Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to Phoenix Group's 2022 Half-Year Results Presentation. It's great to be presenting here at our new London head office building for the first time. Thank you for coming, and welcome to those of you joining us on the live webcast. Phoenix has had a fantastic first half despite the tough economic backdrop. We have once again delivered a record set of results across our financial framework of cash, resilience, and growth. This was underpinned by the strong progress we've made across our wider strategic priorities, which ensure we are delivering for our customers, colleagues, and investors, and on our core social purpose and wider role in society. We continue to grow organically, delivering strongly for customers with GBP 1.8 billion of net inflows across our open business, and a very pleasing 42 new workplace pension scheme wins in just six months. I'm delighted that we've announced our first ever cash-funded acquisition of Sun Life of Canada U.K., and can demonstrate the value creation available from smaller cash-funded M&A. This means our dividend is now growing both organically and inorganically. We have delivered, therefore, on all of the key objectives I'd set for the business at the start of the year, and I am proud of how well the team are delivering. Starting with the financials. Rakesh will cover this shortly in more detail, but in terms of the headlines. We've delivered GBP 950 million of cash generation in the first six months, and now on track to be at the top end of our target range for the year. Our balance sheet remains both strong and highly resilient with our Solvency II surplus at GBP 4.7 billion. While our shareholder capital coverage ratio of 186% is above our target range, providing the capacity for us to invest into growth such as the acquisition of Sun Life of Canada U.K. Finally, we've reported GBP 430 million of new business long-term cash generation. This is more than double the first half of last year on a like-for-like basis. As you can see from this slide, we continue to make excellent progress across our five strategic priorities as we deliver on our purpose and strategy. The strength of this delivery is down to the strong talent we have in our business. Engagement is high as we prioritize our culture and support our colleagues through the cost of living crisis through a range of measures. This includes the payment of a one-off GBP 1,000 net lump sum to all employees other than our top 100 leaders. I'm not gonna go through everything on the slide, but I did want to highlight a few key achievements. Optimizing our in-force business is the bedrock of Phoenix. I'm therefore pleased that we've delivered a further GBP 421 million of management actions in the period. While we remain as super resilient as always with both our long-term cash and solvency surplus protected despite the volatile markets. We've also continued to enhance our operating model, with the standout success being the migration of all 400,000 Standard Life annuities to the TCS platform, which is our first major migration off the legacy Standard Life mainframe. A great outcome for customers and a key strategic milestone. We've also delivered a further GBP 15 million per annum of cost synergies from ReAssure, which means that we have now exceeded our revised synergy target with nearly GBP 1.1 billion of synergies in just two years. Our third strategic priority is to grow our business to support both new and existing customers. Here, we've continued to deliver organic growth in the first half, including another strong performance from BPA. Most pleasing for me is the clear momentum we have in our capital light fee-based businesses with a GBP 1.9 billion year-on-year increase in net fund flows. Our fourth strategic priority is to innovate to provide our customers with better financial futures. On the slide you can see just some of the initiatives we've delivered in the first half that go right to the heart of our purpose. We are here to help our customers on their journey to and through retirement, which is even more important given the current economic backdrop. Finally, we've continued to invest in a sustainable future as we respond to both clear customer demand and demonstrate leadership as a purpose-led business. In summary, a great start to the year. However, probably the biggest achievement in the first half has been the announcement of our first ever cash-funded acquisition, which I am confident will allow us to demonstrate the significant value for shareholders available from smaller sized cash-funded M&A. We very much look forward to welcoming the Sun Life of Canada U.K. customers and colleagues to the Group. It will be a simplified integration, as the vast majority of the business is already with TCS Diligenta, who are, of course, our strategic partner here. As responsible stewards of shareholder capital, we've remained disciplined in our transaction pricing, with the GBP 248 million consideration representing an attractive price to Own Funds of 83%, the lowest multiple for any deal we have ever done. We expect to generate GBP 470 million of incremental long-term cash generation from this acquisition, with around 30% of that to emerge in the first three years. We are targeting GBP 125 million of net synergies. As a result of the value creation expected from this transaction, I'm delighted that the board has been able to propose a 2.5% inorganic dividend increase that, subject to completion, will be effective from the 2022 final dividend. This is proof of concept that smaller cash funding M&A can add significant shareholder value, and we expect further opportunities to emerge over time. What does our success in the first half mean for our dividend trajectory? As you can see, we have a consistent track record of dividend growth over the past 10 years, having delivered a compound annual growth rate of 4%, primarily driven by M&A. Last year, as we know, as you know, we delivered our first ever organic dividend increase from the growth of our open business. This year, our interim dividend is, as ever, equal to last year's final dividend, which is a 3% increase year-over-year reflecting last year's organic growth. Looking forward to the second half, we have the opportunity to prove our unique business model by delivering both organic and inorganic dividend growth. With the 2.5% increase already announced for our recent acquisition, and the potential for an organic dividend increase as well. Phoenix is therefore well-positioned to deliver on our policy of paying a dividend that is sustainable and grows over time. With that, I will now hand over to Rakesh, who will cover the financials in more detail. Rakesh? Thank you, Andy, and good morning everybody. There are three key things I want you to take away from our financial results today. Firstly, we continue to deliver dependable cash generation, which underpins our reliable dividend. Secondly, we remain resilient as ever and are well-hedged against a challenging economic backdrop. Thirdly, we are on track to deliver both organic growth and inorganic growth, which will support our dividend that is sustainable and grows over time. Turning to the slides. As Andy said, Phoenix has delivered a strong financial performance in the first half of 2022. We delivered cash generation of GBP 950 million in the period, maintained our strong solvency balance sheet, and more than doubled our new business long-term cash generation to GBP 430 million. Our leverage ratio has also reduced to 27% following a GBP 450 million debt repayment in July. Starting first with cash. Phoenix is unique in its ability to deliver dependable cash generation over the very long term. This enables us to set very clear one-year and three-year targets and provide guidance for lifetime cash generation. I want to talk to you about each one of those in turn. Starting with the one-year target. We have delivered GBP 950 million of cash generation in the first half, and now expect to deliver at the top end of our target range of GBP 1.3 billion-GBP 1.4 billion for the full year. We have also set a three-year cash generation target of GBP 4 billion, which I will take you through over the next two slides. We are often asked by investors who are not insurance specialists, how they can compare the performance of Phoenix against companies in the wider market. We primarily run our business to generate cash, and this is easily comparable. Looking at the GBP 4 billion of cash we expect to generate over the next three years, and after deducting our operating costs and debt interest, we are left with around GBP 2.9 billion of free cash flow. This translates into an impressive three-year average of free cash flow yield of 15%, nearly double the FTSE 100 average. This demonstrates just how cash generative our business is relative to companies in the wider market. This slide sets out the expected sources and uses of cash generation over the next three years as at 31 December 2021, and shows that we expect to generate GBP 1.7 billion of surplus cash. We also have the capacity to raise up to a further GBP 1 billion in debt, while remaining within our leverage target ratio. This means we have a total of GBP 2.7 billion available for growth. This provides us with the capacity to cash fund the Sun Life of Canada U.K. acquisition, invest our target allocation of around GBP 300 million into BPA in 2022, and to continue investing into future growth opportunities over time. Finally, on cash, we have provided guidance for lifetime cash generation of GBP 17 billion. After servicing and redeeming all outstanding debt and deducting committed integration costs, we expect GBP 11.8 billion of long-term free cash available to shareholders. This long-term free cash number is prudent because it is from our in-force business only, so it does not include any new business or M&A, nor management actions past 2024. This means we can cover our GBP 500 million annual dividend cost over the very long term. Protecting the resilience of this long-term free cash is therefore key in ensuring the long-term sustainability of our dividend. We view the key market risk associated with equities, interest rates, and inflation as unrewarded risks, and they could cause volatility to the value of this cash. Therefore, we hedge these risks to mitigate the volatility and deliver dependable cash generation, which means there is no material impact on our long-term free cash from key market risks, as you can see on the right-hand side of this slide. We are therefore well-positioned to continue delivering for our shareholders in this challenging economic environment. Our Solvency II capital position remains strong with a resilient surplus of GBP 4.7 billion, which, as ever, reflects the accrual of our interim dividend. Our strong position enabled us to repay the GBP 450 million Tier 3 bond that matured in July, which was deducted from our June solvency position. Our economic variance was once again small at just GBP 0.2 billion, despite the market volatility. This reflects our approach of hedging the majority of our market risks, which is designed to stabilize our Solvency II surplus and our long-term free cash. This, in turn, underpins the resilience of our dividend over the long term. However, our approach does result in temporary own funds volatility. This is a trade-off we accept to deliver the sustainable and resilient dividend that Phoenix is known for, and which our shareholders value. Looking to the full year, I currently expect our surplus of GBP 4.7 billion to remain broadly stable. Meanwhile, our shareholder capital coverage ratio has increased to 186%, and the recently announced acquisition of Sun Life of Canada U.K. is expected to reduce this to 179% on a pro forma basis. With our Solvency shareholder ratio at the top end of our target range of 140%-180%, we have the capacity to invest into future growth opportunities. As I have explained, delivering resilience in our balance sheet is fundamental to Phoenix. We therefore have a low appetite for retaining equity, interest rate, inflation, and currency risks, which we see as unrewarded and hedged. This translates into the low sensitivities presented here. We also manage our longevity risk through reinsurance, retaining around half of the risk across our current in-force book and reinsuring most of the risk on new business. We continue to see credit risk as rewarded and actively manage our portfolios to ensure they remain high quality and diversified. The key sensitivity we focus on here is a full letter downgrade of 20% of our credit portfolio, which is currently GBP 0.3 billion after expected management actions, and small in the context of our GBP 4.7 billion Solvency II surplus. Given inflation is so topical at the moment, I thought it was worth reiterating that we have no material exposure to inflation. Inflation emerges in two principal areas within our business, both of which we have hedged. Firstly, we have the inflation-linked annuities, which are hedged with index-linked gilts. Secondly, we have the exposure on our policy administration and operating costs, which we also hedge. All of which means that the current inflationary environment will have no material financial impact on Phoenix. As I have shown many times before, as a consequence of our comprehensive hedging approach, we continue to be far more resilient to the major market risks than our U.K. peers. This low sensitivity is especially important during times of market volatility, as we have at present, and therefore it remains a key differentiator for us. We manage around GBP 270 billion of assets on behalf of our customers and shareholders. Our assets reduced in the period by around GBP 38 billion due to the significant market movements experienced by all. However, these market movements have a limited impact on the fees we earn as we hedge annual management charges against movements in equities and interest rates. We maintain a prudent, diversified GBP 34 billion shareholder credit portfolio comprising both liquid and illiquid credit. With a BBB exposure of 19% and our BBB- exposure at just 3%. We also remain conservative in sector positioning of our credit portfolio and have sought to limit our exposure to highly cyclical sectors by further rotating out of these during the first half. As a result, we have only GBP 1.1 billion or 3% of our GBP 34 billion credit portfolio exposed to cyclical sectors. However, these are with high-quality counterparties, as evidenced by an average credit rating of A-. We continue to have a circa GBP 1 billion credit default reserve. We therefore remain very comfortable with the quality of our credit portfolio. Our ability to deliver value-accretive management actions is a key differentiator for Phoenix, and optimizing our in-force business is one of our five key strategic priorities. We continue to demonstrate our capability here with over GBP 400 million of management actions delivered in the first six months of the year. These were primarily from recurring business-as-usual actions, which are not reliant on integrations and will continue into the long term. This included our ongoing illiquid asset origination, where we delivered a 60 basis points illiquidity premium. We also invested over 50% of our illiquid assets, excluding ERM, into sustainable assets during the period. We have proactively deployed into U.S. liquid credit to take advantage of the relative spread widening and delivered a host of other balance sheet optimization actions too. Moving now to growth, it is great to see that our investment here is paying off. I am delighted that we have more than doubled new business long-term cash generation to GBP 430 million on a like-for-like basis. Retirement solutions contributed GBP 282 million in the first half, delivering more than triple the volume in the first half of 2021 from external transactions. Elsewhere, it was pleasing to see our fee-based businesses report a 17% year-on-year increase to GBP 148 million. Noting that the new business long-term cash generation here is seasonally more weighted to the first half. Last year, we delivered organic growth that more than offset the heritage runoff for the first time. Given our performance in the first half of 2022, we are on track to achieve it again this year. 2021 was the year that Phoenix, through our newly acquired Standard Life brand, firmly established itself as a key player in the BPA market. We have built on this foundation with a strong start to 2022, having completed GBP 1.6 billion of premiums across six external transactions. Our capital strain has also reduced again from 6.5% last year to 6.2% in the first half, which on a pre-capital management policy basis equates to 3.8%. We have improved both the cash multiple and payback, leading to an improved IRRs in the period. Looking forward, we have a very strong pipeline for the second half. We have already completed two further transactions totaling GBP 1.1 billion, and are exclusive on another GBP 500 million transaction expected to complete in quarter three. We will also complete the buying of the remaining GBP 600 million of the Pearl Pension Scheme liabilities in the second half too. As a result, we are confident of fully deploying our target level of capital into BPA this year of around GBP 300 million, with the second half deal economics expected to be broadly similar to the first half. I was particularly pleased to see the strong turnaround in net flows from our capital-light fee-based business in the first half. We delivered a net inflow of GBP 1.4 billion in the period, compared to a GBP 0.5 billion pound outflow in the same period last year. An improvement of GBP 1.9 billion. This was driven by our workplace business, where the investment we have made into our proposition and into our Standard Life brand is enabling us to both retain our existing schemes and win new schemes in the market. As you can see, the momentum in scheme wins continues to accelerate with 42 new scheme wins in the first half of 2022, which is more than the whole of 2021 already. The scheme wins this year do remain in the smaller scheme category, but we are now being invited to bid for the larger schemes, and we are confident we will be successful here too. Turning to our IFRS results. We delivered operating profit of GBP 507 million in the first half of 2022, marginally down on the prior year. This included increased BPA new business profits in our open division, offset by a reduction in heritage, primarily due to a lower expected return as the business runs off. We also experienced adverse investment variances under IFRS from rising yields due to our hedging approach of protecting the solvency balance sheet and our long-term free cash. Other non-operating items includes a provision for future project costs in relation to the rephasing of our Standard Life IT migration that we told you about at the full year. It also includes costs in relation to IFRS 17 and the planned investment into projects to support our open growth strategy. To conclude, we delivered strong financial results in the first half of 2022 across our financial framework of cash, resilience and growth. We are on track to deliver across all of our targets for 2022. This includes delivering at the top end of the 2022 cash generation target range of GBP 1.3 billion-GBP 1.4 billion, and retaining our resilient balance sheet by operating within our target ratio ranges for solvency and leverage. In terms of growth, we are confident of delivering more than GBP 800 million of long-term cash generation from new business this year. We are aiming to complete the acquisition of Sun Life of Canada U.K. in Q1 2023. This will support us in delivering on our dividend policy, which is to pay a dividend that is sustainable and grows over time. With that, I will now hand you back to Andy for the outlook. Thank you, Rakesh. As I've said before, I passionately believe that the best businesses have a core social purpose. Which is why ours is helping people secure a life of possibilities, helping a broad range of people in the U.K. to journey to and through retirement, and enjoy a better later life. As a purpose-led organization, we look to have the best people, who are focused on our purpose, to then deliver better outcomes for our customers and wider society, and in turn, produce stronger returns for all of our investors. The virtuous circle you see on this slide. Sustainability is embedded throughout this. From engaging customers with their financial futures, to being a model employer, to investing our GBP 270 billion of assets to support net zero and leveling up. This purpose-led approach underpins everything we do at Phoenix, and I'm confident it will enable us to execute on the clear growth opportunities ahead of us. Standing in the shoes of our customers, there are a number of sources of retirement income available to them, and these underpin the four major trends in the U.K. long-term savings and retirement market, which offer us multiple growth opportunities. The first is the huge stock of legacy pensions and savings products, where we can improve customer outcomes by moving them from outdated legacy systems to more modern platforms. There are GBP 480 billion of heritage assets, much of which we believe will come to market over time. The next key customer income source is from the GBP 2 trillion of defined benefit liabilities in the U.K. This underpins what is a thriving BPA market of around GBP 40 billion per annum, where we're performing strongly. Finally, we have the capital-light, fee-based, defined contribution pensions offered through the workplace and direct to individuals. In the workplace market, which we believe will see around GBP 40 billion of flows per annum, we've been building strong momentum. While in the individual pensions and savings market, which is another GBP 40 billion of flows, we've been working on developing innovative retirement income solutions. The right-hand side of this slide sets out the impact on these market growth trends of the current economic environment. We believe it accelerates both the M&A market, due to cost inflation pressures for vendors, and the BPA market, where rising rates make BPA transactions more affordable for corporates. Clearly, many people are facing significant challenges from the cost of living crisis, and this is impacting spending habits and bank deposits. So far, we've seen limited change in pension contributions, and do not currently envisage a material impact on our fee-based businesses. Importantly, as we did in our response to COVID, we will continue to support our customers in every way we can. We have a clear and differentiated strategy which creates shareholder value through leveraging all four of the major market trends I've just covered. It is simpler and more focused than our peers. Heritage is the bedrock of our business, which delivers high levels of predictable cash that covers our dividend into the very long term. It also generates surplus cash that we can reinvest into both our open business to support organic growth, and into M&A to deliver inorganic growth, both of which can underpin future dividend increases. What really differentiates Phoenix is how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, with our heritage business creating clear competitive advantages in both open and M&A. For our open business, diversification with the large heritage books means we will be more capital efficient than peers, particularly in retirement solutions, including BPAs, where we are already at a 3.8% capital strain on a more comparable pre-capital management policy basis. While our strategic partnership with TCS provides us with a market-leading cost per policy administration platform that will give us a meaningful cost advantage for our fee-based businesses over time. Now to be clear, we are not fully leveraging these advantages for our open business today. If you think about the progress we are making and the structural competitive advantage we will have in time, I think this is really exciting. Exactly the same logic applies when we do M&A, which enables us to generate significant cost and capital synergies to underpin our ongoing track record of shareholder value creation in M&A. As evidenced by the Sun Life of Canada U.K. transaction, where our synergy target is a 50% uplift on the price paid. A simple, clear strategy. 2021 was a pivotal year for Phoenix as we delivered organic growth from our open business which more than offset the heritage runoff for the first time, which we accelerated through the acquisition of the Standard Life brand and the investment into our Standard Life business. We are now confident of delivering this on an ongoing basis and therefore expect to continue growing our in-force cash generation over time. I covered the four market trends earlier. Three of these are organic, and we will leverage all three of these. We initially turned our focus on to BPA and have already become an established player in this market. We're now turning our attention to the fee-based businesses with our momentum in workplace building and a big opportunity in individual pensions and savings to go at. Over time, we expect to balance our growth between BPA and the capital-light fee-based businesses. We've scheduled a Capital Markets Day on the 6th of December, where we plan to do a deep dive into our open business. M&A remains a core part of the ongoing growth strategy, both large and small, with the remaining GBP 470 billion of U.K. heritage assets potentially available over time. I continue to have cups of tea with my fellow insurance CEOs, and the message from the majority of them remains very much one of when, not if. We stand ready to consider our next deal enabled by our scalable platforms and our GBP 1 billion of remaining firepower. With Sun Life of Canada U.K. being our first ever cash-funded acquisition, it was important that we clearly demonstrate the benefit for shareholders from smaller sized cash-funded M&A. We did this by announcing our proposed inorganic dividend increase with the transaction announcement. However, going forward, given the board's confidence that we can now deliver both organic and inorganic growth on an ongoing basis, we intend to simplify our dividend communications. We will do this by announcing any potential annual dividend increase at our full year results and which will combine both organic and inorganic growth. In summary, Phoenix is unique in the insurance sector with the cash from our in-force business funding our attractive dividend over the very long term. While our business is highly resilient, owing to our strong capital position and our hedging, which protects both the capital position and our long-term cash generation, particularly important in these uncertain times. We are growing both organically and inorganically. This supports us in continuing to deliver cash, resilience, and growth. Phoenix is a growing business with a defensive balance sheet and offers a uniquely reliable dividend that is sustainable and grows over time. We believe this is hugely valuable and particularly so in an uncertain economic environment. With that, we'll move to questions. We're gonna start with questions from the audience in the room. If you can raise your hand if you have a question. Lots and lots by the looks of that. We'll direct one of the roaming microphones to you. If you can please start by introducing yourselves and the institution you represent. For anyone dialed into the conference call, please let the operator know you have a question. For anyone watching on the webcast, please use the Q&A facility, and we will come to your questions after we've answered those in the room and on the call. Thanks. Morning, everyone, Andrew Sinclair from Bank of America. Three, please. Firstly, it was just on the workplace pensions business, on the 42 schemes you've won, and frankly, on the 41 you won last year. Just if you can give us an idea of how many of those have transitioned in H1 this year, and just so we can get an idea of what that means for what's gonna be transitioning over the next 6, 12, 18 months. Secondly, just on bolt-ons. Congrats on the first organically funded bolt-on, great to see, and the dividend increase. At full year results, I'm obviously already looking for more. At full year results, you said that you saw a good chance of M&A deal this year. You're clearly right. What is your outlook for the coming 12 months? Do you still feel similar levels of confidence? Thirdly was just on the non-operating cash flows line, just fairly punchy cost again in H1 this year. Just if you can remind us what's coming through that line and perhaps give some guidance on it. Thanks. Okay. Thanks, Andy. I'll let Rakesh take the third of those. In terms of the workplace schemes, the schemes we're winning at this stage are smaller schemes. Don't expect them to have a kind of transformational impact to the numbers overnight. What's pleasing is we're now getting invited to tender for much larger schemes, which clearly would have a more transformational impact. Typically, the lead time from winning a scheme, you tend to get the regular premiums come in, you know, within, say, six-nine months. Quite often you wait, you know, over a year to see the lump sum assets come across. Just sort of summarizing our numbers in the first half, what we saw was that a big shift in the net fund flows from a small outflow to a GBP 1.7 billion positive inflow from the workplace pensions business. That was basically a 28% increase in the gross inflows. That 28% increase in the gross inflows led to a 60% increase in the new business long-term cash generation from Workplace. You can see the kind of benefits of as you grow the kind of leveraged effect on the business. We also saw a 44% reduction in our outflows. What's basically going on here is we've invested heavily in the proposition. We're now attractive in the market, so we're stemming the outflows we had historically in terms of losing the existing schemes, and we're now starting to win the new schemes. Good positive momentum there. You know, this is a flywheel business, you work hard to get the flywheel going. It takes a while to get going, but when it does, it self-sustains, and it's obviously capital light. We're very determined and confident that we can balance the growth between the fee-based capital light and the BPA going forward. In terms of the M&A question, as I say, think about the market as GBP 470 billion of assets. Just under half of that is a small number of larger deals. You know, it's hard to know the when or if, but if ever anything in that space was available, we'd obviously be very enthusiastic. But then you have over half the market is a much larger number of smaller deals. Basically, what the CEOs say to me when I talk to them is that they like the cash flow coming off that closed book business, but then they recognize that typically a heritage book runs off at about 6% a year. Every year they have to cut their costs by 6% in order to stand still. If they don't cut the cost by 6%, effectively there's an increased expense reserve, and they don't get the cash flow out. That's why people say it's a question of when, not if, because they're struggling with legacy platforms, fixed cost of regulatory change. It's hard for us to predict the exact timing of when deals will come about. We are confident there will be deals going forward for those very market dynamics I've just set out. As I say, because Sun Life of Canada U.K. is a fairly straightforward integration for us, we remain keen and enthusiastic to do and ready to do the next deal, as soon as anything's available in the market. We have GBP 1 billion of remaining cash firepower. Rakesh, do you want to pick up on the non-operating items? Yeah. It's the, I think the question was in relation to cash uses within the non-operating. These really are in two areas I'd probably want, like you think about it. One is just generally the fact that we hedge a lot of the currency risk at the group level in relation to the debt, and then that will have collateral movements and close out of positions. That would be one aspect of it. The second aspect, which I already touched on, but in probably more in the context of the IFRS results, is the fact that we have, you know, integration. We're still ongoing through, you know, the Standard Life IT migration, the ReAssure integration. You know, that will have cash associated with it, and that will come through that line as well. Morning. It's Andrew Crean from Autonomous. Again, three questions, if I can. On Europe, I mean, you failed to sell the package of European businesses last year. I assume that the Irish business would be a lot easier to sell than your German. Would you consider, is that something which is on the table? Secondly, you're still dual running platforms, the Alpha platform, and the TCS platform. Would you consider shutting one of them? And what would be the cost benefits of doing that? I'm assuming the Alpha platform. Then thirdly, Andy, you talk about your cups of tea. Outside of the large deals, which I think we know, how many cups of tea are actually there? I mean, how many companies are actually likely to consider? 'Cause there is a bottom end to this where it's just not worth the bother of you actually going out and doing something. Okay, let me take each of those in turn. We did a strategic review of Europe last year, having had a number of unsolicited expressions of interest. What we basically concluded was that the highest value way forward on Europe was to sell the Ark Life business, which we did for 91% of own funds. There was real value to be had by both putting in place a partial internal model for Standard Life International, which we got approval for much quicker than actually others have done, from the CBI in Ireland. Also to as part of the Standard Life transition to migrate to a much more modern technology. That's what we're focused on in Europe. That would then. That's the right thing to do to optimize the value of the European business, which is performing strongly and is making a good contribution in terms of flows going forward. It also would create the right base for us to consider inorganic expansion into Europe in due course. In terms of the dual ALPHA -- two platforms and so on, so you're absolutely right. When we did the ReAssure acquisition, we've now exceeded our revised target of synergies. We're up at nearly GBP 1.1 billion, but there's nothing in there for phase III integration. That's just the head office phase I integration and phase II for finance and actuarial. The reason we haven't looked to that is that our priority has been migrating off the old Standard Life mainframe across to the TCS BaNCS platform, and delighted in the first half that we moved our first 400,000 customers across in terms of all the Standard Life annuity customers went across really smoothly without any hitches. The team did a fantastic job of that. That is our priority there. In time, we could well consider whether there's a more efficient way of looking at the operations in terms of ALPHA and the ReAssure side. And I would say that, you know, historically, when we've done phase III integrations, there's been material benefits attaching to those. Not gonna give any specific numbers, but there have historically been material benefits attaching to those. Finally, in terms of the cups of tea, I mean, I think one of the things I was quite keen to demonstrate with the Sun Life of Canada U.K. acquisition, it's only GBP 10 billion of that GBP 480 billion, so it's what, 2% of it, yeah. Yet that led to a 2.5% inorganic dividend increase, and really trying to demonstrate that actually doing smaller deals can be really quite accretive and valuable from a shareholder perspective. The way to kind of think about this is, as we had on the slide, there's GBP 245 billion of assets in these smaller deals that we could kind of cash fund. They'd be up to a GBP 1 billion of purchase price. You know, there's, you know, I'm not gonna put specific numbers around it, but there are a significant number. You know, if you think that the GBP 10 billion Sun Life of Canada acquisition, you know, there's books, you know, from that size up to, say, you know, odd GBP 30 billion or GBP 40 billion that would fit into that GBP 1 billion purchase price. If there's GBP 255 billion of assets there, you can kind of, you know, get a sense of working through the number of numbers. Different organizations are different places on their journeys, but there's a significant number of potential opportunities out there. Hi, good morning. Ming Zhu from Credit Suisse. My first question is on your BPA. You've mentioned you've reiterated your GBP 300 million capital commitment. Is there scope for this to go up, and when would you reach the self-sustainability level? My second question is on the group cost base. Would you be able to disclose on a clean basis what's a steady state on the cost base going forward if we exclude those one-off projects and assuming any such bolt-ons are not material? My third question is actually on M&A. What sort of M&A and pricing landscape are you seeing? Because the deal you've just done, the Sun Life one, it's a 17% discount where your shares were trading, you know, slightly a bit more discount than that, than the deal. Why didn't you just do the share buyback? Okay. If I take the first and third of those. It is our intention to spend GBP 300 million of capital on BPA. We think that's a sensible allocation. You know, think about BPA as an attractive, profitable market. I sort of tend to think about Phoenix as a three-legged stool. We've got Heritage open, the Standard Life open business, and M&A. Within that kind of open leg, we want to be balanced between BPA and the fee-based capital light business. Now that's not to rule out that we might not spend a bit more. What happened last year in practice is we secured two large cases over GBP 1.5 billion in December. Ultimately, you know, you're bidding for these cases. Team did a fantastic job, so we won both of them, and it meant we spent a bit more capital. All other things being equal, we'd expect to spend around that GBP 300 million level, and that kind of keeps things balanced. In terms of the M&A pricing landscape, I'll maybe get, you know, Rakesh to add a comment to this in a moment, I mean, the 83% of Own Funds is the lowest price of any of the deals we've ever done. I think Own Funds is a reasonable metric to look at closed book businesses. I think it's a pretty poor metric to look at open businesses. There's a lot of conservatism built into risk margins and Fundamental Spread and so on and so forth. The way we go about valuing deals that we do is we actually look at the cash flows, and then we look at the synergies we can generate. In the case of Sun Life of Canada, the net synergy number we're targeting is 50% the price paid. We can basically run our cost and capital efficiency. Our structural competitive advantage means we can run it 50% more efficiently than the previous owners. That then delivers an attractive return on capital on those cash flows. We're not valuing it by looking at Own Funds. We don't think it's a particularly good measure. We're focused on cash, predictable cash over time, and that's how we think about the value created. Do you wanna add anything to that and then talk about the cost base? Yeah. Thanks, Andy. I think it is Capital Markets Day probably two years ago, we talked about how we looked at acquisitions. As Andy pointed out, we actually look at those cash flows and then effectively determine an IRR and then consider that in the context of other opportunities. Certainly for these transactions, you know, that's in my view, the right way to look at it because. That would include if there was a buyback opportunity, you look at it in that context. In terms of buyback anyway, we have a capital framework that's out there. We operate within that framework. Currently we're at the top end in terms of our Shareholder Capital Coverage Ratio, but we know post the acquisition of Sun Life of Canada U.K. will be just on the cusp of the border. When looking at those cash flows, it was, you know, certainly in our view, it's value. It was just better to do this transaction than consider any alternatives such as share buyback. We'd also consider how quickly the cash comes back and the potential for reinvestment of that cash for other growth opportunities. We think there's some sort of compounding effect happening there, especially if we also over deliver on synergies as well. There will be a question on the cost base within the group. Certainly, you know, if I put those into two categories, one is just the normal operating expenses that we would expect, and that would be somewhere around GBP 75 million-GBP 80 million a year on an ongoing basis. Then you'd have the what we call the one-off cost. As I mentioned earlier in my response, you know, effectively made up of two areas. One is movements in our hedging. That will come through, and now it's difficult to predict what that will be. Depends on how the currency movements how that will change. In terms of projects, you know, probably fair to say we are seeing higher level of these projects because of the integration that we're doing. You know, we've got the Standard Life. We've got the ReAssure. We've got the Mar IT migration that we spoke about. We've also got, you know, some payments we're making in relation to IFRS 17. These are one-off multiyear programs that we. It's just meaning that at the moment, they're quite high. You know, all other things being equal, you know, you'd expect those to normalize. Sorry, Ming. I didn't answer about the competitive landscape. You know, up until a couple of years ago, obviously, there were two players that were kind of bidding for these types of businesses. Phoenix and ReAssure were now together as one. You know, we're undoubtedly seen as a very credible counterparty by anyone looking to sell a business. You know, we know that we'll be the best home for their customers and for their people, that we've got a strong track record of successfully executing on these deals through regulatory approvals and so on and so forth. You know, we're never complacent. There's a lot of private equity money looking to get into this space. I'd say generally that private equity money is more focused on continental Europe and the U.S. than it is on the U.K.. Because it is a challenging regulatory environment for private equity to come into the life insurance space. You've only got to look at what happened with the LV= deal with Bain C to see some of the potential challenges within that. We think we're well-placed in a competitive landscape. I think, you know, because of the scale of our Heritage business, we will generate higher levels of cost and capital synergies. Thank you. Sorry. I think there's one question missed, was on the BPA. What level of AUM or which year you think you will achieve the self-sustainability? Thank you. I mean, I think I'm gonna say you know BPA is actually quite you know we've got GBP 38 billion of annuities, and BPA would be less than GBP 10 billion of that. We're far more diversified than others across our fee-based capital light businesses, annuities, and then the Heritage business. We tend to look at the financials of the business in the round. We're generating lots of excess cash from Heritage. It's attractive to redeploy that at attractive returns on both M&A and BPA. Larissa van Deventer from Barclays. Hi, Larissa. Morning. Congratulations on very strong cash generation, and I have three questions on that if you don't mind. The first one, it was a major beat relative to expectation consensus and ours. Can you help us understand a little bit better about the moving parts and why you're so confident that the level is sustainable? Second, in light of the strong generation in the first half, is the second half target too modest. Third, you mentioned the contribution from illiquids and that it added to the cash generation. Can you help us understand what's changed in the illiquids and how we should think about that going forward, please? That's three all for you. Thank you. I can sit back and have a cup of tea now. Let's start with the first one. This was done on the GBP 950 million cash generation in the first half. I mean, what you see there, you know, we delivered our normal organic surplus, which was about GBP 2.4 billion. We also had a strong, if you recall, management actions during 2021. Again, you know, this we had GBP 1.5 billion last year. We had, you know, over GBP 400 million in the first half of this year. That together with the fact that, you know, I was also cognizant of the fact that we had the Tier 3 repayment of GBP 450 million due in July, which is why that has been slightly probably higher than you were probably expecting. It's taking all of those items in the round and coming to that. The second point, you know, is this cash generation in the second half too modest. I mean, clearly, you know, I did reiterate, albeit it is not a change in the target, that we will be at the top end of the target range. You know, we do think that it's fairly, you know, pretty good for the full year. Do we think, you know, that will that can be sustainable? I mean, you've seen from what we've done previously, and I'll leave it at that. Finally on the illiquids, right? You know, we were currently at 32% in terms of our illiquid allocation. Our aim is to get to about 40% across annuities in the medium term, and then we'll consider further thereafter. What we get from illiquids, we still focus on value over volume. We haven't gone probably as much as people would have thought this year in illiquids because we've seen opportunities in liquid credit. We diverted a lot of funds to U.S. because we saw the relative spread widening, and we took that opportunity, which I think is absolutely the right thing to do. But despite that, in the illiquid space, we still got 60 basis points premium on that. As you know, the liquid assets are a really good match for our BPA annuity liabilities. Therefore, you know, we're in a good space in that regard. I'll just quickly add, Larissa, many things impressed me at Phoenix. One of the things that impresses me most is this core capability in the organization to optimize the in-force business. The fact that we had GBP 421 million of management actions in the first half just from BAU, that's not integration related, that's just BAU, really does demonstrate the ability of creating value from our in-force business over the long term. That's, you know, one of the key drivers behind cash generation, the ability to drive those management actions. It's impressive stuff. Hi, thanks very much. It's Farooq Hanif from J.P. Morgan. Just on the workplace pensions, I mean, that was really impressive growth. The new business contribution from that is not completely comparable on a full year basis, but it's getting chunky. Can you talk about the outlook here? You talked about larger schemes. You know, what have you done that's different, and do you think you can maintain that level of new business profit generation? Secondly, can we go back to the whole question of air traffic control of deals? Obviously, the Sun Life of Canada is on Diligenta already. If it wasn't, what would be the constraint in the sort of number of deals you can do? Therefore, you know, how many deals you need to sort of forego because you. There's no point. Last question is on the commercial real estate portfolio. Can you remind us about your exposure there? There's obviously been heightened concerns about refinancing risk, and how do you feel about the safety of that portfolio? Is it a big deal for you? Thank you. Okay. I'll take the first two and ask Rakesh to cover the third. We are pleased with the progress in workplace. Karen sat in the front here will kill me for saying this, but we haven't scratched the surface on what we can do in this market yet. There's three reasons why there's a lot more to come here. The first is as we migrate this across onto the BaNCS platform, we've negotiated by far a market leading cost rate there. You know, in the past we got a fantastic rate for the heritage business. But because it's declining each year, cost per policy, you know, TCS kind of were thinking, okay, I've got to manage that reduction every year. We said to them, "Well, this is growing, so we need a much lower rate if we're gonna give this to you," which they've agreed to. So we've got that margin benefit still to come through, is the first. The second is that the new schemes we've been winning have all been smaller schemes. Advisors are gonna try you out with their smaller clients before they get you going on the bigger clients. We've got a couple of inquiries on the go at the moment, for example, where we're well advanced with inquiries. You know, we haven't won them yet, but we're well advanced and progressing well over GBP 1 billion of assets, yeah. We're starting to play in that space, which will accelerate as well. I sort of think about the three main drivers of the open business going back to the market trends, BPA, workplace, and then the individual pensions and savings. We sort of started out on BPA 2018, you know, we're now established, we're number two in market share last year. Workplace, we've got real momentum going. The third area we're starting to turn our attention to is the individual pensions and savings market, where basically customers need to consolidate their different pension pots together and plan a journey through into retirement income. Yet only 10% of the U.K. population get advice on that journey to and through retirement. 90% currently flounder around kinda largely in the dark. We're building our capability. We're dealing with the advisor market as well. We're building capability to play in the 10% of customers that advise. The 90%, we've got more of those customers than anyone else, 13 million customers, and a lot of them are in the workplace, yeah. The ability to talk to workplace members, get them to consolidate other pots in and stay with us to journey into retirement income would be another driver. You know, in time, and this will take time, but in time, we want the fee-based capital light businesses to give us a similar kind of value creation each year as we get from BPA. Air traffic control of deals. I think the key point I'd make here is that we can, you know, we can buy businesses and run them separately on the side for a period of time, yeah. It's unlikely that there'll be a constraint for us around doing the deals. What will be a constraint, to Andrew's question on ReAssure, you know, we're full at the moment in terms of migrating to BaNCS. We've not planned that part of the ReAssure business at this stage. Hasn't stopped us delivering GBP 1.1 billion of synergies from ReAssure in two years. You know, we can still do the deals. I think you know even kind of constraints around the finance and actuarial side, the phase II, we need to be mindful of those. You know to date we've never knocked back an M&A opportunity for bandwidth within the business. We gear up and create the bandwidth and would look to take advantage of the opportunities as they present themselves. Rakesh commercial real estate. On the commercial real estate. Probably just worth putting into context first. You know, we have a total of just over GBP 11 billion of illiquid assets and commercial real estate is probably just over GBP 1 billion-GBP 1.5 billion in that region. It's not material in our overall context. Clearly, you know, with our you know, asset management team, you know, they are in a regular interaction with the people on the commercial real estate you know, investments. You know, clearly a lot of these have you know, relatively lower loan-to-value. They're about 65%, and they're also secured on the underlying property. Certainly what we see is that, you know, we're absolutely happy with the credit portfolio and our exposure to commercial real estate. We keep a close eye on all our investments, not just commercial real estate. Good morning. Steven Haywood from HSBC. Three questions please. In one of your slides, I can't remember which one. Sorry, apologies. Inflation going high has no impact on your long-term free cashflow. Can you explain the dynamics on this please? Secondly, in your sensitivities, the credit downgrade sensitivity, it now includes management actions, whereas previously excluded management actions. I mean, the difference between the two sensitivities is very low, but if you can explain why the change, that'd be great. Finally on the BPA and the workplace, what rate of IRRs are you achieving here? What capital strain margin can you come down to on the BPA? Thank you very much. Okay. I'll take the third of those and ask Rakesh to take the first two. Because I'm a good CEO, I'll do the third one first, and you think about the first two, you see, because I'm good like that. We don't disclose specific IRRs, but that's exactly how we think about it. We think about all the excess capital we have. We're very determined stewards of that capital to allocate against the highest value opportunities. You know, the IRRs are comfortably double digits on what we do, but we don't disclose them explicitly. In terms of the capital strain, we did think it would be helpful because, you know, we think about capital strain with the capital management policy because we, like every other insurer, have a capital management policy, and that's the capital you deploy, and that's the kind of clean way to think about what you're actually tying up in terms of capital. Most of our peers quote a pre-capital management policy number. Our 6.2% in the first half would be 3.8% on a pre-capital management policy basis, which is more comparable with others and in a similar ballpark to others. Now, what we've said is our ambition is to get the strain, including capital management policy, down to 5%. That will be more like 3% on a pre-capital management policy basis, on a kind of like for like with others. The reason why that is lower than many others achieve is basically the point I made about the diversification with Heritage. Others don't have a big Heritage business of different risks, and therefore we will be more capital efficient because we get the opportunity to diversify against that. The levers to get there are basically a broader range of reinsurance partners, our Solvency II internal models not fully optimized yet in the way some of our peers are, and also broadening the breadth of the liquid assets that we can invest into. All of those are actually a well-trodden path. We know what we need to do. We've got plans in place to do it, we'll do it, and we'll get the strain lower still, and we'll then be at a structural competitive advantage over others. Thanks, Andy. Let me start with the second question, which was around the credit downgrade and the management action. I mean, certainly from our perspective, it was important that, you know, we showed a realistic position of what would actually happen in practice if that stress actually emerged, and also to allow you to actually compare against our peers in this regard. What we've done for that particular sensitivity is assume that we would take what we call reasonable management actions to adjust for it. Now, the impact of it with those management actions is a strain to surplus of GBP 0.3 billion. Without any management actions, the strain would only be GBP 0.5 billion. It's not talking big numbers here. Even without the strain, we're only at GBP 0.5 billion. With the stress, it's at GBP 0.3 billion. Again, the kind of actions we would do is what I certainly consider is reasonable. We wouldn't do anything on, clearly on the illiquid space because that will be what it will be. There's not much we can do there. On the illiquid, we just aim to get back to the overall portfolio average, and there will be a cost of change in doing that. That's what's reflected, and those are the reasons why. On the first one, on inflation. What we do, inflation, as I mentioned in my presentation, comes from two areas. One is from annuities, where effectively you know you get those annuities going up with inflation. We use index-linked gilts to match them. We're actually, you know, really well matched on that basis. The other area comes through our policy administration and through our costs. What we do is effectively we look to hedge, you know, long-term inflation by stressing our capital balance sheet and looking how that would move with inflation, and then putting a hedge in place that effectively covered us across all our products, et cetera, and our MSA charges against those costs. That's why the inflation sensitivity is virtually nil, because we do that on a regular dynamic basis. Yeah. Hi. Thank you. This is Ashik Musaddi from Morgan Stanley. Good morning. Just a couple of questions I have is, first of all, if I look at, I mean, this thing about integration keeps on coming, especially on Standard Life. I mean, if I remember correctly, this deal was done about five-six years back. So when do we think that Standard Life and ReAssure deal will be completely integrated and there will not be any extra cost? Or would you say that the cost you're incurring at the moment is in line with when you announced the deal? So that would be the first question. The second one would be about management actions. I mean, it was a phenomenal first half, GBP 421 million of management action, which is kind of equal to the organic capital generation of GBP 400 million. Now, if I remember correctly, historically, your guidance has been that whatever capital you generate, I mean, 1/3 would be roughly management action. So is there any grade on that, or would you say that longer term it should still be 1/3, it's just that first half was strong? Thirdly, just on management action again, I mean, there is a big item called balance sheet efficiencies, removing inefficiencies, and it's a big one, GBP 280 million or something. Any color on that would be good. Thank you. Okay. I'm happy to take the first of those, and Rakesh, you take the second. The way we think about the integrations is we set clear targets. If you take Standard Life, we set a target originally of GBP 0.7 billion. We then upped that to GBP 1.2 billion. At the full year, we delivered GBP 1.6 billion. We spent GBP 2.9 billion to buy the business, we did GBP 1.6 billion of synergies. What we basically said is, "Look, yeah, you're right. It's a few years down the track. We're gonna stop reporting Standard Life synergies because we're, you know, we've already busted the target by some margin." The other point I would add is that, you know, what we're doing is kind of more than the base migration. What Andy and the team are doing, yes, they are migrating all formerly Standard Life customers across onto BaNCS, but they're doing it in a way that we then have this really attractive advantaged platform for the open business growth going forward. That's basically kind of reflected through the numbers. If I take ReAssure, the original target was GBP 0.8 billion. We upped that to GBP 1.05 billion, and we're now just under GBP 1.1 billion after two years. We'll keep reporting on the ReAssure side as well, going forward. On management actions, clearly very pleased with delivering GBP 421 million of management actions in the first half. When I look ahead to the second half, it's not gonna be as high as that, and that's why when I said in my presentation that I broadly expect the solvency surplus to be flat during the year with organic surplus plus management actions offsetting our financing costs and offsetting the investment into BPA. That's why I think it'll be broadly flat. Now, over the longer term, I still think that about a third is about right going forward. Clearly, as you get closer, you know, you have a better idea on what exactly those items will be. Over time, you know, if you look at our track record, you know, I think third, continues to be, and you know, many of you know as well, a good proxy here. In terms of the other areas, and what's been pleasing is, as Andy said before, a lot of these actions are being, you know, recurring actions that we know will be there, you know, there each year. For example, on the other line includes items like ERM securitizations. For example, we go and get ERM to back our business, but we can then do further actions to make sure they're more efficient within the structures to generate the additional benefits on that. There is the fact that we've got this new internal model, that we're making, you know, tweaks to that as the business grows, you know, in terms of the way we model certain businesses, the capital associated with that, and this continuous, you know, harmonization. The fact we're doing a lot of this integration and doing this phase II for Standard Life we just finished, then do the same on ReAssure, that gives a number of opportunities. Again, those are the kind of items in that other line. Thank you. Alan Devlin from Goldman Sachs. Yeah, a couple questions from me. First of all, just a couple follow-ups on the workplace pension opportunity. You know, what makes you know, confident you've got the competitive advantage now in that market through your investments? Where do you think that competitive advantage is? Is it on the cost side, on the new platform or on the capability side? And you said you're only kind of scratching the surface of the opportunity. Given there is only three big players in that market, do you think you'll get your fair share of the GBP 40 billion of flows at some point in the future when you are fully competitive? The second question on the liquid opportunity is that temporary given the you know given the market dislocations in H1? Or do you think there is a more of an opportunity on the liquid credit side over and above the illiquids given I think your portfolio is still heavily U.K. focused so is there more you can do to diversify that? Thanks. Okay. On the, I'll let Rakesh take the second in a moment. On the first, in terms of workplace, I'd draw out four key advantages. The first is the Standard Life brand. It's one of the strongest, highest awareness, most trusted brands, and obviously we bought that last year. The second is our proposition, where we're building a very strong proposition. I mean, you wouldn't be invited to tender and winning all these schemes if that wasn't the case. The third, and probably most important, is actually the people. We've built a fantastic team of people here from across the market, from different places. I think people love the fact we're a purpose led organization with sustainability at the core. We're able to attract fantastic talent to the group. You know, for me, that's the most compelling competitive advantage over the longer term. People want to join us and to work here. The cost advantage is very material. The rate card we've got with TCS Diligenta here is, you know. I mean, I've run the workplace pensions businesses at Prudential, Scottish Widows, Friends Life, Aviva. I know this market well over decades. You know, we'll have a material cost advantage. In a relatively thin margin business, that's a huge structural advantage. The other point I'd make here is we're not fully leveraging these things yet. We're, you know. I mean, Standard Life as a core business has got some real strengths, but it was underinvested in for a number of years, and we're making good that investment now. We're making great progress. We're pleased with progress, but we're not, you know, we're half done in what might be feasible. Just to then add on to that second question. I mean, clearly, what's important to us that we have the right assets backing our annuities. Our overall asset portfolio has got the right diversification across currency and also against the geographies as well. We want to have a high quality credit portfolio. Now, clearly, our sterling exposure is highly weighted, and there is a natural tendency that we want to go more and diversify that portfolio into the U.S.. Therefore, it's the right action to take. Getting that relative spread widening is a fantastic effort from the guys to actually achieve that with the same credit quality. That, you know, gives us a clear management action going forward. What it also does is it then also allows us to buy effectively allow us to move to illiquid credit at the right time. As I said earlier, over time, we wanna get to 40%. We're currently at 32%. This allows us to get there as well. There's further upside to this as well. I think we, you know, the guys are doing a fantastic job. Thanks. Dominic O'Mahony, BNP Paribas Exane. I have three questions as well, if that's all right. Firstly, on management actions. You know, GBP 0.5 billion of Own Funds creation there. Is this already in the cash guidance as you set it at full year? Or is there a risk to the upside on the cash guidance specifically from the management actions point. The second, on the fee-based business. LTCG very strong. So the sort of incremental LTCG very strong. Can you remind us, is there a seasonality H1, H2? And if there is, how pronounced is that seasonality? I'm just thinking about expectations for the full year. And then a third, I guess, broader point. How has the change in inflation and rates impacted your counterparts, both on the BPA side, and on the sort of the back book transactions? Has it changed the conversations? Has it made it, you know, in your view, more likely that people will bring deals to the table or indeed less likely? Thank you. Okay, I'll take two and three and ask Rakesh to cover one. I'm gonna pick up pace a bit 'cause we're due to finish at 11 in theory. On the fee-based side, yeah, there is some seasonality. Basically, in workplace, you tend to get more salary increases in January and April than you do in the second half of the year. If you look at previous years, you'll get a sense of the typical split between the two halves. That's as good a guide as any there. In terms of the change in inflation and rates, as I say, the two big impacts. One is if you're running a closed book portfolio and you don't hedge out inflation, then you're gonna struggle to get your cash flow out because you're gonna have to increase expense reserves. That, we think, could well lead to more CEOs saying, "Right, I've enjoyed the cash flow out of this, but maybe now's the time to offload this." We think it'll be positive in terms of the deals there. Anna and the team are doing a fantastic job, doing a deal within four months of joining. Not bad, not a bad effort for Anna, who's joined us in March there. Then on the interest rate side. Basically, it makes BPAs cheaper because we're pricing relative to the return we can get on fixed income and cash flow matching. For those schemes that aren't fully cash flow matched already, typically their assets are going down less than the amount at which the price of a BPA is going down. BPAs have become more affordable for more of the market, and hence all players are calling the market's gonna be pretty buoyant this year, yeah. Yeah. On management actions, you know, there's again, you know, just to reiterate, really pleased what we delivered and, you know, GBP 0.5 billion of it was Own Funds. You know, some of that would have already been in our numbers. And I'll probably look at the full year, see how we've done, whether there's any impact on that in terms of our overall performance of the year. But certainly, you know, some of that's already been reflected on what we've done. Thanks. Nasib Ahmed from UBS. First question, coming back to sort of the M&A landscape and the GBP 470 billion that you've got, just focusing on the larger deals. If I look at the two biggest U.K. with profit funds, they've got about GBP 300 billion. I appreciate some of them would be open to new business. The first question is, would you have cups of tea with those guys as well? Within the GBP 2 billion -GBP 5 billion of large deals, is there like a really big one that's GBP 150 billion and lots of small ones that make up the rest? On M&A again, would you consider, given your focus on fee-based businesses, an advisor or a platform business to acquire as well? Again, would you have cups of tea with them? Finally on Sun Life, is that gonna be funded through the LifeCo surplus or HoldCo? Thanks. I love tea. I mean, I'm interacting with the CEOs of all these businesses. I mean, I kind of play. You know, we're a leader in sustainability, so I'm going out talking to people about sustainability and how the insurance sector could contribute about a third of what the U.K. needs to spend, invest to get to net zero, for example. You know, we're doing a lot on Solvency II. I take a kind of leading role around that. I'm meeting people all the time anyway, and I would look at all of those. You know, we'd be relaxed if a with profit fund was open or closed. That would be fine for us either way. I think in terms of the bigger deals, and I'm not gonna comment on specifics, but I would say the questions there are more strategic, yeah. Generally in the insurance sector, people are moving to focus on core businesses, yeah? Generally people are moving to more focused strategies. Lots of examples of that, but you would know better than I. Organizations that still have capital heavy life businesses with capital asset management, for example, most others are moving away from that. You know, it'll be a strategic call in terms of those. In terms of advisor and platform businesses, I wouldn't rule out doing, you know, potentially smaller acquisitions of capability build for the open business. You know, equally, if you look at the valuations of platform businesses. I think that's unlikely. I think the valuations there are particularly toppy and, you know, we've already got strong capability, you know, through our Standard Life platforms in that space at the moment. Shall I take that, final one? Yeah. This will be funded by HoldCo cash. Because as you know, the way our pricing model works, cash comes from the underlying businesses, but it will be funded from the HoldCo cash. Good morning. Mandeep Jagpal, RBC Capital Markets. Thank you for the presentation and taking my questions. Two from me, please, and the first is on H2 BPA. In the presentation, I think you mentioned that the economics for BPA will be similar in H2 to H1. Could you help us understand the specific economics you're referring to here? For example, as we head into H2, are market conditions now more positive than they were in H1 for margins, or are you referring to the profile of the deals you're expecting to do, so deferred pension splits and therefore the strain? The second question on longevity. Rakesh mentioned that half of the in-force longevity is reinsured. It's one of the few areas where you appear to be keen to take some balance sheet risk. How could-- How would you consider your approach to retaining longevity risk on the in-force or new business if the risk margin comes down under any Solvency II reforms? Do you wanna do both of those? Yeah. First on the deal economics. I think generally what I was saying more at the high level that we expect the cash multiple, the payback and the strain to be broadly similar to the first half generally across. Clearly each BPA will have its different characteristics in terms of the underlying, but overall, in terms of deal economics, I would be expecting the same for the full year. Sort of in relation to longevity. You're absolutely right. We reinsure across. We take the whole of longevity risk, and one of the slides we got out, you can see our exposure to longevity with. It's about circa 20% of our SCR. You know, we do hedge 50% across all of it. All the new schemes are pretty much all of it is hedged out under the current regime. Now, if the Risk Margin falls and clearly the market or you know, it's expecting you know, in terms of the public comment is about 70%, I don't think it would change anything. We would still continue to reinsure all of that longevity risk out, because it's not. In our view, it's not quite big enough to make that difference. We're working with both the PRA and Treasury to make sure we get the right outcome. For us, it's really. It's not a capital release. We're not-- You know, what's more important is to have the ability to invest into the different illiquid assets by whilst, you know, protecting policyholders, but also ensuring that we can get to net zero. We need to find that balance, and it's not about capital. It's making sure policyholders are protected, and we have the opportunity to do our bit. We can do a big bit in this to help the Building Britain Back Better and getting to net zero. Hi. Andrew Baker, Citi. Thank you for taking my questions. Three for me, actually. The first one is on the dividend. Slide 7 shows an organic dividend increase, at least as I eyeball it, about 2.5% for this year. What would have to happen for that not to, I guess, get implemented? Secondly, on your debt capacity, GBP 1 billion, presumably that's on a Fitch basis. If you were to move up, I guess, utilizing that, your Solvency II leverage would be high relative to peers. Is Solvency II leverage something that you could think could be a constraint at some point going forward? Thirdly, just on the Sun Life integration of GBP 125 million. You mentioned the simplified integration because it's already on the Diligenta platform. Where are those sort of costs and capital synergies coming from? Thank you. Okay. I'll take the first and third of those. On slide 7, it's not to scale. Yeah. It says, "Not to scale," but good try. Look, I mean, the organic dividend increase is a judgment that the board makes. You know, you can do the sums yourselves. We've already written GBP 1.1 billion so far in the second half. We've GBP 1.1 billion we're exclusive on. We're confident of deploying the GBP 300 million of capital. You can do the sums. You know, we're clearly very confident that we'll exceed the GBP 800 million, and we'll be growing organically once again this year. The board will form a judgment on a range of factors at year-end around what you know what level of organic dividend increase might be appropriate based on the performance of the business. The one sort of watch-out I would say is last year we invested GBP 360 million into BPA. The plan this year is to invest GBP 300 million. Obviously, that will have an impact on the level of new business long-term cash generation. Suffice to say, we are confident we'll grow organically. The board will form a judgment from there. On the Sun Life of Canada deal, basically the synergies are roughly half and half between capital and cost synergies. The cost synergies would be phase I and II. Combining kind of the head office side, if you like, and combining the finance and actuarial side would be the drivers of those. Not a concern in terms of job losses. You know, Phoenix Group employs 8,000 people. Just natural turnover each year is several hundred people. There's 70 people in Sun Life of Canada. You know, one of the attractions of the deal is 70 very good people that will add to the strength we've got in the business. Yes. On the debt capacity, I think it was one of the slides where we showed that we have GBP 1 billion of debt capacity, and those numbers were as at, you know, December 31, 2021. Then clearly, you know, from our perspective, it is looking at that Fitch leverage ratio to say, you know, can we be within that 25%-30% range, because that's our target ratio. But we also, you know, are aware of the other ratios as well. As you can see in our presentation in the appendix, you'll have the IFRS ratio as well as the Solvency II leverage ratio as well. We will look at that. What I will say is that if you look at our business, it's cash generative, and we then apply our resilience around it. We hedge it. We know the cash is predictable and long-term, so we're happy to operate in that range. That's why 25%-30% from a Fitch basis is appropriate for us because of the long-term cash generation of our business. Oliver, the last word on the questions in the room. Oliver Steel, Deutsche Bank. First back to Andy Sinclair's question about the GBP 165 million of non-operating cash. You said part of that was FX hedging. Why is the FX hedging in the holding company rather than the life company? Secondly, on the basis that you have actually put a dollop of assets into U.S. liquid assets, does that number grow, or should we at least assume a maintenance of that sort of number going forwards? Secondly, you've stopped giving us the proxy to shareholder value. No surprise really, given your own firms have come down. You've moved from a discount to that figure to a premium, I suspect, if you were to give the figure. Look, I'm sort of teasing you slightly because you always used to push this number, and now you're not pushing it anymore. I'm just sort of wondering here, you don't hedge, or rather you hedge out the upside from rising rates. Equally, the NPV of your future cash flows has come down because of rising rates. I'm just wondering how you feel about that. How we should feel about it. Okay. Just taking the second one. I think, you know, Own Funds and the shareholder value is not an unreasonable way to look at a closed book heritage business. I think it's a really poor way to look at growing open businesses because you have a big Risk Margin, you have a Fundamental Spread and various other kind of conservatism in them. So it's not giving a realistic view. What we are all about, which in fact we have been consistently all about is cash generation. And we're looking to protect both the solvency surplus, which is what drives cash generation and the dividend now, and we're protecting the GBP 11.8 billion in cash over the lifetime of the business. Shareholders can be really confident that they're gonna get the dividend from us short-term and, you know, decades ahead into the long term. That's always been our focus. That remains our focus in terms of that cash generation. Do you wanna pick up on the operating cash? Yeah. There's probably a straightforward answer to that, Oliver. The debt sits outside of the life companies, and that's why it's done at the group level rather than at the life co level. The debt is outside of the life companies. There's no debt that sits in the life companies itself. Then second, on the asset side. Clearly the assets sit in the life companies. All the hedging for that will be done in the life companies to ensure that they're matched. Where we went and got U.S. dollar credit to invest and put in our Matching Adjustment fund, that fund will ensure that it has the right hedging in place to make sure we're cash flow matched on that basis. That happens in the life companies. The debt that sits outside the group debt, that is done at the group level. Is the exceptional FX hedging cost in the holdco, is that going to continue? That will move as currency movements happen, because we have a number of, you know, U.S. dollar and euro-denominated debt which we're hedging. Okay. Operator, do we have any calls, any questions from the conference call? We have no questions on the line. You just have the question, please press star one. While anyone on the conference call is pressing star one, have we had any questions come through on the webcast, [Anna]? The only question outstanding that hasn't been covered yet is just on Solvency II reform. Could you give your thoughts on the package of measures and whether you think it's gonna deliver the aims that the government set, and what impact would it have on Phoenix? Our focus on Solvency II reform is on broadening the Matching Adjustment eligibility. As I said before, the U.K. needs to invest about GBP 2.7 trillion over the next 15 years in order to get to net zero, and we believe the insurance sector could do about a third of that, about GBP 0.9 trillion. You can only do that with regulatory reform, because currently the Matching Adjustment eligibility is really tightly defined, and it doesn't need to be anything like that tightly defined. Inevitably, when you're creating regulation to suit 28 member states, which is what the E.U. does, you know, you're not gonna be ideal for any individual country, and we think there's the opportunity to change that. Quite a lot of the debate has been around capital release. From a Phoenix perspective, we've not been lobbying for capital release. We think it's important that the regime protects policyholders. Our focus is on Matching Adjustment eligibility. I mean, for me, to be honest, the acid test here is trying to move away from hard and fast rules and have a more ongoing judgmental approach to this. Because, you know, at some point, someone will crack a model for hydrogen power, for example, in terms of the journey to net zero. It hasn't been cracked yet. Until it has, we don't know exactly what it's gonna look like. Trying to codify rules today in detail isn't gonna work. It needs a more judgmental approach where we can work with regulators when there are scale sustainable investment opportunities and look to frame those in the appropriate way, recognizing that from our perspective, we want predictable cash flows in our annuity portfolio, Matching Adjustment portfolio, because you know, we wanna be confident that we're gonna have the money to pay our pensioners over time. Anything else from the conference call? Okay. Well, look, we're slightly over 11:05 A.M. After a long results season, I don't know about everyone else, I'm off on holiday tonight, which is nice. I'm sure many of you are. Thank you very much indeed for coming along. We'll be hanging around for a few minutes afterwards if anyone wants to catch up. I think my journalist call starts at 11:15 A.M. Thanks so much for coming along. We'll catch up soon. Thank you.