Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the S&U plc Interim Results for the six-month Period Ending the July 31, 2021 Investor Presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab that is situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just type in your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. These will be available via our Investor Meet Company dashboard, and we will notify you when they are ready for your review. I would also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll, if you would give that your kind attention, we would be very grateful. I'd now like to hand over, if I may, to Anthony Coombs, Chairman from S&U. Good afternoon, sir. Thank you, Mark, and welcome to everybody. I must say that we are very great fans of Investor Meet, and we find it a very good way of communicating effectively with our shareholders, particularly retail shareholders. I hope you're all pleased with the results that we've announced for this half year. We're going to be giving you an opportunity to ask questions, and hopefully we'll provide answers for you, which will be very satisfactory. Can I just say that I think that the half year has proved that S&U as a company is back on track, that we are very soundly placed now to take advantage of the increased opportunities for growth that we anticipate in both our businesses for the second half of the year and obviously years subsequent to that. Our people have coped quite magnificently with COVID, and it's to them that I would like to pay tribute, every single one of our colleagues and indeed our customers, but particularly our colleagues, some of them working at home in quite difficult conditions. I think they have coped quite magnificently. I'd like to put that on the record. We are very firmly based in terms of our finances, thanks to the very good work of Chris Redford, our finance director, who has put in place facilities during the half year, which give us significant headroom for further growth. The quality of our debt, both in Advantage and in Aspen, our bridging finance business, is absolutely superb. I got to pay tribute there both to Graham Wheeler and his team, particularly on the collections side in Advantage. Also to Edward Ahrens, who has collected an increasing, and in fact, a record amount of business in the second half of the year for Aspen. Don't forget, we always say that it's good finance, and being a good finance business is not only about sales and about transactions, it's about being able to collect and having good relations with your customers as a result. I think that when we come to it, you'll see that our Trustpilot scores, particularly at Advantage, show that we score very highly on that. Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Chris Redford, who will introduce the highlights for the half year. If we could just change two slides. The next one, please. That's it. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Anthony. Good afternoon, everybody. What are the financial highlights in our half year results? Profit before tax, we're very pleased with. Group profit before tax, GBP 19.9 million against the COVID-affected GBP 6.3 million last year, we'll give you more details on that as we go through the presentation. Similarly, earnings per share up against the COVID-affected results last year. You'll be pleased to hear we've proposed the first interim dividend for this year, which is 50% up on last year, reflecting some of those results. What has driven this great profit result? Well, in Advantage Finance, it's mainly excellent collections and lower than normal bad debt attrition. There's an economic factor behind that, but there's also very much some excellent work from Graham Wheeler and the team at Advantage in collections over the last four months, but also continuing into August and September. New loan volumes have also increased month by month, particularly since the dealerships reopened in April. The profit before tax for the half year for Advantage was an excellent GBP 18 and a half million against last year, which was affected by extra impairment provisions. In Aspen, they had a very good second half last year when book debt grew from GBP 18 million up to GBP 34 million. This year they've continued that with growth up to GBP 57 million in book debt, that's obviously created more profit. Their profit of GBP 1.5 million is actually more than they've ever made in a year before. That's just in a half year this year. Well done to the Aspen team, too. Moving on. What are the highlights in the income statement? Well, you can see against the COVID-affected last year, we're quite level on revenue. It's actually a 5% increase on the second half last year. We've got the book and the income moving in the right direction now. Impairments, very big figure last year, GBP 21.7 million. That's not a very good comparative because that was COVID-affected. If you go back two half years to July 2019, the figure then was GBP 7.9 million. That's a pre-pandemic figure. Against that figure on similar size book debt, impairment is GBP 2.8 million better than that figure, which reflects the excellent collections in Advantage in particular. Other highlights in the income statement, cost of sales is up, but that more reflects increasing new deal volumes this year versus the lockdown last year and admin expenses. Last year, obviously, people weren't earning their bonuses. We also had a bit of help from a one-off VAT refund. Admin expenses are up a bit this year, but there's good reasons behind that. You can see the profit before tax for the group as it was on the first slide, GBP 19.9 million against GBP 6.3 million last year. Moving on. The balance sheet is nice and simple, so even accountants can cope with it. You've got amounts receivable, motor finance, that's down on this time last year. As I say, in the half year, it's actually gone up slightly since January 2021. Property bridging, obviously that's a very big increase, but it has been gradual. It went from GBP 18 million at this time, July 2020, sorry, up to GBP 34 million at the year end, and now GBP 57.7 million. Ed, the CEO of Aspen, will kindly say a bit more about that growth in his session later. The other side of the balance sheet, how are we financing it? Well, we've got good group equity still, and you can see that's gone to GBP 189 million from GBP 174 million last year. The borrowings haven't gone up that much, i.e. the extra investment we've made in Aspen has been compensated for by good cash generation at Advantage. If we could give you some detail on that cash flow, moving on to the next slide. This is the where has all the money gone slide. You can see on the right-hand side, there's two sections, motor finance cash flow. You can see how we've spent your money last year in the first half year and this year in the first half year. Similarly for Aspen Property Bridging. You can see how we've spent your money in the first half year this year against last year. You can see, therefore, in Aspen, it's mostly extra advances, but quite a lot of extra collections as well. The book's very clean at the moment. In motor finance cash flow, again, an increase in Advantage, but very good, what we call basic monthly live collections. Graham Wheeler, the CEO of Advantage, will go on to say more about that in his presentation. Group cash flow, therefore, has moved so that at the end of the period it's GBP 115.1 million against GBP 108 million at the half year last year. Moving on to the next slide. Treasury and funding. Anthony actually mentioned this in his introduction. We've actually put in place extra maturity and extra facilities. Now our total committed facilities are GBP 180 million. If our borrowings are GBP 115 million as per the previous slide, we've got about GBP 65 million worth of headroom. This is anticipation of our growth plans going forward. Group cash outflow in the six months, that also reflects dividends as well as the trading outflows that I mentioned. Next slide, please. I'll hand over now to Graham Wheeler, who some of you will have heard from before, and he will talk about operations and direction at Advantage. Yeah. Thanks, Chris Redford. Yeah, I've got a few slides just to update people on operationally how we're managing and develop the business in Advantage over the last six months. I wanted to start with our people. Anthony Coombs mentioned it earlier on that our team have taken us through previously difficult times and are buoyantly back into the groove of business again now. We've adopted a hybrid working model similar to many other businesses. Of the 180 staff we've got, we've got a maximum number of people in the office at any one time of 120, but that averages itself out somewhere about 100 to 105 every day of the week. That kind of hybrid working model is something that we'll adopt pretty much forever more because it's really working for us very well. As we transitioned from home into the office environment, we took the opportunity to be assessed by Investors in People. Something that Advantage have done historically in the past. We took the opportunity in the middle of all that to assess ourselves again, we were delighted that we were awarded the silver status in Investors in People, which is an upgrade from the previous year. With one very small item that stopped us getting the gold, which we're now currently working on, we are confident next time round we'll move into the gold as we adjust our business according to the report. That maybe gives people a feel for the way that our people have felt about the Advantage in the same way that we feel about them, they've given us a great response. If you move on to the next slide, please. Is my clicker on? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. The big issue in terms of what's going on in the market is sales. Since the release from lockdown on April the 12th, what we've seen a slow but gradual increase in demand. We kind of expected a big boom, but that didn't happen because actually after April 12th, you probably all remember, the government released sections of society piece by piece, and that had an effect in terms of the car market and the car finance market. We've also been affected by the microchip shortage in terms of new cars, and people have seen that there's been lots of delays. I think the market in terms of new cars is 20% down based on even last year. That's had a knock-on effect in terms of the focus on nearly new cars and used car finance. People have shifted out of new cars. In fact, some used cars now at the moment are actually more expensive than the brand new price of a car. Because the market's been focused on satisfying demand in the nearly new car sector, actually used cars in the sector that we trade in, which is the slightly older, higher mileage vehicles, have fallen by the wayside a little bit, and the stock is significantly reduced in the marketplace just now for the types of vehicles that we normally finance. Anecdotally, one of our dealer partners is operating currently with 150 vehicles in stock when they would normally have 600 vehicles in stock. That gives you a feel for the lack of quality used car stock that's in the sector that we currently operate in. That has driven values up a little bit and deliveries down. That's created a bit more competition because there are still the same finance companies about, but a lot less deals that are there just now. Regardless of the competition in there, we've done really well. Our sales volumes have gradually increased month-on-month, almost in a linear fashion during the course of this year. We've taken the opportunity to adjust our business mix, which has had a knock-on effect in terms of our average rate and margin. We've done that by constant focus on improving the quality of the business, from moving from a risk reduction position that we were in the middle of last year to a managing risk position now. We've controlled the commissions we're paying to our retailers. We haven't increased the amount of commissions at all. By also applying a more aggressive rate in terms of the better quality business, which has compensated for in terms of the volumes of business that we've had at the other end of the scale. I'll just click onto the next chart, which kind of brings that into focus a little bit. The chart on the left-hand side shows the increase in volume month-on-month, and also shows that during the course of, I guess, the last two or three months, we've seen an increase in our levels of Tiers D and E, which is our lower quality business but higher rates business. That's been done by design because we adjusted our scorecard a little bit in terms of Tier D, and it's given us the confidence to move back into that marketplace that we had stepped away from in the middle of last year, in the middle of the pandemic. Great news from that point of view. It has a knock-on effect in a number of areas. Firstly, as we've adjusted the mix of the business, our average rate in terms of lending has been up during the course of the first six months. Because the increase in value of cars, we're able to finance a little bit more on the cars as well. Effectively, your average value of the lend has gone from GBP 6,500 to just over GBP 7,000. It's like in a perfect situation of growing volumes, better mix, increased level of average rate, and applied to a higher average lend. That all goes well for the future of the business as that mix has continued. Actually, that mix has continued into the first two months of this quarter as well. From that point of view, we're making some good progress with sales, and we've got some ideas in terms of how we can grow our business, which I'll talk about in a couple of seconds. In terms of our customers, they're still giving us great feedback. The approach we're taking in terms of our employees is to provide that human touch to our customers. Some of the feedback we're getting is first class, even from some of those customers who have had really difficult times financially and from a social point of view. Comments about being as the best customer service in the U.K. and that they'd recommend Advantage Finance. Those are great comments that were scored really well. That kind of relationship with our customers is the basis of the success that we've applied to our collections processes. What I just wanted to do is talk about briefly where we are in terms of collections, because that's the thing that's driving the increased level of profitability within Advantage. The chart on the right shows the percentage of live cash received in the business. If you go back to October 2020, where we were collecting about 87% of live cash, that's gradually improved into this year. We're averaging in excess of 94%, which is actually a record for Advantage Finance in terms of that live cash collection position. How did we do that? Well, we identified that customers coming off of payment holidays, many of them six-month payment holidays, had to be coaxed back into the process or the habit of repaying us again after having six months off. We took the approach that said, actually, rather than all of a sudden chasing them for a full monthly payment in many cases, our focus was on just getting customers back into the habit of paying again. We changed the bonus structure of our collections team so that we rewarded the collections team on arranging sustainable or having sustainable payment arrangements with customers rather than pure cash collected. That has had a really significant effect on the amount of live cash. We might not be getting full monthly payments from every single customer, but the fact that we're getting money from almost every single customer has driven that live cash received over 94%. We successfully applied a self-developed payment portal to customers so that when they do miss a direct debit, we immediately send them a link to say, Oops, we noticed you've missed your direct debit. Here's a payment link to make your payment on a mobile phone. That has really worked for us as well as we've taken lots of nice, healthy cash in from customers through the payment portal. At the other end, we set aside two or three of our most experienced and talented collectors, and set an intensive care service for customers who were having some real serious problems with their finances. The purpose of that was to keep customers in their cars, try and help them to work their way through the problems they've got, and get them back into making some sort of payment towards us. The net effect of all those things has been, as well as the increased level of live cash being received, it's also reduced the number of bad debts, reduced the number of loan terminations, which is having a very significant impact and positive impact on the financials of the business. From that point of view, that's the story behind our collections performance and our financial performance. I just wanted to touch briefly on further growth for the future. We've got a number of projects that are all technology based and digital based. We've been spending a lot of time and effort, working on our digital marketing proposition. We've kind of reworked and redesigned our website over the course of the last few months, which has created a threefold increase in the number of direct web visits from customers who are searching out finance from our type of offering. That has had an impact on the volumes of direct business, which has grown significantly as well during that last six-month period as well. We've got a plan in place over the course of the next few months to take that into another level, too. Great stuff from the digital marketing perspective. We set up, I guess about just over a year ago, a linkage to another finance company who are more of a prime organization. We built a link between their system and our system so that we can take and have a look at some of the deals that they didn't fancy according to their risk appetite. That's actually generating about 90 deals a month through that session just now, which is going really well. We're in discussions with another much larger opportunity, where we can link our system to a prime finance company, where effectively we have a kind of partnership agreement in place with them, that potentially could create a lot more volume for us in the future. Hopefully, we'll be able to tell you more about that in a bit more detail maybe next time we get together. Lastly, from an aggregator website. The aggregator websites like confused.com, compare.com, moneysupermarket.com are all beginning to move into motor finance, as a price comparison position. We are working behind the scenes to get involved in that, with one or two of our broker partners. Again, that's got a big potential for us as well, and we'll continue to work on that over the course of the next couple of months. Lastly, because the payment portal has been so successful, we're developing that further into other online tool services for customers to be able to digitize their relationship with us, for those that want to gather more information from us. That should free our resources up, our great people up, to provide even more of a human touch for those people who need us most. In summary from an Advantage point of view, the last six months have been great from a collections point of view, growing opportunity and growing performance from a sales point of view. We've not been resting on our laurels on that. We've been developing our business behind the scenes to be able to provide opportunities for further growth and further volume and further customer services in the future. That's pretty much where we are with Advantage, and time for me to pass back on to Chris, I think. Thanks very much, Graham. Some really exciting developments in Advantage there, and I'm sure people were interested to hear about them. On statistics, we always try and be very transparent in what's happening within both our businesses. On motor finance, the main business, we quite often show you this slide. I've updated it again at the half year. You can see this is showing the profile of new deals over the last six and a half years. You can see on the top line what number of new loans we've done. Graham's referred to a higher average advance in the six months, so hopefully you can see that 7,050. Also it's worth commenting here that the interest rate flat over the last one year has been a bit lower. That reflects the average customer score that you see just below that, which is much higher quality. Can you see we used to be about 860, and now we're about 900, 905, and that really is also part of the reason why early repayments are so good. This is another slide that we've updated. It's a very complicated slide, I'll do my best to explain it. What this slide does is show you the correlation between the way Advantage customers make their first repayment and the end outcome in terms of how many go to bad debt in five years time. The blue line is the way customers make their first repayment, and you can see on the left-hand scale that between 90% and 100% make their first repayment over the years since 2003 through to the current date. The red line is the inverse scale on the right-hand side, which is the level of bad debt. You can see over the years how closely they've been correlated. Just to talk a bit more about recent trends on this chart, you can see that after a slight blip in March 2020, can you see when the blue line went down? That was when COVID hit, and a few people who'd just taken car loans out, a few more people than normal panicked and canceled the direct debit. We had to work hard to get them back on track. In line with Graham's strategy on quality, the quality has shot back up since then to be about 98%, 99%. In the last couple of months, it's gone down slightly, but all that reflects is Graham's previous chart, where we're moving more back into Tiers D and E, which was more of our normal areas for writing good advantage business. That's had a slight impact on early repayment, but still very high. The reason the red line after about five years ago is dotted, is obviously we haven't had those results yet. If we could rely on how it was up to 2016, that would be great, because there is a strong correlation between the way customers make their first repayments and the end outcome after five years. That obviously helps the business, because it means we can see any problems coming very early on and try and react to them. The reason the red dotted line is slightly below the blue line going forward is just we think cautiously that there will be some impact post-pandemic from some of the economic factors, increased inflation, a bit more pressure maybe on disposable incomes for certain of our customers. That's feeding into those forecasts. We obviously hope they're back up nearer the blue line, if they can be. Moving on. This one is also a slide that we've shown before. It's quite a complicated slide. I'll do my best to explain it. It's a balance sheet slide. What it shows you is the status of our book of net receivables at the end of July 2021 versus the position at the end of January 2021. You can see that at the end of July 2021, 41,034 of our customers were up to date out of a total of live accounts of 61,914. That's an improvement since the end of January, when there were 39,411 accounts up to date out of a total of 62,651. If you want to spend time looking at how far they were in arrears, you can also see that no to one arrears, 6.01+, they may still be good customers. It may be that that's a 48-month deal. We're 36 months into it, and they've only made 30 payments, so six are in arrears. What we're measuring on here is original contract arrears so that we can see where the cash has gone. Obviously, when dealing with the customer as required by the FCA, we treat payment holidays as arrears. On this slide, we wanted to show you as it is, if we were measuring against the original contract. The three columns in the middle are quite interesting, I think. We'd only got 48 accounts at the end of July who were on payment holiday. You can see the profile of where those accounts sit in contract arrears. That is now nil. That column is now nil. 16,209 live accounts have had a payment holiday. They obviously need a bit more intensive care that Graham alluded to in his slides earlier. Then you've got the non-payment holiday accounts, where there hasn't been a payment holiday, and can you see 90% of those are up to date. I hope that's of interest. Just below those two columns, you can also see that as a measure of collections, 96% of non-payment holiday accounts due were paid in July, and 88% of post-payment holiday accounts. As I say, they need a bit more intensive care, but they're paying very well at the moment. If we can move on to the next slide, please, and I'll introduce the CEO of Aspen Bridging, Edward Ahrens, and he will talk about developments in our growing bridging business. Thanks, Ed. Thank you, Chris, and a warm hello from me. Aspen Bridging has had a strong first half of 2021, with some record transactions up at 66 for the first half of the year. This largely also follows the momentum that we were building at the end of 2020, following the reopening of the property market at the mid-year point last year. Net lending of GBP 56 million is also a record. As Chris mentioned, our PBT is GBP 1.529 for the year. Just in terms of quality, we made some changes in 2020 that we benefited from in 2020, but that's also continued this year. We've got really what we're calling the best quality book that we've had. We've only actually got one loan in default to put that into some context. We've net receivables at GBP 57.7. We benefited a bit from that from accreditation to the CBILS government scheme. That scheme has actually closed. We're back focusing on our prime core bridging propositions. Anticipating growth for this year, we've made some early recruitment, bolstered the team. We've also worked a hybrid model. In fact, the Aspen team have been capable of remote working ever since we launched as part of our day-to-day. That enabled us to continue to operate smoothly through the troubles that we had, certainly at the end of 2020 from the COVID and lockdown, as well as the early part of 2021. We're always keeping our eye very close on our competition, and what's happening in the marketplace, and we continue to tweak and represent ourselves on a product basis whilst ensuring we take the right approach to risk. A rigorous underwriting standard as always. Just from a more holistic point of view, since launch, we've issued out 300 new loans over the 4.5 years, and 210 of those have repaid. I think really, the message is overall, it reinforces what we believe is our opportunity to grow progressively with quality lending. I'll hand over to Anthony. Thank you. Thank you, Edward Ahrens. Thank you for all those who've contributed. Excellent. I think you've heard what I was mentioning in the beginning, in that we've got a very firm base for taking advantage of very, very significant opportunities in growth. I think you'll also be, hopefully, impressed by the hard work that our people have been doing during COVID in actually preparing the ways in which we can increase our market reach and increase our market share. That's certainly our intention. Now, without any further ado, I'm going to go on to questions. We've got a nice balance of questions, the first one is, my brother will deal with. It's from Michael D. I do apologize, Michael. Over to Graham. We're doing a bit of musical chairs here because I've only got one monitor. Right. The question is, great results. Well done, from Michael D. Very nice of you to say so. Do you see this momentum continuing, or would you see M&A forming part of your growth? Well, I think the momentum element has been dealt with by the other speakers in large part. We do think that momentum is going to be maintained, in fact, if anything, increase, largely a result of what we perceive to be increasingly, hopefully, a long-term market trends, and also because of innovations which we're making in our distribution networks. The point about the M&A, well, ideologically, we haven't got any aversion to buying other businesses, but there's just two points really to make. First of all, buying other businesses as a whole doesn't seem historically has never been a terribly successful activity. It's only one in three, they reckon, acquisitions actually lends itself to an increase in tangible value of the acquirer. Obviously, we have to be very selective were to undertake any acquisitions. Secondly, we'd probably only undertake under those circumstances, we'd probably only undertake acquisitions if it enables us to do something which in-house we couldn't do ourselves. There may be instances where that's the case. We'd have to be very selective again in identifying these kind of opportunities. Does that answer the question? Yeah. Okay. Great. That was great. Thank you, Graham. We're obviously open to offers on potential acquisition opportunities, but we do set quite high standards, as my brother has just said, in terms of what we're prepared to look at. If there's very good businesses around, we'll have a look at them. The next one is from Javier R. I hope that I've pronounced that right, Javier. The question is, and I don't know that Chris can see it, but I'd like Chris to answer, if you could, our Finance Director. It's about the historical ROE. Over to you, Chris. Thanks, Anthony. Would S&U be able to maintain its historical ROE in the future? Would Aspen affect this figure in a positive or negative way? Thanks very much for the question, Javier. Obviously, I think we're probably referring to historical ROE before last year, when we had a bit of a blip due to COVID. Yes, I think we can. I think there's some excellent developments going on in the business, in both sides of the business that lead me to say that. Aspen is a bit more capital intensive. Yes, if we moved more of the capital into Aspen, then the returns would come down slightly, but it is quite marginal. I think there's a good return on equity going forward given the developments in the business. I hope that answers the question. Thank you, Chris. The next one is from Chris R. It's not our Chris Redford, who is our Finance Director. Actually, I'm sorry. I do apologize. Before we get to that one, there is one from Daniel C. I'm going to ask Graham Wheeler to deal with that one. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. The question is, do you think the increases in used car prices are temporary? If so, how do you manage the risk of potential lending against an overvalued collateral? Which, of course, is a great couple of questions. I think the used car prices are probably quite cyclical. In fact, they're always cyclical, but all of the analysts tell us that because the lack of stock is likely to have an impact for some time yet. The feedback we're getting from people like cap hpi and Glass's Guide and Cazana, they're saying that the current situation will probably last until probably the spring, early summer of next year. That's where we are with that. By that time, I think we'll begin to see some reductions in terms of used car values. The question then is, how do you manage the risk? Well, I guess, couple of things. Firstly, we've got some rules around what we're lending against vehicles, and what we've actually seen is, funnily enough, is a reduction in what we call our loan to value from 80%, 90%, 80%, 88% over the course of the last six months. Much more importantly than that is we do a very detailed affordability calculation for our customers to make sure that they've got the headroom in their finances to be able to afford the car. It's that affordability calculation that we set a limit on the amount we're prepared to lend at the rate we're prepared to lend, that will have a controlling factor in terms of, or mitigating factor in terms of potential risk of overvaluation of cars. Those two things together make us feel a bit more confident that we are somewhat protected by drops in value. I have to say, given the fact that in the marketplace we are in, where we're looking at cars at GBP 6,500 to GBP 7,000, our percentage increase on that type of valuation certainly doesn't have the same effect as the same percentage applying itself to a nearly new car at GBP 30,000 or GBP 40,000. I think we're somewhat protected in terms of the market we're operating in as well. Good. Yeah. We've got a lot of very good questions now. The next one is from Chris R. This one is for you as well, Graham. Yeah. On the car side. Thanks, Anthony. The question from Chris is, do you see the current momentum in used car sales continuing? If so, is anything restricting your growth? I think that our own current momentum is continuing. We've moved into the third quarter and doing very well from that point of view. All of the statistics are saying that during the course of 2022, there's an expectation of about a 10%-11% increase in terms of used car sales volumes. That will hopefully create a bigger opportunity for us into next year. I think the growth factor for us will be the diversification of our sales channels, and I think we're very hopeful that those will create further opportunities for us, too. Do we see the current momentum? I think actually, if we get all this right, there's actually further momentum in terms of our used car finance sales. Is anything restricting our growth? Not really. The issue is the very well-managed pricing versus quality issue, which we maintain very rigorously within our business. Theoretically, we could write a lot more business at a lot lower rate, but that's not the business advantage within. We're here to maximize returns to the best of our ability. From that point of view, there's really nothing to hold us back. Good. Thank you so much, Graham. The next one, I think, is yours as well, from Simon C. Yeah. Thanks, Simon. You guys are making me work. Thank you very much for that. I love it. Simon's question is, as furloughs end, do you see this as a catalyst for bad debts to increase? Obviously, we are in regular contact with our customers, and we believe that there is a limited impact of furlough ending within our existing customer base. The thing that we're just conscious of is, with increases in national insurance and increases in inflation in terms of fuel and motor insurance and living costs, that's actually probably, for us, has probably got more of a risk for us over the course of the next three to six months as we head towards Christmas and people trying to find money for holidays, and trying to make a bigger impact in terms of Christmas this year compared to last. That's the potential of having more of an impact on us. We're ready for it, we're prepared for it, and we're looking forward to helping our customers through those challenges at the same time. Hopefully that's answered that question. Furlough is an issue, but I think it's less of an issue than there may be for some of the other issues that are floating around in our society just now. Thank you, Graham. Next one is for Edward Ahrens at Aspen from Jamie S. Ed. Thank you. Yes. The question is, to what extent was the Aspen business boosted in H1 by a rush to beat stamp duty holiday deadline? A good question. Our volumes in the first half of 2021 really have built on the momentum that we built up at the end of 2020. We have the benefit of the CBILS program, which has added to receivables. Actually, the stamp duty, as our target audience is mainly developers, really the impact of that was really on their own sales, and therefore increasing the repayment volume as opposed to increasing the new lending volume. We see that as basically moving back more to normal, and as we have a strong pipeline for the rest of the year. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ed. Next question is a pre-submitted question, not the one that we've had today. Over to you, Graham. Sorry for the overwork, but there we are. Thanks, Anthony. No problem at all. Yeah, this is a question around sales volumes, could you give us some info about the sales volumes and the progression in August and September? Is the outlook for the sales in the next month expected to continue improving as in H1? Could you give us which amount of this sales volume we'd be comfortable for 2022? I think there's three questions a load in there. The answer for August and September is that we have continued to grow our volumes in August and September, not quite at the same rate as between June and July. I think the tracker that I saw this morning was showing about 1,900 for the month. We've seen continued improvement month and month from a sales perspective. Is the outlook for sales the next month's expected to continue? I think it's probably going to tail off because of the lack of stock that's available, and we're planning for that within our budgets. In terms of 2022, I think I touched upon this earlier on about growth potential. We're certainly planning for an increase in terms of our natural sales volumes for during 2022, up towards 25,000 units, which would be, I guess, about a 15% increase in terms of our sales compared to this. We're quite confident that's going to be achievable. Thank you, Graham. Next question is from Maynard P. Over to you, Chris, for this one. Thanks, Anthony. The question is, results revealed a lower than normal impairment charge of GBP 5 million for Advantage. What is management's best guess at a normal impairment rate for Advantage post-pandemic as a proportion of motor receivables and/or revenue? That's quite a challenging question, post-pandemic impairment rates. What I tried to do was give the investors a clue in the half year announcement by also comparing to the July 2019 figures. If I look at the last pre-pandemic year as a whole, Advantage had impairment as a percentage of revenue of roughly 19%. Graham's been keeping the quality high, as we've seen on previous slides. Normally I'd say, well, I'd hope to beat that, but obviously with the pandemic in mind and some of the factors that we've talked about in terms of inflation increasing, National Insurance, and a bit more pressure on disposable incomes, I would tend to say a normal rate might be around that 19%. Thank you, Chris. Next one is from Robert G. I'll take this one. Why did you sell the personal lending business a few years ago? Well, it very simple, Robert. First of all, we had a very good offer. Secondly, although we're great fans of the home credit business, and we think that it's been unnecessarily criticized, mainly by certain middle class establishment who don't seem to understand the way in which many of our very good customers traded with us for over 70 years. We were concerned at the increasing tide of regulation, which actually was being imposed on what is essentially a very informal, and trust-based business. Those are the reasons why we sold, and we think it was exactly the right decision to take. We've since obviously reinvested the proceeds in Advantage and also in establishing Aspen Bridging. Next one is Robert G. I'll take this one as well. Do you have plans in place for when senior owner/directors retire? Well, given the fact, Robert, that I'm going to be living till 150, I can't really see that it's anything else but hypothetical. Actually, slightly more seriously, yes, of course, we have plans in place. We do cultivate people within the business who can step up. They're already actually working in the business. One of them is my first cousin, who is a director of the main board and also a director of Aspen Bridging. Very talented, very amenable, very decent, and very able executive. I'm sure that you'll be hearing a lot from him in the future. Next one is to Jamie S., which again, I will deal with. Can you give any guidance on dividends as current forecasts are for a 9% increase for the full year when you increase the first interim dividend by a very welcome 50%? Reason for the increase in the first interim dividend was that the profits increased, and we've always tried to keep a broad relationship. We like to be twice covered on our dividends, between profits and the dividends we pay out to our loyal shareholders. Let me tell you that we're very confident about the future, and we've got plenty of leeway with which to pay dividends. We think the profits will continue to increase. As a result, without giving anything away, at the moment, my own view is, and obviously it's up to the board and ultimately shareholders for the final dividend, my own view is that the expectations in the market for our dividends are a little, or even more than a little, on the conservative side. Next is Peter C. That's over to you, Graham. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. Hi, Peter. Yeah. The question is, what might be the effects of electric vehicles? Obviously we're in the middle of a transition from petrol and diesel engines into electric vehicles in the U.K. market, in fact, across the world just now. The effect will be opportunity, in my view, as we transition towards more older mileage electric vehicles. We're not in that market yet because the majority of the long-range electric vehicles haven't hit the five, six-year-old rate that we age of vehicle that we currently operate within. The average price of a used electric vehicle just now is in excess of GBP 20,000. I mean, it's closer to GBP 25,000, and that's kind of out of our reach just now. What we are doing is we're preparing for electric vehicles. We've got a special page on our website that specifically deals with electric vehicle financing and gives customers some help and guidance for what to look out for as they are looking to take an electric vehicle on. We've done a lot of research to see how we can help customers through the management of electric vehicles moving forward. So for example, we've identified that each of the batteries are made up of lots of individual single cells to make up the overall battery situation. We've identified that there is an aftermarket developing in that marketplace just now that when a battery begins to degrade, it's usually down to one or two cells within the overall pack, and that those can be accessed and repaired relatively easy. That gives us the confidence for financing and managing the higher level of electric vehicles into the future. We'll have to say the volumes at the moment are very, very small, almost to nothing in the capacities we have. Last thing I'd say is, we're in the process of changing all of our company cars and Advantage Finance to electric vehicles as well. I've got mine on order. It's coming at the end of this year. The view was that if we're going to move to electric vehicles in the marketplace, we need to take a step ahead of everybody else and learn what it's like to manage electric vehicles ourselves, so that when it comes to interaction with customers, we give the customers the best advice. I've got a nice BMW i4 on the way, with 366 mi on the clock, and I'm looking forward to having that and being able to, and the rest of the directors being able to speak to customers about what it's like to manage electric vehicles in future. Peter, if you ever fancy a chat about, what it's like to do that, delighted to speak to you about that. Great. That's lovely. Thank you, Graham. Next three slides are for Chris, who I think from Maynard P and from Javier R, again. I think Chris probably has replied to a couple of them anyway. Over to you, Chris. Thank you, Anthony, and thank you, Maynard, for the question. Presentation slide show 16,000 accounts. This is slide 16 if we can just flick to that one. 16. That one, yeah. Thank you. There's a figure in the middle there, 16,209 accounts were on payment holiday but have now come off payment holiday. If you calculate that's about 26% of the live accounts. The question is, what level of the receivables do those accounts represent? Well, because they're slightly older accounts, the ones that took the payment holidays, and they've also got bigger provisions against them, it only represents just under 20% of our net receivables. The next question is from Javier R. For how long should we expect lower than normal loan loss provisioning charges in motor finance? Great question, Javier. I'd like to think it would be a long time, but realistically, I think it's more of a this year feature. This year, obviously, we're working our way through and trying to work with customers post payment holidays, and as Graham alluded to earlier, keeping them in cars. If we're successful in that and the collections are maintained, then we'd expect lower than normal loan loss provisioning charges in H2 as well. I would expect that they would normalize more as per my other answer to the question on impairment as a percent of revenue might normalize at, say, 19%. That's not a guarantee. It was a management guess, as requested. Next question, Matt from Maynard P. Results show Stage 1 motor provisions of GBP 18 million. Up GBP 4 million or so on the corresponding, GBP 13 million-GBP 14 million stated for the previous 24 months. Can management explain this GBP 4 million increase? It seems odd that Stage one provisions have increased given the commentary on the improved quality of new loans. This is to do with the ratio of loans that are in those different categories. Stage three has gone down a bit, Stage two has gone down a bit, but Stage one has gone up. That's good news and reflects some of the excellent collection work as things get back up to date in certain cases, and therefore, it's a Stage one provision rather than a Stage two or Stage three provisions, which have both gone down a bit. Thank you. Anthony, Chris, Graham, and Ed, thank you so much. I think for every question that has come in, you have given a response. Thank you for that, and thank you to the investors for submitting questions. Perfect timing with two minutes before the close, so that is great. I know, Anthony, that investor feedback is important to you and the company, and we will shortly redirect investors to provide you with their thoughts and expectations. I guess perhaps before doing so, I could just perhaps turn to you for a few closing comments. Well, first of all, to thank you, and most important of all, the investors for coming on the call. We find these occasions, both with investors and with institutional investors and analysts, extremely useful in terms of getting new ideas, getting their reaction to the current trends of the business, and enabling us to stand back and have a look at the business with obviously refreshed eyes. This afternoon's been no exception to that. It's been extremely valuable. Thank you so much for everybody taking the time and trouble to come and contribute. Thanks very much, Mark and Investor Meet Company, for making it possible. Thank you. No problem. Thank you indeed to Anthony and the rest of the management team from S&U. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of S&U plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you all.