ASA International Group PLC

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ASSA International 2035 Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. 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. Thank you all for joining ASSA International's 2025 Four-Year Results Webcast. As you will no doubt have already seen, we released our 2025 results first thing this morning. I am joined here on the call by ASRA International CEO Rob Kaisers and CFO Geert Embraers. 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're 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 revealed webcast. Let's move to our performance in 2025. It is clear that ASA International had an outstanding year in 2025, with our profits doubling and impact scaling across our operating markets. I'm very pleased to note that we're 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 2025, with our client base standing at 2.8 million. Alongside this client growth, the outstanding loan portfolio, or OOP, 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 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 308 in 2025 from 290 in 2024. This strong operational performance has translated into significantly improved financial performance, with reported net profit growing by 98% to 56.5 million in 2025. 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 2025 from 33% in 2024. 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. And 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 2025 of $14.3, which is double the amount paid for 2024. 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 and regulatory compliance. Lastly, we've driven additional product innovation with the launch of our micro-insurance products, where we now have 740,000 life 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 May 3rd. When this is combined with meeting the evolving and growing working capital needs of our clients with larger ticket sizes, as evidenced by OOP per client growing by 36%, we can see that gross OOP 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 want to move to our digital transformation journey, which is, of course, a major program in the way 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 terminals-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 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 reserves roughly 300 clients. If this average were to move to 600, then it's easy to see how the business can efficiently scale whilst retaining the valuable face-to-face time between the 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 it all mean from an execution roadmap perspective? In terms of country rollouts, we focus on the highest impact by migrating the largest countries 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've 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 the different regions. Here you can see that our well-diversified portfolio is driving OOP 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 two largest from an OOP 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, Tanzania and Kenya. In West Africa, Ghana's strong contribution following a combination of strong operational growth and the impact of the appreciating CD has been the main contributor to West Africa's material increase in OOP 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 two countries. Let's move to our Asian segments. In South Asia, we did see a growth in OOP in 2025. 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 2025 in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with both of these countries now benefiting from refreshed local leadership in place. Lastly, the 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 kiosk, the Myanmar kiosk, versus the central bank rate, as was used in 2024. rather than any underlying operational issues. Accordingly, Myanmar's gross oil P reduced by 23% on 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 2025. 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 ASA model is that it consistently delivers high portfolio quality, as evidenced the low group par 30 of 1.8%. This is a 14 base 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 half a percent, reflecting best-in-class field discipline. but also Myanmar and Ghana are in the next group of countries which sit in the 1-2% bracket, which is still industry-leading in asset quality. Nigeria is strongly improving and sits slightly above this level. And the last category of countries is those with higher Part 30 levels, and this typically reflects the fact that these countries are in the midst of transforming their operations in a new leadership. I'll now happily hand over to Geert to review our financial performance in greater detail. Geert is our new Group CFO for February this year, and Geert, a warm welcome to you to your first webcast.