Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this Sampo Group investor update, which we're hosting in London today. My name is Sami Taipalus, and I am the head of investor relations at Sampo. The agenda today is very much focused on the core of the Sampo Group, namely our Nordic P&C insurance operations. We're going to start with a presentation from Group CEO Torbjörn Magnusson on group strategy and capital allocation.
After which, there'll be a presentation from Ricard Wennerklint, Chief of Strategy, that will dive deeper into our P&C insurance strategy. Then we'll have a short break, and after the break, we will have presentations from Morten Thorsrud, CEO of If P&C, and Ingrid Janbu Holthe, CEO of If Private. There'll be two Q&A sessions during the day, one after Ricard's presentation before the break, and one at the end after Morten's and Ingrid's presentation.
Just to let you know, the event today is filmed and recorded, and a recording will later be available on sampo.com. That's all from me. With that, I hand over to Torbjörn.
Thank you, Sami, and good afternoon, everyone. Good to see so many new and old faces here. After completing the exit from Nordea, we felt it would be natural to organize an event and talk a lot more about the intrinsics of our insurance operations. It's quite a major change that we've gone through over the past two years, becoming a pure play insurance company. It's a natural one because we have a management team that reflects that. Nevertheless, we also see the future opportunities in P&C insurance, and we would like to talk to you about that this afternoon. Disclaimer. Right. Sampo is now a pure insurance group with two segments, you could say. One, P&C insurance says invest and develop. We have a mass market focus for that part of the business.
It's a very significant operation in any comparison with more than EUR 7 billion in gross written premiums. We have operational excellence. It says at the bottom, of course, very strong results over a long period of time. In the past period, we've also had very strong growth of the underwriting profits. The second segment, the life and investments part, is managed for value. Mandatum, the main part of it, has a large run-off book of with-profits book that supports the dividend of the group. Most of you will have studied our report, our Q2 report in some detail. You've seen that it's a very strong report. Some of you will have followed us for some time and seen that it has consistently been very strong results.
We've delivered also underwriting growth, a double-digit underwriting growth for a couple of years. Nordic P&C is the key driver of profits. Nordic P&C is a rational business, a very consolidated business, one of the most consolidated insurance markets in the world, and it has stayed that way over several decades by now. The average ROE for our P&C business in the Nordics over the past decade is 26%. The U.K. performance is robust, and I'd like to say that our U.K. business, Hastings, is now part of Sampo Group, which means that there is no way that that business is compelled to write business at inadequate rates. We've done well in this period. We have some growth, and we have certain pockets of growth that are more interesting than others, and I'll.
We'll return to that during the day. A very agile business model and very strong performance and development also in that part of the business. Of course, there's some claims inflation has crept up a little bit during the year even in the Nordics, but we have been able to absorb those by rate increases in all important segments of the business this year. It says at the bottom here, higher interest rates have added to underwriting profits through higher discount rates. Actually, it's worth expanding a little bit on that. Interest rates actually are a friend in this climate. The short duration that we held in our investment portfolio was, relatively speaking, of course, very helpful.
When interest rates arose, we were able to take quick decisions and add to our investment portfolio with high-quality papers. We increased the running yield from 1.5% to 2.1% almost instantly during one quarter. The interest rates help us in two ways. One is, of course, increased investment returns, but also it does help the discount rate. It increases the discount rates for the proportion of the liabilities that are discounted, which is a minor proportion, but still. And also it helps the solvency ratio for our life company, Mandatum. We published a strategy in the Capital Markets Day that we held, what, 18 months ago or so.
Of course, that was very much focused on underwriting and the elements of underwriting and the targets, the financial targets, resulting from that. I think another part of that strategy that we published that has become equally important is the disciplined capital management that we've shown since then. We are able to have a very reliable dividend because of the fact that most of our profits come from the underwriting results. We have also kept a very efficient balance sheet in the process of exiting Nordea, not least. This now is a situation where maybe organic growth is the priority.
We have, as you've seen, not least from the Q2 numbers, very strong growth, a leadership in digitalization that is the basis for that growth that we now kept for a period, and at the same time, of course, excellent underwriting results. Next slide. We didn't actually plan for this originally to happen at the same time as this investor update, but it did. We had some news for you today, more of a strategic kind. We told the market today that we are evaluating a listing on Nasdaq Stockholm. Of course, that's quite a natural idea, isn't it? The biggest market that we have is the Swedish market. We have a great deal of operational presence in Sweden, but very, very limited local share ownership.
There's no insurance company listed, or at least significant insurance company listed, on Nasdaq Stockholm. It's by far the biggest, most liquid market in the Nordics. Domestic funds, especially the ones only investing in Swedish krona, would have easier access to us. It would be an advantage both to new and existing shareholders, of course. A natural idea being evaluated, and hopefully we'll be able to do this in Q4, the markets willing, of course. Turning to today's main topic, which is to give some insights into our P&C operations. Let's first look at some segmentations here that underline the attractiveness of our business. Most of our business is mass markets. We have a business area called industrial. By U.K. standards, that's actually SMEs.
The cutoff point is 500 employees, so much of that you would call SME business in the U.K. We have, which Ricard will talk to you about in a minute, a leading digital sales franchise that is very important and obviously growing over time. We have, it says here a car insurance partner network. That sounds like something commission-driven that is negotiated every year. It certainly is not. It's a very close relationship to the car industry, the OEMs, the dealers, the financing companies, and us as an insurance company, and in no way based on commission discussions every year, but long-term agreements sharing the fruits of those partnerships. The third bullet point here is an interesting one because it has sort of faded in attention, I think.
I should remind you that we have a rather unique platform. We have a Nordic platform in every way. We have a Nordic organization. We have Nordic systems, which very few companies have, and a Nordic approach to processes around the group. That, of course, has given us a cost advantage, benefits of scale over time, and still does. In our UK operations, there also a digital advantage over our peers. We have distribution focused and to a large degree done on the price comparison websites. We are a leader in motor insurance and also in the technologies underlying that insurance line. This year, we have had more than 20% growth in home insurance, a line that is small to us, but obviously a big opportunity in this rather big market.
You will see some of the details of one of the important success factors for us, digitalization. Here you have some numbers. It says 20% of If P&C private sales is digital. That number is actually much bigger than you might think because it competes with two other channels, two very efficient channels, the car brand channel, if I may call it that, and the inbound call center channel that is very big in the Nordics for historical reasons.
Those three are quite competitive compared to each other. Part of the car industry, car collaboration channels is actually also digital sales, so that number could be portrayed as bigger than that. We're extremely well-positioned for the future because of the fact that we started investing in this earlier than most of our peers.
We certainly have all products available online. We actually have the entire company online. One-third of the new customers come from digital channel. You see the numbers here, very smooth sales, quote, and buy in 60 seconds. Something that's not here, we have very seamless interaction between digital interaction, chats, and phone services, something that is used by the Nordic citizens to a large degree. Digital is not only important for the customer offer, but also for internal administration and product development and the efficiency of that. When you look at this slide, to the right-hand in the middle, you see the IT development costs increasing year after year, and that might even cause some alarm feelings.
Until you see the one on the lower bottom of the right, on the right-hand side, cost ratio coming down year after year, I think now for 14 years consecutively. We've been very able to meet the development costs with savings and often Nordic savings in other parts of the business. Just to point out, we always have a very conservative view on the balance sheet and on the way that we present our numbers to you and others. We have no capitalization of IT development costs. I repeat, zero euros, pounds or krona on the balance sheet for after all this time of investments. Coming back to some more structural things at the end here, Sampo is built for running insurance companies.
Obviously, Morten and Ingrid, after the break here, will have very long insurance experience and deep knowledge of the business. Also, the non-divisional heads, as you can see here on this slide, our background is in P&C insurance. Rather than a holding company with investment bankers, we have a team of people that are really the synergies and the philosophy underlying the business at the top. You can see on the track record here that combined ratios have certainly been going very much in the right direction over time, as has growth over a long period now, and producing the underwriting result that we've seen now over the past few years.
There's always more to do, and I think the first time I got the question whether this was the peak was in 2006. Time has passed, and this is certainly the right point in time, as I pointed out, to go for organic growth with the strong competitive position that we have with an advantage in digitalization. You can see some illustrative numbers here from adding EUR 1 of premiums to different lines. I think that the important part of that graph is really that it's of course very profitable to add to our present business, and the systems and the processes that we have in place for those. One thing that remains key, of course, always in Sampo, is the comment in dark blue.
Underwriting discipline will always remain the key for us as a management team. At this point in time, it is very profitable for us to pursue growth. The margins are very, very attractive based on the channels we have for growth. We will never have to write business at inadequate rates, and we will always respond to developments in the markets in a conservative fashion. With that, Ricard, we're moving on to the delights of digitalization and the details for that.
Thank you very much, Torbjörn, and good afternoon to everyone. I will talk a bit about digitalization, but before that, I wanna remind you of the P&C strategy in Sampo. I will start actually by reminding you, I think, roughly where Torbjörn ended, that underwriting performance, product, and pricing is always the most important part of it if we spend the day today talking most about digitalization. Of course, the ticket to play is underwriting and risk selection. Just to mention one detail, it says that all of our employees are incentivized on combined ratio, and that is for sure true in the group. We also spend more resources than I think almost any other insurance company when it comes to financial reporting and controlling.
If you look at the management team or everyone that is here today from Sampo, actually has a background in either financial reporting or product and price. That's very much the foundation of the Sampo Group. Operational excellence is, of course, very much about taking advantage of our size. We are the biggest insurance company in the Nordics. We're the one insurance company with cross-border synergies and have worked with the same organization for more than 20 years. The last pillar is, of course, customer focus. I think we say no to more deals than we say yes to in terms of affinity deals in the group. If we don't see customer a customer advantage or a customer win, we don't wanna write the business.
Especially in the affinity deals that are floating around in the market, there are many deals where you see advantages for the insurance company, advantages for the intermediary or the affinity group, but it's difficult to see the advantage for the customer, and then we don't wanna be involved. When we talk about customers, it's always the end customer that is the focus. Just to set the scene, when we're talking about digital or IT, there are different focuses in the different parts of the business. In If, where we had the cross-border business for more than 20 years and made a lot of this investments into the core of our production systems, the focus is very much on the front end towards the customer and the front end towards our call center employees. It's a direct market.
In a direct market, of course, customers are used to going directly to the insurance company. It makes sense that customer would like to use digital services if they are available. That's the focus in If, continue to build digital tools and as good as possible interface towards the customer. In Topdanmark, that of course only works in Denmark, where many customers still want to have direct contact with the insurance company or even face-to-face contacts with the insurance company. Here, the focus are very much in the core system, getting the core system modernized, and later takes the step to modernize the front end to the customer. In Hastings, working in an intermediated market, where customer go primarily through price comparison sites, the focus is, of course, on the already very modern core system and on data and new pricing methodologies.
Focus in Hastings is more on pricing and data and the IT that goes together with that. In Topdanmark, it's the core systems, and in If, it's the front end system facing the customers. Let's go back in history, and this is hopefully gonna work as a backdrop to Ingrid and Morten when they talk more about the details in the If P&C business. The digital journey in If started some 10, 15 years ago. If you look at the numbers to the left, that's the percentage of new sales over the internet as it was back then, not really mobile use, but internet and computer use, was around 3%. That was the starting point. What I will try to make come alive is the challenges that we saw and the steps that we took.
If you think about a product manager or a sales and service manager that has a large portfolio responsibility, let's call it EUR 500 million. That's a big portfolio, but it's definitely not. It's definitely quite common in If that you would have such a large portfolio. When you have 3% of your new sales in a portfolio with 90% renewal, it's of course an extremely small number, right? We're talking about EUR 1-2 million in sales. What we were asking back here, our product managers and sales and service managers, to prioritize a EUR 1-2 million number. That's a very difficult story. You have EUR 500 million, 90% renewals. Renewals will always be more important. Price adjustments will always be more important.
A sale of EUR 1 million is just not on the top 10 list for an executive. All the services were available on the internet already here, so you could buy all the products. They were products made for telephone sales or in some cases even direct sales. You had extremely small numbers, everything available online, but the products were made for telephone sales. Just to take one example, if a product manager put in an argument for a price that made sense for a few customers, of course, the person in the call center could decide whether it made sense to use this argument or not, or to ask this question or not.
Focus in Hastings is more on pricing and data and the IT that goes together with that. In Topdanmark, it's the core systems, and in If, it's the front end system facing the customers. Let's go back in history, and this is hopefully gonna work as a backdrop to Ingrid and Morten when they talk more about the details in the If P&C business. The digital journey in If started some 10, 15 years ago. If you look at the numbers to the left, that's the percentage of new sales over the internet as it was back then, not really mobile use, but internet and computer use, was around 3%. That was the starting point. What I will try to make come alive is the challenges that we saw and the steps that we took.
If you think about a product manager or a sales and service manager that has a large portfolio responsibility, let's call it EUR 500 million. That's a big portfolio, but it's definitely not. It's definitely quite common in If that you would have such a large portfolio. When you have 3% of your new sales in a portfolio with 90% renewal, it's of course an extremely small number, right? We're talking about EUR 1 million-EUR 2 million in sales. What we were asking back here, our product managers and sales and service managers, to prioritize a EUR 1 million-EUR 2 million number. That's a very difficult story. You have EUR 500 million, 90% renewals. Renewals will always be more important. Price adjustments will always be more important.
A sale of EUR 1 million is just not on the top 10 list for an executive. All the services were available on the internet already here, so you could buy all the products. They were products made for telephone sales or in some cases even direct sales. You had extremely small numbers, everything available online, but the products were made for telephone sales. Just to take one example, if a product manager put in an argument for a price that made sense for a few customers, of course, the person in the call center could decide whether it made sense to use this argument or not, or to ask this question or not.
Just to take one example, if you had a Volvo 740 that you wanted to get a price for in car insurance back here, one of the arguments or one of the pricing arguments were to decide, is this a car that is used for personal use, or is this actually an ambulance? That was one of the questions, and this was just copied online. Some customers actually got the question, are you trying to insure an ambulance?
Didn't really make sense. It was a pure copy and paste from all the different pricing questions that were used in the call centers. If you have a direct market with 90% retention, you try to cross-sale, right? That's an important thing for the call centers. It meant that you had discounts that you could give to customers insuring more than one or two or three products.
That was an important part of the pricing mechanism. Didn't really make sense when a customer went online and tried to find a price for one product. I mentioned affinity groups earlier. There were a lot of affinity deals in the Nordics, still is. Of course, one part of that is probably a small discount. Another part of the discount mechanism was to give discount possibility to call center staff, especially to the team leaders. How do you make use of that in a digital world? None of this made sense. What we had to do was to redo all the products, to redo all the processes to get the best product and the best price online. This is a huge task, started somewhere around 2009 and 2010, and finalized maybe two, three, or four years later.
One of the ingredients was taking the 140 most senior specialists and managers in If Retail and send them on a training course that we designed in-house, which was 4x one week over a period of six months, to make sure that everyone came on board. The management and the leadership in this project were put to the senior management, in the executive management team. Everyone was involved. Incentives needed to be changed. If these numbers are important, of course, you can't have incentives only based on portfolio profitability, because these are very small sales numbers. But the expectations we always had was that the customer were actually trying to buy insurance online, and they actually preferred to use, on average, online rather than calling or meeting someone. That was everything that wasn't IT.
Of course, IT is also a big part of this. We have today, Torbjörn showed you EUR 90 million in new development, which have been increasing over time. The overall IT spend is roughly the same, but the part that is new development is increasing. I could easily put this number at EUR 100 million if I include everything that we do in with IT architecture. That's more in spending on IT new development than most of our peers have in total cost, excluding direct sales costs. Size is an advantage here. To have a stable organization with cross-border responsibilities is an advantage. IT is not unimportant, but it's not the only thing that will make this work. What have we achieved today? Well, we certainly have an advantage in time compared to most of our competitors.
We've done this now for a long time. We have changed the product, we have changed the pricing strategy. When customer goes online, they see the best possible price for the best possible product. There is no allocation of extra discounts if they give a call to call centers. This is the best possible price, and we haven't forced customer over online. It's not like we've said, "You get an additional discount if you go online." You just get the best possible price. Remember that customers typically buy one insurance online, and then maybe they call to buy another insurance. They finalize maybe 75% of the process, and then they do the last 25% together with the call center employee over the phone. This needs to be very transparent, and the IT tools need to support this. Where are we today?
Obviously, Morten and Ingrid will talk more about this in a few more minutes. Customer satisfaction has improved. It turned out that just as we expected, most customers in the Nordics would prefer to go online and buy their insurance product rather than call. Retention has improved. If we give good services, if we give the best available tools for the customers, there's no reason to switch. Again, we're still working in a 90% renewal market. It's a direct market, so renewal is always more important than new sales. We are now four times the size in sales compared to where we were some 10, 12 years ago. So this is the most important distribution channel. At the end, as Torbjörn mentioned, we've been able to do this without additional cost.
We have nothing on the balance sheet, and we have a 20 basis points average improvement in cost ratio. Where do we go from here? There are a lot of things that we still can do. We can continue to improve the digital tools, the interfaces that the customer sees. Everything today is done with sort of digital first, mobile first, starting point in If. All the employees, and especially in IT, the 1,500 IT specialists that we have in the IT organization in the business, knows that everything starts with digital first. If it doesn't work digital, it's really not worth investing in the retail business. We started with sales, to get sales to work, to get pricing right, to get the culture changed, to get products changed. When that's done, of course, we spend less time on the servicing element, claims handling.
That's the things that we can do now. We can continue to modernize our core system in If, making more core systems completely cross-border and similar in all of our businesses. We can improve automation, especially in claims handling. These are things that still can be improved, and there's more benefits to take from this. Also small business, SME business. Small business owners also wanna buy car insurances online. That's now available, and we have seen an extreme increase in number of sales in the SME business when we gave that opportunity. Again, with the right product and the right transparent price. Where does Hastings fit into all of this? Well, hopefully with all the experience and history we have in transforming a direct company into a digital company, hopefully we know what good like looks like.
Hopefully, we even know what great looks like. I think it was very easy to see when we met the Hastings team, when we looked into the Hastings business, that it's a great company from a sort of IT digital perspective. There are some different focuses. Remember, If, it's a retention market, it's a direct market. It's quite different from the U.K. It means that there's a lot of focus on service and claims handling as well. Not necessarily digital always, but in the group. In Hastings, we have pricing differentiation, pricing skills. We have a second to none, fraud detection, things that we can use in the Nordics. Of course, the pricing skills that are at the core of the Hastings group. There are a lot of things that can work as skill transfer between these two organizations.
Lastly, just to remind you again, underwriting is the key focus of all of our brand names in the Sampo Group. We continue to focus on underwriting, on a low combined ratio, and a low volatility combined ratio. That always remain front and center for us. With that, hopefully as a backdrop to Morten and Ingrid later, I think we can have some Q&A.
Great. We'll then open up the first Q&A session. We're gonna start. It's possible to ask questions both in the room, where we'll have two mics around the place, and please hold the mic in front of your mouth when you're speaking. I'm sure you know the drill. We're going to have questions online as well. There's a small question box in front of the live stream where you can input your questions. Please be concise with your questions, so it's easy for us to read them out. Let's start in the room, though. Who wants to start? Why don't we start with Blair over there?
Thanks very much. This is Blair Stewart from BofA. A couple of questions, if I can. Over the last decade, we've seen the industry move from a 90% combined to 85% or whatever the number is. At the same time, interest rates have fallen. Now that we're moving into a higher interest rate world, I wonder how easy it is for you to separate the two. Will we not just solve for an ROE? The question is, how easy is it to continually focus on improving the underwriting profit when we're moving into a world where you can earn a higher investment return? That's my first question. The second question is digital's 20% of sales, I think, in private you said, Torbjörn. Where do you think that number can go to?
I guess, is it just determined by what the customer wants to do, or do you have specific targets around that? You mentioned it a little bit towards the end, Ricard, in terms of what you're doing on the commercial side digitally. I just wonder how that's evolving, and will we see an increasing proportion of business in the commercial side being done digitally? Thank you.
I think you've followed us for some time, Blair, and you've seen that If P&C Insurance is really not a business we changed overnight. The changes are gradual and develop, and that needs to be investments and rethinking, and rates are changed once a year for many companies, et cetera. Not for Hastings, but for in the Nordics. Let's see what happens with interest rates. We don't know that for sure. There's a rumor that they will increase.
In the meantime, we will continue to reduce our cost ratio. We will continue to try to find synergies between Hastings and ourselves to improve pricing in detail and improve the underwriting based on that, and invest more in digitalization. We will see if the market will react to higher interest rates. I mean that will happen much more quickly than any change to pricing in the underwriting. Of course that in itself is quite an attractive thought, isn't it? If interest rates would go up sort of instantly and whatever happened to rates, it will happen much later. What do you think about the maximum for digital sales, Ricard?
I just wonder, Tor, is it reasonable that ROEs go up when interest rates go up? Is that reasonable for investors and for you to expect?
Well, look at history. If you go back like six or seven years, we had 25% return. Many others in our industry had high returns. Then that sounded attractive to a number of new entrants. Small companies arose and they did that without the investment backbone that we have, that Ricard described. They did that without any idea of competitive advantages that they could use against us, and that ended abruptly after. Well, not abruptly, but it ended after four, five, six years with no success. I don't think there's almost not a single one of those companies left. Okay, what will happen? Who knows?
Maybe I don't think that we will show you an average of 50% return on equity over the next 10 years, but 25 is not so bad either. Let's see.
Well, on digital development, I think it depends a bit on how you actually define digital sales, right? Because if you buy a new car, you need an insurance attached to that car. In most cases in the Nordics is an If product. Is that a digital sale? Well, not according to our number. That's our. It's not. But if you actually argue that, well, that's digital as well, because the car dealer just punches If in his system and then it's bought and ready to go, then of course, you can get closer to 100%. I think most customers in the Nordic would prefer to do this digital, not call in. I think Denmark over time will change from personal sales to more phone-based and digital.
It doesn't really matter for us whether it's 100% or 25, but my guess is that most customer will prefer digital. The same goes for SME customers. They try to buy small business insurance online. If it's available and the price looks right and it's easy to use, they will buy. Right? You have a small, you know, you have your truck and, you know, something else, small business, you wanna do this on a Sunday evening maybe rather than a telephone queue in a Monday morning. It will increase.
Great. Let's go to the next question. Vinit's had his hand up for a little while. Go ahead.
Thanks. Torbjörn, just going back to an interesting comment you made in your speech that you're now a team of underwriting managers. Now, having been in similar rooms for a few more years as well, we used to hear a different statement a few years ago that this was a team of portfolio managers with businesses of different nature. Now, I don't know whether it's too much of a top-down question, but if this shift has really occurred, is it showing in somewhere down the line? Is it showing in morale? Is it showing in how managers are running? Is it really showing in the businesses? That's one question I'm curious to hear your thoughts about, and second question is for Ricard.
The slide 19 that you very helpfully showed about the 4x increase in percentage of sales, I would almost say that that coincides with things like iPhone increase or more mobile phone penetration. How much I mean, have you thought that, okay, if you hadn't really done anything, this would have just happened anyway? Because, I mean, I wasn't using my mobile phone for anything in 2010, but I'm forced to use it now. I mean, how do you think that process is? Because it's an important thing, because if that's just a market trend, then anything people do will not change. Anything Sampo does will not change. I'm just curious to hear any thoughts.
must admit that I don't think I ever heard this portfolio manager statement, but maybe my predecessor or my chairman has said that. I mean, if you look about it's quite a natural statement. The fact that I was the successor of Kari Stadigh, who was more of a general finance person. I'm certainly have more of an insurance background than he has. If you look at the management team today, many of them in the management team have been part of If. If they have not, they are certainly insurance nerds anyway, as in Hastings. That's a good thing, because that is what we're running.
I think the management team at the moment is the perfect one for the businesses that we are running. That also, you know, gives an opportunity for us to put a lot of emphasis on synergies across businesses, across our subsidiaries in the various boards where we're helping out. Ricard, what you say about the more difficult questions?
Personally, I'm convinced that there is no way we would see 20% in new sales if we hadn't redone the products and received pricing transparency. There's just no way. If you just take one small example, you had discount mandates in the call centers, right? We had to take that away in order to get the same price in all different sales channels. We had to change the pricing mechanism so we didn't give the same sort of discount for having three or four products, because that obviously led to the fact that if you buy one single product online, it's a higher price than if you call in. There's a lot of things that just needed to be changed in order to get to a situation where it's easy and transparent to buy an insurance product online.
That didn't happen by itself. Again, much more cultural and process-oriented than IT-oriented, but it's needed to get this done. We needed to change pricing in a big way because you can only ask so many questions to sell a traditional car insurance product in the Nordics. There is no way you could ask 30 questions. Of course, that meant that pricing became a bit more difficult and needed to be done in a different way. You know, get the data automatically or just not use the data, just don't ask the question. You needed to have the same pricing model in both call centers and online. All of this need to happen before the customer starts actually buying products online.
You've all tried to buy things from companies in many lines of business where the site is not quite perfect yet, haven't you?
Great. Faizan next.
Hi there, Faizan Lakhani from HSBC. My first question is that if Topdanmark and Hastings are all on a journey for digital improvement, they use different systems in place, is there an opportunity for you to sort of standardize the systems you use across three, especially given that Hastings and Topdanmark have the same suites of products? Second question is, since you've picked up a minority stake in Hastings, is there an update in terms of what you could do on synergies on that front? Thank you.
When it comes to using each other's systems, I think there's a quite big difference between the U.K. and the Nordics in how the markets operate, and we've come to different stages of development. There's a limited degree to what we can do, but we can certainly get cost synergies by using the same developers, for instance. What was the other question?
It was on the fact you picked up the minority stake of Hastings, but you've not provided an update in terms of Hastings synergies. Is there more that you can do since you've got the.
No, that's, I mean, we already had the opportunities that we have today, so we haven't changed the numbers, no.
It makes cooperation easier, of course, yes.
Understood. Thank you.
All right. If we go Jan-Erik, and then Handley after that.
Yes. Thank you. Jan-Erik Gjerland from ABG. A couple of questions from my side as well. The first one is on the claims handling side, and I think you mentioned, Ricard, that the claims handling processes is next. If I remember some 10 years back, Kari said that everyone would like to do claims handling online, and then they didn't do the digital buying online. Is it sort of this is a back process you're now starting to redo on the claims handling side, or is it that you will redo the online claims handling action, so to speak?
You actually missed his statement six or seven years ago when he said that we were so good at this, that everybody was using it. I think that there's more to be done. It's a perfect cue for this afternoon's session, of course.
I think partly it's about changing the processes in claims handling, partly it's about IT investment, and partly it's just about the focus was getting sales to work, getting prices and product done for the digital world. That is now almost completed or completed. So just next in line, we'll find claims. There is a lot that can be done, both automated or just improving the process that the customer uses.
That is the part that will drive your sort of combined ratio lower or improvement potentially going forward together with fraud detection systems, et cetera.
Pricing. We are a company that has never said, "Let's do this year and something else next year," and a third thing. We're trying to improve on all factors, all numbers, all parameters all the time. That will continue to be true.
Okay, one more. On the motor side, you said that new sales, new car sales are very important to you. It seems like there are some more competition from all of your friendly competitors in the Nordic, bragging that they have won some new contracts on car insurance sales. How is the competitive situation there now? Are you really the number one by any dispute, or is it so that they are sort of creeping up your legs a little bit?
There is absolutely no doubt that we are number one in the situation. If you take a 10-year period or a five-year period, we have a larger proportion rather than a smaller proportion of these contracts, these collaborations and market share of new car sales or insurance for new cars. Now and then there will be the odd contract that we don't win. Of course, we don't have a 100% market share, but we have dominance in this area.
Okay. Thank you.
All right. Hadley next, and then we'll take Jacob after that.
Thanks very much. Hadley Cohen, Deutsche Bank. A couple of extensions from previous questions. Ricard, in terms of the digital initiatives going forward around claims handling and what have you, how do you think about that between developing it in-house and looking at maybe some insurtechs or what have you, and buying the systems that they've already developed and the like?
And then the second question is, I appreciate that it's very difficult to standardize the digital initiatives of Hastings, If, Topdanmark, what have you, but have there been any sort of tangible benefits of saying, "Oh, look, Hastings does its pricing this way. That would improve our system at If or what have you." Are there any? Have there been any positives to come out from that perspective?
It's still early days, when it comes to cooperation between Hastings and If, but there's a lot of learnings that has been done and a lot of, let's call it pilot projects, where we test out new things that we do in the Nordics that they haven't done in the U.K. or vice versa. When it comes to the question on systems, whether we can use.
Sorry. Is it possible to get examples of that, or is it
It boils down to factors in tariffs that are different.
Yeah
Used in different ways, and of course you have to test that, and that takes a bit of time. Tariffication and we have published the list of synergies that we are pursuing, and the other one, the big one is fraud detection, which is a tangible development, of course.
As with many things, when we change something in the business, it typically takes years before you see the full effect and get to numbers that actually make sense to talk about, so still early days. When it comes to technology, we're not really biased in any direction of where we wanna go. We just always wanna make sure that we have the best competence in-house. If our people take the decision that this standard system is actually the best or cheapest to use or most efficient to use, fine, or an insurtech, fine. Let's use that system. But we always need to be able to be in control ourselves. Right, the 1,500 IT specialists, I have no problem with that number increasing or the EUR 90 million or EUR 100 million in new development.
I have no problem with that number increasing as long as we're in charge of what we're doing. You know, we have a lot of systems that we built ourselves in If, and we have standard systems. You know, I can go either way.
It's a good way that you ask the question because that reflects how this has changed over time, because three or four or five years ago, I would always get the question, are you afraid of insurtechs? Now, of course, it's more, are you collaborating, buying them or not, or using in-house? Because that's the way the world has developed. It is a good thing to have millions of customers when you're developing things.
Cool. Jacob next.
Okay. Just coming back to the question on direct or online sales versus direct sales. For example, if you take the Danish market that even, I think, Topdanmark recently reduced the price online to become more competitive online, and then when clients call them, I think in Denmark it's probably 2% that is sold online instead of 20%, then they have the option to upsell or sell more products. How does the upselling work on a purely sort of digital solution, and how would you react if someone would come into one of your key markets like Sweden and do something similar, where basically they have a much cheaper online price and then trying to get people to call them and offer them a lot of add-on products?
Let's take the last question first. The distribution cost in online sales is, of course, extremely small, right? Which means that there is not that much room to decrease the price to get the customers if you still wanna reach profitability. You don't have that much to play with. It's an extremely efficient market. Also, the reason why I try to go back maybe 10, almost 15 years to explain what has been done in terms of getting the product digitally, sort of, available, that's a process that takes a lot of time, and it's not a standard process that you just can, copy and paste, because you still need to get the right price. You still need to get the right risk selection. Just by lowering price, for sure, you will get some sales.
If you wanna reach profitability, you will have to increase prices the year after and the year after and the year after. It's not a value-creative model to sell insurances in the Nordics. We've seen that many times over. That's not really a concern. Maybe you had another question as well.
The upselling part, so how do you do that if people buy?
That's a good argument. Of course, if you can sit down with a customer in his kitchen and sell the complete sort of package of products, that's a good sell in terms of average premium that you will receive. You can argue that you probably get very good response from the client. They're very happy with the service. In that sense, it's an efficient way if you imagine that customer will have a higher propensity to renew products for a long time. The problem with that reasoning is that you haven't started with the customer situation, right? What would the customer like to do?
I think after all this time, it's very easy to prove that a customer would actually like to buy their products by themselves online if they just are sure that they get the best price. Of course, you can defend against this a certain time and try to direct customer in a certain way. Over time, you will lose. Over time, you will lose because it's enough that someone has the low transparent price online and a good service, and they will take the sale. You just have to sort of somewhere you would have to take that leap of faith. We did it in 2010, but it's a difficult one, right? It's a difficult one.
I'm sure our colleagues are going to tell you about upsells online, after the break.
Jimmy.
I have three questions, please. You mentioned you're spending this EUR 90 million on IT each year. Could you give a split of how much is spent on external services, how much is spent on internal resource? Also you mentioned about these 100 IT professionals you have in the company. I guess, what's their key focus at moment? Is it more on, let's say, develop new systems, or is it more on implementation of things? Second question is on, I believe originally the capital allocation topic was on the agenda, but it seems it's got taken off. If you intended to talk about capital allocation, and when should we expect you to give a update on that? Perhaps related to that, you show some slides about investments.
Your risk profile is still more geared to market risks relative to peers. Do you see there's a potential of achieving better return on capital for your investment in, whether it's in If P&C or Mandatum?
Where do we start? IT costs, the majority of the cost is internal. We use consultants, of course, in IT, but we also have the luxury of having an in-house IT company or a unit in the Baltic Rim, where we bought an IT company which makes development cheaper than placing them in much bigger parts of Scandinavia. I remember capital. Yes, of course, we will come back to capital. As we have said, we're at the moment buying back shares at maximum speed, if you want to put it that way. We expect to come with a new message on this in conjunction with the full year results, which makes sense because that's when this buyback program is likely to be finalized.
What more? Remind me, please.
On the investment side.
Market risk.
You mentioned
Oh, yes, market risk. Well, of course, we are in many ways trying to work with capital. One way is the partial internal model that we're trying to build for the group, and we have conversations with the authorities around that. We will obviously always look at various ways to reduce the capital requirements of the group. One other obvious one would be to try to do something with the so-called PE portfolios or investments in Saxo and Nordax and the like. We are not in the driving seat of those, so we cannot decide when that can happen. A few of them have maybe been delayed a bit by the development of the world's finances and economy.
Do you intend to reduce the capital requirement for your market risk in If P&C and Mandatum?
That's like an internal question, obviously, that we will always try to be capital efficient and weigh that against the opportunities that we have.
Great. I think we have time for one more question. I think Claudia had one.
Thanks. So you, I mean, you started early, you invested a lot of money, you did a great job, and you have a clear competitive advantage now. How big do you think the risk is that this advantage will be competed away over time? I mean, what we have seen here in the U.K., for example, with the, like, the pension platforms, ultimately, once somebody cracks an IT solution that costs a fraction, it's not difficult for others to do the same thing. Secondly, have you seen anyone, I mean, no matter how clumsily and unsuccessfully, trying to replicate what you're doing already?
Can I answer?
You can answer.
You can help me out. Well, first of all, I must say that I don't see that Hastings is being caught up by other insurers in the U.K. Market when it comes to their abilities, their skills in pricing and working in the digital arena as they are. I actually don't see us getting caught up either, because there's no simple way of doing this twice as quickly as we have, as it's not about spending twice as much on IT, which is difficult of course, unless you're really big. It's about changing processes and products and all the things that Ricard has described. No, I don't see that as a major risk as we speak, at least, neither in the U.K., Nor in the Nordics.
Let me just add one other sort of angle into this. Of course, the easiest way to modernize an existing sort of large insurance company in the Nordics would be to set up a new organization, a parallel organization with the latest core system and just sort of tailored for digital sales. That would've been the easiest way for us to get decent products online quickly back in 2010. We early decided that, well, to the benefit of all of our shareholders, we need to take the entire If Group into digital sales. That was what we wanted to do, which is a tougher and longer and more difficult product process. If you have this sort of tailored digital company, you start to compete with yourself, right? That's what you do, and you start from very low volumes.
It's very difficult to get the economics to work, and you still have this huge tanker that you need to do something with. Remember, 90% renewal, that's still there. An expensive distribution is still there. How do you take that and onboard it to your now new sort of smaller, more agile setup? That's a very difficult one, regardless of whether it's done by one of our competitors or one of our peers or a newcomer. It just doesn't work that way. It's a direct market, right? You need the brand name. You need the history. I think it's very difficult to not compete with us, obviously, but that can be done every day. But to catch up, that's difficult.
Sami, have you been able to afford coffee for our guests?
Just about managed to squeeze it into.
Really?
Into the tight budget. On that note, let's take a break now for a short while and reconvene at 2:30 P.M. for the next set of presentations.
We'll obviously be out there to continue discussions.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay. We're back after consuming Sampo's annual coffee and cake budget. The next presentations will come from the CEO of If, Morten Thorsrud, who I think most of you know already. He's joined today also by Ingrid Janbu Holthe, who's a relative newcomer to the Sampo Group. She's only been here for eight years. Which is very new in our management team. With that, I'll hand over to you two.
Excellent. I'll then try to kick it off, and then Ingrid will come in and join me sort of during the presentation. We will try to talk a little bit about how we, of course, will capitalize on Sampo's strength in the Nordic pension insurance landscape. We thought that rather than giving you a sort of a regular update on all of the facts and figures, I think you see them on the Q2 result already. We thought that we should try to really focus on some few value creation levers, if you like, kind of areas where we believe that we should be able to produce even more value and underwriting profits in particular in the period ahead. That will be sort of the main emphasis in this presentation.
Still before sort of diving into those areas, let's just sort of on a couple of slides, just recap where are we coming from and sort of repeating the targets set out on the capital markets day some 18 months ago. For this three-year financial target period, we have said that we should produce a combined ratio below 85% for each and every year, below 85%. We have said that we should produce mid-single growth in underwriting profits, and we of course should continue the trajectory of delivering about 20 basis points of cost ratio improvements year-over-year. We are doing this, of course, building on the strong fundament that we have, where the extremely strong underwriting culture, of course, is the center of all of this.
In addition to that, we of course have significant scale benefits that in particular is materializing in a digital world, and Ricard and Torbjörn has already touched upon this. We have really the leading digital capabilities, and we really start to see that that is giving us clear benefits, both on the growth side, but also on the profitability side. Then of course, in the center of all of this needs to be an extremely strong focus on customer centricity. We always need to start with how do we create most value for the customer. That's of course what it's all about. We can have great financial results as long as we really create a lot of value also for the customers.
Now sort of halfway out in this three-year plan period, I guess it's fair to say that we're tracking quite well, which might even be an understatement when it comes to reaching the targets that we set out for this three-year period. We are, as you know, operating in a very disciplined market in the Nordic region, and the competitors are rational, and they respond rather quickly to any changes in increased claims, frequencies or severities, including sort of increased inflation environment. Currently, we have been seeing inflation of a little bit above 4% if you do sort of a Nordic total average, and we'll make sure that we're pricing them with price increases ahead of this and implementing on average again on a Nordic, total Nordic basis, about 5% price increases.
Making sure that, again, we are ahead of the curve, securing also good underwriting profits going forward. I'm really happy to see that we're able to do this, and at the same time, have excellent performance on all important customer metrics. We see that our Net Promoter Score is increasing quarter after quarter. We see that we're growing in terms of number of customers in all business areas and all markets. We see that we continue to have record high retention rates. BA Private, large division, having even above 90% retention rates. We're able to do this in a way that also obviously creates value for the customers with really strong performance on the customer metrics. All of this together gives us also a very strong growth.
We saw for the first half year an organic growth, or all the growth we have is purely organic, of 7.5%. That's even in an environment where the new car sales is fairly low, in particular in Sweden, which is particularly important for us. If you would adjust it for that, our growth for the first half year would even be above 9%. With a super strong performance on the top line as well. All of this together means that we have revised the outlook for this year. At the Q2 announcement, published a new outlook of 80.5-82.5 for the full year of 2022. That's sort of the backdrop.
Again, I thought that the main focus of today's presentations should be more on, okay, where can we find even more value? What are kind of the value creation levers that we have at If? And of course, we have a list here, and we'll try to go through these areas. This is not an exhaustive list. We of course have even more areas that we work on than these ones. These that we've listed here are at least sizable. They make kind of a difference to our business in sort of their size. They're also quite near in timing. Most of these are being sort of materialized, and we capitalize on these as we sort of speak now.
The things that we'll talk about today, we'll talk about our excellent position in the retail market, where we are a digital leader, and how we will capitalize on that by outgrowing the retail market. We talk about the automotive industry, where we again are by far the largest partner to the automotive industry, in particular building on the position that we have in Sweden, and then how we will benefit from that both on a short-term perspective and even on a long-term perspective. We will talk about the SME market that is also rapidly becoming digital and how we will basically be able to copy a lot of the things that we did in the retail market and make sure that we also have good growth in the SME market going forward.
We'll then talk about the personal risk market, a market that is typically showing higher growth rates than the other P&C insurance lines, and of course, how that will benefit also us going forward. We will talk about claims and digitalization in claims, and again, how that will give us even a couple of value creation levers that we can pull even more in the years to come. On top of this comes the continued work that we do on improving the cost ratio. That has actually been covered quite well already in Torbjörn's presentation, so Ingrid and I will not spend much time on that. On top of all of this, sort of these first six items, of course, mostly is centered around things that will improve underwriting profits.
On top of that, we of course also have the situation with increased interest rates. That again, also Torbjörn talked about, so we'll not cover that more in this section. That of course come also on top of continued good underwriting performance that we, with increased interest rates and the duration mismatch we have between assets and liabilities will benefit from that going forward. That's sort of the key areas that we'll try to dive a little bit into, and I'll hand over to Ingrid to start to talk about
Digitalization in the retail market
Thank you. Wanted to start talking a bit how we digitalize the customer engagement, but also just a short recap on the sales was discussed earlier. As mentioned, 20% of our premiums are closed in digital channels. If you look at objects, it's roughly 25%. We have a direct business model, so kind of 60% of our sales are closed in own channels. Out of that, over 50%, you know, of the customer-initiated sales is started and closed online. If you think about started online, then closed in our centers, we are up on 60%. That's kind of. I think that 20% figure undermines how digital sales the business actually is. Of course, when the customers start online, we have increasing expectations on our services.
This is illustrating our Nordic MyPages platform, which is our self-service portal. Remember, we have 3.3 million customers in the retail segment, and on this platform, we have over 1 million logins per month. Kind of the self-service is increasingly used due to the fact that our customers, to a large degree, have started in digital channels, that they have digital invoices, digital policy documents, and so forth. In here, they can edit their insurances, view their insurances, file a claim, track the claim, and so forth. Sixty percent of our customers who use this actually access this through their mobile phone. This also drives business volumes as we see that 30% of the sales we have in digital channels actually stems from customers first starting in our logged-in channels.
You go through insurances, and you think about all the needs you have. This is actually happening quite organically. On top of that, we have invested and are investing further into more digital advisory capabilities and steering, so this is also likely to increase. Here, we are capitalizing on existing customer base logging into our MyPages portal. I can also mention a bit on the cross-sale because, you know, we have also moved away from cross-sales historically, calling kind of more cold prospects so to say, to moving on to more event-based prospects. Event-based in the sense of using external data that's relevant when a customer is moving, changing a car, and so forth, but also event-based in terms of using internal data.
We know that when a customer logs into MyPages, something is happening in the customer relationship. If that customer is not kind of going in and buying something themselves, it triggers also a prospect that we call out from our outbound channels. This is also important to generate relevant prospect for our internal outbound channels. Ricard talked a lot about improving the processes and, you know, designing the products for digital, and that's crucial. I think that's also the most important. With excellent sales platform, but no traffic, there will be no sales. In order to have kind of a good traffic and good traffic that also ensures good distribution economics, you need a strong brand. We have a very strong brand across markets. This is the brand awareness top of mind of various markets.
Really strong. Of course, still with some improvement potential, but in general, a very strong brand, and we're seen as a trusted insurance company. When it comes to the branding and the marketing capabilities, we have a lot of scale benefits through using our media production across markets. We have distinct brand assets that we also leverage across all our markets. Also as part of the marketing is becoming more and more data-driven. We have competitive advantage from utilizing a Nordic data platform, combining also, of course, a Nordic platform for our own customer data, but also the digital data. Of course, our website is the main starting point for our customers. If you look at all the contacts we have in own channels, digital starting point is for two-thirds of our customers.
Annually, we have 36 million visits to this website. I think also if you have to have a good brand to also have the good distribution economics. We have 50% of our customers coming to our website come to direct traffic. That means that they, without any bought media, enter at if.se and start from there. Without a strong brand, you need to buy that same traffic through earned media and with also increasing prices on tactical media. This is a real asset to have such a high share of direct traffic. This has been talked about, but of course, the result of increasing digital platform and high customer satisfaction is that we have seen nice growth in the customer base in the retail segment, now 3.3 million.
Also retention stable over the past year. Also the NPS, net promoter score, at growing levels and already at very high level. 62% is a very high NPS in the retail segment. This has also resulted in a nice and healthy growth that we're happy with. Which we look at the average over the past three years is 5%, also when normalizing for the drop in new car sales in 2020 and 2021. Speaking about car sales, we have by far the broadest cooperations with mobility partners in the Nordics. Every fifth car that runs on the road in the Nordics is insured in If.
If you look at the new car sales, we insure 26% of the new cars sold in the Nordics, particularly big in Sweden, where roughly 70% of the new cars sold are insured by If. This is also due to the special construction in the Swedish market with the collision damage warranty that drives up this high number. Of course, this doesn't happen overnight. This is due to over 20 years of cooperation with the car industry that we benefit from, both through kind of good cooperation distribution side, also on the purchasing power when it comes to the body shops that we cooperate with. And also we are well positioned to take part of the digitization that the mobility industry is going through.
have also won the prize for the best partner in the automotive industry across all markets. Every year, this prize has been given, except one year in Denmark. Short term, of course long term this is an industry going through a trend that we think that we're well positioned to capitalize on. Short term we also see growth opportunity when the car market will normalize back to historical levels. If you look at pre-COVID level year-on-year on Nordic level, the car sales were around 860,000-890,000 and dropped quite significantly during COVID years due to lockdowns and also now supply chain issues.
If you look at the Swedish market, pre-COVID, around 350,000-380,000 cars sold per year and dropped during COVID to sub-300 and now around 300,000. Of course, short term, this is supply driven. This is not driven by a decrease in demand by consumers. Kind of 100,000 increase in new cars sold would equal a EUR 55 million increase in our GWP if you look at the Swedish market. There's also effect in other markets, but it's higher in the Swedish market due to the collision damage warranty construction there. This we also talked about in the previous Capital Markets Day, February last year.
It's one of the key trends happening now that, of course, the OEMs also want to take a larger role in the value chain with also increasing their stake in the direct sales model. We also see that new entrants entering the market are entering with more direct sales model. This require quite a lot of embedded insurance capabilities, like being able to make a quote, make a buy, also file a claim within the embedded insurance or car ecosystems. An insurance player who are the best of providing customer and partner value in this setup are the winners. This is something we have worked with for years and still are working with in close cooperation, because this needs to be developed in cooperation with the OEMs and also other industry players.
Another trend that's happening in the automotive industry that also impacts us is, of course, the electrification of the automotive industry. We are a leading insurer in Norway, which has been a pioneer market when it comes to electrification. Now 80% of the new cars sold are electric vehicles in the Norwegian market. Of course, this makes us have quite unique insight into EV-specific risk, also on the aftermarket side, as it's a bit different aftermarket know-how on the electric vehicles versus others. We also have insight into the EV customers' preferences. Of course, this is a knowledge that we can capitalize on when the EV market is now rapidly increasing in other markets.
If you look at Sweden, which is our biggest or the biggest markets in the Nordics, it's estimated that this year 60% of the new car sales will be chargeable vehicles and roughly 34%-35% will be battery electric vehicles. Of course, this is knowledge that we utilize also in the other markets. Maybe the most important with the electrification is that the electric vehicle models are usually the models that the OEMs use as entry models for the direct model, and they also focus more on connected car capabilities. This really requires that in order to cooperate with car partners on this model, you need to have very high digital maturity and digital solutions already. There's a lot of services that we have and have developed in connection with connected cars.
Of course, primarily being the closest services like roadside assistance, that you get automatic notification, or a prompt automatic notification when you have an accident, and you can be steered directly to the closest body shop, or you can get automatic dispatched roadside assistance to you. We are really well positioned to take advantage of this trend. It can also be exemplified. We launched the world's first Android Automotive insurance in-car app with Polestar. That's just one example that we are one of the pioneers in this development. This is not easy to copy overnight. This is due to over 20+ years with experience working really closely with the car partners and also due to the fact that we have really close integrations with these partners today that we are further building on.
With that, I leave the word to Morten Thorsrud to talk about the SME market opportunity. Yeah.
Good. Ingrid talked about how digitalization has changed distribution in the retail market. Of course, a similar thing is now taking place in the SME market. The Nordic SME market, of course, is a big market. It's a highly profitable market. Of course, it's a market where we already have a substantial market share. Maybe also, of course, can continue to grow and where there are clear pockets of growth for us. If you look over the last five years, this market has been growing about 3%, and we've been having a growth about 5% in this market. Again, digitalization is really taking off in the SME segment as well. However, it's perhaps even more complicated here than in the retail market.
The needs of the SMEs are quite different from one sector, one industry to another, and the breadth of our product offering is really big in the SME market. Digitalizing this is even more of a challenge than the private markets that are a bit more standardized. We see already now a real big demand in the market. Today already, about a quarter of new sales in this market is initiated digitally. Here it's a difference between SME and private. When we talk about the 20% online sales in private, that is purely online. No human interaction, pure online. On top of that comes sort of things that are started online but closed offline. The 20% in private, that's purely online.
The 24% of that we present here, that's things that are initiated by the customer online, but not necessarily closed online. Still in the SME market, our call center plays a very important role following up on the digital leads when the customer contact us. The SME market also in the Nordics is predominantly a direct market. Benefits from digitalization will benefit us, and of course, it will benefit our customers, being sort of predominantly, again, a direct market. Of course, we are now launching a large number of products online. Today, you can insure any vehicle in any of the Nordic markets if you're an SME customer.
That might not sound sort of very great, but if you think about any vehicle, I talk about the company car, I talk about the taxi, I talk about the bus, a tractor, a dumpster, whatever, any vehicle you can insure online, fully automatic in all Nordic countries. That's quite sort of an achievement already. Of course, we are now adding on more and more products to make sure that we really can offer all relevant products for SMEs on the web with full optimization. Of course, we see that this is what the customers want. Ricard talked about that, you know, if you're a small business entrepreneur, you don't want to use sort of the prime business hours to do the insurance errands. You probably do it in the evenings, the weekends. That's what we see.
Sort of a lot of our contacts and traffic takes place outside of office hours. Also similarly, as we saw on the retail side, creating an ecosystem is important on the SME side. We have invested in building a my business setup, where again, our commercial customers basically can do the normal sort of changes, updates to your insurances, a lot of course around invoicing, reporting claims, and so forth. We even made a connection between the commercial market and the private market. If you're an employee of any company and you have employer-paid insurances, like employee benefits type of insurances, the employees will be able to see that in their own My Pages login. We're creating then a link between the commercial market and the private market. Of course, this is well received in the market.
We see that our customers are giving us top rating when we ask them to rate our services. We see that also external partners recognize us as actually being the leader in this segment. We see that this of course makes a lot of sense for end customers that becomes even more loyal with sort of increased retention rates. A really sort of positive story of how again, digitalization is starting really to take off also in the SME market. The next area I thought I should talk about is what we call the personal risk market. When we talk about this market, we think about all of the insurances of a person's life and well-being, so to speak. It could be health insurances, child insurances, workers' comp insurances, disability insurances, accident insurances, and so forth.
This is a market that historically has been outgrowing the other P&C insurance lines. Of course, we expect this trend to be, to continue also in the future for the next 10-20 years. There's clear demand for more health services. People are willing to pay for it directly themselves or through their, kind of getting it as coverage through their employer. This is a market that will continue to outgrow the other P&C insurance products. Historically, little bit less than 4% on other P&C insurance products, and then about 6% in this market segment. Another thing that is a little bit special about these type of products is that quite often they need to be sold. If you think about if you have a car, you need a car insurance, you don't really have a choice.
You don't need to buy sort of an accident cover for yourself. You don't need to buy a child insurance cover. It's more an active choice. That means that quite many of these products, they need to be sold. Therefore, you need a big customer base, and you need a really efficient distribution set up with good cross sales abilities. That's, of course, something that we really have. With our 3.3 million households being customers, with some 350,000 SMEs, and some few hundred large corporates in the Nordic region, we have a lot of customer contacts that we are, of course, leveraging and making sure that we're doing up-sales in this market. We already today have basically all the products you need in all markets.
We can cover any life event or any life stage, whether it's on your kind of private life, leisure time or whether it's kind of more work-related sort of risks. We have already the full breadth of covers. These markets are not fully mature. We see that the penetration here, if you take, for instance, health insurance, it's only an 18% penetration throughout the Nordics. There is a lot of growth from just making sure that this market is becoming more mature, to make sure that market and the different products have higher penetration throughout the various countries. This is also a market where the digital model works. If you look at amount of digital distribution, you see that it's basically quite similar to what you see in the rest of If.
People also like to buy these insurances online. Similarly, also on the claims side, people like to report the claims online. Of course, if there's anything more serious, people typically call us. Insurance and P&C insurance is quite often about frequency claims. The digital channels are really the most effective in that sense. That, of course, means that we can compete in this market with an operational model that has really strong economics. This market represents sort of quite a big growth opportunity sort of for P&C insurers in general in the Nordic region. We have a very strong position by leveraging both our customer franchise, our excellent distribution capabilities, and in particular sort of our digital capabilities. Let's talk a little bit about digitalization in claims, and perhaps you can take that, Ingrid Holthe.
It's on the previous slide, increase in digitalization on the personal insurance claims. That's also the lines of business we actually have the highest online intake of claims. On average, it's now above 50% of the claims are submitted online. These are the claims that customers submit, not the ones that go through partners of glass and roadside assistance that are anyway automatically handled. If you look at the retail segment, it's close to 60%. Of course, this drives down claims handling costs, but also increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. Illustrated by example here, but needless to say, of course, a claim that starts online and handled automatically drives down the contacts per claim.
What is also interesting is that when we measure the net promoter score for claims, everything else equal that are reported online versus on phone, we actually have higher net promoter scores on the claims that are reported online. We know there's a very strong correlation between claim satisfaction and retention for customer who has a claim. This is also important for a customer satisfaction and business volume, not only from a cost perspective, reducing claims handling cost. Another important aspect of the digitalization of claims is that it also enables better steering and cost control, which of course then impacts the claims payment. We have kind of annual purchasing volume of EUR 1.5 billion.
Of course, with the increasing share of customers that are starting online and claims that are being processed online, we see that we have managed to use that advantage to even larger extent. That increases our ability to steer, which again increases our ability to have the purchasing power. When the customers start to file a claim, we steer that customer to the preferred partners. This is done kind of through algorithm-based solutions that we develop and maintain ourselves. We also have cost control through a very structured and solid category management framework and logical grouping of into Nordic cost categories. Of course, a lot of the claims cost control is monitored automatically by self-built analytics.
We use AI to a large extent also to optimize repair methods and also, for example, to validate whether they should actually be repaired or replaced. With this categories, can mention some examples. Will not name them here, but two of the categories here we have had recent examples of both through consolidating into more Nordic categories, increasing the digital share, and also then being able to then steer more. We have seen annual impacts of one of the category 3%-4%, another just above 5% in claims cost saving. Needless to say, but we have long-term contracts within this contract categories that secures stability, and we monitor inflation, of course, carefully and a lot of it is also priced directly into our tariff.
The last thing I want to highlight when it comes to how digitalization also enables claims reduction in claims payment is when it comes to the fraud detection, and this is also related to our cooperation with Hastings. Of course, this is enabled by analytics and also digital solutions, and it's something that we have worked in, but it's really where we see the fruit also of the collaboration with Hastings that has come farther on the use of tools, also in advanced analytics, but also on the breadth of how this is integrated into the core operations. We are on track on delivering on what was also announced in terms of synergies in that area after the, in connection with our first half year results last year.
This is an area where we believe it's significant improvement, but still, of course, difficult to compare across markets with the different risks and market dynamics. A lot of fruitful learnings there.
Guess it's time to try to sort of summarize a little bit. You know our history, sort of, we're coming from a history of very strong performance. We operate in a very rational market. Currently we see really good progress on digitalization. That has created a lot of value for us, in particular in the retail segment, but of course that we'll see is going to create even more value throughout our full operations. Currently, of course, we see inflation creeping up a little bit, but of course we are making sure that we are pricing and keeping ahead of the curve and, of course, continuing to deliver also on operational efficiency. All in all, this makes us in an excellent position to kind of leverage any key trends in the markets.
Today we've been talking and in particular about these six areas, how we will capitalize on the digital leadership in the retail segment, how we will benefit from being the unrivaled leading partner to the automotive industry, how we are well positioned to capture growth in SME, again, as a result of that market becoming even more digital, how we are also well positioned to capture a share of the growing personal risk market in the Nordics. We talked about also then claims transformation, how that will also give us new value creation levers and opportunity to both work on the claims handling cost as well on the claims payment side. On top of this, of course, digitalization in general will enable us to continue to reduce our cost ratio going forward.
First, all in all, this means that we are well positioned to continue to grow our underwriting profits also in the period to come. I thought I should just sort of leave you with this, sort of just showing our sort of ten-year history in terms of underwriting profit performance and sort of these six areas focusing on the improved underwriting profits and in addition to that, sort of course, also still remembering the increased investment yield that, of course, will help us on the investment side. I think with that, Sami, I think we should open up for questions.
Correct. We are now going into our second Q&A session. We didn't get a chance to ask any of the questions from online last time, so I'm gonna start with one this time actually, which comes back to digitalization theme. We've talked a lot about digital transformation and using digital in the business today, but also about underwriting and underwriting discipline and, I guess, steering the profit. How do you combine those two within the same vehicle without them sort of interfering with each other and encroaching on each other?
Yeah, I can start, and then I'm sure Ingrid will add on. I think that was exactly the conflict that we saw back in time and the conflict that in a way Erika was talking about, that when you start digitalization, you get the conflict between underwriting and the underwriting focus and then sort of the more customer focused, sort of trying to simplify. That's difficult. I mean, when we started selling insurances online, we were asking 20, 30 questions. Today we ask two. Of course you need to do that in a way where you're not reducing the sophistication of the tariff.
You need to find other ways of getting that information. I think getting that culture where you understand that, you know, long-term combining the underwriting culture with a more customer-centric and digital culture, it's actually two of the same things, but that takes time. Perhaps, I don't know, perhaps you have some more
Yeah
Inspirations to come in.
I think it's a good example that we have kind of reduced the number of questions, but at the same time improved the underwriting quality, for example, when they start online. Another one is when you look at the retention levels, it's also because we have very stable pricing. We can have stable pricing because we price the customer correct when enter. You know, it's really no conflict if you do this right, is how we see it, but it was seen as a conflict in the beginning. It actually isn't, I would say.
Great. Let's then go to questions from the room. Why don't we start with Alex this time at the front? Can we get a mic?
Thanks. Alex Evans, Credit Suisse. A couple of questions on the dynamics that you're pointing out between new car sales and how impactful that is. I was just wondering if you could give some color on the retention between that and how that compares to the group's 90% and how does it compare to your retention in the used car market? Is there anything that you can do on that customer journey to improve or sort of desensitize your sort of growth to that? And then secondly, I don't know if this is more of a question for Toby or Morten, but just on the synergies between Hastings and If P&C. I think, you know, Hastings have historically been a bit hesitant around EV exposure.
Given sort of the background you've got in Norway with the 80% BEVs, I just wondered if that's changed a bit with some of the cooperation you've had.
Yeah. Perhaps I can start with the Hastings cooperation, and then you can think about answering the first one in the meantime. I think when it comes to Hastings cooperation, I think the most fascinating area of cooperating on is actually on pricing. You know, we can look into the tariffs of Hastings and see how they price, and they use a lot of parameters that are not available to us in the Nordics. But we can use the insight and somehow mimic that back to our tariffs in the Nordics. It goes also the other way around. When it comes to, for instance, our insight into pricing of electric cars, it would take Hastings, I guess, 10 years to build up that insight that we have.
In particular, again, in Sweden, we have a very fast access to claims data on new cars. Again, due to this collision damage warranty that we've been talking about a lot, we insure 70% of all new cars in Sweden. It means that immediately when there is a new model, we have claim statistics. That would take Hastings 10 years to get. We get it sort of right away when the model is sort of first out in the street because we immediately get 100% penetration on the brands and the models that we insure. I think that's really the fascinating area to cooperate on, at least for us really insurance geeks. There is a lot of benefit from cooperating on that, which is also something we of course do in the Nordics.
We have pricing parameters that we use in some countries where we don't have the data directly in other countries, but we can still mimic in a way the insight when we do the pricing then in those countries. That's also an area that we benefit from in If internally as well.
Yeah. Maybe just comment on the car part. I think this is an area where we're seeing increasing retention as well. I think the car industry previously, at least, how others operated and probably were much more impacted by your bait prices. Of course, get the customers in, but you don't have the highest renewal rate. We have moved away from that. We actually have seen kind of the same increase in kind of retention on this. It's not like this is any different than others. Focus on getting them in on the right price.
Yeah. Pricing stability is really important on that because when you insure a car and you get a good attractive price, and you kind of after 3, 4 years replace that car and buy a new one, and you see that again, sort of you get the price that makes sense to you, a good price, you continue to sort of renew and have a relationship with the same company. That's sort of the only way of getting the 90% retention to really make sure that you have good, attractive prices, but also sort of stable prices in a way. You need to be risk correct when you start.
If you're not risk correct when you start, then you need to adjust the price and you're gonna have a problem when a customer then renews or kind of buy a new car because then it's gonna be a big price difference between sort of what you paid before and suddenly what you're gonna pay for the new car. Stability, being risk correct sort of from the start is just so extremely crucial when you go online because then your prices are of course directly there out in the market with no ability to discount or anything. It's sort of the customer get the best, the net price in a way directly. Youdish.
Thank you. Youdish Chicooree, Autonomous Research. My first question is really on your target to grow underwriting profit by mid-single digit. I mean, you are raising rates by around 5% across the book. You're achieving premium growth just under 8%, even if car sales are 20% below pre-pandemic levels. Today you've outlined a number of areas where you think you can create value, like especially I note SME and the potential in personal risk insurance. Is there any reason why you can't grow underwriting profit by double digit, at least low double digit in the next couple of years? That's my first question. Secondly is on the risk of claims inflation and in motor insurance. I think in Sweden you said you insure.
Well, you basically, on new car sales, you have a 70% market share on the insurance side. My understanding is those agreements will tend to be multi-year. Is that correct? If so, how do you protect yourself against the risk of inflation?
Yeah.
Thanks. Thank you.
On your first question, this is a capital markets update. We set obviously the targets for this sort of financial planning period 18 months ago. Of course, 18 months ago inflation was not where it is today. Of course, our financial targets for this planning period is reflecting the situation that we had sort of 18 months ago. We didn't really want to change our targets for this update. The targets are what they are, but you see that we have been clearly outperforming the targets. Of course, the world has changed since we kind of set the targets for this three-year period.
When it comes to the collision damage warranty business that we have, yes, those are typically longer term contracts, but we always have yearly pricing as a part of it. We are very careful on that. We only would like to write one-year contracts. It's something that we've always been extremely strict on, which I think now we really see why that is important. Also in those agreements, it's yearly negotiation of the prices. We are able to implement also sort of then price increases to meet the inflation that we see on those.
Thank you.
We can take Vinit next, please.
Thanks. This is Vinit from Mediobanca. Two questions please. One is more strategic question on motor insurance, because for a while we've been, or a while ago, we used to worry about, oh my god, there'll be no motor insurance in five years or 10 years because this or that will happen to electric cars and OEMs will take control. Your slide, what is it? 31 exactly says OEMs taking control.
Your next sentence is that playing to its strength.
Now, isn't it a risk that, say for example, I'm not fully up to date, but maybe Teslas of the world are doing insurance themselves?
What's the risk on the product mix of motor insurance? What are the OEMs doing? Any thoughts would be very welcome. Second question is just, you know, in the slide 39 had the claims that private customers are presenting to you at more than 50% now.
Again, you know, similar question to what I'd asked Ricard earlier, but it seems that the chart shows a big pickup in 2020, which probably was the lockdown period. More people at home, don't wanna go out, don't want to do other things, just playing around on computers. Is that something at risk? Is it just a number we are celebrating too early, or do you see that to be a stable kind of achievement
Yeah, I can answer the first one, and then you, Ingrid, can take the one on claims. It's quite clear that the OEMs want to take more control over their sort of value chain when it comes to the whole automotive industry. Of course, integrating insurance is a part of that. When that is said, you need to think about the fact that insurance is actually a very physical thing, if you think about it. Those cars need to be repaired. You need to have a repair network in order to do that. You need to do quality assurance on that repair network. You need to have digital services handling that. You need to have roadside assistance sort of to do that. Obviously, the OEMs will not build up that, so they will still need to cooperate with insurance companies.
Just like the OEMs and the automotive industry have been cooperating with insurance companies up until today. I think the change you will more see is that there will be a little bit more that winner takes it all, right? That an OEM will cooperate with perhaps only one partner in the Nordics. You don't need to cooperate with all of them. You can cooperate with one. I think that's perhaps more a change. Again, that's not too different from what we have, at least in Sweden today, again, mainly due to their collision damage warranty, where the OEMs select one partner. I think it's easy to kind of think that, okay, now the OEMs will take over this. No.
It's insurance is actually a very physical thing when it come to think about sort of really the claim signing and the delivery and steering all of this, preventing fraud, preventing sort of wrong repair methods and everything. You basically need an insurance company to handle all that.
Do you know what Tesla is doing? Tesla is using other networks or their own. They couldn't have built. Do you happen to know what Tesla is doing, for example, on that?
Well, they use different partners around. I think that's typically what all of them are doing. I mean, they consider putting their brand on it somehow, but still they need partners. I would think that few of the OEMs and few of the car producers really would like to have the insurance risks on their balance sheet. So again, I think it is over time somehow changing the industry and sort of the value chain, if you like. But I think it's an excellent place for a big Nordic player that really can play to our strength.
On the claims uptick part, I think it's twofold. It's fair to say that I think in the beginning of 2020 when we had kind of an increase in travel claims, also kind of usually highly kind of online submitted, you get a claims mixed effect that increases the share. Kind of beyond that, it's been kind of reflecting both the digital maturity in the population as they also had to use digital services when other things locked down. Also that in the same period, we have also accelerated our effort and investment into this area. Partly explained by general digital maturity. I think the only, in the beginning 2020, we see kind of a mixed effect explaining this increase.
It is really also what we see in general. I mean, when the customer has bought, for instance, an insurance online, that customer is gonna buy the next insurance online. When the customer has reported a claim online, that person is gonna report the next claim online. It's kind of the market is becoming more mature and, yes, suddenly during COVID, people started reporting much more claims online, even though we hadn't changed our operating model at all. That's kind of a bit fun, but that's how it is. People have to get used to it.
All right. If we take Faizan and then Jan Erik and then Blair.
Thank you. Faizan Lakhani from HSBC. My first question on the personal risk market. Talking to some of your peers, they suggest it's quite a difficult market to break in. You need brand awareness, a lot of data to sort of penetrate, and there's, you know, quite high retention. Is there an opportunity for you to look at, you know, bolt-ons or in organic growth to kind of accelerate your presence in that market? Second one is on the SME market. Once again, your peers are all targeting sort of the micro SME element of that market. Are you seeing increased competition on that sort of size of consumers and turnover? Thanks.
Yeah, first at the personal risk market. It is slightly different than the other products. I think it is an area where we primarily see organic growth opportunities, not that many if you kind of, if you were thinking about sort of bolt-ons, there are not that many sort of players. We did the bolt-on sort of some few years ago, actually, with a company called Vertikal in Norway. I mean, that's always an opportunity. Primarily our focus is to grow organically. Again, we have 3.3 million households and still, let's say a modest penetration. The market is growing, the market is maturing.
There is plenty of organic growth that's sort of, I think, the main growth lever in that market. It's also, I think, something that perhaps we didn't mention in the presentation. It's of course products where you have much longer duration on the customer relationships. I mean, you change your car every three to four years. In the Nordic, people move on average every eight years. You have the personal risk products for 15-20 years. That's of course strengthening loyalty in the customer base, the more you can cross-sell of these products. But again, it's primarily an organic gain.
Sorry, just to add to that. Do you have the capabilities, the data, the claims handling experience to policy duration eighteen-
Yes.
plus years or so?
Yeah.
Okay.
This is already a big market for us. I mean, we have all the products. We have the claims experiences, we have the data. Some products are less mature in some markets than in other markets, but we have all the capabilities. It's more about sort of doing the cross-selling, sort of, getting penetration up in the market. Your second question was?
It was more into the micro SME.
Yeah, the micro SME. Yeah, there is a lot of competition on the retail side. There's a lot of competition on the micro SME side. I think both of this market, the thing you really need to excel on is digitalization. In order to win in these markets, you need to be able to have the best digital solutions. Yes, there is a lot of competition. It's also a situation now where kind of size is really important to have sort of the ability to invest sort of the EUR 90 million that you saw. I mean, you need to have a certain size.
Being able to develop Nordic solutions as we do on the SME side, of course, is highly beneficial because then we can really leverage that throughout the Nordics. Yes. There is a lot of competition, but I think they're not all players that are able to invest as much as they need on digitalization. I think that's gonna decide who's winning or not in this market as well.
Great. Thank you very much.
All right. Jan Erik Gjerland.
Yes. Thank you. Some more questions from my side as well. Back to the affordability issue, when electricity prices and energy prices and food prices, everything moves up, interest rates even today in UK also. How is it about affordability and pricing? Is it so easy now? It has been sort of easy to reprice, it seems to be on your underwriting profits.
How easy will it be going forward to really do the repricing to the household sector and also maybe to the SME and industrials? We know that there have been some lower premiums in the past, as you talked about, but is there any sign of anything on the affordability side these days that makes this case a little bit different now than one year ago?
No. The short answer to that would be no. Of course there could be nuances to it. I typically say that, you know, today in the Nordics, 5% is zero, right? Sort of people expect 5% at least price increase. So implementing 5% is almost like implementing zero before. I would argue that sort of, we've been through some few years where we've had 3%-4% price increases and where, the consumers have kind of felt and had opinion that price, general price increases was zero. That was actually more difficult than implementing 5% when everybody expect it. To your affordability type of question, insurance is a very resilient industry, as you know. It works in good times, it works in bad times.
Cutting down on insurance is typically the last thing that sort of a household do. We are at least in previous sort of recessions, if you kind of even talk about that, we haven't seen any kind of big impact from people not insuring their houses and cars and so forth. It's a pretty resilient business model in both good and bad times.
My second question is on frequency. It seems to be some higher frequency in some areas of your products. How could that sort of impact your combined ratios going forward when it comes to the average claims is moving upwards, you're pricing a little bit above that inflation? But when the frequency is increasing again now after COVID, how should we think about your underwriting excellence and profits from that case?
Yeah. Clearly, frequencies are increasing after COVID. That's as expected. We were typically reporting 3%-4% positive impact sort of some quarters during COVID. I noted it was quite a bit more than peers. Now we see that some of that frequency is coming back, which is exactly what we planned for. So far that's not causing any concerns at all. It's exactly what we expect to see that frequencies are moving back to the sort of pre-COVID levels. That's as business as planned sort of, and just as it should be.
Great. I think, Blair, and I think this is gonna have to be the last question.
Oh, that's a lot of pressure to me.
That'd be good.
All right. On the personal risk side, just interested what the combined ratios there look like. Some of it looks short tail, some of it looks long tail. You know, give us an idea of what the combines look like there. Secondly, we're maybe not getting self-driving cars, but we're certainly getting connected cars throwing off lots of data. Do you get that data? Are you using it? Is it useful?
Yep. I can take the first one, then Ingrid can take the second one. Personal risk products, that's a big variety of products. My short and simple answer would be that we have more or less exactly the same targets for these products as we have for If in general. That's the simple answer. Yes, some of them are significantly more long tail. In theory, you could have a little bit higher combined ratio targets. Some of them are just extremely short tail, so you need to have a little bit lower combined ratio target. That's what we have. It's profitability wise, not different than any other kind of P&C insurance product.
Of course, as I mentioned, extremely long loyalty, which is very beneficial when you're gonna price a portfolio that you have high loyalty.
When it comes to connected cars and the data, I think that's where the really strong relationship with the car partners play into role because of course that's what you need in order to get that data in addition to the customer consent solution and the customers' both willingness to share the data and what you can actually use the data for. Then it's up to us together with the partners to provide value adding services, so it actually makes sense for the customers to share the data. 'Cause the data is there, but it's also about the customer's willingness to share.
That's. I talked a little bit about it, but the most natural is kind of, you know, obvious value-adding services connected to also where we operate that you get the kind of automatic notification of loss, which is kind of helpful for the customer, but also for us in terms of further improving and digitalizing our core processes. There are potential for further revenue expansion of the data, but that depends again if the customers are willing to share it for that purpose. What's immediate is to kind of improve the existing processes related to claims handling and roadside assistance and steering to the nearest body shop, as I mentioned.
It's a very complicated area, and therefore we also, as a small side comment, have a small ownership stake actually in a company that is only focusing on this together with one of our big car partners. To really be on the forefront on how to get the data from the car and how to really systemize it and use it. That's definitely for the future. Yes. Good.
Great. Thank you very much. We only have the summary of concluding remarks from Torbjörn left.
Can I be here? Very good. Remains for me then to just wrap up with this slide describing our simple but special company, I think. Stating that we have the exceptional track record that we have. Stating the statement about the Nordic PSE market leadership, where we're harnessing probably more benefits of scale and cross-country synergies than anyone else. But also seeing business opportunities that Morten has described, very often based on our digital capabilities. The size of us makes us an ideal partner, often a Nordic partner, for instance, for car brands, in a way that nobody else can emulate. On top of this, we have the growth opportunity in the UK, with a digital leader, also in that market.
We have of course talked less about capital efficiency and our commitment to the balanced framework that we now have and the optimization, rather rapid optimization that we have of capital since two years, and our efforts to minimize the capital requirements. Today, we have also combined this with the news of the evaluation of the dual listing in Stockholm that we think could benefit both existing and future shareholders. Thank you very much all for spending the afternoon together with us. It was a pleasure.