Good morning, everyone, and thank you for making the time to join us at this African Bank half-year results announcement. This morning, I'm gonna take us through an overview of our strategy, where we are in our journey of Exc elerate 25. Invite colleagues, Sibongiseni, Zweli, and Anbann, to take us through their respective businesses, consumer banking update, business banking update, and of course, the financial analysis by Anbann, our Group Chief Financial Officer. I will then return to share some thoughts about the remainder of the year and our thoughts looking ahead. It would, however, be amiss of me not to start a conversation with you this morning reflecting on the passing of the founding chairman of African Bank, Dr. Sam Motsuenyane. We bid him farewell a few weeks back, and yet, at 97 years of age, he had not stopped inspiring this new generation of African bankers. His vision, his story, is what has inspired the Excelerate 25 strategy that we'll be speaking to in this presentation, but has also been a direction of travel for us for the last four years. Dr. Sam has been, and will continue to be, the conscience of our movement, manifesting as African Bank. We just want to share a few thoughts about this giant of a man. We have lost a doyen, a giant. A big tree has fallen, the founder of African Bank. Dr. Motsuenyane represented more than just a father. He represented more than just a businessman. He was a pioneering figure in business in South Africa as a whole. Black people were largely, by law, excluded from the mainstream of the economy, and the law said what Black people, especially in the urban areas, were allowed to do was only to engage in producing what they call the bare essential needs of our, our nation. We were not allowed to sell even to white people. In 1964, when Dr. Motsuenyane and his colleagues conceived the formation of a bank, the country was going through a difficult time. That was the end of the Rivonia Trial, where the 12 Rivonia trialists they were sent to Robben Island. They conceived to achieve things even at a time when adversity was all around them. They realized that it was a mammoth task that they had in their hands because they had to raise ZAR 1 million. If you just think about how much ZAR 1 million was in those days, it was a lot of money. People said, "Where have you ever seen a Black man do anything and succeed?" It is that negative, you know, mentality, that is brought about by years of subordination that we encountered. And for 10 years, we struggled to raise ZAR 1 million. The day of the inauguration of the first branch, there was a huge downpour at Ga-Rankuwa, and all of us shouted, "Pula! Rain," and which is a good omen in the African society. We thought that this assures us that this project is acceptable to the gods of the Black people, wherever they are. Dr. Motsuenyane's vision was to ensure that there is nobody who is left behind. Left behind not because of finances, left behind... That we also give access to education, but most of all, is to make sure that African Bank grows to be the bank that enables the people. He will be missed for all the examples he created for us of how to live a full life and be a force for change in society. We are obviously saddened by his loss, but at the same time, we are challenged by his example, which will stand with us for a long time. In 2021, we crafted a strategy that we call Excelerate 25, inspired by Dr. Sam Motsuenyane's vision of building a bank for the people, by the people, serving the people. It is that vision of his that has inspired a sense of mission in us to create a customer-centric, data, and digitally enabled business that is diversified, that is scalable, sustainable, and as a path to a compelling listing proposition, very soon. We are grateful to Dr. Sam Motsuenyane and his peers for the trailblazers that they were. We are indebted to them for the compelling vision that now burns in the hearts of every African banker. I'm gonna take a little bit of time here to remind us where we are in our journey of Excelerate 25. In 2021, we went through an extensive co-creation with colleagues, hundreds of our colleagues contributing to shape this strategy with us. We're guided quite closely by the board and consulted with our major shareholders in really creating what is a direction of travel that has proven to be solid, relevant, and one that has inspired a cohesive effort from all of us. So I'd like to take a few minutes to walk us through the evolution of our Excelerate 25 over the at this time. In 2021, we co-created this strategy with colleagues at African Bank, hundreds and hundreds of them, pouring ideas of what is it that they wanted to see as our direction of travel in this vision of creating a bank for the people, serving the people. In 2022, we went further to entrench the execution of this strategy, making sure that, apart from strengthening the core of our existing business, existing capabilities for our customers, we also took on inorganic growth, acquiring Grindrod Bank and Ubank to bolster our capabilities as we sought to ensure that we've strengthened our offering to our customer consumer customer base, but also start growing into a non-retail franchise. 2023, there was a focus on integration, as you can imagine. Firstly, of Ubank, a rapid integration of that business as we ran Grindrod Bank as a standalone division for the bank. It was also a time to ensure that our target operating model is aligned with Excelerate 25 and the businesses that we had just bought. As we are strong believers to the idea that a structure must follow strategy, and so we worked hard in ensuring that our operating model is aligned with agile ways of working and ensuring that we are able to start working very much like a consumer and a business bank at African Bank. This year, in 2024, our focus on the strategy cycle is to drive the business towards progressively meeting our key financial ratios. You will see throughout this year and throughout this conversation this morning, that the diversification of the business along emphasizing transactional revenues, diversifying over and above our unsecured lending to bring in secured lending, diversification of revenue streams, de-risking the balance sheet, is a key theme for us in 2024 as we execute on Excelerate 25. We will also emphasize where we are with the continued work on our end-to-end risk management practices and resourcing, and ensuring that we continuously mature our compliance culture within the bank. 2024 also sees us double-click on the IPO journey. We have announced the staff scheme. We call it our phase one of the IPO, wherein 10% of the bank's shareholding has been sold to colleagues. We'll speak a little bit more about this and how this ensures that we are truly within now the irreversible journey of towards an initial public offering. All of this work, of course, is taking place within the context of a macro environment that continues to be tough. The scheduled health check for our nation's democracy, the elections, as hugely important as they are, and I hope that we all had a chance to go cast our votes yesterday. As important as that work is, it has had an impact of slowing down decision-making, slowing down the trading environment over the last few weeks. And as the new government comes into place, of course, you know, things are gonna be slowly coming back. We continue to trade in the environment defined by high food and, and fuel inflation, and therefore high interest rates that make it quite tough for households out there and many of our customers. Load-shedding experienced in this trading period was quite unprecedented, going to stage six and sometimes stage eight. Although we're experiencing early signs of green shoots in the latter part of the half of 2024. Geopolitics in Russia, Ukraine, in the Middle East continue to be a significant risk that restricts global growth and impacts on our domestic trading conditions.... Our chosen path is however on course with respect to diversification and of revenue streams and de-risking the balance sheet. You will see that whilst we have muted growth in terms of our total group net advances this year, there has been a deliberate shift in the mix of advances. Our unsecured lending business, which before 2021 was really the only business of this bank, has shrunk by 5%, reflective of the tough trading environment that many of our households are going through. The bank needing to take responsible, restrictive credit lending during this period. However, this deliberate shift in terms of diversification of our business is evidenced by a confident 13% growth in our secured lending book this time around. While our total group net advances are muted in terms of growth, half year to half year at just 1%, we're delighted that a deliberate shift in advances mix is starting to show up. Unsecured lending is down by 5%, really reflective of our credit environment that we operate in and what is happening with household deposits, what is happening with many of our customers still battling the effect of high inflation, high interest rates. We have had to take responsible, restrictive credit lending decisions in unsecured lending in line with this environment. That said, though, we are quite chuffed with the 13% increase in secured lending, which speaks to this strong drive towards de-risking the balance sheet and ensuring that we've got risk-weighted assets in the balance sheet that rate much better than unsecured lending. The proactive tightening of our credit criteria, together with improvements in our collections, have ensured that we've got lower impairments during this time. This is something that we're working hard to ensure that we become better at as we de-risk the balance sheet. The diversification of revenue streams is evidenced by the strong trading income that we are reporting at half year, together with purpose lending and consumer banking, and secured lending growth in business banking. These impressive milestones with respect to the diversification of the balance sheet, diversification of our revenue streams, de-risking the balance sheet, is all taking place within very disciplined capital allocation of our resources. We are remain well capitalized at over 32.5%, and we've grown our liquidity to ZAR 7.9 billion, and this being our liquidity surplus at this time. Both these important resources giving us optionality with respect to continued organic and inorganic growth in pursuit of this ideal in Excelerate 25 of diversifying revenue streams, of de-risking the balance sheet, bringing scale to our business to ensure that we really are a fully fledged retail and business bank for our customers, and therefore a bank with longevity and sustainability in what we do. We are quite chuffed to report 42% growth, half-year to half-year, in our total operating profits after impairments to a tune of ZAR 2.5 billion, all of which has taken place while we manage our total expenses well, 3% down, period-on-period, at ZAR 2.3 billion. Ensuring that at half-year, we record a net profit after tax of ZAR 203 million, which is at the backdrop of a ZAR 44 million loss at the same period last year. If I were to isolate just a few key milestones that have helped us deliver at a high level the results I've just spoken about, one of them would have to be this, theme of continued diversification of the balance sheet, which underpins what is becoming a clearly sustainable profit trajectory for the business. The second milestone would have to be the approval of the Section 54 for Grindrod Bank, enabling us to now start a journey of divisionalising Grindrod Bank. This, of course, is a strong indication that even authorities share their view with us, that the integration work done to date on Ubank and Grindrod Bank has been a success. We can now bring Grindrod Bank in as a division of African Bank and have our colleagues at Grindrod Bank assume their rightful positions as members of African Bank Business Banking. We've got approval pending for the acquisition of Sasfin's Capital Equipment Finance Bank business and the Commercial Property Finance book. Once we've received approval from authorities on this Section 54, we would readily welcome colleagues from Sasfin into the business banking division, ensuring that we add more capability and expertise in business banking to serve customers and businesses in South Africa. Our refreshed brand and corporate identity, that was launched a few weeks ago, enables us to ensure that, we've got one strong mono brand in our personal and business and commercial space for our customers, and, we're ready to start looking like a business that is transformed in line with Ex celerate 25 objectives. Another proud moment for us, in this half was, the launch of Ikamva Lethu, a key step in ensuring that, we become, in, real sense, a bank for the people, by the people, and serving our people. 10% of the shareholding of African Bank is owned by, colleagues at African Bank. Every one of African Bank colleagues is today not just an employee here, but also a shareholder here. And all of us will be receiving these shares, equal amount, despite race, gender, seniority, or tenure at African Bank, ensuring that this is truly a bank by the people. The other milestone I'd like to speak to is really the maturation of our compliance culture. Bringing in Grindrod Bank, bringing in Ubank, has given us an opportunity to ensure that we streamline our compliance culture here, and the work at hand to ensure that the engine is strong as you build a much more agile organization going forward that can serve its customers and do the right things the right way in how we serve our customers. Now, to briefly look at our sustainability levers. These are paradigms that we use to check performance against target in areas that ensure long-term sustainability of the bank. The first one is, of course, customer satisfaction. Exceeding the Excelerate 25 targets for three of these metrics in customer satisfaction has been a massive uplift by colleagues. True to the commitment of building a customer-centric organization, we have to interrogate our customer satisfaction lever. The lead indicator here is, of course, whether customers choose you as their bank against the many other banks that are out there. We are delighted to announce that at this first half of the year, our customer numbers have increased from 4 million active customers to 5.7 million in the last six months. 5.7 million customers choosing to bank with African Bank and choosing to become part of our platforms, both in consumer banking, business banking, and alliance banking. The other test, of course, is the Net Promoter Score. We are again delighted that we've improved our Net Promoter Score from 60 to 68 in the first half of this year, something we continuously strive to improve. The percentage of retail and business deposits has increased from 87%-91% during the first half of this year. This is a very important sign of sustainability in the business to increase the share, the mix of our deposits with customer deposits, not just the expensive institutional deposits that tend to be less sticky and less reflective of a great franchise. The social responsibility lever speaks of the group's commitment to advancing the social economic conditions of the communities that the bank operates in. We couldn't credibly claim to be the bank of the people without being close to the heartbeat of our communities. In this period, the bank has been ranked top employer in South Africa at over 87%. The ranking on the forgood p latform is again improved in the reporting period. Personally, the most impressive social responsibility lever for me is the hours undertaken on CSR initiatives. That is because these are hours that African Bankers colleagues actually go and invest in improving the socioeconomic conditions of our communities. Now, with employee force of just over 4,000 to have already surpassed the magical 20,000 hours, which was our target for 2025, is really something that is impressive, and I wish to really take a bow for our colleagues' commitment to our people here. We're registering at this time 22,114 hours dedicated by colleagues to serving our communities. The financial resilience lever will double-click on when Ubank stands up. But again, we're really quite chuffed that while the group creates a solid franchise and grows customer base, it is doing so making solid profits whilst reducing the credit risk that it is taking. Our profits are up year-over-year to ZAR 203 million. Our return on equity is positive and on track to meet target at the end of the year. As I've reported, our net advances, the mix is shifting in favor of secured lending and growing on target for the year. Our credit loss ratio is reducing, evidencing the de-risking of our balance sheet. Our cost-to-income ratio is on target for the remainder of the year, albeit slightly up from the last reporting period, and our non-interest income to total expenses, which is a well-regarded measure of efficiency in banking, is improving at now over 51%, and our CTI ratio is strong at over 28%. The inclusivity and environmental protection levers is an important part of how we view longevity, how we view sustainable success in the business. And we're delighted that the group has maintained its broad-based BEE Level 1 status, even after acquiring two businesses that were not at the same level of BEE rating. Further focus on ESD and procurement spend continues in the period and is in line to surpass the 51% of the full year last year. Our carbon emissions target is being rebased following the integration of the other two banks. That said, though, we've made a muted improvement from 39%-40% in terms of that lever. At this time, I wish to pay tribute to colleagues at African Bank, who again have rated us a top employer for the third consecutive year, score of 87%, speaking to a maturing employee value proposition at African Bank. And secondly, to reflect a little bit on our leadership and culture journey that we launched last year with the new target operating model for the full retail and business bank. We do so because we understand that culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and supper. That is why in integrating these three banks, we made it a point to then get everyone on a culture journey to create a sense of what it is that success looks like for African Bankers. In doing so, our stewardship ethos that is the leadership compact we share as leaders throughout the bank, and building new ways of working, supported by the new target operating model. All of this is enabling us to build relevant capabilities, skillsets, and partnerships within the bank. The African Bank culture is being felt and is permeating across every one of the Movement Makers at African Bank, and it is supported by a growing and maturing employee value proposition. At this time, I would like to call my colleague, Sibongiseni Ngundze, who heads up our Consumer Banking, to give us an update of his business. Thank you, Kennedy, and good morning, colleagues. I'd like to take you through the journey that consumer banking has embarked on as part of the journey to diversify, scale the bank, and deliver quality earnings. Over the current period under review, we've grown our total customers on the platform by 38% to 5.7 million. We've also focused on growing core transactional value, and so we've increased our MyWORLD portfolio by 75% in the period under review. We've gone further to improve the quality of our transactional portfolio by leveraging our loyalty and reward program, and that has seen a significant increase in the value transacted by our customers, and that increase is about 51%. At the back of that, we've launched a number of relationships with partners in the market, big church groups, some of the trade associations such as NAFCOC, and also like-minded people who want to recognize their clients by creating co-brands, leveraging the strength of African Bank. This we deliver under the program of Banking by the Millions. As a consequence, we've then gone to enhance some of our new product offerings. The insurance product offering has been enhanced to look at some of these affinities. We've also changed our price point as part of our evolution of our insurance offering. That really is all the key initiatives that we've been driving to ensure that, one, we accelerate the growth of our transactional franchise.... We diversify our transactional revenue streams, and most importantly, we build a strong core transactional franchise for customers that now use African Bank as their main bank. We've also focused on diversifying our balance sheet so that we, one, de-risk ourselves from the dependency on unsecured lending and improve the quality of our earnings through time. The first outcome we've managed to achieve as part of that is that we've now pursued purpose-specific lending by focusing through our partners on device financing. We have grown both our credit card portfolio, our overdraft portfolio, and we have managed to deliver the home loan solution for our colleagues as African Bankers. We've managed to build a new solution for our career starters because, after all, African Bank is about ensuring that those people that have got a lesser than high chance of receiving help from a traditional financial services institution gets a lift by backing them. So we back first job seekers, and we back those individuals that are getting their first job employment opportunity by creating a series of product propositions, leveraging key partners, and delivering a solution that allows them to focus on the main job, which is really getting their first gig. At the back of integrating Ubank, we had a gem of a product proposition that we managed to lift out of Ubank into the newly integrated African Bank, and that is our Stokvel product offering. The solution has taken off exceptionally well within African Bank, and we are proud about the progress that we've made on that front. On that point, I'd like to invite my colleague, Zweli Manyathi, to take us through business banking. Zweli? Thank you, Sibongiseni, for introducing me to the team, as well as to our very, very important audience at home and in the offices. I'm gonna talk to you about an update, obviously, on Business Banking, and I want to give you a sense of what are the things that have been delivered, and I'll also talk to you about some of the things, very exciting things that we are looking to make sure are available for our customers this very financial year. So if I just start with the... If I start with stuff that we've done, we actually introduced a business transactional account. What we however did is we wanted to make sure that we mature it over time working with customers, and we've done so. And we have onboarded friends of the programs. Those are the customers who help us to actually finesse the product that we have. I'm very, very happy that that work is such that we are ready to go to the market in about July, and we'll go above the line insofar as that is concerned. One of the things that I perhaps don't spend enough time talking about is franchising. We set up a franchise unit, and we've got a small team that is doing extremely well. Why am I saying extremely well? Because we're seeing lots and lots of transactions insofar as franchising is concerned. They are across all sectors. And the other one that we see being done is really good growth in the book for franchising, meaning that we're actually getting market share growth. That is very, very important for us when we look at the vectors for growth in our business. Of course, the other thing that we have actually made very good progress on is what I call Business Direct. Business Direct gives an opportunity for our customers to engage with us at their own time, and it enables the bankers that we have to actually deliver full service banking behind the telephony. And the people who are actually manning these telephones are not just consultants. These people are fully fledged bankers. So it's actually very, very great to actually see this in operation as we onboard new and more customers onto it. And I expect great progress to be made insofar as this is concerned. The one other piece that I think we've got to talk about as this update is this work of building a digital lending solution for SMEs. We have done all of the work that has been done. We have spec'd exactly what is required. We've now submitted our regulatory application that will enable the PA to have a look at the fintech that we're partnering with and give us a green light to go ahead. We expect to get this still in this financial year, so that we can actually get going and make sure that as we go towards the end of the financial year, all of these interventions actually receive good momentum for us to go, you know. I'm also very, very excited to say, when we talked about the acquisition of the Capital Equipment Finance as well as the commercial property finance. One of the things I said was that this transaction not only gives us colleagues who have got enormous experience in the field, it gives us the systems. Most importantly, we can add three new products in our suite. We've got a rental finance product, we've got installment sales product, and we have got a leasing product. So in just that one transaction that we did, we got a whole set of new capabilities that we are going to be deploying. As soon as we get the approval from the Reserve Bank or the Prudential Authority, we will be out in the market and making sure that we serve all our customers, the existing customers in that business, as well as new customers. I suppose you cannot talk business banking without referencing eKasi and rural economies. Those are very, very, very important for us. Remember, we positioned ourselves as a middle-of-the-pyramid bank, which means the trader market that is towards the bottom of the pyramid are our target segment that we are going to be servicing. We have worked very well with some aggregators, and we have got solutions that are ready now to take into this market. The importance of this is you want to make sure that the eKasi, as well as the rural places, have an opportunity to have their own entrepreneurs who are going to grow their local economies, and therefore, make money circulate around those economies. On that note, I would like to thank you very much for the opportunity, and I would like to hand over to a friend of mine who is the CFO of the bank, Anbann Chetti. Thank you so much. Zweli, thank you so much for those kind words. I'm really looking forward to business banking having such exciting initiatives. I'm gonna take everyone through the group financial performance, which has really been the last six months of a steady financial performance, with growing customer franchise, which is so exciting, while in the backdrop, trading in a tough economic environment. That has resulted in a subdued balance sheet growth. As you can see from the financial performance, as we diversified the balance sheet, we had 1% growth in our net advances. However, there's been a deliberate shift in our mix of advances: unsecured, reducing by 5%, while the secured business, growing by 13%. When you move that into the income statement, the net interest income is down 10%. However, net interest margin compressed to 10.2% as we diversify the balance sheet. The highlight for this half of the year has really been the credit loss ratio at 6.6% from a high of 11.1% a year ago. That results in a credit impairment charge reducing by 40%. In addition, operating expenses is down 3%, well contained. Non-interest revenue, really exciting, growing 14% as more and more clients call African Bank their primary bank, which is really exciting. Moving on to that, our capital adequacy at 32.5%, really, really strong capital adequacy ratio, combined with a liquidity surplus of just under ZAR 8 billion. All that together brings us into a half year of a profit of ZAR 203 million. This is really exciting, and we'll delve into each of the financial levers. But before doing that, the most important part is, let's look at our clients. Our customer franchise has grown 38%, from being close to 4.2 million, now over 5.7 million. Our alliance banking has really been successful, growing our client base at 70%. Consumer banking, although flat year-on-year, what's key is the qualitative shift in our client base. We have more than 1.5 million funded customers, which is excellent progress that the team has made. Business banking continues to grow at 6% client growth, and as Zweli spoke about earlier, we've got lots of initiatives in the pipeline, and we expect to see those clients growing in the coming year as well. Moving on to the profitability, as I mentioned earlier, ZAR 203 million for the half year, coming off a loss of ZAR 43 million a year ago. Going into the different components of our profitability, what's exciting is... I'm gonna focus firstly on the three green blocks. The big green block, almost ZAR 900 million reduction in our credit impairment charge. Really a lot of work that the team has done in terms of our credit risk management. If we look at our non-interest revenue, growing as well, as more clients count African Bank as their primary bank, and they swipe and tap and make us their financial partner. Really exciting. Operating expenses, well contained as well. If you look at the blue blocks, what has been pulled back year-on-year comes back to the net interest income. We saw that pullback, and it's deliberate. Two reasons: we've diversified the balance sheet, so we're going into more secured lending, which comes at a lower net interest margin, as well as a subdued balance sheet growth. Combined with that is the bargain purchase price that we received from the Grindrod purchase, which was a once-off. All that together leads us into a ZAR 203 million profit for the half year. Moving into our balance sheet, which is really exciting, ZAR 32 billion. We've got a 1% growth on net advances, but what's really exciting for me is looking at the green block. 13% growth on business banking. Consumer banking, 5% down. But what's even more interesting is when you look at our secured lending, which was 33% of our total balance sheet, now 37%. As you'd recall from Zweli and from KGB, once we acquire the Sasfin transaction of the Capital Equipment Finance as well as the Commercial Property Finance, which is a ZAR 3 billion transaction, that 37% will shift closer to 40%. So really great strides and initiatives we're making to diversify our balance sheet as well. As we zoom closer into consumer banking and we look at those credit disbursements, what you'll notice quite nicely is that when we saw the outbreak of credit, we pulled back, we tightened, we tried to understand our book much better. Looking at H2 2023, you can see how much lower those disbursements was. As we added in our credit risk monitoring, we slowly opened up. We're sitting at just over ZAR 4 billion for the last six months, but a great amount of work has been done. When you look to the right-hand side, what's really interesting is, look at the credit applications. Over 600,000 applications have occurred in the last six months. That's over 100,000 people either coming through our branch, applying on the app, or calling our call center. When you look at our offer rate, slowly picking up just over 30%, and our take-up has stayed in the mid-50%. What is key about all this is, look at the channels that we offer it on. The branch is still the king. We've got just under 450 branches. We've got so many clients coming through the branches, and it's a great cross-selling opportunity. As we mentioned earlier, only over 30% of our clients get an offer, but even if they decline, our consultants can still sell them an insurance product, can still sell them a MyWORLD transactional account, and that's what's happening. That's where you see that great amount of client growth coming through as well. The app at 17%, that's really a branch in the pocket. Then we've got our call center as well, doing about 12% of our credit disbursements. What that shows us is, and our philosophy is, we will have all the channels: a branch, an app, a call center. What is key is our clients must choose. We want our clients to come to the channel that they are most comfortable at. If we move forward and we look at the net interest margin, what's key to look at is 10.2% reduction from last year, but it's deliberate. We've diversified the balance sheet, moving more into secured out of the unsecured. You'll notice earlier, we spoke about the balance sheet growth. We spoke about secured lending growing at 13%, while unsecured reduced by 5%. That's the resultant of that net interest margin. We expect that as well to continue to decrease as we continue to diversify into the secured lending market as well. What's interesting about our non-interest revenue is how we've diversified. The collection fee in the blue block at the bottom is what we collect from RDS, which is the old African Bank. That used to be almost ZAR 500 million a few years ago. We've diversified the bank of being dependent on a strong revenue stream, and as we become a fully fledged bank, our clients are now using our MyWORLD account, their credit card. They're using us to buy their airtime, their data, vouchers. They're making us their financial partner, and that's what that non-interest revenue is so exciting of what we've done in, over the last year. Moving on to MyWORLD transactional banking, really, really exciting. MyWORLD transactional banking has over 1.5 million funded accounts. What a great achievement to the team! In addition, what we've seen over the last year, over 50% of volume of transactions done as well as value. We've processed over ZAR 46 billion worth of transactions over the last year. Great achievement to the consumer banking team as well. Now, moving on to insurance, what we've noticed is the premiums are slightly lower year-on-year, as expected. We spoke about tightening of credit. We've spoken about that, which leads to a resultant of lower premiums as we have lower loan sales. Claims have normalized post the COVID period, and that results in a marginal reduction on insurance. Moving forward now into spending a lot of time into the credit loss ratio of the bank. What we've seen as a great achievement in the last six months, credit loss ratio of 6.6%, off a high a year ago of 11.1%. Moving into consumer banking, 8.2% from a high of over 13.6%. Lots of work has been done in terms of tightening credit, lots of focus on better collections, as well as rehabilitating our clients by offering them treatments as well. Great achievement to the team in pulling back in terms of our credit loss ratio. If we go specifically into consumer banking, what's interesting is that over the last two reporting periods, you can see how the credit loss ratio for new business as well as for the existing book, much better under control, much better to what our expectation is. All that leads us to the end of a credit loss ratio of 8.2% for consumer banking. Now, if we look at the coverage ratios for the bank, what's interesting and exciting to see is that consumer banking had a NPL ratio of 42.2% just six months ago, reduced nicely down to 38.6%. In addition, consumer banking has a coverage ratio of 34.7% just six months ago, down to 32.5%. How is that coming through? Is a continued focus on credit risk management. Massive success! Looking at business banking, what's key to note is that we acquired the Grindrod book at fair value at inception. Now that we, they're in our belly, we're effectively raising provisions for the business banking division, therefore, you're seeing a gradual increase, still well within our expectation for business banking as well. Now, moving on to the non-performing loans, which has reduced overall. Overall reduction. Focusing on consumer banking, down to 38.6% at the last reporting period from 42.2%. Business Banking has increased from 15.4% to 21.2%, as we've noticed specific counters experiencing financial distress that we are working through with the clients as well. Moving on to the risk emergence in unsecured lending, what is pleasing to see is that the risk that tapered in quarter four of 2022 is now declining, which is excellent news, and it moves into the positive roll rates that we're seeing as our collections improve as well. In addition, this leads to lower gross impairments. Really promising and pleasing to see what we see is gonna happen in the future on our gross impairment charges. As previously reported, we're aware that we have elevated coverage ratios in our consumer banking division. We're doing the right things and working on our credit risk management in consumer banking. What is really pleasing to see is that the gross impairment charges are much lower than what we've experienced previously during our stress vintages. Really promising and pleasing to see what we see is gonna happen in the future on our gross impairment charges. Now, moving on into our diversified balance sheet. What's key takeouts here is net advances, ZAR 32.7 billion. Another key takeout, surplus liquidity, just under ZAR 8 billion. Now, that's a balance sheet that is ready for growth. Looking at our funding, ZAR 34.7 billion. What's key to look at when you see our funding is how it's moved over the last few years. The funding liabilities have diversified over the last few years. What's interesting and exciting to see is that over 90% of our deposits are from retail deposits and business deposits, with wholesale deposits making up less than 10%. In the last few months, we've issued just under ZAR 1 billion of Tier 2 bonds, which is really exciting that the market had appetite for bonds that we've issued after a long time. Moving in, into our cost of funding, what is key to see is that it's a well-maintained cost of funds, 7.8% in an increasing interest rate cycle. Great achievement in managing our cost of funds. Moving on to the capital adequacy, 32.5% for this reporting period. Really a strong capital position that enables us to grow our balance sheet as we aim to become a fully fledged, diversified, and sustainable bank into the future with a compelling listing proposition. The key takeouts in this set of financial results is steady financial performance, delivering ZAR 203 million of profits, having a growing customer franchise of 5.7 million clients on our platform, strong surplus liquidity, just under ZAR 8 billion, healthy capital adequacy of 32.5% has us ready for growth initiatives coming into the future. I'd now like to hand you back to KGB. I just want to say a few things about how we think about the rest of the year, and to underscore that, I just wish to reemphasize that you will see us continuing consumer banking, the work to diversify and de-risk the balance sheet through the acceleration and growth of our transactional business. And we are so grateful for now over 1.5 million customers in our transactional business that Sibongiseni mentioned earlier. The diversification of our balance sheet by ensuring that, over and above us continuing to back our customers through unsecured lending, we progressively bring purpose lending products and capabilities to them in consumer banking. And of course, backing ourselves in Banking by the Millions and career starters. There's a focus here on work with the public sector, with unions, and of course, with career starters. That is the work continuing in the next half of the year within consumer banking. In business banking, we've had Zweli touch on some of this with respect to growing operations and the launch that is now been concluded from a POC to a fully fledged launch of our business transactional account in business banking, and the launch of our SME digital lending and business banking app that will give us a winning edge with respect to banking small medium enterprises, but also the entrepreneurs out there. We obsess about the success of entrepreneurs in this country, and this offering will ensure that we give them tools to grow so that we grow with them. In alliance banking, this part of our business, already responsible for over 3 million customers in our platform, will be grown from three alliance partners to seven by the end of this reporting period. Continuing engagements, mitigation and enhancements with existing alliance banking partners is also a priority for us in this second half of the year... Significant progress on our Excelerate 25 strategy, and setting the scene for our ultimate listing in the medium term is really a major focus for us in 2024. We've returned to profitability, sustainable profitability, focused execution on our diversification strategy, de-risking of our balance sheet, all of this is gathering pace and is delivering results. We will double-click on this in the second half of the year. The Section 54 approval that we've received to divisionalise Grindrod Bank means that we now can simplify the structures of governance that we had for Grindrod Bank and ensure that it is very much just part of our business banking offering. We will be looking to welcome colleagues from Sasfin Capital Equipment Finance, and Commercial Property b usiness the moment the Section 54 approvals come through. We were grateful in the first half of the year to close on the 10% sell down of shares to staff. We're looking in the second half of the year to continue with the phase two of our IPO, ensuring that our people, our managers, and targeted shareholders come on board as we prepare the bank towards a de-risked IPO in the appropriate time. In the second half of the year, we'll continue to embed our new CI, which shows us as not just three banks that have come together, plus the Sasfin business that will be joining us, but as one financial services group that is cohesive and is reflective of this bank that we are building as a customer-centric, data, and digitally-enabled bank. A business that houses personal banking offering, business and commercial offering, insurance offering, and also alliances ecosystems offering, for a fully-fledged experience for our customers out there. We continue in the second half of the year to invest in and strengthen our end-to-end risk management practices, and ensure that we continue the maturation of our compliance culture within the bank. And so we look ahead to the rest of financial year 2024 with quiet confidence, given the significant progress on our Excelerate 25 strategy executed up until now. This sets the scene for our listing ultimately in the medium term. The work that's been done to integrate so successfully Ubank, Grindrod Bank, and pending assessment businesses have built a muscle within African Bank around commercially sound acquisitions and integration that enables us to have a step change onto the diversification of our revenue streams, de-risking of our balance sheet, building scale and sustainability in the bank. A bank for the people, by the people, serving the people, is gathering momentum. It is gathering scale, and it is now in a position to offer fully fledged personal banking, business banking, and ecosystem alliance support to its customers, enhanced insurance to its customers, and better value to shareholders. In conclusion, as we celebrate the life of our founding chairman, Dr. Sam Motsuenyane, we are reminded once again of the valiant efforts they embarked on to manifest a bank that today serves over 5.7 million customers. Now more than ever, we return to our heritage, emboldened by the task at hand, providing a trusted, reliable partner to our customers on their journey of financial success. We embrace the beacon and baton of audacity handed down to us by our founding fathers, reaffirming our commitment to be the bank for the people, by the people, serving the people. Thank you, and we shall take questions. Welcome to the Q&A section of our presentation. Katja Hamilton is getting us going on, a question to business banking, and it reads: "In what ways does African Bank support SMEs and startups in leveraging opportunities presented by the African Continental Free Trade Area to expand their businesses beyond borders?" Zweli? Thank you, KGB. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement is very, very important in order to promote intra-Africa trade, whether it is exporting to or importing from African countries. So what we focus on in the bank is the domestic leg of the funding. So we're more than happy to assist all of our SME customers who want to leverage the opportunity presented by this agreement in order to be able to fund. We will fund the domestic piece of the transaction that they wanna do. Thank you, KGB. Thanks, Zweli. The following question is also from anonymous, and it reads: "Further to the question above, could you also speak to African Bank's IPO and how that will contribute to borrowers' cross-border trading?" Well, the IPO process, as I've indicated in the presentation, is well underway. Mm-hmm. We are delighted that we registered a successful phase one, which resulted in a sell-down of 10% shareholding from all of our current shareholders to staff. This has boosted morale. It has brought in a very profound message of ownership by staff and bringing meaning to this adage of being a bank by the people. We are now busy with phase two of the pre-IPO that will look at addressing similar de-risking initiatives for the IPO as and when we are ready. We'll speak a little bit more about what that phase two entails, but we certainly want to achieve that in 2024. Because you do want to list at a time when you've addressed things like BEE, management, and staff alignment, and that is what we are obsessing about. Once listed, we will have a bank that's got access to capital, allowing us to back customers, to back the franchise in the ambitions to take advantage of things like the African Continental Free Trade Area- Mm-hmm ... and to grow their businesses beyond borders. So, IPO isn't just about changing shareholders- Mm-hmm ... for those that have got a longer term investment horizon, it is also about access to capital, and that is opportunities for growth. Thank you. The next question is anonymous, and it's directed to Anbann. Anbann, please recap the key financial highlights of this report period. Thank you, KGB. I think definitely the key highlight is a steady financial performance with an after-tax profit of ZAR 203 million. From that, leading into credit loss of 6.6%, 40% down from last year, which is a great achievement. Our transactional banking has really done well, with volumes and values up 50%. Strong, diversified balance sheet, surplus liquidity of just under ZAR 8 billion, capital adequacy of 32.5%, really has us primed for the growth initiatives we have. Well done. Well done to colleagues for such a stellar half year, and may it long last- Definitely ... to a successful full year. Mm. Next question, to Sibongiseni. Sibongiseni, you last reported around the collections effectiveness. Please elaborate on how this is progressing. Thank you, KGB. In fact, if you recall, when we last reported, we've just had a credit breakout, which was being experienced across the industry. We took a series of actions. One, to pull back from origination and to selectively originate good risk customers. And at the back of that, we have now seen risk come well within our target risk appetite range. But we went further, and we invested in what we call purpose lending. And that really is a way of us moving away from pure unsecured lending into device lending, and we look for a number of opportunities using our partners and leveraging their network. The last area, really, that's given us the highest lift has been investment in our collections effectiveness. Mm-hmm. We've invested both in people, strategy, and systems, and that has seen a significant reduction in NPL levels, accompanied by a significant reduction in our overall impairment charge. And the NPLs really have come down quite significantly by about 40% in the year. That's a very good contribution by the team there. Really, emphasizing how we're making steady progress in de-risking the balance sheet, de-risking the business, and ensuring that the resources that used to cover impairment can be released to back our customers and their financial ambitions. So well done to the team. A question from Chris Stewart reads: "Could you please talk to the uptick in early credit risk emergence on slide 39, the one to threes in Q1 in the first quarter of 2024? Is this just typical seasonality, or are you seeing a more fundamental deterioration?" Do you want to tackle that, Anbann? Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, sure. Thanks, KGB. It's definitely more on seasonality. If you look from a quarter one 2024, that really takes us into the festive season, which is really round around the Christmas festive season, where salaries are paid, moves. You see clients potentially overspending during the December cycle, and we generally would catch that up as clients will rehabilitate themselves into quarter two and January and going forward as well. So definitely more on seasonality. Thank you for that question, Chris. From anonymous question to myself, and it reads, "KGB, will there be more acquisitions on the horizon?" I was hoping not to get that question, but on a serious note, we never really set out to go and make acquisitions. We are obsessing on the strict execution of our Excelerate 25 strategy, which speaks about growth, diversity, speaks about bringing scale and scalability in our operations. That's what Excelerate 25 is about. It's about us accelerating the growth of this business, diversification from just being a monoline microlender to become a fully fledged retail business and commercial bank that has got scale and is sustainable. To achieve that though, we've got to work with what we've got, and, we're blessed to have the capital, to have the liquidity surplus, to have the board support, and, shareholder support to pursue both, organic and inorganic opportunities as and when they appear. The acquisition of Ubank has strengthened our, consumer banking immensely. The acquisition of Grindrod Bank has, given us rails into business and commercial banking. What we are bringing on board with Sasfin, stretches our capabilities, as Zweli spoke about, beyond just Capital Equipment F inance and Commercial Property, but into, many other product suites and solutions for commercial customers. Now, that is what, acquisitions do. They do give you a step up in terms of of what you are building, and we're delighted to have had these value-accretive acquisitions up until now. What has also happened, of course, is that with the rapid integration of these businesses and successful turnaround into one bank, we've built a muscle around commercially sound, sometimes opportunistic, but strategy-aligned acquisitions, and the ability to bed them down and integrate them successfully in a value-accretive way. This muscle stands us in good stead as we continue our path on Excelerate 25, and and we will use it if and where needed. This, of course, is strictly around ensuring that we do not deviate from this laser focus in building a customer-centric data and digitally enabled business that offers a fully fledged set of solutions to personal business and commercial banking in South Africa. We've got a question from Tshiamo Khunoane, and Tshiamo asks: "What are the key components of African Bank's digital transformation strategy, and how do they compare to the digital-first approach of TymeBank?" In the absence of Funeka, I guess you're going to have to try and fill her big shoes, Sibongiseni. Yeah, thanks, thanks, KGB. I think really the first point around our digital transformation strategy is that different to probably what other digital natives are doing, we have taken an approach that in African Bank we adopt an omni strategy. Mm. Namely, because we understand the customers that we serve, we simply do not push people to digital channels only. We've got physical channels that remain available, we have got telephony-assisted channels that are available, and we've got our digital platform. And all of those three channels remain available for our customers in consumer and in business banking. And really, what we then do is that at the back of that is we've mapped out a journey that first talks about frictionless onboarding of our customers, whether we're talking about ID and verification, single identity, and making sure that your authentication standards are incremental to allow you to do every job on the basis that we only ask that which is incremental to what you're doing. Mm. Namely, we will not ask you lending questions when in fact all you're trying to do is doing investments. And so at the back of that, we have then built other capabilities that allow us to modernize the bank, to make sure that all of our processes are not actually a digitization of paper-based processes, but are digital-first in standard- Mm ... and logic. And that we're really doing across both business banking and in consumer. So that's broadly our journey. But I think really the point to, to leave here is that we have adopted an omni strategy, and that's very different to a digital native. And that strategy allows customers to either bank with us on their digital platforms- Mm ... on their phones and apps, or in the branch, if they so wish, or and wish to touch base and see someone, or on the telephony, if that's what they need. Yeah. And also start their journeys with us and conversations with us in any one of these physical, digital, and direct channels, and finish it where they so deem. So that's flexibility and customer empowerment, if you like, in terms of letting them decide what best suits. So well done on that, Sibongiseni. Anonymous asks the next question: and it is for Zweli, and it says, "Zweli, once regulatory approvals have been received, please elaborate on the benefits that the Sasfin Capital Equipment Finance and Commercial Property Finance businesses will bring to African Bank. Thanks, KGB. One of the benefits that we've got is product expansion, in the sense that we will have access or our customers will have access to rental finance, they'll have access to installment finance, and to leasing of these equipments. So that's the one thing that we get. The second thing that we get is, as opposed to driving a greenfield, this gives us not only systems, but very competent cadre of colleagues who have been in the business and are coming in just to make sure that we actually, you know, can leverage on all of these opportunities that are out there that requires the solutions that we now have. So it's product expansion, really is really important for, for us, KGB, and that gives us also access to some of the sectors that we did not serve before. So I'm looking forward to the receipt of those approvals, and our team is just waiting to get going. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you, Zweli. With that, with that response, we don't seem to have another question. We do. Samuel J. asks, "What are some of the challenges African Bank would want to solve in the next six months, and/or under Excelerate 25 in terms of using data science as lever for growth? Mm-hmm. That's a nice, nice one. Do you want to get us started on it, Sibongiseni? Yeah. I mean, I would invite Zweli at the back of this. So as part of our digital transformation strategy, actually this is quite a pertinent point, in that at the tail of all of the things we do is what we call hyper-personalization. Mm-hmm. Really the sense that every customer is unique. We track, follow, and understand behavioral patterns, life stage needs, and what our data science teams are able to then do is design propositions and offers that are contextual for every customer- Mm ... in our space. And so that we then show up in the context of that which customers are trying to solve, and that's really what data science is doing in our space. But actually, also working with our lending and credit teams to make sure that the solutions that we deliver from a lending point of view are relevant to those customers. Brilliant. And, Zweli? Well, it's important for us to almost anticipate what our customers' next requirement's likely to be. And the use of this data science expertise enables us to do that, because sometimes, you know, customers don't necessarily ask for solutions. You know, do we need to actually understand ourselves, what it is that they're trying to do, and at what point? Sibongiseni was talking about a contextual. It's not only contextual, but it's timely. You know, you got to do it at the right time, and the only way you can do that is really, really build strong muscle on data scientists, which we're doing. So I'm very comfortable that over time, people will just experience... Instead of me talking about, people will experience us doing it. So that I agree with Sibongiseni. That's brilliant. And so we go beyond just descriptive and prescriptive analytics for our customers- Mm-hmm ... both personal and business, but data enablement is how we're fashioning the bank- Absolutely ... as a whole. Thank you, gentlemen, for that. That's it, in terms of our questions this morning. Thank you very much, and we appreciate the time that you've given us this morning.