Welcome to the main part of Prudential's 2021 Investor Conference. In my presentation, I'll start with an overview covering the journey we've been traveling, where we're headed next, and the way we've been transforming this business across multiple dimensions. I'll then hand over to Nic Nicandrou, our Chief Executive of PCA, to show you how we execute with a focus on delivery, digitalization, and what we're calling humanization. Put simply, that's about enabling our people to empower our customers. Nic will be followed by Mark FitzPatrick, our Group CFO and Group COO, on how we will translate our strategy into financial value, and I hope these presentations will leave you a clear sense of our scale, quality, and the velocity of our business. We'll then have an initial Q&A session and go into two panel sessions.
After a final Q&A, I'll set out the investment case and close with a summary. Taken together, the showcase of videos we've uploaded for this represents around 180 minutes of rich content. And I realize that's a lot for people to absorb. But the one key thing I'd like you to take away is that, at its heart, Prudential is actually a simple business with a simple proposition to investors. We have a simple purpose. We help people get the most out of life. And we do this by making healthcare affordable and accessible, and by protecting people's wealth, and by growing their assets. We have an equally simple strategy. We focus on the largest markets in the fastest-growing regions of the world, offering a broad set of differentiated products to serve the unmet needs of these communities. We've built a competitive advantage in three ways.
One, through a multi-channel distribution model with 600,000 agents and access to 20,000 bank branches and a modern, scalable platform. Two, through our distinctive culture focused on innovation and growth, and three, through the experience and trust with regulators, policymakers, and communities that comes from operating in Asia for almost a century. We have an inherently sustainable business model. We benefit from a virtuous cycle where the superior economic growth in our markets and aging demographics create an ever greater need for what we do. Policymakers recognize the important role we play as a pillar of their social safety net, and we're also taking steps to align our business more closely with the global transition towards a lower carbon economy. Any future climate crisis will heavily impact the communities we serve in Asia and Africa.
As a steward of long-term capital and a protector of people's lives, we need to drive decarbonization in a way that's just and inclusive. Last month, alongside a new set of near-term measures, we announced a goal that the assets we hold on behalf of the insurance companies will be net zero by 2050. This is a business that's materially larger and more valuable to shareholders than it was 10 years ago, or even five years ago. In particular, looking at embedded value, which is the best proxy for compounding growth, this has more than tripled over the past decade and doubled over the last five years. While many of our peers might be able to move the needle on one or two metrics over a shorter time frame, very few can drive all these metrics over such a sustained period.
There is no single ingredient in the sauce that creates this sustainable growth. It's a blend of positive external trends, constant internal transformation, and the dedication of our people. A dedication so clearly seen in their response to the challenges of COVID. All of this makes our growth formula extremely hard to replicate. This strong track record is one of the reasons why we believe that we can continue to grow new business profits, or NBP, faster than our market's GDP. And it's why we believe we can sustain double-digit growth in embedded value per share in the years to come. Over the past few years, we've taken steps to actively manage our business model to align it more closely with the big structural changes that create demand, again, largely unmet for the products and services we provide. These are the charts that tell that story.
Despite their fast-rising prosperity, Asian people still have low levels of insurance cover, with 40% of health and protection spend still paid out of pocket. This creates a large and growing unmet need, a vast health and protection gap that's been estimated at $1.8 trillion. And even larger is the estimated $83 trillion mortality gap, representing the income that families forego if they lose a breadwinner. It's in these long-term trends which underpin strong rising demand for savings and protection across the region, and they create significant opportunities for growth and value creation. In some ways, it's harder for a successful, growing business to adapt and change than it is for a business facing a visible challenge. But this is exactly what we've been doing over the past few years: fixing the roof while the sun shines. And this has been more than essential maintenance.
It amounts to a complete restructure, reconstruction, if you will, of the house. The transformation has taken place across three dimensions: structural, operational, and cultural. So let's start with structural transformation. When we look back at Prudential in 2015, we had a great set of businesses, but they were strategically constrained. The group was not necessarily the logical owner of all of our businesses, nor were the individual units strong enough to stand on their own as independent companies. What we did was create genuine optionality, and then we exercised those options. Breakups are difficult, which is why you see so few of them in financial service companies with long histories. But with Jackson expected to separate in the second half of this year, again, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, the completion of this phase of structural transformation is within sight.
In 2015, we were a global enterprise straddling across four continents, operating in wildly varying markets. Once the structural changes are complete, we will be focused purely on the two continents with the most attractive opportunities for the services we know how to provide. Shareholders will own a pure play on future growth through a portfolio of powerful businesses: China, India, scale businesses in ASEAN, emerging growth markets in Asia and Africa, and a leading regional asset manager. These businesses are linked by our culture and an increasingly integrated and flexible approach to servicing the customer through digital. This makes us scalable, adaptable, and ready to seize future opportunities. This brings me to the operational transformation. Prudential in 2015 was like an auto company that made separate models for individual countries. They were often beautifully designed for the drivers, but no common platform and few shared components.
What we're doing is systematically re-engineering our business. We call our new common platform Pulse. And you've already heard a lot about it in the business videos. But Pulse is more than an attractive app to welcome new customers with distinctive health and wellness services. It's a new way of thinking and working within the organization. It's a set of common tools to make our agents more effective and more productive. And it's the way in which we can connect seamlessly to third parties such as banks and our new digital distribution partners. It also is transforming our ability to become a genuinely inclusive business. Where before our business model was constrained in the types of customers we could effectively service, now there are a few limits to our reach. Over the past few years, you've seen us rapidly develop our group in SME businesses and our Sharia-compliant offerings.
We create bite-sized products that suit millennials who are not ready yet to commit to our more traditional comprehensive plans, and we've stretched our brand in the high-net-worth segment. All of this makes for a more resilient business, better able to adapt to difficult times and to seize new opportunities as they emerge. The traditional model for our industry was to focus on a relatively small number of high-value customers. And those cohorts of loyal customers, some of which have been with the firm for decades, remain hugely important to Prudential. The model we're moving to now is one where customer acquisition and scale is consistent and indeed supportive of the creation of long-term shareholder value. And that's why we're developing the capacity to reach 50 million customers by 2025, which you'll hear Nic talk more about in detail.
Underpinning the transformation of our capabilities is a genuine shift in our culture. In 2015, compared to where we are today, Prudential was a siloed world in both its internal habits and the way it interacted with the outside world. There's a prevailing view in financial services that we needed to own and control the whole value chain, even the elements in which we had little expertise. Here are a few of the things that we've shifted. First, we've moved from a culture of regarding external firms as mere vendors to building deep partnerships where there's collaboration between teams and two-way transfers of ideas. And to date, we've entered into no fewer than 35 key digital partnerships. Second, we've brought in new people with experience in tech and consumer-facing sectors. And more importantly, we've upskilled our existing colleagues. 3,100 of them have now gone through training in artificial intelligence.
Third, we've introduced new ways of working in order to accelerate innovation and product development. Two years ago, we introduced the Silicon Valley idea of hothouses. These are intense three-day workshops designed to convert at high speed concepts into propositions ready for launch, subject, of course, to regulatory approvals. Since then, the hothouse has become a key part of our standard way of working. The output of this is a step change in innovation: the launch of 175 new or improved products last year, up from 106 in 2015, the rollout of Pulse across 17 markets in Africa and Asia in 21 months, and the ability to swiftly enter and scale up new markets such as countries in Africa or new provinces in China. The acquisition of customer insight through Pulse to define the next phase of innovation is key.
Each day, we acquire 20 gigabytes of behavioral and engagement data. The proof of this execution innovation is demonstrated in the 70 million of Pulse sales in the first quarter of this year. This represents 9% of our sales in the markets where Pulse is available. There's been a fundamental mind shift. The starting point for everything we do is the needs of the consumer, not our ability as a manufacturer to produce. Again, this is an attitude still, even now, too prevalent in the financial services sector. It means that our people can dare to dream in a way they never could in the past. I hope you've enjoyed the videos we've uploaded, and later on, you'll have the panel sessions as well. The energy and dedication of our people never fails to inspire me. This is a diverse team in every sense of the word.
As well as diversity of gender and ethnicity, this is a mix of industry experts and people who have entered our world from other disciplines and sectors. You'll also have watched a mix of veterans and younger people with high potential. All of them have come together to build a distinctive ethos and culture that I believe represents a genuine competitive advantage. This transformation is supported by the development of a diversified franchise focused on the high-growth markets in Asia and Africa. The business has access to 3.7 billion people in Asia and a further 400 million in Africa. The map here illustrates the number of our leadership positions: nine top three businesses. And the sheer scale of those businesses, with seven of them producing profits of over $250 million last year.
The number of material profit engines in Asia is a major change compared to five years ago. In particular, our mainland Chinese business, almost immaterial in 2015, has grown its IFRS earnings by more than five times and is now the sixth largest contributor to the group. The diversity of our platform, demonstrated by our broad product mix and our multi-channel distribution, which includes long-term bancassurance partnerships with Standard Chartered and UOB. In Eastspring, with the reliable and stable flows from our Asian life business, which again are sizable, are largely uncorrelated to market factors and are growing as the life businesses grow. These flows provide Eastspring the opportunity to develop investment strategies that can be subsequently deployed for our third-party retail clients and institutions. Our currently relatively small but fast-growing Africa franchise has great scope for leveraging on the Asia game plan.
This robust platform is a strong launch pad for the opportunities of the future. When we look back five years ago, there were three opportunities that loomed large in our discussions around the board and executive tables. First, the creation of a corporate structure that could unleash the potential of our business. Second, the creation of a common operating platform that would allow us to compete effectively in an era of digital disruption. And third, the creation of a corporate culture focused on innovation and growth, able to keep pace with the fast-changing consumer needs. That work, while not complete, is well underway. And now new opportunities are presenting themselves. In China, we have a huge opportunity through the mainland China business of broadening and deepening our presence and our nationwide footprint.
We're also well positioned to capture the significant opportunity presented by the Greater Bay Area, a region in which, if it were a separate country, would be the 10th largest economy in the world. India, here with the leading life insurance and asset management businesses, there's an opportunity to expand our presence in a country with 1.4 billion people as the businesses grow both in terms of scale and profitability. In Southeast Asia, we have the opportunity to broaden our offerings and enhance our distribution to deliver personalized solutions to meet people's health and savings needs, particularly in the region's largest economies, Indonesia and Thailand. In health and protection, the opportunity to build out from a traditional role of financial protection into solutions that postpone and prevent ill health. And in wealth, the opportunity to combine our capabilities into a super app or one-stop shop for Asia's wealth needs.
New markets will consider the options available to us. The biggest opportunities lie on the doorsteps of our existing offices. There are many hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa who are currently unserved or underserved by financial services. We're well positioned to meet the health, protection, and saving needs of the region. I'll now hand over to Nic, who will say more about how we're delivering digitalization and empowering our colleagues and valued agents, and upon whom the financial success of this great business relies.
Hello, I am Nic Nicandrou, the CEO of Prudential Corporation Asia. Prudential turned 173 years old this year. We have seen a lot in nearly two centuries, and the last year has once again proved the value and resilience of our business. We don't take this resilience for granted.
And this is why we have been preparing for some time for Prudential's pivot to be a purely Asia and Africa-focused group and to become a digital-led organization. Through all this change, we have found a renewed sense of purpose, and that's to help people get the most out of life. Helping people pay homage to our heritage of providing sound financial advice to generations and getting the most out of life speaks to our future as health and wealth partner to millions. You will have seen this come through in the showcase videos from across the business, which were released last week. I am immensely proud of the work the teams are doing, and I would like to give you more context of how all this comes together. So I will cover three areas. Firstly, our objectives and how we're rallying our people around them.
Secondly, a walkthrough of our forward-looking strategic themes. And thirdly, an overview of our unique strengths and recent performance. So let's start with our objectives. If our purpose is to help people get the most out of life, then naturally we want to do this for as many people as possible, which is why we want to build capacity to reach up to 50 million customers by 2025. As you have just heard from Mike, there is an abundance of opportunity in Asia given the growing and increasingly affluent population, the lack of social safety net, and under-penetrated markets. The same holds true for Africa, a continent of more than a billion people that is brimming with opportunity. Swiss Re puts the mortality gap in Asia at $83 trillion.
If we were to claim just a fraction of this gap and a share of the household wealth indicated on this slide, we would then be well placed to meet our objectives of growing NBP ahead of GDP, as well as growing embedded value per share at a sustained double-digit rate. All of this opportunity comes with a responsibility to address the disproportionate effects of climate change on populations across Asia and Africa. This is why we're proud to have joined the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance and to have signed up as an asset owner to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. So how will we meet these objectives? Well, it starts with our people. We have pledged to make Prudential a place where our people can connect, grow, and succeed.
You to the power of Pru, is how we are visually representing the essence of this pledge and the many initiatives that accompany it as we help our people get the most out of their careers. In exchange, we have invited our people to bring the best version of themselves to work every day and to collaborate across businesses as we make our mark on the world. That's how we get the multiplier effect of the collective, which we have symbolized as Pru to the power of you. To create the conditions for success, we have recently refreshed our values, which are simple and sincere. Our values are ambitious, curious, empathetic, courageous, and nimble. These values are how we're asking our people to show up to work every day. They're now embedded in our operating model, our performance system, our diversity and sponsorship programs, and importantly, our expectations of leaders.
From this place of alignment, we are directing our people to focus on three strategic themes: delivering profitable growth in a socially responsible way, digitizing our products, services, and experiences, and humanizing our company and advice channels. This is how we're rallying our people to seize the opportunities that we see in both Asia and Africa. Now, let me walk you through these three strategic themes. Delivering profitable growth and social impact is the first of these themes. Our ambition is to increase our presence in China and India, win back in Indonesia, and deliver the returns of our recent investments in Thailand. By focusing on these four markets and laying the foundations of our expansion in Africa, we will spur growth beyond that which is available to us in our more established markets like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia.
We want to grow in health and protection by leading in accessibility and affordability for two important reasons. Firstly, because increasing access will fulfill our purpose and allow us to serve even more customers, and secondly, because health and protection represent our more profitable products, which drive our NBP and embedded value growth ambitions. Eastspring is our asset management business whose purpose is to be experts in Asia invested in your future. We hold a top 10 position in seven markets and have investment experts on the ground in every one of them. Our growth plans for Eastspring involve deepening its integration with our life businesses and partnering with world-class providers to diversify our product suite and offer global investment solutions to investors across Asia. We're doing this against the backdrop of a global movement around ESG that's encouraging more responsible investment strategies.
As we work towards our long-term goal of becoming a net zero asset owner by 2050, we're doing as much as we can, as fast as we can, always with the goal of supporting a just and inclusive transition in markets we operate in. To this end, we will divest from all investments in businesses which derive more than 30% of their income from coal, with equities to be fully divested by the end of 2021 and fixed income assets by the end of 2022. We will make a 25% reduction in the carbon emissions of all shareholder and policyholder assets by 2025, and we will engage directly with companies responsible for 65% of emissions in our portfolio. Taken together, we believe that these three initiatives will accelerate our growth trajectory in a sustainable and socially responsible manner.
The second area that we have asked our people to focus on is digitizing our products, services, and experiences. This is about our investment in Pulse, a first-of-its-kind digital platform and ecosystem that stands to transform our business. In fact, we think of Pulse both as a business as well as a platform for the business. As a business, Pulse makes it easy for customers to buy and to do so repeatedly. Based on a deep and empathetic understanding of their needs, we're designing the customer experience to be frictionless. Pulse enables people to engage with a range of health and wellness services, including health check, telemedicine, dengue alerts, fitness tracking, meal planning, BMI index, and more each month.
The breadth of services on this all-in-one super app is designed to attract a new generation of Pru customers, one that is younger, more health conscious, and from the middle and lower-income segments. In many of our markets, family is the fabric of society. So this new generation of Pru customers will bring with them parents, grandparents, friends, and relatives, creating a network effect that deepens loyalty and expands our customer base at scale. As customers interact with our platform, we get to know them better and in a way that is unrivaled. We do this with their consent, gaining access to a unique set of data and insights that helps us design more tailored solutions. Pulse also helps customers to get to know their own needs better as they navigate their personal health and wellness goals.
We believe that this kind of partnership will lead to a mutually beneficial lifetime relationship, and that requires trust, particularly when it comes to such personal information. That's why we have taken an uncompromising approach to privacy and security. Trust is also built when we make it as easy to engage with us as it is to buy from us. Pulse will change the game on customer fulfillment with an in-app wallet for payments, 24 by 7 online servicing, and an advanced claims experience. These capabilities are already live in a few markets with the rest to follow. One final point on the platform: because Pulse has seamless end-to-end processing and partnership integration, we're much better positioned to achieve both scale and efficiency. This will have a positive effect on our operating model in terms of cost to acquire and cost to serve our customers.
Taken together, we believe that the initiatives under digitizing can move health and wealth outcomes on a national level. Pulse is perhaps the most all-encompassing investment that we're working on today. Finally, our third strategic theme is humanizing our company and advice channels. Upskilling and reskilling is an investment in careers, but importantly, it is also an investment in our ability to build on our heritage of providing relevant products and sound advice, advice that sits alongside and complements our digital offerings. For our employees, this includes learning in the flow of work with broad-based programs like design thinking and new ways of working. Learning while working on life challenges is accelerating development cycles, in turn allowing us to continuously roll out a wider set of products and digital tools at a much faster pace.
For our agents and our partners, we're undertaking a complete overhaul of our learning and development programs as we move away from the lecture-based PowerPoint in favor of a more modern approach that emphasizes skill building, skills that enable our agents and our partners to more capably and confidently advise on an ever-evolving set of customer needs. More products, enhanced tools, and broader advice enable a much more inclusive approach to the segments we serve. We intend to become a leader in products for women and Islamic customers, and we already have a strong Sharia business in Malaysia and are making investments to build on a similarly solid foundation in Indonesia. Traditionally, the wealthy have had the lion's share of access to high-touch financial advice.
We intend to lower the threshold for wealth services, offering a Private Banca-in-a-Box service to the mass market and one that brings high-quality advice but at a much lower entry point. This will be enabled by a wealth offering on Pulse that can stand on its own or be combined with advice from an agent. Either way, our goal is to be a trusted advisor regardless of channel as we financially educate people, help them plan and visualize goals, and guide them on where and how to invest. On that note, Prudence Foundation's award-winning program, Cha-Ching, is building financial literacy for millions of children. It is available in 13 languages and reaches 35 million households every day on television. Cha-Ching meets a bona fide need in our markets and is creating a generation of financially literate customers that we hope one day will become our valued customers.
As we humanize our company and advice channels, we will become known again not as the man from the Pru, but as the people from the Pru, people who are ambitious, curious, empathetic, courageous, and nimble, people who are committed to and eminently capable of delivering, digitizing, and humanizing. So here you now see our nine growth initiatives together as they relate to our three strategic themes. Looking at the whole picture in its totality, we believe that we have set out a clear purpose-led strategy that will inspire our stakeholders and drive our growth agenda. So this gives you a sense of where we are going. Now, let me share with you where we are and how we're doing. Today, Prudential enjoys a unique set of strengths in Asia that differentiate our business and put us in an advantageous position. We have access to nearly the whole of China.
We're present in India through top three players in both life and asset management. We are developing a compelling digital strategy with Pulse. We have a leading agency force across the region. We have the most bank partners and the largest branch network. We're the largest Sharia player. We have a unique with-profits offering with significant capital support, and we have Eastspring with top positions in the majority of our markets. I would now like to deep dive in the first four areas of differentiation shown on the left of the slide. In China, we have a distinct strategy and a 50/50 partnership with CITIC, China's largest conglomerate. We're in 20 provinces and are present in 99 cities, which gives us access to most of China.
We have built this presence steadily and deliberately over time, getting the necessary licenses, building local relationships, and putting in place the technology and infrastructure to operate efficiently. It also takes time, effort, and expertise to incubate a high-quality agency business. However, this does not slow us down. Each time we enter a new province and city, we have immediate access to CITIC's bank network and relationships. This access allows us to generate new business quickly, giving us time and space to build a quality agency presence from the ground up. That's the benefit of a multi-channel approach. Our agency channel has not yet reached maturity in our more recent province and city entries, so we expect a lot more to come from these as they come of age. The results speak for themselves. In 2020, our agency margins were 85% and our banca margins were 39%.
Our geographic expansion, combined with our multi-channel and multi-product approach, has driven a six-fold NBP increase in the last five years. Last year, we managed to grow NBP by 3%, giving us an edge in a tough year, and we're confident that we can continue to grow NBP at pace over the next five years. In India, we have a minority stake of just over 22% in ICICI Prudential Life or IPL. Ours was one of the first JVs to be approved in India. We believe that this nascent market has become much more disciplined and is ripe for rapid expansion. The sheer size of the opportunity is hard to overstate, with a $16.5 trillion protection gap and a low penetration rate of 2.8%. For life insurance, the private sector customer base is expected to triple from 42 million today to more than 120 million by 2030.
IPL is well positioned to be one of the winners in this expansion. Key to winning is product expertise, which is especially crucial as the economy develops and customer needs evolve, making critical illness, multi-year medical plans, retirement solutions, and legacy planning increasingly relevant. These are all product areas where Prudential can bring a lot of expertise. Our asset manager in India is similarly poised for success. We hold a 49% stake in ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company or IPAMC, a top three player with $57 billion funds under management. The business has several unique strengths in product and distribution, which is why IPAMC today enjoys a 23% share of mutual fund investors in India.
This business platform positions us well to play a leading role in the expansion of the mutual fund investor base, which is expected to more than triple from 25 million today to 91 million by 2030. These are both great businesses with strong positions in long-term growth markets. Even though it was only launched 21 months ago, Pulse is already producing results. It is live in 17 markets and has seen 24 million downloads with around 10 million registrations. The registered users are younger overall than our typical Prudential customer, and some 70% are new to Prudential. They're using a whole new set of services, be they from our own proprietary offering or from those provided by our 23 service partners. Our offerings include time-limited freemium products, bite-sized products, health and wellness services, subscriptions, and much more. All of this is creating communities, teeing up engagement opportunities, and generating sales.
In fact, since its launch, sales associated with Pulse have reached $280 million of APE from both bite-sized products sold online as well as from offline referrals. Each day that goes by brings us more than 20 gigabytes of behavioral and engagement data that trains our algorithms and informs nudges which aim to make our customers healthier and wealthier. But our ambitions for Pulse are much broader. We intend to make it our primary customer onboarding and fulfillment tool, integrating leads generation, activity management, remote selling, payment, and policy issuance, all on a single platform. We're also seeking to make it our e-servicing platform for both Pulse users and existing Prudential customers. I repeat, we intend to do all of this on a single platform, which will have the same look and feel across the markets where Pulse is currently launched.
The way in which we operate our agency channel is also evolving. Future Ready is a suite of Pulse-enabled tools and programs that support all aspects of agency management, from recruiting on PRUdna to learning on PRUExpert to sales and activity management on PRUForce. Given that upskilling our agency force is one of our growth initiatives, let me say a bit more about PRUExpert. For new agents, our ambition is to put MDRT in reach in the first year. MDRT stands for Million Dollar Round Table, and it is the term used in our industry to describe the best performing agents. We have converted training materials from thousands of slides of technical PowerPoint into a more human tone and a digestible digital format that can be self-directed and taken on the go. Once on the job, the learning does not stop.
We now provide agents more than 1,200 bite-sized videos for anytime, anywhere learning and sales enablement. Agents also benefit from enhanced coaching from their leaders, thousands of whom are attending our monthly webinars on agency leadership. Future Ready is already producing results. Recruitment was strong in 2020, with 118,000 new agents joining our wholly owned businesses. Those agents taking our targeted learning programs are 10 times more productive than previous cohorts. MDRT is in our DNA now more than ever, with qualifiers at an all-time high of 13,200 and in the first quarter of 2021, around 600,000 leads from Pulse users generated $70 million of APE. Make no mistake, our agency remains core to our strategy. Together with our bank partners, they provide the advice that our customers have come to expect from channels tied to Prudential.
In the last five years, our customers have rewarded us with top three positions in nine of 13 life markets, which has led us to the doubling of our embedded value and of our assets under management. These numbers are a testament to the quality of our execution. Last year was disruptive, and like everyone else, we had to adapt, but the fundamentals of our business were already strong, and we have strengthened them further with continued investment in our channels, products, and digital capabilities. This is what underpinned the sequential recovery that we saw last year, which continued into the first quarter of 2021. Mark will cover the first quarter results later in the context of our broader financial performance. That's just a snapshot of our current performance and capabilities as they relate to China, India, Pulse, and agency.
There is a lot more color on these, as well as on a broader range of topics from across our markets in the showcase videos uploaded last week. So in conclusion, we have been busy over the last few years improving Prudential's strengths and adding new ones. Through all this change, we have found a renewed sense of purpose, which is to help people get the most out of life. Our objectives are clear, and we aim to deliver them in a sustainable and socially responsible way. We have rallied our people to focus on three strategic themes of delivering, digitizing, humanizing, and to implement the nine growth initiatives that underpin them.
With 12 years at Prudential and now in my fifth year here in Asia, I never cease to be inspired by the talent and passion of our people, and I know that together with our unique strengths and recent investments, our best years are ahead of us. Thank you. I will now hand you over to Mark.
Hi, I'm Mark FitzPatrick, Group CFO and COO of Prudential, and I'm delighted to be talking with you today. You have heard Mike describe how we have transformed the business in recent years and highlight the exciting growth opportunities ahead. My presentation will focus on how our strategy and delivery translates into growing shareholder value. Any truly sustainable growth business needs to be managed through a dashboard of metrics that balances value, cash, new business, and profitability. This slide shows how those core metrics translate into a 10-year scorecard.
As Mike said earlier, it's very rare in a sector for a company to be able to deliver such consistent, broad-based growth over such a long period. This, of course, has been a period characterized by volatile markets and the effect of the pandemic. Today, I want to explain how we drive long-term growth that creates value for shareholders, and I will touch on each of these financial metrics as I do so. In common with our peers, the core metric we use to measure value creation is embedded value. This represents our net assets plus the present value of the expected future cash flows to shareholders from business we have already written. As a proxy for shareholder value, embedded value is a key metric in the day-to-day management and decision-making in our life insurance businesses, and it's a significant component of our long-term incentive plans.
Our focus is to deliver double-digit growth in embedded value per share over time. Now, we use the internationally recognized European Embedded Value basis, which is a granular and very transparent methodology with economic assumptions set actively to reflect observed market conditions and with appropriate risk adjustments for the products we write. We have provided a video and more detailed slide pack on embedded value, which you can access in the library of additional materials that accompanies this investor conference. As shown on the right of this slide, our Asia embedded value has more than doubled since 2015 to $44.2 billion at the end of 2020, reflecting the profitable growth in our portfolio. Since embedded value does not apply to asset management, Eastspring is only included in this chart at its net asset value, which was $1.1 billion at full year 2020.
However, asset management earnings have grown on average at 10% per annum since 2015, reaching $283 million in 2020. Now, key to delivering growth in embedded value is the way we actively manage our product portfolio and the way in which we allocate with discipline your capital to shareholders. I will explain a bit more about both of these themes in a moment. The cash flows we expect to generate from our existing $42.8 billion of Asia EV are highly predictable. This predictability is explained in part by the pie chart on the left, which shows that almost two-thirds of our embedded value comes from health and protection, or H&P. This is a business which is highly valued by consumers seeking to reduce their out-of-pocket health expenditure, as well as the very real financial jeopardy associated with the family breadwinner's ill health or death.
Shareholders benefit too because health and protection is also regular premium business, making for high-quality income, and it also reduces our sensitivity to market risk. The next chart shows the key elements of our Asia life embedded value, which comprises $5.3 billion of free surplus, which is the net assets in excess of the capital required to support existing businesses, and $37.5 billion of in-force value and locked-in capital, which will monetize and be released over the life of the business. On the right, you can see how the $37.5 billion of discounted value is expected to emerge over time into $59.1 billion of undiscounted cash flows over the next 40 years. Even in the second half of the 2050s, our existing business would still generate around $1 billion of annual surplus before any contribution from new business.
Our confidence in delivering these cash flows is also founded in our very cautious approach to assumption setting. Historically, we have outperformed our EV assumptions with positive operating experience variances of around $3 billion and positive investment variances of around $2.5 billion over the past five years. As we have done historically, we will continue to publish our EV monetization profiles every year so that you can track our delivery against them over time. This slide demonstrates how our powerful new business engine has attributes that very few businesses in any sector can replicate. Our disciplined approach to allocating capital generates a virtuous circle. At the top of the circle, we invest capital to write products with high rates of return and very short payback periods.
At the bottom of the circle, we manage our operations and balance sheet efficiently so that the shareholder value created from our products monetizes as expected. This monetization creates new capital on the left of the circle, which can be reinvested into writing more new business. You can see on the right-hand side of the slide why we have increased our focus on writing a large proportion of H&P products in recent years. These products meet growing customer needs while generating returns that are relatively insensitive to markets. Health and protection margins are on average almost 20% of premiums, four times higher than for savings products. This reflects the higher underwriting risk that we take on behalf of consumers and the higher capital we commit, and play to our strengths of careful risk selection, claims efficiency, and underwriting skill.
Another example of our differentiated product mix is our UK-style with-profits savings product, which provides smoothed investment returns for customers supported by with-profits estate, which provides the capital, thereby making this product very challenging for competitors to replicate. Our expertise in product design and pricing, as well as in distribution, is a critical competitive advantage. We created and refreshed 175 new products in 2020, ensuring we are evolving to meet customer needs and achieved a higher health and protection mix in 2020 in seven of our markets. In Singapore, for example, we launched PRUActive Protect, a customizable critical illness plan that provides a lump sum payout on diagnosis of 37 critical illnesses and is flexible so coverage can be added when the customer's needs, priorities, and budgets grow.
In Thailand, our flexible PRUHealth Super Strong product allows customers to select coverage based on their insurance needs and provides access to round-the-clock emergency medical services, providing our Thai customers with protection and peace of mind. This continued innovation and refinement to our product set helps to contribute to high risk-adjusted returns for shareholders. The portfolio of new business sold across Asia and Africa generates IRRs of more than 35% and returns the invested shareholder capital within three years for reinvestment into further new business. While organic investment in new business is our first priority, focused investment in inorganic opportunity allows us to further enhance value. Since 2013, we have committed almost $10 billion of capital to support growth in Asia, including around $5 billion of inorganic investment to grow our distribution reach and to build digital capability.
You'll have seen examples of this enhanced capability in our markets through the Investor Day videos, including, for example, our enhanced opportunities in Thailand as a result of recent inorganic investment. It's this continual cycle of profitable investment in new business which allows us to achieve a high growth in embedded value. Here too, we have a strong track record, with an NBP growth having averaged 8% over the last 10 years. On the left of the slide, you can see how new business profit is supported by our high concentration of regular premium business, our weighting towards health and protection, and our high level of customer retention. When you look at the transformation that's going on in Prudential, including, for example, new value-added services via Pulse, moving to straight-through claims processing, and agent training, these developments all build customer engagement, loyalty, retention, and in turn, NBP and embedded value.
As you can see on the chart, over the five years since 2015, two-thirds of our increase in embedded value, or $15 billion, has been created from new business over that period. And this is in addition to the expected return, which is a natural growth in embedded value created as the backbook monetizes and the discount unwinds, and then the impact of positive experience variances I mentioned earlier. This slide shows how our strategy and disciplined execution drives growth. Put simply, our high-quality in-force life portfolio delivers highly predictable cash flows. We then reinvest these cash flows at attractive returns. Over time, these new business profits monetize, driving growth in our free surplus and increasing our capacity to further reinvest. And this is our growth engine.
To put some numbers on this, we expected $8.1 billion of free surplus to emerge over the six years to 2020, based on our published EV monetization profile. This is a sum of the blue parts of the columns in the charts on the left. When added to the cash flows expected to emerge from each tranche of new business since 2015, namely the light and lighter shades of pink, in total, we expected $11.6 billion of free surplus to emerge over the period. Adding asset management earnings and positive operating experience variances, $14 billion of free surplus was actually generated over the period. The $1 billion of positive operating experience variances, therefore, increased our surplus generation by about 9% compared to our expectations.
From this $14 billion of free surplus generated, we reinvested $3.7 billion to write organic new business, which created the $15 billion of NBP I highlighted earlier. In other words, for every dollar reinvested in new business, we added four dollars of value. The balance of free surplus generated was used for inorganic investment to cover central costs and for dividend payments, and also retained in our businesses to provide additional resilience. This really demonstrates our capital management framework in action. It shows the benefits of writing business that is low strain, with high risk-adjusted returns and a very rapid payback. Every year, we invest in new business to grow embedded value, which ultimately monetizes into free surplus, which can then be reinvested to create compounding growth.
IFRS operating profit provides a measure of how our shareholder value creation converts over time into earnings and is therefore another important metric. Our Asia IFRS operating profit has grown by 13% on average since 2015. As with embedded value, the benefit of our product mix is to create resilient IFRS earnings, which are relatively insensitive to market conditions. 79% of our 2020 Asia insurance operating earnings were generated from margins we make from underwriting insurance risk, primarily mortality and morbidity. Growth in these profits will mainly be driven by growth in our H&P portfolio. Overall, for a growth business such as Prudential, IFRS earnings are a lagging indicator of the value we generate from writing new business. As an example, while our with-profits business makes a significant contribution to our total embedded value, the corresponding IFRS earnings are a very small proportion of our total earnings.
This is because, for our with-profits business, most of the shareholder profit is realized at the end of the policy term when policyholders receive their terminal bonuses, which creates a very long-dated IFRS profit profile. That is why we continue to focus on EV as the key measure of value creation while also producing growing earnings. This slide demonstrates the diversification in our Pan-Asia franchise. As you can see, our sales are broad-based across the six segments shown in the chart, which represent our 13 Asia life markets as well as our nascent Africa markets. Our existing in-force portfolio is also very well diversified, both on an IFRS earnings basis and on an embedded value basis. This diversification helps us to deliver consistent shareholder returns throughout market cycles. As I mentioned earlier, rigorous capital and balance sheet management is a key component of our capital management framework.
The Hong Kong Insurance Authority is our group regulator and officially designated Prudential as being subject to its new Group-wide Supervisory framework, or GWS framework, on the 14th of May. Our balance sheet is well positioned as we move on to the new GWS framework. Under our Local Capital Summation Method, or LCSM, we entered the first quarter with the shareholder cover ratio, excluding the US, of 331%. We anticipate this would increase by around 50 percentage points to 381% once our senior debt is grandfathered under the GWS regime, which is subject to confirmation by the HKIA. Our updated LCSM sensitivities are illustrated on the right-hand chart. These are shown on a pro forma basis, excluding the US, and show the resilience of our Asia balance sheet to severe market stresses.
We want to ensure we are well positioned to take advantage of the Asia growth opportunities ahead of us. As we have previously announced, we are considering a potential equity raise of $2.5-$3 billion following the completion of the Jackson demerger in order to increase our financial flexibility. We are targeting a 20%-25% Moody's total leverage ratio over the medium term, and we have $2.25 billion of relatively high coupon debt, which will be past first call dates by the end of July. If we were to redeem this debt towards the end of this year or early next, annual interest costs would reduce by about $125 million per annum over that time.
In addition to reducing debt servicing costs, as I highlighted at the prelims, we have reduced central costs by $180 million since 2018, and we expect to reduce them by a further $70 million by 2023. We will continue to review the timings of these further cost savings following the completion of the US demerger. However, temporary restructuring costs remain elevated, mainly due to IFRS 17 implementation and the costs of aligning our core functions and processes to support growth. The positive long-term trends I've described are all evident in our results for the first quarter of this year, which we reported on May 13th. Asia and Africa new business APE sales were up 14%, while new business profits were up 21% compared with the first quarter of 2020, reflecting our continued focus on the quality of sales.
This growth was despite lower sales in Hong Kong, where ongoing border restrictions continue to limit severely cross-border business from China. Excluding Hong Kong, APE sales were up 35% and new business profit up 64%, and I'm pleased that we continue to build on the momentum established over the third and fourth quarters of 2020, with 2021 quarter one sales 4% above those in the fourth quarter of last year, despite a number of our markets continuing to experience significant COVID-related disruption. In the first quarter of 2021, our China joint venture was our largest business in terms of APE sales and new business profit. Our multi-channel model continues to perform well, with all channels delivering growth. APE sales through our bank partners were 18% higher. Agency sales also grew at a high single-digit rate, with eight markets reporting year-on-year growth.
We have continued the build-out of our digital capabilities led by Pulse, our health and wellness platform. APE sales generated through Pulse represented around 9% of our first quarter 2021 APE in the markets where Pulse is available. Our focus on quality is evident by the fact that regular premium sales were up double digit, health and protection sales were also up double digit beating the sales levels achieved in every quarter last year, and customer retention held at 97% in the first quarter. Now, Mike spoke earlier about the structural operations and the cultural transformation of Prudential over the past few years. All of this has supported our financial track record with strong growth across our sales, earnings, cash, and value metrics. The capital dynamics of the group remain distinctive to Prudential. We are allocating capital and reinvesting for growth.
We are focused on the quality of the new business that we are adding year- after- year, which results in strong compounding capital generation supported by our strong balance sheet, and as we look to the future, we see large-scale new opportunities emerging. We will help customers get the most out of life while at the same time aiming to deliver high-risk-adjusted returns for shareholders. In China, we have developed multiple ways of developing our large and growing Hong Kong and mainland businesses, which collectively deliver annual profits of over $1 billion. In India, there are opportunities to deepen participation in a market where there is a $16.5 trillion protection gap and to play a leading role in the expansion of the mutual fund investor base, which is expected to more than triple by 2030.
In Southeast Asia, there are multiple opportunities to broaden what we offer to consumers, particularly in the two largest markets, Indonesia and Thailand. In health, there are more ways in which we can close the $1.8 trillion health and protection gap while still maintaining our rigorous approach to capital allocation. In wealth, with judicious investment, Prudential and Eastspring brands have the right to win in the Asian savings market, which is forecast to grow at a CAGR of almost 12% between 2020 and 2025. Today, we have 17 million customers, but that means there are still over 4 billion people in our Asia and Africa markets who have yet to become our customers. Each of these people have health, wealth, and protection needs that we can serve while delivering value to shareholders. Thank you very much for watching.
I'd now like to introduce our Q&A session, where we're being joined by Mike Wells, Nic Nicandrou, Mark FitzPatrick, James Turner, and Ben Bulmer. The lines are now open, so callers, please dial in with your question. And for everyone else who prefers to type in, you can put your question into the Q&A function on the event website. Now, to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to ask your question during this Q&A, can we ask you to keep your questions brief? Thank you very much. And with that, let's go now to our first question. It comes from Kailesh Mistry from HSBC. Kailesh asks us this: Other than delivering double-digit EV per share growth and dividend growth in line with Asia cash generation, are there any other financial targets, for example, VNB, IFRS, OPAT, cash flow? Mike Wells?
I think, Kailesh, we've given today some indications of our views of where the structural growth is in the organization. And I don't want to, you know, I think the targets are effective in giving you a clear view of where we're going, but too many targets, I think, start defining the strategic optionality of the group. You know, so I think we've given you clear indications of what we can and can't do per market. And some of those metrics we're talking about are correlated highly to the forecast that we've given, I think, so far. So we're going to leave the targets we have in place. Again, highly confident in the growth of all of our metrics. And I think we've demonstrated over the last decade plus our ability to grow all these metrics in parallel. And that's one of the core capabilities of the group.
So let's go now to our next question. We have a live caller. It's Andrew Crean. Andrew, please can you tell us which company you represent? And then your question, please.
Good morning. It's Andrew Crean at Autonomous. Questions I have are, firstly, there's a relatively slow monetization of value into cash each year, which I think is related to the proportion of with-profits business, which is back-end loaded. Could you say whether, over the next five years, you would expect an accelerated level of cash monetization as you change the product portfolio? And secondly, I think the importance of India has increased in terms of your perceptions. You only own 22% of the life business. Are there plans to increase that? And do you currently have much control over the business?
Sorry, Andrew, I'll start that, then I'll give it to Mark on the financial piece.
I think on India, you've seen structural changes in monetary policy there, which we think long-term has some impact on saving behavior. So, you know, historically, it was cash, gold, real estate, and the growth of unit-linked and other products, and I think the growth of the life business, you know, is clearly emerging and clearly underserved at this point in the market. So we continue to watch that space very carefully. From a structural point of view, to your question on ownership, like many of the other things we do, it gives us opportunities that if there was a period of time where we thought that was appropriate to increase, we have that option, but that's also true of our CITIC joint venture. That's true of our Takaful businesses, the value chain and Pulse.
You know, one of the unique things about Prudential is not only do we have an ongoing effective growing business and growing backbook, but we also have optionality that other firms don't have the same call on, if you will. Mark, do you want to talk about the metric question?
Sure. Andrew, hi. Good morning. So in terms of the element around the monetization, as you quite rightly say, with profits is a very, very important component of that. And one of the things through the EV video and slides for today's session, you would have seen that 35% of the effective return to shareholders, policyholders, is effectively during regular bonuses, terminal bonuses, 65%. So it is massively back-end loaded in terms of where we are. So we've provided the monetization profile in the slides.
We expect it to grow in line with cohorts of new business, but really focusing on growing EV as a whole, and effectively, I think as we change our product mix, we'd expect to see that evolve over time, but not going to be able to commit to anything at this stage in terms of any acceleration. Effectively, new business investment that we make every year is effectively a use of our cash flow, and as I mentioned in the video snippet earlier on, for every dollar that we have invested, we've created $4 of new business profit.
Thank you. Great.
Thank you very much to Andrew Crean for your question.
Let's move to our next caller. We're joined now by Farooq Hanif. Farooq, please can you identify your company and then your question?
Hello, everybody. I hope you can hear me. This is Farooq Hanif from Credit Suisse.
Firstly, on China, I noticed in the chart that you showed of China's new business by province group, that the very, very early provinces that you entered into are seeing a decline in sales. And I just wonder if that's correct and what might be driving that. Secondly, on China, in terms of margin, it seems to me that what you're saying is that there could be further margin expansion from market share growth in some of the provinces as you move more towards agency, but also you just grow volume. Are you expecting, therefore, this margin in China to grow even further? And last question is on Pulse. Do you have any evidence that Pulse is generating for the new customers, is generating greater penetration into customers that have normally not been customers of Prudential? So if you could share maybe in Indonesia as an example. Thank you.
Nic, do you want to address those, please?
Okay. Good morning, Farooq. I didn't quite catch the first question. If the question was around the development of APE between the various clusters, I mean, clearly China was disrupted last year. So what drove the relative increase, whether you were looking at the early cohorts versus the late cohorts or the clusters within that, what drove that was the mix that's coming from each, from bank or agency. Agency was more disrupted. So in those segments or those cohorts where bank is a bigger contributor, that gave a positive impact on the 2020 flows. And of course, as we're very new in some of the more recent provinces, those continue to be on a growth path.
It's more to do with product mix within each cohort or within each cluster and more to do with the maturity, if you like, of the business that we have there. I mean, your question on margin, margin is always a function of the relative growth of channel. I've said before that the bank channel is predominantly 99% of what we sold in Q1 and last year was savings products, you know, regular premium long-tenured saving products. But clearly, they will never have the same margin as health and protection, which is an agency-sold product. So it will depend on which channel they're coming from and also will depend on the mix within that channel. Is there further opportunity to increase it? Yes, there is. There are scale economies. The productivity of our agents in some of the more recent provinces and city entries will improve.
As they become more mature and more experienced, the productivity and product mix within that will improve, so there is further runway there. On Pulse, it's just too early to say in our development of the tool whether the loyalty of a customer coming in, be it in terms of length that they stay with us or indeed whether the propensity to buy a second and a third product, it's just too early to say. These are hypotheses that we have, but we're only 21 months in, so we don't have enough information, certainly statistically valid information. Back to you, Mike. Farooq, the majority of the clients coming in at Pulse are new to Prudential, to the other part of your question, so that is expanding the households that we're reaching into.
Okay. Great. Thank you very much, Farooq, for your question.
We're approaching the halfway point in this management live Q&A session. So please dial in or put your questions into the Q&A function. We've got another question over here, and it comes from Dominic O'Mahony from BNP Paribas. Dominic asks you this: Where is the PCA capital allocated between the geographies? Like many investors, I calculate the COE based on the weighted average COE by geographic segment, building up from the local risk-free rate. And this varies considerably across your markets. That's a question from Dominic. Mark, would you like to take that one, please?
Sure. So Dominic, there are many different ways in terms of which we look at our capital and at our return on capital. You would have seen in the additional segment information we gave with our prelims earlier this year in terms of the extra analysis around Asia.
So you can expect to see a little bit more of that. And we gave that predominantly on an EV split as well as an IFRS. So in terms of the way that we ultimately look at capital, look at return of capital, EV is a very, very important lens to us. And you would have seen as well in terms of the way that we have changed our AIP and our LTIPs, also a greater focus in terms of EV. So I would point you in terms of the additional EV disclosure that we've provided in terms of the segments and in terms of the element of the capital and the operating profitability and performance of the main segments. And as I said, during the course of the half year and the full year, we'll be providing further information and further disclosure around that.
So thank you very much to Dominic for your question.
We've got a live caller coming in now, and it's Greig Paterson . Greig, if you can tell us which company you're from, and then please put your question to our management panel.
Morning, everyone. Can you hear me? It's Greig Paterson from KBW. Yeah. Three questions. One is, Mark, you referenced your embedded value basis. I was wondering how you think your basis differs from the other Asian insurers. Question one. The second one is, Nic, in terms of the Pulse rollout, the 9% in the first quarter, can you tell us just so we can get a feel where it's been rolled out completely and where it hasn't? Which countries were contributing the most to the 9% in the first quarter? And then in terms of Pulse margins, if my memory is correct, Pulse products typically have lower margin.
Does that mean we're going to get margin compression as you roll out Pulse further into Asia and Africa? Thank you.
So Mark, do you want to start, please? Nic on the Pulse. And then maybe Ben, do you want to talk about the incremental effect of Pulse on margin?
So Greg, thanks for your question. Actually, Ben did a video and some slides which were uploaded earlier today, which you may not have seen, which actually talked to our embedded value in a little bit more color, gives a little bit of color in terms of some of the cash flows by some of the major product sets as well for some of the main markets. That'll hopefully give you a better sense of our embedded value.
Net-net, we believe embedded value is a very robust, transparent methodology which was introduced to address the shortcomings in traditional embedded value. We have explicit allowance for the time value of options and guarantees. It's very much a bottom-up approach that really reflects the product by product and the business and product mix of the products that we sell. And it's also very actuarial-based, which means that the interest rates at any moment in time that we draw our balance sheet and that we report on, we presume that those rates will persist into the future. So there's no kind of real assumption of mean reversion or anything like that. So we believe it's a robust process. We believe it's a very thorough, it's a very clearly understood process, and a very clearly understood metric that we report against.
But I think when you have a look at the video and you get a chance to have a look at some of the extra information that Ben and the team have shared in that video today, I'm very happy to pick up any further questions you may have. Great, so let's jump now to our next question. We have. Sorry, James. Nic, do you want to talk about the success for a second in Pulse in the first quarter? And then Ben, I think on margin, we're also part of Greg's questions.
Yes, Greg. You saw the increase in terms of the user base, greater number of registrations, importantly, more engagement mechanisms. And as I said in my speech earlier, it's really what Pulse is giving us is the ability to capture engagement and behavioral data. 20 gigabytes of data.
We roughly have about 280 pieces of data per user, per registrant, once they engage with a number of the activities. So we're trying to be a little more selective about the leads that we pass down. And we're looking to improve, if you like, the conversion ratio. And we have seen an improvement in that. At the same time, we're trying to bring more agents, unique agents that haven't yet used, have had a referral, a Pulse referral come to that in order to fulfill. So again, relative to the 34,000 agents last year, 15,000 just in the first quarter, just in the first quarter this year. And we're now trying to spread it across more of the market. So the contribution to your question was predominantly Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There were small numbers from elsewhere. But there's a lot more to come from everywhere.
Ben, over to you on the question of margin.
Thanks, Nic. Hi, Greg. I'll be brief. The majority of sales we've seen to date through Pulse are online to offline sales. So the margins really reflect those of the existing product set and the agency margins in the countries Nic's mentioned. So to get a feel for that, you can reference the margins of Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Back to you, Mike. Great.
So we will proceed now with the next question. We have a caller, and it is Ming Zhu. Ming, can you please tell us who you represent and what's your question?
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. This is Ming Zhu from Panmure Gordon. Three questions, please. First question is, could you just give some color in terms of you had a good Q1.
But since Q1, some of your Asian countries have gone back into full lockdown or increased restrictions. What's your outlook in terms of the remainder of the year? And have you done any preparations ahead for such things happening? And the second question, you talked about digital stabilization. And when would you see sort of the really full benefits coming through across Asia and Africa? And the third question is, is Asia also having a sort of rising inflation problem outside of Asia? And how have you actually priced or reserved accordingly for your health and protection product? Thank you.
Ming, thank you for those questions. On the health and protection products, we have the ability to reprice, again, subject to local market competition and also local market regulatory issues in some cases. So that's embedded in the product designs.
We also have product designs where the consumer benefits from low claims in certain markets. So they tend to be, to a great degree, self-managing of some of the inflationary costs related to them because we stay aligned with the consumers. But I think on speed to market, when markets are closed, Nic, do you want to give some color on that? And I think on the digitization part of your question, the benefits are now. I mean, I hope the takeaway from the meetings is that this is not an ambition for Prudential. This is where we are in various markets. We've been working on reducing our marginal costs. We've been investing heavily to make sure that we capture the benefits of scale. And we have more work to do on that.
And I think if we were here 10 years from now, we'll still have more work to do on that, to be clear, because there's new technologies and new ways to get the clients and new efficiencies that we always want to be evolving into the business. But we are seeing incrementally improvements in just about every area of the business. And I think the biggest thing that I've seen in 26 years here now is the group's ability to share across markets so we don't have to recreate things over and over again, even in-house, is really creating an adoption rate that we've just not had historically. I think our management team down to the very local level in the most entry-level operational roles now sees the benefit of this. So there's a real alignment in how people are addressing it.
But Nic, do you want to talk a bit about our ability to deal with an open or closed market and some of the challenges we see as COVID comes in and out of our Asian markets?
Will do, Mike. I mean, we put some information on the website to update you using our usual chart, the chart that we've used before on the level of opening up or re-lockdown in many of the markets. It is true that over the last five, six weeks, there has been more severe, another spike, if you like, in a number of these markets. And even since we put up the chart last Friday, we saw that Malaysia has gone into full lockdown for the next two weeks. So Taiwan is worse than it was during Q1. Malaysia is on the list. Vietnam, Thailand. So those are some of the markets.
Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia have been on a constant upswing curve. The only markets which are completely normal at the moment are China and Hong Kong other than for the border. Inevitably, there will be some disruption, but we're better equipped than we were this time last year. In fact, at any point in the course of 2020, we now have the capability to use virtual technology to do remote sales. In fact, the remote sales through both channels, both banks and the agency, were 30% for agency, 33% for banks. They were higher in the first quarter than what we saw in the full year.
Last year, we had the ability to access and engage with customers through Pulse in a way that we didn't a year ago as we were still launching many of the products, many of the services in those markets. And we're just used to the rhythm of doing this now. So that will act as a mitigant. All these effects will be short-lived. And really, what today is about and really what all the videos were about is showcasing the new capabilities that we're bringing online that will stand the test of time. So now we have more tools to face into the challenging environment through all the peaks and troughs. And fundamentally, we're constructing a much more robust and a stronger business.
And Ming, a lot of those tools were developed last year during a much more severe lockdown for us across our region, almost 100% of our employees locked down. So from a cultural point of view, to highlight earlier, you're seeing tremendous productivity regardless of the office structure we're working under.
Great. So let's move on to our next question. And before we do, a very gentle reminder that we have dedicated time coming up in our markets and capabilities panels where you'll also be able to put your questions specifically on Pulse. So that's all still coming up ahead, and we'll have time for you for that. I think we've got time here in this management Q&A for possibly one more question. And panelists, this is a three-part question coming from Ashik Musaddi. So Ashik says, "May I ask three questions?" This is the first one.
Indonesia has very high protection and UL element in its products, but it has very low EV, whereas Hong Kong has very, very high EV. How do we think about the difference between the two? That's the first question. The second question from Ashik is this: Can you please provide examples of the products you have in Hong Kong and highlight what drives such high H&P EV from Hong Kong? And the third question from Ashik is this: How are you thinking about India now, given you haven't increased your stake? Do you want to sell down out of India, or do you want to maintain/increase? Mike.
We've got seconds to do this one, Ashik. Apologies for the fast answer. On India, we don't comment on strategic M&A, which a sell down or an increase in our stake would be.
But obviously, it's an opportunity set that we have that's unique to us versus peers. Nic, did you want to quickly comment on the product differential and the treatment of them?
Okay. On the product differential, in the end, whether it's a unit-linked chassis or a with-profit chassis, it's a mechanism to attach riders and offer protection to customers' whole of life. It's just that the riders in Hong Kong, both in terms of sophistication, both in terms of case size, are much higher than they are in Indonesia. So case size and richness of cover is much higher. And that really is what accounts for the difference in margin. Multiple products in Hong Kong, as we've been expanding our product range from beyond educational savings with protection riders to standalone medical, standalone critical illness. Now we have an annuity product.
So we are spanning the entire need analysis, but Lilian and Derek will join us in the next session. So perhaps we have an opportunity to expand further on that answer.
Great. I think we've covered that question from Ashik. Ashik, thanks very much for asking that. That wraps up our panel. So thank you for your questions. And we also thank Mike, Mark, Nic, James, and Ben for being here with us. There are going to be several opportunities through this investor day event for you to ask questions during the course of our time together. And we're going to come back on this later. But first, we're going to take a very quick break. And we ask you to be back at your monitors at 7:45 P.M. Hong Kong time. That's 45 minutes past the hour where you are. We're very grateful, and we'll see you shortly.
Welcome back to our event. You just heard Mike and Mark talk about how we have been transforming Prudential structurally, operationally, and culturally. I walked you through how we are continuing this work through our strategic themes of delivering, digitizing, and humanizing. We would now like to hear from you. This is our first of two panels, which is focused on markets and linked to the theme of delivering. The second panel will delve into capabilities, which link to the themes of digitizing and humanizing. Before we get into your questions on markets, I would like to take a few minutes to frame the discussion and to introduce the panel members. I will briefly touch on three areas. First, our business in China and Hong Kong. Second, our joint ventures in India. And third, our markets in Southeast Asia and Africa.
So firstly, on China, having steadily and deliberately gained access to most of this market, our imperative has become one of execution. This involves going deeper where we are already present, expanding agency, adding new relationships, and continuing to broaden our product offering. As you would have seen in our video, our approach is aligned with the city cluster model in China's 14th Five-Year Plan, which focuses on increasing the economic potential of the three areas around Beijing, Shanghai, and the Greater Bay Area. Lilian leads our engagement in China, chairs the board in Hong Kong, and oversees the transferring of solutions between all our markets as they relate to agency, partnership distribution, and products.
She will join Derek Yung, CEO of Prudential Hong Kong, in taking your questions on our China and Hong Kong businesses, as well as how we're planning to leverage synergies between Hong Kong and the broader Greater Bay Area as cross-border sales are further liberalized. Secondly, in India, our life JV has sizable growth ambitions, as evidenced by its objective to double the 2019 NBP in three to four years, but the opportunities extend beyond this time frame, given low protection coverage in this market and the absence of retirement savings, areas in which Prudential can provide considerable expertise. The India asset management business has scaled and a proven track record of innovation, having led the market in hybrid strategies and having been among the first to embrace digital distribution. N.S. Kannan is the CEO of ICICI Prudential Life, and Nimesh Shah is the CEO of ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company.
They can take questions on how both companies are poised for growth, as well as the enabling role that Prudential plays in the partnership. Thirdly, on Southeast Asia, as Mike said, we have the opportunity to broaden our offerings, enhance our distribution, and deliver personalized solutions to a broader set of customer segments, particularly in the largest economies. Indonesia is a significant market for us here, and Jens Reisch, our local CEO, can provide insights on the transformation of this business. He has overseen the upgrading of agency capabilities, the introduction of new digital routes to market, and the expansion of our product set that now appeals to broader segments, including mid-income and SMEs.
In Thailand, we have invested $1.2 billion in the last few years, giving us the means to reach a top two position in the fast-growing life business bank channel and a top three position in asset management. Robin Spencer is the CEO in Thailand, and he can speak to our expanding partnerships as well as the holistic propositions we will offer, including joint offerings between our life and asset management businesses. Wilf Blackburn was appointed as regional CEO with a clear remit to unlock untapped potential in our smaller growth markets. He can field questions on Vietnam, where he was once our CEO, and on the Philippines, where we have reached the number one ranking in 2020, and on Africa, where we have built eight businesses over the last seven years. In fact, Wilf is joining us today from Lagos in Nigeria.
Without further ado, let us take your questions.
Welcome back to our studio, Nic, and everyone on screen in this panel discussion. May I suggest that we jump straight into our Q&A? The lines are now open, so you can call in or type in your questions in the Q&A function on the event website. Now, to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to ask your question, may I suggest that you keep your questions brief? Thank you. And let's go to our first question. It's been an online question from Blair Stewart from Bank of America. Blair asks the panel this: How can you improve H&P sales through banks in Thailand, which have proved challenging in the past? What has changed? Thank you, Blair, for your question. I will ask Robin Spencer to address it.
Hi, Blair. Thanks for the question.
In Thailand, we've got two key health and protection segments. The first is our credit life book, where, in particular, TTB have a really strong business, and I expect to see improvement from that as the economy strengthens after COVID. Obviously, I think your question largely is around the individual health and protection coverage, where, although we have seen some improvement in 2020 versus last year, with about a 6% improvement from 11% to 17%, I think there's definitely room for improvement and to penetrate the customer segments within the bank. I think at the heart of your question, there's probably two or three areas that we absolutely need to dial up or to change, and it comes down to alignment of strategy, alignment of rewards, and making sure the bank sellers truly believe in the products that they're selling, so let me just cover those off quickly.
Hopefully, you had an opportunity of watching the Thai video, where actually the CEO of TTB shares his own view about the market and the opportunities, and one of those key areas is actually healthcare. They have both from a social as well as commercial perspective, a real desire to drive the health business. The second thing is the financial alignment. Both the TTB and the UOB contracts recently signed both have meaningful incentives to reward the banks and its sellers for higher health and protection production. From an operational perspective, as we've entered into 2021, we've actually established a specialist health and protection unit. We've deployed that into the field. Their job is to not only help the bank sellers to understand the products better, but also from a sales advisory perspective, to help with large case support.
We're also making it easier for our bank sellers and customers by simplifying the underwriting journey, reducing the number of medical questions, increasing GIO products, and extending, where possible, the sum assured for our high net worth clients in particular. This has all been done in the last nine months. A couple of final areas I've just touched on. The customers and sellers have to be absolutely convinced about our ability to serve the customers. There's an awful lot of work going into ensuring that our claims handling is slicker. It's down from four and a half days to two and a half days in 2020. Now 65% of all of our claims reimbursement are cashless. I think there's one other area that I think is critical that hopefully, again, you have the opportunity to watch on the video.
We're really focused on the different customer segments here in Thailand and really trying to build products which are right for the high net worth, the affluent, the middle income, and the mass markets. I'd say we've done a pretty good job on high net worth and affluent. I'd say there's more to do in the middle income and mass segments, particularly as those are the segments that we really wanted to penetrate by using new digital means. So, Blair, unfortunately, no silver bullet, but a lot of things going on to drive it up. And we hope to somewhere in the region of double the health and protection penetration over the next three to five years. Thanks very much, Blair, for your question.
We've got another question coming in this time from Kailash Mistry at HSBC.
Kailash asks the panel this: Thank you for the additional detail on the operations. There's interesting information on the business split by clusters, but how is VNB split between these? That is, Beijing, Shanghai, Greater Bay Area, and others.
Kailash, I'll take that question if I may. So, yes, we've given you the split. It's by reference to gross written premiums. Clearly, that reflects not only the new business that we write, but also the in-force business. The contribution from in-force tends to be bigger from the places like Beijing and GBA, where we've been longer. So the VNB split will be correlated to APE, and it'll be equal weighted between GBA, Beijing on the one hand, and Shanghai and the rest of China on the other hand. Next question. Great. Let's go to the next one. Thanks very much to Kailash for that.
We have a question now from Greig Paterson. Nic, Greig asks this: African margin lower than other countries. Why is this? Thank you, Greig. Over to you, Will.
Yeah, thanks for the question, Greig. I mean, firstly, we're enormously excited about the prospects for Africa over the medium to long term. To your question about margins, we do see that Africa displays many of the characteristics that we've experienced in Asia and maybe in a more extreme form. So the very low insurance penetration rate, today it's about half that in Africa that it is in Asia. On the other hand, the rapidly growing population, and over the next 15 years, will grow at double the rate in Africa as Asia. There's a huge population. It's a young, very young population in Africa. It's aging. The middle class is growing, and it's urbanizing.
And so what we're seeing is many of the characteristics that have played out in Asia will also play out in Africa. We've been investing, as you've seen in the video, in eight markets over the last few years, accessing around 427 million people now in the eight countries. That's around 20% of the population. But what we're seeing is many of the characteristics, the needs of people are the same. But to your point about margins, in respect of savings, yes, we've seen big emphasis on savings traditionally, but that's shifting more into the health and protection space where we see the higher margins. Even from last year to this year, we've gone from less than half to more than half of our portfolio, of our APE coming from savings.
With that, although our sales have quadrupled in the last four years, the NBP has grown by a factor of six times, consistent with the move towards the higher margins that we're experiencing coming through in Africa. It's not a function of distribution mix, particularly in Africa. We're fairly broadly based: a mix of a third, a third, a third between the traditional agency channels and another third in bancassurance, and a third more in the new forms of distribution, including the SME sector. Over time, the market will grow. The working-age population in Africa represents around 15% of that on the planet today. It'll be a quarter by the middle of the century and more than 40% by the end of the century. But what we're also seeing is that the millennials are growing in number very, very fast, and they're very attracted to the higher margins.
Is that holding you? Thank you. Thank you, Will. So just to reiterate what Will said, it's a function of mix. 30% of the business is group. That's contributing to the margin, the overall margin being lower. And of course, the duration of the contracts that we write in Africa today tend to be shorter than what you see in Asia. Asia, a lot of the products are whole of life. But it will improve as we push a greater, higher, as Will said, higher mix of health and protection, longer savings products, and as the individual part of the business expands relative to group.
James. Thank you very much, Nic. And thank you also to Greg for your question. Panelists, your next question comes from Farooq Hanif, and it's on Indonesia. Indonesia, Farooq says, has recently disappointed in terms of sales growth.
What are the products and potential inorganic strategy that could change this? Thank you, Farooq, for your question. Jens, over to you. Thanks for the question, Farooq. Yeah, in Indonesia, we have diversified in the past years very much our offerings to customers regarding new and more bite-sized offerings, not only in this pandemic, but actually already prior to that. And we have diversified our channels. I think to those of you who know Indonesia and the potential in Indonesia, we have been known, and we are a leading company in agency and unit-linked. And that has, I think, now a bit diversified that we also have traditional products. In this first quarter, we are now ranked number two for traditional products, where we never before actually have been very strong.
But we see a demand, and we see, I think, clearly a need for protection products, which we offer in a more bite-sized, whether it's digital, whether it's standalone protections. And we have also, I think, digitized our way of fulfilling, way of working, way of servicing, way of selling. We hope, of course, 2019, I have to say, was a great year where we grow faster than the market, and we saw, I think, great fruits. Of course, COVID, since the Q1 of last year, has impacted Indonesia. It was set. The country is still closed. We are still seeing, since Q2 last year, a minus GDP. Also, the market was last year minus. Q1 sees some recovery. But we will try, of course, to further, I think, utilize all of our innovations of the last years to basically harvest the opportunities.
About strategic focus areas, it's mainly bancassurance, where we are underrepresented. And I think we have recognized this. I think Mike and also Nic have mentioned this as potential strategic areas. And we are actively working to see whether there are market opportunities for new partnerships, for new collaborations, whether it's in Sharia, whether it's in conventional. I think there are some opportunities, and the bancassurance part is the most in need to basically catch up with the market share also of that line of business. Maybe back to you, Nic, or if you want to add anything. No, thank you, Jens. Let's go, James, to the next question. Nic, we have another question on Indonesia. And this time, it comes from Ashik Musaddi.
Ashik asks you this: Indonesia is key for Pru as it's one of the largest businesses in Asia, but Pru hasn't grown headline premiums in Indonesia for the past four to five years. What's the reason for that, and when is that expected to change?
Thank you, Ashik. I think Jens addressed a lot of the points or covered a lot of the points in response to that question. I mean, the reason it happened is that we were over-reliant between 2010 and 2015 in agency linked. That segment of the market wasn't growing. In fact, it was shrinking relative to bank, relative to traditional products, relative to group insurance. In 2017, 2018, when we did a review, we decided to broaden to cover in all these areas, clearly on banks.
As Jens said, we need to find a relationship with a mass market bank when one of these comes up for renewal, if possible, but in all the other areas, we've invested organically. We've improved our link proposition. We've added traditional products, and you saw the results of that or part of that in 2019, and then COVID hit, but we continue to retool the business, and whilst 2021 will probably be a transition year in Indonesia because large population and the rate of vaccination is fast, but the critical mass in terms of vaccination won't be achieved until later this year, perhaps early next year. But once we get through this year, the business is in a much stronger position, and once normality, whatever new normal looks like, is in a much better position to fly from there.
And the opportunities are immense in that market on a number of dimensions. And we still retain all our strengths and have added to them. So we are very optimistic about the rebound, as I said, as the country gets past the point of having dealt with COVID. James.
Thank you very much, Nic. Well, that question from Ashik on Indonesia gives us a quick reminder that you can dial in with your questions. So please do that. We've got some more time left in this markets panel. And of course, you can enter your questions through the Q&A function on the event website. That's what Abid Hussain has done. Abid has submitted a question online. And this time, it's on Hong Kong/China. Abid asks this: Can you explain the continuing motivation of mainland visitors to Hong Kong for the purpose of buying insurance policies and accessing private healthcare?
What will happen when the mainland catches up on health provisions? Okay, thank you for that question, Abid. Derek, over to you on the motivation of the mainland Chinese to buy in Hong Kong. And then maybe if you can hand off to Lilian to explain about some of the differences, if you like, between what a consumer in China can buy locally versus in Hong Kong, and how do we stay ahead of any leveling up of the offering. Yeah, thanks. Thank you, Nic. Thank you, Abid, for the question. And in fact, we have been asked for this particular area for many times. People coming over to Hong Kong to buy for a number of reasons. First, they can diversify their asset class, multi-currency, and the so-called services, professional services, be it the selling or the after-sale service that the Hong Kong agent can provide.
The overall system in Hong Kong that has also attracted the people coming over to buy. Not to mention, last but not least, is the claim experience that they can enjoy in Hong Kong. And as Lilian pointed out in the video, the MCV customer, they are really focusing on two particular areas. One is the healthcare. The second one is the childcare. In fact, the quality healthcare management in Hong Kong is still with the upper hand versus China, but not only versus China, but in fact, it's the best in class in the world right now. So a lot of people, they are coming over to enjoy the so-called healthcare management in Hong Kong. And with the H&P product that we can provide, a total solution for them and to support their expenses in spending the time in this quality healthcare management system.
Regarding the child kind of care, I think in Hong Kong, a lot of our products that can support the so-called education fund for the children to study overseas, and not to mention, I think about three days ago, the Chinese government has announced the three-child policy. That I believe will further push or drive the demand for healthcare. So through the information platform in Hong Kong and organized kind of a seminar by PHKL, people can come over to acquire those kind of information for their kids studying overseas and backed up by our product. I think that there is a huge opportunity in these particular two areas. Maybe I pass it over to Lilian, whether you can supplement on the demand from the MC V customers. Okay, thank you very much, Derek.
I think there's been a lot of cross-collaboration or cross-sharing, I think, amongst the two insurance industries on the health and protection-related products and provisions. And to an extent, you're right. I think our mainland Chinese insurers are constantly improving and innovating on the health-related insurance policies. But what will continue to attract mainland Chinese visitors into Hong Kong to purchase the Hong Kong version is that access to what still be seen as world-class quality health management care that I think Derek just described. So it's not so much the insurance provisions that is attracting MCV customers to go across to purchase, but I think it's more the healthcare quality that actually is available in Hong Kong. Now, obviously, there's a lot of catching up in China.
And obviously, as a Hong Kong health management, I think we need to continue to improve and get access, create that very well services for customers willing to come over. Thank you, Lilian. If I may add, if we look at the average case size for a critical illness product in China, it's around the CNY 6,000 mark versus the average case size of a critical illness product in Hong Kong, it's around the CNY 20,000 mark. Now, this tells you two things. It speaks to the one hand, perhaps the sophistication of the product in Hong Kong relative to China. And it also speaks to the fact that the higher end, the high net worth individuals within China, for all the reasons that both Derek and Lilian covered, have a preference to buy that product in Hong Kong.
So that gives you some extra color over and above what my colleagues have added. James. Nic, may we remain with China, please? Because Farooq Hanif has submitted another question online on this particular part of our planet. Farooq asks you this: Can you remind us of further potential province/regional growth potential in China? Strikes me that each province in China has the same GDP as an individual country outside of China. Thank you, Farooq, for your question. Lilian, over to you. Obviously, China is a huge country, as we know. I mean, our president in CPL has access to over 80% of the GDP, over 80%, and over 1 billion population. But I think, as you mentioned, each province is unique. And so our strategy is to make sure we optimize our strategy, our go-to-market strategy in each of the provinces that makes sense.
There's a lot of room. I mean, the latest stat is the health and protection gap in China is $800 billion. There's many runways to go. That's why when we describe, as you see in the video, is how we actually have shaped our different strategies depending on the clusters, whether it's Beijing cluster focusing more on the high net worth, using more protection-type products, and to Shanghai, where it's more the savvy business owner doing more the savings, wealth management platform. As well, I think it's the GBA area, where we believe is where the opportunity, especially for the younger generation. China just released the recent census, the 2020 census. It demonstrated a lot of the youthful populations or workforce is actually moving to the eastern provinces.
So the net gain into the eastern provinces where the GBA areas are is actually two-three points. I mean, two-three points in China, it's a lot of people and a lot of populations. So yes, to your point, I think we are in there. So that's why our multi-distribution platform, whether it's agency, bancas surance, and direct, and also focus on the SME, are all there depending on where our customers are. Thank you. Thank you, Lilian, for that. I mean, our focus as we move forward, just to add to Lilian's comments, is not about coloring in the map. Maybe we will want two more provinces, but it's about going deeper where we currently are. And a lot of the growth that you've seen over the last four or five years has come from penetrating further where we were.
We added 33 cities in the last four years alone. And we've added 20 new bank relationships across the provinces where we are in the last four or five years alone. And of course, added more agents and improved their productivity. So going deeper is really the priority from here. And of course, the three-cluster strategy also inferred that 60%-80% of the economic growth over the next 15 years is going to come predominantly from those areas. So we will follow the money in China. And yes, expand in anticipation of what may come from those additional provinces in the future. James, over to the next question. So Nic, we are at roughly the midway point in this session. So investors, please keep your questions coming in through the dial-in function or by writing your questions in with a focus on the markets panel.
Well, panelists, we've got another question online. And it's this: Thanks for the details on customer segments across many markets. In Indonesia, you provided an estimate of market share in HNW/affluence/mass market segment. I wonder if you've done an analysis on your EV or profit breakdown by customer segment. What is it today? And how would it evolve? Okay. Jens, do you want to have a go at answering this question? So 17%, we said, is our market share of high net worth, around 14% for mass, 2% for group. Maybe some directional color, please. Yeah, thanks for the question. I mean, Indonesia, traditionally, we have had, through agents and also through our banks, a fairly strong foothold in the upper market. But it has been largely served through our protection offerings where we are leading in Indonesia, whether it's health, critical illness, or protection.
There is a big opportunity at the moment, which is also on the investment side for high net worth. We have just launched not long ago Prestige by Prudential, which is our offering tailored and designed for our best customers. At the moment, we already identified 3,000, mostly in banks, but also in agency. I think the other opportunity, which is highlighted, is on the SME segment. We, I think, have the strongest leading brand. We have the leading distribution. I think we now are active since one and a half years to also offer employee benefit. We call it Business@Pulse . Our offering, basically, for SMEs in Indonesia, 64 million SMEs employing 121 million people. It is the backbone of the economy with 60% share, and it is underserved. I think here we have the unique opportunity with our agents being present in 150 cities.
But we have a fully, actually now, digital offering also in SME. So of course, margin's going to be different by various segments. And it's at the end, of course, adding up of different offerings to different segments. But most importantly, I think we have diversified and we are active in all the segments. Thank you for that, Jens. I mean, clearly, to express our—I mean, we know our MVP by segment. To express it as a percentage of the market, we need market information, and that's not readily available. But the profitability of what we do should be higher than the market because we concentrate on the high-quality end of that market. Nearly three quarters of the AP that we write is protection-oriented. Not many of the players in the industry do that.
And a very high proportion, depending on the quarter or the year, in the high 80s, 90% tends to be regular premium business. The vast majority of the market tends to be bank-driven single premium business, which is lower profitability. So overall, I would expect our share of the value pool on the sales that we make each year to be more than our share of AP.
Next question, James. Nic, may we speak about India next? Because we have a question that's been submitted by Farooq Hanif. Farooq says this: India is a fairly competitive market, and I believe the market leader, LIC, will be listing soon. What gives you confidence that you can widen the H&P ownership in India and address what has historically been a weak market? Thank you, Farooq, for your question. Kannan, please, if you could address it. Thank you. Thank you, Nic.
Thank you very much, Farooq, for your question. You're absolutely right. LIC is the dominant player in the market even today, after 20 years of liberalization of the sector. They have about 40% market share. But I just wanted to assure you that even in a very highly competitive 24-player market, we have some assured market share, which ultimately talks about how much of an insurance element we have sold to the customers of 12.5%. And we are the market leaders among the private players, second only to LIC. So that's how we have been able to build this franchise. So yes, LIC is a dominant player, very well-known household brand name. But we have been competing in this market for 20 years with the leadership and some assured market share among the private players. You alluded to LIC listing soon. Yes, that's what the government has announced.
But we see it as a positive move because the insurance sector will get researched even more. The transparency will become even more. And it is good for everybody, is what we feel. And more investors, more analysts will cover the sector, which is good for everyone, including us. You talked about H&P specifically. Here, we are proud of the fact that we are the market leaders in retail protection business in the country with LIC and all the other players operating. There are only about seven players who are very strong in this segment because, as you know, it requires very strong underwriting capabilities, good reinsurance backup, and also investment for the future. So and capital. So these are the elements which very few players can really write a check today in the market. So that competition is confined to about seven, eight players.
We believe that we are the pioneers in that market, and to combine the two questions, I would only say that LIC has so far been dominating in the savings business, whereas we are the market leaders in the retail protection business. Currently, we are 16% of our product mix in the form of protection, which, about three years back, it was just about 5%. I have articulated in our video on what our strategy has been in terms of the product mix, which has led to expansion of our VNB by 32% per annum in the last five years. I believe that we can, in the medium term, get to about 20% broadly in terms of a protection market, protection product mix. Currently, given the COVID environment, there are supply constraints in terms of inability to do the medical examinations and so on.
But given the underpenetration, which Nic talked about, $16-$18 trillion of underpenetration and protection, and the fact that we are the market leaders in retail protection, we think there is a lot of runway to move the protection further in our product mix. I hope that answers your question, Farooq.
Let me hand it back to Nic. Thank you. Over to you, James. So Nic, thanks for that. And to Farooq for your question. We have another question. It comes from Larissa van Deventer. And Larissa asks the panelists this: How do you see your growth trajectory in Africa? And how meaningful can it become within the greater Prudential? Is your main focus on organic growth, or do you plan to enter into partnership, she says. Which countries and products do you consider to be most promising? Thank you, Larissa. Wilf, I think we've reconnected with you.
Over to you, please. Thanks, Nic. And thanks again for the question, Larissa.
Yeah, we do see long-term potential for us in Africa. As I mentioned, the demographic trends, the population trends, the rapidly aging population that will happen all augurs very, very well for the future for Prudential in Asia. We're addressing the opportunities in several different ways. In some of the markets, we've come in and we've bought small companies, and we've invested the Prudential know-how, capability, experience in those, and we've grown organically with the market. Ghana would be a good example. That was our first entry seven years ago. We bought a company with a 1% market share, ranking number 15. We now have an 8% market share, ranking number four in the market. And there have been other markets where we see similar opportunity to grow and to shape the market.
There are some other markets where we see that partnering is the best way to grow with the market. A good example of that would be in Nigeria. And of course, Nigeria is a huge market. It's the seventh most populous country in the world today and already a large market. So there we've partnered with the largest bank, Zenith Bank. And we've been able to combine our capabilities with their deep know-how and their insights on their customers and grow very rapidly. I think you saw Jim Ovia , our chairman, in the video talk about how we've moved over the past couple of years from being in 10 states in Africa to now being in 36. That's one of our fastest-growing businesses. We've achieved this through partnering. Last year, we grew at around 71%, and it now represents around 35% of our markets.
So it will be a combination of different approaches, some partnering, some greenfields, and some acquisitions, as we've demonstrated in the past. The markets we're in today give us access to about 30% of the population. But there are still many opportunities ahead to grow within our existing markets and to enter new markets. And of course, we'll apply our normal strategic criteria to assessing which markets to go in. In respect of your question about the products, we're seeing many similar characteristics to Asia. People have the savings needs, investing increasingly for the long term, and also the protection needs. And that's been, of course, highlighted and become more evident over the past year. In Asia, we're finding that there's a huge amount of traction with Pulse, which will be operational live in all of our African markets by the end of the year. It's currently in six.
And so we're seeing these digitally savvy consumers interested in their health, interested in that, therefore, in the protection. So we're seeing, just as we've seen in Asia, opportunities for us both in the savings and the protection space, particularly the health protection space, Larissa. Yes, thank you, Wilf. Larissa, it's an opportunity we can't ignore. Many similarities with how we started in Asia, and we're reaping the rewards of investments that our predecessors have made. So when it will become meaningful remains to be seen. But we're committed to the continent.
Thank you for your question. James, over to the next one, please. Thank you again, Larissa. And panelists, let's return to the subject of India. There's a question online from Trevor Moss. Trevor asks, "You described India as very far behind in terms of protection gap and also nowhere when it comes to retirement savings.
How quickly might we hope it could catch up? Is there a regulatory/political push towards its direction?" Okay. Thank you for that question. Kannan, back to you and then if you can hand off to Nimesh as well, the role that the asset management sector can play in supporting the retirement solution. Thank you. Thank you, Nic, and thank you, Trevor, for this question.
You're absolutely right that when it comes to protection, it is a very underpenetrated market. Just to put some numbers to this underpenetration, based on our estimates, only 10% of the addressable population is covered today for protection. And if you really look at the protection as a percentage of GDP, that is, the sum assured of protection policies, pure term policies as a percentage of GDP, it's only about 19% today.
If you look at some of our peers in Asia, there would be probably 150%. So there is a huge underpenetration and a long leeway in terms of growth in this business. So yes, there are a lot of steps which are being taken, not only by the government and the regulator, but also from the company's perspective in terms of trying to increase the penetration. But from your perspective, as well as a company from our perspective, it suffices to say that it is a multi-decade opportunity. I believe that in the medium term of this multi-decade opportunity, it will grow at least the double of the GDP growth rate, nominal GDP growth rate in the country. You asked about a question about regulators. On their part, regulators are completely focused on increasing the penetration.
I just wanted to assure you, in every conversation we have with the regulators, they talk about growth and underpenetration. So it's a very refreshing conversation we have had with them. They keep asking us proactively on what measures they should take to increase the penetration. And more recently, they have also asked the companies to introduce standardized products, standard terms and conditions, simple terms and conditions, so that the mass market can start buying protection. So that is the move coming from the regulator. On the government side, a few years back, they introduced what is called the Prime Minister's Scheme, insurance scheme, very low-ticket policies to ensure coverage of protection. So there is a good amount of tailwind coming from the regulators, as well as the government, to push this agenda forward.
The last point on protection I want to also talk about is this pandemic has only increased the awareness about the underpenetration and the need to buy. So in the last year, in the initial periods of the pandemic, we could see a huge increase in terms of the login. As I answered the previous question, there have been some delays in terms of execution because of the physical constraints on the supply side. But I want to assure you that the pandemic has only accelerated the process of buying protection. Finally, on the retirement, the good news is that it is underpenetrated. The good news is also that recently, a few years back, the government has introduced what is called the National Pension System to make sure that they can expand the penetration of retirement savings in the country.
We have a 100% owned subsidiary in this space managing the funds from the private sector. And more recently, it has been opened up for the government sector as well of these funds. And once the accumulation phase gets over, we have a synergy with the parent, which is us, in terms of buying annuities from us. So again, there's a huge opportunity for us. Just to put a number here, it's about 7%, 8% of our GDP is the retirement assets. You would see, Trevor, the rest of the country, it is multiple of GDP in some domains. So again, a lot of push from the government, a lot of push from the companies. And over a period of time, we do believe that it's a great opportunity. Just to put in context, last year, we doubled our annuity sales thanks to this underpenetration opportunity.
With this, I would hand it to Nimesh, who can talk about the asset management company's perspective on this low penetration on retirement. Thank you, Trevor, once again for the question. Thank you, Kannan. Retirement is the space that the asset management industry has always looked at very closely. We have specific schemes towards retirement. But the whole company, ICICI Prudential, has always focused on retirement as a space. And where instead of focusing on pure equity products or pure debt products, we as a company, around five, six years, along with Prudential, we created a category in India called Dynamic Asset Allocation Products, which are essentially meant for a mix of equity and debt, depending on the levels of the market, and make it a very conservative product.
I think the whole retirement space is exactly what it wants, that you remove the aggression out of the equity funds and make it more conservative. So that space has grown big time. We manage around a fund of more than $4 billion on that, where more or less it is the retirement money which has come into that particular category. So I believe that category in India needs to be more structured. And we are in the business of doing that. So both life insurance industry as well as asset management industry, as more and more financialization of savings is happening, this sector is growing. And we have got a huge industry to get this market share from. Where I'm coming from, that asset management industry is only 20% of the banking industry in the country.
That is where the real growth is coming, that bank deposits in the country, as a country matures, as you cross $2,000 per capita, the depositor is becoming an investor. Instead of putting money, the retired person, instead of putting in deposits, is getting towards becoming an investor. That's where the big opportunity on retirement products are. Asset allocation, where ICICI Prudential has always focused on that, where we have around 26% market share in the market on this particular category. Thank you. Thank you, Nimesh. I think fantastic opportunity in that particular market. I'll just repeat what Kannan said, 7% of AUM as a percentage of GDP in formal retirement pools.
It's only the, and while the asset management industry can support the accumulation phase, particularly by moving money away from deposits into investments that can work harder for you, inflation doesn't eat away at them, the life sector can work not only at the accumulation, but also the decumulation space. And up until now, or at least today, annuities is something that only life companies, in other words, the decumulation stage, only life companies can offer. But we're well placed, as Kannan said, to meet that need.
James, over to the next question. Thank you very much, Nic. We have got a live caller. It's Andrew Crean. Andrew, can you just remind us, please, of the company you represent and your question as well? Thank you. It's Andrew Crean of Autonomous Research. I wanted to ask a question on China and the agency growth there.
I suspect there's a lot of runway of growth in China. And I suspect the speed with which you exploit it is constrained by your ability to build agency forces at speed. Could you give us some idea as to the rate of growth in your Chinese agency force over the last five years and what you would plan for the next five years? Do you think, in broad terms, that you can accelerate the growth in your agency plant in China? Thank you, Andrew. Lilian, over to you, please. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for that question. Obviously, agency has a unique role. I mean, I think, as you saw in our video and also Nic's presentation earlier, it's about making sure we equip them to give the relevant advice to customers. So it's not about the speed of growth.
It's about how we can actually equip our agents at speed, at pace. And we've done that through, firstly, a pivot to a more systematic way of recruiting our agents through profiling. And that has worked. So you heard about us talking about the PruDNA. This is where it has actually originated from, is in China, using technology to identify agents, identify recruits that are suitable for this line of career. So once they're in, we actually make sure that they have the relevant learning and training so that they're equipped to offer advice. So the constraint is actually how fast can we actually equip our agents to do so. And as we said, there's been a lot of runway. So what we've done is we have put in place a lot of tools to support them.
Because what we do for our agents is giving tools, giving knowledge, and giving capabilities. Now, as a result of that, we've been able to grow their productivity. So it's about each of the agents' productivity. So in 2020, we've been able to grow their case count productivity by over 33%. And one thing that we are very proud of is actually moving our agents to that professional agency echelon. And in 2020, we've been able to triple, actually, the number of MDRT qualifiers in the business. And that is how we are actually moving our agency force. And this is how we're going to grow our agency force. So it's not obviously numbers are important, but it's about the active number. And also, we want to make sure that per agent, their productivity continues to grow and continues to grow that way to address customer needs. Thank you.
Thank you, Lilian. Yes, compared to 2015, if we compare from 2020 - 2015, we had double the number of agents doing business in 2020 compared to 2015. But as Lilian said, as we go forward, a lot of it will be productivity and more full-time type agents. We don't poach in China. We try and recruit them. We use the same model as we do in other parts of Asia. In other words, trying to bring them in from university, or maybe it's the second job, and actually build their capabilities, the need-based selling, whilst it's still teachable. So in the newer cities, the newer provinces, if you like, the tenure of our agents will be shorter than in some of the places where we've been for a long, long time. Next question, James.
Before we go to the next question, a gentle reminder to investors that we have less than 10 minutes. You've got just about seven and a half minutes to take your questions and register them online. After this, there'll be a panel where we shift our focus from market to capabilities. But we've got a question from Greg Patterson, and it's on the MCV Hong Kong business. Greg asks you this. When Macau opened up the red tape around testing and visas, sorry, let me repeat. When Macau opened up, the red tape around testing and visas held back mainland travelling, and APE sold by competitors. Will Hong Kong have the same inertia when the HK MCV is allowed to happen again? Okay. So Derek, over to you.
Is there a lesson in the way Macau opened its border with China, in the way perhaps Hong Kong opens its border with China? Yeah. Thank you, Nic, and thank you, Greg, for the question. I think we can look at the question from two fronts. Just pinpointing on Macau, right? There's a lot of interest in GBA right now. And Macau definitely is a part of our GBA strategy because 9 plus 2 plus an ICD in China, Macau and Hong Kong. And then we are definitely looking into the opportunities in Macau, and we are planning to apply for a license. And Macau will definitely complement our Hong Kong business strategically and drive incremental business opportunity. That's one, right?
And on the other front, if Hong Kong is being, I mean, the border is being reopened, I would definitely see there is a demand that the MCV customer will come again, be it they come for shopping, property, and then we talk about the healthcare, the childcare demand will definitely be there. But it will be in stages, and then that will be in phases, I believe. So I'm pretty much optimistic that the MCV business will be coming back, but it will take some time. Thank you, Derek. It's great. It's the number one priority of the Hong Kong government to open the border with China. So when that moment comes, I'm sure any lessons from Macau will be learned. And I think, and if there are any teething problems, the people here are quite efficient, and they will sort them out very quickly.
I don't think it's teething problems that will impact the rate at which that market, those flows return. As I always said, it will be the shape of the-will depend on how many places in China are allowed to Hong Kong-are allowed to travel, sorry, to Hong Kong as that opening up expands from being the neighboring province into other provinces as we go across China.
Next question, James. That next question is a twofold one, and it comes from Trevor Moss on Thailand. Trevor asks, "You talked about bundled products, but bundled products, bundling health, wealth, and retirement. Please describe in more detail." And the second question, "You talked about diversifying distribution further, especially banks. Please put some color on the potential here." Robin, over to you.
You referenced in your video the opportunity to bundle products with TMB, so that will be a good place to start. Then I cross to Lilian on diversifying distribution further. Where else can we go within banks?
Okay. Thanks, Nic, and thanks, Trevor, for the question. Look, I think probably worth just positioning a little bit on TMB Bank first. Obviously, TMB merged with Thanachart, creating TTB. It's now the sixth largest bank by deposits. It's got 10 million customers, 6 million of which are new to the pool. Of their clients, about 1 million are classified as high net worth or affluent clients. And it's that market that we, at the moment, we have a penetration rate of only about 3.7%. And a lot of that would actually be historically either credit loan policies or standalone non-par endowment policies.
The real opportunity for us in that segment is, given the growth, and we're expecting that segment to almost triple over the next 10 years, our real opportunity is to look at how we can bundle the wealth products and health products together, but in particular, look at how we can bring the Eastspring business and the Eastspring products, and how can we bundle those together with the insurance offerings. One of the really good things from a government perspective here in terms of reinforcing the need for savings is actually you get different—you actually get an allowance from a tax relief perspective, both on any mutual funds that you invest in as well as life insurance.
So we think there's a really big opportunity for us to actually look at packaging those mutual funds together with health and protection, where the, as we spoke about earlier, where the penetration is tiny in the banks at the moment. And really, for that high net worth segment, really reach out through the wealth part of the bank to give those customers new types of products which aren't available in the market at the moment. With that, I'll hand back to Lilian on the second part of the question. Thank you very much, Robin. I think we've been very successful with our bank partnership, but mainly focusing on the mass affluent segment. So we've done that very well, and we've also used more face-to-face way to penetrate that segment. But there's still a lot of opportunities.
If I just quote, for example, SCB, which has been our partner for over 20 years, our penetration is still less than 10%. So there's a lot more room that we can grow on. And I think, as you saw in the video, there's about 10 million customers that we can attract. So what we're now working with our bank partners is make sure that we are tackling each of the segments differently. So, for example, from the high net worth, which we're going to put in our wealth management platform and working together with the bank. I think what is most exciting is actually on the mass segment. As we said, how do the mass actually go to the bank now? They go through with their mobile.
What we're doing is we're putting our protection product on the mobile so we get access by the mass segment of the bank. And the other segment that we are focusing on is actually the SME segment, which are normally the business banking customers of the bank. And you saw earlier in the video with Business@Pulse , which obviously is something that we are very proud of, and I'm sure our colleagues later on can sort of describe. So overall, we are diversifying out the customer segment with our bank distributions to optimize the opportunities there. Thank you, Nic. Thank you, Robin, and thank you, Lilian. If I may add, clearly, yes, as Jens said earlier, we'd like to work with a mass market bank in Indonesia. But beyond that, really, we've got plenty to go for in the relationships that we have.
If we take SCB, UOB, TTB, the recent exclusive deals that we've done in Vietnam, that gives us access to 25 million customers. If we were to add ICICI and Citi, that brings the number to 150 million. If we were then to add all the other banks with whom we're dealing, not on an exclusive basis, on an open basis, that doubles the 150 million to 300 million. And the number of customers today that have come from banks is just around the 4 million mark. So there's plenty to go for in all the relationships that we have, particularly on the mass segment side. Thank you for that question. Well, we are out of time, but we really want to squeeze in one more question while we still can. To all the panelists, this question comes from Andrew Baker.
Andrew asks you, "Can you please provide an update on the potential tax-deferred pension opportunity in China?" Okay. Thank you, Andrew. Back to you, Lilian. Okay. I think one of the agenda from the state is obviously looking after the aging populations. And so other than looking at the public pensions, they are now working with the private sector to provide for the pensions. So CPL has actually participated in the first round of driving some of the tax-exempt deferred pension products. We understand there's now a second round that they are actually testing with more of the domestic insurers now. And I think there's many opportunities. So once that is broader, obviously, we'd love to participate in driving that, driving the accumulation side with the insurance companies. So yes, lots of opportunities and areas that we are working on. Thank you, Lilian.
So if you've nothing to add there, Nic, we're going to wrap up this panel. Thank you very much for all of your questions. And to Nic, Lilian, Derek, Jens, Robin, Wilf, Kannan, and Nimesh for providing your insight and expertise. Now, before we move to the panel discussion on capabilities, we're going to take a very quick five-minute pause. May I ask you to be back at your screens by 8:55 P.M. Hong Kong time? That's five minutes to the hour where you are. We'll be very grateful, and we look forward to seeing you in five minutes. Welcome back again. You have just heard why we are excited about our focus markets and how they're advancing our strategic theme of delivering profitable growth in a socially responsible way.
For the next hour, we will take your questions on how we're building capabilities and seeking to leverage the best of our enterprise in all our markets. Before we hear from you, let me introduce the panel and offer some context. I will briefly touch on three areas. First, how we think about digitizing and humanizing. Second, how we think about health and wealth. And third, how we are building culture and capability. Firstly, digitizing and humanizing. Digitizing opens a whole new field of possibilities for us when it comes to scale and efficiency. Humanizing, on the other hand, strengthens our ability to provide sound financial advice. Benefiting from both of these efforts would be our agents. We're equipping our agency force to be future-ready with tools like PRUForce and Pulse, which supports all aspects of agency management.
Lilian Ng, who joins us again, can answer questions on how this is improving productivity and customer outcomes. Divine Furagganan, our Chief Distribution Officer in the Philippines and one of our most progressive when it comes to digital adoption, can provide an on-the-ground perspective. When equipped with new tools and a wide range of products and services, agents can provide much more inclusive advice. In other words, beyond advising the affluent segments that many have grown accustomed to serving. This is what we're doing in Indonesia. And Nini Sumohandoyo can expand on how our new capabilities are helping us serve the vastly underpenetrated Sharia segment, as well as our plans to give our Sharia business its own identity. Secondly, health and wealth. For health, we're known for our leading protection coverage, but everything we're doing with Pulse aims to go further by preventing and postponing illnesses.
Al-Noor Ramji is our Group Chief Digital Officer and can speak to Pulse as our digital front door and what this means for customers. He can also speak to Pulse as our digital back end and what this means for the scale and efficiency of our business. Whether front door or back end, I am certain that Al-Noor will emphasize that Pulse cuts across our businesses. It has the same brand in each market. It has a unified look and feel, and it will serve as a single platform for onboarding, fulfillment, servicing, and much more. You will have heard me earlier talk about lowering the threshold for wealth services. We will do this through Wealth@Pulse together with Eastspring, which itself has sought operational efficiency through retooling. Today, Eastspring is the largest user in Asia of BlackRock's Aladdin, an operating system for investment professionals.
Wai-Kwong Seck, our Eastspring CEO, can take questions on how Eastspring will meet its ambition to lead in Asia and on ESG. Finally, culture and capability. This ties back to our strategic theme of humanizing our company. Together with our refreshed values, we're equipping our people to tell stories, think conceptually, imagine possibilities, and build iteratively. These ways of working are characteristic of our hothouses, which are co-creation events that bring together people from across the business as well as from our partners. Jennifer Villalobos is here from our Thailand Life business and can talk about how we are co-creating with our new digital distribution partners such as The 1, enabling a 9.5% conversion rate on the highly tailored wellness propositions made possible by our combined data sets.
This is one of many examples that Mike mentioned regarding the shifts in our culture from one that preferred a siloed own-and-control approach to one that prizes collaboration internally and externally. For more evidence of culture shifts, look no further than Singapore, where LinkedIn just named us one of the top 15 best places to work. Dennis Tan, our Singapore CEO, recently sponsored a hothouse to accelerate enhancements to Business at Pulse, our SME offering. He can field questions on why the old model of workplace marketing proved so difficult and how our new Pulse-enabled schemes are engaging employees directly, leading to greater success in converting scheme employees to customers, both direct as well as through agent referrals. With that, let us hear your questions. We are here in Hong Kong.
I'm sitting with Nic, and of course, we have everyone primed and ready on our screen for this panel discussion on capabilities. You know all the drill here, but just in case, you know the lines are open, so you can call in with your question, or you can register it on the Q&A function on the event website. The lines are open, and so is this panel to ensure everyone has the opportunity to ask your question in the session. May we ask you to keep your question brief? Thanks very much. We can go to our first caller, and we have Blair Stewart on the line. Blair, you can remind us of who you represent and your question to our panel, please. Thank you very much. It's Blair Stewart from Bank of America speaking.
I've got a couple of questions on Pulse and a couple of other short questions. On Pulse, clearly, this is something that's been developed over the last, I think you said, 21 months with partners. Mike referenced the value chain. I wonder if you could just explain what the value chain looks like and how much you've spent on Pulse and will be spending on this. Secondly, on Pulse, how is it differentiated, do you think, versus the several other health apps or ecosystems that are being developed, especially in Asia? And then moving away from Pulse, just two very quick questions, if I may. Health and Protection, as that continues to ramp up, how much underwriting risk are you retaining versus reinsuring? And fourthly, on the Sharia market, I know you have a large market share in Indonesia, but how big is this business at the moment? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Blair. Firstly, let's go to Al-Noor on the question of the value chain. On the H&P underwriting risk versus retained, maybe Lilian, you can touch on, and then perhaps then Ben, our, CFO, can expand if necessary, and then Sharia over to Nini. So Al-Noor, Lilian, Nini. Thank you, Blair. So look, Pulse is a growth engine. It's the world's first and so far only ecosystem dedicated to make our customers healthier and wealthier by solving their customer pain points. So your question about the value chain really plays to that. Now, everything from the prevention all the way through to health, disease care, all the way down, that's a whole chain that we hope that we will solve the customer pain point for the customer. Today, the customer faces a lot of difficulty in navigating the health system and also the wealth system, if you like.
So how do we solve this at scale? And value will come from three things. So whether it's valuations of our company or valuations of anything, it really comes from three or four things, if you like. Firstly, the business model. Secondly, the operating model. And then thirdly, you could say the pace or the speed, which I think Mike mentioned earlier, that we can go to. And then can we sustain it? Can we build it at scale? So the business model allows us multiple sources of revenue, multiple sources of revenue. The operating leverage, the operating model allows us great operating leverage. So providing we can keep those two going, I think the value chain becomes obvious. Now, let me give you an example.
If we detect something early in the health chain, we can save a $100,000 problem, sorry, a problem which is $10 from becoming a $100,000 problem, detecting early. Similarly, if we monitor people's wealth and so on, it's very easy to say things like, "Save more money and you'll be fine in your old age." But how do we encourage savings in a painless way, in a seamless way? So both health and wealth can be solved that way, I think. As to your competitive point, we tend not to focus too much on competition. Clearly, there are many apps. The best ones, I would say, are probably in China, but they're not driven by data and AI at the source of trying to help the customer achieve its or his or her wealth and health propositions.
That's what we're focused on, both longitudinally over time as well as seamlessness back to front. Just to emphasize Nic's point earlier, we make sure the customer can go through the whole value chain seamlessly, whether it's front office, back office, hospitals, doctors, the whole thing, just from Pulse. I'll pass it on to Lilian, I think, for PRUForce. Thank you. Thank you, Al-Noor, and thank you for the question, Blair. On health and protection underwriting risk, how much do we retain? If I just look at health first, which is more our medical portfolio, actually, we retain most of the risks ourselves because it's something that we could manage and because it's a high-frequency but low-value claim. It's something that we have the expertise to manage. That's the area.
Now, on the more long-term protection product, in particular critical illness, we have actually used reinsurer, not just so much for any risk retention or we pass on the risk. It's about learning from each other because obviously, there's a lot of medical advancement and so on. What we do is we continue to work with our reinsurer to actually how do we actually become more inclusive to provide the necessary coverage for customers through our critical illness platform. And something that we've done over the last 12-24 months is we now created what we call our predictive underwriting. Again, I think as Arjan was saying, use the data, AI, analytics, so that we can actually make sure that we can create that coverage for our customers seamlessly, knowing what we are doing. And as a result, become more seamless.
We are also now learning to use other data for underwriting. So for example, when we normally ask people a lot of health questions in terms of the underwriting of a critical illness coverage, actually, a lot of the chronic diseases is because of diet. But we never ask people, actually, what is your dietary requirement? So these are the type of areas we are working with our underwriters to learn in how do we best underwrite our customer to provide more seamless experience and more inclusive coverage for them. So Ben, anything you'd like to add on the reinsurance? Ben is not on the call, Lillian, so we'll take that afterwards. But thank you. It's very comprehensive. I don't think you need to address it. If we can go to Nini for the question on Sharia. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Nic, and thank you, Blair, for the question.
First of all, the Sharia business opportunity in Indonesia is huge. We have 150 million working Muslim population, and in terms of GDP penetration level, it's only 0.1%. So if I may share a little bit on our history, we started our Sharia business back in 2007, about 14 years ago, and we have been the market leader since then. We're grateful that we're at 35% market share, and that's two times bigger than the next competitor. We have 131,000 Sharia licensed agents, which accounts for 75% of the total Sharia licensed agents in the industry. And we are very proud to say that last year, we launched a Sharia-only product. It's a very simple, affordable, traditional product, and the cases sold last year was 106% higher than the previous year. And for Q1 of this year, it was higher 228%.
We are thankful that the Sharia investment funds are being supported by Eastspring Indonesia, Eastspring Singapore, and Eastspring of, sorry, Al-Wara' from Malaysia. And everybody's talking about Pulse, right? So we are very proud to say that at the end of last year, we launched PRUSyariah, which is a modern halal lifestyle ecosystem offering at Pulse. And the reason why we develop it is to build communities and to attract customers. Now, if you're talking about the size of the market, the next offering, the next Sharia offering will be embracing around 30 million Indonesian Muslims aged 20- 44. And the idea is to give these women a safe place, a safe and friendly place to interact, to learn, to share, and even to give back.
Basically, we will have programs and contents for them so they can be inspired and empowered to be better for themselves and for their families and their communities. We so believe in the prospect of this business. We are in the process of spinning off our Sharia business unit. We are happy to announce that we have appointed a very experienced and prominent designate CEO, Omar Anwar, who joined actually yesterday to lead this great adventure. Of course, there are so many. The market is so huge, and there are so many under-penetrated segments, right? We will continue to develop and innovate new products. For instance, we want to develop a legacy product pension, employee benefits, which is the Sharia version of these products.
And we also want to help Indonesian people with religious-based products, such as helping them to go to Hajj or Umrah, for instance. And of course, we also want to expand the market through banca and affinity groups, and not to mention the Islamic communities and institutions, as well as the halal industry that have not been tapped yet. So we are very excited with where we are right now, and we are very positive with the Sharia potential of today. I thank you. Over to you, Nic. Thank you, Nini. So it was Blair that asked the question. Yes, it's 10% of the market in Indonesia. The government has made it its focus to become the leading Islamic financial center in the near term.
I think they'll put more effort creating a much more formal. When Nini referenced a spin-off that meant subsidiarizing, if you like, a product segment and giving it its own identity. So it will still be owned by ourselves. It won't go public. And the opportunity is limitless. And the reason it hasn't happened yet across the sector is because people tend to be less wealthy, and the product set that is available in the market is only now getting to the type of products that the Islamic community is drawn to. The one question that Al-Noor did not answer on the costs of Pulse. So other than the Babylon contract that we signed that was for a certain duration, all the other costs have been incurred internally. In other words, they are all self-development costs.
We've spent, again, excluding Babylon, $100 million over the period that you referenced, $80 million of that last year. As we move forward to expand the capabilities of Pulse further, so we have the ambition to add wealth services and wealth products on the platform. We have the ambition to turn this into our onboarding fulfillment and also a self-servicing tool. We will need to, and then to integrate, if you like, our existing IT stack so that our current customers can also avail themselves of all the services on Pulse. We will have to increase that spend. But it's not to say that this would be incremental. We spend around $300 million or so a year in operating and in developing our infrastructure. Clearly, as Pulse replaces some of that, we will save some cost both in the maintenance.
And given that it is a single platform that we're using across the piece, we won't need very many capabilities or a number of people to administer what is currently 15 different systems. But as we move onto a common platform, there will be operational savings there as well. Thank you for your question. Thank you again. Let's move to another question, which is a multi-question here. It comes online from Kailesh Mistry of HSBC. And Kailesh asks you this. Is Pulse still to be launched in mainland China and India? Can you provide some color on the reasons? Is it absence of suitable partners or regulations? How soon do you think you can have a suitable proposition launched? And the last one here. Can you or would you set it up as a wholly owned subsidiary in those markets so you can retain 100% of the economics? Okay.
No, thank you. Kailesh, I'm not going to comment on hypotheticals at this point. As to why we didn't start there is the Babylon agreement that we had, which is an essential component of the offering only covered our Southeast Asia markets and Africa. So we didn't really want to commit to Babylon for China and India until we proven the concept. It is something that we are reviewing, and we will update you at the appropriate point. And with that, back to you, James. Great. So that question from Kailesh. We have another question online. This time, panelists, it comes from Andrew Baker. And Andrew asks you this. Does having a proprietary asset manager provide you any product advantages versus peers that don't have their own asset manager in key markets such as Hong Kong, Indonesia, mainland China, and Thailand? Okay. Thank you, Andrew, for the question.
Wai Kwong, over to you. Yeah. Thank you very much, Andrew, for that question. I would say that having a partner like Eastspring working in partnership with Prudential actually absolutely helps to facilitate, for example, time to market for many of the life companies. In fact, right now, as we speak, we're working with a number of them to deliver some products to them at a very short notice. So I think that one is very important. Second thing is that you'll remember that Eastspring has a footprint across 11 markets in Asia, and therefore, we actually can source and also create products for our clients, which is the life clients across all the markets in Asia. We also have capabilities to work with third parties to create products from outside of Asia.
I think, as you know, we already done that in the past, and we will continue to do that. So I would say absolutely, and I would say that the partnership works very well both ways, all right? About 55% of the assets that we manage come from Prudential, and that helps us to build a bulk up the company and also increase the capabilities we have. Great. Thank you to Andrew for your question. A quick reminder that we are now approaching roughly the midway point in this special panel discussion on capabilities, and we encourage you to call in with your question or to register it online. Louise Miles has done just that. She's sent through a three-part question for our panel. Let's start off with the first one, question one. You've spoken about Pulse downloads, 24 million, and registrations, 9.6 million so far.
But what are the monthly active users of the app? That's question one. Let's go to the second one. Louise asks you, Pulse is an ecosystem which uses services from various partners. If a partner chooses to no longer work with Pulse, for example, Babylon, who actually owns the customer relationship/data? Is it Prudential or the partner? Can Prudential continue to use and hold the customer data if the partner relationship with Prudential ends? And there's a third question for you to consider here. Would you consider entering another part of Pulse's value chain, for example, by purchasing a healthcare provider in order not to rely on partners? So a lot to work through over there, Nic. Okay. A lot for Al-Noor to address. So please, Al-Noor . Happy to do. Louise, good questions.
So look, if we start off with the value chain where we look at the customer from the AI lens, and then we talk about data, and then we move on to a video doctor, then we move on to a physical doctor, etc., if that was a chain which you're implying in your third question, and then all the way to perhaps hospitals and so on, that's one part. Now, when you try to solve for the customer end-to-end like we are, right, the downloads is really the first time someone's knocked at your door, and he or she's asked for some help. If 24 million people are asking for help, our task is then to figure out what they want. Now, which piece of the health or wellness chain do they want? Do they come for the doctor primarily? Do they come from the wellness side?
What do they come for? And some parts of the value chain, clearly, if you take the hospital, monthly active users would be an extremely poor measure, okay? So what we're trying to learn here is what does the first knock on the door mean? What do they need? What do they want? And we've tried and are trying many different ways of interacting with our customers. And as we develop the measures, we can then come back with a proper set of metrics that we want to define. It's a very vast end-to-end ecosystem. To your point about who owns the customer, it's very clear, if you like, primarily the customer owns the customer, if you don't mind me being slightly flippant. But in this particular question, the customer, quote, belongs to Prudential, and we're very clear about this.
Now, the customer has to give permission, has to give permission to Prudential to use this data, which they do when they do our health check, etc., etc. But there's clarity here. They do not belong to Babylon. Now, whether we would consider buying another part of the value chain, strategically, everything is possible. What we're trying to do is make sure that the solution is scalable. I repeat, scalable, meaning approaching zero marginal cost at some stage. Is it driven by data? Is it driven by data, and can data be used to serve the customer better? So if a healthcare provider would provide that, would give us that power, we would. Second consideration is how seamless can we make it. So if purchasing something would make it more seamless, provide more value, more service, then we might consider that.
What we're really trying to do is work with a vast ecosystem of partners, and we try and make it seamless for the customer in any part of the value chain they want to be, but seamless in the real sense of making sure that real value in either accessibility, affordability, if you like, timeliness, things like this. Hopefully, we covered the questions here, as you see, but I just want to end with saying the Pulse downloads, it's a mistake to call them that. There's a first knock on the door. As our DNA changes from product-led, I think Mike said this earlier, or manufacturing-led or distribution-led, to us here in the first knock, we need to respond to that first knock, and it's a very different game that we have to learn. Thank you. Thank you, Al-Noor . Thanks so much also to Louise for your question.
We're going to go to another online question. It comes this time from Farooq Hanif. Farooq asks, "What can you tell us about your market share in SME currently and the momentum here?" Okay. Thank you, Farooq. I mean, clearly, it varies by market, but the area where our group proposition is most developed is in Singapore, and I'll invite Dennis to address that question. Thanks, Nic. Thank you, Farooq, for the question. Well, first of all, enterprise business is a growth business for us. And as I've mentioned in my video, in Singapore, the enterprise business has been growing at a year-on-year growth of 27%. So how this works really is that it offers us opportunity for us to really build direct relationships with corporates as well as SMEs.
We have access to corporates and large corporates, for example, in Singapore, like to name names, PwC, Singapore Airlines, as well as Singapore Exchange, and also more than 2,000 over SMEs that we've been working with. So all of these allow us access to more than 170,000 employees. The beauty of it is actually building this and integrating it with Pulse. And Pulse being a very successful business for us now, in Singapore, we have just crossed our first anniversary of our Pulse launch and have amassed more than 200,000 users here in Singapore. And with Business@Pulse integrated now, what that means is that employees of these employers will be able to interact with us directly. And even for claims, it will be as simple as just taking a photo of your claims and just submit it.
Pulse becomes an end-to-end, as what Nic referred to earlier in his opening remarks, it's like a front-end to the back-end seamless convergence of our whole process and the systems in order to deliver that to the customers. So with that, we have seen successes in our EB business, and the beauty of it is actually converting these SMEs and these EB policies into individual lives. And again, as mentioned in the video, I'm happy to report that for the Singapore experience, the quarter-on-quarter growth has been phenomenal at 154%. So back to you, Nic. Thank you, Dennis. Now, clearly, across the region, this is something that we prioritized back in 2017, building the capabilities, but to participate in a way that is a little more intelligent because the ambition is not just to underwrite the group scheme, but it is ultimately to convert those employees into individual customers.
Now, in that short period, we've grown at a CAGR of 15% to an APE level of $218 million. In the first quarter, we grew by 33% to over $100 million. Across the piece, we have 7,000 schemes, just over a million employees, and we referenced in the video the ambition for this to be much bigger as we go from here, but as I said, the real prize is the ability to convert those scheme members using now what we call digital workplace marketing into individual customers, whether they're buying a subscription, whether they're buying a bite-sized product, or whether it's the agent that wrote the policy coming back and following nudges and so on, engaging with those individual employees, and that's the model that we want to follow, but do it digitally as we go forward.
Nic and panelists, we have a further question from Farooq Hanif. It's a very short question, and it goes like this: What is the risk to Eastspring from ETFs? Wai-Kwong .
Thank you very much, Farooq, for that question. I think everybody is watching with great interest the development of ETFs across the region. And just to put things in perspective, I think according to the Investment Company Institute, which is really the industry body, they think that in the U.S., 21% of the market is in ETFs, and whereas in Asia, it's about 14%. But when you dive into the details in Asia, what you'll notice is that in the Asian market, 60% of that is already in Japan. And I think, as you know, the Japanese central bank has been using that as a policy tool.
So in effect, the actual market for ETFs, especially among retail, is probably a lot smaller and probably maybe closer to the 8% in Europe or maybe even lower. So I just want to put the thing in perspective. That's number one. But nevertheless, the trend towards ETF is there. I think it will continue to grow in Asia. So for us, there are several approaches that we have taken. Number one, it's very important for us to continue to differentiate our products. For example, we are in the active space, and we continue to develop different strategies to meet the client needs: fixed income maturity funds, especially in a time like this, target income funds, GEM, and Asian equity funds are actually something that, because of our position as experts in Asia, we are developing and we want to develop further. ESG is another area of increasing interest.
On the fixed income side, we continue to develop things like U.S. credits and so on because this is where clients are seeing demand and also what we call multi-asset solutions. The other aspect of it is that Eastspring is one of the biggest investors through ETFs in itself. And what we are also doing is looking into ways in which we can actually manufacture some of these in-house, where it makes sense, where we can do it better or cheaper than others. We want to do it in-house as well. So these are ways in which we are responding to the developments in the ETF market. So over back to you, Nic. Thank you, Wai-Kwong James. Great. Well, we have another question from Kailesh Mistry over at HSBC. Kailesh asks about the markets such as the Philippines and Thailand.
In markets such as the Philippines and Thailand, where you are or plan to offer Pulse as a subscription service, what is the cost of an annual subscription? Are there different tiers? Do they need to be attached to an insurance policy of some sort? Thank you, Kailesh. So I will invite Divine to address from a Philippine perspective, Jennifer as one of the offerings from a Thailand perspective, and then loop back to Al-Noor to cover any other markets or any other points that need making. Divine. Thank you. Thank you, Nic. And thank you, Kailesh, for the question. Pulse was launched in the Philippines in February of 2020, and currently, we have 4.5 million downloads and 1.8 million registered users.
Yes, we have offered subscriptions in Pulse in the Philippines, one of which is Pulse Gold, wherein the subscribers would have received a personalized dashboard that displays their goal, for example, daily, weekly challenges, and their fitness classes, nutrition plan, and a lot of those things. The services vary based on the packages that we are offering, and the annual subscriptions are not necessarily attached to insurance policies. The subscriptions are basically there to engage our customers, our clients, to give them the services that are available in Pulse. That gives us an opportunity to get to know more of them.
With the use of AI and customer-specific data, we are able to pass this on to our agents and even our bank partners so they would be able to know better the clients, and they would be able to service them in terms of their needs and preferences. And an indication of the price that we charge, Divine, for those? What is it a year? I would not have the statistics with me right now, Nic, so apologies for that. Okay. Al-Noor , no doubt, we can cover that. Jennifer, let's go to you next. Thank you so much, Nic, and thank you so much for your question, Kailesh. The reality is that subscription models require a deep understanding of online consumption and data. This is why at least our subscription models, first and foremost, try to understand what people want and what people actually need.
People generally buy insurance during a life-changing event, as you know, when they're about to become a parent, or they're going to buy a new house, or unfortunately, when one of their loved ones is sick, right? So if we are in touch with these life events through our insights, that puts us in a very good position to actually offer solutions in the moments that matter. This helps us understand them. And in exchange, they will trust in us again. That trust then allows us to move a lot of the commercial models and subscription from premium to premium. Pulse in Thailand offers two packages. The first one is Pulse Fit, which is for $2 a month, and Pulse Gold, which is $8 per month.
The first value proposition, which is Fit, is pretty much the foundational work that a person needs to do to actually get fitter. They get access to a meal planner. They get access to actually an amazing, what I call an augmented reality coach that actually helps them do their workouts properly, as well as a journal, then on the Gold subscription, what that also unlocks is access to our unique nutrition advice, so we really believe with this all-encompassing proposition, we got the opportunity not only to package and sell them with products, but more than anything, giving the opportunity to the customer to not feel like they're being rented or their eyeballs are being rented, but they're actually receiving true value. Thank you very much. Over to you, Al-Noor , to expand a little bit more. Yes. Thank you for the rental of eyeballs reference.
Look, this is a very serious thing because what we're trying to do, as both Divine and Jen have explained, is to form a habit, get the customers to form a good habit. But both of these subscriptions are based around trying to encourage not only bite-sized products, etc., but actually encourage habits for good type, if you like. Now, because we're testing and learning, we're using AI to figure out which ones are being used, what combinations will be used, which do get used and not just paid for. We don't want to suffer from the gymnasium kind of phenomenon where people, you all know what that means. So we are trying different packages, price points, different combinations. There's probably 60 odd different combinations.
We have two standard subscriptions, but the customer eventually will be able to use any combination they want, kind of a Chinese restaurant menu, if you like. And to the point earlier about the Philippines, it's the same kind of price point, although in Philippine pesos, it's off the order of $2 and $8. But we'll be spreading this across the whole range when we add the insurance products and other things. So rest assured, we are testing and learning from our customers, as Jen says, to make sure that we are understood to be trusted advisors, coaches in health and wealth, and not just be there in moments of stress and trying to make their life easy just at that moment. We try and prevent as well. So subscriptions is just in the first phase, and we've launched it in at least seven markets, not just these two.
But clearly, these two markets are prominent in digital behavior. Back to you, Nic.
Thank you, Al-Noor . James. Well, thank you to everyone for that because we're going to turn now to Abid Hussain, who gives you this question. Given the rate-limiting factor in some markets is new bancassurance distribution agreements, which are hard to come by and expensive, would you consider buying or partnering or even developing your own digital bank to address this? Many high-net-worth individuals, SMEs, and the young have been switching to digital banks. Okay. Thank you, Abid. I'm not going to comment on the likelihood or otherwise of being involved through an equity stake in a digital bank, but clearly, we are building the capability to plug and play our solutions.
That was not only in relation to any digital banks that our partners may develop, and when we renew the UOB contract, that was part of that, but also plug and play in relation to the banking apps that they have. And I will ask Lilian to expand a little on the work that we're doing both with UOB and SCB as we take this forward. Thank you, Nic, and thank you, Abid, for the question. On SCB, as we said, a lot of customers now access the bank services through the mobile app, whether it's a digital bank or even a normal conventional bank. So they don't actually go and travel to the bank branches. So there's been a lot of work done about connecting our platform to their platform so that we can service those customers through our capabilities.
And I think the phrase that we use, and actually with the support from Al-Noor , is we white-label our Pulse onto their platform. And similarly, so they can also in Pulse, we can also access their digital platform. So in Standard Chartered Bank, their mobile app is called SC Mobile, and we've been able to co-create a term product that is in Hong Kong through that mobile platform. And in UOB, we have launched a Cancer 360 product in their mobile platform, Mighty as well. So this journey is only the beginning, and there's a lot more that we are working with our two bank partners on their mobile platforms to deliver through our Pulse platform as well. Thank you, Lilian. Great. So a reminder to our investors that you have a 15-minute window still on this capabilities panel to put your question to our experts here at Prudential.
Let's go now to another question, and this one comes from Greg Patterson. Greg asks, "Bancassurance deal pipeline, can you provide some color on this, and which markets are most likely to see deals?" Thank you, Greg. I'll take this question. The one market where we said we want additional relationships is Indonesia. I'm not going to comment on the pipeline. But I'll repeat the answer I gave earlier, that in the existing relationships that we have, whether they are exclusive across the partners that we've signed up recently or beyond that, we have 25 million or 150 million or 300 million as you expand from the ones that are in wholly owned businesses across the entire footprint to those that we deal with commercially, not just exclusively. Plenty to go for in those relationships. So with that, I suggest we go to the next question. Great.
So thank you very much to Greg Patterson for that question. Here's another one that's just popped up on screen over here. It comes from Chun Siong Ko. Chun asks, "Please remind us on the mix of NBP in China by banc assurance versus sales agency. How do we see this evolving over the next timeline of about three to five years?" Lilian, over to you. I think earlier when Nic presented, we actually shared the NBP margin between agency and also banc assurance, which obviously at the moment, because we are selling more protection products through our agency channel, obviously it's a higher margin. So from a mixed perspective, obviously our agency will deliver higher relative to the APE mix from that perspective.
But there's a good thing we're working very hard to actually ensure that our bancassurance margin continues to improve year on year, and then you can see that when we disclose our results. So no full regular premium. And lately, we are still also trying, as in Thailand, trying to put health and protection for our bank partners in China as well. Thank you, Lilian. Yes, just to repeat what maybe was covered earlier, the contribution to NBP is about equal weight between the two channels. Clearly, that was in 2020. There were certain drivers that affected both agency and banca, but we would like to stay multi-channel and multi-product, and therefore we expect the evolution of the business not to change that particular ratio significantly as we move forward. James, next question. Thank you, Nic, and thank you to Chun Siong Ko just now for your question.
Now, we have a question from Greg Patterson. This time, the focus is on Eastspring. Greg asks, "Will the trends in product development lead to margin compression, for example, new U.S. credit mandates?" Wai-Kwong, back to you. I would say that margin compression is something that we are witnessing across the entire industry, and this is something which all the players are, shall I say, working with or working against. And as far as Eastspring is concerned, I think right now we are enjoying a pretty healthy margin on net revenue margin for third-party assets as well, 46 basis points. But we are not kind of sitting there and waiting for things to happen. We have actually embarked on several strategies in order to cope with some of these margin compression. Number one is, of course, stringent cost management.
We have been very, very deliberate in terms of our investments, especially in terms of people. We have also centralized and developed centers of excellence across Eastspring. While we are in 11 locations, we also developed centers of excellence so that we can actually centralize and be able to benefit from the economies of scale. Earlier on in the video, you saw that we actually have the largest of the Aladdin footprint across Asia, and we continue to leverage Aladdin as a way in which actually we can actually consolidate and pull a lot of these things together. We have created a common middle office, and we want to continue to work on how we can actually build a more effective and cost-efficient infrastructure, the operations platform that we have.
We are relying on automation and robotics and things like that in order to actually prepare ourselves for growth in the future and also this margin compression that is happening. But I think more importantly, it's not just on the cost side, but I think it's also on the revenue side that we are also developing our businesses. For example, we are continuing to grow our alternatives business. We are also moving into ESG. We've launched actually in 2019, we're one of the first to launch Asia Sustainability Bond Fund here in Asia. We are also actually working on the Asia Technology Fund. And earlier on in an earlier question, I mentioned about opportunities to manufacture in-house some of these ETFs that we are investing in through other parties as well.
So at the end of the day, we recognize that margin compression is there, but we are prepared, and we are working on both the cost as well as the revenue side . Back to you, Nic.
Thank you, Wai-Kwong. And maybe if I can return to the same question in relation to the India AMC business, I mean, that is a retail business. It's a high-returning business. Again, it was covered in the video by Nimesh, having referenced an 80% ROE and a cost-income ratio that was in the mid to low 20s.
While there will be margin compression inevitably in India as the sector expands, really, the fact that this is a fast-growing and a winner in that particular segment, AUM having grown at 14% per annum over the last few years, the fact that it's diversifying its strategies across the piece, including the multi-asset example that Nimesh gave, and the fact that actually it is manufacturing ETF itself. So it's using its scale effectively to secure a good share of that market. The fact that the business is increasingly digital and attracting a big percentage of its revenues and new customers from direct-to-consumer digital tools, all of these are tools that solutions or are capabilities that the business is using to maintain its current profitability. With that, back to you, James. Thank you very much, Nic. Panelists, we've got another question.
This one comes from Dom O'Mahony. Dom says, "In China, platforms like WeChat, WeSure, and Ant Group are disrupting the distribution of insurance. How do you see the impact on the Chinese life sector and the challenges and opportunities for CITIC-Prudential?" Okay. Lilian, back to you. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Dom, for that question. So in China, what we call direct digital sales is about 5% of the total market at the moment. So it is disrupting, but I think in terms of volume, it's not that sizable, but it's something we definitely need to watch out for. It's something that we are definitely planning to do. So in CPL, we actually work with various digital platforms, including, I think, Airstar by Xiaomi and JD.com. But what we've chosen to do is put in products that are quite unique.
So what you normally see in those WeSure platforms are very protection-type products. So we put in bite-sized investment-linked products just to create a different proposition so that our products get noticed. What we also do is we try to also nurture what we get from those digital platforms and see if we can actually cross-sell upsell to the higher-value products as we move forward. So this is a very important channel that we are nurturing and definitely investing to look at. Thank you, Nic. Thank you very much to Dom for your question on the Chinese life sector. We're going to go now to a question. We're going to return to Larissa van Deventer. She asks, "How do you use Pulse to encourage persistency? Is your primary aim to broaden your product offering through Pulse, or is it to aim for a longer client journey?" Okay. I'll know.
Please address the question. And then maybe also, Lilian, on the broader benefits. Excuse me. So I think this question is using an insurance term, persistency, and then trying to talk about a longer customer journey, and I think it almost answers the question. So thank you for that, Larissa. What we're trying to do is make sure the customer stays with us long enough for us to actually be able to talk about the customer's health and wealth. And we've got two measures that are going to be coming in, and you saw that in the video, hopefully, which is called the Health and the Wealth Index. For us to be able to measure the customer's health and their wealth, we're going to have an index measurement, and it clearly needs longevity of the customer.
Now, the benefit of that for the customer is obvious because we are trying to make sure that they actually increase in wealth scores. That in itself should get us a longer customer journey, but also allow us to offer a lot more products during that journey. So I don't think it's a dichotomy here. Providing we offer the best products, and we will get the best product from the whole ecosystem, not just, quote, our own, because a customer journey, for example, is a huge, we hope, a huge journey. It will cut across the whole ecosystem. So persistency traditionally is being used as a product persistency, but in this case, I think it'll be a customer persistency, and hopefully, we can measure with customer lifetime value that we will talk about perhaps in the next event or so. That's really the main aim here.
But let me pass you on to my colleague, Lilian. She's an expert at these things. Lilian. So I think the other way we can look at Pulse is traditionally, insurance is a very low-touch product. So what Pulse has created is actually allow our customer to be engaging with us more often. And what we also see is if we engage them more often, it creates loyalty. And so instead of using the word persistency, I think I'll use the word more loyal to Prudential in terms of the range of services and range of offerings that we do give them. And insurance is only one of the many. So I think that is how we're going to create loyalty with Pulse. Thank you, Al-Noor . Thank you, Lilian. But of course, Pulse is not only good for our customers through all the services and the engagement that we're providing.
It's not ultimately only good for us if we can grow our business faster. It's also good for some of our advice channels, and I think this is maybe the appropriate moment to invite Divine back in and maybe share with us in your engagement with agents. What are some of the benefits for the advice channels such as agents? One of the many values that our agents get from Pulse is in relation to tapping the market, our growing population that are digitally connected. We all know that the Philippines has a very young population that's digitally connected. 69% of the population are Gen Ys and Gen Zs, and Filipinos are internet users, mobile phone users, social media users, and they purchase online.
Since 76% of our agents are also Gen Ys and Gen Zs, they realize that Pulse will empower them to connect to this market. In the video, we referenced and we shared that we work on the middle income and mass affluence segments, and we are now tapping also in the fast-growing mass market in the Philippines that is very digitally connected. Pulse would enable our agents and bank partners to do this. The good news is that 81% of our clients right now are also Gen Ys and Gen Zs. It tells us that our young agents are fully relating to the young digitally connected target of the company, and Pulse will enable them to maximize this opportunity.
In the last figures, the agents who have not been using Pulse have a case productivity of 1.8, comparing to those that are using Pulse at 3.0 case productivity. That proves that Pulse is truly helping our agents to be more productive. Thank you, Divine. And that's productivity cases per over what period? Per month? Yes. Yes. Per producer per month. Yes. Thank you for that. So a very strong step-up in the productivity of agents who are using the tool even in the very first year of rollout in the Philippines. Thank you to everybody for asking your questions and for this very strong engagement. Again, we're going to go a little bit over time to try and answer all the questions that are coming in thick and fast in this capabilities panel. We're going to take one more question, and it comes from Thomas Wang.
Thomas: "The unit-linked market in China is effectively zero. Do you see opportunity to grow it over the three to five years and attach riders to it like in your other markets? Or are the customers in China simply not looking for unit-linked products?" Thank you for your question, Thomas. Lilian. Actually, contrary to that, the way we've looked at growing our unit-linked is actually through our bancassurance channel. As you know, we work across national bank, regional bank, and foreign banks. And where we see at some of the high net worth segment, we've been able to package investment-linked products and sell that through. So for year 2020, our investment-linked mix of our bancassurance channel is actually over 20%. And that is one of the reasons why we could improve margin in the bancassurance channel.
I think it's about packaging an investment-linked that is suitable for the bank customer rather than just selling a really single premium-type product. We've seen that if you package it correctly and address it to the customer needs, it does work, and there are opportunities there. Thank you, Nic. Thank you very much for that question, Thomas. Remember, there's one more opportunity to put your questions to the people here at Prudential in our closing section where we're going to be with the management. It leaves me to say thank you so much for engaging so strongly and also to Nic, Lilian, Al-Noor , Wai-Kwong , Dennis, Jennifer, Divine, and Nini.
We're now going to take a very quick break before we hand over to Mike, who's going to add a few more words on his part, and then he's going to look at the Prudential investment case followed by that final Q&A that I spoke of just now. So we'll see you again in five minutes from now. So today, you've heard our strategy and track record, our execution plans for how we're delivering, digitizing, and empowering our colleagues and our valued agents upon whom the financial success of this great business relies. Let me round up before we open to Q&A to remind you of our investment case. Our business model will be focused on long-term structural growth opportunities in Asia and Africa, building our market-leading positions and growth levers in our chosen segments. We have a high-quality, diversified portfolio of 34 businesses in 23 markets.
In the more developed markets, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, we have top three positions. In the largest scale markets of China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand, we have significant operations which represent huge long-term opportunities. Across the region, we have a leading multi-channel distribution platform with around 600,000 agents in a leadership position in the banca channel and over 300 life and asset management distribution partnerships. We are also building a competitive advantage in digital. We have innovative and adaptive product skills. Customer centricity is our mantra. And with Pulse, we offer an end-to-end solution which covers health, wellness, fitness, diet, links to hospitals in many of our markets, and all through our in-house app. At Eastspring, a leading Asia-based asset manager with AUM of $242 billion, we have an excellent platform giving us access to the fast-growing demand for wealth solutions across the entire region.
We have a strong track record in effective capital allocation and risk management, including clear goals in respect to ESG. Prudential will be focused on growth with a view towards achieving sustained double-digit growth and embedded value per share. For shareholders, this means direct and focused exposure to the powerful compounding value creator that is creating substantial growth and operating capital generation and a unique, proven business model. So now to the Q&A session. Well, thanks very much to Mike Wells for that message. And welcome back to Investor Day, Mike, Mark, Nic, James, and Ben as we glide into the final Q&A of this conference. The lines are now open to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to ask their question to the management. May I ask you to keep your questions brief?
You can call in live, or you can type in your questions on the event website where we have a dedicated Q&A session. Thank you very much. And let's go now to our first question. It's a live caller, and it's Blair Stewart from Bank of America. Blair, please take it away. Thanks very much. And thanks very much for all the effort today and also the showcases. It's been very good. Congratulations. I've got two questions left. Firstly, just going back to the cash conversion of the embedded value, I noticed that free surplus generation growth and embedded value growth have been different. I think embedded value has grown by twice as much as the free surplus generation since 2015. And free surplus generation is running at about 5% of the embedded value. And that's pre-any new business spend.
And obviously, you need to cover your central costs and dividend from the cash that comes from the free surplus generation. So long question, but what can be done to improve the free surplus generation? Because in doing so, you will improve PCA's financing capabilities. So I just wondered if that was something that we should be focusing on or what can be done to improve the rates of cash conversion. I know you talked about the with profits being a slow burner, but it is only 10% of the VIF. Anyway, the second question is just coming back to Babylon and the relationship. I don't know what you can say with regards to the economics for them. Are they incentivized per policy, per user, etc.? How does that work? Is it like a kind of bancassurance type relationship? Is what they provide exclusive to PCA?
And what happens if they were to walk away? Could you just rent that tech from someone else? And then, coming back to one of the questions from earlier, Pulse is conspicuous by its absence in China and India, where arguably its qualities would be best put to use. Thanks very much again. Mike, may I ask you to take the question in whichever direction you wish? Absolutely. I think on this segment, looking at some of the questions in the queue, Mark, I'm going to ask you to host this piece because a number of the inbound questions, including Blair's, I think are more financial. So why don't we put you to work and first respond? You invented some of the questions from Blair, and then you go ahead and host this segment. It'd be great. Perfect. Okay. Will do. Thank you. Blair, thanks for your question this afternoon.
So clearly, at the moment, our focus is on disciplined capital allocation, writing new business, which meets the hurdle rate and also tends to be more regular premium in nature. As I showed in the video, the capital generated each year is really used to invest in new business, build resilience, and also provide funding for inorganic investment going forward. So to answer your question, that is high-quality NBP generated each year would naturally add new cohorts and increase the size of free surplus generated. At a country mix level, some of our businesses have more front-ended cash flows, such as Indonesia. And when this kind of country returns to growth, we'd expect the velocity of that cash flow to increase.
But thirdly, also, there's an element of some of the actions that we've taken in terms of some of our costs, in terms of central costs, and also in terms of, as we look to enhance our financial flexibility through potential debt redemptions, that will also reduce our interest cost in the future. And all of those actions going forward should create a higher proportion of free surplus to be available for reinvestment in the business organically and inorganically. And in terms of your second question around Pulse, Nic, maybe I can hand over to you to take that key piece from me, please. Thank you, Mark. On Babylon, the arrangement is a fixed fee for all the markets that are in scope, with the exception of India and China, for a fixed period of time that started when Pulse was first launched in Malaysia in August 2019.
China and India are open for us to work with Pulse if we choose to. And as to our relationship, I mean, clearly, it's a very warm relationship, not least because through the work that we're doing with them, we're giving them access to the most populous, to 720-odd million people ultimately in Southeast Asia and up to 400 million people in Africa. So that allows the AI to be exposed to other parts of the globe to learn and be much richer as a result. Back to you, Mark. Thank you very much. James, should we go to the next question, please? Thank you very much. We've got another caller. It's Andrew Crean. Andrew, for the benefit of everyone who may have joined a bit later, could you just remind us of the company that you represent? And please put your question to our management here. Hello.
Thank you for giving me a chance to ask more questions. A couple of questions. Firstly, your dividend payout ratio is around about 10%-15%, which is very low compared with most companies. And I want to understand whether that is going to be the long-term payout ratio or whether there is a short-term need to build and retain capital, perhaps to buy out relationships in China and India, and that once you've achieved some sort of inorganic strategic goals, you will raise the payout ratio to a more normal level. So that was the first question. Second question is on the embedded value basis. I know, Mark, that you said that you believe in the European embedded value basis, and that's the TEV basis. But the investors live in a comparative world, and it's quite clear that your main competitor is under a TEV basis.
There have been a lot of questions as to which one is more conservative. Can I just ask you, have you actually done a comparable analysis, both of your EV and your business profits on a sort of TEV basis? And could you share with us, not necessarily in absolute numeric terms, but in broad scope as to whether they are comparable? Andrew, thank you for those. I'll take the first one in terms of the dividend piece, and then Ben will pick up the EV piece. You've got a slightly different lens on that for Andrew. Andrew, in terms of the dividend piece, I think we indicated at the half-year last year that we're looking for the dividend to grow in line with OFSG post-run-rate costs. No change expected in that particular piece today.
Do you accept that the dividend payout ratio is low? One of the things we did indicate last year is that we were making a very deliberate pivot towards more investment into the business. And part of that you saw play through at the second half of last year. Part of that you have seen play through in the first quarter of this year, where we've actually focused more on health and protection. We've focused more away from the PAR fund because we think that the returns, the profit signatures of those are preferable. So in terms of dividend payout, not much more to really be able to say on that really is linked to OFSG and separate from anything that we might be looking at or considering in terms of kind of future inorganic.
We would look at future inorganic as it rises, as opportunities arise, as against it being linked to any particular dividend payout. Ben, would you mind picking up the EV and the TEV, please? Sure, Mark. Thanks for the question, Andrew. In short, no. We haven't restated our EV onto a TEV basis. As I've referenced in my video, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that EV was devised to address the perceived shortfalls with TEV, among others, prudence allowance for risk and measuring risk at a more, or market risk at least, at a more granular product level. But of course, the need for more transparency and consistency of reporting. I think it's the appropriate way for us to measure our business. Let me perhaps give you two examples.
The first is when we measure market risk at a product group level, as Mark has referenced in his slides, and indeed I did in the video. Two-thirds of our VIF relates to health and protection business. So yeah, in essence, these are underwriting profits that aren't sensitive to market risk. So when we combine that with a conservative asset strategy, we're essentially projecting out and discounting back at close to risk-free rates. So really, it's akin to MCEV. If I then think about the investment side of the book, so one-third of our VIF, again, we apply an active approach to setting yields based on the 10-year government rate. We then hold those flat throughout the projection and don't mean revert to an ultimate forward rate. In addition to that, as you know, we calculate time value of option and guarantees and separately disclose that.
Now, whilst we've always had limited appetite for guarantees, we compete on a total returns basis. If we were to move to a passive basis of setting FER and to include some mean reversion, one, we would expect a higher embedded value, particularly when rates are sort of below long-term average levels. Two, I think in doing so, in the absence of anything else, we would tempt management to write higher levels of guarantees in the products. Perhaps one final point on the investment side, if I may. When we do write savings products, we do so in either our well-capitalized U.K. style with-profits funds or through unit-linked chassis. Now, both forms of which don't directly expose our shareholders to market risk. And in that regard, with-profits products and the ability to manufacture them here in Asia is a competitive advantage for us. Thanks.
Back to you, Mark. Thank you. James, should we move to the next question, please? Thanks very much. We've got another question from Ashik Musaddi. Ashik asks, how do we think about excess capital in the LCSM or GWS solvency ratios? How much cash can be deployed into inorganic growth? Okay. Thank you for that question. When I think about our LCS position, very comfortable with the position, and we operate well within internal risk appetites. Free surplus stock also allows for capital buffers in excess of the minimum capital requirements. While the majority of our surplus is fungible, our key stakeholders, whether they be regulators, distributors, or customers, expect our business units to remain well-capitalized. Therefore, the retained capital also enables us to be nimble and react very quickly to local opportunities as they arise.
And it's also worth noting that the comments in my video a bit earlier about accelerating our deleveraging via potential equity raise, which will further enhance our financial flexibility as we consider any potential inorganic growth opportunities. So overall, while we consider inorganic opportunities when they arise, we consider both internal and external funding options. And we saw during the course of last year how with some of the capital that was in Thailand, we were able to reinvest that back into the business as part of the funding for the bancassurance deal, which is a very real and a very current example of how we use the capital locally, but also how we provide some support at a group level. But thank you for that question. Back to you, James. Great. So with that, we can go to a question this time from Dominic O'Mahony.
Dom says, "You highlight that WP IFRS profit is backloaded due to the weighting to terminal bonuses. Under IFRS 17, do you expect group profit to be higher to reflect the smoother profit signature of WP products? Or will this be offset by the change in profit signatures of other products, for example, annuities?" Okay, so we get into the murky world of IFRS 17. This is a complex standard that we will be applying across multiple products and countries, and I think it's fair to say as well that industry practice is still being developed, and it's really too early to give any guidance on where we think we're going to land on IFRS 17 today, but I do commit to be able to give you some update as and when that becomes available in a meaningful fashion.
Now, under IFRS 17, profits are kind of really a combination of the services provided to policyholders in the period. There's a release of the risk adjustment and also the investment profit. Whereas under IFRS 4, the current standard, that's really driven by the release of prudence, which is specific to kind of local reporting bases, if you will. So IFRS 17 doesn't change underlying product cash flows. However, it will change the timing of profit recognition, which is behind the question. It's very difficult to generalize the potential impact given where we and others are in the market at the moment because there are a number of options which are subject to significant judgment, which will ultimately impact this. I suppose at its simplest, IFRS 17 tends to result in profit recognition throughout the duration of a contract, whereas the current standard tends to backend the profit recognition.
So given that, it's likely that the operating profit for the PAR business would be higher under IFRS 17. But there are a number of other products that need to be looked at and around and actually meshed together. So we haven't defined yet what that operating profit profile would look like. But as I said, as soon as we have something further to add, we'll be able to share that with you in due course. So thank you for that question. Thank you. So let's go now to a question this time from Greg Patterson. A twofold question here for you panelists. The first one on EEV. How do you think your basis differs from your peers? And the second one focuses the conversation back on Pulse. How complete is the rollout? Where is the current 9% bracket $70 million mainly from?
And Pulse products, will these be low margin, $70 million APE, first quarter 2021, or 9% of group? Right. Okay. So let me share a bit of the love here. I think we've dealt with an element of the first question in terms of one of the earlier pieces. But let me just check, Ben, if there's anything further you'd like to say on the EEV versus peers. I think we've dealt with that question. Thanks for that. Yeah. Okay. So then on to Pulse. Nic, would you like to pick up the key component around Pulse and the different aspects behind the question, please? Yes. I think we covered that earlier in terms of the contribution. As I said, it's mainly Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia at this stage.
The capabilities of the rollout of Pulse as we go from here will be expanded, both in adding new services, as we said earlier, lead generation, fulfillment. The virtual face-to-face that we talked about a lot over the last year is capable of being done on the single platform of Pulse, which is going to come into play as we face into the current lockdowns that we've been seeing in one or two markets. Servicing is only at the beginning. We can do claims, but we want to put other aspects. And of course, in time, we'll put wealth services. So the rollout is significant. The products that we're selling are predominantly health and protection in nature. So the margins are akin, as Ben said earlier, to what we're seeing in the rest of our portfolio. Okay. Mark, should I go with the next question? Thank you.
It's a long one here, and it comes from Henry Heathfield. Henry asks, "I was wondering if you could answer when investing in new business in Asia, could you provide an idea of how and where this investment is made and where we would see it in your financial statements?" That's the first one. Let's go to the second one from Henry. "I appreciate PCA is a health insurance, life insurance, and long-term savings business in Asia and that most of your profit is generated from insurance. However, health insurance and life insurance are quite different, and a lot of life insurance falls into long-term savings. So I was wondering if you could give me an idea of which is most important: health insurance, life insurance, or savings? If it's life insurance, is that pure-term life protection?" Right. Okay, so those are fairly thoughtful questions.
Thank you for that, Henry. In terms of where our investments show in terms of the accounts, I suppose the key element that you'd look for would be in our embedded value accounts. You'd see the element of new business strain or new business investment in our free surplus roll in our disclosures. So you'll see a separate line item for that particular piece quite clearly in the accounts entry. So that would be the back end of the nearly 400-page document. So that's where you'll find the answer to that key piece. And then in terms of the element of long-term savings and the different aspects of that, Nic, would you like to give a view on that, please? Well, I think in the end, they're both important in the sense that they're fulfilling real needs. Savings products tend to fulfill educational needs, retirement needs, protection products.
And really, what we mean by protection is life insurance. It's medical reimbursement business. It's critical illness, as we covered earlier in one of the capabilities sessions. It's accident, hospital cash. Those are the main sources. And on the protection side, we can sell them as standalone products, which is what we've done. We've started doing a lot, particularly during this pandemic. Or we can sell them bundled with savings chassis. Now, why would you do that? You would do that so that when someone buys a product when they're 30 and they're contributing, say, $100 a month, the cost of those insurance riders, protection riders, is not very expensive. So they will form a relatively modest part of the $100 premium. But later in life, maybe that $100 premium doesn't cover the cost of insurance.
So one is able to recycle some of the account value into providing that protection. Or the customer has the option to stop the product, take whatever the account value is, and not be protected at that stage. So that's the flexibility. And when we talked earlier about writing protection on top of saving chassis, this is what we had in mind. The profitability that comes from savings, it's purely a charge on the account value. The profitability that comes from protection is the ability to understand price risk, deliver good value to the customer, and ultimately a good return to the shareholder. And that's really what underpins our IFRS and our embedded value profitability in the way in which we report it. Back to you, Mark. Thank you very much, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you very much to Henry for that. Panelists, we've got another question.
This one comes from Oliver Steel , and again, it's a twofold question. I'll start with the first one. If you're targeting low-income customers, what does that imply for VNB margins over the next five years? Then Oliver asks you all a second question. How should we think about cost growth relative to revenue growth as a result of Pulse? Specifically, how do costs of writing new business develop as scale grows? And what savings over what timeframe could come from fewer legacy systems? Great questions, Ollie. Thank you very much for those. Clearly, the element of lower, as we move into somewhat low-income strata, the element of the shape and the complexity of the products is going to be rather different, and with that, we're going to see a different level of profitability.
We saw an element of it coming through in terms of the bite-sized products that were sold through Pulse during the back end of last year and through the front end of this year. And that, by definition, squeezes an element of the MCV piece. But having said that, I think as we do some element of potential face-to-face and virtual face-to-face with some of those segments, the opportunity to be able to then upsell as those individuals kind of increase their wealth is very real. And that is part of the customer journey that we're very focused on. In terms of the element of cost and the like, I think one of the things you'll see coming through in time, but it is going to take time, is further operational leverage.
And it's one of the things that Ben spoke about briefly in his video, the element of extra operational leverage that will come through as additional sales come through, as additional activity comes through in terms of Pulse. But let me just see if Ben's got anything further to add to my initial observations. I think it was Johnny talking about the op leverage as we move all the systems onto a singular platform. But you're right, Mark. We're looking for a digital dividend, if you like, and additional operating leverage. But I think it would be premature for me to state our targets in that regard. Thank you. Thank you very much, James. Thank you. Let's jump to this question. And it comes from Charles Cartledge over at Trium Capital.
Charles says this, "Now that Pru plans to have a standalone Asian entity plus a smaller Africa entity, and given the possibility that this entity will seek additional equity capital, doesn't it make sense to publish embedded value data on a like-for-like basis with your major regional peer? This might help analysts and investors make a clearer peer-to-peer comparison." Charles, thank you for that question. I think we've tried to answer this in a number of responses to earlier questions that have come through either from Greig Paterson or others as well in terms of EEV and why we believe EEV is right for us. Hopefully, the additional disclosure that we have provided with our results in March has given everybody extra comfort in terms of our EEV. But in essence, we believe that the EEV that we have is right for us.
It reflects the mix of business in terms of who we are. It's an active basis, and it's one that we think actually is more developed, more refined, and therefore a very appropriate basis to be able to share with investors and share with the market. Thank you. Great. Maybe turn to Andrew Baker, who has this question. Regarding Pulse, can you give us a sense of how you're managing data protection risks and any developing regulations that you see in this area across the region? Now, that's a question that we have been discussing and looking at ourselves. So actually, there's one of the panelists who I'd be very keen to be able to pick this up. So I wonder, James, if you might be able to give a view on that, please. Thank you, Mark. Look, we manage this risk at multiple levels.
We've got a single group-wide information security and privacy team. We also have cyber risk management, which is conducted locally by the business information security officers in each LBU overseen by local risk committees. But look, as we moved when GDPR went live, we made sure we had a really robust framework, which has been maintained in the development and operation of Pulse. And we have teams that take part in the hothouses that Al-Noor referred to earlier to make sure that we build in these controls right at the beginning. Now, in terms of new regulations, I guess a notable one is in China because historically, there's not been one single data protection law in China. The major law was the cybersecurity law of December 2012. But in October 2020, a personal data protection law was drafted. A draft was published.
While the effective date has not been finalized, it does bring in stiff penalties for non-compliance. Now, what we've done is we've compared that law to our policies on GDPR. And what we found is that our policies are largely aligned. The law does bring in a kind of a multi-level protection scheme of information security, infrastructure security, operational security, and data security. And what we've done is we've assessed ourselves against all of those aspects. So it is something that is evolving because data protection laws are evolving across the whole region. But given our history, we're in a really good space in that in terms of our preparations. Back to you, Mark. Thank you very much. Thank you, James. And now back to James from the studio.
It leaves me to say thank you very much to everybody who've been putting forward your questions, not only in this last roundtable with the management, but throughout this whole Investor Day. We obviously want to thank Mike, Mark, Nic, James, and Ben for being with us to answer these questions and to color the many questions that people have had for you over the last couple of hours. We're going to respond to all the remaining questions that we haven't been able to answer today. But it now gives me the great honor to hand over to Mike to close up this event. Mike, please. Thank you very much. I think the catalyst for this event wasn't actually COVID. It was early discussions with you or stakeholders who MiFID or their firms changed their poli cies.
Travel around so many markets we're in is a difficult part of your role. So we decided as a management team that one of the things we wanted to do is produce for you as existing investors and also for new investors a library of vignettes, if you will, on the businesses so you can see what those teams are focused on, what the teams look like, how they talk about their business, the similarities in the work streams in the group, and then the differences that come from having local talent on the ground that understands the complexities of each and every market we're in. So see this as the start of a journey with us and how we deal with our investor relations components. We'll continue to add to this library, if you will.
And I think we're very, very open to your feedback on which parts you like best and which parts you think that we need to work harder on. And clearly, the team did a tremendous job, in my view, in putting together just an extraordinary amount of effort to bring this together for you. And they have my gratitude and thanks. And just closing up, I hope you see the expanded customer focus capability, the cultural shifts, the modernization of Prudential, and that we're ready to be a standalone Asia-Africa business. We're uniquely positioned in markets with structural demand. We have strong positions in those markets. And I hope it's very clear we have incredibly talented colleagues that are on the ground executing for us every day. So it's my pleasure to work with them. And again, they have my great thanks.
We'll see all of you in August at the conference. Thank you.