Legal & General Group Plc

So good morning and a warm welcome, both to those of you in the room and to those joining online. I'm Michelle Moore, Group Strategy and Investor Relations Director. To start, a few housekeeping points. Firstly, to those in the room, please make sure you have turned your devices to silent. In the event the fire alarm sounds, colleagues will guide you to the nearest exit and the normal forward-looking statements apply. Our running order for today will be as follows. Antonio will open with a summary of our full year results and an update of the progress we're making in delivery against our strategy. Jeff will cover the financial results in more detail, and then Antonio will make closing statements before opening to Q&A, at which point he will be joined by Jeff and the CEOs of our three businesses to take your questions. Antonio, over to you.

Thank you. Thank you, Michel, and good morning. It's great to see everyone. We've had a great year with strong financial performance and significant strategic progress. Our core operating profit is up 6% at £1.6 billion, and our capital generation is £1.8 billion, both demonstrating the positive fundamentals of our business. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen with the store of future profit of 14.8 billion pounds, which as you know, will release into operating profit over time. And our solvency ratio is 232%. This gives us substantial strategic flexibility. And as I promised, we are returning more capital to shareholders with a 5% increase in the dividend per share and a buyback of 500 million pounds. Our 2024 results reflect the progress we're making in executing the strategy that I shared last June to be a growing, simpler, better connected business, which becomes more capitalized over time. The business I took over last year had good fundamentals, but I knew that there were three areas for improvement. Firstly, we needed a sharper focus on our core activities. Secondly, we needed to push harder in delivering sustainable growth in the businesses where we have competitive advantage. And finally, we needed to be more disciplined and also more transparent in the way we allocated our capital to deliver better returns for shareholders. So, one year on, I'm really pleased with the progress that we've made and the momentum that we have. We have disposed of non-core assets to sharpen our focus on our strategic businesses, and we've simplified the organizational structure from the four businesses that we used to have to three businesses with the creation of a single public and private markets asset manager. In terms of sustainable growth, each of our three businesses has good momentum. In institutional retirement, we have written good volumes above our target returns in a more capital-efficient way here in the UK, and we continue to grow internationally. In asset management, fee-related revenues are up as we pivot to higher revenue margin products whilst investing to deliver future growth. In retail, we've seen strong growth in workplace DC assets and our annuities business delivered another record year. These commercial successes have resulted in enhanced returns for our shareholders. With the announcements that we've made, we now expect to return over £5 billion over the next three years to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share buybacks. Let me now give you a bit more color on each one of these three areas, starting with sharper focus. So we've rebalanced our portfolio, reallocating capital from businesses that had limited strategic fit to areas of greater growth potential. In June, we created the Corporate Investments Unit, which reports to Jeff. And in September, we announced the disposal of the largest asset within that portfolio, Cala, for 1.35 billion pounds. Last month, we announced our largest ever transaction, the disposal of our U.S. protection business with proceeds of 1.8 billion pounds and the new strategic partnership with Meiji Yasuda that will drive growth in both our U.S. PRT and asset management businesses. The capital that we generate organically and the disposal proceeds of over three billion pounds are then taken to a disciplined capital allocation framework where they must achieve returns on cash or capital above our 14% hurdle. If they do not meet that hurdle, we will return the additional capital to shareholders as we've demonstrated in 2024 with the share buyback that we've announced this morning. It's worth spending a moment on our long-term partnership with Meiji Asuda, which is transformative for LNG. Exiting our US protection business at very attractive multiples sharpens our strategic focus and allows us to do three things with the proceeds of this sale. First, we will invest together with Meiji Asuda to accelerate our growth trajectory in US PRT. Second, we will reinvest a portion of the proceeds to grow our strategic businesses, notably asset management. And I'm particularly excited about the 150 billion yen, that's around $1 billion, of co-investment commitment from Meiji Yasuda in our growing private markets business. This one billion figure, which we are announcing this morning, together with our own balance sheets, will be catalytic to attract third party capital into our asset management business. And finally, we will return one billion pounds of the proceeds to shareholders on completion of this transaction. As you can see, we're very pleased with this partnership and the 5% shareholding from Meiji Yasuda. Now turning to sustainable growth and the commercial successes that we've had in 2024. Firstly, institutional retirement. We continue to be the global market leader and wrote 8.4 billion pounds of PRT business here in the UK. As we told you in December, during our investor deep dive, we've been successful in adapting to new market conditions. And as a result, we have written profitable business in a highly capital efficient manner with a new business strain of 1%. This is one of the reasons why we have increased the size of the buyback that we've announced today. The outlook in the UK remains very strong. We've already completed 1.2 billion off transactions this year at similar strain levels, and we have a large deal pipeline for the rest of 2025, which you can see there on the slide. We have a great track record in writing PRT internationally and have had record PRT volumes in 2024 in both the U.S. and Canada. Our new partnership in the U.S. with Meiji Yasuda will allow growth not just to continue, but to accelerate. The partnership will bring together our knowledge and expertise with our combined balance sheets. USPRT is a highly attractive business for us and we will continue to retain 80% of the economic interest in both the existing in-force business and the new business going forward. In asset management, we've made good progress against the commitments we've set out at the capital markets event last year. I've appointed our new CEO, Eric Adler, here in the room, and his leadership team is in place to take forward the combined global public and private markets asset manager. We have positive momentum in growing our revenues. In 2024, our average revenue margin increased from seven to eight basis points as we pivot to higher margin products, and there is clearly room for further upside. Growth in our other businesses, so in institutional, in retail annuities and in workplace, will further boost revenues and margins. And we have seen good growth in private markets. Now with 57 billion pounds of assets under management, this reflects the positive momentum from new strategies that we launched into 2024 that will deliver 20 billion pounds of assets by 2028 at the 50 to 90 basis points average revenue margin. This includes our newly launched private markets access funds, our affordable housing funds, and the new build to rent partnership with Nest and PGGM. We've already have 1.2 billion of new external commitments across these funds. We're also investing to add new capabilities, including our investment in Taurus, a US real estate firm. So let's turn to our investment in asset management. We have been disciplined with our asset management cost base, driving efficiencies and streamlining the organization. And as you can see there with underlying costs, operating costs growing below inflation at 1%. At the same time, we have invested 48 million pounds for growth. This is at the bottom end of the guidance I gave at the capital markets event, investing between 50 and 100 million per year. We are investing in our distribution and investment capabilities, expanding our footprint internationally with growth in Asia and Europe, and improving our operational scalability. This has led to an increase in our cost to income from 71 to 74%, but subject to market movements, we expect this broadly to represent the high watermark in our cost to income as we now see the benefits of our investments coming through in revenues. We will do a full deep dive on asset management on the 17th of June, similar to what we did in institutional retirement last year. In retail, our customer base continues to grow. We are a trusted brand, and we pride ourselves on the service that we offer to our 12.3 million customers here in the UK across workplace savings, retirement, and protection. Our UK retail net promoter score of 50 is a testament to that excellent service, and this underpins the commercial successes of our retail franchises over the last 12 months. Our workplace assets are up by 17%, to 94 billion pounds, with net flows of 6 billion. And our master trust, which is the largest commercial master trust in the UK, grew even faster, as you can see, at 22%, and has now reached 30 billion pounds. We had another record year in retail annuities delivering high volumes at strong margins and increased our market share by five percentage points. And in UK protection, we have increased volumes whilst also improving margins. We're also planning an investor deep dive into our retail business in the second half of the year. So all of this together has resulted in enhanced returns for our shareholders. I said at our capital markets event that we intended to return more to shareholders, and that is exactly what we are doing, distributing more than five billion pounds over the next three years. You can see that here on the slide. You can see the 3.6 billion of dividends, and then you can see a series of buybacks. The 500 million buyback that we've announced today is the sum of 200 million from the ongoing buybacks, 100 million from the disposal of Kala, and 200 million, as I mentioned earlier, from the lower capital deployed in writing PRT business. We then expect to return one billion pounds after the transaction with Meiji Yasuda completes, and additionally, you have the ongoing buybacks beyond 2025. So in total, this is more than five billion over the next three years, or to put that in context, 40% of our market cap. This is the result of our strong financial performance that I described and also the significant strategic progress that we're making. So with that, I will now pass over to Jeff to run you through the financials. Jeff.

Thank you, Antonio, and good morning to anyone I haven't already met. The synergies between our businesses and our market leading positions have continued to deliver growth. Core operating profit was up 6% to £1.6 billion, driven by the predictable release of the contractual service margin and risk adjustment from our growing insurance books. And our record new business successes in 2024 will provide sustained performance over the coming years. Like others, investment variance mainly reflects the impact of higher interest rates on our portfolio and movements in inflation expectations. This is consistent with our published sensitivities. For corporate investments, the investment variance predominantly reflects already announced valuation write-downs and the accounting impact from the disposal of Carla. Around 70 million of this will come back as profit over time as the discounting on the deferred consideration unwinds. Capital generation is stable against our prior year, and our solvency ratio of 232% is up 8 percentage points. So now moving on to the divisions. Institutional retirement operating profit was up 7% to 1.1 billion pounds, driven by higher CSM and risk adjustment releases due to a growing and maturing annuity book, as well as new business written in a higher rate environment. Expected investment margin is stable as we continue to see good performance on the annuity portfolio and optimize the back book. The annuity book continues to grow as do the consistent margins it produces. As Antonio has already mentioned, we adapted to the economic market conditions, allowing us to write UK PRT at a 1% strain. This means we have used around £200 million less capital than in 2023 to write very similar levels of business net of funded RE. This capital efficiency helped support the share buyback announced today. The lower capital deployment means the business generates very attractive returns. Solvency II and IFRS value metrics are moderately lower, reflecting the slightly lower initial asset yield. but with scope for further upside through future back book optimization. In asset management, fee revenues were up 4% in the year, despite the lower average AUM, as our conscious shift to higher revenue margin business takes effect. This is evidenced by the positive flows we have seen in DC and our wider private markets offering. These were offset by low fee outflows from DB. Clients continue to adjust their portfolios in response to improved funding ratios and execute one-off rebalances. Excluding UKDB, annualised net new revenue was positive at £17.4 million. As Antonio covered, overall expenses and our cost-income ratio have increased, reflecting our investments to grow in asset management. but we are showing good discipline with underlying operating expense growth of just 1%. And we will continue to be disciplined on costs in asset management and across the whole group. Total asset management operating profit also reflects 145 million from our origination platforms and seed assets. This is down slightly following a more modest valuation uplift for Pemberton. Pemberton has again made significant progress in raising and deploying capital, with total commitments increasing by €6 billion. As an example, the first close of its new NAV strategic financing strategy secured commitments of over €1 billion, including anchor investment from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. We expect future growth in valuations as a result of this momentum. International assets now make up 44% of our total AUM, and we remain the market leader in UK DC with AUM up 12% to 183 billion pounds, reflecting the growth in our own workplace DC business. In retail, operating profit increased by 12% year on year to 504 million pounds, and we've seen good progress across all major business lines. This strong performance was again driven by predictable and ongoing profit releases from our growing CSM balance as we had profitable new business. There was also favourable experience variances in the UK and US. We have seen strong growth in both Sovereignty2 and IFRS new business value with record sales of £2.1 billion in retail annuities at attractive margins. and improve metrics in our UK protection business as we continue to operate with a focus on disciplined pricing. As Antonio outlined, the sale of our US protection business and the creation of a strategic partnership with Major Yasuda increases our ability to deliver sustainable growth. The transaction will generate both immediate and future value for shareholders. We covered the key earnings and capital metrics at the time of the announcement, with 1 billion pounds of IFRS profit and 1.2 billion of capital generation. And cash accretion from the proceeds is around 18 times the ongoing dividend that we were receiving from the entity. The future benefits of the partnership are clear. We are bringing together two strong balance sheets with a view to scaling our US PRT business whilst leveraging our own expertise and track record. Our asset management business will continue to manage this growing book, and Meiji Yasuda have also committed 150 billion yen of co-investment capital to our global private markets business. The sale of our U.S. protection business also unlocks value that we can redeploy at attractive returns into strategic growth areas. Our SOMC2 coverage ratio has strengthened to 232%, reflecting the increase in interest rates over the year and the capital efficient way we were able to write new business. We remain well positioned to capitalise on the opportunities in our growing strategic markets as we move into what we expect to be a busy 2025. Finally, I want to remind you of the group financial targets that we set out at the Capital Market event last June. We will now start to track against these. Our strong business performance in 2024 and our financial flexibility with strategic optionality in capital and liquidity set us up well to deliver. The continued momentum we have demonstrated in executing our strategy and the clear commercial benefits of our partnership with Meiji Yasuda gives us even more confidence in achieving these targets. I'll now hand back to Antonio.