Morning, everybody. Welcome. My name is Dan Moyane. It's a pleasure and a privilege to welcome all of you here to the presentation of the interim financial results of the Momentum Group for the period ended 31 December 2025. We're coming to you live from the company's offices in Centurion, here in Tshwane. We welcome everybody who's joining us, especially online as well. The analysts, the investors, the shareholders, journalists as well, and of course, employees of the group who can watch us live on BDtv, channel 412. That's on DStv. We're also live on. We have a live webcast for you, corpcam.com MG1903, which is today's date, the 19th, of course, of March 2026. That's MG19032026.
Also live streaming to our employers on our mPulse platform. The full results already available since this morning on the group's website, which is www.momentumgroupltd.co.za. Shortly, the Momentum Group CEO, that's Jeanette Marais, and the Group Finance Director, Risto Ketola, will present this set of results covering how the focused implementation of the group strategy is progressing and delivering. You'll hear about how this disciplined execution of the strategy has produced the solid set of results, a brilliant performance for the period that's under review. As usual, at the end of the presentation, after they've concluded, we will have time to answer some questions from our analyst. Let's welcome Jeanette with a warm round of applause.
Good morning, everyone. As Dan have said, thank you, Dan. A very warm welcome to our interim results presentation. As he said, I would now say live from Risto's office in our Centurion head office. Poor Risto always have to vacate his office for about a week so that we can get this ready. It really is a good day for the Momentum Group. We are presenting a strong set of results, and it has been made possible by very disciplined execution of our Impact Strategy across all of our business units and the resilience of our diversified portfolio. In my presentation, I will start by highlighting some of the key financial takeouts from the interim results. After which, as always, I will zoom in on some of the delivery highlights from our Impact Strategy.
Of course, as always, Risto will spend quite a bit more time delving into the intricacy, the interesting numbers and, the higher grade ones that is far beyond my ability to explain to anybody. To start off, we delivered normalized headline earnings of ZAR 3.7 billion, up 8% on the prior period. This performance is the result of strong contributions across the group. Three trends really boosted our performance. Firstly, underwriting activities remained at very high levels of profitability. Every business involved in insurance underwriting performed really well, including short-term life insurance and health insurance. Secondly, rising markets and solid investment performance from our investment teams increased our assets under management and our asset-based fee income across savings and investment products. Lastly, good persistency further aided profits across all of our businesses.
VNB declined by 15% to ZAR 238 million year-on-year. Now, improving VNB remains a key focus area for us across all of our business units. It is the one area where we are falling short of the targets that we had set for ourselves. We are seeing some positives. VNB increased by 25% from the previous six months, and it improved in all businesses except Momentum Investments, where VNB was negatively affected by the market shift from guaranteed to living annuities. However, we remain leaders in the IFA market for guaranteed annuities, and we maintained our position overall, and our market share position overall in this space. As the VNB contribution from guaranteed annuities keeps on reducing as sales volumes decrease, other businesses are starting to compensate.
It is worth mentioning that Metropolitan made a significant turnaround from ZAR -31 million to ZAR 16 million VNB. Interesting to note that the VNB peak that you see on the slide there of ZAR 389 million two years ago was also at the peak of life annuity new business sales. I need to do a household thing. I don't have a timer, and it's gonna be a problem if I take up all Risto's time. So if you could switch the timer on, I'll appreciate that. Our sales continued to increase, up by 11% to ZAR 43.3 billion. Momentum Africa delivered the strongest increase of 28%, supported by good corporate protection business in Lesotho, Namibia and Botswana, and increased retail flows in Namibia. This shows that the implementation of our new Africa operating model starting to deliver.
Momentum Corporate delivered 23% growth in sales, driven by FundsAtWork protection business. Momentum Investments increased their new business sales by 12%, driven by higher volumes on the Momentum Wealth platform. Momentum Retail grew sales by 6%, supported by strong long-term savings business. The only business where we saw a decrease was in Metropolitan, where sales decreased by 13%. This is aligned to the restructure of our distribution area that we've spoken about before. I will talk specifically about Metropolitan Distribution in a later slide. We are pleased to declare an interim dividend of ZAR 1.10 per ordinary share. This is an increase of 29% on the interim dividend in the prior year. We are completing the current share buyback program, and at the moment, no further capital has been allocated towards further share buybacks.
Again, a highlight. At this stage, at 24%, we are already above the ROE target of 20%. Our high ROE is the result of good product mix and very disciplined capital allocation. At 24%, our ROE remains one of the highest in the industry. As I said, Risto will shed more light on these numbers. I'm now going to share some highlights on the progress that we've made with the execution of our Impact Strategy. You are very familiar by now with the six strategic objectives of our Impact Strategy. Over the next slides, I will zoom in on unlocking the full potential of our businesses and on investing aggressively in advice to drive growth. I will also just spend a slide or two on updating you on our progress on our digital and our people strategic enablers.
We will provide a full strategy update for our business and for all of our business units at our Capital Markets Day on the second of June. Please make a note of that. Invitations will follow very soon. Unlocking the full potential of our businesses means that we boost our successful business units with more investment, and we fix our underperforming businesses through turnaround strategies. I am delighted to say that if you look back a year and a half ago, the businesses that we identified, Metropolitan, Momentum Insure, and Momentum Africa, where we wanted to implement our new operating model, are all in great shape. Risto will talk about that a little bit more. I can honestly say this morning in my first interview, the journalist asked me, "What is your greatest focus area? What are you most worried about in your businesses?"
I had to say, "Not much, except maybe for VNB." I think, you know, that is really something that we can be very proud of. Sorry, let me just go back. I think I'd like to highlight some of the developments and some of the positioning of our non-life businesses. This morning I'm gonna focus on Guardrisk and Momentum Insure as well as Momentum Health. It is time that we demonstrate the scale and the strength of our combined non-life insurance businesses, Guardrisk and Momentum Insure. If you look at the graph, viewed together, Momentum Group is the third-largest player with a 10.2% share of total non-life insurance revenue. This shows that we rank firmly as a top-tier player in this space.
These two businesses operate in complementary areas of the non-life market, which gives the group broad and diversified exposure across line segments and distribution channels. Our portfolio is intentionally diversified from traditional personal and commercial insurance to more specialist, highly customized product solutions. We also benefit from a diversified margin mix that combines our traditional profits with fee-based administration income and investment income. Rather than consolidating these two businesses and these two capabilities under one brand, we made a deliberate strategic choice to run each business as a focused and distinct model. This sharpens our execution, and it keeps both our units and both our CEOs of those businesses performing at what they do best. Through our structure, I think we have the best of both worlds.
Momentum Insure provides a strong traditional non-life foundation, while Guardrisk extends the group's reach into the fast-growing demand for partner-led, structured, and embedded insurance, where we expect to see further long-term growth. Now, for the other good news. You would have seen the news that Momentum Health has been selected as the preferred healthcare administration partner for Bonitas Medical Fund, and our implementation date is June 1, 2026. Now, this deal represents a significant milestone for us that strategically and operationally reinforces our position as a credible, trusted partner in South Africa's evolving healthcare ecosystem. To give you an idea of the size of this deal in numbers. Firstly, this is the biggest transfer of a medical scheme from one provider to another in the history of South Africa.
It adds 370,000 families and 750,000 beneficiaries under our administration. The addition of Bonitas makes Momentum Health the second-largest medical scheme underwriter and administrator in South Africa. The group's health families in South Africa have grown to 1.7 million and our beneficiaries to 3.6 million when we include our other non-scheme members like our leading Health4Me insurance solution. Now, if we add the numbers and the members that we manage in the rest of Africa, our health business looks after more than four million beneficiaries. We touch the lives of more than 25 million beneficiaries when we include our partnership with Aditya Birla in India. This slide, it's a brag slide, gives you an idea of the impact of the deal on the South African health administration landscape.
Note, these numbers are the audited health industry numbers from 2024, and it excludes the health insurance market. You'll see how we shifted into second place, growing our market share from 22%-30% for lives under administration. The South African medical scheme administration market remains highly concentrated, with three administrators accounting for almost 90% of beneficiaries. We are really excited to welcome the Bonitas Medical Fund members to our family. This deal really aligns with Momentum Health's purpose to provide more health for more people for less. To switch to Advise. Our focus on Advise is one of the ways in which we drive future growth and differentiation for the group.
As part of the strategic initiative, we invest in expanding our advice capability and our footprint while using technology to empower advisors, improve the client experience, and strengthen our competitiveness across the full retail advice market. We have now successfully implemented our Momentum Advice ecosystem from where we strategically guide the advice businesses of Momentum Financial Planning, our tied agency force, and Momentum Consult, our supplier-sponsored IFA network, and these are complemented by Find Global, our financial immigration specialists. Now, although these businesses have different FSPs, different brands, and different value propositions, they share the same advice culture and excuse me, business principles of vertical integration and quality advice outcomes. This not only increase our sufficiencies and efficiencies, but it also improves the sustainability of our advice model. Sorry, let me just take a sip. I'm too excited.
The combined advisor base between these three businesses is now close to 1,000 if you add that up. I think it's important to note that if you also add Metropolitan and Momentum Insure, the group's combined retail advisor base is now closer to 3,000. To focus on MFP. MFP has spent the last two years implemented their strengthened operating model and moving from the culture of a tied brokerage to that of a tied agency model. Over the last six months, 89 new advisors, and they were also mostly new to industry, have joined us. The focus now shifts to acquiring experienced advisors over the next six months. Advisors meeting the minimum production criteria improved from 29% a year ago to 52% over the last year. This is really due to strengthened advisor accreditation and quality standards.
The renewed vertical integration strategy in MFP starting to gain traction, totaling ZAR 1.2 billion in net flows into Momentum solutions for the last six months, which is nine times more than a year ago at ZAR 130.7 million. Consult has continued its positive trajectory in both footprint and revenue. Consult ended the half year on 476 advisors, and this includes 110 specialist short-term insurance advisors. This does make Consult the second biggest independent short-term advisory force in the country. Their focus remains on organic growth, which is complemented with a targeted inorganic growth strategy through the acquisition of larger advice firms in both the life insurance and investment segments. Consult's focus is on growing their own fund solutions managed by Equilibrium, while also accelerating growth in the employee benefits and health businesses.
Consult's fund solutions increased its assets by 36%, and their total assets under administration increased by 25% to ZAR 60 billion. Momentum Distribution Services delivered another strong six-month performance, achieving 10% APE growth year-on-year. They have maintained our position as the market leader in independent financial advisor distribution. In NDS, we segment our distribution strategy to meet the different needs of third-party networks, investment specialist advisors and smaller IFAs. Now, these investment specialists and small IFAs are central to our strategy, and they generate most of our new business. They are resilient entrepreneurial businesses, but industry pressures are putting them under strain. To help them stay independent and continue to grow, we launched Momentum Advisory Partners two years ago.
We support their businesses by giving them access to a full suite of corporate-level services such as practice management support, compliance, skills development, professional indemnity insurance, and a lot more as part of the value proposition. Adoption has been strong. We have grown from 164 advisors in December 2024 to 350 in December 2025. 113% increase in partnering advisors. By the way, they pay for these services. These advisors have also grown their support for Momentum products, delivering a 47% year-on-year APE growth. This really is a strategy that is working very, very well for us. Then Metropolitan as promised. Last year we mentioned that as part of Metropolitan's five-point plan, the channel optimization and rationalization program at that point still required work.
This has now been embedded, and we are seeing strong, sustained results that I'd like to share with you. As part of rationalization, we deliberately reduced advisor numbers to around 1,700, where optimization led to a more efficient and better managed channel, which has also led to better quality business. Productivity remained strong, with advisors consistently writing more than four policies per week since the start of the financial year. This was a direct result of the disciplined workforce management practices that we've now embedded. Persistency improved, with premium collection rates rising to 80%, up from 77%. These gains reflect the impact of our AI-driven risk analytics and the broader adoption of flexible payment options for our clients.
Advisor retention remained stable post-rationalization at 67%, compared to a budget or a target of 65%. Stronger recruitment, improved advisor vesting, and consistent leadership focus on workforce management disciplines have supported this outcome. I think importantly, Metropolitan sustained these improvements even as the recruitment started to resume. This demonstrates that the foundations in place are robust and scalable, as the channels start to grow again. Then of course, the cost of distribution is also reduced as a result of these efficiencies. I will now share with you some of the progress that we've made on our digital enabler. I know this is the one topic that everyone talks about all the time. For us, AI is no longer an emerging capability for the group. It is already delivering measurable banked value for us.
We currently have 60 active AI initiatives across the group, but these are focused mostly on risk mitigation, cost efficiency, and advisor enablement at scale. These are not just experiments. Let me tell you about some of the successes that we've seen already. In Metropolitan, we use machine learning, which is built on 37 behavioral and credit-related data indicators, to identify clients who are at risk of not paying their first premium. This improves our premium collection rates, and it avoids commission being paid on policies that then don't materialize. In Medscheme, AI improves quality assurance and risk control by transcribing and reviewing 100% of sales calls for Medscheme Direct. When we did that manually, we only managed to screen about 10% of those calls due to the capacity that we had.
In health, AI reduced workload by automating the processing of more than 365 pages per month of handwritten forms. We also use AI capabilities for our clients' fitness assessments, monitoring or minimizing nurse and biokineticist cost for our healthier clients. In Namibia, we've automated new business applications, and we're also working towards starting to expand the solution to claims and to other processes. In Momentum Investments, we use machine learning to extract and digitize data from handwritten forms, automating and validating the downstream capture of information. In Momentum Retail, an AI-powered advisor assistant helps financial advisors quickly respond and resolve complex queries, thereby improving the response time to clients, and it's already freed up more than 1,400 hours of advisors' time. As you can see in our sales numbers, they've used it widely to sell more products.
I've highlighted seven of the 60 initiatives through which we're already removing repetitive workload from our service teams. This also unlocks meaningful capacity for higher value client support by our people. In total, these seven initiatives have already given us ZAR 40 million in savings, with further savings to be unlocked as the other initiatives come on stream and of course, also through these as we start to scale them. This is a real shift that we've seen in the value that we get from digital and AI, but it didn't happen by chance. It's the result of a very deliberate approach that we have in four ways. Firstly, every AI initiative must be anchored in clear commercial and operational value, not pet projects. We track the tangible financial impact of each case.
We build reusable capabilities that can serve several areas in the group and that can scale, and we prioritize rapid proof of value. Often within a single quarter, we will start a new initiative and kill it if we don't see that it has the value that we want. I think in summary, we have proof, we have capability, and we have a strategy that is already delivering results. The next step for us would be to continue scaling what works and to embed AI and intelligent auto-automation as a compounding structural advantage for us as a group. Then people. As AI and digital advance, I'm constantly reminded that our power lies in being human, connecting with our clients to build and protect their financial dreams, and we can only do that through our people.
It really is when the why, the what, and the how come together and align that incredible energy is unleashed. I believe that our culture behaviors enable employees to live our purpose and to execute and deliver on our strategy. As we've seen the tangible results of this already, our client metrics in most of our businesses have improved since the start of the Impact Strategy. To mention just two highlights, and I can assure you there are many. Metropolitan has consistently been winning Ask Afrika awards for the last five years in a row. Just last week, Momentum Medical Scheme received the News24 Business Award for Scheme of the Year for the second year in a row.
It's not just because client outcomes is a competitive advantage, which I do believe it is. It's also because I have a personal obsession with how we show up for our clients every day. Getting this right becomes the real power and energy behind our business. Optimizing every single action of every single employee through culture is not the soft stuff. It's actually the hard stuff. I believe that is also critical for our success. Because in the end, the numbers are what we're able to show you, but we are because of the culture that drives the behaviors that we need in our business. To end off, we are very proud of our excellent earnings as well as the quality of the earnings that we achieved. Our great sales numbers confirm that our advice strategy is working across the group.
The power of our federated business model was again demonstrated as each of our empowered and accountable businesses contribute as planned or better. I've seen the incredible difference our deeply embedded purpose and culture behaviors can make to our ability to keep on delivering. Even a strict focus on delivery and execution is multiplied when purpose, strategy, and culture behaviors come together. The thank yous. I wanna thank our employees for the unstoppable energy, drive, and tenacity, and of course, for how much you care about how you make our clients feel. Also, thank you to my executive team who accepted unreasonable targets, and you are delivering on them. Then lastly, to our board, thank you for all your support and wisdom, especially over the last year. Then lastly, to our financial advisors and our clients, thank you for trusting us with your financial dreams.
Thank you to all of you. I hand over to Risto.
Is the cameraman okay? Okay. Good. Okay. Thank you, Jeannette. Okay, so I got the privilege of talking about our results. As per usual, we'll start with the key financial indicators. Headline earnings up 8% to ZAR 3.7 billion. I think the reason why we're so excited about that is the actual underlying growth is better than 8%, in my view. So in the current period, there's about ZAR 200 million of positive market variances. Previous period, that number was probably closer to ZAR 600 million. The underlying operational profit growth is probably closer to 25% year-on-year. That 25% growth maybe explains why we're so proud of this set of results. On a per share basis, the 8% becomes 12, just reflecting the ongoing benefit of the buybacks.
We are actually busy with the buyback still of the last ZAR 1 billion tranche announced last year. Dividend per share up 29%. That's a combination of the 12% growth in EPS and the increase in the payout ratio from 33% to 40%. Last year we updated our dividend policy to target a slightly higher payout ratio. I'm sure that's a welcome dividend by shareholders. Then ROE, as Jeannette indicated, 24%, slightly down from last year, but still well above our internal target of 20%. Embedded value per share up 13% to ZAR 44.55. Over that 12-month period, we also paid quite generous dividends. I think the ROEV, sort of from January 1 to December 31, is probably in the high teens. Again, a very good number over that 12-month period.
Sales volumes are good at 11%. As Jeannette indicated, VNB did decline by 15%, so that 11% growth, a lot of it is coming out of some of the lower margin areas, so our wealth platform, some corporate investment-only business. The 11% growth has maybe not been. Well, we will take it, for sure. But in terms of product mix, it was not optimal, in terms of VNB. That resulted in new business margin declining to 0.5%. I will now talk about the life businesses a little bit more. When I talk about each of them individually, I'll illustrate that all of them actually had good operating profit growth.
The reason why Momentum Retail is down for the period is that that's the one business that was quite heavily impacted by the sharp reduction in yields at the long end of the bond curve. Now, you must realize that in Momentum Retail, Myriad, the sort of the affluent market protection product, is the main source of profits and cash flows. A significant part of those cash flows are actually beyond year 25. Makes it very difficult to hedge those cash flows. As the yields came down, that liability increased without being able to hold hedging assets against them. That impact would have taken about ZAR 150 million-ZAR 200 million of Momentum Retail's earnings. There's a small negative impact in Metropolitan Life, also a life business.
Remember, their book runs off a lot quicker, so there's a lot less cash flows sort of beyond year 2025, so the impact is proportionately smaller. Momentum Investments, the big annuity book, that would have also been hurt by the lower yields, but we had exceptionally strong credit spreads. The credit spreads basically funded the loss we saw on the long-term yields, so there was a net positive variance in investments. When I get to corporate, I'll talk about that there because it's a bit of a unique business. Okay, starting with Momentum Retail, you'll see approximately 10%, just over 10% growth in operating profit. Some of the features in there are good persistency. In fact, good persistency is a theme across all our businesses. Secondly, we continue to see very good alterations experience.
This is where our existing clients buy up additional benefits from Momentum Retail. I think in Metropolitan, we also saw that. Generally, once we get the clients in, we do get quite good. I wouldn't call it cross-selling, but upselling to our existing clients in terms of additional cover, additional benefits, higher cover, and so on. We also have good mortality variance here. If you look at our overall risk variance, I saw one of the analysts wrote that it was a bit lower than in the past. I think on the mortality side, it remains very strong. Our disability experience was a bit weaker. Critical illness and disability was a bit lower than in the past. Good operating results.
There you can see the big swing from positive investment returns to negatives, and that is really the yield curve. Momentum Investments, nearly a doubling of operating profits. Big part of that is the annuity book. There's a little interesting story in the annuity book where we continue to see good mortality variance on annuity book, and this period was actually higher than the last year. There's two parts to it. One of it is structural. We are just not seeing the mortality improvements at the advanced ages that we thought maybe 10 years ago. Our in-force annuity book mortality tends to be pretty static over time rather than improving as expected years ago. The second one is a bit of a technicality, but it ties up to the earlier slides by Jeannette on technology and AI.
Some of you might recall that Home Affairs dropped a bit of a bomb a year ago with the tenfold increase to proof of life checks. We actually stood back a little bit, took a bit of a slower approach to that. We have subsequently found a solution leveraging off one of the 60 AI projects to do those proof of life checks. We're actually doing more frequent checks on the liveliness of our clients, which is beneficial for the annuity profits. Rising markets, pretty obvious, but both the wealth platform and the asset management businesses revenues are AUM-driven, so those are all both up sharply. There was also a one-off, let's call it expense reversal in the investments business.
We terminated a major technology project which resulted in a reversal of some of the expenses incurred, and that had a one-off benefit to earnings in the current period. Lastly, we communicated about a year and a half ago that we're gonna discontinue Momentum Money. That process is now largely complete. There was about a ZAR 1 million loss in the current period for Momentum Money. It was ZAR 25 million in the previous six months. Okay, Metropolitan Life. Jeannette did speak nicely of this business, but I think I'll need to do the same again. If I look at the improvement in operating profit here, very substantial. What I like about it is it's in every line item. When I look at new business strain, sharply down. Why is it down? It's because we're actually selling better quality business.
In other words, we are not wasting commissions or new business capacity on issuing poor quality business that never receives premiums. That's one reason. The other one is, as we run a more efficient, leaner sales force, the management cost of that channel comes down quite significantly as well. There's a number of factors that are leading to an instant earnings impact from the decision to actually focus that distribution force. It was a difficult decision 18 months ago when we decided to do that, but I think it's been a roaring success. It's played out even better in terms of the trade-off in quality versus volume than we thought. We also continue to see good persistency here, good mortality, good disability experience. Every variance line item is also a positive. I can't put...
I can't bet my life on it, but because of the good quality of new business we're writing now, I do expect the operational variance to remain positive for the time being. I think the impact of the better quality will be visible in the in-force profits in the coming years as well. There was a very substantial migration of what you used to call the mainframe platform onto what we call PDS. Substantial cost savings are starting to come through now in Metropolitan for that. Okay, Momentum Corporate. Earnings up slightly, but off a very high base. This is the one business that we've been saying that we're not sure if we can maintain the current level of profitability or at least grow from it going forward. Yet again, there's some growth here.
At the operating level, it is down maybe, I don't know, 6%, 7.08%-6.67%. Last year did have quite a large IBNR, Incurred But Not Reported reserve release. If I look through that technicality, risk profitability is probably quite similar to last year. Continues to be robust both on disability and on group risk. I think particularly in disability, you know, people often think of group risk as quite a commoditized market. I do think the disability space has got a lot of unique features to it, and I think our disability management is market-leading, which explains the very good market share and stickiness of that book. Okay, here you'll see a little bit different. Investment variants are actually up.
Our ALM activities in corporate, most of it actually relates to the claims and payment book. These are people claiming disability benefits. That book tends to run off in sort of seven, eight years. It's not like the life book that runs over 40, 50 years. In Duma's business, we have a lot less cash flows that are exposed to that very long end of the yield curve. It's more the short than the medium part of the yield curve. Secondly, those benefits are inflation-linked, so the lower inflation actually is positive for the outflows that we model. Duma had a positive investment variance, unlike the other South African businesses. Africa. We now report Africa as part of life insurance.
You might recall that, Namibia short-term has been moved to Guardrisk because there is quite a big alternative risk business in there. Health operations in Mozambique, Lesotho, and Botswana are now reported as part of health. Africa is almost just life, so it makes sense to report it as part of our core life operations. Earnings up sharply. Also operating profits up nicely here. I think the country I do wanna give a big shout-out to is Namibia. Namibia went through quite a difficult time a few years ago, and the last two years we're seeing the actual client count starting to grow after a number of years of shrinking. That has big benefits for things like unit costs and margins on the business. Lesotho, I was there last week Friday. Had some very nice hot body chicken.
Thank you. That business, we continue to dominate the Lesotho market, and they have landed some very good corporate business there. I think both Namibia and Lesotho sort of give them a tick. Botswana is a lot harder. I mean, most of us know that the macro environment in Botswana is under pressure because of the diamond industry, and we've been exposed to that as well. You know, I would describe Botswana as probably close to a break-even business at this stage, whereas the other two markets are making substantial profits. Embedded profit. This is really the sum of the contractual service margin and the risk adjustment. This is where Jeannette probably says we start moving on to the second-year course.
I think the easiest way of thinking of that ZAR 25.8 billion on the right there is it's really the amount of profit that we could have released if we had perfect fair value accounting. Because of accounting rules and allowance for risk, we have to hold back some of the profit rather than releasing it all up front. That ZAR 25.8 billion is like a store of future earnings. We call it embedded value. Somebody might call it composite margin, as an example. A good growth, 6% for the six months. If you annualize it, our embedded profits are growing well above inflation. A good outcome. I think any mature life company that can grow at, let's say, 8% or 10% here is doing well.
In terms of the components, new business linked to the VNB, which is not at the levels we want. It means new business is also not contributing enough to this compared to our own desires or expectations. However, again, for the fifth time in a row, we have a very positive contribution of ZAR 1.4 billion from our in-force business. We tend to extract more value out of our in-force business than initial assumptions, and that's been a consistent theme period after period. Probably talks a little bit to that persistency and client satisfaction. We would like to get more clients in at better margins, but once they're here, they seem to stick, and we're able to offer them, you know, an offering of value, and it works for us as well.
Okay, it's really a good in-force story offsetting a little bit of a disappointing new business story. This gives you a little bit more detail. As much as I would love to be here for another hour, I can't get into all of the blocks. What you will notice that every business unit and every product line in every business unit showed growth here. The story about managing better outcomes on the in-force clients is a consistent feature across the group. Now, a cynic might say we're just conservative. I would say maybe a little bit, but it's really about operational delivery more than anything else. Maybe a few other things to note here. I mean, Myriad remains the biggest store of future profit in our group. Very important product line for us. Momentum Investments, that's their annuity book.
Despite lower sales, their annuity CSM is still growing well above inflation, which sort of gives a reasonably good feeling about the future earnings from that business. Metropolitan Life, that recovery in all the operational metrics also comes through as growth in CSM in all the product areas. Bit of a similar story, but a different lens. This is the embedded value experience variances. Each of those bars is a different business unit. Every business unit had a small positive mortality and morbidity profit. That's good news. Persistence and alterations, everybody positive except for investments. Investments, there was actually a reduction on fees to existing clients, so it was effectively a fee cut rather than clients leaving. Also note the very large Momentum Corporate number.
This is something that I sort of talk to Duma about once in a while, that I don't think there's that much movement in the industry there. The schemes seem to be quite sticky, so we're not getting that much VNB in, but I think our client exit levels are probably half what we'd expect in a normal environment. I don't know, is it two-pot? Is it something else? Not much movement, and it's coming through nicely on the variance line for Corporate. Expenses are managed below or at budget. We note in the results announcement that our expenses are up 3% for the year, which is slightly below inflation. Then other obviously includes a number of different items. If you add it all up, every business unit had a noticeable, some of them quite meaningful, positive variances.
You know, I sort of joked yesterday with Jeannette that, you know, if I had to draw a picture to show what a good life company looks like, it will look a bit like this, you know? You know, it's very well managed compared to our own internal expectations and sort of operational metrics. On a theme of delivery, onerous contracts. When we published IFRS results first time two and a half years ago. Billy, when was it? Two years ago? Two and a half years ago. One of the first things people asked us is like, "Why you have so much onerous contracts?" It was maybe a fair comment. It actually was a fair comment at the time. Our new business mix has always been a mixture of some very profitable business and some loss-making business.
One way of saying it is that maybe the level of cross-subsidization was too high. We took note of that. We told investors we will work on it. As you can see, we have made quite good headway in the last 12 months. Momentum Investments, they redesigned their back-to-back annuity product. Metropolitan Life has obviously, through the focus on the distribution efficiency, also reduced their onerous contracts meaningfully. I mean, a 40% reduction in 12 months is meaningful, and it does illustrate that, when we say we're gonna do something, we tend to do it. Lastly, I do think it brings our mix of onerous and non-onerous a bit more in line, with what one would expect. Sales up 11%. A big part of our sales comes from Momentum Investments, and those are up 12%.
Now, a lot of that is the platform sales. Unfortunately, in the next slide, it doesn't quite have the same impact on VNB. Beyond that, decent growth in the other businesses. Only one that's down year-on-year is Metropolitan Life. Like Jeannette mentioned, we're very happy with that outcome because the average number of agents, which also means your running costs, are down by 43%. The productivity per remaining agent improved by 1/3 . In fact, the sales impact is a bit less than we feared when we moved to this decision to right-size the sales force. Definitely a good outcome. Just on VNB, we're not gonna pretend that the 238's a good number because we don't think so. This slide gives you a little bit of a flavor of just how big that impact of annuities is.
If you look at Momentum Investments, their VNB is down ZAR 100 million, and that is explained almost solely by the annuity volumes being down 30%-32%, something like that. That ZAR 100 million is then offset by about ZAR 60 million of gains in other areas. Particularly Metropolitan Life is showing a good trend in VNB, and that upward slope should continue. Also small improvements in some of the other areas. The reduction in VNB is really a story of a single product line. We have seen industry-wide decline in sales of those products. Okay, let's talk about non-life.
As I mentioned like five minutes ago that I think we are a well-run life company, but we are in line to make ZAR 1.5 billion in short-term this year, so we also quite a meaningful short-term player. Both Guardrisk and Momentum Insure, very high levels of profitability. Part of it is the industry cycle, but I do think there's a bit more to it. Obviously on health, we are number two player in this industry, at this stage, and profitability continues to grow. I'll go into each of these one by one. Starting with Guardrisk. All three lines of revenue are up, ahead of our internal expectations, that's for sure. Fee income, this is still the majority of Guardrisk's revenues. Majority of Guardrisk's activity is still running self-captive facilities for their clients.
Fee income is up 11%. That's a good outcome considering that our biggest client in Capitec left during the period. The underlying growth is strong. Underwriting profits up 31%. Obviously helped in motor and property by the same claims trends in terms of weather and severity as on Momentum Insure. I do wanna point out that particularly on the property book, we actually did a lot of work ourselves to improve the quality of that book. Then the gap cover business is area where we have invested in over the last few years, and we're seeing good profits coming through.
It's not only motor, it's also the commercial and corporate property and gap cover. It was agreed by the group to move Namibia to Guardrisk because there's a big alternative risk business there, and Lawrence claimed that he could actually do something with it. So far, 79%, yeah, okay, I agree with you. Okay, Momentum Insure. Like the other players who have reported so far, the claims environment has been favorable, so a claims ratio of 48%, it's an exceptional ratio. People forget that just two, three years ago, this industry was under pressure. I mean, this cycle has gone from very weak to very strong, very quickly and unusually quickly.
The only negative I can mention on this business, particularly now that they paid very good dividends three times in a row, is the expense ratio is too high at 39%. The gross written premium shrunk by 2% as part of the focus on quality of business. That has left the expense ratio a couple of percent above where we think it's realistic on a sustainable basis. Good news here is that December, January, February, we're starting to see the book size stabilize at about 133,000 contracts or so. The number of new clients coming in is roughly the same as the number of clients going out. That is starting to enable us to probably grow this business going forward at top line. Momentum Health.
This business is quite highly operationally geared, so that growth of membership and revenue does come through quite strongly on the bottom line. 5% growth in members I think is a good outcome if I, you know, look at my general feel about what's happening in the medical scheme market. We look after the Government Employees Medical Scheme. We're seeing a bit of growth in that scheme. That's helping. We're also seeing very good growth in demand for products that are targeting sort of basic benefits or the lower income products. Our own branded Momentum Health scheme, I think, is also doing a little bit better than the average scheme. 5%, I don't know if it's market-leading, but it must be close in terms of membership growth. Earnings are also aided.
I mentioned operational gearing earlier, but Health4Me margins continue to be good. So the insurance component of the business is profitable. Jeannette spoke about Bonitas coming on June 1. We are gonna incur quite a heavy investment before that. In the next three months, we need to recruit and train 700-odd people. We are busy refurbishing a major office building of our own, luckily, in Sandton. We are rolling out a number of walk-in centers across the country. There's a substantial investment before June 1. So that will impact Health's earnings in the second half. It's a bit of a heads-up on that. That said, we do think we can run Bonitas profitably going forward. So it's an investment we'd be more than happy to make. But just don't expect 207 to double.
I mean, if it does, I'll be very, very pleased. Okay. India incurred a small loss. This is IFRS 17, so slightly different to the Indian GAAP numbers you'll see from our partner. The trends continue similar to the previous period. Very strong top-line growth. That 20% is in Rands. In Indian rupees, it's closer to 40% growth. Combined ratio improved a little bit, 113%-112%. It could have improved a little bit more, but during the period, we had a couple of interesting developments. I mentioned one of them here, and there were others. I know some of the competitors also spoke about the new labor laws and things like that.
The change to the general sales tax had quite a big impact because a number of our expenses are taxable, and not being able to claim input credits put pressure on our expenses and our combined ratio. Obviously, we will take that into account in our products and pricing going forward, but we, you know, it's impossible to pass that cost retrospectively to clients. It was a difficulty during the period. I'm mentioning Momentum Services on this podium for the first time. This is a business we have in Mumbai. It's our global capability center. That's what they like to call themselves. Now we have 250 people in Mumbai who work for us. They provide largely technology support for our group. Now, it makes a small profit because we have to have a transfer pricing by Indian law.
More importantly, it gives us access to an almost unlimited pool of software and technology talent. Often in India, you're talking about days to find a skill, not months. I think the value of this setup to our group is greater strategically than it is on the ZAR 30 million bottom line. I thought I'll just mention it because I think most people don't know of this angle in our business. Shareholders. Shareholders is really a combination of returns on investments that don't belong to regulatory capital, offset by head office costs, which are always good value for money. Now the decline in shareholders results for the period, there was a substantial increase, ZAR 126 million increase in VC fund losses. Last six months, we had almost like a zero result on VC funds. This time over ZAR 100 million loss.
It's a combination of some revaluations downwards. Also remember a lot of these are denominated in dollars and euros, so there was quite a big FX impact on the VC portfolios. In terms of the shareholder costs themselves, they're down quite sharply year-on-year. Last year, the consulting costs were elevated because of the performance optimization project that I'll talk about a little bit later. Okay, now that's the less technical part done. Now we get to capital management. I wanna talk about this a bit more than normal. This shows the Prudential Authority yield curve. We have seen long yields according to the Prudential Authority decline by 700, 800 basis points. These are massive changes. I mean, these are in the quantum of one in 200, one in 500. These are big, big changes in yields.
The reason why I make a big deal of it here is remember that the premise of a required capital amount for insurance company is effectively a series of stress tests. Some of those stress tests like equity is instantaneous to some degree, but many of them are projected 30, 40 years forward. We would have to assume claims are higher for 30 years, people live longer for like next 40 years, expenses are higher forever. All those stress tests have to be PV'd back today. These very low long-term yields in the PA curve increases the amount of those stress tests substantially. What actually happens is this. On the left-hand side, you can see our solvency capital requirement. This is the legal minimum capital you could think that we need to hold.
It tends to grow very steadily in line with our business. It jumped this time by 20%, and it's really got to do with the fact that the yields came down. All those stress tests, the PV of the extra ZAR 100 million of claims in year 12 is now significantly higher than it would have been under the previous yield curve regime. That 3.6 billion increase, remember, that's 1x SCR. Now, we would never wanna be at 1x. I mean, our chief risk officer would probably prefer a bit more than that. Let's say you take 3.6x one and a half. That's ZAR 5 billion. These are big jumps in required capital.
Also for the first time giving you a bit more detail on the right-hand side there about the composition of our SCR calc. You'll see that the majority of our risk is underwriting risk, not market risk. It might have come through in our presentation a few times today. I think personally that we're a little bit more exposed to income streams relating to death claims, disability claims, short-term insurance, longevity. I think some of our competitors are maybe a little bit more market driven, whereas our capital requirements and our earnings are largely coming from insurance activities. Remember, in those activities, the stress test tends to be 30-40-year stress test. Maybe that also explains why our SCR might have jumped a bit more than we've seen on average in the industry.
Although I think everybody's gone up quite a bit. Okay, just to give you a bit of a flavor of that discounting, we're disclosing for the first time a little bit more of a breakdown of our required capital. Our mortality required capital went from ZAR 1.7 billion- ZAR 2.6 billion. That growth is split. Half to do with the lower yields, i.e. discounting, and half is actually growth in our risk business. If I look at longevity, I remember our annuity book did not grow that much in the period, but our biggest risk in annuities is people living very extended ages. Here we're discounting cash flows like 30-40 years away. Almost all of that increase is just discounting. Okay. Very little actual business growth. Similar expenses, probably 80% of the expense risk increase is just a discounting effect.
That 3.6 billion ZAR I showed you earlier, I would say 75% of the increase is yield related and a quarter is related to our business growth. Okay, these lower yields, they're not a big thing for our earnings because we actually run a very tight and active ALM. It's a big thing for our solvency capital because in the stress test, a lot of the cash flows are beyond the yield curve where you can actually actively hedge. Secondly, this is maybe for the connoisseurs, we actively hedge our IFRS balance sheet, not our solvency balance sheet. We're willing to take a bit more volatility on the Solvency than we do on earnings. Okay, equity stress tests. I suppose our equity stress at 1.7 billion ZAR is quite small compared to our market cap and our other factors.
Here again illustrating that at the moment, we are stress testing for a 52% decline in equity markets over one year. Now, the PA, quite correctly I think, has this anti-cyclical philosophy where once markets have run, maybe the market crash will be bigger than after it's fallen already. Okay, so it makes sense, but at 52%, we're at the highest stress possible actually. Now, in group finance, sometimes we have a bit of energy to do things, and I had guys look yesterday. The biggest fall we ever seen in the South African JSE on a calendar year was in 1920, 30% decline. Okay, so not 52%. Then somebody was even more ambitious and looked at daily data, and the biggest drawdown ever, not calendar year, but point- to- point is 41% in the JSE.
52% is quite a big stress test that we're using. Okay, what does this all mean? The reason I've given you a bit of a long story on capital is because our required capital went up. We agree actually with that view. We believe we wanna hold more capital to back our Solvency requirements going forward. We have updated our required capital level from ZAR 11.6 billion to ZAR 16 billion. Now, if you go through the details, you'll see that our available capital on the regulatory basis is in excess of ZAR 30 billion. But remember, in that, we always want to have a certain level of high-quality liquid assets. Not investments in subsidiaries, not future profits, not receivables, you know. This high-quality asset pool, we have assessed our view of what we wanna hold upwards.
We think it's a prudent and the right thing to do at this time in the market. This also explains, or you could word it other ways, is that we have reallocated our surplus capital into required capital. This also explains why we're not doing further buybacks at this stage. We will rather strengthen our SCR ratio and balance sheet at this point in time. Okay, this is cash flows. Consistent with the previous view of strengthening the life company balance sheet. We have paid a dividend of ZAR 825 million. That's a lot of money. It's ZAR 1 billion less than a year ago. That billion rand less coming to the holdco means that the cash flows coming into the head office is equal to the dividend requirement under the ordinary shares. There is no excess cash, you know.
I think the decision not to do a buyback is consistent with both our desire to hold more capital and the fact that the, following from that, the dividends extracted from the subsidiaries is also not in excess of the dividend we're paying out. Okay. Dividend is good, but I'll talk a bit more about the right-hand table, which is the buybacks. By December, we had done ZAR 439 million of buybacks. Yesterday, it was just under ZAR 800 million. We are gonna complete the ZAR 1 billion buyback we announced last year. It's gone a little bit slower because we're doing a structured program to optimize the price we're paying for the shares. We will obviously then reassess any further buybacks at the next results like we do every six months. This shows you where our capital is deployed and the returns it generates.
Most businesses improve their return on capital over the time period, particularly Metropolitan Life and Momentum Investments. I would also highlight Momentum Insure, used to be slightly below the target level of 20. It's now above it, so that's great. Also, Momentum Africa is steadily improving. I think the last time I looked a year ago, it was probably like a normalized ROE of 12. Now we're at, like, 18, so we're getting very close to the 20% hurdle rate. Yeah. Momentum Retail is the only business where ROE is a bit down. Consistent with the increase in required capital, we have also changed the view of where that capital goes. Now, with the lower yields, the business with the most increase is Momentum Retail, the Myriad book.
That has a bit of a negative impact on ROE. It's still good. It's just not as high as it used to be. Okay. Other topical matters. I think the yield curve and capital was the topical matter, so I'll just talk about only one thing here. This is our performance optimization program. You'll see that we have roughly doubled the amount of banked savings. Remember, a definition of a banked saving for us is a savings that in place for three months continuously. The big items to come through here, the biggest one was the Metropolitan policy system transfer. Substantial savings going forward from that. Another meaningful one is the human capital restructuring. We have relooked at things that are done centrally versus in the business units, leading to savings.
There's a broad range of business unit delivery. Looking forward to this next six months, I think we'll deliver quite a big chunk of the 452. All four items mentioned there are very close to done or I actually know are done. We may be just waiting for the three-month proof period to finish. Maybe I'll just mention that APN optimization, that's tech speak for data costs, mobile data costs. Prepaid, not quite, but yeah, it's interesting. I spoke to Robbie yesterday. We're gonna save, like, ZAR millions a month by just renegotiating, rebuying our data for our staff. Part of that decision is that we're getting more and more people back into the office. It's actually having a noticeable impact on our data costs.
We always wanted people back in the office largely for cultural and delivery reasons, but there are some interesting second-order benefits in terms of, like, data cost and so on. Okay. Just in conclusion, it's always good that me and Jeannette have a good overlap on conclusions, so we don't see things differently. It is an excellent earnings for six months. I mentioned earlier, I view it as 25% rather than 8% at sort of operational level. Strong liquidity and market risk management has been a big feature, maybe more since year-end. You know, through this Iran situation in the last couple of weeks, we've been making and receiving daily, you know, sort of, collateral payments of ZAR 1 billion. I mean, the market volatility on a fixed income book, equity book has been humongous.
BSM, well-oiled machine, running like a Rolls-Royce, Kagiso. Yeah. Okay. I'm very comfortable with what we're doing there, but it's been of great comfort the way that things have been run. We continue to be well-positioned. I mentioned a few times now that I think we're proportionately a bit more exposed to mortality and short-term underwriting. Well-positioned there. Profitable growth remains area of intense focus. I sometimes joke that it's easier to grow fast. You know, hand out ZAR 20 bills for ZAR 10. That's not the game we wanna be in. We wanna show profitable growth, and this is really VNB growth. Then similar to Jeannette, I do wanna congratulate all the employees. I have the privilege to talk about our results. I can act like they're mine.
In reality, it's the 15,000 folks and ladies out there who actually make it happen. Thank you very much for the massive commitment and effort over the last six months again. Also thank you to our clients who entrust us with their money and their financial affairs, and the advisors who are our biggest partners. Thank you, and I'll hand back to Dan.
Thank you very much, Risto. Please don't go too far. There's a lot of questions here around Solvency, related questions, which we'll get to. Can I ask you and Jeannette to come to the front as we begin the questions, Risto. Jeannette, I've got a couple of questions for you. Maybe we'll start with you, and then you can have a seat, ma'am. Thank you very much. A beautiful set of results. Let's give them another round of applause. Very beautiful set of results. Yeah. Firstly, we have a question from Marius Strydom from Austin Lawrence Gidon saying, "Jeannette, what is the potential impact of the Bonitas Medscheme court action?
We can't say that we didn't anticipate a question like that. Marius, thank you for the question. Look, we know that we participated in a proper procurement process. We know the process we were being put through, very detailed RFP submissions, supporting documentation, several presentations and engagements with the scheme, as well as a very comprehensive due diligence process. I think what is maybe a little bit confusing about this is that it should be noted that this court case originates from concerns from Medscheme regarding two completely unrelated contracts that were awarded to other providers in 2022 and 2024. So it's not actually directly related to the scheme being awarded to us.
What makes it tricky is that they now argue that since CMS, the Council for Medical Schemes is investigating this, you know, that Bonitas should be prevented from awarding any other contracts. Not absolutely directly related, but you know, it is out there. I think what is interesting at the moment is that Medscheme had to remove the application from the urgent court roll due to you know, the judge president feeling that the case wasn't ready for hearing. All I can say, we have a little bit of time. Risa shared that with you. We are going full steam ahead to make sure that on the first of June, we are ready to take on Bonitas and the Medscheme members.
Thank you very much, Jeannette. The second question for you now, it's about the wealth platform. Given that the termination of the wealth platform contract with FNZ, what is the plan now for the wealth platform?
We have plans. I think, you know, we couldn't really ever share that openly, but we weren't entirely surprised about this ending up where it is, because over time, we got increasingly worried about late and sometimes lack of delivery. On the one hand, in order to remain competitive, and you saw that our wealth platform is still, you know, doing really, really well in terms of sales, we kept on developing new capabilities and especially market-facing capabilities for our advisors and our clients. That has actually helped us quite a bit in this case. This transformation will continue. Very interesting, a system that five years ago when we started the project, we thought was end of life.
That software provider has now done a whole lot of things, and it now seems that, you know, it's not dead. It's, you know, maybe Lazarus. It's like, you know, gotten out of the grave. I think what is important is that we had a rethink on how to do this. We now gonna go for far more agile development, where we will have both focus on internal development on top of that, as well as also sourcing the best providers for the best services from outside of the group. It's almost a trend that changed in the last four years that it no longer makes sense to be completely dependent on only one provider. I think from that perspective, we actually, the team feels that they're in a better space than where they were.
All of the energy can now be spent on the development of our own platform, and in a way, we kind of, you know, masters of our own destiny, which we believe in the end was actually a really good outcome for us.
Thank you very much, Jeannette.
Thank you. Nothing more for-
Nothing more for you. The rest is all about Solvency this and Solvency that for Risto. That question there about the wealth platform was from Matthew Pouncett at Laurium Capital. Thank you very much, Matthew. Baron Nkomo from J.P. Morgan, let's start off there. A couple of solvency-related questions, Risto. Please bear with us with the time that we have. Baron wants to know, given the broad drag from lower nominal yields and yield curve shifts, what actions are you taking the next six to 12 months to reduce earnings and capital sensitivity to rates, and what milestones should they be expecting? What management actions might you be taking?
Yeah. No, thanks. I think on earnings, we'll do quite little. I think we're comfortable with our earnings sensitivity. You would have noticed in the ZAR 3.7 billion, we still had a positive market variance. Within that market variance, the actual nominal yield movement was a negative ZAR 170 million-ZAR 180 million. The loss we took from nominal yields down is very modest in earnings, and it ties to my earlier point that we hedge earnings risk of interest rates. We do not hedge the additional risk related to solvency. However, never waste a crisis. Okay, that's a strong word. Never waste a lower than wanted solvency ratio. There's a few things we're doing already. Now remember historically, we have always had quite high capital ratios.
We have now decided to look at one or two things that we could have always done that we haven't done. One of them is that historically, we never allowed for a creation of a deferred tax asset in the stress scenarios. We have made a very small ad hoc adjustment now, but I think the reality is that the DTA we could create in a stress scenario is larger than allowed for, and it is quite common in the industry. I would say most people allow for a DTA in their stress calculation. We're also looking at things like, is our calculation methodology optimal? You might have heard of a thing called iterative risk margin, where you can calculate your risk margin requirement as an iteration of the scenario.
Yeah.
We have never done that because we like to keep things simple and cheap in terms of calculations. But if there's a substantial capital benefit from having an iterative approach, we'll look at doing it. Then there's other things such as asset liability management, where many of you will know that we like to hold our shareholder capital at reasonably stable value assets, so cash and floating rate assets. We might wanna buy more bonds in our net asset value, that will then increase our interest rate exposure in the right direction to the solvency. You know, we think the impact on earnings volatility will be quite modest. In the stress scenarios of substantial yield reductions, that additional NAV will actually be quite nice against the increase in SCR.
As you can hear, there is already a project on the go. Yeah, I mean, it will lead to some benefits going forward.
Okay. I just want to get rid of some of these Solvency-related questions.
Solvency is important.
It's very important, yes. I mean, Matthew Pouncett from Laurium Capital says, "Thank you for the presentation. Congrats on the results. What impact do the bond and equity movements during March have on your Solvency?
Yeah, good question. We have done some testing and point-in-time stuff over the last few weeks. Obviously, the decline in equity markets will have a small negative impact. But as I mentioned earlier, our equity exposure is quite small. We're not that equity exposed. Probably talking about limited investment guarantees in our book. Rates increase is actually positive, so the similar way that the sharp decline in your long bonds, the fact that the bonds have sold out during the increased risk environment. Net-net, we believe our solvency ratio is actually up through the war period. Yeah.
Okay. Warwick Bam next from RMB Morgan Stanley says, "Are you comfortable with your ALM matching dynamics? And do you have the ability to reprice your products if yields stay this low?
Yeah. Okay. That's a very topical question. The one thing I wanna add to Matthew, before I forget is.
Yes
I was thinking about it. One thing you must also remember, this is our six-month results. When you do a balance sheet stress test, you get the full impact there, but we only had six months of retained earnings.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I think if we were reporting 12-month results, the reduction in solvency ratio would have been probably 0.05, 0.1 less. Okay? Matthew, just think about that a little bit. ALM, I keep saying that we're very happy with the ALM outcomes on the things we wanna match. I mean, sometimes we choose not to hedge, and I don't think we're changing that. In terms of ability to reprice, we definitely have a contractual right to reprice.
Mm-hmm.
Those decisions are very difficult because you need to take policyholder fairness, market reaction, everything into account. I mean, like, we did an interesting exercise recently with Myriad. Yields have fallen sharply, but they're not that much lower than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know? Even though we have a contractual right to do so, we're debating a little bit like how fair would it be to reprice when the yield's been higher for five, 10 years, now they come back for five, 10 years. Obviously the guys who were sold business, let's say three, four years ago when yields were 14, we might have a stronger case in five or 10 years with them, but that's in the future. We have a legal right to reprice.
I think historically we have chosen not to use that right unless it's like ironclad. I think it also talks to our, maybe our attitude towards client first, in most cases. Well, in every case. We have to take shareholders into account as well.
Okay.
I'm here for the shareholders.
Risto, yeah.
Yeah.
Just bear with me for a couple of more questions. Saul Miller from Truffle Asset Management.
Yeah
says cash generation from the S.A. Life was depressed.
Yeah
versus the past.
Mm-hmm.
Please elaborate. Is it SCR related?
Yeah, it is.
Is it, will it revert back? What is sustainable?
Yeah. Sustainable is sort of closer to 1.5 every six months. The dividend we paid out of the Life company was really the minimum we felt feasible to pay the desired group dividend.
Mm-hmm.
We wanted to retain as much money in the Life Co as possible. Now, obviously, we will have retained earnings and a bit of relief in terms of the capital project by June. I would expect at year-end, we can revert back to a normal level of dividends from the Life company.
Okay. A couple of questions about India, one from Michael Christelis at UBS, the other one from Sinamile Maveve from SBG Securities. I'll just give them both to you at once, and you could address them. Can you confirm if India is expected to be profitable from next year? And what further capital will be required from the group for this business? Sinamile wants to know, the operating loss in India has widened. Aside from the once-off gain in the prior period, are there headwinds in the Indian market preventing a break-even scenario?
Yeah. Okay. In fact, our partner, I think, expects break even in the current year on the Indian GAAP basis. I think next year confidence levels are high. Now, obviously, Indian GAAP is not exactly the same as IFRS 17. As the business grows and matures a little bit, the gap between IFRS 17 and Indian GAAP will close. I do think that this year there's a good chance to be profitable also in IFRS 17. And next year, I would say it's highly likely we are profitable under IFRS 17. Yeah. That's a short answer to that. In terms of the other one-offs, I sort of mentioned the impact of not being able to claim the input GST because of the tax changes. We also had some changes to labor laws in India.
There's also quite a bit of talk in India at the moment about cost of distribution, and maybe regulations might change around that. I think in the coming year, possible changes to commission levels is probably the biggest thing for investors to look. Because if commissions are capped again, they were uncapped a couple of years ago. If they bring commission caps back, it might be beneficial long term, in my view, not everybody agrees, but in the short term it will cause quite a bit of distraction because some of the channels might actually threaten or decide to not distribute. I think, like, India is a very. The Indian regulator is very active, and they're very policyholder protection-focused. Neither of them is a bad thing, but it does mean that industry participants need to be on their toes.
Every year there's quite a few things that change. I think the two big ones last year was from a regulatory perspective labor laws and tax. Also medical inflation, like in most of the world, is high. I think, Johan, I think it's 12%-14% is the medical inflation in India over the last year.
Mm-hmm
which is clearly higher than what we priced in when we sold the business.
Okay. We've got a couple of last
By the way, the capital.
The capital, yeah.
It's obviously dynamic, and it's a function of how much we're growing. I would say my best estimate for further capital injection over the next two years is about ZAR 700 million.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Okay. Got a couple of last questions from Marius Strydom. By the way, just to note, Harry Porter has asked a very technical question, which I won't put to you now. I'm sure that can be addressed.
You break my heart.
Later. No. That can be addressed later on, Risto.
Yeah. Yeah.
Marius Strydom from Austin Lawrence Gidon has got some interesting questions for you. First, he's giving you and the team flowers. He says, "Congratulations on a strong set of results, especially your industry-leading ROE, and thank you for your clean and useful disclosure." Okay? He wants to know, can you please speak to the likely impact of Bonitas on health fee growth? Will this exceed 28% increase in membership, and will this be delivered at a higher margin near term and long term?
Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of a naughty question because we would never disclose commercial matters at an individual client level.
Mm-hmm.
I think particularly Bonitas and GEMS will be such big clients that it will be very dangerous to talk about commercials. What I would say, Marius, is we would not have bid unless we thought we could do it profitably. I also mentioned that we're gonna invest probably over ZAR 100 million over the next three months to set up for Bonitas. We think the pay back on that will be. A very acceptable length. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a profitable contract. I just can't. It's not right to disclose what we think the profits will be.
Okay. Final question from Marius. What will the impact of negative imported inflation vehicles and parts be on the Insure motor book, and are you using strong underwriting performance to price more aggressively in pursuit of new business? Is this not a clear opportunity to grow your book?
Obviously, the likelihood of inflation picking up has increased substantially, and both cars and home electronics are largely imported, so we will definitely keep an eye on it. I mean, the current underwriting margins are so high that I'm guessing that Brent's not here, unfortunately. I think he's at the Cape Epic. I think the reason our margins are high is that we might respond a little bit slower than normal in terms of inflationary pressures on claims costs. The second part, which is, you know, being more aggressive to grow the book, it's interesting that they've done a few small experiments in Momentum Insure with different pricing strategies. They're not seeing a massive impact in conversion rates from cutting prices a little bit or increasing them a little bit.
You know, ultimately, the efficiency of our sales activities, particularly in the direct space, is very much a function of the quality of the lead coming in. You know, it's not so much of a pricing matter as it is of generating more high-quality leads. Elasticity of demand is maybe a little bit less than one would guess. I often say it's a pity we can't do the similar experiments in life insurance or sort of be a bit more dynamic, but anyway.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you very much. Let's give him a round of applause. Risto, thank you for taking all those questions.
Sure.
We appreciate it, and we also thank the analysts who put those questions to you. It's good to know that when people acknowledge the good work that you're doing as fellow analysts in terms of the kind of results and the disclosures that are being made in this transparent way, it's brilliant for the group. A brilliant set of results, and this is how we end our presentation. Thank you again, Jeannette, and to Risto and everybody else who's attending and those who took part virtually as well. Time, the half year is gone. It's time now to put shoulder to the wheel for the next half year, which is the next six months. All the best. Thank you very much.