Future plc (FUTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to today's webinar. I just want to let everyone know we're going to start in just about another minute. We're just giving everyone some time to log in, and we will start in 1 minute.

Good afternoon or good morning if you're joining us in the U.S., and thank you so much for your time today. I do hope you find this session useful and interesting. Before we get started, however, I wanted to reiterate how pleased we are with the acquisition of GoCo. There is clear industrial logic to the deal, and we will demonstrate today some of the unique ways in which the combination of Future and GoCo create a real competitive advantage while ensuring customers are at the center of our thinking. Now you may be wondering why Future is holding a webinar on PCW regulatory landscape. We think it's really important to help shareholders understand our business. And based on some of the questions we have received over the last few months, we realized that the upcoming proposed changes by the FCA were generating a lot of questions. We don't profess to have all the answers. However, in the next 25 minutes or so, we will look to explain a little about the dynamics of the PCW market, the regulatory framework, and then what we believe the implications could be from the review that is underway by the FCA and to ensure pricing practice. There will be time at the end for questions. Now you hear from me far too much already. So today, Lee, Ellen and Sally, who between them have around 40 years experience in the PCW market, will talk to you about this topic. They will introduce themselves to you at the beginning of their sections. However, before I hand over to Lee, it's worth noting how supportive we are of the ongoing changes by the FCA to ensure customers are treated fairly. The very creation of the PCW proposition was to be disruptive. Championing consumers' rights as a consequence, regulatory changes that support that are aligned to the core principles we operate at GoCompare, which is that the customer is at the heart of everything we do. As we will demonstrate today, over the last 15 years, there has been a constantly evolving regulatory landscape in this industry. However, the more it changes, the more our focus remains, doing what's right by our customers. As Lee and Ellen will demonstrate, GoCompare has deeply embedded our focus, not just on price but value. While Sally will talk to you about how the innovative and disruptive thinking that sits in our business ensures we are well poised to take a podium position as change happens. So without further ado, let me hand over to Lee.

Thanks, Zillah. I'm Lee Griffin, one of the founders and CEO of GoCompare. Today, we're going to talk to you about regulatory changes, what's proposed and how we're set to meet them. But first, we're going to talk about a little bit of an intro into the GoCo Group. The group is made up of brands with a mission of offering customers ways of saving time and money, whether they want to be in control and make decisions like GoCompare or let someone else take the hassle away from them like Look After My Bills. GoCompare was founded in 2006 by 3 of the launch team of the first insurance comparison site, Confused.com. With our industry-leading awareness, we are highly cash generative and are recognized as a leading choice when it comes to comparing your insurance needs, putting as much value on product as we do on price. Our model puts consumers in control. They get to make informed choices on who or when they wish to switch, comparing hundreds of brands in the process. The second brand in our group is Look After My Bills, which we acquired in 2019. It had just over 100,000 subscribers to its service then, but we saw significant growth opportunity with recurring revenue characteristics. Currently, with a heavy focus on the energy market, the service takes the hassle away from switching, automatically finding the best deals each year and ensuring you don't pay more than you need to. Whilst we'd be mainly talking about the insurance model in this presentation, we believe also switching more generally could have an impact on the insurance market. Our business model is very efficient and aligns nicely with good outcomes, both for customers and insurers. Customers know, in using our site, they only have to enter their details once and see over 100 brands return prices. They use our site to gain peace of mind on their insurance needs, whether it's researching that their current insurer is still competitive or that they need more cover and they're looking for different products. For insurers, they get access to large amounts of [ core ] volume with no upfront cost. No large precommitted marketing budgets needed. They only pay on the acquisition of a customer. So PCWs need to be able to offer great service for customers, competitive pricing with the added value products, not just so they switch this year, but also continue to choose GoCompare in the following years. As we operate in a regulated market, there's a lot of other stakeholders monitoring firm's behavior and ensuring customer protection. If we think about the funnel previously mentioned, when we talk to our customers, it's the advertising standards authority who ensure everything we say is clear and not misleading. There are many other interested stakeholders as well. They include the CMA, Citizens Advice as well as the ICO. They all have interest in the price comparison website market. The insurers and brokers also represented by trade bodies such as the ABI and BIBA. In some of our other products, we deal with other regulated entities such as Ofgem and Ofcom. Most relevant one for GoCompare is the Financial Conduct Authority, or the FCA, who monitor across our whole funnel. As a conduct authority, it has influence across a much broader landscape than just the regulated products you deal on. We'll touch on this later. This differs to other regulators, such as Ofgem and Ofcom, who whilst they do have market range and powers, only tend to regulate the end suppliers. So with an industry with a lot of stakeholders, it's no surprise there is also change, lots of change. This slide only has a fraction of the changes made over the past 15 years. And apologies, we couldn't get the market information for pre-2013. But even with these changes, we have still seen switching in car insurance not only grow, which is the lighter green, but price comparison websites becoming even more integral to customers in finding the best deals to switch to. But as I say, it's a market used to change in disruption and is proved really resilient to it. This is not the first time fundamental prices has changed. In 2012, the gender directive, which outlawed the use of gender as a rating factor when working out the cost of insurance, initially lowered premiums across the board. But over the coming months and years, pricing changes, insurers got used to the changes and switching continued. And it's not just about the insurer pricing which changes. In 2017, findings from the CMA study initiated changes to the price comparison website market, specifically removing contractual clauses to allow insurers to price differently between different PCWs. Again, this was seen in the market as a fundamental change. We complied, made the changes, and frankly, we've seen no change. If I were to summarize, things change regularly, but in reality, nothing changes. We're now going to look at how, in particular, the FCA works. So over to you, Ellen.

I'm Ellen Sugden, and I'm Risk and Compliance Director, and my role is to make sure the business complies with all relevant regulations. The GI pricing practices that we're talking about today has come from the FCA. We thought it would be helpful to give you a high-level overview of the FCA in the context of GoCompare. The FCA have 3 strategic objectives which drive their activity, and they are: to protect consumers, to protect financial markets and to promote competition. The FCA are an active regulator and keeping up with regulatory change is a constant part of our business, whether that's changes that impact directly on us or those that impact on our partners. We make an active decision to lean into regulation, take the front foot and have conversations with the FCA to influence and inform where we're the experts or have valuable market insight. The FCA considers PCWs to be a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the U.K. retail insurance market. The FCA is a principles-based regulator, and rather than just relying on specific rules at the highest level, the FCA expects firms to conduct their business with integrity, scale, care and diligence, to have effective governance frameworks in place and to establish appropriate systems and controls for the management of the business. And firms must place customers and their interests at the forefront of their business, so decisions must be customer-led and firms must ensure that customers are treated fairly. Moving on then to what this looks like for a regulated firm. It's important that customers can place their trust in financial services firms. Products and services must be designed to meet customer needs and customers should be provided with the right information to help them in their decision-making. The reason this level of consumer protection is needed is because financial services products aren't tangible and can be complex for many people to understand. Consumers are, therefore, reliant on the advice and the decisions that are made by firms to make sure that they aren't caught out, for example, when they come to make an insurance claim. FCA also focus heavily on culture and governance and hold senior managers to account for the actions of their firms. They believe strongly that having the right culture creates an environment that fosters good standards of conduct and behavior, which in turn ensures the right outcomes for customers. An indicator of good culture, for example, would be a firm where staff are remunerated and rewarded for delivering great customer results rather than being purely financially driven. Whilst this could sound daunting, we don't find this customer focus a challenge because putting the customer first helps us to win in our competitive market. GoCompare always put the customer at the heart of the business, and we're originally launched with the aim of helping people make better informed decisions when buying their insurance. We were also the first PCW to introduce product and customer ratings as well as including more policy information to improve customers' ability to make an informed choice. We go beyond saving people money, it's about getting the right product at the right price. It's a business with significant market and customer expertise, not only in insurance and financial services, but also in brand, product to marketing, and the culture and values encourage employees to ask questions, to challenge and to put themselves in the shoes of the customers. And because our mission is to help customers better protect themselves, then we're well aligned with what the FCA is trying to achieve. The proposition is constantly evolving with each iterative step designed to improve the experience for customers based on feedback and research. Price comparison websites have long been regarded as a force for good within the insurance markets. And this is reflected in the views and comments of a number of bodies, including the FCA, the CMA and Citizens Advice, recognizing the benefits to consumers, insurers and the market as a whole. And now I'll hand over to Lee, who will talk about the insurance market.

So let's have a closer look at the car insurance market. There are over 29 million insured cars in the U.K. Some 20 million people annually choose to use PCWs to search for their insurance. And as mentioned on previous slides, PCWs drive the vast majority of switching in the market, but we also drive a large percentage of customers who use the site to get a cheaper quote, but don't end up switching. So why is this? Why isn't the switch rates higher? Simply, most customers need to call the insurer to cancel each year, sometimes to stop the policy automatically renewing. Insurers then have the ability to try and beat or match a price. As you'll see later from the FCA findings, insurers' abilities to do this are because of increased margins at renewal. Frankly, as the FCA point out, they charge higher prices for return customers than they do for new customers. So it can lower the price for people who shop around and ask to leave. We think this is important when we think about the opportunity that insurers may have with less margin to play with at renewal. Moving on to home insurance. Whilst not a legal requirement like car insurance, things like mortgage companies or landlords may require you to have some level of insurance on the property, so there's still a market of 22 million insured policies. As you can see, though, home insurance has a lower customer engagement and thus switching, even though savings can be higher than car insurance, particularly if you've not switched for a couple of years. There are a number of reasons for this: one being that the perception of home insurance as a more complex product and a fear of getting it wrong, or that it has to be insured with the same company as your mortgage. Some of this comes from insurers use an opaque and difficult to understand questions, which they require to price your insurance effectively. Again, it becomes easier not to switch for some people. As the FCA suggests, they believe the home insurance market has the bigger opportunity for lower prices from these remedies. So how does pricing work? The U.K. insurance sector is fiercely competitive, has hundreds of brands looking to acquire customers each year and also adds a fair number of new entrants as well. Why so many? Well, not every insurer sees each customer the same. Each insurers' historic experience with like customers help to find the likelihood of claim and thus drive the pricing. Insurers also add external or unique data sources to help them price the risks. It's also worth pointing out, historically, insurers don't make a lot of profit, if any, from the underwriting of premiums alone. They have other ways of making their profit up, something we'll talk about further in a bit. As mentioned earlier, along with these new customers, prices available, there is also then the incumbent insurer, who will generally price for a renewal customer differently than they would do for a new customer. But just to be clear, virtually all of our switching happens between different brands, not when an existing customer tries to become a new customer with the same brand. This is something to bear in mind. So let's have a closer look at what the FCA found. In September 2018, Citizens Advice lodged a super-complaint to the CMA, which specifically called out possible harm to customers in the insurance market, mainly around pricing tactics used by insurers. A part of its ongoing regulatory road map, the FCA were also reviewing pricing practices in the market, but then decided to open a full market study in October 2018. Over the next 2 years, all interested parties, including GoCompare, engaged with the regulator to help them build their final report into the general insurance pricing practices, which was published in September 2020. Within the report was a number of proposed remedies, which the FCA claims will save customers over GBP 4 billion over the next 10 years. The remedies were around pricing, but specifically price walking, which is described as the practice of giving customers a competitive price for the first year, which is then increased at each renewal based on how likely the customer is to actually renew. The next is product governance, but more specifically around getting fair value for any products or services customers use. I'll explain why this is important on the next slide. They then looked at the ease of switching and in particular, the service insurers use called auto-renewing. This allows customers to ensure they have continuous insurance and are not left accidentally uninsured. Lastly, they looked at how insurers are to prove they are doing a lot of the above and have suggested a lot more reporting to prove the case. As mentioned, these are still proposals, but the FCA track record, we don't believe these will change materially when the statement is confirmed in July. Presently, the work required to meet these remedies must be complete by the end of 2021. So let's go into more information on what the FCA saw as the possible harms and what the remedies mean. Firstly, focusing on pricing in fair value. It was noted that customers in 2018 overpaid by almost GBP 1.2 billion because of not switching. And that 6 million customers paid higher renewal prices than necessary. It was also noted that 96% of insurers' profits come from noncore services, which ranges from investment income to installment charges to supplementary products to the insurance product bought, known as ancillaries or add-ons. For the remedies, they are mainly split into two: one around insurance pricing, which will now be required to quote renewal prices no higher than the equivalent new business price. This, in theory, ends the practice of price walking for customers who do not shop around; they also specify that this can be specific to the acquired channel, but in practice, this is a little unclear how this will operate. The next remedy focuses on the setting of prices and the governance around the selling of add-on products. As the insurers set the price for each of these, they will now need to prove fair value in each instance. So now not only does the product need to be fit for purpose, but also if they are charging a fair price for it. The next area I'm going to focus on is in the findings from improving competition. We've already mentioned the GBP 6 million paid renewal is too high. But alongside this, the FCA found customers on auto-renewals paid over GBP 565 million. To combat this, they've proposed a number of changes in particular to how auto renewals work. It is fair to say that this is a mixed process between insurers already. But the main points made are around 2 areas. Firstly, how clear they are to make the agreement to allow auto-renewing. And secondly, once my policy is in force, how easy is it to stop the auto-renewal. For the first case, whilst they don't explicitly demand positive confirmation of opting in, being very clear that they will be part of the service unless seen otherwise is expected. Then the second case they make is around a much simpler process of being able to cancel a renewal, not just the need to ring. This was particularly relevant in the current climate as in the past year, customers who wanted to cancel insurance could not get through to call centers and were automatically renewed when they didn't want to be. The last point and not insignificant for insurers is that the FCA now require a whole range of reporting from insurers to show that they are following these remedies and that they can ongoing supervision easier. I'll now pass to Sally, who will talk through what the FCA expect the impact of these changes to be, what we think the opportunities are and why we're well placed to take them.

Hello. My name is Sally Foote, and I look after digital marketing and product at GoCompare. The FCA have outlined a number of expected outcomes from this regulatory change. For consumers, they anticipate lower and fairer pricing driven by improved competition and better consistency. And they also see consumers benefiting from time saving at the point of renewal with cancellation and switching being made much easier. For insurers, the FCA anticipate lower revenues and increased compliance costs. However, they're also expecting marketing operational costs to decrease in line with higher retention. At Future, we agree that there are enormous benefits for customers, particularly for those who are irregular switches where we should see a price correction. But for insurers, we don't think it's going to be quite as straightforward as that. We expect to see different insurers taking different approaches based on their strategies and their ability to use data to adapt quickly. And we're already seeing this coming through in our conversations with insurers. So for example, the remedy specifies that the insurer needs to offer the same price to the same customer in the same channel. But there's no definitive definition of channel yet, allowing for different interpretations. And so some insurers have proposed that they will manage this by offering different new business prices direct versus through PCWs, while others are planning to launch different consumer brands to low-price acquisition. If anything, we foresee a period of high volatility in pricing as insurers get the economics of this right. And that, as the FCA points out, drives consumers to shop around and will almost certainly lead to an increase in switching. While there have been some suggestions that switching might then level off over time, our expectation is that, that won't happen because the highly competitive nature of this market, the variability and the risk pricing and the challenges that this present for consumers who are trying to navigate their way through it are the key reasons that price comparison websites exist in the first place and have continued to grow. The regulation doesn't change any of that. And as Lee mentioned earlier, previous regulatory changes have initially lowered premiums across the market. But then we've seen those prices reset as over the following months, the insurers adapt to the changes. In fact, we have a number of reasons to feel really confident about the long-term growth of price comparison websites and the need for switching. It's worth restating that the majority of those switching on price comparison websites are not switching with the same insurer. They're switching between insurers. And that competitiveness played out in price will still fundamentally exist. What will happen for customers when it comes to renewal is that they'll be offered the same price with insurance as if they were a new customer. But that isn't what customers compare to, they compare their renewal price to the price that they paid for -- in the previous year. And there's no guarantee that those 2 prices will be in the same ballpark or anywhere near one another or that the price they're offered for their renewal will be competitive against what's available to them in the market from other insurers. So the need to compare remains unchanged. And regardless of how clear any of this is to customers, price comparison is an ingrained behavior in the insurance life cycle. Customers tell us that they do not trust their insurers to provide them with the best price, and that isn't going to change overnight. Customers will continue to turn to PCWs to assess the renewal against the market. Currently, we also have a segment of customers who use price comparison websites to compare, but then don't switch with us because, as Lee mentioned earlier, they might find a lower price and then they will use that to call their insurer to renegotiate their renewal price. And they'll still be able to do that, but with renewal and new business prices now much closer together, much more closely matched, the insurers may struggle to be as flexible in those negotiations or as competitive as they might have been able to previously. And we believe that this will lead to an increase in switches where insurers cannot provide customers with the price that they want. The changes to auto renewals are also really good news for consumers, but also for us, because for some customers, it removes the whole step in the switching process, the need to cancel, something that can often be frustrating and time-consuming. And this fundamentally makes it easier to switch, and it makes it worth doing so even when there's only a small price saving to be made. We also believe that switching will continue to grow because consumers are increasingly making value-based decisions that aren't just driven by price. And here, I want to come on to how the GoCompare proposition means that we, at Future, can be particularly confident because this is something that we've been working on for a long time. In addition to all we do on the site to enable customers to make value-based decisions that meet their needs. Since mid-2019, we've also been offering free GBP 250 excess protection policies to anyone who switches their car insurance to GoCompare. This is a distinctly different, value-driven incentive that sets us apart in our market. And we've since built on this with a similar offer for life insurance purchases, and we have an MOT for a tenor out in the market at the moment to help people get back on the road post-lockdown. We select these incentives because they're aligned with our mission, which is to help people to better protect what's important to them. Our customers choose to switch through us because they really value these incentives. And you can see this playing out in the acceleration of our conversion rate increases through the course of last year, driven primarily by returning customers wanting to maintain this additional cover. Customers for whom switching isn't being driven by price alone. I'm now going to hand back to Zillah to close out the session.

Thank you to Lee, Ellen and Sally, who have done a brilliant job demystifying the current regulatory landscape around PCWs and insurance, while also demonstrating why we believe GoCompare and Future are in a position of strength. We really do hope you found it useful. And I am sure you can see why we're so pleased to have acquired this business. A really talented team who care about ensuring the customer needs are met with real opportunities for the combined group to create value, harnessing Future's consumer advice and SEO expertise, we are well positioned to ensure GoCompare continues to deliver more than just the cheapest price to customers, but also what they value most. Regulation is the model of the industry we operate in and putting what's best for the customer at the heart of what we do is key to embracing and gaining momentum through these changes. We believe the proposed changes create more people in the market was only around 30% of the market switching today that pose changes to auto renewals where we believe prompt more customers to take action and hence, use a PCW. While we believe that the pricing models of insurers present 2 distinct opportunities, insurers leaning in, in more to the PCW market as an efficient marketing channel as Sally indicated. And as Lee illustrated, we suspect insurers will reconsider [ attitudes ] to risk for some of their customers, which is likely to mean wider disparity in pricing of the same customer across different insurers. Customers are likely to be able to find deals that fit their needs from alternative insurers, which means that it will still be in the consumer's interest to GoCompare. Happy to take any questions. Thank you.

If I could just remind you all if you want to ask questions, you can type them into the Q&A box, which should be at the bottom of your screen, and then I'll moderate and pass across the appropriate person. So 1 question so far, which I'll just read out and then we can respond to. So if there's a new period of pricing volatility post the FCA remedies driving more switching, is it likely that there will also be a spike in PCW advertising to grab share, which GoCo will have to participate in? So I certainly think that we believe that there is likely to be increased volatility post the FCA remedies, and we expect to see a spike in switching. We certainly don't, at this stage, believe the hypothesis that we need to increase our advertising spend. And in fact, one of the real benefits of the Future and GoCompare marriage is that we can use our extra expertise and SEO expertise to help to drive traffic from further up the funnel as well. Plus, as Sally already mentioned, we're seeing huge conversion in loyalty from existing customers as a result of the quality of the propositions we put around that. But I don't know, Sally or Lee, if you want to add anything to that? No? Thank you. So we have another question coming in, which is are insurers looking to cut commissions paid to PCW? And I'm going to hand this one over, but just before I do, I think when I looked at this business initially, one of the things that really struck me was how similar it was to Auto Trader in that it's a very efficient marketing channel for insurers in the same way that Auto Trader was for dealerships. And so when people want to really drive profitability and marketing efficiency, they go to the most efficient channel. And in that environment, that's what you see in PCWs. And so we actually think the opportunity is to be more of a partner with our insurers rather than any threat to that. But maybe Lee or Sally, you could add some comments on that.

Yes. Sure. I'll pick that one up, Sally. Yes. Just really to reiterate Zillah's points, I think we have the opportunity to add more value to our partners. We're already looking at data services, and we go further with our pricing and fraud tools we supply to the insurers. So really, it's about us not just proving value to our front end of our customers, but also the relationships we have at the back end as well. So we haven't really had any conversations around CPA cuts. But as I said, it's very much about how we can all supply true value.

Fantastic. Thank you, Lee. The next question I've got in is, could we provide more color on the conversion rate? What's the base rate? And how much more room for improvement do you expect? Furthermore, what are you doing to increase that conversion rate? So I'm going to hand that over to Sally, but before I do, again, I should remind everyone, we are actually in a closed period, so we won't be giving you any new news, but Sally can certainly give you a bit of color around conversion, what are the factors that drive that? Sally, would you like to pick that up?

Thanks, Zillah. So I think for us, conversion really starts with right at the top of the funnel. So being able to identify customers who are in market and who are ready to switch their insurance or who are looking to price around their insurance. And then moving them through our journey, there's 2 things that we really focus on: one is that they have a smooth and easy experience, which saves them time. If you go back to the kind of core principles of why price comparison websites were established in the first place was about providing all the information that customers need to make the decision in one place, reducing the amount of effort around that decision-making for customers. So that's really a big part of the work that we do is making those journeys very smooth. And then the second big thing that we do is around -- we talked about it in the presentation, which is about providing incentives that support customers and to help them better protect themselves and for our car insurance that is [ out to ] return [indiscernible] excess policy. And those are really the 2 things that we've seen both leading to those conversion increases over the past year, but also that we continue, we think there's a lot more room and work that we can be doing in that place going forward.

Thanks, Sally. And Sally, just picking up, there's a question that came in that's related to that around how we drive loyalty. If I can maybe just add that one just now before we change gear a little bit. So can you use the GBP 250 loss cover as a mechanism to drive loyalty, i.e., GBP 300 cover in year 2, et cetera? And I think the MOT initiatives are good kind of build on that. Do you want to just build on what we're doing there to continue to drive loyalty?

Absolutely. I mean I think we -- I mentioned we're looking -- we've already extended the excess policy out and the thinking behind that into other products, but we will certainly be looking at using that for year 2 and year 3. We've seen people coming back where there's sort of minimal price savings and because we know that they want the excess policy. And again, I think there's just -- there's a lot of room that we've seen from our customers is that they're very interested in this policy and this additional protection. There's a number of different ways that we can expand and grow that over the coming months.

Great. Thank you. So then we had a question saying did we see only tangential benefits between Future and GoCo? Well, the main benefits being growing profits of each part. Absolutely, as I said at the start of the webinar, believe in the industrial logic of this transaction. So we'll, ultimately, our objective to grow profits of both parts, the primary objective is actually to realize the value of the combination. And when we look at acquisitions of Future, we only consider deals where we believe that combination of both creates something unique that we can do together. And I think just thinking about the market we've been talking about just now as consumers are thinking more about value and more about how to navigate through this, Future's consumer media site can help to provide advice which we know is more important than just price for lots of consumers. And if you look at the 10-year Google trend on search terms, you'll see that "best" has significantly growing whereas "cheapest" has stayed flat. People are looking for added value, and that's very much at the nexus of what Future does very well, and it's consumer media brands, whereas what we find with GoCompare is it takes you right down to the bottom of the funnel. So we're able to capture more of the market. And within Future, we control that on our site using the GoCompare tech but white labeled. And at the same time, we can also help support driving consumers to the GoCompare site as a marketing channel. Again, the other thing clearly is our combined SEO expertise. We can help using the expertise we have at Future to help support that within the GoCo Group as we talked about at the time of the acquisition. So this is not an update on the acquisition presentation, we'll do more of that in the results in a couple of weeks, but suffice to say, absolutely delighted with the opportunity of having 2 businesses together and believe fundamentally on the opportunities that it presents. I have another question, which probably brings a little bit back more to the webinar topic. Could you just talk to again why there won't be a lower volume of switches if the spectrum of pricing is more narrow than in the medium term. And again, I'm going to open that one up. But just before I do, I think Slide 14 and just remind everyone that the webinar presentation is available for you in the chat box, if you've seen it. And it will also be available online afterwards, if you haven't. But both Slides 14 and 13 talk about the size of the markets and really indicate the thing on Slide 13 that hammers on for me is the number of customers who use a PCW for research, but then don't actually go on to complete their transaction because they go back to their existing provider to negotiate a better deal. And I think it was Sally that mentioned in the presentation, which is we think there'll be less headroom because of the changes the FCA are making to negotiate a better deal, which thinks we think actually means we'll have more people transact on the PCW. In addition to that, because of auto-renewal, many people don't even look at switching. And we think that because auto-renewal falls away, then that actually prompts up a need for action because you have to consciously decide to do something rather than to be passive in that journey. But I don't know, Lee, if you wanted to add anything more about the different risk profiles within the insurers and why we think that represents an opportunity.

Yes. I think one of the main things and I think Sally touched on part of this in her part is one of the other things we've worked on is making the whole process easier for customers as well. So you're right, there is a price to switch with -- for a lot of people. But obviously, the easier we can make switching, the more likely people are to switch for less sum of money. So actually, for price comparison websites, in general, we've been working on this for the last couple of years, just a standard. We want more people to switch, so making that journey as easy as possible. So I think if you put together the -- actually there will be less margin to play with that we've made the journeys much more slick than they were a few years ago. I think the opportunity to switch and as Zillah says, that the competition is not going to go away. There's still going to be people driving a number of insurers driving for growth. So we still think the switching will increase, not decrease.

Jumping on that a little bit as well, if that's okay, Zillah. I think the key thing is that for an individual customer, the thing that isn't changing is -- what the price that a customer compares to is their previous year renewal price. And what this regulation is setting out is that the new price has to be within the same price that they would be given if they were a new customer. And that isn't fundamentally what customers compare to, what they compared to is the price that they had last year and then what they can find on the market. And the fact that, that competition mechanic, as you just referenced, in terms of different insurers offering different prices, is still operating in exactly the same way is why we believe that there'll be more switches, the thing that customers are comparing doesn't change.

Fantastic. Thank you both for that. So I have another question here, how is Pocket My Pounds (sic) [ Pocket Your Pounds ] progressing and the wider content development around the GoCo proposition? Well, would be the short answer to that, but we will look forward to giving more of an update on how we're getting on with some of these [chicken parts] and the results in a fortnight. But sufficient to say that we're very pleased with the progress that we're making across all of the key areas we've identified at the time of the deal and the strategic rationale very much remains in place for us. Got a slightly different question for us this time, less relevant for car insurers, but in energy and other areas is ESG, an area where PCWs can play a part for consumers. Now I believe, but I don't know for sure, so I'm definitely handing this one over that we actually include ESG or credentials around energy efficiency as one of our filters within the PCW site. But maybe Sally or Lee could add some more color onto that?

Sorry, yes, I think being able to search for green energy is definitely something which exists on our site. Yes. Other than that, I think as the products or these things become more readily available and the ability to search by them, I think there'll be things we'll be adding into the service. But at the moment on [ ING ], it's very much are the tariffs being tariffs or not, and there are obviously suppliers who purely deal in green energy as well.

Sure. And I don't know if anyone else is going add anything. One of the things we have been looking at when we're just talking a little about content is that sits really nicely at the opportunity between Future and GoCo is potentially to launch a site or around ESG in your home or ESG in your life. And when you think about the tools we can draw within the PCW and the wider GoCo family and in the Future portfolio, we're thinking that actually that feels much like a consumer proposition. We think probably the pathfinder route to that from a monetization point of view is initially in a newsletter. So that's one of the things, for example, that we've been developing over the last couple of months as we thought about how the 2 businesses work together. So we're very conscious of the changing consumer needs. And as we hopefully have managed to demonstrate in this presentation what both businesses have historically talked about all the time is actually doing what is correct in terms of our customers and making sure we're actually meeting their needs and doing the things that are important to them at this moment in time. I've then got a question coming in, which is -- so we just got lots of questions -- around, what does the PCW universe look like in 3 years' time in addition to being slicker? So Lee or Sally, would you like to pick that one up?

Yes, I can pick that one up. I mean, I think sort of the first thing I talked a little bit about making things easier for customers, that's really important. But at the moment, customers also have this real challenge of moving from a price comparison website on to an insurer site to transact that. And as they do that, they go through a different experience, some -- each insurer's website is different and operates in a different way and not all of them are very mobile friendly, And so that's one of the areas that we're in constant conversation with insurers about is that looking at how can we support on more areas of the journey? How can we make it overall easier -- more easy for customers? It's probably also worth just touching a little bit on what we mean by a value-based comparison and not just comparing on price. It's a lot about that is about surfacing the features of the policy. So for example, one of the things that we've recently launched is called [ True Comparison ], which is side-by-side comparison of policies. Again, a lot of this is just about making it much easier for customers to make the right decision for them, which isn't just around price. Lee, I don't know if you've got anything you want to add into that?

Yes. The only thing I was going to add was then really from the other end of the scale where there is more data becoming already available, which consumers can use. So the price comparison process can still seem to be a little bit laborious in some products. You have to answer a lot of questions. But obviously, with a number of data sources becoming available, making that easier and then be able to ask more questions around what the consumer actually wants. I think will be beneficial to creating different services going forward as well.

As you can see from my furrowed brow, there are lots of questions. It seems like I'm losing them, so I was just trying to make sure I didn't lose any. So I've got a question here. The body of active switchers are surely facing a period of rising [ premium ] as they lose the free ride of cheap insurance. So the utility of this service to the current revenue driving client base said to be well protected. I'm not sure I completely understood that question. Maybe Lee or Sally might have got it more intuitively than I have, but I can certainly have a go at answering it, but I'll just see if either those 2 want to have a shot. I'm not seeing anyone de-mic, so that certainly means -- so I think -- I'm not sure I completely understand it, it's in the nature sometimes of typing questions, but let me certainly say what we think is that we certainly think that some consumers will see rising [ premium ], some consumers will see lowering [ premium ] because what we fundamentally believe is insurers are going to rethink about risk across their portfolio as they look to make sure that they don't end up with this price walking, which is one of the things that the FCA are recommending against. And so what we fundamentally see is more disparity and more change in the marketplace. And therefore, that's one of the reasons why we believe there'll be more reasons for price comparison sites because as Sally mentioned earlier, what people compare to is what was our price previously, that's the starting position of deciding to switch. And so if we think that there is a fundamental repricing possibly of the book going on, then we think that will certainly create more reasons to switch. Now the bare argument at that point is, well, okay, that's fine, but then once that's happened, the market goes back to stabilization. Now if you revert back to Slide 8, which Lee presented earlier on, what you can see is actually, over time, as regulation has continued and as changes have been made, the PCW share of the market, the market has grown and the PCW share on that market has grown faster. So insurers find PCWs as an efficient market for them in terms of marketing spend and consumers use PCWs to help them meet their needs. And so when we look at the insurance market just now and take a step back and said that only 30% of switches happened through a PCW, that means there is 70% of the market available, which we think, therefore, creates a growth opportunity when you think through a combination of what we expect to happen, which is the removal of auto-renewals and the repricing of the book. And that's why we end up on the bull case in terms of the opportunities for us here, not just in the near term where the disruption happens, but actually in the longer term, as we think more people make the choice to switch. And I'm really sorry if that wasn't the answer to the question that was being asked, but I wasn't quite sure so I thought that was a good question to answer. I've lost a couple of questions. I'm really sorry, the technology is clearly too challenging for me. So if I haven't answered your question, please feel free to ask again. Although...

Sorry, Zillah, I was just going to add to that point as well, is -- that's very much a car insurance view. I think as the slides also showed that home insurance there is a much bigger opportunity and actually engaging more customers in home insurance actually could be a really positive thing. So I do think there is a large opportunity in home insurance as well, where all the things, as Zillah said about car insurance applies, but actually, the opportunity for growth is even bigger there because it's actually slightly underserved with customers switching less.

Sorry, I know there was another question. I can't remember exactly where it was, and I have lost it, so apologies if I've accidentally deleted it and didn't answer your question. We are now at quarter past, I think we had it down for 45 minutes. I've not seen any more questions come in, so I'm going to wrap up there. Thank you so much for your time and your attention. As always, we'll be more than happy to follow up with you individually if you feel that we haven't quite managed to help clear up any confusion. The objective of the session was to really help you understand what's going in our marketplaces and to see why -- how we view those changes and where we see the opportunities within that. So to please do reach out to myself or Marian or Rachel, and we'll set up a follow-up call with some of ourselves and also some of the GoCompare team that you've met today. And thank you once again for your time and attendance. Thank you.