Distinguished shareholders. My name is Antti Mäkinen. I have been the Chair of Sampo's Board of Directors for the past financial year. I would like to wish you warmly welcome to Sampo's Annual General Meeting 2026. In my presentation, I will briefly discuss the financial year 2025. The Group CEO, Morten Thorsrud, will, in his presentation, give you a more detailed review of the highlights and financial developments. Last year was another excellent year for the Sampo Group in financial terms. The insurance revenue grew by 8%, which is very good achievement in this business. The underwriting result grew even faster than the revenue, as much as 13%, from EUR 1,316 million to EUR 1,485 million. The strong growth of the underwriting result was driven not only by revenue growth but also the decrease of the combined ratio, which declined from the previous year's 84.3% to 83.6%.
Correspondingly, the key figure that is central in terms of the distribution of profit, the operating earnings per share, excluding extraordinary items, and the unrealized change in value of investments increased by 7% to EUR 0.50. Perhaps the single most important event of last year was the change of Group CEO. Torbjörn Magnusson, who was first If's Managing Director for 18 years and then the Group CEO of Sampo from the beginning of 2020, announced his wish to retire from his role when we found a suitable successor. After a thorough evaluation of potential successors, the Board of Directors in June decided to appoint the then Managing Director of If, Morten Thorsrud, as the new Group CEO from the beginning of October 2025. I am especially happy that the changeover from Torbjörn to Morten was perfectly seamless without even the slightest disturbance in the group's operations.
Of course, Torbjörn and Morten had had a practice run six years earlier when Morten was appointed Torbjörn's successor as Managing Director of If. The group senior management also saw recently another significant change as Group CFO, Knut Arne Alsaker, resigned last autumn, and the new CFO is now Lars Kufall Beck. Both the Group CEO and the Group CFO have seen successful changes through internal appointments, which reflects our strong corporate culture and the long-term focus. On the screen you saw our extremely skilled and engaged core group. The Board of Directors last year also discussed the distribution policy and changes to that policy were announced in early February and will be applied for the first time to the distribution of profit for 2026. We want to offer an attractive distribution of profits, taking into consideration the preferences of different investor categories.
According to this updated policy, we will aim to increase the regular dividend also in the future and complement it by share buybacks. It is our estimate that in a typical year, the return to shareholders will be approximately 90% of our operative earnings, and more than two-thirds of that will be as annual dividend. In order to secure a strong but efficient balance sheet, we can also take action to return excess capital or to protect the balance sheet. So in practice, we will slightly increase the portion of annual allocation towards share buybacks. This will be implemented gradually, aiming to increase the regular dividend, while at the same time reducing the dividend payout ratio from the current 70%.
In line with this policy, the board has proposed that the dividend to be paid out would be EUR 0.36 per share, corresponding to approximately 71% of the operating result of 2025. We continued our determined efforts around sustainability and achieved excellent results. We made progress in the short-term science-based climate targets according to plan. Customer satisfaction remained stable and our efforts in loss prevention and risk management solutions enhanced the wellbeing and safety of our customers. At the same time, good governance, Group's internal risk management, and predictive sustainability work showed in our full- year results. We report on our sustainability efforts in our website and in our sustainability statement. We encourage all shareholders to read the sustainability statement, which gives a more detailed account of the progress made in 2025 and its impact. A few words about the board work last year.
The board convened 11 times last year. The attendance rate was approximately 100%, almost 100%. The board members are highly committed to their job, and their wide and diverse expertise and long experience benefit the company in many ways. We will deal with the election of board members later on in this meeting. We propose that the number of board members be confirmed at eight, and that Andreas Brandstetter be elected as a new board member. He will introduce himself later on in that particular agenda item. Our long-term board member, Christian Clausen, has announced that he is no longer available for re-election. At this point, I would like to warmly thank Christian for his valuable work done for the company during 10 years on the board of directors. Thank you, Christian.
Finally, on behalf of myself and the entire board of directors, I would like to thank all of you, shareholders, for trusting us last year. With these words, I declare the annual general meeting opened. The next point on the agenda is calling the meeting to order. I propose that in accordance with the organizational document, the meeting be chaired by Attorney at Law, Mikko Heinonen, and the secretary of the meeting will-
Thank you, Chairman. Dear shareholders, dear Sampo board, and dear colleagues as well. On my behalf as well, warmly welcome to the annual general meeting for 2026 for Sampo Group. It is also my very first AGM as Sampo CEO. As I am speaking largely to a Finnish audience, please accept my apologies for my limited vocabulary in Finnish. For that reason, I will be giving this presentation in English. As Antti mentioned, I took the helm of Sampo last year after my predecessor, Torbjörn Magnusson, decided to retire from his role.
I am deeply honored by this opportunity. Having been with Sampo Group now for more than 20 years, I have witnessed the remarkable evolution firsthand, and of course, I am truly excited about leading this next chapter in our history. In a world of risks and uncertainty, Sampo provides safety, stability, and value through understanding and mitigating risks.
As a group, we create value for our customers through modern insurance operations under several brands, and we thereby also create value for our shareholders. Before diving into last year's operational performance, let me showcase our position and strengths as a company and investment case. As a modern pure- play P&C insurer, Sampo has a truly unique position. Starting from the fact that we are the leading P&C insurance group in Northern Europe, we serve around 9 million customers in eight markets through our strong and trusted customer brands. Our scale enables us to provide excellent insurance products and services in a cost-efficient manner, and at the same time benefit from diversification so that we can deliver attractive and stable financial results. Our scale also makes us into an attractive partner.
This, for example, includes partnership with multiple leading car brands that not only give us a great distribution network, but also valuable insight into technology development when it comes to, for instance, electrical vehicles or even the future autonomous vehicles. Sampo is also the most diversified insurer in our region. In addition to scale benefits, having a large diversified portfolio is key in insurance as it reduces volatility. This means that our performance can be more stable and more predictable compared to players that are heavily exposed to one single country or one single region. In the Nordics, we are a clear market leader. However, we are not number one in any of our single markets, meaning that there is plenty of room for stable long-term organic growth. Organic growth is what Sampo is all about.
I will get back to the different growth drivers in a minute, but as you see on the pie chart here on the right-hand side, we have multiple or left-hand side, I guess it is for you. There are multiple attractive areas where we see structured growth and also attractive areas where we see more cyclical growth. Now let us take a look at last year's financial performance. 2025 was yet an excellent year for Sampo, underpinned by strong top-line growth and maintained solid margins. We saw 8% top-line growth, leading to a 13% growth in the underwriting result. Combined with solid investment return, our operating earnings per share, or operating EPS in short, increased by 7%. As you see from the table here, our reported EPS increased by 65%. This was supported by the significant gain of EUR 540 million on our NOBA investment.
This investment gain is not included in the operating EPS, which can better represent the underlying operational performance of the group. Thus, this also explains the large difference between the 7% operating EPS and the reported 65% growth in reported EPS. Our balance sheet remained robust, with solvency and financial leverage ratios being in line with our targets. Strong operational performance, combined with a resilient balance, enabled the Sampo board to propose a 6% increase in the regular dividend per share for 2025. More about capital distribution a little bit later in my presentation. The underwriting profit, which is the main profit driver for Sampo, and shows how much of the insurance revenue remains after deducting claims cost and other insurance operational costs, increased by 13%. This was actually the third consecutive year with exactly 13% growth in the underwriting profit.
While I would like to attribute this to our razor-sharp precision, it is fair to attribute this more to excellent diversification across market and segments. Nevertheless, over this three-year period, we have produced more than 40% cumulative growth in the insurance service result. In 2025, we had some good luck from benign weather, and also from fewer large claims than what we had anticipated. Although in insurance, we do not really talk about luck, but rather about stochastic deviations from an expected norm.
Yet, as you can see, the primary driver for the underwriting result growth was our organic premium growth. This is what the Sampo equity story is all about, maintaining attractive insurance margins while seizing attractive growth opportunities through leveraging our scale, leading market position, superior pricing sophistication, and best-in-class digital capabilities. Now let us look closer at what were the main drivers behind our solid top-line growth.
In the Nordics, the fastest growing product area over the last couple of years has been personal insurances. This includes products such as health, accident, and child insurances. Today, we are insuring more than 1 million customers with health insurances across the Nordics. Due to the quite comprehensive public healthcare systems we have in the Nordics, the market penetration of personal insurance products is still relatively low compared to Western countries. However, the demand is increasing because of demographic changes, wealth accumulation, and also a pressure on public healthcare. Hence, we see a great potential in future growth in this area going forward, driven both by increased demand and also supported by our excellent cross-selling capabilities. Another example of growth in the Nordics is the SME segment, for us defined as companies with less than 50 employees.
This sector represents the majority of our commercial client portfolio, and in 2025, we achieved a 7% like-for-like top-line growth in this area and added some 3,200 new customers. Moving to our digital U.K. business, which has been a significant contributor to our organic growth, we also there see very good growth momentum throughout 2025. Since acquisition of Hastings in 2020, we have added around 1.5 million customers to our book in the U.K., out of which 600,000 in 2025 alone. While we see attractive growth potential in the U.K. in the long term, I would like to remind you that due to different market dynamics, the U.K. market is more cyclical than the Nordic market, meaning short-term volatility is more normal. We, of course, always act in a disciplined manner in our underwriting and manage growth according to the different cycles.
Turning to one of Sampo's core strengths and an important driver of our compelling organic growth, namely our digital capabilities. This is, again, something that is amplified by our scale and our pan-Nordic operating model. Sampo has been a digital pioneer in the Nordics, beginning our investments in online distribution some 20 years ago. Today, we see that those investments bear fruit as our digital capabilities continue to drive growth as well as efficiency. In 2025, we saw 15% growth in digital sales in our Nordic retail business, and we achieved our operational ambition for this metric one year ahead of plan. Similarly, we saw the same growth rate in our Nordic commercial business, where we see that SME customers, in particular, are following the same path in adopting digital service channels as retail customers.
Having market-leading digital capabilities means faster and easier-to-use services for our customers and enable cost efficiency improvements that benefit both our customers and our shareholders. Use of AI, of course, is a very hot topic these days. While some sectors may see it as a threat, we see it as a great opportunity. Insurance is at large a digital and highly data-driven industry with a high number of customer journeys that could be automated.
Consequently, the industry should be well positioned to take advantage of new technology such as AI. However, only the digitally advanced companies are ready to harvest these benefits, and Sampo is certainly one of them. Although I also would like to highlight that AI for us is not something new. It is not really even a separate thing for us. It is just the next step in our technological development in which we have consistently invested.
Moving then to Denmark and commenting on the Topdanmark integration. In 2024, we completed our transformation into a unified pure- play P&C insurance group by acquiring the rest of Topdanmark. In 2025, we are focused on integrating it into our pan-Nordic operating model. The integration process is progressing at true speed, and the benefits are already materializing. Last spring, as we got more detailed insights into the business, we increased our run- rate synergy estimate for 2028 up to EUR 140 million, up from the original estimate of EUR 95 million. By the end of 2025, we had already achieved run- rate synergies of EUR 37 million, exceeding our original plan of EUR 24 million, although the faster than planned progress appears largely attributable to timing. Most of the synergies come from the cost side through such as overlapping corporate center functions and IT systems.
We are now starting also to see clear benefits on the revenue side as well. In 2025, our substantially strengthened position in Denmark enabled us to sign multiple new distribution agreements with car brands. Combining two large organizations is, of course, never easy, as changes can naturally create uncertainty both among employees and customers. Therefore, I am very proud of our organization and how they have adapted to this change and proactively seized the opportunities. This gives me a strong confidence for our future development in Denmark. While the underwriting result is our main profit driver, we also aim to achieve attractive investment returns with manageable risks on top of that. As for most P&C insurers, the majority of our investment portfolio is allocated to fixed income instruments that generate stable, predictable, recurring income and do not tie up too much capital.
At the same time, we like to have a certain exposure to equities. This help us match our liabilities with longer durations, but more importantly, it also provides attractive return in the longer term. As our track record shows, this has been a good strategy. Over the last 17 years or so, we have achieved more than 4% investment return on average. Clearly exceeding the return if you would have just have invested in low- risk, low- return government bonds. Last year, the investment return were, of course, exceptionally high and largely driven by our investment in NOBA, which was listed in September. NOBA has been a good investment for Sampo, as our original investment of EUR 325 million back in the days have more than doubled.
As this is what you call a legacy asset made during the old strategy, we will eventually sell our stake, of course, in a controlled manner. 2025, again, was an excellent year for Sampo, and our performance has been well in line with our financial targets set for the strategic period 2024- 2026. As 2026 then is the last year of our current strategic period, we have already started preparing our operational and financial ambitions for the next one. Therefore, we will host an investor update on the 17th of November this year, where we will provide further insight into our new strategic period. I am confident that 2026 will be yet another good year for Sampo as we continue to leverage our scale and unique capabilities across segments and geographies.
We have set an outlook for the full- year, expecting 5%- 8% top- line growth and up to 8% growth in the underwriting result. The outlook is in line with our main financial target of achieving more than 9% growth in the operating EPS on average for the period 2024- 2026. Shifting from earning capital to returning it to you, our shareholders. As Antti already highlighted in his opening speech, we recently updated our distribution policy. Sampo aims to pay a reliable and progressive regular dividend, and the proposed dividend per share of EUR 0.36 is exactly in line with this. With continued strong performance, you can expect a steady increase in the regular dividends. We plan to maintain a growth that is in line with historic trajectory, but then slightly reduce the payout ratio over time.
The regular dividend will be complemented with share buybacks, which will support our EPS, but also our dividend per share development. Going forward, the capital for buybacks will mainly be generated from our operational business, but there is still some excess capital expected to be released as we continue to sell down our legacy assets. As communicated in connection with the full- year results, we will review and comment on our excess capital position in connection with the Q1 result that is published on the 6th of May.
To conclude my presentation, I am very pleased with Sampo's performance in 2025. These achievements were made possible by our more than 15,000 employees, who together with trusted partners, are dedicated to creating value for our customers and thereby also for our shareholders. I would like to thank our employees, our customers, partners, and all shareholders for your continued support. Thank you