Today's presenters are Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, and Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer. The update will be followed by a question and answer session. If you're an analyst and you wish to be added to the question queue, please press the Raise Hand button visible at the bottom of your screen. For all other investors who would like to ask a question, please press 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 Group Limited. Please go ahead, Adam.
Thanks, Tom. I'm here with Miles, Miles Drury, our CFO. Hello and thanks for joining the call. I'm delighted to once again be sharing an outstanding set of results for Plenti for the first quarter ended 30 June 2025. I know most of you know who we are, but for those who may be on the call and don't know who we are, just maybe a very quick recap. Plenti is one of Australia's fastest growing fintechs. We deliver market-leading customer propositions across automotive, renewables, and personal loans. We really use our proprietary technology platform to deliver very fast, easy, and consistent customer journeys. We only lend to prime borrowers. We've got a very strong funding platform, and we're very focused on the creation of shareholder value. The quarter just passed.
The entire Plenti team, across all aspects of our business, has worked extremely hard on all fronts to deliver great results for our customers, our strategic partners, and brokers, and for you, our shareholders and investors. Pleasingly, we've been able to build and maintain the momentum that we created through quarters three and four last year and really started quarter one with some pleasing outcomes. We'll talk you through our results, and we'll ensure we leave some time for questions for people on the call. Let's just jump straight into it. We had an outstanding quarter on all of the metrics that matter, especially pleasing with the growing momentum in our loan originations. Investors may recall we hit an all-time record of $383 million in quarter three last year. We then beat that in quarter four with $407 million.
I'm delighted to share with you that we smashed that out of the park in quarter one and delivered $437 million worth of loan originations, which is up 44% on PCP. This takes our loan book to $2.68 billion, which is a 21% increase on PCP. All three of our verticals went well during the quarter. Automotive, we went to $229 million of originations, which was up 50% on PCP. Our renewables business did $49 million, which was 13% up on PCP. Our personal loan business did $160 million, which was 48% up on PCP. Some really good results. I'm really pleased with that loan book growth and how we've built on that momentum.
It's a clear signal that when all parts of our company—our business development, our originations, underwriting and credit decisioning, and our technology—when all of that works well together, we deliver a really good result for our customers, our brokers, and, importantly, our shareholders. This growth is the result of a couple of active decisions we've made as a result of refreshing our corporate strategy. Number one, we've continued to invest in our proprietary technology platform. This is at the heart of Plenti, and we're always continuing to look at how we remove friction, make it faster, easier, simpler for our customers, and also, importantly, our brokers.
Number two, we've invested in more operations and underwriting staff to make sure we can hit very strict internal SLAs on making sure we can credit decision the work and the deals that are coming in and give everyone confidence that we will get to the deals when we say we will get to them. Number three is the evolution of our business development team. We were naturally organized around products previously. We went to market via PLs or auto. What we've evolved to is now we've got a very much a broker-centric model where we're going to market to the brokers and talking to them about PLs and auto, for example, with the same teams. Lastly, number four is the power of a very clear target.
We've been very clear to make sure all of our staff understand that our target for the year is a $3 billion loan book by March 2026. We've lined up and aligned every resource in the company around achieving that goal. Let me also share some detail on two developments that I'm very excited about to share with you. One is our strategic partnership with National Australia Bank (NAB). As we've flagged for some time, we spent the first six months really bedding down that solution. The first quarter was one where we were thinking that we would see the first meaningful set of origination volumes. Very pleasingly, that's exactly what we've seen. Obviously, the daily origination run rate growth is growing, but because that's coming off a very low base, what we look at is the absolute level of originations. That's really going well.
You don't have to be a maths Nobel Prize winner to figure out that we're sitting in the double digit millions in terms of originations per month now. We'll share more when we get to the half. Our focus on NAB for the coming months is really to continue the marketing effort from NAB and really sharpen our pricing. Also, from our perspective, making sure we're managing and pulling everything and converting everything through the funnel that we can. Given the size of the customer base of NAB, which is many millions of consumers, we remain very confident and excited about the potential of this product in the coming quarters and halves. I am delighted to share that we won the Western Australian Government's Home Battery Rebate Scheme tender.
It was a very highly competitive tender, and we won the right to administer that on behalf of the Western Australian Government. It is very much in line with our shared strategy of having very diverse and complementary distribution channels to market. We do not want to ever have all of our eggs in one basket. It is yet another example of how we have a very commercially collaborative culture, and we can work very closely with large third parties to make sure we can deliver very, very good outcomes for them. That will give us the program to administer over 100,000 battery rebates to households over the coming years in Western Australia and provision around $200 million of interest-free lending.
As much as winning it was a highlight, one of the things that really stuck out for me was the speed at which we were able to move from when we were announced as the winner. We had six weeks until first of July to deliver on the government's election commitment to then deliver an up-and-running scheme, and that is what we were able to do. We were able to unify our technology, our operations, and our people and really deliver a great result for the Western Australian Government on first of July . We have some work to do, obviously, to fine-tune that, but there are not many organizations who would be able to move at that speed and deliver such a great result. That is something that is making me very pleased. You will see limited impacts of this, obviously, on Plenti's overall loan book in the coming quarters.
One of the most important things is the strategic value of this to us in terms of our renewables business and forging even stronger relationships with national solar installation partners and also in Western Australia being able to then sell and cross-sell things outside the program around the rest of Australia. We are very excited about it, and you will see more about that. Let me pause there now, and I'll pass to Miles to talk you through our margins, credit performance, our funding for the quarter, and also update you on the progress against our FY26 objectives.
Thanks very much, Adam. I echo Adam's comments about how pleased we are to deliver these overall results. Touching briefly on margins, we disclosed that the full-year FY25 result, we've seen some strong margins in April. This was because the market element of our funding costs had dropped off the back of, obviously, some interesting developments in the U.S. that encouraged people to expect some RBA rates to come down. We flagged that this impact had abated through May. Market funding costs had risen a bit. There'd been some competitive repricing. By June, we were broadly back to sort of a more in line with historic averages, maybe even a little bit lower. June tends to be pretty strong in auto, which has tighter margins. Overall, the quarter saw an uplift in margins versus the prior quarter, which is a good thing to see.
Overall, in the blended portfolio, not a huge, huge impact. Moving to credit, I guess given our low REERs position of 43 basis points at the end of March, you could have expected the quarter to be pretty strong from a credit point of view. It was at 94 basis points of annualized losses. Having said that, I'd be lying if I said that even I wasn't surprised by just how strong the credit result was for the quarter. There's not a huge amount to call out in that beyond, obviously, the underlying high credit quality of the Plenti portfolio and the fact that of the customers we lend to, I know they're still in a good credit position. We did have slightly higher than usual collections in the period. There were a couple of larger loans that came through, which bumped it up and helped a little bit.
That was probably more of the margin and just the overall strength of credit in the book was really what shone through. 90-day REERs ended the period up slightly at 49 basis points, although down actually quite a bit from where it was at PCP at 59 basis points. Still in a really good position on the credit front going into the second quarter. In terms of funding, the quarter saw the Plenti Treasury team complete another very successful ABS with a $400 million PL and green issuance. Given the market volatility we saw in April where credit spreads globally pushed out pretty significantly off the back of those US
tariff announcements, it was really pleasing to see how strongly both credit and pricing came back and enabled us to execute a very strong deal, which really is a testament to the strength and investor interest in the Australian structured credit market. I mean, while the quality of our credit book should get investors interested, and we've now got a pretty strong track record, 10 issuances over $3.8 billion of ABS completed. Again, I would say, and our Treasury team executed that deal very well. I was still surprised again by just how much money there was. That allowed us to both upsize the deal from the original announced size and also ultimately deliver margins that were inside that same deal in November 2024, which is a pretty remarkable outcome given everything we'd seen in prior months.
We've now got a couple of months to do internal Treasury projects before we're likely to return to the market in around the third quarter with our next auto ABS. Finally, touching on our FY26 objectives around growth, profitability, and efficiency, we set an objective of achieving a $3 billion loan book by March 2026. Clearly, the origination momentum from the current quarter puts us in a really good place to deliver on that outcome. Equally, strong portfolio growth, low credit losses are very supportive of the objective we've set in terms of driving meaningful cash impact growth for the FY26 year. We also remain focused on delivering operating efficiency as we scale to deliver on our efficiency targets. Overall, the first quarter of 2026 has set the Plenti business up really, really well for the coming financial year.
We remain really focused on delivering on that refresh strategy to grow the business and grow value for our shareholders. With that, I'll pass back to the moderator for you.
In closing, I'm extremely pleased with Q1's performance. Very good momentum on all fronts, on all of the metrics that matter. Personally, having just clicked over a year in the job yesterday, I'm pleased that we've refreshed the corporate strategy. We've got very clear goals across the company and aligned our people. We're starting to see just that increased momentum off a really great foundation that's been built up over many years by the team to continue to deliver a really good set of business outcomes. It's a great example of when the business operates as designed, you know, when the operations go well, business development goes well, we're making smart credit decisions, we will continue to scale the business. I'm delighted with the progress. Tom, back to you, and we're happy to take questions.
Thank you, Adam. As mentioned, we will now take questions from participants. As a reminder, if you're an analyst and you wish to be added to the 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 you can ask your question directly. For all other investors who would like to ask a question, please press 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 call, we will follow up after the conclusion of today's webinar. I'll now pause briefly while the question queue is compiled. Our first question comes from James Bizanella. James, go ahead.
Hi, Adam. Hi, Miles. Congratulations on the result. Maybe just a couple for me. Firstly, just around the annualized loss rates, that was down 28% year- on- year. I think, Miles, you noted that was obviously a very good result. Just on that, that's an aggregated number across the book. I'm just keen to dig in a bit further and perhaps are you seeing any strength in any particular segments or is it pretty broad in terms of the strength that you're seeing there across the loss rate coming down? Thank you.
Thanks, James. Look, I would say it's been pretty strong across the entire book. If I drill into it by segment, the one that was probably interestingly the strongest in the period was actually PL and probably drove the greatest part of the benefit. Having said that, all three channels looked pretty good. As I say, I think there's probably a macro piece there. I think there's probably also, if I look at some of the detail around some decisions we made, probably going back 18, 24 months in terms of just some small tweaks to our credit policy and therefore the quality of originations that have come onto the book. Some of the early indicators of credit stress have generally been trending down, particularly in the PL book over the last 18- 24 months. I think that's been beneficial as well.
Having said that, I generally talk in the sort of the one to low ones number for the business. While 94 basis points is a fantastic number, I still probably think that's, for the medium term, more the type of number I'd be thinking about. Great to see such a strong performance in the period.
Absolutely. Just switching gears to originations as well, just keen to pick a bit further in terms of seasonality. June was a record and it's obviously hard to continue to keep doing records. It sounds like we should see some growth in renewables perhaps next quarter. Broadly, how should we think about sort of the run rate and originations for the group moving forward?
Look, we obviously just try to focus on the results we've delivered. Our ambition is obviously to keep growing things. I think renewables is in a good place given some of those programs. We've got to work through exactly how much the impact of subsidies, the size of loan plays versus volume of loans. Amazing to see the level of top-of-funnel demand that we're seeing coming through there. Automotive, again, was strong in June given you've got that end-of-year impact. Having said that, our objective is particularly to grow all the business. We do particularly want to see that NAB momentum coming through, which was a contributor to the growth that we saw. The personal lending, again, you can see that move around a little bit. We want to keep on doing what we can to drive growth in that channel.
Maybe a little bit more challenging to keep pushing those numbers up in the same way as the other channels.
Yeah, and on the renewables too, we did see some applications pausing ahead of the fi of July where customers and installers were pausing to make sure they could take advantage of the various federal and state government rebates that are in market now. We think some of that will fall. James, the other answer to your question is we're very pleased with the momentum and the growth that we're putting on. Let's not forget we have very, very small shares of very, very large markets. In auto, we're only 2% of the market. In renewables, we're about 24%. In PLs, we're about 4%. Certainly, my view is we need to continue to drive the business forward with a confidence and enthusiasm that we can continue to build meaningful numbers in those large markets. That is the task ahead of us.
That's what we're kind of gearing up to make sure we can get at.
Great. That all makes sense. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Cheers.
Thanks, James.
Thanks, James.
Our next question comes from Lachlan Woods. Go ahead, Lachlan.
Hi, Miles. Adam, thanks for taking my call.
Go ahead, Lachlan.
Just the first one, just on renewables. Is there any investments given the opportunity there that you guys are making? I'd like to kind of front-run it in terms of marketing or additional, I guess, staff to get more market share in terms of brokers?
Yeah, maybe I'll answer that and then Miles can jump in as well. I mean, the renewables business is one that we're in the process of refreshing. We've just appointed a new Head of Renewables, which is fantastic. They joined about a month ago, so they're still in their first 90 days, really taking a look at the performance of that part of our business, which is good. It's going well. Obviously, we are of the mind, we always reserve the right to get smarter and be better. That is the expectation that we will continue to look at ways that we can continue to improve our offer in the market, improve the number of brokers that we serve, and make sure that we're always really relevant.
The other thing is we also want to make sure we seek ways to really leverage GreenConnect, which is our proprietary technology platform for helping customers set up virtual power plants. That's something that connects the likes of AGL with the equipment providers, with the customers and installers, and us as the financier. We've got a very unique platform there that we want to make sure we're getting maximum juice out of.
Maybe the only additional make to that was the reason we appointed a new Head of Renewables was not because the old Head of Renewables left. It was because they've done a great job of building that business. As we structured our auto sales team and increased our focus on commercial, given how successful they've been in building renewables, we've moved them into focus on that channel. Obviously, new leadership brings new views and new perspectives.
Yeah, full marks for 14 halves of.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, seven years of continuous growth. If they do that in the auto commercial space, we'll be pretty happy. I'd also say, the WA program, we are making investments to support that. Obviously, by running that program, anyone who does business in WA has to deal with Plenti because we are the program administrator. That's something that we want to be driving to continue to build those relationships and both capture additional volume in WA, but also nationally. Yes, there is effective investment occurring by virtue of winning that WA program.
Perfect. The second one, you previously mentioned that you kind of have like 30% capacity in the underwriting team. Is that still the case or is it like an expectation you might need a bit more investment in that?
I don't think we thought we had 30% capacity. What I did say is that we've invested in our underwriting team to make sure we have always got capacity to do the business deals we're generating. That's really on our mind. We certainly don't want to get 30% ahead of the market in what we're doing. We'd like to be a little bit ahead of the market in terms of so we never kind of miss our SLAs to brokers and customers. We'll continue to finely and fine-tune the capacity we need of underwriters. We're also using techniques like straight-through processing to augment the human effort because we've also pushed very strongly into straight-through processing to make sure that we can continue to deliver really good outcomes in that space efficiently and effectively.
Perfect. That's all from me. Thank you.
Thanks, Lachlan.
Thank you, Lachlan. I'll pause briefly for any final questions. If you would like to be added to the queue, please press the Raise Hand button or the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. As there are no further questions, we'll now conclude the webinar. Thank you all for joining Plenti Group Limited's first quarter FY26 results update. Have a good morning.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all.