Good morning, everybody. On behalf of Helvetia, I'd like to welcome all of you to our Capital Markets Day, either here in person in Basel or online. Before we kick off with the presentations, just the usual housekeeping: please put your mobile phones on silent. In terms of the agenda for today, we'll have three presentations before a first Q&A session, and then we'll have a short break before going through our regional presentations. After that, you'll have an opportunity to ask questions of those speakers. There will then also be a lunch when you have a chance to speak to the members of the Group Executive Management who are not speaking today. These include our Chief Investment Officer, André Keller, our Chief HR Officer, Esther Roman, and our Chief Technology Officer, Sandra Hürlimann. Let's start with our first speaker. That's our Group CEO, Fabian Rupprecht.
Fabian has only been with Helvetia for a year, but he's already made many meaningful changes. The significant strengthening of the management team, many of whom you'll hear from today, is just one example. Fabian joined us from NN Group, but before that, he also held various leadership positions at AXA around the world. So, Fabian, please share with us the new strategy that you have planned for Helvetia.
Thank you, Peter, for your introduction. To everyone attending here in the room or via webcast, a welcome to our Capital Markets Day 2024. I'm very glad of your attendance, and I'm very glad to be here today to present Helvetia's new strategy and financial ambitions. I will start introducing the strategy and key figures and explain what we will focus on in the coming years. After my presentation, our Group CFO, Annelis Lüscher Hämmerli, will give you further insights into our financials and explain how we think about capital allocation and deployment. After that, our four segment CEOs will present how the overall strategy applies to the areas under their responsibility, what their priorities are, and how their respective segments contribute financially to the overall group. We divided our Capital Markets Day into two parts to give you two opportunities to ask questions and to have a short break.
Before we finish the first half of today's presentation, we will also invite our newest member of the Executive Management, our Group CRO, Bernhard Kaufmann, on stage to introduce him to you. Before I start introducing the new strategy of Helvetia Group, let me share with you what are the key highlights of our performance over the last years. Over the past eight years, Helvetia has delivered significant and sustainable growth with focus on the non-life business. With an annual volume growth of 4% overall and 8% in non-life business, this is the case. In the recent years, we have gained market share in all of our markets organically in non-life, and in addition, strengthened our position organically in some markets. Furthermore, Helvetia has diversified its business, driven by its strong growth in the Specialty Markets and the acquisition of Caser.
Whereas in life business, the majority of business is still in Switzerland, diversification is actually strongest in the non-life business, where there is nearly an equal distribution of business volume across our four segments. Profitable business growth has translated into dividends growing sustainably at a rate of 7% annually throughout the past eight years. Our commitment to deliver on our dividend targets is further supported by our sound capitalization and liquidity. Besides the strong SST ratio and the A+ ratings from S&P and AM Best last year, we built up CHF 376 million of what we call free deployable funds at holding. This provides a buffer to absorb volatility, which allows us to maintain a stable dividend path. Now, let's review our performance with regard to Helvetia's 2025 financial targets.
All targets have been achieved or exceeded, except for the combined ratio, which is still outside of the range of 92%-94%. Still, we're positive to get back into the range by 2025, unless we experience an extraordinary NatCat season in one of our four major businesses. These targets will be replaced by the new objectives from 2025 onwards within the context of the new strategy. Our new strategy builds on our strengths, and it addresses the opportunities for optimization, which we see at Helvetia. A few things stand out. First, in nearly all of our markets, we have a strong direct customer access, be it through agents, through our exclusive bancassurance agreements, or through B2C operations like Smile. These customers appreciate our brand and the service we offer to them, meaning that we have built trust and we enjoy their loyalty.
The setup has allowed us, in all markets, to more easily adjust prices and to outgrow competition. Second, we have excellent know-how and experience in the specialty business with a lean business model that gives us flexibility in a cyclical environment. Our customers appreciate our know-how, our fast response times, and the predictability of our decisions. Running these businesses next to our retail business is very attractive for us at Helvetia due to the significant diversification benefits. With that, we have achieved an amazing market position. And third, we have made important investments into technology, which we can now leverage both in Switzerland and abroad. Proof points are, for instance, businesses like Smile, the leading provider for online insurance in Switzerland, or applications like the chatbot Clara, which leverages ChatGPT technology and is a major success with our customers, as Martin will point out later.
Last but not least, our experienced employees, who impress me with their commitment to Helvetia, their passion, and their customer focus. We, as Team Helvetia, feel a strong connection to our organization and its values, and this is a huge asset upon which we can build our future. At the same time, we see potential in further improving technical excellence, in achieving synergies to drive efficiency, and more generally, in steering the group as an integrated international insurance company. Let me now say a couple of words on the new structure and on the new international management team that is in charge to shape Helvetia's future. Spain has become a separate segment to reflect its increasing importance, and it is led by Juan, while German, Italian, and Austrian markets are now combined under the lead of Thomas.
In the area of investments, we have centralized responsibility for the whole group under André and his team. Risk management with Bernhard, HR with Esther, and technology with Sandra are now functions on the board level because I consider them as key to achieve our ambitions. The direct reporting of these functions and segments to the Group CEO allows for a leaner management structure. With Juan, Thomas, Sandra, Esther, and Bernhard, we have been able to recruit highly qualified, ambitious, and experienced leaders from inside and outside the group, and I am really very happy to have all of them on board. Together with Annelis, with Martin, David, and André, they are all here today and happy to share their views and answer your questions. So, let me now introduce Helvetia's new strategy. We are building our future growth by focusing on two long-term strategic approaches.
As a local customer champion, we want to use the strong relationship we have with our own customers. Helvetia has a strong distribution footprint in nearly all its markets, thanks to its significant agent organizations and the two exclusive bank corporations in Spain. Customers advised by our agents or bank assurance partners are more loyal, and we have more knowledge and interactions, which we can thus provide higher value to them, and in addition, profitability with those customers is above average. The target is to increase the share of wallet with our existing customer base. As a global specialist, we want to take advantage of our know-how and business model. We see opportunities for organic growth in our existing global businesses, where we want to expand with a smart follower approach.
In addition, we want to scale up our SME businesses in Spain, in Germany, in Italy, and Austria with specialty lines, leveraging, on the one hand, our knowledge and skills in the specialty business, and on the other hand, the strong local distribution in the same way we already do it in Switzerland and in France. In addition to these long-term approaches, we will focus on improving in the short term our margins. We will do that by using two levers. Our technical excellence initiative that we have started beginning of this year will gain further momentum. We use our know-how to set group-wide standards and to bring technical capabilities to the next level by investing into technology, processes, and team skills.
And in addition, we see clear opportunities to increase efficiency through process optimization in combination with nearshoring, automation using AI, and a stricter management of the external spend. And we also see synergies from a more central steering of the key functions. As a very important action, we plan to integrate the activities of our companies in Spain, Helvetia Seguros, and Caser. I would now like to share with you how the different pillars will contribute to the 9%-11% growth of underlying earnings in the upcoming three-year strategic cycle. We expect these four pillars to have different patterns of impact over time. Technical excellence and efficiency will have a stronger bottom-line impact from 2025 to 2027 by contributing to margin improvement. This will make up roughly two-thirds of our underlying earnings growth ambition.
The rest of the underlying earnings growth will come from profitable growth thanks to our long-term strategic approaches. Combining the pillars gives us the right balance both in the short and in the long term. Let me now give you some more insight into our objectives and actions for each of these four pillars. As I mentioned earlier, we believe that we can achieve attractive long-term profitable growth by increasing the share of wallet of our own customers in all of our retail markets. We want to invest further into data processing to excel in customer analytics and lead management. We will, for example, leverage technology like our CRM systems to improve the interactions with our customers and enhance their experience. This has the goal of increasing customer access and customer loyalty. And we will apply AI to support and tailor our advice in a dynamic way.
This will, in the same way, increase product density with our existing customer base. While we continue to attract younger target groups as we did in the past, we will put more focus on our customers who are 50 years and older. By addressing their changing needs, we expect to tap into new opportunities in a segment that is becoming more and more important. We have already made initial progress, as my colleagues will shortly explain to you. We expect this to translate into a business volume growth of around 4% annually in non-life, as well as an annual growth around 4% in life, as measured by PVNBP. Martin, Juan, and Thomas will explain to you how they will become local customer champions within their respective segment. We have defined the way forward to grow our global specialty business.
In our existing businesses, we see opportunities for selective growth in our current lines of business, as well as the introduction of new lines of business. Furthermore, we want to unlock cross-selling potential and expand our geographical footprint in Asia and Latin America. The new feature of our global specialist strategy is that we want to roll out our expertise gained in the specialty market segment to regions where we already have a presence. We plan to scale up our SME businesses by establishing dedicated specialty and commercial lines units to provide our local markets access to the international network. We will build up underwriting and claims resources and support these local initiatives. We are a central Center of Excellence , leveraging our existing know-how. This model, which has been proven in Switzerland and France, will now be rolled out to Spain, Germany, Italy, and Austria.
By the next three years, we will focus on establishing these new activities. We expect them to contribute significantly to growth starting 2028. David will later talk about how we will strengthen the specialty business in his segment, and he will also give you more details on how we will roll out the global specialist approach in our European retail markets. With a very prudent outlook on the cycle in the years to come, we expect this business to grow by approximately 5% annually by 2027. We see technical excellence at the core of our business, and we will invest into it during the next strategic period. We will invest concretely into technology, into data, and into team skills. We aim to be among the best top three players in every market where we are active. The following areas will be in focus: portfolio optimization.
We will further optimize our portfolio mix by pushing forward in the most profitable channels and business lines and pricing sophistication. We will drive pricing sophistication, implement top pricing tools, and invest into pricing teams in all markets. In the area of claims management, we will focus on automating and digitalizing claims processes, improving claims steering, and effectively managing partner networks. Furthermore, we will enhance fraud detection through AI models. Through technical excellence, we intend to achieve an improvement of our claims ratio of 1.5 percentage points by 2027. We plan to take out costs of at least CHF 200 million over the next three years. The program to deliver these efficiency gains has already been started and aims to achieve its objectives through the following levers. First, we will build service hubs for non-customer-facing functions and nearshore them.
Second, we will use AI and technology and leverage data analytics. And third, we will optimize and harmonize and automate processes. And fourth, we will unlock synergies in Spain between Helvetia Seguros and Caser, and plan to integrate the two companies with their respective organizations. The cost efficiency program is steered centrally and led by a highly experienced professional who reports in this role directly into the Group Executive Board. The single initiatives run at local level, and their implementation is under the responsibility of the respective segment CEO. My colleagues will share with you more insights on how they are going to realize those efficiency gains. While we are committed to these particular outcomes, we consider efficiency not a one-time effort, but rather a permanent focus of management going until 2027 and beyond. Let me now mention an additional topic.
I want to show how our enhanced focus and commitment to shareholder return translates into action. We manage our portfolio of insurance and non-insurance activities based on ROE and strategic criteria. As you can see, a large majority of our businesses meets or exceeds the internal capital efficiency hurdle rates. Still, there is a set of activities that does not yet yield a return above our internal hurdle rates. In these cases, the respective management has developed concrete plans on how to achieve sufficient ROEs within a time horizon of a maximum of three years. Going forward, we will perform annual strategic reviews of our businesses, and in cases where we conclude that the hurdle rates cannot realistically be achieved, we will consider portfolio measures.
This approach, the margin improvements, and the ongoing capital optimization measures all mean that we expect to achieve an underlying return on equity of between 13% and 16%. With that, I now turn to the financial targets we set for our next strategy cycle until 2027. As shared with you before, the combination of profitable top-line growth and margin optimization will allow us to grow our underlying earnings per share by 9%-11% per year. Together with capital measures, this brings us to an underlying return on equity of between 13% and 16%. Driven by this earnings growth, we plan to distribute more than CHF 1.2 billion of dividends over the next three years, complemented by a dividend ratchet. We continue to manage our balance sheet in line with the criteria for at least a single-A credit rating.
Let me now summarize the key messages of my presentation of today. We have a large potential ready to be unleashed. In our strategy, we target long-term profitable growth as a local customer champion and a global specialist, and we do that consistently in all of our segments. Over the next three years, we will optimize our margins through our strategic initiatives of technical excellence and efficiency. And we will manage our business portfolio in line with our ambitions for return on equity and strategic criteria, taking measures where necessary. So let me now hand over to Peter Elliott, our head of investor relations and our host for today. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Fabian. Our next speaker is one of the more familiar faces to you. Annelis Lüscher Hämmerli has been our Group CFO for the past four years. She joined Helvetia after a long career at Swiss Life in finance and risk management. She was CRO at Swiss Life Asset Managers before she joined Helvetia in 2020. So now I invite Annelis to share with you how the strategy translates into and is supported by the numbers.
Many thanks, Fabian and Peter. I'm truly delighted to welcome all of you to our Capital Markets Day here in Basel. It's wonderful to have you with us on this special occasion. Following Fabian's presentation on our strategic ambitions, I will now detail how our targets are underpinned by our capital management framework. Over the next 30 minutes, I will explain our approach to capital management, including our allocation and deployment strategies, and how these efforts are designed to enhance earnings and dividends for our shareholders. Fabian presented the targets already.
Our baseline for underlying earnings per share growth starts with the 2024 results. We expect underlying earnings of roughly CHF 520 million for 2024. We appreciate that the 9%-11% CAGR is an ambitious target, and we are confident that we have some meaningful levers to pull to help us get there. The group target is the result of a detailed bottom-up approach. It reflects the initiatives at our individual market units and at group level. You see that we communicate our earnings growth target on an EPS level. We expect our earnings growth to translate into a higher return on equity. Let me add that we see interesting organic growth opportunities. At the segment level, my colleagues will talk about growth opportunities and potential of underlying earnings in detail.
That means we will enhance shareholder value by balancing investments in profitable growth and by returning a growing dividend stream to shareholders. Our commitment to creating shareholder value will remain steadfast without compromising the strength of our balance sheet. We will therefore maintain our attractive dividend policy despite our earnings growth ambitions. We target a higher payout of above CHF 1.2 billion in respect of the planned period and maintain our dividend ratchet. We do not assume buybacks in the plan. Now let's dive a bit deeper into how we think of capital allocation and excess capital, how it is generated, and how it is deployed. As I just mentioned, our priority is to ensure a strong and resilient balance sheet both locally and at group level. In assessing capital requirements on a local level, we consider two relevant components.
The first one, the local capital requirement, is determined by the relevant regulatory frameworks. This includes solvency, but contrary to what many people think, this is not always a solvency ratio of 100%. Typically, regulators require insurance companies to hold more capital. In some countries, there is also a need to satisfy tight asset requirements for life business, for example. Second, we hold a local capital buffer to absorb volatility and ensure regulatory requirements stay fulfilled. We assess the volatility of each entity and allocate enough capital to ensure it always remains adequately capitalized. In some cases, there may be a business reason to maintain an even higher ratio, for example, to be competitive in markets where distribution is through brokers. After considering these requirements, we view anything remaining as excess at the local level.
The surplus capital is, as a rule, remitted to the group for redeployment to fund growth, to fund growth and shareholder distributions. The capital buffer at group level includes the free deployable funds at holding, but also a certain amount at the main operating company. Now, how do we generate new sources of excess capital? It's mainly through our statutory profits, which are usually a bit lower than our IFRS earnings. Why is that? One key reason is the different ways we recognize unrealized gains in some asset classes and the varying reserving rules on the local and IFRS accounting standards. However, ongoing capital management activities contribute positively. Here we have several tools available, for example, realizing statutory gains on assets. We also leverage the benefits of our diversification via internal risk transfer using group internal reinsurance.
The statutory profits are either locally redeployed if attractive capital-efficient opportunities exist, or they feed into cash remittance to the group. At group level, the surplus capital needs to cover three things: shareholder distributions, our overhead costs, and our borrowing costs. We are very comfortable that our earnings power will easily deliver a sustainable growing dividend year after year. However, this dividend is understandably lower than the IFRS earnings, as explained. Any remaining surplus capital is deployed according to our group's strategic priorities. We focus on funding businesses with strong growth potential that can generate returns above our targets. We also look at ways to improve our financial flexibility and explore attractive inorganic growth opportunities. We have said that our strategy is to create attractive shareholder returns based on a healthy and resilient balance sheet. So let us look at that balance sheet.
Its strengths can be seen in our solvency ratio, even though for us, solvency under the SST is not a binding constraint currently. Our arguably higher than necessary reported SST ratio is a consequence of our healthy balance sheet rather than an aspiration. It also benefits from our high diversification. We optimize our risk capital consumption. To date, we have, for example, boosted our earnings power via asset reallocation and when making refinancing decisions. The reality is that the SST is intrinsically volatile, and we consider a year-on-year volatility in the order of 10-30 percentage points to be nothing out of the extraordinary, and which we can easily absorb. You can see from the sensitivities in the appendix that despite the inherent volatility of the framework, we are able to withstand very large changes in the economic variables without jeopardizing our solvency ratio.
The recent upward trend was mainly driven by our business profitability, the declining contribution of group life, rising interest rates, and to a lesser extent from some corporate actions such as the divestment of Sa Nostra Vida two years ago. We have seen a broadly flat development since full year 2023. The lower interest rates and the effect of the repayment of a CHF 225 million hybrid bond should be largely offset by other economic factors and profit growth. We recognize a material diversification benefit under the SST framework. This has its root in our diversified business mix, where we benefit by business line, geography, and risk type. This has grown over time. The business line benefit comes from the balance between life, non-life, and Specialty Markets , including Active Reinsurance, of course.
As this business mix has evolved, that diversification benefit has increased from 19% - 26%, so a 37% increase over the past eight years. A larger exposure to European insurance business, and especially to Spain, has been very helpful there. Spain is a region which has relatively little net NatCat exposure due to the reimbursement of weather event-related losses by the so-called Consortium. Juan will explain that later. In summary, our earnings are powered by both non-life and life businesses anchored in our core markets of Switzerland and Spain. Combined with our globally active specialty and reinsurance operations, we achieve strong diversification on earnings streams and risk capital. This makes Helvetia a unique investment opportunity, supporting a reliable dividend and maintaining an attractive total return. We are convinced that the balanced funding mix and maturity profile is also important for the health of the balance sheet.
You can see on the right-hand side that both these statements apply to us. For the capital structure, our board has set the maximum for senior and hybrid debt to be 30% of the total capital base. This base also includes a CSM definition, which is net of each of tax, ceded reinsurance, non-fulfillment expenses, and non-controlling interests. As of year end 2023, our leverage stands at 29%, which is close to the top of our range. However, we are fortunate that we have access to very attractive refinancing conditions, and we believe that it has been in our shareholders' interest to leverage this opportunity. When refinancing, we always consider all options, including repayment and refinancing, as well as different debt instruments. We choose the optimal one after all considerations. This will also be our approach for the future refinancing requirements with the next one due in 2025.
Now let's look at the drivers of our earnings growth, which are key to reach our ambitious target of between 9% and 11% underlying earnings per share growth in the next three years. I will outline our high-level ambitions before my colleagues go into detail in each of our segment presentations later on. The earnings growth target is consistent with an underlying return on equity of 13%-16%. The main drivers will be profitable growth and margin improvements. We expect profitable growth to contribute around one-third of the total. Margin improvement through Technical Excellence and cost efficiency will contribute the other two-thirds. All segments will contribute to a broadly similar extent. Specialty Markets are expected to have a high starting point, with 2024 looking like it will be a good year.
It has seen high growth rates in recent years, resulting in a more modest contribution over the next years. You will see that we are changing our segmentation slightly, splitting Europe into Spain and GIAM, now that Spain is our clear second core market. Separately, we are reallocating GRI group reinsurance from other businesses to non-life and life. We have provided you today with a new financial supplement containing the full year 2023 numbers restated according to our new segmentation. As Fabian mentioned, we are targeting over CHF 200 million in cost savings. Our CHF 165 million are incurred in our market units and CHF 35 million in the corporate areas. In an allocated P&L view, however, not all of the savings ambition will be recognized in profit or loss.
CHF 100 million of the cost ambition is needed to compensate for expected inflation, which we assume to be 2% per year for the three years of the strategy period. From the remaining CHF 100 million, half will be realized in non-life, which will lead to a 0.5% improvement in the cost ratio after inflation effects. The other half of the savings will be in our remaining areas, life business, asset management, and corporate functions. Recall that in life business, the policyholder also takes a share of the savings. Each segment will explain its savings potential in more detail. Let's now take a closer look at the profitability of our non-life business. As I just mentioned, a considerable amount of our earnings improvement will come from margin improvements.
The reality is that we have seen significant headwinds in recent years, especially from inflation and from NatCats, and we currently sit slightly above our 92%-94% guidance range. Over the next three years, we expect a non-life combined ratio improvement of 2 percentage points. We will realize a 1.5 percentage points claims ratio improvement through technical excellence measures and a 0.5 percentage points cost ratio improvement through operational efficiency measures. This is in addition to offsetting our inflation assumption of 2% per year. We keep our combined ratio guidance at 92%-94% and anticipate a continuously improving combined ratio year after year. We expect to be at the lower end of the guidance range by the end of the planned period, despite several headwinds.
Firstly, I would like to point out that bringing our group reinsurance within scope of the group combined ratio will likely add some volatility. Secondly, we expect less help from interest rates going forward. For 2023, the discounting effect, as you know, was at 2.3%. We expect 1.9% for 2024 based on current interest rate levels, and our combined ratio guidance is based on the current forward curves. We do not manage our business to interest rates, but appreciate that these are uncertain, and our combined ratio guidance should be considered in light of this. On previous year development, PYD, this has tended to be a volatile number, but historically, since the introduction of IFRS 17, we have averaged about 4 percentage points. However, this has included post-COVID effects, and we do not expect it to be sustainable at that level. Finally, a word on net NatCat losses.
These have increased in recent years, making up about 4% of our net loss ratio. As we grow and as our business mix includes more property, there is a risk these losses could rise further. However, we are convinced that providing insurance for NatCat risk is part of our business, and there is high relevance and demand. We therefore price in NatCat risk, and we adjust cover if necessary. To manage the risk on a portfolio level, we are balancing it with other P&C lines of business, with mortality and longevity, and with market and credit risk so that we achieve a diversified portfolio. Our reinsurance cover limits our exposure to large events. For peak perils, the maximum retention on group level is CHF 120 million, covering retail lines of business, our commercial lines, and Active Reinsurance business.
What we experience in the past few years is that retail lines of business have been most impacted by weather-related events, and for this, we have a sublimit in place of CHF 70 million. On the other hand, NatCat events contributed to a hardening of the reinsurance market, thereby improving prospects for future profits of our Active Reinsurance business line. On an ongoing basis, we are looking into the reinsurance cover available. This includes cat bonds, but these currently would be more expensive for us than equivalent traditional reinsurance cover. As we anticipate the relevance of the topic to further increase, we will aim to provide more information on our NatCat budget in the future. Now let us turn to the life division. Here, we are very happy with and will continue to follow our capital light strategy.
Our discipline on capital allocation, combined with the fact that we currently see more capital-efficient growth prospects in non-life, means it is non-life that we expect most of our earnings growth to come from. Still, we consider that the life business has more attractive growth prospects that can be seen by looking simply at the CSM development. For one thing, we have an attractive and growing fee business as well as investment products covered by IFRS 9. These are not captured in the CSM. Within the business that is captured, our focus on capital light business means that the risk of the savings part of the life insurance product is borne directly by the policyholder and is therefore also not captured in the CSM. The new business CSM we are writing is attractive and is also shorter in duration than our back book.
This means that the release ratio will increase, driving earnings up despite the stable CSM development. We show this graphically in the right-hand chart. Here, we model the CSM development and CSM release development, assuming zero variances in the CSM. We also assume that the new business we reported for the first half of 2024 is repeated, annualized in future periods with no growth. Much of what I have just described, you will hear in more detail from Martin later. He will go through how this works in practice in Switzerland. Before we leave life earnings, I want to add that we are aware that the current consensus is a bit above our own expectations for underlying earnings in life, albeit closer on net income. Our view on the IFRS 17 has evolved in the early days of its implementation, even though we consider this largely an accounting issue.
We explain in the appendix how we now think of a normalized run rate in life. Let us turn now to the asset side of our balance sheet. Increasing interest rates have supported higher direct yield and therefore an increase in the earnings contribution of our investments. We are not in the business of anticipating short-term movements in interest rates or FX. Hence, we continue our successful strategy of maintaining a narrow duration gap of less than one year and of largely hedging our FX exposure. Meanwhile, we focus on earning an adequate risk premium on our risk assets like real estate, equity, or corporate bonds. Changes in interest rates also do not change our view on the business we should write. We continue to focus on capital light business in life, and in non-life, we manage the business to an undiscounted combined ratio.
While our life business does benefit from higher rates, we only realize this over time. We do not intend to release life reserves at the first opportunity. I have explained that we will considerably increase our earnings power in the coming years and that much of this will be returned to shareholders. Indeed, we want to continue our successful strategy by having an attractive shareholder return and sustainably increasing the dividend year- over- year or in very adverse years to at least keep it at the prior year's level. Hence, we aim to continue the trajectory and trusted dividend policy that has served our investors reliably over the course of many years. Our target over the next three years is for a dividend distribution of more than 1.2 billion CHF.
As communicated already at the closing events this year, we have also built up free deployable funds at holding level to provide an additional security net for very adverse years. We aim to always keep approximately one year's worth of regular dividend available in these free deployable funds at holding level. Additional information on our excess capital can be found in the appendix. I would like you to take away three specific key points from this presentation. First point, we have a very strong balance sheet, and this will remain the case. Our growing diversification provides strong support. We will maintain at least a single-A rating. Second point, we will be fully focused on maximizing value for our shareholders, and we will achieve this by growing earnings at an ambitious pace, targeting an underlying earnings CAGR of 9%-11% over the strategic plan.
At the same time, we plan attractive dividend payouts of more than CHF 1.2 billion over the planned horizon. Third point, our earnings growth will come from both volume and margin. Every segment will contribute with a CAGR of at least 6%. Non-life will be the main contributor, but in life, we continue to target growth in capital-light products, which will benefit the bottom line as well as reduce our capital requirements. In summary, our earnings and our growth are driven by both non-life and life businesses and are firmly rooted in our core markets of Switzerland and Spain. Together with our globally active specialty and reinsurance operations, we are achieving a strong diversification in earnings streams and in risk capital. This positions Helvetia as a unique investment opportunity, ensuring a reliable increase in dividend stream and generating attractive total returns. Thank you.
Thank you, Annelis. For our third presentation before the break, we thought we'd focus on our specialty business. As I mentioned earlier, we will then cover all our geographical regions together after the break. We think the specialty business is a differentiator for Helvetia, but we're aware that it's probably an area where many of you have questions.
So I'd like to introduce David Ribeaud to answer those. David has been in the industry for almost 30 years, and he brings a wide variety of experience. He started at Swiss Re as a treaty reinsurance underwriter and then worked for Zurich in various pricing and underwriting roles in both personal and commercial lines, before then moving on to National Suisse, which later became Helvetia. With us, he has overseen Specialty Markets since 2015. David, please tell us why we are in Specialty Markets , the opportunity you see for us, and how we're managing those risks.
Thank you, Peter, and good morning. Specialty Markets encompasses the three market units, Specialty Lines Switzerland International, Active Reinsurance, as well as Helvetia France, and focuses on risks requiring bespoke technical competencies on an international scale. The business is predominantly acquired through brokers and is cyclical, which requires the readiness to shrink when rates and conditions are not viable. Active Reinsurance and Specialty Lines Switzerland International write business globally, and the exposures lie mainly in Europe and America. The offer is complementary, as Active Reinsurance provides reinsurance treaty capacity and Specialty Lines Switzerland International facultative reinsurance, as well as insurance coverages. Active Reinsurance business mix reflects its market positioning as a smart follower, aiming at providing capacity across all lines of business for the customers it supports.
Specialty Markets Switzerland and International focuses on engineering, industrial property, marine and aviation, among others, and has an according portfolio mix. The Markets unit's leading position in several specialty lines in our home market, Switzerland, should also be noted. Helvetia France, which strongly benefited from the acquisition of Groupama Transport by Helvetia in 2012, became number one in the French marine market last year and, leveraging their excellent reputation and infrastructure, have been gradually expanding their product range since 2016 to best cover their customers' and distribution partners' needs. Since its creation in 2015, following the acquisition of National Suisse by Helvetia, Specialty Markets has achieved a significant compound annual growth rate of 16%. The net income grew by 12% in the corresponding period, and it is an accomplishment we are proud of.
The last few years were namely marked by extraordinary events such as the hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017, COVID, inflation, the Ukraine war, and major man-made losses such as the devastating explosion in Beirut. We accordingly look back on a very challenging period for our industry in which combined ratios over 100% were not exceptional. Our net combined ratio still never materially exceeded that threshold, thanks to our cautious management of NatCat exposures, and I am happy to inform you that we do not expect Helene and Milton to have a material impact on our results, as well as underwriting discipline. To illustrate the latter, I would like to give you a few examples of times when we decided to shrink to safeguard our profitability.
Specialty Lines Switzerland International gave up CHF 40 million of engineering and property business out of a CHF 140 million book between 2015 and 2017 because of unfavorable market conditions. We reduced our marine book in France from EUR 205 million to less than EUR 190 million in the same period and for the same reason. Active Reinsurance significantly reduced its U.S. liability book because of social inflation, with its portfolio share going from 30% in 2019 to only 13% in 2023. In addition, we place a lot of importance on technical expertise, hence ensuring professional day-to-day underwriting based on risk reports for complex risks and benefiting from the learnings we gain from claims. Regular technical reviews and the consistent application of a four- eyes principle also champion high-quality underwriting.
Finally, building sufficient reserves is key to us, and we have doubled the amount of the total assets from approximately CHF 2 billion to more than CHF 4 billion between 2015 and 2023, hence contributing positively to our A + rating and financial strength. Our main USP was and is the combination of a very strong balance sheet with the agility of specialized and pragmatic organizations, resulting internally in an above-average engagement of our employees and externally in high Net Promoter Scores . The other key success factors I would like to draw your attention to are cost-effective processes and tools from decisively leveraging synergies within Specialty Markets. One example being that both Active Reinsurance and Specialty Markets Switzerland and International use the same back-end system.
A bespoke and international technical expertise, including specific fields such as renewable energies and environmental technologies, with underwriters having a profound knowledge of the risks they cover and the markets they operate in. Consistent cycle management, which I previously illustrated with a few concrete measures and is made possible by both our lean infrastructure and technical expertise, and the diversification of our business brings to the group as the risks we write are largely uncorrelated with the business of the other segments. A notable example for this was 2023, when the European retail business was severely impacted by natural events, while Specialty Markets experienced a rather benign year. We trust that this strength will also be very relevant in the future, and our new strategy will capitalize on them.
We will accordingly focus on further developing our business as a global specialist, consistently honing our technical skills and increasing our efficiency. These three initiatives, which I will describe in more depth shortly, are to allow us to grow profitably and in alignment with the underwriting cycles, hence making an even more meaningful contribution to the group's diversification of capital and revenue. Considering the coming three years, we plan on achieving a compound growth rate of our underlying earnings of 6%-8% per annum. The underlying targeted volume growth rate amounts to 5%. As mentioned previously, we will focus on business that we consider sustainable, and this growth can be split into 7% for areas where we consider the market conditions to be favorable and minus 6% in business lines suffering from weakening conditions or structural issues such as U.S. liability.
Shrinking, even if that may sound counterintuitive, can be a good thing in our cyclical business, as it is instrumental in achieving technical results over the cycle. Coming back to our global specialist strategy, there is room for us to increase our market share in our existing lines of business and geographies. We have, for instance, only 0.5% of the global non-life reinsurance market, 1% of the total aviation premium, and 1% of the French commercial property market. We will therefore drive the selective development of our current portfolios in all three market units. Selective means, at the risk of repeating myself, that we will grow in areas where the conditions are favorable and shrink if we consider them unsatisfactory.
This will unfortunately be the case in marine hull, as well as U.S. liability and motor reinsurance, for which we plan a volume reduction of approximately CHF 50 million between now and 2027. The new strategy will, in addition, include the introduction of new products that are complementary to our current offering. Our cross-selling potential will accordingly be greater, and this will be a very effective source of new business. I will now highlight the main strategic initiatives for each market unit and start with Specialty Lines Switzerland International, which is a leading specialty lines insurer in Switzerland and a smart follower globally.
Its strategy will include the development of mid-market international property and engineering business, made possible by the ongoing automation of the relevant business processes, the introduction of international general liability to complement our product range, the growth of our cyber book in alignment with the increasing demand, as well as the build-out of general aviation in addition to airlines and aerospace. In the case of Active Reinsurance, which is a smart follower providing treaty reinsurance capacity on a global scale, the planned enhancements will comprise the introduction of Life Mobility coverage as a meaningful addition to the current offering, the extension of the non-life product range with cyber reinsurance, and the geographical expansion in Latin America and Asia, thanks to our presence in Miami and Singapore.
As for Helvetia France, which aims at becoming a leading SME insurer in its local market by capitalizing on its number one position in marine, the key strategic measures will be to further increase our market share in the recently introduced lines of business such as property, engineering, and motor, the introduction of surety, as well as cyber, in alignment with our group-wide cyber strategy to complement our offer, and the strengthening of our relationship with our distribution network in non-marine by making better use of the many existing touchpoints, as well as by offering them new services such as technical training for their employees. As you may have noticed, cyber is one of the areas we will focus on in the coming years. We are, of course, aware of the risks this entails, and we will ensure a controlled development of our existing book.
A few measures underpinning that intention are the ongoing assessment of our group-wide exposures, including worst-case scenarios, a common cyber strategy to ensure a consistent risk appetite, a Center of Excellence to provide technical support to all the market units, and a quota share insurance coverage with a retention of approximately 40% to limit volatility. Accordingly, we are convinced that we can both cover our evolving customers' needs and limit potential accumulations as appropriate. It should also be noted that the recent CrowdStrike incident did not trigger any material claims for Helvetia. To champion the successful achievement of profitable growth, a dedicated focus on technical excellence and efficiency will be key. Indeed, we must keep abreast of the fast-paced technological progress impacting both insured risks and business processes, climate change, evolving regulatory requirements, as well as market developments to further ensure our sustainability and competitiveness.
Let me first focus on technical excellence and how it will allow us to reduce the expected claims ratio of Specialty Markets by roughly 1.5 percentage points by 2027. As you can see on the left-hand side, the main measures will be to ensure state-of-the-art training in underwriting and claims in the newly introduced lines of business, closely track portfolio changing and external trends to ensure proactive cycle management, extend core competencies required for business and risk assessment with bespoke tools, challenge existing tariffs and NatCat pricing in view of technological developments and climate change, reinforce the existing framework for active recovery measures in claims, and implement integrated data quality management to champion better data and improved risk insight. I now move on to efficiency and the expected reduction of CHF 15 million of our run rate cost by 2027.
To achieve this ambition, we will mainly invest in the optimization of interfaces between our front and back-end systems to avoid any administrative redundancies, the establishment of automated interfaces with our main business partners, which will improve both the quality and speed in technical and claims accounting, and the usage of AI to increase effectiveness of business processes, two examples being the assessment of the reputational risk based on externally available data, automated intelligent capture of claims data, as well as settlement for standard cases. Being efficient and lean is, together with strong technical skills, a key requirement to manage underwriting cycles, as these features allow us to grow and shrink at the right moment and without impacting our cost ratio too negatively.
As advised previously by Fabian, the global specialist strategy is to encompass both the development of Specialty Markets and the specialty and commercial lines business in our European markets. The latter initiative is new and will allow my colleagues Juan and Thomas to unleash the potential they have identified in their respective segments by capitalizing on the experience and expertise we have in Switzerland and France. This know-how will be consistently shared with the relevant units through a Center of Excellenc e, which will be set up in 2025.
It will support the implementation of the strategy by providing business expertise, for instance, by supporting the development of strategy, assessment of complex risks, as well as the implementation of best practices, an international network, an adequate reinsurance capacity, bespoke training in underwriting and claims, and support for the recruitment of key resources to make sure we have competent and empowered people where it matters. It is worthwhile specifying that dedicated specialty and commercial line units will be established in our European markets. Geo-reporting lines will ensure that we bring together both the local and the group-wide expertise, which is key for a successful implementation of the strategy. Investments, even if rather moderate, will therefore be required in the coming few years.
While we expect benefits to be visible in 2027 already, the achievement of leading positions as an SME insurer in all our European markets and a corresponding profitable growth of roughly CHF 500 million reflect our long-term ambition. In summary, the implementation of the global specialist strategy will lead to a compound annual growth rate in underlying earnings of 6%-8% per year, thanks to the further selective development of Specialty Markets. By consistently sharing our expertise across the group, we will also lay the foundation for building leading positions as an SME insurer in our European markets and achieve an according profitable growth of roughly CHF 500 million in the long term. Thanks to our consistent focus on technical excellence and operational efficiency, we will remain competitive and manage underwriting cycles to ensure solid technical results, even if it entails a temporarily lower volume growth.
This will allow us to contribute to the greater diversification of the group, as well as deliver attractive returns over the cycles.
Thank you, David. Fabian explained earlier that the management team has been significantly improved. There was not room for all members to present today, and many of them, including our new Group CRO, Bernhard Kaufmann, have only recently joined. Nevertheless, we wanted to give you the opportunity to ask Bernhard some questions, so I'll also invite him to come up onto stage. His is a familiar name to many of you after his long and distinguished career, including as CRO of Munich Re and NN Group. So, Bernhard, over to you for a few words before we go into the first Q&A session.
Yeah, thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I'm very happy to be here today with you and to join the Q&A session.
My role as Group Chief Risk Officer is a new role in the Group Executive Board, and it was established this year. So we are combining in this role the responsibility for our already existing risk, actuarial underwriting functions, as well as the responsibility to drive our sustainability agenda. Why did I take on this role? Well, aside from its broad scope and interesting nature, I was attracted by the strong focus of Helvetia on growth in the Specialty Markets and in our P&C business, plus our expanding presence in mature European markets. In addition, we are unveiling today a new strategy and are forming a dynamic leadership team, so it's a fantastic opportunity to join at this point in time. Let me share some initial impressions with you. First of all, I've encountered very skilled and encouraged and experienced colleagues who are focused on getting things done.
Engagement scores of our employees are very good and speak for themselves, clearly a good indicator that the transformation has traction and there's a good team spirit in the organization. I've discovered since joining very good opportunities for growth, and Helvetia has an excellent capital base to support these ambitions. Of course, every journey has its challenges, and to enable profitable growth, we recognize that we need to further develop our technical skills in pricing, risk selection in those areas where we want to grow, and we have to make sure that, for example, accumulation scenarios and our natural catastrophe exposure on group level stays within our risk appetite during our further growth agenda. Finally, some words regarding our sustainability strategy. We updated and detailed out our targets as part of the overall strategic review.
Our targets include achieving our Net Zero targets committed by 2040 and 2050, respectively, and embedding sustainability considerations into our daily business, in addition to realizing opportunities, e.g., what also David pointed out in the area of renewable energy. So sustainability is and remains one of the cornerstones of our new strategy. So I'm excited about what lies ahead and looking forward to hear your thoughts and questions. Thanks.
Thank you, Bernhard. So let us now start the first Q&A session. So we'll have Fabian, Annelis, David, and Bernhard, and they would all be delighted to answer any questions you have. But if I could ask you to limit yourselves to two questions in the first instance and introduce yourself beforehand, we'll start with some questions in the room and then we'll go online.
If you are online, please raise your hand and also remember to unmute yourself when it's your turn. So Amelia, I think you were first there.
Yes, hello, good morning. Amelia from Deutsche Bank. So thank you so much for the presentation. You talk about, I have two questions. Well, I'll start with two questions at least. So you talk about underlying earnings growth of 9%-11%, with one-third from growth and then two-thirds from the margin. And I was just wondering within this, how much of it is pricing? So what are you building in in terms of pricing expectations? And then on the impact of NatCats and claims ratio improvement of 1.5 points, I'm just wondering in terms of sort of resiliency with respect to NatCats, if you can just add a bit more on that. So I mean, you spoke, yeah, just a bit more on the resiliency with respect to NatCats.
Thank you. Yeah, certainly. Thank you very much. So one question on the underlying earnings growth, what effect does pricing have in our assumptions? And then one on the NatCat impact. Bernhard, do you want to take the NatCat impact first?
Yes. So the development that we saw over the last years clearly we're taking up also now in our pricing approaches. So what we saw, like Annelis pointed out, over the last years, the 3%-4% impact coming from NatCat. And this is what we also, in addition, now have or assess in the way of exposures that we are running in the various scenarios and mainly also incorporate this into our pricing approach, meaning that is also included here in our assessment also on the profitability going forward.
Thank you very much. Fabian, maybe on the pricing and the underlying earnings?
Yeah. We said that two-thirds of our underlying earnings growth comes from margin improvement. Just to remind, there's a quarter of that coming from operational efficiency and then three-quarters, 1.5 percentage points coming from technical excellence. Within that technical excellence, in our planning, we were prudent. First of all, we assumed that pricing will always compensate potentially increasing NatCats and inflation because that's what you should make sure that you cover that with pricing. At the beginning, we as well expect a positive impact in addition to the margin because we think that the market environment is a good one right now in most of our markets. On the retail side, we are more prudent on the specialty line side because we don't know how the cycle evolves.
Then there's a bulk part of those improvements coming through more structural things, which is working on claims, working on portfolio optimization because these are the important drivers to stay competitive in the future and to really increase our sophistication in that marketplace.
Thank you very much. Simon was next.
Thank you. Simon Fössmeier, Bank Vontobel. Just one question on slide 16. I seem to have a misprint here. On the portfolio capital efficiency, you're not giving the names of the portfolios. Would you mind maybe indicating how much of the volume is negative? And would you be willing to sell some of the portfolios if they are not capital efficient over time? Thank you.
Yeah, certainly. So from your presentation, I think that was for you, Fabian. What's the volume of those? I don't think it was a typo. I don't think we meant to put the volumes on there. But what's our commitment to those and, yeah, our discipline?
Yeah, yeah. What we said is that it is so what we disclosed is the 21% IFRS equity that is allocated to these areas. Now, keep in mind, these are not full businesses. These are lines of businesses. So you might have situations where you have two lines of business, one which is below, the other one which is significantly above the hurdle rates, and there might be synergies in between. So keep that in mind as well. And then how do we deal with it? What I want to say here is that we really look regularly at these criteria. That's a way to steer our business. We make sure so we have now done our three-year plan.
In that three-year plan, the management teams have provided us with plans. How do they get in areas where we are below the hurdle rate? How do they get at least on the hurdle rate? Those plans are committed. We review them on a regular basis because they might be ambitious. When we see that this is not realistic, then I said that we are willing to take portfolio measures because that's part of our concept. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah, just to clarify, that is relative to hurdle rate. So it's not negative on the chart. It's just below the hurdle rates.
Oh, yeah. Sorry. That's an important one. Yeah.
Cool. I think Chantal, maybe? Oh, sorry. We'll come back. Oh, if you've got the mic, do go ahead.
Sorry, Chantal. It's Kevin Ryan from Bloomberg Intelligence. Just a couple from me, please. On slide 12, I could have written it down wrong, so a little clarification, please. You mentioned, I think, Fabian, that you would use AI in a sort of customer advisor role. Is that right? And if so, could you offer a little more detail on that, on the scope and so on? And the second question relates to the cost savings of CHF 200 million over the coming period. You've got CHF 35 million in for corporate functions. And I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about that. I've always viewed Helvetia as being very efficient. But CHF 35 million sounds a lot to come out of the center. So could you offer a bit more background on that, please? Thank you.
Yeah, certainly. Thank you, Kevin. So the first one from your presentation again, Fabian, on AI and a bit more detail, maybe if we can, on the customer advisor angle. And then second one, probably for Annelis afterwards, on the CHF 35 million cost savings from the corporate center. Yeah, Fabian, do you want to go first?
I can take the first one, but what I would direct you to is as well to the second part of the presentation because Martin and Juan will talk about how they use AI locally. And I think there you will get more insight. So it's not an automated advice which we have currently in place. But you can use AI a lot to support our advisors in their advising process. That is where you can do a lot, and that is where our focus will be in that respect. And for the rest, I'm sure that Martin and Juan and Thomas can then give you some more details when they present that in more detail. Yeah?
That sounds good.
Yeah. Okay. Regarding the corporate functions, so what are the corporate functions? So this is a group IT providing services to our entities. This is asset management, also providing the investment services to our entities. This is group finance, so my area, and HR and risk and actuarial, basically. Now, if you have large areas which provide services to the whole group, on an allocated basis, we look lean, but we apply the cost savings before we allocate the costs, the services we provide to all the units. So we made a thorough analysis, bottom-up in all the areas, and came to the conclusion, yes, there is potential.
Yes, we want to get that potential also from the corporate functions, basically. So we see potential in nearshoring of corporate functions because they are basically located in Switzerland currently, most of them. We already started nearshoring in the area of finance, a small part, and asset management. And there is more potential to come from there in the next three years.
Great. Thank you very much. Any more from the room? I might go online before I come back for a second round because I think Farooq had already submitted one. A couple, actually. So Farooq's first question is, what part is pricing in commercial lines versus claims cost inflation playing in our one and a half point combined ratio? So within the combined ratio improvement, what do we factor in for pricing in commercial lines and what do we factor in for inflation? Annelis, are you able to take that one?
I think that would be perfect for David, right? Because it's targeting specialty. It's okay?
Yes. So in commercial lines, we indeed intend to reduce our combined ratio by 1.5 percentage points. The levers are next to claims in underwriting our pricing. And pricing is to allow for inflation, future inflation, which in the past has been difficult to estimate, but I think the situation is more stable now. Then you have risk selection, which also plays a very important part in managing your loss ratio and combined ratio. And last but not least, conditions. And here I would like to make one example. In the past few years, we saw business interruption claims literally exploding. They became larger and larger and larger due to our very complex economy, globalization. And we said we need to limit those claims. How?
By amending the conditions and introducing sublimits. We have been doing that in certain cases successfully. In other cases, we had to walk away from the business because the market was more generous. So these are the three areas in underwriting we will focus on even more to achieve that reduction in combined.
Right. Thank you. I think Farouk had two other questions. The next one actually is also for you, David. New specialty lines, where do we want to grow beyond marine, essentially?
We want to grow in all the lines, but as I mentioned earlier, but marine hull, the conditions are very unfavorable and it's loss-making business, so we're just going to give up business and quite a bit. And then we have motor insurance. Currently, the rates are not attractive, so we're going to reduce that portfolio as well. And also U.S. liability.
There we think there's a structural issue. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the current legal system is not compatible with the principles of insurance or insurance. So these are the three areas where we will shrink decisively. But otherwise, we think there's a great potential for us to further grow.
Great. Thank you. His third question is on dividends. What is the upside to the more than CHF 1.2 billion dividend target? What are we implying by that, Annelis?
We explicitly give no range, but we say, look, we are very committed to this CHF 1.2 billion of dividends over these three financial years. You can be quite sure if the world does not break down to get that. But we do not commit on a range above that. Regarded as a minimum, we are fully committed to.
Great. Thank you. And I think we have a question from Nasib Ahmed from UBS online. Nasib, hopefully your line is open. Can you hear us?
Can you guys hear me okay?
Yes, we can.
Oh, okay. The first question on the ROE hurdles, the 21% that's not meeting the hurdle rate. Do you look at those hurdles at a portfolio level or at a geographical level? And kind of digging a little bit deeper into one particular portfolio, Swiss Group Life, I mean, you've got a strategy of lapsing that business over time. Is that one where it's clearly not meeting that hurdle rate? And that's the reason why you're going down that route. So that's question number one. Question number two is, how much reserve releases are you assuming in the dividend guidance from Swiss Individual Life, given where your interest rates are?
I think Annelis mentioned that you don't really release reserves very quickly. So how much are you assuming over the next three years if you can give some sort of indication of that? And then lastly, on Helvetia Group Solutions, there was a CHF 100 million injection last year. Is there anything more planned over the next three years into that business unit? And is the 1.5% combined ratio improvement from a base of 2023? I think it was 99.8% at full year 2023, their full year combined ratio. Thank you.
Okay. I think that was more than two, but we'll let it go. So obviously, you'll hear from Martin Jara this afternoon on Switzerland, and he'll be able to give you some more information on Switzerland and the group business. Annelis might want to, or Fabian might want to add a little bit at this stage. The ROE hurdle rates, what level do we look at though? That's probably one for Fabian as well. Do you want to maybe start with those two, Fabian, and then we can come back to the others?
Yeah, no. I'm happy to do so. So what you see on the slide, again, I think it's important that we mention that. So we're here comparing against hurdle rates. I reiterate what you just said. We have no business with negative ROEs. That's very clear. The way we look at that is always, of course, we look at businesses, what I said before, and sometimes businesses are linked. Yeah? And if we take Group Life in Switzerland, it's a good example. That's why I want to pick it up there. It's as well linked. You have different parts of the Group Life business which are linked. And of course, here are synergies.
You can do sometimes cross-sell for customers. And so we always look at that together. So that is the answer to that question. And then to Group Life or to Life in Switzerland. So Life in Switzerland overall fulfills the hurdle rates. And what we look at is that we try that we are shifting more and more into capital light. Martin will give you more insights in his presentation. And that for us makes a lot of sense going forward. And here we take as well customer needs and customer demand into our consideration to make that in the right way. And we have been shifting quite a lot, and it makes a lot of sense to us to go forward on that way. We think that this is the most shareholder-creating way going forward.
Okay. Thank you. Nasib, could I just clarify your last question on the combined ratio? I mean, the two points are starting from a 2024 level. You were talking about 2023. Could you just clarify the question?
No, just for Group Specialty Solutions, right? I think you say 1.5 in that division also. So you're going from, I think it was 99.8% at full year 2023. Are you improving 1.5% a point from there, or is there improvement already in 2024?
Okay. So Annelis, will take that.
No, so we rooted our targets on the expectation for 2024. So of course, these numbers are not yet out. What I mentioned in my speech is that until now, it looks like we have a good year in the Specialty Markets area. So you can assume that the starting point is considerably lower than end of 2023. And therefore, it's rather ambitious what David and his team have to accomplish to even increase based on 2024 the ratio down 1.5% on the claim side.
Okay. Great. Is there any more on? I think that was it for online for the moment. So we'll go back to the room. Chantal? Chantal.
That's easier. Sorry. Chantal Risold from Octavian. First question is a big part of your efficiency measure you mentioned was on the Caser integration in Spain. So maybe if you can maybe elaborate a bit also what the timeline and how you will put this forward. And also, are you going to keep the name Caser in Spain when you have fully integrated this business? Second is maybe also more on the specialty market. Also there you mentioned quite a significant cross-selling potential with your local units. Also if you could elaborate how you plan.
Do you plan to go to all the units at the same time? Do you have a rollout where you might choose first a market or how you will go over time to cross-sell specialty at the local European market? And one on the side is, I see that in the current target, you have dropped any fee result, fee top-line targets or any special reason. That was something that you had kind of introduced not long ago, so not worth skipping this target.
Okay. Thank you very much. So you'll hear from Juan after the break on Spain, and he'll probably be able to give you a little bit more insight into the planned integration there. I don't know if Fabian, you want to say a few words on that and probably on the fee target you might like to comment on as well. And then David on the rollout in SBM. Yeah.
Yeah. So as we said, Juan will explain to you in more detail what they're doing. I think this is a great and important project. And we're speaking about CHF 50 million. And we speak about a three-year time horizon. So every figure you see here is considered to happen within a to be realized within a three-year time horizon. So the run rate will go down by CHF 50 million within a three-year time horizon. And on the brand as well, Juan will explain to you, we haven't taken a decision yet how we will exactly deal with it. Then on the fee business, so for us, the fee business is and continues to be part of the strategy.
But the way we look at the strategy now coming from the customer, we say that fee business mainly contributes to services and to investment solutions for the 50+, so for the elderly in our customer base. So there's a focus, and we look at that from this side. So from the segment side, we want to grow that segment. And that is where fee business is included. And that's why we haven't taken it as a separate KPI because from us, thinking from the customer, we like more to look at the segments. So that's behind it. It continues to be an important part of our strategy. It's very diversifying. And that's why we like it. And that's why we put it into the strategy this way.
Great. Thank you very much. And then maybe on the timing of the rollout, David, in SBM? Yes.
So we will implement the strategy in all markets in parallel. As I mentioned, 2025 will be dedicated to laying the foundation because we need to establish organizations, we need to reinforce resources, we need to set up the Center of Excellence . So a lot of work from an operational perspective will be required in 2025. It will be done in parallel. And my expectation is that we'll be ready to go in 2026 already. It's ambitious, but doable.
Thank you. Amelia?
Thank you. Amelia, Deutsche Bank, thank you for taking my additional questions. I just have two. So on the statutory earnings bit, do you expect it to converge to IFRS 17 over time, or how are you thinking about the sort of the two in parallel? And then on the SST ratio, I mean, you mentioned that it's higher than necessary. So two questions related to that.
A, on the diversification benefit going forward, what are you expecting to see there? And then two, is the SST ratio something you're planning to manage down given the sort of the level it's at currently, or how are you thinking about that?
Thank you. So it's probably both for you, Annelis. The first one, how do we expect statutory earnings to converge to IFRS over time, or do we? And the second one on the SST, what diversification benefit do we expect going forward, and are we going to aim to manage it down to a lower level?
Yes, sure. So generally, in the countries where we are active, the rules for statutory earnings are more conservative than for IFRS. That's, of course, for sure. In an economic world, there is only one true number of earnings, and at some point, they will converge. Yes.
But you have to be aware that some statutory rules in some countries are really so conservative that you almost do not get out a part of the profit from these countries. So in short, I always expect a difference between the two views, with IFRS being a bit higher than statutory earnings. So there's no reason to expect complete conversions. Now, the SST diversification benefit, we already have quite a high diversification benefit. We sometimes do exercises where we, for example, just double our whole balance sheet and see, does it change anything? It does not change a lot anymore because we are quite diversified. But you will always have effects here or there depending on growth on the portfolio. Regarding if you only look at the underwriting risk, we are rather free in adding more underwriting risk with almost no effect on the SST ratio.
That shows how diversified we are. About managing it down, we are, as I said, SST is not one of the constraints for us currently. There were other times, 10, 15 years ago, where it was a huge constraint, but currently, it's not. So what we focus on more is on cash, as I elaborated today. So cash is king, as a former colleague of mine always said. And it's actually true because it's the currency you can use to pay back to shareholders. You can invest in organic growth. So we are rather actively managing cash, cash convergence, cash contribution, excess capital. Of course, SST is always on the sideline, is analyzed very thoroughly month after month, but is not managed in that sense or is not like a driver of our strategy because it leaves us currently a lot of freedom to do what we think is right.
I don't know if you want to add something, Bernhard.
I think you described it very well, that it's not a separate target or element of management as the other constraints are the ones we are actively focusing on and managing, and I think also on diversification. You made a clear point on the areas where we want to grow. This is adding additional diversification where we expect benefit, but there's not an explicit target, but looking at our development, that should be from a capital base, be no concern.
Great. Thank you very much. I think Simon had a question.
Simon Fössmeier from Vontobel. A very broad question on AI. Where do you see the best use cases for the use of AI? And as a client, how am I going to see AI? And finally, as an analyst, I know you're trying to cut costs. When am I going to see an impact, a positive impact on the bottom line from the usage of AI? Is that already in the numbers, or is this coming later, much later? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much. So questions on AI from the client perspective, where will we see the benefit in the coming years, and how quickly will that have a positive impact on our bottom line? It's probably for you, Fabian, initially.
Yeah. I'm happy to take that and then to refer you as well in the break to Sandra, who is our expert in AI, and she can, of course, go much more into depth than we have the chance here. The first thing is we see impact of AI within the three-year time horizon. So it's not something where we say it's coming somewhere in the future.
It's part of our plans, it's part of our efficiency plans, but not only in the efficiency plans. We use AI as well in Technical Excellence or positive. The good thing is AI is broad, and that's why your question is broad, and my answer would be too broad to cover everything, but keep in mind, so AI, we have existing use cases. We want to scale up. AI is as well part of platforms we use, be it, for example, Salesforce. They already apply AI, and you can use it. You can become more productive by using that. It's basically everything where you have a lot of manual work, where you can use AI, you can compare policy conditions, and you ask, where does the customer already face it, so we bring the example. That's just one example.
And Sandra kills me that I only bring that one, and there are many more. But the chatbot, Clara, is already something where as a customer, you work with AI because the answers are AI-generated. And that's where, as a customer, you face it directly.
Great. Thank you very much. So I think we'll wrap it up there for the first Q&A session and give you a chance to have some refreshments. And then if we could wander back here in 15 minutes. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Okay, welcome back, everybody. We'll carry on with our remaining segments, starting with our home market, which will be presented by the CEO of Switzerland, Martin Jara. Martin brings over 30 years of insurance experience with him, in particular at Winterthur and Allianz, and over half of these were at board level. Martin, please share with us the prospects for Switzerland.
Thank you, Peter, and good morning. Switzerland is our home market. It's therefore crucial for Helvetia that we further develop our position as a leading player in Switzerland, also during the upcoming strategy period. To do so, we act from a position of strength. We base our success on a product portfolio that balances our risks and enables a comprehensive range of offerings for our customers in retail and in SME. Our high-quality portfolio mix, with a strong footprint in property lines as well as in the customer segments of retail and SME, results in the market-leading claims ratio of 61.2 in a four-year perspective. Based on these strengths, we generate a very significant part of the group's revenues and earnings out of the Swiss business unit. The underlying earnings in 2023 summed up to CHF 334 million.
In parallel to this, we have achieved to create growth momentum and to outgrow the market in non-life and new business individual life since 2020. To further grow profitably our Swiss business, we build on our strong footprint in the relevant distribution channels that provide us the direct access to more than 80% of the more than 1.2 million customers we are serving currently in the Swiss market. This is an excellent base to generate value by leveraging our existing customer portfolio by up and cross-selling. As you have already heard in Fabian's part, our strategy is to become a local customer champion by building consistently on our strengths in all relevant markets. We will become a local customer champion in Switzerland by building on our strong starting position also in the core market. The starting point is our proven track record of profitably outgrowing the market.
We have outgrown the domestic non-life market since 2020 by 1.2 percentage points annually, while maintaining the market-leading claims ratio. This means that we have grown strongly without diluting our sound portfolio mix, neither with regard to lines of business nor with respect to the strong footprint of our portfolio in the smaller SME segment and in retail. We have also beaten the market in individual life since 2020, with new business volumes at four percentage points above the market. This sustainable and profitable growth in our core business is mainly generated by our efficient sales channels and due to the highly valuable Helvetia brand, with a strong attribution to the positive values of trust, reliability, and high quality. Those factors will ensure that we keep the growth momentum also in the next strategy period.
And at the same time, they will help us to further strengthen our margins by technical excellence. In addition, our strong growth in the total premium non-life, with an outstanding CAGR of 9% over the last four years, was additionally driven by Smile and by our activity in the new segment of embedded insurance. At Smile, we expanded our lead as the number one direct insurer in the Swiss market. We thereby achieved to pass the line of 200,000 customers. In embedded insurance, we successfully leveraged our skills and assets of the Swiss retail business to B2B2C schemes across Europe. By the end of 2023, we generated a total business volume beyond CHF 300 million with this business. To further leverage our footprint in the Swiss market, we will use our direct access to more than 80% of our customers and exploit the further potential of our existing portfolio.
The high loyalty of our customers supports the go-to-market of our measures in Technical Excellence, such as further rate increases. In addition, and this is at least as important as the technical measures, it eases us the cross and the upselling along the entire customer lifecycle. Further relevant advantages to realize these cross and upsellings are, on the one hand, our leading capabilities in technology-supported customer contacts and in advisory. In the yearly analysis of the digital insurance experience of the University of Lucerne in 2024, we were just awarded. Helvetia as number one and Smile as number two in the Swiss market regarding their digital experience, just some weeks ago. On the other hand, we profit from our comprehensive and attractive product range and service offerings.
We are the only insurer in Switzerland that may base its market presence on a full offering that includes non-life and life products, a wide range of attached services, and real estate-linked financing and brokerage. Achieving our ambition to become a local customer champion requires us to systematically leverage our customer base by offering our products in the exact moment the respective needs arise. This requires us to bring our high expertise in data analytics and our pioneering role in AI to full impact across all customer touchpoints, and for sure, the foundation for all our future successes will remain the strong identification and the positive spirit of our employees, which drive the implementation of our initiatives and thereby drive the development of Helvetia.
We are very happy to see in our yearly cultural surveys that always more than 85% of our employees are proud to work for Helvetia, and therefore they are ready to go the extra mile for our customers. Becoming a local customer champion goes in parallel with our ambition to increase our underlying earnings from the Swiss business with a CAGR within a range of 9%-11% by 2027. Building on our strengths, we will focus on three main strategic levers to get there. These levers to monetize on our strong starting position are, at first, leveraging, respectively accessing or unlocking the potential of our high-value customer base by consequently using our direct access and the strong relationship with our customers, as well as our capabilities in data and analytics. Secondly, accessing the upside of technical excellence to improve our technical margins.
And third, realizing efficiency gains to further improve our profitability. Leveraging the potential of our customer base means, on one hand, that we will gain and monetize our position as local customer champion in Switzerland by bringing our strengths in customer knowledge, customer advice, and customer experience to full impact. Since 2021, we have successfully built up our capabilities and systems to secure a seamless interplay of our own sales network with online and outbound customer contacts, the data-driven steering of these capabilities, our technology-supported and guided customer advice processes, our state-of-the-art CRM system, and the optimization of the interplay of all customer contacts by A/B testing will allow us to further scale our competitive growth position.
This means further anchoring our attractive offerings in life and pension, non-life, and real estate across all segments of our customer base and increasing up and cross-selling within our portfolio to a level of above 50,000 and growing per year. This will secure that we will continue to outperform market growth also during the next strategy period. On the other hand, gaining and monetizing our position as local customer champion in Switzerland requires also a stronger focus on customer target groups. Building on our strengths of a very comprehensive, attractive, and profitable offering in non-life, life, and real estate, we develop our value proposition for three specific target groups. These three target groups play together in a flywheel over the entire customer lifecycle.
The focus on young customers secures that we nurture our customer base, and the offerings for property owners and those who dream to become it serve us as an anchor in this attractive customer segment. We strengthen our relationship to these customers with the aim to monetize the potential of the segment 50 + by pension advice and investment solutions when it comes to prepare and when it comes to enjoy the first third phase of life. The ambition to become a local customer champion in Switzerland and the focus on monetizing the potential of the customer segment 50 + require that we further strengthen our footprint in the Swiss life and pension market. The life business in Switzerland is of high importance for the group, and it is currently also receiving a lot of attention in the political and public discourse.
I would therefore like to briefly put the spotlight on its development and on the plan to further strengthen this important part of our business. The development in our life portfolio has been very favorable since 2020. We managed to turn our new business production in individual life towards capital light offering and, in parallel, regaining the momentum on growth due to the strong sales performance. In group life, we increased the number of active insured by 2023 to a record number of over 215,000, while also shifting our business mix very significantly towards capital light solutions such as semi-autonomous offerings and flat-rate insurances of third-party foundations. This is important as Switzerland's CSM sums up to 75% of the group's CSM.
With these developments in both businesses, in individual life and in group life, we have secured a full range of offerings to provide our customers solutions for their different needs. In parallel, we thereby will also, in the next strategic period, ensure a stable CSM as earnings source for Helvetia, and the projections of CSM releases and of the development of the new business value by 2027 are based on the current cost level. The so resulting stable CSM releases and the planned increase of our new business value with a CAGR between 6% and 8% by 2027 reflect the stability of our life business as a reliable earnings source for Helvetia in figures.
Our investment plan also takes account of the high importance to further strengthen our life business, especially looking at the renewal of our backend systems, which is underway, and the transformation of the business delivery model and individual life that we are driving with very high focus and very high passion. To monetize our strong starting position in Switzerland, we will also further improve our technical margins and our cost competitiveness. As explained by Annelis, these levers will account for the largest part of the increase in underlying earnings by 2027. Executing on this requires, at first, a high focus on technical measures to improve our claims ratio by 2 percentage points by 2027 to our four-year average of 61.2%. We thereby compensate the higher frequency and severity of NatCat and increased claims ratio due to inflation and spare part price increases at our four-year average.
An important part of Technical Excellence is the further consistent implementation of rate increases. Already this year, more than 50% of our growth in the retail business results from rate increases in motor and in property. The fact that we did this with very stable cancellation rates and achieved to increase the number of insured in these lines of business by more than 3% in parallel shows the strong pricing power of Helvetia, as well as our very close customer relationships in our home market. But Technical Excellence is not limited to price increases. We also improve our risk selection every year and execute a highly disciplined re-underwriting strategy as an important part of our portfolio management in commercial lines. In 2024, we thereby achieved a rate increase in our portfolio of more than 3%, and we will follow up on this track also in the upcoming years.
In addition, we work with high focus on the management and steering of our claims. In 2024, for example, we launched our new tool for machine-based fraud detection, and we widened our network of repair shops across Switzerland to more than 90 partners. This will enable us in the upcoming years to significantly improve our fraud detection and the application of cost-efficient repair methods. Secondly, we will tighten our efforts and initiatives to further explore efficiency gains in the upcoming years. We have already significantly improved our cost base since 2021 and realized by our respective measures cost reductions of CHF 60 million. These effects are only partly reflected in the reduction of the cost ratio by 2 percentage points, as a significant part of the operational cost reductions is related also to our life business.
By 2027, we will gain further maneuver margin by executing measures to realize additional efficiency gains of CHF 75 million. On the one hand, these measures will focus on enhanced operational efficiency and on enhanced spend control by further optimizing and automating processes supported by renewed IT tools in our core business and supported by the stricter management of external spend. On the other hand, we will seek efficiencies out of building service hubs to nearshore non-customer-facing functions in parts of our IT delivery with other market units of Helvetia, namely with our Spanish colleagues. To further reduce IT run costs, we will also transfer part of our application landscape into managed services with third-party providers. In addition to this, we identified targeted use cases for further automation, AI support, and self-services. These will deliver efficiency gains mainly in underwriting, claims, and customer service.
To sum up, by building on and further strengthening our strong foundation and market position in Switzerland, we will achieve our strategic ambition to gain and monetize the position as local customer champion in Switzerland. We are focusing on three strategic levers to achieve our ambition. First, exploitation of the potential of our highly valuable customer base with direct customer access. Second, improvement of our margins through technical excellence. And third, realization of efficiency gains. With the strict focus on the development of these three strategic levers, the systematic building on our strengths, and the trust, drive, and the passion of our employees, we will reach our target to increase our underlying earnings by 2027 with a CAGR of 9%-11%. Thank you for your attention, and I hand over to Peter again.
Thank you, Martin, very much. Next, we come to our second market of Spain. Here, we are fortunate that Juan Estallo joined us this year from Liberty Mutual, where he was the CEO of the personal lines business in Europe. Among his achievements are the merger of three insurance companies from four different countries into a single legal entity. Juan, please share with us your plans for Spain.
Thanks, Peter, and good morning to all of you. I would like to start the presentation of the Spanish segment with a short overview of the Spanish insurance market. Spain is a large mature insurance market with more than EUR 40 billion premium of non-life premiums. It's a market that brings diversification to the group, not just from a geographical and business perspective, but also because of the increasing NatCat exposure that we are facing in Europe. Spanish exposure to NatCat is mitigated by Consorcio, as it was introduced early by Annelis.
As you might not be familiar with Consorcio, Consorcio is a public entity acting as a catastrophe insurer, covering losses arising from a natural number of perils such as floods or earthquakes. It's entirely financed by mandatory surcharge on insurance policies paid by policyholders. This cover minimizes, to a large extent, the volatility from NatCat events. You might have heard about the massive floods that hit Spain at the end of October with claims to the insurance industry worth around EUR 3.5 billion. However, Consorcio has absorbed most of those losses, minimizing the impact expected to less than 5% or around EUR 200 million. Moving back to Helvetia, we are a top 10 insurance player in Spain with more than 2.5 million customers and 4% non-life market share. Since the acquisition of Caser, back in 2020, we are operating through two different entities with limited collaboration.
There are lots for a potential senior uplift in the future. I'll be talking about those potential senior uplift later in the presentation. Our business volume is CHF 2.4 billion, 2.1 coming from insurance activity and 0.3 billion coming from non-insurance business. Our portfolio is well diversified at the line of business level with faster growth line in businesses with higher margins like property, health, individual life, or burial. Some of those lines grow more than 10%. We also have good diversification from a distribution perspective with 70% of our business coming from our loyal distribution like banks, agents, or own networks. Summarizing, Spain is a mature market that brings diversification to the group where we have a solid and diversified position and where we grow above the market with strong underlying earnings.
Before getting into details of how Spain will be contributing to the group strategy, I would like to point out some key strengths that will help to reach our ambition. First, we are the second largest bancassurance player in the market with more than 1 million customers through our bank channel. That compares to the top 10 position that we have for all channels in the market. The bank agreements that we have in place provide direct access to our customers. This is very unusual on the Spanish market where usually the access to those types of customers is really restricted. From the 1 million customers that we have in place, 40% of them are already included in our loyalty programs. Last characteristic of the bank agreements in force is their exceptionally long duration. The two most important agreements we have in place do not expire before 2045.
Second, we have more than 3,500 exclusive agents that help us to access more than 0.7 million customers with a very profitable business. Agents tend to be more loyal and profitable than the average on the Spanish insurance industry. Third, we are a relevant player on the 50+ segment. 60% of our customers already are in that segment. We cover both insurance and non-insurance customer needs through our comprehensive proposition. The 50+ segment will be accelerating in growth in the next years, becoming 50% of the population by 2035 in Spain. We should be able to leverage our expertise there to benefit from that organic growth. Expat customers are growing even faster within that segment. We also have a strong position there with more than EUR 30 million of premium and both volume and growing more than 10%.
Finally, we show a strong technical performance and we have an attractive portfolio mix compared with the market. As you know, inflation has put a lot of pressure on motor profitability. In our case, motor just weighs 20% compared with 28% on the market. On the other side, more profitable businesses like multi-risk weigh 34% versus 21% in the market. To summarize, distribution through banks and agents, 50+ expertise, and strong technical performance are solid foundations for the next strategic cycle. Together with the key strengths of the Spanish business, we identify the key levers for the next strategic cycle that capture most of the additional value. While the local customer champion initiative is contributing to our growth, technical excellence and efficiency will improve our margin. With our strategic initiatives, we want to, first, become a customer champion in banks by leveraging our unique bancassurance model.
Second, become a customer champion also in our profitable agents network, which I'll be covering later. Third, we want to benefit from the organic growth expected in the 50+ segment during the following years while we monetize our strong position there with customized products and services. The fourth lever we'll be investing in is in technical excellence to protect and increase our margin in a very competitive and sophisticated market. Finally, as a fifth lever, we want to leverage further integration opportunities we have identified in the two Spanish companies, Caser and Helvetia Seguros, to unleash cost synergies that have not been released yet. Those levers that I just mentioned will feed our ambition to increase our net earnings in Spain with a CAGR from 8%-10% until 2027. I'll be providing some details on those five levers in the next slides.
I will start with the local customer champions in bancassurance and tied agents network as a growth initiative. In the market, there is a certain lack of expertise in managing bancassurance distribution agreements. In some cases, there are restrictions set by the banks to access their customers. Other agreements set up complicate building strong customer relationships. Our case is different. We have plenty of experience in managing bancassurance agreements as we have ran them for more than 20 years. Additionally, the kind of bank partnership we have in place is different. We have access to the customers and the possibility to build long-standing relationships with them. We benefit from bringing together bank plus insurance data to build more accurate pricing. That gives us a competitive advantage over the market. At the same time, it allows for faster and better underwriting.
Our plan there is to bring more data together to accelerate that journey. We have also piloted building embedded insurance products in bank processes to provide seamless offerings for customers. During the next three years, we will scale those pilots and include them in more processes. Today, insurance payments are charged to customer bank credit accounts. That increases customer retention. Similarly, our shop's insurance proposition is jointly offered with bank services to build a more comprehensive offering for shop owners. Our second driver for growth is our tied agents network. We will expand and evolve our network to a future-proof model by further developing CRM and lead management capabilities. Our agent network will be even more focused on offering high-margin products and as well enhancing cross and upselling opportunities. Finally, we want to evolve the commercial scheme to focus on maximizing product density.
Our third driver for growth is the 50+ customer segment. The agent population in Spain, as in other Western countries, will be accelerated in the coming years. That segment, generally speaking, grows faster and with higher margins in terms of insurance penetration than the other customer segments due to its financial status. Helvetia has already a relevant position regarding the 50+ customer that helps us to know more about that segment than our competitors. We have a broad non-life and life insurance proposition, being able to provide comprehensive and customized insurance offer from property, health, life risk, and burial to the customers of the segment. Growing faster on the market in those products proves our better capabilities. We also have a broad range of care and other services with a non-insurance business specific and relevant for that segment. For example, elderly homes, home care, health, pensions, or financial assessment.
Our growth there also proves our strength to compete in those services. Bringing together a holistic proposition to leverage our insurance offer and profitable services should be helping us to further increase our 50+ segment penetration and margin per customer. In any case, it will be a priority for us that digital insurance services not only deliver the expected ROI on a standalone basis, but they are also deeply interconnected with our insurance activity. Finally, expat customers is a fast-growing segment in the 50+ segment and with a higher margin. We have better access to those customers thanks to our distribution and product proposition. We will leverage that even more to increase our growth in that niche. Summarizing, bancassurance, tied agents, and the 50+ segments will be key to deliver profitable growth during the next three years. Now, let's move on to the margin levers.
Spain is a sophisticated market from a pricing perspective, with pricing-driven channels like direct or aggregator being present on the market. To achieve our ambition to reduce our claims ratio by 1.5 points by 2027, we need to further invest in Technical Excellence. We will be doing so in three different ways. First, we will further refine our pricing. Enhancing our pricing models, we need techniques like machine learning to increase accuracy and reduce time to market. With investments to get more internal and external data, as I mentioned before for the bank case, and having good understanding of pricing elasticities not to leave money on the table. The second element of Technical Excellence will be better portfolio management. We will expand portfolio optimization across different lines of business and channels. We will strengthen our underwriting, and we will apply disciplined portfolio management.
Today, we have businesses with better portfolio stream than others and want to bring all of them to the same maturity level. The third priority will be claims cost reduction. We will focus on increasing the productivity during the prep process. In certain businesses, fastest claims response translates in lower claims cost. We will also try to expand our tight repair network and steer more claims through it due to lower reparation cost, and finally, we will reduce claims leakage and fraud by using analytics and AI. The second lever to increase our margin is related to cost. As part of our 2025-2027 strategy, we plan to integrate Helvetia Seguros and Helvetia to unlock additional synergies. I'll be covering it in a more detailed manner on the next slide.
The two companies have been operating on a standalone basis since the acquisition of Caser back in 2020, with very limited collaboration. Structures were different, and consistency across the organizations to facilitate cooperation within entities was not a priority. That created conditions for some quick synergies. Leveraging the joint scale of the two entities together to get better conditions from our vendors, as well as aligning certain processes like having a single road or home assistance model. Those are some low-hanging fruits that we should be able to start picking from next year. Beyond those quick wins in collaboration to realize cost synergies, we also have a plan to integrate the activities of Helvetia Seguros and Caser to unlock further synergies. Those additional synergies will come from simplifying the organizational structure, optimizing and automating processes, having a unique IT framework, and other additional collaboration opportunities from combining the two entities.
From the EUR 2 billion claims and operating costs including Caser and Helvetia, we will unlock synergies of EUR 50 million in the next three years by addressing a cost base over EUR 200 million of operating expenses. As part of that integration, revenue synergies we'll obtain too, but we prefer not to consider them yet at this stage. Summarizing, we will be doing in the margin side, we will be investing in technical excellence, and unlocking integration synergies will be our key levers here. Finally, to wrap up the segment in Spain, your key takeaways should be the following. First, we have a unique position in the market to monetize the 50+ segment and to achieve long-term profitable growth with our bank assurance model and agents network as part of our customer champion strategy. Second, our margin will be improving by 2027 through further investments in technical excellence.
And third, we plan to integrate Caser and Helvetia Seguros to unlock cost synergies. In addition to that, we will also contribute to our global specialist strategy. We have the ambition to grow the specialty line business to support the 500 million group ambition shared by David earlier today. I hope those were helpful insights into the Spanish market, and it showcased how the group strategy has been captured locally and will be implemented there. Now, I'll pass it back to Peter.
Thank you, Juan. Now we come to our final presentation on our GIAM segment. This consists of Germany, Italy, and Austria. Thomas Neusiedler has the longest track record at Helvetia of our speakers today, following a very successful career in Austria. In July of this year, Thomas added Germany and Italy to his responsibilities, and he now leads the newly formed GIAM segment. We are convinced that his strong management and focus on underwriting can help connect the dots between these three countries. Thomas, over to you.
Hello from my side. Last but not least, I'm pleased to present the strategic outlook for the GIAM segment. I hope you're still with me. I can promise you almost did it. My name is Thomas. I'm working in the insurance industry for more than 25 years now, most of this time in the German-speaking countries. In market-facing functions, what I want to speak about in the next minute is the starting point of the three country markets, Germany, Italy, and Austria. What are our strengths? What is the strategy, the future Helvetia strategy? Then I will give you some kind of a deep dive on three specific topics in my markets. And finally, my key takeaways.
GIAM, already said several times, stands for the German, Italian, and Austrian markets at a glance with a segment with about CHF 2.5 billion in premiums and 2.5 million customers. Three market units, each with its own footprint in a local market. Well-balanced line of business segments, none of them with a dominating motorbook and on the sales side reflecting the specific requirements of the markets. Bancassurance in Italy and long-standing relationships with our core agent partners, a broad basis of direct customer access in Austria, two-thirds out of agents and employed salesforce, and a very specialized broker approach in Germany. All this being a new USP for Helvetia.
A local presence in these three markets is important for our company to provide and to develop accurate market understanding to produce value even in difficult market environments with non-cat exposures such as in September of this year in Austria, our motor markets with challenging combined ratios such as currently in Germany and Italy. Exactly the fact that we have skilled employees in sales, in underwriting, and in claims is a key asset for Helvetia in this market segment. Imagine one of three Helvetia customers comes from the GIAM markets with still a lot of potential within our today's customer base as well as in the overall markets in retail and in commercial, in life and in non-life. The local expertise in our markets enables us to maximize our outcome and to understand the local requirements. Therefore, I'm very confident we can manage all these challenges in the years ahead.
Our strategy approach will explain how. Being a local customer champion is based on our strength, our sales network, our people, our business know-how, developing, growing in a market, and the existing business mix within lines of business and customer segments. In the past, we have been very successful in attracting new sales partners, new customers, new bank assurance partners. Now, based on this, we are going to increase our book of business in using their and our direct access by cross and upselling initiatives in dedicated target customer segments. Increasing product density within our 2.5 million GIAM customers will be key for us within the next years. Let me just pick three figures from the slide behind. On average, two-thirds of the non-life portfolio in non-motor, a focused sales organization with more than 12,000 sales partners, and an employee engagement far above the market benchmark.
The key pillars of the Helvetia strategy are reflected in our GIAM segment in terms of the already mentioned local customer champion, focusing 50+ lead generation, up and cross-selling, already mentioned by Martin for the market unit presentation of Switzerland. Let me have a word on the 50+. In all of the GIAM markets, we have a significant and growing customer base for this segment. We want to address them in a focused way with appropriate product propositions, but this doesn't mean that we disregard the other age segments in our portfolio and out in the market. The global specialist commercial segment strategy in all of the three markets to leverage already existing underwriting know-how that we have, for example, centrally in the Center of Excellence or in Switzerland, already introduced by my colleague David in his section, and the technical excellence in pricing and claims, as well as efficiency.
By the way, Helvetia stands in all of the GIAM markets for superior claims handling quality, exactly following our purpose: be there when it matters. Focusing on target areas will boost us in Germany, in our German market unit, with the ambition to double premium volume in these segments. This is in combination with keeping profitability in our target range. Our market propositions will cover the global specialist as well as the local champion area. You see the segments, for example, car dealers, several areas in retail here shown as property, and a group of high net worth individuals. We also regard this being one of our advantages that we provide to the market. We are there where we understand our business and where we know our customers and our sales partners.
Our distribution network in Germany is well balanced, not too big and not too small for what we do. Life business in Germany is a notable pillar too. We have a strong footprint with high net worth individuals in their business there as well. Let me bring you to Technical Excellence. Technical Excellence covers activities in pricing, which means a clear understanding of the technical price required per line of business and product, as well as the calculation of the proper discount and cost loadings. Technical Excellence also includes the areas of product and portfolio management, claims activities to control and to steer average cost development. And as you see with the example of Italy behind me, to lift our profitability on average by two to three points. Yes, Italy is a challenging market environment, but following a disciplined and technical underwriting approach, we for sure see opportunities there.
With the area of local customer champion, we drive the direct customer access, growing the business in up and cross-selling in the existing customer base, as well as in the online area with our brand Smile, which has already been rolled out in Austria. And last but not least, attracting new sales partners and therefore increasing our volume with their profitable non-life portfolios. Austria is a good example of what we need in the future: growth, profitable growth, going hand in hand with pricing discipline and the ambition to become best in class regarding process efficiency and portfolio management in loss-making segments. We do not want to stop successful growth initiatives like the agents transfer model into our company, but they have to be followed by effective back book activities such as re-underwriting and up-pricing.
By the way, this is the same message for Germany and Italy as well, which we have to achieve cross-country and why the GIAM model therefore makes sense for me. On the left-hand side, you see the technical excellence measures per GIAM country: Germany with a dedicated focus on exposed risks and the backbone topic data and data analytics quality. Italy with claims initiatives and improving pricing capabilities. Austria as well with the ambition to improve pricing know-how, fraud detection, and several process innovations.
On the right-hand side, our efficiency topics, because we steadily have to work on our cost topics to remain competitive. Here you see very disciplined FTE management, organizational transformation to automation, and the Gen AI in the future. These initiatives will result in a claims ratio improvement of one percentage point and efficiency gains of CHF 25 million by 2027. So what are my key takeaways now?
GIAM is an important and well-integrated part of the Helvetia strategy and therefore will bring margins up within the next few years in Germany, in Italy, and in Austria. The core and therefore the value of the segment is understanding the local markets, our local employees and sales partners. We consider and we respect them. All financial targets apply for GIAM in the same way as they do for the other areas. This includes all KPIs, including ROE hurdle rates mentioned earlier by Fabian. Thank you from my side.
Thank you very much, Thomas. So that brings us to the end of the presentations. So I'd like to invite all of the speakers that we've just had, plus Fabian, onto the stage for the second Q&A session. As before, we'll start with questions in the room.
And again, if we take two initially, and we can always then circle back around at this time. After the Q&A session, there'll be lunch. Lunch will be in the other tower, but if you meet outside, then someone will take you across. All right, with that, we'll start with the Q&A. Who would like to go first? Kevin?
Thanks. It's Kevin Ryan from Bloomberg Intelligence. In the Swiss presentation, you talked about an IT cost reduction target, including AI-supported automation and self-service of 18%. How is that squared with getting AI to do more for you? Are you telling us that AI spend has topped out, or is this a reduction in the absolute number of the investment going forward? I mean, are we talking absolute or relative numbers? Yeah. Thanks.
Thank you. So yeah, Martin, a few obviously. Yeah, in terms of we're reducing our IT spend, but still getting AI to do more. How does that work?
Yeah, it's add to run cost on the legacy systems we have. And this is not counting investment in AI. The percentage in AI you have there is the economies we are going to do by using AI in underwriting claims and in customer service. So this is not cutting the AI investment at the other side. We do the efficiency program to get the maneuver margin also to invest in this. And we are quite heavily investing in the AI part. There's a misunderstanding. Thank you for the question.
Amelia?
Hi, Amelia, Deutsche Bank. Thank you for taking my questions. So if I start with Switzerland, I mean, in particular in the sort of 50+ segment, what level of competition are you seeing here?
And where do you really differentiate yourself materially? And then second, sort of on interest rate assumptions in Switzerland, I mean, how does it impact your plan overall, especially in sort of life on the life side, also now considering the SNB rate cut today? And then finally, if I may ask a third question, sort of Spain and I guess across the board, I mean, I've spoken a bit about this with management already today, but you speak about sort of average number of products for your customers, but are you targeting sort of a number of products across customers, or how are you sort of thinking about this holistically for, I guess, all three business units? Thank you.
Okay, thank you very much. So the first one, 50+ segment, what's the competition in that market and how do we differentiate ourselves? Second one, interest rates given SNB's decision today, both of those are probably for you, Martin, and then we'll come on to the third one afterwards in terms of Spain and the product count and how that looks across the rest of the group. Thank you.
Yes, first on the 50+, I mean, yes, there's a lot of competition because it's an attractive customer segment, that's clear. We have the advantage that we are already there. So a good part of our customers already is in the 50+ segment and is becoming 50+ and entering this segment. And we have the huge advantage that we already have established relationships to these customers, and we can deepen it via real estate in a very decisive age between 35 and 50. And we have this direct access. So we are not a new player there.
We're just seeking to not let the margins to others in this part. So we have to develop further capabilities and pension advice and so on, but we are already there and we have the established relationship to our customers. And one really decisive part is also the trust in our brand because with all the changes and uncertainty in the environment, trust will count even more in the future. And trust is something that really we have as Helvetia in the brand DNA. So I think we are well positioned there and have some tasks to do. That's clear. Maybe I just comment on the second one? Yeah, absolutely. Interest is kind of the core in our business, which is clear.
And if I look at today's decision of the Swiss National Bank, you see that in the back book, we are very well prepared for such changes by ALM and by the sustainable reserve levels we have there. So this is, I think, the core business of a life insurer. And at the other side, we just spoke about the real estate, about anchoring our customers in this decisive phase of life to then monetize in 50+. So in real estate, this can also help us because it will for sure, for sure, nothing is sure today, but it has a good potential to activate the real estate market in Switzerland. There we have a position in financing and real estate brokerage also and to deepen the relationship to our customers. So I think like all decisions and all changes in the environment, we always have contingencies in the plans.
This can be positive and negative, and we have to really manage all these effects. But on the back book, we have no problem with this. And the new business is already directed to capitalize. So there, I think we are well prepared.
Great. Thank you. And sorry, just to clarify on the number of products for people, we're talking about the outlook in Spain or further across the group?
Sorry. In particular in Spain, but I was just wondering whether or not it's something you think about sort of holistically on a group level as well. Is there a number you have in mind that you're targeting? Is there an ideal number, or do you just want to grow it?
Perfect. Okay. Fabian, do you want to take that?
I can take that from a group level, and then my colleagues here can complement.
So we see products per customer always to be careful. We discussed it in the break because a product is not like a product. And more and more, we have bundled products, which then contain a lot of covers within one product. So this product per customer is always a very to take caution how we do it. So I can give you an idea. So we think that we can probably, over the next five years, increase that by 30%. I think that is what I saw in a lot of local plans. So it's not. There's one global plan, but in a lot of local plans, that's the order of magnitude which we aim for.
Perfect. Okay, thank you. Yeah, Simon?
Thank you. Simon Fössmeier again. One question on Switzerland and one on Spain.
On Switzerland, if you could sell your group life business at a reasonable price, would you do so to free up capital? And on Spain, I really like your approach of hospitals and retirement homes. Is this an area where you can take your knowledge and leverage this to other countries? And which ones? Asking for myself here.
Thank you, Simon. So the first one was on group life. Is it for sale? Would we sell it? Martin, do you want to take that one first?
I mean, you saw in the presentation that we have basically four types of offering and products in the second pillar, which is the flat rate insurance. You have the risk margin there. We have Servisa, where we have the risk margin, and we have a management fee. We have Helvetia LOB Invest, which is semi-autonomous.
We have the part with guarantee that is going with the market. We have also the possibility to shift in there. I think from both sides, from a customer side and also from a shareholder side, it's the right way to do to have this offering in place and serve the customer's needs in the markets. Meanwhile, the market shifts towards semi-autonomous and be prepared to drive by the own semi-autonomous function and by the flat rate insurance. I think this comprehensive approach we have in these four types of products is the best way to do it.
To cover the Spanish question, the first thing I have some positive news for you. We have a couple of holiday homes by the Mediterranean coast where 50% of our customers are non-residents, are expat customers. Clearly, there is an opportunity there.
Moving forward, for sure, we think that that model can be transferred to other markets. A long time. It took us a lot of time to get the expertise, to understand how the model works, but for sure, it's something that can be scaled to other geographies.
Great. Thank you. Any others from the room? Yeah, Chantal?
On cost, Chantal Risold from Octavian. On cost efficiency, if I look, actually, you expect CHF 75 million from Switzerland. And Spain, where you were mentioning that you are integrated, you have EUR 50 million savings. So also on this integration, almost a bit surprised that you maybe not get more. Do you still have a lot of integration cost, basically offsetting this potential synergy benefit? That's on one. And then also on the cross-selling possibility, more than the number of products, how much in the different unit you have cross-selling that one customer has both life and non-life business in its portfolio? Maybe each unit could say so that we can have an idea if there is a big difference between the market on the cross-selling possibility.
Okay, thank you very much. So the first one, the Spanish cost savings look optically lower than the Swiss ones, even though we're doing something bigger there. Perhaps we can talk about that a little bit. And then cross-selling, I guess everybody will have an opportunity to comment. Juan, should we start with Spain and then move across?
Maybe it's closer if I provide a kind of size of magnitude of what the CHF 50 million means. So the CHF 50 million are going to be very targeted on operational cost.
The base cost that we have in Spain combining together Caser and Helvetia is EUR 200 million. So our plan is to reduce by EUR 50 million to EUR 150 million, which when you have this kind of comparison gives some additional perspective.
So the share of cost savings in comparison to the addressable cost base in Spain is higher than the one in Switzerland. And that is exactly because of that integration.
Who would like to go first on maybe talking about cross-selling in the different markets?
Regarding the cross-selling, we have the ambition to approach our customers on a holistic view. But we have to realize that the starting points are different from country to country. And imagine Italy, for example, with a strong bancassurance segment, you have a different starting point, like for example in Austria with the two-thirds of tied agents and employed salesforce.
But yes, it's definitely our ambition to be there more to the point to push it. And as Fabian already said, I think our goals are very ambitious there.
Okay. We did have a couple of questions coming in online, but I think they were actually the same ones that were asked in the room. So if people asking those felt there was anything we didn't answer, then do get back to us. But I think we've answered the questions that came in online. So anything else from the room here? If not, then I think we can wrap up there. So thank you very much all for joining us. And just leaves me to hand over to Fabian for some closing remarks.
Thank you. So for all in the room and joining us for the web, thank you for your attendance and for your many very, very good questions.
I'd like to summarize. We consider our CAGR growth and underlying earnings as ambitious together with the ROE target, and we see the dividend growth commitment as a sign of continuity and reliability of Helvetia. While our strategy builds on strength, it will allow us to unleash our potential, or in other words, while we will continue to do the good things we have, there is quite some change in that strategy, and I just would like to remind you of what's changing here. You heard us talking today about the customer champion. Behind that is that it gives us a clear focus on where we want to, in which direction we want to direct our investments, and we direct them into a place where we can create most value.
We clearly give more weight to the Specialty Markets while we, of course, keep in our eyes the development, and we will be flexible around the development of the cycle in that part of the business. What you saw today is a consistent and a common approach to all markets, and that will simplify our life and generate synergies, and it became clear there will be more focus on margins going forward, and here, the two programs, technical excellence and efficiency, are there to create that margin whilst ensuring and driving our competitiveness at the same time, so the idea is not that there is a trade-off, and then you have heard that there is a commitment to steering our portfolio according to ROE and strategic criteria. We have taken ourselves 12 months to develop that strategy.
And behind that is, and I am sure you have noticed, we're not just giving you targets. These targets are backed by solid plans where Helvetia teams have worked intensively over the last 12 months. And I would as well like to use the chance to thank all the teams who have been involved here over the last 12 months of doing it. So with those solid plans and these ambitions, we look very positive into the future of Helvetia. And thanks again for joining us today here and discussing with us our plans. And for those who are here in the room, there will be lunch, and that is the most important message. The lunch is not here, but in the other towers. So please, you will be directed by us to get your lunch. And thank you for attendance again. See you soon.