Vanquis Banking Group plc (VANQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. I'm Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive of Vanquis Banking Group, and it's great to be with you today. On the call with me, I've got Gareth Cronin, our Interim Chief Financial Officer; and Miriam McKay, our new Head of Investor Relations. And as you know, this is my first trading statement since I joined some 11 weeks ago. After our interim results on the 28th of July, I talked to many of our shareholders and analysts for the first time. And from those discussions, we promised to provide you a fuller than usual Q3 trading statement, so here we are with that today. I hope that what we will share with you today will demonstrate not just that we've listened, but that we are taking action and responding positively. So while it is still early days, my objectives for this call are to give you some more detail on the immediate actions that we're taking, what these do to improve the 2023 financial profile of the group, and to provide some early guidance points for 2024. And to do that, I want to cover 4 key points: what I've observed about the business in those first 11 weeks enrolled, the positives and the issues and what we're already doing to improve things, the key points from our Q3 trading update, which we issued earlier this morning. And Gareth will talk you through the key numbers. And then how we see the outlook for our business over the rest of 2023 and as we enter 2024. We will provide a fuller outlook for 2024 and beyond when we present our full year results and our Capital Markets Day, which we are committing to hold on the 27th of March 2024. So look, if I start with what I found so far, fundamentally, I believe that we have the basis of a really good business here. And what allows me to say that? Well, I've experienced a business with a strong sense of social purpose, a business that helps to put our approximately 2 million existing customers on a path to a better everyday life and a business that our customers are positive about already. Our Net Promoter Score in cards, for example, is a very respectable plus 56. And while there is upside, that is a pretty good base to work from. We're also a business operating in a growing market of around 15 million working people in the U.K. who find it difficult to access credit from the mainstream banking system. And we have a few competitors who are purely focused on this customer space in the way that we are. And we have structural advantages, too, including access to retail deposits. Our customers vary, but in the main, they are the U.K.'s nurses, police constables, social workers, construction workers, retail workers, taxi drivers, teachers, painters and decorators, the list goes on. I describe them as the spine of working Britain. We are also blessed with passionate, experienced colleagues who care deeply about delivering great customer service. But while this is all good to find, it is clear that we also do have challenges, and they need to be addressed, and we are addressing these at pace. The main challenges I would call out are that the business has been product-led and siloed with significant duplication of functions between the product lines. We need to immerse ourselves in the financial needs of our customers and think about them the way they do, providing them with broader integrated solutions for their financial needs. We have also not been focused enough on profitable growth. While we can demonstrate an ability to deliver absolute growth, our net receivables were up 26% year-on-year in H1, and they were trending even higher for the full year, but this growth was causing NIM erosion, and we need to strike a better balance. We have also not been disciplined enough on cost management, so our cost base is disproportionately high. So to sum up, what I find so far, we have a large and growing addressable customer market to serve, an existing customer base who need us and who value us, motivated people, a significant opportunity to rightsize our central cost base, and therefore, overall, I see great potential in our business. Now over my banking career, I've developed the belief that if you can understand your customers' needs better than anyone else, then you can help your customers better than anyone else can. From that, you become relevant, you become necessary or even essential in your customers' lives, and being that builds loyalty and that allows you to grow long-term revenue. We've already commissioned a detailed review of our target customers, their lifestyles, their financial needs, their decision-making, looking at where we already help them and where we could help them more, and we'll tell you more about this at our Capital Markets Day. If you focus on your customers, transaction values and revenues will grow. Then as long as you keep your cost controlled, your jaws widen and everyone gets happier. Banking should be as simple as that. And I've spent this first period at Vanquis working with the team to review every product line and every call center against those simple beliefs. And my message for today is therefore equally simple. We have quickly assessed the situation we find ourselves in from H1, and we have taken decisive management actions to begin to improve. The actions we have underway already are on cost reduction, margin improvement, continuing to invest for future growth and strengthening our leadership team. So let me expand a little bit on those. On cost reduction, we are moving to a simpler organizational structure, built around customers with clear accountability and 0 duplication. We are moving from 3 product Managing Directors and their individual teams into a structure with a single Chief Customer Officer and bringing all of the previous silo teams together into single centers of excellence. I was really impressed with our outsourcing arrangements in South Africa when I visited there in August. We have an efficient, well set up operation that we can build on there. So we announced an extension of those arrangements last week. Together, all of these initiatives mean that we are removing 350 roles, of which 120 operations roles will be transferred to our outsourcers. For your ease of reference, 350 roles is just under 20% of our total current workforce. And doing all of this will deliver around GBP 60 million of cost savings within the 2024 calendar year, and the cost to achieve that GBP 60 million savings is just under GBP 6 million. On margin improvement, we are making sure we've got the banking basics right. That includes actions to improve our margin and better manage our new business volumes and mix. We are introducing price increases to reflect the increased cost of funding that we have experienced. In September, for example, we applied a 1.8% price increase in vehicle finance. We put through a 2.36% increase for about half our credit card customers because we're very careful to exclude certain segments, including the most vulnerable. And there is another 2.8% price increase already agreed that after the Notice of Variation period will go live in cards in December and therefore, further help our NIM and our risk-adjusted margin as we run into 2024. Now obviously, these actions will have a greater effect on subsequent periods than they have had in Q3. But nevertheless, taking immediate and decisive action means we are already starting to see an improvement in our profitability. If I turn to investing for the future, and we will provide a fuller update on the size of the opportunity that we see in the future at our Capital Markets Day. But to capitalize on the opportunity we see, we do need to keep investing in continuous improvement. And our technology transformation strategy is well defined. We brought in Jem Walters from Snoop as our new Chief Technology Officer. And while he came with the Snoop acquisition, he was also the outstanding candidate in our full market search. Jem brings deep experience of both mainstream banking and credit card platform build as well as great fintech and cloud knowledge built through his 5 years developing Snoop. We are, though, temporarily pausing our current IT transformation spend, just to give Jem and the team some time to look at the work we have underway with fresh eyes and to ensure it does align to our strategy review work that we're running through Q4. And look, while we're on the topic of Snoop, just let me say that this is an asset I'm delighted with as well as helping customers better manage their money, the data and analytical insight we get from Snoop is invaluable. In fact, the data packaging that we have within Snoop represents 25% to 30% of Snoop's current revenues. There are about 7,000 Vanquis Banking Group customers who've already found Snoop for themselves, and they're already using it. We know from the analytics that I've just talked about that they are 42% more active than the average Snoop user. And so they're benefiting from the average GBP 100 a month savings that Snoop delivers to customers. That helps customers be better off, means that they're on their way to making themselves a better credit risk. And by the end of this month, we will be marketing Snoop to the first 100,000 tranche of Vanquis customers. This helps us be relevant to our customers and build that customer loyalty that I talked about earlier. If I then turn to recruiting talented and experienced individuals into key positions, one of the things that I've been really encouraged by is our ability to recruit people with great capability and experience from top class institutions. As well as Jem, that I've been nice enough about already as our new CTO, you'll also see that we've announced Dave Watts, who will be joining us as our new Chief Financial Officer from HSBC on the 1st of November. As well as Jem and Dave, we've also recruited a new Head of IR, a new Chief of Staff, and we've made an offer to a new Chief Customer Officer and we'll be announcing a successful candidate for the Chief Customer Officer role over the next couple of weeks. To complete my executive team for now, John Natalizia, CEO of Snoop, will caretake our Chief Digital and Analytics role as we review the market for a permanent candidate for that role. So the team is full. So look, we've got out of the blocks with pace and determination, and we can show tangible progress over the last 11 weeks. But before I hand to Gareth to talk about our Q3 performance, I did just want to acknowledge that there are always 2 sides to rightsizing a business and especially in doing so at the pace that we've set out. On the one hand, getting a business into fit, leaner shape, does generate much of the same energy and motivation that you get from embarking on a personal fitness campaign. But those of us who have done that personally know that getting fit can also hurt and we are making hard decisions in Vanquis. It is never pleasant when you have to say goodbye to decent hard-working colleagues. And we are doing that with humanity and humility. It is necessary, but it is not easy. And I want to take a moment to thank all of my colleagues for their immense professionalism while we go through this difficult process. Let me now hand you over to Gareth, who will tell you about our Q3 performance. Gareth?

Thanks, Ian. And I would absolutely echo gratitude to all of our colleagues as we push through the transformation of our business. Good morning, everyone. With respect to performance, I'm glad to see the group return to profit in the third quarter. This has been driven by cost reduction and lower impairments. We continue to grow our net receivables but by a more reasonable 5.7%. Total net receivables are just over GBP 2.2 billion at end September. This is the result of deliberate action to moderate growth. We have repriced proportionately in cards and vehicle finance, which reflects and responds to the increasing cost of credit within the interest rate environment. This will help support NIM in Q4 and beyond. Despite the continued macroeconomic uncertainty, the performance of our book remained robust, and the group's move to lower risk customers was reflected in lower loss rates. It's important to note that whilst cost of funding has increased, the group has repaid all unsecured wholesale debt, which has been replaced by more efficient retail funding from Vanquis Bank. The cost-to-income ratio has fallen by 3.8 percentage points to 62.4%. And as for Ian's earlier comments, we will continue to focus carefully on our cost base. We continue to hold significant capital and liquidity resources above minimum regulatory requirements. Our CET1 ratio remains in line with our previously guided target of 20%, which includes any confidential management buffers. The last comment I would like to make about Q3 is with respect to CMC activity in our Moneybarn Vehicle Finance business. In Q3, we saw a drop in the level of CMC complaints and our uphold rates remained low. We remain committed to focusing on and resolving genuine customer complaints. Furthermore, I would reinforce that we have never used discretionary commission, and therefore, we do not have a conduct risk in that respect. Now moving on to our outlook. We've given you an estimate as to where we expect full year adjusted PBT to land at somewhere between GBP 25 million and GBP 30 million. This is largely as a result of management actions with the big delta between Q3 and year-end being lower impairments. Our cost guidance today is we expect to deliver cost savings of around GBP 60 million within 2024, approximately 80% of these savings are expected to be recurring in nature, and the exceptional costs to deliver these savings in 2023 is estimated at GBP 6 million. We've given you a sense of other trends, we're expecting to continue as we look forward into Q4. These are: a move back to disciplined returns-focused growth in net receivables following continued action to moderate growth in Q4, further support for NIM, which is expected to exit 2023 in the range of between 17% and 18%, and continued low levels of impairment, and continued investment in customer proposition and our technology platform. Given the FY '23 profit profile we are describing to you, it should come as no surprise that we've said today that we expect any final dividend payment for FY '23 to be no more than 1p per share. That is in addition to the 5p per share we paid for the first half. And we'll tell you more about our thinking on capital allocation and dividend policy at our Capital Markets Day scheduled in Q1. Thank you. And Ian, I'll hand back to you.

Thank you, Gareth. Again, let me thank you for the fantastic job that you've done as you have helped me learn the business and get to grips with everything. In your time as interim CFO, you really have done an amazing job and I genuinely appreciate it. So I just want to say that. So look, I hope this has helped give you a clearer picture of the shape of our financials going forward. The changes we're already implementing, the foundations that we have to build upon and probably most importantly, the principles upon which you will see us manage the business from here on. I want to end again by talking about customers, understanding, our customers better than ever and targeting their needs through custom insight will be at the heart of what you see us invest in, in Vanquis, and you'll see us do that under the theme of what we describe as customer obsession. While our metrics look silent at the moment, we do remain vigilant on the macroeconomic picture and the financial resilience of our customers, but our focus is what can we do to help them. So that's the story for Vanquis in Q3. Actions taken a pace, but more still to do. And in a nutshell, you're seeing us apply our own customer purpose to ourselves as a bank. So we are reviewing our own income and expenditure to put Vanquis on the path to a better life. None of this is easy, though, and I'm sure there will be bumps in the road, particularly given the pace we're working out, but we are making progress. For the moment, I think if you ask anyone at Vanquis Banking Group, they will say they can already see evidence of a change of direction based on a change in management style that prioritizes customers, sets clearer financials and demonstrates a bias to action. We hope that's come across to you and what we have shared with you in our update today. Thank you for your attention, and we will now be delighted to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question today comes from Gary Greenwood of Shore Capital.

I've got a couple, if I can. So first was just a general question maybe on the strategy review. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the things that you're looking at, particularly there, the various trends and how you're thinking about that? And then the second was on costs. So you've obviously given some guidance on costs and cost reduction for 2024. I wonder if you could just talk about the sort of base level of cost for 2023 that people should benchmark that from? And then also whether there's any seasonality within the cost base, noting the improvement in the cost-to-income ratio that you saw in Q3?

Gary, thank you. As always, you go for good value, 3 questions for the price of one. If I take strategy review, yes, look, this is the work we should be doing as a priority, but we've obviously spent a lot of our time getting some immediate actions taken to improve the position that we found at the end of H1. So the strategy review work we're calling project North Star, and it is literally that. It is taking apart our business through a series of what is actually 22 deep dives into every corner of it to make sure we understand at a granular level exactly how things work and that we look at the opportunities grounded in the research we're doing with customers, around where their needs are. And as I mentioned earlier, where we serve them already, we want to make sure that we are absolutely the best we can possibly be in that. But we also want to be clearer on where else they might like us to help them and start building solutions out in those areas. A small example would be we know 9% of our vehicle finance customers by panel vans. Now no one can tell me that they are driving their children around in a van with new seats and seatbelts in the back. I think if you looked in the back of those vans, you'd find paintbrushes and pain pots or window cleaning equipment or whatever. So we want to understand, can we help these customers through a small business perspective rather than just viewing them as a retail customer. So lots to come from the strategy review, and I really look forward to sharing the outcome of all that work at our Capital Markets Day. On costs, I'll maybe get Gareth just to do the detail on this. But look, you've seen us take a pretty big bite out of our cost base. And some of that is catching up the guidance that we previously put out on costs over the last couple of years, which, frankly, we haven't been as tight on delivering as we could have been. So we're making up for that. But it is around removing duplication in the main. The structure that we had did lead to multiple data teams, marketing teams, digital teams, all doing great work and working hard. But actually, we want to create 1 team to do 1 thing, so that we've got clear accountability and not duplication of costs. So Gareth, maybe you could just touch a bit on the cost base and where we've taken the GBP 60 million from and then maybe the seasonality point that Gary asked about as well.

Sure. Well, if you looked at the half year presentation, the underlying costs were GBP 140 million, the total costs were GBP 157 million. So if you essentially double that and add in for inflation, the cost of the outsourcing to South Africa and the purchase of Snoop that brings you to a consensus of in the around GBP 330 million. So that's where we started from in terms of reducing the GBP 60 million. The slight reduction in the cost-to-income ratio in Q3 was driven by management action, the removal of discretionary spend, tightening around real cost disciplines. We would expect that type of moderate reduction in Q4 also ahead of the real benefit of those -- that GBP 60 million coming through in 2024.

And seasonality, anything on that?

Not particularly, I think in Q3, you'll get a steady state like we have this year, so nothing particular on that.

And Gary, the only thing I'd add on seasonality. I mean, naturally, we see people spend a bit more on their credit cards over the Christmas period. That's why you've seen us moderate our receivables quite considerably for Q4 just to give us a little bit of headroom there as well.

And our next question comes from Corinne Cunningham from Autonomous Research.

Could you give us some idea on costs to deliver? You talk about your adjusted profit expectations for the year. But would that mean that your net H2 result would actually be a loss after booking restructuring costs? And then perhaps if you can also give us some guidance on your capital ratios. And I guess, if you are expecting depressed profit in H2 with some growth, that would suggest that your capital ratio, CET1 is going a bit lower. So what do you expect the floor to be on that capital ratio?

Thank you, Corinne. Cost to deliver, we called out in the presentation about GBP 6 million of implementation costs to get out the GBP 60 million of costs that we are announcing this morning. And as I said, that is a big bite out of our sort of GBP 330 million cost base. And I think that GBP 6 million for GBP 60 million and the fact that GBP 60 million, about 80% of it is in perpetuity, it continues, just illustrates that this is the right thing to do. We don't believe we will make a loss in H2. Obviously, we haven't finished H2, and we do talk about external variables, but we're pretty confident that we're on a good path now to actually be profitable. We've seen that sort of improvement in profitability through the months of Q3. And capital ratios, we talked about the 20%. We're pretty comfortable with that. But again, Gareth, anything you want to add in on those?

No. At the end of Q3, our capital ratios say that 20%. The fact that we'll return to profitability and maintain profitability in each month to year-end sustains the fact that we will continue to have that 20% ratio, at least to year-end.

Most companies, when they talk about cost to deliver is kind of a multiple of the cost savings. Why is it so little for yourself?

You can't win, can you? Look, it's very -- it's a very good payback, right? Basically, we've -- because we're taking out duplication and because the majority of the cost saving is statutory redundancy plus a bit, it's not actually as much as you might think for the number of roles that we're taking out. It really is a simple mathematical equation based on that. But as Gareth mentioned earlier, I don't want to shy away from the fact there are actually some costs coming back in as well. So Snoop, there's 49 FTE there. As I said, we're delighted with, but we have to absorb that cost. And we obviously have the very predictable amount of inflation coming back through as well, which adds some costs back in. So it is GBP 6 million to get the GBP 60 million out, but there are a few other parts that we need to add in. But again, Gareth, anything you want to add?

No, I would just echo that the key driver of the reduction in cost is headcount. And therefore, if you apply the statutory redundancy plus a little, it does bring you to that GBP 6 million figure.

[Operator Instructions] There appears to be no further audio questions. So I'd like to hand the call back over to Miriam McKay for any questions from the webcast.

Thanks, Saskia.

Thanks very much, Saskia. The first question on the webcast is from Andy Brough of Schroders, who's referring Ian to some benchmarking information, I think you provided previously. Andy's question is, you had 712 employees to serve each [ GBP 1 billion ] of lending. What do you think the right number is now given the average for the financial companies is 170?

Well, Andy, first of all, I'm delighted to hear that you pay such attention to the information that I've provided you in the past. Yes, look, this was -- benchmarking is a pretty crude tool, right? But it is -- it does give you a reference to your comparables. The numbers Andy is referring to were 7 of the closest comparables or sort of smaller, more specialist banks in the U.K. that we did some benchmarking against, and the average FTE per [ GBP 1 billion ] of assets was 170. We stood at 722, actually. So obviously, what we're doing with taking 350 out, which is 20% of our cost base is moving ourselves back towards the average. You would obviously make the point that doesn't get us there straight away, but we do have to be careful. As I said, it's a crude tool. You've got to look at the systems and infrastructure that your people are working on before you look at their productivity and ability to deliver their jobs before you look at where you should be in a benchmarking range. So I think you've seen this be a pretty substantive decisive move in the right direction. But are we finished? I would say, not yet. Gareth, again, anything you want to add?