals from ambulances. Our work to enable North Coast Health Connect in Northern New South Wales is boosting health equity and access to primary care through 24/7 triage and direct connection to local health services in the region. Since coming online in December, the service has responded to more than 600 calls and web chats. These types of innovation are what is desperately needed in our health system, both private and public.
This is the role Medibank is uniquely suited to play, providing access to care for people who need it, at the time that they need it, without putting further pressure on a system that is strained. Over the next three years, we aim to invest between AUD 150 million and AUD 250 million in our target health markets, including additional short-stay hospitals. While some of these investments will take time to deliver meaningful financial returns, they are helping increase the value of our services, supporting the health of people throughout Australia, our customers included. I'll now hand over to Mark.
Well, thanks, David, good morning. The key themes of the result are continued momentum in the Health Insurance business, solid performance in Medibank Health despite the external environment and recent contract transitions, a strong capital position. Health Insurance performance reflects continued policyholder growth and positive jaws in the resident business, very strong policyholder growth and margin recovery in non-residents. Group operating profit was up 7.4% to AUD 307.8 million. Whilst investment income increased by AUD 25 million, this was offset by non-recurring costs associated with the cybercrime. For the full-year, we expect these costs to be between AUD 40 million and AUD 45 million, including non-recurring additional investment in IT security.
Reported EPS was up 5.9% to AUD 0.085 per share. Underlying EPS, which adjusts for the normalization of investment returns, was up 6.7% to AUD 0.082 per share. Moving to slide 17. The granular view of total claims for the six months to November shows that despite very limited COVID restrictions this period, payments were below the prior period, reflecting changing customer preferences, workforce shortages, and hospital operational impacts. We continue to see the same trends as observed in previous periods, with nonsurgical claims being more impacted than surgical, particular softness in rehab and respiratory claims, and now evidence of increasing mental health claims.
An emerging trend this period was procedures claims growth being 7% below the growth in private hospital surgical claims due to the positive impact of the 1 July price reforms. This period, resident claims were more than AUD 267 million or 9% below our expectation of underlying claims growth per policy unit of 2.3%. Given this and the absence of government restrictions on hospital admissions, we have not added to the deferred claims provisions period. At 31 December, the provision sits at AUD 411.6 million, which is down AUD 37 million from 30 June due to customer lapse and the expiration of Medibank Extras limits.
Slide 18 covers the Health Insurance result, which shows reported revenue and gross profit grew 2% and 9.3% respectively. During the period, the risk equalization payment increased in line with growth in the number of ahm customers, which is skewed to younger and lower claiming policies. Our claims growth continuing to be lower than industry. Permanent claims savings were returned to customers through AUD 267.7 million of giveback initiatives, resulting in COVID having a modest AUD 500,000 negative impact on operating profit. Pleasingly, underlying gross profit increased 8.8% to AUD 579.6 million, with underlying revenue growth of 5.6% and a 50 basis point improvement in underlying gross margin to 15.3%.
Whilst the management expense ratio was 30 basis points higher, underlying operating margin was up 20 basis points to 8.1% and underlying operating profit up to 7.7% to AUD 305.7 million. Turning to slide 19. The resident Health Insurance market remains buoyant with estimated growth in the last 12 months of 2.5%. Although this is slightly lower than FY 2022, it has been impacted by Medibank's growth in the last three months. Importantly, the trend of growth in new to industry and younger age customers has continued, which given they are typically lower claiming, positively impacts the quality of the insurance pool.
In the same period, our policyholder numbers increased by almost 35,000 or 1.8%. However, with the loss of 13,000 policies since the end of September, growth in the last six months of 0.1% was well below the 1.5% achieved in the prior period. In the last six months, customer lapse and acquisition deteriorated by 80 and 60 basis points respectively. Following the cybercrime, customer retention was impacted by the diversion of resources to support high call volumes, the majority of above the line marketing and other proactive sales activity also paused. Pleasingly, the Medibank acquisition rate was only down 30 basis points, which is indicative of the positioning and resilience of the brand.
Although the ahm acquisition rate was down 160 basis points, this was largely due to lower aggregate sales. As David mentioned, with the resumption of more normal business operations since 31 December, we've seen policyholder trajectory improve with acquisition rates recovering and retention rates stabilizing. In the second half, as we return to growth, we will focus on the growing corporate market, allocating additional resources to improve retention and increasing ahm aggregator sales. Going to slide 20. Underlying resident claims, which exclude COVID impacts, were up 4.8%. Underlying net claims, which includes risk equalization, were up 5%.
Risk equalization had a 20 basis point impact on claims growth this period, which is an increase on the prior period and consistent with the return to more normal age claiming patterns. Underlying resident claims growth per policy unit was up 40 basis points to 2.3%, with stable hospital claims growth and an increase in Extras. Hospital claims growth reflects that the higher risk equalization charge was offset by Precisely savings, with the increase in Extras due to investment in additional benefits and sales mix. Healthcare cost inflation had minimal impact on claims growth this period, with the majority of private hospitals already contracted for FY 2023.
Assuming the Precisely savings we saw this period are maintained and based on pre-COVID rehab referral trends, we expect underlying resident claims growth for the full-year of 2.3%. Given the economic environment, we are closely monitoring spend and more discretionary Extras modalities for signs of further softness. Slide 21 details underlying Health Insurance performance, which shows strong growth in both the resident and non-resident businesses. In the resident business, underlying gross margin was up 10 basis points to 14.8%, with revenue and claims growth per policy unit of 2.4% and 2.3% respectively. The decrease in revenue growth per policy reflects the lower premium increase this period and a 10 basis point increase in downgrading to 70 basis points.
Despite the economic conditions, we expect downgrading of 70 basis points for the full-year, aided by our focus on increasing product value, portfolio management, and sales mix activities. Based on the approved premium increase of 2.96% and the expectation for underlying claims growth, this should result in modestly positive jaws for the full-year. Pleasingly, the momentum in the non-resident business has continued with a 34.4% increase in policy units and underlying gross profit up 107% to AUD 31 million. The favorable student tenure and mix impacts we saw in 2H 2022 have continued. An underlying gross margin of 34.1% compares to 21.5% and 29.2% in 1H and 2H 2022 respectively.
Strong customer growth has continued in January, and with further growth in the work and visitor market segments likely, gross profit in the second half is expected to be higher than in the first half. In the medium term, further growth opportunities exist through utilizing our unique integrated health offering, improving product value, including in virtual health, and investing further in this attractive market segment. Moving to slide 22. Management expenses were up 10% to AUD 273.9 million, with the major driver the increase in non-resident sales commissions, which grew with policyholder acquisition.
Whilst commissions of AUD 11.4 million were in line with 2H 2022, based on the current policyholder trajectory, we expect that will increase further in the second half. The modest growth in VNA reflects higher spend on digital assets, and whilst deferred acquisition cost amortization also increased, this remains above the level of new acquisition costs. In line with the new insurance accounting standard, we will commence expensing all acquisition costs from 1 July. Operating expenses were up 7%, with cost inflation of 4% and modest volume impacts, partially offset by approximately AUD 4 million of productivity savings.
This period, we also had a higher proportion of annual investment and some other spend than normal, but this is expected to unwind in the second half. Whilst achieving productivity savings this period has been impacted by the cybercrime, we are targeting AUD 30 million of savings over the next three years, including AUD 10 million this year. Despite the underlying management expense ratio increasing 30 basis points to 7.2%, we expect management expenses of AUD 560 million for the full-year and that the management expense ratio will not be above last year's.
Going forward, we will continue to leverage our productivity program and the benefits of scale to target further modest improvement in the management expense ratio whilst balancing the need to invest for growth. Turning to slide 23 in Medibank Health. Whilst the majority of COVID impacts on Medibank Health have unwound, this period, performance in the Home Care business was impacted by subdued private hospital admissions and higher labor costs. In Telehealth, the transition out of the 1800RESPECT and Beyond Blue contracts in 2H 2022. Excluding these contracts, segment operating profit was up 7.4% to AUD 24.6 million, with a 14.6% increase in operating profit, partially offset by a lower contribution from our healthcare JVs, where the prior period included non-recurring COVID income.
Revenue increased 5.9% to AUD 139.5 million, with strong growth in health and wellbeing and recovery in Travel Insurance sales, partially offset by a reduction in Telehealth and Home Care. Gross margin was down 40 basis points to 44.7% with higher Home Care labor costs and inflationary impacts, partially offset by business mix. However, flat management expenses and a 170 basis point improvement in the management expense ratio meant operating margin increased 130 basis points to 16.9%. This reinforces the importance of increasing scale in this business. Key areas of focus for the second half include volume and performance uplift in Home Care, continuing to reposition the business to meet the emerging needs of Medibank customers, and delivering synergies between our businesses.
Whilst profit growth this period was impacted by these less selling earnings, the business has good momentum and growth potential for meeting the needs of Medibank customers. We continue to target, on average, organic growth of at least 15% per annum over the next three years. Moving to slide 24. Investment income was up AUD 25 million or 80.9% to AUD 55.9 million, for the benefit of higher interest rates and tighter credit spreads this period. The AUD 8.6 million reduction in income in the growth portfolio pursued a manager under performance in property investments and mixed performance in equities, with strong returns in the domestic market more than offset by weaker returns in the international.
In the defensive portfolio, the AUD 20.9 million increase in income includes AUD 22.5 million from the higher RBA cash rate and AUD 3.9 million from tighter credit spreads. This is partially offset by the steepening yield curve, resulting in AUD 8.6 million lower than expected income on international fixed interest holdings. During the period, the average RBA cash rate was 235 basis points. Based on the current spot rate of 335 basis points, in the second half, we expect an additional AUD 10 million of interest income in the defensive portfolio. Underlying investment income was up AUD 26.6 million, and the underlying investment return up 52 basis points to 1.45%.
The 27 basis points spread above the RBA cash rate is on an annualized basis below our target of 150–200 basis points. However, based on the current shape of the yield curve, we expect this spread to improve in the second half. Slide 25 , covers capital. Our capital position remains strong with the Health Insurance capital ratio of 13% at the top end of our target range, and an allocated capital of AUD 198.1 million modestly above the prior period. During the period, Health Insurance required capital increased in line with revenue growth, and the increase in other required capital largely reflects the hospital joint ventures that David mentioned and the investment in Medinet in 2H 2022.
A strong capital generation and level of unallocated capital means we are well-placed to fund inorganic growth and consider capital management if opportunities don't eventuate. Following industry consultation, the final APRA capital standards have been issued and included a number of favorable outcomes relative to draft standards. From 1 July, we expect our target Health Insurance capital ratio will reduce to 10%-12% of forecast premium revenue from the current 11%-13%. At the top end of this range, Health Insurance capital at 31 December would have been 2x the minimum regulatory requirement for PCA, noting that our PCA as a proportion of premium revenue is significantly lower than the industry average due to our scale and operating margin.
The board has declared a fully franked interim dividend of AUD 0.063 per share, which is an increase of 3.3% and a 76.5% payout of underlying net profit after tax. To finish, a few comments on our areas of focus for delivering growth and managing inflation in the second half. In the Health Insurance business, maintaining revenue momentum is key, and our immediate imperatives are reestablishing resident policy holder growth, continuing to manage downgrading, and maintaining the strong growth trajectory in non-residents. The markets Medibank Health operate in remain attractive, and we continue to focus on growing participation in our leading health propositions, increasing scale to create operational efficiencies, and delivering synergies between our businesses.
Over the next three years, we also aim to invest between AUD 150 million and AUD 250 million through further M&A, where this adds scale, geographic coverage or new capability. We continue to target ways to offset inflationary pressure in claims. With initial promising signs, it is critical that procedures reform continues to deliver benefits, including through changes to the way that general and miscellaneous items are funded. Potential offsets to inflation include the increasing likelihood that the current low rehab referral levels will, at least in part, be permanent, the trend of more procedures occurring on a same day rather than an overnight basis.
The benefit of continuing to grow participation amongst younger customers. By providing more services to Medibank customers, Amplar will also play an important role through an increasing focus on prevention, supporting the shift to new care settings, and delivering integrated models of care at scale. Maintaining our cost discipline productivity program and closely managing non-cash costs will be critical to expense management. Increasingly, we believe our economies of scale will provide a competitive advantage to most peers. I'll now pass back to Dave to make some closing remarks.
Thanks, Mark. Let's look at slide 28. Whilst our strategy is the right one, as I said before, on the short term, our immediate priorities post the cybercrime event are to continue to support our customers and our people. Focused on reestablishing our momentum in the resident policyholder growth and continuing to reposition Amplar Health to support our core customers and pursuing our growth agenda in health. We are a resilient business with great people. Our customers and their needs will always be at the heart of our business. The lessons we have learned from the cybercrime will continue to shape our response, and we will emerge a stronger business. We are well-positioned to grow on multiple fronts.
Based on the early signs of momentum, we are confident that we can regain growth momentum in our resident policyholder numbers, and we'll continue to focus on gaining share in the growing non-resident market. We will continue to scale and connect our existing health and wellbeing businesses with strong foundations in our target high-growth markets. We will continue to prioritize growth in Medibank Health by directly supporting Medibank customers, as well as looking for opportunities to take pressure off the public system through our scalable health offerings. We remain uniquely positioned in the market and are very well capitalized to fund growth, so we can continue to use our strong balance sheet to invest in further opportunities with partners to support our growth ambitions.
We have an incredible team of people at Medibank, and I wanna thank them for the support they have shown to our customers and each other. I now speak to slide 29. Returning to our outlook for FY 2023, we continue to assess claims activity and remain committed to not profit from the pandemic, returning any permanent net claim savings due to COVID to our customers through additional support in the future. Following the withdrawal of our policyholder growth outlook in October, our new outlook for resident policyholder growth in FY 2023 is to grow by 0.5% to 0.75%, which assumes the continuation of trends we have seen in January and February and a modest decline in industry growth rate in FY 2023 relative to the full financial year 2022.
We'll provide a further update on our performance and outlook at the Macquarie Conference in May. We expect underlying claims per policy unit of 2.3% for FY 2023 among resident policyholders. We remain focused on controlling our costs, and as Mark mentioned, our productivity program was impacted by the cybercrime during the half. We are now targeting AUD 30 million of savings over FY 2023–2025, including AUD 10 million in FY 2023. Non-recurring cybercrime costs are expected to be AUD 40 million-AUD 45 million in FY 2023, which includes a one-off investment in IT security and excludes potential further customer and other remediation, regulatory, or litigation-related costs.
Finally, targeted organic and inorganic growth in Medibank Health and Health Insurance continue to be areas of focus, supported by a strong capital position. I'll now hand over the call for any questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Matt Dunger from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Appreciate the additional, detail around policyholder growth and the FY 2026 aspiration. Given you've reinstated marketing activity, you're talking about options on aggregator for ahm and the corporate market, why is the target three years away, and when can you get back to system growth?
Thanks, Matt. I think first is first, we're resuming normal business operations since January. You know, we're very pleased with the early signs of recovery. Some things we look at, particularly, switching intents now back to pre-cyber levels. Our Net Promoter Score, customer advocacy scores are, you know, getting pretty close back to pre-cyber levels, and our sales conversion is also, you know, back to where it was. I think as we ramp up our marketing activities and further strengthen our retention activities, we think that that will lead to our growth for the full-year this year at being 0.5%-0.75%.
When you look at that as a Q4 growth rate, we're then pretty similar to where we were in Q1, and that then gives us, you know, confidence that then we move for the next three years, we're back to where we were before the cyber event.
Great. Thank you, David. If I could just ask a follow-up on claims inflation. Private hospitals seeing some higher surgery volumes. Appreciate you've given us some additional detail on some of the offsets, but how long is the 2.3% underlying inflation able to be maintained? Do you think you can maintain that medium term?
Matt, that's gonna be a balance between a whole series of factors. Bearing in mind, our payments to private hospitals are less than 50% of our total claims payments. Whilst we've seen some inflationary impact through hospital indexation, equally, probably the biggest opportunity for our claims line is on rehab. We're currently seeing somewhere in the vicinity of 20% lower rehab referral rates than what we saw pre-COVID. That's, we're assuming they revert within the 2.3%. If they don't, that's potentially AUD 50 million-AUD 60 million of claims saving going forward. When you look at the other claims component of our claims of the majority, you've got prosthesis, which is deflationary.
You've got the medi-medical benefits, which are capped at a pretty low level given the government's a co-payer. Then there's the potential that we get a deflationary impact in ancillary, given some of those discretionary modalities will be impacted by inflation. If I just sit here today, Matt, and say, "What's the bias? Is it up or down from the 2.3?" At least in the short term, I'd say the bias is more to the downside than the upside. The reason I say that is our current claims are 9% below that 2.3% underlying expectation.
Very helpful. Thank you, Mark.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Vanessa Thomson from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Good morning, David and Mark, and thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to circle back on that rehab referral trend. I think at the last result, you said the rehab spend was 15% around and below the surgical claims growth. Is that still true?
It's 20% below the surgical claims growth. The surgical claims are down 2% and rehab was down 22%. In fact, the trend is actually there's a bigger gap opening up between surgical and rehab claims growth. We're also now seeing about 1/3 of our customers that have a total joint replacement having treatment in the home and not in a hospital. Both of those factors are what are giving me increasing level of confidence that at least some of the rehab savings we're seeing will be permanent.
Thank you. I then also wanted to ask about the prosthesis reform again. I think in initially the expected benefit in FY 2023 was $90 million for the industry. Is that kind of what you're seeing? Is the benefit you're seeing aligned with that target? Thank you.
Vanessa, we're definitely seeing the price savings come through. It'll take a little bit more time for the emergence patterns of lower to ensure there's no utilization offset. I think there are some really good promising signs that the reform will actually deliver real benefits this time. When we look forward into the next round of cuts, we'll have another small set of cuts on 1 March, which is related to a few items on the general and miscellaneous list, but there'll be a wholesale second stage of price cuts coming through on 1 July. In aggregate, we're expecting a modestly higher benefit level next year compared to this year , in terms of total price cut benefit.
Right. Thank you. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Kieren Chidgey from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. I might just start. I've got a few questions. I might just start on sort of the Health Insurance claims trends. Just wondering if you can unpack sort of the difference between the 2.3% underlying you're talking about and then some of the trends on slide 17, I think, where you're showing 1H 2023's actually seen more of a benefit relative to PCP with total hospital claims down 7% pre-COVID relative to 4% last period. What's sort of the difference between those two sort of outlooks?
Sorry, Kieren, You're looking at slide 16.
17. Sorry about that. 17. You know where you're showing hospital claims per policy unit, first half of 2023 tracking 7% below pre-COVID. First half of 2022 was 4% below. I was just wondering.
Yeah.
You know, given you're showing there that, you know, things have improved on PCP, how we sort of tie that in with the 2.3% underlying inflation number you talked to?
Yeah. Don't forget, Kieren, we had some impacts in the second half of last year, which we had high growth in the second half of last year. I think you're seeing the second half impacts flowing through into this period. What I'd say at a high level, though, across most of the trends, and particularly, surgical, we are seeing softness now relative to what we were seeing in the second half of last year. I'd say you need to look across not just the PCP, but also versus the sequential halves as well.
All right. The 2.3%, Mark, I think last result you were saying, similar to some of the previous questions this morning, that you were allowing for, you know, rehab to kind of get back to where it was. Still tracking obviously 20% below, and you also have been pretty conservative on Precisely benefits coming through. Both those areas seem to be tracking better than expected. Just wondering why you haven't revised down the 2.3% outlook? Are there other areas that have been slightly higher, including ancillary?
Yes, a good question, Kieran. Let me start with processes. We are building in some benefit within the 2.3%, but not all of the benefit. We'll wait to see the emergence pattern to ensure that utilization doesn't offset. I think it's prudent we take a conservative approach given the history on processes savings over the last couple of periods. When I look at rehab, Kieran, we are assuming there's AUD 25 million-AUD 30 million of savings in rehab relative to our 2.3% assumption. We're assuming rehab reverts. In the current period, there was real savings on rehab of between AUD 25 million and AUD 30 million that we gave back to customers through permanent claim savings.
You're right, it's conservative, but we see those as being natural offsets to any inflationary pressure coming through hospital indexation. On rehab, we really needed to see 12 months of performance and behavior in hospitals without any restrictions. If you recall, most of the most recent restrictions unwound in February and March of last year. I think we're now getting, with the inflection of time, more confidence that rehab won't revert, and we'll reassess that assumption in terms of reversion or staying at current low levels at the full-year result.
All right, thanks. Just a second question more around sort of industry policy trends and outlook. I mean, you've given a fairly stable downgrading outlook of 70 basis points despite the tougher economic climate ahead. Just wondering, at an industry level, what you're expecting in terms of penetration rates, particularly interested in sort of views around, say, the 30–50 year age cohorts, just given they're obviously going to be more impacted by higher mortgage rates coming through?
Well, I'm going to start. It's on the industry level, and Mark, you can jump in. I think what we're definitely seeing is still a continuation of the post-pandemic factors in industry. Certainly, increased interest in health and wellbeing. Customers are seeing more value in PHI, I think more than 2/3. It's a growing number. Are seeing private Health Insurance essential, and, you know, the knowledge of the challenges in the public system, particularly with waiting lists, are very well known. I think also the focus of the industry and also us on keeping premium increases as low as they can be. You know, with sustained lower premium increases, that's also helping with affordability. I think you've got to look at the customer base of PHI.
You know, they're twice as likely to be a higher income earner than non-holders. You know, I think whilst there will be some impacts in some parts of the community, I think, you know, there's a resilience in the PHI customer base there. You know, we continue to see strong, you know, retention rates above the pre-pandemic levels. I think the other point on the younger customers, we did, as you saw, last quarter, we and others put in the dependent reforms to allow customers up to 31 to be on their parents' cover. We have seen, certainly days we've seen that, you know, come through.
I think that's a key focus continuing for reforms. How do we keep premium increases as low as we can? How do we retain attraction to younger customers? You know, we've seen our acquisition in the last half of customers under 40, they're still being above or around 70%, which is a continued trend for us. Maybe, Kieren, on your downgrading point. There was a slight improvement in the level of downgrading this half, 70 basis points versus 60 basis points in the prior corresponding period. We did invest fairly significantly in the loyalty proposition.
Also, it's fair to say during the second quarter, when we were trying to retain customers post the cyber event, we had to use offers and other incentives more than we normally would. We had two one-off factors that we don't expect to recur in this period. When we look forward into the second half, we think we've got some capacity within that 70 basis points to absorb any further economic pressure. You're right, back to your last question. In the first half of 2022, we saw a more significant sales mix towards Extras, whereas this period we've got a much higher sales mix towards hospital.
Provided either the sales mix to hospital or Extras doesn't change or the Medibank and ahm policyholder growth doesn't become too askew, we're not seeing a lot of further downside or upside to that 70 basis points for the full-year.
That's great. Thanks, guys. I'll leave it there.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Andrew Buncombe from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is just in relation to the DCL. You obviously haven't put any new claims into that bucket this period, for company specific reasons. Going forward, do you expect to put any more in or have you officially closed the window on that? Thanks.
I never officially closed the window, Andrew, but I would clarify, it's not company specific reasons. The driver of having a DCL is that there is federal, government, or state health authority restrictions on private hospital admissions, which we had none of. Our reading, at least of the accounting standard, is there was no constructive obligation and therefore we weren't able to accrue further DCL. Having said that, if there are further restrictions going forward, obviously the same methodology we've used in the past would be possible again.
Yeah, thanks for that clarification. That helps. Thank you. Just my second question is in relation to slide 14, where you have again flagged the AUD 150 million-AUD 250 million of investment in Medibank Health over three years. Can you just give us an update, given what's happened with the cyber event? Should we be expecting that to be more back-ended now or evenly over the period? Just some comments on the shape would be great. Thanks.
Thanks, Andrew. I'll just kick off and maybe Andrew Wilson, if you want to make any comments on what we're seeing in the market. Look, the cyber event was significant for our business, but it hasn't impacted, you know, really our opportunities to expand in health. Our partnership programs continue to drive very positive impact to our customers and where we've maintained a lot of discussions in market about potential targets and opportunities for growth. We will remain very disciplined in how and where we grow, as you would expect. Based on our pipeline and our focus areas, we remain, you know, very confident about that objective.
No, thanks, David. I would just echo that. I mean, we've got a strong pipeline in the areas that we've been very clear about we're looking at, particularly in ambulatory care, short stay, and that really hasn't changed at all as a result of the cyber impact. We think there are tremendous opportunities for us inorganically as well as organically, and we'll continue to look at companies where they're gonna add business to add value to our business in the segments that we're in.
Great. That's it from me. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Siddharth Parameswaran from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. A couple of questions, if I can. If I could bring you back to slide 17, I think it was, where you're showing a significant reduction in the cash payments for several different segments there. I was just wondering if you could help us quantify if the rehab and respiratory claims were to persist at these lower levels. I think you mentioned on the rehab side it was about AUD 50 million-AUD 60 million permanent savings that would continue. I was just wondering if you could also help quantify what respiratory might be.
Yeah, respiratory is about 6% of our total claims, and rehab's around 23%, Sid.
Right. Okay.
I don't think we said there's an increasing likelihood they may.
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I understand. Okay. Well, I mean, maybe on that point, just maybe two related questions around that. Just could you help us understand the logic of the rehab being down? I mean, you know, That, you know, when will you get comfort around this? you know, is there something that's fundamentally changing in the hospital system that's leading to that rehab being down? When will you get comfort around that point?
Kind of go back to when we were at the start of COVID, bed availability was really low. Many beds were put aside for potential COVID admissions. the low acuity beds, in particular in rehab, were held available for the public health system. I think you got discharge planners and surgeons more comfortable of discharging patients to home for rehab or not having rehab at all. That's just continued. It's now two years since that started, and we haven't reverted. There's also a change in customer preference starting during COVID, where customers didn't wanna go to a rehab facility for 14 days and risk being infected if another patient had COVID.
There's a combination all through the referral chain from patients all the way through to surgeons having changing preferences, a greater understanding and appreciation of the capacity and ability to do rehab in the home. I think I may have mentioned in an earlier answer, 1/3 of our customers that go through a total joint replacement now have rehab at home.
Yeah. Okay. It sounds like it should be pretty imminent in terms of your assessment of that. Just around ancillary then, if I could just ask for a similar observation on versus, I mean, similar to what you show on slide 17. Are cash claims down on ancillary at all, or how are they tracking versus pre-COVID levels?
Yeah. Of the AUD 267 million of savings we had this year, permanent claim savings, AUD 54 million of those were lower ancillary, related to the ancillary product. Slightly less than 25% of our total claim savings, which is, ancillary accounts for about 25% of our policies. We're seeing a bit of a mix there, Sid. We're seeing dental claims still being pretty strong. I think like most of the community, I didn't go to the dentist for 12 months.
But the areas we're watching most closely are specialties like, and modalities like optical, where customers are choosing to have a new pair of glasses every two years, not every 12 or 18 months. Natural therapies and physiotherapy are pretty soft as well. I think you're going to get a stratification in ancillary and Extras between dental and the majority of the other modalities.
Sure. I mean, the difficulty is with those permanent savings of AUD 54 million that you've flagged, I think there's, you know, DCLs and other factors that influence that number. I was just wondering on a cash basis how is it tracking?
That'd be around AUD 30 million, AUD 30 million-AUD 35 million. There's about a AUD 20 million Medibank ancillary provision that was released, at 31 December.
Yep. Okay. Thank you so much. Just a final question from me is, just around DAC, and I think, you know, with the new IFRS standards, there will be, you won't be able to capitalize the DAC anymore. A lot of your growth certainly has been coming through the ahm channel, I think through aggregators, et cetera. I was just wondering if you could comment on whether we might see a change in your marketing strategy going forward or whether that influences anything, whether we might see a change in the expenses that come out of the change in the accounting standards once you switch over?
Yeah. If anything, expensing rather than capitalizing will be a slight tailwind for expenses because we're currently running off the DAC balance. Our strategy for some time has been to continue growth in the ag channel, but moving more of our sales to the direct channel. I suspect it's going to be a second order impact for us, but slightly positive going forward. What it does mean, though, is it opens up the marketing spend bucket more broadly and greater fungibility between above the line marketing or paying commissions because they now all get treated exactly the same way from an accounting perspective.
Just to add to that, from a strategic perspective, as Mark said, we will continue to bias acquisition to direct channels. You know, in the last half, 80% of our joins were direct, which is up from about 70% the previous year. Some of that will be, you know, due to changes in marketing spend. But we, that's a target that we have that's quite differentiated in market. You know, that continues to be a focus.
Yep. Okay. Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Nigel Pittaway from Citi. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Just first of all wanted to return to the turnaround in policyholder growth in this year. If possible, I think you said acquisition in both brands had improved. Can you make any comment about what's happened to the lapse rates over the period?
Well, I think when we look at the first half, the acquisition rates, particularly for Medibank, were down slightly year-on-year, but held pretty strong. We've seen that, you know, continue. As I said before, our sales conversion rates have held pretty strong. Certainly the ahm business has rebounded pretty quickly. I think given the impact of the cyber event, and the associated impact on the Medibank name, you know, that did impact the Medibank brand slightly more. As we resume retention activities, that's where our major focus are.
I think the lead indicator I look at is switching intent by our members, and that's now back down to pre-cyber levels. Their thought about leaving is about the same. Their reasons for leaving are now not due to cyber as much as they were. We expect to see improvement as we focus on those activities.
Yeah. Nigel, the Medibank lapse was impacted by 90 basis points across the versus PCP, and IHM was only down 60 basis points. Medibank brand out in the media, bigger lapse impact. Medibank retention program, more developed and more embedded than what it is in IHM, turning it off also had a bigger impact. We'd expect as we're turning those retention programs back on, similarly, it will be easy to have an impact on Medibank retention as a consequence.
Okay. More particularly in the six weeks of this year, has there been an improvement in lapse rate? Or if you've seen improvements in acquisition rate with lapse rate still remaining pretty similar?
Well, in both, but largely there's been a bigger impact on acquisition.
Yeah. Okay. just sort of turning to—sorry , yeah?
No, we're all ears.
Okay. Okay, I was gonna go on and sort of ask about sort of, in terms of I think you're saying that your fourth quarter growth rate you think should be similar to 1Q , which does seem to indicate confidence that the worst of the cyberattack impact is behind you. I was just wanting to hopefully explore that confidence a little bit and also sort of, maybe just question, you know, how confident you are that you're not gonna get sort of a second wave where individuals start sort of really trying to up their scamming activity versus customers. Can you maybe comment on that? I realize it's probably sensitive, but.
Look, Nigel, I think there's first and foremost, the cybercrime event was a significant event, and impacted, you know, our customers. That's the first thing we should say. You know, our priority and my priority for the business at that point was to understand what happened, was to shut down the attack path, which we've now done, and safeguard and support our customers. You know, we rediverted, you know, resources to do that. We greatly reduced our marketing spend, that contributed to, you know, policyholder loss. The main reason for leaving during that second quarter was due to the cyber event, which we expected.
I think as we go now, since we are resuming more normal business operations, we're rediverting our people back to more normal activities because the calls into our call center around cyber are greatly reducing. We continue to support customers if they need us with our cyber recovery program. You know, what we're seeing is customers now want us to support them with their health and wellbeing. We're having people now looking to join us. We're having, you know, retention rate conversations more and more.
Based on those early signs, you know, we're confident that when we get to Q4, we will be resuming, you know, the similar growth momentum that we had, you know, in Q1. Look, the question of the go forward. I think, you know, this is an arms race out there, in the world of cybercrime, and the rules of the game, keep changing. Before the cyber event, we were successfully repelling around 200, 225 million cyber attacks on our perimeter each month. Now it's almost 3x that. You know, we will continue to learn the lessons we've learned.
We will continue to make sure we do everything we can to strengthen our environment, but we're gonna remain vigilant as every company needs to.
Maybe just finally, I mean, obviously you said you've done sort of 44 hospital negotiations. I appreciate you've got some defensiveness in there 'cause you've negotiated forward, but can you give us any sort of broad flavor as to sort of the level of inflationary pressures that are starting to come into those negotiations?
Well, I think as a— you know, what we say is we recognize that the COVID environment has been challenging, and it's required all of us to rethink how we run our business. We've taken AUD 100 million out of our own cost base over the last five years. We've had an ongoing dialogue with all our 450 hospital partners. We just don't turn up the day before the contract is ready and, you know, provide our expectation of rate. We have seen, you know, a move towards a more forward-looking partnership agreements where we're creating mutual value.
For customers, we need to keep premium increases as low as they can be, but also recognizing and supporting hospitals who are keen to create an environment of innovation, and sustainability, and that's what we've been focused on.
Nigel, on behalf of our customers, there's a certain affordability we can pay for all claims inflation. If you've got deflation in processes and you've got rehab rates that are lower than pre-pandemic, then of course the affordability to pay for higher hospital indexation is improved. It actually comes down to the— there's a certain affordability, and if we don't have unnecessary processes , cost increases , and utilization increases, then rehab referral trends are helpful. Of course, that opens up the opportunity to reassess what's affordable from an indexation perspective. I guess that's the way we think about it.
All right. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Dan Hurren from MST Marquee. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thanks much for taking my question. I just wanted to ask about IT costs versus the one-off cybercrime costs in FY 2023. Look, I know we're not talking about FY 2024 guidance at this stage, but is there a risk of a higher reported IT spend in this cybercrime arms race, as you call it, beyond the AUD 40–45 one-off costs this year? I guess I'm asking is, do you know, do we need to think about some of that non-recurring actually becoming recurring? I guess finally, is this considering the productivity savings?
I think the first I'll answer that, yeah, productivity for us is an always-on activity. Cybersecurity and IT security has actually been an area of investment over the last few years. In fact, we've probably doubled our spend in this space over the last three years before, you know, this year. I think that's certainly the priority for us and certainly priority going forward.
I don't want to look too far ahead, I'm not expecting at the half-year or full-year result next year that we're talking about cyber being additional ongoing cyber costs being a major factor of any increase or decrease in management expenses. I think we're more spending time thinking about our long life IT assets that are almost fully depreciated and the impact that has on our costs. I think there was a question before about deferred acquisition costs and the impact of the new standard, the overseas commissions this period being very, very high given the policyholder growth has been 34%. I'm thinking those three factors will be part of our narrative at the next conversation on costs rather than ongoing run costs for IT security.
Yep. Okay. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Doron Kur from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Sorry, nothing more from me. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.