Zurich Insurance Group Ltd

Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to Zurich Insurance Group's first quarter 2020 Q&A call. On the call today is our group's CEO, Mario Greco, and our group's CFO, George Quinn. As usual for the Q&A, when we get to it, can we kindly ask you to keep to a maximum of two questions, but before we start with the Q&A, Mario will make a few introductory remarks. Go ahead, Mario.

Thank you, Richard, and good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. We're living through an unprecedented health crisis. Over recent weeks, our priority has been to support our customers and local communities while ensuring the safety and the well-being of our colleagues. We moved early to remote working. And our business has been fully operational throughout with our investment in the digitalization of our business over recent years paying off. Our business model and decisions taken over years are designed to ensure that the group remains resilient. Our group is highly diversified, both in terms of geography and business line, with no dependency on any single market or business. Our focus on achieving returns through underwriting rather than investments has ensured that we have maintained a conservatively structured investment portfolio, with relatively lower exposure to some of the more stressed industries and asset classes. In life, we moved away from spread-based savings already over a decade ago, thereby making our life business more resilient to ongoing low investment yields while also reducing our overall direct exposure to investment markets. Our unique farmers' business provides us with a high level of stable fee-based earnings and non-regulated cash remittances. back to the group. Further, the balance sheet is strongly capitalized, even under our own highly conservative CDCM ratio, which is calibrated to be consistent with a AA rating. On a regulatory basis, the Swiss solvency test ratio of 186% is also well above any requirements. This capital strength is complemented by moderate leverage and significant reinsurance protection. The first quarter saw the business continue to deliver a solid top-line performance, with the crisis having only limited impact mainly in live sales in the quarter. Most importantly, we continue to see improved rates across the business, most notably in North America, and we expect this to continue. As an insurer, we're used to handling crises and complex events like those that we are experiencing. We have seen it before with events like Hurricane Katrina and the attacks on the World Trade Center. We have provided you with a number today for the potential claims related to the COVID-19 outbreak and see this well within our tolerances and similar to the claims from the three hurricanes of 2017. As we showed then, we're more than capable of managing such events. We expected the crisis to strengthen demand for digital interaction. and more tailored services. And we are already looking beyond the current crisis to make the changes necessary to the business to adapt to what will be a changed world. The combination of our flexible and resilient business model, our committed employees, and the strength of our balance sheet gives me great confidence that we will emerge strongly from the current period and in a position to take advantage of new opportunities as they present themselves. George and I will now be happy to take your questions.

The first question comes from the line of Peter Elliott from Catfish River.