Good morning and a warm welcome both to those of you in the room and to those joining online. I'm Michelle Moore, Group Strategy and Investor Relations Director. To start, a few housekeeping points to those of you in the room. Please make sure you've turned your devices to silent, and in the event the fire alarm sounds, colleagues will guide you to the nearest exit. The normal forward-looking statements apply. Our running order for today will be as follows. António will open with a summary of our first half results and an update on the progress we are making in delivering against our strategy. Jeff will cover the financial results in more detail, and then António will make closing comments before opening to Q&A, at which point he will be joined on stage by Jeff and the CEOs of our three businesses to take your questions. António, over to you. Thank you, Michelle. Good morning. Welcome, everyone. It's great to have you here with us. We've had a great first half of the year with strong earnings and growth and continued momentum in the execution of our strategy. Let me first take you through the headline numbers. Our core operating EPS is up 9%. That's at the top end of our 6%- 9% range. Our core operating profit is up 6% at GBP 859 million. Our OSG is up 3% to GBP 279 million. We continue to have a very strong balance sheet with a Solvency II coverage ratio of 217%. We are delivering more to shareholders with a 2% increase in our interim dividend per share. Our GBP 500 million share buyback is now nearly complete. These are great numbers, but the progress on our strategy is even more encouraging. Last year, we outlined a strategy to be a growing, simpler, better connected L &G which becomes more capital light over time. We've been busy executing that strategy to deliver sustainable growth across our three businesses, sharper strategic focus, and enhanced returns for shareholders. I'm particularly positive about the growth potential for each of our businesses. Last December, Andrew Kail presented a deep dive on our largest business, Institutional Retirement. A month and a half ago, Eric Adler presented his vision to grow our asset management business. Today, we are announcing that our next deep dive into retail with Laura Mason will be on the 23rd of October. Now, looking at the past six months, here are the highlights. First, sustainable growth. I n Institutional Retirement, w e have had good volumes at low strain and we have a very good pipeline. In asset management, we have seen a step change with positive revenue momentum and a further increase in our average revenue margin. In retail, we've had strong workplace DC flows up more than 20% compared to last year. We have a sharper strategic focus with the sale of the U.S. production business and partnership with Meiji Yasuda. We're getting on with the disposals in our Corporate Investments Unit. We have announced the acquisition of Proprium Capital Partners and a new partnership with Blackstone. Earlier this year, Katie Worgan joined us as the Group COO and she's already driving operational improvements and cost discipline across the group. We are on track to deliver our three-year target and return more than GBP 5 billion to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share buybacks. Now let me give you a bit more detail on each one of the businesses, starting with Institutional Retirement. As you can see, PRT continues to grow strongly with over GBP 5 billion written in the first half of the year. You can see there the GBP 5.2 billion. Here in the U.K., we have written new business at attractive margins with a new business strain of 1%, continuing basically the capital-light investment strategy that we deployed last year. Our international business is down on the prior year, given a slower start to the U.S. market. In any case, this business tends to be weighted towards the second half, actually. In fact, since the 30th of June, we have won three U.S. PRT deals, including a $285 million transaction which we won just last night and which therefore is not included in the GBP 5.2 billion. Well done Andrew and the U.S. team. Looking forward, I'm extremely optimistic about the prospects for our PRT business. Client demand remains high with GBP 42 billion of an active pipeline here in the U.K., and you can see there including nine schemes that are over GBP 1 billion. Now thinking of the markets, we continue to see significant interest, as you've seen, in the sector, which for me validates its attractiveness. PRT will continue to be a key driver of our growth and deliver reliable earnings for many decades to come, you can see on the chart. From now to 2028, we are confident we can write volumes in line with the guidance that we gave you. If you remember, that was GBP 10 billion-GBP 13 billion per year or basically GBP 50 billion-GBP 65 billion over five years. I said that this can be lumpy and we will continue to be disciplined on pricing and profitability. Beyond 2028, the market will continue to grow with more than GBP 500 billion of inflows over the following 15 years as the percentage of insured DB assets continues to increase. I showed you that chart before where more and more of the total DB assets in the market continue to, the percentage continues to come to insurance companies and increase. What does that mean for us? This means that our profits will continue to grow for more than two decades as the volume that we write outpaces annuity outflows. Importantly, we have greater capacity for portfolio optimization. This picture here is only the U.K. We anticipate even higher volumes in the U.S. and potentially further opportunities in new PRT markets like Japan. Finally, as the DC market matures and the demand for guaranteed retirement income increases, the retail annuities market will continue to grow for decades and decades. That is a healthy market. Why do we win in this market? Here are the five competitive advantages that we have in this business. By the way, this is the same slide that Andrew presented last December at our Institutional Retirement Investor Deep Dive. There are five key areas. First, our scale and origination capabilities allow us to price competitively. We do this in two ways: through our own asset management capabilities and also through partnerships like the one we announced with Blackstone. Second, we have a strong brand and a track record built over 35 years of writing PRT. Third, we have the strength of our asset management relationships. As the largest asset manager in the U.K., over 80% of our PRT volumes come from our own asset management clients. Fourth, we offer bespoke solutions for the whole market, both large clients and small schemes. Lastly, we support these clients through high quality service. There are a series of live deals right now where the trustees are visiting our client service teams in Hove to see this in action. Over more than three decades we have experienced major swings in the global economy and market changes. We have consistently written PRT business and made money in all market conditions. I am confident we will continue to be a leader in this space. In asset management, t his last six months were a clear turning point with real revenue momentum. Our annualized net new revenue, you can see it there at GBP 15 million, is really encouraging and higher than what we have generated over the past two years combined. This is consistent, by the way, with the run rate required for our GBP 100 million-GBP 150 million cumulative four year target. One particular highlight for me is the growth of U.K. DC. For the first time, our U.K. DC revenue generates more revenues than our U.K. DB business. U.K. DC is now bigger than U.K. DB from an asset management perspective. We have continued to grow our average revenue margin, if you remember what I've said to you before now, from 8 to 9 basis points, which is now close to double digits, which we announced our target, we announced just in June. An important part of that margin improvement in this six months is the growth in private markets, now at GBP 65 billion and on track to exceed GBP 85 billion by 2028. This growth is on the back of good fundraising in private markets. One year on, our private markets excess fund has grown to GBP 1.6 billion. We've also had a series of other private market launches you can see there. I'm actually particularly excited about the one before last bullet point there, which is our new Digital Infrastructure Fund. Good growth, we've turned a corner. How are we doing this? This growth is the result of deliberate investments that we've made in the business. As Eric said at the Asset Management Deep Dive, we are doing this in one of three ways. Either we build, or we buy, or we partner. You can see the specific examples of that momentum on the slide. In terms of build, we have been growing our active fixed income and climate transition strategies organically, in addition to the Digital Infrastructure Fund I just mentioned. In terms of buy, over there in the middle, our investments in Taurus and Proprium Capital Partners complement our existing U.K. real estate capabilities. In the space of just 12 months, we've gone from a primarily U.K. real estate manager to having now a global real estate platform that we can grow and leverage. We are partnering with Blackstone to create public and private hybrid products. It's worth actually spending a minute more on Blackstone because this is a broader relationship. It cuts across all of L&G, not just asset management. Before I do that, I'd like to say that our thoughts are with the Blackstone team following the devastating news that one of their partners was killed last week. As you saw in their New York office, I spoke to both Steve Schwarzman and Jon Gray and I know this was the darkest day in their history. We've got to know the Blackstone team really well over this last year and have really enjoyed the interactions that led to the announcement. We are extremely positive about the potential for the partnership, which covers two main areas you can see on the slide. On the left hand side, first, in asset management, as I've just mentioned, we will create hybrid products for our clients, bringing together L&G 's active fixed income, multi-asset, and U.K. private credit capabilities with the best-in-class market capabilities of Blackstone. We bring all of this together and we will then distribute these hybrid products to our existing clients, but also target new geographies and new segments like Wealth. On the right-hand side for our annuity businesses, this partnership gives us access to Blackstone scale and therefore to an attractive pipeline of matching adjustment eligible assets, predominantly in U.S. private credit. These assets complement our own existing asset origination capabilities and basically they increase our price competitiveness and profitability. If you put the two opportunities together, we have an ambition to generate $20 billion of business and I'm looking forward to what we will deliver for many years to come, starting in the second half of this year. Finally, retail. Jeff will cover the performance of our different retail businesses shortly. I wanted to focus particularly on workplace, which as you know, is one of the most exciting growth areas in the market and of our strategy. We now have more than GBP 100 billion of assets under administration. This was driven by GBP 4 billion—you can see in the slide—GBP 4 billion of net flows in the first half, which is a 21% increase compared to 2024. Overall, t his means that we have close to GBP 200 billion of DC assets. This is across asset management and retail, not just the part that you see here, but across both businesses. That's circa 25% of the total DC market in the U.K. As you also know, the DC market is projected to grow. It will be GBP 1.4 trillion by 2033 and we are really well- positioned to take advantage of that growth. We were one of the first to provide access to private markets as part of our DC default fund. We were the first provider early in the year to connect to the government's Pension Dashboard, which is a tool that increases transparency for DC members and therefore improves engagement with the members. I'm very positive about this and we will tell you more about the prospects for this business and its profitability at the investor deep dive on the 23rd of October. Stepping back, all of this means that we are on track to return more than GBP 5 billion to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share buybacks. Here are the different components on the slide. First, our dividend, which is growing at 2%, accounts for GBP 3.6 billion of the total over the next three years. Second, the GBP 500 million share buyback I announced back in March at our full year results is now 90% complete. Third, after the major student transaction completes, we intend to return GBP 1 billion of the GBP 1.8 billion of proceeds. If you add all of that together, you get to GBP 5.1 billion. On top of that, you have the ongoing buybacks, which is that last little box. Overall, we are doing exactly what we said we would do, which is to return more to shareholders. I will now hand over to Jeff, who will walk you through the financial highlights, and then I'll come back for some closing remarks and to answer your questions. Jeff. Thank you António and good morning everyone. Our businesses continue to grow and deliver increased earnings and enhance value creation for shareholders. Core operating profit is up 6% to GBP 859 million, driven by the predictable release from our growing store of future profit and the benefit of increased back book optimization on our annuity portfolio. Growth in core operating EPS is 9% and as António mentioned earlier, this is at the top end of our three-year target range and capital generation is up 3% against the prior year with the expectation of higher growth for the full year. The solvency coverage ratio of 217% remains strong and reflects the impact of the dividends and buyback in the first half of the year. Now moving on to the performance of our businesses, Institutional Retirement operating profit is up 11% to GBP 618 million. Our growing and maturing annuity book is driving a larger release from the CSM and risk adjustment, resulting in increasing and predictable profits. Back book optimization has generated over GBP 150 million of profit across our annuity portfolio, which we believe is a sustainable level for the medium term. This reflects greater capacity to rotate into direct investments as we continue to write new business using a gilt-based investment strategy as well as taking advantage of volatility in the market to switch out of those gilts. Investment variance largely reflects modeling improvements and an action to optimize our reinsurance. This has added GBP 139 million to our store of future profits but generated day one adverse investment variance in the same way as longevity releases. This effect will unwind as the CSM and risk adjustment release into profit over time. As António mentioned earlier, we have made a strong start to the year with GBP 3.4 billion of total new business completed and a further GBP 1.7 billion in exclusivity. In the U.K. we continue to optimize pricing with new business investment strategies that adapt to current market conditions, delivering a high return on capital deployed and a new business strain of around 1%. New business margins remain attractive at 7.1% and the greater capacity for back book optimization increases the future upside potential as we have already demonstrated this year. In asset management, fee revenues were up 2% in the year despite lower average AUM as our conscious shift to higher revenue margin business takes effect. The GBP 15 million of annualized net new revenue demonstrates the significant progress we have made. Total asset management operating profit includes GBP 79 million from our balance sheet investments. This is broadly flat on the prior year. A lower valuation uplift on Pemberton is offset by higher returns from a growing portfolio as we warehouse assets to support future growth strategies and seed commitments to catalyze new funding. Over the past five years, on average, valuation uplifts on Pemberton have contributed less than GBP 50 million per annum to operating profit, and Pemberton currently makes up less than 30% of the GBP 1.4 billion portfolio. Around 50% of the GBP 124 million investment variance reflects unrealized mark to market impacts versus the expected return in operating profit. The remainder is from exceptional items related to organizational restructuring and the write-down of a small number of assets which did not meet the criteria to continue funding. Across the group, we are taking a disciplined approach to both cost management and investment, and this can be seen in asset management. We continue to keep underlying growth below inflation, demonstrating cost control. In turn, we are considered about our investment spend as we focus on opportunities that we are confident can generate higher revenues and support our growth strategy. Our cost income ratio has marginally increased from 74% as at the end of last year to 75% as we have chosen to deploy GBP 13 million of incremental investment spend d espite market volatility. W e remain confident that with continued cost discipline and revenue growth from the investment we are making, we can reduce our cost income ratio to below 70% by 2028. In retail, operating profit increased by 3% to GBP 237 million, with predictable earnings from our store of future profit and the benefit of back book optimization. Lower volumes in retail annuities follow exceptional performance in 2024 where we materially increased our market share, resulting in record volumes. We do expect continued growth and we are confident in our ability to maintain a leading market share. Protection g ross written premiums are up 4%, driven by a particularly strong first half for our group protection business, and our retail protection margins continue to grow. Our workplace DC net flows are up 21% to GBP 4 billion and as António said, our total assets have now passed GBP 100 billion, generating revenue in both retail and asset management. We will continue to invest in our DC proposition to ensure we maintain our competitive position and gain operational leverage as we scale. The compounding effect of winning DC new business today will be a sustainable source of future growth. Our Solvency II coverage ratio remains strong with surplus of GBP 8 billion, notwithstanding the payments of the largest part of the full dividend and allowing for the GBP 500 million buyback. A coverage ratio of 217% excludes 6% in respect of temporary impacts from non-retained U.S. business that will unwind when the transaction with Meiji Yasuda completes. This is predominantly new business strain on U.S. protection and U.S. dollar hedges on the proceeds of the transaction. The transaction remains on track to close in 2025. As a reminder, when we announced the sale back in February, we said we would generate a further GBP 1.2 billion of capital and it would increase the solvency ratio by around 7 percentage points after the anticipated share buyback. This is on top of today's 217%. Now this slide looks at OSG in a bit more detail. In the first half, we generated GBP 729 million, growing by 3%. We anticipate this growth to be higher for the full year, reflecting the timing of some items in 2024 being more weighted to the first half. This includes management actions of greater than GBP 300 million, which are sustainable in the medium term following increased confidence in back book optimization. In 2025, we expect full year OSG to broadly cover the cost of the dividend and new business strain. At the same time, the OSG per share will be growing at greater than 5%, creating headroom over the 2% DPS growth. This will be further enhanced by the additional buyback we intend to complete next year. This buyback would increase OSG per share by over 9% and in absolute terms reduce the cost of the dividend by around GBP 100 million. As our core businesses continue to grow and we execute on management actions, this gap will widen further, providing greater capacity for investment, for future growth or greater returns to shareholders. Our strong balance sheet and growing surplus generation make us well- positioned to capitalize on the opportunities in each of our core markets as we move into what we expect will be a busy second half. I will now hand back to António for closing comments. Thank you, Jeff. We have delivered great financial performance this first six months and I'm pleased with the execution of our strategy. We have a clear vision to become a growing, simpler, better connected business. As we deliver that strategy, we will become more capital light. We have good growth momentum, as we've just discussed, in each one of our businesses. On the 23rd of October, we will run the last of our three deep dives on retail with Laura Mason. What will we cover in October? You can see it here on the slide. First, the growth potential for each of our retail businesses, particularly given the growing market opportunity across DC and savings. Second, that we have a series of well-positioned businesses with clear propositions to address growing customer needs, and finally make the case that we can generate good economic returns that improve as we scale and leverage the synergies with the rest of L&G. Now in terms of outlook, we all know we are living through complex geopolitical and macroeconomic environments and we all need to navigate that. I'm sure you do that in your businesses as well. Against that backdrop, I am confident in the immediate prospects for the business and their long-term growth trajectories. If you look at each one of our three businesses, you have them on the slide. In Institutional Retirement, we have an active pipeline that I described earlier, which we expect to convert over the coming months, and importantly, we have increased capacity for back book optimization as Jeff just mentioned. I n asset management, the recent client wins, the fund launches, the revenue momentum will continue to come through in our financials and I'm looking forward to the results of the partnership with Blackstone and the first co-investment with Meiji Yasuda. Finally, in retail, we have growing retail annuity sales and therefore expect a stronger second half and we will continue to grow our workplace business and its profitability. In summary, we have high confidence in achieving our overall targets, including the full year core operating EPS growth of 6%- 9%. With that, I'd like now to invite Andrew, Laura, and Eric onto the stage to take your questions together with me and Jeff. Andrew, Laura, Eric. I will start. You all sit at the end. It's well done. Please state your name and your company and if you can limit your questions to three, please. Thank you for taking my question. It's Abid Hussain from Panmure Liberum. The first question is on asset management and net flows. Firstly, good to see the revenue margins tick up there to 9 basis points and t rending in the right direction. Just wondering on the net flows, obviously still negative, when do you think they might turn positive? I know you've got a number of i nitiatives across the private markets and elsewhere, just net flows, when do you t hink they might turn positive? The second question is on PRT. Just wondering if you're seeing any e vidence of increased competition or indeed trustees looking to delay their transactions in the hope of possibly accessing any pension surplus they might have in their schemes? The final question is on the management actions. How would you define the management actions? Is it just back book optimization? Is anything else? Can you help us understand why they are repeatable, and why is the $300 million the right level? How did you increase your capacity? I think you called out that you've i ncreased your capacity to do more. So just any color on that, please. Great. I think that's pretty straightforward in terms of the net flows. If I can ask Eric to do this. I think Andrew, if you can give some color on the PRT and then Jeff management action. Maybe it's just two quick comments just on management actions. We did the gilt strategy and therefore that's providing more capacity. Jeff will give you the actual answer in terms of the management actions. Just on PRT for a second. I've had many discussions over the last weeks and months. As you see, we feel pretty good about the GBP 5.2 billion that we have written and the GBP 42 billion of active pipeline gives you confidence that the trustees are coming to the market. I alluded to it on my slide. We see actually new entrants coming in and that competitive dynamic actually I feel very good. I've talked in the past about a GBP 1 trillion opportunity globally over the next decade and another GBP 1 trillion after that. I feel pretty good about that. It's always been a competitive market. We're not seeing that dynamic of trustees themselves holding back because of the surplus point. We see much less of that and much less. There was a bit of chatter six months ago around that. Andrew will give you more of that. Will you start with the net flows first? Yeah, no, thanks for that question. This is a really key point. ANNR is a net flow number. We have to think about that. It's weighted by revenues, and that's why we're so focused on it. Very excited. Obviously, it speaks for itself in the inversion of that tendency. You mentioned that. I think we're in a unique position. The reason why in a market where you are seeing fee compression, that's a market phenomenon, we're actually targeting a growth over time in our fee revenue, and all that is linked to the importance of us thinking about this revenue weighted. If we're just thinking about what's a very important leveler, I will answer. The net flow is a number. It matters. It's the way you can kind of look at the industry in a quick way. It is an important number, but we need to focus on the ANNR because if we were just chasing net flows, we wouldn't be as focused on that change of product niche, which is a unique opportunity we have. That said, I'm actually quite pleased with where the net flows are, given where it's been in the past. I think first half was one of our best net flow numbers. We all know we have a tailwind in what has historically been our largest market. Right. From an asset management perspective, we are the absolute leader in U.K. LDI. As António mentioned, that is shifting now. DC is symbolically now above the LDI number. Two things. It shows that in our non-LDI businesses, we're in a really good space even in that more generic net flow number. Importantly, we're still winning in the LDI space. We're a leader in that space, and what we're seeing is in the smaller mandates, there's still a lot of movement, and we're not vacating that market. We're actually getting wins there, which again is going to have a marginal positive impact on the ANNR number. That's so positive, but it does kind of keep that net flow number, which is a benchmark. Everybody looks at it. I don't want to predict when that could go positive, but the first half is extremely encouraging in terms of our overall momentum. Even the net flow number, I think, is a positive development. What's really key to keep our eye on the ball on is that ANNR, which is our weighted net flow number. Yeah. We mentioned the run rates. The run rate of 15. You multiply the 15. Right. You do the maths. Right. 30, 30 times four, 120. We're within the GBP 100 million-GBP 250 million target of cumulative ANNR. That's really good to see because this is the first six months for that specific target. Thank you, Andrew. PRT. Yeah, sure. For what I say, we've been in this market for nearly 40 years. We are definitely used to new entrants entering the market. It's always been the way. As António says, that's a huge vote of confidence in the market. Of course, the recent transactions will change the competitive dynamic again for sure. We're well used to that. Why do I remain very confident? For two reasons. One, the market continues to grow, the market expands, and António gave some data earlier about just the size of the market that we can expect to see in the near term and then going out into many years. The market strength and the continued growth, that's hugely empowering. Also, why do we win? The reason we continue to have record results in the years as competition increases is because of the strength of our asset origination, our asset management relationships, the propositions that we deliver to clients, and the service levels we give both to trustees and to individual members. I remain really confident that despite the competition, those capabilities and the growing market mean that we're in a strong position. Specifically to your trustee question and their options, we have seen no evidence of any of our transactions or any of our pipelines, if you like, pivoting away from moving to buyout and reverse. There's been no evidence of that. I think for sure there'll be trustees out there thinking about their options and their strategies, particularly around surplus. I have a personal view that actually using the calculation around a buyout value is a catalyst to look to crystallizing what that surplus might be. We are aware of trustees who are thinking exactly along those lines as to what's really under my sort of funding level, the options I have around surplus, distribution, and buyout, as well. Effectively doing both. Right. Doing the PRT transaction, as Andrew says, and doing the surplus extraction at the same time. Management actions, Jeff. Yes. Before we come on to the latter half, there's a range of actions within management actions. As you know, some of the more material are reinsurance, both internal and external. We've talked before about, for example, warehousing some deferred lives, especially where we're not using too much capital at the moment, so we can take on a few of those. That gives us a lot of optionality around reinsurance in the future. For example, there's structure in that we do assets and then just generally the whole structure of the group, even some hedging, can have significant impacts if you effectively optimize that under Solvency II. The largest with the reinsurance is the back book optimization that we've talked about, which takes a number of forms. There is the capacity that we're creating by bringing on so many liquid assets to simply put more direct investments in the back book. That's just a straight through benefit, if you like. We then can trade around things like the shape and along the curve, etc. We're definitely more active around that. There is the sort of volatility or even hopefully maybe a long- term shift to slightly wider credit spreads where you simply move the gilts into credit and capitalize on that. That was something that we did post- Liberation Day during April and made some of the additional profit. We still have the option then to move that credit into direct investments in due course as well. That sort of never ends, if you like, and you keep optimizing. It is a bigger part of the business now and Andrew's world has been put in a sort of framework around this. We executed very easily. In April, António and I were both at the office actually. It was all done very easily. We had a framework. How do we optimize this? What do we do? There are processes being built around it, which makes it all much more part of business as usual and sustainable than it was previously. Yeah, and Abid, the upgrade on the management actions. I really like this point that Jeff is making, which is more of it is on the back book optimization, which also high quality management actions if you think about it that way. Thank you, Abid. Mandeep. Hey, morning everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. Mandeep Jagpal, RBC Capital Markets. Three for me please. Two on asset management and one on PRT. The GBP 15 million ANNR, you've given a breakdown of that, but can you provide a simpler split between internal versus external? Also confirm if the ANNR includes M&A as the waterfall chart you showed in the deep dive didn't have a column for M&A, but presumably this adds to revenue. Second question on asset management, on the private markets fundraising pipeline, you mentioned the Digital Infra Fund. What is the target fund size and when will you be raising? Are there any other new funds which you'll be thinking about contributing to privates in the near term? On PRT margins, can you help build a bridge from the 7.1% that you reported as the new margin compared to the accretion to the CSM risk adjustment which was closer to 3.5%? On the optimization that you include in here, does it include items that have actually already occurred between contract initiation and the period end? Or is it, I think you mentioned an element of expected optimization that you might be able to do in the future. How much of that is in the 7.1%? Is that what you ask? Yeah. I think Jeff, you should take that. Unless Andrew really wants to jump in, but I think you should do that and then come to you first, Eric, on the two estimate questions. The GBP 15 million internal external M&A and then the Digital Infrastructure Fund, another exciting new fund. GBP 15 million and again, rough breakdown in terms of the synergistic business model. It's less than half, right. It is a big part of what we do, whether that's moving some of our LDI business into PRT. Of the GBP 50 million, less than half of that is really the internally driven. There's a big chunk of it that's part of the synergistic model because it's working in partnership with our retail business. Our DC part of that is quite significant as well. That's true third- party money and then the remainder, which again I think is extremely, it bodes very well. It's a bit in keeping with the first question. We are positive on all the rest of the business so I think we've got some good momentum across all aspects. If you were to break down our business really simplistically, and I think the way you ask the questions is a good way of doing that, we have the truly internal synergistic business model, which is our competitive advantage. That's humming, that's doing really well. I think specifically the third- party business that's linked to the synergies, which again DC is a big part of, that's going really well. When you take all the rest, we've got positive [ANN R] in the first half on the back of a pretty different picture we've had over the last few years, as António said. It's quite broad- based. Not surprisingly, in the near term we're seeing our real strengths come to the fore, our real synergistic model strengths, our real third- party. What makes us a leader in the U.K. and what makes us able to go after certain channels in a way that's pretty unparalleled, like in DC. Not surprising that's driving most of it, but I'm extremely encouraged by, take that out, we're positive on the rest. It's a really good start. Second question and I. T here was a 1B, which is, is M&A included? At the moment, M&A hasn't made much of a big difference because actually, what did we do from an M&A perspective? An investment in Taurus, which provides, and the acquisition of Proprium Capital Partners. That's not included in those numbers. The second question was on the Digital Infrastructure Fund. Yeah. That's pretty hot off the press. I think this is the point where we can talk about it. I think it's not unfair to say that an ideal target is somewhere well above the GBP 500 million mark, and I feel really good that if that were a low target, we're going to be largely there in the short- term. I really can't say more, but the fact that I'm saying that should give you some confidence. These fundraisers, as you know, happen in multiple series and they can last in today's world because it is a challenging equity private markets environment. These can drag out over 18 months to two years. I'm feeling really good that we were able to get this off in this environment. I think that is quite rare. There are the big names that are still hitting headlines with equity private funds, but everyone else has been struggling. I think this really shows a competitive advantage, and I feel pretty good that in the near term we're going to be announcing initial numbers that are very much in keeping with what I just said. That's really strong. Continued momentum on some of our existing products. António mentioned PMAF in the private space. Frankly, every time we talk about it, the number's a little higher because flows are just coming in continuously. That is a very strong best-in-class product we have. We're taking full advantage of it. I think the living sectors that we've been talking about for a while continue to show momentum. U.K. living sectors, we are a leader in that space, and we are soon going to launch the latest in our Clean Power Energy Fund in partnership with NTR. We're in the process of marketing that on the back of a final close that was above expectations. We hit almost EUR 600 million to close the last fund. We had a good pipeline, so we should be back in the market by the end of the year because a lot of that money is already earmarked. Those are the near term ones. That's before we talk about some of the M&A. You can imagine we're going to be very focused on Proprium. We're very focused right now on Taurus. The whole theme of irons in the fire we talked about at the CME, I think we're starting to show the beginnings of that. We have multiple routes we can go through, and that's before talking about our private credit business, which I'm very pleased with. Momentum on separate accounts in that insurance, going after insurance. We've had the Admiral win, but we have a very good pipeline of continuing to grow that third-party business and investment grade private credit. Yeah, the series of client wins is very impressive. I'd say Eric has just arrived, but it's amazing what the momentum is in the business. We've included some of those here in the pack, and you can expect more of that to come. On the first question, we talked last time about an underpin, and that's how I think about it. Exactly as Eric said, there's an underpin, which is the strength of the two businesses sitting to his left. The underpin of the PRT business and the underpin of the amazing DC business we have. Actually, the excitement bit comes then with the third- party money. I think you can see that. That's why I'm saying it's a turning point in this six months. You see that working properly for the first time, Jeff, the 7.1% and what's included. Yeah, that's right. We recognize, I know the teams can help you guys on this. We recognize you can't calculate that number from it. We gave some of the information. The biggest element that's not happened is the reinsurance that is not yet signed at the half year. We're using funded RE for some of that new business. We say that we have allowed for GBP 511 million of funded RE in that GBP 7.1 billion. That is because we can't allow for it in the IFRS because we haven't signed it. Accounting doesn't let you do that. This is the realistic view of the profitability of this business. We do the same on the Solvency II, Solvency II strobe, because this is what we will execute, how we price the deals, etc. The other part on the back book optimization is, as I talked about earlier, the fact we're using the gilt strategy means we can deploy direct investments, private assets immediately to the back book. I'll use some made up numbers just to illustrate. Let's say we're targeting 40% of private assets. The fact that maybe on a deal we might put 20% private assets and make it up completely, 80% for the rest is gilts, etc. and liquid assets. What we do is we say that means we brought on so much liquidity that we can deploy 20%, the leftover 20% of direct investments immediately in the back book. We are doing that on an ongoing basis. We've effectively done it straight away. This is extra capacity that we've got that we immediately do as Eric's business simply flows through. We tell them how much we need for the year and it simply flows through. We have rules around that about are we up to speed, have we got the assets, the amount that we're using, etc. The split is it's not quite 50/50, but it's roughly that. I can take you through the calculation with the funded RE and then you can see how it comes through. I think there are two reassuring points on these numbers, which is the 7.1%. There's been lots of chatter of business being less profitable. It continues to be as profitable as it was last time we showed you the numbers. Second, exactly to Jeff's point, there's all of the back book optimization. We're not including that in the margin upfront. We are including the bits you described. That's from a pricing discipline perspective. Talking with my team, we tend to price it between the three of us. There is an element of we don't want to give that pricing away like the back book optimization that we do later on. That's not in the upfront margin, which is really important. Tom. Hi, morning. Thomas Bateman from Mediobanca. Could you just update us on the outlook for U.S. PRT given the litigation in that market? In particular, I'm interested in does the sale of your U.S. entity and having to write out a Bermuda entity impact your ability to do business or could impact your ability to do business there? Second question is just on the DC transition. Towards your 15% target in private markets, how much of your GBP 100 billion has transferred already? I remember you talk about trustees having to sign off on the new allocation. Finally, it was just on slide 24 and how you were talking about OSG and the dividend, how the OSG would broadly cover the dividend. I guess I'm thinking there's new business strain and I assumed at the capital markets that you committed to some level of recurring buybacks when you change the dividend policy. How should I think about it as OSG versus total capital return or should I think about it as OSG versus the dividend? Yeah, perfect. So Andrew, on the outlook for U.S. PRT, I'll say a word on DC transition and maybe actually it's an opportunity for Laura, for you to talk a bit more about DC from a workplace perspective. Jeff, can you come back on slide 24, which is, feel very good about that slide. We worked a lot on it. Just on DC transition. Tom, the overall, we are a signatory to the Mansion House Accord. This is putting the default fund into a 15% investment in the Private Markets Access Fund. This is a simplistic way of putting it. Each one of the funds, so you have the master trust, you have the different scheme arrangements, are progressively, that's why Eric was saying that each time we talk about the number, it kind of is exponentially going up because each one of the schemes is moving to that default. The simple answer is the fund is GBP 1.6 billion. The bit that we have that is in the fund is the GBP 1.6 billion. You can expect more and more of that, of the overall DC. Think about it, we have GBP 200 billion of DC at the moment and we are 25% of the market. You just do simple maths. The DC market is going to be GBP 1.4 trillion by 2033, we hope. In October we'll talk to you about the ambition that we have in DC. We hope to be 1/4 of that market. There's much more to come. Not all of the schemes will allocate to the Private Markets Access Fund because in some cases you have some employers that immediately have decided that they want to move because they feel this is the right thing for their employees and their members. Some other schemes, they themselves don't want to move into private markets. We are doing what the clients want. The good thing about, from a private, from a Mansion House Accord perspective, is there's a momentum in the market. The employers themselves, you probably saw this, there was an employer's pledge where the employers themselves are committing to allocating more to private markets. You wouldn't expect the full GBP 200 billion, for 15% of that to go into private markets. You can see, just do a simple math, there's a lot of upside. That's why the Private Markets Access Fund and the fact that we were one of the first in the market to have that, we feel really, really good about that. Andrew, U.S. PRT, then maybe Laura, you can say a bit more about the DC market and how excited we are about that. Then Jeff. Yeah, few comments on the U.S. PRT market generally waited to the second half anyway, so that's structurally where that market's been for many years. We definitely though sensed a slowing down in the first half from a pipeline perspective at an overall market level, I think for two reasons. One, just the general U.S. economic environment means that. Don't forget in the U.S. you don't have the trustee interface. It's corporate sponsors doing it directly and therefore I suspect boards had other things on their minds than a pension transaction. There were less jumbo deals in the first half than you might have seen typically. That said, that's not our typical market. We would write at a smaller end of that, so sub $1 billion deals. Litigation comes up in certain conversations, but again, it's typically at the big jumbo end of the market, not at the sub $1 billion where we play in that market. As António has said, we've had good pickup literally overnight on the U.S. market with transactions coming through in the last few days. I think we're feeling very good about that. To your point about Bermuda, not really a huge change for us. I think the sale of Banner to Meiji means that we become a reinsurer, not a direct insurer. Banner will be under Meiji control. Actually, even our own structures, though, used a Bermuda reinsurer as part of that structure. We're just in many ways just replicating the structure we have already and so are Meiji. I think structurally, the way that team are being set up is in a partnership where Meiji will write the direct business and we will reinsure 80% of that. The team are effectively working as one and we'll use a very similar Bermuda structure to what we've had in place already. Thank you, Laura, DC? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things to say, really. You'll have seen that our net flows into our workplace business significantly picked up over the first half of the year. A number of reasons for that. We have very deliberately put a new leadership structure in place which reaches across both asset management and retail. We think this is a real differentiator in the market compared to our competitors. Even just thinking about the investment side of things, we're seeing the people that we sell to, effectively the employers of these schemes, increasingly interested in the sort of investment solutions that we're able to offer to their end members. We've also made significant investments in the front end, the digital side of things, which we will talk a little bit more about in October. Really, I think from having launched some of our digital applications, we've seen incredible uptake from members and I think, I suppose just finishing, we'll talk a little bit more about this in October. The pensions reviews have really played, I think, to the strengths of L &G in terms of really encouraging scale members. Again, linking back to your private markets question, all providers of default scheme arrangements will need to have some GBP 25 billion of assets under management by 2030. We are already there with our defaults and our defaults are now having quite a significant part of the Private Markets Access Fund as part of those defaults. As Eric says, as well as the new money coming into those, the contributions from the current defaults just each month, the amount is ticking up. Great, thank you. Slide 24. Maybe we can put it up, actually, if over there can put it up. Jeff. Yeah. I can tell you how we think about it. We very much look at the OSG that's being thrown off, what's being generated over the plan period. We look at that OSG against the dividend first and foremost. Clearly there's coverage over that. What is left is for us to deploy across the business, put into our capital allocation framework, make sure the businesses are meeting the hurdles, etc. We then use what is left for new business strain, but don't feel constrained by that. In any year in particular, PRT could be quite lumpy. We are happy to eat into our surplus capital position for that new business strain because we're starting from a very strong position and we've always said part of that is to allow us to write significant volumes should they arise in any particular period. As we get more clarity over that, we'd be comfortable running down those solvency levels. We have always said that, and it's not dissimilar on the buybacks. We've never said that is covered from the flow necessarily. It's a capital allocation decision with the added benefit of reducing the cost of the dividend. We will always look at that and assess against it. We clearly have modeled out that we believe it's sustainable given a starting capital level, given expectations for in particular PRT volumes and strain, that those are sustainable. That's why we made the statement, but not from flow necessarily in any given period and comfortable that we can again eat into a very strong surplus position. We have the same happening with the Meiji transaction, which significantly reduces the cost of the dividend, gives us more flexibility around that and increases that solvency position by another 7% and so gives us more capital allocation decisions to make in the future. That's the waterfall we go through in the way we think about it. It just so happens that because of the very low strain, it'll be there or thereabouts. Covering NSG will cover the dividend in this period and improve from there. We wouldn't guarantee it to the point where if there are larger volumes or we decide to deploy a bit more on strain, but I don't think we're ever returning either to the 4% strain days. We've never actually been there, we say less than 4%. We haven't been there for many, many years, even when credit spreads were wider and we weren't using gilt strategies. Yep. We are very comfortable. Actually, as Jeff says, we do this ourselves. We do this with our Board, we do this with the PRA. They approve our share buybacks, so pretty comfortable with that. Thank you, Tom. Larissa. I'm going to do a question online because we have Farooq online. After Larissa, please. Thank you. Larissa Van Deventer from Barclays. Three questions, one on bulks and then two on shareholders' equity. On U.K. bulk annuities, what needs to be in place to maintain your current margins? They were the same. They were similar now to FY 2024, what needs to stay in place for that to continue? On shareholders' equity, it declined from just over GBP 3 billion to about GBP 1.9 billion from FY 2024 into 1H. Can you help us understand the main reasons for the component parts, for the decline, and how much of that you expect to unwind due to market over time? Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. On the margins in PRT and bulk annuities, and then Jeff, clearly on equity. Thanks, (Inaudible). I think on margins, as you say, we've maintained them in a competitive market. That's partly because, as António said before, we stay very focused on pricing discipline. It's not about chasing volumes. Where we don't see the margins we want in deals, obviously we wouldn't compete. It really comes down to asset origination, including funded reinsurance as well, to make sure that we can competitively price. The price in the market is often set by the competition, and we need to make sure that originating assets can generate us the margin at the capital return we do. It tends to be a decision that we take transaction by transaction, looking at the available asset sourcing, the nature of duration, etc., of the transaction, because that could influence our decision about funded reinsurance and coming up with a strategy on a transaction basis that gives us the margin that we're looking to preserve and not chasing the market down in margins that aren't attractive to us. Thank you. Jeff. Yeah, thanks. I mean, to some extent, looking at it is the same, a bit like the Solvency II waterfall that I showed. Looking in a half is a bit skewed. We paid out the largest part of the dividend, we paid out GBP 500 million buyback all in a single period. Clearly that in itself has an impact. There is of course the items I mentioned where you're effectively transferring some of the equity to CSM and risk adjustment which comes back as profit like happens with the longevity. That was, you know, GBP 150 million or so of the investment variance that we had. That's one of those things from accounting. Broadly, I mentioned the exceptional items in Eric's business within coming on board but also the half of it then of the investment is really just flat markets as much as anything. We have an assumption for returns equities at 6%,7% as it would, but private markets, which a lot of our investments were, broadly flat. There weren't many transactions, there wasn't much mark -to- market. The assumption in your OP profit is a negative. Over time, y ou obviously assume that that should trend to a zero over time. You should have offset an item. We're very confident and happy with the position, very confident with the modeling we've done around all my answers to the previous question. We're happy with that, happy with the portfolio. We've done some trimming. We did set up the corporate investments. Eric himself has looked at some of the assets that we hold on the balance sheet and whether they're for the future and will actually ever go into funds. We're being honest about those where we take the write downs. The rest is just a mark- to- market which has broadly been flat, to be honest, over the period. Because you're assuming returns above the line, you get a negative that goes with it. Yeah, and if you want, Larissa, we can give you some more details. As I've said to some of you when we were meeting outside, we've tried to get as much feedback from you and try to improve disclosure. Hopefully, as you've seen, we're trying to be more transparent and each time you ask us a question, next time we try to give you information on that. Let me answer the question from Farooq and then I'll come here to the middle section. What concerns, if any, do you have around increased competition from private market players and others in the U.K. PRT market? This is from Farooq, as you know, from JP Morgan. Any concerns? I'm not concerned. If we think about it from an overall perspective, it's good to have a healthy market. That's the first thing to say. Second, it does validate the fact that this is an attractive market that continues to grow with good returns and it is a validation of that, that very sophisticated investors want to come into the market. In some cases it's different. The two transactions we've seen, we have one new entrant, if you think about it that way, that bought (Inaudible) and therefore from that perspective, (Inaudible) is already a great competitor of ours, already writes a lot of business. In one situation, in the other case, we already had Brookfield as an organic new entrant and they've just bought, just as you've seen, or are about to buy it. There we have one less competitor, if you think about it that way. When we think about what are we here to do to execute our strategy, we are the leader in the market, as I said earlier, we feel that we have the right competitive advantages. We hired the largest asset manager in the U.K., which is different from any other player in this market, where 80% of our volume comes from our asset management clients and then goes back to asset management, where Eric is originating the assets for the PRT business. On top of that, the partnership we did with Blackstone complements that, particularly in matching adjustment eligible U.S. private credit. We believe that we already had all the—it's a competitive market. It's always been, as Andrew said earlier, but we believe we have all the levers. Now we have one additional lever, which is the partnership with Blackstone. Good. Andrew. Andrew in the second row rather than the ones in the first row. Andrew Baker, Goldman Sachs. The first one just on the Blackstone partnership, the asset management benefits are pretty clear. On the annuity side, y ou made the comment that improves your pricing power. I guess I'm just struggling to see how you get that because it feels like you're giving away some margin there. Any comments around that would be really helpful. The second one, again, sorry to come back to these investment variances. I appreciate the market dynamic that you mentioned. A decent amount was on modeling improvements. Do you have any line of sight into that for the second half? Is there anything you can flag ahead of time on that? That would be helpful. Thirdly, just a clarification question. The 7.1%, I don't think you're saying that we just stick 7% well. What, i f market conditions stay as they are today, we don't just stick 7.1% as a normalized margin into the CSM roll forward because essentially that's split between back book and front book. We just need to take a view of how much of that goes in the CSM versus how much is in the back book. Is that a correct way of looking at it? 100%, yeah. Whether it's exactly 50/50, not 100%, it'll depend on the amount of fungibility at any point. Yes, if you split the difference in 7.1% and whatever, then 3.5%, then the bigger the, you know, 5-ish, 6%, whatever the number would be, would go to CSM, but there's always going to be some leftover which is the DI to back book, which then will come through. It has to come through the P&L somewhere. That comes through in our back book optimization. It's the only place it can appear because it doesn't go in the CSM. Thank you. Was it. Were those the three. So first, margin in Blackstone. I think we should give that one to you, Andrew. It's just to. We're very excited about the Blackstone deal as you see. You made the point that asset management is very obvious. We could touch on that. On the Institutional Retirement part, which actually is our full annuity book, which by the way is retail and PRT, how does this give us pricing? That was the first point I made, Andrew. You're right in the slide. It gives us additional pricing competitiveness. Yeah. We've talked about putting up to 10% of our new business assets into Blackstone. Unsurprisingly, they want paying for originating assets for us. That's a perfectly reasonable request of theirs. When we've looked at the mandate we've agreed with them and the commitment, of course we factored in those charges to the effect of the net yield we need to accrue from originating those assets. They've got a fantastic reputation, as António said, in originating MA assets at scale, particularly in markets that are complementary to what Eric already originates for us. If you like, the commitment they've given to us up to the value of the partnership is post charges, it's hitting our hurdles and giving us the assets we need, reflecting the fact that of course they want compensating for doing that. Very excited. Yeah. We were months discussing this and I think why Blackstone is probably worth just rehearsing that for a second. Yes, we have lots of capabilities ourselves to do lots of things, but the scale of originating that private credit in the U.S. at scale so that the sliver of it that is matching adjustment eligible from a U.K. perspective, you need to have that scale. There are very few, you know, less than one hand players that could do that. We felt very, very strongly and we also felt very strongly that that came with a partnership on the asset management side that helps us get into new channels and to new products. There's a really growing client demand for hybrid public and private markets. Investment variants. Yeah. The simple and the modeling is hopefully not, the teams tell me, but there's always work ongoing. A GBP 90 billion portfolio, you don't have to change much to get an improved change in the CSM. We're not looking at big changes for modeling in the second half that we're aware of today. There are investigations on an ongoing basis in a model that complex, which can go either way. Of course, there is potential for longevity releases. We do look at that in the second half, and the impacts of that will depend where the longevity kicks in. If it's very old individual annuities, it has more of an impact than if it was more recent PRT, higher discount rates, it would have less of an impact. There is scope for that, but we've not landed on that. We don't know if it's a modest number or a more material number at this stage, but it shouldn't be huge. It would naturally flow in the same way. Either way, it shouldn't be many hundreds of millions or anything. Thank you. Andy, Andrew, and Dom. Andy Sinclair from Bank of America. First was just on buybacks. You did a bigger buyback this year at full year 2024 results because PRT was incurring less strain with the gilts-based strategy. Should we be expecting similar for full year 2025's buyback given that you're still using that strategy? Second, you generally gave me cash g eneration figure for private assets at full year results. I couldn't find that today. What are you getting for cash g eneration year to date on private assets? I think it was GBP 850 million for t he full year last year. Third was just apologies for missing the asset management day, but one thing that you said quite a few times d uring that day was asset management is a higher ROE business compared to the rest of L &G. Maybe a pretty simple question, but what are the ROEs across your different business units? Because I can't really see that. Good, thank you. You're excused. You are getting married, so it's okay. It was a great event for everybody else. Look, on the buyback I've been pretty clear about this, which is we will look at the full year results with our Board. One of my Board members, we will look at what are the opportunities in front of us in terms of additional business, what has been the strain that we have incurred, what is our solvency position, and with the growth opportunities and our position, we will determine what's the right buyback. That's absolutely the framework. It will continue to be the framework. As you know, and Jeff put it on one of his slides, we have GBP 1 billion earmarked for the transaction with Meiji Yasuda, and we have the GBP 200 million ongoing share buyback. We need to think about what is the right quantum and how many shares you can actually buy back. That is something we will do. Andy, I couldn't tell you today; that is a decision we'll take in March and it will depend on the rest of the pipeline for PRT and how much strain we will see continuing going forward. My commitment, though, is exactly what I said to you over a year and a half ago, which is every single pound that we cannot deploy internally and where we have that access, we will return that to shareholders. When I said it the first time, it was a bit of a theoretical thing. We did the first GBP 200 million last year and we've just done 90% of the GBP 500 million. Hopefully by now you trust us that this is what we will do. In terms of cash generation, I think both questions for you, Jeff. Really. Yeah, cash generation. Obviously, we had the Carla proceeds in the previous period. Of the GBP 850 million or so, GBP 500 million of that was Carla and a few other disposals as well. There actually hasn't been as many disposals, hardly any activity in the first half. A very small number in corporate investments in Quantum. It's more in the GBP 100 million-GBP 150 million range, which is basically half of what's left over when you take the Carla out and some of the other disposals. We would expect that to be higher in the second half. We said we think the majority of the value from the corporate investments will be gone in the 12- 18 months. We are hopeful of things under offer, etc., in the second half. There's no chicken counting going on at this stage. Y eah. We have GBP 0.7 billion left of the corporate investments unit. GBP 0.7 billion. We should both answer on the return on equity, I think. We did make that comment, of course, a month and a half ago that asset management is a really profitable business. It's in the context of, you know, we have a disciplined approach. Return on cash and return on capital needs to be above 14%. The reason why we say capital and cash is because the return on equity, if you think about it that way, Andy, from an asset management perspective is extraordinarily high because it consumes almost no capital. I think that the bigger point from a profitability perspective is what is always in my strap line of the strategy, which is we become more capital light over time. Becoming more capital light over time is growing the asset management earnings. I think you should add, Jeff, you had a slide at the deep dive where why do we really like this earnings? We like this earnings because they are capital efficient. From that perspective, really high return, but they make the entire company more capital light over time, which is a pretty tall order when our PRT business continues to grow very strongly over decades to come, as I said kind of an hour ago. Jeff. Yeah, I mean, there isn't a huge amount to add, to be honest. The vast majority of our businesses don't have any capital or equity of note to them, so have very high returns. It's actually about return on cash. It's really the annuity businesses where we monitor for a pure return on capital to make sure that we are, for each portfolio over the year, really almost every deal hitting those hurdles. Obviously, with the low strain at the moment, those hurdles are not an issue for us. They're all going to be high returns, very high returns for the vast majority of business because they don't have capital. Then it's more like sensible numbers but still high at the moment because of the low capital. That's strain that's in those businesses. At the moment, the binding constraint is what the previous question from Andrew was, which is your question as well on the buybacks, which is how do we think about we're not trading off GBP 1 in each one of the three business. We're saying we have a hurdle for all the businesses and they all need to meet that 14% return on capital, return on capital and return on cash. Therefore, if we can't then hit those hurdles, the rest will be returning to shareholders. Andrew. Good morning, it's Andrew Crean at Autonomous. Can I go back to slide nine and just get some of the modeling which lies behind it? I think you're using the LCP models and LCP has sales peaking in 2028 and then drifting down. By 2033, what sort of market share are you looking at and what sort of net flows to start your assets are you looking at? Are you, because by that stage I would think you're moving more towards a neutral position. That's the first question. Second question is on the retail annuities. What are the outflows per annum relative to the sales? Thirdly, on management actions, clearly you've upped the asset optimization and you're looking for management actions of over GBP 300 million. In terms of asset optimization, what yield improvement on the portfolio, how many basis points does that compute to, and how long does, can you just keep, I think it's about three points, but how long can you just keep lifting the yield basis for, i.e., what does medium term mean? Got it. Let me start on this slide nine. I think, Laura, you should talk about retail annuities outflows. We are in a position where we're actually writing more than the outflows. Laura will go into that and then Jeff, can you talk about management actions? Thank you for not asking the Pemberton question. It was one of those. We asked us a question and we had it. We put it on the slide also for you earlier in terms of disclosure. No, no, but seriously, we're listening to all of you and your questions and we're trying to reflect that at results. In terms of this slide, you're right, we are looking at. We are using industry assumptions. We've LCP. That is the underlying. We actually have a version of this which we don't have here with the flows themselves. This is our own book from a U.K. perspective. The GBP 64 billion, as I said, doesn't include international PRT or the retail annuity. We wanted to focus this specifically on U.K. PRT. The net flows do continue to increase, of course. The total GBP 1.4 trillion. The number keeps on coming down in terms of overall DB, but on the percentages, we get to 50% of the assets being insured within and then it continues to grow. We can give you the underlying assumption, all of you, the underlying assumptions. We feel that there's two things happening. One is the new business and when do we cross that point where the annuity outflows are bigger than the new business. Our view, having looked at some of the numbers you did for us, that's later we continue to write. You have this chart, which that's why we wanted to show this up to 2023. Our actual book will be growing between 6% and 8% and the difference between the 6% and 8% is 6% is the lower assumption of LCP. 8% is the higher assumption of LCP. What are we assuming in terms of market share? We are assuming a consistent market share to what we have. Historically we've had a higher market share up to 24%. We're typically around 20%. We're assuming that. We're not assuming that our market share increases. We're also looking at putting some pressure on Andrew. We're definitely not assuming that our market share decreases. There's an important point there which is we target the profitability of the business and therefore to some questions that were asked earlier, if the market moved in a position where we felt the profitability of the business wasn't right. I don't have a volume target. This is what we're assuming. If the market gets tougher and there's lower profitability, we're very happy to walk away from transactions as we have over the years, including in my tenure over the last year and a half. Andrew, this is assuming the same as maintaining that same rough market share. R etail annuities, Laura and then come to Jeff. Yeah, a couple of comments. I can't remember what slide it's on, but we wrote GBP 2 billion of retail annuities last year. You can see the increase over the year from that slide, so you'll be able to work out that will give you some indication of what's sort of rolled off. I think the other thing to say i s that the majority, sorry? I t's slide 22. The majority of our, w e can give you a bit more information on this afterwards, but just to give you some high-level numbers, if you see where we've gone from GBP 17.4 billion to GBP 19.8 billion, we wrote about GBP 2 billion of new business last year, and the majority of our business is lifetime annuities, so the longer duration. We can follow up with a bit more information on that afterwards, but that should give you a good high-level picture. What's happening in our case, Andrew, is looking at that number. We continue to write more new business than what rolls off because you can see from the stock perspective we can give you the inflows and outflows, but the dynamic for us, different than from other players, is that we are, with the amount of retail annuities that we're writing, the book keeps on growing. The GBP 19.8 billion, we expect that book to continue to grow, whereas without commenting on competitors, in many of our competitors they are in extra structural outflows there because the book is much bigger. We're a very large retail annuities player. The first half of the year was a lot of people woke up to the fact that we kept on gaining market share. The market has been more competitive. The pipeline that Laura has for now actually is really helpful, so is really encouraging. In the second half of the year we're expecting a better second half compared to the first half in terms of retail annuities, which means that definitely by the end of the year our book will be bigger again. It keeps on going. That's exactly right. Management actions. Yeah, I mean I went through, you know, there are a number of different back book optimization options that we're deploying, so there isn't a single answer to them. They will all be giving, you know, greater than 50 basis points uplift, but some of those could be hundreds, you know, because if we sell a gilt and move into a direct investment, you're going to get a very large uplift on yield. We have areas where we've been selling corporate bonds and putting gilts in because of the relative spreads at the moment, the amount of profit we've made on corporate bonds, and of course if we're selling the gilts, just simply. Sorry, on that one we've always said we can get 50- 150. I mean, we wouldn't trade if it's below 50. It just doesn't make sense. You've got the selling of gilts to go to corporate bonds when you get volatility in that, which is the sort of optionality that we've saved up, and clearly you get quite an advantage from that. We do need to look at those in the round around the gilt strategy. We certainly think that's very sustainable over the medium term. We call it a planning period, whatever, and we are comfortable that we can continue to execute on a book our size. The GBP 300 million back book optimization set up with processes and a structure in Andrew's team is very sustainable. Went to the talked it through with the Board, what's in the plan, what we're planning to do over that period. We are very comfortable for across GBP 90 billion that we can trade, and we will trade with the optionality from the gilt strategy to get to that GBP 300+ million. Dom. I will come to Farooq again because I guess online he gets one question at a time. I'll come to that, which I think is for you, Jeff, so you can look at it. Dom. Hi, thanks. Hello, good evening. Hi. Dom O'Mahony, BNP Paribas Exane, and I'm afraid I've only got techie capital generation questions remaining, so apologies in advance. One hopefully simple one, really encouraging to see the guidance on the OSG growth greater than 3% for the full year. What's the baseline, the full year 2024 number normalized for the disposals? If you could give us that, that'd be very helpful. Then h elp me not get too excited on the asset trading. Your guidance here is set in an environment where spreads are basically public. Spreads are as tight as they've ever been, more or less. I f they normalize, p resumably you're very, very geared into that. One of your peers is extremely ambitious o n the asset trading opportunity. I s there any reason I shouldn't be thinking actually this could be a very large source of capital generation for you a s you think more about y ou talked earlier about some of the p rocesses that you put in place around t aking advantage of spread dislocation? Then o n the flip side, if I g o back to that slide where you have the 6%- 8% growth in the size of the book, m y hypothesis is that the book that is running off, A, is more capital requirement rich because you have more longevity risk, and B is more spread and risk. Margin rich because you had more credit risk than the book, the stuff you're putting in. I would hypothesize that the OSG coming out of that book is not growing at 6%- 8%. It's probably growing lower if we exclude monetary actions. Does that make any sense or is that wrong? I'm starting from your reaction. Give you one second, Jeff, to think about that. Just OSG. Yes, we can give you the normalized number. Jeff may have it, but just on the, I think when it normalizes, actually Andrew made this point, we have the first half of this year as a good example because as much as I talked about geopolitical and economic uncertainty, we haven't had that much volatility. We had it very concentrated around Liberation Day, and most of the back book optimization for the first half was done around those days. Those days that we were both out of the office and coordinating. It's a good thing because we have a very disciplined framework that allows us to very quickly act on that. You're right that the bigger upside is if and when the markets normalize. Here it was just the volatility we had for the week, and then it went back. Jeff, you should comment on that and also on the 6%- 8% on that slide nine. Yes. The OSG growth, you were basically after the full year number. It is exactly what you said. It's the removal of the U.S. protection and the 20% of the U.S. PRT. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure we published it in the March results and what that compares, what that would have been with and without it, The number exists. Pretty sure it's that. If it isn't, we do need to tell people, because if you don't know what the number is, you can't do the growth off it. We'll find a way of getting that out if that's good. I'm pretty sure I know in February we only give guidance of it was expert million would be taken off, and then we said what the exact n umber was. In the full year results. In the full results, we normalize it, but if not, we'll send it to everybody mixing. Yeah, but taking off the non-retained business. Agreed. Yes. As António covered, we don't want people to get carried away with, you know, you do need some market volatility. We are sourcing assets. We'll keep the strategies going, but we believe it's a very strong underpin to the OSG. Yes, there is clearly upside for the back book trading in a situation where you get a prolonged period of wider spreads. It would equally change the way that we price new business, which we think would probably be beneficial to everyone and make a lot more sense. Your assessment of that is right. It's just a case of when will that happen, what will that look like, what will happen to other markets at the same time. DI, of course, in those situations tends to lag and take a bit longer to come through, so we almost certainly would be moving into credit at that point in time. Jeff and I debated this a lot. We actually said explicitly more than GBP 300 million on management actions uncapped to some extent rather than giving, because we have numbers that could be much higher. Again, we want, and hopefully you trust us that way, to be realistic. We're doing effectively an upgrade to the guidance, but in a way that is thoughtful. I don't think we're in the game of giving you very big numbers, but I think there is substantial upside. That's why we said more than GBP 300 million, and we'll keep on updating you as we do it. That's the logic. T he 6%- 8%. The OSG capital runoff really was the question. I mean, the capital itself takes a very long time to run off on annuity business. It's very, very long, especially with the amount of deferreds that we have written over the last, probably five years at least, as those have been more and more coming to market in PRT. There is actually quite slow runoff of the book if you think of pure capital runoff. What's happened is that there's been more of an impact to some extent with some of the discount rate changes and higher yields and what's happened around that as anything else. Because it is very, very long and only accelerates towards the end, it's even longer than I think the IFRS 17 because that has accelerated a bit more with the higher interest rates. There isn't anything particularly funny going on in any of that. I would say it's very predictable. It's not fundamentally different than older book versus the more recent book. Thank you. Let me go to Farooq online. It says your CSM new business margins in Institutional Retirement and retail are low. Even taking into account your gilt space strength strategy, what is the outlook for this and how do we balance what appears to be a low level of CSM growth against higher guidance for asset optimization in terms of net earnings impact? Jeff? Yeah, I think this pulls together everything we've been talking about. I know we wrote it a few minutes ago before we said this. I think we've covered a lot of this. Some of it is the new business margins that we state are actually in line with what we said would happen under the gilt strategy, in line with what we had last year. We think there's probably some improvement we can make around the retail new business margins on annuities with some of the investment strategy. T hings w e look at and deploy more of the gilts type strategies in that. We're improving the retail protection margins as well. That market got very, very competitive a couple of years ago, as we said, and it's good to see the improvement coming through on that. Certainly, in terms of earnings growth, our guidance, we're very comfortable with that. We're seeing the back book optimization come through, which to some extent is either embedded in what we assume in new business, as we discussed earlier, or is upside that is giving us more and more confidence in the earnings projections that we've given, if you like, and the targets that we're looking at. I think it is everything coming together around that. Great, thank you. Other questions? Nasib. Thanks. This is similar to what Farooq just asked on the new business CSM. If I look at just PRT, it's about 3% of PRT volumes in the first half. Jeff, when you presented IFRS 17, I think you guided to GBP 0.8 billion-GBP 0.9 billion for GBP 10 billion of PRT. That included risk adjustment, I think. That's 8%- 9% including risk adjustment versus 3% now. It can't just be gilt-based. There's something else going on, I think. Can you, if you go back, try and explain what's happened on the new business CSM relative to volumes? Secondly, on investment variances, it seems like you're not of the view that you need to change the assumptions within operating profit. You've had negative variances for a few halves already, and real estate has not been returning returns. So w hen do you change it or have you already changed it for 2025, and finally, on the GBP 300 million management actions for 2025, how much have you done in the first half? Jeff? Squarely with you. Yeah, so actually the 8%- 9% is more comparable to the 7.1%. I would say the actual IFRS new business margin that we're talking about, that's the way we think of the business, the way we're looking at it because some of it is just you make less pounds through the gilt strategy. That is obvious, and so you're simply not adding as much CSM as you were. We make up for some of that with the DI tobacco. We don't then allow for some of the future surplus. Some of it is, it was quite hard to predict when we were just moving into IFRS 17 as well. I wouldn't say there's anything more fundamental happened there overall. Ivy, actually it's interesting you say we constantly look at this part of our accounting policy, etc., and we are looking and will continue to look at this. It won't be wholesale across the piece because it is supposed to be through cycles, etc. You look at 150 years data to decide what equity returns are and you don't change them because they've been different for even five years. Similar for property as an asset class. We will look at is it segmented, are other asset classes suitably segmented, is there something fundamental going on, and we do that on an ongoing basis and we will continue. We have a couple in mind that we may do that for, but nothing that's material that we need to tell everyone about that impacts the results, etc. The GBP 300 million, we talked about the management action, sorry, the backward optimization, IFRS greater than GBP 150 million, quite a lot of that flows straight through into management action. Of course, net of tax, slightly different number. Some of those don't because they're in the new business strain as part of what we've assumed and then we have executed some of the type of reinsurance, etc., in the first half as well. Generally, it's better to look over the whole year that, you know, we are safely going to be in that, you know, GBP 300+ million for the year for management actions. I think, you know, given what we've stated, the targets will give more breakdowns of some of these, but it's sort of 1 million mi off, halfway of what we need, to be honest. Yeah. Going forward we're giving the same guidance. We say that they'll be consistently above GBP 300 million, sometimes more skewed to one half than the other. Any other questions? Also, no questions online. Thank you, thank you for coming today. As I said, I'm very happy with the performance of the first six months, but I'm particularly pleased with the momentum on the execution of our strategy. Thank you for coming today and I'll see you on the 23rd of October with Laura, if not before, for the final of the deep dive onto the three business. In the meantime, if you're having a break, I know that there's lots of insurance people reporting, so apologies for that, but if you are having a break, I hope you enjoy the summer holidays, I know that I will, thank you.