Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Most of you probably know me, but I'll introduce myself anyways. Paul Holden, Senior Financials Analyst here at CIBC, and it's my pleasure this morning to be hosting Rowan Saunders, President and CEO of Definity Financial. Rowan, thanks for taking the time and joining us.
Thank you, Paul. Great to be with you.
So, you know, just as a quick setup here, you know, Definity, I think, is coming out of a very strong Q4, operating earnings up 24% year-over-year, book value per share up 11% year-over-year, dividend increase of 16%. And then on top of that, you have financial capacity of, I think, it's close to CAD 1.3 billion available for deployment. And now as I'm just looking at my FactSet screen, stocks up 15% year to date, making it the best-performing name in my coverage universe. So very strong start to 2024 after a strong finish financially to 2023. So with that, let's get into some questions, and maybe starting with personal auto.
Continue to get lots of questions on the Alberta rate cap, and I think the key question there is kind of, to what extent does it actually stunt Definity's ability to grow personal auto premiums and achieve its combined ratio objectives? And I guess with the context of one province of multiple provinces, so you don't have those same limitations elsewhere.
Yeah, happy to provide some insight into that. I mean, I think I would say the first comment I'd make just generally about automobile is that we clearly feel like we passed the trough that we were in the last, you know, year or so. So things are looking up quite dramatically, you know, for that segment. And when you just step back for a moment, the environment is much more stable. You know, we've got still elevated levels of inflation, but they're pretty flat now for several quarters, and the frequency is pretty stable as well. The fourth quarter of 2023 was the first quarter that we actually crossed over our earned rate over the loss cost trends, so just happened in the quarter. So as we've kind of guided, that should be very favorable for us, you know, going forward.
So clearly feeling much more optimistic about auto line of business. I mean, your comment about the impact on Alberta and what it does on the total, a couple of things there I think are useful context. The first one would be that Alberta auto represents about 12% of our total automobile portfolio. We're very much centralized in terms of Ontario. So Ontario is about 70% of the total auto portfolio. That's our main market. So when you look at Alberta, I mean, 12%, you then break that down into our two go-to-market brands. There's the Definity Economical brand, which is about 7% of the 12, and 5% is Sonnet. And, you know, they're in different positions. So the one is a very mature portfolio. It's profitable.
While we're not delighted by any means about the trading environment there, you know, that business can continue, you know, on largely unaffected. It's the Sonnet portfolio. So that's about, you know, about 5% that we're obviously more anxious about. And I would obviously make the point that while it's just 5% of the total auto, you know, it's just proportional impact on the bottom-line contribution from auto. So what that really says is, I think, from a growth perspective, we can continue to grow our auto portfolio outside of the province. I mean, we're seeing good growth, particularly in Ontario but in other markets. And we see that both in the broker business but also in the Sonnet business. I mean, so Sonnet is contracting in Alberta, but it's growing in the other parts of the provinces around that.
In terms of margin expansion, there's definitely some headwind in the province because when you think about 85% of the drivers are capped at a 3.7% increase, which is less than a normalized loss cost trend, that's not good news. But it depends on your starting position, and obviously it's just 12% of the portfolio. Outside of that, all the earned rate continues to come in quite quickly. You may recall that our written rate, you know, is now running in the teens, like about 13.5% written rate. In the fourth quarter of last year, we had 8.5% of earned rate. That will now move into double digits as we go into 2024. So that dynamic is certainly going to drive an improvement in our automobile margins.
Okay. So you talked about Ontario being 70% of the auto book, so obviously the majority, the vast majority, is in Ontario. I mean, my impression is that rate adequacy in Ontario has improved significantly over the last 12 months, and that's true probably for Sonnet, but also your broker-based business as well. So I guess my question is, first, is that the right impression to make? Is that true? Has rate adequacy improved a lot? And then second part is, how hard are you leaning in in terms of gaining market share in Ontario?
Yeah, Paul, your assumption is correct. So the first part of your question is rate adequacy has improved, you know, significantly. I'd also remind you that we were one of the leaders in terms of leaning into rate changes. So that did have an impact on our new business growth and even a little impact on our retention as well, as we were earlier than most people in the marketplace. What we've seen is the entire marketplace now really in a pretty firm position, and all have taken significant growth. So I would say not just for us, but for the industry, everyone has made a move up in rate adequacy and significant rate changes. We've noticed that in the last, you know, number of months where our competitive position has materially, you know, strengthened.
That's positive for us, you know, going forward in terms of, you know, the outlook and revenue growth as well. When we think about auto, you know, what we've said is that there's a couple of ways we think about how much we want to grow this. The first is strategically. We've been trying to balance our portfolio. If you recall, ever since, you know, the IPO, we've been growing property in personal lines and commercial lines at a rate faster than automobile. That is by design. We just wanted to kind of have a more balanced portfolio. We made, particularly in personal insurance portfolio, great strides in doing that. The second part was about cycle management. When we went through a couple of tough years, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to add a lot of net new exposures to your portfolio.
We were much more focused on rate and written premium and quality of portfolio. Now, with respect to the Auto, Ontario Auto, we're in a much better position. So we really feel very pleased with our broker business, and that business is now moving into the next phase of expansion, which would continue to be, you know, solid rates and pricing, but also will now start to see unit-count growth feature into that. So it won't just be the rate, but it'll start to be unit-count growth as well. And, you know, we've got a good competitive position and a very scalable platform. So this is on the Vyne platform. And so for us, you know, to rapidly scale that up, if we chose to do so, we could do so quite easily. We're still managing, you know, a balanced approach.
We do want auto to grow more than it has, but still in line with the strategic mix of, you know, commercial lines growing at a faster rate.
Okay. I want to come back to Sonnet for a bit because that was sort of an important part of the story on IPO, hearing lots of questions with the Alberta rate cap, kind of what that means for Sonnet and the target of achieving break-even. I think, you know, on the conference call last week, you discussed now different avenues to drive profitability for Sonnet. Like, that target of achieving break-even may be achieved differently, but it's not broken, I think, is the key message there. So I think it's kind of worth digging into how you're pivoting the strategy around Sonnet and what those profit levers are for that business.
Yeah. And so from Sonnet's perspective, you know, what we've kind of said is we're targeting break-even by the end of this year, so Q4 this year, as we think about what's the run rate profitability of the business going forward. Clearly, that portfolio in Alberta is unhelpful to that cause. That being said, there's a number of actions we've taken in Alberta to minimize that, slowing down new business, turning off marketing machines, etc. But what we have done is continued to focus on rate adequacy, quality segmentation, and keep building the group and affinity business. And that's been a really good success story for Sonnet. So the two kind of focus areas have been, one, how do we enter and disrupt that group and affinity business? So, for example, targeting nurses and targeting teachers, targeting engineers.
And that's been really quite successful and a bit of a disruptive, excuse me, model for us. And then the other one is some corporate partnerships, such as the Tangerine deal. So that's, you know, helped a lot to move that in the right direction. Excuse the cough there.
No problem. We'll just give you a second. Yeah.
I've been doing a lot of talking the last couple of days.
No problem. Take your time, Rowan.
So for Sonnet, it's more of a redirection, looking at areas that, A, are more profitable, more higher quality. And then I think, you know, the genesis of your question came out of Alberta, and it's really about continuing to shrink that portfolio until that market significantly changes.
Okay. Good. So last question for me related to personal auto. And then this is one where we've probably everyone knows somebody that's had their car stolen or had their own car stolen from their driveway. There's been lots of media coverage on this topic. I think you've highlighted that theft now accounts for seven points of loss on the personal auto book and was, what, two points or less, I think, pre-pandemic, so increased 3x or more. But we're also starting to read more about government getting organized on this, police crackdowns, people getting smarter about protecting their vehicles. So, you know, the question for me is like, okay, we know it's been bad. We know the momentum has been negative.
But have we finally reached a point where maybe, given all the actions that have been taken, sort of that loss ratio has kind of peaked out and there's a higher probability that actually starts declining versus continuing to increase?
Well, I think on that point, a couple of points. One would be there has been significant rate alloCated to reflecting that trend. And so when we still see this elevated, you know, loss cost trend, theft has been a driver. If that starts to normalize and reduce, that will be good news because you'll have your earned rate flowing through with less thefts. I would say that, you know, there's a number of things we do as a company. We have tried to avoid the high theft vehicles with our underwriting and rating rules. We have surcharged them. We selectively place the most probable vehicles that are going to be stolen into the reinsurance pool as one, you know, tactical approach. We incentivize consumers. So we eduCate them. We help them fund recovery vehicles, recovery tools like Tag and immobilizers.
So there's a number of actions, but including the pricing. And more recently, the government does seem to be paying a lot of attention. There was, as you referred to, this national summit. And this is really, I think we refer to it as an all-of-society approach. We're obviously doing things around risk management and pricing from an insurance company, but the government does need to make changes to the border services. They do need to change the judicial system. Auto manufacturers do need to step up their game and make changes as well. And all of that does seem to be on the agenda. So I think there's a good chance we'll see some good progress.
That's good. That's good. It'll be better for us all, right, to see more progress on that file. So switching now maybe to personal property, where I think there's probably more questions on personal property, I think, than auto these days. And that's because of coming out of 2023, a period of very high Cat losses for Definity and for the industry. And of course, climate change is very topical and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future. So I think one of your stated objectives at IPO was to grow the proportion of personal property relative to personal auto. You referenced that a bit earlier in one of your answers. Has that appetite to grow in personal property changed at all as a result of rising Cat losses and climate risk?
Yeah, no, we're continuing with that strategy. We definitely think this is manageable. I think, you know, eyes wide open, there is a shift of change here. We see global Cat losses, you know, higher. There's now over $100 billion per annum in global, you know, Cat losses. We'd see the same in Canada. We've had both 2022 and 2023 with over CAD 3 billion of net Cat losses. So the frequency is up and the severity is up. I think the severity has to also do with asset prices. We've had inflation, you know, densifiCation. So that's just naturally, there's more exposures to insure. But all of this we consider. We definitely think last year was a bit of an outlier year. That being said, you know, you'll have seen in our guidance that we are expecting Cat losses to continue, you know, to grow.
So we've kind of said that as opposed to 4% of our total revenues we budget for these Cat losses, we've moved that up to 4.5%. That doesn't change our profitability in any way because it's fully funded. So really, the attritional loss ratio gets better and the Cat loss ratio reflects slightly higher Cat losses. I mean, what it means for us is that you've just really got to be best in class in terms of managing and assessing and pricing this risk. So there's a number of things that we do from appropriate reinsurance structures, which have served us well. And, you know, we've got a Net Cat Agg program as well, pricing, segmentation, some product changes, and really understanding your accumulation. So we've done some work recently.
You saw that impact in the Q4, where some of the higher exposed zones, we wanted to be under our natural market share weight. And so we've reduced some of those exposures in that area as well. But the net of it is we like property. We're very good at managing the claims, pricing the business. We think our platform is very scalable. We think there's lots of growth for us, you know, ahead. So that'll still become one of our stronger, you know, growth lines of business.
Okay. I mean, you touched on this a little bit already with your answer, but, you know, with the change in the Cat loss expectation, right, as you said, from four points to four and a half, it doesn't sound like your expectations around overall property profitability or margins have changed at all. So, you know, maybe digging into that a little bit more, what kind of actions overall, like rates, avoiding certain losses, I think it's worth diving into that to sort of talk about how you're going to defend margins in that business, or maybe even there's an opportunity to improve margins in that business over time.
So one of the things that we've been doing is that, you know, we've been making sure that the policy has an indexation clause in it. So every year, the values go up. So when there's inflation trends, we get that covered. We've really focused a lot on data and sophistiCated modeling to identify where these Cat losses are going to occur and then make sure we're prepared for that. So one of the things you can imagine is they tend to be very localized. And when you do that, you have post-event inflation, not enough suppliers, not enough contractors, and so the costs kind of go up. So being prepared for that, having pre-arranged deals with your supply chain, having advanced Cat management teams all help on the margin. And this is really a relative game to your peers.
I think what you've seen for about a decade now is very strong pricing, and every year, there seems to be enough rate to cover the loss cost trend. You're going to have an outlier year like last year where, I mean, we had 10 events in the third quarter, which just really was kind of unmodeled. But that being said, the pricing, the segmentation, coverage terms can cover that. And so one of the examples, when we think about even geographic movements, there's some provinces we prefer to be in the north as opposed to the south. We change the product. So if you're in a hail-Cat exposed zone, we may offer replacement costs for your roof as opposed to full replacement costs. We put sewer backup deductibles in.
Then the other thing that I think really helps, you know, us is once you've got the analysis done, is how do you get this underwriting segmentation to the front lines? And this is where the modern technology helps a lot. So the example that I very often use is that while the industry may have a flood map zone, I think what's important for us is not that you necessarily are 50 yards from a river. If you're 100 yards elevated up a hill, that type of data really helps you become more sophistiCated and outsegment. You can avoid the claims and you can write, you know, kind of more business. And so that's what we've done. We've really invested heavily in our advanced analytics practices, but also been able to transport that into the front of the business.
I think that's why we have the confidence we can keep growing this line of business and make our returns. We definitely think that, you know, this is a line of business that we can comfortably continue to deliver in the mid-90s, combined ratio on.
Okay. Okay. Can you give us a sense of what's the current pace of rate increases in personal property, roughly, today?
Yeah, I mean, we've got like double-digit increases going through. So if you think about, you've got a few points, several points of indexation, as well as about eight points of rate. And if you put those together, you get into low double-digit price changes to consumers.
And then, you know, the big picture question we hear frequently on this one is, you know, is there a point of, I don't know if you call it saturation, but a point where there's, you know, elasticity of demand starts to break down, right? At what point does the consumer push back on all of these rate increases? Is there potential for government involvement in one way or another? How do you think about that sort of risk over time, the capacity of consumers to absorb these rate increases?
Yeah, it's interesting. And, you know, we do pay attention to this. And when consumers are in a bit more of a difficult financial position, like we've had through inflation, you know, people are more sensitive and they do shop around, you know, more. It does feel to us that people are more sensitive to the price of their automobile insurance than they are to their homes or to their businesses. You need to have insurance if you're going to, you know, get a mortgage on your home. Your home price has also probably gone up significantly over the last decade. And so the wealth effect, you know, is helpful to consumers. So we don't get that level of price sensitivity, but we do pay attention to the fact that it is, you know, a fairly large bill to consumers.
What we've also seen in some product lines where there is, you know, big exposure and certainly higher reinsurance costs is a product change. And one of the most obvious ones we've seen is earthquake, where there are pretty sizable deductibles, very unlikely to happen. But when it does happen, the consumer does bear a pretty substantial deductible. I don't think we're there yet. But, you know, if we get a continuation of this trend for a number of years, you may have to find some form of product changes and coverage limitations that have to apply. So there's still a lot of levers before you form any form of government intervention. And there is no, at this stage, way for government to get involved. It's a completely unregulated line of business, just like commercial insurances.
Okay. Okay. Great. And then the other question I want to ask on this topic is, because things are changing rapidly, you talked about some of the different tools you're using. I'm assuming not all competitors are reacting the same way. So interesting to get a sense of how those competitive dynamics are changing as a result of higher Cat losses and climate change. And is that leading to some opportunities for Definity over time?
Yep. I think the answer is that we are already seeing some opportunities emerging, and I think there'll be more ahead. You know, in insurance, if you don't have size, scale, and that level of sophistiCation, there's the concept of anti-selection. That, you know, may be happening to some insurance companies. That's why you see quite a divergence in performance between the top decile and the bottom decile in terms of combined ratios and loss ratios. When I think about the activity that we're putting in and the level of sophistiCation, it's clear to us that some of the risks we're avoiding are going somewhere. I think that'll have a drain on somebody else's portfolio. I think the other part that's also quite relevant is what we've seen around the world is that global reinsurers have wanted to play higher up.
They've wanted to move out of the working layers. And so they define that as, you know, an expected event or one in 10-year event. What they're really saying is that we don't want to sell coverage into that layer. And therefore, you need to take that onto your net account. And so, as we've increased our net, mostly because we're a public and a bigger company, other organizations, you know, have had to do the same. And as such, if you're not really good at managing pricing and assessing that risk, that is going to be a drain on you. That actually may cause some people to say, you know, this is one of the reasons where smaller players are just going to have a harder time staying relevant and being profitable in the years ahead. That could be conducive to potential future M&A.
Good. I want to remind people, because we do want to get your active participation, if you have a question, please feel free to put it in the chat. I think I will see the questions on the chat, so don't be shy. Or if you want, send me an email and I'll address your question to Rowan. So please keep that in mind. We do have some time left, and I have lots of questions, but if you have one, please do ask. Okay, so let's move on to commercial lines yet, which we haven't talked about yet. And maybe just to tie it in, I mean, we seem to be focused a lot on personal property and the Cat and climate change risk there. But obviously, there is some property risk in commercial as well.
How similar or different is writing that business and sort of the changes you're making in personal versus commercial property? Maybe also give us a sense of just how big is your commercial property exposure as well?
Yeah. So the themes are similar in terms of climate change and inflation that's been affecting both property lines, but there are a few differences. What we see in commercial insurance is that the exposure to floods and to wildfires and to hail-type, windstorm-type events, these secondary perils, is definitely lower than it is to the personal property. And so if you think about the last number of years and you dissect the level of nat Cats, it's mostly impacted the personal property portfolio more than the commercial property. There's a number of reasons for that. It could be construction types, but even loCation types. And so one example, if you think back to last summer, a pretty significant natural Cat event for us was the Kelowna wildfires, where we had several total-loss homes.
That's because people like building homes in beautiful places on a lake up against a forest. If you think about a commercial business, very frequently, you would see, as part of their risk management, there wouldn't be trees right up to the fence lines of the property. I mean, they would have clear-cut that. Now, optics are not as important for a commercial business, and it's mostly about preserving the operating plant. And so that's an example where commercial lines do have lower Cat losses. It doesn't mean that they're completely avoided from those losses, but as a percentage, they are lower.
When we think about our commercial portfolio, property is a significant part of it, but we're more diversified than we would be in the personal lines construction, because you've got commercial property, and then you've got general liability, and then you've got a whole bunch of specialty products lines, as well as a commercial automobile. But it's a significant part of our commercial business. It would be the largest single component of all the product coverages.
Okay. Okay. Well, that kind of leads me into the next question, because the results in commercial have been excellent, right? You've been growing premiums, double digits per your target. Combined ratio results have been excellent, probably even better than target, I would say. And so my question is, has this success been broad-based, or are there specific lines of business within commercial that have particularly excelled and beaten sort of your expectations when you completed the IPO?
Yeah, I mean, I'm delighted with our commercial business. You know, I think that the team has done a fantastic job, and we've created a tremendous amount of value there. As you point out, there have been a number of years where we've had significant double-digit growth, 15% last year, and very strong combined ratios as well. What's encouraging to me is that the market is certainly conducive for this. So we're still in an environment where we're able to charge rates in excess of our technical price. So, in fact, we're building margin as opposed to eating into margin. So I think the outlook looks good for us there. Definitely, the composition is broad, and I think that's encouraging. The two main points I would make would be, one, there's broad-based growth. When we think about our commercial business, essentially, there are three main segments.
There's the SME segment, there's the middle market segment, and then there's specialty. The areas that have grown fastest for us are the small business and the specialty. Now, in the small business, that's a good market to grow in for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's quite concentrated, so the top five carriers really control a lot of that business, and therefore, it's more disciplined than many other product lines. And where we've been winning with is our Vyne platform. So this is a technological advantage that we've brought to the marketplace. It's very easy for brokers to quote and bind. In fact, 50% of new businesses self-quote, self-bind. And that does a couple of things. It makes it for a very easy broker value proposition, and it allows us to redirect our underlying talent into other areas. So that's been a very strong growth area.
The other one has been in specialty. And if you think about the history of Definity or Economical before that, it was very much just a small, middle enterprise-type appetite. What we've done is we've built and acquired teams of talent that have brought specialty capabilities to us. Brokers are very supportive, and they love the one-stop shopping. There's not that many companies in Canada that really have a full suite of offerings, from small business to middle market, various product lines, including fleets to specialty. And so that has really helped us with our broker value proposition. And the other point I would make is that our starting point on specialty was really quite modest. And as such, there's lots of room for upside. So I think that's a good growth. There's still lots of potential ahead of us.
The second main theme that I would say is that the conditions have been pretty good to grow. Roughly, 60/40 is our split between rate and exposure growth. We're gaining share, without a doubt, in the marketplace. But the biggest component of our growth is actually pure rate. And so I think that gives us a lot of confidence in the forward-looking profitability of that line of business.
Good. I'm starting to get some questions coming in from the audience, but I want to ask a couple of follow-ups on the commercial first. I guess you mentioned market share gains are accounting for roughly 40% of the growth. That's still a significant amount in a fairly competitive market. So how are those market shares being achieved, I guess, is the first follow-on question, and I'll ask the other one after.
Yeah. I think part of it is brokers are selecting very carefully who their future partners are. I think Definity is one of the markets that they really like. Brokers have a limiting factor. They don't want to be overdependent on any one insurance company, and they want to make sure they're staying with people that are there for the long run. That stability of underlying capacity is important. What we've seen is our strategic brokers disproportionately growing with us. These are the largest, most sophistiCated brokers. They typically have given lots of volume to our business. I think part of it has to do also, again, with the proposition we have, the trading relationships, and also a broad product suite. We have brought new products to the marketplace. They have great propositions. We've got great claim service.
And so that gives me a lot of comfort that we're winning. We also watch very carefully things like our quote-to-bind ratio to make sure we're not overly competitive in certain segments, and we're comfortable with that. I think the other part that I would make as well is that we've done a very good job on our retention. And given my experience in overseeing commercial businesses, I've never seen our retention rate as high as it has been for the last couple of years. And that's encouraging because there is a balance you need to be careful to manage in terms of your growth, new business as a percentage of your retention. Because, as you would expect, your new business has less margin than your renewal portfolio.
And so you've got to be aware that you don't want to write all new business with a churn in your existing portfolio. And the fact that that is so high is a great advantage for us, not just from helping revenue, but also in terms of maintaining margin in the portfolio.
Yeah, that's interesting. The retention rate is obviously a very important dynamic. So the second question I want to ask you is, I think you mentioned 60% of the growth is coming from rate increases. A frequent question I hear when I ask about is, how long can this hard market cycle continue? It feels like it's already extended longer than the typical cycle. What could change to maybe make that hard market cycle become just firmer, hopefully not a soft cycle, but sort of slow down that pace of rate increases? What's your view on this?
As recently as last week, talking to the teams, we're not seeing anything material in terms of the market conditions. It's still firm, and it's a good environment. We're able to keep our retention rates up. We've seen that in the last number of months, and getting the prices we're putting into the marketplace winning. So I like that view. I think that, generally, the market is anticipating there's going to continue to be NatC at activity. We still have lingering inflation. While it's not going up as much as it was, it's still quite elevated from where it was a couple of years ago, and people want to keep covering that cost. So there has been that level of discipline. And then, as I said, in certain areas, like small commercial, it's quite a consolidated market, and many of those insurers are also multi-line carriers.
And when you don't have the margins in all of your portfolio, i.e., the auto is not contributing as much as you would traditionally like it to be, I think that leads you to be a little bit more disciplined on some parts of your commercial line. So all of these things seem to be pretty disciplined going forward there. I mean, your question would be, what would typically change it? We're not seeing anything that would change it materially. I think that, on the margin, there are a couple of pockets that you will see some tapering and pools of more competition. Very often, that's in specialty or program-type business. And it's not to say that we haven't lost any accounts.
In the fourth quarter, we actually lost a pretty sizable fleet, which the team was very disciplined and said, "Look, at that price, we're not prepared to renew it and we'll let it go." So I'm happy to see that discipline in the business, but that's really on the margin. The other one would be, of course, we make underwriting income, and we make investment income in the industry. And whilst investment income yields have gone up quite nicely, they're still on an absolute return basis, not at the level that you could afford to run a combined ratio much below mid-90s. And so I think that outlook is important. And most people are thinking that the rates will be where they are or down a bit in the next couple of years. And so that's not at all a driver for any more competition on the underwriting pricing equation.
Okay. So, again, a few questions from the audience. So thanks for these. And hopefully, by reading these off, we'll encourage even more. So the first one is with respect to distribution. There's a couple of different components to it. I guess the first is sort of what proportion of Definity's business is now going through brokers versus direct, and that's inclusive of your own distribution business, the brokers you've been buying up in the last couple of years. And then the second part of the question, which is an interesting one, is, how do you mitigate the issue of independence in terms of your distribution through now, I'm not going to say wholly owned, because they're not wholly owned, but you're partly owned and majority owned brokers?
Yeah. So at the macro level, we're still very much an intermediated business. 90% of all of our business comes through brokers, whether it's ones we have investment in or completely independent. And really, our direct-to-consumer business is a little under 10% of the total. So that's the first kind of, I guess, lens. In terms of the business that we've built, and if you think about a little over a year ago, while we had a relationship with McDougall, we didn't have an owned vertical integration strategy into the broker distribution channel. So very quickly, we have built a billion-dollar business. We originally thought about that when we acquired McDougall's in the end of 2022. It was a CAD 500 million business. We set a target for it to be double again to CAD 1 billion. We thought that would take more like five years.
We did it much faster than we thought. And that's why, on the call, I kind of mentioned that we see, in the next few years, another CAD 500 million coming up. So that business is important to us for a number of reasons. Firstly, we get good, high-margin, repeatable, complementary broker distribution income, but also, we get underwriting premiums from that as well. We don't disclose and break down exactly how much of that business we write ourselves and how much is in the market, but you would imagine that they're a pretty significant and strategic partner for us. And so we would be one of their top few insurance companies. And that leads us into the question of, how do you maintain that independence? Different strategies are in the marketplace.
The one we feel quite passionate about is that we bought this to be an entrepreneurial, independent channel, and so we run it like that. We want it to maintain its independence, its agility, ownership in the game. So you would have noticed that when we acquire these brokers, roughly 25% is the equity that the distribution owners maintain through their organization. So they have skin in the game. They treat it like it's their own business, helps with perpetuation planning, etc. So I think that's one of the differentiating features of our proposition. And as such, because there's a strong minority interest in the business, they do the right thing for the business. We, again, encourage that. So what we don't do is we don't facilitate them reducing their levels of markets and transferring business to us. We win business. Now, there's a number of things that we do.
We're strategically aligned with them. We give them great claim service. We can create some bespoke products. So there's a number of mutually beneficial actions we take in place that help their customers. And if we help their customers, over time, we will earn more of that business. And so that's the way we really think about it. And so I've always said the definition of independence to us is more that what happens at the front counter than the financial ownership structure of the business.
Okay, very good. I guess going back to a question from me that kind of tacks onto this is maybe talking a little bit more about your future plans regarding further broker consolidation and acquisitions.
Yeah. What I really wanted to do was to get a sizable platform because, if you believe in this strategy, you want a high-performing business. We were, quite frankly, very fortunate that we had this longstanding relationship with McDougall's. We then acquired McFarlan Rowlands, which was a second, let's call it, anchor broker in Ontario. And then we acquired Drayden in the West. It was important to get those big anchor brokers in place because, from there, you can do these programmatic or bolt-on acquisitions. And I think that's really the plan going forward. If we find another high-quality, scarce opportunity, like we did in the last few deals, we would absolutely lean into that. But there really is not a big pool of that size and scale and professionalized brokers remaining in the marketplace.
More likely, this is about those brokers doing a roll-up, a more programmatic approach. There's a very strong pipeline that they've got. People love the story. They love the independence. They love the fact they can continue to participate in the wealth creation by minority interests. And so that's most likely the way that that's going to continue for us. And we see lots of opportunity. As I mentioned, I think that the next kind of milestone we have is taking it from CAD 1 billion to CAD 1.5 billion. And I think that trend will then continue for some years to come.
Okay. So a question I've gotten in the past in terms of that strategy is just given brokers tend to trade at higher multiples than necessarily manufacturing business. And so there's this concern that maybe it's ROE dilutive. I don't believe that's the case, but I think it's a good question to put to you just so you can explain to people why the ROI and ROE math do work.
Yeah. Look, and I think a lot of this goes to the quality of the assets that we're buying, right? And so when we look at these brokers, I think that, for sure, there's a premium required for the quality and the scarcity that they have. But these are businesses with very high margins, good organic growth rates. And so that justifies a very strong multiple itself. I think our solution here is also really more than just top price. In fact, in each one of these, we've done, not once have we been the high bidder. And I think that's important because these assets don't always trade on just what's the top price in the marketplace. They very much think about, how is this good for my partners, my employees, and my customers?
If I'm going to keep equity in this business, what's the future look like, wealth creation of that equity that I have? So I think those are a couple of the points for us. We are not deploying capital that doesn't help us on our journey to a double-digit ROE. So everything we do has to be accretive. Now, I take the point that if you're coming out of fixed income, anything is quite easy to make it accretive, but we talk about it contributive to our operating ROE targets. So very much, they are. And then I think the other component that is a little unique to us as an insurance company acquirer is not only do we get distribution income, the EBITDA from the business, but we do get access to this pool of high-quality insurance premiums.
As we become and continue to be a leading underwriter, we also get future underwriting income. You're getting underwriting contribution as well as distribution income. I can tell you that it's a profitable strategy for us and our investors.
Okay, good, good. Another audience question, and this one is with respect to the investment portfolio. I think they're just looking around for more details on the proportion of the investment portfolio in equities and want to get a better sense of sort of your strategy around investing in common equity. And maybe I'll throw in the preferred equity there, just starting with what percentage of the investment book is it? Is there capacity to own more, given sort of regulatory requirements on equities, and just broadly kind of what the strategy is with that equity sleeve?
Yeah. Look, I think the way we think about that would be there's a wide variety of flexibility if we chose to move that around. Of course, you've got to consider a couple of things, including the capital requirements. And so there's more of a capital burden if you're acquiring fixed, sorry, equities as opposed to fixed income. So we think about those. We think about tax returns, which some products are more efficient, dividends. We have drifted up a little bit in terms of our equity kind of weightings from where we are. We were in the 12-ish% kind of, and then you add some dividends to that. We're probably as high as we really plan to be. We're really a fixed-income shop. And so I think that investors should not expect to see a dramatic or material shift in terms of that portfolio construction.
I think that while we've got a very capable investment management team, our core competency is really not to try to outsmart and make greater-than-market returns on investment. It's really about deploying our risk in the insurance risk. That's where we're experts. That's what our core capability is. And so you'll always see us really with a pretty conservative, prudent, high-quality investment portfolio. Of course, there's some opportunities to do better on the yield. I mean, we're now kind of approaching about 4% and clearly benefited from the change in yields in the fixed-income portfolio. We do a little bit of private debt, but it's really very kind of small. Our teams haven't felt that there's an appropriate risk-reward trade there.
So while we think about all these things, I think the way to think about it is, clearly, we will continue to optimize our investment portfolio, but it's still going to be pretty prudent and look quite similar to the way it looks today.
Okay. I'm going to layer on a question there because there has been a little bit of a change, and that changes with respect to dividend taxability. So does that influence? I know you just said you don't expect it to change, but does that influence at all sort of the portfolio allocation decision-making, given now you have to pay, or we assume you're going to have to pay taxes on common dividends?
Yeah, we assume so on the common, and I think it hasn't actually fully taken effect yet. When we looked at that, a couple of points, when it first came out, we thought, "Look, this is about CAD 8 million impact for the year for us." When we think about what the impact is on common versus prefs, it's about CAD 5 million on prefs and CAD 3 million on common. So really, the news on the common is very favorable to us. So it's, again, not very material for us. We could potentially pay CAD 3 million in additional taxes. But absolutely, it's one of the points of consideration for the teams. I mean, for an organization such as ourselves, it does mean holding common equity. Canadian common equity is less favorable than it was prior to this. So it's a point of consideration.
But again, I go back to my previous comment, unlikely to make material changes in our portfolio composition.
Okay. Again, audience question. This one's with respect to the restructuring. So just a reminder for the audience, Definity did announce CAD 11 million of restructuring charges with the Q4, I think mostly split between real estate and headcount, but we're going to let you fill that in. The question is, I guess, really twofold. Are you through this, I guess, i.e., is there potentially more to come? And then, two, what are the long-term expected savings associated with the restructuring?
Yeah. So maybe kind of taking that almost in reverse order, I would say that we're really through this. We're not expecting any other meaningful restructuring charges to come through 2024 and ahead. So I think that's the main point. This was more taken out of the fact that we're changing styles of work. I mean, hybrid is the future. We no longer need quite the same level of footprint we had before. The types of offices and the structure to make it very efficient and effective has to have some modernization in our buildings. And so that's where we took the opportunity to do. So it's more driven by that. Of course, there's some headcount impliCations and some productivity gains there. But we're a growing business, and so it's not that we're looking to have big restructuring charges going forward.
I think for us, there's more opportunity in operational leverage as we continue to grow our revenue at a rate faster than our expense growth. So I think that's the way we improve the operating ratio and get more operating leverage in the business going forward than restructuring charges. There's nothing anticipated going forward. It would help us. Obviously, you could see the impact in the MD&A of what it was. But ultimately, over time, these are the lease payments are behind us now, but those are long-term leases. So it'll be kind of noticeable, but not that material in any one year.
Good. Okay. Well, we have maybe 10 minutes left. And again, thanks for the questions that have been asked, and I'll encourage more for anyone that does have more. One topic we haven't talked about yet, Rowan, really is future capital deployment. Again, part of my opening remarks, you have, I think, nearly CAD 1.3 billion of financial capacity. I know you've mentioned organic growth is the priority, which is always a good message because that tends to be the highest ROE growth and, in some cases, the highest quality. So that's good. But when I look at your sort of organic capital generation, the ROE you're generating, it looks to me like you can probably fund most of that organic growth from organic capital generation. Is that fair at this point, given your ROE expectations? Okay.
Yeah. No, if you think about our kind of targeted broadly 10% growth rate, mid-90s combined ratio, we're generating enough internal capital to keep funding the business. And so really, I think the way to think about it is that 1.3%, the way we get to utilize that in our ideal way, optimal way, is through inorganic activity.
Okay. Let's talk about that inorganic growth potential. Just remind us of what your acquisition priorities look like today, and how would you characterize the M&A landscape in terms of the capacity to actually deploy that capital?
Yeah. I think I would go back to one of the previous topics we just had, which is we have deployed about CAD 700 million in building a broker distribution platform. So I think you can see from that that there's certainly an unwillingness and an ability internally to wisely and accretively deploy our capital. We're not the type of team that just sits on that. With respect to insurance carrier M&A, there's a couple of things there. One is the market. We think the thesis is that more and more opportunities will come ahead. These are really opportunistic. If you think about the long-term trend in Canadian P&C, a couple of points of market share typically trades hands every year. In the last couple of years, there's really been a drought of acquisitions. There hasn't been any activity.
And so our thesis is that is going to return over the next couple of years. It's very difficult to, as you can imagine, be precise about the timing. I mean, they are buyers, but they have to be sellers to get a deal. But some of the drivers that we talked about over the last 45, 50 minutes, I think, are conducive. I mean, in personal lines, you do need scale, and you need data, and you need modern technology systems, and you need broker relevance. All of these types of things are going to be important. In commercial lines, if you're flatlining your growth because you don't have a one-stop proposition for brokers, if you don't have the best talent, if you can't buy effective reinsurance programs, I mean, this puts a lot of pressure on you.
So all of these items, I think, are pushing us forward to more M&A activity ahead. What we've been very focused on is making sure that, number one, we've been building this excess capital, and now we're a CBCA company. We can use some leverage. That certainly helps us move to the CAD 1.3 billion. But the other thing is getting ourselves operationally ready for this. So that we've built this business where we can grow nicely organically, we can retain our customers, we can run better loss ratios, we can run better expense ratios, and we've got a scalable platform. The obvious example that I like to use is Vyne. I mean, Vyne is built for a much bigger business. If we acquired a larger personal lines business, we could drop that onto Vyne.
Yes, you would need some extra people in the claims team to pick up the associated claims, but you wouldn't need any more underwriting pricing and servicing people. So significant synergies would be there for us. What I could say is that we're active. We've got a sophistiCated corporate development team. It's taking up some management time. Sometimes, when you're in an environment like this, something could happen in a couple of quarters. Sometimes it could take a few years. So that's one of these ones where it's difficult to be more precise other than to say, "Our priority is on fulfilling our stated aspiration of being a top five insurance carrier." We do think that we've made good progress organically. That'll continue, but it will take a meaningful acquisition to get us into a top five ranking.
Okay. Good. So look, I think we've covered a lot of ground there. And again, I think Definity has shown very strong execution and results since IPO. So congrats on that. And maybe, just Rowan, I'll give you an opportunity, any kind of closing thoughts. How would you summarize this here in terms of what investors should expect from the business over the next one to three years?
Well, look, I hope that our investors see that we've delivered what we said we would do since IPO. I think we are starting to build a track record of a public company of delivery. We wanted to continue strong growth, and I think that strong growth is going to continue. We wanted to keep shaping our portfolio and particularly building our commercial lines business out. I think that's going to continue. I feel much better now that we've diversified our earnings. When you think about the contribution that comes from distribution, which was brand new, and now better net investment income. So if you deconstruct those ROE points, less is now dependent on slightly more volatile underwriting components. So I feel that looks pretty good. You've seen us move our dividend up 16%.
That's clearly a sign of the confidence in our earnings growth over the next number of years. I think that we feel we've got a very strong engaged team. We know that the broker's support is excellent for us, and the macro environment is still very conducive for a P&C insurance company. It feels to us like we're entering 2024 in a stronger position and with less headwinds than we entered 2023. We're excited about the year ahead.
Great. Rowan, thanks for the time. Thanks for all your answers. And thanks to the audience for joining us as well. So have a great day, everyone.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you.