Hastings Group reports second quarter results

Hastings Group (‘Hastings’), the technology driven UK insurance provider and subsidiary of the Sampo Group (‘Sampo’), reports today on performance for the 6 months ended 30 June 2024.

Toby van der Meer, Group CEO, commented:

“I’m really pleased with our performance in the first half of 2024. In light of the tough economic conditions for many households and ongoing claims inflation, we’ve stayed focussed on providing simple, straightforward, low-cost digital insurance to existing and new customers. Hastings has continued to be one of the top 3 most competitive insurance providers during the first 6 months, and we have grown customer policies to 3.6 million.

I am also really proud of the excellent progress we’ve made on customer service, helping over 100,000 customers with claims, many of these dealt with through our mobile app, and with increasing customer satisfaction scores. More broadly, the pace of delivery on new digital and pricing capabilities remains high as we continue to invest in building the UK’s best and biggest digital insurance provider.

As always, I’d like to thank all my Hastings colleagues for their fantastic work and their commitment to supporting each other, our customers, and the communities in which we work.”

Financial highlights

Encouraging performance for the six months ended 30 June 2024, including:

• Live customer policies (“LCP”) increased to 3.6 million policies at 30 June 2024, up 6% year-on-year as consumer use of price comparison websites remained strong. Motor policies increased by 2% after solid growth in the second quarter, while home LCP grew by 26% year-on-year.
• Gross written premium up 26% year-on-year to £879m, reflecting the continued growth of LCP, as well as the earned impact of rate increases implemented during 2023 in response to significant market wide claims inflation.
• Operating ratio¹ of 89.6%, a 1.2 percentage point improvement year-on-year, reflecting rate increases and a reduction in claims frequencies due to benign weather experience, risk mix and the impact of pricing and claims initiatives.
• Operational profit² increased to £81m, reflecting the above factors as well as continued cost discipline.

Strategic and operational initiatives

Delivery of strategic initiatives continues at pace:

• New pricing models and data features deployed in both motor and home, supporting lower prices for good drivers and continued competitiveness on price comparison websites.
• Ongoing investment to the mobile app, which continues to be one of the UK’s most downloaded and highly rated general insurance apps, with over 730,000 downloads in the first half of 2024. In addition to a range of usability enhancements, new digital claims capability went live in the second quarter, which gives customers a 24x7 fully digitalised service to help manage total loss cases, where a car is not repairable.
• New claims management capabilities and suppliers rolled out in home insurance, improving customer experience, in particular helping customers more quickly when their house is damaged from flooding or severe weather.
• Successful upgrades to core technology platforms, increasing cloud capabilities, enhancing resilience and improving colleague and customer experience.
• Further improvements to the YouDrive product, which promotes and encourages safer driving by allowing customers to track their driving behaviour through the mobile app.

Colleagues and communities

Hastings’ commitment to supporting colleagues and communities remains strong:

• Hastings’ 4Cs culture continues to drive very high colleague engagement scores, including the highest rating possible from Best Companies (3* in 2024).
• Ranked as one of the top 4 most inclusive employers in the country (based on 'UK’s Top 50 Most Inclusive Employers').
• Significant talent recruitment in the first half across all customer and pricing teams, including the Group’s largest ever graduate intake.
• Maintained focus on increasing gender and ethnic minority diversity in leadership through continued partnership with the 30% Club.
• Colleague-led Inclusion Council continues to highlight diversity and inclusion events, including Pride month, Carers Week and the religious events and festivals of Holi, Ramadan, Easter, Vesak and Eid.
• The wellbeing programme continues to focus on mental health awareness campaigns including Time to Talk Day, Stress awareness month and mental health awareness week.
• Over 2,700 community hours have been donated by colleagues so far in 2024, including supporting our local educational provider through the Futuready programme. Colleagues have raised over £40,000 for over 30 local and national charities, including Comic Relief, Headway and St Michael’s Hospice. Hastings has matched this with a further £141,000 of charitable donations.

Ends

For more information, please contact pr@hastingsdirect.com.
 

¹Operating ratio is claims and operational costs over insurance and other revenue.

²Operational profit is profit before tax, the impact of interest rate changes and non-operational amortisation resulting from business combinations.