Good morning, everyone. It's really great to have you here in our Cape Town offices at Parc de Cap. And it's also great to welcome you to day one of our new brand, Momentum Group, for the purposes of investors. You hopefully will have seen the presentations being announced on SENS, and so you can download those presentations so that you can follow them as the speakers are talking through them.
You could also get them through the CorpCam website or our newly revamped investor relations website. And for those struggling with either of those options, there are also QR codes circulating, so you can just take a snapshot of the QR code, and it'll take you straight to those presentations. So hopefully, there are many options for you today.
We have many ushers in red jackets, so if there are any questions that you have or any further help that you need, please approach them for things like passwords to the Wi-Fi, where the facilities are, where you can get your next coffee fix, and also for those eagle-eyed people, there are power cords in the room.
So if you're sitting on the aisles, you should be able to plug in and therefore remain connected for the rest of today. The purpose of today is the launch of our new strategy. We run strategies on three-year cycles. We've come to the end of Reset and Grow, and after an extensive top-down and a bottom-up process, we're proud to announce our new Impact Strategy.
The starting premise for all the business units and the planning units was that we continue with tough economic conditions, so there are no free passes here in terms of economic or market tailwinds. The businesses are going to have to produce on the back of their own ingenuity. Following a very rigorous governance process means that we're now finding ourselves in a closed period at the start of this 3-year cycle, which may be problematic for us and not for you as, as investors.
The reason for it being problematic is that we won't and cannot disclose any guidance in terms of where we may finish for 30 June 2024. So where appropriate, and we've needed to reference historic results, we've used 30 June 2023, or we've simply annualized the first half, ending 31 December 2024. Our format today is as follows.
Sorry, so the disclaimer that I just explained is, is really there. I know you all love to read slides like this. It certainly gives our marketing team the hives. And that's Nonthokoza, who's laughing, our marketing champion. So that was a very polite laugh. Jeanette will introduce our strategy today and give you the rationale behind that. Following Jeanette will be Risto, who will share the numbers and the ambitions behind the strategy.
And then we'll have a 20-minute Q&A session where you can ask high-level questions. The more detailed questions can follow the business units that will then go into their strategies in much more depth. Please drop your questions onto the CorpCam site. That just assists Tukelo and I in moderating them and grouping them so that we can then have a more efficient Q&A session.
One thing you will note is the absence of India on the agenda today, and that's simply because we had a rather extensive strategy unpacking session with the India team, with investors in February. So for those of you who may not have seen that, please also go onto our website and the presentation is there.
Jeanette will refer to India in terms of how it fits into the corporate portfolio, and Risto will also refer to India in terms of how it fits into our financial ambitions. Lulama, who's the executive in charge of international, will focus predominantly on Africa, but should there be any further questions on India, you can certainly tackle her during her session. With that, I'm certainly not the star of the show, and so I hand over to Jeanette to launch our strategy.
Rowan, thank you very much for the warm welcome, and to everyone that's here today, it's absolutely wonderful to have you. It's also really fantastic, and Serene said that now, you know, it's so great to just see each other for a change. I know we do see each other at the time, you know, every time, half, half year when we do our results presentations, but it really is fantastic to have the opportunity to also share our strategy with you here today.
You will see that in future, around our results time, Risto and I will mostly be handling, our results engagements, in future, but we are planning to do a similar day to today once a year, where you can have the time to really engage with our strategy and engage with our business unit CEOs in terms of where they are on delivering the strategy.
So that will be a slight change. I think the last time we were here in this very room, it's probably 4, 5 years ago. I think it was before Reinvent and Grow, which is now concluded, not Reset and Grow, Rowan, that's been a while back.
In future, we will endeavor to do this once a year, where we can really just spend a whole day in depth kind of discovering and discussing of our strategy with our results being taken care of once every 6 months. So from my side, really, a warm welcome.
And, you know, as Rowan has said, our reinvent and growth strategy is now concluded. And today really is just about our new strategy, and unpacking it in as much detail as you need us to do. You can appreciate that, when we launched this to our own business internally, it took us 2, almost 3 days to do.
So we really had to condense an immense amount of work into today, where I have my 40 minutes, Rowan has his time, and then I think for the rest of us, really, it's kind of 30-35 minutes, in which to really discuss a massive strategy.
So it's going to happen at quite a lot of speed, but I think use the time for the questions to actually engage with us, and during the breaks, where all of us will be available to have more of these discussions. I wanted to start by just saying that in creating this new strategy, we took inspiration from who we authentically are. We really looked, took a deep look at ourselves to determine who are we really?
To not try and put a strategy together that is not, who we truly are and who we really are, what we're really very good at. So, I hope that you will see that we took the basis of what we've done really well over the last six years, and maybe longer for some of us, and we based our new strategy on that. So I will take you through our thinking. There's a lot to cover, and we believe that this sets us up to deliver a real and meaningful impact on all of our shareholders. So really, my agenda, I will start with some context, just looking at where the group are today, where we came from.
I will touch a little bit on the environment that we considered in our decision making, and then I will briefly touch on our group purpose, something that we've launched very recently, and that we're very proud of. Then lastly, I will go into our group strategy in quite a bit more detail. You will also see that we tried to follow the exact same kind of format throughout the day, which I believe will make it easier for you to kind of keep track on where we are.
So we followed a template for all of our business units. Hopefully, that will help you to also follow where we are and actually just see how it all fits together throughout today. So really, where are we today? We're entering the next three years, but we're entering it from a strong position, and that strong position was made possible by our two previous strategies.
We interacted with you a lot on, firstly, our Reset and Grow strategy, which is what we launched from 2019 to 2021, and this was really a turnaround strategy. I think many of you who were around then will know the state that the business was in, and how much we really needed to do to just get the business back on track. That followed with our F 22 to F 24 strategy, which was called Reinvent and Grow. Grow always there, but a lot of reinvention still needed to be done. But this strategy has created a strong foundation for the future growth.
During these 2 strategic periods, we've achieved noteworthy progress, and I believe that sets us up for where we are now and for much further success. Now, over the last 6 years, we have made many changes to our business to set it up for the future. This is the foundation that we can now build on with our, with our new strategy, and we have shown that we can deliver on promises on many fronts.
I've tried to list a few. There were many more, but maybe it's not a bad thing to just discuss them in a little bit of detail and show you how far we've come over the last 6 years. Now, the first one, and Rowan has maybe stolen some of my thunder, but by now, you know it.
You might have picked up and seen it everywhere, that we've now taken the last step in a process to simplify our group name. You might recall MMI Holdings. Feels like a long time ago. Although everywhere, we're sometimes still called MMI. Every time that happens, Ntokozo has a heart attack, and I kind of closely follow her.
We then, about six years ago, changed MMI Holdings to Momentum Metropolitan Holdings, and really the idea of that was to hero our two retail brands. However, as these things go, pretty soon we found ourselves being shortened to MMH Holdings, which again, didn't really mean much. So this, for us, is really just the final step to call it the Momentum Group. You can imagine that a lot of thinking went into that.
To actually drop the Metropolitan name from the group, group name was not a small or an easy decision for us. But it was really based on some very solid research that have shown us that the Momentum brand has now has the stronger brand equity in South Africa, and that it made sense for us to actually just simplify and go with Momentum Group.
So this process has actually been ongoing for quite some time, and what you will see now is that we've also re-energized our brands quite a lot. And especially the Momentum brand has really been energized and has moved into a very different position to where it was six years ago. Six years ago, when we did our brand research, the brand looked and felt very, very differently.
Today, what we're probably most proudest of, and I did share this with you at the UBS conference last year, Momentum is now the industry leader when it comes to reputational sentiment, and this was a survey done by PwC in 2023. We have gained a depth of brand love and brand equity in a much wider demographic area in South Africa. So there you go, it is the Momentum Group.
We've also changed the operating model, and this was actually one of the biggest endeavors that we took on very early on, in 2018. To change our operating model back to a federated structure and a pure federated operating model that we still believe to this day gives us a competitive edge compared to some of our competitors who has an integrated model.
We positioned Multiply as part of Momentum Health. That was a massive change that we took on over the last two years, and we believe that we're now the market leader in incentivized wellness, with Multiply being positioned as part of Momentum Health. Then we also addressed some underperformance in our business.
It's very easy to forget over the six-year period, what we've actually done and achieved in this space. But we exited Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritius, Tanzania, Eswatini, and Zambia. A massive, massive consolidation and change and exit of our Africa portfolio. We also sold our stake in A. Many of you might not even remember Ayo anymore, it's a long time ago. We exited the lending partnership with African Bank.
We very recently, some of you might not even know it, this happened post our last results roadshow. We decided to exit Momentum Money. And then we have started with turnaround strategies for Momentum Insure, where we've actually come quite a long way over the last year, and then for Metropolitan, where we still have a way to go.
But you will hear a lot more about our plans for Metropolitan today as well. We've solid plans in place for every single business unit to address our VNB challenge, including a group-wide cost optimization project that I will share a lot more detail on. But this is still work in progress; therefore, it's in red. We can't yet claim victory on that.
In terms of distribution success, probably the area in our business that we're most proud of, and you will see a lot of the strategy that we're presenting today being based on the distribution success that we've achieved in the market over the last while. We firmly positioned our dominance in IFA distribution in South Africa, and we can claim dominance there.
We've started that journey by creating a specialized distribution model, which really, among our competitors, is the first and still the only truly specialized model in South Africa. We've established alternative distribution channels across the business, but specifically in Myriad, we've had great success in that. And at the moment, 25% of Myriad policies are sold through digital channels, and one in seven policies are underwritten and onboarded digitally. And obviously, we aim to increase that quite a lot more.
Last year, we also addressed several issues in MFP, our tied agency channel, and I'm sure that you will remember that over the six years, we spoke about our tied agency quite a lot, and we knew that that was something we needed to take on, but we needed some courage. Johan will touch on that as well. Late last year, we decided to bite the bullet and do what we needed to do.
We exited our franchise model in MFP, but we did that without losing any of the planners, which was fantastic. We created a more sustainable tied agency model, and we made significant changes to tied advisor remuneration contracts. You can imagine that that was one of the toughest projects that we ever took on.
When you touch people's money, you really touch their hearts, and that was quite a big project for us to get through. We will share with you further plans today to aggressively grow our advisor footprint in the advice channel, which is one of the pillars of our new strategy. Then in terms of growth, we accelerated step change in earnings.
At the UBS conference last year, I shared with you that we have made a real step change in terms of our earnings. In fact, our NHE were doubling from the 2022 financial year compared to the previous four years, and something that we are really proud about. You can see that step change is actually just been continuing.
Momentum Investments has gained significant market share, and Momentum Investments today is a very different business from the one that we found six years ago. Investment sales are experiencing another record year. Fadi, I'm looking at you and the team here, and we hope that long may that continue for the investments business. Momentum Corporate has improved its underlying profitability, and they've done that through a focus on profitable growth, sustainable pricing, and disciplined expense management. So again, also Momentum Corporate today, a very different business.
Guardrisk, of course, continued its good growth trajectory and their market leading position, which they still hold. Then across the group, we've really done a lot to accelerate our digital in various business areas. Some examples here, in Momentum Corporate, we have Dragonfly. I'm sure that you will hear about that today.
Momentum Grow, in Myriad, our Life Returns product that we talk about a lot. We've made significant progress in Exponential, and then, of course, in Momentum Health. I wanted to just maybe give you some of the numbers of Momentum Health, and there we use mobile phone biomarkers. What is significant is that 96% of our health claims are captured digitally. Now, this relates to 1 million claims per day, worth about ZAR 200 million of claims that we pay per day without any human intervention.
That just shows you the progress that we could make and the scale that we could build through just the application of digital in our business. Then probably what we are most proud of is that over the last three years, we returned significant value to our shareholders. Through share buybacks, that in total, $2.25 billion.
We've added round about ZAR 1 billion of EV uplift through our share buybacks, and we paid dividends of ZAR 4.35 billion over the last few years. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we have a business that keeps on generating cash. I will talk about that a little bit more, and so will Risto in his presentation as well.
So with that as background, let me just maybe share with you exactly what our business look like and what this federated model consists of. So firstly, 8 different business units. We didn't have space for all of them, so Momentum Insure is there on the side, we haven't forgotten about your brand. And that consists of 33 planning units.
What is significant is that the strategy you will hear today is firstly our group strategy, how it all hangs together, and then every business unit CEO will present their strategies to you. But inside their businesses, every one of these planning units actually have its own strategy to get us to where we need to be three years from now.
We won't be able to go into all of that detail, of course, but use this to follow where we are as we go through the day. I'm sure that that will help you. Rowan also referred to the fact that we're not going to speak about India, but as you can see, it's part of the Momentum International portfolio, looked after by Lulama. So please keep your questions for later, for both Risto and then for Lulama later on.
If you have questions about India, we can certainly handle them as we go through the day. Now, that brings us to just what have we considered when we started to put our strategy together? And we really have thought long and hard about the market dynamics out there. What is it that the market is going to give us? And then what are... You know, are there any windfalls?
It's very hard to find any of them. So maybe it's more headwinds that we need to cover and that we need to cope with in putting this strategy together. And we needed to make sure that our strategy is also aligned to our own internal realities that we have and the threats and the opportunities that the market will give us.
Now, I don't have time to talk through all of the market dynamics and key considerations, but you will see as we go through our presentations, mine as well as the others, how we intend to deal with the low South African growth in order to still generate growth in all of our businesses. You will definitely see quite a big kind of focus on how we intend to deal and grow about the advice market, the face-to-face advice market.
Technology, specifically in technology, we have thought long and hard about following a fast follower approach, rather than always to be at the cutting edge when we are implementing technology that actually run a risk for our business.
And then lastly, you will hear a lot more about how we plan to strengthen our core and our good businesses, and some turnaround strategies where we still have businesses that are not entirely where they should be. So that really the background to our strategy. But before I get to the strategy, please allow me a minute to just touch on something that is really very close to my heart. I think from the day that I took over as the CEO, Group CEO of the business, I started sharing that I really strongly believe that we need to create a common purpose with the client at the center of our business.
If you think about the portfolio that you've just seen, it's very clear that we need something, not only that get all of us out of bed in the morning, but something that binds us together as a group, that actually make us a group that stand for a lot more than just a few federated, independent businesses. And this is where purpose come in.
Now, I have a fundamental belief that if you do the right thing for your client every single day, that profit will follow. So luckily, there are some research that back me up, and it is quite well known that throughout the world, organizations with a purpose actually are more profitable and deliver better results over, over time than businesses without a purpose.
So making a real purposeful impact is the only thing, I believe, that will keep us relevant and that will keep us significant, and a significant player in our market. So our purpose is based, and we did a lot of research and work internally to come up with what this should be. It's based on the need, deep knowledge that we want to be known as a business with heart, whose employees understand that behind every transaction, every decision, and every interaction that we have with our clients, there's a human being with hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations.
And that really is why we're here and why we exist. So we want our employees to become obsessed with seeing the human being behind every one of these transactions. But to do that, we need to radically rehumanize the way in which we deal with our clients.
Every single day, I see the outcome of sometimes how we deal with clients, how clients experience us, and unfortunately, it's not always great. Money is a highly emotional topic. We often underestimate, we often think that it's a rational topic. And I've realized that we deal with our clients when they go through the most traumatic, emotional times of their lives.
When they found out they've lost a loved one, when they found out that they've been diagnosed with cancer or a terrible sickness, or when they start to worry about their own ability to be able to retire.... So that's why we're here, to build and protect our clients' financial dreams. We're making sure that our purpose doesn't just remain a statement on the wall.
I think there are many, many organizations who actually have a purpose and values, and it's blasted, you know, sandblasted on the walls of meeting rooms, but no one actually really knows what it means. Actually, it doesn't really mean anything because there's no impact, and there's no action that was put behind it.
So our purpose have really, given us a lot of guidance in terms of the strategic choices that we've made for the business, and that we will make into the future. I think if we can live this purpose, the purpose will outlive all of us, and it will outlive many other strategic, processes and strategic terms that will follow from here on. It is a reference point for us.
We must make sure that we live our purpose through everything that we do, starting with the strategic choices that we've made to put this strategy together. And then there's purpose, there's strategy, and there's culture, and these three, three things are totally interconnected. So we also had a point where we take a long and a hard look at the culture of our business and how it will support us into the future to support this purpose and to make it come alive.
So there's a lot of work ahead of us to make this really, really come alive in our business. But I must say, I'm really excited about the energy in the business around our purpose, the energy in our Group ExCo, and especially around our ExCo having the ability or the willingness to collaborate a lot more in terms of taking our group into the future.
So that brings me to our Impact Strategy. So it is a natural evolution from our previous strategies. We continue to recognize the benefit of a diversified and a balanced portfolio of businesses, and we know that our federated structure gives us a competitive edge. So when we talk about our Impact Strategy, we're not talking impact in the sense of sustainability.
We really think that it's about having a positive ripple effect on the lives of the people that we work with, our employees, our partners, and the people we work for, our clients, our shareholders, our communities, the society, and the environment around us. And in alignment with our purpose, the Impact Strategy aims to have a particularly strong impact on our clients. So this is it, the Impact Strategy on one slide.
You will remember that in the past, we always created what we call the signature slide to really show our entire strategy in one place. When we look at it in a lot more detail, you can see that it divides into six different but correlated elements. These are all our group-level strategic objectives that provide us with clear direction, while it still allows flexibility in the businesses to also add their own flavor to it.
The different elements should also not be looked at in isolation, because they're actually a cohesive, interactive strategy, where each of these strategic objectives have a positive impact on the next one, and none of them can actually stand in isolation.
But it's also important across our business units to see how business units have a positive impact on each other, and ultimately, a positive impact on the group as a whole. So we use the circle as a central design element, and it illustrate the interconnectedness between the purpose, the strategy, and the impact that we want to achieve.
So in the middle, we have the impact targets, and I'll come back to those. And there are also five key enablers at the bottom that I will come back to later. And lastly, we'll see that around the outer edge of the circle, our purpose binds all of this together to take us into the, the right direction and be that North Star for when we need to make important decisions about our business. So let me get into the strategic objectives.
The first one is to unlock the full potential of our businesses, and that really translates to empower our top businesses to achieve more. So I acknowledge that not all our businesses are equally successful, yet. The first way in which we will look at this and to address this, is that we will boost our successful businesses with more investment.
We will make sure that we have clear, communicated turnaround strategies for any of our underperforming businesses. And lastly, you will see this reflected in our capital deployment decisions as we go along, and you will hear that from both myself and Risto as we go through our strategy today as well.
So what I'm going to try to do is that for each of our strategic objectives, we've tried to list across all of the different business units, what they will be focusing on to make the strategic objective come alive. So that link with our business units will be very, very clear. Clearly, there are way too many to list and way too many to actually discuss in a lot of detail.
I marked some of them in red, Nantu, so that you can see the ones that we believe will actually illustrate the strategic objective best. But it doesn't take away from the importance of every single one of these objectives being delivered in our business unit, throughout the next three years, and how it will then all come together. So maybe to name a few here.
Firstly, Momentum Advice, as a top industry player, we believe is a way in which to unlock the full potential and to grow our business into the future. I can't help but be personally very excited about the launch of Curate, our outsourced asset management business, that I really believe will give great opportunities to our investment business and those opportunities going into the future.
Guardrisk will further diversify and grow their revenues through selected acquisitions. So watch that space. I think Lawrence is fast turning into our our M&A expert in the group, but really, you know, on a selected basis, they will keep on doing that.
Then in Momentum Insure, it's very important for us that we own safety, but that we also be able to use safety as a client acquisition methodology, and getting more clients to be attracted to Momentum Insure through our safety value proposition. In Health, we will create a single labor-reliant business, run on one platform, under a single brand, and single value proposition.
A lot of work still to be done in that space. And in Africa, we will improve our distribution channels across all the different countries. Our second objective is to harness the synergies of collaboration within our federated operating model. And this really will be... The test will be the day when we can say that the whole for the group is far bigger than the sum of its federated parts. Then we will know that we've done this really, really well.
In our Federated operating model, we blend a strong value-added center with empowered and accountable businesses, which really is what a federated model is all about. We've seen in the past that the diversified businesses that we have in the group ensures that we stay resilient, no matter what happens out there. Our Federated operating model remains a unique competitive edge for us.
In an economic environment where growth is hard to find, we believe that growth can be unlocked from within by harnessing the synergies of collaboration. There's a lot within the group that we can unlock from this. What we will do, firstly, to unlock this growth, is that we will continue to strengthen and empower our business units to manage their own value chains, ensure high performance and flexibility in the business units.
But at the same time, the center will play a stronger role to provide strategic direction, oversight, resource allocation, and support functions, enabling our businesses to thrive while they maintain accountability for their own numbers and for their own strategies. We must also eradicate duplication. There is one shadow side to being a federated model, and that we end up with a lot of duplication in our businesses.
So by streamlining processes and leveraging existing capabilities across the group, we will reduce complexity, and we will optimize our efficiency. Through collaboration, we will also unlock new growth opportunities and find better solutions to our clients. Sharing capabilities and resources across the group will further drive the efficiency of our business.
Then, by showing up as a group and hunting together, which is not really something we've ever done before, we believe that we will seize opportunities, and we will strengthen our market position against our competitors. We have the opportunity to vertically integrate various components of our offering, and this will enhance our value proposition to our clients and generate more income for the group.
Now, in order to harness the synergies of collaboration within our federated operating model, there's one example that I want to share with you. Just between MFP and our Momentum Wealth platform, more than half of our LISP assets are actually managed by third parties. We can potentially add between ZAR 60 million and ZAR 100 million of revenue per year over the next three years.
If we can only increase the vertical integration on our platform by between 20% and 40% across... or between Momentum Investments and MFP, and that will really make a significant difference. That's really to mention one. But the principle can equally be applied between other businesses, too. Just think of the natural fit between Momentum Corporate and Momentum Health.
Our third objective is not just a financial objective, it's a strategic choice that will strengthen us, and that is to optimize our cost base to grow our earnings. Now, in a low economy, we have no choice. In terms of growth, we will have to optimize our cost base, and it's the only way in which we will be able to address our VNB problem.
Now, some cost savings has happened in the previous strategies, but this, what we talk about here, really is to change our operating model, our cost base, in a sustainable way into the future, to make sure that that cost doesn't just creep back. So we're not trying to cut our way to greatness, I promise you that, but we are getting to what Johan le Roux will call fighting, fighting weight, so that we can operate more efficiently.
This we will need to do to strengthen the group, to enhance our agility, to improve our competitiveness, boost our efficiency, and do all of that without compromising on the quality of our businesses. So we've identified significant cost reduction opportunities through benchmarking with peers and across the world, and really have committed to quite a number there in terms of the cost cutting that we want to do.
More than that, over and above the cost base project that we run across the group, there are also several different objectives that we have in some of the businesses around digital digitalization of our product processes. In Momentum Wealth, the new wealth operating model, once we get to FNZ project completion.
And then client and channel scalability through digitalization in businesses like Guardrisk. Our fourth objective is to continue or to invest aggressively in advice to drive growth. Now, you've heard me say this about 3, 4 times already this morning. So clearly, one of the objectives that we are quite serious about, and that we truly believe in.
So in a world that has gone digital, we truly believe that face-to-face advice is here to stay, and that the more digital, the more clients will still have the need to deal with us and our complex product, products through advisors. So for us, this really is a key differentiator. We want to own advice as a brand in the market. Actually, no one really owns that right at the moment.
We believe it carve out a very unique space for us, and it is also one of our most valuable tools in taking on the banks, because we believe they continue to struggle with the aspect of advice. We also already know that we are great at advice. Our leading market share in the IFA space prove this, and really, that is the toughest crowd to prove yourself to.
So if an IFA like you, you really know that you do understand advice. So we will leverage this, and we will grow from there. A challenge that we plan to address aggressively is our own agency force, which is much smaller than that of our competitors, where we will actually aggressively grow the footprint of advisors that we have.
And then lastly, we will leverage technology to meet the needs of clients and to help our advisors and empower our advisors to actually deliver a far better advice and service to our clients. And we really believe that that consistency of advice through technology will help us a lot in how we show up in front of our clients.
Here you can see specifically the footprint growth in MFP and Consult, but I wanted to also touch for a moment just on Momentum Insure and what we plan here. You can see that every single business actually have a specific focus on how they're going to grow, advice, and their advisor footprint. In Momentum Insure, we will reposition the BDC tied channel to focus on segments where advice is critical to the proposition, and we will align better with Momentum Advice in the long run.
We believe that this should be the only specialist short-term tied agency force in the group, so that repositioning, quite important for us. Our fifth objective is to selectively expand the addressable market where we have a right to win. I think all those words are important.
So this means that we will selectively look at four vectors: channel, segment, product, and geography, and find the places where we're really good at, we have a right to win, and where we believe there are opportunities to expand. In terms of channels, identify our high-performing channels and seek opportunities to diversify and enhance our reach.
Looking at client segments, there definitely are emerging and underserved segments in our markets where we have a competitive edge, and where, again, we can see opportunities to grow. There's an opportunity for us to enhance our product offerings, especially products where we have a unique competitive advantage to seek further markets where we can actually take and roll out those products.
And then lastly, we will strategically look at geographies, where our market research indicates that there's high growth opportunities and where we have exportable products, service, and capabilities that we can use to enter those markets. And by leveraging our strengths and strategic advantages in these areas, we believe that where we have a right to win, we can and we will win. What is really important in terms of this is to look at effective partnerships.
We've seen India as the best example of where we have a very good and a very strong partner, and how that has helped us to collaborate, enter that market, understand that market a lot better, and to actually navigate some of the regulatory landscapes in terms of a strong local partner. So we will look at that.
Then lastly, we always get this question about: Are you going to start a bank? So maybe it's just appropriate that I also deal with that. We acknowledge the challenges of competing in a digital transactional world, where banks really currently have an advantage, but we do not believe that the only answer to that is to start our own bank.
We believe that current and future disruptions will change the traditional banking model, and that alternative plays will be far more effective, such as leveraging the benefits of open banking, open finance, and open data. The ability to access transactional data insights from industries such as retail can offer us far more future-focused options on how we will compete effectively. So we're fully exploring this, and I can only say watch this space in terms of what we will do here.
In terms of selectively expanding our addressable market where we have a right to win, again, you can see that there are many, many different opportunities that we've listed here. But maybe the one that you will hear about more today is in Guardrisk, where we plan to diversify and grow our revenue through embedded insurance, which is also what we plan to take into the India market to open some opportunities for us there.
And then our last and sixth strategic objective is to believe in the power of simplicity and to have an impactful client experience. So we have to design simplified, impactful client experiences as a foundation for growth. I really do not believe that it will be possible for us to live our purpose unless we find a way to simplify the products that we offer.
It really is a problem for us that our products are too complex. Right across our industry, products are way too complex. We need to have far more transparency, we need to simplify our service processes, and we believe that this can also create a competitive advantage for us.
Not only does it cut costs, not only does it bring us competitiveness in terms of service, client loyalty, but we also believe that by having simpler products, we can find reduced costs, quicker time to market, and scale. And I really feel so passionate about this, that in a world of complexity, a lot more must and should be done in terms of simplicity.
Here again, you can see that every single business has its own aims and its own strategic objectives in terms of bringing all of that to life, to look at the design of simplified client experiences as a foundation for growth. And across the business, again, you will see how that plays out. And then the strategic enablers, and I only have a minute left. So I thought 40 minutes is a long time, and suddenly it isn't.
We will not be able to build radically rehumanized client and advisor experiences without our people, and we want to call our people our competitive advantage. In terms of transformation, with more than 80% of our employees being Black, we continue to drive transformation at a senior management level, particularly at this senior management level, where we are not yet representative.
We make a significant positive impact on the broader financial transformation in our country through our dealings with suppliers and society. Driving digital, we will balance innovation with stability. Instead of the shiny toys, let's make sure that they have an impact on our business and help us to run a better business. And then making an impact in terms of sustainability is also about doing things the right way.
And here, we really aim to move from basic compliance to sustainability leadership in South Africa. And then, as Group CEO of the business, I know that in the feedback you've given us in the past, you really worried about our capital deployment and how we think about it. And I know that we are ultimately accountable to you, the market, and shareholders.
And I understand that allocating capital in this group is my single most powerful lever to outperform and to keep total shareholder return at the levels where we currently have it. So every time we use capital for one focus, it represents an opportunity cost for every other use, and this is how we're going to deal with it. Capital is a scarce resource that will be allocated on a best risk-return basis to all of our businesses.
This means that business units that are not profitable has no right to exist in our portfolio, and we will deal with that. Capital allocation to business units will be disciplined, and return on capital will be measured diligently. There will be consequences for prolonged underperformance in terms of delivery on ROE.
Then the market attractiveness and strong competitive state of each business unit will influence how and whether we allocate capital to those businesses. Risto said initially, "Just put this up, and then we can talk about our impact targets, and no one else will care about how we're going to get there." Let's see whether that is true.
Our impact, our impact target right at the middle of everything we do, we... I quite like this: ZAR 7 billion by 2027. 7 by 2027 does sound quite easy, doesn't it? We will also aim for a VNB target of ZAR 1.2 billion, and Risto will give you a lot more detail about that. ROE of 20%, which we believe is still at the top end that the market can deliver.
NPS targets for every single business unit, which is Net Promoter Score, on how we deal with our clients and how we make sure that we deliver for our clients. And then lastly, each business has committed to a cost savings target that adds up to about 10% of our total cost base at the moment. So in the business unit presentations, you will see how we use the strategy circle with the different objectives as little icons to help you keep track of the specific strategic objectives that the business units are delivering on.
So to end off, Johan le Roux always says: "Strategy is not what you think or say, strategy is what you do." I love the fact that there's act in impact, and I think that for us, to have strategy merely on a piece of paper is gonna be absolutely meaningless if it lacks action across our businesses. So we are an action-oriented organization, and we are committed to achieving what we set out to do.
We're here to have and to make a meaningful, lasting impact on all our stakeholders. So I'm gonna now hand over to Risto and then to the rest of the team to take you through how they plan to bring our impact strategy into action. Thank you very much.
Thanks. Yeah, good morning. Nice to see so many familiar faces here. It's the third time we're launching a strategy. Well, third time I'm involved in launching a strategy and giving you financial forecasts. Probably the most ambitious strategy so far, coming out of a bit of a reset and sort of fixing phase. So it's exciting in that way. I was careful titling this financial aspirations, not best estimate forecast.
So I think it's important to realize that there's a bit of stretch in these numbers. So 7 by 2027 sounds awesome, but it's gonna require a bit of work, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna explain to you what, what some of that work involved is.
I normally wouldn't stop on this slide too much, but we are in a closed period, so let me just re-emphasize that these are not forecasts as defined by the JSE. These are aspirations, not 50/50 best estimate forecasts. So maybe don't, maybe don't multiply the 7 by 10. Maybe multiply it by 7, okay? In terms of if you want a simple PE model.
Still significantly better than the current market cap, I would, I would assume. The other thing to note is, we debated quite a bit about what to use as a base because we only have one year of IFRS numbers. And I think if the 2023 numbers were quite low, I don't think they reflect a fair base in terms of measuring going forward.
So in most of my slides, I annualize the first half, which is a bit of a tougher base, so it reduces the growth numbers, but I think, you know, gives a better reflection of what the real underlying growth is in the different operations. Okay, I'm gonna spend most of the time talking about earnings ambitions, but even there, I'm gonna keep it quite high level because all the business units will give more detail.
VNB similar. I'll spend a bit more time on ROE and cash generation because other guys won't cover that in their presentations, and particularly the cash generation is a favorite topic of mine, so we'll stay on that for a while, and I'll recap some of the capital management principles at the end. Okay, 7 by 27. Catchy. How is it made up?
This is the breakdown of how we think we can achieve them. At the moment, if I took the best estimate forecasts from various sources in the group, I'll probably come to a number of a 27 that is 5%-10% below that, okay? So that gives you an idea of the stretch required into that ZAR 7 billion. How are we gonna find that missing ZAR 700 million, let's say?
Jeanette alluded to a group-wide efficiency exercise that we're busy with. I think that will make up half the gap quite quickly, that is not in these numbers. The other half, we're gonna find as we go along, okay? So let's call it an unknown ambition that we're trying. Okay, we're a very diverse group with lots of different starting positions, different environments, different maturities of operations.
This is a nice summary showing how we're gonna get from the current base, which annualised is 4.8 in the... You know, if I take 2.4 in the first half, so start at 4.8. How we're gonna get to the 7. I think the one interesting part here is very little of the growth comes from traditional life insurance. Most of the earnings growth is coming from short-term insurance and health insurance, interestingly enough, and maybe to a lesser degree, from investment management as well.
If you look at the first one highlighted there, it's Momentum Investments. That is the only area where your traditional life business, this being annuities, is a big driver of that growth. Okay. We had phenomenal annuity sales for the last few years. They continue to be extremely strong at the moment.
So we built a lot of CSM in the last year or two that will be released in the coming years. Okay? So the very strong annuity sales of the past few years is driving the growth in what you would see as covered earnings within investments. The other thing to, to keep in mind is we're going into a heavy period, or, or we, or we're busy in a heavy period of investments in the replatforming onto FNZ.
2027 is the first year we believe that those expenses are gone, but then we have the benefit of the, let's call it, a more flexible cost base under FNZ. So there's quite a big kink in the investments earnings projections over the three years, with 2027 being a very good year compared to 2026. Guardrisk, we expect to continue seeing steady, good growth.
Ever since Guardrisk was acquired, people were concerned how much growth is there because it's the market leader in its space. And every time a big client leaves, you know, we get a lot of questions about it. The reality is that there's a long list, a very long list, dozens of names of people who want to set up insurance operations versus a short list of people planning on starting their own insurance license.
So we think Guardrisk will continue to grow earnings quite strongly over the next three years. Then we get health. This will surprise most people because, if you look at the NHI news flow and health sector in South Africa in general, not, it's not exactly the most positive things you read in the newspaper.
And as an individual, obviously, the NHI in its current format, I think a nice way of saying it's controversial and a worse way of saying it's a bit disastrous in the way it's written. Be it as it may, obviously, we're trying to influence the NHI discussion heavily. Whatever happens, the financial impact of that will be felt further down the road, not in the next three years, we don't believe.
On the other hand, within health, we have the fastest growing low income offering in Health4Me, so that should be growing quite well. We're also planning on being a bit more involved in some parts of the value chain, pharmaceuticals, delivery, and so on. And then, quite importantly, health is a very big business in terms of headcount and cost. It's a big, big administrative engine.
Some of the cost efficiencies we're looking at in the group proportionately will maybe have the biggest impact on health earnings than some of the other business units. So we think health will actually be quite a good earnings growth driver, despite all the negative news flow around the health industry. Momentum Insure, this is quite a well-known story.
I mean, if you're covering any personal lines insurer, you would have seen quite a difficult cycle the last few years. We're coming out of it, repricing aggressively. We think the ZAR 300 million-ZAR 350 million is a realistic target by 2027. It will still not be a massively high ROE personal lines insurer. That 350 represents almost more like an acceptable level of profitability.
So it's big earnings growth without actually targeting a unbelievably strong outcome at the end of that 3-year period. Brian's nodding, so I think it, when we launch the 2050 strategy in 3 years, maybe, maybe we'll talk a top quartile performance rather than second quartile performance. And then India, I mean, again, quite a well-known growth story for us. That business is growing phenomenally fast.
I think in India, the people who attended the February presentation by India management, I think the key message there is that if you've got an attractive product, and we do think we have the most attractive health insurance product in India, the top line growth is almost unlimited. It's all about managing the claims ratio while you're getting that growth, and this projection assumes improvement in the claims ratio over the coming years.
But I think, I think the outcome could be anywhere between ZAR 0-600, let's say, in 2027. It's quite a wide range or funnel of doubt, but we do expect profitability. In fact, we expect 2026, particularly the second half, to already show some accounting profits. So by 2027, there should be quite comfortable profitability. Just one or two, two comments on each of the business units.
Now, I'm not gonna belabor the points because each of these will be covered by the individual CEOs. Momentum Retail is the biggest profit generator in the group, and it's expected to continue to do so or to be so. At the same time, we do not expect very fast earnings growth from this business. You must remember that 25% of the profits comes from the closed book here.
So you've got quite a big part of your earnings that is facing a natural 4%-6% declining earnings every year, irrespective of how well we manage that closed book, and we think we have reasonably good skills in doing so.
The other thing to note is that a lot of the activities here, and Jeanette also alluded to it, digital transformation, enabling digital tools for both the end consumers and the advisors, onboarding innovation, Life Returns changes, doing reassessments on digital. All those things, I think, improve the client and intermediary experience a lot, but don't have an immediate impact on bottom line. There's a bit of savings, but this is more about defending our business as well.
So the example I sometimes use is like if you have a shopping mall across the street from another one, and that guy paints, you're like, "Oh, no. Now I need to paint, you know, just to maintain my revenues." It's a bit similar, this digital development in some of the retail segments. There is cost efficiencies, but maybe not big enough to actually see a step change in terms of your earnings profile. What are the key risks here? Yield curves.
Unfortunately, we'll never be able to hedge them fully. But I can tell you now that in the first year of IFRS 17, the yield volatility is a lot lower, okay? So it's, you know... In the past, any quarter could be ZAR 200 million-ZAR 300 million either way. Now, it's more like 50 or 100. So the volatility is less, but it will always be there.
I suppose the lower two bullet points, low asset growth surprise. Okay, it's gonna be in every business unit, so I'm not gonna repeat it as we go through them. Okay, one of my favorite slides. These are the three businesses that have performed well over the years, and we think all three of them can become sustainable ZAR 1 billion a year bottom line businesses.
So these are the three unicorns in our group that we're saying, "Okay, we've gone from an environment that used to make ZAR 300, ZAR 400, ZAR 500. We think they can become ZAR 1 billion a year, you know, consistently within 3 years." Starting with Momentum Investments, obviously, the very big annuity book is in here. We are preparing for a life beyond phenomenal annuity volumes.
I personally think they will continue a bit longer, but there's a lot of opinions on that. We are strengthening our structured product solution set in anticipation of lower yields. We need to replace annuities with other high-margin products if the annuity volumes start dropping off. The other thing is in here, the vertical integration is an important component of achieving that ZAR 1 billion of profitability, and obviously, the delivery of the FNZ project.
But investments... In fact, I saw in the investments presentation, they're targeting ZAR 1 billion upwards, so we thought we were giving Ferdie a stretch, but he's got more in his pocket. Then we got Guardrisk. I already mentioned earlier, Guardrisk has been steadily growing in the mid-teens. We expect it to continue. Now, we've spoken a lot about the fact that we're expanding our underwriting activities here.
So when we talk about bolt-on acquisitions, a lot of it has been in your specialist, maybe sort of upper-end commercial corporate segments. These are clients who are currently on the Guardrisk license that we know well, have profitable businesses, have a sound reason, such as retirement, to sell the business. So I really enjoy these deals. It's like private market, 5, 6, 7 PEs, you know the business, get ZAR 30 million of earnings growth immediately.
That is where we're gonna deploy capital, and you'll see later, if you're very observant, we think the ROE will increase in the business over the next three years. They're smart buying these books, just reflecting the type of multiples you pay on these businesses and the capital efficiency you can get once you integrate them.
You know, we actually had an acquisition in the last few years where I think the amount of capital we released when we integrated was more than the purchase price. So those things happen in this sort of market. So Guardrisk, we're excited about, but beyond the underwriting, we still continue to grow our first-party and third-party business as well.
So it's not like the underwriting is gonna become totally lopsided. It's gonna maybe go from 30% to 33% over the next three years. And then we've got corporate. Now, I keep joking with Dumo that, like, how do you get Dumo to have a ZAR 1 billion business? You give him a business that makes ZAR 1.2. That's a bit rude. That's a bit rude, but...
But this is ambitious because, remember, we're at the high, high part of the group risk underwriting cycle. You know, the reality is that premium rates follow claims experience with a bit of a lag.... So through COVID, there was no way we could increase premium rates quick enough to offset ZAR billions of losses.
And now that the claims are normalized, we're trying to hold onto the premium rates for a little bit longer. You know, so the cycle's sort of turning against us. We think the earnings might drop to about, I don't know, ZAR 800 million in the next year or two. But we think about by 2027, assuming normal underwriting margins, we should be a ZAR 1 billion a year business.
I must say that if we assume very long-term underwriting margins, the ZAR 1 billion is actually a bit of a stretch, okay? It will require a bit of work, but it's doable. The other thing I noted to Jeanette yesterday is, if I look at the forecast earnings of these three businesses, just over sort of, let's say, ZAR 3 billion, that's roughly what the group earnings were in 2016 when I joined, and these three businesses combined made about ZAR 1 billion.
So these three, these three operations have made massive progress in the last 7-8 years. Yeah, actually, all of them. I mean, Guardrisk gets a lot of the credit because it's-- I think it was quite a contentious acquisition at the time. It predates me. But the other two businesses have also really outperformed expectations.
Okay, these two businesses are lumped together for two reasons. The first one is that they actually share quite a similar product set, and a lot of the product management and product engines are managed by the same teams. But the other commonality is there's a lot of focus on VNB here. These are the operations where current profitability is fine, but VNB is negative, which we consider to be unacceptable considering the nature of business written here.
Because of the VNB focus, you'll see the key enablers talk a lot about things that are more VNB impactful than earnings impactful, so agent productivity, partnerships, distribution growth, and so on. In terms of earnings drivers, you see the Metropolitan Life, we are expecting earnings growth. Part of it is a lot of product level, product management optimization.
So we've done things like renegotiated fees we pay to our distribution partners. We removed some benefits or changed benefits that were uneconomical. We changed premium rates, basically new business pricing. Also, this is an area where we are budgeting reasonably high expense efficiencies, particularly in real terms, so we're expecting some growth, well, reasonable growth in earnings.
Africa's a bit tricky in that when I, when I annualized the first half number, I effectively annualized a massive rally in Namibian bonds in the first half numbers. So the decline is maybe a little bit unfair on, on the Africa business. At the same time, the ZAR 450 million is not that different to what I thought normalized earnings were a few years ago.
So the Africa business, you know, it's been stabilized, and we have sold a lot of the loss-making operations. I mean, this business used to be a break even overall. I mean, then we sold loss-making operations in Zambia and Mauritius and Tanzania. That immediately put it to profitability, but beyond that, we haven't really grown that profit line that strongly over the years.
I think in the short term, just maintaining the current level of profitability is not a bad outcome, because a lot of you will not know, but Lesotho and Botswana, as example, are implementing new regulations around commissions, surrender values. So we're going through a bit of a statement of intent, intent type of environment in a lot of our neighboring countries.
Even the 450, I think, will require quite a bit of work from the Africa team. Behind the scenes, you won't see it, but getting stability, and let's call it operational excellence, on the product platforms is also important. The return on effort, I would like to see that improve more than maybe... The ROE might not improve that much, but I'm hoping the return on effort improves a lot, okay, in terms of stability of systems and so on.
Momentum Insure gets its own slide for the infinite growth, infinite growth business. Maybe the highlight here is that 350 does assume a claims ratio of 58% at the end of the period. Okay, Michael's lifting his eyebrows. It's not the same claims ratio as some of the most profitable players in the industry or some of the niche players, but it's definitely better than average for a personal lines with a bit of commercial.
It does require—we talk about being a second quartile player. We'll need to be better than average in this industry to achieve that. I think it also talks about the fact that we think our cost ratio will still be a little bit on the high side at the end of the three years. And some of the cost ratio issues come, for example, the IFA channel. So when Brent talks, the profitability by channel is quite different in our business. So the level of efficiency focus versus revenue growth focus is quite different in direct to consumer versus IFA, for example.
Obviously, this is the one business that is directly influenced by weather. Life insurance, luckily enough, is not that influenced, but I mean, just these Western Cape floods. Yeah. Anyway, we'll wait another quarter. Okay, then India and health, we're lumping together. We often don't do this, but I think it's maybe good to remember that India, at the moment, is a health business.
And while health doesn't show it as part of its PNL, health provides the IP and the, let's call it, regular, input into the strategy and planning around that business, okay? Now, I just wanna give you guys a little bit of credit because I think, I think by charging out just costs, you're doing us a favor in terms of the India picture. So health is quite involved there.
I spoke a lot about health in the beginning and why we think it's gonna grow better than most people expect. The one thing I didn't mention is the union alignment. That's what Jeanette referred to as labor aligned. Same thing. The point is that we have very strong minority partners in this business who enable us to actually have a voice in these discussions.
So we think we can play a very significant role in helping guide where healthcare policy, and the on-the-ground reality ends up in South Africa. That's probably more of a story for the next strategy again, depending on how that plans out. The forecast beyond 2027 might be zero, it might be over ZAR 1 billion, depending on exactly what happens there.
Then India, I tried to make this point earlier, we have a very differentiated product in India. India, generally very traditional. You pay your premiums. If you claim, you phone us. We're the only ones who sort of reward you for healthy behavior. We sort of have dynamic premium rates depending on your fitness levels. In South Africa, it's quite a common model.
It's probably more common than not in South Africa to have this integrated wellness proposition on medical insurance. In India, it's unique at this stage, and it's been very successful. Also, not everyone was at the India Investor Day earlier in the year. I always like telling the story that our partner, Aditya Birla. So the Birla family is one of the richer families in India.
When I grew up in Finland, in Finnish, you have this saying that, "Do you think you're rich as Croesus?" You know, like the Roman general. I suppose in South Africa, you'll talk a lot, "You think you're an Oppenheimer." You know, in India, they say, "You think you're a Birla." That's the saying people use there. So the nice thing about the Birla brand is nobody ever asks who you are.
I mean, you can immediately go into, "This is our health insurance offering. Don't worry about our credentials." It's a very strong partner. And I don't think I mentioned in my presentation, but Lawrence Will, we're getting more advanced with our plans of possibly launching a self-captive offering in India, so that will be quite exciting.
Don't put it in your models yet, but I mean, it's a big... It will be interesting to see how that develops. It, it is a unique idea in that market. Okay, here's just the waterfall in terms of how we get from the 4.8 to 7. Okay, let's talk about VNB a little bit. I have grand total of 10 minutes left and a lot of slides. We get asked a lot about what our VNB margin targets are. Again, the different business units will talk about their own.
At group level, we think we'll, we will end up at 1%-2% VNB margin by 2027. If I had to narrow that range, I would probably narrow it more towards the 1 than the 2. I think, I think the point is, you know, g- two would be an excellent outcome.
I think anything below less will be a disaster, you know? One of the reasons why our margin at group level will generally be lower than most of our peers is our business mix is dominated by Momentum Investments. Okay, so we have a lot more exposure to the affluent and the wealth market, where the margins are quite thin, except for the annuity book. And that's why the development of an improved structured product offering is very important in terms of profitability.
The other thing that is a little bit different at the moment is our Metropolitan Life margin compares very unfavorably with our peers. The 4-5 will be a bit better, but more comparable. I don't want to get technical, but we also use a higher risk confidence interval and a risk adjustment. But anyway, now we're getting into the weeds.
But to get to a 1%-2% group target, we need to get Metropolitan Life to at least have positive VNB margins. Okay? That's the absolute minimum. But, I mean, the 4%-5% target is still our, our plans. If you then look at Momentum Retail and Africa, those margins might not seem that aspirational, but both of these businesses sell a lot of savings business, and the savings business is almost by design, negative VNB or zero VNB. Again, getting a little bit technical, most of you will know that we use market consistent approach to our VNB calculation. When you're projecting these savings contracts at the risk-free yield curve, you're not building up much of an asset base over time.
Okay, so one way of thinking about it is that for us to have positive VNB on the savings contracts, you need to believe in the equity risk premium. You don't need to assume that the asset growth is gonna be 10, 11, not 6 or 7 every year. You know, using 6 or 7% asset growth a year, these are not the most profitable contracts.
Okay, just move on a little bit. So ROE, this was the ROE in December, annualized. I think this slide was exactly as it was at the results presentation. The ROE was about 18% at the time. I mentioned that moving on to IFRS 17, I'm not so sure if the 18%-20% ROE target is relevant anymore. The good news is that doing more modeling, we think it is.
So we think that by 2027, we're gonna get back to a 20% ROE. You can go have lots of fun in terms of the slide and looking at the way we model the NAV and whatever, but the key story here is we think India is gonna go from quite a big negative to a positive. It's a very small sliver, so you might say:
How can 5% of your capital have such a big impact? 5% times -20 is 1. 5% times +20 is 1. There's a 2% delta in ROE just from India. The other one is the ongoing growth of the annuity book, and annuity is actually very high ROE for us because the capital requirements are modest because diversification benefits. So Momentum Investments, we think, will improve ROE.
Okay, and that's quite a big business. So now you got 10% of your capital base, 15% earning an extra 5%. We're also expecting the Guardrisk ROE to improve. Remember my comment earlier that despite ex-, despite increasing underwriting activities, we think the net outcome will be on higher ROE. So maybe another 10% of the group ROE, capital base earning extra 5% over time.
And Insure, still a bit in, a bit in yellow there, but going from sort of low single-digit ROEs to at least sort of, let's say mid-teens. That's quite a big improvement. I think the exact calculation, it comes out to a bit over 20. So I would say that out of our official targets of ZAR 7 billion of earnings, 20% ROE, and then up to 2% BMB, the ROE targets may be the most achievable because there's two levers.
Not only the earnings, but the capital base. You'll also note here that this is a bit lazy modeling, just for simplicity. There's a lot of capital sitting at the center at the end of the three years. In reality, it will not be ZAR 7 billion. You know, we'll, we won't let it accumulate like that. Maybe we'll do buybacks, special dividends, whatever. So if you knock that ZAR 7 billion to half at 0% ROE, quite a big impact on that, on that forecast as well. In fact, I'm not joking now. I can't actually quite figure out why the competitors' ROE is as low as they are.
But, I mean, I'll, I'll spend some time on it when I... over the holidays. Okay, cash generation. I think the first slide on the cash generation has got nothing to do with cash, it's solvency. The point we're trying to make here is that all these buybacks, dividends, investments we're doing, has not come at any cost to our solvency ratios. In fact, they improved over the years.
The other thing I'll maybe point out is that we've been able to actually extract cash through our solvency by managing our required capital quite well. So I see Collins here, who's our Chief Actuary, using old terms. I think we were the first insurer to implement, for example, mass lapse tail risk reinsurance. You know, we identified parts of the SCR calculation we thought was overly onerous, and we could reinsure that at almost no cost.
You know, we do these sort of things all the time. We're reviewing. We're actually looking at something else at the moment to manage our required capital to be efficient. So instead of requiring... Instead of dipping into the, into the SCR ratio over the years, we've actually been able to improve it through capital management.
Okay, my favorite slide. Rowan, Rowan joked about his, his slide earlier, that, you know, not being the prettiest. This is a perfect group finance slide. Lots of information. It all adds up. Lots of numbers, factual. Beautiful. So, so dividend inflows, the first, the first bold, the first bold line, and, and so Peabody is here from balance sheet management, so he can tell you that adds up to the... These are actual cash account, cash coming into the group.
I mean, this is the actual numbers in our bank accounts. So we've got ZAR 9.6 billion of dividend flows to holdings over the last three years. And remember, the first year was a blank almost, with, with COVID. Okay, so the last two years, we had ZAR 4.5 billion of cash inflows coming into our group. Okay, that's not bad. I think that's on a, on an average market cap over the period.
It's probably 16% or 17% inflows. Where has the money gone? Under other, it's positive because of all those sales. It's like, it's not like I've got lots of money from Mauritius or lots of money from IO. Actually, we've got quite a bit of money, but we have been disposing of the loss-making businesses, got a bit of money in. Where has it gone?
Into a few places, India being the biggest. Momentum Insure requiring capital support being another big one. Momentum Money, that injection was made a couple of months ago before we decided to shutter the business, so we'll probably get some of that money back. In fact, most of it, I'm pretty sure. So net of internal investments, we generated ZAR 7.3 billion of cash. Call it ZAR 2.5 billion a year for round numbers.
Paid dividends in line with our dividend policy. Did buybacks of ZAR 2.3 billion, and we increased the cash holdings at the center of by ZAR 700 million. This is almost my favorite way to discuss the business, like at the audit committee board with you guys, because it sort of puts it into real, real, like, tangible things.
One thing people often forget, that you can have a profitable business, makes ZAR 1 billion, but you only get a ZAR 300 million dividend. But if you've got a loss-making business of ZAR 300 million, that's all cash funded. You know, it, it sort of puts into perspective the importance of avoiding those, those steep J-curves. What does it look like going forward?
Okay, it looks a bit better. So firstly, right at the top, we think that the dividend inflows will be ZAR 11 billion-ZAR 12 billion into the group over the next three years. Higher than the last three years. Why? Because we're not expecting a COVID year, so there's no blanks in there. You might have expected it to be a little bit higher.
It's a little bit less than the run rate over the last two years, because in these numbers, we assume that Guardrisk will fund its own, you know, capital investments into its bolt-on transactions. We assume Health will fund Multiply. We assume that, that Investments will fund its own investments, okay? So that is net of investments within the mature businesses. Momentum Insure, Momentum Money will not require capital going forward, okay?
Momentum Insure, I'm pretty sure of that, unless there's some disastrous outcomes in terms of weather events. And the areas that require ZAR 2 billion of support, that number will probably be about ZAR 700 million over the next three years, okay? So without any, without any and no new initiatives, we should generate about ZAR 3 billion more cash available to shareholders, let's call it, over the next three years and the prior three years.
Our dividend policy is not gonna change, so maybe ZAR 5.5 billion of that ZAR 11 billion will be dividends, and the other half will then be... We'll have to decide what we do with it, and I think I have a few slides on that, on capital management. So how do we, how do we make decisions around when we do M&A and things like that? Jeanette sort of mentioned some of these points.
Firstly, you will be surprised, but we have lots of committees, lots of ways of work, terms of reference, guidelines on what cash flows you include, what you don't include, how do you calculate discount rates, risk margins. Okay, so there's very formal processes, and, and in effect, the internal committees, we have a slightly different committee for M&A versus, let's say, repairing a building or starting a new initiative.
It requires different skills in terms of assessing them. All the admin is there. Problem with M&A is still judgment, okay? So you can have all the processes in place, but you're still gonna have to make a judgment call at some stage. The second thing is important is buybacks are always the default starting point. So our internal hurdle rate is always the higher of what the IRRs on the buybacks versus a bottoms-up, risk discount rate.
I suppose the lower our rating becomes, for example, the harder it will be to do M&A. But we do it on purpose because there is obvious question from shareholders as well, "Why don't you buy back more shares?" So that is always the starting point. The third point is something that Jeanette alluded to. You cannot buy yourself out of trouble.
When a business unit is struggling with own day-to-day operations today, buying something doesn't solve their problem, you just add to it, okay? And it's not necessarily a profitable business. You know, we have some businesses, like Guardrisk, that I often say runs like a Rolls-Royce, and it's profitable. But then we have other business don't make much money, but they're very well run, so they have the capacity to think about transactions.
On the other hand, you have businesses that are profitable, but there's a lot of paddling under the water. So you're saying, "We don't wanna add to that strain." So, so I think the ability of a business unit to execute a M&A transaction or a c- or, or internal initiative is quite important in our decision making. Other thing we added in the last few years is, when I joined, everything's IRRs, NPVs.
We focus a lot more on the cash generation in the short term now. What is the impact on your cash flow, your group dividends, earnings yields? It does mean we look at more mature deals maybe now than we did in the past. And I mentioned earlier, I love the Guardrisk deals because you're sort of buying a known cash flow stream up front. And then the last one here is, we also learned, no matter how cheap something is, if it's in a dying business segment, don't get involved there. It's cheap for a reason.
I'm not gonna go into specifics, but there's been a few deals recently in parts of our group where the business unit felt strongly that this asset is almost too good to pass by, but we felt that the medium-term outlook or long-term outlook is so dismal that we're not gonna deploy capital into that area. Okay, so it gives you some sense of how we think about these things. Then my second last slide.
The left-hand side just shows you in the bar chart, how we deployed the capital in the past. The first commitment here is the dividend policy remains the same. We will pay out between a third and half our earnings. It means we're expecting to pay about ZAR 2 billion of dividends over the next three years. What happened to the other ZAR 5 billion-ZAR 6 billion?
Number one, buybacks is the first choice, okay? Beyond that, we also don't want to surprise you too much. So something else we've done now with Jeanette is we've become a bit more proactive in determining upfront what are the areas of investment we desire. Because people come pitch deals to us all the time, and you must be careful you don't get into the cycle of where you look at this because it came to you, look at this because it came to you.
You know, we're a bit more proactive in terms of identifying targets and segments we wanna deploy capital in. So the top three on our hit list, if you wanna call it that, is investment management, distribution, and adding to our corporate business, and the corporate includes Guardrisk and EB. Okay?
So if we don't do deals in these three buckets, then you can count on the fact that the IRR estimate must be in the 30s or something. We will not do deals that are sort of closer to the breakeven rate outside of these three areas. Okay, and then my last slide. I am a few minutes over. Apologies. So the official targets. So ROE target of 20. Yes, management sees 20 by 2027. Okay, quite serendipity there, but anyway. So ROE of 20, I think that target is very achievable. NHE of 7, achievable. VNB margin of 2, that's probably the biggest stretch of them, but these are the targets we're gonna set for ourselves. Okay, and that's me.
If you've got a question, please raise your hand. While mics find their way down to Mike, pun intended, we'll start with a quick question from Barron Risto. You spoke about optimizing costs to grow earnings and improving VNB. Where do you see the biggest opportunity to cut costs, and how will this cost cutting be implemented?
Yeah. Okay, should I...
You can go.
Okay. So we actually recently finished a major exercise on this. So the level of cost savings we're targeting is substantial. I mean, I'll give a round number, about ZAR 1 billion, and our cost base is maybe about ZAR 15 billion-ZAR 16 billion, controllable cost base. Majority of the biggest bucket is actually IT related. Probably a third, 30%-40% of that is relating to IT.
Another quite a big bucket is procurement. So part of being a very federal organization, we have quite decentralized procurement, so we might be losing out on some bulk buying benefits and also usage management. If anybody's in procurement, that's an important term. So procurement's maybe another 20% of it. Some business level activities like straight through processing, you know, improving claims management times, that's a collection of like 100 little projects.
That's maybe another 20% of it. And then some duplication, you know. Sort of support... I mean, what happens in the federated model is that quite often you have a small support center at the head office, and then over time, small little support business, support areas start building up in the business unit. So we're also looking at that duplication. Yeah, so that project has just recently started. You will, you will see some impact. In fact, you'll see actually quite a big impact in the 2025 numbers.
Yeah.
Thanks. Mike?
... Is this on? Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yep. Thanks. Three questions if I can. I have to start on Insure because, because you flat pointed me out. Just the top line aspiration there for GWP growth to get-
Yeah
... at that 58. I'm just trying to back up where the numbers-
Top line ambitions are, I would categorize as a modest. I mean, but Brent will not agree with me. I think focus is more on the underwriting, on the claims ratio than top line. Top line growth?
3.8 billion, so just around inflation.
Yeah, 6%. Yeah.
6%. Then, I noticed you didn't talk at all about the shareholders' ZAR 250 million uplift. What-
Mm.
What is in there, and how does that come?
Yeah, I think there's a few things. So some of the cost savings will also come out of some of the head office expenses. So those will go down a little bit. At the same time, you saw in the model, the model's quite simplistic. There are a lot of retained earnings, you know, so there's maybe a bit more shareholder funds at the center, so more interest income.
And, and then one little interesting change we made over the last few years, I think Serine's the only one who really noticed this, at the last results, is, we now run a little IT business in the center, where we buy all our IT hardware into a legal entity, and then we onsell it to the business units. What's a nice way of putting it?
It's done to manage debt more effectively, and we end up with a little bit of a profit in the head office. So. But I would say most of the delta is actually retained earnings, which in a way. Sorry, retained capital. So if we're more effective on capital management, maybe the ZAR 250 becomes ZAR 150 or ZAR 100.
And then just last one, you mentioned the IRR hurdle on buybacks.
Yeah
... as being your key constraint. How do you measure that IRR?
Yeah.
What is your exit multiple?
Yeah
... on the shares you've purchased?
Yeah. So, the CPWest team does that. We assume a theoretical exit multiple. We don't assume a big rewriting. You know, most of the IRR is actually just the ROE we expected over the next three years. But you're right, there's a bit of a... You need to assume that you're gonna exit at 70% or 75%. At the moment, I think the IRR on buybacks we estimate to be, like, roughly 20%. So it, it's not as far out of line with the bottoms up. I mean, at one stage, it was more like 25 versus 16. Now the two have come a bit closer.
Perfect. Thank you.
Warwick? Thanks. Can you hear me? Is this clear? Yeah. Two for you, Jeanette. Just, you spoke about managing the performance of the business. Can you give us a sense of your time horizon, just in terms of how much space you're planning to give each division to demonstrate success before you start thinking about capital allocation and, and adjusting, you know, relative to the 2027 ambitions here? There's obviously a capital allocation framework that, that supports that.
At, at what point do you reassess that? Question one, and question two, just in terms of the duplication in capabilities and what benefits those might bring, can you just give us a sense of how much duplication and, and which areas are obvious opportunities? And then, Risto, you spoke about the profits in Momentum Retail originating from closed books.
Are you finding it more difficult to manage costs as the book runs off? And can you give us a sense of, you know, what the challenges are there and whether there are any stranded costs to be aware of?
Thanks, Warwick. Is mic on? So I think in terms of turnaround strategies for businesses, I mean, there's actually quite a lot of energy and urgency in the businesses around those. And in every single business unit, I think the kind of, I almost want to say the pressure is different.
But I guess the moment you start to openly talk about these things, and the moment you start to have quite specific conversations at Group ExCo level between business units on where they are, there's firstly more visibility, there's secondly more accountability, and there's more of a reach out from business unit CEOs to each other. I mean, I find, you know, Risto and I, most of us have been in the business for a long time. For a long period in the six years before...
This is where the collaboration, you know, in our ExCo comes in. We pretty much ran like, you come into Group ExCo, and you're there to represent your own business, and then you kind of open your laptop and do a few emails, because the federation was so strong and so independent that, you know, everyone was kind of showing up to do their own thing.
And it is quite different now in the sense that when you're in Group ExCo, you're there to represent the entire group and to kind of put that group hat on. And we find that the conversations we have are a lot more in-depth and a lot more collaborative in terms of how we can help and support each other, not only with our plans, but within execution.
And there's a lot of collaboration between the businesses, for instance, in terms of delivery of kind of IT systems to help Africa, for instance. You know, what Merge is doing, and Jan will talk about that a little bit more across businesses. So, I mean, to answer you quite specifically, I think it, it's different for different businesses.
But what we definitely have are very specific plans, very specific, trackable deliverables on those, and we're on it. You know, I mean, I think you might have seen that in terms of ROE and what we have there, you know, some of the performing businesses actually, you know, maybe like Africa, sorry, Lulama, we'll point that out, you know, need to work on the ROE of their business.
Other businesses actually, you know, have to do a lot more in terms of the predictability of the earnings. So it is different for different businesses, but I think the urgency we have and how tough we are on each other on that delivery is certainly there. If... I hope that's a good answer. Your second question? Oh, we have found through the years, and I mean, actually,
it was prophetic words from Healy-... many, many years ago, six years ago, when we were totally unbundling all of the big centers, you know, like human capital and so on. He actually made a prediction that day, and he said, "You business unit heads here are making a big song and dance about how big the center is.
I promise you, you're gonna take it, and five years from now, you're gonna look at it and go, "Okay, actually, it costs us more now." But just because you control it, you're not gonna be too worried about the cost. This cost optimization project that Risto and his team ran, but, you know, we all bought into it, and we all committed to do it, actually pointed out to us that there's a lot more duplication than we ever thought.
And one of the ways we looked at it was to really determine per business unit, what are the things we really need to go deep on, where you really need to spend money on, and what are the things that you could very easily source from the center and not duplicate?
So a lot of that kind of 20% duplication costs sit in where we actually have a lot of... I mean, the new rules of the game that we've determined for ourselves is, if I want to do something new, I'm going to ask who else in the group has done it already before just embarking on it myself.
You know, I don't wanna exaggerate, but I think there's 7 or 8 different AI projects running across the group. Rather than sitting in one room saying, "What are we gonna do about AI?" And how can one business go a little bit wider to make sure that it's work that can be used in other business units as well?
So there's a lot more of that collaboration coming through, and I think that's what excites me about the overall group strategy, is that you can't even reach cost optimization if you're not gonna collaborate more. And this is where all of these different strategic objectives really link so well together, because you need to do all of them in order to achieve the overall objectives that we plan for.
Yeah, and you talked about the closed book management. So when we talk about merge, that is the, that's the name for the closed book team. Yeah, so earnings in Momentum Retail is about half Myriad, and then quarter closed book and quarter being the investor savings product. As a starting point. To manage the run-off. First of all, stranded cost, I'll get to it now.
It's not a concern now, yet. What we're doing in the short term to manage the profitability of the closed book, we're also looking at, like, product consolidation, common theme across the industry. The other one is product management. A lot of these older products have quite a little bit of management actions you could take, reviewing premiums, reviewing benefits, fees.
Because there's so much of these different products, this team often hasn't got around to doing all of that product management. So, so that's getting a bit more focus to, to ensure that we actually have the right premiums and the right fees on all these legacy books, rather than some of them being subsidized because of lack of attention. In terms of avoiding the run-off of scale, this team has taken on more work.
So as an example, they are now helping Africa on a number of their things, including on vendor systems. So because they've got knowledge of how to run life insurance, sometimes they can actually, not just on their own systems, they can support on vendor systems. Metropolitan, they're taking on some of their business. So we're adding scale onto that team from other parts of the group.
I mean, obviously, the other parts pay for it, but it's at a marginal cost, so it's a reasonably good deal. Well, depends who you ask, but I mean, internal charges are another exciting topic. And I think product management, product rationalization, group level, cost synergies, that will keep them busy for at least 5 or 10 years.
I'm more worried about... Well, we're more worried about getting relevant skills on these old legacy products than we're worried about stranded costs. Very long term, we will need to then think about whether we sort of start managing that team size downwards, let's say, in 5 or 10 years. The other option is to maybe start offering these services to other people.
So we have been approached by some of our peers over the years, whether we could partner, because we have quite strong skills in that. We've never done it because we just never felt comfortable actually doing admin for competitors. But, you know, if it becomes a stranded cost issue in 10 years, we'll revisit that view.
Okay, Tracy. While the mic is finding the way to Tracy, there's a question from Patrice online: "The space that Metropolitan operates in is increasingly more competitive, commoditized, and the big banks are taking a greater share. Would you not consider disposing of Metropolitan and redeploying the proceeds towards reducing the significant share price to EV discount? Recent transactions in the low end of the insurance market points to the fact that you could get EV on this transaction, and then allow the group to focus on businesses where Momentum can rather play a leading role.
You wanna start?
Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Jeanette.
I'll help. I'll help.
Yeah. I mean, the short version is that there's no plans of disposing of Metropolitan. A slightly longer answer is, just now I explained how we're trying to increasingly leverage off the group capabilities. So unplugging Metropolitan will be an extremely cumbersome, almost impossible project. So if we ever got to that level of desperation, where we thought Metropolitan doesn't have a future, it will probably be some sort of a managed rundown rather than a sale, just from a practical...
Because remember, the in-force book is still very profitable. A lot of the costs are involved in the distribution side. So if you got to that desperation, you might get more than EV by running it down effectively rather than selling it, and a lot less complex from a day-to-day management. But we're far away from that. I mean, yeah. I see Metropolitan. Etienne, he's the CFO of Metropolitan. He's looking at me very carefully. Trust me, there's zero plans. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that I mean, this is in line with what we promised in terms of, you know, having the right plans in place to address underperforming businesses.
If we didn't see massive potential in that market, if we didn't believe that our team had the capability to actually deliver on what we need to do to fix what we need to fix and grow in that market.
A lot of it, and you'll see when Peter present later on, a big element that is still not entirely there in terms of our five-point plan, really is around workforce management. A lot of our energy, and I can promise you, I'm also personally quite involved in Peter and his team, and the plans that we're making and so forth. Now, you don't change things like that overnight, but I have absolute full confidence that that team is going to deliver where we need to deliver, and especially in opportunities like in the Affinity market, for sure.
Then, of course, some of our other businesses are also getting closer and closer. In this case, Momentum Health and Corporate, in terms of where they are part of organizations that open up opportunities and work sites for Peter and his team. We are on it, we focused on it, and I really do believe that we will look back at this three years from now, and we will be glad that we did the opposite of what Patrice has been asking us to do.
Thanks. Tracy?
Hi. Thanks. This on?
Mm-hmm.
Just a couple of questions from me. So the first one is, you mentioned areas that you're gonna look for, for growth, and you're looking at different, sort of segments, and you mentioned geographic sort of expansion. We've chatted on Guardrisk, potentially in India. Are there other geographies that interest you?
And, you know, I'm obviously curious 'cause you have made some small U.K. acquisitions in the investment management space. So just how does that fit into your sort of strategy and outlook there? And then just on cost cutting, just so I can understand, you know, obviously it's a big target. So a lot of it comes from IT, 30%-40%. You know, just kind of where does that come from for IT? 'Cause obviously, you know, we're in a digital environment where it's a lot of dollar-based costs. Competitors keep... It's something that kind of tends to surprise on the sort of upside, just to kind of keep your foot in the game.
So just, you know, some idea of just how that, that is going to come out. And then of the ZAR 15 billion of controllable costs, I mean, my understanding, that would obviously grow by inflation. Is that ZAR 1 billion also grow by inflation, or is it today, today's money?
Okay, thanks.
The second part, it is today's money. So Ravi is here, and he's running the IT component of that savings project, and he can explain in a lot more-
Eloquent
...eloquent terms. So, so Ravi, do you wanna come up and, and just give some of that... I mean, and there's quite a few things, I mean, like cloud management, things like that. But Ravi?
Well, while Ravi do that, I'll, I'll answer the first part, of that conversation, Tracy. So we were very careful to, to not just, you know, go crazy on geographical, expansion. We've mentioned Guardrisk, so, you know, Lawrence will also share a little bit more detail on that. Other than that, really, in terms of advice, we find quite a lot of opportunities right now in terms of developments in the UK market and in the European market, around buying stakes in advisor businesses in order to get them to use our capabilities for vertical integration. And those are very small stakes that we buy.
It's very small kind of, you know, acquisition costs, but it actually puts us in a very strong position in order to be able to then vertically integrate the asset management capabilities that we offer in the UK market in there. So those are the two only kind of geographies that we have identified for now. But you will see, obviously, you know, our drive in terms of distribution will in South Africa also play quite a big role in terms of that.
Also, before Ravi goes, let me just give his credentials. So he's the Chief Digital and Technology Officer, so he is the best positioned to answer.
Thanks. So just in terms of how we're thinking about our cost reductions, particularly from a technology perspective, it's important to understand that we're not trying to cut our way and just... And we're thinking on two horizons. One is, as we mentioned, when you, when you operate in a very strong federated environment, you're often going to have the tragedy of the commons, where every single business then tries to solve its problems on its own, which works for us up to a point. But now we're seeing that for the next phase of this, the ability for us to be able to ensure that we're taking advantage of scale, we're taking on our technologies, on our capabilities, on our learnings from our, our innovations, are gonna serve us better. So that's a, that's a key thing.
And then the second one is that in a fast-moving world of technology, you're often seeing opportunities that would not have existed in previous years, to be able to both, deliver on future capabilities, but deliver that in a way that is far more efficient and effective at the same time. So, when we're thinking about our cost reductions, a significant part of that is going to be on looking for duplications that we don't feel are useful going forward. How do we actually seek understanding where the commodities are, and how do we then integrate those? We are consciously avoiding areas that we feel, while it might give us efficiencies, they would actually paralyze our businesses in terms of how we go forward.
So we're very much looking at those that are gonna allow us to make fast changes, yield benefits, keep our competitiveness, and keep our acceleration going. And lastly, we're gonna be looking at opportunities where we can bring in new technologies and capabilities in, but do it in such a way that, as we said, we can test once, learn once in a business, and then seek it to scale it across the businesses, rather than reinvent the wheel. So it is very much around leveraging the power of the group, which we probably haven't done as much over the last few years, so it hasn't been our focus. And with that, we see significant opportunities in terms of how to reduce those costs. But we'll be able to share more more detail.
But we're also looking to ensure that what we do from an optimization perspective isn't just cost optimization, but it's actually optimization on things like experience and time saved, and having a material impact on the experience that our colleagues, our advisors, as well as our clients have in terms of working with us.
Thanks, Ravi. In the interest of time, because we are running behind, I think we'll close off the questions there. But a reminder that you're welcome to speak to any of the executives over the breaks, over lunch, and any further questions that you may want. Also, please feel free to email the investor relations email, and one of our team will get back to you.
Thank you.
If we can be back at 12:00, that'll be great. Thanks. Sorry, 11:00.
Wow!
Johan le Roux is the executive in charge of Momentum Retail, and within that portfolio, he also has distribution and advice reporting to him. So he has the joy of an extra 10 minutes in his section relative to his peers. Over to you, Johan.
Thank you, Rowan. Morning, everybody. Yeah, it's my privilege to present to you the game plan of Momentum Retail. Maybe even better put, the game plans or strategic ambitions, note the plural, of all the businesses, you know, in this portfolio. What's our story? Why do we exist? I trust this will become much clearer as I do my presentation, but if you ask me just in layman's terms, what's the purpose of the Momentum Retail Executive Committee? It's quite simply to make sure that we better connect, hear my words, better connect the product and channel ecosystem across the Momentum Group, to make sure that they achieve their collective value growth and business model transformation objectives.
Before I kick off, at a previous investor conference, you will recall that we spoke about advice-led distribution and digital-led distribution, and how we see the themes of advice and digital, you know, connecting our world, product businesses, advice businesses, clients, and so on. Now, looking at the Impact Strategy, I can assure you that we remain true to this conviction. Yeah, I do think it will become a hotspot of competitive activity in our industry in the next few years. And what you must take out from the Impact Strategy that I present today, we can now really make things more tangible, more concrete, more practical in taking our solutions, you know, into the specific game plan.
If you look at my agenda, very similar to all the other presenters, I am going to spend a bit of time on the Momentum Retail of today. Why do we exist? What are the key themes that brought us here? And why it's set up the way we decided to set it up. And then, obviously, dropping into the key ambitions of the different business units in this portfolio. And finally, you know, why I believe we will win. So if you, if you do have to focus, the first and the last slide is always the best one, you know, to start any presentation. So what does Momentum Retail look like today? Introducing Momentum Retail. You should really see four business domains coming together. Business domains, using that language, coming together in this portfolio. Top left sits the new Momentum Advice ecosystem.
I'm going to spend quite some time on this in my presentation, as this is a fairly new approach for us. But in short, this is where we drive the growth ambitions of Momentum Financial Planning, our tied agency channel, together with Consult, which is our provider-sponsored, independent, you know, financial advisor network. Top right, Jeanette also spoke a bit extensively about that, our IFA distribution team, our narrative in Momentum MDS, Momentum Distribution Services. Yeah, in partnership with the product businesses, they obviously compete for product sales in the IFA space. They do not give advice, you know, by design. But I will go so far as, Jeanette, endorse your statement, this is the team to beat in the IFA distribution space. Bottom left, spend some time on this, maybe now. That's where you find the life product business ecosystem.
Myriad, the four of them in that space, Myriad being the dominant one. And then bottom right, really the digital platform teams. They work for everybody across the Momentum Group, the client engagement platforms, the advisor engagement platforms. They basically stitch together our ecosystem when it comes to, when it comes to, taking our solutions to our various stakeholders. So the advice business block, the IFA product distribution block, and the digital platform block basically plays a broader Momentum Group role. If you think about it, the block on the bottom left, that's really the area where we capture the earnings and the value of new business outcomes, you know, for the Momentum Retail results, to put that, to put that in perspective. What are some of the key events that brought us here?
Some of the big-ticket items, big projects that we landed to take us into the future. Jeanette alluded to some of them. In the advice business space, quite a recent event, but we have made some radical decisions to restructure, reconfigure our tied agency channel, Momentum Financial Planning. We have basically reviewed and redesigned all the advisor support, advisor remuneration, advisor practice funding models quite extensively to take us into the future. I actually take my hat off to this team, both the planners and the sales support staff, you know, for their commitment to this process. Specialization theme in the IFA, MDS space, I'm gonna talk more to that later on. But again, here we changed a 20-year-old operating model, basically.
to set us up for the future, and I do think much of the market share gains we've gained across the product suite recently is due to the, to the specialization strategy for MDS. In the life product business space, I think it's important to just pause a little bit and talk about our group's reward strategy again. If you recall, we announced to the industry in 2022 that we'll, we'll exit the integrated group-wide loyalty program, incentivized wellness conception, and rather drop into a line of business approach. That was a massive change for us. We've executed that now successfully, basically the start of this calendar year. And going forward, every product business will then basically offer their own rewards program if they deem it's necessary in that specific space.
So I was on stage in 2022 actually talking to advisors, saying that, "Listen, going forward, it's very simple. In the health space, you can get more health returns for more clients for less, but it's in the health space. In the insurer space, branch business, more safety returns for more clients for less, but that's in the insurer space. And in the life insurance space, Steven's business, more life returns, you know, for more clients for less." That was basically the narrative. But the important point is, we believe it's a much better fit to any advice-led strategy. Now, why do I say that? It is important for us that every product building block in our product suite must stand on its own feet, must be competitive on its own, must be a best-of-breed solution, basically.
So advisors can plug it in at any advice plan at any given time, and it works for them. Obviously, our new approach introduces significantly less complexity in administering, you know, this conception going forward. I think that's maybe one of the key points. But also, I think to get a great value from Momentum, as a client, you do not have to buy the whole house. You do not have to belong to an integrated loyalty program to actually get value. And advisors love it also because it introduces less admin hassle in their lives. Because you can imagine the admin noise that these loyalty programs do create in the advisor's office, and it actually takes them out of... What they really wanna do is to drive growth. So in the life insurance space, this was also landed successfully. And bottom right spoke about expense savings.
There's another ZAR 50 million or so waiting for us in that space as we optimize, you know, the digital platforms. But we've basically decommissioned a chunk of legacy IT platform systems and re-engineered, upgraded them to bring us where we are today, to effectively land new advisor and client engagement platforms, which all the product businesses effectively, effectively leverage in our space. Key considerations. Now, again, I don't wanna rehash all the other industry challenges and environmental challenges. What's more important for me in this slide is to identify those themes I think that are quite important for us, taking us forward. Kind of those themes that if you do not conquer them in the next 3 to 5 years, I don't think you'll be a successful business anymore, or a seeded player, you know, in this industry.
Talking about collaboration, yes, I think Fatty also speak quite a lot about it in the investment presentation. But, you know, as a team today, we've nurtured some great players, but they don't always play that well together, you know, running on the field. Now, one of the great benefits of our group's federated operating model is that we do create phenomenal businesses. But how do they run in the field playing together better? That is a key opportunity for us. We couldn't do this well two, three years ago because they were still sorting out their own individual domain, domains, you would understand. They were still in that reinvent process. Now, we can actually get them to play better, much better together.
This applies across, you know, whether it's to our internal product channel, Foxholes, whether our business, digital way of work processes across the portfolio, also external partners. It's kind of a mindset change, a culture of collaboration, and you're gonna hear much of that in our game plans. Digital way of work, bit of a motherhood statement for some, I think, but this is no easy transformation for an existing financial services business. It's a global theme, actually, in this space, and we're very proud of our inroads that we've done. This is never done, by the way, but now we can say with confidence, you know, that we're on the right track. Future of underwriting, really looking at the Myriad initiative.
There's no doubt in my mind that if you do not set yourselves up as a proper digital life insurance company going forward, whether, and this applies to underwriting practices, to onboarding practices, to servicing practices, to client engagement models, you won't be around. Now, this is one area, Jeanette, where we decided not to be a fast follower in the digital space. So we do believe the Myriad team is leading the market and probably a year or two head start on some of their competitors, but this is quite an important box for us to tick. And then, yes, the importance of advice. Let's be honest, the more complex our world becomes, and that's a reality, the more impactful, you know, the relevance of advice, the bigger the difference you can make. So that's why we're so passionate about our advice story.
What you're gonna see of in the next few years is much more focus on advisor-led growth strategies in the advice space and single needs product kind of driven sales-led strategies. But the end game really is to stitch these things together, and that's where the real impactful magic actually will sit. And then finally, growth runway. You know, for any retail business, this is probably one of the most important scorecards. We all know that. The industry growth runway is tough. You know, we do acknowledge it. But, what I can really say with confidence, and this fuels much of my personal hypothesis around the success outcomes of where we're heading, is that the way this team is running on the field now, you should feel that, the vibe. I always say, the vibe in the office.
The way this team is running on the field now is much different than three years ago. I can say that with confidence. Now, I know competitors also lift their game, but so have we, and I think that's why, you know, we are giving you this presentation today. Strategic focus areas, just quickly connect with the group purpose. We don't have a separate purpose in Momentum Retail, but the group purpose: to build and protect clients' financial dreams. It just resonates so well with everything we do in this portfolio. You can just think, this is actually what financial planning does, isn't it? And whether you offer a product for retirement solutions or to do some income protection, that's actually what you do. So it resonates really well in our portfolio.
What I do focus on, in particular, at a Retail ExCo level, are really these three kind of themes. And, and really for me, focusing on those critical connection points, you know, between the businesses that touches on, on these three themes. I actually think that's where the real magic will sit. How you, in your execution strategies, connect the themes of growth, digital business transformation, and expense efficiency. They actually run hand-in-hand. It's not separate themes. And that's where I personally spend most of my time on. I do, I ever also wanna emphasize the role that Momentum Retail plays in the broader group ecosystem. Risto also touched on that. We are essentially, Peter, the product system provider to Metropolitan. All the new Metropolitan funeral policies also run on the Myriad back end.
In terms of the legacy Metropolitan products, all the product management and system challenges and the migration by the merge team that Risto also alluded to previously, also do the product development, product management, system administration for the Africa Life side. So we're quite a broad role from a product administration support perspective. But I think the, the other key point is when you start talking sales and distribution, there's a quite a key dependency on the advice ecosystem and also the IFA distribution business, MDS, to, ensure and deliver on the growth aspirations for many other product businesses in the Momentum Group also. But these are really the three themes that, that hold us together. But let me drop into, into a bit more detail. Momentum Advice. This is a new construction for us.
Figuring out and designing an operating model where we can drive the growth ambitions of Momentum Financial Planning and Consult together. It's one advice strategy, but executed through different brands, different FSPs, and different, actually, advisor value propositions also. How important is Momentum Advice to our business currently? It contributes about a third of new sales to the, to the Momentum Group ecosystem, and we obviously want to grow that. In the agency space, we spoke a lot about the size. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you do market research and find that the size of-- average size of as- assets under advice in MFP is actually the largest in the industry, just a small footprint. But the vertical integration opportunity is important. Only half of those assets really sits in a Momentum Group, you know, asset management building block in one way or another.
Also, we know that in terms of active advisors, it's growing, maybe even a little bit faster than some of the other channels, but it's so small, it doesn't really move the dial currently for us. Consult, on the other hand, our RFA, Independent Financial Advisor Network, has been growing from strength to strength over the years. In fact, I think from a short-term perspective, commercial short-term in particular, comparing to the other bigger advice houses out there, it's probably the second largest just in the commercial short-term space. Just give you the sense of the gravitas of this business. We do want Consult to be the number one provider-sponsored advisor network in the industry. That's our stated ambition, and for Momentum Financial Planning, just moving to the top three, I think it will be good enough for us, you know, for now.
What I can say is, overarching both these FSPs is a specific focus on an advice culture. So yes, product sales secure margin, but product sales through an advice funnel is quite important for us. It's one advice culture, but shared principles around vertical integration, digital transformation, and also sustainability, which really talks to the commercial outcomes from this business. In terms of footprint growth, it might be a shock to some of you, but we haven't recruited, that's the language to use, a single agent into Momentum Financial Planning in the past decade. So by putting these two worlds together, we can now offer quite a compelling value proposition to new advisors also. Great career journey, great succession path. Most important for me, all the investment in our advice systems we can now leverage and get scale.
You all know it's extremely difficult to scale a professional advice business, and we can leverage the technology. We also leverage principles around financial planning, wealth management, all the specialization activities, you know, that touches on that. There's around ZAR 100 billion of assets under advice in this collective ecosystem. The lion's share, Jeanette also shared with you sitting in Momentum Financial Planning. But I do wanna emphasize, and I'm not gonna talk to all the targets on the right, you can see it in the back, it's really about securing growth for us in MFP and also in Consult. They've actually got great capabilities, but we don't share it. In the MFP side, great Institute of Financial Planning to groom new advisors. In the Consult side, great practice management solutions. That's the language that we're creating in Momentum.
So the Momentum Group is well known for its product DNA language. We're now creating an advice DNA language, and that's where this business actually lives. MDS, or our IFA Distribution Services, do distribution services, I mean, the theme of specialization grounds everything we do in this specific business. Because of that, we can launch a Curate offering in the MDS, you know, investments team. Because of that, we can ensure that the product business' digital processes connect with the world out there. FNZ delivers from an investment perspective. You take that through the investment funnel. Steven launches his Myriad side, his digital onboarding solutions. We can take that, you know, into the MDS retail space, and so on.... How important is MDS to our group? Maybe you don't realize, but for investment value, about 80% of new business comes through MDS to Momentum Investments.
Ballpark 60-65% on the life side, about 30% on the employee benefit side, and on the health open scheme side, I think about 50% comes from MDS. So this is quite an important distribution business for the group at large to grow and go forward. What we're gonna add to this game, two things also. The one, quite a bespoke focus to support IFAs. Remember, MDS doesn't give advice, but they deal with advice. To support IFAs in their practice management processes also. Specifically, the smaller FSPs, to keep them independent, but at the same time, we will have a bespoke focus where MDS and the product businesses work together to go to the formal, bigger advice networks and really establish a great relationship. We refer to the latter as a key account strategy. We refer to the former as advisor partnership strategy.
Point is, if an independent financial advisor, a small one, small guy, wants to move to a bigger advisor network, we're gonna catch them in consult, so we can close the loop, you know, in that way also. Further to that, our BC force, broker consultant force in MDS, in the retail space in particular, despite market shares, they're the smallest. One of the smallest in the industry. Compared to some of our competitors, it's 2/3 of the size, which means they're very productive. The most productive BC force, but we can't get everywhere. Our stretch is limited to some extent. So we will also invest in our retail BC footprint, and that's the target you see in the top right, to actually make sure. And that will benefit the protection business and also recurring premium saving business and health also, you know, by design.
Efficiencies, key for the channel also to reduce costs, but they can only do that if the product business deliver their digital processes, and that's the target we set ourselves. And clearly for MDS, supporting advisors, IFAs that bring business, growing that as well. But we're quite excited about what the team can deliver for us. My biggest excitement sits in the connection space. I can really see how the product businesses and MDS is really getting close and showing up together when they hunt for growth. That is my biggest excitement, looking at this specific strategy. Our life business, Mariette Stevens' business, I think I spoke about digital, spoke about being the digital insurer. So our ambition for Momentum Advice, to become the leading advice house, advice brand in the industry. MDS, the number one IFA product supporter.
Steven, clearly, the number one digital life insurer in South Africa. In the IFA space, our market share is somewhere between 16, 17. You know, we're kind of number one, number two, maybe number one, maybe number two, depending on how it goes. We really wanna stretch that to 20% also. And advisors actually are very good. The proper surveys rating you on your technology prowess, if that's a language to use. And we're very glad how that's shooting up through the ranks to be succeeded as the number one life tech player, you know, also in this industry. A lot of effort already went into our onboarding processes, Life Returns 2.0. There's new screening capabilities that we will take to the market in the next quarter.
It all builds up, and as I said before, we think we've got about a 2-year lead ahead of competitors. We need to stay ahead of the curve, but make it work for us. What is important to note about life business, and it's a little bit different than investment business, much of the activity actually sits at point of sale. You must understand that. Wealth business is not only point of... A lot of activity afterwards, switches, servicing, tax certificates, you know, all those kind of things. So the battle really is at point of sale. That's where your onboarding innovation, your quotes process, Life Returns, also need to be sharp. The key thing for us is to lift our underwriting game. We spoke about Fast Track previously, and yet you also alluded to that.
What I can add to this conversation, I think, is that, the growth in digital-led direct sales is becoming quite meaningful in our ecosystem. It's a different market segment for us, different client segment, a different client demographic, and that's something that we haven't really played in a lot in the past, and I think that's really, really... So if it's 15% of new business sales in terms of new clients, you could probably easily double that, you know, in terms of the impact. The premiums are smaller, as you know, by design in that specific market segment. So we're proud of what this business can achieve, and probably Investo, from an earnings perspective, will be the biggest, single biggest product business, I think, across the bigger, you know, Momentum Group. But this is a key part of our strategy.
Talking about value of new business, I'm gonna talk a little bit of that later on, but this is a key contributor to the life value of new business also. Our savings business, Investo, it's actually the biggest platform in the Momentum brand stable, when you count policy numbers, quite interestingly. But savings business, Risto alluded to the market consistent new business embedded value criteria. I'm an ex-actuary, so some of the things above my head. But you basically predict less asset management fees and discount them. So the margins, then the present value of gross margins on savings business, has been impacted by IFRS 17, and then also, I think, the impact of present value of renewal expenses also. So the VNB outcomes of Investo has been hit negatively by IFRS 17. Now, having said that, it does put the focus clearly on expenses.
And this business, very simply, has only got one mandate: Change yourself into a digital process operating model as quickly as possible, and that's what they're doing. The quote engines is out there. The onboarding engines will hit the shelf towards the end of this calendar year.... service model, by the way, it is two-part ready from a digital servicing platform perspective also. So that's really what they drive. So a significant chunk of the expense savings we also want to extract from our channels actually gets delivered by the product business processes that the Investo team digitalize and take to the market. We've invested a little bit in this business over the past few years, and I think we've seen the fruits of that. Great market share gains also in the retirement annuity space, and the specialization strategy for MDS also helping us here.
But they've got a very simple mandate: go digital or go home. That's my instruction to them, and that's where they spend all their effort on. There will be more products also hitting the shelf, but for now it's about value chain optimization. It does contribute to the Momentum life value of new business, but we wanna increase that contribution in the next three years. Merge, this, Risto already addressed some of the challenges. On opportunities in the Merge team, for those actuaries in the room, if you're going to prepare to pass Life Office Practice Fellowship, this is the world you're gonna work in. You'll get all the tips there, hardcore, actuarial systems, that's the world you live in. Now, they administer, they oversee, I think it's 2 million, 3 million policies. I forgot the number now.
Pretty much all the Metropolitan back ends, they're driving the big migration from the legacy Metropolitan mainframe system to the traditional Momentum Life policy administration system. So the savings numbers you say, you see on the board, they've constructed together with Metropolitan Life and the Africa team. That's what they're actually targeting. Risto spoke about product rationalization that will actually follow the migration. That migration will land early in 2025, so then you can switch off the old systems, then you can really get going for further efficiencies. But this is quite a seasoned team in this specific space. We've neglected some of the optimization exercises on the legacy Momentum Life book over the last few years because they focused extensively on the Metropolitan migration, but they will now get an opportunity to also actually move into that space.
But that's quite an important team in the bigger picture. I'm looking forward, actually, to the product rationalization thinking, because you're gonna change the culture in this business also. Then Momentum Trust. We don't often talk about our trust business. It's not a money spinner in any way or form, but it's absolutely pivotal in any advice-led strategy. Just understand that. We have empowered this business over the last two, three years with systems, platforms, CRM, we're landing a new estate administration system also in that space. They've plugged into our ecosystem. You can see your will on your app, Momentum app, if you wanna... It's a great estate administration business. They also launch products in partnership with Myriad, so they're well connected in our system.
Obviously, going forward, key part of our Momentum Advice game plan also with MDS, becoming estate administration partners for some of the other bigger advisor networks also out there, but also the product strategy that goes with it. I'm quite excited at what we can achieve here. Again, this is a professional service business. It is difficult to scale. Scales, if you see that efficiency improvement of 25%, basically means you can do more estates with less people, and that's the role of technology systems in this space. So this is one of those businesses that actually plays across all the, all the world. They've also got offshore trust capabilities, and they, dealing with our private wealth advisors in Momentum Advice also, for example, in that space. So this is a key enabler for us in our strategy, our game plan going forward. Why will we win?
Now, it sounds like a broken record techniques perhaps, if I keep repeating myself, why I'm excited about the prospects of this ecosystem. Entrenching the MDS specialization strategy for us is critical in the next few years. That will anchor much of the growth strategies and collaboration strategies that we will launch in the next few years, taking that to market. This team is ready for it. It's still a different model than some of our competitors. You can appreciate that. Many of them still distribute products across a single BC, broker consultant. But this is actually something that we've worked hard towards to get us here. Already 2, 3 years in the running, but the next level, in partnership with product businesses, I'm quite excited about. Our approach to the Momentum Advice game plan, I think it's quite elegant.
We're almost FSP agnostic, and I can say maybe in the Momentum group, and it's unfair to Momentum Financial Planning, they were a bit of a passion bias towards IFAs. Let's be honest about that. A lot of that's got to do with commercial realities in the Momentum Financial Planning space, which we fixed over the past year, but it's really channel agnostic. And in fact, from my side, whether an advisor joins Momentum Financial Planning or whether an advisor joins Consult, I'm quite happy. But you need the full suite, and you can actually close the advice narrative across both FPP- FSPs much more eloquently. You can also specialize better in that ecosystem. There is a strong theme of specialization also in the IFA space, wealth management, insurance, commercial, short-term, et cetera.
Also, this team will, Momentum Financial Planning in particular, will partner with Brent in the short-term insurance side, his BDC channel. I think, Brent, you will talk about that a little bit more eloquently in your presentation. But you must hear one advice culture, grounded, as I said before, on the principles of vertical integration, digital transformation, and sustainability. We can do this because of our investment in advice platforms over the past 2, 3 years. The advice technologies, the advice compliance technologies, everything that coming together for us. I will submit, in all humbleness, that we've made some mistakes or probably learned some tough lessons in our agency space. That's not going to waste in the new Momentum Advice strategy. And, as we've set up the team going forward, I can see the new energy also in the MFP space.
The key message we're sending to the world out there is that the Momentum brand will own the advice space in South Africa. The theme of advice, I think there's much more about, around that theme. The narrative around advice, there's still a lot of work we wanna do in this space. Some of that might only land in the next strategy, Jeanette. But I'll definitely put money on it, that the import of advice, and obviously supported by footprint growth, is what Momentum wants to be known for, and this will definitely dominate, I think, our game plans, you know, going ahead. Dumo, you also spoke about that, I think, in your presentation. On expenses, yes, Risto, yeah, I can just endorse the expense reduction targets. About ZAR 150 million from a Momentum Retail space, contributing to that outcome.
Big chunk of that is IT, Ravi, sitting in that client engagement space. As we mature more technology, there's a lot of duplication that we're also eroding in that specific environment. But it depends quite a lot on product businesses now to deliver those specific solutions for us. And you will hear much more about that. I've spoke about Investo, Myriad, et cetera, but the other businesses also, you know, need to come to the table. And we talk about cost efficiencies, I think just the system migration period in Metropolitan space contributes towards that. Digital transformation. Again, motherhood statement. I can just say it permeates everything we do in our business at the moment, and it's got different phases also.
There's a digital transformation focus in the product business space. There's a digital transformation focus in the advice tech space. There's a digital transformation in the distribution space, and also, you know, in the engagement platform space. You know, I just looked recently, quite surprised actually, looking at our advisor platform, and I'm excluding now the normal things advisor do, you know, looking for commission statements and checking just power reports. The advisor activity on our platforms, client-related, more than doubled, you know, in the past year. Client side increased by 30%. Just shows you how important this is becoming in our strategy. Now, from an expense efficiency perspective, we wanna move more clients to do self-service, so we're quite excited about that. It's something that's not tangible. I feel it, yet I would like to make it more tangible to our competitors.
But one of the outcomes of our fairly complex, use that language, federated operating model, and I'm putting on an IT hat now, is that we had to build the capability to stitch together different product businesses on different technologies, using different product business processes, often playing in different industries, into a single platform. Other product providers do not have to do that. Now, to do that, you need to set up or create a specific architecture to actually achieve that. That's the architecture that will allow us to also play and leverage this as a competitive capability outside of our business domain. And that's something I think that the next generation, I think, will finally leverage. Growth. Let's finish with growth.
There's another part in the classroom I was always in trouble, where the teacher said, you know, "Did you pay attention?" Now, let me just summarize maybe, you know, how I think about growth from a Momentum Retail perspective. Just the three, three areas I wanna highlight again. IFA distribution. I spoke about specialization. Curate digital transformation in much stronger focus between product businesses and channels. I think some of the other presenters will also talk to that. We can now develop a bespoke support strategy off the back of technologies for small IFAs and a bespoke focus on larger advisor networks. It's another form of specialization. We can add to this an increase in our retail marketing advisor footprint. So you can just hear the language, growth, growth, growth. The Momentum Advice game plan, I know well done is better than well said.
I will, I will, I will take that, you know, as a, as a narrative. One of my colleagues actually spoke to... shared that with me recently again. But we are much better positioned to execute on this game plan. We would not have been able to do this just a year ago, just capability-wise. And constructing this ecosystem where we share, where we leverage footprint growth in both worlds, is something that I'm very excited about. They need to deliver the goods, I acknowledge, but we've set them up for success. And when you think about protection sales, I mean, the inherent competitiveness of the offering, its underlying engines, underwriting engines, et cetera, but also very excited about the growth prospects in new client segments. Speaking about the client sales, direct sales, that we can also celebrate, you know, at the moment.
So these things coming together for us, I think, in a very, very specific way. And the rest of your numbers in the presentation, I can't comment on the 1.4, but yes, it's very simple in my life also. ZAR 1.5 billion ambition for earnings, ZAR 150 million cost savings, and that 1% margin on value of new business, you can do your own sums. Broadly, also around ZAR 150 million odd in value of new business improvement that we will then add to the group, you know, value of new business. And I will be very pleased with that outcome. Which brings me to my final slide. And here I can just say, you know, let's be honest, and Jeanette, I'm also getting to the end of my corporate career, but in many ways, I'm probably more excited than ever before. And, and, and, you know, why is that?
I guess, I guess for me, you know, we live in a great environment of change. I see lots of new stuff again, all of us do. But to bring some structure to that conversation, you know, is really what energizes me. Because you can't just go... You need to focus, and know exactly what you wanna do. That's what this strategy makes so powerful for me. It's actually about an execution plan. It's not just about a thinking plan. And the second one, just looking at the teams and their energy in the room. I spoke about them running on the field. I think they're now in a position to truly leverage the competitive benefits of all the reinvented growth effort they went through the past 5, 6, 7 years.
And that's fantastic to see them, to really get, you know, on the front foot again. And then I can hand over the baton and see the next generation of management take this business absolutely, you know, to the next level. That's my story. Thank you.
Thank you, Johan. So tough cues to follow, I guess. Maybe the first point I wanna make is that Momentum Investments, as a group of investment capabilities that we have, are already fully integrated into the broader ecosystem of the Momentum Group, right? So over the years, we've had to collaborate across the business with corporate. Johan spoke about many of those distribution changes that we've made, the specialization in distribution. We have been a beneficiary of that as an investment business, but we are also a beneficiary of the many opportunities that we have across the group of asset gatherers, right? So our life companies, the corporate business, Guardrisk, Lawrence, are all asset gatherers, and we're often the beneficiary of that.
Now, we can argue that that is sometimes a bit of lazy money, and so we need to show up also outside of the group effectively, and this is what this story is about. So let me just go. I'll go through a similar agenda, so not spending too much time on this, but again, maybe slide three and slide five will be the key ones, maybe to articulate who we are, what we are, where we will focus, and why we are also, as a management team in this business, very excited about the opportunity. Now, we have been coined by Risto as a unicorn, right? So that is fantastic. Jeanette, I guess six years ago, that would not have been on the cards by a mile, right? So, we'll take that, and I think, Risto, you're right, and I'll get to the numbers.
We say more than ZAR 1 billion is what we want to achieve. Well, you know, I'm not sure if I'd be excited about that come 3 years' time. So let's see where we end up with those. I wanna show this slide maybe for 2 reasons. Maybe to give a bit of credit to Jeanette, who's been kind of the leader of this business. I mean, I think she really wanted to say that how well we have done under her leadership also in this business. We have got back the mojo that we had in the LISP business, in the wealth business, right? We've captured back the market share. We are a leader in many respects in the breadth of the solutions and capabilities we have, even before the replatform exercise.
Annuities business, you know, stands on its own feet. It's a full contributor to the group, and so forth. And then I think maybe the last point I wanna make is Momentum Investments have become a strong financial contributor to the group, and, and should be, right? And we want to be, as a management team, claim that space. I think, somebody said earlier, "Well, there's three unicorns." The challenge is on, right? So, so there we go. Lawrence, Dumo. So who are we in Momentum Investments Group, right? We have a fantastic range of capabilities, a toolkit that I think often is the envy of others, right? Do we use it well? Well, no, not yet.
I think there's lots of opportunities on this picture where we can grow to a different level, I think, in the business, which is why I would have thought ZAR 1 billion, you know, can we do better than that? Wealth management at the top is key for us. It's part of our DNA. I think, Jeanette, you were also there when we started the LISP, actually. Many years back, we were one of the first LISPs in the market. Lost kind of the way somewhere in between, and we're back in that space. So this is key for us. It is the key touch point in the advice businesses we have, Johan, with you, but also often in how we support, even in the retailization world, Dumo, in corporate. Structured products and annuities is a key, key business for us, very profitable.
Risto mentioned that, too. So the challenge in this picture is for all the other businesses to catch up to annuities, right? And to also deliver in the same way. But in annuities, you can see we've put that second. We're focusing the emphasis on the structured products line, because that is where we definitely need to make more inroads, develop better innovative products, and also create solutions that will navigate a little bit the pressure that we might have on the annuities VNB when the yield curve changes, or when sales drop down, and so forth, and I'll touch a bit more on, on that. Then we have multi-management and asset management, as two key focus areas or two key businesses, planning units, as we call them. The institutional platform forms part of the multi-management business.
In multi-management, there's clearly multi-managed funds, and there's the DFM business, the model portfolios. And we have that in the UK, we have that in SA, and the purpose of this one unit now is to combine all of those capabilities. It's part of also efficiency, making sure that we set ourselves up successfully for the markets in which we operate. And the world has become less of a local and a global world, right? It's an integrated world. How do we show up in SA for clients? How do we show up in other markets in the multi-management space? And Equilibrium, as the DFM, also came to the fore in the last four years. Still a lot of runway and growth possible there.
But it is in this part of the investment engine, I guess, where we create the investment solutions, the centralized investment propositions for, for our channels. So I think you're on with, with the advice channels that we have, with consult. That is where kind of we create that in partnership with advice propositions. This must fit like a hand in glove, actually, with the way that an advisor needs to show up at the client, and this is the engine that creates that. And then on the right side, we've got asset management. Now, we've got multiple components in asset management, and I think maybe for many years, maybe the last five years or so, asset management was subservient in our world to multi-management.
The intent to lift this out is to make sure that we put a larger lens on the contribution that asset management must make in our world. In fact, I think, Johan, you said in the IFA space and in the DFM space, we have fund pickers actually at an asset class level, not at a multi-managed level. So we need to make sure that we set ourselves up successfully to also compete in that market space. There are three components, and I'll touch briefly on them later, too, but I think it's important to mention here. Some are internal capabilities. They are typically the fixed income credit, systematic strategies that we run internally, lives closely with the life insurance license. That was always the philosophy that we have.
Those things that work well can be under the Momentum banner. On the right side, we've had Eris for a long time, right? Eris was really a shareholder's investment. I think we pulled it into this portfolio so that we can also make sure that we get the benefit of the property capabilities, both property development, property management, property funds that sit in Eris. And how can we optimize that business, again, find new growth opportunities for them to add to the, to the asset management, earnings? And then we have IMG. As you know, we've acquired the full business, an exciting business with, with a shareholding in, in a number of affiliate boutique managers, as we call them. Those would be managers that we also, well, mostly not, not always necessarily, use in our multi-management solutions.
But if we put a shareholder's hat on, then it's a fantastic opportunity to also participate in asset management, margin, and revenue that we otherwise won't, right? These are businesses that are effective in the institutional market space. They grow well there. They can target it. For them, the challenge is, of course, the retail space. And so we must make sure that we can find the right way to also deploy them on our wealth platforms in umbrella fund schemes, I think, Dumo, so that they're also sitting there. We give them exposure and an opportunity to also raise retail and other institutional assets. And then Jeanette also touched on our single manager that we will launch in August, but over a few months, actually, which is called Curate. Jeanette called it our outsourced manager.
It is our boutique asset management business, where we insource specialized skills to manage the different funds that we have. It already exists in the market in some form, in an Nedgroup, in an Amplified. This is our exciting solution to that. And in fact, I think, you know, we are probably having very high expectations of this business. I think in the plans and in the numbers, maybe that's also a little rabbit, I guess, Risto, that we might have. I think we should do better in that space than our initial numbers show. It will be a fantastic solution set that we take out to the IFA space, specifically in SA.
But the offshore components that will be in this range will also be available in the UK market and in our expat clients, because the needs are the same everywhere, right? So watch this space. I think we are very excited about this. So we will show up in the retail market under Curate and Equilibrium brands, and that is what we will see in the IFA space, but also, I guess, in our channels, Johan, well, how we deploy it.
So I think if there's, if there's a place where we can actually contribute far better, maybe, you know, not in the next three years, because we're still developing Curate, and there's some investment that goes into that, it will be in the asset management space, where I think there's lots of opportunity for us as a, as a Momentum Group, to really unlock future value. And then, of course, this whole picture needs to be vertically integrated. Money that comes into the top must flow into the multi-managed solutions if it's multi-managed, and it must go into the asset management capabilities. And remember, there is a securities business, too, there, our stockbroking business, where we trade very little of our own trades, actually, through our own stockbroker, right? Easy things to unpick in time to come.
What we have done also, we've set our management structure on this. So we've got a wealth management planning unit, a structured annuities, and a structured products and annuities, a multi-management business, and an asset management business. And then we've overlaid a commercial office on this, and the commercial office focus will be to drive vertical integration, and I think that's quite important. So we will show up in the management team here in the same way that Jeanette described we want to do for the Momentum Group. Vertical integration will only happen if we collectively look at this business, and the executive team overseeing this business will firstly be measured on how successful we collectively are and then individual businesses.
So again, I'll touch on a few market trends, but there are three ones on this slide that was not on Jeanette's slide, which is really margin pressure, sustainability and impact, and migration of talent. Those red blocks, kind of you should find through the rest of our presentation, are how we show up to, I guess, navigate these trends. Now, often people can see these trends as a threat. There are definitely people out there and businesses out there that see them as opportunities, and what we need to do is make sure we see the opportunities in each of these, because there are opportunities that we shouldn't miss. So in the low growth environment, and it's not only in South Africa, right?
We often find that in many other markets, too, where growth changes a little bit or certain elements that we focus on changes something else. So vertical integration, quite key. Consolidation and partnerships, I think investment management, just to put it up there as a potential opportunity for us to look at. There are opportunities, and we can see that across the markets in which we operate. So we need to be, we need to be aware of that. That is a fantastic opportunity in a low growth environment. Margin pressure and regulatory complexities go hand in hand, right? In the U.K., there's a new regulation that's called Consumer Duty.
What the Consumer Duty intended was to make sure that they are better focused by the entire value chain, from the advice right to the last fund manager, in delivering good value and good outcomes for clients. But guess what? It has caused the price point to be the most important measurement almost. So when advisors need to report to the regulator on how they have implemented Consumer Duty, they put a price point there and they say, "I've chucked out all of these funds that's priced higher," irrespective of performance, almost. So it is definitely changing the dynamics in the market, and we must be aware of what regulatory change like that, 'cause Consumer Duty, I'm sure, will find its way to South Africa, too, as all other regulations end up doing.
And it has an implication on how advisors buy and on how we distribute. So we need to focus on product simplification, use AI and digital well. There's a few research papers from BCG and Oliver Wyman that actually are very specific on investment management globally and wealth management, and the efficiency targets that we need to achieve, but also the efficiency targets that we can get by using those technologies through the value chain. And then migration of talent. I mean, Jeanette mentioned that people are our competitive edge. That is true, but therefore, we need to make sure that we are attractive for our competitive edge, that we keep the competitive edge, but also that we find the competitive edge because we have... It's mobile talent. We see that everywhere.
So the question is, how do we set ourselves up in a, in a digital world that can attract talent, wherever they are, essentially? And maybe that's part of a curate business model, too, right? Is we find talent wherever they are without having to employ them in a specific place. So just an eye on the clock there. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. This you'll see from every, I guess, investment management business. We need to be trusted. We want to be known for crafting and pioneering solutions. We want to have-- make sure that we deliver unique investment and, and engagement journeys for advisors and clients. And then, of course, it is to deliver our group's purpose, right? To build and protect financial dreams.
Now, this can be an idle statement on a wall, or it can be the lens through which we make all decisions, and that will be the latter, right? So, so we will use this as the compass through which we, we take decisions and, and how we decide where we focus. In the short term, it's making sure that we live up to the unicorn status, right? So, so our strategy on a page. Five themes that we have identified in the Momentum Investments, group business, focusing around growth, client experience, the operating model, so efficiency in that. Digitalization is absolutely critical in that business, in that part of, of, of our focus areas. Product propositions. I think we had a long debate whether you call it propositions or product, because product seems almost traditional, but propositions are the full experience that clients have, right?
From getting the advice right through the life cycle of a solution, and eventually, that solution delivering on a financial dream that they might have, right? So I think, we may need to look differently at how we construct products. But again, simplification, I think, Arnold, as you said about rationalization of products, we are good in, I guess, financial services, right, to create new things. We are terrible to consolidate them, to change them, to close them down, and so we eventually pull all these things behind us, right? So and that becomes a burden. So how we are more active in this space will be quite critical. And then with margin pressure, I guess it is important for us to understand both ends of the value of the price chain, if you want. Cost efficiency and low cost is important, right?
And that's not a different market segment; it's the same market segment. Affluent advisors in affluent space often want three solutions. They want a lower cost solution, want a sustainability solution, and an active solution. We must make sure that we have the ability to navigate all three of those propositions for, for advisor networks and advisor partners. But we must also make sure that we play in the, in the part of the investment value chain that's the most lucrative, right? Which is real assets, private assets, real estate, and so forth, and so alternative products and the structured focus. People I've touched on. And all of this must be enabled by data and AI and digital. And I think there's one element that I took out yesterday because my colleague said: "What does BFI stand for?" It's behavioral finance.
We've done a lot of work on behavioral finance in Momentum Investments and in the group, actually. The ability to deploy it depends very much on that middle, but having the right operating model, the right front end in advice and so forth, because that is very powerful. I mean, the insights we have and that we can see of personalities, of individuals on their buying behavior and exit behavior on funds, is quite material. And now, if we can deploy that through the value chain to make sure it enhances the experience of, of investors, but also of advisors, because often it's the advisor behavior, right? Or often it's the investment manager behavior, and I think we'll apply it right through to that understanding.... spoken about our federated model, as a Momentum Investments Group Exco.
We own this piece, we own that total piece, and we must make sure that we deliver the bottom line, right, that more than ZAR 1 billion collectively. It might emerge slightly differently, because in vertical integration, we can't just price traditionally, right? We have to price differently in order to unlock the end-to-end proposition for clients. And then the targets at the bottom, normalized headline earnings, more than ZAR 1 billion. In order to deliver that, we believe we need to have assets under management and administration of more than ZAR 1 trillion. Net flows need to be in the order annually of more than ZAR 30 billion. Now, that might navigate a little bit, right? Because some are chunky and so forth, but over time, it should be that annually.
Cost efficiency, I mean, this was a target that incidentally we put down actually as a business unit before we've completed the expense analysis project with the consultants and that Dries just spoke of. It's very similar to this amount, so we need to take out real savings of ZAR 150 million over the next three years out of the business. We know where we need to find it. Some needs a little bit of investment and work, and some obviously require the re-platforming to be completed. The one that I'm, I guess, most worried about on this bottom success factor list here or measurements, is the Net Promoter Score of more than 70, which is world-leading, right, if we get it right. I guess 60 is good.
But we said, you know, we must aspire for a Net Promoter Score of 70 amongst advisors, amongst our clients, and amongst our staff, right? In order to get those right. Now, if we can get a Net Promoter Score of that, then those numbers should be very easy to achieve, actually. But that's the one that I think, you know, is the most challenging for us. Let me quickly run through a few of the individual business units, and I've got five minutes left, so I need to just touch on a few of these. We've spoken about FNZ as our choice of technology partner in the wealth management space. They are definitely the partner for us from a technology capability set. But the re-platform exercise is not a simple exercise, right?
We know that, and we experience that, and we continue to work very hard to get that re-platform in place because it is the digital platform of the future for us, and it is the digital platform that will, that will integrate into the back end, distributed ledger technologies, tokenized fund solutions, all of those components that I can see coming down the line that we need to prepare for, especially in the real assets world, the less liquid assets, and so forth. But then also into the front end, getting that personalized journeys for clients, personalized experiences for advisors who aren't in the, in the advice space and so forth. And how do we, how do we connect that?
Utilizing the overall finance insights across the value chain to make sure we get more stickiness, but we also get better experiences for clients. Vertical integration, this is the glue that binds it, actually. There's a paper on Wealth 3.0 and Asset Management 3.0 from Oliver Wyman. This is exactly that, right? So we need to make sure we deliver effectively here, and we will continue to work and expect to continue or complete the re-platforming towards the end of next calendar year. Then maybe just touch on client experience. This is where the Net Promoter Score must also live up, right?
It is about personalization, and I think if we get digitalization right, if we get the platform right, and the digital, digital journeys, then it creates the possibility for hyper-personalization or the experience of hyper-personalization. You know, we need to make sure that our clients and advisors can engage with us the way they want to. It's almost an Apple model in a sense, right? So this is our version of that. But always understanding that it can't be a cold interface. It must be warm, it must have that warmness, it must have a safety net, and that's why advice and advisors will remain a key part of this ecosystem. And there's a few measures.
I think there's a lot of measures that we have put in place in our business for vertical integration to start to measure how things flow through the business, how we think about the business, and how we interconnect these capabilities. We touched on structured products and annuities. I think we have found a fantastic rhythm in the market in how we price for the volume we want to get. We get probably the biggest share of the IFA annuities business. But remember, where growth must come from for us is in a larger advice business, Johan, a larger agency force, because half of annuities or guaranteed annuities business are probably written by annuity forces or agents in South Africa and half by IFAs. And we play in the one half and not the other half.
So we need to make sure, and we'll push Johan and the team really to get that advice business set up so that we can play stronger in there. And of course, client experience here might mean something different, right? It is a retired client community, and so the way they expect to engage is slightly different to our wealth client base and so forth, and we need to navigate that. Again, we have set ourselves up effectively for that. And then a big focus on structured products.
Now, I think in Dumo, in your world, there's also a structured products and annuities business, and the way we align and the way we put our forces and skills together to really make sure we can, we can, bed this down properly so that we run almost a cycle that's more natural for us in this space. VNB, you can see there for us, 1%-2% VNB depends a little bit on the market environment. And VNB of between ZAR 550 million and ZAR 750 million, I think rest are at ZAR 1 billion to ZAR 1.2 billion. I'm not sure where rest of it is now, but yes. So there's a ZAR 200 million difference. Cool.
In multi-management, you know, in this business, we must be the centralized investment proposition provider of choice for our channels, but also for other channels, and I think we'll continue to focus on that. In the interest of time, I'll skip through a few of these. Jeanette mentioned, some small initiatives we have in the U.K. and the expat market, where we have taken small stakes in, in wealth managers that we've come to know very well over the years, where we enable them to really buy up others and grow a network of their own. So for us, if we do invest there, it will be in the distribution space because that's the most challenging in new markets.
We've got all the capabilities, but it's getting traction in distribution that we don't own in those markets, and we need to grow with it. And there's a lot of consolidation happening in that space, and so we need to make sure that we also play in an area of the market that works for us. The key, key focus here, I just want to highlight that, is the implemented consulting business. Theo, in your business, in multi-management, but in the U.K., where we connect really the asset consulting business and the multi-management capability to actually respond to a market that's massively changing in the U.K. now, where self-standing asset allocation are really falling away because most DB schemes are fully funded, and so they go to either insurance buyouts or implemented solutions. And so kind of this is a response to that.
Well, down the road to actually launch that in a month or two. And then, I guess, you know, product and product performance, the same with asset management. You know, Robert Skrabo, who heads kind of our internal or the internal capabilities to fixed income and credit, says, "You know, if we don't have performance, we can't expect sales to sell, and sales can't get performance right." So we must, we must make sure that we have the right performance in an asset management world, but also in a multi-management world, and we will measure this very differently going forward. Asset management consists of multiple components. I've spoken about Curate, how we need to optimize and maximize the IMG affiliates. What do we add in there? What should... What do we miss?
Are stakes of 15%-30% good enough, right, for some of those managers that we really have a strong shareholder belief in? And how do we exit and change and add, and so forth? And how does it fit into the broader portfolio? So there are four business unit CEOs here looking at this, and collectively, we are sitting down to say: How do we really grow asset management as a contributor to the Momentum Investments bottom line? Right. And then, as I'm on 0 minutes, why will we win? Maybe three things that I want to highlight. I think our comprehensive toolkit and capabilities. I mean, it is clear that there are a lot of, a lot of levers that we can still pull to unlock value. The biggest one is vertical integration, right? Because there are self-standing components.
Jeanette mentioned the number earlier today. We've done a number of modelling around it. It needs to happen, right? We need to initiate it, we need to change our mindset in how we look at it, right, from self-standing, fully independent decision makers, to align the decision making to how we get to that. But a fantastic range of capabilities that will help us win. A group balance sheet, that's fantastic. Many of our pure asset management competitors don't have that. We have it, right? So we share it with the likes of Metropolitan and Dumo, and when we structured annuities and structured products, but collectively, we work to make sure that we optimize that position also.
Our partnership DNA, Johan, the way we show up as investments, I think we not only we create, I think, in Momentum Investments now, probably 60%-70% of group PR value, so... And that's the voice and the passion that we have in the business, right? It's the right voice to use, it's the right platform to use, and so forth. So, I think that partnership DNA and how we want to show up with advisors and clients are key. And the distribution strength that we have in the group. Our challenge is really to find the other markets, or in other markets, distribution partnerships that will, that will work for us. And the other items on there, I guess, are quite clear.
Digital approach, our way of managing towards an integrated, responsible investment philosophy. I think we have the right way. We've just become a signatory to the UK Stewardship Code. You've seen our sustainability-integrated sustainability report. We are leaders in that respect, and I think we will have a stronger voice going forward also in how we see stewardship, ESG, and responsible investing. And then, like Johan said, there's the last slide. Thank you very much.
Okay, I thought Rowan was gonna do a rousing intro. Well, you can't blame me for asking. All right, thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you about the Momentum Corporate part of the impact strategy today. I was reflecting earlier that, and more so after Jeanette's reflections, that the last time we gathered in this fashion, we all had to seat, we all had to sit one or two seats, seats apart. We all had to wear masks, and we were not allowed to post any pictures on social media in case anyone realized that we were gathering. So, and that was quite a challenging time, and it was a time where we had just emerged from probably one of the poorest financial performances we had seen for the Momentum Corporate business in its history.
What galvanized us into action then, and what continues to galvanize us into action today, fueled by the group's new purpose, was and is the knowledge that the products that we provide and are responsible for are very often the largest asset base any employed South African will ever have in their life. The risk solutions that we provide are very often the largest and only form of risk protection they will ever be able to afford in their lives. We deliver on this through six end-to-end businesses. The Funds at Work umbrella fund, which houses our umbrella fund solutions. The group insurance business, which houses all of our risk solutions. And combined, those are our largest earnings contributor in the business.
We have the structured investments and annuities business, which houses a lot of our outsourced annuity solutions, as well as the smooth bonus solutions. This is the third largest earnings contributor in the Momentum Corporate business. If you put these businesses together, you're probably looking at about 90% of our earnings base. We then have our consulting and actuarial consulting capabilities, housed in our direct client engagement cluster. This, combined with our business development capability, which represents our direct-to-client distribution capability, as well as our owned advice capability within Momentum Corporate. In Momentum Retirement Administrators, otherwise known as MRA, we have our standalone administration capability, which we very much see as a great opportunity for vertical integration opportunities into the rest of the group.
Then we have Member Solutions, which is the B2C part of our B2B business, retirement benefit counseling, as well as our ability to deliver retailization. Yes, from a Momentum Corporate perspective, but also into the broader group. So what we do, we do for over 7,000 employers in this country, and there are nearly 2 million employees. Now, the last time I stood here, we were talking about digital engagement being a priority, and at that stage, we were lucky if we even got to 25,000 digital engagements. Now, as Johan has touched on, we have really seen quite a significant uplift in digital engagement. As at the half year, if you multiply that by two, we were over 1.6 million in terms of our digital engagements.
Our group insurance business continues to be one of the market leaders. In fact, a market leader when it comes to disability income protection, and done in a manner that is sustainable, with over ZAR 5 billion in API in our group insurance business. FundsAtWork, as an umbrella fund with the largest number of members in the industry, with over 500,000 members in the FundsAtWork, across the various funds within FundsAtWork. There are quite a number of other stats which I have outlined there, which I will leave for the comfort of your reading. Now, when we look at the reinvent and grow journey, one of the things that we did quite early on was to reorganize the business into end-to-end P&Ls.
And I think that has really unleashed an entrepreneurial energy, which has seen us deliver growth over the last few years. So here, if I can call out, you know, Funds at Work, where we've seen assets under management, and yes, these are annualized half-year numbers, at least. So we've seen the growth of over 45% in an environment where, firstly, a very challenging environment, where growth was hard to come by, but also, what you see here is organic growth. Quite critical to highlight that. And we've also seen our structured investments and annuities business also make strides on its growth trajectory. You'll see in the pack that, we've shared some slides around market share. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on these, but you are welcome to have a look at those.
I think the long and the short of it is that we have been able to retain or grow market share over the cycle. Now, we find ourselves in a very challenging environment. I think the economic dimensions of that environment have been well expressed in today's discussions. And then you add to that the backdrop of the two-pot system from a regulatory change perspective, a change which represents probably the most significant change this industry has seen in decades. We refer to it as the Y2K equivalent for employee benefits. This is our Y2K moment. I can say that as a business, we are ready. We are ready for the first of September.
Two questions are likely to remain to be answered, and we will know a lot more post the first of September. The first one is: how will the value chains work? So as you will all well know, in order to deliver one claim payment, there are quite a few different role players who are involved, and we need to make sure that that value chain is ready as well. And then, of course, quite critically, what will member behavior actually look like? We are doing all the education that we can to encourage people to preserve. But what we will... What we are likely to see from a behavior perspective is definitely a significantly higher number of withdrawals. And therefore, how does that then play out broadly and in the longer term in terms of member behavior?
So member behavior is really where one of the biggest question marks lies as we head to the first of September. But rest assured, we are ready. We also see pressure on pricing, and I think this also meets at the corner of clients that are under some financial strain, and in an environment that is highly competitive, where growth, more often than not, is taken from existing players. And therefore, our ability to distribute effectively in this ecosystem becomes critical, and our ability to distribute and service at lower cost is also critical, and I'll talk a bit more about that in our strategic responses. From a member perspective, we are seeing increasing demands for individualization. So individual choice is a big theme, and this is where Dragonfly has really played a significant role in enabling individual member choice when it comes to product selection.
Yes, within the core EB product, and now gradually stepping outside the core EB product. So our long-term aspiration is to become the leading digitally led employee benefits business in South Africa. And we want to do this in a manner that is sustainably profitable, so it's definitely not about growth at all costs. And digital becomes important here because it also has a direct impact on our ability to deliver at lower cost, at an improved experience, but one that actually promotes accessibility of our solutions and our ability for us to serve those solutions to all who are employed in South Africa. And as we do this, we are looking to be digitally led, but in a way that is human first. So really putting our employees, advisors, and clients at the center of how we approach this.
I have mentioned the point around our desire to grow, but to grow profitably. We want to continue to innovate in terms of our solutions, and I'll share one or two things as I go through. And for us, service excellence is, it's a ticket to the game. We will have to deliver on that. Now, the next three years are characterized by a number of focus areas. First of those being around growth and distribution, and within this space, we talk about our omni-channel distribution strategy. And here we have a two-vector approach, where we look to leverage our group's strength in the IFA market and broader broker ecosystem. I'm happy to say we have won the award for IFA intermediary experience two years in a row as Momentum Corporate.
So that's an area that we want to keep building on. And as we do that, the second vector is really around the direct to C-suite, part of our distribution capability. Our ability to get to the C-suite, engage with them, and co-create solutions with them. So ultimately, here, we are really wanting to make sure that we meet our clients where they are, through an omni-channel approach. Digital transformation is another big theme for us, which really speaks to three things. Firstly, to drive growth. Secondly, to lower our cost to serve. And then thirdly, to deliver a superior client experience. And I think from a biggest change perspective, this is probably one of the biggest changes we are going to be driving through the business over the planning cycle.
Operational efficiency underpinned by lean principles, so we are borrowing a little bit there from the Toyota model in terms of operational excellence, and really looking here to look at how we drive efficiencies, we lower wastage in our processes, and at the same time, we do that in a way where we improve client experience. Simplification also then becomes another big theme here, especially when we start looking at our product ecosystem. Collaboration is major for us, both within the group, and I'll touch on one or two examples there, and then also partnering externally as part of our collaboration drive. From a Momentum Corporate perspective, what we aim to deliver on over the next three years are a number of things.
So the first one is, and yes, Risto, we are going to be aiming for normalized headline earnings in the range of ZAR 800 million-ZAR 1 billion. Now, to put this into perspective, pre-2021, our run rate was about ZAR 400 million-ZAR 600 million. Currently, that run rate is sitting at about ZAR 600 million-ZAR 800 million, and our stated ambition is to shift that run rate upwards to a run rate of ZAR 800 million-ZAR 1 billion by 2027. This will be underpinned by the omni-channel distribution strategy that we are driving, and also what we want to do from an operational and service excellence perspective. We are going to deliver on a value of new business margin of 0.5%, so that sits somewhere in the range that Risto outlined.
And I think here, I think it's quite critical to remind all of us here that, you know, the business that we deal with is lumpy, so deals do tend to be lumpy, and therefore, mix is also quite sensitive. So in the intervening period, there will be years where we do better, and there are likely to be years where we do slightly less. But what we want to be able to manage for, using the omni-channel distribution strategy, as well as what we do from a selective partnerships perspective, is to start introducing more avenues for deal flow, which then starts to create a slightly smoother flight path for us as a business. Then, from a cost and efficiency perspective, we are targeting a cost-to-income ratio of 65%.
You'll recall we were targeting 70% by FY 2024, so this is what we now want to work towards. And this is really gonna take advantage of what we are doing from a digital perspective, the rollout of Lean, and just our general focus on driving efficiencies within the business as we drive revenue growth as well, and that will speak to the 65% there. And from a client experience, we are targeting an NPS of more than 65. And this is really taking into account the fact that we are going largely digital. We want to increase digital utilization, and in doing so, we become a lot more accessible, easier to deal with, and therefore, we should see an uplift in our Net Promoter Score.
As we zoom into the planning units, for FundsAtWork specifically, we do aim to remain within the top four in the umbrella fund space when it comes to assets under management, and this is really from an organic growth perspective. So by 2027, we will be looking after more than ZAR 110 billion in assets. That is what we aim for. At the same time, we do aim to become a significant player in the SME market, led by our new product solution, Momentum Grow, which is digital end-to-end product for the SME market. We launched that in November, and we are already starting to see quite a number of new-to-EB clients coming into our ecosystem. Two hundred and fifty employers that we are targeting by 2027, I...
And we certainly hope it will be more than that. And then, from a collaboration and holistic propositions perspective, we want to be able to offer our clients employee benefits combined with a health solution. Now, this is something we've been able to successfully do with Hannes and his team in a number of instances, and now we just want. We really want to industrialise this capability, and then to digitise the capability as we look to expand further in that SME market space as well. So that's going to be quite a big one for us going into the next three years. Then, from a group insurance perspective, data analytics and insights, using those for margin management is really the headline.
Our ability to remain, yes, a large-scale player in group insurance, but doing so in a manner that is profitable, is what we want to commit to you. We do want to do this, leveraging the capabilities in the distribution space from a growth perspective, and really looking at how we de-commoditize our offering. It's a highly commoditized space, but there are value-added services that we provide, and it's a question of how we package those, as well as looking at how we position what we believe is our market-leading disability management capability as part of that value proposition. And again, here, the partnership from a health perspective becomes quite key, especially when you start looking at your health insurance offering, where we want to then broaden accessibility for employer bases.
In the structured investments and annuity space, we want to grow from current levels, which you will see when you scrutinize the slides a lot closer, to over ZAR 65 billion in assets, by 2027. And we want this business to contribute at least 25% of the Momentum Corporate earnings by 2027. So this speaks to earnings diversification and gradually reducing our dependence on underwriting performance and the volatility that underwriting causes. But, you know, in all honesty, our biggest exposure is underwriting underwriting performance, and we will continue to have to manage that level of volatility while we then work to diversify, our earnings base. And, and quite critical for us here is our ability to construct deals in a consultative manner with clients.
So our deal structuring capability is one we've already started to invest in, and we want to ramp that up over the planning cycle. We also just want to do a lot more work around the products themselves, including the rationalization of some of our offerings. We do tend to have a proliferation of offerings, especially in the smooth bonus space, and, how do we rationalize there, to build scale? Then we really want to cement our internal and external partnerships. This is a space where partnerships have contributed significantly, both with advice houses, as well as some retirement benefit counseling businesses, where we have seen significant flows of assets into the group, and this is something we want to be able to do.
White labelling is another key theme here, where we are the engine inside the product that is being distributed by some of these providers. Then from a direct client engagement, MRA, and member solutions perspective, this is my catch-all here. Firstly, we want to ensure that our direct business development capabilities deliver at least 35% of our sales on an annual basis. I think currently we are sitting at about 20-25%. Pre-2021, that was well under 10%, and we want to gradually grow the contribution of our direct business development capabilities. We also want to grow the Momentum Retirement Administrators business. We believe that the MRA business is in a sweet spot in terms of where the industry currently finds itself.
A sweet spot to grow, but also a sweet spot to enable vertical integration of our broader solutions within the group, and that is an area that we are going to be working on quite closely. And then we do want to build a member-level advice ecosystem that enables us to capitalize on the retailization opportunity. Our member solutions capability, in partnership with Momentum Advice, really looking at how we drive increased share of annuity outflows from our solutions. As you might have seen in the earlier slides, that's currently sitting somewhere late 30s, early 40s. We want to get that share to 45% by 2027. And we do then want to also work to build our consultants and actuaries business as a flagship B2B advice business in the South African landscape.
So it's quite interesting that this week is the Olympic Games. And as we walk into the arena, we walk into this arena as a business with scale, with a strong market position, and a business that is a significant contributor to the Momentum Group. We are a business with a solid track record of delivery, having delivered, yes, on strategic objectives as well as earnings commitments over the, over the cycle. And as we go forward, we will continue to invest in our digital capabilities. We have also demonstrated an ability to innovate from within. Momentum Grow being a classic example of our ability to innovate from within, and we want to continue to build on that. We want to drive operational efficiencies further within the business, led by our digital transformation initiative, and then to improve client experience, as we do that.
This is also something that has been confirmed in a number of surveys in terms of how our client experience is rated. We will further drive the distribution capability as we go forward. We are fortunate to be part of a group that really has a significant strength when it comes to distribution, especially in the IFA space, and we want to continue to build a moat around that, and then, of course, leverage the power of our omni-channel distribution capability. So it says F 25 to F 27, meaning that the proverbial gun at the start line has already gone off.
I can assure you that as we have started lap 1 of 3, that we are a business that is ready and committed to delivering on this ZAR 800 million-ZAR 1 billion in earnings by financial year 2027, but a business that will do so in a manner that remains true to the expression of our group's purpose of building and protecting our clients' financial dreams. Thank you.
Thanks very much. Just quickly, maybe on the replatforming, where are you in terms of the timeline on that and kind of the, you know, executing within budget? Those of us that followed the UK experience of many firms over there, replatforming was a scary prospect, so maybe just a comment on how that's progressing.
The budget is fixed, so maybe that was a good thing that we did at the start of the contract, so we can't have a run on that. Other than own complexities, right? The longer it lingers, the more we need to, to maintain what we have, and so that's an operational, maybe, distraction. But I think, you know, if we ever thought it's gonna be quicker than early next year for the first phase, and then the international phase after, after that, probably middle of next, next calendar year, I think we were optimistic. These are complex projects. They don't go without their challenges, but I think we have a close working relationship with FNZ and the team, right from the top down. So, but it is not an easy project. I'd be, I'd be, dishonest if I say differently.
But I think, you know, having had our existing technology in the wealth platform for the best part of 25 years, this is an investment for the long term, right? So we've got to get it right. And we have asked ourselves: Is this the right partner? But it definitely is the right partner for us, and we'll go through the process with them.
Great. Thank you. Thanks. Couple of questions. Dumo, maybe I'll start with you. Just your aspirational earnings for 2027, what level of variances are you assuming in there, and relative to where you were? 'Cause there were quite large variances for the last year. That,
Oh, it's just one.
Do you want to answer that, and I'll go to-
Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, our departure point is really to try and have as little EV-related variances as we can, so as little basis change related variance as we can. But I think inevitably, because of what we are seeing in terms of downward pressure on pricing, we are likely to see some level of mortality-related basis changes as mortality risk intensifies, but you're unable to recover that through the pricing. So I think that will... That's probably the biggest risk from a volatility perspective that we would see. Now, where we have actually been able to manage for that is just by not writing business at loss-making levels.
So we, it's our hope that at least as we head towards 2027, you will see far less volatility as a result of those kind of things. So touch wood, touch wood that we don't see high levels of mortality-related variances. And then I think when it comes to any positives, from an expense perspective, I think that will then come through as part of the broader group-wide initiatives and the commitment that we've made in relation to those. Yeah.
Thank you. Johan, from your side, just to understand, the Multiply sort of de-emphasis and moving to Life Returns, what has that done to that back book of heavy Multiply users or brokers that were big supporters of Multiply?
Yeah. So we had about just two-thirds of the Multiply... Maybe 70% of the Multiply Premier book, which was a legacy program that's now moved to Multiply Inspire, which is the centralized wellness in the health space, where Myriad clients also. So what we offered those clients is a kind of a long-term protected guarantee solution. Not... They can jump to Life Returns; they don't have to. We've settled a certain glide path with. We did some calculations, and that's what we've introduced to those clients, actually with great success. So all of that's been modeled or baked into the current financial realities of the business already. So we're quite comfortable with what we've done there. But there are no more requirements for any legacy Myriad client that was part of Multiply Premier to do any further engagement with us.
So all the actuarial modeling actually capture that in the ecosystem going forward. So it's a bit of a glide path on discounts that clients received in Premier, but that settles at a certain level, depending on how fit you were or, you know, your status previously. And that's all factored, communicated to clients, probably about three times, I guess, communicated to the advisor fraternity, and I think that landed quite successfully. And that was finally executed in January 2024. So there's no more Myriad client effectively engaging with Premier in terms of experiencing premium discounts, et cetera. And that's fully baked into the actuarial models also. I can't say more, but it's pretty much done, you know, from our perspective.
You're not supporting brokers as a result. Are there brokers that were-
No.
writing a lot of money?
No, we didn't lose any supporting advisors.
Yeah.
Obviously, there were some more difficult conversations, but-
Mm
... appreciate the fact that we went to advisors already in 2022, end of 2022, to start the engagement narrative. The client narrative started picking up speed in 2023 to effectively execute such, you know, on January 2024. This was a massive engagement activity, and that's what made it so complex to execute. Now, you add to that, obviously, there's a conversation in the health space. The health Maria clients needed to move into the new Multiply Inspire solution in health. It was quite a group-wide strategy. The product businesses had to come to the table together with the Multiply team as one voice, taking this to the market out there.
It's probably one of the bigger transition projects I've been involved with, but I think it has landed quite successfully across the board, in short term, in health, and in Momentum Life, which is where those discounts are. But the important part for me is that those models are in the system. You know, they're in the, let's call it a corporate actuarial black box already, fully allowed for.
Then just one for Ferdi. Just on the retail annuity market in South Africa, what differentiates you from, you know, your two big competitors? Surely, from a scale perspective, you're all fairly big. Is there a cost element that you can, I don't know, digitize and do cheaper? Why would I buy an annuity from yourselves instead of your competitors, and how sustainable is that?
Yep. Look, I think, we don't price the best, I guess, so that maybe solves that one, right? We don't try to. I think we are very aware of where the price points are at any point in time, because I do think price dictates often amongst the three, where an advisor will place. But then it's also the engagement that we have in the specialized distribution, I think, Johan, and the relationships that we have with advisors, how we connect with them, how we support them, the tools that we have. Actually, remember, we also have got the living annuities, the hybrid annuities, and the guaranteed life annuities, and that's a whole spectrum of solutions. And so they can sit in front of a client and look from a living annuity to the guaranteed annuity and find the best optimum position between those.
I think there's a large part that actually goes into that as well, so which is definitely unique to us. So it's relationship, I guess. It's pricing at the right levels, consistently. I think we can price more keenly, but also, I think we all, everyone's keen that we don't kind of change the price point massively in the market and so forth. So I think we are comfortable where we are, and it's relationship and solutions, capability, and engagement, I think. Mm.
May I be naughty and add one thing? I was sure Risto is also burning to do the same, but I do believe the strength of our balance sheet actually creates quite a lot of trust with advisors. We often say that there are some of our competitors that we wouldn't buy annuities from, and we believe that the strength of our balance sheet really does play a role in that sense as well. So, I mean, I just thought I'll add that to it.
Good. Francois?
Hi, guys. Yeah, I think, Johan, from your discussion, what I heard is that moving away from a traditional sort of product-based sales, pushmen, pushing, model to kind of from a contractual insurance model to a more wealth management, high touch, consensual relationship with, with clients. But for me, that's all about people, wealth managers, and maybe two parts to the question. You've, you've gained a lot of market share in the wealth management space. Maybe if you can explain how that was achieved, and then secondly, how easy it is to, to grow that sales force. I think you talk about getting to 1,500 wealth managers. Where do they come from? Do you train them? Do you poach them from other wealth managers? And just maybe give me a bit of insight into that industry. Thanks.
So I think two conversations. So there's Momentum Financial Planning, the tied agency, and then we have Consult, which is probably what you're referring to, our provider-sponsored, independent financial advisor network. Now, they focus strongly on wealth management and on short term. Those are probably the two biggest focus areas in that space. We recruited there extensively from other financial advisor spots, either other networks or from bank financial planning businesses, predominantly, and also from one-man shows that wanted to move in there. Probably, I probably neglected to say in my presentation, there's still migration in the independent financial advisor space.
You still find that smaller FSPs, IFAs, want to join bigger networks simply because of the cost of running, you know, my own little business, compliance, KI, advice, you know, all the stuff that goes with it. The effort to giving advice has increased. It's quite a lot. So that trend still is quite relevant. So there is a movement in the financial advisor space, independent financial advisers from one-man shows to the bigger networks. And that's where Consult really lives. We want to gear that up to the next level. So that answers some of your wealth management strategy. But there's also a vertical integration strategy in Consult. We don't allow advisors to have their own Cat 2 licenses as an example, as we do in our agency channel. So there's a bespoke house view around that.
I think the important thing for the tied agency is there's still a bit of... There's still a bit, no, there's still a lot of need to groom new talent also in that space. You don't really find new advisor talent being groomed necessarily extensively in the IFA networks. It's normally the agencies that bring that to the table. Now, this is a tough job. I can just say that. I mean, the benchmark is 1 out of 7 in up and running in 5 years' time. That's almost the benchmark in the industry. So we're also trying to change that model a little bit in the agency space.
But you normally find, as—and this is maybe your point—as advisors age in our agency channel as well as in Consult, they move more from traditional life, you know, into, into wealth management space. There's another level on top of that, of course, which is the private wealth space. We're not that well, you know, represented there, but it, it—I think our value proposition stood firm. You know, they wanted to join this business, given the culture, the advice culture that you just spoke to in the environment. That's an important thing for us. So, so you, you create margin in the product space, as you know, product sales, and there's margin in the advice space. But in the end, you need to execute any advice plan through a product, you know, a recommendation. In any case, and that's where the two needs to come together.
But I think the. If you talk traditional agency, just they churn, you know, in our segment, that's a tough game, you know, to almost win. You need to be. You need to live the game. So we almost see a gap. So we find in our direct sales, clients are also younger. The moment they go into that thirty-five plus space, that they actually start engaging with, let's call it more comprehensive, you know, financial advice, financial planners, and that's what we're trying to get right. So our advice ecosystem is kind of the thirty-five plus client base, if that makes sense to you. And even older than that, wealth management. And the direct sales business, you'll see, is more younger clients. So that's what I spoke about previously, but I think, you know, DNA was the wealth management conversation in consult in any case.
I think that probably it was intentional actually, to set it up like that. What I can say in our agency channel, our experienced advisors are also quite active in the investment space, but as Farri noted, you also know the vertical integration hit rate isn't that high in that specific area, which is an opportunity for us going forward. Yeah, I hope that answers your question.
A link to Francois' question. We had a question online from his colleague, Harry. Just on that one, do we have a strong appetite to buy out IFA businesses? Why do we see ourselves as more attractive than the banks, networks? And then, how much of our advice tech advantage comes from external providers like Elite Wealth versus what is developed internally?
Ooh, it's a lot of questions. Okay, first of all, what does an advisor value proposition look like in a network? What do advisors want? You know, do you make it easier for me? I'm gonna talk to tech in that space. What's in it for me, your advisor value proposition? Do you-- what else do I get in terms of other benefits? Now, latter is really a conversation around succession, practice, book value. If I'm a youngster, do I get career prospects, you know? I think that's what the Momentum advice ecosystem really brings to the... On the technology side, it's all homegrown developed, but we do leverage building blocks in some other financial planning tools also, but not the CRM. It's our own CRM, it's our own platform, it's our own compliance advice.
Now, that's a competitive edge for us, how you deliver advice. So that's our own tech. But you do partner with someone like an Elite Wealth, but we actually do that in both our agency and in our... But only building blocks that you want to use. And then you groom that over time, how you, how you bake it in. There's culture, it's a big part of your value proposition. If you're an agent, the quality of your product suite plays a role, you know, how competitive it is. But you must string everything together in a nice narrative, and we haven't been able to do that successfully, I think, prior to the strategy, and that's what's really resonate for us, you know, as a competitive edge going forward.
Some networks will have a better financial remuneration structure, perhaps, for an advisor, others will be weaker, but you need to string the whole kit together. I think the difficult part is to get that whole practice journey, practice management journey, and succession plan going in any big advice network, and that was important for us to solve also in our thinking. That's really talking to the advisor value proposition also. Then behind that, obviously, you have the brand and the product story that you bring into the narrative and the competitiveness of the product building blocks also. So yeah, that's how we show up, and I think that's how we will take the business forward. Rowan.
Thanks.
I hope I answered all the questions.
Sure. Dumo and Patty, I'm gonna focus on structured investment products and annuities, and a key component to both of your 2027 targets and growth potential. Can you just give us a sense of the product suite between retail and corporate as to how much complexity there is, how much breadth there is? I think, Dumo, you mentioned the fact that potentially there is too much breadth in the product suite.
Mm.
How does that get simplified? Could it be that you can offer retail and corporate in, you know, a very similar form? And then how does that affect the scalability?
Mm.
of that grouping, you know, relative to your traditional asset management type model? Is it as scalable? Should you be increasing AM as much? Should we expect margins to rise accordingly? Thanks.
So shall I go, and then you?
Okay.
So I think a very different product sets actually in the annuity space. So you can speak a little bit about the smooth bonus nature of your annuities. I mean, so there's little overlap between what we offer in corporate for retirement scheme members that exit almost in a solution that's supported by, say, the trustees, right, as a preferred solution in a living annuity type structure. I think it's a scalable balance sheet dependent. It's a scalable, you know, as it can be. I think the solutions behind those, both the retail and that, and I think they are different. You are looking at some new solutions with technology also in that space, and we will see how we collaborate on that.
And in structured products, we all work together in the teams to make sure that we optimize the positions and make sure that what corporate takes out, I guess, in the corporate institutional space, often again through trustees and what we take out to the IFA space of fit for purpose, and that we don't almost destroy margin. I think that's the key, key validation that we do, and those are the conversations that we have to make sure that we don't, right? It, it feeds with the same balance sheet, so.
Yeah, it's actually, it's quite a big collaboration focus. So for example, with our index guarantee solutions, we actually work very closely in constructing and in distributing, those solutions. A lot of the simplification I was referring to is going to happen is in the smooth bonus space, where we we tend to have, you know, quite a lot of bonus series. And we do want to look at how we can, we can consolidate, some of those for, for scale, and scale is quite important in this space. And also we're looking at doing that for some of our with-profit solutions as well. Where, you know, we just want to see where we can pull, longevity risk and the like, across, across solutions. So it's definitely a simplification theme, for those particular product lines.
Just getting to the AUM numbers in 2027, just give us a sense of your market share today, what you think it's going to get to by 2027 implied in your numbers, and what that means for the yield curve. If the yield curve, does that mean, you know, imply a static yield curve to get to those kind of numbers?
Yeah, so market share, I think in annuity space, we know we... What are we? 25% about. So in the IFA, well, more in the IFA space, but, but of course, 25% because of the, the component in the agency force as well. So, clearly, you know, we, we've been there, where yield curves were different and where we sold less, and then I think that's where we need to make sure that we, that we have the right mix of solutions. And I think, as I said earlier, in response to another question, is, is our hybrid annuities that we have developed actually, which optimize the position between a guaranteed life annuity and a living annuity in a unique way. So there's... We believe there's always a place for a, for a, for a guaranteed annuity in those portfolios to some level.
And we've developed a tool that really helped to help advisors to optimize that position, I think, quite effectively, and that differentiates us. So I think that will soften the blow a little bit of just having nothing in that space and having some. But I think therefore, also the focus on structured products and making sure that we have that we balance it out more specifically, I think, you know, because of the success of annuities, that's where the focus went. So I think we need to make sure that we balance those two out.
Thanks.
Great. I see that we've come to the end of the session. Thanks very much for your questions and your participation. We're gonna break for lunch, and the lunch will be outside for those in the room. For those online, I hope it's as good as ours, and we hope to see you in 25 too.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Good afternoon again. My name is Tukelo Mulaudzi, and I will be your hostess for the second half of the race. Rowan, thank you for a stellar job for that first half, but I'll be taking everyone through the second half. As you can see, we've got a jam-packed session store. I hope you had a delightful meal, and that you're feeling energized and not too tired after that lovely food. And that you look forward to the second half of the program. As you can see, we've got Guardrisk coming up. Lawrence Botha will be presenting there. He was FD of that business for a while and has been with the business from 2008.
Lawrence was part of the team that helped Guardrisk through the shareholder change, in 2014. Under his leadership, Guardrisk continues to innovate and to provide customized solutions to its clients. We look forward to hearing from you, Lawrence, and I'm gonna hand over the stage to you.
Thank you, Tukelo. You're dealing with Guardrisk, probably the most federated business in the, in Momentum, but I think we, we try and collaborate where we can. So you will see my slides will conform to the rest, and I will follow the same structure. But, yeah, I think interesting, you know, if you look at a, a captive, captive manager, a normal progression for a captive manager is to move into asset management. And, and, you know, Guardrisk is taking the view that we have an asset manager in the group, we have Momentum Investments, there's no reason for us to do that. So through collaboration, Ferry, I think we've already got more than ZAR 15 billion of assets under management with you guys, throughout the year.
So yeah, you can see we are trying to at least help the impact strategy by properly collaborating. Again, like the rest, I will deal with just Guardrisk today. We'll look at some market dynamics, we'll look at the ambition and the focus areas, and then we'll look at the objectives and the specific targets that we will be targeting for 2027. And then at the end, we'll just conclude on a couple of items. I think before we go into the future, it's important that we just stand still and look at the Guardrisk of today. And Risto alluded to it in his presentation. When Momentum bought Guardrisk way back in 2014, there was a lot of criticism against the transaction. Why? What's the objective with the transaction?
But I think the slide that you can see on the screen actually tells a story of a business that came to life in the Momentum space. It shows you how Momentum unlocked real value in the Guardrisk space. And if we look at the annual gross written premium, it multiplied four times up to ZAR 38 billion, end of 2023, and that's roughly split 50%, 50% life, non-life. So you can see it's a significant business. Within the Momentum space, they allowed us to grow to one of the top three non-life insurance companies in the country. Then the valuation. Now, a lot of criticism that Momentum overpaid for Guardrisk way back in 2014. But you can see that we've increased the value from ZAR 1.6 billion to ZAR 4.6 billion at the end of 2023.
And what is actually more significant is the fact that we've paid dividends almost to the value of the original purchase price. So, so that is quite, quite significant. Then if we look at the revenue mix, this is really where Momentum gave Guardrisk the opportunity to grow. And we, we really started with the, the, the Guardrisk general insurance business and to grow the underwriting part of, of our business. And you can see that in 2014, only 6% of our revenue consisted of underwriting profit, and we've grown that to 31% at the end of 2023. I think with the previous re-into grow, we, we said that we're targeting anything from 30%-35%, and we're probably moving that from 35%-40%. And what we're also saying is we're in a very unique position to cherry-pick the good risk.
So it's not necessary that we're going to cap it at 40%. There's good risk out there, we will potentially underwrite it. Contribution to group earnings, I think that speaks for itself. You know, with all the other growth, it grew from 4%-10%, quite significant. And we have a target on ourselves that we want to grow that even further. And then capital efficiency. Many of you who remember the transaction way back in 2014, one of the items that was hanging around the Guardrisk neck was an extra ZAR 1.8 billion of potential capital that will be required to meet the same solvency regime requirements.
Through very careful refinement of our capital models, here and there, changing some of our contract boundaries, we managed to bring that down to only 17% of our premium numbers, which is very much in line with what you will find with the previous capital regime. Now, we often hear the story that Guardrisk is a different business. It's difficult to understand, and we actually, we're making an effort to demystify the cell captive business to a large extent. That's why we have individual sessions, you know, potentially again later in the year, where we will talk only Guardrisk, and we will try and explain to you, you know, what's the drivers in our business, where's the risk in our business, and where's the positives coming through in our business.
But maybe just to stand still and to link to one of the slides that Jeanette had earlier, just to talk about the Guardrisk business and explain to you how the planning units play out within our business. So we run a semi-federated model in Guardrisk, with a strong center, setting the guidance, setting the strategy, and actually give direction. And then you have the actual strategies playing out in the different planning units where the execution sit. So on the right-hand side, it's Guardrisk Microinsurance. That's the latest addition to the Guardrisk companies, which is our non-life and life microinsurance license. This is really the license that's aimed at the entry level of the market. Simple products, easy-to-sell products, and that's also typically where we, where you will easily find an embedded product in the business.
That's also our play to see if we can increase the penetration into the market, especially the portion of the market that's never been insured. That's typically where they, they will fit. Then Guardrisk Life. Guardrisk Life is a cell captive life license, predominantly doing first-party, third-party business, and a little bit of other structuring taking place in that. And then we have two planning units, two businesses that we run on the Guardrisk insurance license, which is a non-life cell captive license registered in the industry. The one business is our typical cell captive, first party, third party, also including our contingency and our mining rehab products. And then the second business on that license, so Guardrisk General Insurance, or the one where we take underwriting risk and where we do see some significant growth in the future. Right.
The fact that we are a cell captive company doesn't mean that we are not impacted by the normal market tech dynamics. So the general dynamics that influences the life insurance industry, branch business on the non-life insurance side, you know, all those items also influences the Guardrisk business, although it may be slightly different. So the first one that we see really changing the face of specifically the non-life industry is digital and technology. Different technology coming into play. You know, fintechs, insurtechs coming in, you know, taking over some of the traditional distribution channels that you would have found in the insurance space, now moving outside of insurance into businesses that doesn't have that sort of background. Then also data.
I think data is becoming much more significant for the non-life insurance industry, and the companies that will survive are those ones that's going to mine their own data, that's going to understand their data, and that can actually work and price according to the data. New business and product models, specifically in the cell captive space, something like you know the embedded insurance coming into space. We've always done embedded insurance, but as I said, you're now getting different companies, not part of the traditional insurance environment coming in. So we have to also adapt our business models and make some changes to counter some of the impacts that we see there. Capital, changing capital needs. You saw the presentation from Jeanette and Risto this morning, where they're talking about how they determine how capital is allocated within Momentum.
The same happens with the Guardrisk clients and potential clients. The companies normally sit and they actively decide on how capital will be divided. And unfortunately, if you write insurance business, it is capital intensive. So sometimes it takes the back burner in terms of their strategies, and that's where Guardrisk need to come in, and we need to come in with new capital models just to make the cell captive model sexy again, and for people to actually see it as a nice entry into the insurance space. Vertical integration. Now, vertical integration means something different for us in the Guardrisk space. It's not so much vertically integrating all our own systems, but it is to vertically integrate with our clients.
So we need to find a way to use the capabilities that we've built in our own business and integrate that and onsell that to our client base. It will, it will, it will make it more efficient for them, it creates an opportunity for Guardrisk to increase our share of the premium that the clients earn. And then changing distribution landscape. I've mentioned that I think one of the things that Guardrisk recognize, especially in the corporate and commercial space, is that it's still an intermediated market, and the relationship with our brokers are actually critical to our success. If we just look at the long-term winning aspiration or long-term ambition that we have, and that is to remain the leading cell captive insurer in the country, and also have a well-established corporate and commercial general insurance business focusing on specialist lines of insurance.
So that's our long-term, long-term aspiration. We want to have a business that will disrupt, and that will have to be taken note of in the general insurance, in the general insurance space. Immediate ambition. How are we going to achieve that over the next three years? That is to further cement and embed our position as a strategic partner for our clients that goes beyond normal cell captive insurance solutions. Then also we'll achieve that through the strong growth in establishing the general insurance business, and I'll say more about that in some of the next slides. So you can already hear some themes starting to come through when, when I talk around the Guardrisk strategy. The Guardrisk strategy is really going to build on two pillars.
The first one will be to take the solid base in our cell captive space, enhance that, improve that, bring a new model to the market, bring a new model to our clients, and also, through that, provide them with some alternative funding, alternative capital models. The second pillar of our strategy will focus around our general insurance business. We have a business, in terms of premium, last year, I think it was around ZAR 4.5 billion. So we already have a business that's at scale, but we need to enhance the capabilities that we have in this business to actually take it to the next level. So we've got a business of scale, but to take it further, we need to enhance those capabilities. And as I said, the relationships, the partnerships that we've built over the years on the cell captive side will come as...
And will actually help us on the Guardrisk general insurance side, where we already have a presence and a reputation with some of those corporate and commercial brokers. Right. The two pillars will then play out in six very specific focus areas for the business, and the first one is the sustainable, diversified revenue growth. So that's one of the areas that we've seen assisting the Guardrisk business to show some consistent results. Throughout COVID, throughout all the turmoil that we've seen in the non-life industry, the diversification that we have, not only in our revenue lines, but also in the different industries that we underwrite and that we play in, helped us to maintain that steady growth. So how will we build on that sustainable growth and diversified revenue growth? The first one is our reinsurance opportunities.
I think I've mentioned before, you know, we're in an ideal position where we can cherry-pick reinsurance opportunities, where we can cherry-pick where we want to participate and share risks with our clients. You do get clients from time to time that doesn't want to share risk, but they still want to reinsure. So we are working on solutions where we will co-insure with some of our bigger reinsurers on the books of business that we already have on the book and that we understand. So there's a big play for us to be made into the reinsurance space and also to start playing there. Acquisitions, geographical expansion. Let me first...
Acquisitions, you know, I think we've shown over the last couple of years that the bolt-on transactions, which is relatively small transactions, but having a big impact on the business, we managed to do that very successfully over the last couple of years, and that will be a focus going forward. It will be a strategy, and we will continue with that. You know, acquisitions doesn't only give you a benefit on the income statement, but one of the objectives we had with the acquisitions and the bolt-on transactions that we did over the last four years was really to get the right skills into the business, get the capabilities into our business to set us up for the future, specifically with the underwriting, and we will continue to do that.
I think we've seen on a number of them, and the rest have said it before, you know, if you can get into a potential acquisition before it becomes a general market opportunity, you're actually buying good value for money when you do that. The international expansion, maybe let me just stand still at the international expansion. A lot has been said about India for Guardrisk, and we're actively pursuing that potential opportunity. We've gone through a process, and one of the stumbling blocks that you always find going into different territories is the regulations.
The self-captive model does not fit all the regulations, but we employed a team of legal advisors in India, and they've actually done the research, and they've given us proper opinions around the Guardrisk business model, how it will fit the regulations in India, and we've ticked that box. Also, we have a very reputable partner currently through the health space in India, Aditya Birla. And from our side, you know, it's a no-brainer for us to see if we can take this very effective, very cost-effective, insurance model into the India market.
And we are at the point where we are going to start building on a proof of concept, where we want to take a potential client in the India space and say, "Let's build a potential concept and see if we can make that work." And then, as I said, targeted underwriting, it's one of the key pillars on which our strategy will be built. Value beyond self-captives, advanced analytics. We sit with the data. We sit with a team of experts that can analyze the data, so we need to push the information back into our clients to see that we can also enhance their businesses. Embedded insurance, I've said enough about embedded insurance, and then also I've mentioned the vertical integration, which is really our play into getting a bigger part of the premium of clients.
Capital efficiencies, alternative capital structures. We find ourselves that competitors are coming up with more capital-efficient structures, and we need to counter that. So we're in the final phases of going through our governance structures, where we are going to bring to the market a different solution to the traditional self-captive solution. And it's using a little bit of the beneficial or the benefits that you get through diversification on the balance sheet, and to do that, and actually bring a more capital-efficient model to some of our clients. And then the reinsurance optimization. You know, between Guardrisk Insurance and Guardrisk Life, we're probably the biggest buyers of reinsurance in the market.
So we are thinking that if we can build the right partnerships, if we can optimize the reinsurance structures between Guardrisk, our own business, and our self-captive clients, there are some real benefits that we can unlock. Digital transformation. We embarked on this journey a couple of years ago. It's really to automate the Guardrisk systems. Guardrisk has always been a platform business, but what we find is that because it is so tailor-made per individual client, a lot of the work that we do is manual work. So what we are doing, we've actively gone through a process to identifying those processes, those systems, and those areas where we can automate it, digitize it, and actually get to a point where we can further scale the business. Then people, purpose, and culture.
You will see for Momentum, it is an imperative. It's one of those items that's just a given, you need to have it. But we are of the opinion that within the Guardrisk business, where we find ourselves in terms of building a business, we have to put the right focus on, on developing people. Also, the fact that we are the self-captive leader in the market makes you immediately a target when people want to employ. So they target our staff. So we need to come up with better, more innovative ideas to keep on keeping our staff interested, keep on developing our staff, and making sure that they don't go to the competitors.
Money is not always the answer, although that's what it looks like from competitors, but you can actually build a lot more into your EVP to make sure that you keep your clients. Then sustainability. I'm not going to go into the standard sustainability conversation, but maybe just the one climate change, weather changes. I think it's something that the insurance industry, the non-life insurance industry, will have to come to grips with very quickly. We need to understand it. We need to understand whether it's a fundamental shift in weather patterns, whether the weather events that we've seen over the last three years is going to continue into the future, and you will have to adjust your pricing and your underwriting philosophies and your underwriting strategies towards that.
And it may mean that it will cost you more to insure something in KZN than what it will cost you to insure in the Northern Cape or so forth. So insurance, we need to adapt to that. For Guardrisk, specifically on sustainability transformation, critical. We potentially going to go on our own BE scorecard, and we need to target that. We need to actively build on that. So it's a key focus within the Guardrisk business, and I'll show you now in one of the next slide what we're aiming for. And then brand awareness. I think one of the key principles of building our general insurance business is to have that brand awareness with the brokers and the partners that we have in the corporate and commercial space. So they will-...
You will see Guardrisk making a determined effort, very focused on commercial and corporate insurance, to see if we can build on the strong Guardrisk brand that we already have in the market. All right. Objectives and measures of success. The first three items that you see on the list is really going to drive our financial targets. I think we've shown over the years, if you give the Guardrisk business a target, they become like wild dogs chasing the target, and they will make it. So, Risto, you've given us a target. Yeah. Now, I already had a SMS from one of the exco members saying, "Let's make it a thousand and one," which means we will then move up to a second position and not stay the last one of the three. So, the guys bought into your target, they bought into your challenge.
But I think it's, you know, it's a challenge, but it's not unrealistic, and I think that's what you said earlier. It's not unrealistic for us to make this the additional target. So for Guardrisk earnings growth, what we are showing now, ZAR 850 million-ZAR 1 billion. The billion is the upper limit of it, but it will become a target. So we're still targeting earnings growth of around 12%-15% per annum. And we've shown over the last couple of years that it's actually achievable. It means that we need to achieve revenue growth of anything between 10%-13%, which is basically double the rate at which the insurance industries are growing at this stage.
But we think we've got the strategy, and we believe we've got the strategy to make that work. Underwriting margin, because we in corporate and commercial, because we have the solid base of the Guardrisk cell captive business, we can cherry-pick what we underwrite. We do not have to write for top line. So we can actually pick the good risk. We don't have to write marginal business, which means that we can target an underwriting margin of 9%-11%, and we've seen over the last two, three years that we've actually outperformed that target. ROE target, 20%-25%. We have a dividend policy of 60% of our profits are declared to Momentum, to group.
We're very firmly of the belief that the 40% that we're retaining our business is more than adequate to cover our bolt-on transactions, as well as the additional risk taking that we want to take in the business. So we're fairly happy that we will be self-sustainable from a capital point of view for the next three years. And then we want to increase the value. You've seen how the value increased over the last couple of years. There's a target that we set to ourselves. We want to increase the value with another around about 25%. Again, it's something very, very realistic if the earnings growth are there. BE target, standalone level three is what we're targeting. We find in the market that our clients' standalone level three is more than adequate for them.
And then geographical India, I've talked about that. I'm not going to spend time on this slide. You can see it in your pack, but this is really how the six focus areas will be executed in the different planning units within Guardrisk. So you're welcome to catch me afterwards if you want to discuss this slide. Then, I'm strongly of the belief that we have the right strategy, we have the right people, and we have the capabilities to remain the leading cell captive insurer. At the same time, I think we have the right strategy to be a winner in the general insurance space, specifically specialist lines, commercial and corporate, where we plan to play. And just to summarize, you can see the items on this slide. We're going to enhance. We will enhance the cell captive model.
We will make it sexy again. Bolt-on transactions, we will continue to search for those bolt-on transactions that adds value to the Guardrisk business. End-to-end solutions, vertical integration. We're going to cross-pollinate. We're going to use what we develop in our general insurance business, take it into our clients, and we're going to win from that. Selected risk participation, I've said that. Alternative capital solutions, I've talked about. Reinsurance partnerships, critical for us, we'll do that. And then the product offerings that we need to increase. And, and you remember in the beginning, I talked about Guardrisk microinsurance. One of the shortcomings that we find in that space is people have distribution channels, but they don't have products. So we're going to put forward very simple, easy-to-sell products into that market, increase penetration. And then deliberate focus, AI, data, and digitization, which I've talked about.
So I think, in short, that's the Guardrisk story, exciting story waiting for us for the next three years, and I can guarantee you, if there's no external events, we will make the targets because we've got the strategy and we've got the people to do it. Thank you.
Thank you, Lawrence. Really loving the fact that you're taking the challenge on. It's a stretch, but you're willing to stretch it even further. You're so good at taking targets on. You were well within time, so well done on that, and well done on a great presentation. Brent, the challenge is on. Welcome.
Thank you to Tukelo. Good afternoon, everyone. It's always a challenge to follow Lawrence or the Guardrisk business, just given how well they've performed over the years. But for us, who operate in the same industry but in a different segment, it obviously serves as a nice example and a good inspiration. I'll follow exactly the same structure as my colleagues. I'm not going to spend time on explaining that. I think if you reflect on the Momentum Insure journey over the last, you know, three years or four years or so, it's fair to say that it's been a rollercoaster ride. It's not often that one starts a strategy kind of discussion with a quote from Mike Tyson, but let me try and pull it off.
So Mike Tyson said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And over the last, you know, three or four years, we've been punched in the mouth quite a few times. And the plans that we had in the, you know, the last time I stood here, those plans did not realize, and we will be the first to acknowledge that, and we must take accountability for those outcomes. We started the previous strategic planning period by being extremely excited about the Alexander Forbes Insurance business that we acquired. In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, it was the right deal, but unfortunately, at the wrong time. Why do I say the right deal? Because strategically, we gained scale. It added significant distribution capability to our business.
It obviously boosted earnings, and if you remember, the contribution of the non-life businesses at the sort of height of COVID, there was certainly a benefit. The wrong time, because our integration of the Alexander Forbes Insurance business coincided with what was, you know, one of the most complex and challenging periods in our industry. So, you know, right deal, wrong time. When I think about, you know, where we find ourselves now, you know, towards the end of financial year 2023, it was obvious and patently clear to all of us that a significant turnaround is necessary. And we started, you know, putting a very focused, a very decisive plan in place, and our business has done a lot over the course of the last year to implement that plan.
The core focus of that plan was to address the, you know, the key underwriting fundamentals in our business, so the loss ratio. It, you know, Peter will speak about his 5-point plan a little bit later on. We had a 4-point plan. Our 4-point plan really revolved around addressing our new business pricing, addressing the impact of inflation, where we were certainly behind our peers, you know, through just higher renewal increases, addressing underperforming portfolios in our business, and then tightening some of the underwriting controls and benefits similar to what many in our industry has done. Now, if we think about where, you know, our business is now, and I'm just reflecting half-year numbers there, there was already a, you know, a market improvement in our underlying profitability metrics.
No further or additional capital was required in, you know, in the first six months. So we've done a lot to move the business forward. But if I can continue with my, you know, boxing or Mike Tyson analogy, you know, despite the fact that we were knocked down a few times, I don't believe that we've been knocked out. We've stood up, and my sense is that we are winning one or two rounds on points now. But do we still have a lot of work to do? Absolutely.
If I think about the business today, we're often asked, you know, "Do you have what it takes to really compete in our industry?" Three things that I want to highlight, you know, just in terms of where we are today, is that we firmly believe that, you know, from a claims point of view, we have a really excellent claims capability that is comparable to any one of our peers in the industry. Secondly, in this year, we've had to take serious medicine from a new business pricing point of view, and the one channel that has proven to be the most robust in that, in that process has been our direct-to-client sales capability. What that capability needs is just more leads, but underlying, you know, that, the fundamentals are extremely healthy.
And then, you know, we had some wobbles in terms of service during the time of integration. We can, with confidence today, say that our service levels have returned to pre-transaction levels, and we are, you know, delivering on the client promises by and large, you know, that, that we have said to our clients and the commitment we give to, to our group. So the business is, you know, building some strong capabilities. What are the things that we need to address? Obviously, the first thing, and at the heart of any successful, sustainable retail short-term insurance business, is the claims ratio. And we know and acknowledge that our claims ratio isn't yet at a level that is comparable to our peers, and that over the next three years, much should still be done to get us to a more appropriate level.
The second element in our business, you know, something I highlighted as a benefit out of the transaction, is the fact that we have multiple distribution channels. We have a very broad product suite. But sometimes, if I can sort of use a different analogy, it's like if people go. You know, people go to weddings, and a bride and groom, when they plan their own weddings, they choose the nicest music, you know, the best, I suppose, menu, the nicest cutlery, the best designer for the dress. But when you put all of those things together, best of everything doesn't necessarily make the best wedding. And in some respects, you know, our business and our distribution and product have translated into something similar.
So we've got a wide set of capabilities, but those capabilities aren't organized in a way that translates into appropriate profitability and, you know, a proper sort of sales outcome. So we need to do better. Then, something that Lawrence highlighted as a strength in the Guardrisk business is the fact that their business is so well-diversified from a premium point of view. And I think it's a well-known fact that our business historically has had a stronger bias than many of our peers towards motor. So we need to address that, you know, to you know, mitigate against the inherent but normal volatility that we experience in the short-term insurance industry…. The other point related to our distribution channels is that we are seeing very different performance out of all of our channels.
We have two channels that operate solidly and consistently at a combined ratio below 100%. That's our, you know, our direct channel and our tied agency force. But our broker business, our IFA business, and our strategic partner business, those operate at, you know, combined ratios well in excess of 100. And their response and reaction to changes in underwriting philosophy, et cetera, is also very different. So we need to get to a more consistent performance, you know, irrespective of the challenges we face, the actions we take in each of our channels. From a market point of view, I'm not going to share with you, you know, anything that's materially different to what some of the colleagues have shared earlier today. So, you know, we don't expect there to be any tailwinds in the short-term insurance industry.
It, you know, will remain a highly competitive market in a very tough, external sort of, market context. So, you know, from a new business point of view or a growth perspective, low economic growth translates into muted growth in our industry. New business volumes will be under pressure. There will be a fight to retain quality clients, and growth will by and large come from, you know, higher renewal increases and, you know, just managing margin through that process. Speaking about margin, we expect margins to still remain under pressure from a claims point of view, but also just from a normal cost perspective.
So, you know, the impact of that is that they will, and, you know, it's in our business the case, but in also so in many of our competitors, that will be a, a greater focus on digitalization and reducing costs. The challenging industry environment that I referenced there speaks to the sort of structural challenges we face in, you know, in our society and in many respects, in our economy. So failing infrastructure, inconsistent water and electricity supply, rising levels of crime. Although there's optimism, I, I would think about our new government of national unity, the impact, you know, irrespective of how optimistic you are on those things, will be limited in the next three years. So those things will still impact claims experience, and it will make it a bit more difficult for us, for us to operate effectively in, in this market.
Then Lawrence referenced climate change as well. You know, it's a reality. Just what's happened again in, you know, in this province over the last, you know, few weeks, just demonstrates that. Lawrence pointed to the fact that nobody's exactly sure whether, you know, the frequency of severe weather events that we saw over the last three years, whether that is now the new normal. Our view is that we do expect some increase in frequency of severe weather, you know, over a longer time window. But whether it's really the new normal or not, I don't know whether anyone is exactly sure. But do we need to think about it differently and mitigate against that? Yes.
The best medicine for that is obviously better risk selection, more accurate pricing, and better use of data, you know, GIS or geospatial data, and understanding your risk profile and your exposure better and being able to respond quicker than your competitors. The last point I'll make from a client perspective is that, you know, we still see the shift towards more digital interactions and more on-demand kind of consumption of benefits continuing, specifically in the, you know, in the personal lines environment. So we took this also into account when we sort of got to our strategy. So when I speak about, you know, our ambition, I think it's, you know, we acknowledge and we accept that we have to perform ourselves into credibility, and there's no doubt about that in our own minds.
The way that Jeanette and Risto and the rest of the Group Exco holds businesses accountable, that, you know, very clearly applies to us, and we have been on that list of, you know, businesses to address or areas of concern for, you know, the last three or four years. So I don't want to be on that list. If it was a WhatsApp group, at some point, somebody must get a message, "Brent Pretorius has left the group." So, you know, that's my personal ambition. If I, you know, if I can make a bit of a, I suppose, a joke about it. But we firmly believe that our business still has the potential and the ability to be a successful business in our industry that plays a valuable role in the bigger portfolio of businesses in the Momentum Group.
You know, somebody earlier today used a sports analogy, and I would like to use a similar one. The fact that you've had a bad game or a bad season doesn't necessarily make you a bad player. But people unfortunately remember your last game, you know, better than what you did many years ago. So in our case, you know, we need to have better recent games and put, you know, the runs or the results on the scoreboard. No doubt about that. At the heart of what we want to do in the long run from an ambition perspective, is to be a meaningful contributor to the success of the Momentum Group, and, you know, that ambition revolves around this idea of safety. Now, safety, at least on the basis of our own research, is an extremely relevant concept in our country.
Our own research points to the fact that more than 70% of South Africans consistently feel unsafe. Now, that's a very concerning and in some ways, a scary kind of statistic. Now, what we want to do is translate the value that we bring, the products that we offer, the benefits that we provide, to extend beyond the traditional insurance product. Our current value proposition does that. It's not just focused on the assets that we cover, but it's also also focused on the individual, and we believe that that is powerful. We know that it is differentiating, because none of our competitors have such a wide offering when it comes to safety, but many dabble in the safety environment.
But we have to execute it, and we believe that that positive impact is, you know, something which is very, very supportive of our group purpose of building and protecting our clients' financial dreams. And if we can get that right, the long-term ambition will take care of itself. To get to a long-term ambition, short-term runs on the scoreboard is critical. So in the next three years, it is about performing ourselves back into greater credibility. In the next three years, it is about building a viable, profitable, sustainable core business, that has the ability to provide predictable and acceptable financial outcomes to our group. So our short-term ambition for the next three years, different perhaps to many of my colleagues, is a turnaround ambition.
It's not so much a growth ambition as the rest is, but in our case, you know, we believe that it is, you know, obviously quite relevant. So how do we get to, you know, a viable, core, profitable business? In our industry, you know, unfortunately or fortunately, it is about getting the basics right. So what you will see on the screen isn't rocket science, and there's nothing extremely sexy or fancy. We're not bringing the sexy back to cell captive business like Lawrence. We just need to get the core things that we have to do that will translate into profitability. We must do that well. So the first thing that we need to do is to build or further strengthen a viable core direct business, because that's primarily what our current premium income determines.
The foundation of that is, you know, a very robust, top-tier pricing and underwriting capability. How do we get there? What will be different to where we are today? Because that's, you know, to a large extent, where many of the questions originate. We have strengthened our team quite significantly with new people who are doing new and better things, and it is reflected in our results. We are investing in technology and giving our actuarial and pricing and underwriting team better tools to do what they are supposed to do. The tools and the people have translated into very different processes that allows for greater responsiveness, that allows us to operate at a much higher level of maturity.
And the fourth thing we are doing, we are investing in data analytics, and we have, you know, quite a robust plan in place to address the availability and quality of our own data, but also the extent to which we effectively and intelligently integrate external data into what we do. This capability has been subject to two external assessments over the last 12 months, and we are comfortable that the things that we are focusing on now will translate into improved results over time. The second component of building this viable, you know, personal business is really for us to scale our direct business. I referred to it earlier. This is a business with good fundamentals, but just requires further leads. So, you know, there's an investment that we're doing there.
We're working very closely with Nantu and the group marketing team and others to explore distribution opportunities. Then, the third component revolves around addressing the cost to serve in our broker channel, and the broker channel is one of the channels where our combined ratio runs in excess of 100. Now, historically, our operating model has been such that we did not rightly or often integrate with third-party broker platforms. Our self-service capabilities for brokers was reasonably light. Now that we are sort of in a post-data migration or AFI integration era, we are in a much better position to do this appropriately.
And we've got a, you know, a very clear path in the next 12-18 months in terms of how we will do so, so that we can materially reduce our cost to serve in that channel and get, you know, our combined ratio to below 100. The last point, and this is relevant to so many parts of, you know, the group, is to accelerate digital to reduce costs and to create efficiencies. Now, maybe just an interesting point, which you wouldn't currently see in our financials, but which we believe will start playing out in future, is that we—as we are sitting here today, we are servicing about 15%-20% more premium than what we did 4 years ago when we did the transaction, with about 10% less people. And this is just...
We've always said, once we get on the same system, once we expose everyone to the same level of technology, there will be some savings and there will be some efficiency. So that's sort of step one in this process, but again, we acknowledge that more must be done. The second point revolves around, you know, my earlier analogy of the operating model, and we need to align our products, our market segments and our distribution channels in an optimal way that will drive profitability and ultimately growth. So use the tools we have in the best market segments, that's relevant to that environment. And, you know, the critical thing to get right there is for us to reposition our BDC or our tied agency force, you know, in the context of where they play and what they do.
Jeanette referred to it earlier, Johan touched on it as well. We want to reposition our BDC channel to be an advice-led business, focused on the high net worth market segment, focused on the small commercial segment, and ensure that it's properly set up to collaborate and align fully with the Momentum Advice ecosystem. Something which in the past has never really been the case, so that we can optimize distribution capabilities, and in the long run, that capability should be the only specialist short-term insurance tied agency force in the Momentum distribution sort of ecosystem. Then, from a differentiation point of view, the one big shift that we are at, you know, planning to make in this year is, or in the next three years, is how we use our safety value proposition.
Historically, our safety value proposition was aimed at translating into better profitability and longer or better retention outcomes. Now, those who know our industry will know that behavior change is a very difficult thing to achieve. So we were left with a choice. We believe in safety, but do we invest more in building capabilities that will translate into profitability outcomes, so actually just improving claims behavior? Or do we trust that the fundamentals in the business or the capabilities that are responsible for profitability, i.e., pricing and underwriting, that they can get that right? The thing that we are struggling with is attracting new business. So in support of the, you know, scaling of our direct business, we decided to rather focus the attention of our safety value proposition on client attraction as opposed to, you know, the other outcomes. So that's quite a big shift.
And then lastly, you know, everybody obviously needs and requires growth. In this context, growth is nuanced by the fact that it must translate into, you know, better premium diversification. So the low-hanging fruit for us in the next three years is to selectively increase our commercial lines exposure and sales, but it is something that will only receive attention in the second half of the strategic planning period, given the importance of getting the core, you know, personal lines business sorted out and running in a viable, profitable fashion. From a success measure perspective, I'll highlight only three sort of critical things for us. So the first is, you know, for us to live up to the earnings expectations of the group, we must deliver a combined ratio of somewhere between 92%-96%.
The midpoint of 94 gets us to that range of, you know, what Risto spoke to, to, you know, between ZAR 300 million and ZAR 350 million. Implied in the, you know, 92-96 is a loss ratio in the range of 58%-62%, and roughly a 34% cost ratio. The better we can do to, you know, take further costs out of our business, that ultimately translates into more market competitiveness because your pricing is a reflection on your future view of risk cost. So the better we do that, the less actually we need to, you know, place emphasis on the loss ratio. But if we don't, then the bottom end of the loss ratio, i.e., 58, is then what we need to achieve if we do nothing to the cost ratio.
But the core number is really 94 from a combined ratio point of view. If we get that right, we grow the business. There was earlier question from, from Michael, at roughly 6%, so we don't want to do anything better. So it's not about chasing growth, it's about fixing the fundamentals. You know, we can achieve that earnings outcome. There's no further capital in the business necessary. If everything works out towards the end of the financial planning period, you know, we might even be in a position to pay some dividends. The business is, you know, well capitalised, and we are able to, you know, to, to withstand, you know, even unexpected volatility. Then we should get to an ROE in and around that 10%-15% range that, you know, Risto... or 15%-20% range that Risto referred to.
So 94%, ZAR 300 million-ZAR 350 million earnings, no capital gets us to, you know, 15%-20%. The second comment, perhaps, just that I want to make, refers to that last success measure, you know, getting our, you know, non-motor exposure into a bit of, of better balance. So we want to obviously increase that, you know, by 3 to 6 points to get it closer to 40, where it is now, you know, closer to 30%. So in closing, our business has had a, you know, an interesting, you know, last few years, but we are confident that the next phase of, you know, our business will be something that will demonstrate why we have and why we deserve a place in the Momentum Group portfolio.
We've shown, we believe, in the last year, that if our management team has time and when we execute on our plans, that results start to follow, and that's the intention for the next three years. So we must get, you know, four critical things right in the next three years. So if you ask what will be different? Different will be, you know, our underwriting and pricing capability, much more mature, much stronger than what it is at the moment. The second point revolves around the extent to which we must digitalize to reduce cost and, you know, translate that into efficiency and ultimately market competitiveness. We must shift the focus of our safety value proposition, you know, to differentiation, you know, to client attraction, which is, you know, key to scaling our direct business.
And then lastly, we need to organize our products, our segments, and our distribution channels in a way that ultimately translates into better growth and better profitability. And if we can underpin that, you know, by actively pursuing, you know, collaboration opportunities in our group, if we can support that by, you know, working with, you know, Ravi's team and others to add data depth and richness to our underwriting processes, we believe, again, that we will be, you know, a valuable asset in the Momentum Group portfolio. And that when I stand here, hopefully again in three years from today, you know, we will be in a different WhatsApp group on another list, and definitely, you know, in, in a, in a different category when the group reflects on the success of the Impact Strategy. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Brent, and we look forward to you joining the other WhatsApp group.
Sitting close to the unicorns.
Sitting close to the unicorns there. As you, as you said, not bringing sexy back, but focusing on the basics. The basics, basics are important, and we look forward to that focus. I now welcome on stage Hannes, who will be presenting on our health business.
Thank you, Tukelo. Thank you, Brent. You're such a good articulator. I'm sure you're gonna put the runs on the board, eh? Yeah, thank you everybody, and good afternoon. It is about three o'clock. Now, when you... In my part of the forest, at three o'clock, you take a cup of coffee to get focused for the last few day, hours of the day. Now, I had my coffee, so I hope you had your coffee. So, but thank you for being here. It's a real privilege to be able to spend some time on the health business as part of our group and, and sharing with you the strategy as we go forward.
The story of our health business, of the content that I'll share, is a story of a, of a confident business that executes with heart every time that we touch the life of one of our clients, mostly when they're at their most vulnerable. We do that thousands of times every day. As Jeanette shared earlier today, we process and pay, in the South African industry only, around ZAR 200 million of claims every day. It's around ZAR 55 billion a year. Now, if we get it wrong with 1%... I used to be a dentist, I can't even calculate that far. But I think it's ZAR 700 million a year or something like that, nè? It's more money than we make if we make a 1% error, nè? So it's a big, big at-scale business with a lot of heart in every transaction.
We are doing this, we're executing this recipe of ours, we like to call it a recipe, through which we create more health for more people for less, which is our purpose, across the globe for about 30 million clients. This is South Africa, the same recipe used in Africa and in India. I think it makes us the largest health business in South Africa globally. 30 million health clients globally. It's a lot of people, nè? Now, if we get into the more formalities, same agenda as my colleagues, I'll just go through that. If we look at health, the first part of the presentation, just a little bit of looking back, giving you a snapshot of the business, and I think some of it is interesting.
From a volume point of view, since 2017, when the business came together, we've been growing the health base with around 19% per annum. This is the South African numbers on the left. From around 2.6 million beneficiaries to June, Risto will snap me and push the lead if I'm saying things that I may not say, Risto.
Over the time period.
Over the time period. Thank you, Risto. To currently just more than 3 million beneficiaries in the South African context, and then in Africa and India combined, clearly more than 30 million beneficiaries. So at-scale business with plenty clients. We moved this business from 2017, when we started this, from a pure admin business. You know, we used to do admin and managed care for schemes. That's it. Took the order, executed the order. And we decided that there's not space for that model from a sustainability point of view, and we changed our value proposition purposefully to a value proposition that speaks to the end client and to the employer, and we merely executed with admin and managed care capabilities, and we deliberate on that.
As you see moving forward, we're getting more deliberate and more focused on executing more health for more people, for less. That last point there, improving people's health through optimal design. To get sustainable healthcare, it is so important to get the design right and relevant consumption management. Now, it sounds terrible, but get both the consumer and the provider at that intersection of disease to act in the most optimal way, so that we can get as little as possible waste in the industry. And this is then supported by our incentivized wellness program or Multiply. As Jeanette said this morning, we're confident that Multiply is unique in the industry. Multiply incentivized wellness gives us two core capabilities. It helps us in the disease management space to better manage disease in the context of a failing regulatory environment.
Secondly, in that space, it gives incentives to consumers and providers to do the right thing in the space of treatment. So it's unique, it's different, nobody else has something like that, and we're making a difference towards creating then more health for more people, for less. Financially, where did this, what did this produce? So to what extent did the economy award us for what we're doing since 2017? 2017, and this is profit before tax, and I omitted in the beginning to say, I'll be sharing our undiluted picture. Remember, health business, we got some external shareholders four, five years ago, and I'll reconcile it back to the diluted picture every time to speak to Risto's numbers from IFRS. This is the undiluted picture.
Profit before tax, we grew the business from ZAR 100 million in 2017 to the current base, just north of ZAR 500 million. I'm not sure yet. What may I say, Risto, is that good enough? But it's, it's sensible growth in the same period than the volume growth. Now, you see that the profit before tax growth is faster than the volume growth, clearly indicating that we already getting efficiency. So part of the growth came from volumes, big part of it comes from the efficiencies from at scale business that we already extracted from the business. Then the one that speaks to our diluted picture, this is the picture that will recon back to Risto's stuff.
You'll see we grew it from, again, around ZAR 100 million, and then we did the empowerment deals from the outside, which diluted some of the profit after tax that comes into the shareholder group. But that's the normalized headline earnings picture. Our business, from a client and a capability point of view, a wide set of clients across different segments. Open market, our Momentum medical scheme clients. We also have the Health4Me product, which is the insurance product, DBMed, in that open market space. We have big clients in the restricted scheme space or the corporate space. Public sector, biggest client is GEMS, substantially big client. And then we service into Africa and India with the same recipe. We use three main capabilities at scale. Left bottom: design for health and incentivized wellness. It's unique.
Nobody else does it the way that we do it. And then we execute or we enable it with managed care and administration. And in our managed care or health risk management, we're using AI to start to predict hospitalization. We can currently predict that somebody will go to hospital with 85% certainty for a specific reason, which gives us the opportunity to intervene upfront and earlier to prevent that hospitalization and make the life of that individual better. And then administration, which is the just run-of-the-mill kind of admin. Market dynamics, nothing new. We all live in the same South Africa, but I'll start with NHI, and when we built the slides, it was a red blob, and then we thought we'll keep it red, just because it draws the attention.
But I do think that all of you probably have seen and followed the NHI debacle, and we are currently, as Risto also shared this morning, we're really not concerned that NHI will influence the private sector. As a matter of fact, we are very comfortable that private sector will play a huge part in the future of health in South Africa. The industry is doing a lot of work to ensure that at different levels. Firstly, a direct engagement, discussions, plenty of them happening through different forums. Then there's also, as you probably have seen, some litigation happening through different forums. And then thirdly, also busy getting external international consultants, helping us with an alternative model to support the notion of creating universal access to care for all our people, which is the right thing to do. So, we're comfortable that NHI is not a threat to business.
We're supportive of universal access to care. Left-hand down, market need for affordable solutions. It comes in the context of economy that's under severe pressure. Everybody has spoken to it. People don't have money, companies don't have money. So there's a huge need for affordable solutions, and we see it in the industry. People are buying down, employers are buying low. Health insurance products for the employees, there's a need for affordable healthcare solutions in the market. We are very well positioned to be able to take those to the market. Our Health4Me product is a market-leading product, and we are covering more and more beneficiaries out there for employers, especially the employed and uninsured. An area that we're very, very excited about, we see in the industry that employers are starting to see the synergies between traditional employee benefits and health.
So we're seeing that employers are starting to look at that as a combined employee benefit combinedly, and we are uniquely positioned with our corporate business, Dumo, to be able to take a value proposition to those employers, that creates the value that employers are looking for. So huge opportunity for us in that space. Distribution, the trend that we see out there from a health point of view, same as it used to be. It's dominated by one big brand, and we, we won't be able to play, play in a traditional way. Therefore, we are doing a lot of work with Johan's business, MDS, Momentum Consult to have a focused, specialized approach for health through the Momentum business to be able to penetrate into that channel space. Then again, the influence of labor in the employer space is increasing.
Labor are more and more influencing benefit decisions in bargaining councils, and we are so well positioned with our labor alignment and shareholding, that we are able to be able to get onto the table at employer groups to be able to get more business. Then the last market trend that's interesting, and you've seen it, plenty players dabbling now into health: banks, non-banks. The majority are doing it into the retail world, health insurance retail world. Now, we are very excited that there's more players that will bring products to the market to increase the number of consumers that have cover. Absolutely fantastic. We are concerned that players do not understand the risk of low-income retail health.
So we are a bit concerned about the sustainability of some of the solutions that we see, and we really hope that it doesn't burn the credibility of the general industry, so that the industry can actually solve for universal access to care. So those are the six main market trends. Our ambition and strategic focus, very easy. Our winning aspiration: more health for more people for less. And we're comfortable that we've shown that we can do it, and this will be our way to build and protect our clients' financial streams as part of this group, to take a full purpose to clients of the group. If we make this a little bit more practical, we go into the impact strategy.
Our strategy is to grow a streamlined, Momentum-branded value proposition in selected markets, locally and outside our borders, while leveraging existing capabilities to achieve public-private partnership with different government entities at scale, so that we can do the right thing socially and contribute to universal access of care for the broader society. When we achieve this ambition in numbers, our numbers will look like this. We've seen the left-hand side, client growth one. The bars in red are the volumes, and our intent is that our current 3 million beneficiaries in South Africa will increase to around 3.6-3.7 million beneficiaries by F27. So again, that, I think, 20% increase is the... And then our profit before tax will increase from the current level to around ZAR 1,000 million profit before tax. So we're not a unicorn yet. We're a pre-...
We will be a pre-tax undiluted. Yeah, pre-tax. Pre-minority unicorn. Yeah, pre-tax, pre-minority unicorn. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My wife didn't like this pre-tax, pre-minority unicorn story. So, yeah, so we, that's what we're heading for. If you put it in the diluted picture, which is the picture for this community, the volume side stays the same, and the normalized headline earnings will increase from the current base to around ZAR 600 million, as you saw on Risto's slides earlier this morning, which we think is something special to achieve for the health business, given the environment that we're in. The focus areas that we will have, very simple. It's a huge, big business. There's only five focus areas to take us to these numbers. First big thing, one health.
We are a fairly big business, but in some areas we're still fragmented, and we will position ourselves as a single value proposition, single brand, labor-aligned business, so that we can maximize the scale that we have. 3 million beneficiaries is a lot of clients. In the open market, that's our Momentum-branded business. We are refocusing into the channel space and the work that Johan is doing and the work that, that Dumo is doing, so that we are aligned, so that we can get business in, in our traditional product lines. And we're comfortable that it's already starting to show evidence. Public sector, as you can think, our GEMS concentration risk always been an issue.
Again, we will focus on stabilizing that, and then there's also other opportunity, opportunities to diversify the income through other opportunities in the public sector space, so that we can really get rid of the risk of recontracting and losing a big income stream there. Then we will focus on alternative growth. Two points on alternative growth: one is looking for international opportunities, and secondly, investing into the delivery system, pharmacies, and primary care clinics, to be able to create more space for access in the context of universal access to care. And then we will, as a business, contribute to universal health coverage. It's something that we as a business and an industry need to get right in the interest of a stable society out there.
We need to contribute to create universal access and find sustainable solutions for the broader society, and there's plenty projects that we're working on to participate with government and employer groups, et cetera, et cetera, to contribute in that one. All of this underpinned with a huge focus on digital transformation using data from all the claims that we see and the health interactions that we see, and and insights. And five main focuses: big focus on digitizing solutions and creating standardized solutions across our business so that we can get efficiencies from a solution point of view. We have AI-supported clinical risk within health risk management, as I shared earlier, where we can now predict hospitalization with 85% accuracy, 6-7 weeks in advance.
Our Hello Doctor capability, virtual provision, a capability that's really adding a lot of value, where members and clients have access to virtual provision. We're currently doing about 320 virtual doctor consults a day, and we're preventing 80% downstream access to normal doctors and specialists. So exceptionally efficient, not only in preventing unnecessary downstream supply access, but also when that interaction happens with Hello Doctor, the type of treatment and the type of medicine that's prescribed is according to what is relevant and necessary, so we see minimal waste in our virtual provision capability. Fourthly, focusing on client experience through different technologies. Then the last one there, increase our broker efficiencies in our channels to support us better.
So big, big focus for us, digital, right through all aspects of the business. How will we measure ourselves? Now, we've seen the focus areas, the four. Not gonna go through the objectives. I've did share it on the right-hand side. How will we measure ourselves? One health business, that's by consolidating and bringing things together. We will save ZAR 230 million by 2027. I think Risto also this morning said the business is, is big, and there's plenty opportunities if we, if we just get standardization right across. Then in the open market, we're comfortable that we'll be able to grow the business with 350,000 families across, with a 37% Multiply attachment rate. In the public sector, we're focusing on two or three clients, municipal space, and the broader public sector to add volumes to other, the business as well.
Then alternative growth. We want to have a national reach of pharmacies, and we will grow outside South Africa by FY 2027. Why we think that we will win? Our right to win, then. Left top, we are very confident that we can deliver better health outcomes at a lower cost. We've seen it over the last few years. Therefore, we can beat the market at price in an economy that's under strain. It is also very important to be able to do that, to achieve sustainable, affordable solutions. To get a sustainable, affordable solution in health, it's not just price something, set it on the shelf, and try to sell it. It is not sustainable in the current regulatory environment. So we are confident that we can build sustainable health solutions.
Then on the left bottom, partnership with Dumo and his business to focus on the employer space. Employer market, lots of people employed and uninsured, with our alignment with labor, being able to capture some of that market. And then surely execute our value proposition with client delight and with heart. Every touch point is an opportunity to create happiness for our clients. That's our story. Thank you so much. Thank you for the afternoon listening.
Thank you, Hannes, our pre-tax, pre-minority unicorn. Ladies and gentlemen, we're about to reach a break. We've got 15 minutes for a quick comfort break. Get your coffees. We've got two more sessions after this, and we'll see you at 3:20 P.M. I hope you are coffeed up. I see boosters are all around, and to all our online guests, that you are ready and have had your coffee. I'm now gonna hand over to Peter, who's gonna speak to Metropolitan. Thank you.
Thank you to Tukelo, and a very good afternoon to each and every one of you. So earlier when I was listening to different WhatsApp groups, and I thought to myself, it's time I have to start a new one better than the WhatsApp group that I find myself in right now. So I'm gonna be sharing with you the Metropolitan's impact strategy. And I think for me, I'm gonna spend quite a bit of time on the Metropolitan today, and more time will also go to number four. And as for the different dynamics, as well as the ambition, I should be able to go through that a bit quickly. The reason why I'm gonna spend a lot of time on the Metropolitan today, it's for me to be able to create the better context.
Not to explain, because there is a saying amongst ourselves, how to say, "Thandeka, explain." It is now for me to create better context so that when we talk about what we're gonna do from now up to 2027, you really understand where we're coming from. Yes, in the context, there may not be a lot of stuff that we can be able to be boastful about, but it's still very much key that we can be on the same page so that when we do solve for the future, we do it from the same understanding. First, it is about our value proposition as Metropolitan. Now, the Metropolitan value proposition, it is very strong, and on the other hand, it is still very much competitive. And then on the left, on the top left, it is our own diversified distribution channels.
We currently sit with about 3,200 advisors, which to me, it is something that we sit with already. It's a matter of how can we be able to utilize this for the benefit of the business? In the last 12-18 months, we have seen a very good growth when it comes to the broker channel. We have now about 165 brokers that are really supporting our business. And now, what is encouraging here, in the past, the only people who fell into the broker space, those would have been advisors who worked for Metropolitan, and then they reached a point where they say, "No, let me start my own business." We have now gotten some of the independent advisors who are really selling our own products, which to me, it is a positive thing.
We have got the call centre with about just over 300 agents, which is something that we need to make sure that we can harness and be able to get more value from. Then there's a new channel that we have introduced to try and get new revenue stream, and this is the affinities as well as the affiliations. We also have got the direct channel, where clients can be able to buy from us online. When you look on the right-hand side, we sit with something that we are very proud of as Metropolitan. It is about the service excellence. You will know when we had consulted, they used to do the Ask Afrika survey every year, and year after year, we used to come out as the leader.
Now, when we moved from the consultant to Ask Afrika Orange, for us to again win the long-term insurance was a clear indication that there is something in service that we're doing right. But now it's a matter of saying, how can we utilize this and use it to our own benefit? So it's something that we already have, and we're doing something right there. How can we build on that and make sure that we can be able to generate value from that? As from the products point of view, we do have a very competitive and comprehensive product basket, which we have to utilize. And now here, it also links back to when we talk about the advise lead.
As much as advice in this space will be different from the affluent space, but when you're sitting with the products, when you have got the clients, you can be able to sell a lot more than someone who has got only one product to sell. System transformation. This has been a journey for a long while, where we have been trying to get off the legacy system, and now I think we are on the last mile, which is very much encouraging. But on the other hand, this journey has been costly to a certain extent because there's been a number of times where we felt we were very much internally focused. There was no way that we can be able to look up because we had issues that we needed to make sure that we can be able to address. That said, we are now nearing the end.
Johan was talking about some savings that we'll get. It's very much linked to this. But for me, this is far much bigger than the cost saving. It is also going to put us in a position where we can be able to respond quickly to the changes, we can be able to innovate, and also managing our own business will become much, much better. Now, this is the value proposition for Metropolitan as we stand. Now, looking into the last six years... I think it was someone in this WhatsApp group who said it was a rollercoaster ride. So when we started with the reset and grow, things started very well. You can see both our own normalized headline earnings, as well as the VNB, was going into the right direction, which was good.
And yes, you look into financial year 2020 and 2021, and that's where you could see we started to wobble, more so from the earnings point of view, and the biggest driver here was the COVID-19 claims. And now come financial year 2023, we saw that the COVID-19 claims were also normalizing. But when that was happening, other challenges beset. We found ourselves having to deal with our expenses were not necessarily where they should be. They were growing more than the revenue that we were generating. On the other hand, our own advisors, and I think somehow we were struggling to get off to the operating model, which was relevant during the COVID-19 period, wherein people were at home, you can phone a client and be able to sell a policy.
Now, when we get off that, people continue to do exactly that, which was a biggest challenge that we have. We owned it and say, we as the leadership and the management, somehow we were lax to pick that up early. In the end, we ended up with fraudulent business, which was set into the business, and then our NTU, they went up because there was no premium we would collect on a policy which was nonexistent. Then in the end, these people will have to fall off, and then when you have to go and get back the commission you paid to them, they were no longer there. That was the biggest challenge that we needed to make sure that we can deal with. On the other hand, our persistence experience also deteriorated, and which is why we had to introduce the basis change.
All of this created a huge challenge for ourselves. Our own earnings took a dip, and then our own VNB also went into the wrong direction. This was at the end of financial year 2023, and this is where we said: What are we gonna do? And we went back and said, "Let's understand as to what are the things that we could have done differently for us to address these issues before they even happened." This is when we came up with the 5-point plan. This 5-point plan was meant to address, 1, product commerciality, to have the commercial mindset in every product that we introduce into the market. Secondly, managing our own sales workforce. We felt we were far more removed from managing our own advisors. That's why some of these things really happened.
The quality of business, which is very much linked to how we manage them, it also took a dive, and we also said the cost base that we have, given that we are not getting the sales that we expected, it is not aligned, which means we needed to reduce the cost base. Then the migration and automation to say, what more can we do to ensure that even all of these issues, where you would have the migration data cleanup or some of the challenges of policies not deducting, how can we get into a space where all of these issues are addressed so that we can go back to getting the VNB margin of 5%, as well as getting to ZAR 600 million normalized headline earnings going forward? Now, 12 months on, we're looking into the progress that we have made on the five-point plan.
The first thing around the product commerciality. We have done two premium increases in our funeral book. The last one came through in November 2023. That means from this calendar year, we have been getting higher premium, and then when we look into the commission payment, in the past, which created a bit of an issue for us, was we used to pay based on issue. Now, we have got the capability to be able to pay on first receipt of premium, which to me, it managed the cases where people would like to get some money now and then they really disappear. The benefit restructuring. One of the benefit we had was the cashback, wherein in the market, we had the best cashback, wherein you can take out the cashback, solution benefit with us today.
After 12 months, we were already giving you some money back, whereas our competitors were already sitting at three years only. Now, we had to change that to ensure that we can be able to contribute towards our own VNB margin. The market access fee. As much as we have got this strong relationship with some of the unions out there, it was also key and important for our own growth. Now, these are the, the partners who we pay the market access fee, and now this market access fee, it just didn't make sense where we would be paying about 8, 9, in some instances, 10% to this partner when we are not necessarily getting anything back. When we made that call, we had to go and engage with them.
And as tough as it was, today, I can say more than 60% of the premium we used to get from some of this union, they have now already agreed to say they will go with the new percentage which we have given to them, which some of them is as low as 1%, and the highest will be around 6%. Because in the past, we used to pay based on the in-force book. Now, the in-force book, yes, we'll be able to pay you something, but we pay you more when you bring new business. And then this growth that we generate together will be able to generate income for the partners, and then we will also be getting new business.
And then on the cost base, we set a target for ourselves, which we're happy to say we should be able to achieve that. But on the right-hand side, when I look into the migration and automation, some work has been done there, and now one of the tax-free saving solution is now on the OEPA, the new system, which in my view, it is also going to create better opportunities for us, because now this system is the one where we're gonna be bringing all the new solutions which we had on the old legacy system, and make sure that we can be able to rationalize some of the solutions that we're sitting with. Owing to the challenges related to the two-pot system, we were meant to now migrate in August.
Given the date moving to September, we realized that there's no way that we were going to migrate as well as attend to the requirements of the two-pot system. We had to push that out by six months, which in my view, it will be able to impact the cost saving, which we expected to get from here, but it's only a timing issue. Eventually, we should be able to get that. And earlier on, I said we are on the last mile when it comes to this. I can't wait to get to a space where this has been done and dusted so that we can be able to focus on new challenges and building for tomorrow. On the right-hand side, it is the sales workforce management, which is key. In my view, that influences how we get the quality business.
It is encouraging to know that we have seen an improvement on the NTU, and we have also seen a huge improvement on the premium collection, which is a good lead measure for the persistence really going forward. That said, there's still a lot of work that we have to do in that space. Now the three things which are very much interrelated, it's manpower management, the workforce management, as well, the work site management, as well as the activity management. When you only focus on one and not the other, you create problem, which are some of the stuff which, as the leadership, I felt that's what really happened.
Now, it's a matter of how can we create a system or a rhythm which will enable us to make sure that at any given time, we will know and see what is really that is happening in that space? As for manpower, as much as we would like to see growth, we are no longer as overzealous like in the past, where we thought we want to be at 5,000. Not at all. Key for me is to understand the manpower that we currently have and see where we are generating value, because when it comes to the churn, it is happening between those people who have been with us for less than 12 months. Now, if you continuously try to refill that and thinking we're making progress, we're not. Instead, we're just incurring costs.
On the other hand, how do we really divert the resources that we have? If we have 2,000 of those who are doing well, how can we make sure that we can be able to get more productivity, and they will be able to stay with us longer? Now, this is the 5-point plan, which really creates the foundation for us as we get into the Impact Strategy to 2027. Now, this is key to ensure that whatever we do, we build up on this, so that we can be able to achieve all the objectives that we're gonna be setting for ourselves going into financial year 2027. I think as for the market dynamics, yes, everybody says, I'm not gonna talk much to this. I will say the same thing as well.
Here are some of the things that I want to touch on. The tough economic conditions in the market that we really operate in, it is something that will make it very difficult for us to even acquire new clients. On the other hand, those that we already have on our own, in book, on book, you will still find a different way to manage them, because if we don't do that, definitely we may be losing some of the clients that we have.
We are very much aware that digital is the way to go, and some of the clients would like to engage with us differently, which is why I would like to link it back to our own system transformation to say, when we have that done, it gives us an opportunity to do a lot more so that we can also remain current and be able to respond to some of the challenges we'll be seeing out there. And yes, the youth and the space where we find ourselves, we still have to find a better solution which we can be able to take there. Given that the economy is not growing, we need to think hard and differently to see how we're gonna be generating more growth for ourselves.
As for our ambition for the impact strategy, we would like to achieve a consistent and sustainable 5% new business profit margin. And now, this is the one thing that I would like to make sure that we can achieve. And the day we do that, we want to ensure that we can be able to maintain that going forward, if anything, and better it from there. That is the ambition we have really set for ourselves. Looking into the different objectives that we have, you will see on the left-hand side, we have got the different focus areas which we have identified. The first one is around value optimization, which in my view, it links into how are we going to save from our own cost base to justify our business to make the profit that we really expect.
150 million, given the system migration, as well as other areas that we have identified, which can be able to reduce the cost, and then we can be able to deliver the ZAR 150 million saving by 2027. Then the thinking as well is around, let's put the client at the center of everything that we do. Given the system transformation, which I referred to, it is also going to allow us to find a better way of rethinking service so that we can be able to delight our clients. On the other hand, the solutions that we have, we need to find a way as to how can we be able to now come up with solutions which are simple and aligned to what the clients are expecting from us.
In doing that, we don't want to sacrifice or compromise the 5% margin that we have set for ourselves by 2027. As for the customer satisfaction, we'll have to see that improving from 79% to 84%. Then on business development, this is going to be key. Earlier on, I made reference to the negotiations as well as the agreement that we have with the unions. That, to me, is the low-hanging fruits because these partners, they would like to get exactly the same amount which they have been getting from this relationship. The only way they will be able to get that, is for them to create opportunities for us to take advisors who will go there and sell.
When we have advisors who will be going into the space like that, you're already guaranteed that you're gonna be getting quality business, and if their productivity is up to scratch, and then you should see them staying longer with you, and that's what we are going to do. We have also now picked up that some of those people that we have got those kind of relationship, they are also open for discussions around the compulsory solutions which we can be able to give to them, which will also help us to get the bulk business from them. Commercial partnerships is also gonna be key to ensure that we can be able to achieve the targets we have set for ourselves. As for growth, we want to see penetration in this work side, public sector work side, up to 20%.
And then when we look into the alternative channels that we have, new as they are, and now by the end of this planning period, we would like to see that 30% of our own APE must be coming from this ones. This will be the direct as well as the brokers, tele, as well as ANA. And now 30% coming from this area, in an area which is also growing, should be a positive thing that we would be happy about. And then key for me, again, around the diversified distribution, the workforce management is going to be critical. As much as we are going to create opportunities for these channels to be fed new leads, we also have to make sure that we manage them appropriately, because that's the only way we're gonna get productivity up.
When we get productivity up, we will also be able to get advisor retained. I see my time is gone. I should be able to cover this. I think key for me here is we have been on the journey for system transformation for a long while. Now we are in a space where we should be able to tick that off. And now, yes, we will be able to get some cost saving, but on the other hand, we'll be in a much better position for us to lift up our heads and see what are the other things that we can be able to do.
Again, given that we are part of the bigger group, there are opportunities that we need to leverage by making sure that those relationships that are sitting somewhere else in the group, we can engage and see the value we will be able to get from there. It will be key for us to create this distribution cadence, because that's the only way we will know exactly what is happening in our space. And when it comes to the client, we need to continuously build on this to ensure that clients can continue to be really a part of us. Key to this will be the disciplined execution, which everybody has got to own their space, because that's the only way we can be able to see the growth that we expect from the business.
And yes, I also want to exit the group and get to a different WhatsApp group. So that's why we need to really deliver on this. And now my last message would be, if anything, we really have to make sure that we create the agency that we need. We have also appointed a new distribution executive who has already started to really doing just that. And in my view, if anything, we just do not have to lose the momentum that we have really started with the five-point plan. Let's make sure that we really build from there. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. I happen to be the person that is fortunate enough to take a lot of notes in the meeting, so I know where the rollercoaster comment came from. So I guess you can call me the person that does all the screen grabs. Next up, we have Lulama, who is already on stage and kicking me off. I guess little-known fact or well-known fact is, before her role as head of international, Lulama used to look after the purse strings of the group. And now the roles have changed, and she has to go to Risto to ask for money.
Luckily, I made sure there was a balance sheet that I can borrow from.
Thanks to Tukelo.
Good afternoon, everyone. Okay, it is the end. I thought they were gonna cut my time, but I have all my time, so I will use it. I look after the international business.
... but as Risto and Jeanette mentioned earlier, we won't be covering India today. I'll be talking about our businesses in the rest of Africa, but I'm happy to take questions on the India, on the Aditya Birla Health Insurance business, when we do the Q&A. Okay. So, I mean, the agenda is similar. I'll start off with a bit of history and context in terms of where we've come from, as the Africa business. And then talk about market dynamics, and then, into the focus areas really for the coming three years of the impact strategy. So for those of you who've been following us, you'll know that we did exit a number of markets. Jeanette mentioned it earlier as well.
So really the context is we've come from a time at about 2018 when we were in 11 countries across the continent. And at that point, we made a decision to say, "Let's review the portfolio." There was pressure on performance on the portfolio, and we did some work to say, you know, "Are we comfortable with how things looks?" And the answer was no. So we did review the portfolio, and we used the planning periods on restate and grow and reinvent and grow, to really review the strategic focus of the footprint of the portfolio, as well as look at the operational environment in the business, and start doing work around that.
So we've done a lot of work in that context, and now we are in 5 countries, in which are Ghana, Mozambique, Lesotho, Namibia, and Botswana. And we're really... Yeah, the portfolio is stable. We've got a strong brand, so we operate on the Momentum and Metropolitan brands and across the countries, and I'll give you a bit more color in terms of how that plays out in the various markets. We've got strong management teams. There's been a lot of work done to sort of make changes on the management side, so we really are comfortable with the teams that we have in the countries. We've got strong and aligned and non-executive directors as well in the countries.
We think that, you know, the expertise that we have with the teams in the countries as well as the directors, gives us a wealth of local market knowledge that allows us to play really well in the countries that we're present in. The things that haven't gone so well, one is in relation to the refresh in terms of systems that we've been working on. That's still in progress. Johan would have mentioned earlier that we are still in the process of implementing some of those systems. Some of them will go online in this financial year that we're in now, and some a bit later. That's a key focus for us.
It's critical because improving our operational efficiency is gonna be key, both in terms of what our plans are with regards to client experience, which I'll talk to later, but also in terms of improving the cost efficiencies in the business. So that's a key one that we still need to do more work on. Then the second one is around distribution. So scale is a key thing in this business. We're in markets where clients require affordable products, and therefore, we must be able to deliver them in a cost-efficient way. So that's a key focus that we still need to do some work on. So what does our sort of footprint look like? So over the years, we used to be in West Africa. We exited Nigeria. We're still in the Ghana business.
In East Africa, we exited Kenya, Tanzania, and then in the south, we exited,
Zambia.
Zambia, yes, and Mauritius. Yeah. So, there has been a significant change in what our footprint looks like. And at that time, we really had an honest, you know, look at the portfolio and said: What are we trying to achieve? So what is the strategic goals that we want to achieve with the portfolio? And therefore, what do we need to do differently going forward, and how will we measure success, for ourselves going forward? And we came up with a couple of measures, that really formulated the framework against which we would analyze the portfolio, both the existing portfolio and in future, any new potential investments in the business as well or in the rest, in, in other geographies as well.
We basically said, first of all, the business, each business in each country needs to have the potential to be a top three player in the market. Secondly, each business needs to have the potential to be a ZAR 100 million in normalized headline earnings business over the medium term or over a reasonable timeframe. Each business need to be able to have a reasonable or earn a reasonable ROE over a reasonable term as well, and it must be an opportunity for us to leverage our group IP and capabilities and expand them into these new markets. So that's really what we considered. And having looked at that, we basically considered that, for example, in Nigeria, there was regulatory capital requirement changes that meant that the business would not be able to achieve those ROEs, and that's why we...
That's sort of what influenced the exit there. In Eswatini, our business there had a ZAR 10 million NHE, and we could see that even if we tried to grow the business, really, the size would never get to a size that we'd be comfortable with. Yeah, and in the other markets as well, it was really around the earnings, the ability to recognize the earnings, but also the top three, being able to, to be a sustainable player or a large enough player in the market to be able to, to grow the business sustainably. So where are we now? The countries that we are in are really influenced by increasing urbanization, so that's a key focus. There's a lot of rural, still, covered in the markets that we're in.
There's an increasing and high penetration of mobile, so mobile penetration remains a key thing, and it influences how we then do business in the countries. The countries are... So there's still low GDP, I mean, slightly higher than South Africa's in these markets that we're in, but really not, you know, significant. Although there are really exciting opportunities in Namibia and Mozambique, which are influenced by oil and gas opportunities. So in the medium term, we do expect growth in terms of GDP and therefore the opportunities that we can access in those markets. And really the markets are, the GDP is driven by tourism, manufacturing, like I said, oil and gas opportunities coming up as well. And then maybe just to give a bit of color in terms of the countries that we are represented in.
So in Ghana, we are Metropolitan Ghana. We're number 10, officially on terms of market share, and that includes some of the government-owned entities in the market. If we look at profitability, we're number 4, so a lot of the entities really, especially the government-owned ones, are not operating at a profitable level, so we do have an opportunity to play a meaningful role in that market. In Namibia, we are. We play in the life insurance, health insurance, short-term insurance, as well as asset management. So those are the markets that we're in. We operate as Momentum Group Namibia, so we have a Momentum business as well as a Metropolitan business in Namibia. And Namibia is also quite a key part of our portfolio.
It generates about 40%-50% of our gross written premiums across the segment. So an important point, and like I said, quite exciting opportunities there that we are hoping to leverage, as in terms of growth. Then, Botswana, we have a life insurance and health insurance business. The health business, the life business operates as Metropolitan Botswana. The health business is called Witsogo, and it's the largest one in the segment, so quite a key business for us there. We're second in the market, quite far behind the number one player, but we see a lot of opportunities for growth. Botswana is also an interesting market.
GDP per capita is higher than SA, but really very vast market with a lot of rural as well, so we need to think differently in terms of how we deliver our products to clients there. Then in Mozambique, we are Momentum Mozambique, which is the first health insurance company that was formed in Mozambique, really. And there, the Momentum brand has quite a lot of weight, so really, strong brand there. We've done a lot of work to improve the claims ratios in that business, and that's worked well. So we see that the business is actually set up now for, for growth going forward.
We're currently number three in the market, and that's after having lost some market share because of the changes that we made in terms of, you know, willingly, being willing to sacrifice some of the non-profitable business that we had there. Then in Lesotho, we have a 69% market share, so largest insurer in the country. And, yeah, as the biggest insurer in the country, everyone is really trying to see how they can get access to our client base, so really a focus on defending our position there. And I think the plans that we have will set us up to be... to show up better in the market and really be able to use client experience to, to allow ourselves to defend our position and possibly grow our market share there as well.
Okay, so what are some of the market dynamics that we are facing? I've spoken about GDP. There's also a large informal sector. Poverty, unemployment remain key factors that we need to deal with. There's a young population, which is, I mean, interesting and exciting, but at the same time, not familiar for financial services companies. So, finding ways that we can actually utilize access to those, to the young, to the youth, to SMEs, and to the informal sector, requires us to do a lot more work in terms of thinking and how we deliver those products. So, really, the context requires us to have, to provide our clients with accessible products, affordable products, and really simple products. And that's what we need.
That's the work that we're going to do over the next coming years. Digital and technology remain key focus areas. We've implemented automation in some of our servicing, but I think really the focus is on improving that and increasing that. So there's a focus on digital, there's a focus on using mobile as mobile penetration increases. We've got a lot of partnerships. For example, in Ghana, we're partnering with some of the mobile network operators, so that's becoming a key trend as well as banks and MNOs sort of start to enter the markets as alternative players. Regulation, the language we use is that we can feel the regulation.
So there's an increasing focus on regulation, which is similar to other markets, really, including South Africa, focusing on consumer protection, focusing on anti-money laundering. In addition, in these markets, there's a big focus on localization as well and protecting the growth of the local economy. So that's a factor that we are continuously dealing with as well. And therefore, so who do we want to be in these countries? We want to be the preferred financial services partner within our chosen markets, providing relevant solutions that enable the well-being of our clients through exceptional client experience. Keywords are preferred partner, chosen markets, relevant solutions, exceptional client experience. So that's really what we, what we want to be able to achieve. Then, over this planning cycle for the Impact Strategy, what we'll focus on is the significant market share.
So we'll focus on growing our distribution footprint so that we can improve the proportion of our market share. We will focus on providing effective solutions. What that means is that we'll focus on our product suite. As I said, there's some implementation in terms of our products going through in this year, and that's we've got some really exciting products that I think will set us up and make us more relevant in these markets. So that's the one, and then also how we deliver those products. So in terms of the operational efficiency and allowing our clients, our employees to be more equipped to better deliver to our clients, that's the other part of the effective solutions. And then lastly, again, exceptional client experience. So I think we've made the...
We really have made the decision that in order to be effective in the markets that we operate in, we need to have a standardized product suite and system across the segment. So therefore, the base really is gonna be solid, and it's gonna be consistent. And therefore, how we show up to our clients is how we're gonna differentiate ourselves. So we cannot have complex products that are priced at a premium. That's not how we're, we're going to, you know, gain our or cement our position. What we're going to do is show up differently to our clients, and therefore, the client experience becomes a critical element. The focus areas that we'll implement, I think this has already come through. Distribution effectiveness is key.
So firstly, stabilizing or doing better in terms of our fundamental, our foundational distribution practices, enabling our sales advisors to use performance analytics so that they can track the performance of different advisors and therefore, you know, enable them better. Market access is gonna be key, so ensuring that we are optimizing each distribution channel effectively, in terms of to ensure that we are able to grow in each of the distribution channels. Then partnerships are a key one as well, so credit life with banks, like I said, embedded insurance with the mobile network operators as well. Then enhanced client experience, as I said, that's a key one for us.
We need to ensure that we are enabling clients through portals as well as agents through service portals, as well as using our operational efficiency, which I'll talk to later, to impact how we show up to our clients, both by enabling our employees to be able to have access to the information that they need to service clients better, but also to be able to, you know, impact clients faster, respond faster to client queries, yeah, through access to information in that way. We'll also look at product features in terms of cashbacks, for example, that reward clients for loyalty. So simple ways in which we can communicate to clients how important they are to us. Operational efficiency, as I said, system implementations is probably the base of that.
Then in addition to that, it's about the operational processes that we are able to then streamline as a result of those systems that we've implemented. And then using digital, increasing the percentage of automated processes in our stream so that we can be lean and be able to service clients better. Growth is a key one. Work is underway already in terms of saying, how do we actually leverage the opportunities that we think are there, around the youth SME market, as well as informal sector? So that's gonna be critical areas in terms of unlocking the value in those channels. We do have opportunities here and there to introduce new business lines, opportunistically.
In Lesotho, for example, we have a new asset management business that we've started that is supporting the business because of regulatory changes that happened in that country. So any opportunities in that context, we'll leverage. Then product development will come through as we implement our solution. So that's. As we implement the systems, we have an opportunity to sort of refine our product suite and therefore, make sure that we're more relevant in the countries. So how will we measure success? So on distribution, it's about growing the footprint, and it's about productivity, so improving our productivity of our advisors to 1.2 policies per advisor per week. Then another important element is the mix of risk versus savings.
So currently in Botswana, for example, and Lesotho, there's a high proportion of savings business, which is low-margin business, so increasing the mix of risk business is gonna be critical. So that will improve our persistency as well as improve margins in the business as well. We've already implemented some of these, of the measures to ensure to start this improvement. So we've-- you know, we in the process of changing some of our commission structures in some of the countries, and that will allow us to influence how advisors are selling our products. And really, the focus is on improving that mix, and with that, we think that will contribute to some of the VNB challenges that the business has had as well. NPS, we'd like it to be above 65.
Completion of our system implementation project, and then, as Risto mentioned earlier, ZAR 450 million normalized headline earnings by FY 2027. We measure that relative to our, a consistent base over the last couple of years, which is about ZAR 250 million-ZAR 300 million, if you take out some of the once-offs that have happened in the, in recent years. Okay, and so if you forget everything I've said, why will we win? So after nine months in the job, I can definitely say that Africa is a complex market. We're required to provide our clients with affordable products, and we are operating in an environment where the markets are actually very diverse, but we really need to provide a standardized product set so that we can be cost efficient.
So it's a difficult environment to operate in, but I'm really excited about the opportunity that we have as financial services companies across the continent to support economic participation of people in those countries. So I really think we have an opportunity through this business to play a role in that regard, and therefore, what we are doing here matters, and therefore, we do need to get it right. Now, in order to achieve that, we do need to be focused. So we will continue to maintain our focused approach in terms of how we deploy our business in these countries. We get a lot of questions around, you know, why is it that you guys have reduced your portfolio while actually your peers are growing in the African continent?
We think that our focused strategy of saying, "This is how we are going to apply the measures that I've mentioned earlier," in terms of how we deploy the business, deploy capital, both in our existing businesses and in potential new opportunities, is what is setting us apart. And we are comfortable that if we maintain that strategy, we will make the right decisions for the existing portfolios and for new opportunities as well. So we'll stick to that. We will, we will need to maintain a streamlined business, so we do need to ensure that we reduce the cost base in the business. Now, we can't do that by merely saying, "Let's cut costs." We have to do things differently.
That does mean we need to automate our processes, and we need to create an environment where as we scale up the business, it is actually able to scale up without increasing the cost base, as well. Therefore, streamlining the business and improving efficiencies and creating cost efficiency is gonna be critical, so that we have to deliver. We will say we have won and we have achieved our goals when we are a lean, streamlined operation that is focused on elevating employee and customer experience. Thank you.
Thank you. So this is a big panel, lots of topics to discuss, and I see Mike is ready to go. Go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks. Let me just go in the order in which the speaker spoke. Just on Insure, can you just help me a little bit with the math? You're talking about 6% premium growth for the next three years, yet you're gonna get your claims ratio down from 70% to 58%. How does that transpire? I mean, either it's massive volume reduction with very high premium increases, or you're expecting no claims inflation. Can you just walk me through how you get-how that adds up? Is it a massive change in mix?
Not necessarily so much, Michael. So a lot of the heavy lifting was done already in this year, and, you know, given just, I suppose, where we find ourselves, it's difficult to speak to some of that detail. But we do expect in year one, for our, you know, premium growth to, shrink quite a lot relative to where we are now. So we are still in the process of cleaning out the book, and then there is a mix change happening towards the end. So between those two things, you know, we can, you know, get to a claims ratio in that range of, you know, 58%-62%. So the 58% is right at the bottom end of that. If we can get the cost ratio down, you know, 58% can easily be 60% or, you know, or 61%.
You know, we're managing the combined ratio and, you know, seeing how we progress between those two things.
Okay, so the existing client that's still there in 2027-
Yes. So, this-
-will see a lot more than 6% increase every year.
Exactly.
Yeah. Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Maybe then just on health, can you just elaborate, you, you're hoping to get another 350,000 new families into the open scheme. Is that right?
No, no, no, sorry. I, I articulated it wrongly. It's across the base.
Okay.
So, quite a portion of that will be new opportunities also in public sector. And then I would say 50/50 open environment, which includes then the Health for Me insurance product and then the balance in public sector.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. And then, Peter, two questions for you. Just the system transformation, how much of the 150 savings cost is from the migration? 'Cause it sounds like you're quite confident that's gonna come through. Can you, can you maybe just talk a bit about that, and what does that do to your new business margin alone, to view unit costs?
The migration is going to give us, this number has been going up and down, but not more than ZAR 100 million.
Right.
It has always been budgeted to be anything between ZAR 70 million and ZAR 100 million of the migration money that will be coming from there. And the balance, we should be able to get it from the work that we have identified internally. We should be able to really open that.
And that's maintenance cost, right? So that's-
Yes
... goes into your unit cost, which goes into your VNB margin.
Yes.
So the VNB margin delta on that alone, any idea?
I'm not talking about the VNB margin now at all.
Okay.
So I don't know if you're talking to 2027. Yes-
Yeah
... we will be able to get to 5%, but I don't know as to how, what's the percentage of that restore and ETL?
One percent.
One percent.
1%. Okay, great. And then I'm still a little bit... I'm still unclear as to how you're gonna turn this margin around. You talk about workforce management, but what actually needs to happen here? Is it a matter of shrinking the workforce and getting rid of the non-producers? Is it? I'm just trying to understand exactly what you're doing. You talk about workforce management.
Yeah.
I'm not sure I understand what that means.
So yeah, when I talk about the workforce management, I said there are three interrelated things that we need to work on. One is manpower optimization, and then the next one is the work site management, and the third one is more the way of work around activity management. Now, having looked into our own manpower currently, which has been hovering around 3,200, the beginning of this financial year, we made a conscious decision that we were not going to be replacing advisor as we used to do in the past, but focus on those that we already have in the system, and make sure that we can be able to create opportunities for them to do better and give us better productivity.
Because by doing that, they're gonna be able to stay longer with us, of which even if you were to bring some of the new people, when they go into a branch which is already operational, it helps you. Unlike where you bring a big... let's say 250 people, and when you're gonna lose 200 in a volume. So that's the one thing that we don't want to do. We're trying to see as to how can we focus on those that we have in the system, make sure that they do better, and then we can see the productivity that we need from them.
While we are still trying to see as to when we bring you in, you must have a place where you're gonna go, because that will also be the value proposition which will make you to be successful as an advisor. Now, the value proposition for our advisor success will have to depend on them. But it is not going to be a willy-nilly, where you just bring a lot of people inside because that is not creating value for us.
Would that answer have been different six years ago?
Yes, it would. Because the volume would be much better. That's one thing that we expect. The cost that we really incur in bringing these people and then they leave, it will also come down. And given that we already identified where the opportunities are for growth, I already sit with an improved value proposition for those people who are really coming into our business.
Okay, thank you. And then last one, if I can. Sorry. Just the savings products that you sell, especially discretionary savings, what's the value proposition for the customer? I get that it makes the advisor a bit of money, but is there a need to even have that as an offering in a market that may be changed from when Metropolitan was formed?
Okay. I will ask the actuaries to help me with that one.
Yes.
Etienne?
We'll get a mic to you, Etienne.
...
Etienne, are you gonna give us a big, clever actuarial answer?
Yeah, I'm gonna.
That is good.
Sorry, Michael. I think a lot of the client research that we've done has, has seen that there's definitely a need for savings in this market. I think there's two components to it that helps, is if you are able to get the deduction of the savings product from payroll, it is a product that, with the contractual savings component, actually helps clients to save and build up over time because there's not access to the product, as much as a bank account, et cetera. So I think with our new design of these products, we're also getting the two pots, like a pot, not two pots, wrong word, two components: a flex component, which gives the client access, and a true long-term savings component, which gives the clients the ability to meet these contractual savings, goals and obligations.
Thank you, Etienne. I saw Warwick had the mic previously. If we can just get the mic to him. While the mic goes to him, I'm gonna ask another question from the online participants. Baron Goma asked far. And this question is for you, Brent. What gives you comfort or confidence that three years will be sufficient for you to turn your business around, given how challenged it's been the last three years?
Firstly, I said it earlier, I don't think that the last 3 years is a fair reflection of our business. You're comparing a very, very different situation, both internally and externally, to what we believe to be a more stable internal environment. The work that we've put in over the last, you know, year or 18 months has, you know, illustrated 2 or 3 critical things that will be the foundation of the turnaround in future. So the first is the extent to which our new business pricing has, you know, addressed the new business claims ratio. So we've made material improvements there. New business ran at a 100% claims ratio, you know, 18 months ago. That's now dropped to below 75%. So the quality of what we put on the books is materially better.
The second relates to, you know, the extent to which we've cleaned out our existing book portfolio. Again, to the question that Michael asked, we exited, you know, very particular portfolios, which made a, you know, quite a material improvement on our claims ratio. And then the third component is the extent to which we've been able to realize higher than inflationary renewal increases. We're currently running between 12% and 14% actual increases on our existing book. Now, whether that's sustainable for, you know, the full three-year period, obviously not. But as we get our existing book to be repriced at levels that we are comfortable with, renewal increases will come down. The challenge or the risk lies the extent to which that's out of step with what the market is doing....
Now, I think six months or nine months ago, the sort of theme in the industry was that renewal increases will, you know, come down quite materially. Sort of anecdotal feedback is that not, that's not happened to the extent, you know, that, that we expected. So the delta for us currently is not as big as what, you know, we may have thought. So I think those three things for me gives me comfort. The last remark that I will make, again, and this is now at the risk of, you know, sharing too much information, even in the first six months of the financial year, we started achieving claims ratios that's in and around the, you know, longer term targeted range. So it's in the business's ability to do so.
But changing, you know, a loss ratio from the levels which we operated to where we target, that's not a one-day game, to get into a sporting analogy again, but three years is sufficient time to get to within that range on a consistent basis. If we are affected by severe external, suppose developments, you know, that's a very different story, but, you know, the business will be a lot more resilient. We certainly don't have any ambitions to disrupt ourselves with another large transaction like we did. And, you know, we hope that the external environment will be, will be, you know, a bit more stable.
Then from a cost point of view, there is work to be done, but we've got a very, very clear idea of the channels where we are, you know, a little bit overweight, where we, where we are not operating at the right level. I mentioned it earlier, but that's our broker channel and our strategic partner channel. We know what to do, and we know how in the next three years we can get to more sustainable cost ratios. And the other two channels, i.e., our tied agency force and direct channel, we must just maintain the current level of costs there, and we should be reasonably okay. And the digitalization plans we have will back that up.
Thank you, Brent. Warwick, over to you.
Thanks, Brent. Lawrence, I'll start with the two of you. Brent, you spoke about the concentration of the book towards motor insurance. You framed it in a way that it was a negative and there was a need to diversify away. Can you just give us a sense of the current business mix, what you target?
So the current business mix from a motor, non-motor perspective is about 70%, you know, close to, would be motor and the rest non-motor, and we want to get that closer to a 60/40 over time. So, you know, the two things to get right there is, one, just to ensure that the motor pricing is adequate, then the mix isn't that much of a concern. But to, you know, protect against, you know, some of the inherent volatility in our industry, having a greater non-motor proportion helps, you know, just to protect against that, because not all classes of insurance are equally affected by weather, for example.
So in that instance, the first thing for us to get right, the low-hanging fruit I referred to earlier, you know, relates to just selectively increasing our sort of commercial, small commercials, and not the segment Lawrence and his business is focused on, just that exposure. There's work to be done around pricing, around value proposition and distribution, in that order. And distribution, we are, you know, excited about the opportunities that exist in the group. There's an opportunity in Dumo's environment. There's strong opportunities in consult by Momentum. Johan mentioned earlier the extent to which, you know, that commercial distribution force has grown to now the second largest in the industry. We rank as the fourth sort of product provider there, and we can move up in the, in those rankings by doing one or two things better and differently, which we now have capacity for.
So we think in doing that, you know, over the next 3-5 years, changing the mix of the business, I don't think we'll get, you know, exactly to what, you know, would be an appropriate mix in 3 years, but over 5 years, we can definitely get closer to that. So I hope that that helps, Warwick.
That does help a lot. And in terms of capabilities and synergies between Guardrisk and your business, in terms of skills, data, insights, are you benefiting or able to benefit from those? Is there an overlap, or could there be an overlap?
There's a very small overlap, so we operate in very, very different segments of the market. In our minds, you know, quite complementary. To the extent that they... You know, essence in having a short-term insurance community, you know, we certainly share, we try and optimize around things that are common to us. So we share ideas and thoughts around reinsurance. We'd see whether we can optimize there. But from an operational perspective, the businesses are very, very different, and operate very different market segments and, very different strategies, you know, as, as you can hear. But, you know, so, so we, we do as much as we can that is sensible, but, but, you know, there isn't, you know, we think a lot more to be done. So, Lawrence?
Yeah, maybe just to add to that, we've checked it a couple of times throughout the last 10 years, and every now and then, we again go through an exercise where we see whether there's any synergies between the two businesses. But we tend to end at the same answer, which is the one that Brent gave. The businesses operate in such different spaces. Even if you take claims assessment, the claims assessment in Brent's space is very different from what we have in the Guardrisk space, so very little synergies between the two. But yes, we share an investment committee, you know, when we look at the assets. So where we can, we do share.
Thanks. And then Lulama, on the international side, can you give us a breakdown of the ZAR 450 million headline earnings target for 2027 by region, so then in terms of the five countries. And then you spoke about simplification and trying to, I guess, get some scale benefits across these five regions. How achievable is that? I mean, I think that's obviously been an ambition for a long time that would help things, different regulatory environments, a lot of complexity around that, different product sets. How do you go about simplifying that? How achievable do you think it is?
Okay, so in terms of the NHE, Namibia is by far the biggest contributor, so probably closer, so above ZAR 300 million, so probably contribution from Namibia. Lesotho will be the second, over ZAR 100 million, probably. Botswana as well, we expect to probably breach the ZAR 100 million mark. Now, I don't know my math is still working, but so basically, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, then, Ghana and, Mozambique are much smaller, so probably less than ZAR 20 million each. So yeah, without the math, but in that order. So I think that's the, the contribution. There is also an, offsetting impact of costs that we incur in the centre. So there's support from from central businesses that isn't necessarily applied to the countries.
So after sort of looking at each country, we sort of then, you know, deduct that, and that's probably the balancing figure in the math that wasn't working. But yeah, so that's the contribution. We... Yeah, I think that's it. So it is possible, so the streamlining is possible, and the cost of optimization is possible. So systems is one thing. So for the most part, we've tried to use group systems so that we can actually, you know, leverage what's already available in the group and scale that. For the current implementation, we're implementing a system that is separate for the rest of Africa. So already included in these numbers, there is a higher cost relative to what we had planned for previously.
However, once we implement that, with the decommissioning of some of the other systems, we will be able to reduce our costs. So currently, we're on three systems at the same time. When we move, we will have to be on two systems in some of the countries, so there'll be a reduction in cost from that perspective. Then operationally, we believe we are using too many people or, you know, too many hands sort of touching papers along the way. So with the system implementation, we can implement portals, in terms of how we interact with our clients. But in addition to that, we can be a lot more efficient in terms of increasing the automation of some of the activities. So on claims, we're already automating, but the volumes really can increase.
On onboarding of clients, we're already automating, but really at low volumes. So I think those are the things that we expect to help us to optimize costs. In addition, we're quite conscious of sort of what happens in the country, what happens in the center, so the Africa center, and what happens in the product houses. And what we're looking at now is ensuring that we are streamlined even across that, and ensuring that costs only are incurred once and at the most optimal place. So some of the things we're looking at is having you know even one of the countries as a central region that provides services to the rest of the country so that we're not incurring costs in each country, which relate to similar things.
Those are the things that we're looking at, and we think that will translate into some benefits in terms of cost optimization.
Thanks.
Thanks, Warrick. Are there other, any other questions in the room? While we look for questions, I think, Hannes, you spoke a lot about Health4Me, and many in the audience are not familiar with that product and that capability. And we're interested, just, it would be interesting to understand, how much of a play this is gonna be in your three-year plans, and really just an explanation of what Health4Me is.
Thank you so much. Yeah, I think we need to understand the market or at least have a view on the market to think what the solutions are that the market need to solve. Now, remember, I don't want to over-belabor it, but the Medical Schemes Act is governed by what we call a prescribed minimum benefit set. So when you solve through a medical scheme, you're forced to have that comprehensive set of benefits, which is just not affordable for the lower-income market. The lower-income market also, the primary need from an employer point of view is primary care benefits.
Just help my employee to get access to a doctor, and a dentist, and a pharmacy on a daily basis, and kind of, for now, while it's not affordable, be comfortable to live for the hospital events, from where they currently use it, from a public sector point of view, which is very far from optimal, but it is not affordable yet to solve for hospital benefits for the lower-income market. So for that, let's call it employed and uninsured labor market in the industry, we cannot see a different solutions than a predominantly primary care solution, which we currently package in a insurance license, not in a medical scheme license. The take-up on that license is, is really, is really good.
Our product currently sit on around 160,000 families, and we merely started with this product, I think, some 4 years ago. So the growth is really phenomenal. What is really positive, I think I shared with Wick over coffee, that there seems to be a social awareness from employers, that having an employee that is not covered is actually socially not acceptable anymore. So we see a substantial, you know, step up from employers willing to contribute to the cost of their currently uninsured people, which is then typically the market for the self-insurance product. Now, you may probably know that the health insurance products is currently legislated, regulated with an agreement between the Medical Schemes Council and the insurance industry from a demarcation point of view.
With the kind of gentleman agreement that once the Medical Schemes Act gets them sorted around a lower, what they call LCBOs, low-cost benefit options, the insurance products will probably be phased out. We really hope that that will never happen because the Medical Schemes Act comes with a regulatory set of issues that makes it so cumbersome to actually be flexible and nimble in the market. We do, however, position ourselves that if that should happen, that our current Health4Me product can fold into a low-cost benefit option without pain to the members. The point I made earlier about the retail market that's trying to solve for retail low income. Retail market, low income, you can think, and I say it with huge respect, in the low-income market, when you buy retail, you probably buy when you really need it.
So the anti-selection effect in the retail market for low-income health insurance is huge. What we see in the product range, the retail market, on average, claims north of 30% higher than the group market. Now, think if you have a pool of people that claim 30% more, and you need to go back into a medical scheme with a low-cost benefit option, where you commodity rate it, you will have to be rated at a higher price, otherwise, the product won't be sustainable. So we purposefully steering away from retail business so that the future is sustainable, not because we think we don't want to solve for retail.
We just hope that the guys who are trying it out there in the retail market has enough experience behind them, because we really want that market to, to be successful and survive and, and make a difference, to create more, more health for more people out there in South Africa. So that's kind of the picture. Hope it makes sense.
Thank you for that. It helps to get that explanation, especially for a product set or healthcare product that is not as well known to people in the room.
Thanks.
I think just to shift gears and go a little higher. Lawrence, I didn't acknowledge your blue and red tie. Normally we would have seen a very yellow tie, but we thank you for being a team player. This leads me to my question, and I'm gonna ask this to yourself, Lawrence, and you, Lulama, and I'll explain why the two of you. You mentioned that you run a federation within a federation. The question was brought up during the lunch break and has come up when we did our perception study around: What is the competitive advantage of this federated model? So if you could maybe give your views from someone who runs a federation within a federation, and Lulama being, I guess, on the stage, the newest member of the executive, to give your views as well.
Okay. So let me attempt the first one, the federation, the bigger federation within the Momentum Group. I think it worked well for Guardrisk to be slightly separate on the side because the solutions that we provide is different, and not necessarily being hampered by, I think some of the processes that you have in the bigger group helped us to get to our clients very quickly and get to solutions very quickly. So maybe that. Then a federation within a federation, the Guardrisk model currently works for the business, because what we do is, although we manage it centrally, the execution takes place in the different planning units, but it gives us the opportunity to cross-use some of the capabilities that we have. For example, cell captive. Cell captive is the same if it's non-life, life, or micro-insurance.
So the expertise that we have there, we cross-use it between the different licenses, and that's why it's working. Giving it a little bit of a federated spin on it gives it focus. So the non-life business is focused on their area, but with the support. Life, focused on life, the standard life industry, focus on that with the support. Micro-insurance, the new one on the block, again, it focuses them. It's a different almost target market. So the fact that they're slightly federated within Guardrisk gives them that freedom to explore.
Thank you for that. Lulama?
Okay, so thank you for asking the question, because I wanted to say when I was speaking, to talk a little bit about the collaboration, because I think as this segment, we benefit probably the most from the federation. So, for the international business as a whole, so we can learn from other people's mistakes, first of all. Secondly, probably the most important thing is that we get to gain from group capabilities that already exist. And I think what we've been able to do, for example, in India, is to take capabilities that are available in South Africa, and because of the different regulation in that country, we're able to do more with it.
So we have opportunities to use what we have available in the group in a different way, that can actually have exponential impact and more beneficial impact across the group. So definitely from a corporate perspective, in the various countries in Africa, we're relying on product knowledge, technical expertise, systems from Momentum Myriad. In Namibia, we've got a Myriad product. We've got MOM Life, Metropolitan Life, as well as health products. So again, in health as well, it's systems, it's technical capabilities, it's you know, actuarial skills as well. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to leverage what's available in the group, use it. We also have, I think, in the African context, we've got opportunities to test things out in smaller markets as well.
So we are able to sort of do proof of concepts, you know, in a market where the economy is a lot smaller. So we have opportunities to do things that are available in SA, but maybe in terms of the scale, are not able to have as much of an impact. But we can test it out some of the countries and then bring back some of the learnings as well. So there's definitely a huge benefit to being. And I think it also is a benefit for the group to be able to say, using the same capabilities, the same skills, same system, how do we... how can we diversify our earnings base as the group? So I think that's also part of the benefit.
Thank you for that. We've got two minutes, so I'm gonna check one more time if there's a question in the room. There's one at the back. Matthew?
Thanks very much. My question is more at a group level. I mean, should we get, you know, decent returns from SA assets, you know, equities, bonds over the next three years? If GDP growth does pick up and employment stabilizes or grows, what is the kind of delta to your target? You know, especially around kind of the more marginal businesses like investments, where, you know, I think a little bit of asset price inflation will go right to the bottom line. So maybe just some guidance there.
Do you want to take it?
As he quickly gets off the stage.
Yeah. It's an interesting question because nobody's really asked us about upside questions for a long time. I mean, we have to do this reverse stress test for the Reserve Bank, like what needs to happen for us to go insolvent, and it's like minus 80 drop in equity markets. You know, those are the stress tests we do more often. What I would say is, I don't think any of the insurers are quite as equity market exposed as they would have been, let's say, 10 or 20 years ago. You know, savings business is probably a smaller component of your total profitability versus risk business. Also, in our case, short-term insurance has grown as a proportion. I'm trying to think now. I mean, what do you mean a good market?
Let's say equities do, let's say, 60% over the next three years, so that's maybe 40% more than normal. Yeah, you might, you might get, doing mental maths, maybe ZAR 500-600 million more, but it's not gonna be billions more. Yeah. But also remember, we do hedge some of the exposures, you know. So for example, in the past, if we were totally unhedged and the equity markets rallied, you would have reserve released all of your guarantee reserves. Now, to the degree, we're using more scientific hedging, you're not getting the same, sort of nonlinear exposure. What will be more interesting maybe is if there's such a good equity story, if the bond yields fall a lot, then we're talking about big money, then we're talking about a... Like, like if we go to, let's say, 6% ten-year bond yields.
Now, unless the BSM team hedges at all, which I hope they don't—no, we're only about 70% hedged. Then we're probably talking about like ZAR 1-2 billion of investment variance in our favor. But the second order effect might be lower annuity sales, so you might lose on one hand, gain on the other. But don't think of the earnings as almost like a call option on the market, the way people thought about insurers maybe 20 years ago. I think the degree of hedging and the mix of business is very different to back then, it was 80% smooth bonus.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
But if we rewrite to 1.2 times EV, then it's not a bad story.
Not at all. Thank you, Risto, and thank you to everyone in the room. Thank you to my panelists. It really was a great panel. And now I'm gonna hand over to Jeanette to close us off. Yeah.
Why am I more nervous now than I was this morning? I think you'll all allow me, and I'm, I'm deeply aware that I'm the last person between you and a drink and some social time with us. This will literally only take a minute. I think you will allow me to maybe just say a huge thank you to the marketing team. If you see very pale girls running around, it's because they haven't slept for two nights, having to create all of this, set it all up. Our website went live this morning. I think I got my WhatsApp at just before five o'clock this morning, the website went live. So really, really, I think a job so well done that you can be very proud of.
Similarly to Rowan, to Tukelo, our investor relations team, for everything you've done, and to my Exco team as well.
... I think we deserve a drink tonight, and really, you've done yourselves very, very proud. So thank you very much for that. So I really just, reserved my why we have a right to win slide for, for right at the end. And I think if anything, the 10 points that you see here in front of you really is the summary of why I really deeply believe that we've got a winning strategy, we've got a winning team, and we've got a very good shot at delivering on every single one of the promises that, that we've made. Our improved federated operating model. No one asked me the question. I had the opportunity to talk about it, so you wouldn't give me another one.
But I think if there's one thing about a federated operating model that no one can ever doubt, it's the fact that there is nowhere to hide. It's not as if we sit here and integrate business units with each other to hide how we're really doing. There is nowhere to hide. You've seen it today. You asked the questions, and, you know, I think more than anything, in an environment where we toughen ourselves, where we tough on delivery, where we keep each other accountable, really, our federated model, I believe, remains that competitive edge because we all have to deliver and there's nowhere to hide. Our diversified corporate portfolio.
We really have determined that every one of the businesses that you saw in front of you here today have a very important role to play in our bigger group, that we're a good parent to those businesses, and that we need all of them, because together, we just believe that we're that much stronger. I've said a lot about our distribution strength, clearly something that I'm very passionate about, as you know. Our advice focus, something that we will focus on to grow a lot more, that I again believe is something that's going to stabilize our flows and take us into the future, help us with our market share. Appropriate focus on digital, not overly focused on it, but doing what's right to get the right outcomes for our businesses.
Investing in our successful businesses, the optimization potential that we have by really looking at how we can bring our cost base down to a level that is sustainable into the future, and not where we have to come back here every three years because we've got to do a cost-cutting exercise again, but really change how we do business. In Momentum, there's these words and phrases, and one of them that I learned six years ago, I've never heard it before, was a way of work, a new way of work to make sure that these costs do not creep back into our business. Our strong capital deployment discipline. I know that you will test us on this every single time we do something. I know that Risto gets these calls every single time to say: "What are you doing? Why did you buy this?
Why did you not buy something else?" I hope you sometimes get those questions, as well, Risto. Our cash generation ability, and then lastly, just the strength of, of our balance sheet. So really, my last, last thoughts, I believe that if we deliver on this strategy, and I have no doubt about our ability to do exactly that, I think what you will see when we are get...
Well, we'll be here every year, but three years from now, when you hold us accountable for this, I think you will see a group that own and dominate advice in South Africa, really care for our clients through simple products and excellent service, which is enabled by technology with excellent vertically integrated product and asset management capabilities, having the highest total shareholder return of any of our competitors in the market, and thereby building and protecting our clients' financial dreams. Thank you very much.