ASR Nederland N.V. (ASRRF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-02-19 10:35:22 ET

ASR Nederland N.V. (ASRRF)

Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call

February 19, 2025 03:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Michel Hülters - Head of Investor Relations

Jos Baeten - Chief Executive Officer

Ewout Hollegien - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Hadley Cohen - Morgan Stanley

Cor Kluis - ABN AMRO-ODDO BH F

Farooq Hanif - JPMorgan

David Barma - Bank of America

Benoît Pétrarque - Kepler Cheuvreux

Anthony Yang - Goldman Sachs

Nasib Ahmed - UBS

Michael Huttner - Berenberg

Rhea Shah - Deutsche Bank

Presentation

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the a.s.r. Full Year 2024 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Michel Hülters. Please go ahead.

Michel Hülters

Thank you, operator and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the a.s.r. conference call on the full year 2024 results. On the call with me today are Jos Baeten, our CEO; and Ewout Hollegien, our CFO. And Jos will kick it off with the highlights of our financial results and a brief update on the progress that we have with the integration with Aegon, and he will discuss the business performance.

Ewout will then talk about the developments of our financials, the capital position and solvency position. After that we will open up for Q&A. We have ample time plan for this call but we will stop sharply at 10:30. Please observe a limit of only two questions, so everybody has a chance to ask their questions. And finally as usual, please review the disclaimer that we have in the back of the presentation on any forward-looking statements. So having said that Jos, the floor is yours.

Jos Baeten

Thank you, Michel and good morning, everyone and thank you for joining this call. And I'm happy to kick off the Benelux earnings season, especially with the strong set of results that we announced this morning. And as I mentioned to the team this morning, do we really need to have this analyst call, what is not the like about these results but they convinced me to continue. Commercially momentum remains strong. Financial and operational performance is right where we want it to be maybe a touch better actually, we are clearly delivering on the promises that we made at the CMD last year.

I will start this presentation with looking back at the promises we made at our Capital Markets Day in June last year, after which I will go through the financial highlights, our ESG performance, the integration progress and business developments, before handing over to Ewout with a deep dive into solvency and the financials.

Let's move. A successful integration of Aegon NL businesses is of course one of our key priorities. All 2024 milestones have been achieved. We are really pleased with the progress that we are making and this bolsters our confidence in the successful integration. This enables us to accelerate a part of the projected capitalized cost synergies. We're fully on track to implement the life aim by the end of this year and to realize the strategic targets such as the cost synergies and OCC uplift for 2026.

Secondly, we outlined our plans to deploy capital and pursue profitable growth. We continue to see strong commercial momentum in all business lines with an organic growth in non-life exceeding the target range and strong inflows in pensions. We also announced our first pension buyouts, where we see a strong pipeline going forward and reaffirm our 8 billion assets under management target in the coming years.

And thirdly, delivering attractive capital return for our shareholders. Dividend per share is up 8% compared to last year, driven by a 7% increase of absolute dividends and the execution of the 100 million share buyback on the back of the bank sale in Q4. Total capital return over 2024 amounts €879 million, which translates to a 75% payout ratio of OCC. We saw a very strong delivery on the premises that we made eight months ago. Let's have a look at some other highlights....

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