Good morning. It's really an honor and a pleasure to present our six months results to 31st December 2023, to you this morning. It's been a, I think, a very strong and good period for Discovery, and we have a lot to tell you. On the call, I have all of our executive team with us. Our CFO, Deon Viljoen, is in the room with me, so we are looking forward to hopefully giving you a sense of all the happenings and all the dynamics, and then obviously we'll be here to take questions as we proceed. Let me at the outset make the point that we built an organization. I would like to give context just for simplicity.
We built an organization on a very simple core purpose: make people healthier and enhance and protect their lives, and a core set of values that have driven the organization. We built it organically to the point where you see it today, three distinct businesses: Discovery South Africa, Vitality UK, and Vitality Global. All of the businesses sit on this shared value chassis on Vitality, the Vitality Shared Value model, and in the period, there's been a lot happening in terms of evolving that model. I hope that becomes clear to you as we progress through the presentation. You can see on the bottom of the chart the key results for the period for the six months: normalized operating profit, up 13%; new business, up 28%; headline earnings, flat; and normalized headline earnings, which I'll explain later, up 11%, as you can see.
For context, I wanted to make the point, of course, it is a very complex environment we're in. We've been through a pandemic. There's tail issues coming through from that. We've been through a period of very low rates of interest, then rising interest rates, rising inflation, and now that is kind of hopefully subsiding. We have conflict in Europe, conflict in the Middle East. We have elections coming up, pivotal elections in places like the US. South Africa, a very, very important election coming up. It is complex. But I have to say to you, I do believe, and I think our team believes very strongly, great businesses manage ambiguity. Great businesses manage complexity, and they have the ability to spot opportunity through that process. It does require the ability to coalesce prudence and innovation at the same time, and we see that.
We see risk, we see it, but at the same time, we see considerable opportunity. Around the world, social security systems are having difficulty. There's less fiscal room, there's complexity, but there are opportunity. In South Africa, there's specific challenges. We know that we're coming to an election. It's a pivotal, very, very important election. We need to look through that election and think about how we build going forward. We remain convinced at Discovery and deeply convicted to the idea that working with government, working with, with government from a business perspective to build, to use our skills to do so is important. The private sector must collaborate to build and fix and help where we can. I think in the business initiative that we've been part of regarding energy, transport, logistics, crime, and corruption, we're getting some traction.
We need to do more of that, and that's important going forward. So we're a business that is focused on the future, focused on any markets we're in, making a difference, and that's important. So there is complexity, but I think we are well positioned to manage that in the right way. From a micro perspective, if you look at our industry, the trends are dramatic and I think very, very important, and they offer, certainly in our view, a very strong set of opportunities. Firstly, most of the markets we're in are experiencing an aging phenomenon, aging population, rising chronicity. It has a dramatic effect on all kinds of social issues, healthcare systems, et cetera. The nature of risk, I'm going to touch on this a bit later, is phenomenal.
The behavioral effect on bringing mortality, morbidity down is absolutely tremendous. Understanding that, understanding habit formation is fundamental in our business model and in helping society. Technology is remarkable. In the last number of years in our space, it is opening up a whole range of opportunities for our organization. Obviously, AI, but GLP-1s, there's a number of things coming out that just point to a world of opportunity to incorporate that in our model, and I hope you see that going forward. And then, of course, I think social responsibility, sustainability is becoming less than just tick box, but actual, real, authentic focus on being a force for good in society. And I hope you will see that Discovery is doing that in the communities in which we operate.
So in that context, let me talk about the six months under review and maybe make the point, the four things we would like to get across to you. Firstly, in the four focal areas. Number one, a focus on strong financial performance, robust operating performance, good cash generation, strong capital base. Crucial, and I think we're happy with the performance. Second, the very complex transition to IFRS 17. We feel it's gone fairly smoothly. We're coming out the other side, we think, in a very strong space with deep insights into our business, and you'll see that going forward. The third point is that we're at a point of inflection. We've come through an investment cycle.
We have a bunch of very important companies that have now come through and are getting scale, and I hope you see they have the ability to dramatically increase the level of growth of our organization. And then finally, just taking you through a focus on our three composite businesses, the dynamics of them, what we've done well, and the areas that we have to actually, frankly, improve, and you'll see that coming through in the presentation. So let me start by just giving you an overview of the performance. You will have seen it, I think, in the various announcements, but I think the growth and performance tell a very, very important story. I want to start with just an overview of the businesses top-down, give you a sense of how the composites have performed to make-...
Maybe make a comment very quickly to give you a very brief sense of our feeling. As I said, operating profit up 13%, new business up 28%. You can see in the highlighted areas, the South African composite up 9% and 29%. That is boosted by the take-on of the Sasolmed medical scheme inside Discovery Health. UK composite, 13% growth in profit. That's quite a complicated dynamic number. I'll take you through that. New business up 22%. We've been given a boost by the currency, obviously, and then Vitality Global had an exceptionally strong period. You can see operating profit up 71%, new business up 28%. The bank continues to grow strongly, and I think is one of the stars of the show.
A few comments: Discovery Health, very, very strong, robust performance, successful take on of Sasolmed. Discovery Life had a very strong period. Group Life went backwards. It had a very strong period in the previous comparator. That is a risk business that will wax and wane, but Discovery Life individual earnings up 12%. New business up 7%. Strong positive experience variances, and a lot of work done on the new business margins. Discovery Invest, a robust performance. Discovery Insure, growing nicely, but the profitability lagging behind because of a number of weather events. I'll touch on that. That shouldn't happen, and we need to actually get that right. Discovery Bank, for the first time, broke even operationally in the period under review. So in total, of course, it hasn't.
You can see that from the, the numbers, but moving ahead of our expectations and the growth quicker than we expected, which I think is excellent. Vitality Health, really, the UK dominated by the effects of the NHS and the dynamics in the NHS. You will see a claims level has gone up, and that has affected earnings in Vitality Health, but a strong new business performance illustrating how the market is growing, but having to adapt to the very complicated NHS dynamics. Discovery Life having a huge growth in profitability. That is a function of a once-off release of reserves, and the other is a function of high rates of interest. There's a lot of cash built up in the back book of Vitality Life, so it's just a natural flow of that affects it. So don't be...
That 97% does not reflect the ongoing performance or growth of Vitality Invest. Then to make the point, Vitality Network growing strongly and Ping An Health having an absolutely exceptional period. I'd like to give you a sense of these and how they work together as we go on. Let me give you a few overriding comments, and I hope the dynamics become clear as I move forward. Firstly, the operating profit. If you look at it graphically, it's very interesting. From the start, or just 10 years after the start of the organization, you can see the effect of kind of organic growth, very smooth, flattening out finally during the COVID period and thereafter accelerating quite nicely. You can see the move from IFRS 4- IFRS 17. We managed to grow strongly in IFRS 4.
That allowed the move into IFRS 17 to be fairly smooth. So the overall operating profit growing in this period by 13%. There's a complex issue of the restatement of the previous six months that I wanna take you through in detail so you understand that dynamic. But you can see the smooth progression from IFRS 4 into IFRS 17. New business, strong growth. You can see up 28%. It is kind of lumpy because the Discovery Health, which is a... The numbers are very, very big. Discovery Health over time has often these big closed schemes like Sasolmed that come in, so you get these kind of fluctuations that come through, but overall, very strong growth. And if you take out Discovery Health in total, new business growing by 11% across all of our other businesses.
So I think we're pleased with the high-level operating performance, operating profit, and operating growth. From a cash and capital perspective, I think the business is very, very strong. You can see our leverage is coming down nicely. We had a self-imposed limit of 28%. We've been bringing that down consistently. The adoption of IFRS 17 brings out a very different dynamic. How much of the CSM do you count in the denominator when we work out the leverage ratio? The best advice we've had is to count half of the CSM. That's our policy going forward. But we wanted to show you here the variabilities. If you count none of the CSM, you get 24% leverage. If you count all of the CSM, you get a 17% leverage.
Once you count 50%, you get the leverage coming down in that purple line that you see, hopefully, on the chart. It is fairly clear. All of our entities are strongly capitalized, as you can see. The liquidity across the group is strong. The liquidity at the center is very strong, and the cash generation stays within what we set out, kind of 60%-65%, thereabout. As the group grows, obviously, that cash is a bigger quantum, but some of the draws on that cash are fixed, so you get an increasing liquidity position in the group. Embedded Value growing nicely. The annualized return on the EV up 12.1%. It's a fairly simplistic picture. You can see value of new business, the unwind, very little economic experience variances.
But there is a theme of high rates of interest, which you can see there, kind of brings down the value of new business, which is important, obviously, but brings up the unwind. And you can see the kind of interplay in the green. But the total EV growing from ZAR 98.2 billion- ZAR 103.5 billion, as you can see, from the chart. I won't dwell on this point here. It's hopefully fairly self-explanatory. Deon, I think if you wanna go through the detail, you can do that. This is straightforward stuff. The normalized operating profit up 13%. As you can see, there are a number of deductions off that. As you can see, profit before tax.
The key issue, just to point out, is that we had a swa ption instrument inside our UK business. With the restructure now, that swa ption has been realized in the previous period. There was a gain on that sale of that swa ption, so we've taken that out and normalized that to show you a true effect from one period to the other. At the bottom, normalized headline earnings up 11%. So I hope that gives you a sense of the various issues. There's some rise in interest rates. You can see there's some counter effects of that higher up, and I think hopefully that's fairly straightforward and linear and easy to understand. We're declaring a dividend of ZAR 0.65 a share. There's no magic to this.
We followed very much the guidance that we, we spoke about at the reintroduction of the dividend at the last period. We made the point we'd like to cover the dividend approximately five times, and we'd like the first, the interim dividend, to be 30%-40% of the total dividend. And if you apply that logic, you get to about ZAR 0.65. So that's what we've settled on. Obviously, that will progress going forward as the business grows and as we apply our minds to it. We are following very much the philosophy that we set out in the previous period. Let me make some comments about the transition to IFRS 17. Not a simple process, but I think we're very pleased as to where it has landed.
You may recall from the previous announcement, we worked hard to explain that the nature of our business has a very different incidence of profits. Firstly, and importantly, with IFRS 17 or IFRS 4, there is no change at all in the economic value of the business, the cash flows, the solvency. It simply changes the incidence of profits, how quickly profits emerge under the two. Given the nature of our business, under IFRS 4, the profits emerged quicker and therefore were slower in the long term, and you had this so-called crossover point, as you can see from the chart. IFRS 4 have high earnings, flattens out over time. IFRS 17, lower, and then over time, it crosses over and is higher.
The consequence of that is you get a different kind of reserve build up, but the economic value is exactly the same. We did at the previous announcement, explain that Discovery Life is a lot more mature and therefore is closer to the crossover point, and I think that is important. Vitality Life is a much younger business, and therefore is much before the crossover point. What you see from the chart, as I said, when you bring the whole group together, you get a kind of a weighted average of all of these effects, and therefore the total group profitability has kind of blended in from IFRS 4- IFRS 17 fairly smoothly, as you can see from the right-hand side of the chart.
But a fundamental issue is understanding the change from IFRS 4- IFRS 17, and particularly the restatement of the previous comparator, the six months to December 2022. This is an important point. In our SENS announcement, we made the point that restating those earnings from IFRS 4- IFRS 17 reduced the operating profits by 16%, and there seemed to be some dissonance in the market about that. It's important that I lay this out to you. So the slide is a bit complex, and I hope it's not too complex, but we felt we need to play it out to you because we need to understand the dynamics of IFRS 17, and particularly the crossover points and how it plays out.
The reality is that 16% difference is more a function of the specifics of IFRS 17 versus IFRS 4, not the crossover point. So in the case of Discovery Life, in the previous period, there was an excellent lapsation experience. IFRS 4 takes it straight to P&L, whereas IFRS 17 only looks at the in-period effect of that. So therefore, you get a very big difference, and you can see the effect of that is 15%. On the right-hand side of the chart, you can see in the second half, we've been through the year, the previous year, so we can show you this. The right-hand side of the chart, it's a 3% difference. So for Discovery Life, in fact, for the year, we restatement the year, the effect will be a 9% difference between the two.
There were specific issues, that needed mentioning. Vitality Health and Vitality Life had specific issues. Vitality Health, in managing the COVID claims, we were very careful to use reinsurance to make sure that the incidence of claims were appropriate. That created a GBP 10 million gain in the previous period. Under IFRS 17, that is reversed out, and that in fact appears in the net asset value in previous periods. So that affects Vitality Health's profitability in the previous period. Vitality Life has a very powerful value creator in terms of premium indexation. When inflation rates rise, and they have done, as you know, premiums go up. Under IFRS 17, that indexation goes to OCI, but under IFRS 4, it goes to profitability. Creates a very big swing between the two.
So you get all of these variables coming through, and that created the -16% difference. If you go throughout the whole year, you can see the -16 becomes -14. Some of the effects in the UK are, in fact, more marked over that period. The Discovery Life piece, in fact, comes down quite substantially. So important just to explain to you the differences here. I think the irony is IFRS 4 tends to be a lot more volatile. This volatility is actually four moving around versus a much more stable IFRS 17. Our view is that we are-- we've made the change. It's giving us a lot of insight into the business. It's going to be a lot less volatile going forward.
I think very pleasingly, we have in total about ZAR 38 or 38.2 billion of CSM plus OCI that's built up in the group. So it offers us the potential to grow strongly, and to utilize obviously the margins as we go through and as they unwind into profitability. So we are pleased with the process. It's been a very, very complex process. We've learned a lot throughout it, but it provides incredible insights into the business. I hope I've given you some sense of it and explained the restatement and how that plays out. Let me turn to the businesses and how they performed, and I want to focus on the issue of growth and growth platforms.
Very importantly, a number of years ago, we explained quite clearly, Discovery's been an entirely organically built business. We've never made any dramatic acquisitions. We built our business off the shared value model, and we built new businesses that become emerging businesses and flow to established businesses. The truth, as you will know, is it's not a simple thing to do. Businesses take different amounts of time. They take time to scale. But that was really the intellectual process, and we actually modeled our entire capital plan on the back of that. Over the last number of years, the second chart from the left, we went through quite an investment boom, where we actually invested in the bank and a lot of other initiatives, and we went way above the 10% guidance.
We're clear about why we were doing it, particularly the bank, and that has now come down quite substantially. Where we are today, I think, is a point of inflection. We now have a number of businesses that are profitable or nearing profit, like the bank. They are almost cash flow generative. In fact, going forward, they're gonna be very cash flow generative. And importantly, there's not a dramatic investment in other initiatives. We've culled off any initiative that we felt didn't have viability or real long-term potential, and what we're left with is kind of the Discovery stack on the top right-hand side of the chart. But underneath that, four distinct growth platforms. The Vitality base itself, which is really the enabler. Discovery Bank, that has broken even operationally, but I want to show you the mathematics of growth, how that plays forward.
Vitality Group, that is really starting to scale. And then, of course, Ping An Health, that really has reached a stage of considerable scale, and we think has real potential. When you play this out, what these new starts do or what these growth platforms do, is they add 5%-10% to the operating growth of the group. So they become substantial very quickly, and they add 10%-15% to the cash flow generation growth. Important point, because of course, in the past, we're using cash and liquidity to fund them. Now that they're turning around, you start getting the cash coming out of them. So these are pretty fundamental points to make, and I do think the group is at a point of inflection.
We've sold off stuff that we felt is not viable, and the platforms that are strongly, strongly in place. I wanted to spend a bit of time just on the shared value model. This doesn't have a direct financial consequence, but it is at the core of the group, and in the last year, we have focused intensely in taking Vitality into a much more significant dimension of hyper-personalization, of the ability to really underpin globally, life insurance and health insurance businesses in a very, very different way. We alluded to this at the last announcement, but I wanted to give you a sense of how Vitality is evolving to do what it needs to do. The first point to make is that the Discovery data set is globally unique.
As you can see, it coalesces wellness data, device data, engagement data with health data, clinical data, radiology, pathology. It's made up of 600 million member months, longitudinal data we can track. Everything is verified. It's really a unique set globally that allows us to answer questions, but critically allows us real competitive advantage, allows us to use data in different markets in a very, in a very, very different way. And that's at the basis of our competitive advantage. The point to be made, and I want to make it very strongly, is what the data shows is the causal effect of behavior change on mortality and morbidity is far bigger than we ever thought. At the start of Discovery, in the early days, this was kind of a thought that directionally this should happen.
But if you look at the actual data, this is data we, we've launched recently, but if you look at the data, this is quite remarkable. You can see when you isolate out everything else, the confounders, all other issues, and you look simply at the effect of physical mortality, you can see that people going from a sedentary phase longitudinally to low, medium, high levels of physical activity bring mortality down 50%-60%. And the amazing point is that it's age agnostic. If you do that post 65, you get a similar effect. That's the same for healthcare costs, although not to 60%, 20%-30%. On the right-hand side, our data allows us to understand health span, lifespan, risk factors, and that's important.
And allow, allows us to understand which behaviors affect health span and lifespan, what-- and how elastic are they to behavior change. Again, you can see it's quite dramatic, and it's dramatic for older, sicker people, and I think that's important. The contemporary view is that these kind of issues are for young, healthy people. That's not the case. It's particularly powerful for older and sicker people. So if you look at a male, 51, or in this case, an unhealthy 70-year-old female, you can see that you can actually affect the health span by 90% or 50%. And the key thing is that these people need to do specific things differently. Physical activity tends to be kind of a universal solvent, but there could be medicine adherence, there could be nutrition.
There are different activities you need to focus on, certain preventive screening, HIV, A1C testing for diabetic, et cetera, et cetera. So what it says is that the model has dramatic effect, but it has to be personalized because people have different triggers. People need to do different things in order to get the impact that we expect. So what we have done over the last year, and we brought the entire group in, this has been pioneered by the South African health business and the UK businesses, and it's being expanded out globally. We launched our partners and working with our partners on this, is really interspersing the Vitality modules into the traditional value chain of insurance.
The value chain of insurance is fairly transactional, underwrite and price, charge premiums, you know, pay claims and exits, and that's how it works. What we're bringing in is a set of modules that are now dynamic. Dynamic risk assessment that continuously is assessing risk. From that, an AI recommender that's trained on our data, that recommends that next best action, then the incentivized engagement through two simple rings, and then the dynamic pricing. Bringing that in creates a very, very different dynamic. I wanted to make the point just about how powerful the capability is.
So I'm skipping a few steps, but the dynamic risk assessment, together with our data, allows us for each individual to populate a proper seven-dimensional risk factor: health span, lifespan, risk relativities, personalized mortality rates, and critically, the science of habit formation, our ability to understand, is it a strong habit, a weak habit? What's the predictability of that behavior? That then goes into a recommender engine that uses our data to actually recommend what is that next best action. It's a crucial thing. Understand that for a specific set of risks, you have hypertension, or you have diabetes or whatever, there's usually a whole bunch of comorbidities involved. What is that next best action that will get the best effect?
Now, intellectually, you would accept that next best action is a function of two things: the value of that behavior change, the value of mortality or morbidity, the improvement in mortality and morbidity due to that behavior change, and then obviously, the propensity, the likelihood that you'll do it. If something is high value and you'll never do it, that can't be your next best action. So it's kind of a cross-multiplication of value times propensity. So what the model does is, through machine learning, actually works out the optimizing of value and propensity and throws out from all of the potential actions, what are the two or three things you need to do as an individual, based on your specific personalized risk factors?
It also uses the habit formation work that we've done, in fact, launched in London, last week, about understanding predictability of behavior. And what it comes out is two things: personalized kind of exercise routine, steps of what you should be doing, and then very, very importantly, the specific actions you should take. What comes out of it is, is a personal pathway for every individual from understanding risk all the way through, as you can see, to those three next best actions. And despite all the complexity, that's served up in a very, very simple UX, on the face of a mobile, through a WhatsApp, whatever it might be, of two weaving magical rings, the exercise ring that is personalized, and a healthy actions ring that determines what you should be doing based on your risk factors. Close the ring, get incentivized.
All the other Vitality benefits obviously apply. The modeling we've done on this is tremendous. Life insurance markets are quite inefficient. You're pooling controllable risk, behavioral risk. By stripping it out, you get a far better effect, and the value drivers of the hyper-personalization is better lapsation, better selection, better behavior, tighter risk differentiation with the initiators, and obviously making people a lot healthier. I urge you, if you can, to study this chart. It is quite fascinating of our modeling of a traditional. It's one of our global partners. Look at a traditional policy of theirs. On the left-hand side, you can see the VNB under the insurer value. Goes from 100 units with no Vitality to 104 to 112. So the effect of hyper-personalization is tremendous.
People pay less, they get more rewards, and the critical thing from the societal perspective of the model is the portfolio pays less, and there are more of them. They lapse less. So you're covering more people at a lower price, and that, we believe, is the fundamental disruptive ability of the model. In terms of health insurance, this is the Discovery Health Medical Scheme distribution, one of the challenges is getting engagement for wellness and prevention and getting engagement for disease management. What this hyper-personalization does is create one continuous vector. This is based on your own risk factors. If you need disease management, that's the action that will be served up. If you need prevention, that's what will happen.
You can see from this chart here, we really have superimposed the distribution of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme by health utilization score. So from the sick people or high users on the left to the lighter users on the right. What you see, I would argue, our engagement levels are among the best in the world, given the history of the Vitality program. You can see the engagement levels are fairly high, but in fact, they come off for the sicker, higher users, and that's the challenge. So through hyper-personalization, we believe by doing that, we get a dramatically different engagement profile. As you see on the right-hand side, it's remarkable the level of savings that you get when you do that.
So if you get just 25% of the right people to follow that next best action, you get 50%-60% reduction in health costs from that particular disease. So the effects are, are tremendous, and I think as you see, aging chronicity, I'll touch on that later, inside most health plans, the potential for this is quite, is quite remarkable. So a huge amount of work has, has taken place on the Vitality Shared Value platform that is obviously powering all of our businesses, and hopefully, you'll see that come through. Let me now turn to, let me turn to the different composites, and I'd like to run through them. I don't want to be laborious. I'll make comments on, on a few key points, but I think firstly, Discovery South Africa, and start with the bank. The bank's performance has been absolutely tremendous.
The growth has continued and accelerated. If you look at the actual top-line numbers, clients have grown by over 40% to 825. We've + 2 million, I think close to 2.1 million accounts. Our deposits have grown by over 30%. Advances, we continue to be very careful in this environment. You see the revenue growth and the operating results, you can see coming down, the losses coming down quite nicely. But we've broken it down between operational losses and acquisition costs. You can see even in this period, the operational losses were there, but during the period, we crossed over, we're in the in-month operating losses were in fact profitable. So we broke even from an operational perspective.
Obviously, the bank must make profitability quickly, and we believe we'll do that in this financial year. But it is important to understand the dynamics of the profitability of the bank as we cross through, and I'll take you through that later. A few comments I want to make. Daily new business is strong. It's, you can see how it's climbed up over the last two or three years to over 1,000 new clients a day. The source of the business remains quite diversified. Over 50% of new clients are not Discovery clients at all. You can see the quality of the business. Over 40% of the clients are buying transactional and bundle accounts, credit cards, and suites, so there's value there. And we're keeping the acquisition costs in a very tight narrow area of acquisition costs per client.
So there's a lot of learnings about how to acquire clients, obviously, that we will, we will use going forward. Now, I, I need to make the point that this is a bank that we are building on the back of NIR. We strongly believe in building a full services bank that people are using. You can see that we're getting very strong growth in NIR. It's grown to 38% compound over the last number of periods, and the dynamic, I think, is fairly straightforward and I think very pleasing. People come onto the bank, it has exceptional functionality. The digital experience is very strong, easy to use, intuitive, has amazing capabilities, and after a few months, you can see how escalation and utilization tends to go up.
On the right-hand side, we're now seeing record-high monthly banking activity as people in the back book are now using it more and more and more, and new people are coming on. It's quite tremendous how that NIR is growing. Now, the key thing of the bank, and I think driving NIR, is to make it different, to make it a real bank, to make it bigger than just a full-service bank. In and of itself, it needs to do what a bank does, and, and that's what we're focusing on. But its ability to bring the group together, to bring the composite together, to use the power of Discovery, in the environment, to make the bank a super powerful tool is there.
So on the left-hand side at the top, that's, that's kind of the banking stack you get, kind of your accounts, your Vitality Money, your, your various incentives, your payment and structures. But effectively, at the top, you can now... All of your products sit there, and you've seen this before, health, life insurance, et cetera. All the behavioral factors come into Discovery Miles, so the architecture works well. But one of the powerful things that we are now working on is the idea of different ecosystems. Discovery Ecosystems, Vitality Travel, sits on the face of the bank. It's been the most remarkably successful platform. When you want to travel and use your benefits, you go onto the face of the bank, and you pull through this Vitality Travel ecosystem. It lets you, it gives you access to the entire universe of travel.
You can discover where you wanna go. You can do every single flight, every single airline, select a flight, book it, pay through Discovery, pay, use whatever payment system that you want. It's remarkably strong. We're doing the same in other ecosystems. We're about to launch in a few months' time, the Vitality Fitness ecosystem. It's incredibly smart. It's a similar architecture, so it works exactly the same way. You have kind of a view of the entire fitness environment, different gyms, yoga, Pilates, et cetera. You can discover where they are, select what you want to do, you can book and schedule, and then you can pay. So you really have it on the face of the bank. This idea of ecosystems that Discovery works in is obviously very important. It makes the bank-...
We think very valuable to our customers, makes the user interface intuitive, simple, powerful, and drives up the usage and, of course, the NII. When it comes to NII, we've been judicious. You can see the total NII has climbed. Lastly, we continue to be very careful about our growth strategy. As you can see, we are judicious. The new business risk distribution, the bottom panel, second from the left, gives a sense of the quality of the clients. And on the extreme right-hand side, you can see at the bottom, we've seen some rise in non-performing loans, but we are way off levels of other banks. We're being very careful in the quality of clients. And then, the second from the right chart at the top, gives you a sense of the actual correlations to the Vitality Money status.
You can see that people that are on higher Vitality Money statuses simply don't, simply don't default on their credit, and that, that is important. So we're getting a very good ability to drive the NII, but we're doing that in a very judicious way. Bear in mind that Discovery Bank was built off the back of Discovery Card, so it started out in unsecured lending through the credit card. But we're moving now into the home loan space. Over the last year, the Discovery Bank home loan product has been built. It's being alpha tested now and be rolled out, we hope, in the next four weeks. I think it's a very compelling product. It's on the face of the mobile. It's simple, easy to use, and the value proposition is shared value.
If you manage your money, if you're using our products, we bring your interest rate down. That's the, the principle. That's the principle value. We think the market potential for us is, is dramatic. There are ZAR 1.4 trillion rands of home loans out there. Our embedded client base within Discovery Bank has over ZAR 280 billion of home loans, as you can see. And our estimation is 60% of them are, are mispriced from a, from a... in terms of overpaying for interest, the, the interest cost. So we have the ability, we think, to penetrate quite deeply into that space that is with us already. So the bank is well positioned. I'll come back to the mathematics of growth, in a moment, and hopefully that makes, that makes a bit of sense. Let me talk a bit to Discovery, to Discovery Health.
Exceptionally robust business that continues to grow. You can see operating profit up 7%. The membership has grown to over 3.8 million. The Sasolm ed is not yet in that membership. You can see the effect of Sasolm ed on new business. Now, I need to point out, Discovery Health, the Discovery Health Medical Scheme, new business is slightly down, as you can see. In fact, it's kind of leveled off a bit, and this is an important issue that we must address. Discovery Health Medical Scheme is remarkably successful. It is so large. Its new business is made up of two things. It's net new business, new business coming in, there's lapses going out, and these are the difference of two very, very large numbers. In this period, we had a slight reduction.
We have to address that, to bring lapses down, new business up. So it waxes and wanes, but that's an area that we must, we must deal with going forward. But you can see the performance of Discovery Health is very strong. The Discovery Health Medical Scheme continues to perform well. Its market share is high. Customer satisfaction, 90% of clients, and I show this every year, stay where they are. They don't move up or down. So this kind of anecdotal view of people buying down is in fact not the case. Lapses remain stable, and we've been in a very careful process of managing the solvency levels of the scheme. As you all know, during COVID, the solvency levels really climbed to very, very high levels. We need to give members back that money in a very careful way.
We can never let the contributions go below the cost curve. So there's been a very careful process of setting contribution levels in the right way, delaying some of them in the last number of years, and you can see the effect of how that solvency is coming down. It's still about 30%. I mean, it's good for the scheme, but over time, we'd like to get that back to a more appropriate level. I must make the point of chronicity. We're seeing increasing chronicity in aging, and I think that's to be expected. You can see that on the left-hand side of the chart. And again, coming back to this issue of making sure people engage, we're working very hard on this Vitality 2.0, using... training the data to be able to get to the right kind of people.
Again, on the right-hand side, showing you the effect. If we get people to follow those next best actions, the effect on healthcare costs will be dramatic. So there's a strong focus that we'll be rolling out in the next few months. And on the back of that, training of the data and learning, of course, that will inform and help us globally with Vitality, with Vitality Global, in everything that we do. I don't want to dwell on the NHI. I want to make the same comment that I made at the previous announcements, that Discovery is committed to universal health coverage. We're committed to making the NHI workable, and that is important. Our fundamental position is that NHI is not workable without private sector collaboration.
If you go through the numbers, and I did this, We presented this previously, our team has modeled this very, very carefully. You can just see we have a funding challenge. That's one of the tragedies of our country. If you need ZAR 200 billion for NHI, the question is, where does it come from? Our analysis shows that you'd need to raise taxes by 30% in order to achieve it. Our tax base is just too narrow. And then on the bottom of the chart, it doesn't buy much. It buys ZAR 700 per person, not enough to provide very comprehensive coverage, and therefore, employed people, if you follow the act in Section 33, if they can't fund the balance with medical schemes, they would effectively go down from ZAR 2,300 spend per person to the ZAR 700.
So effectively, you'd be saying to the employed people, you'd be saying to the employed sector, "Pay 31% more tax and have 70% less healthcare." Of course, that is not the intention at all of NHI. But the point is just when you look at the funding as it is today, it's difficult to achieve. So we've been hopefully constructive in trying to put those points across. We're hoping that while it sits with the president and the presidency, and minds are applied to it legally, to all the various aspects, there's an understanding of wisdom of how this needs to be, needs to be, changed in the right way to facilitate a process that is workable. We hope wisdom prevails, but ultimately, reality will prevail because we just don't have the funding.
So from a strategic perspective, we continue to invest, we continue to drive Discovery Health, we continue to try and extend our coverage to more people. And I appeal to people because we think the real issue of NHI is sentiment. It kind of really creates a different sentiment of doctors and hospitals and really in people in the healthcare system. We're really making a call out that to understand that this is a very, very long-term complex process, and to just remain focused on building a system that is brilliant and needed and needs to be extended to more people. Let me turn to Discovery Life and make a few comments. As I said, I think Discovery Life's performance has been exceptionally strong.
I want to reverse out Group Life because it had a, it had a really good period in the previous year, which hasn't repeated. Now, it will wax and wane. It's a risk business. But if you take that out, you can see that normalized operating profit for Discovery Life grew by 12%, Individual Life by 7% new business. If you add it in, you can see the 6% and 2% respectively. The business is very strong. It's come out of COVID really strong. Liquidity levels are strong, solvency levels are strong. It's maintaining its market share leading place. And then critically, on the right-hand side is a waterfall of the cash flow generation. Discovery Life now generates ZAR 750 million, and we expect that to grow over time.
So a 35% conversion into cash, which is very important for the group, and we expect that to grow over time. The quality of the earnings, I think, is really strong. If you look at the experience variances, they are... The non-economic experience variances are positive. It's interesting to look at the makeup of them. On the left-hand side, you can see that mortality is quite a long way below expectation. It's an important point to be made because in the shared value model, as people increase their status, there's an expectation that the mortality comes down. So what this requires is for us to do better than that expected value, which you see coming through. We're seeing morbidity. We are still seeing above 100% experience.
It's worse than expected, and it's complex. We're seeing high, high levels of early incidence of cancer. We think it's still the trail effect of COVID, of lack of early diagnosis, et cetera. Also, you see the effect of high rates of interest and inflation. You can see we're seeing lapses kind of making up for policy, also not quite. So people are... Lapse rates are lower than expected, which is good, positive variances, but we're seeing policy alterations, so people are staying with us but altering their policy. We must address that. That's a very important point. EV has grown nicely, 12% return on EV, and if you take out the economic effect, there's been a 53% return on EV. So the EV is very strong. I wanted to make the point just again about the shared value.
As we start to understand the mathematics of shared value, there's been a lot of work done on the VNB margin of Discovery Life. It's gone up from 2.5- 4.3. If you take out group and you look only at individual, that experience has gone up from 3.2%- 5.6%. That's an internal rate of return of over 21%. That is good. The effect of the model is on the right-hand side. You can see what that does to the VNB. That's very, very important. It drives better selection, better lapse, better claims, better business mix. But of course, on the red, there's a cost to the incentives and the rewards that we pay back.
When you bring them together, you can see a 1.8 multiple of VNB from the shared value model. So really coming through in what we said before, and again, our belief is if we hyper-personalize the clear value, the shared value model, we get a better result going forward. So a lot of work is taking place in this regard. Let me make some quick comments about Discovery Invest. Robust performance, no need to dwell on this. 11% increase in operating profit, good new business. There were good asset values coming through from global markets at the end of the period, assets under administration climbing 11% to ZAR 145 billion. Our partnership with BlackRock and Cogence is now really getting some pace. We've had an excellent executive team in place.
We're on track. We've been trying to get to this $1 billion of assets. We're close to getting there. We've fully integrated the product. Aladdin Wealth is now working well with Vitality, so you can offer kind of risk advice on the assets, but also risk advice on the demographics at the same time. That's the value proposition, and giving you access to exceptionally good and diverse asset management skills across the world. So we're excited by the potential of Cogence and of Invest. Discovery Insure is interesting and in a sense, it's been problematic for us. If you look at Discovery Insure, gross new business is up 8%. It's a big business. For six months, its total premium was ZAR 2.8 billion. We've been very careful on the pricing, and that's the key issue here.
You can see that the number of vehicles insured has only climbed by 1%, yet revenue's grown. So we've actually up-pricing quite substantially. But the important point to look at is, is the profit curve. The business, with all its dynamics, has not generated significant profit. And in fact, if you go through its history over time, despite all of the positive dynamics, and I think an excellent business the team, the team has built, you'll see that just prior to COVID, it started to get scale and started to generate profits. And in the COVID period, as you can see on the chart, the profits were very, very high. But post-COVID, you can see them come down. In fact, in the last period, they came down dramatically to almost to break even.
The reason for that has been two significant weather events, the Gauteng hailstorm, that's certainly the worst we've seen in our history, the Cape floods, et cetera. And you can see the effect of that. The total cost of that, of those weather events were ZAR 131 million net of reinsurance. So not insignificant for a business the scale of Discovery Insure, and it wiped out the profitability. But the point is, in every period, you're going to have incidents. You're gonna have different kinds of weather issues. In the previous period, we had the theft of high vehicle insurance, high-cost vehicles, et cetera, and that's predictable, and we have to manage that. But the point is, the margins are just too low.
The water level of the business is just too low, and the source of that issue is in COVID. So in the second from left, and it's very important to point this out, you can see what the premium yield was. In other words, the increase in premiums every year in terms of our rate increases. They were pretty strong pre-COVID. As we went into COVID, understandably, we weakened them quite substantially and gave people money back in terms of people not claiming. But once coming out of COVID, you can see the cost curve in that black line dramatically, dramatically rising. And so we've been in a process now of really re-rating the business. It's gonna take a bit more time, but the dynamics of the business, as you can see on the right-hand side, second from the right, is very, very strong.
That shows the distribution of drivers from good to bad, and it shows 1 year, a cohort that is 1 year old, a cohort that is 2 years old, all the way to 10 years old. And what you see is that as people stay with us, we kind of bleed off the worst drivers who find better cover elsewhere, and we keep the better drivers based on the shared value model. They're getting value for money, they're enjoying the process, they're using the system. And so all the dynamics of duration or better quality are coming through, just the water level is too low. So we have to increase the prices, and that's what we're doing. You can see on the right-hand side that we do have pricing power.
Through price optimization, we can pass prices off to the right people in the right way, an equitable way, and that's what we're doing. So I think the business has great, great potential to grow. It should generate cash for the group, and it should offer considerable value to its customers, which I think it does do through the shared value model. So I think good dynamics underlying it, but the profitability is letting us down. It must be addressed quickly to earn at least the cost of capital, but thereafter, to earn the margin dramatically higher. I hope you will expect this in the next year or so as we work hard on the rerating. Let me turn to the UK and talk about Vitality Life and Vitality Health, two very different dynamics here.
And by lumping them together, you don't really get a set of-- you don't get a clear sense of what's going on. The first point to make is the restatement in the previous year was quite significantly affected by, as I said to you before, the indexation on life and the reinsurance effects on Vitality Health. So you can see the drop in the previous comparator, but the growth of that, the growth of that base on the previous comparator, up 13% for the group. The reality is the growth of the group is very strong. Premiums grew by 11% in pounds, 27% in rand, so the effect on the currency is very strong. Lives covered grew actually quite a bit faster. What you're seeing here is the effect of Vitality Invest and Car that we actually culled.
So a slight reduction, but lives anyway grew by 5%, and the new business, as you can see. But it's important to look at the different businesses. Vitality Health was dominated by the dynamics of the NHS. Massive opportunity and growth, as you can see, new business from the, from the backlogs forming in the NHS, but at the same time, dramatically different claim levels coming through from people using private medical insurance very, very differently. And you can see the effect on profit of being profit down by, by, by 20%. You can see lives covered has grown strongly by 10% to nearly 1 million lives, which is good, earned premiums growing by 11% to just under GBP 340 million, GBP 340 million pounds. The NHS is the most remarkable social security system of power of scale, but it's not simple.
At the moment, it is understaffed, underfunded, with backlogs forming. I'm sure over time, the UK will get on top of it. Not simple to solve. A dramatically aging population, rising chronicity, too few home care centers, so people are going to hospital instead of home care. There's a lot of dynamics underpinning the NHS that you may be aware of. But the net result, the net result, as you can see, is a dramatic rise in backlogs. And from the backlogs, the private medical insurance market has grown. On the right-hand side, you can see the gearing effect. The total market for private medical insurance is GBP 6.7 billion. The total spend on the NHS is 35x higher, GBP 230 billion. It's a huge amount of money.
So crudely put, 5% of the NHS spend is the entire private health insurance market. So if there's some kind of retardation of spend in the NHS by 1%, it grows the private health insurance market dramatically. People have to shift and make that up in private. And to an extent, that is what we're seeing. We're seeing strong new business, but we're seeing a very, very different pattern of claims. There's been a shift in the entire base to using private medical insurance for primary care. You can see on the left-hand side of the chart, so people getting dental checkups, general practitioners, physical therapy, et cetera, mental health checks, cognitive behavioral therapy, et cetera. In the middle chart, you can see what's happened to the actual growth in claims. It is remarkable.
So the usual inpatient stuff is under control, but it's the GP visits, the CBT, that's really climbing. The net effect is dramatic. It's been a GBP 25 million overrun in the six months that we're reporting on. You can see what that's made up of. Dramatic increase in utilization. Primary care, so the cost per claim is lower by 9%, but the net effect is a 7% increase. We are moving quickly to increase our rates to do that. Obviously, you can't pre-empt the market in doing that, or else you get adverse selection. So we're moving quite quickly. I think by this point now, by March, April, we sort of have caught up. We'll see how that plays out.
But the net result is that is kind of a shift in claims behavior from the NHS. I have to make the point, though, that we are very optimistic in the longer term. The team has built an exceptional business in the UK, the brand, the feel, the Vitality model. You can see the actual metrics. It's the third-largest health insurer now in the UK, growing strongly, very tight retention rates. We think the lowest loss ratio in the market, and it's digital first. Everything is digital. Service levels are high. It's a fantastic healthcare system that has been built in the UK. So we need to get on top of those claims levels, and we need to make sure that we can grow at the same time. The team, I think, is confident that they can achieve it, but not simple.
A lot of work to be done. Let me talk about Vitality Life, and I think the primary issue in Vitality Life is making sure that the return on capital on new business is satisfactory. The experience variances are strong, the shared value model is working well. We need to make sure we can grow the new business at the rate that we need and generate the right levels of internal rates of return on that. You will see, and I made the point, the growth in profitability of a lower base of 97% is not indicative of how the business has grown. It's the effect of higher rates of interest on the back book, which has a massive amount of cash and assets.
So you just get a natural increase in flow, and there's a once-off variance that once-off variance that came through that boosted that boosted that amount. You can see the new business flow, although in rands up 17%, was only up 2% in pounds. We focused very carefully on sectors that we felt were profitable, but we're not doing enough new business to bring those unit cost down. We need to be more efficient in bringing that down to drive up the internal rate of return on new business. Just to make a point about the once-off value uplift, I mean, it really talks to the shared value potential. What we're doing now is we're really starting to understand the data and to use the data to actually understand liabilities better.
So through understanding behavior change, the value of behavior change on mortality, the ability to actually model the habit formation, in other words, the predictability of a behavior change and value that over time, allows us to really understand our liabilities better. In this case, it released some value. This ends the... with the Prudential , and that's part of a process we went through in actually understanding it. It offers a tremendous potential and asset and capability, as we go forward. But to talk to the quality of the book and where we need to go, you can see on the left-hand side, the business's variances over the period were positive to the tune of just under GBP 10 million of premium. Lapses, mortality, morbidity was profitable.
The challenge is on the right-hand side. When you look at the value of new business, you can see the internal rate of return was above the risk-free rate by 2%, but below the risk discount rate. So in VNB terms, it's slightly negative. We need to address it. We need to bring that up quite substantially, and there's a lot of work taking place to achieve it. Unit costs, more volume, be more efficient in the distribution. It's a critical issue. But I do make the point, as I did before, some of the effect of this lower value of new business is the high internal rate of return. The fact that interest rates have gone up, so you get the demands are high, and that's something we have to cross.
But there is a concomitant effect, and that's the indexation of premiums. You can see in the third chart from the left, during the period, GBP 13.8 million pounds of premium escalations came through. That doesn't feature in the P&L. As I said, well, it goes to OCI and IFRS 17, but you can see the effect of that. So our view is if we can achieve that indexation, and it's incredibly robust, it's a great thing of the business, but at the same time address the internal rate of return on new business, we think that we have a tremendously powerful business in place. So work to be done on that, and expect us to tell you more as we go forward.
Let me turn to the Vitality, Vitality Global, and make the point: I think the performance over the period was exceptionally strong. Vitality Global is made up of two businesses, Vitality Network, that takes our Vitality business model, partners with insurers around the world, and we earn part of the value uplift from them as we go forward as a fee. So it's not a... It's a, it's a business that gets, gets fees in and has an expense base, it has a margin implicit in it. And then Vitality Health International really is equity stakes in certain key assets that we have in the global health insurance space. Operating result is up. It's an addition of two very different, businesses, but operating result up 71%, as you can see, to just over ZAR 455 million for, for the period.
Vitality Network has had a tremendously good period. You can see operating profit up just under 50% in rand terms to just over ZAR 295 million. You can see on the right-hand side, growing base of members. Second, from the left, I need to point out that the quantum of premium that the model is attached to, over $800 million in the six months, is tremendous, and we're actually getting—we're getting real traction, and the revenue growth is strong, 16% in dollars to over $50 million. So the business is strong. The strategy is about growth going forward on three distinct things. Number one, get deeper penetration in our partners that are constructive, where it adds value to them. Number two...
Sorry, within number one, adding more partners, and we're working hard in markets like the U.S. with John Hancock to expand the partnership. We'll tell you more about that. The second is just the mathematics. It's a good business. You have kind of a fee revenue, and you have an expense line, and that's starting to open up, and that's important. And then thirdly, the ability to add value. I've made the point, hopefully clearly, but at length, about the power of the shared value model, about what we're doing to evolve the platform. We think that adds tremendously more value to our clients, to more clients, and so we think we can grow the base. In the case of Vitality Health International, I mean, it's dominated by Ping An Health, but we've worked hard at Amplify Health.
We have a lot of work to be done. I think a good period, the products are now coming through on stream. There's a pipeline of new business building up from AIA and other, and other insurers, in the region. And we're investing somewhat in the U.S. around taking that, that business focus on employers and offering it to health plans, potentially taking that new Vitality hyper-personalized model into the U.S. in the right way. It's a very complementary approach of building it for the entire, for the entire market. I think it's good for us. So a lot is taking place there, but you can see the operating results growing by a massive 125%. It really is off the back of Ping An Health. The business had a tremendously strong calendar year and six months in terms of our financial year.
You can see the, the effects of that. Ping An Health's operating profit growing by over 126% over the period. And I wanted to point out, look at the, the left-hand bar in, in the orange. That's the operating profit. So you do get investment performance coming through, but in fact, the increases is primarily on the back of, of better performance of operating profit. In Discovery's hands, we've had a, a good result from a, a tax efficiency coming through, so you see an even bigger jump in terms of our earnings, but it's a big business. Written premium has grown to over ZAR 23 billion for the six-month period. You can see it covers over 26 million lives, and we're now getting on top of the new business.
For a number of years, as Ping An Life kind of weren't selling on their own license through a reinsurance structure, Ping An Health started to sell on its own basis. This is a health insurer in the Chinese market transacting health insurance. So it's complicated and complex on the ground, but intellectually, this is a health insurer applying its trade, getting premiums, paying claims, and it's doing that, I think, remarkably well. You can see the operating performance persistency levels are climbing, the loss ratio coming down, so the combined ratio coming down now to 91%, so 9% margin. Exceptionally strong generation of cash. In the six-month period, CNY 3 billion, which is about ZAR 8 billion of cash was generated, and the balance sheet is incredibly strong.
I showed you earlier, 300%, over 300% solvency level, and you can see the balance sheet has a NAV of just under 9 billion, 8.6 billion of net assets. So that's substantial, close to ZAR 20 billion of NAV. So this is a business that has grown substantially. In terms of its peer group, it's done remarkably well. You can see to compare to other insurers, its margins on the left-hand side are dramatically higher. And then to give it a bit of color, it's in terms of margin, number one in China, in terms of profit margin. It's in 16 provinces across China, deals with 1,000 hospitals, which is quite remarkable, and is the 16th largest producer of profit amongst all insurers in the Chinese market. So it's significant.
We've made the point at the previous results announcement that, in fact, in fact, the kind of tailwinds in the space are fairly strong. It's a market that's complex, we know. It's going through difficult times in terms of all kinds of other dynamics, property prices, et cetera. But in terms of social security, there's a strong push towards creating a viable health insurance market, and we do believe Ping An Health is well positioned to do that. The team does believe that the earnings growth, the earnings level, should grow strongly going forward. So let me end just this section by making the point that I think the composites are well positioned. There's work to be done. Vitality Health claims, Vitality Life new business, insurer pricing. It's fairly clear what we need to do, I believe.
But generally, I think the business is the group is in a strong position. I want to come back, though, to the growth platforms, just to make the point, the mathematics of growth. I said earlier that the business now has gone through the cycle of investment. We have four platforms for growth: the Vitality Chassis, that affects everything we do, Vitality Global, Vitality Network, and the bank. When you put that together, I believe what you will see is adding to the group 5-10 percentage points of operating profit growth and 10-15 percentage points growth in cash flow generation. And you can see them when you look at it mathematically.
For the first time, on the right-hand side of the chart, you can see that the effect of these, this core of businesses, is actually raises the level of profitability. In the past, it was actually draining as we were investing a lot in it. So the crossover has taken place, and that difference in compound growth rate starts to open up where we would've been without these, compared to where we are now with these platforms in place. And the mathematics of growth is quite exceptional. Let me talk about the bank very briefly. I made the point that during the period, at the end of the period, faster than we expected, the bank has broken even operationally. Over the period, it, in fact, lost that ZAR 300 million or so, as you saw in the earlier slides.
But if you break down the components into a very simple form, what it is, operating income, minus expenses, minus acquisition costs, give you profitability. That's how it works. The operating income is driven by NII and NIR. The expenses are the OpEx, but the expenses are critical because this is a digital bank, so to an extent, expenses don't grow. And then the acquisition costs are flat by number of clients that we acquire, so very, very controllable. The net effect of it is you get a geared effect. If you look at the February period, what you find is operating income is ZAR 172 million for the month. Expenses are very similar, so there you see the break even. Then you get the acquisition costs coming out, so you get a small loss. But this is the thing, this is the thing.
You can see that the operating income has been growing at 60% per annum compound. The expenses are almost flat in real terms, and the acquisition costs are 0%- 5% growth as we go forward. So if you roll this forward, you get a massively geared effect, and hence the numbers that we showed you, the projection of graphs we showed you, that the bank should get profit very, very quick and start to grow. You get this kind of compound growth rate from the mathematics of the bank. Similarly, in the case of Vitality Network, you can see a very similar issue. If you actually look at how the jaws are opening up, the expense line is a function of a fixed base, a lot of it in rands, in fact, and the revenue line is growing in dollars and other currencies.
So you should get this jaws opening, but in addition, hopefully, over time, the currency effect. You can see the mathematics of that in just the last number of years is a 3.5x times of profitability. So again, you're getting kind of mathematics of growth. And then the final point to make, Ping An obviously won't grow that level, but it's very well positioned in terms of its... It's, it's capitalized very well. It's of considerable scale in the market. The quality is exceptional. So we expect that to continue to grow and very strong cash generation coming out of Ping An Health. And therefore, we believe it should, it should add considerable value in terms of growth to the group, an extra 5%-10% and cash generation. So let, let me come back to the four things we wanted to tell you.
We think the growth over the period has been robust. Operating profit up 13%. As we've shown you, leverage has come down to 20%, cash conversion at 66%, strong new business growth. We've had a relatively smooth transition into IFRS 17. We've tried our best to show you the restatement of that previous period. It's made up of a number of different factors, but in fact, in terms of the crossover, we are very comfortable of where how it's crossing over. And then importantly, in terms of CSM, we go forward with a ZAR 38.2 billion combined level of CSM. The group itself is well positioned. We know what we have to do, the areas of weakness we have to address, and I hope they are clear.
Then the areas of strength, the growth potential from what we put together is very, very, very strong. So we are, we know what our work is. We've a lot cut out to do, but we felt we need to give you a very thorough oversight of that. Let me end there by thanking you for, thanking you for the time. It's spot on an hour. We're gonna take questions now. I have Deon Viljoen, our CFO, who's with me. Our whole executive team is online. We're gonna take questions. We have a number of written questions, and we have people on, on the call. So should I hand over to you, Deon?
Thanks, Adrian. Good morning, everybody. We received quite a few questions, and we'll try to get through all of them depending on time. First question from Michael Christelis from UBS: At first glance, your net CSM seemed to have declined since December. What does that mean for the growth prospects of the two life businesses? There's quite a bit of detailed analysis in the financials on the CSM, but maybe just in broad terms, the CSM for Discovery Life actually grew over the period. There was some negative impact from policy alterations taken to CSM, but on the whole, actually a growing CSM balance.
For VLL, the CSM did decrease, mainly due to strain on CSM due to the VNB margin, as we discussed. But perhaps worth just mentioning that as part of that dynamic and the high interest or inflation rate in the UK, that also gives you very strong benefits of higher indexation on existing policies, which obviously goes through OCI. So, you know, a number of dynamics playing through on that side. The second question, also from Michael: How confident are you around turning UK life margins positive and then to generate your targeted risk-free plus 10 ROE? Can you provide details of the plans here?
Before I hand over to Neville, maybe just to mention that the risk-free rate plus ten, that target, that's sort of at a high level, group target. Obviously, in our capital allocation, we bring a lot more sophistication into that, for each of the composites, given the markets that they operate in, and that's typically a weighted average cost of capital, plus a margin, target in each one of those areas. But maybe, Neville, if you want to, take that, that question.
Yeah. Thanks, Deon. I think Adrian gave a very good explanation of the dynamics in what I've seen. Maybe just to add, a lot of this is around volume related. The UK has been through a tough market in terms of cost of living, prices, high mortgage rates. The mortgage market has dropped quite significantly, which has led to lower volumes. Having said that, we're very confident, due to a number of initiatives and tools that we've developed. The most, probably the most important one is our price optimization and understanding where to target business, and especially in the profitable segments of severe illness, cover income protection. We are seeing significant growth in that, and that is highly profitable business.
So it's really a combination of volume that's been impacted over this period. The market shrunk slightly. We actually grew a little bit, but we're starting to see that turn around. Inflation figures in the UK have come down as of this morning. And also, very importantly, the shared value model and our ability to actually influence behavioral change and the impact it has on mortality, morbidity , and lapses. So it really is a function of volumes, and that has an impact on unit cost and expenses, as well. So there is a plan. Michael, I'm not gonna share every detail with you on this call. Very happy to take it offline. So we absolutely aware of it and feeling quite confident.
Thanks, Neville. The next set of questions is from James Shuck at Citi. Quite a few. Let's go through them. The interim dividend per share implies of a full year EPS of 975. Is this where management expects to land at this point? The dividend range, the ratio of interim dividend, final dividend, is actually quite a wide range of 30%-40%, and so I wouldn't necessarily read into that any forecast. We're also not in a position to provide forecast, but I wouldn't sort of directly relate that to a profit forecast.
Question two, the divisional organic growth expectations of CPI plus 5%, due to the IFRS 17, should this be faster near term versus the new 2022 base? As we indicated, at our year-end results last year, as well as the discussion earlier by Adrian, we do expect, obviously, a steeper growth coming out of IFRS seventeen because of the CSM, and that transitional impact. And that plays out over time. We also made the point that, for instance, for VLL, that's further away from that crossover point. That will still take some time to get to the crossover, and you may expect a bit more volatility in that. But overall, your earnings momentum should be higher under IFRS 17, given that impact on transition.
The third question: Should we expect further earnings drag at Vitality Health? Maybe I can pass that one on to either Neville or Emile.
I'm happy to take it, Deon. So, James, just to, just to say that when we have a sharp increase in claims as we had last year, it does take quite a while for premiums to be earned through. So we have to give roughly 2-3 months notice of a premium increase. Then when it happens, remember that it's only 1/12 of the book, more or less, that renews in that month. So when you're looking at the earnings over the year, you definitely see that it takes at least a year, actually 15-18 months, for the premium increase to be earned through our members. So yes, you should expect some of that premium increase to come through in H2, but there will still be a drag.
The important thing, of course, is that this is our variation of when the premiums have caught up with claims. What we're saying at the moment is that we think that we're pretty close to that level. Of course, there's still a bit of volatility in claims. I think that answers the question.
... Thanks, Emile. The fourth question from James, expectations for further policy alterations, EV charges in the second half. Riaan, maybe if you wanna give some thoughts on that?
Sure. I think it's important to consider policy alterations in combination with a very positive lapse experience and premium experience that we've seen in this period, as Adrian has shown on the slides. So when you combine the very positive lapse experience, premium experience, with the negative policy alterations, you actually get to quite a neutral position over this period. And then in addition to that, we are looking at implementing additional actions to specifically address policy alterations. And some of these would include, for example, to make sure that the incentives of our advisors are fully aligned with the incentives of Discovery Life, and thereby getting alignment in terms of experience.
So I think there's lots to be done, but we're quite confident that, you know, once you consider the full impact of lapses and partial lapses together, the position is a lot more neutral than it looks in isolation.
Thanks, Riaan. We have a question from Tasneem Karnani from White Oak Capital: Is the lower profitability in Vitality Life a function of scale or function of challenging economics? The business is growing, but we don't see operating leverage kicking in while VNB margins are negative. What is the path to VNB margin recovery? Very similar to Michael's earlier question. Neville, I don't know if there's anything specific you would like to add to that.
No, it's exactly the same one.
Yep.
Maybe an indexation issue. Can I-
Sure.
Just to add one thing, Neville, that you may have... I think you did cover. I mean, one of the dynamics in IFRS 17 is the indexation of premiums going to OCI. There's a large store of value there that we're not seeing now in the P&L. It's maybe obvious, but just to make that point, I think that is important. Thanks, Deon.
I think, to beyond, just to add on to that, with further questions coming through on the CSM, just maybe Justin Skinner, when it gets to that question, can just give a little bit, more light on how indexation is playing in OCI. And looking at the CSM and OCI, in combination, in terms of where you try to understand the dynamic is playing out.
Sure. Shall I take that? So, this has been an effort in the UK team for quite a long time to actually enhance the quality of the business written there. So a lot of these policies are index linked, and what we saw during this period of very high inflation, that the clients actually accept this higher indexation adjustment to their policies. That adds a huge amount of value, obviously. There is a technical sort of guidance within IFRS 17 that intuitively this indexation will reflect in higher premiums going forward, and higher benefits, obviously. And as I said, makes the policy much more valuable. And it's real cash. It actually resets a new watermark.
But in terms of IFRS 17, because it is linked to a specific economic indicator of inflation, it is treated as a, as an adjustment due to economics, and therefore doesn't house itself in, CSM. It actually routes through OCI, then recycles from there, to P&L. So the value is there, but, you'll find it in the OCI rather than, in CSM. I hope that, that helps. We've got a question from Francois Du Toit, from Anchor. Sorry, sorry, just trying to get it here. Sorry, there was a previous one. We've got equity accounted earnings. Sorry, here we go. Francois, sorry. Assets arising from insurance contracts increased by $4.9 billion, effectively explaining 100% of the pre-tax profits. How does this square with a cash conversion of 66% on net earnings?
This is quite a technical question. I'll give a very brief overview, but you know, very happy to engage with Francois on the side. So what you now see coming through in the P&L from an IFRS 17 perspective is not directly the increase in your insurance contracts that you see on the balance sheet, because that is made up of a whole number of things: new business, you know, your present value of your future cash flows, and against that, your risk adjustment and your CSM.
So what routes through to the P&L is largely the unwind of the discount of that of those future cash flows, as well as the accretion of the CSM and the release of the CSM, and then certain components that routed through OCI because of economic changes now routing through to the P&L. So taking the balance sheet move and relating that to the P&L is technically not correct. And therefore, also from that perspective, the cash flows are then or the cash conversion is accounted for separately. And particularly in IFRS 17, you now account for that insurance revenue components. And also, you in the P&L split between your underwriting result and your insurance finance income and expense result, and the combination of that.
effectively gives you your, your earnings from insurance. So Francois, I'm very happy to take that further, later on. The next question from Francois: equity accounted earnings were ZAR 302 million. How does the earnings from these investments compare with dividends from these? Now, the larger equity accounted entities, obviously, Ping An Health, a significant associate, as well as, you know, entities such as CMT, et cetera. In Ping An Health, at the moment, that is a growing business, still gaining market share, still investing in its operational capabilities. But, and so up to this point, not yet any dividends received from that business.
But as we can see from the results, they're on a very fast track, and one would expect in the near future that there will be possibility. Adrian, I don't know if you wanted to add to that. Yeah, therefore, these are, you know, a lot of these are startups. There are certain of the associates, such as Quantium, et cetera, that are highly cash generative, and we do get some dividends from that. Danesh asked: What is Ping An Health's market share in the Chinese health insurance market? Adrian, I don't know if you wanna field that?
Barry.
Barry?
I'm not sure. I mean, this Barry maybe allude to specialists versus others. It's quite a complicated question there.
Yeah.
It's a good question.
It's not, it's not too complicated.
It is a bit... Oh, sorry, Barry.
The specialist health insurance market share is. The Ping An Health is 22% of the specialist health insurance market. But if you include other insurance companies that also sell health insurance, you know, Ping An Life sells a bit of health insurance, for example, and there are others that sell health insurance. Our market share is 10.8%. But pleasingly, our market share is actually growing. Grew 0.5% two years ago, 0.2% the year before, and 0.3% last year. So our market share continues to grow, which is very pleasing for us.
Thanks, Barry. Another question from Warwick, Warwick Bam from RMB Morgan Stanley: Can you elaborate on the bank's ability to contain operating expenses once it expands its lending capacity? Maybe Hylton, if you wanna field that.
Sure. I mean, the expense base has been fairly... it's been fairly stable. And we've largely built the home loan capability within the existing expense base and on the platform. So we don't expect any material change in the expense base as we start to roll out home loans and other lending as we move forward. It kind of all plays off the same platform.
So I'm just waiting for that to come on screen. We've got a question from Andrew McNulty. Quite a long question: While normalized CSM replenishment, excluding variances, is reasonable on a combined basis, it looks like Vitality Life CSM is facing meaningful pressure. Do you expect Vitality Life CSM to grow in the short term, short to medium term, or could it be facing declines? And, is there a risk of weak or negative Vitality Life operating profit growth as a result? Neville, I don't know if you've... Again, it sort of links to our previous discussion, but, maybe you can add to that.
Yeah, maybe Justin Skinner. I don't know if there is anything more to add. I mean, we've spoken about it in terms of the dynamic between CSM and OCI, the inflation increases. And also the profitability of the new business will grow the CSM for over a period of time. So again, I, I'm not sure there is much, much more to add.
Okay.
Um, Justin.
And Justin?
Just one further thing to add. There's a later question from Andrew, from Absa. Just to note, there's approximately GBP 15 million of benefit going through to the OCI from indexation. So although the VNB for the life business is lower than where ideally it would be, it's not coming through to the CSMs. We're not getting CSM growth. We are getting growth through the OCI, which over time will release through to the IFI into the P&L.
Thank you. Another question from Warwick: You disclosed the cash conversion for Discovery Life of 35% of normalized earnings. How do you expect the cash conversion to increase in future periods? Riaan, do you wanna maybe take that one?
Yeah. I think if we track the recent past of cash conversion in the Discovery Life Limited business, so this includes Discovery Life as well as Invest, that's been reasonably stable and really in line with our expectations. So I don't expect that to change dramatically in the near future and kind of continue on this smooth trajectory which we're currently on.
Thank you. Danesh Ranchhod from Franklin Templeton asked: How much of the OCI is linked to indexation? It is a very substantial part of it. If you recall, under IFRS 4 last year, there was that sort of impact on the UK Life business between GBP 15 million and GBP 18 million odd. So it's at least that component on transition. Don't have the exact number, but it is a very substantial part of the OCI that is there. We can always get back to you with the exact number. Then Andrew McNulty, Absa CIB, saying comment: "Your approach to IFRS 17 has been very helpful. It is providing deeper insight into the business.
Question one, how meaningful are onerous contracts and unallocated expenses in the large restatement of Vitality Life and results and Discovery Life's meaningful restatement? So, maybe if I can hand that over to-
Justin.
To Justin.
Yeah, the restatement, the onerous contracts and unallocated expenses are part of it. I'd have to dig up the actual numbers. Apologies, I don't have them to hand. As a business, as Neville alluded to earlier, there is a big strong focus on looking at onerous contracts and business mix and pricing actions around them.
Riaan, I don't know if you wanted to talk to Discovery Life?
Yes. I think that maybe the key point to add is we do give very detailed disclosure of what is the component of onerous contracts within the income statement, as well as the build-up in the CSM. So you can actually completely track within a period what that implication is. So very happy to take you through the details. In a nutshell, the impact of onerous contracts within the current period for Discovery Life is not that material, and it has not materially changed from one period to the next, but it is clearly shown on the income statement.
Yeah, and maybe just to take everybody back to the session we had last year at our year-end results. We did identify the two components that sort of caused most of the impact on transition was the definition of directly attributable expenses, which you now effectively write off, and that then creates on the counter of that a larger CSM that will unwind over time. And the granular cohorting, so, you know, that effect of cross-subsidization across the portfolio, and that, to an extent, will result in some onerous contracts, which then are written directly off into P&L.
So those dynamics remain there, but, you know, obviously, that built up over that sort of fully retrospective and, we've seen a lot of improvement in that already over the past number of years when you look back at that retrospective. Adrian, I think those are all the questions. I'm just...
Yep, I think.
Those are all.
That's it, Deon.
Think so.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you to everyone for attending the presentation. Thanks for the questions. Obviously, Deon will be interacting and engaging on detail of the issues. Thanks to the team, and thanks to all our Discovery people. A remarkable period, a lot to do. Thank you for listening, and hopefully see you soon.