Asa International Group Stock

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ASA International's 2026 Interim Results. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded.

I will now hand over to Jonathan Berger, Head of IR, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining ASA International's 2026 Interim Results Webcast. As you no doubt have already seen, we released our 2026 interim results first thing this morning. I'm joined here on the call by ASA International's CEO, Rob Keijsers; and CFO, Geert Embrechts. Rob and Geert will run through this results presentation. And afterwards, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have.

Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer at the end of the presentation. Please be advised if you continue to listen to this presentation, you will be bound by this disclaimer.

With the formalities out of the way, I would now like to hand over to Rod for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Jonathan. And of course, also from my side, a warm welcome to today's webcast.

Let's move to the performance of the first half '26. Let me start with expressing my pride and gratitude towards our clients and staff. I mean it's clear that ASA International has delivered a robust performance in the first half of this year with strong profit growth and a resilient portfolio expansion. And with the enhanced profitability, we also see a strengthened balance sheet.

We've seen continued commercial success with our client base growing by 11% in the first half of this year versus the same period in '25. This means that our client base now stands at over 2.7 million. And alongside this client growth, the outstanding loan portfolio or OLP increased to $600 million and represents an 18% growth versus the end of June '25.

The first half of this year saw adverse currency movements, which affects the dollar reporting of OLP. On a constant currency basis, the year-on-year OLP growth amounted to 24%. I did want to flag that we now show client, branch and OLP data, excluding India, so as to better demonstrate the performance of our continuing operations.

PAR>30 has ticked up slightly to 2.4%, but this remains at an industry-leading level and is a testament to the strength of the ASA model. From a productivity perspective, on average, individual loan officers are serving more clients than last year with clients per loan officer increasing to 290 in the first half of this year compared to 285 in the first half last year. This strong operational performance has translated into significantly improved financial performance with reported net profit growing by 70% to $45.6 million in the first half of this year.

This reported net profit includes the favorable impact of one-off items relating to India. If one excludes these items, underlying net profit amounted to $34.3 million, which still represents a 42% increase compared to the same period last year. And this profitability, of course, has boosted our return on average equity on a reported basis from 49% to 55% year-on-year, again, mainly due to the India-related one-offs.

The strong level of profitability also further strengthened our equity base, which increased by 41% year-on-year. Accordingly, total comprehensive income of USD 39.9 million was generated in the first half of this year, which is 8% lower than the first half of last year. This, of course, reflects the continued growth in net profit, which I just spoke about, offset slightly by an adverse movement in the FX translation reserve as we saw currency depreciation across a number of our markets.

It is this financial performance, which means we can continue returning capital to our shareholders in line with our dividend policy. This morning, we declared an interim dividend of $0.069 per share on underlying net profit, which is also 43% higher than last year's interim dividend. Of course, Geert sitting next to me will dive into the financials in much greater detail later in this presentation. And lastly, we were delighted to have been admitted to the FTSE All-Share Index in June, which is clearly a recognition of the hard work being undertaken by colleagues to transform the business over the last couple of years.

Then to the next slide, we first show 2025 full year results as it was important to highlight the operational leverage that is inherent in our business. It is great to see that this trend has continued into 2026. As you can see on the slide, yet again, we can see the scaling impact of the various KPIs, starting with client growth and moving through to net profit. Clients have grown 17% since 2023, which is 27% when you exclude India.

When this is combined with meeting the evolving working capital needs of our clients through larger ticket sizes, evidenced by OLP, outstanding loan per client, growing by 36%. We can see that gross OLP has grown by 60%. The strong growth in loan portfolio creates a compounding revenue base, which in turn drives scale and efficiency and ultimately, of course, the strong growth in the net profit. We simply put more load on the system. Then using the traditional operating jaws metric, we can see that revenue growth has outpaced cost by 34 percentage points as operational leverage continues.

Let me take you through our portfolio in the different regions. Here you can see that our well-diversified portfolio is driving OLP growth with the portfolio effects helping to drive the improved operational performance we are reporting today. In particular, we can see that our African regions are now the 2 largest regions by OLP. East Africa continues to be the largest segment with 29% year-on-year growth being driven by Kenya and Uganda. Tanzania, of course, remains a large market for us internationally. In West Africa, the 7% year-on-year growth was driven by strong client demand in Nigeria. Ghana remains one of our top countries, but the OLP performance in dollar terms year-on-year was affected by the depreciating cedi.

And moving to our Asian segment. In South Asia, we can clearly see the impact of the deliberate strategic decision to exit India. OLP has now reduced significantly to $4.3 million. That is for the end of June. If you look further into early September, the balance sheet is basically empty. And excluding India, South Asia's OLP grew by 42% year-on-year. This was predominantly due to Pakistan, which is our largest operating country.

And lastly, in Southeast Asia, it's more useful to look at the constant currency growth of 13%. The decline on an actual basis reflects the fact that we now have to use the market rate for the kyat in Myanmar versus the Central Bank rate as was used in mid-'25 rather than any underlying operational issues.

Let me touch on our loan portfolio quality, which remains truly industry-leading despite slight uptick seen in the first half of '26. This reinforces the fact that we are not sacrificing asset quality in the pursuit of growth. Of course, one of the benefits of the ASA model is that it consistently delivers high portfolio quality as evidenced by the low group PAR>30 of 2.4%.

From a regional standpoint, East Africa saw an increase in PAR and mainly due to the new trade regulations in Uganda, which affected many of our client businesses. And overdues in Ghana due to the rainy season and subsequent flooding drove the higher PAR in West Africa. It's worth mentioning again that despite these increases, the overall portfolio quality in those regions remains very high.

South Asia's materially lower PAR reflects the contribution of the growing and high-quality Pakistan portfolio as well as the wind down of the loan book in India I just talked about. And lastly, Southeast Asia's higher PAR is driven by the Philippines, where the business is being restructured and where we see encouraging signs now in the near future.

I'll now happily hand over to Geert to review our financial performance in greater detail. Geert, over to you.

Yes. Thanks, Rob. I would also like to add my warm welcome to today's results webcast listeners.

Let me first zoom into the income trends that we've seen over the last half year. On this slide, we have set out the income trends for the business year-on-year alongside the recent yield and funding rate developments. As you can see, income rose by a steep 32%, driven predominantly by the asset growth that Rob already mentioned earlier, which also boosted the net interest income. Other operating income includes the $11.4 million one-off gain that we realized by the sale of the NCDs in India. Excluding this gain, other operating was broadly flat year-on-year.

If we look at our interest rates, the gross yield came at 46.4%, which is high and at a healthy level. There was some margin pressure in a few countries, for example, Pakistan, and this has also led to partly higher funding costs. This has led to a slight reduction in the overall NIM to 37.4% seen in the first half of 2026.

If we move on to the next slide, we see the cost-income ratio developments. And on the face of it, we can see a rise in total operating expenses of 27%. This increase is mainly due to a combination of personnel and office costs associated with business growth as well as transportation costs. Encouragingly, the cost-income ratio has further improved to 55.6% in the first half of '26. This continues the positive trend that we've seen since 2023 when the cost-income ratio stood at 72.1%. At the same time, it is important to point out that we continue to invest in people as well as in our digital transformation, which will add to the cost base in the short run, but will bring strong benefits in the years to come.

If we move on to the next slide on the equity base, I would like to cover, first of all, the strengthened equity base that we have seen it. As you may recall, we had a strong equity improvement in 2025 on the back of strong profit rise as well as the positive translation results because of the stronger currencies in the country that we operate in vis-a-vis basically a weaker dollar. In the first half of 2026, we again see strong profit generation, as explained earlier.

As can be seen from the left-hand side, the total comprehensive income decreased by 8%. The key reason behind this was the negative FX translation reserve movement of $5.7 million in the first half of '26 versus a positive movement in the first half of 2025 of $15.5 million. This was primarily attributable to the movement of the Ghana cedi, which partly offset the strong growth in profit. [ Net-net ], of course, you can still see that we added approximately $40 million in total comprehensive income.

If we then move on to the next slide, we can look at the bottom line, the net profit. As Rob already mentioned at the start of this presentation, we have seen strong headline profitability development as well as solid underlying profit development. Net profit grew remarkably more than in the first half of 2025. Reported net profit increased by 70% to $45.6 million, with the underlying net profit increasing by 42% to $34.3 million versus the first half of 2025. As a reminder, underlying net profit excludes the favorable impact of the India-related one-offs.

I also want to flag that the effective tax rate, including the withholding tax reduced from 43.9% in the first half of 2025 to 31.5% in the first half of 2026. This decline was mainly driven by India, where we utilized previously unrecognized tax losses, and next to that, a more favorable country earnings mix.

The underlying effective tax rate came out at 38%. It is worth noting that trend-wise, the ETR is usually lower in the first half of the year than in the remaining 6 months as we expect more dividends from the countries, and this requires additional withholding tax payments. The strong growth in profitability derived from increasing operational leverage that Rob has already discussed earlier. The chart on the right highlights the traditional operating jaws metrics since 2023. And here, we can see that revenue growth has outpaced cost growth by 7 percentage points.

On the funding side and from a funding standpoint, we saw the company's funding position significantly increased to $752 million at the end of the first half of 2026 compared to $711 million at the end of 2025. In line with our funding strategy, we observed a 6% growth in the local funding since the end of 2025. This is a deliberate approach and which naturally meant that funding has reduced from development banks and microfinance loan firms.

As you can see on the chart, local deposits in U.S. dollars have been largely stable in the first half. This is where you see the impact of the currency depreciation, particularly in Ghana, which had our strongest deposit base. In local currency, our deposits still grew. Further, growing our deposit base remains a key funding priority, and deposit monetization plans are being put in place in the countries where we have the appropriate license.

For example, in Pakistan, we expect to go live with deposit strategy at the end of this year or early next year. Overall, the funding profile remains solid and stable, and the pipeline is robust, standing at more than $300 million for the remainder of 2026. This will ensure that we will also be able to fund our growth ambitions for the remainder of the year.

I also want to take the opportunity to highlight our favorable maturity profile with term loan maturities, exceeding our typical client loan tenor of 6 months. This is an indication of efficient but also very sustainable and solid asset liability management. Lastly, on the right-hand side, you will note that we have minimal FX risk on the liability side with almost all funding either hedged or denominated in local currency.

Let me now hand over back to Rob.

Thanks, Geert. Yes, I want to take the opportunity to update you on the progress we've made against the top 2026 strategic priorities we outlined to you at the time of the full year results. The original slide is shown at the top of the slide, and a summary, meaningful progress has been made across each of these priorities.

The first one, client journey is how we better meet the needs of our clients, both in relation to the core loan products and expanding the product set. The MSME pilot, for instance, currently underway in Uganda shows how we can bridge the gap between microfinance and traditional banking. And lessons from this pilot will be integrated into any additional country launches. The first half of '26 also saw the further expansion of our micro insurance offering, this time in Pakistan, our largest operating country.

The second priority, digital transformation, has seen meaningful progress in the first half of this year with the core banking system rolled out in Tanzania. And we're also working on the pilot program for the client app in Ghana.

The third one, operational excellence, is how we update and reconfigure the ASA model to fit our new human-led tech approach. This is the detail behind improving loan officer productivity and streamlining processes, basically the ASA 2.0 model. In the first half of this year, we've seen continued process improvement initiatives, for instance, cashless collections and the changing of the meeting frequencies. Cashless collections are convenient for our clients and reduce fraud risk at the same time. And reduced meeting frequency is also a way to improve loan officer productivity so they can deal with more clients.

In terms of deposits, the fourth priority, this is an important lever to pull to secure efficient and diversified funding. In addition, it really deepens the client relationship that we have with them. A key part of this priority is seeking deposit-taking licenses in countries where we only have an MFI status. A lending license, basically. One such project is already underway in Uganda. And as Geert said, Pakistan is due to commence taking deposits later this year.

The fifth priority relates to a renewed focus on disciplined capital allocation across the group. In essence, we want to put capital to work where returns, resilience and impact are greatest. And here, the team have implemented this framework and it is being embedded across the organization.

And last but not least, we look into new country expansion. This speaks for itself, of course, but done in a highly disciplined and selective manner can increase resilience, and of course, our addressable markets. Potential new markets were identified and investigated this year with execution plans for early next year. And our belief that each of these actions will have a compounding effect on growth, and of course, by extension, the overall performance of the business going forward.

I want to move on to our digital transformation journey, which is a major program and a way to deliver enhanced resilience, improved productivity and a platform for future growth. And it is important to note that our approach is very much human-led technology, where we will maintain our high-touch client model, but with digital enhancements. Basically, we take out manual pain points to improve the client journey in order to spend more meaningful time with our clients.

And as we've mentioned previously, in terms of country rollouts, we focus on the highest impact by migrating the largest countries first and then subsequently leveraging these infrastructure investments to other countries. With this in mind, as of today, we've already migrated Pakistan in '24, Ghana in '25, Tanzania in early '26 with digital apps live in Ghana and Tanzania. Crucially, we've now implemented our core banking stack and our digital services in both an MFI with lending only and MFB banking environment scenario, which will allow for more efficient rollouts going forward.

In Pakistan, the focus has been on rolling out the Islamic banking module in T24, so we can offer Sharia compliant banking to clients. As said, deposit mobilization will also commence this year, leveraging the new digital platform. And with the addition of Kenya, which is planned for early next year, we've covered more than 60% of our client base already.

Let me wrap up the presentation by drawing out the key highlights in the first half of '26 across 3 themes. First of all, people. As I've mentioned in the previous presentations, strengthening senior leadership across the organization, both at the group and the country level is a top priority. People are the key to delivering the strategic priorities I outlined in the previous slide. With this in mind, we're delighted to welcome Geert, sitting next to me, as our Group CFO in February. Gwen Muteiwa as new CEO in Ghana and Interim CEOs appointed in Uganda and Zambia.

Strategy. Key steps were taken in terms of products with micro insurance as well as developing an MSME proposition. The digital transformation program also progressed with a major migration in Tanzania and the ramp-up of activities in Kenya that have their migration next year. New market expansion has also been undertaken with a huge execution commencing next year.

Lastly, our strategic plan to exit India has substantially progressed with a significantly reduced loan book, and crucially, the license surrender has recently been approved by the Reserve Bank of India. The income statement impact from now on is negligible with the business effectively wound down.

And then financials, of course. The financial success of ASA International in '26 has been made abundantly clear throughout this presentation. Whether it's profitability, loan portfolio, asset growth, I think the financial strength of the business has also improved with the growth in total equity. We are proud that we're able to continue providing capital returns to our shareholders.

And lastly, I'll also cover the outlook for the remainder of '26. Building on the momentum shown in the first half of '26, we expect demand for loans by clients to also be resilient and our focus is on disciplined execution of the strategy and ongoing productivity and efficiency initiatives. Accordingly, we expect full year '26 underlying net profit to be in line or slightly ahead of the current company compiled consensus of USD 70.2 million. It's worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that amidst a rather volatile year across a number of fronts, we've managed to still deliver strong growth and profitability.

With that, I think we've concluded the formal part of the presentation. I'll hand back to the operator to open the floor to questions from the conference lines. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Rahim Karim with Cavendish.

Congratulations on another strong set of numbers. Three questions, if I may. When we talked about entry into new markets, I was wondering if I could perhaps press you on which areas you're specifically looking at, which countries you're specifically looking at and how those entries will evolve over time and how long the nature of those entries would be helpful?

The second question was just around NIM and margin development in the second half. Obviously, came off a little bit in the first half. So how should we think about that going into the last 6 months of the year?

And then obviously, lots of good progress, note the post-balance sheet event in terms of the Indian operations. What's left to do now? I appreciate there's not much left in terms of operations, but just helpful to understand what the last few steps are from our perspective?

Yes. Thanks, Rahim. It's twisting my arm on potential markets, but I'll give you a proper answer. So let me take the one on expansion and on India, and hand over on the NIM to Geert.

So we finalized the diligence in several countries. And to spill the beans, I think the D.R. Congo comes out as a top country for us for the short term, where we, of course, need to go through a number of hoops to finalize that. But we aim to enter the DRC early next year.

What does that mean? Of course, we have the muscle strength from a long time ago, between 2007, 2017. We had all those greenfield start-ups in 13 countries. So basically, we do that in the same fashion as we did at the time. We start careful. I mean it's a big country, 110 billion people. But if you only look at Kinshasa and some surrounding cities like Lubumbashi, you talk about 60 million, 70 million people in a relatively compact area.

We start with a couple of branches. We train French-speaking loan officers in Kenya and Tanzania, for instance, and deploy them back to the DRC. So again, you want to have a good taste of the market. You want to investigate properly. We do a lot of conversations with people that know a lot about the market, but we're dipping our toe into the market first carefully before we ramp up significantly.

So that would be my answer on DRC. I hope that answers your question, Rahim, on the...

Yes, very helpful.

And Rahim, on India, indeed, like I said, the book is empty by now. So the $4.3 million in June is now basically empty. So no more clients, no more branches, no more staff. The very good news, of course, that we received last week is that the surrender of the license has been approved by the Reserve Bank of India. So we're no longer a lending entity in India. So we only had a skeleton structure in place, which is less than a handful of people going forward. And there will be no drag on the income statement anymore.

So what is left to be done is the final restructuring of the balance sheet, final settlements with a couple of lenders. But that is remaining to do. So all in all, I'm very happy with the status where we are now because we significantly derisked that, of course, by means of having no longer having the license in place and the fact that the balance sheet is empty.

And then for the NIM part, I'll hand over to Geert.

Yes. Thanks, Rob, and thanks, Rahim, for this question. The expected margin developments, well, on the one hand, of course, we see a trend of rising interest rates globally. At the same time, we see that so far, we have been able to protect margins really well. And at least for the months to come, we expect that to remain the same. We see of late that margins continue in the levels that we have disclosed now, even maybe a bit higher. So we're fairly resilient on that part.

At the same time, of course, for the longer term, the rising interest rates globally may have an impact, but that's currently too early to foresee. So the expectation is that for the second half, we would remain in that bracket, which we are very comfortable with, between 35% and 40%.

There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to Jonathan to address -- my apologies. We do have another question. It comes from Hugo Cruz with KBW.

I also have 3 questions, if I may. So first, on your earnings guidance for the full year, it implies flattish earnings in the second half versus the first half. What does that mean roughly in terms of the shape of the P&L half-on-half, so revenues, OpEx, credit losses and tax rate? So that's sort of the first question.

Second question, I think your presentation talks about revising the capital -- you revised the sort of the capital framework. What does that mean for your dividend payout, which I think you have the target over time getting to 30%? Roughly when you expect to get there?

And then finally, on your new products, the insurance product is expanding. You have the SME pilot in Uganda. When those 2 products ramp up and potentially any others to sort of the full run rate, do you expect a materially different shape to your revenue line or not? Any color there would be basically on the profitability on these products would be very helpful.

Thanks, Hugo. Good questions. Let me take the one on the new products and on the earnings guidance and the capital framework, I'll happily hand over to Geert. What does it change? I mean, if I look at insurance, micro insurance, I think I said before that this is not because there's a massive fee income. Of course, there's a couple of million on fees that we earn on the micro insurance. However, the biggest reason for us to do it is, one, it's a big part of financial inclusion. Savings and insurance is a safety net when life hits your hard. So from that part, it's extremely important to us.

But also from a business case perspective, the more services you have in your ecosystem where you offer a broader set of services than other players, of course, the retention rate potentially goes up. And that's also what we see occurring bit by bit in the countries where we roll out the micro insurance. It's easier to retain our clients for a follow-up loan. And of course, there is a big business case because a second loan is often a bit bigger. The risk is lower because you know the client better, et cetera. So the biggest business case of micro insurance is not so much in the very welcome, of course, fee income, which is differentiated from the interest income. So that part is good, but the biggest part is in the retention and the follow-up loans that come with that.

On the MSME side, over time, of course, that can be quite a big part of your overall OLP, because if you only have like 5% or 10% of your clients in MSME, that could very well be 25%, 30% of your OLP. But we want to do that very carefully. I mean our bread and butter is the ASA model, group lending. That is where we really want to excel. And the growth into MSME is really because we lose clients, because if we serve clients for 10 years and clients do a fantastic job and they outgrow us, but they're not ready for a bank, that is where we need to step in with our MSME portfolio. So I see a lot of opportunities for MSME, but not to blow up our book significantly in this product suite. But over time, of course, if it becomes 20%, 25% of our OLP, it's a big driver for growth as well.

I hope that answers your question on both insurance and MSME, Hugo. And with that, I'll happily hand over for the earning guidance and the capital framework to Geert.

Thanks, Hugo, for the questions. On the earnings projections, let me first paint a bit of a picture on what we expect in the second half overall. To some extent, our business is seasonal in the sense that we see particularly the season from September to December, that there is a significant growth on the back of seasonal related spending by our clients.

If we then dissect that more in the various drivers of the P&L. First of all, on the revenue side, although this will, of course, also support the revenue development, the biggest benefit of that we typically cease in the year thereafter and start because then you just start in 2027 with a much higher asset base as well. Then on the OpEx side, as mentioned, we continue to invest in our people and in, for example, our digital transformation, as Rob pointed out as well. At the same time, we expect costs to be well under control, but we will see a bit of a further rise.

On the ECL, the current provisions on the back of a slightly rise in PAR. Also, these ECL charges are likely to rise slightly. And then as I already explained on the effective tax rate, we expect the effective tax rate to go up basically from the underlying 38% to in the range of around 40% to 42%. What does that all mean? Indeed, that means that we expect the total, I think, net profit to be in line or maybe slightly ahead of that consensus of $70.2 million, as indicated earlier. So that's a bit of a projection that we are making.

Then let me move on to the dividend payout. As you have seen, we currently -- we will be paying out 20% in interim dividend, 20% of the net profit. Our goal is still, and our aim is still to pay out 25% over the full year of 2026, which means basically that by and large, we will pay out 30% in the final dividend of the profit of the second half. So that's I think a little bit of the expectation, and we will continue to have that policy have around 25%. Our internal policy also states a maximum payout of 30%. So it will be in the range of, let's say, 25% to 30%.

Hugo, did we answer your questions with this?

Yes, yes. All good.

And now there are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to Jonathan to address written questions submitted via the webcast page.

There's a very quick question, which I'll tackle and there's a second one, which I'll hand over to Rob. First question, can you elaborate why the client base has declined from 2.8 million in FY '25 to 2.7 million today? And if this is a conscious strategic decision or a function of lower end customer demand?

I think the simple answer is the wind down of the India operations. So that reflects that change and it's the main reason why we're showing those numbers now ex India. So you can see the performance of the business on a continuing operations basis.

Indeed, Jonathan.

The second question, how did the new trade regulations in Uganda affect clients and the loan portfolio quality?

Yes. To be very honest, that was rather brutal. And you see what happens is that most of those traders are not regularized or shops with a license. And what happens is that basically all those shops were bulldozered away and were basically evicted out of Kampala and Greater Kampala. So that had a significant effect on our clients who basically lost everything, their shops and all the goods that they had in their shops and needed to rebuild outside of Kampala again. And of course, imagining this has a significant effect on the PAR, because people just need to rebuild their businesses. So yes, that has been and will be significant.

Okay. Thanks, Rob. That's the end of the questions that we've received via e-mail. I think I'd just like to say thank you to everyone for joining today. And our next update will be the Q3 business update, which is scheduled for release on the 29th of October. Thank you once again.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ASA International 2025 Results. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all the participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Jonathan Berger, Head of IR to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining ASA International's 2025 full year results webcast. As you will no doubt have already seen, we released our 2025 results first thing this morning. I'm joined here on the call by ASA International's CEO, Rob Keijsers; and CFO, Geert Embrechts. Rob and Geert will run through this results presentation. And afterwards, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have. Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer at the end of the presentation. Please be advised if you continue to listen to this presentation, you are bound by this disclaimer. With the formalities out of the way, I would like to now hand over to Rob for his opening remarks.

Yes. Thank you, Jonathan. And also from my side, a warm welcome to today's result webcast. Let's move to our performance in 2025. It is clear that ASA International had an outstanding year in '25 with our profits doubling and impact scaling across our operating markets. I'm very pleased to note that we are now seeing sustained growth, enhanced profitability and a strengthened balance sheet. We've seen continued commercial success with our client base growing by 10% in '25, with our client base standing at 2.8 million. Alongside this client growth, the outstanding loan portfolio or OLP increased to $611 million and represents a 33% growth versus last year.

The growth of the loan portfolio has not been at the expense of portfolio quality, with PAR 30 having improved to 1.8% at the end of 2025. To provide some context, this is an industry-leading level and testament to the strength of the asset model. From a productivity perspective, on average, individual loan officers are serving more clients than last year with clients per loan officer increasing to 308 in '25 from 290 in '24. This strong operational performance has translated into significantly improved financial performance we reported net profit growing by 98% to $56.5 million in '25. This net profit includes the impact of hyperinflation accounting and impairments relating to India. Excluding this item, underlying net profit amounted to $57.2 million, which still represents a 94% increase compared to '24.

This profitability has boosted our return on equity to 44% in '25 from 33% in '24. What's also very encouraging is that the total comprehensive income increased significantly to $73.6 million in '25 compared to $21 million in '24. As there was a positive FX impact on the FX translation reserve this time around, next, of course, the doubling of net profit. It is this financial performance, which means we can continue returning capital to our shareholders in line with our dividend policy. Today, this morning, we announced a recommended final dividend of $0.095 per share on underlying net profit, implying a total dividend for the full year '25 or $0.143, which is double the amount paid for '24.

And of course, Geert will dive into the financials in much more detail later in this presentation. It's also important to note that alongside the improved financial performance, significant work has already been undertaken to refresh and renew leadership across the organization so we can accelerate the transformation. Risk and compliance was naturally part of this effort, and this has led to an enhanced resilience of regulatory compliance. Lastly, we've driven additional product innovation with the launch of our micro-insurance products where we now have 740,000 live policies. Providing insurance to those at the bottom of the pyramid demonstrates that financial inclusion has grown beyond simply loans. We've also worked hard to develop a micro SME proposition where we seek to meet the evolving and growing working capital needs of our clients and bridge the gap between microfinance and traditional banking.

I'd like to take the opportunity to talk about operational leverage that really starts to kick in. As you can see on this slide, we can see the scaling impact of the various KPIs, starting with client growth and moving through to net profit. Clients have grown 19% since '23. When this is combined with meeting the evolving and growing working capital needs of our clients with larger ticket sizes as evidenced by OLP per client growing by 36%, we can see that gross OLP has grown by 62%. The strong growth in the loan portfolio creates a compounding revenue base, which in turn drives scale and efficiency and ultimately, the strong growth in net profit we simply put more load on the system. Using the traditional operating jaws metric, we can see that revenue growth has outpaced cost growth by 37 percentage points as operational leverage has truly kicked in.

I now wanted to move to our digital transformation journey, which is, of course, a major program underway to deliver enhanced resilience, improved productivity and a platform for future growth. It is important to note that our approach is very much human-led technology, where we will maintain our high-touch client model, but with digital enhancements. Basically, we take out the manual pain points to improve the client journey in order to spend more meaningful time with our clients. Our new market-leading Temenos based T24 core banking system replaces the existing in-house system that is nearing its end of life. From a resilience and compliance perspective, this provides the robust foundation we need to scale our growth in the future. Equally important is the fact that it meets the evolving regulatory requirements in our operating countries.

This is especially relevant in those markets where we are seeking to gain a deposit-taking license. And linking to the previous slide on operational leverage, the digital transformation program will provide the tooling to increase loan officer productivity. The loan officer app will simplify onboarding and applications and will eliminate manual processes and excess paperwork. Combined with this, we're exploring reducing the frequency of meetings from weekly to bi-weekly. This is already the case, by the way, in Pakistan and Myanmar, which have excellent PAR 30 levels, showing that it's doable. To give some context, at present on average, each loan officer serves roughly 300 clients. If this average were to move to 600, and it's easy to see how the business can efficiently scale whilst retaining the valuable face-to-face time between a loan officer and the clients.

The third aspect of our digital transformation effort is to create an even more compelling and truly digital client offering, where applying for loans and managing their accounts becomes much easier with an app. Our clients are becoming more digital savvy. So meeting their expectations is essential and future-proofs our business moving forward. So what does that all mean from an execution road map perspective? In terms of country rollouts, we focus on the highest impact by migrating the largest country first and then subsequently leveraging these infra investments to other countries. With this in mind, as of today, we've already migrated Pakistan, Ghana and Tanzania with digital apps live in Ghana and Tanzania. Crucially, we have now implemented CBS and DFS in both an MFI lending only and an MFB, a banking environment scenario, which will allow for more efficient rollouts going forward.

With the addition of Kenya, which is planned for this year and Nigeria, which is planned for the first half of next year, we'll have covered nearly 70% of our client base. Let me take you through our portfolios in a different regions. Here you can see that our well diversified portfolio is driving OLP growth with the portfolio effects helping to drive the improved operational performance we are reporting today. In particular, we can see that our African regions are now the 2 largest from an OLP perspective. East Africa continues the largest segment with growth from each country seen in the first half. Accelerating growth from Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia, is also highly encouraging alongside our traditionally larger markets in, for instance, in Tanzania and Kenya.

In West Africa, Ghana's strong contribution following a combination of strong operational growth and the impact of the depreciating cedi has been the main contributor to West Africa's material increase in OLP this year. But it's also pleasing to see the growth in Nigeria and Sierra Leone this year given the historic performance issues seen in these 2 countries. Let's move to our Asian segments. In South Asia, we did see growth in OLP in '25. This is despite the intentional shrinkage of our operations in India as we work to deconsolidate our business there. You can see that ASA International is still growing strongly by 31% in '25 in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with both of these countries now benefiting from refreshed local leadership in place.

Lastly, Philippines and Myanmar have grown on a constant currency basis. The decline on an actual basis in dollars reflects the fact that we now have to use the market rate for the kyats, the Myanmar kyat versus the Central Bank rate as was used in '24 rather than any underlying operational issues. Accordingly, Myanmar's gross OLP reduced by 23% on an actual basis but increased by 32% on a constant currency basis. It's also worth noting that in Myanmar, our colleagues and clients demonstrated tremendous resilience in light of the devastating earthquake that struck earlier in '25. Then combined with the portfolio, of course, the portfolio quality, I want to touch on that. it is industry-leading. This reinforces the fact that we're not sacrificing asset quality in the pursuit of growth.

One of the benefits of the asset model is that it consistently delivers high portfolio quality as evidenced by a group PAR 30 of 1.8%. This is a 40 basis point improvement compared to the end of '24. Outstanding portfolio quality was consistently recorded in Pakistan and Kenya and Uganda with PAR 30s of less than 0.5%, reflecting best-in-class field discipline. But also Myanmar and Ghana are the next group of countries, which sit in the 1% to 2% bracket, which is still industry-leading asset quality. Nigeria is strongly improving and sits slightly above this level. And the last category of countries is those with higher PAR 30 levels, and this typically reflects the fact that these countries are in the midst of transforming their operations and the new leadership. I'll now happily hand over to Geert to review our financial performance in greater detail. Geert is our new group CFO per February this year, and Geert, a warm welcome to you to your first webcast.

Thanks Rob. And I would also like to add my own warm welcome for those who listen to today's webcast. As you may know, I have recently joined ASA International and I'm now presenting my first results and I'm very proud and honored to present these great results. Let me zoom in on the value drivers and particularly the first one, income and the income trends of last year. On this slide, we have set out the income trends for the business year-on-year alongside the yield and funding rate developments. Income rose by almost 40%, driven by asset growth. Rob already mentioned this earlier and margin improvement.

In essence, it was a positive volume mix effect seen throughout 2025, both asset growth and margin improvement. Gross yield increased to 48.2% as we saw a positive mix effect with the subsidiaries with the higher yields increasing more and giving a higher OLP growth. So basically, we grew more in the countries that also had the highest margins. Funding rates have remained stable since 2024, this meant that the NIM increased by nearly 4 percentage points to almost 40%. On the face of it, other operating income decreased in 2025 compared to 2024. But 2024 was positively affected by an incidental gain of $3 million from the loan assignment agreement with ASA Myanmar lenders. Excluding this one-off item, other operating income remained broadly flat period-on-period. Let me then take you to another value driver, costs. As you can see, our cost rose by 26% year-on-year, and this increase is mainly due to a combination of business expansion, investments in technology, as Rob already explained as well as impact of the appreciation of the Ghanaian cedi, which amounted to more than $5 million.

And most encouragingly, with higher income growth than cost growth, the cost-to-income ratio has significantly improved to 56.8% in 2025 from 61.4% in 2024. As can be seen from the bridge on the right side, this improvement is mainly due to the growth in net interest income, which significantly outpaced the increase in costs. Now I would like to turn to the equity base and the developments in the equity and what I'm really happy with is that I can report a strong improvement and strengthening of that equity base. As can be seen on the left-hand side, Total comprehensive income has grown significantly by 233%, reflecting both increased profitability of the business as well as a positive FX translation reserve impact. The positive impact of the latter amounted to almost $16 million compared to a negative impact in 2024 of $4.3 million. As a result, total equity increased by 68% year-on-year in 2025.

Now moving on to the bottom line on the next slide. Net profit. As Rob already mentioned, at the start of the presentation, we've seen strong profitability growth delivered by the business as well as good underlying net profit growth in 2025 compared to 2024. The reported net profit increased by almost 100% to $56.5 million, with the underlying net profit increasing by 94% to $57.2 million. As a reminder, underlying net profit includes -- excludes, in this case, the impact of hyperinflation as well as some other impairments relating to India. I also wanted to flag that effective tax rate has improved. If we look at that effective tax rate, including withholding tax, it reduced from 55.1% in 2024 to 45.6% in 2025. This is a significant reduction, and that was mainly due to a change in the profit mix with greater contribution from the countries that have a lower effective tax rate.

Further structural reduction in our effective tax rate is still dependent on the implementation of transfer pricing in 3 countries, mainly and the ability to capitalize on the tax losses in India and at the holding company levels. The strong growth in profitability derived from an increasing operational leverage, which Rob discussed earlier as well. The chart on the right hand highlights the traditional operating jaws since 2023. And here, we can see that the revenue growth has significantly outpaced the cost growth, and that adds to a total improvement, I think, of 37%. Moving from the P&L to the balance sheet. Let's touch on the funding side. From a funding standpoint, we saw the company's funding position significantly increased to USD 710 million at the end of 2025 compared to $500 million at the end of 2024. We can observe growth in almost every funding category except the microfinance loan funds, which in any event was anyway a small category. As you can see from the chart, local deposits have increased in line with our funding strategy with the intention to grow further with a focus on fixed deposits.

This will actually be a strong focus point going forward. And at the same time, fair to say that the appreciation of the Ghanaian cedi also contributed to this growth in local deposits as Ghana is one of the countries where we already have a good deposit base. Overall, the funding profile for the group remains stable and the pipeline is robust, standing at $261.6 million for 2026. This will ensure that we can fund our growth ambitions very well for the year. Lastly, I would also like to take the opportunity to highlight our favorable maturity profile with term loan maturities exceeding our typical client loan tenor of 6 months, an indication of efficient but also prudent asset and liability management.

On the right-hand side, you will note we have a minimal FX risk on the liability side for the lending purposes, which is almost all funding is either hedged or denominated in local currency. Let me now hand over back to Rob for closing remarks.

Yes. Thanks, Geert. I'd like to take the opportunity to update you on the progress we've made in '25 in driving long-term sustainable growth at ASA International. In the top right-hand corner of this slide, you can see the strategy house we shared at the time of the '24 full year results. This demonstrates how we will seek to fulfill our mission. As a reminder, the house has 3 pillars, which cover our plans to drive growth, build resilience and achieve sustainable impacts. In terms of driving growth, we can see progress across the board with strong operational and financial growth. As mentioned before, we delivered significant operational growth with strong margins on the asset side. There have also been productivity enhancements with an increase in clients per loan officer. And lastly, but of course, the digital financial services is now live in Ghana and Tanzania.

The growth indicators I just highlighted, of course, need to be fully backed up by greater resilience across the organization. And in terms of the resilience pillar, '25 also been -- has also seen progress across a number of areas. This includes a strengthened executive committee at the group level alongside refreshed leadership teams in a number of countries. We see greater system resilience with the migration to T24 as our core banking system in Ghana and Tanzania on top of the already migrated Pakistan business in '24. Grace Thiongo, our Chief Risk and Compliance Officer, has been busy reinvigorating the risk and compliance functions. And the last pillar of our strategy relates to achieving a sustainable impact. Financial performance is the thing that will drive the achievement of our sustainability goals. And as I mentioned already, we've seen robust profitability levels in '25. A key initiative has been ASA International joining the client protection pathway as we seek to ensure our clients are treated fairly and responsibly.

We've also continued our community social and environmental programs. There's clearly much still to do, but I firmly believe the disciplined execution of the strategy is really yielding the first results. Then looking forward, I'd like to take the opportunity to detail ASA International's top strategic priorities for '26 and beyond. And given the scale of the transformation effort underway, we have decided to distill the existing strategy house developed last year into 6 tangible levers, 6 tangible priorities. The first 2, client journey and digital transformation have been covered already in this presentation. The third priority, operational excellence is how we update and reconfigure the asset model to fit our new human-led tech approach. This is the detail behind improving loan officer productivity and streamlining processes.

Basically, the ASA 2.0 model. In terms of deposits, the fourth priority, this is an important lever to pull to secure efficient and diversified funding. In addition, it really deepens the client relationship. A key part of this priority is seeking deposit-taking licenses in countries where we only have an MFI status, a lending-only status. The fifth priority relates to a renewed focus on disciplined capital allocation across the group. In essence, we want to put capital to work where returns, resilience and impact are the greatest. Geert, as mentioned, our new CFO, will be embedding this discipline.

And lastly, we took -- we look into new country expansion. This speaks for itself, of course, but done in a highly disciplined and selective manner, can increase the resilience and of course, our addressable markets. Our belief, our strong belief is that each of these actions will have a compounding effect on growth and by extension, the overall performance of the business going forward. I'd like to wrap up the presentation by drawing out the key highlights from '25 across 3 themes. First, people, most importantly, as I have mentioned already, we've strengthened senior leadership across the organization, both at the group and the country level. People are the key to delivering the strategic priorities I outlined on the previous slides. Then the strategy.

Like I mentioned, key steps were taken in terms of products with micro insurance as well as developing the micro SME proposition. The digital transformation program also progressed with major migrations in Ghana and recently Tanzania. Then of course the financials. The financial success of ASA International in '25 has been made abundantly clear throughout this presentation, whether it is profitability, loan portfolio or asset growth. We are proud and thankful that we're able to continue providing capital returns to shareholders.

Lastly, I want to cover the outlook for '26. As with many other companies, of course, we continue to closely monitor the situation in the Middle East and what the potential impacts will be in our operating countries. While this does create uncertainty, we believe the fundamentals of the business remain strong as evidenced by the growing profitability levels in January and February of this year. We currently expect demand for loans by clients to also be resilient, and our focus is on disciplined execution of the strategy and ongoing productivity and efficiency initiatives. We've now concluded the formal part of the presentation, and I'll hand back to the operator to open the floor to questions from the conference lines. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Rahim Karim with Cavendish.

Hopefully, you can hear me. 3 questions, if I may. Rob, just to maybe pick up on some of your last comments around the macro situation. Could you perhaps share any additional or initial sorry, indications you have with respect to client behavior. Are you seeing anything changed there? Or is it very much kind of business as usual. I appreciate we're still early days in the conflict. But any colors you have on that would be helpful. The second question was just to talk a little bit about the digital transformation that you outlined and maybe just some examples, if you can, around the operational leverage that, that should support. You obviously mentioned some of the kind of the customer experiences, but kind of help bring that to life in terms of your cost base and how you -- it helps embed scalability would be useful.

And then the third is, I think you mentioned at some stage the development of new offering in Pakistan around Sharia banking. Just to get any color or any additional comment you can on that and whether that's something that you're able to roll out to other jurisdictions at the appropriate time.

Yes. Thanks for your questions. Let me start with geopolitical situation and what we see in our markets. So first and foremost, what we've seen in January and February and also in March from operational perspective, we don't see any impact yet. What we can see is, of course, that with a 50% higher petrol price, fuel prices in the countries that puts pressure on the cost of living of people. And that is something -- I mean, if you put it to the extreme, if you have fuel rationing in some of the countries. And for instance, our loan officers are driving with their motorbikes to see the clients. And if you have a fuel ration of 5 liters per week, that might become more difficult. There's always ways to find ways around it. And until now, we don't see issues there. So until now, we don't see that.

However, of course, I mean, if you do the simple math on higher oil prices, which might lead to higher inflation, which might lead to a higher cost of living which, in the end, might have an effect on the FX compared to the dollar. It's not something that we've seen significantly now. But the longer it takes, the more painful it becomes for the entire world, including ASA, of course. And we monitor it closely, and we make sure that we are cash rich that we have a clear eye on our business that we closely monitor our clients and our business in the different opcos. But until now, we show much resilience. Then maybe on the digital transformation. Yes, that's, of course, a very interesting one. So I mentioned just to take one metric or one KPI is that 300 clients are served by one loan officer. So if we roll out -- once we roll out our digital transformation, basically take all the paper pain points and all the nonvalue-add touch points with the clients you take out.

So if you digitize that, simplify that process, a loan officer can have more meaningful time with a client whilst at the same time, having more load on the system. So rather than servicing 300 clients per loan officer, you can grow to let's say, 600 clients per loan officer. And it's, on the one hand, because of the fact that you take out all those pain points in the process. So rather than having a 2-week turnaround time to provide a loan, you bring that back to 3 days. You take out manual loan application forms and you do that digitally, for instance, but also we now have weekly group meetings for all the right reasons. But if you bring that to biweekly then, of course, the loan officer visits half of the time.

So that combines means going from 300 to 600 clients per loan officer. So and you can just calculate on the back of an envelope, what that does on your operational leverage and your scalability of the business. Then maybe on Sharia bank that's a very interesting question, well remembered. I think we can be extremely happy that we already rolled out T24 in Pakistan in 2024 because T24 has a so-called Sharia banking module. So it's relatively easy without an entire implementation to also offer Sharia banking. So what happens in Pakistan that we have a double banking window, a conventional window and an Islamic window next to each other. We can offer that because as Pakistan is a foreign owned so we are able to offer also conventional banking. And you see that the majority of urban area clients would opt for conventional bank. In a more rural areas, you see more Islamic banking. So we see that going live towards the tail end of '26.

And that is also combined with the deposit-taking capability that's now being rolled out. So also both in the Islamic window as the conventional banking window, we should be able to in Q4 offer deposits. But it's well underway. In principle, your question, could we roll it out in other jurisdictions as well. The answer is yes because once you have T24 everywhere and you have the Islamic or the Sharia banking module live in your ecosystem, we can also deploy it, of course, to other markets. For now, we don't see a significant demand outside of Pakistan, but the fact that we have it readily available is, of course, a good thing that if need be or want be, we can roll it out. Does that answer your questions?

That's super helpful. And congratulations on the extremely strong set of numbers.

Our next question comes from the line of Hugo Cruz with KBW.

I have 2 questions as well. First, on the cost/income ratio, you actually only improved slightly half on half due to the strong OpEx growth, obviously, you have a lot of tech investments, business transformation investments, et cetera. So I was wondering if you could give us a few numbers on what those investments are to try to strip out what was kind of, let's say, natural inflation in the cost base versus sort of investments for growth. So that's the first question.

Second, on the SME offering. Can you quantify the potential size of this opportunity relative to your traditional addressable market? How many clients basically grow too big and you're dropping out and now can be addressed with the new offering. And then third, on the -- again, on -- you mentioned capital allocation as a value accelerator. If you could give us a little bit more color what that could mean? What is changing, especially with the new CFO in place here?

Yes. Thanks, Hugo. So on the first and the third question, I'd like to hand over to Geert on the MSME one, I'll take it. But please, Geert start on the...

Yes. Thanks, Hugo. On the kind of cost rises, as indicated, I think around $5 million of the cost rises or a bit more than that was attributable purely to the appreciation of the cedi. I think then in terms of inflation, what we've seen, and it goes a bit too far to now provide details. But we've seen, of course, that inflation in most countries was relatively subdued. So that -- but at the same time, with the growth and the number of clients rising, the number of branches rising as well, and a number of FTEs rose as well as, I think, our investments in the IT side. It goes a bit beyond, I think, to reveal, let's say, also for competitive reasons, the details on the investments in IT, but I would label that approximately about 20% to 25% of that cost increase is attributable to the investments on the digital and transformation front.

Then let me turn to the third question on capital allocation. Yes, actually, yesterday, we had a Board meeting where we have improved the capital allocation framework, which really foresees in, I think, clear, transparent, but also tighter and solid allocation measures, first of all, by looking at the ROE, return on equity for countries adjusted where needed also for CAR for capital adequacy ratios because then you can really make a like-for-like. But next to that, equally or maybe even more important, the total comprehensive income because, of course, that's what brings the shareholder return. We balanced that shareholder return in U.S. dollars with our need to also diversify. We have a few countries where we are very strong and we have a good size, particularly Ghana and Pakistan.

We also want to diversify that to more countries, at least have 6 to 7 countries being the leader. What does that framework bring us? It really shows us, I think, in which countries we are already achieving the hurdles that we've set and where we need further improvement. The good news is that I think in most countries, we are meeting the hurdles and at the same time, we've looked at countries being overcapitalized from a return perspective and from a capital adequacy perspective. And in these countries, we are seeking repatriation of capital also to keep that at head office level, and we're where possible, redistribute that also to our shareholders. I think that's the main focus at the moment.

Of course, there's more angles towards capital allocation as such. But I think to further improve, I think the shareholder value by allocating that capital better is the first premise on this one.

Yes. Thanks, Geert. And Hugo, you had a question on MSME. Maybe a bit broader first. I mean I think up until now until the recent past, we've been under-debting our clients rather than over-debting so we need to increase the OLP per client. That was also the operational leverage that I showed at the start of the presentation. So last year, we grew the OLP per client from $180 to $220 and that needs to grow over the next couple of years to roughly $400 to $500. So it's not only MSME, it's really growing into the financial life cycle of clients to really provide the working capital needs that they have. Then indeed, if clients outgrow us now, we lose them whilst they cannot step yet into formal banking. So this is really about closing the gap.

In the end, it might only be 5% of our clients, but it might be because, of course, the OLP per client is much higher to be roughly 25% or 30% of the overall OLP. I want to add to that, that we really take this carefully. We don't want to go into mission drifts. We don't want to lose our clients persona. The client persona is changing a little bit. Traditionally, there was a $3 to $5 a day kind of female entrepreneur based on World Bank data, that's shifting a little bit to slightly over $8. So in order to serve the entire financial life cycle of the client, we want to step into that. But again, in a very careful approach and to max 30% of our OLP and max 5% to 7% of our clients. Does that answer your questions, Hugo?

There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to Jonathan to address written questions submitted via the webcast page.

So I had a question come through. Which territory do you think will add the most to achieving your growth aspirations for the next 3 years?

So we see -- thanks, Jonathan. We see, of course, a significant growth in Africa, in general. I mean, Sub-Saharan Africa is a growing powerhouse, a growing population, young population, very entrepreneurial population. So we see our traditional growth markets, Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana, of course, growing much bigger. But I also always take the example, for instance, of Nigeria. I mean, 220 million people, 110 million women, 70% in the informal sector gives you a market potential of 80 million people. So why not grow there substantially, substantially compared to what we have today. So I think Nigeria is a big one. We see a significant growth in Uganda. We haven't been large enough there, but it's quickly catching up.

And if I look at the demography, the economy, Uganda compared to Tanzania and Kenya, I think that Uganda will grow also substantially. And to be fair, 2 countries in Asia, Pakistan is growing fast. It's also a very, very large population that has been underserved for years. We've under-debted them in light of my previous comments on MSME. And Philippines for us has been stable on roughly 360,000 clients for a while. But with revamped leadership and a new focus on operations, I foresee also the Philippines to be a growth engine in the years to come. And then on top of that, of course, if you talk about new countries, There's, of course, plenty of opportunity to step into new countries. We want to do it carefully. I mean if you are on 1%, 2%, 3% market share in the country that we are, we should, could and must go much deeper in the countries that we are today.

But of course, to broaden our market potential and to diversify also risk, we will -- we might add another sub-Saharan African country basically next year.

Thanks, Rob. A couple of other remaining questions. The first one was, is the impact on increasing kind of hardware costs on the digital transformation program.

Yes, that's an interesting one. Of course, the AI boom drives the hardware cost across the board. So whatever you want to stack up your data centers with new hardware, there is a significant price difference if you compare it to 2 years ago or even a year ago. It's remarkable to see what that AI boom does. Look, in general, our IT spend is very much below the market practice. So we have some room to expand. We've taken those increased costs into our budgets for next year. So hence, yes, there is an impact. But as the part of the overall transformation costs and investment that we're doing, it is still an overseeable amount.

Another additional question has come in. Are you seeing more capable competition entering the market?

Yes. So it's very interesting to see. Of course, we get a lot of those questions. So what we see is, on the one hand, you have, of course, the traditional MFIs, MFBs and they are, of course, competition. I think what we do with the significant investments we do in both leadership and technology that we have not only a right to play, but certainly a right to win in basically all the markets. And then everyone says, of course, yes, but all those fintech players that are fully digital with an ease of use where you just touch of a button and you've got your loan disbursed. That is, of course, true. That is more personal lending than working capital loans, very short term, often very high priced.

So the interest rates are extremely high because the NPL rates are higher. I mean, I always say, it's easy to disburse $1 billion. It's difficult to collect $1 billion. And if you don't have that face-to-face model like we have where we combine the technology with our entrenchment basically in all the communities that we are where we can charge lower rates than all those fintechs can. So yes, of course, it's competition because our clients will also try. But they really cherish the relationship that they have with the loan officer. They understand over time that our interest rates are much better, and they're losing on the personal touch. So yes, of course, there's competition, and there's in some countries, stiff competition. But I think with the offering that we have, and certainly, the offering that we grow into with our human-led technology is a winning combination.

And the last question that's come through from the webcast just relates to India and whether there's any further updates on the whole deconsolidation process that's mentioned in the materials.

Yes, that's a good question. Thanks, John. Look, the winding down of the business from an operational perspective is progressing very well. So in Q1 of '26, 2/3 of the branches, staff and clients are reduced. So that's a significant step towards the full deconsolidation. Furthermore, of course, important for the fact to relinquish the license is the approval of the RBI. We have very good conversations with RBI. We've answered all their questions that has been confirmed by the RBI and we expect their imminent answer. And with all that, we hope to really put a close to it before the end of '26. But we're taking the right steps now, and I see a real on-the-ground progress.

Thanks, Rob. That's everything from a question standpoint. So I would like to take the opportunity to thank everybody who has participated in the webcast, those that have submitted questions. And by way of reminder, we have our Q1 business update coming out at the end of this month, on the 30th of April, where you can find out further about our performance during the first quarter. So thanks again.

Thanks, John.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ASA International 2025 Interim Results. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Jonathan Berger, Head of IR, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining ASA International's 2025 Interim Results Webcast. As you will no doubt already seen, we released our 2025 interim results first thing this morning. I'm joined here on the call by ASA International's CEO, Rob Keijsers; and CFO, Tanwir Rahman. Rob and Tanwir will run through the results presentation. Afterwards, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have.

Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer at the end of the presentation. Please be advised that if you continue to listen to this presentation, you are bound by this disclaimer. With the formalities out of the way, I'd like to now hand over to Rob for his opening remarks.

Yes. Thank you, Jonathan. And I would also like to add my own warm welcome to today's result webcast. Let's move to our performance in the first half of '25. It is clear that ASA International has carried over the positive momentum seen in '24 into the first half of '25.

I am pleased to note that we're seeing sustained growth, enhanced profitability and a strengthened balance sheet. We've seen continued operational excellence with our client base, having grown by 9% versus the same period in '24 as our client base stands at over 2.6 million.

Alongside the client growth, the outstanding loan portfolio, or OLP, increased to over $540 million and represents an 18% growth versus the end of last year. From an efficiency and productivity perspective, on average, individual loan officers are serving more clients than last year. This strong operational performance has also translated into significantly improved financial performance with net profit growing by 99% to $26.8 million in the first half of '25.

This net profit includes a one-off gain from hyperinflation accounting for Ghana and Sierra Leone of $2.5 million. Excluding this item, underlying net profit amounted to $24.2 million, which still represents a 73% increase compared to H1 '24. This profitability has boosted our return on equity to 46% in the first half of this year.

I also want to take the opportunity to note that this robust profitability and returns profile has meant that there's no longer material uncertainty in relation to the going concern in the 2025 interim financial report. Encouragingly, total comprehensive income increased significantly to $43.5 million in the first half of this year compared to $4.1 million in the first half of '24 as the negative FX devaluation impact was much reduced. It is this financial performance, which means we can continue returning capital to our shareholders, in line with our dividend policy.

Today, this morning, we announced an interim dividend of $0.048 per share, which equates to a 30% payout ratio in line with last year's interim dividend and represents a 60% growth compared to last year. Tom will dive to the financials in much greater detail later in this presentation. I'd like to take you along on our OLP growth, our outstanding loan portfolio. Here, you can see that our well-diversified portfolio is driving OLP growth with the portfolio effect helping to drive the improved operational performance we are reporting today.

On a regional basis, 3 out of 4 of our regional reporting segments have demonstrated loan growth in the first half '25 versus the end of last year. In particular, we can see that our African regions are now the 2 largest from an OLP point of view. Ghana's strong contribution following a combination of operational growth and of course, the impact of the appreciating Ghanian CD has been the main contributor to West Africa's material increase in OP this year. It is very pleasing to see that the growth in Nigeria and Ser this year, given the historic performance issues seen in the 2 countries before.

East Africa continues the largest segment with growth from each country seen in the first half. Accelerating growth in Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia is also highly encouraging alongside our traditionally larger markets in Tanzania and Kenya. In South Asia, we did see a reduction of OLP in the first half of this year. This is a direct result of the intentional shrinkage of our operation in India as we work to deconsolidate our business there. It is important to stress that as International is still growing significantly in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with both of these countries now benefiting from refreshed local leadership that's now in place.

And lastly, the Philippines and Myanmar both continue to perform well, and this is reflected in the region's positive contribution in the first half of this year. Myanmar's portfolio growth is a testament to the resilience of our operations and colleagues in that country following the devastating earthquake that struck earlier this year. I now want to touch on our excellent portfolio quality. This really reinforces the fact that we're not sacrificing asset quality in the pursuit of growth.

One of the benefits of the model is that it consistently delivers high portfolio quality as evidenced in the low group PAR 30 of 2%. This is a 0.2 percentage point improvement compared to the same period in '24 and the end of '24. Outstanding portfolio quality was consistently recorded in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Myanmar with a PAR 30 less than 0.5%. Also, we see a sharp improvement in portfolio quality in both Nigeria and Sri Lanka. Items to note include a low legacy portfolio quality in India, which fed into the decision to withdraw from this market. Also the Philippines, higher PAR levels seen in the last 2 time periods were due to the multiple typhoons which hit the country in 2024.

Now let's turn to our micro insurance partnership in Africa. This is something we've been rightly vocal about across our comps channels and has gained traction with the local media outlets, as you can see on this slide.

Following a very successful soft launch of ASA Life Care in Uganda in May, the product is now officially launched in Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria with plans to expand across ASA International's other African markets. This approach embeds enhanced credit life into ASA International's loan products, providing affordable protection for our clients for just $0.30 per month, covering credit, life and health-related risks.

And we expect that this will bolster client retention and generate additional noninterest income. This product brings added value and protection to our clients as we seek to deepen and broaden financial inclusion. I'll now hand over to Tanwir to review our financial performance in greater detail. Over to you, Tanwir.

Thank you, Rob. On this slide, we have set out the key financial highlights for H1 2025. Pleasingly, all these major metrics have moved in the right direction when compared to the relevant prior period. As Rob mentioned, we have seen strong profitability delivered by the business with reported as well as underlying net profit in H1 2025 growing markedly.

This time around, we have USD 2.5 million hyperinflation accounting adjustments, whereas in recent periods, this has been a drag on the income statement. This improved income profile has materially reduced our cost-to-income ratio, which demonstrates the operational leverage inherent within the business. On the balance sheet side, total assets have grown strongly since the end of 2024. Total assets have now comfortably surpassed the USD 600 million mark. This is yet another positive indicator with respect to the resurgence of the business and indeed our prospects going forward.

Total equity has also strengthened, supported by higher profitability and hence, retained earnings and a positive impact from foreign currency translation reserve. Lastly, we have total comprehensive income, which grew to USD 43.5 million in H1 2025 compared to USD 4.1 million in H1 2024.

Alongside the increase in net profit, this was also driven by currency appreciation, notably in Ghana. Now turning to yield and NIM. Here, we can see the continuing positive yield and NIM trends. Gross yield increased to 48.4% as we saw a positive mix effect with subsidiaries with higher yields increasing their proportion of overall OLP. Funding rates remained stable since 2024.

This meant that NIM increased by more than 4 percentage points to 39.6% in H1 2025. Lastly, in terms of the NIM buildup, we can see that the increase in NIM was predominantly driven by interest income. Now moving to the income statement. The NIM expansion I covered on the previous slide, alongside a growing loan portfolio drove the USD 38.2 million year-on-year increase in net interest income. In essence, there was a positive volume mix effect with H1 2025. On the face of it, other operating income decreased in H1 2025, when H1 2024 was positively affected and integral gain of the USD 3 million from the non segment agreement with ASA Myanmar lenders.

Excluding this one-off item, other operating income remained broadly flat period-on-period.

As a result of these components, total operating income increased by 39% year-on-year. This improved income profile was a key driver to the significant increase in profitability seen in H1 2025 versus H1 2024. I also wanted to flag that the effective tax rate reduced from 52.4% in H1 to 43.9% in H1 2025 due to a change in profit mix with greater contribution from lower ETR countries.

Structural reduction in our effective tax rate is still dependent on the implementation of franchise fees in 3 countries and the ability to capitalize tax losses in India and the holding companies.

Moving to the cost side. On the face of it, we can see a 24% increase in total operating expenses year-on-year. This increase in total operating expenses is due to the combination of business expansion and the impact of appreciation of Canadian City on USD translated expenses. As mentioned earlier, the cost-to-income ratio improved to 56.4% in H1 2025 from 61.7% in H1 2025. As can be seen from the bridge, this is mainly due to the growth in net interest income.

From a funding standpoint, we saw the company's funding position significantly increased to USD 597.3 million at the end of H1 2025 compared to USD 499.3 million at the end of 2024. We can observe growth in every funding category, except for microfinance loan funds, which in any event is the smallest category. As you can see on the chart, local deposits have increased in line with our funding strategy with the intention to grow further with focus on fixed deposits. The appreciation of the Ghanaian CD also

contributed to the growth in local deposits. It is also worth noting that the overall funding profile remains stable. USD 117.7 million of new debt was also raised in H1 in line with our overall funding strategy to support the growth of the business.

Lastly, we want the opportunity to highlight our favorable maturity profile with term loan maturities exceeding our client loan tenor, an indication of efficient asset liability management. Here, we provide a quick update on hyperinflation accounting. As a reminder, IAS 29 is applicable to hyperinflation economies and a key indicator for this is cumulative 3-year inflation to exceed 100%. Under this accounting standard, the balance sheet and P&L are adjusted to reflect the current purchasing power at the reporting date. These are noncash adjustments.

As of 30th June 2025, hyperinflation was applicable for both Ghana and Sierra Leone. For the remainder of 2025, Ghana and Sierra Leone expected to no longer be considered hyperinflationary. Nigeria and Myanmar are currently on the watch list. A key aspect of hyperinflation accounting is determining the net monetary position, which is monetary assets minus warranty liabilities. This time around, net monetary position loss of USD 1.8 million has been more than offset by a positive CPI adjustment for the for other P&L items of USD 4.3 million. This amounted to a net positive impact of USD 2.5 million on profitability in H1 2025.

As you can see from the top chart, hyperinflation accounting had a negative impact on the FX translation difference in other comprehensive income. The CPI adjustments balance out the FX impact. This contributed to a positive impact to equity for H1 2025. Now over to you, Rob.

Yes. Thanks, Tanwir. I want to take the opportunity to update you on the progress we've made in the first half of this year in driving long-term sustainable growth at ASA International. In the top right-hand corner, you can see the strategy house we shared at the time of the full year results. This demonstrates how we will seek to fulfill our mission of enhancing socioeconomic progress of low-income entrepreneurs by increasing financial inclusion.

As a reminder, the house has 3 pillars, which cover our plans to drive growth, build resilience and achieve sustainable impact. In terms of driving growth, we can see the progress across the board with strong operational and financial growth. We're rightsizing loans to better reflect the needs of our clients and consequently drive portfolio growth and client retention. Linked to this is the work well underway to develop a micro SME proposition. This will ensure we can grow with our clients and this closing the gap between microfinance and traditional banks.

Further product innovation is taking place in relation to a micro insurance offering that I just alluded to, which should boost the client retention as well. There have also been productivity enhancement with an increase of clients per loan officer. And lastly, of course, the imminent deployment of digital financial services, DFS, which is starting with Ghana and Tanzania should herald the acceleration of long-term growth. And the growth indicators I just highlighted, of course, need to be fully backed by greater resilience across the organization. our internal controls.

In terms of that, H1 has also seen progress across a number of areas. This includes strengthened executive committee at the group led alongside refreshed leadership teams in a number of countries. We are about to see greater system resilience with the migration to T24 as our core banking system in both Ghana and Tanzania later this year. Grace Fung, our Chief Risk and Compliance Officer, has already reinvigorated the risk and compliance functions. And lastly, we've seen improving financial resilience with reduced effective tax rate, rebuilt equity base and a much lower cost-to-income ratio.

The last pillar of our strategy relates to achieving a sustainable impact. Financial performance is the thing that will drive the achievement of our sustainability goals. And as I mentioned already, we've seen robust profitability levels in the first half '25. A key initiative has been us International joining the client protection pathway as we seek to ensure our clients are treated fairly and responsibly. We've also continued our community social and environmental programs. There's clearly much still to do, but I firmly believe we're on the right track.

As I referred to in the previous slide, substantial program has been made in our digital transformation program this year. Last year, we successfully completed the migration of more than 600,000 clients in Pakistan from our incumbent loan system to the Temenos Transact or T24 core banking system. The new platform means that the word transition to Sharia-compliant financial services is much easier than before. This success positions us well to move to the next stage of the rollout, which will focus on Ghana and Tanzania, and that caused a combined more than 500,000 customers. This time around will involve a core banking system migration alongside with the digital financial services implementation, our DFS app. Both of these country rollouts are due for later this year and will be key key milestones for the business. The work is already well underway in the rollout in Kenya as well, which is scheduled for the first half of next year.

Once Kenya has gone live, 60% of our client base will be managed through the new digital platform. Now moving to the outlook for the remainder of the financial year. We expect continued strong client demand for our products and greater efficiency in the business, which should translate into robust financial performance. We are providing some signposts for this performance. We still expect around a 20% growth in OP this year with a cost-income ratio that now stands at circa 60%. The latter is an improved outlook metric compared to what we disclosed at the time of the full year results.

But as a reminder, currency movements and inflation will continue to affect financial performance for us International. Then I'd like now to wrap up the presentation by drawing out the key highlights in the first half of '25. I firmly believe we've demonstrated that the first half of this year has indeed seen sustained growth, enhanced profitability and a strengthened balance sheet. And we will continue to drive operational excellence with further loan book growth combined with an exceptional portfolio quality.

The operational excellence has driven significantly improved financial performance, both in terms of net profit, but also in terms of balance sheet metrics, such as total assets and of course, total equity. We've got a very stable funding position with a healthy pipeline to support future growth. This financial performance will support the continued and growing capital returns to shareholders.

And as a final remark, I would encourage everyone to watch out for our new video titled Power, which is featured in the Climate Week interview series on cnbc.com. And the link can be found in this morning's announcement and of course, on our website. We've now concluded the formal part of the presentation. I'll hand back to the operator to open the floor to questions from the conference lines. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Milo Bussell with Cavendish.

Congrats on another great set of results and the progress you've made. micro -- a couple of questions for me. The micro insurance feels like a very interesting opportunity for you. Are there other regions you're looking to roll this out across? And then secondly, related, are there other adjacent service offerings you're thinking about introducing to enhance that client retention further?

Secondly, do you expect the NIM to be maintained around the 39% to 40% level in the first half? And then finally, how should we think about growth going forward? I mean, what do you think the split will be between further penetration in existing markets versus potential expansion into new geographies?

Yes. Let's start on the micro insurance. So first, let's focus on rolling out our ASA Life offering to all of Africa. I mean that is our first priority. And whether there's opportunities outside of Africa is to be seen. And as you rightly said, this is the main driver for client retention. Of course, it will give us fee income, noninterest income.

But in the end, once people have the insurance with us, they feel that safety net that they have from a financial inclusion perspective, that's extremely important. But for us, from a client retention perspective and to reduce the churn on our clients, this is, of course, one of the pillars that will help drive client growth in the near future. And maybe to your question on the NIM, 39% is high.

We expect it to be roughly at this level. It might soften a little bit in the course of the year and next year. But broadly, we believe that these levels can be sustained. And on your question on new markets, it's a very interesting one. On the one hand, I always say there's so much more opportunity that is untapped in our markets. I always use the example of Nigeria, for instance. I mean, 220 million people, 110 million women, 70% in the informal sector that gives us a potential market of 70 million, 80 million people.

We have less than 200,000 clients there. In Lags alone, 20 million people are there. So yes, we can grow substantially significantly further, and we will do so in the near future. However, we shouldn't close our eyes for other opportunities. I mean we want to grow further and further and faster and faster. And that means, of course, that we don't close our eyes for that. We have a couple of countries on our radar screen, not be too specific for now, but African markets are very close on our radar screen to at least test the waters next year.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Mayer with KBW.

I have 2 quick ones. First is on fintech competition in your present markets. You -- I think you said in your press release a different strategy? So that's my first question. And just on the second one, just around the dividend policy. I saw your interim dividend announced that's about 20% payout last year. Can you just remind us again of the dividend policy going forward, please, guidance around that?

Let's start with the fintech competition. Of course, we should never close our eyes for it. And of course, every potential competition is something to be very wary of. So that means that anyway, in order to compete with fintech, we need to make sure that our client journey is top-notch. We go from a very manual process, of course, via our DFS proposition to a fintech-like client journey for our clients where you can basically do everything on your app.

And if you look at the current fintech, there's a difference between full digital and of course, the hybrid human-led technology that we plan to do. I mean we will never take out the human interface because the fact that it's easy to disburse money, but very difficult to collect money -- and if big tech is disbursing money, they find it until now extremely difficult to also do all the collections with a par rate that is not even close to what we can offer. So never strike out the middleman.

So take out all the non-value-add manual processes, replace that for digital to ease the client journey, make our offering a lot more efficient so that we can scale in a very efficient way, whereby operational leverage is key. But it doesn't mean that we will remain very entrenched in our communities that we're very close to our people, that the loan officers know our clients that will never go away. So that is the difference between the full fintech and what we do, and I think we've got a winning proposition with that.

Then on the different segments. Well, we -- I highlighted shortly the micro SME proposition. That doesn't mean that we're drifting away from our core. The only thing is that we want to grow with our customers because what happens is microfinance often stops at roughly $500 and banks start at $5,000. After a couple of years that we serve them, let's take an example of a barber shop. The lady starts with a $50 kind of loan with a common apparel of scissors and all of a sudden, she's in a brick-and-mortar store.

She has 3 wash balls and all of a sudden, she needs $2,000 or $3,000. So it's not into a new client persona. It's stretching our client persona. We want to grow with our customers and therefore, be able to serve them. So we stretch it from real microfinance portfolio that will always be the core of our offering, but also offer something slightly bigger, which that we call micro SME. So that's broadening the segment without venturing in a new client base.

And last but not least, you asked about the dividend policy. I think that is in line with last year, whereby we have an interim dividend of 20% of the earnings. And for the rest of -- for the full year dividend, we aim to pay out 25% like last year. Of course, you've seen that the payout on the 20% is 60% higher than last year. Last year, we had a EUR 0.03 payout in the interim period, and now we have a EUR 0.048 payout, which I'm very proud of, very thankful also towards our long-standing investors that have been very patient with us.

And there are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to Jonathan to address written questions submitted via the webcast page.

Thank you. I have 2 submitted questions. The first question is around the digital transformation program and I guess, the expected returns profile for that substantial investment.

Yes. So what you normally see if you do a core banking transformation, you either never going to backward takes at least 10 years. So let's be very clear on that. It's also a license to operate. So it's not only an investment in digitalization and our client journey improvement, but it's also in order to stay in business, if we want to grow, if we want to have a mature and stable platform, if we want to pursue further licenses, for instance, you need to have a proper off-the-shelf core banking system because CR allows by a regulator to have a homegrown system.

But that aside, yes, what we see with -- if we take a very conservative stance on the payback period based on the increased number of clients per loan officer that we can serve. So the sheer amount what we can run on the machine will earn this back in roughly 3 years, which is basically second to none in these kind of transformations.

And the second question for Tan is the expected likely impact of any hyperinflation accounting for the second half of this year.

Yes. So according to the latest IMF information from which we base our IAS 29 application, Ghana and is no longer hyperinflationary and Nigeria Myanmar is on the watch list. But again, this -- the exact calculation will come out at year-end, December 31, based on what we have at that time from IMF.

And that's the end of the written questions. Thank you. I think that ends the call now.