S&U plc (SUS) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, and welcome to S&U plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I now like to hand you over to Anthony Coombs, Chairman. Good afternoon to you, sir.

Good afternoon, yes. Well, great to see you all. We're big fans of IMC. We think it's a tremendous way of communicating or keeping in touch with both our existing investors, very often retail investors and also potential investors. We want more to invest in our company. We believe in what we do and in the long term, sustainability of it. I'm just going to introduce to our half year results today. I think you know the gentlemen, I got with me, Ed Ahrens. On my left who is Chief Executive of Aspen. Finance is our Property Bridging business. On my left, I've got my brother Graham Coombs, who's Deputy Chairman. On my immediate right, I've got Chris Redford, who is the Group Finance Director. And on his right, we've got Graham Wheeler, who is the Chief Executive of Advantage Finance, which is our Motor Finance business. I'm Anthony Coombs. And I'm just going to tell you, first of all, that we continue to trade well as a business. We've got a very strong team. We must say that we don't live in the most perpetuous times because, obviously, cost of living pressures, higher interest rates and some regulatory interest in the financial services sector has obviously produced headwinds, which we have to deal with, but we're very confident that we can and are doing precisely that. Unfortunately, all those things do have an effect on the valuation of shares on the British stock market. I'm sure you're all aware of that. But hopefully, we think that the core will be turned in a year, 2 years' time, particularly if we ever get a conservative government. And I think you'll know where I'm coming from when I say that. But anyway, in the meantime, we're trading well. We think that the markets that we're in are extremely good for long term, but the motor market because it's basically utility, people need cars and well priced cars in order to be able to get to work to do that, shopping to take the children to school, and we think that is a great business to be in. And also the bridging market, basically, we're playing into a situation where there is a substantial shortfall in the supply of residential property in this country, and we are able to take advantage of that and help people who want to add to the supply of housing. So we're busy laying the foundations of what we hope will continue to be a very successful business in the medium term, irrespective of, as I said, the short wind -- see the headwinds in the shorter term churn. If we turn to the next slide, which is the highlights -- the next slide on the highlights of the half year, the 6 months to July, I won't go with these in detail you can read them yourselves, but I think group profit before tax, a little bit ahead of last year. Earnings per share is down, not because our properties [indiscernible] our government, as you say, [indiscernible] corporation tax rate is being introduced and obviously that we slightly taking down our earnings and share. But the net receivables in the business are recruiting. And so they should be really good markets. although we are being cautious in terms of our outlook on those markets, the reasons, which I'm sure you'll find are obvious. We're holding the dividend of 35p a share for the first half because we think that's the prudential thing to do, particularly given the EPS effect from the increase in corporation tax. But nevertheless, we do have a very strong balance sheet in our business. We're certainly financed Chris Redford on my right has done an excellent job in making sure that we have more than adequate to synergies for our expansion -- GBP 280 million facilities now and we're using [indiscernible] [ GBP 183 million ] of them?

About GBP 190 million .

Sorry, GBP 190 million. It goes up and down within our -- very much our Bridging business. So all being very solid, there are some headwinds. We're not going to be [indiscernible] . We're not going to be [indiscernible] in terms of predicting the future, but we think that we will do well and continue to do what we've always done, which is to serve the interest of our customers better than we've ever done before. So with that, I'm going to ask Chris to turn over to the group financials. Next slide, please.

Thank you, Anthony, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining the webcast. Just going to give you some highlights from the financial performance. This one is the income statement. So if you look down the income statement, we happily got more revenue than we did in the first half last year. That was driven by bigger book going into the year. Growth has been a bit more cautious, as Anthony mentioned, in the first half year, but that revenue has gone up nicely, and we've needed that to offset some slight headwinds with admin expenses up there. Those of you who joined the webcast here and they remember that last year, in line with inflation running away with itself, we did give our staff a couple of increases last year. So that's fed into the admin expenses increased plus some extra costs with people like [indiscernible], et cetera. The even bigger increase and the headwind that we've had to face is finance cost. So we pay a variable rate on our funding as that's gone up from just over 0% a couple of years ago. Now to 5.25%, therefore, albeit capable within our model. It has increased a lot, as you can see there. Along with these headwinds, though, the revenue has helped to grow our profit, which we're very pleased with. So you can see we've gone to GBP 21.4 million in the first half this year against GBP 20.9 million last year. If we could go to the next slide, please. So this is a group balance sheet. Still a very simple balance sheet. It's all about receivables, borrowings and equity. There's not a lot else going on. If you look on the receivables, we split that here so that you can see what the growth has been since July last year in Motor Finance, you see that's up 12%. Property Bridging up 16%. Motor Finance, in particular, was helped by a very strong second half last year. So the growth in the first half of this year has only been 2%, but that has helped stable the revenue line, as I mentioned before. Aspen Bridging, strong growth since last year. It's actually gone down slightly in the first half this year. The book debt, but it's quite a lumpy product. And certainly the way quarter 3 started, I think we're back on the growth trail in terms of that in terms of year-on-year growth by the year end, I suspect. We've mentioned the committed facilities on the borrowing side. And you see that at the half year, they were about GBP 184 million. As I said, I mentioned a more recent figures [indiscernible] over [ GBP 90 million ]. If we can go to the next slide, please. We generally -- this slide. It's the "where has all the cash gone" slide. So you can see here the group cash on the left-hand side, and then we show you how the cash is being used in our 2 excellent trading businesses. So Advantage in the middle there, you can see still strong basic monthly live collections and Graham Wheeler on my right will say a bit more about that in a minute. And on the further right, you can see how Aspen going to use their borrowings during the half year. You can see a very strong repayments, bigger settlement collections, GBP 46.3 million and GBP 30.7 million, and -- some of the stresses in the housing market and with interest rates, we're very pleased with that figure. If we go to the next slide, please. During the year, Anthony may have alluded to this, we had a new 3-year club facility. That's going to end therefore, in May '26, but he's got some capacity built into it, what's called the 3 plus 1 plus 1. So potentially in 9 months' time, I can extend that again higher year in [indiscernible]. And then another year, 12 months later, it's also got an accordion facility built in where again, both parties agree, we can say we can add to that facility if we need to. At the moment, the headroom is very good, so we probably don't need to. So we talk about committed facilities and when they mature in the second bullet point and then just how the cash has moved in the third bullet point. So without further ado, I will hand over to Graham Wheeler, who -- the CEO of Advantage Finance, and he will tell you a bit more about it.

Okay. Thanks, Chris. Good afternoon, everybody. So the first slide I talk about is sales performance. So there's 2 charts in there. One is the [ Insulate ] business. We are lending to the -- we categorize our customers into 5 tiers of business, A to E. And the chart on the right-hand side is our movement in our average interest rate in terms of our new lending. I guess what that showed you is that our volumes are very consistent. Our peer mix is very consistent, whilst we are slightly behind budget in terms of the cases financing because of the increased average lend, we are over budget now in terms of the advances. So that puts us in a very strong position moving forward. The tier mix is very stable. The average customer score in terms of credit score is very stable as well. And we have been spending this year making small increases and improvements in terms of the mid-quality customers going to be the categories that give us the higher margin, which has helped us to manage our overall interest rate margin moving forward. On the chart on the right-hand side, in terms of average rate, we see -- what we see in there has been a dip in the final quarter of last year as we tested the market for lower margin but high quality business, which was actually in terms of volume, very successful for us and it has a knock on event in terms of collections, which I'll show you in a couple of minutes. Since the gradual increase in interest rates since the turn of the year, we've obviously moved our -- both our interest rates and a field mix to help protect some of those margins moving forward. So we are kind of doing the best in terms of those interest rate headwinds to manage the overall margin of the business. The next slide, please. Now this slide is the 4 charts around there in terms of customer payment update. The top 2 charts are actually information that we look at every single day in our business, which is our live cash collected performance. And what those 2 chart shows? One is the percentage of live cash and the other one is the monetary live cash volume that we've got. The light blue line is the -- it's the budget and the dark blue line is actual. So you can see -- on the chart on the top left-hand side, we're regularly collecting more than budget in terms of percentage. And that's a 94%, 95% of live cash during the course of the first half of this year. If you think about the headwinds created by cost of living and the sector of the market that we're operating in to be collected 94%, 95% of live cash in our marketplace strongly and one that continued. The chart on the right-hand side at the top is the monetary value, and that shows you that we have collected ever more in terms of monthly income, and that puts us in a very strong position. The 2 charts at the bottom are kind of more cost orientated. One is our bad debt rates on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side is our voluntary termination rates. And you can see that we're pretty much on budget, but slightly better than budget in terms of bad debts. And in terms of volume termination as we are substantially under budget, which is a good thing because with controlled bad debts and a better than expected performance on voluntary termination, that has a real positive effect in terms of the cost line within the P&L, and we'll pick up again. I'll get a little bit more detail on that later on. So overall, from a collections perspective, it's a really good new story. We're collecting better than we expected and if we're losing less than we expected, and that's got to be a good thing moving forward. So you don't have to [indiscernible] to the next slide, please. So this slide is about the regulatory landscape that we're currently working our way through. And the Financial Conduct Authority are very active at the moment. They're very specifically active in the Motor Finance market. And there's been a number of different inquiries that we've been working our way through with the FCA in terms of the market segment over the course of the past -- actually a couple of years driven by some concerns they had in terms of Corona pandemic. And secondly, we could have driven by the cost level increases. So we've been working with the FCA on a number of issues around affordability, around financial resilience, around the collection processes and forbearance review and in terms of consumer duty. Where we are at the moment is we've successfully completed all of the work required to be ready for consumer duty. Consumer duty went live on [indiscernible] first of July this year. We had a kind of readiness audits by external auditors to make sure the work that we have been doing in the 12 months previously were going to come to fruition and that we satisfy the requirements of consumer duty, and we sailed through that order quite easily. So we are, I think, in good shape with consumer duty. We've completed the detailed affordability inquiry from the FCA as they look to add all lenders in our sector in terms of their data and processes for undirected customers, and we came through that process well in regularly important term financial resilience. But I think that will stem from the FCA having some concerns on nonbank lending companies, nonbanking lending companies, and we all have to report quite regularly to the FCA in terms of our head driven from our treasury position, which actually, Chris has already spoken about. A couple of things were coming as tracking progress. The FCA have been in a market study review of collection processes and forbearance and we're working with the FCA on that particular issue just now and it's too early really to say too much about that at the moment. It's work in progress. The last thing is a market issue that doesn't affect Advantage, but should be available on Commission Disclosure. I think The Sun, The Telegraph 2 or 3 weeks ago made some comment about this moving forward. It's likely that the financial [indiscernible] will make some decisions that will ask particularly prime lenders to pay some commission back to customers because they didn't disclose the amount of commission, which strangely enough. The regulators are never upset that lenders had to announce the amount of commission, [indiscernible] existence of commission, but that's moved on and there's some risks about the overall marketplace in terms of Commission Disclosure. For Advantage, we are really in a lucky position in that we never offer the type of commission that has been outlawed by the regulator, and we offer a flat fee commission to our brokers. So that's meant that the 3 legal cases that we processed, we won them all against claiming management companies. And we've had about, I think, 24 or 25 individual decisions come back from for us 100% of which came in our favor. So we're pretty sure that, that actually isn't going to affect Advantage. But actually, in the long run, it might benefit Advantage because as the prime lenders focused their businesses on possibly readdressing some customers, they may take [indiscernible] in terms of lending to new customers, which might actually create a bit of an opportunity for us moving forward. So lots of activity taking place with the regulator, not just the FCA, but financial [indiscernible] service as well, and we work our way through that to the best of our ability. So that's an update in terms of where we are with the regulators. I hope we get a couple or 2 or 3 more slides left. [indiscernible] Click on to the next one, please. This just gives you a feel for just how much we've been investing in systems and automation over the course of the past 12 to 18 months. I'm not going to go through all those different individual projects, but I'll name a couple. At the Settlement Portal was there to allow customers to get ongoing settlement because of accounts previously they had to call in for a certain figure and that could be sometimes 500 or 600 calls a day and we'll find a way to automate that whole process now, which is effectively saved about 3 or 4 man hours [indiscernible] -- sorry, in terms of staff that could be redeployed into other areas. And then the other thing, which has had a huge impact on our business. Over the course of the past 4 or 5 months has been the Voyc Analytics project, where we identified through consumer duty that we had a potential weakness in that we couldn't gather evidence of all the great customer conversations that we're having to help solve their problems. And what the Voyc analytics does is it records and transcribes 100% of the calls straight on to our contract management system, which was a further analysis later, but quality checks, customers and improvement or training process for our staff that if we identify any issues quickly, we can identify it actually through the Voyc Analytics system and go back and retrain the staff. So it means that the level of service we provide our customers is significant improved. So that's that slide. Moving on to the next slide, which is what we got on the roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months well. Similarly, a huge amount of work, most of it focused on building efficiencies and automating things and providing a better service to customers. And one of, I guess, the only one I'll pick out from that chart is our Customer Portal -- which is really have not been done in our marketplace for this effect. We're developing that as a tool to sell to our customers those good, great customers who don't really need our help to look after the finances for themself. And if you click on to the next slide, please. That just gives you a feel for the tool that we're working on to provide [indiscernible] now and the end of the year where customers can self manage a whole range of different processes for themselves, which means that we can focus our efforts and be looking after the customers that need it most. So I think that gives you a feel for a sales perspective, the collections perspective, the regulatory position and the developments that are taking place within the business. And at this stage, I'll hand back to Chris.

Thank you so much, Graham, and some [indiscernible] still happening in Advantage in the first half of this year. We do show you some longer-term slides as well. If you could just move to the next slide, please. . This is just an update slide. We do this on a consistent basis. So this is our new business Advantage, what profile has it got, how many loans have we written in the first half year, what's the average level of Advantage. You can see all that on this slide. Interest rate, as Graham alluded to earlier, that's going to tune up a bit now. And you can see the original term that we lend over. So that's just, again, an update slide. If we go to the next slide, please. This is an interesting one. So this is to do with first repayment quality. The blue line on the chart on the left-hand scale is how each tranche of customers over the last effectively 20 years have made their first payment, and that's shown by the blue line on the graph, and that's buried in the early stages when we were doing manual underwriting. That was down there at 90% of customers making their first payment on time. You can see all the increased automation and scale of the scorecard and the underwriting to Advantage took that up to near, 96%, 97% and 1.8% to 99%. And then as competitions come in, in about 2016, you can see that falling back to a more natural level of about 96%, 97%. And other than that yellow piece on the graph you see on the blue line, that's where we've been -- not through the pandemic, but recently, you can see that -- you don't forget. Why is this just so important? Well, it's really the red line as well. So you can see how -- the red line on the chart and the inverse scale on the right-hand side, that's the number of accounts that is coming to bad debt in the 5 years of term of the deal. So you can see that on the red line, you can see how well that's correlated over the years with the blue line. So customers tend to make their first payment at a certain level. Then we can pretty much try and predict on the red line what the outcome in terms of number of bad debts is going to be after 5 years. So that's worked quite well, you can see it's 2018. Obviously, after 2018, we don't know what the 5-year outcome is because we haven't had it yet, but you can see from the blue line what that trend is. And if you assume the red dotted line, which is also shown on the chart, which is our estimated bad debt after 5 years might follow the blue line as well. Hopefully, that's of interest to investors as well. If we can have the next chart, please. The next chart is more of a snapshot. So it's comparing particularly our live book, 65,000 customers roughly at the end of July versus 65,000 customers roughly again that we have at the end of January, and you can see how that's moved during the 6 months. There's a little bit of seasonality here in terms of people that tend to pay as well at Christmas. But even allowing for that, we've gone from 46,000 up to date to 48,000 today, 76% of the live receivables up to 78% of the live receivables, and we're really pleased with that, and that reflects some of the trends that Graham showed very well in his charts in terms of how well our monthly payments are being made by customers in there. So if we could have the next slide, please, and I will hand over to Ed Ahrens, who is the CEO of Aspen Bridging.

Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon to all. So given progress in Aspen in the first half of the year, but on a cautious basis, record PBT for the half year, but importantly, on the quality book. It's been a challenging period with interest rates rising and property values. But we've risen to that challenge and we've increased -- reduced our LTVs on the book and on the new loans. And we've also taken a more cautious approach to underwriting, so basically repositioning ourselves in the marketplace. And although the receivables have come down a bit since the beginning of the year, we've actually built a quality pipeline that we expect to [ talk fill ] on through the rest of this year. And reinforcing the book quality, we've had a strong performance in terms of collections and we expect to have a positive outcome on those 15 loans through this year. So our overall view is that we remain cautiously positive about the opportunity in the market for Aspen. Next slide, please. You can see here the performance over the years. And if I take your eyes to the right-hand column in terms of the first 6 months of this year, you can see that the average gross balances are pretty much where we expect them to be. In terms of the cost of sales, we're in control of those costs of sales, and you can see the trend over the years. We've been helped in the first half of this year with returning customers and that's reduced the amount that we've paid away in terms of commission. And below that line, you could see the progress in terms of the LTV as described previously. We've also been working on the margins and increasing the rates through the period, and we're currently at 1.03% versus we were at the end of the last financial year. And in terms of all other aspects, it's steady as she goes. Terms are the same as they have been for quite some time and these are good loans we're putting on the books. Next slide, please. Just draw your attention to an update in terms of where we are on our focus of this year into January '24. On the left-hand side, this is really all about our customers and brokers. You can see that we've got 15% of our new deals are repeat borrowers, which is very good news. We've obviously tweaked and we keep an eye on the horizon risks. We've increased our stress testing for refinance sectors. And as we've described earlier, our approach on tightening our LTVs, we've done a lot for 6 months in terms of our broker development and industry attendance and that's helped improve where we are on our work in progress cases. On the right-hand side, it's more operational and staff. We've deployed 9 projects to date. Some of those involving the automation of letters, which improves our efficiency. We're looking to go live with our new website in Q4, beginning of Q4, that's an important interaction with our brokers. And in terms of our staff, we've been concentrating on lifting net skills and providing them with accredited courses. Some provided by the association of short-term lenders and a number of people in the team have -- become [indiscernible] qualified from a valuations perspective. I now hand you over back to Anthony.

Thank you very much indeed. So I'm not going to repeat what I said at the outset. We are confident about the future. We're trading well. But we admit that we don't work and move from perpetuous economic and political climate at the moment, which is one of the reasons why the British stock market is valued in the way they need, I'm sure you will be aware of that. However, we continue to work very hard indeed to improve our customer relations. We offer -- that we made to customers and the way that customers approach us. And to that extent, we really want to repeat what I think -- I don't know any of you watch or see Warren Buffett Show, excellent podcast. And he always talks about delighting customers, delighting investors. And that's really what we want to try and do in our business. And we're entirely focused on that.

And that really leads us into the first pre-submitted question, which is about competitive advantage and -- in my screen once you will see. And it says, what do you feel? Could we move the -- because I seem to have lost it on my screen.

Yes, I think [indiscernible]

Yes. What is our competitive advantage over peers? And concentration on customer service, customer experience is obviously very much part of that. But over to you, Graham Wheeler.

I would say -- I could go back [indiscernible], but there are two primary advantages. One is the quality of management experience. If I look at Advantage, we've been trading for just under 25 years. And the majority of the management team have been with the business for that time. So these are people that truly understand how to successfully service non-prime customers. I think the average management experience and advantage is something like [ Advantage management ] team is something like 20 or 21 years within the business as an average. So I think that means that we've been through all sorts of different scenarios and different cycles, which means that we are well positioned to be able to highlight the comes away. I think the other big advantage we've got is -- enough in our management system in that the contract management system that we operate is self-honed, self-developed, self-supported, which means that we are incredibly nimble with an ability to make fast changes to our system, very, very quickly and very agile, and that means that we can react and provoke the marketplace very aggressively. So I think those are 2 very strong competitive advantages over many of our peers. I could go on for ages on this particular subject, but I think we should stop at that [indiscernible]

Thank you, Graham. Next questions are related -- are from the same gentleman, [indiscernible] his name here. And it basically suggests that we reduce dividends and put the money into adjacent businesses, which could mitigate -- he -- what he sees as weaknesses in our current markets. I think we can say with some confidence, but actually, the market for our used car finance is not declining. If anything, it's actually the size is going up. Why? Because where normally you get 2.5 million new cars produced every year. At the moment, it's about 1.6 million...

1.8 million [indiscernible]

Still 700,000 less than [indiscernible] That obviously has a good effect on used car values and on the demand for used cars themselves. It's very interesting. If you look at the proportion of people now who are happy to have used car finance, it used to be, I think, about 32% is now near at 45%, 46%, 47% of the population. So that just shows an increasing market. And we see the same with the property market, which, although temporarily trending down at least in terms of price, in terms of the long-term undersupply of housing in this country very much is on the up.

So is the rapidly rising population.

Exactly. Exactly, a good point. So what we would say is that we don't think it's sensible to reduce dividends for 2 reasons. First of all, we want to stick to our last. We don't really want to get into adjacent businesses particularly at the time of economic uncertainty about which we may not have the expertise that we do at the moment. And obviously, we'll look at any good business opportunity, but it would have to be a very good one if we're going to move away from our areas of expertise. And the second reason why we're moving to do this is because we don't need to. I think I did say that we've got a very significant headroom in terms of our available finance through our normal financing mechanism, and I wouldn't want to add unnecessarily to that headroom by depriving shareholders and the owners of our company on their due return. So I think that's where we are on that particular question. And I can now move on to Pat H's question, which I think originally also contained why the frustration that we have with regulators in the financial services industry. And the frustration is very simply this, Pat. The -- we believe that the free market works very well. We're not quite all about to caveat [indiscernible]for no reason at all. But there is -- there does seem to be a recent trend over the last 15, 20 years. The market itself can't be trusted to deliver the very best outcomes for customers. And that seems to embed itself in certain parts of government. We, however, believe that the free enterprise system does work very well. It obviously has to be regulated. There's a degree of that regulation, and we think that probably with the whole plethora for Consumer Trade Act in our industry, consumer duty, [indiscernible] rules, there is a continuing questioning of the way in which the industry works. And that has a bad effect. Why does it have a bad effect? One, because it means that we can spend less time improving our business for the benefit of our customers because we have to deal with all these regulatory inquiries. And secondly, and possibly most important of all, I want to recognize, I think in the financial services industry, it -- that overregulation does inhibit innovation, people put new products, new processes, which might benefit customers very considerably on hold. And that we don't think is good for customers in the long term. So that's our basic philosophy. It's perhaps due [indiscernible] S-166 appointment or remediation exercise and not come from -- all I would say as far as that is concerned is that while it'll always be unwise to try and anticipate what the FCA may suggest in any particular scenario. We do know from our contact of the FLA, that the FCA seems to be using the 166 mechanism far more widely than it ever did before in order to investigate practices within the financial services industry. And so it's impossible to say whether they would apply that in our particular case. What I would say, however, is that it is wise spread, it is a major investigation. We are proud of the way that we service our customers. We provide a service to them. And we would be very relaxed if a 166 application came our way, although obviously, we don't necessarily welcome [indiscernible] anticipated given the previous arguments that I made about regulation as a whole. So I hope that's an answer to you, Pat. [indiscernible] the company has announced the forthcoming retirement of Graham Wheeler appointed an external successor. Mr. Wheeler is appointed externally as well, why has the Board decided again that the best leader of Advantage is working outside the group? Business is quite rightly priced itself. Obviously, last year's long-term performance, the -- internal appointment might set a lack of proper succession planning and managing development within Advantage. Outside appointments may also risk not fitting the Board's commendable culture. All perfectly reasonable points, but ones which have been taken into account during the succession and the selection process of [ Carl Learner ] as Graham Wheeler's successor. We recognize that internal promotion is very important. We've been doing this for many years. And indeed, 3 or 4 of the applicants for Graham's post were internal, but we do feel it's important that we have the best person, the best fit for the job and [ Carl Learner ], who has got an excellent record within the Motor Finance industry and the wider financial services industry came out as the outstanding candidate. That's no reflection at all on internal or indeed other candidates. And in fact, we are looking at the moment, a succession planning within the business, within the various specialties in that business, and we're absolutely certain that we have a number of very talented medium-level and medium higher-level executives who will fit those roles. So could we move on to next question, which is again from [indiscernible], [ RP ] which refer to just a 31% acceptance rate from 1.2 million applications for Motor Finance, which equals 372,000 acceptances actual new accounts are a small fraction of this. Why are you so many successful applications not convert into loans being granted? It seems like Advantage offering in the best terms for a small minority of prudential customers, and how does the 31% acceptance rate compare to past levels? Over to you, Graham.

Yes. And the last part of that question, I'll answer first. [indiscernible] 35% acceptance rate. So that's still a standard for us. It's a source of personal restriction that we can't penetrate those numbers of approved cases more than we kind of do. I would say though that the market intelligence tells us that even though we approve it next half of those accounts that we approved are for people that we [indiscernible] where they're actually testing, whether they could get access to money, but the time to get an acceptance -- may not find the car, may decide that the monthly payment is something that they can't afford just now. [ So the step back from even though we've improved it ], which I think is fine. But you're still in the position where you've got 160,000 to 170,000 applicants that are still in the marketplace and we're writing between 20,000 and 25,000 of those that shows the competitive nature of the marketplace, and we would like to do more of those. But at the same time, we'd like to achieve the margins that we've currently [indiscernible] said that turnover is vanity and profit is sanity, I think we've got the right balance.