Axa Sa Ord

Good morning, and welcome to AXA's first half 2025 results call. Presenting today are Group CEO, Thomas Buble, Group Deputy CEO, Frederic de Courtois, and Group CFO, Albon de Mainel. Also in the room are Guillaume Bory, CEO of AXA France, Patrick Cohen, CEO of AXA Europe, and Scott Gunter, CEO of AXA Excel. With that, I turn it over to you, Thomas.

Thank you, Anu. Good morning to all of you and thank you very much for joining our first half 2025 earnings call. As you can see from the results that we have published this morning, our business is in excellent shape. We have developed strong organic growth of plus 7% top line and underlying earnings per share is up 8% at the top of our target range during this plan. We are generating a very attractive return on equity while maintaining a strong capital position with a Solvency Tool Ratio of 220%. Our results reflect the strength of our model which is simple, balanced and now with the completion of the sale of AXA-IM completely focused on insurance. We are very much on track to achieve our plan targets, and this is important to say because we are in the middle of our current three-year plan. If we go to the next slide, these results reflect the quality of our franchise and show that we have executed in a disciplined manner, very much in line with our plan. Our businesses, all of them, are delivering solid organic growth We are well balanced between pricing measures and volume growth, and we are also well balanced between the line of business. If you look at the growth of 6% in P&C, 9% in life, and 6% growth in health. This is not only strong top line growth, but the top line growth is also converting into higher earnings growth through a continued focus on technical excellence. We have delivered further margin improvements, particularly in P&C and health, and have also shown higher net flows in life and savings, which is reflecting the strong momentum of stronger sales and better persistency. Importantly, we have achieved these good results while continuing to invest in our business. In particular, we are investing in technology solutions and capabilities to expand our mid-market business in Europe and the Americas. We are modernizing our core tech platforms and building strong data foundation to deploy and now scale artificial intelligence and also in particular general artificial intelligence across the group. We are also investing in expanding our distribution networks and tools to sustain our growth momentum. So in short, we are executing on all of our priorities. Our operating businesses across all geographies, across all lines, deliver strong results, very much in line with our plan. And we have built a business that is now a reliable profit generator. If we move to the next slide, obviously the environment is becoming more complex with geopolitical tensions, tariffs, macroeconomic uncertainty from trade wars, and in particular also social fragmentation. We enter this environment in a position of strength. Our business is well balanced between P&C, life and health, and we are not overly exposed to any single geography which is a great position to have given this growing geopolitical fragmentation. All of this gives us confidence to not only deliver our plan targets, but to also sustain future earnings growth. We see several important levers for earnings growth beyond this plan. You've seen in the numbers that we are rejuvenating our life business. This is already delivering results with strong sales momentum and accelerating positive net flows. This will clearly drive earnings growth over time. Secondly, in health, we are investing in care delivery, care coordination and prevention to become more than just a pure play of our health competitors. This should drive more margin improvement, building on what we expect in this plan by reducing fraud, waste and abuse in claims and improving patient outcomes to drive higher customer retention. This specialization will further improve our competitive positioning in order to capture growth opportunities in health and employee benefits. We are also strengthening our distribution to expand our addressable market and capture market share. What does it mean exactly? We are adding to our propriety agent distribution and invest in their digital capabilities in order to better serve our core mass affluent customer base. We have also at the same time forged more strategic partnerships, such as the one with Coreos in Spain, which represents the Spanish postal system, and it expands our reach to rural customers and those with modest incomes. But we have also struck an exclusive partnership with Lloyds Bank in the UK for personal motor, covering roughly 20 million customers. As you can see from the acquisition of Prima, we are also strengthening our direct distribution. This channel is not in competition, but complementary to our traditional sales channel, which is targeting digitally savvy and price sensitive customers. Frederick, in a moment, will talk more about this. While we are already operating with a very high NPS across our markets, we see the opportunity to further increase our customer retention and to improve cross-selling through investments in customer service, in digitalization, and AI. to improve customer experience through a more tailored way of offerings and by reducing obviously the cost to improve customer value. More broadly, we see a great and significant opportunity to increase productivity, claims and operational efficiency in order to enhance our pricing and underwriting from scaling AI. We started a test and learn approach within AXA and identified a selected number of cases that we have deployed across the entire group. Leveraging this experience now, we are pivoting to transform four areas. One is customer contact centers. Second is claims. Third is underwriting. And fourth is software engineering. The benefits from these initiatives are still to come. So if I have to summarize, our model is well placed to deliver sustained earnings momentum in a challenging and changing world. Secondly, we see catalysts for future growth beyond this plan. And thirdly, we are very confident that our strategy will drive value creation for our shareholders, including through disciplined capital deployment. If I come to the next page, which is my conclusion, Our focus on execution has delivered strong results with an underlying earnings per share growth at the top end of our range. The businesses are delivering, and all of them, in line with our plan. We are well positioned to sustain this earnings momentum with clear catalysts for future growth beyond this current plan. We are committed to continuing a very disciplined capital deployment, and we are confident that our strategy will deliver long-term shareholder value. Thank you, and I'll now hand over to Frédéric.

Thank you, Thomas. Good morning to all. We are, as you've seen, we are pleased to announce the acquisition of Prima, a quality company the leading direct player in Italy with strong growth, superior technical excellence, an internally developed and smart tech platform, and a team with strong entrepreneurial spirit. According to us, this acquisition has two main dimensions. The first one is to bring scale in Italy, one of our core and strategic markets, and And the second one is that it reinforces our existing direct franchise. If I look at Prima, Prima has grown significantly since its launch in 2015, generating 1.2 billion euros of premium in 2024. Modern, scalable technology platform, Prima sells not only via price comparison websites, representing about 40% of the business, but also directly through its own website, about 30% of its business, and through multi-tied agents, about 30% of the business. It has captured 20% share of new business and an overall market share of 10% in motor. This market share gain has continued in first half 25 with premiums up 47%. With Prima, AXA will almost double the size of its motor book in Italy. and it positions the group at the level of the top three players in the Italian market on the motor business. It has delivered this growth while generating and underwriting profits with an excellent combined ratio of 90% in 2024. Prima has sophisticated pricing capabilities, leveraging external data sources and behavioral models to capture the right customers and consistently achieve a claim frequency that is lower than market levels. It also has a competitive expense ratio supported by modern technology and lean processes including end-to-end digitalization. This is important to understand that PRIMA is the first real disruption that we are seeing in personal lines in continental Europe. PRIMA has a winning model delivering growth and profitability and all of this is validated by our extensive due diligence on the loss ratio and an extensive due diligence on the reserves booked by PRIMA reinsurers. Management and founder absolutely wanted to stay on board, further reinforcing the confidence in the business. In one word, Prima is an attractive business that brings us scale in Italy and additional know-how on the direct business. Moving to the next page on our agenda. direct franchise this is something we've we've not discussed in the past and i think it is good that we we discuss it a bit now so prima will strengthen our direct franchise and you know you don't know that axa is already a major direct player the group currently writes 3.5 billion euros of premium across eight geographies with top positions in four markets and profitability in line with overall personal line margins where we have scale. Except in the UK, direct penetration remains relatively low in our core P&C markets. Nevertheless, we expect this channel to show high growth in the future. It targets a growing customer base of young, digitally savvy, and or price sensitive customers and will contribute to addressing protection gap by offering more affordable solutions to customers with modest incomes in motor but also beyond motor the direct channel supplements our traditional distribution to widen our customer reach prima will further enhance our direct franchise by bringing A modern digital omni-channel platform that offers seamless user experience for customers and agents. A very tech-focused organization with nearly 40% of the workforce comprising of software engineers and data scientists. and an entrepreneurial and experienced team that can support the development of our overall direct business in Italy and beyond Italy. As a conclusion, I would say that Prima is an attractive acquisition for us and totally in line with our M&A policy. It brings scale in Italy and capabilities to enhance our direct franchise. We paid 0.5 billion as a consideration for 51% of the company. We have put-and-call options in a few years for the remaining 49%, and the price of this put-and-call is tied to earnings, and including the capital required to recapture the business currently underwritten by third-party insurers and reinsurers. The total consideration corresponds to a price-earning ratio of 11 times. So we are investing to strengthen our direct franchise, and we are well positioned overall at AXA and even more now to capture market share in direct and accelerate growth. Thank you, and I leave the word to Alban.