Unipol Grupo Spa

Good afternoon. This is the Chorus Call Conference Operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Unipol Group's first quarter results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Mateo La Terza. CEO of UnipolSci and General Manager of Unipol. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning to everyone and thank you for participating to this call. Before opening the floor to the questions, let me make some remarks and statements on the presentation that you saw this morning that, as you know, does not include in the consolidated results the contribution coming from the bank, even if, as you are able to see in the presentation, we gave evidence of the contribution of the two banks as well in the pro forma data. Anyway, coming back to the insurance business, starting from the PNC, we achieved a quite solid increase in revenues in the high single-digit almost driven by all the line of business above all as usual health insurance is the driver of the business but as I said all the other line of business achieved quite solid increase in the premium and This is, above all, the effect of repricing that are underway in the PNC in general, in particular in motor, where I can see that the repricing is almost in its full stage, but it is starting to take effect also the repricing in some area of non-motor, above all property and fire in order to take in consideration in our risk assumption the possible evolution and effect coming from NatCat going forward. In terms of technical profitability, of course, the increase of premium and repricing gave a positive contribution to the combined ratio. Consider Nevertheless, the first quarter usually has a positive seasonality because of the lack of nut cut in the first quarter. But anyway, 91.1% is a quite good number if you compare it to the 94.8% of the first quarter in 2023. And on top of repricing that I talked before, we had a positive contribution coming from a reduction of claim frequency above all in the comparison with the first quarter of 23. Concerning life, we had a very strong production coming above all from a bank assurance, the contribution of banks is very solid and they contributed above all for the 750, 748 million of net inflows that we achieved in our segregated portfolio. That is very helpful in order to increase, reinvest our new cash flows at higher rate and contribute more to the increase of the gross yield of our segregated portfolios. As you can see in our presentation, we continue to have an increase of the gross yield, a decrease of the minimum guarantee, and this is very positive also for the capital absorption coming from the life business. This strong production gave a quite important contribution to the new business. You were able to see that the contractual service margin created by the new business is almost twice the contractual service margin released, and this is a direct effect of the very strong production that we did in life. Finally, insolvency, we had a quite small increase compared to the number at the end of 2023. 217 is a very solid number, but in order to compare ourselves to the other insurance players, as we said last time, you should take in consideration the solvency coming only from the insurance perimeter, that is 269 that we showed in the presentation and in the press release. And this number is at the top of the range of the insurance business at the European level. Having said that, I am here with Enrico San Pietro, General Manager, and we are open to answer to your questions. Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir. This is the Chorus Call Conference Operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on their touch-tone telephone. To remove yourself in the question queue, please press star and 2. We kindly ask you to use handsets when asking questions. The first question comes from Peter Elliott of Kepler-Chevreau.