Axa Sa Ord

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the AXA full year 2025 earnings presentation. Currently all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. Please note that today's conference has been recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Anu Venkataraman.

Please go ahead. Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to AXA's full year 25 results presentation. Presenting the results today are our Group CEO, Thomas Buble, Global Head of Finance, Strategy, Underwriting, Risk, and Technology, Guillaume Boury, and our Group CFO, Alvon de Mainel. In addition, we also have in the room Patrick Cohen, CEO of AXA European Markets and Health, Mathieu Godard, CEO of AXA France, and Scott Gunter, CEO of AXA Excel. With that, I turn it over to Thomas.

Thank you, Anu. Good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining us for our full year 2025 results presentation. As you have seen from the numbers, we had a record performance with a group that is now positioned exactly where we want it to be, a pure insurance player with every business and every geography contributing positively to both the top and the bottom line. I'm extremely pleased with these strong results across the board. You see that the top line has grown by 6%, which is reflecting the strength of our franchise. You also have seen that the underlying earnings per share have grown by 8%, which is the top of our target range. This all happened while we were enhancing our reserve prudence and were absorbing significant headwinds. For example, the adverse foreign exchange development we had last year and also the temporary dilution from the sale of AXAIEM. All of this happens on a very strong balance sheet with 5.6 billion cash at the holding company and a Solvency II ratio that remains high post-rent fathering of the debt at 215%. We expect a further 17% uplift from the Solvency II revision that will kick in on the 1st of January, 2027. This is a very solid position and in the current environment also a needed position to absorb shocks. The return on equity is at 16%, which enables us to fund organic growth and to sustain an attractive payout to our shareholders. We have also now completed the 3.8 billion euro share buyback that was related to the sale of AXAIA. So, in total, we are very well positioned, strongly capitalized, and we are delivering consistent high-quality growth in the top and the bottom line. When we look at this year and based on this record performance, I am very confident that we can deliver underlying earnings per share for this year at the top end of our target range. If we move to the next slide, our performance this year reflects a very disciplined execution on all fronts. which are growth, margin and efficiency, while at the same time we are continuing to invest in our business. The top line growth, as I mentioned earlier, was 6% and is well balanced across all lines of business. At the same time, we also increased our margins, which reflects a disciplined growth, a deployment of machine learning and predictive AI in particular in pricing and underwriting, and also a reduced leakage in claim settlement through better analytics and tighter processes. We have also made good progress in delivering efficiency through technology and automation. The underlying earnings, if you exclude AXA-IM, which we sold and closed by the middle of last year, grew by plus 9% on a constant currency basis. More importantly, these earnings are of very high quality. We do not have to fix any business anymore or have benefited from any turnarounds or one-time effects. In fact, we have taken advantage of strong earnings to reinforce prudence across all lines of business. What I would particularly like to highlight is the P&C performance. This is a stellar performance, 9% earnings growth, resilience pricing, including Excel, a lower current year loss ratio, excluding nut cut, a reduced expense ratio, strong investment income, and as I mentioned earlier, further reserve prudence. The life and health results are also of high quality. They have grown by 7% in earnings. We see a strong commercial momentum. We see higher net flows across all geographies. And what was important for us in 2025 was to particularly work on the short-term technical results. And you've seen that there is a 15% increase. while we also have a strong CSM release that is driven by reserve growth and improved margin on our in-force portfolio. This has also allowed us to build additional prudence on both technical experience and fund distribution. So we are delivering strong earnings growth in line with our commitments while further strengthening the resilience of our earnings across all lines of business. This performance reflects the quality of a well-diversified, strong insurance franchise and the deliberate strategic actions that we have taken over the last decade to reposition AXA and strengthen the execution. So we are very confident that we can sustain this performance. And as I said, my view for this year is that we can clearly deliver an underlying earnings per share at the top end of our range. If we go to the next slide and take a step back and look at the industry, it is in very good shape. with profitability and capital being at strong levels. The insurance industry is certainly also benefiting from structural growth drivers that support sustainable long-term expansion across all lines of business. When you look, for example, in retail, we see growing protection gaps from underinsurance, especially amongst the modest income customers. And this is obviously fueling demand for more affordable and accessible coverage. When you look at emerging risks such as autonomous vehicles, cyber, data centers, energy transition, these are creating new and attractive growth avenues in the commercial and specialty lines. When you think about life and health, we are confronted today with aging demographics, we have pressure on public systems, and we have demand for private health protection and retirement solutions, in particular in the countries where public systems have not delivered. And if you think about the UK, this is probably a very illustrative case. AXA today is well positioned to benefit from all of these opportunities because we have a broad and strong distribution footprint to capture these opportunities. For example, we are expanding in direct distribution And we are forging partnerships to reach modest income customers. And in particular, in Europe, this has been a very successful journey over the last year. We have deep technical expertise to underwrite risks profitably. AXA XL has been insuring autonomous driving technology for some time now, and we are amongst very few insurers that have the engineering and risk management expertise to underwrite, for example, larger data centers and digital infrastructure. Our scale, and it was always very important for us to be in fewer countries but have scale, enables us to deliver competitive products to our customers. And we obviously, given that scale continues to increase, We intend to continue to drive down our unit costs as we go along. Importantly, we have a very trusted brand and we are and will remain a long-term partner to our customers. So if you look forward, there is plenty of opportunities ahead and we are well placed to capture them and my team and I are very excited about the future growth opportunities. If we go to the next slide, page six, and looking at this year, our priorities are obviously twofold, because on the one hand side, we have to deliver the current plan. And as I said, I'm very confident that we will be delivering at the top end of our range so that we have a good delivery for this current three-year plan. But on the other hand, we also lay the foundations for the future success. As a CEO, I have to identify and execute a few decisive moves to secure our long-term competitiveness. Today, my biggest strategic priority is to continue to transform our business. When we talk about transformation, we don't talk about moonshots. Our goal is really together to create a consistent and sustainable value for our shareholders. And obviously, in this equation, our customers do remain at the center of everything. This transformation I would like to design with my team along four dimensions. First, we see AI as an absolute enabling technology that can create tremendous benefits for companies that can leverage it well. For us, AI is an efficiency play, but not only. Because AI will change how customers access insurance. It will change the personalization in products. And it will also change the customer experience. And so we want to be strongly positioned for the shift. Secondly, AI is already improving pricing accuracy, underwriting quality and claims management because we have a lot of data, often also a lot of unstructured data, and AI will help us to leverage them not only for the underwriting decisions to make today, but also using all the historic data we've got. And AI is also absolutely key to continue to develop our own tech cycles. When you think about further developing our tech landscape, when you think about making sure that our data foundations are stronger. And so we work with very tangible cases that are now ready to scale. Secondly, AI also enables us to increase the efficiency and agility of our business so we can adapt to this constantly changing environment. As you know from the past, AXA is a company that is not afraid of change. We have a history of making bold moves and we will continue now making these bold moves in an environment that is more driven by organic development. Third, we intend to enhance our capital allocation discipline even more to focus on the highest return growth and the best investment opportunities. Finally, and that is very important in a period like this, we aim to build resilience to drive greater predictability and reliability in our performance. You've seen that over the years, we have strengthened our diversification enormously. not only just across geographies or lines of business, but also across our customer segments and distribution. And we will continue this journey to ensure that we always have a robust balance sheet and a robust risk management framework. Our ambition is to be a winner in our industry, the preferred insurer for our customers, a place that can not only attract the best talents, but can also compound great value for our shareholders. Thank you. And I'm now handing over to Guillaume Boury.