Earnings Call: H2 2025

Apr 6, 2026

Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Guaranty Trust Holding Company Plc's full year 2025 investor analyst conference call. All attendees will be in listen only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions when prompted. You are then welcome to key in star and then one on your telephone keypad. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by keying in star and then zero. Please note that this event is being recorded. I will now hand you over to Segun Agbaje. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody who's on the call. With me today, I have Miriam Olusanya, who's the Managing Director of the bank. I have Adebanji Adeniyi, who's the CFO, and there's me. I think we've all had a couple of days. We put the investor call out, investor presentation out, I believe Thursday or Wednesday last week. We'll just go to questions and answers. I'm ready to take the first question. Lovely. Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please key in star and then one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may key in star and then two to leave the question queue. Our first question comes from Nabila Mohammed of Chapel Hill Denham. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. I have a couple of questions. The first one is just with the capital that was raised. I just want to know how the money has been deployed so far. My second question, I see that your loan guidance for 2026 is between 5%. I'm just trying to understand out of your top five sectors- Nabila. Apologies. Nabila. Okay. Hello? Sorry. Your sound is not coming through over here. Can you please repeat the question? Can you hear me? Can you hear me clearly now? That is a bit better. Yes. Yeah. It is better. Thank you. Okay. Apologies for that. My first question is with regards to the capital that was raised. I'm just trying to understand how it has been deployed so far. My second question is just sticking to your loan guidance of 45%. I want to understand the top three sectors that will drive that particular growth in 2026. I noticed that the effective tax rate for 2025 was up by almost 10 percentage points to 39% in 2025. I'm just trying to understand if this is the new norm going forward, and that is what we should expect in terms of effective tax rate. The next question I have is on dividend payout ratio. I noticed that based on the reported EPS, we are now at 50.2% of The other thing is you used to be able to deduct interest income on treasury bills, which you cannot do again. Come 2025, there's no fair value gain. The quality of earnings is a lot stronger than 2024, which is why you've been able to pay a higher dividend. You also are not able to deduct interest on treasury bills. That's again why the tax rate is higher. If I look at where we are today, there are only like really two items that you can deduct today, interest on bonds and interest on foreign income. Therefore, to answer your question, you would be hard pressed if your quality of earnings is good not to have an effective rate of about 27%-28%. While we're at 29%-30%, I think we can do some work to bring it down to about 27%. I never like to use the word new normal because every year you hope, hopefully you get better at what you do. If we change some of the mix of our investment securities and put some bonds into it, hopefully we can bring it down to about 27%. That may be the kind of tax rate we would like to hit for 2025. Look, in terms of strategy, I mean, I could go on. 10 years is a long time. We will continue doing what we're doing. The banking business will continue to grow both in Nigeria and outside Nigeria. We've shown you how we think the income distribution will be for this year, about 65% Nigeria, 35% outside, about 3% non-banking subsidiaries. We'll continue to grow that way. Most of our growth will be organic. Obviously, out of respect for the regulators in the country which I'm looking at, we're hoping that by the end of this quarter we will have another country opening for Access Bank West Africa. Then we might look again. I think it'll be more important for us outside of Nigeria to gain market share and become stronger in the countries in which we are. Try to be number one, number two, and number three profitable in those countries. Very broadly, that's our strategy going forward. I hope I've answered your question adequately. Yes, thank you. If I have more, I'll come back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder that if you do have background noise, to lift your handset when asking your question. Our next question comes from Ronald Goriah of Domras. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, Segun and team. Congratulations on the very high quality of numbers put out in 2025 and obviously the dividends. With that being said, I have maybe two or three questions. The first two questions maybe would be a bit of a follow-up. So you mentioned loan growth of 25%. You mentioned the sectors. You know, given where monetary policy rates are, where interest rates are, could you talk about the underlying asset quality risk of growing by 25% in an environment where interest rates seem to be, you know, in the high twenties? What kind of risk are you taking from an asset quality perspective? The second question, again, somewhat related to loan growth. When I look at the guidance, loan growth guidance is 25%, deposit growth guidance is 40%. We're also seeing the loan-to-deposit ratio guidance increase from 24% to 35%. Could you just help us understand how, you know, how that comes about? Because it seems deposits will continue to outgrow our loans, and so LDR should be dropping if anything. I guess the final point, again, related to the guidance, capital adequacy ratio declining from 43% to 35%. If I look at your ROE guidance, it's 30%. Loan growth guidance is 25%. So if anything, you know, just based on those numbers, the capital adequacy ratios should be dropping, should be relatively steady, just looking at your ROE and loan growth guidance. Just trying to understand what's driving the significant drop in CAR ratio. Is it, you know, are you seeing some significant increase in risk-weighted assets intensity or is it a higher payout ratio that we should expect going forward? Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll try to take each one. When you look at loan growth, and again, I'm gonna spend a bit of time, please forgive me. One thing about us, if you watch us historically, we're not obsessed with loan growth. Our obsession is really more portfolio yield on the asset side and the NIM. You know, the guidance we will give you 25% loan growth because we hope that will happen. We're not gonna sacrifice our conservative posture and take on higher risk just because we want to grow loans. We take the asset side of our balance sheet and we see three items. We see placements, we see investment securities, we see loans. We're gonna play those three things together and maximize the portfolio yield and maximize the NIM. Even though we think we will try and grow 25%, if the risk is too high, we're not going to. If the interest rates remain elevated and we can make our money off placement investment securities, we're gonna put more there. That is why this is a guidance. For us, our guidance, we stay very, very agile. In terms of loan to deposit ratio, part of what you must always remember when you look at our loan to deposit ratio is that it's CRR. You're not gonna be able to put all your deposits in loans. You've got to take out CRR and put some loans, and then you balance it, and hopefully if you do that, you will arrive somewhere about where we are in the loan to deposit ratio. Capital Adequacy Ratio will continue to pay dividends. I think the dividends, sorry, I forgot to address the other person's comment. This is the kind of dividend payout ratio you're gonna start to see. We're going back over 50%. At this kind of high capital adequacy ratio, we think we're comfortable. The type of risk we're taking, how de-risked the balance sheet is, we think we can pay more. We will try to work the capital more slowly. I think, yeah, you will see the high dividend payout ratio for as long as we can continue to make money and quality earnings are high. Please, we try to guide what we believe is our minimum expectations, so we don't come here and have to start to explain ourselves. Even though we've given you a hurdle of 30%, hopefully we'll do better than that. Some of those ratios will be adjusted. Okay. Just maybe one final one. Sure. Some recovery on NPLs last year for some pretty decent recovery. Can we expect that momentum continue? Especially there was that one big write-off in 2024. Any prospect of recovery on that? Well, just like we had promised at the start. Thank you very much. That recovery was. Well, the one you might be referring to is Iche. Because we have provided to Iche at the end of 2024, any money that comes in goes to the bottom line. Yes, I think that is the one big one left. There was another one we took in 2025. That's one-off and that's done, and we've kind of you know, we shake hands with the debtor and we've gone different ways. But I believe for as long as Iche continues to perform in this banking industry, then every year I think the restructure is a 13-year loan. If the restructure works, it means that for the next 13 years we'll have more recoveries on Iche. Yeah. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Steven Chima of CardinalStone. Please go ahead. Right. Good afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. My question, first question is on the bank's FVTOCI equity instruments. Right? We've seen the past impact of appreciating naira on this instrument. We're thinking, how is the bank looking at managing this? Are there plans to liquidate these positions and realize these gains or losses as the case may be? Secondly, we looked at the performance across geographical segments and, you know, we like the growth that we saw from the Rest of West Africa, the contribution from Rest of West Africa to total gross earnings. However, we noticed a decline in contribution from East Africa and Europe. I don't know, could you speak to the drivers of this decline? Lastly, on loan growth again, right? Given the significant deviation from the actual versus guidance for loan growth that was given for 2025. I was wondering, could there be some high-level macro signals that, you know, probably limiting credit growth for banks? Just to help us think through what to expect for 2026. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. No, we're not going to change our position. I think when you're an organization and you're long term, you don't make short-term decisions. Yes, we're in an appreciation scenario today, but it's too early to tell that that's what will happen over the next five years. No, we're not gonna get out of that position. Any losses that arise during an appreciation situation, we'll take it. Hopefully loan growth or what we deployed into in terms of loans will help cushion some of that. Now, we talked about. Thank you very much. I mean, we too wish East Africa and UK could grow like West Africa, but we're gonna focus. We're gonna focus on those two regions. We now own 100% of our East Africa franchise, so we think we're more empowered to start to derive the potential of the region. It's 0.9% today. I think you will see we'll do better in 2026. We'll do the same with the U.K. We're gonna pull all the levers. We are happy with West Africa, not as happy with East Africa and U.K. for now. There's nothing sinister happening there. Sometimes the business and the macros that you're in, the U.K. interest rates dropped in 2025 over 2024, so some of the yields were lower. In East Africa, like I said, we're rebalancing, so nothing, there's nothing out of the ordinary going on there other than interest rates movement. If you're very familiar with East Africa, also the yields in fixed income securities dropped. It's a change in interest environment. The only way to deal with it is to scale up the business. Once you scale up the business, hopefully what you will make will outweigh what you lost in the yields on both the loans and the fixed income. In terms of loan growth, look, like I said to one of the earlier speakers, we would like to grow the loan book 25%. We think there is one way to do it. The corporate space has it, retail has it, SME has it. The thing that can stop us from doing that is that we are not going to be emotional or irrational. If the corporate wants to lend, sorry, borrow between 400 basis points below the SDF rate and the T-bill rate, then we are not going to grow the corporate book aggressively. Because then that dampens the portfolio yield, reduces the NIM and reduces the profitability. There's nothing wrong with the macros. We can grow the corporate loan book, but we've got to make sure it's appropriately priced when we compare it to our other asset classes where we can deploy our funds. Honestly, if the 25% is there, we will. The two segments we're comfortable growing right now when we look at the pricing is retail, SME. When we balance the risk versus the yield, we think those are two areas we'll try and grow. Corporate, if it can be priced perfectly, we will. Again, we are not going to grow the loan book just because we want it to be 25% if the pricing is not correct. No, we don't see any macro headwinds in terms of risk, but we wanna be very mindful of the pricing of the corporate loans we're doing. Don't know if that answers your question. Yes. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Samuel Sule of Renaissance Capital Africa. Please go ahead. Congratulations on your results. Obviously the NPL is quite impressive. My first question is, I was looking at the deposit growth guidance of 40% there within the historical deposit growth levels and your focus of around protecting and time deposits. I'm just not sure that your cost of funds remain low, trying to wrap my head around that number can be a bit aggressive. Can you just shed more light on that? Also for capital adequacy ratio at around 40%, my view has always been that it's kind of at that level, the bank is carrying excess capital. I wanted to ask regarding that, like, what is your view regarding excess capital for banks? Do you think it is ideal? My second question regarding the POS terminal. You have said and did announce that putting 20% agency for POS terminal. I wanted to ask how is that going? Is that strategy working? Where is that development? Where is it at now? Thank you. Thank you very much. On the first one, you're right. The deposit growth based upon our philosophy is aggressive, but we're gonna go for it. We did 25% anyway in 2025. You will always try to do better. One of the things that is gonna drive our deposit growth, you've already hinted, so maybe I should just answer the question now. One of the things we're gonna use to drive our deposit growth without taking time deposits is our POS strategy. It's working very well for us. When we announced this in February, we were doing about NGN 22 billion collections a month. Right now we're about NGN 250 billion. From our perspective, on a monthly basis, it's working. Some of that will stay in the system and will drive deposit growth. We have different things that we're doing. Also, the regions are getting bigger. The first question that person asked me is actually what we were doing with the capital we raised. Some of the capital is going into additional branch network. Additional branch network will bring additional deposit. If we didn't have those branches in 2025, and we have them in 2026, we think that's gonna bring some deposit growth. The POS strategy is also going to bring some deposit growth. Yes, while it is aggressive, we have things in place which we didn't have in 2025, where we did 25%. What-- the only guess we'll both have to guess is these new things will they give us the 15%? Only time will tell. POS strategy is working. Look, capital adequacy is what it is. I don't think you can ask that question again, whether it's good for banks or not good for banks. It'll happen. We have the capital. We all need to deploy it comfortably. We must not get into the temptation to try to bring an ROE that's very high too quickly. 'Cause if you do that, the easiest way to do it is a loan book, and you're gonna pick up NPL. We just have to be patient. The capital adequacy is now what it is because you've all raised the capital. We'll try to deploy it over the next two, three years in a nice way without destroying the capital that we raised. That's kind of where we are. We're not in a rush. If you look at it, we raised the capital just last year. We still did 28% post-tax ROE, 40% pre-tax. We're pretty comfortable that at that level of ROE, we can deploy the capital and not over worry about whether it's too high, it's too low, and that over time it will get back to the levels we're comfortable with, which is around 23%-24%. That's kind of where we get comfortable based upon current volatility. We're fine. It's there, so we have to deal with it. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Leo Oni of Aspicius Securities. Please go ahead. Good day, Segun, and thank you for the time to take our questions, and congratulations on the results. I have a question. Thanks so much. First is, I think your overall view on the interest rate environment. Sorry, you're a bit muted, so I can't hear you very clearly. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Very well. Thank you. Yes, much better. Okay. Thanks, Segun, and congratulations on the results. Thank you. First question is, I suppose, your overall view on the interest rate environment. Given the geopolitics and I suppose how you think monetary policy decisions go, given likely, changing directions for, inflation, where is getting your balance? Secondly, also the regulatory environment. I think there was a recent stress test being conducted by the Central Bank of Nigeria. First, to get a sense of where you think, systemic risk is and where suppose the sector could be lagging from that point of view. The other question is on your. Looking at your price, I saw a big jump in natural gas, your price exposure to natural gas. Just wanted to understand what's happening there and how you think things evolve over the next year from that, article exposure. I think I'll pause here and then maybe come back to. Okay. Just a few more questions. All right. No problem. Let me take the first one. Look, interest rates, well, the geopolitics is moving so fast that even I struggle to keep up. Going into the year, and we try to do our worst-case scenario, and I'm not sure it's changed much. Look, let me tell you, I think the Central Bank is doing a great job with monetary policy because you and I were both here when we lived in negative interest rates. Today it's now positive interest rates, which is why you see the inflows into the country. I still think that at the very worst or best, depending on which side of the divide you are, we will have a year of two halves, which means in the first half of the year, we'll have elevated interest rates. We're already in April, so we only have May and June to go. 138-day T-bills last week came out 21.9%. Elevated interest rates, positive above inflation. I think you will see that till at least June. If interest rates start to temper, I think it will be in the second half of the year, and we'll deal with it then. If you held me to a prediction now, I would tell you that the interest rate environment we see now will continue till June and that we should reassess in July. The stress test I think is worth it. You are de-risking the banking environment. Forbearances are gone. You still have maybe some forwards that people have to deal with. It's better to stress the balance sheet of banks now, especially since the capital just come in. The capital allows you to do this now. As Guaranty Trust Bank, we've done our stress test in the bank. Yeah, we're prepared for it, and I think most banks should be. Natural gas, maybe call it luck. With what has happened in Iran and Iraq, you've seen what's happened to the price of gas. It even means that most of the loans we've booked are looking much better. Even when we did the stress test, it wasn't this good. We're trying to diversify away from just crude and PMS in the downstream. It seems to work because we've seen natural gas as a growth area in the oil and gas sector. The one thing I will say before anybody asks that question is that if these elevated prices remain, we will not fall into the trap of letting the monies go. We will actually rate repayment of these loans. From a natural gas perspective, it looks like we made a great bet. The current prices of natural gas are very good, and if we look at the book in the oil and gas sector, it is probably the best and the lowest risk at the moment of all sectors. Okay. Thank you. Our next question comes from Habeeb Audu of WSTC Financial Services. Please go ahead. Hello, Segun. My name is Habeeb from WSTC Financial Services. Congratulations on your financial results. Well done. On a quick one, my question is on technology adoption. What is the plan or what is your projection on how to get a larger customer market using technology? Then second question is- If you plan to go bigger and loan book about 10-15%, what strategy are you looking, putting in place to minimize bad loan? The last question, despite the lower EPS, you maintain a dividend payout ratio of 54%. Should we expect this to continue or was that a one-time thing that will happen? That was my question. Okay. I missed the second one, but you'll tell me again. Look, I already mentioned it. Dividend payout 54%, we're gonna continue. The reason we couldn't reach these levels in the last two years was because of the quality of earnings. A lot of those earnings were revaluation gains, fair value through P&L, which the Central Bank rightly does not allow you to pay dividends on because it has no capital implication. Come 2025, we don't have that challenge. We then have the high quality of earnings that allows us to pay that kind of dividend at that sort of level. Yes, the intention is to continue. I think the 50%, 54% dividend payout is to continue then. Technology adoption, if you look at the presentation, going very well, 3.1 million users of GTWorld. If you're a customer, hopefully you will tell us you like it's working well. The cards are doing well. You have to, when you look at what's happening in our card business today, do it with, like instant transfers because people are changing behavior. People on POSs today use cards and they transfer. Our technology bet, which maybe in 2024 where we went through a bit of hell, things have paid off. Technology has stabilized. It's working for us. Technology for us is not only going to be used also for what you see as a customer. Technology for us is gonna give us cost optimization, 'cause we're going to be able to optimize our processes and create cost efficiencies. 2025, we started, we'll continue to optimize the use of technology going forward, and it's gonna allow us to serve a much larger customer base without throwing bodies at a lot of the processes. I think your second question was on loan growth. I think I really said to everybody who's asked me about this, 25% loan growth, we're gonna aspire for it, but we're not gonna do it if it's gonna sacrifice the quality of the loan book. The good thing is when we sit, we play with three different asset classes on the asset side, and they're all earning. We take our placements, we take our investment securities, we take our loans, and we play with those three to optimize the portfolio yield. We do not feel any crazy pressure to grow this loan book. If it is safe, properly priced, then we'll hit the 25. Hope I answered your questions. Yeah. Could you answer my question on that? What's your pricing? Do you have a benchmark band for the interest you're lending at your pricing? Sorry. Oh, do I have a benchmark? Benchmark. Well, you know, my personal opinions are not what Cal Man is on the phone, Value is on the phone. In my personal views, you shouldn't be doing any loans below the SDF rate of 22 today. That's my personal view. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you're welcome to key in star and then one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Samson Esemuede of Zrosk Investment Management. Please go ahead. Hi. Hello. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Hello. Hello, Segun. Thank you for the call and then congratulations on the results. My questions are sort of an extension of three topics that have been discussed earlier. First is the need, especially around the liability structure. You're doing 73% growth in your term loans over 2025. Also your Q sequential growth in fund liability interest in Q4 increased quite significantly. How should we think about term loan growth going into 2026? Is there any sort of change in ratio that we should expect for 2026 and 2027 going forward? The second question is around asset quality. There seems to be a divergence between your corporate book and your retail book. The stage 2% of your retail book saw almost a six-fold increase. I would like some context around that. Is that product specific? Is that broad-based stresses or just conservatism? Is there any evidence of migration over what you're seeing in Q1 in the state, in the retail category? My final question is around Ghana. Ghana has become quite significant for the group. I'm trying to unpack to what extent the growth is driven by underlying franchise value versus X and high interest rate environment. In a normalized environment, what should Ghana be for the group? Thank you. Okay. Let me start with Ghana since you just asked for that. We're very, very happy with Ghana. If you drill down, and we tend to be very transparent, Ghana is growing. It's not currency. Ghana today is, I believe, 23% of loans, 30% of deposits. West Africa. Ghana's loan growth was 54%. That is real growth. West Africa's contribution to the group from a profit perspective is 28%. We are also investing more in Ghana in terms of a branch network. I think we're in 25, we opened like 6 branches. In Ghana, we opened about 42 branches. We're gonna start to do in Ghana more of what we do in Nigeria, which is a retail play. It will up the deposit base, it will up the loan book. It's not benefiting really from exchange rate, it's benefiting from real growth. I'm trying to understand your question on NIM, but I will try to make an attempt to my understanding. Our NIM is 4.3%. Portfolio after yield, 14.6%. You talk about term loan growth. Honestly, to me, I really don't see the relevance of why I should be concerned about term loan growth. Because anyway, even when you grow term loans, very few of them are fixed, so there's no interest rate risk. When I was growing my term loans, I can reprice the customer can be priced. I don't have a focus on term loans or ODs or ISF. Loans are loans. Most of our loans in Nigeria, 90-some% are flexible. The place where I would be worried about term loan growth is if I was a fixed interest rate environment, I was going out five years with an interest rate risk. That can have very adverse effects or positive on my NIM because of my portfolio yield. In Nigeria where everything is floating, it doesn't really make a difference. Whatever grows. I don't really have a fixation whether it's term loans, overdraft or ISF, on that one. In terms of segmentation, yeah, the retail book is growing. I've mentioned earlier on that we are very comfortable with the pricing of retail and SME loans where we can control the risk. That's what we would like to see is take more from where we're 85% corporate and put more in retail and SME and reduce the corporate. In 2025, we've said we started that, and you'll see some reallocation of the loan book between corporate retail and SME, and we're doing this very mindful of not putting more risk on the loan book. I hope I answered the question because that's how I kind of understood. Just two clarifications. Sure. The first question on the NIM was focused around the liability side. The 73% growth in term deposits. And then I think the NIM, the interest expense for Q4 was about NGN 114 billion. Sure. I think prior was about 9. Run rate was around 90. Oh, okay. There was a step up there. Sure. I'm trying to understand if we should annualize the Q4 numbers or is there any underlying trends that are driving your capital ratios lower? That's the first question. Oh. The second is around the asset quality on the retail, because there was about 5.6 times increase in your stage two loans on the retail portfolio. I wanted some clarity if that was product specific, is that broad-based retail stress or just a mere reflection to the fact that that book has grown relative to the other portions of the loan book? Okay, let me answer the first one. The term deposit growth you're seeing is not in the bank. That's the asset management company. It's now 6.7% of total deposits. What is growing is not the bank. The bank's low cost deposit is still 90-something%. The growth you're seeing is not the bank, it's asset management company, which as you can see, AUM is about NGN 1.5 trillion. Growing very well. That's where that is coming from. In terms of what you see that went to the retail, it was historical, as we're cleaning up charges. One of the risks of retail is sometimes people abandon the account or you have disputes and charges. We went back and basically wrote off and provided for charges that had been in the system, that the customers had not paid. Certain agreements were made in certain cases before the final. It wasn't the core loan book facing any other significant risk. That's great. Thank you. Thank you, Segun Agbaje. Thank you. Our next question comes from Wilson Temitope of Pearl Pensions. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. I wanted to know, this is on current exposure to cocoa industry. I mean, now has the recent downfall of cocoa price and broader industry, like how has this affected your outlook? You know, we actually don't. We're very bad at things like cocoa. No. The place that we have cocoa is not in Nigeria, it's in Côte d'Ivoire. The cocoa season and cocoa trade is very different in Côte d'Ivoire. It's a major crop for them, and so far we haven't picked up any NPL. The cocoa exposure for Nigeria is Côte d'Ivoire. Okay. All right. Thank you. The next question comes from Dele Akintola of Stanbic Bank. Please go ahead. Dele, your line is open. Dele Akintola, can you hear me? Not very well. You're very low. Sorry, sir. Are you able to pick up a handset to ask your question? How am I now? Much better. Thank you. Apologies. Okay, thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. My first question. Can you speak up, please? Can you hear me? Yes, now I can. My question is on your view of the Fintech space. I'm not sure I heard comments on how the Fintech is doing and also what you think the market is seeing the competition that is arising from other financial technology companies. Thank you. Oh, good. We like the Fintech space. If you look at our investor presentation, our bank's doing very well. TPV is NGN 1 trillion, profit NGN 9.7 billion. It's growing at over 100%, which means we've positioned our speedboat Fintech against one of the Fintechs threat we see. It has become a bit of a, for us, our innovation hub and our speedboat. Yes, the Fintechs are here to stay. I mean, I don't know why anybody thinks they're not here to stay. They're here to stay. They're going to compete with the banks. They're going to make sure the banks are agile. They're going to make sure the banks are efficient. My simple advice for every bank would be to have a competitive strategy to compete with Fintechs and not focus on only competing with banks. I don't know if that answered your question, sir. It does. Thank you. Our next question comes from Mubarak Ajenipa of Zrosk Investment Management. Please go ahead. Yeah. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for taking my question and for the update on your results. My question is more like a follow-up on what New Grass said and your answer after that. You mentioned that going into the second half of the year, you expect interest rates to basically like go down. I mean, if not significantly, right? But if I look at your current balance sheet structure, I mean, liquid assets basically currently accounts for about a small chunk of your total assets, right? How quickly does the blended assets basically change, right, as risk allowance basically unwind. Because I'm just really thinking around the fact that you have a lot of exposure on this investment securities, right? How quickly can you basically deploy these assets in other more yielding instruments? If you can maybe maintain your NIM? Yeah. Well, first of all, couple of things. I'm not sure. I said in the best case scenario, I think we'll remain elevated and we might drop in the second half. Another simple thing is you've assumed that all our investment securities are 90 days. Our investment securities could be 365 days, which will take us almost through the end of the year. If that asset class we don't like as much, we might pivot into loans. Loans might not be dropping as fast. That is why I keep emphasizing that for us, the agility and the ability to go between the three asset classes I keep mentioning is what is gonna help us preserve the portfolio yield and the NIM. If you look at our guidance, we have built in the fact that the portfolio yield might come down. that is why even though in 2025 we closed with a NIM of 12.3, we have actually advised a NIM of 11% for 2026. we have taken that risk into our guidance for 2026. Hold on that, yeah. What is the average NIM, like, of your current loans of your current book, if it's something that you'd be happy to, like, disclose, just for model? Look, let me be honest with you. I'm not sure it's really relevant because I've already dropped the NIM by 130 basis points, which means I've already modeled for you a drop in interest rates. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a further reminder, if you have to ask a question, you're welcome to key star and then one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Dean Chachai of Frame Capital Management. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, team Standard Bank. Yes, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you again for this call, and congratulations on the excellent results. Just looking 3-5 years out from now, can you just please speak to just the overall country mix and how you're thinking about this? Is the overall strategy to diversify significantly outside of Nigeria and which of the existing markets that you're in are prioritized for growth? Just to add to the question, are there any other new markets that the group is considering entering over the next couple of years? If you can just speak to the strategy with regard to that. Thank you. Okay. First of all, Nigeria must remain very relevant no matter what we do. I'm also hoping that Nigeria is not gonna give in to the other regions as quickly. We would like three regions to continue to grow. We would like Nigeria to remain extremely relevant. Even if the contribution drops, I don't believe Nigeria should ever drop below 55%. West Africa must continue to grow. Because we haven't done as well in East Africa, we think there's a long runway to take it from 0.9% and have it go up. The reason I don't mention countries is because sometimes regulators are not very happy when you're mentioning their countries, and they haven't given you a license. Yes, we do have some growth plans. I had said earlier in this call, hopefully by the end of By half year, we would be open in another Francophone West African country. We might then look at some other countries in West Africa. The balance still has to be. Nigeria still has to be 55% of this business. Whatever we pick up outside Nigeria should be no more than 45% or maybe 40%. Then the non-banking subsidiaries, which are also doing well, should be around 5%. Okay. That's excellent. That answers my questions. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Steven Chima at CardinalStone. Please go ahead. Right. Hello again. I would like for you to speak on the non-banking businesses, right? The pension business as well as the asset management business. We noticed the bank is guiding for non-banking business contribution to PBT at 30%. Just like to get a sense of, you know, the strategy around the pension business and asset management business for 2026. Thank you. Well, I don't know why you only think we have those two. Everybody forgets HabariPay. HabariPay was actually our most profitable non-banking business last year. HabariPay did NGN 9.7 billion profit. Asset Management did NGN 9 billion. Pension did about NGN 1.7 billion. Our strategy, those three will continue to grow. HabariPay is growing very well, payment business. Asset Management is growing extremely well. This was a business we bought four years ago. It had assets under management of NGN 22 billion. Today, but it's in, well, at the end of the year, I can't tell you what it is today because it's not yet published. We were close to 1.5. It will continue to grow. The pension business, which we bought at 40-something billion, which was all AES, is now NGN 150 billion, all RSA. Everything we did outside the non-banking subsidiary has worked, and it's working. Apart from the numbers you see, one of the benefits you cannot quantify is the ecosystem play gives us. It allows. Ladies and gentlemen, apologies. We seem to have lost connection with our speakers. Please remain online, and the call will resume shortly. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, apologies for the delay. Please remain online, and the call will resume shortly. Thank you. Are we back? Thank you, sir. Yes, you are. Sorry. I'm really sorry. Apparently, we lost the operator. Just like I was saying, I'll have to summarize and not go into too much. You asked about two, but when we look at non-banking subsidiaries, like I started to tell you, we look at three. We look at the payment business, we look at PFA, and we look at asset management. Last year, the payment business was actually the most profitable at NGN 9.7 billion. Asset management was NGN 9 billion. PFA was about NGN 1.7 billion. They'll go from 1.7% of group to 3% of group. They are growing very, very well, very, very fast. When we bought the asset management business, it was 22 billion assets under management. As of end of last year, it was at NGN 1.5 trillion. HabariPay was a complete startup. Volumes last year was NGN 81 trillion. Even the PFA we're very happy with because we are growing the PFA from the RSA side, not the AES side. Honestly, do we see 3% doable at the current growth rate? Absolutely. They give us a total ecosystem play. Well, I've finished. I think I've finished with that question. Thank you. The next question comes from Phoenix at PSI. Please go ahead. Hello. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thanks for the call. I think you gave a bit of clarity on the market expansion. I wanted to know if, along the line of expansion you have, there will be a need for extra capital, especially on the debt side, and if you'd be coming to the Eurobond market. Not at all. If you remember, one of the callers even said I should sell my long position. No, we will not be coming to the Eurobond market because we're not selling our equity position. I think we have enough. If you look at our placement line in our financial statements, we have enough dollars not to have to come back into the Eurobond market. Okay, thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, just a final reminder. If you'd like to ask a question, you're welcome to key star and then one on your telephone keypad. Okay. We do have a follow-up question from Marie in Uh- RTSG Securities. Please go ahead. Yes. Okay. I just want to get your own sense from your customer interaction of what's happening in the downstream oil and gas sector, particularly the disruptions that the Dangote Refinery has created in that sector. If there's any asset quality concerns you'd be having. If you think about all the movements that has happened, especially with the importers and the marketers, and how if there's some concerns that there could be asset quality issues that could come up in the future. We have concerns or not. Well, selfishly, we don't have to worry about that because if you see it's only 1% of our loan book. We've always been very gun-shy about the downstream sector because of the volatility. Even before the Dangote Refinery, it is the sector where the volatility is so high. When you look at the capital of the players, it has always been an area of oil and gas that is high risk. It will remain that. The Dangote Refinery will bring it because it's a commodity and it's susceptible to movements like any other commodity. When you look at the size of the cargoes and the profit margin, it will always be a high risk area. I'm not sure whether we have the Dangote Refinery or not, the downstream sector is a high risk sector because of the volatility of the pricing of the commodity. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. Our next question is a follow-up from Wilson Temitope with Pearl Pensions. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. I wanted to know if maybe, aside from 2026, if maybe 2027 could be, maybe a potential income guidance? No, I won't be. I think I would rather say 2026 and even deliver that. When we get to the end of 2026, we'll talk about 2027. It's not the complete strategic planning as opposed to an investor call. No, the polite answer is we've put 2026 guidance out and that's all we're gonna put out. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with no further questions, that brings us to the end of the question and answer session. I will now hand back to Mr. Agbaje for closing remarks. Well, for everybody who came on the call, thank you very much. For all those who are shareholders and investors, thank you very much for all your support. I guess we'll try and go back to work and make sure we deliver the 2026 numbers. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's event. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your line.