Achmea posts €388 million operational result
- Good progress Acceleration & Innovation:
- Many initiatives launched to improve customer service
- Operating expenses reduced by €143 million
- Sale of Russian insurance business completed
- €239 million of reorganisation expenses and goodwill impairments of €143 million result in net profit of €16 million
- €335 million of profit used to curb increase in health insurance premiums in 2015
- Financial position boosted, solvency of insurance activities increased to 215%
- A+ rating insurance entities maintained, risk management score upgraded to strong
Willem van Duin, Chairman of the Executive Board:
“With our change program Acceleration & Innovation we significantly increased the pace of innovation across our company. We recently completed the first year of our three-year change programme, Acceleration & Innovation, which is designed to become a more customer-driven, effective and competitive organisation.
With a great number of new, mostly online, initiatives, we continuously improve our service to our customers. For one, they can contact us next to through the telephone, also via chat and apps, and report claims with their smartphone. In addition, we actively assist our customers online through ‘co-browsing’ and use a growing number of digital resources to keep them informed.
Furthermore, on a growing number of our websites for our brands, customers can rate our services directly. Our brands released various apps for our customers to easily manage their insurance businesses. This way, we develop innovative new solutions for our customers and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.
We ended the 2014 financial year with a net profit of €16 million. Reorganisation expenses of €239 million and goodwill impairments of €143 million strongly impacted our net profit. Our operational result declined to €388 million (2013: €542 million). One of the reasons for this is that we allocated €335 million of our results to keep health insurance premiums for our customers practically equal in 2015. Our gross written premiums remained stable around €20 billion, while our Property & Casualty insurance business managed to grow in a shrinking market.
Our solvency increased to 215% and we maintained the A+ credit rating for our insurance entities with S&P, which demonstrates that we continue to be a solid financial partner to our customers and other stakeholders. Two recent financing transactions in beginning of this year, would have had a positive effect on our pro forma solvency ratio of 13 percentage points.
We reduced our operational expenses by €143 million in 2014 and are on track to achieve our target of reducing our costs by €450 million by the end of 2016. We are also on schedule with the inevitable reduction of around 4,000 FTEs within our organisation. In 2014 the number of jobs at Achmea in The Netherlands was reduced by some 1,200, whereby we made every effort to protect our employees’ interests as carefully as possible. We will continue to drive our Acceleration & Innovation program forward. This will enable us to maintain who we are: a cooperative insurer with very strong brands that communicate with their customers in a modern way.”
(Watch the webcast of the press conference.)