A record first half for the core insurance business at Personal Group (PGH), where premium income from the various employee benefit plans rose 12.5 per cent to £6.3m, was masked by a sharp increase in reorganisation and acquisition costs, which left cash profits down by nearly a third at £3.2m.
Work continued on building its new technology platform, called hapi, in conjunction with the Sage employee benefits platform. This will allow penetration into the small- and medium-sized enterprise sector, which the current distribution model does not. The 2014 acquisition of Let's Connect, which allows employees to buy computers and smart televisions, saw like-for-like sales up 14 per cent. However, plans have been pulled to proceed with PG Mobile, a facility designed to offer additional mobile airtime products, and the operation is being wound down by the end of 2016.