Storebrand ASA (STB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. It is now 9:30 CEST, so suggest we start the call. On behalf of Danske Bank and SEB, it is a pleasure to welcome you all to this presentation of Storebrand ASA. The company announced yesterday that it is contemplating to print a senior unsecured bond issue with a targeted maturity of 3 to 5 years and with size up to NOK 500 million, subject to market conditions. This call is being arranged on Teams live. [Operator Instructions] All questions asked will be anonymous. Storebrand will now be presented by Lars Loddesol, Group CFO; Kjetil Krøkje, Group Head of Finance and Strategy; and Nikola Heitmann, Head of Capital Management. So with that, I hand over the word to you to go through the presentation.

Thank you, [ Howard ], and welcome to the call. Good morning, everyone. Storebrand, as most of you know very well, is a broad financial company working in the Nordics in a strong structurally growing markets. We have a strong capital and solvency position, which I will go through in a moment, and we are contemplating a new issue of 3 to 5 years maturity from the Storebrand ASA holding company. So Storebrand has been a financial -- has been a pioneer in the financial Nordic markets since 1767 for 257 years and we aim to continue to grow and be a part of the growing financial markets and be a pioneer in developing this market in the years ahead. We are currently a pensions and savings business, the market leader in Norway and in the nonunionized part in Swedish market with NOK 655 billion under management which feeds into the asset manager that has close to NOK 1.3 trillion in assets under management, i.e., approximately half of the money is captive and the other half is institutional money and retail money -- savings money from the Nordic and European markets. We have more than 50,000 corporate customers and more than 2 million individual customers. We also have a fast-growing retail bank and insurance operation, both fully digital. The corporate structure, legal structure is illustrated on this picture. However, the reporting structure is simplified through us reporting on savings, insurance, guaranteed pensions and other in order to simplify the reporting and value drivers in the company. We have been a pioneer also in developing sustainable finance in the Nordic markets over almost 30 years. We started with sustainable investments back in 1995, and we are recognized as a leader in the market ever since then. We are currently working with a strategy that can be summed up in this picture. A, we want to be a leading provider in occupational pensions in Norway and Sweden, which we are already and maintain that position. We are a Nordic powerhouse in asset management. We're now the fourth largest privately held asset manager in the Nordic and the largest one in Norway by far. And we are a growing challenger in the Norwegian retail market where we have a broad position in both savings, insurance and banking. This is underpinned by a strategy of people first, where we have motivated and engaged people, leadership in sustainability and sustainability solutions and good digital solutions to our customers as well as efficient back office and systems. This creates a good cash flow, which gives rising ordinary dividends from earnings as well as share buybacks and also additional capital generation, which allows us to do additional growth or M&A or increase the repatriation of money to shareholders. The broad -- now the company has a broad financial structure built on strong synergies. To give you some examples: 21% of our pension customers, i.e., people with a corporate pension plan in Storebrand, they also choose to buy individual products, i.e., much larger than our market share in the retail market of approximately 5%. So a good cross-sell. I've already mentioned how the captive pension money feeds into the asset manager, NOK 655 billion. And then we have significant capital synergies by the diversified risks we have in the group. The strong growth in the front book of Storebrand, i.e., all but the guaranteed pensions business, has been growing very fast for a number of years and is actually accelerating over the last year. So double-digit growth in all of our growth areas for the last 10 years illustrated here by -- from 2016 up until today and we expect to continue with double-digit growth in these areas going forward. I'm not going to go through the following pages, but leave that for you. This is our position in the private -- sorry, in the occupational pension market in Norway, in Sweden and in the asset management business and also on the retail side, and I'll leave that for you to read or answer any Q&A. Then we move on to interest rate. The significantly higher interest rate environment that we've seen over the last few years have strengthened our solidity and solvency and it has allowed us to invest in more long-term fixed income bonds which stabilizes the income and the profitability in the guaranteed portfolios as well as in the company portfolios in the years ahead, creating additional stability and result growth. The group has been through a very significant transition illustrated here for the last 11 years from 2012 up until last year, where we see that the premiums have -- that used to be 50% of our premiums used to be from guaranteed business, it has now significantly reduced to about 20% of premiums, whilst the savings business and the insurance business has been growing at the same time premiums have doubled overall. Similarly, in assets under management, the nominal amount of guaranteed investments have been fairly stable. But as a percentage of the total, it has significantly decreased. So we have grown the savings business, and we also have significantly improved our position with external mandates succeeding in growing in institutional and retail mandates across the Nordics and Northern Europe. This is an illustration of how we expect the business to develop in terms of strengthened ROE by growing the low capital-intensive business in the years ahead. Again, in the interest of time, I will leave this for Q&A if you have additional questions. I already mentioned, we are a leading in sustainable -- leading position in sustainable finance and continue to have high ambitions within this area. We can broadly define this -- our work in this area in 3 areas: Storeband in society, how we work politically, how we work with partners and how we work with, for example, reducing disability are examples of how we work in society for sustainable solutions. Then we have sustainability in products and services, especially within the investment side, where sustainable investments, as I mentioned, have been part of our business for a long period of time, but we're also building sustainability into our insurance products and banking products as the markets develop and as this becomes -- as this market evolves. And obviously, sustainability in own operations in our buildings and in our flying patterns, driving patterns, et cetera. This gives rise for our financial ambitions of creating more than NOK 5 billion in group profit next year, increasing our return on equity to above 14%, increasing dividends every year and doing share buybacks of NOK 1.5 billion per year up until 2030 to start with. Then we also have strong sustainability ambitions with necessary investments on a group level by 2050. We also work on intermediate goals these days. Workforce participation, reducing disabilities, as I mentioned, strong gender balance in the group and in our offerings. We have currently -- we won the SHE index last year, and we have a very good gender balance in our business and in our management teams. And we have work on a commitment for science-based targets for ourselves and all of our suppliers. On capital and solvency, we have low leverage, we have strong liquidity and we expect to continue to maintain a similar level of leverage, and we want to maintain a strong liquidity in order to create necessary flexibility in operations. The numbers here are as of last year. And last year, as you may know, we've upstreamed funds from subsidiaries since then, also paid out a dividend for the group, initiated a share buyback program and last, but not least, sold Storebrand health insurance for a sum of NOK 1.3 billion, which has strengthened liquidity as well. So overall, the liquidity has been strengthened since year-end. The term structure of the subdebt in Storebrand Livsforsikring is illustrated on the left-hand side. In Storebrand ASA, we only have NOK 0.5 billion outstanding maturing next year, and we are now contemplating raising another NOK 0.5 billion with a maturity of 3 to 5 years in order to diversify the maturity structure. The investments we hold are strong investments. These are on the guaranteed investment side. Average rating of AA, a book-to-yield above 3% and basically, a very strong investment portfolio giving stability in returns and making sure that we meet the guaranteed liabilities of the group. This is an illustration of the composition of investments in the guaranteed portfolios in Norway and Sweden. And this picture is part of our quarter -- presentations every quarter so you can follow this if you want to. It's been fairly stable over time. Importantly, the customer buffers in the guaranteed portfolios have significantly strengthened at a record level, 23% in Sweden and also significantly strengthened 6.8% in Norway as of the last quarter. And the expected running yield in the guaranteed portfolios is now 4.4% versus a guaranteed level or guarantee level of 2.9%. So a significant pickup, which promises that we will have a profit split from the guaranteed portfolios as well as significantly higher returns on the company portfolios in the years ahead. We have also a capital policy, which says that we will pay ordinary dividends when the results -- when the solvency is above 150%, and we will do share buybacks when the solvency is above 175%. It's currently at 191%, and there's -- it's quite low volatility in this number quarter-to-quarter, which ensures that we can have predictable or growing dividends as well as share buybacks in the years ahead. I should also mention that we are in the process of sending an application for a partial internal model to the FSA in Norway, which will improve our risk management even further in the years ahead when that has been approved. These are some of the numbers that you as debt investors would be interested in, in terms of leverage and debt service capacity as well as our solvency development. And this obviously is also something that the rating agencies look at when they have -- when S&P has given us a A rating with a stable outlook and has also commented, as you can see it from this foil, on the strength of our market position as well as our cash generation and solidity. And with that, I sum up the very brief presentation, but we are very happy to take any questions you may have, and I leave the word back to you, [ Howard ].

[Operator Instructions] It seems like there are no questions this morning. So -- then I suggest we conclude the call. Thank you all for participating. If you want to review this presentation again, there will be a replay available by using the same Teams link as for this meeting. And this link will also work then immediately after this call has ended. We now look forward to receiving any feedback and indication of interest that you may have. And of course, do not hesitate to reach out to any of us if you have any further questions later in the process. So with that, thanks again, and have a nice Tuesday.