Welcome to Swiss Re's Investors Day here in 2023, live from the auditorium at Swiss Re Next here in Zurich. My name is Thomas Bohun, I'm the Head of Investor Relations. I'd like to say good morning to everyone joining us via the live webcast, and of course, to all of you here joining us in the room. We'll shortly start the morning session with our Group CEO, Christian Mumenthaler. You'll then hear from John Dacey, our Group CFO, Velina Peneva, our Chief Investment Officer, and Philipp Rüede, our Head of Alternative Capital Partners. We'll then break for lunch. Those of you in the room, we also have other colleagues joining us here today, so please feel free to exchange with them. We have the business area CFOs, we have our group chief actuary here as well.
We have Moses Ojeisekhoba, the CEO of our Global Clients and Solutions business, and various others. So please feel free to interact as well. We'll then come back in the afternoon, and we'll hear from the business CEOs. That will be Urs Baertschi, Andreas Berger, and also Paul Murray. And we'll end the day with an extended Q&A session. For the analysts joining us via the webcast, you'll have to dial in through the separate conference call line to ask questions. And for those of you in the room, we still have a little bit of time; we have an informal apéro at the end as well. So with that, I'd like to welcome Christian Mumenthaler, our CEO.
Thank you, Thomas, and a very good morning to all of you here in the room. It's a pleasure to see you so numerous. Feels back to normality, definitely now. And of course, you know, good afternoon, good evening to everybody who might be online in different time zones. Welcome to our Investor Day, and I will take the first part of today, and quickly lead you through the key messages of the day. So first one is Swiss Re is well-positioned in a very attractive environment, probably the best one we had in about 10 years. Second is all around IFRS. This is the big IFRS day, and you might be surprised that there's one company out there that's excited about switching to IFRS, but in our case, we are actually excited.
John will lead you through the details of it, but maybe I give you the perspective of the CEO, why this is really beneficial to us. I think the first one is that the shareholders' equity is not a function of the change in interest rates. So in GAAP, the asset side is mark-to-market, liability side not. In IFRS, you have something that resembles mark-to-market on the liability side, and therefore, the shareholders' equity going forward is gonna be less subject to changes in interest rates, which, as you know, had wide swings in the past. When it went down, our shareholders' equity is very high, very difficult to achieve decent ROEs, and vice versa. Now we're very low, and there's concerns around ratios, debt ratios.
So this will go away, and therefore, also from the debt ratio point of view, we're gonna be back in the pack, as some of you wrote, back into the normal sphere. So the balance sheet, that's really positive. The second one, from my perspective, that's really positive, is that because we go from U.S. GAAP to IFRS, we had the once in a lifetime opportunity to basically reset the whole life and health balance sheet. So we basically... The way it's done is basically we could, as an IFRS company, purchase the old book that we had on the U.S. GAAP, and therefore reset the full balance sheet, all the parameters, all the errors that we've talked over the years that were problematic. On the U.S. GAAP, we were not allowed to write down.
It was written down in EVM, but not in U.S. GAAP, and we were dragging it along. This is gone. That's a huge positive. Of course, there's the higher, you know, baseline in terms of earnings, the better predictability. I'll come to that later in my presentation. And then the third one is comparability. We have been, I think, suffering from being very hard to compare with others, and finally, we joined the family of IFRS filers in the world. And as we went through the IFRS project, we took great care and put this as a top priority to be as comparable as possible.
And as we saw some peers publish this year, we have actually adapted some of our assumptions, because IFRS, as you know, has a wider set of assumptions you can take, and so we put a lot of emphasis on comparability. So overall, also, I think just overall, because we have steered the company on EVM for many, many years, which will not be necessary going forward because IFRS is close enough to EVM, we think that the business we have written over time in life and health looks particularly favorable also under IFRS. Then I'll go into the P&C reserving philosophy. I'm sure that's of great interest, so we will change the philosophy going forward.
We use this transition to IFRS to do this change, and all of that leads to a net IFRS net income target of more than $3.6 billion and a multi-year ROE bigger than 14%. Again, with all of that, we aim to return to sustainable dividend growth. So let me go through some of these points. First one is in terms of the markets. So as I said, it's probably the best market in 10 years. You have a few indicators here. On the left side, the P&C Re, that's our own nat cat index, so it's risk adjusted because we can do that. We have all the, the deals we have written over time, so this is risk adjusted. So this takes into account also the risk models getting more stringent, climate change being priced, and et cetera.
So we're back to a 2013 level, even though the models, of course, are very different. Then on the life and health re side, you can see a jump in direct premiums, a lot in the U.S., but also around the world, as people, you know, see the value of life insurance rise after the pandemic or in the pandemic. Corporate Solutions, you're all well aware, this is the March index. This is not risk adjusted, so I think if it was risk adjusted, it would look more like the P&C Re index. Of course, we're in a very good phase, probably better than 2013 actually at this stage. And in asset management, the yields are incredibly positive to be in a high yield environment. So this is all very positive.
I'd just like to remind those who think it's maybe too positive, that this is a function of the bad years, of course. So there was a reinsurance had to absorb a lot in the value chain. The COVID stands out as a huge shock we had to absorb, but also nat cat, the whole effect of climate change. We had inflation, we had a war started in Europe, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot to absorb, and the function, the pricing is a function of everything we had to absorb. And of course, reinsurance needs long-term capital and needs to be viable for their shareholders, too. So this is a, I think, just a natural consequence and beneficial for the whole value chain, I would say, at this point in time.
Then last Investor Day, I talked about what I consider our strategic advantages. So things that stand out, maybe not versus all reinsurers, but versus a lot of them. So this is just a quick recap. This is not the focus of today. First one is capital strength. I think what has changed in the meantime is capital is back into fashion. So having capital was always one of the pillar, one of the importance why people come and reinsure with Swiss Re. This has been diluted the last few years because with very low interest rate, capital is worth nothing or very little, and now it's obviously very much, very much back in fashion. So it's good to have a very strong balance sheet. Diversification, I showed you some figures last year.
It's. I think this is a very good illustration of the enormous power of diversification, which is, in the end, our business model. So what you see here is actually our nat cat book. First simulation, if we only had nat cat in our book and how much SST this will cost, and therefore how much capital we would have to hold, it would be 8% return. So just about okay, probably some. Not enough, actually. And if you take our full P&C book, the return becomes 25%, thanks to diversification, which allows us to have less capital allocated to nat cat. And with life and health in it, it's another huge boost, and it's 41% return.
So I think this illustrates well the power of having a very big and diversified book of business, which is the key core purpose of a reinsurer. Third one is scale and efficiency. I mentioned it last time. This is something we have worked on very hard over the last 10 years. So you can see the top line has grown quite a bit, while bottom line has stayed more or less stable. We divested from Admin Re, but that's just about $300 million. But at the same time, we built up CorSo, we grew Life & Health, we grew P&C, we built up iptiQ, et cetera, et cetera. So this translates into $hundreds of millions of savings we had to make during that time to keep the costs as flat as it is. Then ACP, so alternative capital markets.
This is a function you're going to hear later that we've built over the years, that you're well aware, but by now it's one of the leading players in the world. It's become quite big. Not so big in relative size than others, but in absolute size, it's very significant. They have now $3.3 billion of you know third-party capital, a lot of them long-term partners that are in the back and profiting from our underwriting capabilities, and it translates in about $174 million of fee income. So it's basically what comes in minus what comes out. Solutions capabilities is important also. It has always been important for us, but we have made it a bit more commercial now. We're tracking it. It's. We have 15 solutions. We have 40% revenue growth.
That's the fee growth, internal fees or external fees. We have about 400 clients on this, and we see this as a very interesting area and maybe something for a future Investor Day. And finally, risk knowledge and client access, always one of the core strengths, I think, and a differentiator with about 800 FTs in R&D on a lot of different programs. This is one of the reasons some clients come to us for the solutions also, and 80,000 annual client interactions, which are all documented and tracked. So as you know, the relationship we have with many clients, we have direct access. All the big clients, we have hundreds of people at Swiss Re, who interact with hundreds of people at these clients. And this gives more touch points for solutions, for discussions around large transactions, et cetera.
So this is a summary of what I consider our core strategic strengths. Then this year, we also went through a very significant reorganization. I've talked about it to you in the past, but now looking back, I'm extremely happy how this worked out. You know that we put a lot of focus on these market units. We have 22 market units that give them more power, so that 80% or so of risk decisions can be taken locally. And then we took a whole management layer out. So overall, we reduced the number of managing directors and above by 20%. So it's a very significant cut at the top, but we're able to do that without any significant disruptions in the system. So we now have one layer less. It's much leaner.
We could also reduce the time we spend in committees. So we went through the whole governance, how can we simplify things? So we cut about 40% of hours that we spent in committees in the EC. And there's cost benefits that will come through this year, next year, et cetera, but we, of course, counterweigh that with inflationary pressures we have and try to keep the cost line as down as possible. And of course, we have these new units, so Global Clients and Solutions with IPDQ, the solutions part, and then P&C and Life and Health... On the cost side, one more slide. So again, looking back at 10 years, we have worked a lot on that.
We're conscious that we're not not in a too good position 10 years ago, so there was a lot of work going through it, with some stronger work, I would say, the last two or three years, also because inflationary pressures were particularly high in this time. So on the left side, you see operating expense ratios, how they went down, and they're much closer to peers now. But actually, the one that counts more in our mind is not just our internal costs, because some people choose to go through brokers, and so you have to add the total cost of doing business. In my mind, is the brokers and how much the client takes, so all the costs, and that's the total cost ratio you see on the right side.
Ten years ago, we had a disadvantage of three points, which means your underwriting has to be better by three points, and by now we're equal to our peers, who have obviously also done a lot of work on this. Now coming to the reserving approach, I think it's worth, you know, this first slide is to understand the motivation behind it. So this is a 10-year picture of the P&C combined ratios versus key peers. You can see, that's pure luck, that it ends up we have the same average combined ratio over the same period of time. It's not totally astonishing that it would be close, because in the end, we have the same clients, the same lines of business, the same deals. So sometimes we do something better, sometimes worse, and so do the others.
So I wouldn't expect this to be exactly the same, but similar. But the pattern is very different over time. And what you can see is on the, on the U.S. GAAP, we tried a best estimate reserving approach, which is very challenging looking back. And so you see the years 2013-2016, we freed up a lot of reserves from some of the good times. But at the same time, looking back 2014, 2015, we didn't know yet that these years would be attacked by the US legal system, and that these ratios we had here were actually too low. And so we have the same overall result, but with more volatility with this method.
This is obviously something we have discussed many, many times with all of you, and there was a very strong desire, I think, from all parties, to get to something more similar to what our peers have. So we studied under IFRS, can we use this transition to also have a transition in reserving philosophy? So this is what we came up with, which I think will, again, in this spirit of comparability, bring us closer to peers. It's still in the logic of best estimates, so you have a wide range of best estimates. Every actuary will tell you that there's a high uncertainty around every reserve you're setting, and this is actually a function of the curve, how people see it.
Going forward, we're going to set the initial reserves higher than we did in the past, but still staying in the best estimate, just higher up in the probability range. Very importantly, this is just for new business. This has nothing to do with the old set of reserves. This is a philosophy change. This is not a one-year effort, this is a multi-year effort, and starting next year, we're going to add these reserves to the new business. How this works is we still expect our underwriters to cost everything correctly. Obviously, there are KPIs that they need to set, the cost ratios, the cost ratio, the loss ratios at the point they think is the right point.
But afterwards, we're just going to add, reserves on top, and this will shift the probabilities of outcome, basically. And so, I mean, some of you might say, "Why don't you just give us the schedule? What does it mean for next year and the year after and the year after, et cetera?" That I understand, but we cannot give a fixed schedule, because that would not be in line with the philosophy of how actuaries work and how auditors work. So this... There cannot be a mechanical approach to this. The philosophy is fixed, but of course, every year there needs to be a study overall, whether we're still at the upper end of best estimate, or if maybe in one year we go above, and then there will be less comfort around this, or below, and we need to do more.
So it's impossible to give a fixed schedule. What I can say is, of course, if going forward, the underwriters were always correct, so if you just assume this assumption, then of course, over time, some of this will come back, some of these additional reserves will come back, and you will get into a new steady state. So you should expect this approach to continue on this path. If everything is correct, then you continue to put this amount of money away or higher if we have higher premiums, but then things will flow back over time if it's not needed, and you would get into a new equilibrium. So I hope it's clear and transparent, and also why it's not possible to give a fixed schedule, but you mentally, I think you can understand what we try to do and how this works.
So we can do that now in this hard market. We can do that and grow earnings, and so we felt this is a good time. This, the transition to IFRS, the philosophy of being more transparent and more equal to others, is the right moment in time to do something which was very much asked from us by a lot of investors. Because, as you know, there's a high asymmetric perception of reserve, you know, going up and down. The last three and a half years, actually, our reserve have been more or less flat, but not every quarter. This volatility is not something that is useful or valued or even necessary fundamentally from a valuation point of view. So we're happy to be able to do that in the next phase.
The result for next year in terms of target is that we start with the U.S. GAAP $3 billion. We have an uplift in life and health of about $600 million, and all these figures, you have to take them with a grain of salt. We debated whether we show them, because not everything is so certain, but we hope you appreciate that this is a transparency that will help you make the bridge. And then on the P&C side, we think that the margins we have now will continue to earn through, plus $300 million. There's also investments. We can use investment uptick, $200 million, but then minus this change in reserving approach. And then the last point here is a bit an arcane IFRS point, which you know, John will explain to you.
But basically in the P&C approach to IFRS, you have this issue that you always discount your new liabilities you take on board with the current interest rates, and then you have an unwind of discount from before, and that very much depends on at which interest rate that was locked in at the time. And because our peers, when the year earlier, these interest rates were significantly lower, creating a difference versus us, who do it now, and lock it in at a much higher level, so you don't have this huge, you know, gains or losses. Obviously, these figures, if interest rates were to crash down or so, there would be some negative effects on this. But with what we see with forward rates, et cetera, with the movements we see, it should be a pretty neutral effect.
So no distortions coming from this slightly arcane point. We also have a multi-year ROE of about 14%. Obviously, I'm conscious that three point six divided by the equity of now is a higher number, so don't take this as a target. We don't try to achieve 14. 14 has to be seen as a floor, multi-year, because, of course, you know, over the years, we hope to accumulate also some equity. The cycle will not always be as good as that, and so we need to think about that, and so we chose a figure that's comparable to our peers. One more word about Life and Health.
So, I think we're quite excited, and I used to lead life and health, so and I used to suffer from U.S. GAAP in life and health, because I think U.S. GAAP is a very bad standard to explain life and health. Nearly impossible to explain anything in life and health, but IFRS is pretty much the contrary. I think it's extremely... I mean, once you get into it, it's extremely transparent, logical, easy to understand. You see the movements, you see the thinking that is behind the best estimate moves, et cetera. And not only that, but because the amortization, because we could clean up, of course, the portfolio, but more importantly, the amortization of these earnings are much shorter than they were in the U.S. GAAP.
The earnings go up, which has, I think, a very beneficial effect on the mix of earnings we have. It goes up from 30% to 40%, and this is obviously not correlated to the P&C cycle, so you have a better mix and diversification. I would expect the volatility, if there's a pandemic or so, to be similar, but it's starting from a much higher base, so the relative volatility of life and health results goes down. I think that's one interesting aspect of it. The other one is really this more or less predictability of the stream of income, this whole concept of CSM and the amortization of it. You see actually on the right, sort of the, let's say, draft illustration, whatever, is you get the risk adjustment back and the CSM.
Just over the next 10 years, we expect with what we have in our current CSM, this to be about $10 billion, with relatively good predictability. Obviously, you have, then reality kicks in. If there's any changes, this would affect this, but, but you, you have much more visibility over the CSM than you had before with this U.S. GAAP margins of $25 billion, which were never really, you know, very useful and could never be broken down to, to years. So in my mind, a big improvement in transparency for life and health. Then finally, on the capital side, on the left side is a recap of dividend and buybacks, and you can see the SST ratio on top.
I think it's important, and you're aware of that, that the SST ratio is also very much a function of interest rates, because of one feature that is similar to Solvency II, it's called MVM. And so when interest rates go up, the SST ratio goes up a lot, so this is quite sensitive, quite volatile. So we have to always take this 314 with a grain of salt and a bit of caution, because as interest rates normalize, this will naturally come back down. But obviously, we're in a very comfortable position from an overall SST point of view. The capital management priorities on the right, we haven't changed them. They're the same for 10 years, and I think we have pretty much followed it through all the cycles. So the first one is we need a superior capitalization.
This is really important for our clients, and we definitely have it. Then we need to grow the ordinary dividend over time. The third priority is to be able to deploy the capital that we have to the business, and obviously, we're now still in a very positive business environment, so this would definitely be a priority. But as this deteriorates at some stage, and if we can't find these opportunities, then repatriate excess capital is the fourth priority, and I think we have a good track record of doing that when it's appropriate. So this is all for my first section. We're gonna have a Q&A this afternoon. Looking forward to your questions. And I think now we go into the dry part of IFRS, with my CFO. John, I think you... Stage is yours.
Thank you, Christian, for appropriately setting the tone. I know we're late to the party. You've heard a lot of IFRS 17 presentations in the last 12 months. I'm going to start with a very similar starting point, which is the disclaimers. These numbers are illustrative. I remember Giulio at Allianz spent about five minutes in his presentation, December, exactly a year ago, talking about what illustrative meant. I'm assuming you're all familiar with the concept. We believe these numbers are pretty solid, but they're not necessarily final, and they're not audited.
So what I show you today, both on the opening balance sheet in the first three or four slides, and then subsequently in the numbers which are coherent with where those targets that Christian just put on the slide are, these are strongly indicative, but not necessarily the precise numbers that you will finally see when we publish our final results. I hope our external auditors are happy with that starting point. So just, Christian's mentioned a couple of these points, but I think it's worthwhile walking you through. We will be closer, both to our SST and certainly to our philosophical basis at Swiss Re Group on EVM. And the reason that matters is because our core underwriting activities have been focused on this economic basis, not on a U.S. GAAP basis for 15+ years.
It's going to be much closer aligned to the reported results under IFRS, not precisely, but much closer. The comparability Christian mentioned, you already see that. And again, right now, we've got this interim year where everyone has moved already. We're going to be a year later, but things like the combined ratio of our P&C Re business this year look a little awkward compared to our reinsurance peers in Europe. That will disappear next year. The market consistent valuation, Christian also mentioned, again, we think this is exactly the right way to think about our business and the better reflection of life and health earning power. I'd also focus on the right side of this page. It's very important. The cash flows and underlying economics of our business do not change because of this accounting change.
We see no indication that the business strategy will change as a result of this, and as important as Christian said at the very end of his section, the capital priorities also do not change. A couple thoughts about Swiss Re's specific adaptation and adoption of IFRS 17. First, we've made a choice of using the GMM, the general measurement model for the entire group, so we have a single standard, rather than splitting the primary business from the reinsurance business. And it's fairly straightforward in the way that it comes together, right? We have the future cash flows, both in and out. So premiums come in, we have claims, we have expenses, we have other charges against that. That's under number one in this page. As Christian said, there's a discounting impact.
And again, I'll reiterate this about four different times because it's important compared to our peers that went a year earlier. On January 1, 2022, discount rates or the ten-year U.S. government bond was traded at about 1.50. At the end of the year, it was trading at around 3.90. 240 basis points of change during 2022. What we've got here... Sorry, during 2021. So the start, the starting point, let me get this right. 22. I was right. Thank you. The starting point was, for all our competitors, a move of 240 basis points during the course of their year from their opening balance sheet. For us, that move is about 40 basis points, and it turns out to be fairly trivial in the impact, and I'll get to a couple slides specifically on this. But it, it's important to note that there's a balance that we're going to see when we start reporting next year that some of our competitors this year have not had necessarily. Over time, it will all balance out with the unwind, but there's been a bit of a windfall for some of the competitors in this calendar year.
The Risk Adjustment is another movement down, and you'll see our numbers are significant, largely driven by our large life in force portfolio. The Contractual Service Margin, which then allows us to show the earning stream, effectively the earn-out over time that people would expect, and lastly, the loss component for owners' businesses. And at the moment, we think that these numbers are relatively modest in the overall picture, but it's part of the calculation to get us where we need to get to. On the right side, the accounting options that we've chosen, some of them are very similar to our competitors. I don't think many of them are very different, but the discount methodology, using a risk-free rates consistent with the Swiss Solvency Test.
Just to give you a sense of numbers, this is 3.5% of a 200 percentage calculation, the bottom end of our range for a Swiss Solvency Test target. When you were to back that out into the where we would be at 100%, it would obviously be 7% discount rates here. Embedded in that is a figure for zero for the illiquidity premium, again, consistent with our Swiss Solvency Test approach... the discount rates I've mentioned. Other comprehensive income, not a big deal for us compared to anyone else, I don't think. On the risk adjustment, we talk about this. We've got, you know, three different factors for life and health, the trend risk, pandemic risk, and the parameter risk that we see in this portfolio.
On the P&C side, and it's dominated both by reserve risk and some specific very large risk given the nature of our portfolio on the P&C Re. On the transition approach, again, we've used fair value for the majority of the portfolio. I think Paul's got a slide later in his deck on life and health, which explains how we've grown over decades, the life and health business. The reality was, it was the granularity that's required to get a full retrospective approach is very complicated for a reinsurance business generally, and certainly for a reinsurance business that's been built by acquisitions. And therefore, what you see is we've done most of it on fair value, 15% on modified retrospective, and 10% on the full retrospective.
Again, illustrative numbers, but largely where we expect to land on the opening balance sheet as of January 1, 2023, so the beginning of this year, which will be the starting point. Our balance sheet will be smaller than that under U.S. GAAP, which was about $170 billion at $135 billion. Investments, relatively unchanged, and you'll see this with Velina's explanations in greater detail. Reinsurance assets of between 10 and 15, depending on some final decisions on the bookings. Other assets of 19 in this left side of the balance sheet. On the right side, liabilities are what tend to drop, and the related important shifts are reduction of the insurance assets and insurance-related liabilities. It just shrinks both sides of the balance sheet down by approximately $35 billion.
To get to the shareholders' equity, and this is a walk again, indicative. You start with the U.S. GAAP numbers of $13 billion, which was the December 31, 2022 number. The change in economic valuation adds approximately $35 billion to that total. We reduce that by a contractual service margin. Here you see a range, $21 billion-$23 billion. In addition, an $8 billion risk adjustment. That brings you down to a shareholders' equity of approximately $17 billion. In addition to the $17 billion of shareholders' equity under the categorization for IFRS 17 total equity, we add back the $2 billion coming from perpetual debt, which gets us to the figure of 19. During the course of 2023, we've continued to increase the economic value of the group. We believe the shareholders' equity will trend towards $20 billion at year-end.
We'll see where the final number is when we close the accounts. More specifically, on the contractual service margin, what you see again is the dominance of life and health. Approximately 90% of this $22, I'm picking the middle number of the range, is defined by our life and health book of business, and that is dominated by the mortality. And Paul will give you some additional information about that in the details of geographies across. P&C Re, a relatively small piece, and this is actually surprisingly coming mostly from the nat cat book, not the liability book. Corporate Solutions, a pretty small number as well, and group items, fairly trivial here. On the risk adjustment, a slightly different split, but directionally similar.
Life and health, again, the most important piece, and again, given the long duration of this large book of business, those risks that I mentioned, the trend risk, the pandemic risk, and the parameter risk, also dominating the calculation of this $8 billion. On P&C Re here, rather than the nat cat, it is the casualty book and our liabilities, which are a liability book of line of business, which is influencing this 20% that gets attributed. Again, Corporate Solutions, a fairly small number, and the group items, also. One of the interesting numbers on Christian's chart was the net income, more than $3.6 billion. How do you get there? And again, this is a pretty straightforward walk for us.
We've got insurance revenues, a smaller number under IFRS than gross premiums written, and I'll come through each of these. But largely, what we're saying, we have insurance service results of approximately $5 billion. The associated charges coming through the IFE of approximately $2 billion. Our investment result attributed to investments of $3.5 billion. That number is a little smaller than some people might otherwise anticipate, because some of the investment results will be a little less than $500 million will be actually dropped into the insurance service results. Other income and expenses, financing costs, and finally, income taxes bring us down to the $3.6 billion. Again, indicative numbers. This is going forward for 2024. This is not retrospective, so these numbers have not appeared in any balance sheet or any PNL yet. Let me walk you through the pieces.
I mentioned we expect these to be lower. It's largely the exclusion of the ceding commissions and P&C Re and unearned premiums as well. So the P&C Re dimension is what you see shrink the most. CorSo doesn't get affected in the same way, largely because the commissions are paid to third parties, not to the counterparty in the business, and so that's relatively stable. Life and health, also relatively stable, given the in-force books dominance over new business. The life and health insurance service result, and again, Paul will give some additional color to this, but what we've got here is a new business CSM, which we think will be largely covering the CSM release. Graphically, you see in this indicative set of numbers, it doesn't completely cover.
But importantly, when the interest accretion is added back, what you see is our CSM will grow over time in life. That's our expectation today with what we know and where interest rates are. We will also be releasing the risk adjustment associated with that year's business in life and health. We give, on the right side, some indications of the amount of release for the CSM, where you should be modeling somewhere between 7%-8% of the opening balance. For the risk adjustment, a little higher percent, 8%-9%. There will be some new business which might be booked on day one. It should be relatively small in the context of the broader set of activities. We're trying to underwrite profitable, value-enhancing business. The insurance result, we therefore would estimate somewhere approaching $2 billion.
Subtract from that the IFI, the insurance finance result, add back the investment income, others, including taxes, brings us back to this estimated 2024 indication of $1.5 billion. And again, that should be viewed in the context of the 2023 target we have for life and health earnings of $900 million under U.S. GAAP. So an increase of $600 million year-on-year, largely driven by the recognition nature, our underlying recognition activities of IFRS 17 compared to GAAP, as well as the adjustments to balance sheet, which we've been able to put in place to remove any negative overhang from prior years. P&C, a fairly straightforward walk, and again, we've combined CorSo and P&C Re on one slide here.
No disrespect to either businesses, but I think the way it works should be the same. The new business CSM release is stronger here, a more important part of the business as we write contracts on a yearly basis. The in-force business also contributing the risk adjustment release, and again, we see the amounts that you could model both for P&C Re and CorSo identified on the right side. The loss components for new business are a little higher here. This is going to be affected by the additional new business reserving that Christian talked about.
So as we add positions on top of what would have been the underwriting best estimate for costing, we will in fact find that some of the businesses which we believe underlying are still good businesses, end up in the owners bucket with this additional charging that we're adding. The IFRS 17 service results we would expect for P&C Re to be about a little less than $2.5 billion. For CorSo, $700 million. A CFO dream. I have two different calculations for a combined ratio within the group. We're doing this on purpose, because we think it's a better way to think about the businesses vis-à-vis their competitors. So under U.S. GAAP, we've used the same calculation, claims plus cost, acquisition and operating expenses over net premium earned, a standard across... basis, at least with full year disclosures.
But I think for now, you should assume that we're going to be showing a better and materially improved combined ratio, thanks to this adaptation for P&C Re and a similar on Corporate Solutions. And specifically, when we get to the P&C Re business, we start with an expected GAAP combined ratio. And again, that GAAP combined ratio, if you apply in 2024 the same kind of additional reserving charge on new business that Christian spoke about, would be bigger than what we currently show in 2023. You take off of that, the commissions, a discounting impact, which is real, but again, contained at 6.8%. Again, not with the windfall that we've seen, some of our competitors achieve, on a discounting basis in 2023.
Expenses of another three points, which is moving from part of the expense base outside of the directly attributed expenses, a new concept under IFRS, and plus or minus a few things, gets us to a much better position. And this is consistent with the target of better than 87. On Corporate Solutions, less impact, again, because of the different calculation methodology. The gross versus net is actually going to have a negative impact, as a starting point. The discounting will be in place for CorSo as well, a shorter average duration. And again, on the P&C Re business, we've got a bit of a barbell duration between the nat cat portfolio and the specialty and liability portfolio.
On CorSo, the strong property book, and much less longer tail exposures means that this discounting effect is less than half of what we would see in P&C Re. Expenses are not going to be materially different in the way we calculated this on the gross basis, and we expect the combined ratio to be similar as a result of the pluses and minuses. Again, indicative numbers, but we think directionally, this is a pretty good way to think about the future for these businesses. And this is why we think that the combined ratio targets for Corporate Solutions remain robust, even when we're dropping dramatically the combined ratio target for P&C Re.
One small thing which you'll appreciate, the seasonality that we've had in our business, the light gray bar, which is the U.S. GAAP basis, which says because our nat cat exposures have a seasonality, and in particular to the hurricane seasons in the third quarter, where we've attributed most of the premiums earned of that book, or a disproportional part of premiums earned in that book to the third quarter, and been a bit of an outlier. It played out just fine this year, right? Our third quarter earnings of $1 billion under U.S. GAAP were partly the result of this. On an IFRS basis, you're going to see the dark blue bars, a much flatter distribution across the year. And so we won't be talking about seasonality to you. Back to discounting.
Again, not to beat the horse, but, compared to what you're used to, this first year, it is important. So discounting will have a positive result, but the interest accretion occurs in following years. And what we think on the next slide, maybe just to cut to the chase, is when we look at the in-force business and the distribution, and assuming that interest rates at the end of this year and in the next year do not radically change from what's implied by forward rates, we don't see any sort of big positive impact coming through the earnings. There will be a benefit, as we saw in the combined atio, but it will be offset by that interest accretion, both in 2024, which is on the left side, and 2025.
These are projections. They're obviously indications for what we know now, but we don't expect then that you would see a big positive here. On the other hand, we don't have a big liability coming through, that this accretion will be a cost to us more than the benefit from discounting in future years. There's no catch-up that we have to worry about because we don't have the upfront benefits. On earnings volatility, we don't expect a particular increase. There are two reasons to this. One is Christian mentioned in his opening discussion, which is life and health will be a more important part of total earnings. And as a result of that, the fairly predictable life and health delivery of earnings should help overall group. On this page, what we talk about is the asset side.
This year, we've already been marking to market large parts of our investment performance.
... If you remember, U.S. GAAP made this shift three years ago. It was somewhat painful for us. We had to show that volatility coming through on listed equities in particular.
It is a pleasure to be here today, to share some highlights of our investment portfolio. I know I'm a new face on the executive team, to all of you, having, taken over from Guido Fürer as CIO this spring. My start coincided with the US regional bank crisis, the bank, the fall of, Credit Suisse, all in the context of elevated inflation, higher interest rates, and highly uncertain geopolitical environment. Unfortunately, one cannot choose the first hand that they're dealt, but we can make sure to make the best out of any situation, and this has been our focus for 2023. So let me maybe start a bit with the macro environment.
It has been quite uncertain. The last three years, financial markets surprised us in many ways, and that was in large part driven by COVID-19, the impact from the policy decisions made, and the historically 40-year historic high inflation that we experienced. Just a few highlights of what we saw. First, we lived through three consecutive years of negative bond returns, and this is unprecedented. We have never had 3 consecutive years of negative bond returns. On average, we expect bonds to decline once every five or 10 years, depending on the time frame you take. Second, we saw the end of the lower for longer narrative.
... U.S. Fed rates moved from 0.1% to 5.3% in a matter of two years, and they topped 5% for the first time in 16 years. Then equity markets. Equity markets were quite volatile. Last year, the S&P 500 was down over 20%. This year, it made a fast and furious comeback. So what does this mean for us going forward? On the right-hand side, you see some of the trends that we are following and some of the risks we are concerned about in our portfolio. First, inflation. Inflation tops our list, because while you've been following markets and you see that U.S. inflation has gone down more than expected, yesterday, we got European inflation numbers, and those also went down more than expected.
We believe it's too early to declare victory here, and we also believe that the market narrative of soft or no landing at this point is overly optimistic. History tells us that labor markets need to crack and correct for inflation to go down sustainably, which means we should be expecting a downturn or a recession in the next twelve months. Second, geopolitics. We have seen geopolitical risks not only not abate, but actually spread, which creates continued global instability. We're also looking at the impacts of energy transition, AI, which, yes, they create risks, but for us, are also investment opportunities. With all this in mind, let me move on to our performance and why I believe we're well positioned to navigate these markets and take the best advantage of them. Asset management has had a strong track.
We have delivered on average 3.4% ROI over the last 10 years. We manage a portfolio of about $100 billion in assets, effectively, all of which is under ESG considerations. If you look at the first nine months of the year, our net investment income was at an all-time high. This was driven. Our realized gains also contributed to our ROI this year, even though we had a meaningful program of targeted turnover of lower-yielding bonds into the fixed income portfolio, and that was not just lower yielding, but also lower quality. And this uptick in realized gains was mainly driven by selective sales in our real estate portfolio. If I move on to what our portfolio looks like on the next page.
Here on the left-hand side, you can see comparison of our portfolio today versus 2022, and given our cautious market outlook, we have been positioned relatively conservatively and have capacity and cash to add financial risks as opportunities arise. You can see that our credit investments increased from 40% at the end of the year to 46% today, and we modestly decreased our exposure to alternatives in equities from 12% to 10%. We took a few specific actions. First, we increased investments in high-quality fixed income, which includes investment-grade corporate bonds and senior securitized private debt. And on the former, we added credit, both in a higher interest environment, but also during times of the year where spreads were significantly higher than they are today.
Second, we significantly reduced our public equity portfolio, something that John has covered in our quarterly discussions, and that is driven by the fact that we believe valuations at this point are quite rich. Third, we right-sized our exposure to our principal investment and acquisition portfolio with the sale of CPIC in the third quarter. And then finally, we took some selective exits from our real estate portfolio at what we consider to be attractive valuations in the current environment. The right-hand chart illustrates the result of these actions on our recurring income yield. It is currently at 3.5%, compared to 2.6% at the end of 2022, and that translates over the first three quarters in $600 million of additional recurring income, which is ahead of our guidance of $700 million for the full year.
And again, this move has been driven by our active reinvestments at higher interest rates. So in addition to focusing on adding credit, our focus has also been on portfolio quality, and we find that important in this current macro environment. So the next two pages, I'll give you some highlights of what I mean by higher portfolio quality…. First, looking at fixed income. Our fixed income, our corporate credit portfolio makes up more than half our fixed income exposure, and it is a key contributor to our recurring income. And you can see here that in the last four years, we have moved significantly away from high yield and also emerging market credit to investment-grade credit in developed markets.
We have a hybrid model in how we invest in corporate credit, so we use proven external managers to manage our securities, but also have an in-house team that oversees the portfolio, which allows us to react swiftly to sectoral risks. I can give you two examples there. For example, last year, we took targeted actions on our Chinese real estate developer bonds, and we exited a large part of those before the market dislocation. This year, we were able to significantly de-risk our U.S. regional bank bond exposure well before the March crisis. A result of these actions is our low impairment rate. If you look at total over the last 10 years, it totals $168 million, which averages to below $17 million a year. Another area that illustrates the focus on quality is in our private assets portfolio.
First, in private debt, we invest predominantly in investment-grade equivalent senior secured financings in real assets, and those include infrastructure debt and CMLs. We expect to commit around $1.6 billion in those markets and are taking advantage of opportunities given tighter liquidity that we see both from banks and capital markets. Second, in real estate, our portfolio is really geared towards cash flow generating assets with limited development risk. 70% of our portfolio is in Switzerland and Germany, and that part of our portfolio is managed in-house, where we invest the full where we control the full investment process. We have less than 20% exposure in the U.S., and our U.S. portfolio is well diversified, where we have both regional diversification, but also good diversification by property type, including multifamily and industrials.
And then finally, our private equity platform is largely focused on buyout. We have very little venture capital exposure, which has experienced the highest valuation corrections in the last couple of years. Here, we focus on primaries, secondaries, co-investments, together with managers that have proven track record. And also here, we are well diversified. We own positions in over 2,500 private market companies. So maybe let me wrap up with a few parting thoughts. Asset management is well positioned to continue to deliver strong and reliable income to Swiss Re Group. And I believe we have three key strengths that enable us to do that. First, we maintained a balanced and high quality portfolio with no outsized positions and a focus on investment-grade credit.
Second, we remain focused on recurring income, and looking ahead at 2024, we expect to add another $300 million of recurring income from our portfolio. Last but not least, we maintain flexibility through strong capitalization, which means that we have the capacity and the liquidity to invest in the market during dislocation times. These factors differentiate us from competitors and also position us well in what we consider a continued challenging macro environment. Thank you very much, and now I will hand over to Philipp Rüede, who will provide update on Alternative Capital Partners.
Thank you, Velina. So good news, this is the last session before the break. Alternative Capital Partners. So before we go to our small corner of the investment universe, it might be useful to remind ourselves that what we're talking about here is typically, for the investors, part of their alternative allocation. And with what happened in the public markets, it's pretty obvious that a lot of those investors are now over-allocated in percentage to alternatives. And this macro factor has an important impact on the overall inflow and outflow of what we call the alternative capital markets.... Now, it's been dominated from the beginning to 2017 with relatively benign Nat Cat period, and we saw the rise of collateralized Re during that time. And since 2017, I would say the industry has faced its first significant challenge.
As any industry, when faced with challenge, there's change. There are winners, there are losers. So even if at first glance, one might think this looks flat and boring, underneath, there's actually significant reshuffling in that industry. And we see the part that is most directly competing, maybe with reinsurance, collateralized Re declining. We see the cat bond space continuing its steady growth. And side cars and to what we would call more aligned, offering, shall we say? Now, even when we look within the cat bond space, and we define a bit arbitrary, the top as being below 2.5% expected loss, and the bottom to be below 2.5% expected loss, then you actually see that even within the cat bond market, there is a shift towards the upper layer.
The bottom layer actually has been decreasing, while the top half has been increasing. So the idea that I would like to leave you with as my personal opinion is that this market is reverting to being more complementary rather than competing with the reinsurance industry. Now, unsurprisingly, we ourselves opted for a strategy that positioned ourselves to be complementary, and it's a pleasure to update you on the progress so far. Our ultimate goal is to reduce the cost of equity for Swiss Re. Simple goal. The first manner in which we can contribute is to help us to grow in a controlled manner, and in the spirit of exposure management, we would then take a basket of our peak perils and ask investors to participate alongside us in a very transparent and aligned manner.
And so we've been able to quadruple our assets under management in this space, and are receiving positive feedback on our principle of skin in the game. The second way we can contribute is by improving the capital efficiency of Swiss Re. And what you see on this chart is a figure of 19%. The interpretation thereof should be that if we ceded every single business, and we call that a 100, then we are now at 19, in the sense of what would be the maximal potential overall, and how much do we reduce our group economic risk?
So as an example, in the public space, the group stop loss covers that we did would fit in that, but also the diversification benefit that you've seen earlier in Christian's presentation on the Nat Cat, part of it, that diversification benefit, comes from cutting the peak. Now, we've been active in this market for 25 years, as a structure, but also as an investor, and this has really provided the foundation for this build-out. So we currently have increased our investment to $1.3 billion, as we thought the market was quite attractive recently. And last year, we decided to open up this to investors as well, to invest alongside us. Now, a different lens on the same thing is to look at our total expected loss in Nat Cat.
As you can see, we have grown the gross figure by $1 billion over that period, and approximately half of that growth was supported by ACP. You will also note that the figure for the current year has been lowered to $1.7 billion from earlier in the year, $1.9 billion. The two main drivers of that were that we increased the attachment point, and that lowers the expected loss, as well as on ACP side, we moved from more tail protection to proportional protections, and these two effects combined means a lowering of $200 million. So with ACP support, we can continue our long-term growth path in Nat Cat. On the next slide, and last slide, you can see here that we have roughly doubled every two years our fee and commission revenues.
I'll quickly explain what's part of that. So figure by a billion dollar over that period. And approximately half of that growth was supported by ACP. You will also note that the figure for the current year has been lowered to $1.7 billion from earlier in the year, $1.9 billion. The two main drivers of that were that we increased the attachment point, and that lowers the expected loss, as well as on ACP side, we moved from more tail protection to proportional protections, and these two effects combined means a lowering of $200 million. So with ACP support, we can continue our long-term growth path in Nat Cat. And on the next slide, and last slide, we use our fee and commission revenues, and quickly explain what's part of that.
So that would be the seeding commission or the profit commission, or the fees as percentage of assets under management, or the fees as percentage of collateral, plus the fees that we earn for structuring and arranging cat bonds. So you can see on this slide that in 2018, we were below $30 million and far away from our competitors in the... Now in line as of 2022 with our peers, and for the last 12 months, so until Q3, we are above continue, but probably not at the same pace. And with that, and a bit earlier, I hand it over to Thomas to close.
Thank you, Philipp. We're just a bit early, but we'll break for lunch now and then reconvene at one.
All right. Good afternoon, and welcome back to everybody online. Welcome back to everybody in the room here as well. We hope you enjoyed the lunch and have plenty of energy for our afternoon sessions. We're gonna get deeper into our businesses here. I will kick you off on P&C Reinsurance, then Andreas is going to talk about Corporate Solutions, Paul about Life and Health Re, and then we'll get into our Q&A sessions later on. So P&C Re, let me summarize it as follows: We have a strong franchise, we have a good market, and we have a clear strategy. We like the Nat Cat space. We like specialty. We want to do more business with our smaller and medium-sized clients. We like the structured solutions business, and we're cautious on casualty. We're going to unpack some of these topics here a little bit.
I'll start out at a higher level, and then we're going to go do a deep dive into Nat cat and into US liability. Let's start out with the size and the diversification of our business. This is a big business, $25 billion. Approximately 10% of a global market that we expect to continue to grow at a healthy pace over the next 10 years. We're well diversified on a regional basis and a line of business basis. You see that at the bottom of the slide here in the bar chart, so you don't have to take out your ruler. I'm going to tell you a little bit order of magnitude. On a line of business basis, about a little bit more than half of our capital goes to the property business, about a third to casualty, and the rest to specialty.
Regionally, just under half goes to the Americas, about 40% in the EMEA region, and then the rest in the APAC region. This is what we do. Now to the how we do it. We are channel agnostic. The client picks, we can engage with the clients through a broker or directly, and it's about a 50/50 split. What is important to us, that we're close to our clients, and this is why we have about 1,000 colleagues globally in underwriting and in claims that are spread across 40 offices. The reason this matters is this is how we show up to our clients. This is why they rank us number one in their views.
When we engage with our clients on a frequent basis, we increase the share of mind, and we often are the first port of call, and this is why we get access to some business that some others do not. Now, let me tell you a little bit more about our portfolio, where we are and where we're going. I'm going to have to take you back about 18 months ago, and what's been happening in our industry is a very significant rebalancing of the risk sharing between insurance companies and reinsurers. For a long time, actually, insurance companies were able to gear their own balance sheets and pass off a lot of the more traditional losses to reinsurers, and that stopped earlier this year. And so you saw a very dramatic shift, actually, in structures, terms and conditions, attachment points, and price.
What this has meant for our own portfolio so far through the first nine months this year, we've been able to increase our prices by 18 percentage points. We've also increased our own loss pick, and this is a combination between underlying values, inflation exposures on the one hand, and model and assumption changes on the other hand. The delta between the two, plus what we're getting on the higher yields, is generating economic profits more this year of greater than $1 billion. Now, it's not on the slide, but I know you want to know about renewals, so let me preempt the question and talk about this right now. I'm going to repeat what we've been saying about our expectations on the market environment, because it's still true. So what we've been saying is that we would expect an orderly renewal.
This is in contrast to the chaos that we had in the market last year. We said that we would expect a continuation of the discipline and the focus by the reinsurance industry. We've been saying there is actually enough capacity for most risks out there. There's continued focus on an evolving risk landscape and adequate rates for the risks that are being taken on end to end in the value chain, right? This is still very much our expectation of the market environment. I can give you a little bit of a flavor of where the renewals stand right now. It is early. In continental Europe, about a quarter to a third of the market has now FOTs, so it's a little bit further along. U.K., along the market, maybe around 10%. The U.S. is just getting started, and different markets in APAC as well.
So overall, it's still early, but you can start feeling a little bit of a flavor for what's going on out there. I'm going to bring you back to our own portfolio here and just go through the journey that we've had in our portfolio mix over the last few years here. And essentially, what you see here from 2019 through this year, it's a flip-flop of the focus around, casualty and Nat Cat. And when we look forward, we like the CAT business. We like property as well, more generally speaking, specialty, and we're cautious on casualty. Now we're going to go to do the deep dive in Nat Cat first, and then we're going to go to U.S. liability thereafter. All right. In the Nat Cat sector, we need to start out with the development of insured losses.
The new normal in the Nat Cat space is insured losses in excess of $100 billion. That's been the case on average for the last 6 years. This year is another active year, and it's been growing at a clip of around 5% or 7% per year. And what's behind this is demographic changes, migration, urbanization, increasing values, increasing exposures, people living closer to bodies of water, and this is increasing a trend here that we actually expect to continue. Now, we also see on here the price index for the Nat Cat business. 2017 was sort of a recent low in the cycle, and since that point, we've increased prices by 40%, and it's about back to somewhere in the 2010, 2013 area, as Christian already alluded to a little bit earlier.
Now, I'm not going to go into the details on these slides, but they're in your pack. These are some of the drivers behind the increased exposures and the growth of the natural catastrophe market opportunity. But I do want to talk about secondary perils. Secondary perils, so here you have severe convective storms or tornadoes, you have wildfires, drought, flood, and they make up about half of all the insured natural catastrophe losses over the last 30 years. They tend to be a little bit smaller on a one-off basis. They tend to be a little bit more localized, but they do add up. And what you see here as well, they can make up a very important part of the overall insured losses. Actually, when we go back to the slide here, the dark part of the bars, those are the secondary perils.
The light blue are hurricanes and earthquakes. You see there, obviously, in 2017, this is when we had Harvey, Irma, and Maria, and since then, secondary perils have actually been more than half. Now, this matters also in terms of the structures. This goes back to the attachment point topic that we talked about earlier already... Clearly, we picked up a larger part of this over the past few years, but we've seen a dramatic change in the share that comes to Swiss Re in 2023. Going a little bit further into our nat cat business. This is good business. We make good mone at it, a combined ratio on average over the last 10 years of 69%, $9 billion of underwriting profits over the same period of time.
It's a very well-diversified portfolio, and if you look at the map on the left, the bubble sizes represent the size of the expected losses, and the various colors represent the various perils in the nat cat space. Of course, when we think about unexpected losses, but more extreme loss scenarios, earthquakes and hurricanes will take up a bigger part of that share. And that's what we saw in 2017, and you see this on this list as well here. Again, this was the HIM years. This is good business. We like it. Another good business that we like is our specialty business. Not gonna spend a whole lot of time on this, but we need to just recognize for what it is.
We've been growing it at over 10% per year for the last five years at an attractive risk-adjusted Combined Ratio and good contribution to our underwriting profits. It is well diversified. This is where you have engineering. Bigger here in the EMEA region, because some of these lines get written out of the London market, but fundamentally, we're talking about a global portfolio that we like. This brings us to U.S. liability. We are very cautious around this segment, and we want to do a deep dive. Let me just frame the casualty topic for you. It is not all created equally. So there's different pockets here that we need to focus on, different regions and different lines of business. Fundamentally, there's liability, motor, financial lines, and workers' comp. We're focusing right now on the U.S. liability market overall. This is where we've seen the biggest problems.
Now we're gonna talk about the market overall. This is not Swiss Re, and there's three points I would like to emphasize here. The first one is, this topic of social inflation has been around for quite a while, and it really actually started with a social sentiment. So this idea that juries would go and vote on a verdict against large corporations and maybe not be so positively inclined, has been around for a while. It got worse. This is the middle upper chart here. The second topic is around the activity in litigation. It is up very, very strongly. And you can look at different measures. You can look at the number of court filings, the number of class action suits, the number of click-through on ads from lawyers, the amount of litigation fundings, the average verdicts, the nuclear verdicts, and so on.
They're all trending in one direction, up. And so when you have this combination between a social sentiment and an increased litigation activity, that means losses are up. I'm gonna bring you to the right side here in the chart. This is the primary liability market in the U.S. The blue bar charts are the initial loss picks. The pink additions above that, that's the difference to the current ultimate losses. We got those from the U.S. Stat filings. When you look at the years 2015 through 2019, you get increases of somewhere between 8 and 10 points per year, and you see that also represented by the dark blue line here, which is the loss ratio trend. The yellow line, the reason behind this is twofold. On the one hand, there's non-proportional coverage.
When verdicts go up, and it's only go into the XOL layers, that's where they sit. The other thing is, there have been overriding commissions of several points that come out of the loss ratio for the primary insurers to go into the loss ratio for the reinsurers, and that's what you see here. All right, you see a fairly problematic trend, and we actually expect most of this to continue. Now, let's go to Swiss Re. We've identified one of the principal, principal drivers in our own experience, which is the ultimate client segment and policyholders that we're insuring. And there is a very significant difference in the loss ratio experience between large corporations and everybody else. 30 percentage points over the measurement period here. And large corporations, these back our exposure, and you can see the experience is very significantly different.
So what, what have we done about this? Step number one, we have vastly reduced our limits to this segment, right? So large corporate risk segment limits, we have decreased that from the 2019 level to today to more than 70%. Second thing is we have doubled the prices for this business, and the third thing is we're also benefiting in total economic terms, not insignificantly from the higher yields. Need to talk a little bit about reserving. Okay, I'm actually gonna start you out here in the upper right corner. You remember this page here, the pink bars from the market overall, and what we talked about 2015 through 2019. The increases to loss pick from the original here, and this is probably not surprisingly, is that there are higher IBNRs in some of the more recent years.
But what is important is that across all of the reserves for U.S. liability of $11 billion, 75% is in IBNR. And then you can say, how does this sort of compare this year to last year? And that's gonna get you into the lower right corner here. If you go back and look at various points of 3 years back, 5 years back, 7 years back, what was the IBNR percentage at that point and what it is today? And it is, in most cases, a little bit higher today than it was last year. I'll take you to the field that says 2018, when you had an IBNR percentage of 68%. So five years back last year was 68% IBNR. This year, the IBNR 5 years back is 73%.
That's what the slide means, and that gives you a bit of a flavor around our reserves for US liability. I'm gonna do a quick walk through here of the IFRS target, a combined ratio. John has already given you most of these numbers, but just to illustrate it a little bit more here, the changes under IFRS from a recognition perspective, expenses, the first box, is around 5 points. Then we talked about the discounting. That's a range between 6 and 8 points. We do expect a little bit more to come through from margin improvement, but it's also a factor of how much we're thinking about increasing our own loss picks. And then, of course, there's the reserving philosophy change in here that we're not expressing as a percentage, but as the numbers that Christian had articulated a little bit earlier.
I'm gonna wrap it up here before turning it over to Andreas. We're well positioned to increase the resilience of our earnings. We've got a strong franchise. We've got a good marketplace. We like the Nat Cat business. We like the Specialty business. We're cautious on Casualty. I look forward to the Q&A. Until then, thank you.
Thank you. That makes full P&C for Swiss Re. Let me see the slide. Good. So Corporate Solutions is part of Swiss Re Group, integral part of Swiss Re Group's strategy. I think we need to state that again and again, so that we remind ourselves. What I would like for you to take away are three key elements today. Number one, we're gonna continue to be disciplined. We can grow profitably, and we apply a stringent target liability portfolio approach. Secondly, we invest into differentiated propositions to avoid the commoditization of our product and to fall into that commodity trap, commoditized trap of the soft market. And thirdly, we're gonna continue to increase the relevance, of course, in the group, to contribute further to the group net income. So that's the message that we wanted you to take away. We are operating in a very attractive market.
The commercial insurance market is attractive. We estimate a 5% growth, and it is a target market of $300 billion as it stands, and our target market comprises 40,000 corporate groups with all their affiliates, obviously, and we subdivide them into the mid-market. It's actually the upper mid-market, and then the large corporates. This is our space, and if you want to be a specialized risk partner for the medium and large corporates, we can go to the middle of the page, then we want to shift away from just being an excess and follow player. So we have two categories. That's the core, and then it's also the differentiated.
Within the core, we used to be known as the wholesale market player, where it's very much broker-driven, and you can be exchanged very easily, and there's a lot of pressure then on price when there's more capacity coming into that space. Two, then the primary lead capacity. That's the story that we told all the Investor Days since the turnaround. I think, just to remind yourself, in that space, primary lead, the competition is tough, but there are less competitors than in the excess and follow market. And also, you can see that on the right, the differentiated part, there are assets or differentiation, uniqueness that we can bring to the party, where the number of competitors even further shrink. Those are international insurance programs. Those are innovative risk solutions.
In particular, now with the hardening of the market, companies go more to self-funding to address the risk financing on their own with captives, and here we are market-leading to provide solutions for the captives, but also for parametric solutions. Now, you can see that 60% of our premium year to date is already coming from the primary lead space. So I think that's the good news, and that's the follow-through from what we said in the first Investor Day after the turnaround. This is an interesting picture. In the early stages of CorSo, we had extreme volatility in the combined ratio. It ranges from 88% to 150% between 2014 and also 2015, 2017. Since then, we had an average of 91% combined ratio, and we could take away the volatility here.
It's also due to the rate increases. You can see that we had more than 50% risk-adjusted rate increases since 2017. The market helped us, that was tailwind, but there was also discipline and also clear risk selection and proper portfolio management and the granularity of the portfolio management. Secondly, we addressed the expenses. We were overly expensive, but we also built an infrastructure. That was an investment. And as we built the infrastructure, that makes sense then to move away from the excess market into the primary, where we can then deploy all the infrastructure and the expertise we have. And lastly, we changed our reinsurance program. Remember we said the attachment points were too high in the past, so all the losses that came through ended up in our net, and it was an inadequate reinsurance protection.
Now we are more comparable to markets. Our net positions are more like market net positions, and we are comparable, and we can then focus on the profitable underwriting. In order to stay robust and resilient, also for the next soft market cycle, we said we need to address the portfolio steering. What do we do if rates decrease in property, for instance? We are overweight in property, and this will happen at some point. At the moment, we see very healthy, strong rates. The hardening is moderating a little bit, but I think we still see rate increases in property. If property goes down, we need to be resilient. That's why we look at the composition of the portfolio with a forward-looking view, five years.
We take market trends into consideration, and then we see how do we behave and what portfolio shape do we need to have in order to achieve the financial KPIs that we promised to achieve. So property will always be overweight. This is our anchor line of business. That's the reason for us to be. That's why customers come to us. And then we look at attractive specialty segments, in particular, engineering. That's a nice growth area. But still, the pricing cycles still correlate. On the casualty side, as you have heard from us, for CorSo, since the turnaround, we have been very cautious. We cleaned our portfolio. It's the history. It's not here anymore. So we're not underwriting large corporate risk in the U.S. on general liability, at least not as long as I'm here.
Secondly, we can still find some attractive subsegments in casualty where we would like to grow. So in particular, General Liability, EMEA, that's an area where we feel comfortable, we're underweight, and if we have a prudent approach with the right costing tools in place, then this is an area where you can expect us to be a bit more present. But then the last two lines of business, Accident and Health and Credit and Surety, are the lines that are decorrelated to the property pricing cycle. And that's why we like it, and that's why we say we would like to have focused growth, in particular in those areas.
So it doesn't mean that we're not growing in the other areas, but here we're focusing on growth, and also, this addresses the diversification, the scalability of our book, because A&H is nicely reducing the average expense ratio of the overall book, and then credit and surety is decorrelated, as I said, a line of business where we have performed very well, where we have demonstrated that we can cycle manage well. So that's the area we would like to be in. Let's turn to the three differentiating propositions that I was mentioning. International insurance programs is becoming one of our key features. If you remember, the last Investor Day, where we promised to have 600 international programs by now. We are at 650. You can see it in the next slide.
This is an area that we also feel very comfortable. It's mainly property, but also liability, and the other lines are a bit smaller, but, this is very healthy business. It is based on a very global reach, so we have a 150-plus network. We have, compliance and laws and taxes all built into our platform, into our tool, and data and technology is the differentiator that we bring to the party. People are switching international programs to CorSo, not because of underwriting or price, it's because of the service, superior service.
On the innovative risk solution side, this is, I would say, the flavor of the year, because due to the hard market, people are thinking, "Should I pay the high premium or not?" And as they start to take more control of their risk and understand risk and risk management and risk financing, you will see that there will be more creations of captives. You will see the association, the foundation of the... or the creation of the association of captive insurers in France. There will be more competition around captive regimes and regulation, and this is something we would like to accompany. We are market leading. Swiss Re has always been very strong in that space, even before CorSo was created, and we have three main propositions. And I would like to maybe use the captive as an example.
So take a captive, so we can sit with structured fronting in front of the captive. We can sit within the captive with insurance, reinsurance solutions and structuring or parametric solutions, and then we'll sit behind the captive so that we can strategically embrace the captive from all sides and be a long-term partner to captive managers. And last but not least, and it's linked to also the first two differentiating propositions, we bet on data. Data, technology, in particular data analytics and risk insights. We have developed a platform which is called Risk Data Services, and we're forward integrating into the customer space, the corporate space, and we deploy the models that we have, the insights that we have, so that they can start to take more control of their risk... and manage also a risk transfer together with a broker in a much more effective way.
So this is the differentiation of just a few numbers. As I said, we are at about 650 with international insurance programs to date, and the premium development is very healthy, very good. So this is an area where we feel very happy. It's also helping us to diversify, in particular, also to be ready for the soft market cycle. It's a very sticky business. It's business that our customers like because they only have little choice, so partnerships are long-term. This is very good for us. And then on the innovation of risk solution side, we're counting from 2021 because that was the start of the initiative. Yes, it existed before, but since then, we have added 430 IRS accounts, which is quite impressive.
Here also, from a gross written premium perspective, this is business that's healthy. Just on the booking side, there's a lot of fee businesses coming through, ceding commissions that are coming through, and under IFRS, you will see the different treatment of those. That's not premium that's coming through. You will see the commission side, the innovative risk solution side, but also international program side under IFRS 17, under insurance service results. The RDS fees are a software as a service, so that's a subscription fee, and you'll find it under other operating income under IFRS 15. Quick walk, like John, you did, you gave all the numbers. I'll just walk you quickly through like Urs did. So 94%, and then we will announce a target of 93%, better than 93%. And then change in methodology.
It'll take the net earned premium on the U.S. GAAP side, which now is the the gross insurance revenue side on the IFRS side, the denominators, and the difference in the calculation of the combined ratio. This is quite substantial for us, also due to the increased expansion into primary lead business, but also the expansion of the reinsurance program. So that's this part. The opposite direction is then, you know, the discounting of the cash flows under IFRS 17. You'll see that it's not as pronounced as with competitors, for instance, but also P&C Re, because we have a shorter tail. Portfolio composition of a large, large American incumbents, primary insurance companies, they have a significant larger casualty book, hence, the discounting effect will be stronger. And then we've got the earn-through effect for, of margin improvements, in the nine-month results.
So, still healthy, very good, at a very high level already. And in addition, we have a stringent, strict expense management in place, so that all fact is factored in here. And then you've heard from Christian and also us, the change in reserving approach. And here we must say, CorSo has started already in 2022 with this prudent reserving approach, which now is also applied at group level. In summary, the takeaways, we're focusing on cycle resilience and diversification. This will make us more immune for the next soft market cycle, which will come. We don't know when. We'll try to keep it as stable as it is at the moment. Differentiating propositions, as I mentioned, are very key to us in order to avoid the commoditization trap, and then also continued productivity increases. Expense management for us has to be strategic.
Then lastly, we will increase the contribution to group net earning, net income, and beyond the net earnings contribution. I'm happy to say also that on a qualitative level, we also are lighthouse initiatives in certain areas like data technology, like the target liability portfolio that we share, you know, with our colleagues and discuss it as a deployment to group. But also the smart circle in order to create the more robust underwriting technique and approach in the business. So that's Corso. Thank you very much, and over to you.
Hello, everyone. The headlines of today, the big one, our net income under IFRS, will move from the 2023 GAAP number of $900 million-$1.5 billion next year. That's the big one. Alongside that, as we transition into IFRS, we're able to strengthen our balance sheet. You'll see the CSM that is generated as a result of that is significant, and because of the long-term nature of the CSM of the life and health business, that CSM running off over time will create a stability for group earnings. We also anticipate through our franchise that we can grow that CSM. So lots of good news for life and health. What it means for us as a group is that life and health becomes a much more significant contributor to earnings at a group level, increasing our contribution from around 30%-40%.
So let me tell you a bit more about our business. This is a very large, global, diversified business... we take about a 15% share of the reinsurance market globally, and this is a market that's anticipated to grow by a very steady 5% per annum for the next 10 years. Our footprint is across 29 offices, and after our restructure, that includes 680 people in our market units, eight market units around the world. They now have a powerful blend of empowerment and accountability, and they are supported by more than 300 underwriters who provide the backbone, who put the systems in place, who put the frameworks in place, and to help decision-making on the more complex matters. We own our direct, our client relationships directly. 95% of our client relationships are direct.
We have a small dependence on brokers, and our clients regard us as the number one in our target market. That's the vast majority of the life reinsurance market around the world, so we're well positioned. The business is also well distributed across the three main territories of Americas, EMEA, and Asia, as we look at the world, and also increasingly diversified by product, which I'll show you in some detail shortly. Now, as the big message today is around IFRS, it actually helps to understand a bit of the history of the life and health business to know why our numbers are the way they are. If you go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, Swiss Re completed a number of significant acquisitions, starting with M&G, Life Re, Lincoln Re, and more recently, with the GE business, which had a significant life and health component.
More recently, having established that significant balance sheet from these acquisitions, we've grown organically, and we've grown at a good pace, and that's been underlined by growth in the underlying risk market, as well as our expansion into Asia Pacific region. A very steady expansion into that space, growth in longevity, and also, fairly quick growing transactions business, throughout that period. That's the history, and that's why our balance sheet is where it is today. Our strategy operates across the whole value chain, and we have footholds in the value chain, which are carefully selected to fit with our expertise, married up with where our clients tell us they need our support. On the distribution space, our product development, the ideas we bring to bring new products to break down the protection gap, is central to decision-making on who clients pick for the reinsurance partners.
Our underwriting remains at the forefront. Our Life Guide is the number one manual in the world. It's accessed well over 20 million times a year. And of course, given that it's quite a manual process, automation is playing an increasing role in this through our tools that we provide to the market. Our automated tools provide support for 15 million decisions a year as well. Of course, at the core of who we are is taking risk. We take risk on new business as business flows on, as new policies are written, but we also support our clients on their balance sheet by providing opportunity to conduct capital-motivated transactions. And these transactions typically are in blocks of in-force business, where our clients might want to reduce capital deployed or to optimize, capital deployed.
We're able to do that very effectively and very efficiently using reinsurance paper, and that's underlined by our capital strength, which is supported by our diversification, and our low-cost base enables us to find a price point that works. A big part of who we are, being a long-term business, is our in-force. So how we manage that, both ourselves and with our clients, is also a big part of our strategy. We help our clients to manage their in-force. We have tools we can use to help them optimize retention. We also look at where the value is on our balance sheet and where capital is being deployed effectively and not, and where it's not, we have options. We can do recaptures, we can do rate reviews. There are a number of different things we can do.
Our use of analytics helps us understand where the business is performing well and where to direct our attention across the complex animal that is our in-force. What about our new business? Well positioned for the future. The margins on our new business since 2020 have grown by 4 percentage points in return on capital terms. That's something we're very proud of, and let's remember, that's a period during which we've had one of the great pandemics in human history, and that was driven by a recognition that our business is at risk, and we should get a good return for the capital we put at risk.
You know, there is a perception that what we do is highly commoditized, and it's hard to get good rate for, but by good systems and processes, managing the supply of capital and optimizing where we deploy it, we've been able to create this significant shift in, in returns on new business. I'm also happy to say that we managed to do that on top of charging for the expected cost of pandemic for the new business we wrote during that period. So I think it's a great success story. In 2023, we anticipate creating new business with an economic value well in excess of $1 billion.
In the middle, you can see how our portfolio mix is changing over time, where our history is, shows the weight of the mortality business on the left-hand side, and our new business with a bigger shift towards Asia, where the health business is more significant, shows a better balance between life, health, and an increasing share of longevity and financial solutions. Our outlook is actually positive across all lines of business, but with some subtleties underlying that. In mortality, as we're quite heavy in the U.S., we'd like to have more balance, so we're looking to grow more in other parts of the world. We see great opportunities in Asia, particularly in the Southeast Asia region. Longevity, we like.
It provides a reasonable offset for us, but pricing is quite challenged, so we're selective, and we make sure we get a good return for the capital deployed there. Health continues to be a strong growth area, particularly in Asia. We have strict risk controls in place there, and we continue to do that with significant underlying discipline. And lastly, financial solutions. This is a large marketplace, and we have combined capability here that we bring together across our biometric skills as well as our financial markets platform, hedging optimally and fully wherever possible, to bring solutions to our clients that help them manage their risk across both biometric and financial risk. We anticipate growth in this area, but we'll be careful.
Now, to help understand the CSM that we present, actually, there's some figures we released in our 2022 annual report, which provide a good grounding. And of course, we've moved from a blend of a mixture of EVM and GAAP into a world where it recognizes earnings year by year, whereas EVM and IFRS recognize all future earnings as you write business. So in GAAP, what we tried to do in this exercise was to say, "What's the embedded future margins in our GAAP balance sheet?" Which is the $25 billion number there in the middle of the page. And that actually translates very well to the IFRS balance sheet.
The combination of the CSM and the risk adjustment will give you something plus or minus a few billion around the $25 billion mark, and I'll show you how that breaks down in the next slide. So similar margins overall, it's just constructed in a different way. Now, as we transition from GAAP into IFRS, this is, of course, a complex systematic change, but from an actuarial and insurance risk management point of view, we have to make sure that we set up the balance sheet for success. So there's been a tremendous amount of work still ongoing to make sure that we hold the right numbers for all our business, so we do a line-by-line, treaty-by-treaty review. And through that process, we aim to get to an end result of a robust balance sheet that will stand the test of time.
But that means that some of the liability in the CSM figures that we hold are a bit different from what it would have been under the GAAP world. And there's a couple of examples. Our pre-2004 US business was an earnings drag under GAAP, but under IFRS, as we can reposition that business with stronger reserves and a CSM against it, we can anticipate an earnings contribution from that business going forward. There's other blocks of business where we actually unlock more profit potential, and we hold a slightly lower margin on that business relative to what was implied under IFRS process, and I think we end up with a robust balance. Now, the margins are spread as shown on this slide.
So you can see the CSM in America still dominates, but also, a significant CSM in Asia as well. Just to connect back the $25 billion number, if you take the bottom end of the range on the CSM shown there and add it to the risk adjustment of the $6 billion, that gives you the $25 billion. Now, the amortization rate by region and also between the CSM and the risk adjustment are a bit different, and I'm sure you'll have questions about that, but, you know, you have to understand that the runoff and the shape and the profit profile of different markets and different products around the world is what drives this. And the difference between CSM and risk adjustment is due to the different carrying profile within IFRS of the way they run off.
I want to take a little deeper into mortality improvements, so thinking about the risk that we take on our book. As we've gone through this process of appraising, do we have a robust balance sheet? This is the biggest item that we consider. How are we doing with mortality, life expectancy, looking to the past, looking at what we've been through during the pandemic, and contemplating what the future may hold? If we look at the past, we've seen dramatic improvements in life expectancy over decades. If you look under the surface, you can see that the sources of that mortality improvement have come in waves from different contributing factors, and these are the bubbles that you can see on the chart on the left-hand side.
In recent years, troubling times as we went through the pandemic, wherever the lines here for the U.S. and the U.K. are above, that's when we had excess mortality. You can see the heartbeat is coming down, and that indicates that excess mortality is coming down over time. If you can see close enough towards the right-hand side of the chart, you can see it's coming right down, close to zero. And that is our expectation, that the mortality and the lethality of COVID is dissipating. It's evident in population mortality, and our outlook reflects an anticipation that that will be the long-term position. During the COVID periods, I mentioned to you, we managed to generate more new business margins.
The number is there, $700 million-$900 million of extra underwriting margins. But we also, during that period, even from the first indication that there was something problematic here in time. But what about the outlook? So this is the key part that drives our balance sheet, and if you remember, we talked about, I talked about the waves of sources of improvements from the past. Well, as we look to the future with our large research teams, we see multiple sources of improvements ahead of us as well. And some of these, you can start to see some emerging research that support that there will be dramatic things to come. We've all heard about the, the impact that mRNA vaccines had during the pandemic, but their use has not really been explored beyond, the experience of the last few years.
We're already seeing some tremendous prospects of combinations of mRNA and immunotherapy techniques to address cancer risk. So there's a lot of reason to be optimistic, and, and what that all adds up to, to for us, is that we anticipate mortality improvements will continue in the future. However, the way that we look at it, we break it down between short term and long term. In the short term, we reflect the fact that recent headwinds from COVID will take a bit of time to, to dissipate. But in the long term, we think we'll return to a level of mortality improvements around the world, which is coordinated in all our assumptions. But they... We project that they will be below the historical long-term trends, and we believe that's on the prudent side.
Back to the CSM. So this big, $25 billion asset with the CSM and the risk adjustment, in combination. We've talked about the stable contribution to earnings that that should provide to the group over time as that asset develops. As we write new business, we replenish the runoff. And as John said, we replenish that at a faster rate than it runs off. This is important for us. We want to be able to show a growing CSM, and when we put our business plans together, we do anticipate that as we lay our new business tranches onto our CSM over time, we will be able to project a growing balance sheet asset under IFRS there. Factors that drive that, well, the protection gap is still enormous and actually grows every year.
Underlying economic growth also supports our ability to continue to write good flow business. We see growing opportunities to transact with companies on capital-motivated opportunities as well. So there's plenty of, you know, positivity, I think, as we look forward. So in summary, the big story of today is that we announced this $1.5 billion for next year. And, you know, to, to break it down a little bit, from the GAAP number to the IFRS 17, a big part of the contribution is the in-force. The new business contribution increases going forward because of... contribution of earnings. So our franchise is strong. Our industry position is very strong. Clients open their doors for us. We're very positive about this increased earnings potential, and I just underline with that also the future stability of contribution.
Our outlook on long-term mortality is positive, and that's supported by a strong balance sheet that we've been through a thorough review of... moving forward from all regions of the world. Thank you, Thomas.
Thanks, Andreas and Paul. We just need around 15 minutes to set up for the Q&A session, so we'll try to start it a bit ahead of schedule. Let's-
Welcome back. We now start the Q&A session. We have all speakers on stage. We'll start with questions in the room that you introduce yourself before asking the questions so that everyone, especially those on the webcast, has the benefit of understanding where the question's coming from. So if we can start in the room, who would like to start? Ivan.
Reserving change, which I think is a very welcome, one. But I was wondering specifically if you could comment on the back book reserve confidence. Maybe if you could outline what's the right range. Should we refer back to the 60th-80th percentile? You have had, a bit of a focus on that. Maybe a similar comment. Pretty phenomenal with the, you know, multi-billion book, probably at least $2 billion of underwriting profit this year, if, if I look at your, your figures. Just what... contribution, or you think that it could be sustainable going forward at this scale? Thank you.
So the showed it that the scores put up had some material actions during the course of 2023, in addition to reserving that's been done over the previous 2 or 3 years, including but not limited to inflation. I think an important piece of the discussion. So there has been some case increases based on information that derived from some of the primary clients. But we've positioned ourselves, I think, in a very comfortable. The final numbers for the year will be prepared to sort of be a little more explicit about the reserve positioning, but I think you should be comfortable that we remain in the upper half, even if we have some. Those have been covered, and then some.
And so, I'm comfortable that we're in good shape, and obviously in much better shape than we would have been at the beginning of the year or even- n terms of sustainability, obviously, the market is dynamic. This is representative right now for the attachment points and the structures, and the prices are right now.
Chris?
Hi there, Stefan Schürmann from Berenberg. Thank you for the presentation. I got three questions, and one is on ROE. I just want to clarify if the base for shareholders' equity is $17 billion or $19 billion, and appreciate Tony said that the 40% is a floor, but when backing out the profitability, it appears to be structurally lower in terms of net net income than the current target. So any comments on how to think about this would be appreciated. The second one is on capital management. Slide 13 looks like growth coming in the fourth quarter, which I think is the last one. Does it mean we get more dividends than buybacks?
Maybe you can elaborate on how you prioritize returning capital and deploying capital for growth in light of the hard market conditions. And third one on U.S. liability, more of a market question. I'm just wondering why why is there not more urgency for the reinsurance market to push down ceiling commissions and hopefully force primary rates to rise further, given that you guys have shown that you incur a bigger share of the losses? Do you think the current rate environment is adequate enough to allow you to get payback over and above the past losses? Thank you.
Okay, maybe I take the first one, second, third?
Yeah.
So on the, on the ROE, I think you, we, we said $17 billion, but that's the beginning of this year's balance sheets. Of course, next year when we start, it's gonna be a hopefully higher number, as John has alluded to, and obviously $3.6 billion divided by that is a much higher number. It's just that we wanted not to have another, you know, one-year target. We have a one-year target, which is very precise, but then we wanted to have something over the cycle, much longer term, and something that is more to be seen as a, as a, as ambition, a floor, and something that is in line with what competitors have. And so that, that's how you have to understand it. There's no hidden message for next year.
This is more thinking about sustainability over a multiyear horizon, and that therefore this choice, yeah.
Just, and on that point, I just might add, because I didn't mention it when I was walking you through the starting opening balance sheet. That $17 billion included what I think are some prudent choices about positions that we had some ability to adjust before we landed on it. And so in particular, if you remember, in our life and health business, we could have made, or we did make some choices which were relevant for the EVM balance sheet, did not affect our U.S. GAAP P&L, but then came through as a potential reduction in the shareholders' equity that we show as of January 1, 2023.
So there, there's already built-in, I think, a certain level of conservative to the $17 billion, and therefore, that's one of the reasons why it won't be surprising for that number to build up, modestly, at least, over the coming years. On the capital priorities, I do think, our shareholders expect us to live by the, you know, what we've written, and the, there's ... We understand maybe a little bit of frustration in recent years that the dividend has not grown. I'd argue that, we've been paying attention to be sure that it's been at least maintained, even when the economic earnings of the group have been weak, in addition to the GAAP earnings, due largely to COVID, but not only.
And so as a result of that, I think getting back to a not huge, but a clear and unambiguous growth of dividends in the near term is consistent with the expectations that we frankly put out over the years. What happens after that, I think a little bit depends on how we see the actual development in 2024 of these IFRS numbers. I continue to emphasize the illustrative and indicative nature of these numbers. Our targets are there because we believe we can hit them. When we do hit them for the full year 2024, I think we can probably start to think about what the macroeconomic conditions are and how we would think about the capital structure.
For now, I think the focus should be on the first three boxes of that quadrangle, which says we want to be very well capitalized, we want to return to a growing dividend, and we want to grow our business and deploy the capital that we have.
You had a question around the relationship in the U.S. liability market between reinsurers and insurers and what we're expecting to see there. I'm gonna take this opportunity to expand slightly and start with the dynamics that's happening at the primary market, because that's a driver of what's ultimately coming into the reinsurance market. Principally speaking, insurance companies can decide how much they cover, this is the limit, how they cover, what they cover, these are terms and conditions and structures and what they charge for it, the price, right? What you have seen over the past few years in the primary liability market in the U.S., you've seen terms and conditions tighten, you've seen prices increase, and you've seen particularly limits come down.
So previously, in a GL lead, you would have found a general liability lead, you would have had a $50 million or $75 million and up kind of a lead. Today, the lines out there are much, much smaller, you know, $5 million and $10 million and $15 million, but the corporates can still buy the tower. You know, same limits, there's just more names on it. And so as a result of that, it's a much more diversified market. The underlying business is better too, structurally, than it was before, and then that gets us into the reinsurance market. What we have seen, and I'm talking specifically about the Swiss Re book here, what is important for us is the reduced exposure and limits to the large corporate space, the increases in the prices.
You know, on a going forward basis, we have been out there and saying that some of the commission overriders need to change. Now, we don't know how the market is going to react here. We're obviously in an active situation, and we'll have to see. But directionally, this is one of the pressure points that you're pointing to as well.
If I, if I could build on that, because I think it's, it's quite important. There's a, there's a huge uncertainty in all of that. So I think Urs showed you all the negative factors, why it's gonna continue. But of course, on the other hand, you have 100% price increases, you have all the actions the primary companies have done, and you have an interest rate environment where it's significantly higher another duration of five years, six years, seven years. That makes huge difference. So I, I, you know, I, I can understand that somebody else could take the other side of the bet and say, "This is enough." The challenge is just, it's, it's quite difficult to say whether it's enough, and the, the uncertainty around it means that from the positions we are in this market, we want to continue to reduce.
It doesn't mean that per se, we're 100% sure it's not gonna perform. It's just that the uncertainty, I think, is too high for a significant position. Andrew?
Hi, sir, Andrew Ritchie from Autonomous. I haven't quite got a question for all of—each of you, not quite anyway. Just starting off with the IFRS equity transition, slide 18. I was surprised there wasn't a loss component. I mean, almost all your peers have had one. I guess it might be in other. I just want to clarify, is there one, first of all? I thought there would be one, especially on some of the legacy life business. And I'm just concerned what we should do to roll forward to the end of 2020, to the end of 2023. Obviously, I'm not asking for a number, but I mean, I—we know what the economic earnings are.
We can have a guess what the IFRS earnings are, but is there some additional further, I don't know, true up on a best estimate basis that would create a loss component as we roll forward to the end of the year? That, that means, you know, we'd get very wrong on thinking what the end of 2023 equity would be. The second question, just on the reserving philosophy change, I'm just trying to understand. One of your peers has also done a similar thing and described it as a, as a sort of philosophy change throughout the organization, in terms of how they think about ... even how they think about what kind of business they want to write, and how they might price it, as, as well as a pure reserving compliance exercise.
I'm just maybe just question for question, how you kind of really frame it. Is it a cultural change? Other question on CorSo. There's quite a lot of optimism you expressed, Andreas, about further margin improvement. I guess there's a debate, 'cause some large commercial risers are sort of saying, "Well, you know, commercial margins can be defended here, but not really expanded," because price increases have tailed off a little bit. There's a bit more headwinds on FinPro. And you know, so I'm just quite, you seem unusually confident that there's still an underlying margin improvement. Forget accounting, just talking straight underlying. I'm just curious on that. Final question on life and health. Do we expect more volatility than under the U.S. GAAP? Because obviously, you're running best estimate.
I guess there must be blocks of business where you could end up in an onerous position, which would then have to be reflected in the P&L. So just, can you just give us a sense as to the sensitivity, not so much, well, partly the CSM, but partly the, to the extent it becomes onerous, then in the P&L, to any sort of mortality, sort of assumption changes? Thanks.
Sure.
So I think the first one is aimed at me on page 18. There actually was a loss charge. It's incorporated in what you see as this positive $35 billion, the change to economic valuation. There's about $1 billion of losses incorporated in that. It's reasonably equally split between P&C Re, Life and Health Re and actually group items where a bit of the IPDQ charge would drop in to that number. Your other question is, can you predict what 2023? Again, indicatively, I suggested that we would expect the shareholders' equity to be migrating from the $17 billion you see here, to something that's approaching $20 billion.
I'd say that should include some choices we might make on the life and health business of continued reinforcement of a couple assumptions to be sure we've got a very comfortable and prudent starting point as we go into 2024 in a couple of portfolios, which have been challenging over recent years. But I think that would be the only place where I could imagine positions. What I did show on the other slide on P&C was in 2024, there. When we do this addition of X% for the reserving to give us a more comfortable uncertainty reserve on new business, there will be some modest bookings that look onerous, nothing that concerns us.
Yes, the 17.
So, on reserving, this is not a cultural change. The way we look at this is, for years, our obsession is, or the idea is, that all underwriters have the proper costing, that they cost precisely. And obviously, in 2014, 2015, in casualty, they underestimated, but it was not visible, but they underestimated the ultimate loss, because then there was this attack by the hedge funds and the legal system, et cetera. And also through the soft attack, there's sometimes a bit of optimistic bias. And so to close that gap between the A versus Z, the actual versus expected, has been a top priority over the last few years. It's unrelated to the reserving piece, just to make sure, and that's how underwriters get measured.
We're going to measure over time how accurate they're in predicting the correct loss ratio. So that's... If you want, that's-- it's not a-- that was not a cultural change. That's just good underwriting. That's what we need to have. This is, this is on top. So this is once you have everything coming up, at the top level, this is going to be done, per line of business, of course, and according to how actuaries think it makes sense, is to add something on top of this loss ratio. And, and the, the rough amount is what we can give you today. And so the idea is also going forward to do the same every year. So this, this amount you put on top will be similar to your growth as you grow different lines of business, et cetera.
But every year, there will be this check whether you're still within the best estimate, and only if it's acceptable, you would continue with that. What you would also have or expect if the underwriters are precise and correct is that over time, some of that comes back, so it would start to flow back. Of course, not in year one, because you would want to be sure that it's there, but it would start to flow back over time. And so you basically reach a different equilibrium over time. But this is not something we roll out to underwriters. They shouldn't be confused. They have to, you know, as much as possible, as much as humanly possible, determine.
Question. I think factually, yes, it's more volatile. I explained, we're very careful in taking this opportunity now to make sure we establish the balance sheet on a robust basis. It's kind of a once in a number of years opportunity for us. So we go through line by line, very deep review, making sure anywhere where the onerous is low enough or manageable. And then on the new business, we're very actively monitoring the margins by line of business. We take action and make sure that the business is lined up properly.
Just on also a margin improvement, the optimism that I have. So I talk about overall margin improvement. So what we do is a target liability portfolio approach. So we look at various scenarios, and we ask underwriters: What do you expect to happen with the rates, for instance? And then we've got various scenarios, and quite frankly, underwriters were quite conservative. So the reality was actually not reflecting their conservatism. So the granular steering of portfolios, where you play, where not, that worked quite well so far.
So now I think as long as we stay in that discipline, I'm quite confident. Second is it depends on the line of business. So we always call it the insurance clock. So at what phase is each line of business in the cycle? And the composition of our portfolio seems to be favorable at the moment. We see some lines of businesses, like, for instance, FinPro, as we mentioned, you know, where we think we have a negative outlook. Yeah, so they are starting to be careful. And lastly, it's the expense ratio. Yeah, so managing expenses is absolutely our mantra. So in particular, in the areas where you don't have the large complex deals, so where you have smaller average premium per policy, there we need to significantly improve internally also. That's something we're working on.
So we're measuring it, and we're not only by adding A and H, accident and health.
Vinit, in the back?
Yes, hi. Thank you for taking my questions. Vinit from Mediobanca. So I'm spoiled for choice, but I'll try to pick up the top three. That's harder work than I thought. Just on the reserving, if I can just ask in another way, and Christian, I appreciate you said there's no schedule here that you're presenting. But I would say that if we go back to, say, COVID period, you're already probably changing some of the reserving views and how stable we could see some of the numbers. And so I'm just trying to understand that maybe we are not really in year zero now of this change in reserve, because if we are not in year zero, then maybe we don't have to wait too long for the benefits to come back as well.
I'm just going to try this in this way, but I think it's not year zero now. So even if you could comment a bit on that, that will be helpful. Second thing is just for Velina and maybe the reserving side again, but you mentioned, Velina, somewhere that your inflation outlook is probably different from the market. And it could suggest that maybe some of the forward curves which have been used by the liability side, that could be some upside also for discounting, also for, you know, also for the—I'm just looking for, has there been any deliberate out, then some of these numbers would be stronger? And lastly, for Andreas, the Corporate Solutions. Thanks for the walk on the combined ratio.
But if I start from another place, I'm just curious on that walk, which is, you know, the current number being 91. Unless there is something to, we don't know. Thanks.
Okay, Vinit, I start on the, on reserves. So, I think what you probably heard the last few years, I mean, this is... Just imagine a large organization going through the soft cycle, having negative surprises. So obviously, there's a reaction by everybody, to tighten things, to be a little bit more conservative. But this was all done within the philosophy that we had, the best estimate philosophy. But clearly, I would expect this to be pervasive, that everybody is a bit more cautious. The underwriters are more cautious, our clients are a bit more cautious, reserving actions are a bit more cautious. So, but I wouldn't, you know, mix this up with a little bit into a new type of philosophy, and which we will have to follow up, you know, over the next years.
There's no, or there's not a one-off, generally, as in cause, et cetera, to be a bit more conservative, but it's, as I said, within the rules we're currently under. On course. I'm sorry, Velina.
So maybe on your question on inflation. If you look at, I mean, the interest rate projections of currently pricing in, probably not so high based on what the market, out of consensus. We do, what I was trying to say on inflation is we're not declaring victory on it. Patient, until they see a sustained decline, and they will only see that-
The average 91% combined ratio since 2021 is far... I think that's an effect that you can see then. If you... That's something we see in all lines of businesses. There was a delay also in casualty. Claims count notifications actually began at the beginning of the year. But as you can expect, you know, towards the end of the year, it's picking up. Activity in the market, and that's how we get action to that number. We've got an overweight in property, and so that's 90-93% combined ratio, better than 93 is reasonable. It's still stretched, but there is still volatility in the market and uncertainty also.
Cameron?
Hi, it's Kamran Hossain from JP Morgan. Three questions. The first one was just on, I guess the, I think you're considering IFRS 17 and then cash flow. I guess IFRS 17 benefit's pretty dramatic to earnings, or, you know, definitely positive to earnings. Is there, you know, how do you think about cash flow in that context, particularly in the light of, you know, kind of capital return? To Vinit's question, if we assume that the assumptions that you're making right now are correct, should we assume that the cycle back to, to that maybe being returned to, you know, the, the income statement is similar to the length of the liability? And the third question is just on, the Life book. On GLP-1.
Thanks, Cameron. On the first one, I think, your question on cash flow is actually at a macro level, not an individual on cash flows. What I can say is, you know, we start the transition- and a very strong liquidity position. We believe that we will maintain that strong liquidity position, that we obviously will no longer be reporting after 2023 year end. An EVM set of numbers and IFRS, and the only other... Are one sort of where we stand with rating agencies. I think it's fair to say that we're pretty comfortable with where we... Coming out of IFRS are being recognized by a number of the rating agencies. So that L&H Swiss Re is also developing fine. So I don't think you should expect that we've got any imposed problems from IFRS compared to where we've been under U.S. GAAP on a going forward basis. And again, the overall level of the Group's capital is very, very strong.
The overall liquidity position is strong, and our ability to deploy the capital to new risks.
On the reserving side, this is a reserve philosophy change. It has to apply. It's gonna be across, so therefore, also, even though we clearly steer you not to expect it next year, because you know, it will take a bit of time, even on the Nat Cat side, to be sure, but it will, some of it will flow back quicker, some of it slower, and some of it over a very long period of time. So I don't think I can give an average. But, yes, probably. If you want an average duration, I don't know if it makes sense in the whole thing, but...
Since there's quite a bit of short tail line and then a bit of long tail line, and then it will be very long until you're in a complete equilibrium.
Paul?
The factors we take into account among a wide basket of things when we're looking at our mortality improvement assumptions. We've released some thought leadership management, but rather lifestyle changes. There is potential upside, so it's on... It's on our chart of potential sources of mortality improvement. To the general population. For us to see the benefit of them in our life and health portfolio, it needs to be accessible to the general population. So I think that puts it in context. Good question. Thanks.
Isa?
On the work that's been done on the life and health balance sheet, it sounds like you've gone out and looked at... How do I judge the fact that you've added prudence there? And I guess the overall sort of theme, question is: how do I ensure... P&C and life? Second question is, just understand with the reserving, how I think about the split between P&C Re and CorSo, and in terms of the philosophy of this uplift. And third question is, in terms of capital returns, when I think about it, interest rates are going to be less... Quality capital. Your SST sit well above 300% now. So what is the missing piece for us to go?
You want to take the first bit? Paul first.
On the EV versus IFRS... PO4 reserves. There's two or three other blocks, particularly the U.K, Canada, and some in Asia, where we've actually been able to release some of the locked-in GAAP margins. How do we ensure prudence? There's no guarantees, of course, but, you know, we've been through a very thorough process now over the course of this year in reconstructing our... I think, you know, you have to think in, you know, in our mindset, this is our chance to set up this balance sheet for success so that we can be confident we're going to deliver the income over time. That's what we want to do. So me and my management team are very focused on thinking about where are the risks, where do we need to strengthen, et cetera. I think spend a lot of time on that, and we're reasonably confident we've got to a point that we'll be quite of targets. I think it's fair to assume that we've gone through as a management team the entire set of targets that we've put out here. Not just the net income, but the segmental targets. Tried to get a parity, which means everybody to be stretched.
We want everyone to feel they need to absolutely, positively perform in 2024 achievable in the round, and, you know, our nature, the nature of our business may come and bother one or two of them during the course of the year. But for now, I have to say we're confident we can.
It's going to be a philosophy change for both, of course, and it's going to be added as IBNR because there's no concrete claim.
Earlier point. This is new on top of what we've been doing. I think when you look at page 61 of the course of results, a P&C Re, but generally speaking, it will apply across the board, all lines as a top off to what we expect to be correctly costed bus- was I think your question. I observe a couple of thoughts. One is, yes, the SST ratio is high. We think macroeconomic conditions have elevated it at the moment. And so, as one of the reasons why we're very comfortable with it being well above the upper end of this sort of long-term target of 200-250.
After 5 years of stable interest rates, you'll see a natural revaluation that will more normal than where they are today. You'll also see some sensitivity adjustments there. Secondly, in addition to macroeconomic conditions being a little unsettled, geopolitical situation. Over time, we might be more comfortable if everything settles down and we get to a much more specific situation at all. The second thing I'd say is, you know, we've not been able to increase that dividend for 3 years running. Give us a chance to get that part right. We've targets for the first time in, and I think 5 years. And so, let's deliver.
Let's adjust to what we say our stated capital goals are, and let's go into what is to IFRS 17 is a bigger step than my colleagues in the industry that have gone from one version of IFRS. We'll lock this down. We hit these targets, and we'll be able to have a different. Ultimately, the board's in charge.
Roland?
Yeah, hi. Roland Pfänder from ODDO BHF. Two questions from my side. First, try to move mortality more to into Europe or these two business units are growing more meaningfully and diversify the rest of the business. You are quite positive on recent growth and profitability. There are other players in the market on the further development. Thank you.
Thank you. So in terms of diversity, location of the life is a very mature and attractive market in the U.S., but it's better for us in aggregate if we have mortality around the world so that, you know, we can get up in the right spots at the moment with our clients to get access to that. We don't, of course, only think about mortality as the source of diversification. The other main one is health, right? And as mortality, and both of them are now at a scale where, you know, they're providing that for us. Longevity and FinSol, Financial Solutions are somewhere set to mortality. As you know, the markets are very concentrated, so there's mainly the U.K., a little bit in the Netherlands, and there may be some... They offset mortality.
We take the philosophy that we only take that risk, get a good return on capital deployed. And Financial Solutions, I think I would just position that at the moment as a diversified source of earnings that we will grow over the coming years. It will be a meaningful contributor, but we want to be a bit careful and take the right steps within our controlled risk appetite to do the right thing there. So I think that's one that we can talk about more over time.
So in the specialty business here, the reason why we like it, it's growing, it's profitable, and it's well diversified. So if we look a little bit below it, so we've got engineering. For example, we do like the engineering business. We like what's happening in our market share there. So it's a mix.
Thanks. Phil Ross, Exane BNP Paribas. First question on corporate solutions. You mentioned the non-typical part of the portfolio, slide 62. What does the build-out of the accident and health and credit and surety look like there that you're referring to from the 27 we see on the slide, if you can comment on that, please. This overlaps a little bit with the previous question, but you highlight the growing protection gap over the last decade. Can you expand on where you're seeing increased demand? Are there any particular trends? And then additionally, can you maybe give us a teaser or an example of where you see opportunities for new products as well that you mentioned on the page? Thank you.
Just on. A niche is a big space. But we're operating in the employer stop loss business in the U.S., and we can expect maybe, as far as the share is concerned, you could definitely see, this staying double-digit going into the 20 percentages, on credit and surety. We have already a good platform here, and, there we're quite, inquisitive around specific areas within credit and surety. You know, that we're not in the space. So here, I would expect this to be double-digit, yeah, and, and see how the opportunities look like. The organic plans that we have, for the next three years show them growing since.
So on the questions on life and health. First of all, on the protection gap, I think... Where there's economic growth, the need for insurance grows, and often, the pace of economic growth. And if you look at the outlook for economic growth around the world, the combination of that and the growing protection gap actually provides opportunity in many places. I think the one that's going to be a little bit slower going forward, that we're, our expectations on have come back a bit, is China, just in the light of their economic slowdown. So as you know, we have a good presence there, and a good proposition and a good team, but, our plan for that country in particular is a little bit lower, still growing.
But offsetting that, very interestingly, the Southeast Asia region is now growing extremely well. We're seeing that in a number of countries in that region, so we're well positioned to take advantage of that. One thing we've been able to do in the financial solutions space is trade duration, where we are on one side of the duration asset liability, and the client is on the other side. So we can use reinsurance structures to end up in a win-win, where there's a better match for duration overall. Really nice idea that's easy, relatively easy to do. And on the more traditional space? Otherwise get access. And our underwriting approach plays a huge role in that. So many years ago, we were one of the first to give access to people for life insurance who have HIV.
In the last year or two, we then expanded that to provide health products to people with HIV. So if it's well managed and well rated, that's possible. So I think it's just a good example of saying there's a sector of society that's not getting access. Now we help provide that access, and we continue to look to ways to grow that.
In the back?
Just one thing on the top-down approach to a more conservative reserving philosophy. Now, given the complexity of the programs that you're writing and the long-term nature of many of the client relationships, what's the sort of mechanism that is going to exist internally to make sure that ultimately you actually get the pricing right on these things? Because isn't there a danger... Sort of a rather technical question. In the choice of the net combined ratio for the P&C side, can you just as part of a sort of retrocession insurance result, or is that actually?
I'll try the first one, because this is actually nothing to do with the new reserving philosophy, or it shouldn't, because it's not gonna be transparent to the underwriter. You geocode the exposure of people, and you have pricing tools, and you get a certain distribution and therefore an expected loss. In other lines of business, it's more due to general trends, inflations. You look at the past claims of a client. It's just constantly trying to get better and better at it, and looking more forward and bringing in certain factors, loss ratio. That's how they're gonna, you know, see it in their system.
It's just that at the end, we at a group level, will add these, you know, fixed amounts to every line of business, which means that, if, if the line of business, develops as the underwriter had expected, this will come back out. But as we could see in the past, this has not always been the case, in particular, when they... To mitigate some of these negative developments, should something have been forgotten at the, at the point of, costing.
Flow back into the underlying businesses where they're associated with, we've got parts that are in the P&C, parts that are in the life and health. The specific geographies of where it shows up depends a little bit on the nature of what happened. So part of the income that comes from the cat bond portfolio that we operate effectively as a broker-dealer would show up in the investment result rather than in the results of the P&C reinsurance per se. On the technical side, the parts of the cat risk hedging on the P&C side would make their way into a-
Maybe see if someone else has a question in the room, and then I first take it to the phone line.
Hey, can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Perfect. So I have two questions, please. Coming back to the reserving situation, just the underwriting year development you're showing for US liability. Significantly, you pulled back on the large corporate business. So keen to understand the drivers there, and I guess a similar question relating to 2014, 2015, because I would have expected that to largely have seasoned fully at this stage. Returning to a question you had earlier on about the percentile, I can hear you that you're moving up towards the higher end of the percentile range, the 16th percentile. Can you just confirm if that has also moved up towards the higher end of that range, please? Additional question, sort of more broadly, I think just taking a step back on the casualty reserve additions overall.
Obviously, we've seen a significant adverse development, precautionary, call it what we want in 2023. Have you now drawn a line under this? Will we actually expect, you know, additional precautionary to come potentially in Q4 and into 2024?... It'd be helpful to have a comment on that. Next question-
Sorry, James.
It'll just help me understand.
All right.
That's one, isn't it?
Nice try. Nice try.
Where Urs had shown the development. Yeah, thanks. You're right, the right side of this, the most recent years might surprise some people, given the price increases that have occurred in the underlying P&C market, as well as what Urs has said is our reduction of a large corporate risk. What I can say is you should expect that the IBNRs have had a distribution across years, and we've not limited ourselves to everything which is the true problematic years of 2014 through 2019. And so some of it's probably come over the top.
I don't think we've got any experience that says the picks that had been in place are deficient, but I think what we're saying and what you heard Urs say is this entire line of business on U.S. liability is problematic, is not gonna get better, and better safe than sorry. And so if we added a little bit to these out years, so be it. If we don't need it, that'll be a lovely reality, but for the moment, I think this is a distribution which made sense to us. The same thing in 2014, you know, or 2015. Yes, these years have seasoned.
If you look on the left side of this, what you see is most of what we find there are in paid losses or even in case reserves. But we continue to see some places where a long, drawn out litigation as a need for being sure that we've got adequate reserves put in place, and that's what we've done in terms of making additions along the way. So I'm, you know, I don't see that we're. We've got any years which have not been addressed to a good level at this point of time. Your question of where we are in the ranges, I think what I did say is for the entire book, we're in the upper end of the range.
When we finish the year, we'll have the data in hand to be able to be a little more specific about line of business or other positions. So I wouldn't go so far to say any line of business is particularly over-reserved at 82% or sitting at hours we put in place last year, the majority of which still remains with us at the end of nine months. In addition to the other reserving actions that have been taken in P&C Re in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, put us in a pretty comfortable place. And we'll. Can I guarantee nothing will be added in 2024? No, I would never do that as a CFO, but I can guarantee, as I mentioned before, that at least what we see today, there's nothing that appears unmanageable for.
James, you want to go with the second question?
If that's okay, I'll try, I'll try and be a lot quicker this time. Thank you. It's more on the combined ratio bridge in P&C Re, but I'm keen to understand. So, the target was below 95 for 2023, and it's now going to below 87. You gave some a five-point indication for the move to IFRS 17, 6 or 7 points discounting effect, and then the reserving approach, which looks to me to be about 2 points. So if I funnel that through, I get kind of below 87. Clearly, margin kind of benefit. So I guess my question really is: What is that below 95 in 2024 on the kind of old basis, if you like, not on IFRS 17. Thank you.
Sure, James. And I probably wasn't clear when I explained the slide. Better than 95 is what we've got in place for 2023. But you know, Christian's observation that we're going to be adding a uncertainty reserve into the target. And so, you're exactly right. If you did the math as we've laid it out here, you get to a target that's materially below 87. When you add back in $500 million, which again, is a mix of CorSo and P&C Re, but you should assume that for P&C on a standalone basis, it's the vast majority of that, you should get yourself back into a number which says 87 is not a cakewalk. Again, it's achievable.
We expect to achieve it, but that's the missing link compared to the walk that we've just - when you started only at 95.
Thanks, James. Will, are you there? I am there. Thank you for taking the questions.
T han as this ad is currently approved. And it, it's vitally important just so we can understand when it, when it rolls in. I guess, is it on a broad range that likely to be closer to a quarter? The next one is, is whether you're able to say what P&C Re revenue growth is assumed for 2024 in the net income guidance.
Yeah. So Will, I understand it's frustrating. We're not trying to frustrate everyone out there, but I think as we introduce this uncertainty loading, it's probably premature to give specificity onto a potential release pattern associated with the loading. I think, as Christian said, we will be surprised if there's not redundancies that develop as a result of this. We think our actuaries, in part, and certainly recent quarters, have got a costing combined ratio that should be adequate. And so, if this uncertainty reserve is not needed, then yes, there will be the potential for redundancies and ultimately releases. But we're not at a moment in time where we're going to be speaking explicitly about those.
Year-end 2024, I hope to be able to say either this uncertainty was needed because, in fact, the world became uglier than we thought, or we start to see some of the short-term lines where you've got a positive impact. And I apologize, what was the second one for me, too?
On revenue growth for next year.
Well, revenue growth from P&C Re.
Yeah, I can address this. We're actually not guiding to a specific top-line target growth. As you might have heard us say in the past as well, the correlation between the bottom line profitability and the top line in our business is quite low. We're focused on the profitability as expressed by a better than 87% combined ratio.
Freya, are you there?
Thank you.
Thanks for taking my questions. Sorry to come back onto reserving again and move to more conservative best estimate. How do you or your actuaries assess this for new business going forward, and how do you reconcile it with an overall view of reserve strength on the historic years? Why wouldn't you want to move your existing reserves to a more conservative range of best estimate as well? Or as you allude to, are you happy to let this equilibrium arrive naturally over the next few years? Secondly, is the cautiousness on casualty being driven by the deterioration you're seeing in your historic underwriting years, or the inadequacy of pricing in the primary market, given that loss picks do seem to be improving in recent years? Does this not mean liability is a lot more profitable now?
Haven't rate, primary rate increases been enough of payback, or do you simply not trust these recent loss year picks? And thirdly, just quickly on social inflation, do these trends remain limited to the U.S., given that there are very similar sentiment shifts we're seeing in the U.K. and across Europe, and also increases in litigation?
Look, I think, Freya, you know, your question is absolutely legitimate. We think, and you've seen us squirm a little bit in recent quarters, that we actually have increased materially the reserving positions in many lines of business that needed additions made. And the good news is, we've actually had in our portfolio redundancies that we were able to release to fund most of that. What we disclosed in mid-year, plus what we've showed for an overall loss ratio of U.S. casualty, you know, would, I think, reasonably bring an outside analyst to a guess that you've probably added, you know, $1 billion to U.S. liability in nine months. And that wouldn't be something we would argue with.
But prior year development has only been -180 for P&C Re for the full nine months. And so we've had some offsets, but we've materially increased the in-force reserves. And so what we're doing with the uncertainty margins that we're adding on top of a going-forward basis, is just being sure that we're not facing a moment three years from now, where we have to do the same sort of catch up that we've actually executed against on the in-force.
And so that's the position, and if in fact, our costing has been improved and we've learned some lessons along the way, and we're appropriately paranoid about U.S. liability, as I think you've heard Urs suggest that we are, then this uncertainty reserve will not necessarily be needed, or at least not be needed for all lines of business. And then what we manage with, we'll see. On casualty, maybe I'll turn it to Urs but just to reiterate, we think there are people in the U.S. market who are able to make money at the primary side with casualty by being very selective in the risks they take and the positions which they've assumed in terms of relations with their primary clients.
World that can be profitable, partly because of the price increases we've seen over the last three years in the market, partly because of our willingness to work with those better underwriters. And that's what our objective will be on a going-forward basis, but as Urs said, with caution. I also think it's important to understand that even if prices for large corporate risks have increased dramatically, we're not absolutely convinced in that space that you're to a point where the risk is appropriately rewarded, and that's why we're down 70% in our exposures. And so we will not go back into this market tomorrow just because prices have managed to increase by whatever percentage points they've increased. I think we're...
Urs has thought this through, not just within the P&C Re team, but with everybody in the group, and we will be cautious as we go forward. But maybe you want to add also whether it's only US or other places.
Yeah, I'll address the last question that you have of are there elements of social inflation outside of the U.S.? And social inflation is an element of our business, and it can represent itself through social sentiment. There can be political pressures, regulatory changes, and so that's part of the overall business in insurance anyways. What is very distinct about the U.S. liability space is the U.S. legal system and the level of litigation activity here, and we don't see this at this level in other parts of the world. But, of course, there are certain selected instances where there could be some elements of this as well.
Great. We'll take one last question or two from Darius.
Good afternoon, thank you for taking my questions. I'm sorry to come back to the reserves, and I've got a question on combined ratio. So I'll start with the Combined Ratio. So if I think about the usual cycle management done by the insurers, companies aim to build reserves during the hard cycle, can release during the soft part of the cycle. Now, reinsurance rates are already stabilizing and could begin to deteriorate in the medium term. Since you will be strengthening rather than releasing from the reserves during this time, are you confident that you'll be able to maintain your 2024 Combined Ratio target in the medium term? That's the first question.
On the reserves, so you've been strengthening U.S. liability books for a while, and I think you said you added about $1 billion in 9 months this year. Since you've now committed to reserves strengthening more broadly, $500 million in 2024, that it will continue, will you provide disclosure to see how those additional buffers are developing in order for us to be confident it's not something that will be eaten by the loss development in line, such as US liability? Thank you.
Shall I try? Give you a break. Yeah, on reserves casualty. I mean, what should give you some comfort is that we disclose pretty detailed triangles every year. We've done this year, we will do next year, and I think there's a series of you who have done analysis based on that and came to conclusions which are, I think, pretty close to what our own actuaries come to, and that's not random. That's because we have basically the same information, and none of us has the, you know, the crystal ball where we see future losses, but what we see is the trends that we had.
I think the challenge this year is really that you have these, these deteriorations of the years 2014-2018 over the last few years, and in the midst of that, we had COVID. And in COVID, the courts closed, and so there was no activity for a while, then they reopened. The claims that came now are, you know, you know, if there's any compressed or any element of, that is much higher than the new norm, et cetera. So it's... none of us has information that will help us, you know, navigate that. We just have to make, you know, guesses. And so I would just say, we have our local reserving teams, we have our, reserving control team that's, directly reporting to the Chief Risk Officer.
We have the KPMG actual team, and then we have you, you guys out there, everybody looking at the same data and coming to similar conclusions. As none of us can read the future, but we always try, and I think everything I've heard from you, from KPMG, from everybody, is that our reserves are currently in the best estimate range. But there's unfortunately no guarantee any of us can give about the future.
And in terms of the specificity, we will publish again at the end of March with our annual report, these loss triangles, where you'll see it by line of business. I think one of the things people will be not surprised at, but it will be notable, is how much some of those triangles have moved year-on-year. I would argue that in the context of industry positioning, we will be robust, is my expectation.
Thank you, Darius. Thank you to all of you for asking questions, for joining, the Investor Day. Thank you for coming here, for those of you here in the room. With that, we wish you a nice weekend. Thanks again.
Thank you.