Good morning, and welcome to Solvar's Financial Year 2023 Results Presentation. From the company today, we have Managing Director and CEO, Scott Baldwin, and the company's CFO, Siva Subramani. Before I hand it over to Scott and Siva to go through the presentation up on the screen, I'll just remind you that you can submit questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and we'll get to those towards the end of the presentation. Scott, I'll hand it over to you now. Thanks very much. Thank you, Simon, thank you, investors and other interested parties, for taking time to join our presentation today. Siva and I will go through the presentation. There'll be questions and answers at the end, and should there be anything left unanswered for you at the end of—p lease feel free to send an email through to Simon, and we will respond to you. Next slide, please, Simon. Just in terms, I'll run through the highlights of the business over the last 12 months. We have certainly seen strong revenue growth out of Australia. You know, most of the results that you see there in revenue and loan book growth are driven out of our two Australian operations. New Zealand, essentially has been flat through that period, in both of those, as a result of, you know, the many things we've called out: the flood, one-off weather events and, and essentially the economic downturn that New Zealand's been through. Australia, on the other hand, has been very resilient. We have continued to see strong demand for vehicle finance throughout both of our businesses here, and both of them have posted very strong growth. Loan book of, of Money3 growing some 24% and AFS, our near-prime focused business, nearly 50%. A lot of that loan book growth you see is driven out of those two operations. In terms of bad debts, we think, while you will have noticed that there's been an uptick in bad debt in the second half, a lot of that driven out of these one-off weather events in New Zealand. We are predicting in the forecast we put out last week, for some of that to continue through this, this financial year, FY2024. We believe that our bad debts are going to still be within our target range of 3.5%-4.5%. As you can see, for FY2023, we're at the bottom end of that range. Very happy with those results. In terms of cash on balance sheet, we currently have AUD 78 million of unrestricted cash in our business. The rest of the cash that you see there sits within the warehouses as restricted cash in our business, that we don't have access to until certain timing happens that allows that to be released. In the announcement we put out last week, where we are predicting an uplift in that restricted cash component as we continue to draw down on debt to fund our operations. As you'll see further through the slide deck, we're in a very good position where we are able to continue to fund the growth of the business all through debt. There's not a need for additional capital, equity capital to fund that growth over the next year or 2. Just finally, on the highlights, we have declared for the second half, an AUD 0.09 dividend, taking the total to AUD 0.165, and that dividend will be payable on the 9th of October this year. Moving to the next slide. Strong track record, good revenue and loan book growth, over the last 6 years there. We predict that that's going to continue into FY2024. Revenue growth, we're expecting, given the loan book growth that we've written, you'll note that that's roughly 24% growth in the, the loan book, over the last 12 months. That's the leading indicator of what's going to happen with revenue growth. We're expecting revenue to continue to grow into FY2024. Very good results there. Some of the headwinds in terms of that revenue growth that have been fairly well announced in the media, you know, in terms of slowing consumer demand. We feel that over this period of time, we've continued to take shelf space, so to speak, or market share from our competitors, given that the business is well-funded. We've been able to grow, particularly in our Australia operations. We will call out further through the deck, though, that there has been some margin pressure with that growth in revenue, but we anticipate good revenue growth coming into FY2024 as well. Just moving on to the next slide. Just one point to call out in the previous one, we completed our share buyback program. AUD 15 million was the share buyback program, of which you'll, you'll see this in the accounts, but AUD 13.5 million was spent in FY2023. The remainder was spent in FY2022, but we concluded that program. For those of you that are new to the Solvar operation, this is a bit of an overview of our business. The Solvar Group has three trading entities that sit and operate within it. Automotive Financial Services, which is targeting consumer and commercial near-prime applicants. Predominantly cars, but there's certainly an slight mix of other assets funded by the AFS business, light commercial, and some caravans and boats in there. Money3, the, the legacy business of the group, has had an exceptionally strong year in FY2023. You'll see that through the loan book growth. They also repositioned themselves and launched a new set of products in September last year. That has fueled a lot of that, that growth. You'll note in the accounts that the group is now writing roughly 45,000 loans, written in FY— sorry, AUD 45 million worth of business is written every month. That equates to roughly 3,000 loans, is what we've been settling. A lot of that is driven by that growth out of the Money3 business unit. Go Car Finance, you'll see year-on-year, that loan book down, we're expressing it here in Australian dollars, which is different to what you'll see in the appendix, where we give you the New Zealand dollar number. That business has been flat. We called out, we expect it to be reasonably flat throughout FY2024 as well, because of the well-stated headwinds there. The other business, though, we expect to see continued strong growth. In terms of the assets that we fund, typically, they're cars, but with a small mix of other assets as well, and that's cars for consumer and commercial purposes. We then break down our business, as we've done here, in terms of assets, that we do in consumer assets versus commercial assets. Just noting that, that this is the portfolio as a whole, and 93% of our portfolio is secured against the vehicle, typically a car. Across the group, we have over 20 years track record of, of lending and collecting money for personal loans, particularly in consumer, and over the last 3 or 4 years, a growing presence in commercial lending. Our strategy across the group has been to continue our profitable growth by offering sustainable products to our customers that they, they buy. We have a very strong collection team across Australia, and we are leveraging a lot of the experience that we have in Australia and New Zealand at the moment, and trying to reflect the operations that we have in Australia, in New Zealand, as we work on lifting our cash collection and our collections processes across the business. You'll notice that we talk throughout the slide deck about improving our efficiencies through our business. We see a lot of that being in our collections and credit team. As stated before, the business has a very strong balance sheet. Your company is very well capitalized. At 30 June, there was AUD 70 million cash on hand, which gives us lots of optionality in terms of capital management for business to either continue to fund further growth, or some of the other initiatives we've discussed over the last 6 months with the market around, you know, share buybacks or other capital management issues, or potentially using that money to fund an acquisition to drive growth. Just moving on to the financials. Called out some of the reasons for that strong revenue growth. You'll note that second half bad debts, if you break it down, there was a bit of an uptick on first half. We've called out the reasons why, with the announcement that we made last week, we had factored in a continual, continuing, bad debt experience similar to what we experienced in the second half. It's yet to be determined, but as we'll cover in our credit quality slide, further in the slide deck, you'll see that while, while there is some deterioration in credit quality, I think as every lender in this space is experiencing, it is well, you know, well within typical bounds of where our business has been. It gives us confidence that the bad experience over the course of FY2022 is not going to be any material movement from what you've seen in previous years and well within our target range of 3.5%-4.5%. Just calling out there that a lot of that revenue growth that you see has particularly come out of the Money3 and the AFS business unit, and both of them, given the loan book growth, are well placed to continue to grow throughout FY2024. Moving on to the next slide. One of the things I think worth calling out here to explain this slide, the cars that we have funded as of June 30, the loans against them is AUD 910 million. The way we recognize revenue in this business is against cash, so only when cash collected is revenue recognized. If there isn't cash collected or there is a non-cash component of a loan, say, a fee that hasn't been paid, all of that lands in the deferred revenue line. You can see there, what makes up that AUD 910 million is AUD 62 million of deferred revenue. All of those deferred elements of revenue that we're waiting for the cash to come through to collect them. Impairment provisions, you'll note that impairment provisions grown year on year. A lot of that's a result of that AUD 176 million growth in loan book over the time. And, you'll note in the next line there, 5.7 to 5.2. The reason for the reduction in impairment provision is because overall, the credit quality, it continues to improve across the group. Each of our three business units have very different profiles when it comes to arrears, bad debt, and credit, and impairment. Our, our largest segment of growth that you will get when you go through the rest of the deck, you'll see coming out of the automotive financial services business. With a bad debt profile there, well under 0.5%, it is driving down our overall need for impairment provisions. Investors should expect that as the business continues to grow, and as the Money3 business has been writing better credit quality than it did, say, three years ago, that those impairment provisions will continue to, as a percentage of the overall whole business, continue to come down. Impairment provisions, as you will see there, are $43 million versus the bad debt expense we had in FY2023 of $33 million. In terms of our debt facilities, we have $323 million of headroom in our facilities. You can see that a lot of that, and I'm sure many of you will work out, that a lot of that headroom is in New Zealand, but as we start to draw down on our headroom, it will free up some of the cash that's there. We're also in Siva is in constant negotiation with our funders to look at the facilities in the Australian operations there. We're quite confident that we will be able to continue to fund our business over time. We, we also continue to work to drive further efficiencies across all of our funding stacks to take out as much costs as we can, which you'll see in the next slide, and improve the structure. We, we acknowledge that there's some work to do in our debt facilities and our debt structure to, to improve its efficiency. You know, what we can call out here today is that we have over AUD 300 million of debt facilities, and a lot of that we can draw down without the need of additional equity, which in the announcement that was put out last week, one of the assumptions we did make is that our growth was all driven by debt, without equity, which the previous slide would call out for you. Just moving on to our cost and cost over time. What we're wanting investors to see here is the improvement in net margins that we've generated through this business as we've looked to restructure how we are funded through debt capital. If you look to the last line there, average net margins across our, our business over the last 3 years, I think Siva and his team have done an exceptional job of driving down that average margin from about 10% to 5%. What that means is, if you are sitting there thinking about our cost of funds, the average margin across our debt stack is 5%. All of the other bits move, as, as, as you would see, or you can make your own assumptions there about RBA or RBNZ in terms of their cash rates, but the margin has come down to 5% at the start of FY2024. As we continue to draw down and grow debt across the group, there is a little bit of improvement that we can drive through our average net margin costs over the course of the year. A lot of that benefit, we don't expect to really come through until FY2025 in our business. We acknowledge that there's some, some work to do there, but that is our average net margin. Anything else you'd like to add there, Siva? I think that answers that quite well, Scott. Yeah. Stable credit quality. This seems to be a concern, an item of concern for many investors from phone calls that I've had. When we look at our portfolio here, you'll note that at, at closing FY2023, why we're so confident of our bad debt continuing within the trend, is if you go back a couple of years, you, you can see that we've, we are materially ahead of where we have been. Notwithstanding that, there has been a slight deterioration particularly over the last 6 months in, in the business from, essentially from March through to June. We are still in very good shape to manage, to deliver within our target range of bad debt experience we think that the group is going to have. Just in terms of some of the highlights that we see coming into FY2024, we think that we are going to be able to continue to take market share, take shelf space from some of our competitors. While we've called out that FY2024 is going to be a challenging year for our group, we believe that we're in very strong position to do better than most of our peers in this, in this market at this point in time. A lot of that benefit will then come through in future financial years, but we do think we are in good shape, principally because of our very strong collections team and our ability to collect. The fact that we feel that we have, that the quality of the business that we've been writing over the last 12 to 24 months is superior than the quality of the business that we wrote traditionally in the past. As that rolls off, better quality business should lead to lower bad debts and more efficiency coming through our business. We also call out that we have more work to do to pass on all of the central bank interest rate increases that have happened over the last 12 months. We have passed on some of those increases, but still have some, some work to do. Just calling out in terms of New Zealand, we have seen an improving experience in terms of our collections through our business. We have slowed new front book originations, given the current state of the economy in New Zealand. You know, we think that that business is well-placed to make a solid contribution coming back in FY2025. In terms of the financial outlook, that momentum continues in that we are riding sort of north of, or about AUD 45 million worth of business a month, roughly 3,000 loans a month. We expect that to continue with some growth in Australia. I think we've called out many of the other points in here. At that point, I think we will park it there and ask if any of the investors on the call had questions. Perfect. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Siva. Just a reminder, if you did have any questions, Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. First question from Jonathon Higgins at Unified Capital Partners. Can you just talk to us, is guidance still retained for FY2024, from a couple of weeks ago, it just wasn't specifically called out? The market update we put out from a couple of weeks ago is retained. We put that out because there's obviously material movement from the profit that we're delivering this year to where we're calling out with all the headwinds in FY2024, we anticipate giving a more fulsome explanation and guidance at our AGM. Perfect. Thanks, Scott. second question from Jonathon. A lot of free cash, what's it to be utilized for? Also noticed that flagging further finance facilities, what's the purpose and requirement of these? It's in terms of the free cash that's sitting on the balance sheet, I mean, we've called out that it is sitting there as optionality to look at essentially the capital management approach that we could put in place, like a share buyback, the acquisition of another company, or investors should expect to see that come down over the course of FY2024 as we use it to either or, or to fund continual growth through in the loan book. The headroom that you see in the funding facilities is what we are drawing down on in order to fund the growth of our, of our loan book over the course of FY2024 and beyond. Perfect. FY2024 guidance, actually, the AUD 600 million in loan book growth since FY2019 are not being accreted to net, but despite also a large increase in leverage. What has management learned about managing interest margin going forward so future growth actually translates into returns to shareholders? No, that's fair, fair question. Just to quickly, the announcement that we made a couple of weeks ago in regard to the forecast. There's 3 headwinds that we were signaling there, and I understand that funding costs have been the focus of those. We are predicting a slight uptick in our bad debt experience. Still be well within the range, and that is dragging down FY20 24 profit. We're also flagging an uplift in our operational expenditure across our group. Partly that is just the inflationary environment that we've seen, whether it, you know, at all levels of costs of running a business are going up, particularly labor. Our business has experienced that like others, and we haven't, at this point, been able to pass on all of that cost through to consumers, and hence why we call out a number of pro-profitability measures that we are passing through, the productivity measures to pass through our business to improve our, our, our productivity across the group. Some of the increases in labor around the developing of a governance risk and dedicated cyber teams, while they are recurring, we don't expect to have that incremental growth coming into FY2025. With the revenue growth that we expect to experience over the course of FY2024, shareholders should expect the operational expenditure to grow, to moderate as we go from FY2025. Yes, there is a big lift that led to providing that, that downgrade, but a lot of that we expect not to be reoccurring as we go into FY2025. In terms of the last part of that question, in terms of funding costs, I might allow you to answer that in some detail, Siva. Yeah, no, thank you, Scott. Just to add to what Scott had said, the reason why we also put the downgrade is, there are a couple of timing issues that are coming into FY2024. One of them, as we grew the book, there, there's naturally a higher credit quality portion of the book, which had a lower margin. To Scott's comments earlier, we are trying to increase our front book margins by passing on the rate increases over the course of—w e have done that over FY2023, and we'll continue to do that in 24, which will have its impact on correcting the, you know, the adjustments that are going to in FY2024. Secondly, to interest rate, as you would all appreciate, there's been an accelerated interest rate over the last 12, 18 months. The general consensus in the market is maybe we are at the top of the interest rate cycle. As things normalize or the rates start to come down, there's going to be a natural expansion in our NIM, given we are also repricing our front book. The benefit of those should definitely start to come back into the P&L and reflect the profitable increases for the increased loan book that we are driving through this process. Calling out that FY2024 is just a timing, as in there are 2 negatives that are coming in play, which should start to correct itself as we move into 2025 and beyond. Great. Thanks, Siva. A few questions just around share buyback and dividends and whatnot. Please talk to the audience with regards to why you didn't buy back shares instead of paying dividends, and any thought process in terms of dividend outlook FY2024. Look, in terms of dividend outlook, the Board has guided the market to the policy, which is to pay out up to 90%. I think a number of shareholders have provided feedback to the Board in terms of their views on that. At this point in time, there's been no discussion about changing the policy that's currently in place. As you can see by the cash that we're holding, some of our issues are around FY2024 and still generating a large profit as a business. But specifically in terms of dividends, obviously, the AUD 0.09 won't be replicated at the next dividend for the first half, but the intent is to keep the policy in place as it stands today. You know, as, as, as the Board have called out, that is to pay up to 90% payout ratio of the profits earned over the next half, so that we don't, we don't plan to change that. I think there was a second part to that question, Simon, if you could just repeat it, please. Bear with me. Sorry, there's a hell of a lot of questions coming through. Oh, that was just in terms of why, why not do a buyback now instead of paying dividends? No, look, I think, there's many capital management programs that the company can put in place. The buyback is something that we did. We can find that it supported share price greatly over the past 12 months. I do understand at these current levels that it will drive EPS accretion. It is an ongoing topic of conversation at the Board level at this point in time. In terms of the dividend that has been declared, the Board were very much looking for consistency of messaging. We had the funds available to pay the dividend. We're very conscious of the growing franking credit balance sitting on the balance sheet, and it's an asset of the shareholders of the company. We wanted to disperse those out to the company, and, we didn't feel it prudent to make any material change to that at this point in time. Rest assured that it is an agenda item. The Board will continue to consider dividends versus share buyback in, in the current environment. Great. Thanks, Scott. Just a question and this view along these lines. I'm happy to have made all of them, but I just want to understand the downgrade a little bit better. Was the back book not fully hedged to match the duration of money written? If not, why not? Yes. I think to express that, I need to put it in two parts. The part of the backbook, where we don't have high interest margins on OpEx, that is hedged today and has been hedged, and that's been part of our policy in the past as well. The portion of the book where we have high interest margins, yes, we don't hedge. There are two reasons for that. There has always been a strategy to pass on interest rates through the front book to offset the backbook portion. The second part of the offset is, in the past, if you take 12 or 18 months back, we were at quite low levels, so a significant portion of the book continued to be through equity. As we are moving through this, credit structure change from more equity to debt, we will continue to sort of look at how much more, we'll continue to hedge appropriately. Great. Thank you, Siva. A question from Marcus Barnard at Bell Potter. Regarding slides 8 and 9, could you give us more detail on how the spread/net margin over BBSW will vary as more of the debt facilities are drawn? Do all the facilities have fixed margins, or do these vary by usage? We, we, we do have, or we did have, decreasing margins when we initially put some of these facilities. I would like to call out that those margin reductions were with growth in the facility. We have preutilized all those growth and the margins, so you could assume that these margins would more or less be fixed into the future until we renegotiate future debt facilities. Thanks, Siva. What proportion of the RBA rate hikes do you think you'll be able to pass through to customers, and what's your medium medium-term target for return on equity? Great questions. There certainly has been some, some competitive tension, and what is making this a challenging question to answer is the fact that the yield on the AFS business is much lower than the yield on the Money3 business, for example. When you average gross yields across the business, you will see that they are declining. That's not always a point for concern when you consider that the AFS business has a very different profile for productivity, bad debts, and particularly, attachment points for funding. We are calling out that our yield has— You know, I think we said on a number of presentations to expect a 2% decline over time, over a number of years, as our business repositions itself from being only a very deep specialist provider of credit to broaden our credit appetite. We, we're getting to the end of that. We think our business keeps yields in the 20% for the time, for the time being. We are calling out that with the contraction of the business in New Zealand, that the yield does appear, does come down faster this year than we had originally anticipated. That's only because New Zealand will be flat or maybe some slight decline while AFS continues to grow. AFS's yields across the portfolio at the moment tend to be in that 12%-13% rate range, which does produce profitable outcome for our business. Albeit, you know, its cost of funding is the cheapest in the group, its bad debt is the least in the group, and its productivity is the highest, given the nature of the clients that are coming in to be funded in that group. When you consider all of those, it produces a profitable outcome of business. In terms of passing on the rate rises, Another part of what is impacting our business is we've made a conscious decision for some of our highest margin customers not to fund them through the lending period as, as we look to become more conservative. Some of the offsetting benefit of that lowering yield will be a reduction in bad debts. That hasn't necessarily materialized as we anticipated because of growth in bad debts, particularly out of New Zealand. Over a longer term, we'd expect our portfolio yield across the group to stabilize around these levels. Around 23% is where we think that that's going to come through in FY2024. And some bad debt normalization as times go through will offset that. Then you'll start to see more of that revenue falling to the bottom line, which I think is actually what investors are asking, when you see more of that come through to the bottom line to return our profitability to normal levels. We expect that to happen in FY2025. Thanks, Scott. A few questions from Alan Dana at Canaccord. Could you please provide some detail on the lending line remediation and assessing costs versus PCP, and how to think about this line item more generally? Well, a lot of that is driven back out of the AFS business. When, if you look at it, you will see that the cost of client acquisition there is typically higher than the other businesses, and that is, you know, that is coming through in the the P&L. A lot of it is driven by client acquisition in terms of that growth, more so than the servicing costs. I'll go to the other side, as credit quality continues to improve, client servicing costs have been somewhat flat over the last couple of years. A lot of growth has been driven by cost of client acquisition costs. We're expecting some of that to, to, to normalize as we see less competition in the marketplace. It has been a, a trend over the last couple of years that, with growing competition, there has been even down at that sort of specialist client quality, higher fees paid by other parties. Many of them are starting to materially retreat from that business sector. We think you should expect to see that flattened in the Money3 and Go Car businesses, particularly, yeah, through 2024. Yeah. Well, Alan, referencing—s orry, I already asked that one. How should we think about Money3- linked debt funding availability? Do you need additional facilities to cover near-term growth? As you have seen in our balance sheet, we do have a significant portion of free cash. While we'll continue and continue to work on facility expansions, we will also look at using some of the free cash in this high interest environment. Just talking on facilities in specific, as we grow faster and have, we've continuously expand our facility limits. As a natural progression from here, we're also looking at term securitization in the near future. I think it's fair to say that Siva has a number of things that he's in discussion with, on the Australian and particularly Money3 business units, to fund those. You know, we, we, I mean, the existing fund that there is also has appetite to expand that facility when we're ready. Part of one of the things that we're considering is, is about not having too much capacity too soon, given the cost, and managing that to, to manage our bottom, bottom line, you know, in some detail. Thanks, Scott. Just going back to a question I asked earlier, just in terms of medium-term target for return on equity, just get to that. Look, FY2024 is going to be challenging because, as everyone will see, return on equity is likely to be, return on potential assets is likely to be around 8%, or a little bit less. We understand that headwind, driven by those 3, 3 items that we discussed before. We would like to see that return on equity trending back to the 15%. We'd like to see that coming through in FY2025, but it might be more like FY2026. The only hesitation here for me, like, I know what we can drive through our OpEx, and we think our bad debts are, but there is a little bit of uncertainty about funding, and we hesitate to make any sort of speculation on where base rates will go, given how quickly they've changed. If, you know, we've predicted 50 points of rise in the— is how, is how we came to the number that we put out to the market last week. We did that based on some estimates that Siva got from, from one of the banks. We're not trying to speculate on that. If it flattens out or if there's a rate reduction, then getting back to that 15% target return on equity in FY2025 is far more achievable. Certainly, we see us being there by FY2026. If I could answer it, we know we're not there in FY2024. We're working towards it in FY2025. We're definitely there in FY2026. Perfect. Just final question from Alan at Canaccord. Turning to the loan book outlook for AUD 1 billion+ by June 2024, is it fair to say that this requires a lower level of loan originations versus 2023? Any additional detail on how to think of any sort of loan growth between the brands, noting New Zealand's a headwind to this. Let's give a comment on the, the origination numbers, because you're right, that's not a material movement from where we are at the moment. The other bit to keep in mind is that New Zealand, we're, we're actually expecting to be flat or contract through that period of time. Leasing is all being done out of the Australian operations. Further after Scott comment earlier, yes, the new lending would be slightly lower than FY2023, and that has been a deliberate attempt, as you've seen in this comment in our in a couple of weeks back. We are slowing lending in New Zealand due to a few macroeconomic headwinds, and we we're very keen not to grow our lending during these tough times, and we're very conscious of keeping our credit quality up on one stable over this period. Great. Thanks. Sorry, Scott, yeah? I was just gonna say, we, we're calling out that if you think of our book over the last sort of five years, this year is likely to be about half of that typical level of growth. We are still growing, and most all of that growth, we're predicting to come out of the Australian operations. We, we think that that growth is coming to us as a result of our ability to take more market share in this, in this period of time. All right, thanks, Scott. Just noting the time, we'll try and get through the rest of the questions with respects reasonably fast. Were there any provisions taken up for the ASIC case? No. We haven't taken up, taken up any specific provisions. In the results we've just seen, we've, we've not called out any of the incremental legal fees that we did accrue in that. At this point in time, there's not much to update in terms of the, the, you know, the progress of ASIC. As soon as anything is known, we will make the market aware. At this point in time, it's, it's a, it's, it's a approval process that, that just takes time to work through. Thanks, Scott. What's the dollar impact of the New Zealand extreme weather event? I would say we haven't seen the full result of that yet. Hence why the prediction and the forecast to the market last week. I think we would be best to provide guidance to that number at the AGM or at the half, when the rest of that comes through. Because what you can see in the impairment slide in here, is that we have some accounts that are on our credit repair or watch list, that at this point in time, we are uncertain whether to move through to write-off or whether they start to improve. What we experienced is that from March through to May, we experienced an tightening of cash flow in our New Zealand operations. As this is normalized, or if I put it in more simple terms, as consumers became more accustomed to their income and the impacts of inflation, they started to get back and pay their cars again. You know, many customers expressed it quite challenging with washed out roads, with their inability to get to work, or their inability to work normal levels, given they were dealing with the impacts of the extreme weather. Now that they're behind them, people are starting to catch up. We can see that in improved cash flows, cash flows through June and July, and we are confident that that continues to improve through August. We think August is going to be one of our best months of cash collection in New Zealand operations this year. We are confident that it continues to improve, but it's not a guarantee. It would be better if we gave a fuller account of that once most of these accounts move through. Can you talk to us about anything that you're seeing in terms of change in borrower behavior or sentiment? Are there any leading indicators that would impact bad debts in the future? I guess we're seeing more borrower conservatism, but that's probably more of new originations than we are, we are seeing in terms of to predict the bad debts. I mean, the market is becoming conservative, particularly in New Zealand. If you look at credit applications through any of the bureaus, you'll see that it's a material reduction from 12 months ago. I think we're seeing some of that here in Australia as well. In terms of predictions for bad debt, you know, part of the reason why we're confident in continuing to, to hit within our target range is just that unemployment in both countries continues to trend at record lows. While arrears may have upticked a little bit, particularly in New Zealand, of, of those one-off weather events, while people are employed, they will manage through this. They may be a bit slow, but we're expecting to go through and pay loans, their loans out. That, that's probably one of the key indicators that gives me confidence that through this economic cycle, that we'll do reasonably well. Most of our consumers aren't. They don't have another debt to repay. This is the largest debt, as we hear every day from consumers, the car is an essential item to them. It gets them to work, it gets them to take the kids to school, it gets them to participate in society. They are very keen to maintain access to a vehicle, to be able to continue to travel. We've seen that coming through in our cash collections, improving in the month of August. In New Zealand, the last two months have been months of improvement in terms of cash collection. Great. Thanks, Scott. Just a few questions around the large discount to NTA. How do you sort of look at issuing shares under DRP at these low share prices, as well as growing the book versus buying back shares? Look, that question comes up often, even when we're not trying to get a discount. Remember, the only participants in the DRP are existing shareholders that support the business for the long term. You know, we have, I guess, a couple of competing challenges here, all, all positive, and that is, as a profitable business, we have growing balance of franking credits. We hear from many of our shareholders who'd like to see more of those franking credits count. On the other hand, we have a dividend that we could be using for other things. I think the point and where we continue to look is that dividend reinvestment is only for existing shareholders who are on the register. Those franking credits and those dividends are, you know, they belong to the members, to the shareholders, and hence why, we pay them. We ideally love to see more shareholders participate in the reinvestment plan and grow their holding in, in the business. It would make it easier for us to maintain or, or, or lift dividends. I understand for those that don't participate, that the, that there is the challenge there. We feel that the, you know, that the happy medium is, is paying, a reasonable amount of our dividends out, and providing an option to-- for those that wish to, to, to participate in a reinvestment plan. Great. Thanks, Scott. Just last question. Just any change to the Credit Suisse facility post the UBS takeover? I'll let you answer. No, there, there's been no change. things have been business as usual. We all hear that with the change. By the way, Credit Suisse has also sold the structured finance product to Apollo, and they've established a new company, as you have picked up in the market. It's called Atlas. It's the old Credit Suisse facility. What we see is, as these transition complete, there's going to be an easier ability to expand facility limits through this transition process. Yeah, I understand in the media it might be creating some confusion there, given Credit Suisse's funding provided to Apollo, but for, you know, for investors' purposes, you should consider that the Solvar Group is funded by the Atlas entity here in Australia and New Zealand. Okay. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Siva. Scott, I might just hand it back to you for closing remarks. Thank you, Simon. I understand that we need to do some more explanation in regard to funding and the other headwinds focus in the business. We tried today to address those questions and concerns. If there's things that we've missed, please send them through to Simon, and we will attempt to come back and answer those questions. We do thank all the shareholders for, you know, being on the call today, and continuing to hold stock as we move through this challenging time. Thank you for your time and for your investment in the company.