Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Network International interim r esults 2022. My name is Poppy, and I will be the operator for your call this morning. If you would like to ask a question during the question and 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. Thank you, Poppy. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today for Network International's 2022 interim results. I'm Nandan Mer, CEO of Network International, and with me is Rohit Malhotra, our CFO. We will run you through our results, and then we are happy to take your questions. It's been nine months since we laid out our new strategy and ambition to be the fastest-growing and most innovative payments company in the Middle East and Africa. At the center of this ambition is our purpose, to help businesses and economies prosper by simplifying commerce and payments for merchants, financial institutions, fintech, and ultimately the consumers they serve. To achieve this, we set ourselves the goal of 20%+ revenue growth year-on-year and to work towards an EBITDA margin of 45%-50%. These targets are predicated on a series of strategic initiatives through which we will both accelerate growth and continue to innovate on our industry-leading suite of services and capabilities. I'm pleased to say that we are progressing well and delivering on track against our plan. There's been a lot going on across the business. Let's start with some highlights from the first six months of the year. We've had another strong trading period, delivering substantial revenue growth of 31% year-on-year, and we've made strong progress on EBITDA margins too. As we committed, EBITDA margins are up 190 basis points while we continue to invest for growth. With such a strong balance sheet and cash flow generation, we see an opportunity to return excess cash through a share buyback program without compromising on our growth ambitions. This performance was supported by acceleration of digital payments across our markets, our successful strategic execution of our plan, and share gains as a consequence of that, including, but not limited to our home market in the UAE. We're also seeing good GDP growth across the region, and we're seeing buoyant economic conditions. Our market entry into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is progressing well, having recently secured another customer win. DPO also saw accelerated growth in the second quarter of the year, supported by some new services and capabilities that we have launched. All of this reaffirms our outlook and guidance for the remainder of the year. Now let's go through some of the strategic achievements in more detail, starting first with our Merchant Solutions business. Our Merchant Solutions business continues to grow from strength to strength. The slide here is mostly focused on our merchant business in the UAE and Jordan, and I'll talk about DPO in a moment. As you can see, across every KPI, we are seeing significant growth. The UAE in particular has seen strong consumer spending in the period, particularly from domestic customers where spending now is already 18% ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Also from tourists, with a particularly high number of tourist visitors in the first quarter of the year. We've spoken before about our focus on the SME space where we see significant growth opportunities, and our work here is paying off. We like the space as it is underserved by other acquirers, and there's still a lot of share to be gained. It's also a higher margin customer segment, and there is opportunity for a lot of cross-sells to help our SME customers to grow their business. All of this is leading to market share gains. Let me explain how we will continue to drive growth. As we set out at the launch of our strategy, growing our capabilities is key to strengthening our position in our markets and attracting new customers, and this is exactly what we are doing. Let me highlight three areas in particular. First, we're making it easier for merchants to do business with us, whether that's through automated onboarding or specific offers such as our hospitality solutions that make it easier to join up digital payment acceptance across multiple environments like the front desk, restaurants, spas, bars, and so on. Secondly, we're also helping merchants to accept many more types of digital payments, which in turn helps them sell more goods and services. We offer the widest range of stores of value. Our merchants can accept over 25 different types of payments, which is more than any of our competitors offer. Including but not limited to BNPL, mobile money wallets, and there's more to come soon, like real-time payments, which we're hoping to launch before the end of this year in the UAE and Jordan. We're also giving merchants more tools to accept those payments, including using their mobile phone if they don't want the expense of a point-of-sale terminal. Finally, last but not the least, we're helping our merchants grow their business. By growing our capabilities and value-added services, we're making it easier for merchants to do more with not just us, but to also grow their business. We're enabling merchants to grow their business through small business lending and providing merchants with analytics for them to better understand their P&L and their consumers. Let's talk DPO. DPO has been a part of our group for nearly a year now, and we're making good progress together. Merchant sign-ups are growing fast with wins across both key merchants as well as in the SME space. Sign-ups have been helped by the launch of real-time onboarding, which previously was a feature only available to our South African merchants, but we are pleased to say is now available to our merchants across almost all our DPO markets. I'm also very pleased that DPO has recently been awarded its license in Kenya, which is an outstanding result considering that there are a number of competitors in the market that have seen their license applications declined recently. We said there would be a number of revenue synergy opportunities between DPO and Network. During our year together, we've already launched services and signed cross-selling contracts that are building the foundations of future synergy delivery. DPO solutions are finding tremendous traction with our existing bank customers with whom we have processing agreements. DPO is leveraging Network's existing merchant base by expanding their online services backed with DPO Pay in the UAE and coming soon to Jordan. All this ultimately translates into increased revenue opportunities. While they've had a slightly slower Q1, DPO saw strong acceleration in Q2 back into the guided revenue growth range. Rohit, I'm sure, will talk more about their financial performance shortly. Let me move on to our plans for launching merchant services in more markets. As many of you know, Egypt is already an established market for Network in the processing space, where we serve over 20 financial institutions through both acquirer processing and issuer processing. The next step for us naturally is to serve merchants directly. After much preparation, we are now market-ready and are just awaiting our license to be awarded by the Central Bank of Egypt. While regulator timing is never within our control, we are hoping this will happen soon in the second half. While we are not expecting a substantial incremental revenue opportunity this year, we'll use our time in the second half to test our market approach and to continue to refine our business plan. If all goes well, as we expect it will, we expect to see new revenue streams building from 2023 onwards, which will be incremental to the long-term revenue guidance we have already given to the group. We'll provide more detailed guidance, financial guidance on that in Egypt in the next year. With a population of over 100 million and double-digit growth expected in digital payments over the next few years, we are really, really excited about the opportunity that the Egyptian market presents to us. Let's move on to the performance in our other business line, Issuer Solutions. As I mentioned earlier, our Merchant Solutions is growing from strength to strength, but we're also seeing the same record traction in Issuer Solutions. We have seen two quarters of high-teens growth, revenue growth, which is a first for this business line. We are winning plenty of new business, not just with brand-new customers, but also expanding our mandates and cross-selling services to our existing clients. We're seeing strong transaction growth with existing credentials and portfolios. New customer sign-ups are still well ahead of pre-pandemic levels with wins across both Africa and the Middle East. Let me also explain how we are achieving this growth. First, like in Merchant Solutions, we're making it easier for banks to do business with us. We're simplifying the sign-on process, the onboarding, and the migration of credentials from their existing operating systems to ours. We've spent a lot of time and effort in developing our API suite, which is gaining traction with fintech due to the ease of onboarding and our expanding range of APIs. Secondly, we're developing solutions that are top of mind for FIs when it comes to managing their highly valuable consumer credentials. When we survey our FI customers, they consistently say to us that credit and fraud solutions are the top priority for them. As a consequence, we are allocating resources to broaden our fraud and security solutions. We're also helping our issuers grow their business by reaching new customers. Through sector specific solutions for fintechs and digital- only banks, such as Fintech in a Box, where we issue cards and undertake processing for Fintech through Payment as a Service and chat banking, which provides our customers with the ability, provision transaction inquiry and real-time customer service and push notifications. We also provide bundled processing solutions such as Business in a Box, which enables our banks to integrate banking with wider business services for their SME customers. This is being rolled out through both, to both our acquiring and issuing customers. We've also expanded our data advisory services to enable our customers to enhance their access to their consumer base. Let's turn to Saudi. We are pleased with the progress we have made in Saudi, and it will be a significant market for us going forward. We've indicated previously that our key milestone this year would be customer signing rather than revenue, because that lays the foundation for future revenues. We've already signed two additional customers for processing services so far this year, which gives us a very solid underpin to our long-term revenue target. We have crossed over 20% of the long-term revenue target with these two new wins and with our existing clients. We're in the process of onboarding these two clients, and we expect to see customer revenue starting to build shortly. Our customer pipeline also continues to grow in Saudi, and we anticipate we will be announcing some new customer wins as the year progresses. All of this gives us renewed conviction in our long-term $50 million revenue opportunity and our payback of our investment in three to four years. With that, I'll hand you over to Rohit for our financial overview. Thank you, Nandan, and hello everyone. I'll take you through the financials and key highlights of our performance in the first half of the year. As Nandan mentioned, it's been a strong half. We delivered total group revenue growth of 31% year-over-year, and even without the contribution from DPO, we're comfortably north of our 20%+ revenue growth target. We saw margin expansion with underlying EBITDA growth of 26% year-over-year. There's a little bit of noise in that number, given the addition of DPO and the sale of our investments in Transguard Cash and Mercury. Stripping all that out, we saw very healthy like-for-like EBITDA growth of 32% year-over-year. The business is generating strong underlying free cash flow, which is up 90% year-over-year, primarily driven by higher underlying EBITDA. Our balance sheet remains strong, with leverage at 0.9 x EBITDA, leaving us with significant headroom to our covenant threshold of 3.5 x. Now, let's take a look at the trading performance in each of our business line, starting with Merchant Solutions. We saw strong growth across both TPV and revenue, which is a reflection of growing consumer spending in our key markets on the back of expanding GDP, as well as our improving competitive position. As a reminder, revenue in Merchant Solutions is predominantly generated in the UAE and Jordan, although the addition of DPO expands our direct-to-merchant presence across Africa. Compared to last year, group TPV grew 43% year-over-year and revenue was 53% higher. Growth remained resilient even after excluding the contribution from DPO, with TPV up 33% and revenue increasing by 30% on a year-over-year basis. Encouragingly, slightly more than half of the year-over-year revenue growth in UAE comes from same-store sales, while the remainder comes from new business, which could either be additional stores with existing merchants or new merchant sign-ups. Take rates excluding DPO were marginally lower in the period, albeit they still remain higher than they were in 2020. As you know, take rates are impacted by various puts and takes. Firstly, we have seen continued growth in certain merchant segments with higher take rates and a growing SME footprint. Our ever-increasing range of value-added services has also been supportive to take rates, and this has been marginally diluted by BAU mix changes with the growth of large key accounts as well as normal pricing adjustments for some customers. Let's now look at the domestic and international TPV trends. Direct acquiring volumes and growth trends in the UAE and Jordan have been positive through the entire first half. Within this, domestic TPV increased by 20% year-on-year and was also up 18% versus first half of 2019. The region has seen a sustained rebound in economic growth and consumer confidence since the start of the year, with domestic consumer spending seeing the natural correlation. International TPV grew by 92% year-on-year, which reflects COVID impacts in the prior year. If we strip that out and compare spends to the first half of 2019, they are still comfortably ahead with 7% growth. Trends there were supported by high visitor numbers with events such as Dubai Expo and major sporting events helping to drive tourism inflow in the countries. The other lens to apply to our direct-to-merchant business is growth by merchant segments. As you know, our merchant mix is well diversified across sectors, where the buoyant consumer environment is evident across the board. The main aspect to highlight here is the high growth in the travel and entertainment sector, where the year-on-year growth in volumes is significantly ahead of other sectors. We see this growth aligned with the trend in international volumes, which helps to explain the particularly high Q1 growth, which then naturally moderates into Q2. Although still a relatively small part of our directly acquired volumes, e-commerce is not only fast-growing, but also a strategic focus area for us. Our online TPV growth, excluding government and airlines, grew over 40% year-on-year in the first half, which was supported by growing demand for online payments from both consumers and merchants, as well as the capabilities we have launched in this space, like automated merchant onboarding, a web store builder, and introducing more stores of value. Let's now consider the trends at DPO. DPO saw an acceleration in trading through the first half, which, as Nandan explained earlier, is supported by the launch of new capabilities and investments in our sales approach. As you are aware, DPO was acquired in September last year, so the information provided on this slide is on a pro forma basis for information purposes only, as we had committed to doing. Overall, DPO saw H1 revenue growth of 23% year-on-year or 29% in constant currency terms. Within this, performance improved significantly on a year-over-year basis as we moved through the period, with second quarter revenues up 35% year-over-year in constant currency, following the 22% growth we saw in the first quarter. Take rates also improved as we progressed through the half, supported by an improvement in the mix of higher margin merchant services and mix changes between aggregation and gateway. We saw strong operating leverage through the P&L, with EBITDA up 65% in constant currency terms, with margins expanding by 200 basis points. Overall, we remain encouraged by the group's progress in Africa and confident in its ability to deliver our aspirations of revenue CAGR of 35% +. We also remain focused on delivering on the revenue synergies, where we have a number of ongoing work streams and expect to start showing benefits in the quarters to come. With that, let's move on and look at the performance of our Issuer Solutions business line. We saw record growth in Issuer Solutions with revenue up 17% compared to last year, driven by new business wins, expansion of existing client portfolios, and focus on value-added services, accompanied by strong underlying transaction growth. An important element to call out here is the presence of contractual revenue caps we have in place, which apply to certain parts of the Emirates NBD contract, which slightly lowers the overall growth of the business line. Excluding Emirates NBD Group, revenue increased by a very healthy 24% year-on-year within Issuer Solutions. KPI performance was also strong, with credentials hosted up 4% and the number of transactions processed accelerating up 30% on a year-on-year basis. Within this, Africa delivered particularly good growth, supported by an increase in credentials hosted following the onboarding of new customers last year across many markets and higher cross-sell activity. With that, let's now look at our performance by geography. The regional performance during the first half is reflective of the underlying business mix in our key markets. In the largest region, the Middle East, we have a balanced business mix across both Merchant Solutions and Issuer Solutions business lines. The region saw particularly strong trading with revenue up 22%, supported by growing consumer confidence and an increase in tourism inflow compared with the prior year, where COVID impacted international travel. Contribution margins for the region were higher, expanding by over 200 basis points year-on-year. This was mainly a reflection of the strong revenue growth in the region and demonstrates the operating leverage in the business, while at the same time investing in a market entry into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Moving on to Africa, where most of our activity relates to the processing on behalf of financial institutions across Issuer Solutions and Merchant Solutions and now includes direct-to-merchant services through DPO. Revenue increased by 56% year-on-year or 21% year-on-year if we exclude DPO. Growth in the region was consistent between the quarters alongside a continued expansion in all KPIs, particularly the number of transactions processed. Africa saw significant contribution margin expansion of over 900 basis points, partially driven by the addition of DPO. Even after removing DPO, margins were still up 800 basis points year-on-year, a reflection of a strong revenue growth alongside a largely fixed cost base. On that note, let's now consider our cost profile through the period. We maintained strong cost control around BAU expenses during the period, ensuring that where we have invested, it is within areas that are directly correlated with strategic projects and revenue growth. Total underlying expenses increased by 27% year-over-year, which I will break down into two categories. The first being expenses related to our strategic investments for growth, mainly associated with the addition of newly acquired DPO, which as I have previously mentioned, has seen strong margin leverage itself in the year, and costs relating to our entry into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The second category relates to like-for-like operating costs, which are up only 12% despite inflationary headwinds, supporting the 21% revenue growth delivered in the core business, excluding DPO. Within this like-for-like expense growth, almost one-third of the year-on-year cost increase pertains to investment in our people and talent retention, which is extremely important for us to continue to deliver on our growth agenda, especially in a highly competitive talent environment. We've also had strict discipline around core operating expenses and a number of initiatives we have put in place to do more with less that have started yielding benefits already, with more to come in the subsequent quarters. That includes developing and promoting internal talent, insourcing our tech capabilities, and relocating operational support functions to lower-cost locations within the group. With that, let's now look at the net income bridge for the period. Profit for the period increased by 113% year-on-year to $32 million, which as you can see in the chart, was primarily driven by higher EBITDA. We had a gain on the disposal of a 70% stake in Mercury, alongside the removal of STIs impacting EBITDA, which were nil in the period, in line with the guidance given earlier. The removal of STIs was broadly offset by higher D&A charge and net interest expense. We also saw a net FX gain on balance sheet translation, largely as a result of the devaluation of the Egyptian pound, where we have a regional operating center in Cairo. Lastly, we had higher taxes in the period following changes in the tax environment in some of the African markets, alongside overall higher taxable profits. Let's now move on to cash flow measures, starting with CapEx. Total CapEx amounted to $24 million in the period. Maintenance CapEx was $6.9 million, flat on a year-on-year basis. This mainly relates to the continued enhancement of our tech infrastructure, including hardware, software, storage, information security, and other compliance needs, and helps support our very strong BAU volume growth across both business lines and regions. Majority of the CapEx in the year was in growth, as we had guided to earlier, which totaled to $15.3 million. This was up year-on-year, and as normal, mainly relates to procurement of POS terminals for new merchant, new customers, especially driven by the increased pace of SME signings during the year, onboarding of new issuer and acquirer processing clients, and ongoing product development across both business lines. Lastly, capital spend relating to the entry into Saudi Arabia was $1.5 million, which remains on track within budget, where we expect to spend about $5 million in total this financial year. Our expectations for the full year on CapEx remain unchanged, with total CapEx expected to be in the range of $55 million-$60 million. Moving on to cash flows. We were highly cash generative through the first half. The business generated underlying free cash flow of $40 million, up 90% compared with the prior year. This was supported by higher underlying EBITDA, alongside positive changes in working capital before settlement-related balances. Lastly, the absence of STIs impacting EBITDA and the share of EBITDA from our investment in Transguard Cash, which we exited last year. These items more than offset the slightly higher CapEx spend, largely associated with our continued investment for growth. Given such strong cash flow generation and a strong balance sheet position, this has influenced our decision to implement a share buyback program. You would have seen our announcement this morning where we intend to return excess cash through a share buyback program of up to $100 million. Let me firstly remind you of a capital allocation policy which is consistent with the framework we articulated at our capital markets day last year. Our top priority is to invest for future growth. That growth could be through various organic growth accelerators such as new market entry or through selective and disciplined M&A, which will all be assessed against strict strategic and financial lenses. We also want to maintain a healthy balance sheet. Our target leverage is between 1x-2 x EBITDA, giving us plenty of headroom to our covenants at 3.5 x. We'll also be prepared to flex that higher in the short term for the right growth investment. Finally, we will take the opportunity to deploy excess cash when appropriate. Given our views on the current share price, our strong cash flow generation, and the strength of our balance sheet, we see share buyback as a sensible allocation of capital to return excess cash to our shareholders. Just to be clear, that doesn't preclude us from taking advantage of other growth accelerators or being able to pursue selective and disciplined M&A at the appropriate time. Let's now consider our financial guidance for the remainder of the year. We remain encouraged by the positive momentum and strong growth in the first half. Whilst we are mindful of the global macroeconomic challenges and inflationary pressures, our markets continue to see solid trading conditions. Bringing all of that together, we are comfortable in reconfirming our financial guidance for the full year, where we expect group revenue growth of 27%-29% year-on-year, excluding the three-month contribution from DPO in the prior year, and modest group EBITDA margin expansion. To conclude, our financial performance in the first half of 2022 saw solid trends and broad-based across growth across both regions and business lines. Cash flow generation and the balance sheet remain strong, supporting our share buyback program. We are reconfirming our financial outlook for the full year. With that, I will now hand you back to Nandan for his closing remarks. Thanks, Rohit. Hopefully everyone's takeaway from what you've heard today is that we remain resolutely focused in delivering on our organic growth strategy, targeting 20%+ revenue growth and 45%-50% EBITDA margins in the medium term. Our H1 financial performance gives us the confidence in both the targets that we have set and our strategy. I'm very proud and grateful to Team Network for delivering broad-based revenue growth across all regions and business lines. As I had mentioned previously, we embrace competition as it makes us better. I'm pleased to report that our competitive position in the UAE continues to be strong, and we are growing share with our market-leading capabilities. As mentioned before, we are seeing new client wins in Saudi Arabia and our pipeline of prospective clients is growing thanks to our brilliant leadership and the team based in Riyadh. Our Egyptian team has done a great job in readying us for the launch of our merchant services in Egypt. The scale of opportunities in our fast-growing market also means, as we've said before, we are not limited to organic expansion, and we continue to evaluate selective, disciplined acquisition opportunities. In summary, Network has a very bright future. Our amazing team, our unrivaled and expanding range of products and services, our highly resilient on-soil technology in key markets, strong corporate governance at the executive and board level gives us a position of strength across all our markets. Our continued progress is evidence that the path we are on is the right one. Thank you for listening, and with that, we'll be happy to take your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish 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 that your phone is unmuted locally. To confirm that, press star followed by one to ask a question. The first question for today comes from the line of Justin Forsythe with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Hey, thank you so much, guys. Nice quarter here. I've got a couple for you. First, I wanted to just touch on the decision for the share buyback. I know historically you've talked a lot about the kind of investments into new markets, trying to accelerate your growth at that 20%+ longer-term revenue guidance. Just wanted to understand how you weighed the ROI between kind of the share buybacks and what you expect to kind of generate in return on those newer investments. Is that what we should read into it, is that the return on those investments is lower than what a share buyback would be and/or what you could get from M&A, given private deal valuations maybe have come down a little bit recently? Secondarily, wanted to touch on integrated payments and, specifically, the Foodics integration, but even more broadly, ISVs and the integrated payment space within the Middle East. Is that an exclusive relationship? If not, who is the other partner on there, if you can share that, and any directional color on wallet share. Also, you know, what offerings I know you talked a little bit, I believe it was Nandan Mer about the hospitality vertical and some of the vertical specific offerings you have. Is that like a POS, a proprietary POS software? And how do you think about partnering versus your own developed software and technology there? Thanks a lot. Thanks, Justin. I'll take the first part of the first question, request Rohit to tag team with me, and then we'll come back to your question on integrated payments. I think as we said before, Justin, the principal focus of our capital allocation policy remains to prioritize investment to accelerate organic net revenue and profit growth. That's front and center of our consciousness day in and day out. We also continue to see inorganic growth opportunities, as you rightly pointed out. You know, we're in discussions constantly with third parties. You know, we'll be, as we said, very selective, highly selective, and we'll be very disciplined should we decide to pursue M&A. M&A in the context of, as in the Capital Market Day stated, we prioritize consolidation in existing markets as our number one priority for M&A. Secondly, accelerating our growth in new markets. Third, you know, acquiring new capabilities. That's again, front and center of our consciousness and, you know, that's part of doing business every day. The good news is, our leverage is below target. We're highly cash generative, and we have excess capital now. We see buyback as the best method to return excess cash on a one-time basis to shareholders in the current environment. That's how you should see this. Just to again answer possibly a concern that I detect in that question is that the buyback program is structured such that it gives us the flexibility to not compromise on our growth opportunities in line with our capital allocation policy. There was, I think, an embedded question on ROI. I'll pass on to Rohit. Thanks, Nandan. Hi, Justin. As Nandan mentioned, I don't think announcing a buyback program means that we can't pursue some of the other growth opportunities, which, as you rightly said, ROI is the lens we look at. I won't get into specific numbers, but that's the assessment we look at all the time for our growth and our inorganic growth initiatives. We already have opened up two new organic opportunities this year, Saudi Arabia market entry, as well as the direct-to-merchant launch in Egypt, and we'll continue to do so as we go along. I think you should look at this purely as a one-time program to return excess cash, given the fact that we, based on market expectations, would deliver roughly about $90 million-$100 million of free cash flow this year. If we hadn't done the buyback, we would have ended the year probably at about half a turn leverage, which is significantly below our threshold of 1x-2 x. Like I said earlier, we could flex that higher in the short term as well. We believe we have got enough and more firepower to pursue those growth opportunities as well, to continue to deliver at least 20% top line growth and perhaps beyond as well. Got it. Makes sense. Okay. Moving on to the second part of your question on, you know, verticals, including but not limited to hospitality. Absolutely. I mean, look, our job primarily is to help our customers, in this case, merchants, businesses grow. That's the value we bring to them. Sell more goods and services, to put it simply. You know, we are constantly surveying or researching best practices around the world and looking to deploy those best practices. Now, we have a set of capabilities that we know are market leading, but there are developments that are taking place in other parts of the world that we believe could augment our capabilities and therefore the partnerships with the likes of Foodics and FreedomPay. You know, we've obviously we are in touch with the market on a day-to-day basis. We get a lot of feedback from our customers. We take that feedback in terms of determining which are the best partnerships for us and evaluating those partnership opportunities. Justin, the other way to think about partnerships is it's a great way to test whether the technology that's relevant or is serving the market well in other markets is relevant for our markets. Clearly, you know, if the partnership construct works well, we will continue down that path, but if it doesn't, then we're happy to invest, you know, the free cash flow that we have in developing similar or more specific market-specific capabilities. Just as a note, we've been pretty good at doing this for the better part of two decades, so this is not new to us. We've had partnerships in the past, and we continue to develop new partnerships. Awesome. Thank you both. Appreciate it. Thank you. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to two questions only. The next question comes from the line of Orson Rout with Barclays. Please go ahead. Morning. Congrats on the very strong results, and thanks for taking my questions. The first one is just on Saudi Arabia. Good to see yet another customer announced there. Of course, issuing was very strong in H1, but I'm guessing it's too early for Saudi Arabia to having already added revenue in H1. Can you perhaps give us some rough color how much revenue you will expect in H2? Is a couple of millions of revenue perhaps the right way to think about, say, in H2 in terms of sizing? That's your first question. Then the second one is just on the online offline TPV split. Online is still obviously growing very strongly, even against tough comps. In Europe and the U.S., we've really seen online slowing in market growth rates to roughly flat versus very tough comps. Was just wondering, in the Middle East, are you still seeing a market shift to online, or is this more of a case of Network growing above the market rate in online and currently winning share versus competitors? Thank you. Thanks, Orson. Appreciate your questions. First one was on KSA. H2, we certainly hope to see more customer signings. Our job is to accelerate customer signings, and that's what we're focused on. We have a great set of capabilities. We've taken our best- of- breed capabilities from the UAE to KSA. We modernized it. We've installed it in the cloud in Jeddah, in partnership with Oracle. We've added new APIs. We made it simpler for banks to do business with us, as I mentioned. I think, you know, the way to think about these first two customer signings is really an early validation of our capabilities that we have brought to the kingdom. We continue to pursue new customer signings. We are the first of our kind in the kingdom, really, because, you know, the banks have largely been served by in-house installs, licenses installed. You know, having a third-party processor in the kingdom is a great alternative for banks as they consider the modernization of their capabilities, number one. Number two, there are also cost advantages of using shared infrastructure and shared capabilities such as the ones that we provide. In terms of you had a question regarding specific numbers, I'd say order of magnitude, you're in the right direction. I can't get into further specific because I don't have a crystal ball. Order of magnitude this year really for us in the kingdom, the number one objective is proof that our capabilities are fit for purpose in the market, and that the transactions are flowing through as resiliently and as, you know, accurately, et cetera, as they do in the UAE. That's our number one priority this year. In terms of online and offline, I'd say online growth, because we're coming off a much smaller base, I don't see online growth in our region more broadly slowing down. I'll get Rohit to speak a bit more about specifics. Just looking at the macro view, you know, I don't think we've broken up our DPO revenues, but or our TPV, but when we do at the end of the year, you'll see that the pace is accelerating. Now, some of it, you asked how much of this is market, you know, market shift, secular shift, and how much is us. We are, I can say with reasonable confidence, growing faster than market. What that means is that our capabilities are fit for purpose in the online space. Over to you, Rohit. Thanks, Nandan. Hey, Orson. In terms of numbers, our online business, as we've always said an online business is really a tale of three cities. We've got large government relationship, airlines, and then the rest of retail e-commerce portfolio, which is what we focus on. That portfolio was growing 15%-20% pre-pandemic, and then we had a massive jump, the volumes doubled last year. We've always said that at some point in time, once face-to-face shopping returns, those will normalize, but they'll clearly normalize at a level higher than the growth rates where they were pre-COVID, because there has been a behavioral shift, both from a consumer's perspective as well as from a merchant perspective. That's what we are seeing in these numbers, 40% year-on-year growth. Whether it stays there or marginally drops, but we still expect to stay higher than the rate at which we were growing pre-COVID, partly because of the fact that there's momentum in the market. There's clearly a transition happening from face-to-face to online, but also because it's such a strategic focus area for us, and we continue to add more capabilities, value-added services, and partnerships to augment that. Super helpful. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Alexandre Faure with BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for letting me on. Two quick questions from me. Firstly, Rohit, thanks very much for unpacking the different take rates drivers in H1. Was just wondering if you could highlight perhaps which of those you expect to stay in H2. You talked about price modification, so I think that's gonna have a bit of an annualization impact in H2, for instance. I was wondering if you could comment on any impact from digesting the regulation changes a few quarters ago. That was my first question. Second question is for both of you. When do you think you'll consider that the DPO integration is well underway and you have capacity to move to other things? Thank you very much. Thanks. I'll take the first one and maybe hand over to Nandan for the second one. In terms of take rates, Alex, as I've always said, it's really a mathematical output of various puts and takes in the business. Our take rates, even if we exclude DPO for a minute, for a like-for-like comparison, were about 34.5 basis points in H1 this year, which were just marginally lower than 35 basis points last year, and comfortably higher than the 32 basis points we had in H1 of 2020. I've always said they'll broadly stay in the same range because you've got puts and takes. Let's look at what those are. On the upside, we continue to expand our presence on the SME side, sign more merchants. As we have called out in the release, SME volumes now contribute to almost 26% of our total volume base. This number was less than 17% pre-COVID. That comes with a higher take rate. We also continue to bring more and more value-added services to the market, which again helps us increase those take rates. That's on the positives. In terms of the offsets, we have seen a very strong international footprint in the first half of this year. Depending on which industry vertical you look at, because our take rates on the international side tend to be slightly lower. Then we have also seen very strong relationship growth in our large relationships, which also tend to have slightly lower take rates. When you put all of that together, that broadly remains stable. I wouldn't specifically talk about H2. Those trends continue to change, continue to evolve. What we've always said is, because we have such a diversified portfolio, across domestic and international and also across different industry verticals, with our continued momentum on the SME, on the online, on value-added services, we don't really expect that to meaningfully change, in second half or more longer term. This is excluding DPO, which again just to reiterate, at 74-75 basis points is clearly more than twice the take rates that we enjoy in the core Network business. Nandan, you wanna take the second? Yeah. Thanks, Rohit. So the second question was on DPO integration. How do we feel about that? Is it underway? I qualify that as a yes, it is underway. Deep engagement with our colleagues in DPO. Frequent, you know, travel back and forth between our Network folks, leadership, as well as at a more operating level. A good, healthy respect across Network and DPO for each other. You know, fortunately, our capabilities are quite complementary to each other. We're learning a lot from DPO. DPO, I believe, is also learning a lot from Network. You know, the learning will continue. It will continue for a long, long time to come. The beauty about this combination, which I guess was the thesis for this acquisition, was that it would open up new markets for us, which it has, and I'm pretty confident, you know, hindsight is 20/20, but even in the first nine months that we've been together, we've been able to talk about harnessing opportunities in markets in a much more differentiated way than we would be able to do by ourselves, or I would say even DPO would be able to do by itself. The proof of the pudding now is gonna be how fast can we grow in the DPO markets as a combination. These are new markets for us from an acquiring perspective. How quickly we can make DPO successful in the Middle East. I'm hoping in six months, you know, we'll be able to reinforce that is well underway. Both those are well underway. That's very clear. Thank you very much. The next question comes from the line of Alastair Nolan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe first just on the setup into the second half. I think the volume trends you showed as part of the presentation show a little bit of a slowing into June. We've obviously got a tougher set of comps in the second half. Can you just talk about the various puts and takes as to what kinda gives you confidence about maintaining growth at the existing level given those tougher comps? And then secondly, just on Egypt, can you maybe give us a little bit more of a feel for conscious of 2023 contribution, but kinda how big that market could be, how big of an opportunity, and maybe try and put some numbers around it? That'd be really helpful. Thank you. Sure, Alastair. Did I ask, please? First, in terms of the comps. It's just taking a step back. Our guidance for the full year is to deliver 27%-29% year-on-year growth, excluding the DPO contribution in the base. Of that, in H1, we delivered 31%, and we always expected H1 to be a stronger half just given the base effect. First half of last year, we had the impact of Omicron in UAE and international as well, which impacted the travel and those trends, normalized only from Q3 onwards. We always expected H1 to be stronger, given the base effect. Our top end of our guidance of 29% year-over-year growth implies 31% in H1 and about 27% in the second half of the year, which still is quite impressive. We expect the momentum in both issuing and acquiring, as well as in DPO, to continue into the second half as well. Again, we continue to... The world is a tougher macroeconomic environment now than it was earlier. There are inflationary pressures as well. We have flows from tourists that live in those markets as well. We continue to monitor the situation closely, but at this point in time, we haven't seen the impact of any slowdown in any of our markets, so that gives us confidence to be able to deliver a full year guidance. Nandan, you wanna talk about Egypt? Sure. Alastair, you know that we're a company that plays for pole position, right, in the markets, and we're used to being operating in pole position in our core markets. Frankly, even DPO has the same mindset. As a group, it's all about pole position, both about share as well as harnessing large pools. We would not be looking at Egypt unless you know, Egypt represented a pretty significant revenue pool for us to go after. You know, it is early days only because we haven't processed a single transaction yet. We're on the, you know, we're at liftoff now. We're ready to go. We're waiting, as you can, as for our license approval. Maybe this question is better answered six months from now once our license approval has come, and we are starting to see some early, you know, flow of business. You should expect us to have a pretty significant ambition for Egypt. Excellent. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Sandeep Deshpande with JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Thanks for letting me on, and good results this morning. Congratulations. Couple of things for me. Firstly, on the recovery in the international business, do you see, I mean, clearly you have an understanding of how international is recovering in the UAE, whether international recovery in terms of the number of international visitors to UAE has recovered, or this is a recovery which of course in dollar terms you are above the 2019 levels, but whether this is just much higher take rate per tourist coming or foreign visitor coming into the UAE. As the volume of visitors increases, whether you expect this to change. The second question is regarding back again, unfortunately, the take rate. Historically, you've had some kind of seasonality in take rates. The first half is lower than the second half. I mean, in this new growth environment that you see, do you expect that to continue? I mean, you saw a small decline year-on-year excluding DPO in the first half of this year, but second half last year was much higher. How should we be comparing take rates in terms of forecasting into the second half of the year? Okay, maybe I'll take a stab at your question, Sandeep. Thanks for the compliment. I'll share it with the entire team here. 1,700 employees working their best to deliver these results. Just in terms of volumes for the second half, Sandeep, you know, the second half tends to be stronger, or at least fourth quarter tends to be our strongest quarter. We're hoping that that trend will continue. Unfortunately, we don't have a crystal ball either. We see trends from our previous years, obviously, and that gives us our forecasting ability. But at the end of the day, as Rohit said, you know, there's a lot of factors impacting international visitors into the country and, you know, we hope that the country is, you know, the UAE, as you know, is a very hospitable place for people to come visit and, you know, there's something for everybody, for young families, for, you know, for more mature, you know, tourists, et cetera. Long may that continue. Of course, even Jordan is growing as a destination for people, and we've seen that in our Jordanian volumes. Then of course, as everybody's aware, we've got the FIFA World Cup coming in Q4, and I'm told that Dubai is going to benefit from that rising tide. You know, a lot of people are gonna be looking to stay in Dubai and make the commute to Qatar. I believe the airlines, the hotel chains, everybody is gearing up for that. I hope that gives you some comfort around H2, especially Q4. In terms of take rates, I think, you know, as Rohit emphasized, we're very focused on growing take rates in addition to growing volume. For us, growing the Merchant Solutions business is not just about growing TPV. It's about adding value to our customers, while the transaction is in flight, you know, reducing fraud, reducing credit risk, and post-flight, providing them with the analytics that can help them grow their business. Of course, start taking more share of value, et cetera. I think as we've discussed before, Sandeep, alternative payment methods are higher yielding than your traditional payment methods or traditional brands or rails. Again, that's another component of take rate. Rohit, did I miss anything? No. Okay. Thanks, Sandeep. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Great. Thank you. Morning, Nandan, Rohit, and congrats on the results. Two from me. Firstly, you talked about the buyback but also pursuing kind of your M&A strategy in a disciplined way. I'm curious to understand what is the level of leverage that you feel comfortable to run with? Would you consider kind of announcing further buybacks, as well as sort of ongoing, M&A? Just to understand what threshold of leverage you're comfortable with. Secondly, just to kinda better understand the opportunity in Africa, I'm actually in Tanzania at the moment, and I've had some pretty good experiences with DPO myself. Just curious, you talked about direct acquiring in Egypt, but what are the other kind of big pockets you see in Africa, in driving kind of the acquiring opportunity for you in a region where historically you've been much more issuer-focused? Thank you. Hi, Mo. Let me start with the first one. I'm glad that you're enjoying the services of DPO in Tanzania. On the buyback, as we have said, our target leverage, in consistent with the capital allocation framework we outlined at the CMD last September, is 1x-2x EBITDA. That's our target zone. For the right opportunity, we wouldn't mind flexing it in the near term to higher than that, so long as we have a deleveraging profile and we come back to our target leverage. It has to be the right opportunity, either organic or even if it's inorganic. It has to be extremely disciplined and meet our ROI thresholds. That's the thinking behind it. At this point in time, we are at lower end of that range. If there was no buyback, we would have been at half a turn. Even if we were to complete the entire $100 million between now and end of the year, we'll still be only at 1x. We've got sufficient flex. At this point in time, this is a short-term, one-time opportunity to return excess cash to the shareholders because we do believe we have a lot of opportunities again. I wouldn't infer this to have another buyback subsequently, though, world keeps evolving and we continue to monitor the situation and if we think that's the best use of cash, we would come back and update the market. At this point in time, we believe we have got ample growth opportunities and a balance sheet to fund it, and this should be just seen as a one-time tactical excess cash to the shareholders. In terms of DPO's own growth opportunities, DPO is in 20 markets. It has market-leading position in three or four markets, including the one that you're in. We continue to see obviously tremendous runway for growth in its key markets such as South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, et cetera. There's also where we have a very small base in many of those other 20 markets. What we'd like to do is, you know, reach our potential, you know, reach pole position, most of the key markets in Africa that DPO is already in. Then consequent to that, when we see that, you know, the runway for growth is becoming a bit shorter, start opening up new markets at that stage so that we don't spread our butter too thin and we are focused in how we invest for organic growth. Again, I think in another six months, we should have a better lens on that. Got it. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Tammy Qiu with Berenberg. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you for taking my question. Regarding your online transaction volume, which has been very strong, and I just wonder, do you get more online business from your existing merchant that you are serving for offline purpose, or do you actually get it as a package of, let's say, online/offline as omni-channel? How do you feel like serving the merchant who is international merchant, but having UAE or presence for online in your region? Okay. I'd say all of the above is the best way to think about it. In terms of online merchants, clearly our DPO footprint is, you know, we are acquiring new merchants there. That's great. I must say that we've also had record signings, thanks to DPO Store in the UAE, where we've launched only three, four months ago. Every month we're breaking new records there. The ease of integration, the capabilities that we're bringing in terms of listing your products, you know, if you're an SME merchant, giving you a quick win in terms of broader distribution and broader reach, that's working well. But we're also signing up new businesses, new online businesses that are launching in our region. It's a bit of both. In terms of omni-channel, thank you for bringing that up. As you know, we have N-Genius Online, we have N-Genius Point of S ale, both of which are market leading in terms of their capabilities. We are now on a journey to bring that, those capabilities closer together under a unified commerce umbrella. That journey has started. We made some progress and we've, I think, mentioned it in our release and more to come, but I think we will truly be much more of a unified commerce capability set in H2 than we have been in the past, just because we're integrating those capabilities at a faster pace. Was there a third element to that question? Basically, how do you feel like serving or do you get traction with international merchant who wants to operate from online perspective or omni-channel presence in your region? Yes. Thank you. There are two kinds of international or multinational merchants doing business in our region. One who have franchised their products or their brand or their capabilities into the region. There we've had a very strong track record on, you know, serving these franchisees in our region on a standalone basis. I think we referenced this earlier, our partnership with the likes of Adyen points to basically, you know, an increased cooperation with international, you know, providers of our service, of online payment services, so that we can augment their capability set for our regions. That was the whole rationale for the partnership with Adyen, and that rationale still holds good because we are seeing progress and we're able to serve our merchants, you know, through this partnership. We're hoping to sign more partnerships such as that, because ultimately it is about, you know, as I think you rightly point out in your question, it is about being able to serve the global merchant through a single capability set. These partnerships enable us to provide that, you know, that last leg, if you may, of capability in the markets in which we are present. Okay, thank you. Is it right to understand, in the future from your omni-channel online perspective, you'll be mainly serving your local merchants who have both channels, and you'll be working with someone like, for example, Adyen when it comes to international merchants instead of directly competing with them? It's a bit of both. It's a bit of both, frankly. I mean, where the merchant has originated the relationship with, let's call it a third party, without being specific only about one name, and the merchant is now looking for an additional, you know, just basically a hub and spoke model, where they have local acquirers providing similar services to what they're used to in their home market, that's where we step in partnerships with the global majors. Having said that, we have the same capability set that these global majors have with respect to clients that are multi-market in our own region. I'll take DPO again as a classic example. If you're a multi-market African business such as an airline or a hotel chain, et cetera, single point of integration into DPO in Africa will give you multiple markets and so on and so forth. Again, with DPO coming to the UAE and to Jordan, we're just expanding that multi-market capability to the Middle East. But there are plenty of. If I may just use Apple as an example in the UAE, you know, they're a global merchant for, you know, an acquirer in other parts of the world, but they work with us here in the UAE, right? Okay, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A, our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Nandan Mer for any closing remarks. Just wanna say thank you for participating in this call and we appreciate your engagement and the coverage you provide to Network. You know where to find us if you have any additional questions. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.