Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Network International Results Presentation. My name is Nairobi, and I will be the operator for your call this morning. If you would like to ask the question during the question answer session on today's call, you can do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to Nandan Mer, Group Chief Executive Officer. Please, sir. Thank you, Nairobi. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be speaking to you all again, this time to present the Full Year Results For 2021 at the end of my first full year in the role. I must say, I'm loving it even more now. Six months ago, in September 2021, we laid out our strategy to grow at a 20%+ revenue CAGR. With this growth being predicated on a series of strategic initiatives, which eventually would result in us being the fastest growing payments business in the Middle East and Africa. We asserted that as we grow the top line, cost efficiencies will generate further margin leverage towards 45%-50% over the medium- to long- term. I'll recap on the key highlights. Let's start with the financials. We had a record closing with revenues at $352 million. We made progress on EBITDA margins as we committed, delivering $143.5 million in underlying EBITDA. Our debt continues to be well within the covenants of our lending arrangements. More exciting is the fact that we are on very strong foundations and growing at a record pace. New customer signings are higher than they have ever been. We said we'd be live in Saudi Arabia in Q1, and that's very much on schedule. We're doing this at a capital cost less than the original budget. We also powered through the completion of DPO across 21 markets, and we are pleased that DPO is trading strongly. We're even more pleased to see them delivering positive EBITDA with margins already over 16%. All of this continues to give us confidence that as we work towards our longer-term goals, we will achieve our objectives. Let's recap on the overall strategy now and how we are performing against it. As we said, our strategy is based on two pillars, acceleration and innovation. Innovating to ensure our solution set stays ahead of the competitive landscape, and we continue to be the best at serving our customers' needs. At the same time, accelerating and having the ambition to achieve our true potential from a growth perspective by fast-tracking the acquisition of customers on both sides of the business. I'm pleased to report that we have already made solid progress since we launched our updated strategy less than six months ago. There's been a lot going on across the businesses which gives me the confidence for the future delivery of our financial targets. Let me pick out a few highlights, such as the number of partnerships we've signed, which are helping us to accelerate the new development and deployment of capabilities, as well as lowering our costs at the same time. The progress we have made in accelerating customer sign-ups across both sides of the business by continually digitizing and automating our processes, by adding many more APIs, making it even easier for merchants and FIs to do business with us. As well as the new capabilities we have launched for merchants and for banks, which is supporting the overall growth of our customer base. Let's dig into some of these initiatives in a little more detail. Let's start with Merchant Solutions. Versus pre-pandemic levels, we are back in positive growth over the last few months of 2021. Domestic spends in particular were back in double-digit growth as we exited the year, and this is key to the underlying health of our business. The secular shift from face-to-face to online spending is playing out with our healthy growth in online GPV. You can really see and feel this on the ground. In the UAE, which represents the majority of our merchants business, the region is thriving. Tourists have returned in their droves. It's easy to get in and out with testing restrictions being eased, and even more so in the past couple of weeks. From a personal perspective, I can tell you that it's pretty difficult to get a dinner reservation at a decent restaurant. The merchant base is also growing at the fastest clip we've seen, almost four times pre-pandemic levels, which includes the number of wins away from competitors. Let's take a closer look at why merchants are doing business with Network. Well, it's really a reflection of all the new capabilities that we have launched. We start the customer journey smoothly with our faster 60-minute onboarding process, where we're not just signing them up faster and not seeing any follow-up through and spends. The conversion rate is very strong with more than 90% of these merchants going on to deliver volumes almost in the first month. Why do these merchants choose Network? Well, we give them the widest range of stores or values. Our merchants can accept over 25 different types of payment, which is more than any of our competitors offer. This includes buy now, pay later, and mobile money wallets from many countries in the region. We're also giving them more tools through which to accept these payments, including using their own mobile phone. We're giving them more than just acceptance, like interactive dashboards that help them to understand their business better. SMEs in particular expect us to serve them with more than just payment acceptance. We've partnered with an existing bank customer to provide them with working capital finance. As you can tell, the SME space is a particular area of focus for us in our merchant business. As we all know, SMEs are the bedrock of every economy, and also the segment where the opportunity for cash to electronic payment displacement is the greatest. Margins for us are higher in this segment. As I've said before, SMEs are hungry for more capabilities than just plain acceptance because they want assistance to help them grow their business. This gives us the opportunity to upsell our value-added services to the segment. We've recruited more SMEs in the second half of 2021 than all our competitors combined. This links back to our market-leading proposition, the size and distribution of our sales force, and the quality of our referral partnerships. We are confident we will continue to accelerate our growth in this space. DPO has been an important investment for us, and as I said earlier, we are pleased that we are delivering across all the key metrics and performance indicators we highlighted at the time of the acquisition. Merchant sign-ups are growing fast with 5,000 net additions in the year, and that momentum is continuing into the early months of 2022. We have wins across the SME, micro SME, and multinational segments, including chains such as Pizza Hut and Steers. We had said at the time of the acquisition that there would be a number of revenue synergies opportunities, and we have already launched services or signed cross-selling contracts that are building the foundations for that future synergy delivery. For example, DPO is leveraging Network's merchant base by expanding their online services batch as DPO Pay, and that's begun in the UAE. We will soon be launching DPO Pay in Jordan. I've had the pleasure of traveling across many African markets, and I'm pleased to report that DPO solutions are finding tremendous traction with our existing bank customers that we have processing agreements with. We expect to sign more white label cross-selling agreements in the year ahead. Finally, from a financial perspective, they are ahead of our expectations, having delivered a positive EBITDA at a margin of over 16%. At our Capital Markets Day, we talked about moving into new markets, and I'm pleased to say that our direct-to-merchant services in Egypt are now near market-ready. As a reminder, we already have quite a significant presence in Egypt from a processing perspective. We already have an office base, a tech platform in place, local expertise, a great team, if I may add, as well as existing relationships with a lot of banks. Direct to merchant will be yet another arrow in our bow, leveraging on the strengths we have built in the UAE and Jordan and bringing our best-of-breed capabilities to Egypt. It's early days. We're testing the market with a low CapEx approach, utilizing our existing infrastructure and a payment facilitator approach where we will partner with our bank customers who will act as the acquirer, just like the DPO model. We're expecting to launch in Q2, and later this year, we will give you a more detailed lens on the business momentum and the potential long-term financial opportunity in Egypt. Moving on to Issuer Solutions, which is the larger of our two businesses. We are pleased that momentum is growing now that the banks are moving beyond COVID and back to BAU with larger marketing budgets to acquire new consumers and to serve their consumers better. We expect to see even more acceleration in 2022 on both new credentials as well as transaction growth. We've had great momentum on customer acquisition with 17 new, which I believe makes it a record year, more than double the pre-COVID sign-up rate. Many of our new signings, like Carbon Bank, have already started gaining substantial traction, delivering transactions quickly despite being new to market. We now have 200 FIs under our belt, so we're gathering scale really quickly. As you can see, we are equally well-positioned to serve large, medium, and challenger banks in all our markets. This is a result of the breadth of our capabilities, the ease of onboarding, and the expanding range of APIs. On Saudi, our foray is also coming along nicely. We are on track to deliver on all the commitments we made. We are well below the original investment budget and ahead of the original time schedule. Not only is our tech infrastructure ready and the local team expanding, but we're also in the process of signing up new customers, having won one new processing mandate in January this year. I'm pleased to report that our customer pipeline is growing, and we anticipate announcing more new wins as the year progresses. All of this gives us the conviction in the long-term $50 million annual revenue opportunity. We also spoke to the modernization of our technology capabilities at the Capital Markets Day. We said this would be based on four pillars. Pleased to report that most of our new services are now being delivered from tech platforms in the cloud. We are rapidly expanding our range of APIs to make it even easier to do business with us. We are in the process of setting up centers of excellence in Egypt and South Africa, both of which are well underway, and this will improve our speed to market and give us greater operating leverage from 2023 onwards. We also committed to building a data lake, a single source of data repository for the group, across which we can also provide data insight services to our customers and unleash a substantive new set of capabilities for this. Work on this has commenced. We expect a higher proportion of value-added services revenue in 2022 and onwards. ESG has also been an increasing area of focus for us, and we have anchored our ESG strategy on what is core to our business, which is financial inclusion. We believe we have the toolkits to support financial inclusion. We're launching a set of initiatives that help us to serve the markets where we can better and to fulfill our purpose of helping economies to grow faster. Whether it's our partnerships with NGOs in Jordan to support low-income communities with access to digital payments or our partnerships with banks to enable them the onboarding of unbanked citizens like we are doing in Malawi, the list will keep growing as the year progresses. We're also committed to playing our part and being a responsible citizen from an environmental standpoint. Even though our emissions are relatively low, we have committed to being neutral on Scope 1 and 2 before 2030. We will soon also seek to becoming carbon neutral on Scope 3, on which work has already started. With that, I'll hand you over to Rohit for a more detailed financial review. Thanks, Nandan. Good morning, afternoon, everyone. The financial performance of the company in the year was one reflecting improving business momentum, having recovered from the impacts of the pandemic and delivered strong growth in revenues and EBITDA that was ahead of market expectations. As the year progressed, we focused on winning new business and delivering for customers by enhancing our product capabilities and focusing on value-added services, and ensuring we continue to invest in the best talent to fuel our recovery. Ultimately building a solid foundation to deliver on a faster growth strategy that we articulated at the recently held Capital Markets Day. Let's now look at the financials in more detail. Our financial performance improved significantly through 2021. Revenue grew 24% year-on-year, and underlying EBITDA was up a healthy 27% as trends improved considerably through the second half of the year. While continuing to invest for the future, our top-line growth and inherent cost leverage in the business resulted in more than 200 basis points expansion in our underlying EBITDA margins. Our underlying earnings per share increased by 70%, and we generated 19% growth in underlying free cash flow, helped by growth in EBITDA. Our balance sheet also remains strong. We have ample liquidity in the business and our leverage ratio at less than 1x EBITDA is well below the covenant threshold. Let's now move to the performance of the two business lines, starting with Merchant Solutions. We saw trends improve during the year, particularly through the second half, reflecting continued recovery in consumer spending, increase in the inflow of tourism, and an acceleration in the shift away from cash towards digital forms of payment. Compared to last year, TPV was up 28% and Merchant Solutions revenue increased by 47%, which as a reminder, included a $7.5 million three-month contribution from DPO. If we exclude that, we saw TPV growth of 24% year-on-year, with revenues up 40% year-on-year as we benefited from higher take rates. We also provide revenue and TPV growth compared to 2019 for transparency and as a more informative way to demonstrate the improving momentum and the strong recovery in our business. Compared to 2019, group TPV was down 2% while the revenues grew 5%. The overall TPV growth isn't fully reflective of the positive trends we saw towards the end of the year and the different levels of recovery between domestic and international spends. Let's look at those trends next. This chart really focuses on direct-to-merchant TPV growth trends versus 2019. Overall, Network's direct acquiring volumes have been on a positive trajectory through the second half of the year. Within that, domestic spends grew strongly versus 2019 from August onwards, following a strong rebound in consumer confidence and the broader pace of economic recovery. International spend surprised positively through most of the year, outperforming our expectations and was in strong growth territory compared to the pre-pandemic levels as we exited the period following two consecutive months of double-digit growth compared to 2019 in November and December. These positive trends in international volumes were supported by the peak holiday season in Q4, a number of sporting events held in the country, and the start of Dubai Expo. With the recent news flow in mind, international TPV trends remain broadly stable in line with our expectations. While we can't predict what the impact of sanctions will have on the Russian tourist mobility, our direct exposure to Russia and Ukraine is minimal. As you are aware, Merchant Solutions accounts for 45% of the group revenue. Within that, international TPV is approximately 20% of the direct acquiring volumes, and within that, Russia and Ukraine spends is about 10%. Therefore, we have a less than 2% exposure at the Merchant Solutions level and less than 1% exposure to Russian and Ukrainian spends at a group revenues level. The other lens we apply to direct acquiring TPV is the merchant sector mix, which I will share with you next. On the left-hand side of the page, the chart focuses on direct-to-merchant volume growth trends across the key merchant sectors versus 2019. The key point to highlight here is the improving momentum since July, where all sectors saw an improvement in the growth trajectory. This further reinforces the strong rebound in consumer confidence and is reflective of the regional recovery from the pandemic, with retail sector performing relatively stronger than other segments, particularly through the last three months of the year, alongside travel and entertainment, both of which are supported by the increase in tourism. On the right, we see how Network's online direct volumes have grown versus 2019. As a reminder, online volumes represent about 30% of our TPV, excluding DPO. Within that, a large segment is e-commerce merchants, which excludes airlines and government, and is a key strategic area of focus for us and has seen significant growth with TPV up 39% versus last year, and more importantly, up 112% versus the 2019 levels. This accelerated growth has been driven by the investments we have made in our dedicated sales resources, partnerships with several marketplace merchants to accelerate merchant sign-ups, and the acceleration in our merchant onboarding process. This has also encouraged rapid growth among our SME customer base. Let us now look at our Issuer Solutions business line next. Performance within our Issuer Solutions business line remained resilient with trends in revenue growth consistent as we progress through the year. We saw revenue growth 11% compared to last year, and 3% compared with 2019. I will briefly explain one data point on the slide which may have caught your attention, which is the 2% growth in credentials in 2021 versus 2020. To recap, this is mainly driven by a change in the billing process with one of our large issuing customers, as we have mentioned before. Excluding that change, credential growth year-on-year basis would have been higher. Stepping back, overall, both KPIs across the number of credentials and number of transactions were significantly ahead of the 2019 levels, which reflects the strong step up in the new business momentum, as Nandan mentioned earlier, having won 17 new clients in the year, as well as renewal of contracts with some large customers and strong demand for value-added services such as fraud solutions. Let us now look. Take a closer look at the performance of DPO, our newest addition to the Network family. We are very pleased with DPO's performance following the completion of the acquisition in September, with the implied valuation at less than 11x net revenue at the time of completion. On 2021 trading, TPV growth was very strong through the year, growing by 55% on a year-on-year basis in reported currency terms, or 42% in constant currency terms. Similarly, revenue growth remained strong throughout 2021, with reported revenues up 45% year-on-year and 33% in constant currency terms. The difference in TPV and revenue growth mainly relates to mix, with stronger growth coming from gateway merchants during the year. One large customer which outgrew the aggregation product was moved into the gateway suite since we offer a complete range of products across the DPO merchant set. There was also some merchant mix effect with some of the larger and strategic merchants that have a preferential pricing model made up a proportionately higher percentage of overall TPV, particularly in Q4. In terms of profitability, underlying EBITDA was positive, ahead of our expectations, with healthy margins of over 16%. In summary, since the time of the acquisition announcement, DPO has continued to perform well, slightly ahead of our expectation, which gives us growing confidence in the business going forward, particularly as we have also made considerable progress in setting the foundations to deliver on our revenue synergy aspirations. Having looked at our two business lines, let's move to looking at our performance by region. The regional performance during the year is reflective of the underlying business mix in our key markets. Starting with Africa, revenue grew 25% compared to last year and 11% compared to 2019, including one quarter contribution from DPO. Excluding DPO, revenue in Africa was up 16% versus last year and 2% compared to 2019. We saw strong growth in the number of credentials hosted versus both last year and 2019. The number of transactions also saw strong year-on-year growth, but was impacted by a tough comparator in the last quarter of 2019. Contribution margins for the region increased by about 20 basis points, mainly driven by strong revenue growth, but with what was reflective of the change in revenue mix and continued investments in the region to deliver on the significant growth opportunity we have in the continent. Moving on to Middle East. Revenues for the region were up 25% compared to last year. Growth in first half was helped by the relatively easier comparative, but accelerated in the second half following the regional recovery from the pandemic. Contribution margins for the region increased by 380 basis points year-on-year, supported by significant growth in volumes and take rates. A largely fixed cost base, which reflects the inherent operating leverage we have in the business. With that, let's look at our cost profile for the year. As a reminder, we delivered 27% year-on-year underlying EBITDA growth with over 200 basis points of margin expansion. After removing the dilutive mix impact of DPO, margins expanded by about 260 basis points year-on-year while we continue to invest to deliver on the future growth aspirations. Let me take you through the key movements in our operating costs during the year. You should really think of our increasing cost base in three broad categories. The first category represents the costs incurred in 2021 which were not present in the 2020 cost base. This includes costs for talent retention, which accounts for the return of discretionary bonus accruals and performance-linked compensation, and DPO expenses for the three months following the completion of the acquisition. The second category are cost items relating to the strategic investments made to deliver on higher growth and operational agility. This includes the cost required to operate a standalone data center following the separation from our shared data center with Emirates NBD, which will give the business much-needed operational flexibility to grow even faster. Investments in our direct-to-merchant capabilities, which are already leading to faster merchant sign-ups and higher revenue growth. Leaving us with the third category, which is the like for like cost growth at only 5% year-on-year increase reflects a largely fixed cost base, while we continue to be prudent and have implemented a number of initiatives to further optimize the cost base, the benefits of which we will see in the coming years. With that, let's look at the net income bridge for the period. From a net income standpoint, underlying net income increased by over 80% relative to last year as a result of the strong underlying EBITDA growth and lower net interest costs. Net interest charge reduced by over 30% compared to the prior- year with the lower interest rate charge on our facilities in line with the leverage-based pricing grid. The underlying tax rate during the year was about 10%. Finally, as we bridge through to the reported net profit, this was also significantly ahead of the prior- year, where we saw over $10 million uplift from the gain on disposal of a 50% stake in Transguard Cash, and significantly lower specially disclosed items impacting EBITDA, which included the final year of share-based compensation linked to the IPO and the cost associated with the acquisition of DPO. Excluding any M&A, we do not anticipate any SDIs affecting EBITDA in 2022. It is important to highlight that the specially disclosed items affecting net income now include amortization of acquired intangibles from DPO. Going forward, we expect this item to be around $7 million per annum. Let us now move and look at our cash flow measures starting with CapEx. We took a strategic and prudent approach to capital spending during the year. Total CapEx amounted to $56 million in line with our guidance. In line with the commitments made earlier, growth CapEx accounted for around 60% of the overall investment and increased by $8 million year-on-year, with the majority of the increase attributable to the spends to enter the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We can really split our growth CapEx into three main categories. Investment in our product capabilities across both issuing and acquiring business lines. Investment in point of sale terminals as we have ramped up significantly our pace of SME signings during the year. As I mentioned before, our market entry to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which totaled $5 million in line with our expectations. We continue to expect to deploy less than $10 million to support our market entry there, and the balance will be invested in 2022. Maintenance CapEx is around 40% of our overall CapEx investment, increasing by only $2 million year-on-year. This CapEx includes spends on continued enhancements of our technology infrastructure, including license renewals and system upgrades, all of which support our longer-term growth strategy. In 2021, it also included capital spend to separate our shared services infrastructure from Emirates NBD. We have now invested a total of $17 million on the separation programs, much lower than the $30 million guidance we had provided earlier. Moving on to free cash flows then. We were again cash generative in the year, generating free cash flows of $62 million, 19% higher than the prior- year. As shown in the chart, this was supported by higher underlying EBITDA, which was partially offset by higher working capital before settlement-related balances. As a reminder, this represents the amount of capital needed to fund our daily operations outside the settlement needs of our acquiring business. In 2020, working capital requirements were significantly lower due to the impact of the pandemic on the business activity and the proactive steps we have taken to manage the liquidity situation better. As the business to continue to recover in 2021, the working capital requirements marginally over 2020 levels. However, they have still been significantly below our long-term guidance of 3%-5% of revenue as we continue to focus on a working capital cycle, both on the receivables end and on the payables end. The underlying free cash flow was also impacted by higher capital spends, which as we can see, was mainly invested to support our growth initiatives. In line with our strategy, we have made two divestments of non-core operations this year. Let me briefly touch upon both of them next. We disposed of two non-core assets in Mercury and Transguard Cash last year, which allows us to focus our business activities on core digital payments offering. If we first consider Transguard Cash, we disposed of a 50% stake for around $74 million in cash, which means a loss of associate contribution from the P&L, but we remain confident of recouping this through the performance of the core business in the year ahead. We also agreed to sell a 70% holding in Mercury, a domestic UAE card scheme which has an immaterial impact on our financials. Both these disposals will bolster our balance sheet, where we are operating at a leverage ratio of less than 1x EBITDA. These disposals are also in line with our capital allocation policy, where again, as a reminder, we will continue to undertake selective investments through potential growth opportunities and acquisitions in order to accelerate revenue and EBITDA growth over and above our core guidance. With that, let me now talk about the outlook for the year ahead. We are encouraged by the positive momentum and strength of the business performance in 2021, and I'm pleased to say this leads to an improved margin guidance for the year ahead. As highlighted by Nandan and myself earlier, with the tragic circumstances in Ukraine, we have taken proactive action to comply with all relevant sanctions. In terms of revenue, our guidance is unchanged. Whilst we are mindful of the potential impacts of the international tensions, including around travel and general consumer confidence, we continue to expect our total revenues to be up 27%-29% year-on-year, in line with the guidance provided earlier. As a reminder, our revenue guidance for 2022 excludes the three-month revenue contribution from DPO in the 2021 base. On EBITDA, we now expect modest margin expansion, and it's primarily the result of strong trading at DPO and the transition into positive EBITDA territory ahead of our expectations, as well as reduced expense outlook for the core business as we continue to make progress in our various cost-saving initiatives. Our capital expenditure in 2022 will be $55 -$60 million, which includes $55 million of core CapEx, in line with our previous guidance, and incremental investment of CapEx of $3 -$4 million to explore the growth accelerated opportunity of expanding our direct-to-merchant services in Egypt. In conclusion, our financial performance in 2021 demonstrates the significant progress we have made across the business, which has continued into 2022. I will now hand back to Nandan for his closing remarks. Thank you, Rohit, for that comprehensive update. As you've heard, our focus remains on the delivery of our organic growth strategy, which continues to give us confidence as we work through our target of 20%+ net revenue growth. If I was to summarize the key milestones you should expect to hear about in the year ahead will include more customer signings in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, further cross-selling between our existing customers and DPO to support the delivery of revenue synergies, continuing to build on our value-added services and our new capabilities for both merchant and financial institution customers, and the launch of our merchant services in Egypt. While organic expansion will remain our core driver, we will also continue to seek options to drive further growth through disciplined selective acquisitions. Our capital allocation policy prioritizes investments for growth, with investments and returns rigorously assessed against internal strategic and financial lens, such as ROCE. The tragic impacts of the Russia-Ukraine situation bring new risks for the world economy that is yet to fully recover from the impact of the global pandemic. For our business, let me take you through any exposures. In terms of direct impact to our Merchant Solutions business, while we have some exposure to cross-border spending from Russia and Ukrainian visitors, the value represents only circa 1% as a proportion of the total group revenue. I want to reassure you that we have already taken action to comply with all sanctions. From a tech perspective, we source some of our licenses for the group technology platforms from suppliers with some Russian operations. However, we have no connectivity or operational reliance on these suppliers. Our platforms are hosted on our own servers and maintained, upgraded, and enhanced by our own colleagues. We also have contractual arrangements with the suppliers' European affiliates from a continuity perspective. Therefore, we see minimal risk to business continuity and our ability to innovate in our core markets. To summarize, I continue to be encouraged by the scale of opportunity in our markets, and I'm confident that Network's capabilities will best serve the industry in which we operate, and we will deliver on our ambition to be the fastest-growing and most innovative customer-centric payments company in our region. Thank you very much, and we look forward to answering your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind and wish to remove your question, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your phone is unmuted locally. To confirm that star followed by one to ask a question. Your first question is from the line of Josh Levin from Autonomous. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. I have two questions. The first, Magnati will no longer be owned by a bank. It will be owned by private equity. How does that affect the competitive landscape? Does non-bank ownership make it more likely that banks will choose to work with Magnati? The second, you've disclosed that 1% of your revenues are related to Russia. That's helpful. That's your direct exposure. Given that Dubai has historically attracted its fair share of Russian visitors, are there potential second- and third-order impacts from Russian sanctions on the UAE that could ripple or ultimately impact Network? Thank you. Thank you, Josh. Good morning. Magnati, let me take the first part of your question. Magnati is still bank-owned. FAB owns, I believe, 40%. I think the details are still emerging, but from what we've read, 60% is gonna be owned by a financial investor and 40% still with FAB. I would say at least in the short-t erm, it's reasonably unlikely that other banks will want to work with Magnati given that, you know, it's a direct competitor to other companies in this space. But who knows? Time will only tell. From a sanctions perspective or from a collateral, or, you know, sanctions on the UAE, we don't foresee any. UAE has maintained a neutral stance in the situation and is fostering reconciliation through dialogue and through diplomatic means, and so I'm not sure, or at least we don't see a path to any further impacts. Thank you very much. Next question is from the line of Justin Forsythe from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me here and congrats on the nice report here. Just a couple questions from me as well. The first one is, I think you noted, Nandan, during your comments that you acquired more SME customers in 2H than all other competitors combined. I know in the past you've noted some data issues around share and determining what that is. I mean, have you gotten greater visibility in the time kind of since we chatted back in January as to what that's looking like and how you're doing against competitors? My second question is around just 2021 expectations. You know, I understand there wasn't. Or sorry, 2022 expectations. You know, I know there wasn't really any detail around merchant and issuer specifically, but any finer points you could put around what the expectations there and maybe how far ahead of 2019 levels you expect to be on merchant TPV. If you expect, you know, how you expect issuer growth to be given the credential issue and what that impact actually was on a points basis. I think I missed that. Thank you. Data still remains. I mean, a single source of data on market share is still not available. What we're tracking since we last spoke is wins and losses versus competition. Our confidence and our assertion comes from that tracking mechanism that we have put in place internally. We look every month, as you would expect, at the wins and losses in every segment that we serve. What we're seeing is that the wins from competition are growing versus the losses to competition. Every business goes through churn, but we are pleased to report that we are seeing a greater momentum in our favor. I think that's, like I said, a combination of a breadth of capabilities as well as the number of stores of value that we accept. We are very, very focused on ensuring that our merchants can accept as many digital stores of value as possible, because ultimately it's all about the merchant making the sale and the goods and services flying off the shelf. That's the reason for the focus on stores of value. Again, it's just, you know, it's like I said, it's not just the capabilities, but it's also the distribution. We focused quite a bit in 2021 in adding feet on street and distribution agreements with, you know, with retail partners, such as trade houses, where, you know, new businesses are registered. I hope that gives you a sense of where our confidence is coming from. The second part of the question I'm not very clear about, but I think what you're asking is, do we have a lens on how merchant TPV will be in 2022 versus 2019, if I understand the question correctly. Can you just clarify? Yeah. Sorry, also yeah. Just kind of if you're able to give any rough guidelines around what you're expecting on a segment basis between merchant and issuer for 2022, whether that's versus 2019 or versus 2020. But yeah, exactly. If you have any finer point to put on TPV growth. I'm gonna hand over to Rohit, but in our quest to be the fastest growing and most innovative customer-centric payments company, we've obviously got ambitions on both growing our merchant base and growing our credential base. Before I hand over to Rohit, I'll tell you the journey that we're on. We are at 154,000, 155,000, let's call it merchants. We're looking to get to 1 million in the next few years, ideally in the medium term. On credentials, again, we're looking to amplify our credentials growth quite significantly. We are at 18 million credentials now, and the North Star for us is 100 million credentials on the issuing in the issuer business. With that, I'll hand over to Rohit to speak more to the shorter- term, sort of guidance. Sure. Thanks, Nandan. Hey, Justin. In terms of the guidance, we obviously don't give guidance at a business line level. If you just take a step back. Reference to 2019 was relevant from a 2021 perspective, as everybody was really interested to know how the business is shaping up against the pre-COVID levels. Both on the issuing and the acquiring side of the business, on an exit run rate basis is past that hurdle. As we look at 2022, we expect. I mean, if you look at the guidance we gave at the CMD, 27%-29%, which includes the full impact of DPO. If you really strip DPO out, we're almost looking at 20% for the core business. Given ex DPO, we are 50-50 mixed between Merchant Solutions and Issuer Solutions. It's really difficult for us to grow at 20% unless we're really firing on all cylinders. We do expect on the Merchant Solutions side the growth to come from strong growth on same-store sales TPV, continue to acquire more SMEs, larger relationships, value-added services are becoming a greater share of the wallet, which impacts the take rates. On the Issuer Solutions side, credential growth has only been one part of the puzzle. We have credentials growth, we have transactions, and then a lot of value-added services where we are doing a lot. We have 17 new banks that we have signed in the pipeline. They really haven't started. They haven't delivered much in 2021, but we expect those to contribute in 2022. By and large, very excited about the trajectory in 2022, both on the Merchant Solutions and the Issuer Solutions business line, which along with the expectations we have laid out earlier on DPO, plus the mid-single- digit revenue contribution from KSA as we onboard new customers, underpins our 27%-29% top-line growth guidance. Got it. Just a quick clarify there. Just given, right, you obviously have some easier comps, you know, given COVID impacted year-over-year growth in 2021. Imagine you expect just from a higher level that merchant will be growing, you know, significantly faster than issuer on a year-over-year basis. Correct. Absolutely. That's the plan. Yep. Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. Cheers. The next question is from the line of [Orson] from Barclays. Please go ahead. Hey. Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. It's [Orson Rout] from Barclays. First question I have is just on the volume growth and especially international TPV in January and February. I mean, at the trading update, its December volumes looked very encouraging, more than 10% above 2019 levels. You said that this level has remained broadly stable, I think. Is it right to read broadly stable to mean at similar levels seen in December, so broadly double-digit above 2019 levels? To what extent do you think this would have been even stronger if it would have not been for Omicron in January, specifically, and a bit of February as well? Then my second question is just on the margin guidance, obviously encouraging to see already an upgrade to the outlook. At the CMD, you clearly made the point that Network is primarily a growth business with the biggest focus really on investing in top-line growth. Is the upgraded EBITDA margin a consequence of not being able to invest quickly enough? Should we be expecting less margin accretion in the outer years, given that the medium-term targets have been reiterated? Maybe then within that, on DPO profitability, obviously at 16% margin, it was higher than expected. Can you give any sense to what extent you expect a further margin increase this year on DPO profitability? How much of the margin guidance increase is due to this increased DPO profitability? Thank you. Let me take that. There are quite a few questions in there. If you start with the international spends, what I said was, absolutely those positive momentum, as we exited the year, has continued in early part of this year as well. And that is both on the domestic and on the international spend side. We'll obviously give the numbers, and the actual growth rates, on a year-on-year basis when we report the Q1 update in April. They have remained. The trends have remained broadly stable and very supportive. And that really underpins the guidance. The fact that we are reiterating the guidance again now, having done it earlier. That's on the international side. I guess there was a little bit of impact of Omicron, not significant. We always see things just a little bit slowing in January for a couple weeks after the year-end, but all on expected lines. Despite that, as I said, the trends have remained very supportive with minimal impacts from Omicron and so far from the other geopolitical situation. In terms of margins, the margin upgrade is really driven by two factors. One, DPO, as you rightly said, DPO was break-even EBITDA in 2020. We have talked about the CMD, that over a three- or four-year period, we expect DPO margins to converge with the group margins at 40%-45%. It's a journey. At 16% in 2021, they were higher than where we expected it to be. We expect that to continue in 2022 as well. Therefore that is really one of the drivers for the margin guidance. At the same time, on the core business, we absolutely want to continue to invest to deliver on the growth opportunities. As we talked about earlier, we are investing in KSA. We are investing in unlocking the new direct-to-merchant growth accelerator opportunity in Egypt. We'll be very focused on investing for growth. At the same time, every business has areas where you can optimize the cost base better and therefore we have identified a number of those which we have put into place last year, and it's going to take some time for the benefits of that to be realized. The margin expansion is certainly not at the compromise of not investing for growth, and all in line with our longer-term articulation of delivering at least 20% top- line growth along with the margins expanding to 45%-50% in the medium- term. Super helpful. Thank you. Thanks. The next question is from the line of Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Mr. Moawalla, can you hear us? Mr. Moawalla, please unmute your microphone to ask the question. Okay, we are not able to take that question at the moment, so the next question is from [Alexander Hauzo] from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon. Thanks for letting me on. I had a couple of questions. I think DPO got awarded payment processing license in Nigeria in January. I think you were quite involved in Nigeria in the past on the processing side, so just curious to hear how you intend to leverage the new license to expand the business in Nigeria if that's part of the plan. The second question is more of a refresher really. I can't recall exactly the situation with Emirates NBD as an issuing customer. I think revenues ticked down a little bit in 2021 after a big hunt for a couple of years. If you could comment on the demand from Emirates NBD and how we should think of it in the outer years of the plan. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you, Alexander. Let me take the first part of the question. Yes, we are very pleased with DPO's recent licensing in Nigeria, and that opens up tremendous opportunities for us. I actually had the pleasure of being in Nigeria a couple of weeks ago. Met with several of the CEOs and retail bank heads of the large Nigerian banks. We spoke about leveraging, partnering with the banks to enable them to serve their customers better, either through a white label solution or through a partnership approach. We also reserve the right to go direct to market as we do with DPO in many markets. Really, it's all the options are on the table, and we are exploring each one of those, and the teams are working together to ensure that we have the most optimum go-to market approach. I will say that, yes, expect Nigeria, DPO Nigeria, to ramp up reasonably quickly during the course of this year. It's a very important market. It's a large market. The capabilities are portable. We have not just a team on the ground, but we also have processing capability in Nigeria. We have a lovely Tier III data center in Lagos, and so our data is processed on soil, which is a requirement for Nigeria. We're ready for Nigeria, and we're very pleased with this license. Alex, in terms of the second question with regards to Emirates NBD, in percentage contribution to the overall group, it was higher in 2020 because the rest of the business was impacted because of the impact of the pandemic, especially on the merchant side. Our contract with Emirates NBD is on the issuing side, which has contractual caps and floors. In absolute terms, on a year-on-year basis, the absolute volume revenues have gone up, but as a percentage, it's come down simply because we have a recovery and the rest of the business, especially on the merchant side, has grown much faster because from the depths of the pandemic in 2020. I see. I must have something wrong in the model then. I will take that offline. Thank you very much. Sure. The next question is from the line of Sandeep Deshpande from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Thanks for letting me in. Clearly you've indicated to me that you're working towards a positive impact of the. Sorry, Mr. Deshpande. Sorry, we are not able to hear your question. Can you please. Can you hear me? Check your phone? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? We are not able to hear you good. Are you able to reconnect or to check your microphone please? Sorry, Mr. Deshpande, we are not able to hear you. The connection is very bad. Please reconnect your phone. We will take the last question from Rahul Bajaj from Citi. Please go ahead. Hi, this is Rahul from Citi. Thanks for the call. I have two quick questions actually remaining now. One is on interest costs. Rohit, you've given guidance of $15 -$17 million for 2022 interest costs. Just wanted to understand, have you baked in any rate hikes in your guidance for interest costs? How many rate hikes are baked in? And what impact or what sensitivity I should kind of bake in for every 25 basis of rate hike on your interest cost on average? That's my first question. The second is related to Emirates NBD separation. You mentioned on the debt that there is a $5.4 million cost related to Emirates NBD in 2021 cost number. I'm assuming this is OpEx and not CapEx. How should we think about this kind of OpEx then in the future? Should this Emirates NBD related OpEx cost of $5-$5.5 million recur in 2022 and years in the future? That's the first part of the question. The second part of the question is around CapEx. I mean, there is about $10 million in CapEx for Emirates NBD separation, which at least I had on my model for 2022. Are we done with the Emirates NBD CapEx, or should we expect more to come in 2022? Thank you. Thanks, Rahul, for those questions. Taking them one by one. Our expectations are obviously based on the expectations which are modeled by the analyst community. Our expectation is for about, or a model, I should say, is based on about five rate hikes. This was obviously done earlier in the year. As things continue to evolve, we'll update that. For us, the bigger part of the financing cost really comes from the margin, which is again a function of the leverage grid. If our leverage remains within the range and there's a pricing grid, if it remains at the lower end of the grid, the margins are lower and or should be lower than what we have, which should offset some of the impact of the base rate increase. Simply from a rate increase perspective, we have factored in five rate hikes. That's the first one. Secondly, with regards to Emirates NBD separation, let me start with CapEx. Our guidance, a couple of years ago, was for $30 million spend, up to $30 million. The biggest part of that was the separation of the data center, which we have done between last year and the between 2020 and 2021, and that's a number of only $17 million. We have a little bit of work to do on the finance and the HR systems, but we don't expect that to be more than a couple million. We should be able to complete the program significantly below the $30 million number, let's say give or take $20 million. In terms of the OpEx, we are as we bring things in-house, obviously you don't get the same benefits of scale as a large organization does. The $5 million is really the in-year charge for us to run that in-house. There may be $2 million more increase on a year-on-year basis, as we get the full year running cost this year, which is factored in the guidance that we have given, and nothing more after that. It's not a one time. It's a recurring part of our cost base, which is factored in the margin guidance both for 2022 as well as in the reported margins for last year. Understood. Thanks a lot. We will have our final question from the webcast. I hand over to Amy. Thanks, guys. We'll just take one over the webcast here as the final question. This is about the medium-term revenue guidance. Can you break down the 20%+ medium-term revenue growth? If the core business is doing 20% this year, what level of tailwind is there from post-pandemic tourism recovery? And therefore, how sustainable is 20%? What's the contribution from Saudi and Egypt in that? Thank you for that question. Any growth is a combination of market tailwinds and the hard work that the folks that come to business, you know, the result of that. It would be very difficult for me to necessarily break that down, but completely, very accurately. But we've said that typically our markets have, you know, secular growth in the low- double- digits. That's call it 12%- 13%, in that range. It does vary by year, but effectively somewhere in that region. Effectively, if you were to piece part or, you know, broadly, where the 20%+ growth is coming from, you would say that there are some secular tailwinds that we benefit from because of the industry that we're in. The rest of that is really down to the competitiveness of our business, the quality of our technology infrastructure, and of course, the excellent team that we have that is serving our customers to the best of our ability. Do you wanna add to that? Yeah. Just a couple points, just to clarify. The 20% medium- to long-term guidance is predicated on, as Nandan said, secular tailwinds of the business. Our initiatives and action that we have talked about earlier, DPO, for which we have given an explicit guidance, and then Saudi Arabia market entry, which we have said would be or we expect it to be at least a $50 million revenue opportunity over the next three to five years. That underpins our sustainable 20% guidance on the medium- to long- term. Just as a reminder, we articulated a few more other growth accelerator opportunities that have got the potential to increase the growth rate from even higher than 20%. We'll obviously be prudent in our timing as to when do we embark on those. This results release, we have announced our commitment to embark on one of those, which is a direct-to-merchant opportunity in Egypt, which we expect to be over and above the 20%, but we need a little bit of time to test the waters in the market and come back with more specific guidance on that opportunity later on in the year. Okay. That's all the questions we have time for today. I'll hand back to Nandan for any closing words. Yeah. I'd like to say thank you for attending this call and for your support and your understanding. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank all my colleagues, all 1,700 of them, who, you know, come into work to do their best and who are industry champions in the markets in which we serve. The confidence that you heard from Rohit and me is largely based on the fact that these individuals are the best in the business in the markets in which we serve. I wanna extend a shout-out to our 1,700 employees. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day. This presentation has now ended.