Annual General Meeting (AGM)

So good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Royal London 2026 Annual General Meeting. I'm Isabel Hudson and I'm the Chair of Royal London. We appreciate you taking the time to join us today, whether in person or online. And I'm particularly grateful to those of you who braved not only the Tube strikes, but also the pouring rain to get here. It's been a bit of a challenge, hasn't it? So we're very grateful.

Today's AGM is an important event for us. It's a chance to hear your views and to talk about what we believe makes being part of a customer-owned business so special, and what we're doing to maintain the trust of members, customers and the wider society. That theme of trust is a thread that you'll hear me come back to at various points today.

For those in the room, we'd like you to join us for lunch after the meeting. For members joining online, if you experience any technical challenges, there's guidance available via the ‘help’ link, or you can submit a query via the Q&A tab. You should have also seen a welcome message when you logged in, inviting you to respond to a short survey. This is to help us improve your experience of the AGM, and we'd be very grateful for your responses. It should only take you a couple of minutes.

For those in the room who took time to provide your views at registration, thank you for doing that. If you hadn't had a chance to give your feedback, you can also speak to a member of the team after the meeting and tell them what you thought of Barry and myself.

So just to confirm that there are no alarms planned for today. So if the alarm sounds, please follow the Royal London team who are placed around the room and they will guide you to the nearest exit.

Before we start with the formal presentations, I'd like to take a moment to introduce your directors who are here with us today. I'll highlight the committees they chair and you'll see their full committee memberships on the slides.

So starting on my far right, we have Dan, our Group CFO.

Next to Dan I'd like to introduce our newest Director, Michelle Cracknell. Michelle joined us at the end of April, so she's very new, and brings more than 30 years of experience in financial services, particularly in pensions and retirement planning.

Next we have Pars, who is the Chair of the Royal London Asset Management Board.

And then we have Eithne, who chairs the With Profits committee.

And then next is Barry, who is of course our Group CEO. You'll hear more from Barry shortly.

And then on the other side we have Mark, who is the Senior Independent Director and the Chair of the Risk and Capital Committee.

Next to him is Jane, who chairs the Remuneration Committee.

And then we have Nicky, who chairs the Investment Committee.

And last but not least, we have Gregor, Chair of the Audit Committee.

So before I continue, I just wanted to mention one thing, which is Barry's appointment as a non-executive director of the Yorkshire Building Society, which has just been announced today. Barry is a vocal advocate for mutuals. If you've heard him speak at previous AGMs, you'll be very aware of that. Alongside his role as CEO for us, this is an excellent opportunity to share experiences as leading mutuals in our sector, and I know he's looking forward to it.

I'd also like to take a moment to recognise two directors who have stepped down this year. Kal Atwal, who retired from the Board in January on completion of her six-year tenure. And Ruth Davidson, who earlier this year indicated her intention to retire from the Board today. Ruth has served on the Royal London Board since 2021. Both Kal and Ruth have made a significant contribution to Royal London, and I'm very grateful for the commitment that they have shown during their time with us. So on behalf of the Board, I would like to extend my thanks to both for their service. Please join me in showing our appreciation.

So moving on to the business of today. I can declare that a quorum is present, the notice convened in the meeting is being displayed on the screen, and assuming that no one has any objections, I propose the notice is taken as read. Thank you.

The voting today will be conducted by a poll. Every member or duly appointed proxy is entitled to one vote. For those joining us online, you'll be able to vote via the AGM portal throughout the meeting and for our members in the room, please complete your voting card and post it in the ballot box before you leave the room or pass it to a member of the Royal London team. If you've already voted, any vote you cast today will take precedence.

As stated in the Notice of meeting, the Board recommends that you vote in favour of all of the resolutions. The voting is now open and will close just before the end of the meeting. Turning to the agenda, in a few moments, I will share my reflection on Royal London's progress during 2025. Barry will then take us through the key achievements and touch on future priorities. We will then move to the Q&A followed by final votes, before closing the AGM. The results of the vote will be published on the Royal London website later today.

Let's now turn to the year in review. It was another year shaped by significant global uncertainty: geopolitical developments, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and tariffs introduced by the US administration. All of this continued to cast a shadow over the global economy, and global tensions have continued into this year with the war in Iran.

While it's not at a scale of the crises we are seeing overseas, uncertainty also continues closer to home. Families and individuals are feeling the impact of rising costs and higher bills, which continue to affect everyday spending and long-term financial wellbeing.

It's just so difficult to predict what might happen next, and people are having to rethink how they plan for the future. They want providers that they can trust to help them protect their finances, invest for the future, and plan ahead so they can reach their retirement goals. Naturally, we want Royal London to be their ideal partner to help them navigate the course.

Many of us are asking, how do we best manage our finances when faced with such uncertainties? If you were to ask any financial commentator worth their salt, they're likely to tell you that what's important is to build up a diverse savings portfolio and to stay invested over the long term. And many of our customers are invested in Royal London's Governed Range, which is a multi-asset portfolio that provides good diversification.

In 2025, we continued that theme of diversification by acquiring Dalmore Capital, with its strong expertise in UK infrastructure investments, ranging from utilities to energy networks. These are typically referred to as Private Assets, and there has been much debate around the benefits of including Private Assets in long-term investment portfolios.

But even before the Dalmore acquisition, we were already invested across traditional property sectors, including offices, retail and industrial, as well as residential, natural capital – that's farming to you and me – life sciences and health care. The addition of Dalmore further strengthens our capabilities across a wider range of Private Assets, and will help increase diversification.

All these investments mean that we were well placed to sign up to the Mansion House Accord, the government's voluntary initiative encouraging increased investment in UK Private Assets. We have also backed the Sterling 20 initiative as one of the 20 largest pension and investment providers in the UK, which aims to boost regional growth and investment in infrastructure.

But wherever we invest, the choices we make will be first and foremost in your best interests. As many of you will know, we are a strong advocate of financial advice for people making important financial decisions. But we also know that a significant proportion of people in the UK can't afford it, but still need guidance they can trust.

This is where the new Targeted Support can help. It's a new form of free financial advice in the UK, introduced following proposals by the Financial Conduct Authority or FCA. Rather than fully personalised advice, it lets us make sensible recommendations based on what has worked for people in similar circumstances.

Royal London played a leading role in helping the FCA shape their proposals, and in April we announced the launch of our first Targeted Support offering, our ISA service, which you can access through our app. Barry will share a little more detail about this in his presentation.

The UK pensions landscape has changed significantly over the past couple of decades. It's moved from defined benefits to defined contribution, where the reliance is on the individual to build up their own pot of money for retirement.

We have seen the benefits of auto-enrolment into workplace pension schemes. However, given the relatively low mandatory contribution rate, many savers will not have enough for the retirement they want. But many people do not realise this and they still think that their savings will be enough.

We're clear about this at Royal London: pension contributions will need to increase over time. That's why we're working with the new Pensions Commission. Their recent report clearly highlights the under-saving challenge for future generations, and we will continue to play our role in raising this critical issue.

When it comes to saving for the long term, over 40 years or more, people want a provider they can trust to put them first everytime. And as a mutual, that is what we can and will do. Customers come first. One of the clearest benefits for eligible customers is ProfitShare. Over the lifetime of a product, we believe that ProfitShare, combined with investment growth, can make a meaningful difference to our customers’ savings, and we're proud to have shared over £2 billion in profits since the scheme began in 2007.

But we know that, for many in the UK, mutuality is not a concept that's well understood. We don't think that mutuality is talked about enough and we want to change that. So later this week we're launching a new campaign, and we thought you might like to have a sneak preview of our new TV ad. So let's take a look.

[Video]

Morning, boss. Good to see you. Morning boss Good to see you. Morning boss. Morning, boss. Morning, boss. At Royal London, we're customer owned. Morning, boss. Morning, love. Stop kicking my seat. Morning boss. Good to see you. Which makes you the boss and our priority. Good to see you. Royal London works for you. Pensions, protection and investments.

[Isabel Hudson]

So I think the message is clear. You're not just our customers. You are, in fact, the owners of our business. And as the advert says, you are the boss. And we will always remember that.

Let me turn now to a topic that will undoubtedly shape the standard of living for many people over the decades to come, and that's progress in tackling climate change. Some global companies have reconsidered their climate commitments. We, however, remain committed to playing our part.

We continue to focus on reducing emissions from our investment portfolio and operations. It's an important part of achieving our Purpose, playing our part in moving fairly to a sustainable world. Some companies simply divest and walk away from high-emitting sectors. Our belief is that long-lasting, real-world change has to be driven through active engagement.

Sometimes our influence is behind the scenes, such as our engagement last year with the energy company EDF. We flagged our concerns privately about a slowing of their emissions reductions and expanding their gas business. We are encouraged that they're listening to investors as they refine their long-term strategy. We also positively engaged with Shell on how they disclosed their growth strategy for liquefied natural gas, and how that aligns with demand forecasts, their net zero ambitions and long-term financial resilience.

Other times, we act more publicly when we're not seeing the appropriate progress, such as voting at AGMs. This has been the case with Canadian oil company Suncor, where we've raised concerns about their decarbonisation strategy and climate risk management. And by reflecting our views through voting against key resolutions, that allows us to make our point very publicly and frequently alongside other investors. We will continue to engage constructively to champion progress, maintain pressure where it's needed, and hold companies to account where improvement is required.

To keep driving progress, it is just as important that we engage with policymakers and regulators. To help us deliver our climate goals, we will continue urging them to put in place the frameworks to achieve global climate ambitions. As an example, in partnership with Business in the Community, we launched a report that explores how the UK can deliver a fair and inclusive transition, and it includes recommendations for government action to create a future-ready economy. You can find this, and other reports on our climate actions and plans, on our website.

Community-level action has a big role to play in our climate strategy. In February, we kicked off our collaboration with Groundwork, a federation of charities helping to transform communities through better access to nature, habitat restoration, tree planting and wetland improvements. We’ve funded 14 projects around the UK so far and the early signs are promising. People in those communities are getting involved in more volunteering, outdoor learning and wellbeing activities.

We also support initiatives that help build financial resilience, including our long-standing partnership with Turn2us. This is an organisation that does exactly what it says on the tin. If you're facing financial hardship, you can turn to them for help. Together, we've developed resources such as the Personal Independence Payment Helper. If you've ever tried to help someone with a PIP claim, as I have, it's not easy. So I think this kind of tool is very welcome indeed.

We've also sponsored a piece of research called Stigma in the System. This looks at how stigma stops people from claiming for benefits they're entitled to, and what we can do about it. We believe that our work can make a lasting impact, and last year we extended the partnership by a further £2 million over the next three years.

Now let's turn to some key topics that will shape our future plans. One of the key roles of the Board is to oversee strategy. So last October, the Board held our annual meeting to talk about how we can make the most of future opportunities. Not surprisingly, we expect much of our growth to come from workplace pensions. As I mentioned earlier, many people are not saving enough for the future, and workplace pensions will become even more important going forward. We welcomed 230,000 new Workplace Pension customers last year, and they're all now members of Royal London, all qualifying for ProfitShare. We will be a trusted partner, from their first pension contribution, to and through supporting them in retirement.

Another important topic at the board has been artificial intelligence, or AI. It's clearly set to revolutionise almost every industry, so learning how to make the best use of this and doing so responsibly is essential. And when used responsibly, it provides exciting possibilities to improve customer service and empower millions of people to take control of their finances, such as through Targeted Support.

We're using AI to make processes more efficient so that our colleagues have time for the critical job of looking after our customers. On a visit to our Alderley Park office last year, I spoke to teams dealing directly with customers, often at difficult moments, such as bereavement. I was hugely impressed by their dedication and how they're using AI to take away some of the process burden, so they can focus more of their time on personal service to support customers.

While innovations like AI can create opportunities, we know that delivering for customers and building up trust comes from balancing innovation with human oversight. And while oversight is led by the Board, we must also have oversight that's independent from Royal London. So we have an Independent, Governance Committee, which is an FCA requirement and it provides just that, independent governance. It assesses and, where necessary, challenges, the value for money received by our Workplace Pension customers and by our customers that draw down their pension in retirement.

Colin Stewart is the Committee Chair. He's also with us today. Colin is here, and I would encourage you to take this opportunity to speak with him, as he will be available after the meeting. You can also read the Committee's annual report on our website and see a short video of Colin.

In a minute, I'll hand over to Barry to share his reflections on progress made in 2025, as we take the next steps in our strategy and empower even more people to take better financial decisions. But before I do that, at our last AGM, the unexpected star of the show was the acquisition of 21,000 acres of prime farmland. This year, we thought we'd show you something different, and we’ll take you from the farm to the sewer.

As referenced earlier, the acquisition of Dalmore Capital has diversified our Private Assets capabilities. And among the assets that Dalmore invests in, we thought you might be interested to hear more about the Thames Tideway Tunnel, better known to all of us as the 'Super Sewer', designed to significantly reduce pollution in the Thames and protect its ecosystem.

I know last year Barry was delighted to fulfil his ambition to drive a combine harvester. I'm yet to find out whether he's going to don his wellies for a visit to the sewer, and I think he's probably going to leave that one to me. But before I pass to him for his presentation, let's take a quick look at a short video to show you the important work that's happening at the Thames Tideway. And I'll also give some thought to what we're going to show you next year. Thank you everyone.

[Video]

After 10 years of construction, the last of 21 connections has been made between the original Victorian sewers and the new Thames Tideway Tunnel, bringing the entire system online to protect the tidal Thames from sewage pollution here at Putney Embankment.

As at the other key interception points along the system, the tunnel will prevent 95% of sewage spills that would otherwise overflow directly into the river. It's lovely to sit here and relax on these newly open public spaces created along the river.

As part of the project, over 25,000 people have worked, largely unseen beneath London to construct a new system.

What did it involve? 25 kilometres of tunnel the width of three London buses. It took six giant tunnel boring machines to dig out the tunnel, weighing up to 1,200 tonnes each. We dug out 21 joint shafts to both lower equipment and divert sewage flows to the new tunnel.

At Acton in West London, where I started my journey, the depth of the tunnel is 31 metres, dropping to 66 metres at Abbey Mills pumping station in East London, where it joins the Lee Tunnel.

Together, the London Tideway Tunnel has a storage capacity of 1.6 million cubic metres, or around 600 Olympic sized swimming pools.

We also moved almost 6,000,000 tonnes of material by river, much of which was used to create new wetlands for wildlife.

We delivered wider social impacts too, engaging close to 100,000 young people via STEM and supporting almost 50,000 people and over 500 organisations through community volunteering and funding.

[Barry O’Dwyer]

Good morning everyone. I'm delighted to be here with you today and to share the progress that we've made in 2025. It's also great to follow such a clear, practical example of how we're growing and diversifying what we offer to our customers. While infrastructure and farmland represent a relatively small part of our investments, they are important to bring to life the positive impact of a diversified portfolio, but also that Royal London is delivering for our customers.

At Royal London, our Purpose – ‘Protecting today, investing in tomorrow. Together we are mutually responsible.’ – is the foundation of everything we do. And we maximise our impact, we maximise the delivery of our Purpose by helping as many people as possible to take good financial decisions. Since setting out our strategy in 2020, to be an insight-led modern mutual, growing sustainably by deepening customer relationships, we've made great progress growing and diversifying while delivering substantial change. In 2025, we continued to build momentum and lay further foundations to advance our strategy and deliver even more for a greater number of customers.

The first part of our Purpose, ‘Protecting today’, is all about helping customers protect themselves and their families. In 2025, we paid out 98% of protection claims, amounting to over 62,000 claims and a total of £821 million.

For the very small number that we didn't pay out, most were due to customers providing incomplete or incorrect information during their application. To help avoid this, we continually review and improve our application processes and that's to ensure that, through the questions we ask, we make it as easy as possible for customers to share the details we need, and so that we can gather the right medical information to assess claims fairly and accurately.

We continue to evolve our Protection offering and, following the proposed Inheritance Tax changes in the 2024 Budget, we've seen strong demand for our estate planning propositions, as advisers continue to support customers with their inheritance planning needs.

Delivering consistently great service to customers and advisers is a priority for Royal London. Our Customer Value Statement score, which we use to measure customer satisfaction, continues to rise. In 2025, 44% of our customers rated us 9 or 10 out of 10 across the seven assessment criteria, and that's a 12 percentage point rise since we started using this measure in 2020.

Our customer focus is also reflected in the five-star ratings we received for both protection and pensions at the 2025 Financial Adviser Service Awards. We also retained our five-star investment provider rating for the 12th successive year.

In Ireland, we continued to hold our leading position in the financial broker market for protection, and for the third year in a row, we awarded ValueShare to eligible pension customers, our equivalent in Ireland of ProfitShare. This is a great example of how we make sure eligible customers share in our growth and success.

Offering increasingly diversified investment solutions that meet people's needs is critical to the relationships we build with customers and their advisers. For many people in the UK, building their financial resilience involves saving as much as they can through their workplace pension and then supplementing this with money in an ISA.

Our new Stocks and Shares ISA, which we launched last September, offers the same investment choices as our pensions products and, like our pension, it makes you a Royal London member and eligible for ProfitShare.

Through our digital channels, we're also making it simpler for our customers to do business with us day to day. Our mobile app is a core part of how our customers track and manage their plans, bringing their investments together in one place. By the end of last year, more than 500,000 customers were actively using the app, up from nearly 400,000 in 2024.

Last year, we also became one of the early adopters of the government's Pension Dashboard programme, which is due to be rolled out across the UK within the next year. This programme aims to create dashboards that provide clear and simple information to customers about all of their pension savings, including their State Pension.

Our Workplace Pensions business, as Isabel mentioned, is our largest source of new customers. With 230,000 new Workplace Pensions members joining last year, we now support 2.2 million with their retirement savings. And over the next three years, we'll invest £100 million to enhance this offering with the aim of supporting even more employees in the future.

Our Bulk Purchase Annuity offering helps thousands to achieve greater security in retirement. We're unique as the only mutual that offers a Bulk Annuity option to pension trustees and employers, and 2025 marked our first full year in this market. We completed 18 buy-in transactions with external schemes generating £1.3 billion in new business sales.

Also, as Isabel mentioned earlier, the multi-asset portfolios used by many of our Pension and ISA customers are designed to deliver diversification, combining growth assets like Equities with those that can help protect against inflation.

So this slide that we have on screen now is often called the ‘patchwork quilt’ of investment returns, for obvious reasons. I appreciate it looks quite complex, but each type of asset is given its own colour in this chart. And then the returns generated by that asset class are ranked from best to worst each year. And you can see that different asset classes perform well at different points in time.

Take Commodities for example, in light blue, at the top left-hand side of the screen. You can see that in some years it's the best performing asset class, other years it's the worst performing asset class. And by spreading investments across a range of investments, a diversified approach, demonstrated by the Multi-Asset purple box in the middle, can help support more consistent outcomes for customers over the long term.

Most of our Workplace customers are invested in our multi-asset Governed Range of funds, and the acquisition of Dalmore Capital will, over time, broaden the selection of assets available even further.

What sets our Asset Management business apart is the strength of our offering and the consistent value we deliver to clients. We continue to expand our offering, including internationally, through the launch of four new Australian unit trusts, and last October we increased our Sustainable range for our Pensions and ISA customers, now offering nine funds for greater choice and flexibility, and underscoring our credentials in sustainable investing.

Our propositions, of course, are only part of the story. Alongside that, being a mutual is a sizeable part of the ethos and fabric of our business. However, I believe what makes us truly special is the culture we have built together, and the talent and commitment of the 5,000 colleagues who work for Royal London.

Our colleague engagement survey in 2025 showed continued belief and pride in our Purpose, and earlier this year we were delighted to be named one of the top 10 places to work in the UK by Glassdoor, which is based on the reviews that colleagues leave about us on the Glassdoor website.

We continue to invest in ensuring that Royal London remains a great place to work, and to enable colleagues to deliver good customer outcomes. We'll keep investing in our people and their skills to ensure that we keep pace with advancements in technology too. And with the interest in AI growing, we remain focused on using this ethically and safely, with clear controls and ongoing vigilance around cyber risks.

Through our external partnerships, we look for opportunities to drive positive change. Levelling the playing field for women in sport remains an objective of the partnership with the British and Irish Lions rugby union team. We invest at the elite level of the game, with the first ever tour in New Zealand now only a year away, and also at grassroots level, empowering local rugby clubs to create more opportunities and inspire a strong pipeline of talent for future Lions Women's teams.

I'd now like to turn to our trading performance in 2025, and to summarise some key points that reflect the strength of our mutual offering and the positive momentum across our business. In 2025, our Group's adjusted operating profit grew by 18% to £327 million, which was supported by our first full year, as I mentioned, in the Bulk Purchase Annuity market. Protection new business sales rose by 17% to £991 million, driven by proposition enhancements and increased market share, while Life and Pensions new business sales were up 13% to £12.2 billion.

The Group's assets under management reached a record £199 billion, which included assets from the Dalmore Capital acquisition. Gross inflows rose to 42.5 billion, with net inflows at £4.1 billion, boosted by a new multi-asset mandate with St James’s Place. And finally, our capital position remained robust, reflected by our Investor View capital cover ratio. And this continues to support ongoing investment in our business.

So, looking ahead, and as Isabel indicated earlier, workplace pensions will play an increasingly prominent role in the future. This is the primary savings vehicle for most UK pension savers, and it's where we can have the greatest impact. But following the changes announced in recent budgets to Inheritance Tax, cash ISA contributions and salary sacrifice pension contributions, it's likely many people will need to rethink how they save for the future.

With only 1 in 10 of the UK population paying for personal financial advice, the vast majority are navigating complex decisions alone. Our modelling shows that Targeted Support could benefit 21.5 million people in the UK with actionable guidance. That's around 4 in 10 of the adult population. In April, we launched our own Targeted Support offering. This complements our continued commitment to supporting advisers with tools and resources to deliver positive client outcomes. And we've kicked this off with our ISA service.

Now, our Purpose helps us define the positive outcomes we want to achieve. We want customers to build their financial resilience. We want to play our part in moving fairly to a sustainable world. And we want to strengthen the mutual choice for customers, by ensuring that Royal London is still here for the long term.

What's implicit in our Purpose statement, but is not explicit, is scale. We have to help millions of customers who don't have an adviser. And to do that, we need to engage customers digitally with services that are designed to make it easy to deal with us. Therefore, how we're going to describe our strategy going forward is: we want to empower millions of people to take better financial decisions, harnessing technology to make it engaging and easy.

If a customer has an adviser, that's great news. The adviser will work hard to help that customer do the right thing, and we'll do all that we can to make it easy for them to do so. At the same time, we'll need to provide even more help to those that don't have an adviser, and engaging them will be crucial.

As a customer-owned business, our mutual model underpins both our Purpose and our strategy. Since we were founded in 1861, we've operated without the demands of shareholders, allowing us to focus entirely on our customers’ long-term interests. We'll continue to protect, insure and invest to secure our customers’ financial resilience, while also contributing to an environment and society that they can look forward to retiring into.

In short, we don't just work with you, we work for you. And to help bring this to life, and before I hand back to Isabel, we'll show you another of the ads from our upcoming campaign. Thank you for joining us today, and for those of you who have joined us in person, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to chat with you after the meeting. So let's play the video.

[Video]

All of this and we could boost your pension with a share of our profits. How's that sound, boss? I think we're aligned. Oh, yeah? Yeah. This has a lot of legs. That was blue sky thinking. Let's run with it. At Royal London, we’re customer owned. Which makes you the boss. And growing your pension our priority. Now we're really peeling the onion. Search Royal London Pension Transfer or go to the app.

[Ends]