Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Plenti Group Limited's full year 2025 results presentation. All participants are in a listen-only mode. Today's presenters are Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, and Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session.
If you're an analyst, broker, or institutional investor, and you wish to be added to the question queue, please press the raise hand button visible at the bottom of your screen. For any other investors who would like to ask a question, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type in your question. I will now hand over to Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer of Plenti. Please go ahead, Adam.
Thanks, Tom, and thanks, everyone, for joining the call. The Plenti team has delivered an exceptional set of results for the full year ended 31 March 2025, and I'm delighted to be sharing them with you today. The team has worked extremely hard on all fronts to deliver great results for our customers, our strategic partners, and brokers, and for our investors. Let's just jump straight in. Let's start with a quick recap.
Plenti is one of Australia's largest and fastest-growing fintech lenders, as measured by loan book momentum and cash and pad growth. We deliver market-leading customer experiences via our proprietary technology platform, and this is helping us grow our market share rapidly across the three verticals of automotive, renewable energy, and personal loans. We fund prime borrowers and have an exceptional 10-plus year credit record.
We have deep and diversified funding, and we have a long-term shareholder value focus. I'm here with Miles Drury, our CFO, and our plan today is to talk you through our results presentation covering the FY25 highlights, our operational performance, our financial results, our strategy and ambitions for the coming years, and also our outlook for FY25.
We will also make sure there's plenty of time for your questions. Plenti had an outstanding FY25 and all of the metrics that matter to deliver cash impact of AUD 13.8 million. We delivered against all of our FY25 outlook objectives for growth, efficiency, and profitability. We grew loan originations up 18% on PCP. We grew our loan book up 19%. We reduced our cost to income to 23.9%, and we delivered a 126% increase in our cash impact.
Of note, we also delivered AUD 24.7 million statutory profit, which Miles will share some additional data on later on. We successfully launched the NAB powered by Plenti car loan into the market. Plenti continued its strong growth trajectory in FY2025, with performance accelerating in Q3 and Q4. The loan portfolio grew to AUD 2.5 billion, which drove meaningful revenue growth to over AUD 250 million.
Especially pleasing was the growing momentum in loan originations. We hit an all-time record of AUD 383 million in originations in quarter three and then smashed this record with AUD 407 million in Q4, despite this being a traditionally weaker month due to seasonality and fewer business days. Plenti is generating increasing cash impact due to loan book growth, stable margins, and disciplined cost management.
It's great to see the cash impact trend growing over recent years, and it's a clear sign that when all facets of our business, including business development, credit underwriting, operations, technology, and customer service, perform strongly, we see an increase in cash impact. Of note, we're also very disciplined with regards to our project selection and execution because we expense all of our technology spend, which was AUD 14.1 million of technology costs expensed in FY25.
Let me talk about our operational performance before passing to Miles to present on our financial performance. The automotive loan book grew organically and benefited from the quality of our relationship with brokers, Tesla, and NAB. We delivered 14% originations growth with solid margins. This was a strong performance in a competitive market. We invested in operational capacity to ensure that we could fulfill all our customer opportunities.
We launched the NAB powered by Plenti product, more on that later, and launched a very successful subvention deal with Tesla. We were able to get this deal up and running in a couple of weeks, and both Tesla and Plenti are very pleased with the tight technology integration we've been able to achieve for their digital customer purchase journey. We also launched a technology integration partnership with Cadillac. It's extremely pleasing to see these large third-party organizations validate our technology leadership and the value of our proprietary technology stack.
The renewable loan book grew significantly, driven by strong relationships, Green Connect, and higher battery uptake. We delivered 18% originations growth and won several new large national installers. I'm extremely pleased with the momentum of our renewables business, and we once again built on the success of our Green Connect platform and our key relationships to drive significant growth.
Green Connect facilitated a record number of home battery installations, and we see this as a strong source of ongoing competitive advantage for us. It's also pleasing to see the federal government validate our renewables capability by appointing us as the first financier for their household energy upgrade fund. Significant growth in personal lending was driven by operational excellence and technology enhancements.
I'm extremely pleased with the work we've done in this vertical to drive increased volumes, and we delivered growth of 24% on PCP. We invested through the period in additional underwriting capacity that helped us deliver faster originations and more responsive service to our valued brokers. We also invested in automation and customer journey improvements, which, when combined, enabled us to deliver greater straight-through processing and customer re-lend and cross-sell.
This is increasing the level of straight-through processing, and we're seeing material volumes of loan origination from application to approval with no human touch. NAB powered by Plenti setup is now complete, and origination momentum is accelerating. The product is now fully implemented and visible on all of NAB's digital assets, including the web, internet banking app, and desktop internet banking. NAB has also started to invest in external marketing that's driving more meaningful volumes.
NAB and Plenti will continue to collaborate closely on optimizing the product to both increase the volume going in top of funnel and the conversion rate through the funnel. After moderate volumes throughout the last period, we're now very excited to see the more meaningful momentum that's building into Q1 26 , with average daily origination through the May month to date of 105%.
Investment in our proprietary technology underpins our partner relationships, growth, and efficiency. Our proprietary technology gives us total control. It's tightly coupled to our strategy and how we work. We deliver continuous innovations driven by business insights and customer feedback loops. We can differentiate our journeys to make them fast, simple, and easy, and we're never reliant on the release timetable of external technology vendors. All of this provides a foundation for rapid change and AI adoption.
We're extremely well placed to exploit additional advantages from strong operational efficiency and process improvements. We have multiple proof points where we've been able to deliver material innovations quickly and seamlessly for third parties such as NAB and Tesla, and we've just launched an AI experimentation program that we expect to deliver some exciting benefits in improving service and increasing productivity. These elements combine to deliver real-world commercial outcomes and continued strong growth.
We have highly awarded customer and partner journeys, highly automated straight-through processing rates, deep integrations with respective partners such as NAB, and we have differentiated platforms such as Plenti lending platform and Green Connect that add real value to our customers. Let me now pass to Miles, our CFO, to talk about how Plenti scale is now delivering meaningful improvements to our cost efficiency and productivity outcomes.
Thanks very much, Adam. One of the fundamental design principles of Plenti is to use its proprietary technology to drive ongoing efficiencies and lending activities. Slide 13 shows how this has been delivered, with all of our key efficiency metrics continuing to go in the right direction. We provided guidance for FY25 that we would reduce cost to income from 26.5% to below 24%, which we delivered.
The metric I really focus on, however, is cost to net margin, which is what pays the bills. This also continues to improve, dropping from 67.2% last financial year to 60.7%. I'll talk more about this when we get to the business's profitability jaws. Plenti's focus on prime credit borrowers has also been one of the consistent features of the business. We want to fund the same customers the major banks would otherwise fund.
As I will talk to in more detail in the financials, we've now seen a good period of stability in our realized credit loss numbers as the business mix has shifted towards lower risk secured and renewable energy loans. Importantly, notwithstanding the strong growth the business has achieved in the last few years, we've not done this at the expense of credit standards. As you can see in the chart on the right, the average credit score of the portfolio is actually trending up.
Turning to the financial results, slide 16 provides a summary of the key features of the FY2025 financial result, which saw excellent numbers delivered across the business to achieve very strong cash impact of AUD 13.8 million. I won't talk to this page in detail given the key elements I've covered on the following pages.
Originations and the loan portfolio drive most aspects of the financial performance of Plenti, and this page shows average loan book given it most directly links to financial results in the period. Pleasingly, we saw another year of good growth in the average loan book, up 16% year on year, with 49% growth in the average loan book over two years.
This was driven by the growth in originations and particularly second-half originations momentum, which Adam has talked to. I note the slight step up in monthly amortization in the period to 3.7%, which is consistent with consumers being in a slightly better cash position and also the seasoning of the book.
We do like our customers to pay us back, obviously, but at that amortization rate, we do need to originate about AUD 270 million per quarter to keep the loan book steady, which highlights why we're so very focused on ongoing origination growth. It was pleasing to see that we're able to achieve some modest expansion in NIMs in the FY25 year, stepping up from 5.2% to 5.3%.
If you look at these numbers to two decimal places, it's actually an increase of 14 basis points, which is good to see. There are a few different drivers which play into this: strong growth in PL and renewable channels, which are high margin, some good outcomes in our funding activities through the year, as well as some accounting assumptions around loan lives.
You will see that the exit rate in April-May was very strong at 6.1%, which is great, but I do caution investors that this was something of an air pocket with funding costs dropping quite rapidly post the U.S. tariff announcements as the market expected more RBA rate cuts. With more U.S. policy stability and some competitor-driven pricing changes, you can see that the May month to date is back to a more usual level at around 5.8%. Credit was a definite highlight for FY25, with a really strong performance across all verticals. The full-year net realized result of 1.1% was basically flat on the FY24 result of 1.06%.
I've talked on numerous calls about the factors underpinning the stable credit environment, notably the fact that during calendar 2024, Australian consumers started to see real incomes rising with interest rates stable, inflation subsiding, wages still rising solidly, and the tailwind of tax cuts from the middle of the year, along with stable unemployment.
The positive credit environment is also reflected in the low ECL balance as a portion of the loan book, which dropped to 1.98% from 2.2% at the start of the year. This reflects the lower arrears rates in the portfolio at the end of FY25. I mentioned earlier that the cost ratio I care most about is cost to net margin, and this chart shows the relationship between net margin in the blue line and total operating costs in the orange line.
This chart explains a lot of the profitability growth that Plenti has achieved in recent years as growth in margin dollars has exceeded operating costs by a factor of 2.4 times due to the operating leverage in our technology-led business. Over the past 12 months, margin grew at 2.1 times growth in operating costs. Slide 21 brings everything together in the P&L, which is a result of the drivers I've just talked through.
Clearly, a very strong result for the year with 126% growth in cash impact to AUD 13.8 million. In summary, with solid loan book growth and some margin expansion, we drove good net income growth at 25% with funding costs up proportionately. Realized loan impairments also grew basically in line with net income, and operating costs of AUD 62 million were only up 11% on the prior period.
This difference in income and expense growth as the loan book scaled resulted in the profit uplift. I again highlight that we expense all of our technology spend in the year, which this year totaled AUD 14.1 million, so there is zero capitalized technology on the balance sheet. I should highlight the statutory impact result of AUD 24.8 million, which is clearly a very large number.
Embedded in that result is AUD 18.4 million non-recurring tax benefits from the introduction of tax-effective accounting into our numbers. For the last few years, Plenti has been generating taxable profits, and with clear confidence in our ability to continue to generate ongoing taxable income, we have brought some of our available tax losses onto the balance sheet and also recognized deferred tax assets for balance sheet accounts, including large items like the expected credit loss provision.
This is what has driven the benefit in this year, and while this benefit is non-recurring, it does flow through to our net asset position, which has increased 60% from last March. There is further detail regarding tax in the appendix, and I encourage investors who model the business to review this closely as we are moving to the point where we will be paying cash tax potentially late this financial year.
Backing out the tax benefit, underlying statutory profit was still AUD 6.4 million given the materially lower ECL expense in the period. This was excellent to see. This final slide in the financials talks to our funding position, and it was a standout year for Plenti from a funding perspective. We materially increased our ABS issuance and executed some really strong ABS trades, expanding our depth and diversity of our funding partners.
Plenti is now well established as a regular issuer of high-quality term debt transactions with very good relationships across both domestic and international investors. Related to funding, you will have noted in the summary slide that it refers to AUD 12.5 million of underlying operating cash generation. These funds were effectively reinvested back into our funding facilities to support growth in the business. I'll now pass back to Adam to talk about our strategy and objectives for the FY 26 year.
Thanks, Miles. Yeah, let me now talk about our strategy going forward. As the new CEO, I've enjoyed coming into Plenti and working with the executive team and our board to refresh our corporate strategy. We ran a tight process through the summer to look outwards at the world, better understand the needs of our customers and partners, refresh our strategy, and then put in place new processes, tools, roles, and dashboards to ensure we can execute and implement it with rigor and enthusiasm.
This is a process I'm extremely energized by, and we've now briefed and aligned everyone in Plenti so they understand what we're going to achieve, what role they need to play, and how we'll measure success. Plenti currently, watch this space, has small shares of very large markets creating significant runway and growth potential.
We have a 2% share of auto, about 20% of renewables, 24%, and about 4% of personal loans. What excites me is the amount we do not fund in these markets, meaning that given our current growth rates and our ability to deliver great customer outcomes, this puts us in a very exciting position. I can see absolutely no reason why we cannot grow our share in each of these markets.
Our proven competitive strengths work together to deliver our performance and growth momentum. We have a very solid foundation for growth and several elements that clearly differentiate us from others. I have spoken already about our proprietary technology. We control it. It is cloud-native and scalable. It enables fast, simple, and easy journeys. We have also got proven partnership capabilities.
We've got a commercially collaborative culture, proven technology integration capabilities, and external independent companies such as NAB, Tesla, Cadillac have validated how good we are by trusting us to digitally enable their customer purchase journeys. Very importantly for a lender, we've got great credit and pricing capabilities, as evidenced by the way we price for risk and our track record of low losses over the last 10 years.
Continuing to scale the Plenti business is critical to driving our profit trajectory and shareholder value creation. As you know, financial services is all about scale, and it's clear that not every fintech manages to achieve it, which is why we're so pleased with the track record and momentum we've been able to achieve, and we expect to build on. We're focused on growing the loan book with prudent margin and credit management while simultaneously driving operating cost efficiency.
We know that when we do this and the company continues to operate and deliver as designed, we will drive strong cash impact growth. Our strategy is therefore simple. We are pursuing a breakout growth ambition across three clear horizons over the next five years. Horizon one is to grow by doing what we do, but better. Horizon two is to grow by also doing new things, and horizon three is to grow by scaling boldly into new opportunities.
Profitable growth is our goal for the next five years, so let me now elaborate a little on each of these horizons. It's pretty clear to me that we already have a great business. However, unless we focus on what we already do, avoid distraction, and critically look at every part of the company, I fear we'll never realize just how good we could be.
In horizon one, we're therefore applying discipline focus to excel and grow significant market share in our existing three verticals and working to extract as much mutual value from our existing relationships, such as the NAB powered by Plenti auto product and working closely with Tesla and Cadillac. Only when we build even greater momentum will we seek to also grow by doing new things in horizon two.
We think there are many opportunities where we could expand into adjacent products, create new verticals, and engage new strategic partners to further fuel our growth. We expect to then build on this momentum in horizon three, where we fully anticipate other opportunities to become available to our rapidly scaling business, such as additional products and potential acquisitions. This growth and momentum will not just happen. Our success will be underpinned by extending and improving three distinctive capabilities.
Number one is deeper relationships with target customers and partners with the objective of creating diverse and complementary distribution channels to market. We want to create greater mutual value with our broker network and earn a larger share of their business. It makes total sense for us to work with larger organizations and leverage their scale to grow our own business.
Number two is data and artificial intelligence to drive fast and reliable credit decisions, reduce our operating costs, optimize pricing, and uplift our customer cross-sell capabilities. It's fair to say that there's probably not a company around that is not trying to use data and AI more. However, we believe our proven track record of technology innovation and rapid execution capability puts us in the driver's seat to really deliver against this aspiration.
Number three is our proprietary technology stack to provide our customers and partners with fast, simple, and consistent digital journeys and low cost of manufacture. As I've already mentioned, we see this as already a significant differentiator and driver of material value for the business and will continue to invest to maintain our momentum. We will continue to drive loan origination momentum to deliver a AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026.
We have refreshed our corporate strategy. We started executing it in Q4 last year, and we are already seeing positive results and momentum. When we assume historical loan book amortization, which is a good thing because it means our customers are paying us back, and the natural run-off and break that this creates, and we also reflect on the relatively short loan duration of personal lending, it becomes clear that a business like ours has to grow faster and faster.
When I talk to our staff, I liken this to the effects of gravity as a rocket ship seeks to escape Earth's atmosphere and explore the universe. Just like a rocket has to get faster and faster to escape the pull of gravity, so too Plenti to escape the pull of amortization. We have to materially accelerate our growth rate to truly scale the loan book, and this is what we've already done.
You'll see that based on our growth run rate in Q2, we'd anticipate achieving a loan book of AUD 3 billion by about September 2030. Now, due to our loan book acceleration through Q3 and Q4 and the early impacts of our refreshed corporate strategy, we're targeting a AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026, a full 45 months earlier. This is an exciting ambition, and we've lined everyone in the company up behind it.
Our refreshed strategy and momentum now powers a AUD 5 billion loan book aspiration over the medium term. You can see from the graphic that illustrative loan origination growth rate scenarios based on having achieved a loan book of AUD 3 billion by March 2026 show the loan book size we could achieve under different growth rates. A 15% growth rate aspiration would see us hit AUD 5 billion achieved in Q4, FY30.
A 30% growth aspiration would see a scenario where a AUD 5 billion loan book is achieved in Q2, FY29. As mentioned previously, Plenti's actual FY25 loan origination growth rate was 18%. In summary, I'm extremely excited by the company's future. Plenti is well and truly focused on profitable loan book growth. We've got a clear and logical strategy. Our people are aligned and understand their roles. We've got outstanding momentum, and we're determined to achieve our ambitions.
We're confident of achieving our FY26 priorities for growth, profitability, and efficiency. To recap, our FY26 full year priorities are a AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026 in horizon one with acceleration of origination growth into horizon two. Two, continue to drive meaningful cash impact growth as we scale. Three, remain on target to deliver AUD 25 million in efficiencies as the loan portfolio scales towards AUD 3 billion with a circa AUD 69 million cost base.
Let me close my remarks by saying that I'm extremely pleased with this set of results and the hard work of everyone in the Plenti team, and I'm extremely excited by the path ahead. Let me now pause, and I'd open up for questions to Miles and myself. Thank you.
Thank you, Adam. We will now take questions from participants. As a reminder, if you're an analyst, institutional investor, or broker, and you wish to be added to the question queue, please press the raise hand button visible at the bottom of your screen. When your position in the queue is reached, you'll be unmuted and can ask your question directly.
For any other investors who would like to ask a question, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type in your question. Questions will be selected for answering where they are broadly applicable to investors. If your question is not answered during the webinar, we will follow up after the conclusion of today's webinar. I'll now pause while the question queue is compiled.
Once again, if you're an analyst, institutional investor, or broker, and you wish to be added to the question queue, please press the raise hand button visible at the bottom of your screen. For any other investors who would like to ask a question, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type in your question. Our first question is via the Q&A chat and comes from Joe Resells. Miles and Adam, how rational is the Australian lending market at the moment, and how do you see NIM developing while you grow originations further this year?
Look, I mean, I think my observation would be, you know, we operate in a competitive market, and every now and again, you do look at competitors and think, you know, what's their, what is their strategy? But overall, if I look over the last couple of years, once we've got through that phase of sort of adjusting to the new interest rate environment, NIMs tend to get back to a relatively stable place.
And while we'd always like to have NIMs that are higher, and we're always looking for ways to differentiate ourselves through our technology or our relationships to do that, the NIMs that we're experiencing, as we've demonstrated over the last 12 months, have enabled us to drive good profitability growth. Look, we don't build a lot of NIM expansion into our future.
It's all about executing on the strategy that Adam talked about, which is what we want to drive. As we say, our focus is profitable growth, not just dropping prices to drive growth, and that's what we're going to continue to do. How do we continue to differentiate offering to make sure we can drive good growth while maintaining solid margins?
Thank you, Miles. Our next question comes from Andrew Johnston. Firstly, congrats, Adam and Miles, on a great result. Two questions. Do the NAB powered by Plenti loans appear on your balance sheet? If not, how will they affect your key metrics of NIM and income separately?
I can take that one.
Yep.
The answer is no. They're not on the balance sheet because they're funded by NAB, and therefore we don't need to have our own debt. Obviously, that's a positive thing in many ways because it means we don't have to be putting capital in. It's a very capital-light way to grow the business.
In all of our investor disclosure to date, in terms of originations and loan book, we do include them because in terms of actually sort of bottom line economics and what drives the performance of the business, the NAB loans are just as relevant as any other loan that we write. We obviously calculate NIM and those sorts of metrics only on loans that are on our loan book because NAB loans don't contribute NIM. They just contribute effectively a servicing fee to us.
Particularly as that loan portfolio scales, I'm expecting we're going to have to provide more separate disclosure of the loan book, including NAB, the loan book excluding NAB, so that investors can see that difference. In terms of where the profitability comes through on the income statement, it comes through as other income at the moment. You can see over the last few years, other income has stepped up as the NAB relationship has come through. Obviously, we're looking forward to that coming through. Maybe just one other observation.
It probably is a headwind from a cost-to-income ratio perspective because the income or the revenue we generate from NAB is not sort of top-line interest rate revenue. It is more akin to a margin sort of after losses. Therefore, it delivers, I guess, less income dollars per dollar of lending. In terms of the profitability margin, we should be able to generate on that. It should obviously be a lot higher because we do not have funding costs, losses, et cetera, coming out of that income. I hope that answers that question.
Perfect. Thank you. Andrew's second question is with reference to slide 22 in the presentation. Have the challenges to the credit market in April affected your ability to issue new ABS? How do you see the risk of not being able to raise new ABS going forward?
Probably another one for me. Look, there were a couple of weeks there where credit markets were somewhat dislocated and there was not issuance in the ABS markets. That came back reasonably quickly after sort of the Easter ANZAC Day break. One of our competitors did a very successful ABS trade for over AUD 1 billion at margins that I thought were very strong.
That market has continued to operate. There are a range of deals out there in the market. We have actually got one in market at the moment, which is we are in the process of executing. Look, it certainly created a bit of instability, and that happens from time to time in capital markets. At the end of the day, Australian credit is seen, is viewed very favorably by global investors. We have got a good stable economic environment here. We are continuing to see low unemployment rates.
In that context, the impact of these things kind of washes through, and debt investors have a lot of money to put to work, and Australian structured credit is a great place to be doing that. We're seeing that. Will we see rates or margins on ABS as low for the rest of this year as they were back pre-US tariff announcements? I doubt it. That was always going to move at some point in time, and all of our competitors obviously see the same thing. It's not something that we lose a large amount of sleep over.
Perfect. Thank you. Our next question comes from Will Lawrence. Adam and Miles, well done on the result. On page 30 of the presentation, the illustrative loan book scenarios, what are the key drivers for growth of 15% versus 30%? That is to say, what do you need to see from the business to achieve the 30% target?
Yeah, great question, and thanks, Will. I mean, this is something that we're really focused on, on profitable growth, as we've mentioned. We want to do all the things that we're doing now, which is right from our business development teams really working and deepening their relationships with brokers to get a more substantial share of that flow, looking at new broker relationships. We want to really extract that mutual value from organizations such as NAB, Tesla, and Cadillac that we already work with.
We'll also be looking at what other organizations and strategic partnerships could we open up. We think we've got really good commercial and technology capabilities to help open up new relationships with OEMs and things like that. We'll also be looking at some adjacent verticals, new products and extensions, things like that.
We're pretty excited by all the opportunities that we've got in front of us. We want to really maintain and grow the existing growth rate that we have. You'll note that we grew 18% last year. We really want to keep that foot down and make sure we deliver the first milestone of AUD 3 billion by March 2026, and then we're onwards from there.
Thank you, Adam. Our next question comes from Luke Wosbrum. Congratulations, Adam and Miles. With the new 30% battery rebate in the federal budget, how is Plenti planning to take advantage of the expected growth in home energy finance? How do you plan to stand out from competitors like Brighte, Wisr, and MoneyMe and protect your margins as the market becomes more competitive?
Yeah, really good question. Maybe I'll answer, and then Miles can follow up. We think we've got a very kind of competitive business in the renewables kind of market, and that's really borne out by the numbers. We'll continue to really deepen the relationships that we have with installers. We really want to continue to leverage our proprietary technology like Green Connect, which is a differentiator, and that helps customers set up their virtual power plants.
We think that's quite distinctive, and it's a drawcard for us. We do see that that rebate will start to drive and initiate action by consumers and customers to look again at solar panels and batteries and those types of things. We fully expect that market still will be very vibrant. It will continue to be competitive, but we think we're really well placed to be competitive in that market and win our fair share of that market.
Maybe the only dynamic we're probably just keeping an eye on, less to do with competition, just more the impact of the rebate scheme, is whether there's a short-term slowdown in some of the demand there as customers sort of defer decisions to put batteries in until the rebate sort of starts to come through. Obviously, the sooner it happens, the better.
Hopefully, once the rebate comes through, you're seeing a greater level of uptake because it becomes cheaper for people to take up loans or take up that equipment in their house. Yeah, net net, we think it's a positive, possibly just some timing impacts through the year depending on what it does to short-term demand, which we've seen in other jurisdictions where there are battery rebates. Sometimes people defer that. As Adam says, it's kind of more of the same from my team. We've been executing very well for the last few years.
Thank you. Our next question comes from several participants. To summarize, the question largely speaks to at what stage in the future would Plenti consider paying dividends?
A very good question. Dividends is something that certainly gets discussed and is a focus for the board. I think the reality is it depends somewhat on the growth rate of the company. Obviously, as a financial services business, we do utilize capital as we grow the business. The faster the business grows, the more we need to make sure we're utilizing that capital.
Absolutely, as the scale of our loan book grows, as our profitability grows, we do start to generate more meaningful amounts of positive operating cash flows. You would have seen that we generated circa AUD 12.5 million of underlying operating cash flow. This year, that was reinvested back into supporting growth in the loan book.
As we increase cash NPAT and therefore increase cash flows, that distinction of where that money gets allocated between returning capital versus loan book certainly becomes more open. It is something that the board is very aware of, I know.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ron Shamgar, and he asks, how do the recent RBA rate cuts benefit Plenti's profitability?
Ron, in some ways, it's because we're a fixed lender and therefore our pricing is more off swap rates. It's much more about expectations. I mean, yes, there was a direct benefit yesterday because the market had probably been expecting sort of a slightly more hawkish RBA.
With what Michelle Bullock said, we saw a drop yesterday afternoon of 15-odd basis points in the three-year bond rate, which is a pretty good proxy for swap rates, which obviously goes into our cost of funds. Yes, the more the market is expecting rates to drop, you tend to see that forerun or front run in bond yields for the three-year bonds, therefore in swap rates. We saw that.
The reason that we saw such a strong NIM in April, May was after the US policy announcements, expectations around RBA rate cuts increased substantially, swap rates came down. I kind of talk about being an air pocket for a period of time where customer rates do not adjust, but funding rates do adjust. The thing I would say to that is we do operate in competitive markets, and we do expect over time that those things normalize themselves to an extent or move back towards sort of historic numbers.
We certainly do not build that type of thing substantially into our forecasts. It is no doubt it is nice when it happens to have a month where every time I look at my NIM report on a Monday morning, I see green across all of the products.
That's a nice place to be, albeit, as I say, I don't expect it to be a long-term structural change. I mean, the other more, in some ways, important benefit or equally important benefit is obviously reducing RBA cash rates helps everyone who's got a mortgage, which improves the credit position of consumers. That's obviously a positive thing. It also helps consumer confidence. Consumer confidence is a positive thing for demand for consumer credit, which is good for our business. It's really three limbs through RBA rates that we see.
Thank you. We have another question from Jo Risells. You mentioned you may be starting to use your tax losses in 2026 as you commence paying cash taxes. Can you please remind us if your tax losses could also be used by a potential acquirer?
I'm not a tax lawyer, so I probably can't answer the second part of the question. I suspect there's a whole lot of same business test and continued ownership issues you'd need to get through there. I mean, the answer is, as you'll see in the appendices, we've got AUD 20.1 million of tax losses available to use.
Cash NPAT is a reasonable proxy of what our taxable profit looks like. So sort of depending on what you assume sort of cash tax cash NPAT looks like for the coming year, we're getting to the end of using up tax losses, which again is a positive thing because it means that the business is generating consistent profitability, which is positive.
Thank you, Miles and Adam. That brings us to the end of our question queue. I'll just pause for a moment. If there are any final questions, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. We have a follow-up question from Ron Shamgar. What's the margin on the revenue from NAB loans? How much drops to the bottom line for Plenti?
Look, we do not give a specific number on that, but if you kind of look at our cost base, the cost base for a NAB loan is not massively dissimilar to a cost base for operating a standard Plenti loan. If you look at what that runs at the margin, over time, you sort of start out in the 40%-50%. Hopefully, over time, it goes higher than that, obviously depending on the volume you get to and how much operating efficiency we can generate. It will depend on a range of different things.
Thank you. That brings us to the end of the Q&A session today. As there are no further questions, we'll now conclude the webinar.
Thank you. Let me just say thank you for everyone for dialing in. We certainly appreciate the support. We are very pleased with the results and excited for the future. Thank you.
Thank you for joining Plenti Group Limited's full year 2025 results presentation. Have a good morning. Thank you.