Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the S&U PLC Investor Presentation for the Full Year Results Ending 31st of January 2021. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted anytime via the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. These will be available via our Investor Meet Company dashboard, and you'll get notified once they're ready for your review. We'd like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded, and before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Anthony Coombs, Chairman, Chris Redford, CFO, and Graham Wheeler, CEO of Advantage Finance. Good afternoon. Can I thank you, Paul, welcome everybody to this presentation on Investor Meet Company. Very, very nice to meet you all, be it on a virtual basis. Hope you're all well and that you're thriving as much as possible in the current rather curious conditions under which we live. Anyway, great to see you all. Just in case some of you don't know S&U, I'll just give you a very brief background of what we do. You've been introduced to our participants, Graham Wheeler and Chris Redford, I won't say any further on that. Just to say that we work very closely as a team, I should think the combined experience of all the four participants today from the S&U side in the finance industry is well over a century. We're rather gray beards, but nevertheless, I think that helps in terms of ensuring that your money is well invested. Having said that, S&U is operating in two main sectors. The first is the used car motor finance sector, which is about 1.5 million cars a year in the finance part. We have approximately 2.5 million cars a year in the finance part. We have about 10% of the market, which is the sector in which we operate, 1%, about 25,000 vehicle transactions a year, normally, of the total market. We've been doing that since 1999, when we set up Advantage Finance from scratch. It's great that Chris Redford, who is now the group finance director, was one of the founding directors of Advantage Finance back then. He's got more than 20 years of experience in this business, and that kind of experience and wisdom is invaluable. Talking about Graham Wheeler, Graham joined us one year ago as Chief Executive of Advantage Finance. He might have thought that he could have got his timing a little bit better because he joined about three weeks before lockdown or the first lockdown. I must say that he's done a magnificent job in guiding the company through what has inevitably, in terms of the markets as a whole, been a fairly turbulent period. In addition, in 2017, we started a property bridging business called Aspen Bridging, which has been growing steadily ever since. It made a profit in its first full year of operation, and has now grown. It had a hiatus at the beginning of last year when effectively the property markets were closed, but it more than made up for that in the H2 of the year with a record number of deals transacted. The signs are very, very propitious this year for another record year. We'll explain a little bit more to you about that when we get to the relevant slide. Our business philosophy as a business is basically based on steady, sustainable growth. Now, obviously, we haven't been able to offer that this year, but that is our aim, and that is something that we've achieved at Advantage Finance every year, except the latest one, since it was founded in 1999. That's a proud record. The reason why we like steady, sustainable growth is very simple. The founding family, and obviously I'm a member of it, whose grandfather, who started the business as long ago as 1938, own a majority stake in the business, and that gives us an identity of interest with other shareholders and a feeling of responsibility in the way that we manage the business. It has huge advances in terms of our financial strength and our credibility, as we will demonstrate later on. We would hope that as investors come in to our company, obviously they see an opportunity in terms of the potential growth in the company, but also they follow the Warren Buffett philosophy of ensuring that what you are buying is a long-term investment with sustainable growth in terms of share value and also in terms of dividends. That's one of the reasons why the financial position of the company is so strong. Obviously led for the company by Chris Redford, the Finance Director, that our gearing, particularly for a finance company, is low. It can and will go up if opportunities arise, nevertheless, I think it demonstrates our caution and our commitment to our shareholders, but also to the sustainability of our earnings. I think I've said enough, hopefully, to give you an indication of what the company does, what our philosophy is, and who the main individuals involved in leading it are. Could I just move on to the first page of our slide, which I'm told is this? I think I'll just refer again to my short-term prognosis, so far as the business is concerned in page two of the slide, which indicates that we've been through a difficult period, as everybody has. We’ve taken the opportunity during that period to actually make sure that the fundamentals of the business are working in a way that I think is more effective and more efficient than they’ve ever been. Our staff have been our strength and, fortunately, they’re all safe and will be gradually reintroduced into the workplace, when government policy and safety allows. We do see a tremendous future in this year as the country and the economy rebounds, and as a result, we would hope to return to our, as I say, habitual levels of success. Moving on to the facts. The facts are that group profit this year was half about what it was last year. That was mainly due to an additional GBP 19 million worth of impairments, which, under IFRS 9, we were required to make in order to anticipate future cash flows likely to come into the business. What affected that was the effect on collections in, particularly in our motor finance business of government or FCA, Financial Conduct Authority, mandated payment holidays. Nevertheless, we think that that provisioning was absolutely right. I think, was probably on the conservative side of our peers. I'm pleased about that because it means we don't get any nasty surprises, and we may get even a few nice ones as the economy recovers. Our earnings per share, GBP 1.20, and we would anticipate that that would yield a dividends of about GBP 0.90 this year, which is a coverage of about 1.34x. Normally, we're at 2x. In line with our long-term philosophy on dividends and maintaining faith with our loyal shareholders, just as we maintained faith with our loyal staff, we wanted to make sure that dividends were maintained, albeit not at the same level as had been the case in the past. It is our intention gradually to work our way up to twice-covered dividends. We don't see that happening in five minutes, although it will happen steadily over the next two to three years. Just going further down, I think it's self-explanatory about Advantage Finance new loan volumes. I think this year was the lowest year for some time, mainly because, in terms of transactions, the dealerships have been closed for, I would think, probably two-thirds of the year. Obviously, it's more difficult, even with click and collect, for customers to buy their vehicles and therefore for us to finance them. The Advantage profit, therefore, was reflected in that, and together with the provisions and the less advantages that we did, about GBP 16,000 against GBP 22,000 the previous year. Aspen Bridging had a very good H2 when they did 55 deals against only 25 in the H1. The quality of the book is its best ever. The underwriting criteria have been tightened in order to take into account what is an uncertain residential property market, but one which is nevertheless improving as we speak. For the full year, they produced GBP 800,000 worth of profit, and we would expect a substantial, and I emphasize the word substantial, rebound for 2021, 2022 if our plans, and it's a relatively short-term business, average loan between 10 and 12 months, if our plans come to fruition. Finally, I just emphasize again the strong balance sheet, which has GBP 155 million of committed facilities. Chris Redford put GBP 25 million extra facilities into place, only weeks ago, I think it's about two weeks ago, with one of our long-term funders. That's extended our maturities and gives us an excellent base for which to grow. Of course, if we need further facilities, that gives us the opportunity also to increase the amount of facilities so that we can accommodate that growth. That gives you, I think, an overview of what's been going on, what we see as the prospects. I hand over now to Chris Redford for the next slide. Thanks, Anthony. I think you should have called it the exciting financial slide. Yeah? Right then. First we start, and I'll only pick out highlights from here. On the group income statement, clearly the main highlight is impairment. We've got an unusual GBP 36 million impairment charge during the year, most of which relates to motor finance and is a requirement of IFRS 9 that we look at the book, and when COVID hit, we said, well, in normal circumstances, we'd expect so much future cash flow from the book, from individual groups of customers, and now realistically, we're going to expect less. That feeds into this impairment number. It was more weighted towards the H1 year, when it was well over GBP 21 million, and then the balance of GBP 15 million was in the H2 year. That also produced, therefore, profits that were recovering in the H2 year. They went from GBP 6.3 million in the H1 to GBP 11.8 million in the H2. One thing I haven't mentioned on the slide, which I should just mention, is admin expenses, we saved 14%. We didn't quite save 14%, we got a one-off benefit on that line from GBP 700 grand worth of VAT recovery, longstanding due from HMRC. Just thought I'd mention that. You can see from the figures at the bottom that our main business by far is motor finance. That makes the majority of the profit, we have high hopes, as Anthony mentioned in the highlights, for Aspen Bridging next year. Our intention is to try and get that diversification business up to about GBP 5 million profit in the course of the next couple of years. Moving on to the group balance sheet. This is very simple, which is useful for us accountants. Basically, you've only got three things that matter here. You've got the net receivables, the book debt, the borrowings, and the reserves. What you can see is even in a COVID-impacted year, your net assets and total equity have gone up 1%. You can see that because Advantage, even in a difficult year, is cash generative, the borrowings have gone down slightly. This is the where has all the money gone slide. Borrowings have gone down slightly. They went down from GBP 118 million to GBP 98 million, as you can see on the left-hand side of the slide. We try and split that between motor finance and property bridging and say, well, how have we invested your cash flow, in terms of what's new advances? Are the borrowings down because of more collections or because of less Advantage? It's mostly a combination of much lower advances and a bit lower collections because of the payment holidays that Anthony mentioned in his introduction. On the smaller business property bridging, what you've seen is collections up a bit on last year, but not much. Why is that? Because we did most of our advances, as Anthony mentioned, in the H2 year, and therefore they're not due for repayment yet. We expect collections for those businesses, for those loans to come in more in 2021, 2022. Anthony mentioned HM Treasury, so I won't repeat what he said there. Group gearing, he's also mentioned, and we generated GBP 19 million cash flow during the year. That's a brief overview of the main financial statements in summary terms. What I'll now do is hand over to Graham Wheeler, who joined us about a year and a half ago, I think, Graham, initially, and then was appointed to the S&U board back in February. We're very lucky to have Graham. He's handled COVID and the team, a fantastic team he's got at Advantage, have done that brilliantly over the course of the last year, and he'll tell you a bit more about the operation at Advantage and what his future plans are. Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everybody. What I wanted to do this afternoon is just take you through just a few slides that explain kind of operational update in terms of how Advantage have worked our way through the COVID pandemic and what we've been working on for the future. This first slide, it's an interesting picture. It basically sums up our attitude to some of the trials and tribulations that we've all seen during the course of the past year. Every time we've had a bit of a setback, whether it's a setback in terms of the lockdown or pandemic stage, or whether it's a setback in terms of the different variations of FCA guidance that we've seen over the course of the year. Basically, we just got on with it, and that very much epitomizes, I guess, the attitude and the culture of the business. You'll see during the course of the next few slides just how we've used that to react to what's been going on. The things we've been focusing on during the course of this year is improving our sales offer whilst we've been refining business quality and underwriting, improving our collections processes, maintaining regulatory standards, and coping and developing our forbearance activities based on all the different variations of guidance the FCA have given us on forbearance and payment holidays. At the same time we've been managing the core of our business, we've been looking forward in terms of some technical developments, digital marketing, developing new routes to market, and we've even had the time to have a real deep dive in terms of our strategy review of the business, and specifically, we've been having a look at the impending electric vehicle market and the impact that that might have on Advantage and our marketplace moving forward. I'll talk to each one of those things over the course of the next few slides. From an operational perspective, we've been operating for the last, I guess, four or five months with just 30 staff in our offices in Grimsby. We are planning to increase that over the course of the next few weeks and months. All of our staff are working very well from home. We've built an infrastructure that manages equally successful home working as we have office working. I think in terms of the lockdown, I think we've all experienced it, that's brought its own stresses and strains, particularly for our collections staff who have got their own personal situations of having to speak to customers on a daily basis who are suffering mental health issues and financial health issues. We've sort of developed a wellbeing program for our staff that helps them to cope with those particular situations. We're registered with the business COVID self-testing program, and we hope to get involved in that very shortly. In terms of the four stages of returning back to the office, they start on April 12th. We're going to move from 30 to 60 staff on April 12th, and we'll gradually build that up to about 115 staff out of the 170 by June 21st, I think the date is, where that will be pretty much the new normal for Advantage moving forward. Because having that kind of flexible working model will certainly work for us, and will create additional spaces within the office, and at the same time, just being just as efficient, if not more efficient than we have been over the course of the past 12 months. I guess in summary on this page, despite all the impacts that we've suffered, the business operationally has been trading just as well as it was before. I did mention we'd cover talk about sales. The dealerships, as Anthony said earlier on, have been pretty much for two-thirds to three-quarters of the year have been closed. They've all adapted to a kind of click and collect delivery process. People are buying cars on the web, clicking and taking delivery of them where possible. Because of logistics issues, the dealers can't deliver every vehicle that people order. What we've seen is, I call them digital tire kickers. Those are the guys that are sat at home at nighttime with an iPad or their phone or their laptop in front of them and are looking through brochures of cars on the internet, and in some cases, looking for finance to go along with it. What we've seen is a big uptake in terms of finance proposals coming through to us. There's clearly a physical limitation in terms of the number of vehicles that can be delivered through a click and collect process. That tells me there's a huge opportunity and a growing opportunity, and that when things are released in the marketplace over the course of the next few weeks, when dealerships open on the 12th April, that we should see a bit of a boom in the marketplace because there seems to be some pent-up demand there that we can certainly take advantage of. During the course of this month in March, we've seen our sales performance almost increase on a day-to-day basis during the course of March. As people get ready for some form of release back in the later part of this month, in the early part of next, and even in the past two days, that 100% of the budget in March is now looking as if it's going to be 105% or 106%. That gives everybody a feeling of how the marketplace is expected to kick back up again. At the same time as we've been doing that, we've been looking at, I guess, the four key areas in terms of sales, improving the overall quality, making sure that we're writing the right level of business, and we'll talk about that a little bit later on. Moving from a risk reduction scenario to managing risk. Last time around, we told everybody that we had withdrawn from our lower quality TVE business and some self-employed because of the inherent risks of the self-employed marketplace. Over the course of the past couple of months, we've moved back into that territory. We've made some adjustments in terms of our scorecard to identify characteristics which give us a better opportunity to lend to better people, even within that higher risk area, and that seems to be working very well for us, too. We're still maintaining the cost of sales and controlling commissions as far as the brokers are concerned. We are testing different interest rates products for different large brokers. Previously, we had effectively one set of rates for the whole marketplace. We've now built the ability to amend rates depending on the volume, the business and the relationship we've got with certain brokers. That's now fully operational, and we've got slightly different rate structures for some of those brokers moving forward who have big opportunities. All those issues have helped us to push together our sales volume and make sure that we're ready for the big boom that we expect to see in the used car market hopefully from April 12th moving onwards. I did say I would talk about a little bit about regulation. The Financial Conduct Authority have had a huge interest, both in terms of mortgage lending and in terms of motor finance and credit cards. They have issued lots of different phases of guidance, which we've been able to adapt to very well. More recently, they've had a couple of interesting analyses of the marketplace in terms of two areas. One was how are the lenders dealing with the level of forbearance measures? Are their processes robust? Are the customer interactions correct? Are the documentations correct, etcetera. Also, they had a bit of a concern, not specifically with us, but generally, that there was enough liquidity in the financial markets to be able to support lending in the different markets that are there. Our response has been, we have adapted to all those collections approaches and forbearance measures. We've managed our way through that situation extremely well. We're now back into repossessing vehicles where necessary, which there's been an embargo on that during the course of this year up until February 1st. In terms of the two specific interrogations in the marketplace from the FCA, we took part in both of those. We worked very closely with our colleagues from the FCA in terms of analyzing our forbearance processes and policies and customer interactions, and we got a complete clean bill of health, which was great. We were also supplying them with, I guess, liquidity and a liquidity monitoring study, where we're supplying them with information about our liquidity position. They very quickly realized that we were very much in control of our liquidity within S&U and Advantage, and have stepped back considerably in terms of their requirements from us from a reporting point of view. Again, zero negative feedback from that perspective. While all this regulatory issues have been going on, we are delighted to say we have maintained our position in terms of feedback from customers. The approach we take is individual customer contact and individual customer solutions, because every customer is different. We have been getting some fantastic feedback from many of our customers, and we're still rated 4.8 out of five in the Trustpilot surveys, and long may that continue. I think that's reflective of the approach we've taken in terms of looking after customers within our business, even in these very, very difficult circumstances. My last slide is just to give you a feel for the areas of development we're looking at. I split them up into four key areas around CRA data, sales development, technology, and risk management. In terms of the CRA data, we've introduced a third credit reference agency, and we're in the process of integrating that into our systems and processes from an underwriting perspective. We're also looking at restructuring the contract we've got with our current biggest supplier, Experian, that's going to help us to move into comparison websites where lots of the brokers in our marketplace are moving towards comparison websites like confused.com and clearscore.com and comparethemarket.com, all these people. There's a move towards comparison websites within used car delivery and used car finance, and we're looking to partner with those guys moving forward, which would create us a big opportunity. Of course, the cost of searches, credit searches, has to be controlled in that very high volume environment, and we're working with Experian to find a way to allow us to step into that marketplace without the additional cost that would come with the search costs. In terms of sales development, yeah, we're working on those comparison websites. We hope to go live with our biggest broker partner over the course of the next two or three months. We continue progress with developing our affinity partnerships. This is prime lenders who are interested in supplying services to the non-prime arena but don't want to do it for themselves. Therefore, they're looking to partner with people like ourselves and link their systems with ours, so that we can get an opportunity to write some of that business moving forward. The partner we've made some great progress on has been affected by COVID. The guy who was leading their project at their end really unfortunately succumbed to the disease a couple of months ago, and it set them back a little bit, and therefore it set the project back a little bit. We're still making some good progress from that point of view. Then in this last area, we've had a look at electric vehicle funding, and the decision we've taken is to step into that market of financing older, higher mileage electric vehicles. The concern I think that everybody had was that the battery was somehow very different from the car, and that there was a higher level of potential degradation in the battery power over a period of time. Given the detailed review of that marketplace, we are now very comfortable that's not the case, that batteries do not degrade at the same level as the concerns were there. Even if they do degrade slightly, it's usually one or two of the individual cells within the battery compartment that can be very quickly and cheaply refurbished to bring the electric vehicles back to almost manufactured power. We're very comfortable in this marketplace, and we're going to step back into it, though I have to say that the size of the opportunity, it will be extremely small at the moment. Our view is that we're better to learn now and learn how to finance electric vehicles over time, so that in five or six years' time, as you see a quantum leap in terms of electric vehicles in the marketplace, that we have already learned how to manage those, and are well-primed to take advantage of that part of the market moving forward in the future. Quite exciting times from that point of view. From a technology point of view, digital marketing, we're focusing on redesigning our website, introducing customer self-service, and developing a lot of our SEO proactive activity for existing and previous customers as a kind of prelude to giving us the capability of going direct if we need to sometime in the future. Lastly, in terms of risk management, we've now fully installed an enterprise risk management approach across the whole business. We've completed our SMCR registration and documentation for the FCA. Even within the last few days, we've upgraded our SAS data management system to effectively significantly upgrade the level of intelligence that we can provide within our portfolio to help us make more smart decisions moving forward. I think that pretty much covers my slides, Chris, and I'd like to pass back on to you now. Thank you very much, Graham. Graham described in good detail what his future plans are, but he also mentioned a few actions that he's had to take during the year, particularly in the light of COVID. Just what the next four slides show you where that leaves Advantage in terms of the summer statistics we normally look at. What was the motor finance loan profile this year compared to previous years? You can see on this slide the number of loans we did was down. We've talked about that, 15,589. Most of the year, there was lockdown. It was difficult for customers to access dealerships, and we were quite cautious in our underwriting approach. As Graham mentioned earlier, we withdrew from some of the normal lower paying quality customers, who we like to serve, partly as a result of less certain information on the credit reference agencies. That was a cautious approach. What that resulted in was that the average advance, because higher quality customers tend to take bigger advances, the average advance went up to GBP 6,581, the average interest rate went down to 17%, and the average customer score, which is our internal measure of customer score, went up to 900. All those three things really are slight departures from what you can see were the trends in the last six years, and those departures reflected our cautious approach and a slightly higher average customer quality as we went through last year. One other line I should mention is the cost of sales line. You can see that's been creeping up over the last six years. That's as a result of more competition, the market going more towards internet introducers. Internet introducers have a higher cost base associated with them, that's where customers like to shop now, as Graham mentioned earlier, and therefore that's driven the costs up. Also in the last year, we didn't get quite the economies of scale, we would see that 872 figure going down slightly over the course of the next year, according to our budgets. This is an exciting slide, it's a complicated slide anyway, it's quite a relevant slide, we think. Historically, there's been a strong correlation between first repayment quality and end outcome after five years. It is quite a scientific business, Advantage, and the risk team and the analytics team in particular, do a fantastic job in making sure that the quality is as we expected, and we're pricing it correctly. What's happened over the years, this slide actually shows you from 2003 right through to up to date almost, and the blue line shows the first cash received percentage, which is the left-hand scale. What's that saying is that between 90% and 99% every month over the last effectively 18 years, how they've paid their first payment. That's what the blue line shows, and you can see that post GFC, we managed to attract a higher quality of customer, nearer prime. At that point, the blue line went up 2011, 2012, 2013. Since then, there's been a bit more competition in the market. It's come back down, but still very high, around 95%. Those of you who have got very good eyesight can see at the right-hand side of the slide that in February, March last year, recent deals that we'd just done didn't quite pay their payment as well. There's still 94% paid their payment okay, but there's a big dip there. Why? Because everybody panicked a bit, or a few people panicked a bit because of COVID. It's since then with the quality measures and the sensible underwriting that Graham and the team have introduced, it's gone back up again such that we're hovering again around the 98% mark, as you can see there. What is the other thing I'm showing on this slide? Well, it's the red line. That is the outcome loss ratio after five years. There's a fantastic correlation for those of you who are into mathematics between the blue line, the way customers make their first repayments, and actually where they end up after five years. Bad debts, what the right-hand inverse scale is showing is that between 10% and 30% over the years have turned into bad debts after five years, five years being the normal cycle of an Advantage loan. You can see that up to five years ago, where the red line stops being a firm red line and starts being a dotted red line, the correlation was very good. The dotted red line is just our latest estimate of where the outcome loss ratio might finish after five years, so it's less certain inherently. That starts to depart from the blue line. Why? Realistically, we think customers are going to get more problems post-COVID and in the post-COVID economy, and we're forecasting that at the moment, which also feeds through effectively into our provisions. The dotted red line, particularly for recent business, may not be right, but we believe there'll still be a good correlation with the way people make their first payments. It might be just that the outcome losses are realistically a little bit lower than they have been. This is a cash slide, so it's a payback slide. What the green bars show is for every year of origin, how much money we've collected, and the blue bars show the advance, including the cost of sales. It's like a payback. It's what you've invested on day one. One of the many things I like about this business is that you know day one what your main outlays are. You know what the advance is, you know what the cost of sales is. That GBP 800 figure is our biggest cost, that's your upfront investment. Generally, it takes us about 30 months to get that investment back. A little bit longer recently because, obviously, we've had payment holidays, but also we're in slightly longer terms. What the green bar shows you, therefore, is on a cash basis, well, we know what we advanced, so how much to date have we actually collected back? You can see on average what percent of our original investment we've actually collected back. Years up to January 2016, if you go up the scale on the left-hand side, are reasonably final years. January 2017 onwards, clearly we're still busy collecting those, and January 2021 is the least certain year in terms of what we've collected so far because it's the most recent and therefore it's got the furthest to go. What I've also put on this slide is an end outcome estimate for years up to January 2016. That's pretty much where we are. We won't collect any more, and they are good results. January 2017 onwards, clearly it's a little bit less certain, but still collecting 140% or even 131%. That's consistent with over 10% return on capital employed before cost of funds. I hope that explains that payback slide. Just briefly on this net receivable slide, what we set out for you here is on an original contract basis. This year we've experienced payment holidays. This says while payment holidays effectively are counting as arrears on this slide. What has been the cash we've missed out on this year, we're 62% up to date, whereas last year we were 79% up to date. In the middle of the slide, we've split the book for you between, yeah, but what about the people who haven't had a payment holiday? How are they paying? You can see that non-payment holiday accounts, and that's the bulk of our book, 44,000. You can see the performance for 15,000 who've had a payment holiday but are now starting to pay again. You can see the performance for 3,700 accounts that are still on payment holiday, typically they're on a six-month payment holiday in line with FCA guidance as to how to treat customers that need the most forbearance. I hope that explains some of the stats behind Advantage, and I'd like to now hand over to Anthony to talk about our property bridging business. Thank you, Chris and Graham. Very good indeed. I'm going to be very brief on Aspen because we got about 13 questions that have come through. We started Aspen in 2017 because we saw an opportunity in the refurbishment and small builder market for short-term loans, which were effectively being ignored by the mainstream banks. I think our analysis has been proved accurate despite the high interest in the market last year, because the year before last, Aspen made GBP 1.2 million. Last year, even with the COVID, GBP 800,000, and we're expecting a significant increase in profitability this year to the extent that we would want to make GBP 5 million and therefore a sensible contribution to group profits in the next two and a half, three years. We think there's huge profit growth. It's very well managed. It has strict underwriting criteria and obviously we regard quality as we do in the rest of our business as important as quantity. We can answer questions about that in a few moments. I'm not going to go on too much about the outlook. I think you've got a very clear indication of our confidence in the future. Now I'm going to go on to questions. I don't know how you want to do this, Paul. Do they want to ask the questions? Anthony, thank you very much firstly for the presentation to the team. Obviously, we have had a number of questions come through during the live event, and we can run over if required, but we will have the opportunity to review all the questions submitted today on the platform as well. Just coming on to the questions and conscious of time, we had a couple of pre-submitted questions. Perhaps we could start with those, Anthony, and then we can work through the questions submitted during the event. Yeah. Okay. I'll read them because presumably Has everybody got them on their screen? No, just me. If you wouldn't mind reading them out. Right. The first question is, based on S&U's ROCE and leverage levels, they can achieve a return on reinvested income of over 15% and do so with impressive consistency. The money you pay out in dividends based on standard PE ratio is a greater return of around 8%. If the reinvestment opportunity exists, would management consider lowering or even scrapping dividends to favor growth and create higher shareholder returns? My very short answer is that there are huge benefits for having management and shareholders co-aligned, if you like, in terms of their interests. My second point is that we don't live forever, and in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes said, "We're all dead." We like dividends. The third point that I would make is that reinvesting is great, but unfortunately, we have an inheritance tax regime in this country which certainly doesn't favor publicly traded companies. It means that one has to at least have a pause before you say, "We're going to reinvest more than we do at the present time, and give 40% to the chancellor, whoever he or she may be." The answer is, we'd like to try and maintain a balance between our dividends and our potential to reinvest. We would never allow dividends to get in the way of necessary investments. That is something that I can pledge. At the same time, we do think that we ought to reward shareholders on a sustainable basis, and will continue to do so. That's the first question. Second question is, what do you see as the medium-term drivers of growth for Advantage? In particular, how much further structural growth might there be in the penetration rate of used car financing, whether you're seeing more prime borrowers migrating to near prime, and the extent of any pullback from the market from competitors. I'm going to give that one to Graham Wheeler. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. I guess, first of all, in terms of organic growth, if we look at some of the volume of deals that we approve that are not taken up either from competition or whatever, those are what I would call the low-hanging fruit. There's plenty of room in there for us to penetrate the market based on our current business. There are other opportunities in terms of our SEO activity, in terms of existing and previous customer base, developing a wider cohort of brokers that we've currently got, the comparison websites that I mentioned earlier on, and the kind of affinity partnerships that I've spoken about that could create substantial opportunity for us moving forward. There's still plenty of opportunity in terms of growing our business in a number of those different areas moving forward. In fact, this year, in terms of our volumes, we are planning or budgeted on a return to, in fact, a record year in terms of sales compared to previous years. That hopefully gives you a sense of the level of confidence and ambition we have for growth of our existing business. In terms of the second question, which is about prime borrowers migrating to near prime, I don't think we've seen that yet, but if you think about the number of people that will have been affected by unemployment and furloughing, and the effect that's had on their finances for some people, I suspect what's going to happen over the course of the coming months and year is that people who have been affected more by COVID who had unblemished credit records will move down towards less prime rates and less prime products. I guess, I think that will create further opportunities for us moving forward, too. The last part of that question is in terms of pullback from market competitors. One or two of the competitors have stepped back from lending at all during the course of the worst part of the pandemic last year. They've come back into it again and we still have the same level of competition now that we've ever had. That's good because that drives quality of interaction with customer, drives quality of the deal they have. From a market perspective, long may that continue. We just need to make sure that, as always, we're ahead of the game when it comes to the level of service and our lending appetite in the marketplace. I think that's pretty much covered all of that, Anthony. Good. Thank you very much indeed, Graham. The number of questions is growing all the time. The next one is Joseph D. The earnings release was very positive in the terms of the opportunity to grow the business. From 2015 to 2019, the car finance business grew profit before tax at 20% per annum. From 2019 to 2007, I think that's probably wrong, the car finance business grew profit before tax at a whopping 24% per annum. I think he meant 2009 to 2017. Can you help us to understand if that level of growth is achievable going forward over the next five years or three to five years or beyond? Are those levels of growth no longer realistic for the business? Obviously, the bigger you get, the more a percentage increase in growth is difficult to achieve. Why? Because the absolute amount is more. Having said that, I can say that having seen the fall in earnings this year, for reasons we've outlined, we would anticipate, as a group, getting back on the growth trail. I would certainly anticipate and hope to see very significant increases in growth over the next three years. Those are put into our budgets. I would hope that they would approach in percentage terms, what we've been achieving in the past. Nobody can guarantee that, and I've always been very wary of predicting high levels of growth in a finance business, because obviously it depends upon the quality of debt and the general economic environment. That's certainly our ambition and where we would like to get to. Joseph D again, "The property bridging business appears to be going extremely well. Congratulations." Many thanks. Has your estimate of what the total scale of the property bridging business could be on a very long-term business view changed materially? Is there any chance you can help us to understand just how big this business could be on a 10-year view? First of all, we don't take a 10-year view because even if you're the Treasury or the Office for National Statistics, you have a big enough problem in taking a two-year view, let alone a 10-year view. We're slightly wary of these grand strategic predictions. We do see there's significant opportunity in the Aspen business. We would certainly hope to grow it so that profits, as I said earlier, exceeded GBP 5 million and were going upwards in the next two to three years. That implies quite an impressive growth rate. What ultimately it can be, I don't know. It depends on the strength of the housing market. It depends upon the appetite and the ability to attract finance from smaller builders and refurbishers and buy- to- letters. I would have thought that given the substantial structural imbalance in this country between the availability of good housing, not just any housing, good housing, and the demand for it, I would have thought that actually Aspen is set fair for a period of sensible and sustainable expansion. I go to Jerry Yu. "Cost of sales and Advantage reduced from GBP 884 per transaction, H1 to GBP 857, H2. Is this reflective of a weaker competitive environment or some other factor?" Over to you, Chris, on that one. Okay. Thanks for the question, Jerry. Obviously both figures are a bit above what we've seen in previous years, both figures reflect the economies of scale point that I mentioned before. GBP 857, we're always looking to save money on commissions and playing with pricing and margin to try and make sure we've got the right product in the market. The GBP 857, I wouldn't see as a significant move indicative of the future, but I do hope on average over next year to be below GBP 872 given our commission budgets and what Graham has planned for the CRA costs. Thank you, Chris. Next one from John A. Good question. "Could you tell us concisely why I should consider investing in the company?" What I would say, John, is invest in the company if you regard its long-term prospects as good and therefore that you will be holding the shares on that basis. As I said earlier, it's the Warren Buffett school of investing, and we think that our long-term prospects and the way we go about them justify that. What do you get for that long-term investment? You get responsible, sustainable earnings. You get a good dividend yield. As we've seen over the last 10 years, although not so much over the last four or five, you get capital appreciation as well. That's my concise, hopefully, answer to your question. John A again, "What would you say are your USPs? What gives you your competitive advantages, and are they sustainable?" I'm going to go on to Graham Wheeler for those. Thanks, Anthony. I think if we have a USP, it's probably our bespoke scorecard and systems capability in terms of change. A scorecard is specifically designed for our marketplace. We take data from the credit reference agencies to build into a scorecard, we decide ourselves and our own characteristics of success, that's the probable thing that's driven the success in terms of we call them the golden nuggets of our marketplace, picking out the deals that are most appropriate for us moving forward. That's probably our biggest USP in terms of the mix of volume quality. Are they sustainable? Well, yes, absolutely. We've invested heavily, as I said earlier on, in terms of our SAS data intelligence system that's constantly analyzing the quality of business we've been writing. We wouldn't be investing that if we didn't think that was a long-term sustainable option for us in terms of managing our scorecard moving forward. I think it's absolutely that's our advantage and absolutely sustainable. Which I'm going to direct to you is from John A again. "Can you tell us what percentage of the market do you have where you operate? Who are your main competitors, and what share do they have? Is that one again for myself, Anthony? I couldn't quite- Yeah, Graham. Yeah If you look at the volume of approvals we give in the marketplace in the year versus the amount of business we write, that suggests we've got about a 10% market share of approvals. 25 to 250,000. That seems to work out about 10%. Our biggest competitor is probably Moneybarn, which is part of the Provident Group. We've also got Oodle and Startline, and I could go on in terms of for another five minutes in terms of different competitors. There aren't any new competitors, but in terms of the market share we've got, that's about where it is. The biggest competitor, as I said, is Moneybarn, and over the course of the past year, they've probably been about 30%-35% market share. Which, I guess the question, is that a good thing or not? I guess we'll find out over the course of the next two or three years, when we see the quality of their indebtedness in terms of the business they've been buying over the course of the past 12 months. Too early to say, I think, at this stage. Thank you, Graham. The next one is for Chris, from Javier R. "Congratulations on your great results. If current trends persist, when should we expect your gearing to increase towards 90%-100% levels given the growth you're anticipating for the next couple of years? Thank you." Chris. Thanks, Javier, for the question. Yeah, a good question. As Anthony alluded to earlier, it depends a bit on how we continue to see the asset investment opportunity, and that's always been our view on gearing. We haven't naturally geared up just because we can. Therefore, I think the answer to your question is, according to our plans, it's likely to hit sort of over 90% in three years' time, but it might be quicker than that if the right asset opportunity is there. Brilliant. Thank you, Chris. The next question is from Jerry Yu. "Customers on payment holiday have decreased from just under 5,000 to just under 3,000 now, and used car pricing is high now as you recommence repossessions. Are you anticipating reversing any of full year 2021 impairment charge?" Over to you, Chris. Okay. Thank you very much again for the question. Am I anticipating reversing any of the FY 2021 impairment charge? I think I don't expect it, but I'm hopeful that it might happen, particularly with the expertise that we've got in the Advantage collection section. Many of those have worked there over 10 years, some of them have worked there 20 years, and they're very good at coaching customers through difficult situations and enabling them to keep their cars, and on that basis, also keep paying for them. If we're successful in that, then we may be able to reverse some of the impairment charge. Do I expect it? I think that would be a bit rash to say I expect it. Thank you, Chris. Very sensible. Could we now go to John A.? I think this one is for Graham Wheeler. "Could you conservatively estimate about how much of an opportunity you have from selling via comparison websites? That's a great question. Conservatively, we're not experts in terms of the comparison websites, our brokers are. The specific numbers that our biggest broker is estimating is around 60,000 proposals a month, as they move into that marketplace. That's one of the things that is driving a change in our structure with Experian because frankly, there's 60,000 searches a month. We don't want to be paying that. We want to be paying based on the success of the deal going live rather than paying for the search, which is what we're trying to get to with Experian. If we can be successful in that with this levels of penetration I was speaking about before, that could be 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 for us, which would be a bit of a game changer to take us towards the kind of target level we've got in our own heads heading towards 30,000 finance cases a year. That's why we're really quite excited about that as an opportunity for ourselves. Thank you, Graham. The next question is from Alejandro M. I think it's for Graham. Can you give us some color on the evolution of secondhand sales for 2021 Q1? Thank you. It's such a difficult question, I'm not sure how to answer that one, to be honest. All I can say to you is that we've seen an increase level of finance proposal coming our way. We know that the used car market is on fire at the moment because there has been a lack of supply in the marketplace now for the best part of four or five months. We know that dealers are out buying stock to get themselves ready for a launch into the marketplace on April 12th, which is pushing the used car prices in the wholesale market up. Therefore, we're expecting to see a knock-on effect, both in terms of volume and lends because the vehicle prices are going up, opportunity going up, and April 12th when the dealerships open, and they're all ready for moving back into the marketplace. I guess that's why we are, again, quite excited about the opportunity that will bring into Q1. If you look back last May, when the first lockdown was released, there was a boom in the marketplace for about four to six weeks as pent-up demand was being released. We're expecting to see the same thing again this time round. After the first six weeks, it'll even up a little bit, and then we expect to see a kind of linear increase in terms of volumes between now and the end of the year, because as people become more comfortable with and more confident about heading out and getting back to their lives. I guess the last driver for all that is, the old push toward or the preference for public transport and things like subscription financing models. I don't personally think that people are going to be comfortable doing things like that and sitting close to people in public transport. I think there's going to be a big move towards people having car ownership again, because at least they can trust that the car that they're in is protecting them, and if they're going backwards and forwards from work, they're going to want a second or third or fourth car in their family. I think that's a big factor for driving an increase in terms of their secondhand car sales over the course of not just the next quarter, but the rest of this year. Thank you, Graham. That partly answers the next question, which is from John A. "Can you tell us what, if any, ideas you have or what actions you are taking to diversify the business, given the trend that some consumers are giving up their cars due to climate concerns? Also, changes in technology mean that people are giving up ownership and using taxi services, Uber, et cetera, and in the future, autonomous taxis like vehicles as a service." Can I just briefly answer that one? I think I won't add too much to what Graham has said. I think there is going to be a trend, which is the opposite of the one that you identify, for private castles on wheels, and away from the public sphere, in a safe environment. I think that that means that the car-sharing services and the autonomous taxis, I think are going to be very much on the back foot over the next at least two or three years. I don't think that people outside the metropolitan areas are in any way wanting to give up their cars, whether it be for climate concerns or anything else. I think that they want to change their cars. It's one of the reasons why we're investing in investigating electric vehicle finance, because that will become increasingly important over the next 10 years. In fact, probably over the next five years, too. I don't see any of these trends meaning that car ownership per se will fall. Can I now go on to John A.'s second question, which is, "What is your typical margin? Can you break down any blended margin?" Over to you, Chris. Okay, thanks for the question, John. In motor, we talked about a 17% flat interest rate. If we think about that over a four-year deal, on average, we're just over four years. That means that the customer gets charged 68%, so if the advance is GBP 6,500, they would pay a maximum of GBP 4,420 interest. They'd also pay a GBP 325 acceptance fee and an option to purchase fee at the end if the contract gets to the end of GBP 200. All in therefore on that loan, if it's a four-year loan, you'd be talking about over GBP 5,000 in charges. Do we end up collecting all that? No, we don't. Generally, I like to think of this business as a cash business. We advance GBP 6,500, and at the moment, I think we might collect GBP 9,500 back, which gives me a GBP 3,000 cash margin to cover my expenses and also our profit. I hope that gives you a bit of a flavor on motor. On bridging, blended margin is roughly 1% on the gross per month. Typically, we would lend GBP 500,000 or GBP 600,000 on a secured property deal, and the margin on that would be 1% a month. Again, that margin includes interest mainly, but also there's some fees involved. I hope that answers the question. Thank you. Next one is, I think for Graham, from Jerry Yu. "Administrative expenses for Advantage declined substantially. Beyond the one-off VAT saving, there appears to be a further reduction of GBP 1 million in absolute terms and 0.7% as a percentage of revenue. Is this also a one-off or rather a structural reduction in the cost base?" Over to you, Graham. That's a great question. Actually, it proves my Scottish heritage, that particular one, in terms of cost management within the business. The reality is that when we saw what was happening in terms of lockdown last year and people working from home, and the effect that that was going to have on the P&L of the business, then it was right that we had a roots and branch review of many of the costs within the business to make sure they were controlled, and that GBP 1 million that we managed to find and save, obviously had a direct impact in terms of the results that have been, I guess you've seen over the course of the last couple of days. Is that a long-term thing? Well, we'll always control costs within our business. It's the right thing to do, and it exposes the odd conversation, I'm sure, that I'll have with the chairman and the chief financial officer during the course of this year as I like to invest in other things in the future. I guess that's watch this space. Next one is from John A. "What are the, say, three things in the business you're excited about and that shareholders or potential shareholders should be watching closely?" If I was a shareholder, which I am, profits is probably the most important thing that I'm excited about because it's a reflection of the success of the business. I'm excited about the potential for rejuvenating profits in the way that I indicated earlier on. That's number one. Number two is I'm excited about certain areas in which we are going in terms of Advantage being able to connect with our customers more directly, and also in terms of the potential for financing electronic cars. In terms of Aspen, really more generally in terms of being able to grow a very strong business. The final thing I would say is that good businesses are people's business. I like to see people benefit, enjoy, and develop their potential as a result of going to work. That's one of the things that we are going to be putting a huge amount of stress on. One of the things that's going to go into that is that I think we've all learned to work flexibly, as a result of COVID. I would hope that we would be able to raise people's job satisfaction levels and enjoyment of their work substantially as a result of what we've learned over COVID. Those are the three things. Next one from John A: Can you talk about the share structure of the company? Does management have significant skin in the game? Management in terms of my brother and myself, and Jack Coombs who runs with Ed Ahrens, Aspen, the property bridging business, we have about 48% of the business, probably nearer 50%. Yes, we do have skin in the game. Does management? We do operate LTIP schemes. In the past, managers have, with the glorious exception of Chris Redford and to a lesser extent of Ed Ahrens, who's in charge of Aspen, have tended to sell their shares in order to be able to pay the tax, which is one of the problems that LTIPs generally face. We do want to encourage senior management to do that. Otherwise, we tend to incentivize senior executives and others through shadow share option schemes, which relate their bonuses to the performance of the company and the share price. Can we move on to Maynard P., who's put COVID-related provision for the full year was GBP 19.5 million, implying an extra GBP 5.7 million for H2. Why the extra provisioning given motor monthly collections actually increased on H1 to GBP 72 million during H2? Over to you, Chris, for that one. Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. In terms of provisions, you're also considering future collections as well as collections within the half year, and there were three things I'd mention that happened in the H2 year that affected that increase in provision. First, we had extra lockdowns. I think when I spoke to people at the half year, I expected not so many lockdowns in the H2 of the year. We also had additional FCA holiday extensions, where most of the holidays we'd had in the H1 year were three-month holidays, and they were extended to six months in some cases. Of course, what the provisioning represents is that you're providing for the outcome on that customer. In some of those cases, particularly the ones that are still on payment holiday, we have assumed that, not unreasonably and logically, I think, that they are going to be the worst customers in terms of their performance post payment holiday. We also suffered from more repossession restrictions. Happily, they're eased now, but up to the year-end, up to 31st January, they were still in place. What that led to was that you had more live customer debts than normal on the books, and therefore bigger provisions. As we go through next year, as per another question, they will either be needed as we try and work with those customers to find our way through those difficult situations or we repossess the vehicle and sell it. I hope that answers the questions and the reason for the extra provisioning. It was basically those three things. Just conscious of time as we're just running quarter of an hour through in attendees' time that they may have to potentially drop off. The floor is yours if you wish to carry on just to go through some questions. We want to take as many as we possibly can. Next one is Jerry Yu. This one for Graham Wheeler. In a recent FOS decision, the Ombudsman suggested reliance on ONS data and credit file checks were not always sufficient. Given the FCA's requirement for lenders to update their procedures for FOS decisions, is this increasing your underwriting costs and/or is it restricting the pool of potential borrowers? Graham. What a brilliant and detailed question. One of the issues that not just Advantage, but the whole of the industry faces is the divergent views between FOS and the FCA. The FCA have been as one is very comfortable with lenders using information like ONS data and credit reference information data, et cetera, to be able to underwrite customers. You're right. There have been a couple of unusual decisions from FOS more recently that have brought some focus onto the area of affordability checking. Us, like every other lender, will have a look at the sources of data, including the data that comes from open banking, which is more readily available for us just now, and we will always have a look at how we could find ways to finesse our both affordability calculation and credit rating for customers. Does it increase our underwriting costs? No, it doesn't. Does it restrict the pool of potential borrowers? No, it doesn't. It just means we, like we will always do, is we'll be as careful as we can be and use as much of the data that's available to us to make those decisions. There's clearly a bit of angst regarding this, about the divergent views between the Ombudsman and the FCA, which I would expect over the course of the coming months to be more aligned in terms of the way things are moving forward. I think hopefully that's covered that question, Anthony, if you're okay to move on. Yeah, that's excellent. Thank you, Graham. Next one is from Jerry Yu. What do you see as Aspen's target ROCE pre-funding cost at scale? Obviously, this is not as high a margin business as the motor finance business because it is secured lending, whilst the motor finance business is semi-secured on the vehicle and obviously on the lifestyle and capability of the customer. We would probably see ROCE for Aspen, without giving away too much, about 12% at scale, maybe a little bit more. It all depends on obviously what scale we reach. Next one is from Bill H. Did you make use of government help over the last year, and have you paid the money back? The answer is we didn't use furlough money. That was a principal decision right at the beginning, and we haven't used it since, and therefore there isn't any money for us to pay back to our wonderful government. Next one was very nice from John A. Thank you for doing this presentation. I hope you come back and do this again. We certainly will. We find it valuable, and hopefully you found it valuable as well. Finally, Jason S. Potential customer here, I think, Graham. Do you normally advance 100% of the cost of the car? Well, the industry uses CAP and Glass as two guides for the valuation of the car, and we look at every deal individually. It can range from 85% of the sales price to, in some cases, we go over it because of the quality of the car. There's no hard and fast rule, but we'll lend based on the customer's affordability first and foremost. If that fits within the price of the vehicle, then that's great. Great. Thank you, Graham, for that. That concludes the questions. I very much enjoyed it. I hope our audience has as well. We do hope that, one, you learned a lot more about the company, and secondly, you've been impressed by what you've heard and will consider a long-term and sustainable investment in our business. Because certainly we'd like to have you as shareholders. Thank you, Paul. That's fantastic. Anthony, Chris, Graham, thank you so much for that session, including the questions. You got through a heck of a lot of them, thank you very much. You've answered every single one. That was great. Anthony, thank you for the closing remarks and updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session, as you will automatically now be redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. If you've accessed the meeting from our website, the feedback page will just appear. If you've accessed via the link sent to you in the email, you'll just simply be asked to log back in. It takes just a couple of minutes to do so, it'll be greatly appreciated by the company. On behalf of the management team at S&U PLC, thank you again for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's event. Thank you. Thank you.