Good morning. We'll start with our call. If I can ask that you mute for now so that we don't get any background noise into the call, and then you can unmute when we get to the Q&A session section of our call. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Absa 2025 Pre-Close Call. As I approach my six-month market absence next week, I want to update you on our progress since we spoke to you in August. I will hand over to Deon to present our financial guidance for this year and for 2026, and to set out our medium-term financial targets. Thereafter, we will field your questions. I want to share our advice strategy with you. It is finalized, and we've started rolling it out. Our group purpose and ambition remain unchanged. However, we've modified the underlying pillars. The first is customer-led growth. Customers are the starting point of everything. Winners are obsessed with knowing their customers and differentiating themselves on customer experience. Most banking products are the same. Customer experience is the key. In retail, customers are much more demanding for prices that are constantly reducing, with margins shrinking. We need to understand and fulfill their needs. Of course, on the corporate side, all corporates are multi-bank and very choosy. Therefore, addressing customer pain points and understanding what makes them tick is our top priority. In the past, we were largely product-led, but are starting to shift to focus equally on client segments and understanding how we can win in those segments. We need to be very clear on which customer segments we want to focus on and how to build competitive advantages in those segments. Sharper customer focus will inform the investments that we make going forward. Secondly, we want to diversify our group, both from a geography point of view as well as from the business lines point of view. From a geography point of view, we have an over-concentration in South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. If there's an issue in any of these countries, the group feels it, as we saw the impact of the sovereign default in Ghana in the last couple of years. South Africa still contributes about two-thirds of our revenues and earnings. We expect the contribution from African regions to increase over the medium term, given the stronger GDP growth in the rest of the African markets, market deepening, as well as our increased market share as we continue to execute and implement our strategy off a relatively low base. Within African regions, we're overly dependent on Ghana and Kenya and want to increase the contribution from the other countries. Our bolt-on acquisitions in Mauritius and Uganda are part of this strategy. Looking at our footprint, we see massive opportunities in Tanzania and Uganda, given the significant infrastructure investment, as well as in Mozambique, despite the current sovereign debt challenges that that country is experiencing. Moreover, from a business perspective, CIB's performance has been very strong in the last couple of years, increasing its contribution to over half of group's earnings. Personal and Private Banking and Business Banking have been dragged, and we need to rectify this to improve our diversification. Third, we need to drive efficiency as we can, in terms of both cost as well as capital allocation, while simplifying our operations in order to ensure consistency in customer service. Improving our cost efficiency is a priority. We must structurally shift cost and reduce our cost-to-income ratio to closer to 50% as quickly as possible. Near term, we are aggressively targeting low-hanging fruit such as wasteful expenditure. One example is we have closed the taps on outsourcing thinking to consultants, with meaningful savings achieved already. In some areas, we also want to change the culture and mindsets away from the culture of abundance to prudent financial management. We also need to allocate capital cleverly, being more discerning about allocating it where we can crowd in ancillary revenue. Lastly, the fourth pillar is actively exploring new growth opportunities to ensure we remain relevant amid rapid change. We'll invest in initiatives to improve our growth and support our strategy execution. Some of these could be via partnerships and other small acquisitions. One area is accelerating our digitization and digital capabilities. Another is strengthening our wealth offering, particularly in African regions. We'll look at potential wealth partners. In addition, we want to expand our value-added services, including insurance, and launching a mobile virtual network operator as part of this plan. Going into next year, we are focusing exclusively on these four pillars and will execute on them diligently. The performance of our senior management team, as well as the incentives, will be aligned to execution at the back of this strategy. We articulated our strategy in easily understandable language, making it simple to communicate to teams and cascade it down the organization so that every staff member can relate to the strategy and see their contribution towards its delivery. I should call out some of the enablers of our strategy. The strategy requires a cultural shift, and we're accelerating the change initiatives that are aimed at shifting the culture within Absa. It will not happen quickly, but I think there's overwhelming support among our staff members to remove bureaucracy, move away from being inward-focused to focusing on customers and outcomes. We're also focusing quite aggressively on ensuring that we can strengthen our senior management team, having already announced the appointment of Zaid Moola as the CE of CIB, and we're glad that Zaid started with the organization from last Monday. We've also made the appointment for the CE of Personal and Private Banking. Unfortunately, we can't give you the name yet, as that appointment is still subject to regulatory approval. And we aim to finalize the appointment of the Chief Executive of Business Banking by the first quarter of next year. When Deon shares our target, you will see that we are phasing them over the short and the medium term, focusing on ensuring that we improve on a continuous basis, as performance is not an event but a journey. With the bulk of the key hires already behind us and confident that we are on track to constantly deliver on our strategy and our targets, I will now hand you over to Deon. Thank you, Kenny, and good morning, everybody. Since you may not have gone through the detail of our trading update, we'll cover it now. Starting with our 2025 guidance, the second half trends are in line with our expectations, and our guidance is largely unchanged from when we spoke to you in August. In South Africa, GDP growth is slightly better, while inflation and interest rates are slightly lower than we forecast. We are seeing stronger activity in the corporate sector, with healthy loan growth in the second half across many sectors. Retail activity remains subdued, although more positive year on year. We see consumer health improving, particularly in early arrears, which also reflects changes to our origination strategies and enhanced collections. Outside of South Africa, in East and West Africa, conditions are improving in retail. We continue to see strong momentum in ARO RBB's customers and non-interest income. Ghana is cutting policy rates materially, which is a short-term drag but should stimulate growth in time. Botswana and Mozambique have their idiosyncratic challenges. My commentary will refer to the percent year-on-year change in our financial results versus 2024. We still expect mid-single-digit revenue growth, with stronger growth in non-interest income than net interest income. Net interest income growth will remain muted, although improving in the second half, due to modest retail loan growth in South Africa and slight margin compression. Overall, we expect mid-to-high single-digit customer loan growth, driven by strong second-half growth in wholesale lending and mid-single-digit deposit growth. Within non-interest income, fee income growth remains moderate. Net insurance income is lower given the disposal of the insurance business in Africa regions, while trading revenue continues to grow strongly. Our credit loss ratio is expected to improve to the upper half of our through-the-cycle target range of 75-100 basis points, from 103 basis points in 2024, resulting in lower credit impairments. Improvements in Personal and Private Banking, CIB South Africa, and ARO RBB offset increased charges in Business Bank and CIB ARO. We expect mid-single-digit growth in operating expenses, producing a slightly higher cost-to-income ratio than our 53.2% in 2024, and low to mid-single-digit growth in pre-provision profit. Higher performance cost growth will be offset by direct cost savings. Our productivity program should generate a gross benefit of almost ZAR 1.8 billion for the year, taking its cumulative contribution to ZAR 3.3 billion. We have also refocused our investment spend to fewer initiatives that will have greater impact on customers and have reassessed our intangible asset in line with more conservative capitalization practice going forward. Consequently, we expect an ROE of around 15% from 14.8% in 2024, with headline earnings growth in the low double digits. As previously flagged, other reserves have increased our equity more than we expected, reducing our ROE while supporting our NAV. We expect our group CET1 ratio to finish 2025 at the top end of our board target range of 11%-12.5%, and we plan to maintain a dividend payout ratio of 55% for 2025. We expect a weaker rand to underpin earnings slightly, and Africa region's earnings growth should be noticeably stronger than South Africa. Division-wise, we expect strong ARO RBB earnings growth, continued momentum in CIB, and a smaller head office loss to drive group growth, outweighing moderate PPB growth and lower Business Bank earnings. Since it's December, I'll make some high-level comments on the shape we expect in 2026. As usual, we'll provide more detailed guidance when we report in March next year. We forecast improved GDP growth across all our key markets in 2026. We expect far stronger GDP growth from our Africa regions and South Africa again, although rand appreciation is likely to be a headwind to group revenue and earnings next year. Revenue growth is expected to improve in constant currency but remain moderate in 2026, with reported currency revenue increasing by mid-single digits. Net interest income growth should improve somewhat, given mid-to-high single-digit loan growth. Our net interest margin is likely to compress slightly, particularly as policy rates reduce in Africa regions and wholesale loan growth exceeds retail. Non-interest income is expected to exceed net interest income slightly, given solid growth across CIB and Africa regions, while Business Banking and PPB growth improves. We expect mid-single-digit cost growth in 2026, producing slightly positive jaws and better pre-provision profit growth. Our productivity program should generate ZAR 1.4 billion gross cost benefits, largely completing its contribution. Lower policy rates and improved GDP growth should see our credit loss ratio decline further next year to around the midpoint of our through-the-cycle range of 75- 100 basis points. We expect continued improvement in our retail charge-offs in South Africa, given far better early arrears at present. These drivers should generate an ROE of around 16% in 2026. Having finalized our medium-term budget, I wanted to share our ambitions with you. We have set an ROE target of 16%-19% for the period 2027- 2030. We aim to improve our ROE to well within that range by 2028. We see four drivers improving our ROE. First, stronger net interest income growth in the upper single digits medium term. Africa regions are expected to drive this growth, with stable margins as the rate reduction cycle should be materially complete in 2026, and superior loan and deposit growth to South Africa. However, South Africa should also improve from the muted current levels, given stronger GDP growth, improving confidence, and the impact of lower policy rates, with margins protected through the structural hedge. Second, we expect solid non-interest income growth, which is broad-based across fees, insurance, and trading revenue. We see continued momentum in CIB and ARO RBB, and while fee income growth in our personal and private bank and Business Bank should improve, increased competition and the shift to digital make growth more challenging. Third, improving our efficiency from current levels is critical. We aim to contain direct operating cost growth to mid-single digits over the medium term. We see further cost opportunities, which include optimizing retail banking channels, third-party supplier spend, more focused strategic investments, process re-engineering, and discretionary spend such as consultants, entertainment, and marketing. With improved revenue growth and costs well contained despite continuing to invest, we expect our cost-to-income ratio to approach 50% by 2028. Lastly, although less of a driver, we expect our credit loss ratio to cyclically improve further over the medium term. In particular, we expect to see our unsecured retail charge-off in South Africa improve. We continue to execute balance sheet optimization initiatives, which, together with an improving ROE, should increase our CET1 in the medium term. Thank you for your attention. We'll now take your questions. Alan, let me drive the questions. Ross, go ahead with your question. Thanks, Alan. Morning, everyone. Thanks for your time today. So three questions from me. I'll just ask them one by one. Just on the fee income within NIR that you mentioned, you talk about moderate growth. I don't know if you can give us any more detail on what sort of level that reflects, and then it sounds like you're expecting that to remain challenging into the next year, but just wanted to check whether there is some improvement implied or if that strong NIR growth into FY2026 is more a function of trading revenue. Could I ask your three questions, Ross, and then we'll take it? Oh, sure. Okay, thanks, Deon. Okay, the second one is just with regard to the Africa regions and the growth plans there. Just wondering if you could comment on the reorganization being made with regard to the structure of the business, just how that business might look in a year or two years, whatever timeframe you want to use, and maybe talk about some of the drivers behind that. And then finally, on the four pillars that Kenny elaborated on at the beginning, just wondering if it's too early to ask, but on the chosen segments that you talk about in the customer-led growth, any thoughts on what those are or might be? And similarly, on the diversified Pan-African business pillar, on the chosen market segments and sectors, is this a work in progress? Should we expect to hear more on this in the future? Any comment there would be great. Thank you. Deon, do you want to go first? Yeah, I'll deal with the fee income question. So we said fee income remains moderate, and that's for 2025. We did call out within this, Ross, that net insurance income is lower because we've got base effects of disposing of the insurance business in Africa regions. Trading revenue continues to grow strongly. If you then turn to 2026, we talk about net interest income, sorry, non-interest income is still expected to exceed net interest income slightly. We expect solid growth across CIB and Africa regions. We've seen those trends this year, and we continue to see opportunities as we extend into next year. Business Banking was down this year. We don't expect it to be down two years in a row, so we do expect that to recover. And we expect our Personal and Private Banking to continue to grow, although moderately. As we called out here, you do have headwinds in fees here, given increased competition and higher reduction in fees associated with cash and branches. However, at the same time, we have seen the trends where driving activity through the use of rewards and data, seen a big uptick in activity levels, particularly towards the second half of the year. And also, the value-added services are contributing growth. So you've got these two offsets that sit in that business. But the sum of all of that, it's still fee and commission income still moderate going into next year. Thanks, Deon. If I may reflect then on the other questions, I think the first related to Africa regions, and some of them will link to some of the comments that Deon has made. The first sort of benefit of the new operating model is that it aligns the business unit priorities much better with the country priorities. We haven't completed that process, given that some of the chief executives of the business units are only starting now. They only haven't started now in December, and the rest will be coming on board in the first quarter of next year. Charles has already started to harmonize alignment in terms of where we want to focus and where the areas of biggest growth are so that we direct our resources both in terms of investment spend as well as capital in areas that crowd in ancillary revenues and give us a better chance of driving efficiency and ultimately improving our ROEs. That is work in progress, and absolutely at the right time, we'll be able to provide feedback on where we are on that journey and what else needs to be done. In addition, we'll be reorganizing the Africa region to have far more dedicated focus to East Africa, as well as a dedicated focus to the rest of the footprint, in addition to aligning from a business unit point of view. That will free up Charles' capacity and time to be able to intervene well appropriately, but more importantly, to focus on areas that are likely to give us a massive step change from the overall contribution of Africa region. Again, we'll be able to talk about that more when we provide the full year results next year. The question around the chosen sort of client segment, there is no doubt that we've been trying to be everything to everyone, and that results in firstly, spend that is spread too thinly across too many initiatives, and secondly, dilute the allocation of capital in that, again, we use our balance sheet too widely. The intention is to focus on those segments where we think we can win so that we're able to build appropriate competitive advantage and allocate capital on the basis of the impact that it gives us from a market share point of view, and secondly, from the ability to crowd in ancillary revenue, again, improving our overall earnings growth as well as our ROEs. We have a sense as to what those line segments are, but we want the new CEs to have a fresh look on the areas that have been identified and make sure that they're able to fully commit their resources behind execution so that we're able ultimately to ensure that our strategy does not just live on paper, but it becomes part and parcel of what all of us do on a day-to-day basis. We're comfortable with where we are in terms of the focus on PPB, starting to be comfortable with the focus on Business Banking, but we still think there's a lot of work that needs to be done in that regard. Comfortable with where we are from a CIB point of view. The thread that runs across all three of these business units is that we need to up the ante when it comes to client coverage. There is no doubt that there are certain gaps that we need to close, and we've started the process of closing those gaps, and hopefully, as the CEs come on board, they'll be inheriting businesses that are also attending to some of the shortcomings so that they've got a better chance of winning and executing at the back of our priorities. Understood. Thanks, Kenny. Thanks, Deon. Thanks, Ross. Harry, go ahead with your question. Morning. Thanks very much. And thank you for the detailed guidance. Maybe just in terms of the loan growth, you noticed that it's improving in the second half. Does that carry through into next year? You've given similar mid - to high single -digits guidance for both years. And then I guess, is it reasonable to assume that most of the African expansion growth will be CIB-led? Is there still meaningful market share gain potential in CIB in South Africa as well? Thank you. Let me start with the overall sort of question. Absolutely. I mean, I think that CIB will continue to lead what we do in the Africa region. But the intention is that where we've got sufficient scale from the CIB point of view, we should be leveraging that to grow Business Banking as well as specific segments within our Personal and Private Banking. And in some of the markets that we operate in within the Africa region, we do have that scale, and we're leveraging that scale to also grow our market share when it comes to Business Banking as well as the middle market within PPB. But we think that there's more work that needs to be done to ensure that the three businesses are far more coordinated, well aligned. We think there's a lot that we could leverage if we can just improve the alignment and the coordination across the three business units. We are also mindful of the opportunities that are presented by South Africa. The fact that the GDP growth in South Africa is starting to rise, we're starting to see increased infrastructure spend, restructuring in the energy sector, the deregulation in the logistics sector with massive opportunities likely to arise, and we see private sector participation in the sort of trade or logistics sector. South Africa also has massive opportunities for growth. We, however, need to plug some of the gaps that we have organizationally. I refer to just taking our client coverage to the next level. The second area that we're attending to and the gap that we're trying to plug is improving the offering from a structuring and advisory point of view. We have been a very, very strong balance sheet-led bank, and that has helped drive the growth of CIB. We can leverage that balance sheet strength to effectively cross into ancillary revenues, but we need to have the capability to capture that ancillary revenue, hence the focus on structuring as well as advisory. Yeah, Harry, maybe just a few comments around loan growth that we are seeing. As you and I have the conversation about our very low growth coming into this year and certainly into the first half of the year, as we have to deal with the back book on impairments that we brought into the year, we're quite pleased to see the loan growth in the second half that has come through. On the wholesale side, it's been mainly wholesale, I would say, across many sectors: renewable and power, oil and gas, mining metals, agriculture, etc. It's just the retail sector that remains a bit subdued, but very good loan growth, and now you'll know that a lot of that will flow into next year. So it's actually the entry point that's looking very encouraging. I would say even on the retail side, we've seen better secured lending type of activity. Unsecured will be down year -on -year, but even there, in the last month, we see that the rate of decline has now stabilized as origination and maturities are now starting to catch up, and we'll see some runway of that as we start into next year, so quite encouraged on what we're seeing at the moment in loan growth and important as an entry point into next year. Great. Thank you. Hi, Charles. Go ahead with your questions. Hi, morning, Kenny and Deon. Thanks very much for the call. I do have three questions. Maybe I'll just give you all three at once. The first one is just a comment around Africa performance if you exclude Ghana from the equation. Obviously, Ghana's had a tremendous or abnormal rebound over the course of this year. Second question relates to your cost containment program in 2026. You mentioned mid-single digit growth. It seems that peers are sort of guiding a little bit above that. So just to get some additional color on that. And then thirdly, can you comment on the hedge performance in the second half as well as other margin movements and how you think that evolves into 2026? Yeah. Charles, I think we'll get into the detail on Africa region when we report. I think Ghana, let's acknowledge, has been a strong contributor. It's been a drag for a number of years, but it will be a strong contributor given hyperinflation and given the strength of their currency. But we are seeing good performance in other parts of the Africa region's portfolio outside of Ghana as well. But the actual split will provide those details when we report. In terms of cost containment in 2026, I think we're very mindful around things that are within our control, like costs, that we feel we still have opportunities around. Some of the medium-term themes that I'll call out. It's certainly something that we've got in our plans, but we also have more structural opportunities around us. The three I will call out is retail channels Pan-Africa, how we think about that, the cash costs around that, particularly with volumes of cash reducing as fast as it is, but also manual processing where we have opportunities. The second theme is around bureaucracy and associated committees and processes that Kenny speaks about often, together with duplication. And I think this allows us to create capacity in head office, which you should see coming through. I think as Charles really spends time on the regional operating model, how we think about group services into the country, right-sizing, what the business units do, what happens in the country, and then what happens at head office is part of that. And the third one is just the culture of abundance and wastage that we think has some short-term low-hanging fruit. So that's, I suppose, bureaucracy duplication as a second theme. The third theme is really ongoing on our technology costs and third parties. We have really refocused how we think about spending on strategic investments. We've cut that investments by a third because we feel that we should be now through the point of the big investment that was needed to be done. We can now be a lot more targeted and focused on big, impactful investments, but fewer, and focus on client and digitization of client experience. And we've been very robust and disciplined as we set that book of work going forward. We've also raised our capitalization levels and remarked all of that so that we have a far lower intangible asset as we think about the medium term and going forward. Legacy tech as we bring on stream new technology and taking that out. These are quite expensive to run, so be very diligent in taking those out. And we've still got a lot of third-party contracts that are maturing and will continue to renegotiate for value. So those are the three themes around the cost. And we've got a large part of that in our plans, but there's still elements of that that we're still doing planning around that we expect to bring through next year. Excellent. Yeah, the hedge performance, yeah, the average rate, as you would have seen in our half-year results, was above 7%. That has continued to tick higher given the maturity of some of the five years ago swaps that we did during COVID. So it's actually higher than that as we speak. And so it's performed well. It's been releasing strongly. In fact, part of our NAV growth has actually been the mark-to-market of our structural hedge now. That's gone deeply in the money. I think about five-year swap rates now well under 7% and on a 100 billion portfolio. So it's been very supportive and will remain supportive if we look at our interest rate projections and very benign rate environment over the medium term. So it has contributed positively, Charles, in that respect. Let me just add one point around costs. You would notice that we are making a lot of investment in hiring people, plugging leadership gaps, and ensuring that we strengthen areas that we think are slightly weaker relative to the market, and we're able to do all of that without seeing a significant spike in our year-on-year cost growth going into 2026, and that's largely because of us capturing the low-hanging fruit from a cost containment point of view, i.e., diverting expenditure from wastage into uses that are productive, and we think we've just scratched the surface. There's still a lot that we can do in that regard so that ultimately we start to see net saving despite the investments that we are making into the organization going forward. Thank you very much. If I could just maybe press in on part B of the third question, which was the other margin movements in second half and into 2026. Yeah, the other margin, Charles, will be, as I called out at the half-year, that we are seeing rate reductions in our big markets. We've seen that in Kenya. Ghana is cutting rates. So that'll be more of the theme. We do have some hedges against that, but those are shorter dated. And as they start to mature, we see a little bit of that compression now in the second half. And we'll see that as a theme into next year until the end of next year before that stabilizes. On loan growth, is that expected to, obviously, with wholesale growing faster than retail, continue to be margin negative? From a mixed perspective until unsecured retail lending comes back. Thank you very much. Hi, Chris. Go ahead. Thanks, Al. Thank you very much for the call this morning. Just a couple of questions from my side. One is, if I look mathematically at the guidance you've provided for this year and indeed next, and also the guidance that you've provided with regard to payout ratio, certainly this year you've talked to capital adequacy ratio at the top end of guidance, but you haven't talked to any particular initiatives to return capital to shareholders outside of dividends. It does appear to me as though you come in probably somewhere around 50 basis points short of a 16% return on equity target next year, unless there are other factors impacting the NAV that perhaps one hasn't yet taken into account. Now, Deon, you talked, in fact, to the fact that the structural hedge, if anything, has increased the NAV, but at the same time, I understand there was some movement around intangibles, and I would surmise that given recent rand strength, you're probably going to have some foreign currency translation losses coming through the P&L with regard to the translation of some of your offshore capital sources. I mean, is that the magic source that gets you to a 16% return on equity rather than the sort of mid-15s as per your earnings guidance? That would be the first question, and then the second question, if we look beyond 2026, part of your guidance is continued strong growth in non-interest revenue. If I look at the constitution of your non-interest revenue, about 50% of that is fee and commission income in South African Retail and Business Banking, which, I guess, with my analyst hats on, I see as being under siege currently and being under siege in an accelerated manner over the next few years, and therefore, I guess it may be very difficult, even with good performance from those entities, to be able to show material growth in those line items. Where do you see yourselves making up the gap to be able to deliver strong growth in non-interest revenue, given that that's a very large proportion of your base? Thank you. Deon, do you want to deal with the return on dividend and growth? Yeah. So I think, Chris, as we spoke previously around this topic, look, I think the 2026 ROE of around 16%, very similar drivers as we spoke about previously. Positive jaws is the first one. And cost containment within that is a big priority for us. We do think cyclically we have further runway on impairments, given our experience in the second half of the year and where that can go. And that's why we speak about around the midpoint of that range. And that'll be helpful while revenue and lending growth recovers in 2026 and we build momentum in that. I think the key points around execution is pace of NII growth, as you called out, recovery in our PPB and Business Bank, and the rate of decline of impairments. And these execution points are all important in getting to us landing an ROE of around 16%. You've called out intangible assets, absolutely, as a lower intangible asset is supportive, both for CET1 and ROE. FX translation, as we do the math, you offset earnings with NAV. So it has a little impact on ROE specifically. And then in terms of our CET1, we do see opportunity for that, as we've called out, to improve in the medium term as both ROE as well as our capital and balance sheet optimization initiatives continue to contribute to improvement in capital generation. And just in the second question, Chris, just to say, I mean, if one looks at our market share, I mean, from the BA 900 with regard to loans and advances to customers, we are fairly decent across the board. But the problem is that we're not leveraging that to achieve primacy from a client-bank relationship point of view. And that's something that we're attending to, firstly, by ensuring that we build appropriate capacity and expertise within the business units, particularly PPB and Business Banking, to think client-first and product-second. As we speak today, I would say the scale is still tilted in favor of product-first. And therefore, people will focus on growing the loan book, which is the easiest thing to do, and worry about being the primary bank and crowding in transactional volume second. Even in an environment where you've got declining margins, I still think that there's a lot of money that we're leaving on the table, and it is that shift in how we originate client, what we focus on, what we regard as being the first thing that we should be aiming for, and leverage the balance sheet as a hook, but knowing fully well what we're after, and make sure that our sales team, in a very, very systematic and methodical manner, chase the ancillary revenue. I've looked at the details of the Business Banking, engaged with the team, visited various sort of regions, Cape Town, Durban, visited countries. The dominant demeanor is still that of pushing debt, and people only think about ancillary and being the primary bank to client only when they are challenged. I think it is that mindset that we're aggressively changing, but also ensuring that we have the skills and the necessary mindset to be able to execute and drive that NII growth. It's not going to swing overnight, but I have no doubt in my mind that if we're able to shift the culture and that focus appropriately, we should still get a reasonable share of those revenue pools despite declining margins. Thanks, Kenny. Just one point of clarification, if I may, Deon. The point around intangibles is simply that you're going to adopt a more conservative approach with regard to the capitalization of tech spend rather than any particular impairments of existing intangibles on balance sheet. Is that correct? Chris, I think we've reset our practice around capitalization. We are looking at the current intangible asset and whether that stands the test of our new practice. We will be looking at whether those still will be capitalized according to our new practice. But it's difficult to say now. We've still got to close this year, close that process out. Super. Got you. Thanks very much for your time. Thank you. [audio distortion] I go ahead with your questions? Hi, Kenny. So just on the medium-term guidance, I mean, it's really nice, quite aggressive and bullish guidance from 2027- 2030 that you put out there. And I mean, before you joined over the previous few years, Absa has at times struggled to meet the guidance they've put out there. So I'd just like some comments on your confidence on these medium-term numbers and maybe what you've seen in Absa over the last six months that's given you the confidence to go out with quite nice guidance for the medium term at this stage already. I think, firstly, I mean, if I just look at the process that we followed in formulating our strategy, it is clear that we sort of are using a completely different starting point, which is clients and segments. Where will this growth come from? And what makes us think that we'll be able to win? And the alignment that is coming through across the three businesses is encouraging. And this is within an environment where we do not even have our entire top management teams. And with Zaid, and we started a week ago, just the conversation that is already happening with the team and some of the obvious gaps that we can plug in our CIB business, it becomes pretty obvious that we are leaving a lot of money on the table. And by just closing a few gaps, we can up the ante and start to accelerate the growth and the performance of our business. These sort of targets that we've set for ourselves as medium-term targets have been modeled based on actual plans that came through from the business units. In fact, we moderated these plans quite aggressively because we thought that plans do not deliver themselves. Unless we've got capacity, we've got the right people, and we've been able to change the culture sufficiently, there is no point in having plans that are way too ambitious because they're not going to implement themselves. So I'm fairly confident, cautiously so though, because we need to start doing certain things as early as possible for us to be able to see the results come end of 2026, 2027, and 2028. Awesome. I can't speak for the previous sort of leaders of Absa. I don't know what process they followed, whether these were targets that came at the back of clarity of thought from a strategy point of view, with plans that are backed by real evidence from the business units, or whether it was a thumbs-up. I can tell you now that this is not a thumbs-up. Everyone is focused on executing, and we'll make sure that we drive people appropriately. Fantastic. Thanks, Kenny. Hi, Timi. Go ahead with your questions. So just three questions from my side. The first relates to, I think, Chris's question on retail and Business Banking NII, but for my question, it's specific to Business Banking, with us seeing sort of a downtrend in Business Banking earnings and just the confidence that even in full year 2026, you're not going to see a down year again, particularly in this competitive environment. So besides just the fees, other areas we saw your credit impairments tick up in the Business Banking in the first half. Can you also just comment on other areas of confidence around this Business Banking earnings growth trajectory? That's the first question. Second question on the head office losses. So we saw you had the Ghana hyperinflation last year and some of the Group Treasury costs come down in the first half. Is the main reason why your head office losses have come down, is it mainly the Group Treasury and Ghana once again and not sort of costs? Maybe just explain the head office losses a bit. And then last question, just on sort of leadership and management. Kenny, you made a comment at the beginning just saying you have confidence in the current team that is there on the bench to sort of drive the strategy forward. Are we expected to see any more executive appointments in any other areas? We saw the non-execs come in a few days ago. So maybe just a comment on the leadership. All right. Let me start with the leadership one, and then we'll sort of share the retail and Business Banking with Deon and I, and then Deon will deal with the head office losses on his own. Yeah. I mean, I think that, yes, you can expect that there will be other leadership announcements that get made as we sort of start 2026. What we're trying to do is to look at gaps throughout the various stack or levels within the organization and try and close them as much as we can. One of those was a recognition that in as much as we have good quality individuals on the board, the skills base was overly concentrated on audit and accounting and that we didn't have sufficient commercial and banking experience. Therefore, the appointments that have been made are intended to plug that very sort of hole and will continue to use other avenues of ensuring that we broaden the skills base as well as the commercial depth and gravitas within the board. Equally, we are closing gaps within our own management layers. We've appointed Zaid. We're just waiting for regulatory approval with regard to the PPB business. We are in the process of finalizing the appointment of Business Banking. In addition to those, we're looking at gaps within each of those organizations. And one clear-cut is that of client coverage. An understanding and obsession with understanding the client segments, where the opportunities will come from, and ensuring that the organization is aligned appropriately to capturing that opportunity. That's an obvious gap in PPB. That's an obvious gap in Business Banking. CIB, not so much, but I think even CIB can improve, and we are definitely also looking at how we close those gaps and the number of people, again, who will be appointing to ensure that they give us that capability to deliver appropriately and make sure that everything that we do is client-segment-led and we can align then the resources of the organization appropriately to capturing that opportunity. Yeah. So, to be on Business Banks specifically, yeah, a large driver of them having a down year was they had a single name. Also, the lending in their biggest sector in Agri didn't happen in the first half. That lending has now come back. If I look at their balance sheet levels going into next year, it's actually starting to look really good. Now, it's not going to benefit you this year, but as you go into next year, you've got that momentum coming back. As we look at the early delinquency profiles in Business Bank, we're not seeing anything big like we saw in the first half. I mean, obviously, that can change in the first half of next year, but at the moment, it's looking fairly clean. I think the other thing that we have seen is that they're starting to make some wins. I mean, they've just landed a fairly large public sector transactional relationship, which bodes quite well for their kind of transactional banking and associated revenues around that. And I think the thing that we know is going to continue to decline, which is cash revenues. Volumes are reducing. Cash fees are reducing. But we expected that, and we continue to expect that going forward. But I think if you put all of that in the mix, I think Business Bank momentum into next year, even though they've got a down year this year, is looking much better. And then if I can talk about head office, yes, I did call out that we were going to do significant ALM optimization during the course of this year. Pleased that that has landed within the treasury. And that has helped offset some of the margin decline that we see coming out from outside of South Africa, where you're seeing interest rates come down quite significantly. So that's actually been quite helpful and supportive for margins. Some of those actions we've taken will flow through to next year. Some of these deposits, expensive deposits, will still mature during that time. And we still have to get a full year of benefits around that. The second item there is head office costs. I think we've taken a very hard scrub of head office costs because often in head office, a lot of the leaders don't have a P&L. So they don't always have a cost-to-income ratio. So we have to be a lot firmer and harder around where we see costs that are not necessarily contributing or potentially duplication and activity we must just stop doing. And that we expect to continue into next year as well. And head office should have a fairly low growth next year on costs as we look at really more productively using those resources at head office. Thank you. Hi, James. Go ahead with your questions. You're on mute. Now, James, you remind me of 2020 when all of us were getting used to these online meetings and sharing with unmute. Can you hear me now? Yeah, it's happened. There we go. Okay. Sorry about that. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity and certainly a welcome outlook into 2026. Four groups of questions from my side. First up, I mean, I know, Kenny, you said the retail bank appointment is still to be confirmed, but any chance you can give us a sense of your chosen candidate's background, perhaps their geographical industry experience? I mean, is it a seasoned banker? Is it from outside banking, from South Africa, outside South Africa? Anything along those sorts of lines will be very helpful. Maybe I'll just run through all my questions, and then I'll leave you to answer them. The second one, maybe for you as well, Kenny, is just regarding the client experience and the level of digitization. You flagged that as a key area to focus on, improving VAS, MNO, etc. Can you perhaps just give us some color on how you perceive yourself at the moment from a metric perspective and where you think those might get to your current state of affairs and where you'd like to be in the medium term in progressing that? And then with that, what is the associated investment spend? I know you've mentioned reprioritizing sort of existing spend into more impactful spend, but maybe just some color. I should be expecting an incremental investment in digital capabilities to achieve that end. That's the number one. Just then on loan growth, if you can just comment, I know you flagged some improving trends in secured lending in retail in South Africa, but perhaps just give us some color on where you're finding the growth. Do you have an improved appetite to lend into that space, better acceptance or rejection rates? Anything that gives us a sense on that, particularly for mortgages, given it's such a big part of your business? And how are you finding the housing market? Consumers clearly still stinging from some severe house price depreciation everywhere except in the Western Cape over the last five years. Is there confidence in that market? Maybe I'll just leave it there for now. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, James. Just when we sort of see your PPB, we can't provide, I mean, any sort of additional light at this stage, but hopefully, we are talking to SARB to check if they'll be comfortable with us announcing subject to regulatory approval and so on until we get the nod. Unfortunately, we can't provide any more color. What I can say, though, is that he's an extremely strong candidate who brings unbelievable skills, not just from a PPB point of view, but in terms of where that market is headed, and I'm fairly confident that he's actually the right candidate for the job at this point in time, but we'll provide them further sort of information when we get the say from SARB. From the client experience point of view, I mean, I think we have all sorts of measurements that we do. Some of these measurements are actually very positive. We are measuring our existing customers who possibly do not have any other experience other than ours. That's not quite useful, which is why we want to shift what we measure and how the measurements that we look at from a customer point of view also impact on the profitability of the business, even though they'll be late measures. We'd want to see that there's a reasonable lag that filters down to the performance of the business. We are refining some of those measurements. The historical measurements were number of new clients onboarded, number of clients that are transacting with us digitally. All of those are useful metrics if you think about them. But if you're not measuring how many clients are you losing as you are getting new clients, i.e., what's the net new number of clients that you're adding into the sort of customer base? You're effectively looking at one side of the equation without the balance of the attrition rate on the other. So we'll be revisiting all of those and making sure that we focus on the right things that ultimately drive the performance and the profitability of those businesses. And the ongoing work is already at an advanced stage, and we would be then changing the scorecards going into 2026 to ensure that they are aligned to things that we think will have a significant impact on the business. In African regions, that's less of a problem. I think what I was describing is more a South Africa problem. I think in African regions, we're actually seeing actual net growth in clients, and that net growth in clients is translated in the actual net growth in our own revenues as well as the overall performance of those businesses, so I think the gap between those lead and lag measures in African regions is much more clearer, and the link and the connection is much more visible, not in South Africa, which is why we're spending a bit of time with the team to correct that. Otherwise, we praise ourselves that we're winning, and people will tell you how many clients they've originated, but when you look at the quality and what you're making from those clients, you'll realize that is a false measurement and is a false sense of winning. Yeah. I'll be brief on the housing market just given time, and we can engage more in March or post this. But we have risk appetite for mortgages. The growth in demand here has been quite low. And I think it's reflective of retail sector activity anyway. Where we are seeing some green shoots, though, is more on a regional basis, like the Western Cape, for example. And part of our strategy is to be far more focused on the regional pockets of growth. That's why when Kenny talks about sectors, segments, it's also about the micro-segment and going after the growth where you see it, but not broad-based growth yet. I think this market's very sensitive to installments. There's a few more rate cuts next year, kind of forecasting a terminal rate of around 6%. So as that comes through, I think that you should start to see more momentum as we go into next year around in this market, together with a slightly stronger GDP growth. What I would say is that the delinquency profiles are looking really strong. So this market's using this opportunity to pay down potential delinquencies before we see growth come back. I hope that's enough for now, James, and we'll engage more. Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. That looks like all the questions. There's nothing in the chat. So thanks, everyone, for dialing in this morning. And all the best over the festive season. Be safe. Take care, everyone. Thank you. Until then. Bye-bye. Thanks.