Old Mutual Limited

Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. On behalf of our board and the management team, welcome to the All Mutual Group Annual Result for the period ended 31st December 2024. I am Langa Mangaile, Head of Investor Relations for the All Mutual Group. On our agenda for today, I will begin with our Group CEO, Ian Williamson, who will kick off with an operational and strategic review. He will shortly be followed by Kasper Toski, our Group CFO, to cover the financial review. Ian will then come back to the stage to give us his concluding message. I'll then pick up from there to facilitate the questions and answer sessions. And with that, I'd like to hand over to you, Ian. Thank you.

Thanks, Lange. A warm welcome, everyone, and we really appreciate your attendance today. We've delivered strong double-digit earnings growth with our key metric for distributable earnings, adjusted headline earnings per share, growing by a strong 17% to 150.6 cents per share. The return on net asset value continued to trend upwards, growing by 160 basis points to 12.7%. And excluding our investments in new growth initiatives, our RONA have improved materially to 15.6%. In line with our dividend policy, the Board has declared a final dividend per share of 52 cents, bringing our total dividend for the year to 86 cents a share, an increase of 6% year on year. Despite increased competition in our retail mass market and a constrained affluent market as well as lower corporate sales, we continue to expand our V&V margin and the value of new business margin improved by 20 basis points to 2.5%. Funds under management grew by 10% to R1.5 trillion, supported by improved equity market performance in South Africa particularly over the second half of the year. To kick off our review of performance, let's begin by reflecting on the value we've created for shareholders. Our diversified business continues to demonstrate resilience and is in a strong market position, delivering strong growth. We continue to demonstrate a positive trajectory in our return profile, And since listing on the JSC in 2018, we've returned a staggering R89 billion to our shareholders via a cumulative R61.6 billion in special distributions and a further R27.4 billion in ordinary dividends. Our capital allocation strategy continues to prioritise enhanced returns through both balance sheet optimisation and the investment in growth to drive long-term shareholder value. We continue to demonstrate profit and earnings growth in a demanding macroeconomic and consumer environment. In South Africa, we've navigated a combination of higher household debt and lower wage growth. The formation of the Government of National Unity in South Africa improved sentiment and there's been early momentum in the macros and further improved load-shedding has further improved investor confidence. We've seen relatively benign inflation and strong equity market returns, a strengthening rent, all creating an encouraging picture in the second half of 2024. But that positive market sentiment has not yet translated into a broad recovery in consumer confidence. In our Africa region, several countries experienced significant inflationary pressure, with some entering hyperinflation. We've seen weakened currencies and climate-related risks impacting some of our key growth markets in both East and West Africa. Just a brief reminder of our strategic framework, which is our true north and is anchored in our victory condition of becoming our customers' first choice to sustain, grow, and protect their prosperity. with a set of value drivers creating a clear link between our strategic actions and the value created for our shareholders and other stakeholders. Our integrated financial services strategy rests on two key vectors, both growing and protecting our core business and unlocking new growth engines. And I'll share more detail about our progress against these growth vectors later. Moving then on to our segmental businesses. In the Masson Foundation cluster, a deliberate shift in sales mix and focused multi-channel strategy continues to drive profitable market share. Life APE sales increased by 9% to R5.24 billion, driven by a 21% increase in higher margin risk sales. We continue to lead market share growth in both Life APE sales in the retail mass segment. Our in-force book, including both Group Funeral and Two Mountains, remains the largest in the industry by gross flows and by number of policies. Our VNB margin in this business increased by 20 basis points to 9% and is at the top end of our target range of 69%. This reflects the robust growth in retail risk sales and the positive contribution from the integration of the Two Mountains business. and this has been further supported by strong management action on both costs and persistency. In arbitral finance, our credit loss ratio deteriorated to 8.9% compared to 7.2% in the prior year. This was driven largely by the impairment in the secured loan book of R306 million. Excluding that impairment, the credit loss ratio improved year on year to 7.1%. In personal finance and wealth, our strengthened high net worth value propositions deliver diversification benefits in the affluent market. Life APE sales increased marginally by 3% to 4.8 billion rand, driven by better savings sales. But total retail sales, including the non-covered part of our sales, increased by 9%, bolstered by an 11% growth in savings sales from our wealth management division. We sustained our V&V margin at 0.9%, supported by an improved margin in guaranteed annuity sales and a higher proportion of risk sales. This was partially offset by a shift in mix towards lower margin volumes in the wealth business. Our wealth management business has now significantly expanded its customer value proposition over the years and increased assets under management by 14% to R420.4 billion. This has been underpinned by growth across diversified asset gathering capabilities, including our private client solution, the Old Mutual international platform, the Old Mutual multi-manager capability within Wealth, our discretionary fund management solution, and our fast-growing cash and liquidity platforms. In the investment cluster, our diverse capability set delivered strong top-line growth with a record R28 billion in deal flow, bearing in mind we've had two prior strong years of deal flow in that business. Asset under management grew by 8%, largely due to the uplift in South African equity markets in the second half of the year. Our alternatives capabilities, which are a major differentiator from our peer groups, delivered significant capital raising and record levels of deal flow. Total revenue increased by 20% to R4 billion, driven by significant non-annuity revenue arising from a transaction in the alternatives business. In corporate, we continue to route profitable new business, with our BNB margin increasing by 50 basis points to 1.5%, driven by a higher mix of risk sales. However, due to a high base effect from a very large single premium savings deal in the prior year, life APE sales decreased to 1.8 billion rand. 2024 was a seminal year in the retirement industry in South Africa with the implementation of the two-part retirement system. Whilst this system preserves long-term retirement outcomes, it triggered expected industry-wide outflows. Our net client cash flow came under pressure due to a combination of factors. We had 2.7 billion rand in payments in two-part claims to over 170,000 members. We've seen higher retrenchment benefit payments, particularly within the mining sector, which is a sector which we are strong in in corporate, and we've also seen two client terminations over the period. Despite pressure in the South African economy, we continue to record steady growth in funds under management, which supports our fee earnings base. On strategic delivery, we launched the Superfund in-fund living annuity, strengthening our post-retirement value proposition, and we continue to make progress in new solutions in both health insurance and the award-winning SME Go platform. Omnitune Insure recorded exceptional performance with strong margin recovery and top-line growth ahead of nominal GDP. Gross written premiums increased by 9% to R21.9 billion, bolstered by new customer acquisition and supported by effective management action. The net underwriting margin improved materially to 6.2%, so it's now above our target range of 4% to 6%, and it benefited from strategic adjustments in the pricing of certain portfolios, delivering a higher price adequacy ratio, and robust performance in the alternative risk transfer and specialist business portfolios. Our strategic acquisitions portfolio in Old Mutual Insure, which we refer to as Blue Sky, continued to add significant growth. This portfolio covers niche classes of non-life insurance products and provides business processing services to insurance brokers. Blue Sky increased portfolio RFO by 29% to R342 million. Olmito Africa regions delivered solid results with continued top-line growth and R1 billion cash remittance to the group. Life sales increased by 7% to R1.65 billion, supported by strong sales growth in Southern Africa, but partially offset by lower sales in both East and West Africa. Our BNB margin in this business decreased by 260 basis points to 0.2%. This is largely due to a different allocation of expenses across the group. Gross written premiums have increased by a muted 2% with strong growth in Southern Africa, particularly in Namibia, and partially offset by lower growth in East Africa. Our net underwriting margin declined by 260 basis points to minus 3% due to a significant deterioration in underwriting result in Nigeria for the first six months of the year when we still included their results. Excluding our discontinued operations in both Nigeria and Tanzania from the base, our underwriting margin for the year was minus 0.4%. So moving then on to strategic delivery. And to remind you once more, our strategy rests on two growth vectors, growing and protecting our core businesses and unlocking new growth engines. In growing and protecting the core, our investments in the core support organic growth across the business. Since 2022, we have invested in small, bolt-on acquisitions to expand our value proposition and made targeted investments in future capabilities to capture growth in adjacencies. Our investment in digital and technology transformation is aimed at simplifying and modernizing our technology estate, enhancing our customer and advisor experience, and accelerating operating efficiencies to improve shareholder return. In simplifying and modernizing our technology estate, we have successfully decommissioned 21 legacy systems in 2024, and we've grown the number of active digital users by 22% to 1.7 million across the group. In enhancing our customer and advisor experience, we've concluded the pilot of our new savings and income proposition, and expect to commence a national rollout in the second half of this year, starting in the affluent market. Our implementation of the two-part solution enhanced customer experience, and we successfully processed over 275,000 claims digitally, to the value of 3.4 billion rand across the group. 99% of these claims were submitted via WhatsApp. In accelerating operating efficiencies, Casper and I have completed a detailed group cost allocation review, which resulted in the reallocation of shared expenses across our segments. This has had varying impacts on segmental key performance indicators, but it sets us up to understand our costs better and drive positive action to drive efficiency. Casper will provide additional detail on this later. Moving then to new growth engines. Our strategy aims to secure top three market positions in the markets where we operate. Our perimeter review is now substantially complete. Our exit of general insurance in Nigeria as well as the general insurance business in Tanzania in 2024 substantially de-risked and focused our portfolio. With regard to OM Bank, as we've already announced, the Prudential Authority has approved Clarence Ntengwe as the CEO of OM Bank, Namkite Nkwene as the Chairman of the Board, as well as approving all the nominated board members and executives. Last Friday, he received the approval for Old Mutual Bank, or OM Bank, to commence business. And with that, I'd like to hand over to Clarence to give an update of where we are now and what's coming next for the bank. Clarence?

Thanks, Ian. We have launched the bank, and we launched it last Friday at 7 o'clock in the evening, and we signed up our first two customers who are employees of the bank. OM Bank is a material growth catalyst and a concrete realization of our integrated financial strategy that Ian was talking about. This organization is built on a 180-year legacy of customer focus, resilience, and innovation, and the bank represents a key lever to unlock shareholder value for us. OM Bank has begun taking deposits from all mutual employees, as I said, including myself and Ian. Yesterday we signed up on our app and we have started playing around with the app and we were like kids with new toys last night. And this will be followed by a campaign to our 1.1 million money account customers and then we will take it to the general public on the fourth quarter of 2025. Turning to the preview of the value proposition, OM Bank is a fully digital-first bank with a variable cost at a customer level. It is built on a cloud-native platform with world-class cybersecurity protocols. OM Bank will debut with a single facility account offering, which will test-driven myself and Ian. I've got a debit account which is part and parcel of this one facility account. A customer could also have access to an overdraft facility if it is needed. Myself and Ian, we don't need that. A savings account which offers generous interest rates for our customers depending on the balance that is in their account, as well as a credit card which our customers can activate. Our customers will enjoy access to all payment channels, And our bank app features a hyper-personalized user interface, which is quite exciting, and I cannot wait to launch this to the general public in South Africa. The user interface is unique to each customer, depending on customer activity. With that, I would like to hand back to Ian.