Alexander Forbes Group Holdings Limited (AFH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the live webcast of the Alexforbes Interim Results Presentation for Financial Year 2023. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the webcast is being recorded. I would also like to bring your attention to the disclaimer and forward-looking statements slide on Slide 2. I have with me today Dawie de Villiers, Chief Executive Officer; and Bruce Bydawell, Chief Financial Officer of Alexforbes; Ann Leepile, CEO, AF Investments; and Viresh Maharaj, Executive Customer Experience and Strategy. Please note that the presentation material as well as the full results announcement is available on our website. And with that, I would like to hand over to Dawie. Thank you.

Thank you, Zak. Welcome, everyone, to our half year results presentation. We've got a whole team, and we'll definitely allow time for questions at the end. We've ordered some thunder in the background for effect. So if you hear that, it was planned, and hopefully, it comes at the right time. That's the disclaimer and the team, as was introduced by Zak. Glad to have all of you here. And hopefully, it will add some value to the presentations and certainly the strategy looking forward. To always start with our purpose, and it continues to get legs to live and to feed the system of Alexforbes as we navigate this journey to try and impact people's lives through the advice and solutions that we deliver and obviously, the insight that we pioneered to get it done. I think it's landing with the clients. I know it's landing internally with the staff and you know the progress that we're making along these lines are really significant. I want to start the presentation by just recapping quickly the concept of impacting people's lives. We have constantly said we have a focused business. We've sold our insurance businesses, and we have a core few capabilities that we concentrate on, and that is the administration, the consulting and the investments. Those are the cornerstones in the wholesale employee benefits market that we deliver. I'm not going to unpack that again, and we can certainly talk about those and why it's there and what it's doing for our business. But ultimately, if we have the consulting businesses being in touch with our clients, what our clients want to deliver, their needs, we have the administration that it's based on the data that we need to actually deliver that service and then the investments that ultimately gives the returns, and the wealth gets created by the investment returns overall. So that integrated approach that we've landed through the One AF model is working for us. It's working great for our clients and certainly something to build on. What is a natural flow from that is looking at those individuals that we have in the system that we're doing administration for, that we're talking to about health benefits, that we're providing investments for and to really connect with those individuals. And that is the big part of the strategy going forward, helping them through their journey whilst they save when something happens in their lives and also when they retire. The benefit we have is to give them wholesale pricing in terms of their retail needs. And if we really package that whole thing and you look through, then we can demonstrate real value to them, real change in the outcomes and definitive improvement in the outcome. So that's what we're about. And that journey has started. We're on that journey. And hopefully, you'll see the progress in that journey as we go forward. Certainly, we are hearing the feedback from our clients, both retail and institutional, in terms of how that progress is making a difference in their lives, and that is one box ticked. Now it's about getting the values to the bottom line. I want to start with a few -- you'll see the theme, obviously, for this presentation is about our sponsorship with the ArchAngel, the boat. You'll see the theme coming straight through, and we're obviously quite proud of that. If we think about the highlights in a different way for the 6 months, and we think about, firstly, the business has been many parts of the business like Investments, the Performer fund and certainly our umbrella fund is over 25 years old, celebrated 25 years in this 6 months, gives us credibility, gives us the scale. It's been around. It's something that will continue into the future and certainly helps with the sustainability of the business, the trust that has earned over time and obviously gives us that track record. So very proud of this 25-year anniversary. And then we've had quite a few of innovative ideas flowing in the 6 months, which we're also proud of. I think you can't grow if you don't continuously think about new things to do that really impact members. And in our line, you can see in that box, quite a few, not with -- only stopping with the brand refresh, building a new investment product with navigator, which we've talked to the whole market about. I'm not going to go into the detail. But if you think about the way that we call it evolve consulting model, the way that we consult, the way that we pitch up in front of umbrella fund clients, and the way we inform them and the way we give them feedback, that is really new age, new thinking and making a difference in the lives of certainly our clients. So lots of new exciting things, which talks to innovation and definitely talks to the future, which we're quite impressed with and quite proud of. Lots of industry recognition and not just the normal award for best administrator and best consultants through PMR that we've won now for a few years, but also acknowledgment from the industry with regards to our transformation, with regards to our future-looking, forward-looking impact that we're making. And that is exciting. That is really transformative for us as well and hopefully we will continue to make an impact in the business. And then our force for good, as we call it, our CSI initiatives, our sponsorships and certainly the impact that we're having in the market. We've been talking about this for years in our annual report. But certainly, it's becoming -- it's coming alive in what we're doing amongst the staff, amongst our communities and certainly amongst our clients. So very proud of what we've achieved from that point of view and the impact that we are making. But we must recognize that we are still in difficult times, upside-down environment to operate in and the risks are high. And not only just the volatility of the market, we can think about monetary policy tightening, we can think about electricity supply, all of these things that worry us on a day-to-day basis is adding to the risk in the system for SA Inc. and certainly adding to the risk in the system for us as Alexforbes. We're actually quite proud of how we've navigated the route in this environment. I think we were prepped quite well during COVID, and we've changed the business in a way that we can navigate these stormy waters. But it is something that we constantly have to look at, constantly make sure that we take our clients with us during this tough period, certainly take our staff with us and our shareholders to understand how we're going to produce the right results during this high-risk environment. And as we all know, in the last week or 2, I think that risk has just heightened, and we continuously look out for that. If we go to the actual results, I can probably spend most of the time on the operating income growth of 8%, very proud of that. You as shareholders understand that our growth comes 60% from the financial markets, our assets under management, and we know that's been quite negative during the 6 months. For us, our average assets, as you can see, they increased by 3% year-on-year, which did produce growth in the revenue on assets, but muted. And certainly, our new business of the previous year, our ability to increase fees because of great service and because of higher inflation on administration and consulting and our growth in those areas have delivered an 8% year-on-year growth, which is -- which we're very proud of, which we think is excellent in this environment. And now it's a question of hopefully getting some of the tailwinds into the future. The profit's down, as you can see, and as has been recorded as a result of the increase in expenses. Bruce will unpack that a little bit later, but suffice to say that none of the expenses were unplanned, none of the expenses were outside of what we wanted to do. It's a question of investing in the business, in people, systems and into the future. So we understand the result as the way it is, the differentiator basically being the market. Happy with our dividend of ZAR 0.15, as we indicated at the end of last year that we will change the dividend policy to pay out a higher percentage of the earnings and that led to a ZAR 0.15 -- 25% increase and a ZAR 15 dividend. New business is the one that supports our growth strategy. It doesn't just happen with more salespeople. It happens because of the whole system working, with the whole organization working, with the integrated approach coming together, with the brand supporting us, with the trust being earned, with the actual delivery in the market for our existing clients, which leads to more clients wanting to be with us. So that's our half year number of ZAR 86 million annualized new revenue added to the bottom line, which means that in the 3 years in a row, we will add ZAR 140 million to ZAR 150 million to ZAR 160 million per annum to the bottom line, about 3% growth in revenue just from new business year-on-year-on-year which led to the great growth in operating income, but also gives us the confidence that we are on the right track, continuously doing more of the right things. And it's now becoming a continuous number and a big number where a lot of you 2, 3 years ago asked me about this mature market and how can we grow in this market and specifically the headwinds that South Africa Inc. is facing. Yes, despite those headwinds, despite the lower employment, despite the EB market being a declining market, we're growing at ZAR 150 million per annum in addition to our current revenue. So very excited about that. And hopefully, that will continue into the future. I'm going to leave those other blocks for later and for the team to unpack. I'll touch quickly on Retirements and a few other areas before I give over to Ann to do the investments bit. The Retirements story is all about the new business and all about the members under administration. And you can see the massive increases in members under administration. None of this is included -- is any of the Sanlam funds included that we're going to get across in the next year. This is all new business. Despite the retrenchment story, despite the decline in employment, this is our growth in members as a result of the new business. The retrenchments are much lower than what it used to be, closer to pre-COVID levels. But despite that, we added a lot of new business. And then the rest of the revenue is basically because of consulting, Retirements consulting being able to charge increases on their services in line with inflation, which leads to an 11% increase in operating income, which we're obviously very proud of, a great success story in the Retirements space. Healthcare, an even bigger story. We've shared with you at the end of last year, the new business that we achieved in the normal health care broking, and that is part of the 6% increase. And we've maintained that number during the 6 months. That's helping us to get a big growth in operating income. And the other very attractive part is our advice in the health care, which grew by 78%. We had a lot of new business in that space. It also shows a little bit to the need in the market for more advice in terms of health care. People are under stress, people need the help, and our team are there to help these corporates and certainly navigate these tough times. So that's a great story for us on the health care. On the Multinational, which includes Botswana, Namibia, Jersey, and our Arrive strategy, which we've talked about a lot, is doing very well with regards to growth, a big turnaround, specifically for Namibia and Botswana, which have struggled in the recent past. The business coming together, leading -- getting some new business wins and the Arrive strategy is continuing to grow as we spoke about in the past. So outside of South Africa, a real positive growth. We've had a client loss in Namibia, which leads to the loss in members. But all in all, great opportunities, great growth and the reconfigured businesses in Botswana and really looking poised for growth into the future, which we're quite excited about. And then I'm going to hand over to Ann, who's going to talk a little bit about the investments business, more than just the numbers. And hopefully, it will be quite a highlight for you during today's presentation. I'll be back a little bit later after the numbers from Bruce.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us for this call. So I think points that I would like to note for the Investments results is, in my mind, a really impressive increase in our institutional blended margin. We have, over the past several years, reported a reduction in institutional market -- in institutional margin, but very similar to the rest of the industry. So this was very good in terms of a result, but really mainly as a result of the asset mix change, we are seeing a lot more allocation to the alternative space in a number of our institutional portfolios in particular as well as well done to the finance team on this one, the ability to negotiate better asset management fees. This has helped us, and this is often where the benefit of having leverage has come in. Closing total assets has gone down from the 1st of April to 30 September. But also, once again, that is really as a result of market movement. So of the ZAR 22-odd billion reduction in assets, ZAR 19 billion of that was pure market movement. So over 80% of that was a result of the market, which points to our blended market return, a reduction of 4.1% when the equity markets were down a lot more than that, also talks to the positivity of having a wider asset mix than pure equity, which I think is positive relative to some of our competitors. Obviously, it's challenging market conditions, and we all recognize that. It has been tough, but we're still happy with the fact that we were able to achieve a growth in average total assets. And once again, like I spoke to, an improving institutional margin. Just in terms of the multi-management positioning, we often talk about why multi-manager versus why single manager. It has really been the best year to explain the value proposition of multi-management. This has to talk to the risk-based approach of investing in multi-manager. If you look at -- in all our surveys, if you look at, for example, Performer, I think I'm going to put up the Performer numbers a little bit later, you are able to actually see that over the longer term and over some short-term periods, Performer remains above median and over a number of periods in first quartile. That speaks to the ability to pick both a far wider range of investment philosophies and investment managers that has benefited our ability to generate better risk-adjusted returns. We are also looking at increasing the allocation to the alternative space, ZAR 20 billion plus at the moment and expected to grow that over the next few years. Obviously, the improvement of the infrastructure landscape and the impact investing landscape will make it easier for all of us. The team is increasing the capabilities in the investment team within the alternative space. That means that we are able to put more people on the ground, making sure that we are putting the right assets into the portfolios. We also get asked a lot around the 45% allocation that was regulated in the beginning part of the year. We've not gone to 45%. I know a number of our competitors have upweighted quite dramatically. A number of our underlying managers have also upweighted quite dramatically. We have maintained an underweight position in offshore allocation simply because we were of the view that strategically, we still do not see the need for a 45% allowance. Also, in keeping to our benchmarks, we did not believe that it was the best core. But actually, over the past month or so, we have done a marginal upweighting to the offshore allocation. Like I spoke to in terms of the multi-manager sell, if you look over there over a 1-, 3-, 5- and 10-year basis, this is a result that we are very proud of in terms of, I suppose, what would be our flagship fund. Obviously, in terms of absolute performance, we are all under some severe pressure. But the relative performance of Performer is one that we really are proud of. What we want to show you here is the fact that the manager that is #1 over some periods will not be #1 over other periods. So the single manager selection tends to be quite a riskier proposition to a multi-manager proposition. Maybe finally on my side, when it comes to sustainability and transformation, we are really trying to be very serious about leading the change as a force for good. The pressure on ESG integration in our portfolios is something we are feeling keenly amongst our clients. It is something we are feeling keenly internally in the business as well, but we've got to make sure that we do it right. It is important for us to be able to contextualize the ESG need of a South African market, of a South African investor base and of a South African business. What is it that we are meant to prioritize and what is it that we can put out for a little bit later. We will be coming out in the next few months with a far stronger stance on how it is we are going to implement this force for good, and we're really excited about all the conversations we are having both internally and externally on that. In our minds, the private markets program is really a good way to enhance sustainability of the South African economy, enhance the sustainability of the ESG proposition in our business, and that is something that we are also, as I said earlier, going to increase over time. The transformation policy launched in May of this year is another one that, in our minds, really does speak to ESG. It speaks to ensuring sustainability of the fund management industry. And we really look forward to coming back to you over the next 2 to 3 years with a progress of how we see the industry as having, I suppose, transformed -- speaking to transformation, has transformed over time. And that is something that we believe that we've got the ability to actually make a real change in. We will also be exploring additional opportunities to collaborate with industry participants. Let's make sure that we use all our voices, all the leverage we've got. Let's speak to other fund allocators. Let's make sure that we understand the client need so that by the time we do come out with a sustainability model, we have got one that is suitable for, most importantly, our members. So I think that's really it from my side. Coming up next is Viresh to discuss the retail proposition.

Thank you, Ann. It gives me great pleasure to be able to speak to you about this business unit because for us and certainly personally, it represents the biggest opportunity that we have as Alexforbes to make a difference in people's lives. We'll touch on what we mean by that and how we're going about trying to leverage that opportunity. But firstly, looking at the results over the past 6 months. Very pleasingly, the closing assets under advice have remained relatively flat over the reporting period. Now this is in the context of the market movements that we're all aware of and that Ann has gone into a bit of detail describing. Yes, in the retail space, given that the majority of our book is made up of pensioners, these are relatively more conservative portfolios, but they are delivering according to their label to deliver the kind of stability that these customers and clients are looking for. Bearing in mind that given that this is a large living annuity book, there would be drawdowns on a monthly basis. So the ability and the result of being flat over this period is something that we're quite pleased about. What we're not as pleased about is the reduction in new business flows arriving out of the Financial Planning Consultants unit within individual consulting. This is down on a year-on-year basis, and we attribute this result due to resourcing constraints given the competition for scarce skills when it comes to retail advisers. We've picked up and certainly the market's picked up a number of new entrants, and there is increased competition to attract and retain advisers. I'll go into a bit of detail on how we are addressing the situation a bit later, but this, we believe, has affected this result right now, but we do anticipate a remediation in this flow over the coming -- for the rest of the year. AFRIS itself, the Alexforbes Retirement Income Solution product has delivered pleasing growth over the period. In fact, since inception, which is only a few years ago, it's grown to just over ZAR 15 billion in assets under advice and management. Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with the product, it's effectively a retail product that is priced on a wholesale basis. So unit trusts, preservation funds, retirement annuity and a living annuity delivered through to retail customers, but at wholesale prices, which explains the growth that we've seen, but also sets us up well into the future as the two-pot system itself starts being implemented, and we anticipate an impact on people's lives through the mechanism of AFRIS itself. The retention rate speaks to our net retention rate of members who are exiting at withdrawal stage, who are choosing to stay preserved with Alexforbes, and we see a marginal reduction over the reporting period that we attribute largely to the financial constraints that the typical retirement fund member is now experiencing given the larger macroeconomic context that they are not just funding for retirement, but trying to meet their daily financial needs. For the first time, we are also starting to quantify and will be expanding upon our reporting when it comes to in-fund assets. So where a member has exited a fund but has chosen to preserve or annuitize using an in-fund solution, we are starting to showcase those numbers. And for this period, we've got a figure of ZAR 2.6 billion, and it's a number that we will continue to report on into the future because we do anticipate that as a result of the regulatory change and member behavior as well as increasing awareness of these capabilities that more and more members will elect to preserve and annuitize using these solutions. Now I've mentioned that we are taking this as our primary strategic opportunity, and it is a very exciting one for us who have been a traditionally institutional business to turn our attention to the retail space to our members to understand how we can make an impact on their lives. And as I've said, this is the biggest opportunity that we've got to make a difference. Now the formula that we're applying to do so is very simple, and it's what you see on screen. It's about having a scalable retail advice capability using the footprint and the foundation from our consulting and administration base to engage members to apply retirement benefits counseling to provide members with access to information, but also to act as a lead generation capability feeding our retail advice pipeline. Our digital transformation initiatives are all calibrated towards engaging members to make it easy for them to access advice, easy for them to transact with us as Alexforbes and making it easier for them to succeed over the long term. Now this has to be backed by member-oriented solutions. And so our product development capabilities internally are now calibrated to developing a range of solutions to encourage engagement, utilization as well as access to best-of-breed solutions delivered through our best advice model. And what's been a successful initiative to date is the relaunch of our brand earlier this year, which was again done very much with the intent of creating awareness of who we are and how we can help individual members through their respective life stages and their respective journeys. Now on the next slide, there's a lot of detail, which I'm not going to work through, and you can cast your eyes over that as I give a bit of a voice over. But effectively, the point I want to land with you here is that when it comes to resourcing, product development and digital transformation, let alone the brand work that we're doing, we are investing heavily and predominantly with a view of enabling and capacitating and delivering upon our retail ambitions. So we do -- we are on an aggressive drive to not just retain our existing financial adviser force, but to grow that force substantially and aggressively over the near term. And we're putting in place the mechanisms and the infrastructure to do so, let alone many of the other initiatives that you can see on screen, which speak to really amplifying our ability as Alexforbes to grow our reach and connection with each and every one of those individual members who we currently serve through the institutional context and we now hope to serve in their individual financial services capacities as well. With that, I'd like to hand over to Bruce.

Thanks, Viresh. I joked in the staff presentation this morning that this is the most exciting part of the presentation now. It's always great to get into the numbers. So I'll be taking you through the income statement, just a view of the overall income statement as it's been reported. We will go into a bit more detail around operating income and the operating expenses, as indicated at 8% and 14% by Dawie. This results in an operating profit of 9% down. We've also experienced a higher-than-usual provision in our cell-captive within our nontrading items, and I'll take you through some of that detail as well. Our income tax expense rate is at 31.7%. It's still high. And if you look at the underlying normalized view, it's even higher than that, and it is an ongoing issue for us to deal with this expense rate through our restructuring. The loss from operations -- discontinued operations is an improvement from the prior year where significant provisions were made in our AF Life business. That business was sold at the end of March, and we are continuing to run that business down, and they have incurred a few additional losses in that business. So I'll talk to that a bit later as well. As Dawie mentioned, we're very, very pleased with the growth, the 8% growth in operating income. It is in the context of difficult market conditions that, that 8% represents really good fundamentals with regards to some of the growth initiatives that we've taken in the last couple of years. So a number of new business initiatives and things coming through, which have impacted those numbers very well. Just to clarify, there is -- 1% of the 8% is actually inorganic growth and is the income that we received from EBS International, the business that we bought and was closed out in July. So the underlying organic growth of 7% is still very pleasing. We're also pleased with the progress made in -- with regards to our integration with EBS, and I think that there's some exciting opportunities happening in that space. On the expense line, clearly, 14% is not sustainable and high, and we understand that, but comes on the back of building capacity as well as some cost pressures and some of the timing that's happened in our expense base over the prior year -- first half of prior year versus the second -- the first half of this year. Underlying payroll costs have increased by 9%, and that comes off the back of a 3% increase in headcount. So in addition to the 3% increase in headcount, we also had increases given a little earlier in this year, again, off the base of a 0% increase in the prior year for most staff. The cost pressures in technology have been a bit of an issue in terms of some of the suppliers that we have from offshore, a little bit higher than expected from our -- for our application and license fees. In addition, we've also starting to recognize the developments that have happened over the last 2 years, and that depreciation is coming through the income statement. One of the things that has been fairly good in the last 6 months is our finalization of our property lease arrangements with our landlord. We have managed to land a number of tenants coming into the building, and they have been moving into the building over the last couple of months. So pleasing results in terms of the subleases, which should impact our property expenses going into the future. In addition, we've also settled on the renewal lease at the end of September 2024, which will bring substantial savings to our income statement. We've indicated that these savings are ZAR 150 million a year. It should impact our cost-to-income ratio by at least 350 basis points. It is going to take some time for that to come through the income statement. So the impact of that -- those savings will actually only land in the financial years 2025 and 2026. But it's part of our new ways of work. We have rearranged our footprint and are now setting up our property for the hybrid model with our staff. Just another point of information on our expenses is that over the last 3 years, if you do take the average expense increase, it is just below 7%, which is in line with inflation. And it is still our commitment to remain within the inflationary or inflation plus 1 sort of growth rate in our expenses over time. Moving to nontrading items -- moving down the income statement to non-trading items. You'll notice that we have experienced a loss in our professional indemnity insurance cell-captive. That's off the back of some provisioning that we've made with regards to historic issues that we have, which have recently become more prominent. This does not indicate an increase in our E&O experience at the moment. It is -- these are historic issues. And as we indicated to the market, the insurance cell-captive program is essentially our first insurance layer. And over time, given the premiums that we pay to the insurance cell-captive and the experience of claims losses, it should tend towards a 0 result. And you will -- if you go back in the last 2 years, we have experienced profits for the last 2 years. So this loss comes off the back of that. We also had some additional corporate transaction expenses. You will note from our results that we have indicated a number of corporate transactions including the EBS transaction, the share listing or the change in shares from Mercer to Prudential as well as some of the transactions that we've had with Sanlam and more recently, the acquisition of the [indiscernible] business. So all of these corporate transactions have cost, and that's where the cost comes through the nontrading item. With regards to weighted average number of shares, there is a decrease in our weighted average number of shares of 3%, and that's off the back of some of the share repurchases that we've been doing over the last 12 months. And obviously, that impacts our headline earnings per share from a total operations perspective. We also have declared a dividend of ZAR 0.15, which is in line with our dividend policy at 100% of our normalized headline earnings per share. We have made some progress, continuing to make some progress in terms of our solvency capital requirement, which has declined by 12%. Our regulatory surplus has also declined as a result of the dividends that we have paid out over the past year. So -- but we still sit with a healthy surplus of ZAR 1.2 billion, which is essentially 1.9x cover on the regulatory capital. Our available cash at ZAR 589 million remains fairly strong. And as a result, we have and are comfortably paying the dividend of ZAR 0.15. Return on equity has improved, and that's largely as a result of some of the items in the prior year half year results versus the fairly strong growth that we had in the second half of last year. That return on equity is the last 12 months number. Just finally, a status update on our -- on some of the corporate transactions that we have completed. As indicated, our group risk and retail life business was sold to Sanlam, and that sale transaction went through in March of 2022. We are running down the AF Life license. There's still approximately ZAR 400 million worth of claims to be paid out of that license. And we anticipate that it will take probably another 12 months for us to settle and close out those claims. There will be a process thereafter of shutting down and liquidating the license. There were some negative reserves built in the AF Life business, which are coming through on the discontinued line. And that is as a result of some claims experience, largely with regards to PHI claims. And ultimately, the underlying cause of that has been ascribed to long COVID within the claims base. With regards to EBS International, as indicated, that closed in July of this year, lots of good work being done there with regards to looking for and making sure that the synergies are achieved specifically in terms of systems changes that will be happening in some of our countries with regards to Namibia and Botswana. We're all aware of the change in shareholding from the Mercer 15% and the fact that Prudential and LeapFrog have through their company, New Veld, have taken up a 33% shareholding in Alexander Forbes. That transaction happened successfully just after the year-end in June. The purchase of the Sanlam stand-alone business has also closed. It was effective on the 1st of November. Things are going really well there. Lots of integration work being done. I think we did indicate to the market when we announced the transaction that this is a 2-year process whereby we will be taking on over 33 clients. That list of clients has grown by another 13 on top of that. And we are working very hard with those clients to obtain approval, make sure we go through the regulatory process and have those clients onboarded. All of those -- that project is taking a lot of capacity within Alexander Forbes, but ultimately, it's going very well, and we're pleased with the results that are happening there. Lastly, the sale of our LISP business, AFICA, to Sanlam is in process. Lots of complex agreements that have to be finalized as a result of the conditions of that agreement. But we do believe that, that transaction is imminent and should be concluded before the year-end. From my side, I think that that's it. I'm going to hand back to Dawie just to conclude.

Thanks, Bruce. I can't add anything more exciting than the numbers, Bruce. So thanks for that. And it's just one slide, and I'm certainly not going to reiterate everything that's on this slide, but I think every 6 months when we give the feedback, I feel more positive and mainly more positive because of the client feedback, but also because of the strategy is being implemented and coming to fruition. So the difficult times that we go through kind of supports and underlines the fact that we're on the right track. And never mind the 8% growth in revenue and all of those and the dividends and so forth, it is actually, for me, the indicator is the fact that the business is growing. The business is handling the pressure of the external environment very, very well, showing the sustainability of the business into the future and then obviously having the positive feedback from the clients. So great. The question is, how do we translate that into peak growth into re-rating, into -- adding to the NAV of the business. And hopefully, today, you could have -- you would have seen that it is happening. It is there. It is coming through. We're investing in the right places, and we're certainly seeing the growth in the right places. It is important to continue to invest. We could have sat and said stop a few projects because the markets are down for the past 6 months, and therefore, you'll get a better outcome, net profit after expenses if you stop some projects. That would be wrong. And we've continued and with the Board's input, obviously, continued to invest in the business, continue to certainly invest in the individualization strategy, in the automation on administration, which is key for us to be able to scale, key for the growth and obviously, to help with the capacity. So we've continued with that. It's on track and it's going well. The transactions and the implementation of the transactions that we've done has gone exceptionally well, specifically EBS, which was the first one and the work that has been unloaded into the wider Alexforbes has been phenomenal. The areas, the touch points, all of that is looking great. On the Sanlam transactions, ahead of target, ahead of what we thought, unraveling in a very positive way. Bruce knows the numbers, but I think more than 50% of the revenue is already decided, signed over to us, 10 clients already signed over to us in terms of coming across, and it's a one-on-one negotiation into the future. So all of that going very well. Looking forward to the start of the journey with Glacier for our retail clients and for our advisers. I think that's going to be an exciting time for them as well. So all in all, looking very good. Our journey with transformation and our journey on CSI front including our future journey on sustainability, ESG really excites us. This is something that we can really transform the industry. We can really make a difference in South Africa and really invest. With our capability of assets under management, our buying power, we believe we can make a difference in South Africa for the benefit of individuals, for the benefit of the wider South Africa. And we're really on a journey to try and implement that and make good on our promises in terms of making that difference. And then as I keep on saying, it's bad timing for a company that's come through a turnaround and a big strategy change to have so many headwinds and so many uncertain terms around us with regards to macro, with regards to SA politics, all of those things impacting the higher risk environment and the volatility. But the way that Alexforbes has come through this is actually commendable and shows us that there's high growth opportunities in -- with a few tailwinds coming our way. So I think I'll leave it there, leave it on that slide while we take questions. If you can make your way to the waterfront on the -- Cape Town Waterfront, not Knysna. You'll see the start of the Cape2Rio Race on, I think, the 2nd of January, where our boat will hopefully be in that pack and leading the pack and quite excited about that as well. So I hope to see you there. Happy to take any questions. Or, Zak, read the questions that's already been asked. Nothing yet. We're going to allow a few minutes for questions. Difficult not to see the people. I've had a few requests of why don't we do this in person. And it's probably time -- not that we've ever had this in person, but it's probably time to try and do that into the future. But happy to take any questions, anything that's uncertain. And then obviously, afterwards, Zak and the rest of the team, we are all available for clarification. Nothing? No questions. I'm seeing myself on the screen, and that's an uncomfortable position. So either you must ask questions or we're going to close the call. Bruce, I think you were very, very clear on the numbers so that nobody has to ask any questions.

[indiscernible]

Sorry?

We have no questions.

Have no questions. Okay. Thank you very much. Enjoy the holidays. See you in the new year and rest well. Looking forward to more challenges -- tackling more challenges into the new year. Thank you very much for joining us. Keep well.