Sabre Insurance Group plc

okay good morning everyone just give a few seconds people to join okay i think we're good to go um thank you very much for joining us and darling on this uh bright and sunny day and i'm pleased to say bright and sunny is pretty much how we feel about the half year results actually we think it's a good half year performance and we're looking forward to um explaining why and giving some of the detail in the next half an hour or so usual usual process today. Myself and Adam will run through a few slides and then we'll leave all the difficult questions to Trevor and Matt to pick up at the end. As we go through, you have the option to type questions into the Q&A box now. We'll pick up all at the end, put your virtual hand up and Hanro will unmute you and introduce you into the call. So this will be the presentation we'll run through. Fairly punchy. We're not going to drag this out too long. Run through the Top highlights, Adam will run through the financial performance, a bit of a market update, bit of a strategy update, restate our investment case, and then the outlook. And we will, as ever, leave plenty of time for Q&A at the end. So the highlights are, I guess for me, strong growth, probably slightly more growth than we expected at this point, and very confident in delivering against our current guidance of a profit slightly higher than last year. Probably impressively, we've done that ahead of a meaningful market turn in pricing as well. So looking into the DECA a little bit. As I say, very confident in the full year profit projection. Part here probably underplays the progress. I know there's been some focus on the margin. To me, that's just maths. The margin will snap back into line. We're very, very confident by the end of the year. Matt can explain why later. Growth, we've been able to grow ahead of the market term as I say partly because we've been able to reduce our claims inflation assumption as we discussed in the full year and the full year results by coming back from high single digit to mid single digit. That's allowed us to rebase slightly. Importantly we continue to do right completely within our target margins on new business and we're completely covering our forward-looking claims inflation which we'll discuss later. So financial result, 15% up on the top line, profit before tax, pretty healthy at this point. Four year profit, as I mentioned again, anticipated to be ahead of NIC last year. All new goods have been written within our target markets, we're not underpricing to grow by any stretch of the imagination. Strong solvency position, dividend is fairly mechanical, but hopefully an attractive dividend coming out of the half year. Virtually finished the share buyback, And on strategy, good progress on Ambition 2030. First proof points coming through as motorcycle. And we're also building in more customer enhancements by use of portals and looking at how chatbots can support customers going forward as well. So at this stage, very happy with where we are at the half year. At that point, I will leave Adam to talk about the financial position.

a bit more detail then we'll come back and give a bit more context around some of those those points so if I can hand to you great thanks Jeff and good morning everyone I'll take you through the financial performance for the first half of 2026 once the slides start to move forward there we go so the first half reflects two important themes in the business Firstly, we've delivered a strong and profitable growth, with gross premium increasing by 15.7% year-on-year to £116 million. Secondly, because insurance premium earns through the life of the policy, the value generated by that growth is not yet fully reflected in the period. As a result, profit before tax of £23.9 million is slightly lower than the comparative period, but entirely in line with our expectations, and supports our confidence in delivering full-year profit slightly ahead of 2025. Our net insurance margin was 15.7%, reflecting a net loss ratio of 55.7% and an expense ratio of 29.9%. The loss ratio remains comfortably within our long-term expectations, whilst the expense ratio reflects lower earned premium from the reduced volumes written during 2025, together with continued investment in people and technology. Importantly, the increase in premium written during 2026 is expected to earn through progressively over the remainder of the year. resulting in a lower expense ratio and we expect the net insurance margin to return to within our target range of 18% to 22% for the full year. Our solvency position remains very strong at 161.4% after allowing for the interim dividend and the ongoing £5 million share buyback programme. That strength has enabled the board to increase the interim dividend in line with our dividend policy by 20% to 4.1 pence per share. This chart provides some additional context around the movement in net insurance margin. As a reminder, net insurance margin measures the proportion of net insurance revenue retained after claims and expenses and is our key underwriting profitability metric. The principal driver of the reduction from the 19.2% achieved in 2025 to 15.7% in the first half of 2026 is the expense ratio. The expense ratio increased to 29.9%, collecting the lower earned premium generated from reduced 2025 volumes. Because our growth returned strongly in the first half of this year, there is a natural timing mismatch between pricing the business and earning the associated revenue. Alongside that, we continue to invest in our people, systems and technology as we execute our ambition 2013. As those higher premium volumes earn through during the second half, we expect the expense ratio to improve meaningfully, which, along with a strong loss ratio delivered through continued underwriting discipline, will allow the net insurance margin to return to within our target range. Our core strategy remains unchanged. We continue to write business at target margins and fully cover expected claims inflation within our pricing. And as a reminder, for comparability with previous periods and many of our long-standing disclosures, all of the headline ratios shown here are presented on an undiscounted basis. and do not include any benefit from IFRS 17 discounting. This slide breaks down the loss ratio into current year and prior year with the chart on the left showing the performance in 2026 today and the chart on the right showing the full year 2025 comparative. The overall net loss ratio for the period was 55.7% compared with 54.1% in 2025. The current year loss ratio was 66.5% This is a little above the position at the end of 2025 but remains firmly within normal levels of volatility and is consistent with our usual approach to reserving. At the half year stage there is always significant uncertainty around recently reported claims so the current year position naturally includes the largest level of explicit margins. The prior year loss ratio was a favourable 10.8% that reflects continued release of explicit margins held against older claims reserves as those claims mature together with some positive priority of development during the period. There have been no unexpected adverse trends, frequency or disparity trends, and our assumption for coins inflation remains unchanged to the mid single digit level. Overall, the loss ratio remains fully consistent with the business being written at our target profitability levels.

The slides change.