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I am not sure where you got the £100m from. If their current beginning of period net incurred but not reported claims and unearned premium reserves are £159mn and they had not accounted for 13% inflation on this, then that is a shortfall of circa £20mn.

A lot of big insurers did not jack up rates in H1, and as a result led to a market where premiums were too low. In H2 almost all of them have taken corrective action. One of the worse offenders were Direct line who completely messed up pricing and their CEO had to resign as a result. Their share price has more or less halved in the same period.

I disagree regarding the £100m hole in insurance. At H1 this was an issue where new business was 50% down compared to PY mainly due to pricing action by Saga to not write at a loss. Per their FY TU they said their FY premiums were now 3% lower than PY. Therefore I can only assume the rest of the market has caught up and increased prices in tandem. This is further corroborated when looking at Admirals year end presentation (they write >20% of the uk motor market).
Please see page 20 onwards on their presentation where they discuss how premiums have moved against the wider market and how they have jacked up premiums in H2. In H1 saga's insurance director had predicted this would happen, and it has.
https://admiralgroup.co.uk/sites/default/files_public/slides/2023/03/2022-full-year-results-slides.pdf

This is an excerpt from the 2022 Annual accounts:
The Directors anticipate starting discussions to renew the RCF, which expires in November 2023, during Summer 2022, and believe that, based on the forecasts, the underlying strength and appeal of the Ted Baker brand alongside the positive and supportive relationship that the Group has had with its lender banks, the Group will be able to agree an extension to the RCF at an appropriate level and terms prior to its maturity.

They have a better utilisation than CCL at 65%.

Alot of the dry docks in Europe are now being converted to build Naval ships after Ukraine. So there will be less ship building capacity.

Cruise 83% load factors for H2.

The BoD played a blinder refinancing their debt and extending their maturity by 2 years to 2026, although at the time we were all complaining at the higher coupon. If they tried to refinance now they would be paying closer to 9% rather than the 5.5%.

Insurance companies always have prior underwriting year(s) reserve releases, sometimes they are large sometimes not so due to how much prudence the actuaries have built into their backbook. I doubt their underwriting would only produce a profit of £10m, almost unheard of for the size of book they have. When actuaries reserve they do not do so in a silo, their actuarial central estimates consider what others are doing in the market place, and therefore if Saga's incurred loss ratio went down everyone elses would as well.

Don't forget most of their business is in the food sector, hence defensive in a recession.

Plus the offer was made in the depths of the pandemic where the share price was 12-13p. Things are a lot better now with cruise restarting.

Longterm that was the cash consideration, what they acquired was negative net assets, meaning the impact on equity was far higher than the £3m paid. Notwithstanding, it was still a good deal for a fintech.

Or Co-op putting a bid in, since they are finally in the black.

I have very little hope re Carlyle getting this as well Investor6, mainly due to how much the original investors put in and how much the book value is, as well as the upwardsly sloping yield curve.

Carlyle are unlikely to pay top dollar, unless they have another UK bank to merge it with. What would be ideal is if another bank came forward and acquired due to synergies.

https://www.carlyle.com/sites/default/files/case-studies/Butterfield_CaseStudy.pdf

Look at Odey go, now down another 0.39%.

Odey down three days in a row

You would be surprised with what happens behind closed doors at the FCA.

With most regulated companies it is all about economies of scale. They will probably be looking at the synergies of the combined group.

TSB is twice the size of Metro and has 300 branches, whilst metro only has 77. They are offering 1bn for TSB, will they offer half that for Metro?

These mid sized banks need to merge to survive.