Aviva's half-year results, announced on 14 August, gave investors what they have come to expect twice a year now: profits up sharply, the dividend raised again, and management talking about targets being hit early rather than missed. Operating profit rose 24% to £1.33 billion, the interim dividend climbed 7% to 14.0p, and cash remittances to the group rose 47% to £1.5 billion. A decade ago, none of that would have seemed plausible at a company better known for burning through chief executives than for growing profits.
Group CEO Amanda Blanc has now delivered six consecutive years of what her own results statement calls "excellent financial performance." For brokers and underwriters who have watched Aviva lurch between strategies for the best part of two decades, the turnaround she has engineered is starting to look less like a rescue job and more like a template other composite insurers might study.
Aviva's problems were built in from the start. The group was assembled in 2000 from the merger of Norwich Union, a 203-year-old life insurer, with CGU, itself a 1998 combination of General Accident and Commercial Union. Three old insurers stitched into one meant three cultures and three sets of systems – a business too sprawling to run coherently for years afterwards.
The chief executives who followed struggled to make sense of it. Andrew Moss diversified into odd corners such as the British School of Motoring and a windscreen-repair chain before leaving amid a shareholder revolt over pay. Mark Wilson lasted longer but departed under similar pressure. Maurice Tulloch resigned after just 15 months, citing family health reasons. By 2020, Aviva was a business spread thinly across Europe and Asia while UK rival Prudential had already refocused on faster-growing Asian markets, and international investors had largely stopped taking it seriously.
Amanda Blanc, previously CEO of Axa's UK and Ireland business, took over in July 2020 and set out three priorities in short order: simplify the portfolio, rebuild the balance sheet, then grow. Six years on, that sequence has largely played out as planned.
The first phase was deliberately brutal. Blanc sold eight non-core businesses – including Aviva's operations in France, Italy, Poland, Singapore and Turkey – raising around £8 billion, most of which went straight back to shareholders as part of a wider £10 billion capital return since she took charge. What remained was a business built around three markets where Aviva could realistically lead: the UK, Ireland and Canada.
Having narrowed the business, Blanc then began adding pieces back in, selectively. The £385 million purchase of Succession Wealth in 2022 gave Aviva a financial advice arm capable of capturing some of the roughly £6 billion a year in pension and savings assets that had previously walked out the door to rival advisers. In 2024, the £242 million acquisition of Probitas took Aviva back into the Lloyd's of London market for the first time in more than two decades, handing its Global Corporate & Specialty (GCS) arm a fully integrated Lloyd's platform and access to Syndicate 1492.
Then came the deal that changed the shape of the group. Aviva's £3.7 billion takeover of Direct Line, agreed in December 2024 and completed on 1 July 2025 after clearing the Competition and Markets Authority, brought the Churchill and Green Flag brands into the fold alongside Direct Line's namesake business, pushing Aviva's share of the UK motor market above 20%. It was the largest deal of Blanc's tenure, and brokers who had watched two of the market's biggest personal lines players merge were entitled to wonder what it would mean for pricing and capacity on their own books.
That question is being answered gradually in the results. Direct Line's contribution helped push UK & Ireland General Insurance premiums up 42% to £5.9 billion this half, with the division's operating profit rising 50% to £643 million. Aviva says it has banked £100 million of the £225 million in run-rate cost synergies it expects from the deal by 2028, and remains on track for more than £350 million in capital synergies by the end of this year – synergies that, once regulatory approval comes through, should lift the group's Solvency II cover ratio by more than seven percentage points.
For intermediaries, the more interesting shift may be underneath those headline numbers. Aviva's UK commercial lines book held broadly flat through a softening rating cycle, while personal lines growth came substantially through the Intermediated channel, including a new home insurance partnership with Nationwide. On the GCS side, Aviva has continued to lean on its dual UK-and-Lloyd's platform to widen the risks it can place for brokers, an approach the group has explicitly built around Probitas since 2024.
Elsewhere, Canada general insurance profit rose 22% on a constant-currency basis, helped by pricing discipline in a market where Aviva positions itself as the country's second-largest property and casualty insurer, built up over several years through broker and bank partnerships including RBC and President's Choice Insurance. In Wealth – the business built substantially on the back of the Succession Wealth deal – net flows rose 32% to £7.6 billion, with assets under management up 12% to £261 billion, aided by the first tranches of an exclusive scheme to manage flows from the Mercer Master Trust.
Group-wide, operating earnings per share rose 10% to 31.8p, and IFRS return on equity climbed to 20.3% from 18.2% a year earlier, already ahead of the group's own "greater than 20% by 2028" target with two years to spare.
Not every reaction has been unequivocally positive. Ahead of this week's numbers, Hargreaves Lansdown senior equity analyst Matt Britzman noted that although Aviva was heading into the results with "good underlying momentum," he flagged that UK commercial lines were softening and that claims inflation remained a risk worth watching alongside premium growth. That note of caution has been echoed elsewhere: AJ Bell analysts said in the run-up to results that the market would be looking for continued evidence that Blanc's management team is delivering against its medium-term targets, rather than taking further progress for granted.
Aviva shares have made substantial gains since Blanc took charge in 2020 – reporting from CNBC's Ian King put the rise at around 150% as of this month – comfortably outpacing the wider FTSE 100 over the same period. The stock remains one of the more widely held on the London market, a legacy of its Norwich Union mutual roots that left large numbers of small shareholders holding stock, and Aviva now counts nearly 22 million customers in the UK alone.
Even Blanc's supporters concede the story isn't risk-free. Performance across some of Aviva Investors' funds has been described as patchy at times, a reminder that asset management remains a tougher, more competitive corner of the group than insurance underwriting. Further out, there's an active debate in the industry about what wider adoption of autonomous vehicles would eventually mean for motor insurers' profit pools, Aviva included.
There is also a structural question that dogged Aviva's previous chief executives and hasn't entirely disappeared under Blanc: whether a business spanning UK life insurance, general insurance, wealth management and now a much larger motor book risks becoming the kind of unwieldy "composite" insurer – closer to European peers such as Allianz or Axa than a focused UK life company – that previously earned Aviva's stock a persistent valuation discount. Blanc has pushed back on that framing directly, telling reporters around February's full-year results that Aviva identifies with those diversified European composites rather than with UK life peers, arguing the comparison works in the group's favour.
For now, six years of compounding evidence – rising profit, a growing dividend, and a share price that has comfortably outrun the wider market – have given Blanc the credibility to make that case. Whether the next phase, built on Wealth, artificial intelligence and a much bigger motor and commercial lines book, proves as durable as the turnaround itself is the question brokers, analysts and shareholders will all be watching for at the next set of results.
