Good morning. Thank you for the time. It gives me always great, it's always a great pleasure and honor to present Discovery's results to you. The presentation this morning is our interim results for the six months to 31 December 2022. At the outset, let me say it's been excellent period. It really has been for us, a robust and strong growth, and I hope you'll see that coming through. I do wanna thank our Discovery people, Vitality people, Vitality Group people across the world. They've worked remarkably hard for the set of results that you will see. I think our executive team and board are very grateful to them. Let me also say that we have, I have with me our CFO, Deon Viljoen, and all of our key executives online.
Afterwards, we'll take whatever questions that you have, and we'll try our best to answer them. We've also tried our best to provide all the data and stuff in the presentation, and you'll, you can drill down with it as we go through. Let me get going and maybe make kind of the point. I always get kind of teased by my colleagues that I say every period is a complex period. Unfortunately, I have to say that this last six months really has been a remarkably complex period. I really like this risk analysis from World Economic Forum.
Shows on the right-hand side, this idea of a polycrisis, really as we've seen the COVID epidemic come through, the knock-on effects of that, the great resignation, supply side inflation, the conflict in Ukraine, polarization, stagflation in the UK. In the South African context, Eskom. It's just continuously remarkably complex and causal. One thing leads to another, as we're seeing. This is a really, really complex environment. If you look at the kind of risk registers that come out of the various analyses, I'm always amazed at how in the sense accurate they are, as you can see on the chart, they keep changing, you know. You can see the mix of climate, geopolitical confrontation. These are all risks now are serious and real.
If you go back a number of years, they do keep changing. I guess the question is, with such risk, what is the appropriate corporate strategy? What is the appropriate response to this? I think from a Discovery perspective, we've taken the view that's kind of both ends. We need to be very prudent, kind of the adage of prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. We've been very prudent, and I hope that comes through in every regard, and very defensive in many ways. At the same time, with change and complexity comes opportunity, and I think we are more and more confident about the relevance of our business model, and so we're investing heavily in growth.
Hopefully you'll see through the presentation, I think it's those two themes that really frame, I think, what we set out to do and set out to achieve in terms of both growth and managing a very, very complex environment. If I turn to the top-line numbers, hopefully you've seen them. I think they're hopefully self-explanatory. We've had a strong growth in operating profit, up 22%. Core new business growing 15%. For the first time, we illustrate and give them materiality, and particularly of Discovery Bank coming through. You'll see that in the chart, what we're calling kind of non-insurance businesses. We're measuring it on a revenue basis, so you can get a sense of the growth in that, up 51% to over ZAR 2.5 billion. Becoming quite significant, and I think that's important.
Normalized headline earnings up 30%. The effect of interest rates, of long-term rates of interest are really volatile, brings headline earnings down 9%. We normalize that out as a policy, you'll see that coming through in the rest of the presentation. You know, we wanted to start, I think, in the sense with the end in mind and make four points that I hope are fairly clear. It's been a strong growth period for us. The earnings of high quality, I hope you'll see that. They really are the manifestation of the efficacy of the Vitality shared value business model and our organic growth operating model that should achieve a whole lot of things concurrently, I hope you'll see that.
Second point, given the strong growth, given the strong performance, there's no need for the raise of capital through a VCP that we announced. We won't be doing that. Given the strong growth that we're doing, we do believe it is premature to reinstate the dividend. We'll revisit at the end of the financial year, and I'll show you exactly the rationale behind that. Thirdly, we focus very much on financial prudence, and we structure the organization to be largely immunized from changes in interest rates. I think that is important in a remarkably volatile environment. Fourthly, and again, I hope you'll see that through the presentation, the model really is evolving very strongly, and it provides a very powerful platform for future growth. I think all of the businesses are well positioned for future growth.
Let me start going through the bits of rationale. I felt importantly, to start everything is context and strategy. Our view of the world, around the nature of risk, the power of technology, and the importance of purpose, the idea of making people healthier through our model is fundamental. We see the relevance of that more and more as we go on. As healthcare systems get into difficulty, we see the relevance of what we're doing. As we see life insurance margins coming under pressure, we see the relevance in what we're doing. The model is highly relevant. In terms of the actual business model, the shared value model should do the right things. This is theoretical. This is what we set out to do, and I guess the question is, are we achieving it?
The shared value model should, for our customers, offer better value for money, lower cost of financial services, and make them healthier. Healthier physically, healthier financially, et cetera. From our perspective, they should offer real product differentiation, better competitive advantage, higher margins, better persistency, low mortality claims, et cetera, and that should drive up growth and margin. That's at the business level. The point of the shared value model is our deep belief is that it's repeatable, scalable in adjacencies in different markets and therefore our organic growth model. It's primarily about new business and new businesses. We have to grow these things from new to emerging to established businesses. If we achieve that, we believe strongly we can achieve superior operating growth. Our target has been growing operating earnings by CPI + 10% without recourse to additional capital.
Getting that all right will allow us to create real strength, but at the same time enduring, shareholder value. To an extent, I think you need to look at these results in the light of what we set out to achieve. Are we achieving the growth in operating performance? Are we getting the customer engagement, the better persistency and mortality? Are our new initiatives getting materiality, and growing? Ultimately, are we creating a business of capital strength, the right balance of cash generation and growth? I think we are, but I think you need to see, the results as we play them out. The first point is maybe just to run through the businesses as they are. This is just a table of the performance. Obviously, I'd like to give you context, and strategy.
I want to give you a sense of how the businesses look on the face of things. You can see that I think the results are robust. Overall operating profit up 22%. You can see to just over ZAR 5.9 billion. New business growth has been very strong. Core new business growth over ZAR 11 billion in the period. Very importantly, you can see that the what we're calling the non-insurance business is growing by 51% to over ZAR 2.5 billion. You can see it for the first time, seeing how the bank revenue is coming into the picture and being very significant in that regard. At the same time, Discovery Health is having considerable success in growing non-scheme products and penetrating other markets.
That's coming through, I think, very nicely, and you see that in the growth. What's happening in the Vitality Group, also very strong growth, up nearly 70% in that regard. If you look at the kind of the three, what we call the strategic strand, South Africa, the UK, and Vitality Group, the performance is strong across the board. 23% growth, 15% growth, 33% growth. A few comments I'd make. A few difficult issues for us to deal with, and I'll give you much more detail as we go through the presentation. Discovery Insure has had a difficult time over the in the previous six-month period. Operating losses coming through from very, very complex supply side inflation, motor parts, cars, et cetera. Added load shedding claims, et cetera.
We've done some remarkable action in that regard, and you can see it's kind of broken even. We're restoring the margin. I'll give you more insight going forward. The other difficult environment, Ping An Health. China, obviously, environmentally has been very, very difficult. Lockdowns, the COVID wave coming through, all of that happening in the six-month period. You can see profitability down 40% in that regard. Beside those two, you can see, I think, a strong growth. Discovery Health's robust across everything it does. The performance up 4% is somewhat muted. There's some one-off costs we think that ameliorate by the end of the year. Discovery Life in total up 30%, but a lot of that growth is due to Group Life really recovering post-COVID. Individual Life up 11%. Discovery Invest in a very difficult market, growing, I think, strongly.
Some tax efficiency in that growth of 15%. Operating growth more in line with the growth in fees, more like 7%-8%. I think a strong performance in a very difficult environment. In the bank, the performance continues to be exceptionally good. The bank is performing well within the capital plan, firstly. Secondly, every single metric coming out of the bank in terms of growth, quality, every aspect makes it very much on track towards what we set out to do, and you'll see that later in the presentation. The U.K. has had a tremendous period. It's a complex environment. It's a mix of stagflation, complexity in the NHS. You can see the growth of Vitality Health in terms of new business, very strong, and Vitality Life new business.
Vitality Health's profit growing by 2%, looking fairly flat, but certainly not. You will see in the presentation later, the previous period was a massive jump up from the past. This is off a very, very high base. Vitality Life growing strongly by nearly 50%. It really was a beneficiary to an extent of rising inflation. But the policies are largely index-linked in the U.K., so to some extent it's been a beneficiary of inflation. It's worked remarkably hard in terms of getting the operating performance and benefiting from that. Again, I hope you'll see that through the presentation. Vitality Group is a makeup of a number of different issues. I will take you through that later. Vitality Network growing its profitability strongly. There's complexity in Vitality Health Insurance.
There are a number of large things we're doing. Obviously, Ping An Health, Amplify Health coming to being. You will see how those are playing out in the process of the results. Let me just end there with kind of the dry numbers, give you a sense of a few off-the-cuff remarks about how the businesses, in a sense, are performing. Let me make some comments. I mean, I guess the first comment to make is, you know, are we growing sufficiently? Is both the Vitality shared value model and the operating model playing out appropriately? I think they are. You can see the operating profit has grown strongly by 22%. Obviously, that's a bump up.
You can see in the previous number of years, it was the COVID period, it was a period of a considerable investment in new initiatives, over 20% of operating income. We brought that down, so you can see the jump up. In fact, if you actually look at the progression of the operating profit over time, and you look at the shape of the curve, we're not at 4 of CPI + 10. We're probably at about CPI + 7 or 8, thereabout. Over the last 10 or 15 years, the growth has been very, very strong. I do think that we're kind of getting the mathematics of how the group grows, coming through, and I do think we are positioned to continue that for some time. We'll see how that plays out.
Obviously, all of this is buttressed with concern about the environment and all of the risks that are present, but I think we're confident about how the group's dynamics are playing out. You can see the growth in new business again, growing strongly over time. I think graphically, when you look at the total income from non-insurance businesses driven by Discovery Bank, some of it will be done by Discovery Health, the growth is very, very strong, and I think the numbers are very material. Turning to new initiatives, you will know if you followed us that we spent a considerable amount on new initiatives. The guidance we've given has been about spending about 10% of operating profit on new initiatives. That's how the mathematics play out.
If you spend 10% on new initiatives and you grow the other business in line with the Greek state, you get the CPI plus 10% growth rate. You have to accept that you cannot do that linearly. As the group gets bigger, you've got to take bigger bets in order to grow. You can't start up things in a linear fashion. We accepted building things like Discovery Bank would require much more investment, and you can see that in the chart, how that spending in initials went up over 10% to 12% to over 20% in the last number of years. We made a point at the last results announcement that we'd bring that down to within guidance quite quickly. You can see that that's exactly what's happened.
We're about 11%, even in that number is the Vitality Invest business in the U.K., which is, in fact, now not a new initiative. We've wound it up. We're transferring it. All our structures are done. That will come down further. Amplify Health in Asia with AIA is immediately accretive to our, to our P&L because the nature of the, of the commitment of capital is that it flows through every year to build and make acquisitions in Amplify Health. That's somewhat accretive to the numbers. You can see on the right-hand side where the spend is. Half of it is in Discovery Bank. A small amount is in other Discovery business insurance umbrella funds. That will come down very quickly. Quite a bit is in, is in VG outside of Amplify Health. There's a lot there.
I think as we go forward, you'll see the bank come down and the VG spend go up. I think that's probably the right allocation of how new initiatives should play out. I think we're feeling comfortable about the materiality of the potential of a new initiative. I think we're feeling comfortable about the spend and how that's come down to within guidance. Let me then push on and talk about the model. I think every time we present you, we try best to give you insight into how the Vitality shared value model is working from an engagement, from a correlation, causal perspective, and all the factors we're trying to address.
We tried in this results to kind of not show any doubts, but take all the data that we've got and show you how balanced the model is. First, the issue of engagement. I would put it to you that I don't think any there are organizations anywhere else that are getting the kind of engagement in customers that we are. This is not light engagement, you know, signing on to an app or whatever it might be. This is proper engagement in physical activity, non-physical activity, eating differently, activations in the bank, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can see from the chart in terms of scale, quality, and duration, all, I think, are remarkably strong. In terms of scale across every market we're in, the average is about 40% of our clients are engaged.
You can see that across the distribution. In terms of quality, it's amazing. I think people Obviously, we're a physical engagement, doing their steps, using their device, et cetera. We're seeing very strong non-physical engagement, healthy foods and other aspects that we focus on. I think also very pleasing is over duration, engagement tends to improve. You can see the engagement almost doubles over a 24-month period. As people come in to the system, engagement tends to get stronger as they go on. From an engagement perspective, I think we're feeling very strongly that the group has the ability through our shared value model to get best levels of engagement.
Even in markets like the U.S., where we offer Vitality to corporate clients, I think our engagement levels are the highest in the industry. The model is working. I think our understanding of how to engage clients is getting stronger and stronger. In terms of the actuarial factors, I mean, the fundamental issue is to bring mortality down, morbidity down, defaults down, accidents down, et cetera, and to make the business stickier and more persistent. You can see across the board from all the data we have, those down sloping correlations are strongly in place. We're getting remarkably strong results. I think the differences between mortality of people who aren't engaged or lightly engaged versus those that are heavily engaged is dramatically different, as is the persistence. That kind of tends to be a virtual cycle.
You keep your better lives, you can say, lasting this and they're getting hopefully healthier and healthier over time. The portfolio over time gets better. I think we're feeling comfortable about where the model is. There's a considerable investment in kind of a Vitality 2.0. I'd like to talk to that a bit later. It's off the basis of what I think we feel very, very strong about is a very, very strong model. The manifestation of that, I think, is fundamentally in operational, non-economic experience variances. You can see over the period for the group, they're strongly positive at ZAR 1.8 billion. You can see how they're made up of. There's a lot of moving parts in that. I urge you to look at the detail.
There's complexities and all kinds of stuff taking place, long COVID, high morbidity claims. You'll see that coming through. When you look at the group level, I think across the board, the results are strong. It shows that the embedded value build-up is strong. The annualized return on the embedded value is just over 14%, 14.4%. I think the build-up is fairly clean and fairly simple. You can see the opening balance, positive experience variances, unwinded the discount rate, and VNB coming in, giving you the operational EV. The economic effects are quite small. Despite the swing in interest rates, we are somewhat of the beneficial of inflation, and that kind of mitigates it on the embedded value. A fairly smooth and I think strong growth in the EV, illustrating where shareholder value is being built up.
I do think one of the important points is that we're a business now that's building a bank. We have a health insurer in China. We have a motor insurance business. All of these businesses, we have Vitality Group, all of them are not in the EV. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart that 28% of group revenue is now attributable to businesses, not kind of EV'd, so to speak. These are business of scale. I mean, Ping An Health has an NAV of around ZAR 20 billion of our, ours is 25% of that. These are businesses of considerable scale that are building up. I think over time, hopefully you'll see that shareholder value coming through in the sum of these issues.
It does show, I think, the manifestation of the group's model, the manifestation of the growth target operating model, and I think the quality of the business being written. Let me turn to cash generation, and how we are growing the business. We always show this chart. I think it looks a lot more pleasing than in the past, and illustrating how, I think, the model is very much in balance. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, just the cash conversion numbers, close to 70% of profitability was in cash. You can see how the cash is generated and where it's used. You can see we generated ZAR 7.5 billion of cash. We spent ZAR 6.9 billion of it, mainly on new initiatives and particularly on new business.
We're investing most of it in growing the organization, leaving about ZAR 600 million at the center, shareholder cash at the center. Obviously, liquidity and cash remains inside the different businesses, but at the center, the kind of the excess cash is about ZAR 600 million. We used a lot of that to pay down debt. We really are focusing on bringing debt down and bringing the FLR down at the same time. When you bring it together, the position looks, I think, fairly clean. You can see cash generation, as I said, about ZAR 600 million, better than in previous periods. The FLR, the leverage ratio, that's coming down strongly. We had a self-imposed cap of 28%. We were around there a number of years ago. We brought that down to about 22%.
Inside the businesses, they're strongly capitalizing. At the center, we continue to have the same kind of buffer that we've used over the past. The business is very much in balance. I think the model is playing out very much as we set out to do. I wanna turn to the dividend and spend a bit of time on this because as we said, we're not an organization that's focused on the dividend, the scale of the dividend. We're focusing on growth. We're focusing on growth in the terms of not top-line growth, proper quality operational earnings in terms of our growth. I have to say, we got lambasted significantly at the last presentation. We're flippantly saying, you know, we're not reinstating the dividend.
We felt it's important we take you through the logic, and I hope it makes sense. I mean firstly, just theoretically on the left-hand side, we've had a dividend cover, historic dividend cover of 4x-5x . It's actually just a derivation of how the model works. Our established businesses should pay 2x-3x the dividend. The emerging businesses shouldn't pay anything. They're kind of new. We should spend the 10% of operating profit on new initiatives. If you work that out, you get a 4x-5x cover. That's how it pays out. Just mathematically, if you're paying a 4x-5x cover, you can facilitate the growth model that we set out to achieve. That's what we did until COVID started.
When the COVID period started, 2020 to 2022, like most companies in our sector, we ceased the dividend, but we focused on prudence in two other ways. We took a view to actually reducing our leverage. We began doing that during the COVID period, secondly, given massive interest rate volatility, if you followed us, you will know we went through considerable pain as rates went really far down in the U.K., the lowest, I think, ever on record. Now they've picked up again. We focused strongly on making sure that the group is immunized in terms of operational solvency, liquidity from volatile interest rates. We focused on achieving that. Importantly, we focused on growth at the same time. We continued to invest in growth in our businesses.
We invested over 20% of our operating profits on new initiatives, notably Discovery Bank. We followed our ZAR one and a half billion capital raise from Ping An Health into the business. At the same time as kind of focusing on prudence during that period, we focused very much on growth. Where are we now? I think the model is very much in balance, as you can see. Operating profit has grown strongly. Cash generation is there. You can see the leverage ratio has come down. I'm summarizing what you've seen. Investment in new has come down. The Bank, we think during this calendar year, from operational perspective, will break even and is growing strongly. The business is in a strong position. It's really in balance.
It seems at this stage that the focus on growth and our dynamics are excellent. It's not the time to reinstate the dividend. We'd like to wait and revisit it at the year-end. To make, I guess, the obvious point, when you look at how we're spending cash and capital, coming back to the previous slide, you know, we're spending ZAR 4.5 billion on growth in our existing businesses. We're spending nearly ZAR 1 billion on new initiatives into businesses we think will have considerable materiality. We expect the return on those investments to be close to long-term risk-free rates plus close to 10%. That's over 20%. That is an incredibly good use of capital, in our view. Given the growth dynamics, we think that's where the focus should be. Give us time on this.
We'll revisit this at the year-end and continue to see how the group plays out. We're very comfortable with how the group is in balance in terms of its operating model. Let me end on the kind of group reconciliation by just working down from the operating profit, which is what I focused on, down to normalized headline earnings. Operating profit up 22%, that's what I focused on, as you can see on the face of the income statement on the chart. Hope that's clear. The fundamental issue is just the scale of volatility in interest rates and what that does through the P&L. You can see in Discovery Life, the first entry underneath there. In the previous period, interest rate movements created this bloating of nearly half a billion.
In this period, a reduction of over ZAR 862 million. What you see is when you look at it, the swing is about ZAR 1.2 billion or ZAR 1.3 billion over the period. That has no effect at all on the operations, liquidity, solvency of the group. Therefore, we as a policy, we normalize that out. You can see as it plays out down, profit before tax from operating income up 22% is a profit before tax down 10%. A few adjustments to headline earnings down 9%, as you can see. When you add back those interest rate effects, you get the headline earnings up 30%. I mean, our view is that I think the operating profit up 22% illustrates, I think, the strength of the operating profit of the group.
The headline earnings, I think, illustrates the effect of the kind of flat leverage, and many other expenses that are flat over time below the line, giving you a bit of a gearing effect up to the 30%. It's important just to make clear our kind of position on interest rates. I made the point, and I think it is important that we build an organization that is not affected dramatically by changes in long-term rates of interest. They are hugely volatile. We've seen that, I think, probably the most volatile in history. The shape of the curves are changing. Real long-term rates of return are changing dramatically. What this analysis does in your own time, I urge you to go through it.
It kind of looks at the South African and the U.K. life businesses and the impact of interest rates on them. What you will see is that in the second part, earnings are dramatically volatile through the income statement under IFRS 4. In IFRS 17, that may be different. In IFRS 4, you can see the dramatic change in earnings. In the case of Discovery Life, if you had the year-end two weeks before or two weeks after, it would make a difference of hundreds of millions. The effect on the income statement is dramatic. When you look at liquidity and solvency in S.A., it hardly has any effect at all. The South African life business is largely an asset.
It's simply a present value of a bond in a way, and that moves up and down. It doesn't affect solvency much, nor liquidity. In the case of the U.K., it's more complex. Given that part of the business sits in the belly of the Prudential, as you know, if you followed us, there is a truing up of the PNL every year, and therefore fluctuating interest rates did in the past create some potential liquidity issues, as you can see. We've, over the years, developed a very sophisticated approach to hedging out that risk, as you can see in the chart, and therefore, ultimately, there is no real effect on solvency nor liquidity in the U.K. Either.
We've got to a point where you have this massive volatility in interest rates, but given the structure we've created, it does not present any liquidity or solvency issue. It doesn't affect operations, operational impacts whatsoever, and therefore, we tend to obviously deal with it, but it doesn't affect how we see the business progressing, and therefore, as per our policy, we normalize it out. Let me summarize. At this point, I've taken some time. I hope it's clear, but to get you to the numbers, they're there. They're clear. You can see the dynamics of operating profit, strong growth in new business.
You can see the dynamics between normalized headline earnings, which really is an accurate depiction of how the group has performed, and then the effect of interest rates, which we've largely immunized for in the structure of the group. Let me move on and make some observations about the businesses, the three big pieces of the business in terms of Discovery SA, Vitality UK, and Vitality Global. I wanted to just make some points about Vitality and how the model is evolving. I think it's very important to understand just the power of what we've done, what the data can do, and how we see it going forward in the future. I showed you earlier the incredible correlations between people engaging in the program and illustrating, for example, much lower mortality rates.
The issue about that is that That's factual, but it could be selection. It could be correlations, not causal. To develop the model, we really need to understand the causal effects of what we're trying to incentivize in changing the behavior of people. Just looking at physical activity, which is an area of considerable data, and on the left-hand side of the chart, this is a similar analysis that you've just seen, but looking at only physical activity. It's stratified by age, 45-65, et cetera. What it shows is as people engage in physical activity from a base of zero to low to medium to high, you get a dramatic decline in levels of mortality. It's a fantastic result, but, you know, we kinda knew that.
The question is what is the causal effect of physical activity on mortality? To do that, you've got to kind of get rid of every other effect. We have the data to do that. This is a study we did over the period just before COVID. Over half a million lives used in this, and we keep updating the factors that come out of this. It really takes out all the different covariates, vitality status, extent of health usage, socioeconomic class, et cetera, et cetera. You can see on the list of that. Isolates down the effect of exercise on a person based on age. What you see on the right-hand side is exactly that. We're really focusing down on the causal effects of physical activity on mortality. Again, it's remarkable.
It is incredibly strong, I think what's very positive about it is it's even more powerful as you get older. We are getting to a point where you can see the benefits of, for example, physical activity. The studies we're doing now will be mental health as well. We're trying to get all the factors that we understand because I think understanding the causal effects will allow us to properly value our products. We'll properly structure them in the right way, we're getting to that kind of precision of data. Now, once you know the factors of what causes changes in mortality, the question when you're valuing something going forward, you have to be able to predict will people change their behavior.
The data's allowed us to develop this concept of habit theory, understanding how people change habits, say, with physical activity. We've got to a point of seven weeks of data, we can ascertain the extent of a habit, how strong it is, how weak it is it good, is it bad? From that actually work out the scale of the habit. Once you have that, you can understand going forward the causal effects, the habit effects, and actually value what that behavior change could do. That creates a valuation model where you can kind of value prospectively the value of that behavior change, and then compare it to the value you're giving that to clients in terms of premium discounts, incentives, and rewards.
Create a profit-sharing model for the product, allow us to really perfect the products, but at the same time, for the first time allow us to do proper valuations of assets and liabilities on the back of the shared value model. What we'll get to, and I can't get to the detail now, is a Vitality 2.0 that really is a sophisticated set of modules. You know, in the case of the customer, it stays the same. Know your health, improve your health, get rewarded. In terms of us, it's the prediction model and the Healthy Futures, understanding lifespan, health span, risk factors.
Going to the engagement model, understanding what's the next best action for that particular individual using our Gateway technology to be able to give people access to the entire range of health applications out there, incentivize people properly, and then critically, the ability to value this, the ability to use the data and the data science underneath it. More and more, we are getting these modules, I think, to a point with obviously of extreme value to us, but to our partners as well. Help us obviously make changes to the lives of our customers, but help us monetize and get real much more value out of where we're heading with the model.
I want to give you some sense, in a very short space of time on a very complex issue, but how the Vitality shared value model is evolving from correlation model to one that's causal, and one that we can properly value, and really get the precision of what's needed to make it super powerful. Let me talk through three strands and give you some strategic insights into each. I'm gonna talk about the South African piece. As I said, I think the performance has been strong. Operating profit up 23%, new business up 15%. Starting with Discovery Bank, I think the performance has been remarkably strong. We are very proud of the bank's performance.
It's operating well within its capital plan. It's playing out exactly as we'd hoped for and better than I think expected. You will have seen these numbers in different ways, but I wanted to cut them in a way that gives you a sense of kind of the strategic areas of importance. First, you can see the growth continues. Clients now touching over 580,000. Total accounts over 1.3 million. The net income to the bank is over ZAR 700 million during this period, up 70%. You can see the rate of growth coming through in terms of proper revenue flowing in. Deposits and advances are growing. Advances is largely on the back of Discovery Card. There's much work to be done on personal loans, on mortgages, et cetera.
We need to grow the NII, you'll see that coming up a bit later. The operating result is turning around. Now, for the first time, I wanted to show you the difference between kind of operating profits and losses versus acquisition costs. Obviously, the bank must make profitability in total. Given a bank that's growing this quickly, we're spending a lot of money on acquisitions. It's important to understand kind of the core operating result versus the acquisition cost spending. You can see how they are turning at different levels. The operating loss is narrowing very, very quickly, but you still will have acquisition costs as we go forward. We need to grow the bank, I think that's important.
The first point to make, just off the face data of the slide, is just the scale of growth that we're achieving, and I think the quality of the growth. We've set a goal of 1,000 cases per day. That's to a large extent what we're achieving. You see from the chart, and that growth has come up very strongly. The, you know, we are watching very carefully that each cohort of new businesses are the same quality. You can see the product mix is largely the same if you look a year ago to this period. I think what's exciting is that people come into the Bank, and they use it more and more.
This is about a, you know, a full service bank that we built where people to come in and buy our products and use it fully. Over duration, you can see from the third panel how people come through. I think what is important is that if you do the analysis between Discovery Bank and the other banks, in the environment, our NII per client now is already in line with the average. I think that's been the case for the last period as well. Is in fact the second, I think it's the second largest or about the second largest in the sector on individual banks. If you look at the extreme right-hand side, what you find is total revenue is a lot less per client. The gap there is NII.
We have not been doing much personal loans at all, or other forms of lending. That, of course, is an important gap for us. The potential, I think, is tremendous. It's simply a product suite we're having it developed. We're rolling that out quite soon. Factually, you can see the quality of the client base that we have. I think the, you know, we're really banking the mass affluent. You can see that we had great success in growing our new credit market share up significantly to 15%. You can see how low in the latest period our credit loss ratios are, dramatically low. I think it's a quarter of what the banks have on average. The quality of the installed client base, the quantum of what they borrow is significant.
We just need a product to offer into that space. That's, that's imminent. Our sense of that is quite quickly we'll see the NII grow in addition to NII driving the economics of the bank, I think that's important. I think from a, from a growth perspective, from a revenue perspective, I think we're feeling fairly confident that the bank's ability to grow strongly is present and almost kind of imminent. You see it, you see it playing out. The question, of course, is just the economics of growth. I'll point you to the right-hand side of the chart, firstly, just to make the point, the shared value model is very much in balance here. You will know we have a number of very complex structures and I think fantastic value to customers.
Our travel platform, for example, that offers access to the entire end-to-end travel experience. All of these things are triggered by your behavior, your Vitality status, et cetera. Interest rates flex, et cetera. You can see on the right-hand side kind of the lifetime value of clients and the embedded value of clients, or the NII per client is actually very flat across the board. In fact, our more engaged members are giving us, in a sense, more value. It's actually a very, very balanced model. It means that we seek clients across the board. We seek highly engaged clients 'cause they're good for us as well, and I think that's important. The economics of growth actually is interesting. On the left-hand chart, this is a theoretical analysis. Just please follow me on this.
It's kind of we came out of an insurance background to an extent. I mean, that's been our kind of our genesis. In insurance markets, they're very different to bank markets to starting up and growing. Insurance businesses typically do 200-300 new units a day of business if they're doing well. In insurance markets, typically clients buy one of your products. You buy one motor insurance product. You may buy one medical scheme cover. You may buy a few life insurance products, but typically one, you know, one that's, you know, very infrequent purchase. It's typically a one product purchase. Secondly, lapsation rates are very high. They're typically 10%-15% insurance market.
What you find is you can grow quickly on the white, on the white line, but over time, your new business footprint can't quite meet the lapsations. At some point, 10, 20 years, you can plateau. It's a harder cycle. In the case of banking, it's different. It's a bit like a coffee shop. People come, and they don't leave in a sense. You have a massive market in South Africa. The margins are good. Very importantly, what you see is the lapse rates are very, very low. People typically don't cancel their banking products or their credit cards. What you get is a strong growth, similar in the early years, but it tends to out accelerate. By year 5 or by year 10, you're kind of 2.5 x the size.
It seems to us clearly clear as we experience the growth of Discovery Bank, the potential to grow over a long period of time is quite remarkable. We're seeing that in how the bank is growing. It's a remarkably strong rate of growth. As we look at the economics of how it plays out, it's remarkable. Our sense is that the growth will continue and hopefully accelerate. At the same time, the quality is there. I think the fundamental issue is the power of the digital base. As you can see in the middle of the panel, operating leverage is quite incredible. You can see just over the year, over 18 months or so, you can see how our NIR stayed flatter going up per client.
The actual operating expenses are coming down dramatically per client as the fixed cost base kind of kicks into gear. The effect on profitability is obviously going to be significant. We've made this point before. We expect to break even, we expect to break even operation during this calendar year, and that's our hope. We expect to break even in total in the next calendar year. You can see from the chart, we've shown both just operational break even and total break even below. You can see on both a kind of a base set of assumptions and an upside.
Not only is the break even, I think, quite imminent, but at the same time, you can see the ability to get to a ZAR 100 million or so run rate a month in a short space of time is not going to be difficult. We believe it will happen in the next couple of years, as you can see from the chart. We thought of giving you a sense of how the bank economics play out, giving you a sense of operational break even should happen during this calendar year, total break even next calendar year is important. We've tried our best on the right-hand side of the chart to show you the assumptions on base upside, et cetera, and where we think the fluctuations in terms of the underlying assumptions are important.
You can kind of draw conclusions from that. I think we've been feeling very comfortable about the potential, and the quality of Discovery Bank. Let me turn to Discovery Health and make some comments. I've tried... you know, we tried our best. There's so much to say about these businesses. You know, I'm not doing our teams the justice, you know, that they deserve. I had to pull out a number of comments of what to say, but hopefully these things are clear. Discovery Health continues to perform robustly. It's completely in tune. I think that's so important in a healthcare system. It is about kind of an orchestra keeping things in balance, solid in everything you do. You can see the growth continues. New business has been stubbornly strong, up 23%.
I do believe you see it in this, in Vitality Health as well. There's a flight to quality. There's an importance of healthcare. There's a primacy of healthcare. You see it coming through in our new business growth. We've seen that inside employers. Employers are hiring more and putting more people on Discovery Health, and we're seeing that in individual side as well. Discovery Health Medical Scheme is seeing that growth. In addition, non-scheme growth, we're getting considerable success from products in primary care, gap cover, et cetera. That's grown nicely by up to 15% of total revenue. This is a market that was at one stage quite marginal for us. We see it as socially important and financially important for Discovery Health. The operating profit, I think, is stable at 4%.
They set some one-off costs that will ameliorate in the second half of the year, so we expect that growth to continue, but it just kind of, you know, moves on and on and on at scale, and the quality, I think, is exceptional. The Discovery Health Medical Scheme has been remarkably strong. Credit to the trustees of the scheme and the management. It's been really strong. As you can see, membership has really grown. Sorry, I'm jumping the wrong slides. Just the Discovery Health Medical Scheme continues to grow. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, just it now close to 58% of the market share of the open scheme market. You can see its scale compared to its competitors.
I'm always amazed by the stability of the scheme. In a sense, the stability versus the narrative is very important to understand. Of course, affording medical scheme coverage is a massive issue. That's our primary role, making medical scheme coverage affordable. The concept that people are buying down and all the time doing that is not really the case. You can see in the pie charts, it's hard to see, but that really reflects the percentage of people buying up or buying down, I think, in the red. Downgrading up or buying up their plan or buying down. What you see is it's not only remarkably stable, it's coming down. A couple of years ago, it was about 5% or 6% of people during the year either bought up or bought down. That was typically half and half.
What you see in the latest year is that's gone down to about 3%. That's become more sticky, more stable. You see on the bottom of the chart, the left shows have stayed largely the same at about 5% to 5.5% there, thereabout. We're showing on the right-hand side the scheme is massive. The growth is substantial. We attracted 338,000 lives over the 6-month period, but we lost 212,000 lives. You can see the reason for that in the previous analysis, just trying to point out that a lot of that loss was in fact not within our control. People leaving their employer group, finding it unaffordable, et cetera. Emigrating, a small number, as you can see.
We don't know the exact reasons for all of these factors, but hopefully it gives you a sense of just the dynamics of growth. Just to put it to you, I think strongly, the performance of Discovery Health, the performance of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme has been remarkably strong. I think one of the points we wanted to make in the presentation is now we're kind of hopefully post-COVID. The COVID pandemic has created quite a dilemma for the medical schemes industry and the healthcare industry because what you will know is that two things happened during this period. One is that people could not go for healthcare during the COVID period, as you know, and therefore utilization went through the floor and surplus inside medical schemes dramatically grew.
The second point is that people could not follow preventive screening. Therefore, there's all kinds of embedded potential health issues with the people that would have screened out in a period that didn't have COVID. The dilemma is how do you deal with these issues? How do you deal with the health issue? How do you deal with the affordability issue? It's a legitimate social issue here because people are battling to afford medical scheme coverage. At the same time, the medical schemes have considerable medical scheme surplus. What do you do with this and how do you think about it? How do the trustees of medical schemes think about this?
I guess the colloquial or the contemporary view is, well, why don't you just escalate your contributions at a rate lower than medical inflation and eat up the surplus and give people a kind of a break in terms of affordability. We wanted to demonstrate that it's a remarkably what appears a simple issue is a remarkably complex issue in a healthcare system, particularly one that has community rating. The analysis on the chart is actually a simple one. What you see on the left-hand side of the chart is medical schemes have surged in terms of surplus up to 50% of contributions. The solvency requirement is 25%. They've got much too much surplus. They don't need it. They should give it back to members in some way.
On the right-hand side, the cost curve at this point is growing at, we know, CPI + 4%. If you look at the supply side dynamics, the demand side dynamics, underlying fees, et cetera, we know that medical inflation is typically CPI + 4% or thereabout. That's what the cost curve is doing. The question is, if you were to take a view that what if you just, you know, escalate contributions? If you're a trustee, if you're a body of trustees of a scheme, if you escalate the contributions at, say, CPI, which I think is actually probably not dissimilar to what customers would expect. It's CPI + 4, but you've got all the solvency. Why not just escalate at inflation? What you find, I guess it's an obvious conclusion, but I don't think it's evident clearly to people.
Once you escalate below medical inflation, you're falling below the cost curve, as you can see on the chart. Once you're falling below the cost curve, you're eating into surplus, which is what you expect to do. The problem is that you can't catch up. That's the difficulty of medical schemes, because a 4% deficit turns into an 8% deficit by year 2. You're 8%-10% compound below the cost curve. You've got to get back there. How do you get back? You've got a community rate environment. What you do is you wanna jack up your contributions. When you escalate contributions, your 25% of contributions, solvency requirement goes up.
At the same time, you get adverse selection, which means that healthy people, when you put through an 8% or 10% increase, drop out and go elsewhere, drop out of the system entirely. You're left with the sicker block. You get into a death spiral. What you find from our projections on the left-hand side of the chart, and it's quite terrifying, you can see that while you're at 50% solvency, if you were to go up at CPI, not CPI + 4, so in other words, follow inflation, not medical inflation, in literally two or three years, you're insolvent. It's kind of like the Everest 2:00 P.M. rule. If you haven't summited by 2:00 P.M., no matter what it looks like, you will not make it back. That's the same thing with medical scheme solvency. It is a very, very tricky issue.
If you fall behind by 5% or so, 4% a year or thereabout, after two years, you will never come back. You will never recover from it without dramatic structural change. We've taken a very, very conservative view. The trustees of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme have obviously applied their minds very carefully to how we bring that surplus down over time. The approach we've used that I think makes absolute sense is a delaying tactic. In other words, on the right-hand side, always staying at the cost curve, but delaying those increases, as you can see. Staying at the cost curve, delaying the increase by a couple of months, going back to the cost curve. Having the same correct increases, but spreading them out.
What you finally have over time is a situation where the rate increase is at the right level, and you're eating up the right amount of solvency, but you never fall below the cost curve. That's one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is something I think very, very bold that the Discovery Health Medical Scheme has done. It's created this WELLTH Fund. You can see from the data that people have really reduced their screening over COVID, as you can see on the left-hand side of the chart. We've seen terrible results in that regard. People are presenting much later in the illness than they would have. We're picking up stuff a lot later, and that's problematic. The WELLTH Fund is a structure within the Discovery Health Medical Scheme.
The office spend is up to ZAR 10,000 to pursue discretionary wellness, screening and benefits, et cetera. They're really aligned with the Vitality mindset, it's inside the scheme. Offers considerable benefits to get a health check to understand that stuff. Almost a once-off reset of a proper understanding of people's health. If you bring these two things together, what I think you'll find is hopefully affordability. You'll find the scheme surplus at the right level. At the same time, people have access to considerable benefits. Of course, fundamentally, a reset of their healthcare, and that's kind of where the strategy is moving. Let me end by just one comment, and I hope it's maybe a good segue into that. The issue of just private healthcare.
What you can see from the analysis I've shown, I hope, is just healthcare is about stability. It's about a very complicated orchestra of things that work together. If you shock it in any way, it gets into difficulties very quickly. In a medical scheme, in two years, you can create insolvency. It's a good segue to the concept to the debate about the National Health Insurance bill that the legislation in some way, I would guess, is a few months off. This is being debated. I guess our position, I wanted to state it. Obviously, the unacceptable levels of inequality in healthcare are not sustainable. They must be addressed. At the same time, it must be taken as unequivocal. The quality of private health is exceptional. It's an incredible asset.
Our doctors, our hospitals do a great job. We need to preserve, we need to build it. Our view very strongly is an NHI that's functional is important. It must happen in the right way, it's important to have a blended funding model. The private healthcare system has to play a role in that NHI. At the same time, there's a range of products, low-cost benefit options being debated. I showed you some of the products we're rolling out to considerable success outside of the traditional medical scheme environment. FlexiCare with Clicks and others that service domestics and all kinds of people in the environment. It offers considerable support for people that want private healthcare. It is a powerful asset to be used in the tapestry of the NHI.
Of course, our appeal, I'll make it again, is just appreciate, I think the quality, the importance and the powerful asset that private healthcare is in a blended funding model going forward. Let me move to Discovery Life and move quite quick. I'm speaking too long here, but let me keep going. Discovery Life, hopefully becomes clear. It's had a very robust performance over the period. 30% increase in operating profit. A lot of that driven by the Group Life bounce back, but still 11% growth in individual Life. Strong new business APR growing 17%. A lot of that is growth in ACI, so growth in the inflation. That's part of our model. People take inflation increases and tend to stick with us, and that's important.
You can see the growth in embedded value just under 15%. We remain the leader in the market share on the pie charts on the right-hand side. Some of the actual dynamics I think are important. One of the issues we are driving Discovery Life to is cash generation. That is important as the business grows. It can never generate massive amounts of cash given its profitability. It is fundamentally investing capital at scale to get returns over time. You can see in the period under review, over 6 months, it generated just under ZAR 700 million. It's about a 30% cash conversion, dramatically better to previous times. You can see the positive experience variances on the left on the second chart. Highly positive over the period.
It's interesting that the lapse rates and the mortality variances are quite small. In a sense, that's counterintuitive. I've just told you about the Vitality shared value model, that people are engaging, they're getting healthier, they're sticking more. I wanna show you a bit more about the dynamics of that. I wanted to make the point on the third chart, post-COVID, mortality has largely come back to where it should be. You can see in the blue line. We do have elevated mobility claims. Income continuation, there could be long COVID. There are issues of moral hazard in a tough environment. We've seen capital disability somewhat swelled. You can see that in the red circle, on the chart. Hopefully you can see that mortality has come down, kind of in line where we expect it to be.
I wanna get back to the dynamics of the shared value model and make the point that the model, in a sense, is self-correcting. I've shown you that as people engage in the Vitality model, their claims, their mortality and morbidity claims go down, and their lapsation goes down. That's exactly what we see. Of course, the critical issue is the model expects that. I mean, that's how the model works. It has in the valuation model, when people go up, its expectation of mortality is to be lower. What the chart shows you there is in the horizontal white lines, what the expectation is, and in the actual charts, you know, by Vitality status, what we're actually experiencing. I want to give you a sense of how in balance the model is.
The experience variances are there, they're positive. You can see how the model is self-correcting. I think the fundamental thing to understand is that our mortality experience is close to 13%-15% lower than the benchmark in the industry. That's what our reinsurers' analysis show us. You see the effect of the power of the model. In the right-hand side going through COVID, you can see that while our mortality went up like the rest of the industry, it was 42% lower through the COVID period. I think in terms of the shared value model, making people healthier, focusing on behavior change, seeing that come through in benefits, you don't necessarily pick that up in the granularity of the experience variances inside the embedded value.
I wanted to give you that clarity of how the model works. Let me turn quickly to two other businesses, Discovery Invest. It was a tough period, I think you know. Discretionary savings almost dried up. It's a risk-off period. People focused on money market funds. The assets under administration gained 3%, was quite pleasing. Fees I think grew by 7%. Normalized operating profit by 15%. It was quite the swell by a taxation structure that affects below the line and gave a bit of a boost to Discovery Invest profitability. That's somewhat boosted. New business was actually not. It was 1% off. Not a bad performance in a very difficult time. The shared value dynamics continued to grow. Fairly robust in that time. The business has been strongly profitable.
It has good margin. It's doing remarkably well. I guess the question is why in a market that's difficult, where margins are under pressure? I think two points to make here. On the left-hand side, the assets under administration that we have now, in addition to the umbrella fund business that's coming on stream, in the little white pieces on the graph, now has reached about ZAR 150 billion. Not insignificant, but particularly we're one of the only players that are outsourcing that asset management. We're buying quality asset management on the margin. Given that scale, we can work with the best asset managers like Ninety One and others, at marginal cost to us. It provides incredibly good and competitive input costs. In the middle though, our products are very differentiated.
We've got two platforms now, Discovery Invest. Cogence with BlackRock is starting to roll out. They're dramatically different. Boosts and structure that offer people engaging in Vitality. They're very sticky. Lap rates are very low. I think I didn't show you in the previous chart. Sorry. The lap rates are in fact. Sorry, I've gone... There we go. Back. Essentially what shows a model where you have some pricing power, but you have low input costs. It's given us the ability to somewhat maintain our margins, maintain our profitability. There is some volatility with tax, et cetera. Generally, profitability is strong, stable, and even in a very difficult market, I think we're pleased with the performance and excited about how we can grow Cogence with BlackRock as we go forward. Let me talk to Discovery Insure.
A very, very difficult period. The team has worked really hard to recover back the margin. I think they've done well in that regard. Gross written premium up 11%. New business up only 3%. We focused very strongly on quality during this period. You can see we're touching about 295,000 vehicles we insure. Operating profit period on period is down. I'll show you in the next chart, that's not really the issue. It's the previous six months where the losses were that we're recovering from that's important. Our market share at about 10%. You can see those numbers. Sorry, I'm out of kilter here. Just, Deon, help me out. I'm showing you the wrong slide. Sorry. I've just shown you a range of numbers about Discovery Insure. Is that...
I think I am right.
I think you have to click again.
I think I am right. Sorry. The numbers I've just showed you on Discovery Insure are on the screen as you can see them. I hope that's fairly clear. The point I wanted to make was to drill down kind of one chart and just try and understand the dynamics. The first point is that the business dynamics are working really, really well. The shared value, Vitality Drive model is working well. All the correlations are in place. The fundamental issue is one of pricing, and just what's happened to the industry through COVID. Fundamentally, I think we lost pricing power through COVID. Through the COVID period, what happened is that people didn't drive.
It was very difficult to put rate increases through obviously in that period, despite the fact that the underlying dynamics of cost was starting to come through. Kind of rates were fairly flat over COVID. Underlying to us, and I think the industry, and I think we picked it up very early, is supply-side constraints, motor spares constraints, et cetera, sent a massive suddenly through the floor, the cost of repairs went through the floor and just came past the premium curve. The cost curve actually completely broke through the premium curve. In the previous page, you can see on the extreme right-hand side of the chart, in the previous six months, the consequential six months, you had a massive loss. In addition, we've seen huge increase in power surge claims.
We're paying, I think, close to ZAR 100 million every six months on power surge claims. We've seen theft of hire vehicles, et cetera. Those things I think will manage well over time. The fundamental point is I think the pricing power that we need to make sure that we get back. We need to get that, the pricing correct. Over the last six months, the team has done I think a remarkable job on using price optimization, focusing hard on how we increase prices. I think they've done a great job. We've increased prices in the right places all over the book. You can see in the bottom chart, on the third panel that the loss ratios or the claims levels of people leaving versus staying are dramatically different. We're keeping better risk, losing worse risk. Lap rates are actually quite low.
They're not dramatically high despite what we've done. What you see in the third panel is very important. You can see how the cost curve came through in the white, just shot through the premium curve, creating losses in the previous six months. We've brought the premium curve very quickly up, as you can see, and now we are kind of hopefully restoring margin. Giving you a sense that in this period, it's almost a break-even, as you can see. There's no predictions here. It's not guidance at all. Want to give you a sense that we think in the next period, margins should go up, should get back to close to 4% with a bit of a confidence band. A lot of work to be done. The inherent nature of the model, I think the business built by the team is remarkable.
I think the work done in the six-month period has been strong. Let's see how it plays out over the six months. We'll see very quickly if those margins do recover to where they should be. Let me end with the South African piece at that stage. I hope it's fairly clear. I wanted to give you some comments and turn to the U.K. Make the point, the U.K. has had a, I think a strong period, a very complex environment, high rates of inflation, economic growth down, kind of a stagflation environment, all kinds of dynamics taking place. The business is growing strongly. Operating profit up 15%. New business up very strongly. You can see it broken down in the different panels. As you see, lives cover growing very strongly, 15% to nearly 1.7 million lives.
A tremendous performance in new business driven by both VitalityLife, and Vitality Health. There really is a demand for our products. I think Vitality Health has had a tremendous performance. It is really turning out to be, I think, a leader in terms of quality, digital first, just everything it does. If you cut the data in any way, I think the performance is strong. You can see the normalized operating profit, I made the point, is only up 3%. If you look at the graph, you can see how it jumped up in the previous period, and we've maintained that. It's off a very, very high base, and the quality is very strong. You can see new business up 26%. It's just under GBP 44 million in the period, and very strong growth in lives cover.
Very strong growth to over 900,000 lives in the period. The actuarial performance of the business is strong. COVID claims or claims now or authorizations are now at pre-COVID levels. The claims, as we thought they would do, have bounced back. Our concern about how they would come back is largely manifested. I think all of the reserving, the benefits that we set out to achieve have been achieved. Lapse rates have come down. We're keeping them there. Then you see the loss ratio and the engagement, the correlations between people engaging in Vitality, engaging in all the stuff we're doing, is dramatically down sloping.
The business continues to generate good cash off the back book and use some of it for new business spend, new projects, but still generating over GBP 20 million of cash at the end of that. I think we're very pleased by the dynamics of Vitality Health. What is very interesting, though, is just how the business is growing and how it grows in relation to the NHS, and what we are trying to do in terms of growing the capability. You will know the NHS, which is a remarkable capability of the U.S. Its spend in itself is bigger than the GDP of Greece. It's an incredibly powerful thing, and in the U.S. and the U.K., it has tremendous social importance.
It's free at the point of care, that's important, and that must obviously perpetuate. It has had a difficult time post-COVID. All kinds of difficulties in terms of resources, the bounce back of claims, of mental health claims. What you see in the left-hand side is just the waiting. The number of people waiting for treatment in the NHS has suddenly grown from the COVID period quickly up to where it is today, and it's really problematic. You can see how the product system to an extent is operating as a safety valve. You can see our growth in the face of that. People are buying more and more private medical insurance. I think what's very important is the nature of PMI is changing. What it used to be is kind of potential hospital coverage when you have long waiting periods.
Today, it's the entire healthcare system. Talking therapies, mental health treatment, physiotherapy, optics, dental, very importantly, GPs, all of that stuff is now becoming part and parcel of the offering. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart just the growth in that primary care that's come about. What I thought is very interesting is just to superimpose on the chart, I hope you can see it, the timing of the change in waiting period in the NHS to all of the growth in Vitality Health, to the growth in primary care demand. It's completely and totally correlated. It's almost to the day that those things happened. It illustrates obviously the kind of the symbiotic relationship that takes place, which I think is kind of ironic in the debate of the NHI in SA.
You can see how the private sector plays an important role in hopefully supporting the NHS. I think the agility of the team, they've built a remarkably strong capability. The Vitality Health today offers a digital first across everything. We try our best to show you, whether it's online GPs, talking therapies, claims, wherever you want to access booking appointments, all of it is available on the face of the mobile. It's a digital first capability. We are, I think, pleased with the performance and quality of Vitality Health. The team has done an unbelievably strong job in that regard. In terms of VitalityLife, performance again has been strong. It's been a difficult evolution, as you know, over the last number of years. We've worked hard to get...
to make it a quality company with strong returns on what we're doing. Operating profit grew by 49%, as you can see. Very strong growth in new business. We focused on quality of new business. We still have to make sure that all of our expense levels are appropriate to get the kind of returns out of the new business we believe are coming through very strongly. The quality and scale, I think is very strong in that regard.
If you look at the actual dynamics of the business, it's an old chart, but I wanted to make the point that over the last number of years, a huge amount of work has taken place in every aspect of the business, and that has manifested in considerable strength in every regard. We left part of the back book in the belly of the Prudential, never did the transfer. We made sure that the capital structure of the group was super efficient. We looked at new business channels, et cetera. Every aspect of the business has been rebuilt, and it's coming through in a very powerful way. No matter how you cut the data, I think we're very pleased with the performance of VitalityLife.
One of the key things in the period under review has been the fact, and I think very important, is that we're selling indexing policies, which is very, very important, that people are linked to inflation. What's happened in the U.K., as inflation has come through, premiums have gone up. At the same time, given the engagement in Vitality, our premiums have gone up. We haven't seen the lapsation, which is an incredibly powerful result. A lot of the gain you see coming through, and you'll see that in the, in the various statements, has come through the indexation of the policies, through the engagement of Vitality, and through the high rates of inflation in the UK. You can see the lapses on the third panel largely staying very much below expectation.
While we grow market share to I think third biggest in the market, about 7% or 8% or thereabout, growing strongly. We are pleased by the performance of Vitality Life. Work to be done in every regard, but I think the U.K. has performed remarkably well in a very, very difficult environment. Let me turn to the last piece. I'm running a bit late here, and I'm sorry for that. The last piece of our, of the Discovery puzzle, and it's a very important piece for us for future growth. It's been a complex period in the case of Vitality Global. We're excited about its potential growth. I think the numbers are complex to follow because there's so many different moving parts in Vitality Group. It's made up of two distinct pieces, Vitality Network, which is where we take the Vitality capability tech models.
We partner with major insurers like Sumitomo, AIA, John Hancock, Manulife, et cetera, around the world. They use the model. In a sense, we earn a fee structure from that and some performances from that. It's a light capital model, and hopefully over time, it grows and becomes material. Our focus on that is extending the reach, extending the depth, and making sure that can grow. I think that the possibilities there are very, very strong. On the right-hand side is Vitality Health. It's a different structure. It's generally equity structures, notably Amplify Health and Ping An Health, and are working down in the U.S., where we expect those to really grow substantially through organic growth of those businesses in and of themselves.
Looking at the kind of overall, there's so many moving parts, it's important to see kind of the underlying performance. I'll deal with the Vitality Network piece first. It has been not an easy time, as you will know. Asia is still somewhat recovering. AIA, for example, now is starting to bounce back in terms of growth. You can see integrated premiums in dollar terms are slightly down. In rands, they obviously strongly, given the strength of the dollar currency. Revenue growing nicely by 38% in rands, reflecting we're getting more materiality or more revenue out of our partners. Operating profit growing strongly to just under ZAR 200 million or just under $12 billion. Materiality has to change. We need to grow that base.
You can see the growth in membership is very, very strong. There are a number of areas that we are growing in all of our partners. I think in many cases, what we're doing is transformational. Hopefully, the results inside John Hancock, Sumitomo Life, AIA are remarkably strong. We need to grow on that. There are a number of things I wanted to mention to you that are important about the potential growth. Firstly, AIA is bouncing back strongly, and that, I think, is important. Second point is that for the first time, we've entered India with Tata AIA, so there's Tata AIA Vitality that will grow very, very quickly. We are very excited about the potential growth of that market. We are working now with Prudential U.S.
across Latin America around a proper wellness ecosystem where all the learnings we've had in the South African context, we'd like to take there. Manulife, which is the group that John Hancock sits in, Manulife in Canada, is now a much more comprehensive focus on a kind of all-in Vitality strategy. In addition, there's certain large markets we are looking at additional partners for, we're in fairly advanced process of how we'll play that out. There's a lot of potential growth in that business. It doesn't present capital risk. It presents considerable upside. We think we can grow that significantly going forward. I think importantly, the stuff I showed you earlier on how the Vitality model is evolving is important in the context of how that may play out. Let me turn to Vitality Health International.
This is made up of a number of complex moving parts. Again, I think just looking at the kind of addition of them doesn't give you any sense. You can see the revenue of the non-Ping An stuff has grown dramatically. That's a function of Amplify Health and immediate revenue generating for us. On the right-hand side, really a break even, a function of Ping An Health, somewhat constrained. Spend on new initiatives and Amplify Health. It's a mix of a number of different things. I wanted to make a few points about the potential of each, just breaking it down, you can see, I think, the scale of what we have there in terms of Ping An Health, Amplify Health, Vitality U.S., and the other Vitality Africa, which is very important for Discovery Health, and Qantas.
All of that, I think, have growth potential. There's real big potential in them. It's about how we play them out. The period under review has been a complex one. I mean, in the case of Ping An Health, it has really been a very, very difficult time, as I think you'd understand. Just some data we wanted to share with you. On the left-hand side of the screen, this really was six months of considerable lockdown. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, kind of the lockdown index across 100 cities in China, really almost a total lockdown coming down, coming up again, and then ultimately the move from zero COVID and opening up almost entirely. In the middle, you see the Omicron wave coming through during that time. Significant wave came through.
Estimates are that 80% of the population were infected. Official death rates are kind of 80,000 people, but I think models show that it can be half a million to 1.5 million over that period. Future waves are likely to follow, hopefully of a less intensity. We've watched very carefully. Obviously concerned about COVID claims coming through. You're sounding at the business and being very, very cautious about and a very careful approach and a conservative approach to reserving is taken during the period. I'll touch on that now. You can see that the economy is likely to bounce back. These are growth predictions of the economy. The economic growth came down to 3%.
It's expected to get to just under 6% in the 2023 calendar year. The chart at the bottom shows you how that is expected to manifest. The growth is expected to be very strong. Our sense of it is the six months under review, a very, very difficult period for the business, but the growth potential going forward this year should be strong. You can see the playout of this on the faceplate of Ping An Health. Operating profit's down 44%. You'll see on the left-hand side, very interestingly, we've broken it down between investment income and operating profit. Investment income actually took a bigger hit than the operating profit, as you can see. The business actually performed quite well.
You can see our share of the after-tax number down 40%, very much in line with the top-line performance of Ping An Health. Written premium flat for the six months, about ZAR 20 billion of written premium. New business down significantly during the period. A feature of two things. One is we've made this point before. We're using less and less of the Ping An Life channel, and you're seeing that come down in certain markets. Even on our own license, it's down 12%, reflecting a very difficult period in China. Not unexpected. I think we are confident about the business's ability to bounce back. We wanted to break down the performance for you. Ping An Health has a calendar year.
I wanted to show you the entire year, how that's played out from an operational perspective and then from an investment income perspective. What you see, interestingly, investment income has been somewhat curtailed, but the real hit took place outside of this period. The profit operations has been actually very strong. In the last quarter, a very conservative approach to reserving in the face of COVID was taken, and you can see that bringing our profitability quite substantially. On the right-hand side of the chart, you can see that fully CNY 11 billion of reserves are being held. It's a very, very large asset base, a very conservative approach to reserving. I think we're confident about the quality of the business. A combined operating ratio at just under 94%. You can see the level of solvency.
The business is large, rock solid. I think it's well positioned, as China emerges from the zero COVID policy. Let me finish with Amplify Health, it's a year into the rollout of Amplify Health. I think things are moving very quickly. We are pleased with the year. It's been a year of shifting a huge amount of IP from Discovery, building the team, et cetera. Five observations we thought we'd make. The first is that there's a pretty complex revenue model. You'll recall the $200 million of capital of our spend will be funded by AIA over a 10-year period for the build and the acquisition requirements of Amplify.
That's turned out to be, I think, entirely appropriate, and fit for purpose in the sense that we think it's the right quantum, we think it's right given the scale of IP that we shifted, and it's playing out quite well. We already have shifted most of the IP, most of the people, and we've done acquisition of Ada, which is a fantastic health tech data science business across Asia Pacific. It is entirely complementary to the Discovery IP and offers fantastic synergies in the belly of Amplify Health. That's been digested. It's being worked together with the Vitality, with the Discovery IP, so it's gonna offer considerable product strength in the Asian market. The fourth point, we've developed and identified seven products that we will be rolling out very quickly.
Smart claims, chronic disease management platform, very important and powerful data foundation. There's a number of products we are prioritizing in that regard. Now we're in advanced discussion with three markets within AIA. Early stage discussion with others. Amplify Health, we believe, is ready for proper business in this calendar year. Hopefully we'll get moving, and you'll see it play out over the year. The growth we expect hopefully will come in over time. The revenue model comes through our P&L in a, I think, a very important way, as you will see if you look at the detail. I've said too much. I hope I've given some clarity. I wanted to just give you a sense of three strands of business.
Discovery SA, Vitality Global on a model of Vitality that is continuously evolving. We're in a very important phase now of growing that model, of growing that model into something into a separate form that I think is much more powerful. You can see the numbers, I think are fairly clear and very strong. We're pleased with the results. The four points that I wanted to get across around growth, around performance, capital, dividend, a focus on prudence, hopefully have come through in that regard. Let me end. I am 9 minutes late, Deon. Hopefully given you a sense of how the group has performed. We are feeling good about the way forward. There are gaps and holes in different places. We need to work hard to fix them. Enough said. Let me end then.
Thank you for the time. I think with Deon, we'll facilitate questions. Questions that come through. All of our team on side. Do you wanna deal with them?
Quite a few questions, Adrian, thank you, that came through. Let's hope we can get through all of them in the remaining time. First question from Michael Christelis around you have, you've highlighted that IFRS 17 will result in downward restatement of equity in the two life operations. Can you elaborate on the sources of that write down? Given the similarities between your accounting policy and IFRS 17, and also any comment on the size of these impacts. We also had a question from Keith McLachlan, who was also asking, can you talk through your expectations for how IFRS 17 will affect the group result in future? Maybe just a few points to make here. For the others on the call, just to make sure everybody's on board.
IFRS 17 is a new accounting standard for insurance contracts, replacing IFRS 4. It is applicable to Discovery for our financial year ending June 2024. As from July this year, we will be in that new accounting standard. Michael is right. At a very high level, general philosophical level, the way that we've always applied IFRS 4 is very similar to the underlying philosophy of IFRS 17. Obviously, there's a lot of detailed guidance in IFRS 17 that would make an impact. At a very high level for the short-term insurers, the impact is immaterial. For the two long-term insurers, there are some impacts, and that's what Michael is asking about.
So, maybe just to explain where some of those impacts will come from. Later in the year, as we head towards year-end and into the next year, we will certainly make sure that we spend quite a lot of time to educate around this around this particular issue. Most important point, this is an accounting standard that really deals with how you account and how you account for your profit around these very long-term contracts. So that's an important point to bear in mind, that underlying the economics, the cash flow of the policy doesn't change at all. That remains intact.
In the work that we've done, our best estimate liability, and the quantification of that remains unchanged. Where there are some impacts is in the way that IFRS 17 dictates how margins are quantified, accreted, and released to P&L, and the timing of that is different, as well as the treatment of these economic assumption changes that we've seen where you have an election under IFRS 17 to take those impacts through through OCI. The real impact comes from things like the definition of upfront cost, the definition of your of your coverage unit and how you release that that to profit. Again, important to understand to the extent that you now raise additional margin, it is purely because of timing of those of those releases to the P&L.
To the extent that you create more margin on the balance sheet, that margin will release to profit over time in the future. We've seen some very interesting publications from the rating agencies, for instance, that would deem that CSM to be part of equity or a proportion of equity. Those are the sort of high-level impacts that we would expect. As I said, you know, this is purely timing. Doesn't change the underlying cash flows, doesn't change the EV, and you will now see these economic assumptions coming through OCI if we use that election. That also supports the reason for us over the past while, when we had these economic impacts coming through the P&L, to normalize that impact.
Maybe a few other points just to make, also in this regard. We are in a very unique position as a group that we were able to go back because of the data that we have. We are applying IFRS 17 fully retrospectively. That has given us the ability to model, how IFRS 17 plays out over time, and has actually identified some very unique sort of features. For instance, during the global financial crisis, how the profit emergence happens over that period and also during COVID. Where you have swings and roundabouts, but if you stand back from that, the profit emergence and the profile of profit emergence was not significantly different.
The negative impacts, as I said, largely from the definition of upfront cost, which is much more narrower in its application, and a much more granular cohorting and portfolio profiling under IFRS 17. Where under IFRS 4 you had a larger portfolio, and you had a number of offsets or cross subsidization within that portfolio, you now are much more granular in IFRS 17. It requires you to identify loss-making policies that are profitable but at risk and profitable, and you treat those separately. You also treat every cohort from a time perspective separately. You've got a much more granular view and treatment of policies.
All of that, obviously, will have some impact on how you recognize through the P&L, and for that reason, the impact on the transitional balance sheet. From a economic perspective, and that opening balance sheet, the transition, it's merely a factor of where the markets are, to the extent that interest rates are treated now separately, depending on what the rates are on the transitional balance sheet. The reason why we flagged this issue is we saw that obviously the opening transitional balance sheet is June 2022. We know what the interest rates did at that point, and you will have that impact in OCI. When interest rates revert, that will actually revert back. Some of it is purely timing.
Some of it is the granular cohorting and the definition of upfront cost, that is what impacts the equity position. As I said, important to understand that to the extent that you have a negative impact on equity, that will release as profit in future. For that reason, you'll see the rating agencies also taking that view on the CSM. Michael also asked about quantification. We are currently, this has been a project over a number of years. We are currently busy with finalization of that and the verification and providing or getting assurance from the auditors. We're in a very unique position in that as we transition, we've now gone into the sort of joint audit and the compulsory rotation of auditors.
We've actually got three of the large firms who are required to sign off on this. That verification will happen over the next number of months and to be ready for implementation on the 1st of July. At that gives a feel, and as I said, later in the year, we will do a lot of education around this issue and to explain how exactly it impacts Discovery.
Deon, do you wanna keep going?
Yep. We had a question from Sandile Magugula. At which level or year will growing Discovery begin to make less economic sense to paying dividends at 2x-3x cover? Secondly, has the gearing level peaked at this level, given delivering a deleveraging effort? What is Discovery's hurdle rate of return associated with investing in growth? Yeah, maybe just to take that last point, our default minimum hurdle for return investing in growth is risk-free + 10, typically. We've communicated that previously. Adrian, I'm not sure if you wanted to address that first bit on the dividend.
Maybe back to the point, I think, you know, we've had this guidance of 10% spend on new initiatives. We kind of back down to that issue. We've got a lot on our plate to get the bank to scale and for our Health to scale, et cetera, that we haven't really thought through how that will play out over time. I think that we will always continue to invest in the right kind of new initiatives, but I think the model is in balance, and I think we should get back to the same over time, kind of dividend cover deal. I don't think it's gonna be different. I think we've kind of feeling at the moment we're in balance, let it play out longer. Give us time to get clarity.
I think our focus must be, if you get the bank to scale and the stuff we're doing, the returns for shareholders will be dramatic. I think that the payoff will be significant. Let us play that out a bit longer. Thanks for the question.
Yeah, and maybe just very briefly on the deleveraging point. You know, the absolute, in our capital plan, the absolute level of debt is, sort of, relatively stable. The FLR therefore comes down as the group grows and the equity grows. Warwick Bam from RMB Morgan Stanley, you had quite a few questions here. The first is there's been significant volatility in the Ping An Health profits for 2022, profits declining by 18% year-on-year, and H1 2023 by 40%. Can you give us a sense of whether this earnings volatility is unique or will investment returns and claims dynamics naturally result in large profit variances from period to period?
Maybe let's deal with that one first, and then we can talk about the ROEV.
Let me just make a point, maybe Barry can just very shortly speak back at him. The volatility for us is often that Ping An Health is a calendar year, and in fact, their earnings have been quite stable and growing quite steadily from year to year. We kind of see often volatility in our first 6 months, and I think that's important. I think this volatility now is a function very much of the COVID and lockdown period that should not recur. Barry, if you're online, will you make a few comments on that?
Thanks. Thanks, Adrian. I mean, it's. First of all, let me say that business is managed by an excellent team in China. We also got a team there from Discovery with excellent management. I think it's very conservatively managed. Over the last six months, just given the dynamics in the market, I think they've just managed the entire business conservatively, ensuring that there's sufficient reserves for any eventuality falling from the COVID pandemic. We should see a strong recovery coming into 2023.
Um-
Yeah.
The second part of Warwick's question is your ROEV of 14.4 includes material positive experience variances considering the IRR on new business of risk free + 9.4% and the decline in new initiative losses. Should we expect the ROEV to improve beyond 14.4? What gives you comfort that the inflation-linked nature of premiums in VitalityLife does not increase the persistency risk given the unusually high inflation rates?
Let me do the second piece first, maybe. Just make a point. Neville, you might wanna come in. Is that there's certainly an increase in lapse risk with higher levels of inflation, but it's kind of counterbalanced with the increase itself. To an extent, we can sustain quite a bit of lapsation, but keep some of the value. I think we had a very good period, Neville. Neville, if you're online, make some comments on this.
Yeah. I think, I mean, the point being made that we have a dedicated and conscious effort to do retention, especially in these high inflation environments. The cover goes up as well so that people understand the need for the increase in cover. As Adrian said, we have made allowances for high lapses and for some inflation-linked premium holidays, which have been taken into account. We're quite confident that we'll be able to continuously outperform in terms of in terms of the lapse rates. I think importantly, though, the significant increases far, far outweigh the lapses that have actually occurred. We're quite confident.
Obviously, we understand that, you know, the economy and the cost of living crisis plays a role. Once again, what we've experienced is that we have definitely got a higher quality of client who is not as impacted as our competitors are, who are some of them targeting the lower end of the market.
Neville, thanks for that. Maybe Andy, if you online, Andrew Rayner, our Chief Actuary. Maybe talk to the ROEV comment, question.
Thanks. Thanks, Adrian. I can do that. Hi, Warwick. Thanks for your question. I think, yeah, look, I mean, the key moving parts in the ROEV that beyond the unwind of the risk discount rate, which is just baked in, is obviously the value of new business that you can add and the margin on that, the experience variances, and then basis changes if they're needed. Then obviously the things that aren't in covered business. All your other businesses, what profits or losses they make.
With regards to the latter, you know, we would expect that as the J-curve of the new initiatives comes down, particularly the spend on Bank, that will directly come into a lift in ROEV as businesses like Ping An Health and Insure recover and get back to former levels of profit and beyond. That will also give a lift to ROEV. In terms of value of new business, you know, obviously, we continually strive to reduce acquisition costs and get expense efficiencies across the board. There's some areas where we're looking to increase the volumes as well. Obviously, you do as much of that as you can at profitable levels. You know, we're definitely working on improving that. The experience variances are less predictable, I guess.
They're a function of your basis and the strength of that, but they're also not entirely within your control. If we look at this year's experience variances, there's a couple of them in there which are very much, you know, one-off. The, the lift from very high inflation in the U.K. and somewhat high in South Africa, could be a one-off. You know, we may not see that in year one and two and three from this point forward. You do need to take allowance for that. I think where we can control it, we definitely would see lift in that ROEV going forward. The experience variances are less under our control, I think, Warwick. Thanks, Adrian.
Andy, while you're online, there's a question from Kunaal Kalyan. Says, good day
Are our rates Discovery on ESG? It's good to see improvement in ESG disclosure, especially on renewables. How's Discovery integrating ESG into its underlying investment portfolios?
Thanks, Kunal, thanks. I'm glad that Risk Insights is evaluating us. Thanks for that. I think a couple of key things here. We are a signatory to the principles for responsible investment, we apply that rigorously across the assets in the group. We have adapted, you know, investment mandates that we have with our investment managers to accommodate that or to incorporate that. We've selected investment managers that are fully committed to operating in consistent with the UNPRI principles. You know, we regularly monitor that. They give us fantastic feedback on their engagements with the companies that they direct some of our investments to, you know, the level of in their view of the ESG ratings of those companies.
It's in, it's very deeply rooted in the way we do investment management. The other thing to bear in mind is that there's very little shareholder investments in equity markets. Most of our shareholder investments are in our own businesses or in very, very stable cash and government bond-type assets. The majority of the equity-related investments are sitting in our linked funds in the Invest business, where, you know, by nature, the mandates are, you know, do need to be competitive. As a balanced fund, it needs to be sort of comparable with the balanced fund mandates across the market. There's, you know, there's obviously that's a caveat to that. But all of the funds are managed according to the UNPRI.
Do you want the next question, maybe correlate, but I think Riaan and Emil can maybe talk.
I'll just quickly read it. This is Andrew Baker. You clearly show lower claims and lower lapses from greater engagement with the shared value model, for example, gold versus blue, and lower mortality and lapses versus the insurance industry as a whole. Are you able to share any data that shows that you have better persistency and lower mortality versus your direct peers in South Africa and the UK who don't have a shared value model?
Maybe Riaan.
Maybe Riaan.
Maybe if you want.
Yeah, thank you for the question. I think the numbers that Adrian has shown in the slide, the 20% reduction in lapses compared to peers within a reinsurance study, is a good way of showing that, as well as the 13% reduction in mortality experience compared to peers in that same reinsurance portfolio. I think that is comparable. I think however, the beauty of a shared value model is that one shouldn't only compare a total reduction in mortality and lapses over time. The statuses are indicative of underlying mortality and morbidity experience, and very importantly, we see a reduction in persistency rates more pronounced at the higher statuses where you have the best claims experience.
Put differently, we see the best persistency experience at the best areas in the risk pool, and that really leads to an overall improvement in the, in the risk pool, compared to peers. Hopefully that gives some insights to that question.
Emil, maybe as a U.K. perspective, could be worthwhile. Emil Stipp.
Yes. Thanks, Adrian. Good question, Andrew. What we can see, unfortunately, the data is not, the published data for the industry is not entirely up to date. There's a bit of a lag. Certainly from what we can tell, the UK business is performing exceptionally well against the industry in terms of lapses. We think also in terms of claims, although it's not always visible because, not everybody discloses segmentals in the U.K.. The way that we do. Certainly that appears to be the case, and there's more and more evidence as we're developing, that that is indeed happening. Maybe just the way to think about it is that there's almost this logical reason why this happens. The simple fact is that we give rewards to people.
If you exercise more, you get rewards. It means that you're less likely to lapse your policy. Because you get healthier by exercising more, it means that those effects just build up in time in the portfolio. Across the world, we see a net improvement in engagement, which then leads to an improvement in lapses and mortality over time as it unfolds in the portfolio.
It's just a suggestion that Michael Christelis has a follow-up question on just on Vitality. We'll come back to others, too. Just that question, Emil, maybe if you're online, can you see it? With the presence in 41 countries, how does Discovery plan to leverage the data and experience from the network to improve healthcare outcomes? Now, Emil, you're at the epicenter. Just make some comments.
Sure. Absolutely. It's a question from Mike, what he asks for says that, you know, COVID-19 demonstrated how our health is interconnected across the globe. Do we think that Vitality plays any role in managing, you know, the impact or preventing global pandemic? I think what was fascinating to us, Mike, when we looked at this during the pandemic is that, you know, for years we've said that exercise reduces the risk of non-communicable disease. What we saw during COVID very quickly is that actually people who exercise more also had a much lower COVID risk, both in terms of hospitalization, also in terms of mortality. When we look...
When we look at the data now over time, we're now emerging from COVID. Those causal inference models that you saw in Adrian's slides earlier, if we extend it to during the COVID period and after the COVID period, it's all consistent. Basically, it shows the same trend, whether you include COVID claims or not. The answer to your question is that to a large extent, what this model does in 41 countries in the world by encouraging people to exercise, is to reduce their susceptibility to consequences of getting a virus as you get in a pandemic. Obviously, it doesn't stop the virus itself. That emerges for different reasons.
It, it's seems to us, and it's very clearly indicating in our data, that exercise and lifestyle is a very important factor both for infectious disease and non-communicable disease, the outcomes of that and mortality. For that reason, we think it does play a significant role in managing the impact of a pandemic.
Thanks, Emile. We had another question from Andrew Baker. On persistency, we've heard some of your South African peers being pretty vocal about the risks here. Why do you think it hasn't impacted you to the same extent? Is it business mix related, or do you think that it is something to do with the shared value model? Are you able to provide a little more detail on the one-off costs in Discovery Health? What were they and how much it was? Thank you.
Maybe Riaan.
Riaan, on that, on the persistency issue, maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think the current environment certainly adds to the persistency risk of that going looking forward. We haven't seen any impacts in persistency. The shared value model, as we've explained earlier, certainly reduces any risk to higher lapses. Given, as Emile also explained, that for engagement, we do provide lower lapses, better benefits, and more rewards to our customers, so it's in the interest to engage, and through that we see significantly better persistency on our base risks. I think it's also important to note that Discovery tend to operate in the higher end of the market, where historically we have seen our customers being more resilient in terms of economic stress. We also have seen a flight to quality.
In tough economic times, there's typically a flight to quality which has lower Discovery's persistency risk relative to competitors.
I mean, just the one-off costs. Obviously, I mean, there are few areas of one-off cost. Nothing dramatic. It should recur. They should come back quite quickly in the second half. How much we need much more detail. Do you wanna say anything on that?
Yeah.
A couple percentage points of growth probably.
There's a bit of investment there in operational and.
Yeah, some timing on...
Et cetera.
on certain center payments, et cetera, et cetera, if I remember right. If you're okay with that.
Yeah. Then another question from Michael Christelis, just asking: What is holding back the new business margins in the two life operations, given that volumes are largely back to pre-COVID levels? Riaan?
Do you wanna-
Maybe Hylton might comment on the U.K.. Riaan?
Yes. Looking at the South African affluent protection market, what the market share statistics have shown us is that the market has shrunk overall compared to pre-COVID levels. Discovery Life has in fact maintained and even grown our market share within the affluent protection market. We are quite comfortable on that front. I think what that means is really for margins to improve, we require an increase in volume as well as a drive in terms of Of costs, acquisition costs, ongoing costs, to reduce unit costs at the same time, to get a lift back in margins. On the back of that, we're focusing on innovation.
Just yesterday, we have launched some exciting new initiatives which we are confident will give us a lift in new business volume. Should we get that lift in new business volume, we are also confident that you could see a somewhat recovery in margins.
On the U.K.?
On the UK, Neville wants to comment as well. Just to say, like, there's two aspects there. On the health business, there's an anomaly in tax rates. Corporate tax rates are going up. It means that effectively You know, just the way that the VNB calculation works, there's an anomaly and it reduces VNB for a temporary period. It will basically adjust as soon as the corporate tax rate is consistent through the projection period. In other words, we write off expenses at a low corporate tax rate than what we'll pay tax in the future on the margins. On the life business, there are mix issues involved there as well. The mix of new business has changed quite a lot.
We are working hard also on going forward with the launch of new seek products, changing that mix again, and driving higher margin products in the life business in the U.K.. Don't know, Neville, if you want to add to that.
Yeah, I think just the one thing to add is that we've got some really interesting kind of price optimization play in the U.K. to be targeting the higher margin business. As Riaan said, it is a function of new business volumes, business mix and expenses. The team is working exceptionally hard to get ourselves improving in all those areas, and it's looking very positive at the moment.
Should we-
Yeah
Varun's question?
Yeah.
Baron, I think we did touch on this. Varun Kumar just asking the UK life business benefited from high inflation without an impact on lapses, do you not anticipate a delayed impact on lapses going into H2 and H1 of 2024? Neville, yeah.
Yeah. I think we've answered that question, in various of my colleagues have here as well. I think the underlying, you know, issue is that the shared value model actually is working, especially in tough times. You know, Riaan made the point on the flight to quality. We definitely see people valuing their Vitality rewards, their Vitality benefits, and looking at it as a complete package and not just an insurance premium that's going off on their debit order. I think that the shared value model is robust. Stood us in excellent stead, and now is the true test.
We continue to push ahead to make sure that our members understand the value they're getting out of Vitality, not only about their personal health improvement, but also about the value they get from a financial perspective. We have a significant amount of work that takes place, digital work, call centers calling out to people. The conscious effort that the teams are undergoing to actually maintain this is significant, and we're quite confident going into the future. Caveating that, caveating that, we're not hubris about the marketplace, the environment. We, once again, you know, believe that the shared value model is significant, in the impact that it's having.
Okay. Can I ask you this, Dion, we wrap up?
Yes.
We've dealt with most. There's permutations of questions coming through. If we can, I know we were out of time. Once again, just to thank you for your time. It's been a busy period. I wanna again thank my colleagues and all the Discovery people across the world for a remarkably successful six months. It's always a pleasure to present their work and an honor. Thanks, everyone, and thanks for the time and best wishes to you all.