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