Good morning, and thank you for your time. It's always an absolute pleasure and an honor to present Discovery's results to you. The results today are for the full year ending 30th June 2022. It has been a very good year for us. A very, very important year for us. Certainly very complex. We put out the numbers early in our trading statement, and I hope they are clear. Operating profit up, normalized operating profit up 45%. Core new business up 6%. Headline earnings up 74%, and normalized headline earnings up 71%. There's a lot of dynamics obviously behind these numbers, and I hope through the presentation I get those across to you. I'm joined by CFO Deon Viljoen, and our entire executive team is on the line.
After the presentation, we'll take questions as they come, and we will obviously answer them to the best of our ability. We'll go through this hopefully in a simple way, and I hope I get across the complexities of what is a, I think a very, very important year for Discovery. Let me start maybe with just slight reminiscing and just maybe make the point. I kind of wanted to thank our Discovery people. It's been 30 years of Discovery, this year in 2022, and it was kind of interesting to juxtapose the simple but powerful purpose that we built the organization on, make people healthier, at its core, and enhance and protect their lives. That's what we built the organization on, and a set of values.
The reality is we haven't strayed from that. In fact, if anything, I think we've become more focused on that. I think we juxtapose that on the financial kind of performance of the group over time. You can see the pattern that's been achieved, and I really wanna thank our people for that. 13,552 people, and the thousands that have worked with us, our intermediaries, our stakeholders, our shareholders and all. It's been a wonderful journey. Enough of that. We are not the kind of organization to look backwards. We're looking forwards. We're metamorphosizing. We are evolving. We are really focusing hard on pivoting to growth in a market that is remarkably complex but very, very exciting.
I mean, maybe make the start with context, then again, this is stuff that know that you know, but I thought it important to provide context. Three, in our view, very powerful conflating forces. The first, of course, is COVID. Hopefully easing towards endemic, but it's still a pandemic in many ways. We're coming to, hopefully the tail of it. Massive knock-on effects on how we live, how we work. The Great Resignation. That has all kinds of effects on other things, supply chains, globalization. We've seen that come through. Then you overlay the tragic Ukraine war with all kinds of ramifications on food security, food prices, energy prices, inflation, et cetera. All of that kind of culminating in a very complex economic environment of inflation, rising interest rates, and for sure, recession in many markets.
In our world, four charts that make a difference as you see on the slide. We see inflation rates going from very low levels in many markets to really climbing now. We're seeing long-term rates of interest who are exceptionally low in markets like the U.K., climbing. We see market values coming down in the second half of our financial year, and then we've seen at 15-18 million COVID deaths globally through these various waves, and hopefully, as I said before, we come into an endemic phase. This is a complex time of great geopolitical instability, macroeconomic risk, and all kinds of complexity. In that context then, our focus has been, I think, very clear on what we need to do. We've been clear about our ambition.
We are building globally a new generation financial services organization we believe that can lead the world through our Vitality Shared- Value model that is good for all. Makes customers healthier, offers better, more sustainable products, and provides better returns to shareholders. I hope through the presentation you will see the power of how the model is played out. In this regard, we focused on four distinct strategies. Achieving robust growth, pivoting to growth, while navigating COVID-19 and hopefully the end of COVID. Importantly, navigating a very complex macroeconomic environment. Second point is scaling and streamlining our new initiatives. You'll see in the presentation that I think many organizations have new initiatives. We have them all over the organization. We've always grouped them together to look at them through a specific lens and make sure there's a focus on them.
In this period, there's been a specific focus on scaling the ones that really have potential and applying discipline where we need to, and you see that come through. The third has been just, I think, just making sure that the Shared-V alue model works. It has been a remarkable anchor through this difficult time and illustrating how that has worked through the complexities of what we've gone through. Then finally saying, I guess it doesn't need to be said, but I think kind of obvious but very important. Capital strength and liquidity, I think through difficult times, that is what you require. That is kind of the four focal points or the four themes of the year under review. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart, just we try to place where we are now.
I think we're proud of the organization, where we are. ZAR 9.4 billion of profit, 30 million customers in 39 markets, 13,500 people in the Discovery fold. We're measuring things, and I'll show you a bit later, like how many activities or healthy choices are we kind of generating per year. In this year, over 470 million. We are an organization, I think, of a considerable footprint, but a very clear focus on what we need to do. Let me go into the results and kind of pivot on the operating profit, up 45% to ZAR 9.4 billion. I wanna go back to that chart and just illustrate the shape of the performance.
I think what's important in this chart on the left-hand side is just to overlay the three complexities. Firstly, the investment in new businesses. We accelerated that investment specifically with the Discovery Bank, but with other initiatives over the last four years. The pandemic lasted the last three years. Then I would say to that the real macroeconomic complexity has been over the last two years and is in fact happening now and is likely to intensify in many ways. Kind of a combination of those have come together. You can see the value that created in the performance of the group. Notably the effect of COVID and the effect of death claims on our group. I think you can see we bounced back very, very strongly, up 45% and quite strongly ahead of previous periods.
The group, in a sense, is, I think back to where it needs to be and is very strong, strongly poised for growth going forward. On the right-hand side of the chart, this is not any kind of back solving, just trying to illustrate the mathematics of organic growth. If you add back the effect of COVID, you add back the effects of investment in new initiatives, those should ease over time. You kind of see where the trajectory gets to, and therefore, we think we are, in terms of scale and potential growth, in a very, very good spot. Just giving a sense of how these things have overlaid and conspired in the shape of the performance of the group. Let me go to the detail. This is a table which you would have seen in our trading update.
I think we sent that out last week. It gives you a sense of what's going on. I'll make some comments, and I'll delve deeper into them later in the presentation. Operating profits up 45%. New business up 6% to ZAR 21.7 billion over the year. I think importantly, the South African composite up 42% in profitability. Very strong growth, obviously, driven by the bounce back of Discovery Life. New business up 13% on the back of strong new business in Discovery Health. The U.K. had an exceptionally strong performance. Robust 25% growth in operating profits with 19% growth in new business. The Vitality group had a difficult time. It was robust performance, but in an environment of considerable headwinds, especially in Asia and China, lockdowns and whatnot.
I'll give you some sense into that. When you look through, you'll see the performance is strong, and there's some very good dynamics and important points to make in the process. Let me make a few comments on some of the specifics, and you'll see them later in the analysis. Discovery Health, I think, performed really, really well across every single issue, with really a good focus on sustainability in every aspect of the healthcare system. Discovery Life really bounced back strongly. Strong positive experiences. Strengthening our bases to go forward in preparation for long COVID. Discovery Invest, robust performance. The launch of Cogence with BlackRock has been an important development in the period under review. Discovery Insure's a fundamental issue during the period. You can see we made a loss in that period, a considerable swing.
ZAR 369 million overshoot of claims due to three things. Motor parts, the cost of motor parts and inflation. The effect of weather and the KZN floods, which were particularly tragic and problematic. The load shedding, the power surges. Those three elements account for, I think, 80% or 90% of that overrun. Considerable work is being done to address it, and you'll see that later in the period. I made the point about the U.K. Strong growth from VitalityHealth. Really a multiplicative force of many aspects of the model coming together. Real strong new business growth, gaining market share and strong profit growth. VitalityLife, robust performance. There's been a 10-point plan that's been worked on over the last number of years.
The last part of it, kind of delaying the transfer of an old block of business we did in the early years in the Prudential balance sheet. Leaving it inside the Prudential has been a very important issue. It's a great block of business, but it's much more efficient in the belly of the Prudential, and that's what we've done. It's been an important strategy that has really solidified the business in terms of its rigidity from a solvency perspective, from a financial strength perspective. You'll see that later in the presentation. Ping An Health is an important issue to call out. You will see that the operating profit is 18% down. Interesting, the actual operating performance has been remarkably strong. The reduction in profitability is due to the asset values.
Ping An Health has a large asset base. Given how the Chinese equity markets have performed, there was a reduction of RMB 1.3 billion in investment income over the period. That really drove the operating profit down. You'll see later the actual operating performance, despite the complexities in China, has been very, very strong. Then to make the point across the kind of top-down, the new business, the 20% increase in Discovery Health was counterbalanced by the 15% decrease in Ping An Health business. I guess the rest kind of holds together. The bank had an exceptionally strong year. You will see that in the performance. The spend is 10% less. Then I wanna show you the spend on other new initiatives, how we've consolidated that.
There's a number of one-offs in that number that should come off very, very quickly. You will see that I think across the group, the new initiatives are well placed for growth going forward. Let me end there by just kind of giving a sense of where the numbers are. I think we believe there's strong organic growth potential in what has been built, and I hope that comes through in the rest of the presentation. Let me make some cross-group comments on these focal areas. The first is COVID, and give you some sense. There are different ways, of course, of cutting the data. I thought that these charts make the point very, very well.
You can see on the left-hand side, just looking through, sifting through the mortality or the case fatality rates from wave one to wave two to wave three, all the way through to the Omicron wave. You can see what has happened. There's different levels of infection, different R factors, but you can see the disease was, has been deadly, and particularly so in the second and third waves. It has come off now where, in fact, mortality rates are lower than the flu. At this stage now, unless a variant of any other concern or real concern comes through, it would seem that mortality rates are far lower. Now, it has the effects on mortality like the flu does, and that's not insignificant, but it's additive to the flu, and that's important.
To an extent, we are hoping it's in an endemic phase, but it's too early to call that. We would say that it's outside of the emergency phase of the pandemic, and I think that's important. In terms of long COVID, we have considerable amounts of data, and these are studies that will be published. It's very, very interesting to understand the effect of long COVID. It's a complicated slide, but what it does is it tracks people, the 12 months or so prior to infection through COVID and then what happens then 12 months after. On the mortality side, you can see that the mortality post-infection seems to be largely unaffected. Long COVID from our data is not illustrating any escalation in mortality rates, so to speak.
What you do see is on morbidity, on sickness, on diabetes, on cardiac disease, et cetera, the effects are quite significant. You can see it prior to COVID, through the infection, and then thereafter. There's an elevated chance of hospital admissions that is quite significant. 1.4x chance of hospital admissions two to 12 months after infection, but much, much higher soon after infection. The effect of COVID, the effect of long COVID is not insignificant. You'll see later in the presentation in Discovery Life's morbidity experience, we saw that coming through. Elevated morbidity claims. It's not clear where they're coming from, but the analysis of the issue shows quite clearly the effect of COVID, or long COVID. I think that's important.
Just to avoid being too verbose here, I think we are feeling some sense of hopefulness that we're coming to the end of hopefully the pandemic phase, but we need to keep ourselves vigilant about, you know, any bounce back in that regard. Let me make the point about our businesses, how they're positioned, obviously in the context of COVID. There were concerns earlier on how this manifest, high lapse rates, all kinds of issues. Ultimately, if you followed our story, I think it's pretty clear, ultimately from a financial perspective and a social perspective, became about deaths in the South African environment. The U.K. largely was vaccinated by the time Delta hit. In the case of South Africa, we were not. We had very heavy levels of mortality.
If you actually look at how the life companies have come through, I think they've done a remarkably strong job. We've paid ZAR 7.2 billion of COVID claims, which is a large amount. Ignoring the financial numbers, the social effect, the tragedy behind those numbers is important to notice and to understand. I think our social role of being there for our customers has been important through COVID. Having said that, financially, you can see from a solvency perspective in the middle of the chart, the businesses are strong. We strengthened our assumptions around claims and around lapses in terms of long COVID. They're quite substantial, as you can see.
In terms of we put through both long-term assumption changes or basis changes to actually strengthen the base, as you can see, and then one-year assumptions. You can see the impact in respect of claims, assuming ZAR 550 million of additional claims and ZAR 330 million of that ongoing. A similar kind of like mindset in terms of lapses. A considerable strengthening of our bases going forward to make sure we understand and preempt the effect of COVID and long COVID going forward. A lot has been done. I think our life companies have come through very, very strongly. They are well-positioned, they are well-capitalized. I think in terms of basis strengthening, appropriately done, so that we can interpret COVID properly and we are strong going forward and grow our earnings going forward strongly.
Let me make the second comment about new initiatives. As I said, I think across the group and across any organization, you're investing in new initiatives. The Discovery approach, I think is quite unique. We built the organization organically. We've had a long-term guidance of spending 10% of operating profits on new initiatives. We've actually accelerated that quite significantly over the last number of years, led by the Discovery Bank initiative, which is the largest investment Discovery has made. We've had a number of different initiatives. There are some of them are adjunct to existing businesses. For example, Discovery Business Insurance is kind of a product line or structure, commercial structure next to personal lines.
There's a number of things that we've done, but I think bringing them into a composite portfolio created the discipline and the focus that I think we need, and it's an important issue. Coming through this period, there's been a very, very strong focus on scaling the stuff that we think has to be scaled and making hard decisions and streamlining others. What you see on the chart, there's three, I think, very big initiatives that position us, I believe, very strongly for growth. Discovery Bank, you will see later in the presentation, is well positioned in terms of scale, balance sheet, profit structure to really grow strongly. Amplify Health, our JV with AIA across Asia Pacific, is embryonic, but very, very well structured, and I think we collectively have high hopes for its ability.
Vitality One, our technology platform is now across 24 markets with over 2 million lives on it. It's multi-tenanted, multi-language. You can do all kinds of things as we grow globally. There's a number of businesses that I said are adjunct, mainly in the South African market, that over time you will see absorbed into the businesses and folded in. We've taken some important decisions. VitalityInvest in the U.K., we've made a decision to exit this business. You will see that the traction has not been insignificant. It attracted GBP 15 billion of assets quite quickly. The market receptivity has been strong. In fact, the performance over the year was not weak at all, quite very much along what we expected.
It's just that our analysis showed that the margin compression in the U.K., the complexity in the U.K., the shifting from an IFA model, which we felt was too expensive, the DTC model would require too much shift and change. Our analysis showed GBP 50 million or more would be needed to scale this business to real scale and profitability, and we felt that there's a better use of capital and opportunity than doing that. It just seemed to be too risky, too low returns on capital. We've taken a decision to exit that business. The business is still there. Of course, that's a decision made. In the accounts, we've actually written down all the intangibles, all the capitalized software, et cetera, and I think that's an important step that we've taken.
The manifestation of this is on the right-hand side a new business spend that you can see over time has climbed up quite substantially. It's come down to about 18%, I think, of operating profit. On the left-hand side of the chart, you can see the makeup of that spend on new businesses. Nearly 50% of it on Discovery Bank, about close to 60% in the South African market, and then the balance sitting in the U.K. a nd across the world through Vitality Global. I think importantly to say, the number of one-offs there, VitalityInvest and a few other issues, the setup of Amplify Health, et cetera.
A number of other issues that when you go forward into the next year under review, we believe that new business spend, with the turning of the bank, should come down closer to the 10% long-term guidance. We are feeling comfortable that the portfolio of new businesses is well-positioned, well-structured, with three very large initiatives and a number of important adjuncts that you will see playing out in the various businesses. COVID, new businesses. Let me make one last set of cross-group comments. Let me turn to a third comment just about the Vitality Shared- Value model. I mean, we've obviously spoken about the power of shared value, the power of behavior.
I think often when you talk about business models, you talk hypothetically about how they will play out in different scenarios. I think what's important here is that going through a pandemic for a health and life insurer is a fundamental challenge. It's kind of the fundamental challenge you can face. Together, flexing interest rates and all kinds of factors, it's a fantastic test of the efficacy of the model. I will tell you, for us, it has not only been resilient, it's been a fundamental pivot or anchor for us during the pandemic. I think there are a number of bits of examples across the group you will see all of the correlations work well. I wanted to kind of highlight you a few key observations.
In the case of resilience, the fundamental point is that the correlation to risk of death from COVID was so strongly correlated. People that engaged in Vitality, people that were physically active, people that followed the kinds of regimes we try to incentivize and nudge had dramatically lower levels of mortality. You can see there on the top left-hand side of the chart and across every one of our data sets that we saw. In addition, we saw that people that were active in Vitality tend to get vaccinated. All of those factors in the model created a very powerful anchor in terms of COVID. We saw exceptional persistency, so lapse rates were low. I think even against kind of all odds, in the case of the U.K., VitalityHealth in the left-hand side, in.
You may know this, but in the case of the pandemic, during the height of the pandemic, the NHS took the capacity of private hospitals. In a sense, private medical insurance had difficulty in a sense during that time of its value, et cetera. Ability to offer value across the board to our customers in a real economic sense through Vitality, through the products, through all the different issues, created a very good value for money during the time. You can see the lapse rates were low and were very much correlated to Vitality engagement. Across the board, stability and positive selection, whether it was in our motor insurance business, in Discovery Life. On the right-hand side of the chart, one of our large partners, you can see the correlations were quite remarkable.
Really much lower levels of mortality for people engaged, much lower lapse rates, providing real stability, and positive selection. We saw some unexpected correlations. I'm going to explain to you the complexity of Discovery Insure and the weather effect on our loss ratio. It's been quite dramatic. One of the interesting things is that when you're covered by Discovery Insure, we actually warn you if there's weather and hail coming your way, so that you should move your car or park in the right place or whatever it is. These things are kind of nudges to get people to avoid doing things that cause them damage and lead to us having claims. It's not clear why, you know, driving better or managing your health better should have a correlation.
The expectations are kind of that when people manage certain things well, they manage all things well. When you look at weather claims to motor vehicles, you find it's down-sloping with Vitality status. It's a remarkable finding. People who engage in these things tend to be much more vigilant and much more disciplined about listening to, you know, there's hail coming your way. There's unexpected correlations. I'd say too, we see clear causality. You know, there's correlation and causality. In the case of Discovery Bank, the things that we're nudging lead you to have lower credit defaults. You can see from the bottom of the chart that as people have done these things, the default levels are completely much lower.
Just to make the point that I think the period under review has given us much more confidence in the power of the Shared-V alue model. Then another kind of cross functional or cross group comment I would make, one of the big themes has been the kind of shared value end-to-end health insurance model pioneered in Discovery Health, doing remarkably well in VitalityHealth . In fact now through Ping An Health, through Amplify Health, through Africa, through Vitality Health Africa, you will see it. There's a lot of cross-pollination of capability, telemeds and digital capabilities all over the group that are now going across the board. I wanted to show you some demos. We just didn't have some time here.
Amazing tech and amazing capability that's lifted out of Discovery Health, that's developed in Vitality Health. All of the stuff is cross-pollinating and I think that the group really has the ability to be a global health insurer of considerable scale and ability. Hopefully with things like Ping An Health, Amplify Health, what we're doing in the U.K., those opportunities are really starting to come through. There's a few cross-group capabilities I think that we've seen during the period under review that offered tremendous potential. Let me raise one last issue on just the Shared-V alue model. It's interesting I raise the point of potholes. It is ironically a shared value mindset. I mean, we know about the road quality and the difficulties in Johannesburg.
Our mindset about filling potholes was obviously it's for the social good, but the mindset of it was shared value. We're getting claims in Discovery Insure for pothole damage, and if you can fill potholes and stop the damage, you get savings. The shared value equation is really what's the cost of filling the potholes versus what's the saving on the claims? I mean, that's the clear issue. I don't think we knew how successful this would be. We partnered Dialdirect. They've been a great partner in this as well. We work closely with the City of Johannesburg, but it's been a remarkable initiative. I always joke, if you look at a Discovery pothole, it's a beautiful pothole. It works well, it's filled well, it's smooth.
We have a third party that in fact adjudicates the quality of the pothole. Look at the scale of it. We filled 112,000 potholes, and the claims have come down dramatically. The equation is simply, you know, our claims saved cuz, you know, we're one insurer, divided by our market share. That kind of grosses up the savings to the industry theoretically, compare the cost of filling the potholes. From the analysis I've seen, it actually works. It's costing us money, and we're happy to do that. This is ultimately a social service.
I actually wanted to, you know, make the point to you that this is actually a use case for a public-private partnership where the value created really is, you know, is great for the city, great for society, and great for us as the private sector. Like the vaccination process, I think in our home country of South Africa, the ability to work together in a collective way, we can make a real difference. I tell you, one company or two of us working on potholes has made a difference to the city. We can do more and we should do more on that. I think that's exciting. Let me end there and just get back to results and make the EV go back to group embedded value. I think the growth has been strong.
I think the growth is 15.5% from ZAR 74.6 billion to about ZAR 86.3 billion. As you see, the return on EV, 14.8%. I think what's notable, I think, is the build up of the operational EV, new business growth, the unwind that you'd expect, and then strong positive experience variances illustrating, I think, the strength of the group. Hopefully given the strengthening of the basis that we've done, you should see that happening going forward. We focused hard on being well capitalized, making sure that our entities are strongly capitalized. They are. The only one that suffered degradation was Discovery Insure through those claims, and we've ameliorated that post the reporting period. You can see our gearing level, FLR, is down at 23.8%. We are determined to drive that down further.
Then liquidity across the group is strong. Liquidity center is very strong, quite a bit bigger than previous periods. The group is capital strong and I think well is liquid in the right way. Let me just kind of reconcile the financial piece and just talk from the operating profit at 45% down to the normalized headline earnings. I've been focusing on operating profit at 45% to ZAR 9.4 billion. But just to make a few comments, you can see that as you go down the face of the income statement, one of the clear effects is the increase in interest rates in the U.K. and South Africa.
They have counterbalancing effects in South Africa that has a negative effect in the U.K. That is a positive that somewhat comes through the our income statement. Part of it actually has been taken to margin and used to strengthen bases. Part has been used to continue the hedging strategy. The other point to make is our foreign exchange gains and losses. Different to the last period, we saw the rand actually weakening, which means that our assets in our foreign subsidiaries go up, and you see the effect of that. You can also see the effect of vaccination costs. We spent ZAR 157 million in the period under review. Bring that all together, you get profit before tax up 73%. You then go down to headline earnings up 74%.
When you add back some of the normalizing items, normalized headline earnings up 71% to ZAR 5.8 billion. Hopefully that is fairly clear. Let me make the other point that the group has decided to continue our policy of not paying a dividend. At this stage, I think our rationale is strong. As I said before, we're in a COVID period. We are not clear that period is over. We're in a period of high levels of inflation, high levels of interest, for sure, some forms of recession in many markets. At the same time, we're driving our financial leverage down. There's a focus very much on being prudent. While the group, I think, is strong and highly liquid, our decision is to continue the policy of not paying a dividend.
Well, of course, evaluate that at the interims and the finals and communicate with you as we go along. Enough said on that, on the financial side. Let me just make a point about our social impact and our impact from an ESG perspective. I think it goes without saying, and I hope that's clear, the group was formed on the basis of making people healthier. Our entire reason for being is we want to make a social impact, and therefore, we are really focused on authentic effect on society, not simply on the ratings, et cetera. I think the focus on where we are now is on a number of clear issues. I think after a lot of work, we've clarified where our focus has to be. Obviously, making people healthier is a fundamental issue.
We are measuring that in terms of how many healthy activities are actually recorded in the year on the base in our client base. How many life years are saved in the year and actuarially determined? Then importantly, how much economic value is created through the process and shared through rewards, premium discounts, other structures, paybacks, et cetera. You can see over the period, we'd like to get to 1 billion healthy activities every year. In this period, 470 million were done. We estimate over 2 million life years saved from the conduct and behavior of people engaging in the Vitality program. We've given back to customers ZAR 11.4 billion of shared value in the process. We have a clear focus, obviously, on climate and our carbon footprint.
We've committed to be carbon neutral by 2025, but I think importantly, we're making rapid progress. Right now we're the lowest carbon emitter in our peer group. Our carbon emissions have come down 17% over the period under review. I'm very proud of our effect on strengthening healthcare systems. Through the Discovery Foundation, we've actually trained 10% of South Africa's subspecialists, which I think is remarkable. 75% are in the public sector. In terms of diversity and inclusion, work has to be done here. We have to do better. I think we are making progress. You can see that at different levels in terms of that table. The organization, I think, is strong. Work has to be done, of course, at the top level.
We are particularly strong from a gender perspective. I think more than 50% of our leadership team are women. Work needs to be done continuously on this, but I think there has been progress made. In terms of pay and ensuring fair and responsible pay, we are second in our peer group from the RS analysis. When you finally come down to ratings, I think we're highest in our peer group according to the ratings that you see on the screen. A lot of work being done on ESG.
I guess at a kind of philosophical level, the organization is determined to have social impact, determined to be a progressive environment for people to come in and thrive, whoever they are, wherever they come from, and give them real opportunity in that regard and making a massive effect on society. Enough said, I think, hopefully from a cross-group perspective. If I can, I'm going to move into the specific strategies of our three strands of Discovery. South Africa, the U.K., and Vitality Global. I think we've been pretty clear about what we're trying to do in SA, creating this perfect composite wrapped around the customer, and really pivoting on the bank as the bank is scaling. You'll see the rationale for that.
In the U.K., our best would-be product in the same kind of composite and a very clear focus on the brand, on Vitality, how it brings it all together. Of course, taking the Vitality platform global, working with partners in both Vitality Network and Vitality Health International. One model, three strands, and that's the approach. Let me just take you through comments on each. There's a lot, of course, to say and to be said on each, but I've tried to lift out, our team has tried to lift out the various things we think are relevant for you to see. Let me go to the South African composite and deal with Discovery Bank. As I said before, I think Discovery Bank's performance has been exceptionally strong. We are very pleased with the growth.
You can see over 500,000 clients, over 1.1 million accounts. Retail deposits has climbed nicely. You can see the advances book has grown, but quite moderately. We've been very, very careful in this regard. The important point to make, and I need to make it, is we are only operating in the credit card market. The bank is not yet doing term loans or mortgages or anything like that to build the advances book. The book has been built very, very carefully. You can see the operating results, still substantial, but starting to turn. We expect that to get to break even on budget in line with what we said. The bank's performance, I think, from a growth perspective, has been very strong.
In terms of the strategy of the bank, I just need to restate what we're trying to achieve here so that your expectations and your understandings are clear with ours. This is not a neobank where we're trying to get to, you know, tens of millions of clients with a very thin, skinny offering. This is about a full-service offering the entire banking offering full frontal against the major banks out there offering something that is different. It's based on our Shared- Value strategy of Vitality Money and all of our other Vitality programs. It brings together behavioral measures and Shared- Value. Importantly, it is a digital bank. It gets all the functionality of a digital bank without any need for cash or.
It is super powerful in that regard, but it has the economics of a digital bank. As you scale it, the fixed cost hopefully gives you that gearing effect. If we get this right, what you should see is differentiation and growth and the ability to capture market share. You should see real quality and revenue coming through in terms of behavior, all the correlations and coming through with NIR and NII coming through. You should see economics that over time becomes super powerful in terms of fixed cost base and the jaws of revenue and expenses kind of widening over time and giving us that geared effect. I would say I think that was the hypothesis when we started the bank.
I think the evidence coming out from the data, and I think under this period, strengthens our confidence in how that will play out. The growth has been strong. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, we're close to 1,000 sales per day. You can see the trend line is strong. I think very interesting, more than 50% of new clients to Discovery Bank are not Discovery clients. So there's almost an even indexing. Almost look at our medical scheme market share of 40% of our target market, the bank is actually not that different. So it's almost getting the same kind of indexing as our footprint in that market. I think we're very pleased with the distribution channels. We have a number of distribution channels that is driving that new business.
You can see that little piece on the top in the purple, our intermediary channel. I think one of the key things for us is to get our agents and our face-to-face distribution to sell the bank, to promote the bank. The quality of accounts that you get in that regard is quite substantial. That's starting to really bite. I think an important issue to say is 74% of our clients are active or primary clients, and that's an important issue. Anecdotally, you can see iOS downloads across the major banks were, in fact, our third. You can see the absolute run-up in terms of number of downloads or share of the download market in iOS. You can see just elements of growth, elements of getting market share, and I think that is important.
In terms of quality, we've grown our credit market share, I think very comfortably. We've made the point before, the quality of the client base, the quality of the book is exceptionally strong, so it is of a much lower risk here on average than the rest of the market. The third panel shows you market share. You can see in the high end of the market, we're getting 23% of the credit market share. The credit loss ratio is remarkably low, including overlays. It's about 2.2%. So the quality of the book, I think, is quite remarkable. I think you would expect that from Discovery Bank and our client base.
I think it's a fantastic base on which to then extend term loans and other kinds of products to create a much bigger advances book. We're being very careful during the period under review. When you bring this together, you can see the effect on the economics of the bank. You can see the effect on how the bank will break even and make profitability. If you look at the NIR per customer per month, we're now the second largest amongst the four big banks, about 20% or 19% bigger per client than the average. The revenue growth has been strong. If you add the NII and our NIR together, we're at about ZAR 1.2 billion.
We've crossed the ZAR 1 billion mark, and you can see quarter by quarter the growth is remarkable. We would expect that revenue growth to grow substantially as we grow, and of course that is what drives the profitability. You see that through the operating leverage. Your expenses are staying fairly flat, but the cost per member is going down significantly as the revenue grows. In the right-hand side, we've provided some, just a sense of the trajectories of how the bank should break even. Over the period 2024, 2025, as we've said, we're staying with what we've said before. In the 2024 financial year, towards the end of it, we expect to break even. You can see the different levels of trajectory based on a few clear issues.
Scale of the advances book, scale of the bank, and of course, credit loss ratio. Those things flex. You can see the scale of what we believe we can build. The performance of the bank, I think, has been very strong in the period under review, and I think has kind of reinforced the hypothesis of those three ideas. Of full service, of shared value, and of the digital nature of the bank. In terms of the strategy going forward, there's one other piece that we wanted to get across to you. I think it's very, very important. There's been a lot of work in, over decades, different forms of bank insurance models. They've been often cross-sell models. I think the integration between the bank in South Africa and Discovery and our other insurance products is about a composite.
It's a very, very different set of dynamics. Just consider the opportunity here. We have some unique attributes that I think are super powerful. Firstly, in the other products, from Discovery Life to Discovery Health, all the way through to Discovery Insure, our market share is kind of leading. In Discovery Life, 30%, in Discovery Health, we're nearly 50% of the market, and so on. We have products that are really, market leading in every respect. The second point is these products are all built on exactly the same architecture. The institutional capability on the Vitality, on the Vitality platform. Sorry. A much needed coffee break at this stage. I am sorry. I'm talking too much. Just to make the point on exactly the same architecture. On Vitality, you've got Vitality, you've got Vitality Drive, Vitality Money. Same points, same structure.
It's now completely and totally uniform and the same idea. Then critically, the amount of value, economic value being created through behaviors, you can see on the chart, is substantial. Whether it's Discovery Life or Discovery Health or Vitality Drive and fuel cashbacks, there's a huge amount of money that's being given out in different ways as paybacks and rewards. All of this is now kind of almost a unified theory of how this thing can work. What the bank offers is an amazing opportunity. It's exactly the same structure, kind of the institutional capability on the rewards platform, as you can see on the face of the mobile. It is used all the time. Unlike other products, a bank app is used all the time. People are using. We know the data attests to that. The bank has powerful payment systems linking to Discovery Health, to Vitality.
The bank, of course, has Discovery Miles, so it has a rewards currency. If all of those economic value created is pushed into the one currency, you suddenly have a very different set of dynamics. Going forward, the bank has the potential to really be kind of the composite maker and bring all of this into one kind of architecture. It really lets you control things from a singular view. Our team has provided a kind of demo. I'll try and do it for you, but I thought it just might be interesting to see. The bank construct, as you can see on the slide, has kind of the bank with its accounts sitting on the Vitality platform. If you're a bank customer, you will know this.
The Vitality platform tells you know, what your discounts are and lets you see your different behaviors. Through Armadillo, tells you how you can earn those rewards. Effectively, you can just you know, page through the carousel through your different accounts, open up a foreign exchange account, do what you like. I think the strength is you can now open up your health portfolio and see your medical scheme, your Gap Cover, et cetera. It's gonna pull through over time, the Armadillo. So you can actually see how your behavior's in that specific environment manifest. You can pull through Discovery Life and see those issues and go deep into all of your policies and then see the behavioral issues and rewards in terms of doing that. You can pull through Invest portfolio and see those elements of it.
Of course, you can do that to any of our products and control everything with all of it going through Discovery Miles. It gives you on the face of the bank, which is huge, considerable power. There's other capabilities working closely with EasyEquities. Soon you will see that on the face of your carousel. Pull that through open account, just trade through the face of the bank. Everything takes place in this kind of metaverse of financial products. On the base of the bank are our payment systems. I think the power of this is Discovery Pay links you to all of Discovery clients. Now with Health Pay, links you to the healthcare system, to all of the structures. With Vitality, it links you to all of our Vitality partners.
Now you have the ability to do all kinds of things. You can see all of the Vitality statuses on the app of the bank. Health, life, sorry, Health, Money, Drive. You can start making all kinds of payments into the system. I'm not doing a great job on this demo, but if I can get there, hopefully it will tell you. If I transact and I want to go into the healthcare system, I can just basically load a card or an account and everything in the healthcare system not covered by my medical scheme is really funded through the app of the bank without even people feeling it. Going into a pharmacy, having a co-pay, walking out, just takes place through the bank. You can now join your gym soon through the app of the bank.
You can pay as you go using the bank and so on. The payment systems through our travel portal, which is super powerful. End-to-end lounges, as you've seen, fast tracks through the airports. All of it will be pulled through the payment system of the bank. Giving you a sense, I think the power of the bank in terms of its own performance and its own economics is very strong. Its ability to create this composite around what we have in our leadership and our products really provides a unique opportunity to offer real value to our customers. Let me move on to Discovery Health and just give some insights. The performance has been really good.
You can see the membership of the total lives under administration at Discovery Health now topping 3.7 million. I think importantly, there's been explicit strategy about getting business outside of the medical scheme market. Flexicare, Gap Cover, Healthy Company business. That's climbed significantly. Not insignificant now, the revenue topping ZAR 1.2 billion. The new business over the period has been very strong, up 20%. I'll touch on that later. Really across the board, very strong receptivity. I don't think it's surprising. I think it's been a flight to quality. I think with the COVID pandemic and I think the economy, given employment levels, have somewhat increased. We see that coming through in what we call type two business. Operating profit continues that very robust, solid growth at 5%, as you can see.
On the point of Discovery Health Medical Scheme, we always show elements to give you a sense of just how strong the scheme is. I think on the left-hand side, just in terms of scale, you can see that Discovery Health Medical Scheme, when you look at its scale, is significantly bigger than all of its competitors added together. It just illustrates the considerable social responsibility we have together with the trustees and the medical scheme in terms of delivering and managing healthcare in a very, very responsible way. You can see in the middle of the chart, it's always the stability. While the kind of narrative and the anecdotes about people, you know, buying up and buying down, you can see the scheme in the main is 96% stable. Very small number of buys and buy downs, and lapse rates are very low.
Then on the right-hand side, it's pretty clear how the solvency of the scheme has climbed during COVID. There's been excess solvency to an extent of ZAR 28.3 billion of reserves built up in the scheme. You can see that's coming down as the scheme works out ways to kind of provide relief to members. It's a fundamental issue, this, and I'm gonna actually jump this slide later. It's a fundamental issue of how through COVID, with less claims, most medical schemes develop some kind of surplus and often reserves climbed above what they are meant to be. How do you give that relief to members? What Discovery Health and Discovery Health Medical Scheme have done, I think, is incredibly smart and appropriate.
You can't reduce your contributions, because if you do, you fall below the natural claim level. When claims catch up again, suddenly you've got a deficit. When you jack up the claims to meet it, you get all kinds of difficulties. People can't afford it. People drop out. You get adverse selection. You can't do that. What Discovery Health and the Discovery Health Medical Scheme has done has been a very smart approach of essentially delaying contribution increases. Staggering the increases longer away. Whenever the increase takes place, it's at the right level, which is appropriate. Because it's being done at a later stage, the effect of cost on members is lower. By doing that, there's been a careful use of surplus in the right way.
I think that method will continue over the next number of months or years to make sure that the scheme balances affordability of its members together with solvency requirements. It's in a very, very strong place. Let me make the point as well about growth. On the left-hand side of the chart, just showing you we've grown by 46,000 members net. To achieve that, we had to grow by 241,000 coming in, and we lost the balance. 220,000 or thereabouts left. What's interesting about that is you can see the reasons for leaving. Given the scale of the back book, the small lapse rate generates a lot of churn.
You can see the back, which a few observations. Quite a lot of leavers have left their employer. They generally soften their way back into the Discovery Health Medical Scheme to other employers. That's one comment. The other I thought was interesting was look at the issue of immigration. If you look, I think it's second from the bottom. It's an interesting statistic. Obviously, anecdotally, and I think rightly so, we are concerned about the loss of skills, we're concerned about immigration. But when you look at the actual numbers, it's about 16,000. It's a big base, so it's pretty representative. It's about 16,000 on a base of 2.7 million in the Discovery Health Medical Scheme. So that's kind of a rate of immigration of about 0.5%. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
It's probably less than people would expect. It's not an absolutely accurate number. We track as best we can and do our best to understand reasons for leaving the Discovery Health Medical Scheme. I think the direction it is right. Often the force of emigration is lower than I think people think, but that's important. In the middle of the chart, growth from all types of business, I think is critical. We've grown on the individual side at the bottom, but we've seen considerable growth from employer groups that are with us, but hiring more people. It does kind of mirror. Certainly, we've seen now the economy has somewhat contracted, not unexpectedly, but there's been strong economic growth and strong bounce back in some segments. We've seen that in growth in the scheme.
Then the right-hand side, much better performance in terms of the percentage of new business attaching Vitality. It is a crucial issue because you can see on the bottom of the chart, those people with Vitality exhibit much lower levels of admission rates, generate much greater surplus, lower lapse rates. It's a very, very important development around the growth of the scheme. I put to you that there's been a lot of work done on the different distribution channels of the scheme. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, you naturally shed 220,000 lives a year through leaving, through affordability, through immigration. Unless you have the distribution channels to keep feeding that, you can go backwards.
One of the channels I want to just highlight to you is the direct-to-consumer channel through Discovery Connect. It's one of the new businesses we built over the last number of years. It has been remarkable. Discovery Connect really offers an ability for people online to join the Discovery Health Medical Scheme. What's amazing about it is it's now about 60% of our individual business has come through Discovery Connect. I wanted to show you a demo. It actually did not work because it kind of shows you a bunch of screens paging through that really is quite boring to watch. I mean, just understand what we've achieved here. You can join the Discovery Health Medical Scheme in basically 90 seconds. It's quite remarkable. You go online. The entire plan choice is advised through an advanced AI platform.
The underwriting is automated, efficient, straight through. The process is secure. You just work your way through providing minimal amounts of data. In literally 90 seconds, you have the Discovery Health Medical Scheme membership card lodged in the app for you. You can then enter the healthcare system immediately. There's no barriers to entry, so to speak. It's simple, it's easy, and we can see the scale of what we're achieving in terms of distribution. The other point I wanted to make was just there are a number of different elements in healthcare that are developing, that Discovery Health is pioneering. COVID has been a massive opportunity for transformation, especially for digital healthcare, for breaking down normal delivery systems. One of the important developments globally is around this idea of Hospital at Home.
The idea that people don't need to be in a hospital setting for everything. It can be right in their home with the right kind of technology, the right kind of medical support, advice, data. Discovery Health has been part of a peer group globally of a number of other healthcare systems, that is pioneering this idea. We believe we can get to 7%-8% of our admissions done at home using the technology. We wanted you to just see what we've built and kind of the potential it holds. A very short demo of this, please.
In January 2022, Discovery Health launched Hospital at Home, a new healthcare service capable of delivering quality hospital-level care at home for a range of medical and post-surgical conditions. Global Hospital at Home practice shows it is possible to deliver superior patient experiences and clinical outcomes at much lower costs than traditional hospitals. In line with international trends, our service uses cutting-edge wearable technology, AI predictive analytics and systems to deliver personalized home-based interventions for acute and chronic conditions. Discovery Health has set up a clinical command center staffed with highly trained healthcare professionals, where patients' vitals are continuously monitored remotely in real time. Patients have access to full-time monitoring, virtual ward rounds, and in-person visits from healthcare professionals when needed.
Hospital at Home was enhanced through our collaboration with Brigham and Women's Hospital's Home Hospital Early Adopters Accelerator Program to ensure that the service is world-class and relevant to the South African context. Discovery's is the largest virtual hospital in the program, and we are the only organization to admit in multiple cities. The researchers found that Hospital at Home patients returned to health quicker and were readmitted less often than similar in-hospital patients and at up to half the cost. Discovery Health operates South Africa's largest virtual hospital with up to 750 active beds at any one time. We can manage up to 50,000 annual hospital admissions, equating to 7% of our hospital admissions. Hospital at Home is transforming healthcare delivery towards greater access and affordability for South Africans. Hospital at Home, reimagining healthcare.
There are really exciting developments in healthcare. This is embryonic, and it's rolling out, and we're gonna learn as we go through the process. It is a complex but exciting time for just new technologies. As you go through the presentation, you go through our numbers, you'll see that, I think, the interlinking pieces between Vitality Health, Ping An Health, et cetera, and that's the opportunity. Let me turn to Discovery Life, make a few comments. The growth, I think, has been robust. The profits have bounced back 200% up to just over ZAR 4 billion. Our capital and liquidity position is strong.
On the right-hand side of the chart, you can see that market share has climbed somewhat to the strongest in the market, just over 30%, I think for Q1 and Q2 2022, so the last six months of the year. In terms of COVID, I think the company did remarkably well. Despite the fact that COVID is easing, it's important to say that in this particular period was the largest payment of COVID claims, ZAR 3.7 billion. So seeing kind of the tail end and the peak of the Delta wave through wave four and on to Omicron. That's what we saw. Credit to the team, a lot of work and modeling was done about understanding COVID, what the implications might be. As you know well, we set up very careful provisions.
You can see in the middle of the chart, the provisions were adequate and very accurate, so we utilized 96% of the provisions over the year. Proved to be very accurate. On the right-hand side, I think the management of cash in the balance sheet has been strong. That's a breakdown of the cash generation. You'll see that, before the COVID effects, Discovery Life generated about ZAR 870 million of cash. We spent a lot in new business investment. Importantly, after COVID, the net position was -ZAR 245 million, despite paying ZAR 3.7 billion of claims. There's been a careful management through FinRe and other structures to make sure that the business from a liquidity perspective was very, very strong.
In terms of embedded value and in terms of value creation and how the business is played out, I made the point about strong positive experience variances, about ZAR 650 million or ZAR 660 million of them. You can see across the board strong. We did feel the effect of long COVID. I made the point, and in fact, there's analysis that I'm sure our team can share with you about the morbidity experience and where that's coming from. We are seeing the effects of long COVID, and you can see that in the negative experience variance around morbidity. We believe the strengthening of the basis is part of addressing that going forward. The embedded value growing by 10.5%, a similar kind of pattern, as you can see, to the overall embedded value.
New business, the unwind, and then positive experience variances. There are obviously economic effects that bring the embedded value down. On the right-hand side, the VONB of new business and the margin is somewhat down on previous years. The volume was slightly low, unit costs were higher. We need to address that, but I think the margins in a difficult time are not unsatisfactory. Overall, I think we're very, very pleased with the performance of Discovery Life, its strength, and critically, its strength going forward, which is pretty fundamental. Let me turn to Discovery Invest. Just a comment about its robustness. I mean, it has been a difficult period. You can see in the third panel of the chart, markets have been very volatile.
They climbed strongly in the first half of the year and came down strongly in the second half. We saw this increase in asset values and then coming down. Over the period, assets under management are 4% to ZAR 122 million. The robustness of lapses has been very, very strong. New business is up 7%, despite the complexity of the period. Operating profit up 11% to ZAR 1.2 billion. The Shared-V alue model and the nudges, we continue to measure the behavioral effects, and they're very, very positive. I think one of the points I wanted to raise, just in terms of the kind of application of what we're doing, is work we've done with BlackRock over a number of years.
This manifested in just the last number of weeks about the launch of Cogence, which is a DFM, a discretionary fund manager. It's a fantastic business we believe will be a very central part of Discovery Invest going forward. It's a powerful capability. I mean, just bear in mind, the market is much more complex. Investment decisions are more complex. With Regulation 28, people can now invest up to 45% offshore. So investment choices are much more global. When you overlay that with the global complexity, you understand what people and advisors are facing. The other point that has been an issue that we've obviously worked with BlackRock on is the fact that with defined contribution long-term savings away from defined benefit, the market has gone entirely. All the risks now sit with the investor.
Beside the investment risk, you know, how much they invest, when they invest it, when they draw down, how much they draw down, all those behavioral issues sit with the investor, and therefore, life expectancy and health management become a central issue. The power of Cogence is it brings together for the first time BlackRock's Aladdin technology with our Vitality technology. It allows the advisor to actually advise the individual on investment choices, what risks they run. It can stress 3,000 risk factors, political developments. That's what asset managers around the world use Aladdin for. It's now available to the advisor, together with Vitality, Healthy Futures, what's your life expectancy? What risks do you run? At the point of making investment choices about retirement, you're properly informed about investment risks, about demographic risks. It's incredibly powerful.
BlackRock makes the choices about asset allocation across the world between South Africa, globally, what funds to invest in. Considerable power, we think, in Cogence. It's a partnership with BlackRock just rolling out. I think kind of talks to the progressive nature of Invest and what we are trying to achieve with bringing really international best practice in long-term savings together with the Vitality Shared- Value model. I think a powerful development. Let me turn to Discovery Insure. I made the point at the outset, this was a very, very difficult time for the business. I think the dynamics across the board are not unexpected. The key issue, of course, is the operating profit, as you can see, down 165%, flipping to a loss.
That loss of ZAR 162 million was driven by ZAR 369 million of an overshoot. Just to break it down graphically, you can see the ZAR 369 million overrun made up of a few clear components. Adverse weather, just a longer La Niña period. The KZN floods as a consequence of that. Then the supply side inflation, nearly 30% of the overrun. Motor spares are just climbing at a rapid rate. Supply side pressures. Depreciation of vehicles is, in fact, slower because of the price of secondary vehicles has gone up. So all of these are conspiring in a very complex way. Then we're seeing the effect of load shedding and power surges, and there's continual claims in that regard.
I mean, I think that's just an issue of pricing that is likely to repeat. If you look at the actual chart, you can see the detail of what's happened. In the middle and the left-hand side, you can see motor parts have inflated at 10%-15%, in some cases close to 20%. That is way outside of expectation. We cited this at the interim results. Nothing has really changed. You can see the shipping costs have gone up. There's been delays across the board. The only hold I think we have is trying to get people to claim this. You can see Vitality Drive does do that in some way, but we've had to address it in terms of pricing. On the bottom of the chart, you can see the rainfall period has been extended.
The KZN storm is the largest catastrophic event we've seen in the history of Discovery Insure. Besides the financial effect, I think the devastation of that is, must be noted. I made the point about just the kind of unexpected correlations to the model that even through weather issues, we're seeing correlations to the Vitality model. We haven't been caught. We've been caught somewhat unawares by this. It happened obviously as the environment developed. To be fair, our team pointed this out six months ago, and I think we're on top of it very, very quickly. Considerable action has been taken over the last six months. There's been a range of interventions in terms of rate increases in certain parts of the book, certain controls, certain measures, data, all kinds of different issues.
You can see on the left-hand side of the chart that the premium, the average premium, has gone up by 10% continuously. There's been a very, very strong repricing of the book. The lapsation has been within control, about 10% increase in lapses during the year, bringing it down to expectation. Again, the hold, you can see the lapses by status are better. I think a critical point is we've seen selective lapsation. People leaving the book are two and a half times higher claimants than those that are staying. I think the overriding point is we hope we are back to where we should be at this stage. No hubris here.
We have to see how the environment plays out, but you can see the additional margin generated on the right-hand side of the chart exceeds what we believe the repeatable claim effects of these forces might be. No hubris. These claim, you know, to get ahead of the claim frontier when you have these kind of forces is not simple, but the team has acted swiftly, and I think with a lot of data and activity, and the base has held very, very firm. We will see how it plays out. We hope we are back into profitability. We'll see that as the six months play out going forward. Let me end with the South African composite and turn to the U.K. I made the point, the U.K., I think, has had an exceptionally strong period.
It really is the culmination of, I think, exceptional work of VitalityHealth getting market share, the work done in strengthening VitalityLife. You see that playing through normalized operating profit up 28%, just under GBP 100 million. I think that's an important milestone for us. You can see lives covered climbing to just under 1.6 million across the U.K. New business, very strong, reflecting, I think, certainly the strength of VitalityHealth, particularly getting market share from its competitors. The embedded value build-up, I think, is strong. You can see it across the board, a very pleasing build-up from GBP 790 million to over GBP 1 billion in the period under review. You can see the strong experience variances coming through.
You can see the effect of leaving part of the book with the Prudential. There were a whole lot of capital requirements in that regard. The Prudential is a much more efficient balance sheet for that kind of business. You can see a release in terms of that coming through, GBP 45 million in terms of the value of cost of capital, in that regard. The right-hand side of the chart, it shows you kind of the embedded value build-up over the years through COVID. The build-up has been very, very strong. We hope we can grow off this base. Few points on VitalityHealth to make the performance is strong. Operating profit up 43%. You can see lives covering new business have very, very strong growth. New business up by 30% to just under GBP 86 million.
Significant new business growth. I think the quality of that new business is strong. It's important to just explain the increase in profitability because it's not any one item. The reality is that the team has really used the data, the model, and the pricing factors to first optimize pricing, to optimize the retention using the Vitality model, understanding how to retain, where to focus resources on, using engagement and our care abilities to manage care better, to bring demand down during the period. All of this had a multiplicative effect. We kind of look at how you reconcile the growth in operating profit from pre-COVID to post-COVID of 58%, and you can see what that's done. Obviously, COVID had a distorting effect.
If you go before COVID and post-COVID, you can see the tremendous multiplicative effect of higher levels of new business, better pricing, a better revenue in terms of the total earned premium, low retention, selective lapsation. You get this very strong cost multiplication. I think that illustrates the power of what the model can achieve. I think the excellent rollout in the case of the U.K. The other point to make is I think there is potential growth in the U.K. market. The NHS, which is of course a critical and fundamental issue in the U.K., and our role must be complementary and supportive of the NHS. You can see waiting lists are growing, as I think people know in the U.K., given the stress and strains of the environment.
Vitality Health is responding by offering products that are much broader. More and more, we're offering primary care services. It's quite remarkable. Nearly 50% of our claims by number on our primary care, talking therapies, mental health treatments, Vitality GP. I wanted to show you a demo of the tech kind of online, where you can book appointments, work with GPs, talking therapies. It's incredibly powerful, the ability to do that. The technology we're building across the group really has tremendous applicability. Let me turn to Vitality Life and make the point. It really is a beneficiary of, I think, exceptional work done by the team over the last number of years to strengthen the business, to de-risk it, to focus on quality. Normalized profit growing by 7%. You can see lives covered growing by 9%.
New business strongly up 13%. A strong focus on quality of new business. There's been a very, very distinct focus on a number of things over the very difficult period over the last number of years in VitalityLife as rates of interest went down, the COVID pandemic. The last big piece was about the, what we call the Part VII transfer. Right at the start of VitalityLife, there was a block of whole life, flat level premium businesses. It's very strong business, but it didn't link to Vitality done in the JV with the Prudential. The plan was to bring that across. It's very, very capital intensive, and it's very, very sensitive on our balance sheet. In the case of the Prudential, which is a much bigger diversified balance sheet, it behaves very, very differently.
One of the pieces that we've been working on the last 18 months has been really delaying that Part VII for a long period to make sure that we de-risk the business. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, that has been done exceptionally well. It's been good for us, good for the Pru in many ways. It's economically valuable to both parties. This is an exceptionally good development. In addition, we've had a very careful hedging strategy. We have seen upside from FX rates have gone up, but we've used that. We've taken a lot of that to margin and used that to strengthen bases. We've also continued to hedge against volatility in the environment. We continue to see very, very high levels of retention.
Lapse rates are 25% lower than we would expect, and the correlations come through. Business is very strong, and we believe can grow off this base. We've strengthened mortality assumptions. There's a number of factors done to strengthen the business. We expect to grow off this base strongly with positive experience variance. I think that's crucial. Again, the team, I think, has done a remarkable job. Let me turn to Vitality Global. Vitality Global is made up of two pieces. It really offers the group tremendous growth potential. Obviously, during these times of COVID in markets like Asia and China, there are a lot of headwinds to growth generally, but the potential for growth, of course, sits in Vitality Global in many, many different regards. It's a matter of two pieces.
Vitality network that really works with partners, taking the Vitality predominantly life and health insurance model, and letting them use it through a structure that we kind of embed with them. We have Vitality Health International on the other side that really is health insurance, health tech led by Ping An Health and Amplify Health around really creating this global health insurance capability. We focused hard on scaling that during the period under review. If you look at the financial results, I think they're robust. There's one complexity here. We have to reverse our Ping An Health because we own 25% of its equity account. We have to take that out. This shows the Vitality Global performance excluding Ping An Health. What you can see is revenue grew by 22%. Profitability grew by 15%.
It's just over $31 million. You can see the growth in the actual integrated premium to $1.4 billion. The membership, the number of lives that this touches, exceeding now 3 million at 25% growth rate. If you go across our partners and you bring together all of it, you can see the growth continues. It was a difficult period in certain markets, but the growth continues to happen. Number of Vitality network markets has grown. Our penetration in our partner markets has grown. Of all the products that we attach to, there's a penetration of 64%. When intermediaries sell the product, 64% of them in those markets have a Vitality link. You can see the membership growth very strong. We now attach to 191 products.
At the previous period, we started publishing kind of a valuation we do. It's not on our balance sheets or not in our EV. We try and just value the contracts that we have. From one period to another, you can see that's grown by 9%. It's just over $1 billion if you work out the present value of the value of those relationships effectively. A lot of foundation built here. We believe we can grow off the back of that. As the market hopefully eases and changes, the more opportunities come about. I'll point out to you that the Amplify Health opportunity came out of this network. In other words, as you work together with these partners, different opportunities start to emerge, and we'll see that going forward. Let me turn to Vitality Health International.
I think the stack of businesses here has tremendous potential and growth potential, obviously, by Ping An Health and our Amplify Health. There are a number of other entities that we are building Africa Health across four markets. We've spoken about that before. There's a lot of aspects here in that we are building. I wanted to make just a call out for Amplify Health again. AIA announced their results, I think, a week ago or thereabout, and made points that are on these slides about just the potential for Amplify Health. It is a JV between us and AIA. They own 75%. We own 25%. The idea is they provide the capital and the growth capital.
We provide all of the assets and the capabilities across very complex integrated capabilities of digital health platforms, of optimization of medical costs, of policy management, benefit management, data analytics, et cetera. All of this is going to Amplify Health, and we'll roll out across the region. The company was launched formally in March 2022, so literally a few months ago. I think that the progress has been very, very swift. The team is probably now full, nearly 200 people of exceptional quality there. Jonathan Broomberg from Discovery is its CEO, with Axel Baur as Deputy CEO. It's a strong team that has been formed.
Five of our major technology platforms have been lifted out of Discovery Health and put into Amplify, and already we're in the process of deploying it into certain AIA markets. We're moving quickly. I think the potential for Amplify Health in terms of the AIA captive business is number one, and other payers and governments in the region is quite remarkable. There's a very strong focus on this. Then just to end off on Ping An Health, complex business of considerable scale and opportunity. I think kind of the colloquial view might be the complexity of China. At the moment, China is in a complex phase. Our view remains that in the medium to long term, the scale of what can be achieved is quite remarkable.
Just to explain the development of Ping An Health, there are a few complexities. The first one is just to understand, just to make the point. Ping An Health sells health insurance across China, but in some markets, it doesn't have its own branches, which means from a regulatory perspective, it can't write that business on its own balance sheet. How it's been done is Ping An Life has sold the business, and we have participated in Ping An Health through a reinsurance structure. Nothing unconventional about that. But we separate that out from the core Ping An Health own licensed business. We do that because a year ago, there was a decision taken that Ping An Life would not continue doing that where we don't have branches. That explains the reduction in growth in new business.
In fact, we explained that at the interim. Just to explain that complexity and to give you a sense of how the business has played out. If that's clear, let me continue. First point, you can see the scale of Ping An Health. It's now 27 million lives. You can see on its own license, it's close to 20 million lives, as you see. The written premium now is over ZAR 45 billion, so the scale is quite remarkable. It has a large asset base, net assets of close to $1 billion. As you can see, RMB 6.6 billion . The operating profit, I made the point, has come down 14% to ZAR 2.5 billion. It's important to understand that that reduction was a function of investment income dropping, of asset values dropping.
The Chinese equity market took a hit during that period, there was a RMB 300 million hit at one stage. There's been a complete change of investment strategy in that regard. It's a big asset base, but that had the effect on the operating profit. You can see the core real operating performance of Ping An Health grew by 30%. Really a focus on growth, a focus on quality growth, and I think that's exceptional. Our share of it is simply the after-tax piece of it, less our expenses, down 18% to ZAR 338 million, as you can see from the business. I'll make the point, I think China is obviously complex. You have the property market, you have droughts, you have fundamentally the biggest issue is the COVID zero-COVID policy of lockdowns.
These are complicated issues. There's nothing simple about it. There's a lot of political issues. There's a lot of real epidemiological issues there. This is a population that at the highest levels is largely unvaccinated. There isn't infection-acquired immunity, so there's real risk of a sudden lift in restrictions. It would seem that at some point that's going to happen. It's gonna move into the endemic phase, and that will change things significantly. Our view is while economic growth is constrained somewhat in the medium to long term, that's likely to go back to the 4%-5% level. It's important to state that the expense that they spend on healthcare continues to grow. It's been growing at 14.3% compound over the last number of years. That's likely to accelerate.
The middle class is expected to double in the next decade, and all of the regulatory thrust is about kind of empowering healthcare, empowering private health insurance, creating a proper health insurance market. Directionally, we are focused on making sure that the scale that Ping An Health has achieved, which is significant, continues to grow. If you look at the new business, you can see the reduction of 15% is really a reduction in the Ping An Life reinsurance business. As you see, we've worked hard towards creating a channel that is shifting away from the Ping An Life channel. You can see it was about 35%. That's grown to 42%. The Ping An Life channel is now stable for us, and we expect it to grow its share.
The business has considerable branch networks now across maybe 60% of China by GDP, and that's important. The final point to make is that I think Ping An Health is emerging as the strongest and largest health insurer in China. You can see that over the six months to June 2022. Actually, most of the business was stable. They were strong. Vitality, Ping An Health grew strongly. In the group market, it's done remarkably well. Against competitors like Cigna or MSH, it has really pulled ahead. The final point to make is that I think the operating performance or dynamics of Ping An Health has been remarkable. Operating margin in this period was 6.7%. Dramatically higher than our competitors.
Bear in mind, Ping An Health works in a calendar year, so we're slightly out in some of the numbers on the chart. Complex environment, but the operating performance, I think very, very strong. I think we're confident as China hopefully normalizes over time, the opportunities to grow the business are strong. Let me end off by just making the point that it has been a complex year. I think a very important year for us. We've been focused very much on robust growth, focused on creating new initiatives like Discovery Bank and Amplify that really offer real platforms for growth. We have a clear vision of what we need to do. I think the group in terms of our Shared-V alue model is illustrating how repeatable it is across the world.
Importantly, from a health insurance perspective and life insurance, the repeatability of the model is clear. The opportunities to work in global markets to do more with it is substantial. We're in a strong place. We need to capitalize on that going forward. That's it from my side. I think what I'd like to do is to open the floor to questions. We are slightly late. I have Deon Viljoen, my, our CFO on my left-hand side. All of our key executives are on the call. We have a number of questions coming in. Deon, you happy?
Yes.
I kind of just facilitate this, right?
Thanks. I'll read them out quickly. We received the first question from Michael Christelis, UBS. Thanks, Michael. Asking, why do we still feel the need for the Ping An Health capital raise, given, one, the lack of dividend being paid, two, the gains made in the U.K. interest rate hedges, and three, the relief from the Pru agreement, all of which presumably were not in your capital plan. Maybe just to point out, as we mentioned at the previous results presentation, we mentioned that these kind of events, and we likened it to the buyout of the last 25% of the FirstRand card book. We typically fund through capital.
As you mentioned, not a massive amount, but it's really a question of keeping to that discipline in our capital plan. The item two there, the gains made in the U.K. interest rate hedges. This again, a reminder that's a very carefully put together hedge structure to ensure that the business can operate within its risk appetite during those very volatile interest rate sort of movements, and in particular, when interest rates are very low. The increases that we've seen now, as mentioned, some of that gain was taken to margin, but the hedge itself is actually a risk mitigation strategy. The relief from the Pru Part VII transfer, that deferral, was actually in our capital plan.
That was the default position in our capital plan. Those items should actually be seen in their own right. Adrian, I don't know if you wanna make some comments on the dividend position.
No, I hoped I was fairly clear. I think we thought long and hard about the dividend policy. The group is strong, but there are considerable risks in the environment. We are still in the tail of COVID. The recessionary risk is not clear what will happen. You know, in our estimation, we should just be prudent at this point in time. I think that decision is right. We'll revisit it continuously at each stage. We will continue to relook at that carefully as the environment plays out. Not sure what more to say, Deon. I think it's fairly-
Yeah.
-binary.
Thank you. Adrian, the second item there, the name reflects, but I'll keep that anonymous just because of the nature of it. I think still worth perhaps reading it. And thank you very much for that. It says, "I don't have a question, but we'd like to thank Discovery Health for their support during the period. I had COVID on a ventilator for 61 days and hospitalized for 88 days, and the 18 months thereafter with long COVID effects. Discovery Health is the best around, and we will always be grateful to them. During the challenging period, as you can imagine, the medical costs were millions. Thank you very much." A very kind message, but also, you know, a very important reminder of exactly why we exist and our purpose for existing.
Thank you for that. Question from Kunaal Kalyan. Good day. Risk Insights, he's from Risk Insights. Has rated Discovery ESG. My question is surrounding renewable energy. What is Discovery's strategy regarding the move to clean energy use, and by when will this be disclosed to the market? There is quite a lot of disclosure coming in our integrated report, which will be published a little bit later on. Perhaps, Andy, if I can hand over to you, if you wanted to address that one in more detail.
Yeah. Thank you, Deon, and thanks, Kunaal, for the question. It's a great question. It's something in the U.K. we're certainly very very aligned to using clean power, and where the supply of clean power is very good. And in South Africa, we are busy. Right now, I'm looking above me. On the roof here, we're actually installing solar panels all across the roof of 1DP. We're exploring other options in terms of other private power producers. But I think you'll be aware that the number of options at the moment is still developing and still quite limited. But we're very actively pursuing that. As Deon said, in our integrated report, we'll give further details of what we're doing in this regard.
We're very conscious of our responsibility for, you know, narrowing down the carbon footprint of the group.
Thanks, Andy. Warwick Bam from Avior. Did your COVID-19 provisions release match your excess mortality claims, or was a portion of the re-release effectively deferred profits from FY 2021 due to an overprovision? Largely matched, but Riaan, shall I hand that over to you?
Separate the provision into its two components. The first component, looking at identified COVID-19 claims. Just getting some echo. Hopefully you can hear me. The first part of the provision, considering identified COVID claims, quite closely matched the provision. We've utilized about 96% of the COVID claims provision through identified claims. Then we also had a second part of the provision where we've still allowed for a higher expectation of lapses. We've actually seen the opposite. We've seen a brilliant lapse experience through the industry. Part of that release then funded the higher non-identified COVID claims, which we've seen in this period. We've seen higher morbidity claims in rating cells that one would reasonably expect to be quite highly correlated to COVID claims.
The net result of that was a small surplus and a positive experience variance as we have discussed.
Thanks, Riaan. The next question on the list, also from Warwick. With the exit from VitalityInvest, are you looking to partner to achieve the same outcomes and sustain the existing product specs? Could there be a negative impact on the VitalityLife business? Neville, maybe if you wanted to respond to that.
We looked at alternatives, but we've decided to make a clean break out of VitalityInvest. In fact, the distribution of the products are very different in the U.K. You have wealth brokers who are in the invest market, and you have protection brokers who focus on, obviously, the life and health market. We are not seeing any negative impact on that. In fact, our distribution channels, our franchise channel, which services both the wealth advisors as well as the protection advisors, have got a renewed focus on the protection business, and we're starting to see the benefit of that renewed focus coming to the fore. If anything, we are actually feeling more positive about the doubling down on our current protection business.
Thanks, Neville. Another question from Warwick. The cash utilized in new businesses increased by 12% year-on-year. What was the primary reason for the increase year-on-year, considering the exit from VitalityInvest? Maybe just to point out that the decision of that exit wasn't, you know, that that was towards the end of the year, so, and that operation's still there. Then, as we mentioned, you know, we continue to invest in new businesses over this period, taking the bank through the J-curve, the Amplify, and further investment into Vitality Global. So that continues. But we also indicated that over time, you know, that spend on new will come down quite rapidly.
Adrian, I don't know if you wanted to add to that.
Just with the obvious comment, Deon. The cash spend and the effect on the PNL are delinked.
Yeah.
As you capitalize software and other strategy building, things like the bank, the cash spend doesn't match necessarily the PNL, but I guess that's obvious. Deon, is that-
I think those are all the questions, Adrian, that I received. I don't see anything further. Yeah.
Okay.
Hand it back to you.
We are, of course, around and our team will be visiting in different forms of various people. We look forward to interacting. I actually wanted to do something quite unusual. I was debating doing it, but I do wanna make a call-out of these slides on the screen. I actually do wanna make a call-out for South Africa at this results presentation. Just to give you some context here, we're a global company and we are proudly South African. We work in many global markets. It's a complex environment, and I hope we made it clear at the outset that these are difficult times. The South African situation is quite unique, in the sense that the narrative is particularly negative.
We have real issues, and we've just seen now the GDP has contracted in Q2, not unexpectedly. We've got more load shedding coming our way. There's all kinds of issues, and I will not excuse those away. I guess, though, that I think the concern and maybe my callout here is the issue of loss aversion. We know from behavioral economics, when people have a sense of what they've got and what they can lose, it really motivates different behavior. I think our concern, or certainly my concern, is that as leaders, as business leaders, we need to actually in a realistic form understand the scale of what we've got, and we need to build on the back of it. I'll make the point, and I'll share some anecdotes here that are, I hope, interesting.
You probably know this stuff, and I may sound patronizing. I hope I don't. Just wanna make a few points that often people don't realize. You know, we've seen the tragedy in the Ukraine in just one country that can really bring the world to its knees in terms of food security. It's remarkable. Just bear in mind, our economy is nearly double the size of the Ukraine, so people often see the vastness of the Ukraine. South Africa is nearly double the size. Gauteng's economy is nearly the size of the Ukraine. I'm amazed by the fact that nearly 80% of the continent's pension fund assets are in South Africa, the size of our capital markets. Then just an anecdote that I always find amazing, you know, the Global South, only 10% of the world's population lives in the Southern Hemisphere.
It's quite remarkable. Yet the Cape Town-Joburg route, this is prior COVID, was the eleventh busiest in the world. You know, unexpected. Then even in its hobbled state, Eskom still produces nearly a third of the continent's power. When you look at the actual numbers, the power produced is more than Switzerland, Ireland, Ethiopia, Israel and New Zealand added together. You know, I guess, I assume because of the scale of our mining operations, et cetera. The country is big and sophisticated, and I guess the concern is that people don't appreciate that. If they don't, you kind of feel you've got nothing to lose. This is an amazing country with considerable power and scale. We need to build it.
I say this with the conviction that, you know, from a business leadership perspective, if you really are determined to build, you are less tolerant of incompetence or of corruption or whatever it might be. You have a seat at the table to make a difference. You know, we know it has to be done. There are five issues we know need to be done urgently. Energy, we're already moving in that direction. Water and sanitation, transport, ports and rail, unlocking infrastructure investment, and of course, improving law and order. These are things that have to happen. We're moving, but too slowly. I just wanted to use the opportunity to make a call-out to just appreciate the scale of what we have.
This is true for every country we operate across the world, but I think it has to be said, if we can fix the narrative somewhat, we can address often some of the challenges. It's remarkable what we do. We have to build it and be very, very intolerant of degradation, of decline. We need to build. It's maybe inappropriate to say, but I just wanted to make the call-out in difficult times. As leaders, I think we need to take an optimistic view and help build. That's it. I'm out of court here. I've said enough, Deon.
Thank you.
Are you comfortable? Everybody, thank you. Thank you for the time. It's been a real pleasure and an honor to present to you. We are of course available for the complex questions, no doubt, that will come through as you go through the numbers. Thank you very much for the time, and we will see you soon.