Dame Amanda Blanc

Today we are announcing that Aviva has delivered another excellent performance in our first half of 2026, once again extending our track record of strong, profitable growth. Operating profit is up 24%, with double-digit growth in operating earnings per share. And we are driving higher returns, with IFRS return on equity above 20%. Our interim dividend is up 7% year-on-year and we completed the latest share buyback last month.

Every business contributed to these results. For example – in General Insurance, premiums are up 29%. In Wealth, net flows are up 32%, driven by all parts of the business. And over the last 12 months, we have also grown by more than 250,000 customers.

In Retirement, both Individual Annuity and Equity Release sales were up double digits. These results are testament to everything that we have delivered over the last six years. That is why we are on such a strong trajectory. Behind every number in these results is a colleague making a difference for customers and I’d like to thank the team for their commitment, skill and hard work.

Let me focus now on where we go from here. We think about Aviva’s future across two horizons. The first is our three-year targets. We have real confidence in these as we unlock material benefits from Direct Line and drive strong organic growth across the group.

The second horizon is what comes beyond 2028. Here, we have three clear opportunities: First – our customer advantage is unique and we can serve more of our customers’ lifetime financial needs than any other insurer. We have more than 25 million customers, and nearly half of all of the new policies sold today are to existing customers. We are the number one trusted brand, with a full product suite to meet needs across a lifetime.

Second – we are transforming with AI, with a greater opportunity than most insurers. Our scale means that we can invest, innovate and redeploy across the group. We have huge volumes of proprietary data, an advantage that cannot be replicated, and one that will widen over time. And our transformation here is well underway.

We are launching an AI virtual assistant for customer support. In Protection, we have halved the time it takes to review each case in medical underwriting. In claims, we are building a voice-enabled AI claims agent. And in Wealth, we are using agentic AI to automate quality assurance.

Our third opportunity is in our attractive long-term growth platforms. Wealth remains a fast-growing market. We are also the clear market leader in UK General Insurance. In Global Corporate and Specialty, we have real headroom to grow.

And in Canada, we are one of just two players with a truly national presence, with attractive opportunities in both Personal Lines and Commercial Lines. It’s for all these reasons that we have absolute confidence in our current targets – and the full conviction in sustaining strong earnings growth beyond them.

Steve Sedgewick: Well, let's be brutally honest about it – navigating the UK personal wealth situation when you've got a government which is oscillating and clawing back money left, right and centre – it's tricky, isn't it? So absolutely very interesting that Aviva is hosting its In Focus Wealth Investor event today. In its half year results, Aviva said the division was on track to deliver £280 million in operating profit by next year, with an update on that target expected today. Dame Amanda Blanc is the CEO of Aviva and joins us now. Amanda, lovely to see you.  

Amanda Blanc: Good to see you too.  

Steve Sedgewick: Yeah, thanks. I know you've got a really busy day, so thanks for joining Ben and myself firstly. Look, you've watched this show enough to know that I am in dismay for the viewers and for your clients and investors more generally about navigating British wealth situation at the moment as well. It's never been more tricky for them, has it? 

Amanda: Well, first of all, thank you for having me this morning and it's good to be here. No, you're absolutely right. It is really difficult. And if you think about the wealth market today is £2.7 trillion, it's actually forecast to grow to £7.5 trillion by 2035. So how does one navigate your way through that? It doesn't almost make sense in terms of the sort of difficult environment that we're in. But if you think about a big portion of that is your pension and particularly workplace pensions, which of course everybody now has to contribute to their autoenrollment pension. So that's an £800 billion market today. It'll be £2 trillion in 2035 and £4 trillion in 2045. So what we're trying to do today is to sort of expose Aviva's strength in this market, we’re the number one player here, and talk about how you need to not only rely on your pension, because if you do, 15 million people in the UK are not saving enough into their pension for retirement, but how you need to complement that with other things like savings, ISAs, bonds, whatever, to make sure that you are well equipped when it comes to your retirement. 

Steve: A number of business journalists who are very cocky, maybe I'm just talking about myself here, who think that they know about business, but know very little about personal finance. There is a lot of us out there as well. My worry is that there are people at number 11 Downing Street who know even less than me about personal finance and what it's going to take to have a well-financed retirement for an aging demographic as well. How difficult, again, is it offering a clear product to your clients and basically democratising pension and wealth as well, which I think is part of your mantra as well. How difficult is it to do this when there is financial illiteracy at number 11 Downing Street? 

Amanda: So, look, I think you are absolutely right that the politicians need to think very, very carefully about the messages that they're giving about something like pensions. Because pensions are a long-term game. They're not something to be messed around with, because you can do short-term things that have very long-term consequences. And if we think about some of the signalling into previous budgets, so, for example, this time last year, when there was, you know, a lot of noise around tax free lump sums, we saw 30 times the amount of withdrawals from pensions in the run-up to that budget. So we desperately hope, that this time...  

Steve: And people can invest that tax efficiently.  

Amanda: No, once you take that out, you're done, right? Once that comes out of your pension, you cannot put it back in. So it's really, really important that the government have, you know, announced the pension. The pensions act has been enacted. That happened a few months ago. We've got things like the Mansion House Accord, which is pension companies' commitment to investing more in private credit to get better returns or private assets to get better returns over the longer term. We need for pensions to be not touched so that people can actually rely on them for the future retirement. As I said to you earlier, so many people are just not saving enough. And when it gets to retirement, they're going to get there and go, well, what happened there? You know? 

Steve: I'll make one more on this one because Ben obviously once again as well. But when the entire debate is on pensions is being dominated by the triple lock, when actually, I can't help thinking it should be revisited on catastrophic issues like the inheritance implications of what the previous chancellor have done for pensions, for spouses, for the salary sacrifice as well, which is discouraging people because of the increase in N.I.C.s if you invest over two thousand pound. These are actively stopping people getting involved with pensions in a more aggressive way and thinking about other forms of investment, which there aren't necessarily tax incentivised ways of doing so. It just seems to be completely moving in the opposite direction. 

Amanda: You're absolutely right. Anything that you do, which makes it more difficult for people to save or more complicated for people to save, they're going to switch off. And so what happens then, as you know, huge amounts of money are kept in cash. We know what inflation is. So that cash is just diminishing. And so, you know, and then people get to retirement and go, what do I do now? So you're right about things like in the inheritance tax changes. You know, we have seen an uptick in people wanting more protection products to try and protect from that. And so it is very, very important that we simplify the message that we basically, and Aviva does this, we do something called a midlife M.O.T. Maybe Steve, we can encourage you to have a midlife M.O.T.  

Steve: I think I do need to a stop take as you will know.  

Amanda: So that actually you can really think about if you saving this much today, what will that mean? Because I think the state pension is one thing, but you are always going to have to supplement that. If you want a comfortable retirement, you need forty five thousand pounds a year to have a comfortable retirement. I don't think people are. Most people are going to be nowhere near that.  

Steve: By the way, you could ask to him about mid life. I mean, he's not as young as he looks Amanda. 

Amanda: I was giving you a compliment. 

Ben Boulos: Yeah, midlife at best.  

Steve: Thanks, guys.  

Ben: Amanda, just picking up on the point that Steve made about the changes to the relief, national insurance contributions relief on pensions, which due to kick in April 2029, there is a danger that that reduces the incentive for both employees and employers when it comes to how much they're actually contributing to the measure, could worsen the situation that you've outlined where people aren't saving enough. Have you had conversations with the government, with the Treasury about the potential consequences of that? And do you get the sense that they would listen and potentially revisit that decision before it kicks in in April 2029? 

Amanda: Look, so first of all, you know, we were very disappointed about the salary sacrifice point for the very reasons that that Steve mentioned. Yes, of course, we have lots of conversations, you know, as the ABI, which is the industry body, we are always saying, you know, really think about the long term consequences of what you're doing here. So I think we do hope that it might be revisited before it's implemented at the at the back end of the decade, because I think discouraging people to save into their pension is not what we want. You know, if we think about it, what we want is for people to take responsibility for their finances. And, you know, if you basically make it difficult for them to do that, then they're not going to do it, are they? 

Bem: And then in terms of the forthcoming budget, just a matter of weeks away, there are reports around about speculation that the Chancellor may look to hike taxes on banks, relift the surcharge. He may look at the insurance sector, the wealth, the pension provider sector and think, actually, they're doing pretty well. We could maybe take a little bit from them as well. Are you concerned that that might be the direction of travel or are you a bit more relaxed about things? 

Amanda:  I'm never relaxed because I mean, I'm not going to speculate. However, what I would say is financial services is one of the core industries in Britain. What you need to do is to encourage financial services to be successful. We employ so many people. We do so many good things. So my urge would be, you know, if you really believe that financial services is important, don't make it difficult for people to invest in the UK and for those businesses in the UK to invest in the UK. 

Steve: Amanda, I'm just a little bit on the topic du jour, which is AI as well. And you and I on this channel have spoken about AI in various ways and forms. But in terms of the vast amount of investment that is going into it in pensions, in wealth at the moment as well, are you concerned? And you know, I am because you watch the show as well, that a lot of this investment isn't going to realise a decent return on it as well. And actually, we are heading for a very rocky road, which could affect everyone in every sector. 

Amanda: So I think absolutely you've always got to look at the way that Aviva think about this is our investment in AI. And we are very excited about the opportunity in AI to just say, you know, there are lots of things that AI can really help with, including lots of the topics we talked about this morning. You can use AI to help somebody, you know, to give guidance and support without having to have expensive advice in terms of their savings. But it's always got to make the right return. And the way that we look at it is, you know, that the AI investment, we need to see what that return is going to be over the medium and longer term. And it competes for capital along with everything else. On saying that, when we look at this, we do see that there is a really good return. You know, if you think about our operational work, that we're doing machine learning on pricing, on claims, on outsourcing, on offshoring. And then, of course, in IT development, if we had all of those things together, it's pretty significant. 

Steve: Sure. That's for Aviva, though, and integrating it into its operations. But what about for Aviva Wealth and the money that your fund managers and wealth managers are putting into the AI sector as well? Are you concerned about the return or the return of that capital, let alone the return on it? 

Amanda: So if we think about our investment directly in things like hyper-scalers, it will be more on the debt side and it's a relatively small amount as we sit here today. So I think, again, we would be thinking because we'd invest in on behalf of our members, our pension holders, obviously, and the fund managers. And I know you have some of them in here on a regular basis. We'll constantly be looking at that. What are the returns? Are they good returns? Whether that's in the debt investment or the equity investment, those returns have to make the right bar. 

Steve: Lovely to see you. Thank you very much indeed for your time as well. And thank you for your two minders who came along with you as well. They are lovely, despite looking pretty much like a pair of heavies. Luckily, they're both old friends. Thank you very much indeed for that. See you Aviva. Have a good day today. Thanks, Amanda.