Hello everyone, and thank you for joining this afternoon's webcast, which will focus on another of our specialist lending businesses: Commercial Finance. Before we start, I'd just like to bring to your attention the normal disclaimer notice which is on your screen now. This is the third of these events, having previously updated you on each of our Retail Finance and Real Estate Finance businesses. Last November, Retail Finance highlighted their proven track record in leveraging our proprietary technology platform to scale the business and deliver cost efficiencies. Since the end of 2020, we've doubled net lending in that business to just over GBP 1.3 billion in June this year, and our share of new business in that market was 17% at the half-year. The opportunity and ambition for further growth in Retail Finance was also explained. In July this year, the Real Estate Finance team articulated their strong track record in specialist property lending, the strength of their relationship management, and highlighted their cost-efficient platform to support further profitable growth in a very large market. The earlier presentations on Retail Finance and Real Estate Finance remain available to view on our corporate website. Today, we will focus on our Commercial Finance business. After some introductory comments from me, I'll hand over to Managing Director John Bevan and colleagues Sean Powell, James Hodkinson, and Will Airey. John and his team launched the business for the group in 2014 and have organically built the success story you'll hear about today. John has decided to retire at the end of this year, and consistent with our succession planning, James will become Managing Director with effect 1st January 2025. I would like to thank John for his hard work and dedication over the last decade. We wish him a long and happy retirement. The board and I have full confidence in the team, under James's leadership, continuing to grow and deliver attractive returns. After the presentation, we have time set aside as normal to take questions, and the session overall should last a little over one hour. For those less familiar with Secure Trust, having exited several subscale businesses in recent years, we're now a more focused specialist lender. We've made significant progress and grown net lending by GBP 1.25 billion since the end of 2020 until the end of Q3 this year. We see further growth potential in each of our large addressable markets. We're predominantly retail deposit funded and have broadened our product range and grown deposit balances by GBP 1.15 billion over the same period. At the end of 2023, we had GBP 390 million of drawings from the Bank of England's TFSME scheme, which requires to be repaid fully by Q4 2025. By the end of October, we'd already repaid early on GBP 120 million ahead of next year's contractual maturities. We remain focused on managing our costs in support of our financial targets and continue to deliver operational cost efficiencies. In August, we upgraded our ambition for our Project Fusion cost optimization program to deliver GBP 8 million of annualized savings by the end of 2025. We will have delivered GBP 5 million of that by the end of the current financial year. Having reviewed how we are organized internally, we're in the process of implementing a new organizational design that will deliver GBP 3 million of savings in 2025. We're making solid progress toward achieving our GBP 4 billion net lending target that will support an attractive return on capital. You will have seen in our recent Q3 trading statement that net lending of GBP 3.4 billion at the end of September was 7.1% higher than the same period last year and 0.5% up in the quarter. New business lending of GBP 577 million was at its highest for the year. Net lending in Commercial Finance grew by 3.1% in the quarter, despite evidence of some clients divesting in anticipation of potential changes to Capital Gains Tax. Changes were subsequently announced in the Chancellor's budget at the end of last month, and those client choices will impact on net lending balances in Commercial Finance in Q4. The market environment remains challenging. However, with expectations of further reductions in interest rate, we are confident that demand for credit will pick up and be supportive of our own growth plans. We have five medium-term financial targets which are shown on this slide. We continue to make good progress towards achieving these, and clearly our priority is to deliver improved returns in the 14%-16% range. As you can see on the bottom half of the slide, we are crystal clear on the level of loan book scale and other metrics that are required to deliver those levels of return. It requires us to continue delivering lending growth to get to GBP 4 billion, maintain our credit discipline, deliver a further small shift in the mix of lending towards our consumer businesses, and to keep control of cost growth. We remain confident in our ability to do so. The group then becomes capital accretive. Our core purpose is to help more consumers and businesses fulfill their ambitions. Our purpose provides clarity of direction and is the common focus in each of our diverse businesses, even though they operate in a range of large specialist lending segments. The Commercial Finance team serves business customers and delivered lending growth of 65% from the end of 2020 to the end of last year, when lending balances stood at GBP 381 million. Today's presentation will bring to life what we offer, the team's track record, the size of the market, and opportunities for further growth. Unlike our other businesses, Commercial Finance provides clients with a revolving line of credit to support their working capital needs. The team will explain the recurring revenue benefits of their model, as well as their approach to structuring and risk management. You will hear similarities today with previous business spotlights, the same focus on helping customers, a deep understanding of the market, the importance of relationships, disciplined risk management, and the opportunity to capture further growth. The team are asset-based lending specialists and have a track record of delivering growth in their specialist market. The operating model is low cost and scalable and generates attractive returns with a service-led approach. John will explain the scale of the market, which is why we see further opportunity for profitable loan growth in the specialist business. So let me now hand over to John initially to explain more about the business. Thank you, David. Hello everybody. My name is John Bevan, and I head up the Commercial Finance business. As you've just heard from David, after 10 years with the group, I'm about to take up my well-earned retirement. I am, however, delighted to be joined here today by my colleague, Sean Powell, National Sales Director, Will Airey, our Head of Risk, and James Hodkinson, who is currently our Chief Operating Officer, but post my retirement, he will take over responsibility for the Commercial Finance business. Before we hear from the guys, I will provide you with a brief overview and a summary of the core pillars that underpin the financial performance. Importantly, a common theme throughout the presentation will be how the three parts of the business collaborate with one another and how they are relying on each other's outputs. As you can see from the screen, we have an experienced team and one that has largely been together since our inception. I have every confidence that they can take the business to the next level of growth in the coming years. I'm also very conscious that asset-based lending may not be as familiar to some of you as perhaps more traditional debt products. Put simply, we provide working capital solutions for UK SMEs or, importantly, with the benefit of asset-backed security. Our facilities typically range from GBP 5 million- GBP 50 million. To help demonstrate this on screen, we have a brief video which we frequently use to exhibit the product capability. In Commercial Finance, we provide asset-based lending and funding solutions. This is primarily to support working capital, mergers and acquisitions, refinancing, or even turnaround situations. Traditionally, a standard business loan is provided based on historical financial information and requires amortized payments, whereas asset-based lending is based on the current financial assets and can also be provided on a revolving basis. Being future-oriented is all about embracing change. At Secure Trust Bank, we try to apply this not just internally, but most certainly when we're speaking to our clients and looking to ways of providing funding solutions for them. It's allowed us to demonstrate a partnership approach to our funding, which we think is very much customer-oriented as well as being future-oriented. The process that we use to sign off a deal here can really be split into two parts. The first part is the deal forum, where the new business team brings a deal in, and we help them to structure it, making sure that it protects the bank in a good structure but also meets the client's needs. The second part is a credit committee where the terms and conditions get fully approved, etc., and the full paper is put through. That's then approved by risk. Because of the different types of deals we like to do, Secure Trust has a very strong hybrid ABL cash flow or overpayment facility offering, which works really nicely with the types of transactions we like to do. So in terms of signing off a new business file, once the deal has been sanctioned through a credit committee, we then go through a process of getting the legal documents in place. We have pre-commencement conditions, and then the final thing is the KYC. We sign off the customer due diligence, and then we'll hit the button to make the first payment. So the key factors we look for in a deal can pretty much change on every deal that we look at. To give you an idea, the two key things we're looking for, the areas, are the financial performance of the business, making sure that the business has enough liquidity and working capital to continue to thrive, but also that it can ultimately repay the debt that we're putting in. The second side that we look for is the collateral or security piece. So it's making sure that we've got the right exit strategy alongside that collateral to make sure that if it is required, we can fully exit from a transaction without a loss to the bank. The ongoing due diligence is really important. It's the reason why a lot of our private equity and sponsors keep coming back because they know the value for money and the service that we provide is excellent. I think it's fair to say within Commercial Finance that we're looking at the ledgers, the collateral, the financials every day. So it's not a case of we have a monthly review. Every day we have a system called Risk Factor that shows us the collateral trends of our clients. So the RM team here are monitoring that. So every day we're constantly looking at the various different movements in the client's position. The story doesn't end there. It's the start of an ongoing relationship and a flexible facility which can change with the business. We know that funding is the lifeblood of business growth, and that is central to creating jobs and supporting the U.K. economy. Secure Trust Bank Commercial Finance, where our expertise helps business ambitions flourish. Hopefully, you found that useful. You can see that the business has enjoyed consistent balance sheet growth, and for transparency, we have shown here the gross and net monthly end balances, the difference being that any cash receipts received on the final day of the month are processed overnight, and the net balances will take this allocation into account. During the COVID period, many clients either paused trading activity or traded at much reduced levels, but in either case, turnover levels typically fell by over a third. Most took advantage of government schemes to provide additional liquidity, and while the wider ABL market is still to fully recover this position, we can see that the STB balance sheet has not just recovered but has shown significant further growth. When we established the Commercial Finance business, we invested in a scalable infrastructure, which I will cover in more detail on the next slide. With this now established, any future growth should only see a marginal increase in the cost base. This is demonstrated in the flattening of the forecast headcount line on the graph you can see on screen. You may have previously heard from our Real Estate Finance colleagues. The Commercial Finance book effectively represents the other half of business finance in Secure Trust Bank. Our primary product offering remains Receivables Finance, with some exposure to inventory and other assets that may sit on the client's balance sheet. Nearly 70% of our book is represented by prepayments against receivables. Key to the effectiveness of our operating model is the level of collaboration among the three areas: origination, portfolio, and risk. We believe that this is cultural and essential to how we manage our clients and the debtor risk. Importantly, this is a high-touch model. Key strategically to our development over the last 10 years has been the build-out of the regional model, with a head office in Manchester and additional regional offices in Leeds, Birmingham, and London. It is essential that we are close to both our source of new business and our clients, as both are built on individual relationships. Creating a critical mass with the right levels of expertise in each of the four regional offices has been a significant investment, but one that is now well established. Key to achieving this has been to attract and retain the best people. You will have seen in David's earlier slide that we have grown the balance sheet by 65% over the last three years, but it is these strategic achievements that have enabled us to grow the net income line by over 100% during the same period. We commenced trading from a greenfield site in August 2014. While some of that growth has inevitably been affected by COVID, we have outperformed the market by some distance and taken considerable market share from our competitors. This is a market which is dominated by the high-street banks but continues to grow year- on- year. Outside of these banks, there are more than 50 independent providers of various forms of asset-based lending, and the U.K. remains the most developed market outside of the U.S. The U.K. is a GBP 21 billion industry, with 34,000 businesses using this type of facility and supported by a history of year-on-year growth. From a startup, we have already become a top five provider of ABL lines outside of the main banks, providing nearly GBP 20 billion of funding to over 250 U.K. businesses. We are confident that we can continue to increase our presence in the market and at the same time increase our overall contribution to the group. Our business is underpinned by the four pillars we see on screen, and it's important to note that our people remain central to all of these. The pillars are effectively the levers that we have available to drive the financial performance. The guys will walk you through each of these in their individual sessions, with a particular focus on how we manage them, but also how we can further develop these opportunities. So, in summary, I'm hoping that you leave here with a clear feeling that the Commercial Finance business has a strong and experienced team with a collaborative business model which is based on providing bespoke working capital solutions to UK SMEs. We have a proven track record of consistent growth, and in a market where there remains a significant opportunity. On that note, I will now hand you over to my colleague, Sean Powell. Thank you, John, and hello everyone. My name is Sean Powell, and I'm the National Sales Director within Commercial Finance. Alongside the regional managing directors and the dedicated team of sales professionals, my team are responsible for originating and structuring new facilities. In this section, I'm going to cover our first pillar, maximizing new business. Here we can see our proposition. We offer a full range of asset-based lending products. While our facilities are typically receivables-led, it's important that we are seen to have the capability of delivering multi-asset solutions. Our product set is not unique. What differentiates us and why we win business is how we structure our facilities and our ability to deliver a tailored funding solution which meets the customer's needs. We invest the time to truly understand the customer's business model, their plans, and both current and future funding needs. Through a series of face-to-face meetings, we will quickly ascertain if we can provide the right solution. Our teams are skilled at debt structuring. They know the ABL market and have extensive networks in their local advisory communities. Our reputation for delivery gives our introduced network the confidence to refer their valued relationships to us. We are structured in such a way that enables us to be agile, make quick decisions within a robust credit framework, and meet tight deadlines. Key to our proposition is our in-life management, which is focused on a relationship-led approach. James will cover this in detail later. We do not operate in the volume market where price is often the key driver. We target customers that will benefit from a tailored solution where our value proposition is fully appreciated. Here you will see some of the key features of our pricing structure. The revolving nature of our facilities, together with our average client life, delivers excellent recurring income and an endowment effect which James will discuss in more detail. We have a clearly defined target market, which we believe is ideally suited to our product set and value proposition. We work with U.K. trading companies seeking a specialist funding partner. Targeting facilities between GBP 5 million -GBP 50 million enables us to demonstrate our expertise and provide a return which is commensurate with our service proposition. These requirements will usually arise following a specific event where there's a strong need for a tailored funding solution and price is not the key factor. These events arise across different parts of the economic cycle, providing us with a non-cyclical flow of leads. While the customer sector forms an integral part of our overall risk assessment, we are sector agnostic, giving us a large target market. Private equity is an important part of our target market and an area where we've been particularly successful. Transacting with over 25 different PE houses, our reputation for delivery and a strong in-life management has led to significant repeat business from over 2/3 of our active PE network. PE-backed companies represent 50% of our portfolio, and with access to additional capital alongside sector and financial expertise, we believe this delivers a lower cost of risk. The profile of a typical opportunity requires a funding structure in what can be a complex and evolving customer scenario. The funder will often be an integral part of the solution, acting in an advisory capacity. This can lead to early engagement, exclusivity, and the importance of certainty of delivery and meeting tight deadlines. This profile plays to our strengths of agility, flexibility, and fast decision-making and makes us well placed to take advantage of the significant market opportunity. We recently provided a facility to Hobbycraft, the UK's largest arts and crafts retailer, which is a great example of our target market and proposition. This introduction came to us exclusively via Modella Capital, a peer that we've transacted with previously. The opportunity arose through a proposed acquisition and service-led refinance from a US ABL. This was our second transaction with Modella, who had prior experience of our structuring capabilities and in-life relationship model. We worked closely with both the PE and external advisors, and alongside our sector experience, were able to deliver a facility which leveraged this expertise. Direct access decision-makers enabled us to move quickly and work to their timeframes. Our robust due diligence and credit process gave all parties confidence in our ability to deliver the facility. You will see from the quote how important these factors are, which is a common theme for transactions of this nature. John talked about our impressive growth in both balance sheet and income over the last three years. One of the key pillars which has contributed to this track record is our new business performance. Here you can see the trend over that period, which is aligned to our strategic goal of being a specialist funder, providing a tailored solution in the GBP 5 million- GBP 50 million space. Our average facility size has grown by 102% to GBP 21.5 million, and average income has grown by 184% to GBP 764,000. The improved returns reflect the higher fees which can be generated on larger deals. It is not a reflection of us moving up the risk curve. There have been no changes to our risk appetite throughout the period, and we have maintained a robust credit process, as you'll hear from Will. Our ability to generate larger deals is testament to our growing reputation for delivery and ABL expertise. We believe we are well positioned to maintain our current profile of new deals. We operate a low-cost of acquisition model, which is not focused on the broker market. Our commission payments are immaterial. Our route to market is through the advisory network consisting of accountants, insolvency practitioners, corporate finance houses, PE, and debt advisory boutiques. We have established small regional teams of highly experienced and skilled originators who will always transact on a face-to-face basis, reinforcing our relationship-led approach. The new business team works closely with our risk and portfolio teams and offers a deal team approach, which enables us to capitalize on our expertise when assessing each opportunity. This approach provides certainty of delivery, with over 80% of offers becoming a client, and benefits from the seamless handover to the portfolio team, creating the platform for an excellent customer journey. I spoke earlier of our success in the PE market, and over the last three years, 65% of our business has been sourced from this community, with the remainder largely coming from our advisory network. This reinforces the strength of our proposition and the importance of our solution-led approach. Over the last two and a half years, we have written 4% of the ABL deals transacted in the GBP 5 million -GBP 50 million space. We believe we have a significant opportunity to increase our penetration and grow our market share while remaining a specialist funder. Our ability to transact across a wide facility size, our tailored solutions, together with our in-life management, will continue to provide us with a competitive advantage. We have invested in our regional model, which provides an excellent platform for growth, with the capacity to more than double penetration in our target market. Our expertise and service model will help facilitate partnerships with debt funds and offer syndicated facilities, which not only represents an opportunity for growth, but also presents a lower cost of risk due to their structure and profile. We have transacted in a number of less crowded sectors and have the opportunity to build our expertise and capitalize on our existing relationships further. The PE market remains a key sector for us and one which we believe will continue to provide opportunity for growth. By nurturing our existing relationships, we will benefit from ongoing repeat business, and with only 10% penetration of the BVCA members, we have a large untapped market on which to build new relationships and transact. I'm going to hand over to James, who will talk about our in-life relationship model. Thank you, Sean, and hello everyone. My name is James Hodkinson, and I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Commercial Finance. Very excited to be taking over from John at the end of the year. Obviously, very big shoes to fill, and the business is in great shape, and we have a lot to thank John for in this regard. My team are responsible for the ongoing in-life management of our asset-based lending clients, and in this section, I'm going to cover two very important pillars of our business, which are minimizing client attrition and maximizing recurring income. I'd like to start with three examples to outline the benefits of our relationship model at different times in a client's life cycle. Our first case study is an example of helping a client to overcome a short-term challenge as it seeks to fulfill its long-term strategy. Our client Expert Tooling & Automation has been delivering bespoke automated solutions for over 50 years. We provide funding to their automotive division, and they have a long-term relationship in place with Jaguar Land Rover. The business has been through some challenging times in recent years, with the pandemic followed by numerous supply chain headwinds. STB provided a CLBILS loan, which has now been repaid, and this helped them to recover more quickly from the effects of the pandemic. The management have always been forward-thinking, and more recently, we have provided additional funding to support further diversification into the aviation sector with the manufacture of airport security scanning platforms, which many of us will have experienced on our travels. The business is complex, but we have invested time to understand their needs, and it's a great story to see them going from strength to strength. Our second case study is an example of putting in place a funding package that sustains the needs of a long working capital cycle. Hornby Hobbies is a British-owned scale model manufacturing company, tracing its roots back to the early 1900s. Over the years, they've acquired other iconic brands such as Corgi, Airfix, and Scalextric' s, and they've built up a very loyal customer base. Operating within the retail sector, each year the business has a seasonal spike of sales in the run-up to Christmas. However, this journey starts much earlier in the calendar year as the company seeks to increase its stock levels to meet the demand. STB put in place a facility that was designed to help Hornby sustain their working capital through the cycle, and this happens in two distinct ways. Firstly, we provide an inventory facility, which allows them to borrow money against the value of their stock. Often, this can be a major challenge for any business where working capital is tied up for five to six months. A large element of stock is then sold via wholesale channels to other retailers as they stock up themselves for Christmas. Typically, these customers will pay Hornby for their stock on 60-90-day terms, and this is where STB's invoice discounting facility further supports working capital by providing an advance payment against the unpaid invoices. The facility ensures that Hornby can access funding right across an eight to 10-month cycle, and it helps them to smooth out the peaks and troughs of cash flow. In this third case study, we have another example of our support for our client's long-term strategy. Lyte Ladders are a manufacturing business in South Wales. They've been a client since 2019, and we've provided a range of facilities, including a CBILS loan during the pandemic, to support working capital. They're a very forward-thinking company, and they've developed a carbon reduction strategy that will see them reach net zero by 2050. STB have invested time to understand their plans, and this has led to us providing a tailored funding package to enable them to install solar panels at their production site to support a more sustainable manufacturing process. The business goes from strength to strength, and STB are delighted to be able to support their long-term goals. The key message is that we support clients at all stages of their life cycle. We help them to overcome obstacles on their journey to achieving their ambitions. If we can maximize the length of our relationship with our client, then our income grows via the endowment effect, which I'll explain in more detail later. Our average client life is five years, and I thought it would be important to explain the reasons why a Commercial Finance client may leave STB. Client loss is typically event-driven, and there are three main reasons which are fairly evenly spread. Firstly, the facility is no longer required. In many ways, this is seen as a success as they've established themselves and become less reliant on our Asset-Based Lending. Secondly, there's a sale of the business, and the funding is repaid. Most often, this is a Private Equity exit driven by the opportunity for returns or closure of the fund. More recently, we've seen activity ahead of the budget, with shareholders second-guessing the changes to the tax environment. The third reason for clients leaving STB is insolvency. From time to time, businesses will face sector headwinds, and while the sale process will always be explored before insolvency, occasionally clients do fail. Will Airey will cover a good example of this shortly. The key message is that we typically don't lose clients to competition or for service-related issues. Our client satisfaction scores reinforce the key messages from the previous slides. Over the last four years, our client satisfaction score is averaging 96%, and this is testament to service that is provided by both the operations team and the relationship team. This very strong client satisfaction is underpinned by our own world-class staff engagement, where the engagement index in Commercial Finance is 97%. We hire staff who believe in the journey we are on, and it's in their DNA to serve our clients. Typically, our relationship managers will have a portfolio of between 10 and 15 clients, depending on complexity. This means we're in touch with our clients every week, and it helps us to build deep relationships. We understand what makes their business tick. From experience of working in a variety of large and small banks, one thing for certain is that clients really appreciate having access to the senior team. When you combine this with being easy to deal with and making transparent decisions, you can quickly see why a prospect would choose the STB relationship model over cheaper service from a high-street bank. Our clients also have a dedicated support from our operations team, which is based in Manchester. Their role is to undertake the day-to-day processing of our clients' facilities, and clients have a dedicated point of contact at the end of the phone at all times. The quote on the right-hand side emphasizes everything that we're trying to achieve, and the key message is that we've built an outstanding client service proposition. This slide emphasizes the size of the opportunity if we get things right. In this example, we onboarded a new client in 2016 and generated GBP 134,000 income in year one. We spent a lot of time working alongside our client to understand their growth plans and tailor our facility to their needs. If we get it right, then it becomes a win-win situation. Our client grows its business profitably, and we grow our income at the same time. We've generated over GBP 7 million revenue, which is a compound annual growth rate of 42% on this one client alone. The key message is that recurring income is the key to our growth. And finally, a case study of a client that joined STB in early 2018. In the first couple of years, they focused on growing the business, but this came to a grinding halt with the onset of COVID. As with the case with all of our clients, we sought to understand their specific needs and agree a plan to help them trade out of the lockdown. STB provided additional support during this critical period and helped BM to get back onto an even keel. Post-pandemic, the challenges didn't end there. Sector headwinds, including supply chain challenges and rising inflation, continued to make life difficult. We've built a very strong relationship with the management team, and we continue to work closely with them to weather the storm. Once the business had recovered, the private equity owners of the business prepared it for sale and successfully exited to an overseas conglomerate in 2023. While this can often lead to the repayment of the facility, the management team were instrumental in ensuring that the invoice discounting facility with STB remained in place, despite lower-cost options being available from an overseas bank. This was down to the strength of the relationship and STB's flexibility and support during a number of very challenging years. The key message of the case study is that we're a trusted partner who were there in the good times as well as the difficult times. I'd now like to hand over to Will Airey. Hello everyone. My name is Will Airey. I head up the Credit Risk Team and report into the Group Chief Risk Officer. My team is responsible for managing credit risk across the portfolio. This includes management of credit policies, sanctioning all new business requests, and the overall monitoring of portfolio performance. I'll be covering the final pillar, as outlined by John, that of minimizing impairments. We rely on the strength of our specialist team to provide expert credit partnership on each transaction. The underwriting process itself is robust, with approximately 100 years of combined experience on each deal. We benefit from input from professional advisors, lawyers, accountants, and valuers, with the valuers' due diligence underpinning all our collateral-based lens. We also ensure that every new business file includes an exit plan, providing a blueprint on how to recover our funding should the need ever arise. We do not focus on any one sector and have no specific concentrations to any area. Our risk, though, is further differentiated by the fact that our core lending product, invoice discounting, looks through our client, with its primary source of repayment being a well-spread debtor book. As an example, our largest debtor exposure within the portfolio represents only 2% of our total portfolio exposure. We also track debtor exposure against credit reference agency limits, ensuring our exposure is controlled appropriately. Climate change is an important focus for Commercial Finance, with every connection having a tailored climate change risk assessment, which is updated at least annually. In life, we work closely with customers and collaborate closely with Sean and James's team. We have developed a real risk-aware culture throughout Commercial Finance. This is added to by our access to real-time client data. This is across sales, debtor performance, and liquidity. This allows us to offer excellent customer service and insights to the client on their working capital. This insight also allows early identification of risk issues, which are then managed by our highly experienced team. Our facility structure and relationship approach means should an issue arise, we always have numerous avenues available to recoup our borrowing without loss. The slide provides examples of the available options. This is not a linear progression, and there are many other options not covered here. As examples, though, given our position in the market, it is often possible to refinance our facility to a lower-tier lender. Many of our businesses also benefit from a supportive equity sponsor, as referenced earlier by Sean, and the relationship with both the client and ourselves often means that they choose to follow their investment and support the business. Should the strategy turn to recovery? In the first instance, the early identification of issues can allow us to wind back our exposure. A key feature of our lending facilities is the cash dominion via the STB trust accounts. This means we control all cash flowing into the business. This allows us to safely wind back our advance levels should the need arise. A recovery process could then conclude with either an accelerated business sale or a collect-out against our funded collateral. In these cases, we work with an approved panel of professionals with whom we have built strong relationships and have experience of successfully working with over many years. We have control over these processes, with all our structures benefiting from first-ranking all-asset debentures. This means that we benefit from the sale of other non-funded assets on the balance sheet. As you can see, our relationship-driven approach and expertise allows us to access these multiple options and recover all our funding. In order to bring this to life, we have outlined a recovery case study that was undertaken earlier this year. This case relates to a connection that had been part of the portfolio for two years. A reduction in the demand for its products in the market ultimately led to a loss-making and distressed position. However, due to the early identification of this issue and the strong relationship with the private equity sponsor, the exit blueprint, which was discussed with the owner at the time of the deal, was put into action, and the STB exposure was wound back. This was possible due to the control of business cash flow that, as mentioned earlier, is integral to all our facilities. In conjunction with management, sponsor, and the engagement of a panel accountancy firm, it was possible to preserve cash and reduce our exposure, obtaining a full exit prior to the administration. The forward planning on the exit plan, the strong sponsor relationship, and the dominion over cash receipts allowed us to achieve a full exit, an exit fee, repayment of the sponsor's debt element, and the partial sale of the business. My final slide shows the cost of risk over the last 10 years. This has been low at an average of 0.49%. This is a strong track record, even including the write-off in 2023, which we consider as a unique circumstance. This enviable track record is a result of robust facility structures, including control over cash, a risk-aware culture throughout the whole team, a team of seasoned professionals both within STB and from our external network of professionals, and finally, it shows the benefit of the deep relationships that STB foster. Now, I'll hand back to David for closing remarks. Thank you to John, James, Sean, and Will for an excellent presentation. As you've just heard for Commercial Finance and heard for Real Estate Finance in July and heard for Retail Finance in November last year, we have the capability and opportunity to continue growing. We have a clear focus on attractive, specialist lending markets, and our diversification and resilient business model is a key strength. The operating model in Commercial Finance is efficient and scalable and complementary to our ambition to deliver operational efficiency across the group. The team has a strong track record and reputation in specialist Asset-Based Lending. You'll now have a better understanding of that specialism, not just in underwriting new transactions, but for managing exposures and risk when customers need additional support. Our specialist Commercial Finance business is well placed to continue contributing to the group's success, and as is the case for each of our businesses, we have significant growth opportunities ahead of us. We have sufficient capital to support our growth plans, and we remain on a positive trajectory towards that GBP 4 billion net lending level that supports an attractive return on capital. We are confident in delivering on that commitment. Before we take the first question, I will make a few remarks about commissions given recent news flow and because we are constrained of what we can see. Our Commercial Finance business, the subject of today's presentation, is relationship-driven business lending. The business model in Commercial Finance is not and has never been dependent on broker-generated business. In relation to our Vehicle Finance business, we have complied with the regulations and take regulatory compliance very seriously. As we announced at the start of this month, we did briefly pause new consumer lending in that business. We've made rapid operational changes and have restarted lending again, reflecting the agility of our systems and processes. We expect there to be further legal and regulatory developments around the topic of Vehicle Finance commissions, and it is premature to speculate at this time. So we're not in a position today to disclose any new information relating to our Vehicle Finance business and commissions pending further legal and regulatory developments. Now, let's open up for questions on our Commercial Finance business. Great. Thanks very much. The first question we have is from Alex from Berenberg. Have you seen an increase in competition in the ABL market, in particular from private credit firms? Do you want to say a long thought? Yeah. We probably don't see private credit firms as a direct competitor. They operate further up the risk curve than ourselves, where they can command the required returns. In lending, we actually see that as an opportunity where we've got clients that require funding that's beyond our capacity. We can often work collaboratively with the private credit funds and provide collaborative funding solutions. Great. Thanks, Sean. The second question comes from James at Firm Returns, and he wants to ask, can we explain a little bit more about how the facilities are structured? Does the size of the facility fluctuate in line with asset backing it, and do you have minimum cover levels? Thanks, Phil. I'll take this one. So the quick answer is yes, it does fluctuate. The availability generated by each facility will depend on the amount of assets available day-to-day, week-to-week. It's also one of the strengths of our products that allows the facility to grow alongside the business, which also allows the income generation to grow as well. We do have minimum cover levels. These are our appetite levels against each asset class. This includes a security buffer and supports our low cost of risk. Great. The next question is, I'm going to merge a couple of questions because they're around growth. Jens from Investec and also Gary from Shore Capital are asking about growth plans. There's a GBP 21 billion addressable market, clearly very significant in terms of how big Commercial Finance is today. How are you looking to drive your growth in the Commercial Finance business? And then are you looking at particularly opening other regional offices? You talked about that being an important part of how you attack the market. Can we say that? Yeah. Yeah, I think the key slide 14 in the deck that John took us through, which was optimized for growth. Now, the four pillars, if we can get these things right, we are going to get that growth, and I'll just quickly summarize what they were. Bring on new business if we can retain the clients for as long as we possibly can. If we can minimize the impairment and then maximize the recurring income, that will bring growth. Now, in terms of how that is delivered, we have four regional offices. We set them up five to six years ago, and again, we've invested in the people. They've invested in the local communities, and from there, we've built out, and that's how we're going to get the growth. Now, you asked whether we'll open new regional offices. That is possible. There are a few locations that we may consider, but at this stage, there's no immediate plans to open any further offices. Great. Okay. Thanks, James. Follow-up question here, I think, would be, again, from Jens at Investec. Thinking about those growth plans that you've just talked to, what sort of cost investment do you need to continue to drive the growth of the business unit? Yeah, can I take that one again, David? Yeah, I think that's the benefit of the model that we've built. So the investment in the people is largely done. So from a growth perspective, if you brought on 10 new clients, you may need one new relationship manager. And then, again, Sean's been through the average deal sizes. So that is quite a big growth in balance sheet with fairly minimal cost implications. Great. Thanks, James. We have a question here from James. Given your diverse customer base, have you been impacted by the M&A slowdown in the last year or so? Yeah, we have noticed that the M&A market has slowed down over the last 12 months or so. It's probably important to stress that this only forms one part of our event-led opportunities, and we do expect that the M&A marketplace will start to pick up again as we see some more certainty arise in the marketplace. Okay. Thanks, Sean. We have a question here from a private shareholder. How is the interest rate environment impacting your business? And as we are sort of returning to more of a normal interest rate environment, is that helpful or not helpful? Yeah. Happy to take that. Yeah. All of our lending, I think it's important to say all of our lending is base rate linked, so it's passed on immediately to the clients. So, in terms of direct impact, very little. It's immediately passed on and doesn't affect the NIM so much. I think it needs to be taken into account, though, in the wider context of the macroeconomic environment that we're operating in. Clearly, as we've seen over the last 12 months, after a long period of low interest rates, we're now starting, or we've seen quite a hike in those rates, and it definitely impacts on business confidence, as we've seen, and we just heard there from Sean, we've seen a downturn in some of the, if you like, the transactional activity, and we've seen more refinancing opportunities, and that's probably a strength of the product. It's very adaptable to changes in the market. Great. Thanks, John. We had another question here from Gary at Shore Capital. Two different questions. So the first one is, in terms of the recent budget, are there any implications for your business, either good or bad, that have come out from the budget? And then I'll ask the second one in a minute. I'll just mention one thing before passing on. We did mention in the trading statement, Gary, that went out on the 1st of November, and it was mentioned again in the presentation today, that we did see actually one or two client exits as a result of owners pre-planning for the potential risk of change in the Capital Gains Tax levels in the budget. Now, there were changes. They may not have perhaps been as significant as may have been feared by some, but it certainly has had an impact in the short term and will have an impact on the size of the balance sheet in quarter four for Commercial Finance. In terms of looking forward, budget implications? Yeah, I mean, I can talk about the client base. The client base is affected in different ways, as you can imagine. We have a diverse portfolio. Some have a workforce where the cost is going to go up, others not. So, I mean, this is the beauty of the model that we have. Each relationship manager has 10 to 15 clients, and we're speaking to the clients very regularly. And this is what we do. We seek to understand where the problem might be, when it might appear, how we can help. And we work together to overcome any challenges, so. Great. Thanks, James. I've got two somewhat related questions around cost of funds. I think the first question is, what expenses are included in the net income figures? I think, Sean, that was one of your slides. It was indeed, yes. It is primarily the cost of funds. We should take it from the overall discount income and interest income. Yeah. Great. Thanks. And then related to that somewhat is, given the revolving nature of the facilities that you're providing, how do you match them to your retail deposit funding? Yeah, well, so we tend to try and naturally match the tenure of the liabilities, the tenure of the assets. So that is something, as we look at the exposures that we have in the Commercial Finance business, there's a pretty close working relationship with our Treasury team on the funding that will be required to support both the existing facilities and also to pre-fund the pipeline for business that we are due to complete. So that's an ongoing management activity, just making sure there's close monitoring of the funding requirement and the tenure of that requirement as well. Great. Thanks. It's interesting on that point. As David says, we try and match the actual tenure, but the facilities are technically on-demand facilities. And that was proven through COVID. So as the clients actually stopped trading, we saw the balance sheet across the whole marketplace, not just with Commercial Finance, drop instantly in response to that cease in trading. And that's kind of proving the point that these are on-demand. If we were to unapprove invoices, i.e., prevent people from drawing them, then the balance sheets react immediately to that. So it also gives us a lot of control over the balance sheet as well. Great. Thank you both. I have a question here from Mike Trippett at Progressive Research. I think he's picking up on one of your slides, James. Can you give a bit more insight in terms of your losses and the mix between event-driven insolvency or other? Yeah. So I think I described them as being fairly evenly split. So the failures are always going to happen in a Commercial Finance book. That's inevitable. We do often see a sale process run, and at the end of that sale process, there's sometimes an opportunity for us to fund the business on the other side if there's a new buyer. So that's one way of retaining them. There's a no longer required category, which is very difficult, as you can imagine. We do see that as doing a good job in many respects. We've got the clients to the point where the facility is no longer required. And then the third category was the sale. And I think this plays to the private equity side of things. The private equity firm at some point will want to move the asset on. But again, there's an opportunity for us there to speak to the acquirer. And we've got good examples of that even this year where we've done that and we've retained the business. Great. We're down to the last couple of questions. We've got one here, which is, are there any particular regulatory issues for the Commercial Finance business? No, there are not. Great. Short and sweet. Thank you. And then currently, the final question here is that earlier in the presentation, you talked about GBP 5 million-GBP 50 million being the sweet spot in terms of facility size. Do you see opportunities to continue to move up to the top end of that range to drive further growth, given it's been a successful strategy thus far? Yeah, we certainly do. And I think what we've done over the last few years is prove our capability as we've increased our average deal size through to GBP 20 million. We also recognize that as you get to the bigger end of the scale, a lot of these facilities become syndicated or bifurcated. And we're very keen to operate in that part of the market as well, where we see a lot more opportunity. And I think I would just add, we've sort of alluded to this earlier in terms of we have got a pretty clear risk appetite framework and limits as well. So though we will do some larger-sized deals, there'll be a limit on the number that we'll do just to make sure we do not become overexposed to certain counterparties. Great. Well, that concludes the questions we've had from the webcast. I'm going to hand back to you, David. Okay. Thanks, Phil. And thank you, everyone, for those questions. I think the team has demonstrated they've got a strong track record in asset-based lending and have a cost-efficient platform to support further profitable growth in what is a very large market. And you'll now have a better understanding of their market, their business, and their specialism. At the group level, including the contribution from Commercial Finance, we continue to grow. We have sufficient capital to support that growth, and we've got many opportunities in each of our markets to continue doing so. And as a team, we therefore remain very confident in achieving our ambition of growing net lending to GBP 4 billion and unlocking improved returns in line with our 14%-16% target. I look forward to updating you on the further progress we've made across the businesses when we have our full-year results presentation in March next year, and when there are further legal and regulatory developments following the recent Court of Appeal decision on commission disclosures, we will review those and consider what further comment we can make that's appropriate at the time, but for now, I would just like to thank you again for joining us today to hear from the Commercial Finance team, and thank you for all the questions. Look forward to talking to you soon.