London, April 22, 2026, 15:16 BST
Legal & General Group Plc’s latest regulatory notices put its record capital-return plan back in view, with the FTSE 100 insurer disclosing another 6.66 million shares bought for cancellation and a separate share-award transaction by Chief Financial Officer Andrew Kail.
The buyback update matters because investors are tracking whether L&G can deliver a promised £1.2 billion repurchase while preserving capital for its retirement and asset-management businesses. The company said it bought the shares between April 13 and April 17 through Barclays Capital Securities at an average price of £2.6542, for total consideration of £17.68 million.
After settlement and cancellation, L&G’s total ordinary shares in issue will fall to 5,662,331,182, the company said in the April 20 RNS filing. No shares are held in treasury, so that figure is also the total number of voting rights.
The company’s own buyback tracker shows 35.56 million shares purchased so far for £88.97 million since the programme began. That is still a small fraction of the £1.2 billion plan, but it gives shareholders a cleaner read on weekly execution after the March results drew a mixed market reaction.
In a separate notice on Tuesday evening, L&G said Kail exercised 426,166 nil-cost options — share awards that cost nothing to exercise — under its 2021 Performance Share Plan. He sold 204,858 shares at £2.707991 each to cover tax and dealing costs, raising £554,753.62, and retained 221,308 shares.
L&G’s share-price page showed the stock at 271.7 pence at 13:36 BST on Wednesday, near the top end of last week’s buyback range. The April 20 filing showed L&G paid as much as 273.30 pence per share on April 17 on some trading venues.
The buyback was announced with 2025 results last month. L&G reported core operating profit of £1.62 billion, up 6%, core operating earnings per share growth of 9%, a 21.79 pence dividend and a pro forma Solvency II coverage ratio of 210%; Solvency II is the insurance capital test used in Europe and Britain to judge whether a firm can meet long-term obligations. Chief Executive António Simões said then that L&G had made “meaningful progress in reshaping L&G.” Legal General Group
The market was less smooth. Reuters reported on March 11 that L&G shares fell after the company missed analyst expectations for some key earnings metrics and posted a lower solvency ratio, even as it launched the buyback. The same report noted that L&G had lagged rival Aviva and the FTSE 100 since Simões took charge at the start of 2024, a gap that makes delivery on cash returns more important.
Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, wrote after the results that L&G’s numbers had “a few moving parts,” with some areas better and some weaker. He said pension risk transfers, or deals where an insurer takes over pension obligations from company schemes for a lump sum, remain core to L&G’s model because they feed assets into its investment arm. Hargreaves Lansdown
Simões is also trying to push L&G harder outside the UK. He told Reuters last week that the group wants to double Asian assets under management to about $500 billion, saying L&G was “very bullish on Asia right now”; the region is its fastest-growing international market. Reuters
The risk is that capital returns do not settle the whole debate. The Financial Times reported last month that KBW analyst William Hawkins called L&G’s solvency result a “big miss,” while competition in the pension risk transfer market has grown as private-capital-backed players push into the sector. Higher yields, market swings or weaker capital generation could make the buyback less powerful than the headline number suggests. Ft
