Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 1Q 2022 conference call. To begin the call, I will now hand over to Anu Venkataraman, Head of Investor Relations, and Alban de Mailly Nesle, Group CFO. Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to AXA's conference call on our activity indicators for the first three months of 2022. Our Group CFO, Alban de Mailly, now will take you briefly through last night's release. At the end of his introductory remarks, he'll be happy to take your questions. Alban, I hand over to you. Thank you, Anu. Good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining the call today. As you saw from our release yesterday evening, AXA delivered a high-quality growth in the first three months of 2022. The performance across our technical and fee-based businesses has been excellent. In particular, Health, P&C Commercial Lines Insurance, Protection, and unit-linked, all off to a strong start in 2022. At the same time, we have taken decisive underwriting actions to reduce NatC at exposure at AXA XL Reinsurance, as previously communicated. We are also maintaining a strong discipline in Life and Savings, shifting to a very high-quality mix and away from traditional general account. Overall, our total revenues increased by 1%. I am very pleased with the direction of travel as we are executing on our strategy, focusing on growing in our core technical segments. Our balance sheet continues to be very strong, with a Solvency II ratio at 224%. Let me now go through the key numbers of the press release, starting with P&C. P&C revenues were up 2% overall, with growth in both commercial and personal lines. Commercial lines insurance, which excludes AXA XL Re, had a strong start to the year, growing by +4%. We continued to benefit from favorable pricing conditions across all of our geographies. Growth was particularly strong in Europe and France, with revenues up 6% and 4%, respectively. At AXA XL Insurance, pricing and renewals remain strong, increasing by +10% and well ahead of loss trends. Revenues here were stable, with growth in property and lower revenues in casualty. This reflects our prudent approach to managing our exposures as we remain focused on profitability. What you also see in a hard market is customers trying to optimize insurance purchase by agreeing to higher deductibles or lower limits in response to higher prices. This has also impacted exposure growth. At AXA XL Reinsurance, we have reduced our NatC at exposure by circa 40%, in line with our strategy. The reduction will continue for the rest of the year as the business comes up for renewal. Overall, revenues in reinsurance declined by 12%, and this includes the impact of favorable pricing momentum that continued this quarter at +8%. Now on to personal lines. There, gross revenues were up +1% in the quarter. We are seeing excellent growth in personal non-motor at +5%, and this is driven in equal parts by volume and price across geographies, and the outlook is supported. Personal motor declined by -1%. Pricing up 1% is starting to respond to inflationary pressures. Volumes remain subdued in the first quarter, notably reflecting lower new car registrations. We remain attentive to inflation and are being proactive in managing claims, including through procurement, partnerships, and claims orientation. In addition, new ways of working have kept claims frequency below pre-COVID levels. Now moving to other lines of business. In Health, revenues overall were up 6% in the first quarter, driven by higher volumes and better pricing. Both individual and group businesses reported strong growth momentum. France performed again extremely well this quarter, with revenues up 8%, notably from the continued success of its international partnerships in the U.S. In Mexico, revenues were up 15%, reflecting the strong pricing actions we have taken to restore profitability, which was negatively impacted by COVID-19 claims. Now moving on to Life and Savings. We continue to see a favorable business mix with strong revenue growth in unit-linked and protection, offset by lower general account savings. We are seeing similar trends in net inflows. A few highlights on our Q1 revenue performance. France continued to perform very well in individual savings, with a record share of both unit-linked and Euroc roissance products at 63%, 20 points ahead of the market. Switzerland saw strong growth in protection, +5%, driven by the Group Life semi-autonomous business. Our strategic transformation continues to bear fruit. Our protection business in Asia also delivered very good results, +8%, notably in Japan and Hong Kong. Finally, in asset management, AXA IM continued to deliver a strong commercial performance with EUR 9 billion of net inflows, notably EUR 5 billion from third-party clients. Our management fees were up 10%, benefiting from higher average assets under management and an improving business mix towards alternatives. This was offset by lower performance fees, which, as you know, tend to be lumpy by nature. As we have seen in our press release, we are now including Architas in our asset management segment. Moving on now to Solvency II. Our Solvency II ratio was 224% at the end of March, an increase of 7 points from the end of last year. This improvement reflects notably 2 points from the positive operating return net of accrued dividend, three additional points from the net positive impact from the changes in IBOR in some geographies and negative UFR impact, +2 points from net debt issuance, and -2 points from the EUR 0.5 billion share buyback. The impact from financial markets was +2 points, driven by +10 points from increase in interest rates. I know that in periods of heightened volatility, assessing the impact of market movement can be complex to model from the outside. Our disclosed sensitivities reflect accurately the impacts of market movements, but they are not linear for significant moves. There is some convexity embedded. We have provided, in our release, estimated updated sensitivities to changes in interest rates. Our sensitivity to a 50 basis points change, +50 basis points change, is now +5 points versus +9 points previously. This clearly shows the effect of convexity. Similarly, sensitivity to a -50 basis points decrease in rate is now -8 points versus -14 points previously. This favorable effect of higher rates was partly offset by the following. First, lower equity markets, -2 points. Higher implied volatility, -3 points, reflecting the higher cost of options and guarantees offered to policy holders. The effect from inflation of -4 points. This reflects the impact on the change in inflation expectation across the inflation swap curve. Please note that is different from CPI. To be clear, this is a pure Solvency II model effect. It does not factor any management actions that would be taken to mitigate the impact of inflation, notably through cost reduction measures or increased pricing. Overall, a very strong Solvency II ratio at 224%, up from year-end level. We are very pleased with the reduced sensitivity of our balance sheet to moves in interest rates. Before moving on to the conclusion, I would like now to say a word on Ukraine. As a company with deep roots in Europe, AXA has been profoundly moved by the tragedy affecting the Ukrainian people. To date, reported claims from this crisis have been immaterial. Aviation and marine risks, which are written at AXA XL, are very complex, and we expect claims to take time to develop and almost certainly to be the subject of litigation. Based on our current assessment and the current scope of the conflict, we believe that net underwriting losses, including political risks, will be akin to a mid-sized NatC at event. Overall, we still expect AXA XL to contribute to the group's earning growth in 2022. To conclude, a few takeaways to highlight. We are focusing on executing our strategy, and it continues to produce good results across the group. AXA performed very well this quarter with high-quality growth, notably across health and P&C commercial lines insurance. We have a very attractive business profile focused on technical risks and cash generative lines. Our balance sheet remains strong with a Solvency II ratio of 224% and with lower sensitivity to interest rates. We completed our EUR 0.5 billion share buyback, and you can expect us to remain disciplined in the deployment of our excess cash resources. The group is in a very strong position with a very good outlook. We are well-placed in the current uncertain environment. I'm now happy to take your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad. We have our first question from Andrew Sinclair from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Thank you. Morning, everyone. Three from me as usual. Firstly, just if you could let us know some context on what you actually see as a mid-sized NatCat. Secondly, was just sticking on Russia and Ukraine. What context can you give us on how you get comfortable with that level of net insured losses? Is it because of reinsurance protection, types of claims you feel will actually hit the industry, maybe how that relates to the cover you provide? Is it cancellation of policies and timing? What gives you that level of comfort? Thirdly, was just on NatCat s, actually. Just I didn't see any comments on NatCat s losses in Q1. Just any color you can give us there. I think you've usually given a little bit of color in the quarters since owning XL. Thanks. Hello, Andrew, and thank you for your questions. I'll start by the third one on NatCat. We didn't mention anything on NatCat because obviously there were some natural events this quarter. You have in mind the Eunice and Franklin Europe or the Australian floods, but there was no large NatCa t that would be material to the group. That's a perfect transition to your first question on what is a mid-sized NatCa t. What we have in mind by saying that is that it's similar to the loss that we had last year with the Texas freeze, which is a cat which is not material to the group. As you maybe heard in what I said, we still expect AXA XL to contribute to the group's earnings growth despite that loss on the political risks, aviation and marine due to the Ukraine war. On this particular, if you'll allow me, I want to spend one minute to describe why it's complex. Complexity doesn't mean that the loss would grow indefinitely. I mean, we know our exposures, we know our reinsurance. It's just that the mechanisms that I'm gonna describe are such that to put a precise number now would be difficult, but we will do that for H1 and we share with you then what is our best estimate of that cost. Let me explain where we are on this. We have received very few claims to date, first. Second, our standard property policies typically contain exclusion for losses arising from war and other hostile acts. Now, it's common as you would know, that such losses would be included in coverages for political risk, aviation, and marine. In that regard, aviation is particularly complex. Aircraft and aircraft spare parts are covered by a matrix of policies taken out by different parties. What I mean by this is aircraft operators, aircraft lessors, manufacturers, financiers. They are typically separate policies covering losses from war perils and for losses caused by non-war perils. What happened? Sanctions declared by the U.K. and E.U. On February 26th required aircraft lessors to cancel leases with Russian airlines. On March 14th, Russia passed a law that enabled Russian airlines to re-register foreign aircraft on the Russian aircraft registry. At this stage, it's unclear what effect that law might have on the ability of foreign aircraft owners to repossess or to retrieve aircraft from Russia, and whether any re-registration might constitute theft or confiscation or nationalization or seizures. We need to assess whether there's been a loss, as well as how and when the losses were incurred. Furthermore, we will need also to ascertain if lessors have taken action to mitigate the damages and what recoveries we may be able to get through salvage or subrogation. You see the complexity, and we expect that many of those issues will be subject to protracted litigation. It will take years to get to the final result. Again, complexity doesn't mean that this can drift significantly. It just means that we need more data to come to a more precise number, hence the. It's not a ballpark figure, but a ballpark notion of a mid-size NatCat event. Okay. We have another question from Michael Huttner from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Fantastic. Thank you very much. I've got a fishing question. I hope you like it. SCOR today, another French insurance, the insurance group, gave a figure for the IFRS 17 balance sheet, including contractual service margin. I think the figure is EUR 9 billion. I just wondered what is your figure? If SCOR, have it, I'm sure you have it, and I'm sure this would be a good opportunity to start discussing IFRS 17. It's not that, are we? My second question is on inflation and pricing. You made lots of different comments on inflation pricing. Some bits were good, some bits you didn't talk about, so they're presumably not good. I just wondered if you could kind of go back over it and give us a little bit more clarity. At the moment, I see the AXA XL is good. I'm not sure if the rest of commercial lines is good or not. Not clear from your notes, so maybe I'm not clear. Personal lines sounds like there's a big lag, but maybe you can explain what's happening. That'd be really helpful. Then the final one is a really small one. What is solvency today? Thank you. Sorry, Michael, I didn't hear the very last one. What is solvency? Solvency today. You know, as of now. Absolutely. Thank you for your questions. I feel I might disappoint you on the very first one, because we will give you more details on our IFRS 17 numbers in Q4, probably with the Q3 activity report, and you'll have the full numbers next year. Sorry for that. On inflation. May I just interrupt? Sure. I think you might think again. If SCOR can do it, there's no reason AXA can't do it. I imagine a lot of investors will be asking that question. My feeling is, you should celebrate that investors will welcome it, and if you don't, they might feel a little bit disappointed. Okay. Point taken. Inflation and pricing. We need to be very precise on this and look at the different business lines in P&C. When you look at XL, you see that the market is very hard still, and we concentrate on our profitability, and therefore we take business where we can have still significant price increases on renewals. You saw that we are 10% at AXA XL Insurance. If I compare that to loss trends, loss trends is not exactly inflation, but I think it will give you a good illustration of where we are. Loss trends at AXA XL are around 5%, so you see that there is still margin expansion at XL. When now I look at Europe, there are three different lines of business. I'll start with commercial lines. We do see some inflation in commercial lines, notably obviously in property with construction materials. But as you saw, what we have been saying for a number of months now is that we have the ability to increase prices, and that's what we've been doing in all our countries in Europe, where you see that commercial lines prices are up by 4% in France and 2%-4% in Europe. You will note that Switzerland, given the strength of their currency, has not had much inflation to date. That's the same story for retail non-motor, where there again, we have pushed for price increases in all our geographies. There again, Switzerland is to some extent an exception for the same reason. We are pushing for price increases and therefore that's a good offset to inflation. What's happening in motor? Motor is slightly different because there again, we do see some inflation, but we first are able to take measures to offset part of that inflation. When I say part, it's at least 50% of it through better procurement, through orientation, through better fraud detection. That allows us to reduce the impact of inflation. Very importantly, what we see is that the frequency that we have is lower than the 2019 frequency level. We don't attribute that benefit to COVID-19. We attribute it to two things. The first one is the fact that we have better quality cars. The second one is that we believe that new ways of working or remote working, whatever you call it, have a positive impact as well because people use less their cars, and therefore, there are fewer accidents. At this stage, and obviously, we need to be prudent on this, but at this stage, we don't see the need to significantly increase prices in motor one. You see that we are up 1%. For us, that's sufficient to maintain profitability. We don't want to enter into price wars. You've seen that from country to country, sometimes we have positive net new contracts, and sometimes we have negative net new contracts depending on the local context. On your third question on where is solvency today, I think what I can tell you is, you have our new sensitivity on interest rates, and we are very happy that those sensitivities, +5, -8, are lower than before, because there again shows the lesser sensitivity of the group to financial markets. You have the sensitivity to inflation, which is 4 points for 50 basis points of inflation. The sensitivities to equities has not changed. Oh, fantastic. That's really clear. Thank you so much. We have another question from Peter Eliot from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. Three from me as well, please. That's right. The first one was just a follow-up on Michael's question just now. I mean, that's interesting, Alban, what you said about, you know, you can offset it through better procurement and fraud detection. I mean, I guess just playing devil's advocate, it seems those are things possibly you ought to be doing in your day-to-day business anyway. I'm just wondering, you know, what's changed, how inflation has enabled you to do those things better. That was the first one. Second one, on your disclosure on inflation, I found that very interesting. I guess when I look at the factors that feed into the inflation swap curve, I'm interested in how closely you feel those are aligned with the actual drivers or risks to your business, and therefore, how appropriate a sensitivity that is. Be grateful for any comments you have there. The final thing, the third one, I was really interested in what's happening in Switzerland. You know, very impressive growth in semi-autonomous products. You attributed that to your current strategy. I mean, I think that strategy's been going on for a few years. I'm just wondering if you could give us more detail on, you know, what's specifically driving that very strong year-on-year increase there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. You're absolutely right on your first question. It's not inflation that is leading us to be more efficient. It's those programs of orientations, procurement, et cetera, that we are further enhancing. It's continuous progress that we've had over the years, but some are linked to technology. What I mean by this is, we use artificial intelligence to detect fraud. Some time ago, it was 5% of the cases that were detected through artificial intelligence, now it's 25%. You have to put in place those tools to have the benefit on fraud detection. On orientation, what we see is it takes some discussion with agents, with brokers to have them accept that their customer will not be able to go to any repair shops, and that it is in everybody's benefit that we take control of that. All of this takes time. I'm just saying that we've been pushing this for some time, but we still have somewhere to go because it takes a bit of time and because technology helps. We still see some room for improvement in all those actions that will help us compensate partially or totally the inflation impact. On the inflation yield curve and the impact on business. As I tried to say in my introductory message, the way the model is done, you take your costs, and you know that we project our costs over the life of our policies. What we apply is that inflation yield swap curve mechanically. It does not fully reflect our business in the sense that, as you know, we have EUR 500 million cost reduction target for 2023 compared to 2019, and we ignore it for the purpose of projecting our cash flows. We just take inflation. Whereas in real life, we are taking a number of actions to contain inflation and to stick to our EUR 500 million target. That's short term. Mid- and long-term, if we take a macroeconomic view, our view is that the central banks, not only the Fed, and we've seen the powerful action they took this week, and we believe the same on the ECB. They will take actions to curb the inflation spike that we see today. Mid- to long-term, we believe that the inflation swap curve that we see, and obviously it's not the current CPI, it's much lower, does reflect more or less accurately what will be an inflation in the future, because I guess that no central banks will tolerate a high level of inflation. I think that makes economic sense, mid- to longer-term. On Switzerland, we moved to a model where we don't have the savings component on our balance sheet, but we still offer two things that are separate. One is protection, and we are very competitive on that business. Why are we competitive? I think it's important to understand what's the change in model implied for us. When we had savings on our balance sheet, there was some cross-subsidy from protection prices to the savings business, and therefore protection prices needed to be higher to offset for the savings business, which was general account with guaranteed rates which were high. Now that we have a pure protection business, we can have more competitive protection prices while being very profitable. It makes much more economic sense. The second component of that is that we advise the foundations. To be simple, the pension funds on their asset allocation. We have a fee for that without taking risk on our balance sheet. That's a very powerful model and, as you see, a very competitive one. That's great. Thanks so much. Could I just come back on the second point? I mean, if I just take, for example, you know, you may have some non-life reserves which might be very exposed to medical cost inflation, for example. I'm just wondering, you know, to what extent, if at all, you know, that is reflected in the model. I'm just thinking, you know, you're looking at what the core inflation swap curve, but the reality is that your business is, you know, more granular and exposed to certain things than. Yeah, absolutely. If that's fair. Yeah. That's perfectly clear. On this, what we are looking at is the inflation rate that is embedded in our reserves. We are, as always, cautious on this. We review reserves thoroughly twice a year, and we make sure that the inflation embedded in those reserves is adequate. There are, exactly as you said, some businesses where there is a direct indexation on CPI. I'm thinking of, for instance, workers' comps, annuities. On that one, the impact is mechanical and is not linked to inflation swap curve, but to real CPI. Those reserves and that risk are hedged through inflation-linked assets on the asset side. That's great. Thank you very much. We have another question from William Hawkins from KBW. Please go ahead. Hi, Alban. Thank you for taking my questions. For Ukraine and Russia, what is your aviation and marine sums insured compared with the figures that you gave us for political risk when we were talking at the full year stage? I appreciate everything you say about the outcome being uncertain, but presumably the sums insured are pretty straightforward. If you could help us on that, please. Secondly, please, what was your insurance loss on the Texas freeze last year? I don't know that number. Related to that, I mean, clearly you're being coy on this issue, but whatever the number is, whether it's EUR 200 million, EUR 300 million or EUR 400 million, related to the Ukrainian tragedy, on the assumption that largely falls in AXA XL, that's a very big hit against a consensus assumption of EUR 1.2 billion. You've made a very clear statement that you're optimistic you can keep growing earnings, which is great. But what are the offsetting factors? Because again, whatever that number for Ukraine seems to be is a big number against this optimism that AXA XL can grow earnings. Lastly, please, I apologize if I missed this in your interaction with Michael. The 2 percentage point impact from markets in your Solvency II ratio, could you just help me understand how that breaks down between available and required capital, even if it's just qualitative or directional, please? I'll start with. Well, your first three questions are linked, so I will answer them in one go, if it's okay. What we mean on Ukraine and Russia is that it is not material to the group. For AXA XL, it is a hit, that's for sure, which is like the hit on Texas freeze last year that didn't prevent AXA XL from achieving the EUR 1.2 billion. We said that AXA XL would participate in the group's earnings growth. What are the other aspects that allow us to say that? We've been clear that we were focusing on profitability. You saw that we have a 10% price increase on insurance, 8% on reinsurance. Loss trend is at +5%, and we have significantly reduced, and we will keep on reducing our cat exposure at XL Re. We've done that by 40% in Q1, and we'll carry on with that. We have margin expansion on the attritional, and we have less exposure to cat than last year. That allows us to be confident. I mean, everything else being equal, obviously, yeah. We need to see if there are significant cat losses in an abnormal year. You can never predict, but that would affect also our GI entities. It's not specific to XL. XL budget allows for a number of severe losses. Obviously, this one, which is a man-made large loss, was not predictable as such, but we have a budget for man-made losses and for NatCat. That's embedded in XL numbers. On the Texas freeze, it's true that we didn't give a specific number because as I said, it was not material at group level. When it's material and we showed it, we show the numbers, and that's what we had for Bernd last year, the floods that we had in Europe. And on the exposures to aviation and marine in Russia and Ukraine, I believe all this needs to be discussed in detail, and we'll do that at H1. I think what matters at this stage is the comments I made on the overall loss it could represent. We have obviously the exposure, but we also have a significant reinsurance on aviation that will come into play as well. Thank you. Just sorry, the solvency question, please. On this, we'll come back to you, but it's a mix of both. It's both EOF and SCR. Got it. Thank you, Alban. We have another question from Thomas Fossard from HSBC. Please go ahead. Mr. Thomas Fossard, your line is open. Yes. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Sorry for that. Just one last question for me related to, as I said, insurance growth. Actually, the revenue is flat, which I mean, adjusted for the, price increase implied volume are still running down 8% at the present time. I think that, last year, although you were a bit more on the capability of, the, primary line or insurance lines to show a bit more growth. I mean, at least taking the benefit of the, rates increases. You are saying in your press release that you're still pretty cautious on casualty lines, but maybe you can tell us what's the outlook in terms of revenues for primary and if we should expect growth to pick up or, I mean, if you've changed a bit your mind given the current environment regarding inflation and maybe pricing adequacy. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. Several things to have in mind when looking at XL Insurance revenues, which I agree were flat. Prices on renewals were up 10%. On new business. By nature, new business is less profitable than renewals simply because obviously we know less of the business, simply because if it comes to us, it's probably also because the price offered by our competitors are too high. We need to be more cautious on new business than on renewals. What you need to have in mind as well is that Q1 is very much Europe. In Europe, we are comfortable growing on the property side, and that's what we did. On the casualty side, I think we said at the end of last year that it needed a bit more rates to reach the level of profitability that we want. That's Europe, and I wouldn't say the same about the U.S. We'll see along the year how both short tail and long tail lines will grow in the U.S. A last item, what we start seeing as well is that with price increases. Some customers start reducing the demand for coverage. They want higher deductibles, for instance. That also leads to a reduction in exposure, and therefore a reduction in premiums. It's all this combined, and notably, obviously, the price increase that leads to XL's revenue being flat in Q1. We have another question from Andrew Crean from Autonomous Research. Please go ahead. Good morning, Alban. Listen, can we get a bit more clarity around NatCat s and man-made losses? I mean, I think what we're trying to get to is, was the NatCat in the first quarter above or below your normal cat load, and therefore, the man-made Russian losses do they come on top of a lower or an average level of NatCat? That's what we're truly trying to get to. Really, we're not interested in the size of the Texas freeze other than to know in monetary terms, roughly speaking, what you are looking at for Russia, which I think is a fair question to ask. Secondly, you said on new business that you're not writing new business for Russian-owned assets located in Russia. Two questions on that. Are you writing renewals of Russian-owned assets located in Russia? What about new and renewals for foreign-owned assets located in Russia? Are you writing those? Finally, a question on M&A. AXA hasn't done any acquisitions since 2018. I think at the full year, you indicated that you are more open to bolt-on acquisitions. Could you define what the maximum size of a bolt-on is? Thank you, Andrew, for your questions. On NatCat, when I look at the group overall, I would say that Q1 was broadly in line with what you would expect from a quarterly budget of NatCat, and that our GI entities in Europe were more affected than XL because Eunice and Franklin were in Europe. I hope that answers your question. On the Russian assets, to be clear, we don't write be it for new business nor for renewal any policy on Russian assets on the Russian soil owned by Russians. Now, if we have international programs for non-Russian companies with Russian assets, we, in the respect of sanctions, obviously, cover their assets that are on the Russian soil. On M&A, I think what we wanna say by bolt-on doesn't really matter. What we mean is it's acquisitions that are of a limited amount that will not come as a surprise and that are well embedded in the strategy that we have described to you, where we want to use capital for both buybacks and acquisitions. It's not like it's a maximum amount. It is something that needs to make sense and is reasonably limited in size. How, if you did an acquisition, how are we supposed to measure whether you would have got more benefit out of buying stock back, which is your- Yes. First, what we said was that we wanted to do acquisitions in countries and lines of business that make sense for us. We don't want to put new flags on the map. We gave the examples of countries where we want to be, such as Spain, Italy, Germany, which means that we will have synergies in those countries because they are, we are already present there. What we want to do when we compare to a share buyback is to look at the amount spent for the acquisition, see what would be the impact if we had spent that amount for a buyback, and see with the acquisition, take into account the synergies and the moment they are realized, say two or three years, how they compare to the benefit of the buyback. Thank you. We have another question from Ashik Musaddi from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning, Alban. Just a couple of questions actually. One is again going back to this pricing and inflation. I mean, you gave very good clarity to Michael's question that you're able to offset the inflation through, say, other actions as well. How should we read that into the combined ratio, especially from Europe? I mean, Europe, you've been hitting a combined ratio of around 92% for a reasonable time. Would you say that 92% is still safe, given that, I mean, inflation is still running high, whereas you don't see that in the headline pricing, at least what you're reporting both on personal lines and on commercial lines in Europe. That's the first one. Second thing is Solvency II. When you mentioned the reduced sensitivity on interest rates, et cetera, I mean, how much of that is management action, and how much of that is just purely mechanics of convexity, et cetera? I think for volatility, you mentioned it's purely mechanics, but does that apply to interest rates as well? Given that your solvency ratio is high at about 224%, would you take some management action to reduce that sensitivity, or would you say you are still happy with the exposure you have to interest rates? Thank you. On your first question, I'll be disappointing you because in Q1, as you know, we don't comment on earnings, so we'll not comment on the combined ratio. I believe what I said on inflation and the way we manage to compensate it should give you some ideas of where we stand. On Solvency II, there is obviously some convexity, but convexity comes from our management. In other words, we have a duration gap. That duration gap was around 0.4 years three months ago, in December, sorry, it's five months ago. And now it's closer to zero. We have the ability to increase it or decrease it depending on where we want to be. We shouldn't believe that it's purely mechanical. At some point, we might wanna say that we want to be more exposed to further rise in interest rates, and therefore that we would want to increase our duration gap. That's not on the table today. We're very happy with the +5, -8 sensitivities that we have, but it's within the hands of management. That's okay. Thank you. Thanks, Alban de Mailly Nesle. We have another question from Dominic O'Mahony from Exane. Please go ahead. Oh, good morning. Thanks for taking our questions. Can I just firstly ask about back book transactions. Interest rates have obviously moved an awful lot over the past six months or so. Has that impacted your appetite to engage in back book transactions? Has that impacted the counterparties' appetites? Has it impacted economics or that you see in those transactions at all, indeed, the pricing? Any thoughts on that would be very helpful. Similarly, on general account savings, have the increase in rates had any effect on your view of sort of the strategy that you've been pursuing for the last several years of essentially trying to reduce your exposure there? At what sort of level would you start to think again about whether that product set might be attractive? Just on AXA XL, you said you expect it to contribute to the Group's earnings growth. Can you just help us understand what that means? Does that mean you think XL will grow its earnings or that it will be a contributor to earnings in general? I'm not sure quite how to read that statement. Your help would be helpful. A final question. Clearly a very large reduction in cat exposure in XL Re. I'm just wondering about the mix effect that has. Is the cat business sort of higher or lower average combined ratio on a normalized basis? What sort of net effect does that have on your sort of normalized combined ratio expectation? Thank you. Let me write down all those questions. Okay. Thank you, Dominic, for your questions. On the first one, on the back book transactions, that hasn't changed. The recent rise in interest rates has not changed our position and our appetite for several reasons. One is, we believe it's a strategy that makes sense, because it reduces further our exposure to financial markets, and that's independent on level of rates. Second, we are still prudent on long-term rates. Obviously, they've gone up recently. It's not impossible that, with interest rate hikes by central banks, a recession might come. In such cases, it's possible, not obvious, but not impossible, it's possible, that rates, long-term rate yields would go down again. We need to be cautious in this current environment, and we don't see any risk, any reason, sorry, to change our stance. Same for the buyer's appetite. We have, as you know, transaction going on, and we don't see at all any reduction in their appetite to do those acquisitions of back books. It's a bit the same answer to your second question on general account. We are, to be clear, we are not against general account business. When you look for instance, at euroc roissance in France, where we have guarantees at maturity, that's the kind of general account business that we like and that we want to sell. Because it's obviously better for us, but it's also better for the customer because it allows us to have a more dynamic asset allocation, because we don't have to be in line with our guarantees year after year, but only upon maturity. That's the kind of general account that we wanna sell. What we don't like is the traditional one, and that's why we are doing those in-force transactions. On XL earnings, I said XL earnings growth. Yeah, we expect XL earnings to grow this year. Finally, on the reduction in NatCat exposure and what impact it has on our normalized combined ratio. As you know, it is very specific to XL Re. We are not reducing our exposure to NatCat at XL Insurance or in our GI entities in Europe. At XL Re, what we said, including last year, was that even with the price increases, we think that the cat market is not yet adequately priced on the reinsurance side. It's not the only reason why we are reducing our cat exposure. We believe it brings too much volatility, but nevertheless, it gives you an idea of what we think about the profitability of the reinsurance cat business. Thank you very much. That's really helpful, Alban. We have another question from Farooq Hanif from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi everybody, good morning. Just firstly on COVID-19 reserves. If I remember, in Q1 2021, the ability to release some of those reserves was a great benefit to get to your targets. Can you tell us your latest thoughts, you know, a few months on I think that you've had your results. Second question, you're drawing in casualty. Can you remind us what kind of areas of business, maybe in London market and other regions that you're pulling back from? Then lastly, clarify again on numbers. You gave some numbers on political risk. Can you repeat what those numbers are at the- Farooq, we're having trouble hearing you. You keep breaking up. Would you mind just summarizing your questions for us again, please? We didn't catch the first one. Yes. Yes, of course. First one was COVID-19 reserves. Do you still have buffers there? Because I know that helped you in 2021. Is that an area of padding that you could use? Secondly, which areas of casualty are you pulling out of in which regions? And thirdly, political risk, can you remind us of the numbers of summer short that you told us and just update us on those numbers, net of reinsurance? Thank you. Hello, Farooq. So, on COVID-19 reserves, I'll remind you the numbers we gave at the end of last year, we still had within XL 25% of IBNRs on COVID, 25% of the total loss. We will update you on this at H1. On casualty, if I understood your question, it's European casualty that we have renewed at 1/1 and with some degree of prudence as I said earlier. But I wanna make sure that I understood your question well. Your third question, sorry, was it on- On political risk. Could you remind us? Yeah. the numbers? The total exposure was EUR 300 million for both Ukraine and Russia, and that was 50% quota share. The net is half that amount. On casualty lines, so is it professional liability? You know, can you give areas? Sorry, again, you're breaking up. I'm very sorry, Farooq. What did you say? Really sorry. Which lines of casualty are you pulling back from? In Europe, you know, the market is structured differently from the US. It's commercial casualty, but you don't have the same distinction as between the primary excess and so on this side of the ocean. It's the typical group programs or company programs that we have in Europe that would be on products or environmental and general casualty. It's not specific. It's whether the prices make sense or not. But there's no specific line that is targeted. Just going back on the COVID-19 reserve, are you able or willing to give a number for how much of the risk initial reserve that you set aside, the EUR 1.5 billion, you know, how much of that's been used? The only numbers we mentioned is the EUR 1.5 billion that we had set aside, and the EUR 400 million reserve release that we had at the end of last year. As I said, we'll update you on this in H1. Okay. Thank you very much. We have another question from Andrew Sinclair from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Thanks. Just a couple more to follow up. We've heard lots about underwriting losses from Russia, Ukraine, but just really wondering if you could give us any color on asset exposures. I think you mentioned a Nord Stream 1 investment, amongst others. I just really wonder if you can add an update there. Secondly, just on your RESO-Garantia stake, any update there? Thanks. I guess that will have to be the last questions. On asset exposure, nothing's changed. What we said on February twenty-fourth was that we had less than EUR 50 million of exposure to Russia on the asset side. We had and we have EUR 140 million of exposure to Nord Stream 1 through a debt instrument. There again, nothing has changed since then. On RESO-Garantia, there again, the only change is that we had two directors on RESO-Garantia's board and both directors have resigned. Apart from that, we still consider RESO-Garantia as a financial participation. We don't have management control there and we have 38% of the company. Nothing specific to report on that, apart from the fact that the two directors resigned. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much for your questions. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to the investor relations team. Thank you all. Have a good day.