Great. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining in person and on the line today. I'm David Richardson, Chief Executive of Just Group PLC, and welcome to our 2022 interim results presentation. As usual, today, I'm joined by Andy Parsons, our Group CFO. A year ago, we shifted our emphasis to building shareholder value by delivering profitable growth. We said we would do this by maintaining our pricing and capital discipline, and by selecting attractive risks that enable us to take advantage of the opportunities available in our markets. Today, Andy and I will provide a market update. We'll share the progress we are making to achieve our sustainable growth ambitions and deliver our underlying operating profit growth target. We'll briefly cover our investment strategy and how we're managing risks to deliver shareholder returns in a prudent manner. I know you've all got a busy day ahead, so we'll make a start. Now, at the heart of our business is a strong purpose. We help people achieve a better later life. We are the retirement specialist, and we use this strategic focus, market insight, and intellectual property to differentiate Just by successfully innovating and delivering exceptional customer outcomes. In 2021, we were awarded Company of the Year in the FTAdviser Awards for delivering a decade of consistent service excellence to our customers. The FT Awards are voted for by over 4,000 financial advisors across the UK, so it's a very powerful, independent validation that we're doing the right thing. In February, our DB de-risking business was awarded the Risk Management Provider of the Year in the Pensions Age Awards for a second time in three years. Last year, we were named by Best Companies as one of the UK's 100 best large companies to work for and accredited as a two-star organization, which represents outstanding levels of engagement. These awards and others are indicative of how our strong purpose and focus on customers motivate our people to go the extra mile, and they demonstrate the positive and collaborative culture we've built here at Just. In turn, this underpins our confidence that we have a model to deliver profitable growth and to do so sustainably. Let's turn to those results and the highlights of those on slide five. We've got sales in the green boxes. Headline sales were broadly flat, primarily due to timing differences, as we actually completed our largest single DB transaction to date just two weeks after the period end. On the right-hand side, underlying operating profit increased 15% to GBP 74 million. A good start as we head into what we expect to be a very busy DB market in the second half. The July DB transaction added GBP 24 million of profit and is capital generative on day one. We are very much on track to achieve our annual underlying operating profit growth target. The capital coverage ratio has improved by 20 percentage points to 184%. Over the past six months, the headline ratio has been driven higher by the sharp increase in risk-free rates, and Andrew will provide an update on our approach to interest rate hedging shortly. What I and the team are extremely proud of, and is within our control, is the continued excellent performance by our new business teams who delivered a new business capital strain of just 1.3% of premium. This contributed towards underlying organic capital generation of GBP 31 million in the first half. Now, after careful management of capital generation in the first half, we are well-placed to deploy our capital budget into the attractive opportunities available in the second half of the year, which, as I mentioned, is shaping up to be very busy. The board has declared an interim dividend of half pence per share, which is in line with our stated policy. Finally, the tangible net asset value fell to 172 pence per share, impacted also by the sharp upward movement in interest rates. The sensitivity now is much lower as we've shifted the emphasis of our interest rate hedging towards minimizing IFRS exposure, which Andy will touch on later. Moving to slide six. Let's quickly recap on the DB opportunity. You've seen most of these graphs a few months ago, but they tell a very powerful story that is worth repeating. You can think of our future growth opportunities in three broad categories. Firstly, in the coral slice of the pie chart, that's the segment for transactions below GBP 250 million, and we can definitely do more here. Secondly, the green part. That's the GBP 250 million to GBP 1 billion parts of the market. We are very confident we can broaden our participation in this space, and we have the optionality in how we achieve that. We can go it alone or we can do it using our partnering model. Finally, the third area of growth is we can secure repeat business from our existing DB customers, something we are being very successful at. I'll come back to discuss all of these topics over the next few slides. Moving across to the top right chart, one of the main factors driving these opportunities is pension schemes funding levels, which have markedly improved since 2017, driven by higher employer contributions. Individual pension schemes are of course at different stages of their de-risking journeys, but the overall picture has improved as rising interest rates have further helped to close the DB funding gap. What this means for us is that more schemes have reached a stage in their journey where they can now transact either via buy-in or buy-out. Finally, in the bottom right, these trends are having a real effect. With around GBP 10 million-GBP 12 billion of DB business transacted across the market in the first half, Hymans Robertson are predicting around GBP 25 billion of business in the second half based on an extensive industry survey. With only GBP 11 million of new business strain in the first half, most of our capital budget is available for deployment into these opportunities. This heightened level of market activity is expected to continue beyond 2022, with Hymans predicting a record year for new business in 2023. You'll agree, I'm sure that's a highly attractive market, and we're feeling that demand building with our current active quote pipeline in excess of GBP 5 billion. Moving on to slide seven. We've built a strong record of service and innovation to meet the needs of our customers. On this slide, we set out two examples of how we leverage this in the small to medium end of the DB market. Now, one of the main constraints in the DB de-risking market is human capital. I think you've all heard that before. Of the over 5,000 DB schemes in the UK, three-quarters have assets of less than GBP 100 million, and 1,500 of these have assets less than GBP 10 million. There's a very long tail of small and medium-sized schemes. The key to increasing access to these schemes to DB de-risking is to provide a very efficient solution, and we are leading the way here through our innovative proprietary service. We've developed and implemented a streamlined bulk quotation service. It's having a material impact in this space and has really helped to establish our franchise with our target audience. How does it work? We receive member and scheme data directly from the trustee or EBC, and we agree a target price. Our streamlined service then monitors our pricing, and when it aligns with the target price, we quickly execute on standard terms. To date, we have completed 40 transactions using this service. Some of these are repeat business, but for many schemes, this will be their first transaction with us. I'd now like to move on to what we call our repeat business, as it's not something we've talked about in great detail before. When we transact with a pension scheme, the transaction may be for a small part of their overall scheme. Their de-risking journey often consists of a number of transactions over many years. We've developed a very strong reputation with the schemes who transact it for providing excellent service, demonstrating flexibility, and investing in our relationship with them. This, in turn, has translated into real commercial benefits, and the trustees of these schemes often develop a preference for doing subsequent or repeat transactions with us. We have completed 42 such repeat transactions with our existing customers, and in the process, we are building real franchise value. To bring that to life, we've written GBP 1.6 billion of repeat transaction premiums, and that is based on initial transactions of GBP 1.7 billion. That is a very strong endorsement from the trustee of our service and the member onboarding experience we provide. Putting both of these together, the business generated through bulk quotation and repeat business represents around 15%-20% of annualized DB volume, which when you add it to our retail GIFL volumes, provides a steady source of business throughout the year. There's a lot more we can achieve. The pie chart in the middle segments the less than GBP 250 million market. Within that, we have 27% share in the less than GBP 100 million part and 16% between GBP 100 million and GBP 200 million. We have ambitions to continue growing in both of these subsegments as well as bigger deals, which we'll talk about shortly. One interesting point is that the rise in interest rates is having an even more pronounced impact on the funding of small schemes because these schemes tend to have much less interest rates hedged than larger DB schemes. When we transact with smaller and repeat business, in the majority of cases, and increasingly so, it's on an exclusive basis. Our proprietary streamlined service and the franchise we have built is helping us to win valuable business in what we judge to be an overlooked part of the market. Importantly, by bringing efficiency and scalable approaches into this, it helps free up our resources to work on more complex cases. Let's move on to discuss these opportunities in larger cases where we're motivated to win more business too. On slide eight, the pie chart on the top left-hand side shows that since 2015, the GBP 250 million to GBP 1 billion segment of the market has accounted for roughly 1/3 of total transactions. The chart on the bottom left shows that this area of the market has more than trebled over that same period. Now to date, we have very selectively participated in this segment of the market, but it is a natural evolution to accelerate our growth in this area. Moving to the right-hand side, we now have the capabilities and appetite to be successful in the market. We are confident of repeating the success we have achieved in the smaller end of the market. To put this in context, in 2021 we completed two transactions in this segment, and in 2022, we have already written our largest deal to date at approximately GBP 500 million. Let's take a closer look at that on the next slide. As I mentioned, in July, we signed our largest single DB transaction to date. We've reinsured roughly half of that transaction, which generates an upfront origination fee. We've then retained the economic exposure of the other 50% for our own balance sheet. The entire deal is capital generative on day one, while also generating a significant IFRS new business profit and a very attractive addition to overall IRR new business. We're continuing to widen our panel of partners. This gives just more optionality in the style of deals we transact and gives us scalability and confidence to secure bigger deals. We can then choose where to write them on our own balance sheet, the balance sheet of our partners, or in this case, a combination of the two. You should think about our partnering strategy as being the icing on the cake and not something we would use to replace the business we choose to write ourselves, but to supplement it. EBCs are supportive as our approach brings additional capacity to DB market, creates competitive tension, and increases our participation in the broader market, which represents a win-win for all parties. Moving on now to slide 10. A key success factor to be successful in any guaranteed income market is the investment strategy and asset mix backing our customer promises. As shown in the chart in the top left, our target liquid to illiquid asset mix is around 50%. 50/50, I should say. Andy will shortly go into detail on how we prudently manage our credit portfolio as part of this. What you can see here, though, on the right-hand side in the chart, is how the typical rating and spread over gilts varies for the main illiquid asset classes we invest in. As you can see, the mix is complementary by rating, duration, and yield pickup. We are continuously reviewing how the illiquid spreads move relative to each other and can dial up or down our appetite between the different asset classes. The chart at the bottom shows how we cash flow match our assets to our liabilities. To meet our long-term predictable liability cash flows, you can see how we combine a diverse range of assets to achieve portfolio yields pickup. This means we can offer better pricing to customers and generate attractive shareholder returns. So for example, in this graph, the orange bulge on the right shows social housing investments, which tend to be long duration with bullet repayments. The thin blue strip is income strips and ground rents, much more spread out over the long term. They are particularly suitable for DB deferred business. Infrastructure, which is often inflation linked, is in the middle, and private placements and commercial real estate loans on the left with a shorter duration profile. Looking forward, we expect the Solvency II reform will broaden the matching adjustment eligibility criteria, and this will create more opportunities to invest in line with the government's public policies, including increased investment in infrastructure, science and research, and decarbonizing the economy. At the same time, this will increase our overall portfolio diversification. Now, as set out on slide 11, in this year, 2022, we plan to invest around GBP 1 billion in total in non-LTM illiquid assets, and we're making good progress towards that, helped by further origination capacity via an Aviva Investors multi-asset mandate we signed a few weeks ago. We're already receiving interesting opportunities from that arrangement. In total, we now have 14 investment mandates with appetite to add more in addition to increasing the size of existing mandates as our partners deliver. Our acceptance levels on mandates do naturally tend to increase over time as the working relationship with our partners build. They learn about the type of assets most attractive to us, including our disciplined approach to risk management and stringent loan underwriting standards. A recent example of a productive and social investment is an income strip secured on a hospital in Essex. This transaction is effectively a sale and leaseback, whereby we provide an upfront investment, receive inflation-linked cash flows for 30 years, and return the asset at the end of the term for a token amount. This exclusive investment allows us to design the structural protections for this commercial and public space and is backstopped by a very good counterparty in the NHS Trust. Putting it all together, our illiquid asset origination via our external manager of managers model is attaining a scale where it is providing real portfolio diversification. To bring that to life, in 2022, that GBP 1 billion of other illiquid asset origination will be approximately double the amount we invest in new lifetime mortgages. That's a good indication of how far we've moved the model along. Moving on to slide 12. In 2020, we were the first UK insurer to issue a green bond, and in 2021 we followed this by becoming the first European insurer to issue a sustainability RT1 bond. I'm delighted to say that we've completed the GBP 250 million green bond investment allocation and expect to complete the sustainability bond commitments by the end of this year. As you can see from the text box in the middle, we are meeting our commitments by investing in a range of assets. This includes renewables, social housing and the redevelopment of a commercial property into a green building. Importantly, our investments are aligned to wider social goals and government policy, such as the need for more social housing and building the path to carbon net zero. The government have ambitious plans in this area and we expect large scale investment opportunities, including offshore wind, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and energy storage to emerge over time. We expect a lot of activity in this space. With that, I'll hand over to Andy. Thank you, David, and good morning to you all. It's great to see a number of you again in person. As David has outlined, we've made a good start to the year and with the addition of our largest ever DB transaction in early July, as well as a very strong DB pipeline, we remain very confident that we will meet our growth ambitions for the year as a whole. Now, David focused on the untapped growth opportunities, but it's worth spending a little time looking at half one and our full-year outlook. We recognize that the DB market in particular tends to be second half weighted and expect this year to be similar. Operationally, over half one, we were busier than ever, writing 14 DB transactions versus just nine last year. with these focused on the smaller scale transactions, our average transaction size was down and DB premiums only marginally ahead of half one. The new record deal we announced in July will clearly boost our year-to-date average transaction size significantly. Retail sales reduced as we maintained our pricing discipline in the face of increased competition in what has been a comparatively weak GIFL market, a factor of reducing customer pot sizes and also potentially customers delaying purchases, awaiting higher interest rates to boost their returns. We remain confident of the significant longer term potential in the retail market, driven by strong demographic trends and our ability to participate fully in this. Our strong pricing discipline has resulted in very low new business strain year-to-date, less than GBP 10 million from half one new business and the July partner deal combined. This leaves us with plenty of firepower to support new business in the second half, where we have multiple small, medium and large opportunities we are quoting on across our current GBP 5 billion DB pipeline. A number of larger deals in the pipeline provide optionality to either write on our balance sheet and or with partner capital. We continue to manage the business with the same new business margin and strain targets we announced at full-year 2021. Note that partnering may enable us to outperform these, particularly in new business strain. Moving to the results and focusing first on our growing IFRS underlying operating profit. Within this, new business profit of GBP 68 million was GBP 6 million lower from a combination of 3% lower sales and a slightly lower margin. On the right-hand side, we've illustrated the impact of the early July DB partner transaction. Adding that deal with an estimated new business profit of GBP 24 million to the reported figures demonstrates our very strong new business profit growth potential, as well as boosting new business margin in aggregate ahead of guidance. As David mentioned earlier, we assess each larger deal individually and DB partnering is an option available to us that can improve the pricing we can offer to the trustee and the profitability of the deal for us. Our in-force profit increased by GBP 10 million to GBP 54 million, as higher interest rates have lifted the return on our surplus assets. Wider credit spreads also boost our in-force returns, as we've explained before. In the absence of these factors, we would expect our in-force profits to grow more steadily each year as we grow the size of the business. Our finance costs peaked in 2021 and have reduced following the opportunistic RT1 refinancing exercise completed last September. Further savings are expected in the future as debt with historically high coupons matures. Other group companies and development expenditure were in line with expectations. Overall, this translates to a very healthy 15% increase in half one underlying operating profit to GBP 74 million, with the new DB partner deal providing a strong start to half two. Moving on to Solvency II on slide 16. Here we show the key components that make up our organic capital generation in half one 2022. As at full-year, we've included TMTP amortization as a separate line. As a reminder, this runs to 2031, with the gross cash from in-force continuing thereafter, reflecting the longer-term cash generation potential of the business. This is the source of cash that pays for our new business growth, day-to-day running expenses, and returns to capital providers. Excluding external factors over time, we expect the cash from in-force to increase steadily as the business grows. This can be distorted in any one year. In H1 2022, rising interest rates has led to a significant increase in the capital coverage ratio, principally reflecting a reduction in the SDR and risk margin. With these leading to a lower unwind of margins and TMTP amortization that then compresses the net cash from in-force release. Similar to IFRS, financing costs have reduced with group and other costs also reducing as the new business overrun was eliminated as promised in 2021. Despite the fall in in-force cash, organic capital generation available to support new business growth and returns to shareholders remained at a healthy GBP 42 million in H1 2022. As already discussed, we see huge potential for new business growth, in particular in DB. Hence, we expect to allocate a significant proportion of this emerging net cash from our in-force business to fund new business. Due to our strong pricing discipline, risk selection, and optimized asset origination, new business strain was only GBP 11 million in the first half, a fall of 1/3 for roughly the same amount of business as last year. We would expect capital invested in new business strain to be higher in the second half given the multiple attractive opportunities in our pipeline. We've had a great start to the second half as our largest deal to date has delivered positive day one capital generation, i.e., less than zero new business strain due to the DB partner fee income offsetting the new business strain for the business that we retain on our balance sheet. As a result, we still have most of the 2022 capital budget available to deploy in the second half. Net of new business strain, our underlying capital generation for half one 2022 grew by GBP 6 million to GBP 31 million. Our capital coverage ratio strengthened by 20 percentage points during the half to 184%, helped in particular by the rise in long-term risk-free rates over half one. I'll outline the moving parts in our latest slide, but we're obviously very comfortable at this level of capital coverage, in particular given current market uncertainties. Our capital position has demonstrated excellent resilience through the economic volatility arising from the pandemic. As you know, we've taken steps over the past two years to significantly reduce the sensitivity of our Solvency II balance sheet to residential house prices. This slide outlines our approach to managing the various risks on our balance sheet. Our asset strategy is first and foremost liability-led. With strong matching, as David outlined earlier, of our asset cash flows to the predictable cash flows from our annuity liabilities, both of which have similar durations of just over 10 years. We diversify our assets by geography, but fully hedge the currency risk. We also hedge any residual inflation risk that is not covered by inflation-linked assets. We choose to retain the credit default and house price risk associated with our assets as we believe we are well rewarded for this risk through the illiquidity premium we receive as part of the asset spread above risk-free. For credit defaults, in IFRS, we reserve for 64 basis points per annum upfront as a deduction in the investment yield. With the fundamental spread in Solvency II derived independently, but out of a similar order. This compares to a global 100 year average default rate of only 14 basis points per annum. Indeed, our own experience over the last 15 years, including the global financial crisis, is below one basis point per annum. Historically, illiquid assets have had even lower defaults than liquid assets, but there's less history here. As we increase our illiquid asset exposure, we're very careful to build in layers of structural protection that reduce risk for the debt holder. Having reduced our LTM exposure, we're now comfortable with the level of NNEG risk that we hold. On longevity, although it's still early days in the evolution of the data, we do expect later this year to start to incorporate our understanding of the increased mortality since COVID-19 into our future pricing and reserving assumptions. This brings us to interest rates. We actually have little economic exposure to interest rates through our business model, but the Solvency II requirements create sensitivity in our capital position, causing it to decline with lower rates and strengthen as rates rise. Historically, when interest rates were very low, we hedged to protect the Solvency II position. As rates have risen and our solvency position has strengthened, we've adjusted our hedging to reduce the IFRS and economic cost. This next slide illustrates the material impacts from our interest rate hedging to below the line IFRS profits over the last few years. The good news is that since 2018, when we strengthened the hedging in place for Solvency II, the cumulative IFRS impact is only GBP 57 million, just 4 pence per share. Large gains in 2019 and 2020 as rates fell have been offset by equivalent losses in 2021 and H1 2022 as rates rose. As I mentioned earlier, we've actively reduced our interest rate hedging over H1 2022, with a chart on the bottom left showing that our IFRS sensitivity is now much lower. Indeed, since half year, we've reduced our hedging still further, which will be expected to more than halve this sensitivity. The major Solvency II sensitivities are shown on the right. With lower hedging, the solvency ratio has become more sensitive to changes in interest rates, with a 50 basis point fall leading to a 7 percentage point reduction, which will have grown slightly as we reduced hedging post half year. A 50 basis point rise at half year would have resulted in a 9 percentage point increase. These sensitivities ignore any impact from debt restrictions which can arise as rates rise. There's little change in the very low sensitivity to credit spreads. During half one 2022, we've seen an encouraging stability in ratings across our investment portfolio, with the net impact from upgrades and downgrades over half one being a small positive. In ratio terms, our property sensitivity has gone up by 1 percentage point to 12%. However, this is a function of the lower SCR and higher capital ratio, with the actual sensitivity in pounds terms reducing by 10% as lower new business backing continues to gradually desensitize the solvency balance sheet. On this slide, we show the evolution of our tangible net assets and Solvency II positions over H1, illustrating the significant impact from rising interest rates on both. On the TNAV, the interest rate hedging program has led to a significant economic loss in the first half, but the effect will be much reduced in future now that we've recalibrated our hedging program. With lower sensitivities, we expect future NAV growth to be driven far more by the operating performance than by volatility from below-the-line investment variances. By contrast, in Solvency II, rises in interest rates have caused a very large 12 percentage point increase in the coverage ratio, as the SCR has fallen materially. The ratio has also been augmented by organic capital generation and other economic movements, including portfolio management actions and other economics, which together have increased the ratio by 8 percentage points. This level of capital gives us a very solid platform from which to continue to grow our new business as we execute on the opportunities available to us in 2022 and beyond. With that, I'll hand back to David. Right. Thanks. Great. Thanks for that, Andy. Just a few concluding remarks from me. Turn to slide 21. As I mentioned, our business model has been configured to provide sustainable growth. We're being disciplined in our pricing and risk selection, both on the asset and liability side, to ensure we write low-strain, profitable new business. This means we're generating a sufficient quantity of organic capital to fund attractive new business growth. It's a self-financing model that delivers attractive rates of return for shareholders and will support a growing dividend. We have a unique opportunity to build substantial value for shareholders via the DB market opportunity, where there is significant untapped potential for Just. All the ingredients for us to be successful in that space are there. These are a strong set of results that give us confidence in achieving our 2022 ambitions. With the opportunities we see in our business, we are reiterating our target to deliver 15% growth in underlying operating profit per annum on average over the medium term. To sum up with some final conclusions, we've consistently exceeded the promises we made during the last three years by being innovative, focused, and disciplined. As we move our focus to delivering our profit pledge, these same behaviors will be critical. Our DB capability is increasing. We have our biggest ever new business pipeline, a strong franchise value in attractive customer segments, and an innovative proprietary service that's helping us to win business. Our investment portfolio is expanding and diversifying, and as I mentioned, we're on track to originate around GBP 1 billion in other illiquids this year. We are confident in delivering profitable growth from a vibrant DB market. We believe this is a winning formula and one which will ensure we fulfill our purpose: To help people achieve a better later life. Putting all this together, we're very optimistic and excited about what the future holds. With that, we'll now invite questions. We'll start in the room, and if you could just raise your hand and wait for the microphone. For those of you who've joined on the webcast, just click on the hand symbol and that will let us know you'd like to ask a question. Great. I think so first I saw was Mandeep, so let's go with him. Morning, everyone. Thank you for the presentation and for taking my questions. Three from me, please. The first one is on new business strain. Andy mentioned that the low strain in the deals and the deals year-to-date provide additional flexibility for the types of deals that can be undertaken for the rest of the year. Are you able to provide any details on how these higher strain deals are different than the deals you've written historically? And what are the advantages of writing these types of deals versus what you've already done before? The second one is on the pipeline of GBP 5 billion, and what is the timing of this pipeline in terms of when they expect to come to market or complete? And how often does it refresh? I mean, how much more deals do you expect to add before the end of the year? Then the split in this pipeline between sub-GBP 250 million and your new kind of target segment of above GBP 1 billion, that would be interesting too. Then the final question, I think Andy mentioned that the understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on mortality rates is gonna be incorporated into pricing and reserving. We've seen UK mortality rates pick up materially over Q2. I was wondering if you could provide any insight into what you're expecting the impacts to be on mortality for the new to population of Just Group. Great. Thanks, Mandeep. Two questions on relating to DB, which I'll pick up. Andy, if you could pick up the impact of COVID on mortality rates, please. In terms of, I think just thematically, the fact that we've used so little capital in the first half of the year, and then we've written a capital generative deal to kick off the second half of the year, what that does is just sets us up really well for a super busy second half of the year. I think what you know we're kind of highlighting is that that means there are some transactions that will have slightly higher strain, but deliver very good profit margin. They'll always be subject to our IRR thresholds, but sometimes there is a trade-off on some of the longer duration schemes, particular types of indexation, which sometimes drives up the capital strain a bit, but delivers long-term value, which flows through into IFRS margin. In the round, it's just giving us more flexibility to make sure we hit that 8% profit margin and less than 2.5% capital strain guidance. That's what's going on there. In terms of GBP 5 billion pipeline, it's actually been like that for a couple of months now. To your question, how often does it get refreshed? Every week. Every week, new deals come in. We have a triage meeting on a Monday morning, and we decide which ones we're gonna allocate resources to and which ones we're not gonna allocate resources to. That GBP 5 billion is just the ones that have gone through our triage process, and we've allocated team members to price it up. It's getting refreshed all the time. I don't have a figure off the top of my head what's sub 250, greater than 250, but there's a significant proportion in each. It isn't skewed materially in one direction or the other. I think the thing which is both very refreshing but also very tiring for the DB team is that it just keeps coming. They have dialogue open with the EBCs, the big EBCs, about what's coming down the track because pension schemes need to do a lot of preparatory work before they even put it out to tender. To put it out to quote, they've got to clean up the data. They've got to check all the legals. The EBCs who help them with that preparatory stage, they have a kind of a lead time of, you know, several months as to what's coming down the track. That is what feeds into the very bullish statements now in what, early August, about what 2023 is gonna look like. The Hymans Robertson survey I mentioned was going around all the industry participants, and they're confident, it's Hymans, judgment, not ours, but they're confident that 2023 could be the biggest year yet. It's a very positive picture, Andy. On COVID-19, I guess the mortality impacts. We can't give you an indication today in terms of where we expect that to go. There are two things that we're looking at. One is the actual experience, and what you've actually seen is obviously heavier experienced mortality over the last two years. Actually, it got lighter in the first quarter, but has now gone back to heavier again. We're sort of effectively trying to flow that in, but it's difficult because there is no long-term trend established yet that you can start to build in. Yeah, we are seeing, you know, and believing that that will have an impact as we go forward. We'll step gradually into that in terms of its likely impact on our overall longevity. The other area that we're looking at is improvements where you know we're still back on CMI 2019. You know it's likely that we will look to move to update that to either 2020 or 2021, probably more likely 2021, later on this year. There should be a small benefit associated with doing that. Thanks, Andy. I think, yeah, Farooq, I think I saw you next. Hi there. Thank you very much. Farooq Hanif from JP Morgan. You've got this sort of tension here between massive demand that seems from pension schemes and larger schemes now coming to you, which you can now quote in great reinsurance pricing, which is giving you a capital strain, positive capital strain, or negative, sorry, capital strain. Also, you know, your dividend, which I think has helped people sort of understand your value. Mm-hmm. How do you think about all those three? I mean, is your preference now, look, we just need to grow because this is the time to sort of make hay and really, you know, the dividend will go up, but it's something that's a delayed outlook. If you could just talk about that. Then second question is on reinsurance pricing. Why is it so good? How long will that last? Thank you. Maybe I'll have a go at both of those. Although, Andy, I'd be happy for you to chip in on the first as well. Again, I won't repeat what I just said, but clearly it's a very strong DB market at the moment. As we've commented on in previous sessions before, and it's in the appendix to the slides, this isn't a short-term thing. You know, the industry projections are GBP 650 billion of DB transactions over the next decade. There's a huge, as I said in my comments, unprecedented opportunity here. For us, while there is delivering good margins, really attractive IRRs, it seems like a very, not just rational, but exciting opportunity for shareholder capital to take advantage of that market, opportunity. That's a general comment I think you apply across the industry. What particularly then rings true for us is we've got huge untapped potential, and that's really we're trying to bring out. We've held back because of our focus on capital in the past, but having got such a strong capital position in place now and that self-financing model, we can now devote our attentions to more and more growth. That, for us, is why first order of play is take advantage of that growth opportunity at really attractive IRRs for shareholders. In parallel, as we've already said, we will commit to growing the dividend. We'll not put a figure on that because first order of play is try and take a really good advantage of the market opportunity. Don't know if you have anything you want to add to that, Andy. The only thing I would probably add is just that natural dynamic of, you know, we want to be consistently growing over time and effectively, you know, growing our new business then grows the in-force that then gives us, you know, more capital generation to then fund more new business the following year. That's what we set out at full-year 2021. That's very much the aim to be able to demonstrate consistent growth across the business going forward. On reinsurance, just to break that into two components, just to clarify for everybody's benefit. You know, longevity reinsurance has been an established part of DB market for many years. You have reinsurers who, like everybody, are looking for opportunities to grow, and a lot of those historically were overweight in protection, but underweight in longevity risk. So they've helped fuel the growth of the DB market. What we're now seeing is a definite increase in an appetite, particularly of international reinsurers to participate more fully in the DB market, not just longevity risk, but also taking on asset risk. Yeah. So being putting real capital to work in the sector. The challenge they've got is that if you wanna offer buy-ins or buyouts, you need to be a PRA-regulated company. We've talked about that previously, about the barrier that creates and that's a very long, expensive, and complex process. They're very interested in partnering with players like us who've got a lot of untapped potential and can offer them indirect access to the market via reinsurance. That's really dynamics going on there. They see a huge growth opportunity, and this being the most pragmatic way to play into it, deploy capital into it. Obviously you'd have to ask them rather than us, but we're seeing very, very positive indications. Yeah. Andreas, just beat Barry to the draw. Yes. Thank you. Andreas Fernandez from Peel Hunt. In a rising interest rate environment and widening spread environment, and a competitive market at the same time, how much of that liquidity premium or the widening spread of the corporate bond are you able to keep on your own book to sort of boost the in-force? How much are you actually passing on to your DB clients or individual annuitants, and actually, you know, you're just retaining the same spread you had before? The second question is actually going back to slide number 10, where you show the new business as liability cash flow matching. That's a new business perspective outlook on how you're gonna earn your spreads on illiquids going forward. If I look at your back book today, what are the big differences? Is it purely just now corporate bonds and lifetime mortgages? It's just a pink and sort of orange chart all the way through, or can you incorporate more of the colorful bits as you reinvest over time? Thank you. Great. Thanks. I'll pick up the first one, and I'll let Andy think about the color chart, the second one. It's a really good question. Undoubtedly, in a time when credit spreads are widening, the available yields to investors are widening, some of that does get passed on to pension schemes in the form of DB pricing. How much of that, frankly, will vary from case to case and market dynamics at the time. All I can say for us is that what we've seen is that it's translated into very low capital strain for us and very, very attractive IRRs, well in excess of our mid-teen IRR guidance. I think it's natural. You will always see some of that get passed on to pension schemes, but it's not inevitable that all of it will. Andy, do you wanna talk about how the in-force differs from the new business on the colorings? Certainly. Yes. I was wondering whether I should get my crayons out on that. But no, I think it. You know, you're right that that's very much sort of the new business chart. If we drew an equivalent one for our in-force, you would definitely see slightly higher LTM profile at the bottom of that in terms of the bulge at the bottom. And actually slightly lower in terms of the other illiquid. So if you looked back, you know, three or four years, we probably weren't doing very many illiquids. We had largely LTMs and more vanilla corporate bonds. What you see now is probably more colors as we in terms of new business, in terms of backing the new business. We're gradually building the illiquid proportion of the in-force. That's partly coming through each year of new business. Also we're expecting to write GBP 1 billion of illiquids this year. A portion of that will actually go onto the in-force because it's not needed to back new business. That's right. I think roughly 12% of the in-force portfolio is now in other illiquids. That kind of those other asset classes are gradually increasing in prominence over time. Ultimately, we expect that to get to about 25%, but that'll be multi-year journey. Barry, did you want to ask your questions? A few questions. First of all, in terms of GIFL market, you know, you suggested that it's been impacted by expectation of rising interest rates and better annuity rates going forward. Do you think it'll be impacted by increased cost of living in the UK, whether or not that will have an impact on the GIFL market? Secondly, you've given a guide for the impact of a 10% fall in the housing market, which I think is 12% in terms of coverage ratio. Should we extrapolate that for a 15%-20% fall, or is it different? The last question I had was in terms of the outlook for equity release as a product, going forward in a falling housing market, which we could be entering. Just wonder whether or not that would have an impact on your sourcing of long-term assets. Thank you. I'll pick up the question on GIFL and LTMs. Andy, if you could pick up the property for one, please. GIFL's hard. It's hard to be really precise as to, you know, how obviously lots of individuals are gonna behave in what is an untested time. You know, when was the last time we had rampant inflation like this? I think the one thing we feel will come through is that this period of volatility and uncertainty will make financial advisors think about their advice model a bit more carefully and will place greater value on the importance of guarantees. That's not a prediction for the second half of 2022. That's more how it plays into their advice over the longer term. That's particularly relevant given fewer people annuitize at age 65 now. They tend to leave their money or put them onto drawdown platforms, where actually not a lot is drawn down. The assets are left exposed to the financial markets. Ultimately, those customers need an accumulation strategy. At the moment, there's roughly GBP 250 billion-GBP 300 billion of assets on those platforms. There aren't really, I would call, very sophisticated accumulation strategies developed for those customers yet. Those are going to have to be developed over the next few years. We've got a proposition in that area. This period of uncertainty and people seeing real incomes eroded will make people think more carefully about managing the resilience of their retirement portfolio that can really last them for the rest of their lives. That for me is the kind of the big takeaway from this experience. On lifetime mortgages, equity release mortgages, the question from Barry is, in a falling market, will that impact demand, and what will that mean for us? I think it's a possibility. There may be certainly a little bit less of people rebroking as well of lifetime mortgages because rates aren't falling like they were. Really, we still fundamentally are a country where people have undersaved for pensions, and they've got a lot of money in their property. There's over GBP 2 trillion of equity for over 60-year-olds in the UK. We think people will continue to use their property assets to help with their retirement. The market's been incredibly strong in the first half. It's been up over 30%, lifetime mortgage market. Of course, our demand for LTMs have come down significantly over time. I was just talking about how we're more on other illiquids now than LTMs. As a result, we're voluntarily ceding some market share in the LTM market. We're less concerned about that, and certainly a lot less concerned than we would have been four or five years ago. In terms of the I guess the housing sensitivity, you know, to an extent, your question is almost sort of, well, how are we thinking about housing? I think, you know, if you look at the current economic climate, you know, clearly higher interest rates could make mortgage repayments more difficult for people, so that could put pressure on the housing market. You probably also point to the fact that we're still not building enough houses, so ultimately, you know, that I think the demand versus supply will work in a positive way. If we do end up with higher inflation going forward, then that's quite positive in terms of that ultimately boosting wages and that will, we believe, flow through into house prices. In terms of our own stock, you know, we are not at all concerned around the overall security of our own portfolio where, you know, the average loan-to-value is about 36%, I think, in terms of the overall portfolio. That's very much sort of unchanged over the last two or three years. That's very positive in terms of where we are. As we know, the solvency rules then create this sort of volatility within the solvency ratio. You know, that is at 12%. For a 10% fall, yes, you could probably extrapolate that reasonably straight line if you had a higher fall. You know, we're not, certainly not expecting there to be higher falls than that. You know, who can tell? Oliver? Thank you. Oliver Steel, Deutsche Bank. Two questions. The first is on debt. I think Tier 2 and Tier 3 is capped, and you've got about GBP 80 million of unutilized Tier 2, Tier 3. How are you thinking about that? Because I mean it sounds as if you can keep your strain relatively low, particularly with partnership deals. By implication that debt is not really required. I think historically you talk about replacing expensive debt with cheaper new debt, but that's a bit harder these days. I'm wondering why you don't just pay back early some of the existing debt. The second question, nice and simple. Slide 16. Can you just talk about the outlook for group and other costs over the next, say, six to 18 months? Okay. Probably two for you, Andy. Options on debt and the outlook for group and other costs. Yeah. In terms of debt, you're right. We have now got around a GBP 80 million restriction across that Tier 2, Tier 3 bucket of debt. Largely a factor of rising interest rates reducing the SCR. So that's where we are at the moment. Now, clearly some of that debt as we roll forward naturally rolls off over the next two or three years. So sort of 2025 is certainly when we start to kick into that debt rolling off. You know, that's probably the point at which you would definitely look to adjust that if we've still got that restriction in place. As you've said, you know, naturally over time, we would expect our SCR to gradually grow. If our interest rates rise any further, then, you know, clearly that's helpful for our solvency ratio, but it does create more of a debt restriction. That's something we are sort of mindful of in terms of how we manage moving forwards. In terms of the group and other costs, the big reduction you see in that was largely the fact that last year the new business overrun was part of the GBP 18 million last year. That's dropped away. I think you could take the 13 as a reasonable sort of run rate, in terms of those group and other costs. Thanks, Andy. Any more? Yes, please. Hi. Qi Lin from Barclays. Thanks for taking my question. One question. The new business margin is 7.8%, but 8.4% including the partnering deal. Could you give me a bit of color on the dynamics around new business margin and then lower strain and the DB volume? How does it interact with each other? Yeah. Thanks. Andy, do you want to? If the primary focus on the margin, do you want to describe? Yeah. How we're thinking about that? Certainly. I guess firstly, in terms of the 7.8%, you know, before we add the partner deal on. If you look back to last year, you know, our half one margin tends to be slightly lower than the half two, mainly from our costs are broadly sort of flat across the year, whereas our business comes in more in the second half. We have a lower cost loading in the second half that improves the margin sort of naturally in that second half. You can imagine that dynamic should play through this year as well. Obviously when we add the partner deal on, you know, that's improved that margin. The key point to note there is that, you know, we've only taken approximately half that partner deal onto our balance sheet. So, you know, the margin is actually into double figures in terms of that partner deal. So that's sort of the positive that we see, that's boosted the first half margin when we add the partner deal on. Ultimately, yeah, the key on profit margin and capital strain is about maintaining a pricing discipline. That's something which we've obviously been very focused on for several years now. As we look into a very strong second half of the year, it's something we're gonna make sure we maintain. Did I see a hand go up? No. I think you're set. Hi, good morning. Guillaume Desqueyroux for Sanlam. Two questions if I may. You were very helpful to give us a bit of explanation of your team time allocation when it comes to DB between the bulk quotation service and the repeat business. On the latter, if I may, you said that you engage mainly on exclusive basis for those transactions. Can you articulate the benefits on the margin compared to a normal original transaction, just to understand the benefit on your side, I guess. Mm-hmm. Maybe on the business train, actually, I don't know. The second one, if I may, is on this move with your partners to the larger segment. That's definitely a credit space, so if you have this pipeline, you may not be the only one watching the same pipeline. The price competition should be quite or getting harder, let's say. Is your partner just an option when you enter this specific segment or the price will anyway drive the competition, and then you have to go with those to this solution? Thanks. Okay. I'll have a go at both of those. So first of all, the repeat business, we've done, I'd say 42 repeat transactions. In the early days, so going back a few years ago, often those were not exclusive. But as we built our reputation and built our franchise in that small to medium end of the market, and we've built that's with the EBCs, that's with independent trustees who sit on a number of pension schemes. They've been more and more comfortable to transact with us on an exclusive basis. They get advised there'll be a target price set. It isn't just we kind of turn up and pitch any old number, but they will have a target price. What we're seeing is that because we've made it a very efficient process for both sides, and because it is an overlooked part of the market a lot of the time, particularly when it's really busy, there is, you know, they're not gonna get greedy with their target prices. As a result, you get to an outcome that is, you know, genuinely a win-win from both sides. We get it done quickly, they get certainty, at a time when maybe they're not getting a lot of attention. And typically, as you're seeing now, the market's really busy, it's when it's a good time to transact. It's hard to put a number on that. As I say, they're advised, so it's not like, you know, they're getting a bad deal, but we do definitely eke out slightly better margins and returns. In terms of larger segment, you're absolutely right, that's a more crowded space, and that's why it's really important that you maintain your pricing discipline. To put it in context, our market share in that GBP 250 million-GBP 1 billion segment has just been 2%. You know, we don't have to do a lot to significantly add to our top line there. You just need to do an extra deal or two a year, and that will really add to our top line. First it's all about pricing discipline. How do we partner in that space? To give an example of the one we did in July, we did price that entirely to keep it on our own balance sheet. That was very much an option. Not just an option, but that was actually our default. In parallel, we got a partner to price it up, and they came in relatively late in the process with a price that worked and improved the overall dynamics for us, so we went with that. That's why I described in my comments as you should view it very much as optionality rather than as a must-have. Clearly it's got very nice upside if you can make them work. I think because it's a busy day, we've answered the questions online. Of course, we did. The questions were of high quality in the room, so they covered all the bases. I know you've got a very busy day, so I'll just leave it there. Thank you so much for your time and attention and enjoy the rest of the day and week. Thank you.