Good morning from our offices here in London at the Gherkin. My name is Thomas Bohun. Esteemed, I'd like to welcome you to the Management Dialogue event today. We're going to kick it off straight away with our Group CEO, Andreas Berger, followed by our Group CFO. That session will take around 45 minutes. We'll then take a short break to set up for the Q&A here right away. So with that, Andreas. Yeah, thank you, Thomas. Let me just take this. Thanks for coming here. To those physically present here who came in person, and to those who dialed in, a nice welcome here. It's been busy. We were busy, but busy in a positive way. A lot has happened. I've been in a job now a bit more than five months. I spoke to you when we had the half-year results. We couldn't say much then. We did a lot of homework, and some of it you know already, and we'll present a bit more here today. I can repeat again what I said at the half-year result. It's such a privilege to work for this institution. There's so much to Swiss Re. Got great people, got a great brand, and a lot to offer to the industry. I think that's something that makes me proud to work here for Swiss Re. Today, you saw the agenda. I'm going to talk to you a little bit, and then John will go through the financials, and then we'll have a break. After that, we'll do the Q&A. We'll have Urs Baertschi, who can be a bit more specific about P&C Re in particular, about the renewals. I'm sure you've got a lot of questions there. Then also we have Phil Long, our Chief Actuary. This is an important topic, as you know, and we'd like to give you the comfort that we were doing the right things to take away the drag. Five things I want you to take away today. Number one, we addressed the recurring drag. When I spoke to investors and analysts, the number one topic was the drag in the world class. We saw U.S. casualty reserves always in the middle of everything, and it basically distracted from the good assets we have and also the good underlying performance we have. So that's a topic we're going to address. But it's not only the U.S. casualty reserves. It's also one of actions that we took where we said, "Look, we need to clean portfolios that were not really performing, that do not really belong to the core of our business." So that's also something we addressed, and that's the first topic. Second topic, we're an underwriting company. Underwriting is at the heart of what we do. Now, underwriting includes claims, etc. What I want to say is we're a technical company. I mean, we understand risk, we price risk, and we're there to make our clients more resilient. Data technology, people and talent, and the culture. I'm going to talk about that a bit later. This is focusing on our core and advancing our core. Yeah, not getting distracted. Third topic, we also look at being leaner, quicker, more effective as an organization. This translates into cost savings, obviously. It's not the first primary goal, but organizing ourselves in a proper way, being faster, being more business-oriented, and also bottom line return. I think will translate into an operating cost saving run rate of $300 million by 2027, which means the inflation and also additional investments are digested. So that's obviously the bottom line number that you see here. The fourth aspect is we feel comfortable about the underlying business. We address the drag, as you saw. So we see now the earnings power of the group. That's why we feel comfortable on the back of a good market that we're in, that we can target a net income for 2025 of more than $4.4 billion. This is significant as an increase. The original target for 2024 was $3.6 billion, so it's $800 million more, 22%. So if you take the new outlook for 2024, more than $3 billion, then it's even bigger than that, bigger than the 22%. And lastly, we're confident that our business is operating in a good environment. You've seen the underlying quality of the business coming through, and we feel comfortable also to then aspire or aim for an ordinary dividend per share increase of 7% or more over the next three years. So those are the five takeaways I'd like you to think about when you go back home to your desks. Now, let me start to recap. Swiss Re has a fantastic platform. It has three important businesses. It's nicely diversified. We've got two P&C businesses, P&C Re. That's the traditional strong business we had, and we have corporate solutions, an important part of the group as well, and Life & Health reinsurance as market leader in the world. Those are the three core businesses, undisputedly core. That's strategic core. We're also well diversified when it comes to line of businesses and also to regions. We're nicely balanced between property specialty and casualty, and then also Life & Health. You can see that casualty, we'll talk about that, the share will actually reduce, but I think this gives you the overall picture and also nicely balanced with correlated and decorrelated lines of businesses when you look at pricing cycles. Territorially, the Americas is 50%. U.S. is the single largest market for all three business units, and we have got a nice balance with EMEA and APAC. We've got a strong capital base. We're comfortably above the target range of 200-250% SST. We're a technical risk insights company. We've got 200 proprietary Nat Cat models being updated continuously with more than 50 scientists working on those more than 200 models. On Life & Health, we're number one, consistently ranked number one with our Life Guide, now also added with an AI component to keep pace with modernization and innovation. The client franchise is second to none. Clients and brokers always rate us either number one or number two. The NMG rating for P&C Reinsurance is number one. Life & Health is number two. Corporate Solutions is using the Net Promoter Score. Here we have a 62. This is the all-time high record score that CorSo could achieve, and it's an industry high also in comparison to peers. This is an increase of 8% in comparison to last. So that gives you a very, very strong platform to base on. So everything you see in the outcome and the numbers is actually based on those hard work and feedbacks that we get from markets. The results to date were driven by resilient underwriting, very good underwriting. I said it before. You see here on the left-hand side the pro-rata target for 2024, which was more than $2.7 billion. You know that we took the reserving actions, then we landed at $2.2 billion. Actually, if we didn't take the reserving actions into consideration, we would have been actually much, much higher than the $2.7 billion. Actually, we would have actually made the year-end target of more than $3.6 billion. So that gives you comfort also. We're excellent positioned in the underwriting on the P&C side. Life & Health is also very good positioned on the new business side. The P&C, in particular, the strategy, the renewal strategy there two years ago we introduced is paying off now. And keeping that discipline in the market, and those we'll talk a bit more in our Q&A, is critical. You will talk about also the sentiment for the renewals; it's early days, but I think it's very constructive. We're very positive also about this P&C market on the reinsurance side. On the CorSo side, we definitely see a plateauing of rates. I'll come back to that in a second. Life & Health, it's reflecting obviously the steady CSM release. And then to mention also the very good environment or the returns on our investments, the recurring investment income is at 4%. So it's quite attractive. So we still think in 2025 we can still bank on this, and this will continue. So you see then on the right-hand side the business units performances. P&C Re, that's the effect of the U.S. liability one-off reserve increase. Life & Health is at $1.2 billion nine months, and we're confident to make the $1.5 billion. John will talk about this also in his section. And Corporate Solutions, again, 17th consecutive quarters of consensus beat. This is a very strong performance due to very disciplined, rigorous underwriting, portfolio steering, reserving positions to be aligned continuously to reality. Market condition is very favorable. You'll see the increases. Let's start with the P&C Re side. Steep increases. Recently, in the renewals, Swiss Re was participating also obviously in the change of the tone and also the pace in the renewals, and others followed, and you can see already that it's starting to plateau, but actually at a healthy level. I get asked very often, "This is too profitable," etc., and to always remind people, "We need to earn our cost of capital." For too long, this was a drag in the industry. Now we have to have that equilibrium. The insurance industry and reinsurance industry needs to show healthy profits in order to serve its role to increase the resilience of the company. On the Corporate Solutions side, you definitely see the primary insurance market are reacting earlier probably than the reinsurance markets. We see this in particular in the property rates that they're plateauing, but again, at a very healthy level, we still see strong rate adequacy in those lines of business, and obviously, it depends on the areas you're operating in, the territories, but also the occupancies, the type of risk that you underwrite. There are some areas that are obviously not very favorable in some financial lines, FinPro lines of business. Casualty is always something to watch. We're very vigilant. We manage the portfolio. We have a forward-looking view of rate increases or decreases in the market, so we manage the cycles very actively. Life & Health Reinsurance, the mortality side, you've seen a more positive view on mortality in the U.S., but we still stay vigilant and cautious. There is still excess mortality that you observe in the U.S. That's something we cannot ignore, but the situation is much, much better than it used to be. On the asset management side, I mentioned that before. But let me make one clear statement here. We're not chasing for growth. When you see the rate developments being so attractive and markets being so attractive, we don't have any growth target. Underwriters don't get growth target, nor on P&C lines, nor on Life & Health. It's the quality of the business that we underwrite and the bottom line. So when we talk about growth, we always refer to bottom line growth. Obviously, when you want to have bottom line growth, the top line also needs to be addressed, but then in very targeted areas where you feel comfortable, where you have the right risk appetite and the right understanding of the risk and the market conditions that are favorable. Let me come to the program that I started, actually not when I started in first of July. It's actually started since the announcement. That was a four-phased strategy that we laid out, mainly driven also by the input that I got from my listening tour. Some of you in the room were part of it. We got your sentiment, your feedback. We got clients' feedbacks. We got employees, more than 500 employees visit in six weeks, basically. And all of this feedback gave us the rounded picture, and it was pretty consistent, things that we needed to address. So we said, "Why waiting?" So from the 3rd of April onwards, when the announcement was made, I sat down with my predecessor, Christian Mumenthaler, and we looked at what do we need to decide. He is the CEO. I'm the incoming then starting from 1st of July. But we promised ourselves, if we identify topics that need to instantly, why waiting until the 1st of July? And that's exactly what we did. So we started in transition phase. We withdrew from iptiQ. That's the announcement we made. And the U.S. liability reserve was another topic that we already identified. We have identified Reinsurance Solutions as an area where we were not profitable. The break-even was so far out in the future, and we were always pushing it further out. So we needed to really review strategically what Reinsurance Solutions really meant for the group and how to also give the team the outlook of achieving something, a break-even pretty soon. And I can confirm that by first half year 2026, after the review of strategy, we'll have a break-even in reinsurance, reducing it to the core delivery, and then from there expanding really into new areas. Then came July 1st. That's where the immediate action started. Immediate actions was indeed mainly driven by the reserving review or the discussions around reserves per se. Then obviously the implementation of the iptiQ withdrawal then also happened. I'll come to that in a second, but a separate slide on this. Then I really asked my teams to really look very deep into, in particular, the U.S. casualty or U.S. liability one. We did an overall review of our reserves, which we usually do actually in Q3, but this time we put so much more effort into it. We really went very deep into each underlying portfolios. The outcome I will talk about in a second. The third ellipse, the third phase is more the midterm, the midterm ambition. There's also. Then finally, the fourth phase is the North Star. We said we should not talk about a North Star now as we increase the resilience of the group to set the foundation actually to be able to earn the right to talk about a North Star. So we made good progress. It was a busy five months now. We'll continue. It's a transition phase. Next year, we'll articulate our strategic direction setting for the future. And that's something that we will then share with you in next year's Investor Day. And this would then be what we could call a North Star, which will address maybe a much more fundamental question around where are the opportunities, curves, and where to invest into the future. iptiQ, just quickly, we were successful in addressing one portfolio of the few iptiQ portfolios. It's the largest portfolio. It's the P&C EMEA iptiQ portfolio. We announced a transaction. We are selling this iptiQ EMEA P&C business to Allianz Direct. Allianz Direct agreed to take over the employees, the business as such, including the distribution partnerships, and they were obviously interested in the platform that we created. This went very smoothly, and it also gave a positive outlook to the rest of the portfolios that are remaining, but this is the bulk of it. It's 74% of the insurance revenue that we now address with this P&C EMEA move to Allianz. Obviously, we expect closing in Q3 2025, so we're well on track here. The other portfolios, we have to look at them differently. We've got the Americas. We put the business in Americas into runoff. There's a small solutions business, Sales Solutions we call it. It's more a sales unit, L&H Management. We will sell. But the rest of the business is going into runoff. APAC, same. We haven't concluded yet, but I think we're comfortable that we will find a solution not too long from now, but we cannot confirm yet, but we have very advanced discussions that you should expect not too long from now. EMEA, Life & Health. Here we continue to focus on delivering on the financial plan, and we weigh up all the options because we want to maximize, obviously, the value for the group, so that's something that's ongoing, so you can see there are clear action plans and playbooks for all the underlying portfolios, and I'm happy to say that we're delivering on what we said we would do. The impact, the base case, and you can see it here, the third bullet point, the base case for us is that by 2027, we'll have a drag of roughly $50 million in Group items. That's a significant improvement. The numbers from the past, and I'm quite happy with the development here. Now let's come to reserving action. Remember, we always said we want to position ourselves at the 90th percentile of the best estimate range. Actually, this time we came actually out with that number where we said we want to be at the upper end. And we felt we need to be transparent enough in order to create also that credibility to tell you where do we exactly want to position ourselves. What is the quantum, the gap actually between where we were and the 90th percentile? This is obviously overall the P&C lines of businesses. But the main action topic here was U.S. casualty. You've seen that we increased significantly. And it's a net increase. I think it's important also. It's a net increase of U.S. liability reserves. It's not counterbalanced with other businesses, the P&C lines of businesses. So that gives us the comfort that I used to say we can sleep well now. I can sleep well now. So you should not expect any activities, actions, liability portfolio based on. We have and the data that we included into the understanding of the underlying exposures and the reserve positions. We still stay vigilant and cautious. We are in a volatile business. That's why we will continue with the uncertainty allowance on new business. We think it's prudent. It gives us a reflection of the exposures that are there. And I think this is good practice. It's a philosophy change. We introduced it before. We started with it, what was it, three years ago in CorSo. So we learned really to live with it. We had experience with it. We saw the impacts, the reactions of our book and our numbers. And we could now translate it also into reinsurance. So beginning of the year, all P&C lines is uncertainty allowance on new business. Now let me come to the transformation. Sorry. After the listening tour, one thing was very clear, and I think I reported out to you individually when we had individual meetings. You could group the findings into four main topics. And this was consistent whether you spoke to clients, to colleagues internally, but also your observations because you also talk to markets and you. So the first thing was technical excellence. We're an underwriting company. So we needed to make sure that this is also reflecting in what we do, what underwriting decisions we take, and also will be seen in the outcome. So we had to accept that we are not number one. Now you might ask, what is number one? We were talking about this this morning. It doesn't matter. However you look at it, we were not number one, and I think it's important to recognize because you need to shift gears. You need to say, "Okay, how can I actually close the gap to whoever is number one in the category that we define," so you can take TSR, cost of equity, market capitalization, whatever KPI you want to take, we were not number one. How often did we meet or exceed our targets or consensus in comparison to peers? I think that's something that we had to reflect upon, and that reflection creates the energy also to address these things. It was very clear when we listened to a lot of commentaries also from your side that very clearly there was an agenda that one had to pursue. We were looking very deep into it and also looking into our reviews, and then we said, "Closing the gap to number one will be defined by each and every constituency in our company." For P&C Re means something different to Life & Health Re, to maybe the accounting, technical accounting people, the client executives. So everybody has to reflect upon this topic, and I asked four questions to our organization. Each and every employee needs to, whether you're sitting in the group center, whether you are facing the markets, whether you are in a technical. Question one, what makes us more client-focused? Question two, what makes us quicker? Question three, what makes us improve technically? And question four, what makes us more profitable? That's it. Everything else is in addition to that, but let's focus on this. The whole company will have to focus on this. And it starts with the core. We're a technical underwriting company. Get the pride into the underwriting exercise. Also in claims, yes. That's what we're there for. And clients are coming for us because of our technical excellence, but also want to have recognition, or we would like to have the recognition for clarity in risk appetite, speed, yeah, and consistency. That's very important. So that's a technical excellence bit. And we also added delivery to it because in the delivery, we needed to apply more discipline. We had leakage along the process. And we could see this also in the performance. This is partially an industry topic, but there's no excuse why we should not. So this will be added, obviously, by data and technology investments. This will help us to be much more active. But as you can see in the headlines here, focus on bottom line growth. Again, technical underwriting is focusing on bottom line growth. And now we would like to become a data-driven company. We believe that we have market-leading data and technology assets. Now, if we have that, how can we articulate the benefits? How can we demonstrate to you also that we are superior here? So I think there's more to come here. And the third topic is the people and talent topic. We're investing into our people. Why? Because technical excellence requires continuous investment. And also the data and technology aspect, obviously, will contribute to it. So people and talent, we'll look at the capability models of the future. We'll look at the technical leadership architecture that we have. So there's more investment going into the part. And then the last and the central part is the culture. We need it, and you see here less academic, more business. It sounds a bit more cheeky also, but it's serious, yeah. We have very good people, but we need to apply the intellect, and translate it into outcome. I think this is something to focus on. We want to be a more performance-oriented culture with client centricity, but also cost thing. And that's why we say in the takeaway box, this will translate into cost savings of $ 300 million. This is a net number, the run rate. In reality, obviously, you can imagine the number is a bit bigger. But it's not the first objective. The objective is really to have a leaner and more quicker company. Let's come to the targets. We believe that on everything what I said, this can translate into an ambitious target for 2025. So we aim to achieve more than $ 4.4 billion. There's a reason why we say more. But also there's a reason why we say more than 4.4 because we're still in a very volatile environment. We need to react. And I explained before that we stay vigilant. We're confident, yes, about the quality of our underlying book, but things can happen. So I think it meets probably what we hear from you. That's why also the more than 4.4 is actually important. And if you look at the various components, $ 3.6 billion, that's the old target that we laid out for 2024. Half of it is coming from the increase is coming from underwriting. We've got a very healthy environment. Rates are going constructively. So the earning patterns will show that it's coming through. So that's half of it. On the investment side, I said before, we've got attractive investment returns so far. And then the cost savings, 100 million of the 300 million are already coming through in 2025. A bulk of the savings is already coming through the P&C, the Reinsurance Solutions activities, actions that we address. So parts of it is coming through, and the 100 million is reflecting this. The long-term or return on equity aspiration doesn't change. It's more than 14%. Obviously. Now, going to the business units, we improve the combined ratio for the 2025 targets by 2% for both P&C Reinsurance to 85 or better than 85, and then Corporate Solutions better than 91. The Corporate Solutions one, by the way, if you translate that into the reinsurance definition of combined ratio. So it's a very healthy part. I think now we recognize also the quality of the book and the good positioning with this very good target. Life & Health, we increased by $100 million to $1.6 billion. That obviously reflects the CSM and risk adjustment and obviously also adjustments that we will make. John will talk a bit more. The capital management priorities haven't changed and don't. There's a clear prioritization here. We have a superior capitalization. That's a priority. It will remain like this. I said we're comfortably above our target range, 200%-150%. We're a dividend stock. We want to grow the ordinary dividend with a long-term earnings potential. And we deploy capital for business growth. We're in an attractive market. And in this next phase of the strategic direction setting, we'll reflect. Ultimately at the end, if we would have now superior levels of SST ratio, capitalization ratio at some point, obviously we will then address a share buyback scenario. But I think that's not the priority now. There's enough to be done. Hence we're comfortable to announce that we aim a dividend per share increase by 7% or more over the next three years. Obviously for the 2025 or 2024 numbers that will be then decided at AGM 2025. This is then the proposal that the board of directors will. That's what you can take away from here. As you can see overall, I'm actually very confident. It's a very focused work. We're not getting distracted. I'm very happy where we are so far. I'm happy also how the team is taking also the new thinking on board and. Thank you very much for being here. I would like to hand over to John, to you. Thanks, Andreas. Thanks. Lots of people with lots of questions come through after the break. Maybe a little more detail on a couple of these topics. There will be a little bit of redundancy to Andreas's points. My apologies in advance, but I think there's utility in just getting enough detail around some of these positions. Andreas talked about the diversified portfolio. You can see a little bit some of the migrations year on year as we've gone from 2023 to 2024, in particular on the left side with our P&C Re business continuing to reduce the exposures on casualty. And you should expect for the full year this will be very clear. This is in spite of price increasing in this line. So the absolute amounts have been going down, consistent with our view that the underlying primary market needs to get more rate for U.S. liability in particular. The other lines have been performing very, very well. Our property book through nine months with a combined ratio of 61%. We've had lower than expected NatC at activities across those nine months. The third quarter was relatively normal, but the first two quarters of the year were. What we see year to date in the fourth quarter, without making a particular prediction on the full year at the moment, and we still have some weeks left. At the moment, we don't expect a cat load in the fourth quarter that would be anywhere above our expectation. Corporate Solutions continues to move a little bit. I think here the property dimension of Corporate Solutions remains clear, and the restructuring that Andreas led in 2018, 2019, 2020, we've jettisoned exposures to U.S. liability. The excess and surplus lines in particular, which CorSo had been big in, stopped completely. Teams were dismantled, and as a result, that business has continued to perform very strongly, as indicated. On Life & Health, not much changes. Mortality continues to be the important piece of that business. Again, we talked about the reserve strengthening. We gave you a little bit of additional information of the work that was done in 2023. $1.4 billion is specific to U.S. liability. There was a slightly bigger number, $2.1 billion overall casualty positioning in 2023. Again, $3.1 billion additional in 2024, and you can see by the shading in these bars sort of what years we focused on with which additions. Overall, it's very important to say that the total reserves have moved up from $10 billion at year-end in 2022 to $13 billion in nine months. The chart here at the bottom right may not be intuitive to people, but maybe if I can just point out how important the strengthening has been. If we look back to the older years, the problem years of the industry. When you look at the nine months 2024 number for the IBNRs to total reserves for U.S. liability in 2019, you see this figure of 75%. The comparable number two years ago would have been this 2017 number of 67%. We've added 9 percentage points of relative IBNR to the as a result of these reserving actions. The other way to think about it is just go vertically down. And in spite of paying claims over the last two years, and we have paid claims, each one of these sees a larger IBNR in these problem years. The more recent years are a little more difficult to interpret just because the reserves have not seasoned, and over time, we would expect that these kinds of numbers in 2022, 89% of total reserves in IBNR, 2023, not surprisingly, 94% in IBNR will decrease over time, but what you should see is a strong pattern that, to Andreas's point, will not require additional reserving for the in-force book. Why is this such a big deal? Why didn't we catch this five years ago? Well, five years ago, it wasn't quite obvious how catastrophic this issue of social inflation has been. There's a great Sigma study. I'd encourage you, if you haven't sort of dug through it, it came out, I want to say, August of this year at Sigma number 4 of 2024 on social inflation broadly, U.S. liabilities. What you see is the total losses by financial year between 2014, which were below $70 billion, in 2023, where $143 billion was paid out. That 143 is 30% bigger than the total net Nat Cat insured losses worldwide. That's the magnitude of this problem that we're working with. Economic inflation has been an issue. Social inflation, as the Swiss Re Institute identified, a compounding annual issue. Other causes of exposure creep also contributing to approximately a 10% per annum compounding on loss costs. The reserving actions that we did, informed by our Chief Actuary and his team's work, put an additional load, a pessimistic view of 4% per annum increase in that underlying rate. That's why we're at the 90th percentile overall for our total reserve positions. That's why we're comfortable that we've got enough to deal with any future deterioration. Andreas also mentioned the uncertainty load. We continue to put this on. He explained how it's worked very well for us in CorSo. This is adapted to unforeseen developments. We believe our costing has gotten more prudent in the last two years. We believe, in fact, that we're costing closer to the actual truth of ultimate loss cost. But we continue on the P&C Re to add this uncertainty load as we go forward. We've already disclosed that for 2024, this will be approximately a $500 million charge to the P&C result. We've also been clear that we don't expect to see any releases in 2025. The net prior year development for P&C Re in 2025 right now in our plans underlying these targets is for no net releases. Over time, as we continue to build this out and we see that it's truly uncertainty load and not needed for developments that we've not foreseen in the costing, you could imagine there will be redundancies. But for now, you should not expect them. Corporate Solutions. Andreas mentioned the strength of the market for large corporate risks. That's what Corporate Solutions business is. Again, we've been able to avoid those areas that have been problematic for the industry. And as such, since 2021, after the restructuring came into place, the average combined ratio on a U.S. GAAP basis or now an IFRS basis has continued to hover around 91%. This is a business which is systematically making money with a reduced volatility to what you saw for Corporate Solutions in prior years. We continue to buy important reinsurance for the Corporate Solutions business. The majority is placed outside of Swiss Re, not because Swiss Re doesn't like the risk, but we think the diversification and getting the affirmation that other people are willing to reinsure this at reasonable prices is a helpful data point for the underwriters inside CorSo. Life & Health. A little more detail of where our portfolio is as we're now deep into our first full year of IFRS. The CSM of $19 billion is dominated by North America. This is the U.S., a large position in Canada, at least for the size of the population there. The experience to date has been marginally positive. We'll see what it ends up year end. My expectation is it'll be close to flat, actual versus expected. APAC Health, another big piece. Chief Actuary and his team on the Life & Health side this time, to evaluate the models we had for long-term mortality, for critical illness in Asia, for other big portfolios of the book. And in that analysis, we decided to make some material additions to reserves in these top two areas, about two-thirds of the total portfolio in Life & Health. Those numbers approximated $5 billion of reinforcements of Life & Health reserves. You did not see this in U.S. GAAP as we reported in 2022 and 2023 because U.S. GAAP had a fixed set of assumptions. Where you did see this was in our March reporting of our EVM accounts. It was absolutely transparent there. We spoke about it, but the magnitude, I think, still surprises people to some degree. We are very comfortable that those reserves, with all we know about the Life & Health developments, are strongly in place. And EMEA, excluding the health business, over time of 2024, we've seen some adjustments to be made. You've seen some negative variance on that portfolio. That's largely coming out of some of these smaller areas. We think we've got most of that done. There's some other portfolios, which includes EMEA health businesses and includes some small portfolios in Asia. We would expect in Q4 to probably make some adjustments here. They're not going to be material in the overall position of the group, and they are already baked into this forecast of $1.6 billion of earnings in 2025. So the way we've talked about this is we think we're starting, well, we don't think. We're starting with 19.3 and a risk adjustment of 6.3 as of nine months. There will be these assumption updates, which comprehensively might see a CSM reduction of approximately 5%. That's the bar in the middle. We also think that the CSM release pattern, given the individual portfolios and our experience with them in 2024, should be viewed as a slightly lower number of 8% compared to the 9% guidance that we gave you at the beginning of the year. The risk adjustment release will continue at 9%. And again, these are fully baked into the targets we've got out there. Moving to investments. You all work at institutions that have your own macroeconomic departments and plans, estimates for what's going to happen to rates in 2025. We don't know that. And that's why we stopped in 2024, but we had to put a plan together and some expectations of what 2025 might bring forward. And in that context, our view is that rates are likely to be coming down somewhat, especially in the shorter end, right? The inversion of the yield curve will not last forever. And as that happens, the reinvestment yield is likely to come down. That will not change our recurring income yield in material ways, right? We continue to see the reinvestment yield above where the current recurring income yield is for the next two years. That could change in both directions. But for now, that's what we're thinking our 2025 earnings, the more than $4.4 billion is based on. The portfolio continues to be strongly oriented towards fixed income, equities, and alternatives. As of September, only 10% of the total. The credit portfolio remains high quality. We're unimpressed with the spreads that are achievable today in corporate credit. And therefore, we're not trying to run out that yield curve or run out that credit curve any more than it is reasonable given the tightness of spreads. One additional piece of information, just we're new to IFRS this year. Our colleagues in the marketplace have had another year, but we thought for ourselves and maybe for you, this could be an interesting view of what happens in our net income, the bottom line, when interest rates move. And so this is an interest rate shift, a simple move of the curve up or down of 100 basis points, what that means for us. And by far in the year one, the largest impact is going to be on the discount rate that's applied to our P&C businesses. So you see the upper left year one top explains the majority of the net income. That impact could be for hundreds of basis points up, +$300 million for 100 basis points down, -$300 million. It's symmetrical or nearly symmetrical at this point of time. As years go out, the upside actually gets a little higher than the downside in the way that the portfolio runs itself off. This is not particularly important for Life & Health given the duration of that business, but it would affect our P&C businesses. Andreas talked about capital. The capital continues to be very strong. The required capital versus the actual allows us to stay well above the top end of our range. Nothing has changed since nine months. We would expect to close the year again ahead of the range. I think our ability to bring on additional insurance risk in our core business, potentially bring on investment risk in the moment where we see well-priced opportunities is there for us. We've spoken about the adjustment we made on the SST ratio methodology. I don't think I need to add anything to that other than it has reduced the volatility to interest rate moves. Just a sidebar, we don't talk about our alternative capital partners' activities that often, and when we do, it's usually me. This business is a group business and actually reports into the CFO's office. This has grown materially as our expected net Nat Cat losses have grown materially. And what you see from 2019, where on a gross basis, those Nat Cat losses were at $1.7 billion. We talk about the expected losses above $20 million per event. There's another bar, which is less than 20 million, but still adds up into our loss ratios. But the dark blue on the top is the relief we get from the activities in the ILS market, where we've increased materially the size of our side cars. We've increased materially our other risk transfers for large losses. The good news is the experience in the last years of Swiss Re, thanks to very solid underwriting of this portfolio, has left our investors in this space with a very strong performance. They're happy about it. We're happy about it. It allows us to renew this and even expand the programs at very interesting rates. And so we've not been handing them losses. Our interests are deeply aligned with the exposures that they get from us. As we continue to see opportunities to grow the gross line, as we've done from 1.7 to 2.8, we can continue to find very interested investors to take some of that risk off our hands for large events. In addition to this, sorry, the one piece on the ACP, we've got a series of related businesses, which includes the structuring and placement of cat bonds for our clients, which includes an actual portfolio of cat bonds that we manage ourselves on a proprietary basis, includes some funds which we've opened up in recent years. These are all activities that are adjacent or actually right on top of our core capabilities in this space. You should expect that we will continue to build those capabilities and continue to build the fee income related to that, which at year-end 2023 was approximating $200 million. This drops into the P&C Re bottom line. For the reduction in the leverage ratio, we continue to be focused on reducing our senior debt. The positions based on the increase in shareholders' equity and the CSM, which is the way that the world is now thinking about the denominator for leverage ratios, has allowed us to drop from 18% to 15% as of nine months, and you should expect that the subordinated positions will be replaced as they mature. The senior debt will run, and you see the peer comparison where we had been probably towards the bottom of this four years ago, and we're now towards the top and comfortable where we are. With that, I give it back to Thomas. Thank you, John. Thank you, Andreas. We're just running a bit behind, so I suggest we reconvene here at 10 minutes past 11 for the Q&A session. So just about 15 minutes. Great. Welcome back for our Q&A session. So for this, Andreas and John are joined by Urs Baertschi, our CEO from P&C Re, and Philip Long, our Group Chief Actuary. We'll take questions from the room. And if you ask a question, if you could please introduce yourself so that people on the webcast can also understand who's asking the question. So who would like to start? Maybe we'll start with Kamran. Hi. So it's Kamran Hossain from J.P. Morgan. Just one kind of big picture. It seems like in the P&C business, you could have pushed a little bit harder than the kind of better than 85, given how well things are going this year. When you were thinking about where to set that number versus the 4.4 and relative to the 3.6 initial target last year, how much did reliability of earnings come into your decision-making around that? I think you said you can look at peers, and some of them have delivered very well. How much consistency factoring in did you have when thinking about those kind of numbers? Thank you. I mean, let me start, and maybe Urs can add. We built in quite significant vigilance and prudence, as I mentioned. And as reality kicked in, and we saw also the A versus E, actual versus expected numbers coming through, and this is a critical KPI for us to see to manage the gaps. And as we see that, the teams were on top of things. So that informs, obviously, your next, what we call target liability approach. We have a forward-looking view into the future, and we look at trends, our rates going down or not. And that's a forward-looking view, and that informs the plan also. And they have a clear bottom-up view. They see what's happening in the markets, see how competitive is the market, they see how competitors behave. And you've seen the underlying book. It's a very healthy book, but don't look at it as a run rate. It's very dangerous. It's a volatile market. We were at 79%-80%. So I think you need to factor in the realities of our business. And I think that's what we've done so far. And Urs, maybe you can add to it. Yeah, maybe I'll just say a few words about the market environment and the outlook, and naturally, I'm a little bit limited in what I can say right now. We're in the middle of the renewals, but I can give you a bit of a context and also what we're seeing maybe a little bit longer out than just the next three weeks. Overall, the market is what we expected it to be, and it's consistent with, of course, our targets that we're putting out here as well. The market is not homogeneous at all, so I'll give you a little bit of a flavor for what's underlying here. Most of the time, people talk about what's happening on rates about really Nat Cat and really non-proportional Nat Cat, and this has been a very dynamic past few weeks and months, really. You might recall when we had Hurricane Helene and Milton, there was a bit of a question of how big those events would be and what it would do to rates. Before that, there was a lot of talk about rates going down pretty significantly. And then the hurricanes didn't turn out to be so big by themselves, but overall, in short, Nat Cat losses are again over $130 billion. And so this new normal around where Nat Cat really is and that reality setting in is now pretty much clear to everybody out there. At the same time, when you're looking at the high layers of non-proportional Nat Cat reinsurance, it's been a good place to be. Many of those programs have been loss-free. And of course, supply and demand talks in those circumstances. Rates are coming off a little bit in those high layers, as we expected, and which is consistent with our targets for next year. They are coming off a little bit. The per risk, so the more the man-made losses, there's more attention, more sort of focus on that because there's been some losses in that as well. Casualty is a bit of a mix globally, but also in the U.S. There are different views on risk there. Then specialty is a bit all over. In summary, what I would say and what we have been saying is that we expected the discipline in the market to be maintained, particularly around structures and wordings. We continue to expect the market to be quite constructive. What is currently playing out is essentially what we expected across the board. That market environment, in addition to the prudence, is reflective in our targets for next year. Maybe Vinit to us. Many thanks, Vinit from Mediobanca. If I might invite you to look at the 2024 net income that we are seeing, excluding the reserve charge, we get to a number which is significantly higher than the target you're setting. So if you think of $2.8 billion charges, maybe $2 billion post-tax, you're targeting $3 billion for the year. So a very, very top-down view would suggest that Swiss Re, the company, is earning about $5 billion a year. So I'm sure you would say that's not the case. So I'm more keen to hear why would you say that's not the case and why we should be thinking about this level that you're proposing today. Yeah, and that sounds like a CFO question. Look, I think, as I mentioned, it's not been a benign Nat Cat year, but our Nat Cat losses have been unambiguously below where our Nat Cat budget has been for the full year. As I mentioned, the minimum losses in the first half of the year, Q3 more or less normal, Q4 trending to be below the budget at this point of time. And so as a result of that, we've got an uplift in the earnings because we've been lucky. And I'm constantly reminding our underwriters that they cannot confuse good luck with good underwriting. It's great to be in the right places in the structure. That's been part of why we've not been caught out by some of the secondary peril losses. The terms and conditions that Urs talks about are exactly what he and the teams need to continue to focus on to not expose ourselves on a going forward basis. But that's the starting point, which is a big chunk of the 2024 overperformance, is linked to that. We've said our Life & H ealth business will deliver 1.5 for the full year. Our target of 1.6 means that that's more or less stable year on year, 7% up, but not dramatic. I just think the target of more than 4.4 allows us to observe an environment where the softening may be more extreme than what we expect. There's no reason for this. We don't see any big increases in supply. We think continued demand for our reinsurance in the property market broadly and that cap specifically will be robust. The primary companies are tired of paying for all of these losses. They're asking us for more cover at lower layers. We're uncomfortable broadly diving down. There might be some specific situations where we're prepared to accommodate our good clients at certain levels. Urs can comment, but largely speaking, we've been holding the line as has the industry, so I think I pay attention to the sign that we put in front of the 4.4. It's not an equals. It says that we think we can get there. The other thing I would say, maybe speaking on Andreas's behalf, the decision at nine months to make this major reserve increase, knowing it would have us miss the full year target of $3.6 billion, was not taken lightly by the management team broadly and by Andreas specifically. I'm pretty sure nobody at Swiss Re Group wants to miss that target two years in a row. And so there we are. And it's consistent with what I said at half-year results. I said from the investor perspective, do you expect us to meet or exceed our targets? I think that's a sentiment that we have, hit our numbers, and. And the other thing I would say, $4.4 billion is $800 million more than the target we had for 2024. And it's an ROE, which is approaching 20%. So I appreciate that an extrapolation of some of the sort of more positive developments that we've seen in 2024 gets you to a relatively robust earnings. Not everything will go perfectly for us next year. Ismail in the back. Hi. Ismail Dabo from Morgan Stanley. I guess one question for John and one for Andreas, so I just want to make sure, John, on the uncertainty load. I think you mentioned the 500 million. Are you still doing that in CorSo as well? I think you mentioned it was maybe just P&C now, and even thinking about that uncertainty load, if I just look at 2025, less than 85%, slap that on, 500 million, I get somewhere around two and two points on the combined ratio. Is that how I should think about the underlying profitability of the portfolio? And then I guess for you, Andreas, how do you expect to close the gap to number one? Obviously, peers are stagnant, and just thinking about how long in each segment of the business you think it will take to close that gap. Sure. So on the uncertainty load, we continue to load Corporate Solutions with this. As Andreas said, we're now three years in, and there we actually see the results of that allowing some consideration for a release of certain lines of business due to true redundancies. So I think the view is we're getting closer to an equilibrium position for Corporate Solutions faster because the duration of that book is also shorter. We don't have the U.S. liabilities in there, as I mentioned, since the restructuring. And so over time, I think you should expect that the CorSo will not have much of a net charge to continue funding this. I think in P&C, we're only in the second full year in 2025, and therefore we're far much further away from that equilibrium state. Your back-of-the-envelope math, I would not argue with. Yeah. The way to think about closing the gap to number one is the following. I've laid out these four areas. Behind each of the four areas, we define clear metrics and KPIs that can be broken down by business unit and global function. So we will have a more consistent set of new KPIs that will clearly also be linked to the financials. So A versus E, et cetera. This is the technical side. On the data side, we want to increase, for instance, specifically the adoption rates ratio on data and technology, things that that's what we measure. And this will translate that into financials. And the good news is, since a couple of months now, and in particular since the reserve increase, we're already close to gap to number one. It doesn't mean that we are number one, but we're closing the gap to number one. That's significant, and we'll continue on that journey. Michael, up front. On closing the gap, I just wondered if you could. It's a bit unfair, but maybe so you have, I think, 85 targets for this year for P&C Re. Munich Re has given for a very similar business now that for the first time, a target of 79. I just wondered if that's the gap which we could think of one day that you achieve and how quickly. Then the second on Life Re, there's loads of negatives coming through, but your profit is still going up. I just wondered if you can walk us through the offsetting positives. I can work out the negatives, so lower reserve rate, release rate, and lower CSM, but I can't, the positives are missing. Munich Re guided to negatives. So again, here you're standing out already. Yeah. So I might observe to the degree that Munich Re does something conceptually similar to an uncertainty loading, they've been doing it for a long time. And so they are at this point of equilibrium where the net cost to their business, I think, is probably close to zero. They can speak for themselves. I don't want to put words in their mouth about how they do that. But when you think about the differences between target combined ratios under IFRS, which should give you a somewhat similar positioning, I think that's part of the answer. And maybe just a clarification on the math from the question before. $500 million is 2024. In 2025, this might even be a slightly bigger number because we have earnings from the book written in 2024 that will come through in 2025, plus a brand new book in 2025. So your point is we're largely on the same risks. We've got different clients. We have different intensities of some of the lines of business. But directionally, the current divergence is probably larger than you might expect from the two largest players in. So that was that. On the Life & Health, I think the positive is actually the underlying of our Life & Health business and the CSM release. Yes, the ratio we're guiding to 8% from 9%. The total amount will be slightly lower at start of year 2025 compared to start of year 2024. But largely, we're in place. We've had the negative variance in 2024 that we've explicitly spoken about. Some of that will reduce, but the underlying delivery before that negative variance was, in fact, higher than 1.6. And so we don't need a lot of extra in the portfolio to be able to deliver that. What we need is a containment of any downsides. And that's one of the reasons we're making some of the assumption adjustments here in the fourth quarter. In the back, please. Hi, there. Faizan Lakhani from HSBC. I want to come back to Life & Health Re. I mean, a year ago, you stood back and said that you've done this once-in-a-lifetime adjustment to the balance sheet. It's much stronger. You have a much clearer picture. And yet, we're here 12 months on making modest changes, but nevertheless changes. And given the fact that you've also just adjusted a small portion of CSM, a 1% drop in the CSM authorization feels quite high. So maybe if you could explain that. And second question on the reserving. Great job in terms of topping up the reserves. Just wanted to understand the warp from 2017 underwriting into 2023 in terms of, if you could break out reduction in the large corporate risk, rates coming through, how do you see that flowing through? Thank you. On Life & Health, maybe I'll ask Phil to weigh in. I think if you think about the magnitude, and I'm trying to be as explicit, coming up into the transition into IFRS, as I mentioned, the major portfolios where we thought we had material reserve challenges, we've added $5 billion. That was a reduction of the margins in our U.S. GAAP numbers, but no P&L hit. There was a reduction in our economic value on this portfolio. For what it's worth, that was relevant to our compensation programs. And so it was not without paying to the group, but it was the right thing to do. What we're doing here, the potential 5% of $19 billion is some of it has already come through in the first three quarters. Whatever we do in Q4 is an addition to that. Our own portfolios where the underlying performance in U.S. GAAP was, I think, probably less clear because of the locked-in assumptions, and as we walk through the IFRS reporting quarter by quarter, we've seen this difference between actual and expected a little more clearly. We've had the teams sort of scour these small portfolios as well, and that combination has simply brought to light some places where we might make some additional adjustments. I don't think in terms of magnitude, this is anywhere near what we've done on the big portfolios coming up, and I also think it leaves us in a more resilient position going forward, but Phil, you might want to add. Yeah. On the Life & Health side, we mainly focus on trends, some trends in 2023 and 2024. And that has a high level of judgment, of course. And it'll take some years to see whether we're right or not. But that was a conscious decision to take a more cautious approach there. I've also, by the way, also had some external people look into this independently, and they're coming around same ballpark with us. So I'm quite happy on that part. In recent times, yes, we've seen some deterioration in some of the smaller regions. And so we want to take action very quickly. And so that's what we're doing. We're also thinking even in places where we have seen positives year to date, we may think of further action just because of the size of the exposure we have. So again, that's really the slightly more cautious philosophy we're trying to adopt there. So that's Life & Health. For P&C, I can't give you a great detailed walk between 2017 on, but I can tell you what we did. Just we looked at, I think we had a shock like the rest of the industry for 2023, how bad it became. And so we had to do a lot of thinking about what we would do in 2024. And we saw quarter one and quarter two also was deteriorating. So that's where the thought of taking a lot more action happened. The reserving actuaries in America did their very detailed work. I have an oversight team and actuarial control who also then did their own work. I also pulled in two independent lots of people. These are ex-Swiss Re employees, retired. We brought them back. I say there are 140 years of experience between the three of them. So quite seasoned. They've seen the hard and soft markets. We did all sorts of different looks at things. We took into account the fact that COVID happened. There was slowdown, speed up. The extent that you want to take the benefits of the speed ups, we didn't. The taking to account the frequency benefits, no, we didn't. When people tell us about limit compression, tendering limits, you take those things into account. Are the claims processes improving? Well, everybody tells you that their claims processes are improving when they are, and nobody tells you that their claims processes are not improving. So you have to take everything in balance, plus all the pruning activity like you mentioned over time. As you know, a lot of large corporate risks were done. We looked at the pricing. We have this on leveling that our pricing actuaries do. We used that and looked at the loss cost versus the price increases as well, year on year, adjusted that. That's where you get some of that 4% that is quoted also. That is also something that we kind of back solve looking at those. That's there. We came up with this. As you can see, we've loaded up the more recent years. Whether or not we should be doing that, well, mechanically, some of these things have come out that way. We say, let's be cautious on this thing. We did a lot of work, of course, on the pre-19 years already. You can see on page 17 that's happened. Then what I did also, there's science and there's judgment. I also did some judgment myself by looking, like you say. I looked specifically at 2019 versus 2020, for example, and 2024 isn't looked here, and I looked at 2023 versus 2024, and I added on a lot more for 2020 because the gap, I couldn't fully explain from a top down. There was a gap, and we had a lot of rate increases, significant there. But I was saying, I need to be able to explain this from a common sense approach, and so I bumped up 2020. So you make judgments like that. Just like I bumped up 2023 because of what we were doing in 2024. Yes, we were a bit more cautious now in the new business in 2024, but I also used that as a reference point to go back. Okay? Sorry, long answer. Maybe you could just add what you mean then by cautious new business? Yeah, so I can complement this a little bit to give you a flavor of how the new business that we're writing now compares to what we're doing in 2019 at sort of where we're at the peak, and so we had an outsized market share. Now we're within the pack of where we wanted to be. Large corporate risk limits are down over 80% from that peak. We've doubled rates, more than doubled the rates since that time. Terms and conditions and limits have come down significantly, and also all of the reserving actions that we have done here, they're fully reflected in the costing of the new business, and so that's sort of the total package. Obviously, today's portfolio of what we write. New perspective is very different from the most problematic years. Just to reiterate, we were overexposed eight years ago. The team has actually cut that market share down by more than 50%. Will in the back. Thanks. Will Hardcastle, UBS. First one, if we can address. You talked about added focus as being an underwriting business, essentially. I guess, can you describe some of the more obvious changes that can sort of pick that out? And is that an intensifying view in your mind? And one thing you've not touched on is maybe has any staff incentivization changed with that? And did you feel there was any cultural pivot required in that sort of debate? The second one is more on the uncertainty load. If we're not expecting any releases from that, presumably that means we're moving up from the 90th percentile each time. It might be really marginal, but presumably we're moving up from that. And I guess that almost implies that you want it to be higher. I guess, how should we think that you're trying to fix this too? Should we think about that as potentially reserved? Should we think about that as absolute number? And when should we start seeing that unwound? Sorry, there's a few questions on that one. No, that's good. Let me take the first one. And then I think, John, you could talk about the uncertainty load and unwinding. This culture shift, yeah, it's a comprehensive exercise. And we spoke before, 90% of all culture activities or changes actually fail in companies. And we had to recognize that when we try to bring in culture values, for instance, like accountability, decision speed, and to be honest, the feedback from employees didn't work out. So I think we need to find the formula now where really we bring it into the behavioral aspects of organizations, the practices that we need to change. And I think we spend a lot of time in very concrete workshops around the globe now. So the whole organization now is following one lens. And that will take time. It will translate into practices also like incentives. But let's not make a mistake. The incentives already are not top-line driven, so we started already. We will add to those incentives, and we will actually focus on the most critical KPIs. We had so many KPIs. We actually probably had too many. I think to really focus on the right things, to follow through on the things, and it's just about focus. It's also in line with focusing on the core of our business to reduce basically the distraction to say we need to. The core of our business is funding the journey of any innovation, by the way, so let's stay focused to make the money on the core of our business. Then from there, we earn the right to expand. That's the trajectory that you can find across the company. It starts not only at the top of the house, it comes also bottom up. We introduce. I can be public about this. It's nothing to hide. We introduce something that is called an email, an eliminate-bureaucracy@swissre.com email. So this encourages people, staff to identify practices in our company where they think they slow us down. They're not really outcome-oriented, client-oriented, not in line with what we said. Remember the four questions that we need to answer. This is quite healthy. Some of the questions you could answer immediately. There was a quick fix, but some were more structural. And I think this is helping us also in management to take the right decisions going forward and focus. Yeah. Well, on the uncertainty load, what we're guiding you to is in 2025 to not assume a release. That's different than, say, don't assume ever a release, right? The objective, and Urs has just talked about this, right, together with Philip, we've changed our costing, and we've taken all the experience, the painful experience that we saw in needing to make these reserve adjustments, put it in the costing. And so our belief is our costing should be adequate. The reality is, and you saw this with the IBNRs that are sitting out there, 94% of total for 2023 still today, that you're not actually able to see how these businesses develop in year one. That probably is a little different for some of the property business. We'll see more in year two. In year three, we'll be pretty confident on where the property is. We'll still have uncertainty about how close the actual results are tracking to the midpoint of our ranges versus the 90% of our ranges. And so over time, if we find ourselves in the pleasant situation of having more reserves than we need, that'll be something for Andreas and my successor to sort through about judgments on when we're comfortable that the position is truly redundant. What we're saying right now is a priori, I don't bank on this in 2025. As we get more and more years and as we demonstrate that our costing is, in fact, accurate, and the uncertainty load really is there for uncertainty, not for a bias, which in 2019, 2020 was clearly in our costing, then we'll have a different answer for you. And that's, I think, the way to think about this. For now, we'll continue to add this, and the triangles will be published thanks to Philip's team's work. In March, you'll be able to see where we are year in 2024. A year from now, well, paid claims will have continued this reservation. You'll see the potential increases of those positions on some lines in 2025. But the transparency should be pretty clear. The second row. Great. Thank you. It's Andrew Baker, Goldman Sachs. First one. So on the 4.4 or greater than 4.4, I think if I'm hearing you right, that you're saying that if you're sort of it's not your best estimate of current condition to hold for the year in terms of next year. Are you able to give us a sense of what your sort of best estimate would be of failing that? Sort of how much, what sort of downside scenario you could absorb and still hit your target for next year? And then secondly, I also think you're pretty clear on no sort of additional capital return above, obviously, the DPS growth. Not top of the agenda right now. Again, just curious why, given your capital position, obviously, the strength of your confidence in the business. So what has to change there to, I guess, change your view there as well? Thank you. See question four. Our best estimate is more than 4.4. And what I will say is 4.4 should not be viewed as a 50/50 chance. But we've got a fairly high level of confidence that we'll be able to achieve that. And I reiterate the discussion that when I showed the ACP slide, right? We've got a net exposure for NatCat expected losses of $2 billion in any one year. That number has a pretty big standard deviation on it. And so can we manage an extraordinary new Hurricane Andrew that hits Miami, not 20 miles south of Miami, and still do the target? I'm not sure of that. But for reasonable deviations from expected, we should be able to hit 4.4. And so that's the way we think about this. On the capital, again, Andreas walked you through our objectives, right? We think it's important. Yes, all the elections are over, but I'm not sure the geopolitical environment is more secure than it was six months ago. I'm not sure forecasted macroeconomic conditions are more secure than they were six months ago. We're viewing the need to maintain a market industry-leading capitalization is in our interest, but especially in our client's interest. So we will continue to do that. We've given you, I think, some reasonably clear guidance that we've never given in the past, which is we understand the frustration in some recent years where that dividend did not grow. We're putting a target. It's a target. It's an aspiration. I can guarantee it will be 7% plus or 7% every year for the next three years. That's the guidance we're giving you, which is to say that we should be at or above 7% as a way to moderate any capital accumulation if we hit the earnings targets that we hit, which we expect to do. That's the first level for returning capital that our shareholders seem to be keenly interested in. If at the end of some reasonable period of time, we find that we're simply unable to deploy the market conditions that— or spoke about are not as robust a year from now as we think they are today, then yes, other capital measures are certainly to be considered. We've shown in the past that we're prepared to do either special dividends or, more likely, share buybacks, but that's not in the cards for the near term. First, Iain. Hi, Iain Pearce from Exane BNP Paribas. The first question was just on the 14% or greater than 14% ROE target. I'm just really wondering what to read into that, given your sort of stated 4.4 is a 20% ROE level, and there's clearly some conservatism in that 4.4. So should we view that as sort of that's your view on where things get in a worst-case scenario in a soft cycle, or that's what you need to be above your spread on a cost of capital basis, just trying to understand the 14%, or if we should just sort of ignore it? And then just coming back to the CSM release move, just trying to if you could just give us a little bit more detail on that, please, because if we think about the, obviously, the changes that have been made to the smaller portfolios, but it sounds like performance on the portfolios that were reviewed last year has been in line or better than expectation. So it implies a quite big move on the smaller portfolios or something big different on the bigger portfolios on that release rate. So just trying to understand why that release rate changed so much. Sure. So 14%, I think we've had that target out there for a number of years. We didn't see a rationale to change this in part because Andreas, while he's demonstrating the confidence and knowledge that delays six months, I'm not sure he's ready to change that long-term target. But yeah, right for 2025, you should assume 4.4 based on our capital-based approach is 20%. It depends on the accumulation of shareholders' equity and where rates are, and so that's what you should focus on, and Andreas will come back, I think, during the course of 2025 with maybe a clearer long-term view on where things might be. Is that fair? Absolutely. Nothing to it. On the CSM, first year of IFRS, and we learned some. And maybe Philip can add a little bit. But I think when we saw the release patterns of some of the portfolios and what was actually in the numbers, 8% seems a better guidance on a going-forward basis than 9%. But it should not be viewed as anything sort of material in the change of. No further question. So maybe just some of the adjustments were more on shorter duration business. Yeah. You're getting more of the longer term, which has a lower amortization rate. That's the immediate link of some of the actions as well. Simon. Simon from Vontobel. First question relates to what Philip said on the life reserves. I understand mortality in the U.S. is not really improving. But the pharma companies are telling us that with the new obesity drugs, that's going to prolong everyone's lives. Is that in your long-term trend assumption included? And the other question is on your four boxes, on your, I call it cultural changes, be a data-driven company. Obviously, AI comes to mind. How much are you currently spending on AI that's above the normal run rate on IT spend? And can you give us maybe some use cases? Because I struggle to see a benefit of AI in the bottom line. Thank you. For the Ozempics and Wegovys, when we did that work, I don't think it was out there, but it didn't figure very highly when we set that long-term trend. But then it's a big judgment. And it's also hard to know what happens in a few years' time with all that. So I wouldn't take that so much into full consideration, but it's probably a plus, right? Unless something else, yeah, happens with it in the future. The only thing I'd add is I think for the first time in I don't know how many decades, obesity in the United States has declined. One assumes it's because of some of these drugs. On the assumption these drugs don't have unknown side effects that haven't emerged over time, lower obesity will have positive impacts on not only the average health, but also other important diseases. But it's way too early, I think, to bring this into our models. And in terms of experience, I think we've had a couple of good winters, including now. We are trending year to date okay with the U.S. mortality as we expected, in fact, a bit positive. But as I said before, right, if we're trying to exercise caution, then we may look at it and say, do we need to just exercise a bit more? I don't know. But that's a decision we need to take d ecision. I'm not an actual real scientist. Okay. There's a second question on data. Yeah, the AI and the cost of AI. We conducted a benchmarking exercise as we speak on IT spend. We consistently show up at the upper end in comparison to our peers. And we tried to find out the reasons for that and whether that should be something we should look into and maybe address as a savings potential. Now, you've got to be careful because consistently over the years, we have spent a lot of money on IT, invested significantly. And we're actually harvesting now. So we invested into the most modern technical platforms. We invested into data. And we think in data models. We've got analytical data models across the businesses now. And I think this is something that is not broadly visible in the whole industry. So when you compare the benchmarks, the IT spend, I guess you will see a lot of underspend in the industry. And I would expect this trend to increase. So they will come closer to our side. We might maybe find some optimization, yes. But we need to demonstrate now what the benefits are. Now, specifically on AI, and that's why I'm starting with the IT spend and now with the infrastructure that we built. So we have a central IT infrastructure. We do have data as a strategy and a sound data foundation. We work with the most modern analytical data model tools. And this is enriching the data and bringing the analytics to the workplace of each and every employee. That means the decision-making is faster. We get better decision-making because we've got more data and analytics at hand. Now, in order to harvest from those AI use cases that you hear about in the industry, you've got to have that in place. Otherwise, you will have piled-up use cases by users by use cases proliferation in many cases that adds to the expenses. The data consumption will go up, cloud consumption will go up. And that element of data and cloud economics is not really broadly in place. We have the best use cases, the most promising use cases in underwriting, on document management, on this whole aspect of data ingestion and triaging when data comes in from various partners, unstructured, etc. And monetary-wise, the best quantification we get out of claims. And here specifically around fraud detection and around subrogation. And this is significant. This is really cash. The benefit here is that if you get it right, if you can read the patterns correctly and translate them into your portfolio and find insights, this will not only improve the underwriting or you can deduct it actually from the loss ratio ultimately. It also is a valuable insight for clients, for their portfolios and for steering of their portfolios. This is tangible. We're pretty advanced. It's under the headline of Claims Brain. We call it Claims Brain. It requires an increase of adoption ratios of data and technology. I think that's why I specifically highlighted that element because we need to manage this, but also manage the demand management and the data consumption because the data consumption goes up when you let people play around with AI in a coordinated way. I'd say this is one place where Andreas's focus on less academic and more business is massively important because the level of curiosity and we've got lots of really, really smart people at Swiss Re that are keen to experiment in this space. Keeping those experiments very focused on a bottom line impact is one of the things we're focused on. Just looking for first question from someone, otherwise, Ivan. Thank you. It's Ivan Bokhmat from Barclays. I have a question on or a couple of these cases, I suppose, on capital allocation. Maybe it's the first one to tie into the ambition to be number one. As I think about the underwriting risk, which is clearly in the core of it, do you think that there are areas across the footprints, P&C, Life & Health, of course, where clients would need more balance sheet and this is where you need to invest more? I mean, I know you mentioned no growth targets, but if we think about that in terms of capital allocation, what would you identify? And secondly, and that's perhaps a bit more of a CEO, CFO question, but within that capital allocation, how should we think about market risk? Because for a while now, you've been highlighting that you've been a little light on market risk. You could increase a bit more if needed. When would be the right moment for that? How do you feel about it? Maybe the first, I think we should give to us. Then you can take the second, and I might add. Yeah, look, I mean, we have the capital to deploy for the needs that our clients have where we see an adequate return on that capital. So we do see demand generally going up in a very volatile and uncertain world. So generally, insurance companies want to protect themselves more, and we can lean into those opportunities where they are. So that's already part of the dynamic capital allocation process internally here. And we have the capital to lean into that market-worthy opportunity. But to be clear, there's competition around capital, capacity. So we look at the best opportunity to deploy, not only on the liability side, but also on the other part of the balance sheet, the asset side. Within reinsurance and prime insurance, you mentioned it before. We've got a nice balance sheet here because we reinsure out. But when it comes to capacity and capital allocation, that's us and Ivan Gonzalez who have to then compete for that capacity. And maybe just to add one line of business specifically, the demand for property broadly in CorSo and P&C remains robust. And this is an adequately priced line in most geographies. I'd say there's a couple of fast-growing lines which we're continuing to be less comfortable with, cyber being first and foremost amongst them. So I don't expect us to be allocating more capital to cyber risks, even if the risk itself might be growing. I think the performance we've had in both P&C businesses on specialty lines continues to demonstrate that these are very valuable places to be. There might be some sublines. We've gotten out of aerospace in CorSo. That seems to have been a good move, that there's some other places where we'll continue to evaluate our expertise and relative positions. But specialty, broadly speaking, for the reinsurance team has been very helpful to us. Yeah. On the investment side, I mean, you're right. We have been risk-off. We've missed some potential opportunities on listed equities in 2024. I don't feel bad about that. At least as Swiss Re, we've shown our ability to manage this yield curve nicely and continue to increase the return on investments. We've continued to avoid any material write-downs in sort of mini crises, whether it's regional banks in the U.S. or commercial real estate in the portfolio. I think we've got a modestly increased exposure on private equity and private debt, nothing dramatic. That feels comfortable and is being well managed by professional managers that we oversee. I think the biggest question is on investment-grade corporate credit. And here, when we get back to triple-digit spreads that seem to be more reasonable in compensating some risk because there is some risk, then we'll probably expand a bit more into them. But you shouldn't expect any big risk on positioning out of that portfolio for the foreseeable future. Kamran? This is Kamran Hossain from J.P. Morgan. Just one question following up on the investment side. I don't know whether the chart you put in on recurring income yield versus reinvestment yield is purely indicative, but you can see a flattening of the recurring income yield. Should we expect that or not? Because it feels like for reinvestment yields above the recurring income yield, the recurring income yield should tick up. So just clarification on that. And the second question is around, I guess, the indication that you expect kind of neutral experience on reserves this year, so kind of net release, nothing. I guess if you look back at the last few years, clearly the U.S. liability has been the negative headline, but there's been some really positive development elsewhere in the business. Why should we not expect that over the coming year or so? Or is this again just a $4.4 billion, and you want to be far more than 50/50 on that? And if you do get those releases and you do get smaller than $4.4 billion, say the world's going well, what will you do with that? Will you use it to build buffers? Or, I don't know if it's blue sky and hopeful scenario, but just interested in how that might play out in your thoughts. Thank you. Let me start with the second question first. One of the sources of those releases were redundancies on major cat events that occurred in 2021 and 2022, but even before that. I can go all the way back to Typhoon Jebi, which was a painful experience for us because we added a material amount in two quarters after the event, and then it turns out that we had redundancy. So some of our primary clients put us some scary data. We acted on that, and then it turned out not to be nearly as scary. The other event, which I can reference specifically, Hurricane Ian, which appeared to put at risk a large position we have with NFIP, it turned out that flood risk ended up being a non-event as well. And so yes, there were releases of hundreds of millions of dollars coming out of these large NatCat positions. In 2023 and 2024, we've not had those kinds of major events which have been potentially over-reserved, and I go back to Helene, which was in Q3. Lots of economic loss, non-trivial insured loss. Urs's team managed to avoid being exposed to most all of that. And so we've not had the $500 million loss this year. And so I don't think, at least in the property book, there's lots to potentially release, which is not to say that we're concerned about the reserves. We actually think we're well-reserved on these positions. But there may not be, at least in the near term, big events. The other thing I will say is we're prudent. We're not masochistic. And so if there had been lots of redundancies sitting around in 2024, we probably would have thought about them before we added this net. I think, Kamran, you asked me that question some time ago, and when CorSo had that massive release, that was due to COVID because there were no losses or property losses. I mean, there was no reason to hold it anymore, so that's why that was the big release, as an example. Yeah, for example, exactly. Another place, and I apologize. You had a first question, which I've missed. Why is it recurring income yield reinvestment? So it's partially what's actually in the portfolio. And we do expect rates to come down. But on an absolute level, we would expect recurring income to stay broadly flat to slightly increasing. So let us give you the details on the denominator. Partly is also straightening out of the yield curve. So we've been very fortunate at two-year money, for example, paying four and a half plus. We don't expect that to last. Nick in the back. Hi. It's Nick Johnson from Deutsche Bank. This is a big picture question. Perhaps you could just talk a little bit about your sort of post-big event strategy, say, sort of one-in-a-hundred-year type event. Would you just take the price increases, or would you look to grow market share and exposure? Just wondering how much sort of opportunistic appetite do you have? Maybe that ties into the less academic, more business strapline. Thanks. I just can repeat. This is part of our target liability portfolio exercise. We look at the current position of the portfolio, the mix. Then we project out where the rates are going. And if we see healthy markets and enough margins to achieve, then we're obviously overweight. If we think that in a certain line of business and properties, the classic one that we're discussing at the moment, when we see that over time now the rates are not only plateauing, but actually going down, then we look for decorrelating lines of businesses where the price cycle is not behaving like a property one. And then we say, okay, that nice balance would help us to address the situation where we might have to be a bit more conservative on property and address also the stranded cost that you will live with and then increase the parts of the other portfolios. That's a focused growth strategy, as they call it then. You've got it in P&C Re as well, yeah. Yeah, I think the scenario that you're describing, too, that's certainly one of the scenarios that we're preparing for. It's in all of our models. It's in our capital planning. It's in how we steer dynamically our risk appetite depending on what the market gives. But if there's a large capital dislocation and there's a shortage and rates are going up, of course, we want to lean into that. You mentioned a single large event. It can also be things that happen a little bit over time. And you saw a reset really in the property in the NatCat area at the beginning of 2023, end of 2022. And that's exactly what we did. But just one of the reasons why I encourage our team to keep the capital levels where they are is precisely to be able to be responsive to something major in the marketplace. We will not have to come to the market to ask for additional capital to write at those improved prices. Vinit first, and then we'll go. Yeah, Vinit from Mediobanca. Thanks for the follow-up opportunity. So, certainty allowance was meant to kind of reduce by, I think, $100 million a year, sort of the effect. And I think you've undone that. And I just want to confirm that as a very quick checkpoint. Should I just go on, or should I wait for, should I just ask more questions now? So I can go on with more questions. Sorry, don't forget to ask one at a time. So you're right. When Christian introduced us a year ago, he indicated that over time, there is a mathematical calculation you could do in the context of potential releases related to the charging that would continue. We've made an adjustment to that messaging, at least for 2025. And I'm trying to be as clear as I can. But you should not expect the releases in 2025. I think over time, we'll come back and give you a little better sense of how confident we are and how confident Philip is that that uncertainty load is related to uncertainty versus any costing challenges or any new events that we haven't thought about to date that might be there. But right now, you should assume that we're continuing to load what we reserve to this additional positioning. Did we have Chris in the back, or? No. Oh, sorry. Then we can go to Anne-Chantal. Anne-Chantal Risold from Octavian. On the U.S. liability reserving, you have been giving us some information as a slide in the last few reporting. But would you be willing also to include the U.S. liability in your triangle so that we have also more detail and to be able to follow this? Because now everything is fixed, and we are probably not going to look at it anymore. But so why you would speak against disclosing this a bit in more detail? That's for one. And the second on what the investment you had in your portfolio in the asset allocation, you almost completely went out of equity and wanted to reduce volatility. So is also this strategy that you keep, or you could consider changing your asset allocation towards going back into equity at some point? Well, I had no intention of creating another triangle. But you will see the impact there in the liability portfolio, the proportional, for example, for reinsurance. So I think it will be there. We don't expect to move it around too much. There may be allocations between underlying years, but since John and Jess have been so kind to give this reserve, so I'm trying to hold on to it and not let it go. We're just listening to you, Philip. We're trying to not have any releases. I mean, the natural thing, if you put in the portfolios, it does release them. Then it kind of defeats the point. Nor do we want to have any increases because we've had something at a high estimate. We look at low, medium, and high scenarios. We put it right up to the high. I said there were four different people came up. It's fairly similar, and we just chose that. I think we just want some stability there. On the investments, again, we've reduced materially our position on listed equities. As I said, we've got a non-trivial exposure on private equity that has served us well. Actually, I'm a little surprised how well it served us. The team is very focused on where it's allocating specific mandates, and we're very pleased with the results. And so that won't shrink, I don't think. I'd be surprised for us to take major new positions on listed equities. There may be some opening up if we're convinced the market sees opportunity, but we're more likely to do that after a major correction rather than in the current environment. And if it never corrects, so be it. Second question from maybe Ismail first, and then Faizan. Hi. So a lot of the focus has been on the 2025 outlook, right, for the net income. But I'm trying to figure out you have a plan for the DPS growth of around 7% up through 2027. Can I map that out for the earnings growth as well? It seems like you're targeting a payout ratio of around 50% next year. Can I basically extrapolate that to earnings for 2027 as well? So good question. I think the way we think about this is we've got wind at our back in terms of the pricing and property casualty. In terms of the investments, we showed that this investment return is just a different environment than we were sitting in three years ago, four years ago. And so in that context, while we're not making any predictions about earnings for 2026 or 2027, the market conditions we think will continue to be supportive, starting point. The second piece is, again, the franchise that we have, the stability coming out of our Life & Health portfolio makes us confident that we can make this kind of commitment for a dividend increase. We specifically don't talk about a payout ratio. We think it's probably inappropriate for a sort of global reinsurer to be linking dividends to any one year's profit because it will be volatile. And if by chance we have a fabulously lucky year, we wouldn't want necessarily to be paying out an enormous amount in dividends and then have to cut the dividend the following year. And if we have a fabulously bad year on cats in particular, we wouldn't want to cut the dividend. And so compared to the primary market, which I think a payout ratio is entirely appropriate for, for a reinsurer, you should not think about that. And that's why we've given you this guidance on earnings per share growth. So it's not uncorrelated with underlying profitability, but we're not saying it's directly linked. Faizan. In terms of P&C Reinsurance mix, you're reducing the Casualty in an absolute amount. Combined Ratio is higher for the Casualty versus Property. What is the implication of that business mix change on the Combined Ratio next year? And second question on Corporate Solutions, rates are flattening, yet you've improved your guidance by two points. Is that simply driven by greater confidence, or is there something else underlying that? Thank you. I'll take the first one. The business mix on a year-to-year basis doesn't have a massive impact on a one-year combined ratio. There's also earnings from the prior year, some new business, so it doesn't have that much of an impact. But you're right in terms of the overall direction of travel. Casualty has a higher combined ratio than the short tail lines, and as we're going a little bit shorter, there's a net impact and benefit over time. But it's all part of the overall target that we have for next year, and I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Let me take the Corporate Solutions one. The business mix is favorable, so you can compensate the flattening or maybe slight rate reductions that you might see on the property side with very attractive rates and margins on the credit insurance side as an example. The growth on the specialty side is very favorable, engineering in particular. So that counterbalances very nicely. And then secondly, you will see the earning patterns, obviously. So the business that you write today will earn through not immediately in year one. So that's why I think with confidence the CorSo team could commit to that number. Maybe one technical piece on the CorSo book for 2025. We've been writing in the accident and health business a non-trivial book on iptiQ's Medex. That's going to leave our own portfolio because of an acquisition that was made of this business. That's a material reduction of top line. It actually will not affect the bottom line very much. This is a low volatility, low margin business that is no longer going to be with us, and net net, that might have a modest positive to the combined ratio. Thank you. I think one question for us is on how much easier it's been walking around the market since the 14th of November. In other words, are people saying, "Oh, yeah, it didn't matter, but now I don't have to worry about the drag, and I don't have to talk to you about liability. I can just talk about new business. Can you get more new business now?" And then the other question is on the $300 million. Can you give us a feel of what the base number is? $300 million seems to be a big reduction. I mean, it really is a culture shift that we're seeing here. I just wondered how big it is because if I add back inflation and investments, then we're getting close to maybe $600 million or something as a gross number. I'll talk to your first question. You can rest assured we're going to continue to talk about what's going on in the market in U.S. liability. This is a market issue. Overall, there's a fundamental issue with social inflation and the way that the legal system works in the U.S. That hasn't fundamentally changed. If anything, if you look at some of the indicators around number of class action lawsuits, number of legal advertisements, number of nuclear verdicts, average size of a nuclear verdict, the amount of litigation funding that's out there, they're all trending in one direction. There was a little bit of a dip in the 2021 years because the courts were closed. When you look at it, there's a very clear trend line, and that continues. The fundamental issue around U.S. liability, which is an occurrence-based product, hasn't gone away. And the big debate among the primary insurers out there is, do you get enough rate to stay ahead of trend? And the reinsurers, by the way, are making the same kind of judgment on whether they're leaning into that market or not. And we clearly have a cautious view around this that's informed by a lot of data. And the second question on the cost reduction in terms of relative magnitude, I think, unfortunately, the IFRS accounts sort of split up how expenses are reported. So it's a little complicated for outsiders to view this, but they're just rough numbers to have in mind. The total cost position of the group operating cost is a little under $4 billion. And we're saying we're taking $300 million out of that. A large part of this is going to come from some of the central functions. What you might think about is overhead cost, about a third of it from the restructurings that Andreas has already announced between iptiQ and resizing some of the solutions teams. And so of the remaining $200 million, the way to think about that is another cost item which shows up in the IFRS accounts that's a little more than $1.5 billion. And so, yeah, I mean, it's not insignificant. Culturally, it's an important thing. This is an issue about Andreas's five questions, the answer to four questions. The answer to those four questions should broadly be focusing the group on a more efficient delivery and a reduction of some of the things which have been, frankly, distractions. And as we get rid of the distractions, we need to be sure we get rid of the costs that are associated with those distractions. One more upfront. His second question he couldn't ask before. Yeah, he couldn't. So anyway. That was the NatCat strategy for. The budget, if I look at that as an indicator of what's happening there, was $1.8 billion last year for 2024. It's now up to $2 billion for 2024, suggesting four quarters $200 million higher. But apart from that, if you're saying that higher layers are seeing pricing as you expected, pricing cuts as you expected, should this budget be going up? Are you going to do more? Are you going to retrench? And obviously not, hopefully, going to lower layers. I'm just curious on what you want to react to that and the budget estimate, please. Thank you. Yeah, sure. Look, I mean, the Nat Cat business is a business that we like and a business that we think we know what we're doing about. And when you look at our track record, it's been quite strong over many years. Naturally, in any one year, if you have a large event, the results will be quite volatile. But if you look at it over a longer period of time between all of our models, we have over 200 proprietary models in this space. We have over 50 colleagues who focus on this. There's been a lot of model improvements over the years as well, particularly as it relates to secondary perils. And so we like the space, and we're leaning into it. It's still a good environment. Yes, you're right on this pressure on the higher layers as sort of people have opened up the risk appetite based on recent performance, and it is still good. The market also remains reasonably disciplined as it comes to attachment points and some of the structures that got the market into trouble. Low attaching aggregate structures, and they're by and large just not getting placed. They're actually just not in the market at any kind of significant volume. So I think the risk sharing between the primary insurers and the reinsurers has had that reset two years ago, and that's largely maintained there. The way that we set our budget is we look at what we write and where our exposures are, and then there's costing that comes with that. And so relative to what we're taking in on premiums and our expected loss, then ultimately informs the budget, right? And so as we grow the business, as we're leaning into it, and as also rates change, that budget can, of course, change. But that's a little bit the background to it. It's a product that we like, and we're leaning into the market. And maybe just the dimension of our retro programs. Part of the reason we got to $2 billion was a modulation on how much we've put out through the retro program, precisely because the pricing is very strong, and we like to keep 100% of this on our books in some cases where it makes sense. And so we will always use retro. Sorry, I need to be clear. It's not that we're 100% as a target for retention of this, but as we share these risks, we'll continue to evaluate on the margin whether there's another $100 million to put into the market or to hold onto our own balance sheet. Any final one? Will. Thanks. Will Hardcastle for UBS. It is a quick one, please. Just any extra detail you can give on the bits of business that did see the L&H CSM hit? I know they're probably small in all. It might be an aggregation of lots of different things, but which countries, which products? That'd be helpful. Thank you. I think it's fair to acknowledge, yes, it's an aggregation of a series of smaller portfolios in smaller Asian countries and some of the health and disability business in EMEA. And so I think, as we said, we think we've done the major adjustments on the critical illness business in Asia in 2023. That would sort of broadly be greater China. And so we saw no need to make further adjustments there. I don't believe. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, both via the webcast and, of course, here in the room. For everyone in the room, we invite you to stay for a light lunch that's prepared just outside, and thanks again for your.