Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Omni Bridgeway Limited full year results 2022 conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Andrew Saker, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Sarah. Good morning. My name's Andrew Saker, and I'm the Managing Director and CEO of Omni Bridgeway. Welcome to our results call for the year ended June 30, 2022. Joining me today is Stuart Mitchell, our Group CFO, Jeremy Sambrook, our Global GC and Company Secretary, and Guillaume Leger, our U.S. CFO and soon to be Global CFO. Turning to slide three, FY 2022 was another strong year in terms of performance against our short-term and long-term goals. This year was our third consecutive year of producing over $200 million in gross income and revenue, generated from a diverse range of sources across our various fund vehicles.
This confirms our view about the merits of the diversification strategy we commenced in FY 2016, where we sought to migrate from balance sheet investor to fund manager, generating revenue from our direct investments in funds and from our management and performance fees for managing third-party capital. Over 97% of our investments are now funded from our funds, and as such, our transition to a fund manager is now complete. This year, we saw a modest net profit after tax, which is a AUD 25 million turnaround from last year. We have maintained our long-term conversion rate of EPV to income of 15%, notwithstanding the small dip this year. The conversion rate will vary across periods as we saw in FY 2021, where we had a conversion rate of 22% compared to this year, where we saw a conversion rate of 13%.
This year's conversion rate was affected by a number of factors, including completions of long-dated investments in Fund 1, where the completion was driven to optimize IRR and an acceleration of a number of completions that resulted in a reduced ROIC but an elevated IRR. We continue to expect the long-term rate will be 15%, which should be measured over a period commensurate with the asset class. In addition to new commitments and cash generation, the key drivers for the business include success rate and pricing. Omni Bridgeway has, over the last three years, maintained a high success rate of 77% after withdrawals and at a ROIC of 107% with an IRR of 39%. Relative to our peers, these high-quality performance indicators place Omni Bridgeway as one of the leaders in the industry.
Notwithstanding the various continuing challenges arising from the disruption of COVID, we delivered a record AUD 463 million in new commitments to investments across our active funds. This was a growth of 12% over last year and a CAGR of 34% over the last five years. We have established our competitive advantage in sourcing and underwriting of investments derived in part from our geographic footprint and our range of products, and in part from the depth and breadth of our investment management team. Our growth in new commitments translated into continued growth in our portfolio, reflected in a 35% year-on-year growth in EPV and a 28% year-on-year growth in IEV. I'd like to emphasize that point. We added AUD 463 million in new commitments, which translated into an additional AUD 11.2 billion of EPV before completions.
We have now launched our eighth fund structure, which when fully established, will lead to managing close to AUD 3 billion of funds. This fund structure is innovative in its use of insurance to mitigate risk and enhance absolute returns to Omni Bridgeway. While I will expand on this further in my presentation, I note that Omni Bridgeway has become the industry leader in terms of innovation for risk management through structuring. We have maintained a strong working capital position with over AUD 300 million of cash and receivables at year-end, which combined with the undrawn debt facility of AUD 100 million, provides us options to, on how to allocate capital in the most efficient manner. This has allowed the board to approve a share buyback program that will be used opportunistically to purchase shares where it is determined that such a buyback will create value for shareholders.
We set ourselves a number of strategic priorities for FY 2022, which included targets for annual commitments, the launch of a new fund, refinancing our debt facilities, and a focus on developing the U.S. business. I'm pleased to report to shareholders that we have achieved all of our targets for FY 2022. One of the key goals for this year was to grow our presence in the U.S., the world's largest legal market. The outcome of that effort would be reflected in a growth in commitments in that region. We are pleased to report that during the period, we increased annual commitments by 72%. This outcome was achieved through the execution of a number of strategies, including expanding product offering to specialist enforcement practice, which has enhanced our global footprint for this offering and an antitrust practice.
The enforcement business in the U.S. is led by Hannah van Roessel, who is on secondment from our Amsterdam office to assist with the establishment of this business in the States. Our antitrust practice is led by Jason Levine, who also leads our Washington, D.C. office. We expanded our head count from 26 to 39 during the year and opened new operations in Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis. We launched what was for both us and perhaps for the industry, a truly innovative capital management approach to funding enforcement investments with Fund 8. I will expand on this later in my presentation. Another key goal for our refinancing was the refinancing of our bonds and notes with a debt instrument that was more aligned to our needs as a fund manager.
In the current environment of heightened credit risk, the placement of this new debt reflects the views of our lenders that Omni Bridgeway is a strong and valuable counterparty. The debt facility provides us with an overall lower effective cost of capital compared to our bonds and notes, as the new facility allows us to significantly reduce the amount of capital that we are required to retain on our balance sheet. In addition to the record new commitments made this year, the launch of Fund 8 and the refinancing of our bonds and notes, we achieved a number of significant milestones, including we undertook our first secondary market sales. These were sales to arm's-length third parties that maximized our outcomes while preserving a material amount of upside. I'll expand on this further later in the presentation.
Secondly, we launched the innovative risk management strategies using insurance structures to protect both profit and capital associated with one of our Fund 1 investments. This will create opportunities for us to accelerate the realization of this investment through factoring, sale, or refinancing. Finally, we distributed over $100 million to investors in our funds that will accelerate the time at which shareholders will receive distributions from our first generation fund vehicles. This acceleration in completions was achieved in both Fund 1 and Funds 2 & 3. During the year, we also made several key appointments, including the Global CFO based in New York and the Head of Portfolio Management based in London. These appointments reflect the continuing maturation of the business as we focus towards our growth areas. As noted in our annual report, Michael Bowen will stand down from the board after 21 years of service.
We have also commenced the process of finding a new board member to be based in the Northern Hemisphere. Arising from these developments and reflecting our confidence in the future of the business, the board has authorized a share buyback program. This program provides us with an additional tool for capital allocation, which will be used to enhance shareholder returns. We have a number of capital allocation opportunities this year, including investing into potentially high returning investments in legal risk management, potential M&A, and now to purchase our shares where we perceive there's an attractive and accretive opportunity when they may become undervalued. Turning to slide five. A snapshot of our financial results for the year revealed that we have a diverse source of income, with substantial revenues generated from completions in investments, but also a growth in our other sources of income, including management fees.
While total revenue and income was down relative to the prior period, we must recall that last year we recognized income from Wivenhoe, which drove large growth in that year. As most of our shareholders appreciate, our investments are uncorrelated and there will continue to be variations between individual years. That is the very definition of our investments. We strove to broaden our income sources and increase our average income per year, which we have achieved. The CAGR of income and revenue over the last three years is 70%. We also saw a significant reduction in our expenses this year. The most significant variance on the expense side is the reduction by over 90% in impairment charges and adverse costs.
While we have had our share of disappointments, which is expected in any litigation risk management business, we have not experienced the significant losses we incurred in the prior year. The other notable point of success we had was in managing our controllable costs, being employee expenses and other overheads. Notwithstanding a substantial increase in headcount by over 11%, we saw an increase in employee expenses of only around 3%. Further, we saw a decrease of around 19% of our operating overheads, notwithstanding a net increase in our operating locations. Turning to the next slide. During the year, we refinanced our debt facilities, which converted those current liabilities to non-current liabilities in July. Excluding debt from our analysis, we've returned to a more capital-light scenario.
With the availability of the undrawn debt facility. We are more confident in retaining less cash on our balance sheet, which is a more efficient capital use of capital, given the cost of the undrawn facility relative to the alternative uses for our resources. The capital that has been released has been put into productive investment opportunities. We retain sufficient working capital for our liquidity requirements and corporate initiatives to fund and grow future investments, deploy to existing investments, and maintain liquidity to support global business opportunities. We've completed our transition to a fund manager with the collateral benefit of reducing the capital needs of the business, which combined with our available debt facility and latent earnings capacity, supplemented by access to the emerging secondary market, means we can progress with our capital management plans.
In addition to capital optimization, we continue to realize operational efficiencies that come from economies of scale. In our view, our investment managers are assets that create value at a greater rate than their cost. However, to improve efficiencies, we need to see that investment managers are managing and generating more. As we can see, on average, the investment managers have increased their managing ratio by 38% and their generation ratio by 28%. These gains should not be underestimated. We are now, on average, achieving more per head for less. The expenditure coverage for management fees was impacted by the closing of the investment period in Fund 6 and the reduction in the expense reimbursement. This is expected to be picked up with the full establishment of Fund 8 and the cost reimbursement that will be made from that structure.
We have reviewed the fee structures of a number of our peers. While there may be managers that attract management fees that attach at an earlier point in time relative to our own, that is just one point of reference. In our view, the total fee is the key to determining the value of any structure, which is then overlaid with the return profile of the relevant investment strategy. In our view, there is little point in operating a fund just for management fees. While our management fees will continue to grow as deployments increase, the value to the manager is mostly derived from performance fees. Our team has now increased to 199, and our geographic footprint expanded in the U.S. with openings in Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, and new openings in New Zealand and Uruguay.
We now have a presence in five continents, in 13 countries, with 23 offices throughout the world, which makes Omni Bridgeway the largest manager of legal risk in the world. We have maintained our diversification in terms of the number of investments. In our view, moving forward, it is critical to avoid concentration risk from any one large case. We consider that it is important to diversify geographically by capital source, case type, and investment size. Turning to slide seven. The metrics in slide seven are similar to previous reporting periods, which continue to reflect consistent annual growth in our key metrics of investment carrying value, EPV, and commitments. We have provided a quarterly breakdown of our annual commitments in the third graph.
As you will note, there is a reasonably consistent surge in investments in the last quarter of each year, which reflects a number of issues, most notably a desire by claimants and their legal advisors to put funding in place before the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. It is also a note to our stakeholders that investments are not made on a linear basis, and that we generally have quieter second and third quarters. Finally, as you will note, we've set our target for new commitments for this financial year at between AUD 550 million and AUD 600 million, which is a 20%-30% growth on FY 2022. Turning to slide eight. Slide eight is also similar to our previous disclosures, which continue to reflect our diversification by geography, by investment type, capital source, and now by size.
We've identified diversification as a key risk management tool to mitigate against the binary risk of the underlying investment and also against regulatory intervention and competition. Some salient points include. There is a predominant weighting of cases to the Northern Hemisphere. We have long recognized the significance of these markets, both to diversify risk, but also because of the size of those markets for investing. With the continued growth in EMEA and the opening of new offices in the U.S. and Europe, we expect to see a continued trend towards investments in the Northern Hemisphere. We continue to see a decrease in our focus on Australian class actions. These investments now represent 12% of our total portfolio. Single-party, large litigation and arbitration matters remain the predominant portion of our portfolio, where we continue to enjoy a high success rate and high pricing.
Our balance sheet investments now represent less than 3% of our total book, and we will continue to see a decline in capital source derived from Funds 1 and 2 & 3, as these funds progress through harvesting and investments convert into cash. Our new graph shows concentration risk for our top 10 investments. We have included this new graph to show that while we have a number of large investments, our portfolio is not dominated by a single large investment, which could expose the group to concentration risk. Out of our top 10 investments, one is a law firm portfolio that comprises a number of subsidiary investments and is thus further diversified. Turning to slide nine. The next two slides in this presentation are complementary, one relating to past performance and the next to the future anticipated outcomes.
In terms of our current picture, we continue to enjoy what we understand to be industry-leading success rates and returns for large-scale dedicated industry participants. This reflects the bench strength of our investment management team, which includes our investment managers, investment committees, our pricing and structuring teams, and other risk managers. We offer a differentiated product compared to our peers, which includes both the provision of capital and services to manage legal risks. Our sourcing and underwriting provide us with competitive advantage over our peers, and with our continued innovation on pricing and structuring, we aim to also achieve a price advantage over our peers. On slide 10. In terms of the near-term picture, we anticipate that a bulk of our revenue will be generated from completions in our first-generation funds as we progress through the harvest phase.
While we have historically incurred delays in completions and will inevitably continue to do so, we now expect the secondary market will provide an alternative to waiting for legal outcomes or settlements, which should improve liquidity and ameliorate duration risks. The latent earnings in our portfolio reflected in our AIV is around $1.2 billion before any performance fees. Of note, the appeal decision in our previously impaired Fund 4 investment was handed down against our client who is considering further appeals. There is no financial impact in FY 2022, but we continue to retain the EPV in our portfolio. The EPV is scheduled for completion in FY 2024, and as such, will not impact on anticipated completions this year.
In any event, the AIV attributable to Omni Bridgeway associated with this investment is less than 4% the total attributable AIV to Omni Bridgeway. Turning to slide 11. Omni Bridgeway has long been regarded as the leading innovator in the litigation risk management industry, also being recognized as a founder of the industry. Omni Bridgeway continues to explore opportunities to mitigate risk and enhance returns through innovation. This year, we've progressed with secondary market transactions, the use of unique fund structures and insurance products to mitigate risk, and the continued application of AI and data mining to enhance our sourcing capacity. I'll discuss the secondary market transactions in the Fund 8 later in my presentation. I'd like to touch upon the innovations we have seen through technology and the application of insurance products to our industry.
Like many of our peers, we've sought to utilize technology in a variety of ways, including for sourcing investment opportunities. There are a number of our peers who also use technology for underwriting investments. We have not yet reached a level of comfort that technology can be used as a substitute for due diligence, and as such, do not believe we can rely on AI for underwriting at this point in time. However, as a pre-qualification for sourcing, AI has proved to be a useful tool to identify appropriately qualified investments. We have used AI for this purpose in the U.S., EMEA, and APAC, and intend to explore how we can further utilize this technology across all of our regions. In the past 12 months, we've seen a number of developments in the application of insurance to mitigate risk for our asset class.
The most significant was in relation to Fund 8, but of importance was also the provision of profit protection insurance for a Fund 1 investment. This policy was unique because it provided on an ATE basis cover for profit that we can realize under our funding agreement. This creates options for us to monetize the investment prior to a decision in the legal proceedings by way of factoring or sale, or the use of the policy as collateral to refinance the investment. If we are able to utilize this type of policy for other investments, it will provide another alternative to the secondary market opportunities that have already been identified. Turning to slide 12. We recently announced the launch of our new fund focused on global enforcement opportunities.
The fund is intended to be supported by EUR 270 million of external funds in the form of debt secured against a profit protection insurance policy and EUR 30 million of our own capital. The fund will pay costs for operating the fund up to a maximum of EUR 5 million per annum, which will be used to defray almost entirely the current operating costs of our EMEA operations. The fund will accrue interest on a PIK basis with an equity kick-kicker, such that all-in costs of the debt and insurance should be less than 20%.
On this basis, the returns that will be generated for Omni Bridgeway will far exceed the returns we're able to generate from a typical fund structure. We were able to secure the insurance policy that underpins this fund because of our strong track record of success and performance over decades of execution. We do not expect that this type of structure will be available for pre-judgment type investments and as such may be limited to enforcement-focused funds. However, we will continue to explore opportunities in the deep pool of capital that exists in the insurance industry to see how we can ameliorate our risk for an appropriate cost to optimize risk-adjusted returns for Omni Bridgeway and its investors.
On slide 13, the next innovation I'd like to address is our participation in the secondary market transactions for the sale of partial interests in two of our investments, being the Combustible Cladding and the CBA class actions. The secondary market is evolving, and we expect that Omni Bridgeway will be an active participant in this market, both as a seller of our investments but also as a potential buyer of assets. The buy-side participants for our assets are expected to include a variety of specialists and generalist funds and investors seeking a high and uncorrelated return. In the fullness of time, we expect that the market will evolve further to allow for the securitization of portfolios of investments that will further enhance liquidity and improve IRRs.
The assets we sold were marketed to third parties who undertook their own due diligence and confirmed their view of the value of the assets. As such, this provides us with an arm's-length market view of the current value of those assets. The sale of these partial interests allowed us to recognize a profit on those assets before the legal proceedings have determined an outcome which mitigated both duration and completion risk. We are also exploring the possibility of recognizing unrealized gains on the remainder of the relevant assets, which will potentially unlock $50 million in additional profit before tax. We will aim to generate a material amount of our annual income from secondary market sales, which will mitigate some of the delays that inevitably arise in our estimated completion dates for our investments. Turning to slide 14.
We perceive there will be opportunities for investments created by the prevailing macroeconomic conditions, both because of the demand for our capital when traditional sources of capital are constrained and because litigation risk is usually elevated during periods of economic stress. While our underlying investments are uncorrelated, there is also a countercyclical trend. We have established a strong platform of human and financial capital for growth that has been tested and refined over a 30-year period. That track record is industry-leading. As we do each year, we set out our plans for this financial year, which include generating new commitments for investment between AUD 550 million and AUD 600 million, which is a 20%-30% year-on-year growth from this year.
Extending Funds IV and V through the exercise of investor options for Series Two of these funds, or to replace those funds with new funds if those options are not exercised. If these funds are upsized, and when Fund 8 is fully implemented, we expect to be close to AUD 4.5 billion in FUM. Continuing to innovate with new capital and risk management tools to enhance risk-adjusted returns and improve liquidity. Exploring the launch of new funds, potentially aimed at ESG and low-cost structures to fill gaps in our product suite. Moving into new markets in Europe, the U.S., and Asia to maintain our competitive advantage and leadership role in the industry, and also exploring possible M&A opportunities that we expect will evolve during the course of this year, either complementing or expanding on our geographic footprint.
There remain significant opportunities in our industry, and Omni Bridgeway is at the forefront of its evolution. We expect the investment into our infrastructure will ensure we remain as the global leader in our industry. Before closing, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Stuart Mitchell, our outgoing Group CFO, for his contributions to the Group over the last four years, and particularly his efforts in finalizing these accounts and handing over to our incoming Global CFO, Guillaume Leger. I would now like to open the call for questions. Thank you.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset to ask your question. Our first question comes from Michael Peet with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Oh, hi, Andrew. Thanks for taking my questions. First one, just on duration. You mentioned the secondary market insurance, things like that. Just thinking about what impact or benefit you see for duration, and do you think we'll see this come through maybe this year, or is it gonna take a little while? I'm just also interested in what sort of triggered or created the secondary market, and how do you sort of link up with buyer and seller, I guess, is another question. Thank you.
Thanks for that, Michael. So to answer some of those parts, because I think there were three parts to it. In terms of the benefit. We see this as a way to ameliorate duration risk, but also completion risk. It provides us with the opportunity to enhance accelerated returns and therefore improve risk-adjusted outcomes for our shareholders. Most critically, it improves liquidity. I think the benefits are significant and will be realized during the course of this year. What has triggered this is the general maturation of the industry. I think we have evolved from, you know, what was a cottage industry to something that has now become more industrialized and has grown in scale.
There's a deeper pool of capital that recognizes the benefits of the uncorrelated returns that can be derived from this type of asset class. In terms of the linkage between buyers and sellers, there are agents that operate in this industry that are now starting to connect buyers and sellers. We also have direct approach from a number of people that are looking to buy and sell assets that are in this asset class. It's starting to evolve and starting to mature.
Thanks. Just one follow-up if I may. Just on the AUD 550-AUD 600 sort of target on commitments this year. Broadly, I mean, maybe where it's specific to that or just broadly, how competitive is it out there? How many of these investments are sort of self-generated or exclusive with your, you know, law firm partners versus competitive in a tender process? If you could just give us a sense of that. Thanks.
Sure. So, your question goes to the heart of competition, and it does vary, depending on which market you're referring to. We do find different levels of competition within each of those markets. We are finding that some markets are becoming more competitive and some are becoming less competitive depending on where other funders are applying their capital. That was the thesis on the diversification strategy that we started several years ago to ensure that we didn't expose ourselves to any one particular market, and thereby suffer the effect of undue impacts on pricing, price compression that does evolve from competition.
In terms of self-generation, that's continuing to evolve, and I think our application of AI technology to sourcing opportunities is going to assist us with a higher level of self-generation. We also continue to enjoy very solid relationships with law firms and other service providers in the various markets we operate in to have referrals. The split hasn't dramatically shifted. In Australia, you know, we still have a higher level of self-generation relative to referrals, whereas in other markets, it's a higher level of referral than self-generation.
Great. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew.
Our next question comes from David Fraser with MST. Please go ahead.
Morning, gents. Can you hear me?
Yes. Thanks, Dave.
Hi, Andrew. How are you? I don't know whether it's evening or morning for you if you're down here. Anyway, quick one, well, actually two questions. Fund 8, I'm sort of guessing that you'll probably need around about 25 or 30 people in your investment team. Are they gonna sort of come out of the existing EMEA team, that you picked up with OBL, or OBL, should I say? And do you envisage that you might need some more, I guess, bums on seats to roll out Fund 8?
Following on from that, if we see the second series of Funds 4 and 5 rollout, which, you know, we expect to happen over the next 12 months, do you have enough headcount to actually run all that new business coming forward?
Thanks, David. To the first question, the Fund 6 was the strategy that we initially acquired through the merger with Omni Bridgeway. That came with a body of professionals that had deep experience with the enforcement strategy. Fund 8 is a follow-on fund to that. The team that was involved with Fund 6 will roll into Fund 8. We have expanded that capacity through expanding the product offering into the U.S., and we now have some additional headcount servicing that in the U.S. We would expect that there will be continued growth in Europe in particular, but also in the U.S., with specialists dealing with that type of strategy.
I suspect we'll be announcing the opening of a couple of new offices in Europe that will be partly dealing with that expansion. In terms of the uplift on Funds 4 and 5 and the implications for headcount growth, we're not expecting any significant or material growth in headcount specifically to deal with that upsizing. There will be some natural growth over the next couple of years as we continue to build out the current facilities and offices that we have around the world. We would be adding just on a normal basis headcount for that growth.
Great, thanks. Then a couple for Stuart and perhaps Gian, now that he's started. Last year, you gave us a guidance for capital calls in full year 2022 of AUD 65 million. I can't see it, and apologies if it's there somewhere. Have you got a view on what your capital calls will be in 2023? This sort of leads to my, you know, cash flow to OBL and how much of the buyback you can fund. Then a sort of an associated question on the balance sheet, you had an accounts receivable of AUD 61 million at the full year. Most of that's associated with obviously the Wivenhoe settlement. Have you been paid any more since then? When do you expect that balance of the Wivenhoe settlement to come through?
Lastly, associated with that, the likelihood of any of the potential 18 income that we, you speculated, around about at the time of the settlement.
Thanks. The AUD 65 million of calls that we've put to market for last year, we expect to increase this year, along with the maturing of the underlying litigation investments that we already have, but also on the increase of what our commitments would be for this year. We expect that the amount called each year is going to continue to increase as our investing activity and our portfolio increases. In respect to the AUD 61 million receivable, yes, a large component of that is Wivenhoe. We have received a further installment in July. We're due to receive another installment tomorrow. Then there is the finalization of the underlying distribution scheme that the Maurice Blackburn are in control of.
The latest update is that they anticipate that to be completed by the end of this year. The completion of that will free up both the unearned income or the unrecognized income that we've pointed to, and also the payment of any residual receivable that's due. It's all dependent on the loss assessment of the individual claims in that process. Our outstanding income is a percentage of that number. It's dependent on when that scheme is finalized by Maurice Blackburn.
Thanks, Stuart. Cheers.
Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one. Our next question comes from Jason Palmer with Taylor Collison. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Good morning, Andrew and Stuart and Gian, how are you? A few from me, maybe with Stuart to start with, please. Just in terms of, you know, capital available or capacity available now, it looks like you've got, you know, as David pointed out, AUD 160 million of cash and receivables and an upsized facility that you could draw down on of AUD 100 million. So let's call that AUD 250 million. Where do you see sort of comfort, liquidity for the business in terms of how much you'd like to keep for annual commitments, and capital calls?
Yeah. Thanks, Jason. Look, I think that when we look at the group, that there is a very strong funding and financial capacity of the group and OBL. As you pointed out, the cash, the receivables, and the undrawn amounts. Additionally, obviously the management fees are increasing and rolling through on a regular basis now, and there's the completions to occur. I think that from a group perspective and from an OBL perspective, that there is incredibly strong ability there already.
Internally, you don't work towards, you know, a metric of X times called capital and overheads or anything like that?
No. We have a detailed budget and cash flow process that we roll out to look at our needs over the short term and medium term. It's not a metric in reverse.
Okay. Thank you for that. To Andrew, a couple if I could please. Just in terms of the secondary markets, you provided some detail in respect to, you know, the materiality towards the business, both on a buyer and a seller level. Are you able to talk to maybe the depth of the pipeline on both of those sides, if you could please, and just sort of how concentrated they are at this point in time?
Sure. Thanks for that, Jason. It is and continues to be an evolving part of the market. At the moment, I would say on the buy side, there is growing interest. There are a number of specialists and generalist funds that have expressed interest in participating as a buyer from us. We will continue to explore it. There's certainly more capacity available than what we would have willingness to sell. To that extent, I think we feel comfortable that we'll be able to achieve our goals. In terms of the sale side and us as a buyer, there is a number of funders, as you would appreciate.
Who have funds that are coming to harvest period, and they are suffering, as we all do, the inevitable delays that occur with this asset class. They're looking for monetization events or risk management event, and we will gladly look, explore those opportunities and see if we can purchase assets that will expand our investments and provide us with good returns. I'd say the sale side's a bit thinner and a bit more discreet, because there's fewer funders that we'd be willing to engage with in that type of market.
Okay. Thank you so much for that.
Thank you.
Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press Star, then one at this time. Our next question comes from Alex Zhao with Cavouder Management. Please go ahead.
Hi, Andrew. I have two questions. Can you hear me okay?
Yes. Thanks.
The first question is on the stock buyback program. Is there guidance on the amount or how big the buyback program is? If not, it's okay.
Yeah. Thanks, Alex. The board has authorized to buy back up to AUD 50 million over the next 12 months period.
Got it. Has the board issued like a level of which you would do the buyback, or you'll be opportunistic, or?
Yes. It will be opportunistic, based on our capital needs at the time and how we can allocate capital to enhance returns. As I mentioned, we've got a number of opportunities to deploy capital and, you know, capital allocation decisions will be taken in the context of those opportunities as they present throughout the year.
Got it. Typically, is there a threshold in the sense that if you're deploying it towards buyback, it has to be at least, you know, the stock has to be trading at least like 20% or some sort of a percentage off from the intrinsic value of the stock versus kinda other capital needs where the IRR might be similar or higher?
No, Alex. Those decisions we've made, based on what the options are at the time and how we perceive it will enhance the shareholder value.
Got it. Great. Another question is, I see that for Fund 8, you, the fund is designed to have limited recourse debt, and that's on the fund level. Is that correct?
Yeah. Correct. It'll be recourse only to the fund assets.
Okay. Got it. For other funds out there, do other funds carry debt on the fund level in general?
No.
This is the first time you're designing it this way?
This is the first time we've designed it this way. There's actually restrictions.
Okay.
In terms of debt at fund level.
There's also an insurance policy, right? For the debt, so.
Correct. Yeah. Fund 8 does have the support or benefit of a principal protection insurance that covers both the principal and some of the PIK, but it is somewhat of a unique and innovative structure.
I see. Is there any idea on roughly how much the cost of the debt will be on those debts in general, on the recourse debts for Fund 8?
No. We've not given guidance on that, Alex. What we have said is that the overall cost of both the insurance and the debt will be less than 20%.
Got it. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Alex.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Saker for your closing remarks.
Thank you. Thanks for that, Sarah. I think we've hopefully answered all of your questions. If not, we'd certainly take the opportunity to address those in our meetings that are gonna take place over the course of the week. If you do have any follow-ups, please don't hesitate to reach out. Otherwise, thank you all. Goodbye.