Standard Life plc

Good morning. Welcome to Standard Life's half-year 2026 results presentation. I will now hand over to Andy Briggs, Group Chief Executive Officer, to introduce the session. Andy, over to you.

Thank you, Claire. You said that without moving your lips. It was quite impressive. Look, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Standard Life's 2026 half-year results. Today, I'll begin with an update on how our delivery is building momentum across our strategic priorities. Nick will take you through the detail of our financial performance which supports achieving our 2026 targets. I'll then return to update on our next phase of growth before taking your questions. We're now in the final stages of our three year strategy and I'm delighted with the progress we've made since 2024. First, the UK market is one of the most attractive globally for retirement savings and income and we're uniquely positioned in that market because of the capabilities and platforms we've built, our leading brand and our commitment to putting our customers at the core of everything we do. Second, we're building momentum through execution of our strategic priorities which is driving growth across our key financial metrics. and means we've already achieved some of our end 2026 targets with our strong half-year results and we're on track for the remainder. Third, we're poised for further growth and an acceleration of our strategy through both the £2bn Aegon UK acquisition and the recently announced £2bn UK plc partnership. Together these are a step change in strengthening our capabilities in customer offering and provide access to a broader customer base. All of which means we are accelerating our vision to be the UK's leading retirement savings and income business, a retirement champion, helping customers achieve better outcomes and greater financial security. It also means we have even greater financial flexibility to further invest in growth and deliver strong shareholder returns. As I mentioned, the execution of our strategy continues to translate into strong performance across cash, capital and earnings, as demonstrated here. Once again, we have good growth in operating cash generation, and we remain confident in mid-single digit percentage growth into the long term. Our growing business is generating surplus capital, which we've used to improve the quality of our capital by paying down debt, while remaining in the upper half of our solvency range. Finally, on earnings, we remain on track to achieve our £1.1 billion operating profit target in 2026, having delivered another period of strong operational performance. And we continue to grow our dividend, bringing total dividend payments to £1.4 billion across this phase of our strategy. In 2024, we set a highly ambitious three-year strategy underpinned by three strategic priorities – grow, optimise and enhance. We've made excellent progress against all of these in the first half, which has contributed to the strong financial performance that I just covered. Under grow, we announced the Aegon UK acquisition and our UK PRT partnership. I'll come back to these later. Alongside these transformational developments, we're also continuing to innovate, launching Future Opportunities, a new alternative default solution designed to improve customer outcomes by opening up access to high-quality private assets. And we're increasing the allocation of private assets in our main default fund. The overall investment in our new business capability is driving strong outcomes. I'm particularly proud of the workplace wins in the first half, which I'll touch on later. Under Optimise, we achieved our deleveraging target ahead of plan and increased the amount of annuity-backing assets managed in-house to £12 billion. Under Enhance, we delivered £210 million of cumulative run rate cost savings using technology, including AI, to reshape our organisation, enhance our colleague experience and create a more efficient and scalable business. The message is simple. We're executing with discipline, delivering against our strategy and building strong momentum for the second half and longer term.

Let's look at the market we operate in.