Sanlam Limited (SLM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to Sanlam's 2023 Interim Results Presentation. It is my pleasure to welcome members of the Investment Analysts Society, members of the Sanlam Board and guests joining us in the auditorium and via the webcast and telephone lines. I am Grant Davids, Head of Investor Relations at Sanlam, and I'll be facilitating today's session. I trust you will find it informative and engaging. We are joined in the auditorium today by our Group CEO and Group Finance Director. We are also joined by other members of the executive leadership team in the auditorium and online. For the agenda today, Paul Hanratty, our Group CEO; and Abigail Mukhuba will present the financial results, and then we will move into a Q&A session, both from the auditorium as well as the webcast and the telephone lines. I'll now invite Paul to begin the presentation.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Sanlam's first 6 months of 2023 results presentation. As Grant mentioned, we've got Abigail here today presenting with myself. Today, we will -- I hope somebody is moving these slides on. I -- sorry, I couldn't see us. Sorry. Today, we'll be reverting to our familiar format for this presentation. In March, we presented our financial, strategic and competitive progress since 2019 to assist you all in understanding our journey through the pandemic years. Today, we're operating in a new environment from the pre-COVID one, and we will update you on the business performance and outlook for the first half of 2023. We've included some additional information at the end of our presentation pack on the implementation of IFRS 17 at Sanlam, but we're not going to be covering that today. Our key long-term financial targets at Sanlam are set in terms of return on group equity value and dividend growth. These are set to have a primary focus on long-term shareholder returns, supported by reasonable income growth for shareholders. The first half has seen a strong return on group equity value on an adjusted basis as well as on an actual basis. At a per share level, we've achieved an adjusted return of 8.5% against a target of 7.5% for the 6-month period, assisted by strong new business value generation, solid risk results and the impacts of capital allocation decisions. The return was slightly offset by weaker persistency in the retail mass segment in South Africa. Actual return on group equity value at a per-share level was higher than adjusted return on group equity value at 12%, despite a negative tax impact from the introduction of IFRS 17. This arises from the earlier payment of tax in the future under an IFRS 17 taxation basis regime. Cash earnings were up 30% for the first half of the year. Strong return on group equity value and cash earnings growth underlines what we said in March. The progress made from 2019 to 2023 is now coming through in shareholder value creation, including dividend paying capacity. We are also delighted to have finally closed our transaction to create the new SanlamAllianz Africa business. This will be the strongest, most competitive and largest insurance group on the African continent outside of South Africa. We're delighted to have partnered Allianz, whose scale, human capital resources and culture make them ideal partners for Sanlam. We've historically seen very strong growth off admittedly a low base in Africa, and this partnership will allow us to benefit from the African demographic and grow dividend for years to come. Our outlook for the balance of 2023 is positive with global inflation peak finally on the distant horizon in sight and strong underlying momentum in all our businesses. Each of our businesses has seen strong performance in the first 6 months of 2023. In March, I explained the disorientating effect of COVID, the Ukrainian conflict and the fundamental change in global inflation and interest rates. If we look back to 2019, we can now see that our financial trajectory is back on track post a number of what we regard as 1 in 100 or 1 in 25-year dislocations. All of our general insurance operations are recovering well from the impacts of the inflation surge experienced in 2022. We're satisfied with our sales growth in the light of a tough economic and consumer environment and continue to grow or hold market share in every market segment and every product line. 2023 has seen us integrate Absa Asset Management successfully with synergies realized earlier than expected. We've bulked up in the linked investment platform space, taking out the minorities of BrightRock and acquired a strategic stake at Capital Legacy as well as taking the majority stake at AfroCentric. This all supports our Fortress South Africa strategy. We took advantage of the weak share price of our stock to execute share buybacks in early 2023. We've also bought back over ZAR 2 billion of debt from Standard Bank that underpinned our black economic empowerment SPV formed in 2019. This debt is backed by 85 million Sanlam shares. And by buying back the debt, we're able to shield the shareholders from any overhang created should the SPV be forced to wind up in March 2024. The implementation of IFRS 17 has had a very negative impact on our return on group equity value for the period because it brings taxation forward for Sanlam. However, this is a one-off impact for shareholders, who will see [Audio Gap] Life new business growth has been muted given the extraordinary single premium sales of '21 and '22, which were undoubtedly driven by a spike in the savings rate in our economy. General insurance growth is solid and in line with the expectations. Although investment inflows have been excellent, unfortunately, this period has seen high outflows, so net flows overall are disappointing. We are, however, satisfied that the volume and quality of new business written is excellent. As the environment slowly recovers, we expect to see solid growth given our extremely strong competitive position in all markets and product lines. As outlined earlier, our first half returns for shareholders as measured by return on group equity value is excellent, driven by continued new business value add and sound management of claims and expenses. Value of new business growth is strong, reflecting both mix changes and expense efficiencies. Cash generation has been strong for the first half of 2023, but it's extremely important to note that the rate of growth will not continue into the second half because the second half of 2022 was a lot stronger than the first half of 2022. We do, however, expect cash generation in the second half of 2023 to remain in line with the first half. Despite corporate action, share and debt buybacks, the group solvency position remains extremely strong, and the group's leverage is very low. I think it's instructive to look at how our group has performed when one looks at the results from the periods pre and post COVID. This chart shows the compound annual growth rates in earnings, life new business, total new business and the value of new business between the first half of 2019 and the first half of 2023. You can see that despite the various impacts that we've had in the ensuing years, earnings growth is 7% per annum, and that volume and VNB growth were a little ahead of this. It is important to note that the 2019 earnings are on an IFRS 4 basis, and we have definitely not gone to the trouble of recalculating them on IFRS 17. Given the macro over the intervening period, this chart shows how the earnings growth and value creation have been kept fully intact during this very disorientating period. The group has continued to invest in the core South African business, becoming the majority shareholder at AfroCentric, taking out the BrightRock minorities and acquiring a stake in an enlarged Capital Legacy. We believe this capital deployment will allow the group to capture growth going forward in South Africa. AfroCentric opens the door to create synergies between our life and health businesses, as well as generating future cross-sell. The BrightRock transaction will enable considerable cost and capital synergies over the medium term, while the Capital Legacy transaction helps Sanlam offer leading will and estate solutions to our clients. Although AfroCentric is currently experiencing difficult trading conditions, Sanlam will invest in this business going forward and expects good long-term returns to flow from this. The corporate action and share and debt buybacks have resulted in the full use of our discretionary capital. We've taken advantage of market conditions to buy back shares at attractive prices and have bought back the debt provided by Standard Bank to fund the BEE SPV established in 2019 to partially finance the Saham transaction at that time. The latter decision is in the best interest of shareholders as it eliminates overhang risk from the market in Sanlam stock. The group has already prepared a program to issue new subordinated debt, and this issue will restore capital buffers shortly. You will also have seen the announcement of the Santam special dividend earlier this week. Our various transactions and capital allocation decisions have impacts over different time frames. The majority of our decisions have been immediately accretive. Some transactions will take a little longer to see uplift in earnings because the synergies will take longer to extract. And in the case of the SanlamAllianz joint venture, we expect fantastic long-term returns from creating the continental insurance powerhouse, but no immediate short-term financial benefits. Turning now to the new joint venture. The formation of SanlamAllianz Africa business as a joint venture between Sanlam and Allianz heralds, a new era for the Sanlam Group. We believe the strength of this business in terms of scale, diversification and its ability to draw on 2 strong shareholders will give rise to strong growth and good shareholder returns over time. The business will operate in 8 out of the 10 biggest economies on the continent and right around about 16% of the insurance business in those countries in which it operates. The 2 shareholders are committed to continue to build the strength and competitive advantage of this portfolio in key markets. The new management team is now in place with Heinie Werth as the CEO; and Johannes Bayer, formerly of Allianz as the CFO. The new company's Board will consist of course of Heinie and Johannes, as well as Oliver Bate, the CEO of Allianz Group; Chris Townsend, who is an Executive Director of Allianz; Johan van Zyl from the Sanlam Board; Andrew Birrell from the Sanlam Board; and myself. Chris Townsend of Allianz will initially chair the new Board, we have a rotation of Board Chairmanship every 2 years. The strength, experience and diversity of the skills within the new executive and the experience and the seniority of the Board give me great confidence that this will be an exciting and rewarding business into the future. Sanlam remains focused on ensuring that everything we do supports a sustainable business into the future. Our lens is much wider than simple ESG. I'm delighted to say that our initiatives to support job creation are bearing fruit. Our national parks in South Africa are an important legacy and a vital source of biodiversity, a much undervalued contributor to climate impacts. We're supporting investment into SANParks and the iconic Kruger National Park in a way that also creates jobs for local communities while preserving our biodiversity. Sanlam continues to invest in youth and employment opportunities directly and through innovative financing. While our primary focus is not on climate change itself, we've announced 2 important new initiatives in 2023, one, to help finance the preservation of the Galapagos Islands and the other to produce green hydrogen in Southern Africa. Both of these initiatives are being led by climate fund investors. Sanlam's reporting on climate matters is improving and receiving a great deal of attention. Sanlam was also the recipient of the Sustainable Investment Manager of the Year award in South Africa and a finalist for the most sustainable South African company. On that note, I'm now going to hand over to Abigail to take us through the financial results. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Paul, and good afternoon to everyone. Before I start with the actual financial results and the business performance for the period, we thought it's appropriate to give some context into the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standard 17 that took effect from beginning of this year. So since last year, we have communicated that the new standard does not change the group strategy or the cash generation capabilities, the dividend policy nor the overall group solvency of the group. So Sanlam continues to focus on return on group equity value as its primary value measure for shareholder value creation. And in line with past practice, the group will continue to prepare shareholder fund information in addition to the IFRS information. And this is also aligned to the way that the Sanlam Board assesses the group's performance. We will continue to provide reconciliation between IFRS and shareholder fund information for purposes of transparency. So in terms of the impact on Sanlam, IFRS profit after tax attributable to shareholders decreased with the new standard or when the new standard was implemented due to the nonrecognition of investment variances, which were previously absorbed by the asset mismatch reserve. So this mechanism is not permitted under IFRS 17 and therefore, it's excluded. Our net result from financial services increased mainly due to the effect of discounting liabilities on the general insurance business in 2022. However, if you look at the more significant impact on our business, it was more on the shareholders' equity on transition. And when I talk transition, I talk 1st January 2022, where shareholders' equity increased by approximately ZAR 14 billion from the old to the new standard. And this was largely due to the discretionary margins or reserves that were held as part of policyholder liabilities under IFRS 4, which are now released and held as new shareholder fund reserves in shareholders' equity. I know there are a lot of technical terms, but as Paul has alluded, our results for this period have been reviewed by our auditors and our 1 January 2022 opening balance have also been audited by the auditors. So on transition to the new standard, we report a contractual service margin, what we refer to as CSM, of ZAR 31 billion and a risk adjustment of ZAR 10 billion, and this represents a significant store of value for long-term insurance business. In addition, approximately ZAR 13 billion shareholder fund reserves are available to absorb the impact of the investment market volatility on our earnings, and this is done through the asset mismatch reserve as well as the impact on cash available for dividend distribution from the cost of projects related to insurance businesses and other specific events such as future pandemics. So the establishment of these shareholder fund reserves allow us to have an overall prudence inherent in Sanlam's financial management when you look into what matters could come into the future. Sanlam -- also, we've reclassified some of our contracts between insurance and investment contracts, but with a limited impact on the total policyholder liabilities. A large proportion of our savings contracts are classified under IFRS 9 as investment contracts. And this means that IFRS 17 therefore does not apply to as many of our savings products as it might for some of our peers, making the size of our CSM not directly comparable with the peers. And then another reason for the size of our CSM not being directly comparable to the peers is probably due to our product mix as well. CSM is not relevant to a significant proportion of the short duration general and life insurance businesses. As Paul also mentioned, additional slides are at the back, so I'm not going to go too much into IFRS lesson this afternoon. So we'll go and focus the presentation on the actual financial period for the business. If we look at our return on group equity value at 13.3% and 7.9%, respectively, we achieved actual and adjusted return on group equity value above the 6-month hurdle of 7.5%. Again, just to reiterate that these are 6-month numbers, they are not annualized. And the details of the split between covered and noncovered business would have been published in the pack that is available on our website. But on a per share basis, RoGEV was 12% and adjusted RoGEV was 8.5% for the 6 months. So the uplift on a per share basis also refers to the issue that Paul alluded to earlier, the 85 million shares held by the BEE SPV which are now treated as treasury shares for purposes of GEV per share purposes after the acquisition from Standard Bank. If one looks at the different contributing buckets to the RoGEV performance, we see that satisfactory levels of new business volumes with increased sales of higher-margin products supported the VNB contribution. And then further, the RoGEV performance was supported by net positive operating experience variances as well as assumption changes. In this reporting period, we experienced an even more favorable mortality experience, leading to a better positive risk experience if you compare to the prior period. However, this was partly offset by weaker persistency experience, particularly in the retail mass business, corporate as well as the emerging markets operations. And then overall, we experienced a negative experience variance in the noncovered business due to outflows in the international investment management operations, which were higher than expected. Persistency experience in the retail affluent business, however, remained positive, benefiting from a range of proactive management intervention. If I go back to the retail mass business, the management actions that have been put in place, we've started to see a positive impact, particularly on the early duration persistency, which has since stabilized. The longer duration persistency continues to show strain, reflecting the difficult economic climate and its impact on lower income market segments. And then on the emerging markets front, from a persistency perspective, we saw weaker experience in Botswana. Then positive assumption changes in the noncovered operations that we saw during the period were due to an improved growth outlook in the Shriram Finance credit operations in India and the realization of synergy benefits from the Absa Asset Management integration. Obviously, Santam has already gone out with the results, but Santam outperformed its return on capital target over this period. And in this time around, the net impact of market volatility, the yield curve exchange rate weakness, it is the rand against most of the valuation currencies and other economic movements impacted RoGEV positively. And then finally, maybe just to explain that with the introduction of IFRS 17, we saw an introduction from revenue services of changes to the tax basis vis-a-vis the old tax basis under IFRS 4. And the changes address the transition from IFRS 4 by calculating a phasing in tax amount, which was based on the transfer of discretionary reserves from policyholder funds to shareholder funds and thereby resulting in an increase in future tax obligations. The amount that is taxed and paid to [ us ], as Paul has referred to, is more or mainly impacted by the fact that it gets accelerated over a 6-year period versus at least for long-term insurers, in a 3-year period for short-term insurers. And then the cash flow impact, we do talk that it gets paid earlier. However, it's already provided for. Therefore, this additional tax does not actually go to our income statement. It goes directly provided for against the balance sheet. Then from a cash earnings perspective, in this slide, when I talk cash earnings or when I talk earnings, I just want to make clear that I'm referring to net results from financial services. There are some differences between the earnings that we disclosed under IFRS 17 compared to how we disclosed it under IFRS 4. Under IFRS 4, our reported earnings was close -- was a very close proxy to cash earnings, whereas under IFRS 17, we need to make some adjustments to get back to the actual cash earnings number. We, therefore, now start reporting cash earnings, as Paul showed in earlier slides. To get to cash earnings, we adjust the IFRS 17 based earnings for items like amortization of intangible assets as well as IFRS 17 specific noncash adjustments. And for this reporting period, there was a difference of around 4% between, let's say, normalized earnings versus your cash earnings. Then we also show on the slide the cash available for dividend, which takes into account projected expenses and the release of shareholder fund reserves that we used to absorb the impact of specific items like when you're modernizing some of our investment platforms, particularly in the South African business. Then from a solvency position perspective, we remain strong and well within the target ranges. The ratio reduced marginally over the period. There was positive contributions from operating and economic experience variances and assumption changes, as well as the inclusion now of the Santam subordinated debt issuance into our calculation for the period. These, however, were offset by the cash outlay of ZAR 1.5 billion for the AfroCentric and BrightRock transactions, as well as the SPV pref share buyback of the debt. The makeup of the group's capital base, however, remains prudent and with low levels of debt. So from that perspective, we're quite comfortable. And now I'm going to go into the detail maybe of the line of business performance analysis. So if we unpack from a life insurance perspective, we saw pleasing earnings growth due to strong positive risk experience across the portfolio. We saw higher asset-based fee income from improved investment market performance and higher earnings from the credit portfolio backing life insurance liabilities. As Paul said earlier, we basically saw very good performance across all our businesses. The strong earnings improvement was broad-based, even if you look at the geographical representation as well. Then from a volumes perspective, on a present value of new business premium basis, we saw an increase of 4% driven -- on a retail mass business, we saw good growth in the group businesses as well as the Capitec JV. And then in retail affluent, we saw recurring premium sales increase as strong growth in intermediated risk product sales were dampened by muted growth in savings product sales and weaker sales from direct channels. The individual life risk sales were very strong [Audio Gap] Share gains over this period. Then the single premium sales were in line with 2022 with a significant increase in [Audio Gap] The corporate business, it benefited from a substantial increase in group risk sales, but recorded a decline in single premium sales take-up of non-life single premium products over the period. And then in the emerging markets operations, we saw good growth with -- that was recorded in the North and West Africa region and in India, which was dampened by weaker sales of credit life and savings business in the Southern and East Africa regions because of weak credit extension by banks in these markets. Then if you look at net value of new business, the increase, we're very happy with the over 20% increase in constant economic basis, with retail affluent benefiting from strong sales of higher-margin risk and guaranteed annuity products. Overall, South Africa recorded a margin of 2.6% and emerging markets recorded 4.7%. And then on a longer-term trend basis, one should note that both new business and VNB remain well above pre-pandemic levels. And then on the slide, finally, on net client cash flow, we saw a strong positive net client cash flows, albeit 26% lower than 2022, and this decline is due to higher terminations in the corporate business and increased outflow from maturities and early retirements as well as increased withdrawals from discretionary savings products in retail affluent. Then if I move to general insurance line of business, strong rebound in the performance. In South Africa, Santam improved its underwriting performance and recorded a strong recovery in investment return on insurance fund. In fact, just over 2% net earned premiums earned versus just over 0% last year. And then from an underwriting margin perspective, it earned about 3.8%, which is below its target range. But if you take out the one-offs, their performance was well within the target range. The Pan-Africa portfolio benefited from continued book growth, improved investment return on insurance funds partly offset by a lower yet still very strong underwriting performance with the net underwriting margin being positive -- at least positive just over 7%. And then India's earnings increased due to book growth and reserve releases from better-than-expected claims experience following very good claims management. I'm not really going to go into the details of the Santam volumes, but I think Tava and Wikus would have gone into the detail. But suffice to say that Santam achieved business volume growth of over 7%, which also took into account steps that management took to prune some of the underperforming businesses, which is aligned with Santam's strategy to focus on the profitable growth of the business. And then from a Pan-Africa perspective, we saw robust performance about -- increase of about 10% in constant currency, which was supported by good growth in Morocco and Saham Re. In India, the new business volumes, it increased in constant currency, benefiting from a recovery again in Shriram distribution channels and strong direct channel performance. And then in the investment management business in South Africa, we saw asset management achieving satisfactory results despite lower performance fees in the active asset manager and lower establishment fees in the alternative business. The diversity of revenue streams in this business, which includes the passive and retail implemented consulting business as well as the strong earnings contribution from the recently acquired Absa Asset Management business, supported the earnings growth. On the international front, we saw lower earnings being recorded, impacted by the lower fee income because of the recent outflows experienced in this business. And then talking about the volumes, both South African and the Pan-African operations recorded solid growth. However, despite this robust inflows over the period, the group's investment management operations recorded net client cash outflows of about ZAR 4.8 billion, mostly in the international business due to withdrawals by single advisory businesses in the closure of a fund and withdrawals due to challenging economic environment. On the South African asset management front, we saw net outflows due to single low-margin institutional withdrawals from a multi-manager and the inclusion of the Absa Asset Management net outflows. Suffice to say that the management actions to curtail some of the outflows, particularly the Absa Asset Management outflows have been implemented, and we are seeing lower net outflows recorded in the early parts of the second quarter of 2023. Then I think, finally, on the last slide on my part. On the credit and structuring businesses, South Africa's contribution to credit and structuring earnings declined due to higher bad debt provisions, which were raised in the institutional and retail credit business in response to the current challenging economic environment. And this was further impacted by lower earnings in the equity structuring business. Then Pan-Africa increased its contribution in credit and structuring due to an improved performance in Namibia. India is the biggest contributor to the earnings on this front. Its rapid earnings growth of 65% was due to continued strong performance from the Shriram Finance Limited business. This business benefited from a larger advances book, improved collections and overall unfolding synergies benefits after the merger of the Shriram City Union Finance and Shriram Transport Finance businesses. And with that, I would like to thank you and hand back to Paul.

Abigail, thank you very much. And I really would like to thank you and your finance team for an amazing job at implementation of IFRS 17. I think Sanlam is one of the first big insurers to actually go live and publish numbers. And of course, these are now comparators for '22 and the actual numbers for '23, so well done. I'm also delighted to say that when we started down this road of implementation and the auditors were telling us that we would have to release all of our historic margins, some of us didn't receive that message well. But Abigail and her team have done an amazing job of moving, as you've seen, the money from the one side of the balance sheet to the other and into our NAV. So we remain as a company as well provided as ever, and that allows both shareholders and clients to operate with confidence knowing that our strength is the same as ever. And I think that what is also excellent, Abigail, is the disclosure and the transparency that you provided in the shareholder funds that people can see how we get from this new accounting standard to the cash that drives the bottom line. I'm going to end off with one slide. The operating environment has been very difficult in the first half of 2023. The levels of inflation and interest rates experienced have made conditions extremely difficult for our clients across the continent and in India. Although we are beginning to see the peak of inflation on the far horizon and have hoped that central banks will gradually ease up on monetary policy, we do expect conditions to remain challenging for some while. We expect conditions will ease gradually over the next few years, but nevertheless, focused on driving further efficiencies within our business. We're also determined to drive out the synergies from each past transaction and to fully integrate these businesses into the Sanlam ecosystem. We do remain very optimistic about the balance of 2023 from a growth, earnings and return perspective, and we would expect the second half of 2023 to be similar to the first half with some more benefits flowing from past transactions. It remains imperative that the South African economy recovers post the pandemic and Sanlam is very supportive of all the role players who are working so tremendously hard to turn around energy supply, logistics and to improve levels of crime and corruption. However, even if we turn all of these around, much is required to address long-term structural growth and employment issues. We are very optimistic, as you've heard earlier about the African growth story. Although many countries are challenged by increased interest rates, elevated debt levels post the pandemic, we do believe that the demographic dividend and gradual development of the African continent will support long-term growth at very attractive levels. We're also very optimistic about the Indian economy and our own business, in particular in India. The sound management of that economy and the underlying growth story remains intact. Shriram enjoys a unique competitive position that enables it to consistently benefit from the underlying growth in the Indian economy. As well as being optimistic about Sanlam's prospects, we have retained tremendous balance sheet flexibility with strong solvency position and very low levels of leverage. This does, of course, now allow the group to come today to our results, and I will now open up to questions.

Welcome back, everyone, and thank you to Paul and Abigail for presenting the results. We'll now go to the Q&A session. I will just make the point that there is a lot of information that we've given this afternoon, especially in the packs that we've given out. It is the first reporting period under IFRS 17 or under the new accounting standard. We have scheduled one-on-one sessions with analysts and investors. So I will ask that for very detailed or technical questions, we leave those for the one-on-one sessions. But with that, we will go to the lines. I will ask that before anyone poses a question, you do introduce yourself, give your name and the organization that you're representing. We'll start with the telephone lines. Operator, are there any questions from the telephone lines?

The first question we have is from Andrew Baker of Citi.

It's Andrew Baker from Citi. Three from me, please. First, can you just give an update on the outlook for persistency risk? I appreciate, obviously, management actions, you said have beginning to have a positive impact on the shorter duration persistency. Just interested as well, if there's anything you can do on the longer duration persistency from a management action perspective. Then secondly, on the additional ZAR 2 billion subordinated debt and then also the Santam special dividend, are both of these flagged to rebuild capital buffers? Or should we expect these proceeds to be deployed in any other way? And then finally, on Slide 9, you highlight some of the longer-term revenue and cost synergy potentials from SanlamAllianz. Are you able to give any sense of sort of the size of synergies that you're expecting here from the combination? Anything you're able to say there would be really helpful.

Okay. Andrew, nice to hear from you. You've become our new #1 in the queue. So Michael and others are under some pressure now. On the persistency question, obviously, it is much more difficult to deal with longer-term persistency than it is with short duration. So short duration, we've made quite a number of changes to remuneration practices and to the vetting of the quality of the business coming in. But with longer-term persistency, it's a much tougher issue to deal with on this front. And you'll have your own views on how long we're likely to see the current pressure on consumers. But my own view would be to continue to see pressure on that front, maybe longer. I think your second question, just remind me Grant was on...

Capital.

Capital. So it's quite difficult to say. We do generally like to have around about ZAR 1 billion of discretionary capital handy in the -- at call. But we're not in any position to make any -- to give you any guidance on what we may do with that. But we would generally aim to have around about ZAR 1 billion of discretionary capital and preferably no more than 3. And the last question was on synergies at Allianz. So Andrew, you'll appreciate that for competition reasons, right up until today, we have been unable to share very detailed information with each other. So when we did the transaction, we've modeled in what we felt were fairly standard cost synergies. We've -- both parties have spent a lot of time with Heinie. And I think we are -- we can say that we're pretty confident that those levels of synergies will be fairly easily achieved. I think you'd appreciate that in the short term, there will be some costs associated with getting those, but not too high. But we won't -- we don't expect to see any benefits in the first year or 2 to the bottom line from those. And I would also say that there are 2 levels of cost synergy involved here. The first is at the central level and those, actually, we will flush out very quickly on day 1 because both Allianz and Sanlam clearly had management structures to oversee these portfolios. Now we've got one structure, which is exactly the same size that each of us had previously. So that's fairly simple. But in country, we -- I think we've got 14 countries where there's an overlap. And the progress on integrating those will vary depending on local regulatory responses. So for example, in Morocco, we're having to hold the businesses separately initially until we can clarify how we're going to deal with some very specific areas that the regulator has flagged where we would have too dominative position in the market. So some of the synergies will take longer to flow. But I've said it once, and I'll say it again, we did not do this deal to get cost synergies at either Sanlam or Allianz. It's much more about building a business for the future, and we would expect the synergies and the benefits to arise over time actually on the revenue side. So this deal was never premised on any cost synergies at all.

The next question we have is from Warwick Bam of RMB Morgan Stanley.

Three from me as well. From an underwriting perspective, the Pan-Africa general insurance margins in North and West Africa specifically were 3%. Santam called out some specific claims experience, which you quoted as well, which showed a favorable underlying dynamic. I mean are there similar dynamics to call out in that GI portfolio that could indicate a positive outlook for underwriting margins? That's question one. Question 2, just in terms of the credit book growth that you're seeing in your Indian exposure. What's your sense of the quality of that book and any risks around that? Lastly, the profitability in the SanFin business improved significantly year-over-year. Was that just a case of a low base? Or are there any one-off items to call out in the current period?

Great. So Warwick, three quick answers. So the first one on the underwriting margin in Africa beyond Santam. So the reasons are actually very different. So as you would have known from Tava, there were a number of sort of weather and reinsurance related matters at Santam. In the African businesses, actually, the issue has been much more that the team has been slightly slow in responding to escalating premiums with inflation. So they have not been quite as quick at addressing premium revisions as the Santam team. It's taking slightly longer. So obviously, as each month passes, you will see an improvement because they will be repricing on renewal. So that is -- so this is -- the outlook in short is positive on that. Your question on the credit quality of the Shriram book. I see your team now covering that out in India side, they'll probably have their own views they could give you. But my view is that Shriram has a 50-year history of extremely conservative and prudent credit advance. None of that has changed whatsoever. And I think the underlying drivers and dynamics in that economy are very positive. So the consumer pressures are, if anything, easing much more quickly there than anywhere else. So -- and the book growth has been very modest. You'll see that relative to their competitors, they grow their book at a much more modest rate. So they give up growth in order to preserve quality and prudence. So I'm very convinced that the quality of that book remains excellent. Also tremendous stability in that management team as I'm sure you know. And then the third question...

SanFin.

SanFin. So the answer there -- so SanFin is a business where there can be some quite big moving parts, and they have very large hedging costs. Last year, those hedging costs were really high. This year, they've been a lot lower. And that is the single biggest reason for the improvement in the underlying profitability of that business.

The next question we have is from Michael Christelis of UBS.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we hear you well, Michael.

Paul, 3 questions. If I can go back to the last question, can you give us a bit of a sense of the split between mass and corporate and retail, just what the relative sizes of each of those are? Just -- and maybe some color on what -- you just talk about stability there, but I'm just trying to understand, is the long duration actually deteriorating? Or is it stable? I couldn't quite pick that up from the commentary. Then 2 questions on SanlamAllianz. Firstly, you mentioned in the trading update last week that there were potentially some post-close adjustments to the deal ratio. Can you give me any sense of what those relate to specifically? And what we should expect in terms of is there a potentially a material change in the 60-40 original split that was announced? And then lastly, your introduction of your asset mismatch reserve for SPA GI is quite interesting, particularly in a time when returns have been quite strong and underwriting has been strong. Does this affect your targeted range for underwriting and/or investment results there? Or should we still be expecting that same thing, I think it was 4% to 9% for each?

Okay. Great, Michael. Thanks. So your first question, the majority of the persistency issues are in the retail mass business. The corporate, there's a little bit, but it's relatively small. And I'm sure that when we see you one-on-one, Grant can pull out the exact numbers for you. The issue with longer-dated persistency is that it is deteriorating, not that it's stable, that it's deteriorating. And it tends to be historically a very stable metric. So that is of concern. And it is, I believe, because we are seeing that consumer base under pressure. Your second question was on...

Allianz adjustments.

The adjustment. So Michael, so the adjustments do not relate to the relative appraisal values or group equity values of the businesses, but to any adjustments to audited NAVs. And certainly, I can't talk for the Allianz side. But on the Sanlam side, these will be absolutely de minimis because you can imagine that we are running these businesses properly and don't expect to have any holes in NAV relative to the original mid-2022 -- no, '21 NAVs that went into the deal. So there's going to be very small adjustments. And I know that you have flagged always this issue of the deterioration in the value of the Egyptian pound. But remember, for many of our businesses, we've had deteriorations in the value of those currencies. So most African currencies have weakened in value. So I would expect de minimis adjustments to the 60-40 split. And then the last question, Grant?

The SPA GI target range.

SPA GI, okay. So you asked about us introducing the smoothing into the accounting. I have to say, we took a decision from a policy point of view to introduce that change before we saw the actual investment results. And I think it's a very good thing that we introduced it in a period where investment returns were strong. So obviously, if we'd reported on the old basis, earnings would have been even higher than what they are, and you would have all been cynical, I think, if investment returns have been poor and we put in the new practice. But that's really good luck. You shouldn't expect to see any change in the hurdles because, clearly, what we're doing on the investment side is we've set a long term hurdle. What you should expect is for it to be met more often now because over time, you would expect the smooths return coming through to be much closer to the hurdle. But the hurdle itself shouldn't change and the achievement of it shouldn't change.

The next question we have is from Francois Du Toit of Anchor Stockbrokers.

Can you hear me?

Yes. We can hear you, Francois?

First one on your cash net result from financial services. I think in the past, your dividend policy related to that you tended to target a 90% payout ratio of that cash number. Can we expect that practice to continue? Number one. Number 2, would you make enough -- and I think there was also a time when we were able to reconcile back to that cash earnings number ourselves. You do give us the adjustments, but [ ideally ] one would want to use audited numbers to reconcile back to that. And I guess the numbers that's missing here is the assets for insurance acquisition cash flows and the amortization of it, as well as, I guess, the capitalized project expenses. Would that be made available on an audited basis in the future that we can reconcile back to cash earnings? I think given also that we tend to target that for dividend policy, it would be very helpful if we could do that. If you can also just confirm your dividend policy? I think you've had a degree of smoothing to your dividend policy, so let's call it a progressive policy. Do you expect that to continue as well? Or do you have enough smoothing buffers in your earnings not to need to do that? So a few questions around your dividend, if I may. And then the last question, just on your experience variances. The experience variances were in the life business, a lot bigger. It seems in IFRS, that in EV statement, it looks like your EV statement is still on an old cash basis, and if you can just reconcile that. There's a ZAR 1.4 billion contribution from this year's -- sorry, experience variance contribution that adds to the CSM -- sorry, that accrues to the CSM and we don't see such a big contribution or growth in value of in-force in the EV statement. So maybe just a sense of why the experience variance is so much bigger on the IFRS basis than in the cash basis, EV statement basis? So those are the 2 discussion points if you can help me with.

So Francois, let me start with dividends. So we clearly haven't changed our dividend policy. If and when we ever change our dividend policy, we will communicate that very clearly. Our dividend policy is to pay cash earnings out as a dividend, and we move within a 10% corridor. So we can -- we'd either hold back 10% or declare a dividend 10% above cash earnings in any one period. So there's a little bit of smoothing, not a great deal. The second question is the issue of audited accounts. We never audit our midyear accounts. They are reviewed by the auditors. The end of year accounts will clearly be fully audited, all items, and it will be fully audited. And so you'll have that. The third question, unless Barry Laggar, who's the Chief Actuary of Sanlam, is able to handle it, I would suggest that the last question falls very squarely in the bucket of highly technical. And I would suggest that your range of one-on-one, unless Barry you've got a quick, snappy short answer that will be of interest to the wider audience.

Thanks, Paul. I think that the main reason there is essentially that IFRS 17 has a different approach to how experience is handled. So if you look at an embedded value, the experience on the year comes through in terms of what happens to profit, but also the future profits in terms of the value of in-force, whereas IFRS 17, you only have the current year's experience going through in terms of profit. And so if there are any experience variances that relate to the future profits, that actually goes through into your CSM.

Thanks. But Francois, I think you're welcome if you want more detail to pick it up. I suggest -- I'm guessing that most of the audience like me is not to...

That's fine. It is quick technical. Maybe just a quick one as well in terms of the asset -- the Absa Asset Management acquisition. I think you bought about ZAR 130 billion of assets under management. Can you give us a sense of how outflows or inflows or net flows have behaved since the acquisition?

Yes. So they've been better. There are net outflows in total, but they've been lower than the historic ones before Sanlam took the business over. So it has been slightly better, and it is improving all the time, that situation.

Excellent. I'm going to squeeze one quick one in still as well. Your wealth management earnings is up 45%. Can you give some color of what's driving [Audio Gap]

Different question. Abigail, I think I'm right in saying that last year, they had some abnormal IT costs. One-off IT. I spent quite a lot of money on upgrading some IT systems last year, and it's a relatively small business. So that can make quite a big difference. But they have had a good year. Assets are up nicely.

Operator, are there any more questions from the telephone line?

Yes, we do have more questions. The next question is from Saul Miller of Truffle AM.

Just a question on the new business strain. It came down quite significantly. Is that because of -- is that because of IFRS 17? Or is that to do with -- is that partly related to the business? Yes, if you could just shed some light on whether that is sort of repeatable is the sort of new level. So, I think it went from like ZAR 1.5 billion to about -- down to ZAR 1.1 billion.

Saul, yes, nice to hear from you. I'm going to ask Barry if it's all right with you, Abigail and Grant. Barry, is that something that you could explain?

Yes, Paul. That is very much related to IFRS 17. So for investment business, the new business strain comes through very much as it did before. But for insurance contracts that fall under IFRS 17, [indiscernible] essentially had 0 new business strain for most business or very close to it, basically because your CSM offsets against that strength. So essentially, when insurance contracts come into force, they come in with a 0 value rather than a negative, which would be that new business strain.

So Saul, maybe just to help you join the dots a little bit, but yes, this is precisely why we have a tax issue. So historically, a typical life contract that we sold would have had a big upfront loss that we would have put through because that would have been the cash impact, and we would have clawed that loss back over many years into the future. So if you can think of a curve starting below 0 and growing nice and smoothly up over a long period, maybe 40 years on a life contract. Now it's replaced by a flat line in the IFRS 17 of profits. That's now the CSM, this flat line, which, in theory, is equal to the sum of all the pluses and the minuses from the old line. So you're now taxed on the flat line. So you've got new business strain actually replaced by a small profit in year 1 on new business. But as Barry pointed out to you, that's only true of contracts that are classified as IFRS 17. And you heard from Abigail that for us, that is mainly risk-related contracts and some savings products, but perhaps not as many as some of the peers.

Any more questions from the telephone line before we move to the webcast?

We have one more question. The next question is from Baron Nkomo of JPMorgan.

Just 2 quick questions from my side. Firstly, on AfroCentric, you mentioned difficult trading conditions in the current financial year. If you can maybe elaborate on some of those challenges in half and how Sanlam is going to help direct and grow that business? And then secondly, just to clarify on the guidance, you mentioned that you expect the second half of the year to be similar to H1 on the operating performance. Is that referring to both earnings as well as your new business volumes, and maybe your VNB, just to clarify on that guidance?

Okay. So Baron, yes, nice to hear from you. You've got some of your colleagues sitting here in the audience. The answer to your first question on AfroCentric, they will be issuing as I understand it, a trading update, I think, tomorrow, Abigail, if I'm not mistaken. So I don't -- I'm probably at risk of crossing a line here. But at a very high level, what has happened in that business is that during COVID, they had some exceptionally good performance out of their pharmaceutical business because there was a very high demand for some of the things that they were selling. That's fallen off. They have also got out of one business and had to make some write-offs of inventory and so on from that business as they close it down, so there's some discontinuance costs. And then on the sort of medical aid side, the scheme administration, they have experienced some IT issues. And we have already been stepping in and helping to resolve those with the technology team from here, and there has been a cost to them from those. And those would be at a very high and simple level, the explanation for what's going on there. Your question on the second half of the year, as I love to remind people, we're actually already in September. It's not -- it's spring in Johannesburg, but not in Cape Town, but it is already September. So by definition, we already know what some of the second half looks like. So there's less speculation perhaps than one might think. And I think at an operating level, absent any calamities of weather events or market corrections, I think on earnings, we're pretty positive. And we also are seeing slightly positive trends in new business and in persistency. So yes, I think we can say with a fair degree of confidence that we're reasonably sure of a decent second half.

Operator, in the interest of time, I will -- I think we'll take one more question from the telephone line, if there are any.

We have no further questions from the telephone lines, sir.

And from the webcast? [indiscernible] Okay. Just one question from the webcast from Phillis from Risk Insights, and this is more an ESG-related question. What metrics or key performance indicators does Sanlam used to track and report progress on its renewable energy goals? And how does the company plan to enhance transparency in the area going forward?

So as I mentioned earlier, we are enhancing our disclosure on climate-related matters, and that's going to be an ongoing process. So that's the plan to communicate it. We don't have specific targets to -- and I assume the question related to investment in renewable energy. We do invest in renewable energy. But as I hope I explained well, we have a much, much broader approach to sustainability than simply a focus on something such as investment in renewable energy. And we have a dashboard and we measure a whole myriad of different items in a balanced fashion on the issue of sustainability. And I would -- when we think about things like investment in renewable energy, that's clearly one element of creating offsets to some of the carbon creating activities in our portfolio, in our investments. But things like sorting out biodiversity probably would have a far greater impact in any event than simple investment in renewables.

Thank you, Paul. Unless there are any questions from the audience here, I think that will conclude the questions. Paul, if you have any closing comments.

No, I'd just like to thank everybody very much indeed for attending. And I'd like to wish Abigail a lot of good fortune in the coming months as she has her second child. We're going to miss you. But the good news, we're going to be able to spend all the money. So, good luck, Abigail.

I'll be watching. Thanks, Paul.

Good. Thanks very much. We will end it there.

Thank you, Grant.

Thank you, Grant.