Admiral Group plc

good we're good to go right so welcome everybody to uh 2026 alfie results for admiral i'm very glad to be here today to present you another solid strong set of results characterized by the usual admiral features discipline strong underwriting performance and real strategic progress So I will go through the highlight and then as usual end over to Rachel for more detail on our financial performance. This is my first presentation alongside Rachel as our new CFO since Geraint left us recently as a CFO, but I'm very glad that he's still with us working part time. You can see the picture here of our selfie on our results presentation at year end. Rachel has been in the group for 20 years. She's a rare mix of sharp, intelligent, real common sense. She has an understanding of the business that is second to none and a strong understanding of our foundational competitive advantage, capital management, risk management, and of course, our culture. So I'm generally excited to start this new partnership with her. And just before we go into the results, I also want to take the opportunity to thank Diane, our head of investor relations. For the last three years, she's been really crucial in helping us in preparing a day like this and much more. I think her life is bringing her in a different place, but we are very thankful for the great support she gave us so far. So now back to Admiral.

First off,

So we had a strong start of the implementation of the strategy we set out at year end, with many progress across different area of the group. Few key message from me to start with. Agility and discipline deliver excellent handwriting results in our largest business, UK Motor, despite a very competitive market. And at the same time, we kept growing margin and profit in our other lines of business. We have a very strong capital position with a solvency ratio of 190% after the investment in FLOC and we deliver attractive shareholder returns that now will also include share buybacks announced at year end. We continue to invest in our capabilities. We evolved our customer propositions and set up good foundation to capturing more of the benefit of the new technologies. Having anticipated the market and acted earlier on rates, as typical of Admiral, we end the first part of this year in a strong position to capture more growth when the cycle turns. I will remain fully confident in our ability to deliver on our growth ambition across products. Let's look now into the results a bit more in detail. So we added the 600,000 more risk driven mainly by UK motor staying largely stable with double digit growth elsewhere. Turnover was flat year on year, but up more than 10% versus last half, reflecting high single digit rate increase in UK motor, which will continue to earn through over the coming months, plus continue to grow in other parts of the business. Profit of £429 million, down 18% versus H1 last year, but very close to H2 last year. This is underpinned by a combined ratio of 78.5%, generally excellent, better than our historical average, despite the market being softer for longer than expected. But what I'm most proud of is that the strong underwriting performance reflects underwriting improvement across all our major lines of business. And the trend is expanding across products as we transfer our key competitive advantage into different lines of business. A market leading return on equity of 45%. We returned £259 million to our shareholders in H1, an equivalent of 80p per share, and that includes £45 million of share buyback to start in H2 and a dividend of 70p per share. In addition, we finally submitted our internal model for approval. More importantly, we're very proud of the progress we made on our customer promise, improving journeys and experience with a strong focus on outcomes that is reflected in great feedback scores and strong retention. So let's look now at our main business a bit more closely, starting with UK Motor on the left side of the slide. You can see two lines on this chart. Risk count on top, market premium change on the bottom. So different units, but they move almost as mirror image of each other. So why is that? It's because we tend to grow our market share where margins are attractive and we hold back or even shrink as happened in 2022-2023 when margins were weaker. This time we stay stable rather than shrinking in the soft part of the cycle. This is core to our strategy to consistently underwrite at higher margin than market. As we said at year end, our plan for UK Motor is to keep growing across cycles, as we have done in every single cycle since we launched, and to do so at the right time while protecting a very strong combined ratio advantage. Our discipline in the first half of this year, including increasing rates earlier and harder than most, puts us again in a good position to capture more growth at the right time and improve earnings as these price increases earn through. Now on the right side, our other personal lines. These include household, pet and travel in UK insurance, Admiral Money and European Motor Insurance. Slightly different story here, as this business still benefits from economy of scale, we're working to build further and therefore continue to grow across cycles every year. As you can see, we've continued to grow our risk base up to around 10% in H1 versus last year, While at the same time, we increased margins up more than 50% versus H1 last year. As we said at year end, our ambition for this business is to keep growing both top and bottom line together over time. And while we recognize that these businesses are still small and therefore more volatile than UK Motor, we remain confident that we'll materially increase their contribution to group profit over time. We're also very pleased with the progress on strategic priorities we set at year end. First, growing selectively and profitably. Alistair and Constantino will expand more on this later. But overall, it's great to see some of our business maturing and consolidating similar competitive advantage to UK Motor. l'olivier in france unsecured personal loans in admiral money household in uk insurance are indeed running at a very strong margin broadly in the range of 20 percent while we continue while continue growing at the same time We also continue to improve our product proposition with the launch of a new household product under the More Than brand. There are pleasing progress in car finance, where we launch from day one a consumer-friendly, transparent product into a market contest that is still adapting to new disclosure regulation. In commercial lines, two new tax offerings, including the insurance of Wave robotaxi proposition. Wave, as a reminder, is a UK-based autonomous vehicle company piloting in London as we speak. Second pillar, continue to evolve our core capabilities and competitive advantage, increasing customer lifetime value over time. There's so much progress here that it's hard to summarize in a few minutes. But what I would call out is 8% growth in a customer holding two or more products, driven by improvement to our app, our digital journey, an area with real excitement, but also plenty of runaway. Continued expansion in Predictive AI, that's one of our biggest source of competitive advantage, with more models in production and better performance from them. Heavy experimentation on Gen AI, now scaling several pilots across distribution, claim settlement, customer service, including voice-to-voice now live both in UK and in Italy, plus strong embedding of these tools across our software development lifecycle. Third pillar is amplifying our long-term impact building sustainable product and service that are fit for the future with real positive impact on our communities. We've seen electric vehicles uptake rise almost 10% year on year. Exciting area where we believe we have good advantage over the market as Alistair will explain later. we continue to invest in our people our most important asset delivering more than 10 000 hours of data and ai training in h1 building a community of over a thousand people across our markets we want several recognition in the data and ai space and we're among the first signatory of the financial service skill compact Underpinning of this, of course, is our restless commitment, strong commitment to our customer that is reflected in extremely high net promoter score over 50% and our strong culture. With that in mind, I will hand over to Rachel for more detail on our financial performance.