Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Plenti Group Limited's fourth quarter FY2025 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. Today's presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. You can ask a question at any time throughout the presentation or during the question-and-answer session by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We will prioritize questions that have broad relevance to all our shareholders. If your question is not selected during the call, we encourage you to email us directly at shareholders@plenti.com.au, and we will respond to you directly. I will now hand over to Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer. Go ahead, Adam.
Thanks, Glenn, and good morning, and thanks for joining the call. It's great to meet with you, our shareholders, to discuss Plenti's Q4 results for the period ending 31 March 2025. We've not previously held shareholder calls for quarterly results, but we have a focus for the coming years to increase engagement with our shareholders, and so we're introducing these calls as part of that program. I'm delighted to be sharing such a great set of results, and I know that the extended Plenti team have worked extremely hard on all fronts to deliver them. Since joining Plenti last July, I've been continually impressed with the caliber and energy of our people and their collective ambition for our company. I'm here with Miles Drury, our CFO, and our plan today is to walk you through the results and then make sure there's plenty of time for some questions.
This is a fantastic and balanced set of results that shows an improvement against every measure. It demonstrates that we're making very solid progress on our goal to build Australia's best lender based on speed, service, reliability, and value. Certainly, for me, the highlight is our loan origination growth. We wrote AUD 407 million in loans during the quarter, exceeding all previous quarter records. The fourth quarter is typically seasonally weaker due to the January holidays and February being a short month, so I was very pleased to see that Q4 was 42% above PCP and 6% above the prior quarter. We also had cyclone Alfred in there, which did impact our lending volumes for a week, so I was really impressed by the team's ability to keep working through that and deliver a great result.
This is exceptional growth that takes our loan book to AUD 2.5 billion, which is 19% above PCP and 6% above the prior quarter. This once again demonstrates that when we have everything working well together, including our loan origination, fulfillment efficiency, technology, and credit performance, we can deliver profitable growth for you, our shareholders. It also shows that there is significant growth potential in our core business and that this will also be complemented by our partnership with NAB during the coming financial year. As we announced to the market last September when we launched our NAB powered by Plenti product, we thought volumes for Q4 would be moderate. We have seen some good growth in March, and looking ahead, we now anticipate that NAB volumes will become a more meaningful contributor to our quarterly loan origination numbers. Let me add some color to our results announcement.
All three verticals have contributed to these results. Auto loan originations were AUD 195 million, up 35% on PCP, and broadly consistent with the prior quarter. This was a strong performance in a competitive market. We've leveraged our well-priced product and strong service proposition, and we're continuing to differentiate our offering. You may also recall that we had a Tesla subvention offer, which really supported the Q3 result and showed how we can use our technology offering to differentiate Plenti and work closely with partners. While this continued in Q4, it contributed a fair bit less this quarter, but that was offset by growth in the other areas of our auto offering, which really highlights to me the value of having diverse distribution channels to market.
Renewables loan originations were AUD 52 million, up 27% PCP and 6% on prior quarter, and I'm extremely pleased with the momentum in that part of our business as we once again build on the success of our GreenConnect platform and our key relationships to drive significant growth. GreenConnect facilitated a record number of home battery installations, and we see this as a strong source of ongoing competitive advantage for us. Personal loan originations were up to AUD 160 million, up 58% PCP and 14% on prior quarter. I'm extremely pleased with the work that the team have done in this vertical to drive increased volumes and growth. We're seeing strong demand, and the ongoing improvements to our proprietary technology platform continue to make our customer journey fast, simple, and easy. We're also seeing greater volumes of straight-through processing, delivering a great experience to our customers and reducing our cost of fulfillment.
Something we've not historically been as good as we'd like to is repeat lending to existing customers. While we still have some work to do, we launched some new technology in the period to drive better outcomes, and we're already seeing some good results from this work. Margins have remained broadly stable through the quarter as we've grown our loan book. I'll now pass to Miles to speak to credit, funding, and some other elements.
Thanks very much, Adam. Maybe as the answer, just to say how pleased I am to be presenting these results today. It was a quarter or a half quarter where we saw sort of record after record across a lot of teams, so my congratulations again to all the team for the effort they put in. Just turning to credit, credit's definitely been one of the pleasing aspects of the year so far, and Q4 was no exception in this regard with a result of 1.16%. That was slightly up on the Q3 result, but that's seasonally a lower result or a lower loss period, and so it shows ongoing stable position for our credit results.
Even drilling into the detail a little bit more when I look at it at a product level, this was very stable across all of our products and delivering the types of results that we would expect given the credit settings in the business. We've consistently talked to the strength of the Australian consumer and their credit over the last little while, and obviously you've had interest rates flat for a period, then coming down, wages are still going up, and from the middle of last year we had the stage three tax cuts, and all of that's definitely contributing to consumer credit and reflected in our stable loss numbers. Realized losses are obviously a backward-looking metric, whereas arrears give you a bit of a view of what's coming down the pipe, and in that regard, there's also been slight upside versus our expectations.
As you'll see in the release, 90-day arrears came down slightly at the end of the quarter versus the end of December, and our 30-day arrears were also down a little bit, which all speaks to that pretty solid consumer credit picture. Certainly, unemployment levels remain very, very strong across the economy, and there's no doubt that that is contributing to borrower repayments and supporting credit from ours and other lenders' perspectives. I think it would be remiss just to note that given the strong origination momentum we've got and therefore the faster loan book growth that we're delivering, this does tend to flatten your credit numbers a little bit. The denominator's growing a lot with more new loans on the books, but even if you back out that effect, the results are still very, very strong.
In relation to funding, we had a very successful fourth quarter, and again, my congratulations to the Treasury team on that. We came back from the Christmas break well advanced in preparations for our next auto ABS, and with market conditions looking pretty solid, we were able to launch and price that by early February. At AUD 509 million, it was our largest ABS to date and delivered even results that I probably thought were a surprise to the upside. We had three investors in that deal who came in with orders each over AUD 100 million within 48 hours of announcing the transaction, which is not something I have seen before in any of our other eight deals.
Based on that investor demand and support and the breadth of investor support, we were able to continue to bring in pricing on that deal and deliver results and pricing that was inside where comparable deals were being done at the end of 2024. Obviously, there has been some pretty significant disruption to capital markets following the U.S. tariff announcements earlier this month, and there is some way to go in terms of the ultimate impact on that across a range of areas. I was pleased, though, to see one of our peers, Metro, announce an auto ABS on Monday this week, and when I look at the pricing that they have got in market, while not as low as it has been at the absolute tights earlier on this calendar year, they are still pretty attractive from our perspective, so keen to watch that, but definitely a positive sign there.
As you'd expect, we are making plans and have a range of different funding options to support our ongoing growth. That's across ABS deals, across warehouse capacity, and potentially other funding structures. Even though markets are obviously a bit volatile, we continue to see good strength and good buying appetite for Australian auto ABS. I'll pass back to Adam to talk about just the full year in cash impact, but again, I should note that I'm very, very pleased with the result that's been delivered there, so certainly a happy CFO here. Adam.
Thanks, Miles. Yeah, let me comment on our unaudited cash impact result for the full year. As you may know, we delivered AUD 5.5 million of cash impact in the first half of FY2025, and we have built on this with good growth into the second half where we delivered AUD 8.3 million of cash impact. AUD 13.8 million cash impact for the full year represents growth of 126% on the prior year number and shows Plenti is starting to produce some substantial profitability. This, as I said at the first half, is where we showed some really strong year-on-year growth. This result is a consequence of what Plenti's business delivers when you simultaneously deliver strong loan growth in origination, manage the loan book, manage margins and losses, and drive a cost of efficiency in operations. It is starting to throw off some real good scale economies for us.
At the start of FY25, we set three financial objectives for the business. One, grow loan originations in the loan portfolio. Two, continue our profitability momentum to drive year-on-year and half-on-half cash impact growth. Three, continue to improve cost efficiency. Pleasingly, we've been able to tick all three of these boxes, and I look forward to providing more detail around this when we release our full year results on Wednesday, 21 May. Let me close my remarks by saying that I'm extremely pleased with the result and also the hard work of everyone in the Plenti team. Everyone has really worked very, very hard over this last quarter to deliver these results. Let me now pause and open up for questions via the moderator.
Thank you very much, Adam. We will now take questions from participants. As a reminder, all participants today can ask a question by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. You can simply click or tap Q&A and type your question. We will prioritize questions that have broad relevance to all our shareholders. If your question is not selected during today's call, we encourage you to email us directly at shareholders@plenti.com.au, and we will respond to you directly. I'll now pause briefly while the question queue is compiled. Our first question today relates to lending demand, and the question is, are we seeing any change in demand for loans in the last four weeks?
I mean, April's an interesting period because you've got both school holidays, and then we had both Easter and ANZAC day. I think demand across the Australian economy has probably been impacted over the last four weeks. I think generally, if you sort of look at how things are tracking at the moment, there's nothing that surprising compared to what we might have seen prior to that. Yeah, I don't think that, I guess that question is in the context of global events, and I don't think we've seen any meaningful impact of global events on what's happening to demand. If anything, demand was obviously pretty strong in the first quarter, sorry, the fourth quarter, our first calendar quarter, and we hope to see that continue.
April's a little bit hard to get your head around just because of the various broader impacts on it, but nothing that suggests that there's a material impact of global events.
Our second question this morning, how should we think about balance sheet capacity to support book growth?
Look, obviously, the business does use capital as we grow, but I think the thing that we've been able to do over the last five years, we've taken the loan book from AUD 400 million to AUD 2.5 billion with the capital base that we've got. What we've been able to do is create some very effective ways to recycle our capital to continue to support the growth in the business. We continue to have available a debt facility which does scale as the loan book grows. We obviously do not provide full balance sheet details, so I can't give you exact details. That will be at the May result. We will give the full balance sheet details and show you where that is at.
The kind of structures and the flexibility that we've created in the business to manage and to support growth, I think gives us a really good platform to support the growth that we're looking to achieve going forward.
Thank you. We've reached the end of the question queue so far. However, I will offer one more opportunity for participants to ask questions. As a reminder, any participant today can ask a question. Simply use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen and type your question. I'll pause to see if there are any remaining questions. Our third question this morning relates to dividends and the possibility of the payment of any dividends, and if so, when that might be.
A good question. I know something that shareholders obviously always have on their mind. I think, as I mentioned, this business does use capital as we grow, and so historically, our view has certainly been that the application of cash that we've got is best used to support the growth of the loan book. Depending on how much we're able to grow that going forward, we'll determine the extent to which we need to use capital that we've got in the business to support growth versus when dividends may or may not become available. The relationship of capital use in the business really depends on the scale of the loan book versus the rate of loan book growth. Our ambition is certainly to continue to grow our loan book. We know that financial businesses are most successful at scale, and so that is our primary focus.
Certainly, as the business gets larger, you've seen over the last few years the way our cash impact has continued to grow year- on- year- on- year. The more our cash impact grows, it does give us the opportunity to internally fund that loan book growth, and then as we generate even further cash, I'm able to deliver dividends. Yeah, we obviously, the board is very conscious of that, but at the moment, the best use of our capital is growing our business to generate a more valuable business for our shareholders.
We will share some more detail on those growth ambitions at the full year in May.
Our fourth question this morning relates to our electric vehicle loan portfolio. How do you think about the growth of your EV book and in particular growth provided from consumer demand for Teslas?
Yeah, obviously, we've been very happy with the strategic relationship that we have built with Tesla and the subvention deal that Tesla ran in, especially in third quarter, and then came off in fourth quarter. We've seen very good volumes from that relationship. The thematic of EVs is something that we're very interested in. Again, we'll share more of some of our ambitions for that space in May when we do the full year results and talk about our outlook and strategic plans.
We do like to think of ourselves as well placed generally on EVs, particularly with our renewable energy. Our solar batteries plays nicely with EVs. I think the one thing we have been conscious of, which has impacted the opportunity to really lean into EVs over the last two years, is the government's FBT rebate, which does for cheaper EVs add some benefit to taking that up via a novated lease. It has made it harder for us, but obviously, at some point in time, that program comes off and then definitely opens up. What we have been doing is really using where we can use our proprietary technology platform to deliver solutions like Tesla, like Cadillac, to make sure that we are a preferred supplier. It is an area that we are keen to continue to grow into.
We've again reached the end of the question queue. I'll offer one last opportunity. If you'd like to ask a question, simply use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Click or tap Q&A and type your question. I'll pause briefly to see if there are any final questions this morning. As it appears, there are no further questions. We'll now conclude the webinar.
Yeah, can I just thank everyone for dialing in? We certainly appreciate your support as shareholders, and we want to make sure you're fully informed about your business. We are very pleased to have set this up, and we see this as part of an ongoing program. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone. We'll now conclude the webinar. Good morning.