Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending our virtual meeting to present the results of the 1st quarter of 2023. A few housekeeping reminders before we start. This conference call is being recorded and has simultaneous interpretation into English. If you want to hear the audio in English, click on the Language Interpretation button on the bottom menu of your Zoom screen. We are going to start our presentation in Portuguese. To see the documents in English, please access our Investor Relations website at the address www.bbseguridade/ri. During the presentation, if you want to ask a question, please click on the Q&A button. We are also going to allow a few questions to be made in audio after the presentation in Portuguese only. Today is with us, we have Ullisses Assis, CEO of BB Seguridade, and Rafael Sperendio, CFO.
I would like to give the floor to Ulisses who's going to start the presentation. Ulisses, please, floor is yours.
Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here this morning to talk a little bit about the results of Q1 2023. We are very happy with our performance. This result has been built on very sound basis. It's the best result ever for the first quarter in the company. I am going to share with you the main numbers, a little bit of our strategy. Then Rafael is going to give you more details. Then we are going to open for Q&A. We closed the first quarter with BRL 1.8 billion, considering IFRS 17, BRL 1.83 billion. For presentation purposes, we decided to use the old methodology also to facilitate comparison.
According to the eighth methodology, we have BRL 1.761 billion, an increase of 50% over the same period last year. As I said, this has been the best first quarter ever in the company and very robust growth, with premiums going up by 35%, premiums from insurance with BRL 3.7 billion premiums issued and a loss ratio of 30%, 16 percentage points below what we had before. Also, in pension plans, our contributions is very interesting, 14% higher than last year, totaling almost BRL 15 billion in contributions. Also, with net inflows of almost BRL 2 billion, which is more than we had during 2022 as a whole. In the first quarter of 2022, we had BRL 475 million negative.
This year, considering the contributions and a little slowdown in redemption, we have positive contributions or inflows by BRL 2 billion. We had a 4% growth year-on-year in premium bonds, almost BRL 10 billion reserves accumulated, 22% growth year-on-year. A number that places us and that confirms our leadership in reserves. Obviously, all this commercial performance that has had exponential growth with higher brokerage revenues, with BRL 1.2 billion and 19% growth year-on-year. Now, considering these numbers, I would like to mention our three management pillars, and I've been talking about this ever since I started working here. We talked about analytical intelligence and customer experience. We are still investing in digital transformation.
Last year, I was estimating which percentage of our products that are complying with the new architecture. We completed the project with 100% of our products, of our main products in the new IT architecture, but we still have a lot to do. I would like to share this not just in terms of the new IT architecture, improvement and expansion of channels, and we're really obsessed about that, to be wherever customers want us to be, so that they can have any type of transaction. Simplification of customer journey, to contract or to have any access to products, and also heavy investment in analytics, because we think that this technological framework supports our strategy much better and helps us to attract sales and also helps to improve customer satisfaction.
We are reviewing all our journeys with one-click design. We are improving transactional journeys end-to-end in WhatsApp. This is something that we have noted that is very valuable for customers. We have transactions through the voice assistant. We are working with pension through Alexa and also intensive use of predictive and propensity models in our communications of customers. On the right-hand side, we have a few examples. We are using analytical intelligence, for example, to define the best payment date, amounts, for allocations, time for contribution in pension, if the salary changes, a child is born, they get married. We can identify those moments to make the best offers to our customers. Also using WhatsApp to do remarketing of life insurance.
In another case is the use of geo-referencing geolocalization, something that we did during Carnival, offering personal belongings insurance during Carnival in the main markets where Carnival is the most famous in Brazil. Now, going to the next slide, you can see that the results of these investments are taking place. Everything is evolving very fast. We went from 13.2%- 16%. Here, we are talking about sales through the digital channel. When we compare the growth of products sold over the same period last year, we have had a growth of 42.5% in terms of businesses conducted through digital channels compared to Q1 2022.
Premium bonds focused very much on digital solution, credit life also, and personal belongings is something that is widely accepted and is selling very well through digital channels. We're having significant sales. Also, using the digital mode of operation, we are not going to say everything, not to give you details. New product functionalities, customer experience, we are going to see a slide translating that, cybersecurity, payment means and/or payment solutions. We need to be really up to date with new payment methods, and we need to be very efficient. This strategy supports our partnership aims, and also I think that we can really advance in this strategy as a whole, supports the entire growth of other strategies of the company. Now, going briefly into diversification of distribution.
This is something that is very dear to us. We have insisted on that for the past two years. We ended Q1 with BRL 417 million. Outside Canal Banco do Brasil, we have had an 80% growth as compared to Q1 2022. We have cooperative sales of machinery, agricultural inputs, sellers, banks and others. We are also diversifying the products that can be distributed in these partners. In addition to agricultural insurance, we have machinery insurance. Also, we have a product called Bem da Sorte, which is a philanthropy premium bond that donates funds to NGOs. Also, we worked with a travel insurance via Ciclic for plane tickets. We want to make the most to make these partnerships profitable.
The ones that we already have, existing partnerships, we want to make them more profitable. I said this, and I am repeating, whenever we create a new partnership, it won't sell overnight. We need to implement many integrations. We think that we have good partners, we have good existing partnerships. Now we need to focus on making the most of the existing partnerships. Of course, we're always trying to seek new partners, especially those with the highest potential to drive our growth. This is something that has been growing. I'm very happy about that. In the midterm, it will be increasingly more representative as a share of our businesses. Lastly, I'll talk about customer experience and our journey in this area.
Since last year, we challenged ourselves in terms of the critical processes in a relationship with our customers. We have been using lots of technology in order to reduce those frictions. We have seen an increase in NPS that has been very robust, more than 10 points in rural insurance, more than 11 points in premium bonds, and more than 12% in life insurance. In addition to increasing NPS, the number of complaints has gone down more than 30% year-on-year, and the churn for term life and home insurance going down by almost 7%. Churn is something that is essential for us because we have a strong attraction of sales, and the more we can retain them, the better will be our results.
This is very important work, and we've been investing a lot in that. All of this, in a scenario of increasing our customer base from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023, we have had a growth of 4.3% in our customer base, driven especially by savings funds, bonds, credit life and home insurance. Lastly, and I'm ending my part of the presentation, I'll talk about our relationship program. I have been talking about this work, and I'm been giving you a few spoilers since last year. We have created a segmentation model. We have different levels, and we've been working in our relationship program. First, as a pilot model, it's still in a pilot model, and we hope to expand it to our entire customer base still this year.
When we take our customer base and compare it, the period of growth, when we finalize segmentation and we started the piloting the program from October 2022 until now, our customer base, the NPS of our customer base grew 14 points. When we talk about the overprotected customers, our main customers, the customers that do more businesses with us, it increased 10%. We take the 50,000 customers that are within our platform, the protected customers, NPS has grown four points. This is very clear to us, every time we research, that has been demonstrating that the more we talk to them, the more interact with them, the more we improve experiences, the more we have premium service experiences. We talk more to them, we deliver effective value proposition.
We see that their NPS goes up and the churn goes down. On the right-hand side of your screen, this is just a short example. This is still being piloted. Now we're testing with BB Insurance staff. Within the bank, customers can, and we are finalizing testing to release it to our entire base. They may know what is the level of protection that they have, their products, and which product that they need to consume so that they will become an Overprotected customer. As they go up in protection, they gain other benefits as compared to the previous category. We can, in a very playful way, we're going to gamify the relationship with our customers so that they can self-manage their product portfolio.
Our idea, as I said, is to cross-sell, upsell, to sell more, to communicate effectively with customers, and to deliver a value proposition in which they will see the benefit and make them more loyal. Felipe. I'm going to give it over to Rafael for him to talk about the numbers, and then I'll get back to you at the end of the presentation.
Thank you very much, Ullisses. Before going into the results of our first quarter, on this page, you can see the details of the impact of the new accounting standard, IFRS 17, that had been issued by IAS and is in effect since January this year. And you must have noticed that our financials are already compliant with the new accounting standard.
According to this, our profit would have been BRL 1.833 billion, growing with a growth as compared to the net income reported in Q1 2022. For the market to get used to this new approach, considering the modalities according to IFRS 17. Segregating by products at Brasilprev, it's been classified as an onerous contract, and the impact has been fully reported in a transition balance sheet. We retroacted to December 2020. According to the new accounting standards, IFRS 17, if we have an onerous contract, this will be immediately booked in our financials as we have adopted this new standard. It has been booked in the company's transition balance sheet.
As to P and VGBL, and for insurance products, both, credit life and homeowners insurance, we have BBA and the others. They are annual risk products. We use PAA, and PAA is the simplified approach in, according to IFRS 17, that where the results are very similar to a linear deferral and recording of premium according to IFRS 4. In terms of equity accounts, you can see here that the net equity has gone down, it reduced. This is the impact of traditional owners. Today, thinking it has no impact in our capital, and we didn't have that impact in our bottom line, but we had excess capital. We had this being booked.
As to Brasilseg, we have the net income of BRL 423 million, especially because of the products that I mentioned, credit life and others. We have no more linear deferral. The results now comply with the dynamics that we are seeing in the company's track record in terms of receiving premiums and payments in the flow of expenses. Here, especially at Brasilseg, we have the record of results is faster than we used to have in the previous standards. There is a bottom line being recorded at the beginning of the season that is higher than we used to record in IFRS 4. For this reason here, in net equity, the net equity has gone up in 2021 because of the advance of this result.
This will also explain, if you look at the right-hand side, the two charts. When we have the equivalent of Brasilseg end up being lower with IFRS 17 than it was with IFRS 4. In season of 2021, we booked more according to IFRS 17 that with IFRS 4, thereby increasing shareholders' equity. So that's why the net income is going to be lower. As those seasons go by 2024, 2025, this difference is likely to go down. This is what we expect. On the other hand, at Brasilprev, the results being booked is higher with IFRS 4.
Especially the main explanation is because the longer deferral, which in IFRS 4 we deferred about three years, and now we have a longer period according to how long contracts stay in IFRS 17 than with IFRS 4. This is the main reason explaining the higher Brasilprev numbers. In closing, it's important for us to remember that Susep has not received IFRS 17, but IFRS 17 it translated in the national level at. It's recognized by CVM and IASB.
The flow of dividends for Susep will continue the previous accounting standard, IFRS 4, especially because as Susep is not adopting it, all the companies that are impacted, Brasilcap, Brasilseg, brokerage houses do not suffer the impact of IFRS 17, and it just an impact, and they will continue managing capital based on the previous accounting standards. For this reason, we continue to publish our financials in compliance with the previous accounting standard to be on comparison basis with the market and also to facilitate the understanding of the new standard.
We have published materials today together with our financials that we published today, giving details of how the accounting standard impacts the company and how this dynamic will work. It's going to be reflected in our numbers as we adopt IFRS 17, considering that Susep has not adopted it. We are going to have a parallel reporting of our numbers, that we are going to have unaudited financials to keep it on comparable basis until we have a full transition to IFRS 17, and it takes place in the future. In the meantime, we are going to have two records in parallel. Now going to the next page. In terms of net income, as we said, we have BRL 1.8 billion, 49% growth as compared to Q1 last year.
This quarter specifically, the impact of temporal mismatch in terms of assets and liabilities of plans with defined benefits had a negative impact in the result of BRL 26 million, whereas Q1 2022, we had a positive effect of BRL 52 million. If we take out this, our net income would be BRL 1.786 billion, one of the best results ever in our company. It was special highlight because it is booked in the first quarter, which is usually the weakest quarter in a year. On annualized basis, this has been one of the best quarters in the company ever. On the right-hand side, you can see the consolidated net investment income. This is the number after tax.
We had a contribution of BRL 338 million to the profit in terms of net investment income, growing 47% year-over-year. On next page, you can see the evolution of the main component. This is the growth of BRL 481 million as compared to Q1 last year, and 82% of that growth comes from the operation. 18% of that growth comes from net investment income. One of the highlights of operational performance, you can see the strong performance in sales, especially insurance, the reduction of loss ratio of crop insurance, impacting Q1 with quite significant impact in Q1 last year, and then with a reversal. The growth of revenues with management fees at Brasilprev, one of the main drivers for the growth in operational income.
Here on the net investment income, you can see a growth in volume of funds, which is natural. A stronger commercial performance, increase in the financial margin, coming more directly because of the increase in the average Selic interest rate and also the rates of reinvestment of funds, and also because of reduction in the cost of liabilities because IGPM is still going down, and closed in terms of year-to-date numbers, it's negative. Well, +0.6 , better saying, very close to IGPM, and IGPM with a deflation. We have been observing quite beneficial behavior for our results in terms of IGPM and a lower mark into mark market performance. Here we have a gain of BRL 20 million compared to the results that we reported in Q1, 2022.
Going into more details about the growth of each one of our operations. In terms of insurance, premiums have grown 35% year-on-year, getting to BRL 3.7 billion. In terms of rural credit life, with the top positions, with a highlight as the main business line. The combined rate, as you can see here, on the bottom, on the left-hand side, almost 17 points of reduction in loss ratio and a strong contribution of the crop insurance, and also a marginal reduction in commission rates in terms of G&A ratio.
That investment income has grown 45% year-on-year with an increase of average rates, and also because of volume and also premiums earned, and an improvement with net income growing 156%, getting to BRL 910 million in Q1 2023. Now on page 13, you can see that collection has grown and net inflows of BRL 1.9 billion, reversing the negative performance Q1 last year. Because of the reduction of redemption rates, that was lower portability and more inflows. We had a positive result in our net inflows. In terms of reserve, the 10% growth in 12 months, getting to BRL 355 billion. The driving, the growth of 5%, with in management fees.
As it is clear here, the growth in revenue ends up being slower than the growth of reserves, especially because of the drop in average management fee, which is a result, as you can see here. On the upper right-hand side, reducing the share of multi-market with more risk aversion by customers. Even though the flow is positive, the flow is concentrated in conservative products, which annually charge a lower management fee. For this reason, our growth in revenues is slower than the growth of our reserve balance. Here, our net investment income has grown 28%, as I said before, because of an expansion of the net investment margin, because of a reduction of our, the cost of our liabilities.
With this growth in revenue, net income has grown 9%, getting to BRL 438 million in Q1. On page 14, you can see our premium bonds with a growth of 4% year-on-year. An expansion in the balance of funds with an increase of 0.3 percentage point. The net investment income has contributed to a growth of 18%, getting to BRL 63 million. Now going to our brokerage and our distribution operations. Revenue got to BRL 1.2 billion, it's because of everything that I said before. This is especially driven by a very strong performance that we had in credit life, rural and pension. We had better net investment income because of the higher Selic rate.
Almost all of the company's funds are invested in LFT and other bond indexed by the Selic rate. We have more revenue, higher margin, a 23% growth of net income getting to BRL 708 in Q1 2023. In closing, our presentation, this is the guidance for 2023. We are exceeding all our parameters. We exceeded, we were expecting this behavior last year in Q1. In terms of operational results, it concentrated one-third of all our expenses of claims in the year. The comparison basis ends up being kind of weak. In terms of premiums written, 2022 started much more tentative, especially with credit life and rural. We were expecting these numbers in Q1 this year.
As a consequence, for the following quarters, we are likely to see a slowdown in this rate that is very strong in terms of growth converging to the range of our guidance before the end of the year. It's always good to emphasize that even though we expected this, it ends up being slightly bigger than we expected. Once we structure these intervals, we have two main variables of uncertainty. The loss ratio of our crop insurance and the total volume of funds that is going to be allocated. The first one, in terms of the crop insurance, is much better than we expected. And we were already calculating the La Niña effect, but the impact was concentrated more on the south of South America, extreme south of South America.
In Brazil, only the state of Rio Grande do Sul had the impact. This effect alone, if we look at the guidance of operational results, this better loss ratio than expected would be enough to position us on the top half of this range. Now the 2nd variable there, the volume that should be allocated in terms of funds to our plan, we still do not have a very good visibility. We can't really see it, we hope that towards the end of the second quarter and beginning of the third quarter of the year, we can see better the amount of funds that is going to define and be the basis for the growth of written premiums for the end year.
If we look at PGBL and VGBL pension plans and the reserves of Brasilprev, this here, as you see, it's within the range. This is everything that I wanted to say in the presentation. Now we move on to the Q&A session.
Thank you very much, Rafael. We are going to start the Q&A session. If you want to ask a question in audio in Portuguese, please click on the Raise Hand button. We are going to release the button. If you prefer, you can post your question in writing by clicking on the Q&A button. If you do not want to answer any questions, if you cannot answer them because of time, we're going to answer your questions afterward. Our first question comes from Antonio Ruette from Bank of America. Antonio, please, you can open your microphone and ask your question.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for the chance of asking a question. One is about the guidance and the other one about commissions. The first thing you have just said that there was an operational surprise with a better loss ratio than expected. Were there any surprises in terms of the growth of premiums? Also here in terms of commissions, on my second question, how do you see the product mix? We had a product mix that did not favor brokerage in terms of the products. How do you assess the product mix looking into the future and trying to understand what we should expect in terms of revenue from brokerage?
I am going to talk a little bit about the performance of products that you have mentioned. First of all, the first quarter, when we analyzed credit life, especially, we see that in the past, even in the first half of last year, we had a performance that was slightly lower as compared to credit life. Then we had a change in level in terms of contracts. In terms of credit life, premiums, I can say that we were surprised. We weren't. We keep a dynamic. We're keeping the virtuous cycle that we started in Q2 last year. This is something that has come to stay, the new level of contracting. Of course, it's due to more operations eligible. Some improvements to the spread that has been made available to contract INSS and others.
In terms of inventory, we also improved our contracting process for the digital channel as part of credit operations. There are many improvements that we have implemented for the product, but it's especially due to a new dynamic, a new cycle that had started in the second half of last year. This continues. Now going to the second part of your question, Rafael is going to help. First of all, crop insurance, we have a very good performance in Q1. What we expect for crop insurance will depend, obviously, very much on the Safra Plan. Of course, we expect a robust year-on-year growth as much as possible in terms of product pricing and distribution and improvement of the penetration in the customer base that has been taking place year-on-year. As we said, claims are our best ad. Every year we can see that it's higher demand for this product.
For other items, when we talk about commissioning, we already have some of those items, such as, for example, life insurance, that we have a completely different approach from the first quarter, and also because of the dynamics of what we have defined with the bank in terms of work of the sales force. Last year, you remember, well, in the Q2, we had the highest sales incentive campaign in the history of Banco do Brasil and our student. We have repeated this campaign now in Q1, we hope that everything that we have in terms of sale in Q2, we can see the products that were lagging behind a little bit in Q1. They are recovering at quite interesting speed.
We have, we are kind of confident in terms of delivering the goals for the year that we have and also the products with more appropriate commissioning.
Just complementing, it's always good to remember. At the end of last year, when we reviewed the compensation of some products and now included performance and then brokerage that was variable, we've definitively incorporated into product. What this means is that once those payments and whenever sale the targets are exceeded and results were immediately recorded. When they are incorporated in brokerage, they are deferred along the effect while the product is in effect or during the life of the product. The most appropriate way to look at results would be together with the variation of commissions to be sold.
We had BRL 3.7 billion. It has grown 29%, almost BRL 1 billion, and it has grown 5% in the quarter as compared to December. This is future result. When I talk about future result, there is less volatility in the company's performance, and it's no longer related to portfolio. It's definitely incorporated to the product. We receive it in cash. Especially here in terms of credit life and with this change. Here, we see in the brokerage, as in unearned commissions, which is the balance that will be earned in future cycles. This is just a complement.
Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Tiago Binsfeld from Goldman Sachs. Tiago, you may ask your question, please.
Hello, everyone. Ullisses, Rafael, Felipe. Well, I would like to ask a question about the guidance, what you said about the Safra Plan. Do you remember how much it was last year, and what are you expecting for this year? For us to understand what is the expectation from now on and at what point in time you would consider revisiting this guidance. Could you give us some more color on pension, talk about management fees? It looks like the allocation in multi-market is stabilizing. Any color that you could give us for us to understand the main trends here.
As to the Plano Safra crop plan, it was BRL 340 billion for the 2020-2023. It had gone 36% as compared to the previous plan. As to 2023, 2024, it's difficult for us, and our expectation is very difficult to predict. We don't know how much it's going to be. Our results for Q2 is going to be published in August, and then we expect the crop plan 2023, 2024 and considering volumes that will be made available. We understand that the variation may be above expected for the growth of premiums, and then we can review it. For now, and everything is still just a possibility, we do not have enough information to change our premium growth projections. As to your second question, I'm not sure I got it. It was about the dynamics of the pension plan, market management, and allocation strategies. Was that right?
Yes, that's right.
As you can see in the behavior along the first quarter, it even exceeded a little bit, our estimates. In terms of gross inflow for the quarter, we expected these funds to be better distributed along the business year. We had a very strong Q1, which is not what happens for pension. In the historical theories, we see that Q1 is always a weaker quarter, especially because it's the beginning of the year, people are paying taxes, vacation, and everything. This year was different. We noted a quite beneficial behavior in terms of gross flow and redemption year-on-year went down, portability went down, and allocation was very much concentrated on more conservative alternatives and a drop in average management fee.
Customers are extremely adverse to risk, and this risk aversion was intensified because of everything that happened in Q1 this year, especially in terms of private credit assets, everything that happened in retail with energy companies. In the case of Brasilprev, our exposure and in our private numbers, ex-financial institution, is less than 5% of overall. Our total exposure in these assets that had problems is even smaller. It's really residual. It did not affect the profitability of our products, but it intensified risk aversion by customers. So far, according to May numbers, this is not changing.
We are still betting in the context of aversion, if it persists along the year, and then we hope this trend of drop, and then it's more than we expected in terms of net flow for the company. In principle, one thing is better than the other. We don't expect that much will change in terms of expected, in terms of pension from now to the end of the year.
Thank you, Rafael. If I could follow up. If we look at your monthly numbers, we see the average daily production, both in insurance and pension, was affected. Is there any reason for that to happen in April and May?
I'm going to start to go first here, and then you can complement. This sometimes happens because of the sales dynamic, because the network gets an input in terms of budget for the period. And we have noted in January, in February, that sales volume was above the budget. Whenever you have an intense movement in the first months, there is an equation to deliver the final numbers after the end of the period. This is what happened. Obviously we have a curve for each one of those products along the year. Some of those curves are not so steep. Also in accumulation products, we carry them over a little bit more in the beginning so that we have recurrent results along the year. This is the dynamic. Sometimes one month we have something that exceeds more, and then when we see year-to-date numbers, it kind of balances out. Is it clear?
Yes, it's very clear. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Pedro Leduc from Itaú BBA. Pedro, please, you can go on.
Thank you very much for the call, for the question. The topic related to channel, especially digital media. There were some slides showing that the amount of businesses done through digital channels has grown 43% with premium bonds, credit line. What has driven that growth? Is it a new technology, price adjustment, journey? And as it gains share, and I think it will, what about the economic of businesses originated in digital channels?
Okay, Pedro, I'm going to give you an overview, and then Rafael is going to complement if he finds it necessary. Well, this is a little bit of everything. Obviously, as I said, in terms of investment in technology, the first thing that we had, what we used to have before, considering everything that we had last year, to invest more than half a billion in digital transformation, we had a great difficulty in terms of times and launching a new product. Today, we can launch a new product very, very easily. It takes only a few days. This both to meet the needs of internal BB channel and also to meet the needs of any of our commercial partners that we've been prospecting.
The dynamics in digital channels, we have an appropriate product portfolio for that channel. We really value analytics to understand the clients that are most likely to use it in each different time in life. We have changed the journey to contract those products, even the cost. Today, we can be much more effective in getting the customer's attention in the bank App in a very simple way. For example, Ourocap, we have oftentimes said, "Well, do you want to get rich, your dream fulfilled, or your money back?" We can make them interested in a product with this strategy, and we really intensify sales, so much so that in a few weeks we have more sales in the digital channel than in the physical channel.
When we talk about other products, credit line within the credit journey is also a product that, to make it simpler, is a product that is more widely accepted. You remember in the past, we reviewed the entire pro-portfolio for credit life products. We used to say, it's going to be a little bit cheaper, because it follows the dynamics of the overdue balance. This has been materialized, also personal items, insurance. It's, we launched it this year, it was very attractive, it had an impact in the number of sales. When we analyze it quantitatively, the digital channel has been growing, as I told you, it's grown 42% and 16% in the total of our sales in terms of quantity. When we think of the ticket of digital sales and physical sales is completely different.
There's another dynamics the physical products have a higher ticket than those sold through the digital channel. When we look at the market as a whole, if we think of the Brazilian and global market, we don't really have a long tradition of insurance products being sold exclusively by digital channels. We are very successful in terms of offering appropriate products, with completely different, mode of contracting than we used to have, and with more services added. It's hard for us to talk in terms of our bottom line, how much this is going to represent in the midterm. It's difficult and for us to tell, and Rafael can talk a little bit more about that. Our main mission right now is to have a product that will be increasingly more appropriate at the right time, for the customer.
There's a layer of our customers that do not necessarily have their services management in the day-to-day of our branches. That's why we have more low-cost products to sell in the network to the relationship customer. It ends up being expensive for us. For example, for the personal belongings insurance, we only sell it through digital channel.
Excellent answer. You really should be commended. Thank you.
Thank you, Pedro.
Our next question comes from Kaio Prato from UBS. Kaio, you may ask your question, please.
Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for taking my question. I have 2 very quick follow-up. First, rural, if you discuss the guidance, we think of the rural loss ratio, which is better than expected for the quarter, which helps in the operational result. In the first month and a half of Q2, what about rural insurance? Is the loss ratio better than expected? Number two, looking into guidance, which other metrics do you see that might help to improve operational result even more than expected? You talked about the crop plan and the loss ratio. Is there anything else that is clearer? Is there any clear opportunity?
Kaio, thank you for asking your question. In terms of rural, we are ending the La Niña cycle. Now we are in transition time, that it's neutral. According to this configuration, the La Niña had an impact in the center and south of the country, especially with soybeans and corn that are harvested between January and March, within that timeframe.
What happens is that when we see January and February numbers, they are much below what we had expected. In March, it's closer. From now on, we have the interim season, and then we're not expecting anything unusual. For Q1, usually, loss ratio is concentrated in these regions. The harvest season has ended. Loss ratio was better than expected. From now on, we expect that the behavior will be as expected. We don't expect anything unusual. This should be enough to drive us away from the bottom, and we are going to go to the middle of the guidance to and the upper point or upper limit of our guidance. As to other products, we are not expecting any major surprises in term of loss ratio.
The crop plan that may impact written premiums with lower sensitivity in terms of operational result is also because most of the impact is related to our crop insurance, with 20% of the risk, 80% goes to reinsurance and impacts more premiums written less on the operational result. In terms of positive surprises that we can still have, I would concentrate the commercial performance overall. This is where we can have a potential.
Okay, great. Perfect.
We have a question, one, actually two, from individual shareholders that have been posted on the chat, and we have talked about strategy here. They want the company to talk a little bit more about how we see the market in the next five or 10 years, and how we are positioning ourselves, and which are our initiatives to position ourselves, considering the competition and to keep those very high growth levels.
Well, number one, we see a very, very promising market in the future also because the penetration of insurance products in Brazil is very low. We know that. We are aware of that. Also with CNseg, the market has communicated a plan for the insurance market for the next two years when we expect that insurance will represent 10% above the national GDP. We have a business model and product that are likely to grow in the Brazilian population.
I think that each one of the main players and each one of the insurances should be positioned in a way that we will take more information to the population, and we've been working very much in terms of financial education, and that we position ourselves as something that will add value to the lives of people. I see very good prospects, the rural insurance. If we look at planted area as compared to funded areas, there's a big gap there that is very positive for us. What we see, technology and product, well, somehow at some point, they are all going to be on a good basis. We should comply with the pace of the market. This is what we've been doing.
This is what drove us to make the decision to double the investment in technology and to have strong investment this year. This is fundamental. Appropriate product, for sure. We've been reviewing portfolio, and you've been monitoring new residential with many different assistances. Our business product that is very successful. We've been trying to improve all our products. Product and technology, they're all going to happen at some point in time. We've been investing. We have an obsession for customer experience. What we've been seeing over the last two years, we have advanced greatly in terms of segmenting our customers, presenting an appropriate value proposition relationship program to offering the appropriate product at the right time in life at the appropriate prices, investing in analytics. There's a whole range of situations and things.
It's not just one thing. There's no silver bullet, but it's many investments that we've been making in terms of making our products more popular and having a more seamless interaction with our customers. In terms of what we've been monitoring in the market, we are on the forefront regards of those pillars, technology and also advancing in terms of customer experience to make our company bear in better positions. As a reminder, we have an really great sales force that very few insurance companies have in the market, which is Banco do Brasil network. We want to create a new sales channel, diversifying the channels to sell our products. We can see that in a very short time, in increasing premiums written and a growth that is robust.
As I said, last year, we wrote almost one million premiums just in crop insurance. We would be number two insurance company in crop insurance, only losing to ourselves in the BB channel. We built all of this in just one year and hope that in the future years, we will be able to develop this strategy even better because this will help us, as I said, to have a better penetration for our products.
One last question also from an individual shareholder posted in a chat asking about our dividend policy. What are your expectations in terms of payout and also in terms of flow to improve the frequency of payout of dividends?
As to payout, we hope that we can practice something that is very close to what we said last year. We are not seeing anything different. All companies are very well capitalized, also with a surplus. Operational result is very good. Net investment income too. The level of payout of dividends last year was very good. By doing that, we still were able to make all investments. We think this year it will also be sufficient. The company is using 80/90. Last year was 90. We think that this year is going to be the same in terms of payout. Of course, variations may happen, but we think that we're going to keep at similar levels as we been having.
We have no further questions, neither live nor in the chat. Now we end our virtual conference to release the results of the first quarter. I would like once again to thank everyone for your presence, for your questions. Our team is here fully available to you to answer any questions you may have. As a final message, we are very optimistic with the strategy that we have adopted in recent years. With our strategic pillars, we see that they have been very good. We are very successful. I'm sure that we are building a very strong company to fight in the market for future periods. Thank you very much.
As one last reminder, you're going to see a link to answer a feedback questionnaire, and we are grateful if you can answer that questionnaire. Have a good day. Thank you very much.