Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Investec pre-close trading update. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the conference. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal for an operator by pressing star and then zero. Please note that this call is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Fani Titi. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Claudia, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us for today's pre-close trading update, which provides the basis for our expectations for the six months ending 30 September 2022. I'm joined this morning by Nishlan Samujh, Group Finance Director, and a number of our executives are also on the call. I'm pleased to report that the earnings momentum we experienced in our last financial year has continued despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. The period under review has been marked by spikes in energy prices and inflation, which have in turn led to market volatility and rising interest rates globally. We have seen good client acquisition, with our lending franchises benefiting from higher average advances and the rising interest rate environment, while our wealth, corporate advisory, and equity capital market businesses were negatively impacted by the volatile and uncertain operating environment. Today's trading update shows the benefits of our continued strategic execution and the progress that is ahead of our expectations with regards to the achievement of our medium-term targets. For the six months ending 30 September 2022, we expect adjusted operating profit before tax of between GBP 372.6 million and GBP 406.2 million compared to a figure for H1 last year of GBP 325.7 million. Adjusted operating profit for the U.K. business to be at least 20% higher than the prior period, which was GBP 133.8 million in H1 2022. For South Africa, we expect adjusted operating profit to be at least 10% ahead of the prior period in rand. The rand figure for the first half of last year was ZAR 3.828 billion, or GBP 192 million. Group adjusted earnings per share is expected to be between GBP 0.30 and GBP 0.33 or 14%-25% ahead of the prior period. ROE is expected to be within the group's financial year 2024 target range of 12%-16%. This guidance is based on the year-to-date performance for the five months ended 31 August 2022. The performance was characterized by strong revenue growth driven by the reasons already mentioned, cost discipline in an inflationary environment, and the need to invest in technology as well as good credit performance in our books. Looking at the underlying drivers for our core divisions, being Specialist Banking and Wealth & Investment. First of all, starting with Specialist Banking. Core loans grew by 7.8% annualized to GBP 30.9 billion, driven by corporate lending in both geographies and residential mortgage growth, predominantly in the U.K. For the Wealth & Investment business, funds under management declined by 2.7% to GBP 61.7 billion, driven by market volatility. I will now turn the call over to questions. Please note that this is a trading update, so there is only a certain amount of detail we can provide at this stage. Our full interim results for the six months to 30 September 2022 will be published on Thursday, 17 November 2022. Back to you, Claudia. Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one on your touch-tone phone or on the keypad on your screen. If you decide to withdraw your question, please press star and then two to remove yourself from the list. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one. The first question comes from Chris Steward from Ninety One. Please proceed with your question, Chris. Thank you. Fani, good morning. Nice to hear from you. Thanks for providing an update. I'm not gonna be unkind with my question and ask you for an outlook statement for the full financial year because I understand it's tough to call the future right now. I would like just to understand, if I may please, just an indication of the sensitivity both of the South African banking operation and the U.K. banking operation to interest rates. Specifically, the sort of positive endowment impact that you might anticipate coming through in each geography relative to higher prime or U.K. bank rate. Thank you, Chris, and thank you for not asking for an outlook statement in what is a pretty volatile environment. As we say, we are pleased with the progress that we have continued to make and the momentum that is evidenced by this trading update. As you know, interest rates are positive for banking businesses given the endowment effect. In the longer term, we have to be concerned about the impact on activity and the impact both on consumers and on businesses. On the private client side, we serve clients in the high net worth space and we serve high income clients, so you would expect that their resilience over time would be quite encouraging. Obviously, businesses over time will be impacted by rising interest rates if those go on for quite a long time. I may ask Nishlan to give you a sense of the sensitivity on both sides of our balance sheets. Needless to say, in South Africa, we are now back to where interest rates were in January 2020 pre-COVID. We would think that even if there is a little bit more to come, we think the economy as such should not be too negatively impacted by that. In the U.K., we are still at significantly we are significantly above where we were pre-COVID, so the impact on both consumers and corporates will be felt much more there over time. In the short term, as we say, the impact is positive. Nish, do you want to just give? Yeah, Chris. Okay. I think the numbers similar to what we communicated with the year-end results. I think for the U.K. around about GBP 10 million for every 25 basis points. In South Africa, around about ZAR 100 million for every 25 basis points. Thanks, Nish. Appreciate it. Yeah. Chris, do you have any further questions? No, that's me. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question comes. Is it? The next question comes from Alexander Bowers from Berenberg. Please proceed with your question, Alexander. Morning, everyone. Two questions from me, if I may. Firstly, on capital. You talked about sort of surplus capital in the South African business in the past. I'm just wondering if it's possible to get a view of the latest thinking on potential uses for this capital, and the appetite for distribution in the current economic climate? My second question is, just want to understand how the power shortage issues in South Africa have impacted your corporate client base. Thanks. Okay. If I may start on the first question relating to capital surplus. We have obviously indicated that we remain highly surplus on the South African side of our balance sheet. We have done a lot of work to see how best we can deal with the surplus, given obviously the complexity around the DLC structure. If you were to try, as an example, to implement a buyback, you have the three registers. You would need to work through how you would tackle from one balance sheet to deal with the potentially a buyback if you brought across the three. Similarly, if you were to look at a dividend, you would have to make some considerations. We have made significant progress in our overall work around reduction of the surplus capital. When we do announce our results in November, we will give you a full appreciation of what our intentions are in this case. We can confirm that the intention is to reduce the surplus capital. Both businesses generate enough capital going forward to cover the needs of the business in terms of growth in the loan book. We should be able to deal with the surplus capital. We also have the investment portfolio in South Africa that we had indicated we are reducing, and we continue to make progress around that particular issue, and we will report in November the progress we have made. With respect to your second question relating to power shortages, we obviously have started to see some pleasing activity on the corporate side. As we reported, we have seen some good growth in our loan books on the corporate side on the back of some of the promising signs of structural reforms, whether those be the liberalization of the energy market in that private sector participants can now participate in that market or some auctioning of spectrum on the digital electronic communication side. A number of things have been done on the network trust of network infrastructure. Again, certain regulatory and business changes have been mooted there. We've seen some signs, and we have, as I say, begun to see some increased activity. The level of load shedding now necessarily will dampen some of that pickup in activity. We would expect that in the next 18-24 months to maybe 30 months, private sector participation will begin to assist in providing more capacity and therefore giving Eskom some space to deal with their maintenance and related issues. Unfortunately, electricity would not be a short-term issue to fix, but we do see the participation of the private sector as a positive indicator. In the short term, Stage 6 load shedding does affect consumer sentiment, and it would obviously affect corporate confidence as well. As you can see in these numbers, we have been resilient in terms of our performance. Thank you very much. That's very helpful. Thanks, Alex. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just one final reminder. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one. We will pause to see if there are any further questions before we conclude. The next question comes from Cornette van Zyl from Absa. Please proceed with your question, Cornette. Morning, guys. Thanks for your time. Just two questions from my side. The first one is on U.K. banking business. Just given what's going on in the macro in the U.K., can you maybe give us a bit of an indication, in terms of credit appetite and loan growth from this point onwards? Are you becoming a little bit more conservative? Then related to that, in terms of credit performance in your U.K. banking business, towards sort of the end of this period and possibly, you know, going forward, can you give a little bit of guidance on the outlook for early arrears and NPLs? Is that still coming down, or do you anticipate that those should start picking up at this point? My second question relates to your group investments and specifically IEP and the other unlisted group investments that you have in South Africa. Given the economic environment here and, I suppose related to that load shedding question that you had, how has the performance of those been? Can you give any indication of that? That was not dealt with in the trading statement. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cornette. I'm just trying to check whether my colleague Ruth, who runs our U.K. bank, is there, but I'll give just some introductory comments and ask Ruth to deal with that question. Dealing first with the group investment question relating to IEP, as indicated, we have seen some pickup in activity post-COVID as the economy opened up. Generally, the performance has been very encouraging. The advent of Stage 6 load shedding, if that persists for some time, clearly will dampen corporate activity and may well turn out to be negative. If the current load shedding schedule reduces to much lower levels, we obviously would be happy and we would expect to see the positive corporate activity and consequently positive performance from IEP to continue. IEP is a large business has a number of different businesses inside of it. The current focus that we have is to reduce our shareholding there. The shareholders of IEP are engaged in some discussions around restructuring that business to make it easier for those shareholders who would like to make an exit to be able to do so. I cannot say more than that. We have made good progress around that. By the time we announce our results in November, we should be able to shed a bit more light on that. On the U.K. banking business, we've seen very good loan growth as indicated. Clearly, the environment is much tougher there, given the economic environment and given rising interest rates, given issues around the cost of living. We have seen some moderation in growth. We've always been conservative in how we have run our business. As you know, the structure of the loan book has continued to change over the last five years or so, with property lending having reduced from more than half of that book to now around 16% or so. We have said in the trading statement that we do see impairments normalizing as we move forward. We are not seeing concerning specific impairments. We're talking more about deterioration in the economic outlook as a driver of our expectations around impairments. The book is not worrying at the moment. Is Ruth on the call? I'm here, Fani. Oh, sorry, Ruth. I didn't see you, so I wasn't sure whether you're on the call. Do you just want to give a bit more color on the question? Sure. I think you covered that pretty well, Fani. There is demand in the market or support for good credit. We remain conservative in our lending and have done for some time, so maintaining credit discipline. Certainly, as Fani points out, there has been. We have done loan growth at the levels that you'll see in the statement. We're not seeing at this stage deterioration in our asset quality figures, and any trends towards normalization of the credit loss ratio is largely driven by deterioration in the macroeconomic outlook. So limits, limited specific impairments at this point in time. We will need to monitor closely to see the impact of rising rates on our corporate clients. And we'll be monitoring the impact of any announcements from the government today to see where that may take the economy as we go forward. Thank you, Cornette. Thank you, Cornette. Yes. Thank you very much. Appreciated. Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions in the queue. Mr. Titi, if I may hand over to you for closing remarks. Thank you, sir. Again, thank you all for your time this morning. As usual, if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our team. Thank you very much. Back to you, Cornette. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you very much for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.