To today's presentation where we have the pleasure to present Sampo Group. The occasion of today, of course, the fresh out of the print this morning, Q3 interim statement. To help us through today's presentation, we are joined by the Head of Investor Relations, Sami Taipalus. As always, you're very welcome to ask questions in the box down below. This is primarily a Q&A. You will run through some of the headlines of the results, Sami, but it is trying to get through this quarter too. Questions. Mainly. For now, I will hand the call over to you, Sami.
Thank you. Yeah, as you said, I'll run through a few key points quickly to begin with. I have quite a lot of slides because these are the same slides as our CEO presented on the conference call, and there was quite a big strategic backdrop, but I'll skip some of them. Just to begin with an overview of the result, really. There's a few key highlights there for us, I think. First of all, really strong operational momentum, particularly in terms of organic growth in the Nordics we're seeing. In our private retail business across the Nordics and in our commercial business, which is mostly directed towards smaller companies, we're also seeing actually strengthening growth momentum over this year.
That's partly because we have some targeted growth initiatives in this area and partly because we're seeing a bit more of an increase in tailwind from the sales of new cars. I'll come back a little bit to that later. We continue to grow well in the U.K. as well, although we've had to slow growth there a little bit because the pricing environment has got a little bit tougher. In industrial, we're continuing to be very focused on profitability and on managing risk and margins. The margin development for the group as a whole has been very solid. Similar underlying trends to the second quarter, so a little bit of margin improvement in the Nordics, around 50 basis points in total on the combined ratio if you put together the risk, so the claims and the cost side.
In the U.K., a sort of steady development. We've had a fairly actually benign claims environment in the third quarter with sort of limited weather losses. Limited big fires, and those types of losses that we can have with the corporates as well. We haven't let all of that fall through to the bottom line yet, though, because these are things that can go up and down. What we've done is we've continued to conservatively recognize sort of longer-term loss trends and be prudent in how we set those numbers. That's a bit on the operational result. Putting it all together, it drove a 17% increase in the underwriting profit, so the money we make off the insurance premiums year on year, which drove a 14% increase in the operating EPS, operating earnings per share. Now, that comes on the back of a very strong development also in 2024.
We are just over halfway through our strategic period now, and we have seen that the performance now has been so much stronger than the more than 7% operating EPS growth target that we set at our capital markets day in 2024, that we have actually increased now the operating earnings per share target to more than 9% for this period from 2024 to 2026. Partly that reflects, as I mentioned, the strong performance to date, so it is a little bit backward-looking. Of course, it shows that we have confidence going into the last year of the strategic cycle, 2026. It shows also that we want to keep the ambition high going into that last year. We do not want to let up or take the foot off the gas just because it has been going well in the first so far.
Outside the operating result, I want to highlight a couple of important things. First of all, we saw the IPO of Nova, the Swedish consumer bank, in the end of September, where we owned 20% before the IPO. We sold down five percentage points of that, so we now own about 15% of the company. That generated, the IPO and the subsequent share price development, which was very strong, generated a large EUR 355 million gain in our P&L in the third quarter. The proceeds from the IPO itself, which is what we've got as cash out of all of that to date, were EUR 150 million roughly. We have announced today that we're going to return those proceeds through a new share buyback program, which will be launched as soon as possible. That's the high-level overview. I am going to.
See if I can dive into a couple of these slides. I think maybe just on this one, a couple of words. If you looked at the results materials today, we have talked quite a lot about organic growth opportunities. You will remember we had a change of CEO, a new CEO came in on the 1st of October. A big part of the agenda going forward is to capitalize on the strengths that we have across the Nordics, on the sort of often quite unique operational capabilities that we have to drive profitable organic growth. This little donut here on this slide shows where we see opportunities. The dark blue areas are where we think there is a structural long-term opportunity for us to grow. It is things like the personal insurance market. Maybe a little bit different in Denmark, but.
The Nordic countries take out very little personal insurance. There is a catch-up, there is a structural growth trend there as the public healthcare systems subside a little bit. We have the digital personal lines insurance market in the U.K., where U.K. consumers continue to use price comparison websites more and more and more. We are one of the best players on those. We are standing in a sort of tailwind there and scooping up more customers. We have some slightly—and there are some other examples there I will not go into them. We have some slightly more cyclical elements of growth, like in private motor. We have seen a big decline in the purchase of new cars over the last few years, which has been a headwind to us. Now we have seen that bottom out, and we are starting to see that tick up.
Because we're so strongly positioned in the new car segments, we have so many great and unique distribution agreements with various sellers of cars, particularly in Sweden. We stand to benefit if that market comes to life again. We have some other areas where we're more focused on margins and managing risk. Still very profitable, still very high returns. Like, for example, the industrial market I mentioned earlier.
Actually, normally we ask the questions in the end, but I think one of them is perfect.
Feel free.
Because I think we are hearing that from a lot of the Nordic insurance companies that they actually have high growth ambitions organically in the coming year. There is a question here, and I think it is well-founded. Is that possible? Can everybody grow with these high expectations for organic growth? Is this slide actually trying to answer why you think you can do it because you have more growth opportunities? A little bit, I know it is not easy to answer on others' behalf, but is the whole business going to be able to grow this much as they are thinking they are going to do? Are you more convinced about your own capabilities, I would ask?
I'm most convinced about our capabilities, which I would be, of course. As you said, I don't really want to comment too much on the other companies. That's not for me to do. I think it's important to emphasize here that some of these opportunities are structural, and then they might not just be structural for us. Personal insurance, for example, that is an expanding market. It's a market that's growing quicker than the insurance market in general. There's a bigger cake there for not just us to eat more of, not just us, but also the market more broadly. I think we are very well positioned there, actually, to take more share. Not least, actually, because we now have Danske Sundheds Sikring in the group, which is a very sort of unique player in that area. There are also some specific things to us.
The biggest area here, for example, digital U.K. personal lines. The other Nordic companies do not have that at all. Private property. Part of the growth opportunity there is that we are a little bit underweight in some areas, particularly in Sweden, but also in some other areas. We have a lower market share than our natural market share is because we have not been as focused on it historically. Now that the distribution is changing more towards digital, we are well positioned to take advantage. Similarly, in SME. Small companies are behaving a lot like your retail customers. They are also increasingly buying insurance online. We have led the development in digital insurance in personal lines, and we are able now to export those skills to the SME market space.
It's a part of your own belief in this also that you are actually willing to invest in the coming years. You are not only having a target of getting a combined ratio so low, you're actually willing to invest into it. I guess is that kind of the new CEO's kind of statement?
It is. Remember, we're the largest by far. We have the biggest resources to invest, quite simply. That's super important now in a more digital world where you can create solutions that you can apply over a broader area. Before everything had to be local, now you can create Nordic-wide solutions on a lot of things. The other thing, because these are all words in a way, and I'm sure there are people in the other companies that can also say smart things about this. If you look at the rate of delivery of growth, we're growing the top line probably about twice as quickly as our peers this year. We're growing bottom line probably more than twice as quickly than a lot of our peers. Probably the exception there is the companies that really benefit from this slightly exceptional pricing situation in Norway.
There is an element there of delivery that I think where we can point to already having momentum on this strategy that I think sets us apart a bit as well.
Perfect. I know I wouldn't get you to comment on the other ones, but I think you gave us a view on our view on ambition. It's well-founded. Perfect.
We have some very capable competitors as well, so I don't want to. I mean, maybe just to sort of continue on this point. What this page shows, first on the left-hand side is that growth, we talk about it, sometimes it's talked about as like a new thing, but actually we're on the fourth year here on this chart of delivering pretty attractive growth. Some of this is a little bit inflated because it benefited so much from the sort of high inflation in the U.K. The number where we are now is probably closer to what a longer-term number is. Clearly, we have a few years in the bank already of executing on this strategy. It's also broad-based. This is not coming from one area, as you can see on the right-hand side. This is coming from many different areas across the private and SME.
Spectrum. If you look into the detail behind this, actually within retail and SME, and this is now including the U.K., we grew by 5% or more in every country this quarter. It is a broadly based momentum. It is not just IR talk. It is also backed up by some good numbers in our reports.
Check.
This goes even more a little bit into the detail of this specific growth within our Nordic private business. I won't spend too long on this, but I think it's interesting here to see that this was the fourth consecutive quarter of record growth, actually, within private Nordic. That is coming from high retention and so high renewal rates of customers. It's coming from growth in these target areas, and it's coming from this sort of slight bounce back in new car sales. U.K., very briefly, we've been very skillful in navigating what's been a slightly tricky market this year with declining pricing there. We've done that by shifting the portfolio into slightly new areas where we've seen more attractive pricing and by introducing a very innovative, actually, telematics product. Now, looking forward.
Pricing has come down to a level where we do see a little bit fewer opportunities to grow near-term in the U.K. Obviously, the longer-term investment or the longer-term growth case there is very much intact. In the next few quarters, we are going to be careful to make sure that we make the margins that we aim to make. We have a long and good track record. This is the final slide on the right here of delivering very stable profitability in the U.K. as we have elsewhere in the group as well.
Is it only to protect the margins when prices are going down, or is it the market dynamics, I guess? As if I understood correctly a couple of times with you, that it's very, very the price comparison basis. Those homepages that drive the growth. And if prices are going down, less people, I guess, are going to those pages. Is that all one explanation?
That is also part of the picture, that there are less people going to the sites, and so there's a little bit less flow for us to catch on to. At the same time, it is also the fact that just the market-wide pricing now is less attractive than it has been for a little while. We're a disciplined underwriter. For us, we're not reliant on the U.K. to grow. We have many other areas where we can grow either top line or profits. We're not going to jeopardize our profitability for the sake of a few quarters. Nordic commercial, just very briefly. It's the small and medium-sized companies that drive the development here and the growth there, and that's where we see the opportunity, as I think I mentioned already. Top Denmark integration. I'll spend a minute on this, given that.
It's all happening in Denmark. What we've seen in this quarter, an important step happened in the integration. We merged the Top Denmark corporate entity into the IF corporate entity and have moved everything onto IF's sort of Nordic operating model. As we've done that, we've had a very significant uptick in synergies over the quarter. We've actually hit this EUR 24 million target for synergies one quarter earlier than we expected. EUR 24 million was what we expected to achieve for the full year of 2025, but we've already got to that in the first nine months. We do think that this is mainly just a timing issue in that we had this big surge in the third quarter of synergies and that therefore we still stick to the EUR 140 million ultimate target of synergies to be delivered in 2028.
Of course, when you have a good quarter of delivery like that, it does increase your confidence in delivering the ultimate synergies. Fundamentally, Denmark, it's always been our Achilles heel. That's where we've been the weakest because we've been split between IF and Top Denmark there before. Now, when we have both of them combined, we can create a joint stronger entity that will also be able to be, particularly with all this synergy work, be able to be more competitive in the future. Good. Just final slide on the operating EPS. As mentioned, 14% increase year to date in operating EPS, driven very much by the underwriting result. We have a 17% increase. On the back of that, we've increased the target. Very happy with the performance so far in the strategic period, I guess is the only thing to add there.
I think that brings me to the end of the presentation.
Perfect. Let's jump into some questions. There are two questions here about the Nova Bank. You mentioned it briefly. Is there any limitation on how many Nova shares you are allowed to sell?
First of all, there is a lockup period for 180 days from the IPO. End of March sometime, the lockup will expire. During that period, we cannot sell any shares. We are going to continue to remain a 15% holder, at least until the end of March. After that, obviously, we are not the only owner in Nova. It is us and then Nordic Capital, a private equity company, is also still a big owner. It would be unwise, I think, of either us or them to start flooding the market with shares at any one point. We need to make sure that the sell down happens in a sort of sensible manner. Of course, we will only sell at prices that we think are fairly reflective and attractive of the Nova valuation. Our intention is to over time exit this holding.
Yeah, there's no strategic reason for you to own it, but of course, all the things you mentioned there. Then there's on the share buyback, that's exactly on the size of the Nova. As you said, you would probably distribute if you got some gains from Nova, and that's the EUR 150 million. There's a question here. Don't you have anything from the running business that you could also distribute? Meaning, shouldn't it come on top of something Nova? You run these programs, share buybacks quarterly, and now you got the Nova, but we only got the Nova. Any reasons for that? Is it simply limitations of how much shares you can buy back or any thoughts about the solvency or anything? There's a question here. Why not something on top of the Nova?
Yeah, yeah. No, and it's a fair question. The answer is that there is, from the sort of forgetting all gains and special things, from just the annual ordinary capital generation, there is absolutely room to do buybacks on top of the regular dividend. The way the numbers to think about here is that we deliver a regular dividend that's roughly 70% of the operating EPS. Then we have about 20 percentage points on top of that that we retain for, we retain, but we do not need. We can put that into a buyback, about 20 percentage points. Then we have about 5-10 percentage points that we need to retain to just cover the growth in the business so that we are sufficiently capitalized all the time. There are those 20 percentage points.
The way we've managed this is that we announced the dividend with the fourth quarter results. The regular dividend, 70% of the operating EPS. Then about once a year, we tell the market what we're going to do with the additional capital, be that the 20 percentage points that we have left over from earnings, or be that special things like Nova or some improvements we've made in our models or something like that. The reason we do that only once a year is that we want to give ourselves the time to reflect on how to best deploy that money. Also, a little bit because if you do these things too often, it becomes too much of a focus for particularly certain hedge funds.
I guess that is very much driven on what we call an internal model, I guess, in the business here. I guess you only make that internal model once a year. Is that correctly understood also?
The internal model, there's no sort of annual cycle to that.
Okay.
Most of that is just a function of the fact that there are still some things that we're consolidating between the different companies. What were the different companies within Sampo? Now we're a much more unified group than before. That brings some benefits also to the way we run capital.
Yeah, but I think you gave a pretty good answer to why only Nova. That. Perfect. Let's see. There's a question here about the U.K. Is that the current growth rate we have in this quarter? I guess it was around 7%. Is that the run rate you also see in the future, or are you actually seeing maybe even more pressure down on this growth rate with the current market dynamics?
I think. The U.K., to some degree, is a cyclical market. You do get times when pricing is not attractive enough to grow. You get other times where pricing is so attractive that you can grow a lot very quickly. Now we've come from a period where pricing has been super attractive to one where it's a little bit tighter. Let's see how it develops. There's been a big change in the market structure over the last few years where there's been basically a lot of consolidation. Now the market is, to a large degree, dominated by companies a little bit like us. Very listed, disciplined, sensible companies. The only difference is that we and Admiral have the best price comparison franchises. Their businesses aren't set up for price comparison websites in the same way as ours are.
We're better positioned, but in a more disciplined market. Let's see how it plays out this time. I'm not certain that we're going to fall into the depths of a sort of dark and long bad market or bad pricing markets. We do still need to be disciplined and careful. Longer term, I think the growth rates that we talked about in terms of underwriting profit growth of 10-15% at the last capital markets day, they're not inconceivable numbers on a longer-term basis. With that sort of variation with the competitive cycles, sometimes it will be quite a bit more, as it has been now. I mean, we've changed the operating ambitions to 20-25% now this cycle, given how well it's been going. Sometimes it'll be a bit less.
On your insurance income, it's slower than the premium growth this quarter, I guess. There's a question here. Any large claims? I think you said that would be nine if I remember correctly. You had 17% growth year to date and 5%. You say it's not about the large claims. You also mentioned that you might have been putting a little bit to side. Is that the Amy Storm that have you setting aside? A little bit of explanation there. Is there something structural in that, or why this sudden change?
Certainly nothing structural. It is more towards what you mentioned there about the prudence. We did have a fairly benign quarter on the claim side. As mentioned, we have reflected the claims environment very cautiously. I am going to be a little bit technical here now. Typically, on our underwriting margin, we reported an underwriting margin of 17%. Combined ratio of 83% in the third quarter. That margin includes some changes to loss cost assumptions. Typically, we get a tailwind of maybe one and a half to two percentage points on the margin from that. In this quarter, we had a headwind of about 50 basis points instead. The 17% would have been more like maybe 19% if we had not had this prudence that I talked about. That fully explains this difference, disparity in the growth rates.
It also fully explains actually why our underwriting result was slightly lower than consensus in the third quarter.
About your full year guidance. You raised it in Q1, and I think you raised it in Q2. Correct me there. You have not raised it here even if I think the results kind of point to that. Is that a reflection on you being a little bit more cautious on the large claims? I think I mentioned Amy. I heard that Norway pretty hard. I know Danish people, the Danish insurance companies have said that was okay, storm, but I guess it hit Norway pretty hard. Is that a kind of a little bit of the explanation why you are a little bit hesitant to maybe also move this year's targets up?
That is exactly it. In terms of this year's outlook. As you mentioned, we saw Amy already. It was a big event in Norway in particular. What it did was it was actually so big that it already led to enough claims to fill what we would usually expect for a fourth quarter. We have kind of got to the level that we usually expect in terms of severe weather losses for a fourth quarter already. Of course, we are only in the start of November. There is another 10 weeks or something to go before the end of the year, or eight weeks or whatever it is. Enough time at least that there can be more storms and more things. We thought it was a little bit too early to sort of not reflect that uncertainty.
Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. I think that was the last question. I will just check. Yeah, that was the last question. Thank you, Sami, for taking us through your results in.
Yeah, a pleasure.
Fast and orderly manner, getting a good overview. Thank you for answering questions. Thank you for the audience listening in.
Great to be here as always.