Good morning, everybody. My name is Gianandrea Roberti. I'm Head of Investor Relations at Tryg. We published our Q4 and full-year results earlier this morning, and I have here with me Johan Brammer, our Group CEO, Allan Thaysen, our Group CFO, and Mikael Kärrsten, our Group CTO, to present the figures. I would just like to remind all participants that in the Q&A it would be one question at a time to allow everybody to ask questions, and with these words, over to you, Johan.
Thanks a lot, and I will go directly to the financial highlights on slide three. Tryg is today reporting an insurance revenue growth of 3.6% in the last quarter of the year and just above 4% for the full year. The growth, both in Q4 and for the full year, has been primarily driven by price increases in the Private and Commercial segments in order to fight off the inflationary pressures. Importantly, the growth of the Group has been achieved in a period where our Corporate Segment has been reduced as a result of our very deliberate strategy of running a smaller and more controllable corporate book closer to home, where we are more familiar with the risks we underwrite. The insurance service result landed at DKK 1.708 billion for the last quarter of the year, bringing us to a total of DKK 7.324 billion for the full year.
Please note that when normalizing for better-than-normal large and weather experience, the number for the full year is just above DKK 7.2 billion, completely in line with what was disclosed very clearly at the CMD in December last year. The ISI in Q4 has been primarily driven by a positive top-line development, an improved underlying performance, and lower-than-normal large claims. Again, this was partly offset by a generally lower level of interest rates, impacting the discounting of our claims reserves and a lower run-off result. We are very pleased to end the reporting of the RSA Scandinavia synergies at DKK 930 million for the full year of 2024, against our initial target of DKK 900 million. I guess it has been visible for some quarters that we were ahead of the plan, so this is unlikely to be a major surprise.
It is important to remember also that the overall level of synergies would have been higher with a more favorable currency development for the SEK and the NOK. The overall combined ratio for Q4 2024 was very similar to Q4 last year, with the Group underlying claims ratio improving by 20 basis points and the private underlying deteriorating at a similar level in line with Q3, but less than previous quarters in 2024. Motor remains an area of focus as we continue to see slightly higher frequencies and a slightly higher average cost of claims. We'll get back to that. My main comment on the investment result relates to the fact that we've been de-risking the free portfolio and sold more than DKK 7 billion of risky assets in October, swapping these with highly rated and liquid covered bonds and government bonds.
As a result, we do expect a lower but more stable investment result going forward. We'll come back to a couple of the technicalities tracking down the investment result in this particular quarter later on today. Finally, we report a Q4 pre-tax result just above DKK 1 billion, a quarterly operating EPS of 1.54, and an ROOF of just below 22% in Q4 and 34% for the full year. The ROOF would have been around 32% for the full year, excluding the DKK 2 billion buyback that followed the asset de-risking. We're paying a quarterly dividend per share of 1.95, in line with previous quarters in 2024, and I'd like to remind you that we launched a buyback of DKK 2 billion on December 4th, of which we have currently bought back around DKK 546 million as per January 17th. With that, we turn to the next slide on customer highlights.
We are showing on this slide the overall level of customer satisfaction, and as you may remember, we did have a target of 88, but we are closing the year and the strategy period at a customer satisfaction on 87. This shortfall to the 88 target is obviously disappointing, but in a period of very high inflationary pressures, we've had to raise prices accordingly, which has impacted the overall customer satisfaction. And we do indeed take some pride in having increased the customer satisfaction from 84 to 87 during the last strategy period. In fact, we have achieved the highest score ever in Tryg. During the period, we've seen a higher customer satisfaction, in particular within claims handling, thanks to more automation and faster processing times.
This has actually been enabled by the implementation of a new claim system in Norway and Denmark, and as a consequence, we are now also migrating claims Sweden into the same system to achieve similar benefits. We've set a new target for customer satisfaction of 83 when we go into 2027, and please note that the reporting in the last strategy period did not include Sweden, where the customer satisfaction level is somewhat lower, and hence the baseline for 2024 incorporating Sweden would have been 81. In the next slide, as usual, we show the insurance service result by the different business segments. It's important to remember that the headline ISR is, as always, impacted by a number of different factors, such as large and weather claims, run-offs, and the level of interest rates.
As for the Private Segment, on top, we report an increase of the ISR of more than 10%, helped by lower weather claims and a higher run-off result. As for the Commercial segment, we are reporting a lower ISR driven by higher large claims and a lower run-off result. And finally, as for the Corporate Segment, we are showing an unchanged ISR with a lower level of large claims offset by a lower level of run-off result. It's important to remember that the Corporate Segment has around 20% lower premiums in the quarter or approximately DKK 180 million. Also, please note that the Corporate Segment reported a combined ratio of 83.8% for the full year.
With that, I turn to slide six, where we also show the ISR by geography, and in this quarter, Denmark and Norway are reporting higher earnings than last year, while Sweden is slightly lower due to lower run-offs and higher large claims. In general, we'd like to stress that although Norway is improving, Norway is still not where we want it to be, and we'll deep dive on this topic when we discuss the price increases later on in this presentation. When you look at the financial bridge for the Group in Q4 on the top of the right-hand side of this slide, I would point to the following key positives: growth in the business, improved underlying performance, and lower large and weather claims taken together. These positives have been partly offset, only partly offset, by a lower level of interest rates and a lower run-off result.
When we look at the financial bridge for the full year on the bottom of the right-hand side, I'd like to repeat, as mentioned already at the CMD, that while we are ending the year close to the middle of our ISR target range of DKK 7.2 billion-DKK 7.6 billion, adjusting for the better-than-normal large and weather claims experience, we're actually closer to the DKK 7.2 billion, once again showing that it has been a complicated period for our business with the sudden return of very high levels of inflation. Turning to slide seven, we are, for the last time, updating this slide with the full RSA Scandinavia synergies. We are ending the integration with DKK 930 million of synergies, slightly above the initial target of DKK 900 million, and in this regard, it's important to remember that during this period, currency movements did indeed develop unfavorably.
We show on this slide also that we are disciplined and committed to deliver on our promises when we do M&A. Both in the case of Alka and most recently RSA Scandinavia, we delivered synergies slightly above the initial ambitious targets communicated to the market. Moving into the new strategy period, we'll now achieve a second wave of synergies from the RSA Scandinavia acquisition by leveraging scale across a number of areas ranging from systems and infrastructure, technical, as well as customer and commercial excellence. Moving on to the next slide, I'll briefly comment on the fact that we have indeed achieved all financial targets for 2024. We stand therefore on very solid grounds, ready to move into the 2027 strategy period, where we aim to lift the ISR by DKK 1 billion, as communicated at our CMD in December.
We've also met our strategic targets, leaving aside the customer satisfaction shortfall that I discussed previously. With that, we turn to the next section on insurance revenue and portfolio and move to slide 10. Here we show a revenue growth in local currencies of 3.6%, while the equivalent number for the full year ends at 4.1%. The growth during this period has come primarily from the Private and Commercial segment, while the corporate business has been reduced due to our strategy of rebalancing the Corporate Segment, including strategic exits of non-Scandinavian property and U.S. liabilities. The growth during the quarter in the full year in Private and Commercial has been clearly driven by price increases needed to offset inflationary pressures and improve profitability, especially in Norway. We remain very focused on protecting margins and improving the parts of our business which are still not where we want them to be.
Please note that due to the internal reorganization that we announced more than a year ago, we've merged the segments Commercial and Corporate. This means that for reporting purposes from Q1 2025 and onwards, we will only show two segments, namely Private and Commercial, whereas the Corporate Segments no longer will exist as a separate business unit. We will, however, still make sure to publish selected financial highlights related to the corporate business, which, by the way, is expected to report a modest growth for the full year of 2025, most likely more in the second half than the first half. With that, I turn to slide 11 on rate increases. In this slide, we are showing you the rate increases in our main Private Segment split between motor and property in the different countries.
As mentioned for several quarters already, we see a need for improved profitability in our Norwegian Private lines business, and therefore it should not come as a surprise that rate increases are the highest in property and motor regarding Norway, and this will continue to be the case going into 2025. Mikael will come back to that. It is our impression that all listed players are very focused on improving profitability in Norway, and this is very supportive. Additionally, we've noticed recently strong financial targets from one of the large not-listed players, which is also supportive. On the next slide, we are showing the customer retention levels, which remain broadly stable after a period with high inflationary pressures matched by similar price increases. It is important to be aware that in Norway, we lost a selected partner agreement that weighs modestly on the overall retention rate.
I guess in general, despite the loss of selected customers across the different lines of business, it is our very clear impression that customers do continue to value the insurance protection, especially in a more volatile macroeconomic environment as we're experiencing today. And with that, I hand it over to you, Mikael, to go through the claims development.
Thanks, Johan. And we now move to slide 14. We are reporting a group underlying claims ratio improvement of 20 basis points for the quarter and 30 basis points for the full year, driven primarily by profitability initiatives in the Commercial and Corporate segments. The Private segment is still reporting a 20 basis points deterioration in the underlying claims ratio, driven by the motor segment. We remind everyone that 10 basis points for the quarter is equivalent to approximately DKK 9 million.
Although this is a relatively small amount, we are somewhat disappointed that we haven't seen more improvement in Private lines underlying, driven by Norway. As Johan mentioned, we continue to drive rates in Norway, and going into 2025, rate increases for the Norwegian personal lines motor, as well as house and content books, are in the high teens. We have been mentioning at the Capital Markets Day, and we reiterate today that we for the group expect a broadly stable to slightly improving underlying performance going forward towards 2027. By that, I move to slide 15. In this slide, as usual, we show the different levels of large and weather claims, as well as interest rates and the run-off result. Large claims experience was more favorable than normal in Q4, while weather claims were slightly worse. As an example, snow arrived early in Denmark in November.
Storm Jakob hit Norway in the first part of Q4, while at the end of December, bad weather hit Denmark. In general, Q4 and Q1 always see a higher amount of weather-related car accidents and a higher amount of pipe bursts just due to general winter conditions, and hence we seasonally expect more weather claims in these quarters versus the average. Large weather events are tightly connected to our reinsurance. From a more forward-looking perspective, we are happy to conclude that we have renewed our reinsurance program virtually on the same basis, both in terms of coverage and premiums.
This is better than what we had planned for, and from a coverage perspective, the only notable change is that we for our property per risk program have a more clean deductible of DKK 200 million, whereas we before bought some coverage to decrease the deductible from a second large claim and onwards. Interest rates fell in the quarter, and we now have a discount rate of 2.1%. This has an impact, all else being equal, on our reported claims ratio, as lower discounting of claims reserves implies higher claims in the P&L. Finally, the run-off result was 2.4%, close to recent quarters. We have been guiding already for a run-off result around 2% in the new strategy period, and by that, I hand it over to you, Gian.
Thanks, Mikael. As always, we're showing the full picture here of our invested assets, totaling DKK 61 billion at the end of 2024. The free portfolio is approximately DKK 17 billion, and the match portfolio is DKK 44 billion. The most important thing to remember is that during Q4, we de-risked the free portfolio, having sold more than DKK 7 billion of risky assets and replaced these with highly rated and liquid Scandinavian covered and government bonds. On the next slide, we're showing the total investment result, which for the quarter, it's minus DKK 265 million. If I look at the three components, the match portfolio had a result very close to normal expectations with the current level of interest rates.
The free portfolio was dragged down by the sale of the risky assets in October, crystallizing a loss of approximately DKK 80 million on some of these sold assets, while properties reported a negative return of approximately 1.5% in the quarter. Importantly, covered and government bonds reported a nice and stable 0.6% quarterly return or 2.4% annualized. Other financial income and expenses included a DKK 70 million negative value adjustment on the inflation swap coming from lower inflation expectation in Sweden. This is obviously long-term positive for our core insurance result. We've also been mentioning that going forward, our key asset of choice is Scandinavian covered and government bonds, and the real estate long-term will not be a strategic asset class for Tryg. And now over to you, Allan.
Thanks, Gian. Please turn to the first slide in the solvency and expenses section for details on the solvency position.
Tryg reports a solvency ratio of 196 as per end of 2024, which is fully in line with our message at the Capital Markets Day. The development in the own funds in Q4 is primarily driven by operating earnings, dividends, and buybacks. As a reminder, the 2 billion buyback is fully deducted from our own funds at the start of the program. The solvency capital requirement is primarily impacted by the de-risking of the free portfolio conducted back in October, selling risky assets and buying highly rated and very liquid Scandinavian covered and government bonds. This has resulted in a net fall of the SCR of more than 800 million. We would like to repeat that modeling Tryg's solvency ratio is fairly simple, as operating earnings and capital distribution primarily impact own funds, while the SCR is likely to remain relatively stable.
Finally, I would like to point out that our capital generation remains very strong. The insurance service result after tax is not too far from the total solvency capital requirement. Please turn to the next slide. Here you can see the long-term solvency ratio development. We are very satisfied to close the year with a solvency ratio of 196, supportive of future capital returns. As mentioned at the Capital Markets Day, we expect the solvency level to long-term gravitate towards a less conservative level, but for the time being, and especially during the last period of macroeconomic turbulence, we believe a robust solvency position to be a positive for our investment case. As also mentioned at the Capital Markets Day, we will at year-end, starting end of 2025, review our solvency level and may consider extraordinary buybacks if found appropriate.
As always, we prefer a gradual approach, benefiting our shareholders with balanced actions. Now, please turn to the next slide. In this slide, we're showing the updated solvency sensitivities. Unsurprisingly, the solvency ratio sensitivities are much more stable now, following the de-risking of the free portfolio. The vast majority of our fixed income exposure is represented by Scandinavian covered bonds, and therefore, it is not surprising that spread risk against this asset class is Tryg's biggest sensitivity. The sensitivity to interest rates movement is very low, taking into consideration our matching strategy and generally low sensitivities due to our strong and hedged balance sheet. Finally, I would just repeat that long-term, we do not expect real estate to be part of our asset mix, potentially releasing a further approximately DKK 300 million of SCR. Now, please turn to the next slide for details on the expense ratio development.
We report an expense ratio of 13.3% for Q4 and 13.5% for the full year, which is fully in line with our guidance for 2024. The overall expense ratio is impacted positively by tight cost control and the synergies from the RSA Scandinavia acquisition. As mentioned before, a significant amount of the cost synergies are being reinvested in developing the business, especially in Sweden. The number of employees remained broadly stable this quarter, and for the full year, down some 250 FTEs. Finally, we see a low expense ratio as a key competitive advantage, and we are very pleased to be able to run our business with such a strong level of efficiency. And with this, over to you, Johan.
Thanks a lot, Allan. And we are now entering the final part of our presentation. I'll take you to slide 25, where I'd like to remind you of the three main pillars supporting our 2027 strategy and our ambition to grow the ISR by one billion. Scale & Simplicity will add 500 million. Technical Excellence will help with 300 million, and Customer & C ommercial Excellence will bring another 200 million towards 2027. We are quite excited about this journey, and we look forward to updating you on our strategy progress and monitoring our financial developments in the quarters to come. On the next slide, I'd also like to repeat our financial targets for 2027. We are targeting a combined ratio of around 81, as always assuming current interest rates, currency levels, and guided large and weather claims.
The combined ratio target translated into an insurance service result target of DKK 8.2 billion, always stated between DKK 8 and DKK 8.4 billion, allowing for some flexibility at both ends of the range, considering all the moving parts. In addition, we'll deliver a ROOF between 35 and 40, and finally, we aim at distributing DKK 17 billion-18 billion to shareholders, including the ordinary dividend and the DKK 2 billion buyback started on the day of the CMD in December. We are highlighting in this slide also the three strategic KPIs supporting the financials, being customer satisfaction, straight-through processing, and CO2 reduction. And lastly, but not least, on the last slide, we end our quarterly presentation with our favorite quote from John D. Rockefeller: "Our focus on remunerating our shareholders is intact and completely unchanged through the different strategy cycles." And with that, our favorite slide I hand it back to you.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press five star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing five star again. In the interest of time and the maximum duration of this call, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. If you have additional questions, you may rejoin the queue. We'll have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question is from Asbjørn Mørk from Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my one question. It's basically going to the underlying group claims ratio development, the 20 basis points here in Q4. If I sort of look at the development, the last eight quarters has been a quite linear deterioration to the year-over-year improvements.
Obviously, some of that is driven by the synergy realization, of course, from the deal three years ago. But basically, my question goes to how much is this surprising you? How much is this according to plan? I do remember what you said at the Capital Markets Day six weeks ago on the development for the next three years. But really, if I look at the trends, combining this with the customer retention slide that I agree is still on a high level, but nevertheless, the customer retention seems to be at the lowest level in quite a long period for your private division, at least in Norway and in Denmark. And then obviously, the pruning that you have done in the corporate portfolio, which I guess has been a tailwind for the underlying claims ratio trend.
So basically, we just take it a little bit deeper, also considering the communication you had on the motor part in Norway. How much of this is actually a surprise to you?
Thanks, Asbjørn, and good morning. I'll start to try to unpick that question. I think if we go back just to very high level, I mean, our commitment of fighting inflation is our top priority. It has always been, and it always will be. So I mean, that's always our starting point. Then when we come to sort of what surprises us and what doesn't surprise us, I wouldn't say that there are any big surprises, but I think we can conclude that severity inflation in the motor segment, particularly in Norway, is more stubborn than probably what we had hoped for.
So that means that although we are pushing significant rates, as mentioned, and that we actually will do even more going forward, that is still a part which, as I mentioned before, is slightly disappointing to us. That in no way sort of shies us back from doing more actions and taking the correct actions going forward. And then just sort of slightly over to sort of the Commercial and Corporate parts that you mentioned. Yes, we have been running various initiatives. We still see good effects from that, and we're very comfortable with our commercial and corporate development overall.
And if I could just add a few things, Mikael, because I totally agree. If I just, Asbjørn, to your questions, if I could just add a few more comments around it. So first of all, taking a step back, you are asking whether there's a disappointment.
And just to be very clear, we have no disappointment overarchingly with our Q4 or our full year result. Of course, there are bits and pieces in our portfolio that we would like to improve, but overarchingly, as a group, we are very content with our full year numbers. Q4 could have been slightly better, possibly, but having a Q4 for our group with a combined ratio of 82.5 in one of the more weather-impacted quarters is not disappointing. I actually believe this builds a very strong platform for our 2027 strategy. I could not have hoped for a better start to the new strategy, to be honest, delivering on our financial 2024 strategy. You mentioned one other topic. I don't think you commented on that, Mikael, around customer retention.
And you're right in saying that it is, of course, having some impact, the inflationary pressures we're seeing and the pricing initiatives. When we go back decades, we've been through these cycles before. We've seen how retention rates soften up a little bit when we do the repricing to the magnitude we're doing now, but it doesn't concern us at all. We are seeing a very high customer satisfaction. We are confident that when inflationary pressures take off, we will come back to retention levels that we've been before. So we don't see any concern.
And thanks for that. But let me just follow up. Is it fair to then, because we were all very excited at the Q3 report that the underlying claims ratio deterioration in private seemed to sort of improve to only 20 basis points, now still 20 basis points Q4? And given what you're seeing in the motor inflation and motor frequency, is it fair to assume that we will not get any improvements in the next couple of quarters from private, even with the price hikes that you're carrying through? And maybe a couple of quarters ago, you would have expected some improvements already in the beginning of 2025.
I think this is fine surgery when we're discussing 10, 20, 30 basis points on our underlying, to be honest. We are expecting a fairly stable and slightly improving underlying for the next three years. I think we are in that ballpark, to be honest. Would we like to do more pricing to improve it? Yes. We are in no hurry to do so. This is actually very, very much in line with what we said, stable and slightly improving. This is okay.
All right. That was all from my side. Thanks a lot.
The next question is from Faizan Lakhani from HSBC. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. My question's coming to the combined ratio. So the full year is 81%. Within that, you benefited from some benign large losses, and PYD was 80 basis points higher than the guidance for the next business plan. Once they adjust for all those factors, you're operating around the 82% combined ratio, assuming a 2% PYD. I understand, and you reiterate a number of times you're assuming sort of a flattish underlying improvement. Large losses are meant to be flat on an absolute basis, which may suggest a 30 basis point improvement. How do I bridge the gap between the 82% - 81% if I'm not getting further underlying improvement? Just want to understand the walk from a combined ratio perspective.
It's a good question. Maybe I can just start, and then I'll hand it over to you, Mikael. I think what I was saying was broadly stable to slightly improving underlying. And I think in that, there is plenty of room to actually bridge the gap you're trying to bridge. So it does all stack up broadly stable, slightly improving. I think that's the key to unlock your question.
Yeah. And maybe if I just add on this topic as well, and it goes a little bit into the previous question. As Johan said, we reiterate the stable to slightly improving underlying loss ratio. And again, there are things that we're looking for improvements on, Norway in particular, which is very much linked to the price initiatives and other profitability initiatives that we have mentioned. Of course, there will be supporting elements in bridging that gap and taking us towards both the core and the ISR levels that we have communicated earlier.
Sorry, just to add or to ask a slightly different way, I guess, is should we be assuming some level expense ratio improvement given sort of the detailed buckets you've given, or is that all just going straight into sort of reinvesting in the business? Because that to me suggests as an element you haven't really talked about as potentially an element to bridge that combined ratio.
Hi, and good morning from my side as well. I mean, in general, at our Capital Markets Day, we focused on combined ratio, which is our overall measure for our margins. And what we also said was we expect underlying and expense ratio to be broadly stable to slightly improving. But we allow ourselves the flexibility. And we think an overall [CER] on combined ratio coupled with broadly stable underlying and expense ratio is enough guidance and within what can reasonably be set towards 2027. Yeah.
Okay. And sorry, if I could just ask one follow-up, and I apologize. This is sort of a second question. Is it realistic to assume a flat absolute large loss and weather level for the next three years, given the fact that you are growing, there is inflation, there's climate change? Is that realistic?
So let me dig a little bit into that. I mean, overall, yes. I mean, obviously, we guide for DKK 800 million on both of these elements. When we do that, obviously, we have done quite a sort of deep-dive analysis into both the large element and the weather element. I mean, at some point in time, obviously, you're right, because growth, etc., will take out its right. But that's sort of not in any way impacting our overall story. And that will be sort of potential slight changes to that. But obviously, we'll communicate that, but that has no impact whatsoever on our overall guided ISR scores, etc., etc.
And just to bring it back to sort of the composition of our portfolio, we are a very short-tailed business. So should any of our assumptions change over time, and they might, as Mikael said, it could be due to growth or other changes, this is a matter of us deciding and moving it into the tariffs as the rest of the market will do, and we'll make it go away. So it's a short-tailed business that will help us also square this should it change.
Okay. Thank you very much.
The next question is from the line of Alex MacKenzie from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Hi, there. Morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. It's really just on Norway and on Motor. Could you please provide some more detail on what's actually driving the frequency and severity dynamics? I mean, just maybe some practical examples, and then whether you maintain the view that the market remains attractive. Thank you.
Right. So let me start on some examples of the inflation part with frequency and severity. I think if I start with the severity part, I mean, obviously, we have said before, we are affected both by salary inflation and also not least spare parts.
And if I take a couple of examples on spare parts, we can see that we are in the low end of double digits inflation for things like rear fenders, doors, front headlights, etc. So actually, the sort of inflationary figures that you see out in society, we see different inflationary figures when it comes to the spare parts in particular. So it's really important to keep fighting that off. And then when it comes to frequency, I mean, that's not a Norwegian thing particularly. That's a motor thing overall. We have seen frequencies increase. There are some tendencies for that to normalize, but we by no means take any victories in that, but rather stay very conservative on our assumptions going forward.
And I guess to your last point around market attractiveness, I think we've tried to communicate this before. The market in Norway is absolutely attractive.
If we look at some of the challenges we're seeing in Norway at the moment, they are related to the Private lines business. Our Corporate lines business is actually producing attractive returns. If you look at the Private lines segment, there's plenty of other operators in the Norwegian market who have historically been making healthy profits, including ourselves. We are on a journey towards that level. We are not where we want to be right now, but there's nothing that indicates to us that Norway is not an attractive market to be in. We just need to make our Private lines business more profitable, and we are in the midst of that. We are not where we want to be. If you look at the year-on-year comparisons on combined for Norway as a total, it is actually going in the wrong direction.
If you look at the Q4 versus Q4 last year, we are actually seeing slight improvements. So we are on the right trajectory, but moving a portfolio of the size of ours takes time. As Mikael says, it's a lot of detailed decisions based on data. We are doing that. The medicine has been given. Now it's a matter of massaging it into the portfolio, and we are confident that we'll get Norway to where it wants to be. But we are not falling in the trap of setting a deadline or setting a date. I think these things, with our experience, take time, and we just need to be relentless in driving for profitability in Norway, and we are.
Thank you.
The next question is from Mathias Nielsen from Nordea. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thanks a lot, and thanks for taking my question. So my question is also a bit related to Norway. So you already alluded to just there, Johan, that the improvement, when you look on Q4 versus Q3, the improvement is down. Can you say a bit about how much is weather, how much is underlying? And also, when you look on the underlying, how much of the private underlying on the group level, how much of that development is actually only related to Norway? And is that anything that is like the underlying improvement in the private loss ratio? Is that anything that is holding you back from turning on the growth mode, again, especially with the cross-selling in, for example, in Sweden and also in Denmark? Is there anything that looks odd on that?
Good morning, Mathias, and I'll start on that question.
I think if I sort of take it maybe one step back, looking at the underlying overall, to zoom in, our concern on underlying and our focus on underlying is motor, and it's Norway. If we look at all other parts of the portfolio, we are sort of exactly where we want to be, profitable portfolios, etc., etc., then when we come into motor, in particular, we see inflationary pressure, as we've said before, and we see that in all markets, especially, we see that the severity of inflation is quite stubborn, so by no means sort of inflation is dead from that perspective. We've said that in previous quarters. We're saying that again this quarter, so the price increases are vital in order to fight that off, and if we then move over to Norway, I think what is particular about Norway is two things.
One is that we had a starting point which was worse, meaning that we need to improve the business, not just fight off the inflation, and the other part is that the stubbornness and the sort of increases, especially in spare parts, tend to be higher in Norway than in other markets, so with those sort of starting points, we take the medicine, as we have described and as Johan was alluding to before, and we are keep taking that. We are taking stronger medicine, as we've said before, especially in parts of the Norwegian portfolio with even more rate increases, and that's something that we will continue to do in order to get the portfolios to where it should be.
And then to your other point around the more commercial opportunities and the growth and the cross-selling in Sweden, as you alluded to, I think we've been pretty clearly stating that with inflation at levels as it's been in the last two years, we've had our focus on keeping that off the premises of Tryg. We are all anticipating a time when inflation tapers off and we can sort of restart our commercial engines with more cross-selling, upselling, more growth coming from new customers, etc. But I think we're very content with our current focus coming out of this strategy period with all the macro we've been fighting in the last strategy period, delivering a combined ratio for the group for the year at 81%. That means that we've been doing our job, and I think it's a good platform for the future strategy period.
We will definitely also reignite those engines, but we'll do it when it's time, and so far, it's not the time for all our markets.
But is there any margin where it's the time, or are you saying all margins are still in price increase focus only?
No, I think, I mean, that's a good nuance, right? There's definitely parts of our business where we are also entering into new partnership agreements, where we are offering new product categories, where we are offering online flows into the SMEs. So there's plenty of commercial activity also on our side. I think what we are trying to just emphasize here is, even though we're doing all those things, the key priority, priority number one, two, and three is margins at the moment, but we are doing many exciting things also with customers, both Private lines and SMEs at the moment. And maybe your question means that we should try and bring that to life at our next quarterly call, actually, because we're doing many things that we can open up to.
Thanks a lot.
The next question is from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Yes, good morning. Thank you, sir. I'll try to steer a little bit similar but slightly different angle on Norway. So at the CMD, which was beginning of December, I presume that you might have had some idea that fourth quarter in Norway was still pretty rough, or maybe you didn't because December was rougher. So I'm just curious that based on what we have been discussing, do you see that you'd be tweaking any of the strategic objectives you've laid out? I'm sure you just laid them out and they're well thought of. But if there's any tweaking you would be doing, that minor changes that you think you would point us to, or maybe we should wait a few more quarters. So just looking for that. Thank you.
Good morning, Vinit, and I'll start on that again. I think back to what I mentioned during the webcast as well, that just to say something around sort of the magnitudes here. I mean, 10 basis points for the quarter equivalent to DKK 9 million. Let's just have that as a reference point. I mean, again, we are not exactly where we wanted to be in terms of the Norwegian underlying development, as has been mentioned before. It's relatively low amounts, but still, that doesn't sort of in any way shy us away from taking the medicine that we should. From a more strategic perspective, this in no way sort of changes anything. We are doing exactly the actions that we want to do in order to have the improvement necessary in Norway. And from a strategic perspective, it changes absolutely nothing.
I think you could even take the contrary point of view, right, that we are delivering as a group a combined of 81 with a Norwegian performance which is hovering around 92. So there's room to move and improve for us as a group.
And there's no specific electric vehicles or any other thing to mention here, right?
Sorry, come again. I couldn't hear you.
And you mentioned spare parts, etc., but there's no trend between electric and fossil fuel vehicles or anything to note?
No. I mean, this is sort of the market in general and some of the sort of different inflationary pressures and then getting the price levels to the point where they should be. All of those actions are in working, and obviously, we are super keen to see them fall out. And as Johan said, we're not promising any specific dates, etc., but we're taking all the strong medicine needed.
Lovely. Thank you so much.
The next question is from Johan Ström from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Good morning, and thanks for taking my question as well. I'll continue on the underlying. If we go back a couple of years, the underlying claims ratio improvements were very strong, and I think part of the improvements were due to a mix effect where reduced exposure in corporate and generally low-margin business helped the underlying development. Is that still the case? Are we seeing any of those effects in Q4 given the current development in corporate as that becomes less of a relevant effect for the underlying? Thank you.
Good morning, Johan, and I think, I mean, overall, you're very, very correct on this. I mean, we said before that the composition of underlying development, again, staying stable to slightly improving, will change going forward because we have taken the big steps in Commercial and in particular the Corporate book. Again, going back to the last strategy period where we took quite some big moves within the Corporate segment, de-risking the book, making sure that it was profitable to the extent we want to, etc., so it is less of that improvement, as you've seen over the year to coming through, but still, it's actually sort of quite nice improvements coming through, and then we need to do what we need to do in the personal lines business, again, fighting off inflation for motor as we are and improving Norway.
So I think the storyline is actually pretty simple in that perspective.
Thank you, Mathias.
The next question is from Martin Gregers Birk from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thank you so much. Perhaps switching the topic a bit, if we look at your investment income, you report another quarter where you report a loss on your swap. And to my recollection, and please correct me if I'm wrong, we have only talked about the losses during this accounting regime. We have never talked about positive fair value adjustments in this respect. So given that you've used this accounting practice, there is also a benefit in your technical results. So for the accounting year 2024, what's the benefit in your technical results from applying this accounting practice?
Martin, hi. Good morning from me as well. I will take this question. First of all, there have been quarters where this item has been positive as well. So it's not entirely correct to say that it's always been negative. Secondly, obviously, long-term, there are some offsetting elements of this, which is in the runoff, so you really cannot see it. It's in the big pot of the runoff. And I think we have been mentioning before that we don't use the mark-to-market curve on inflation, but we use a more long-term smoothing assumption. So we've been mentioning before on this precise question that you really cannot have a one-to-one impact in the same quarter in the runoff, but longer term, this is what will happen.
But again, I'm not asking for the quarterly impact. I'm trying to sort of get a sort of a one-to-one impact in your technical result of this because I guess when we talk about, I mean, you never talked about fair value adjustments on your inflation swap. Let me put it that way. We only talked about negative. And I guess inflation expectations have also been falling ever since you started to implement this new accounting regime. So there has to be some kind of uplift of the technical result. And I'm wondering what that is.
But I mean, if you take the DKK 70 million that we're booking now in Q4, what we are saying is that not using a mark-to-market because we don't do that with inflation assumptions, but long-term, this DKK 70 million should be reflected in the runoff result in the business. So it's relatively precise, right?
Yeah. So back to my question, on a rolling four-month basis, what's the benefit of this accounting regime?
Last 12 months, or?
Yeah.
I need to go back and sum up all the negatives of this year, but I'm probably around 120-150 with the, I would hate to be more precise than that. Then you should just take that number.
Okay. All right. Thanks.
Next up, we have Jan Erik Gjerland from ABG. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thank you for taking my questions as well. Just going back to Norway, it seems like the medicine is price increases to improve your underlying Norwegian business. Could you shed some more light into when you have done your price increases, at which sort of starting dates so we can understand the trajectory? And also, if you could shed some light into how much, if that's possible, so we understand what you have done and when you have done it. And on the same topic, the runoff loss from motor the last couple of quarters seems to be there rather than a gain. Is this something happening with Norway, or is that sort of a Swedish TPL issue? Thank you.
Thanks for your questions. Maybe I'll start off on the first one, which is a little bit around the timing, right? When did the price increases start? When are they going to have the estimated impact?
Yes, exactly.
And I think if you'll start by the timing of the implementation, all right? We need to just emphasize that this is a moving target. So a year and a half, a year ago, when we saw inflation hitting our businesses, we started to implement price increases across all geographies, especially in Norway. That being said, it's been a moving target. So it's changed from product category to another category. It's now coming from raw materials into inflation. So we keep implementing new price increases on different parts of the business. So it's not an easy question to give a specific answer to, but we've been ongoing for easily a year and a half. But inflation has also kept on moving upwards and is now tapering off, but we are still not where we want to be.
As you know, it takes 24 months for a price increase to have full impact. And since it's been a moving target, there's still going to be a delay until it sort of stabilizes. And inflation hasn't stabilized.
And I just want to, and I think what you're asking for is a little bit around when are we going to see the true impact in Norway? And I'll be very honest, I don't want to come out with a number since we are fighting a moving target. We are seeing impact Q-on-Q. I expect us to, with this sort, there might be some outlier quarters, but I expect us to see a Q in, Q out improvement going forward, but it'll take time with a portfolio of our size. And I think you're seeing also, if you look at the market as a whole, this is a market situation also somehow emphasized with the currency, the weak NOK currency that keeps importing more and more inflation. So I mean, I think the whole market is fighting this and we are along with them.
It'll take time before we are where we are, but I will not make the mistake of committing to a deadline.
And maybe just to add here, Jan Erik as well, on the implementation of Norwegian actions, as Johan said, they started roughly 18 months ago. They have been gradually increasing over time. So I mean, we have reported each quarter what the rates we're pushing through in motor and housing content. And you've seen those bars become sort of higher and higher over the year. And now we've also communicated what it looks like on a go-forward basis with what I said before in the high teens. So the earnings impact of that will obviously come through sort of over time with the portfolio renewing. But I mean, overall, we started roughly 18 months ago.
There has been gradual improvements or increases in those rate increases over time, and I think when it comes to, I'm very clear. When it comes to the second question, runoff, I would suggest that we come back with a precise answer, but I mean, there is nothing structurally in this for one specific market or the other. This is not a specific Norwegian or sort of Swedish thing, so let us come back with a precise answer to that.
Perfect. Thank you.
As there are no further questions in the queue, I will hand it back to the speakers. Please go ahead.
Thanks a lot to all of you for the good dialogue and good question. As always, Investor Relations remains around at your disposal today, the next few days. We are also on road shows, so we look forward to see you around in the forthcoming days. Thanks again.