Vanquis Banking Group plc (VANQ) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for 2026 half year results webcast and conference call. I'm Ian McLaughlin, the Chief Executive Officer of Bankless and I'm joined as usual by our Chief Financial Officer Dave Watts. Dave, good morning and welcome. Good morning, Ian. I'll start with an overview of our performance and the updates to our outlook that we've announced this morning. Dave will then take you through some more detail on our numbers and guidance and I'll come back to summarise and then of course, we'll be happy to take your questions. So if I can take you straight to slide four, the first half of 2026 represented another period of significant progress for Bankless. We continued to lay the foundations for sustainable, profitable growth and attractive returns over the medium term. Let me draw out a couple of key points here. Firstly, we delivered a further two quarters of profitable growth. Statutory profit before tax increased by 44% year-on-year to £8.9 million, so exceeding the profit that we delivered for the whole of 2025. Secondly, gross customer interest earning balances increased by 24% year-on-year to more than £3 billion, principally reflecting growth in second-charge mortgages and in credit cards, and this supported an 8% increase in income. Importantly, that growth was delivered while maintaining stable credit quality, reflecting our disciplined underwriting and the continued financial resilience of our customers. We also continue to improve our operational efficiency while still investing in the capabilities needed to support the future scalability of this business. Now Dave will take you through the key financial metrics on our capital position in more detail shortly but at the bottom of the slide you can see that our progress in trans...