Momentum Group Limited (MTM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Momentum Metropolitan First Quarter '21 Update. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Hillie Meyer. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us. I will kick off with an introduction and then Risto will unpack the financial results in a bit more detail. I might also ask him for help when we get to some of the detail that I'll share with you on Guardrisk BI insurance, in particular, which I thought we might as well cover upfront because there will be some interest in that. Okay. So we -- I think we're quite happy with our financial performance for the quarter. It's really very pleasing operational performance with most of our underlying business units doing very well. I think we try to make the point that this is not necessarily a new base. And it's not a quarter that we can necessarily repeat because I think some of them, the more sort of secondary economic impact of COVID-19, we haven't really seen it so far. The COVID-19 on quarter 1 was muted. But I would also say, for most parts, in line with expectations. And after allowing for the release of our COVID-19 provisions for this quarter of around ZAR 170 million, I think the net COVID-19 impact is pretty neutral. So I think also a point just worth making is that the very pleasing quarterly results is not a function of releases in excess of actual experience but is sort of a true reflection of a good underlying quarter. I made the point that we haven't yet seen the secondary economic impact of COVID-19. But I think it will certainly start impacting 2021. As far as new business is concerned, Momentum Investments deserve special mention with strong growth on the investment platform business but also guaranteed annuities. Metropolitan, especially on the protection side, that's funeral, also continued with strong growth. And we're reporting for the last few quarters that the overall adviser productivity improved and it continued to improve even further. And it's interesting how the Metropolitan guys tell us that the productivity per adviser is currently at the highest level since the Momentum Metropolitan merger more than 10 years ago. I'd like to spend a bit of time on the Guardrisk business interruption cover and our position on that because I think many of you would be interested in that. And also, Risto, please jump in if there's something I missed or needs more explanation. Our BI insurance is almost exclusively related to business written through Guardrisk. There's not really anything in Momentum Short-term side, MSTI. We participate on a quota share basis in 30% of the insurance underwritten by HIC. That's an underwriting manager that specializes on the hospitality industry. And our exposure is through a scheme of approximately 720 policyholders. But we do this in the -- directly on the Guardrisk balance sheet as part of our Guardrisk General Insurance business. Some of the more direct exposure that we increased on Guardrisk increased over last number of years. I think it's just worth mentioning that early during the process of obtaining legal certainty or realizing that there will, for a while, be a lack of legal certainty, Guardrisk was proactive and the first insurer to make settlement offers to policyholders. And that was even before the FSCA suggested that the industry consider some payments. I mean, we did mention to the FSCA what our approach was going to be. And they were happy with that. But I think we were probably quite proactive. And I think it's working -- it worked in our favors. We're also seeing that the claim amounts that we foresaw and that we originally mentioned in terms of exposure, the actual true plan amounts seem to be lower than that. And that's because maybe some of the clients didn't allow for some of the positive cost reduction impacts or they haven't really updated all their numbers to the sort of latest profit numbers. So there was maybe a bit of under-insurance also at play here. I also just want to mention that we generally offer 3 months' compensation or the claim -- we allow sort of claims equal to 3 months of profits during the hard lockdown period. Obviously, that's net of cost savings and so forth. We've benchmarked that, and I think it's a reasonable offer. So we're not trying to induce clients into something that is really ridiculous and not in their interest. So in terms of data, we have 513 plans at Guardrisk through this direct 30% quota share for the UMA that I mentioned. Of the 513 claims, we've paid in full and final settlement 347 of the claims. And the plan amount there is ZAR 302 million that was paid. So that's about 2/3 of all the claims that is about, you'll see later, 80% of the total claim amount that's been settled. Then 34 of the plans rejected our offers. The value here is ZAR 32 million. So that's about a number of 6% of claims and 8% of claim amount. And then there's still another 132 offers, which are still under consideration. The claim value here is about ZAR 58 million. That's about -- that's 25% of claims and 15% of the claim amount. Now our exposure -- these are the sort of [indiscernible] claim amounts. Our exposure is 30% of these amounts, but that complicates the calculations a little bit. But what we've calculated is that our total exposure, because all of this adds up to ZAR 392 million, our total exposure is ZAR 102 million after allowing for some of that complications. And that's if we assume no recovery from excess of loss reinsurance. If the excess of loss reinsurance kicks in, then that amount reduces roughly half, okay? The reason why we mentioned that it's without the impact of the excess of loss reinsurance is we've lodged a claim with the reinsurer now. But they haven't considered it yet. So I mean it's possible that they might reject it, but then at least we would stand. So I think just in summary, we believe that we've adequately derisked the portfolio or largely derisked it through this process. I mentioned that we've seen that although businesses were locked down with no income initially, the savings they had during this time, like UIF refunds and Solidarity Fund contribution, less working costs, et cetera, combined with the increase in turnover post lockdown, I mean, that the initial view on [indiscernible] of the policy [indiscernible] domestic period may have been overstated. So in total, I think we're quite comfortable with our provisions. Obviously, if there are any questions, we can discuss on [indiscernible] in more detail. I hope that gives you a first sort of initial feel for where we stand with business interruption cover. Just in conclusion then, we continued, I think, to make good progress with our strategy. And that's the Reset and Grow strategy, where we're fixing things. But that, we've done very well over the last 18 months. There's more focus on [indiscernible] now, which is obviously difficult in an environment where there's a lack of growth. But I think we're making good progress in terms of positioning ourselves to bring market share in pockets and so forth. Also, we were very happy with progress with the integration of AFI into MSTI. And also, we see continued solid performance in India. There are also some very pleasing progress on our -- as far as our Africa portfolio is concerned. And you would have seen that cost discipline remains intact. If we look at on a comparable basis, our cost for the last quarter, then it represents a 3% year-on-year increase to the comparative period. Just finally, we are busy with the strategic review. We've been spending the last 6 months on that. We're in the process of finalizing the strategy with board members. And we will do some internal communication over the next 2 or 3 months. But we will communicate our sort of plans for the period beyond Reset and Grow with the investor community in the second quarter of next calendar year. And it's [indiscernible]. That's all for me. And then over to Risto.

Thanks, Hillie. I'll give you a bit more color and background on the earnings and sales numbers. I won't cover the business interruption because Hillie covered in a lot of detail. And we're quite happy to maybe firm up some of those numbers if people missed them. Okay. But just starting on earnings. Profit for the quarter of ZAR 1.042 billion, now that's quite a bit better than we expected at the start of the year, part of it. Probably about ZAR 300 million better, to be honest, than we thought start of the year. But there's a few things that I need to explain here. So first of all, the biggest driver of the positive variance, if you want to call it, is the investment returns on the annuity book and the guarantee in [ diamond ] book. So when we started the year, credit spreads were quite high and we were a little bit nervous around possible credit events as the year unfolded. So we roughly trebled our usual credit in payment allowance in our budgeting from sort of ZAR 150 million to about ZAR 450 million for the year. And then surprise, surprise, first quarter, we didn't have a single specific impairment on the credit book. So the new to book [indiscernible] profits were very high by historical standards in the quarter. Obviously, the credit markets are pricing in a slightly better outlook than maybe a while ago. But let's see, we're not out of the woods yet. So let's see how the rest of the year unfolds. Hillie also mentioned that expenses are well contained. Expenses were actually quite low in the first quarter last year. So the 3% was a very good achievement. And we actually came in ZAR 170 million below budget on expenses for the quarter. So on an after-tax basis, that's about ZAR 100 million variance again versus budget on earnings. And then lapses were a lot lower than expected. So as many of you will recall that at the start of the year, well, end of last financial year, we assumed that 50% of clients who were taking premium holidays wouldn't restart paying their premiums. And most of those premium holidays have come to an end in the last few months. And between 70% and 80% of clients have started paying. And it's closer to 80% on products like Myriad, where it's maybe more sensitive to lapses. So let's call it the curing of the premium holidays has been very good and resulted in quite a big lapse variance -- positive variance in the first quarter. And the other items, these are individually smaller, but they add up to quite a bit. Health admin, they had a very good period in terms of profits. Short-term insurance claims, particularly on personal lines, remained low. Disability experience was good in Corporate. And we had Africa results were good. And then lastly, what I already mentioned the expenses. Okay. And then I'll add 3 items just to tell you a bit about our earnings that might help you to understand that business a little bit better. So we had a negative mortality variance for the quarter. At the same time, we were positively surprised at the amount of death claims for the quarter. So that sounds a bit illogical, but we always knew we're going to release the COVID-19 reserve quite slowly through the year. But at the same time, we thought that the claims will be very heavy in August, September, maybe even October. So we expect actually a bigger negative mortality variance in the first quarter than what happened in the end. Because we have released quite little of the reserve, and we will continue to release it quite slowly over the year, it does mean that when we get to the year-end, I think we're going to have quite a big reserve that we need to deal with. And at that time, we will know a lot more whether there will be a second wave or not. So in some ways, the COVID reserve that we thought we need for the next 12 months, it is now also starting to be used a little bit to think about a potential second wave. So I just wanted to make the point that we were quite happy with that at the pace at which mortality claims declined after mid-August. And we're comfortable the negative variance doesn't reflect claims to be much higher than we thought. It's more a fact of we're releasing the COVID reserve very slowly over time to give us a bit of leeway into next year if there is a second wave. The other thing that I have seen in one or two questions from investors already is the relatively low return on our shareholder funds. Now we have a ZAR 12 billion portfolio, which is largely variable rate, money market-type instruments. Our portfolio shrunk by about ZAR 1 billion in the last year because of the acquisition of AFI. And also, you must remember that earnings went particularly high last year. At the same time, we continue to invest in India as an example. So that portfolio hasn't grown -- well, it's down by ZAR 1 billion over the year. At the same time, your money market rates are literally halved. I was looking, I think the 3-month guide is now 3-odd percent. And it used to be like 7% or 8% just a year ago. So the halving of investment returns is majority driven by the fact that we invested in the money market to a large degree. Okay. And then the last thing I'll just mention very briefly is we are at June year-end, so our salary increases go in, in the second quarter of the year. So I was actually looking, the first quarter always seems to be a reasonable quarter for us. And at least ZAR 50 million of that has got to do with the salaries dumping into the second quarter. Okay. Just on new business and value of new business. Hillie already mentioned a few things. But I think -- but it's not obvious from the trading update or the operating update is Metropolitan Life actually increased funeral sales by 20%. Okay, so we talk about the mix shifting. But maybe we weren't clear enough how big the mix shift was. And there's been a major tilt towards funeral plans versus savings products. And that is what really drove the VNB margin improving to levels we haven't seen in about 5, 6 years. In Investments, we also doubled. That's got to do with the annuity sales really. So annuities are a popular product at the moment. And on top of that, the yield per volatility we've seen in the last few months has also enabled us to lock in quite good rates. So annuities are in a nice spot because they're in demand and they're also quite profitable for the underwriting at this stage. Africa, a bit more mixed. Sales were up 22%. But majority of the growth was savings and corporate savings. So there's a lot of growth at very thin margins. Now if you look at the actual VNB, it was slightly negative for the quarter. A big part of that negative is Namibia, which most of you will know we had a negative VNB for about 2 years now. So Namibia continues to receive a lot of management's time and effort in the Africa business. Momentum Life. VNB is down, but it's positive. Now this business is a business that carries the majority of cost to do with our Momentum agency, Momentum [indiscernible]. That's the IFA management and sort of BCs and branches, all those costs. So this business is very sensitive to volume shifts. So we were actually pleased to see a positive VNB against a 14% decline in volumes. And then lastly, Corporate. Dumo is actually sitting here in the room if you have questions. So Corporate was a disappointing quarter. I think we'll all agree to that. Our sales halved against the first quarter last year, which was quite a normal quarter. It wasn't a massive [indiscernible]. And I mean it does seem like corporate activity has been probably hit more by COVID than retail in that a lot of the decision-makers' minds and heads are probably in a slightly different space. So the activity levels have not been great in the corporate space. At the same time, we realized that there's maybe things we can do ourselves as well in terms of the efficiency and the productivity of the sales activities in Corporate. So I just want to make the point is that we need to see the volumes improving. But we can do things outside just the volumes to try and improve the VNB picture for this division. Okay. Last 2 things in my long monologue. Embedded value is ZAR 26.12 per share. The ROEV for the quarter was sort of high single digits. I think it's important to realize that there was an increase in the discount rates that we used to value some of the non-covered business. And that had a small drag effect on the ROEV for the quarter. And then the last thing is capital position of the key Momentum Life license. It was pretty static. It was 1.85x versus 1.86x a quarter ago. Now obvious question is what happened with all the retained earnings. The retained earnings are there. We didn't pay a dividend. So the available capital went up, but we did relook and improve the modeling of the credit risk component of SCR. So our actual required capital went up by a few hundred million to allow for the refined modeling of credit risk. So that sort of offset the benefit of the retained earnings. And that's why that ratio was static. Okay. So that brings me to an end. I think we've given you a lot of info today compared to normal. But we're welcome to take questions.

Dumo as well.

Yes.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Michael Christelis of UBS.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

First question I've got is just about your investment guarantee reserve. I mean can you talk a little bit about what impact that had on these numbers, whether there was any strengthening of the IGR required or relaxing there? The second question, I'm a bit surprised by your comment, Hillie, that you've lodged a claim with your reinsurers, but they haven't committed to paying. My understanding was that as at full year, you had already got commitment from your reinsurers to pay for business interruption. So maybe if you can just comment a little bit about that. And then I guess the third question is really around lapses. It does seem like across the sector, everyone's talking about lapses not materializing to the extent that everyone was concerned about. Do you think this is kind of a calm before the storm? Do you think that the worst is now actually behind us and we don't need to be worried about lapses? I mean maybe just some thoughts around that and what you're seeing. I know your provision was specifically around premium relief customers. But what are you seeing, for example, in just your run of the mill lapse rates settling in Met? For example, are you seeing guys canceling policies more or less than they did in the past?

Yes. Thank you, Michael. Hillie here. I'll start with the Guardrisk question, reinsurers question. And I think all the others, Risto will then deal with, I might venture a view on lapses. Keep in mind, we've got a quota share reinsurers. And that reinsurer is committed to and they've paid their proportionate shares and so forth. So that's always been intact. It's the excess of loss where we now have a large claim. Because remember, it is around definitions of the excess. Is it one event? Is it more than one event? So that's a bit more complicated. So that's the only component of the reinsurers that there's not clarity and finality on about. Yes. Look, I mean, I think when we talk about lapses, my view would be that, as I mentioned, we haven't seen the secondary impact of COVID-19, the economic impact. So I would -- I think we're very pleased that there's a bit of a delay in some of these lapses and maybe even new business volumes being impacted and so forth. And I think we will see -- and I think we haven't seen the end of that yet. We definitely -- I think we'll see the pressure on the economy on household income. People have been -- retrenchments have been delayed because of some of the relief measures. I think some people that have been pleased might have received packages. So I think they just -- there was just enough in the system to help people not to make some of the tough decisions yet. But I think we'll see that. And I think the brunt of that will be in the first half of next year.

[indiscernible] guarantee reserves. So obviously, offshore assets did quite well as assets. So a lot of the volatility was actually in the yield curve, which we stabilized, the investment stabilization reserve. So the impact was a small positive. I mean the funding levels have improved a little bit as the years -- financial years unfolded. But it wasn't a big feature in the results compared to the negatives that we saw a couple of quarters ago. I'll just add on the lapse a little bit here, that I think always in the last 20 years when we had the financial crisis and a few other events, lapses have had quite weak correlation to the economic cycle. It's been level, it hasn't been massive. I think what's also changed, if I look at our book, our book today is becoming predominantly risk rather than dominantly savings. And I think in savings, people always have that traction that rather than just saving the premium, you can also cash in your policy. So I think fixed savings products are a little bit more economically pro-cyclical whereas risk products, people seem wanting to keep them through thick and thin. So [indiscernible] seen as a slight move towards insurance tech have been a little bit more defensive because they're predominantly doing risk rather than savings in the past. And then just lastly, on Met specific, this is interesting. Met lapse rates are lower in the last quarter than 12 months ago. And it talks a lot about the changes we made to the way we accept new business and everything else. So we can see that the impact of our internal initiatives and we have some new collection mechanisms as well. So our premium collections have improved year-on-year. And like Hillie says, we continue to wait for some more headwinds from the real economy.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Francois Du Toit of Renaissance Capital.

First question just relates to the results of Momentum Investments. So clearly, an area where there's quite of volatility in numbers and a function of market performance and yield curve movements and the impact that's had. And you've talked to the impact of space also on the annuity book. But maybe if you can give us an idea of what normalized basis in that area because there's been obviously a few changes in segmentation in this definition of what is operating profit, what is investment return. Because [indiscernible] there's been massive volatility here last year. I think that's the first question. Second question is how much of that profit relates to life insurance? And third question, just how much [indiscernible] recovery in spreads and so on because the preceding 2 quarters had no earnings? So that's the first area of discussion.

Francois. I'll answer them one-by one before I forget. Yes. So the investment earnings are ZAR 250 million for the quarter. That is split about ZAR 200 million life and about ZAR 50 million in asset management, if you want to call it that. Now the ZAR 50 million in asset management is probably a normal number. Last year, it was actually a bit low because of a certain fine that we have to deal with. Okay, the ZAR 200 million includes about a ZAR 50 million positive credit variance in the numbers. So I think, yes, maybe ZAR 50 million for non-COVID, ZAR 150 million COVID is a good number for operating profit. And then the investment returns were obviously a bit low in the current period. So ZAR 247 million, maybe close to ZAR 200 million, within that range.

And then the second question just related to the release of your mortality provisions. Given that there's been really no excess deaths since, I think, about the beginning of September in South Africa, firstly, your experience starting with that as well. And if there is no second wave by 31 December, can we expect the last part of [ ZAR 600 million ] mortality provisions to be released? Or maybe just more color around the [indiscernible] of the [indiscernible] quarterly release of the senior and [indiscernible] for a few more quarters, if you can give a little bit of indication of that, please.

Yes. You have asked very good questions there. Now first of all, on claims experience, we actually have quite different exposures in different parts of our business, which I know you'll find interesting because you -- by end of this. But so in Metropolitan, the claims -- there was a cliff sort of after mid-August. We literally went from getting tens of claims a day to getting 1 or 2 a week. So in the funeral market, the mortality claims fell off and disappeared very quickly. In Momentum Life, it never got that high. But it also took a little bit longer to normalize. What is interesting in our legacy book, remember, we've got a lot of closed book. Those clients are quite old, like 70s, 80s. There, we did see a mortality loss again in this quarter. So that again talks to the different impact of COVID on different age groups in that your funeral book that has got quite a bit of younger lives saw a very quick decline in death [indiscernible] post book, a lot of 70 to 80 year olds, their death pension remains quite high. What is maybe hardest for us to fully understand is in Corporate, which actually represents working age population, mortality claims remained high through the full 3 months. So the patterns we saw in Met and Corporate were very different with Corporate having higher claims. We're actually doing quite a bit of internal -- hard to understand the reason because you would have thought that there's quite a bit of overlap in the demographics and the age profiles of Met and Corporate variance doesn't really reflect that. So I would say Corporate is the only business where death claims were as high as we see it at the start of the year. In every other business, the death claims declined very quickly towards mid-, late August and stayed low. Okay. So that gives you some color. So it's not as easy answer -- if Corporate had been down as well, the answer would have been easy. Then in terms of the reserve, this is a very good question because we thought we'll have to use quite a bit of reserving in the first quarter. And now haven't had to use much of it. We used like a 1/4 of it. So we've got a lot of reserve left. One obvious solution is like you're saying is that if there's no death claims to reset, we're actually going the other way around almost. We're saying let's release very little in this quarter now because there's very little death claims. And we'll release very little in the third quarter if there's very little death claims. If the death claims pick up, we'll release more. Only end of the financial year will we decide whether to release the reserve or not. And that will largely depend on whether we see there's a second wave coming or not. So the release, the big release will happen 15th of June next year if there is no second wave.

[indiscernible] it's just that it's winter time again, you follow? So we're saying, listen, let's not get overexcited if there's very few claims during the summer. But let's be ready if there's a second wave in the winter. Now obviously that will depend a lot will there be vaccines and all of that. But I think Risto is 100% right. We're not going to release, I think, some of the provisions at the interim stage if we have another good quarter.

The experience of your funeral books suggest there is quite a lot of seasonality or winter-related plans in the general population potentially. Okay, that's probably wise. And then just quickly on -- I see other question now. Have you got a sense of the market share that you've got in business interruption in South Africa?

Yes. It's a bit tricky. I mean we know who the really big players are. I think everybody knows that. Now Guardrisk is probably, I would say, probably #3 or 4.

Look, our direct insurance, where we actually participate directly, I think our market share is low. It's 2% 3% of the insurance market. So if it wasn't for this one quite big UMA in the hospitality industry, we would have been a lot smaller. But I don't know where all the cover would be because, I mean, some of the competitors are very quiet and seem to be below the radar. But I mean I would -- even in BI insurance, Risto, I mean, we can hardly be bigger than 6% or 7% market share.

Yes. I think we're a bit bigger. But if I look at the claims numbers people are talking about, it's very clear Sanlam is the biggest and Old Mutual is probably the second biggest.

There must be some other players that are just like below the radar. I mean I don't know.

Even in IUM, even in Guardrisk, we do have some clients who do some small business interruption. But that's with their own account and they're heavily reinsured. So that way Guardrisk -- and if you look at industry data, Guardrisk will look a bit bigger than just hospitality industry still. But that's our real exposure because we underwrite that. The other ones are just...

If we add all the cells, in other words, all the business that Guardrisk does, then the Guardrisk market is 10%. But it's very specialized. A lot of the UMAs are specializing. So I'm just saying if Guardrisk is 10%, including all the cells, I mean, I would be surprised if we represent 10% of BI insurance. I would have thought it's a bit less but anyway. So Francois, we're not really sure.

All right. So the numbers you've given us there was only in respect of this 1 year that you underwrite.

Yes. It's under HIC. You're exactly right. Because there, we're the actual underwriter and we reinsure through quota share in excess of loss. And then we have a couple of smaller clients who do BI. And they have their own reinsurance plans. Now we have -- we obviously have risk management. So we sort of double-check the wording and the reinsurance. And for -- as an example, we have 1 client that we just talked about yesterday, they only retained 2.5% of their own account, 97.5% is reinsured.

Excellent. This may be a final question in response to something you've mentioned. So there are increases. Any indication of the percentage level you expect it to be this year?

Well, we gave a 4% increase, I think, for staff this year. It's already been given.

Our next question is from [indiscernible] of Ninety One.

[indiscernible] maybe just [indiscernible], so the excellent performance of that business, we exited in the base with a full operational improvement and also [indiscernible] from services [indiscernible]

Yes. So in Africa, there was a small positive from exiting some of the markets, but that's going to be out the base a bit now. So that definitely wasn't the main driver. That's maybe like less than ZAR 10 million through the 2 years. The big thing there in Lesotho is we continue to have very strong result. So our Lesotho business, as you know, sort of 75%, 80% of the market in Lesotho and that had strong results. We had very good annuity sales, for example. And as I mentioned earlier, annuities haven't been a too bad a product to be selling. Also, I mentioned earlier, the guaranteed reserves were quite a small impact, but they're proportionately a bit bigger in Africa. Remember in Africa, most of our savings business is Smooth Bonus. And in Africa, we also don't hedge to the same degree as we do in South Africa. So that business would have had a little bit bigger benefit from recovery at the funding levels. I must say the ZAR 160 million I think we did in Africa for the quarter are not bad, ZAR 165 million. Okay, I would probably say it's maybe ZAR 20 million, ZAR 50 million higher than normal if I think of the positive variances.

And the other question on the short-term insurance side is for a benefit on the [indiscernible]. I'm unable to understand why the benefit for MSTI is so much higher than the benefit for the [indiscernible]

Yes. I'm going to venture a little bit of a guess here. Now obviously, the Forbes book and the Momentum book are still quite different with their reinsurance strategy. Because we bought the business in February and we're really sort of deciding on how do we structure the Alexander Forbes book for the long term. So if you think one business as having very little reinsurance, other business having a lot of reinsurance, and that is leading to quite different net ratios. So I wouldn't read into the one being a lot more generous than other in terms of benefit.

And then last, if you can expand a little bit on the [indiscernible] segments that you talk about on the quality and life side. You talked about new premium collection initiatives, which enable [indiscernible] more flexibly.

Yes. So that's an initiative called [indiscernible]. It started from 0 last year. Now we're doing high single-digit millions in collection. So for a 6-month period, it actually adds up quite a bit of money. It's a mechanism where instead of running a double-digit order or [indiscernible] order on the 15th and 21st and so on, we sent the client a link where they can go to a retailer or they can pay through [ Zebra ]. It's basically enabling people to make effectively cash payments to make up for missed premiums and short premiums. And the takeup of that is on millions a month. So -- and a lot of those are premiums we will probably never get if we try to double debit later or so on. So that's been quite helpful. It's quite exciting because we view it as quite a new innovation and it drops straight to bottom line. Even though it's a few million only, it's a nice thing to have.

The next question is from Matthew Pouncett of Laurium Capital.

I've got three questions. I'll start with the first one. Regarding Momentum Life protection sales, do you guys expect -- why don't we pick the lag there about in terms of when somebody is trying to sell the policies that it actually ends up on book? So is kind of this quarter's performance more indicative of what you experienced, say, in May, June and we expect -- you're expecting now to come through in Q2? Just trying to understand the recovery there of the sales volume.

Yes. I mean, Hillie, do you want to try to answer that one?

Okay. If I understand the question, look, I would say, on Myriad, there are probably 2 factors. The one is that there are more delays and there was more of a slowdown during the hard lockdown. And obviously, it took a while to pick up. So I think there is a bit of that lag. That's the one factor. But I would say, secondly, I mean, we anticipate that slower growth in the Myriad market segment, even before COVID-19. Because of some new [ RBR ] requirements, the switching, much stricter switching regulatory requirements. So we sort of anticipated that -- the Momentum [indiscernible] anticipated a 10% drop in protection volumes in that segment. And I think we're seeing some of that. I think there is a bit of a more permanent slowdown in protection sales in that market segment.

Okay. Great. But I suppose now we're sort of on level 1 sales volume pickup, but we would only really see that coming through the improvements in August and September [indiscernible] October, November. Is that fair to say? There's a sort of lag between sales activity and what you actually reported a new business.