All right, everyone. We're going to start the investor day today. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Geoff Kw an, Deputy Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Investor Relations Officer at Intact Financial. On behalf of the entire team here, we thank you for taking time to be here with us today. We've got a lot has happened since our last investor day in 2022, but more importantly, we've got a great lineup of speakers to articulate how we intend to meet our objectives over the medium to long term. In terms of some housekeeping items before we start, firstly, the slides for today's sessions will be posted to our website at the conclusion of the presentation. If you go to the Investor Relations Events and Presentations section, you'll be able to access the slides there.
For those of you that are in the room, you can see there are little signs there. You can scan the QR code, or you can type in the web link, and you will be able to get a live access version of the slides that we will be using today. On slides two and three, going through the typical forward-looking statements, as well as the disclaimers, please note that these will apply to the sessions that we have today. We have a comprehensive agenda for you today. There will be two opportunities for Q&A. For those of you that are on our webcast, feel free to submit a question, type it in the box at the bottom of your screen, and we will look to get those asked. Finally, after today's events, please join us in the foyer for lunch.
You'll be able to interact with the speakers that we've got today, as well as other executives from the company that are in attendance. As well, we also have our AI demo booth in the back gallery over there. We'll reopen. It is a great opportunity for you to interact with people from our data team, as well as business leaders from those lines to understand how we're using AI to incorporate into our business. With that, we're going to kick off the sessions. It is my great pleasure to introduce our CEO, Charles Brindamour, as well as our CFO, Ken Anderson, who will kick off today's presentations. Ken, I turn it over to you.
Thanks. Thanks a lot, Geoff. Thanks, Geoff. Those disclaimers and forward-looking statements are really important. They're a little bit boring, but they are important. The good news is the boredom stops now, folks. We have a great lineup for you today. You'll get to see some recognizable faces, and you'll also get to see some new faces as we expose you to what we call at Intact our bench strength. If we go back to 2022 and our last investor day, there we focused on one of our key financial objectives, ROE outperformance. Today, we'll zoom in on the other key element of our financial objectives, and that is growing net operating income per share at a 10% rate compounding through the end of the decade and beyond. We'll talk about growth, we'll talk about margin expansion, and we'll talk about capital deployment.
As those disclaimers will also say, past performance is no indication of future performance. But as any actuary will tell you, and especially an Intact actuary, past performance is a good place to start. We're pretty proud of our track record, and we think it lends credibility to the road ahead. If we take a look, net operating income per share over the last decade has compounded at a 10% rate. At Intact, when we talk growth, we talk earnings growth and earnings power. Net operating income per share, sorry, on ROE, the other key pillar, 650 basis points of ROE outperformance over the last decade. Over the last decade, 15% ROE. Over the last five years, it's closer to 17%. Outperformance is the mindset. We come to work trying to get better every day. We've exported the mindset now as well.
2024 ROE in our three main geographies, Canada, U.S., U.K., all running mid-teens and outperforming by 500 basis points in each market. One more thing on ROE. Yes, outperformance, but when we stack ourselves up against the top 30 global P&C insurers, what we see is that mid-teens ROE, but we also see low volatility, the upper right quadrant. It is not by chance. When you look at the combination of investment and distribution income, you see now that that is generating north of nine, close to 10 points of ROE before we start the business of underwriting. Also worth noting here that all three elements, underwriting, investment, and distribution, have increased in terms of their contribution to that ROE in 2024. We still ask ourselves, though, are they the right financial objectives to focus on?
We think they are, and we think shareholders have been rewarded for the focus on those objectives. We have delivered a 15% total shareholder return over the last decade, well in excess of markets. With that being said, to tee up the day, I will ask our Chief Strategist, the architect of the roadmap, and our CEO, Charles Brindamour, to tee it up.
Thank you, Ken. Where are the two other person? And we've become more productive as well as a firm. Three jobs, one person. Thank you very much, everyone, for being with us this morning. More importantly, thank you for your support. It means a lot to us, but we do not take it for granted. When you look at the track record that Ken has just laid out, it is good financial performance, but we think, more importantly, you need four key ingredients. The first one, when you want long-term and sustainable advantages and performance, you need a strong moral compass. That is number one. Number two, you need to be super clear about what good looks like and what success actually is. Third, you need a clear game plan, a roadmap within which you execute year after year after year.
Finally, and we'll demonstrate that today, you need a talent advantage that has a very strong bias for action. These are the four ingredients that we're using to build Intact. That is me and the other two person. That's where the boredom starts, as Ken would say. When we've laid the foundation for Intact, Louis and I were very clear. If we want long-term success, we need to build a business on a foundation of very strong moral compass. Some of you look at the screen. It's not on the screen. That's where the values come in: integrity, respect, being customer-driven, excellence, as well as generosity. At Intact, we start with that because we think in the mid to long term, this is more important than results. That's where sustainability comes from. We make decisions on that basis.
We choose people on that basis, and we make no compromise on that. That is a promise we make to our employees. Success. How do we define success? What does good look like no matter where you operate at Intact? Our belief is first and foremost that customers decide who wins. Therefore, the first measure of success is that customers who deal with us should be our advocates. That is the mindset. We want to outperform our competitors on service. This is fundamental. Three out of four customers need to be advocates of Intact. I would say sitting here today, following a transaction, following an interaction with our people, we are roughly in that zone, 70%-80% advocacy across the group. The challenge is when people step back and think about the relationship and when they have not dealt with us recently, that drops to one in two.
Our challenge is to get that to three out of four. It comes with brand recognition, mind space, and frequency of interactions. We have a bit of work to do there. To create advocacy, we work through brokers and personalize a bit, but certainly in commercial lines. It is very important that brokers be advocates of Intact as well. That is why four out of five brokers should see us as the best market where we operate and should recognize us for our specialized expertise. The good news is we are roughly in that zone. Whether it is the US, Canada, or U.K., we are in the 80% range. We have some work to do, but we are in good shape. Second, if you want to deliver on your first measure of success, our belief is that people need to be proud of what they do, and they need to like their colleagues.
If you do not have that, you are not going to outperform from a service point of view. It is very simple. We do not do that to be nice. We do that to win with customers. Therefore, being a best employer where we operate is mission-critical for us. We have been a best employer in Canada for nine years, in the US for six years. Our focus now is on the U.K. There is a lot of change. It can be disconcerting at times. We are very focused on that. Obviously, being a best employer also means having the best people. To have the best people, there is one recipe, and it is to make sure you have the biggest talent pool possible. That is where having a workforce and leaders that are representative of the communities we serve is strategically very important. It is not nice. It is not woke.
That's how you win. We think that business is not about being popular or about love. It is about respect. We want to be the most respected operator where we play. That comes really in three ways. One, you have to live your values in the marketplace, not just inside. Second, given our business, we want to be seen by three out of four stakeholders. What's that? It's you, it's customers, it's brokers, it's employees, it's government officials. We want to be seen as the leaders in building resilient communities. We're at about one in two at the moment. I think we're punching below our weight. In other words, we're doing way more than what is recognized for. We've got some work to do there, but that's an important measure of success. Lastly, where does respect come from?
It comes from beating your competitors day in, day out. That's the mindset. That's where service comes in, but that's where ROE outperformance comes in. That's not an output. It's an input. That's how we think when we show up to work in the morning. Quite frankly, Ken's track record illustrates this deep commitment to beating our competitors from an ROE point of view day in, day out. Second, respect comes from growing your earnings muscle, the earnings power of the firm. Our track record is very clear there, and this is what we will unpack for you guys today. Thirdly, you need to know how to get there. That's what we call a roadmap, our game plan. Companies who use corporate speak will call this a strategy. These are the choices we're making. That's where the money is going. That's where the energy is going.
That's where the strategic priorities come in. How do you come up with the game plan? At Intact, we do it in two very simple ways. One, we take an outside-in approach. By that, we look at where the world is going. We figure out what are the deep trends we should bet on. Then we figure out how to leverage our strengths and make sure our strengths are world-class. Where the world is going, it's consumers' expectation, it's technology and data, it's climate, and it's geopolitics. Our key strengths and how we win within that framework is risk selection, claims and supply chain management, capital and investment management, and how we manage distribution. Year after year, we keep investing in those core strengths to make sure that we're amongst the best in the world in those areas. Why?
Because if we want to compete not just here, but abroad, you need to be world-class where you choose to be. That is how we have built our game plan. Today, Louis will talk about how we are thinking about our game plan for Canada. Ken Norgrove will talk about Ireland, our second big growth sandbox. Emmanuel Clarke will talk about how we are building our specialty lines leader. We will then have Patrick, our Chief Operating Officer, talk about risk selection and claims, two big drivers, about two-thirds of our ROE advantage. We will then have Werner and Ken talk about capital and investment management. We look at the past, and if you look forward, we debated, are these the right objectives? Are they achievable? Are they too easy, et cetera?
I would say ROE outperformance, as I look at our position today, 650 basis points in the past, two-thirds of the business is Canada, roughly, one-third outside, and that's likely to increase over time. In theory, you could say, well, there's a bit of a headwind when it comes to ROE outperformance. The reality, as Ken pointed out, is we have now four years post the last big international acquisition, ROE outperformance across the board. I think this is highly achievable in the next decade, and more so than in the past decade, in fact, for a number of reasons. The first one is that we have more scale to play with. We can invest more, and in fact, we do.
The second one, that was not the intent when we made a number of our acquisitions, but the business mix, the insurance mix, is actually better than it was a decade ago. I'd say much better. It has a better ROE profile, a better volatility profile, as Ken illustrated, and I think this is very helpful. Third, the investment side of the house and the distribution side of the house contribute more meaningfully more than they did a decade ago. You put all that together, and I'm very confident we'll outperform by at least 500 basis points every year in aggregate, but also in every market where we operate. This is not an aggregate game. It is a game at the customer level where you need to outperform.
When you look at growing the earnings power of the firm at the same clip as we did 10 years ago, there is one big headwind, and it's called the denominator. We're three times bigger than we were a decade ago, and the earnings are indeed roughly three times what they were a decade ago. How can you grow at that clip when you're so much bigger? That is what today's discussion is all about. There are two things that I think put the odds in our favor and for you guys to judge what the odds are. As far as I'm concerned, the two things I would point out to is first, performance is good across the platform. In some parts of the platform, we're actually just starting. Second, the sandbox is 10 times bigger than what it was a decade ago.
You put those two things together, it's very simple, but not simple to execute. Certainly, at the macro level, I think the odds are in our favor. The fourth ingredient for success is the talent advantage that has a strong bias for action. I'm hoping to demonstrate that. We've assembled a group of people at different levels of the organization. Many of them you might not have seen before, but we're very proud of the depth we have at Intact, and today is just a small example of that. Talking about talent, why don't we start with Louis and Canada? That was not a joke, actually, but we got to work on that.
Thank you, Charles. I was expecting a joke, and yeah, it was a joke. Great to be here, guys.
It's my, I think, my sixth or seventh Investors' Day, so it's pretty cool to see you all. Always fun to come to talk to about the business, about Canada there. Been with Intact for many, many years. Very proud of what we've accomplished so far, but I think there's still a lot of work. People are working very hard on a day-to-day basis. I'm also very proud to be with three of my colleagues from Canada. There are three young people that I'm sure you'll appreciate the depth that we have. They're a bit nervous there, but you'll see how great they are. In Canada there, as I said, lots of stuff is going on.
Just to come back for a second on who we are, most of you know that we are the largest in the country provider of P&C insurance, CAD 16 billion of DWP. We're two and a half times larger than the average four following players. We are 22,000 people now in Canada. Remember when we were less than 4,000? What's the most important? We have 18% of the market share. Year over year, we are generating very often over 25% of the underwriting profit of the industry. I think that's the really key of the outperformance of how we do our business in Canada. We've been outperforming growth and combined ratio for the last 10 years on a steady basis. It's because of the team, because of, I would say, our game plan that is pretty focused, pretty focused on the right thing.
Charles gave you exactly where we're going, and that's something that we are as a team always concentrating on, outperforming the market in growth and also in combined ratio for sure. 4.7% beating the market year over year in Canada over the last 10 years. That's what we've been doing. Our ambition as we speak right now, we're at CAD 16 billion, and our ambition is to be at 2030 at CAD 25 billion, largely through organic growth. Again, but also while we're doing that, always maintaining that five-point of combined ratio outperformance. This is the key. We want a right profitable business. We want to continue to write the right stuff, and that's what we will continue to do. A few things that we've built over the years that are very important, and I think they're the strength, I would say, of the Canadian operation right now.
My colleagues are going to go over more specifically on some. First of all is our knowledge of the customers. We have presented that to you. I think it is two Investors' Days ago. We presented you that segmentation of customers, and they still today hold true. This is what we think that the consumer in Canada looks like, and we have put all our effort to make sure that we are servicing those customers in the way they would like to be served. This is very important for us. We have four segments of customer in personal lines. We have the do-it-yourself. We also have the deal seeker, the advice seeker, and the do-it-for-me. Those are the four segments. As I said, our colleague will talk about them more in detail.
But we also have a very strong commercial line portfolio and a very strong specialty line portfolio. Also, we have people that will come and give you a lot of great detail on that. For us, knowing the customer, knowing where they want to buy the product, what's their need, this is fundamental to our success. That's, I would say, our number one strength. The second thing is over the year, we've been working really hard at building our brands. Intact now today is the most recognized brand in the country. Lots of effort. You've seen the ads just before. Lots of things. I think we always work to make sure that the ads are known for what we can deliver, right? The things that are important for customers that are attracted by those brands. We have 33% awareness with Intact in Canada.
Our objective is to be at least at 50. I mean, we're going to continue to invest heavily in our brand. It's a reason, I think, of our success and the future of the organization. We also have Belairdirect. Belairdirect is a smaller company with a very, very strong brand. The growth in Belairdirect, and we'll see, is great. You'll have more details. Those two brands are in the top four of the Canadian brands in insurance. That is quite something, I think, that we're very proud of. All that, and Charles talked about customer advocacy. Every time that a customer does a transaction with us as we speak, 74% are advocates. They are talking about their experience. They're referring people to do business with us. That is also a very, very important objective. What we want to improve is the relationship.
It's when they don't do transactions with us, how they perceive us. That's something that we're working on very, very a lot there. Finally, we're not just insurance now anymore. We just bought Jiffy. Jiffy is a home maintenance organization that does that work with trades, people in trades that are vetted by them. There's a process to make sure that we're sending to the house the right people. They're doing a great job. We decided to invest in that. I think it's a real good complement for our business. People need something in their house to be repaired. We are the insurance company. We can help them also in prevention. Jiffy is our new acquisition. I'm going to be like Oprah this morning.
If you go on Jiffy and you download the app and use the promo code IFC2025, you will have CAD 50 off on the next time you ask Jiffy to come to visit you. That's just for you guys, just for you. This is Jiffy. Another thing that, so we know the customer. We think that we have the right structure to the right brand. We also have a very, very extended distribution footprint. We build Intact based on optionality. We want to make sure that we're there where people can buy our product from different ways and how they want to do it. We have Belair Direct. We have Intact Insurance, Intact Prestige. We have BrokerLink and all the affiliated brokers that are also part of Intact and that we're financing. We have also a range of MGAs across the country.
Just by the way, just information here. If you take Belair, if you take BrokerLink and all the brokers we have investment in, we probably have about CAD 8 billion of business within those brokerage. It is quite an important thing that I think is unique in the marketplace. We have CAD 11 billion of personal line and CAD 5.2 billion in commercial line. On that, just to go a bit deeper into the information we've just given, I'll ask Yoram Perez, our Deputy SVP for Belair Direct and direct distribution, to come and give you some information about our personal line in Belair.
Thank you, Louis. We will start talking about personal lines, more specifically Belair Direct, which is IFC's direct distribution channel. As Louis mentioned, customers are at the heart of everything we do.
At Belairdirect, we cater specifically to the do-it-yourself and deal seeker segments. How do we win in that segment? At Belairdirect, it is about what we call insurance simplified, which is not just our brand tagline. It is also our operating model. What is insurance simplified? It is all about providing fast and efficient service for customers, a product suite that is streamlined and simple and fits the needs of the do-it-yourselves and the deal seekers, a highly efficient operational team, and industry-leading digital capabilities that enable all of that. What makes us different than other digital-only carriers is that we are not just a digital insurer. We consider ourselves to be truly an omnichannel carrier. We have excellent customer service.
If you call one of our 3,000 employees from coast to coast to inquire about one of our products, if you want to add a driver through our mobile application or want to chat with one of our agents about one of your upcoming payments, our customer service advocacy, as pointed out by Louis and Charles, is second to none. This insurance simplified mindset has also enabled us to outperform our peers in the direct channel from an expense ratio perspective and from a combined ratio perspective, which gives us good optionality to reinvest that in future organic growth. We are coming off of a really strong year of growth in 2024. In 2025, we expect to reach CAD 4 billion in premium annually, which effectively means we will have doubled our size since 2020.
When you combine our insurance simplified mindset, our strong brand, like Louis alluded to, our industry-leading digital capabilities, and our affinity offering, we think we are in a very good position to continue on our growth trajectory from the last couple of years. To unpack our organic growth, I will focus on two things: digital and affinity. We will start with digital. First things first, between Intact and Belairdirect, we have the number one and number two most downloaded insurance apps in Canada, 1.5 million users. At Belairdirect, specifically, 80% of our customers have downloaded the app or created a digital account. It is not just about creating an account. Our customers are actually using it. One in three car policy changes are done digitally. That is double what it was in 2023. Clearly, we are investing in self-service.
Our customers are using our self-service tools. We are also investing in the online purchase experience, which for Belairdirect is very important because half of our sales comes from the digital channel. We are leveraging our expertise in design, behavioral science, data science to really optimize the funnel from top to bottom. You have seen these investments pay off: 80% growth year over year, two years in a row. Another thing that sets us apart from other digital players is that we do not compromise, as Louis mentioned, on pricing and underwriting rigor. Despite the growth we have seen in digital in the last number of years, we have been able to maintain our outperformance from a combined ratio perspective. In 2019, we also talked about we committed at the 2019 Investor Day to reach CAD 1 billion in our digital portfolio by the year 2025.
We actually reached that last year in 2024, a year early, just with Belairdirect, which we were really excited about. That is digital. I'll now talk about affinity, which is another important source of growth for us at Belairdirect in the last number of years and we expect in the future. For those that do not know, affinity is our portfolio, which leverages our partnerships with large groups, associations, and employers, where we leverage their endorsement as a trusted partner to distribute our products. This is a proficiency we strengthened in 2021 with the acquisition of RSA and Johnson. In 2023, we rebranded that business from Johnson to Belairdirect. Today, we have over 500 partners that provide us access to their members across preferred risk sectors like healthcare workers, educators, university alumni.
These are typically clients that have higher retention with us, higher loyalty. A proof point of that is that two out of three affinity customers who have an auto policy with us also have a property policy or travel policy or group benefits with us, which generally adds stickiness to the value proposition for affinity. This is roughly 10 percentage points higher than on the rest of our portfolio. We also have white-label partnerships with three large Canadian financial institutions, which we are able to administer cost-effectively thanks to our digital capabilities. In 2024, we grew affinity and white-label by 27%. This is partly due to the fact that we were able to retain 97% of the business that converted over from Johnson to Belair Direct. We also were able to deepen our presence within the core affinity sectors I mentioned earlier.
When you combine Johnson's longstanding affinity, expertise, and relationships with Belair Direct's digital capabilities, insurance simplified mindset, and our strong brands, we think we're in a good position to continue growing that business. Talking about strong brands, I'll now hand it over to Andrea Balfour, Deputy Senior VP, to talk about Intact and personal lines. Thanks.
Good morning, everyone. Very happy to be here. Our approach at Intact Insurance when it comes to personal lines is pretty simple. First, we've excelled at fundamentals up until now that we plan to continue to leverage to maintain our leadership position. As Charles mentioned at the top of the segment, we're also not blind to the fact that customer expectations are evolving, and we plan to use our competitive advantages to lead on that front.
Our products today are already delivered to a broad spectrum of Canadian consumer segments that you see here today. We plan to continue to make sure that we're designing journeys for customers and for brokers that make sure that we get as many of our products in as many Canadian hands as possible going forward. I'm going to start talking about, first of all, how our distribution partners help us in achieving our organic growth ambitions. First of all, we pride ourselves on making sure that we deliver second-to-none service to our distribution partners. Based on the survey feedback that we received last year, we definitely feel that we're on the right track. Last year, in 2024, we reached an all-time high of 82% when it comes to broker satisfaction, and that was a five-point increase since 2022.
With almost 2,000 broker relationships across the country, we're really focused on making sure that we can deepen those relationships through a variety of different levers. First, we're really rethinking the broker value proposition. We understand that in personal lines, speed and ease of doing business is critical when it comes to a broker deciding on where they're going to place their business. One of the things that we've really focused on is how can we structure our teams to make sure that we're delivering on speed and ease of doing business. In 2025, so far, we've managed to increase by a rate of five times the speed with which we respond to certain broker inquiries. Second, we also understand that today, more than ever, brokers are looking to technology to drive efficiencies within their operations.
We are committed to being right by their side and making sure that we can deliver on those ambitions. That is why we continue to focus on investing in our flagship policy admin system, Contact PL, to make sure that we can drive overall effectiveness in broker operations and also for our internal users. We are specifically focused on driving autonomy at the point of the sale so that brokers can spend less time on the phone with us and more time doing what they do best, which is servicing their customers. Finally, we are focused on really driving a pipeline of distribution partnerships through what we call DFS or distribution financial strategies. We partner with brokers to make sure that we can partner with them in a way that is helping them achieve their financial ambitions, whether that is growing their business or planning their succession.
Like I said, our distribution partnerships have been key to getting us to our point today where we're a leader in Canada when it comes to personal lines with just over CAD 7 billion in premium in 2024. We feel that we can continue to build on that momentum by leveraging our competitive advantages and further injecting growth in the broker channel. Like I said earlier, we're also not ignorant to the fact that customer expectations are evolving. We'll talk about how we're also making sure to respond to those changes and further growth in the broker channel going forward. We have the right ingredients to grow personal lines already.
We have a unique option in Canada as well and a unique value proposition in Canada by making sure that we can be the best insurer and offer when and where customers want to deal with us, but also have the backing of a local trusted advisor in their community. The first ingredient is our brand. Louis alluded to this earlier, but we have the number one brand in Canada with over a third of Canadians able to recall Intact Insurance without any sort of prompting. We know that a strong brand is key to driving growth in Canada. We are already seeing evidence of that today with an increase of 16% branded search queries, meaning that when customers start their online shopping journey, they are already starting specifically looking for Intact Insurance.
Second, we talked about our leading distribution footprint, but what is unique about us is the fact that we offer, like I said, that true distribution optionality. Our products today are available in over 4,500 locations across Canada through our distribution partners. Third, we are confident that we have a very strong customer value proposition in the market today. With our number one insurance app, as Yohan mentioned, we are really focused on making sure that we are delivering that optionality and being where and when customers need when it comes to managing their insurance. Today, at Intact Insurance, over half of our customers have an account, and we plan to grow that number as well and also make sure that the broker is front and center in that experience through a focus on dual branding. Finally, we have products for all segments.
As you saw, we already cater to a need of multiple customer segments across the country. Today, we offer a wide range of products ranging from the straightforward home and auto to our high-net-worth product, which is celebrating its fifth year anniversary this year in 2025. We have seen great success with our Intact Prestige product growing at a rate of more than 10% in premium since its launch five years ago. That is what we have been really great at so far, but what are we focused on next? We are really focused on making sure that we leverage our strong competitive advantages. Yohan talked about how we are optimizing our online sales funnel, and we are using that as well in Intact Insurance to reinject growth into the broker channel.
By continuously investing in our online funnel, we now anticipate that one in eight sales in the broker channel will actually originate from the web. Since we have managed to increase our investment in that digital platform, we now see an increase of 40% annually of new business premium that is generated and influenced directly from the web, and we expect that to continue. All of that volume goes right back into the broker channel through our distribution financial strategy partners, as well through our Intact authorized agencies in Quebec and in BrokerLink in the rest of the country. When we talk about expanding our leadership position in Canada, scale and distribution is obviously a key factor in our strategic roadmap. That is why we want to spend a little bit of time also talking about the success story that is BrokerLink.
BrokerLink is well on its way to hitting its ambition of reaching CAD 5 billion in premium in 2025. With a 20% CAGR since 2018 in premium growth and distribution income CAGR at 23% set to outpace that, we're confident that we'll reach that ambition that's been announced in the past. How has BrokerLink been able to manage to get to this point, and where are they turning their attention to when it comes to going into the future? First of all, we have a leading customer experience at BrokerLink, and that's evidenced through our ability to consistently achieve high 70s customer advocacy following a transaction. Second, BrokerLink is also a proven consolidator. With over 100 acquisitions since 2020 and 25 acquisitions in 2024 alone, BrokerLink has effectively demonstrated how they effectively bring businesses together.
Being a consolidator is one thing; being an integrator is something completely different and takes a different skill set. BrokerLink has essentially written the playbook on how to bring businesses together, retain employees and customers, and generate value. Finally, we are also committed with BrokerLink to continuing to invest in technology both for their internal users but also for customers. They are delivering on a true omnichannel experience with the ability for customers to deal with them in person, in their communities, via chat, via text, or over the phone. We are also focused on driving automation to drive overall operational efficiencies and increase margins. These are the ingredients that have gotten BrokerLink to the point that they are today, a leading distributor of personal lines insurance in Canada.
As they've gone through their acquisition journey, what's become evident as well is their ability to grow and manage a sizable commercial lines portfolio, with their commercial lines volume more than quadrupling since the year 2018. That is why we talk about now their future ambitions and where they're going forward. We're talking about becoming a top five commercial lines brokerage in Canada. This, coupled with the fact that they have an ambition to become a top personal lines or the top personal lines distributor in Canada, means that we're at a point now where we're refreshing our ambition for 2030 to aim for CAD 10 billion in direct premiums written. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Peter Janzen, our SVP in Intact Insurance for the Ontario division, and he'll talk to us a little bit about commercial lines.
Good morning, everybody.
Happy to be here with you. I am the third and final of Louis' young, nervous millennials, and we're excited to be here with you today. I think Andrea set it up well talking about the BrokerLink story, particularly the focus in commercial lines. Today, I'm going to be talking about how we're going to be leveraging our track record of growth and our outperformance into the future. I'll also talk about how we're going to be developing a leading customer experience and scale and distribution to grow in the future. Of course, customer is central to everything we do. I think Yoram and Andrea did a great job talking about the personal lines space and how we've thought deeply about customers and how we're applying our brands correctly to win in personal lines. That's equally as important in commercial lines and in specialty lines.
We are thinking deeply within commercial lines about how we're applying the right people, the right operations, the right technology to win in that space. Emmanuel Clarke and the global specialty lines team will join me later up on stage, and they'll tell the story for specialty lines, but the customer segmentation is equally important across commercial and specialty lines. To start, we'll talk about our strong track record of growth, which is based on a foundation of outperformance. You can see here in Canada today, we have CAD 5.2 billion in commercial written premium across commercial lines and specialty lines. That equates to a 15% market share, which is very strong positioning, but allows room for growth, and an 8% combined annual growth rate over the past decade.
It is important to remember, over that decade, we have acquired and integrated some very large commercial players like RSA and GCNA, and at times taken targeted portfolio remediation action in order to get to our standard of outperformance, which is very high. You will remember at the end of 2024, we posted an 86% combined ratio in Canada, and in Q1 2025, an 81% combined ratio, very strong. Looking forward, we are building momentum and leveraging our strengths. Firstly, the depth and strength of our team. We have over 1,400 commercial and specialty lines underwriters in Canada, one of the biggest teams in the country. Over 500 of those 1,400 are senior underwriter level or specialist level. We have the depth and talent to provide solutions in any area that we play. Additionally, we have strong broker relationships, over 2,000 partnerships in Canada.
There is diversity across our partnerships as well. Strong relationships with the large national consolidators selling commercial insurance, large accounts, regional community-based brokers selling insurance locally, agencies and affiliates, and of course, BrokerLink, as Andrea mentioned. In addition to that, our scale and size of our portfolio allows us advantages in pricing and in risk selection. We are going to leverage that to outperform into the future. This is a very strong foundation from which to grow, but we are not complacent and we are not settled with where we are at today. We have some strong growth strategies to propel us into the future, and I am going to share a few of those with you now. Firstly, I want to talk about how we are segmenting our approach to win and grow with brokers and with customers. As mentioned, customers are extremely important, and customer segmentation is equally important in commercial lines.
We now understand within the commercial lines bucket, there are three subcategories. Firstly, there is the micro small business, just paying a few thousand dollars in premium, all about speed. You have your traditional small business market, where it is about ease of doing business and service. Lastly, mid-market to large accounts, $25,000 plus in premium, relationships, expertise, and the talent that you are bringing. In 2025, we are restructuring our operation with three distinct teams to deliver on the needs of these three customer sets. We are going to be providing unmatched service, delivering the solution in the right way, with the right product that affords the right coverage to the right customer, and of course, the right people staffing these teams with the expertise required to win.
We're very confident that this is going to set us apart moving forward so that if you're a broker looking to place a commercial account in 2025, Intact is uniquely positioned with the broadest product suite, but also delivering it in the right way to win. Setting yourself up for success is not enough. You need to execute well also. Here we've thought deeply about optimizing our sales funnel or our sales engine. Here we've broken it into four parts to illustrate some of the actions we are taking. Number one, it's about generating more opportunity, generating submissions. Here we're leveraging our relationships, leveraging technology, leveraging our value proposition to generate more opportunities. In 2025, we've seen a 4% lift in submissions overall, but more importantly, in the mid-market space, a 23% year-over lift in the amount of submissions coming in the door.
Once you get the submissions in the door, you need to quote more and decline less. Here we are challenging our teams to be creative, to leverage their expertise, to utilize technology to offer quotes. We are seeing some amazing success here with a 35% year-over-year lift in the amount of quotes we are offering the broker channel. If you look at that mid-market space, a 60% year-over-year lift in the amount of quotes we are offering. Once you quote it, you need to close it. Here we are focusing on closing more deals. We are offering negotiation training to our team, training them up so they can close those deals and leverage those partnerships, utilizing speed and how we are structuring ourselves to win.
Here we're seeing an 18% year-over-year lift in both the amount of new business we're writing on a premium basis, but also on a customer basis. Once you get the customer in the door, you need to hold on to them. Here we're retaining our existing customers through targeted strategies, specifically in areas where we know there's a lot of competition, and we can see a very healthy retention of 93% on a premium basis. Of course, it's important to acknowledge that today the market is extremely competitive, particularly in certain pockets like large accounts. At Intact, we're going to be maintaining our discipline, focusing on risk selection, maintaining our pricing sophistication and strategies, and not chasing prices down. Instead, we're focusing on what we can control, which is our service, our people, our structure, our product in order to win.
A good example where we are focusing on what we can control is in our technology. In 2025, we are launching a new tool to the broker channel, a full rating and quoting platform for the small business channel. What sets this tool apart from the competitor's tool is the broad and deep functionality. I'll walk you through three examples and three types of functionality that we're offering through ContactCL, which is our rating and quoting tool that are not currently available in the market and set us apart. Firstly, we have the broadest digital appetite in the market. Over 1,000 different types of businesses can be quoted through this tool, whereas the competitors are offering only a few hundred. We're essentially offering the underwriting tool to the broker so that they can self-serve and quote new business.
In addition to that, it is not just a new business tool. We are allowing brokers to manage their entire portfolio, manage renewals, midterm changes, and endorsements. Again, it is a one-stop shop, which is unlike anything available in the market today. Lastly, ease of doing business. What we hear from brokers is, "I do not want to do duplicate entry. I do not want to send you the submission and have to put it in the tool." We have eliminated that through some technology that we will talk about later in the data lab section. We are uploading the document and prefilling the information so that the broker can simply upload the document and avoid that duplicate entry. Again, these three types of functionalities really set us apart from what is available in the market today, and we are very excited about where this is taking us.
We anticipate by the end of the year, when the tool is fully deployed into the broker channel, that 40% of our commercial submissions are going through ContactCL. This will result in a 10% lift in net new business in commercial lines and a 14% operational efficiency. This is a great example where we're introducing something new to an already existing strong foundation, and we're excited about where it takes us. In conclusion, I hope you can see we have a very strong foundation, but we're continuing to push the agenda forward. We have a very strong team, and we're structuring themselves to win. We understand our customer, and we're building teams around them. We're introducing new technology, and we think it's going to differentiate us from the competition. We've got an enormous portfolio, and we're going to leverage that for pricing sophistication and risk selection advantages.
All with a name so that four out of five brokers value our expertise, three out of four customers are our advocates, and we maintain our five points of combined ratio outperformance. Thank you, and I'll hand it back to Louis to conclude the Canadian section.
Thank you. Don't have a lot to say after all that. We are definitely well on our way to achieve the CAD 25 billion by 2030, but again, with continued outperformance, this is the key of that. Again, just in a bit of a quick update, two out of four of the top insurance brand, very robust commercial line growth plan, digital channel that is ready to even go further than what we're doing right now, and great distribution. On that, I'd like to give it now to Emmanuel Clarke, our CEO of GSL, to continue the presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Louis. Good morning, everyone. I joined Intact less than three months ago as GSL new CEO, but I had been on the board of Intact since 2021. I have to tell you, I have always been impressed by the quality of this team, and specifically also by the opportunity that relies in global specialty, a real powerhouse. I feel honored and privileged to succeed Mike Miller and to take the business forward. I bring 30 years in insurance and reinsurance, and specifically the experience of running global specialty businesses. Three of my executives will be joining me today, and together we will share the excitement of our GSL opportunity and some of the unique features of our capabilities. GSL will contribute to Intact's profitable growth objective. To do that, we have a very clear and unchanged roadmap. It is unchanged because it has proven itself.
It's basically four things. We're going to be leveraging our specialized value proposition to our specialty brokers and customers. We'll be deepening our distribution network. We'll be expanding our verticals and our geographies and leveraging all our capabilities to continue to deliver a sub-90% combined ratio. In 2022, we communicated to you our 2030 ambition. My message is we're on track to deliver on our CAD 10 billion premium objective by 2030 at a sub-90% combined ratio. Basically, it's down to three things. It's the track record, it's the opportunity, and the capability. The track record, since we last talked to you two years ago, we've added CAD 1 billion of annual premium at 87% combined ratio. Opportunity, as we'll show you in the deck, the GSL markets are very large, and we have a small market share, so lots of room to grow.
Capability, we have the platform and the distribution relationships to grow this business. Equally, we recognize, as Peter mentioned, we evolve. We operate in a dynamic pricing and risk environment. Our capabilities are set so that we can actually sustain that sub-90% combined ratio in any kind of market environment. By the end of today, you will have gained full confidence in our ability to deliver on our objectives and sustain that sub-90% combined ratio. Our target of CAD 10 billion premium by 2030 is an ambitious one, but it is the right one. Why? Three down to the track record. Mentioned the track record, but there is more into the track record. Let me tell you more about that track record. I mentioned that the performance has been very strong. Not only has the performance been very strong, it has been strong in each one of our geographies.
80% of our verticals today deliver combined ratios below 90%. On a relative-to-peers basis, we've actually delivered five points of outperformance over the last six years. How have we done that? Customer focus, being deliberate about where we play, and continuously investing in our pricing sophistication, our technology, and our risk selection. Our game plan here is to simply, sounds simple, but leverage this success that we have had in North America to double down in the US, where we have such a potential, and also replicate this winning value proposition to other markets where we have also room to grow, Europe and U.K. We do have lots of room to grow, and we can do that without planting new flags. Today, we have access to 70% of the worldwide GSL market. We estimate around $500 billion of premium.
We can do this through our four platforms that are US, Canada, London market, and Europe. We can do that through our 20-plus verticals. We also have the advantage of having our own global network. Our global network is what enables us to support our international clients in more than 150 countries. That is a real differentiator because there is only a handful of companies out there who can actually provide this capability. Our market share is small, as you can tell, and the markets are large. That is the playground and the potential. We are confident in our growth levers and the ability to deliver not just on growth, but on profitable growth at sub-90% combined ratio. To demonstrate this, Lynn runs our US operation. She will share with you how we intend to grow.
Jeff, who is our Chief Operating Officer for GSL, will share with you how our capabilities are set to sustain that sub-90% combined ratio. Before we do this, I'd invite Nadia, who runs our U.K. and European business, to take you through the specificities of our value proposition and of the potential that we have in Europe and U.K. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Nadia Côté. I've joined Intact recently as CEO Europe and head of Specialty Lines U.K. I bring 29 years of experience in both the European and London markets. The global specialty markets provide a significant opportunity for Intact. One, it is a highly fragmented market. Two, we hold 1% market share across GSL. Three, it is a highly profitable segment of our industry.
By executing on our competitive advantage, which is the specialized customer value proposition, we can capture very important market share. What distinguishes global specialty lines from commercial lines? It focuses on niche products like cyber, surety, or specific industry segments like marine or technology. In terms of capabilities, it requires a tailored approach to underwriting, to claims handling, and to risk management. Risks are complex and unique, and it requires insurance solutions to be designed customer by customer. This is where Intact stands out. We have a deep industry expertise to accurately underwrite risk. We can get the insurer back on their feet quickly in the event of a claim. More importantly, we can prevent claims through loss prevention. All of these capabilities are foundational to our GSL operations.
To outperform in specialty insurance, it requires a unique combination of human knowledge and data insight, and we do have both. We also have a strong momentum because our combined ratio has outperformed the GSL benchmark of 92% by five points. We have a lot of opportunities in all of our regions, but I will dive into specifically the European and London market, which are uniquely concentrated with specialty risk. The London market is a distant and separate part of the U.K. insurance industry centered in the city of London. It is a truly global hub of insurance innovation. A lot of products and insurance solutions are first developed in the London market. It is where we trade a lot of internationally traded insurance and reinsurance business. 68% of the risk are originating outside of the U.K., and more notably, 40% originates from North America.
One of the key primary competitive advantages of the London market is that the broker, the reliability the broker has that they can place virtually any type of risk because of the diversity and the deep industry expertise that the insurer competing in this market has. We do underwrite our insurance portfolio to the company market. The size of this market is GBP 48 billion, and we hold approximately 2%. We do not underwrite to the Lloyds market because we have access to the risk that fits our expertise and underwriting appetite to the company market, and we have still a lot of room to grow. Similarly, we have a lot of opportunity to grow in our current footprint in Europe, in France, Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium, where we will continue to push our strategy of specialty leaders in these markets.
With our presence in London, in Europe, in North America, and also with the global network, we really have a strong global platform and a really, really important and critical tools to build on. As a new leader for Europe and for London, I will continue to drive our investment in new verticals and new specialisms to increase our footprint. For example, we're working today on expanding our trade credit and surety vertical in both London and Europe. We've developed a significant expertise in Canada and in the US, and we want to build on this expertise to build our product offering in new geography. This is one of the key levers of our growth roadmap. Now I will hand it over to my colleague, Lynn O'Leary, who leads our GSL operation in the US to talk about additional levers to support our growth. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. I am Lynn O'Leary, and I'm President of Specialty Lines in the US. I have been with Intact for 12 years and most recently spent the past two years in Europe leading our team there, building out our specialty organization. I'm excited to be back and take on the role as President in the US and equally excited to be here with you today to talk about how we're driving profitable growth across specialty lines. When we set our ambition of $10 billion in 2022, we also developed a strategy on how we were going to grow. That strategy was based on two key factors: one, expand distribution, and two, grow our profitable verticals. That strategy has proven very effective. Today, I want to talk to you about how we're delivering and executing on our growth levers and producing those results.
In our emerging specialty segments, we've been able to accelerate growth by capitalizing on the momentum in the E&S market. We've grown our portfolio from 13% to 30%. We're also growing our specialty lines—excuse me—we're also growing our surety lines business. We are now number one in Canada and number six in the US. We continue to introduce new products, including a recent expansion in our—excuse me—in our London market business through a super yacht program with capacity up to $200 million. We're also leveraging our capabilities by exporting verticals across our geographies. We've recently exported technology and management liability from North America into Europe. We've also established and launched a renewable energy business in the US that leveraged expertise that we had in both London market and in Canada platforms. As Nadia mentioned, we're not done.
We're looking at expanding the surety and trade credit portfolio into Europe and the U.K., as well as launching life sciences business in Canada. We're adding talent. We're investing in talent across all of our geographies, including key senior leadership roles such as Nadia. We continue to hone our acquisition distribution opportunities by really honing in on targets that we want to invest in. Finally, expanding distribution. We've made significant progress on the expansion of our distribution platform, and I'm going to zoom in on that a bit for you today. Expanding distribution is a significant growth opportunity for us in specialty. Two ways we would look to expand our growth: one, in continuing growth of our owned MGAs, and two, deepening our broker relationships. Our owned MGAs have contributed significantly to our top-line growth, and we continue to look at opportunities there.
Our strategy with MGAs is threefold. One, it provides additional distribution relationships to us. Two, it allows us to invest in specialty segments where you really need niche expertise in areas that we do not already write. It allows us to control the amount of risk that we want to take. Finally, it provides distribution income. The MGA market is growing. It is evolving. As we think about MGA opportunities, we see those opportunities across all of our markets, and we will continue to identify acquisitions in that area. In terms of deepening our existing broker relationships, we have built a strong network of broker partners and strategic partnerships. That has given us the ability to play from not only large national brokers, but also regional local brokers.
That is important to us because that gives us an opportunity to really leverage our cross-selling opportunities as well as our global capabilities and the strength of our brand. As we think about going forward, we have clear confidence in our ability to execute on our growth levers. Our strategy is clear. Our team is aligned, and our track record proves that we have this ability to drive sustainable, profitable growth over all of GSL. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff Bellmont to talk to you about our capabilities and our platform.
Thank you, Lynn, and good morning, everybody. GSL COO, and I've been with Intact for now 14 years with previous roles in corporate actuarial and reinsurance. You've heard us talk about our plans for growth. Maybe you can hear me through my microphone.
I get to talk today a bit about how we will continue to deliver sub-90% combined ratios that we've worked so hard to achieve through our platform and our capabilities. When we think about our platform, and you can see it a bit on the screen, it's a very diversified portfolio of different segments written out of four different distinct global markets. Diversity in and of itself won't deliver good combined ratios, but it does provide a number of benefits. I'll talk about a couple of those today. For one, it gives us optionality to grow where market conditions are most favorable, like we've done with builders' risk and excess property in recent years. We can also shrink if market conditions deteriorate too much, like we've done in some of the financial lines. Separately, it provides us with the ability to manage our financial volatility.
I'll give you a couple of dives into how we think about that or where our portfolio sits today. For one, with a portfolio of over CAD 6 billion, our natural CAT risk is lower than you might think, as evidenced by less than $10 million of losses from the recent California wildfires and very minimal claims coming out of the last couple of hurricane seasons. From a US liability perspective, we're also underweight. 17% of our US premium is in segments that are exposed to bodily injury claims. I mention that for a couple of reasons. For one, it's interesting to me because I think that's the area of our industry most exposed to social inflation. It's also of note because if you go back pre-Intact acquisition of OneBeacon, that 17% number was more like 38%.
We've intentionally reduced that over time, helping us outperform in the last few years as the industry has dealt with significant issues in that liability area of the portfolio. We're left with a reserve portfolio that has less risk than many others and a lower duration of about two years compared to an industry that's about a year more than that. That's a bit of a dive into our platform, but also importantly, we have the capabilities to continue to drive and have the foundation for outperformance in the combined ratio. That foundation starts with underwriting expertise around the globe. It's expertise that's recognized by brokers in each of the areas where we operate as top tier within the industry. Those underwriters are partnered closely with teams of actuaries dedicated to each specialty segment. We're investing heavily in our pricing sophistication.
If you go back three years, we had very limited predictive models in place, and they were pretty basic in nature. Today, a third of our business is supported by predictive models, many of which are based on sophisticated methodologies like machine learning. Two years from now, two-thirds of our portfolio will be supported by machine learning predictive models. If you would have told me that three years ago, I might not have believed you, but we've actually had a lot of success even with small data sets implementing machine learning models that give us a lot of predictive power where we can, at the time of quote, understand much better the profitability at an account-by-account level.
Speaking of quotes, you've heard a little bit about it, and you'll hear more today, but we're also investing in technology to help get those quotes in brokers' hands faster, to help them do their job, and to win more business. It's very early days, but a couple of things that are being implemented, even in the US, are reducing quote times by 50% or even more. Importantly, our claims operation has lots of small teams dedicated to specific areas of expertise like ocean marine, contract surety, or technology E&O. A number of those are segments where it's very high severity, low frequency, and the ability to identify and manage a very small number of potentially big claims has a huge impact on the loss ratio. We're continuing to do that very well, and it's an intense focus for the team.
We hang on to the advantages of scale that we have with a global claims operation, bringing expertise to bear even if it's a claim outside of that claim handler's jurisdiction, and with concentration of the more traditional P&C claims in a team within each country, getting the advantages of scale that you'll hear more about later today from Patrick and team. Underlying all of it is collaboration across the organization. I'm fortunate to every day see the extreme talent we have with a very solid platform and some of the best capabilities in the entire industry. Those will help us continue to deliver combined ratios that are significantly better than the specialty lines industry, which, as you've heard, has the track record of even outperforming the general insurance industry. It's a journey we've come a long way on, and I'm excited to continue with our new leader, Emmanuel.
Thank you, Jeff. What you heard today is we do have the capability to deliver on our ambition to get to CAD 10 billion premium at a sub-90% combined ratio. Just to wrap it up, we have the track record of performance and outperformance. We have the opportunity to grow our small market share and a deep pool of premium, of specialty premium worldwide. We have the capabilities to sustain that sub-90% combined ratio. I hope we've been able to convey our enthusiasm and excitement over the GSL opportunity, but also the uniqueness of our value proposition. That is how we will contribute. GSL will contribute to Intact's profitable growth and NOIPS growth objectives. Thank you. With that, I'll pass it on to my UK&I colleagues. Thank you.
Thanks, Emmanuel. Good morning, everybody.
I wish I was one of Louis's young millennials, but unfortunately, I can't turn back the clock. My name is Ken Norgrove; I'm the CEO of our U.K. and international business, and I'm delighted to join you here again today to talk about the progress that we're making. I'll be joined on stage by Karim Hirshi, who's the CFO of the U.K.&I. business, and together we'll unpack some of the progress we've made since the Intact acquisition, but probably more importantly, the opportunities that we see that lie ahead for us. I'm truly excited to do that today. When I was here on stage two years ago at the last presentation, we were really at the early stages of post-acquisition, and we were talking a lot about what we were looking to achieve over that period of time. It's been immense.
That is why I'm so excited to talk about that immense progress that we've made, but we've also identified how big the opportunity set is for us. Hopefully, you'll get a sense of that as we go through the presentation. There are four ways in which we will contribute to the Intact strategy from a UK&I point of view. Those four ways are leading broker and customer experience in our ambition to become the best commercial lines insurer in the U.K., optimizing our underwriting and claims for outperformance, continuing on our pricing sophistication journey, and as you'll hear from Etienne and the team later on, embedding some of the outperformance activities, particularly around claims and claims indemnity improvement into the UK&I business. We also want to expand our broker distribution position, enabling to support our growth ambition.
Karim will unpick responsive and agile technology and operations where we see technology enabling our growth ambition in the business, but how we've also improved and enabled a much greater security of our systems in the UK&I business. A lot of work has been going on, all in ambition to reach our 90% combined ambition that we have for the business. What has happened since the acquisition? You might remember that we spoke two years ago about immediately post-acquisition reshaping the underwriting portfolio for outperformance. That is where our energy lay for the first period of time. We really doubled down on what it is we want the portfolio shape to be. That quickly followed with a number of pretty significant activities and opportunities that we faced over the coming year, over those following years.
First of all, the sale of the Kodan business in Denmark, along with the sale of the Middle East business. We de-risked the balance sheet with the pension scheme, through pension scheme de-risking, which was a very significant movement for us in 2023 in terms of balance sheet performance. The real prize, we acquired the commercial lines brokered business of DLG in 2023. At the same time, we announced the exit from personal lines where we had premiums of about GBP 800 million. We also did the preference share buyback of the old RSA preference shares in 2024. Importantly, in 2024, we migrated that DLG brokered business into the RSA franchise in the UK&I business. At the end of 2024, we also achieved our best combined ratio in over a decade, ending the year at a 93.8% combined ratio.
All of that while focusing on the opportunity set that's set in the market, which Karim will unpack shortly around how we're aligning those two businesses around a single product, single price, and a single proposition to market, and doubling down on becoming the best U.K. commercial insurer in the market. We will focus on U.K. commercial lines business and the Irish business, as Nadia has already unpacked the European specialty business and the London market business for us earlier today. What does that reshaped business look like today, and why is it a great platform for us? You can see that we've moved the dial on combined ratio performance from a high 90s to a low 90s, sitting at 92.8%. I think I said 93.8%. I was doing myself a disfavor there earlier.
A three and a half, over a three-point improvement on the combined ratio in that period of time. More importantly, we've moved the operating ROE by eight percentage points in that space of time. That is a massive movement in operating ROE. We sit today with about GBP 2.7 billion of direct premiums written across the franchise, the UK&I franchise. We're going to double down on the opportunity that sits in that UK commercial line segment. Maybe just to spend a little bit of time before I hand over to Karim around why that is such a big opportunity for us. RSA was a great franchise in the UK for mid-market business and some niche specialty segments. It had a low volume of customers, and we dealt with a small number of brokers in the UK market.
When we acquired the DLG commercial brokered business, they operate firmly in the small and medium-sized sector of the market, particularly at the small end. Much higher volume of customers, much higher volume of interactions with brokers, and a much broader set of distribution brokers that in RSA we hadn't previously had access to. You put the two businesses together, and we have such a broad range of product offering from small to the mid-market into the corporate side of business. We also have a range of products, specialty products that we haven't sold across that platform. NIG brought motor trade and farm capabilities to the organization. RSA have profane marine engineering, construction, and renewable energy that we can cross-sell into the NIG brokers.
Our broker distribution footprint now has an opportunity set of over 1,500 brokers that we have never previously tapped into with that broad breadth of product set. That is the opportunity. That is why this is such an exciting opportunity for us. To give you a sense of scale of the market, the U.K. commercial lines market is 2.7 times greater than the Canadian market. We hold a 25% market share in the commercial lines market here in Canada. We hold 6% in the U.K. With that, I'm going to hand over to Karim, who's going to unpack some of that opportunity that we're facing into.
Thank you, Ken. My name is Karim Hirji. I'm not a millennial from Canada. I'm one of the Gen Xers that Louis shipped over to the U.K.
I've been with Intact now for just under 25 years, again, mainly in the Canadian operation. I've had the pleasure of working in the U.K. now for the last 18 months. First, I was overseeing the integration of the DLG brokered business that Ken mentioned, but recently was appointed CFO of the U.K. operation as well. Ken demonstrated all of the heavy lifting that's gone on post the Intact acquisition. There's been a lot of activity. A lot of that activity was to reshape the business to make sure that we built a strong, profitable base. The 92.8% that Ken mentioned is the best combined ratio result that we've had in the U.K. in over a decade. That's not where our ambition ends. 92.8% is roughly in line with where our peer set is. Our ambition is to get down to 90%.
We are going to do that by focusing on two key areas. The first is leveraging our core competencies on risk selection and pricing in order to right-size the DLG brokered business that we acquired. The second is because we are exiting personal lines, there is an expense drag in personal lines that we need to take care of, mainly through decommissioning our IT platforms and systems in the coming years. What does a low 90s combined ratio give us? It gives us the ability to invest in growth. It gives us the ability to take that 6% market share that Ken mentioned and leverage that in terms of our customer experience going forward. We are in a very fortunate position because we have done this already in Canada. We insure close to one out of four small to medium-sized businesses in Canada.
We've built a strong base in Canada over the last 20 years. The U.K. marketplace is not very different. We're taking those learnings from Canada and transporting that into the U.K. in order to build that foundation. Ken mentioned one commercial. One commercial is a program that's taking the business that we got from DLG. We've migrated that into the RSA portfolio last year. Now it's taking the RSA business, the DLG brokered business, and combining that into one product, one price, and under one brand. That will begin in late Q4 of 2025 and continue into Q1 of 2026. Just combining the businesses does not achieve organic growth. We're taking the opportunity to actually put in a service model on top of that combined business in order to generate the outperformance that we want in the marketplace. We're not waiting until Q4.
We're already making changes in the business today, and we're seeing the results. Three weeks ago, we were awarded a five-star award from Insurance Times on the e-trade or digital business that we write. On the manually traded business on the regional side, again, we're revamping our service model to make sure that we're responsive and that we demonstrate our expertise. That's a key part of our broker value proposition. We've developed clear metrics. Again, over the last five months, in 2025, we've seen the results. Peter Jansen talked a bit about the pipeline in Canada in terms of submissions. We have the exact same pipeline in the U.K. In the last five months, we've doubled our quote rate in terms of quotes going out the door back to brokers. We'll hear later on today Antoine talking about some of the work that the Data Lab is doing.
We're doing the same in the U.K. as well. We're taking 100 data points on submissions and ingesting that so that our underwriters can respond back to brokers within 24 hours. From a sales perspective, post-NIG, that doubled the size of our sales force, which gives us a lot of opportunity. It is not just about increasing the volume. Each one of those salespeople has become more visible. We've increased our visibility rate by four times compared to 2024. They are in the marketplace more. We have also expanded our broker distribution set post-NIG. We have about 1,100 brokers today that primarily trade with us through our digital or e-trade platform. This year, we want to deepen relationships with about 200 of those, move them into our regional model, and offer cross-sell opportunities throughout our entire product set. The organic growth opportunities are there in front of us.
Pricing is key in terms of how we actually achieve outperformance. It's been the key lever that we've utilized to get to the 92.8% today. We're not done yet in terms of what we want to do with pricing. We want to make sure that we incorporate machine learning throughout all of our products in the U.K. As we develop technology tools, we'll make sure that the pricing models that we build are available in real time to our underwriters to use. In our claims operation, again, we can leverage the experience that we have in Canada. There is a fundamental difference in opportunity that we have in the U.K. as we think about our customer and broker journey. In the U.K., we only sell products to business customers. We don't sell products to personal lines customers. As well, we only distribute through brokers.
We can reimagine that customer and broker journey in terms of creating advocacy both on the customer and broker side. In claims, though, we're focused really on two main areas. The first is to make sure that we leverage our investment in Guidewire to increase our service levels and throughput for customers. The second is we want to control indemnity spend. Over 60% of our indemnity spend comes from less than 1% of our claims. We're looking to internalize loss adjusting as well as our legal services in order to account for that. Technology is an important catalyst in order to transform the business. I'm going to actually unpack that on the next slide and go a little bit deeper. People is at the core of what we do. Our ambition, as Charles mentioned earlier, is to be a best employer in the U.K.
We have a bit of work to get there on that journey. Ken, in a few minutes, will talk a bit about how we're using our rebrand in order to actually be an important catalyst on this journey and how we embed the values of Intact and our leadership success factors deeply within our employee base on that. As I mentioned, we're not waiting for one commercial or the future for this to happen. An important metric for us is that four out of five brokers recognize our specialized expertise. At the end of 2024, we're already at 85%. The opportunity is right in front of us. From a technology perspective, this is really what will help transform the business. Remember, our combined ratio has been coming down post the Intact acquisition.
We're geared to get to a 90%, but our investment in technology has gone up. Today, we're spending north of GBP 140 million on technology in three key areas. The first is modernization. Modernization is all about making sure that we're cloud-based, we're agile, and this really helps improve our security posture in the U.K. Two proof points on this. The first is we've exited our legacy data centers. This means that 1,200 servers have moved to the cloud. Second, we've shut down 1,400 servers and eliminated 170 applications. This really helps in terms of security in the U.K. and I perimeter. Second is transformation. I already mentioned how AI and data ingestion on applications helps from an underwriter perspective in terms of service. But this also powers pricing sophistication.
The more data that we ingest into our platforms, the more our underwriters and our actuaries can actually utilize that in terms of looking at technical pricing, market elasticity, and charging the right price for the right risk. From a claims perspective, we have over 60% of our claims already on the Guidewire platform. We launched a cloud-based claims portal that's available now on our auto, our motor, and property claims, and we will be rolling that out to more product lines in the near future. We have already seen a 5% reduction in settlement time through this initiative. Lastly, decommissioning. Decommissioning is important for three main reasons in our business. The first is simplification for our underwriters. The fewer systems that they have to manage, the easier it is to provide top-tier service. The second is simplification in IT.
The fewer systems that you have to manage, the better your security posture can be. Third, important as a CFO, this is an important lever in terms of our expense base. The more that we can decommission our platforms, it helps with the personal lines expense hang that we have, which will allow us to get to a low 90s combined ratio as well. On that, I'll hand it over to Ken to talk a bit about the Irish business.
Thanks, Karim. Just a brief one slide on the Irish business we'll talk through. This is a business that I know really well. I helped build this business over many years and have a real affection for the business. Just a bit of a summary around what we have in Ireland.
We have a business which is just under EUR 400 million in premium and is split roughly 55% personal lines, 45% commercial lines. It performs exceptionally well in the market. You can see it's running at a sub-90% combined ratio today. It is a business where we have strong broker relationships and great customer engagement through our 123 direct insurance brand in Ireland. I think there are four areas that we're focused on in the Irish business in terms of building scale and market share and presence. The first is a leader in SME business, deepening our broker relationships and moving towards that four out of five brokers respecting us for our expertise.
The second is scale in personal lines, where we have a very strong direct brand, and we want to build the trust factor in that brand much further and also evolve the digital capabilities that already exist and are market-leading in our direct business. The third is claims outperformance. Etienne will cover that off in more detail later on. We are looking to improve our indemnity performance, our closure rate on claims, and move more claims into a digital environment. Finally, that digital engagement of customers. At the moment, we are the leading digital brand for direct personal lines business. We want to move that digital engagement capability into our intermediated personal lines business and also into our SME customer base and claims portion of our business. Really good opportunities exist within the Irish business.
We have about a 9% market share, and we're number six in the market. We feel that there is room, significant room to grow that business over the coming years to 2030. Myself and Karim also mentioned that last month we announced our intention to rebrand the U.K. and I business as Intact Insurance. I am talking about all of the U.K. and I business, including our London market specialty business and our European specialty business. There are a number of reasons for that. As Charles mentioned earlier on, we're already fully integrated and share the same value set. We already have the same set of behaviors that we use to lead the business. We call them our leadership success factors, and they're already in the business.
We have been focusing on how to build that outperformance mindset within the U.K. and I business over the last number of years. The timing feels right for a number of reasons. One, we feel like we are part of the family already. Why should we not be called Intact Insurance? Two, as we bring together the DLG brokered business along with the RSA business, it is an ideal opportunity as we look to the market with one brand, one product, one proposition. Finally, we are really trying to transform the business, not integrate the DLG business into RSA, but fully transform the RSA and DLG business into what Intact looks like here in Canada today. Bringing all of the strengths and capabilities and development that you have seen across Intact Canada over the last decade to bear on the U.K. and I market.
Why is that important to us? I think it's important for a number of reasons. If you look at the size of the U.K. commercial lines market, GBP 25 billion of revenues in the U.K. commercial lines market, 2.7 times bigger than the same segment of the market here in Canada. We currently have a 6% market share. As Karim said, we're going to lead off with a brand proposition that's easy to do business with, where we're focused on speed, service, relationships, and deepening those capabilities in the market to build that market share. In Ireland, it's a EUR 4 billion market, and our share is 9%. Again, plenty of room for us to expand within the Irish business. Nadia and Emmanuel have already covered off the opportunity set that exists within specialty lines. Really excited about that opportunity that lies ahead.
Maybe to summarize where we've the session this morning, I think we really believe we're refocused for outperformance as a business. You've seen the progress that we've made over the last number of years. You've seen the opportunity set we've identified in the market. We believe that our broker value proposition in U.K. commercial lines will make us number one commercial lines insurer. The rebrand is an accelerator to that, where we focus on that reestablishing an outperformance mindset within the U.K. business. We believe that we're well positioned to double in scale over the years to 2030. Thank you for your time this morning. With that, I think I'm handing back to Geoff for the Q&A session.
Perfect. Thanks, Ken. We're going to go with the Q&A session. I know we're running slightly behind.
If you do have a question in the room, please put your hand up. We do have a couple of mics that will be going around. Again, if you're on the webcast, there's a box at the bottom you can click, submit a question there. Maybe we'll start in the room if there's any questions. Sorry, I see Tom at the back there, Tom MacKinnon.
Yeah, just a couple of quick numbers and then one other question. You talked about a personal line expense drag with respect to U.K. and I. If you can quantify that and where do you see that going. The other kind of numbers question is it looks like about 40% of your direct business in Canada is really affinity business. How much of that CAD 1.5 billion that you picked up or that you have is really Johnson?
Do you need to have further acquisitions in affinity to kind of drive that growth? I have a follow-up. I do not know how you want to work that. Is there any way you can answer some of those two questions that I asked?
Maybe I will tackle that firstly on expenses. I guess firstly, it is important to note in Canada, we are outperforming on expenses both in the direct channel and in the brokered channel. When it comes to the U.K., as we are exiting the personal lines, you will note that is now reported as an exited segment. Our objective is to essentially have that business run off with negligible impact on earnings absent unusual weather. I think we are in a good place to do that.
What Karim was referring to in terms of expense ratio is that as that premium runs off, and we're looking to run it off as quickly as possible, the exit of the system supporting that business may take a little. As Q1 through the rest of the year. As we look out to 2026, we try to manage the expense ratio so that, if you like, that bulge as the personal lines business runs off is not a drag on the continued business. That is the objective that we have. We are pretty confident we will be in the zone and able to achieve that. The question about the affinity. Sorry, affinity.
Yeah, sure. How much of the 1.5 you have in affinity is Johnson? It looks like 40% of your direct business is really affinity.
I'm certain you probably had a bit of a hockey stick growth in that as a result of that RSA acquisition. What's driving the direct growth? Is it really more and more affinity?
Yeah, that's a great question. When we acquired the Johnson business, that was around CAD 1 billion in premium. We had some affinity business. Sorry, I'm talking this way. There was around pre-Johnson acquisition, it was around CAD 100 million in affinity business. Over the years since we acquired in 2021, we've grown the business. That gets us to around CAD 1.5 billion. That includes some of the white label partnerships that I spoke about before. In terms of the growth, the growth we show is all organic growth. It doesn't include the growth coming from the acquisition.
I think part of how we grow going forward and what we've had success is really our digital offering, which is kind of unique in the digital space. We think the digital space is where we're generating a lot of growth, and it's no different than affinity. We have a great way to kind of find those affinity customers in the digital space, and they're coming to us pretty organically.
The last one was really on this brand, going to one brand in the U.K. and I. What's the brand that you run in the U.S.? Is that still One Beacon? Just correct me if I'm wrong there. If you want to be, you talked about how much brand awareness is so important in Canada. Now you're embarking on a new brand in the U.K. and I. You can talk about that.
How much is brand awareness important in global specialty?
The first part, this is turning into a one-on-one, Tom, with all our friends in the room. First, Intact Insurance Specialty Solutions is the brand we use in the US. The emphasis you have heard about brand awareness this morning was in personal lines, in particular where you need to generate traffic in a direct business or traffic in the digital channel. That is really where it makes a huge difference. The specialty lines business and the commercial lines business is distributed pretty much exclusively to brokers. As a result, the risk and the amount of investment needed to rebrand when it comes to broker distribution is much less. We have done that many times before as we integrate broker-type acquisitions. Therefore, not something you should be worried about.
At least you can be worried about it, but I'm not. And then what was the last part of your question, Tom? I forget. It might have been something about. Yeah. I guess the call in the U.K. to go from RSA to Intact, which was day two. You have seen what day one looked like. Ken laid out everything we have done. At that stage, we said, "Look, let's improve the business. Let's roll out the values. Let's make sure the behaviors match what the Intact brand stands for. And then we will decide if we rebrand." There are really, beyond the transformation, two reasons why we decided to rebrand now. One is the fact that NIG and RSA came together, and you had a brand challenge to start with in the U.K. CL business.
Two, if you want to build a real global specialty lines business and all your North American franchise and offer is branded Intact Insurance, you need to rebrand the European and the London market franchise as well. For those two reasons, we said, "Let's just do it because the business is ready. Service is better. We're living the values. We're, from a performance point of view, in a real good place." That's why we're doing that in 2025. As Karim said, this is not just a name change. This is part of the transformation. Ken, you want to add something?
Yeah, no, I think the only other thing I'd add is, it's not what I was going to ask. The only other thing I'd add is, before we embarked on this brand change, we spoke to our brokers. We're entirely distributed through brokers.
What our brokers said to us is, "What's important to us is delivering on your service proposition. We don't mind what you call yourself. We do the interaction with the customer. You deliver the service that enables us to grow our own businesses." We talked to our brokers in advance of making the brand change to say, "How are you thinking about if we change our name to brand?" What they have seen is the massive service improvement since 2021 when Intact acquired the business and also the opportunity set that we have been talking to them about, about how we can get much quicker and more agile with our service over the coming years. That is what really is important to them, not the name above the door. I think that has also given us a lot of strength in what we are doing in terms of changing the brand.
I think what we just did in the intertime, we may move, we'll extend the Q&A session afterwards. I think we'll do probably like a 10-minute break right now. I think we'll reconvene at, let's say, 10:45. We've got some refreshments and drinks outside. If I can maybe just add on one last thing on Louis' Oprah offer, just for people on Jiffy that are not familiar, they are expanding across Canada. If you're in Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver, that's where Jiffy currently operates. I think they're trying to go more nationally. Apologize if you live in one of those locales where they're not there yet, but hold tight. Again, I think we'll look to reconvene at 10:45. Thank you.
All right, everyone, thank you for taking your seats. Hopefully you found the first session very insightful.
I think we've also got a great lineup for the second half of our Investor Day presentation. We'll be kicking it off initially with our data as well as our claims teams that'll walk through how they help to drive margin expansion, followed by a discussion on our capital deployment strategy and how that's important to our announced growth ambitions. Try to keep us on track. I'm going to now turn it over to our COO, Patrick Barbeau.
Thanks, Geoff. Good morning. As Geoff introduced, we'll now be talking about first data and AI and then claims management, two key areas where we've invested a lot in the past years at Intact, so starting, you know, at Intact over the past two decades, we've built significant competitive advantages in pricing, in underwriting, and claims management, which together have contributed to two-thirds of our ROE outperformance track record.
Data and AI in particular is part of our DNA. We've been using machine learning models in pricing for many years, and we've deployed AI models and more recently generative AI models in many areas of the organizations, in particular to improve underwriting and boost top-line growth. We see—I’m not sure if I'm—yeah, I thought I was covering your slide, but we see tremendous opportunities to push these strategies forward and contribute to knowledge growth. My team will come and present some of these key initiatives, and I'll come back to conclude afterwards. I'll introduce Isabelle Girard, who many of you have met in the past. She's now SVP of the Lab, combining our expertise in digital and design as well as everything related to data and AI.
She'll be followed by Antoine Sazeville, VP at the Lab and probably one of our top experts for everything around artificial intelligence. Isabelle.
Thank you, Patrick. Hello, everyone. I'm really happy to be here today to talk about the exciting tools we develop at the Lab. Maybe let's start by saying that Intact has a long-standing strength in data and analytics, predating the current focus we see in the market on AI. We created the Intact Lab back in 2017 as a catalyst to accelerate the integration of AI in all facets at Intact. Today, the Intact Lab has grown to more than 500 data and AI specialists with a footprint in many locations and countries, working closely with our core business units to elevate customer experience and drive sustained outperformance. Let's see a breadth of our deployment so far.
We're strategically applying AI in two primary areas: pricing and risk selection, as well as within our operation. Pricing and risk selection has been an important lever of our outperformance, contributing to one-third of our ROE outperformance. We are applying predictive AI in pricing and risk selection, and this has been a cornerstone to our success, and we've been doing so for many years now. In the operation, we are deploying a diverse and expanding toolkit of AI techniques, including generative AI, as Patrick mentioned, streamlining our processes and even automating them, as well as enhancing decision-making capabilities across our business lines. Last year alone, when we look at all the AI deployments we've done so far since the inception of the Lab, we brought over CAD 150 million of recurring benefits annually. I can definitively say that it's a clear return on investment.
Let's now go a bit deeper in how do we use AI in pricing and risk selection, and how do we plan to scale our state-of-the-art models and enrich them? We recognize about a decade ago that machine learning techniques will bring significant advantage over traditional actuarial methods and would revolutionize the way we determine insurance premiums. We created our own machine learning models that are able to analyze billions of data points and their interaction simultaneously with better accuracy, again bringing maximizing the value of the data assets we have. Those models are very good at differentiating between high risk and low risk, and even when the data is limited.
When we look at this example we have here, which is our commercial property book of business in Canada, we can see that with machine learning, we're able to identify higher risk segments that we see on the left side of the graph that are 10 times riskier than other segments that we see on the right side of the graph. For those high-risk segments, they are generating a higher loss ratio. With that insight, we can enhance our pricing accuracy and adjust our pricing accordingly. Same with the lower risk on the right side of the graph. We did not have that much precision with our traditional methods. Now that we have seen how we use AI to determine our risk-based premium, success also relies on the combination of pricing optimization and solid governance. Let's explore this a little more.
Our cutting-edge models not only improve our combined ratio, as we saw, but also foster unit growth through sophisticated price optimization, positioning us very well to take advantage of market inefficiencies. We're balancing profitability and competitiveness, applying regulatory constraints, also considering long-term customer value when determining what will be the most optimal price point. We do that at the risk level. We also have a strong governance framework that allows us to have rigorous monitoring over the deviation from our recommended premiums, as well as continuous monitoring of the quality of our business. Building on this strong foundation, let's see how we plan to scale those techniques across our business. We started our journey in personal lines in Canada back then and are still continuously improving our segmentation. Today, more than 90% of our personal lines book in Canada is priced with machine learning algorithms.
Later this year, we're about to roll our third generation of our models, now using reinforcement learning techniques for further optimization. We're also expanding those techniques into the commercial and specialty lines of our business with significant progress in Canada, but also actively pursuing opportunities in the U.K. and in the U.S. We are building specialized teams, which is a mix of machine learning experts based in Canada working with local pricing, product, and market experts. When looking at commercial line, our focus in Canada is really to push further the price optimization, while in the U.K., we're continuing working to build a strong data assets, data-driven model, pricing, and governance.
We saw a bit earlier with Jeff that for global specialty line, about 33% of our lines of business are already priced with predictive modeling, but we're fully utilizing our capacity to modernize those models and also, at the same time, strategically undertaking an IT transformation that would broadly improve our pricing optimization and governance. Sorry. To accelerate the progress globally, we're also investing in what we call our own global AI platform. This platform will allow us to export faster the development and the deployment of the reusable models and solutions with consistent core capabilities. This is not all. We also saw earlier today that all those lines of business are already showing strong results and outperformance. We're really excited about what the best of science can even bring on top of it. It is not all.
We're also enriching our models with additional data and data sources beyond what we call our traditional sources. Today, we'll see two examples of this. First, our telematics program has been in place for many years now. Through that program, we're getting second-by-second data points that we use to analyze driving behaviors, but also better predict the risk of a car accident. We're using all those insights to dynamically adjust our premiums for our customers. Based on the strong success we already have in personal line, we're now exporting those models in commercial and specialty lines later in 2025 in Canada. We're also recognizing the growing importance of the climate-related risk. In 2024, we deployed our new peril maps that are really directly used in pricing and underwriting decisions, especially for the high-risk zones, enabling us to manage our exposure to certain peril.
We're really leveraging our internal expertise as well as forging external partnerships to gather even more climate-related data to develop our own and proprietary climate models. While we also think that most of the impact of the climate scenarios we tested will be addressed through rates and segmentation, we also, more than a decade ago, transformed our property product, showing now strong results despite periods with elevated CATs. Now that we've seen how do we use data and AI to enhance our pricing and risk selection part of the business, I will invite Antoine to shift our focus to what we do with our operational team and see how do we use AI to really enhance the underwriter, the customer, and the broker experience as well as to fuel growth. Antoine?
Thank you very much, Isabelle. First, let me discuss our track record.
We have been building and deploying AI models in our operations at Intact since 2018, giving us a head start in this area. Our deep expertise developed over those years, and our strong AI governance framework also allowed us to be early adopters of generative AI. We have already built a GenAI model in mission-critical use cases across all our business lines in Canada and deployed them in production. Now we are increasing our investments in AI and operations to accelerate our strategic objectives, including enhancing the customer experience, building a specialty lines leader, and leveraging data-driven innovation in pricing and risk selection. To illustrate this, let me introduce you to our underwriting advisor. AI is empowering us to improve the broker experience while we are improving our pricing accuracy at the same time. That is a previously very difficult-to-attain combination.
An underwriting advisor is a set of AI-powered capabilities that support the underwriters throughout the entire quoting lifecycle. From the moment the quote from the broker hits our mailbox, it supports the underwriter with data entry automation, looking through the guidelines for information, and also helps in the decision-making process, whether it's to ask an additional probing question or to accept the risk as it is. This is a great example of how we're supporting our employees with state-of-the-art tools in our business. These sophisticated AI models can automate the quoting for simple risk, or they can greatly reduce the workload for more complex risk. In the process, we're collecting key data elements that then feed back into our pricing and underwriting models for future improvements. This is where the power of generative AI combined with our quantitative modeling expertise really creates a unique competitive advantage.
This approach increases consistency, it improves efficiency, and it positions us for further improvements to our pricing and risk selection competitive advantage. Now let's dive further into some of the capabilities of underwriting advisors, starting with ingestion and extraction of data. The quoting process for commercial and specialty lines is mainly conducted through emails and other unstructured documents that require significant manual efforts to pass through for underwriters today. Substantial progress has already been achieved in Canada in automating the data entry with a high level of accuracy for all types of risk and all types of documents. To give you an idea of the scale, today, there are 4 million data points that are automatically entered into our core policy system, ContactCL, in Canada. As Jeff and Karim mentioned earlier, this successful approach is being scaled to the US and the U.K. as well.
Advancements in generative AI now allow us to extract more and more complex fields and further driving the number of quotes that we can fully automate in this process. Let's now explore how we're using AI to enrich this data. Incomplete submission documents often really slow down the quoting process and create frictions with our brokers. Our data enrichment process leverages AI to complete that information and cross-validate the information we already receive using both internal and external data. This reduces the need for multiple broker interaction. In fact, there are now fields that we do not even ask them anymore, and we prefer using our higher quality external data that we have curated and collected. This accelerates the quoting process, but it also improves our pricing accuracy at the same time.
Moreover, our data scale advantage allows us to find new predictors in this external data where others would only find noise. The finding we make in our larger markets can be leveraged in the markets where we're still growing. In conclusion, all of this reinforces our commitment to AI in our strategic vision for the future. Although GenAI lowers the barrier for basic AI applications, Intact's years of experience and unique data asset position us to deliver long-term sustainable competitive advantage through AI. Scaling AI in mission-critical use cases requires deep expertise, robust infrastructure, and integration into complex core policy systems. We've been at this for a long time now. Trusted, well-curated, and business-specific data remain the key ingredients to generate real-world outperformance with AI. This plays into our strengths. Recent advancements in AI only reinforce our strategy of investing heavily in AI and data-driven innovation.
Finally, I'll let Patrick reiterate our AI game plan and expectation for future margin expansion growth.
Our plan with data and AI is very clear. We've been at it for a while. Even if we're investing in many parts of the organization to support NOIPS growth going forward, I would summarize the key areas of focus in two big buckets or ideas, if you want. The first one is deploying our most advanced machine learning model in pricing across all of commercial lines and specialty lines and across all our geographies. You've seen that we're just starting, we just started to do that, and there's tremendous opportunities left to do it across the board. It's also leveraging this very precise quantitative view, risk per risk of the predicted costs with generative AI through the underwriting advisor to improve and accelerate the underwriting process.
That's the first big idea. The second one is to leverage AI, including generative AI, in the customer journeys, whether it's in digital, personal lines, underwriting, offline, claims, or commercial lines underwriting. These are the two cornerstone initiatives that will allow us to take the CAD 150 million of recurring benefits we have deployed already and that we have in production to more than CAD 500 million of recurring benefits within the next five years. We have deployed more than 500 models in the different parts of our operations in the last few years. We have the expertise not only to develop the models, but to successfully deploy them in the organization.
These benefits will take mainly the form of improved margins as it contributes to NOIPS growth, but also improving profitable organic growth in two main ways: improving the customer journeys, as we said, but also from a pricing model perspective. Isabelle showed that our machine learning model not only predicts loss costs, but incorporates external data points and market dynamic indicators to balance or optimize the profitability of the risk and the growth objective at the risk level of our client by client. That covers our data and AI section. If you have not done so already, I invite you to go see the booth after the session this morning or during lunch. There will still be live, and I think it will illustrate even more concretely some of the key use cases we have with AI in the organization.
Quickly on claims and supply chain, this is another key area of our investments over the past few years. It contributes to a third of the ROE outperformance. We are working actively on very specific strategic initiatives that will boost or improve the margins across many lines. Without further ado, I'll introduce the next two speakers: Etienne Berlinguet, SVP of Claims Canada, overseeing all of our claims operations in the country, and Stéphanie Lalonde, VP of Casualty and Liability Claims, also overseeing all of these liability claims across the country here in Canada. Étienne.
Thanks, Patrick. Hello, everybody. I'm Etienne. With Stéphanie, we'll walk you through the claim story. We will go through our strategies and some of the unique things we do at Intact in claims because I think we really do things that are quite unique in the industry.
How we approach things in claims when it comes to strategy is we want to build competitive advantages that will be long-lasting and hard to replicate. What we mean by hard to replicate is that even if they were to be replicated, they would yield lower benefits. How do we build that? We leverage some unique strengths that we have at IFC. Obviously, scale, technology, data, actuarial expertise are all strengths that we use when we define our strategies. The first one that we've been working at for decades now is extensive internalization. We'll go deeper into that. This is how we lower the cost of our operations and also generate lower indemnity. The second one is a deep involvement in the supply chain where we use our scale to generate benefits with our partners and get favorable terms with our vendors.
Antoine described some of that. We leverage our data and AI in our operations to generate further gains of productivity and hence also the benefits. When you put that all together, what you get is shorter cycle times, higher customer satisfaction, and lower cost of indemnity. This leading customer service is the best predictor of future growth for our organization. If we zoom in on the first big strategy of internalization, the key concept there is that there is a very strong positive correlation between shorter cycle time, lower cost of indemnity, and customer satisfaction. This is a combination that we repeat in a lot of our strategies that gives us a lot of benefits. You can see there the size of our teams. We've pushed that very far. We internalize more than 98% of our adjusting and appraisal work.
In terms of legal work, we internalize 83% of our work. We closed last year 10,000 files with our legal firm. With 600 people, we rival the size of many large legal firms in Canada. We are pretty proud of that. We believe we still have some opportunities to further internalize, especially in legal. If you go into more sophisticated cases like class actions, this is something we absolutely want to export in all markets, in all lines of business, everywhere to push that concept. If you look at the outcomes of that, you will see on the right-hand side our loss adjustment expenses expressed in percentage of our revenues. The upper portion, the light blue portion, the ALEE, represents the external costs that we have been able to internalize over that period of time. You can see the resulting decrease in the loss adjustment expenses.
Our employees are faster to close claims. They generate higher customer satisfaction, lower benefits. Those benefits get compounded also by the lower indemnity that comes with that increased efficiency of managing things internally. This unlocks a lot of synergy potential when we look at M&A activities, both for past acquisitions and future ones. That was evidenced when we did the RSA acquisition. At the time, RSA, because they were externalizing more of their work, were operating at close to 9% in terms of loss adjustment expenses. We bulked up their claims team, managed to internalize that. We brought them on par with our level of internalization. That yielded significant, that was a key part of our synergies in that transaction with the associated benefits in the indemnity cost.
If we now move to our relay network and what we do in supply chain, the key strength that we are leveraging there is scale. This is something very hard to replicate, how we push that thing, especially when you go outside of large urban areas. Because of our size, we're able to push that in semi-rural and rural areas and have far more impact. We operate there with three different models: Service Centers Plus, Service Centers, and Reliable Partners. Through those three channels, we push 70%. That's customer's choice, but we make it easy for them. 70% of our customers go through those three channels. If I describe them briefly, the Service Centers Plus, this is unique to us in Canada. We have four of them. This is really a turnkey concept.
Where customers go there in those service centers, they are Intact-branded, operated by Intact employees. We make it super simple for them. We just exchange keys. We take their damaged car. We give them a rental, and we take care of everything in the background. We take their car. We bring them to a body shop. We make it repair. We inspect the quality of the work. We bring the car back to the service center. We exchange keys. Off they go. It's the simplest experience possible. We get significant lift with that model. The other model is the service centers. We have 34 of them through Canada. This is a very also interesting model where those are independently owned body shops. The owners have trusted us, and they've changed their branding to an Intact branding. They have given us 100% of their capacity.
This is very powerful for us to give us access to very strong operators located everywhere and gives us access to quality repairs with a full national coverage. Because of our size in that model, we're able to fully fill the capacity every month of those body shops, which maximizes their revenues and generates efficiency gains. In turn, we can have a favorable agreement where they share part of those gains with us. Again, we get faster cycle time, customer satisfaction there, and lower cost of repair with those models. Very useful and very tough to replicate without size. Moving to property, this is pretty much the same thought process. However, there were some characteristics of this industry that gave us the opportunity to deploy capital in that space. The restoration service industry in Canada is highly fragmented as uneven quality of execution.
We thought we had a good opportunity there to invest capital and improve the control and the customer experience, accelerate cycle time, and add to our distribution income stream. The income that comes from that are countercyclical to our insurance earnings as the earnings of the restoration firms go up when the frequency in claims go up as well. In 2019, we concluded the acquisition of Onside. Since then, we've been very busy increasing the size. We now have national coverage, as you can see there. We've more than doubled the size. We have the ambition to bring that business to CAD 1 billion in revenues and expand further the margin in the coming years. With Onside, we also have the opportunity to use unique restoration practices that bring a lot of benefits for customers also in terms of cycle time and indemnity cost.
One of them is the so-called dry-in-place technique. This is super useful for commercial customers and institutional customers. How this works is when they have a weather event, instead of the traditional tearing down of walls and demolition and stopping operations, Onside, through training and specialized equipment, are able to do incisions at the bottom of the walls and use equipment to dry between the walls. With that, we have a carbon footprint gain by avoiding demolition. Our customer can stay open. We avoid the business interruption. Everybody wins. We accelerate the cycle time. This is a very good practice that we are able to deploy with Onside. A very exciting opportunity, unique to us, and something that we will push further. In the face of climate change, there is clearly a good growth avenue for us with this investment.
On data and GenAI, this is also where we're combining scale in our actuarial expertise. Antoine described a little bit of some of those items, but this is very powerful. We have a large team of very talented actuaries that are working in claims. One of the things they do is they leverage our data in claims to quickly identify emerging trends in inflation or cost. They are able to share that with our colleagues in pricing so that we're able to very fast react to movements in the marketplace and adjust our pricing. This is very powerful. If I look at some of those things that are on the slide quickly, we have deployed earlier this year with the help of Antoine's team, GenAI tools that permit to summarize documents in very large quantities. This is super useful to our in-house team for people in the casualty team.
We have significant productivity gains through those tools. We have simplified and automated a lot of processes. Those tools are very useful to coach people, flag, and identify potential fraud cases. Multiple usage potentially. We have a strong pipeline of other tools coming into the operations and continuously improving our competitive advantage in terms of less adjustment expenses. On that note, I will let my colleague, Stéphanie Lalonde, continue to walk you through the claim section.
At Intact, customers are at the heart of what we do. To hit our three out of four advocate target, we are dedicated to increasing our digital engagement and delivering outstanding customer service. We are continuously improving our apps with new customer-centric features. We have heard from Yoram earlier today that our apps are the most downloaded one in the industry in Canada. Our customer can submit and access their claims at their own convenience. By streamlining our claims process and eliminating unnecessary steps or back-and-forth communication with claims adjusters, we are not only improving our customer service, but we are as well reducing claims cost. We operate in an omnichannel environment. We are giving our customers the freedom to choose. They can easily access useful information on our apps, or they can still call a claim adjuster for detailed information or on more complex matters.
These digital capabilities offer a strategic advantage in times of catastrophic weather event. For instance, last summer, our digital claims submission increased to approximately 50% during CATs event. By embracing those digital solutions, not only do we meet our customer needs, but we're anticipating their expectations and we're strengthening our market position. Last year, we've concretely demonstrated the full strength of our claims teams and how effectively we can deploy all of our strategic advantages at once to do what we do best, getting back our customers on track. Our purpose became particularly evident when we faced four major weather events at once, including Jasper Fire or Hurricane Debbie, for example. To give you some perspective, these events generated about 50,000 claims. If we take Debbie itself in Quebec, this represents at once the level of work we would typically have planned for seven months.
We were prepared, and we swiftly implemented our CAT playbook. Again, our strategic advantages make the difference. First, we leverage our scale and internalize 100% of these CAT claims within our own operation, having better control on the risk on time to our customers. Not even three months after some of these events, 65% of these CAT claims were closed. This was made possible through enhanced collaboration within our claims teams. We have mobilized resources nationally, even outside of claims. We also leverage our supply chain with the Auto Service Center and Onside. In fact, Onside took approximately 70% of the repair work sent to our network following the Ontario CAT on July 15. I have mentioned earlier how we leveraged our digital tools during this time. We also leverage our data to optimize file assignment, identify exposure, optimize emergency work, send mass communication to our customers.
We proceeded also to geospatial mapping to support with reserving. This highlights the resiliency of our platform. Not only were we able to absorb this massive volume of claims, but still, we stayed focused on our growth strategy forward. Now, let's see how we're able to export these strategic advantages in building a commercial line and specialty lines leader. Since 2% of our claims represent about 60% of the claims cost, we've adapted and deepened our global claims expertise across the chain value to make sure we've optimized the large loss and complex claims handling. We now have a dedicated and specialized team of experienced claim adjusters, whether it is in large loss property, large loss casualty, specialty lines verticals such as financial institution, surety, or management liability, just to name a few. We have replicated our successful Canadian internalization strategy.
For example, in the U.S., 98% of the file handling authority now sits with our in-house team. In the U.K., we've doubled down the size of our field-based commercial adjusting team. We are also internalizing lawyers, accountants, engineers across our global platforms. Yes, we do have access to a global platform, which brings additional knowledge and expertise. The enhanced collaboration between Canada, U.S., U.K., and I leads to optimal claims management strategies, especially in multi-jurisdictional claims that are more prevalent. Through close collaboration, we identify and share emerging trends both to the benefit of our customers and shareholders. Again, we're leveraging our data. To give you one example, with great modeling expertise, we're able to early identify files that have the potential to evolve into large losses. Again, to the benefit of our customers, reducing cycle time and having better control on claims cost.
On that note, I'll pass it to Patrick for closing remarks.
Thank you, Etienne and Stéphanie. I'll quickly summarize. There are really four ways on a go-forward basis in which claims can contribute to further improve margin and customer experience. The first one is expanding our performance to CL and SL, so exporting our expertise and internalize the way we did in Canada, in the US, and in the UK. The second one is to leverage AI and technology to continue to reduce the cycle time, so close the claims faster. The third one is to further develop our digital and omnichannel platforms for customer experience. Finally, doubling the size of Onside within the next few years, so doubling the capacity of Onside here in Canada. Onside is already the largest restoration firm in Canada. We have visibility on opportunities to double it within three years.
The way this will contribute to NOIPS growth will be obviously on expanding the margin, but also increasing the contribution of Onside in the distribution income line. That concludes the claim section. I'll now invite, we're moving to the board panel. I'll first invite my colleague, Frédéric Cotnoir, EVP and Chief Legal Officer, to introduce our board members.
Thank you, Patrick.
Do you need it?
Good morning, everyone. This is not a panel comprised of millennials this time. What we have with us today is two great and very experienced directors. The goal is to provide a bit more insight in terms of how the board contributes to the achievement of our objective. First, Bill Young. Bill has been with us since 2018 and has chaired the board since 2022. Secondly, Indira Samarasekera. Indira has been with us since 2021 and chairs the Human Resources Committee of the board. Starting with you, Bill, it is not necessarily common practice to have directors at an investor day. Why is it important for you to be with us this morning?
First of all, let me just say good morning and how delighted I am to be with you today. On this particular question, Fred, first of all, the board recognizes how important investor relations are to the company's success and also recognizes that the management team has done a fantastic job over many years building trust. This is partly a function of the fact that there's consistent delivery of great financial results, but also sessions like today where the strategy of the company is exposed and investors can watch year after year. The execution against the strategy, I think, is a real asset. I also believe the board has an important role to play directly with investors, particularly on topics where we have essentially the oversight role. For example, CEO and NEO comp, succession planning and retention, board composition and priorities.
As a result of that, over the past four or five years, we've proactively stepped up board outreach and engagement. That's really been an important opportunity for us to expose our thinking to shareholders and, more importantly, get their feedback. That feedback gets reflected right back into the boardroom. It's an opportunity for us to hear from you what you think on certain topics and reflect that in board decision-making.
Thank you, Bill. Three years in your role as Chair, have your views of the role, the priorities, the focus of the board changed?
I'd answer that in two ways. First of all, there's a part of the board's role that is consistent year in and year out. The board's always going to want to be engaged in approving strategy, overseeing the approval of large CapEx, M&A projects. RSA was a great example. The board was engaged in active conversations with the management team reviewing the potential acquisition for six years and had incredible visibility into the risks involved, the mitigation strategies of those risks. At the end of the day, as that's unfolded, I think that has been an excellent example of really good planning between the board and the management. Oversee execution of strategy, talent management and succession, key topic, risk management broadly defined, and overall governance. Those are always going to be there year in and year out.
The other second level of oversight, I think, does change. It is based on a dynamic view of the world. It has been mentioned this morning that the strategy process starts with an external view and that those trends can impact strategy. A good example being the recent geopolitical turmoil as well as AI and key risks such as cyber, both at an enterprise level and underwriting level, but also climate. If you look at what we were talking about actively three years ago and what we are likely to be talking about in another two years' time, those will change and the emphasis will change as a result.
Thank you, Bill. Bill discussed talent management a little bit. You're Chair of the HRC. There's been a lot of change in the senior management of the organization in the last year, more than usual, I would say, with Ken stepping in as CFO with change and Emmanuel stepping in as CEO of her GSL business, Nadia and Lynn, President of their respective jurisdiction. What's the role of the board in terms of succession? What position are you looking at or directly involved?
Thank you. It is very good to be here. Let me start off by saying our job is really at the top CEO succession. At the very outset, let me say the CEO has no intention to retire. The question we get most often asked by investors is CEO succession. Let me say that the board spends every quarter, if you will, on succession planning. I say very broadly. While we have a special focus on CEO, the board is also very focused on looking at succession planning for the regional CEOs and for all of the EVPs within the organization. The process that we use for CEO succession very much is the process that is employed broadly in the organization. Management has a very robust framework for succession, obviously, in the organization.
What the board does is really to dovetail with the management framework. We recognize that it's our people that deliver on the outperformance. And so the process for succession is very comprehensive.
And Indira, can I ask you to be a bit more specific, like how you go about planning the succession?
It starts with the profile. We know what skills and abilities we are looking for in successors. In the case of the CEO, the board recently refreshed that profile, particularly given the material changes to the size and the scope of our business. It is really important to refresh it regularly, as we did, and to ensure that the candidates we are considering are well equipped, not just for now, but into the future. Hence, updating the profile is really looking at where the future lies. Next step is, of course, identifying candidates, not just those who are ready now, but ready over the medium and longer term. Here we are talking five to ten years, looking more broadly over a long horizon and reviewing potential candidate moves over that medium and longer term to assess potential paths to readiness.
Also, the next one, of course, is in the case of the CEO, we actually go one step further. We envision a team for any particular candidate and look at what development needs for not just the individual who would become our CEO, but for the team that might potentially surround that particular CEO choice. We then build development plans. This is where the gaps get fulfilled. We do everything from job rotations to training to education and mentoring. Of course, the plans will also involve 360 assessments with the help of expert consultants. The board's role is to ensure that we follow up on executing those plans. Finally, even though the HR committee does a lot of this work, ultimately, it's the board's role with respect to particularly CEO succession.
We would normally make sure that not only does the board get exposed to senior management as part of board meetings, but there's a deliberate strategy of bringing certain people to present their work to the board so that we get that longer-term view five to ten years out.
Do you feel good about the succession and the bench strength?
Yeah, we feel very good, actually, because all of the work that's been done is demonstrating how the plan is evolving. We also feel good because the expansion of the company over ten years has done a lot to grow our talent pool and help with talent management. The pool is deeper than it's ever been for all executive positions in the organization, including, obviously, at the CEO level. Our talent model is now truly global. From all the presentations you heard, you can see how the company's footprint has grown. We leverage human capital from all the regions. We've got many more opportunities, I would say, to develop talent than we had ten years ago. Let me give you an example. Think about Ken Anderson stepping in as CFO. Ken had pretty much touched all the functions within the finance team.
There is no doubt that putting him in the CFO role for U.K. and Ireland business was a unique way to finish his apprenticeship. We also have enhanced our ability to recruit externally because the company's visibility has improved. We are known as an attractive company to recruit. The addition of Nadia Coté, from whom you heard this morning, was another great example of this. Finally, just looking at the big picture, I would say that the board has a view that we have the talent and expertise to capture the opportunities that are out there, also including in the context of large M&A.
Thank you, Indira. Bill shall mention at the beginning and the end through the big trends that we are looking at and incorporating in our strategy, customer expectation, data, AI, climate, geopolitical and societal issue, and talent management. How does the board work to make sure that these are incorporated into our strategy? Do you have examples of a few issues that you've looked at in the last year?
Yeah, so I'd say as a starting point, in every board meeting, strategy and corporate development are important topics. We design the agendas to make sure we have plenty of time for those discussions. The annual review that we talked about earlier starts with an external view. That external view is done pretty rigorously and analytically. The key objective there is to hone the company's competitive advantages. There is a very clear understanding of why the company is achieving the ROE results that it's achieving, why it's achieving the NOIPS growth that it's achieving. It's based on competitive advantages that are sustainable. The question is, how do those trends impact or enhance those competitive advantages? That's a key part of the strategy discussion. The last 18 months, Fred, you asked about the key trends.
We've spent a lot of time looking at the impact, long-term impact of generative AI, climate change in particular, and the increasingly turbulent geopolitical environment, starting with the Ukraine conflict, but more recently on the tariff issues.
If you take the last one, the tariff issue and the current political situation, what do you do exactly in the boardroom?
Yeah, so on geopolitics, let me just start by saying I know on the recent earnings calls, the management team has talked about the impact of geopolitics on the business. I think you will recall, for example, on claims cost, very marginal impact, only 7% of the claims cost structure is impacted by tariffs. Nonetheless, at the board level, we've really been spending a lot of time in that in recent meetings, in particular helping think through and designing stress tests. It's a useful way of looking at the impact on the business and looking at it from the standpoint of insurance risk, operational risk, asset management, portfolio issues, large-scale capital deployment, M&A. The conclusion that we have come to at this point in time is there's no need for fundamental change to long-term strategy. We're really comfortable with the direction the company's heading in.
That is predicated on the board having substantial internal expertise, as well as we brought geopolitical consultants into the boardroom to help us think this through. No change to long-term strategy. I think the stress testing has demonstrated to us the resilience of the business is really well defined. It will enable the company to play offense and continue to grow in the future, notwithstanding this turbulence.
Thanks, Bill. We saw a great presentation from Isabelle, Antoine, and Patrick earlier on AI. When we think about AI in general, how does the board contribute to outperformance?
The board composition, you may have recalled or you may recall that Stuart Russell joined our board a number of years ago. Stuart's a leading world expert on AI. That was a very deliberate step as we realized in the future AI is going to play an incredibly important role in the evolution of the business and strategy. All of the board is engaged in that discussion. As Isabelle and her team outlined this morning, predictive AI has been a function and a factor in the business for the last ten years with hundreds of models in production. That's a normal course of operation. The focus of the board on that is much more on the governance level. The 2018 governance framework, Isabelle and her team periodically report to the board on those issues. Generative AI, much more recent development, significant future potential.
The role of the board thus far has been in, again, at the governance level, looking at the guardrails, specifically looking to protect confidential data, protect IP, and figure out how to deal with model bias and how to focus our resources. Where do we want to put money? What are the priorities? Is it the customer experience or efficiency or some combination of both of those?
Thank you, Bill. Maybe one final question, Bill. The insurance industry has been in the news quite a bit because of CAT event in the last few years, including obviously the wildfire in Los Angeles at the beginning of the year. I assume the board thinks quite a bit about the long-term profitability of our personal property business and generally the availability of the product in the Canadian market.
Yeah, good question. First of all, this is a great business, right? It's had strong profitability and combined ratio performance for many, many years, personal property Canada in particular, that I'm going to talk about because that's where a lot of the climate and CAT disruption occurred in the last couple of years. In 2023 and 2024 in Canada, strong reminder of climate change. The board engaged with the management team specifically on where's this business going in the next 15 years? Can we be satisfied that it's got the same incredible potential looking into the future? The takeaways really were two or threefold. First, the company has very, very, very deep expertise in climate, arguably one of the centers of excellence in Canada on this topic. Impressive modeling capabilities.
Second, this is going to remain a highly profitable and attractive business for the company going forward through product modification and design, through the strength of pricing tools that the company has, and through adaptation both by the policyholder and at various levels of government. Canadians are going to consistently need protection. The irony of this is as the climate deteriorates, the need for this product goes up. The key is for the company to manage this effectively as they have in the past. This is not a California situation. Canada's got a pretty deep competitive field. We do not foresee any gaps in Canada occurring in the future. Final two comments. Balance sheet and tail risk is well protected through our reinsurance program.
Last but not least, Charles leads an effort within the company with government at the municipal, provincial, and the federal level for adaptation, which is going to be key in the future.
Thank you, Bill. Thanks, Indira.
Okay, great. Folks, we're on the home straight. Hello again. You've heard about the growth and margin expansion pillars of the game plan for NOIPS growth. Now we'll talk about the final pillar, capital deployment and investments. At Intact, I would say capital management, capital deployment, and investment management are core competencies. They've fueled NOIPS growth over the past decade. When we look at the type of capital we've generated through our operations over the last ten years, it amounts to about CAD 12 billion. When we couple that with the support that we've had from capital markets, together, we've had close to CAD 20 billion of capital to deploy. We have deployed that in line with our capital management framework. Dividends and organic growth have left us with about CAD 12 billion that we've deployed on M&A.
That $12 billion has generated four points of the NOIPS CAGR over the last decade. The good news is the platform is really set up to grow and deliver beyond that in the years ahead. When we take a look at our capabilities through 2030, conservatively, very conservatively, we see line of sight on north of $15 billion in capital being generated from the operations. As the balance sheet grows, we anticipate being able to add close to $5 billion in leverage to maintain our target leverage ratio, which gives us approximately $20 billion, in fact, north of $20 billion we expect to deploy. That is deployed in line with our capital management framework. Werner and myself will take you through that framework and the backdrop in which we will invest over the next five, six years.
It starts with managing volatility, managing the balance sheet, ensuring the balance sheet is strong, and ensuring that we have the ability not only to be defensive, but to play offense at all times. If you take a few scenarios, excess catastrophes similar to 2024 where we had CAD 600 million, that absorbed approximately 20% of the capital margin. A significant market shock similar to COVID absorbed less than one-third of the capital margin. With the earnings power that we have, we're now in a zone of generating significant replenishment and rebuilding of capital over time. If we look at a scenario in the current macro environment of a prolonged trade war, we anticipate that we're in the zone of being able to deploy up to CAD 10 billion of capital on M&A in that scenario. Very well positioned.
As I said, investment management is an important pillar. I'll ask our EVP Head of Investment and Capital Management, Werner Mülemann, to talk about investments and some of the other pillars of capital deployment strategy.
Managing volatility does not stop here. Actually, our investment income is also a good source of earnings that we can count on. It is coming from a well-crafted investment strategy. Actually, if we combine our distribution income and our investment income, they now represent over CAD 2 billion of pre-tax earnings annually. Over the last ten years, we have grown our investment income at the clip of 14% per year on average. This has approximately resulted in about 50% of the operating income. In addition, it also contributes to other financial objectives. The investment strategies have added over 120 basis points of ROE gap outperformance. This comes from a combination of active management, where our own portfolio managers exceed their respective benchmark, and asset allocation, where we optimize the allocation to our different strategies to the constraints and needs of Intact, including tax, capital, and our risk appetite.
Our CAD 41 billion portfolio is well balanced. It is balanced with essentially a strong fixed income portfolio that has highly graded corporate bonds, government securities. We add to that dividend-paying securities, high-quality preferred shares. Finally, we diversify away with some private debt and a small real estate strategy. The key success to this investment strategy is our internal investment management capability. We have a team of over 80 professionals, including our operations, that focus day in, day out to protecting the capital for good times and bad times while outperforming the industry. The second key pillar to our capital deployment framework is leverage. We target a debt-to-total capital of approximately 20%. We believe this is where we optimize the cost of capital while continuing to have a good credit rating. It gives an uplift to our ROE and maintains a strong balance sheet.
However, we'll be ready to increase that leverage from time to time for M&A purposes, knowingly that we generate a lot of capital and we'll get back to that target within a few years. You can see how we have done that in the past while growing our book value per share at the pace of our earnings growth. Increasing our dividend annually is also a key part of our core pillar in our capital deployment framework. We have a dividend yield of approximately 2%, coming with a payout ratio of about 30%. We believe that's quite respectable for a company that's been growing its earning base at a double-digit growth rate. The key focus here for us is really the consistency at which we can increase that dividend annually. We have increased it 16 times since 2009, growing it on average by 10% per year.
Continuing to return capital to shareholders through dividends will be a clear focus. In no way does that prevent us to grow or to hit our other financial objectives. Let's talk about capital deployment and growth. Our first priority here is organic growth. The question we often get is, is capital a constraint to organic growth? Simple answer is no. If we take an example of where we would be growing the business at the clip of 10% per year, we would still have 70% of the capital generated after paying dividends, which would be available for external opportunities. This is because our return on regulated capital is actually very strong and more than covers the needs for organic growth. Our focus is simple.
Every day we wake up and we focus on growing the business as fast as possible, increasing the premium level, and at the same time, maintaining or improving our margins. Knowing that we have limited capital needed for organic growth, there is ample capital still available to deploy for M&A. In the last decade, we've deployed over CAD 10 billion in capital, bringing in-house over CAD 11 billion of direct return premium and welcoming 12,000 employees. Those acquisitions have redefined strategically who we are. We've expanded to the US, U.K., and Europe through those acquisitions, going from a Canadian leadership position to a leading global insurer. On average, all these acquisitions have generated an internal rate of return of approximately 20%. How do we get to this IR track record? Two focuses. First is our discipline in dealmaking.
Second is really how we think about integration and how we make a successful integration. Our value creation goes way beyond just combining two businesses and having expense synergies. We actually leverage our core competencies, which you've heard about today, to improve the profitability of the businesses we acquire. Examples that you've seen today are in segmentation, where we use data and AI, optimizing the investment portfolio, or leveraging our great supply chain to decrease costs. We've kind of demonstrated our expertise and how we can now export this expertise of M&A across the globe. We have done so. Two good examples of this are really our US and UK transaction, where we have shown that we are capable of improving the profitability of that business through successful integration.
The best way to look at it is looking at the combined ratio four or five years after the transaction and how we have improved in those segments. These are two segments where we had limited cost synergies. This gives a good view a bit of how we can continue to expand through M&A. We have talked about past acquisition. Let's talk about the future. I have mentioned we have expanded geographically quite a bit. This brings in a ton of new opportunities. Actually, our sandbox for M&A has grown tenfold in the last ten years. In each of these regions, we are outperforming the industry. We can and want to grow in all these regions. In Canada, while we are a leader by market share, we still see ample opportunity to grow. Clearly, our ambition remains to serve one out of three Canadians.
An acquisition would clearly help towards that goal. In the U.K., we have transformed the organization to be a top commercial lines insurer. We have less than 10% market share. There again, we see ample opportunity to grow. Finally, global specialty lines, not much to say, except that the opportunity is just enormous. We have a lot of runway to continue to grow through M&A transactions. We also have the financial capability to do so. This is what Ken will demonstrate in the next few minutes.
Thank you, Werner. Yes, so a massive addressable market. As we have talked about earlier, ability to do successful M&A across multiple geographies and running in multiple geographies now at mid-teens ROEs, and outperforming everywhere. As I said at the outset, using conservative assumptions, we see line of sight on north of CAD 20 billion in capital generation through 2030 and available to deploy. When we look at allocating for dividends and organic growth, we will have north of CAD 10 billion to deploy at target leverage. When we look at our hurdle rates north of 15% IRR and deploying capital in that context, we see line of sight of north of three points of NOIPS through 2030 deploying in the CAD 10 billion plus zone. As I said, that is at target leverage.
If we look to further leverage the capital market support and the great support that we've had over the years through debt, additional debt, and/or equity financing, that's where we see line of sight of taking the NOIPS from capital deployment north of 4%. It's not just manufacturing M&A now that's open to us. We've shown that we've grown distribution income from less than $100 million in 2014 to now north of $500 million. We certainly are aiming to grow at a CAGR of north of 10% in the years ahead. We have less than 20% market share of the brokered business in Canada. We also have a pipeline with global specialty lines. We've deployed $300 million since 2020 in MGAs in global specialty lines.
That is another avenue now for us to continue to grow, deliver distribution income, and aid on the top line and profitability side of the business. Distribution in itself has contributed a point to NOIPS growth over the last decade. We see line of sight for it to continue to contribute a point or more in the years ahead. The last leg of the framework is share buybacks. Here, they are not a priority. We have deployed a modest amount over the last decade, but at an average share price of CAD 150. We know they are dilutive to book value per share, but they can be accretive. They are accretive to operating income per share and to ROE. As I say, not a priority, but a useful lever if no line of sight on M&A.
We anticipate a CAD 1 billion share buyback, adding about a point to NOIPS over time. To just bring it all together, let's say in a base case scenario, and I would call it a pessimistic scenario, leveraging just distribution and buybacks, we see gives us capability of north of two points of NOIPS growth through 2030. With the support of capital deployment on M&A, be it distribution, but also large-scale manufacturing, with the track record that we have to integrate and successfully deliver our IRRs well north of CAD 15, that's where line of sight above four points comes from. Hopefully this morning, you've enjoyed the presentations.
We've set out, I think, quite clearly the game plan in terms of organic growth, delivering in the zone of six points to the NOIPS ambition, then margin expansion coming from data, AI, pricing, risk selection, together with claims of approximately two points. I'd point out here that we have flexibility. Depending on market conditions, depending on segment profitability, we can oscillate or toggle between top line and margin expansion. All in, we see line of sight on close to and approximately eight points. With the capital deployment, two to north of four, that's where we land on being quite confident and excited about the opportunities ahead and our ability to deliver that double-digit NOIPS over time. As I said, we're all pretty excited. One person that does not get too excited is our CEO, Charles Brindamour.
I think even maybe this morning, he might have some excitement from what he's heard.
It's an inside joke. We cannot use the word excited. You've used it like four times in the presentation. Hopefully you've gained this morning a better appreciation for what success looks like, how we get there, and some of the people we have to deliver the goods over the next decade plus. It's the people part that makes a huge difference. I do think we have a people advantage at Intact, a highly competitive, values-driven culture where we've built a best employer. A best employer means you can provide a better experience to customers and brokers. It's a great place to work. It drives loyalty.
Loyalty is very important when you want to build a competitive advantage, when you want to build a long-term track record of success, when you think in decades, this is a mission-critical element to our strategy. Second, we think we have a people advantage in terms of being a destination for top talent. We're working really hard on that, developing our people, attracting new people. The depth is very strong. We're promoting for all managers across Intact, three quarters of promotions come from within. When I look at the top 250 roles in the organization, the roles that I'm very focused on, we have five successors for each of those roles ready with entry years in average.
That is good because when you look at the sort of numbers that Candace talked about, you need talent to support those opportunities and to make sure that you generate the sort of return, that the culture is moving rapidly towards the values of Intact and so on, as we have demonstrated in the previous transactions. We invest a lot in our people to make sure that they thrive at all parts of the journey. We invest in training. We move people a fair bit, not only to develop them, but to bring a fresh perspective and people who can challenge the status quo throughout the operations of Intact.
A big advantage, as far as I'm concerned, and a really important element to allow us to be successful in delivering the objectives that we've laid out and growing the business in a fashion that's comparable to what we've done in the last decade. Lots of opportunities right here at home. A market that's almost three times the size in the U.K. where performance is really strong. Global specialty lines, where we already outperform and have all the capabilities we need, is the big driver that has led to our opportunity set to be 10 times bigger than where we were a decade ago. Hopefully you have a degree of confidence that the odds of hitting our financial objectives are in our favor.
I think what we haven't talked about, but as an investor in myself, which I consider very important, is the fact that not only is Intact a values-driven organization, which means that the risk of running into sharp objects, in my mind, is much narrower. Equally important, we're an open and honest team. You can see that in our disclosure. You see that when you exchange with us. That is a core part of Intact. Finally, we do what we say we'll do. That is what investing with Intact means. On that, I think we can maybe take a few questions. I'll pass the gizmo back to Geoff.
Thank you, Charles. Yeah, so we'll do Q&A. We ask if you're in the room, limit your questions to two. If you're online, you can submit online on the bottom. I see Steve got a question right there.
Thanks, Steve Bolland, Raymond James.
Yeah, it was one.
This is a question, maybe or two questions. First is one of the first slides you had was expanding Canada. I presume that's beyond just brokers and MGAs. You used to talk about a certain amount of market share in manufacturing that changed hands every year. I do not know if that has happened. It seems very quiet. I am just wondering how you expand on the manufacturing side.
Do you want to share? Sorry. Anyone that we have speaking on the team, if you can come on stage, that would be great.
Yeah, sure. I think, I mean, it's a disciplined approach. I mean, in every geographic region, we essentially have a number of companies that we follow. It's pretty much the whole industry, which we kind of look at two folds. One, the strategic fit. We study those companies. It's being ready. At the end of the day, it's being ready. RSA is a good example. Worked on it for many years before it actually happened. In Canada, we are ready. You're right that lately there hasn't been any transaction. If there is to be done any transaction, we are ready to do so.
I think, Stephen, we've had that conversation for the last 20 years, I feel. And we've done a bunch of deals. We used to say 20%-30% would change hands. I think if you look at the makeup of the industry today, there's lots of opportunities. There's over 100 insurance groups. It's still super fragmented, being more than twice the size of number two. Two and a half times the size of the top five shows the fragmentation that exists in the market. The ownership is also very different. There's a great degree of fragmentation and diversity in the ownership. We have a view and relationships with the owners. We have a view of the right entry point as well. There's actionable and too expensive. Then there's non-actionable now. Then there's never actionable.
The first two buckets are pretty substantial as far as I'm concerned. We have lots of room to grow. We can buy the competitor. There's no limit to our next acquisition in terms of growth. It's a question of time, as we've shown in the past. The upshot is now, though, that we have other places we can deploy capital and therefore a much richer M&A opportunity set. I'm convinced we'll see Canada consolidate some more in the next five to ten years.
Second question, since you dated me, I'll just say 15, 20 years ago, the MGA channel was a very hot commodity here in Canada and other jurisdictions. Some companies got hurt. That channel kind of, I wouldn't say dissipated, but the hype definitely went out of it. Since the hard market in the last six, seven years, whatever you want to count it, that has seen tremendous growth in the US and in Canada with you taking ownership. What has changed there that's made this channel more desirable to enter and to own?
Yeah. I think that people get burned in the MGA channel when they give the pen, when they use other parties' products, and when they're essentially a balance sheet. That is a fundamental difference with how we've approached the MGA business. We haven't been historically a big player in the MGA space because we just don't like to let others price our product. What has changed? Two things have changed. One, we are good at managing distribution now. Where 10, 15 years ago, we were not really in the business of managing distribution, now I think it's a core competency of ours. We can therefore manage MGAs, earn distribution profit from it, align the incentives between the insurer and the MGA. They're easy to align where it's the same owner.
The other big element that's changed is that we're a deep specialist in the global specialty line space now. MGAs are specialists per se. Why have MGAs become attractive to us now beyond the fact that we love distribution? They allow us to deepen our specialty and our expertise in the field. They allow us to add relationships because MGAs are intermediaries of intermediaries. They have brokers submitting business to them because they have access to markets. When we say we want to expand our distribution relationships, there are a number of ways you can do that. You can do more with the existing brokers you have. You can add brokers, or you can buy MGAs and add brokers in the exercise.
What's changed for us is that because of global specialty lines and because of our distribution expertise, this is far more interesting than it was historically. Where we do not own the MGA, we control pricing, we control product, and we control claims. Otherwise, it's very hard to outperform.
Next question, any from the room? Maybe we'll do Paul first, I know, because he had it in the first session.
Thanks. Two questions. First on U.K. and I, I did note that the premium target is two times what you are currently. There was no number put behind that yet. Pretty much every other segment, I see a nice number on the 2030 target.
We don't want to mess with the foreign exchange problem.
OK. I just want to know, was I reading too much into that, or was that intentional? So you would have a target, though, in pounds?
Ken, do you want to? I was joking. It's not foreign exchange. Do you want to comment on that, Ken?
Ken, sorry. If you come up on stage, they ask.
Sorry. It's invisible. Yeah. I guess we have to be mindful. There's a bit of overlap between the U.K. and I, the reported branch, and the GSL business. Ken was talking with the 2.7 is the existing U.K. and I footprint. That's where we talk about being able to double that. That'll come from a combination of the U.K. commercial business, the Irish business, but also the expansion of the global specialty lines business as it pertains to London market and Europe.
Got it. Second question. When Louis presented, he brought up a really interesting fact. Market share on premiums written is 18%, but share of profits 25%. Does that change at all the way you think about market share targets in Canada over time? Very long period of time, we talked about sort of an objective of 25%-30%.
Are you changing the way you're thinking about that 25%-30%? Is the profitability more important than the premiums?
No. I think that our perspective is that Louis, do you want to answer that question? OK. Our perspective is that we can have a relationship with one entry Canadian. It's a highly competitive marketplace. Therefore, we do not feel that there is an antitrust barrier to get in that zone, after which it is primarily organic growth. If you outperform by 5% of combined ratio, as we have in the past and as Louis has laid out as an objective, you will naturally get to a higher share of the underwriting profit pool. We do not want to use that as an objective per se. I think it is simpler for our employees to say, guys, 5% of combined ratio outperformance. They have a good sense of the CAD 25 billion overall target. Outperformance does that. 27% is an average.
There were a year where it was higher than that. The higher we can make it, the better. If the ROE is north of 15%, it's a balance between when you want to create value and you're far from your cost of capital, it's a balance between how much growth and how much bottom line do I want. Therefore, an overall underwriting profit pool target, in my mind, not sure necessarily helpful. It is good as a visual to realize that our market share of the profit is much bigger.
Jaeme, I think you are next.
Thanks. Question is on the organic premium growth target of 6% over the next five years. That's accelerated from what we've seen in the past from prior investor days where it's more around 3% and even the historical track record from an organic growth perspective. Is there a shift in your view of the competitive landscape, the ability to push price, the ability to gain share today or over the next five years that's different than what we've seen in Intact's markets previously?
I think the point is the 10X size of the opportunity, I think. You are in a zone where the combined ratio performance in global specialty lines and on the other side of the Atlantic in the U.K. is really good. We are small in these markets. Therefore, if we cannot generate earnings growth in that zone by growing one customer and one broker at a time, I do not think we are doing our job well. I feel like this will come back to haunt me. Therefore, the size of the opportunity is much bigger in my mind. There are obvious organic growth opportunities that should be able to fuel that sort of performance. I want to point out that Ken said there was a bracket on the last slide that said 6 and 2. We have flexibility.
I mean, this is to give you a sense of direction and to also highlight how you get to 10% NOIPS growth if you've got three times more earnings to start with. Will it be 6 and 2 and 4 and 4? Likely to be in the upper single-digit sort of range. We think the organic growth muscle needs to pay off more. The fact that the ROE is in the upper teen zone at this stage, this is where you want to make sure that your organic growth muscle are delivering.
Any other questions within the room? Trying to see. I guess if there's no questions, just want to say on behalf of everyone here at Intact, thank you for joining us today. I would say just in particular, I want to thank the teams that helped get all of us, the presenters, ready for today, including the event planning team. Specifically, if I can make a call out to the incredible work of the investor relations team in terms of putting this all together. Reminder, we've got a lunch outside in the foyer. You can, like I said, mix and mingle with the execs that we had here today. Again, we've got in the back gallery over there is the AI demo booth. If you didn't see it this morning, please go to it. It's an absolutely fantastic display of how we're incorporating AI into our business.
Thank you very much. That does conclude our Investor Day.