Let's kindly take our seats. For those who are following us online, the questions and the queries that you might have, kindly post them online. We'll be able to respond to you. It's now my honor to invite the Group CEO and MD, Dr. James Mwangi, to come and present the half-year results. Dr. Mwangi. Thank you very much, Alex, and a very warm welcome to all of you. We are delighted to have you, and we trust that we'll have a good morning together as we look back at the performance of our group, the Equity Group, for the first six months of this year. This presentation and review will be slightly different. We have been going through a journey of transformation, and I'm sure you all remember that I've really focused on how we are inducing transformation, the change, and the disruption. So we'll now start focusing on outcomes. We have been on transformation for four years. We'll now focus on what is the outcome of all this transformation. What can we see as transformation? It's early days, but we want to capture the narrative early enough so that we could work with the impact of change. I want to thank shareholders for their patience during these four years that we have been building the organization. And we then start—I want to start with where we are with the governance structure because the strategy we know, we've been dwelling on the strategy. Broadly, we have completed the governance, leadership, and risk management framework. If we can go to the first slide, and that's how the new Equity Group looks like. As we can see, the technology group is in place. It has two licenses. The banking group is complete, which of the subsidiaries with the bancassurance as the distribution vehicle, the Equity Investment Bank. And now the structure of the health group is complete. We have the three licenses that we've been waiting for. The general insurance commenced business in January, so we'll be able to see the results of the first six months. And we got the health insurance license in July, and we hope we'll start seeing the outcome for the general insurance. The foundation has continued to play a very pivotal role. It has helped in ensuring the transition moves well. We've now started to see the foundation has started also creating a structure of its own. There are components that can't be done in the foundation, like health, and it's first sort of subsidiary in Equity Group. I just want to point out that the foundation and the financial group, the economic arm, and the social arm are parallel to each other. The foundation is not a subsidiary of the economic group. We want that independence. We want to ensure these arms create positive tension between themselves, and that is really important. In terms of how the flow of governance structure is, the breadth and depth, I'm glad that, again, we have really focused on creating the governance structure, and we have created the leadership structure both at the board and executive. And we can now say we have the team that will execute the future of this group. The search has been long. It has been arduous, but I thank God that the board has been able to bring on board people who can be entrusted to take us the next phase. And this has also been completed at the subsidiary level so that now it's not talking about effort. Then we contextualize this transformed Equity Group, the operating environment, and we see the global environment is still weak, but it's having signs of potential green shoots, either because of lower prices, because of pockets of growth that we can tap on, and also because Africa, and specifically East Africa, is going through a positive tide. And as we see at the globe, whatever, inflation still has not been brought under control. Ideally, inflation in the developed world is always below two, and we can see two has become very sticky. Even where we are doing very well, like the Eurozone, we are stuck with two. And that then has kept interest rates very high, and high interest rates are not good for GDP growth, so GDP has remained very, very depressed. But when you come to our region, which we could call the Eastern Central Africa region, the story is very, very different. We have said this before, that this is emerging as the fastest growing region in the world. We are very confident that this will be long-term growth. The headroom for growth is very high. The runway for that growth is very high because it's built on fundamentals, and it's fundamentals of economic activities, development of infrastructure, and investment in social assets like education and health, and there is growing competitiveness and also growing relevance to the global market. The East African region provides significant solutions to the future of the world that we are all trying to build. It's in that context that the transformation of Equity could not have happened at a better time because then you could be able to convert these opportunities into commercial value, and that would be music to the ears of investors and shareholders. That is why we are saying we'll now focus to showing them how this value will be unlocked. A very special mention is the relationship that is evolving between the Bretton Woods Institution and this region, again, demonstrating interest by the world. I think the geopolitics, we have seen how central the Eastern Central Africa is becoming to the global geopolitics, whether it is Qatar, whether it's the African Union, whether it's the U.S., trying to provide solutions for the challenges that may be conflicting the region. The more important thing is how we are then positioned in that region. You can be a very transformed organization, but how are you positioned? And as we can see, we are very well positioned, particularly in the critical markets of Kenya and DRC, where we occupy position two. But it's not just position two. It's a substantial position two. It's a relevant position two. When it comes to DRC, it's a systemic position. 25% of the market share. You go to Kenya, it's 13% of the market share. You go to Rwanda, it's like 19% of the share. So if you then combine the capability of a transformed organization, an environment that is enabling, and the capability, as is being shown, then you can see how the future can look if we continue to execute the transformation. As we can see, Uganda, we are almost becoming relevant in Uganda. We can comfortably say by the end of this year, we'll settle number four, organic growth. If there is no inorganic growth, that then puts us quickly to position three, and then we bring parity in the region. We are confident we will be close to position two in South Sudan by the end of this year, and then we are left and finding a solution of becoming systemically relevant in Tanzania, and that positions us the go-to bank for trade finance and cross-border trade. That will be very important and a national partner to the African Continental Free Trade Area. That kind of position then gives you a competitive advantage and gives you a head start ahead of everybody else, so if you play your game well, then it becomes an easy way. In terms of depth on governance, we have really seen a very significant change in shareholders. We have been telling it as a story, but it appears we have won the trust and the confidence of investors. So we have seen a structural positioning. And we are very excited to see that the social security funds in the region now anchor the bank. Yes, there is a huge foreign capital component of shareholding, but the region is anchoring. And the message we are getting when we see Kenya Social Security Fund, Uganda Social Security Fund, Rwanda Social Security Fund being on the top is that it has settled well with investors, that we are a long-term investment because of our rapid growth and high return. So it's growth and high return. And when you combine those two, then you settle naturally. The advantage of social security funds is that they are long-term investors. They're investing pension money. So you create stability in your shareholding. That then joins our two largest shareholders. IFC is not a trading investor. Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and Arise, the Sovereign Wealth Fund, those are long-term investors. So again, once you stabilize and then you realize these are deep-pocketed shareholders, then you are confident that they will walk with you on the journey of growth and your strategy execution. At the board, I'm sure you have seen we have revamped and strengthened the bench of the board to bring the skills and the competencies that can challenge us not to take comfort with the success of the first phase. But people who now have not brought us here substantially, they are setting new goals because they also want to show contribution in their three years. We are delighted that at the group board, we were able to attract two former vice presidents of the World Bank, both at risk, former chief risk officer of the World Bank, retired just in November, and is helping us to think risk. Having thought risk at that global level, it's lifting us to the next level. In terms of investment, former vice president of IFC in charge of investment. We are also glad that we are able to attract the former head of research and product development at J.P. Morgan and former chief executive of BII, the British International Investment, who then brings the knowledge and many years in these spaces. That then strengthens the governance. People who have everything to lose, the reputation they have built as vice presidents of the World Bank, they will not keep quiet when things are not going. They will call us out, and that is a sense of independence. Somebody who wants to make a contribution to Africa, and we're very proud that this brand gives such a caliber of people the confidence that we will not drown their reputation, that we can build their reputation by their impact, and that gives me confidence that people believe in our strategy and its execution, and we have the reputation that it will take, so that governance structure has really executive management has, most likely, you see it has continued to be renewed, and we are happy that we almost have everybody we wanted to have in management, and now it's execute, execute, execute. It's no longer strategizing. It's execute. You can't execute if the capability is not at par with the responsibility. I'm glad to have won the confidence of this team that I can help them orchestrate their capabilities and deliver for people. We are happy with the strategy. The Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan has got huge acknowledgment globally. It's now being referred to as the Marshall-like Plan for Africa. People are playing on it, and we have used it to develop our business plan for 2030. Essentially, that overlap makes us leaders, the public leaders for the development of the African continent. I think with customers, we have realized we need new different products that really focus on the segments that the Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan focuses on: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, SMEs, trade and investment, energy, and technology. We are seeing that the appropriate solutions no longer are talking about products that have been put in place. People, we have said we have got the right people. We have created the right environment to continue to retain those people. We have attracted them. The challenge is to retain them and to challenge them to be the best of themselves or the best version of themselves, but the biggest achievement has been on systems: the infrastructure, the backbone that we needed that is scalable, that is next generation, that is digital aided, that is machine learning enabled, that is AI enabled, has been completed, and the thing we are now doing is processes and procedures, processes, because we need a new generation of what one would call applications so that we innovate on. We don't innovate in infrastructure. You innovate in applications. That, again, we are confident that that has come out well and the framework has now then formed, and we can confidently say that from the strategic framework, we should be able to deliver on our objective. We are not changing 2030. We are sure that we are confident there are gaps. We are aware there are gaps, but we want by 2030, 30% of our loan book be invested in transforming agriculture so that we are relevant to the 70% of African population whose employment is in agriculture, 30% GDP contribution, 46% of foreign exchange earning. It's all about agriculture. That agriculture should then lead to agro-processing and the first layer of manufacturing. We hope manufacturing will come to 15% of the balance sheet in terms of loan book. Trade finance, we think, will become the most popular solution because it's all about trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area. But that will then also mean that these verticals of the former sectors will be populated by SMEs. And so formalizing SMEs and ensuring they take 65% of our loan book. We have no doubt about bringing on board 100 million customers. That's what their ambition is. And we feel the tools are in place. It's not just being in place, but they have been tested. So when we look at the banking group, we have started seeing this transformation has brought in added efficiencies and optimization. And I can't help myself looking at this slide and seeing the green colors and the direction they are going. Any investor looking at Kenya, net interest margin moving from 6.5% to 7.5%. That really tells you efficiency has been unlocked. You don't need to wait for long. You quickly see its impact when you look at return on assets because it is not the balance sheet that is growing. It's not the assets that are growing. It's the efficiency that is being unlocked. That transformation then gives shareholders a return of 3.9% from 2.8%. A 100 basis points jump within a year. A balance sheet the size of Kenya, which is KES 1 trillion, then tells you what it means when you move. When Kenya started the subsidiaries in the region or the investment in the region, it was doing a return of 4% on assets. Kenya has bounced back to 4% return on assets, but this time on a very big balance sheet. That explains why return on equity is now at 28%. If you look at Equity BCDC, and we have done that deliberately, Kenya and BCDC, because Kenya is 50% of the balance sheet and BCDC is 36% of the balance sheet. So you are saying when you combine 50 and 30, it's 80% or 85% of the balance sheet is behaving the way an investor would like to. Net interest margin above 7.1%, and this is in dollars. This is not in Kenyan shillings. It's in dollars. And then return moves to 3.1%, and return on equity moves to 23.5%. So we could say DRC now has a return equal to the cost of capital. So it changes the game. It's no longer where it was giving us a return lower than the cost of capital. And we see Uganda. Yes, net interest margin of Uganda didn't look sustainable as you can look there. We have no problem with them coming to 9% because it means that they are normalizing. The real game is as they normalize. What is happening to the return on assets? That's, as you can see, from 2.2% to 3.4%, and return on equity from 17% to 25%. That is the transformation we have been talking about, and the picture then becomes clear. One might see Rwanda, and I want to add to it the people who may be thinking Rwanda is red, but look at where Rwanda is operating in. Despite the decline in interest margin, it still has the highest return on assets and return on equity. Remember, last year, Rwanda acquired Cogebanque. Despite the growth by 25%-30% of balance sheet, returns on equity and returns on assets have not been significantly reduced. It's more of an adjustment when the subsidiary is unlocking the synergies. Of course, efficient markets like that, net interest margin, we expect to be the lowest, so that can go. But despite that, the return on assets. It's not surprising that Rwanda is the aspirational subsidiary when it comes to cost-income ratio. It's operating at 35% cost-income ratio. It has set the standard, and we have asked subsidiaries if the model can be delivered at a cost-income ratio. What are we doing at group level at cost-income ratio of 50%? It gives us a headroom that maybe we should be able to reduce the cost-income ratio for the group by about to 40% in the short term. That's then a balance sheet of KES 2 trillion. When you start reducing cost-income ratio at a group level from 50% to 40%, we all understand what it means. The biggest transformation has happened in Tanzania. As we can see, Tanzania has upped its yields. It has now hit 4% return on assets and 27% return on equity. So it's the entire business that has transformed. And that, to me, is the biggest thing we have achieved. It is the entire group. It's not pockets within the group that have simulated the change. But change transformation has occurred in the entire group. South Sudan, I'm sure I have said it repeatedly. Don't worry about South Sudan. It's on maintenance of license. The performance of these years, we saw in the first quarter, have been affected a lot by South Sudan, but that is inflation accounting. It has nothing to do with cash, so it is accounting for inflation. And broadly, then if you look at numbers behind these, the issues are the most important aspect. But we can see the greatest maybe success on a broader perspective is where we see the subsidiaries in regions are now contributing 49% of our deposits. So what one would have called diversification of the sovereign risk, we're in a good place. We had thought we would be at 70% Kenya. Kenya has now been reduced to 50% loan book, 50% of the loan book. And so the shorts, and we will see, that is why the returns are very well distributed because the risk has been fairly distributed. Assets at 48%. Again, we can see a complete replica. If you believed in the Kenya model, then the regional model is a complete replica of Kenya because, as you can see, 50% of deposit, 50% of the loans, 48% of the assets, 50% of the revenue. So the model has really been implemented with amazing precision, amazing precision. And that is the execution. We have always known Equity is famous for its execution capability. Let me draw a bit of attention on because it all boils down to what does this mean to the shareholder. Look at the return on equity. Kenya is at 28%, but the regional subsidiaries are at 24%. So as they mature and they become more efficient, it means they can do better than Kenya. And return on assets, 3.2 and 3.9. So we have pulled very, very well as far as that. And if you look at these numbers, if you look at South Sudan, because you need some time to do adjustments, you'll see the position of South Sudan is inflation accounting. It's not operational profit. So things could have been fairly different. Asset quality, despite, and we all know that the NPLs for the industry are elevated at 17%, we still have been able to maintain our NPLs at 13.7%, showing what we have said before, our NPLs have peaked, and now it's working them down. And as we can see, it's the collection of the corporates that we have been talking about, but you all are aware that we have now got to the last phase. We think the corporate loan book that we have been talking about will be sorted this year because all of them now, we have got most of the judgments, and we should be able to do. We have maintained a very strong coverage for those NPLs. Even when we collect these corporate NPLs, coverage will bounce back to 90% on its own without needing to go through the P&L. That coverage story, demonstrated and comparative with the industry, gives us confidence that it's not just about growth, it's quality growth, and it's value-creative growth. The control environment has been so. That gives you a view of the regional expansion plan. We started as a Kenyan bank. We will be lying to the world if we say we are a Kenyan bank. We are now a regional bank because 50% of the balance sheet is above Kenya, but we are headquartered in Kenya. That is maybe the new narrative. It's a regional bank with its headquarters or roots in Kenya. But then we also said, yes, we have done very well in banking. How can we do in insurance? And we said, let's diversify the product offering. It's not just about region. The product offering. Can we equally be successful? And we are very impressed that gross written premium third year is up 115%. Revenue, insurance revenue up to 59%, and net insurance and investment revenue 30%. As you can see, our profit before tax has gone up 26%. What is incredible, and I'll forever be grateful to the team in insurance, is that it's now self-funding. When you have that level of return, you don't need to keep on looking for capital. You only need to tell shareholders to be patient, but internally generated cash. So we are not going to dilute shareholders because we are growing fast in insurance. But look at the assets. In three years, we have managed to reach that KES 31 billion in terms of assets in the insurance group and the liabilities, as you can see, of 23. But that is a group level. When we do a deep dive, how is this group insurance? You then look at the life insurance, our first born in the insurance group. The first born is only three years old. He's preparing to go to a baby school in third year. But look at how our baby is performing: KES 3.8 billion in terms of premiums written, insurance revenue almost a billion, and net investment, and a profit of 890. So essentially, the insurance group at the moment is equal to the life assurance, or ELAC, as we fondly call it. But for an investor, what they would really look most is, how is this growth? Is this growth creating value? And we see the return on equity is at 40%. We were very excited with the return on equity in the banking business, around 27%. The insurance, life insurance, it's at 40%. We are very excited with 3.8% return on assets; return on assets on the life business is at 4.7%. And this is off-balance sheet. This is non-funded income. And maybe for the investors, the issue is how you value your streams of income. Non-funded income attracts very different valuations from balance sheet funded income. So this is contributing to non-funded income significantly, changing the structure and quality of our revenue and income. And maybe I just needed to emphasize that because we have seen how it is growing, and it's moderating now the group. It may remain small, but when it's at this level of returns, it's almost two times the return numbers of the banking group. But I think, well, this is good for investors. What we look at is the impact we have in society. And when you look at it, we have now done, in just three years, 16.6 million policies. And as you can see, in just half a year, we have done almost an additional million new customers. And it's not just policy 16 [points]. It is a diversified reach, 8 6.7 million unique policies. So we are almost heading towards three policies per customer. And that is the real thing that inclusion in the insurance business is taking ground. I'm told by Angela that these might be about nearly three times the policies of the rest of the insurance industry. That is what Equity did. It brought or helped to bring financial inclusion from 4%. When we started the journey, we are now over 90%. People have access to finance. Looks like insurance. People get access to insurance. But what really pleases me most is that it's three policies. People are not going for the mandatory car insurance. They're now thinking about their health insurance. They're thinking about their life insurance. And shortly, they will be thinking about the investment class of how big can this scale be if we go back one slide? It's fulfilling to see that 79% of the policies are issued online. So we are almost now making it easy and convenient. And there is no time you get insurance. You get insurance when you need it. So we have compressed time. And it doesn't matter where you are. We have also compressed destination or geography for that matter. So whether you are in U.K., you can take an insurance policy irrespective of where we are. We have a very deliberate and intentional focus to SMEs. Why? Because that's where our people are. That's the businesses, the informal. And we want to work with the regulators to ensure significant coverage. I mean 65% of our loans are in SMEs. So if that's where we are from the banking perspective or from banking focus, then we want that to be mirrored on insurance. We distribute to the people who are building our economy, the people in the real economies. And when you look at the positioning, it's a very strong start for this baby. As we can see, Group credit is ranked number two. Return on equity is number seven, and profitability is number eight. I guess AKI is from 56 insurance companies. So we're really pretty happy. And it's a journey. It has started very well. And so we could really see that the transformation of diversification, as we like, and all that now we will be doing is to report numbers to you. The potential is very, very high because we are coming from a low base, and we believe that this will be a game changer. Earlier this year, we got approval for the general insurance. The general insurance, as you can see, has no comparative numbers because it started the beginning of this year. At the beginning of this year, it has started to generate meaningful numbers. As we can see, it has made a profit before tax of KES 32 million. Within six months of a startup, it has made KES 32 million. Return on equity, too early to speak, 6.6%. I can't wait to see the competition between general and life insurance or life assurance because they seem to be. While they are under the group, we are feeling the best thing is to really initially allow them to operate completely independent of each other so that they really scale, they really compete because that's the way we could be best. I'm glad that by the end of the year, we'll bring you now the health insurance. It got its license in July. And because we have been waiting, it has started lending business. And I hope Dr. Gatonga will have something to report for the third quarter. And Dr. Gatonga, as you can see, it's been profitable in six months. So it can also be profitable in three months. Now, this really underpins how the transformation was done. It was heavy lifting, a lot of hard work, and now it's just reporting the numbers. It will be just more of reporting. I think the story that I don't really want to focus more is the technology group. As we said, we went to the technology group to enable the business or the group to really have reliable technology. That's why we got the MVNO, the PSP license. And if you look at it, brick and mortar is only doing 1.8%. It's now less than 2% of the customers who use our traditional infrastructure of branches. The business has gone digital, and even third parties, whether it's agents, ATMs, merchants, those are on digital platforms in one way or electronic, let's use the right word, electronic platforms with a back office that is digitized, and if you look at the channels, you can see what has happened. The business, the customers have migrated from fixed and variable cost channels to self-service. We had fixed costs, then we moved from fixed costs to variable costs, and now no costs model because it's the customer serving themselves, so look at how quickly everything on fixed costs is on a decline. Everything on the variable cost is on a decline, and it's on the number of transactions and volume, and look at what everything in self-service is on an upward growth trajectory. And that essentially, we have really now to look for uses of branches. The branches are no longer relevant for transaction business. And we need to look at how do we innovatively and creatively have the fixed cost channels to start generating revenue. And we have called that the commercial conversation, and we must find. So if we move this cost to start generating, the cost of fixed channels to start generating revenue, because as you can see, it's not generating, it's a cost driver. It's a cost only, but importantly holding the brand. How do we make commercial value? And that is the next phase. And it's like creating a double charge. We have very good business on self-service. Let's go back and rebuild the old model. We like it, and I want to emphasize, we're increasing branches, not because they are to do transactions, but we are now One Equity. One Equity, the branches can have a very different business model. And that is what the strategy team is thinking about. How do we start to generate revenue to correspond? So when you look at non-banking business, because we looked at the banking business when we were looking at the regional approach, it then combines the insurance and the technology group. And this is more of diversification on business lines. It's not regional. It has a regional approach, but this is now moving away from banking to insurance. So it is not that we are no longer a Kenyan bank, but we are no longer a Kenyan banking group. We are now a financial group bringing banking and insurance together and converging and recognizing that there has already been convergence between banking, insurance, and technology. It's platform businesses. So essentially, we are building a layer of technology. We have also seen the brick and mortar has been replaced by self-service. That model is a technology model. And essentially, so it is not technology as a technology company, but technology as a business. And that is what maybe I want to emphasize on because we now ask the technology business to come out and see banking, insurance, and technology competing as businesses, not as a service provider, not as a cost structure, but as a profit center. And essentially, you see a lot of work. The way we are making brick and mortar to start becoming a business and developing a model, the technology group is also in the works to make it. And remember, it's One Equity. The costs have all been covered. Any additional revenue that we get from the branches because of an innovative model to use that infrastructure, we only have revenue. The cost has already sunk. Any revenue we get from technology, we just go down to the bottom line because the cost has already been covered of acquiring technology. So I think that as we can see, assets from this group have moved from 1.4 to 1.9, revenue from 2.8 to 4.4. For you to believe. Sorry, from 2.8 to 4, for a startup to be able almost to double and leading from a very big group. The banking group is very, very big. So, to see insurance and technology growing faster than the banking group, it tells you how fast these startups are growing. And that is why they're able to break even. Dr. Gatonga said you hold him in October. I can't wait for October, Dr. Gatonga, to see your results. General broke even in six months. I'll break in three months. Why are they breaking in three months? Because they are leveraging on a powerful brand, and they are not investing to create a brand. Creating a brand is the most expensive thing. And people underestimate what this group will become simply because they are leveraging the most expensive items. They don't have them. They don't have infrastructure. They're using bank assurance for distribution insurance. So essentially, the technology business is coming on top of the infrastructure that the banking group has paid to be provided technology as a service. And then they are converting that asset or either state of technology into revenue-generating assets. And that is why they break even very quickly. And I'm not being surprised. The issue is how big could they become? How big could they become? And so our focus on this strategy is scale. It's growth. And that is what we said we'll be measuring. Construction is over, and it's the growth. But as we do this, it's giving us enough revenue then to do good to society. We have always believed that doing well can be done alongside doing good. So we have scaled up our investment in society, shared prosperity. We don't want to be seen this very, very successful group, but enjoying success alone. We want to enjoy success with the members. We want to enjoy with our host community. We want to enjoy this with the public. We have everything for everybody. For our rural community, we have food and agriculture. For our young people, we have education and leadership programs. And we have enterprise development and financial inclusion. They can employ themselves. And for all of us, we have health, energy, and environment. So nobody is being left out. And you can see the staggering amount of money. If you multiply $715 million with 130, it tells you the amount of money in excess of KES 100 billion that we have expended in shared prosperity. This is the most best kept secret. And I hope we'll be able to articulate it more, and you help us to really talk about the social impact. When you look at the staggering numbers, 60,000 secondary scholarships, 2.5 million women and youth trained on financial inclusion. It means we might be doing more than all our tertiary colleges put together in terms of if you look at SMEs, and this is post-COVID alone, nearly 700 micro, small, and medium enterprises trained given KES 400 billion. And as you can see how well they are doing in creating jobs. Dr. Joanne, we are now at what? 2. What? 2.4 million jobs. And you can see we have a lot of trust in our education. But look at the number of kids that we have been able to send out. And I'm glad that immediately after this, we'll be giving a ticket to 123 kids to fly out of the country in search of opportunities. And I'm happy to say 14, how many are going to Ivy League Schools? 16 of those will be giving tickets. In one year, you are sending 16 kids to Ivy League Schools, 123 kids abroad. That power is as we succeed, society succeeds. It's alignment of interest between an organization and society and community. Look at the farmers. We had a target of 35 million trees. We didn't stop there. We said, "This is our new way of life, planting trees." And we hope we'll catch up. But the most incredible impact has been on social impact. Look at social impact. 5.9 million households relying on Equity to be able to limit to them social safety payments. We talked about health the other day here, and we made Dr. Joanne stand up. Now look, now it's not about standing up. It's people, it's the footprint to the Equity Afia clinics. 4 million patient visits have been recorded. And we are talking about a startup. So the Equity brand is that powerful. It goes to health, it becomes a hit. It goes to insurance, it becomes a hit. And hopefully, we use this concept to solve most of society's problems, whether it is the marginalized with the social safety nets, whether it is now we are thinking about innovation for our young people because we believe the challenge of Gen Zs is not a political challenge. It's an economic challenge. We must give them opportunities. And we'll use the capability of this bank to reach out to young people. And you can see what we have done with SMEs. Train them, give them money, handhold them. But what we are thinking now is, why don't we make the 23 million customers of Equity a marketplace for them? And then we give them the platform of a digital public infrastructure to sell to our population. It becomes a captive market of 23 million for young people. We believe to satisfy the needs of 23 million people with quality services, quality products, we should be able to create 10 million jobs. We should be able to create 10 million jobs very easily. So we'll ask you, we partner and see what we can. The long story seems to be coming to an end. How does the balance sheet of the group look like? But as you can see, you can see the partners continue to increase. Look at the names of the partners. And we have grouped them. Banking partners who have signed to the African Recovery and Resilience Plan, funding partners who have taken ownership into the bank, and EGF Foundation partners who are giving us partnerships into programs. It looks like the screen is becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. Next time, you may not be able to see it. I will have to read the names for you. That again talks about the brand, the trust, Equity, and joys, not only among its people, but also global. As the world recalibrates to find solutions to the disruption that we have had of funding as we knew it, we believe together with this team, we should be able to provide a solution. So that leads us to the balance sheet of the group, and the balance sheet of the group has gone through a lot of restructuring, so if you look to the bottom of it there, yes, despite the very challenging macroeconomic environment, as you can see, we have grown 3%. I want to say it is not 3% because if I was asked, I would add the 9% reduction in borrowed funds. We chose strategically to shrink the balance sheet by removing borrowed funds because they were becoming increasingly unaffordable, so that is deliberate, so if we had maintained the borrowed funds, the growth would have been different, but we have chosen to leave it, but what excites me about this balance sheet? For the first time in four years, if you look at net loans, they have grown by 4%. We're saying, yes, it's challenging, but we will not abandon the people. We have developed the capability now to lead in challenging environments. The group is becoming increasingly resilient, and during difficult times, it will start with its people, with its members, and within the communities it's operating, and so I'm so excited to see the change in net loans is the exact change in cash and cash equivalent. We're now moving. And that, while it's helping those who need money despite the challenges, it also means earning. Cash doesn't earn, but as soon as you migrate it. And that is the biggest opportunity we have. It's not just moving the cash. If you look at the number just below cash, that is government securities, KES 540 billion. It needs to go to the third line in loans. And I think those who may not have understood this balance sheet and the potential it carries, it can still double its income by just reallocating, not growing the balance sheet. If we grow balance sheet, and that's why you find we are not focused on growing the balance sheet. We are focused on optimizing the balance sheet. And the best way of optimizing the balance sheet is to reduce the first two lines and reallocate that to the third line. Give it out in loans. The government pays us now maybe 9%, but the customers will be willing to pay 14%. You can see the yield. And it looks like we are now able to manage credit much better. So that is the potential of this group. It's not growing the balance sheet. If you have been measuring the growth of the balance sheet as an investor, you are missing it. It's how Equity reallocates the balance sheet to the highest earning asset classes. That is the big responsibility. And when we start talking about the business is digitized, then it starts telling you. Today, I think on the Business Daily, and I'm not advertising the Business Daily, it has a very beautiful article. There is a bank with 55 million customers. That is digital-heavy. Another one with 33 million customers. But we have 23 million. But you can see when you go to the same business data, it says which bank has the highest number of customers with more than KES 500,000 in their bank accounts. And CBK, the agency that has on behalf of Equity Group, we have 139,000 of our customers having above KES 500,000, followed by a bank with 121,000. Now you can see the comparison. Number of customers, but who is making the biggest difference in the customers? That number is because we are an SME bank. And we'll continue to strengthen us. Money is made by businesses. It's not employees who have a KES 1 million balances in their bank accounts. It's the businesses in their current accounts, in their transaction accounts. So a lot of focus on SMEs. And that's why the foundation is very central to us to de-risk and to capacitate our people to get into business. We are willing to take the risk. We recently signed a KES 500 million guarantee with African Guarantee Fund. It's simply to say we are upping our appetite on taking risk on small and medium enterprises. You can see the impact. This effort has not been in vain. You can see a bank can have 55 million customers, Equity in Kenya, because these are Kenya numbers, has only 14 million. But when you go to where are the most successful customers, they're in Equity. A bank can have 33 million, Equity has 14, but Equity has the most accounts that have demonstrated capability. That is how to read this balance sheet and the latent power within this balance sheet and the ability. As microeconomic environment changes, I want to say we want to support the government. We have asked them to allow us to graduate those the government has de-risked. The government has been giving 26 million young people the Hustler Fund. We've looked at the list and said, "We can onboard them in the bank." Digital capability, if you find us going digital capability, is now to be able to scale. The money is there. What we don't have is the borrowers. We'll optimize profitability if we are able to reduce government securities from KES 540 billion to about KES 75 billion. What it means, KES 450 billion needs a home in loans. That explains the African Recovery and Resilience Plan and the opportunities it gives us in transforming agriculture in partnership with like-minded people, particularly with the blended finance, where we will provide our balance sheet and they provide funding for capacitation, de-risking, risk sharing. We see within a short time we'll be able to convert these government securities into loans. I will leave you and your calculator to compute the implication that we'll have as I turn to the page where it will have profound impact. The impact will be in income statement. We see the decline in interest income. We're now getting up there, moving up. It's no longer declining. But I think you can see again the reason why we slowed in balance sheet growth is we said we'll not take a deposit at any rate. We'll make borrowing possible and we reduced our interest rates. Yes, we lost about KES 70 billion, but we said we want meaningful. You can see the transformation that has happened. Net interest income, as you can see, has grown all the way, 9% for the first time in four years. We're struggling with non-funded forex. It's a challenge there. Transaction is a challenge. But I'm happy to say total net income is a growth of 3%. Again, as we have said, we have managed our own book. We are happy with the quality. We are happy with the coverage. And this is the prudence of Equity. Be proactive. Now we don't need; we now can fall into lending without necessarily having to provide. You can see the cost of additional staff, the staff we are bringing, and then we have been able to mute other expenses. And we'll mute those. No, we may not mute expenses more. What you see is revenue as we make use of technology as a business to start generating revenue, as we make the branches to start becoming profit centers as opposed to cost centers, so our total cost down 2%, giving us profit before tax of 12% and profit after tax of 17%. If you look at profit before tax, and we have said when it includes South Sudan, if you remove South Sudan, that profit before tax goes to 20%. That's how profitable the transformation has been, but we have to account for inflation. That is inflation accounting, so minus South Sudan, which is a licensed maintenance subsidiary, the business is doing well. South Sudan has not taken away the KES 3 billion loss that is registering from the group because it has no impact on cash. And that is what people need to realize, that it is what one would call an offset. So that is where we are making good progress, very difficult times. What does this show? It shows the resilience we have been able to build in the group during this transformation. It was to build the resilience. We have learned the hard lessons. It started with interest capping, those who can remember, 2016, and interest capping were retained all the way to 2022. And we couldn't lend because the cost of risk was higher. We couldn't lend at that cost of risk. And that's how the KES 500 billion was accumulated. Now, lending, we can price risk. So we could, and you can see we have started releasing the money back into lending. And you can see a direct correlation between the reduction. The second aspect that hit us very hard is COVID, and you know how disruptive COVID was. That shock came, and really we struggled with it. But it was the unintended consequence of COVID disrupting global supply chains, so things like trade, investment were muted completely. And this is the ramification. It may have been 2022, 2020, but the effect is felt going into the future. And that is the future that now we are living of the aftermath of COVID. But most underestimated impact came from last year Ukraine conflict or war, as some people called it. And simply because the two economies were dominant suppliers of grain and food to the world and energy, both oil and gas, particularly the dependence on Europe. So what did they do? Their conflict made the world go back to the 1970s in terms of food and energy inflation. That's where the biggest problem came to, and this was not a country. It was not a regional. It was global because food is global. Energy is global, and the world, to manage inflation, which we all know went all the way to 10%, had today's interest rate, so the economy is dealing with high inflation and very high interest rates. And we saw inflation, although it was 10%, it has come to 2%, but 2% is still above the global long-term averages, which are always below 1%, normally below 0.5%, so we are still four times higher than the average, so interest rates have not come down as they should do, and as you can see, there is a lag, a huge lag, and that is what has affected us. Lessons of this shock said, "Never again into the future shall we be hit and made redundant by shocks. We'll create a resilient business model." The transformation was to build resilience in the group. As you can see, the balance sheet has now become very agile because we have built in the resilience that was necessary. It has taken us four years. Four years that has disrupted our track record of growing 10 times every five years. Every five years, we have only grown three times instead of 10 the last five years, simply because of being disrupted. We think we have now built shock resilience. The shocks we know. It doesn't mean there won't be any other shock. But if this is a shock that we have created the agility, the flexibility, and created sufficient buffers to be able to do the what has this done? If you look at the previous slide, look at what has happened to shareholders' funds. We're now near the KES 300 billion. We're now above $2 billion in capital. Why? Because the buffer we had created to take care of mark-to-market, which had almost reached KES 90 billion, has now been released. And this you can see. If you have a capital of KES 300 billion, 25% of KES 300 billion, you have almost a single lending obligation of KES 75 billion. Equity now can go to development space. And that explains why we are leading the world in the campaign, a global leader in the campaign of private sector-led development financing because we now have the capability. We have the comfort. When you have a single lending obligation of KES 75 billion, you can't finance. And given that we decided to develop the Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan or the African Marshall-like plan in a collaborative way with IFC, with IMF, with the UN, with 24 development banks, then that capability to syndicate for the development of Africa. I'm very excited, and I'll give Joy a moment or two to tell you a little bit about the influence we have had in Seville to develop the concept. And I'm glad we are about to release a white paper on that space so that we could be able to lead the transformation of Africa through the private sector. And the private sector. Loans can be done by the private sector through PPPs. The government's headrooms are very narrow. The debt burden has shocked the governments. And as you can see, debt repayment is now even more than the recurrent expenditure. That space, we all need to rise and say, "It's not sustainable. Why don't we get the capital of the private sector to do development financing?" I take real pride that we have been able to craft that ability. If you take it up in just one page, we see customer deposits up 2% to KES 1.3 trillion. Total income for six months breached KES 100 billion. Almost giving us a guarantee that it will be more than KES 200 billion group revenue by the end of this year. Efficiency ratios, NIMs, cost-to-income. I want again to talk about that number. That number is inflated. The loss that we are seeing in South Sudan, inflation, that is what is causing that cost. If you adjust for the cost of inflation because it's factored in the cost-income ratio, we are navigating towards 48%. So the trade is the right one. And we see that when you go to the individual subsidiaries. Kenya, which we used to operate at 56%, is down now close to 48%. So we can see the trade is right, but that number has been affected. If you look at loans up, profit up, assets up, profit after tax up, return on assets up, I can tell you if we deal with the cost-income ratio adjustment of the number of inflation accounting, which we saw gross profit jumps from 12 to 20, cost-income ratio will be positive. Return on equity will be positive. So the dashboard is all green. So the two leads, as we have said, that is inflation accounting, and you can discard it. I think let's predict the future because I think the future is more important for investors. Investors never invest into the past. They invest into the future. They bet on a company's future. And I want to draw you to the last three quarters. The fourth quarter, we made a profit of KES 9.7 billion. The first quarter, we made KES 18.6 billion. The second quarter, we've made a profit of KES 22.9 billion. Your guess is as good as mine. The transformation is complete. This is what you need to be measuring as. How long will this waterfall last? It can last as how long it will take us to move the KES 500 billion from government stocks to lending. That's really what you need. It will take as long as it will take us to completely turn our technology investment into revenue-generating investment. It will take as long as converting our branches to a different business model that generates revenue because they are now just cost. Technology and branches are just cost structures. We need to convert them into revenue-generating, and so that graph can be as steep as it is, but I bet it will be steeper than that, and it can be for a long time. Investors don't say you were never told. I've taken a little bit of time because this is technical, and I wanted to simplify it so that all investors have the equal chance in decision-making. And it's also good to say, George, KES 22.9 billion is the highest, highest quarterly profit we have ever made in the history of this bank. So we are setting a new history, but I don't want to say it's a new history. We have innovated a new equity. It's a new business model. It was not optimizing on the business we had. It was about disrupting the business model we had and completely transforming it. If you look at 22.9, it compares with the last four years' average of quarterly profit of 14.8. That gives you the delta of the transformation. And we are saying it has just begun. It has just begun. But that is the delta we have. And the delta, you can see, going forward, the average trust will not fall below that. That's the new business that we have. If you look at 10-year average, it has been 11. Four years, 14. What does it mean? The business is really transforming. New average going forward, not below 22. You can choose where your future is, but as an investor, we are inviting you to bet on us. We have been transparent, very open, and we have given you the data. This is because we appreciate you walking this journey with us. If it was not for you, this journey would never have been there. You trusted us. You put your faith on us. And now we are saying the hard times are behind us, not because the environment has changed, but because we have learned how to operate in a challenging environment. And we have developed a resilient business model through regional diversification, through business line diversification, changing the delivery channels or delivery model from a brick-and-mortar fixed cost to a variable to self-service. The cost structure are very different. And I've taken a bit of time because I wanted to honor the investors who have joined us today, the investors who are online to understand the game has changed. This is a new invention in business models of how to transform, to disrupt yourself, brutally be honest to yourself, transform yourself, and look for better days. Let's look at the ratios. How are we sitting on the ratios? Shareholders will be more concerned about capital. That's why I want to talk about it. Look at your capital. The capital is growing. What does it mean? We are now generating internally enough cash to fund this growth. Unless we want to accelerate the growth through mergers and acquisitions, we are comfortable. Our shareholders can sit knowing unless it's acquisitions, we're not going to ask them for capital. The only thing they can anticipate is enhanced dividend going forward. That's how to interpret those ratios. But I think we talked a lot about KES 500 million that needs to be moved loans. Look at liquidity. That is the second test you test. Is that movable? As you can see, it's liquid. Liquid means cash and near cash. So it can be liquidated on demand. So essentially, those are the two tests. And as we saw again, efficiently look at the line on cost of risk. We are moving in the right direction. Coverage has been. We are not profitable because of coverage. And look at PAR. We have moved from and we are making good progress to get back. And we hope in the fullness of time we will be below 5%. So if you go below 5%, cost of risk can be about 0.4%. And then it tells you how much efficiency then will be released to the bottom line. We know the lines that we need to do. I want to introduce our new Chief Business Transformation Officer. Murage, why don't you pick the mic and introduce yourself? That's a man who has been given this mandate. Maybe that's why staff costs have gone up by 10%. But we think it will be worth it. Now, why did we bring Murage? It's to ensure the lessons that we have learned over the last four years are codified and put on paper and institutionalized so that this agility becomes our way of life. Business balance sheet restructuring, the lessons of what to do and what to do. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. James. My name is Anthony Murage. And you can be generous. I've been very efficient, so there is time. Shareholders need to know who their trust is. That one you can leave out. Well guided, Dr. James. Anthony Murage recently joined the group as a Group CFO, but with a very clear mandate on business transformation for the group. I think, Dr. James, you've talked quite a bit about some of the things that are already in flight. It's very clear from the presentation. The transformation is paying off early days, but tremendous good results. What are we focusing on? I think it's to solidify that success. But a couple of things still, again, we can do more. I think I like your words. It's balance sheet optimization. It's not really focused on growth. With the current balance sheet, the investments we've made, it's about leveraging those techn ologies. We need to unlock that. There's a lot of upside there. We need to improve our profitability. And there's a gap on income. I think that's a big focus we shall focus there. But on cost as well, I think you talked about the investments we've made in technology. We are automating. We need to make sure efficiency. Learning from some of our subsidiaries that are doing very well. You talked about the transformation we've seen and the results in Tanzania, in Uganda. Rwanda. Rwanda is the best in class when it comes to efficiency. We need to replicate that and even scale even more across the group. From a balance sheet perspective as well, we are looking at strength from a capital perspective. We're in a good place, but continue to strengthen that. We are looking at our funding, diversifying our funding. I think our biggest opportunity is. I had a request on Anthony was to introduce yourself. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you, Dr. James. I'll come back to that. I recently joined the group, having spent 25 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, working initially in audit and later on moving on to consulting. I spent about 11 years as a partner. We did a lot of work across the continent, in Europe, Middle East, focusing on financial advisory, financial reporting, mergers, and acquisitions. So again, that's why I've been a consultant quite a lot of my time. That's why very quickly saw me going on into really showing we understand the challenge, we understand the opportunities, and how to address it. Thank you very much, Dr. James Mwangi. Anthony was the senior partner in Pricewaterhouse for 11 years, in charge of capital markets and advisory in the region. We needed somebody from the region because we want to be advised about the region. My take from him is early days. It's very early days. Don't think this is optimized transformation. This is early days. Transformation will happen when the KES 500 billion gets to loans, when liquidity moves from near 60% to 28%. We optimize profitability at 28%. Now, you can see that delta. Pivoting that is what Stanley, sorry, Mr. Anthony is very good at, and we really want to really put there. I think to do that, we need a lot of partnerships. And I'll ask two people who are in charge of partnership, Joy, and Dr. Joanne, maybe to talk a little bit. We can start with the Global Affairs Director, Chief Communication Officer. Thank you very much, Dr. Mwangi. As you could see from the Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan, we can't accomplish everything in the plan without partnerships. We have been looking for partners across the platforms in the Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan for trade and investment, for agriculture and natural resources, for our SMEs in the clean and green space and technology. We have a variety of partners that we have been really bringing on board to crowd in capabilities and capacities to deliver the Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan. Since I have the mic, I'll just also extend the conversation to the private sector, which is. Maybe before she does that, she has said crowd in those who have capability. Equity cannot own the transformation of the African continent. It's just providing leadership. It's just orchestrating like-minded people and saying, "We are an African group. We understand Africa. You can land on our capability, our infrastructure, and our knowledge so that we do it together." And to that point, I would say that the example that we have tried to put out into the world, that purpose can be profitable and profit can be purposeful, is also what we're trying to do with the private sector work that we're doing. We're trying to share our example with the rest of the continent so that other companies and other partners can take forward the example that we have been exemplifying for so many years now. And that's the work that we're trying to do with the private sector. Since January, we have been working with the IMF, with the Club de Madrid. And this is your camera. Yes. Okay. Thanks. I'm from CNN. I should know that. But since January, we've been working with the IMF, with the Club de Madrid, with the World Bank, with the United Nations, with many other partners, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Milken, Ford Foundation. And we went to Seville with a plan for how the private sector could actually crowd in different kinds of financing, essentially, with the partners to deliver development in a time when the development progress has been stalled because of the cuts in international funding. And I think that you'll see over the next few months that we're going to deliver a formulaic white paper that we will be presenting at the G20 in South Africa in November and then also to the G7 leadership at the French G7 Summit next year. We're partnered already in New York during UNGA to workshop the white paper that we have developed with about 100 different partners at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. So ideally, it's to bring the world to support African development differently, this time using the private sector, African private sector, so that you build the capacity in the country. The argument we advanced to the world is, "We are okay you financing governments," but governments are not involved in development. Development, which is GDP or gross domestic product, is an aggregation of goods and services produced in a country. It's a private sector that produces goods and services, not government. Government is an enabler and creates a light environment. We said Bretton Woods should help governments to create an enabling environment for the private sector to allow private capital to flow to produce goods and services in a country. And I'm glad that argument won. And it's now being presented to all the global organs. But back home, Dr. Joan, how is it happening in the foundation? Okay. Thank you very much, Dr. Mwangi. And good morning, investors, partners, and our guests this morning. Yeah. So if you've seen the presentation that was shared by Dr. Mwangi, that's cumulatively, as you've seen, we've currently had about $713 million going into our social impact investments cumulatively, of which about 81% have been investments directly towards young people and upskilling, education programs, and exposure really for our young people. Through the way to transform Africa is to invest in education. We are glad that we now have an opportunity to use the best universities on earth to develop human capital for the African continent at scale. In universities now, we have 29,000 scholars. We will up that because it will be 42% of the 60,000, such that we have a critical mass of the right skills, of the right experiences, the right exposure. We have maintained them in class so that it is not just about investing. It's investing in the future, in the leadership, business leadership, civic leadership, political leadership, people who, as a generation, should be able to put Africa. This is not in Kenya alone. We are in DRC. We are in Rwanda. We are in Uganda. We are starting in Tanzania. It's really a generational leadership in the markets that we operate. So besides our focus, which you've always known us to take in terms of entrepreneurship and financial literacy, we offer capacity building as well in food and agriculture, which is a non-capital. Why? Because it's entrepreneurs who create wealth. The reason we're building on entrepreneurs, they're not jobs for our young people, but they're educated. We have highly educated entrepreneurs. We want to persuade them to go to their family business and formalize and transform those businesses. That's really the gist of it. And we'll add all the while we're forming crowds so that we can have these crowds where we exchange ideas. And our most accomplished customers will be patrons to those crowds. And they will be having meetings regularly so that we generate, we create a generation of entrepreneurs who make this nation a startup nation in terms of businesses and formalizing. And hopefully, we'll get iconic. I was very delighted to see Kenya now is leading in Africa in terms of icons. There are 300 icons in the world. I think Kenya has a few. So we want to really make our Year of Peace scholars to be part of driving that agenda. Yeah. So we maintain the same focus at the end of the day, but we are seeing now how can we do it perhaps differently and ensure that we're able to deliver the same impact but at scale. You've heard about our ambition to be able to reach 100 million people, impact 100 million lives by 2030, which means we need to look at ways in which we can do it more effectively, efficiently, perhaps through digital channels. So in view of that, the foundation is also morphing to also introduce that to say, "How can we empower young people to be able to take up those opportunities that present?" And of course, as indicated, is that our health programs are also ensuring that we focus on maintaining the resilience of our communities because, as we've all known, we've always said before that good health is both an ingredient or an input as well as an outcome to economic development. So for us, we maintain the same focus, but also while exploring new ways of being able to deliver that impact. Lastly, is that we are immensely grateful to our partners. If you look at the partners that we started with across the foundation way back in 2008, about 17 years ago, is that we've maintained the same partners, being able to onboard new ones, being able to design new programs with them at scale. So even as we crowd new additional ones, we are grateful that we maintain our portfolio of partners, as indicated. Thank you very much. Agriculture Transformation Center of this plan because that's what African Recovery is all about. Development of leaders very central to the plan. Young people and innovation center of it, but more importantly, health because of the productivity of our population. Education is not enough. You need to be healthy population for productivity to gain. So a lot of what you see scale, scale at a level maybe not seen before happening because we have the trust, we have infrastructure that can be able to run these programs better than before. But as we said, you'll not be able to manage this unless you understand economies. You have to understand economy because we are now operating not at the enterprise level, but at the economy level. So do you want to project how the region looks like? Because this plan is as good as the region and the way the region is positioned. That's our Chief Economist. He's backed by an economic advisor to me, and they are doing a stellar job in predicting. Thank you, Dr. I think one of the things we're seeing macroeconomically, and I'll just talk to the end of the year and into the second half of the year, is that there are several bright spots that we can take advantage of, and there are seven risks that we need to look at, several rather. So the bright spots we're seeing, first of all, in DRC, is that the economy is ticking along well. We've been able to secure a lot of good funding from the IMF and the World Bank. That's good concessional lines. And we are seeing, of course, through the peace agreement that there's a positive sentiment that hopefully that will be implemented and settle the region down. So the outlook for DRC now is much stronger than it was in the beginning of the year. We're really hoping that the implementation of the peace agreement will foster that. Uganda is in a good space. Of course, they'll be going into elections soon. But one of the things we're just seeing from Uganda, they'll be getting a lot of oil revenue, hopefully, from next year going forward. That's deep U.S. dollars that weren't previously in the economy. And we're also seeing a return of concessional financing to Uganda. The World Bank is going to be back, and they may have a program with the IMF. Concessional financing is important for our governments. It gives them access to cheap money to allow them to then make it productive. Tanzania, again, good space. We don't see uncertainty in the election. Of course, there's heightened tensions. We're seeing the incumbent probably coming in through. Then we're going to have a good ramp of five years of quite a bit of policy stability. We were able to meet with the governor of the Bank of Tanzania about a month ago. And they're really focused on economic growth and implementing the new vision for the country, Vision 2050. So I think in terms of the opportunities there, we're seeing quite a bit. Regarding Kenya, I think one of the opportunities and the bright spots we're seeing is that our forex is doing very well this year. Our remittances are doing well. Our tourism is doing well. And agricultural commodities are doing well because the weather has been favorable. We've also seen food inflation going down. It's been ticking up a bit, but it's been much lower than usual. But obviously, the low oil prices are really helping inflation go down. We are seeing low oil go through to the end of the year, and that will be positive for most of the region, with the exception of South Sudan. Of course, South Sudan, one of the things we're seeing is a contraction that was anticipated in the economy may not be as pronounced as we had thought. One of the things that we are seeing, however, in South Sudan is a need, and I think Dr. Joanne's point was very true, for foundation support to really come in and support the communities there, particularly with regard to mitigating the effects of climate change. Rwanda is in a good space again. We've seen some currency volatility. But I think because of the peace agreement, hopefully, we're going to see some stability going forward there. I think I'll just stop there so I don't take too much time. So the prognosis is mixed in terms of bright spots. But we are, I think I've mentioned some of the risks that we're looking at, particularly in the fiscal space for Kenya. I think we're still monitoring the elections for Uganda and Tanzania. And of course, with DRC and South Sudan, conflict is something we're continuing to keep our eye on. Thank you, Dr. I thank you very much. So this plan can be as good as it can. But the environment in which it is being implemented counts a lot. So it looks like the environment is better than even the plan. We seem to be guys who are in the right place at the right time. But we are not just coming at the right time, but with the right capability because we have transformed ourselves and made ourselves very agile. Talking about that agility, and maybe what is most important is that we are also transforming our organizational culture. We want to be customer-centric, very customer-centric, and very market-driven. And the reason why we are so customer-centric is because the customer needs the same things, whether they are in DRC or Uganda or Kenya. So the common theme is the customer. And so we want to lead the culture. It's about customer-centricity, market awareness, or to be market-driven culture. And of course, professionalism and integrity, the foundation, the values that have brought this bank. But this time, holding ourselves strictly to our values, having audits of code of conduct to ensure there is no deviation. So we're very, very confident. The last one is that we promised that this plan is not about Africa feeding itself. It's allowing Africa to play appropriately in the marketplace. The marketplace is a global economy. It's unfortunate that we are 25% or 20% of the world's landmass, but our power is 2-3%. Our trade is 3%. We are 18% of the world's population, but everything else is below 3%. The objective is to bring investment into Africa and open Africa for those investments, but also open the world for African commodities for trade. That explains why recently you have seen us trying to take Africa to the world and then bring the world to Africa. I'm sure all of you noticed when the shareholders approved our first international office in Dubai. I'm glad to say we have now appointed our UAE and Middle East first director. Maybe if we can give the mic and make her raise her hand so that people can know. First of all, introduce yourself and then speak to whatever responsibility your responsibilities. If you start, the mics, the camera will be. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Mwangi. Good morning, everyone. I'm Dr. Michal Annoske. Dr. Mwangi, mic up a little bit. As Dr. Mwangi mentioned, I'm the UAE country director, also responsible for the rest of the Middle East. In terms of my background, I have a PhD in Islamic banking from the London School of Economics. I then moved on into diplomacy, and I was more so as a representative to the U.N.'s International Maritime Organization. I also served some time as the Prime Minister's advisor on trade and investment, focusing on third countries that wanted to use Malta as a stepping stone into the European single market, and I was also appointed special advisor to the E.U.'s first commissioner for equality. I've also then spent time as a consultant in the Middle East, where I advise governments on diplomatic engagements, notably COP28 and the WTO's MC13. And I've also worked with private companies on public-private partnerships. And I'm delighted to be here now with Equity. And the responsibility in UAE? So job description a bit. That is a tall order, but I believe that in the beginning, our immediate priorities are going to be diaspora, trade and investment, and of course, working with the foundation to find ideal partnerships to invest in Africa. And ideally, that is why her PhD in Islamic banking, because this is a banker, is all about because the Middle East banks are all Islamic banks. We needed somebody who understands how do we build. As you heard, she wants to focus on diaspora. It's the fastest growing African diaspora, Middle East. How do we get the remittances back? They need to be structured with the banks, partnerships, and frameworks within the bank. But if you look, you heard her very well. Her biggest job has been in trade. And I don't want to say she's the one who was behind Malta, but Malta now is the fifth strongest shipping line business in the world. It's a sort of a Singapore perspective. And the question is, how can we develop trade and monitoring trade between Africa and Middle East? It's a point-to-point and maybe maximum three days for a ship to move from Mombasa to Dubai. That's the thinking. How do we get trade? How do we get the wealth that is coming in the East, Asia and India, pick up Africa? How do we link Africa with the lead region for global growth, India, China, and the Middle East? So that's really, and of course, this is a diplomatic job. It can't get better if you negotiated the European Union Brexit Treaty. It gives you that level. And this is what we are saying about governance, the skills and competencies that this bank has put. AQ is not in the room, but the Europe desk officers are in. Again, so we don't want to say we are just taking Africa to UAE, that the traditional partners of Africa is Europe. So we have opened a desk for Germany and one for France and shortly one for UK. We have just agreed with the UK ambassador. And what we have seen is like the French one. In just one year, we have opened 38 accounts for French companies that want to be matched with African business people for fro capital, and export of goods to Europe. It's really this is optimizing. We have also another office in the U.S. based in Washington. These offices are to bring the world to Africa, make them understand Africa, and it's not negative that we had to appoint a French or a German to be in Germany because it's helping the Germans to understand. So somebody who is based here but working in Germany and France to bring those companies so that they are grounded and are working within the business. How has been your success in your first year? Good morning. Thank you very much, Dr. Mwangi. The introduction was just right. My name is Patricia Janečková. I'm the German and European desk manager at Equity Group, and we just recently had a very successful German desk annual reception in June, where we invited around 80 German companies to celebrate with us the first part of the German desk. And besides traditional banking bank accounts, of course, I facilitate business and trade. The Germans and Europeans are keen to join us to our DRC trade mission in September. They've come to Tanzania and Uganda in April. And we are the only bank in Kenya that has such a European desk. So we are the forerunners of trade between East Africa and Europe. And I want to call on our customers really to take advantage. If they want to export, we now have a desk to help them to export. If they want to import, we have a desk to help them import. So the common international trade challenges have been resolved for our customers, but not exclusively for our customers, for anybody who are operating in Africa. French desk, anything? Good evening. Good afternoon, everybody. Or sorry, good morning. My name is Mahvish Malik. I'm the associate director for international trade relations. I also oversee a lot of work which Patricia does, which includes, of course, French companies. My work is, of course, to enhance strategic partnerships within the European markets as well as globally. We recently hosted an Italian technical leather association here in Kenya. It was a very successful three-day event, and we're looking to potentially sign an MoU with the government of Kenya and the Italian government, facilitated by the Italian embassy. I would encourage and invite you all to attend our webinar tomorrow. We are hosting a webinar on unlocking trade and investment opportunities within the DRC. This is a lead-up. It's a teaser for our trade and investment roadshow to the Lubumbashi and Kolwezi in DRC, which will take place from the 14th to the 20th of September. So please do join. It takes place from 2:00 P.M. to 3:30 P.M. tomorrow. And very excited about it. We will have interesting interlocutors from the Investment Promotion Agency in the DRC, from the private sector, as well as a number of key private sector players. Thank you very much, Dr. Mwangi. It's really amazing that Italian leather crafter coming to Africa. And broadly, what we are saying is that the region has 25% of the entire world grazing herd. Yet it never benefits from skins and hides. It only takes the meat. When we looked at the value, we realized the meat is less than 1% of value. The real value is in leather, but not exporting it in raw. It's exporting leather hand bags. It's exporting leather shoes or making them. That's where the value is. I'm very excited that part of the agreement is to bring this investment crafter into the region. I'm sure you all know Murang'a Conference, where we are trying to develop the GI for coffee, for tea, for macadamia, for rice, and avocado. You could imagine when they get the geographical identification, the power. You can't get a global identification unless you are processing. We are forcing value addition. That's why we're excited about the special economic zone in Murang'a, which will host all these things. You expect a finished product. We're optimistic price will not go below 10 times. You can imagine if the price of tea went up 10 times, the value, the transformation in the tea growing zones. This is the relevance of bringing the world to us and taking us to the world. We are lobbying using the Washington office, and we're almost sure that the products we are championing will be on the American-Kenyan trade agreement. That's when you say, yeah, the world has come to consume African products. So if we do that with UAE and do with the others, I think Africa can't continue to remain closed to the world. And the world can't shut its doors to Africa. We'll break those doors. That's the essence of getting people who can break the doors because they understand. They have the capacity and knowledge. I think we have said enough. Allow me to sit so that those who paid the price of being on the podium or got the privilege of sitting on the podium can pay the price by answering your questions. So I invite the questions. Thank you very much. So the first question. Oh, questions are really coming. Yeah, very good. Thank you very much. One of the new things that I've heard from you today is this issue of clubs. Clubs that have an entrepreneurial background. Can you please say a little bit more how we are executing that? I've been trying to manage and help chamas in Kenya for the last 25 years, and I'm interested in that. Broadly, the team as Dr. Joanne then prepares and her team to tell us where we are. And I don't know how to say this, but in 2005, I won the Global Vision Award of business modeling, the model we have developed. And you can see where the model is 20 years later. 2012, I won the World Entrepreneur of the Year Award, followed closely by the Forbes African Person of the Year, heading up with the Oslo Business for Peace, what people call the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2020. And I've asked myself, how can I share the knowledge of entrepreneurs? I've been very privileged to be in many advisory boards. I'm on the Advisory Council for the World Bank on Jobs. I'm on the Advisory Council for Robert Smith, Vista, the largest technology investment group in the world. And the question is, how do we use this knowledge to help our customers? How do we help the sons and daughters, the heirs of our customers' businesses so that we can have a critical mass? And the idea is by using your card to write your friend's card. It doesn't dim your card. It just makes the room brighter. So if we make the businesses of our customers brighter, Africa is better, and I believe Equity will be able to reallocate the KES 500 billion because great business is leverage. So Dr. Joanne, we give you the mandate. Where are we? Okay, thank you very much. And call out to those who are in charge if they're in the room. Okay, thank you very much, Dr. Mwangi. If the microphone goes to Sheila Mallowa. We've been very successful with our portfolio of SMEs within the foundation that we've previously worked with and empowered, and we've been able to track their empowerment journey and even how they've grown and become very successful. And we're able to track these through metrics such as, for example, the first loan size, the growth in the loan size, the performance and the quality of that loan. Some of our customers as well are very successful business ventures. What we are doing as Equity Group Foundation is a partnership platform, bringing them on board to say that there's a huge cohort of young people that are also coming on board and are very interested in understanding practical business from those who've been successful on it. We are setting up the business clubs, and we are starting with the counties. The Equity Group Foundation team led by the Enterprise Development and Financial Literacy team has already started setting the map in the counties. I think now we have 23 counties where we've done that, set up the business clubs together with our Equity Leaders Program scholars who you've heard. You've heard it mentioned that we now have 29,000 scholars who've come through the Equity Leaders Program, gone through the universities, studied in various sectors. So what next in terms of being entrepreneurs themselves and also creating opportunities for others as the Equity Afia doctors, for example, have been very successful in doing. So Sheila? Sheila, how do our customers get benefit from the crafts? Thank you, Dr. Mwangi, and thank you for your time, and introduce yourself. I don't think I've ever given you the mic in. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Mwangi, and thank you, Dr. Joanne. My name is Sheila Maloa. I serve within the Enterprise Development and Financial Inclusion Pillar, and our focus is in capacity building of entrepreneurs both at ideation, at startup, and even as businesses mature in scale, and we look to empower them so that they can be able to take advantage of the opportunities that exist within the group. One of the programs that we are currently running and implementing is the Young Africa Works program, where we have been successful, as Dr. Mwangi had mentioned, in capacity building over 565,000 entrepreneurs. When we look at chamas and we look at the youth, we look at supporting them, as mentioned, in terms of how to generate ideas, business ideas, whether they're at university or whether they have just finished their education and would like to venture into entrepreneurship. And so we support them in financial literacy, entrepreneurship education, and digital literacy to ensure that they have the expertise that they need to be able not only to just start their businesses, but also to scale. Once we have done that, we take them through an intense program of business development support, where we ensure that the learnings that they have learned within the sessions are actually being implemented in their businesses. Once we are able to successfully do that, then we want to position them within the entire group through the entrepreneurship clubs to be able to participate in the opportunities that exist, whether it's in the investment sector, whether it's insurance, to be able to take this so that they can be able to be strong and fortified businesses. And that's what we're currently looking to do across all 47 counties in Kenya. Thank you. Maybe one would ask how will this function and what support the level of sponsorship, the patrons, the executives. And maybe I will ask maybe my colleagues who have come from the banking world, consulting world, investment world to kindly stand. You came from consulting, financial services, banking, or insurance for that matter. Now, these, as you can see, are the people who will be advisors, so one would not assume it is James Mwangi alone. We will have a curricula here, would agree, and each person will take their regional crafts, and then I will be part of the patronage of those crafts and have a regular interaction with all the counties. We are focusing on young people, but we are also focusing on people who are in business with a special emphasis to our customers because we want to help them. This is for free. We are not charging anything. We are now saying if Anthony was advising James Mwangi when he was in PricewaterhouseCoopers, why doesn't he advise our customers? The best way not to charge is through crafts. So that what we will get in return, we'll get in return lower risk on our customers and maybe better business opportunities from our customers. But we shall be righting the environment. Kenya will take a position. If Kenya starts growing quickly because of dominating the African continental free trade area space, you could imagine how much trade will facilitate. I guess the biggest opportunity for Kenyan traders will be DRC. You can see we are both in both markets and number one or number two in both markets. You can see the opportunity. We are inspired, we are motivated, we are aligned, and we will do it. As you have heard from Dr. Joanne, we already have 27. This will be the team. It's the executive reporting to me that will be doing this with me and facilitated by the foundation so that we can bring partners. We may train and then get somebody like Mastercard say, "Okay, we'll de-risk that cohort you have trained or that the members of this club will provide the young people with a guarantee or we'll share their risk." The World Bank is a good partner to us. IFC may say we'll take. So it's really to open the opportunities. But I think the most important thing is really to help small and medium enterprises to formalize so that they can get efficiency and they can be very competitive, and we are doing this because we are ahead of them. As you heard from the European desks, it's about trade missions. We are constantly taking the investors or the SMEs to the markets we are in, and they can explore the opportunities in those. It's expanding the market. Lastly, I understand our IT team to make the technology group our profit center. They want to create a marketplace. Now, you can imagine 100 million customers being a market. Then each of these traders is trading in that market online without moving goods, and we are facilitating their payments. We are funding the goods being traded in the marketplace because we know all the players we can. That explains why we are pushing for public digital infrastructure so that we can have a trading ID, a digital ID. We work with the government to make that happen. Colleagues, you may sit. I thought you are a banker. So there are many more who we are not studying. George, your question? Yeah, thank you for telling us that we have free consultants anytime we want. Yeah, Kenyans don't like to pay for consultants. That's why they have moved from consultancy to the bank. You are very upbeat about the opportunities in the South African region, that it is the fastest growing region as we talk. And you are keen on leveraging AR RP with that. Talking about agriculture, what are the pain points that you wish to address or those that if only they were addressed, they would move quite a number of the masses to the next level? To Angela, what is your secret in translating latent demand into real opportunities in the manner that you were told by [Foreign Language]. Daktari once told us not long ago that the foundation has overtaken the business side in brand affinity and recognition. Is that still so, or are they still contesting? As we said, the financial group has been struggling because of the shocks that we were talking about. But addressing those shocks gave the foundation an opportunity to seek partnerships. So the pain of the financial group became the opportunity for the foundation. And if you look, the scaling of these programs so much. The fact that default was 40% of the default was because of a health incident. It gave the foundation an opportunity to see what it could do. And it developed a solution of high quality, affordable, and accessible health. And it's now rated the highest in those three parameters provider. It's now the largest outpatient health provider in Sub-Saharan Africa in just five short years. It has rather been partnerships, and it has been challenged. The foundation has been challenged to prepare to set 1,000 hospitals in partnership with a global community. They have also been told to prepare for 1,000 pharmacies. We now have hired a chief pharmacy officer. Maybe you could start and give her a mic. You can see that problem that was in the bank. While it was weighing down the bank, it gives the foundation a huge opportunity. We've done that in young. Look at young people. When I was saying 60,000 young people, now those are homes where the Equity brand lives and will live into all future generations to come. That is why, and as we said, look at the clubs, how many people they will lead. The face of those clubs is not a bank, it is the foundation. They are soft. And because it's not a profit-making machine, including health, Equity Afia, the franchisee, the foundation doesn't make profit on it. Then it brings out empathy. You're not paying, so it's empathy. And then it's compared with paying interest. So that's why the brand is. But also, if you looked at the slide, and Alex, you can play that slide of the partners, the kind of partners we've been able to bring themselves by merely associating with them, it's a huge conversation, this one. And you can see how well they are categorized. So those who are in banking to fund the bank, capital and loans, those who are funding the foundation. And if you look, the inclination is to work with the foundation. Only banking partner. Everybody else is with the foundation. Now, with the Trump decision to close USAID, we are seeing there are huge gaps. If you look at health in Kenya, look at education, we are saying, "How can we fill those gaps?" So we are designing. And maybe those who recently joined the foundation as associates, maybe you could start. Those associate directors recently. And somebody can give them the mic. So we can start here. Now you start seeing even the capability we are thinking about. Just introduce yourself and what you have come to do in one minute. Sure. Good morning. My name is Dr. Jeremy Gohil. I'm the Chief Pharmacist. What I have come to do is to enhance the availability of quality, affordable, essential medicines, and with a partnership that's going to make the local manufacturers, the international manufacturers, the international relations to be able to have a better market. And now that is manufacturing in the Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan. Absolutely. That began with a bang. If you didn't think I can see people are happy. Now, Equity has gone to medicine. It has not only gone to distribution, but to manufacture. We are bringing international. We said, "Bring the world to Africa." We are bringing the biggest pharmaceutical companies and saying, "We have aggregated demand. We'll get this only if you manufacture in Kenya." That is how manufacturing is going to come to Africa. That is how jobs will be created by Africa. It is a very quiet. What do you bring? What experience do you bring? Sure. So I was working in the public and the private partnership, so hospitals. So I was working as a chief pharmacist in Aga Khan University Hospital, Nairobi for over a decade. I have worked in the Coast General Hospital, and I have also been a consultant working with private investors, IFC and World Bank. Excuse me now. Yeah, thank you. One minute is over. So if you don't use your minutes, I will cut you short. Good morning and thank you, Dr. My name is Dr. Patricia Odera. I recently joined the foundation as associate director for health. Previously served as deputy country director at the International Center for Reproductive Health Kenya, overseeing the portfolio for reproductive maternal and health programs. So it is not amateurs. It's not amateurs. It's not bankers doing it. Get the right people. If you wondered where the 10% cost is coming from, this is where it's coming from. It's not Anthony alone. Programs. And within the group, I'm looking forward to building and designing health programs in reproductive health, maternal health, child health, and also non-communicable diseases, diabetes, hypertension. And she's doing that strategy too that how do we invest. We have done outpatient. She has told us, "James, 60% of all inpatients are mothers delivering." I said, "Is delivering a sickness? Why do they go?" You know, and the primary thinks differently, so we said, "Why don't we do four-star hotels, three-star hotels, and two-star hotels where mothers can go to deliver in a hotel and you bring the nurses and the doctors in the hotel?" They don't need to go and contaminate newborns in a sickly environment where everybody is sick, where there's a person there sharing a bed with is sick, and then they came to deliver. They say, "Delivering a baby is not sickness," and it should be done in the best environment possible, so we welcome the newborn in a special way in our health environment, so you can see the thinking. No, because of her pharmacy, but we give them choice. Those who want Serena, okay. But it's just a maternity. It's not too well coming to see our children being delivered. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Dr. James. My name is Dr. Anup Das. I come with an experience of 30 years in the healthcare industry. I work with world-class multinational pharmaceutical and medical devices companies like Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer. So that can tell you we are going to manufacture. He is the Group Director for Health. He shaped the strategy. We're not just going to do it rightly, but we're not investors in health, but we'll get investments to be done in the continent with the right people. Last 14 years, I've been managing large hospitals in this country as well. So if you find us setting these hospitals, you call maternity, then we go to zone, you call them what? Diseases. Communicable diseases. And non-communicable diseases. And critical. You know, we will know segmenting customers. We know who are in agriculture, who are in manufacturing, who are micro, who are small. So we bring segmentation in the health sector and provide specific solutions so that you are not paying for what you are not using. And you are not being pulled at least. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. James. My name is Priscilla Nyokabi. I'm the Director of Advocacy in Equity Group Foundation. Now, that is advocacy to bring partners for all the pillars in the foundation. I think at one time, which year was you voted the youngest member of parliament in Kenya? I was the youngest member of parliament in the 11th parliament, that is 2013 to 2017. And that is the advocacy we need, somebody who can be able to articulate that level. But now to partners. Thank you, Dr. Mwangi. My name is Harold Mate, associate director for agriculture. I'm coming from the development sector and my experience in working with smaller farmers in commercializing their businesses, but also looking at access to inputs and technologies, but also working with small and medium enterprises in processing, especially for their agriculture. What's your experience and knowledge? Yes, I've worked in the development sector for the last 19 years, working, of course, as I've mentioned, with small and medium enterprises in processing, accessing finance, upgrading their facilities in terms of how they are able to leverage on technology, but also next. Thank you. So now, George, you can see why the brand will be very powerful. It will be more powerful than because these are also the links to the partners. They come in and then they bring the partners they've been working with. Good morning and thank you, Dr. Mwangi. My name is Joe Sanders. I'm coming in as the director of food and agriculture within the foundation. Harold and I have very similar experiences. I've been leading large-scale agricultural development projects around the world for the last 27 years, and the last 10 years. Large-scale agricultural product globally. Give examples. Well, in Zimbabwe, we linked 150,000 farmers to agribusinesses that were exporting for high-value markets through contract farming arrangements and especially through long-term relationships with the financial sector. So the question on transformation of agriculture, now I hope George you fully appreciate that we are leaving nothing to chance. Agriculture is what will transform Africa. Transform agriculture. Now, the biggest transformation in agriculture is productivity gains. Production in Africa is a need of productivity in the world. So you don't need more land. What you need to do is to make the right to produce to global standards eight times. As soon as it does that, that is no longer food for the family or the household or the shopping center. That is for the market. Get somebody to aggregate it and process it and take it to the urbanized center and provide food for urban population. The suppliers find a way for export. This team is to create value chains. These teams are the ones doing [GIS]. So the capacity has been built. Remember I said governance and leadership was the first one to address. That is now fixed. Now we are dealing with the capability. Do we have the fit skills at the delivery level? George, I hope we have finished the question. Thank you, chair, your question. Sorry. Yeah, thank you, Dr. James Mwangi. I'm also Julius Kamau. I joined the Equity Group Foundation as the Associate Director for energy, environment, and climate change. And I bring on board about 23 years of experience in nature conservation, climate change resilience, and sustainability. Thank you. Before that, where did you work? I was the chief. So you got it from your village. Not definitely. Before this, I worked in the public sector and I was the Chief Conservator of Forests, Kenya Forest Service, with a national mandate. Thank you. So you could see we were saying perfect good and you can see the capability. You're not delivering this transformation unless you have the right people. The right people, as I said, are in place now. We are now looking at each other, light in the eyes and saying, "Yes, you didn't steal from customers because you could have gone. Do you steal from the employer by not being productive?" So we are now looking at each other in productivity and saying, "Are you producing what you are being paid for?" We are holding people to the contractual obligation. And the reason is to create the momentum of delivery. It's all about execution. If you have staff, you can have the best plans, but if they're not being executed. So one of the biggest deliveries for Anthony is a framework of measuring performance. And we are measuring performance from a commercial point of view. Don't tell us stories. Tell us what is the commercial contribution and quantify it to the P&L and to the balance sheet. That's the only conversation. So you find people learning to go and give the farmers the loans because that is the only survival line. You have to really give commercial value in a balance sheet and show it in the profitability. If you give poor loans, it takes off the profitability. You're out. So it's quite really transforming the workplace. It's about performance. It's holding ourselves to a culture of customer centricity. It's dancing for the customer in what really they want. It's no longer about truly the advent of the customer being the king must be seen in Equity because that is the only way we deliver this brand. There was a question. Yes, thanks, Dr. Mwangi. My name is Eric from Bloomberg. Angela refused George to answer your question. She will answer then before we get George's question. All right. Thank you, George. I think the answer to the latent demand actually ties with what Dr. Mwangi talked about, the customer being king. One of the things about insurance solutions is that largely, historically, we have been supply-driven, but we've spent and invested a lot of time in understanding what the customers need and redesigning our products to ensure that they are customer-relevant. So that's one of the things we've done over the last three years. I think we've also invested greatly in capacitating our teams. As mentioned by Dr. Mwangi, we do have a partnership with Equity Bank Kenya Limited. Over the last two years, we've actually been able to have over 1,800 relationship managers within the bank qualify in insurance, therefore enabling them to be an astute customer advisor, not only in banking solutions but in insurance solutions as well. The last one I would say, which is something you'll see soon, is really our capability to leverage on group infrastructure. One of the things that Equity has done really well over the last 40 years is build a brand that is loved and trusted. So the insurance business coming from a supply era, being able to sit and have a strong brand, sit within a strong business with several branches, several team members, and a strong balance sheet is what has enabled us to grow as fast as we have. George, thank you. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Mwangi. My name is Eric from Bloomberg. My question is on profit growth and loan growth. So for the first half, loans grew at 4%, and there's a projection to double that by the end of the year. You're also forecasting faster quarterly profit growth. Will that be achieved by reducing the investment in government securities and adding customers? And what else do you intend to do to grow those two? Let's put it to Moses Nyabanda. He's the one who has impressed us most. He used to be negative 10. I think he's now negative one. So he's getting out of the hole. How are you doing it? So thank you very much, Eric. And as Dr. Mwangi has mentioned, we've just started. The first half was characterized by a lot of efficiency gains, and that was on the backdrop of the macroeconomic situation that we were coming out of. As we look forward, and you've heard our economist mentioned, we believe now is the time that we are ready then to really engage the customer. We've set ourselves alight with all the efficiency gains that we've done, so we are quite agile. We are also in a good position in that the macroeconomic environment has turned, and we now have ability then to leverage and allocate the bonds that we've held, which is a significant part of our balance sheet, over 40%, into real intermediation. The team has been set up to ensure that we then take full advantage of what the macroeconomic environment creates. You've seen private credit growth from central bank being published, indicating that there's now light at the end of the tunnel. We believe that will continue. The interest rates are increasingly coming down, which means then affordability of the loans would be there. The government definitely needs to deal with a couple of areas around pending bills and the like to unlock part of the SME, but as Equity Bank, we are ready now to ensure that our customers are fully facilitated in terms of what it is they want to achieve economically, and maybe it's also having the right skill. Is the new director for agriculture in the room? And Mining give them the mic. Mining, director of mining. Okay. My name is Chiteme Ochanye. I'm the group director for food and agriculture on the commercial side. Prior to joining Equity, I worked for various banks for 17 years, regional banks as well, and prior to that, I worked for the Ministry of Agriculture for the Republic of Zambia in policy formulation and also providing extension services. As you can see, we have combined policy and execution and financing. We trust that still the South African region is a food basket for the region we're trying to borrow. I think we have also realigned ourselves. Our former Chief Legal Officer has now become Chief Commercial Officer. Deliver on those commercial targets. Do you want to add anything to Eric's question? How do you ensure and why is the money coming and how is it taken? Thank you, James. Good morning, everyone. I think the MD for Kenya has covered from a loan book perspective just a couple of additions to make. We are refreshing and revamping our digital lending capability. In the last few months, we've had some challenges with how that engine has been running. We are revamping that. As the MD says, we want to make sure that we provide credit to customers that deserve it, but at the same time, we want to do it affordably and to make it easy for them to be able to access that credit. I think the other thing that we're doing is on the NFI side as well. Over the last few months, we've been trying to look at ways to strengthen both on the trade finance side and on the treasury side as well. So we believe that in the next six months, we'll be able to see significant traction in those two areas, which should then support our non-funded income as well. I think the GCO wanted me to talk about the mining. We've been able to enhance our capacity with support on the mining side, particularly in the DRC, Tanzania, and Uganda. I think from what the economist says, we've recently acquired talent from South Africa, from Nedbank and Total South Africa, who is going to help us with defining our value proposition as far as mining and extractives are concerned. So I just thought I would talk about. Thank you very much. And maybe let's introduce Patrick Gatonga, who is a Group Director for Product House. Where are we in these solutions for the customers? And introduce yourself. Sir, I'm Monique Njeru. You last spoke. Okay. I'm Rene Kalonji. I'm actually in charge of all the product delivery and product management, as well as actually the finance. That is where the issue is. Do you have the right product? And broadly, what we did, Eric, you remember, we came from financial inclusion. We wanted people to be banked. But we were not very good at once they have been banked. They kept on graduating to the banks that had powerful solutions. They said, "Wow, who is the best in the world?" It's JP Morgan. We went and hunted for JP Morgan's global head of Product House and said, "Come and do like JP Morgan." They have segmented the markets, have segmented the sectors, they have segmented on demographics, and then they are developing products for each. How many products have you developed? So the last 12 months, actually, what we call minimum viable product, 231. In one year. Because we want solutions. Now it's no longer inclusion. It's facilitating economic transformation of Africa by transforming ecosystems and value chains. Those must be solutions, which you convert a product into a solution for a value rate for a segment, for a sector, for an industry. And that's why the products are so many. Broadly, the journey seems to be doing very well. It's leading now, technically, and that is why it was not easy to transform Equity because you had to have all the components in place. I couldn't, for four years, say we have transformed. I kept on talking about strategy. It's now transformed. It's a different game board. When do you think you will change the commercial outlook of this bank? Actually, it's coming because we see the activity with Kenya already, the uptick, and all the other regions also are really taking the tailwind from Kenya as well. So I think we can see a double-digit growth quarter by quarter as we're going through. Eric, don't be disappointed by Moses if his [loans] still remain negative because Christine Browne, Special Assets, has told me by the end of this year, his NPLs will have moved from 20 to below 15. He might be collecting more than he's capable of disbursing. You'll see the change in coverage and the change in net interest income and, of course, the bottom line significant. If I quoted you right. Confirm in mic. I want it to be on record. Let the camera capture you. Share with investors, NPLs in Kenya will be below 15 in the next six months. Let me look at the camera. Good morning, investors. Just to reaffirm James' position. We have been on the runway for a very long time, and we can now see a pathway to recovery. We spent this time unlocking the web in the courts, and it was important for us to take that time. Being a systemically important bank, the kind of precedent coming out of the courts was very important to have it right because that will then inform decisions going forward. So yes, James, I support the position. And if you're doubting Christine, just check Tanzania. We gave her Tanzania two years ago with NPLs of 39%. They are now 2.8%. Earlier this year, we gave her Uganda, NPLs of 17%. You are now at? Below 10%. Below 10%. I have no doubt NPLs in Kenya. I said 15% so that she can overdeliver, but I would be disappointed if Kenya doesn't go below 10% NPLs by the end of the year. Christine is grounded, a lawyer by profession. Introduce yourself briefly. I would need to know you are grounded. Yes, I have a master's in law, and I am a certified mediator. I am also a member of the certified mediator. So it's not just you in court. It's mediating and arbitrating between the bank and the borrower. That's why she's so successful. Yeah, thank you, and she was famously known for structuring in the World Bank for how many years? I was at the World Bank, and I was in the development banking world at EADB altogether for about nine years. So she has what it takes, and as we said, human capital. People underestimated the human capital we have put in this bank. You can't come and joke about transforming Africa. You can only speak about it if you have the right people, you have the right partners, and you have the right skills. The good thing is the layers of Equity will be the platform on which it will be done. Compute the balance sheet size. Compute the P&L. It's a platform who will have 100 million customers. Last question. Yes, to Mwangi. Thank you, Dr. James Mwangi. And I have followed your presentation very well, and I think there is no better time to be a member than now. Hopefully, we will continue hearing the good news. Now, I have three very short questions. Number one, you have said that you are planning to reallocate the KES 450 billion from the government stock to loans. Now, considering that you have 13.7% of NPLs, hopefully, it is not going to go above that. And you are moving this money where there is no risk and putting it where there is risk. I'm trying to see how you will balance the two between removing the money from where there is no risk or where the risk is zero, bringing it where at least it is going to generate a lot of income for the bank vis-à-vis the risk involved in this KES 450 billion that you are reallocating to loans. Now, number two, there was something that I heard. I don't know how far it has gone about the government of DRC saying that you must cede some percentages of Equity BCDC maybe to locals. I don't know how far it has gone and how far have you been able to do that. My last question is on the sealing of the loopholes. I know when this group is growing with such a magnitude, definitely there will be so many leakages. Once in a while, we have heard here and there about somewhere where there was a leakage. Now, what guarantee are we going to get as shareholders or as investors to know that as this group grows, all the loopholes are sealed so that as the technology grows, so grows the technology of those people who want to put some holes. So I hope that you have sealed all the loopholes or you are trying to do your best to make sure that there will be no leakage. I wish you the best, Dr. Ali. And I think when I grow up, I want to be Equity and you. Thank you very much, Mother. I think let's go to shifting. If you look at the currently, the yields on Treasury bills is about 9%. Actually, it unfolded by MD Kenya. We are now down to 8%. That's what it is earning. If you shift it to lend and do SME, it will be 16%. Double. You have priced the risk. And there is a commitment from Christine. NPLs will be below 10%. Why? Because we have learned the lessons and we have brought the skills and competencies. So I think banking is intermediation. It's not being a lazy bank, picking money and giving it to government. It's really taking the risk of intermediation. So you better get it right, and we have committed to getting it right. And if you take a lease, it's very well priced, actually overpriced. The yields, you can imagine a portfolio of a trillion shillings, the yields going up 200 basis points. I'm sure it has sunk in. Very good. The second one, DRC, I'm happy to say we launched our presentation to the Senate, to the president, to everybody, and I'm glad the Senate acceded to ours and that clause is being amended. So we are no longer required to cede. We will be exempt in that country like we are exempt in Kenya or any other country to be fully owned. I think I like the last question because it brings Beth, Beth now, and Defense Council. Defense Council maybe could be starting to start. Those who are in charge of leakage, very good. Let them first of all introduce themselves, and then she says what they are doing. Very good, and what you are doing to ensure you know shareholders are really worried about leakages and the rest and the rest. I think Sagawa, you should be starting. You are defending us from people with their own products. Yes, quickly. Thank you, Dr. James. And your experience quickly. What you do and what experience you have. My name is Naftali Mwangi. I'm the Group Director for Fraud, Investigations, and Security. I hold a master's in economics, and my experience is in the investigations and fraud management, having worked in the DCI as a cadet inspector and rising back and doing the banking and also in the central bank. And we are the founders of the cybercrime unit, the DCI and the crime and intelligence unit, and the chair of the Kenya Bankers Association. Can you bring him next to the door? In case he's required, I would do no trouble. Next to there. Credit unit quickly. My name is Samuel Gitwekere, Group Chief Credit Officer. I hold a master's, MBA, and I'm an associate, a chartered banker, 44 years in the industry, over 20 of those in leadership. My role is to fix the credit underwriting, and we have brought in senior resources. The senior banker we have within the group, 44 years of banking experience. Doing where and where? I was Chief Risk Officer for Standard Chartered for seven years. I was Chief Commercial Credit Officer for Barclays out of Dubai, covering the Africa region for four years. And Asia where? I was in Bangladesh. I was in South Africa. So he brings in the credit risk. This is what we were lacking. As I said, this transformation was about having the right skills, the right competency. Yeah, give the people pass on. Yeah. Good morning, all. My name is David Sagawa. I'm the Group Director, Human Resources. I bring in 30 years of human resource leadership at FMCG, Telcos, and African Development Bank. Which ones? They are known by names. Employers are known by names. I was Group Asia Director at Unilever, at Coca-Cola, at Airtel Africa, and Africa, And that is the experience David brings. You can see when David steps in, he said, "Enough is enough. Let's do the audits of products." Now he has said, "Yes, we have dealt with those who were stealing from customers and making loans unaffordable." What about those who steal from the employer? They come and hang their coat. They come and they keep long queues because they are not processing. We can catch them by saying, "This is the number of transactions per day," and I can't wait to see this, so once you get the right people, nothing happens without an assignor. If you look at all the incidences you talked about, the leakages, there is a staff we have taken to court. There is a staff we have taken to court. So we are cleaning the house, and we clean it salary, salary, salary, and never again will it ever happen because once one finger is soiled, it's soiled all the others. That explains to you why we have taken the approach. You can't make a promise to the market and then undermine the market. You can't eat a blood and then undermine the blood by what you do. So you can trust that if leakages is from people, we'll deal with that. If leakages is from fraudists, Naftali will deal with it. If leakage is from credit, Samuel Gitwekere will deal with it. Yes. Good morning. Yeah, it's okay. Good morning, Director, shareholders, and colleagues. My name is Patrick Kinoti coming in from Telco side. I've worked for 24 years in telecommunications and fintech as well. I am the Director, Group Director for Non-Financial Risk, acting CRO currently. Basically, what I'm bringing in is a conduct risk. I've done a lot of work around revenue assurance, which is where the errors are omission, not a commission. Done a lot of work in fraud management domain, as well as actually looking at the fintech in terms from the risk aspect. Thank you. Very good. Good morning, shareholders. The last one we have asked him, after you have defended us, why don't you also help the customers who are being defrauded by being socio-engineered through cov? And we are now using algorithms and AI, and hopefully, we'll be able to stop this problem in this country. Yeah. Good morning, Apollo Flavian Obure, Group Director for Internal Control and Compliance, been with the financial services for 27 years, having worked with Mashreq Bank in Africa, Middle East, and Asia, looking after risk and policy. Where these silos have been controlled, we have brought people in. I think, madam, the best I could have done is to introduce to you the team that we have assembled. As you can see, it's not promotion from within. We have no time to train, get the best from the world. We can afford it. The amount of money we have lost in fraud is too much. It could have paid these people. But I think the problem is not the money. It's the reputation. Are we the safe, secure place? Is the brand? So if you see us using a hammer to kill a fly, it's because it's hurting us and hurting us where it pains most. It's blood. It's cash. And I said the last time I will not speak again. It's doing. And we'll continue to do. Internally, we'll be clean. Clean as snow because we have said, "Let's deal with it internally." And it doesn't matter. Cash will change. And everybody must know it's a contractual obligation. We have been too family for too long. We'll now be customer-centric, market-driven, and professional in our dealings within the group because it has hurt us most. It has hurt us most. So last. Good morning. My name is Thelma Kganakga. I'm the Group Chief Information Security Officer. So my role is to secure the systems of the group. I've been in cybersecurity for over 20 years. I've been the Chief Information Security Officer for about three banks in South Africa and telecoms. You can name them. FirstRand, ABSA, UBank, South African Revenue Service, MTN, looking after Africa operations. Thelma has really done her work. When all organizations in Kenya were being denied services by whatever it was, she did what she did. But that is being coordinated by BEST. BEST, imagine people who you are, what you brought, and I think you have switched off. Yeah. Yes. Thank you, Dr. James. Good morning. Give shareholder Kimotho assurance of his fear. He can see money now starting to come, but he's not sure whether he will receive it or it will be intercepted through what he called leakage. No L oophole. We will give that assurance. My name is Beth Kithinji. I'm the Group Chief Internal Auditor. I joined Equity last year. Before that, I worked for Central Bank of Kenya as advisor to the governor, but also in charge of internal audit and risks. Before that, I worked for 16 years with KPMG, both here in East Africa and the U.K. in various capacities. I began as an external auditor, did advisory, was head of quality and risk management for East Africa. Just to give assurance, together with my colleagues, we took on the challenge to make sure that we preserve value for the business, but also, more importantly, for the shareholders and investors. We looked at it in three aspects, looking at it from a people perspective, and that's why Dr. Mwangi asked David to speak about culture and his role in transforming our culture and maintaining professionalism and integrity of our staff, which is two of our values. We looked at it from a process perspective, working with the operations team, one, to process engineer, carry out process engineering, but also transaction monitoring. Right now, we are able to see any transaction that happens across the group as we monitor all transactions. We are also looking to automate and create efficiencies in the processes, making sure that we digitize the process. Lastly, on the technology side, was looking at we are currently implementing two systems, a fraud management system and a financial crime system, which are top of range used by global banks across the world, and that will really improve our fraud management and financial crime capabilities. But also on the cyber front, improving our capabilities. Right now, as Thelma mentioned, we are doing well on the cybersecurity front. And lastly, the use of AI, which we cannot run away from in terms of from the technology side and also from a process side. So I want to assure you, shareholder Kimotho, that we are doing everything possible. We have seen improvement, significant improvement on the fraud management in terms of incidences, both internal and external fraud. And right now, risk is everyone's responsibility. Everyone has a key performance indicator on how they manage risk. If an issue arises in your area or unresolved audit issues or delaying audit issues, it's a direct impact on your pocket. And so that understanding of the cascade of risk to all team members, but also ensuring that as an entire team, both down from the teller to top leadership, that risk is on everyone's mind. Thank you. I think consequence management has really worked, and I'll forever thank David for really introducing. It's not just the top line that we have really invested in. It's the next lines and next layers of staff. Solomon, maybe you can look at Mr. Kimotho and introduce you because he needs to be really assured that he can't see dividend, and then if he doesn't, he go to him because somebody picked it before he reached him. Thank you, Dr. James. My name is Solomon Abiakalam. I joined the group about four years now. I joined from HSBC, but also as StanChart. And in those places, I looked after compliance across a number of African countries. So at the moment, I'm sitting in EBKL, that is this Kenya subsidiary, and I'm also supporting the group on the compliance side. So, shareholder, I can assure you that your investment is secure. Thank you. As you can see, there is the first. I think everybody who talked, most of them were the first line of defense embedded risk management in how we do things. Then there is the second line. I think, Kinoti, you're in the second line, risk, managing risk. And then there is a third line of defense, which is Beth's audit, which reports to the board. And what we have seen is that those two have really aligned well. That's why they are coordinated by Beth, and we really are impressed what people can achieve if they work together, and they align themselves properly. So we call that the defense council, and I can assure you I'm now sleeping. So you could also start sleeping. If James is sleeping and his personal responsibility, shareholder, you can sleep because we have managed that. We have brought it under control. We have to reinvent ourselves. We have to bring the tools. We have to invest, and we have to bring the right people. But it's not just bringing the right people. Our first ELP scholar, Samuel Kirubi, as you know, has been with us 28 years. There is a question of commitment. We saw his commitment very early. So he was in the team that went to open South Sudan as director of operations. We saw his talent. He went and as managing director to open Rwanda. He went to Uganda to transform Uganda, and then we say, "Oh, he can serve. He can initiate or start, and he can grow, and he can transform." And we said we have had too many problems with the systems and operations, and we said, "Sam, you are not an engineer. You are not an IT expert. You are not a processes person, but this is the task we have." I just want to give him the last five minutes to brief you on what, in two years, we have achieved in technology. As you can see, none of you have asked any questions on technology. We can all assume it has become hygiene. Stability of systems have become hygiene. The question is, how did he do it? Now, we have said to him, "Every process must be digitized. We must remove human interaction. And we must sieve every process using machine learning, and we must test that using AI." And so what he has done, he has installed next-generation system for the industrial technologies, digital leader, machine learning leader, AI leader, and now it's layering applications to harness those capabilities. And it's being done by a banker, not by a technology person. We've seen people with a wheel. We also look and measure the attitude of a person. What is their natural attitude towards work, to do a purpose? Are they aligned to the purpose? Sam, last five minutes. If I don't speak to you after this, I thank you most sincerely for giving us an opportunity. Sam? Thank you, Dr. Mwangi. I think I want to start by thanking the shareholders and also our customers for being patient as we renewed our infrastructure for the last two years, but also to report that where we are currently, we almost at the end of that stage. We did request for some patience when we were having instability on our systems. Basically, what we did was to do the infrastructure refreshment exercise that ensured that we renewed around four stacks, our compute capability. We also renewed our storage capability. We also did our networks, but also did great work on the information security stack led by Thelma. And maybe Dr. Mwangi, with your permission, Thelma and Michael should start as I speak because they also played a key role. I don't know whether Michael is in the room. Yeah. So that ensured that the stability that we are enjoying, but also the availability and security is guaranteed, and not only from maybe a current environment, but also giving us headroom for the next couple of years, maybe 10 years. Michael would say from a compute capability, we moved from average levels of 97%. We were breaching almost 90% of our storage. And now, with all the operations and transactions growing, we're not even hitting 20%. We are in the 10s in terms of the storage capability. And the number of transactions have increased from 300,000 transactions per day. Yesterday, we did 22 million transactions, and we're only using less than 10% of the capability. So when Sam says, "We have now secured the future," the 100 million customers that come, we don't need to invest in the future. So any new customer, the unit cost of IT goes down. The cost-income ratio will only go one direction for the next 10 years. Why? Because we have front-loaded costs, and then it's investment. You have said Michael is in the room, and he keeps on saying, "Give Michael, put this in technical jargons," and introduce yourself. Good morning, investors. Good morning, colleagues. My name is Michael Offei I'm the CIO for the group. I take care of the technology strategy and the development and the rollout and execution. Prior to Equity, I worked with Standard Chartered Bank, covering the African market, and with Ecobank Group as well, also covering the African market. And prior to that. And what have you achieved in summary since you came? Yes. In summary, or since you paired with Sam? I don't know about before Sam being with Sam. All right. So since I paired with Sam, we did a complete overhaul of the systems in terms of what you describe as changing the wheels or refueling while the plane is in the air. And we've been successful at that. It's not been a straightforward path, but we've been very successful. And now, for all the core systems, we've been able to move them onto new infrastructure that Dr. James has described, and they are working as expected, and they are ready to take on additional load. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Engineers have very few words. Yeah, and also, the great work they have done is to ensure in all the markets we are, the geographies now, we have both primary and the DR data centers now are almost what you'd call active-active, so we used to have more or less supporting markets from Kenya, but that has been extended. Markets like DRC, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, all of them now have got their instances to support all the licenses operating from that side. Maybe shortly, the next level and where we are spending a lot of time is on digitization, and what we are doing on that is to ensure consumptions of financial products and services, even the social part of it, is digitized. I was happy to see in insurance, almost 80% of the product consumption is through technology, what you'd call even online channels, and that will continue. But also, we are orchestrating all the products within the channels, making it very easy for our customers, and layering that with AI such that in our customers, their availability and personalization becomes very key. At the back also, the engineering process has started, and these are more forward-looking processes, both from the customer side but also from the operations side. And what that brings to investors is efficiencies because on the customer side, we are looking at moving from an average of product consumption 1.2 to around four products. And the cost or the unit cost of delivering that will be very low. And on the defensive side, investor Kimotho, what you talked about, sealing the loopholes, that's coming on new technologies that are starting to be rolling out. So it's just the beginning, and what you're going to see is the efficiencies brought by that transformation. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Dr. I apologize, but bear with us. I will explain to you as I personalize my apology. Thank you, Dr. Mwangi, and thanks everyone for listening and tuning in to our half-year 2025 results. As you leave, you'll have a copy of the investor booklet. Kindly ensure you pick one, and also a copy of the press release. The results are also hosted on our website, and we'll continue to interact with our analysts and investors as the week goes by. Our investors' call will be on Thursday at 4:00 P.M. Kenyan time. I want to invite Reverend Evans to close for us with a lot of prayer. And I also want to remind our guests once again that after this breakfast, you'll be served, and we are very grateful for your attendance, and we look forward to another great half-year of 2025. Reverend Evans.