Vanquis Banking Group plc (VANQ) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. I'm Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive of Vanquish Banking Group. Thanks for joining us for our 2025 Half Year Results webcast and conference call. As usual, I'm pleased to be joined by our Chief Financial Officer, Dave Watts. Dave, good morning and welcome. Thanks, Ian, and good morning, everyone. So as you can see on slide two, I'm going to start with an overview of our performance for the first half of the year. Dave will then take you through the numbers in more detail. And after that, we'll be happy to take your questions. So if I can take us straight to slide four. Let me start by briefly looking back. And this is hopefully the last time I will mention 2024. But you know, for us, it was a challenging year. One where we addressed the issues of the past, reset the business, and laid the foundations for sustainable, profitable growth in the future. We also had external factors that we had to deal with in the form of CMC complaints and vehicle finance commissions and I'll update you on both of those in a moment. Importantly that reset is now behind us and the progress we're making shows that our plan is working. Profitability in both quarter one and quarter two obviously means we've returned to profit in the first half of the year. And we have now delivered three consecutive quarters of balance growth. Q4 last year, followed by Q1 and Q2 this year. All our products were profitable and overall customer balances have grown by 7%. We still have much to do, though. Gateway, our technology transformation program, is fully mobilized and remains on track for completion in mid-2026. It is a critical aspect of our plan, so I'll also come back to more detail on that shortly. Cost control remains a top priority for the management team with over half of th...