ASA International Group PLC ($ASAI)

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 learned, we released our 2025 results first in 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 client growth, the outstanding loan portfolio or 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 for 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 million. 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, here, we'll 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 Phase III. 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 tele-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 and operational leverage, the digital transformation program will provide the tooling to increase loan officer productivity. The loan offs app will simplify onboarding and applications. and will eliminate manual processes and excess paperwork. Combined with this, we're exploring reducing the frequency 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 get some context, at present on average, each loan officer reserves 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 selling. So meeting their expectations is essential and future prudent business moving forward. So what does that all mean from an execution road map perspective? In terms of currency 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 MSB, a banking environment scenario, which will allow for more efficient rollouts going forward. With the addition of Enea, which is planned for this year in 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 reads. 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 and for instance, on Tanzania and Kenya. In West Africa, Ghana's strong contribution following emanation of strong operational growth and the impact of the depreciating CD 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, first, the central bank grade as was used to '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 the low group are 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 in the next group of countries, which sit in the 12% 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 power 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 for 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 are 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 as we saw a positive mix effect with the subsidiaries with the higher yields increasing more and giving a higher OP 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 load assignment agreement with ASA -- 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 Ghanian -- 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. 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% and 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%. 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 51% 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 job 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 increase 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 Ghanian 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 million and $0.6 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 by greater resilience across the organization. And in terms of the resilience pillar, '25 also been -- also seen a 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 Tango, our Chief Risk and Compliance peer, has been busy reinvigorating the risk in appliance 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 in a way, 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 reconfigured 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 leverage of pool 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. Here, 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 market. 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 teams. 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 financial success of ARS 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 a business as usual. Appreciate we still -- day in the conflict. But any color 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 can you 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 pasta around sure 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 an 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, 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 them 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 to 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 dealer transformation. Yes, that's, of course, a very interesting one. So I mentioned just to take 1 metric or 1 KPI is that 300 clients are served by 1 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 1 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 offer. 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. The -- 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 area 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 the '24 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 won't be, we can roll 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 had 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 on 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, had a number of FTEs roles 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 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 sort 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 distribute 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, you had a question on MSME. Maybe a bit broader first. I mean I think up until now into 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 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 question, 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 the Philippines for us has been stable on roughly 360,000 clients for a while. But with a 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, MFDs 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, stage 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 of staff of 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 it 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 who have submitted questions. 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.