PayPoint plc

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the PayPoint Preliminary Results conference call. I am George, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be listened only more than the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star N1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star N0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Nick Wiles, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the presentation of our results for the year ended 31st of March 2024. As you can see from our agenda slide, we follow the usual format with me covering an overview of our results, strategy update, our business review and our outlook. Rob will be covering the financials ahead of us opening up to Q&A. We turn to the overview slide. It's really pleasing to be reporting a really robust performance for the year, which I think very much underpins our confidence in the outlook for the current year. and it's really an important step towards our near-term target of £100 million EBITDA. I think it's fair to say we delivered a real standout performance in parcels and in digital payments. We made good progress in our other key growth areas. In the final quarter of the year, we streamlined our organisational structure and our cost base to support the next stage of our growth, and we're really pleased to announce today alongside these results our intention to commence a three year share buyback programme with a clear intention in the first year to buy back at least £20 million of equity and the potential to increase this further in years two and three. This slide very much summarises our financial performance for the year. The key financial metrics of the business as a whole are strong and the overall financial performance of the business has more than met our expectations for the year as a whole. We will cover the individual divisional performance in more detail later. But as you can see, the net revenue headline performance shows solid growth in shopping, slightly down in payments and banking, an outstanding year in e-commerce. Turning to the share buyback, this is the final slide in this section, which covers the share buyback program, which we're announcing today. We will commence the program with a buyback of at least $20 already to increase this further in years two and three, subject to our performance market conditions, our overall cash generation and capital needs of the business. With respect to dividends, throughout the period, we propose to continue increasing dividends at a nominal rate, resulting in our dividend cover moving beyond our current earnings cover range of 1.5 to two times to a cover of over two times by FY27. Following significant investments we've made in the past, and certainly over the past four years, which have largely been done in finance from our own financial resources, which have been necessary to build growth, this program is very much the next step in enhancing shareholder returns, whilst balancing the capital needs of our business, a strong dividend policy, and ensuring we maintain an efficient capital structure, which we see as being somewhere around one times net debt to EBITDA. With that, I'll now hand you on to Rob, who will take you through our financial performance in more detail.

Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. If we go to the first slide, that's got net revenues for the year of £181 million, which is up 40.4% or £52.1 million versus the prior year. Of this increase, £47.9 million is the inclusion of a full 12 months of love to shop, and the remaining £4.2 is from the pay point segment. I'll cover this in more details on the next slide. Underlying EBITDA of 81.3 million is an increase of 32.6% or 20 million year on year, again driven by the full 12 months of love to shop, which accounted for 16.8 million of the 20 and the remaining 3.2 EBITDA growth coming from the pay point segment. Underlying BBT for the year of 61.7 million is up 21.5% or 10.9 million on the prior year, with love to shop accounting for 100,000 from the pay point segments. Adjustee items of 13.5 million include 8.1 million of amortization of acquired intangibles. That's a step up versus the prior year, primarily because I've loved to shop inclusion. We've got 200K net movement on convertible loan notes and 5.2 million of exceptional items, which is 2 million in restructuring, 2.1 million of legal costs and defensive claims, and 1.4 million in respect to the recent refinancing. Diluted EPS, excluding adjusting items, of 62.6 pence is up 3.8% on the prior year of 60.3. And lastly on this slide, net debt of 67.5 million is down 6.8% versus the prior year of 72.4 million, which I'll cover in a few slides and cash flow. The next slide gives more detail on net revenues across the group. For the PayPoint segment, overall revenue growth of 4.2 million, is driven by strong performance in e-commerce, which saw revenue growth of 61.6% to 11.8 million, supported by transaction volumes exceeding 100 million in a year. Shopping provided positive growth of 3.9%, with growth in service fees, card payments, and other, such as FMCG, more than offsetting ATM and counter cash performance. This growth has been part dampened by a drop in payments and banking revenues, which fell 2.7 million year on year, And that's driven by the decline in legacy cash and bill payments, plus some one-off energy bill support scheme benefit for the prior year, which benefited digital to the tune of 3.5 million. In terms of love to shop revenues, the full year net revenue of 51.3 million compares to 3.4 million for the prior year, which just includes one month post-acquisition. And then we move on to profits. This slide shows the profit progression year on year. The first four columns to the left reconcile the prior year reported and underlying profits, with adjusted profits of 50.8 million before exceptionals of 5.6 and 2.6 million of other adjusting items. The next six columns in the middle of this slide show the drivers of the 200K increase in pay point segment profits. And we can see here the 2.4 million and 4.5 million revenue growth from shopping and e-commerce, part dampened by 2.7 million decline in payments and banking, plus cost growth of 3.4 million and 0.6 million extra financing costs, which I'll cover on the following slide. These movements give 0.2 step up in profits from 50.8 million to 51 million for the year, and the extra 10.7 million of profits comes from love to shop, giving overall group profits of 61.7 million. This slide gives a little bit more granularity on cost delta versus prior year. For the pay point segment, overall costs went up 5.3% from £75.2 million to £79.2 million. And you can see some of the drivers on this chart. Asset leasing costs of £1.6 million, investment in fuel sales £1 million, investment in people and salary increases of £2.4 million, finance costs of £0.6 million plus £1 million in DNA and other. And these costs have been part dampened by £1.1 million of PLC synergies and £1.5 million of lower fulfilment costs. and bringing in lot to shop costs of 37.2 gives an overall cost base of 119.3 million. In terms of cash flow, reported profits before tax, post adjusting and exceptionals were 48.2 million. And the key movements to get to the 57.9 million cash from operating activities are essentially DNA and working capital. For DNA, the 20.7 million for the year is up 10.2 million on the prior year, And the delta is really driven by 11 months' DNA from love to shop of 2.3 million, plus an extra 5.5 million of acquired intangibles, and plus an increase in pay point DNA of 2.4 million. Working capital was an outflow of 11.8 million for the year. And the three key drivers of that 11.8 are essentially, A, an increase in credit terms for a key customer, which is 3.7 million. B, an unwind in accrued acquisition costs, the love to shop acquisition, which is 3.2 million. gives cash generation of 57.9 million and after deducting tax of 8.4 million capex another of 17.2 million 0.1 of investments and 27.3 of dividends gives an overall inflow for the year of 4.9 million that's brought our net debt down as i said earlier from 72.4 to 67.5 million very briefly on the balance sheet The two most sizeable swings on this slide that I've really already covered, other intangibles, 8.2 million lower, driven by that 8 million of amortization of acquired intangibles. And secondly, on working capital, the 11.7 swing, which again is driven by the swings that I spoke of previously. On the last slide before I pass back to Nick on dividends, the 19.2 P final dividend is a progressive increase compared to the 18.6 P for the prior year. The 20 million share buyback Nick has covered and in delivering our three year plan, it provides the opportunity to maintain or potentially increase the level of buyback in years two and three, whilst targeting gearing levels of one times. And we will revisit the buyback in 12 months time to determine the level of buyback for year two. On capital allocation, we will continue to invest in capital expenditure to support revenue growth and the resilience of our IT estate, and also pursue investment opportunities that are of strategic importance to the group. On net debt, I've covered this mostly on previous slides, and the main outflows for FY25 will be dividends, the share buyback, along with capex and investment spend. On financing, this month we successfully renegotiated a new facility and have brought on board two new lenders in the last few months. This is a £135 million facility, of which there is a £90 million RCF, plus a non-armatisation loan of £45 million. The duration of the facility is four years and therefore expires in June of 2028. I'll now pass back to Nick.

Rob, thanks. Starting with our strategy, really on this slide, we've highlighted the really key building blocks we've identified to the delivery of our near-term target of £100 million. underpin each of these building blocks. In parcels, we continue to invest and grow our Collect Plus network to achieve our ambition to be the number one out-of-home network in the UK and to deliver an outstanding service to our carrier partners and their customers. Last year was a landmark year, with parcel transactions for the first time exceeding 100 million transactions. delivering a record net revenue contribution of £11.8 million, whilst continuing to grow the CollectPlus network to over 11,000 locations by the year end. Looking forward, our multi-carrier strategy and selective growth in our CollectPlus network are key to achieving our ambition of a network and a parcel channel which is transacting over 250 million parcels per annum. To this end, continue to expand our locations, work in partnership with each of our carrier partners to maximize customer out-of-home adoption and drive parcel volume through our network. We believe Collect Plus remains a great opportunity with scope for significant volume growth and network expansion from here. In card processing, in the past, I've described our card business as work in progress. The work we've done over the past year, I now believe we have the necessary ingredients in place to deliver a really important step change in the performance of this business and its positioning in the marketplace. We've grown both our Lloyds CardNet and Evo merchant estates over the past year, driven by the significant progress we've made in four critical areas. We've enhanced our merchant proposition We've strengthened our field, telesales and retention teams, increased the focus on retention and churn reduction, and increased investment in AI and data analytics to support these teams. We've established strong price disciplines and governance, leading to improved margins in both new and back-board business. And our customer support investment has led to a significantly improved onboarding experience for new merchants, including a halving onboarding time and a rebalancing of new contracts from one month a year ago to a majority now in excess of 12 months it's a combination of these actions that are leading to better margins and longer merchant lifetime value this progress in the infrastructure of our car business is a great platform from which to launch our lloyd's banking partnership later in the year which will bring in all of our new merchant experience. We believe after the hard work of the last few years, all the ingredients are now in place for this to be an outstanding business with significant growth potential and a genuinely unique USP in the marketplace. In open banking and digital payments, delivering a multi-channel payments platform supporting integrated payments across all payment channels is crucial to the growth and success of our payments business. Growth in open banking and digital payments is fundamental to this success and the transition we've had for some time now from our legacy cash flow payments business. Open banking adoption is an early stage in the UK, but growing rapidly. And I'm really pleased with our positioning in this area through our partnerships with both OB Connect and the Peridata. Our client list is growing strongly in corporate comp and broader open banking services and we're already one of the leading processes of open banking payments in the UK. The applications for open banking across our client base are significant, and we are well placed to continue our rapid growth in this area. Through our multi-pay platform, we continue to win new business, as well as enhancing the platform of payment services we offer our existing clients. We continue to win new business across a number of key sectors, including housing associations, charities, local and central government departments. And it's great to see the coordinated approach we're seeing already between the PayPoint and Love2Shop corporate teams as they work together to win new business. A combination of our capabilities in open banking and digital payments create significant opportunities for us in both existing client base and also in new client sectors. Turning to Love2Shop and Apart Christmas Savings A year into the acquisition of the Appreciate Group, it's clear we've bought a really excellent business and one that we can see has significant potential for growth. We've already begun the process of investing in the technology platform to support a better corporate customer experience. We've been investing into the corporate sales team to broaden our corporate coverage and our reach, and we've been reconfiguring our market resources to actually drive better value and effectiveness in the market. A great example of this at work is our high street vouchers platform, which over the last 12 months we've totally reconfigured, and as a result is now performing strongly. It's great evidence of the rapid turnaround we can achieve in a single year. The building blocks of future growth in these businesses are focused on expanding our partnerships for our love to shop rewards and prepaid saving solutions, expanding our range of products and services that we can offer our corporate clients, and leveraging the opportunities for our MDL card management services platform, where I think we've barely scratched the surface, and the growing delivery of our white label savings schemes, model on the enduring success of our Christmas savings. In addition, the growing collaboration between our pay points and love to shop corporate teams I've talked about already, and these are creating new opportunities and really showing an increasingly joined up business. A year on, I see great renewed energy and innovation in both Love to Shop and Park Christmas Savings, which we know are key ingredients to the ambition and expectations we have for these businesses. Turning to cash and local banking. Building a community cash access and banking network for both consumers and SMEs is a major opportunity for our business. And it very naturally builds on the network we've already developed, which today offers ATM and cash at the counter services. and the consumer cash deposit service for a number of the neobanks, including Monzo, Revolut, and Chase. We have the network coverage, we've got the technology, and we have a low-cost solution such that we can be an important partner to the high-strength Turning to our services for our retailer partners, one of our key objectives in recent years has been to increase the services we can deliver through our retailer network, to increase the support we can bring to a community, create greater opportunities for retailers to generate commission and income from being a pay point retailer, to drive revenue into our own business. On this page, we highlight the strong list of going services that we provide through our retailer network. From a time not that long ago when the primary service being offered was a bill payment cash top up, our proposition today has grown rapidly to a strong portfolio of commission generating services that we can offer, ranging from parcels, cash access, participation in FMCG brand campaigns, support of government services, and most recently, the addition of love to shop gift cards. The majority of our paper on retailers today offer at least three PayPoint services, with a growing number offering more than five through their store, when already we have further services in mind for the next phase of rollout. And this is really important to the continuing positioning of PayPoint and its services at the heart of the local community. Turning to the business review, I feel much of the financial detail in this section has already been covered by Rob. So I'll move through the next few slides relatively quickly and focus on the highlights for each business area, starting with shopping. Overall, positive performance from our shopping business with net revenue growing by three point nine percent and growth in both retail services and our car payments business. We've delivered a state growth in each of our products and then really turning to the highlights. Our service fee income grew by 10.1%, reflecting both an RPI increase in our fees and a growing pay point estate. Our card payments net revenue increased by 2.8%, with growth in both our EVO and Lloyds card net merchant estates, and growth in transaction volumes of over 4% in each of our front books. This performance reflects a good sales performance, better merchant retention, better pricing governance and better merchant onboarding experiences throughout the year. Our performance in the ATM business is still not where we want it to be and we're in the process of taking further action internally to improve our estate performance and our retailer compliance. This is a solid business and I expect us to make progress in recovering this performance during the current year. Looking ahead, there are a number of emerging opportunities beginning to scale in the business, including the growth of our FMCG brand campaign engagement, on foreign currency offering, and the expansion of our partners for saving super agent network. Turning to e-commerce, a really strong performance in this business with net revenue up in the year by over 61% to 11.8 million pounds. year. Our carrier partners continue to grow, and selectively we are growing our Collect Plus estate, adding new locations where we see they bring value to the network. We continue to invest in our infrastructure to support the network, including a further rollout of printers across the estate. As we look forward to emerging opportunities in the current year, we are broadening the range of services we offer each of our carrier partners. Expanding our network into locations such as universities and hospitals, and our Collect Plus network and established carrier relationships are now well set to deliver further significant growth as an out-of-home deliverer becomes even more important to the choices available to both carriers and consumers. Payments and banking. Our overall performance showed a small decline in the year. Although after excluding the prior year benefit of the government EBSS scheme, our digital payments net revenue was up by almost 10%. Cash through to digital, orderly flat, and our cash flow payments and top-ups were down 2.5%. So overall, I think a solid performance in the year. The underlying performance of multi-pay and our digital platform remains encouraging. the new client business pipeline expected to deliver another strong year for both in-year and recurring year revenues. Our cash through to digital business appears now to have stabilized, looking ahead with further growth from a combination of new client schemes and growth in the neobank cash banking activities, some of which I've described earlier. In cash bill payments overall, we saw a much more stable H2 after the weakness experienced in H1. In the current year, The impact of the reduction in the energy price cap and continued tight family budgets will impact our prepaid energy transaction volumes, although to the extent to which we see a decline is still not clear during this first half. Looking forward, new business growth looks well established across a number of sectors, including housing and charities. As I said already, early collaboration between the pay point and the love to shop teams is encouraging and already delivering results. as we continue to expand further both in open banking and provision of government services. Love to Shop. Overall, a good first year contribution for both Love to Shop and Park Christmas Savings. As we indicated in our Q3 statement, the Love to Shop corporate buildings came in a little lower than we'd anticipated from the peak Christmas period, but the Q4 bounce back, although seasonally less important, was better than expected. and it's pleasing to see part Christmas saving billing showing modest growth year on year. Finally, strong performance from MBL with the value process on this platform up 36.9% in a year. Turning to the highlights, as I've said, encouraging progress in part Christmas savings and a positive start to the outlook for the 2024 year. We're already looking to the 2025 savings campaign the opportunities we have in mind to drive further buildings growth there. As I've said already, after a week Q3, we finished the year well in Love to Shop corporate and we've been strengthening further our platform in this area and our sales team to better position ourselves for growth in the current year. As we look forward, we see significant opportunities for growth in Love to Shop delivered through new partnerships, the expansion of the MBL platform and investment in some of the key areas for growth in the business. We're making good progress in growing Love to Shop gift card sales and our retailer network, developing partnerships in this area, and in part Christmas savings, we're now looking to expand into white label savings schemes. Already we have a number of live conversations with interested parties. As I indicated at the start, a year on from the acquisition of this business, it's clear there's significant opportunity to accelerate growth in both Love to Shop and part Christmas savings. Turning finally to the outlook for the business, and perhaps like every year, there are a number of key ingredients to our outlook. Firstly, we've done work in the final quarter of last year to streamline our organizational structure, reduce costs, and give ourselves the opportunity to invest in the key growth areas across the business. In terms of trading, early into the year, it's clear that the consumer behavior across a number of our business areas has remained subdued. although most recently I would say less so, and as such our expectation remains that the consumer outlook will continue to improve as the year progresses. We remain confident in the prospects for the business and the actions to be taken to underpin growth for the year ahead and the delivery of our medium term financial targets. We remain confident in delivering further progress in the current year and our commitment today to a share buyback of at least £20 million over the next 12 months as part of a three-year program and alongside our increased final dividend for the year, further reflects our confidence in enhancing returns and delivering for our shareholders. And with that, very happy to answer questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star N1 on their touch-tone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. Our first question comes from the line of Joe Brandt and Bibiru. Please go ahead.

morning gentlemen congratulations on a good set of numbers three questions if I may maybe take them one at a time firstly you talk about 250 million parcels which is obviously well more than twice where you're currently running what's the sort of time frame of that and what are the key key parts of that business that is going to deliver that growth

there's always the danger when you put a number out there that you then have to sort of kind of work back from that. I mean, I think, look, I think we slightly want to celebrate going through 100 million, because that in itself was a target that was well beyond us a few years ago. Having said that, I think that the very specific plans we've got when we've talked to each of our carrier partners, plus clearly the benefits and the opportunities from out of home consumer adoption and the direction of travel there gives us real confidence actually that there is momentum really building actually for consumer out of home adoption. It's great that sort of big carriers such as Jodl and actually our partnership with Vinted is a real opportunity to drive store to store volume. And that's clearly a channel actually with Vinted customers really appreciate and actually really value. And I would like to think that having got our raw mail network to 5000 sites by the middle of July, that will begin to sort of ramp up in terms of volume as raw mail put more of their parcels actually through our network and actually to our out of home locations. And one shouldn't underestimate the value that we're seeing actually in the partnership we've also developed within post. I would say the groundwork has been very much developing the carrier partnerships, working hard with them to move consumer adoptions and experiences to the right place, all of which actually says we've got the building blocks. I would like to think within the next two to three years to get towards that target of 250 million parcels through the network per annum.

Thank you. And the second question was around your super agents. I think that's kind of got to the 1700 level, and presumably that recruitment focuses on the Christmas period, so a bit of a pause now. What are your plans, what are your thoughts about how you develop that network over the rest of the year and beyond?

Yeah, look, I think that a year into creating that new channel actually for Progress for Savings, we have to think about how we balance the support of that against some of the other initiatives around growing sort of essentially prepayment saving schemes for specific events. And I think it's going to be one of those moments where we've got several conversations live at the moment around other major organizations that are looking at prepaid saving schemes. And we're going to have to balance which of these support, which of these we actually support. Part of my hesitation is that I think one of our own criticisms internally, and I think certainly amongst investors, has been don't try and do too many things, but do the things you do, do them well. And I think we're going to have to balance how hard we go with the next phase of our resource it needs to succeed there versus actually the similar commitment and resource requirement to succeed in other prepaid savings schemes. So I think year one in, we learned quite a lot. We recruited retailers well. I think we recruited savers through those retailers less well, and I think there were some learnings there which we would need to apply So the next Christmas savings campaign, which is for 2025, and I think we'll need to reflect on that, as I said already, balanced against how we use the same resource to drive other prepaid events and whether they potentially generate more value. So I would say that the super agency year in is work in progress, and then how we take it forward from there needs to be balanced against the other opportunities in prepaid savings products.

Thank you. And then finally for me, you've obviously announced this major partnership expansion with Lloyds. Could you give us an indication of how and when that will start to impact numbers?

Yeah, I mean, this has been quite a long time in the development, if I'm honest with you. And I think the reason being because how we develop our card processing business and infrastructure and i think i'm just going to the page in our presentation deck page 17. um really what what page 17 in in the deck is very much about is saying that you know in the second quarter um of of this current financial year so sort of in that period from july through to september we'll be in the first phase of that roll out of the lloyd's card net partnership and then we go for a full launch really from the first of october So from the 1st of October onwards, all new card merchanting business will be written onto the acquiring platform of Lloyds Card Net. And as you see, that's very much driven by further enhancement actually in the proposition. And by that, I mean 12 months fee-free banking in terms of a business account, competitive commercial card offering. And I think more importantly, you know, that whole sort what they need in order to be quickly onboarded with a really broad proposition, next day settlement, a merchant app, plus actually the enhanced banking offering as well. So I think with the groundwork that we've already done in terms of improving our engagement with our merchants, improving our governance and pricing discipline, this will be very much the building block for the next stage, actually, with Lloyds. So we hope to be in full flight actually during the final quarter of this calendar year on which to be writing new business.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Donnelly and Investac. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. Can you hear me?

Morning, Michael.

Great. Nick, just two from me. Nick, on open banking, there are some extraordinary growth forecasts out there for the market, both globally and in the UK. Do you have any sense right now for what your realistic addressable market in the niche that you're choosing to play in is for UK open banking? And following on from that, what major threats do you see on the road to getting to capturing your bit of the TAM? And then secondly, The parcels business and the 15 student unions that you're active in now is extremely interesting. Can you just give us a small brief case study of precisely which services it is you're delivering in these places at the moment? Just to get a clear idea in our heads about how that service operates on a campus as opposed to in a convenience store.

Thank you. Michael, thank you. If I deal with open banking first, the honest answer is we don't know. I think that open banking as a payment channel is evolving incredibly quickly. And I think we're only beginning to understand what the sort of full range of open banking tools can actually do to support payment journeys. More importantly, actually, the broader way in which consumers are able to understand their accounts to budget and actually make better financial decisions. For us, open banking means a number of things. Firstly, it means confirmation of payee, which is becoming increasingly familiar to consumers and to corporates. We are actually really growing very quickly in supporting the corporate market there. And I think there is that really material and sort of quantum scale growth that we can see for our confirmation of payee business and the way we support our corporates. And that's obviously in partnership with OV and Connect. Secondly, in terms of payments, I mean, very clearly, open banking payments lend themselves very well to the sectors that we support. That's housing, that's energy, that's charities. And I think our penetration in those markets is today relatively small, but growing very quickly, as I said already. Our open banking platform is already one of the largest open banking payment platforms in the UK in terms of transaction volume. And again, I think that's going to grow strongly double digit, both in open banking cop and open banking payments. So I think we're talking about quantum double digit growth really sort of compound over the next three to five years. In the other area, which is actually the area of information, I think the ability to support Agencies like Citizens Advice is a great example of actually working in partnership with the PERI data to actually create an open banking framework platform so that actually in the case, for example, of Citizens Advice, we can actually give them the tools to support their customers as they come in needing support around payment planning and importantly actually sort of managing their finances. I think that's another area which is growing quickly Similarly, we're using that same technology and platform capability to support utility companies when they start thinking about how do they apply and use the right rules and support for discretionary credit. So I think each of these key areas of open banking are largely in their influence, growing quickly, and I think that we're really well placed. And I really genuinely mean, I'm not quite sure yet how fast and how big they could be, But it's really good for Paypoint to be in a position to be at the front end of something rather than actually sort of follow on in terms of growth opportunity. On parcels, I mean, I think a really good case study is probably Leeds. It was an early adopter. And the student union leads have been a very early adopter of actually sort of creating a pick up drop off location actually for parcels. And we've seen really, really good volume from that student union location. And what it's done is actually become a real enhancer to the out of home proposition for that local area. And what we see is not only the lead student union volumes grow, but also the volumes of the locations that are offering collect plus grow in the immediate vicinity to the lead student union location purely because the adoption rate from consumers goes up. And, you know, we've got something similarly running with Durham. We've got some other strong university performances as well. And I could easily see a network here of 30, 35 universities really enhancing actually the collect plus network proposition into the right demographic, into the right age group for sort of early adoption of out of home delivery. And I do think actually, you know, as we move into hospital locations, it will give the same ability to support a different demographic and a different working community that probably needs support for pick up and drop off out of hours, given the particular sort of timing of working constraints in, for example, the National Health Service. So I think, you know, that's a really good example of actually using a new channel and a new sort of, you know, sort of network channel to enhance the Collect Plus network.

Nick, thanks. That's really great. And just quickly, when you talk about transport hubs, does that mean mainly railway stations where I normally see all the bank of Amazon sort of boxes? Is that what you're thinking in there?

We are actually. And I think that's, as with all, it's all very specific and it's all about identifying the right location that actually supports and complements the existing network in that area. And it's interesting how, you know, there have been one or two conversations we've had around very specific opportunities. You know, we've had some conversations, for example, with some builders merchants around things we might better do with them. And it's all around sort of looking how each new channel complements and strengthens the overall Collect Plus network. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, you may press star and one. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions. I hand back over to Nick Wells for any closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us this morning. We have our AGM on the 1st of August and we'll be releasing our Q1 trading update on the same day and very much looking forward to catching up with you in the meantime. Thanks for your attendance this morning, interest in our company. Have a good morning.

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