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 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.
Thanks, Glenn, and good morning to everyone who's joined the call. I'm delighted to be sharing an outstanding set of results for Plenti's first half ended 30 September 2025. I'm here with Miles Drury, our CFO, and we're going to talk you through our results, and then we'll also leave some time for Q&A at the end. We might jump straight into it. By way of a very quick recap, Plenti is a technology-led lender. Our vision is to provide fairer, faster loans through our smart technology. Our cash-amp is growing very rapidly. We deliver market-leading customer experiences via our proprietary tech platform, and this is really helping us grow our market share rapidly across the three verticals of automotive, renewables, and personal loans.
I'm really pleased with the diverse and complementary distribution channels we keep building into market, which provides us both with opportunity and with resilience. We fund prime borrowers, and we have an exceptional 10+ year credit record. We also have deep and diversified funding, and we have a very long-term shareholder value focus. Quite simply, we are all about, and we aspire to build Australia's best lender. As I mentioned, Miles and I will talk you through the highlights, operational performance, financial results. I'll talk about the strategy, and I'll also share something around our outlook for the second half. It's fair to say Plenti had an outstanding first half, delivering cash PBT of AUD 14.1 million, supported by profitable portfolio growth and strong credit.
The entire Plenti team, across all aspects of our business, have worked extremely hard on all fronts to deliver these great results for our customers, our strategic partners, and brokers, and for you, our investors. We had an outstanding first half, and it's a clear function of how our company continues to grow and scale as designed. It demonstrates that when all aspects work well together, including business development, our underwriting and operational fulfillment, our technology and product and innovation, we deliver a great result. We drove our Horizon One Growth strategy, which is to grow by doing what we do, but better, very, very hard, and with disciplined focus across our core lending verticals. This drove great outcomes. Our loan originations were AUD 912 million, up 46% on PCP, and this drove our profitability with cash PBT of AUD 14.1 million, up 147% on PCP.
We delivered this top-line growth by also maintaining disciplined credit outcomes whilst continuing to find ways to be even more efficient and reduce our cost-to-net margin. Very, very pleasing result on all fronts. We continued our strong growth trajectory in the first half, with performance continuing to accelerate. As I just mentioned, our loan book grew very strongly across all three verticals, and I'll speak to each of those in a moment. It is very pleasing to see us make great progress towards delivering our strategic goal of an AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026. We put that target out there at the end of last year, and I am very pleased that we are really making great progress towards achieving that large milestone. As a result, we have had now four record quarters of growth in a row, with Q2 up 47% above PCP.
That is all driving meaningful revenue growth. It is over AUD 150 million for the half. Great results on really generating good growth with the loan book and loan originations. Plenti accelerated profitability in the first half, with cash PBT for the first half equivalent to the full year 2025 result. You can see the graphic there on the left. We are comparing our first half 2026 with our full year 2025. It is a great result for our business and really evidence of everyone's hard work and how the business is set up. Our cash-amp result of AUD 12.8 million represents growth of 133% on first half 2025. Miles will talk in a little bit more detail about this, but at the headline level, Plenti is now paying tax and consuming its carry-forward tax losses.
As I've said before, it's not every day you reference paying tax as a positive, but it is a very clear milestone for us that our business is maturing, it is scaling, it is generating meaningful profit, and growing effectively. It is a real milestone for us and one that we're extremely proud of. Cash PBT, therefore, provides a better way of assessing operational trajectory as we consume our carry-forward tax losses. We're being as transparent as we can. This profitability trend really demonstrates when the business and the loan book operates and scales as designed, it starts to generate meaningful profits to shareholders. Later in the presentation, I'll talk about what that looks like over time. I'd like to also point out that once again, this result is after expensing all technology investment.
We are very pleased with the project selection discipline and project execution efficiency that this drives. Let me now talk about operational performance. I'll start by talking about automotive, our largest lending vertical. Our automotive loan book continued to grow strongly, supported by diversified distribution across brokers, OEM partners, NAB, and auto dealerships. We did AUD 493 million in originations for the half, up 54% on PCP, and this took the loan book to AUD 1.618 billion, up 24%. We saw strong growth across both consumer and commercial, and we continued to enhance our consumer product and associated policies and expanded our broker relationships. That is something we've been really focused on, and those broker relationships are up 25% on PCP.
We focused more heavily on commercial by investing in resources across the country and getting out and introducing ourselves to more brokers, and that helped us grow 46% on PCP. It is all about we continue to invest in our strategy of deepening relationships, improving the broker experience and the service proposition to both our brokers and to our customers. We also continue to work closely with Tesla and Cadillac to drive additional loan volumes, which is a very key part of our strategy. I really like our renewables vertical, which continued to grow significantly, driven by demand for solar battery systems spurred by federal and state government incentives. Our renewables loan originations were AUD 106 million, up 21% on PCP, and this took our loan book to AUD 376 million, up 24% on prior half.
This was driven by strong demand across the country, again, spurred by those federal and state government incentives for battery uptake. We also successfully launched a revised BNPL product off the back of regulatory change. GreenConnect, our proprietary platform, continued to differentiate us in market and make things much easier for our customers to set up their virtual power plants. We also saw strong demand from the Western Australia battery scheme, which we won earlier this year, and it is now up and running and delivering good volumes. It is something we are very pleased with. Last but not least, we drove significant growth in personal lending, driven by technology enhancements in our credit engine, our customer journey, and third-party integrations. Our personal loan originations were AUD 314 million, up 44% on PCP, and this grew the loan book to AUD 838 million, up 25% on PCP.
Now, this growth was balanced across both our direct and broker channels and was characterized by stable credit quality and performance. We remain committed to continually improving our customer journeys and credit engine, and this delivered higher straight-through processing rates, which for us means no human touch. That really is all about improving borrower conversion and better outcomes and consistency for our broker partners and for our customers. Pleasingly, our investment in data infrastructure and the borrower portal is starting to deliver increased cross-sell and refinance volumes. This is something that we're very, very focused on and is very much part of our strategy. The NAB powered by Plenti car loan originations continued to grow quarter on quarter. We continue to work closely with NAB on building awareness, generating consideration, and converting demand.
The NAB and Plenti product and marketing teams continue to work together effectively to grow the top of the funnel and optimize conversion rates. NAB also launched multiple special offers to their existing customers, covering refinance and also comprehensive car insurance. All of this delivered 110% growth in daily originations growth on the prior quarter in first quarter and a further 23% growth in second quarter. Plenti's partnerships demonstrate external validation of our technology platform and help diversify our channels to market. Plenti's proprietary technology is well recognized externally, with several large organizations inviting us to integrate and enhance their own customer acquisition journeys. Our NAB strategic partnership delivers an innovative outcome for NAB's customers. We're extremely pleased to have won the Western Australia government's open tender to set up and administer their battery scheme.
Our deep integration capability has positioned us extremely well as a key lending partner for both Cadillac and Tesla. We continue to enhance and roll out our proprietary GreenConnect to make our renewables offer even more compelling for utilities such as AGL and to help our customers set up their virtual power plants. This ongoing investment in our proprietary technology underpins our partner relationships, growth, and efficiency, and we are absolutely trying to create this flywheel of value. Ownership of our proprietary technology gives us total control. Our platform delivers our strategy and is tightly coupled to our own business processes and customer and partner journeys. Importantly, our innovation is not reliant on external technology vendors or their release cycles.
This proprietary technology provides a solid foundation for rapid change and AI adoption, delivering operational efficiency improvements across product and process, and enables us to be fast and responsive, such as our six-week program to get the Western Australia battery scheme up and running. When these combine, we deliver real-world commercial outcomes, which is what it's all about. I'm especially pleased at the progress we're making on straight-through processing. We did 21% of personal loans without human touch within the application to approval process and 58% of automotive loans. This not only contributes strongly toward providing consistent outcomes for our customers, partners, and brokers, and reducing our operations cost, but also provides an excellent platform for us to continually explore and implement additional AI opportunities. I'll now pass to Miles to talk through some of our financial results.
Thanks very much, Adam.
The following two pages talk to operating efficiency as the business scales, and then on slide 15, we talk to the credit quality of the business. I'll cover those both in more detail when I talk about the details of the financial results in the financial section. Clearly, if we look at slide 17, which is a summary of the results for the quarter, this was a very, very strong set of financial results for the business, with the headline being the very material uplift in profitability for the half. I won't go through all of these points in detail because they're covered further on the following slides, which I will talk to as we explain the key drivers of the operating business.
On slide 18, with the acceleration and origination that's achieved, we've naturally seen a step up in the rate of growth of the loan portfolio, with AUD 430 million added to the average portfolio value in the half. Interest rates have flattened out, and the rate environment has stabilized, meaning that revenue has grown in line with the average loan portfolio. You will note that we focus on the average rather than the closing portfolio in the financial section, given it is the average portfolio that most closely relates to financial performance in the period. Loan book runoff or amortization has been trending up slightly over the last few periods. This is fairly broadly based across the loan portfolio, and we've seen it as consistent with a consumer that's in a solid financial state, and so some borrowers are having increased ability to repay their debts ahead of schedule.
On slide 19, we look at net interest margin, and obviously, writing loans at the right level of profitability is a key focus for Plenti, and so it's pleasing to see another solid performance in terms of NIM in the period. Net interest margin stepped up from 5.3% in the first half of 2025, and it was also the same in the second half of 2025, to 5.4% in the first half of 2026. Given just how strong originations growth has been for Plenti over the last year, it's a testament to Plenti's customer offering that we've been able to achieve the significant growth without sacrificing loan profitability, which goes to some of the core differentiators we talk about in our business.
An important contributor to the margin result for the half was very favorable debt capital market conditions over the past 12 months, with Plenti achieving strong pricing outcomes when completing new ABS deals. This has also flowed through to improvements in warehouse pricings as we've renewed existing warehouses. On slide 20, in terms of credit results, the credit loss result in the half was clearly a standout, with 94 basis points of net realized losses stepping down from the 1.1% level we've seen in the prior two years. As I noted on the quarterly call, we see the strong loss result as a reflection of a couple of factors. Firstly, the types of high credit quality customers that Plenti lends to are in a solid financial position with falling interest rates and low unemployment. Secondly, Plenti's simple and efficient customer journeys are helping us attract good quality customers to Plenti.
Thirdly, we need to recognize that with a fast-growing loan portfolio, we have a greater proportion of newer loans in the book, which tend to have lower losses and therefore help bring down the average loss rate across the book. On the lower left-hand side, you can see our expected credit loss provision chart. The fact that there's a reduction not just in the provision, but also in the provision rate, but actually the dollar value of the ECL was notable given how much we grew the loan book in the half and reflects again the solid underlying position of credit across the portfolio with Plenti's focus on prime quality customers. Slide 21 really is the money slide, given it shows how and why Plenti's profitability has improved so substantially in the last few years.
It charts the absolute dollar value of net margin against the operating costs of the business. Over the last five years, Plenti's technology-led business model and our growing scale have come together to see margin grow materially faster than costs. It was pleasing to see this trend continue in the first half of 2026, with 27% growth in net margin year on year and only 16% growth in operating costs, notwithstanding that 46% growth in our originations for the period. Slide 22 brings together the drivers I've discussed in the last few slides into the summary P&L for Plenti. Without repeating what I've said in the prior slides, the material improvement in profitability is really just a reflection of how the Plenti business should function when key drivers go in the right directions.
Strong originations driving solid uplift in loan portfolio, improving margins, ensuring that loan book growth flows through to dollars available to the business, low and stable credit losses, and good cost operating leverage as the business scales. It is really outstanding to see the business deliver an equivalent level of cash PBT in the first half of 2026, as was achieved for the whole of FY2025. I've been noting for some time that Plenti is transitioning to full income tax paying, and Adam referenced this as well. I won't go into the details now, but I do note that there are various tax reconciliations in the presentation appendix for those who go into the detail on this topic. Finally, on slide 23, in relation to funding, we saw some really positive developments in the period.
Over the last five years, we've been working very hard to build out our public ABS issuance program, and this is really paying dividends with Plenti achieving strong, consistent outcomes when we've gone to market. The auto ABS deal we've just priced last week, while outside of the half, was a standout, with the AAA notes priced at 95 basis points over BBSW and a blended margin of only 1.02%, which is the lowest margin we've executed on since our very first deal in 2021, which was off the back of COVID. Debt capital markets have been extremely robust this year, and while it probably feels that they're softening just a touch, that really is off a very, very low base and providing some very competitive funding costs. While also outside the period, it's worth calling out our new warehouse facility with a major global bank signed last month.
The facility continues to scale up and diversify funding sources for Plenti, and it's both cost and capital efficient for us. Also notable and important in relation to funding, and again covered in more detail in the appendix, was the fact that Plenti was able to fund its net equity contributions to warehouses and ABS structures in the period, which was AUD 7.5 million from operating cash flow in the business, which is an excellent milestone to be achieving. All in all, an excellent half from a numbers perspective, and I'll now pass back to Adam to discuss both strategy and outlook.
Thanks, Miles. Let's talk a little bit about strategy, but let me start by saying right up front that Plenti currently has very small shares of very large markets creating significant runway and growth potential. It's something I'm extremely excited about.
Based on our analysis, the three markets we compete in have experienced some great growth over the last year. Automotive has grown by about 10%, and renewables and personal loans have grown by about 20%. You note from this slide that Plenti has been able to grow at significantly higher rates, especially for auto at 54% and PLs at 44%, which means that we've been picking up some market share from others. My key personal takeaway from this is that we have lots of room to grow. It's important that we consider that is the context in which our strategy is playing out. When you consider these growth market rates, our proven competitive advantage strengths, I expect Plenti to continue to deliver performance and growth momentum. I'm confident in the strength and sustainability of Plenti's key strategic differentiators.
I've spoken about our proprietary technology stack earlier in this presentation. I'm extremely pleased with our end-to-end cloud-native stack, our scalability, our fast, simple, and easy customer journeys, and our proven straight-through processing functionality. The combination of a very commercially collaborative culture and our proven technology integration capabilities means that third-party partners can work confidently with us, and we're trusted by them to be deeply embedded within their respective customer journeys, which is a privilege we take very, very seriously. Lastly, our sophisticated credit and pricing capability continues to enable the pursuit of prime customers and to deliver historically low loss rates. I spoke about our new corporate strategy at the beginning of this financial year, and I'm pleased to share with you that we've made solid progress against our growth ambitions to drive towards our primary goal of a AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026.
Some of you might recall that our AUD 3 billion loan book goal was pulled forward a full 45 months from historical origination levels, and I'm extremely pleased with our performance in the first half towards achieving this ambitious goal. During the first half, we've applied disciplined focus to grow by doing what we do, but better across automotive, renewables, PLs, and winning new partnerships such as the Western Australia Battery Scheme. All of this has driven the loan book to AUD 2.8 billion. Our Horizon One strategy still has a way to run, and then we'll be entering Horizon Two with the objective to grow by also doing new things, such as expanding into new verticals, creating new verticals, and working with new strategic partners.
Above all, we are also continuing to extract maximum value from our existing three verticals across auto, renewables, and PLs, and we see those three verticals as a very, very integral part of our strategy going forward. Horizon Three, to then grow by scaling boldly into new opportunities, will enable us to leverage the growing scale of the business and explore a greater set of potential options. It's important that the majority of our focus remains on successfully delivering Horizon One at this point. However, small parts of the business are turning their attention to Horizon Two initiatives. Our focus will inevitably enlarge to grow by also doing new things, and that means building on our core strategic capabilities across deeper relationships to develop diverse and complementary distribution channels to market.
We think this is a very important plank of our strategy and something that differentiates us from our competitors. We want to use data and AI to drive better credit decisions, reduce our cost of operations, and importantly, to enhance customer cross-sell. We want to invest in our proprietary technology stack to provide customers and partners with fast, easy, and simple digital journeys. Horizon Two is all about disciplined expansion of the business by considering where we should invest next through a lens of how we add to our scale, how we can achieve synergy with our existing business, the product and marketing economics, and making sure they make sense for us and deliver value, and how we can leverage our distinctive strengths and competitive advantage to pursue new opportunities. We expect to progress an initial set of projects and focus areas from early FY2027.
Now, some of you on the call may also remember that when we set this ambitious goal of achieving a AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026, and that this goal was brought forward by 45 months based on the loan origination rates we would have achieved in second quarter 2025. I'm delighted to share that we are well on track to deliver this AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026, and the important takeaway from this is our strategy is working. After two more additional quarters of record loan originations, we're closing in on achieving a AUD 3 billion loan book in the fourth quarter. We also think it's worth noting that the loan origination momentum built over the last three to four record quarters, if maintained, starts to deliver a very meaningful, mature, steady-state loan portfolio.
While these trajectories are not provided as a forecast or guidance, the mathematics of quarterly loan origination, unless our portfolio amortization rates, define the size of the steady-state portfolio as the business continues to scale and mature. As our business continues to grow and scale as designed and drives increasing loan originations, efficient fulfillment and underwriting, writes good prime credit, manages losses, and innovates with its technology stack, the overall loan book inevitably gets bigger over time. Our business objective in Horizon Two and Three is to drive our quarterly loan originations growth even harder. Let me finish by providing an update on our outlook. We're confident of achieving our FY2026 priorities for growth, for profitability, and for efficiency.
We told the market that we'd deliver a AUD 3 billion loan book by March 2026, would continue to drive meaningful cash and pad as we scale, and that we'd achieve a cost-to-net margin below 57%. Whilst there should be no trophies at half time, I'm extremely pleased with the performance of the business for the first half across all aspects of our entire business. We've started the active implementation of our refreshed corporate strategy. We're making progress against our clear goals, and we've aligned our people to execute the strategy with enthusiasm, with confidence, and with determination. In summary, our strategy is working, and these efforts are delivering great results across all of the metrics that matter, and importantly, delivering value for our shareholders. Let me pause now, and Miles and I will take questions from the floor.
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 you can ask your question directly. For 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 whether broadly applicable to investors. If your question is not answered, we may follow up with you directly at the conclusion of today's webinar. I'll now pause briefly while the question queue is compiled. The first question comes from James Bisinella. You may go ahead.
Hi, guys. Congrats on the result. Just a couple of questions from me.
Firstly, just on the straight-through processing rates, great to see the increase there. I guess, do you see much in the way of continued increases here? And then how material is that to operating leverage and, I guess, further strengthen cost-income ratios for the business? Thank you.
Yeah, maybe I'll make a couple of comments, and then Miles may add some remarks. Number one, it's very important. So straight-through processing for us is a great advantage because obviously we get a very consistent result, and it's a very efficient result because it is truly no touch. In answer to your question, we think there is some more volumes to be had from that.
It's a careful journey that we've been building over the last couple of years, and we will continually start to increase those % as we make sure we are always regulatory compliant, which we are, and also that we continue to make it a great customer experience. We're also then happy with the outcomes that are being achieved from a credit perspective, which we're managing very tightly because, as you know, we're a prime lender, and so that entire aspect of straight-through processing is something that we're treading very, very carefully. I'm extremely pleased with the momentum and the increase in volumes that we're putting through that channel.
Look, from a cost-to-income perspective or cost-to-net margin, look, I can't give you a specific figure, but obviously, yes, the more we drive automation through any part of our business, and it's not just credit, it should be across sort of all elements of our business, then that is positive from an operating cost perspective.
Our next question comes from Tom Tweedie. Please go ahead. Hi, team. Just want to check you can hear me. Yeah.
Hi, Tom. How are you?
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple of ones from me. Firstly, on the funding arrangements, the ABS deal yesterday, you're able to give us a sense of either how that's going against the auto warehouses or what we should expect from just NIM expansion from that deal alone?
Yeah. So look, AUD 550 million deal, and you do take out some margin versus warehouses. I won't give you the exact number, but it's definitely helpful, particularly when you're pricing it at levels as low as that. Yes, there is some tailwind from a margin point of view that comes through from doing an ABS deal at those types of levels. As I say, I won't give the exact numbers, but no, it's definitely helpful. Obviously, that's our largest deal that we've ever done. You're talking about 20% of the portfolio going through in, give or take, in a deal, which is helpful.
Thank you. The comment around the new global bank providing a new warehouse facility, again, how does that compare to your existing facilities? Is it a more favorable rate, or is it broadly in line?
Look, it would definitely be at the low end of what we've got available across the warehouses that we've got.
Yeah, very competitive cost of funding. I think the other thing that's quite helpful there is from a capital contribution perspective, and that warehouse can fund all three products, so PL, renewable, and automotive, particularly compared to the existing PL and renewable warehouse. It's pretty efficient in terms of the capital we need to put in. Now, ultimately, over the long term, that doesn't make a huge difference because when you turn out to ABS, you release capital anyway, but it does mean sort of through the cycle of a year, there's less net capital going in and having to come out, which just reduces the volatility in our corporate cash balances. It's pretty helpful in that regard as well.
Awesome. I just had one question up on the costs in the medium term. As you sort of scale into Horizon Two, do you think you can maintain that cost-to-net margin below 57%, or how should we be thinking about that?
From my perspective, absolutely. I mean, the whole focus of this business, I guess we've been doing it consistently for the last, I've been here almost six years. We've consistently been stepping it down. I mean, we have talked about making a bit more of an investment in the second half, given the strong product technology.
I mean, things that are really going to help us kickstart our momentum into Horizon Two, Tom, because we need to make sure we're building that momentum. We want to do that in a very kind of efficient and effective way.
Not withstanding that, even with that extra investment, we're still focused on continuing, given the top-line growth we're driving and the growth in net margin, to keep on driving that cost-to-net margin. Look, is there a low point? Certainly not that we're seeing at the moment. Things like investment in data and AI, all those sorts of areas, how do we continue to grow the business without, not necessarily taking people out of the business, but without having to continue to add heads at a lower rate than you would otherwise have had? Yeah, lots to do there, we would say. Yeah.
There's a lot of opportunity.
Thanks, guys. Thanks.
Thanks, Tom.
Our next question comes from Lachlan Woods. You may go ahead.
Hi, Adam. Hi, Miles.
Hi, Lachlan.
Hi, guys.
The first one for me is, do you guys want to provide any, I guess, color in how the quarter is progressing to date? Is there any change in consumer confidence that we should be aware of, or any consumer behavior?
Look, it's still sort of, we're obviously only halfway through the quarter, and obviously, December is sort of one of the key determinants. I think I've said before, December can go sort of either way. I think it would be fair to say that there's obviously some mixed economic data out there, and you might be seeing a little bit of that in some areas. Again, it sort of varies channel by channel and product by product.
Nothing too notable to call out, but we are definitely watching markets reasonably closely because with sort of expectations about interest rates and so forth, it will be interesting to see how the consumer responds to that. Really, the key determinant for the quarter is going to be sort of how the December month comes through.
There are less business days.
Yes, I should say there are less business days in the quarter, just to remember in terms of the overall number for the quarter.
That is perfect. The second one for me is just your October NIM is up 20 basis points, first half 2026, but then I guess when you take into consideration the transaction costs, your NIM, I guess, pre-losses, post-transaction costs actually goes down 30.
Can you just kind of talk me through what exactly this step up in transaction costs is?
Yeah, absolutely. Look, obviously, we provide monthly visibility, but obviously, things do move around a reasonable amount month to month. Probably the big thing that's impacting that transaction cost line is we've been able to do more deals in our direct channel on what we call a cost-per-funded loan basis. We only pay the money to the partner if a loan is written, and the accounting treatment of that is a bit different to how most things were historically done, where it's a cost-per-click where an individual click is not associated with a given loan.
I see that as really positive because it makes the direct channel look more like the broker channel where the guidance to the team is just write as many loans as you can, and the cost of that will be reflected sort of in line with the profitability that comes through from the loans. It does mean a slight shift in terms of where some of those costs are being recognized, the transaction costs and marketing costs. Yeah, a little bit of a shift in how that market is operating, but one I'm really happy with because I'd certainly rather pay people every time we write a loan than pay people on the possibility that we might write a loan with them. It's a good thing. It was a bit elevated in October as well, I should say, just based on the mix of volume.
I would directionally, you'd suspect that from the 1% overall in the portfolio, that should all other things being equal, sort of we'd see that ticking up if that continues from what we've seen in October.
Perfect. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Miles.
Thanks, Lachlan.
The next question comes from the Q&A. With the recent ABS transaction, how should we think about the run rate benefit to funding cost and whether Plenti intends to allow it to float in NIM or to be reinvested through lower pricing?
As I said, we won't give you a specific number on exactly what the delta is between our warehouse funding and the ABS deal, given the commercial nature of that. Yes, it is beneficial. I guess I think about that in terms of largely dropping through to net interest margin.
As I kind of observed in the question from Lachlan, there are obviously quite a number of different moving parts that flow into our net margin in terms of new origination levels, funding costs, the construct of our commissions, et cetera. There are a few moving parts. I generally suggest to people that we're always trying to look for ways to expand margin, but assuming that it continues to go up is a slightly brave thing to do. I generally think about it as the opening point is trying to maintain the NIMs at the levels that we've got them at the moment in the competitive markets that we operate in.
Our next question also comes from the Q&A. How are you thinking about paying dividends going forward and any potential timing of this versus continuing to invest in growth?
Also a good question. I guess the first thing is the first thing we need to start doing is paying some cash tax because until you can frank your dividends, obviously, you do not want to be handing, it is very inefficient to hand back any capital. In terms of timing, and look, this is obviously something that our board is very aware of, it really depends on exactly what the rate of growth in the loan book is because how much capital or cash is being invested in the business to support growth depends on how fast originations are growing relative to the loan book. Now, in the quarter just gone, or in the half just gone, it was great to see that we were able to fund that loan book growth from operating cash.
I guess depending on how much faster we grow into the future or what that looks like relative to the loan book will determine where that is. I know that's not a very specific question, a very specific answer, but I guess it's a watch this space, but the first thing is to generate some franking credits that we'd be able to utilize when we get to paying dividends.
Yeah. I'll just add to that. I mean, you'll recall when I was talking about the context in which our strategy and our operations is taking place and the relatively small shares of very large markets that we have. Our focus is very much to grow that share and significantly scale this business.
We know that when we scale the business, we grow loan originations, it does start to create the mathematics of it starts to create more shareholder value. That is what we are very focused on.
As there are no further questions, we will now conclude the webinar. Thank you for joining Plenti Group Limited's first half 2026 results presentation.
Let me echo Glenn's thanks there. We really appreciate the support and interest of all of our shareholders. Thank you for taking the time to join the call and ask questions. Thank you.