Zurich Insurance Group Ltd

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Zurich Half Year Results 2026 conference call. I'm Vicky, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star, then 0. Transcription by CastingWords

We will not be taking any questions on the proposed acquisition of Beasley or comment on its results, given we are still two separate independent companies. Before I hand over to Mario for some opening remarks, please can I remind you to keep your questions for the Q&A session to a maximum of two. Over to you, Mario.

Thank you, Adrienne. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we take your questions, I'd like to make a few remarks on our half-year results. I'd like to start with three messages that I'd like to highlight today. First, we delivered another record result. Business operating profit increased 13% to $4.8 billion and core EPS grew 11.5% with every business segment contributing to this growth. These results reflect the strength of our diversified model Our focus on execution and our ability to generate attractive returns through the cycles. Second, we are seeing strong momentum in our strategic growth areas. In property and casualty, our diversified portfolio allows us to expand selectively in areas where we see attractive returns, such as specialty and middle market. In life, protection growth reached double digits, well ahead of our targets, and our farmers Policy Count growth continues to build with exchanges gaining market share for the first time in a decade. And lastly, today's results reinforces our confidence in meeting or exceeding our 2027 financial targets. We continue to see attractive growth opportunities across our business, supported by structural trends such as investment in AI infrastructure and rising demand for protection solutions. Now, let me briefly touch on the performance across our key business segments. And as usual, I start with property and casualty. Gross written premiums grew 7% to nearly US$30 billion, with an all-time high operating profit of US$2.8 billion, up 16% year-on-year. Combined ratio was an excellent 92.7%, reflecting the strength of our underwriting and active Portfolio Management. Within commercial property and casualty, specialty remains a key growth area with premiums up 8% and an underlying combined ratio of 91.2%. Construction was a particular strength, growing 18%, supported by demand from AI-related infrastructure, not just in the U.S., but around the globe. This is an area where our risk engineering, underwriting expertise, global capabilities such as our fully integrated global industry vertical and ZRS expertise give us a meaningful competitive advantage. And this supports our leadership position. We currently lead on around 70% of our underwritten data center projects. Within our customer segments, middle market also continue to perform strongly with premiums up 7% driven by growth in Germany, Italy and France and targeted expansion in the U.S. Across our commercial portfolio, margins remain healthy following several years of cumulative rate increases. We continue to see pressure in line signs such as U.S. large property and E&S, while financial lines and cyber are showing signs of stabilization as the market responds to increasing claim complexity and emerging AI-driven threats. Casualty rates continue to increase, reflecting persistent loss-cost trends. Importantly, the breadth of our portfolio across geographies, products, and customer segments give us the flexibility to dynamically manage our portfolio through different market cycles. NatCard losses remain low at 1.9% of combined ratio. Reflecting actions we have taken over recent years to reduce cat exposure in our portfolio. In terms of the recent wildfire events in Central Europe, we currently do not see a material impact on our results. You will have seen in our materials from this morning that the prior year development contributed 2.4 points to the combined ratio, somewhat above our usual level. We expect PYDs to remain modestly elevated in the near term, supported by positive experience from shorter lines, particularly from EMEA property, where we took a conservative approach following the inflation spike in 2022. In addition, the 2025 accident year has developed very favorably for global travel and for our U.S. crop business. Our approach to long-term lines remains unchanged and we continue to carefully monitor trends in casualty given continuing social inflation. On retail property and casualty, the operating profits grew 14% year-on-year and the underlying combined ratio improved by a further 60 basis points to 94.6%. Rates remain positive and we continue to see improvement in motor and property, supported by investment in pricing and claims. In EMEA Motor, for example, the combined ratio has improved by more than five points over the last two years to a healthy 96.2%, close to our longer-term ambition of operating below 96%. Turning to life now, business delivered the record operating profit of 1.3 billion US dollars. It is up 16% on a like-for-like basis. We're particularly encouraged by the pace of growth we're seeing in protection, where premiums grew 10% ahead of our targets. Growth was supported by strong performance in the UK, Australia, and Latin America, where we saw continued expansion in our bank assurance partnerships and our joint venture with Santander returning to volume growth. Beyond protection, both our savings and unit link businesses contributed to earnings growth, benefiting from strong customer inflows and favorable financial market impacts. As a result of this, we are raising our live profit guidance for the year. Looking ahead, we see significant opportunity to grow protection further as we continue to help customers address their increasing needs for protection and health solutions.

And now farmers.

Farmers delivered the strongest half year ever with operating profits of US $1.2 billion. The exchanges grew premiums by 4% and are organically gaining market share for the first time in more than a decade. This represents a key milestone and is a testament to the successful transformation that the team has executed on since 2023. The exchanges are now operating from a position of strength with an industry-leading combined ratio of 82.4% and the surplus ratio of 58.7%. Looking ahead, we expect exchanges to benefit further from key initiatives to enhance agent productivity alongside a newly launched brand campaign. So to summarize, we are just at the midpoint of our three-year financial plan. We announced it at our investor day back in 2024, and today we're pleased with the progress we're making. The strong momentum we are seeing in our first half result reinforces our confidence in meeting or exceeding all our 2027 targets. Thank you very much for your attention and now Claudia and I are happy to take your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star, then two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Kindly limit yourself to two questions only. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question from Michael Hattner, Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Fantastic, thank you. Well done on the results, but I'm really sorry. I want to focus on Beasley. I only have two questions. On Beasley, my two questions are the following. One, is there any update on the timing for the completion of the deal, whether it was September, October, or earlier or later, or are there any milestones we have to think about? And then the second is also on Beasley, and this you might choose to say, well, we can't answer, but the results yesterday, the day before yesterday, Thank you Michael.

It's interesting that you start with the first question after Adrian said that we're not taking questions from Beasley. And that's two questions. So look, on the timing, I don't know. I mean, we are in the process. We got approval by a number of jurisdictions, but not all of them. I would say that this is a Q4 event. Now, we're in the Q4. It's hard to say. There are no issues, no delays. It's just that it takes time. On the results, we have nothing to say because we have really nothing. We don't know anything. And so we can comment on something that we have no information about. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome.

The next question is from ,, Kepler Chevreau. Please go ahead.

Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. On North American rates, Minus 1% and Q126 was flat. And I believe the outlook has changed from stabilizing to moderating. I suppose, could you just put a bit more, you'd already talked about some business clients, but could you just talk about in terms of the outlook then versus now and what's changed? And I was wondering if you could also talk a little bit more about specialty, your specialty business. and where rates are developing. You highlight some segments where you've cut back and one other segment that you have increased premiums. But you can just talk around the different aspects of specialty of all, please. Thank you.

Yeah. So, look, on the rates, in particular the U.S. rates, the rates in the second quarter have been very positive, double-digit positive on... on a specialty. They've been high single-digit positive on liability and motor. S in all the past years have been close to flat on workers' comp. And they've been negative on property. Property remains negative in the rounding of 10%. That's the composition. With respect to Q1, specialty has improved. Motor and Liability have stayed on the same levels. Property has slightly worsened and workers' comp is practically unchanged. So that's the situation on the North American grades. The rates are slightly better or are better in NIA and this is probably structural characteristic The market is less competitive, so it's not just a lag in transmission, it is just rates in EMEA are structurally higher than the ones in the US. Then you asked about specialty, but what particular angle of specialty do you want me to answer you on? On rates or on the volumes?

I suppose you can do both. And if you could just also segment between the large specialty business and the middle market specialty business as well.

Yeah, so on specialty, of course, the predominant component in our results is what the construction and infrastructure vertical does. This has been the highest source of growth, and it's also probably the most rewarding one for us in terms of margins. ENS has performed slightly better than it did in the past years, but it remains for us an area of careful underwriting. Financial lines are showing, as Claudia said, I think a number of times already showing some improvements in the rates and in the margins. Energy remains a growth area for us and quite stable. We got some, as it happens every number of years, so we got some losses in surety for some of the exposures that we had Now related with construction and infrastructures. And on cyber, we see a market which we expect now to turn into better. The rest of specialty for us is insignificant.

If I may add, implicit in Mario's comment, There's also the geography aspect, right? It's great to see that the growth is broad-based, so it's not a US topic only. As you were rightly pointing out, there is some overlaps as well between middle market and specialty, so roughly one-third of specialty is done with middle market customers, and this is a big driver of growth in the European markets as well. So the UK has been traditionally leading, but what we are seeing now is and more and more prominent in continental Europe. There's a number of beyond data centers, infrastructure projects, very large projects in the energy field, which need a lot of insurance support. So we're very happy to be growing there. It's double digits in Germany, in Italy, France, Benelux on a smaller basis. So those are great markets for us and we are very well positioned to be growing there.

Thank you.

The next question from Ian Pearce, BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Hi, afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one was just if you could talk a little bit particularly about the commercial accident year combined ratio XCAT trend. So that was 120 basis points higher year on year. Could you talk a little bit about how you're expecting that number to trend and if you think that the retail improvements can offset that? And then on the expense ratio, obviously that was quite a bit higher year on year as well. You flagged business mixing and commission impact, but when I look, it looks as if the expense ratio has basically gone up in all regions ex-APAC and in both the retail and commercial divisions. So it's just trying to see if there's anything else to flag in the expense ratio trend across the different segments. Thank you.

Yeah, so I'll start with the expense ratio and then Claudia will continue on the combined ratio, commercial and retail. Look, on the expense ratio, there are two things that are happening. The pure expenses, we're very confident that you'll see them by year-end coming down. And so we're still confident that we're going to show by year-end and then in the next year A reduction of the pure expenses component into this. On the commission side, however, that reflects the business mix and reflects partially the different composition of the premiums that we are reporting in our portfolio. Now, we will carefully manage it over time, making sure that this doesn't worsen further, But in a sense, this is also a more stable business mix for us. It's a more encouraging business mix on the margins than the one with a lower commission ratio. There are products like Travel, but also F&I, which do have higher commission ratios, but then they offer us important benefits on customer loyalty and in profitability of the relationship. Is that enough on the expenses and commissions?

Yes, that's clear, thank you.

Thank you, Mario. On the loss ratio, just to give you some context, out of the Iaronia move on the combined ratio, two-thirds is loss ratio and one-third is essentially the commission point that Mario already mentioned. The year-on-year worsening on the loss ratio, while it's there, it's 80 basis points. So in the context of a book that's growing 7%, being able to maintain this business mix and this level of margin is really, and sorry, let me reiterate that because I think it kind of comes across as if it were obvious, it's not, right? There's a lot of Proactive Portfolio Management that's done to keep a portfolio of this size growing at 7% at 91% combined. So important that we reiterate that. So in terms of the loss ratio changes, there's a bit of a mixed impact there as well. So obviously the rate movement in property is such that we are growing less in property and Here and there, we are also proactively ruining some business where rates are no longer adequate. So that's also visible, obviously, in the loss ratio. There are a few losses, as Mario was mentioning. It's very pointed on the surety book, older underwriting years, but it's coming through the accident year. So some relatively small in the context of the overall book, but there are a number of factors coming together. So The volumes, property, some very specific losses coming through. We want to continue to grow the book in our target and strategic areas. The combined ratio might move slightly from here. Obviously, we have a very strong focus on expenses, as you know, and we'll continue to have it going forward. But we are happy about the context of the book Can I add a comment because not many of you have been around in 2018-2019 but I was there and at the time there was a similar discussion where

Some of your colleagues were asking us what about for the reduction of the combined ratio. We're saying we're targeting EPS growth and BOP growth. We're not targeting low combined ratios. We're running targets for targets which are on BOP and EPS and this is what we want to achieve. We're not in a race to have the lowest possible combined ratio no matter what the BOP and the EPS are. So please be mindful of this because otherwise you don't understand what we're trying to do here.

And the growth, maybe that might be a related question on this, right? The growth that we are pursuing, just to be very clear on that point as well, is mostly growth that's coming through very profitable, mostly short tail lines, right? So we are not... Great, Claire. Thank you.

The next question from William Hawkins, KBW. Please go ahead.

Hi, Mario and Claudia. Thank you very much. Could you first talk about any major issues you want us to be aware of in terms of seasonality or sequential change when we think about 2H versus 1H? There may be a lot to say on the non-life side. Obviously, NATCAT seasonality, and it would be good to have an update about whether you think PYD or other loss picks could limit the impact of that in the second half. but I'd prefer if you could start by talking about the life result please because you have just had a great print and I'm not sure about the seasonality of life you know from first principles I just thought your life result should be stronger in the first half from the second half because of things like dividends but the history seems to show that actually the second half gets better relative to the first half so I'm just trying to manage my expectations for that thank you and also thank you very much for slide 19 where you've dug a bit more into margins on the life side that for me at least that's really helpful thank you then secondly much shorter question In the SST walk, there's a very small change in target capital, which seems a positive surprise to me, given how much you're growing the business. So could you help me understand why there's almost no change in required capital and what the outlook is, please? Thank you.

Okay, I'll start, William. And by the way, thank you very much for the title you used this morning to your report on us on the sonar of a lesser god. You remember that I said many, many times, and I'm happy to see that it's finally coming back to be a normal son. And then I'll ask Claudia to take the capital question. Look, seasonalities. Of course, in the second half of the year, you start watching the weather conditions. reports every morning or twice a day, especially on the US. That's a constant thing. Now, one thing, however, I want to stress is that if you look over the past years, we constantly outperformed the market in terms of share we have on natural catastrophes. We have become very good at selecting the cat exposures Meaning that we're less exposed than anybody else, I would say, in the industry to CAD events. But that is the fundamental seasonality in the second half of the year. I think on the cost side, vice versa, H1 is kind of heavier because we make investments, we make a cost decision at the beginning of the year, and then in the remainder of the year, we manage the results. We typically reduce it and that's where we're confident that the costs will be lighter by year end. Life, I think the only change that exists between H1 and H2 really is that some of our distribution channels will feel the constraint of meeting their budgets and they will be forced to do better in the sales. And so we expect actually that on the same side, we should report even stronger numbers by year end for that. But other than that, there is much seasonality there. On capital?

On capital, so relatively easy explanation, William. So there is a very tiny net incremental increase in the capital that we need. but most of it has been diversified away because the growth is so broad-based in terms of where it's coming between life, non-life and geographies as well. This is a place where talking about seasonality, we might see potentially a bit more of an impact in the second half but it still stays in the single-digit areas.

Thank you.

The next question from Vinit Malhotra, Mediobanca. Please go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon. Thank you, Mario. Thank you, Claudia. So my two questions, one is, I'm sorry, back on life, but more thinking about, I mean, this unit has persistently surprised positively over many years. And I'm just thinking that if you're getting a plus 10, above 10% earnings growth this year, then how, I mean, what could, Theoretically, business-wise, they drive further growth next year. So just looking next year or next year, you know, of what could be in the business that could make another push on growth on life. Second question is, again, slightly hypothetical. The data centers in the U.S. obviously is one of the key tools at the moment, I think, from all the conversations. I mean, recently there was some article in The Economist which was titled Not Compute, which basically shows that The populations and all the people in the US are beginning to object to such data centers. And I understand that that's where you come in, right? You're there for the warranty, the project being built. Are you seeing anything? Are you hearing anything about such kind of risks to this business line from a claims perspective? Or are you seeing anything there that is worth flagging? Thank you.

Sorry, let me address this reactively. That's not a risk for us because we only insure projects which are authorized, which are decided authorized and can officially start. So if there is opposition, the project will not even start. And anyway, that's not a risk for us that the project then will not be, how can I say, will not be authorized to continue. The risk for us is that the project doesn't deliver what it's supposed to deliver because construction doesn't work, because construction is not appropriately realized. So we fundamentally insure two things. One is the builder's risk and one is the construction risk. Plus, we insure the workers, we insure the transportation, we insure the energy definition of the solution for the location for the place. You know, the opposition of the people is before the project starts, if there is. For life, look, I mean, first of all, I'm glad that life starts to be considerably valued. I think our life basis is fully discounted in our results. I believe that in 2027 we'll grow even further. We are expanding very nicely across Asia, for example, where our results have been not very significant in the past. We have been investing in Hong Kong and in the development of the live market in Hong Kong. We're even investing in branding around there. That's an area where we expect further returns. Japan has been a fantastic surprise for us. The success we reported there. We own today 8% of the unit link market in Japan with incredible success of our products and services and all done on a kind of ground up basis. Brazil, Latin America, especially with Santander, we've discussed it many times. I think they still have something to recuperate. And Santander has very aggressive plans for the growth. So even there, I expect better results. But to start with, now we want to deliver further improvements in the second half of year. And we want to deliver above the results of life and exceeding 2.5 billion, which will be for Zurich a very important achievement.

And then we will concentrate on 27.

But you remember all the investments we made in life. We changed the organization. We brought it to a global platform. We insourced underwriting. Today we have a global database of risks in life, which allows us to price and underwrite centrally. Giving very good services to customers and achieving full control of how we manage the business. We never had that before and probably not many companies have it. So it's a journey that now is starting to deliver the results and the profits.

Can I just follow up with you, please? Because you mentioned Hong Kong. I mean, there's been loads of news around Chinese tax Thank you. But there is very significant wealth there. And so the demand there is super high and super hot.

and this is a great opportunity for us.

Thank you, Mario.

Yeah, you're welcome.

The next question from Will Hardcastle, UBS. Please go ahead.

Oh, hi there. It's a question on the data center growth. Maybe a couple of sub-questions, actually. I'm trying to get to grip on Zurich's competitive edge you have here. You've discussed that edge of what the risk engineers give you in the past, but maybe the addition is... Scale also a key advantage. I'm trying to understand perhaps what line size you can offer versus competitors and whether the lead role because of your capability is really differentiating in price versus the follow market. And just as an extension, I read there's some consortia happening and they're scaling up together to offer higher limits. Are you seeing that as a threat to the price or not at the moment? Thank you.

Construction and infrastructure has always been the main competence of Zurich on property and casualty since really decades ago. You remember that we advertised years ago as the insurance company who made the Panama Canal, and that was really decades ago. What we have, which is special, I mean, besides having hundreds, really hundreds of specialized underwriters in this, now we have the risk engineering, but also we have run this as a vertical, as I mentioned before. Vertical means that we don't just offer construction, builders risk and constructional risk. We offer the customers integrated in the constructional risk and builders risk, the offer for everything else that they need. And this is... Motor Transportation Marine, this is workers comp, this is fleets, every kind of, and of course this is also surety. Nobody, I think, in the market comes to them with an integrated offer. And we have people who have done this for years and they know very well how to make this project from the insurance standpoint and how to support the customers doing that. Look, this is a market which is clearly in excess demand, not in demand of insurance. So I'm not afraid of anything. Actually, there are projects who are waiting to start because there is no insurance available. We're happy if some capacity comes because we'll be able ourselves to do more. We can do all by us. We have limits. So we control our exposures, we control our concentration of risks. And as long as there is a clear excess of demand from the customers, we're happy with everybody entering. And I don't see how this can be reverted in a situation of excess supply. I really don't see that happening any times.

Right at this point in time, if I may add, there's rather a constraint on the insurance and the capital side as well that goes into insuring data centers. We've been, I think we put it in the deck as well, we were successful in a new strategic placement, we placed a variable quota share Now, first of July, which gave us one billion of additional capacity that we now can deploy in the market to support new projects. But as Mario said before, I mean, if we had more capacity to give to our engineering teams, the request is there. They would be actually super happy to deploy more in other projects. So right now, I think we are at a point where the traditional insurance and the insurance market is coming to a limit in terms of the capacity. and solutions that are more innovative that foresee some type of consortia or bundled capacity. I think they are actually a necessity to be able to continue to support projects of this scale. So we are welcoming and we are exploring ourselves as well some innovative forms.

Also, Will, just be mindful that data center is something that it's easy to Visualize. But this is about infrastructures. It's about energy projects. It's about transportation means. Because a lot of these projects are just about, in Europe, for example, are about highway and railway systems. A good part of what Germany is now planning to do or started doing is about that. There are lots of energy building infrastructure projects. In the Middle East, there are lots of projects, significant ones, focused on energy. So it's easy to talk about data center because it's intuitively important for everyone. But a lot of what we do there is infrastructures. And again, this is a nice job for us. I mean, we know it. This is core business for us.

Super helpful. Thank you.

The next question is from Andrew Crean, Autonomous. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. I wanted to focus on slide 11 first. You've given us this new breakdown between US commercial, international, global specialties. You've given us the accident year combined ex-CATS, which I think went up from 90.4 to 91.6, and I think The global specialty deteriorated from 85.3 to 91.2. Could you just give us the combines for the other two sections, both first half 25 and 26, the U.S. commercial and the international, because they must have been improving if specialty was going down. That was the first question. And the second question is actually coming back onto data centers. You focused very much on the construction, ensuring the construction of data centers. Are you also big in the insurance of data centers once they're up and running? Because I've seen some reports where the rate is aligned there.

No, we're not.

You don't do it. You walk away once.

No, because that's casualty, and that's not a target risk for us. So we're not. We're not targeting the market. It's a completely different story, and that's not our bread and butter. We are on construction. That's an easy answer. Sorry to interrupt you, but that's easy. On the other one, I need support because I don't have it out of my mind.

Go ahead, Andrew.

Do you want me to take this up afterwards? It's a bit of a detailed question.

Yeah, let's do that. The one point that I think is important to note, and I think the U.S. is actually in the supplement, so it's visible there, the North America piece, which is essentially the U.S. But more importantly...

The U.S. commercial will have some of the specialty in it, won't it?

Yes, yes. Okay, so you were asking for U.S. specialty, standalone?

No, for U.S. without specialty. You split things out on slide level. I'm just wondering the accident year combines ex-cats. I think we've got the special team, it's just the other two. Great, thank you.

Let's do it separately. The one point that I wanted to emphasize is that they're actually improving year on year. So both the US ex-specialty The next question from William Hawkins, KBW. Please go ahead.

Hey, sorry for the follow up. I know it's greedy. Mario, you made that passing remark in your prepared remarks about expected PYD to remain modestly elevated. Is that just in the second half or is that a more prolonged statement? Because when I hear that, I think of cycle management. So you're doing PYD to offset deteriorating attritional claims ratios. So how do you want me to interpret that kind of emphasis you made on the prolonged PYD, please?

Because we see, as I mentioned, that we have an excess that we have built over the past years in shorter lines that we cannot further hold. And we have no reason to do that. And so we will continue likely in H2 to unload that. But that's not cycle management. We have buffered up. Our reserve says we should have done over the past years, and we don't like to do cycle management, and we don't plan to do that. But if we exaggerate on shorter lines, then I don't know what to do with that. I mean, we need to get rid of it. So this is not cycle management. It's just, if you want, correcting excess or mistakes of the past couple of years.

And please keep in mind, William, that we have also in the past, for sure, two years, probably three years, we have been extra cautious and we continue to be extra cautious in the way we've been reserving, particularly for property lines that were subject to a lot of inflation pressure. So this is now coming through in the PYD. And as I said, we continue with that approach going forward as well. But there were Thank you very much. Thank you.

Since we don't plan to use it, you have to put the limit to that because otherwise we create a new kind of excess capital which is then very difficult to liquidate at a point in time.

Understood. Thank you very much.

The next question from Ben Cohen, RBC. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to ask on farmers if I could. I think the gross return premium growth of 4% in the first half is below the outlook given for the full year. Could you talk through sort of, I guess, the mechanisms by which you think you are going to achieve that growth and maybe if you could give us some colour by line and by geography in terms of how your competitiveness is working out and maybe a bit more colour in terms of what seems like a very competitive end market. Thank you.

Yeah, so as I said in my remarks, farmers is gaining market share, which means that many of the peers have grown much less than 4% this year. The 4% is composed of two pieces. One is the average rates in the portfolio for the renewal of the portfolio, Pharmacy is improving on portfolio retention, but the rates are not very high on renewals because the market is kind of soft for auto and homeowners in the US at the moment. And then there is the growth where they grew the customer or the policies and forces by 215,000 in H1. which is the biggest number for them in many, many years and that doesn't compensate the slow growth of the portfolio and this is how you get to 4%. Considering the market condition, considering what the competitors are doing, I think this is an excellent result. The growth of the portfolio is accelerating and as soon as the rates will become more conducive, we will see much more satisfactory numbers of growth from farmers and they clearly have the capital to do it. Does that answer you?

Well, I guess, I mean, are you seeing the signs that actually pricing is turning in that market? I mean, is that why Is that why there is that confidence? I take it in terms of the PIF growth, but it sounds like you need price to move as well. Is there a risk there if price doesn't move?

Yeah, I mean, the other thing that you have to consider in our numbers is that farmers still had in these first six months a tale of cancellation. from the cleaning actions of the past years, which depressed the portfolio numbers. And they are over now. So from now on, the growth is the growth, and they don't have further impact from cancellation, which is a better condition in H2 and then next year than they had before. because remember that they started the transformation in 23 and then they started acting on portfolio cancellation in 24-25 and they're still seeing in H1 this year the tail of these cancellations. But overall, I would say that it's a little bit unfair to consider these results. I mean, they're better. We look at all the reported numbers from farmers' competitors. These results stand out. I can mention them one by one, but I'm sure that you've seen them yourself.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

We'll take the last question from Mr. Michael Hattner, Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much. Do you have a question on Beatly, Michael? Say again? What did you say?

Do you have a question on Beatly?

No, no, no, no. Sorry, I'm joking. No, no, no, you're absolutely fair. No, no, of course. The first one is you highlighted that your growth is BOP and EPS, but maybe it's not combined ratio, but to understand this better, back of the envelope, my guess is you're now writing non-life overall, so Thank you for joining us. And I know there's tax, but there's also investment income that probably offsets it. Is that roughly the way you think about it? Because that, of course, makes a huge amount of sense. Why not grow when you're making such high ROEs? And then the last one is, I know you gave a big interview to Bloomberg last week, the week before, I can't remember, on whatever happened in Switzerland. I was really puzzled. I thought that, I mean, obviously there was a mistake made. You've dealt with it. It's past. But it sounds to me, or the way I understood it, that in fact, Zurich, Switzerland, so not your decision, but whoever was there at the time, actually were getting better pricing to the pension funds than allowed or authorized by the regulator. I thought that was strange. Anyway, it was just a question.

I'm not sure I understand what you question, Michael, in Switzerland. So yes, they were giving lower prices to the customers, yes. So they benefited the customers against the company.

Yeah, that was what they did. But why did the regulator object to that? This is what I didn't understand.

Because prices are controlled in Switzerland. and the regulator cares for solvency more than customer satisfaction and set the prices where they think that the solvency of the company must be. Now, why the Swiss colleagues did that is still a mystery because this was not incentivized, it was not a KPI, they had no budgets for. I have no idea why they did that. I presume they started as a mistake and then they thought that it was easier to continue with the mistake against fixing the mistake. But that's my guess. But yes, it's precisely that. They sold, they underpriced customers or a number of customers and this is no compliance with the rules on that product. Yeah. Then on your calculation, look, I'm not very familiar on how you got it. My point is simpler. I mean, first of all, we're growing the short tail lines. So capital is pretty light on these short tail lines. And we run, I mean, the targets that the companies have, is on BOP and it's on APS growth and it's on remittances and dividends that they send to the business. Then yes, we do control carefully the combined ratio, but we don't target the combined ratio against the BOP. And I mean, put in a different way, if I look at 94, sorry, at 2024 versus 2026, We still have an improvement of our combined ratio. We still have an improvement of roughly 20 basis points, but we have an improvement of almost a billion in Bob. That for me is a good trade. That's a good way to run the business. You know, because I'm creating space to remunerate shareholders. I'm growing the business, which means that I have more customers. that I can then loyalize. And I improved over two years. The combined ratio stayed by something like 20 basis points. That reminds me of the discussion in 18 and 19.

Very clear. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you.

This was the last question. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Greco for closing remarks.

All right, then thank you very much for your question and for the interest in our results. Let me just repeat quickly the key messages for today. We're delivering an outstanding performance in the first half of the year with the record operating profit and double-digit EPS growth. All business segments contributed to this. And we're seeing strong progress against our key strategic priorities. Couple with a strong balance sheet and a high cash conversion rate, this position has wealth to execute in the best long-term interest of our shareholders. We'll talk later in the year. I wish you a very good summer. Bye, guys.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.