Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the presentation of the annual financial results of Momentum Metropolitan Holdings for the period ended 30 June this year. My name is Dan Moyane. Just a short while ago, before we started, I was outside this room, and Hillie Meyer told me that, among us today, we've got the Big Five. Actually, it was Hillie Meyer's wife who said they've got the Big Five. Hillie is here with four of his brothers. Let's welcome them with a round of applause. Mrs. Meyer is here as well on this day. I guess the reason will become clear to those who may not know why I'm mentioning this a little bit later on.
We're coming to you live from the company's offices here in Sandton, Johannesburg, welcoming everyone who's joining us today, the analysts, the investors, the shareholders, journalists, and of course, the employees of the company who are watching us live, either on MPulse, which is our company's intranet, or on DStv, channel 412 on DStv, or they can... You can also follow our presentation of these results on, via webcast. That's corpcam.com/mm01392023. The full results of our company are also available on the website, which is momentummetropolitan.co.za. Thank you very much to the Momentum Metropolitan Group Investor Relations team for putting together this presentation, and our thanks also goes to the group marketing's PR and events team for their beautiful execution. It's really wonderful here, and you can see that for yourselves.
Now, as you'll hear shortly, this is a very strong set of results that's gonna be presented, which we can all be proud of. They reflect our shared journey to success together. Indeed, they mark a historic peak at a time of significant change in the group's leadership. Our new Group CEO, or is it incoming new Group CEO, the formidable Jeanette Marais, and the Group Finance Director, Risto Ketola, will unpack fully how the group's businesses have performed in the past financial year. But before all of that, let's warmly welcome to the podium the outgoing CEO, the great man himself, Hillie Meyer, who has been at the helm since 2018, and is now about to embark on a well-deserved retirement after leading a very successful turnaround for the group. When I was dressing up for this occasion today, I thought I was overdressed.
Wait until you see Hillie. Give him a big round of applause.
Thank you, Dan. Thank you, everybody else. I really appreciate the warm welcome, and I'm sure it's not because you're glad to see me go. As you heard, Jeanette and Risto will present the results. I'm here, I think, merely to sort of publicly, I suppose, hand over the baton. But I will use the opportunity to do a number of thank yous. Firstly, I would like to thank the Momentum Metropolitan Board and our key shareholders for the opportunity to lead this wonderful group. Thank you for your support and guidance over the last five and a half years. It's really been valuable, and I really appreciate that. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank our regulators and also, you know, industry bodies like ASISA and Business Leadership South Africa.
Thank you for constructive engagement and for support over the last few years. Also, a big thank you to our clients and our partners, in particular, independent financial advisors. I know we make the point often, but we don't take your business for granted. We're very happy to work very, very hard for it. Dan mentioned my family members that gate crashed the meeting, so I suppose I've got to thank them for being here. Otherwise, I'll be in trouble when I get home tonight. But a very, very special thank you to the Momentum Metropolitan people. We've got a wonderful culture. We've got wonderful people, people that respond positively to challenges, people that, you know, I think are happy to communicate openly, happy to, you know, embrace change.
It's really been an honor and a privilege to lead them, and I think just that positive attitude made it easy, you know, to lead this group. So to all the Momentum Metropolitan staff, there will be an opportunity this week in Cape Town, next week in Centurion, to sort of more personally, you know, thank you all, and I really look forward to that. But, in the meantime, thank you very, very much for your, really wonderful support the last number of years. My final thank you is to the Momentum Metropolitan ExCo. I leave with a happy heart because I know the group is in good hands. Now, Jeanette's gonna speak shortly. You know, Jeanette's been a key member of the executive team for the last five and a half years. Jeanette deeply cares about this business.
You know, she understands the culture, and Jeanette's ambitious. I think she's got... You know, she really wants to take the business, you know, to new heights. So to Jeanette, Risto, and the rest of the leadership team.... I look forward to you taking Momentum Metropolitan from strength to strength. Thank you.
Thank you, Hillie, for your very kind words. I promise I won't cry today. Maybe at the end when I thank you, but definitely not when we start. Also from me, Dan has already done so, but let me also use the opportunity to say a very warm welcome to all our shareholders, our analysts, the media, we call them friends as well, our financial advisors. To all of the Momentum Metropolitan employees, I know that, you know, for the next hour, you're going to also focus on the results that you played such a big part in delivering for us. Then lastly, our family and friends from everywhere that's also watching us today.
So, yes, this is my first time in front of you, but I think what a privilege to be able to stand here and to be sharing such a strong set of results for the Momentum Metropolitan Group with you today. It often is easier to start your tenure at the bottom, so, Hillie, you had that benefit. I don't. I think we start from an incredible high level, but again, you know, like you said, with absolute belief that the team that we have, the people that we have, will help us to only go from strength to strength. So today, my presentation is quite short. I wanna start off by sharing with you some key takeouts from the results.
And then secondly, I will just give you an update on the Reinvent and Grow strategy, and share with you some of the interesting developments that we've had in that space. So let's start with the best news of the day. Our earnings over the last six years, and I think, you know, you can see the six years there, clearly show the success of our Reinvent and Grow and our turnaround strategy that we started in 2018. You can see that, F 19 was already a significant improvement in earnings. But then, of course, we were rudely interrupted by COVID, and the next two years were quite tough. But we got through COVID successfully. Not many businesses can say that.
What was great about it was that there was still a positive trend in underlying earnings, even during the COVID years. But the real growth curve, of course, has returned last year, and little did we know that the results for this year was going to be even better. So the FY 2023 earnings are exceptional, and it is higher than our earnings target for FY 2024. But I must mention that there were tailwinds that has helped us in the FY 2023 normalized headline earnings, and we do not expect those to repeat. But then every year we say this, every year we get some tailwind. So let's hope that, you know, next year will also look after itself.
Our operating profit was largely driven by changes in our mortality experience in our life businesses, and then, of course, an increase in the investment variances. But if you look at the graph, I think you will support that we believe that our business has rebased to a higher level of performance, and we believe that also the next slides will help to illustrate more of that. So then let's look at our present value of new business premiums. Now, although our new sales, which we present by this number, has actually gone down by 5% to ZAR 69 billion, we still think that it is a very credible performance, and especially if you look, that is given, that is 38% higher since when we started with this turnaround process in FY 2018.
Sales in our retail operations contracted by 3% from the previous year. But I think we do need to mention that especially single premium flows showed an upward trend during the second half of the year, and it increased by 15% in the last quarter of the year on a year-on-year basis. Now, when we look at this, we have to mention the South African environment, and I think that we will all acknowledge that the South African operating environment continues to present challenges and a lot of uncertainties that put our clients under financial pressure. We think that this is only gonna get tougher going forward. So it makes it difficult for our clients to save and to maintain their levels of savings and insurance.
But as a consequence, I think what we would be watching very, very closely is firstly our client acquisition, our new business sales, and then of course, our retention numbers. Those would very quickly show you what the trend is and where you're going with that. Then our value of new business, and that was... You know, I think we can kindly say that it was more of a sideways move than a massive drop, but it has declined by 4% to ZAR 600 million. And this was, of course, largely driven by lower new business sales, higher long-term interest rates, and we know how that work in, in VNB because it's part of the calculation. And then mostly a move in or a change in the general business mix.
For many of the businesses, it's moved to lower margin products, across many of the business units. On the retail side, the protection business pulled the VNB down quite a bit. But while, again, and this is why we have a portfolio of businesses, Momentum Investments had a record year for guaranteed annuities, and that balanced out our VNB more or less. It is also interesting to note that Momentum Investments is now the single biggest contributor to our value of new business at 78% of the group's VNB. Again, I think considering the numbers relative to six years ago, the VNB has increased 74% since 2018, and I think that is another rebase that happened, especially over the last three years.
Then when we go to our corporate portfolio, and I think this remains one of the strengths of our businesses, of our business that we're very proud of. I think what it really just illustrates to you, and the significance to the colors, is the benefits of having a diversified business portfolio. Our model of empowered, accountable business units has again demonstrated its resilience, and it has assisted the group to cope with the challenges that South Africa has thrown at us over the last year. In green you can see the five businesses that performed really well and that all made very strong contribution to our earnings growth. Risto will unpack the numbers in quite a bit more detail.
Momentum Investments is in orange, and I think simply because our earnings moved sideways, but again, back on or on the back of some two very, very good record years of earnings in the last two years. And then there are two businesses in red that experienced some challenges. We're confident that the plans we have in place and that the steps that we've taken will really get both Momentum Insure and Metropolitan Life back on track. But I do think it is worth spending a minute on these two businesses to share with you the plans that we have to get them back on track. And let's start with Momentum Insure. So the last phase of the AFI integration was really complex, and it took longer than planned to execute on that integration.
Now, that really caused some capacity constraints with our key staff, and you sometimes underestimate these things. But I think what made it a lot worse was that this happened at the same time that we faced severe claims and some service challenges, and that was on the back of the real spike in weather-related claims that we experienced at that point in time. You know, you can almost refer to it as the perfect storm. You know, not just referring to the weather, but it all happened at the same time.
But I think if you look at the slide, you can also see that since the completion of the AFI integration, our business is now at scale, our capacity issues have been resolved, and we've already taken some very strong management action to get the claims ratio back to the targeted range where we want, where we want to have it. So the first step we took was some premium increases. The second one is that we canceled some policies where we found that the claims ratios were outside of our risk tolerance, and then we made some benefit changes. I think in this case, you know, everyone will be familiar, but specifically around power surge claims. Then we increased the excesses where we needed to do so and where that was applicable.
Now, you know, when I engage with Grant and his team, I think that I can say that with these action steps in place, I'm quite confident that we will reduce our claims ratio back, you know, from the 77%, which is, you know, much higher than it's been in a long time. And that we would get it back to the mid-60s and that that will put our earnings back on track. Then Metropolitan. Now, the main challenge in Metropolitan that has both impacted the normalized headline earnings and the VNB negatively was high lapses. And that really was due to two things. Firstly, some operational challenges that we've had in the business that have actually added to the problem of the lapse rates, but then also driven by tough economic circumstances.
We find that in this market, when the economy is tough, it has a stronger impact on the lower income groups, and this really caused clients to struggle to keep up the premiums. Again, our Metropolitan team has got what we call a five-point plan. Not going to go through the whole plan, but what I will share with you, three things that I think is going to make quite a big difference to, again, within the next years, already going to start to make quite a big difference. The first one is more dynamic pricing, better benefit design, and that really is around improving the commercial side of the business. Then secondly, rigorous management of the quality of new business.
Then lastly, we also have some cost-saving initiatives that we believe will be quite necessary in, especially in order to bring the VNB, the VNB back up. So by doing that, Metropolitan foresee and, you know, Peter has made this promise, over the next two years, our earnings will increase back to the ZAR 600 million level and our VNB margin will get back to 5%. And you can clearly see what difference, that will make. So now I will just share with you a little bit of an update on our reinvent and growth strategy. Now, this slide is what Hillie called our signature slide, and I'm sure all of you are quite familiar with all of the information on this slide.
I don't have time to discuss all of the different objectives, but I will highlight a few of the more interesting developments that we've had. I think one of the most important ones for us is to not move away, but to develop some new distribution channels for the group. Traditionally very, very strong in the advice, the face-to-face advice, market. But again, as a distribution channel, we need to start growing that. And really, in all of the businesses, that has really paid off for us over the last years. Momentum Life, their direct initiatives have increased from less than 1% to now more than 7% of the Myriad APE over the past two years.
What's more significant is that now 25% of our new business is actually written by direct channels, which is quite a marked improvement. Secondly, Momentum Insure's direct channel has actually shown or increased by 15% over the last year in their gross written premium, which is now actually a total of 20% of their total business. Metropolitan Life was traditionally much stronger in the agency world, but they have also focused quite a lot on their broker and their tele channel over the last few years. And you can see now that combined, these two channels have grown from 15 to now 19% of the Metropolitan APE over the last year. Then Guardrisk.
Guardrisk is always interesting because it's different to the rest of our businesses, and Guardrisk uses channels that are quite different from the existing way in which we distribute the rest of our products. So Guardrisk general insurance gross written premium increased by 49% over the last year. Life third-party sales, gross written premium increased by 14, and the non-life third-party, sales gross written premium increased by 20%, 26% in the past year. So you can see just phenomenal growth in these alternative channels, in the Guardrisk business. And then lastly, Momentum Corporate through retailization. Now, retailization has been a theme in our industry for many, many years, and not everybody gets it right. But I think Dumo's team has made enormous progress to really, really start to make a very big difference for us in retailization.
We now capture 41% of annuities, annuity outflows, and 34% of preservations that comes back to the group. So this really just means that a significant number of members who exit their pension funds, the employer funds, are now reinvesting their money with some of the companies in the Momentum Metropolitan Group. So that really, really makes a very big difference. Then, digitalization. Now, you've known that for many years, this has been a theme for us, and I thought today what I'll try and do is show and share with you the very solid framework that we've developed over the last three years that help us to look at how we will accelerate digital in the group. And there are really three ways in which we do it. So digitizing the core speaks to improvements where we focus on business as usual.
So you take a business that is already operating, and what you do is that you take that business as usual and you digitize it. Now, the best example of this is Project Singular, which is our FNZ wealth replatform project that we are busy with in Momentum Wealth. Then the second one is where you invest in digital enablers, and that really is to evolve your current processes. Now, a great example of this, and one that, you know, I tend to talk about a lot because I think, you know, we need to own it a lot more than we do at the moment, and that is our biometric mobile screening capability that we've developed.
Now, we developed that as part of the Exponential Innovation Project, an initiative that we actually started as far back as 2015, and we are now using it in Myriad Life Returns for digital underwriting screening. I mean, it sounds weird, but you can literally look in a phone and know your blood pressure, you can know your, your BMI. It's actually quite incredible. And really what this is, is that the application of this, this technology in life insurance is a world first. We've not yet found anyone in the world that use it the way that we do. And then that sets us up to underwrite and onboard clients without any human intervention in Myriad. And then lastly, our long-term focus is to pursue new digital growth, and this involves new business models and new platform solutions.
Here again, I want to use an example that we're doing in Momentum Corporate, which is our Project Dragonfly. This is an internal marketplace initiative where we use lean startup principles, we create a next generation business, and we are digitally enabling basically the B2C part of our B2B business in Momentum Corporate. Lastly, you know, I wanna make a bold statement and say that I think what we've done over the last 5, 6 years in terms of digital has really moved us back to becoming a disruptor again, instead of being disrupted by our competitors. We believe in transforming authentically, and I think that is quite important. You could easily just tick boxes and chase numbers, but for us, we don't just chase employment equity numbers. We celebrate our diversity.
We make sure that we don't only include everyone, but that everyone also feels that they belong. And that has become such a cornerstone of our culture to make sure that that belonging and inclusion is part of it because it's so important to us. So our steady progress show in our numbers, and I can go through them. Top management remains stable at 36%. Black leaders, we grew Black senior management to 44%, middle management to 47%. Middle management is also the one that is tougher for us. It's most tough in all of these numbers. And then lastly, our employee base have remained constant at 85%. But I do wanna also throw something in, maybe just because I'm here. Women play a strong role in our business. 65% of our workforce are women, and it's amazing.
We think 50% of the population are women. 65% of our workforce are women. 20% of our board, 20% of our ExCo are female, and then 36% of the senior managers in our group are women. But I will say, Ntokozo, watch this space. And then I want to illustrate some of our growth focus areas to just maybe focus on market share, because I think it is the one that is always kind of a outside-in measure to show you how well you are doing in the market. And I'll start here just with Momentum Wealth.
You know, I have to hand that baby over to Ferdi now, but I do want to say how proud we are that, over the last three years, we've actually managed to grow Momentum Wealth market share by 5%. For our retail businesses, we gained market share in spite of the fact that our agency force is still much smaller than those of our competitors. So we're still much stronger in the IFA market, but our agency force is not big enough to have actually given us the same boost that often our competitors get in terms of market share. Remember also that 1% market share gain here for any of the businesses is quite significant. It's not that easy to even take 1% market share away from everybody. And then this indicate good progress.
I think across all the business, you can see that we've either maintained our market share or we've grown it. Sometimes we get the question about Momentum Insure being so small. Brand, you're here, we're watching you. But also knowing that that number already include the AFI merger, and right before that, it actually was even less than that. It was half that. But, Hillie, I decided that just because you're here, I'll do a slide especially for you. Many of you will remember that Hillie made a comment at his first results presentation in 2018, when he actually said that winning back independent financial support and market share will prove that we have fixed our businesses.
And I quote him there, and I, we wanted to put this up for you today because the business is mostly supported by independent financial advisors, are Myriad and Momentum Wealth. And here you can see that over the last, Myriad, from FY 19 - FY 20, have gained just more than 2% market share over this period of time. And Momentum Wealth has actually gained just over 1.5%, and that's only after, over the last two years, and only because actually we had a change of statistics providers, so we couldn't really show you numbers for longer ago. But we know that the growth in market share over the 5 years was actually even more significant than that. So, Hillie, I think you can leave with a good heart.
We've all done all of that, especially for you. Just before I hand over to Risto, I thought I'll just share with you a few thoughts in conclusion. I think for me, looking back over the past financial year, we really have made solid progress on our reinvent and growth targets. However, as we've said, it's not just about increasing profits. I think that's one thing that is very close to my heart. We could be a business that just chase profits, but I think we are a lot more. There's a lot more to us than that. At the heart of that, for me, is that we, we're also a player in South Africa, and I think there's the opportunity for us to add significant value to a wide range of stakeholders.
I want to use the opportunity to share some of those numbers with you, because I think they are really something we could be so proud of. We're here because of our clients, and in addition to our shareholders, we also added value to our clients by paying out more than ZAR 38 billion in claims over the last year. We paid ZAR 7 billion in remuneration, and we invested in our people by spending more than ZAR 280 million on their development, training and development. We built communities by giving ZAR 43.5 million through our CSI initiatives. We transformed South African businesses by channeling ZAR 10 million towards enterprise development initiatives and ZAR 4 billion towards B-BBEE preferential procurement.
Then lastly, we invested ZAR 4.1 billion in renewable energy in South Africa over the last year. Sorry, some amazing numbers to show that we are a citizen of South Africa, and we're actually making a far bigger contribution than just making profits. We acknowledge that we've benefited from tailwinds during the past year, and we also know that this will not necessarily repeat in FY 2024. Sorry, pressed the button. However, we believe that the underlying run rate of our earnings at approximately ZAR 4 billion is really solid, and it's a solid reflection of our true performance. We've made very good progress on delivering on our three-year reinvent and grow objectives, as I've shown you now.
In the last year of our three-year plan, we committed, as we can be, to deliver normalized headline earnings of between ZAR 4.6 billion and ZAR 5 billion in FY 2024. We have also already started with a planning process for our FY 2027 plan beyond reinvent and grow. And a year, a year from now, we would have shared our new plans with all of you in the market. And then lastly, to all our employees, I really look forward to working with you to take this business to its next height. And then on a personal level, Hillie, thank you. Hillie has been in... I, I knew I wasn't gonna do this in, in front of so many people, but it's from my heart. I've got so much to thank you for.
Not just the generosity with which you did the handover and you shared time with me, but I think more than anything, that you leave this business in such an amazing place. So, I know I've got big shoes to fill. Luckily, I'm wearing different shoes. So I think that will help. And then I just want to say, on behalf of the entire Momentum Metropolitan Group, and every single one of our employees, thank you for the amazing leader you've been to our business. Thank you.
Thanks, Jeanette. Always a pleasure to come and share financial results with you guys. I have a pretty set format here, which is starting with the key financial indicators. There's a bit of a lag here. Okay. Now, earnings of ZAR 5.1 billion for the year are exceptionally strong, as Jeanette mentioned. I had two people remind me this morning that a year ago, when Willie rocked up here wearing a tie for the first time in four years, I said, "I'll wear a tie when our earnings are ZAR 5 billion or more." Now, I'll just clarify, when our underlying earnings are ZAR 5 billion or more, I'll wear a tie. So I view these numbers as more like ZAR 4.2 billion. Okay.
Yeah, but okay, in terms of earnings per share, those are up 19%, so 3% more than the absolute earnings. Obviously, through the buybacks, our weighted average shares in issue are decreasing all the time. Obviously, we have continued to buy back shares late last year. We're gonna do more buybacks now. So I think that number of shares will continue to decline for the next year or two, which will obviously be a boost to all the EPS numbers. In line with the earnings per share growth, the dividend is up 20% year on year, so I think that's a strong dividend. And our return on equity continues to be in the low twenties, 22%, which is actually quite strong compared to the overall sector, I think.
When I talk about IFRS 17, I'll mention that the ROE will probably decline a little bit, but I think our ROE will remain quite attractive, compared to the peer group. Next set of key financial indicators, so embedded value. You know, I've been calling it steady growth for the last few years. I think this year the growth is a bit more than steady, so embedded value is up 13% for the year. If you add in the dividends we paid during the year, the actual return on embedded value was 17%, which is the strongest we had in a number of years. A very pleasing number. Jeanette mentioned that sales volumes are down 5%, value of new business down 4%.
There's quite a bit of operational gearing normally in the VNB number, because that ZAR 600 million is really the difference of a couple of billion of revenues and a couple of billion of expenses. What protected us this year against operational gearing on the downside is the expanding margin on annuities. So annuities were a big boost to our VNB numbers for the year. I have another slide on it later in the presentation. New business margin flat at 0.9% overall. As per usual, instead of going slide to business, I'll just quickly run through some of the key business units. So Momentum Life, it is normally our biggest business, and it's returned to that position in terms of earnings.
You'll see there that two years ago, in the height of COVID, we actually incurred quite big losses on this business, which is expected. I mean, we've got probably like ZAR 1 trillion of sum assured there. Good recovery last year and further recovery this year, so earnings are up to ZAR 2 billion. The ZAR 1 billion jump from last year, I would say that you could split it into two components. About ZAR 500 million is additional mortality profits. So last year, the first quarter still had the third wave, so we had one quarter of bad mortality this year. This year, we didn't have that one quarter in. Also, the remaining COVID provisions we had, we have now released them. You know, we believe COVID is now endemic and is built into our normal mortality assumptions going forward.
The other ZAR 500 million relates to really the yield curve movements. This business has significant liabilities, like 30, 40, 50 years out. So obviously, with bond yields rising, the PV of those liabilities have fallen quite significantly and is a source of profit. Momentum Investments, earnings are down, but at a very high absolute level. Remember that this business houses our annuity book. So during COVID, we actually were benefiting from high deaths in terms of annuity profits, and that is now starting to normalize a little bit. So the declining earnings here really reflects normalization of annuity mortality to some degree. Metropolitan Life, Jeanette spoke about the VNB issues there. Earnings are no less interesting.
That ZAR 400 million, well, close to ZAR 400 million decline, there's a lot of things going there, but I thought to myself that maybe the easiest way to explain it is, is two components. First one is quality issues, secondly is basis changes at year-end. Around the quality, we continue to see negative lapse experience. In other words, less people are paying premiums every month than we expect. And I, I do think it's a bit of a macro and a sector thing. So if you look at the other insurance company results, you would have seen similar lapse losses in this low end of the market. And it got a little bit worse year-over-year. The more company-specific, the more Metropolitan-specific quality issues and the new business activities. So in the last year, we, we had a lot of what we call like NTUs.
Those are not taken ups. It's where we go through the process of selling all these insurance policies, you know, underwriting, communications, you know, paying advisors, and then we never collect a single premium. So the product, the policy actually gets canceled, you know, three months later, four months later. There's a significant wasted cost of all that activity. What makes it worse, if the advisor leaves in that time period, because you don't get the commission back. Okay, so the high churn, high turnover in our agency force compounded the financial impacts of the poor quality in the sales at general.... Yeah, so quality issues, maybe ZAR 200 million after the year-on-year movement. The other ZAR 200 million relates to the basis changes at year-end.
Now, because of, again, linked a bit to the quality, this book hasn't really grown over the last few years, but the expenses have. The unit cost had to be adjusted upwards, which is negative for the actuarial reserves. So there's probably about ZAR 200 million overall impact from the actuarial assumptions at year-end. Okay, moving on to a much better story, Momentum Corporate. This business, again, we incurred heavy losses during COVID. We then implemented. Now, this business is different to retail. In retail, we sort of live with the premium rates we gave the clients. In Momentum Corporate, we negotiate them every year with the employer, and it's quite often based on the employer's own claims experience, that we will do these negotiations. I recall Dumo going, and they're, like, increasing premiums by 20%, 30%. Now we're losing 400%.
So I remember giving Dumo a hard time, like, "You know, can't we push these rates up a bit more?" Because, you know, at that time, it looked to me like we're gonna take losses for another year or two with those increases. In line with many other assumptions, I've been wrong with in my life. You know, COVID disappeared quite quickly, or not disappeared, but it reduced quite quickly. So all of a sudden, we're making mortality profits. So we've gone from an environment of making unusually high mortality losses to actually making decent profits at the moment. Now, obviously, the downside is that this is annually rebrokered business, so we do expect giving away a bit of that margin going forward. But Dumo promises, as always, to be very diligent, to not cut those premiums too quickly in response.
The other part here is the disability book. People who've been following us longer, we went through a 5-6-year period, right in the beginning of these 5 years, sort of the end of it, where we took steady losses every year on a disability book. ZAR 100 million here, ZAR 200 there. You know, I recall wondering whether we should be in this business at all. Significant action was taken to reprice the book, manage the disability better. It's both in terms of accepting the claims and also working with the claimants to get them back into work. And we've gone from a situation of perennial losses to now making steady profits, so there's a few hundred million ZAR swing from the disability book as well. So I must say, Corporate has done exceptionally well.
There is tailwinds there, but I would say the underlying profitability of this business has maybe shifted more than any other, if you try and look through the noise over the last five years. Okay, moving away from the life operations. Now, our health business is a very steady, very good contributor to group earnings. That ZAR 290 million is net of our minority shareholders in this business. The health environment is extremely complex. NHI is never far from mind, among other things. At the same time, the economics of this business, so the environment they operate is very complex, but the economics here really is an administrator to a large degree. You know, fee per member, cost per member, and I must say, this business has done very well to expand its operating margins.
You know, they're managing year after year to get fee increases slightly above inflation because they're growing by 1 or 2%, which, you know, is a good... It's a— In terms of members, it's a good achievement when employment isn't growing, so we're probably getting some market share gains. And also managing costs below inflation, so the, so the jaws, the operating margin, is expanding here, and the business is doing really well. Non-life insurance, there's, there's two very different businesses within that number. So Guardrisk, which is our self-captive insurer... Haley, I'm not gonna cry, except maybe for joy at ZAR 5 billion. Yeah. My throat's dry. Okay, now... Okay, so non-life insurance, Guardrisk is in here. Guardrisk had a phenomenal year. Earnings of ZAR 550 million. It's the first time they've done over ZAR 0.5 billion.
Guardrisk launched their Double Up campaign about four years ago, where the plan was to double revenues and earnings. It was quite an ambitious target because I don't know if you remember, but it's not like SA Inc was a massively positive story back then, either. And they have actually far out, you know, out-achieved on that personal target. Also, sometimes Guardrisk is in the news because there's a big client leaving, setting up their own business. The list of clients wanting to do something with Guardrisk is a lot longer than the list of clients looking to set up their own license. So I think there's a lot of runway, despite the high base of ZAR 550 million in this business. It really is a great operation.
Unfortunately, if you do the math, you'll see there's ZAR 300 million missing, which is the losses in Momentum Insure. Momentum Insure is largely a personal lines insurer, not an easy environment. We've been through cycles of quite heavy claims inflation. Weather has not been very helpful. Load shedding doesn't help. Increased crime rates doesn't help. Condition of the infrastructure doesn't help. Yeah, and a lot of action is being taken, like Jeanette said. I mean, there's no We can't avoid the fact that we have to increase premium rates to reflect the higher levels of claims and things like that. And we are internally quite confident we'll get back to profitability in a reasonable timeframe. But for the year, the losses were ZAR 300 million.
I would point out that ZAR 100 million out of ZAR 300 million is a bit of a technical deferred tax adjustment. So because of the level of losses, we felt it's prudent to derecognize the existing tax asset to some degree. So which compounds the... Well, maybe we're gonna write the ZAR 100 million back next year, Brand. So it will be even a more. It will be a quicker recovery in earnings. Moving on to Africa. A very good year in Africa. About ZAR 200 million of that ZAR 400 million-ZAR 500 million swing is mortality again. Some of you might know that Namibia and Botswana were hit even harder than SA per capita in terms of COVID in the third wave. So very big mortality recovery in those two countries.
We also had positive market movements, both in terms of equities and yields in the SADC countries. The last bit of the improvement is a bit of a technicality, which relates to us now setting the inflation assumptions in SADC a bit closer to South Africa. I think historically, we were a bit overly conservative, assuming that inflation is gonna be a lot higher in those countries than in SA. New initiatives that includes India, but there's a bit more there. There's Momentum Money, Consult, Exponential. Of the ZAR 40 million reduction, India accounts for ZAR 80 million. So India is trending in the right direction. Maybe a little bit slower than we were hoping in terms of reaching break even, but the trend is right. I've got a slide on India a bit later. Then lastly, shareholders.
This is really a sum of two items. There's an approximately ZAR 18 billion, ZAR 17 billion portfolio of shareholder funds where we earn investment income, and of that, we deduct ZAR 150-200 million of head office costs. That's great value for money for the business units. But last year we had quite positive VC fund gains. Now, if you follow that market, you realize that the whole fintech VC market has slowed down a bit. So in the current year, we actually took small, negative fair value movements on, on those investments. In terms of volumes, this slide is drawn to the scale exactly, all over the place. Now, marketers always ask me: "Can't you, like, cut something here?" You know, I, I think I'm too much of a mathematician. I, I just put it there as it is.
It all adds up. There's no funny scales, no logs. But it also tells a story here that Momentum Investments is half our business in terms of volumes. It's important to remember that we are, we are bigger in terms of the affluent IFA market than probably most of our peers. You know, we're more weighted towards this business. It's the reality of our existence. So if Momentum Investments is down 4, it almost guarantees your group's gonna be down close to 4, okay? That is just how dominant it is. If we look beyond that, Momentum Life actually saw some growth in sales volumes. So later on, when I talk about the value of new business, it was not really a volume issue. There's... You know, it's slightly deeper than that.
Metropolitan Life, a bit of a, bit of a slowdown as the year progressed, as we started to deal with the quality issues, but still flat year-on-year. Momentum Corporate is down 15%, but in Corporate, the actual volume is not as important as exactly how you manage to price the big deals and the deal flow you got for the year. And in the current year, even though it's lower than last year, some of the business, like in the annuities, we wrote at quite decent margins. So the VNB is flat, despite volumes being lower year-on-year. In Africa, we don't split retail and corporate. I suppose marketers will they kinda fit in a sixth, column. Maybe, maybe we'll think about it, but okay. So... But there's a very different trend there. So corporate business is actually down year-on-year.
We had some big business in Namibia and Lesotho last year from corporate clients, which didn't repeat this year. So the Momentum Africa number is a bit more volatile because it's not a retail-only business. Okay, new business margins. Momentum Life, margins have continued to decline. Now, this business houses Investo savings products, so retirement, annuities, endowments. Those margins are always gonna be quite tight, okay? So you don't expect those margins to be more than 0%-1%. What is an issue here is that the Myriad, which is our protection business, which should really be profitable, on new business terms, that's also got a negative margin at the moment.
Now, a lot of action has been taken, but I just wanna explain that there's been a very big change over the last year in the way we sort of operate our discount models, if you wanna call it that. So we used to have what we call Multiply Myriad integration. So if you had a certain status on Multiply, you could qualify with certain discounts and things like that. That model has been replaced by Life Returns, which is a more life-specific model that, over long term, we think is actually better for both the consumers and for our risk management. But in the short term, it's negative because under the Multiply structure, we assume that the high status is like gold and whatever, that they'll have high persistency, low claims, you know, things like that.
So from a modeling perspective, the Multiply integration business is actually very high margin compared to the business now that doesn't have that feature. Johan is chasing me and my actuarial team up on this, but the plan is that once we have enough experience on Life Returns, we will assess to what degree can we build in better behavior in that client base who have bigger discounts. But at this stage, the guys are getting discounts, but we're not really allowing for it in terms of assumptions, and, and it's hurting the VNB margin a little bit here. Momentum Investments, margins increased, despite volumes down. That's really the annuity book. Annuity margins have continued to widen, which is quite interesting.
I mean, the volumes are so large that it actually is quite a struggle to find high-quality credit assets to back the liabilities. So the margins are based almost on assuming government bond type of underlying asset structure, yet the margins are decent. So if we get into a cycle, let's say, three or five years from now, where corporate credit markets improve in South Africa, the underlying profits on this book could be actually very strong. So it'll be interesting thing to look out for. Metropolitan Life, Jeanette has already dealt with this. It's largely to do with sales quality, which is really a function of sales management to a great degree. Momentum Corporate, as I mentioned, you know, decent margins for the year for that segment, despite lower volumes.
I would also mention that it tends to be quite different, that on the FundsAtWork , we tend to have positive margins year after year, whereas on the large clients, it's a bit more dependent on the exact deal you negotiate and agree on. Africa margins have continued to decline. That is really a story of Namibia. So Namibia on its own has a worse margin than anybody else. It's worse than Momentum Life. Whereas Lesotho has the best margin of anything here. So the average of African negative margin is really a Namibia story. I mean, we have to get to the VNB in Namibia to be at least slightly positive for Africa to be a real contributor. This EV slide. This is a finance slide. It's very boring, but it's boring on purpose.
That, that's the message here. We've been through a pandemic and some significant market volatility, yet the EV keeps, you know, steadily, you know, growing through thick and thin. The return on embedded value, so think of it as EV growth over the 5 years, has been 8% per year. You know, I would personally say that under the conditions we were given, that's quite a credible achievement. As we're now coming out of the COVID period, the ROEV has accelerated to 17%, in the last year. EV of ZAR 33.75. Important number to remind yourselves when I talk about the buyback a little bit later. This is a slide I haven't had before. Normally, my presentations are the same every 6 months. That's why I don't need notes. It's become a habit now. But this is a new slide.
It gives a bit of a rundown of the last five years, and it's a nice summary of what we've been through. So mortality, not very surprising. We went through COVID, difficult times. Now we're coming out of it, mortality profits are back. Investment variances, not too much of a trend there. And the point is that there is no trend. We are at the mercy of markets to a great degree. It's just the nature of our operations. The two at the bottom are the ones that, why I put this slide up. Expense variances, if you go back to all our results presentations the last five, six years, cost containment has been a big theme, particularly in reset and growth in the first three years. It actually drove a lot of our positive metrics in the early years.
The last two years, as we have started to invest in modernizing our business, building new channels, that has a cost to it. And it's not like you spend money today and we have revenues tomorrow. There's a time lag between the two. So we actually had group costs overall grow more than inflation for the first time last year in five or six years, and it immediately comes through as a negative expense variance here. So I think the storyline is changing a bit. Like, rather than just keeping costs down to a minimum, it's more about what return we get on the investments we're making at the moment. The second one is terminations. If you look at the industry results to date and in December, negative persistency tends to be a feature. In our business, it's only really Metropolitan.
In Momentum Life, we continue to see positive variation. In Corporate, it's positive variation. Africa, it, persistency is positive. So I would say that we look very good, despite the tough economy in terms of overall client behavior. Capital coverage, this is something that, obviously for, for me, is a big focus. Our capital ratio, we target a range of 1.6-2. At the moment, we're at 2.1, so we are above the upper end of our, our solvency target. Hence, the buyback and so on that I'll, I'll talk about a little bit later. The, the, the strong solvency position, our capital position, also enabled the 20% increase in dividends, so it's a dividend of ZAR 1.20.
Just to also clarify, the final dividend is actually ZAR 0.70, versus the interim dividend of ZAR 0.50. So that's a decent payout in a couple of weeks. And then the buyback. The board has approved that we do a further ZAR 500 million of buybacks, starting probably now, sometime, you know, in the next day or two. If you combine that with the ZAR 500 million we did early in the year, it's ZAR 1 billion of buybacks for the year, and a total dividend payment of ZAR 1.8 billion. It's ZAR 2.8 billion, which is 10% of our market cap, that we're distributing to shareholders in the 12-month period. And it's not that different to the previous 12 months, you know.
So the cash generation, both in terms of for the group and then for shareholders, is very high here. Yeah, average price. So we bought—The shares we bought back last year, we averaged ZAR 17.20. I mentioned, remember the 34 rand EV number? We, we ended up paying about 50 cents to the rand on the buybacks on EV. So because our EV has grown by 17% through the year, the value of the buybacks in retrospect is even more than we thought. You know, so effectively, we, we bought back ZAR 2 billion of EV for ZAR 1 billion of cash that we paid out. I don't have the calc here, but I think it added about ZAR 0.50 per share to the, to the remaining shareholders. But actually more than that, more like ZAR 0.60. Okay, cash generation. These are my two favorite slides.
So it's probably the best way of looking at an insurance company in between all the noise. So no offense to the other 126 business units, but these are the four business units that actually pay dividends to Holdings. So thank you. If you work for the non-dividend paying business units, please bypass the snacks on the way out. Leave it for the Guardrisk and the health guys. Okay. Now, so these are the four dividend-paying entities in the group. We'll start with SA Life. So obviously, the Life business had phenomenal earnings last year, ZAR 4.5 billion. And we speak about the fact that the yield curves, which basically means asset liability mismatches, generated a lot of the profit. The nice thing is that because we do have assets backing the liabilities, you know, it, it's complex, but some insurance companies actually don't.
It means we can actually pay out those profits. You know what I mean? So it's not like it's funny money. It's a one-off, but it's real. It's a, it's a realized profit we get there. So we were able to pay out ZAR 3.8 billion in dividends from the life company. I mean, that, that's a tough. It's a big check. Then Guardrisk and Health paid dividends, what I would consider almost normal for them. I think on Guardrisk, when the business was bought 10 years ago, the expectation was that it was gonna be quite a long time before dividends will be received because of the uncertainty around capital. Yet Guardrisk has become quite a steady dividend payer over the last few years. Health's always been a good dividend payer.
Then Africa, similar to SA Life, the SADC countries are mature businesses who don't really need to retain much capital, so most earnings are paid out. If you do the math, these four companies, legal entities, paid out ZAR 5 billion to the group. Okay, so these are the guys who really make it possible to do everything else we do. Okay, so this table brings it together. So the first four lines are the dividends from these entities. The first thing I'll talk about is the money that didn't get spent this year, and that's India. So for the last few years, we have spent ZAR 400 million a year funding the India growth plan. Towards the early part of this financial year, we got a minority shareholder, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, to inject money into the entity.
So they bought 10%, 5% from us, 5% from the other partner, Aditya Birla. That capital injection is sufficient to fund two years of aggressive growth in India. So effectively, the dilution of 5%, the financial benefit you see here, we didn't have to inject our ZAR 400 million this year, and we don't have to inject our ZAR 400 million this year. Whether we have to inject some money later on, that, that's another model we need to talk about later. But anyway, so the capital injection by Abu Dhabi really funds two years of growth in India. Momentum Insure, we had to inject ZAR 580 million in there. When I say we had to, we have internal capital targets for all our business units, so it's not like Momentum Insure was, like, close to 1 times SCR.
It's more about the fact that we target 1.5 in the Insure business, so we injected ZAR 580 million into that. MM Finance Company, I spoke about this at interims. We do some lending in the group, for example, pension-backed home loans. We do Guardrisk premium finance. This is our treasury company that funds those books, so we had some expansion in our lending activities. Momentum Money, we injected ZAR 160 million. That funds 2 years of operations for Momentum Money. At the end of those 2 years, we should have clarity in terms of the commercial prospects for that entity. Other operations are small. Preference shares, a bit different this year. Normally, we pay about ZAR 100 million in preference dividends.
We redeemed ZAR 400 million of preference shares during the year, so that was really just a capital mix decision we made. After all that operational type of activity, before we engaged with the shareholder transactions, we had ZAR 3.4 billion of cash at holdings. ZAR 1.8 billion is what we spend on dividends, and ZAR 1 billion will be spent on the buyback. So we end up with about ZAR 600 million of cash at holdings. So I always quite like this view because it brings it all together. I mean, I suppose, what is the moral of the story? First of all, the life company is a cash generator of note. You know what I mean? Without the life company, it won't be quite as much fun here.
You know, it's not growing very fast, but it's printing cash. The other thing to note here is, if you look at the growth in cash generated to MMH, you went up by ZAR 1 billion in a year, and earnings went up by ZAR 1 billion. It talks about the fact that most of our earnings is backed by cash. So when earnings go up and down, there tends to be almost a 1-to-1 movement in terms of dividend flows to MMH. Yeah, and I suppose the last thing it tells you that, despite the good dividends and the buybacks, there's still a bit of money left at the center. So I suppose somewhere down the line, we'll have to look at the dividend policy as well. Okay, my last couple of slides. India. We've been in India now for basically six years.
It's become a little bit more topical with investors, so I thought I'll just spend a minute or two here on it. The left-hand side shows you the, the gross written premiums of this business. So we started six years ago, ZAR 400 million. It's now a ZAR 6 billion rand a year business in terms of premium income. Remember, this is not an admin business. This is an underwriting business, so these are. This is actual, real revenue. To put into context, that's more than the premium income across all our Africa operations. It's actually bigger than Momentum Health in terms of contributions, I think. At this growth rate, I'll be surprised if we don't get to ZAR 20 billion in about three years. That will make it the biggest operation in our group by far.
I mean, I'm not gonna name any competitors, but it's actually crazy when you think of a ZAR 20 billion book. You know how big it is in context of SA insurance. So the top-line growth in India is not a problem. The product is attractive. Our partner is great. It's sort of flying off the shelves. We also have very good support from the different banks in India. The more interesting question is on the right-hand side, and in terms of how much of that revenue actually comes to the bottom line. Now, a lot of this language will be very familiar to Brent. Okay? So starting with the red bar, that's the expense ratio. At the moment, we're spending about 45% of our premium income on our expenses. We need to get it to 30%-35%. 30%, preferably.
At the current level of premium growth, you would think to yourself, you're gonna double premiums. It goes from 45 to 22. Not quite easy. You pay commissions, and there's a cost to expanding your business. That said, we are very comfortable that within 2, 3 years, we're down to 30%. So with this sort of top-line growth, the expense ratio is not a problem. That's gonna get to the budget of 30%-35%. The bigger question mark is the claims ratio. So you can see the claims ratio has started to tick up the last two years. It's in the mid-60s. That is probably 5% higher than it needs to be for us to meet our internal targets and break-even points. A lot of action is being taken around the loss ratio management. I mean, they're repricing parts of the book.
It is an industry-wide issue, which means the Indian regulator is also a bit more open than usual to the repricing activities we're doing. We're also looking at benefit designs, you know, certain cancer benefits, things like that. In India as well, it's a big market. Hundreds of cities we present in, actually, thousands of cities, if you think of where the hospitals are, and it's a very fragmented hospital group. There's lots of different operators. We're having to also become maybe more selective. If we see there's two or three hospitals there that are claiming excessively, we have to cut them out. So there's a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse management as well. And obviously, we actually play quite a big part in terms of IP, in terms of health risk management and things like that.
If we can get, if we can get the claims ratio down to about 55%-60%, we will break even in two years, latest, three years. You know, so if you're wondering, is this business a success? In terms of top line, definitely. In terms of managing expenses, operations, definitely. In terms of claims ratio, let's see. Let's see if the claims ratio is what it needs to be. Okay, VNB. Our only slide on VNB. I look at this as a chance to share information, because this information can be interpreted in a few ways. If you look five years ago, most of our VNB was protection business, Metropolitan Funeral and Myriad, Momentum Life Myriad protection business. Five years later, our margins are almost zero on our protection business.
It's a problem in a couple of ways, because it should be positive to contribute. But secondly, I think most industry players acknowledge that risk business should be the profitable part of your book. You know what I mean? It's less competitive, less substitute products, things like that. On the—what's hidden it, within the group VNB, is that annuity VNB has increased fourfold or fivefold, depending on exactly where you measure it. Okay, so it's been a great story in annuities. Savings business, the margins are so thin, it's never gonna be humongous in our VNB. Internally, we have a target to get the VNB back to ZAR 1 billion, three years from now. The short story there is, we need the protection VNB to be ZAR 400 million, at least, ZAR 400-ZAR 500 million to get there. Okay. So yeah, watch that protection margin.
That is a, is an important number going forward. And then, you can't have a insurance presentation without some IFRS slides. This one is actually a repeat from a recent Investor Day, but repetition is the, is the mother of all learning, so, so let's do it. I think the short story here is that under IFRS 4, our liabilities were ZAR 6 billion higher than IFRS 17. What does that mean? Is you can basically think that we were overly prudent under IFRS 4, okay? So we're releasing ZAR 6 billion of liabilities. So we can pat ourselves on the back. We were more conservative in the past. Doesn't really help you going forward, but it's good to, you know... It's probably better that way.
Also, if you then adjust the other accounting issues, our total equity increases by ZAR 3 billion, so it's about a 10% increase in our equity. We mentioned at the Investor Day, our earnings will drop a little bit, let's say 3%-4%. Combine that with a 10% increase in equity, our ROE will shrink by 1%-2%. So historically, we had an 18%-20% ROE target. Going forward under IFRS 17, 16%-18% is maybe a more realistic target for ROE. At this Investor Day, we also had people asking us: "Thanks for letting me know that the CSM-" CSM stands for contractual service margin. In simple terms, think of it as the future profits embedded in your current book. It's the excess prudence in your current liabilities.
Investors say: "Thanks for letting us know it's ZAR 16.5 billion, but where does it come? Like, what business units, what products?" So this is group finance's gift to the analysts. So there's some new information. We split the ZAR 16.5 billion by business units. So, for example, we're saying ZAR 7.7 billion of that, so almost half, sits in Momentum Life. Of that, almost half, almost 90% is Myriad. So remember my comments earlier about the importance of Myriad for our VNB going forward, importance of Myriad for our earnings going forward. I mean, that business is gonna have a big influence on our financial results over the next coming years. Then you look at Metropolitan Life, a bit more balanced. Maybe people will be surprised, because people always think of Metropolitan as just funeral. It's not. There's a lot more.
There's annuities, there's savings, other things are a bit smaller. And at the bottom, we have a thing that's called the expected one-year release rate. It means how much of that CSM we expect to release each year. So, for example, on Momentum Life, that future profit of ZAR 7.7 billion, we're gonna release it over seven years on average, so it's ZAR 1.1 billion a year. So if you ask me today, like, if nothing, if everything goes to plan, which never happens in insurance, what is the earnings under IFRS 17 for Momentum Life? The answer would be, like, ZAR 1.1 billion. That's a good starting point. It will be ZAR 700 million for Metropolitan Life, that's a good starting point. So this will hopefully keep the keep all the investors excited while they update their models, going forward.
Okay, so that was the last of the financial slides. I will just close with the presentation as usual. I'm a couple of minutes over. I concur with the statements made by Hillie and Jeanette, that even if you look into the underlying earnings of ZAR 4 billion-ZAR 4.2 billion, that sort of range, they are a solid result in still what is quite a demanding environment. I think it's a very pleasing set of results. Secondly, our strong balance sheet. I mention often that it's good for the dividend and buybacks. It's good for a lot more things as well. We will never say no to an idea because we lack the liquidity or the funding. You know, as the FD, it's maybe dangerous to say this, but our balance sheet extends further than people's ideas.
You know what I mean? If there's a good idea, we can fund it, okay? Which, which is obviously a great position to be in. This is repetition from last time. In a zero-growth environment, winning market share is the only way for a larger domestic business to succeed. I mean, that remains the focus. Three top-of-mind issues. Hillie had his three top-of-mind issues last time. Jeanette didn't have it this time, but I kept mine. Now, first, firstly, IFRS 17, we're ready with the numbers, but now it's about embedding to everything. Now, all of a sudden, I've gone from worrying about having financial results to thinking: how do we rephrase all our risk management principles and stuff on the IFRS 17? Secondly, top of mind is margins on retail.
Johan le Roux told me yesterday, "You're welcome to come and work there." I'll just keep watching you, Johan. Thanks. I'm watching you fix it. Thank you. And then lastly, Insure is here. Now, Insure was first last time, now it's third. It's important that we internally are quite confident about the prospects of the plans we have in Insure. Okay, so that's an important statement to make. And then lastly, as per usual, I think we have to congratulate our employees for the great results. Similar to Jeanette, I just wanna thank the clients, advisors, they're more important in our business than maybe in a lot of other places. And it's my last chance to thank Hillie for the last five years. Wish you well for your retirement.
I do know he's going to run the Ryder Cup, so it's not a bad way to start, huh? Okay. Thank you. Yeah, you'll have to give me a lemon or two. Okay. Thanks.
Thank you. Let's give Risto another round of applause. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're... Jeanette has got a very busy, busy afternoon ahead, and Risto as well, with analysts and the media. I'm sure Hillie doesn't mind that. I mean, he's done his fair share of media interaction. But we've got a couple of questions that have come through on our platform, on our Corpcam platform from analysts, which I think we could handle now very quickly, not more than four. Mike Christelis from UBS, Risto, wants to know if you could explain the sharp deterioration in expense variances in the embedded value for the second half of 2023.
Yeah, Mike. So I sort of alluded to it when I presented, saying we have accelerated spending on a number of projects. Also, it's linked a bit to the very good results. So, think of Momentum Corporate wouldn't mind me using a good example, where they're going through a very good underwriting cycle right now. It meant that they accelerated some of their system decisions and projects to do it this year. And sort of things you can't capitalize because you're only sort of exploring system options. They also decided to just sort of pre-fund some of the work they need to do around scheme closures and things like that. Yeah, so I think it's two things.
It's really an increase in real investment and the fact that the good underwriting results enabled some of the business units to fast forward some of the things they wanted to do into the current year.
Okay, Risto, just hang in there. The next one is for you as well.
Mm-hmm.
From Warwick Bam , RMB Morgan Stanley: You booked an unfavorable expense assumption change in Metropolitan Life?
Yes.
What new business volume growth do you need in Metropolitan Life and Momentum Life to avoid further negative expense variances and/or assumption changes?
Yeah, the easy answer is that, that it needs to be greater than inflation, okay? So, so that, that's simplistic answer. Our unit cost assumptions assume a 6% increase per year. Obviously, if our book grows by 1% or 2% and our cost by 1 or 2, the sum is less than 6. You know what I mean? So there's a few variations to it, but you could think of it as inflation or better, to, to be sure of avoiding, further unit cost changes.
Thanks, Risto. Jeanette, the next question is for you. The underlying earnings now currently about ZAR 4 billion versus the target for next financial year 2024 of between ZAR 4.6 billion-ZAR 5 billion. What are the key growth drivers that would see earnings hit the financial year 2024 target from the current base? This is Matthew Pounsett from Laurium Capital.
Thank you, Matthew. Look, I mean, I think everything that we've spoken about today. I mean, I don't think we're going to have a year where we can sit back and think that the market's going to give it to us or that, you know, the economy is gonna give it to us. I mean, I think in every single business, and I wanna get back to why we so passionately believe that our federated business model is the right model to have. I think every one of the ExCo members know what they're accountable for, and all of us are going to have to make sure that we win back market share. All of us are going to have to watch the cost base of our business.
All of us are going to have to do absolutely everything we can to improve on every single one of our numbers and targets every day. Now, that 4.6-5 is actually also broken down per business, and even those businesses need or they do know exactly what they need to deliver, you know, even in terms of sharing in bonus pools at the end of the year or so. So I think, for me, it's about that focus. No one has any doubt on what we need to do, but I think it is everything. I mean, I think you, we won't be able to let slip on anything because it all works together. It's a vague answer, Matthew, but, you know, I, I mean, I think it is absolutely everything that we need to do.
... I'm sure you're gonna have more opportunities, of course, as you engage with analysts and others later. Thank you, Jeanette. The final question is from Cornelius Zeeman , Fairtree. Risto, this is to you. What do you think is a sustainable underlying earnings run rate for corporate?
Yeah, Dumo is laughing because me and him had a few phone calls in the last month on it. So I'll tell you exactly. We think it's about ZAR 700-ZAR 750. You know, I personally think it might be a bit higher. It's really a function of how quickly the market reprices the latest mortality experience. So we've gone from those big losses to some profits now, and every review, the premium rates are coming back down. Now, how quickly it comes down, that will determine it. I think Dumo lives in the market, and he keeps telling me how competitive it is, so he thinks it's gonna get cut quite quickly. I keep telling him, "We have such a great service offering, whatever, you can hold it a bit longer." So, so Dumo will give you 700-750.
I'll make it 700-800. That's quite a good range.
Thank you very much. Let's give Risto and Jeanette a round of applause for answering those questions. Well, there, there we have it, and, I'm sure there'll be more engagement with the analysts, Risto and Jeanette, to answer more technical type questions. I want to thank our analysts for not having asked too many technical questions for now. Well, this brings us to the end of this, presentation of our results. The group itself, as you've heard, also marking an end from a leadership perspective. All the best, Hillie, and make sure you hit a few birdies there in the Ryder Cup, eh? All the best there, Jeanette. Also, congratulations to you and all the best for the year ahead. Thank you very much for everybody.
Now, we've ended our presentation, and there will be occasions, of course, as we finish here, for everybody who's here in the room to interact with Jeanette, Risto, and Hillie as well. And, Mrs. Meyer, it's been a pleasure getting to see you and know you. Thank you very much for coming here. Now, we know all about the Big Five. I want to ask, which of the Big Five is Hillie? Thank you very much.