Edited Transcript of LBH.J earnings conference call or presentation 27-Feb-20 8:00am GMT

It’s worth starting with some comments about the environment in which we operated, and particularly, that environment here in South Africa because we run our biggest businesses here. But we tend to forget that there were some really fantastic moments of hope in this country during 2019. We had the Springboks win The Rugby World Cup in November. We have the Ndlovu Choir getting through as the first choir ever to get through to the finals of the America’s Got Talent competition. These are moments of hope and they reflect the tremendous possibility and potential of our country.

Thirdly, as we all know, we are also beset with some significant challenges. South Africa’s economy continues to face headwinds in 2019 or continued to face headwinds in 2019, and that’s continued into 2020. These have been evidenced by low growth, muted investor confidence, policy uncertainty, power shortages and constraints, financial and governance issues at our state-owned enterprises, fiscal deficits, rating agency downgrades, you know the list. These are the difficult issues that we’ve confronted during this period. Indeed, across the countries that we operate in sub-Saharan Africa, there have been rising geopolitical tensions, currency volatility and the impact of a volatile oil price. Indeed, our biggest country outside of South Africa, Kenya, faced a very significant drought in the early half of the year, which impacted agricultural production which represents 27% of that country’s GDP.

So in reflection, it’s been a tough time to run and navigate a big business in a consumer environment like this, and in particular, in South Africa. And so in this context, preparing for the future is even more critical. But I would also say, it’s also much more exciting. And I’m going to reflect a little bit on that at the end of our presentation.

We said that 2019 would be our year of execution. And as you know, we use the 5 value driver model to guide and monitor and help prioritize the allocation of our resources as we execute our strategy. So I’m going to share with you the work that we’ve done during 2019 and the achievements that we’ve made using that 5 value driver.

But to headline these results in this presentation this morning, I’d like to say to you that we, as Liberty, are proud of these results and what we’ve achieved in the year. We think that our performance represents resilience while we’ve continued to invest in the future of our company.

So let me start with the experience of our customers and advisers. And I would say to you, and you’ve heard me speak about the purpose of our company before, that the most critical experience that a customer has with us is that moment of truth when we fulfill the promises that we’ve made to them that are represented in their policies. Together with our advisers, we aim to do this in the most human way possible, respecting the dignity of everybody involved.

And so when you reflect on the statistics on this slide, in 2019, we paid more than ZAR 10 billion worth of death and disability claims, which is 10% more than we paid in 2018. And this represents a financial contribution to people, to our customers who are — experience those most profound moments of human vulnerability. This is our purpose truly in action. Being up 10% on 2018 is also remarkable in that context.

Likewise, we paid nearly ZAR 8 billion in annuity payments, mainly to pensioners. That’s up an equal 10% on 2018, a critical injection of disposable income into people who are looking for dignity in their later years, and us honoring our promises to them. These numbers demonstrate the profound impact of our business on people’s lives and importantly, on the lives of their families. And it’s why it is so important for us to continue to build and grow the health and competitiveness of Liberty.

Our experience initiatives for clients aim to help foster a life-long relationship with Liberty. In supporting the way that we made — in supporting this, we made several enhancements to our product offering. By way of example, as I’m sure you’re aware, we launched something called the Liberty Wellness Bonus last year, to reward clients for living a healthy lifestyle. In our Liberty Corporate business, in the Employee Benefits part of that business, we delivered a new in-fund preservation and default annuity capability for members of both the umbrella funds that we run and for stand-alone retirement funds.

These and other efforts were rewarded when we were awarded the Best Life & Risk and Best Employee Benefits category winner status by the FIA Intermediary Experience Awards last year. We’ve worked hard to simplify, connect and enhance many basic customer experiences, using and applying agile work methodologies, and where appropriate, robotic automation. Our teams have digitized and streamlined some of our client processes and improved the stability and resilience of our technology platforms.

Following on this progress, we also enabled our advisers for more meaningful human interactions through a human and outcomes-orientated experience for their clients. We have focused on adviser productivity to help them establish, build and grow meaningful relationships with their clients; doing this enabled by smart tools that we provide to them and through the competitive product offerings. Through partnerships with big tech and cloud-based solutions, we were able to radically improve our ability to connect clients, advisers and employees. The best examples of these are firstly, the rollout of an intuitive digital financial planning solution provided through the atWORK platform. And importantly, for us, the launch of a pilot of what we call the adviser workbench. This is a modern, digital and scalable customer and adviser engagement platform. This is powered by Salesforce. We will complete the pilot in 2020 and we hope to commence scaling this platform with its digital tools as fast as possible, following a final decision in May.

We successfully launched INN8, a wealth management proposition inspired by Global Investment Trends, to incorporate a client-centric approach that advisers can relate to.

Focusing on 2 of our major subsidiaries, the STANLIB business is critical to our client franchise and adviser offering, and Liberty Two Degrees manages our iconic property portfolio. At STANLIB, management efforts to improve investment oversight were strengthened. And enhanced governance processes have really benefited the business and the investment performance that we’ve been able to deliver to customers. The improved investment performance has been maintained over the full year of 2019 despite challenges, in particular in the South African equity market.

In partnership with Standard Bank, we launched 1Invest, a specialist index tracking fund, providing a simple, transparent and cost-effective passive investment product for STANLIB. Fund rationalization continues to improve the competitive positioning of the product suite. And we’ve worked hard to improve the stability and resilience of the technology platforms and continued stringent cost focus with outsourcing options identified for various parts of our business.

At Liberty Two Degrees, Amelia and the team released the results on Monday, and I won’t cover them in any more detail here this morning. But we can cover them in questions, should there be any.

The relationship with Standard Bank remains a critical differentiator for Liberty. We have a valued commercial relationship with continued good performance from the embedded credit, new business and growth, particularly in our direct life insurance business. Through collaborative efforts with the bank, we launched and enhanced several offerings, including a new funeral life offering.

Moving then to our second value driver, which deals with employee experience initiatives. These are ongoing to make sure that we provide an environment for our employees to thrive in. People are absolutely integral to our business and represents a strategic imperative for us to deliver on. It is pleasing to note that we have completed an entire year with the new operating model embedded in the business. And the business now feels much better aligned and we are working much more collaboratively. We defined a leader-led culture, and we’ve adopted several modern digital technologies to encourage meaningful collaboration and communication for faster execution and reduced complexity.

Our third value driver is risk and conduct. And our risk and conduct initiatives have strengthened the group as we’ve simplified our business. Liberty remains well capitalized and has been managed within its risk target range and well within our risk appetite throughout the period of 2019.

In 2017, we commenced the risk and enhancement — risk and control enhancement program, which has now largely been completed for our South African operations, and we’ll continue to focus this initiative in STANLIB and our operations across Africa regions. Complexity in our technology stack continues to be a challenge for us. However, good progress has been made to simplify this, too, as we continue to simplify our business. Our use of cloud continues to increase as do our efforts to enhance our cybersecurity and data protection capabilities.

The final value driver that I’d like to cover this morning before I hand over to Yuresh is what we call the SEE impact, social, environmental and economic impact. We have prioritized — we have previously, I beg your pardon, we have previously outlined how we align our SEE initiatives with the 5 prioritized sustainable development goals that we at Liberty feel we can deliver on. In our report to society, we measure progress on these goals and report on the delivery that we’ve made.

In 2019, we’ve continued to deal with the unclaimed benefits issue in the pension fund industry, where we are focused on the primary goal of making sure that we pay benefits that are due to beneficiaries. During this period, we managed to pay ZAR 126 million to over 25,500 beneficiaries who previously had not been able to receive their benefits.

With regards to our fund rehabilitation project, Liberty has previously reinstated 25 funds via a high court process. We are hoping that we can reinstate a further 10 funds in the first half of this year through a similar process. We are committed to working with the Financial Sector Conduct Authority to ensure that the remaining funds are reinstated. And we are committed to working with the newly appointed Section 26 trustees to ensure that all benefits are paid to members as soon as possible.

These initiatives remain an absolute priority of Liberty’s. We want to enable financial inclusion through financial literacy in all markets in which we operate. In 2019, we spent more than ZAR 20 million on these literacy — financial literacy programs. Particularly, Liberty’s Mind My Money program seeks to deliver comprehensive financial literacy training to over 25,000 people per year. And finally, in relation to our impact in society, we continue to be committed to support the education of learners in high schools in Math and Science. And in doing that, we sponsor — we continue to sponsor the Mindset learning channel, which has in its roots the Liberty Learning Channel.

I would now like to hand over to Yuresh, who will share with you an outline of financial outcomes delivered in the year. And then I will return and talk about the future. Thank you.

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Yuresh Maharaj, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group Financial Director & Director [2]

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Good morning, everyone. I will start my presentation this morning with a brief overview of the South African investment and trading environment, which does provide context to our 2019 financial results.

We continue to see investor uncertainty driven by global events, directing flows to safe haven assets and bond markets. We also saw the rand/U. S. dollar volatility during the year, with the rand strengthening in the final weeks of December. The economy is struggling to gain momentum given the downward trend in business confidence, slowing household income and the ongoing risk of intermittent electricity supply. This is evidenced by the single-digits growth from South African equities on a weighted average basis.

The rate of increase in consumer spending remains fragile, affected by a slowdown in disposable income growth. Growth in retail spending is well below its historical trends. Moody’s has recently revised the South African economic growth outlook to 0.7% in 2020, indicating in the view the pace of economic activity will remain subdued and well below the country’s potential. The IMF also recently commented on the undeniable economic potential of South Africa. We also support this view and Liberty will continue to invest for our future in the country.

Against this backdrop, let’s reflect on the group’s financial performance. The group’s performance for 2019 reflects continued progress in achieving our medium-term key financial outcomes, with return on equity of 14%, supported by a 10% growth in normalized operating earnings and a significantly higher earnings from the shareholder investment portfolio. The return on group equity value of 11.5% is significantly higher than 2018. The group value of new business margin increased by 10 basis points to 1%, entering the lower end of our target range of 1% to 1.5%. Liberty Group Limited’s capital position remains strong and also remains at the upper end of our target range.

Expanding now on the drivers underpinning each of these financial outcomes, normalized operating earnings for the year of ZAR 2.2 billion reflects an improved operational performance, with good earnings contribution from STANLIB South Africa and the continuing businesses in the Africa regions. The South African insurance operations remain resilient in the current economic climate, reflecting muted growth over 2018.

The shareholder investment portfolio delivered earnings of just over ZAR 1 billion, benefiting from strong performances in foreign and local equities and local bonds and delivering a gross return of 8% for the year. This results in normalized headline earnings growth of 42% to ZAR 3.2 billion for 2019.

Earnings from the SA Retail business of ZAR 1.5 billion were marginally lower than 2018. The business experienced lower-than-anticipated risk profits in the second half of the year, where lower persistency experience continued throughout the year, reflective of the environment. This was partially offset by active and disciplined cost management.

Liberty Corporate’s earnings of ZAR 85 million reflects a good outcome for 2018 with an improved disability claims experience, increased annuitant mortality profits, coupled with good expense control.

LibFin markets, comprising our assets and liability capability and the credit portfolio, delivered earnings of ZAR 396 million, up 5% on 2018. STANLIB South Africa’s earnings increased by 30% on 2018 with higher fee income recorded from strong cash flows throughout the year and benefiting from favorable investment market performance. The improved earnings from the continuing operations in the Africa regions of ZAR 54 million was mainly supported by a better claims experience in the Kenyan short-term insurance business.

Good progress has been made in the second half of the year with the operations under ownership review, with the successful sale of STANLIB Ghana and Botswana businesses effective at the end of November and December of 2019. The sale of our asset management businesses in Kenya and Uganda is progressing according to plan and is expected to be completed by June this year. Included in the operations under ownership review is Liberty Health business, which incurred a loss of ZAR 126 million for the year, with the business continuing to lack scale.

Efforts continue to find a suitable outcome for the health business. This is however taking longer than anticipated. Cost discipline is critical in the current business environment, and central costs have been consistently well-managed across the group for the last 3 years.

Looking at STANLIB South Africa’s improved operational contribution, STANLIB’s earnings grew by a pleasing 30% to ZAR 460 million, supported by a 7% growth in assets under management. Favorable investment market returns and good net client cash flows assisted the net income fee — net fee income growth of 5%.

Work continues on reducing the cost base, with an encouraging reduction in the cost-to-income ratio to 66%. STANLIB’s third-party cash flows remained strong at just over ZAR 15 billion, including goods, retail and institutional, non-money market cash flows.

Money market flows are more liquid in nature and tend to be volatile from period to period, in particular, over June and December closes. STANLIB’s reputation for being a large fixed income manager continued to benefit from the risk of investor sentiment during the year.

STANLIB’s quartile peer ranking reflects some short-term volatility, with a longer-term performance largely maintained across its funds. It’s pleasing to note that during the year, 80% of STANLIB’s core retail products were in the first and second quartile based on the 1-year peer group ranking. This is a significant improvement over 2018.

Let’s take a closer look at the sources of group equity value earnings. The significantly higher return on group equity value was supported by STANLIB’s — South Africa’s improved performance, investment returns being closer to actuarial assumptions and the lower interest rate environment. Management actions, including maintenance and overhead cost control, contributed to our 8% growth in operational equity value profits.

SA Retail’s risk variances remain positive, although lower than 2018. Persistency, particularly at earlier durations, is reflecting the impact of the economy. Liberty Corporate’s experience variances were negatively impacted by higher umbrella terminations, lower salary growth rates and member withdrawals during the year.

Turning to the key insurance metrics, the group value of new business of ZAR 407 million grew by nearly 10% from 2018, with margin improvement from 0.9% to 1%. SA Retail value of new business increased to ZAR 290 million due to positive product enhancements and ongoing margin management. Liberty Corporate and Liberty Africa Insurance value —

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– more product and feature enhancements in between the Retail and Corporate Risk & Investment propositions during the year, which are aimed at addressing the current and future needs of our clients.

Moving to our capital position. The group’s capital position remained strong, with the group’s main long-term insurance license, Liberty Group Limited, at 1.99x cover, remaining at the upper end of our target range.

The Board has approved an increase of 3% to the 2019 full year dividend, which amounts to ZAR 7.12 per ordinary share. This results in a final dividend of ZAR 4.36 per ordinary share, which is a 5% increase under the ’18 final dividend. The dividend is in line with the group’s dividend policy and reflects the Board’s confidence in the business in improving operational performance over the last 2 years.

So in summary, we believe good progress has been made in moving towards our medium-term financial outcomes over the last 3 years. Our focus remains unchanged, continuing to invest in and improving client, adviser and employee experience, managing our risk and control environment, achieving our medium-term financial outcomes and continuing to make a positive impact on society, the environment and the economies in which we operate in.

Thank you. I’ll now hand over to David to conclude this morning’s presentation.

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [3]

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Right. Thank you very much, Yuresh. It’s hard to believe that it was 2 years ago that we thrust Yuresh into the job as Finance Director and he had 7 days to prepare for the 2017 results. As I said earlier, passion in business is everything; and well done to you and your team and the whole actuarial team, risk teams for preparing and getting us to be able to release these results for today.

I think if you reflect on the numbers that Yuresh has shared, and particularly that final slide, we’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made in this business. We set out those medium-term target ranges on the 4 metrics for the 2020 outcome, and we’re nearly there. And if you look at the numbers that we —

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– up to ZAR 15 billion. We’re pleased with these results, and they’ve continued to fund — or create the foundation for us to go forward.

So let’s now focus a little bit on the year ahead, what we’re going to do. We will continue to invest in improving our client and adviser experiences to drive satisfaction, loyalty and, in particular, new business, with a real attention being paid too, to the persistency in the business that we’ve written in the past. As a management team, we focused on the motivation, loyalty and productivity from both our advisers and our employees and the wellness of everybody in the Liberty community remains a key focus for us.

Managing our risk and control environment is essential to do the right business the right way and to ensure that we utilize our financial and other resources responsibly. The achievement of our financial goals which, with continued focus on stringent cost discipline, operating efficiency and less complexity, will create the financial leverage to invest and grow this business.

Ultimately, if we do all of these well and right, we will be able to continue to contribute positively to society, preserving our natural resources and we’ll continue to play a positive role in growing the economic environment in which we operate, to create and return value to all of our stakeholders.

So in summary, when we think about 2020 and the year that lies ahead, our plan has not changed. We are simply focused on the execution of our plan to do it the best that we can and to do it as fast as we can to continue to deliver value in the here and now.

But our founder implores us to be bold and courageous. And so I’d like to share with you some thoughts about what I think Liberty needs to look like in 5 to 10 years’ time, so to take that horizon away from 2020 and the here and now and the immediacy of value creation and competitiveness, and to project into a 5- to 10-year envelope, to give you a sense of what we’re thinking the Liberty of the future needs to look like.

And when you think about that context, all businesses are looking at a future where people are living longer. We all understand this longevity dividend that is coming our way. And customers and clients of businesses like ours are demanding integrated or will demand integrated, cross-category services, with an experience that is aligned to and dictated to the experience that they have on their social media platforms. They will want everything digitally. But it’s our proposition that they will continue to value human-to-human interaction even more than they value it today.

Because of the avalanche of the digital connectivity and engagement, that human-to-human connectivity will become ever more important. And so our business — the business of Liberty in the future lies in augmenting the power of that human-to-human engagement that already exists between our advisers and our clients, augmenting it with the power of a scalable digital engagement platform, where we provide simple and intuitive tools and solutions, all of it grounded in an advice philosophy that seeks to support and encourage our customers to lead their best lives.

Not only will we provide our own solutions in this future, we will look to work with our partners in an open source manner to provide adjacent solutions to ours that create value for our clients and, indeed, for everybody in our ecosystem. And we will drive this, as you would not be surprised, when we think about that 5- to 10-year envelope, we will be driving this using the power of all sources of data, including that of our customers, for their benefit. We’ll do this through the adoption of cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning. You’ve heard all these words before. They will be ubiquitous to our business model, and I’m sure our competitors, in this time frame. But we’re going to do this in partnership with some of the world’s biggest technology firms.

As we build now to that future, we will continue to retain that human focus, that focus that I spoke about at the start, delivering against the promises that we make every day and fulfill them, helping people lead better lives as they pass through the various stages of life. Much of the work that was completed in 2019 lays the foundation for this future, and we continue to prioritize efforts to achieving these goals.

So finally, ladies and gentlemen, for this morning I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the entire Liberty community for their hard work and resilience during what can be described as 2019, as a tough year, in which we managed to continue to build our business for the future and we demonstrated the resilience of our business for today. Thank you very much, and I will take questions.

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Questions and Answers

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [1]

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We’ll start here at the Global Leadership Center, and then we will move to the conference call and then to the webcast. So let’s see if there are any questions here in Johannesburg.

Well, it would seem that there are no questions. Would anyone like to ask anything here? No. Okay. Then let’s see whether there are any questions from the conference call. I can see that we are running around haphazardly at the back. Any questions on the conference call?

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Operator [2]

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Yes. We have a question from Michael Christelis of UBS.

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Michael Christelis, UBS Investment Bank, Research Division – Director and Insurance Analyst [3]

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Just a question, if you maybe can give us a little bit of color on the variances you’re seeing. So firstly, the persistency variances. What product sets specifically are issues there and what actions you’re taking there? And then if you can also talk a little bit about the NAV variances in the corporate business? Or is it presumably, on a risk basis, it’s disability, I’d imagine. But I mean just trying to get a sense of what the, I guess, the expected level of earnings for corporate should revert to if variances normalize?

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [4]

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I know you’re not directing that question to me, Michael, because when you speak about color, I’m thinking about the color spectrum. So I’ll have to hand over to my finance colleagues to answer the question. Yuresh?

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Yuresh Maharaj, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group Financial Director & Director [5]

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Yes, sure. Hi Michael, so on your question on variances, I think for one is what we’re seeing is, particularly in our fee, dissected between the SA Retail business. What we have seen is that our responses have reduced. And that’s a combination of lower mortality or, should I say, more — lower risk profits as well as sort of persistency weakening that we see sort of year-on-year. And that is particularly in the early duration lapses that you’re seeing in our risk book, and which can be linked to the sort of trends that we’re seeing in the economy. If you look at the corporate business, they are the variances, then we did speak about this at the half year where we saw, again, in terms of pressures of the economy, we saw some of the member, sort of growth rate reductions due to retentions that we’re seeing out there in the marketplace, as well as sort of scheme terminations also being a trend associated. Those are the sort of key elements in terms of impacting variances year-on-year.

In terms of our corporate run rates, I think ideally, where we’re at now, which is obviously a remarked improvement from where we were in 2018, I think edging to sort of the — within these levels and sort of growing beyond this into the ZAR 100 million mark is where we would like to target.

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [6]

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Have you got any further questions, Michael?

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Michael Christelis, UBS Investment Bank, Research Division – Director and Insurance Analyst [7]

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Nothing from me.

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [8]

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Thanks, Mike. Nothing more from the conference call?

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Operator [9]

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Yes. There is a next question, which comes from Warwick Bam of Avior Capital Markets.

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Warwick Bam, Avior Capital Markets (Pty) Ltd. – Head of Research & Research Analyst [10]

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Can I just get some more clarity on the new business strain; it’s fallen quite sharply? And you mentioned actions that you’ve taken. I just want some more insights around what you’ve done and what we can expect out of the new business strain going forward.

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [11]

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Sure, Warwick, I’ll ask Yuresh to answer that, again.

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Yuresh Maharaj, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group Financial Director & Director [12]

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Warwick I think, the —

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David Charles Munro, Liberty Holdings Limited – Group CEO & Executive Director [13]

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(technical difficulty) – half of 2020. Thank you very much, everybody.