Today, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to LendInvest PLC Full Year Results 2024. The presentation will commence shortly. After the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, you'll be able to either through the Zoom webinar link provided separately or by submitting written questions using the Ask a Question button on the Spark Live webcast page. If you have joined us via Zoom webinar, please note this call is being live streamed to a webcast for a wider audience and will be recorded. By participating in the Zoom webinar, you agree that recordings made during this event may be shared by LendInvest PLC. During the Q&A element of this morning's call, if you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand feature, which is located at the bottom of your Zoom screen.
If you already have a question, please do this now, ready for when the Q&A begins. Once you have been introduced, please then unmute yourself and begin with your question. We advise that for the best viewing experience, you watch the Q&A in speaker view. Please do this by clicking on the view button at the top right corner of your Zoom screen. I would now like for you to hand over to Rod Lockhart CEO, to open the presentation.
Thank you. Good morning, and thanks for your time today and the opportunity to present our full year results for the 12 month ending 31st of March 2024. I'm joined this morning by Hugo Davies our chief capital officer and interim CFO . You met Hugo when we presented our half year results. We're also joined this morning by Stephen Shipley, our Finance Director, who joined the business in January. We were delighted to announce this morning that Stephen will assume the role of permanent CFO with immediate effect. Stephen was previously CFO at Foundation Home Loans and before that was at Barclays for 24 years, including serving as CFO of the Barclays Group Treasury. I'd like to thank Hugo for his focus in leading the finance team through the transitional period, and I welcome his return to his role as Chief Capital Officer.
Hugo will also continue to lead on the investor relations side, so you'll continue to benefit from his valuable insights. In addition to that, Hugo will assume the role of Managing Director of our Mortgages Division, and we'll be responsible for driving the growth of that division and supporting its return to profitability. Before we start this morning, we'll walk through the slides, and that should take about half an hour. We'll then be available for Q&A. I'm going to start by providing a summary of our performance and a reminder of our business model. I'll then hand over to Hugo to cover the market backdrop that we've been operating in and the strategic progress we've made in strengthening our position for a more positive market outlook. He'll also run through the business review of each of our divisions. Stephen will then talk to our financial performance over the year.
Finally, I'll conclude with an overview of our outlook and the longer term opportunity for LendInvest. The past financial year has reflected both the complexities and opportunities of our evolving market. We've experienced a challenging year, particularly in the first nine months, but we're starting to see early encouraging signs of recovery. In our first quarter of FY25, our new lending is about 20% higher than the quarterly average during FY24. In the period, we remain committed to progressing key strategic objectives, making significant strides, iterating our lending product offerings, expanding our funding partnerships, and evolving our technology. This year, we were pleased to launch our fully integrated mortgage portal, which enhances the broker and customer experience while increasing cross-selling opportunities for us. We implemented a seamless product switch process for brokers, which will enable them to transition to a new loan when mortgages reach their revert periods.
We continue to secure diversified sources of funding, including welcoming BNP Paribas into a GBP 300 million funding syndicate alongside HSBC and Barclays. We raised GBP 700 million across two separate account mandates, and we extended and enhanced our relationship and partnership with National Australia Bank. Post-period end, we successfully refinanced GBP 42.5 million of strategic mezzanine financing facility. Crucially, over the year, we focused on strengthening our balance sheet and our overall financial position. In the first half of the year, we initiated an internal restructuring. We prioritized liquidity. We enhanced our balance sheet by reducing and extending our debt, and we strategically reduced our cost base. These actions were vital to navigate a turbulent period and lay a solid foundation for the future. We'll go into the details of these actions throughout the presentation.
Of course, we were disappointed to record a full year loss in the context of the challenges we faced, and Stephen will provide details on that in his section. We've also confirmed today that we're on track to return to profitability during FY2025, as previously forecast. For those of you that are new to our business, LendInvest is a pioneering platform for property finance that develops cutting-edge technology to simplify the process of securing a mortgage. We seamlessly connect borrowers with a diverse range of funding sources while offering investors access to a broad segment of the UK mortgage market. We simplify the mortgage application process by reducing the need for extensive paperwork and shortening approval times. Our entirely online platform provides a seamless and efficient experience for borrowers and brokers alike.
We facilitated over GBP 7 billion in lending and significantly impacted the UK housing market, in particular increasing the availability of new and refurbished homes. We've established a broad and international capital base, and our access to the UK mortgage market allows us to offer extensive and attractive investment opportunities. Our partners include leading global financial institutions such as JP Morgan, HSBC, Lloyds, Citi, National Australia Bank, Barclays, BNP Paribas, and more. I'm now going to pass over to Hugo, who will run through the market backdrop and the proactive steps that we've taken to prepare the business for the future. Thanks.
Thank you, Rod, and good morning, everyone. It is my pleasure to be able to present our business review to you today. Now, as we are all acutely aware, the macro environment has been marked by uncertainty and complexity over the last few years. In response to a melting pot of geopolitical events, banking crises, and soaring inflation, central banks have been tasked with the seemingly impossible job of delivering soft landings and finding the right level for interest rates. Naturally, as we have got to grips with interest rates rising rapidly to their highest level since the financial crisis, there have been a number of consequences, particularly in the sectors that we serve. Affordability in sectors such as buy- to -let and residential lending have been squeezed as the cost of financing has increased, a dynamic more pronounced in southern and eastern regions where average property prices are higher.
As these markets are also the largest, they have an outsized impact on confidence and activity at the broader level. This has meant that both mortgage approvals and transaction levels have remained below pre-pandemic averages, and as market demand reduced, there was an expectation that the U.K.'s infamously imbalanced supply-demand dynamic would begin to loosen. This would have led to a sharper correction in house prices, further impacting confidence. Interest rate swap markets and other forward-looking measures of interest rates, which together form crucial elements of mortgage pricing, reached post-crisis highs during the summer of 2023, and we started to see buy-to-let mortgage products that have been priced around 3% now being priced closer to 8%. The volatility, which was inevitable given the market backdrop, meant lenders could be passing on rate cuts one week and rate hikes the next.
While this may seem pragmatic, you would have alienated your customer base, and if you had priced in a buffer, you were not as competitive. It didn't help that specialist banks funded by savings deposits were relatively cheap through this period. This all helped to create the level of operational and commercial friction that we had not seen since launching into this market at the end of 2017. Let's not forget the fact that we have been through a pandemic. This made the market backdrop incredibly challenging, but there are now tentative signs of progress. At the start of the year, it became clear that there is a significant wall of demand waiting to be unlocked once mortgage rates come down to a level that is more affordable by more people.
This is the group that has in effect been frozen out of the market that had culminated in a 50% year-on-year contraction in both buy-to-let purchases and buy-to-let remortgages. Mortgage rates do not need to travel too far from where they are today to see that come through once more. This goes to a dynamic that we have discussed before regarding windows of opportunity. While there is a clear relationship between market activity and mortgage rates, we are currently witnessing strong demand for our products despite these products being priced higher than where they once were. You can in part rationalize this by the relative resilience of the jobs market and the strength in wages. The market has also moved on from expecting a material house price correction.
But in some ways, more importantly, borrowers have greater certainty about the future and are therefore more confident to make investment decisions with greater conviction. That confidence is underpinned further by the prevalence of cash buyers in the UK market, who represent 30%-40% of all transactions. This has helped to keep the market's head above water through this time. When you look at the most recent mortgage approval and transaction data, both are trending back towards pre-pandemic averages. Inflation is at target, and the components of inflation that we have come to love or hate for being either sticky, stubborn, or transitory appear to be slowing into the second half of this year. With interest rate swaps trading in tighter, more predictable ranges, operational and commercial friction is removed.
You could almost get away with saying that the U.K. is a port of relative calm compared to the choppiness in international markets. This has led to a renewed sense of optimism, where in markets such as securitization, the relative value of high-quality mortgage-backed bonds are driving pricing to levels last observed in 2021. Finally, we think it was worth mentioning that we are relatively confident that within the next 2 MPC meetings, we will see our first rate cut since 2020, which will be an important milestone for U.K. markets. We've spoken about the raw ingredients of the backdrop, and the question you are no doubt asking now is how we're going to get ourselves back in the game and deliver what this platform is capable of delivering given the year that we have just had. First, we worked tirelessly to protect the balance sheet.
We have repaid over GBP 125 million in mezzanine-style funding during the course of the year, and this was split between a privately managed separate account and a retail-eligible bond. We simultaneously raised GBP 81.5 million in new capital from new investors with a longer maturity profile that offered greater strategic flexibility. This ability to reconfigure our funding strategy is what has allowed us to repay over GBP 45 million on a net basis while continuing to originate high-quality loans and without compromise of our ambitions. This demonstrates the inherent agility of the platform to react and pivot when necessary. We also closed several transactions that allowed us to pay down senior debt facilities by nearly GBP 650 million. There was the portfolio sale that closed during a period of extreme market uncertainty, and we did this because it returned cash and prioritized liquidity.
It also removed cost of risk and future NIM dilution, which were added bonuses. There was also our fifth securitization, which was our largest ever and achieved the best buy-to-let securitization pricing in the second half of 2023, having been many times oversubscribed. This is testament to the market's view on LendInvest-originated loans and investment opportunities. We didn't just focus on the paydown of balance sheet debt. We concurrently closed a GBP 200 million separate account for short-term mortgages, which was a first for the business, and a GBP 500 million separate account for buy-to-let mortgages to capitalize on emerging opportunities in our mortgages division and to support its return back to profitability. We're achieving this by building predictable and recurring fee-based revenue streams.
If we can continue building on this momentum, we will soon be in a position of having access to deep third-party pools of capital for all of our products in both the mortgages and capital divisions. Secondly, whilst we have acknowledged that we could have managed our costs better and earlier in 2023, as Rod described before, we must also accept that volatility works in both directions. Operational and commercial friction is not just caused by a general upward trend in mortgage rates. The same is true when the markets intimate at possible falls, and therefore right-sizing the run rate of people-related costs in this context can be difficult to deliver. If the market recovered sooner, you would not want to be in a position where you could not capitalize on that. That all said, the restructuring exercise from last November reduced our people-related cost run rate by 25%.
And again, as Rod described before, we have done this all while maintaining our origination capability as we leverage the power of our proprietary technology, which is now deployed across the full breadth of our mortgages division. Naturally, the full effects of these actions were not expected to benefit FY24 from a P&L perspective, but instead will emerge through the course of FY25. And that brings us neatly onto the third and final point of a resilience and competitive moat. Again, as Rod described, we've been in this market for over 15 years. We were born out of the financial crisis, and since then we've continued to lend through several significant market shocks and have come out the other side stronger.
This is reflected in our technology, which has benefited from 15 years' worth of learning and development, forming the foundations of a competitive moat that would be difficult to replicate without either a lot of time, money, or both. For example, we deploy close to 12 technology changes on average every day. This keeps us ahead. Instant DIPs or decisions in principle are now a relatively common feature in mortgage markets, but being able to submit a full mortgage application in under 5 minutes is not. We have the power and streamlined processes to deliver same-day pricing changes, and one LendInvest underwriter can process 100 new mortgage applications every month, supported by machine learning credit modeling. We've now discussed the market and the actions we have taken to steady the ship.
This slide will now demonstrate the strength of our foundations that we're building from to support our growth in FY25 and beyond. We're delighted that we have achieved 14% year-on-year growth in funds under management. We welcomed BNP Paribas as a new funding partner in our balance sheet-funded short-term mortgages business, and post-year-end, we welcomed a further investor to support the growth trajectory in short-term mortgages. We also secured two new separate account mandates, as discussed before, raising GBP 700 million to support growth in the mortgages division. Additionally, we successfully issued our fourth listed bond and closed the company's largest securitization to date, raising GBP 410 million.
As discussed before, this was the best price buy-to-let securitization in the second half of 2023, and we sold the residual economic interest in that transaction in early 2024, underscoring our strategic objective of reducing the proportion of assets held on the balance sheet. Our platform AUM increased by 8% to GBP 2.8 billion, driven by a 13% increase in buy-to-let and short-term mortgages. In fact, we achieved 26% growth in short-term mortgage AUM, despite the balance sheet-funded proportion growing by less than 1%, highlighting the rapid deployment of new separate account arrangements in this area. Finally, I will conclude the business review section with a relatively brief strategic update of our two divisions, LendInvest Mortgages and LendInvest Capital. LendInvest Mortgages provides fast, flexible, and simple mortgages to homeowners, experienced property investors, and portfolio landlords across the U.K. across three key products: buy-to-let, residential, and short-term mortgages.
The LendInvest Mortgages strategy is built on three key pillars. Pillar one is about service. We are continuously focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences, ensuring that our products and services meet the needs of our borrowers and brokers. It is important for us to find ways to say yes, supporting our customers and their objectives. Pillar two is centered around technology. We have invested over GBP 60 million in developing a market-leading platform that enables seamless integration with third-party data sources, where over 20 APIs collect over 100,000 data points, automating certain underwriting processes, all while ensuring reliability and scalability. This year, we launched the latest iteration of our mortgages portal, which centralizes the mortgage division's product range and processes, offering brokers and their clients real-time access to our entire suite of solutions, in addition to product transfers, and offering the company the chance to cross-sell.
The third pillar is our people. We invest in continuous professional development, fostering a culture of innovation and responsibility. This year, we were proud to launch the Mortgages Academy in Glasgow, reflecting our commitment to develop the best talent. LendInvest Capital is an expert provider of specialist investment products backed by real estate debt. It focuses on either complex or larger lending that benefits from an expert, human-centric approach. We draw on our deep domain expertise and in-house real estate experience that matches both institutional and individual investors with secured, risk-adjusted, income-producing opportunities. We provide a variety of investment entry points, ranging from actively managed funds to a self-select platform that provides investors with greater autonomy over how they may deploy their capital. We also provide loan syndication and co-investment opportunities and a solution that collaborates with third-party lenders to expand our lending footprint.
Our diverse array of funding and suite of products are supported by our strong relationships with global financial institutions that continue to support our growth and expansion. Thank you very much for listening. I will now pass on to Stephen to present the financial section. Thanks very much, Hugo and Rod. I'll now give a brief overview of our financials for full year 2024. As noted, the result for the period was a pre-tax loss of GBP 27 million and a post-tax loss of GBP 20 million. This was primarily impacted by several one-offs. While we made gains of GBP 12 million from the sale of Mortimer 2021 residual interest, this was offset by GBP 13 million of losses from other portfolio and residual interest sales. Against a backdrop of lower lending volumes, we also saw exceptional and restructuring costs of GBP 2.7 million, which led to a GBP 6 million annualized reduction in annualized staff-related costs.
We also had an increase in impairment charges of 42%, but as explained at the half-year, this was partly due to accelerated debt recovery efforts in half-one of full year 2024. We recorded an unrealized loss on hedge accounting of GBP 4 million in full year 2024 versus a GBP 5 million gain in full year 2025. We aim to improve our hedge accounting efficiency in full year 2025, leading to lower volatility. These impacts were partially offset by a 42% increase in net fee income from higher separate account originations. Due to negative reserves, a dividend will not be declared, but we remain committed to a progressive dividend policy as soon as it is prudent to do so. To give an idea of our progress and impact of our strategic actions during the year, we wanted to share a comparison of financial performance in half-one versus half-two.
Net interest income substantially reduced as a result of GBP 3.7 million unrealized loss on hedge accounting in half-two compared to a GBP 0.3 million loss in half-one. In half-two, net fee income increased as new lending volumes to our separate account providers increased. Net losses on derecognition of financial assets increased as a result of loss on sale of Mortimer 2023 residual interest. Administrative expenses slightly increased in half-two, but GBP 1.8 million of this was driven by exceptional items. Excluding exceptional items, administrative expenses reduced by 7.5%. In the second half, impairment losses substantially reduced, reflecting the one-off nature of half-one charges. Finally, our underlying loss before tax in half-two improved by 52%. As we have discussed, we have taken significant action to deleverage our balance sheet in full year 2024, as evidenced by a 56% reduction of GBP 645 million in debt, achieving a 39% reduction in our leverage ratio.
Investment securities has increased as a result of the 5% risk retention we hold in our latest securitization. Cash and cash equivalents have increased 19% over the period, with GBP 17.2 million in unrestricted cash available at the end of the period. This provides us with liquidity to support ongoing operations, invest in growth opportunities, and navigate any potential uncertainties in the market. Looking ahead, we remain focused on maintaining a prudent capital structure while pursuing opportunities that drive innovation and profitability. However, as we increase assets in advance of our next securitization, there will be a corresponding rise in interest-bearing liabilities.
Thank you, Hugo. I'll now pick up on this slide. I wanted to reiterate the progress we've made in strengthening the balance sheet and reducing our risk profile.
A first point to note is the proportion of assets held on our balance sheet has been reduced from 45% to 17% over the year. That was a key strategic objective for us. Over the period, as Hugo explained, we reduced our debt by GBP 645 million and our leverage ratio by 39%. As Stephen pointed out, we've been really focused on cash management, which has supported us through the refinancing that Hugo has described, and which we've now completed, and led to an increase in both cash and unrestricted cash at the end of the period. I'm now going to pick up and close with the overview of our outlook and the long-term opportunity for us. Our unique market-leading platform is fundamental to the service proposition that we're able to provide both brokers and borrowers.
Our investments in technology and innovation have been designed to ensure that we remain at the forefront of the industry, adaptable to change, and competitive in our offerings. We've invested over GBP 60 million in developing a market-leading platform that enables seamless integration with third-party data sources and automates underwriting processes, ensuring reliability and scalability. This year, as we've described, we launched the latest iteration of our mortgage portal, which centralizes the mortgage process, offering brokers and their clients real-time access to our entire mortgage range. In an ever-changing environment, our technology provides us with the ability to look quickly, launch products, change prices, and adapt to market dynamics and customer needs. We're able to customize and directly manage product attributes through our platform to innovate our products at pace. Our excellent market reputation is underpinned by the seamless nature of the application journey we provide with brokers.
Through our platform, brokers can submit a full application in less than five minutes. Our investment in technology ensures scalability and operating leverage as we grow. As Hugo pointed out, we can now support 100 new buy-to-let applications per underwriter per month. Looking forward, we're in a strong place to capitalize on the market opportunity ahead of us. As I've mentioned, the launch of our mortgage portal brings all of our products onto one platform. It gives us operating leverage, promotes a seamless process for brokers and borrowers, but crucially, it provides us with the opportunity for growth. The platform gives us our edge. We're able to act quickly, innovate, and design customer-oriented solutions. We can take advantage of opportunities that may arise in the ever-changing market, for example, long-term fixed-rate mortgages, if the market environment evolves to support that opportunity.
Our comprehensive suite of financing solutions enables us to capitalize on countercyclical dynamics, such as through our short-term mortgages, which grew last year despite the drop in overall mortgage market activity. Having this broad range of products supports our continued resilience. If one product struggles, another can help pick up the slack. From a regulatory perspective, the new Basel 3.1 capital reforms are likely to impact many specialist banks who provide a significant proportion of the new buy-to-let lending. That presents an opportunity for non-bank lenders like us. We've worked really hard with our funding partners over recent months to ensure that we're well placed to take advantage of this dynamic. We've also just welcomed a new government who've recently reinstated the housing target and announced a significant commitment to deliver planning and land reform in the U.K. This is a potential tailwind for the development finance market and us.
It's early days, but hopefully these commitments are encouraging for the UK housing market and the mortgage market. So, to conclude, we acknowledge the challenging market backdrop in FY2024 and the impact that it had on our business. We've worked really hard to strengthen our foundations for a more positive outlook. We've got a strong track record underpinned by an excellent reputation from a large broker network, market-leading technology, and a diverse range of funding partners. In light of initial signs of improvement in the UK mortgage market and with a solid strategic plan and clear focus on increasing our operational efficiency, we're well positioned to get our growth trajectory and profitability firmly back on track in FY2025, whilst increasing our origination numbers and focusing on delivering sustained value to our customers and shareholders. Thank you for listening to our presentation. Now, happy to take questions.
We will now start the Q&A. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Once called upon, please unmute yourself and begin with your question. We will pause a moment to assemble the queue. The first question is from Rae Maile at Panmure Liberum. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.
Good morning. One of the more entertaining expressions of my name. Thanks very much, Rod, for the presentation.
I wonder, can I tempt you a little bit more to talk about the current state of the market and, in particular, your competitive positioning on pricing, which obviously was something of an issue 12 months ago, how you see that now, how the pipeline's developed, what impression you're getting from brokers and from landlords about the outlook now, in particular, as you mentioned, after the change in government?
Thanks, Rae. Thanks for a great question. I'll answer part of it, and I'll pass across to Hugo, so he can hear his view too. But look, I'll start by saying that we're in this financial year, we're in a much better relative position across most of our products than we have been at any point over the last 18 months. That's driven by, I guess, a number of things, but principally better relative pricing to our competitors.
So, as interest rates rose, savings banks who we compete with for a number of products didn't pass rises in interest rate onto savers and were able then to offer much more competitive mortgage products than we were able to over that period. You know, at points in the last two years, we've been priced 1% wide on a buy-to-let mortgage, which doesn't give enough to a broker. You know, a broker will know that they can select us on service, but with that sort of distance, it's hard to drive originations. Fast forward to today, we're much closer. So, we're in and around, let's say, 25 basis points off some of the leaders in the space. That's a level of pricing that a broker can encourage a borrower to choose one of our products.
And so, you know, as a result, volumes are materially higher today, pointed out through the presentation over the first quarter. Our lending's about 20% up on last year. Hugo, do you want to pick up, add to that, and then also probably pick up the second part of Rae's question around the development market?
Yeah, so I think the point around this kind of bifurcation that we've seen in the buy-to-let space from a funding perspective between non-banks and banks over the last two years is beginning to fade. So, I agree with Rod on that particular point.
I think the other important aspect of the buy-to-let market and its outlook, from my perspective, is that at various points over the last, you know, again, 2 years, a lot of broker advice has kind of been around, not to like wait and see, but given how much volatility there was in the market, brokers have certainly tried to bide their time to ensure that they're seeking the best solutions for their clients. We saw that at the end of 2022 with the prevalence of tracker rate products. And those tracker rate products, in particular, did not carry early repayment charges. So, they were almost like a hybrid bridging solution for the buy-to-let market.
Through 2023, we also saw the buy-to-let market evolve by establishing kind of new higher fee, lower rate products, which would primarily help with the affordability equation that landlords were facing up and down the country. So, the buy-to-let market has been incredibly agile and really quite innovative in terms of trying to grease the wheels and keep things turning. I think fast forward to today, the fundamental difference between today and this time last year is we know that interest rates are going to come down. This time last year was when you were looking at interest rate benchmarks or forward curves, and they were predicting that Bank of England base rate was going to hit 6.25%. That would have been an incredibly precarious position for lots of people.
On the development side, yes, look, I think there's a broader point here that is consistent with the progress and, I guess, growing optimism and outlook for what I would describe as commercial real estate. We only have a residential development finance offering, but it's classically a more complicated product to fund because it includes construction. It takes the best part of 2-3 years. From our perspective, we've certainly seen through the first half of this year growing demand for our development finance solutions, which is great because we have an incredibly good partnership with HSBC and the British Business Bank, I think one of the few of its kind in our market, and we hope to be able to utilize that more going forward.
That's great. Thanks.
Thank you.
Just a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Our next question is from Gary Greenwood at Shore Capital. Please unmute yourself and begin with your question.
Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my question. It was just regarding the cost takeout in the business. If things pick up as you expect and maybe even pick up faster than you expect, will you have to put more cost back into the business? I'm just wondering whether you sort of cut back too far or not, or you can sort of scale into the opportunity that's there. Thanks.
Thanks, Gary. Thanks for a great question. When we were focusing on restructuring, bringing costs down throughout the business, we removed costs on the basis of seeking to maintain lending capacity.
So, we believe we have capacity to deal with rising volumes as we're starting to see come through. The other key benefit that we've had was the launch of the new mortgages portal, which now allows us to process mortgages much more efficiently, particularly on the buy-to-let side. And we pointed out that 1 additional underwriter now can process 100 mortgages in a month. Another way of thinking about that additional 1 additional underwriter is maybe think about that as over GBP 100 million of loan completions in a year. So, we have, I guess, created a platform that's now highly scalable with limited additional resource. So, we do think that we have the capacity to expand as the market expands. One of the other core strengths of our platform is the breadth of products that we have.
Over the last couple of years, we've spent time training underwriters and operations people across the various products. So, where we get a spike in, let's say, a spike in demand for buy-to-let products, we're able to transition excess capacity from other products to help support that product area as well.
Just to add to that, Rod, and hi, Gary. I think at our peak, in the 15 years that we've been around, I think on the technology side, we probably had at one point 40% of our staff, our colleagues were working in a kind of technology-type position, which is consistent with what you'd expect from a company that's very much in its kind of build phase and building lots of proprietary tools and applications and software and all of that good stuff.
But clearly, once that technology starts to be materially built or be materially ready for deployment in the market, there is a kind of natural technology cycle. And that's where in this presentation, which will be shared after this, or the recording will be shared afterwards, you'll see that we make specific reference to that.
That's great. Thanks very much for answering my question.
Thanks, Gary.
Just a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. There are no further questions on the webinar. I will now hand over to Rod Lockhart for closing remarks. Please go ahead.
Thanks, everyone, for your time this morning and the opportunity to talk through our results.
We are pleased with the progress we've made over the year to strengthen the foundations of the business, and we look forward to a more positive outlook. If you do have any follow-up questions, we are really happy to answer them and meet up, but please do reach out to our investor relations email.