Well, first of all, good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us here today. Thank you for battling past reception downstairs. I think most of us have made it through. I guess in some ways I'd rather not talk about the results for 2022, but I guess it's incumbent on me to do so. I think more interestingly is what we did in 2022 and how that set us up for 2023 and onwards. We've got the usual presenters here today. Myself and Adam will do the presenting and any hard questions will get thrown to Matt and Trevor at the end. Today's agenda, very simple, very brief. I think it's quite a simple and brief story actually for last year and into this year. We'll run through the overview.
Adam will talk through the financial results, sustainability. We'll spotlight some of the highlights as we see our strategy. We'll leave plenty of time for Q&A at the end, which I guess is always the more interesting bit. On Q&A, if you're online, you can feel free to type into the web portal effectively. Those questions will come out on an iPad. We'll also open up the lines to calls by phone as well, if that's helpful. Query your questions in the room. Overview. Strange year, I would say, 2022, and that was following an even stranger few years. Perhaps some of that we'll unpack as we go through this. We performed poorly by our own standards. I think very well in a market context.
I guess we feel vindicated that our long-term calls on inflation have been accurate. Our painful early call on inflation in 2022 was correct and has set us up well. Broadly, I would say we've taken the right calls, we've made the right calls, and we got those big calls right. It's just slightly unfortunate that some of those benefits will take a little time to earn through into this year and into next year. We identified inflation very quickly. We took very rapid pricing action and reserve in action. You'll see we got all of that out the way in the first half of last year. We returned to growth last year, albeit driven by motorcycle and taxi. We made an underwriting profit, which I don't think is gonna be particularly commonplace across the market this year.
Strong capital position maintained, and we've also positioned ourselves very well for growth as we go into 2023. I'll come back and talk about a lot of these things in more detail later. Adam, I think you're gonna now chat through the financial results.
Thanks, Geoff. Hi, everyone. I'm going to run through the numbers from last year, then I'll hand back to Geoff for some strategic highlights and thoughts on the outlook for 2023. The key elements of our P&L are probably very familiar by now, with our gross written premium and combined ratio telling most of the story. In this case, the story is one of some top-line growth with premium up to GBP 171 million, driven by 2 new products and some short-term headwinds on loss ratio, which came in at 68.7%, which I'll go into over the next few slides. On the balance sheet side, we are very comfortable with where we ended up for this year.
Obviously, capital generation's been a bit slower, than in previous years due to the higher loss ratio. The balance sheet's held up very well. We declared a special dividend taking our total distribution for the year to four and a half P per share. Let's take a closer look at what's been going on with the underwriting result in 2022. For our core motor book, in some ways it's a tale of two halves. The first half of 2022 was clearly heavily impacted by inflation. I won't repeat our half-year results update. In summary, we saw inflation was increasing fast. We acted quickly, strengthened reserves, and made significant adjustments to pricing.
Following our assertive rating action, our H2 motor loss ratio was a marked improvement on H1, with some more significant inflation impacts largely limited to the first half of the year. Of course, the motorcycle and taxi books in H2, which are targeted to have a higher loss ratio, became a larger proportion of the earned premium, naturally nudging up our overall loss ratio in H2. Our expense ratio dropped by 1% in 2022. We've always controlled costs tightly, and that, along with our growing net earned premium, has led to the improvement. A slight cautionary note on that, we do expect high levels of overall inflation to continue in 2023 and hence cause some strain on expense ratio as the growth in earned premium catches up.
Digging a little deeper, we can see that while our motor book has performed well in market terms with a financial loss ratio of 61.5%, the new lines have been a bit of a drag on loss ratio in year one. Both motorcycle and taxi have undergone a period of bedding in, where we've improved pricing levels and underwriting controls throughout the year. Given a very significant proportion of motorcycle business was written early in the year, much of this business didn't benefit from the full suite of enhancements, which contributed to the high loss ratio in 2022. Business written today is expected to generate far better returns. Taxi generated a small amount of premium in 2022.
We saw a couple of large claims through the year, which are fairly random, but when set against the low premium, had a significant impact on the loss ratio, but not massive in GBP terms. Of course, both taxi and motorcycle accounts have been subject to the same inflationary issues as core motor as well. This is a slide I've shown in the last few presentations, which I've updated to the end of last year. Clearly, we put through very substantial rate increases throughout the year as soon as we saw the high inflation had emerged, and we sustained those increases as we continued to cover inflation throughout 2022. On investment strategy, unchanged in 2022. We held a portfolio of investment grade corporate bonds, government-backed assets. As we hold them to maturity, no losses were realized on the portfolio.
On the regulatory balance sheet, which is market-to-market, those market-to-market movements were offset by increases in the discount rate. We expect the investment return to increase in future periods due to higher reinvestment yields across the same investment mix. While we're on the balance sheet, in spite of the challenges during the year, we generated an underwriting profit and capital, which we've been able to return to shareholders. We paid a relatively big interim dividend and decided to top that up with a special dividend at year-end, taking the total distribution to four and a half p. Leaves us comfortably within our preferred SCR range. Obviously, the dividend's small by historic standards, but reflects our strategy and policy to return capital, which we consider to be excess to our shareholders. Quick dip into IFRS 17.
We have been fairly quiet on this front. I can confirm that the adjustment to IFRS 17 for us is expected to be relatively straightforward. Because we're applying the Premium Allocation Approach across the book, the earnings pattern is similar, with the only real differences in being the discounting preserves and the lower amounts of cost deferred under IFRS 17. The risk margin under IFRS 4 is now at a similar level to that which we have planned for the risk adjustment under IFRS 17. We don't expect much impact or any impact on the regulatory balance sheet or our ability to pay dividends. While I'm on my feet, a bit on sustainability. We implemented a Net Zero Roadmap last year and have significantly enhanced our disclosure around climate.
This year we made some good progress, particularly through our building refurbishment, where we've implemented more efficient and therefore more environmentally friendly building elements. We'll continue to monitor developments in this space carefully, particularly with a strategic focus on the opportunities presented by emerging products and evolving technology. With that, over to Geoff for some strategic highlights.
Thanks, Adam. It struck me today that it's just over 5 years since we IPO'd in the room just behind this wall actually, and it's been quite the 5 years, I would say. If bad news comes in 3s, I think we've hopefully got them all out of us. We IPO'd straight into a cyclical soft market. We then crashed into the COVID era, and having just emerged as that tapered out, we then went straight into an extraordinary inflationary environment. We've not really had a year of plain sailing since we first came to market, and we hope this year is the start of a return to something much more normal. It's been a challenging year. Extraordinary rapid increase in inflation, which I think has been well flagged. We made a very early call.
You recall we came out with a profit warning. I think we called it first and we called it hardest. Probably more importantly is we took a very assertive rating approach to fix that position. We moved our reserves at the half year, and we moved our pricing to reflect the new reality. That means we had a difficult second half. We think others were too slow to move, which we'll come back to later. A good motor loss ratio in year. 61%, I think, is looking like it's market leading. At this stage, I've seen no one else go anywhere near that for this year so far. Motorcycle and taxi were launched, reviewed and evolved. We didn't expect to get this perfect straight off the bat. We wrote a bit more than we expected, sort of early doors.
Business we've written since probably halfway through last year, we are pretty confident is on the right rating terms now and will deliver our target profitability. Clearly, there's some new product strain. We always expected that. Timing perhaps slightly unfortunate in that we had that new product strain at the same time the motor loss ratio was gonna have a bit of a tough year. We stuck rigorously to our profitability as a target and volume as the output philosophy. We firmly believe that. No change to our philosophy. In the face of what we believe is undisciplined market pricing, we allowed our motor business to shrink, which meant we delivered a profit performance.
If I was playing a game of insurance Top Trumps, and why not, I think I'd pretty confidently play our Top Trump cards around loss ratio in year, our inflation call, both the accuracy and the timing of it, and our price increases. To reiterate what Adam said, 30% in year, 50% since January 2020 is well ahead of the market, I suspect. I might also play a card on how well we are now positioned moving into this year and into 2024. The motor insurance market in 2022. Our view, the market was far too slow to unwind Covid discounts and far too optimistic on the whiplash and post-Covid benefits, as well as being too slow to reflect inflation factors.
There is a slight feeling of, "I told you so," having been here. Sadly, that doesn't stop us suffering the pain of that rapid increase in inflation, nor does it stop the pain of the volume impact we suffered before the market caught up, perhaps with our view of the required work rate. Claims inflation, we think, peaked at about 12% last year. We expect 2023 claims inflation to remain high, which we'll come back to, although we did see signs of pricing starting to increase in 2023. Motorcycle and taxi, I think Adam's already said this. Just to reiterate, on taxi, a couple of large claims against low-end premium sort of makes that loss ratio look worse than we think it is on an underlying basis.
The rate and sophistication that Matt and his team have now deployed, we believe is at the forefront of the market, and we are confident we're now riding motorcycle at our correct loss ratio targets. Motorcycle is a seasonal product, you know, we'll find out as we go through spring whether that's fully worked. Overall, we believe these new products are gonna be highly attractive contributors to our profit going forward. We've entered new markets at pace, scale, and with hardly any cost. If you recall, there was no M&A in here. There was no renewal right purchase. It's been replacing existing underwriters or entering panels as a new underwriter. Inflation. Always one of the more interesting bits of our presentation for people. I'm not gonna read these words out word for word. We believe 2020 at about 12%.
2023, we can see softening slightly to maybe somewhere around 10. We think overall inflation will run hot, but it doesn't have the same impact as 2022, as we've seen it coming and we priced for it appropriately. Key bits here, we saw inflation across parts, paint, labor, repair costs, used car values, injury, mobility, almost everything, which I think is quite a unique position. As we look into this year, what might change? We can see parts availability becoming slightly easier. If we can repair cars, that reduces repair length, which reduces the amount of time our customers are in hire cars for mobility costs. We see the improvement areas as parts availability and mobility. We do, though, have a careful eye on injury costs and how wage inflation might impact, especially the larger injury cases.
I would say at this point, this is what we think will happen. There's limited evidence so far for it happening, so we wouldn't call this inflation having softened yet, I think it's fair to say, Trevor. Some new news, I guess. 2 things. One is we are deploying in the summer a new direct platform. At the moment, the vast majority of our customer contacts on our direct system are still by phone. That's expensive and cumbersome and not great customer service. We're well on track to deploy a new online administration with online portal, as you'd expect. That's due to go live in the summer. We've involved no consultancy spend. There's no CapEx involved in that, so it shouldn't have any meaningful effect on our numbers.
We do expect it to see cost savings being generated, which we can reinvest in our direct pricing as we go forward. We're also rolling out Insurer-Hosted Pricing. A bit nerdy, a bit techy perhaps. What it effectively allows us to do is to deploy more granular rating at pace without some of the restrictions of software houses. Matt will happily give a couple examples in the Q&A if that's helpful at the end. Some crystal ball gazing on what might happen. What I would say is there's a range of scenarios for the market this year. Possible positive factors. We think underpricing by competitors in prior periods may bite, and maybe there's been some evidence of that over the last few weeks as results of audit have rolled out. Rational market pricing might sustain, we would hope.
Inflation may soften more than we expect. I am pretty confident there'll be some competitor market exits. We know for an almost fact that there's a couple of meaningful people looking to exit the market. From our point of view, our Insurer-Hosted Pricing will start to impact later this year and into 2024, as with the new direct platform. What might go wrong? Competitors can lose discipline as volume starts to hurt. It is easy to lose discipline and not to stick to rational pricing. There could be an undisciplined market entry. We don't see that at the moment. There's always a possibility someone comes around the corner.
The Official Injury Claim portal, as you may be aware, there was a Court of Appeal decision which basically backed claimants, I would say, in terms of how small value claims are valued. That is now through the ABI being appealed to the Supreme Court, or leave to appeal is being sought. We're not massive fans. We think it could elongate the uncertainty. We're well covered. Our reserves don't receive any good news out of that, but we think that creates some uncertainty for the market. Inflation could come in above expectations. That's not our base case.
Our base case is for us to be able to deploy below market price increases now, because we've already fixed the delta between inflation and where we are today, and for Sabre to either grow or to increase our margins, and we'll optimize whether we grow or increase margin as we go through the year, depending on market conditions. Our base case is for growth and margin enhancement. On people, we continue to benefit from very low staff turnover, and indeed, we recruited into areas ahead of our anticipated growth, primarily into claims and into Matt's team in actuarial. We continue to pay bonuses, and we continue to try and look after staff through cost of living allowances as we came through the winter period.
We rolled out a range of enhancement, self-service HR, employee benefit schemes, electric car schemes, and as Adam mentioned, we're completing a full building refurbishment to make ourselves a more modern sort of environment for people, while also helping our ESG scores. On customers, the big thing here is to look to enhance our direct capability through the new platform, as I've mentioned. We're also looking at processes to identify customer vulnerabilities, especially where that it relates to the current cost of living crisis. I guess the acid test is we have very low levels of complaints at the moment, across any of our lines of business, be that claims, pricing or anything else. We are pleased with how we are being able to support customers through these difficult times.
Looking forward, just to reiterate a few points, we believe we've managed the impacts of inflation as well as is possible. Maintaining our price discipline means we continue to anticipate growth as the market hardens. I would say recent 2023 volumes are pretty encouraging in this regard. For the first time, I think in a long time, we've seen our volumes moving up on a weekly basis, not through our own actions, through the market starting to catch up to our pricing. IHP with our more sophisticated pricing. At the moment, we're less than 1% of the market, we don't feel at all constrained by the opportunities ahead of us as we start to roll out IHP and some more rating sophistication. We think we'll find other opportunities to grow beyond just market price wave surfing.
We continue to see a lot of partnership opportunities, be that MGAs or broker schemes or M&A opportunities. We maintain a very high hurdle. It's not at the center of our strategy. We believe there is a lot of opportunity open to us through organic growth. Outlook. I think we feel just about confident enough to try and give some guidance, which I know is what everyone has so far. Premium first. Motor, we expect to grow. We expect to grow our motor volumes. Motorcycle, there'll be stronger Q1 performance than Q4. Overall, we expect to grow motor and shrink motorbike, as our rate changes start to bite. As our exit volume was slightly lower through the end of last year, we don't think market pricing caught up last year.
Our exit volume is a bit lower from last year than we might have expected. That gives a bit of earned premium paying into this year. Overall, our base case would be for motor growth, as in car, in the low double digits, for bike to shrink a bit. Overall, at the moment, we would expect high single-digit growth across the portfolio. There are quite a lot of scenarios around that. We could grow much faster and inflation could soften. If I was feeling bullish, and I looked at the last couple of weeks' numbers, I might say I'm being too pessimistic on growth. Our view is we've been here before.
For those of you who've listened to us for a few years, we said this in 2020, the market then rapidly ran out of steam and our volumes tailed off again. We're not gonna get overly ambitious. We're not gonna put a bull case forward here. Similarly, competitors might lose discipline, inflation could remain high. What we think we're putting forward here is a sensible central scenario of how we think the year will pan out, there are scenarios either side of this. Other income and profit. We will see an increase in investment income. We're expecting very material increases in loss ratios across the whole portfolio. We're already seeing that in the early weeks and months of this year, we are confident our loss ratios will improve as we hope.
We do expect a bit of deterioration to expense ratio, as Adam mentioned. There will be, sadly, some residual impact coming through from inflation last year. central view, overall COR mid-80s% to 90s%, depending on how those scenarios pan out. As I say, there are views around that. We think we're in a sensible central scenario at the moment. I think overall and in closing, I think we've delivered possibly a market-leading result in 2022, certainly on loss ratio. We're very well positioned now for growth through 2023 and 2024. Our central case is of growth while reducing COR, i.e., growth growing and enhancing our margin. We think that's not a bad place to be.
The extent of that will be slightly influenced by market factors, I think it's just how much growth and how much improvement in margin we see, not whether either of those two things happen. At that point, I will pause, we're very happy to take any questions on anything at all. We'll start in the room, we'll go to phone, we'll go to the web. Hands have flown up. Rory, you're in charge of the mic. I'll let you choose who to go to first.
Thank you. Good morning. It's Abid Hussain from Panmure Gordon. I've got three questions if I can, please. Firstly, on replatforming, why are you migrating the policies now? I think you said you deliberately delayed that. Just wondering why now is the right reason? Have you quantified any benefits, any benefits to the expense ratio that might occur? The second question is on the software. You touched upon the Insurer-Hosted Pricing. I suppose if you could just put a bit more color around what is that and what the potential benefits of that might be?
Sure.
On pricing, you mentioned that you may not need to push through as much pricing as some of your peers 'cause you've moved hard and early. Just wondering, how do you track that? Is there any data that you could share with us on that front? Thank you.
Okay. I'll start in reverse order into that pricing first, while I remember. Our belief is that claims inflation is gonna run, I would say, about 10% this year. To cover 10% inflation, we need to put through probably 14-15 points of rate, allowing for the mix effect. Our view is that others have catch-up to do to fill out the delta between where inflation got to and where their base point was. We will still be increasing prices as we go through this year by, say, around 1% a month or so. Others, we think, need to do that and quite a bit more besides. As we're putting on our normal price increase, we expect others to put on a lot more. That will allow us to see the benefit in volume.
As I mentioned, in the most recent weeks, we're seeing some pretty firm evidence of that happening. We'll see if that sustains at the current level. On the software mark, if you answer the IHP one in a second, if that's okay. Replatforming onto the direct system, it's one we've been looking at for a while. We've been through a pretty extensive market tender process on that through the early part of last year. Costs have come down dramatically, and I think we're now at a point where direct is a large enough part of the book to make it worth the time and effort in moving that across to get the benefits of online, full online servicing. We're not publishing benefits for that.
We expect to reinvest that back into pricing as they emerge and take extra volume, would be our central point there. Matt, do you wanna describe IHP sort of in a simplistic-ish way?
Yeah. The advantage of IHP is currently under software houses. It takes about 6 weeks to get rate changes in. Once we have IHP, we're fully in control. We think back to the times during COVID, we could have actually done more segmented targeted rate changes quicker to ensure the pricing is as accurate as possible during COVID. That's kind of looking back. Looking forward, what it allows us to do is put more complex rating algorithms live. For example, if we wanted to say, "What's the probability of someone in a suit?" to, in our rating, we could get model adds into our rating, which today would have limited ability to be able to do that. We can also refine and learn from our rating much quicker.
Currently we have a 6-week window to get rates live, and then it takes 1 month to get data and another 6 weeks to make a change. Going forward, we'll be able to get something live much quicker, assess it, and then make refinements much quicker. It's all about that speed to market as well as the ability to have more complex models.
We have to change base prices on a daily basis, effectively. This allows us to make much more complex prices on a daily basis. What we won't do is use this to chase volume. We'll use it to deploy more sophisticated pricing as quickly as we can. Ivan, you're next.
Hi. It's Ivan Bokhmat from Barclays. Thank you. I've got 3 questions. Well, the first one, I'm glad you've brought up the slide with the 5 years since the IPO, 'cause I wanted to ask you about your motor portfolio. Obviously, there's been quite a change in it in terms of the size over the past 5 years. So in what shape is it now? In a sense, how much is, like, the specialist, how much is mass market? Where do you think over that period you've shed most of the premium volumes? 'Cause if I count just on policy count, it's down 38% since 2017. I think back then we were thinking that, you know, of the total book, over 2/3 were specialists. You must have had some bite into that niche segment by now already. Maybe some general thoughts on that. Sorry.
The second question is, I'm thinking of your, you know, your profitability being quite cyclical, unfortunately in the bad part of the cycle. I was wondering if now that the margins are gonna need to start to recover and prices rise, would you consider setting aside a bit more in reserving to help steer your earnings? Perhaps a related question to that, but separate, as you move to IFRS 17, can you share what kind of reserve margin percentile you consider to be in? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. I'll take the first one. First two. Adam, you take the IFRS one, if that's okay. Yeah, since IPO, we've had to grit our teeth. I think we always said when we launched we expected to shrink at certain points of the cycle. We didn't expect to get three such big waves smashing straight into us. The cyclical downturn we expected. We didn't expect COVID, clearly, and nor did we expect the inflation. We have had to shrink more than we would have expected. I would say we still maintain a very strong moat around our more nonstandard business. Our average premium, Matt, as we sit here today...
GBP 700-GBP 800 a car.
GBP 7, GBP 750. That is a lot higher than the market, which I suspect is around GBP 400. We're still maintaining that moat. The business we've lost is the stuff nearer the mass market, as people have, in our view, underpriced. We've clearly not been competitive for some of that nearer mass market, lower average premium business. We're still very comfortable, Ivan, that we've maintained that moat. We haven't really seen anyone massively come into our sector. A few people have had a poke. Some have come in, they boomed a little while, then they've maybe disappeared for a bit. We'll see how that works going forward. On the profitability and cyclicality, I guess that's really the reason we're trying to launch other product lines. We wanna try and smooth out some of the troughs.
Bike and taxi are less cyclical. Once they're fully established, earning, we believe that gives us a slightly non-cyclical line through the middle of the accounts as well. I don't think we're going to change our reserving philosophy, Matt. We try and reserve to our actuarial best estimate with an appropriate margin. I guess, Adam, that's a good segue to you on the margin.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's fair to say we've chosen to be a follower rather than a leader on IFRS 17. I think we wanna make sure that what we do is consistent and easily understandable and comparable across the market. It seems that there is a range of sort of percentiles that are being applied on the risk margin across the market. I don't think opinion has settled as to where that should be. Obviously, it has to be different for every insurer, depending on your own risk mix, and there's a sort of choice of judgment there. I think it's fair to say we're in the pack.
We sort of don't have to choose that 100% yet until we until we come out with our IFRS 17 numbers later in this year. We'll definitely be sort of in the pack when it comes to our IFRS 17 risk margin, which as I mentioned, is likely to be of a similar order of magnitude where it currently is under IFRS 4, although it's on a slightly different basis.
May I ask a couple of follow-ups?
Mm-hmm.
On the first point, on the IPO market.
Yeah
...maybe you could share your thoughts about the elasticity of it, because I think the main advantage in the past was that you're one of the, you know, two, three people quoting for some kind of business.
Yeah.
You know, clearly the volumes, they may suggest something else. Secondly, just on, Adam's point, maybe you can share that range that you refer to where you're in the pack, just for our, for our benefit.
Sorry, my mic? Feels like most insurers seem to be pitching somewhere between sort of 80-95% confidence interval on their IFRS 17 risk margin.
On the elasticity, it's an interesting one. We did some price benchmarking fairly recently and looked at who was quoting around us. By and large, it was us quoting against ourselves still. You may recall back to the IPO days, we said when we quote often we're the one of very few people quoting. We looked at who quoted, it was our own direct brands, and it was brokers who when you dug through the broker quote, was also us. We still think we have that positioning. I think for the last few years, we've seen less young drivers come into market, as we've discussed before. We've seen less people become slightly non-standard, so there were less cars being purchased. We had less people getting speeding convictions 'cause they were driving less. The non-standard market itself sort of...
It didn't shrink, but it didn't really grow much. I think what we're seeing now is that market opening back up again. As you know, driving tests are now fully maxed out. We know young drivers are still coming to market. We can see new car sales starting to improve. We're definitely seeing quote volumes on aggregators are now back pretty much to where they were at about 2020, Matt, 2019, 2020. Aggregator quote volumes have bounced all the way back up in the most recent months. We see the volume coming back into the market again, which will be benefiting our volumes as well at the moment.
Okay, thanks.
Exactly. Thanks, Adam.
Thanks. James Pearce from Jefferies. First one's on pricing. You said market pricing has been promising in recent weeks. Firstly, can you quantify that? I guess if rate momentum continued on a weekly or monthly basis, if that was sustained, and claims inflation behaves how you expect, i.e., up 10% this year, how long does it take for the market to start pricing adequately? Is it the first half this year, second half this year, next year? Second question is, last time you spoke about combined ratio of around 80% in 2024. Appreciate that it's early days, are you still happy with that as of today?
Yeah, sure. I'll take that in reverse order. We're still targeted 80% as our ideal position to get to in the short to medium term. No change there. Market pricing, how do we track it? We don't spend a huge amount of time tracking competitors, if I'm honest. I'm not sure what we do with it. We sort of price to our own requirements rather than chase other people's numbers. What we can see is the impact on our weekly volumes. We can see a pretty good year-over-year improvement. It's an interesting position. Last year, if you recall, the first half of the year was before we made our big inflation call. Last year wasn't a knockout year, but we were still pretty competitive in the first half of the year.
We made our big call on inflation around what, June or July, and increased our prices dramatically. What we're seeing is a very distinct step up now from the volumes we wrote in Q4 last year. Agree that the seasonality is slightly different, so we don't want to get overexcited, but at the moment, our volumes look pretty good, I would say. We wanna see how that pans on a year-on-year basis, and we wanna see if it sustains. We think we're in a sensible place at the moment on our call at the moment without getting overexcited. Adequately pricing. I think it's the real, without knowing people's base point on pricing, it's really hard to say. Our view is looking forward, if claims inflation is at 12, everyone should be putting Sorry, 10.
Everyone needs to be putting forward the same sort of pricing going forward. You know, some are in a 10%-15% range looking forward. What's the catch up required from people is what I don't know. Is actually what we would say our pricing, their projection for the year, 14%, 15%. Should that be 25% or 35% for other people? That's what we don't know without knowing how far they are off a strong starting position. We think we're on a really firm foundation. We've got to cover inflation looking forward. We'd expect that rate of increase to be much less than is required by a lot of competitors, from basically what I'm hearing in some of the recent results announcements.
Just over, sir. Thanks.
Hi, good morning. Thomas Bateman from Berenberg. Premiums or pricing for young drivers still seems to be lagging the rest of the market. Could you comment on whether you think it's that due to telematics, and if that's impacted your competitiveness at all? Second question, just on installment income seems much lower this year. Could you put a bit of color around that? Is that due to potentially lower young, less young new drivers? Finally, you commented on motorcycle, being in the, your kinda target range. What is that target range? When do you think you'll be able to hit that on an earned basis?
Sure. Pricing lagging on young drivers. I guess not for us, it's not, Matt. We're applying our price changes consistently and equally across the market. We're still seeing a pretty decent mix of young drivers coming through. We track our risk mix on a monthly basis. Yeah, I don't think we're lagging. Well, we're certainly not lagging on our price increases there. There are more telematics providers in the market that may be having an impact. Some of those have been MGAs. Some of those people are struggling for capacity. We may see some of those prices move up quicker than the mass market as the rest of this year pans out as well. Slightly vague, Tom. I don't really have a specific answer on that one, I'm afraid.
On motorcycle, I think, Matt, we're confident we're writing at that, our target loss ratio now. If motor loss ratio is in the low to mid-50s or probably in the early 60s would be our target for motorbike. We have less expenses to deploy to that, so we're still looking for the same combined ratio, but to reflect the fact there's reasonably marginal cost coming through there. Installments, Adam.
Yeah. It's not so much impacted by a change in mix within the direct customer pool. Recall that we only sell installment income to direct customers. Motorcycle and taxi are both effectively broker-led, so we won't get any installment income for them. It's really the motor pool and then the direct bit of that, which is smaller, which is driving the lower installment income in the year.
Let's go this side, just to save.
Good morning. It's Nick Johnson from Numis. A couple of questions, please. Basically thinking about risks to the combined ratio. Firstly on that, on claims inflation, your assumption of 8%-10% this year, what do you see as the biggest risk to that number? Is it bodily injury claims, CPI, you know, supply chain? Just where do you think there's most uncertainty on that assumption? Secondly, on fraud and theft, which I think probably traditionally rises in economic downturns, are you seeing any increase on that front at the moment? Have you loaded pricing for that in the year ahead? Thanks.
Perhaps if I take the theft one, Trevor, you can talk about injury and things. Theft. I guess the stuff you read in the papers about Range Rovers in London being a difficult risk to write, that's absolutely true. We are trying a few slightly different things there. I would say we are seeing certainly increased theft on Land Rover, Jaguar Land Rover vehicles. That's one we address. We are seeing some other makes being targeted as well, Trevor, as well.
Yes, a number of the larger SUVs, so Lexus, and, you know, some of the Mercedes-Benz type vehicles as well, we're seeing going missing, particularly around London. I think the other area of theft that we've seen quite a bit of is catalytic converters really just being taken for the precious metal.
I think what I'd say, Nick, is that we have very short feedback loops between claims and pricing. If we start to see these issues emerging, we're onto it pretty quickly in terms of our group rating. Our belief is they're still the right price for almost every car, just that right price might be rather larger than it was a couple of years ago. What's the risk to call on claims inflation? I guess the overall risk here is responding to it too quickly. We can see signs that it might soften. Our view is we're gonna wait until we see evidence that it has softened rather than try and pre-guess that too much. Trevor, probably injury would be the bigger one.
Yeah. I think generally there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of everything from the bent metal piece, the mobility part, and personal injury. If we look into personal injury, we've got a corrosive activity around inflation on those outstanding claims. We've taken that into account in terms of the reserving. However, the risk there is that wage inflation causes more pain, particularly around care costs, in those larger losses. In the smaller attritional claims, as Geoff referenced, we've got an outstanding or potentially outstanding decision around how those claims are valued. And certainly at the moment it would appear that the savings which were originally considered to be coming through from the Whiplash Reforms aren't there. I think it's the extent to which they're not there is the uncertainty.
I've seen other people refer to those numbers being nearer 15 than GBP 25. I think we'd be in a similar sort of place.
On care costs, can you just elaborate a bit on, in terms of what you're assuming in your inflation assumptions?
We're looking at that really as a sort of, as a blended number around that sort of 10% level. The opportunity we've got there is that the majority of those claims will be protected by our excess of loss insurance cover.
Just to follow up to, you talked about, theft, but is there anything to say on fraud as well?
Uh... Yeah. Perhaps. Shall I just comment a bit on that?
That's all right, yeah.
One of the significant areas of fraud was around personal injury, so we have seen a material reduction in personal injury frequency. That is being displaced into some property damage, so third-party property damage, hire, and repair. We're absolutely vigilant to it. It, it is there. We're also doing more at point of quote to ensure that we're identifying the right risks. Matt really has introduced those tests into the new product lines now. We've got a lot more capability around bike and taxi as well, just as our core business.
What I would say, Nick, is one of the things we describe quite a lot internally is the temptation to have a whiteboard on the wall where you write down all the things that might go well, and therefore start a discount race, and decide not to think so hard about the things that might go wrong. We spend just as much time thinking about the things that might go wrong, and usually we come up with a balanced approach. We're not gonna lurch on price discounts for claims inflation reducing till we see some pretty firm evidence of that coming through. That's the main way we avoid getting caught out again.
Okay, thanks.
That side. Hannah. We'll come to you next, Barry. Have no fears.
Morning. Darius Satkauskas, KBW. Two questions on the insurance cyclicality. First of all, can you share what you learned during the last few years of the soft market? I mean, what worked, what didn't from Sabre's point of view? The second question is, apart from a product launch, are you pursuing any initiatives in terms of risk selection or pricing that will help you manage the cycle better going forward in terms of it rather than shrinking the being forced to shrink the policy count, I suppose? Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, what have we learned about insurance cyclicality? I guess we've learned it's really painful gritting your teeth to try and do the right thing. That's the main thing we've learned. We would not normally see cyclicality in the way we have done. We'd normally expect to see an 18-month maybe burst of downturn, then the rates recover. I can't think of any time in the last 25 or 30 years when we've seen 3 events like this that have all caused such disruption in the market. I sincerely hope never to see them again. I think cyclicality, we would not change our approach in the future. We wouldn't chase volume. We would still stick to our margin is the way you make money in the medium term. We don't want to blow ourselves up by ever changing that strategy.
If we can get some things that are less cyclical, great, we'll try and build those into our portfolio as well. Risk selection. Well, I mean, we do risk selection every week and month in the pricing. Matt.
Yes. With the risk selection, we continue to look for opportunities, and if we can identify segments that would be less impacted by the cycle, of course, we'll expand into them. Our idea is to find those new pockets of high margin business to expand into.
Yeah. One of the things we've never really spoken much about is our work around data science and machine learning. We have a pretty impressive team, I would say, working on that stuff now. Part of the reason for IHP is to allow us to deploy some of that machine learning techniques as well as our normal traditional pricing techniques into rating going forward. We've absolutely got stuff coming through on that over the next 18 months. Barry, I've ignored you a couple of times now.
Thanks. Morning, everybody. It's Tryfonas Spyrou from Panmure Gordon. I have 3 questions, if I may. First of all, Geoff, you had talked about organic growth. I just wondered whether or not M&A might feature this year for you. Do you think the market turmoil that you've described, I think you mentioned a couple of firms maybe possibly thinking of closing their doors, would create opportunities for you much as you had last year with the acquisition at nil cost with the motorcycle book? Secondly, just talking about the cycle and just wondering, as others play catch up, do you think there's a possibility that rates might overshoot on the upside? I guess I'm thinking about things such as the cost of living biting and reduction in usage of vehicles and things like that.
Last of all, thirdly, I just wondered whether or not you could comment on how the motorcycle and taxi books have performed in terms of retention, as you've acquired these books, how they've actually panned out in terms of renewal. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Organic growth versus M&A. We always look at M&A opportunities, we maintain quite a high hurdle there. I guess if we think about motorbike, if we'd spent GBP 50 million acquiring a motorbike book, we'd be much more inclined to try and maintain the volume because you're trying to justify the payback. If you've picked up a deal as an underwriter, you don't feel that same pressure to justify payback. Our preferred approach is to be an underwriting partner for people with data or distribution expertise where we can apply the right prices, if that's a fair comment. Opportunities, yeah, I mean, we've seen all sorts put in front of us. We could, without any exaggeration, have written GBP 100 million worth of partnership business, signed up last year.
I think we may have lost a lot more than that while we did it. We are very thoughtful about these opportunities. There's some good books out there. We've seen some good books fairly recently, just not right for us. Our view is we're still a relatively high margin insurer. We'd be very cautious about anything that took us into more of a low margin mass market book. We'd start to look like everybody else at that point. I don't think we're going to go down that route anytime soon. Will prices overshoot? I guess in such a competitive market, the chance of, you know, customers being price gouged is very slim, it feels to me. If we see the market turning, people will adjust for better claims experience coming forward.
I don't think there's a risk of customers being disadvantaged here that I can see. motorcycle and taxi... Sorry, what was the question? That was motorcycle and taxi...
Whether or not the retention-
Retention, yeah. Well, motorcycle, we're only in the very early months of that happening. Well, we should say that we've mentioned 30% price on car. We've put quite a lot more than that on bike, I think it's fair to say. We would expect retention this first year to be fairly low. It's probably a bit confidential to our partners to give out the retention levels. But.
I think what we could say there is we expect it to grow through the year. As the year-on-year price change comes in and gets lower, we expect retention to build as the year goes on.
Yeah. Good one. Thanks.
Come to you, yes.
Thank you. Andreas van Embden, Peel Hunt. Just a question about distribution. You've traditionally been very much broker-focused. With this new strategic initiatives, particularly the platform and the IHP, how do you see in the next five years your distribution mix changing? Are you gonna de-emphasize the broker network and emphasize more on new business? Or is the new platform gonna be incremental to what you already have as a presence on the broker panels? Thanks.
That's a good question. Well, we didn't really clarify. The Insurer-Hosted Pricing allows us to support the broker channel through more sophisticated rates. We won't just be using that on direct. That Insurer-Hosted Pricing will equally well apply to all of our broker partners. We can push out more sophisticated, better, more competitive rates to our brokers as well. We've always described our distribution as being agnostic. We think best price wins it. We're not focusing on direct against broker or either way. We're very happy to carry on with our current split. I think there will be some consolidation in the broker market. We can already see some of that coming through. I think you may see a split between very big brokers, the sort of smaller high street type brokers.
It's the ones in the middle who need to decide which way to go. We keep an eye on that market shift as well. We don't think it changes our market potential at all. Adam.
Cool, thanks. Adam Avigdori from Goldman Sachs. Still got three questions. Just first of all on growth. I mean, in the past, given your high level profitability, growth was quite capital efficient at your 85%-90% COR, although I'm guessing written basis is probably at the lower end of that. Is that still the case, that from a capital point of view, you could grow if the opportunities were there? And then also on the claims side, any capacity constraints are there or could you still, you know, grow and be able to manage your claims if the opportunity existed? And then secondly, you know, a few of your competitors have launched Essentials products.
I know that get a lower average premium is probably quite away from your sweet spot, but any kind of thoughts and comments on that? Thirdly, a question for Adam on the investment side. I mean, you have increased your corporate bond portfolio and over the last couple of years, but given the high level of yields even on government bonds, any subtle changes to the investment portfolio going forward now you're getting, you know, getting paid to take the risk? Thanks.
Okay. You'll take that one in a minute then, Adam. On the growth, I think we can still be very capital efficient there. Now we're writing at around our normal 80% COR amount. That still allows us to grow and fund our own growth. We're still got all our powder dry. If we ever needed to see a substantial growth, we've not used any reinsurance. We know there's attractive deals out there if we wanted them on Quota Share. Our view is now maybe in the future, if we had really extensive growth, that might do something for us. We keep an eye on how the economics of that work, we understand the levers we could pull if we needed to. We don't feel constrained on capital at all in terms of growth.
claims, you mentioned the building, part of that is to open up more space in our building. We've been recruiting to claims. I think, we've been really encouraged that we haven't seen staff leavers, nor have we, since the summer, struggled to recruit staff. We've done pretty well, I think.
That's right. We probably had 2 years where we were over capacity during that COVID period where we didn't furlough anybody. We weren't recruiting, so we've really embarked on quite a heavy recruitment during 2022 to position ourselves well. We're also developing our own system further to really make us even more efficient.
You might recall that we try and maintain a capacity over our required claims account, so we can grow into it. That's still our ambition. We're happy to accept a bit of expense drag from the claims department to allow us to grow into it. Essentials products, I think are really interesting. I think there probably is scope to do something. That may be something we look at towards the end of this year or into next year. I think we'd be really careful what these products are. Just taking out windscreen cover and knocking GBP 150 off the premium doesn't strike me as the best way forward. If we do it, we'll be doing it quite thoughtfully on what is truly an essentials product and what is the correct price to deploy for it.
I think some of them look quite good out there, some of them don't look quite so well thought through. We'll be quite thoughtful before we do that. Investments?
I think we reached our optimum mix in 2020, and we've been at a fairly steady state since then. We don't have any plans to change that in the immediate future. Certainly, over the last year, I've been quite happy that we've been in the relatively low risk end of the investment market. Certainly, all the sort of marks and market movements have been pretty much counteracted by risk-free rate movements on the solvency balance sheet. That's kind of worked. The reinvestment yield is obviously higher now than it would have been previously. That's probably coming in around 4.5%.
With the weighted maturity of the portfolio being sort of between 2 and 2.5 years, that will clearly take some time to pay us back in terms of yield coming through the P&L. It's moving in the right direction. Because it is a buy and hold strategy, we wouldn't necessarily execute trades to bring that forward, particularly when investments are sort of underwater when it comes to market value movements. I think we will see a tip up over time in investment return. That'll be very useful in the current environment, but we're not going to actively pursue anything more risky at this time.
Thanks. Any more questions in the room? Abi, you had your hand up for actually quicker.
It's Abid again from Panmure's. Just a follow-up question actually on taxi. I understand that some fleets such as Uber are moving to an all-electric vehicles, I believe from next year. That's even if it's a hybrid vehicle, it has to be a plug-in electric vehicle, as opposed to having a combustion engine charging it. Just wondering, how does that feature in your thought process in growing the taxi book?
I guess our view is an electric vehicle is just a vehicle like any other, so we're perfectly happy to insure them. Matt, anything you want to add?
No.
We think it's just, it's got a large engine, a large petrol in it. It's got electric motor. It's just a car. We need to take into account the repair costs and time off the road. It's part of our underwriting business as usual.
I suppose it doesn't have a catalytic converter to be stolen.
That's a good thing. You wouldn't wanna poke about there with your screwdriver too much underneath, would you?
I have.
Yeah.
Hi, it's Ivan Bokhmat from Barclays again. Just one follow-up. As you've provided the combined ratio guidance. I'm just trying to understand how much of a drag from those two new product lines is gonna carry on into 2023. I mean, you've suggested the, you know, the target loss ratio for those books. Obviously, this is more than half drop versus 2022. I mean, when do you think we can get to those levels in terms of timing? Is that 2024 or second half 2023?
Adam, do you wanna take that one?
Yeah. I mean, the Part of the reason that we've guided in the way that we have is that we do expect there to be a drag into 2023. I think that's clear. Motorcycle rates are sort of broadly in the right place. That'll take some time to earn through. Still, some rate to put on taxi. Overall, we think they're both generating profits into next year. Clearly far in advance of the profits that are generated in 2022. It sort of remains to be seen exactly how they contribute. Overall, on a loss ratio basis, they are still being written at higher loss ratios than
Than the original sort of motor book would have been because the relative expenses on those products are far lower. If the motor book doesn't catch up in terms of size with where we would expect it to be, and those remain a proportionally more significant element of the book, then that will be a drag on combined ratio. If the motor book does accelerate, then we should see them being less of a drag on loss ratio.
Thank you.
Yeah. Sure.
Henry.
Just a quick follow-up on motorcycle. I guess I'm a little bit surprised that you need to put so much rate through on motorcycle. Why is inflation so much higher there? I think you alluded to it being less cyclical as well. What's driving that?
Yeah, I won't say too. I think some of the underwriting controls and pricing sophistication were not optimum on the previous book, and I think we've had to work quite hard to get them to what we think is an optimum level. It just took a bit more work than we'd maybe anticipated. We got there, Matt. When do you think we probably got the rates to a level you were completely comfortable with?
I'd say Q3. I think it's the starting point was worse than we expected it to be, which is why we had to put more rate through that inflation.
I don't think that it had been inflation. Inflation was a factor. I think it was we had to optimize the rating and underwriting controls. Okay. I guess I'll sort of look to the eye in the sky. Any questions on the phone?
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I've got a couple here on our high-tech iPad. Can you quantify the level of rate increase we've seen at a market level in 23? I would say the ABI review is the best sort of independent view on that. I think that was looking at about 15% at the end of the year. I'm looking at Matt and Trevor. Somewhere around there, I think it was. I think our view is not enough. I think is how I'd quantify the rate increase. You mentioned certain insurers are pulling back this year. Could you provide a bit more color on how big they are? I won't on that one 'cause I'm not sure these are entirely public, but we are aware of some meaningful players looking to pull back from the private car market.
Probably not massive in market share, but you know, it'll make a difference. Perhaps I should have shut up I'm starting to go on.
Just one more. On your slide of the potential positives, you didn't have higher new car sales on that. I'd have thought that would have helped kind of risk mix for the market, put more business, new business into the market, which does play to your strengths and hopefully over time, reduce the ratio of the car prices as well. Do you think that's a positive?
Yeah, I think it would be. The more sales there are, the more people changing cars, that's normally a catalyst for getting a different quote. I think there's some interesting stuff going on used car values, Trevor, as well.
We have quite close relationship with the vehicle valuation guides. From conversations with them, their outlook is that broadly used car prices can stay flat. Not yet come off because there's not enough new vehicles still coming into stock. A lot of the new vehicle is really being driven by the manufacturers meeting their quotas around BEVs. We have seen BEVs, so Tesla, for example, reducing their retail price, and that's had a knock-on effect in terms of used car prices. If we look at the internal combustion, the petrol and diesel vehicles, we don't necessarily believe that there's gonna be a reduction there. Those prices will stay flat. Anecdotally, there is still a shortage of stock.
I think, yeah, we need to see the new vehicles coming in at the top to free that up.
Hopefully, but we don't see much evidence yet. Okay, if that's the lot, then, thank you very much for your time, attention, and thank you for the questions. Happy to answer anything individually later. Thanks so much.