Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Phoenix Group's Half Year Results. Phoenix has made great progress against our strategic priorities in the first half. We've reported strong cash generation and maintained our resilient balance sheet. Key highlights include the sale of Ark Life, the harmonized internal model application submission, and the Fitch Ratings upgrade. We've delivered increased new business long-term cash generation and taken ownership of the Standard Life brand. We also continue to remain focused on delivering for our customers and our people, and we are making good progress with our sustainability strategy on our path to becoming net zero carbon and fulfilling our purpose of helping people secure a life of possibilities. I will talk in detail about our progress against each of these strategic priorities shortly, but first, I will cover the financial highlights. We have once again delivered on our key attributes of cash, resilience, and growth during the first half of 2021. Rakesh will cover this in more detail shortly. In terms of the headlines, we delivered strong growth in cash generation with GBP 872 million in the first six months. Our balance sheet continues to be strong, with a Solvency II surplus at GBP 5.1 billion, following a planned GBP 200 million debt repayment in March. Our shareholder capital coverage ratio of 166% is comfortably within our 140%-180% target range. Finally, we've reported GBP 412 million of new business long-term cash generation, a 15% increase on the prior year. GBP 206 million was delivered in the first half across our open businesses with a lower first half contribution from external BPAs owing to a slow first half for all market participants. However, our BPA team worked hard to accelerate the second tranche of our Pearl Pension Scheme buy-in on the preexisting agreement. This completed in July and delivers a further GBP 206 million of long-term cash. Delivering cash and resilience are central to our investor proposition, and it's our ability to deliver value-accretive management actions from both BAU activity and our integration programs that are critical to this. In the first half, we have continued to demonstrate this with nearly GBP 300 million of management actions delivered, 75% of which were from BAU actions such as our liquid asset origination and asset risk management. Our ability to deliver value-accretive M&A is also clearly demonstrated in the ReAssure transaction, where we've already recouped half of the GBP 3.2 billion consideration paid in less than 12 months. In terms of resilience, our unique hedging approach continues to deliver resilience to market events, regardless of the growth in the size of our company or periods of sustained market volatility as seen over the past few years. Minimal variances throughout. In November last year, we announced that we had received unsolicited expressions of interest for our European operations, and that the board was therefore assessing a range of strategic options to maximize value for shareholders. That process continued throughout the first half of 2021 and included entering into advanced discussions about the potential sale of our entire European operations. The board concluded that this would not maximize shareholder value and instead have agreed that value will be maximized by treating the two parts of the European operations separately. As a result, we've agreed to sell the Ark Life business to Irish Life for an attractive price of GBP 197 million or 91% of Solvency II own funds. We expect this capital to be reinvested into higher return growth opportunities. We have chosen to retain Standard Life International. This is a complex business, including with-profit products, that is being run on old legacy systems. As the market leader in transforming businesses and delivering cost and capital synergies, we believe we will maximize shareholder value by retaining it and progressing a clear set of management actions. These include moving the business onto a partial internal model and migrating the customers onto the modern Diligenta BaNCS platform. These are the right actions to create value in the short term, but also over the longer term, these actions will create a platform that offers us strategic optionality to consider the European M&A consolidation market. I'm really pleased with the progress we've made in our open business during the first half of 2021 as our investment begins to deliver tangible success. The enhanced capability we are building in our bulk purchase annuity business will enable us to significantly increase the proportion of transactions in the market we can quote on, from around 35% last year to around 90% by volume. We have also made significant progress in reducing the capital strain on this business, which was 6% in the first half using our new harmonized internal model. I am delighted that the investment we've made in our workplace business is beginning to show. With new scheme wins evidencing the momentum we are building and the recent award for Master Trust Offering of the Year, a testament to the work our team are doing to develop a truly market-leading proposition. The acquisition of the Standard Life brand is already proving to be a significant catalyst for our open business growth strategy. It is a trusted and well-known consumer brand that we will invest in, including a refresh of the brand, an acceleration in our proposition innovation, and the rollout of enhanced technology for customers and intermediaries. All of which will drive future growth and help meet our aspiration of proving the wedge. Critical to our success is our focus on our customers. I'm delighted that we have continued to exceed our customer satisfaction targets in the first half. We continue to invest in our customer proposition with some great initiatives delivered this year. For instance, we have now made our market-leading ESG default fund available to our DC Master Trust members. Continue to work with our asset management partners to expand the range of self-selection responsible investment funds we offer. We have also widened access to in-scheme drawdown to a further 1.5 million members this year. Our investment in digital is also resonating with customers, with a 34% year-on-year increase in mobile app logins. We continue to migrate our customers to modern platforms to improve the customer experience. Phoenix is committed to addressing the challenges of climate change, which have been laid bare this week in the IPCC report. We have laid solid foundations in the first half to help us deliver on our ambition of being a leader in this space. We are committed to making our investment portfolio net-zero carbon by 2050, becoming public signatories to the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance and Race to Zero campaign evidence this. As one of the industry's largest asset owners, it is imperative that we take a lead role in driving change, our recent open letter sets out the expectations we have of our asset management partners. We're excited to be working with our partners to find the solutions that will deliver portfolio decarbonization, look forward to sharing these solutions in the run-up to COP26. We will also be setting our own ambitious 2025 and 2030 decarbonization targets for our investment portfolio over the coming months. We have made strong progress towards our target of being net-zero carbon from our own operations by 2025. We're on track to reduce scope 1 and scope 2 emissions by 20% this year, expect to have all of our occupied premises using 100% renewable electricity by the end of this year. One great example of this in action is that we are installing an innovative photovoltaic glazing roof at our Wythall office, which will reduce our carbon footprint and generate our own energy, it will be the largest of its type in the U.K. Finally, in line with our ambition to make Phoenix the best place our colleagues have ever worked, we continue to invest in our people. We are developing the excellent talent we already have while strengthening our current team with high-caliber new appointments to bring new expertise and thinking to the Group. We remain committed to making Phoenix a diverse and inclusive company where people can bring their whole self to work. We have created an innovative new app, Who We Are, to capture powerful data and insights to support us in delivering on our commitment, and it is great to see that this has been completed by around 75% of our colleagues since launch. Women now account for 29% of our top 100 leaders. Whilst we won't be happy until this represents broader society, it is strong progress, up from 21% just six months ago. We also have 13% of our top 100 leaders who are ethnically diverse, which is already broadly in line with the wider U.K. population. The overall investment we are making is once again reflected in our strong colleague engagement score of 79% in the first half. With that, I will hand over to Rakesh. Thank you, Andy. Good morning. As Andy said, Phoenix delivered a strong financial performance in the first half of 2021, which reflects the scale of the new group. We have delivered cash generation of GBP 872 million in the period, and long-term cash generation from new business of GBP 412 million is up 15% year-on-year, including the second tranche of the Pearl Pension Scheme buy-in completed in July. We've also delivered increased operating profit of GBP 527 million. In line with our stable and sustainable dividend policy, we have declared an interim dividend of GBP 0.241 per share. With our focus on delivering resilience, our financial position remains strong. Our Solvency II surplus is GBP 5.1 billion, with a solvency ratio of 166%. That remains comfortably within our target range, and leverage is stable at 28%. The reduction in assets under administration in the first half largely reflects the announced sales of the Wrap SIPP, onshore bond, and TIP products to abrdn and Ark Life. Turning first to cash. With strong cash generation of GBP 872 million delivered in the first half, we now expect at the top end of our target range of GBP 1.5 billion-GBP 1.6 billion for the full year. I also wanted to briefly remind you of the guidance we announced back in March, with our existing three-year cash generation target of GBP 4.4 billion and guidance over the life of the business of GBP 17.7 billion. It is important to remember that Phoenix's cash generation guidance is based on in-force business only. Also excludes the impact of any new business to be written in the future, and also excludes management actions from 2024 onwards. Looking over the period from 2021 to 2023, this slide sets out the whole co-uses of cash generation and illustrates how secure our current dividend is. It also highlights a significant amount of cash that will be generated over this period, with around GBP 2 billion expected to be available for growth through BPA and M&A. Group long-term free cash was GBP 13.4 billion at the end of 2020, which incorporates the impact of selling the platform businesses to abrdn and the future corporation tax change. While the recently announced sale of Ark Life is expected to be broadly neutral. After the servicing of debt until maturity, this leaves GBP 11.8 billion of cash available to shareholders. With our current dividend cost of around GBP 480 million per annum, this level of group cash supports our stable and sustainable dividend for the long term. Our Solvency II surplus remains resilient, and the small decrease during the first six months of the year reflects the planned repayment of a GBP 200 million Tier 2 bond in March. We had a strong start to the year for Solvency II management actions, with nearly GBP 300 million delivered in the period, and I would expect broadly the same amount in the second half with the internal model harmonization benefit on top of that. We continue to see the benefits of our hedging policy, with only a small economic variance in the period despite market volatility. Phoenix has a unique approach to managing risk. We have a particularly low appetite to equity, interest rate, inflation, and currency risks, which we see as unrewarded and therefore hedge to protect our Solvency II surplus. This translates into the low sensitivities presented here. We do see credit risk as rewarded and so actively manage our portfolios to ensure they remain high quality and diversified. The key sensitivity we focus on here is the 20% of the portfolio having a full letter downgrade, which is GBP 0.4 billion in the context of our GBP 5.1 billion Solvency II surplus. It is worth noting that the credit sensitivities we disclose here are prudent, as they assume no management actions are taken to rebalance our portfolio, which is different to how many of our peers disclose. Finally, we manage our longevity risk through reinsurance, retaining around half of the risk across our current in-force book and reinsuring most of this risk on new business. As a consequence of this hedging approach, we are far more resilient to major market risks than most of our U.K. and European peers, as this slide clearly demonstrates. We see this as a core part of the Phoenix story and a key differentiator to others. In order to manage our credit risk, Phoenix maintains a diversified GBP 33 billion shareholder debt portfolio. Our proactive management has enabled us to uphold the high credit quality of our portfolio and has minimized our downgrade experience with 99.9% of cash flows paid on our bonds. Integral to this is ensuring we keep our Triple B exposure below 20%, and we always seek to minimize our exposure to Triple B minus, which remains at only 2%. Our ability to deliver value-accretive management actions is a key differentiator for Phoenix. During the first half, the delivery of management actions contributed GBP 276 million to our Solvency II surplus. The majority of these have been value-accretive actions that increase own funds with 75% delivered from business as usual activity, including illiquid asset origination and asset risk management actions. We often hear that Phoenix is overly reliant on integration synergies. Since the onset of Solvency II, around 60% of the GBP 4.4 billion of Solvency management actions we have delivered have been business as usual, demonstrating our capability here. We continue to make good progress across both integration programs. We are well on the way to integrating the ReAssure group functions and are on track to complete this work stream in early 2022. This will free up more capacity for future M&A. In our finance and actuarial work streams, we completed the Standard Life integration in June and have begun the ReAssure phase II integration with cost synergies expected from 2022. We also have several internal model applications planned, which in turn support our plans for future Part VIIs, including combining our legacy Phoenix and Standard Life entities into a single life company in Phoenix Life, which we hope to complete in 2023. With this progress, we have now delivered over 90% of the Standard Life synergy target and 70% of the ReAssure target. We are on track to deliver the balance, and that is before recognizing the benefit from harmonizing our internal models. With a decision on our internal model harmonization application due from the PRA next month, I wanted to explain in more detail the expected impact. As you can see, there are three immediate impacts that deliver a total solvency benefit of around GBP 400 million and a future cash benefit of approximately GBP 100 million. Firstly, having a single harmonized internal model allows us to realize diversification benefits between our legacy Standard Life and Phoenix Life companies at a group level. This will generate significant solvency benefit but does not increase cash surplus at the life entity level, which remains unchanged. Secondly, by improving the modeling of our credit risk and how we diversify risk within the life companies, we can release some of the prudence we have in place today, which provides both a solvency benefit and a future cash benefit. It is worth noting that I would not expect this cash benefit to emerge in 2021, as we will want to confirm the internal model is performing as expected over a period of time first. Finally, we are holding a temporary solvency capital strain of around GBP 100 million in relation to group currency hedges we put in place this year, which unwind upon implementation of the new model. The harmonized internal model also unlocks a wider pipeline of future management actions, including future Part VIIs and the scope to improve our credit risk modeling further, as well as being supportive to our BPA pricing and future M&A. The final management action I wanted to touch on is our illiquid asset origination. Long-dated or illiquid assets provide excellent cash flow matching for our GBP 38 billion annuity book, and are a key enabler of reducing the capital strain on our BPA business, too. Our illiquid asset portfolio comprises 28% of annuity backing assets, and we continue to target increasing our allocation of illiquid assets to around 40% over time. Reflecting the ongoing investment in our capability and team, during the first six months of the year, we have increased our illiquid asset origination by 67% to GBP 1.3 billion, with an average credit rating of A. Within that, we have increased our investment in ESG assets by 132% to GBP 788 million. As you can see on this slide, several great examples of the meaningful impact our targeted ESG investment can make as we seek to deliver on our sustainability strategy and support the government in building Britain back better. Moving now to growth. We have reported a 15% increase in new business long-term cash generation to GBP 412 million. Like most market participants, we saw a slow first half market for BPA transactions and therefore decided to accelerate the second tranche of the Pearl scheme to July. Elsewhere, it was pleasing to see the other asset-based open businesses all deliver increased cash generation year on year. With GBP 431 million of external BPA transactions completed in the first half, we have maintained our market share at around 7% in what has been a slow market. Importantly, we have been able to reduce that capital strain from 8% in 2020 to 6% this year, primarily due to our new business pricing now reflecting our harmonized internal model. We continue to target a future BPA capital strain of around 5%, with illiquid asset origination and improved reinsurance the drivers of further improvement from here. In terms of the second half outlook, we are currently quoting on an improved pipeline of deals. However, we will remain disciplined in our approach, and as ever, we will be focused on value over volume. We were delighted to reach an agreement with the trustees of the Pearl Pension Scheme to execute a buy-in for a further GBP 998 million of premiums, which completed in July. Similar to our external deals, the capital strain on this second tranche has reduced substantially, down from 12% in 2020 to 6% this year, reflecting the expected harmonized internal model efficiencies and improved reinsurance structuring. Turning to our asset-based businesses in the open division, where we are beginning to see the benefit of our investment in this business, with increased long-term cash generation, despite the increase in tax rates and improved growth inflows from all business areas. In Workplace, we are pleased with the momentum we are building here, with new scheme wins in the first half providing a platform for future growth and higher growth inflows a function of improved pricing and proposition. However, we are reinvigorating a business that had been under-invested in historically, and during the first half we saw several scheme losses that led to net outflows in the period. These scheme losses have been deferred by a couple of years and reflect decisions taken on our legacy proposition, which has improved significantly since then. In Customer Savings and Investments, we are very much in the early stages of our building a retail offering for the long term but saw an improved performance in the period due to proposition enhancements. In Europe, gross inflows increased due to stronger sales, while the 47% increase in long-term cash generation from Sun Life is due to higher volumes and profitability. Turning to our IFRS results. We delivered operating profit of GBP 527 million in the first six months of 2021, 46% higher than the prior year, reflecting the scale of the new enlarged group. Operating profit in our Open business has reduced year-on-year due to the lower contribution from external BPA deals in the first half, accounting for around GBP 70 million of the movement. Group costs and service company movements reflect increased costs owing to the enlarged group and the build-out of additional group capabilities. The sizable swing in investment return variances and economic assumption changes reflects the impact of our hedging strategy from rising rates and equities. We hedge the solvency position to deliver dependable cash and dividend resilience and accept that this will cause volatility in our IFRS balance sheet. Phoenix is known for the resilience and sustainability of its dividend, which the board and I see as our priority to maintain. With our Open business delivering growth, we have the opportunity to consider whether organic growth can support a dividend increase, in addition to the periodic increases we already consider following value accretive M&A. I must stress that the board will only consider an organic increase in the dividend if the business has grown. Any increase must also maintain our dividend sustainability over the long term. An increased dividend would then establish our new stable and sustainable dividend level going forward, with further increases dependent on delivering further business growth. The board has a clear framework for assessing whether organic growth has the potential to support a dividend increase, with two key conditions that trigger an assessment. Firstly, we must prove the wedge and see the cash generated from new business more than offset the run-off of our in-force business of circa GBP 800 million per annum. The second is that our recurring sources of cash exceed our recurring uses. If the conditions are met, the board would consider whether it is appropriate to increase the dividend, but will only do so if the group's dividend sustainability is maintained over the long term. To conclude, Phoenix has a clear financial framework which supports our strategy and delivers cash, resilience, and growth. In the first half, we delivered strong cash generation, our balance sheet remained resilient, and we delivered growth with increased new business. I was delighted with the recent credit rating upgrade from Fitch, which is a clear validation of our business model. Looking forward, we now expect to deliver cash generation for the year at the top end of our GBP 1.5 billion-GBP 1.6 billion target range, and will continue operating within our target ranges for both solvency and leverage. Finally, we will continue executing on our growth strategy as we look to deliver incremental new business cash generation in order to prove the wedge. We will, of course, prioritize value over volume in the BPA market. I will now hand you back to Andy. Thanks, Rakesh. Phoenix has a clear strategy that is focused on three key priorities and leverages the industry drivers of change. Our priorities are to optimize the in-force business to deliver resilient cash generation, to deepen our customer relationships as we help people consolidate their pensions and journey to and through retirement, and to acquire new customers, both organically through our workplace and BPA businesses, and inorganically through value accretive M&A. Our business model therefore flows from this, where we're the market leaders in both heritage and M&A, and our Open Business has unique advantages to succeed and win, too. The successful execution of this strategy will ensure we continue to deliver against our financial framework of cash, resilience, and growth. Our business model delivers some unique advantages to Phoenix by having our Heritage and Open businesses operating alongside one another with our differentiated M&A and integration capabilities supporting them. Those unique advantages include our approach to risk management that differentiates us from our peers and delivering resilience to our in-force business, which in turn underpins the delivery of high levels of long-term, dependable cash generation that both supports our stable and sustainable dividend for many years, and generates excess cash that we can invest in a range of high return growth opportunities aligned to the industry drivers of change. At Phoenix, the whole is therefore greater than the sum of the parts, which enables us to deliver market-leading cost efficiency across both Heritage and Open, significant ongoing capital diversification, again benefiting both Heritage and Open, and an unmatched scale as the U.K.'s largest long-term savings and retirement business. At Phoenix, we also recognize that we have a clear role to play in society. That's why our purpose is helping people secure a life of possibilities. This means providing the right guidance and products at the right time to support the right choices. As I've said before, I passionately believe that businesses with the best people, focused on their purpose and their role in society, deliver better customer outcomes, and in turn, stronger returns for shareholders. The virtuous circle you see on this slide. In support of that, I'm delighted to announce that we are launching a new think tank later this year called Phoenix Insights. Life expectancy in the U.K. has risen dramatically over the past century. These longer lives are the gift of advances in public health, living standards, nutrition, and medical science. We are not yet structuring our society and our lives in ways that help us to make the most of that gift. Phoenix Insights will be dedicated to catalyzing the change and innovation needed across society to enable us all to live better, longer lives, and to make that a national conversation. I'm therefore honored to be chairing expert advisory committee that brings together some of the most distinguished experts in this field. I'm confident that Phoenix Insights is going to deliver some truly impactful research, inform the public debate, and of course, enable us at Phoenix to develop the propositions that will help our customers enjoy their better, longer lives. Our purpose in action, helping people secure a life of possibilities. Let me conclude with our priorities for the second half of 2021. We will continue to deliver dependable cash and resilience through the disciplined management of our balance sheet by executing on our pipeline of management actions and integration programs. We will also deliver on our growth ambitions by investing in our Open business and the Standard Life brand. We will continue to actively assess value-accretive M&A opportunities. As we've outlined previously, M&A is a core part of our strategy. We see a huge market opportunity over time, and we have the bandwidth at a group level and the financial firepower to do M&A today. We will remain disciplined in our approach and given the substantial value still to be delivered from our current management actions pipeline, we have plenty to keep us busy. As a purpose-led organization, everything we do is underpinned by ensuring we deliver better outcomes and improve propositions for our customers, delivering on our sustainability commitments and setting ambitious near-term targets towards decarbonizing our investment portfolio, and continuing to invest in our people and culture. With that, we will move to questions. Can I please therefore ask the analysts if you could now log into the Zoom call with the details you've been sent by the IR team. In terms of the format for the sell side analysts who are joining the Zoom call, please ask your question using the raise hand function. Once you've accepted the invitation, which will come up on your screen, the operator will bring you into our presentation live on the video. For anyone watching on our webcast, please use the Q&A facility, and we will come to your questions after we've been to those on the Zoom call. While we give the analysts a moment or two to log in on the Zoom call, we probably can take a pre-submitted question. Vicky, is there a first question we could take, please? Hi, Andy. Yeah. While we're waiting for our analysts to join, I've had a question submitted via the webcast, so I'll just read that one first. Swiss Re have recently sold half of their strategic stake ahead of the lockup expiry. Do you expect them to sell down more? What are the intentions of your remaining strategic shareholders? Okay, thanks, Vicky. Obviously, we're delighted to have Swiss Re as a shareholder. The position was that Swiss Re have quite a large portfolio of equities as part of their capital base. When they held 13.3% of Phoenix, that was an outlier compared to the other holdings in their equity portfolio. Now they're down at 6.6%. That's much more in line with other holdings they have elsewhere in their portfolio. It's no longer an outlier. It is very much a decision for Swiss Re as to what they do going forward. What I would also add, a couple of points. Firstly, that I've had a lot of feedback from investors that they like the fact that the free float in Phoenix is greater, that liquidity in Phoenix shares is greater. Also, in terms of other strategic shareholders. Back in February, where we did the deal to buy the Standard Life brand, Stephen Bird and abrdn reconfirmed at the time their commitment to the strategic partnership and their strategic investment. Also back in June, MS&AD also reaffirmed their commitment to their strategic partnership and strategic investment in the Phoenix Group. MS&AD have a conscious strategy of diversifying their earnings away from Japan by taking strategic stakes in overseas companies. They're very happy with the 7% dividend yield they get from the Phoenix stock. Do we have our first analyst question now, Vicky? Yep. Andy, we can now move over to questions from our equity analysts. The first question is from Steven Haywood of HSBC. Steven, could you unmute yourself and go ahead and ask your question, please? Good morning. I hope you can hear me. Thank you. Morning, Steven. Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. Three questions from me, if you don't mind. On your internal model harmonization, I noticed that one of the bullets on the unlocking management actions pipeline suggests that it will support future M&A. Can you give us an indication of how this will support future M&A? And then, two other questions on BPA. Can you discuss the outlook for the BPA market for the rest of this year and beyond and Phoenix's pipeline? Secondly, in terms of your BPA capabilities now, you mentioned in the slides that you can now quote on 90% of all deals coming to the market. I wonder if you can give some more details around your capabilities now, what they were previously, and also what you think this 90% quotability can lead to for your pipeline and future years' new business. Thank you. Thanks, Steven. I'll take the second and third and then ask Rakesh to take the first one. The broader outlook for BPA, that there's GBP 1.5 trillion of assets in DB schemes in the U.K., and as I've said before, I'm yet to meet the finance director that's pleased to have this big financial services company called a pension scheme attached to the side of his manufacturing business. I'd say we're getting to a place where probably two-thirds of that GBP 1.5 trillion is well advanced on a journey to be able to move to de-risking and buying in due course. In line with other commentators, we would expect over the next decade, a GBP 30 billion-GBP 40 billion a year market for BPA. What we've seen is the first half of this year has been quieter. We would estimate the external BPAs have been around GBP 6 billion in the first half of this year. I think that's quite simply just down to the fact that the pandemic happened last year and finance directors had other priorities. We'd expect the market to be more normalized in the second half of this year. What does all that mean? Basically, what I would say is that if I take a medium term view, I am really confident that we will be able to exceed the GBP 800 million long term new business cash and more than prove the wedge. If you ask me specifically about 2021, then if you're asking me about cash generation and management actions, they're all things we can control internally ourselves. They're our internal projects. When it comes to predicting future new business, we're in a competitive market out there, and the reality is that the vast majority of our competitors are monolines. They're probably sat there thinking, 'If we don't write volume BPA this year, we've had a bad year.' At Phoenix, we won't think that. We have a multidimensional business. We play in lots of areas, and we will maintain discipline over what we do. Therefore, there is a chance in the second half of this year, we've got an attractive pipeline of business, but there is a chance that the monolines that were starved in the first half are super hungry in the second half. We will maintain our discipline and only allocate capital where we can get attractive returns. In terms of the capability, probably the best anecdote to summarize this is that I was chatting to Matt, one of the guys in our BPA team, who's been in the BPA team for quite a while, in our London office the other day. He was saying to me that 16 months ago, as we went into lockdown, the BPA team was six. As we come back from lockdown, it's now 25. That gives you an indication of the capability we're building. The fact that we can now quote on 90% of the market, we used to be able to quote on only 35%. We've developed the ability to look at deferreds, for example. We've developed the ability to do buyouts as well as buy-ins. We just have more capacity in the team to be able to quote on a broader range of business. What you should expect from us is we've allocated GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million of capital a year for external BPA. We're targeting a 5% strain. Delighted that we've moved down from 8% to 6% on the external business, and the Pearl scheme went from 12% to 6%. That's a real testament to what we're doing here. We're targeting a 5% strain. That means GBP 3 billion-GBP 4 billion a year of external BPA. I wouldn't rule out potentially allocating more capital in due course, but let's get ourselves to successfully allocate GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million at a 5% strain as a first step on that journey. Rakesh, do you want to pick up on the internal model harmonization? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Steven. I think the question was about unlocking future management actions and the potential for helping on M&A. First thing, the benefit of the internal model, which is still a decision for the PRA in end of September, will allow us to then combine the life companies within a single entity. At the moment, if they're on separate internal models, you can't do that Part VII. By having Standard Life and Phoenix Life all in a single harmonized internal model will unlock that Part VII and allow us to then complete it, which is expected in 2023. In addition to that, it then sets us up to bring ReAssure onto that internal model over time. Finally, when it comes to M&A pricing, we will be able to give a more accurate reflection of the risks involved in bringing a target onto our harmonized internal model. Just to finish off, Steven, in terms of other management actions. What it allows us to do is it gives us an option to further go into more granular detail on our credit risk calculations. At the moment, when we calculate our credit risk, we use the same capital across a letter. Triple B, we make no difference whether it's Triple B plus or Triple B or Triple B minus, the same capital cost. We'll go into the next level of detail by having different capital charges for Triple B plus versus Triple B. It'll give us a better reflection of our risks. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Steven. Vicky, next question, please. Hi, yeah, next question is from Andy Sinclair, from Bank of America. Andy, please go ahead. Thank you. Morning, everyone. Three from me as usual, if that's okay. Hopefully, you haven't covered anything in this Q&A. It's been a busy morning this morning. Firstly, was on the remaining European operations. I just really wanted to understand the timeframe for your new plans. Just want to make sure I'm reading slide 22 correctly, that this should be largely complete in slide. Just when would we see the admin outsourced? I think in the past, you didn't have European outsourcing agreements in place, so just to understand a bit more there. Second question is just on bulk annuities and Pearl transfers. What's the timeframe for further transactions? Could we potentially see more in 2021, depending on how the annuity market goes in H2 and what those monoline peers are doing? Is that just further out? Third question was just on the U.K. Open savings business. I was probably a little bit surprised to see net outflows in H1, given a pretty strong year for U.K. asset gatherers. I just really wondered if you could give a little bit more color here and what you'd be expecting in terms of a return to net inflows going forward. Thanks. Thanks, Andy. None of those are ones that you've missed having done your other results earlier on. That's all good. I'll get Rakesh to pick up the third in terms of the savings flows. In terms of Europe, there are three core areas of focus there for Standard Life International. One is the move on to the partial internal model. We are pretty close to being able to submit that application to the CBI. The CBI would typically take a year, potentially longer, in order to work through and approve an application like that. Give you a sense of time frames there. In terms of the administration and migrating to more modern technology, we'll do that in tandem with the program to move the U.K. business off the old Standard Life mainframe across to the Diligenta TCS BaNCS platform. That's something that will happen over the next couple of years broadly from here. The third action just ongoing is now we've taken ownership of the Standard Life brand, which is very exciting for us. We can really start to push that Standard Life International brand from the new business perspective, both in Ireland and Germany domestic markets, and then the offshore bond business back into the U.K. Taking ownership of that Standard Life brand has resonated really positively with employee benefit consultants and intermediaries because they can see we're really committed to those markets. In terms of on the BPA side and the Pearl scheme, that's basically a dialogue we have with the board of trustees of that pension scheme. They are keen to go the whole way and to buy the whole business out. We're committed to do that by the end of 2023. We can have a significant influence, but not totally control that timing. Obviously, we went to them when we saw the BPA market was quieter in the first half. They were happy to accelerate the next GBP 1 billion, which is what we completed in July. We can influence the timing of that, but we need to agree things with the trustees. Rakesh, do you want to pick up the flows position? Yeah, the flows in the first half, Andy, as I mentioned in my script, was primarily due to people deferring their decision that they took a couple of years ago, that it's actually coming through now. That was based on our legacy proposition that was, as we know, was under-invested in previously. We are doing a lot of work now on trying to reverse those net flows, and it will take time. What's really pleasing is that you can see the fruits of that coming through now. In the fact that our gross inflows are actually going up year-on-year. You can see the benefit of having that heritage and open business together to get that cost efficiency, capital efficiency, and scale to actually improve our pricing on that basis. We've got the brand now, that investment in brand will allow us to also further enhance that proposition. We're continuing to improve our proposition in this space anyway, as you've recently seen the launch of the ESG default fund within our Master Trust. A number of areas, a number of initiatives. We're investing in this proposition, and it will take time, but we are seeing the fruits of it because we've had more scheme wins this year. For the one-off deferred outflows that came through in the first half of this year, roughly how much was that's one-off in terms of the outflows this year? I think roughly that was about half of it. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. I think the key point is that was decisions those corporates made a couple of years ago before the investment we made. We won 17 new mandates in the first half of this year. We won one last year. That'll give you a sense of the momentum we're building in our proposition now. We're the early stages, and there's a long way to go, and we're not getting ahead of ourselves. You know what we're like. We are very confident that in the medium term, we will build a very much a leading business here. Vicki, next question, please. Hi, Andy. Next question is from Larissa van Deventer from Barclays. Larissa, please go ahead when you're ready. Good morning, everybody. Three from my side as well. The first one, now that you've decided not to sell the European businesses, could you give us a sense of your strategy for Europe? If you see more near-term opportunities in the U.K. or in Europe? Second question relates to the hurdles, Rakesh, that you mentioned on the dividend. You seem to be on track to meeting both of them. The question is, how often and how aggressively will the board review those? Is this a six-monthly focus, or do you take a longer-term view with respect to potential M&A? On potential M&A, could you give us a sense of what you consider your deployable capital to be for potential M&A transactions, please? Sorry, Larissa. I missed the very last bit there on M&A. Could you say that last question again? What do you consider your deployable excess capital to be? Right. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I will take the first and third of those and then ask Rakesh to cover the dividend side. Basically, the strategy for Europe in the shorter term is the transformation of that business. Move it from a Standard Formula to a partial internal model, migrate to much more modern technology, and then invest in the Standard Life brand and the propositions. That's sort of a two-three-year program of work, which are the right things to do for the business on a kind of standalone basis. That also would then turn it into a business that would be a platform to consider potential consolidation in Europe. Don't expect us to be doing any European M&A in the next couple of years. That's not on the agenda. We've got a lot of work to do with that European business organically, if you like. Our focus of our M&A activity is on the U.K. Let me just give a bit more color around that. M&A remains a core part of our strategy. We're confident that's a significant driver of value. We say in the disclosures today that currently our firepower for M&A is GBP 1.4 billion, without raising equity, and that's before you take the Ark Life proceeds of about GBP 200 million. With that, you're looking more at what GBP 1.6 billion. I guess, we're in the very fortunate position that there's a huge amount of value that we can create through the transition of the Standard Life business and the integration of the ReAssure business. I mean, just seeing the GBP 400 million of surplus gain from the harmonized internal model, that's just one of the integration actions in practice. If we were to do an M&A imminently, we would have the bandwidth at a group level to oversight the business. We would have the financial firepower to do it, so we could do a deal. We'd be able to do sort of the phase one integration. We'd need to leave it on the side from a phase two or phase three integration perspective. What I'd say is, we're not desperately pounding the streets, desperately looking for the next M&A deal. If we didn't do another deal in the next year or so, I wouldn't be at all perturbed, because we're in the very fortunate position that we've got lots of value we can still generate through the integration of the businesses that we have. Rakesh, do you want to pick up on the dividend side? Thank you, Andy. Larissa, your question was around the dividend and the review of the dividend. As you know, Larissa, we have a stable and sustainable dividend, and maintaining that is the key priority for the board, and the resilience is paramount. We're only going to increase the dividend if we can see and demonstrate that the business has grown. This is in addition to M&A periodic. To the extent we do an M&A, that will be separate. This is just looking at organic growth only. Any level then we then establish as that new level will be the new stable and sustainable level going forward. There are those two conditions, like I mentioned in my presentation. One was around getting long-term cash generation to greater than GBP 800 million, effectively proving the wedge. Secondly, the recurring sources being greater than the recurring uses. They're the two conditions. If those two conditions are met, the board will then consider whether it's appropriate to increase the dividend, and they'll have a decision and judgment to make in that regard. I would expect this to be an annual process, depending on how we've done in that financial year. Thank you. Thanks, Larissa. Vicki, next question, please. Hi. Yeah, next question comes from Farooq Hanif from Credit Suisse. Farooq, over to you. Could you please unmute yourself? Hi, everybody. Hope you can hear me. Hear you loud and clear, Farooq. Thank you. Yeah, very good. Yeah, great. Can you just talk a little bit more about your plans for Standard Life brand? Is this now going to be the face of your open business everywhere? You'll basically migrate people from, to use Standard Life proposition. Then on the technology, are you basically looking to replace the platform that you've basically given back to Standard Life with your own proposition? Secondly, on BPAs, you're talking about creating for 90% of the market. What about the really big deals? Would you consider major reinsurance partnerships to try and facilitate doing those really larger deals? Then lastly, just a quick one on BaNCS versus ALPHA. Looking right now at unit cost, now that you've got these two platforms and you've been using them, which is, for you, the most efficient? Thank you. Thanks, Farooq, good to see you. We're absolutely delighted to take ownership of the Standard Life brand. Obviously the deal we did in the first half basically means that we now own all of the life and pensions business of Standard Life, including the brand, the transferring across the marketing and distribution teams. That's fantastic. Just to reiterate, we basically do three things at Phoenix. We're the market leader in heritage business, we're the market leader in M&A, and we're building a thriving and growing open business. Yes, we would see over time that basically the Standard Life brand is the brand we will use in that open business. It's a fantastic brand. It has very high awareness, very high levels of trust, a strong consumer brand, very deep heritage. It is exciting for us to have that. The key for us is focusing on developing our propositions, developing the technology and therefore the service and offering for customers and for intermediaries, and building our people capabilities. We have fantastic people already, and we're bringing some fantastic hires into our open business as well, creating, in my view, the strongest team in the market. You raised specifically the advisor platform. Our focus at the moment is on workplace business. That's where basically there's about GBP 40 billion of new money coming into the market every year. We're a top three player in workplace pensions. Customer savings and investments. View that as the individual pensions market as people look to consolidate and journey to and through retirement. I think it's unlikely that we will try and create an advisor platform in the way that abrdn have. I think that's unlikely. I do think we will look to play in that market, and we're currently working through and thinking through different strategies and options around how we might do that. Obviously we've got the BPA side and Sun Life and Europe as the other parts of that open business. To your second question on the BPA market. The way to think about this is that we're happy to allocate GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million of capital. As I say, I wouldn't rule out potentially doing more in due course, but right now we're happy at GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million of capital. We're targeting a strain of 5%. Obviously the Could we end up doing a scheme at GBP 2 billion? Quite possibly, because that would only use GBP 100 million of our GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million. Equally, Farooq, Tom Ground and Kunal Sood and the team that we have in place, some of the very best people in the market, in my view, they will look at things like asset reinsurance and other ways of structuring. I wouldn't rule out potentially doing something larger if we had some form of asset reinsurance in place. That's some of the things we're starting to think about. Early days for us, and we will take a very disciplined and considered approach to BPA. We will not try and run before we can walk. We will make sure we only deploy capital at attractive returns. Finally, in terms of BaNCS and ALPHA. First of all, we've got a huge agenda on the go. You just got to look at the slide Rakesh had up of the transformation and integration activities. Any consideration of BaNCS and ALPHA is not for the next few years. We've got far more value accretive things that we could do. Our view is the outlook for M&A in the U.K. is attractive. There's a global theme here of insurers focusing down on core businesses. You can see it with AIG, with Prudential Group, with Aviva. You can see it everywhere. That, for me, is good news for us. It means there will be M&A opportunities and that the longest lead time in our M&A is the phase III of integration, which is the customer operations and IT side. Having two strong platforms in BaNCS and ALPHA is plan A for us to accelerate the pace at which we can do M&A. If the M&A isn't forthcoming, there would be fairly material benefits in bringing those two platforms together. That's an option to think about, but plan A would be to accelerate the pace at which we can do M&A by having the two platforms side by side. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Farooq. Vicky, next question, please. Hi, Andy. Our next question is from Oliver Steel, from Deutsche Bank. Oliver, could you unmute yourself and go ahead when you're ready? Hello. Andy Sinclair knew most of my questions. If I can just add a little bit of extra detail or ask for extra detail. The first is on Standard Life International, what are the savings that you actually expect, in terms of both cash savings, benefit to Solvency II, and also the cost of achieving that? How does it change your long-term free cash buildup, in other words? Secondly, can you just remind us of what's left of your own pension scheme in terms of liabilities? I'll take the second and then ask Rakesh to pick up the first. In terms of the own pension scheme, it's a GBP 3 billion scheme. We've basically done 60% of it now. There's 40% to go. GBP 1.2 billion roughly of that pension scheme still to look at in due course. Rakesh, do you want to pick up? Because it all interlinks with the U.K. synergy targets as well, doesn't it? Yeah. There's Standard Life International, I think there was two parts, Oliver, to your question about synergies reduction and impact on long-term free cash. Let me just talk about the capital bit first on the partial internal model. This is really what we're doing, is moving two of the modules to become internal model because we don't believe Standard Formula is appropriate for that. Those two modules will allow us to better manage those risks going forward. There will be a modest benefit to long-term free cash in doing that because we will be able to reflect a more accurate picture of the SCR which then has a small knock-on impact to the risk margin. We should see an increase in that coming through into the long-term free cash. In terms of the cost synergies, I think what we want to do is make sure that once you've got it onto the platform, as Andy discussed earlier, that will allow us to have a more manageable cost level. Again, given it's still open to new business, I wouldn't see this as a material benefit going forward. What it will do is allow us to ensure that our proposition in Europe is appropriately priced and can be efficiently sold. Does that cover it, Oliver, for you? Is there a cost to achieving this? Certainly, there will be a small cost for the internal model, because that we need to get through the process. Going from a Standard Formula to a partially internal model, you need to make sure you have all the governance, et cetera, in place to do that within Ireland. Again, it will be pretty low compared to the big harmonized internal model. Thank you. Thanks, Oliver. Good to see you. Vicky, next question, please. Our next question is from Trevor Moss, from Agency Partners. Trevor, would you like to unmute yourself and go ahead? Yep. Morning, Andy. Morning, Rakesh. Morning, Trevor. How are you? Yes, very good, thank you. Very good. Just a few questions. Without wishing to do the M&A theme to death, because you had a couple of questions on that already, Andy. I guess I would say that the financial resources of Phoenix to do M&A have probably never been better. I thought last year, both at your interims and at the CMD, you were talking quite optimistically about the prospects of deals. I sense from your commentary today that you're a little less optimistic about anything happening. You see the long-term effects of various things, market volatility, companies deconsolidating, et cetera. It doesn't sound like there's anything imminent. I wonder if that's because you've been looking at some deals and some deals have gone away, or whether there's a change in the marketplace and the way that people are thinking about deals, and there's a lot of deferral going on of that thinking. That was a little bit more about M&A. Second thing, I noticed that you've dropped about GBP 1 billion of shareholders' equity this half year. I realize, obviously, that you hedge the economics, you don't hedge the IFRS balance sheet necessarily. I get that, but that's quite a lot of equity that's gone. Now, that's also had an effect on your fixed leverage ratios, which would have been quite a lot better had that not happened. I wonder if you might talk about that a little bit. Those are the two. Thank you. Okay. I'll get Rakesh to handle the second. In terms of the first, the first thing I'd say is my intention is no change in tone or messaging around M&A from what I've said before. If you're reading something different, please don't. That's not the intention. We remain very positive about the outlook for M&A over the medium term. There're two drivers of that. The fact that insurance groups are generally focusing in on core businesses. I think the pandemic has accelerated people thinking about where capital is deployed and how to optimize returns on capital in different parts of their businesses. We would be optimistic about that in the medium term. I think we are extremely well-placed, and I think your point is very well made. With GBP 1.4 billion of firepower. Every deal we've done in the past, we've needed to raise equity. A big slug of the value created goes to service that equity. That GBP 1.4 billion firepower we have at the moment, is kind of earning next to nothing on our balance sheets at the moment. Therefore, if we deploy that to M&A, the ability for more of that to find its way back to shareholders in the form of increased dividends is clearly much greater. I think that's all exciting. The bit I sort of temper is that we've got two or three years of serious, heavy lifting, hard work to get all the benefits out of the Standard Life transition and the ReAssure integration. As I said earlier, just looking at the GBP 400 million from the harmonized internal model, these are big numbers of value creation. Therefore, if we did another M&A deal, as far as sort of the phase II finance and actuarial side is concerned, and the phase III customer operations and IT, we would need to leave those sat on the side for a period of time. We have the bandwidth at a group level. At a group level where we've integrated Phoenix and ReAssure and Standard Life together. We could oversight another subsidiary. We have the financial firepower. We don't feel a desperate need to pound the streets and find the next deal, because if it was there, we could do it. We'd need to leave it on the side for a decent period of time before we could start realizing those synergies. That's the nuance. The other piece I'd add, Trevor, is that I see some commentary that only big deals would move the needle. I don't see that at all. If we did a smaller deal, you can kind of do the math yourself. You think what the cash generation, if we deployed half a billion into a smaller deal, that's going to generate GBP 50 million a year of incremental cash. Well, you could take a chunk of that and divert it to more BPA. You could take the majority of it and say, "Well, that's additional cash generation for the shareholders that we can feed through in the dividend." What you're foregoing in terms of return is very low indeed on that half a billion of cash on the group whole code balance sheet. I think smaller deals or larger deals would be equally attractive from our perspective. Do you want to pick up on the leverage and IFRS equity side? Yeah, no, absolutely. Thanks for your question, Trevor, and your question related to the fall in the shareholders' equity. Really just putting some context here, Trevor. As you know, our focus is on the cash and resilience elements, i.e., the cash generation, dependable cash generation, and that is driven from the Solvency II balance sheet. All our hedging strategy is there to protect that solvency position. Together with the management actions, that we delivered nearly GBP 300 million just in the first six months of this year, that will ensure that solvency position is protected. That will give us dividend resilience and gives us dividend resilience already over the long term, ensures that we maintain that resilience. Impact of that is the hedging strategy then has a potential adverse impact on our IFRS balance sheet through the rising of rates and in equities as you've seen this year. Given that we can focus on the balance sheet and to ensure that our capital position remains robust and we can deliver dependable cash, the dividend is safe for all investors, and we'll have surplus cash to repay debt as and when it comes due, we can ensure we can manage that leverage ratio. For example, we've just repaid in July, GBP 100 million of our senior debt that was coming to maturity, and our Tier 3 bond is due for maturity in July of next year. We have a number of maturities coming up. By ensuring we protect that balance sheet, we maintain that dividend resilience, and we have the cash to repay debt as it falls due to manage that leverage ratio. Thanks, Rakesh. Thanks, Trevor. Vicky, next question. Yep. Next we've got Andrew Crean from Autonomous. Andrew, would you like to go ahead? Morning, all. Morning, Andrew. How are you? Morning. Talk to you about a couple of questions. As you know, like Oliver, I don't think most things have been asked. A couple of things. Down the line, the internal model harmonization of the ReAssure, should we broadly, I mean, it's never certain, but should we broadly plug in the same benefits that you had for the Standard Life harmonizations of GBP 0.4 billion of capital and GBP 0.1 billion of cash? Secondly, you were talking about your workplace business and the fact that you are seeing a number of outflows. Is there a pipeline of outflows, which people have, you know, firms have told you about, which are likely to go into the second half and into next year, which will keep you in net outflows? Okay. I'll take the second of those and get Rakesh to take the first. I would say these were schemes notified as Rakesh said earlier, couple of years ago, and that it takes a while for the money to go anyway, and the pandemic delayed things. We're kind of through the worst of that storm, if you like. So far this year, existing schemes get reviewed on a regular basis, and the team have been doing a great job this year of ensuring we retain those existing schemes as well as, say, as a big step up in the schemes won. Again, just to position that carefully. We won 17 new schemes in the first half of this year, compared to one in the whole of last year. What happens is the employee benefit consultants, the intermediaries, corporate advisors, that they will tend to give you their smaller clients initially to kind of test you out. Don't expect this to be a kind of wall of value coming from those schemes. They're generally smaller ones. That's how it works. You win the smaller ones, you do a good job of them, and then they'll trust you with their bigger, more prized clients in due course. Really pleased with the progress and momentum that we're building in that part of the business. Rakesh, do you want to pick up on the ReAssure internal model? Andrew, to answer your question, I think the simple answer is no. The reason for that is the fact that when we did our current harmonized internal model between Phoenix Life and Standard Life, it's effectively bringing together a heritage business and an open business, and we can diversify those risks together. They were two different businesses that helped us then in that diversification. When we bring ReAssure, the risks are very similar to what we already have with Phoenix. Those numbers will be no way near than what we've seen in the expected impact for the current harmonizing of the internal model. Great. Thanks, Rakesh. Thanks, Andrew. Good to see you. Vicky, next question, please. Thanks, Andy. Next question is from Andrew Baker from Citi. Andrew, please go ahead. Morning, Andrew. Morning. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just two for me. The first one's really a clarification on the dividend. Is the GBP 800 million, should we look at that as sort of a hard number? Or is there some flexibility there? Let's say you're close to it this year, but you have a really good line of sight into strong pipeline. Could you still increase your dividend this year? Or if you don't hit your GBP 800, there's no dividend increase? Then just on the Pearl scheme, we've seen a number of insurers now transact with their own plans. I'm just curious as to what the sort of the requirements for the third party for the arms-length transaction is on those and the independence. Thanks. Yeah. Again, I'll take the second first and then ask Rakesh to clarify on the dividends. Basically, you kind of have an employer with a view. You have a board of trustees, independent board of trustees with a view, you have the insurer, ourselves in this case yeah. All of them will take independent expert external advice. Then there's a negotiation and a discussion around it. Ultimately, the trustees won't agree to a transfer if they're not getting a good deal compared to what they could get in the broader market. They recognize that the pension scheme is full of ex-employees of the Phoenix Group, that would probably rather have their bulk annuity and their ongoing individual annuity with the Phoenix Group because that's who they worked for. There're strong checks and balances within it. What actually happened in terms of the Pearl scheme is it wasn't sort of quite funded fully up to the level to do a buyout, which is why the economics of the Pearl scheme transaction last year looked less attractive than the economics of the open market BPA business. It's a zero-sum game for us because we would have had to put the extra money in ourselves as employer anyway. What the team have done is where we're building the capability of the team. Tom and Kunal on the team got a fantastic reinsurance arrangement as they brought this extra GBP 1 billion across, and that's what brought the strain down from the 12% to the 6%. That just shows the kind of capability that we're building in the BPA business and why we're optimistic about our prospects for the medium term there. Do you want to pick up on the dividend side, Rakesh? Yeah. Hi, Andrew. Just to reiterate again that our policy is stable and sustainable, and resilience is key. Clearly, what we're trying to do is if there is organic growth and we can demonstrate that growth, then the board will then have a decision to make on whether it's appropriate to increase the dividend. To inform that decision, we've got these two conditions. One is, as you mentioned, the GBP 800 million long-term cash generation, and that is effectively showing that we've proved the wedge and got the growth in the open business to offset the runoff of the heritage. That's the line in the sand. It's not a target. It's a minimum. Clearly, we want to go above that. That's the minimum we would need. Second is whether the recurring source is greater than recurring uses. To answer your specific questions, I think we'd have to potentially look at both conditions to be met before we would consider looking to increase the dividend. Yeah. Just to add to that. Ultimately, GBP 800 million is the point at which we've replaced the runoff. We haven't grown the franchise at that point. We've replaced the runoff. If we're not at GBP 800 million, I wouldn't envisage a dividend increase because ultimately we need to be above GBP 800 to have grown the franchise, and therefore the increased level of dividend to be sustainable into the longer term, yeah. We're very confident we'll get there in time. We will be disciplined and sensible about this, and in the meantime, generate large amounts of resilient, reliable cash generation with a very resilient balance sheet underpinning it. Vicky, next question, please. Yeah. Just quickly, I'll just remind anyone in the room, if you would like to ask a question, can you please raise your hand for the analyst? We'll now move to Gordon Aitken from RBC. Gordon, could you please go ahead and ask your question? Good morning, Gordon. You're looking very tan there, Gordon. Is that Scottish sun or you've been away? Just been away, Andy. I would recommend it. Had a really nice time. Very good. Good to see you. Just a couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, when you use reinsurance, I'm talking about any risk here that you're offloading. On average, what proportion of the future expected cash flows do you keep? Secondly, really in response to Andy's question on flows when he was asking earlier, Rakesh said that the savings business was underinvested and that you'd inherited. When David Nish became CEO in 2010 at Standard Life, you spent a fair bit of money, GBP 200 million on these propositions, most of which now end up being yours. Is it that investment, you just need to continuously invest in these types of businesses? Thanks. Yeah. I'll get Rakesh to do the reinsurance one in a moment. On the Standard Life side, for the last several years, the vast majority of the investment that Standard Life abrdn made was in the Wrap platform, which they have retained as part of the deal. What we picked up is the workplace business and the retail pensions business. They kept the Wrap platform. The workplace and retail pensions business had been underinvested in over a number of years, and that's what we're now well advanced in rectifying that. That's why we've got the strong pipeline of new scheme wins and we're building the momentum in the market that we are. Just to reiterate what I said before, buying the Standard Life brand is critical to that because the employee benefit consultants, the corporates. First of all, in a brand license agreement, you spend all your time going back and forth trying to agree things, and Stephen Bird and I were very keen to just simplify that whole relationship down, who does what. It's now a strategic asset management partnership that we have rather than lots of other interactions going on at the same time. Also, the employee benefit consultants, the corporate advisors, the intermediaries, the corporates, that they see actually this company, Phoenix, that they might have seen as a back book consolidator before. They are clearly deadly serious about this open business as well. It doesn't make us any less serious about M&A or Heritage. They're still critical parts of the strategy, but that's also been helpful in building momentum for us. On the reinsurance side, Rakesh? Yeah. Thank you, Gordon. Really, reinsurance, the pricing will depend on what exactly you're reinsuring and the type of risk. What would normally happen, say for example, on BPA, any new business that we write on BPA, we're pretty much reinsuring 95%, 100% of that risk. Therefore, there'll be a fee charged by the reinsurer of doing that, and that would effectively reduce our expected cash flows. That's all included in our new business strain and our long-term cash generation numbers. That just shows the importance of the work that Tom and Kunal are doing to make sure that the reinsurance structuring and the way we do the BPA deals is so important that we get the best value and help us reduce that strain and get the best returns. If I could just come back on that. It's actually the question was really in relation to when you buy a business, so big acquisition. What you tend to do is you announce these very large expected management actions. A lot of that is because of using additional reinsurance. Just in these situations, so when you've inherited business, what proportion? Because clearly you have to give some of the future cash flows away to the reinsurer, otherwise they wouldn't do the deal. What proportions do you keep and what proportion do you give away? In the context of an M&A, Gordon, is that your question? Yeah. Just historically, say, on any of the big deals you've done. Is it 50/50? You've released the capital as well, which is a big positive. Yeah. But- As an example, Gordon, with the ReAssure transaction, just do a live case. They were previously reinsuring, before we acquired them, about 30%-40% of the longevity risk. Phoenix reinsures about 50%. We would then look to get ReAssure up to that 50%, the enlarged group remains at 50%. It just depends on where they are. In taking longevity risk, which is our biggest reinsurance that we do, we keep 50% of the risk and reinsure 50% out on that, whatever we've acquired. Okay. The questions about future expected cash flows and what you give away. Yeah. Maybe I can take that offline with you, Gordon. Sure. Thank you. The basic framework is one of, by taking that action, we release capital up front. We need to be confident we can redeploy that capital to get a higher return than it was being deployed in covering that longevity risk. Yeah. We wouldn't do it if we didn't. We're always taking a very objective financial lens to these things. Vicky, I'm conscious of time. We love our end customers. We also love our analyst friends, they've got, I think, three different sets of results to get through today. Maybe we'll take one or perhaps two final questions before we wind up. Yeah. We've got two analysts left. We will go to Louise Miles from Morgan Stanley, and then we will follow up with Ming. Louise, if you could go ahead first with your question, please. Morning, Louise. Sure. Hi. Morning, Andy. Morning, Rakesh. Thanks for taking my questions. Just three quick ones from me. You've talked a little bit about the ReAssure and Solvency Part VII. Are these allowed for? I know they're not until 2022, 2023. Are these allowed for in your lifetime cash generation target? What exactly can you give us any idea of the magnitude of these impacts as well? That'd be really helpful. You mentioned that you've done some NNEG hedging. I'm curious how much of the equity release book has been hedged, and would you do any more hedging on the book as well going forwards? Finally, just a quick question on the outlook for longevity release in the second half. Other U.K. Life players have said they're going to be more conservative because of the kind of uncertainties around COVID, and around delayed hospital treatments and things like that. Just if we could get a bit of color on your longevity in the second half, that would be really helpful. Thanks. All three for you, Rakesh, then. Let me just talk about longevity first, Louise. I absolutely agree with what a number of my peers have said. I think we're in a similar position. I think we've got, when we set our assumptions, we look at the last five years. We normally do that review, and we'll continue to review in the second half of this year, but we will pretty much exclude what we've seen in 2020. That devastating impact is not a true reflection, and therefore it rightly should be excluded. Similarly, on the CMI 20 tables, we're going to exclude the 2020 results from that. We will be a conservative view, but clearly, we'll look at other areas on methodologies, et cetera, but not the experience that we've seen in 2020. On the ERM hedging, we've hedged about 6%, roughly of our portfolio, 6%, 7%. Really, whether we do any more depends on the pricing. If it's a good risk return and it meets our hurdle rate, then we'll absolutely do that. If not, then clearly, we will keep that. It's really good to get one done at a really efficient pricing. We're pleased with that, and we are looking potentially to do more. In terms of the Part VII, you're talking about the Phoenix and Standard Life. There is some benefit already in those cash flows that we've announced, and its circa GBP 100 million. Thanks. Thanks, Louise. Ming, last but by no means least. Thank you. Thank you for taking my question. Just two questions. Actually, it's three questions, if I may. First, dividend. Could I just have some clarification on the two conditions? Because it looks like to me, you are on track of meeting both of them this year. Does that mean we should be expecting a dividend increase at the full year? Second, I think Rakesh mentioned this is reviewed on annual basis. Let's say if we meet it this year, as I asked before, do we expect dividend increase? For whatever reason, if say next year you missed it, what does that mean to the dividend? In a year, you achieve both conditions as well as an M&A, what does that mean for the dividends? My second question is on the M&A. Could you give some color in terms of, have you seen any changes in the pricing and the competition landscape with the outlook where we are in terms of interest rate and inflation? My third question is, on Standard Life. Now you've got a brand. How does this new relationship or partnership work with you and Standard Life? What stops you moving away your asset management side from Standard Life to go somewhere cheaper? Okay. Thank you. I'll take the second and third of those and then get Rakesh to cover the first. On M&A, we haven't seen any particular changes in pricing or outlook. I think the biggest change is that, if there were back books available in the U.K., you would have had two established players, Phoenix and ReAssure, and now there's one because we've combined together. I think that's the biggest change that we've seen from that perspective. In terms of the Standard Life brand, just to be clear, but basically, we own all of the life and pensions business of Standard Life now. What's left is the asset management side, and it's no longer branded Standard Life. There's a couple of bits that are still coming off, but they'll get to a point where Standard or Standard Life won't be used at all by abrdn. We own that brand entirely. What we then have is a Phoenix Group and Standard Life part of the Phoenix Group having a strategic partnership with abrdn. They are our core strategic asset management partner. We are completely free to use any asset manager we choose in any asset class, in any geography. I think that's a real differentiated advantage we have. I spent over 30 years in the insurance sector across four different companies. In all the others, basically there was always this drive, you must give it to your in-house asset manager. We don't have that. We will choose where we think asset management partners will best deliver for our customers and for our shareholders. Having said that, abrdn are great and we have a fantastic strategic partnership. Some of the work we're doing together on sustainability, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The strategic partnership is excellent. We're not compelled to do it. We can choose where we use to work with different asset managers. I'll get Rakesh to comment on the dividend in a moment. I just want to reiterate something I said a little while ago, though. In terms of the outlook for the second half and hitting the GBP 800 million of long-term new business cash. The asset-based businesses, they're what I call kind of flywheel businesses. You work to get the flywheel going faster, and when it goes faster, it keeps going faster and faster. It's pretty predictable. We could predict now quite clearly what we expect to come in terms of long-term new business cash on the asset businesses this year. BPA is the swing factor. We would need to deploy the lion's share of the GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million of external capital in order to break the GBP 800 million target. In the first half, we've deployed GBP 25 million capital externally, and we are up against a bunch of competitors who are mono lines who've been starved in the first half and are going to be hungry in the second half. If I take a medium-term view, I'm really confident we can break through the GBP 800 million. I do want to be really clear with everyone that we will be disciplined about this. GBP 800 million isn't a target for us. It's an aspiration. Yes, the GBP 1.5 billion-GBP 1.6 billion in cash generation, that's a target, and that's something we would take very seriously and ensure we do achieve that target. The GBP 800 million is an aspiration, and we will be disciplined around the allocation of capital. If we can get there, that's fantastic, and we will seek to do so. We will not deploy capital at poor returns in order to seek to try and get there. We will be disciplined about that. I'm conscious there were other aspects about the conditions over time and M&A and next year and so on. Do you want to just pick those up? No, thanks, Andy. It's a good segue because I think you answered the first part about what the potential is this year and the fact we're focusing on value over volume. Clearly, we've got the two conditions. Ming, if in that scenario, we were higher than GBP 800 million for the rest of the year, we saw recurring sources greater than recurring uses, the board made a judgment that it was appropriate to increase the dividend, that would be a new established, stable, and sustainable dividend level. The reason they would have done that, because they would have been confident that this dividend is sustainable over the long term. The new established level is sustainable over the long term. If in the next year we weren't close to that GBP 800 million, we would still remain at that new established level. Just briefly on M&A, I think that would be dependent on M&A when it happens. I think that's a separate decision, as I've already said. Okay. Thank you very much indeed, Ming. Thank you everyone for your time joining us this morning. I'm conscious it's a busy results season for everybody. Appreciate you taking the time to join us. Needless to say, Rakesh and I and Andrew and Claire and the team are all available, both sell side and buy side. Although we might get a little bit of holiday over the next couple of weeks, available to follow up with anyone would like to. For now, thank you very much indeed. We'll catch up soon. Thank you.