Helvetia Annual General Meeting confirms all Board of Directors' proposals

Helvetia Holding AG / Key word(s): AGMEGM Helvetia Annual General Meeting confirms all Board of Directors' proposals 24.05.2024 / 13:00 CET/CEST Media release St.Gallen, 24 May 2024

Helvetia Holding AG shareholders approved all proposals put forward by the Board of Directors at the company's Annual General Meeting. Members and Chair of the Board of Directors were re-elected.

The Chair of the Board of Directors, Dr Thomas Schmuckli, welcomed 2,394 shareholders with voting rights (representing 62.94% of share capital) to Helvetia Holding AG's 28^th ordinary Annual General Meeting held at the Olma Messen St.Gallen venue. Fabian Rupprecht, Group CEO of Helvetia, presented the annual result for 2023. Helvetia successfully continued on its selective growth path with a focus on profitable and capital-efficient business fields and increased its business volume by 7.2% to CHF 11,311.3 million on a currency-adjusted basis. The Helvetia Group generated underlying earnings of CHF 372.5 million (2022: CHF 492.9 million). The result was characterised by exceptionally high claims from natural catastrophes and major loss events in the insurer's non-life business in Switzerland and Europe. As at 1 January 2024, the SST ratio stood at an outstanding 288%.

"The past year has shown how important excellent management of our core business is. We are continuing to place a clear focus on this in order to strengthen our technical profitability in view of the challenging market environment", explained Fabian Rupprecht at the Annual General Meeting.

Chair of the Board of Directors reports on artificial intelligence
In his meeting address, Dr Thomas Schmuckli referred to the topic of artificial intelligence and highlighted the potential of using artificial intelligence at Helvetia, saying, "The ability of AI to recognise patterns is key for Helvetia, for example when it comes to detecting insurance fraud." He also outlined how the Helvetia chatbot Clara, which is linked to ChatGPT, improves the experience for customers contacting Helvetia with queries. "The benefits are obvious: a chatbot allows us to respond to queries in a wide range of languages 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Simple but frequently occurring business transactions can be fully automated", he explained.