Language of good health. We do not use a language of fear. You know, we have been told all the time, insurance is about scaring consumers to buy that. We say, no, if that was the case, the penetration will not be what it is in India. Therefore, we have to talk about, you know, talk in the language which will actually make sense to consumers, and especially the younger consumers. As I said, that is a large opportunity. Our whole model is built around, I am sure you have heard about it, know your health, improve your health, get rewarded. If something happens, stay protected. All our capabilities are built around this. We say, we sell two promises to consumers. You know, we will partner with you in your journey of good health. If something happens, a promise of insurance will, of course, stay.
Now let's see what has been our journey so far. Multiple milestones that we have covered over the last many years, whether it's innovation in product, you know, bringing newer distribution categories into insurance. Of course, financial outcomes over the last eight years. We continue to be the fastest growing health insurance company in India over the last eight years, more or less through and through, you know, with clearly demonstrated superior unit economics. I think the big one for us was when we decided to, you know, both shareholders, you know, do not need, you know, fresh capital from outside. When we looked at getting an external shareholder, it was more to kind of validate are we on the right track.
When Aadiya came in at the end of 2022, that transaction is still the highest valuation multiple that any health insurance company in India has ever got, including recent transactions. That was just a, you know, a reflection of the quality of franchise that we have built and will continue to build in the future as well. You know, this is the trajectory of our growth. We completed eight full financial years in March of 2025. Just look at the difference between us and the closest player at similar stages of operation, more than 2x time. Clearly the pace of growth. That is not the only thing which is important, of course, because, you know, you can grow, but what about profitability? India has a unique, you know, regulatory regime in terms of the way accounting happens.
The faster you grow, the more the new business train, the way accounting works. Therefore, at our pace of growth, sometimes profitability might be difficult, not because the unit economics are bad, but because accounting profits do not tend to emerge as soon as you would typically like to see as a shareholder. Still, we are one of the fastest, I think, just a year more than any other health insurance company, even though we are growing at this pace. We are now close, you know, I think in the next two years, we are likely to shift to IFRS when the whole profit kind of emergence will be very different as per our initial estimates than what we see in the current regime. Of course, you know, consistently adding market share today amongst the monoline players, 12.6% share. I think India is a market of scale.
At 1.4 billion people, you cannot afford to be a niche player and be valuable in India. It is absolutely critical, high volume. Therefore, in a business where distribution is very important because you have to be where the consumer is, our strategy has been very clear that we would like to be where the consumer is, wherever they are. If they're, you know, they prefer access through agents, we have about 140,000 individual agents selling for us. We have about 20 banks working, selling for us, including the largest private sector banks in India. We have in India and PolicyBazaar, which is the largest web aggregator in the world in terms of selling insurance. We are the number one player on that platform. It is as open architecture as it can get to be.
You know, we ended last year as the number one player on their platform. You know, what is unique is because digital is now where the consumers are. I'll just give you one example, Ola, which is a ride-hailing, you know, like Uber equivalent in India. During COVID, we were selling 200,000 coverages a day of, you know, ride assurance to cover, you know, we innovated along with Ola. You know, all kind of offerings. What is important is sell what the consumers need and where they need. You know, that is our kind of mantra of how you can really scale up. Let me just quickly talk about last year's, you know, performance, FY2025, which is April 2024 to March 2025. We ended the year, we crossed two very important milestones.
I think Jeanette mentioned, Risto mentioned, you know, the biggest one for us was profitability, break-even. Even though there were multiple regulatory changes on the accounting side, which actually made the emergence of profit even more difficult last year, you know, even in spite of that, the team really, you know, worked hard to make that milestone be achieved. What gives us, you know, that comfort is that from now on, when we seek capital, we are seeking capital purely for growth, not to fund our losses. I think that's a very important shift in any business's history. The other big one was that we crossed the INR 50 billion top line kind of milestone. At about, you know, that INR 50 billion milestone, you are really in the big boys' league. It's a very large-sized health insurance franchise in India at that scale and size.
Growing, you know, at more than 40% as per the old, you know, accounting regime, you know, more than two times the average industry growth rate. You know, well ahead of where the industry is. I think the combined ratio is a metric of how well are you kind of moving towards profitability. All of those metrics, you know, looking extremely positive in terms of the trending that we would like to see. You know, as I spoke to you about just the diversified distribution mix that we have, it's very critical because it removes concentration risk in a country where regulatory action is happening very fast. You never know at what point of time which kind of part of your business might be impacted by regulation. You know, we are the most diversified distribution franchise from an insurance perspective in the country today.
What is important is if you see the growth rate last year, you know, the least growth rate was 30% for any channel. I think it just shows the, you know, the way we have not only ensured that we have large kind of mix of distribution, but how for each distribution model, what is our approach to make them successful. I'll talk about some of them in subsequent slides. You know, to make our performance sustainable, as a team about a year back, we kind of revisited our what we call our right to win pillars, what will give us a right to win in a highly competitive environment in the future. We have five of them.
I spoke to you about purpose, customer obsession, data, digital, people first, because it's a people business and our model requires that focus even more than any other business. What is a unique thing about the way we execute, which we'll call the ABHI way of execution? Our model, you know, I spoke to you about that, about 6%-8% of people will get a claim. In our case, in addition to that, 9% of our eligible consumers get some benefit for good health. You know, of course, I'm sure you've heard the word health returns, which is, you know, there's an Indian version of that in our business. It means that there's so many more consumers who are actually engaging with us than typically what any other health insurance company, which gives us access to data. I'll talk about what we are doing with that.
Therefore, it means that the stickiness of these consumers will be a lot more than traditionally what you see in the industry, because these set of 9%, for example, consumers have much better persistency, but more importantly, significantly better claims ratio for obvious reasons. What this model actually does is it creates a selection bias in the favor of our business. Because consumers who typically have a good health situation would, when traditional businesses talk to them, they say, "Why should I buy? Because I do not see myself in the hospital." That is when you pay me a claim. It is just completely different in our kind of model because we say, "You want to have good health, we will work with you in that journey." If something happens, insurance is in any case there. By the way, we reward you for good health.
We have the only product probably in the world where consumers can get their 100% of the premium back for good health. People ask me, "But how will you make money?" I say that much lower than what you pay for actually a claim event. I'd rather pay the premium back than actually the, you know, a claim back to a consumer. You know, these are just some metrics, as I said, much lower loss ratios for consumers who are engaging with us on health, much better persistency. You know, because we have access to large volume of data, we've created intellectual property around risk scoring our consumers. So there's a score called Wellbeing Score. All our consumers where we get access to their health data, we give them a personal health risk score called Wellbeing Score.
There's a whole team of health management specialists who are looking at that. They stratify consumers into high, medium, low. For high-risk, high-health risk consumers, they're constantly engaging with them and intervening to find ways through our own team and through a whole set of partners. Good news is that digital health has become very pervasive today. I mean, consumers are willing to access and take kind of use of digital health. We are leveraging that kind of trend very significantly. There's a large part of a set of partners in the area of health tech that we create, and then we work with them. Even those consumers who have higher health risk, the intervened, people who are kind of willing to, you know, allow us to, you know, help them deal with that versus non-intervened, much better outcomes.
You know, in fact, last year we saved, for example, 10,000 potential events of hospitalization just because of that set of interventions. You know, consumer obsession, these are some metrics that are kind of important in the Indian landscape in terms of claim settlement ratios, you know, consumer grievances, net promoter score, etc. There is a lot behind this. In a country of 1.4 billion people, you can get lost as a business. It is very important to know where you will focus on. I heard Jeanette talk about focus on where you can control or where you have the right to win. Similar for us. We have leveraged and used our existing data, but also behavior science and neuroscience along with a firm, because health is not a logical way.
I mean, everyone sitting in this room has a very different definition of health, nothing unique, you know, different in India as well. How do you leverage that, you know, emerging science of how consumers behave, you know, not logically always? We have done segmentation of consumers and we have decided which set of consumers to focus on and build all our capabilities and have what I call an unfair share of that market by fair means. That is very important, you know, given the governance, you know, standards that we have as a group. Of course, product, you know, if you talk to anyone in the Indian ecosystem and they say product, which insurance company comes to mind? By far, they will say Aditya Birla Health Insurance.
Because one of the things that we've always kind of attempted to put in place in the organization is experiment, find ways, do not just because some things have happened a certain way, try out different product offerings, try out, you know, experiment. You can, I mean, if something does not work, cut your losses fast. A few things will really work, you know, just scale them up. We have some unique offerings covering all facets for different consumer segments, whilst we will focus on some segments, but we are a player with national aspirations. We need to have products for the entire spectrum, even though we will kind of put our effort and energy in some of them, including both retail and corporate. Corporate market, for those of you who have kind of looked at the Indian market, it is traditionally loss-making in India.
We are probably the only health insurance company in India which actually makes profit in the corporate side because of our unique ability to design the right product, the benefit structure, and of course then execute with rigor and diligence, including last year as well, right? All kind of offerings, they're the largest corporate insurance in the outpatient expenses space in India, for example. We are now, because we have got success in the retail part of the business and the whole health first model, there's a clear shift toward in the corporate, you know, area also. We are taking that model in the corporate, you know, landscape as well, which we feel will be another category creation effort that we'll do in the next two to three years. Digital, our consumer app, I'm not sure you can use, but I think you can.
If you download our consumer app, Active Health, it's actually a product in itself. So our, you know, now, you know, we have started acquiring consumers. It's a freemium app. You can, you know, access some of the benefits without having access to our full-fledged health insurance products. That has become a customer acquisition engine for us. You know, it gives us access to data as well for those consumers. In fact, just one couple of data points. An average consumer spends about 79 minutes per month on our app. You wouldn't connect this data for an insurance company app, right? Which means that consumers are finding, you know, engagement with us very, very relevant to them, you know, in today's environment. Our app has really become a health and wellness ecosystem.
We are now building many unique capabilities constantly on them, 4.7 star rating as we speak. You know, nothing can be at scale if you have high scale, you know, engagement aspiration. A health first model has very, very high scale engagement kind of need. Therefore, digital becomes a very big imperative in the way you build a business. We've invested in this from the very beginning. Today, these are some of the metrics. I'll not go through each one of them. Just one or two. 90% of consumer transactions are self-serve digitally. You know, call center and, you know, coming to branches, et cetera, are just 10%. That is also kind of reducing as we speak virtually every quarter. You know, and the whole consumer life cycle, we leave the choice to the consumer.
I mean, of course, they can come and have face-to-face interaction with us, but we make that digital interaction so convenient that they rather prefer that than coming and, you know, interacting with us in person or even a call. It does two things. It reduces costs dramatically, but also increases experience equally dramatically because, you know, the consumer is doing at their choice in the way they want to. Data and, you know, I'll use two or three examples to kind of just, we have about 5,000+ frontline salespeople. We know exactly what our frontline salesperson is doing every day. How many clients did they meet? You know, what was the, you know, quality of, because we have, you know, we take feedback from clients, you know, on a sample basis.
What it does is that it helps us in personal intervention for each of our frontline salespeople. It's an issue of discipline, early action. It's an issue of training, very personal training intervention. This person needs training in how to recruit agents. This person needs training in how to sell this particular product and so on and so forth. That suddenly changes our ability to intervene and improve productivity of our salespeople at a very different scale because people do like personal intervention. Don't put me in a segment. Don't put me in a cohort. Talk to me about what is relevant to me, right? As an individual. Claims, you know, unlike what you see in India, sorry, in South Africa, where five chains of hospitals are probably covering the majority of your treatment, at 12,000 hospitals in our network, it's still small. It's a very fragmented environment.
Documents are flowing through different, you know, portals, not necessarily the way data flows in your environment. We are today leveraging AI and kind of ML capabilities and now GenAI to kind of process claims in seconds versus hours that it used to take. We're already processing about 40% of our claims, kind of virtually, you know, auto adjudication. That process is, you know, going to be further scaled up as I speak. You know, health is a subject. Any engagement of ours is now going through an engine which we call hyper-personalized engagement engine. We've already put about 50% of our engagement, you know, framework in that.
In the next six months, we'll put 100%, which means the system will say at this point of time, what must you engage with this customer for what reason, through what medium, with what content? The system will throw that, right? All of that will make the consumer engagement process and framework extremely relevant for every consumer. Again, with all other related benefits that you can think of. You know, we are leveraging, you know, we have a Chief Data Officer, probably the only health insurance company to have that because of the way our business is structured, you know, leveraging GenAI, conversational AI, to even agentic AI as we speak. For example, we are right now in the process of building agentic AI capability to do complete sales process humanless. That is one project right now in way.
There are many others, you know, I can, you know, talk about separately if time permits. This is our team. You know, I think what I take pride in is the diversity. People come from very varied backgrounds because our model is so unique. Right from consumer industry background to health tech entrepreneurs to banking. In fact, you know, internally they say that I have a bias. If anyone is from health insurance industry, more likely than not, you'll not be recruited. Because I say you have an inherent bias which will not work in the model that, you know, we want to take to the business. I mean, I can't be, you know, we do have people who are really smart and experts in that.
The other thing is that because I said people first, our managers, more than anything else, are evaluated on this one metric of how are you making your people successful. Wherever there is concentration of performance, those managers will find it difficult to grow in our organization. Where there is a spread of performance, those managers will really grow very well because your job is to actually grow your people. If anyone has joined the Aditya Birla Health Insurance brand, it is your responsibility to make them successful. I think that's the culture we constantly build. We are lucky that, you know, we have the frameworks which come from the larger Aditya Birla Group in the Indian context because that's very, very unique. Execution, I think agility speed is a very important part of that, but also the way we are structured.
While there is a formal structure for any key strategic initiative, we quickly regroup. At any point of time, there will be at least 15 or 20 squads which are working on specific projects. People will just come together and they are empowered to kind of drive that agenda. Similarly, P&L kind of organization, I will just take a minute more. I know that I have crossed. Everyone is kind of trained on economics of the business so that they can take much better quality decisions because we believe that does help in the way they take decisions. I think I have covered most of them, you know, very, you know, growth rate much faster than industry. We cover about 22 million lives today in the country. You see the kind of composition is constantly changing.
Where we feel there's more money to be made is where we'll continue to kind of invest and grow our franchise. Of course, profitability is an important criteria that, you know, we'll constantly work on. From here on, I think the fact that we have broken even, the focus on that will only increase as I speak. I'll skip these numbers. I think they're there for you to look at. Lastly, I think it's a very exciting market with lots of opportunities. The question is, do you have the right strategy and the ability to then execute it to kind of make sense of what your strategy can deliver? You know, I think so. We'll continue to grow ahead of market. I have no, you know, I'm absolutely confident of that.
Also, our model and therefore what comes with that model, which is superior unit economics, will actually let us stay ahead of where competition is in times to come. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mayank. I would invite you to please stay on stage. We're going to head into Q&A. Thank you, Mayank. Thank you, Jeanette and Risto, if you can join us for Q&As. That was a very insightful first session. And Lulama, sorry. First session, I think going from just high level where we are with our strategy and how we've performed against our strategy, which Jeanette gave to us. The focus on how we are unlocking our businesses and their potential, the focus on advisors, and how we are optimizing the business. Risto went on to speak about cost optimization and capital management, always a topic of interest when we are on road shows. I'm sure there'll be lots of questions on that. Mayank, Lulama, congratulations on the first break even.
A question that we've had to answer many a time on when is break even? When is break even coming? Finally today we're here. Congratulations on that. I think just the capital allocations to India are also quite topical. Thank you for reiterating that we are capitalizing for growth rather than a loss-making business. Well done on that. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to start Q&As. We'll get started in the room and then move on to the website. There's a question here in front. Go ahead.
Yeah, thanks very much. Just a question, Risto, you made a point on the Matthew from Lorium Capital. Risto, you made a point around the cost cutting is almost to kind of protect the in-force profit. You mentioned that you have shrinking policyholder count in certain books. Maybe if you could just discuss where exactly in the business is that happening and why? Is it market reduction or is it market share reduction? Is this a question that comes back to VNB as a solving point?
Yeah, so I think if I think of market share in Momentum Retail, we're definitely gaining a bit of market share, both protection and savings. I think in Metropolitan, we may be gaining market share in savings, but maybe losing a bit in funeral. I think in corporate, it's quite steady. In investments, I think our market share in annuities is very strong. Some of the areas where our market share is a bit low, like mutual funds, that's not affected by book shrink as accounting. I think we have some closed books like a lot of the big insurers have. I would say the biggest areas are savings in Metropolitan and then the closed book in Momentum. Those are the areas where our policy count is going backwards. We probably need to keep expenses at zero at most in those areas.
I sort of mentioned in my presentation that the curatorial team did a presentation to me recently where Momentum Metropolitan Life, which is the South African legal entity that houses most of these operations, we probably need to keep the cost growth between 3% and 4% to keep to our current unit cost assumptions in our models. Now VNB, obviously a little bit of the savings relate to distribution and that will drop straight into VNB metrics. Let's say out of the billion less taxes, 700 million, maybe 160-170 is VNB related. It is a big help for VNB. It does not get our margin maybe to the top of the industry, but it certainly gets us closer to the 1%. I think the other thing I learned on this project is the world is ever changing.
I used Jumo as an example, but almost every business unit, because we're putting a lot of pressure on them, keeps saying that something new has happened. There's a new technology, new regulations. At the same time, sometimes you need to cut fees on some products. All of a sudden, like you think in this business unit, 2% cost growth is great, and then you cut fees, all of a sudden it's minus 2%. I think the message I wanted to get across was this helps us. It's ZAR 1 billion of real savings. It's ZAR 700 million times 10. It's a ZAR 7 billion project, but it's maybe ZAR 7 billion of value saved rather than added.
Obviously getting the VNB up to 1%, part of that is distribution costs. Maybe getting it into 1.5-2% is more probably unit growth in sales. There is more productivity. Does that not then solve this cost question? Does the 3-4% required level then give you a bit of breathing room?
Yeah. You must also remember we have on retail side, we maybe have two and a half, three million policies. I do not see the unit growth being so that we can grow expenses at 6% or 7%. That is impossible. I think maybe three to four becomes four to five. Growth alone is not going to solve the problem. Jeanette said that we keep saying it is between 1% and 2%. I think at the moment, I think we would be quite happy at the midpoint of the range. Business mix has an impact as well. One thing that is fascinating about life insurance is the cost of distribution is set by regulation largely on the commission side. Now, some products with good margins like annuities have low regulated commissions. That makes them very attractive. You have some products like long-term savings.
Commissions are quite high, but the economics are quite weak. The regulatory commissions almost compound the difference in margins on products. We have product margins ranging from 8% -4%. Your mix has a massive impact on whether we get to one or two. I think on the current mix, one and a half is a good outcome.
Thank you.
Thank you, Matthew. Marius, I see you've got a mic already.
Is it on? Yes.
Yep.
Marius Traton from ALG. My questions are for Mayank. Welcome to Cape Town, wet and rainy. My first question is, what is your market share of fresh GWP? My second question is, can you please explain the one over N a little bit more to us and particularly why that would impact GWP as I understand it to be a reserving requirement?
Yeah. Unfortunately, whilst by the current reporting and disclosure guidelines, they do not report the fresh and renewal separately. The fact that our market share is 12.6% for the total business and many of our competitors have actually been in business for a much longer tenure than us, including the largest one having started about 10 years back. My sense is that our market share in fresh will be in excess of 25%, but we do not exactly have a business. I think it is somewhere in that range. We know we can get back to you with more specific if that is important to you separately. On your second, yeah, I mean, on your second point, one by N, I am sorry, it is a complex subject. It is the way the accounting, you know, the reserving happens in India. What they did is for businesses which are multi-year.
We write single year, we write two-year, three-year, we are allowed to write up to three-year business. They said that earlier the entire three-year business will be accounted for in the first year itself. Let's say I do INR 300 premium for three-year, you know, the entire INR 300 will be accounted for in the first year itself. In the midterm from 1st of October 2024, they said that you'll have to account only for that particular year, which means that if the tenure is three years, one by N, which means, you know, one third of that INR 100 will be accounted for in first year. What you see there for sales, while sales is at, you know, more than INR 52 billion, the accounting of that is lower because I can't account the balance INR 200.
What it also does is that it actually not only reduces the top line, but also has a negative impact on the profitability. If you see, as per the earlier accounting regime, we would have made INR 750 million profit, but it reduces to about INR 65 million because of the new regime. Now, the unit economics have not changed. It's just that the difference between 750 and 65 will emerge, will unwind in the next couple of years. The profit still remains in the books, but the way you are allowed to account for it and recognize that profit kind of changes.
All right. So that also, that 33% GWP growth is then understated. It's a once-off impact. After that, you should revert to potentially a higher GWP growth again.
Yeah. On a sales, you know, like-to-like basis, our growth was 42.5% last year.
Thank you.
Also, Marius, maybe just to add to that, the other important regulation on the multi-year was we can no longer pay commission for all three years upfront. I think we now pay commission equally across the three years. Yeah. We were worried that's going to have a sales impact as well because of lower effective upfront comm. As far as I remember, you guys launched quite a few rider benefits to sort of make up for lack of upfront comm on the core product. You could get the comm on the riders. Wasn't that as big as impact as we thought? Probably not. I mean.
Yeah. You see, when it happened, it happened so suddenly and that we were expecting a much larger impact. I think the team really rallied behind, came up with different product options, et cetera, kind of to negate to a very large extent the impact of that, at least on the sales side. Even on the profitability, we came up with products where we added some riders, optional benefits, et cetera, to kind of still find a way to increase the profit margin on our products. We are, as I said, in about 1st April 2027. 2027, 2028 is a year in which, as per the current expectation, we are likely to move to IFRS, where a very big shift will happen, which is deferred acquisition cost.
The whole cost today, the whole acquisition cost today is accounted in the year in which we pay, whereas in IFRS it will be. The whole emergence of profit will change in that regime. We are still in the process of closing that. We will come back as we do that.
Thanks, Doric Ben from RMB Morgan Stanley. Just continuing that conversation, Mayank, just give us a sense of the capital intensity of the business. I mean, can we assume that because it's a break even and some of this new business strain is rolling over, like you're suggesting, that the capital needs of the business, from a shareholder point of view, will there need to be more capital calls down the line? Is that very dependent on growth? Is it also dependent on mix between corporate and retail? That's also been an important factor in the past. Maybe you can start there.
Yeah. I mean, as I said, that because we are now profitable, we do not need capital to fund losses. That part of the equation is out now. Therefore, what is left is capital for growth. As an operating team, I mean, our job is to make sure that we create an ability both at design and execution level to continue to be able to grow ahead of market. After that, it is a constant conversation with the shareholders on what would they want our growth aspiration to be in the context of where the market is giving us.
For example, if you're continuing to grow so far ahead of the market, continuing to show superior unit economics, then the question that, you know, as an operating team, we'll continue to ask the shareholders is, you tell us what your capital allocation appetite is and we'll kind of reorient our growth strategy in that context, both in retail and group. In fact, as I said, in corporate business, we are either only one or probably one of two, which makes profit. I don't expect a very large capital requirement now, but we'll continue to put before the shareholders growth opportunities and then have conversations and then decide what their actual capital requirement should be going forward.
In our capital budgeting, we are allowing for about INR 500 million over the next two years. That's based on quite high growth. It's an interesting one because I sort of jokingly say that it's a big capital commitment. At the same time, one of the biggest frustrations me and Jeanette have is there's a shortage of capital projects. You know, we committed to giving money back to shareholders if we can't deploy it, but we do believe that India is an attractive investment option. I suppose we're glad in a way that there's one or two areas of the group that actually demands capital.
Just, sorry, just one more, just on RDI, are there committed long-term shareholders or do they have a specific time horizon?
I mean, as a sovereign fund, they're definitely more long-term than any private equity fund. Of course, they do have kind of a time frame in mind. They're happy at this stage to continue as an investor. There's no specific timeline they've mentioned, but my sense is that in the next three or four years, they will expect some transaction for themselves. Yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks for that, Doric. While the mic moves to Tracy, I'm just going to ask an online question. It's from Cameron Naidu from EPSA. He says, regarding the Africa optimization pillar, is there any consideration being given to potential market exits? Were the underlying performances dragging returns rather than the capital deployment?
Can we maybe leave Lulama, who's presenting on that, to answer it? If there's another question after that, Lulama is actually here representing India at the moment. Post the Africa presentation, if you feel we haven't answered the question, otherwise we're going to give an answer now that we're actually presenting on later. That's okay.
That's fine. Thank you.
Hi, it's Tracy from Cora Nation. I just wanted to follow up on the Indian operations. It's obviously a very exciting opportunity. Could you give us an idea? I mean, you give us a combined ratio, I think it was 105 or 102, depending which basis, just the sort of split between claims ratio and your cost ratio. If I look, you've had very strong growth in corporate over the last couple of years, and a large part of that's been driven by trying to get your cost ratio down to meet the regulatory requirements. Kind of where are you? Are you now meeting it? If you are meeting it, what would be your strategy going forward? My understanding of retail is obviously a lot more profitable than the corporate book in time.
If you could give me a sense of that.
Yeah. If I can just rephrase just to clearly understand, you're saying what will be our strategy in terms of the mix and how the.
I guess I'm just trying to understand the sort of dynamics of the various mix. You've got a combined ratio of 105%. What is it per sort of segment? How do you see it going forward? Where is your growth aspirations in terms of is it carrying on in corporate or is it trying to expand more into retail? Trying to understand that dynamic.
Okay. We have disclosed actually our combined ratio for our corporate business is 99%. It is already less than 100%. Unlike the common understanding in the Indian market that corporate business is actually less profitable than retail, we are actually, to the surprise of most of the participants in the industry, demonstrating that is not necessarily the case. There is also a trend that we are seeing in India where there is more and more health insurance through the corporate route because as the economy is becoming more formalized, corporates are, including what we call the SME space, they are kind of offering some of these benefits. Having said that, we will continue to grow ahead of market in retail. In retail, I think from a profit emergence perspective, one thing which is very different from corporate is the relatively much higher acquisition cost.
Even in a deferred acquisition cost regime in IFRS, it will still be much larger than what you see in group. In a market which is highly competitive, where even portability, et cetera, is allowed, you need to continue to kind of not only do the right thing when you're acquiring the consumers, but also continuing to kind of leverage the kind of model that we have to retain those consumers. In summary, what I'm saying is that at this point of time, the way we look at the market is that we will continue to grow our retail franchise. On the corporate side, as long as we can demonstrate much better profit signature, we will continue to grow that because it is less capital intensive as well than retail.
Okay. Sorry, just have you met the 35% ratio requirement for the current year?
Yes. This is the current year, 2025, 2026 is where we are supposed to, and we are well on track to meet that requirement of the regulation.
When I chat to a lot of your peers in India, I mean, one of the areas that they're most worried about is allowing life companies to sell health insurance, mainly because they've got very good distribution and agency, and they think it will be a good fit kind of within to health and natural extension. What is your view on that, and how do you think it would affect your business if it does go through?
Yeah. See, actually, as I said earlier, very briefly, competition is going to come from life insurers, assuming that this law passes of composite licensing regime. I mean, I do not know when they will take it to the parliament, but assuming it happens soon, it will come from other newer entrants. If you saw their... So I think we have to be prepared for competition for sure. I mean, we cannot be complacent about what we have achieved so far. But having said that and having spent 15 years in the life insurance industry, I can tell you that just by leveraging distribution, it is not going to work because health insurance is not another product line. It is another business line. And what most of my colleagues in the life insurance industry are missing, this very subtle but very important difference.
I joke with my colleagues, including a life insurance company CEO, that we'll welcome you to the health insurance industry. You want us to teach you how to do health insurance industry, we'll tell you that as well. Come and try and execute that. You will realize how painful it is to kind of really operate the way you need to. Jokes aside, 55 million people are covered with retail lives in India, pure retail lives. We do not need to worry about competition in such a highly underpenetrated segment. I think if they open up newer segments, good for everyone. We have opened up. Others can come and copy if they want. They can replicate if they want. I do not think that should be a reason to worry. At least we are not.
Keeping a very close eye on what they can do, continue to build on our right to win pillars, and just keep relooking at what we need to do to stay ahead.
Thank you for that. With that, I think we've come to the end of our Q&A. We're going to take a 15-minute break. For those of you who are joining us online, please be back at quarter past 11, and we'll resume again at quarter past 11. I invite everyone who is in the room to please interact with our exco members. If you have any further questions during the break, thank you so much. Bye.
Thanks to those of you online. I'm very pleased to see that we have a lot of online interest as well. As Takela mentioned, our capital markets day is a great opportunity for you to engage with our leadership.
We certainly are very proud of our people, and I think this gives you a great opportunity as investors to see why we have confidence in them and their teams to deliver to our impact strategy. This next session, we're going to focus on the flag bearers for the Momentum brand and the corporate business. I'm not going to hold you back any further in the interest of time, but I would remind you, please do drop any questions you can in the Q&A block as we're going along, and then we'll address those after the session because we'll have 15 minutes to address those. We'll first start off with Johan Leroy, who will talk to our Momentum Retail business, which includes the life operations as well as distribution. He will hand over to Freddie Finheerden to cover the investments business.
Last but not least, Dumo Mbethe to complete the session with Momentum Corporate. Over to you, Johan.
Thank you, Rowan, for that. Morning, everybody. It's my privilege to give you feedback on our progress in executing the impact game plan for the Momentum Retail business portfolio, or perhaps better said, the game plans, I think, of the different domains or businesses within this portfolio. Just a reminder again, why do we exist? Why does Momentum Retail exist? It's really just to connect, Jeanette, to connect the product and channel ecosystem across the Momentum Group to help them to achieve their growth and digital business transformation objectives. The theme is connection in retail. We use the word connection. Collaborate is a smart word in the group strategy, but it's really the fruits of, I think, such connection that you should look forward to in my presentation.
You might recall, I think it was 2021, at a previous investor conference, we spoke about the importance of advice-led and digital-led distribution and how we expect the themes of advice and digital really to connect this world. I think where we are now in June 2025, I think we can really start showing you how we're actually doing this in the group and how we're turning this, I believe, into a real competitive reality. My discussion, first and foremost, is kind of going to stick with the cadence of the four blocks that you see on the slide or the four business domains in the Momentum Retail business portfolio. Top left, it is the Momentum advice business or advice ecosystem. That is where we support the growth ambitions of Consult, our group-sponsored independent financial advisor network, and Momentum Financial Planning, our agency channel.
Both of these businesses have got strong growth ambitions. It is also where we will invest most of our target, most of our investment in growth currently in the group. We have also added recently to the Momentum advice ecosystem Fin Global, as you know, a business that really focuses on giving advice to clients who want to immigrate. Last year, I spoke a lot about the radical changes we want to make in this ecosystem, not only at a portfolio level, but then in particular in MFP. These are all now, Hannah's pretty much done, so we can now really get onto the front foot. A big highlight for us, Jeanette spoke to this also in March this year, really delivered a massive, but a really impressive technology platform upgrade for advisors and clients.
Also with that advice management capabilities for this Momentum advice business, I have a specific slide that I will touch on later. Top right, our IFA distribution team, internally referred to as MDS or Momentum Distribution Services. They are really back in partnership with all the product businesses, hunting for sales in the independent financial advisor space. MDS is not an advice business, obviously, but they are in the business of advice as they partner with other independent FSPs out there. They have a strong advice-led ethos, I think, in their distribution approach. We spoke about the specialization narrative that underpins their strategies. I think it was critical for us. Yes, we celebrated and shared with you the whole few results, also market share gains that this team actually achieved.
I do think MDS is the team to beat in this industry at the moment from an IFA distribution perspective. Yes, I'll give you some feedback, exciting feedback on their progress as well later on. Bottom right, not a team we often speak about. It's really an IT shop that digitally connects the, call it the Momentum Group ecosystem platform for advisors and clients and contact centers. They've called themselves the Momentum Digital Connect team. I think you can say what's in your name, but really it's in partnership with every product and channel business in the group that they managed to land the big platform upgrade for us in March this year. Bottom left, finally, that's really the Momentum Retail numbers you see in the results. That's for life product businesses.
The biggest one, as you know, the protection business, Myriad, but also in there our savings business, the merch team that looks after all the traditional products and also Momentum Trust. Now, the digital ambitions of the product businesses are well articulated. They want to be the digital leaders, all of them in their respective space, but really two big ticket events in the space for us. I have got specific slides on that. Obviously, improvement. You saw the improvement in the life value of new business that we showed in the half-year results. I will talk a little bit to that. Secondly, Jeanette also mentioned it, a massive highlight for us was the big system migration that the merch team really pulled off in partnership with the Metropolitan and Africa team also.
Also, another project that took us at least five years, switching off the final mainframe system in the group that was 50 years old, actually. I think Metropolitan really a great beneficiary or benefactor of that specific initiative, Peter. It is definitely or was the most difficult, impressive life policy system migration, I believe, in the history of South Africa. Yes, our strategic focus at a portfolio level is that of connection. If you look at those themes, growth, transformation, expense rationalization, it all cuts across the value chain. That is why you actually look at those. Those are the three key blocks or the three themes of conversations we have at this retail executive committee. From a cost optimization perspective, just a few thoughts on that. Prior to impact strategy, we actually removed more than ZAR 200 million from the cost base already.
The rest of you guys struggle, you can come and ask the retail team how to actually do that. That was really three blocks. It was digital platforms, the change in reward strategy to life returns, really in the Myriad space, and also a massive restructure in our agency channel, the MFP. Going forward, we target another INR 150 million, part of the rest of those billion. Again, but a slightly different flavor, again, digital platform, but here you now start seeing the way of work coming through, the digital product processes changing, but then also the procurement and group support functions that live with that. That is quite a key one for us. Risto spoke about renewal manex.
We're showing a positive experience, very installed on maintenance expenses for the six months that ended, but we do target 1.5-2% managed growth and ends at ZAR 250 million impact on that. What I can say, and back at the previous slide, mainly those big ticket events we put in each block, operating model changes in Momentum Advice, done. Specialization in MDS is done. The big system migration in the merch team at Metropolitan is also done. The massive digital platform launch, done. The business is really in a very different position today to really get onto the front foot and going forward. Examples of connection, just the value of new business. Looking at the half-year results, about ZAR 100 million improvement in the life value of new business. Now, in the long run, yes, Risto is correct.
The protection business and Myriad business really is the key driver of the VNB number, but the improvement, the 100 million improvement actually kind of equal contribution from both the savings and the protection business in terms of that specific improvement. Now, what caused that? Really looking back, the big MFP restructure we speak about, lifting the game. Also, product chain, the life returns message, the product pricing model in Myriad, and Risto also spoke about the capital optimization project that we also benefited from and sales growth in protection. Going forward, what's still to come is the cost optimization impact of 250 million, and clearly the footprint growth, Hannah's we're looking forward to in the Momentum advice ecosystem, and we're planning some product pricing changes in the savings business space also. That's really how things are coming together for us in the value of new business narrative.
Important to note, for savings business, it's really about the cost of the value chain. Cost optimization is key for a savings business. You appreciate you've got low gross revenue margins, but for the protection business, it's really about the sales growth and the pricing engine that you put behind it, and that really drives the value of new business. The Momentum Digital Connect launch, the March 2025 launch, big one for us. Looking back over my career, if I have to list the top three, this will be one of them to be part of such a journey. It's almost the end game of one of the end game, but in many ways, the end of a five-year project for us, switching off a plethora of legacy advice and other channel systems and product engines off as we went into this journey.
The nice thing is not just a cleanup, it's also setting up our advice business for the future and also new tech for our distribution channels also. This was so important to us that if we missed this deadline, I think we would have missed probably the delivery of the impact strategy in its totality because it vested a number of connection points that almost forces every product business across the group to play in a certain way. It's not just about platforms for advisors, also for clients, also contact center technologies. We have added new digital analytics tools, client feedback tools, client interaction stores, single client view capabilities across the board, and we're still investing in more client service capabilities, as Jeanette mentioned, also a key theme.
This was really a great event for us, and it changed the whole narrative, I think, in the Momentum Retail business portfolio, specifically from a product and a channel perspective. Let me move now into some individual feedback by business unit to give you a sense of how they're tracking their respective targets. Starting again with the Momentum Advice business, really the impact strategy ambition of this team is to set up an advice business with a rep count or an advisor count of 1,500, starting with a baseline of about 500 for agency channel and 400 for Consult, the IFA network. Really turning our agency into a top three player. Our market share is relatively small relative to the other guys in the industry, but Consult is really a seeded player in the IFA space. The whole strategy is grounded along five key themes or blocks.
First one is the culture, the advice culture. In many ways, that for me is the most exciting one because it also changes the way the Momentum Group thinks about its business models. Sustainability, vertical integration, which is really how they support also the in-house product set of the group, advisor growth, and then digital ways of work. I think, Jeanette, you might have mentioned both Momentum Financial Planning and Consult have got new CEOs, new executives leading the pack. That is also very important for us. We are investing in those things also. If you look at some of the results where we are today, you can really see great movement on the vertical integration narrative, both in Consult and in our agency channel, but also from a digital adoption perspective, really fantastic. It is important because running an advice business today is not an easy thing.
Compliance costs and advice management costs and all those things. You need to have proper systems in place to run a proper advice business. Very exciting for me is also part of the March 2025 launch. We refer to this as the Consult Connect part of the launch. For the first time that we as a group have given an advice business a bespoke client engagement platform that they can speak to their clients from an advice business perspective versus just a product business conversation and really building on that. The acid test for me was the feedback from advisors, and it has been phenomenal. It is really been phenomenal. I think going forward, we are just getting stronger and stronger in this specific way.
You can see the confidence ooze out of this management team's heads at the moment in terms of their ability to get it right, but it's not easy. The footprint growth targets is not easy, and you really need to work hard on that. The most important part is actually done, and that is advisor value proposition. There's now firmly in place for both Consult and Momentum Financial Planning. Turning to Momentum Distribution Services, the IFA distribution shop, really the ambition for a number of years, but more focused, I think, in the last two years or so to really be the preferred business partner for the IFAs, providing them with specialist knowledge. I think that's key. That's an anchor in our specialization strategy, technology capabilities, practice management support capabilities, and also to make it easy to do business with the group.
That is why you also see many of the product business plans, that ease of business theme coming through, product business partnering with MDS, making it easy for advisors to do business with us. I mean, that is the Momentum I joined many years ago. Remember, if you deal with IFA, we are fundamentally IFA-led sales that keep you on your toes. They have got product provider choice. If your products are not up there, if your service is not phenomenal, if your engagement strategy is not first class, you are going to lose the business. I think that provides a natural competitive pressure in the Momentum Group ecosystem that you do not have to ask for. It is just natural. That is why the partnership of, for lack of a better word, between the product businesses and the channels is so important in our group.
Big target for them is the number of supporting independent financial advisors, target of 2,500. We haven't been able to meet that target in the past decade. We're running about 2,300, odd was the highest. Really chasing 2,500. One of the key investment areas currently is our retail business consultant footprint. The MDS team's really split in two worlds. They've got an investment team and then a retail team that looks after most of the life savings and health business from that perspective. Now, our BC footprint numbers is probably, no, it is lower than most of the big players in South Africa. If you look at our market share, it's often on the higher side. That shows you that the productivity of this team is quite phenomenal, but you do fall for some reach. You can't get to all the advisors out there.
We are investing in the retail BC footprint, growing them by about 30%. Channel costs always there, but I think the important thing is the 2,500 number. How do they play and how do they show up in terms of their progression? Number of new games in place that's starting to show traction. Obviously, yes, they're talking about growing our BC footprint numbers. Now, this is not an easy thing to do. We're very selective, obviously, in who we bring in, but you can see already successes on the scoreboard. We've also got a very specific initiative around small independent financial advisors. We've got a significant market share from the small IFA or the one or two-man business out there in South Africa. We've got a very bespoke initiative referred to as advisor partnerships, where we provide them with capabilities to stay independent if that's their wish.
We're also seeing some good growth, traction in that initiative. On the other side of the fence also, we deal with big advisor networks. We've realized we need to focus exclusively on them. We refer to that as a key account strategy. Consult, by the way, is a key account of MDS also from that perspective because they play in the IFA space. It's really how you take the management team, the product business management teams to those big networks and really focus on their bespoke needs. Looking back, did specialization work for us? I can just say it would have been very difficult to land a life returns message without that specialization focus in the retail space. Jeanette spoke about the successes of Curators, an example. Again, another example where specialization is working for us.
We reckon that this specific space is about 20%-25% of the advisor market. In the highest sum assured space, they probably have just short of 10% at the moment. It is becoming a meaningful player there. The most exciting feedback that the team really received, that really excites them, we do an annual advisor survey, quite a comprehensive one. They really track four things there, expecting to have a podium position, at least top three, and at least in all four of them, actually. That is underwriting capability, technology leadership, product set, and ease of business. For three of those four, they have moved up a notch. All four on the podium, and the really exciting one is the gold medal they received for ease of business, which is really important for this part of the impact strategy journey.
It shows you that the digital onboarding journeys they're putting together is really parting for us. Yes, and genetic recovery in VNB also was important, just to mention. You can see again a team that's highly confident. I've got a message on the confidence ratings right at the end because I am challenged about that, but it is a fair reflection of what's happening in the business. Our savings business, I spoke about the need to run a low-cost value chain also. My challenge to them was quite simple. Go digital or go home because the revenue margins is low. Your value chain needs to be thin. You can only do that if you've got a digital platform. You cannot depend on the classic traditional contact center-led paper head office, where's my stuff kind of model that we're so used to in this industry.
The ambition is simple: to be the client experience leader in this space, offering very simple and easy-to-understand products. That's not so easy to get right, by the way, but that is the ambition. They also had to navigate two parts as they predominantly are retirement and utility business. They put a lot of pressure on service levels. They are getting better at it again. For them, really, the digital adoption is key. They've got a big launch planned in the first quarter of the new financial year. In other words, third quarter of the current calendar year that really will showcase the world their work around digital onboarding and also some product changes. It's quite a big step for them, basically a new savings message that they'll take to market. It is an important part of the value of new business conversation.
They do support both the shareholder and the channels from that perspective. I moved to the merge team, which is a team that really looks after all the traditional life products in Momentum, Metropolitan, and Africa. They also provide the Africa team with a new product capability. Lulama might speak to that also. Yes, we spoke about the big life system migration. It is a massive project. I mean, the Metropolitan team themselves developed a new product administration system for certain products. They changed advisory remuneration systems, billing systems. It is basically replacing the old Metropolitan Life Company in totality. That is almost what you should hear from me. That is the way I look at it. The merge team themselves developed new product capability for the Africa team on new systems to get it right.
It's a migration of more than one system to multiple destination systems, pulling that off in the first week in May. In fact, the whole system migration, the Metropolitan system migration was started in 2017. We've migrated two and a half million policies now, effectively on the platform collectively over that specific period. This is a celebration of collaboration. I think products are launched that you should see in the group. It was really a big ticket event. It's important for this team because the ambition really is just to unlock stakeholder value. They are really in the efficiency game. They really have, because of the legacy book that swings a little bit, they really have to search for efficiencies all along. The big beneficiary of that cost saving is Metropolitan.
The first 70 now and maybe the next 20 or so in the next two years as we wind down some of the other functions. It is important that this migration finished on time because it really allows the Africa and the Metropolitan team to unlock the full potential of their growth narratives also. It is such a big event for us. I have to talk a bit about it. Momentum Trust. Sorry, I'm not doing the slides justice, but you get the message. Momentum Trust, the interesting business. It's not the biggest earnings contributor to the ecosystem, but it's probably the most important business sitting at the nucleus of the advice strategy. You can appreciate that in the financial planning advice space, if your will isn't in place, most of your financial plans aren't in place.
They play a key role supporting advisors and the Momentum advice business as well. In fact, they get the most new wills from agency channel MFP, actually. They have a strong partnership with the investments team in terms of custodian of assets. They have a great partnership with the Miriam team in terms of life products that you bundle with the wills message. This is a big one for us. We invested in systems for them, both estate administration, because that is really where they make their money. You can see on the outcomes some good revenue growth. That is really in the estate administration space for this. We expect this to be quite an important part of the advice story for us going forward. Yes, this business is also now ready to grow and go forward. Yes, Risto, they do not need any more capital.
Now, getting to the finish line. I am actually making up good time, I see. Now, I think the energy in the Momentum Group for me, Jeanette, really sits in the way we leverage the power of our operating model. What I mean with that is investing in the competitive muscle for our different product businesses as well as the channel businesses, really making them strong. The real magic sits in how they show up together, how they hunt together for growth. That is really the Momentum DNA. We drive a client narrative at a portfolio level, but to execute a game plan through product and channel businesses. Okay, that is really an important thing to grasp. We really see that connection between the product and channel business ecosystem as our competitive sweet spot, if that is right language to use.
Now, five years ago, we stood on the podium and we shared stories with you around resetting and reinventing. That was really giving muscle back to the product and the channel businesses. That was a narrative. Where we are now in impact is really about telling you the story of how they're showing up together, how Health and Momentum Corporate is showing up together, how every channel is working together with the product businesses, how some product businesses are working together, how the Momentum advice business is also working together with some of the advice business in Momentum Corporate as an example. How the product business in Fadi's team, Equilibrium, Fadi, etc., partners with the Momentum advice business. That's a narrative that you should hear and feel that's happening in the business portfolio.
Now, for me, there's really three important connectors that I just want to talk to, and I chose them for a specific reason. The first one is, I think, brand and culture. The second one is your technology, your architecture, your digital platform. The third one I want to add, which really talks to the importance of the specific block in the Momentum Retail game plan, is the advice narrative. Is the advice narrative. Now, if you look at the brand and culture narrative, I think everybody in this room must agree with me it's well sorted. We're just going from strength to strength. It's a complement to the Momentum brand team, but also that's the people part of the business. That's what you should hear and feel looking at many of these confidence ratings.
The second one, the digital narrative, the connection narrative, that really is fundamentally sorted with the Advisor Connect launch I spoke about in March 2025. What is left there for us is really to invest more time and energy on what is next, which is really the advice narrative. That is what you will see in the next two years. Most of our execution efforts will go towards bedding down the advice narrative from that perspective. If we run through the slide, if you ask me, "Give me one minute, why I believe this portfolio will win?" I said, "Just look at it. I have high specialization, new BC footprint growth, key account focus, market share gains, advisor partnerships coming through." My challenge to the team is you need to open the gap between yourself and your competitors because it is a tough game. It just shows you the energy.
I actually spoke to one of them. We had a leadership summit on Monday last week, about 180 people, some senior middle management and senior management, giving feedback on what's happened. I asked one of the leading executives in the IFA distribution team, "Describe me. What do you feel? Forget about all the sales target. What's different?" He said, "Only one thing. The partnership with the product businesses gives him goosebumps. He's never been in that great position." That shows you if you've got two strong partners, a channel and a product business partner hunting together, how they actually can actually change the world. Advice business, when Hannah's will say, "Advisor value proposition in place, we didn't have this capability before March 2025." Management team in place. You can see consult coming through.
It's really now just getting the rep count moving and with that, obviously boosting the sales of the group. In fact, what really excites me about the Momentum advice model, we've never really enjoyed the tailwinds that come from a big advice business, you understand, within the Momentum Group. Just think about that. We never had the luxury of a big agency channel feeding the product businesses or anything like that. I think that's something new and fresh. It actually changes the DNA of the group exco narrative a little bit also from that perspective. The rest speaks for themselves, but just the growth story. I have market share, direct life where we never played before. I think coupled with the tight agency channel initiatives also, I can just see these things really changing the world.
The Momentum Retail business portfolio today is fundamentally different from the place two years ago. The key, however, is how you connect everything and how they actually show up together. For me, I think final words, advice or the advice narrative or the impact of the advice narrative definitely is the glue, if you want to use that metaphor of the Momentum Retail business portfolio. I think everybody in the room will agree with me that good advice is one of the most important ways in which you can build and protect clients' financial dreams. That is why it is so important. Looking at our operational deliverables, even as our product business do service, I am going to make sure that the impact of the advice narrative definitely touches the way they deliver and execute things in the portfolio. I have got 14 seconds left.
I can just say thank you to my team also. It's not often that you sit nine months down the line, you've witnessed biggest platform launch ever, biggest migration ever, market share gains, operating model change, tough people conversations. It's not often you've got the privilege to give that feedback. The feedback I'm going to give you, final words, is the feedback I gave my own team. Very simple. Said, "Guys, you've done well. It's nine months odd down the line with the impact strategy. Looking at capabilities, you've basically removed all the excuses not to deliver the results now in the next two years. I'm really looking forward to the hard numbers to now start moving also." That's the feedback from my side. Thank you.
Thank you, Yuan. Thank you, everyone, for the opportunity to give your feedback on Momentum Investments. Firstly, yesterday, my feedback was if I can bring a bit more passion to my presentation as Yuan has. A bit of personality feedback. Thanks, Nonto. You can see you gave it, right? From marketing. Let's see. That was the passion that I showed. There you go. We recently did an update on Momentum Investments about three weeks ago to many of you in the room. That presentation is on the Investor Relations website if you want to reference that. Today, that took me 47 minutes. Today, I've got 25 minutes, so I can only cover so much. That's a bit of a test for me. I cover those. As you've seen, the agendas are the same. This is our portfolio picture.
Yuan is a slightly kind of more clearer picture, I guess, but this is positioned in this way because the top three blocks are really asset gathering platforms, if you want, for our business, product solutions, very close to the end consumer and end advisor, and then the execution of the investment strategies. At the top, structured products and annuities, and I'll cover that specifically in the update. Our wealth management business, which is really the list platforms, domestic, the local, and the global platform. The institutional platform is really in partnership with corporate for institutional clients and umbrella fund schemes and trustees. That actually sits within our multi-manager business. Multi-management is an investment solutions capability, right? I guess this is the DNA historically of Momentum's investments approach. There are two components in there that I'll cover briefly.
It's the fund-to-funds business, the multi-manager business, really institutionally, if I can call it that. Model portfolio and Equilibrium is the retail focus for the default solutions that we create for advisor networks and partners, Yuan and your business with Consult and MFP networks. On the right-hand side is the asset management capabilities that we have. I think since Jeanette came back, far bigger lens on this part of the business, which is the final execution, final part of the value chain from wealth management into solutions, into underlying investments, probably more product and alpha versus solutions and outcomes-based investing in the investment solution space. There are three components in there. Retail asset management, which is Curate, and I'll cover that a little bit later, where we are. I've not just touched on that.
Institutional asset management, really fixed income and systematic strategies, bit of stockbroking business, private client business in there. Almost commercial interests, if I can call it that, really, in specialists and boutique entities through the IMG structure that we have, six affiliate managers, that's underlying investments in there, and our ERS business. The one thing that's not on there, and it came up in Risto's slide and reminded me actually, was Momentum Money that would have been there a year ago. Maybe that's the biggest cost saving, Risto. Where is Risto? That we could contribute. It's not counted. It also shows the importance of closing a business that actually is loss-making, comes at a high cost, and so forth. It was closed and out of the system in the first half of 2025.
The winning aspiration, I think we spoke about last year also to you, and I think there are only two points I want to make on this. Clearly, for investment businesses and wealth businesses, it is all about trust. Trust is all about delivering on the promises you make for clients, which is investment performance. What brings us to life in our business now is the purpose that we have as a group, and it is linking it to building and protecting clients' financial dreams. That connects almost an academic exercise sometimes for an investment manager of delivering alpha, delivering an investment outcome, but it links it very much to what the financial dreams of clients are and how we connect and how we can deliver for that through our platforms, into our multi-management solutions, and into our end capabilities.
Briefly, this also just to recap, we have grouped our kind of key strategic initiatives under five themes. This is Yuan's three, which is growth on the one side. Clearly, it is all about asset growth, but profitable asset growth for us in our business. In the middle, probably very much interlinked components, right, which is client experience, an operating model that supports that, and product propositions that's fit for purpose for clients, simple to understand, even though they might be complex behind the scenes. We deliver with people. I think people must connect with all of those. People must connect with client needs and deliver properly. Our EVP, the ability to attract the right staff, the right capabilities also as the world around us changes is critical.
I'll cover those in the four business areas or planning units that I'll give an update on just now. There are three underlying foundational elements to our strategy. The first one is obviously digital and AI. It's not a solution in its own right. It is an enabler of all of the above components. Unless we adopt it, I think maybe that's my mantra in the business. I can see a lot of activity in this space in the U.K. market, in the global markets where we operate. If we think it's down the line, and Ravi always says, this is all around us. Unless we adopt the use of AI, the application of that appropriately in digital technologies, we will not win. That is critical for us. The federated model, collaboration in the model, as Yuan calls it, connection.
How we connect all the components in Momentum Investments, but how we connect it with Momentum Corporate, with Momentum Retail, Risto with your team and balance sheet management, absolutely key. That is the glass bowl in which we operate. I think we've done that well. On the right-hand side is the simplicity that I spoke of. We have to put the simplicity lens on everything we do, especially when we look from the outside into our business. Let me give an update on the different parts of our business. Maybe just one point on the previous slide. Risto mentioned the many OKRs that we track also through Ondele's team. There's about 120 OKRs that sit in Momentum Investments, backing those kind of five themes across the four planning units that we have. So detailed at a granular level that we track those.
No way to hide, I guess, if you're in the businesses. Our wealth business, the list business, is probably the most open architecture platform in South Africa. Maybe that's also a little bit our downfall. We must make sure that it is an enabler of vertical integration. The future fit focus that we have on the technology came out last year and will come out in the feedback too. I think it is important to note that we have a fantastic existing platform, right? We've built it over the years. We've evolved it over years, but the realization is to continue to do that takes the eye off the ball of the future and of the new capabilities that come along. There are some core capabilities in the back end of a platform that's not necessarily a differentiator.
It's what you do on the core capabilities, and that's why we decided on the replatforming. We don't have to wait for the replatforming to do many of the things that we do on the propositional side, and I'll touch a bit on that soon. There were kind of four measures of success that we have identified. There are many more underneath sitting in those OKRs, but I think these are the ones that we showcase. How have we done so far? I think we continue to get in. Yuan spoke about advisor connect. This business is key in connecting into that ecosystem or technology. Yuan, I think specialization in distribution is really a big benefit, and we can see that both in the annuities business, but also in our wealth business is the market share that we get, the continued growth.
I think market share here varies depending on which quarter of the year we're in, between 16% and 18%. We continue to get good net flows into our platform, both domestic platform and the offshore. The offshore platform is a little bit more competitive, and we need to really focus our minds that we actually make sure it retains its competitiveness for offshore investing, which is a big part of the South African landscape at this point in time. Key focus on client experience and operating model. They're probably interlinked because the operating model delivers a good client experience. We have done a lot with various technologies, and I'll speak maybe just about two or three.
The one is optical character recognition, which takes about human almost involvement in when you get an email or a piece of paper in, where it ends up in a queue and how it elevates in importance is automated, far, far better than human interface and takes it to the right place very quickly. Talkdesk is a fantastic client engagement technology of the future. We have implemented it in our offshore platform. We will do it in the domestic platform also. Ravi is, I guess, showcasing this in the bigger group as a key technology because it is powerful in the analytics that it has, the AI engagement that it gives a client service agent, for example, the omnichannel capability. It is really kind of far more than a telephone and a tracking of that actually, really.
Powerful technology, which we're implementing, and it'll seamlessly sit across the FNZ platform when that's in place and our existing platform. On the operating platform with FNZ, many of you would know that a year ago, key changes in FNZ's global management team. FNZ, probably everyone would recognize, have been one of the most successful fintechs in this space globally in the last few years and the way they've grown, but that was also their downfall in implementation. The new senior executive team that was put in place in October, September last year are all implementation specialists, and they're really focusing well on that. We have engaged specifically with top management. We are one of the top five projects in FNZ globally to deliver. Momentum's project is critical for their success in South Africa.
We know we are getting the resources we want, and we have recently delivered with FNZ on a key milestone, which is the technical release of the platform that we will build on now in the next while. Our partnership with them, I think, is in a good place. As I said last year, whether we implement early next year, end of next year, or even kind of the global platforms in 2027, does not impact our cost base in the way that we have contracted with FNZ. We are in a good place, we are very comfortable with the focus that we are getting, but it clearly continues to be a challenging project. Spoken about many of the technologies. Where are we tracking?
I think just about $300 billion in assets on the platforms, which is the right place to be because above that, with an FNZ platform, we're in the lowest scale of fees, which is where the benefit comes from an FNZ replatform. The cost-to-asset ratio at 35%, we target 33%. It might end up slightly higher in the year. It depends a bit on cyclicality, but I think we're heading in the right direction. NPS is 52 this quarter. I mean, with this time where we are in 2025, it varies a little bit also depending on the cycle and kind of whether it's tax season or any other season and so forth. The one thing that we've achieved with the focus on NPS is everyone thinks in client. I think that's the best benefit that we can get. Will we get to 70%? Our aspiration is 70%.
That is kind of leading in this kind of platform space. I'm sure we can get there. It'll need diligence and so forth, but we have certainly focused the minds of people on the client, both with a purpose, but also in the way that we track this, the way that we speak about the client in our business. Let me just make sure I keep to the time here. Wealth management, I think relatively confident on NPS. Maybe those are two amber ones, reasonably confident. Signing up, I guess, partnerships with books of business is probably also reasonably confident because they're either a one or a zero. You either get the book or you don't get the book. In the retail business, Yuan, we're doing well with MDS distribution, consult distribution, and so forth. Very comfortable where we are. Confident we will achieve targets.
I think we are in a far better place with regards to our confidence on the replatforming exercise with FNZ. Structured products and annuities. This is kind of a key capability for us as a group. One of the longest-standing solutions we've had. I think from our early days in Momentum, early 1990s, this is when annuities started as a business. It is well established. The technology is well bedded down. Clearly a key focus for us. It has been a star business for the last three years, both from an NHE perspective and a VNB, not only for Momentum Investments, but for the group actually sustained. Although I think we downplay this, it is coming down a little bit.
Thank you very much, Yuan, for lifting VNB and other parts, and Dumai for lifting VNB so that we can lift the burden a bit of this part of the business. 1-2% is what we target in terms of VNB margin. Few things on annuities. Where are we? I think market share still doing well. Clearly, the interest cycle has changed, right? Less sales in guaranteed life annuities, but still at the top end of our market share. Still gaining market share. Our reduction was slightly slower than competitors. We can see the shift to living annuities. Remember, we at Momentum have a wide range of retirement income solutions in living annuities and guaranteed annuities. Definitely the best, not the best, hybrid annuity in the industry, right, where we combine a guaranteed component, gap product we call it, onto a living annuity.
It definitely has a place, I believe, in any living annuity solution for a client, actually. Across those three, we have fantastic market share, specifically with independent IFAs. The area where we're focusing on is in the guaranteed products. I mean, we call it structured products and annuities and not annuities and structured products for the reason that we want to put the lens on other structured solutions. As a group, we've got great capabilities in this space, in balance sheet management, asset liability modeling, credit origination skills, in the product design skills and how we construct solutions between corporate and Dumo Mbethe, your business and investments and our securities business. Fantastic skills. On the back of a great balance sheet, right? This is a sweet spot for us as an insurance business and an investment business in an insurance group.
We've recently launched another guaranteed endowment. It's capacity constrained because it's asset dependent. We do good structured notes in our securities business on an individualized basis. We do index guarantee fund structures with Dumo in partnership with NBSM also. Great collaboration opportunities. There is more that we can do in taking some of the structured notes and retailizing them in a better way. We are doing some work on that to bring out a broader range of certainty solutions for clients. If this business speaks about what they are for clients, it is about certainty for clients. 61 is their net promoter score. They're probably getting to the upper end. I wouldn't be surprised if we can get to 65 shortly. Our best business, but it is a very specific client set. It's a retired group of individuals. It's people who seek certainty.
I think once you take out a guaranteed endowment, we can deliver on certainty. I'd like to speed up a bit. Quite confident here. NPS, I think, on the score, but I'm very confident that we will uplift the client experience in this business. Multi-management, as I said, is our DNA as an investment business in Momentum in the group historically. We set out to do quite a few things, actually, predominantly to put together the global and the local businesses, make sure that we have enough focus on market growth. This is the glue that binds the platform in the front end and the asset management components at the back end, key for vertical integration in our business. Let me move to where we are and what we've achieved in this business. Quite a few things, actually. I think let me start with Equilibrium as the DFM.
It is the default investment provider for our in-house channels and consult and MFP for a number of third-party advisor networks also. Well-positioned, well-established, and a fantastic team that understands clients and their needs and where we need to be spoken, where we need to have common solutions. Good growth, as Risto and Jeanette actually showed in their slide from our own direct advice channels. In integrating the U.K. and the local businesses, I think we've aligned investment focus far better. We've unlocked probably up to $30 million expenses now by this time. Risto, you showed $25 million just in aligning those, making sure they're better positioned, reduced some skills that we didn't need, and actually refocused the two businesses. I'm too passionate. Let me just fix that quickly. What we have also done, Jeanette touched on the two kind of international networks that we've invested in.
They're small investments, really. One to two and a half million pounds in investments that we make. We do that in partnership with Hannes in the consult business because that's also part of what you do in your business, Hannes, in how you acquire and advise businesses. We've done that successfully. So tick, Yuan. There you go. Done those two. Good initial successes. It is a little bit of an exercise for us to see kind of how we can amplify this. If it works well, then it's a great opportunity for us to build distribution in a different way in global markets, expat markets, and in the U.K. market, where we don't have the luxury of an MDS and a consult and an MFP.
Also, we've had an asset consulting business in the U.K., similar to MCA, I guess, in your business, Dumo, but in the U.K., we don't have the luxury of an MCA. We recruited a team from Mercer 10 years ago, a very successful kind of team acquisition, but they hit almost the top end just before COVID. Through COVID, all the schemes became self-funded and fully funded and went the insurance buyout route. That business did this. The big schemes are no longer really available just on an asset consulting basis. We've changed that team now to a fiduciary management capability, which is implemented consulting in the South African sense, both asset consulting, but also implementation of solutions. We've launched that in the market in March with great early kind of take-up and success.
We've got a great team in place, and we will see how that builds. Clearly, that needs to build up again now. But again, we've taken out the excuse, Yuan, for this team to actually say we still need to launch it. We've launched it. We've got those relationships in networks where they can grow the networks, and we will help them to do so. Our partnership with corporate, fantastic. I think the index guarantee fund that we promote together also again speaks to the skills that you have, that we have, that BSM has. And that will go from strength to strength. I think it's collaboration. It's connectedness. So thank you for that partnership. And then lastly, investment is key, right? So we target 70% in quartiles one and two. We did 65%.
I'm very confident we will more often than not be in the 70%+ range if some historical performance moves out in five years. Confidence levels, yes, I think we are confident we will achieve in the multi-management business what we set out to do, and hopefully a bit more. Four minutes. Let me speed up a little bit. In the asset management side, quite a few things. This is a broad portfolio. It includes Curate, our institutional business, which is fixed income and systematic strategies, and then the investments we hold in Eris and in IMG. Let me go there. I think great collaboration. Jeanette also mentioned the securities business where more of our trades and our vertical integrated in there. I think we were very low. We're now at 18% from 9% up. Probably around about 20% should be appropriate for the business.
I think we've achieved that. Again, also the partnership of securities, Yuan, with MDS and the top end and Consult also in targeting private clients and delivering private client solutions and at a record height, actually, in assets under management in private client portfolios at the moment. Curate launched in October. Great acceptance in the market. That's another tick, Nonte. Again, now it is just the hard yards to make sure that there's recognition of the proposition. Clearly, the biggest benefit in Curate is the offshore investment managers that we have in there. They are single strategy managers that we've worked with for a long time. We have great arrangements with them in place, and we have a great proposition in Curate.
The benefit for us is this is an asset management business in heart and minds, but we do not have to go and seek and employ resources to run these strategies. We partner on an exclusive basis on all of these strategies to bring it to market where there are fantastic strategies. Let me just quickly see. In the institutional fixed income business, we have combined the two businesses, SCAM and MAM. Some work to do to really make sure we set it up as an asset management business. The team that we acquired in Crown Agents Investment Management is an asset manager at heart, right? I speak the language, Jeanette, that you also know, that we understand that is very different to multi-manager. I think this will change this business.
Combining them also gives us the opportunity to unlock the pipeline that we acquired with CAIM, which is really kind of fishing institutions in many emerging markets in the world. Investment performance important. IMG, key for us. IMG affiliate members just surpassed the 200 billion assets under management. Here in our business, we have 200 billion in assets under management, so 400 in total. ERIS is a multifaceted property manager with great opportunities. In the interest of time, quite confident about these. I think clearly in our institutional business, maybe reasonably confident we need to do some work to really unlock the opportunity. The pipeline is institutional by nature, right? It takes time. It'll unlock. We recently had a great African bank give us a $140 million mandate. There are a few of those around, and we need to unlock that capability.
In 50 seconds to conclude, bringing it together, right? This is, as I said, our key focus areas. At the bottom, the financial results that it must bring. Incidentally, we are probably just above a trillion in assets under management and administration, but the mix is more administration than management. We need to get that mix right. I am relatively confident that we will achieve the normalized headline earnings. Actually, you'll see, hopefully, by the end of this financial year, we check closer to that than we thought a year ago. Can we do more is the question. Yes, we should do more, right? By the orders to a billion because that's 15% of the 7 billion. That's our commitment. Savings is part of that. I think we're tracking 30 of the 150.
The last 20, I think of that 150 will be a challenge, but I think we can get to 120 quite conveniently. Our right to win in a second is this. A great range of solutions in our Momentum Investments business. Some that's at scale, some that's mature, some that's developing, which is in a good place to be because we can mature these businesses and maintain the mature businesses. A strong group balance sheet. The next two lines are all about distribution, group distribution strength, but also our partnership DNA that we have in our investments business, that we have in corporate, that we have in the broader retail business. Yuan is all about that partnership model that we have right through the business in Momentum. The way that we focus on digital innovation, Ravi is a great catalyst also for enabling the thinking in our business.
I think we have created enough of a focus on that where people accept that it is an enabler and not a threat, and it will help our business to a different level. I spoke about targeted growth opportunities that we have in SA and in global markets. At the bottom, I think at heart, we are an integrated, sustainable business. We believe in the commercial factors. We believe in being sustainable, but we understand the balance between the two. It is not either/or. Actually, our investment teams live that. Our business lives that. I think we are in a good place, and I am more than reasonably confident that we will achieve on our targets. Thank you. Dumo. Thanks.
Good afternoon. It is really great to be in front of you this afternoon. A year ago, we were standing here making all manner of promises.
I'm happy to say that Momentum Corporate continues to be a business that is focused and driving profitable growth. It is a business that has continued to deliver on client experience and doing that in an environment where we had to navigate the most significant change that the retirement funds industry has seen in South Africa. As we've been doing that, we've been doing that through a team of about 1,100 colleagues spread across our key capabilities in the Funds at Work Umbrella Fund, our group insurance business, our structured investments and annuities, our consulting and actuarial solutions, one of the leading standalone retirement fund administrators, and our member solutions capability, which is essentially the B2C of our B2B business. This is what drives us. This is the aspiration that is powering us to 2027.
We are looking to build the leading digitally led employee benefits business in South Africa, underpinned by a foundation of sustainable and sustained profit growth. Quite critically, the reason why we want to do this is to ensure that those who are fortunate enough to have the gift of employment in our country can have access to employee benefits. Over these three years, we are essentially focusing on four critical areas. Just a quick request, if you can please make the slide bigger. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I've got post-COVID eyes. Growth and distribution being very critical for us through our omnichannel distribution capabilities. This is a very, very big focus area for us. We also want to tap into expanding addressable markets. I think the narrative has always been we have to take from the competitors, and I think that's the reality in South Africa.
There are still untapped, at least levels with areas with low levels of penetration in the market that we are looking to tap into. Operational and service efficiency. I think in an environment where margins are continuously shrinking, whether you're looking at your underwriting ecosystem or your asset-based charges, this will continue to be a key priority for us. Product excellence, both in terms of innovation and building new capabilities, but also looking at how we can simplify, streamline, and optimize our capabilities. The ever-critical focus on collaboration and partnerships internally as well as externally. The commitments at a segment level were that we will deliver 800 to 1 billion by 2027, value of new business of 0.5%, cost to income ratio of 65%, and a net promoter score exceeding 65. Where are we?
I'm happy that in the first half of the year, we have continued on the path of profitable growth and are delivering earnings actually beyond our own internal expectations. I will explain when I get to the group insurance part of the business, some of the drivers in that particular area. The omnichannel distribution capability and strategy is really gaining strong traction. I'm quite happy with that. We've also seen good growth in the SME space, which I'll touch on later. Probably our biggest frustration as a team is our value of new business, where we are performing below our weight. Two things at play here. The first one being our volume of business when it comes to our more profitable product categories.
Of course, the mix of business overall towards lower margin products, some of which are actually very profitable, which I'll touch on when we get to structured investments and annuities. Without a doubt, the highlight here is that in an environment where we had to deliver on the two-part system, 259,000 claims paid by the end of April, ZAR 4.3 billion distributed. For your models, ZAR 1.4 billion of that is from Funds at Work. That's where we generate asset-based fees. 84% of those through digital channels, which again is quite a big achievement, considering that in the first phase of two-part, we had quite a lot of clients who still insisted on using manual claim submission and processing methods. I'm happy to say that in phase two of two-part, we've seen digital take up now closer to the 100% mark in terms of adoption.
The change management journey is progressing very well. More than that, our business has fundamentally changed. Historically, on a monthly basis, we would see 8,000 claims. Now we are processing about 45,000 claims per month as a business. When it comes to emails, typically we would see about 45,000 emails a month. Now we are tracking at 70,000 emails per month. The call centers, typically on any given month, we are dealing with about 50,000 calls in our call centers. Now it is 111,000 calls per month. I am just trying to illustrate to you that we have had to really navigate significant change.
The fact that our rolling net promoter score, three-month rolling net promoter score, is sitting at 44 is really testament to the efforts of our teams on the front lines who have really held our client service up and delivered to our clients at this time. We have also been able to achieve this in a manner that has still managed to contain costs to a large extent, leveraging digital capabilities. A few other things I'd like to touch on here. Our B2C digital distribution ecosystem, our Dragonfly product shop, has continued to make strong progress. In fact, in the month of October, we launched our first third-party product, so a non-Momentum Corporate product, which is the Momentum Emergency Savings product within the Dragonfly ecosystem.
That is now starting to teach us a few things just around how do we get third-party product moving within our ecosystem. Fortunately, in partnership with Momentum Investments, who provide the money market unit trust that actually powers that product. I'll talk about product rationalization later. Of course, collaboration, we have seen some excellent outcomes there, which I will cover. We are fully confident to a large extent, but also highly confident that we are going to achieve the objectives we set out for 2027. Now, moving on to the Funds at Work business, this business this year was celebrating 25 years of Funds at Work in the market, a great milestone. The fact that we are moving well towards the 110 billion in assets target by 2027, sitting at 94 billion in assets as of the first half of the financial year.
We continue to be in the top four within the umbrella fund space when it comes to assets, and we are the market leader when it comes to the number of members. That is, if you include active and inactive members, with over 500,000 members within Funds at Work. We have also seen strong traction in our SME acquisition capability and objective, 154 employers that we have acquired in the first half of the year. Fortunately, I think the group is really blessed in that we have got the strong IFA footprint through MDS that has actually been a very big driver of that flywheel effect in our SME objectives. Just to give you a sense of the 154 employers, about 3,000 employees in there.
From a segment perspective, 15% coming from the retail sector, another 15% from your professional service and administration sector, and then 12% coming from the manufacturing sector. What I'm also happy about here is that, yes, we do have quite a long history of acquiring SME clients within the Momentum Group, but we are doing that in a far more deliberate manner. Fortunately, that historical effort is also now showing progress, where we have seen 100 employers graduating from SME to, I'll probably call your more medium-sized businesses over the last six months. That's really what we're about here. It's about growing with our clients over time. I've spoken about two-part, but quite importantly here, we've seen digital engagements exceeding the 3 million mark. Again, it demonstrates the positive effects that two-part has had.
I've never seen a scenario where we had so many phone numbers for our clients. The level of phone numbers, accuracy of phone numbers, our ability to engage with our clients has really improved. We have also seen an uptick in self-service, which again will speak to our longer-term efficiency objectives. In the month of November, we went to the IFA market and communicated our integrated value proposition for Funds at Work, which really was well received. We have also seen strong traction of Momentum Grow, which is our SME digital-only solution, but distributed via advisors. We have seen very good traction there. I think the last point I'll touch on here is really around the collaboration with the health business, where we are gaining significant traction. Hannes will touch a bit more on that.
We are all now focused on the 1st of July, where we are about to do some wonders in this market. From a group insurance, yes, Funds at Work team also fully and highly confident. From a group insurance perspective, the focus for us is really around how do we ensure we continue to build a business that demonstrates sustained profitability whilst at the same time delivering on the growth objectives that we have as a group. We have been able to maintain the margin above the 5%-7% range. I'll probably say, I mean, if you had to try and be more specific without being specific, it's over 10%. I think the objective for us here is around a number of levers. The first one is that we have to continue to focus on client retention.
I must say we have done exceptionally well when it comes to retaining our clients. The second one has been around a disciplined management of our reinsurance program, where again, we have seen a positive stride in our ability to manage the levels of risk that we carry on the balance sheet versus risk that we pass on. Some really exciting stuff is happening in the underwriting space, especially in the disability management area, where we have, again, kept the basic disciplines around early intervention, around rehabilitation and case management, but are using digital and data analytics to enable us now to be a lot more razor-sharp in terms of the interventions that we take. Now we are able to track the sort of claims cases we are seeing, the root causes we are seeing by industry.
Even within those industries, we're able to track the effectiveness of the interventions that we are putting in place. We are now able to actually replicate to some extent where we have seen successful interventions and also to monitor the cost of those disability management interventions. We've also made good progress on digital solutions. Here for Funds at Work Risk Only, we have launched a digital smart benefit statement for group insurance. I think for most of you here, I'm sure you will know, group insurance is very low touch, low content. The fact that we can now engage our clients digitally in the group insurance space will start to open a world of opportunity, especially when I think about our B2C digital product platforms. Of course, we have made very good progress in the collaboration with Momentum Health.
There's some good stuff happening with Health for Me being embedded into our Momentum Grow product. The Momentum Medical Aid is visible in the Dragonfly platform. On the 1st of July, we are launching a big initiative into the market on the 1st of July. Overall, still fully confident on quite a few of the aspects here and high level of confidence. The key thing, which I'm sure you are all interested in, is just around how do we sustain the profitability trajectory. I mean, that is coming under pressure, and we've seen it in the last quarter. We are taking the actions to at least ensure that we are able to deliver on the range of 5%-7% through the cycle.
When I look at the structured investments and annuities business here, targeting 65 billion in assets by 2027 and a contribution to the corporate business of 25% in earnings by 2027. A great story here of collaboration. Collaboration internally with Momentum Investments and our balance sheet management colleagues, which has seen significant flows into the index guarantee solution. Collaboration internally with Funds at Work as we are starting to see some good flows going into our smooth bonus solutions in Funds at Work. Also in partnership, external partnerships where we've seen great flows into the retirement navigator, which is our smoothing-only smooth bonus solution. We have a partnership there. Also our golden living annuity product, which is gaining very strong traction again through partnerships.
To further highlight that 80% of the flows into the SIA business in the first half of the year were on the back of partnerships. We are really building partnership management muscle in this particular space. Our contribution to earnings at 21% of the corporate earnings as a half year. We want to gradually see, again, this particular part of the business growing as part of managing our longer-term earnings mix within the business. I think something else that's quite important to highlight here is that we did merge two of our annuity series in the first half of the year. A very complicated initiative. I think initially we all thought it was going to be pretty straightforward. We'd get the approvals. I mean, this thing makes sense. The governances you have to go through, the treating customers fairly considerations that we had to navigate.
Ultimately, we were able to achieve this. This now helps us to give value back to pensioners, about 100 basis points in terms of the cost of managing these products that we have been able to pass back to pensioners. Again, speaking to our purpose of making sure that we can build and protect our clients' financial dreams. Overall confidence is quite high in this space as well. I think the one area where we still have to do a bit more homework is just around fleshing out the green assets objective in partnership with Momentum Investments and then starting to look at practical and tangible objectives that we would then want to drive towards 2027 whilst delivering on the investment return commitments that we make to our clients. Here we cover the direct client engagement part of the business, Momentum Retirement Administrators and Member Solutions.
Firstly, when I look at our direct distribution capabilities, we are targeting 35% of sales by 2027. I think for us here, we believe there's still a bit more work that we need to do, tracking at 10% as of the first half of the year. What gives me hope? What gives me hope here is the fact that this channel in two of the last three years delivered 26% of our sales. I'm also hopeful because the pipeline in this particular channel is also quite strong. It is really around the pipeline conversion and also understanding the lumpiness of the flows that we would be dealing with in this business. We've also seen strong client retention. I must reiterate in our environment now and where South Africa finds itself, a client retained is like a client won. A very good outcome from a client retention perspective.
We have seen in the MRA business, we are tracking at over 380,000 members with a target of 500,000 by 2027. Two-part executed excellently, client service levels excellent. I think, without fear or favor, the leading delivery and execution of two-part in the standalone retirement ecosystem in South Africa. We have also been able to manage expense growth below inflation, which is quite key to the 2027 earnings objective for this particular business and for Momentum Corporate as a segment. From a retailization perspective, in partnership with MFP and the Momentum Advice business, we have started off on the retirement income solutions channel. We are partnering there on distribution to individual members within Funds at Work. Some great traction there and a pilot that has really performed well. We want to keep building on that.
Our pension-backed home loans solution, which has actually seen quite a good take-up from members yet again, whether it was for solar panels, small upgrades, boreholes, etc., is still seeing a strong demand for pension-backed lending in our client base. When it comes to preservation and annuity flow, the level of market share for the group at first half of the year is sitting at 55%, which is above our target of 45% by 2027. We understand, I think, there are elements here where there are some one-off big retirements or preservation events which skewed the numbers. We are seeing a little bit of a normalization, at least as part of the quarter three reporting that we were looking at, but still over our long-term range. I think now the key for us is how do we stay there.
Something like that, this retirement income solutions channel is critical. Overall, highly confident here. I think the key area for us now is to get our direct to corporate distribution capabilities firing on all cylinders and converting the pipeline of business that we have in place. As we look forward towards the next two years of the impact strategy, I am quite excited that working with a team that is extremely capable and a group of individuals within the Momentum business who are highly committed, but also knowing that we have our big brothers and our cousins in the rest of the Momentum Group in this power and spirit of collaboration that we can deliver on the objectives we have set for ourselves. We are a business with scale. We have a strong market position. We are making a credible contribution into the Momentum Group's earnings achievements.
Our profitability over the last five years has been consistently positive and stable and growing. We have delivered on our strategic objectives that we have set out. We will continue to build on the digital capabilities. I like what Johan said, go digital or go home. I think it goes without saying that in this time and age, this is a ticket to the game. It is around driving effective distribution, using our omnichannel distribution strategy, sales, sales, and more sales. As my colleagues like to say, those sales need to be profit-positive. Hence, value of new business becomes very nice business. Through this, we do aim to deliver on the earnings objectives that have been set. As we do that, to build and protect our clients' financial dreams. Thank you.
Thanks very much, Dumo. If I can invite Ferdie and Johan to join us.
Dumo, not so fast.
Yeah, I'm just going to grab.
Just a reminder to everyone online, we're really thrilled to have 80 people online, and very few of them are staff members, which is a great sign. For those of you who are online and you'd like to sort of drop a question, please do so in the Q&A bank. Do you have any questions? Prezly? Right, thanks, Warwick.
Or Warwick Van from R&B Morgan Stanley. Two to start, just Dumo, maybe just understanding the corporate business in terms of KPIs. You've got a variety of KPIs, AUM. VNB is still one of them. VNB over the years has been very low, currently negative. Yet the business, high ROE, good net profit after tax margins. It's a variety of ways of looking at this business. Is VNB relevant? How should we think about that metric?
Yeah, Warwick, thank you for that question. We do have these debates sometimes. How relevant is VNB in a business where you are dealing with annual renewal cycles? Where actually profit, if you look at your underwriting performance, it's positive. Similarly, around the index guarantee solutions, the VNB modeling is on a market-consistent basis. We are recognizing, I'll say theoretically, a margin of 0.5%, whereas your actual margin is 1%. That market-consistent element, I mean, is part of the reality. For example, if you look at the growth in earnings in the SIA business, where we've seen great flows into index guarantee solutions, which are not as VNB accretive, but actually very earnings positive. I think there is a bit of a dislocation around the VNB measure for an EB-type business.
It goes without saying, though, that there is currently, if you compare us to our competitors, we are lagging on our value of new business. That is primarily a mix dynamic, which I think we've chatted about a few times. Also, now really making sure we can get volume, especially into our more profitable lines, your annuities, your bundled umbrella solutions, and then managing our costs effectively. The commitment that's been made by the rest of the group, we also have to show up and deliver.
Thanks. I'll pass it on.
Morris.
Hi. Dumo, let me start with a question for you. Your SIA target is for 25% of NHE, correct?
Yeah.
You're currently sitting at 21%. This may be more of a group risk question. If group risk was in fact in the 5%-7% range, wouldn't SIA be sitting well above 25% already?
Yeah, it would. It would, Morris.
Are you targeting to shrink that business?
No, no, actually. I think.
No, no. That was a facetious comment. It's more about the sustainability of the group risk.
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, it is about the fact that when we look forward to our 2027 picture, we have made a commitment to retaining, I'll say, a high level of profitability within the group insurance business. On the upper end of our 5%-7% range. That is going to be critical. We can't afford for group insurance to go backward materially. Of course, the SIA business growing into that particular space as well. Yeah, we don't want to shrink it.
Okay, well then. Ferdie, a question for you. What do you think would be more instrumental to your margin? I'm not talking about new business margin. I'm talking about operating margin. The conclusion of FNZ or achieving those 30% internal flows consistently?
I think it's probably more the flows, Morris. To be honest, I think FNZ is a future capability for us. I think we've got a great technology stack at the moment. I think where we want to spend our time in the future and where we want to differentiate is in the front-end side. FNZ is critical for that in the back-end. I think from an operating margin point of view, I guess, is making sure that the assets under management versus assets under administration is also the right mix and at the right margin and that we get the right flows into the business. I think that's key. Clearly, being able to deliver the right value propositions for clients are also key. I think on balance, for the F27 targets, I would say that's it. Yeah.
Thank you. And then finally for Johan. Even fully digitized, can you see positive VNB for investor business?
Yes. That's the dream of the team that rhymes. It is possible. It is possible. What you should add to the mix is the value chain in totality also needs to move. If you think of expense buckets, and it's a really expense story. It's not a sales story. It's not a gross margin story. It's really an expense story. If you look into three buckets of expense, we've got, let's say, channel cost, product business cost, and support functions. Now, in the VNB, the portion of product business that goes to acquisition and the channel costs really inform the acquisition cost narrative. There, within the product channel domain, the digitalization will make a big impact.
The portion of product business that relates to servicing and, of course, the support function, most of those goes into the renewal management bucket or the maintenance expense bucket that you see. Now, maintenance expenses have got an impact on the VNB for savings. Unlike protection, it does not really move the protection VNB. The work the group is doing around the overall cost savings, it is important that we also extract efficiencies from the support. Once that happens, because the product channel side will be sorted, that digital will sort, remember, and the servicing model there. It is a latter part that we also need to optimize. It will show positive value of new business. For sure, I can see that, actually. They have actually been managed, the team managed to shrunk the NLOS, if that is the language you use, to almost no pre-IFRS 70.
Risto can talk more to that. It's outside of my actual domain now. I'm an ex-actuary. But the IFRS 17 basically dropped the value of new business for savings by, I guess, was it INR 80 million? And now they're recovering that again. We already managed to close that by half. That is a narrative. I think it is important. It's doable. It's really doable. You will see that. Whether you see that 2027 or 2028, I don't know. It is definitely doable, yes. I give you kind of the impact of maintenance expenses on savings is relevant.
All right. Just finally on that, some of your peers are actively reducing savings sales because of profitability issues. And owners' contracts really shone a light on the lack of profitability of certain business lines. Would you ever consider cutting certain products?
We did the sums for a number. We have did it a number of times. The question you're asking, should we exit savings, life savings? That's the question you're actually asking. We did the sum a number of times. If you remove group overhead from the conversation, you whistle if you remove savings from the mix, from a VNB perspective, but also from a channel sustainability perspective. In our world, we do not, it's not a, we set up our savings product line as a savings business, not as a product line for a life ecosystem, if that makes sense. That allows you to track those metrics quite carefully. The group is doing some work there at the moment. I'm fairly relaxed around the sustainability of the savings in the Momentum Life space. Also looking at the client value proposition. That's important.
Our client value proposition is very competitive out there. What is also important is the partnership and the growth in the Momentum advice agency space, for example, in particular. We do not really have those tailwinds in the savings business currently that I think we will get going forward. That answered my question. You need to look at this across the group portfolio, I suppose, Risto.
Thank you.
Morris, I just want to add very briefly. We're doing a lot of work on the savings products. I would say Investo has the best marginal profitability of the savings business. If we do start to exit savings, the affluent market's probably the last place. I think there the argument is the marginal profitability is quite decent. There are pockets where we're wondering whether the marginal profitability is there. I think we'll accept some fixed cost coverage from Investo. Some of the other ones are a bit tougher. The market-consistent one is interesting because Johan referred to IFRS 17. It's actually MCEV. We're now sort of building up the savings products using risk-free returns. You can just imagine how the asset build-up versus expenses looks different versus using equity risk premium. That was the 80 million he lost overnight with the move to market-consistent.
Thank you. That's why we need Jeanette Cilliers here for this question.
Hi, good morning. My name is Sean Grant from Rechargeable Africa. I'm happy to say I'm a new corporate customer of Momentum Health4Me. Just a couple of questions. I'll shoot them at you. You can choose which you want to answer. First one, why have emails and calls not dropped if your mobile uptake is increasing? I would be tremendously concerned if my emails increased from 45,000 to, what, 70,000 or 100,000 per month if I get the figures right. Number two, I'm just curious to know, I gather I'm sitting in a room of mostly independent financial advisors, consultants, investors, shareholders, etc., not customers. How many of you in this room are actively using any of the apps such as Health4Me or Multiply? Just by a show of hands. Okay, so that's about half. So perhaps halfway there.
I'm just curious to know who of you and which of your customers are actively doing user testing? I got an email this morning from Momentum explaining to me how I should link my device. I have spent about half an hour since trying to link my device only to find out that I can't do it through the app because it's not a Samsung or an Apple device. I have to go to my service provider's device. I went through about five or six different pages to get to that point. Other customers who are not as tech-savvy might be a bit frustrated. Apologies for the public criticism. Just an idea to use staff and customers for user experience testing. The last question, I noticed you have a multi-cloud strategy. I'm a Google Cloud partner for business at Enterprise.
One of the slides that I prepared for one of my presentations this week shows that if you are not using a single cloud stack, then you're open to security vulnerabilities. Because you use Azure and AWS and Google Cloud, which is the multi-cloud strategy, as I understand it, are you aware that you are vulnerable? For example, Microsoft platforms are 98% more vulnerable to attacks than a single cloud. As far as we know, Google are the only company that owns a single cloud stack. I am very glad that you are open to Google Cloud. Why would you not want to be on a single cloud so that you own all of your data from top to bottom? Apologies for all the questions.
Yeah. Go forward with that. Sorry, I didn't get your name. Sean. Okay. You can start.
Thanks very much, Sean. Those are great questions. Let me pick up the certainly we understand that we need to be thinking about our channels quite holistically, which we probably have not done as much over the past couple of years. As we have started to improve our technology stacks, which I am going to talk about a little bit later, we have started to be able to then put the analytics in place. Exactly the question you asked, when we have, for example, self-service capabilities, are we actually seeing the shift in volumes appropriate to what we are looking at? When we see a spike in a channel, particularly for activities that we believe are better suited for the client in a different channel, we need to ask ourselves, why is that happening? What is standing in the way for the customer? How do we actually improve that?
Certainly not something we've gotten perfectly right thus far, as I think our numbers show, but something that we're putting a lot of effort into. We are hoping that certainly over the course of the next 12 months, we're going to see significant improvements in that. To your second point around our mobile applications, again, mobile applications is probably an area, as you would have seen in Johan's presentation, we've made great strides in terms of what we've been able to do in terms of Advisor Connect and our Connect capabilities for our consultants. Our next phase now is to be able to strengthen and improve our direct-to-client capabilities, which is on our apps.
One of the challenges from an app perspective, as you noted, is that if you're not on either the pure Android or Apple ecosystems, especially if you're on the Huawei ecosystems, it does pose a little bit of a challenge in terms of the different technologies that they apply and the different stores, something that we're working on with the providers themselves to be able to strengthen our capabilities. I am really hoping that when we stand in front of you in a year's time, we're going to have a far more seamless user experience. Certainly, my boss is going to be holding us to that. Finally, on your question around multi-cloud, it's an interesting question. We do not necessarily feel that multi-cloud, especially when we work closely with the cloud providers, we've got very close relationships right now with AWS and with Microsoft on Azure.
We are looking at adding in other cloud providers. What we do is that we tend to actually create internal layers between ourselves and the cloud providers so that we're always in control from a security perspective and from a data perspective, as well as giving us, from a resilience perspective, some security in terms of what happens if one of them does go down. I am very happy to have a more detailed discussion with you afterwards in terms of discussions around how we think about the multi-cloud as well as GCP.
Yeah. I think, Sean, just to touch on the first question that you asked, part of the fundamental change that Toolport has brought into the retirement industry is that you now have a scenario where a member can initiate a transaction themselves. Historically, all claim-type events were initiated, yes, by the member, but via the employer. It would be a retirement event. Someone is changing jobs. Someone has passed away. Now, once every tax year, someone can get onto their phone and process a withdrawal transaction. Just by virtue of that, there's an uplift in levels of engagement that I think we should accept and expect that will continue. There's also the element of people just taking a keener interest in their retirement and their retirement outcomes. A lot of what we see is people inquiring, how much can I withdraw?
What are my options? I want to understand better. There are elements of that. The last one is, I mean, the numbers I have taken you through are averages. I think what we should see over time is a tapering to a new level of normal. The historical normal will not be the normal going forward. The way we have looked at that is to say, look, let's keep our headcount relatively stable. Let's pump as much capacity and capability from a technology perspective to better enable our colleagues on the front lines to service our clients and to manage the volumes. Stuff like optical character reading, we have actually embedded into our ecosystem to help with things like indexing and basically moving items across the ecosystem a lot quicker. I think we are learning.
We will all find the new altitude at which this industry needs to be flying going forward.
Thanks for your question, Sean. I'm sure you're going to enjoy Ravi's session a little later. Speaking of enjoying things, we now have lunch. The good news is it's grab and go. Hopefully, you'll be able to sort out your appetite and be back in the room at 10:00 P.M.
Thanks again. Because we did want this to be a bit of a networking session. We're now heading into the second half of our Capital Markets Day, and we'll shift into Metropolitan Life, Africa, and hear a bit more from our health businesses and the business. A bit later, we'll hear from our short-term insurance businesses and digital. For this half, I'd like to just call up Peter to get us started. Thank you.
Thank you, Tugelo, and a very good afternoon, everyone.
Earlier on, Risto was talking about whether he has to wear his glasses or he doesn't have to. I heard Dumo talking about COVID-19 eyes. I don't know that. That was a first for me. Mine are just old eyes. Now when I try to look, because these are multifocal, I have to find the right angle to be able to look so that I can see this. To ensure that I can still be able to see you, I'll keep them on. I'm going to share with you the journey for Metropolitan. Last year, we spent some time where we covered the focus areas as well as the strategic objectives which were going to lead us to F2027 deliverables. Today, we get an opportunity to also share with you the progress that we have made to date.
I will also touch on the confidence level as well as why we say we are going to achieve the F2027 deliverables. The first thing here is we would like to make sure that we can be able to sustainably deliver the normalized headline earning at ZAR 750 million by 2027, as well as achieve the margin of 5%. That said, we had to make choices to say, what are those areas that are going to help us to achieve this? The first one is around optimized value. Then we have got the client-led solution, the client experience. The other two are around the business development as well as the diversified distribution. In my mind, there are three themes which are really attached to these focus areas. The first one is around cost.
Now, even when you look into the different focus areas, you would see that the operative word is optimized through and through. The other day, I was thinking, I do not know how many times this year, this financial year, have I said optimized or optimal or optimization? I have said that so many times. Each time I get an email, there will also be optimized. If we were to think about it, and I see each time I also when I see Wendy, it is also about optimization. If you were to think of the history of the organization, I am sure in these 12 months, we have said optimization more than we did in the history of the organization. That shows how important it is for us to ensure that we can be able to manage costs.
Now, the second theme is around putting the client at the center of everything that we do. Now, here we're talking about, can we ensure that we come up with the solution which really lives up to the client's expectations? When we do that, we shouldn't forget to make sure that the shareholder doesn't lose out as well. When it comes to the client experience, this is the one area where as a business, we have really done very well. We used to have sections where we used to be number one on client experience. We moved on to South Africa, we still came up tops when it comes to the client experience. That said, it means we have to continue building on that to ensure that we can remain the people who live up to what the clients really expect from us. The third theme is around growth.
Here we're talking about, can we ensure that we can be able to understand our current market access to ensure that we can be able to build from there? Also, to optimize that, we look into the systems that we have and the processes that we have, which can ensure that how can we be able to grow our business? That said, we need to look into other opportunities outside of what we have, as well as create new, new revenue streams for our business going forward. While we're doing all of that, it will also create an opportunity for the different channels that we have or the ones that we have to create to ensure that we can be able to attract different revenue streams with different channels because clients do not necessarily want to be serviced the same way.
In doing all of this, we need to really continuously build on our brand as well as build the culture of high performance. These are the objectives that we shared with you last year to say, if we can be able to achieve all of this, we will be able to deliver the $750 million as well as the 5% margin. On optimized value, key for us is to ensure that we can be able to deliver $150 million cost saving by 2027. When we look into the solutions, we said, while we are going to create value for our clients, can we also make sure that the shareholder can be able to get the 5% margin? On the client's experience, we need to ensure that the client satisfaction can be at 84% by 2027.
business development point of view, yes, we would like to get to a point where 30% will be coming from both public sector as well as the private sector. Currently, we're sitting at about 1% in the private sector space. We say we need to make sure that we can intentionally go into the private sector for us to get the growth that we want. The different channels. Now, when you look into alternative channels where we have got the brokers, we have call center. When we look into digital, which is very new, the direct as well, we're not where we want to be. Somehow, we need to look into our distribution channel and get into a space where 30% must be coming from alternative channel. Some work to do in that particular space. We would like to see improved productivity.
About nine, ten months later, how are we really doing there? From the cost point of view, as at the end of H1, we have already banked $40 million. Now, when I look into this as how did this come about, you will see that there is a lot of work which was done in the ops space wherein we digitize so many things in that area to get to a point where we service clients better. That is one. Also, the number of people who are supposed to be part of the servicing team, we had to reduce that because we have got the digital way of engaging with the client. On the other hand, we have now just done the migration. Having done the migration, there are some savings that will be coming through, but there is a lot more that we are expecting in the future.
I will be able to chat to the migration at a later stage. Now, when we look into the VNB, by the end of H1, we are sitting at -0.9%. This is where our biggest challenge is. We are sitting with a 5% margin by 2027. When I look into where we are currently, yes, we have seen some improvement, significant improvement for that matter. We are way off the 5% margin that we have set for ourselves. When I look into what are the contributory factors which got us to here, it is mainly the product commerciality, which played a huge role where we had to go and re-engage with our own market access owners to see if we can be able to pay less. We had to reprice some of the solutions that we have. We had to re-look into the benefits that we have.
All of that was not enough to get us where we should be. Cost reduction will also be able to contribute towards that. We're speaking about the migration of which the 70-100 million that we're talking about, the lion's share will be coming to our side. All of that should be able to help us to really improve the VNB margin that we're sitting with. Also, when I see the improvement that we are getting now, it is happening at the time where we have also seen a reduction in the annuity sales, which to me, it means there are some stuff that we are doing which are in the right direction. Volumes are not where we want them to be. The mix was not necessarily where it should be. All of this, we need to do something about going forward.
The customer satisfaction, we are already sitting at 93%. I said the target is 84%. This is one thing that we'll continue to really build on. One key contributor to this is the digital self-servicing where clients are very much happy with that, which to me, we need to ensure that we can build through. From the business development point of view, yes, we have seen a bit of improvement when it comes to both the private as well as the public sector. There is a lot more that we still have to get from here. There is a lot more that we still have to do and be intentional so that we can see this growth that we're talking about. Another element, we said we wanted to get new revenue stream. We have signed the partnership with the Nazareth Baptist Church.
That is the Chamber Church. As much as we've entered into this relationship, there's a lot of work that we have to do. We're not going to be utilizing the current distribution channel to really penetrate this market. What really excites me about this is this is a different kind of a client. On the other hand, we also have to learn as much as possible from this particular grouping. One, given that this is a church group, I mean, I even went to the church about two weeks ago. It was very interesting and a very interesting experience. The Chamber Church people, for those of you who do not know, sometimes when you're driving along the road, you will see people wearing white on the side of the road. That is the Chamber group. I went to Tuvatuba two weeks ago.
When you are in the temple, you have to walk barefoot. I got there, we walked barefoot. Now the king, as they refer to him, the Chamber King, had to do the sermon where we were sitting down. Somewhere along the way, he was talking about this partnership that they have with us and how much he would like to support this for their benefit. He says, you will see amongst you, there are Metropolitan people. It was myself and David Mavugane who was the lead on this. He says, the only way you will be able to identify them, it is shiny heads. Why he said that, the Chamber people, they do not cut hair. You are born, and then you do not cut until you die. So they all have hair.
The only two people who did not have hair were myself and David. There is a lot to learn from this group. There is a lot that we have to also understand on how we can be able to say it is very hierarchical and they respect authority in so many ways. We are not going to get someone who comes from our side to go and sell there. We want the members themselves to be the ones who can sell amongst themselves because that also talks to the trust. There is a lot more that we have done to date, but we still have to see how we can be able to start getting the numbers from the Chamber Church, which in my view, it will be a totally different revenue stream for us.
When I look into the diversified distribution, first, we have now done the rationalization, which I will be able to chat to a little bit more, but productivity has also improved. The retention post this rationalization has also improved. What I like about it is we are now keeping the right people, the people that we want to go forward with. From the strategy, from the confidence level to the strategy that we have set for ourselves. Yes, when it comes to cost, I am 100% sure that we should be able to deliver the INR 150 million. At times when I speak to Etian, the CFO, he feels like, yeah, we should do that and better. INR 150 million, we will be able to deliver that.
When we look into the client-led solution, yes, this is where the challenge of not getting the VNB margin is sitting. We are still confident that we will be able to deliver the 5%. There are things that we have in place which should be able to help us to get there. Already, given the migration, the one thing that we have done, we had to build new solutions on the new system. Now, all of the replacement solutions, they have got better margin compared to the ones that we had that side. Hopefully, we will be able to get additional contribution from there. The one other area where we are reasonably confident, it is on the alternative channels.
I said earlier, currently, the brokers, call center, there is some work that we need to do there so that we can be able to really generate more new revenue. The church or the partnership that I referred to as well should be able to help us to get closer to the 30% that we said we want to achieve going forward. A little bit about why do we think we will be able to deliver on that. First, it is the migration that we have been talking about. Yohan has also chatted about this. In one of my discussions with Yohan and Philipp, who's from the match side on this, they said to me, you know what? This is the biggest migration, not only here in Momentum Group, it's in South Africa as a whole.
Without any thought to it or not knowing exactly how big this is and any other migration that has happened, I said, if anything, I'm not going to repeat that, but I'm just happy to get the benefits of whatever we have done. I will keep it that way. Now, here when we talk about the work that has been done, we have been on this journey for more than seven years. Now today, we find ourselves here. There are so many other benefits that will be unlocked by this. Already, I know Erwan, our CIO, is not here. Each time we'd go to him with something new to do, he says, no, no, migration for seven years. Now I said, migration is gone. There's no longer an excuse of saying, no, I have got migration.
We need to make sure that we can start to really move forward. Cost saving is a big thing. Yes, already, the 70-100 million, which is said to be coming from switching off the mainframe. The biggest part of that will be coming back to us, which is a positive thing. Now we're going to end up with the new and modernized platforms, which to me, it's a good thing. One, we should be agile enough now. When we have to make any changes into the business, we have got a system that will enable us to do that. Technology risk now is going to be reduced, which on the other hand, it's a positive thing on its own. It also makes sure that the people that operate in the business, they can do better.
We have got the straight-through processing that we introduced a couple of years ago. Now when I look into all the new solutions, they are also now on straight-through processing, which is a positive thing. You no longer need a lot of people to touch the new applications. That means you have got some savings that we'll be able to generate from there. Our own servicing model as well as the sales model, they can be able to integrate to this new system that we have, which to me, it also strengthens our own employee value proposition. They can be able to do well as well as allow the clients to be able to self-service themselves. So many benefits which are really linked to us having done the migration successfully.
When I look into the second issue, it is the TARD agency optimization. We did this in the last, I would say, 10 months. To find ourselves where we are, we had to go ahead and reduce the number of provinces. We used to have five provinces. We now have only four. We used to have 30 regional managers. We are only going to be sitting with 18 regional managers now. The branch managers, we were just under 300. We are targeting to end up at 175 branch managers. The advisors already, when we started the year, we were just above 3,000. We are now sitting at 1,800. What I like about what we have done to date, one, we have seen productivity going up already. Secondly, the team that we are left with is the right team.
It's the right people that we would like to have and ensure that we can really be able to build from here. We are also making sure that we need to embed the workforce management so that whenever you bring an additional individual, they come into a space where they can be able to be successful as well. Now, having done this, we have to build from here. We have no aspiration to go into the 4,000-5,000 number of advisors. We want to ensure that we can be able to have a salesforce that can be able to perform to expectations and we build from there. Digital-ready business, so much has been done. I spoke about the service-related digital way that people can be serviced. When we look into the two-part system, withdrawal system, last year when this was implemented, day one, we were ready to already pay.
That is how proud we are to have the team that we have who could be able to deliver like that. More so when it comes to the two-part system, some of the rules were only finalized within a month from the date which was operated. We were very proud to have done that. Even now, the clients who are engaging with us, as much as two-part has become BAU, engage with that digitally, which is positive as well. Last but not least is our people. When I look into how tough this couple of years have been, the team that we have here are the ones who made all of this really possible. If I were to look into the migration we are referring to, it is really big up to the team.
When I look into the rationalization, this was big work, which had so many other moving parts, but we have managed to pull this off without necessarily losing or creating commotion in the system. The last one is around the expense management discipline, which is why I'm comfortable to say the 150 million we are set as a target, we should be able to really deliver on. Let me be the first one to acknowledge that for the last three to four years, the focus has been very internal. Now we are standing where we are. We are so happy and proud to say we can be able to lift up our heads and make sure that we can be able to go out there and fight. It is going to be a big one.
Yes, there's a sub-story that already outside our head to chat to some of you, and I'm sure we'll have more opportunity to really talk to that. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Okay, so I've been here earlier representing the India business. Now I'll be wrapping up the international portfolio by covering the Momentum Africa business. I will start off by just giving a recap of what we said our key focus areas for the impact strategy would be. Then I will give an update on where we are so far. I will talk about the operating model. Maybe just to give context, I mean, Jeanette did mention earlier that we've made progress in terms of determining the new Africa operating model. I will cover that later on in the presentation. I think it's worth saying that we've done the work. We're comfortable with the decision and how we're going to take the business forward. It is not a change in the strategy of the business.
All the things that I'm saying today remain relevant. We still maintain our targets for F2027. In fact, what the operating model is going to do is going to be enabling us to better be able to deliver that strategy because of the teams being set up better, better operational alignment, and probably the right reporting lines as well, which will enable the strategy. We think we're setting ourselves up for success for the strategy. Lastly, I'll close off with a few key focus areas for us for the next 12- 18 months, as well as what excites us about the road ahead. Our winning aspiration is to be the preferred financial services partner within our chosen markets, providing relevant solutions to enable the well-being of our clients through exceptional client experience.
Emphasis on chosen markets, emphasis on relevant solutions, emphasis on exceptional client experience. I think you'll hear those coming through throughout the presentation. How are we going to deliver on this? I think if I can summarize sort of this strategy for us, the word that I would use is anchoring. We're trying to build a steady, predictable, sustainable business that is set up for growth that we'll see already in this three-year period, but also beyond. That's what we're aiming to do over the period. We're looking forward, and there's been good progress already in the last year. I think everything we're doing is tracking towards getting that and achieving that.
Starting off with the five focus areas, distribution effectiveness, that is really about embedding the fundamental distribution disciplines across the teams, making sure that each individual, each sales manager has clarity about what they need to do on a day-to-day basis so that the actions that they are doing on a day-to-day basis translate into the outcomes that we track at an overall level for the business and on a financial level as well. We also want to grow sales, grow existing channels, improve our market access, but also grow new channels in the business and use partnerships to support the growth of our sales as well. Growth is important because I think scale is critical for us.
We are at a stage where we're investing a lot in the business in terms of systems, but the scale of the business needs to support that growth so that the sustainability and the earnings can come through as well. Second, enhanced client experience. For us, that means reducing the amount of friction that our clients experience when they interact with us. It relates to operations and systems, but also the ease of doing business. The ease that our teams have in doing what they need to do on a daily basis and how that translates into perceived experience of our clients. We will be tracking and measuring all the activities that we're doing and ensuring that they translate into that better experience. Next, operational efficiencies.
We have identified a few specific initiatives to improve operational efficiency across the business that cuts across automation, improving customer service channels and how we operate there. What we're really saying is with the implementation of the new systems, we have to follow through for each process and say, have we made it easier? Have we eliminated friction in each part of the process so that it's easier for our teams to do what they need to do? By that, it translates into, again, a better experience for clients as well. It includes the systems implementations that's in progress. It includes automation, improvement in our RPA processes, and so forth. Okay, then the next one is the growth in new markets and channels.
Here, what we've said is there are key markets that we think are really sizable in the countries that we operate in, and they relate mainly to SMEs, to youth, and to the informal sector. What we need to do is to create a clear plan regarding how we will access those markets on a sustainable basis and a commercial basis so that we actually have an impact in those markets. It's not markets that we can ignore given the size of them in the markets that we operate in. We are making progress in terms of just understanding what the opportunity is and how we can sustainably tap into that opportunity. Lastly, product development. We have implemented some savings products in the last year. It's a key thing for us.
I think for the last probably seven to ten years, there haven't been changes in terms of our product suite. It has been a key focus to ensure that we have the right products mix set up in each of the businesses, each of the countries. Savings products have been implemented. We are on track to implement our risk products during the course of this calendar year, around August. I think that will be concluding this current stage of product development that we're aiming for. The key measures that we've put for ourselves in order to track that we are progressing on all of these focus areas are advisor productivity, target of 1.2 policies per advisor per week. I'll talk a little bit about that later.
New business risk-to-saving ratio, so having more risk business rather than savings business and shifting that ratio, increasing target to 50% by F2027. NPS target of 65 across the Africa business by 2027. Conclude the system implementation project, which is well on track, as well as an NHE of ZAR 450 million by F2027. How are we progressing on those? I'll first give you an overview by country just to give you an update in terms of how things are progressing per country, and then I'll do a summary overall. Namibia first, and Zakaria, the CEO of that business, is here today. If you've got Namibia-specific questions, he's here to answer them. Namibia remains the largest part of the Africa portfolio, biggest contributor in terms of earnings, biggest contributor in terms of sales. We're really excited about opportunities in the Namibian market.
The GDP growth has been strong, 3.7% like this relative in Africa. That is strong. It's been good GDP growth. We've seen continued interest in the oil and gas exploration, sometimes tentative, but still really promising. We've seen a new government that's come in and really focused on stabilizing the country and growth in the country as well. We're really excited about prospects for business growth in Namibia. In terms of performance, sales have been really good, strong sales growth, strong increases in productivity. Namibia has already surpassed the F27 targets that we have for the business as a whole. They're currently carrying the rest of the business in terms of productivity. In terms of sales growth, there's been a 21% increase year on year in terms of APE as well. Really strong output.
Namibia was also one of the first areas where the distribution fundamentals that we are implementing were properly embedded, and we can see the fruits of that and the impact of that. Definitely things are going well there. Also strong pipeline in terms of corporate business, going well as well. We expect by the end of this financial year that the corporate business will be able to see the outcomes there as well. In terms of partnerships, we've recently concluded a partnership with the Lutheran Church, which has about 500,000 members across the country. That is going to be a key focus on growing sales in that country as well. The short-term insurance business has done really well, increasing sales volumes and good claims ratios over the period as well. Really good outcomes there. VNB is probably the one thing that is a key focus.
Zakaria has a self-confessed fear of failure. So that VNB has made him very unhappy. That has been driven by an increase in sales-related expenses over the period. We have a clear plan and a targeted plan to ensure that is fixed over the next financial year. I think if we sort that out, the VNB will move in the right direction again. Yeah, positive about, really excited about opportunities that we have in Namibia. Then Botswana. Botswana, also interesting context. I mean, Botswana is the only country where we've seen a contraction in GDP over the period. A new government also come in, really positive, really excited about the plans, the long-term plans and prospects that they have for the country and the diversification of sources of income for the country. Still positive.
You might all know that the GDP per capita in Botswana is actually about $7,000, so higher than South Africa. There are opportunities there to land our business and to improve going forward as well. I think we're punching below our weight in terms of the size of our business there in that market relative to our competitors. In terms of sales, the productivity has improved, but I think the level of sales are not yet at the level that we desire. I think the one thing that keeps Wutimelo, who's the CEO of that business, awake at night is the mix of savings versus risk business. We are still very highly weighted towards savings business, which is not ideal. A key focus has been, first of all, improving the type of savings business that we've launched.
In the last year, we launched new savings products, which have increased the minimum premium, focused on the right target market of clients, but also focused on improving the VNB and the client outcomes for those products as well. We are in the process of, as I said, we'll be launching the long-term risk savings products in August this year. I think that, as well as repricing on the funeral business, will give us opportunity to be able to increase the risk proportion of the business. That's a key focus, I think, for Botswana. Also good partnerships there. We've actually formed nice partnerships with Orange Money and Mascom for a rare premium collection just to make sure that clients have different opportunities and different ways rather than going to branches to repay and to minimize lapses and to increase persistency. Okay, then Lesotho.
The savings, the implementation of the systems applies to Lesotho as well. The systems we implemented were for both Botswana and Lesotho. That has gone well. For Lesotho, we have a 69% market share. In an environment which has been hampered by the change in American policy and the exit of USAID with constraints in economic growth, that does mean that our competitors are looking to our business for growth. It means we have to keep our foot on the accelerator. We have to continue to grow the business. I think exceptional client experience is going to be the one thing. If we look at ourselves and look at peers, we really have an opportunity to do well there. It is going to be a key focus for us to continue to grow that business.
We have launched unit trust products in the asset management business in partnership with Momentum Investments in this year. That will give us opportunity to play even better in the institutional space in terms of asset management and, yeah, have a relatively better offering as well in the market. Lastly, Mozambique. We've seen really strong sales growth in this period. Last year, we repriced some loss-making schemes and therefore we did see a drop in the book. We've overcome most of those losses and back on track now. Good growth in terms of sales, good claims ratios as well. We recently launched a Portuguese-based mobile app in that country. That will improve engagement as well with our clients. Yeah, good progress there business-wise from a Mozambique business. Okay, overall, I think good progress on distribution effectiveness.
A little bit of focus, a little bit of peer pressure will take us beyond the current levels of productivity that we're seeing. The 1.08 is not where I think we should be right now, but tracking in line with our targets for F2027. I think, yeah, with focus and with a little bit of pressure from the Namibia team, we'll be able to probably reach and probably exceed even our F2027 targets during the period. Risk-to-savings ratio is sitting at 42%. That will improve over the next year or so once we've got the products in place and are able to sell them and enable our agents to have a good product suite that they can offer to clients. NPS is currently sitting at 59.
We've done a bit of work to change the way that we're measuring the NPS to align with the rest of the group, but also to have it be more effective. We're also increasing the measurement and making sure that we've got enough data that we're measuring it on. I expect that the 59 will probably reduce before it goes to the levels that we're tracking at, but yeah, it's currently sitting at 59. It'll deteriorate over the period, but we still aim to get to the 65 by the end of the 2027 impact strategy period. System implementation, as I mentioned, that's on track. With the migration, as Johan mentioned earlier, with the migration of the OB system, we then implemented the new savings products on the XAG platform. That's been done.
The next stage is the last implementation, which is the risk products, which will be at the end of August. We earned ZAR 254 million in normalized headline earnings at half year. I think my only concern there would be the proportion of investment variance linked to yield curve versus operating profit. For me, it's increasing the proportion of operating profit in that number. That'll be our focus going forward. Yeah, confident on all the items. I think the one thing is the new markets that the project is just a little bit behind, but even that, I think we'll sort out and make good progress in terms of figuring out how we can tap into that. The operating model. We've concluded on the operating model. We've done detailed analysis.
What we've concluded is that the Africa business had remained on the old centers of excellence model even after the rest of the group transitioned to the new federated operating model in 2018. What we found is that impacted on focus, on accountability, on clarity, teams working in different places are not enabling us to be more aligned and able to achieve the outcomes. What we have decided is that we will transition this business in line with the group operating model, and we will transition the health operations that are in the rest of Africa, which are already operating on the HIP platform for health and already received actual support from the Momentum Health business into the Momentum Health business unit. We will transition the Momentum short-term insurance business in Namibia, which is currently very closely aligned.
In fact, when we did the impact strategy plans, we connected with the Guardrisk business to sort of say we see opportunity in terms of the corporate and commercial business, especially with the gas acceleration in Namibia in partnership with Guardrisk. We see opportunities there. That business will now form part of the Guardrisk business unit. We will formulate what we call a new Africa Life business unit, which will cover retail life, institutional life, as well as asset management. The asset management businesses in most of these countries are also closely aligned to the life business. Normally they start off with investing life business assets. Maybe just to be clear also, the alignment with the rest of the group will remain. Continued collaboration with Momentum Investments, continued collaboration with Momentum Corporate on, for example, reinsurance arrangements. Those will remain.
Continued collaboration with the Myriad Product House. Those will remain. It does not mean that the business is not working together. The ongoing collaboration, if it is across the group, will continue. This will enable a business that is more end-to-end business-focused. It will enable all three parts of the business to have focus, to have clarity of outcomes, and to focus on growth going forward. I think we think this new operating model will set us up for success going forward to achieve the growth and the opportunities that we see going forward in the market. What are our focus areas for the next 12 to 18 months? Firstly, landing the new operating model. It is more operational. It is more about teams and where they are sitting and where they are structured and reporting lines.
As I said, it doesn't change strategically where the business is going and what the key focuses need to be, although we obviously will continue to dynamically review those. I think the focus is on saying, let's have clarity, create that clarity as soon as possible, have a focus, and move to implementation as soon as possible so that the business can actually extract the value that we think will be achieved when we close that out. Sales growth is going to be critical. We need good, quality, sustainable sales in this business. Retail sales, it's critical. Institutional sales is also critical. We're focusing also on bank insurance partnerships, on partnerships with affinity groups, and that's going to be important. We have to achieve sales growth so that we can get the right scale in the business. Lastly, everything culminates with VNB.
We are not comfortable with the level of VNB at present. We think that continuing to grow our sales is going to be important. We think operational efficiency and the plans that we have in place, they will help to improve the VNB outcomes. The focus on the product mix is going to be critical as well. Good plans in place, clear plans in place to support the improvement of VNB for all the five countries that we have. Oh, I did not cover Ghana in the slide. I am just remembering now. The right to win. Why are we here and why do we think we have a right to win? We believe that as insurance companies and as financial services companies, we have a very important role to play in the lives of our customers and our consumers in the markets that we cover.
It's important for us to enable our clients to use financial services as a tool to achieve their goals. I think we have an important role to play in that regard. We think that that requires us to then be more lean. Our clients require relevant products depending on where they're at. They require our products to be cheaper, to be cost-effective. We have to make sure that we are efficient, we are diligent in terms of how we use our resources, and that we ruthlessly prioritize so that we use our resources in the right sequence to achieve the outcomes that we need for the business. We have to have a lean and streamlined operation that's focused on making it easy for our teams to do what they need to do, but also deliver an elevated client experience. Thank you. Thank you, Lulama.
I thought to just come on stage while Hannes gets his jacket on. It does not always happen. We are quite fortunate today. Ladies and gentlemen,
Hannes Fadioun from the health business. Yep, thank you so much. The jacket is really not my big thing. Janet got me into it. Yesterday morning, my wife actually said, "You must remember that jacket of yours." I think firstly, it is a huge privilege to be able to share a bit of time with you. Thank you so much for sacrificing your time. It is 3:00 P.M., almost, a long day. Thank you for staying awake and being with us and listening to our stories. Also, thank you to my team. I think when I shared with you what is happening in the business, you will see that it was a huge effort from the team.
Really proud of what the health business is achieving. Luckily, Norman D. is sitting there at the back. They brought the presentation together. If there are difficult questions, they are here to help us with those difficult questions. Thank you again for being here. We are really excited about the business. I was thinking sitting here, and it is not a secret. I mean, if you look at the air, life is moving on. I started in the group in 2002 when our group sold Discovery to R&B and then started a new health business. It is quite some time. Thinking back, it is probably the best place where our group is in since I have started here 23 years ago. It is a fantastic place to be in despite terribly difficult economic situations, interesting political situations. I do not think it is the easiest environment in which we are operating.
I think focus and energy and leadership is making a huge difference, and it's a privilege to be part of the group. Yeah, quickly framework like everybody else did, a short recap on our strategy. We shared it a few months ago. I'm not going to bore you too much on that. An update on where we are from a progress point of view. Just closing two slides on some closing thoughts. I think in recapping again, and this is really important, is that the thing that drives us, that winning aspiration for us, is to create more health for more people for less. This is how we build and protect our clients' financial dreams. This is so deeply seated as purpose.
I was very fortunate to be at a global health conference last week where all the, let's call it, countries in the world that have a private health sector were actually together and discussing global issues around health. If there is one takeout for me that was interesting in this whole pursuit of people in the world living longer, two big questions that it poses: firstly, how do we deal with funding retirement? Because as people get longer, they did not provide for it. Another thing is how do we take care of people from a health point of view? The one kind of is contra the other one. If people live longer because of health, you have a bigger retirement funding problem, etc., etc.
The bottom line is that all the countries agree, you need to solve for the economy, and then you can solve for those things. Do not think that you can solve for health and that will solve the economy. First, solve the economy, and then you will be able to have an economy in which you can actually sustain health and those other issues. Very deep in us, more health for more people for less. Just recapping again, our ambition strategy to grow a streamlined Momentum-branded value proposition in selected markets locally and outside our borders while leveraging existing capabilities to achieve public sector private partnerships with different government entities at scale so that we can really play a role in broader society. The five key strategic focus areas which we identified: first, one health, why is that important for us?
We were a very fragmented business, came together from acquisitions, etc., etc., and managing around 1.2 million families or just below 3 million beneficiaries, but in a very fragmented way, under different systems, different brands, different approaches. The position there was we need to start to play in the market at scale with the presence of a single brand from a single system to be able to get that scale across the business. The second thing, our flagship Momentum Health branded scheme, we need to grow that to a credible level. A lot of effort must go into making sure that Momentum Health is a credible solution in the marketplace. As you know, our public sector sustainability, quite a big portion of our business.
Typically in the public sector, the tender cycles go out on tender, and you worry what's going to happen and margin is eroded, whatever, whatever, whatever. How do we get there to a sustainable situation? Given all of this, South African market mature, not growing. We're in a listed company. How do we create growth and earnings? There are only two ways. The one is we want to diversify vertically into the delivery system, not only for more earnings, but to be able to control the starting point of creating more health for more people from a primary care point of view. We want to diversify into that. The other thing, we need to look outside the boundaries of South Africa. We will not be able to grow earnings into the long term only in the South African market.
All of that supported by our digital transformation using data and insights. Five key points there. Digital solutions, a key focus. Managing clinical risk by understanding our clients better through AI. Digital provision, huge. Virtual doctors. I'll share with you a little bit about that. To provide access to primary care through virtual doctors. Servicing our clients, a digital service experience and supporting channel advisors with digital service abilities. Those underpin across the whole business. Just recapping then the specific objectives that we set ourselves in those focus areas, the four on the left, one health, common sense of actually already said it, single labor-aligned business on one platform. It is key for us to get scale at technology level with a single brand, play in the market as Momentum, and aligned client value proposition.
That value proposition that will give us and our clients more health for less or help them enable a quality life. Then optimize our corporate portfolio. Again, a lot of small little schemes and clients, hugely subscale, either consolidate, put them together, and/or put them in an environment where we can actually manage them at a lower cost. Open market growth, key. That is what Momentum stands for. In that space, optimizing our channel space with a few things. Firstly, get closer into the foxhole. Johan spoke about that. Get close into that distribution foxhole, align relationships, incentives, and system support, digital support. Make it easy to do business. A lot of work happening there. Then group collaboration, and Dumo spoke about that.
We know it is a huge opportunity in the market, in the employer space, where employers are looking for integrated solutions for their employees between health and employee benefits. Big focus for us. Public sector sustainability, create a sustainable partnership model and try to get away from the tender cycles that are creating a lot of risk, and also grow into other public sector markets. There are other markets that we know that we can get to. Alternative growth, already set our delivery system, including virtual delivery like the Hello Doctor model, and then participate in healthcare outside South Africa. Go and do what we do here well outside our country. Measures of success across these actions that we drive. Cost savings by 2027. We want to reduce our cost base by ZAR 230 million. It was our promise.
New families from a growth point of view in a mature non-growing South African market. We want to add 350,000 members. We'll get to the detail now. Our take-up rate of Multiply or incentivize wellness. We want to increase that to 37%. Public sector, we want to access other markets, municipal markets, and some other markets that's definitely available. Again, this thing we spoke about, grow our pharmacy primary care footprint, grow our virtual footprint, and get into international markets. That's what we promised the market a few months ago. Progress update. Exactly the same picture. One health, progress so far. We've already migrated three schemes onto our single platform. The next big one is our Momentum-branded scheme. It is a huge, huge thing to migrate Momentum Health. It's our branded solution. It touches own clients, Momentum clients, Maria clients, investment clients, advice space.
To get that right is crucially important. We are on target to migrate that in the first quarter of the next financial year. Corporate optimization is taking the small things, putting them together, creating a bit of scale. We already amalgamated Lanman and Suzankey, two mining schemes, and that amalgamation was effective the 1st of June this year. They are what ago. We are working on two other amalgamations into Momentum Health. Of one, the exposition, we are waiting on the outcome. The other one is in process of submission. Positive development in that space as well. These small, smaller little schemes, small subscale, costing a lot of money. We created a new co-environment that can operate at lower cost for eight of those schemes, and that will be effective from the 1st of January 2026.
We will save a sensible amount of money when we get that right. Open market growth. Johan spoke about it. Dumo spoke about it. I have been around for 22, 23 years. It is probably some of the most positive energy that we experience in the channel space for a long, long, long time. Although we are a little bit behind the numbers, the last three months, we have actually achieved better than target. I think 150% of target. The work that we did to energize people, create aligned incentives, and to empower the channel with the right technology took a little bit longer than we thought. Now that it is starting to get the traction, we are really excited that we see now on a monthly basis, hitting 150% of target.
Both for the scheme business, both for health for me, and even for the multiply take-up, which is really, really encouraging for us. The big thing, collaboration with Momentum Corporate in the employer space, and Dumo alluded to it, and a lot of positive stuff happening there. Just in that integrated employer space, creating meaning for employees, not only for health or only for employee benefits, but for employee in totality. We are very fortunate that we are executing our first big scheme, Dumo, on the 1st of July, as you said it, and a total of 22,000 new beneficiaries that will come into the combined space for us. We worked long on this, Dumo, I would think 18 months. First, just to land it, and then to scope it and execute it.
On the 1st of July, our first big success, 22,000 families in the South African context, getting access to health and employee benefits from the Momentum Group as an integrated value proposition. The last one, there on open market, it's a wonderful achievement. When you're acknowledged from the outside by independent groups, you're really happy and confident that you did the right thing and hope to work harder to achieve it well again. We've been awarded by News24 as the medical aid of the year. Now, if you think of it, sometimes when I think of this, I get this chicken bumps. Because in a market where you are, sorry, Lawrence, where you're 6% of the market and News24 do work because they want to see who's the best and you come out top. There are other players that's 40% of the market and 25% of the market.
We're like 6% of the market. From all the consumers that they asked, the scale gave us that we are the best. We were the best for 2025. A huge acknowledgement to the team and well done to the teams that did all the hard work. The Board of Healthcare Funders, that's the industry body, gave us an accolade as the most innovative health business for the year, including our multiply or incentivize wellness offering, which again, is absolutely fantastic, all happening in one year. Hopefully, it's also adding to the growth that we see at this point in time. From a GEMS point of view, you all know that's one of our risk areas, the tender cycles, every five-year tenders.
I really think we improved the relationship substantially to the extent that GEMS decided not to do their tender cycle this year. They literally retracted their tender. They decided to focus on the key business challenges for GEMS, like their claims ratios and the sustainability and stability of the business in totality and rather work with partners like us to improve that. That tender risk is a big, big thing that's a bit out of the system for us. Alternative growth. We're very, very comfortable that the Africa profitability is on target as Lulama has shared. From the rest of it, the diverse delivery system and our pharmacies and primary care clinics, we're a little bit slower than we thought for all the right reasons, capital scarcity, given the NHI uncertainty, et cetera, et cetera, and also the right opportunities.
We made progress, a little bit slower than we wanted. We are very, very, very happy with the progress that we made with Hello Doctor, which is our virtual primary care. Up to the end of March this year, Hello Doctor already for this year had a million virtual consults for nine months. It is like 110,000 doctor consults, virtual consults per average month, which is making a huge difference in the cost of the solutions, in the access that people get, in the digital access. We are seeing good adoption there. One of the interesting things in this global conference where I was last week was the question was, how will consumers adopt digital in something like health? Because it is so personal and so special. One of the articles that was shared was how human beings started to trust the technology of flying.
Now, think for yourself, if somebody, if you get into a plane to fly somewhere far, one of those long, dreadful flights, Cape Town to Atlanta, 16 hours, 14 hours. And once they close the doors, they tell you, today, this flight is manual. There is absolutely no technology, no radar, nothing, nothing. We are flying like flying was born, the way it is, manual, the way we do claims and stuff like that. I think the majority of us will probably get out because we started to trust technology in something like flying from Cape Town to Atlanta. It is just a question of time, and we will start to trust technology with clinical understanding and interventions of ourselves as well. We will see a bigger adoption in that virtual space, and we are very excited about that.
Digitization, remember, that's one of the key things for us, just a slide about that. The big thing here is about adoption. Are we seeing the adoption that we want to see? Because we're spending money in that space in three big areas. First one on the left-hand side, scheme, health, for me, and multiply. That's just service experience, how people experience the product. You will see year on year, on the scheme side, 25% up, health for me side 348% up, and then multiply 95% up. How then people use the product by not using call centers, et cetera, et cetera. We're really excited about this that we're seeing. On the digital provision side, Hello Doctor, 140% up year on year. We also have a chat capability, where people can like a chatbot engage with a doctor and help themselves, 83% up.
In the advisor environment, really important to us, advisors using our digital technology, 23% more than the previous year. We are excited that we are not just building apps and stuff, and they are not getting used. Yeah, we have challenges, and we try our best to solve them as fast as possible. There is definitely positive progress about the usage of technology in our business. A little bit of progress on one page. The five factors on the left, we started in 2024, and then on the right, what we then said we want to achieve and where we are in the middle, NHI. We know in 2024, the uncertainty was big. We want a stable industry for the sake of society and our clients. I think the debate is sensible. A lot of things are happening.
We are comfortable that we will get to a stable industry in the next two to three or four years. Competitors, as a small player, we've seen a lot of irrational competitive behavior. We would like to see an industry that's competitive and sustainable and people can play. We've made good progress with that, especially with the growth of our HealthForMe product as well. We're getting into employer groups and then getting up into the middle and higher income markets is really helping us a lot. Membership growth. In 2024, we had 2.955 million beneficiaries. Our target was for 2027, 3.89 million beneficiaries, South Africa only. The latest numbers that we have for FY25 is that we're on 3.039 million. We are seeing sensible growth. If you've seen the rest of the market, it's actually been shrinking.
We're very comfortable with the growth that we're seeing. We're also comfortable that we will get to the F2027 targets. Expense management is on track. We're actually a little bit ahead of what we wanted to achieve this year. These are numbers that we currently see. They might change a little bit. We're also confident that we'll get to the F2027 numbers. Diluted headline earnings. Why I'm saying diluted? Remember, our health business has a 30% external shareholding. This represents 70% of the business. F2024, our earnings was INR 255 million. We set ourselves a target of INR 600 million by 2027. Our current position, current view of where we stand for this time of the year is INR 208 million. We're comfortable that we're on and a little bit ahead of target. We will be able to achieve the INR 600 million.
Now, you can think perhaps that gap looks big. If you take 255 or take the 208 to your own calculations, add the 230 expense savings and then add the growth at the margin on that, you will see you get to the 600 in 2027. We are really comfortable that we will deliver on that promise as well. I think I have dealt with the majority of this, just high level. We are either fully confident or highly confident about the majority of the factors. There is one, and that is growth into other public sector markets, where we say we are reasonably confident. Why we say that is not because we doubt whether it will happen. It is more a waiting thing, a bit of a timing thing.
It takes longer, and it may not happen in the time frames that we thought it will happen, but we're comfortable still that it will happen. In closing, our focus for the next 12- 18 months is to further invest in our value proposition, to deliver on our purpose. There's a lot more work that's happening there across our business, not only Momentum Health, also the other schemes in our business. Investing in growth. We've discussed that ease of doing business, unique collaboration with corporate, organized labor focus to get into the lower income market, and then expense-based reductions. Those three things, that's what keeps us awake. That's what we're focused on. That is what will deliver the promise that we made to the market. Why we think we'll get it right?
We are very comfortable that we can deliver better health outcomes at lower cost than the majority of the market. We can win market share with sustainable and affordable solutions. Our collaboration with corporate is unique, and the value proposition is really unique. We are very confident that it will help us. Our ability to execute client delight through service, whether it is digital service or normal service, we are comfortable that we can do that. That is the snapshot. I am dead on time for some seconds now already. That is it. Thank you so much for listening to our progress update. Thank you.
Thank you, Hannes. If you can please remain on stage. I would like to call up Peter and Lulama to come for the Q&A. I love how Hannes says, "I am dead on time for a few seconds." Five minutes later.
I guess that's what you get for being in the group for 23 years. You get a bit of latitude. A great session overall. I guess, one, we've got Peter with his old eyes and shiny head, but a good turnaround story there and a bit of work to do in terms of just your agency optimization. Lulama speaking about anchoring the Africa business, building a steady and predictable business, but also, again, a focus on the VNB challenge. Hannes, 23 years later in the group, very energized, but focusing on building a good investing in the value proposition and the expense base. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to open up for questions. Warwick.
Thanks very much. Peter, three for you. Just the large system migration you spoke about, Momentum also, Momentum Retail also doing large system migrations. Are you all on the same platform now? Are there synergies between the two businesses, or is your instance of the system different? Just elaborate a little bit on that. Then just remind us the mix of profits between Funeral and annuity and other products, just how it stacks in Metropolitan. I mean, Johannes spoke quite a lot about the next phase for him being the advice framework. What's the next phase for you? Is advice framework one of the things that you've looked at and need to address?
Okay. I'll invite the connoisseurs to come and help. The question on the migration, we used to have seven different platforms in the mainframe. Now we are left with three systems. That is on the Metropolitan side. That's OIPA. We have got MFP. The other one is for, what's the term, PDS. These are the three systems that we have. When you look into Momentum Retail, PDS, and then they will also have a play. When it comes to MFP, they have got a difference. OIPA, they are not on OIPA. That's how the systems are in our space. On the question of Etienne will come and help me on the different annuities as well as the FINAP policy profitability.
We're just getting a mic to him.
Sorry. Hello, everyone. I think it's a question, just clarifying the question. Is it VNB or earnings? Earnings, okay. On the earnings side, the long-term savings book is probably marginally profitable overall at this point in time. The annuity book, I would say, is just doing the maths, about 20% of the profits. The protection book is the bulk of the profits.
Warwick, there was a third question, if you don't mind reminding us.
In terms of the next phase.
Next phase.
Okay. Yes. We are also embarking on the advice-led solution for our tied agency space mainly. Advice in the lower end of the market and advice in the retail affluent space is totally different. We are still defining what advice in our space is going to be like. More so, given the market that we serve, it is our thinking that we have to own it and not necessarily allow an advisor to own it as a principle. More so, given some of the dynamics we have seen in the worksite space, if someone were to move, how do we ensure that the advice that has been given to the client was relevant? As to the tools that we are going to use, we'd like to make sure that Metropolitan becomes the owner of the advice, which means we'll have to guide.
We are still very much in the building phase. It is our intention to have advice in the lower end of the market as well.
Thank you for that, Peter. Any other questions in the room? There's one there. While we move to Sean, while the mic goes to Sean, I'm just going to reiterate a question we got earlier, Lulama, around the Africa optimization plan. I think when Cameron and I do ask this question from ABSA, he was referring to the slides that Risto had put up around capital and that we're going to start optimizing the capital in Africa. The question, I think, took a bit of a different stance because he was asking about any considerations to exit potential markets and where there's underlying performance and a drag on returns. If you can please address that.
Okay. So maybe just the capital optimization that Risto was referring to. As Risto has mentioned, we did look at the capital base of each of the businesses that we have in the Africa portfolio, as well as the ROE and what that looks like. Currently, overall, we're sitting at about 9% ROE, which we believe is below where it should be. Part of it is driven by the fact that the way we entered some of these markets was through acquisitions. As a result, we've got quite a big capital base just historically over time through the businesses being bought and being brought in. Therefore, we think we can optimize that. We are looking at, so currently, in each country, the way capital is being measured is on the old regime in terms of Solvency SVM methodology.
In SA, we measure the same measurement on the rest of the business, but not in the Africa business. Currently, we're in the process of estimating what our capital would be under SAM and considering whether the level of capital is not too high, whether we can consider lower multiples, solvency multiples for the Africa business in the interim until the business moves to a SAM sort of measurement over time. That is obviously dependent on country-specific regulations. We do believe that the size of the capital is high and that optimization is about saying, is there a way that we can optimize in the interim before the transition to newer, more economic-based regulations come through? That's on that. In terms of the portfolio, I mean, there isn't specific plans that we're looking at.
Currently, everything we've said today is about stabilizing each of the businesses, improving, progressing them, and moving them forward in the right direction. We're comfortable with that. We're comfortable that we've got clarity about what's important or what the portfolio needs to look like and the plans going forward. If there's something that concerns us in the future, I think we'll act on that. We've been very clear to say that we're not going to lie to ourselves in terms of how great the prospects are in certain regions when things are not working. We'll be very honest with ourselves and make the right calls at the right times when those need to happen. At this stage, I think we're comfortable with the portfolio as is.
Thank you. Sean, I think you had a question.
Thank you. I had the privilege of using the Health For Me app for the first time this week as a new corporate customer. I would like to congratulate the team for what they have come up with. It was very easy to use. I requested a Hello Doctor at about 8:00 A.M. yesterday morning. I was sent SMSs confirming that you were very busy at the time, understandably, that I would receive a call within four hours. I received a call within two hours. The doctor was very polite, introduced herself, asked a few questions, and then she referred me to see an actual GP, which I was able to do this morning. She offered to help me with how to do it on the app, but I actually did not need that because it was so easy to use.
I was able to find a doctor within one kilometer of where I live. Yeah, very, very positive experience as a first-time user. I use hundreds of apps as an EdTech person, and most of them are not as good. If I may just ask for a hands-up, who has used the Hello Doctor service to date in the room?
I have.
Okay. We have some early adopters. As a customer, as your customer, are there any other customers in the room?
No, actually. I guess most of us are customers by virtue of being Dumo's customers.
As the only voluntary.
It is, I guess, a conference where we were giving a strategy update. Not quite customer-focused. Well done, Hannes, on the Hello Doctor app and all the good work you're doing there.
Sorry. Last question, which I didn't get to, is do you have any plans to localize the Hello Doctor app into other South African languages? Number one, we have 11 or 12, as I'm told, and Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, Ghana, local languages there. Any plans to localize the app?
At this stage. Thank you so much for the feedback. It's really appreciated and all. They share it with the people who really did the job. Thank you so much. At this stage, the focus is to keep it in the language that's mostly usable. I understand it creates its own challenges. We just rolled it out in Lusu, Tuba, and in Tswana as well. I mean, if the scale is big enough and it makes sense to give it local languages, we will definitely consider. It's not the main focus for us at this point.
All right. I saw Marius's hand, but we've got another online question from James Stock. It says business unit stock, but R&B Morgan Stanley. It's for you, Peter. A few of your competitors are following some variation of a bank-related strategy, which appears to support distribution and collection cost efficiencies. How do you plan to respond to threats posed by bank-related distribution strategies, and in particular in the funeral segment?
I think this question has come up in so many other settings. The group's position is we are not going to build a bank. If you were to ask me, I know there are a lot of advantages to have a bank, more so in the market that we really operate. Now, what are some of the capabilities which the bank will give? It will be you have the data, you know where they really spend the money. Now, with open banking going into the future, it is something that I would like to explore and see how we can be able to have exactly the same benefits for us as compared to what the bankers can also do.
Yes, if I were to be able to get a partner who can also be able to give me exactly that, it is something that we can really explore. We are definitely not going the banking route.
That is clear. A question we often get. Thank you for that. Marius, you had a question?
Hannes, this is for you. Your member target is very aggressive, and you seem very confident about it. Please explain. I mean, do you have a pipeline? Are there certain schemes that you think you're going to shift? Where is this going to come from?
Thank you. Thank you, Marius and Savela. I actually thought I just need to share a little bit more while the slide was up. Quite a portion of that target that we have sits in this lower-income market where employers are coming forward to fund their employee base. The growth that we're seeing there is really very, very positive. It aligns with the need that we have, I think, as a society have to give some kind of access to care for people, at least when they're employed in a certain way. A good portion of that 350,000 is in that lower-income market, Marius. The balance sit in growth, either retail growth where we're really seeing very, very positive growth coming through the channels. In the collaboration between the health business and the employee benefit business, there's huge opportunities there.
Without a doubt, some, let's call it acquisitional growth, Marius, where there are opportunities in the market. You're probably also aware about this trend in some areas in the market where we're bullish that we're actually ready to take on some of that stuff. When you unpack that a little bit, you see if you get one or two bulk volumes in on top of a monthly growth in Hello Formy of more than 3,000 members a month, then getting to 350,000 over 36 months is not that difficult. We are very appreciative of the support that we're getting from the market. Our labor alignment also helped us well. We sold shares in our health business into the union spaces. Through the bargaining council support that we get, we actually get good access to that market.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this Q&A session. We're going to head out for a coffee break. It'll be 10 minutes. We'll be back at 3:15 P.M. to just finish off with the last session. Thank you. Those of you who are online, we'll see you at 3:15 P.M. Thanks.
You'll recall in our reinvent and grow strategy, the target was that 20% of our income would come from non-life insurance. We dropped that with this strategy, but both the Guardrisk business and the Insure business have been doing exceptionally well of late. I suppose it's just really the fact that the other businesses have also been steaming ahead that keeps that 20% target elusive. We have, in Lawrence representing the Guardrisk business, a serial outperformer and long may that last.
For a change, we have somebody who's weathered the bad luck and persevered and, through a disciplined approach, now finds himself in a bit of a purple patch. It is really the fact that he's turned this—why is that funny? Brunt, I suppose it's with great relief that you come to the podium having had a terrible time at times. True to form, Brunt will just really talk about his team and what they've delivered rather than anything else. As we finish off, we've seen Ravi field a couple of questions, so I don't really need to introduce him. Our innovation and our digital application in the business has been a common thread through all of the sessions.
We thought it was quite important to have Ravi come and explain how critical it is in our strategy and how we manage that collectively, collaboratively, and within the severe budget constraints that Risto has for the business units from the center. I'll hand over to Brunt.
Thanks, Rowan. I think the only batch that I'm aware of is the bald batch, definitely not a purple batch. Welcome to the last session. You have survived what feels like 47 PowerPoint presentations, 89 acronyms and buzzwords, and three or four awkward coffee sessions. What's one more session? I'm sure you'll survive until the end. As Rowan said, it is my privilege to talk to you about the Momentum Insure business and the way that we've progressed. Somebody once told me that the key to a successful presentation is to tell people what you are going to tell them, to then tell them, and then to tell them what you've told them. For an Afrikaans-speaking guy, that's a mouthful. Jeanette, earlier this morning, spoke to you or just mentioned in passing with a lot of conviction that Momentum Insure turnaround is complete.
My job, I suppose, is to back that up with our progress and just to talk you through where we are and where we find ourselves now. We are certainly comfortable that we have a healthy business, that the improvements that we've seen in our business are sustainable, and that we've made a great few strides towards sustainable profitability. Our long-term winning aspiration really deals with three sort of key ideas. The leading South African insurer component just reflects our ambition to not be an also-ran. It speaks to scale. It speaks to relevance. It speaks to the fact that over time, we certainly want to be a seated player when competitors look at us, but also from the perspective of clients and advisors. The second component deals with this idea of feeling safety. Now, I'm often asked, why would a client choose you?
Now, this idea of safety is at the center of the reason why clients will choose us. You will know that we do business in an extremely competitive environment with seriously sort of proper world-class competitors. We have tested the idea of safety numerous times with consumers, most recently with Nanto and a team at the end of last year to check the relevance, to check whether it is something that consumers resonate with. The answer has been overwhelmingly positive. In a country such as ours, safety is a reality, or perhaps in many cases, unfortunately, the lack thereof on a daily basis. Just as a basic human need, safety is relevant. Functionally, safety is important in the context of short-term insurance. If we think about it a little bit further, the idea of helping our client to feel safe is equally important.
Lastly, the idea of protecting what matters most just reflects our shift over time away from just being a claims payer to being a proactive risk management partner, and for us to do this in a way that creates value beyond just the traditional short-term insurance products. This is an ambition which the Momentum Insure team has united behind, and we are looking forward over time to make this a reality. When we think about our strategy and the Momentum Insure focus for the impact strategy period, we said that the critical thing for us to get right is to ensure that we end at the end of the three-year period with a healthy, sustainably profitable core business. That core business is a personalized direct business. Why did we choose that part of our business to really reflect the core?
It is because it is our most profitable channel by a fair stretch. It is also the channel in our country, if you think about personalized, where probably in excess of 70% of new business is going. We would have to be, I suppose, a little bit—we should be recognizing where our clients are going. That is critical for us to achieve. We identified four focus areas. The key thing for us to get right in the context of profitability, in our view and in my experience in close on 20 years in our industry, the engine that drives sustainable profitability for a short-term insurance business is the quality of its technical pricing and underwriting. It is fair to say that we historically have underinvested in that part of our business.
We have, over the last year, and perhaps even if we rewind the clock even further, started to properly invest in that capability because it is so key to one's success. It is starting to reflect in our results. The second key decision we made was to scale the personalized direct business for reasons I have already explained. The third element relates to sort of cost. We need to ensure that our broker channel, the IFA channel, which is on the other side of the spectrum, if we compare our channels, is our least profitable channel, that that channel becomes profitable. You cannot be part of, I suppose, the face-to-face distribution in our country and not have a successful value proposition in the IFA space. We said that that is a key thing for us to get right.
Lastly, to address the fact that our premium income is—well, growth is slowing down, our policy count is reducing for reasons to clean up our book, that we need to face the cost realities in our business and address the cost concerns that we have. That is also in support of the group's strategy to do the performance and cost optimization. Our contribution to that is ZAR 50 million. We said operating model-wise, we need to ensure that the products and the distribution channels we have are appropriately aligned with the market segments we target. Historically, over the last year or two, we have had some sort of channel drift in particular. We started to run into ourselves as opposed to having channels and products that are complementary. There is also some optimization in doing that. In a highly competitive market, differentiation is key.
A key shift that we decided to make was to move our safety value proposition away from just focusing on profitability-related outcomes. Historically, we've proven to ourselves that if you engage with us in the context of safety, you claim less and you stay longer. We want to now evolve that even further to drive client attraction. Client attraction is absolutely key if one wants to scale a direct channel in your business. That, for us, felt like the most sensible thing to do. Obviously, growth is critical. Over the last six months, you would have seen our growth compares not so favorably to some of our competitors. It is something that we need to get right. Sequence-wise, we said first get the fundamentals right, and then one can start focusing on growth.
Our growth sort of strategy will only kick in from 2026 and 2027 onwards. It has a few key elements. The first outcome is we want to ensure that there is appropriate premium diversification in our business away from predominantly motor where we used to be. We need to ensure that we maximize the collaboration opportunities in our group, and specifically with the Momentum Advice ecosystem in your environment. There is a lot that we can do better there. Obviously, again, in line with where clients are going, we need to find a way to expand our digital personalized offering. From a success measure perspective, most of these measures relate to our ability to translate what we do into ZAR 350 million in earnings and an ROE of close to 20%. That is the ultimate measure for us.
Now, in order for us to deliver that, it's critical that our business runs at a combined ratio of somewhere between 92-96%. Now, why that range? It's just to cater for the cyclicality in our industry. If we hit a combined ratio of close to 93%, that translates into the appropriate ROE. If we grow our premium income by roughly inflation in the next two years, that will get us to $350 million in earnings. We meet the expectation that both Jeanette and Risto have put on the business. In order for us to do so, scaling direct is important. We set ourselves a target for that to be more than 40% of the new business that we write. We want to ensure that from a safety point of view, we drive higher adoption.
Fifty percent of our book, we want to engage with safety. NPS, a theme that you've heard from any of the colleagues today, 55 NPS. In our case, that includes the full value chain, claims as well. Also, to drive this idea of just premium diversification, we want to move or improve our diversification by between 3% and 6% points. To give you an idea, before we started, we were running the business with a motor portion of north of 65%. We wanted to get that to below 65% and ultimately closer to 60% so that we get a lot more non-motor in the business. If we then look forward and we see what have we done, this is now the part of the presentation where I'm telling you what we've done to get back to my initial analysis or analogy.
Again, to reiterate that message, I think we can with confidence say that in all material respects, the turnaround of Momentum Insure is complete. Over the last six months, if we just take our results up until 31 December, we recorded ZAR 230 million in earnings. If I had to stand here this time last year and tell you that that is what we will do in six months, I think a few of you would have smiled and said to me, "Brant, you're a little bit unrealistic with that expectation." We are obviously very pleased with the results that we have achieved. We are very pleased with the fact that we are now also a dividend contributor on Risto's scoreboard that he shows every year. There is obviously work to be done for us to, I suppose, wipe out in a sense the most recent capital injections.
We are very excited by the fact that we have contributed INR 300 million odd in dividends. From time to time, I am also asked whether our business is at scale or not. Obviously, in our industry, size matters. There are numerous examples of small insurers who run profitable books. There are some examples of very large insurers who also are not profitable. There is an idea of sort of bad scale. We were on our way possibly there. It was critical for us, again, to address the profitability component in the business. As I stand here today, we support 30% more gross written premium per employee than what was the case three years ago. Our headcount has reduced by more than 10%. We are slowly changing the fundamentals.
The claims ratio, I've got a specific slide that I'm going to speak to now to speak again to this idea of a rising tide raises all boats, which is sometimes the feedback we've received that everybody is doing well. That is the reason why your claims ratio has improved. New business direct is now more than 40% of our total personalized sales and 33% of our total new business. That is already a good step in the right direction. Safety adoption above 30%, our NPS score not yet where we want it to be at 41, but maybe a little bit of additional good news. On an annual basis, the FIA, so the Intermediary Association, runs an intermediary experience survey and a report. Momentum Insure ranked number two in the industry for the 2024 survey, something which we are very proud of.
We were very, very, very marginally beaten by the insurer just up the road from here, which is a big step forward in our attempts to do better in the broker environment. From a premium diversification point of view, we have already progressed beyond 35% non-motor. We are making good progress. If I then just stand still for a minute or two on the claims ratio, when we started this financial year, our claims ratio was 66%. We did not expect the weather to improve to the extent that it has. We targeted a loss ratio for this year of in and around 62%. The levers would have been strong renewal increases and targeting a slightly lower new business claims ratio. New business typically runs at a higher loss ratio.
We reduced where we used to run to an even lower level. We thought that that would get us to a claims ratio of in and around 62%. We achieved that, but then achieved an even greater claims ratio improvement as a result of our renewal increases. That contributed another 2.5 percentage points to our improvement. Because we wrote slightly less new business than what we anticipated, that also had a beneficial impact on the claims ratio, which then gets us to 58%. The rest of the improvement to 52% is a result of the external environment just being better. Although it was a very wet season from a weather point of view, we just did not have large severe weather aggregations like we did specifically in the previous financial year. We tracked about 10 in the previous financial year.
In the past one, we only tracked two. That made a big difference. When it rains slightly less in areas where one has exposure, there is lower motor accident claims frequency. We benefited from no load shedding. We saw a reduction in theft frequencies of high-value vehicles, which is in line, I think, with what some of our competitors saw. All of that contributed to a nice improvement in our claims ratio down to 52%. Even if we add all of the good experience back, we're at 58%, which for us is in the range that we were targeting. We think that we can still do a little bit better. We're miles away from where we were in the 60% range and previously in the 70% range.
If we speak about confidence, I'm just going to touch briefly on the two components where we've marked it as reasonably confident. For the rest, we are confident that we will deliver on our impact strategy objectives. The first relates to our ability to get all our distribution channels and specifically the IFA channel to an appropriate combined ratio. The extent of work we must do in the broker channel around technology and operating model changes is significant. We are slightly behind in terms of our plans to deliver that. Only reasonably confident, but we are trying to accelerate that. The second one relates to safety adoption. Specifically there, in the spirit or in support of our strategic objective to drive greater adoption, we will be launching a new version of our safety value proposition early on in the new year.
Again, that's slightly delayed in terms of implementation. The benefit we will get in terms of client attraction may also be delayed. Therefore, just reasonably confident. For the rest, very confident that we'll deliver on the promises and commitments that we've made. To close, maybe just two or three ideas. For us, what does winning look like? The key thing for us is to have or deliver predictable, acceptable financial results for our shareholders. That's the starting point. That's the ticket to the game. If we get that right, and if I wanted to add a tick to that top sort of box there, the graphic design team said to me, "No, you can't do that. It's out of touch with the rest." I listen.
My voiceover is there's a big red tick there saying, "We think that that bit is done." There are other things that we still have to do. Obviously, that will require our attention. The ingredients we believe that will lead to a right to win is a proper pricing and underwriting capability. It is a differentiation that's driven by safety but focused specifically on client attraction. It's critical that we must deliver on our cost savings initiatives and specifically the digitalization component thereof. It's key to our longer-term success. Competitive premiums, if the risk price is right, you can only influence unless you manage your claims cost even better by reducing the cost of operating in the business. We have some work to do. We do not compare well with all of our peers when it comes to that.
We acknowledge that, and we know what we have to do. Lastly, it's critical for us to ensure that we collaborate better. We're very excited about the growth that the group will see in advisor support out of the advice ecosystem, both consult and MFP. Our business, I think historically, has been reasonably insular. There's a nice opportunity for us to collaborate better. What will we focus on in the next 12- 8 months to get us to the completion of the impact strategy? That's too early for applause, Peter, but you can keep it until a little bit later. Obviously, I said earlier, the engine that drives our profitability is technical pricing and underwriting. We're investing in tools and technology and additional data. We're doing a lot to improve our GIS and weather data.
We can now, at a rooftop level, geocode about 80% of our book. At a suburb level, we can do 99.7%, I think was the last feedback that I received. We are making good strides there. We are speaking to partners, some that Ravi has introduced, to help us complement our current data with third-party data sources, which may, if it works, lead to underwriting advantage. That is a key thing. Obviously, we have our work cut out from a growth point of view. There is scaling the direct business. There, it is important for us to highlight new lead strategic partnerships that we are pursuing. It is interesting now that the business is doing better.
How many external businesses are now all of a sudden knocking on our doors saying, "Guys, we want to do business with you." That is a much better position to be in than what was the case previously. It is critical to get the collaboration right, as I said. Our new Head of Distribution is sitting over there. He joined my team in May. Part of his job is to really build a new, more exciting value proposition in the IFA space. That obviously will take a little bit of time, but we are excited about the opportunity that presents. Expense focus, all our digitalization initiatives to ultimately drive our cost ratio down. In this year, FY 2025, we are investing in people and technology. You will see our cost ratio go up and then come down in the next two years.
That is by design. We are excited about where we are. There is a nice energy in the business. Like many of my colleagues, it would be remiss of me not to congratulate, thank, and recognize the Momentum Insure team who has really worked tirelessly under sometimes quite trying circumstances over the last two years to deliver a great result. I am extremely grateful for the work that they have done. We believe that we have shown that we are a valuable contributor to the Momentum Group portfolio of businesses. We hope to become an even more meaningful one in the months to come. Thank you very much. Rowan,
I have been called many things over the years, but never did it include the word cereal. Never mind. Shawnite, I know whether you are still here.
How glad am I today that Gladys does not have an app on the system. But Brant, as your cousin in the non-life space in Momentum, I think congratulations to you and the team being successful on your turnaround strategy. I know the hard work. I almost want to say the blood, tears, and sweat that went into that. Yeah, I always believe do not tell us, but show us. You guys have shown us. Please, to you and your whole Exco team, tell them congratulations and well done on turning around. Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to share with you the progress, the Gladys progress with our impact strategy. Strategy that we initially thought was a stretch strategy until Risto came last year with his visualization of what a strategy should look like. Some mythical animal or something that he called it.
Yeah, Risto, Rowan, Risto, nothing like a challenge to focus the mind. That is where Gladys is. We are really focused on the strategy. Our winning aspiration is to remain the leading sale captive and alternative restaurant for provider in South Africa. Together with that, to have a well-established corporate commercial specialist line general insurance business that can compete with the best in the market. I think we are well on our way in setting that up. I think just before we go into the strategy, maybe just recap on what the Gladys business is, because it is a different business, but nevertheless a very interesting business within the Momentum Group. We have four very distinct business units in Gladys. The first one is Gladys Life, which is predominantly a sale captive business, fee-based business.
We have the Gladys Micro Insurance business, which is a composite license, again, fee-based business. We have the non-life business, which is split between the non-life sale captive business and the general insurance business. Why is this important? It is important because a lot of our sustainability comes from the fact that 65% of our revenue is still based on fee income, stable, solid fee income that we earn from our clients. Only 35% of our revenue is really exposed to underwriting volatility, underwriting results. We anticipated and we accepted the fact that it will be a little bit more volatile than what we are used to in terms of the normal revenue earnings that we have. For this reason, our strategy is really based on two pillars. The first one is to build on the solid base that we have in our sale captive business.
The second one is to really scale and enable our general insurance business to scale up and compete with the best in market. If we just look at our impact strategy, which we believe will take us to our winning aspiration, it is focused on six specific areas. I will not deal with all of them. One of the successes of the group risk business in the past has always been the diversification that we have in our revenue stream. Diversification not only in clients, but also the industries that those clients are operating in. That helped us to weather the storm on many occasions. That is why you would have seen in the COVID period, Momentum Group was not so significantly impacted by the COVID in 2020 as some of the other insurance companies. If we look at that, we need to build on our self-captive business.
We need to reinvent our sale captive business. We realize if we want to bring new entrants into the market, we need to offer them more. To provide a platform, provide an insurance license and not to answer anymore. We have to build up and we have to scale up. We have to gear ourselves to also provide administration services, key to the success of the sale captive business going forward, especially in the micro insurance, where you often have distribution channels, but you do not have a system. You do not have an administration system. That system, most of the time, needs to be a low-cost digital type solution that you provide. Also, now we have the skills in the office. We need to take those skills, actuarial, pricing, product building skills, data analytics. We need to take that out to our clients.
We need to offer our clients those specialities and those specialist skills that we have so that they can build their businesses. The business has always been built on partnerships, and it will continue to be built on partnerships. I think we've talked about geographical expansion. Let me first mention the one. You've heard Lulama talking about the Africa operating model changing, the Namibia business coming into the Gladys space. I think between the two management teams, we are confident that we will be able to, by finding synergies, by providing additional services into that space, be able to grow that business at an accelerated rate, faster than what we've seen currently. I think there's good alignment between the Gladys management team and the Namibia short-term insurance management team to do that. Also, reinsurance opportunities for Gladys. We always talk about reinsurance.
Most people will think in an insurance company about reinsurance on the expense side of the income statement. For us in Momentum Group, we also think about the income side, the revenue side of reinsurance, which is critical. We have the opportunity to spot those areas where there is good underwriting profits, where we can share in the risk with our clients, or we can participate on a reinsurance structure with some of the professional reinsurers against one of the sales. There is a good opportunity for us on the revenue side of reinsurance. Capital efficiency. Those of you that have worked with the cell captive model in the past, you will know that capital is critical to bring someone new into a cell captive space. There are a couple of items that we need to do.
Our actuarial team over the last couple of years has really refined and optimized the calculation of capital for the individual sales. That is not enough. We need to come up with an alternative solution, which is significantly less capital intensive to bring new players into our space because we are not competing against insurance companies only anymore. We need to do that as well. We need to find better ways in terms of capital. Digitization, changing the business into digital for insurance companies, is critical for us as well to move into that digital space, but more about that a little bit later. There are significant revenue targets that were put on the Gladys business. We know that normal organic growth, normal new business growth, is not going to take us to the target that we have for 2027.
Acquisitions are definitely on the table for us. It's on the menu. We are actively seeking to acquire businesses where it makes sense. Like Risto said earlier, it's not big transactions. It's small transactions. If you can buy an earnings stream of ZAR 20 million-ZAR 30 million at a three, maybe lower, PE multiple than three, it makes sense because that adds 2%-4% to the Momentum Group bottom line in the income statement. It makes sense for us to look at the smaller opportunities as well and not ignore those smaller opportunities. The market is not ideal where most insurance companies, most people in the insurance industry are currently making profit. It's not an ideal place to look for acquisitions. That's why we're expanding our net a little bit.
We're also thinking to expand that to maybe potentially acquire some administration services into the business. I, yeah, India, geographical expansion. I have to say something about India. We had a session on Thursday also with many of you where we got a lot of questions about India. It's a bit in my youngest not yet. Gladys is in a very privileged position that Momentum already has a very well-established relationship with one of the biggest business groups in the India market, one of the most successful business groups in the India market. If we can manage a partnership through this with them, it will significantly change the business. What have we done so far?
We've made some good progress on the India project in the sense that Aditya Birla Capital, they contracted with an external consultant to search the market, research the market for us, to look at the Gladys business model and really analyze the Gladys business model and see to what extent it stacks up and competes with the existing business models that exist in the India market, specifically with regard to distribution, fee sharing, and profit sharing. I think we've ticked the box. We actively and we very well compete with those existing business models.
I think it's now important for us to build a business case, a business case where the quantitative numbers will also convince Aditya Birla Capital that this project is not only in a return, but in size big enough to think about it and for it to get preference above some of the other projects that they have in their business. I mean, they look at scale, they look at size. You've heard Mayank talking this morning. It's all about being the top of industry. We need to put something through that really interests them and that makes them tick. Qualitatively, I think we tick the boxes. We've checked the boxes. It will be a first in that market. It will be a market disruptor. It will increase the size of the insurance market in India with other players coming into that space.
It ticked the box on the regulatory side. We've checked it with the legal firm in India. There's nothing that's stopping us from going into that space and making it work. It's for us to really build that business case and convince the team in India that it is viable. All right. Maybe just looking at some of the progress that we've made. Earnings growth, we ticked the box so far. Revenue growth, I think we ticked the box. ROE, the latest one that was presented is 26 point something %. We ticked that box as well. Our underwriting margin, I think I've mentioned before and Brant alluded to that. Size matters in the insurance industry. Our benefit is the general insurance business is shielded by this big machine, the sale captive business. We are not so affected by the size.
We're not criticized by the size and the volume that we write top line. We can really be selective. We do not have to write marginal business. We can really go and find those profitable businesses. That's why I can say our target for an underwriting margin is between 9%-11%. That's why we're on 9.5% for the first half year. It's possible for us, and we are in a unique scenario to do that. Also, the value for Gladys, we firmly believe we need to stay relevant in the Momentum Group. It's important for us to grow value. We put a target. We want to grow the value of 25% over three years. After the first half, we've already grown it with 9%.
We have already made up one third of the target that we have set for ourselves in growing the value of the business. I think something which one should not neglect and that one should also look at is transformation, the sustainability element in our business. There is a good possibility that the Guardrisk business will eventually be taken out of the Momentum BEE rating and where we need to get our own rating purely because of the size in the short-term insurance industry that we currently do have. There is a good chance that we will have our own BEE rating. We started with a process. We set ourselves a target. We want to be at a level three in three years. We started off three years ago by being non-compliant. That is where we started. A level three was quite a stretch.
I'm happy to say that with the last rating review, we achieved a level two. It's not that we've done something special. The only thing is we've cleaned up the data and we've made sure that our data is complete. With that, we managed to get to a level two. It's for us to lose that level two per se. All right. I've already talked about the India business. In terms of our confidence levels, in terms of where we think we will get with the different items, our alternative model, we are in the last phases of navigating through all the governance, all the governance process, getting the necessary approvals. We should have this in place by the end of the financial year.
This will set us up to compete not only with the sale captive businesses, but to compete also with those general insurance businesses that exist in the market, even new players coming into the market. It is a capital low intensive model that we are going to introduce, and it will compete with some of the more known businesses in the market. The Zest Life business, Francois is in the audience today. He is heading up the merger or the integration of the Zest Life business. It is an acquisition that we had a couple of months ago, I think beginning of the previous financial year. It is going well. There is a good meeting of minds between the two management teams, between Zest Life and the Gladys management teams.
We continue to identify additional synergies that we did not initially anticipate, opportunities that we did not initially anticipate when we bought the Zest Life business. Francois, I think it's fair to say they're meeting our expectations in terms of performance. It is adding to the Group's bottom line, and it is one of the areas that we are giving a serious tick. The alternative capital models, I have talked about it, ROE, and then digital transformation, digital transformation and data. It is such a fast-changing environment. You need to be so agile in your processes. You need to be so agile in what you do that you can change and keep up with the pace. We think we are there where we can keep up. The fact that it is in an amber rating is to reflect the fast-changing environment that you have there.
Knowing the Gladys business, we've got 300 cells, 300 partners out there that collect data, that create data by issuing policies. It's important for Gladys to have the systems to pull that information into our ecosystem and to make the most of the information that we pull into the ecosystem. You can imagine the type of infrastructure that you need to put in place to be able to import 15 million records on a monthly basis into the Gladys ecosystem. It's a key focus for us. This is also, unfortunately, one of those areas where one needs to be very careful in terms of your strategy and how you execute on the strategy because the cost can run away. There's a very fine balance between setting yourself up to be successful for the future, but also to protect your income statement.
I see Ravi nodding his head. I think we're very careful that we do not step into a hole there, neglect the one, and overemphasize the other one. There are one or two very special projects or specific projects that we have in the business to help us with this data digital transformation process. We keep up to date, and we work with the group IT team to assist us with that. In closing, right to win. For us in Gladys, it's like eating a nice steak. For us that work there, you just can't get enough of it. That's how much we enjoy working for Gladys. It's such a dynamic, changing environment. It's a stimulating environment. Ask Andrei, ask Rieta, ask Francois. Every day is a different day. Every day you get challenged with something new.
We believe we've got the right people, and we've got the right tools to change the value proposition that we have on the sale captive business so that we can bring more people in. That includes the alternative capital solution that we're taking to market. Bolt-on transactions, we've showed you how successful it can be. At the previous board meeting, one of the board members, when I said, "No, it's a small transaction, it's not moving the dial," he said to me, "You're making a mistake. 33% IRR moves the dial. Doesn't matter about the size of the transaction." That's true. That's why we look at the smaller bolt-on transactions. Reinsurance partnerships. Team is currently in Europe looking at our reinsurers. I think the reinsurance market is in a very interesting space, very different from what we had two years ago.
The reinsurance market is open for opportunities now. The reinsurance market is a soft market. We see new insurance companies, new reinsurance companies coming into play that want to participate on some of our reinsurance structures that we have not seen before. Again, it's critical that you keep your partners, those long-standing partners, the bigger ones that took us through COVID, took us through everything so far during the years, that we keep that partnership. End-to-end solutions, vertical integration. Jeanette talked about vertical integration. It means vertical integration for Gladys means integrating more elements of our clients' own systems, our clients' value propositions. End-to-end product offerings, I've mentioned. We see multiple products. We assist companies to build products.
I had to comment during one of the tea breaks, "Don't build another X, Y, Z and not participate in the equity of that business." Yes, it is one of our strategies in future. We're not going to just build businesses and build products. We obviously look at opportunities to also participate on a longer-term, more sustainable basis in those businesses. Selected risk-taking, I've talked about that. The deliberate focus on digital and specifically data within our business is critical for us to manage that and get it right. I think we've got the right people to do it. That was a quick view, quick glimpse into the Gladys world. Like I said, I've been called many things, but never cereal. Thank you. We're going from the honeybee to the butterfly.
Brant, if it makes you feel any better, if you got one tick, imagine how many Johanna and Lawrence would have had to put on their slides. They might have accused us of changing our logo. Everyone, thank you very much for staying the course with us. If we've done what we've done correctly, then there should be very little that I talk about in terms of what we're doing that's new because you would have heard about our progress on each and every one of our businesses. What we wanted to talk to in this last session was very much to bring it all together and speak to how are we engaging with digital and technology in a way that takes advantage of the economies of scale and benefits of scale that you get from executing well in the space.
How do we ensure that we are meeting the needs of our various businesses? Not all of them are exactly the same, but how are we doing it in such a way that takes advantage of being part of our group? Fundamentally, everything we do, or a large part of what we do, must be delivered in our businesses because we believe that if you're going to innovate in the digital and technology space, it's got to be close to the people who you are enabling. What I'll be talking about in the last session is very much how we're doing that. From a digital and technology perspective, it's important to just put down how do we see our role in the organization.
Fundamentally, we believe that each and every one of our brands, as well as our products, relies on a trusting relationship with people, be they advisors or clients. Very little can break the trust in a relationship than when the technology fails in that moment of truth, or the technology or the journey has not met expectations. Our digital and technology teams across the group, we see ourselves as the guarantors of that trusted relationship that has to exist. In terms of our ambition, we feel that it is empowering our group and businesses with future-capable, cost-effective, and performance-accelerating digital and technology capabilities that are going to enable us to achieve our purpose. The word empowering is the critical one there.
It really is ensuring that we have an organization of people who are enthused and capable and confident about applying the art of the possible with regards to our digital technology and data capabilities. Digital transformation is one of those words that gets thrown around in every company, every presentation. It was important for us to be able to be quite clear what do we mean when we say that because what we were looking for is to ensure that we have a scene-setting, directional, make-the-boat-go-faster viewpoint in terms of does everything we do matter and is it measurable and is it having impact. When we think about digital transformation, we think around the we believe that digital organizations are those where people engage with that organization with software.
That means that you've got to be delivering high-quality, easy-to-use, wonderful experience at a fast cadence in the software world. We talk about meeting human needs with the thoughtful and caring use of our technology and data capabilities. That is something that is a North Star for all digital and technology teams across the group, be they in the center or in the business units. We always ask ourselves, is it going to help us deliver better software? That talks to the drivers of delivering software. You've heard a lot around, for example, our technology platforms. These technology platforms are critical because it's not just because of the cost optimization, which it allows us, but as Risto mentioned earlier, it's around modernization predominantly. Modern systems will allow you to be better at delivering modern software.
Data is critical, but apart from data, it's also around ensuring that you are automating your processes. We need to ensure that our processes are instant outcome for clients and advisors because if they're not, then it's very hard to make the case that that's a quality journey in a software environment. To get that right, you've also got to make sure that your delivery practices and tools are consistent, that they are best in class, and that they are able to be trackable and measurable. Finally, when you innovate, innovation should be with the aim of solving a real problem for a user. Now, this led us to the strategic choices that we've made from a digital and technology perspective, which we believe underpin both our group strategy as well as the specific requirements of each and every one of our businesses.
First and foremost, competitive, trusted value for many technology environments are a non-negotiable. That talks to the work that we've been doing in our replatforming. That does talk to the work we've been doing around ensuring that we are looking at our architectures and that we are always leveraging best-of-breed solutions. More importantly, that we are flexible enough to change solutions as things change. We talk about our digital DNA very much in two cases. It's one, how do we deliver software, as I mentioned? Number two, are we looking at each and every one of our processes and automating them? The third one is enterprise data. Now, Johan spoke about how without digital, you cannot have a strong advisory business. In addition to our digital capabilities, you require data.
As Peter mentioned, our ability to compete with both traditional and non-traditional competitors is going to be enhanced by being able to more actively leverage both the data that we have inside the business, but also taking advantage of the exponentially growing sources of data outside of us, particularly in other categories like retail. We believe that technology teams need to be diverse, but that is more than just human diversity. Fundamentally, one of the biggest changes that technology and AI is bringing is not just as an output of technology, but it is actually as an input into how you deliver technology. Making sure that we see the future as human plus machine is important. How do we ensure that our people are able to work with the augmentation and automated tools for both development and testing of all our technology?
We think that's going to speed us up, and we think that's going to add to our capacity. Finally, new digital and technology value. Innovation is crucial. As you heard from most of my colleagues, especially in Momentum Retail, we believe that we've been world-first at some highly innovative capabilities. Apart from the benefits that that's given us directly, it's also ensured that everyone in our business has recognized the power of what we can deliver in terms of innovation. Now, our operating model, as Jeanette mentioned earlier, we believe in the power of a federated operating model in terms of being able to action closer to the client. As part of our federated 2.0, we've been thinking about how do we ensure that we're doing that whilst also taking advantage of being part of a group.
Now, as I said, ideation and delivery must take place in our units, in our business units. That is critical because it is our business units who are in the face of the client and understand the needs of the clients and the advisors and can identify the right problems to be solved. However, the center still has a role. Firstly, the role of the center is in supporting, accelerating, and scaling the solutions that we have. We do that through ensuring that there are curated capabilities that the businesses are able to pull upon when they require it. It also enables us to ensure that we remove duplication and are always looking to reduce complexity. Perhaps the most important thing that the center does is that we ensure that there is a high level of visibility across everything we are doing from a digital and technology space.
Where businesses are solving for key problems, we're able to bring that into the center and ensure that other businesses are able to look at it, understand how they might take advantage of it so we can learn from what works, learn from what hasn't worked, and increase the ideation that we have in the rest of our businesses by looking at what some of us have been able to achieve. If we think about the portfolio of initiatives that we've been driving, there are a few, both current and ones that we're working on right now, that I think are highly indicative of this. In the first one, as Johan mentioned earlier, our direct business has started to really pick up steam in the Momentum Retail space.
Now, the challenge with that is that as you start bringing in a higher volume of applications, what you then have is a need to be able to quality assure those applications before they go into underwriting. Now, with the multiples of applications that were coming in, we decided we did not want to have to hire people to be able to curate these things, if for no other reason than to quality assure an application means listening to a transcript, confirming that the questions were asked, that they were answered, that it's exactly that on the form, and then creating a record of advice. That is a 90-minute to two-hour process. What we did with the Murray team is that we developed AI agents that could do exactly that in two and a half minutes.
What that has led to in the nine months since we've deployed that is that we've been able to screen 31,000 calls, and we've been able to save the business ZAR 1.5 million in avoided cost, which, and I can see the Momentum Retail CFO is looking at me, which thankfully has already paid for the solution. Our development cost and implementation cost on that solution has been paid off in the nine months. Secondly, biometric screening and active fitness. We've spoken about that a lot during today. This was one of our world-first capabilities. What's important about this functionality is that it has allowed us to offer a more seamless experience to clients who are able to get an immediate answer on both their initial application as well as their yearly benefits.
This means that for especially younger, healthier lives, we're able to attract them, and we're able to have a higher conversion ratio. Thus far during the course of this year, we estimate that we've saved our clients 25,000 hours of time in avoiding health visits and biokineticists' visits. Finally, I saw a paper recently that said that about 40% of time in organizations is spent finding data and putting it together in terms of reports. We said to ourselves, "That sounds like exactly what we ought to be using automation and AI for." We've just completed a pilot amongst a few of our administrative teams where we've been able to show that with applying copilots and productivity tools, we're able to save individuals approximately 200 hours a year in that work.
By deploying this more openly, firstly, we're targeting a saving of about 19,000 hours across the group in these tasks. It also gives us a pattern on how we actually deploy these sorts of human augmentation capabilities into more complex roles. Current priorities that we're looking at, we're looking at how do we deploy AI and digital twin capabilities into processes like claims to be able to speed up our claims processes from days into minutes. We're looking at automating and augmenting software development and testing. Right now, we have roadmaps in the business that require more investment and more capacity. Whilst I don't agree that Risto is fat-stingy with the budget, even if he was able to give us the budget, it's not guaranteed that we'd be able to find the capacity we were looking for.
What these tools are going to allow us to do is to actually increase our capacity and ensure that we're able to take best advantage of our people in the business. Finally, improving the speed and quality of access to information and data stores. We have a lot of information in the organization that sits in document form. The time spent looking for the answers is often at the cost of the client and advisor experience. If we can deploy AI tools to be able to make this information easily accessible and position it to our internal staff in a way that makes it easy to get that out to our advisors and clients faster, we think that that's going to have a huge impact on our user experience and ensure that our time is used for higher value activities.
Now, about five years ago, Jeanette was on the stage, and she talked about the vector, about how we are going to succeed. She talked about how momentum equals mass times velocity. It is that velocity that is what the digital and technology teams in the group aim to give us because we take the vector one step further. We aim to ensure that we are pointed in the right direction regarding the technology art of the possible and that we are moving at the right speed. To conclude, the right to win of this group is going to be enabled by us ensuring that we have quality-designed software that is delivered to meet the specific experience and outcomes of our users, that we have a technology environment that enables high quality, high stability, and high cadence operations.
We need to ensure that we effectively leverage data and new AI opportunities, understanding that with all the excitement around AI, we're still relatively early in the application cycle. Therefore, it is important to ensure that we are innovating in an outcomes-focused way and not just spending money wildly. Finally, modernizing our processes for delivering technology with human and machine teams. To close, our vision is that we want this group to transform into a butterfly and not just a digital caterpillar. With that, I will hand over to the close. We did not question. Sorry.
Thanks, Brent. Lawrence, can you join Ravi and I? If there are any questions online, if you can please just log those. Brent, thanks for telling us what you wanted to tell us by telling us.
Lawrence, I think we've learned that you like to eat steak and not cereal. There was one person who asked me if Ravi really is our IT guy because he owns a suit and he's not here in shorts and slops. At least he's wearing shoes and not tacky today. More seriously, thanks for the last session. Are there any questions in the room? Marius. Thank you.
Brent, I've only got a question for you. Your new business volumes were up 20% for the first nine months we heard yesterday. What I'm more interested in is how does your run rate compare to its peak? Because obviously, you're not quite there yet. Otherwise, your GWP would be growing. I'm just interested in how the current run rate compares to the peak.
That's a good question, Marius.
Maybe the first comment is when we ran at our peak, that was in an environment where pricing and underwriting was not as tight as what it should be. It is not necessarily something that we compare ourselves against. For us, the measure is at a minimum that we must run at a new business run rate that eliminates what we lose from a lapse point of view. That is the sort of key starting point that we measure our new business volumes against. We are currently running probably about 15% below what that level is, but we are closing that gap to compensate for what we lapse. Something which I neglected earlier to say is we are obviously in a soft market cycle, so it is competitive, and we see competitors invest in lead generation, so acquiring new business. Also, there is a big fight to retain clients.
It is difficult to churn given just the fact that our industry is not growing. We do not think that high renewal increases in the long run at the levels that we saw perhaps over the last 18 months or so is sustainable. On our own book, we are probably reducing our targeted renewal increase by also about 10-15%, but that will be compensated for by lower lapse rates. It sort of cancels each other out. New business is the trick. We need to step up, back to your question, by probably 10-15% to get to that level where we cancel out what we lose.
We have a question online from James Stark. Lawrence, Goddard's has an impressive track record validating the captive model. You mentioned the diversification across clients and industries that gives you that level of resilience.
Can you give some color around the characteristics and intrinsic features and opportunities that lend themselves to using a cell captive solution? Why would a corporate use a first-party cell or a third-party cell? Where is it most relevant? Yeah.
I think there are two different areas that one needs to cover. First-party and third-party, because there are two completely different reasons why they will enter into a cell captive space. First-party is very much ensuring your own risk. The big benefit there is you can protect yourself against market volatility, increase in rates. In hard markets, you can make use of your own facility. You can smooth the rate that you pay for insurance. Also, first-party is often those areas where it is difficult risk to insure or where it is very expensive to insure.
You have an opportunity with this first-party cell captive to access the reinsurance market directly via the Guardrisk system. There are some benefits in that. I think that's the first one. Third-party, it allows you to share in the profits that you generate in your client base relating to insurance. If you already have a client base, you already have an affinity group, you already have a distribution channel, it makes sense to add financial services to your solution and to your product offering, which immediately creates a second stream of revenue in the business. We've seen it with many of our retailers where their financial services insurance element grows to an extent where it starts competing sometimes with some of the other retail elements. I think that's the biggest benefit.
It creates that opportunity for someone to build a business, to build an insurance business, get access to an insurance license.
Lawrence, how big an insurance written premium sort of suits a first-party cell? Are we talking about the biggest companies? Are we talking about Bob's cleaning down the street?
Lawrence, it all depends on the risk that you write. It's not so much the size of the premium that counts because we've got more than one option. You don't have to go into a cell. You can go into a different type of structure where it's potentially cheaper, but it gives you the same protection as a first-party cell. Obviously, the moment that it becomes a difficult-to-insure risk, a more complicated risk, it's easier to put it in a first-party type environment.
Obviously, on the life side, if it's a first-party type of arrangement, EB type arrangement, it obviously makes sense to put it in a cell. That you will not necessarily put in a different structure. It's not really size. It's complexity of what you put in there.
Your team, are they hunting in specific industries for specific types of risk, or are you pretty agnostic to the types of risk that you might underwrite within Guardrisk?
Pretty agnostic. It's not that we hunt in specific industries. Obviously, there are certain industries that you stay away from. Heavy motor vehicles is something that we try and avoid on the non-life side. Aviation on the non-life side, we try and avoid that. It's high-risk industries. Yeah, it's where the opportunity gives it. We'll take it. It all goes back to the underwriting risk in that particular space.
Even in a first-party site, you're not going to necessarily write something in a first-party cell where it's an unreasonable underwriting risk. It must be reasonable.
That's obviously how you choose to set up a cell and collect the admin revenue. How do you decide when you want to participate in the underwriting experience? That's typically on your third-party site, both life and non-life, where we will decide where we participate in underwriting risk. It depends on the underwriting performance that you anticipate. We will not participate in the underwriting risk if it's a risk that's not acceptable and that you don't anticipate making an underwriting profit on. You can select life site. Very often, funeral credit life is a profitable business, so it's a good one to share in. On the non-life side, again, volume and affinity, good opportunity to participate in the risk.
Thanks. Good day. I've applied for a cell captive before as a startup business, and I discovered that the minimum capital contribution that you have to put on the table is ZAR 1 million. Apparently, you can go down to ZAR 500,000 with reasons, flexibility perhaps. What's interesting to me is we sell a particular technology product, which is called the Google Chromebook, which is like a laptop, but it runs on the Chrome operating system, not Windows. The device failure rate on those is about 1% on average industry-wide. We sell extended warranties on those devices, which increases the cost of that device by about 20%. I'm just kind of curious, number one, are there any plans to lower that capital requirement for startup businesses?
I understand that small businesses make up most of the GDP in South Africa, and that one million limit might be beyond, especially the informal sector coming onto the market with similarly viable products. Also, just personally, as a business, we spend probably 25% per month on short-term insurance. If you can combine those two and put the business's self-insurance and their product solution into a viable cell captive, is there a way to onboard more SMMEs, schools, private individuals, etc.?
You're asking me a question that fits in right with the offerings that we put in the market. Sean, I think there's some regulatory barriers to some of the questions that you're asking. First of all, you're not allowed to do first-party and third-party in the same cell.
You will not be able to put your first-party business, your own risk together with client risk unless you can structure that warranty that it is your risk and your offering that you offer. I think when you found out, the microinsurance licenses were not in place yet. There is a legal requirement, a regulatory requirement for minimum capital of ZAR 1,000,000 if you set up a cell. Guardrisk has come up with solutions where we support you in terms of capital that you need to put up. On the lower end, the entry level of the market, simple products, the lower sum insured products, you now have a microinsurance license. ZAR 250,000, if I am correct, is your entry capital that you need for that. That is specifically why we got the microinsurance license to accommodate smaller options.
The alternative solutions that I've talked about, the alternative solution that we're going to put in place is probably a nice one to look at because that's low capital intensive. If it's a warranty where the underwriting is good, it's probably the ideal vehicle for you to start. And own risk, the premium that you're talking about, there's a very simple facility available in Guardrisk where you can do that, which gives you the same options, the same flexibility as a cell captive, but it's not a cell captive. It operates like a normal insurance policy.
Great. Thanks for the question. I don't have any further questions online. Are there any more in the room? Before I hand over to Jeanette, I would like to invite those of you who don't quite have the energy to tackle the traffic to join us for a drink or a snack.
The team will be around if there are any further questions that you've thought about over the break and you didn't have an opportunity within these sections. Thanks very much to the gentlemen on the stage with me. I hand over to Jeanette. Thank you.
I'm deeply aware, oh, yeah, I think there might be a slide. I'm deeply aware that I am now between you and a drink and a snack. I'm glad I'm not between you and an education session on Guardrisk, but if you need one, you can also spend your time really well afterwards on that. Lawrence, I had to give you a little bit of stick there. I mean, from my side, I really just wanted to say thank you so much for a great day.
I know it was a long day, but it really was a great one. I want to specifically say thank you to my team for keeping the energy up, for conforming to our very strict rules around where what slide will go to make sure that we at least helped to remove some of the complexity of our businesses and help everyone to kind of follow and get the same idea of where we are in our business. Today was also a really great day for another reason, and that was that our share price has hit its all-time high in its history at ZAR 36.11. Now, it was while Johan was presenting. Someone did say to me, "No, it's not Johan. It's a lag after Risto's presentation." Whatever works for you, I mean, unfortunately, we did not end exactly there.
I mean, in a fairly rare day in the financial services sector, to still be up 2.5%, I think, is incredible. We have all of you to thank for that, for your belief in us, your support in us as a group, and for investing in us and staying the course. I guess also just keeping us honest. Annika, who's head of our kind of media relations, also shared with me that while I was presenting, scamsters actually created three new deepfake identities for me on Telegram, inviting all of you to buy and invest with Momentum. Please do not fall for those. I promise you that is the last thing I will ever do. That is just how scary the world is and how quickly things happen.
You've seen many of these slides today, and I thought I'll take an opportunity to also just end on exactly the same note. Again, all of these 10 components were on a slide exactly as they are here when we presented last year. I think for me, when I was sitting here today, it's like last year we said, "This is our right to win," and it was a vision. Today, they're a reality. I think we're starting to bring this to life through the diligent execution on our strategy. Again, I have not just a team, but 17,000 people to thank for that.
To maybe summarize them very, very quickly, our federated model that consists of diversified, impart businesses that each have to compete out there against all of their own sets of competitors every single day, I think, is what makes us an amazing business. Not just are we diversified, but also federated, and each one almost in charge of our own destiny in terms of that delivery. The combination of our distribution strength and our advice focus, as you know, advice being a massive focus for us to increase our market share and our focus there. Again, also a very, very competitive world out there. Some of you asked me over the last break, "What keeps me awake at night?" I had to think quite a lot about what exactly it is that keeps me awake because I think there could be so many things.
At the same time, with businesses being out there competing every single day, that helps me to sleep really, really well. You have our commitment that, and of course, digital. Thank you, Ravi, for all of that. Ravi is a medical doctor, by the way. In case you think there is no diversity, it shows you who we can put in front of clients and in front of actually caring about our clients and how we show up there. Investing in successful businesses, the optimization potential of our businesses, the promise we made that we will constantly keep our finger on the pulse of where things are working and where not, and that we will address it wherever we need to do it.
I think lastly, and probably most proudly, our cash generation ability, our very, very strong balance sheet, and our disciplined cash management or our disciplined capital deployment that we, again, made a promise that we will keep our eye on that very, very closely. I think just with these 10 components firmly in place, we do not just believe that we have the right to win. I think we are proving it every single day. Thank you very much for sharing today with us. Thank you.