Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Aktie

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for Bendigo Bank's 2026 Full Year Results Briefing. Let me begin today by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands in which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. I also extend my respects to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are present on the call today.

Following our recent results announcement on the 18th of August, we have slightly adjusted our approach to the results presentation today. Richard will start with a high-level overview of the key performance highlights. He'll run through the strategic deliverables and an update on the AML/CTF program. Andrew will then step through the audited financial performance and provide an overview of our credit position within the current macro environment. We'll then move on to Q&A.

I'll now hand over to Richard.

Thanks, Sam, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking the time to join us today. We recognize our market release on the 18th of August provided a number of updates, including unaudited statutory profit and financial metrics. So today, I'd like to provide some more detail in relation to our strategic progress and risk programs. Our full year result demonstrates our ongoing disciplined approach to driving targeted business growth and delivery against our strategic agenda. Cash earnings have again improved this half, benefiting from continued growth in lower-cost deposits, supporting margin expansion. Our second half expenses were down, reflecting the benefits from Phase 1 of our productivity program and fewer days in the second half. We have regained lending momentum following a return to growth in our residential lending book in half 2.

Our key differentiators, including our quality products and the Bendigo brand Net Promoter Score that is 21 points above the industry average continues to attract customers. We're on track to exceed 3 million customers with Up's customer numbers growing 11.5% over the year. Up's profitability continued to improve into the second half with deposit balances growing 45% over the year to more than $4 billion, while momentum in Up's home loans continues with growth of 56% over the year, now reaching $2.6 billion just over 3 years since launch. Our acquisition of RACQ Bank's loan and deposit book is progressing at pace with a significant amount of pre-migration work completed. And as outlined on the 18th, the uplift of our risk capabilities is our #1 priority. I'll provide more detail on this later in the presentation.

I want to share some more detail with you now in relation to the financial performance for the 2026 financial year. Cash earnings for the year of $530 million were 3% higher than the prior year, driven by income growth of 5.1%, while expense growth was 4.2%. Income growth benefited from a 7 basis point increase in net interest margin, higher fee revenue and Homesafe realized income. The improvement in margin over the year was largely driven by our continued focus on delivering a more favorable mix of lower cost deposits and a measured approach to term deposit pricing.

Operating expenses for the year increased by 4.2%, reflecting the expected increases in software amortization and technology costs and the ongoing investment in risk and digital capabilities. Our focus on productivity and cost management helped to offset a proportion of these costs. And second half costs were down 2.1%, benefiting from a lower average FTE number and -- as a result of our productivity programs and lower remediation expenses and fewer workdays. Credit costs increased for the full year, reflecting our cautious outlook from the updated macroeconomic forecast.

That said, the overall credit portfolio remains resilient, and we are focused on helping customers that face difficult choices due to cost of living and other pressures. Pleasingly, our ROE is now back above 8%, and our return on tangible equity is above 10% with half 2 ROTE near 10.5%. Our 3 areas of focus that will support our 2030 ROE target are all progressing well. Our efforts in these areas will be further enabled by our risk uplift programs, which will strengthen our risk management frameworks and systems to support sustainable growth.

Let me step you through the progress we've made this half. Our deposit-first approach to managing our balance sheet has been supported by digital deposit sales growth of 34% over the year, following the introduction of new digital onboarding capability in the Bendigo app, along with continued growth in our Up customer base. The enhanced functionality in the Bendigo app has materially improved the experience for new-to-bank and existing customers. EasySaver deposits continue to grow, up 10.7% over the year. And the introduction of Grow & Flow to Up-siders has helped grow Up's deposit balances by 45% over the year to reach $4.1 billion.

Leveraging what we've learned, we will improve the functionality and experience for business and agri customers over the next 18 months with a sequence of improvements and uplift in the digital capability for B&A. This functionality we're building will make it easier for our customers to join the bank and further support growth in lower cost deposits.

Turning to productivity. Our FTE numbers have reduced by 3.4% over the year, driven by the first phase of our productivity program. In April, at the quarterly trading update, we announced 2 significant strategic partnerships as part of the second phase of this program. And in July this year, we commenced a 7-year technology service partnership with Infosys, which will significantly improve IT service delivery and provide access to enhanced capabilities, software engineering and AI talent to deliver innovation capacity. We've also established our 6-year business operations partnership with Genpact, which will bring deep expertise in process optimization and delivery to drive greater productivity and support stronger process disciplines across the bank.

And finally, to sustainable growth. We've seen some positive impact from recent targeted pricing through BENExpress and our Qantas partnership to support digital channel growth momentum in residential lending, which was up 1.9% in the second half. The Bendigo lending platform now accounts for 80% of home loan flow for the Bendigo brand, reducing time to decision for our customers and improving our productivity. The momentum behind Up Home continues, up 56% to $2.6 billion. And coming soon to Up-siders, in this half, the Up Home investment loan.

We've been clear about our objectives for business and agribusiness to be at growth by FY '26 and above system in FY '27. We achieved our growth targets this year with agribusiness lending up 3.8% and business lending, excluding portfolio funding, up 8%. Since Adam Rouse has joined the bank in 2022, we've selectively grown our agribusiness book by more than 15%. And in business, we continue to build in business direct and the commercial broker channel. In FY '27, we'll be launching a new equipment finance platform to support both our agri and SME customers.

I want to share how the 2 programs of work depicted here will serve as the foundation to strengthen our risk management frameworks and systems to support sustainable growth as we deliver on our 2030 strategy. In December 2025, the Financial Crime Transformation Program commenced with a focus on enhancing our enterprise-wide AML/CTF risk management. This program will deliver a material uplift in our ability to detect, deter and disrupt financial crime, and we continue to add capacity and capability to our financial crime operations team to support this work. We expect to invest $70 million to $90 million, of which $8 million was spent in FY '26. These expenses will be contained within our existing investment slate.

Last week, we announced a rectification plan to address deficiencies in our management of non-financial risk. This multiyear program of work is expected to require an initial estimated provision of $70 million, which has been included in the 2026 financial year results. The plan will drive a fundamental shift in our risk maturity. Our approach to embed non-financial risk management into all aspects of the organization will ensure we can continue delivering for our shareholders, our customers, our people and our communities. This is the #1 priority for the Board and executive team and will be led by me. Andrew will run through the costs and associated treatment of these expenses in more detail shortly.

Now for some more detail on our Financial Crime Transformation Program. We launched this program to significantly strengthen our controls against financial crime and enhance our AML/CTF framework. Since the announcement late last calendar year, we've acted with pace and purpose. We appointed a new AML/CTF Chief Compliance Officer in January, bringing in significant experience to drive this change. This program is well established across 5 dedicated work streams, and we're already seeing tangible results. We've upgraded our monitoring systems, improved controls and are leveraging our new partnership with Genpact to draw on their global expertise and capacity. Looking ahead, our focus remains on building a best-in-class financial crime function to help protect our customers and the broader community.

And finally, I'd like to recap our progress on the first year of our 2030 strategy and the strategic deliverables we've achieved. We first spoke to the market about our new strategy this time last year, outlining the 5 strategic pillars and our 3 enablers that will help deliver on building scale through innovation. We recognize as a bank with 2% to 3% market share. Innovation, partnerships and capability will create the opportunities we need to grow efficiently. The FY '26 results demonstrate our progress on the 2030 strategy with the streamlining of our approach to both lending and deposits.

The Bendigo lending platform is now being utilized by all of our retail branches in addition to our broker network. And approximately half of our new-to-bank customers are being onboarded digitally by the Bendigo Bank app. The migration of our Adelaide Bank customers to Bendigo Bank in December 2025 marked the completion of our multiyear core banking consolidation project. This key strategic program has delivered a simpler and more efficient bank and creates a platform for sustainable growth.

Over the year, we've delivered several initiatives that will pave the way for the next phase of growth, including our partnership with Google. We currently have over 5,000 of our staff actively utilizing our Google AI platform, Gemini Enterprise, to support their daily productivity. Our partnerships with Infosys and Genpact will deliver the capabilities we need to maintain and improve our foundational technology, allowing our core technology team to drive improvements in data quality, cybersecurity and AI.

And finally, we've appointed a new Chief Customer Officer for Consumer, Christopher Dean, who assumes the role in September. Christopher brings deep retail banking experience, most recently as Managing Director at HSBC U.K., where he managed a network of 300 branches and led digital banking services for 8 million customers. Christopher is well placed to help us deliver on our 2030 strategy by deepening our customer relationships and improving how we manage risk. I'd like to thank Adam Rouse for leading both customer divisions over the past 6 months and helping to bring a consistent, disciplined approach to customer experience across both networks.

I will now hand over to Andrew.

Thanks very much, Richard, and good morning, everyone. First of all, let me confirm that there are no changes from the unaudited numbers, which we presented last week to the audited numbers we're presenting today. Going now into some of the metrics underpinning the second half result. Total lending grew 3.5% with strong seasonal growth in agri and business lending and a return to growth in residential lending, which grew around 0.6x system. We've also seen an improved funding mix with lower cost deposits now comprising almost 55% of total deposits.

Through careful management of our funding requirements, we have continued to improve net interest margin, printing 1.98% for the half. And we've tightened our management of business as usual costs in the half, delivering absolute cost reduction compared to the first half. Given the uncertain macro environment, we've increased our collective provision and skewed scenario weights more to the downside. Our operating performance was 11.2% higher than the prior half, reflecting a combination of income growth and expense reduction. Cash earnings of $273.8 million was 7.7% higher than the prior half. With the improved operating performance, return on equity for the half improved to 8.26%. Our balance sheet is in a strong position going into the financial year 2027, reflected in strong capital, funding and liquidity.

Turning now to total income for the half. Income of $1.04 billion was up 2.6% on the prior half. Net interest income increased 1.6%, reflecting an improved margin, offset by a small reduction in average interest-earning assets and the impact of 3 less days. Other income, excluding Homesafe was up 5%, reflecting improved wealth and cards income. Homesafe income was up 29%, reflecting 40% growth in completed contracts on the prior half and a slightly softer average profit per completion.

In respect of key considerations, there are 2. First, we expect the RACQ transaction to complete during second quarter 2027. So you should expect a resultant uplift in income in year of between $33 million to $37 million, and that reflects around $2.6 billion of loans and around $2.3 billion of deposits and for this gap and LCR requirements to be funded most likely with wholesale funding. Second, as previously flagged, income from the Homesafe portfolio will reduce over time, subject to the rate and profit on contract completions. This half saw the number of open contracts reduced by around 4%, which is a slightly faster rate than the last 2 halves, whilst the average life of contracts completed through the half was around 10 years.

Turning now to net interest margin. Compared to the prior half, our NIM was up 6 basis points to 1.98%. Asset pricing negatively impacted 4 basis points, which was due to a combination of front book pricing pressure in residential lending and ongoing retention pricing pressure in business and agri. Deposit and funding pricing improved 6 basis points, mostly reflecting the benefit of term deposit repricing. Mix provided a 4 basis points benefit, reflecting a combination of improved funding mix and improved asset mix. Income from our replicating portfolios was up 3 basis points as expected and revenue share negatively impacted 3 basis points. Our fourth quarter average NIM was 200 basis points.

On key considerations for 1 half '27, we definitely see headwinds and a couple of tailwinds. On headwinds, there are 2. We see competitive pressure on both sides of the balance sheet and funding costs will also be a headwind, noting that we put some wholesale funding into the balance sheet in the fourth quarter. We also lifted term deposit pricing through the fourth quarter. On tailwinds, we think there is possibly one more cash rate rise, likely late in the first half and higher swap rates should see replicating portfolio contribution continue positively given the current delta between replacement yields and expiring tractors.

Turning now to residential lending. Settlement volumes in aggregate were up 31% on the prior half with strong growth recorded in third-party and digital channels. This charge has improved following a spike in the first half, which was mostly due to the closing down of one of our partner channels. We continue to prioritize the deployment of capital into channels where both the economics are compelling and growth opportunities exist, being self-serve digital mortgages and our proprietary branch network. This half, around 35% of new settlements came through our physical network, whilst just under half came through broker intermediated channels and 15% through direct digital channels, including Up.

The positive trends in our mortgage book continue. First, around 40% of new loans are below 60% LVR and almost 90% of new loans are below 80% LVR. And second, the average credit risk weight on new mortgages has continued to improve. Momentum in the book has slowed following the federal budget. We expect system credit growth for residential lending to ease to around 3% to 4%. At the same time, we see a lot of opportunity to continue to grow through our digital and our physical networks. Importantly, discharges also slowed progressively over the second half. So with this momentum in mind, we are targeting growth around system through financial year '27, although this may be influenced by the level of competitive pressure.

On deposits, our deposit gathering franchise has strengthened this half. We continue to see good momentum in digital deposits. In our Up business, digital deposits increased 16% over the half, whilst Bendigo digital deposits grew 14% over the same period. Whilst deposit growth over the half looks modest at 1.1%, deposit mix has continued to improve. We continued to see strong growth in EasySaver accounts, which were up 3.4% on the prior half and overall savings accounts up 4.3%.

Following a dip in third quarter, transaction account balances had a strong fourth quarter, finishing marginally lower than the prior half. We also saw offset accounts reduced almost 2% over the half. Whilst term deposit balances were down 0.6% on the prior half, we did receive our pricing in fourth quarter and recorded 3% growth for the final quarter. The overall picture is that lower cost deposits increased to 54.8% of total deposits, up from 52.5% just 12 months ago. Critically, our household deposit-to-loan ratio remains strong at 76%, which is 10 percentage points higher than the industry average.

Turning now to operating expenses. As previously flagged, second half costs came in lower than first half, down 2.1%. Business as usual costs, which exclude remediation costs, reduced 1.1% over the half, mostly reflecting our ongoing productivity and cost management program. Spot FTE were 0.7% higher than the prior half, reflecting investment in our risk team as we continue our work on lifting risk maturity across the organization.

In respect of financial year '27, we expect business as usual cost growth to be between 5% to 6%, including RACQ. This reflects 3 factors. First, we expect inflationary pressures to persist and inflation to stay around the 4s. Second, as we complete the RACQ transaction, we will bring $8 million to $9 million of costs into the organization in the year, which is in line with previous guidance. And third, we are making further investment in risk capability as we seek to uplift our maturity. We expect expensed investment spend to be flat year-on-year. And over the medium term, we reiterate our cost guidance, which is to keep BAU cost, which excludes remediation and investment spend contained to no higher than inflation through the cycle. Underpinning that, we expect to fully realize the benefit of our strategic partnerships in financial year '28.

Moving to credit quality and credit expenses. Our key credit metrics remain sound, and we continue to carefully watch trends in the industry and within our book. Through the half, we booked a charge of $16 million, mostly related to an increase to collective provision, reflecting an expected deterioration in the economic environment. Our coverage of total provisions to credit risk-weighted assets has increased 3 basis points on the half and 2 basis points on the prior year. Gross impaired loans have continued to reduce down to now 13 basis points of gross loans.

Arrears across the book remain low, but are increasing. 90-plus days arrears in residential lending have increased in the low-single-digit basis points in the last 6 months to 87 basis points. In agribusiness, arrears have reduced over the half and the dollar value of arrears has reduced. The technical issue that we have previously disclosed around expired facilities has mostly been resolved. Business arrears have continued to improve, now at their lowest level in a number of years. Whilst asset quality remains sound and arrears are at relatively low levels, we do expect bad debts to trend upwards over time.

This half, we've included further detail on the composition of our business and agribusiness exposures. In our business book, excluding our portfolio funding business, over 99% of customers have loans of less than $10 million, and we have a very small number of large customers. Arrears in the portfolio are modest and 95% of the book is secured. In agribusiness, the profile is similar. Almost 99% of customers are sub-$10 million, and again, we have very few large customers. 99% of the book is secured.

Our funding and liquidity metrics remain strong and well diversified. Our average liquidity coverage ratio for the fourth quarter was strong at 140.2%. The proportion of customer deposits to total funding reduced on the prior half to around 77%, following the raising of around $1.8 billion of wholesale funding to fund around $3 billion of asset growth. Our coverage of household deposits to loans at 76% is well above the industry average. Our community bank partnerships importantly provide us with a net $15 billion of funding, which provides further diversification and a relatively cheaper funding source than wholesale funding. To illustrate my earlier point on funding pressures, you can see that we have a large volume of term funding maturities to manage through financial year '27.

Turning now to capital and dividends. Our CET1 ratio eased 3 basis points to 11.34% over the half, and this reflected a few key drivers. Earnings were impacted by lower statutory profits resulting from $59 million of regulatory provisions, which we took up as disclosed last week, which lowered CET1 by around 15 basis points. We did benefit through the half from some data and modeling enhancements, which lifted CET1 by 11 basis points. CET1 was also impacted 18 basis points by the APRA capital overlay reflected through a higher operational risk capital charge, which was effective 1 January, 2026. Our capital remains well above the Board target of above 10%. Directors have determined to pay a final dividend of $0.33 per share, which will be fully franked. This represents a 69% payout ratio for the half and on a cents per share basis is flat on the prior comparative period. So in summary, we're in a strong capital position going into financial year '27.

Last week, we gave you a summary of some notable items into next year. So I wanted to now bring that picture together for you, along with a reminder of the benefits associated with a couple of our strategic programs. For financial year '27, as we disclosed last week, you can expect us to report on 3 key notable expense items. First is the cost associated with the implementation of our strategic partnerships of $56 million to $66 million. This is consistent with the disclosure which we made in early April of total costs of roughly $85 million to $95 million. Second is costs related to the migration of RACQ customers onto our core banking platform of $28 million to $34 million. This is consistent with the disclosure which we made in early December 2025. And third is a one-off methodology change to the mechanics of our staff equity scheme of around $16 million to $23 million.

In aggregate, these costs will total between $100 million and $123 million pretax. We expect each of these costs to be isolated to financial year '27. As a result, our costs, including notables will be elevated and return on equity inclusive of notables will be diluted in financial year '27. To support our progress towards our return on equity target of above 10%, we are on track to deliver the benefits which we previously guided to on both our strategic partnerships and RACQ, as you can see on the right-hand side of this slide.

So there's a lot of information which we've just run through. Let me summarize the total impacts across our key line items in financial year '27, and this includes income, expenses and capital. On BAU expenses, we expect to grow between 4% and 5% on financial year '26, excluding RACQ operating expenses. We expect investment spend to be in the range of $230 million to $240 million, inclusive of notables. We expect $120 million of that to be expensed, around $60 million to be capitalized and $50 million to $60 million of notable items related to our strategic partnerships and RACQ. So that means expensed investment spend pre-notables is expected to be flat on financial year '26.

For RACQ specifically, on the basis that we complete the transaction during second quarter '27, we expect the following in-year impacts: First, NII of $33 million to $37 million; second, incremental OpEx of $8 million to $9 million; third, a 31 basis points impact to CET1 upon completion, reflecting the risk-weighted asset carry; and fourth, an uplift to return on equity of 23 to 27 basis points.

I'll now hand back to Richard for closing comments.

Thanks, Andrew. To recap, our areas of focus for FY '27 are clear; embed our risk programs to drive a fundamental shift in risk maturity, continue to grow our deposit base, migrate the RACQ customers and leverage our strategic partnerships as we build a better bank. We remain committed to our target of an ROE of 10% by 2030, delivering long-term value for our shareholders, supported by the necessary uplift in our risk capabilities as we build a better bank. And finally, let me take the opportunity to thank our people, partners and customers for their continued support over what has at times been a challenging last 12 months.

I'll now hand back to Sam to moderate the Q&A.

Thanks, Richard.

[Operator Instructions] I'll now hand back to Sam.

Our first question comes from Annabel Ross of Barrenjoey.

Hopefully, you can hear me okay. So I just wanted to go through the operating expenses guidance that you provided. So in FY '26, your operating expenses, excluding investment spend landed at $1,142 million. And your guidance for FY '27 operating expenses pre-notables and RACQ is to grow between 4% to 5%. If we then add in the RACQ impact, of which you're guiding to approx $8 million, this implies BAU expenses next year should be around $1.2 billion. Next, adding in the investment spend expense of $120 million, this means costs ex notables should land at around $1,320 million. If we then add in notables of $100 million to $123 million, this means total expenses should land around $1,420 million to $1,460 million in FY '27. Is this the correct way of thinking about it? And then just to add to that, in FY '28, you talk about the strategic partnerships, which are going to give a $65 million to $75 million benefit. And is this benefit required to keep the cost growth in '28 to around inflation or are you implying costs will fall further by that number?

Annabel, that was about 87 questions in one. So what we might do is just -- Andrew or Richard, if you could just give the top line on that expense guidance, that was probably not.

Yes. Over to you, Andrew.

So Annabel, just on your second question first, let me cover that off. So what we've previously said is that our business as usual cost growth ambition over the medium term is no higher than inflation through the cycle. To be clear, the benefit of the partnerships is included in that BAU cost growth of no higher than inflation. And the key reason for that is that there is a large part of our cost base or around 20% of our cost base, which is growing faster than inflation, and that is license, cloud and amortization costs. So what those partnership benefits will do is allow us to meet that BAU cost guidance no higher than inflation. That's the first question to cover off.

Let me step briefly through then the second part of your question, which is how do we bring all these pieces together? And there is quite a bit of detail we've given, which I'll step through. So you're absolutely right. Our business as usual costs for '26 were $1,142 million. That is absolutely right. We then said add 4% to 5% on top of that, then add the run costs or the operating expenses for RACQ on top of that again. So that's $8 million to $9 million. So that total cost for BAU is around about 5% to 6%.

Then there are a couple of notable OpEx items. So these are items that will only occur, we believe, in '27 and no further than that. So there's a proportion of the partnership costs, which we disclosed. That's somewhere between $34 million and $40 million. And then there's the incentive scheme adjustment, which is $16 million to $23 million. So that implies then that the overall costs are growing somewhere between 9% and 11%. That's the BAU costs.

Then on investment spend, we've said the expensed investment spend, we expect to be flat year-on-year, so around about $120 million. Then there's a proportion of that partnership spend, which relates to investment spend, that's between $22 million and $26 million. So that means that our overall investment spend OpEx is between $142 million and $146 million. So hopefully, that's clear in the way that all those parts come together.

Our next question is from Kelsey Bentley of JPMorgan.

Richard and Andrew, I just wanted to ask a question on your outlook for mortgage growth. You talked to wanting to grow around system just based on competitive tensions, sort of see how that tracks. How does that sort of feed into the information you give on Slide 9, where you talk about the average mortgage NIM for new business, and we can see a pretty steady trend downwards over the last year. How is this sort of fed into your growth in particularly the fourth quarter of FY '26 and how you see things trending in FY '27?

Yes. It's a really good question, Kelsey, because I think we're all going to be facing a pretty dynamic year when it comes to the mortgage industry, given what has been happening from a government perspective with changes to tax rules, et cetera. From my perspective, I think we're reasonably well positioned to continue to see some growth going forward, particularly through a couple of channels that I'd like to highlight. First of those is the digital channel, which consistently has sort of been in that 15% to 20% of mortgage settlements for us. And we expect that will continue to see pretty steady growth. And with some of the pricing changes we've made recently in a couple of those offerings there. I think that will hold us in good stead.

And the other one is we continue to mature the use of the Bendigo lending platform through our retail channel, where we expect we'll continue to see some growth there. We have seen a reduction in application volume from where they were through most of FY '26 by about 15%, but that has steadied now. And we're starting to certainly see some -- in the last few weeks, maybe a little bit of more resilience coming back to that market, but it is going to be dynamic this year. So that's why we're not giving any firm guidance on that.

I don't know, Andrew, is there anything else you want to add?

Yes. Kelsey, just picking up your comment on Slide 9, part of the reason why we saw a dip in that NIM to credit risk-weighted assets, that's the chart on the top right-hand side is we did see an opportunity through the course of the half to write some fixed rate business, and we felt it was important to build some momentum. It was a little on the thinner side in respect of margin. The returns were still returns we were looking for. So that really is the explanator for that dip.

Our next question is from Sally Hong from Morgan Stanley.

I have a couple of questions. So firstly, you're targeting business and agribusiness growth at system for next year. What do you think system growth is for FY '27? And can you comment on the business and agri competitive landscape?

Yes. Sally, we're thinking that, that's going to be in the order of just above mid-single digits. Again, there's a little bit of wet finger in the air with this stuff, but probably in the order of maybe 6% to 7% growth just based on the resilience we've seen last year and over the last few months. We actually are pretty comfortable with the offerings that we've got that we can continue to see some solid growth coming through our business there. We clearly have some strength in the agri space.

There were some concerns earlier this calendar year on the back of what happened in the Middle East that this was going to be a really challenging year for farmers around the country with fuel prices and fertilizer prices. But on the back of what has been a pretty good year in many parts of the country from a climate perspective, it looks like there will be another probably solid year from a yield perspective. So as we're looking forward, we think there are a number of areas that we can continue to drive that growth. Sure, things are competitive. There's always competitiveness out there in the market, although we're finding plenty of opportunity based on our relationship-based banking to find customers that are interested in joining us.

And just a second question on the margin. So the June quarter margin was around 2%, but you're flagging mortgage competition and term deposit repricing as headwinds with some benefit from the replicating portfolio to come through. Should we expect the first half '27 margin to be below this June quarter margin? And can you give us a sense of what those magnitude of those competing impacts would be?

Over to you, Andrew.

Sally, we don't normally give too much guidance on margin other than talk about the headwinds and the tailwinds. And as we said last week, we think there is -- there are definitely headwinds. And those headwinds you've just laid out, which are competition, which we're all seeing on a day-to-day basis on both sides of the balance sheet. And then in respect to funding costs, we can definitely see headwinds there. And so we have a wholesale funding cost ahead of us through the course of '27. We put some wholesale funding onto the balance sheet in the third quarter. So there's some headwinds there. And in addition to that, part of what drove our margin outcome in the half and to an extent in the final quarter was our approach in respect of term deposit pricing. And of course, as those term deposits further reprice when that book turns, there will be a headwind there.

On the positive side, on the tailwind side, we can certainly see that in our replicating portfolio, particularly on the deposit side, the gap between front book tractors and back tractors is still quite wide. And so that will give us a benefit, assuming that 5-year swap kind of stays about where it is. And then we do think there's still a possibility of a cash rate rise. I think the market this morning is still implying somewhere between 60% and 65% by the time we get to the end of the calendar. And as you all know, what we have typically talked about in respect of our leverage to rates is roughly, roughly 2 basis points for every 25 in cash rate. So I can't give you any more specifics than that other than give you all of the various considerations.

Our next question comes from Andrew Lyons from Jefferies.

Just a question on investment and the progression out to your 2030 targets. Just your investment slate, you're now carrying a number of items that you describe as notables, and there's also the $70 million to $90 million that will come through over the next 2 years for AML. Now you obviously speak about your cost growth of sub-inflation. But just thinking about the impact of investment spend on that cost trajectory out to 2030. As some of these sort of programs, notable programs fall away, how should we be thinking about investment spend? Should we see it decline? Or will you be basically reinvesting in the broader franchises as those programs come to an end?

Yes. Look, it's a really good question, Andrew. It's one we ponder a little ourselves. So I can't give you a definitive answer. It's one of those things that we're going to need to turn our mind to over the next year or so. As you pointed out, some of those programs naturally start to wind down. This year, obviously, there's a fair bit of work going into setting up those new partnerships and the RACQ migration that will be finishing up. But at the same time, we'll be ramping up the work we're doing on the risk front, both the AML/CTF piece, but also the work we're going to need to do on the non-financial risk -- in the non-financial risk area.

It is really going to be dependent on what is happening in the market and what is -- what are the investments we need to make to remain competitive and relevant going forward. I'd love us to be able to be in a position where we can see some reduction in that investment spend between now and 2030, but I'm not going to sit here and make that sort of commitment because things are changing so quickly in the technology space, in particular, that I'm not sure how that's going to play. There is -- the whole AI area is really interesting because you can mount an argument that, that's going to drive so much productivity from a development perspective that you should be able to do more for less. But at the same time, I'm not sure what sort of developments we're going to need to implement within our organization to keep up with the industry and our customers' expectations importantly.

Just one other point, Andrew, sorry, just before you go to your next question, the rectification claim that Richard mentioned, we did provide for in our '26 results. So that's not part of our investment spend. That's already been put on the balance sheet, and we will draw that. So I just want to make sure that's clear.

No, that's clear. And maybe just -- thanks for those comments, Richard and Andrew. Just Andrew, one for you. And again, it's similar to the previous question or maybe a bit of an extension, just around the replicating portfolio. And I assume sort of swap rates remain where they are at the moment, and that's purely an assumption. But how long would you estimate, if that was the case, that you'd have an ongoing tailwind from your replicating portfolio, if you were to make that assumption?

Yes, I think -- so there's a couple of big ifs in that, Andrew. So if swaps stayed where it is now, there's probably another, I would say, 12 to 18 months of benefit ahead of us. And that's really a function of where those back tractors sit right now relative to where we're printing front tractors.

Our next question is from Ed Henning at CLSA.

Just a couple of follow-ups. Just firstly, on the margin. Andrew, you talked about you put in some more wholesale funding and there's some more to do and you increased your TD prices in the fourth quarter where you've got a benefit through the half. Can you just talk about your margin? Obviously, you printed 2% in the fourth quarter. Is the exit from that down a little bit given TD pricing up, wholesale funding coming through and then to think about then going forward with the headwinds of competition and that? That's the first question.

So Ed, we're not disclosing what the exit NIM actually was. What I can tell you is that the term deposit book doesn't reprice straight away. So there's new business that comes through, there's roll. So there's a progressive reprice that will happen in the term deposit book. It then depends on what tenors customers choose. So if we've got customers that are on a 12-month rate and they were on that rate 9 months ago, then clearly, there's going to be an impact as those term deposits roll. Similarly, with wholesale, that's a part impact that will have come through in the fourth quarter and then that more full impact will play out into next year.

What I will say, just in the interest of balance is that we do have a pretty substantial maturity profile into next year, which we're going to be refinancing. I would hope that we do better in respect of spread. So where those deals were printing 3, 4, 5 years ago, depending on the tenor, our spreads would have been basis points wider than where we've been able to write wholesale business recently. So whilst the volume of wholesale funding will certainly increase, I'd hope to see some better spread as we print in whichever form of execution we choose.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just a second question, thinking about kind of cost and revenue growth going forward. You're talking about some margin headwinds. You've got Homesafe rolling off a little bit, and you've got substantial investment going into -- through your P&L just on regulatory and compliance. If we do get an environment where the revenue growth starts to fall for the system, how much discretionary spend do you have that you're able to pull back on spending? Or how should we think about that with -- obviously, the regulatory spend that's got to come through?

Yes. Thanks, Ed. From my perspective, that's the reason we're doing things like these strategic partnerships to give us more flexibility there. And they are, by their nature, costs that we can flex depending on the resources we're requiring from those areas. So if we think about things like operations that there's less volume going through, we require less support in processing areas and the like. And likewise, with the relationship with Infosys, we can make some decisions to flex up and down. Now that's generally though around the edges. The reality is there's significant fixed costs in running a bank. But look, we're always conscious of the revenue environment and in how we then look to manage our cost base to try and make sure that we can continue to generate strong returns and over time improving returns for our shareholders.

Our next question is from John Storey at UBS.

Hopefully, you can hear me. I just wanted to kind of to Ed's question just around the deposit benefit that you saw, right? I'd be quite interested to just get a high-level understanding of your strategy in terms of how you think about deposit pricing, particularly on your savings product and just the elasticity of your rates, I guess, and how clients potentially can kind of think about potentially moving to other banks relative to your rates relative to peers would be helpful.

Yes. Thanks, John. We get this question a lot. And I assume, in particular, you're probably talking about the EasySaver product, which from a savings product perspective, it provides a solid return for customers, but there are higher returns available elsewhere. We recognize that. But it is interesting, we continue to get strong growth in that product over the last 12 months, north of 10%. We think that reflects the more general attraction of our offering to customers. It's not just around the product. It's around having access to over 400 branches if they want to come in and speak to someone face-to-face, which obviously, for many of those banks that offer higher rates, that's not possible.

It's for customers who actually like what we do in the community over $50 million in the last 12 months going back into community contributions. Often, those contributions are supporting things that are meaningful to those customers around the country and their local communities. So -- and I think the last one I'd probably point out is the reflection then in our Net Promoter Score being more than 20 points -- percentage points above the average of the industry isn't by accident. So customers that continue to be attracted to banking with us. They're satisfied with the returns they're getting from the products we're offering on the deposit side. They don't -- if they're looking for a higher return, there are other options that we offer as well. But we do know with the EasySaver product with the functionality it provides, along with a solid return, it continues to attract people to putting their funds there. So right now, with the flows we're getting, we're comfortable with where we've got that positioned.

Maybe just quickly one for Andrew. Just on the DRP, obviously, and how you've been using it, I guess, over the last few reporting periods. What percentage of investors actually take up their dividend in script?

Undiscounted, John, it's typically around 12% to 13%.

Our next question is from Tom Strong at Citi.

Perhaps a question for you, Andrew, to start with just on the NIM. On the waterfall, you can see 6 basis points from deposits. And you've called out term deposits were also 6. I mean you should have got a benefit on the unhedged deposits from the cash rate rises. It would have been about probably 2 to 3 bps from those. Can you just sort of talk to the other things that might have netted off in that deposit tile?

Thanks, Tom, for the question. So the deposit and funding pricing block of 6 basis points is all term deposits. We capture all the replicating portfolio benefit inside that replicating portfolio column. So that includes both unhedged and hedged deposits. And remember that it's 80% that are hedged and only 20% unhedged. So that's how we pick it up.

What I will also point out, again, in the interest of balance is revenue share, which someone will no doubt ask about, so we'll go there now. So of that 3 basis points impact of revenue share, about 2 of that 3 is term deposits. And so whilst as you all know, the revenue share somewhat acts as a limiter when our margin is expanding and vice versa. And so what we've seen with that pickup of term deposit margins through the course of the half, about 2 of the 6 has played out in revenue share, just to make that clear.

Great. And just a question on the RACQ book. I mean you sort of make reference to the 30 June, 2025 numbers. But if we look at the December balances first today, it looks like the lending and deposit balances are down sort of 2% to 3%. Can you just talk about how that book is performing? And how you can sort of arrest that decline under new ownership?

Yes. Tom, in respect of RACQ, we're not giving an update on the 30 June numbers because they are yet to release those publicly. We -- looking forward, we're very keen to see if we can continue to grow that book. We're bringing over nearly about 20 lenders who currently support the lending book with RACQ, and also those RACQ members will have access to our very large branch network in Queensland. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think it's about 90 branches across Queensland, where they can do their banking going forward. So we are going to have a referral agreement in place with RACQ going forward. So we'd hope we can continue to attract more customers from their very large member base in Queensland going forward.

Our next question comes from Carlos Cacho from Macquarie.

I just had a quick first question just around the partnership work. I know it's still early, but it would be great to kind of hear how that's progressing versus your expectations and if there's any kind of key learnings or insights as you've worked through that work with Infosys and Genpact so far.

Yes. Thanks, Carlos. Look, things are very much on track. We're very pleased with the way the partnerships are performing early days. The Infosys work is further progressed. And as part of that, we've had a significant number of ex Bendigo members of our team transferred to Infosys as part of that arrangement and things are starting to get better down there with Infosys picking up a range of new -- sorry, a range of existing services to provide back to the bank on our behalf. Genpact, that work is not as far advanced, but we're certainly in the process of well progressed with the blueprinting of all the processes that are planned to move across to Genpact.

And one of the learnings from that -- through that process, that has really helped as we've worked with Genpact to map our existing processes and to be able to leverage their experience where they see opportunities from the work they do with other banks around the world to provide support and advice to us on how we may want to look at doing things differently or more efficiently going forward. So from my perspective, it's certainly really quite exciting the way things are progressing, and I'll be heading across to visit those operations in October, along with a number of others within the organization to see firsthand how things are progressing. So -- but as we sit here today, certainly, we're really pleased recognizing it's still early days.

Great. And then a second question maybe for you, Andrew, just around the non-interest income. You called out ex Homesafe that was driven by better wealth management and cards income. How sustainable is that? Should we kind of think of that as the new base going forward? Or are there any one-offs that are likely to roll off for FY '27?

Yes, I'll deal with the 2 -- Thanks, Carlos. I'll deal with the 2 separately. So the wealth business is absolutely sustainable. And so what we've seen through the course of both the half and the full year is strong growth in funds under management and some improvement in margin as well. And so it's a good set of products. Our customers like them. They're very straightforward products. So our people provide general advice in respect to the sales of those. So that is a good business there, and we expect that business to hopefully continue.

On cards, there is a little bit of a one-off. So there's a -- we extended our partnership with Mastercard through the course of the year. And so there was a little bit of a one-off benefit, which will mostly recur, but not fully recur in '27, but that's $3 million, $4 million. It's not a big number in the scheme of things.

Our next question is from Brendan Sproules from Goldman Sachs.

I have a couple of questions. Firstly, just, Andrew, in relation to your comment during the presentation around inflation, you kind of flagged 4%. Could you maybe distinguish between, I guess, staff wage inflation versus, say, tech and other cost inflation that you're expecting in '27?

Yes. Thanks, Brendan. So just to reiterate the way we've been talking about our cost base the last few times we've spoken to you. So if you think about it like this, we've got roughly 60% of our costs today that are staff-related costs. And as you've seen through both our half and our full year results, we have managed that cost base to below inflation, and that's largely because of the first wave of productivity work that we've been doing. Clearly, that part of the cost base will be impacted by any wage inflation. At the same time, the strategic partner benefits will come through that line as well.

The second group of costs, which is around about 17%, 18% of our cost base is license, cloud and amortization costs. So software licenses, cloud costs and amortization costs. This part of our cost base is growing at a multiple of inflation. And it'd be no surprise to you or anyone on this call that we continue to see when we utilize the services of global tech companies that the cost of such services have been increasing in the double digits.

The third part of our cost base is then what we would describe as property and external services. And whilst those costs over the course of the year have grown around about inflation, we're actually quite bullish on these going forward because we've continued to do a lot of work in respect of our corporate property footprint. So we think over time, we can grow those costs below inflation.

And then the final part of our cost, which is a very small amount is what we describe as non-lending losses. And so 60% of our costs, going back to your point, we expect to see grow below inflation, and that's staff costs. We expect another 20% of our cost, which is property and external services to be able to grow a little below inflation as well. Where the partnerships are really helping us to stand in front of a cost group that is growing faster than inflation is those license, cloud and amortization costs. That's why, again, we come back to that overall guidance of our cost base of growing no higher than inflation through the cycle. So I hope that answers the question, Brendan.

That's great, Andrew. Really appreciate it. And my second question is just on the performance of the business and agribusiness division on Slide 46. I mean you've shown lending balances are growing above system, 12.6%, also driven by the portfolio funding business, which you show in the slide is a higher NIM to credit risk-weighted assets. But how -- when I look into '27, how do I balance out that with sort of falling customer balances, falling other income, particularly FX, higher expenses and you've seen quite a fall in profit, I guess, over the year. We expect those similar trends to continue into '27 outside of lending?

So a couple of things, Brendan, on that. I'll start, and Richard might want to jump in as well. So we remain pretty bullish about business and agri. So we talked about strong growth in agri. We recognize that there's seasonal growth that happens typically in the second half and then runs down in the first half. We have continued to expand our different channel offers through business lending. And that -- and you've already rightly pointed that out, one of those is portfolio funding, which is a really good business. It's a business that has been growing and it offers depending on the variety, either both NIM and credit risk-weighted asset benefit and/or just credit risk-weighted asset benefit. And so we continue to be pretty optimistic there. We've increased our presence in broker markets, not substantially, but nonetheless, that's a benefit there.

Where we've got more work to do, and it's part of our investment slate into next year is in onboarding and digital onboarding. And so we very successfully through the consumer bank rolled out digital onboarding this year, and we've seen good signs of success there early on. The next piece of the strategy that we need to tackle is digital deposit gathering for our business and agri customers. And so that's certainly part of that investment slate we talked about earlier. We know we've got work to do there. And so getting that part of our business really humming again will certainly help to underpin, I would hope, better stability in margin. But Richard, you might want to.

Yes. Look, on that slide, John, I think the -- sorry, Brendan, I think the key point there is if you look at the growth in assets, yes, that's positive. And it tends to be every second half stronger because we get the agri flows with the seasonal lending there. But the liabilities has been pretty much flat over 4 halves. That's where we're looking to drive that growth, which will then help the margin. And so that's the key for us arresting that decline in margin from a divisional perspective is starting to get the liability flow growing there. And the reality is we have fallen behind when it comes to digital capability in the B&A space for deposit gathering. And so that's a key focus for our digital team this financial year.

Our next question is from Brian Johnson at MST.

Two questions, if I may. If we have a look at Slide 42, we can see that the average flow of a new home loan being done is about $480,000, which is really low compared to the overall stats. What we can also see is that you seem to be over-indexed towards investment property. Could you -- and when we think about that, it would appear that even the life of the digital home loans would appear to be shorter than through the branch. Can we just get a feeling as to whether those 3 observations are right and why that may be? So low average home loan drawdown and another question after this is shorter life than the over-indexed towards investment.

Yes. Thanks, Brian. The -- we historically have had a lower average mortgage value than the market, which also reflects our strength in regional Australia. The reality is if you're buying a property in regional Australia, where many of our branches are, the price of those properties and therefore the amount you need to borrow tends to be significantly less than if you're focused more around Sydney and Melbourne. So that's historically been a key element of lower average value.

As far as the investment flow, it's been 27% in the most recent half. And -- but it's not massively different to the portfolio, which has been at 23%, 24% over the last 3 halves. Yes, we have chosen to be a little bit more competitive from a pricing perspective in investor. The reason we've done that is because we know that we can generate an appropriate return there because even being slightly sharper on rate there, it's still a rate that's above the owner-occupied rate. So we saw an opportunity there in the market to position ourselves to take a little bit of market share through that investment space. But certainly at 27% versus a portfolio of 24%, I don't feel like we've -- we're skewing the business in any significant way.

On the weighted average life, I must admit I haven't turned my mind to that. The reality is, I think with -- I suspect one of the drivers of that may be the fact that we shut down one of our third-party channels about 12 months ago, and we've seen increased turnover in that back book there as a lot of those customers through those -- that channel have refinanced elsewhere. And so I suspect that will be impacting that weighted average life. As that portfolio continues to reduce in absolute size, the amount of attrition there on a month-to-month basis continues to reduce. But it might be one that, unless Andrew, you've turned your mind to it, we might have to take that one on notice.

On the digital point, Brian, narrowly, it's probably still too early days to really get a sense as to the average life of the digital loan. We certainly know those numbers for broker-introduced customers and also through our proprietary network. And no surprise for a proprietary loan, it's typically around 5 to 6 years average life, depending on the number of products the customer takes, and it's typically somewhere between 3 to 4, maybe 3 to 4.5 for third party. But it's still a little early in our digital through the various channels like up to get a good sense as to how sticky or otherwise the life of those loans are. But Richard's point on the mortgage partner channel is right.

Okay. And now the second question, Richard, I apologize. I'm not sure this is a question for you or the Chair or the Head of the Risk Committee. But it is quite disappointing to actually go through another presentation and still we haven't had it clearly enunciated whatever the AUSTRAC problem basically is, whether the staff are involved, et cetera. But that said, right now, if we have a look at the stock, as far as I can work out, net book value is $11.67. So you're trading below book value. Common sense says issuing shares at a discount to net book value is net book value dilutive. And when we have a look this time around, you're issuing DRP shares, that's on Slide 22. But then when I actually have a look at Slide 23, I can see the employee bonus equity plan, there's this one-off adjustment where you're moving from 100% shares, as I recall, to 50% cash.

I'd just really like to understand what is the logic when you're trading below book value, asking shareholders issuing new shares under the DRP, but giving the staff basically 50% of the bonuses through cash in an environment where there has been this recurring governance issue, which shareholders are yet to pay for when we find out whatever the AUSTRAC fine is. Can I get some comments, please?

Yes. Brian, there's a few elements in there. The first thing I will say is -- and there was some information in the press over the last week. These matters are still being dealt with by law enforcement. And as such, I just can't comment around any details around the specific issues that led to the AML issue coming to light last calendar year. Now unfortunately, that's going to remain that way until the police announce any action that they do or don't want to take in relation to that.

In relation -- we're certainly conscious of the fact that we're operating at a discount to net book value. For a number of halves there, we were not adding to our share count and doing that quite deliberately. The reality, as we sit here today, as I think you're aware, we do not know yet what will come of the investigation from AUSTRAC, and that may lead to some form of penalty. We just don't know. We continue to collaborate with AUSTRAC through that process. And -- but we don't know when we'll find out and what impact that will be. So during the.

Sorry, Richard, could I just interrupt you there? So the $120 million of DRP underwrite we did last time around, which I think has been more or less linked to the AUSTRAC risk. What you're saying today is this DRP issuance is the uncertainty around the same issue, which is implying the fine greater than that?

No, you're not doing a great job putting words in my mouth. Yes, I know you are. The reality is in an environment like this where there is uncertainty going forward, we feel it is an appropriate thing for us to be conservative in relation to our capital position. We have just set aside some -- about $70 million at the end of 2026 for some further work we need to do on the risk front. And that has had an impact on our capital position at 30 June. We are making sure we are conservatively positioned until we have greater certainty around this issue in particular. I certainly don't have any view and will not be making any prediction about any potential penalty if one is applied and to what value that will be. And I wouldn't read into the excess capital position we're holding today as any form of indication of what we're expecting on that front.

And the staff issuance cash versus shares?

Yes. And that is more driven by making sure we've got a competitive offer for the majority of our people that we look to attract and retain to this organization. We want them to be shareholders, hence, 50% of their bonus plan, it will remain in equity. But the reality for a lot of those people, they do really appreciate getting part of their bonuses in cash as well rather than 100% equity. So that's the decision that was made by the organization, which has a one-off impact with a timing impact effectively bringing forward that cash element rather than being deferred by 12 months. That's the impact that is called out in the pack.

We'll go to our final question from Christian Mazza at Jarden.

Just one quick last question. Referring to Slide 20 in the presentation, you mentioned there is 11.4% of your business portfolio exposures greater than $50 million. Is there any exposures that exceed $100 million? And if so, what are they secured by?

We will come back, Christian. We'll confirm afterwards. Let's get the data for you. We'll happily share that data. That's fine.

From memory, Christian, I think there might be in the order of less than 5. But again, let us come back with the security information on those through a one-on-one discussion. But it's -- certainly, for a bank of our size, anything with an exposure north of $50 million we make sure that there is very strong collateral in place, and we manage those very carefully.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us, and we'll talk to you all this afternoon.

Good day, and welcome to the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank 2026 Half Year Results Briefing. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to hand the conference over to Sam Miller, General Manager, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Rocco. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank's 2026 Half Year Results Briefing. Let me begin today by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet today, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. And I also extend my respects to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are present on the call today.

Moving towards the agenda. There's been a minor change to our presentation today, and we will broadcast audio and slides only. Our CFO, Andrew Morgan, has tested positive to COVID, and our CEO, Richard Fennell, will present the first half 2026 results with Richard and I handling the Q&A.

I'll now hand over to Richard.

Thanks, Sam, and good morning, everyone, and appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Our half year result reflects a period of intensive strategic execution, disciplined margin management and a significant reduction in operating costs in the second quarter of the half. We've taken a patient approach to deliver against our strategic priorities, which is strengthening our business. These actions are delivering momentum that is building and is expected to deliver stronger balance sheet growth in the second half. Our customer numbers continue to grow strongly and are expected to reach 3 million in Q4. This growth is supported by our Bendigo Bank and Up Net Promoter Scores that are respectively, 25 and 42 points above the industry average.

During the half, we saw the benefits of our deliberate strategy to focus on growing our share of lower-cost deposits, which grew by 3.6% to now represent 53.8% of our total customer deposits. Our investment in digital capability is a key driver of this outcome with digital deposit sales accounting for 41.4% of total deposit sales, an increase of 7.4% for the half. On the lending side, we are regaining momentum in residential mortgages with strong application flow in December and positive growth for the month of January. The more balanced approach to residential loan growth follows the decision to exit our legacy mortgage partner business, allowing us to deploy our capital into higher returning channels. This decision has led to higher discharges in that channel, which has been offset by 6% growth in our digital channel. Meanwhile, application momentum in our higher returning channels is building, placing the bank in a stronger position over the long term.

Our second quarter expenses were 6.4% lower than the first quarter, reflecting higher seasonal cost drivers in the first quarter, such as the annual salary adjustment process. A highlight for the half was our digital bank Up, achieving its first month of profitability in September, more than 6 months ahead of schedule. This is a significant milestone and tangible evidence that our investments in digital are creating value and continue to contribute positively to the group's competitive position. As we announced back in November, we are acquiring RACQ Bank's loan and deposit books. This is a valuable opportunity for us to grow our business in Queensland and welcome a new group of customers to the fold.

Finally, towards the end of last year, we identified and self-reported the shortcomings in our management of AML/CTF risk. We continue to engage proactively with regulators and are developing a comprehensive action plan to address the issues identified. We are committed to strengthening our processes and meeting our regulatory obligations, and I'll have more to say on this matter later in the presentation.

Returning to execution. The first half was a period of intense focus and significant process on the delivery of initiatives aligned with our strategic pillars and enablers, which we shared 6 months ago. I covered some of these strategic achievements at our investor update in December, so I'll only briefly recap them here. In just 3 months, our digital and technology engineering teams rebuilt and delivered our in-app digital onboarding capability, which is delivering significantly increased new customer flow through this channel. We finalized the full rollout of the Bendigo lending platform with it now being available across all of our retail branches. And we migrated 180,000 Adelaide Bank customer accounts onto our core banking system, delivering on our long-held objective of 1 core banking system and 2 main customer-facing brands.

One aspect I didn't speak to at length at our investor update last December was our new 5-year partnership with Google. This partnership will provide enhanced cloud capability, access to enterprise-wide AI tools and industry-leading cybersecurity defenses. Over 2,200 of our people are already utilizing the Gemini AI tools with early adoption showing significant productivity benefits. Examples such as generative AI for hardship detection, improving timeliness of engagement, accuracy and productivity are supporting improved customer outcomes. These initiatives I've highlighted are tangible examples of the early progress we are making to deliver on our 2030 strategy.

I'm excited by the benefits we're starting to see flow, which I'll walk through shortly in our progress update. But first, I'd like to turn to our financial performance. For the half, cash earnings of $256.4 million were up 2.8% on the prior half, driven by a 3.7% uplift in total income. Notably, this is the first half in the bank's history that we have delivered more than $1 billion in income. Income benefited from a 4 basis point improvement in margin as we focused on delivering a more favorable mix of lower cost deposits following a moderation in lending growth. Operating expenses increased by 4.2%, reflecting expected increases in software costs and amortization charges, additional workdays during the half and higher remediation expenses.

Our investment spend declined by 19% for the half as major technology projects such as the rollout of the lending platform came to an end. And finally, in credit expenses, we saw a $2.4 million write-back for the half as collective provisions reduced, reflecting lower overall loan balances, together with the repayment of some larger impaired loans. The overall credit portfolio has remained resilient, and we remain focused on helping customers that face difficult choices due to cost of living and other pressures.

Turning now to our divisional performance. Our Consumer division delivered strong earnings growth of 5.9% for the half, with net interest income increasing by 4.9%. This performance was largely driven by an 8 basis point improvement in margin, supported by the previously mentioned strong growth in lower cost deposits. Residential lending declined by 2.6% for the half. As noted, this reflects our strategic decision to exit less profitable legacy partners in our third-party originated channel, which contracted by 7.4% over the half. However, our digital lending channel grew 6%. This deliberate shift in focus towards more profitable channels is expected to continue to lift the returns for our Consumer division over the longer term.

Our Business and Agri division's cash earnings decreased by 1% with higher net interest income largely offset by higher expenses. Higher NII benefited from higher average interest-earning assets and additional workdays, while expenses were impacted by the ongoing investment in our business lending platform. While overall loan growth was largely flat for the half, we have a strong pipeline of business coming into the second half with momentum building across our broker channel, agri business and equipment finance.

At the FY '25 full year result, I shared 3 areas of focus for the next 2 years that will be critical to progressing towards our ROE target. As I said then, at each half and full year result, I will update you on the progress we're making across each area of focus. And to recap, these areas are optimizing our deposit franchise, enhancing productivity and delivering sustainable growth.

Let me step you through the progress we've made this half. We've previously highlighted that we'll be taking a deposit-first approach to growth, targeting lower-cost deposits as the primary source of funding for our lending activity. To enable this deposit-led approach, we've strengthened our digital deposit franchise through the refresh of our in-app digital account opening capability for Bendigo's new-to-bank customers, and we've enhanced app functionality to deliver improved digital experiences for all our customers. We're now seeing weekly volumes of 400 to 500 new customers joining us through this digital onboarding functionality. Our frontline teams are proactively engaging with our existing Bendigo customers who don't currently have a Bendigo transaction account. And we've also continued to upskill the sales capabilities of both our frontline and virtual banking teams. These initiatives have already delivered benefits with lower cost deposit growth of 3.6%, particularly in the EasySaver and increased digital deposit sales of 7.4% for the half.

Up's Grow & Flow product drove an additional $190 million of lower cost deposits over the half, and we expect this momentum to continue as highlighted at the investor update, and we are targeting digital deposit sales of 45% by the end of the financial year. Following the announcement of our productivity program in August, the outcome of the first phase is evident in the half year results. Investment spend has reduced, supported by a 48% reduction in contractor numbers over the half. Our full-time equivalent employee numbers have reduced by 5% on the prior corresponding period and 4% over the half. This is a result of several support function and technology division restructures.

But let me highlight a couple of the outcomes this half. Through our focus on operational excellence within our operations teams, we've successfully realized a $9.6 million benefit this half. And we're elevating our AI and automation program in partnership with Google, which continues to empower our people to self-drive productivity and process improvements. Our entire workforce has access to the Google AI suite, and we're seeing organic people-led innovation outcomes. Our productivity program has now entered its second phase, which comprises 2 key initiatives. The first initiative is a new information technology partnership for which we are now in advanced negotiations and the second focus on business processing where planning activity continues. Together, these initiatives will enhance our technology and operational capabilities, drive innovation and support our guidance of keeping business as usual costs no higher than inflation through the cycle. We'll provide further updates to the market through the course of this half year.

Our third area of focus is maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation to drive long-term sustainable growth that exceeds our cost of capital. This discipline is reflected in our NIM to credit risk-weighted asset ratio, which despite slightly moderating this half, remains well above the level of 2 years ago. Our recent decision to exit less profitable legacy mortgage partners is another example of this discipline in action. By prioritizing growth in our higher-returning channels, we're actively managing our portfolio to improve returns. We expect decisions like this will continue to support our NIM to credit risk-weighted asset metric over the longer term. In Business and Agri, we saw the usual agri seasonality with high loan repayments driven by strong yields for our grain growers, particularly in WA and New South Wales. This seasonality is expected to reverse as funding is redrawn down in the second half. In addition, growth in the business portfolio remains robust, particularly across portfolio funding and business lending with a strong pipeline heading into the second half.

Finally, I'd like to take a moment to provide an update on our approach to addressing the deficiencies in AML/CTF risk management at the bank. We recently appointed a new highly experienced Chief Compliance Officer and Head of Financial Crime Risk, Steve Blackburn, to lead our response. We've now received detailed recommendations, actions and a road map from Deloitte, which we're using to guide our remediation and uplift program with a focus on enhancing our enterprise-wide AML/CTF risk management, including transaction monitoring. Our current expectation of the total cost over a period of up to 3 years will be $70 million to $90 million, of which we expect an initial cost of $15 million will be incurred in the second half of financial year '26. These expenses will be contained within our existing 2026 investment slate. In parallel, Deloitte are also completing an additional root cause analysis across our broader nonfinancial risk management.

I'll now move to the financial results in more detail. This result reflects improved momentum across a number of metrics following our first quarter trading update. We've slowed the decline in residential lending and expect to return to growth into the second half. We've also seen an improved funding mix with stability in transaction accounts and continued strong growth in savings accounts. This has enabled us to deliver a lift in net interest margin in the second quarter despite the lower cash rate. We've also carefully managed pricing decisions to stimulate growth in key target segments. And we've tightened our management of business as usual costs in the second quarter with quarterly costs reducing over 6% on the first quarter. Our operating performance was 2.8% higher than the prior half, mostly due to strength in income and cash earnings of $256.4 million are 2.8% higher than the prior half. Our balance sheet is in a strong position going into the second half, reflected in strong capital, funding and liquidity.

On this slide, we show you the usual reconciliation of cash to statutory earnings. You can see that the Adelaide core consolidation was in line with the higher end of the flagged range and most of the restructuring costs booked in the first half was in relation to the productivity initiatives, which I mentioned earlier. Growth in house prices in Sydney and Melbourne boosted Homesafe unrealized income. And going into the second half, we expect a very small amount of residual costs associated with the Adelaide Bank core consolidation. We also expect to incur further restructuring costs in relation to the next phase of our productivity program and also preparation work for the completion of the RACQ transaction.

Turning now to total income for the half. Income of $1.01 billion was up 3.7% on the prior half. Net interest income increased 3.2%, reflecting a slight contraction in average interest-earning assets and an improved margin. This was further bolstered by stronger other income, which was up almost 7%. Other income, excluding Homesafe was up 6%, reflecting improved wealth and cards income. Homesafe income was up 8%, reflecting 5% growth in completed contracts on the prior half and a stronger average profit per completion. In respect of key considerations, as previously flagged, income from the Homesafe portfolio will reduce over time, subject to the rate and profit on contract completions. This half saw the number of open contracts reduced by around 3%, which is a rate consistent with the last 2 halves, whilst the average life of contracts completed through the half was around 8 years.

Turning now to net interest margin. Compared to the prior half, our NIM was up 4 basis points to 192 basis points. Asset pricing negatively impacted 3 basis points, which was due to a combination of front book pricing pressure in residential lending and ongoing retention pricing pressure in business and agri. Deposit and funding pricing improved 3 basis points, mostly reflecting the benefit of term deposit repricing and mix provided a 4 basis point benefit, reflecting a combination of improved funding mix and improved asset mix. Income from our replicating portfolios was flat as expected as was revenue share. Our exit NIM was slightly higher than the second quarter average.

Looking forward, key considerations for the second half of '26. We think it likely that a further cash rate increase will happen later this financial year. And we expect a small amount of NIM pressure as lending volumes improve into the second half following some selective repricing during the second quarter. We also continue to see customers rolling off fixed rates and mostly favoring variable rate mortgages. First half maturities were around $2 billion, and we expect around $1 billion of further maturities into the second half of '26. And higher swap rates could see replicating portfolio contribution turn from flat to slightly positive. The unknown factor as always, is the degree of price competition on both sides of the balance sheet.

Turning now to residential lending. Settlement volumes in aggregate were down 15% on the prior half, particularly in third-party channels. Discharges were also elevated, mostly due to the closing down of one of our partner channels. We continue to prioritize the deployment of capital into channels where both the economics are compelling and growth opportunities exist, being self-serve digital mortgages and broker intermediated mortgages through our new lending platform. This half, almost 50% of new settlements came through our physical network, 1/3 through broker intermediated channels and 17% through direct digital channels, including Up. We do see further growth opportunity in our physical network following the completion of the rollout of the new lending platform, which was completed in November 2025.

The positive trends in our mortgage book continue. First, around 40% of new loans are below 60% LVR and almost 90% of new loans are below 80% LVR. Second, the average credit risk weight on new mortgages has continued to improve. And third, critically, the ratio of NIM to credit risk-weighted assets on new business as a proxy for risk-adjusted returns is up strongly on 12 months ago. Momentum in the book is improving. Applications per day steadily improved over the second quarter, and we saw the strongest volume of applications per day in December and expect these loans to settle during the third quarter. Discharges have also slowed progressively over the second quarter. So with this momentum in mind, we are targeting growth around system towards the end of the second half of FY '26.

Our deposit gathering franchise remains an ongoing strength and is improving. Across both our proprietary network and community bank partners, we delivered growth of just under 2% on the prior half, and we continue to see good momentum in digital deposits. In our Up business, digital deposits increased 24% over the half, whilst Bendigo digital deposits grew 13% over the same period. Whilst deposit growth over the half looks modest at 1.1%, deposit mix has continued to improve. We continue to see strong growth in EasySaver accounts, which were up 7% on the prior half and overall savings accounts up 5%. Following a dip in the first quarter, transaction account balances had a strong second quarter, finishing marginally higher than the prior half. And partly as a result of tax receipts, we saw offset accounts rise 5% over the half.

Through careful management of our funding requirements, we also managed to reduce term deposit balances, which were down 4% on the prior half. The overall picture on deposits is that lower cost deposits increased to almost 54% of total deposits, up from 52.4% just 6 months ago. And critically, our household deposit-to-loan ratio remains strong at 77%, which is 9 percentage points higher than the industry average.

Turning now to operating expenses. Total costs increased 4% for the half as previously flagged, second quarter costs came in 6% lower than the first quarter. Business as usual costs, excluding the increase in remediation costs, grew 5% over the half. Inflation software license fees, amortization and 3 additional workdays impacted our BAU costs, contributing 6.1% to overall cost growth. Spot FTE were 4% lower than the prior half, reflecting a number of restructuring activities through the half. In respect of second half costs, we are targeting to manage total BAU costs to no higher than the first half. And longer term, we reiterate our cost guidance, which is to keep BAU cost growth contained to no higher than inflation through the cycle.

I want to spend now a few minutes on our investment spend, including its composition and how we think about investment spend for the second half of the year in the context of the recently disclosed AML/CTF issues. As a reminder, coming into this financial year, we had said we expected cash investment spend to be roughly the same as last year or around $230 million, plus noncash spend of $30 million at the upper end of the Adelaide core migration. So in total, around $260 million. Around half of the $230 million cash spend was expected to be expensed. For the first half, we spent just under $89 million on cash investment spend with 65% of that expensed. In addition, we spent $35 million on noncash investment spend, mostly on the completion of the Adelaide Bank core migration.

Our early-stage estimate for the AML/CTF uplift program is that it will cost approximately $70 million to $90 million and will run over the next 3 years. The remainder of this year will be about mobilization and early-stage activity, costing an estimated $15 million in the second half, and then the work will ramp up into the next financial year. We intend to cover the cost of the AML/CTF program inside our previously flagged FY '26 cash investment spend and expect expensed investment spend in the second half to be slightly higher than the first half.

Moving to credit quality and credit expenses. Our key credit metrics remain sound, and we continue to carefully watch trends in the industry and within our book. Through the half, we booked a net write-back of $2 million, mostly reflecting reduced collective provision on the lower residential lending portfolio. Gross impaired loans have remained stable at 15 basis points of gross loans and arrears across the book remain low, but are increasing. 90-day arrears in residential lending have increased in the low single-digit basis points in the last 6 months to 85 basis points. In agri business, arrears have been stable over the half and the dollar value of arrears has reduced. The technical issue that we described at full year around expired facilities has not yet been fully resolved, though we do expect third quarter arrears to return to more normal levels.

Whilst asset quality remains sound and arrears are at relatively low levels, we do expect bad debts to trend upwards over time. Our funding and liquidity metrics remain strong and well diversified. Our average liquidity coverage ratio for the second quarter was strong at 135%. The proportion of customer deposits to total funding improved on the prior half to just under 80% and our coverage of household deposits to loans at 77% is well above the industry average. Through the half, we retired some wholesale debt, bringing the proportion of our funding needs met by wholesale down to 21%. And our Community Bank partnerships importantly provide us with a net $15 billion of funding, which provides further diversification and a relatively cheaper funding source than wholesale funding.

And finally, turning now to capital and dividends. Our CET1 ratio increased 37 basis points to 11.37% over the half, and this reflected lower capital consumption through reduced lending. Our capital remains well above the Board target of above 10%. On a pro forma basis, our 1 January capital position reduced by 18 basis points, reflecting the inclusion of the $50 million regulatory capital overlay. Directors have determined to pay an interim dividend of $0.30 per share, which will be fully franked. This represents a 67% payout ratio for the half and on a cents per share basis is flat on the prior comparative period. As a prudent measure, this half, we will be underwriting around 70% of our dividend, which will, in effect, mean we retained 31 basis points or approximately $121 million -- sorry, $120 million of our CET1, CET1 following the payment of the interim dividend, further strengthening our capital position. So in summary, we are in a strong capital position going into the second half.

I'll now open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions].

Thank you. I'd like to go to our first question. We have Annabel Ross from Barrenjoey.

I just had one on expenses, specifically BAU costs. So turning to Slide 20, when you talk about you're targeting to limit business as usual expenses to no higher than inflation through the cycle, I'm wondering, do you mean 2.5%, which is the RBA target or 4%, which is the current inflation rate? And then just a second part on BAU costs as well. So they were down -- in the first quarter, they were $299 million and then in the second quarter down to $280 million. And should we extrapolate from that second quarter number when forecasting and going forward?

Thanks, Annabel. In relation to inflation, the reality is that we face the inflationary environment that exists in the economy. So we obviously recognize the RBA is targeting 2% to 3%. But when we're sitting more in the 3% to 4% range, that's the inflationary environment we're operating in. And that's the basis upon which right now, we're focusing on trying to keep our BAU costs no higher than that inflationary environment. Clearly, over time, if the RBA is successful in getting that down within its range, then our target will likewise reduce to that 2% to 3% range rather than where inflation sits at the moment at 3% to 4%. In relation to looking forward to the second half of '26, the guidance we are giving on costs is to keep our second half BAU costs no higher than the first half BAU costs. So rather than looking at quarter-by-quarter, if you look at the cost numbers for the first half, that's the target we've set ourselves to not exceed in the second half.

Our next question comes from Kelsey Bentley from JPMorgan.

Just looking at the NIM walk on Slide 17. Could you please describe what drove the 3 basis point headwind of lending pressure just given the fact that there was negative credit growth in the period? And then just as a follow-up per your guidance point, how much should we expect margin to come under pressure as growth builds as you said, it has already begun?

Yes. Thanks, Kelsey. Look, a couple of factors on the lending pricing pressure. The reality of the fixed rate lending that is expiring is a lot of that was written at a time during the COVID period when funding costs were at all-time lows. And so the margin on those loans as they then roll into variable rate loans often has a slight headwind. We're also seeing on the business and agri side of it, there is intense competition. So the competition to retain and write new business is continuing to have a slight impact on margin through that channel. So overall, the B&A side was about 2 basis points of the 3 basis point contraction. So they're probably the 2 key factors there.

Looking forward, the pressure in the second half, look, it's going to be an interesting one to see how that plays out. We're comfortable with where our pricing sits right now on the lending side of it. But the reality, if we do see continued growth in application flow leading to stronger growth in the second half and if we're able to get up to that expected level of around system growth by the end of the half, we will need to fund that growth. And the reality is moving from little or no growth to stronger growth, we may need to look at utilizing some other funding sources such as wholesale or term deposits, which are slightly more expensive. So that's really what we're pointing to with some potential impact with some slight margin pressure from that higher growth. The reality is there are going to be a lot of moving parts as there always are with NIM, with the higher cash rate. That obviously has generally some positive impacts. And also with the higher swap rates as well, we expect to see some slight positivity from the replicating portfolio versus what we saw in the first half when that was no positive impact.

Thanks, Kelsey. Our next question comes from Sally Hong from Morgan Stanley.

So on margins, what benefit do you expect to get from higher rates? Like what's the sensitivity for every 25 basis point increase in the cash rate on your unhedged deposits?

Yes. Sally, generally, it's around 2 basis points, maybe 1.5 to 2 basis point range for every 25 basis point move. The interesting aspect, though, as always, with interest rate moves in either direction is what the price setters in the market. And obviously, with us sitting here at a couple of percent market share, we don't have that luxury of being a price setter or what they choose to do on both sides of the balance sheet as far as passing all of that through or not. So yes, I think a decent rule of thumb that we have traditionally used is around that 2 basis point level. But as I said, the competitive dynamics will always be interesting to watch as the cash rate moves up or down.

Just a second question. So you had a 3 basis point benefit from term deposits. Would you see that as a one-off benefit? Or do you expect to get further benefits in second half '26? And do you think the deposit mix benefit of 2 basis points can continue if the loan growth improves?

Yes. Look, the term deposit, we have a really strong deposit franchise, as I know you understand. And over the last half, with less demand on funding, we haven't needed to price our term deposits as sharply as some competitors have done. The reality is, as we move to stronger lending, I don't think we'll have that luxury again, and we'll probably need to make sure that we are priced more closely to where our competitors are. So I don't expect that TD benefit to play out again.

From a deposit mix perspective, I'd love to sit here and say yes, we will continue to see stronger growth in our savings accounts and lower cost deposits in generally. That's the reason we've invested to improve our digital deposit gathering capability, but it's very hard to make that sort of commitment with a forward view, again, given the competitive dynamics and also with the expectation that we'll be growing the balance sheet in the second half. So look, I'd be -- I'd love to say, yes, that's what's going to play out in the second half, and I'll be delighted in 6 months if we can report that. But I don't have a strong level of confidence that we'll see a similar benefit in the second half.

Thanks, Sally. Our next question is from Andrew Lyons from Jefferies.

Richard, just a question that somewhat relates to what's been asked already around margin, but maybe from a higher level. If you look at your divisional revenue performance on PCP, your Consumer division saw strong revenue growth in the face of a shrinking loan book, while your Business and Agri division saw strongly negative revenue growth, I think, minus 5% or 6% in the face of what was pretty strong loan book growth on the PCP. Now while I accept you can't shrink to greatness that infinitum, from a high level, what does it say about the state of the business when the cost of loan growth seems to be such significant revenue margin pressure. And I think it's particularly relevant given you are looking to accelerate growth into the second half.

Yes. Look, it's an interesting conundrum, isn't it, Andrew? What we need to do is try and get this balance right. One of the reasons we -- I guess, or that influenced the lower growth in the residential side or the consumer side of things, well, there's 2 factors there. One of those was what I spoke about earlier with exiting one of the third-party channels, which has seen accelerated runoff in the back book there. But the other factor is we really did want to wait until we had the functionality in place from a digital perspective to see stronger growth in our lower cost deposits before we felt comfortable to, I guess, move back to a more competitive position and hopefully drive stronger growth going forward. And the reason we did it that way is so we can hopefully keep that balance in check between in the consumer business, the lending side and deposit growth so that we don't face the margin crunch that we saw on the back of the finalization of the government support on the back of COVID when margins got crunched pretty badly.

On the B&A side of things, when rates fell, our low rate-sensitive savings accounts really did get a -- took a hit in that space. B&A, the deposit business in B&A is heavily skewed towards those transaction accounts, those lower rate accounts. And so they are more sensitive to moves in interest rate. And look, I would be hopeful then we'll see some improvement from a margin perspective with higher interest rates and not quite sure how high they will go. Also, I'm not sure -- I'm trying to think back, I've been in this business nearly 20 years now with this bank. I'm not sure I've seen such competitive pressure in the business and agri space during that time. And the reality is that's a challenge. We want to retain our book. We'd like to grow our book. We've got a good offering, but the reality is we've got to be priced competitively in that space. We'll be doing our best to maintain a solid NIM in that book going forward. It is a NIM that has a reasonable premium over the consumer business. We don't want to give it all away, but it's the ongoing challenge we face, and it's a challenge for the industry as a whole.

Yes. Great. And Rich, just that comment on business and agri being as competitive as ever. Is that a comment on both sides of the balance sheet? Or is it particularly in that space biased to one element?

Look, it -- they tend to be related because if you do a good job of bringing a B&A customer onto the books, hopefully, you get both sides of their balance sheet. But the reality is the competition actually is manifesting as much as anything in the competition for business and agri lenders and business and agri business managers. And so look, we've seen these things happen from time to time again. I do suspect that will ease at some point. But right now, it seems to be a flavor of the month. One of the other aspects that I think will help us although it's still probably a little way away. Once we finish the build-out of our consumer digital onboarding capability, we swung that team now across to start looking at building digital onboarding capability for our business and agri customers.

That's a more complex build because, as you can imagine, onboarding the complexity of a business customer versus an individual, there is -- it is by its nature, more challenging to do that in a digital environment. But that's some work we've kicked off, and we think that will help us continue to grow the deposit side of that business once we've got that in place. I'm not going to be able to give you an exact date. It won't be this half, but I would hope that to be up and running during FY '27.

And then just a second question just on expenses. Your overall expense -- sorry, investment spend guidance is broadly unchanged from what you said in August. But since then, you've had 2 additional things that you've got to effectively include within that envelope being the AML and then the RACQ acquisition, which does somewhat imply that you are sacrificing, I guess, investment spend to grow the business in inverted commerce. So like are you really in a position to allow this to happen in an environment where your major bank peers are ticking up investment spend and reshaping it more towards growth? And you've obviously got what's going on just in the broader revolution in relation to AI. Just keen to sort of understand the decision to hold investment spend in the face of additional costs. Yes.

Yes. Look, it's -- one of the real positives that we've been able to deliver over the last 6 months is actually a significant increase in productivity in the technology development space. And a really great example of that is one we've probably banged on about a bit, which is the build of the consumer digital onboarding capability in just 3 months for about $0.5 million, we expected that to take a lot longer and cost a lot more. We are in the process of materially changing our technology development operating model. That was one of the first areas operating under a new operating model. So we're seeing greater efficiency and productivity coming through that space, which has actually freed up space in our investment slate for us to then reallocate funding to AML/CTF and also RACQ.

Now the other aspect that actually has allowed us, as we've been generating this productivity, that has allowed us to free up contingency that historically we haven't necessarily been able to free up because we've had to use it on major projects. So again, I'd like to say this is a foresight of what we'll continue to see with a significant improvement in productivity, and that includes the use of AI tools in the development of new functionality and coding and the likes, which is actually having a positive impact in our tech productivity space. So that's -- we don't think reallocating funds to these areas are going to impact our growth agenda. We think we've got it enough to allocated to those aspects that will drive growth, such as the digital onboarding for B&A. But the reality is you're always making tough choices when it comes to the investment slate because there is always an excess of demand over the amount that we're prepared to allocate.

Thanks, Andrew. Our next call is from Tom Strong from Citi.

A couple of questions. Just going back to the TD pricing. I mean you have lagged your peers considerably over the last few months and sits below them. I mean, is there a point of catch-up regardless in terms of getting back into flow? Or is it more just contingent on the sort of growth dynamics between your digital deposits and low-cost deposits versus getting back to system?

Yes. You're right, Tom. We have deliberately lagged some of the pricing there. We did make a move in our 12-month TD I think it was late December or January, I'm trying to remember exactly when we did make a change, but that has put us -- we found with that 12-month one, which has become positive again as the curve has moved higher, we had to move back to a more competitive position there. And look, we will continue to monitor the different terms across the TD profile to make sure that we've got certainly 1 or 2 competitive rates out there, generally one in the shorter terms, sort of sub-6 months and generally one more around that longer term of around a year. And I think from memory, we did make some other tweaks just going back in the last week or so as well just to make sure we've got competitive positioning there. Obviously, that also reflects the cash rate change that happened a week or so ago and locking in a higher curve where everyone is adjusting their TD rates to reflect that.

Great. And just a second question on capital. You mentioned the strength of capital, which is popping up further. You did get a considerable benefit in this quarter from the cash flow hedge and some of the reserve movements. Can you just touch on the sustainability and what's driving that?

Yes. Look, that's -- this is one that I'll probably normally throw to Andrew to give me all of the detail on this. But the cash flow hedge reserves, I mean, they are -- the movements there do depend on when those hedges have been set and obviously, movements in rates. I don't expect you're going to see an additional tailwind in the second half. But look, maybe to give you a fulsome answer on that, we might pick that up in our one-on-one discussion later today because if you'd ask me 6 or 7 years ago when I was sitting in Andrew's seat, I would have been all over it, but I must admit it's not one that I've necessarily focused a lot of attention on that specific point.

Thanks, Tom. Our next question is from John Storey from UBS.

I just want to go back to your deposit franchise, right? And one of the things that definitely sticks out to me, obviously, you've got a fantastic offering there. And obviously, you've got a great client value proposition as reflected by a very high NPS score. 27% of the deposit base, if you're going to have a look at it, is effectively at a cost of 0% to 1%. I'm just thinking kind of more structurally, as your client base becomes more digital, how price sensitive would this client base be? And how sticky are those deposits within that context?

Sorry, that -- was that -- you just got a little bit muffled there. Was that in relation to the Bendigo business or the Up business or both you're talking about?

No, that's in relation to both, Richard. Yes, absolutely.

I got it, yes. Look, the -- on the Bendigo side of things, it is interesting. Most of our customers who do most of their banking with us will have a transaction account and the savings account, and they will actively move funds between the 2. As I mentioned earlier on the call, one of the important elements of our business banking franchise is actually a pretty significant transaction account balance where you generally see a higher float being held in the transaction accounts. So just because they're moving to a digital channel, what we're seeing interestingly from the -- I'm trying to remember how many thousand customers we've already onboarded through the new digital capability from -- through Bendigo Bank. We're seeing them then bring -- open a transaction account as their first account and then open additional accounts, often a savings account. And so there is a mix then of funds sitting in those 0 or very low interest rate accounts and then also putting money into savings accounts. And in some cases, in fact, actually then going on and taking out lending with us.

On the upside, the move to the new Grow & Flow product has actually been really positively received by their customer base with significant increase in funds going there. Now from memory, the flow rate is around 1.5% or thereabouts and the grow rate is above 4%. So again, it's a reasonable mix. There are some specific requirements such as no withdrawals from your Grow account to get that higher interest rate. But again, what we're finding with the customers, and I was talking to my son about this over the weekend about how to manage his cash flow so we can maximize the amount in his Grow account versus his Flow account, which pays 1.5% is to -- they end up having funds in both. So I'm not sitting here overly worried that we're going to see a significant reduction in those lower cost deposits on the back of the digital channels.

And I think, Richard, the aspects you talked about at Investor Day with the emotional drivers and the strong NPS, this seems to be coming to fruition.

Absolutely. No, we've been really encouraged by the early customer flow we're seeing through that new digital channel. I mentioned 400 to 500 a week. We're hopeful that we can get that up above 100 a day in the near future with some targeted promotion and marketing. And it's been really pleasing to see the customers voting well, I was going to say with their feet, but really with their fingers in taking up those digital accounts.

Great. Maybe just quickly on my second question, just around lending growth and obviously, your ambitions to try and accelerate that in the second half of the financial year. Maybe you could just comment around the ability of Bendigo to lean on some of its proprietary channels to try and drive growth. And it looks like as you've kind of mix -- as the mix has changed more towards proprietary, obviously, your new business volumes have come off pretty substantially. And just thinking about it from a volume margin trade-off, if you can drive lending growth through proprietary, obviously, you'd be able to hold margin a little bit better. But if you're reliant more on third-party channels to try and accelerate growth, particularly in the second half of the year, arguably, there would be more of a margin impact. Just how do you think about those dynamics there?

Yes. Thanks, John. I'm really quite positive about what we can do in our proprietary channels this half. We didn't actually move our largest geography by customer, Victoria onto the new platform until I think it was late November or even early December last year. Now getting on to that new platform drastically reduces the amount of time a lender needs to work on actually delivering a home loan and processing for a customer that home loan. It literally takes it from many hours down to minutes. And on the back of that, we're looking for an increased flow through our lenders out in the retail network. The other element historically, we've seen a disappointing percentage of applications to settlement. And roughly through our retail channel, we were seeing only about 60% of applications settling. And a large reason for that was the amount of time it was taking us to get to unconditional approval, in many cases, many weeks.

Now unconditional approval or conditional approval is within minutes. unconditional approval tends to be dependent on the customer getting any additional information back to us. But at the moment through the retail channel, that's down to about 7 days on average from, as I said, weeks. And on the back of that, we have the early signs of the loans going through the lending platform through retail are seeing a higher proportion of applications settling. And so that's a significant productivity and also growth improvement opportunity for us.

Thanks, John. Our next question is from Matt Dunger from Bank of America.

Richard, if I could ask you around the residential lending flows on Slide 36. I understand that the value of third-party flows is more than halved versus the first half of '25. And you've talked to the net interest income to credit risk-weighted asset improvement. Just wondering how you can maintain this? How much of this do you expect to unwind in the second half as you return to growth? And what sort of cost of capital targets are you going to set? Will you be able to maintain the improvements that you've got through from pricing discipline?

Yes. We are certainly hoping that we can hold out our margin and therefore, the returns we're generating through our residential lending book in the second half. The reality of that drop-off in third party, I expect that on a percentage basis, it not to rebound all the way because I do expect we'll probably continue to see some elevated runoff in some of those third-party channels that we've closed. But I do also expect that we may well see some additional new business flow as we have moved some of our price points in some of the higher returning points across the competitive market into a position where we are price competitive.

Look, it's going to be -- that's the real challenge in front of us to hold that return in new business through our margin. The one thing, though, that does help us is the significant productivity benefits we are now getting through that new lending platform. So the cost of manufacture of a lot of those loans is a lot lower than where it was a couple of years ago before we had that platform. So the price points we've got there are above our cost of capital across those different products. The challenge, though, as I mentioned earlier, is as we get that higher growth is to not give that margin back through funding. And that's the art and science of this business. As I said, we've now got more capability from a customer deposit perspective in that digital space. Up is making a positive contribution, a net positive contribution with its deposits as well. We're going to be working damn hard this half to not give back margin as we start to see growth come through.

That's very helpful. And if I could just follow up on the cost side, and thank you for quantifying the $70 million to $90 million of AML and CTF costs. Just wondering if you could talk to the scope and composition of this spend. Why is this the right number? And does this Deloitte program have scoped out the work? Does that draw a line in the sand?

Look, the way we've come up with that number is through working with Deloitte, who have the experience of working with a number of other banks have gone through similar processes. And one of the few positives out of this experience is that we're not the first bank to experience this. And so we can leverage the experience of others. They have identified from the review they undertook, which we obviously identified to the market late last calendar year, they have then done work to map out the actions they believe we need to take over the next few years. And they've also given an estimate of the cost to do that.

We've worked our way through that. We've also assessed each of those actions against what we believe our capability is to deliver on those and then done a bottom-up analysis of the potential contingency around the different actions we need to take. And so that's where we end up with a range whether you've got it with or without contingency. As far as drawing a line in the sand, look, we would -- we are very hopeful that this time frame and this investment will get us to a position of addressing the shortcomings that we've identified. Steve Blackburn, who I mentioned, who's just joined us, comes with the experience of working or doing the same role with one of the major banks when they went through this process and also another large listed organization, not in the banking sector who went through a similar challenge.

He's only been with us a couple of weeks now. He's now working his way through a review of that estimate. Early days, he's only been with us a couple of weeks now. He thinks it looks reasonable, but there's still more work for him to do and his team to really forensically assess whether that's the right plan and the right cost. But we thought it was really important, given we've got this initial estimate to get it out there. It may change. But if it does change, we'll certainly keep the investment community abridged of that. I'm very hopeful that we're allowing sufficient funds and sufficient time to fix the issues we've identified.

Thanks, Matt. Our next question comes from Ed Henning from CLSA.

Just following on from the question from Matt there. On the $70 million to $90 million, does that include there's still analysis going underway of the root cause? Is there potentially any add-on from that and change of scope?

Yes. This is specific to the AML/CTF, Ed. Yes, as we've identified, we're doing an additional piece of work to see if there's any read-through from the shortcomings. We've identified on AML/CTF to our broader nonfinancial risk management within the organization. That will report back to us late this half. And we will see what comes of that. If that requires further activity to be undertaken to improve our nonfinancial risk management, then we'll address that. We've already been doing work for some time to uplift our capabilities in that space. So if anything, that would probably see a continuation of that work, which is already work that is included within our existing slate. So we'll just have to wait and see what comes and what findings come from that work and then if there's additional activity that needs to be undertaken. I would hope that, that would again be something that we could manage through a mixture of BAU costs and slate -- existing slate.

Okay. And just further, just to confirm, I think you said during the presentation that you'll expense 65% again in the second half of your investment spend. Was that right?

I'm just trying to get exactly the words so I can -- we were certainly guiding to above...

Greater.

Yes, above more than half. For the first half, 65% was expensed. In the second half, we're expecting the expense ratio to be more than half. I wish we could forecast with exactly that level of precision, but -- so we're being a little bit more general in saying we expect more than half to be expensed, but we'll have to wait for a few things to play out, but it was 65% in the first half.

Okay. That's fine. And then as you know now with the AML program and you're talking about investment spend of around $230 million for this year or broadly a bit under that. Is that what you expect going forward, including the AML spend as well?

I'd love to sit here and be able to confidently say we'll be reducing that into FY '27. That's something we'll know further have a better feel for later this half. We highlighted that we're in advanced negotiations in relation to a new partnership in the technology space. That's going to be an important factor in our ability to continue to drive efficiency in our ongoing development. So I'm hopeful, but I'm not going to be able to sit here today and give you guidance on that one.

All right. And just one final one, just another clarification. You've talked today about getting back to system on the mortgage side. You got a benefit during the half on the asset mix side. Do you think that reverses or it just becomes more of a neutral going forward? How should we think about the margin on the asset mix side, please?

Yes. I think asset mix will probably be more neutral in the second half, I'd expect. The benefit -- there was some benefit from the runoff in the lending book versus growth in average interest-earning assets on the business and agri side of things. If those 2 are running more in line, then the mix shouldn't see a significant movement one way or the other. Clearly, there are some tailwinds, though from a margin perspective coming into the second half. As I mentioned, the replicating portfolio should have a slightly positive impact and the rate leverage with higher rates. So -- and not that I want to make a big deal of it, but our exit NIM at the end of the year was slightly higher than the average. So again, it gives us some positivity around margin in the second half as we move into what we expect to be a slightly higher growth. Well, certainly a higher growth on the resi lending side of things.

Thanks, Ed. Our next question is from Carlos Cacho from Macquarie.

I was just curious on the capital side and your decision to do the effectively small $120 million raising. When you announced the RACQ acquisition, it was fully funded by cash reserves. With a 31 basis point raising, it's now largely funded by new capital. I guess curious that you can talk us through what changed since December. I mean, obviously, the APRA overlay is added, but the potential for that was probably known at the time. Is there something else that you're concerned about? What shifted there?

Yes. Look, thanks, Carlos. When we announced the AML/CTF issue in concert with the RACQ piece, we weren't aware of the $50 million overlay from the regulator. Now in hindsight, should we have expected that? I don't know, but we weren't aware of it. So that is one element that has changed. I think also, as we are looking forward with some growth levers available to us, I think the Board has decided, let's make sure we're in a strong capital position, knowing that we've got that RACQ drag of pretty much the same amount that we're underwriting here so that we know that we have plenty of capital available for whatever comes up in future periods. So it really is making sure that we maintain our very strong capital position, both pre and post the RACQ acquisition completing.

Great. And then just on the deposit side of things, you have spoken to the strong growth you've seen in lower-cost deposits. But we've seen incredibly strong system growth over the last 3 to 6 months. And so your growth, if we compare it to that, has probably been a bit on the softer side. I understand you're shrinking in TDs, but still it's been half system overall in the housing book. How much capacity do you think you have to get back towards system growth in deposits? Because it would seem that without that, the risk is that the mortgage book growth you're hoping to achieve potentially becomes a negative for returns and margins.

Yes. Look, I think we will continue to hopefully see strong growth through these digital channels I've spoken about. We only went live with the digital onboarding, I think it was in October. In fact, I do recall, it was October 2 was a birthday present to me. So that's only been in place for a quarter, and the volumes are increasing through that channel. Having said that, we do know that we will need to see some growth in term deposits. And I guess our flagship deposit product of EasySaver continues to grow above system. And that continues to be a really attractive product for our customer base. And so we'd hope to see that continue. But look, your question is a fair one. As we start to grow the lending side of things, we need to make sure that we maintain our deposit-led approach to lending and not let that lending get to a position where the funding of that is going to have a material negative impact on margin.

Thanks, Carlos. Our next question is from Brendan Sproules from Goldman Sachs.

Richard, congratulations on doing the whole presentation by yourself, the process of answering questions. Look, I've got a question on Slide 40 around the composition of your business lending mix. I mean, 18 months ago, Bendigo came to the market with a new strategy around business lending. But what we've seen since then is growth really in equipment finance, and we haven't really seen the growth in those 4 target areas of micro SME, property and agri that you outlined. In terms of the equipment finance, you have had one of your competitors say that they're exiting that market, citing very low returns on equity. Can you maybe talk about the returns on equity in that part of the business? And then secondly, around when we should start seeing some growth in those 4 target areas that you outlined 18 months ago?

Yes. So look, equipment finance is an interesting one. We actually see really strong returns there, but we are not generally offering -- our book is not dominated by distribution through third parties. And so we often see it as actually a great first product for a relationship with a business customer that allows us to then build out from there. So it's a really important part of our offering. And certainly, the direct returns for equipment finance have been strong. On the -- and that actually goes not just for business, but agri as well. On the agri side, we've actually seen growth customer numbers through the agri business. And prior to the seasonal runoff that we saw with the paybacks in November, December, the book was actually in a really strong position.

And if you look where it is versus a year ago, it's slightly higher than where it was at December '24. I would be really hopeful that we'll continue to see good growth there as we continue to build out the mix of agri subindustries that we're seeing growth come from and being a little bit less reliant on the cropping and livestock side of things. So I'm really positive on the agri business. As I said earlier, it is damn competitive though. But one thing I do know about agri is it is a really important relationship business. People remember you if you stick by your customers through the good times and bad. And unfortunately, there have been some challenging times in South Australia and Western Victoria and then throw on some floods in Queensland, we have got a good reputation amongst that customer base. So hopefully, we can continue to grow that.

SME is one that is -- this is one where I think it's going to be really important for us to build that digital deposit capability. A lot of SMEs we're seeing now in the market are looking to use digital channels in how they look to interact with their bank. Less and less of them are cash reliant. And so that's where we see a real importance to build that digital capability to allow us to grow, again, what is often the first product for an SME customer being a deposit product and then potentially moving into the lending side of it. So look, there's a number of factors there. We are seeing some growth on the business lending side. As I said, I'm pretty comfortable that the agri side is in a good place. We need to enhance our digital offering. We did consumer first, now focused on business and agri. And I think that will hopefully then in the next 12 months, we'll see continued growth in business and agri. And certainly, the team -- I caught up with them not just a few weeks ago. They're pretty excited about the half year ahead.

Thanks, Brendan. Our next question comes from Brian Johnson from MST.

Thanks, Richard, and well done on a great result. Richard, a few questions. The first one is if we have a look at the slide on the AML program, I think I asked this question last time, but I'm just wondering, can you explain to us exactly what happened in very simple language? And the other one is, could you talk about us -- talk to us about the prospect of a fine? And then I have a few other questions.

Okay. In very simple terms, Brian, we identified some suspected money laundering occurring through one of our branches. And we identified that early last calendar year. We reported that to the appropriate authorities, both the regulatory authorities and law enforcement. We worked with those authorities over a period of time until action was taken. I've got to be careful how much I'd speak to here because these legal matters are not an area of great expertise for me. But once that action had been taken, we then pretty much immediately assigned a third-party, Deloitte, to come in and review the root cause of the issue that we had identified. They undertook a review of several months to look at the underlying -- or the issues that we'd identify and the underlying root cause. They identified deficiencies in our AML/CTF risk management, the way we were doing that, that had allowed this to occur. And -- that's as soon as we got that report and the report was finalized, we self-identified that and self-reported that to the market.

On the back of that, and as you can imagine, through that whole process, we were in regular contact with the regulators to keep them informed of the process we're undertaking to make sure that was an appropriate process. On the back of that, just before Christmas, the Prudential regulator imposed the $50 million capital overlay and asked us to undertake a broader nonfinancial risk management review, which is underway. And AUSTRAC initiated an enforcement investigation. So if you like, there are 3 streams of work going on at the moment. The AML remediation, the $70 million to $90 million that we've kicked off, there is the nonfinancial risk management review that we're undertaking for the Prudential regulator. And we are working with AUSTRAC to provide them with all the information they need to complete their enforcement investigation. What comes out of that enforcement investigation, I really don't know, and I don't even know the time frame.

So Richard, that this was facilitated by Bendigo staff.

This was not -- look, I'm not -- actually, I'm not going to go there, Brian. There was clearly a breach of AML/CTF activity going on, and it went through one of our branches. And that's, I think, all I can say. If and when law enforcement activities are completed, then I'll be happy to make public anything that is made public through that. But I just -- I've really got to be careful what I do and don't say.

Now Richard, the other one is just on the net interest margin slide. Very cautionary outlook. But then if you have a look at the considerations, we're talking about cash rates rising, but you're talking about some margin pressure. You're talking about returning to growth perhaps in the fourth quarter. You're telling us that the exit rate is actually higher than the December rate, which was higher than basically the September quarter. That kind of sounds to me as though you're telling me in the next quarter, the NIM is up and then it falls quite dramatically in the quarter thereafter. And then when we have a look out in the year after, are we talking about this 3 basis point decline on the asset side that we see coming through each quarter going into '27?

Yes. Look, you're right, there are some tailwinds, but it is really hard to be that precise to -- I mean, if I could precisely forecast our NIM in the fourth quarter to the basis point, I'd probably be in a different job or retired. But look, the -- yes, there are some tailwinds for this quarter, absolutely. The challenge we're leaning into is to not see significant margin degradation as we return to growth. Now you can all form your own judgments as to our ability to deliver on that. I hope in 6 months, I'll be sitting here hopefully alongside Andrew, so I only have to do half the presentation and talking about maintaining our NIM in parallel of seeing some stronger growth come through.

Richard, the final one for me, just the slide on capital and dividends. If we have a look at the pro forma capital ratio, 11.19%, but then we've got to take out RACQ out of that. And so we've got the operational risk overlay. We've got the dividend comes out, and then we've also got basically RACQ comes in. What is interesting is that you guys keep on talking to a greater than 10% core equity Tier 1, whereas your direct peer, Bank of Queensland actually talks to greater than 10.25%. I see where that figures in the ROE. Can we just get a feeling a little bit more precision on that greater than 10%? Does it actually mean greater than 10.25% like your peer? Or if it is, in fact, just greater than 10%, why is your capital requirement lower than your immediate peer?

That last question is one I'm not -- I can't answer. But our Board limit is 10%, and our Board requires us to keep our common equity Tier 1 ratio above 10%. Now clearly, any time you pay a dividend, then that has a negative impact. So we need to run a significant buffer above that 10% running into dividend period assuming we're not going to be underwriting a DRP every time. But 10% is our Board limit, and we're required to keep it above that from a risk appetite perspective. I can't comment on our Northern neighbors.

So Richard, just on the 11.19%, when you think about all the bits and pieces, can we be relatively confident this has got any APRA or any AUSTRAC fine that may be incorporated that you could fund it basically without resorting to another capital raise?

As I said to your earlier question, I have no idea what potential penalty, if any, will apply. And we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. We -- post RACQ and dividend, I think our adjusted common equity Tier 1 ends up around 10.70% or something ex-div. That clearly provides about $270 million of capital buffer above that 10% limit. I'd love to think that's all going to be available to drive value-creating growth. But we'll continue to make sure that we're in a conservative capital position, and we think that's the right way to run this bank balance sheet first.

Fantastic. And congratulations again, Richard, great operational performance during the period.

Thanks for that, Brian. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Brian. Our next call is from Christian Mazza from Jarden.

Two questions, if I may. Firstly, as discussed, we've seen FTEs fall over the recent halves as a result of your productivity initiatives. What -- where exactly are these employee reductions coming from? And if we include contractors, are FTEs still down?

Yes. Thanks, Christian. The FTEs have come -- let me -- I guess I'll talk through a number of factors over the half. Early in the half, we did a number of reviews of our support functions. And so across a number of support functions, there were headcount reductions, employee reductions. Then in the -- following that work and following the relatively recent appointment of a new Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer, there were significant reviews undertaken into our technology organization that has seen reductions in both employee numbers and very significant reduction in contractor numbers during the second quarter of the half. That's been probably the biggest impact in the half. Contractors have not been replacing employees that have been reduced. In fact, the contractor reduction has been more significant than the employee reductions. Those contractors have generally been contractors that have been employed on the investment spend.

And again, as I spoke about earlier, one of the real positives we've been seeing lately as we've changed our technology development operating model is greater efficiency in that space, and that has allowed us to reduce the resources needed to be applied in our investment slate. Where we've gone first is to reduce the contractors in that space because they are generally more expensive than our employees. And to be frank, I'd rather retain our employees who have made a commitment to our organization if we can.

Yes. Perfect. That makes sense. And then secondly, reflecting on your Google partnership, it's clear that recent norm has been to migrate data systems to the cloud. However, if AI reaches its potential, is there a risk we have to U-turn and bring back core elements of data infrastructure back to on-premise just to protect that data?

Yes. Look, again, I'm probably edging into an area outside of my limited areas of strength, but on this one. But everything that we know is at this point in time is that the level of security that is available through leading cloud providers such as Google and the way those cloud services are established, managed and protected certainly doesn't nothing in our forward view sees us needing to bring significant workloads back on-premise to on-premise data centers. And so that's not currently in our plans. Again, I haven't done a lot of broader research in this space. So again, probably not an area of strength for me, Christian.

Thanks, Christian. We have our final question from Richard Wiles from Morgan Stanley.

Your answers to the questions from Carlos and Brian on capital raised some extra questions about how the Board is thinking about capital management. APRA has imposed an overlay on every bank that has had an AML issue in the past 10 years. So I don't know why you expected in October that, that wouldn't be the case when you announced the RACQ acquisition. Even if we put that aside, the pro forma is 11.2%. You yourself just said that after taking account of the acquisition and the DRP underwriting, it will be 10.7%. That's a buffer of $250 million, $270 million. It does raise the question as to whether that 10% target is appropriate. That seems like a very large buffer. It also raises the question as to whether you have confidence in your capital generation.

On Slide 24, we see that you've got a 16 basis point RWA benefit from the runoff in the loan portfolio. You also got benefits from deferred tax assets and then other factors such as the movement in reserves. Without that, you wouldn't have generated any capital, even taking into account the runoff of the loan portfolio. So do you have confidence that if you get the loans growing again, if the portfolio grows on the back of an improvement in mortgages, that your capital generation will be positive? And do you have confidence in that 10% capital target that the Board has currently outlined?

I'll go to the last bit first. I've got no indication that there is any intention to change that 10% target from the Board. Now we obviously have management targets also that provide an additional layer above that. So although that's the Board target, we then have a management target that builds in some buffer above that, that we operate towards. And the reality is that we feel that it is more appropriate right now to take a more conservative position with our management target as we're moving into a period of time where we expect to grow the balance sheet. Now there are other actions we are taking, and I talked about earlier in the presentation, the second phase of our productivity initiative to look to drive higher returns. And if we can, therefore, keep a relatively stable margin as we grow through those partnerships, generate greater productivity.

So more of the revenue we write falls to the bottom line, then over time, we'll hopefully move to a position where we're generating more capital organically. That's not going to happen overnight, I get it. But in an environment like this with a lot of moving parts, I certainly was very comfortable and as a Board member, supportive of moving to a more conservative capital position.

So Richard, can you tell us what that management buffer is? There's a Board target, then there's a management buffer. In practice, that means that the management target is your capital constraint. Can you tell us what that buffer is?

Look, we don't disclose that.

Is it 50 basis points?

As I said, we don't disclose that, Richard. That is a dynamic target. So it does change from time to time, but it's not something we'll be disclosing publicly.

Richard, that was our final question. I might hand back to Richard Fennell to do some closing comments.

Thanks, Sam, and looking forward to a couple of minutes of not talking in a moment. But in wrapping up, hopefully, over the half, you've seen that we've demonstrated our strong execution capabilities as we've really delivered some significant progress on our refreshed strategy. Our customer numbers are growing, supported by the customer advocacy scores across both our key brands and also improved digital capabilities. We've increased the share of low-cost deposits. We're regaining momentum in our lending businesses and our productivity program is going to drive sustainable long-term benefits. So I want to thank all of our people who work so hard to deliver great outcomes for our customers and value for our shareholders. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning, and look forward to talking to many of you over the next day or so.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for joining us and welcome, everyone, who's on the conference call, and thanks so much for those who came in person. We really appreciate it. Let me begin today by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands in which we meet here in Sydney, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present and pay my respects and extend my respects to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today and on the call.

So today, we have Richard Fennell, our CEO, who will provide an overview of our strategy thus far and our momentum that we're building. We also have Andrew Morgan. He will look at our business momentum with our normal 3 focus areas of optimized deposits, sustainable growth, productivity, both in the long term and the short term.

Richard will include in his section an update on the announced RACQ transaction. We'll then head into Q&A, where Richard will also give a quick overview of our AML announcement last Tuesday.

In the Q&A section, we have members of our executive who are here to help with Andrew and Richard and answer questions. Just a few logistics. Our bathrooms are outside to the right. If there is a fire alarm, please follow the instructions from the concierge. I'll hand over to Richard.

Thanks, Sam, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to those joining on the conference call as well. I'd like to begin by addressing the announcement we made last Tuesday. I recognize that as an organization that works hard to deliver on its purpose, we've fallen short of the standards we set for ourselves and that our stakeholders expect.

The Board and senior management are fully committed to prioritizing a comprehensive uplift of the program of work required to rectify the AML issues that we announced last week. I'm going to give an overview of where we're at just before the Q&A session. But what has become even more clear through this information over the last week or so is that our key enablers are critical components of our strategy.

We had already started an AML uplift program, but we'll need to do more in order to future-proof our risk management. But at the same time, we will continue to pursue the initiatives necessary to deliver on our strategy. So this will require a parallel focus. Our recent progress is the direct result of being patient and deliberate in the foundational work that we've completed over the past 6 years.

So what I'd like to do now is highlight some of the progress we've made, in particular, since our full year result announcement. By this time next week, we will have completed our core consolidation program of work, going from 8 core banking systems 6 years ago down to 1 as we finalize the transition from the Adelaide Bank core banking system to our Bendigo Bank platform over this weekend coming.

In undertaking these system rationalization programs, we've developed repeatable customer migration capability. We've also deployed our new Bendigo in-app digital onboarding capability for customers, who can then use this to join in a far more efficient way and also able to be used by our frontline staff as a fast and safe method for customers to be onboarded to our bank.

Our market-leading Bendigo lending platform is now in use at our over 400 branches right across the country in addition to being used by our broker partners and our white label partners. And our recently announced 5-year partnership with Google is going to ensure that our people and customers have access to the benefits of the latest AI capabilities digital skills and importantly, cybersecurity defenses.

And in September, our digital bank, Up, launched a new deposit product structure called GrowFlow and this has resulted in significantly stronger inflows of deposits to Up. And last but certainly not least, our balance sheet remains in a very strong position. Our capital position is well above our Board minimum.

And as at 30 September, we have $360 million in excess capital ex-dividend. Our customer deposit funding ratio is 77%, and our loan loss rates remain at historically low levels. So these strengths will continue to allow us to take advantage of strategic opportunities as they arise, build our growth momentum as we, in parallel, address our required AML uplift program.

I'll now take you through some specific details relating to the key sources of our strategic momentum, including Up, why customers are continuing to choose Bendigo Bank and how the Up and Bendigo teams have worked together to build new capabilities for the Bendigo offering. So let me start first with our long-term strategic investment in digital innovation, Up.

I'm delighted today to confirm that our approach to support Up's independent development and operation is continuing to deliver strong results. And specifically on the back of the Grow Flow initiative, Up achieved its first month of profitability in October, more than 6 months earlier than we had expected.

Now over the next few months, Up may move in and out of profitability. But as we continue to see its balance sheet grow strongly, the trajectory is firmly towards consistent positive contribution. Over the past 7 years, we have built Australia's leading digital bank. It now serves well over 1.2 million customers, holds 6.5% market share in the 18- to 24-year-old demographic and continues to deliver strong year-on-year deposit and lending growth.

Just in the last couple of days, it ticked over $2 billion in residential loans on its book. So the trajectory for this business is strong and innovation with agile execution remains at the core of how Up goes about its business. Currently, the team are investigating broadening the lending products to include an investor residential loan product to capture a broader range of borrowers in the digital market.

Up reaching profitability is an important milestone, and it is tangible proof of our ability to make life easier for our customers with digital capabilities. I now want to talk about the power of the Bendigo brand and its role in supporting our strategy, which has been a frequent point of discussion, since our full year results announcement and how those insights have influenced our work on the Bendigo app.

Research shows that when choosing a bank, approximately 70% of customers are driven by rational factors, customer experience like ease of use and channel choice. The remaining 30% of customers are driven more by emotional factors, reliability, authenticity, trust, fairness.

At Bendigo, we score significantly higher on those emotional drivers in comparison to the major banks and also the mid-tier banks, and that's our core strength. This demonstrates that we forge a connection with our customers in a way that others often struggle to achieve. But we are also focused on improving our performance on those rational drivers through improved customer experience.

Fast digital sign-up, improved digital account management and speed of our lending platform are all tangible examples of the improvements we're making. So when we are asked why do customers bank with us, we know that the customers choose and stay with Bendigo Bank because they have a strong emotional connection with our brand. But our strength isn't just confined to emotional drivers. It's also reflected across other crucial performance metrics like our rep track scores, our overall brand consideration, our status as a trusted brand and our NPS versus market.

And we know that it's important that we can correlate that high NPS to deposit gathering strength. And Andrew is going to talk a little bit more about that later. If we take our strong customer connections, NPS and focus on growing lower-cost deposits, we know the Bendigo app plays a vital role in helping us to achieve that. And the app had fallen behind on a number of capabilities, which support those rational drivers.

So we use that research to directly inform the app's features and our focus with a clear goal of closing that gap when it comes to customer experience. In addition, we knew with our old online account opening capability, 3 out of 4 customers were dropping out before they'd get through that process. And we've also seen through our experience with the EasySaver product that when we've given our existing customers access to easy-to-use digital capabilities, they will take them up.

So Xavier Shay, our Chief Digital Officer; and our new Chief Technology Officer, Kieran O'Meara, they brought their teams together to focus on this challenge. And in doing so, they've been able to rebuild the in-app onboarding capability for Bendigo Bank in just 3 months. And this is a clear demonstration of how our investment in Ferocia, the team behind Up, is now bringing their execution capability and agility into the Bendigo business. And early results are really encouraging.

Since the launch of the refreshed app at the start of last month, we've attracted over 1,500 new-to-bank customers, most joining outside normal business hours. And the app is now scoring a rating of 4.8 in the App Store. The early indicators are positive that this channel will be a key driver for growing lower-cost deposits once we ramp up marketing and promotion activity.

Turning now to our announcement today of the RACQ Bank acquisition. This transaction represents a compelling opportunity for us to enhance shareholder value. The transaction will result in Ben acquiring approximately $2.7 billion in primarily residential mortgages and $2.5 billion in retail deposits as measured at June 2025.

And based on these June figures, we estimate that this book of business will generate approximately $50 million to $55 million in net interest income. We're going to commence integration activities early in the new calendar year, and we estimate post-tax integration costs of $25 million to $30 million.

We're targeting completion to be in the first half of financial year 2027 and will be funded by existing capital reserves. The acquisition is highly aligned with our strategic objectives. RACQ Bank, like Bendigo Bank, boasts a strong and loyal customer base and a low-risk lending book. It's going to increase our proportion of lower-cost deposits at a group level by around 20 basis points.

And we'll leverage Bendigo's existing infrastructure and capabilities on an ongoing basis. We'll migrate customers directly onto our core banking platform, allowing us to support these customers simply and efficiently, and those customers will be able to use our 75 Queensland branches and the ongoing run costs are going to be modest.

The acquisition also provides geographic diversity, expanding our presence in Queensland to around 18% of our consumer lending book. And the mortgage portfolio is sound with a low loan-to-value ratio of 58% and owner-occupied loans representing 79% of the book. Credit quality is excellent with minimal historic arrears.

Importantly, the financial benefits are going to be significant. Based again on those 30 June 2025 pro forma financials, we're estimating a 35 to 40 basis point uplift in ROE and about $0.04 to $0.05 of increased earnings per share. This path will support our -- sorry, this acquisition will support our path to enhance shareholder returns through both improved profitability and strategically aligned growth.

And today, as we announced this acquisition, we are a much simpler bank, 2 customer-facing brands, leading digital capability and one core system. As this slide illustrates, our ability to migrate the 90,000 customers onto one core system and the Bendigo brand will translate into shareholder value creation.

I'll now hand over to Andrew to talk through the momentum in the business.

Thanks very much, Richard, and good morning, everyone, and great to see so many people in the room joining us today. Today, I'm going to cover a few things. So first, I'll talk about business momentum and provide a little bit more color following our first quarter trading update, which was released on the 11th of November. And I'll talk about momentum with reference to our 3 near-term focus areas.

Then I'll talk about productivity and how we continue to think about managing our business as usual costs in line with our guidance of no higher than inflation through the cycle. So starting with our deposit franchise and picking up a thread from where Richard was going. You've heard us talk now about the power of rational and emotional drivers in customers' choice of banking. And you've seen that on emotional drivers, we score very strongly relative to the major banks and Tier 2 banks. And through the work that we're doing in digital, we're aiming to close the gap in rational drivers.

We believe that our customer-focused model drives that emotional connection and in turn, drives high customer satisfaction and strong Net Promoter Scores in both our Bendigo and Up brands. In our view, this advantage that we have is very difficult for others to replicate.

So how does that translate to value? Very simply, there is a strong correlation between Net Promoter Score and the ratio of deposits to loans. We would argue that it's part of the reason why we can gather lower cost deposits at the pace and the price point that we do. Continuing on the theme of deposits and now into business momentum.

As you know, building our muscle in digital deposit gathering is key to strengthening our already strong deposit franchise, where today, almost 2/3 of our deposits come from our physical network. As Richard mentioned earlier, about a month ago, we rolled out our refreshed Bendigo app, which now allows customers to join the bank digitally in as little as 5 minutes.

Early signs are positive with more than 50 new transaction accounts being opened every day. We're also seeing 1 in 4 customers take a savings account. And some of these new-to-bank customers have also taken out other products, including mortgages. Our growth in savings accounts continues to be strong, underpinned by a combination of Easy Saver through the Bendigo brand and Up savings accounts.

Year-to-date, Easy Saver is growing at over 13% annualized, whilst growth in Up Savings is very strong, up 35% year-on-year. With slower lending growth this year, we've been actively managing deposit and funding mix, and this has seen the mix of lower cost to total deposits improve.

Moving on to sustainable growth. You've previously heard us talk about the work we've done in the last few years to understand the marginal profitability of our various lending channels and using that as a basis to allocate our capital. For residential lending, in particular, what we do is look for growth opportunities, which also deliver the best combination of margin and return on equity.

That means that when our net interest margin and return on equity expectations are not being met, we will reallocate capital using price as our predominant lever. Through the course of this half, we've stayed patient in residential lending markets, being very selective about pricing decisions and trusting that we would see flow into our physical channels once the new lending platform came online. That patience is now being rewarded. For the month of November, applications per day, which are our key lead indicator are the highest that they've been all year and critically important, still within our funding appetite. We expect the book to start growing again in the second half and to be back at or near system annualized during the fourth quarter. This patient approach also means that our margin has been stable through the course of this year.

Moving to productivity and cost management. As you'll recall, we announced around 100 redundancies at our full year results. As of November, most but not all of those roles had come out of our FTE numbers and our cost base. In addition to that, we've completed further restructuring and other teams. And as of the end of November, our FTE are down 3.6% year-to-date, which is the lowest level that they've been, since January 2022.

What that means is that you will see lower headcount transmit into our cost base, partly in the second quarter and fully in the third quarter. We've seen that play out in our October numbers and our November numbers, which are tracking lower than first quarter average daily costs. We think that puts us on track for a second quarter expense result that is lower than first quarter.

In addition, we've been actively reducing contractor numbers down over 30% since the start of the year. This mostly benefits our investment spend and gives us confidence on our full year investment spend guidance. Moving on to productivity longer term. We've previously said that our longer-term business as usual expense guidance is to grow our costs no higher than inflation through the cycle. That guidance remains.

What I want to do now is give you a little bit more color on how we think about this long-term cost path. We know today that of our 9 cost pools in our organization, 2 of those will grow faster than inflation, and that is software license and cloud costs and also amortization. Neither of those 2 will be a surprise to you. 3 of our cost pools, we expect to grow around inflation, and that includes, for example, our customer-facing teams.

That leaves 4 cost pools where we're actively working to manage the growth in those cost pools to a rate below inflation. Overall, we believe that the benefit will allow us to maintain business as usual cost growth to no higher than inflation through the cycle. So how will we get after those 4 cost pools that I've just described? There are 4 key actions. The first is operational excellence. We established a program in 2022 and now have over 30 practitioners in our central team.

That team has been very focused on our operations and contact center teams and has yielded around a 35% reduction in that resource base over the last 3 years. We've also trained around 100 senior leaders in process excellence disciplines. The second is capability building through strategic partnerships. We've previously spoken about our current 60-plus partners that we use today in technology.

These partners perform both run and change activity for us. We're actively working through streamlining the number of partners which we use in future, and that number will likely be in the low single digits. We believe that this gives us both access to enhanced capabilities and a much more efficient cost signature in both technology run and change costs. We're also exploring partnerships around some of our other business processes.

Again, we see a lot of opportunity to access both new and improved capabilities and cost efficiency in running those processes. And we'll have more to say on this through the course of the next half. The third bucket is AI and automation. And as we said earlier, we recently signed a 5-year deal with Google that will provide enhanced capability around cloud and access to enterprise-wide AI tools.

We currently use AI in a number of areas of the bank, and we'll now look to accelerate use cases in other parts of our business. The fourth is refining external spend, including the cost of our corporate property footprint. Our work in this area in the last few years has been substantial and will continue.

As one example, in the last 3 years, we've reduced our corporate property footprint and rent expense by 30%, and we can see a path to a further 15% rent reduction in the next 3 years. On all of these items, we'll have more to say through the course of the next half as our plans continue to harden up. I'll now hand back to Richard.

Thanks, Andrew. I'd like now just to turn briefly to the announcement that we made last Tuesday and to provide a bit of context on that where I can. We identified suspicious activity in one of our branches and self-reported that to AUSTRAC and law enforcement authorities. We then commissioned Deloitte to undertake an independent review of the root cause of those issues.

That review, and we received the final report early last week, highlighted deficiencies in our approach to anti-money laundering processes and controls, and we've accepted those findings in full. We've now reengaged Deloitte to help scope the activities to help us to address the identified deficiencies. This work will then be aligned with the existing AML uplift program that was noted in our annual report.

The Board and executive of the bank are fully committed to funding this necessary program. And while the specific costs and time lines are not yet finalized, I can assure you this work is critically important to us. But I also understand this results in a level of uncertainty. I can assure you that we are moving with urgency and rigor to develop a comprehensive remediation program.

We're committed to achieving full compliance, and we'll update the market as soon as we have a finalized and actionable plan, including cost estimates. But at the same time, we must also continue to deliver on our 2030 strategy. Execution of our strategic initiatives will continue, and we'll make appropriate trade-offs to ensure we can balance both our AML uplift program and our strategic priorities within our funding plans.

So we'll now open it up for Q&A, and we'll be joined by Sarah, Kieran, Adam and Xavier as well to answer your questions. Sam, I'll hand over to you.

Thank you, Andrew. I look at the 2 in the front. All right. Jon Mott. Nathan is going to bring the microphone down.

Jon Mott from Barrenjoey. Just a question, a small acquisition, but a bolt-on acquisition today. Can you give us a bit more information? How much did you pay for it would be kind of useful. I hadn't seen those numbers. Was it above book value? Is there goodwill?

And also just -- I'll be brutally honest, a lot of the small banks and nonbanks around Australia are really struggling financially. And you heard in Matt [ comment ] talk that there's only 2 banks in Australia covering the cost of capital. With the technology, cyber, AML, risk, compliance costs, they're under a lot of financial stress.

Are there additional businesses that you'll be looking to acquire, either they're coming to you or you're going to them as additional bolt-on acquisitions that can grow the bank and provide scale over the coming years?

Yes. Jon, this is -- this acquisition is at book value. So there's no premium. And that was an important part of the consideration about whether to undertake this transaction. We've -- as you know, we've had a lot of experience with goodwill on our balance sheet. We're happy not to have any more. And -- but as well as the compelling financials of this transaction, we think strategically, it's a good fit for us as well. We're delighted to have some stronger presence in Queensland, one of the fastest-growing markets in the country and provides a good balance to the natural strength we've got in the Southern states.

As far as -- and look, I saw Matt's comments as well, and it is a challenging industry. We're not out there actively knocking on doors looking for more acquisitions. The reality is this was a conversation that started from the RACQ side of things. And if other opportunities come up, where we think there is a good fit strategically and economically, it's a really good outcome for our shareholders, then we'll consider it.

But it's not something we're looking to race around mopping up a lot of these smaller banks. We'll assess them if and when they may come and have a chat to us. But it's not a -- I mean, as we were talking about, I think, last time, our focus is primarily on organic growth.

And what customer losses you are receiving?

We've made -- look, we're not going to announce the actual assumptions we've made, but we've made some attrition assumptions in there. But importantly, there is an ongoing referral agreement in place, Jon. We're bringing across -- or we'll be making offers to their lending staff to bring them across as well.

So we're hoping we'll be able to keep those attrition levels to natural levels of attrition. And hopefully, with that ongoing referral agreement, which covers both lending and deposits with -- I think it's 1.7 million members, I think, RACQ has in Queensland, we would hope we'll be able to continue to attract a proportion of those to our bank.

Move to Andy.

Thank you. Andrew Lyons from Jefferies. Andrew, you speak to sub-inflation BAU expense growth over the cycle. Do you realistically think that you can do that in FY '26? You've done 7% expense growth in the first quarter on PCP. Now you have said today that you think you'll get second quarter costs down on the first quarter.

But it would appear to get to 3% full year expense growth, you're going to have to reduce cost by 6% to 7% for the remainder of the year versus that first quarter. Like is that realistic to sort of continue to maintain that sub-inflation cost growth in FY '26?

Just to clarify one thing, Andrew, no higher than inflation, not sub-inflation. So the trajectory is very strong, and our FTE is down 3.6% year-to-date. We've got other pieces of work in place at the moment. At this stage, we're still targeting to be around inflation, maybe a little bit higher than inflation. I note as well that inflation is continuing to tick up.

There are fewer days. Surely, you expected that. But look, people costs are 60% of our costs. And as I said earlier, our FTEs are as low as they've been in -- since January 2022. And with new leaders, some of whom are sitting to my right here, the work that's being done to restructure to bring capability into the organization to get cost out is as strong as I've seen.

So the indicators there are good. Now there are always going to be exogenous factors that might impact. But as we sit here today, the largest driver of our cost base, which is people costs, and that 60% of our cost is down -- is pretty well down year-to-date. And certainly, in the first couple of months of the second quarter, the trajectory is good.

So we'll go to Richard Wiles.

Richard Wiles, Morgan Stanley. Your capital level at the result was about 11%. Dividend takes off 40 bps. This acquisition takes off another 35%. So we're down to 10.25% and the target is above 10%. You're hoping to improve your loan growth, and I assume you're hoping to hold your dividend. So what makes you think you've got enough capital to do this acquisition, improve growth and keep the dividend where it is?

Yes. So our CET1 was 10.93% in September. That was [ active ], and it's climbed back up to about 11%. So if you do the math on the Board versus the Board target, we're sitting on around about $400 million of capital before we move into this transaction.

There's 2 parts to the capital impact of the transaction. 1 is transition costs that we'll incur between now and when the transaction completes, and then we'll step into the risk-weighted assets. That's first half '27 likely impact. Because of the very low marginal costs associated with the transaction, it generates organic capital immediately. So it's -- if you kind of back solve the costs that we've assumed, it's about a 25% cost-to-income ratio. So it's a very low cost to actually run the book. So as we sit here today, Richard, yes, we're comfortable with our capital levels.

And if you've taken into account the potential cost of the uplift program and the potential for your regulators to impose some sort of capital overlay?

Yes. I mean we don't know a bunch of things today, as you would expect. But as you would also expect, we regularly run capital testing and the like. And so as we sit here today, we're comfortable.

And can I ask separately, you've made some comments about your expectations for volume growth in the second half. And Andrew, as you've said before, you're very focused on margin management. Do you think you can grow revenue in 2026?

We'd like to. So the key, as we previously said, is it's a deposit-led approach to lending, and those deposits should be largely through lower cost deposits. Because of slow lending growth this year, we've been able to, for example, manage down more expensive forms of funding like wholesale funding, like term deposits.

Some of that might need to lift a little bit as we start to see growth pick up, in particular in the fourth quarter. But as we sit here today, our margin is in pretty good shape, and we'd like to see that balance growth translates into income growth.

Thanks Richard. We now move to Matt Dunger.

Matt Dunger from Bank of America. I wondered if I could ask about the anti-money laundering issues. I know it's too early for you to quantify today, but I'm sure you've looked at Bank of Queensland, who took a $60 million provision back in 2023.

Just wondering if you could talk to what sort of allowance you had already made for anti-money laundering and how you would compare Bank of Queensland's uplift program to yours, your own?

Yes. Thanks, Matt. So look, we'd already set aside a number nowhere near $60 million for the uplift program we're planning to undertake. It's a lot less than that. I must admit, I'm not across the scope of exactly the BOQ program of work.

And the reality is we don't know yet that the piece of work that we've asked Deloitte to do will help to inform that. And any number I try and pick out of the air now, I know it is going to be wrong. So the reality is I can't give you guidance on that. And -- but once we do have a reasonable guide for that, we will share it with the market. We're not going to try and be perfectly precise on that. But as soon as we know a number based on a reasonable set of assumptions and analysis, then we'll share it.

And should we be thinking about sub-inflation cost growth as being excluding a provision for this program of work?

The reality is we don't know. I'd love to be able to sit here and say this program will work, we'll be able to manage within our future view of our slate and BAU costs. But I just don't know. Again, as soon as we do know, we'll share it with the market.

Thanks, Matt. Tom Strong.

Tom Strong from Citi. Just wanted to go back to Richard's question around revenue growth. I mean coming back to system in the mortgage book really is contingent on these lower-cost deposits coming through. So can you just provide some color around the assumptions you've made to get to that 45% digital deposit target by the end of June '26? And where do you think you can get that to in time?

Yes, I might get Dave shortly to comment on Up in particular. But I'll just give you a couple of data points. So Easy Saver, as you know, and we've talked about Easy Saver for a couple of years now is one of our strongest growing products. It's a lower-cost product. It's a very simple product that our customers love. So that's growing at 13% annualized.

We've only just, in the last month, put the new join the bank capability in app and it's very early days, but we see that there's opportunity there. And Sarah might also -- I'm throwing to a few of my colleagues here. Sarah might also want to comment on some of the targeted marketing that we can do to then support the launch of that app. And this is my segue to [ Xavier ].

Up's growth continues to be very strong. And one of the things that Richard talked about earlier was the launch of Grow Flow. This is a different type of Saver product, which customers have responded very well to. And early days, very strong growth, and I can see a changed trajectory, since we launched that product. But [ Xavier ], do you want to talk about that?

Yes, 100%. And That, for me, was almost the missing piece for Up. We knew we weren't getting our share of customer deposits commensurate with the number of customers we had. We're now seeing that starting to come through. And so that's really positive. And I think also noting that our deposit growth in Up has been consistently outpacing our customer growth.

So even outside of growth flow, this was still true. And so -- and that's for a few different reasons, where our customers are aging and the average deposits goes up. We're starting to attract some slightly older customers that sort of shifts the balance up. And people are just getting more comfortable with Up as well. So that's working out really well.

On the 45% target, you mentioned that's I don't think -- so the assumptions that get us there are pretty much the things that we've just done. But there's no big other major things that I feel like we need to do in order to hit that. We just need to continue to push what we've done to get there. So I'm feeling pretty confident about that target at the moment.

Tom, one of the other things that's interesting with the new join the bank capability under Bendigo, as many of you are aware, we have -- on the Bendigo brand, we have a very strong demographic skew towards older Australians. The customer demographic that's coming through now is more clustered around the mid- to high 30s.

And so that's kind of exciting for us to see. Yes, it's early days, but through that capability, we're attracting a customer group that we weren't succeeding in attracting previously largely because we're asking them to come into a branch to open an account. And not many people in the 30s really feel that they want to come into a branch if they want to open a deposit account.

Thanks, Tom. We'll go to Andrew Triggs.

It's Andrew Triggs from JPMorgan. Perhaps one for Richard. Just on the AML issue, can you maybe take us into why it took the reporting of suspicious activity in one branch to do a proper third-party review of your AML preparedness? I mean this has been a topic for regulators and for the market since at least 2018. It strikes me that there wasn't -- this review hadn't already been completed by the group.

Yes. Look, that's a fair question. I think in hindsight, and hindsight is a wonderful thing that we arguably should have done this earlier. We weren't aware of the deficiencies that were identified. We've been working very closely with the regulator, AUSTRAC over many years. We've been continuing to uplift our AML capabilities over the years.

The reality was it took for the identification of a particular issue for us to go, hang on, let's go and do a root and branch independent root cause analysis here. We haven't seen to that point in time, evidence that there were deficiencies. And yes, look, a, that's probably all I can say on it. I'm not -- in hindsight, yes, it would have been nice to have identified these earlier before these issues arose, but the reality is we are where we are.

And for Andrew, just the 10% BAU cost growth in the first quarter, can you unpack that for us? I know some of it was redundancy remediation, but the bulk of it appeared not to be. And if 60% of your costs are fairly predictable being staff related. Could you sort of unpack that big number for us, please?

Yes. So there were some seasonal and some one-off factors, Andrew. So there was a higher days count than the second half average. There were some redundancy costs. There were some remediation costs. And we also do our pay review cycle in the first quarter. And that's -- as I think some of you reflected on in your notes when we published the trading update, this is the first time we've done a quarter 1 trading update.

So I think you're all getting used to our seasonal idiosyncrasies, and that is one of them. So the main drivers were those seasonal factors and hence, the reason why -- part of the reason why we're seeing now an appropriate drop in the second quarter. Some were the genuine one-offs, so things like redundancies and remediation.

I'll go to Brendan, please.

Just a question on your longer-term productivity. You did note that you got 60% of your cost is staff related. You've got a cost-to-income sort of over 60%. Now that you're on a single platform and you're developing a lot of these digital interactions with customers, particularly in deposits, what's the latent opportunity for staff reductions here? Like you've taken out 3.5% now. But in the longer term, what would be the ideal sort of target? And where would they be coming from?

Look, we think there are significant productivity opportunities across a range of areas within the organization. Now will they result in direct reduction in FTE like we've seen over the last 3 or 4 months? Maybe in some cases. But if we can get back on to a growth trajectory, some of those resources will be required to support growth.

I mean the acquisition we announced today, we've made some assumptions on some additional resources required to support those 90,000 customers. There will be changes, though, in our workforce over time. And that's the reality of all workforces at the moment as new capabilities, new technology and new demands occur.

I mean one area that I expect we're not going to be seeing reduction in headcount and probably going the other way is financial crime, not just based on the announcement of last week. So it's hard to give an absolute number. But one thing I will say is we're working really hard to drive productivity in the areas, where that's possible.

We're not going to be taking a foot off that pedal. There are other initiatives that are underway that have still got a way to go before completion. And once -- as Andrew, I think, mentioned in his update, in the second half, we'll be able to give you more insight into those. But we don't have a set number that we're targeting. We're looking to drive productivity as hard as we can right across the organization.

Just to build on, Richard, Brendan, FTEs is interesting. FTEs is important as a lead indicator. Ultimately, it comes to cost. And that's why we continue to talk about no higher than inflation, we think, is an appropriate target. And what I talked about in my slide, I can tell you one of those initiatives, particularly around partnering is a piece of work that we've done an extensive amount of work on already, and we'll be ready to talk about that in the second half.

And that really underpins that comfort we have around continuing to reiterate that guidance of no higher than inflation. And again, it's really about understanding that there are certain parts of our cost base that will grow above inflation, and you guys know that. So license cloud costs, every bank, a lot of companies across the market are seeing exactly the same thing. Amortization, you know as well because of our higher CapEx. So we've got to do work to stay in front of those costs and then manage the overall to no higher than inflation.

It might be useful to hear from Kieran to some of his observations, particularly around the technology range of platforms we use, et cetera, and how you think about that, Kieran, because to your point, as we simplify and get to one core banking system, that's providing opportunities.

Yes, it's a good point. So I think there's a few dimensions we're looking at. The work is underway. The first one is referenced in the slides before around the partners landscape. So in excess of 60 partners in the organization today. And it's true to say there's nothing particularly unique about any of them. So there's a scale opportunity there to rationalize and that started.

I think the second piece after that then is, to your point on one core is where do we take that one core next and what opportunity does that present? And the next immediate push for us will be into more decoupling of that so we can enable more of the front-end work that Xavier's team does that will accelerate the growth. But it will also accelerate the ability to rationalize the amount of technology we manage.

And so being relatively fresh to the organization, one of the first observations is there's a lot of discrete technology, and there is an opportunity to rationalize the number of things that we look after, which is the next big push. And my team have started on a point of view for that in the second half that we'd look to execute from FY '27 onwards. And that in itself is fairly significant in addition to looking at FTE numbers and so on.

I think third then is the -- for me is the mix of work and who does what work and where that happens and linked to the partnering strategy, we're exploring options there as well.

I got a second question on the AML. You talked about the process from here, getting Deloitte's to scope the changes that you need to make across the organization. How do the regulators get involved in this? Obviously, they would have concerns. Are they doing their own investigation? Or how does that integrate into what you're doing?

Yes. Look, we've kept the regulators fully informed on the process throughout. And from what I can see looking at the process that others have been through, and clearly, we're not the first to stumble into some issues in this area. We'd probably come out earlier. And we've done that out of an abundance of caution in making sure the market is as fully informed as we are around this issue.

So we're liaising, as you can imagine, very heavily with the regulators around this issue. They have access to that same report that led to the announcement last week. So they received that last week. I expect they'll be reviewing that before forming their opinion on how they want to work with us to make sure that we get our AML/CTF program to the necessary level of sophistication and maturity.

Thanks, Brendan. I'll work my way down to Ed, please, Nathan, and then BJ.

It's Ed Henning from CLSA. I just wanted to clarify something today, you've talked about committing to your 2030 targets, which is great. But -- and while I understand you don't know the cost of the AML and what's going on, can you just clarify for us, are you thinking about now just ring-fencing that and continuing to work with the growth initiatives to get to your 2030 targets?

Yes. I'd love to be able to ring-fence it perfectly and just say that's going to be over there. But the reality is this is -- we expect this is going to be a pretty significant program that is going to need a fair bit of focus. So the way one probably think about more is running in parallel rather than ring-fencing it. And I don't know whether these are the right analogies to be using.

But we will -- what is important, though, is we don't stop the business and say, right, let's all like moths to a flame, focus 100% of our attention over here. We need to absolutely commit the appropriate resources and attention to address the deficiencies that have been identified. But we need to make sure we continue as far as possible to drive the business forward towards that 2030 strategy.

Again, hopefully, by the time we're out with the half year results in February, we'll have greater clarity on exactly how that's going to play out. But I mean, there are going to be implications for our consumer bank, where the issue arose. There's going to be implications for our technology and digital areas, I expect.

There's clearly going to be implications for our risk management teams, both line 1 and line 2. So there are there's going to be a lot to work on here. But in the discussions we've been having internally, we want to make sure that those that need to be involved at this point of the process are giving the appropriate level of focus to this, but let's not swing the whole organization to be 100% focused on AML because we still got a business to run.

Okay. And then just the second question, just on the growth you've talked about today, getting back to growth in mortgages and still maintaining some margin management there. But also you mentioned price is part of it as well. Can you just talk about more in the medium term getting to that 2030, how you're thinking about growth? Do you think around system? Or do you think you need to grow above system to get to your targets?

Yes. Look, in the short term, probably the next 12 months or so, we'd like to be growing at around system. As we continue to build our capabilities and drive productivity importantly, so we can see more of the NII dropping to the bottom line, that's when we think we'll hopefully be in a position to start to take some market share again.

If you look back over the last 5 or 6 years, we have grown market share. Now there's been ups and downs on margin over that time. We want to try and get a much more steady approach to that margin management. And so over the course of the 4.5 years left of this strategy, we would like to see us grow market share once we make further progress on both the deposit capability and the productivity focus that we've got at the moment.

B.J., please.

Brian Johnson, MST. Richard, a few questions. And I appreciate the fact that there are things that you don't know about the AML. There are things that you do know, but you don't want to answer. And unfortunately, I think there were some questions that you should answer that you probably don't want to answer.

So if we ever look at the kind of trajectory of AML problems at banks, it strikes me that if you go back and look at it, CommBank got a pretty big fine. Westpac got a gigantic fine. The Westpac mine was demonstrably bigger because they hadn't kind of seen what had gone at CBA, NAB got a fine of 0 because they were very compliant.

So the first question, I'd like the subset of the questions on this, then I have another one on costs. Is that if we have a look at the AML issue, was this just a suspicious transaction identified in one branch? Or was there some money laundering? If there was only a suspicious transaction reported in one branch, but we've found a control deficiency, were there other breaches in other branches?

And then coming back on it is the real problem that you've got is that while have you gone, for example, and I apologize for this question, have you gone and had a look at the control environment, for example, in up to make sure that it hasn't got the same dynamic coming through. So can we get some detail on what the actual transactions were? Was there some money laundering involved? Why it only -- did this only happen in one branch?

Did it happen across multiple branches? And have you -- have we got the same control risk outside of the branches. And then over and above it, you've got 2 types of branches. You've got corporate branches and community branches. So could you unpack that for us, please?

That's a lot of questions.

How [indiscernible] we got. Look, the actual transactions, I can't comment on because they are still subject to law enforcement activity. So there is law enforcement related to those activities. And because of that, for legal reasons, I cannot comment on that. So that was the initial issues identified. We -- once we identified those and they were escalated, we then let the regulator know and law enforcement. Both of those parties were then involved on an ongoing basis.

In parallel, we asked Deloitte to do their review, which that review did not go beyond that branch, but it did identify there are deficiencies in the way we are monitoring and controlling AMLCTF more broadly. Now I'm trying to catch up with that question 5 or 6.

At this point in time, I'm not -- we have not done a full review of all branches and all transactions. But to this point in time, that is the only issues that have been identified. I'm not going to sit here and say, if -- once we've addressed those control issues, we may go back and then reassess other transactions there may be identified. I don't know. These are all hypotheticals at this point in time. We've got more work to do before we can give an answer to those questions.

From a look, the reality is that the transaction monitoring that goes on in our organization is the same, whether it be through Xavier's Up business, whether it would be through our branch network, through other channels. Those transaction monitoring activities that were being undertaken, we've identified deficiencies. So we need to understand what risk is involved more broadly with those deficiencies.

That's part of the work that's going on now and how we can then close the control gaps, whether we then need to go back and reassess historically, I don't know. Again, these are things that are very much in front of us to work through. And I'm sorry, I can't be more definitive than that on this matter. But it is very early days, and this is one of the challenges arguably in us coming out early with this because I know it's going to be frustrating for all of you and others in -- with lots of questions that we're just not in a position to be able to answer yet.

Okay. And historically, Richard, that's a great way to attempt to answer the question. But I look forward to finding out more about this over time. And I would encourage you just come out as you know, tell us.

The second question is, Richard, if we have a look at the housing market at the moment, housing lending in Australia, Macquarie is still out there pricing well below the peers and pricing up deposit rates. Of late, we can actually see Bendigo and Bank of Queensland for that matter, have basically repriced home loans up and then recently have cut them back down.

But if I have a look at the deposit product at 4.85% against an owner-occupied mortgage of 5.39% and I pay out the mortgage broker commissions more often than not, it doesn't seem to me like there's a lot of margin between the 2. What is the -- are you writing home loans at the moment below the cost of capital?

Short answer is no. I'll let Andrew and unpick some of this a little more in a second. Picking, for example, the highest possible rate through Up is not the weighted average interest rate that Up pays on its deposits. Its spread is well above 2% between its deposit rates and its lending rates. So we're very comfortable.

In fact, it's a strong ROE return through the mortgages we write there on the basis they're funded by Ups deposit. The changes we made recently were on the investor side of things. Again, the returns post those changes are above our cost of capital. We deliberately did not go in Owner Occ because that's where the returns are tightest at the moment.

So we've been tweaking some rates here and there to generate some -- help support some stronger flow, and we're seeing the benefits of that alongside some stronger flow in our resi -- sorry, in our retail business as we've rolled out the platform there. But Andrew, I don't know, if you want to add to that?

I think you've just answered the question beautifully.

So Owner Occ is below the cost of capital and investors above?

Owner Occ, if we were to cut pricing further in Owner Occ in broker, that would be below cost of capital. So that's deliberately why we've not moved pricing in there. Where we're growing the book is in digital, proprietary to an extent in our community banks and in broker, but investor.

And so when we do our calculations of marginal return on equity, we've got a hurdle rate that we want to meet, and we're comfortable meeting that hurdle rate. That's why we're only being very selective, Brian, about the way we price. We're not pricing -- we're not trying to grow volume by cutting pricing across all products. That doesn't work.

But just to clarify, am I right in concluding that Owner Occ is basically below the cost of capital. The front book through the broker channel. Is that...

At our current price point, where we're not writing a huge amount of volume right now, it's around about the cost of capital.

It does depend on the LVR at different point -- price points.

Carlos Cacho from Macquarie. On your -- your productivity agenda, we've recently seen one of your peers announce for the first time an offshoring of some more basic customer-focused roles. Do you have any plans to do similar, whether it's accessing more technology talent like peers have done or the lower-hanging fruit of customer service, like it seems like some easy ways to potentially reduce costs over the medium term.

Yes. I'll get Kieran to speak a little bit about the tech side of things in a moment. I think it would be an unusual action for our business and with our culture to put customer-facing activities offshore. Now I'm not saying that's an inappropriate thing to do. But culturally, that's not something that's on our agenda at this point in time. But we already use offshore-based skills in the tech space.

But Kieran, do you want to add what your thinking is there?

Yes. So again, we touched on this a little bit earlier. And so we've been quite transparent on this point with the partners. So for the 60 we referenced before, one thing that's interesting here is the majority of those partners' resourcing is here is actually resident in Australia.

And so that is an immediate opportunity. And so a feature of that rationalization down to the low single digits that Andrew talked about earlier will mean that more of that work that those partners do today will move overseas. We are in the process right now of looking at various options on what that might look like, and we'll look to execute on that in the second half.

And just around, I guess, back to the mortgage kind of margin discussion. Given -- as you noted, the mortgage growth and margins have had some ups and downs over the last few years. How can we be confident that getting back to system growth isn't going to come at material cost to margins?

I guess, can you share us what your learnings have been over the last few years and how you will do things differently? It's all well and good to say it will be deposit driven. But if the deposits aren't there, does that mean the mortgages aren't going to be there? How do you balance those 2 things? Because from the outside looking in, it has appeared at times like it's been a very difficult balance to get right.

Yes. I think -- thanks, Carlos. I think the lessons of the first half '25 have stuck with the organization. And we had a rollout of a platform, which was very successful, more successful, I suspect, than probably what we had anticipated, and that required a funding response. When we got to the point where we said we're growing too fast, we made then pricing changes in a couple of tranches, and then that slowed the volume down. That gave us a few key lessons.

1 was around the volatility in our margin, which was not what we wanted. The second was it gave us a clear sense as to where we needed to price the book to grow. And I've mentioned this before. So we've got a pretty clear sense as to the price point at which we need to set our mortgages to grow at a certain level.

And so the way we construct our plans, and I referenced this earlier, is we've got a number of applications per day that we target. And the way that we think about that number is we figure out what that means in a volume sense. And if we feel comfortable that we can then fund that as much as possible with lower cost deposits, then we say, okay, that's the number we go for. And so what we're doing is using price as a lever to control the flow, taking into account how much flow will move to a settlement, we'll move to then a loan on the balance sheet. That's why we do it.

Is that, I guess, a new initiative looking at that applications per day? Or is that...

No. No, I think they are connecting Up of funding and making sure that we support lending growth with as low-cost deposit funding as possible. And then some of the more recent digital work we've done to build our lower-cost deposits, so transaction accounts is helping to underpin that. But it was a critical part of the strategy that we -- that Richard took to the Board back in June of last year.

Next question. Christian?

Christian [ Mazer ], Jarden. Just back on deposits and with Up, you mentioned the strong growth that you've had and the new grow and flow offering that you have. How exactly does that interest rate structure work? And is -- are you attracting those new customers through price? Or is it more the offering that you have?

So I think it's the offering we have. Like if you want to get the highest interest rate in market for your deposits, that's not us. We're pretty competitive versus the majors, but we're not sort of total best in class. That's a deliberate pricing strategy for us. So I don't -- it's not 100% price driven.

I think previously -- so sorry, what is it? That will help. So we sort of have a 2-tiered interest system. If you don't withdraw, you can get the growth rate, which I think is about 4.6% at the moment. And if you do withdraw, you get a lower flow rate, which is 1.25. This matches up with how a lot of customers use save. A lot of saves are actually used in a more transactional sense and they're the sort of flow savers and then sort of nest eggs or emergency funds, that's sort of what tends to attract the grow rate.

Previously, we didn't have this sort of -- and you also need to be doing 5 qualifying transactions as well. Previously, we only had the qualifying transactions criteria, but our headline rate was sort of high 3s. And so what we're finding is sort of in this middle ground where for people who wanted a higher interest rate for their [ NestJS ], we didn't have a product for them.

And then for people who are really using it for sort of financial funds, we were probably overpaying. So sort of in this middle area. So now we split those 2 and that's provided a much more suitable product for a lot of people who were keeping a lot of their deposits elsewhere, but also just made the whole offering a bit more compelling for people.

So I will say we do have some customers, who don't like it, like it's not a slam dunk, and we knew that going in. We did a lot of research into this. But sort of on net, we -- more customers were interested in it than not, and that's come through in the numbers.

Second, Brian, just let Christian finish if that's okay.

Is it one product that flips between 2?

Yes.

So it's still an underlying just Up Saver product. And then depending on your activity for the month, it qualifies for the different rates.

Yes.

There's a really good explainer on the website. If you link through to growth flow, it's got a really good -- that sort of lays it out really nicely.

Next question [indiscernible].

So can I ask about your digital onboarding? So first, you talk about 50 transaction accounts per day. How do we benchmark against the current onboarding without the digital capability? And then secondly, you're talking about increasing marketing expense. What kind of magnitude are we thinking about? And what type of marketing campaign? And is the customer acquisition cost at a similar level at ARPU, which is you mentioned $50? Or is it significantly different?

So I'll just quickly answer the first bit and then -- so we were really just not seeing much at all previously through the prior onboarding that we did have. So it did technically exist, but like we were seeing a handful of day that. So it was basically nothing, and now we're seeing quite a lot more. So that's sort of the first part.

And then second part...

Yes. From a marketing perspective, we've been increasing our support for low-cost deposits in the run-up to digital onboarding. And now we'll start to build that. So the way that we work in marketing is we optimize the activity to where we're seeing performance. So you'll see our marketing of the digital onboarding product, or fast sign-up for customers build into the new year, and then we'll trial campaigns if we need to.

But I think previously, when we think about kind of we've talked previously about the demand we've driven, we've got a lot of latent demand there anywhere. So the brand connects with customers. It drives demand. And when they were coming to us, they couldn't sign up through the app to onboard. Customers can now. So we really need to get that balance right of what do we need to actually market versus optimize the demand that was already there. But yes, you will see it still build next year.

Maggie, one of the things that -- I mean, I'm a bit of a junky for the dashboards on these things. I probably hit refresh too often to watch how the numbers are flowing on a daily basis, but they have been growing since we launched quite nicely. And so I think Tuesday, we had 70 new accounts.

So it's -- on average, it's been about 50. But in the first few days, it was 30, 40, and it's continuing to grow. Look, first, I want to get to 100 a day. And that's probably going to be I mean, 30,000 customers we wouldn't otherwise have had. And then if we can really start to ramp up the digital marketing and from a marketing perspective, it's not like we're going to go and spend an extra $5 million if it were otherwise.

It's about -- Sarah doesn't get that much from me to play with. So she has to put it where we think we can get the best value. But I don't know, where the potential ceiling is on this. I mean we have a long time, I think, before we get to Xavier's 500 a day. Cost of acquisition actually is probably actually lower than Up because we're not paying referral dollars on this. So it will be a very low cost of acquisition at the moment.

James, do you have any media questions?

It's David Ross Australian. Richard, I had a question for you around AML. Can you tell us specifically which was the branch affected that you've referenced? I mean Bendigo has released a closures impact statement for every branch it's closed apart from the Pinewood community branch in Mount Waverley in Melbourne. Why was the Pinewood Community branch closed suddenly on 9 September and the franchise agreement terminated with no reason provided?

As I said before, with legal activity underway, there are certain things we can and can't disclose. And we're not, at the moment, in a position where we can identify the branch that was the source of those transactions.

I just also wanted to ask, obviously, Bendigo has had it community branch model for a while. In your view, I know everything is preliminary and the final Deloitte report is still yet to come. But has there been any indication if that model exposes you to more risks, particularly on AML?

So I think the community bank model is 28 years old now, and it's been a wonderful supporter of our ability to grow our business and also to grow our deposit base. The reality, as we do this review, we'll look at all aspects of our business. But over that 28 years, there has not been a particular skew that I'm aware of between community banks versus company-owned branches from a risk perspective.

They all have to meet the same policies and procedures, whether it be a community bank or a company-owned branch. And so I wouldn't expect there would be a particular skew there, but we haven't done that work yet.

Nicholas?

Nicholas Sobolev, UBS. Just regarding the RACQ book, are these loans predominantly owner-occupied? And once they're brought on to the balance sheet, how are they going to impact NIM for the group?

Yes. So 79% Owner Occ. The margin on their loans is comparable -- or sorry, the rate on their loans is very comparable to ours. So they'll be transitioning across to a Bendigo product at time of completion. There is only one deposit product, where there is any significant variation between any terms and conditions, and we'll work through how we might grandfather some of those terms and conditions for those customers.

But when it comes to the lending book, that will be a straight transition. They will continue to get the rate they have. And as rates move up and down, it will be from that rate. But there's no -- we're certainly looking through the book, we're very comfortable with the rates being offered on both sides of the balance sheet.

Okay. So for that 79% roughly would be written above cost of capital from your point of view or at like the rest of the...

Look, the reality is where those loans are coming on to our book with the only acquisition cost being the transition costs. So I mean, you could do a range of different ways of working out that cost of capital. But at the rate they are, we're certainly very comfortable that they'll be paying their way.

And as I said, more generally, the -- when you look at the acquisition, it's going to be strongly accretive from an ROE perspective and also generate up to $0.05 per share on an EPS basis.

Thanks, Nicholas. Time for 2 more questions. I can see Sally's hand up.

It's Sally Hong from Morgan Stanley. So you noted that Up Bank is becoming profitable today. Can you talk to me about how does Up Bank's like cost-to-income ratio compare with the broader group? And can you give us a sense on how Up Bank will contribute to taking Bendigo's ROE above 10% by 2030?

So maybe I'll start and then Andrew, if you want to comment on some of the longer term, how it fits in. So I mean, we've just hit profitability. So right now, the income is 100% right. But I think if you look -- if you sort of extrapolate out in terms of our -- the number of humans and technology costs we need to support the business, the marginal cost of adding growth, our expense profile is pretty flat.

And so the -- I expect that, that will continue to improve. And if you -- and long term or even medium term, we'll get under the sort of group CTI like relatively quickly. I'm not looking at -- like if I sort of look out in the next couple of years of growth, I don't need to drastically change my expense base to support that. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about that. And then do you maybe want to speak to the longer term, how...

Is the absolute key is that we are putting capital to work in that business. It's fully funded or more than fully funded from a deposit perspective today. The cost of that deposit stack is attractive. So hypothetically, Dave could grow his book by double and the marginal costs are pretty small because of the efficient platform that he's built.

And so the way that we think about that business is we'll continue to allocate capital to it whilst it's delivering such attractive returns while it continues to gather customers at the pace that it does. So that's how it contributes. It's a very low additional marginal cost as we bring more assets on the balance sheet.

Thanks, Sally. We'll finish with Richard.

You've talked about some of your productivity initiatives, your headcount reduction, your outsourcing initiatives and rent are good examples. Can you quantify the cost savings that you expect to get from these initiatives? And if you can't do that today, do you have any plans to quantify the cost savings perhaps at the first half result?

Yes. So again, what we think is most important here is what it actually means from an overall cost perspective because I could give you a number. But if I don't give you a reference with that number, then you might say, okay, well, what's happening with the rest of your cost base? And so the way that we've described it, Richard, is to say that those costs and the savings in those 4 cost pools that I referenced earlier will help us to manage our overall cost growth, our business as usual cost growth to now higher than inflation.

Inside that, yes, we know what the number is. We'll take it on notice as to whether we quantify that or not. But what you will see over time is as we execute on those 4 key initiatives, it will translate then into the cost base, whether that's through FTEs, lower rent, whatever it might be.

Andrew, there's an alternative way to look at that. We could say if you do nothing, your costs are going to grow 5%, 6%. We know your amortization is going up. So we want to know what cost savings you expect to deliver to get to that BAU within inflation.

So I think it would be helpful if you disclose some expected cost savings. You have done it in the past. Other banks do it. So I think it would be helpful if you disclose that at the first half result or when you're ready.

Sure. We'll take it on notice.

Thanks, Richard. Thanks, everyone. I'll hand back to Richard for final comments.

Thanks, everyone, for the questions and some really good questions there. Based on what we know today, we do remain committed to our target of achieving an ROE above 10% by 2030. This is a goal that drives our business priorities and decisions, and we will keep you informed with our progress on that as we continue to drive our strategy forward.

So thank you for coming along today. We appreciate the time you've taken and look forward to joining you for some refreshments, if you got time now that we finished the formal part of the day. Thank you.