Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited Q1 FY 2025 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero, on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Anup Bagchi. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Good evening and welcome to the results call of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company for the quarter ended June 30, 2024. I have several of my senior colleagues with me on this call: Amit Palta, who heads distribution, brand, marketing, and products; Dhiren Barot, CFO; Jitendra Arora, who heads human resources, customer service, and operations; Deepak Kinger, who handles audit, legal risk, and compliance; Manish Kumar, Chief Investment Officer; Sourav Khaitan, Appointed Actuary; and Dhiraj Chheda, Chief Investor Relations Officer. Let me take you through the key developments during the quarter before moving on to discuss the company's performance. We held our 24th AGM over video conference on June 28, 2024. All items specified in the AGM notice were approved by the shareholders of the company. We express our sincere gratitude to Mr. Ramachandran, who has retired from the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors effective June 30, 2024. Mr. Sandeep Batra has been re-designated as Chairman with effect from the same date. I'm also pleased to inform you that Mr. Suresh Vaswani has been appointed as an additional independent director effective July 4, 2024, subject to the approval of the shareholders. Mr. Vaswani is a highly experienced leader in global technology and IT services. He's acclaimed for effectively building, scaling up, and transforming businesses and serves on the board of various public and private companies. On the regulatory front, we welcome IRDAI's effort to increase insurance penetration by improving the customer's value proposition for non-linked products. It will lead to an improvement in the surrender value in case of early exits and comes into force effective October 1, 2024. We believe that such customer-centric changes will boost the industry's long-term growth. As you are aware, even before the revised surrender value norms came into force, we had launched ICICI Prudential GPP Flexi with benefit enhancement to provide customers the option to receive 100% money-back or premiums paid anytime. The commission structure in this product is more level-based while keeping the overall lifetime payment at similar level. The product has been well accepted in the market segments where it was launched. We have also experimented with a scale-based commission on the unit platform, where again we have seen acceptance by distributors in the market segment where it has been launched. We believe that by aligning the interest of all the three stakeholders, namely customers, shareholders, and distributors, we'll be able to absorb any impact that might come due to the change in regulations. We continue to work on process innovation in line with our objective to become the most customer and distributor-friendly life insurer. 85% of our policies have been issued using Digital KYC, and 48% of our policies were issued on the same day for savings line of business in Q1 2025. Notably, we are also the first life insurer to pay out commissions on the same day to our distributors. Our focus is on building customer trust by enhanced coverage and superior claim settlements. Our AUM is over INR 3 trillion, and we cover 98.4 million lives for INR 35.1 trillion total sum assured as of June 30, 2024. Claim settlement is the moment of truth for any insurer, and we have an industry-leading claim settlement ratio of 99.2% for FY 2024, with an average turnaround time of 1.3 days for the few non-investigative. Our customer-centric efforts have been recognized by various industry platforms. The list of awards won during Q1 2025 is presented on slide 39. Now, let me talk about the key performance highlights. We have delivered RWRP growth of 46.8% year-on-year in Q1 2025, outperforming both the private and the overall industry for the third consecutive quarter in a row. In line with our focus on proprietary channels, agency and direct vendors have delivered 54% AP growth year-on-year in Q1 FY 2025. On the product side, annuity and linked business grew strongly by 135.2% and 78.3% year-on-year in Q1 2025. The overall company AP grew by 34.4% to INR 19.63 billion, and number of policies increased by 15.1% year-on-year in Q1 2025. Thirteen-month persistencies stood at 89.7% and 49-month persistencies stood at 70.7%. The value of new business grew by 7.8% year-on-year to INR 4.72 billion, with an AP of INR 19.63 billion. Margins stood at 24%. Lastly, our business growth and profitability have been delivered with risk and prudence and is exhibited in a strong and resilient balance sheet. To summarize, we will continue to offer the right product to the right customer and deliver it through the right channel. With customer-centricity at the core of everything that we do, we'll continue to work on our strengths, that is product leadership, extensive distribution network, and business excellence aided by the building blocks of people, digitalization, and analytics. With the strong business fundamentals, our endeavor will be to deliver sustainable VNB growth with our efforts pivoted towards balancing business growth, profitability, risk, and prudence. Thank you, and I'll now hand it over to Amit to take you through the business updates. Thank you, Anup. Good evening, everyone. I will be talking about performance updates for Q1 FY 2025. Let me start with premium growth, which is presented from slides 10 to 12. As highlighted by Anup, our market-leading performance has continued in Q1 for the third consecutive quarter in a row on the back of our innovative and comprehensive suite of products, distribution strength, robust technology, superior customer service, and strong risk management architecture. Our total AP grew by 34.4% year-on-year to INR 19.63 billion, and retail AP grew by 42.2% year-on-year to INR 16.66 billion per quarter. Agency business AP grew by 61.6% year-on-year and contributed 29.4% to overall AP and 34.6% to retail AP in Q1. Direct business AP grew by 40.6% year-on-year and contributed 15.2% to overall AP and 17.9% to retail AP in Q1 FY 2025. Together, agency and direct distribution now contributes 52.5% of our retail AP mix in Q1, and we will continue to invest in our proprietary channels to drive the business growth further. Bancassurance business AP grew by 33.6% year-on-year and contributed 28.8% to AP mix. Partnership distribution AP grew by 24.9% year-on-year and contributed 11.5% to AP mix, and group business AP grew by 2.8% year-on-year and contributed 15.1% to AP in Q1. To ensure our products are delivered extensively, it is our continuous endeavor to deepen our partnerships, which is presented on slide 37. We continue to build capacity and have added more than 12,000 agents during Q1 spread across geographies. We are tied up with 43 banks with access to more than 21,500 bank branches and 1,150+ non-bank partnerships with an addition of 47 non-bank partners during Q1. Contribution from linked savings product to overall AP increased from 38.8% last year Q1 to 51.4% in the quarter ending period on account of customer preference shifting towards unit products from non-linked products. In this category, we have recently launched Protect N Gain Growth, which offers differentiated value proposition to our customers, preferring units and comprehensive life accident health and accident disability cover. Non-linked savings contribution to overall AP decreased from 27.7% last year Q1 to 16.8% in current year Q1. In this segment, we have seen an increase in the customer's demand of immediate liquidity products. Each company has different products across participating and non-participating segments to cater to this demand. In the PAR category, our flagship product, Gold, caters to immediate income need of the customer. It continues to deliver a very strong growth for us. Our annuity business contribution increased from 6.2% last year Q1 to 10.9% in the current year Q1. With annuity, we continue to witness a tilt towards regular premium annuity over single premium annuity. The overall protection AP stood at INR 3.55 billion and contributed 18.1% to overall AP in Q1. Retail protection business grew by 1.8% in Q1, with number of policies growing by 6.7%. On a two-year basis, retail protection AP has grown at a CAGR of 28.3% for us. Retail protection continues to be one of our focus areas, and we expect a strong growth trajectory going forward. Credit Life businesses continue to do well in line with the strong credit growth in the economy as we continue to add partners and introduce propositions aligned to their various lines of businesses. Coming to group term business, it is a yearly business which comes up for renewal on an annual basis. Therefore, if you also include the renewals, our AP is actually flat. We understand this segment well and will underwrite business only if it matches our risk-reward expectations. Our focus on data analytics to mitigate insurance risk at onboarding stage has led to 71% reduction in cases with higher propensity for fraud and early claims for savings policies. Overall, I'm very pleased with our performance in Q1. I would like to reiterate that we have been undertaking various initiatives over the last two years on various building blocks of the business to strengthen our fundamentals across products, distribution, and processes. The results you see now are the consequence of the consistent work we have put in over the last few years and not an outcome of some short-term initiative. With a diversified and innovative product portfolio, extensive distribution network, and customer-centric initiatives aimed at delivering best-in-class customer journey and superior claim settlement, we endeavor to deliver a sustainable VNB growth through business growth. Thank you. Thanks, Amit. This is Dhiren. Good evening. Now, let me take you through the financial metrics. The VNB for Q1 2025 grew by 7.8% year-on-year to INR 4.72 billion. The VNB margin stood at 24.0%. The relevant comparison of Q1 FY 2025 margin is with financial year 2024 margin as that captures the impact of all assumption changes done at March 31, 2024. The movement in margin is primarily on account of product mix shift. While quarter-on-quarter, the overall product mix may vary given customer preference, the wide range of our distribution partners spread across geographies with access to varied customer segments will always help us sustain a balanced product mix. Coming to expenses, our overall cost-to-TWRP ratio stood at 32.6% in Q1 FY 2025. Our cost-to-TWRP on the savings line of business has shown a marginal increase and stood at 19.2%. We monitor cost ratios for the savings line of business separately. Our objective is to bring efficiency in the savings line of business while we continue to focus on growth in the protection business. We will continue to invest in agency capacity, greater digitalization, and improving brand awareness in order to deliver sustainable VNB growth. Moving to other financial metrics, the company's AP for Q1 2025 stood at INR 2.25 billion, an increase of 8.7% year-on-year. Our solvency ratio continues to be strong at 187.9%. Our AUM is over INR 3 trillion, and we cover 98.4 million lives for INR 35.1 trillion total sum assured at June 30, 2024. Thank you, and we are now happy to take any questions that you may have. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone phone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question is from the line of Swarnabha Mukherjee from B&K Securities. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi sir. Thank you. Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity. So I had, so first question is on the cost side. So if you could give some color on why the cost-to-TWRP number has gone up. And also, you had mentioned in the results release that there is an INR 446 crore impact on policy liabilities because of some allocation methodology changes that you have undertaken. So I just wanted to check whether what is the reason for that, what change have you taken, and whether that is already in our VNB assumption, or should we expect that to flow in in upcoming quarters? See if you could give some color on that. So that is my first question. Second is on the agency side, if you could give some further cuts on which product agency is selling, and given that annuity growth has been very, very strong, whether agency is driving that, which product is seeing some traction, whether it is the product where we had a trail commission kind of a structure. So if you could highlight. And lastly, on the impact of the surrender value regulation, how you are seeing that, how should we see and expect on VNB strategy regarding the same. Yes, sir, I don't have any questions. Yeah, hi Swarnabha, this is Dhiren. Coming to your question on cost-to-TWRP, I think we should note that the cost-to-TWRP for savings business is roughly at about 19%, so that's broadly stable. The larger increase that we see in the cost ratio is primarily on the group side. If you recall, April last year is when the new commission guidelines came into effect. Quarter one was subject to the effect where we were still working through our commission guidelines. A large portion of that is now being seen on the group side, which is visible in terms of the overall cost ratio. And that's stable at this point from quarter to quarter, sequentially. Coming to the other point on the expense of management change that we have done, that primarily is a change around the expense drivers. IRDAI requires us to disclose this if there is a change in expense drivers. It has been done for a specific segment of expenses such that we are able to allocate them more appropriately for that line of business as well. This doesn't really have any material impact on the VNB at this point. The larger impact as we have disclosed is on the statutory liabilities. In terms of the surrender value regulations, Anup spoke about it. We've already had experience across a couple of products. They have tried out a trail commission structure or level commission structure. As we've always said, we will look at a win-win in situation for customers, distributors, as well as us as we modify our structures into the coming quarter. Yeah. So coming to agency business, your question on the reasons for success in agency. As you know, that agency overall has delivered a 61% growth for us. It is a combined effort of initiatives taken on distribution, capacity, capability, and products. So while products have played an important role and in alignment with our overall strategy of trying out a trail-based commission product on the platform and 100% money-back feature launched by us on the annuity platform, both these products did extremely well, extremely well with agency. And we are very happy that large part of our distribution on the value side really aligned to this organization objective of long-term customer investments product portfolio. And hence, we were very happy with the deferred or a level commission structure that we designed for them. And they have done exceedingly well both on trail-based commission product on units as well as on annuity range of products. The rest of the product performance has been in line with what we have witnessed with other channels as well on immediate liquidity feature, which has been quite a demand in the market today. Through our participating product called Gold, they've been able to deliver a quite decent growth for us on an overall basis. But like I mentioned, product was only one element of growth that we witnessed in agency. It was also about capacity that we built by almost 20% over last year, quarter one. And also the increase in productivity that we witnessed by having invested enough on building learnings and cutting the learning curve and converting our capability architecture to support them to deliver better productivity. So we have seen productivity right across various cohorts of employees as well as various segments of our advisors. Right, sir. Understood. This is very helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Supratim Datta from Ambit Capital. Please go ahead. Thanks for the opportunity. So on the VNB margin side, first thing that I wanted to understand was that how do you allocate cost across quarters? Do you assume a similar cost across quarters, or is there a cost loading in the later quarters? That would be my first question. Presently, in the fourth quarter or FY 2024, you had indicated that there was a change in operating assumption. Now, that had a negative impact on the VNB margin. Can you let us know that what has been the impact from that in this quarter? That would be the second question. And the third question was that from 1st October, there is going to be a shift towards a new product design in non-PAR segment due to the higher surrender charges. Could you let us know what kind of impact from that do you expect on margins, and how are you looking at mitigating that? And finally, on the group protection side, could you give us a breakdown of what is your credit protect versus what is your GTI? After several quarters, this category seems to be growing. Just wanted to understand what is driving the growth in this category. Thank you. Supratim, Dhiren here. From a cost perspective, as we look at VNB, we look at forecasted expense of cost for the full year. Absolute cost, obviously, when you look at from a cost-to-premium perspective, will be higher in the first quarter, and you will get an operating range as you look through the coming quarters. What we do is we look at a build-out of cost for the full year, and we factor that part of our expense setup. At quarter one, as you look at the margins, the reason why I told you to look at full year numbers is because whatever assumptions that we've had, primarily which were around the expense impact that we had taken at the end of last year, that's been built into full year margins. Therefore, it is more relevant to look at quarter one movement from the full year numbers rather than quarter one of last year. The group business, we haven't broken that out. We do that on a yearly basis, Supratim, across group credit as well as group term. So broadly, on group protection, as you know, there are two elements of our group protection business. One is credit-like, which is through our bank and NBFC partners. And second is group term, employer-employee businesses. Broadly, when you were to look at credit-like business, I think this business has been almost growing twice the rate of credit-like industry or, sorry, credit growth in the banking setup. So there, we are quite happy with the progress of 27%-28% growth that we have on the credit-like business. And that is largely on account of new partner additions that we are doing consistently. And also, we are exploring various opportunities with our partners to align differentiated propositions across various lines of businesses of theirs. So both have led to us managing our growth quite significantly and creating an alpha. Coming to group term business, now, this is a little different because we have been actually in this business for very long. We understand this business. We laid out our entire relationship structure to reach out to large corporates, the organized sector, to offer this group proposition. And we have done very well over a long period of time. Now, incidentally, since we have the largest share of this business, we do see that this business being a one-year business comes up for renewal every year. While we are persisting with 85%-88% of our old customers to come and renew with us, there will still be 12%-15% of the business that doesn't get renewed and gets renewed with any other competing insurer, is counted as a new business. So from that perspective, the way we look at our group business is new deals, new corporate deals, plus the business that we renew. And both the deals, if you were to look together, I think our profit premium has been quite similar. However, the growth has been relatively subdued because of very, very competitive practices. So that's what is my view on the group term and credit-like business. Supratim, on your question on surrender value impact, I think the old set of products don't matter anymore, and they will cease to exist beyond 30th of September. As we have mentioned earlier, the focus for us is to align this in place of all three stakeholders: customers, shareholders, and distributors. We believe that will be able to absorb any impact that might come about due to the changing regulations. As we also spoke about, there are experiments that we have done along two sets of products, and which have met with very reasonable success in the market segment that we've launched. As we look at what happens beyond 1st October, I believe the market will switch to some degree towards some of these products. Got it. Got it. And just one follow-up question. So have you seen any increased competition in the credit-like business in the recent months? Because one of your competitors indicated that competition in that segment has been indicated. So are you seeing similar trends there? No, no. See, I have to still come across a distribution segment or a customer segment where we are not facing competition. Competition is common right across the customer segment, and credit-like is no different. So to that extent, there will always be an action. Across product lines, we are in a competitive environment, and we see insurers present in most of these businesses. It may not be the same insurer present everywhere, but we have competition across all segments. Got it. Got Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all the participants in the conference, please restrict your question to one per participant. If you have any follow-up questions, you can rejoin the queue. The next question is from the line of Shreya Shivani from CLSA. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity and congratulations on delivering a good set of growth numbers over here. So my question is again on the margins itself. And 24% margins while the quarters are 50% mix coming from units is quite good. Going ahead, two questions over here. Is there any artificial limit that we maintain on the product mix on the units, or is it just going to be dependent on what is the flavor of the season and what is selling more? And second is this 24%, I mean, one can expect this to continue for another quarter, but after once second half starts, that is, after October begins, where should we see the trajectory? If you could give us some numerical, some numbers around it, maybe 50 with contraction, any numbers that you can help us with on where would this 24% be in third quarter or maybe nine months or full year 2025, that would be very useful. Thank you. So, on product trajectory, I will speak about. And I'll ask Dhiren to talk about VNB trajectory. See, on products where the mix will eventually move and what is the targeted mix, these are the questions we have answered at various points in time. That our focus over years has been about ensuring that these stay relevant irrespective of what the economic environment is around us. So when the markets are good, we are happy to serve with unit-linked products. When markets are tending towards guaranteed products, we should be ready with and have the products available with us. And hence, a lot of time and energy and capacity has been deployed to create options and create choices across platform of products and make it available to the customers depending upon their prevailing economic environment. So we actually don't look at a targeted product mix. But yes, we do look at margin maximization initiatives within product lines. And that could happen by increasing the tenure of the policy and looking at riders, which adds value to the customer as well as to the company. And by looking at some assured multiples over the premium that you can get customers to be convinced of to drive a higher profitability for us. But for every step that we take towards profitability within the product line, what is sacrificed is something which has to add value to the customer. So whether it's a longer tenure or whether riders or whether increasing some assured multiple, all three elements you will see add value to the customer. So as long as it adds value, we'll be more than happy to let customers choose what is the most relevant depending upon the economic environment. On VNB trajectory, I'll ask Dhiren too. Hi, Shreya. So on the VNB trajectory, I think it's still a little too early to call, primarily because of two fronts. One, the products are still in a development phase at this stage, and conversations with our distributors are still live at this stage. So until these come to a head, it's a little difficult to identify where the margin would be. But as we mentioned before, fundamentally, what we're trying to do is to align interests of all three stakeholders: customers, shareholders, and distributors. And we want to create a win-win situation out of this. Okay. This is useful. Thank you so much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ravi Purohit from Securities Investment Management Private Limited. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. So I have a more fundamental question in the sense when I look at our reported profits, when I look at our reported net worth, right, it gives you a number of return on equity of around 8%, right? Of course, we understand a lot of expenses get booked in year one and income is spread over a longer period of time. But just like health insurance companies have started kind of indicating what are their IFRS-based numbers and ROEs, can you help understand what is ICICI Prudential Life Insurance business's normalized ROE of the business, right? Is it like if all those accounting norms were to be changed, would our economic profits be INR 1,500 crore today on a net worth of INR 11,000 crore? If you could just indicate some ballpark to understand and evaluate what's the real true economic profit of this company or business? So Ravi, you're perfectly right. ROE in the current Indian GAAP doesn't make too much sense. The true ROE will start to emerge when we move to IFRS. We are awaiting instructions from the regulators to when we could move to IFRS. There are a set of conversations live, but we are still waiting for notification on this. I think it would suffice to say that we expect to have a release of capital based on the regulation that we expect coming out of IFRS. But it's too early to figure out what these numbers would be. In the current context, given that we are still working with Indian GAAP, we are looking at VNB and EV. And ROEV is the more relevant metric at this point to look at from a return perspective. But just if you could just do an exercise, I mean, if this was a case study and if you were actually doing a study and trying to assess just to give some ballpark range also, not even like a pinpointing saying that health insurance companies have gone to the extent of actually reporting both the P&Ls and ROEs. But let's say even if you are not able to do at least some ballpark range, would that kind of not help investors kind of make some sense of the reported numbers? Otherwise, the reported numbers have absolutely no connection with the true economic power of the business, which we are never able to assess in that sense. Yeah, you're right, Ravi. I think at this point, we work with ROEV. It's a little easier to do on the health insurance side given that they are shorter-term businesses. But in our case, the nature of the business is quite different and it is long-term. So until we get to IFRS, it will be a little difficult to call out these numbers. Okay. Thanks. I tried, but thanks a lot. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Prayesh Jain from Motilal Oswal. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, good evening, everyone. A couple of questions. Firstly, just a clarification on budget. There have been some calculation changes with respect to expenses that can be identified. And so does that impact our tax rate in any form? That is one. Second is on the surrender charges, you mentioned that you will create a balance between all the three stakeholders. So is it fair to assume that the returns would go down? Companies' structures obviously are changing. And for that matter, even VNB margins could also be hit. And within that, one agency mentioned that moving to trade has been quite successful. But with your bancassurance or your corporate agent, would you feel that a fallback would be a better option? And how is the kind of negotiation? Yeah. This is my question. Thanks. So right now, Prayesh, from the budgetary aspect, we are not seeing any material impacts onto us. On the- Surrender charges. Yeah. So on the surrender aspect, I think we've been able to demonstrate that there is a segment of distribution who are looking at picking up level commission products. And that's essentially we are not losing margin in these types of products. And we discussed that in the previous call as well. The very fact that the pickup has been quite good in segments that we had launched this in gives us a great deal of confidence that you can actually manufacture products that create a win-win for all the stakeholders. So that's the direction that we're going around. Yes, our conversation with our bancassurance and other partnership distributors alike. And these are some of the offerings that we would take to the table as we have conversations with them and figure out what the right commission structures would be, which create value for all parties. In fact, just to add here, amongst bancassurance partners or non-bank partnerships, CA, BR, that we have, they contribute 23% of our business. So the remaining part of our business is mostly proprietary. Apart from ICICI, as you know, emphasis on protection and Standard Chartered, which also is single insurer. So our multi-insurer business that you're talking about actually forms only 23% of our business. And there also, we are in discussion. Some of them, some partners have picked up our 100% money back on our level commission kind of a structure. So we will see how discussions pan out. But eventually, that is not as large an issue. And that is probably an advantage of having a proprietary distribution contributing almost 55% of the business. Just to add to that, Prayesh, if you look at the entire non-linked mix, we're looking at about a 20% mix. And even within that, you're looking at PAR and non-PAR. So actually, the impact onto us is quite muted compared to what the rest of the industry may be at. Got it. Thanks. That's very helpful. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Vinod Chandra, Kailash Chandra Agrawal, who's an individual investor. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity, sir. I just have one question. What is the Q1 ending Embedded Value? We have not disclosed that to market yet. We do that half a year, once in every half year. Okay. Thanks. And congratulations for the good setup numbers. Thank you, Vinod. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Madhukar Ladha from Nuvama Wealth Management. Please go ahead. Hi, good evening, and thank you for taking my question. So a couple of questions from me. One, your bank channel has done quite well. There's a growth of about 33%-34% in there. So what's driving the growth? How about some color on how ICICI Bank has done? Are we still in the INR 80 crore-INR 100 crore type of a range? Or is there any sort of pickup of the new products there? Second, you mentioned about the INR 446 crores expense allocation methodology change, which has resulted in policy liabilities coming down. Is this more like expenses getting allocated to PAR policies, which is sort of helping this? And also finally, on the annuities side of the business, annuities seen a very good growth, whereas protection on a year-over-year basis, retail individual protection is very muted. So I wanted to understand what's wrong, what's not working with protection, and what sort of growth should we be looking at for the year? And what's actually doing very well for annuities? And how we are able to grow that piece of the business so well? So yeah, those would be my questions. Thanks. Yeah, thanks, Madhukar. I'll take your questions pertaining to distribution. So I'll start with ICICI. So ICICI is now stable like we have maintained even in our previous earnings calls as well. ICICI is consistently at around INR 100 crore kind of top line. But what is very heartening is that they've been creating a delta on retail protection very well. So they're doing well on retail protection. And this is a choice that they've made. And we are quite happy with the outcome on retail protection, specifically in ICICI. On banks, other than ICICI, our growth has been close to around 31%. So 31% growth is what we have actually delivered on banks other than ICICI and Standard Chartered. We look at ICICI and Standard Chartered as businesses which are only with ICICI credentials. So what is driving our growth in those bank assurance channels is actually, again, multi-fold. We have invested in creating a seven-block enablement framework called Partner Stack to help our bank partners grow end-to-end, right from opportunity identification to choosing value propositions which are unique to their customer segments. Then investing hugely on capability building on offline, online channels, then doing a network digitization, creating integrated sales processes, investing in demand generation. And then through onboarding process and policy lifecycle management, we have completely been able to integrate our business with their banking end-to-end. I think that is what has been able to give us the alpha on growth over a period of time. So it is not necessarily only price or commercial considerations. It is also the investment that we have done through sheer hard work and our presence in these shops for a long period of time now. Coming to our product, your comment on annuity, you're right, we've done very well on annuity. Within annuity, we actually chose customers at 50 years of age as a huge opportunity because we thought that large number of customers, less than 50, were still investing in life insurance. But there was an opportunity where customers would start investing for their retirement subsequently. To reach out to this customer segment, we have segmented our distribution to see where and who has access to these customers. And then came out with this product which has a differentiation of 100% money back, which basically takes the crisis away from the minds of the customer. They can, without any fear, buy a life insurance product without having apprehension of losing the principal in case he was to lose his ability to pay premiums later. Annuity was a natural success, which we have already spoken. On retail protection, see, if you look at a longer time frame, 2-year time frame, you will see a CAGR of around 28%-29% growth on retail protection. Now, both our own online business as well as our web aggregator business has been a significant contributor to our retail protection business. And the consequence of that also in that channel is extremely competitive nature of business because it's extremely competitive platform that they operate on. So in between, there are a few price considerations, 3 interventions done by us, 3 interventions that competition did on pricing, and specific super-mature banks where we are very strong. I think we saw some impact on a short-term basis, which has been corrected now. And we are quite confident that absolute business will come back once again. But the good part is that since this business will always remain volatile, it is important to keep investing in proprietary channels, keep building capability to sell protection through them. ICICI is already doing very well on retail protection. And like the way what the agency has done on overall top line, we are very confident that they will become significant on retail protection as well. While we'll stay invested on online channels where there is a natural disadvantage of very stiff competition, but I think we'll reduce our volatility by improving capability through our proprietary channels. We are not very worried. This is an interim phase. Practically, we will handle it. We are quite confident with the focus that we have and new products which are there in pipeline on retail protection. In the latter part of the year, we will see growth coming back. Got it. On the- Sorry. On Sorry. On the- Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Madhukar. No, no. Dhiren, you go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So on the expense management policy change that we spoke of, within the quarter, the expense reallocation has actually given some relief to par. So there's not loaded the par book at all. In fact, the four policies that you referred to does not have any par impact. Understood. One final follow-up. To maintain this VNB margin of 24%, what is sort of the full year growth that you have built in in your assumptions? Because you work on unit cost method for the year, right? That would at least give us some idea on how to think about margins versus our sort of projections on AP growth. Madhukar, I think we have built out a fairly decent growth in this current financial year, with, of course, looking at how the product mix evolves. As we would do at every quarter, we would reassess where we are in terms of how expenses are evolving and how the top line also moves in that direction. So we'll keep coming back to the market every quarter and let you know how that's headed. Sure. Thanks. I'll get back in the queue. Thanks. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Avinash Singh from Emkay Global. Please go ahead. Yeah. A couple of questions. First one, more sort of a near-term. Of course, we have touched upon this point many times. On retail protection, I mean, is sort of your growth in line broadly with the market? And also going forward, the growth, will it be kind of driven by volume or the ticket sizes? I mean, any sort of a pricing action? Because I mean, the media was reporting very recently that there are kind of scenarios where leading life insurers are taking price hike in this business. So I mean, the outlook for the volume growth and the pricing action, that's one. Second, more for the medium term, a bit of, I would say, jumping on, as I mean, indeed leads to sort of some release of capital or a scenario being over-capitalized. What would be sort of alternate available for insurers like you in terms of optimizing your capital allocation? I mean, what to do with a surplus capital, whatever preferred option that regulatorily that you will be allowed, I mean, to take out that capital or do something else? Thanks. So Avinash, in terms of protection pricing, this is a continuous process. We keep looking at where we are in the market space. We keep looking at various segments. We look at how the emerging trends are in each of them from a risk and a profitability perspective. And we keep taking price action in specific spots. So I know there are some media reports that have spoken about the various price rises. But this is the nature of the industry. And I'm sure other companies would also be taking similar actions along that front. With respect to Ind AS, IFRS, I think we have to allow that to come first. It's a little difficult to estimate what would happen and what could potentially happen with the rules that come into effect. This is difficult for us to say at this point. Fair enough. Thanks. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sanketh Godha from Avendus Spark. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. See, our growth on individual AP has been very strong around 42% for the quarter. Just wanted to understand how you are looking at the full year number. And honestly, the growth was largely driven by prop channel around 53% for the quarter. Whether this number, with base increasing, is sustainable, how do you see the number to play out from full year perspective? That's point number one. And if growth remains as strong as it was in Q1, then given our solvency at 187%, it will be sufficient? Or we would also plan to do a sub-debt to fund the growth if the growth sustains at the current level? So that was my first question. If I understood you, Amit, properly, you said ICICI Bank is just INR 100 crore for the quarter, which means that ICICI Bank would have declined by 49-odd% and other channels would have grown materially in the quarter. That's the way I need to understand it, which includes agency. Lastly, Dhiren, just hypothetically, you can choose to prefer to answer that. Suppose the current product mix remains true for second half. Then likely impact on the margin in absolute terms or percentage terms for the second half because of the surrender rules. It will be great if you can do a directional quantification on the margins. Or you can otherwise tell me to what extent you need to claw back to make sure that margin doesn't get impacted. We are not able to get you. Can you just repeat the last part? The last part I was trying to ask you that, if the current product mix, what you have reported in 1 Q, remains true for the second half of the current year when the surrender rules become live, what is the likely impact on the margin? Assuming your projected cost in the margin remains true for the full year. And suppose or you can otherwise tell me how much clawback you need to do to make sure that the margin will remain at the similar level what you have reported, assuming the product mix remains at the current level? Sanketh, let me first clarify, Sanketh. Your colleagues are also there on the call. Let me clarify. ICICI Bank, I mentioned, INR 100 crore on an average in a month. They are at that level, ±5% to 10%. It keeps happening. Growth numbers are only an outcome of what happened last year. So within that INR 100 crore, kind of a rate, they are doing much better on the choice that they have made, which is protection. So protection is growing definitely quite consistently month-on-month. On overall top line is what I mentioned on a monthly basis. Second question on sustainability of growth that you witnessed in quarter one. See, when we delivered an alpha growth in quarter three last year, we gave a guidance of 10% growth in quarter four. And we're very happy that we delivered that. That happened not because what we did in quarter four got us the results in quarter four. That was on the confidence that investment we did over a period of few years was at the point of starting to deliver outcomes for us. So to that extent, that fundamentally doesn't change. I will not comment on outlook on what we will do in quarter two, but we will draw our confidence from what we have done over a period of last two to three years. After that, I'll leave it for you to read how consistent and sustainable will be the growth from quarter one. By the way, after delivering an alpha in quarter four, what you see now is the growth number. So there's a consistency of performance from quarter three to quarter four and now quarter one. Now, over to Dhiren. But just sub-debt. Okay. Maybe Dhiren can answer that one. Yeah. Yeah. So the question on sub-debt is always available. We keep assessing whether we need any solvency headroom from time to time. We discussed with the board. If we need to, we'll go down the track as that. As you know, we already have INR 200 crore of sub-debt on our book. My question was, if the current growth rate must maintain, then will it become inevitable for you to raise sub-debt? Those are actions that we will evaluate when we get there Sanketh. Okay. Fine. Fair point. On margin, if you can- There are many impacts on margins because of surrender guideline changes from first October. Sanketh, if you can look at the product mix slide, you will note that that side of business is only 17% of our portfolio. So at a 17% of portfolio, the impact on margins that you see today, you can back calculate and see. Though we don't really visualize anything happening on demand, like I mentioned, we want to stay true to the customer cooperation and want to manage with other two stakeholders, which is manufacturers and the distributor. I don't see demand going away anywhere. So in that scenario, existing 17% mix, even if it gets impacted by 1%-2%, will not have an impact on the overall company. Perfect. That's it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Nidhesh from Investec. Please go ahead. Thanks for the opportunity, sir. W hat is the share of trail-based or level commission products in our AP today? We have not called that out, Nidhesh. It has been lost in a specific segment, but it has done quite well there. Secondly, the growth in Annuity has been very, very strong for the last 2-3 quarters. So can you give some detail on what is the product structure on the Annuity side, which is driving such high growth for us? And how are we hedging that product? Yeah. So you can actually get in touch with us offline, and we can detail out the product components. You can consider for yourself and your family as well. But yeah, it is very feature-packed. And the biggest feature, of course, is to take the fear away from the minds of the customer of losing principal if he were to lose the ability to pay his subsequent premiums. Apart from that, also, it is very feature-rich. And we believe that Annuity is a great opportunity to be unfolded. It's only a beginning. I guess we will only get stronger from current levels. From a hedging perspective, it's fully hedged. It's fully hedged, yeah. We've been very, very tight about our hedging program. We do this on a very, very rigorous basis. The time that we have launched all our non-linked products as well as unit products, we've ensured that they've been fully hedged. This product is a regular pay NUT, right? Yeah. The larger portion of the NUT business right now is a regular pay NUT. We do have a sizable single pay NUT as well. When you do a single premium, as you know, the last 4, 5 quarters has been relatively muted because of multiple options available, whether it is bank deposits. So this trend is kind of continuing this year as well on single premium platform. Sure, sir. That's it from my side. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Aditi Joshi from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you for the invitation. It's Aditi here from JP Morgan. So I have two questions. So firstly, on the product side, on the non-linked segment, can you please help us understand that within that segment and split it between par and non-par? So what was the reason for a weakness in that product segment? And secondly, on the other partnership channel, it's still not majority portion of the business coming from there. But we see that in FY 2024, we have added some significant number of new distribution partners in that segment. And that segment, among the all channels, has delivered a strong double-digit growth, but still lower than the other channels. So going forward, do you think that there might be some growth pickup in that segment? These are my questions. Thank you. Actually, distribution, if you see their growth being relatively lesser than other channels, is largely on account of the choice that this distribution segment has made on prioritizing businesses other than link. As you know, that market forces positive sentiment in the market really got tailwinds going for unit-linked products. Incidentally, unit-linked products form a very small proportion of partnership distribution space. So within the space that they are operating, I guess they have delivered quite a decent growth of 25% or so. But yeah, because they have not participated as much on unit-linked business, their growth is relatively lower to others. Your second question was about participating in. So roughly about 2/3, 1/3 is where the PAR/non-PAR split is at. And then the decline that you see in the non-linked product line is because of the stress that you've seen in terms of volumes of the non-PAR product. Okay. And is there a reason why we had seen some weakness in the non-par? And going forward, what is your sense where this product line will go ahead? So I think, honestly, the market buoyancy has been a big factor in this. Our principle has not been to set out product mixes, but to drift where the customer demand is. Very clearly, you've seen the market buoyancy affect positively the growth in the unit-linked segment, and that's grown about 70%-80%. So clearly, we've seen some customers gravitate towards the unit-linked product, which is a great product in this environment. Okay. Got it. Thank you so much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Nischint Chawathe from Kotak Institutional Equities. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. When I look at slide 10, which is essentially the channel-wise breakup, our partnership distribution is around 11.5%. And in the call, you mentioned that partnership as a multi-insurance partnership is around 23%. So that effectively means that the balance sits in bancassurance? So I just want to make sure what I mentioned, let me clarify. I mentioned that multi-insurance banks and partnership distribution, which is 100% multi-insurance, both put together are 23% odd. So you are right. Outside this 11.5% mix, the remaining, you can count it as banks who are multi-insurance partnership for us. Which is essentially other than ICICI and Standard Chartered to some extent. Yeah. ICICI and Standard Chartered. Yeah. Okay. And in terms of the product mix in these channels, is there a substantial difference between partnerships and the proprietary channels? Substantial? The product mix. Yeah. Yeah. See, product mix, of course, even within banks, every bank's product mix is very different from each other. So these are the choices that our partners make. We only align and ensure that the resources are provided by us, both in terms of products as well as people to build capability and systems to integrate our processes with them and give them a seamless distribution and customer experience. That is common. Otherwise, the choice of products and prioritization of the customer segments where they want to offer our products is entirely our partners. By the way, what you see as our product mix at a company level, not even a single channel has that product mix. What you see is a sum total product mix of all the channels put together, which gives you a view on ICICI potential. Every partner is different. Every partner is different. Very little. One or two here and there, you may see likewise distribution players who may have similar mix, but there is no player who has a similar kind of product mix. Nischint, the full year numbers in terms of channel-wise product mix are there in slide 16. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I was just looking at the quarter. And finally, have you given any guidance on growth further year? Because I missed some part of the call. Our idea is to be able to work sustainably and to look at delivering an alpha over the market. Sure. Okay. Thank you very much and all the best. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Dipanjan Ghosh from Citi. Please go ahead. Hi. Good evening, sir. Just a few questions from my side. First, going back to the cost by TWRP ratio, especially for your savings business. Now, what I understand is your unit mix during the quarter has been substantially higher. Despite that, your cost by TWRP has been stable or maybe marginally up. So just wanted to get some color on product-level cost by TWRP within the savings business and how that is stacking up. Second, have you seen any margin-level changes? In terms of the cost impact or the operating assumption impact, has there been any margin-level change because of the subsegment or subproduct mix change within respective product segments? And lastly, if I heard correctly, did you mention that ICICI Bank and SCB growth was around 31%? I just wanted to get that number rectified. No. We didn't put that number out, Dipanjan. That is not the growth number. So coming to your other questions, so the answer to your cost of TWRP increase lies, of course, in the redesign of the commission guideline that was started last year but had its effect through quarter two and quarter three as well. So as we are in quarter one of this year, we have the full impact of that available, which is why you see this cost increase. We have not seen too much of a margin-level change, but these are elements that we are working with, especially in terms of delivering value to customers. As Amit spoke about, improvement in terms of longer tenure, which aligns with the customer's goals that have been set, adding riders along the way, which makes a lot of sense from a protection perspective for the customer as well. These are some of the actions that we have on the ground. They do help a little bit in improving margin at a segment level. That's what we will continue to work at. But again, just on the cost part, I mean, if I understand your fourth quarter cost by TWRP for the savings would have been anywhere ballpark around 15% or 14%-15% sort of a number. And while I understand that fourth quarter is high on volumes, and this quarter is like 19%, despite unit mix being like almost 8-9% higher than fourth quarter. So adjusted for the higher unit mix, which probably gets offset by the higher volume that you see in fourth quarter, should one expect the exit range for 4Q and 1Q to be similar in terms of the payouts across different savings products? Yeah. If you assume the product mixes to be steady. Got it. Got it. Thank you and all the best. There are multiple elements at play, but one of the big elements is going to be the product mix. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Anup Bagchi for closing comments. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Have a good day. Thank you. On behalf of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.