Good morning, thank you for joining us for our 2023 interim results presentation. Before I get into the results, I would like to begin with thanking all our stakeholders, without whom these results wouldn't have been possible. Our customers for their ongoing loyalty, our colleagues for their commitment in a difficult operating environment, and our shareholders for their continued belief in Absa. Looking at our results, I will share my thoughts on the operating environment that we faced in the first 6 months of the year and where we stand as a group in delivering our strategic ambition, before briefly focusing on our financial performance for the half. Thereafter, Jason will unpack our numbers in detail and provide guidance for the rest of 2023, then we will take your questions. The global, regional, and domestic environments entered the year on an uncertain footing. Persistently high inflation prompted global central banks to continue increasing policy rates as fears of a sharp economic slowdown were moderated by stronger than expected labor indicators and financial markets. The failure of several regional banks in the U.S. and a very large European bank raised market concerns over potential financial sector fragility, although this largely subsided in the second quarter. It is important to acknowledge that South Africa's banking regulatory framework has largely protected the local market against the issues experienced by the U.S. regional banks. Geopolitical tensions remained a concern as the Russia-Ukraine conflict intensified and Western relationships with China remained strained. The collapse of the Russia-Ukraine grain deal, along with the emergence of a strong El Niño weather system, created further uncertainty for food prices, particularly in developing countries. Turning to our ARO presence countries, the tight global financial conditions and weaker commodity prices, high inflation and policy rates continued to weigh on economic activity and growth prospects. Debt sustainability challenges in some markets saw large outflows from the region, weakening currencies and further eroding business and consumer confidence levels. Economic performance in our presence countries remained well above South Africa, although performance was varied, with East African economies generally fairing best. The South African economy faced this difficult external environment along with its own internal challenges, although it seems to have avoided a recession despite the gloomy outlook at the start of the year. Looking at South Africa more closely, given its position as our biggest market, it is evident that the operating environment has worsened in the first half. The cost of living increased sharply, with headline inflation consistently above the SARB's upper target range. This led to a further 125 basis points in rate increases since January and placed more pressure on consumers and consumer-focused businesses. Positively, headline inflation fell back to within the target range in June. Load shedding reached record levels with over 15,000 gigawatt hours lost in the first half, which exceeds all the cumulative load shedding since 2007. We have seen an improvement in Eskom's generation capacity recently, as since April, the monthly energy availability factor improved from 51.5% to 57.5% in July. Despite the record levels of load shedding, first quarter GDP expanded in eight of the 10 reported sectors of the economy, suggesting that parts of the economy are becoming more resilient to the electricity shortages. The recently published second quarter business and consumer confidence indices show further deterioration in sentiment, with 73% of businesses surveyed reporting unsatisfactory business conditions, while consumer sentiment is at its second lowest level since 1994. This is expected to weigh on growth prospects going forward. Despite this mixed bag of news, we continue to focus on our priorities as a business. In our March results presentation, I said that a sustainable solution to South Africa's economic challenges is rooted in forging a strong common cause among key socioeconomic role players. We have seen commendable progress in this regard. In March, we welcomed President Ramaphosa's reaffirmation of Operation Vulindlela as a vital part of this journey. A closer alignment between government and business over the past few months has resulted in progress around the delivery of key priority interventions needed in the areas of energy, transport and logistics, and crime and corruption. The recent signing of the CEO pledge initiative further reaffirms the commitment of business to work with relevant stakeholders to rebuild the country. The partnership, which Absa is part of, has mobilized teams to start delivering meaningful progress towards South Africa's economic growth. This shows the importance that we ascribe to rebuilding our economy and creating a conducive environment that we can all thrive in. As Absa, we are encouraged to play a meaningful role in our society to help improve our economy for all citizens, including our customers and colleagues, amongst many of our key stakeholders. These partnerships are integral to our new organizational purpose of empowering Africa's tomorrow together, one story at a time, and our strategic ambition of being an active force for good. What is critical now is that we continue to work closely together to facilitate urgent implementation of these reforms as we strive towards creating a sustainable and inclusive economy. Our strategy remains consistent, and we are confident that it remains relevant. As I will show a bit later, we are executing consistently against our 5 strategic focus areas as we strive to become a leading Pan-African bank. Our consistent delivery against our strategy is evident in the continued progress we have made towards our medium-term targets of an ROE of sustainably above 17% and a cost-to-income ratio in the low 50s. Our ROE of 16.7%, which is lower than our strong first half in 2022, remains above our cost of equity and is commendable given the particularly tough operating environment I discussed earlier. Our cost to income has continued to improve since we started the separation process and is below 50%, although I should note that our first half ratio is generally lower than our full year. As we implement our strategy, we are purposeful in our efforts to create a more diversified business across geography, segment, and product as we look to areas with attractive growth prospects. Since 2019, we have significantly improved the contribution of our ARO operations from 19% of pre-provision profit to 29%, aligning with a more attractive economic growth, while our CIB components increased to 33% from 28%, with growth in SA and ARO. This diversification stood us in good stead in 2023, given the pedestrian economic growth and the pressures on the SA consumer. We will increase this diversification going forward by deploying capital to attractive growth prospects on the continent, which provides a natural performance edge for the group. While we are successfully diversifying our group, it has been done through a period of sustained growth for the organization, which was a deliberate focus for us. Our earnings have grown 8% compound since 2019 through one of the most uncertain and trying times, given the impact of COVID and the subsequent global uncertainty, including the heightened geopolitical issues and stagnating growth across the globe. Our growth has been measured and hasn't come at the expense of capital, as we deliberately strengthened our balance sheet in this period, demonstrated by the improvement in our Group CET1 capital from 11.9%- 13%. Turning to our customer franchise, I am pleased to say that we continue to see tangible progress on becoming a primary partner for our customers. This is specifically important in growing capital light revenue. It requires the power of our group ecosystem as we understand and satisfy our customers' needs. Since we implemented our strategy, we have been deliberate that we first needed to fix our propositions in the everyday banking and the relationship banking areas. We are now starting to see the benefits of the work we have done, as our new-to-bank transactional account sales increased by 23% in SA, with our overall SA customer numbers growing to 9.8 million. Growth in new account sales was driven by our focus areas on youth and SME. Our youth sales grew by 40% in a segment that creates a future pipeline for the business and ensures the sustainability of revenue over time. SME transactional account sales increased by 56%, an area that we have not traditionally been strong in, which again, creates a pipeline for future revenue sustainability. In everyday banking, we enhanced our pricing and propositions with a further ZAR 250 million in price reductions for primary bank customers, bringing our cumulative pricing reduction to ZAR 750 million since 2020. Key among these changes was making Absa Rewards free and eliminating some price pain points on our Flexi Account offering. These changes have proven effective in deepening our relationships with our customers, with the new to reward sign-ups increasing by over 300%, while over 18% of our rewards members have tiered up since January. On our Flexi Account, we have seen improved customer usage, with the majority of customers increasing usage by 40% on average. The culmination of changes we have made in this business has seen our customer experience measurements improve significantly to 97 points from 81 in 2019, with improvements seen across all our segments, but particularly strong in youth, which is now at 101 points. Within Product Solutions cluster, our bank assurance model continues to grow, and we have seen the benefits of creating integrated customer journeys, specifically in Credit Life, where 78% of SA retail loan applicants selected a linked Credit Life product. In RBB ARO, our new propositions improved customer acquisition across the franchise, with active customers growing by 10%. This helped drive further revenue diversity, with non-interest revenue growing by 15% in constant currency. While in CIB, we have added over 270 new-to-bank clients, with ARO providing most of the growth. Pleasingly, we have seen strong primacy within these relationships. In line with our CIB strategy of building global corridors for our customers, we intend to establish a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise in China, which will connect trade, investment flows, and clients into Africa, where we will serve them across our extensive continental footprint. We continue to accelerate our digital transformation efforts, although we know there is always more we can do here. Our digitally active customer base continues to grow across SA and ARO. In SA, digitally active customers grew 8%, taking the compound growth to 17% since June 2019. In ARO, our digitally active customers grew 16% in 2023, whilst more than doubling since June 2019. Customer adoption of Absa Access, CIB's single sign-on transactional banking platform, has grown, with 75% of those migrated onto the system being active users. The growth in digital active customers in SA has been enabled by the digitization of customer onboarding across everyday banking's product suite. This has driven a 57% increase in digital sales volumes, which now account for 18% of all product sales. Customers are becoming more comfortable with digital as a channel, as seen in the continued digital transaction migration, where digital volumes increased by 11%. To align with our customers' increasing comfort in using non-branch channels, we increased the number of value-added services on our ATM estate. These increased by 91%, including the innovative tap-and-go functionality, as well as the first to market UIF customer banking details certification. This is augmented by our digital payment capabilities, with digital device payments from Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Wallet increasing by 154%. We were also amongst the first cohort of banks to launch PayShap, a groundbreaking low-cost payment system, and to date, we have captured approximately 40% market share. In ARO, we were the first to market with Mobi Tap, which allows merchants and SMMEs to use their smartphones as point-of-sale devices to process contactless card transactions. Our short-term digital insurance product, Activate, continues to show strong momentum, with new policy sales increasing 18% year-on-year. This improvement in our customers' digital activity hasn't come at the cost of stability. Our system availability for the past 6 months was 99.9%, and pleasingly, we haven't seen a severity 1 or 2 incident for over 18 months. We believe our colleagues are our competitive advantage, and we want to attract Africa's top talent as we create a winning and diverse team. Our colleague engagement levels are at their highest ever, and this is translating into our colleague retention, as our retention of top talent is at 98%. Again, the highest on record and well above the industry standard. Our efforts are being recognized externally, we were recently rated the best South African company to work for and grow a career in by LinkedIn. We have invested heavily in our staff, with over 50% of our ZAR 271 million in training spent focused on critical, scarce, and future skills to ensure we have future-fit colleagues. We have made significant progress on diversity and inclusion, with our Black senior management representation improving by 5% year-on-year to 58%, while we increased focus on strengthening our female representation, which increased by 3% to 38% at a senior management level. The culture of ownership we have driven in recent years will be further supported by the launch of our recently approved staff incentive scheme, which has created much excitement within the organization. We want to be a force for good in everything we do, specifically within our three focus areas of climate, financial inclusion, and diversity and inclusion. We have made progress across all three of these areas in the past six months. Our leadership position in renewable finance in South Africa has continued as we built a signature competence and participated in 53% of REIPPPP projects, with over 4.3 gigawatts of projects to date. We continue to see significant growth in this space over the medium term as we contribute to this national and global imperative. We recently partnered with the International Finance Corporation on a loan of up to ZAR 4.5 billion to support our financing of certified green buildings in South Africa. In March, we announced our long-term ambition to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 for scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. We have made progress on inclusive finance. For instance, in ARO, we disbursed ZAR 3.6 billion in mobile lending to underbanked or unbanked customers, a 44% increase. We also partnered with Kula in South Africa to promote the inclusion of SME farmers into the agriculture value chain. Lastly, our recently approved B-BBEE scheme has an evergreen CSI component that will benefit a broad range of beneficiaries from previously disadvantaged communities in South Africa, with a focus on education and youth employability. Moving to the salient features of our performance. Our performance in the first half has been resilient in light of the constrained operating environment, with all key measures continuing to grow and significantly above pre-COVID levels. Importantly, our performance is due to strong pre-provision profit growth, which in turn is driven by solid revenue growth. Our pre-provision profit is 55% higher than 2019 levels and has grown at a compound rate of 12%, with 40% growth since 2021. Our diluted headline earnings per share continues to grow and is 35% above 2019 levels, having grown 8% compound since then. For shareholders, our first half dividend per share increased by 5% as we increased our payout ratio to 52%. Our dividend per share is now 36% higher than 2019, while our net asset value is 32% higher. I will now hand over to Jason to cover our financial performance in detail. Well, thanks, Ari, good morning, everybody. As usual, throughout my presentation, I'll talk to our normalized results, which better reflect our underlying performance as it adjusts for the remaining consequences of separating from Barclays. We reconcile these with the reported IFRS results in our booklet. We also adopted IFRS 17 in the period and restated all relevant comparatives, the impact at a group level wasn't very material. Starting with our income statement, Headline Earnings increased 2% to just over ZAR 11 billion, with diluted HEPS up 3%. It's very clear from this graph that our earnings growth was driven by pleasing growth in pre-provision profits, which in turn was due to strong revenue growth of 13%, to ZAR 52 billion. Within this, net interest income rose 16%, reflecting further margin expansion and 14% growth in average interest-bearing assets. Non-interest income increased 8%, in part due to strong growth in insurance revenue, as well as 9% higher net trading revenue. Operating expenses remained well controlled, growing 10% to 8% in constant currency, while we continued to focus strongly on franchise investments, which will generate future benefits. These combined to produce 16% higher pre-provision profits. Our credit impairment charge rose 60% to ZAR 8.3 billion, largely due to the impact of higher interest rates and inflationary pressures in South Africa, mostly in our consumer-facing businesses. The small increase in other losses was due to higher minorities, pref share, and AT-1 capital payments and headline earnings adjustments, offsetting a lower tax expense and strong associate income growth. Our strong net interest margin widened further to 4.6%, mainly on the back of higher policy rates across our business. Unpacking the moving parts, our lending margin continued to improve by 9 basis points, reflecting better pricing in everyday banking and the favorable composition impact of slower home loans growth. Deposit margins also widened by 21 basis points, predominantly due to the impact of higher policy rates, which offset faster growth in wholesale funding in South Africa that was negative for composition. Higher average policy rates and growth in South African endowment balances added 12 basis points to the overall margin before hedging. Prime increased by 450 basis points from the start of 2022, with average rates 336 basis points higher in the first half. Higher policy rates and equity balances across Africa regions also widened our margin by 2 basis points. The endowment uplift was offset by a smaller contribution from our structural hedge. It released a debit of ZAR 568 million to the P&L, 29 basis points less than the ZAR 1.3 billion benefit in the prior year. The after-tax cash flow hedging reserve decreased to a ZAR 3.5 billion debit balance from a ZAR 3 billion debit last December. The total endowment impact after hedging in South Africa was a reduction of only 2 basis points due to slower growth in endowment balances than our interest-bearing assets, indicating that the hedge is operating as designed. Other factors had an 8 basis point negative impact, including lower yields on our South African liquid asset portfolio, faster growth in investment securities, and a reduced basis differential between Prime and JIBAR. The significant rate increases over the past 18 months mean that this result season will show a big difference in margin trends between hedged and unhedged banks. The inverse occurred between 2020 and 2021 on the back of substantial monetary policy easing at the time. Due to our rolling structural hedge program in South Africa, our group margin is less volatile through the cycle. It provides protection against low rates, although we are still positively geared to higher rates, albeit less so than unhedged banks. While unhedged bank margins will rebound materially this year off lower levels, ours has been stable and superior for some time now. To date, our hedge program has proven effective through rate cycles and its substantial cumulative contribution, and has exceeded our original expectations, having released ZAR 18 billion to our income statement since inception. Looking forward, in isolation, given the aggressive monetary policy tightening over a relatively short period, we expect a debit of over ZAR 1 billion to our P&L from our structural hedge this year, with another sizable debit next year. We believe this will contribute to net interest income expansion at a slow and steady pace over the medium term. Importantly, post our hedge, our group net interest income sensitivity is ZAR 650 million per 100 basis points higher rates, with about ZAR 200 million of that in South Africa. Turning to our balance sheet, total loans grew 8% to ZAR 1.25 trillion. Group loans to customers rose 10%, while loans to banks fell 12%, although these were 27% higher on average. South African customer loans grew 8% to almost ZAR 1 trillion, and Africa regions increased 23% or 18% in constant currency to ZAR 160 billion. Loan growth was pretty well diversified across our divisions. Product Solutions cluster loans grew 7% to ZAR 409 billion, in part due to good production levels in the second half of 2022. Everyday banking increased 9% to ZAR 69 billion due to sustained production momentum, particularly in cards. Relationship banking grew 7% to ZAR 142 billion, given continued momentum in the agri portfolio and commercial asset finance, particularly in the transport and logistics sector. ARO RBB loans grew 20% or 16% in constant currency to ZAR 80 billion, with growth across personal lending, mortgages, and commercial. CIB customer loans grew 11% to ZAR 448 billion, driven by strong fourth quarter 2022 growth in investment banking, solid growth in commercial property finance, and increased demand for short-term finance in corporate. CIB South Africa loans grew 8%, with CIB ARO up 27% or 21% in constant currency. Our retail loan growth in South Africa remained resilient, considering the unfavorable economic backdrop. Our market share improved slightly to 22.5%, with continued momentum in vehicle finance and focused production in unsecured. Home loans, our largest book, grew 6%. However, our production dropped by 26% as applications fell materially across the industry, given the subdued property market. Approval rates also deteriorated. Vehicle and asset finance rose 9%, with 4% higher production as new car sales remained resilient. Our market share improved slightly to 24%. Margins are stable, although pressure on new business pricing continued due to increased competition. Credit cards grew 10%, reflecting strong new account sales and increased utilization and 7% higher turnover. Here we remain the largest by market share, at 26%, which excludes our large Woolworths Financial Services book. Despite reducing our risk appetite from the fourth quarter of 2022, personal loans increased 6%, with production up 7%, due to strong growth in digital sales on our mobile banking apps. Personal loans remain a small component of our retail lending, our market share is very low, at just 10%. Deposits rose 9% to ZAR 1.3 trillion and accounted for 86% of our funding. Customer deposits grew 11% to ZAR 1.2 trillion, while bank deposits declined by 6%. Excluding 29% lower reverse repurchase agreements, total deposits were up 13% to ZAR 1.25 trillion. Everyday banking customer deposits grew 6% to almost ZAR 300 billion. Low margin deposits grew faster, with investment deposits up 9%, in part due to a successful marketing campaign in the second quarter, which remains in place. Higher margin transactional deposits declined 3%, reflecting the adverse cost of living pressures, particularly in the entry-level segment, while the affluent segment was relatively resilient despite significantly higher debt installments. Our retail deposit market share decreased slightly to 20.8%. Relationship banking deposits increased 11% to ZAR 211 billion, with a similar shape to retail, given strong 20% growth in savings and investment deposits, while transactional deposits reduced slightly. ARO RBB deposits rose 21% or 16% in constant currency to ZAR 124 billion. Transactional deposits, the largest category, grew 14%, and investment deposits, 28%. Deposits also remain a priority for CIB. Total CIB customer deposits rose 12% or 10% in constant currency to ZAR 465 billion. CIB South Africa customer deposits grew 7% to ZAR 369 billion, driven by strong 18% growth in core check and 45% higher fixed deposits, partially offset by lower national treasury deposits. CIB ARO customer deposits rose 33% to ZAR 106 billion, up 23% in constant currency, with strong growth across all markets. Growing capital light revenue remains a key priority for us, and the underlying trends were encouraging. Total non-interest income grew 8% or 7% in constant currency to account for 37% of our revenue. The largest component, net fee and commission income, grew 3%, although the underlying was 6%, excluding our disposal of Absa Asset Management, where the economics are now reflected in the associates line. The shift to digital channels dampened everyday in relationship banking fee growth, while ARO RBB increased 25% and CIB 16%. Net trading, excluding the impact of hedge accounting, grew 9% to ZAR 4.5 billion. Global Markets rose 16%, which I will unpack later, with market South Africa down 7%, while markets in ARO increased 54%. Growth in our insurance revenue remains strong, up 35%, with the largest component, South Africa Insurance, increasing 31%. At a divisional level, Product Solutions cluster non-interest income grew 22%, reflecting strong growth in South Africa Insurance, Absa Trust, and Home Loans. Everyday banking grew 3% to ZAR 6 billion, driven by growth in customers and activity levels that outweighed the continued drag from migration to lower margin digital channels and price reductions and investments in Absa Rewards. Card issuing turnover grew 7% and digital transactions 8%, while branch usage actually fell 20%. Relationship banking increased 1% to ZAR 2.5 billion due to 6% growth in digital volumes, offset by 9% lower cash volumes that declined industry-wide as customers continue migrating to digital channels. Card acquiring volumes grew 6%. We remain the largest card acquirer in Africa and just outside the top 50 globally, with over 40% share in South Africa. ARO RBB grew 20% or 15% in constant currency to ZAR 2.4 billion, driven by 10% growth in active customers and increased activity. Banking revenue rose 28% with strong growth in foreign currency revenues and cards. ARO Insurance revenue declined 9% as life declined 16% due to higher claims and an increase in onerous business. CIB's non-interest revenue grew 15% or 13% in constant currency to ZAR 6 billion. Drivers included a strong markets performance in ARO, plus continued growth in trade finance and transactional revenue in corporate. These were partially offset by 11% lower revenue from Markets South Africa, where client flows were hard to monetize in relatively volatile and illiquid markets. Moving to costs, our operating expenses increased by 10% or 8% in constant currency as we continued to invest in our franchise. Staff costs rose 12% to ZAR 14.7 billion, reflecting salary increases and people investments. Staff numbers grew 5%, predominantly in frontline business areas, mostly in relationship banking. Total incentives were flat, with bonuses down 3%, while deferred cash and share-based payments increased by 10%. Non-staff costs grew 7% to just over ZAR 11 billion. IT costs increased by 10% to almost R3 billion due to further investment in digital platforms and cybersecurity spend. Amortization of intangible assets rose 1%, reflecting continued investment in digital, automation, and data capabilities. Total IT spend, including staff, amortization, and depreciation, increased 10% to R6.5 billion, or a quarter of group costs. Marketing costs rose 21% on increased advertising and sponsorship spend as we reinvested in our brand and product presence in the market. Equipment costs grew 70% as power costs grew significantly due to worsening load shedding in South Africa. Depreciation declined 3% from reduced utilization of physical IT infrastructure and further optimization of our property footprint. Professional fees fell 9% as we used less external resources on strategic projects. Cash transportation costs increased 1%, reflecting lower merchant cash volumes given the migration to digital banking and increased cash recycling. Well, I'm very pleased that our cost income ratio improved to below 50%, although this is seasonally a bit higher in the second half given salary increases in April. Turning now to credit impairments. I'll spend a bit more time on this today, given our charge grew 60% to ZAR 8.3 billion. It's very evident that this large increase stems from higher credit charges in our South African retail lending portfolios and relationship banking due to significantly higher interest rates and inflationary pressures. While credit impairments grew materially across these portfolios, home loans, relationship banking, and card all increased off a relatively low base in the prior year. For its part, ARO's 20% higher credit charge was in line with its strong loan growth. CIB's charge was also off a low base, and its credit loss ratio remained below through-the-cycle levels. The next slide shows that South Africa drove the increase in our group credit impairments and loan loss ratio. Given the difficult macro backdrop, South Africa's charge increased by 2/3 to ZAR 7.5 billion, pushing its credit loss ratio to 138 basis points, well above our group through the cycle range. Conversely, Africa regions grew just 9%, improving its credit loss ratio significantly to a low 66 basis points. Its first half charge was flattered, however, by a ZAR 85 million release in CIB ARO, largely due to performing book construct improvements. In combining these drivers, our credit loss ratio increased materially to 127 basis points, well above our through-the-cycle range of 75-100 basis points, from around the midpoint in the previous two comparable periods. Nonetheless, our credit loss ratio remains well below GFC and COVID levels of 170 and 280 basis points, respectively. We believe our current period charge represents a 1-in-10-year event from a credit risk perspective, mostly on the back of the rapidly rising rate cycle. Unpacking the portfolios, Product Solutions cluster's credit loss ratio increased to 111 basis points from 75. Within this, home loans rose from a low 19 basis points to 65, given higher delinquencies, sustained pressure on the legal book, and inflows into debt review. Vehicle and Asset Finance increased to 234 basis points on higher arrears, inflows into legal and debt review, reduced consumption of the macroeconomic overlay. The prior first half was also high, but impacted by DebiCheck implementation issues that were resolved in the second half of 2022. Everyday banking deteriorated to 9.2% from a comparatively low 6%, reflecting elevated roll rates into late delinquency cycles. Although early arrears are improving due to proactive risk management and collection actions. Within this, cards rose to 8.8% from 5.7% as seasonal inflows in the fourth quarter of 2022 and first quarter of 2023 migrated through arrears buckets. Similarly, personal loans credit impairments increased to 11.7% from 8.8% due to high inflows into arrears in the second half of 2022 that rolled into late cycles and legal. Relationship banking increased to 68 basis points from a relatively low 35, due to higher defaults in the second quarter and reduced collateral values on NPLs. ARO RBB was flat at 1.7%, below its through the cycle range, reflecting targeted retail lending and improved collections, partly offset by higher single name charges in business banking. CIB increased slightly to 16 basis points from 13, but also remained below it through the cycle range of 20-30 basis points. However, the trends within CIB differed, with South Africa increasing to 23 basis points from a low 9 that included a net release on the performing book. Conversely, CIB ARO credit impairments reduced to a net ZAR 85 million reversal, primarily due to performing book construct improvements. I now want to address a question we've heard from a few investors on whether we grew home loans aggressively when rates were at record lows from mid-2020 to late 2021, which could result in elevated credit impairments on mortgages originated during that period. Many customers would have seen their monthly home loan installments increase by 40% since then. Importantly, our strategy in home loans is one of consistency, including being there for our mortgage originator partners and our primary customers, for whom home loans are an anchor product balanced by proactive risk management. We did not increase our risk appetite or approval rates during that period. Various comparative indicators, such as Delphi scores, indicate that our mortgage book is high quality relative to peers. Although rates rose faster than we expected, we increased the rate stress buffer we applied to 300 basis points at that time, albeit less than the rise that subsequently occurred. We can see that the average monthly installments across our transactional base increased 29% from late 2021 to May this year, so there has been some customer deleveraging at play. During that period, we benefited from some competitors withdrawing from the market, which allowed us to write attractively priced new business at well above current historical margins. As you can see, the risk-adjusted margin on the mortgages written then is high, even after adjusting for our first half credit impairment experience. Moreover, we grew mortgages by 4% in 2020, 9% in 2021, which isn't excessive, and our market shares remained between 23% and 24% for several years now. Our growth was not aggressive, and the stress is being experienced relatively consistently across our portfolio and across vintages. Our credit impairments reflect stage migration of our loans overall, with non-performing loans increasing 19% year on year and 14% growth year to date, while stage 1 loans grew 10% year on year and 3% year to date. As a result, NPLs increased slightly to 5.8% of total loans from 5.3% in the prior year and last December, although it remains below 2020's 6.3% high. NPLs increased most year on year across South African retail portfolios, particularly personal loans and home loans, while relationship banking and ARO RBB improved. We remain well provisioned for a tough operating environment. Our NPL or stage 3 coverage remains strong at 46%, due mainly to single name charges in our relationship banking and ARO business banking portfolios. Our total loan coverage also rose slightly to 4.1%, which remains well above pre-COVID levels of 3.3%. The increase was driven by higher total coverage in our South African retail lending portfolios, as well as a change in mix. Moving to divisional performances now. Our results again show the benefits of diversification as earning trends differed materially, despite almost all of our businesses producing strong pre-provision profit growth. The higher South African retail and business banking credit impairments that I highlighted earlier were a material drag on these divisions' earnings, offset by strong earnings growth from CIB and ARO RBB. Product Solutions cluster's earnings declined 13% to ZAR 1.1 billion as credit impairments rose 60%. Revenue grew 12%, driven by 22% higher non-interest income, with Insurance South Africa up 31%. With costs increasing just 3%, its cost-income ratio improved further to 42% and pre-provision profits grew 18%. The picture is similar in everyday banking, where earnings fell 21% to ZAR 1.5 billion as 62% higher credit impairments outweighed 17% growth in pre-provision profit. Revenue grew 9% on the back of 14% higher net interest income, while migration to digital channels constrained non-interest growth to 3%. Costs were well managed, increasing 2% to improve its cost-income ratio to 51%. Significantly higher credit impairments also reduced relationship banking earnings, which fell 9% to ZAR 1.8 billion. Although in its case, pre-provision profit growth was muted, given investments we are making in that franchise. ARO RBB earnings increased 84% to over ZAR 900 million, largely due to strong 44% pre-provision profit growth here. Revenue grew 26% or 21% in constant currency, driven by 29% higher net interest income as loans rose 20% and margins widened. Non-interest income grew 20%, slightly ahead of costs. CIB earnings grew 32% or 30% in constant currency to ZAR 5.9 billion, as pre-provision profit increased 25%. Revenues rose 19% or 17% in constant currency, again driven by strong net interest income on volume growth and better margins. Non-interest income grew 15%, accounting for 39% of total revenues, with costs up 11%, CIB's cost-income ratio improved to 43%. Lastly, Head Office, Treasury, and other earnings fell by almost ZAR 800 million to a loss of nearly ZAR 200 million. The decline reflects increased funding costs and lower investment returns in the South African Treasury, adverse fair value movements on our structural hedge, and higher impairment charges on sovereign exposures in ARO. CIB's contribution to group earnings increased noticeably to 52% from 44%, while ARO RBB almost doubled to 8% of the total, excluding Head Office, Treasury, and other. Given their elevated credit impairments and lower earnings, product solution, cluster, everyday banking, and relationship banking decreased to 40% of earnings from 51%. Nonetheless, our earnings remain well diversified, especially because the divisions are themselves all diversified by activity and/or geography. Lower earnings reduced everyday banking and relationship banking's returns, although they remain relatively attractive at 23% and 24%, respectively. Product solution clusters return on regulatory capital remains below our cost of equity, although its returns are sensitive to credit impairments. Given its significant earnings growth, ARO RBB returns improved materially to 14%. Lastly, CIB's return on regulatory capital improved materially to over 26%, a very strong performance. We continue to allocate capital based on sustainable expected returns, with a focus on continuing to grow capital life revenue over the medium term. Unpacking the Product Solutions cluster, its lending businesses were a material drag on earnings, offsetting strong growth from Insurance South Africa. Home loans earnings fell 38% to ZAR 700 million, as credit impairments increased significantly off a relatively low base to negate 7% higher pre-provision profits. Revenue growth slowed to 4%, with 3% higher net interest income, reflecting lower loan production and margin pressure due to increased funding costs and competition. With costs decreasing 1%, its cost income ratio improved further to 31%. Vehicle and Asset Finance earnings fell 31% to a small profit, as 14% higher credit impairments offset solid 13% pre-provision profit growth. Its net interest margin widened, producing 11% net interest income growth. Revenue growth of 11% exceeded 8% cost growth, improving its cost income ratio to below 36%. Insurance South Africa earnings grew 40% to ZAR 653 million, with life insurance up 35% to ZAR 579 million, in part due to significantly higher investment income given higher interest rates. Non-life insurance earnings increased 90% to ZAR 74 million as net premium income grew 10% and its underwriting margin improved. A strong performance from Absa Trust reduced the loss in non-bank financial services, where the cluster's head office costs also reside. Moving to everyday banking, significantly higher credit impairments offset very strong pre-provision profit growth in its unsecured lending businesses. Given 70% higher credit impairments off a relatively low base, card earnings fell 85% to just ZAR 52 million. Strong 16% revenue growth, combined with well-managed 5% cost growth to produce 26% higher pre-provision profits and improve its cost income ratio to just over 40%. Personal loans pre-provision profit grew even more, up 30% as revenues increased 19%, while costs only rose 3%. However, 51% higher credit impairments increased its loss to over ZAR 200 million. This business remains subscale, given its low market share of just 10%, and we continue to test the market for selective growth opportunities over the medium term. Credit impairments are less of a factor for transactions and deposits, where headline earnings grew 1% on 5% higher pre-provision profit. Revenue growth slowed to 3%, given continued migration to digital channels. Cost growth was well contained, growing 1% despite continued investment in digital, marketing, and fraud detection and prevention. Some may consider relationship banking's first half performance pedestrian. Its earnings declined 9% as credit impairments more than doubled off a low base, while muted 5% revenue growth produced flat pre-provision profits. However, we're upbeat about this business and its prospects. Firstly, we expect to see benefits from it shifting to a client-centric operating model rather than a provincial-based one. Second, it remains a strong contributor to group deposit gathering as a large net originator of customer deposits. While deposits grew 11%, we see significantly more growth here medium term. Loan production also improved in targeted growth areas such as commercial asset finance and term lending. Third, it's investing for growth. For instance, its 10% cost growth was due to significant investment hires in frontline staff, in private banking and SMEs, where, together with wealth, we see substantial growth potential medium term. Transaction account sales grew materially off a low base. Relationship banking continues to invest in digital capabilities, and digitally active customers grew 5%. Fourth, it generates revenue for other areas of the group, such as private bank lending and transactions reflected in Product Solutions cluster and everyday banking. Lastly, we expect relationship banking to continue generating attractive returns in the mid-20s. Turning to CIB, we split it out by business and geography, although it's run on a Pan-African basis. Starting with corporate, which continues to perform extremely well, earnings grew 38% to ZAR 2 billion, as very strong 42% pre-provision profit growth outweighed substantially higher credit impairments. Revenues grew 27% with pleasing growth in transactional revenue and strong net interest income growth, particularly in ARO. Investment banking earnings grew 29% to ZAR 3.9 billion, due to a combination of materially lower credit impairments and 16% pre-provision profit growth. Revenue grew 13%, with ARO up 44% on significantly higher global markets revenue, while South Africa decreased 1% due to lower global markets revenue. Using a geographic lens, CIB ARO earnings were exceptionally strong, growing 98% or 90% in constant currency to ZAR 2.6 billion, reflecting 64% growth in pre-provision profits and a net release in credit impairments. It contributed 44% of CIB's total earnings. CIB South Africa earnings grew 5% to ZAR 3.3 billion, driven by 6% income growth and sustainably lower taxes, which offset significantly higher credit impairments. Africa regions contributed significantly to our overall group growth during the period. For starters, its strong 36% revenue growth accounted for more than two-thirds of our total group absolute revenue growth, given South Africa's moderate 5% higher revenue. As a result, Africa regions increased to 29% of group revenue from 24%. Moreover, its contribution to earnings was even more notable, as South Africa earnings fell by 17% to ZAR 7.5 billion, mostly due to elevated credit impairments I highlighted earlier. With Africa region earnings almost doubling to ZAR 3.7 billion, it accounted for a third of group earnings for the period, from 17% in the prior year. While the weaker rand added 5% to Africa region's revenue and 10% to its earnings growth, its constant currency revenue and earnings growth of 31% and 87% respectively, remained very strong. Aspects of its contribution may not be fully sustainable, such as ARO markets' 54% growth and CIB ARO's very low credit impairment. We also continue to monitor sovereign risks in some of our key ARO countries. However, we still see compelling growth opportunities across our existing Africa regions portfolio over the medium term, in part due to far stronger economic growth in these markets than in South Africa. ARO RBB's strong revenue momentum and earnings recovery is very encouraging, given its significant revenue-driven growth and pre-provision profit, which in turn produced its substantial earnings recovery over the past two years. Although its profitability improved dramatically as its cost-income ratio reduced materially, its return on regulatory capital remains an ongoing opportunity, and we see room to improve its efficiency ratio further over the medium term, with opportunities on both the cost and revenue front. We remain very well capitalized to fund our growth opportunities. Our CET1 ratio improved slightly year-to-date to 13%, and it remains above our 11%-12.5% board target range and comfortably exceeds our regulatory requirements. Group risk-weighted assets increased 7% year-on-year and 1% year-to-date to ZAR 1 trillion. Credit risk RWAs grew less than gross loans and total assets due to RWA reductions as new regulatory credit models were implemented. We remain strongly capital generative, with profits adding 1% to the CET1 ratio over the year, partially offset by paying 60 basis points worth of dividends. The strong CET1 ratio allowed us to increase our dividend payout ratio, resulting in a 5% higher ordinary dividend of ZAR 6.85 per share. Turning now to our guidance for the remainder of the year, the economic environment remains very uncertain. Geopolitical concerns, particularly around the Russia-Ukraine conflict and rising tension between the West and China, look likely to impact the outlook for some time. Headline inflation has softened considerably, helped by significant base effects, and global central banks have signaled that policy rates are likely at or near the peak of the cycle. Markets will watch for evidence that these tight financial conditions are causing undue strain or risk a sharp slowdown in activity. For South Africa, we expect real GDP growth of 0.7% in 2023. Electricity supply remains a significant risk for the economy for the foreseeable future, and higher rates are placing significant pressure on interest-sensitive parts of the economy, such as many consumer-facing sectors. In addition, degrading rail and port infrastructure present material downside risk to these expectations. Helpfully, headline inflation is expected to continue to fall and to oscillate in the 4.5%-5% range for much of the next year. We believe that the current policy rate is the peak for this cycle and that the Reserve Bank is likely to be in a position to deliver a measured pace of cuts beginning in the first half of 2024. We forecast that GDP-weighted economic growth for the ARO presence countries will slow to 4.3% in 2023. The impact of relatively tight monetary policy in most ARO countries is likely to provide a headwind to growth, and hard currency scarcity may also continue to generate downside risk for economic activity in several markets, with sovereign risks still high on the agenda. Based on these assumptions, and excluding further major unforeseen political, macroeconomic, or regulatory developments, our guidance for 2023 is as follows: Revenue growth is expected to slow in the second half, in part due to material base effects, as we guided in March. We continue to expect high single-digit revenue growth in 2023, driven by Net Interest Income growth, with low double-digit growth in customer loans and deposits, and higher policy rates. Given significantly higher rates, our credit loss ratio is expected to exceed our through-the-cycle target range of 75 to 100 basis points this year. However, our second half credit loss ratio is likely to improve substantially to slightly above this range. We expect high single-digit growth in operating expenses, resulting in a cost-income ratio similar to last year's 51.4% and high single-digit growth in pre-provision profit. Our broad-based black economic empowerment transaction will be included in our 2023 financial results from next month, and we currently expect the transaction to reduce earnings by approximately 1% in 2023. Combining the above, we expect to generate an ROE similar to 2022's 16.4%. Lastly, our Group CET1 capital ratio is expected to remain above the top end of our board target range of 11%-12.5%, and we expect to maintain a dividend payout ratio of at least 52%. In terms of medium-term guidance, we still aim to achieve a cost-income ratio in the low 50s and an ROE above 17% on a sustainable basis, which is heavily dependent on the macro backdrop globally and in our presence countries. We've always said that we will normalize our financial results for the separation from Barclays as long as the consequences are material. Since the impact will be relatively small from next year, we expect to stop reporting normalized results in 2024. We also won't normalize the impact of our B-BBEE transaction, so we'll return to pure RFS reporting next year. Well, thanks very much for your attention and support, and I look forward to meeting many of you over the coming week, and I'll hand you back to Ari now. Thank you, Jason. To conclude, I would like to add the following remarks. The macro environment has been tough, particularly in South Africa, and we don't expect it to provide any tailwinds for a while, but we have a well-positioned balance sheet to withstand it. We continue to believe in our strategy, and as we have shown throughout the presentation, we are seeing the tangible benefits of our consistent execution. Together with an experienced leadership team, we are confident in our ability to deliver over the medium term. We will now take your questions on Slido. What I'll do is I'll just read out the questions, as they've come through, just for the benefits of everyone that might only be on the line. Then between Ari and myself, we'll dovetail and answer, all of the questions here. The main themes, of course, seem to be around impairment in mortgages and, a couple of questions there, Ari, around the transactional account, primacy and, and, fees and commissions. We'll just work through those. First one's anonymous. It says, "Good morning. Could you please provide some color on the tripling of the impairments in the home loans portfolio? Is this a concern or is this expected to ease? I think, you know, first thing is that the base that you're comparing that to was a very low base, and we actually called it out as a low base first half of last year when our loan loss rate in mortgages was, was only, it was just below 20 bps. I think it was 19. So to come in at 60, was, it's obviously is a big increase off that low base. In all the slides, what you can see is that we're actually quite comfortable with our net margin after loan loss. And you can see all the different vintages that we've been writing. We do expect it to ease. If you see the guidance that we gave for the full year, we're saying that our loan losses will only be slightly above our through-the-cycle range. Of course, there's some reliance in that guidance on the, on the performance of the mortgage book. In summary, we've got a, a cohort of loans that I think are moving through the delinquency buckets, but we've built significant coverage for those. We've got some reliance, of course, on the interest rate environment, which we think is, is at its peak now, and, and therefore, have reasonable conviction with our guidance. The second question there: How do current home loan impairment levels compare to the highs seen in 2008 and 2009? Is the potential of large-scale distress selling repossessions a concern, and what measures are in place to prevent the latter? Yeah, look, from memory, I just joined the company then in 2008. We had a, a loan loss, in mortgages at 190 basis points, compared here to, to the 60 that we're printing. Not really comparable, for a number of reasons. Leading up to 2008, there was a substantial mortgage boom, not just by Absa, but, you know, all the banks in South Africa had participated extensively, loan-to-values originated were very different to what we've seen. I think that's, they're not really comparable, but, yeah, those were... Our, our previous two high points, of course, were the GFC and then the COVID period, not so long ago. This is well below both of those and, and speaks only really to the, to the dramatic, increase in interest rates. Yeah, we can give you comfort that we're not seeing large-scale repossessions. Our property and possession portfolio is actually very small. We, we work with our customers to realize collateral value when we get to that point, fairly swiftly these days, so there isn't that type of risk of a large property and possession portfolio. Ari, next one's from Charles. We'll, we'll probably dovetail this one a bit. Barring seasonality, what gives you confidence that your credit loss ratio will improve substantially into second half, when rates and consumer prices are at cycle highs? Charles, we covered it. Well, I've covered a little bit of that already. I think what I'd also add is that, you know, we, we generally, here at Absa, calibrate our models in such a way that we build coverage very quickly when incurred losses come through. We've done that, I think, in an appropriate way for the half, which, which should put us in good stead for, for the second half. Of course, I think we need to execute well, particularly in our collections, part of our business. Yeah, I think another point to raise would just be, you know, that graph that I showed that shows the net interest margin adjusted by loan loss, which is, which is still attractive. In fact, although there, there's a lot of competition out there in the market today, I think we're still maintaining our shares, and we're, we're writing business that I think will give us long-term economic value. That should cover that. Ari, do you want to take the part around- yeah, please. Thanks for, thanks for those comments as well, also thanks for the, for the questions. I think just to build on what Jason is saying from a home loan impairment perspective, I think what we've got to, just again think of here is the context in South Africa, where we expect impairments to increase, so this is certainly not unexpected. As you can see from this, with the rise in consumer distress, the rise in cost of living inflation, that is coming through, but it's still well within, well within our appetite, so we continue to manage that very tightly. I think the point that I also just want to reemphasize is the fact that we will continue to work very closely with our cover, our customers during this period of time, to ensure that we stay with them as they deal with this, this fast move that has happened in interest rates. It's, you know, the customer's ability to adjust to the, to the pace of pace of interest rate increases. When it comes to customer numbers, I think for us, as you would know in our strategy, increasing primacy and growing customers is a key part of our, key part of our focus. You'll also see this in the increase in our marketing spend. We're very encouraged to see, off the back of a number of adjustments that we made specifically in our acquisition strategies, that we see our acquisition rates tick up very nicely, as you can see from the numbers, so well, well into the double digits in the segments that we want to see. This is off the back of improving propositions, making a few small pricing announcements, like making it Rewards-free for us was critical, making some adjustments in our Flexi space as we start focusing on the entry-level banking space going forward. What we're particularly encouraged about is seeing customer numbers growth in the segments that we want to focus in. Good primacy growth in new-to-bank customers and corporate. Good growth in our Commercial segment. SMEs is, you know, slightly down, but that is a key focus for us, and you see that in our acquisition run-ons. Then, of course, both in our private and affluent bases, you're seeing double-digit customer, you know, customer number growth. Then, of course, in our Youth segment, which we highlighted a year or so ago as a key focus. We expect to see our acquisition numbers increase as these strategies embed themselves in our business. Great. Thanks, Ari. That should cover off Charles there. Then, of course, the, the, the last part of Charles's question, just around the reconciliation between transactional accounts, growing nicely, like you say, and, and, and fees and commission line. The, the, the, I suppose the offsets against the kind of customer growth are, are, in essence, related to the Absa Rewards program in South Africa, which we, which we kind of now provide on a free basis, which would have had a headwind on fees in the near term, but more sustainability over time. There's a bit of a shift to digital there that drives some of that. In other words, the digital fees coming in a little bit lower than the physical fees. Then, and then the last part is that the, the Asset Management business that we disposed and then did the joint venture with Sanlam, used to have fees on that line, which is now. Well, all the economics of that are now represented on the, on the associate line. There's an anonymous question there, which is basically the same around the customer franchise, but it does conclude with a, a specific question around marketing. It says: Can you please provide a figure for the 22% increase in marketing spend? Yeah, that, that, was up 21% to ZAR 920-odd million. As Ari said, very targeted around particular campaigns, around products and deposits, which we're seeing good traction around. Right, there's quite a few more. Let me just go to, go to James. James Stark: Given South Africa's CLR at 138 for H1, and your group guidance for H2 improvements, which product areas in South Africa do you see the biggest CLR improvement into 2023? Look, James, firstly, it would have to be fairly broad-based for us to achieve the kind of improvement that we're talking about. Home loans is, is relatively high at 60. We'd see that improving a little bit. Probably thinking about the different products, you know, VAF, very high charge in the, in the 230s, we think that can come down quite substantially relative to any other one. I'd probably call that out as probably the biggest one, but James, that basically we see line of sight for improvement across the portfolio. I think we also expect a better performance on our unsecured, given the sort of risk appetite changes that we've made since, since the end of last year. Yeah. I think also, probably some improvement in our business banking sort of, loss rate. It's, as you say, across the, across the board. Yeah. Right. Harry Botha from Anchor Capital: Could there be a delayed credit impairment impact on your Africa regions portfolio, i.e., CLR to peak in second half 2023 or first half 2024, given the impact of high hard currency interest rates and lower economic growth? Harry, yeah, I wouldn't call out a very big risk with respect to our ARO regions, particularly on the RBB side. Important to note that the vast majority of our loans are fixed rate, less sensitive to the rising rates. The type of lending that we do there is very much related to scheme loans, which are, of course, underwritten by the employer in many instances. We don't quite see the same volatility of CLR coming on the back of rising rates in ARO. Of course, we have to watch single names, and we have to watch sovereign, and we probably kind of close to our business banking portfolio. As, as regards, our guidance, it, it, it, it factors in what I just covered. Can you provide more color on credit impairment charges for sovereign exposures in half 1, 2023? Well, we built substantial coverage at the end of last year for sovereign exposures to the tune of about ZAR 2.7 billion, and that's materially unchanged for the half. In other words, we didn't have to materially build further coverage against that risk. We, we kind of indicated we thought we were dealing with it last year, and we still have that conviction. Right. Ross, Ross Krige from Investec. Good morning. Thanks for the call. Please comment on the assumptions that underpin H1 CLR guidance, loan staging and coverage. Is it assumed that NPL migration reverses? Okay, I'll take that one first. I think we've covered a lot of context around how we see coverage playing out in the second half. We factored in migration of a few cohorts through the different NPL buckets into the way we kind of built coverage at the half and therefore are comfortable with that. Second question is, what drove the net asset pricing benefit that contributed to H1 2023 NIM accretions? Well, it was fairly small on the loan side. It was about four basis points, and it was very much in the everyday banking space and personal loans. Although I would say over a long time, I think we've been able to enhance asset pricing, quite strategically since about 2018, continued benefit there coming through. Harry again. How do you see the NIM benefits from loan pricing and deposit pricing evolving in 2023 and 2024? I think net-net, Harry, what we're kind of saying is that, you know, from this base, the 460 base that we're at, at the moment, and given the hedge and all the factors that way, at play with respect to the hedge and huts, it probably become more beneficial as rates start coming down at some point, we see rates coming down in 2024. You know, loan pricing and deposit pricing, I think the one to call out is probably investment deposits. Very competitive, very price sensitive right now, we're in the market in that space. Overall, our net margin at 4.60%, I think, is very much intact, I think we're saying probably a slow and steady improvement of what is already a very good margin. James Stark again. CIB, CLR, 13 basis points, very strong, even in South Africa, 23%. How much longer can CIB credit losses diverge from the pressure seen in retail and consumer? James, a very good question, that. As you know, we see the range of loan losses that contributes to our overall group guidance of through the cycle in CIB at 20-30%. I think this is a good performance, I think it's also 'cause we're proactively managing risk. Of course, there have been some single names in CIB, not just at Absa, but the other big banks for, for some time. I think we've been navigating those and building coverage as the risks have emerged. So I'm relatively comfortable with the quality of that portfolio. It's not particularly overweight in any sector. It's relatively underweight commercial property, where there's, there's still some distress relative to others. From that perspective, you know, we see near-term stability in that 20-30, maybe even a little bit better. Over time, you know, of course, you're right to say that South African corporates are in pretty good position. The retail consumer isn't, and over time, that may cause distress at, at, at the corporate level. Once again, we, we believe our corporates are largely carefully managing their cash flows and carefully managing their debt levels, with only one or two exceptions. From that perspective, we're comfortable with the CLR at CIB. Jason, can you tackle the next one? Please. Just give you a bit of a breather. Yeah, thanks. I'll get some water here. Jaco, Jaco Visser. How bad has the South African consumer deteriorated during H1 2023? How does the current electoral cycle as it influence Absa's outlook for consumers' ability to meet debt obligations? Will this inform Absa's lending for the rest of 2023? I think what's very clear is, the, the, the consumer in South Africa, you know, has had to deal with, you know, quite a difficult environment, probably since the second half of last year already. You've seen 470 basis points rate hike in a very short space of time, which is what we've highlighted all along in this process, and consumers struggle to, you know, to deal with that adjustment. What we are seeing in our primacy customers is that liquidity balances in their accounts, you know, does show that sort of, that sort of strain. I think we're very encouraged by, you know, consumers' you know, willingness and ability to continue to, you know, to meet their obligations. What we're seeing is mortgage installments over our portfolio have increased close to 40%, VAF, sort of 14%-15%. There's definitely an adjustment that is that is required. As I said earlier, we will definitely continue to stay very close to close to our customers during this during this cycle. Yeah, I think that that covers that that covers that well. Jason, can you please unpack which products are set to drive the CLR lower in 2H 2023, and in which products do you see the most downside risk to your current expectations? Yeah, thanks, sir. Look, I think we've covered a lot of that with respect to how we see broad-based improvements across our portfolios. I'm, I'm not gonna say that there's any particular product that we see elevated downside risk to. I think, in fact, general improvements across the board, I would, I would suggest, is the way we see it coming through. Of course, there's a set of assumptions that we've used around the economics and the background by which we expect to execute that guidance. I'd say that unsecured portfolios generally have the risk of the most distress. Once again, our exposure to the personal loan market sitting at about 10% or 11%, and we continue to proactively look at that market for growth opportunities- Yeah. We're not seeing great quality coming through, so we should be relatively unscathed on the personal loan side. I'd suggest that probably as a product, sector-wide might be one with more elevated risk. Yeah. I think also just to make the general point that risk appetite for us is something that we adjust dynamically across, across all our businesses. Of course, when the interest rate was at a low, you know, we stress all these, you know, affordability across, across all these segments. Once they should be adding as much as 300 basis points, you know, to an affordability stress. I think what we can say is that approval rates are down across all our product sets, and a big part of that is actually affordability in the current cycle. You know, we're managing that risk appetite very, very dynamically, as we've, you know, as we said all along. The next one there, similarly, around confidence around our, our lower half-term impairment charge, calling out consumer SME distress and a low impairment charge for CIB in half one. Look, I, I do think we've covered most of that in the previous questions that we've, and answers we've provided. We've got conviction around the guidance that we're giving. In other words, a substantial improvement into the second half on the loan loss. Once again, fairly broad-based. Calling out the CIB charge in half one, I think I mentioned just now the quality of our distressed assets list, and the way we're proactively managing that risk together with those clients. And in many instances, these are kind of more shareholder problems and equity problems than debt problems. Shareholders seem to be generally, on the names we've been concerned about in the past, generally quite supportive. On that, on that set of assumptions, we, we, we kind of really think that our, our loss guidance is, is intact. I think the impairment questions we've. Yeah - we've all covered. I think, they continue to come through. Yeah. I think obviously top of mind. Top of mind, yeah. I think there's a question from Waleed. Waleed. Just around Yeah. Can you please kindly unpack and reconcile the H1 2023 cost income ratio of sub 50% with your full year 2023 cost income ratio guidance of 51.4%, implying that H2 will be elevated at 53%? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Waleed, a couple of factors, of course, the main one is simply seasonality. If you look at Absa over many past reporting periods, half 2 cost income ratio is generally higher. The main reason for that is we put through salary increases on the 1st of April. The 2nd half really has the full benefits of the investment in colleague franchise. When we guided, actually, in March, we actually also set out the shape of our performance for this year. Thankfully, that's been fairly consistent with the actuals, where there are some base effects of revenues and costs that looked a little bit different in the 1st half compared to the 2nd half of last year. It's more technical reasons like that. If I look at the underlying commitment we're making to sustainably generate a cost income ratio in the low fifties, I'm pleased to say that. A lthough there are revenue pressures emerging, no doubt. We still have efficiency opportunities in the company that we're executing against. We also made a very strategic decision to invest in the company over this time, and you'll see, you know, the first time in a long time we've had headcount up. But it's been very targeted in coverage areas, in frontline, for instance, in relationship banking, where we expect to generate future benefits. We are investing in the franchise and just trying to get that balance right. Yeah. I think that's, that's spot on, Les. I think, maybe off the back of that question, Simon, with these strong developments in ARO, how confident are you that this momentum can be maintained, especially the improvement at ARO RBB? Thanks for that question, Simon. I think, you know, momentum is up across all our businesses, specifically, you know, in our, you know, ARO markets. As we said earlier, we continue to invest, both from a people as well as from a technology perspective, to maintain and build on that, on that momentum. As a franchise, we're very confident that we can continue to build the momentum behind the areas that we've identified. Certainly, our expectation is that we will continue to build on that. We've spoken about some opportunities now. I think, apart from growing the customer franchises across ARO, there's still quite a significant cost income or, or cost benefit there that we're gonna be seeking out. If you look at RBB there, sitting at around 65%. A nice improvement in this half, but certainly a focus area for us as we go into the second half of this year. Yeah. Thanks. I think the last question there. I'll take the last one. The earnings guidance does not reconcile with a flat ROE at 16.4%. Should it climb, can you reconcile? Well, the ROE is similar to our FY 2022, 16.4%, which we guided. Of course, a large part of the answer relates to the question Waleed asked around the cost-income ratio going up a little bit. Then, of course, we also see very strong equity growth in the company, so having more equity is also a feature. Ari, I think that's the last one. Certainly. That's. Well, thanks, everybody. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. We'll see many of you over the coming days in person or on, on virtual meetings, and, thanks for your participation here. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for joining us.