Discovery Limited (PDI.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our results presentation. It's always a great pleasure and an honor to present Discovery results to you. This is for the full year ended 30 June 2024. I'm joined by our key executives online here with me, Deon Viljoen, our CFO, is with me here. And I will do the presentation. We'll then take questions afterwards, which David Danilowitz will host and direct. He's also sitting here with me. But we're all here [indiscernible] to deal with issues as the presentation ends. Let me first say, and in fact, I say it every year, and I hope it doesn't sound trite, but it has been a very complex year, but it's been a good year with Discovery and I think a very, very important too. And I hope that comes through in the presentation. We released our results earlier this morning, and we released a trading update, I think, last week but I have to -- the numbers are now clear. It's been a robust year for our group normalized operating profit up 17%, as you can see, strong new business growth up 18%, normalized headline earnings up 15% and headline earnings up 7%, as you can see on the chart. And I hope through the presentation, I'll give you a sense of all the dynamics behind the numbers. I want to, at the outset, just thank our Discovery people who have worked incredibly hard over this year to achieve what they have done. It has been a remarkable year. To begin with, I do want to just provide some context. It's a risky volatile environment we operate in. We operate in multiple countries. I think the general themes have been moderate GDP growth slowing inflation with high rates of interest, obviously, given the Fed's announcement last night, and we'll see later today here in South Africa. There is hopefully an easy coming in terms of interest rates. But interestingly, in every market we operate in, we are specific dynamics that affect us and we have to manage very, very carefully. In the U.K., of course, NHS and its challenges, creates a fundamental dynamic. In China, slowing economy relative to the pass rates, other dynamics. In South Africa, considerable change taking place. Obviously, in the U.S., the election coming up. So a lot of different factors taking place. I wanted to make the point, and I hope it's evident in our numbers and in our performance. We are not traders. We're operators. We don't have views on any one issue. We are building our business on a robust basis. We use very careful risk principles around matching assets and liabilities, matching currencies, not taking interest rate. So while things ebb and flow I'd like to think that our business is robust. I think you see that in these results. Some up, some are down, some are complex, but in the main, the growth has come through. And I think that, that approach to managing risk carefully has been a very, very important one during this period. I do want to say just a few comments on South Africa. So I think ironically, it has been a very, very important here, and it's turned out to be very, very good. And I think a few comments are worthwhile. The first is I am proud of the business government partnership, they are all Discovery's played and colleagues in all other businesses together with government have made a massive impact on the country. We built a partnership on a very simple hypothesis that a focus on 3 distinct things: energy, obviously, given load-shedding; transport and logistics, getting good support and exporting them is critical; and of course, climate correction. And the hypothesis of getting those to you right would turn the fulcrum for economic growth has been at the heart of that partnership and the belief in the potential of the country. I think the progress in just over a year has been remarkable. We've seen kind of the -- almost the end of load shedding, hopefully, that remains. But it's an amazing signature event of that partnership and the incredible work done by both business and government in that regard. Illustrate certainly to me, and I hope my colleagues that we can make a change very, very quickly. We can create growth and hopefully that continues. The second question of course is GNU, and I think that talks to the attributes of our country, a good faith of 75% of people voting in the center for a constitutional approach for a market economy, et cetera. And then finally, of course, now touching that the complexities of the NHI. Of course, the narrative is complex and often conflictual, but I believe we can engage and work and find ways through, and I'll talk on that later in the presentation. So let me get to the results themselves and kind of frame them in 4 distinct categories. I'd like to talk about performance, I think, is strong and illustrate that to you. I think the central thesis or the central message I'd like to get across to you is that the group is entering a different life cycle in our growth. It's a very different phase of high growth, we believe in cash generation. Hopefully, that will come through. I want to evidence that to you in terms of the organic growth model and why that takes place. I then want to show you how we organized our group into 2 distinct businesses, Discovery South Africa and Vitality Limited, which is global and how we see them playing out and then dig into them into the various businesses and the specific performance. I'm not going to go through every single issue. There's a lot of information in the pack. So I'll try and point out the different issues, but I'd like to give you a sense of the strategic issues at play and how we think about them, and I hope I get that across to you. So let me start with the performance. You saw the headline numbers, operating performance up 17%. New business up 18%. When you break it down to the -- at this stage 3 composites because in the previous year, we're still in 3 businesses; Discovery South Africa, Vitality U.K. and Vitality Global. You can see how it's played out. Discovery South Africa, I think, had an excellent robust performance. All of our businesses were robust. Discovery, the bank performed exceptionally well across every single metric in short turnaround in the last 6 months, and that's important. Vitality, you've had a difficult year. And I need to juxtapose the actual positioning of Vitality U.K., which I think is exceptional in the U.K., with the financial performance was affected by 2 specific things that we believe will bounce back, but not simple, and I'd like to take you through that. And then, of course, Vitality Global, we have an excellent performance, Ping An Health, really, really growing strongly, commencing a dividend, which is important not just in terms of financial effect, but I think the phase of where the business is and this cash generation illustrates the strength of what's taking place. And then Vitality Network, growing very, very strongly as well. That is potentially for us a very, very powerful blue sky, ability to globalize the Vitality model with our partners and more we say later. So that really gives you a sense of the dynamics of the performance and I will delve a bit deeper. So to show you a sense of the capital strength of the group and cash generation, these are metrics that we always show. You can see that our leverage is coming down. All of our entities are strongly capitalized. Cash conversion is improving. You can see liquidity at the center is strong and that's important. But I want to delve down into these numbers in a slightly different way and give you a sense of what the dynamics behind them because I think fundamentally, the group is in different space now. I want to explain why. Just a small point, the leverage coming down slightly flatting in the period. We did take a view. You can see that in the in the center liquidity. We had a refinancing requirement later in the year. And we took a view given the election that we should actually -- we should kind of prepare for that early. So while we are, as you know, an optimistic focused company, we kind of plan, we hope for the best but very much planned for the downside and therefore raised debt early in terms of that event. So slight flattening of the ebb flow that will continue to decline over time. But you see that slight bloating in the center of liquidity. That's just a prefunding of that event. So we're very comfortable with the capital position of the group and the cash generation, but I want to delve into that a bit deeper. The EV obviously is a pretty clean, I think, strong performance, annualized return on EV over 13% growth, and EV about 12%. You can see it growing from ZAR 98.2 billion to just over ZAR 110 billion made up of good value of new business, positive experience variances, the unwind of the discount rate and in fact, not dramatic effects on the economic side. Just a reconciliation and Deon, you might speak to this a bit later, just a reconciliation from the normalized operating profit. I made the point up 17% down to profit before the fair value gains on swaption still at 17%. The real 2 dynamics that affect going from 17% down to the 15% normalized headline earnings is the previous year's swaption, it was a hedging instrument that we realized that won't recur. It was value created in the previous period that bloats the previous number, and that reduces the profit before tax from 17% down to 11%. And then the closure of businesses in the U.K. had a cost. We took that cost on a churn in the operating profit, but the accounting standards require us to add that back in from the headline adjusting numbers. And so that number is added and again, boost up the base. So the headline earnings is up 7%. We normalize the effect of the swaption out giving you a normalized headline earnings up 15%. The dividend is actually a very simple mathematical calculation. We've been pretty clear about the dividend cover of 5x, and we're applying that kind of clinically in this approach with a simple view of taking the normalized headline earnings divided by 5, making that per share and deducting off the interim dividend, that gave us ZAR 1.52 per share. So strong growth in the dividend, I think, reflecting growth in the underlying normalized headline earnings, obviously, will also be getting to the 5x cover, and that's important, of course, going forward, I'll touch on that in a moment. So hopefully, that's kind of a simple review of the numbers that are very high level. But I think more importantly, I wanted to give you a sense of what I think is important about the operating performance of the group and where we are in the phase of growth and I guess to put to you that we believe we're entering a new phase of growth so if you look at where we are today, you go through the actual underlying key KPIs earnings growth percentage spend on you, and that's an important number given that we're organically grown. Cash conversion, return on equity, leverage, FLR, the dividend cover, you can see where we are, 17%, the spending moves down to 8%, et cetera. The group has performed significantly better than in the past period, as you can see. So on the left-hand side, you can say our earnings growth has been at about 9% compound over that period 2016 to 2022, and I tell you why I think that's important in a moment but you can see a dramatic difference in that performance. But going forward I wanted to give you a clear sense of we believe where we're headed. We are confident that we can grow earnings at between 15% to 20% for the next 5 years. Spend on new initiatives will come down to about 5%. Cash conversion will stay at 60% to 70% level. ROE should escalate to 15% to 20% as our new initiatives come through. Gearing should come down to between 10% and 20%. Absolute debt should come down as we repay the debt. But the business, the group gets bigger and that also brings it down. Our mathematics show that leverage at about 15% is probably the optimal point. So we should be at that kind of level as we go forward. And then dividend cover, we should be in a strong position. So 5x is our guidance so we're putting 5x or less as we go forward, and we'll see how that plays out. But of course, at a 5x rate, the dividend itself should grow at the earnings growth rate. So we are confident that the dividend itself will grow strongly going forward. So kind of that's where we are. That's where we've been and that's where we're heading. And I think that hopefully tells the story. Of course, the question is why? So let me just go to the evolution of our earnings over the last kind of 2 decades or so. We've chosen this period quite carefully. This is the earnings evolution or the emergence of earnings from 2006 to 2024. The first lens is just for completeness, looking through the IFRS 4 to IFRS 17 and the COVID period, which you will know. COVID locked down the earnings quite significantly. We bounced back strongly and have continued to grow. That's one clear issue that I guess you will know. The other is IFRS 4 to IFRS 17. We made the point that the IFRS 17 would take us back somewhat. But in a few years, we've crossed that line, and I think we've done that quite clearly, as you can see in the slide. So hopefully, that gives you a sense of the operating performance and how things have evolved through that lens. But I think more importantly, and this is the point we made, I think we've been in 3 distinct phases of growth, and that's a function of our operating model. We would call the period pre-2015 kind of unsettled organic growth. It's exceptionally strong. We grew at 22% per annum compound and I'll show you some of the dynamics underpinning that in a moment. And then we went through a phase where we started making big investments, particularly at Discovery Bank, and the growth averaged 9.1% over that period from 2016 to 2023. And then now we've got to today's phase. And the point I made earlier, we expect growth going forward over 5 years to be between 15% to 20%. So let me just give you some rationale on these phases and why we believe we're in a different phase. The first point to make is that building a business, certainly organically, invariably involves this very famous S curve on the left-hand side. You start out, you go into kind of the value of death as people call it often, but the J shape of the curve and then you start to grow very quickly and you get this really rapid growth. And over time, you start to plateau and the kind of 2 inflection points turning from a loss and turning from high growth to plateauing somewhat. That's inevitable of a well-run business. And in the extreme, the better the business the more the inevitability of the plateau because ultimately, if you get to the size of the economy, you can only grow the GDP growth rate. So at some point, you're going to plateau. The question is how do you grow? That's an existential issue. Many companies grow through acquisitions, so essentially layering growth above that plateau, and that's successful in many cases. In any case, it isn't, it's expensive, et cetera. Our approach has been organic growth. And the organic growth has been built on our conviction of our business model. The Vitality shared value model you can see on the right-hand side of the chart, the data that we have created an incredibly compelling set of economics in terms of better selection, better persistency, lower claims, the causal effect of behavior change and the inherent profitability, be it life health claims, life health insurer or banking or whatever. We have a deep conviction about what we set out to do and the data tends to back that up. So the key thing is you can't grow organically unless you have a repeatable scalable model. This model is repeatable in different adjacencies, health, life insurance. It's repeatable globally, that's what we've seen. So our approach has been to actually grow organically, not to make acquisitions. I guess you know all of this. But the point I guess to make is that growing organically is not a smooth process. To an extent, if you get this right, we'd like to be on the shoulder of that curve at very high levels of growth where we can achieve it. But it isn't that simple. I would say to you that the early phase of our evolution up to 2016, we were in that phase, growing unfettered easily high rates of growth. But there are phases to growth. And I wanted to show you this chart. It's a complex chart, but just to follow it up obviously, you'll have the pack and you can then study it. But it really lays bear all of the different variables that we're speaking about. So what it does do is it looks at operating profit, spend on you, return on equity, cash conversion, leverage and dividend cover and it follows it over the 3 periods, unfettered growth, et cetera. So the point to make, you can see in that first phase, it was an exceptionally strong phase up to 2016, growing at 22% per annum, very small spend on new initiatives 8%, good return on equity 20%. Cash conversion is strong. Virtually no gearing and dividends at 4.5x to 5x, and that was our guidance and we stuck to that. What happened then is this is the key issue you can't grow organically by starting small businesses and you get to a certain scale, the investments you make have to be bigger, and that makes it more clunky So we started to then make much bigger investments. We bought out the crew and most notably, we started Discovery Bank, which has required about ZAR 14 billion or ZAR 15 billion of capital over that period. The effect of that is very, very onerous. You get cash strain, your leverage goes up, it hits your operating profit, et cetera. And so you can see through that phase from 22% growth -- compound growth in earnings that came down to 9%. You can see the concomitant spend in new initiatives going from 8% up to over 20% at its peak. You can see the leverage coming up to fund that from virtually no leverage up to -- went up to 28% or thereabouts coming down to 22% on average. And you see the dividend dwindle and decline obviously in COVID and starting late. So the dynamics are very, very different. What has happened now is kind of a reversal of those dynamics. And I think hopefully, justification of what we set out to do. The new initiatives are scaling well, particularly the bank, but all of our new initiatives, either cold, made more efficient or scaled. Our established businesses are operating well and so the dynamics of all of this comes together into a very different set of dynamics. So I think you can see that clearly in this slide. The spend on new initiatives has come down to 8%, and that will continue to slide down to about 5%. That's an effect on earnings, and therefore, that has a dramatic effect on earnings growth. We're having improving cash conversion, but at the same time, while our businesses are generating cash, they're passing more to the group, the Ping An Health dividend Discovery Life, et cetera. So the group has more cash, has less debt as a percentage of its earnings going forward, and that's important. But critically, you can see in terms of actual cash flow, all of our entities require very little going forward. So this chart shows you the amount of money that Discovery Insure, Discovery Bank, Vitality U.K., et cetera, has required funding over the last 5 years from 2019 to 2024, and you can see that. In the case of the bank, you could say it's ZAR 8.3 billion over that 5-year period. But you can see going forward -- I'm sorry, I hope you can see this slide that shows in the last bar 2025 to 2029. Virtually no funding required in Discovery Insure, Vitality Global, Vitality U.K., both Vitality Life and Vitality Health are self-funding. And Discovery Bank, in fact, needs very little capital for the next year and then it requires no capital to grow. So the dynamics are completely different going forward, and you get this kind of amalgam of less spend on new initiatives, more cash generation, more cash coming to the center. And so the group finds itself in a very, very different phase. If you break it up into 2 components, into the 2 business units, we believe the inherent growth potential of Discovery South Africa is between 12.5% to 17.5% despite the size because it has the bank in its belly. And in the case of Vitality Limited, it has a number of high-growth potential sitting in it and we expect the growth potentially will be 20% to 30% per annum over the next 5 years. So what it does is it puts these 2 business units onto the shoulder of that S and the group sitting in the middle. There are businesses there like Ping An, like Discovery Bank, like Insure that's turning -- they have a dramatic run rate to grow. And that, of course, is the potential opportunity. And with the dynamics underlying the cash flow, we expect more cash, less debt, high growth, and that's important. So there's a lot in the group that's been achieved over this period, not simple, but I think a consequence of organic growth. The other point to make is the actual operating model. This has been a year of considerable investment and focus on our shared value model on hyper-personalization. You will have seen these data sets from us in different ways. I wanted to make the point, I'll leave it in the pack for you but to make the point that the causal effect of behavior change on morbidity and health care costs on all kinds of risk is dramatic. When people are physically active to certain clinical things, the effect on their life span, their health span, every aspect is dramatic. It is transformational. And it gives us the opportunity to use this data in a much more hyper-personalized way. I think over the years, we've been focusing on this idea of next best action of getting to a point of absolute precision around how we actually get people to change that next best action, be it a health action and action in the bank that does exactly the right thing for them. There's been work done on the capability of the group in this stack, and you may have seen this in different forums. But I did want to make the point to you that I think the group has a tremendous stack that is both data, a business model, technology that we can deploy in. It's made up of 4 distinct units. I do believe our data set at the bottom is the largest and most relevant of its kind at 600 million member months of data, longitudinal data, health data correlated to, wellness data correlated to, financial data, all of it sits in the ramp in the belly of the stack. We then take it to the second layer where we actually do a very sophisticated risk assessment of individuals' ability to understand health span lifespan, what is exactly the issue they need to do. The third layer is fundamentally now using for the first time AI, where we're actually using machine learning and other algorithms to understand what is that action that has the greatest value to that individual? And what is the action that has the greatest propensity of they'll do it? And then bearing on the fourth layer, how we incentivize, how we communicate and how we get people to do that next best action and the ability to serve that up in a simple UX, simple ring, in the health context, the money context, the drive context, that's the issue. Where you see us going and I think this is really, really powerful. It's a simple concept of a personal health tile on the right-hand side, where we serve up to our customers a simple thing. That's what you need to do by that date. So despite all of this complexity, the model is evolving into a very simple UX, a very simple piece of real estate that will appear in different parts of how we operate in our apps in our bank via WhatsApp, simply getting people do the right thing at the right time and providing considerable economic value in that regard. So we really do believe that the -- where the group is at in terms of its kind of natural financial dynamics we're in a high-growth phase, high cash generation phase. At the same time, the model really is maturing. It's a hyper-personalization capability that really through our partners, through our businesses has the ability to be very, very transformative. So let me then move to our 2 distinct composites. We announced a number of weeks ago, the amalgalation of all of our global businesses into one Vitality Limited. It's been a very, very important step. These businesses have grown in different ways over time, opportunistically, a joint venture with Prudential that became our U.K. business. Partnership with AIA that became Vitality Network, a long-standing partnership with Ping An that was a startup in Ping An Health, et cetera. The view, of course, was to bring us into one distinct focused Vitality Limited business with focused efficiency, focus on brand marketing, singularity on the technology,singularity on the actual IP. And all of that is taking place now. We're very excited about its potential, but it really renders the group into 2 focused areas. Discovery South Africa and Vitality Limited. On one chassis that is focused in exactly the same way. I think we've articulated clearly what we need to do. We understand that clearly, in the case of Discovery South Africa, it must be the leading financial services group in South Africa, a consistent application of the shared value insurance model across all of our businesses, but a clear issue. Each one of our businesses must be number one in its category. And then ultimately, as the bank scales, we see that taking place. Now the bank sucks them up into this kind of composite maker. That is where we're heading. We think that the dynamics, the integration, the bank provides a very, very different value proposition to our customers. And of course, creates better value for our shareholders. In the case of Vitality Limited globally, we are committed to building the leading insurance group that revolutionize insurance. We really believe we have the opportunity to do that. The causal model, the effect of it is dramatic. And we do that by using our U.K. business as a center of excellence using it as a hub of R&D and then using partnerships globally to globalize and monetize the capability. And that's hopefully I'll get across to you kind of the embryo of how that process is taking place. So let me start delving into the businesses themselves. Sorry, excuse me. Let me just start delving into the businesses themselves and give you some insight. There's a lot of data here, and I'll highlight the areas that I think are highly relevant, but I do want to run through the businesses in terms of Discovery South Africa, firstly, and start to the bank. The bank's performance has been exceptional. It has been strong. It's exceeded expectation. It is tracking on all of our measures as we set out, and it continues to do what I think you will have seen over the last number of periods. You can see on the left-hand side, we've crossed 1 million mark in terms of accounts now at the year end 950,000. You can see the very strong growth of 36%. On the slope of the curve, you can just see how strong that is retail deposits continue to grow to just under ZAR 19 billion. Advances grew by 27%. Revenue, which is an important measure of this kind of full-service bank, and I want to touch on that a bit later, grew by 41% to over ZAR 2 billion. And then importantly, the operating results for the first time we made a profit on operating performance. Of course, in total, the acquisition cost brings us below the line. But we've kind of got a delta, it's kind of a heuristic of over ZAR 400 million in the jump in the overall profitability. So the loss reduced by over ZAR 400 million, as you can see, to that number by 89%, as you can see before the effect of acquisition costs. So the business had a fairly transformational year beside the growth from an operational perspective, turn into profitability. And of course, in the year ahead, we expect the bank to become profitable in total. A few slices of data you would have seen before, but it's an accentuation of the same stuff. The quality of new business and the growth is exceptional. We continue to see an acceleration in the growth in sales, touching 1,100 sales per day we're really doing well in the high -- in the mass affluent space. The area we were doing well in terms of 25 to 45 to 50 in terms of age groups, as you can see. A critical point that I think is worth pointing out is just where we are selling business. At the outset of the bank, I think the thought was that we sell into the Discovery base but that, by its nature, it could be limited. You can see on the right-hand side of the chart, that's not the case. Now nearly 60% of new business is coming from people new to Discovery, and that not only provides an opportunity for the bank itself but provides considerable opportunity for the rest of the businesses in the group as this kind of amalgamation integration and the banking a composite maker plays out. So we've seen very strong growth in terms of new business, great quality of new business. The advances book continues to grow. We've been very cautious on advances. I think you know we continue to do that. You can see the actual credit loss ratio is dramatically lower than the market average about half the market average, and we will watch that very carefully. We understand the need to grow their advances book, but we are very comfortable in how we're doing it, we carefully in a focused way. And at the bottom of the chart, you can see the correlations to the Vitality Money status remain very, very strong. So people who are engaged in Vitality Money, illustrating how they're managing the money. You can see the credit loss ratio really dwindles down. We launched the home loans product during this period. It's been very well received. It fits into the shared value model very well. You can see it's early days, but in total about over ZAR 750 million of home loans has been somewhat secured. You can see that it's a long process in terms of going through the actual approval, legal finalization, et cetera, but it gives you a sense of how we're doing. So I think we're very comfortable with that more will follow. And then something I thought it's worth mentioning. It's not to gloat a survey results, but it is an interesting kind of a conclusion. I mean we built the bank on the side of not having a very thin skinny digital bank. We took a view that the bank needs to be a full-service bank must compete head on in terms of all aspects. And despite the fact that our competitors have been around for decades, in some cases, centuries. We had to compete on a broad range of different issues. I think we're amazingly pleased with the perception of customers and non-customers of Discovery Bank that in fact, we tend to win across all different issues. So whether it's products, experience metrics service, private banking provider, it illustrates, I think, the kind of the hypothesis and how it's playing out in terms of a bank that is full-service and compete across every single issue. And I think the bank really is strong across all of the dimensions. The financial dynamics are coming out very strongly. I made the point that operationally we broke even. You can see there on the left-hand chart where it shows you is the cost per client coming down with scale, but the revenue per client kind of climbing and you see the crossover. The other important point is just the acquisition cost. Although we are spending more on acquisition because of the growth the acquisition cost per client is fairly flat, and that creates this kind of dynamics. So as you saw in the opening slide, it gives you a sense of how the bank has moved from losses towards hopefully profitability. And in the second half of this year, or the last 6 months, operationally, we broke even in the blue, but will continue to carry those acquisition costs. We are planning now during this financial year to breakeven in total. On the right-hand side, it illustrates to you kind of what we expect to happen slightly ahead of target. I believe a business of this size, breaking even, of course, is an important milestone attuning to profitability, but across our expectations for the bank are far higher. So let me kind of end off the bank with trying to give a sense of where we think we're at because I think, as I said, the bank was built on a certain set of hypothesis, but the manifestation of that is there to actually -- we think are very, very powerful. The first that our clients are high quality. So clients are coming in 50% of them are using our services in a rich way, Credit Suisse transaction and bundle accounts, fully 25% of primary bank accounts. So we're getting real traction. This is a deposit-led bank. Our deposits are 2.5x our advances and both are growing strongly. This is NII driven so the NII is growing at 45% in total and 8% per client. So we're dragging that along. I think that's important. And then the scalability of the digital frame is coming through very strongly. We're seeing the cost-to-income ratio improve by 15% per year and that should accelerate as we go forward. And so you see the dynamics playing out. What I think is exciting is that the bank is coming quite close to the end of needing capital going forward. Obviously, there's some unique opportunities with great potential, we would look at that. But in its current business model, the capital requirements are coming down significantly with one more year of investment, as you can see from the chart. Going forward, we thought we'd put this to you. We expect the bank to grow its profitability by ZAR 400 million per year nominal. That will obviously grow in real terms, but that's the expectation. If you play that out, we'd expect our 2029 to have 2 million clients and generating ZAR 3 billion in operating profits. So that's kind of the heuristic we think is the manifestation of this business, while it hopefully gives you a sense of how we see the bank playing out. Let me turn to Discovery Health and make a few comments on it. I think the performance has been robust. It's a big business. The Discovery Health Medical Scheme is a massive scheme. So its ability to absolutely grow is, of course, difficult. We expect the business to grow at CPI plus 3% to 5%. You can see that what we're trying to achieve. New business was buoyed somewhat by the [indiscernible] take on in the period. The total membership flow, the total membership under administration, ZAR 3.9 million and we're making considerable progress on the non-scheme growth, and that we think would be a considerable growth area for Discovery Health going forward. The Discovery Health Medical Scheme continues to be a remarkable, remarkable entity and credit to Discovery Health and the trustees of the scheme. You can see the scale of the scheme is so large compared to its competitors. It creates a very, very interesting hard-to-manage dynamics to grow at that level, often the growth rate versus the lapse rate, the growth itself in a year is bigger than many of our competitors. So you need a new business footprint that exceeds your lapse rate that kind of takes place. But you can see the lapse rates continue to remain stable although you get all kinds of planned buy ups and buy downs of new business inside the scheme if people buy their health, they typically don't change. So 4% of people change and half buy up and half buy down. So kind of the content review that people are buying down all the time is not the case. The danger is that people coming in come at different levels, but it gives you a sense of the stability. And then solvency is being managed very, very carefully. As you can see in the COVID period, during the lack of claims solvency client too high in a sense that the scheme is holding too much in its assets and cash. And there's a clear glide path of how to get that there. You can see how that's playing out. The scheme is performing, I think, remarkably well. As you administrate, I think we are pleased with how it's playing out. But the one issue that does need to be fleshed out is just high rates of medical inflation. We have just announced a few days ago the rate increase of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme that will apply to members in 2025. It's a calendar year process. The rate increases are from 7.4% to over 10%, that's high. We know that. And we're focused hard on trying to make health care affordable. But it's important to understand what the components are. When you break it down, you can see what is driving that. You get kind of the raw inflation of tariffs growing at not much more than price inflation. So in fact, we're keeping that well under control. But you have the unique aspects in health care or supply side, drivers, utilization drivers, new technologies, et cetera come through and invariably creates some inflation but the really problematic side is the demand side utilization that adds like 4% to 5% of that inflation rate. The risk management of Vitality takes up 2%. When you bring this across, you get this rate increase of 7.5% to 10.5%, 11% as you can see on the chart. But I wanted to highlight the demand side utilization because we're seeing incredible aging is increasing chronicity. And we've seen the buy down effect because new people coming in often buy -- healthy people often buy very basic plans. And that creates an adverse selection effect in terms of revenue you get for the risk that's presented on average. It's not a simple thing to manage. The question is, how do you manage it? It's not easy to manage. We have egalitarian system by law. That means you have a community rate. We have relatively open enrollment. So to an extent people often avoid buying in or buying up to comprehensive plans of while they are sick. They buy down when they're healthy. It's a complicated process. But it must be understood because it is very, very inflationary. We estimate that nearly 40% of the demand side impact is due to adverse selection. When you play out the numbers, 40% or so 5% a year, gives you 2% inflation per annum. When you compound that out, just to put it out, it means that I have a 10-year period, 25% of the cost of health care is adverse selection. I mean that's a massive number. That tells you the difficulty. So we need to manage this very carefully. Ideally, we need to -- as slightly understand the cost of kind of the egalitarian pricing, which has got massive benefits but at the same time, the effect on inflation. But we mismanage the micro effect of it as Discovery Health, and we're doing that. So we're focusing hard on 2 distinct areas. We launched just in the last -- just this week, a range of new initiatives that we think are going to be very powerful for our customers and members of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme. On the one side, focusing on growing the market, focusing on young professionals. Our active smart product comes in at under ZAR 1,350 per month which is kind of a cutoff from our research. It is a rich set of benefits. It offers considerable benefit through Vitality Gym Membership. So it really brings together all of the offerings we know work very, very well, but our expectations are high of how it can grow into that market. And then at the other extreme in terms of aging and chronicity, really focusing on this issue of hyper-personalization. Every single member of the Discovery Health Medical Scheme will have incentives and rewards and targets as provided by the scheme. And this idea of hyper-personalization on these ideas of tile that focus every individual what they should do is now going to start playing out. So we have a great focus on chronicity or making people healthier. We believe the 2 together, of course, will create a massive sense of stability and growth potential for the Discovery Health Medical Scheme, of course, for Discovery Health. But of course, one of the issues I did want to mention in the case of Discovery Health, but it's a bigger issue than Discovery Health. Of all the Discovery Health. It is a national issue is the issue of NHI and where that's heading. The current narrative has been pretty complex and conflictual in many ways. But at the same time, the NHI bill was passed into a law. It's now an act and it is law. So we have to deal with it and understand it and find solutions to make it workable. Our position remains as it was before, we do not believe NHI is workable with our private sector inclusion. That's a fundamental issue. We need more funding. We need more doctors. We need more resources like less, and that's a key issue. We did this modeling, you would have seen this before that if you kind of take the draconian view of NHI, where you say there's one fund, the NHI fund, there's no other funding allowed, no medical scheme funding allowed. Can it work? And what you find is the kind of some of the estimates of additional funding need of ZAR 200 billion, what it buys and you will have seen this from us on the left-hand side, I hope you're following my chart. On the left-hand side, what's happening currently is people -- typically employed people using private health care are spending about ZAR 2,300 per person. People in the public sector spending about ZAR 410 per person, which is that's the issue, how you get that up. If you take that ZAR 200 billion and add it to the public sector scheme, what you find is everyone then gets ZAR 700 per month. So can this work? Well for public sector people, that's not a dramatic increase. ZAR 700 isn't enough to buy huge amounts of benefits. But for private sector people, for employed people, it means that their benefits go down 70%. How is that possible? And the problem is made worse by where does the ZAR 200 billion come from? I would have to come from taxes. And to get ZAR 200 billion in taxes, you need to raise tax rates by over 30%. So simply put, you say to employed people, take 30% more tax and get 70% less health care benefits. Of course, that is not a sustainable situation. And there's no attempt in this to glout or to -- it's illustrating the complexities of our country, the lack of resources, the inter quality, et cetera. But it shows a simple analysis of this that the draconian form of NHI can't work. You need funding from the private setting, medical scheme funding, you need a whole range of issues. Where else can you achieve it? The only way to achieve it is economic growth. On the right-hand side of the chart, our team did this modeling. I think it illustrates really the problem quite crisply. What this shows you is how much economic growth we need to fund different levels of benefits. So what you see, for example, in the middle, were we to generate enough our GDP to fund health care, we'd have to go at nearly 9% for 20 years to fund primary care extended chronic benefits, maternity benefits, PNB benefits in other words, a package of benefits and so that will be acceptable. Obviously, that's an incredible low, but it does illustrate you almost the intergenerational issue of this NHI. We need economic growth. We need time. We need resources to achieve it. We need the collaboration of all. So we've been pretty clear in that message. We've been unequivocal in the message. And as a private health care sector, we've made that message clear in this business, we made the message clear. At the same time, in our planning, we've been clear to our customers, to our members that they shouldn't be concerned. Section 32 of Act is the pinch point. There are many other areas of the act that are problematic. But Section 32 really is the fork in the road around the role of the private sector. And what is given people calls for concern is that it says once NHI has been fully implemented as determined medical schemes may not cover what the NHI covers except for complementary cover. And that has been kind of one of the really big pinch points in the act and that is something that will be debated. But just to flip it around to understand our kind of level of confidence about the way forward, certainly in the short to medium term is the implication of it is also the other way around. Until the NHI is fully implemented, there are no restriction on the medical schemes. And so there's a lengthy process of time here before medical schemes have any real impact. And the question is, how much can NHI really have an impact. And that's the question. So let me put it to you our thinking about this is in 2 distinct streams. We see no difference to our business, to our members, to the Discovery Health Medical Scheme, and we will continue to invest and focus on what we need to do. We need to make sure doctors, providers and members are comfortable in that regard. At the same time, we need to work and engage with government on making NHI workable. And we started that process. You will have read that just 2 days ago, business met with the government for the first time to engage. We are trying to find solutions in that process. So I think what you will see is a private sector focused. You will see potential litigation and you'll see how engagement to find ways to make -- to find solutions to get this workable. So we are focused on it, but not deterred and focused on our business at the same time, meeting the needs of the Discovery Health Medical Schemes or the other schemes and of course our members and customers. And I've said on that, let me move to Discovery Life. A lot of data here, but it had a very robust performance, normalized profit up 9%. Individual Life profit up 11%. New business was pretty robust, not great 4% increase, but it's a market that is kind of sliding sidewards, it's not growing. So on the right-hand side of the chart, you can see that we've maintained our market share slightly up. It doesn't give you tremendous growth in new business. The company is very strong from a liquidity perspective and solvency perspective in that regard. I think the thing to maybe note is the increasing cash generation in Discovery Life, as you can see, operating cash flow before any finery or repayment of finery up to ZAR 2.6 billion. So 35% of earnings coming out in cash. We've improved the value of new business margin from ZAR 2.4 billion to ZAR 3.8 billion internal rate of return is close to 20% on that new business and the Individual Life margin is about 5%, as you can see from the chart. Strong EV growth. And on the right-hand side, you can see the operating variances are positive. The noneconomic operating variances are positive over the year. I mean I'm speaking too fast. Let me keep going on this. The operating variances are important. You can see that, that positive in total but it's important to understand the persistency variances on persistency lapsation and policy alterations. If you put them together, it's kind of a wash but there's a worry about the policy alteration. We've been concerned about this. People are not lapsing policies but often buying down at different points in time. We're watching this very, very carefully. But at the same time, that stress assumptions in the EV. We have made a basis change on 3 years, you have strengthened the basis on account of 3 things. We are taking a view of policy alterations and strengthening the basis on that we'll manage that very, very carefully. At the same time, there's a long-tail morbidity sickness trend that we're looking at and we strengthened base in that regard. And then our dollar rand life plans with fluctuating exchange rates, you get some kind of lapsation effect that we strengthened the basis for. So while we've had positive experience variances, we've strengthened the basis on the EV to about ZAR 1.2 billion. The effect on the balance sheet and certainly the CSM is a multiplier there, as you would know, the CSM is a longer projection term, it's pretax, et cetera. But essentially, we are looking very carefully at these issues and focusing hard on it. Hopefully, low rates of interest and a better growth environment could arrest that, we are taking views around how it could play out. For completeness, we did want to show you the buildup of our margins. I'm not going to go into this in too much detail. Of course, for those of you that want to go through the pack is here, and of course, our team will work with you over time on this. But we thought it's important to understand almost the heuristics of our margin buildup. You know that we've opted for the OCI treatments, and we look at margins, you need to look at CSM risk adjustment and OCI together. And on the left-hand side of the chart, just when you project our things, we expect our margins to grow actually before new business. It's just the nature of how the -- how the accretion of interest -- the rate of that versus the release to earnings. So we expected to grow whereas most companies expected to decline. But effectively, what we expect to happen is new business to add about 7% to the margins. We expect the interest accretion to add a further 9% and of course, the release to earnings to reduce by 7%. So we would expect normally the total margins to increase each year by 9%. That might change over time, but we felt it important to give you just a simple set of what should happen. You can see in the middle the strengthening of the base had a net impact of ZAR 2.3 billion part of it's in the CSM, but of course, that's at the original interest rates the other part when you flex out the rates today, you get the netting of effect. So the ZAR 2.3 billion having that effect on margins. So in effect, we'd expect margins to increase by 9%. In total, it went from ZAR 24.5 billion to ZAR 23.5 billion just ZAR 1 billion drop over that period. And of course, you need to consider the actual retained earnings increase over the period. I hope that gives you a sense of the buildup. Let me turn to Discovery Invest. I will be quick because I think the business has performed remarkably well robust. It is a tough environment, but operating profit grew 20%, 12% operating growth. There was an 8% change in just aligning the IFRS reporting around how guaranteed products work, and that added a further 8%. New business grew by 8%. Assets administration over ZAR 155 billion. And we continue to get a very good set of product mix. We've had really good evolution of Cogence, our DFM platform with BlackRock. A lot will be said about that going forward. There's a lot of really good work between land and vitality. Early days, but investment performance in it is very strong. Assets under management are approaching ZAR 20 billion, I think about ZAR 18 billion or thereabout. So a lot to be said going forward, and you will see that. I wanted to touch on Discovery Insure. I mean it's an exciting phase. This is a business that should be really a big contributor to our profitability, to our cash generation. And it really is an incredible translation of the data of the science of making people behave in a way that's healthier and it's worked remarkably well. You will know if you've followed us through the COVID period. We did do some underpricing and that really -- that together with the supply chain issues got us into a position that we shouldn't have been and we've worked hard over the last 18 months to write the business. You can see what's happened. Gross written premiums grew 9%, good new business coming through. You can see on the profit line, and this is important. We showed it half year by half year, because you can see the turnaround in the last 6 months. All of the work we think, has got us to a very different position. The business really is started to generate cash and profitability. The margin in that 6 months is about 7%, which is, of course, a lot better than we've had. And we believe strongly this business will grow really nicely from now. So we're targeting a 10% margin in a short space of time. I think we can achieve this. The business has done some interesting things. I wanted to show this to you, because I think it illustrates just some of the use of data and really the shared value model. Discovery Insure has provided really exceptional coverage for motor insurance, home insurance, et cetera, on a very different basis. But it has through it's history offered unique value-add products impact alert using data to understand people and accidents, DNA kind of driving footprint to know who's driving the cars. And we've been using data throughout in different products that add value to our customers. Over the year, the team has worked on a very different idea that we've rolled out now, and I think there's tremendous potential. I think it just illustrates the kind of the ability of the shared value model to stretch and the use of data in a very different way. So first, you just understand the core of our business is about understanding how people behave and how to fix their sickness or their mortality rates. The same thing can be said for a car. I mean, a car over time ages and how it's being driven and treated will affect how it kind of claims for its repairs, et cetera. So just bear in mind the amount of data that we have, 20 billion kilometers of data, you can see it on the chart, just mass amounts of data that we are all the time growing to understand. Now correlating those data sets to using vehicle repair data, motor plan claims, et cetera, gives us ability to understand like a human being what behavioral effects affect the value of the car. And so what our team has done is, it's kind of applied this in the longitude in a way. The current way the dealerships value a car is cross-sectional. They look at a point in time, what's the vehicle's history, it's age. Are there any issues with it, service history, et cetera, very basic cross-sectional stuff. What we can offer is a wide range of things longitudinally to actually understand statistically how good their car is, how it's been driven exactly over time, has it been started cold and accelerated, cornering, breaking, distance travel, when it's had an accident, what its repairs been, what quality of parts have been used, et cetera, as you can see on the chart. And therefore, we have the ability to rate cars probabilistically about their real value. And so we've done that and have created a rating capability. So a 5-star rating for a car. We can say statistically is in the top 10% of quality. Now, we're working with dealers to make sure that our customers with that 5-star rating can get 15% more, for example, on the trade-in. So we're doing things with the data, I think that is different that will add value to customers and really offer a very different value proposition to our clients. A real sense of the use of data and how we go forward. And maybe that takes me to a good kind of -- to a good segue illustrating how all of this comes together in this kind of hyper personalization composite. We rolled out this week, as I said, this idea of every member of Discovery Health having the focus on what they should be doing, their next best action being incentivized to do that. But it has really been rolled out in a way that brings the whole group together. So what you see on the screen in the middle is a very simple UX manifestation. This individual is told she should go for a mammogram by the 8th of October. That's the action that they've given. But what you see is all of the group is starting to fall into this tile. So at the same time, Discovery Life wants the individual to go for a mammogram. We know the value of those benefits in terms of mortality and morbidity. So we've added now -- it creates economic value. We've added a payback benefit of ZAR 1,000 around the premium back if they do that in their payback front. At the same time, it creates economic value for the health plan. So they get a personal health fund or personal health fund injection in terms of doing that adds in a sense to an adjunct of the medical savings account. In addition, we offer miles. So this tile, this go for a mammogram, is now loaded with benefits from all parts of the group in terms of payback benefits, funding your health benefits and really getting to the idea that all of this creates real economic value and that economic value can be shared. And of course, these tiles -- these personal health tiles are going to appear on different parts of our group, our app, ultimately on the bank where the composite really comes together. And so we really are bringing together different areas of group onto this magical tile. And I think the power of this personal health tile brings a very simple UX to the complex issue of mass personalization. Individuals get a simple act by simple date, do it and earn those benefits, and that's the power of it. Let me turn to Vitality Limited and just move quickly, I'm sorry, I'm taking too much time, but I will move quickly. I want to move through the various businesses. The U.K. is important. It's critical, too, as a hub in the center of it. It's had a difficult view of financial in those 2 events, and I'll take you through them. But I want to put across our strong belief in the incredible quality of the business that's been built. So when you look at it together, this is a business that covers nearly 2 million lives, over 1 billion of premiums. We're getting close to GBP 200 million of new business being transacted. The brand is incredibly present to incredibly well. Our mascot is Stanley, our dog, Vitality is stretching. Our latest Vitality Partner is Itsu, the sushi chain is one of the largest retail outlet, one of the largest restaurant chains in the U.K. You can see on the -- on their brand is Vitality attached to think that kind of a health life insurance brand is attached to a food, it's a different kind of use of the brand. And then, of course, the quality of the group in terms of how clients think about us on Trustpilot, the company itself was rated among the top 10 -- within the top 10 best places to work for a very large corporation by the Sunday Times. So if you go across the board, the actual quality of the business that's been built is quite unique. And anecdotally, when you meet, clients of Vitality in the U.K., you can see the effect we're having on people. I make that point because I think it is an important hub of how the group will go forward, because complexity of making sure we get the returns of capital, we get the growth is critical. So then we go to Vitality Health. It's had a very important year with NHS dynamics, but you can see the earnings were affected, and that was pretty clear in our trading update. You can see earnings halved in pound terms. You can see a drop from IFRS 4 to IFRS 17 and a further drop this year. We hope that it wouldn't happen, but the main issues of claims overrun of around GBP 30 million caused by the NHS dynamics. That is a massive effect. You can see the new business is strong, up 10% in pounds, up 21% in rands of life cover, cover continued to grow to over GBP 1 million. So the growth and the quality is there, but there's a specific issue of the NHS. I think it's become pretty stark the issue. The NHS is on a considerable strain. I'm sure, over time, it will be addressed, but it is a central part of the U.K. and we, of course, play a supporting role in that regard. But you can see the problem with it, the latest review issued by Lord Darzi that, in fact, the new Prime Minister is, of course, using very carefully illustrates the problems. It is in a difficult state. Quality of care is not where it should be. The capital investment has been low. It's had some level of austerity. Staff are disengaged. Quality of care is suffering from that and ultimate manifestation is very long waiting period. What you see on the right is a very interesting chart. What it shows you there is kind of waiting periods in red, experienced by NHS patients. And in the green is our claims curve. So the dynamics are pretty simple. People are demanding more PMI and they're claiming through the PMI for things that might have been done at the NHS. That's a good thing in the sense that the demand is increasing for PMI, and I think the industry will grow. But at the same time, in the short term, it creates this claim spike. There's nothing new in this. We mentioned this at the interims. We'd hope to get closer to the claims curve by this time, but we didn't. And you could see that claims overrun, and that's the dynamics within the group. We're acting hard in a responsible way to address it. What you can see on the left-hand side is kind of the claims curve and the premiums in red as we've tried to pull ourselves to where it should be. So we put through very careful rate increases in a responsible way to our customer base. But you can see post the reporting period, we've now kind of got to that claims curve. So we're feeling confident we're kind of on budget. There's a confidence that we are where we should be. And therefore, we're pretty confident about the bounce back in this financial year, but the pain is felt in the year that it's just past, as you can see. The margin will recover strongly. It will get to probably in the next year or so where it should be. But in the short to medium term, it is somewhat lower than we'd like it to be, but I think we're very confident of a strong bounce back, as you will see. The rest of the chart shows you just the lapsation rates have stayed fairly constant on the right-hand side, you can see by Vitality status that lapsation is -- goes down. So we've been very careful in the price optimization to make sure lapse rates in total, remains stable and you get the right performance. Having said that, I want to kind of buttress the argument, just with the competitive position of Vitality Health. Health Insurance in the U.K. is an industry that will grow. We need to be well positioned in that regard. And what you see on the left-hand side is you've now crossed -- we're the third largest health insurer, the latest data we have available somewhat outdated. But you can see the market is dominated by 4 players, now Bupa, AXA, ourselves and Aviva, but we've crossed that line. We're tracking better lives in average. So the average age of our customers is lower. And you can see on the right-hand side, structurally, our claims levels despite the overrun are lower than our competitors. So the business is well positioned. It's had a short-term pain with the dynamics of the NHS, but I think there's strong confidence, it will bounce back. Let me turn to Vitality Life. And again, mentioned a once-off issue, it's not ideal, and we must deal with it. But I wanted to explain the dynamics behind it. You can see that operating profit came down 27% in pounds. IFRS 17 brought it down, we're clear that IFRS 17 will be penal on Vitality Life, but it came down due to a basis change and I'll touch on that in a moment. The growth has been strong. Life's cover have grown by 6% to over 810,000 policyholders. So this is a large business in a very large market, and the challenge is to get the rates of return on capital. If we can get them, the business is significant. You can see the growth throughout has been strong. It's really a tale of 2 halves. The second half being very, very different to the first. On the issue of the profit dropping, I wanted to deconstruct that you see exactly what played out. The profit in 2023 on IFRS 17 would have been GBP 22 million. It emerged -- the emergence of that profit, it jumped up to GBP 29 million, up 30%, but we made a basis change. And the basis change was in an old block of business sitting in the Prudential balance sheet. It's a closed box in that balance sheet that we've been managing very, very carefully. This has been a business of great complexity over the last 5 years as rates of interest went down and then went out. So we've been very, very careful of how we've managed it. And one of the clear focuses has been to look at the business sitting in the Prudential back book in a very different way. It's a business in runoff, kind of ring-fence it, leave it inside the Pru and manage it very, very carefully. And that's what we've done. So you can see now 20% of the total business sits in that back book in runoff, 80% now is in the forward Vitality Life book. All of the CSM margins or most of them you can see is in the front book over 400 million with about GBP 14 million sitting in that back book. So it's a small block essentially in runoff. We have focused hard on this. If you've followed us, you'll know what we've done. We've deferred any transfer left it in the back book. So there's no capital risk. We've continuously focused on the basis to make sure that it is tightly managed and has the right assumptions going forward. And in this period, we took a view to strengthen the base further. So that GBP 12 million or GBP 13 million lock came from that process. At the same time, the key challenge, of course, is to make sure that the front book grows well. And we are confident that we're getting very good traction in that regard. The U.K. Life Insurance market is a big market. It's the fourth biggest in the world. It's a market that is very, very complex. 98% of advisers use portal. So it's a market that is commoditized, and we have to find margin in the right way. This is where the opportunity is, and this is where the team is focused. We are using our product in a very careful way to get that margin. In the last 6 months, making considerable progress in that regard. The shared value life insurance products using around the world has a discount. It starts out at a discount and then people based on engagement, determine what they pay over time. It offers a considerable competitive advantage where we can compete on price but have the right actual dynamics at the same time. Over this period, there's been really good work down on price optimization, getting us to be able to compete at the top of these portals, which is critical. At the same time, we're getting fantastic take-up of rider benefits because of that discount, and we've done great work on the straight-through processing. So nearly 80% of all business is straight through. It's never touched. It's efficient. So exchange rates have come down. The key thing to mention here is on the right-hand side of the chart. If you look at the value of new business from half 1 to half 2, it's a completely different place. In half 1, we are losing on the value of new business. Now there's considerable value there. We're not where we should be. The internal rate of return on a VNB basis is kind of the risk discount rate. That's not good enough. We need to do better. But the slope of that is considerable, and we're already seeing in these early months of this year, a really, really good performance. The focus here is kind of harvesting or really capitalizing on the scale of the market, but using our product structure in a much more disciplined way to make sure any capital invested gets the right rate of return. I must point out as well that Vitality Life now self-standing in its own model, it requires from -- over the next year -- from the next year, no capital from the group at all. So a lot of work has been done to make sure we can achieve that. So a strong focus on sustainability and a good return on capital. We thought again for detail, we'll just give you a sense of the heuristics of the CSM buildup. Again, you should look at the 3 together. In this case, there was, in fact, the variances added -- the various and basis changes added to the margins, as you can see. But again heuristic there that shows you like the rest of the market, we expect a decline of the margins over time, but a lot less than the market, and will depend on the rate of new business and the value of the new business would be right. So we'll see how it plays out. I'm very, very confident in how the company will bounce back in the next year. It has been a very, very complex number of years, but the team has done an excellent job. Let me just talk to about Vitality Network. It is the group's ability to globalize our Vitality shared value model. There is no doubt that we are seeing a repeatable scalable model. We need to monetize and grow that strongly. It also has the incredible economics of kind of a gearing effect based on the expense base versus revenue base. And you can see that coming through. So operating profit grew nicely in rands, very strong -- sorry, nicely in dollars. Very strong in rands despite the fact that a lot of the revenue was in the Japanese yen that actually had a very tough time against the dollars, you would know. But you can see the general growth of the business, growing strongly, revenue up 16%, profit up 30%, illustrating the growth rate. The business has an incredible embedded set of partners, the best companies around the world and our key issue must be to work with them to get more partners, but to work with them and deepen their offering. In each of these cases, we are really, really well embedded and working hard to work out how best to, of course, help them but to create more value in the process. We've made the point that there are 3 distinct strategies. One is to grow the partnerships and grow deeper within partnerships. There's a lot of work taking place in the U.S. We're not through that yet. There's a lot of good discussions happening at different carriers in the U.S. It is the biggest market in the world. And the work with John Hancock and the experience of John Hancock illustrates just how well the model can play in that market. So a lot of work taking place. We're having incredible penetration with Sumitomo Life and AIA. So we're confident, we can do that. The second is to evolve the products. I want to touch on that in a moment, the shared value model. And the third, of course, is the gearing, just the basic economic gearing of the business unit. You can see that its profit margins are now 30%. So we're seeing that profit margin come through. I think that can grow further going forward. I wanted to just make this point, and it is important, our ability to monetize that IP is the ability to repeat and scale of what we've done. I showed you the stack and how it works. We have built it in a way and building in a way that we can really take it out to our partners in a very different way. The V1 platform was a spend, a considerable spend over many years in that new initiative spend. It has matured. We can now stand up the market in 3 months and deploy these capabilities. It's cloud-based, multi-language, so it really can scale. But at the same time, the science, the causal model we're taking across in a different way. So I wanted to just kind of give you a sense, when you look at this tile on the right-hand side of go for a mammogram or whatever that clinical advice is or whatever steps you need to do, it would appear quite clinical and quite simple. But we're developing a branch of actuarial science that we think is important. We're collaborating with Swiss Re on this and really creating this causal model. So when you price life insurance, for example, you have a mortality curve, as you can see, and that's an average curve and life insurers typically know the health state is at entry, but nothing thereafter assume an average. In our case, we can actually use a Bayesian model. We know that mortality rate over time. And in this case, it's a female who has diabetes. So we can see in the red that, that mortality curve is higher, so 31% extra mortality. So we know the mortality given risk factors in lifestyle. So that's a one point using our data. But the second critical point is a cause and effect. Once we start prescribing what next best action to do, we know from the data, what that next action does. And once habit formation is created, what that does to mortality. So in effect, if this individual does do that action, you can see that the mortality rate comes down versus where it would have been, and understanding that ability allows us to price life insurance differently. It allows us to create this massive value in the green between what mortality would have been versus what it becomes, and get that back in value on the tile of the personal health pathway. So really, what we're getting to your point is the ability to use data, our stack, V1 to transport this to different markets. And of course, with great partners like Swiss Re and collaborating. We can take the actuarial science of the reinsurance, the QXs across to different markets. So a lot of work taking place. We're in a very formative stage of this. And of course, the new Vitality limit of composite will give us that opportunity. Let me end off with a few comments on the other part of Vitality Limited, our health insurance focus predominantly Ping An Health, which has had a tremendous year. I would mention that Amplify Health, we have great expectations for, it has been a slow rollout. It's complex, many different markets in Asia, penetrating many different companies within AIA. I think in the last 6 months, there's been tremendous traction. We expanded out to 6 countries. There are clear products in each country, claims benefit management, risk profilers, fraud waste and abuse and others that are now being embedded into those companies. And we're shifting to a value share revenue basis. So work is being done in that regard. We'll report that. We'd hope to move quick. It's taken time that we do feel we're getting traction. There is investment in Vitality U.S. in the business itself, but predominantly in the technology that we used in the U.S. for John Hancock, the U.S. and other parts of the group, and I expect that investment to narrow. But the main piece I wanted to, of course, talk about is Ping An Health, because the company had a tremendous period and really a different phase in its evolution. You can see that its operating profit pretax grew by 56% in RMB. 85% for us in rands post tax. There's some gearing given our expenses, but a very strong performance. Obviously, the company scale is amazing, 27 million lives. Total written premium, nearly ZAR 60 billion, as you can see in rands. So it's come to a company of considerable scale. I have to say to you, the operating performance is really just a kind of a [indiscernible] force of good execution. The combined ratio came down strongly, as you can see, it was a focus on expenses, on making commission more efficient, on better risk management, on better underwriting. So all of the cumulative fed has brought their combined ratio down. At the same time, we've got -- trying to get rid of some of the volatility on the investment side. This is a company that has nearly ZAR 60 billion of -- or ZAR 50 billion of investable assets. So it was somewhat in equities in the past. There's kind of a much more conservative approach to that, so removing some of that volatility. And there's a focus on kind of diversifying the distribution channels, somewhat away from just Ping An Life on its own and product strategy around just issuing now, which is one particular product, as you can see, about 80% now makes up 60% of the production. So it's not a complex story. It's actually quite a simple story of just kind of block and tackling the way in the market, that is potentially very large, and the team is doing a great job. The balance sheet and cash flow is incredibly strong. You can see cash flow -- operating cash flow coming through very strongly, growing by 10% in the period, retained earnings of RMB 4.2 billion and their solvency level over 300%. So the balance sheet is very strong. The company declared a dividend of 30% of its distributable profits, we received RMB 255 million of that. As I said, of course, it's important in terms of its financial benefits to us. But I think the symbolism and I think the phase of where the company is at is very important. So we have high hopes for how Ping An Health will continue to grow in not a simple market, but a very, very large market. So let me end Deon at that point. I'm sorry, I have been quite long, but I want to end on just summarizing where we are. Strong performance, as you've seen, normalized operating profit up 17%. The dynamics of the group we believe are different. We're entering a different phase of growth of the group. We expect earnings to grow going forward for 15% to 20%. We expect to spend in new businesses to come down, cash conversion to increase, leverage to go down and cash generation to be significantly better for the group. And then importantly, we're now structuring in 2 distinct businesses, Discovery SA and Vitality Limited, each with potential to grow. That is where we are, a lot to do, and as I said, a very important and complex year. I said enough, I think we need to open now for questions. I'm going to hand to David. David, you're going to facilitate this. Thanks.

Adrian, thank you very much. We've got a fair amount of questions coming through. So I'm going to, in the interest of time, just try to bring some of them together, just so we get through as many of them, hopefully, all of them. The first question, I'm bringing two questions, one from Michael Christelis from UBS and another one from [indiscernible] Capital. And this -- the question is, do you think a separate listing of Vitality Limited would unlock value? And does this mean you're looking to restructure the group into 2 separate listings?

No, it's not inevitable that we detach them or list Vitality Limited. I think it is detachable, but that's not the plan. The plan here is focus and efficiency. And creating 2 businesses of value. I think that will give us optionality. It will give us clear kind of line of sight of scale on what needs to be done. This is a business in a few years' time, that could be worth -- could be -- should be generating hundreds of millions of dollars of profitability. That's what we hope. So I think the optionality is there, but that is not the initial plan, no. Let's see how it plays out.

The next question, again, I'm going to merge 2 together here. I'm going to move to Neville on the line. The first question again from Michael Christelis. How confident are you that the U.K. held earnings can effectively reverse the GBP 30 million in the next 12 months? And I'm going to combine that with a question from James Shuck from Citigroup. Talking really about Vitality Limited as a whole, but to forecast the guidance given of 20% to 30% earnings growth. Should this adjust for the 2024 one-off charges that are happening more broadly in the U.K. business for the underlying figure.

Thank you, David. I think the first question on Vitality Health. I think Adrian articulated, comprehensively the catch-up of the premium increases versus the claims. So we are cautiously confident that we're on track to reverse this trend and the business is, as Adrian said, going according to plan in the first part of this year. In terms of the second question in terms of Vitality Limited, the numbers of 20% to 30% growth are basically rebased off this '24 financial year number. So we also are confident that we will be able to achieve that over the next 5-year period.

Great. Thank you, Neville. Again, putting 2 questions together. Another one from Michael Christelis. Can you -- this is to -- sorry, to Hylton Kallner. Can you confirm if the bank generated a positive cash earnings during the second half of the period? And the question again from James Shuck. Where do you see the loan-to-deposit ratio trending over time for Discovery Bank? Two separate questions, but over to you, Hylton.

Yes. Thanks, David. So the bank did generate an operating cash surplus in H2. Very, very similar. Just behind the operating profit that we showed for the second half, which was about ZAR 100-odd million. For the full -- for the overall results, the cash -- it was a cash investment, which slightly...

I think we've lost the link to Hylton there. We'll come back to that question. I'll move on to the next question. Again, just to close off -- final question from James Shuck. Over to Andy, why doesn't cash conversion improve going forward from the 66%. If you recall in the slides, the guidance was between 60% and 70%. Over to Andy.

Thanks, David, and thanks, James. Thanks for your question. So I think it's important to think about the composition of the earnings across the group. There's still a substantial, probably over half of the earnings are coming from the life insurance businesses in South Africa and the U.K. and they would be expected to grow faster than, for example, the health business in South Africa, which is a 100% cash business. So at 66% or the 60% to 70% does reflect the mix of the different businesses and life will continue to be a big proportion of this group as we go forward. Maybe also bear in mind, the way we've expressed the cash conversion for something like Ping An, at this stage, we've expressed it as the dividend received in cash as a percentage of the earnings as well. So even though Ping An should be a big growth vector, that's not necessarily drawing through in the numbers we've showed you indicatively today as a big increase in the cash conversion ratio. So hopefully, that answers your questions, James.

Great. Thanks, Andy. And flowing from that question, a question from Sandile Magagula from [indiscernible]. There's 2 parts to the question, Adrian. The first question, I'll pose to you, again, around dividend. Why are you not paying a dividend similar to the size of your peers, yet you anticipate capital structure and cash conversion to improve. And would you consider gearing your dividend at any stage?

I mean I think -- it's a great question. I think we've been pretty conservative on the dividend. I think in the projection, I think we -- and we show that we believe that cash generation will be stronger and maybe that dividend coverage of 5x could come down. So we'll consider that over time. But I have to say we've taken a view, and I hope I've been pretty clear that we had a specific phase and evolution. That's our expectation and we believe in it, but let's see how it actually plays out. I think the group has the capacity on plan to pay a lower coverage than 5x. But I think it'd be irresponsible to declare that now. We'd have to think about that carefully. It's a great question.

Great. And then the follow-on question for Deon. Looking at the cash flow statement, Sandile, we're interested to know what is the most important line item in the cash flow statement?

Thank you, David, and thank you, Sandile. It's important, perhaps, just to point out that the IFRS cash flow statement is not our deal in analyzing the cash flow that comes from a very diversified group as we have. We've made some adjustments during the current reporting period to make it user-friendly. But for that reason, we always supplement the cash flow with additional analyst information that's contained in that additional pack. You'll see on Page 11, we've got a group shareholder cash flow movement analysis, and that's probably the more important reference point in our view. And within that, obviously, the cash generation by our existing businesses and the reinvestment of cash into growing new business. Those are very critical line items within that. And then ultimately, in some of the measures that we published today as well that includes cash conversion as an overall measure, cash diversification and dependency on cash generation across the board and to manage that very carefully. And then Adrian mentioned also the other item we do monitor very closely would be our investment in new. We've come through a phase of very significant investment in new, and that is now tailored down to our long-term guidance. So it's a combination of all of those items that we track very carefully.

Great. Thank you, Deon. I understand that Hylton is back online. If we just move back to Hylton just to finish off with that question. Thank you, Hylton.

Sorry, David. Hopefully, you can hear me clearly now. So the cash surplus in H2 was largely in line with the operating results. And the overall cash results tracks the overall IFRS result very, very closely. We expect that to be the case going forward. And hence, you see the steep decline in capital requirements for the bank over the next year and in FY '26, effectively moving to enter positive cash as [indiscernible]. In terms of the advances to deposits, we expect the ratio to level off at probably double where it currently is. So a lot of room from a funding perspective still to grow in -- from an advances perspective relative to the deposit base.

Excellent. Thanks, Hylton. We caught all of that. I appreciate that. Moving on to a question from Baron Nkomo from JPMorgan. This is over to Riaan Van Reenen on SA Life. Please unpack the recovery in the SA Life, the value of new business margin and what level of new business growth are you targeting in this business into 2025?

Sure. Thank you for the question. The new business margin in Life recovered for a number of reasons. I think primarily, it was through strong expense control. We saw good new business volumes. And also, we optimized the business mix that was written in the business, so all coming together to generate a significant improvement in the new business margin. And then thinking about growth going forward, the affluent protection market has been somewhat sluggish. So the only way to really get good growth in affluent protection space is to grow market share, which we do through innovation and products and chipping away at that. And then we've also got significant opportunities to grow in additional product lines and really in adjacencies to the affluent space. So we do believe there are opportunities in the market to expand.

Thank you, Riaan. I'm going to move over to the next question from Warwick Bam from RMB Morgan Stanley. The question is, where is your focus in terms of future cash investment, given that the bank and the Vitality Life are soon to be self-sustaining -- sorry, Adrian, I should have alluded you to the direction to you. So what is your focus in terms of future cash investment, given the bank and Vitality Life are soon to be self-sustaining?

So you didn't direct it to me so can you just repeat from start.

Apologies. So where are we thinking of allocating future cash investment, given that we've got the bank and Vitality Life, which are now soon to be self-sustaining, certainly in case of the bank.

We've assumed in the projection that 5% of spend on new businesses. In fact, if you roll them down, we actually don't need that. So it goes down to not quite to 0, but it goes down very quickly. I think it would be foolish to assume we don't spend, number one. Number two, I think that we need to find areas we'll be growing and investing, and we're going to be quite careful in that regard. But I think the one thing, Dave, we're not going to go back to high levels of new business spend. But I think that you will see the group will spend some money on building certain things. I do think the core investment in technology and in the model itself, require some investment. And therefore, that will require some money, but I don't think it's of that caliber. So we put that 5% in the plan. We'll see how it plays out, but we felt it not prudent to assume lower than that.

Great. Thanks, Adrian. Sitting back to the order of the questions coming through. This is to Neville, Vitality Life question. What level of new business growth do you see in the broader U.K. life insurance market? And how does VL's growth compare?

We're starting to see a recovery across the broader market, but very, very slowly. But VL has actually backed that trend quite dramatically. Our shared value model is proving to be incredibly powerful in a commoditized, low growth environment. And we have seen in the last quarter, Vitality Line new business outstrip that of the market quite significantly. So we once again cautiously confident that the growth in new business that we've seen in the last 6 months period will continue.

Great. I think we have got a call online. We're going to shift over to the online question. Todd, if you could load that up for us, please.

We have a question from Francois Du Toit of Anchor Stockbrokers.

A couple of questions around the Life contractual service margin, also the Slide 40 that shows the release of margins from the contractual service margin. If you can maybe just unpack the ZAR 5 billion negative basis change in experience variance impact on the Life contractual service margin, please? And maybe just assess how much of that impact is also already in this period flown through the Life earnings, IFRS 17 earnings? And then also your Slide 40 shows -- second question, Slide 40 shows that your CSM margin release expectations is for certainly the earnings in the Life business from current policies to increase nicely over the next 10 years. Can you maybe just, in practical terms, explain how that is expected to be achieved in the light of the type of policies, which is whole of life policies with increasing -- typically increasing mortality of around 10% per year. Typically, well, I think also you've got fairly steep cash back benefits on those policies as well. So how do you expect to have increasing cash generation from the in-force policies or increasing CSM margin delivery from making force policies in light of the start of policies that comprise that book. Just those 2 questions. I've got some more detailed questions, but I'll email them to you.

Thank you, Francois. I appreciate the questions. Riaan, are you happy to touch on those fronts? So we're also, again, happy to handle the technical questions with you. We'll be in touch in a range of session. But Riaan, if you want to give a view to those 2 questions.

Sure. Thank you for your questions, Francois. I'll do my best to answer them. So I think your first question on the CSM buildup and the impact of the assumption changes in the period. I think it's important to combine the impact, just looking at the total value impact coming through the CSM and then the OCI just given that the CSM really captures your impact at initial recognition rates. And as you know, South Africa has had a very increasing interest rate environment over the years. So you do get an offset on through the OCI. So the number to look at is what's shown on that slide really is the ZAR 2.3 billion approximately net impact combining all these items. And I think your other question was what of that has been through this current period, and that's obviously already through this current period. And that's -- I mean, that's the impact you would have seen through the balance sheet and the income statement play out. So hopefully, that clarifies a little bit. But I think the key message here is you have to look at the CSM and the OCI impact together. And then your -- I think your final question was just around the graph on the left-hand side of that slide that Adrian has shown on the future CSM release. And that's really a combination of how you set your coverage units, how those would unwind over time and then the dynamics of the book that largely maintains value over a long period of time given that many of our policies are linked to CPI and value gets retained in real value. So I think it's also important to think of the CSM has got an element of how you set your underlying release or the coverage units, and that's fairly important. Hopefully, that answers it. I don't want to go into too much technical detail, but at a high level, that hopefully gives some insights.

Excellent. Thanks, Riaan. I appreciate that. The next question comes from [indiscernible]. Deon, I'm going to -- if you come [indiscernible]. Given clear expectations, of 15% to 20% growth in operational earnings over the next 5 years, all management incentives be linked to this. How important are returns are the group ROE or REV where applicable in management's focus, and so that we're not growing at the expense of returns.

Maybe just to -- as a reminder, and you'll see a lot of that being addressed very clearly in our rem report. But our incentivization or the incentive structures are absolutely aligned with the group's long-term ambitions and also drive short-term delivery in order to achieve that. And so what you typically will see in these -- in the individual business unit balanced scorecard are absolutely these kind of drivers. That then flows up to the top group scorecard where you will also see those but measured over the longer term. So absolutely aligned with those ambitions and the intermediate delivery in order to get there. And to answer your question on items such as return on equity, et cetera, obviously, plays out differently for each of the business units and at group level. And you will find that also in the group's scorecard that the return on equity is very much a measure. And again, set for the long term. And you will have noted over the past few reporting periods, given the investment in new, we didn't quite get to those targets in all instances, but that's part of the long-term growth ambition. Adrian, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that. I hope that answers the question.

I think it does. We've got one final question. And that, again, Deon, over to you. It comes from David from Fairtree. First was a compliment to you, Deon, thank you for making the cash flow statement more user-friendly. And then the question, how do we think about the net movement in operating assets and liabilities?

Sure. Thank you, David. And as I said, unfortunately, the IFRS cash flow statement, you are constrained by a fairly rigid guidance. And as I mentioned earlier, not always the best place to find reference. And as an example, we are required to consolidate the unit trusts that are under our control, but these are client investment flows, et cetera. Those are all consolidated in our financial statements because we do or deemed to control those. And that obviously convolutes the cash flow statement, and hence that additional supplementary that I referred to. But to answer your specific question, and it's probably a good example. We do break this down in the notes in quite a lot more detail. But I guess the short answer to your question, how do we think about the net movements in operating assets and liabilities. The only way to really make sense of that is to break it down into the granular components included in there would be your net cash flows of policyholder and shareholder assets and liabilities, your net purchases and disposals of investments, government bonds, treasury bills, et cetera, net movements in loans and deposits with banks -- of the bank and other such as our revenue and assets and liabilities. So the only way you can really make sense of that is to break that down into those components. Having said that, as part of our capital plan, our funding plan and our liquidity management, we obviously look at all of these dynamics over the long term and make sure that we manage that with appropriate risk margin on top of that as a group, as a whole as well as the individual regulated businesses.

Great. Deon, thank you very much. Adrian, that is the last question. So moving over to you.

Okay. David, thank you. Thanks for that, Deon. Thanks to everyone. Let me thank you all for attending and listening. We tried our best to make a very complex story, hopefully easier to actually, I think the investment case hopefully is clear of what we're trying to do. Our team will be on the road and obviously, meeting people we're available always for any questions of any debt. We are holding an Investor Day on November 12 on Vitality Limited given them amalgamation of this into one business and all the plans and all the businesses. So we'll communicate more about that soon, but we're excited to do that. I'm very, very pleased to show you in depth how the business is being built. Neville and his team will obviously be available in that regard. We look forward to it. So let me end. We've taken a lot of your time. I greatly appreciate it. It's been a good year for us. We have a lot of work to do. We know what we need to do. Thank you for listening and just best wishes to you all.