Hello everybody, and welcome to our presentation of the six months results to the 30th of June 2026. Today Gary Thompson, our CFO, and I will be very happy to talk you through the successes and the problems we've encountered over that period.

Overall, it's been a really strong performance for us in that six-month period. Now, as usual, I'm going to talk you through at a very high level the results.

I'll also cover off how we're doing on our strategy and why that's delivering the results you see today. Then I'll do a brief overview on what we see on the regulatory front.

Then Gary's going to pick up from there and he's going to talk us through those results in a lot more detail division by division and talk about the funding side and the balance sheet as well. At the end, I'm going to pick up then and I'll give you some outlook comments.

It should be an interesting presentation, but I should start by saying for us it's an unusual presentation. Ordinarily, we would be standing up and doing this free format, but circumstances have changed, and so today this is our last financial presentation as a listed entity on the FTSE.

It's quite a momentous occasion for us. The reason is that we're being acquired by another entity, and that's Basepoint.

I thought I should start by bringing you up to speed on where we are at with that transaction. If you look at this page here, you can see the timeline of the events that have taken us up to where we are today.

Now, for many of you who know us, you'll know that on the 24th of December, we announced that we had agreed terms with Basepoint. That was our board and the board of Basepoint had agreed terms for a recommended offer for the business.

Then we rolled on to February 2026, and then we had a revised offer, which was 235 pence per share plus a special dividend of 15p, 250p in total per share. We then had that approved at the shareholder meeting on the 11th of March, but then the really important piece was to get all of the regulatory approvals in place that were required.

The final one of those came in just recently on the 3rd of July. Now all of those conditions precedent that were set out in the documents have been met.

As we sit here today talking to you about these results, in a couple of days' time on the 31st of July, we will have the sanction hearing of the court, and hopefully that all goes to plan. Then after that on the 4th of August, the transaction should become effective.

Basepoint then and their agents have 14 days to make all of the payments due under this transaction. Effectively our last presentation as a PLC, but what's really good for us is that we're going out on a really strong note, and you'll see this as we walk through the results now.

Turning now to the results and the strategy just at a very high level. We announced this morning that we delivered £47.4 million of pre-exceptional profit before tax.

What's really encouraging is that net receivables are up by 17% year-on-year. That's as a result of us seeing really strong demand from our customer segments, so that's underbanked and underserved customers around the globe, but also really good operational execution throughout the business.

Now, the strategy that we have in place continues to be robust and appropriate going forward, and I'll talk about that in a second. Then the balance sheet, as always with us, we have a really strong balance sheet.

Gary's going to talk about that and the funding position. Unusually for us today, we're not going to talk about an interim dividend, and that's because as a result of the acquisition transaction, there is already a special dividend of 15p that's been agreed.

I'll move on now just to talk a bit about our strategy. Now, what you see here on this page is just a pictorial representation of our three-pillar strategy, and we call it our NextGen strategy.

Just as a reminder, the three pillars are NextGen financial inclusion, and that's all about us building the products and services and distribution channels to deliver to our customers the products that they want in the way that they want it and through the channels that they want it. That's been a big part of our development over the last few years.

NextGen Org is all about us becoming a smarter and more efficient organization. Then finally NextGen Tech and Data is about investing—and I really mean investing large sums of money in tech and data so that we can be relevant in the years ahead, but also that we can be smarter and more effective for our customers.

Now, all of this is guided by the financial model that Gary has put in place and also supported by our values, which is being responsible, respectful, and straightforward. None of that has changed, and if you know us at all, you'll have heard us talk about this now over a period of several years.

How are we doing versus that strategy? Let me just give you some brief examples here.

On financial inclusion—and again, remember this is about giving the customers the products and the services they want through the channels they want them—one example would be credit card in Poland. Now, the credit card market for our customers didn't exist in Poland 3.5, 4 years ago.

Today we're approaching close on a quarter of a million cards in issue, which is truly phenomenal. We've effectively created that product in the market in Poland.

As a result of that success, we're now in test phase for that card in Romania, and I'd imagine that within a matter of months, the results of that test will prove to be very positive—that's what we see in the early signs—and so we would expect to be rolling that card out in Romania as well. That feels like a huge success for us.

In Mexico, we're continuing our expansion there, and as we're opening approximately two branches per year, and the latest branch to be opened will be Chihuahua, and that'll be opening in a couple of weeks' time. Feeling very good about the expansion plans there.

Now, over the last couple of years, you've heard us talk about our partnership model, and this is where we get together with retail partners—again, back to this, where the customer wants to acquire finance, providing finance to our customers when they're at the point that they want to purchase something. Now, we have over 3,000 retailers on our books at this stage, feeling really positive about that.

As always, when you open up a completely new distribution channel, what you have to do is build your scorecard. We're not going as fast as we could go here because we need to make sure that the credit quality is improving all the time.

We're feeling positive about that. Then the final thing on financial inclusion is in Czech Republic.

We acquired our largest home credit competitor in the Czech Republic a few months ago. Now, in the overall context of IPF, it's a small acquisition, but for our Provident business in Czech Republic, we think this is hugely important.

I'd have to say we're both really delighted with the way that integration is going. It's early days, it's only 2 or 3 months in, but we feel really positive about that.

In terms of NextGen Org, well, here what we're doing is we're putting a lot of time and effort now into ensuring that customer representatives, you might call them agents, and we have more than 16,000 of them, we want to make sure they feel comfortable in their roles with us. Because versus other businesses, you might think that there's reasonably high turnover, it could be 30% or more turnover in that population that we have.

We're putting a huge amount of effort into making sure that we're making the roles as positive and as productive for our agents as they possibly can be, because bringing down agent turnover is fantastic. It's great for the agent, they have a longer time with us, they get to earn more money, but also it has spinoff benefits for us.

Those agents become more successful at selling, but in particular their portfolio quality improves the longer they stay with us. Our focus here is all about the clarity of the role, the expectations, and making sure our agents are being appropriately rewarded.

Then finally moving on to Tech and Data. Now, here we've been investing very significant amounts of money in tech and data, and both Gary and I would feel at what stage do we feel we're spending enough money, but for now we're very satisfied that the money we're investing is delivering what we need.

We have a big renewal program going on for all of our base systems, and we are now approaching 70% of the way through that program. At the same time, we're rolling out lots of things that are good for the customer, our customer app.

Now, that's been in Mexico for some time and Poland, but within a matter of probably a couple of more months, it'll be across all Provident businesses, all four Provident businesses in Europe, and clearly it's already in Mexico. We're also putting money into what we would call more scalable platforms, one area would be SAP.

We're putting in a completely new SAP system across the whole organization, and that is a mammoth undertaking for us. I feel like we're on target generally speaking.

Definitely.

It's going well. It's a multi-year, multi-million pound project, that one for us, but we believe it has huge payback down the line.

Finally AI, because lots of people ask us about the impact of AI in the business. Now, you would have heard me say at the annual results when it was February that actually I'm becoming more and more optimistic about the positive impact that AI can have in our business.

We're seeing that in our call centers. In fact, as a leadership team, we had a 2-hour session this morning, a teach-in for us as senior leaders on how to use AI effectively.

I would say as we go forward over the coming months, but particularly over probably the next couple of years, we're going to see quite significant changes in how we use AI in the business, and we believe that a lot of the returns there are going to come as a result of productivity. We'll get faster and smarter as a result of using AI, but I think productivity gains will be the key thing.

That's where we're at in terms of our NextGen strategy, making good progress, and really happy with how things are going. I thought now I'd just give you a brief update on regulatory matters.

The key thing that's occupying our minds in terms of regulatory at the moment is the Consumer Credit Directive number two. CCD1 was in place for I think 14, 15 years.

It's now being replaced by CCD2. The implementation date for that I think is November of this year.

It's been a long time coming, you would expect that all of the countries would be ready. The truth is it's Hungary that is the one country that is ready and they've promulgated it in their local law.

For our other countries are affected by this, many of those countries aren't there yet and it does look like they possibly might not be there by the deadline. What that means for us is that we're currently having ongoing engagement with regulators and politicians about this because it is still open to some extent in some of these countries.

We have a really good track record in terms of implementing regulatory change, and I feel positive that that should be the case here. Whereas we would have expected by now to be done on this and just waiting for implementation, in fact it feels like that's going to be pushed out further, probably to later in 2026, but for some of these countries surely into 2027.

It's in hand, but probably taking longer than we would have expected, but nothing to do with us, more to do with the environment in each of these individual countries. That's it for me, the brief update, really strong set of results, strategy being executed well, and a regulatory update there on CCD2.

With that, I'm going to hand you over to Gary now, and Gary is going to take us through much more detail in terms of the financial performance for the six months.

Thank you Gerard and hello everybody. Moving on to the first slide, profit before tax.

As you've heard from Gerard, we've delivered another solid set of results in the first half, delivering a profit before tax of £47.4 million, and it's really important to say that's fully in line with our plans this year. Actually the reduction in profit of 5% on a reported basis, but 13.5% on what we call a constant currency basis, so that's taking out FX, is entirely consistent with the guidance we provided at the year-end results last year in terms of accelerating and investing in our growth agenda.

It's important also to note, and like Gerard said, the result was delivered through disciplined execution of our NextGen strategy and stable credit quality around the group. Before I go on to talk about the results in a little bit more detail, I should flag that there were a couple of exceptional costs in the first half which total £4.6 million, and it's split into two parts.

The first part is we incurred £3.3 million of costs relating to the reorganization of our businesses in Czechia, where we acquired Express Cash as Gerard mentioned, but we also simultaneously closed our digital business, and that was a small business with around 7,000 customers, but we're now focused on driving the scale in the home credit business. Then secondly, we incurred a further £1.3 million of transaction-related costs, and that's on top of the £3 million that we incurred in 2025.

Now moving on to some more of the detail behind the numbers, and if we start with customer growth. It was really good to see a continuation of the really good momentum we saw in the second half of last year flow through into the first half of this year.

We overall delivered a 5.4% increase in customer numbers up to 1.743 million in the first half. There's really good demand both for our core products, but also the newer channels and the newer products that we have introduced over recent years.

Now, what I will say as well is the growth in customer numbers included 13,000 customers acquired with Express Cash in May. It was really good to see that all three divisions supported the growth in the first half.

Provident Europe delivered 3.7% growth, with around half of that being delivered organically and the other half being delivered through the acquisition of Express Cash that I've just mentioned. Provident Mexico delivered really solid growth of 4.5%, and IPF Digital delivered 12.7% growth, with the main contributors being Mexico, where our expanded product set, including short-term loans and retail finance, delivered 26% growth, and also in Australia, where our increased brand investment delivered 15% growth.

Now if we move on to lending growth, we delivered a real acceleration in lending growth in the first half of the year, delivering 18.5% growth at constant exchange rates. Again, all three divisions delivered really good growth.

Firstly if we look at Provident Europe, we delivered strong growth of 25%, and there Poland was the main driver with growth of around 50%. That is following the launch of a new 2-year credit card product in Poland, which allows us to offer higher credit limits to customers, but also at the same time maintaining affordable repayments over a longer term for customers.

Approximately 50,000 customers were transitioned from the 1-year product onto the new product in the first half. Romania, Hungary, and Czech combined delivered really solid growth of 8% during the first half, which backed up the strong performance from Poland.

Moving on to Provident Mexico, Provident Mexico delivered 9% lending growth in the first half, and that again really carries on the momentum that was built in the second half of last year. We've always thought that the growth in Mexico in that sort of 9, 10, 11% mark is a real sweet spot of growth to keep the operational rhythm working perfectly.

Then so Provident Mexico delivered another really solid first half result. In IPF Digital, again, really good growth in both customer numbers, which you've seen, but also in lending, and there's real good demand for those fully remote credit solutions.

Lending was overall up 12%, and again, that's really always investing in new product and distribution channels, as well as you may remember investing more in our brands. In terms of individual countries, Poland delivered 40% growth, Australia 14%, Mexico 10%, and our more mature Baltic markets, they delivered around 3% growth.

Overall, a really, really good growth performance from the IPF Digital division. Moving on to receivables, overall group receivables grew by 17% to £1.17 billion, and that was supported by again double-digit growth in each division.

In Provident Europe, growth was 23% up to £649 million, and the biggest growth there was in Czech, where we grew by 42%, with around £12 million of that growth being attributable to the acquisition of Express Cash, and again, that's broadly half of the growth that we delivered in Czech. Poland, similar to the lending growth, grew really strongly at 33% year-on-year, and again, that's supported by good lending growth generally, but also the introduction of the new 2-year product, the credit card there, which customers really, really appreciate and really like.

Then in Romania and Hungary, we also delivered really good growth there with 16% and 14% growth respectively. All round really good growth in Provident Europe on a receivables level.

If we move to Provident Mexico, again, really good growth, 12% there from Provident Mexico up to £210 million, and that's really supported by the ongoing geographic expansion with two new branch openings this year, but also the really strong, disciplined operational rhythm that is adopted through David and his team in Provident Mexico. If we move to IPF Digital, receivables growth there was 10%, and again Poland led the way with growth of 27%, Australia delivered 18% growth, and the Baltics delivered really solid growth of 6%.

The actual rate of receivables growth in Mexico was actually lower than expected at 5%, and that's really due to the mix of lending in the first half, which was much more weighted to the newer channels such as short-term lending and retail finance where loan sizes are much smaller. Credit quality is a little worse in the early stages as we refine our scorecards, but the actual ticket size of lending is much smaller than when it's balanced towards more existing lending.

That's why you've seen such strong growth in customer numbers in Mexico Digital, but much lower receivables growth. Now, the balance will change as we progress, and we should see more existing growth from existing customers, but in the first half, the dynamic you saw was the much bigger growth in the newer channels.

Now to turn to our core KPIs supporting the financial model that Gerard mentioned earlier, and as you might know, the key metrics that we use to assess performance are revenue yield, impairment rate, cost to income, and then return on required equity. Before I jump to talking about those individual metrics, what you will see again on the slides that follow is us presenting the metrics on a fully consolidated basis, but also excluding Poland.

This is really due to the significant impact of the ongoing transition in Poland that was experienced over the recent 2 to 3 years, due mainly obviously to regulation and us introducing the credit card, but they have distorted some of our medium-term targets. We like to present them in both ways really to set out the picture for everyone to see more clearly what's happening.

The trends that I'm about to talk you through are fully in line with our guidance, our expectations, and therefore when you look at the metrics, the key to getting to the group's medium-term targets is really about rescaling the Polish business through increase in the distribution of the higher-yielding credit card proposition. If we start with revenue yield, in Provident Europe, we saw the yield reduce from 1.5% by 1.5% to 44.1%, and this is really down to two factors.

Firstly, the flow through of lower rate caps in Poland, albeit we expect the Polish yield to begin to recover as we expand the credit card offering I just mentioned. Then secondly, we also saw slight moderation in yield in Hungary, again due to a reduction in interest-linked rate caps.

Also because Poland's growth was so strong in the first half, and it is slightly lower-yielding than the other three countries, that was a contributing factor to why overall the yield is a bit lower in the first half. In Provident Mexico, we also saw a reduction in the yield from 84.4% to 83.4%.

This is due to the increase in mix of good-quality existing customers. Clearly as you get bigger and grow, there's more existing customers in the book, and typically they're served with slightly longer duration, lower-yielding loans, clearly better quality, but you will see a small reduction in the yield as there's a bigger portion of existing customers in the portfolio.

Moving on to IPF Digital, the annualized revenue yield saw again a slight reduction to 42.4% due to the strong growth really in Poland and Australia, both of which are slightly lower-yielding relative in particular to Mexico. Overall, when we look at the group, the annualized revenue yield has reduced from 53.3% down to 52% over the last 12 months.

However, as I started this section with, if you exclude Poland, the revenue yield was actually around 55.7%, which is pretty much at the bottom end of our target range of 56 to 58%. Clearly improving the revenue yield remains a key feature for us as a business, and we expect the ongoing shift to higher-yielding products through credit cards in Poland and the growth in Mexico to help improve the revenue yield over the coming years and firmly get us into that target range of 56% to 58%.

Moving on, despite some volatility in macroeconomic conditions in our markets, customer repayment behaviors remained really stable, really robust, and we continue to be really happy with the loan portfolio around the group. Now, as expected though, the annualized impairment rate actually increased from 1.7% by 1.7 percentage points to 10%, and that's really all to do with the upfront IFRS 9 impairment charges associated with the strong growth, particularly in our new channels, so that was entirely expected, okay?

Now again, if you exclude Poland, which over the last 12 months because it actually shrank before it's now started to grow, it's actually had a really favorable impairment position. That's what you get when you shrink with our open-ended accounting: as you grow, you pick up more impairment because you take it all upfront.

Actually if you exclude Poland, the annualized impairment rate was 13.1% at the end of the first half, and actually that is nicely below the group's target range of 14 to 16%, credit quality in really good shape. Now, we do expect that impairment rate to trend back towards that target level, albeit probably at the lower end of that over the next 2 years as we continue to regrow and gain scale in Poland, but also as Mexico receivables continue to take a bigger portion of the portfolio, because the Mexican businesses, whilst they have a higher yield, also have a higher impairment rate.

Then finally on impairment, the really stable credit quality has meant that our impairment coverage provision ratio has remained broadly unchanged at around 30.9% at the half year, in a really conservative, robust position. Moving on to costs, you'll see that costs increased by 9.3% compared with average receivables growth of 11.4%, as we continued to focus on two things: clearly keeping costs under wraps and disciplined cost management, but also continuing to invest in growth and our strategic capabilities to support that growth in the future.

The annualized cost-income ratio improved by about 1.5 percentage points to 60.4%, which clearly is supported by revenue growth, but also scale benefits as we start to regrow Poland. Actually if we exclude the Polish business, the group's annualized cost-income ratio was around 55.9%.

That is above our longer-term target of 49 to 51%, but as we continue to gain scale not only in Poland, but in our digital businesses, we expect to come down to our target range of the medium term. Then if we move on to return on required equity, consistent with the guidance we gave at the end of last year, the pre-exceptional return on required equity have reduced from 15.4 to 12.9% over the last 12 months, and that really again is all to do with the acceleration in growth and is entirely consistent with both our guidance and our own plans.

The effective tax rate behind this is 38% 38%, which is consistent with last year. We expect our returns to remain below our target level of 15% to 20% through 2026 and actually through 2027 as we continue to invest in growth and increase our scale before returning to target levels in 2028.

I should also say if you look at our returns based on statutory earnings and actual equity, our ROE was 9.1% at the end of June, down from 14.7% June last year, which is really a combination of the reduction in profit after tax, but also the exceptional charges that we've incurred over the last 12 months. Before I hand back to Gerard, I'd like to talk you through our strong funding and capital position, which really underpins our growth ambitions.

At the end of June, we had total debt facilities of £820 million, which comprised £552 million in bonds and £268 million in bank funding. Net borrowings at the end of June totaled £713 million, which basically meant that the group has funding headroom at a really nice, comfortable level of £107 million.

Now, for me the highlight of the first half was the strengthening of our funding position with the successful pricing of 950 million Swedish krona bonds, and that's about £75 million, and the really positive thing about this transaction was there was excellent demand and the margin on that borrowing was 5.75%, and that's the lowest margin we've achieved for a number of years. It's really pleasing to see the market really understanding and also reflecting the strength of this business, the strong cash flow position, so that was really pleasing for us.

Then sticking with debt capital markets, our credit ratings remain unchanged with both Moody's and Fitch, and they both continue to have a stable outlook for the group. Now, our blended cost of funding has reduced from 12.5% in the first half to 12 first half last year to 12% in the first half of this year, and that's benefiting from lower interest rates, but also reduced hedging costs.

Our gearing and interest cover covenants at 1.3 times and 2.5 times respectively, they're both comfortably within the covenant limits of 3.75 times and 2 times at the end of June. Then finally equity-to-receivables ratio stands at 48% at the end of the first half.

Now, that's down from 53% 12 months ago, but that reduction really reflects the acceleration in receivables growth over the last 12 months. That's been partly offset by foreign exchange gains of around £36 million over the 12-month period, which has been taken to reserves, mainly through the Mexican peso and Hungarian forint strengthening against sterling over that period.

Now, that capital position supports the group's growth plans through to the point at which we're delivering our target returns and operating much closer to our 40% equity-to-receivables targets, and we expect that to be in 2028. To sum up, another really good, solid set of results in the first half of 2026.

Credit quality is stable, in really good shape, and there's really good momentum on lending growth. Obviously we've got a very strong funding and capital position to support that growth.

On that note, I'll hand back to Gerard.

Thank you. If we turn now to the outlook page, and really this is just a summation of what Gary's really talked us through in detail.

We saw really good demand in the six-month period, but on the back of that, we saw good credit quality and excellent operational execution, and that's really what keeps this business driving forward is the operational execution day in, day out. The balance sheet, as Gary said, is really strong, robust funding position, lots of funds in place to continue to build the organization.

Then in terms of investments, clearly we're investing more in technology, but we're also investing in growth, and we did indicate last year that we would be spending approximately £5 million more per annum for the next 3 years on both technology and the opportunities to grow, and I think we're still well within that effort,

and

feeling good about those investments. From a regulatory perspective, obviously CCD2 is the focus, not there yet because of countries not really being ready, but when they are ready, we will be ready.

Finally, we feel confident about delivering on the strategy because the strategy is applicable today as it was the day we created it, and we are building financial inclusion. Finally, just to wrap up this last session of ours as a listed entity, I just want to say a huge thank you to all of our colleagues, because if you're watching, you are this business.

You deliver every day for our customers, and it's through your hard work that we deliver this success. A huge personal thank you from Gary and from me for that.

With that, we're going to sign off. If you have any questions for us, you'll find our contact numbers and details on the website, and we're always available to talk to.

From Gary and from me, thank you very much, and...

Thank you.

...we'll take the business forward from here. Thank you.