Morning, everyone. Thanks for your time.

Myself and the management team are going to be presenting our interim numbers for 2026. We appreciate your time.

If you have questions, please put them into the—type them into the questions as we're going, and we'll cover all questions at the—at the end. Moving—moving on, thank you.

It's been a challenging six months for the business, and I think globally there've been numerous challenges with the war in Iran having a ripple effect across—globally across inflation. I think we've decided to position the business specifically for this.

However, within this space, we've had really great execution across a number of our strategies which are starting to land within the business. Within this space, we've had a 10% increase in revenue, and our group PBT is down 9%.

Our Fintech vertical, which covers payments, lending, and insurance—our payments and insurance verticals have done very well. Our lending business has make—made the decision to tighten significantly on credit and cut disbursements in order to proactively manage and position the business for this changing market.

Our Retail business has also gone through significant change over the last year. We made the decision a year ago to shrink the size of the business and actually to reposition it towards a more niche retail business that is more cash-generative and more profitable.

The team has had real success on this, with improved profitability in the last six months. Looking at our customer, we've had good—really really good attraction into our platforms over the last six months.

For the first time, we're over 5 million customers that have signed across all of our platforms. This is up 17%.

If I specifically look at the Fintech customer itself, 70% of our customers are female. She remains the urban African woman, very tech-savvy as I've said in the past.

I think one of the things that are noteworthy in the last six months is just for us to have a look at the Gen Z. So 30% of our registered users fall within this Gen Z grouping.

They've got a very high Net Promoter Score and a high of this payment business with our Google rating sitting at 4.7%. Interestingly, we also within the Fintech space are now sitting at just under 20,000 rand in terms of our average monthly income.

I have presented this before. One of the things I wanted to share with you was just how digital is actually shifting both the market that we play in, and I think this is a long-term trend that we're going to be staying with.

If I just look at a little bit—so at the moment, our market share within lending is only 2.4%. It's a really big market in South Africa and has continued to grow.

If you look at the bottom left, there's been a fast growth in the last year around—in the last six months within the credit-active females within taking part in the credit market with a 17% increase. Obviously, this speaks exactly to our customer base.

Then staying with digital, globally digital payments are a very fast-growing category. South Africa is no different.

Our share of this digital payments is currently 3.5% of the 2.9 trillion, including our cards market in South Africa. Digital payments themselves are growing very fast.

Globally, the buy now pay later market has grown by 230% and is fit to do so over the next four or five years. This is mirrored within ourselves, and the graph in the middle shows you that in the last year, our digital payments, which covers both our payments and our wallet transactions, is up 62% in the last year.

Really fast growth, as I said, within this payment vertical, echoing adoption globally. For me, this is—if you want to understand our group and what our chief strategy is within the Fintech space, it's this slide.

This speaks to how our customers and merchants drive our ecosystem and our flywheel in terms of product adoption. That this is starting to accelerate.

If I start with our merchants, we've got about 3,800 merchants at the moment. Sean going to chat to you about our PSP, payment service provider, adoption in the next six months, and we anticipate closing the year on about 18,000 merchants within our network.

On average, we have about 1.1 million customers signing into our ecosystem. A merchant will sign up, and once they sign up, we will start offering our buy now pay later products to their customer base.

This is traditionally the first product that our merchant's customers start using. Once they've started using those products, they get offered the other products within our network.

That could be another lending product, further payment products, wallet, or an insurance product. It's this flywheel and the fact that our customers, our merchant's customers become our own, and then we offer products within our ecosystem, that is the pivotal thing to understand.

You can see in the last six months, we're really starting to deliver gains as we've got a greater understanding of the customers and offered her different products. We've seen a 64% increase in our lending within the ecosystem, 2.5 times increase in terms of our other payment products, and insurance for the first time is really starting to gain traction.

It's off a lower base, but we've seen a 35 times increase in volumes through this space. If I stay then with the customer and look specifically at the products that we are rolling out for our customer, the 4.8 million customers that I spoke about, we're building a connected ecosystem for our customers.

Our entry point is the payment product. The next product that she typically takes is a lending product, and this is where we've got a number of lending products across varying terms that she's able to take.

She then takes an insurance product with us, and that could be across funeral, personal accident, credit life. Lifestyle for us is very important because this is our first engagement product, and it actually speaks to what we offer our merchants.

She comes on, she's able to engage in deals or other—discover new stores that she may not be familiar with, online stores typically. This helps her discover, but also keeps her coming back to shop at our engagement platforms.

Finally, our fifth product is other engagement products. We've gone live with our MVNO.

We're in a beta phase in the second six months of this year, but that is an engagement product for us, and we're also offering airtime, data, and other value-added services. Our rewards product is going live, the first element of our rewards product is going live.

Then finally, next year we'll be looking at account, other account products, and a virtual card during 2027. This is all built around getting her to become a habitual engager on our platforms, specifically using our engagement and lifestyle products.

Looking in a similar view with our merchant products, our payment options attract our merchants, but it's the shopping platform that ultimately delivers benefits to their customers and also enhances their value. If we start with our payments, we've got a couple of different payment products, and we'll be launching more during the course of next year as well as the card.

It's the sales accelerator element that our merchants want, and here we partner with our merchants to drive further traffic referrals to their selling platforms. We drive marketing campaigns to their platforms and offer improved conversion through our payment products.

We're launching our adtech platform. We do have digital media solutions at the moment, and we're launching our platform in the second half of this year, and we're enhancing our sales team in this space.

Then finally, analytics is the final element where we help our merchants gain insights around how their products are performing, how their deals are performing, and how shoppers are responding to their platforms. Finally, I wanted to just spend a little bit of time talking about AI and how we see it within the business.

We are wanting to invest ahead of the curve, although this is such a rapidly changing part, I think, of every business globally. What we're trying to do is to compound some of the moats that we currently have and some of our long-term advantages.

We've doubled down on our tech spend. We've had a 50% increase in our spend in the last year, and you can see how our customer service is improving on the right-hand side in terms of cost to serve or cost per transaction.

We see AI in four phases. Our first phase is what we're calling AI Assistants.

We have Copilot throughout the organization, and our engineers and our analysts and executive teams and management teams have Claude Code. We're starting to see the benefits through improved velocity and also more than a 50% recovery time on some of our code that we're going live with.

Obviously, the focus on this is to strengthen our velocity, or improve our velocity, but also our cost platform, and that phase is pretty much finished. Our second phase is our Data Foundation adoption.

We've chosen Snowflake as our data platform. We're about 80% of the way through, and the objective of this phase is actually to—we've got champions in terms of driving more data insights using AI throughout the business, but it's to create proprietary insights, whether that's through credit propensity modeling, and how—or fraud, and how we're using AI to enhance this space.

Phase three, which I would say we're about 40 or 50% through, this is how we're using AI to redesign our workflows and bring through agentic operations. Once again, the focus of this is to expand monetization as we use autonomous agents to drive improved performance or operations.

This is a multiplier that we want to try and do across all of our contact centers and all of our touchpoints that our customers have with us. Then finally, which is I suppose our end goal, and this is where we're very nascent, is actually to have an AI-native ecosystem.

Where we're using AI to transform all of how our products are built, our flows, and how our customer is actually interacting with the organization, and using insights to drive and start to anticipate our customer needs. At this phase, we believe that we're going to be reinforcing our ecosystem.

Like I said, this is very fast-changing and it's super exciting for the group as we start to uncover. I don't even think we know fully where we're going in this space at the moment.

This is our plan in the next year, year and a half, but things are changing very fast and it's a super exciting space for the group and the business. I'm now going to hand across to Paul, who's going to give you some more insight from our finance perspective.

Thanks, Paul.

Thank you, Shirley. Despite the changing macro and the impact on the first half's profits, I'm pleased with the purposeful allocation of capital that's been achieved by the group to lift shareholder returns in the first half of the year.

Firstly, in the Fintech space, the change that is driving there is what's delivering the four-year compound annual growth rate improvements. Over the four-year period, revenue up 13%, profit before tax up 18%, and a similar outcome on HEPS.

We've purposefully resized the Retail business, it's transformed into a smaller, more profitable business as well. The profit before tax in the first half of the year is down 9%, we've been impacted by payments issues and the macro environment, but we've made the right changes and we've increased our provisions well.

I'm very pleased with how we've managed our group trading expenses, now down to 27% of revenue, so that's a strong reduction over the four-year period. I'm now going to share with you how that purposeful capital allocation reflects on the group profit and loss.

If you look at the bottom block, you can see that we've purposefully reduced retail revenue, so that's down 22%, lending revenue up 21%, insurance revenue up 13%, and notably the payments revenue is up 88% in the first half of the year. That is what's driving the Fintech fees to nearly 40% of revenue in the Fintech business, and consolidated together, that's what's lifting group revenue by 10%.

Very pleased with the improvement in the gross profit margin. Chris will speak to what the drivers of that are.

Debtor costs for the group are up 44% in the half. We've made the right changes there.

We've lifted provisions in the Fintech space. Sean will unpack that in further detail, and Chris will speak to the improvements that are flowing through into the early metrics in the retail debtors book.

Trading expenses well-managed. Chris will go into the detail of what's delivering a sizable cost reduction in the Retail business, and Sean will unpack what's been invested in the Fintech space in terms of the trading costs.

Standing back, the debtor costs are impacting group profits. The board has decided not to declare an interim dividend, but rather to reinvest that capital into the Fintech business while the credit normalizes.

In terms of the cash flow, I'm pleased with how we've managed capital and cash in the first half of the year. That's then flowing through to an improved group return on equity.

Bottom right-hand side, you can see it's up to 13.2% despite the lower profits in the period. I want to draw your attention in the table to the cash from operations, so that's improved by over R300 million in the first half of the year compared to last year.

What's driven this? Firstly, Retail has been focused in terms of its cash generation.

It's tightened its credit risk, lowered its costs. Showrooms are delivering higher cash sales, and Retail has also shortened its book term, and this is then converting into an extra R200 million in group cash in the first half of the year.

We've also curtailed lending, which is generating a further R200 million of cash for the year. We've held our funding at a very similar net debt to net receivables level, so that's within the targeted range, that's at 56.9%, and we've ended the half with strong cash on hand of 240 million rand and further available facilities of 860 million rand.

We are considering repurposing property capital, which could generate a further 400 million rand for the group as well. Pleased with how we're managing our cash and our capital to improve our group returns.

Why are we allocating capital into the Fintech space? You can see from the bottom right-hand side is because the Fintech return on equity is well above that of the group, Fintech return on equity at 24.4%, so that's well above the group's 13.2%.

It's a very similar trend to what I've shared previously, we collect more off the short-term book than what we disperse. We're driving a higher fees mix.

That's converting to better cash. Both the lending portfolio, which is a short-term book, and the payments portfolio on the buy now pay later space, also a short-term book, those are both converting well in terms of their capital utilization, and that's delivering an improved Fintech yield to 224%.

What does that mean practically? On an annualized basis, we are collecting double the size of the book, and we are also collecting four times the size of the net debt outstanding, it's a high-returning portfolio with a very strong yield coming off the book.

Standing back, my reflections on the first half of the year: we've moved capital into the higher-performing Fintech space; Retail business has been right-sized; we've responded well in the challenging macro, we've made the right changes; happy with the early reads that are showing out of that portfolio and the higher provisions that are held; and we've improved our group return on equity. Very happy with the capital allocation that's been driven through the business in the first half of this year.

With that, I'm going to hand over to Sean Wibberley, the CEO of the Fintech business.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everybody. The Fintech business continues to enjoy really strong top-line growth, our revenue up 30% with a CAGR of 32% over the last five years.

This growth driven across all of our verticals with the payments business really scaling hard at very good risk. We have had challenges in the lending business, and we've taken big provisions against our lending book, which has impacted profits, but very pleased with the top-line growth across all of our verticals.

Our fee income mix is now 40% of revenue, representing a nice increase, as you can see on the top right graph, against our strategy to get to 50% in the medium to long term. Our trading costs continue to come down, 23.3% of income, while our debtors costs took a steep increase this year as we took on provisions under the prevailing climate, and I'll cover in later slides our rationale behind that.

All translating into flat trading profit of R579 million and PBT for the Fintech business down 10%. Customers continue to be attracted into our ecosystem.

We're booking over 130,000 customers in this half, the rate of growth is actually accelerating of our intake. We booked 835,000 customers in H1 at an average cost into our ecosystem of just R60, representing the powerful effect of our ecosystem, which has got viral adoption and cross-sell built into it.

Our base of Fintech customers is now at 4.8 million with very high retention rates across both the lending and the BNPL portfolios. Customers rate our platforms highly at 4.6 and 4.7 Google ratings, a lot of good engagement and retention from customers as well as viral adoption into our ecosystem.

The flywheel is continuing to turn faster and faster, and we're seeing a greater adoption of customers taking two or more products. We grew that base by 29%, and the base of customers who are coming into our portfolio of lending and insurance products coming from the payment side of the business increased to 24% from 19%.

More and more customers are cross-selling into our base after coming in from the payment side. On the top right, you can see the adoption of customers who have two or more products, how they are taking that second and third product and increasing the number of products that they hold.

This is showing in the bottom right graph how the ARPU increases substantially as customers take that second and third product. That is the core part of our flywheel ecosystem is getting customers into the flywheel and her engaging on the platform and migrating through the different products.

What attracts her is our products, but what engages her is the platform. Our unified destination provides an immersive shopping experience as well as a growing financial marketplace.

We enjoyed 5.8 million monthly logins into our app, and this is converting into customers discovering stores and personalized deals from our merchant network. The average customer, when logging in, is seeing about 19 different store directory impressions for every time they log in, delivering personalized deals to those customers, and we're seeing greater and greater impression counts, up 44%.

Our financial marketplace is where we offer all of the financial products within our ecosystem, and we're seeing nice uptick in impressions there, up 15%. A key focus on the business is working on once customers have seen the offer and clicked on it, what is our conversion, and that's up 21% to a 14% conversion rate through our funnels.

Looking at our P&L, as I've mentioned, revenue up 30%, driven very strongly by the payments business, up 88%, and our fee income mix going up over 40%. Lending up 21% despite us purposefully cutting disbursement, which I'll touch on a bit later.

Debtors costs up 62% as we provided strongly against our book under the current macro conditions, plus had higher write-offs net of recoveries of R127 million. The payments portfolios, by the way, are performing very well, and the book with high book growth requiring incremental provisions to cover off on that higher growth.

I've mentioned trading expenses up nicely only at 22% versus revenue at 30%, whilst we still invest heavily in technology, which Shirley mentioned up 56% in terms of investment tech. Altogether, PBT down 10% with flat trading profit at 579.

Lending growth at 10%. This time last year, it was 30%, we've slowed down lending.

Insurance still comfortably growing at 18% and strong growth in our GMV of 76% in the payments business. We had a number of lending issues that we've contended with in the first half of this year, some related to uncontrollable factors in payments.

We've had several different banking issues over the last year, which have caused customers to roll. We've also had some of our own making.

We made changes to our tracking strategy in DebiCheck. That's now been rectified, and we're starting to see a strong improvement there.

We've also bolstered our collections team to deal with customers in this current macro environment. Customers are definitely feeling affordability headwinds given the rise in costs related to fuel and the increase in the CPI.

We've made massive changes in the book in the last three months of the year, cutting demand from 28% last year this time in Q2 to just 6%. We've reduced acceptance rates.

We've taken about R700 million out of our open available exposure to our existing base and reduced terms slightly. What is good, the very recent roll rates in our July cycle have come down across the board in the lending portfolio 13%.

What we're doing is working, and management have taken the view to shore up provisions in this time and position the business conservatively for the macro ahead of us in H2. Looking at the debtors costs themselves, our debtors costs are up to just over R1 billion, 49% of revenue.

Our gross book is up over R8 billion, of which 14% now comes from the payments business, which has seen the biggest growth. On the top right, you can see growth of over 100% in the payments book and more muted growth of 17.7% on the lending book itself.

Our staging has improved to 71.9% as we've increased provisions to have higher coverage over our Stage 2 and 3 provisions. The bottom right shows an early vintage graph.

These are customers reaching a 60-day arrears position after taking up a loan. We noticed in the course of the first six months of this year that we had a couple of higher months in March and April, and we cut back significantly in May, and the May vintage is now tracking in line.

We're confident we've done the right things. We're also seeing the 0 to 1 in July come down, and so our lending business has been tightened and it's been tightened in an appropriate way.

BNPL has performed robustly, and it's still maintaining under 2% of capital at risk of the GMV. PayStretch draws from the pre-qualified BNPL base, it itself is also performing well.

It's the lending book we've tightened on, which we believe is appropriate in the circumstances with which we find the macro and our consumer headwinds. Our payments business is by far and away the growth driver in the ecosystem.

We are booking about 120,000, 130,000 customers a month into the BNPL product. This growth, as I've mentioned in the previous slide, is done at quality, in other words under 2% of capital at risk.

Since starting the business, we've dispersed R17.9 billion in GMV at the merchant's tills, and that is actually compounding. Look at the bottom left graph.

A customer who comes in in Year 1 more than doubles their spend in Year 2, and again that increases in Year 3 and 4, and so on. Customers get used to this product allowing her to split payments at the till and make her purchases more affordable and manage her cash flows.

On the top right is our PayStretch product. We launched that two years ago and scaled it last year.

This half, we've done R290 million in GMV with a massive uptick in transactions, up 286% half on half. Down on the bottom right, you can see the two different products and how we position them in the market: BNPL for convenience; the Pay in 12 PayStretch product for larger ticket items where we see slightly higher average order value, lower frequency on the longer-term product, but larger annual spend as expected because the customer is able to pay over 12 months rather than the shorter-term 42-day BNPL product.

Our insurance business is a high-margin business and a key vertical and focus of ours. We have 189,000 customers in force, up 28% on the half.

Our claims ratios are stable, and we booked R122 million of premiums in the half. Very pleasingly, our digital strategy continues to improve.

Now over half of all our transactions are concluded end-to-end, all of our sales end-to-end on the customer doing so on her smartphone platform. The introduction of PJN branded products has seen a big uptick of 115% on the half, small volumes, but very exciting that we're able to engage customers digitally on the PJN platform.

We'll soon be launching an MVNO product allowing us to reward customers with airtime for persistence on the insurance products, and we're looking really forward to that product coming in, which we believe will be a massive improvement in the adoption and persistence of insurance on our platform. Our merchants, we have 3,850 merchants, and we're looking to expand that tremendously over the next six months of the year through our PSP strategy.

On the left-hand side, you can see merchants who've adopted to us in the past and how those merchants enjoy greater and greater GMV in the following years. A lot of loyalty from customers and merchants in the trade, making us the number one BNPL in South Africa.

We cover most of the tier-one brands and have a few exciting other brands coming in the future. Probably one of the biggest changes we will be making in the second half of the year is integrating into payment service providers, thus opening up their integrated merchants into our platform, thus us seeing a big step-up from about the 3,850 merchants to we're targeting 18,000 at the end of this year.

Also exciting is branching away from traditional retailers into other categories: medical, travel, and education, where customers are going to be able to split those transactions across those new verticals. Really exciting category for us.

Ad spend revenue, this has grown nicely by 17% where we are monetizing our 4.5 million BNPL customers engaging on our shopping platform and clicking through to merchants, and we are monetizing those clicks. We've invested in tech allowing for merchants to interact with us digitally and to create their profiles and their marketing profiles.

The merchants who have been engaging with us thus far have seen more than a 10 times return on their ad spend, meaning R100,000 spent on clicks is translating into over R1 million in checkout volume. Lastly, Shirley actually mentioned this, the introduction of PJN Mobile.

We're going to be soft-launching this in Q3. This is in partnership with an MNO, very capital-light partnership allowing us to sell very affordable data and airtime to our 4.5 million customers.

The real opportunity here is us being able to engage and reward and incentivize our customers on the platform by using our platform and our products, getting rewarded for that in data and airtime. We see this being a great customer boon and improving engagement on the platform.

With that, I'm going to hand over to Chris de Wit, who will take you through the Retail business.

Thanks, Sean. I'll share our retail story.

As Paul alluded to earlier, it's a lot about capital allocation and what we've been doing the last six, seven months is to have a reduced niche retailer with stronger returns. As part of that strategy, our sales are lower year-on-year, we tightened credit and we also cut out certain sales.

Very pleasing is our GP, and you'll see there that our GP is up about 60 basis points year-on-year. That despite some headwinds around fulfillment costs with increased fuel, quite a good job on the GP and we're quite proud of it.

In terms of debtors cost, marginally down year-on-year. The big benefit of debtors with closing our credit would really be felt into 2027, and that's where we expect some real positive savings to come through as the book matures.

Trading expenses year-on-year down 31.7%. That was around our restructuring, we have a leaner cost structure, and we've been quite proactive in AI adoption.

Shirley touched on a few AI projects. Overall trading profit growth 15.4% and profit before tax 71%.

Real strong result after our changes in the end of last year. The bottom right, strong cash generation, which we are very, very positive about.

In terms of our showrooms, showrooms are the primary growth sales channel, but we've also invested quite a bit in our customer experience. In-store payments, we've seen quite a good increase in that.

Our customer service, we've reduced our query time, it's now less than two minutes. Really good service back to the customer, and putting the customer in the middle has led to an improvement in our NPS and our customer scores.

If you look to the right there, we've also implemented a new account opening process this year. We've invested in technology and some credit risk metric changes, and we've gone from about 20 minutes to open an account to less than five minutes.

Those things will also lead to improved payments and better efficiencies. The last one, we've also seen a 65% growth in our buy now pay later customers, which is really good for us in terms of cash sales.

Overall from showrooms, very, very happy with the trajectory. If you look at credit, we mentioned that we've reduced our credit appetite, and at the bottom left, our vintage is showing that our credit metrics and the early vintages are well back in line.

We have improved our early-stage roll rates, so that's both in the new and the existing populations. Our first payment defaulters are on track, and we are very, very comfortable with the outcome that we're seeing in credit at the moment.

One of the key things I shared with you earlier this year in March, April was that we wanted to reduce the sales term of our book, and we've been able to do that. We've reduced that from 16.8 to 14.8 months, and that really helps us reduce the asset and improve the return on capital employed.

Happy where we are in credit and also comfortable with our level of provisions. Lastly, I would like to talk about our AI and technology.

In the AI and technology, we've been able to save quite a bit of money, but we've also replaced systems with AI design tools, and we've seen the speed of development and deployment really, really improve and we've shortened that time period. In terms of investing into WhatsApp and our customer engagement with the customers, we've seen that those monthly users are up 170%, and also the sales coming from WhatsApp has started to grow.

Yes, off a small base, but very, very positive. We've got a very, very quick query response time on WhatsApp.

Again, putting the customer in the center of what we do. At the bottom left, you can see the Net Promoter Score has gone up from 58 to 61, and again fast resolution time for our customers.

We are combining the investment in technology together with showrooms as I've mentioned in the previous slide, putting the customer in the middle, and we really believe we've got a very, very good platform as we start growing sales that we will achieve those metrics of double-digit margins as we set out to do. I'm now going to hand back to Shirley.

Thanks.

Thanks, Chris. It's exciting to see how the Retail business's strategy is playing out.

Just to close, we've seen our ecosystem is compounding. I spoke about how we're seeing increased engagement and adoption, which is driving our profitability, and we are well-positioned in terms of the macro headwinds.

Just looking a little bit more closely, we've spoken about how our two-plus products are compounding. This is a trend that we anticipate continuing to see, and as we focus on the flywheel, we'll start seeing that customers internally sourced will continue to grow from the 24%, and we'll continue to see improvements in our fee income during the course of the next six months.

From a payments perspective, Sean has chatted to you about these verticals. We anticipate seeing our payments and merchants vertical being the fastest-growing verticals within the group.

Payments will accelerate in the second half of the year as they always do, and in the first couple of weeks of the second half of this year, our payments is continuing to grow at similar levels to the first half of this year with great risk. We've all chatted about our credit and how we've tightened in the first half of this year.

We're seeing improved roll rates across the board, specifically within the existing population, which was the area that we were concerned about. We'll hold the course while the macro remains under pressure.

Finally, I spoke to you about investment in AI and how excited we are about the changes this is going to bring in our business as we move from an assistants-based model into more insights and proprietary models and redesigning our workflows. In terms of the last six weeks, our disbursements, as I said, we've held the course.

Payments is accelerating fast with great risk, and our Retail team is starting to show a growth on last year. We're excited for a purposeful second half of the year.

Thanks, everyone, for your time. I'm now going to move across to questions.

As I said earlier, please put your questions into the chat and we'll answer them as we go. Thanks so much.

Great, I'm going to start with a first question. This one is for you, Sean: "The South African consumer is under pressure.

What are the indicators that you watch most closely?"

Thank you, Shirley. We monitor all the typical ones: what's happening with transport, fuel costs, where food inflation is going, the CPI, and interest rates in general.

One of the other indicators we look at is our own data where we closely monitor customer performance and utilization of our products. We also frequently ask customers when they log on to our platform how they're experiencing their financial lives and how it's impacting themselves, their family, other support networks within their household.

We then use that to make decisions on where we think things are going. Not just the external factors, but also ones internal to our database.

Another one for you, Sean: "How do you see AI changing the financial services business?"

We use it quite extensively across all of our various departments within the business, everyone is actually consuming AI and using it to improve how they operate as individuals and as teams. I guess specifically the biggest area that's changed is engineering.

The vast majority of our code is developed by AI and then assured by the engineers, they're not actually coding themselves, they're not actually typing code by hand, they're reviewing it. We have an agentic bot that reviews our codebase, develops documentation on the code, and QAs the code, and then raises risks and flags for engineers to look at.

When tickets are raised, the AI bot looks at the tickets and actually writes code for the engineers to then go and review and ingest into the system. We're still in the process of trying to automate this, but in the process of sort of trust and audit on what AI is turning out.

The quality is very good, and I expect in time we're going to start seeing quite a bit of automation of fixes on the fly by the code. On the agentic side, the customer services and so on, again AI is ingesting feedback from customers and providing prompts for our agents to use, and we're in the process of looking at that to try and automate.

Really it's about understanding whether we trust what's coming and using that into the system and automating it. Very exciting space, and the piloting we're doing is showing real value across the business.

I think it's going to change things quite radically for us because we've got so much data coming in, and AI is so fantastic at pulling it together and coming up with the right answers off a broad codebase. Very exciting stuff for us.

Thanks, Sean. Chris, a question for you: "If you're trying to make Retail into a smaller, more profitable retailer, what is next in this strategy?"

Thanks, Shirley. The first ambition we had is to get to double-digit margins, so that's operating margin and return on capital.

We want to achieve that by the end of this year into next year. Then the business is really set up for growth and customer acquisition.

Really two main channels: so the one is to continue into showroom and invest in the current showrooms around her experience and having a great experience, and combining, as Sean also mentioned, using technology and the data that we have to improve things like conversion and marketing. Then on the digital side, we do think there's also some real opportunity.

We have invested in WhatsApp, improving the journey, and we're also working on our website to improve her experience and her interaction with us. We believe those are the two kind of key drivers that can set us up for growth into next year.

Chris, a question for you, Paul: "Can you speak to Weaver's debt maturity and when is the next likely refinancing requirement?"

Thank you, Shirley. We've got active engagement with our lenders, we talk to them regularly and they're very supportive of the group.

We're expecting to raise new funding during the course of 2027 again.

Thanks. Sean, this a question for you: "What is the appetite for acquisitions?

What assets and markets are likely to be of interest?"

Thanks. We do have appetite for acquisition.

In the history of this business, we acquired the Payflex business about five years ago, and that augmented our existing lending and insurance verticals with the payments vertical. As Shirley mentioned earlier in our presentation, we are exploring verticals in the wealth segment, acquisitions in that sector would be appealing to us.

At the moment, we're looking at South African acquisitions, but we would be happy as well to explore anything on the continent. For now, the growth in the business and what we're doing and the strategy Shirley outlined in our verticals is where our key focus is, but acquisitions absolutely on the table.

Thanks, Sean. Another question for you: "Please, can you provide some insight into the source of the 833 fee income in Weaver?

Is this largely a fee levied on retailers for providing the service?"

Sure. We have a range of different elements that drive our fee income.

We have merchant discount revenue from our payments business, we have ad spend revenue from the clicks we monetize with merchants, insurance, and service fees levy on our lending portfolio. The fastest-growing is the merchant discount revenue because we're rapidly expanding our payments business and also the breadth of our merchant offering, we're garnering a higher and higher fee income mix there.

We don't share that with the market, the breakdown at present, but the fastest-growing is most definitely our merchant income.

Staying with the merchants: "Buy now pay later, there are a number of tier-one large retailers who have the tech and financial capacity to provide BNPL services. Why do you think they outsource this to Weaver and not keep it in-house?"

Look, I think frankly most of the larger retailers have been doing buy now pay later for a number of years. Customers apply for a credit facility where it's interest-free for the first six months.

What buy now pay later does is it gives those merchants a larger swathe of other customers that might shop at them. Buy now pay later has become the smart way to shop.

It's digital, it's interest-free, it's very short, it's easy to apply for and to manage, and the younger generation are just seeing it as the smart way to shop, and it's become a phenomenon. The Payflex brand, we have 4.5 million customers and that's growing by 130,000 a month, more and more consumers are seeing BNPL outside of the distinct retailers being the smart way to shop.

Hence we see that growth, and we see it globally as well with brands like Klarna. "And

how important are merchant relationships in the long-term Weaver story?" Sean, I think this is for you.

Very. We're a two-sided ecosystem: 4.5 million customers and we've got just under 4,000 merchants at present.

We want to rapidly expand that to 18,000-odd by the end of the year by integrating into payment service providers. The reason they're so important to our ecosystem is that the more merchants we have, the more attractive we are to customers; the more customers we can garner, the more attractive we are to merchants.

It's a very virtuous relationship between ourselves, the merchants, and consumers.

Thanks, Sean. Paul, a question for you: "Please explain the board decision to pass on the interim dividend."

Thank you, Shirley. The board is conservative with managing capital.

Shared the progress on our capital and cash management in the first half and the healthy cash and facilities that we have available. The board has decided that in the current macros, the right thing is to hold on to that capital to be available to reinvest in the Fintech business.

Thanks, Paul. Sean, another question for you: "What are staff attitudes towards your AI adoption?

Are you seeing global fears of job losses and how do you plan to manage this?"

I think we've been quite proactive on that, Shirley. We have a weekly forum on AI which is very inclusive across the organization.

We are asking staff to go and use AI and explore it for themselves and with their teams, and then to present back how they're using it, to train the staff on frankly how to use it. There are no training manuals for AI that are relevant because a few weeks later new features come out, new ideas.

We found this to be a very engaging forum where staff are literally adding a lot of value in their workspaces and within their teams, bringing that back in and getting exciting momentum. I think AI does cause fear amongst people, and we've decided to hit it head-on and to make it an inclusive, engaging experience with our staff.

Thanks, Sean. "With a significant number of purchases still occurring in-store, is there an intention to expand the buy now pay later product to enable in-store usage?"

Our buy now pay later product at Payflex is largely in-store. About 60% of our gross merchandise value actually happens at physical tills, we are already there.

We want to continually expand with our merchants both online and in-store. What we're going to be doing is exploring broader terms than the simple Pay in 3 product.

We're looking at a Pay in 2 product, which we believe is more suitable to FMCG, and we'll be exploring that as well as longer-term PayStretch products. We have a Pay in 12, we're going to go to a Pay in 24, and we're going to be piloting a Pay in 6 and potentially a Pay in 18, trying to cover the full swathe of offerings for customers both in-store and online.

Sean, another question for you: "What is the financial impact of the ecosystem on the business?"

There's a few things. One is because we have a range of attractive products on the ecosystem, most notably the BNPL product, we're attracting customers at scale into the ecosystem.

Then the platform itself drives engagement and then exposure to our other product sets leading to very efficient cross-sells. Our average cost to acquire a new customer onto another product is just R60, and that's because the incremental cost of cross-selling that customer is very, very low on our platform.

Hence we get really good scale both in revenue from customers and also cost efficiencies.

"Payments has been a standout. Can you elaborate on where you see the biggest opportunity?"

The biggest opportunity in payments is basically the continued scale. When we add a whole lot more merchants, we're going to have a whole lot more use cases for customers to employ the product.

The increase in frequency we've evidenced over the years with customers using the product, with more merchants, increased frequency. I've just mentioned we're going to add different terms to the payment product, thus befitting more needs of the customer.

Then next year, we're going to be launching a virtual and physical card linked to the payments products, again to further facilitate access at the till.

I think we've got time for one last question. Sean, another one for yourself: "What gives Weaver a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded Fintech landscape?"

A number of things. I think we've got strong mover advantage in the BNPL space.

We have 4.5 million buy now pay later customers. Payflex is becoming a household name for splitting payments at the till.

The business's heritage is very much focusing on the Black female South African. 70% of our customers are female.

That's fairly unique in the marketplace. We are experts in direct marketing and mass-market consumer credit, having been in the game since the advent of HomeChoice in 1987.

Our focus on the customer, our digital 24/7 interaction, and the intense focus on her user experience on the platform is what keeps her shop.

Great. Thanks, Sean.

Thanks, everyone, for your time. Appreciate it.

Looking forward to the next six months. We'll see you in March.

Take care. Bye-bye.