Our journey so far

As I reflect on the performance of the past year, I am proud of our robust response as a Bank in the face of tough market conditions across the sector. Despite this we have managed to achieve significant growth especially in Property. The Property originations team has had an outstanding year and has transformed their balance sheet to £1.1bn, year on year growth of 64%. We took the opportunity to focus on growing our Bridge and term Property lending on the back of declining consumer confidence and the consumer point of sale market seeing a year on year fall in demand. This has been further compounded by the exiting of a key retailer partnership which impacted new business in the first half of the year. As a result, Omni originations fell 20% year on year and the balance sheet experienced a fall of 8% year on year. Total assets now stand at £1.7bn a growth of 51%. This total asset growth was supported by our strengthened savings proposition as we approached the threshold of £1.5bn in Customer Deposit balances.

As a Bank, we have maintained good discipline in credit and pricing and remain focused on managing our resources prudently to maintain robust levels of profitability. All of this has been achieved whilst maintaining our core values and continuing to make substantial investments in our products, technology, people and our brand. This is reflected in the improved and strong NPS and Trustpilot scores from our customers across our business lines.

As a result, we delivered a total Statutory Profit Before Tax (PBT) of £9.4m (2024: £9.1m) and a total ROE of 5.4% (2024:5.5%). This represents a solid performance against the headwinds we faced as a business and an increase on the prior year. In July 2025 we received an additional £8m of Tier 2 capital from our shareholder, J. C. Flowers & Co., reflecting their confidence in our long-term strategy for growing the Bank. The continued pressure of the high-interest rate environment on our funding costs, changes to product mix and a lagged effect on our asset pricing, have resulted in our Net Interest Margin (“NIM”) reducing to 4.7% (30 Sep 2024; 5.4%). However, the easing of the Bank base rate gives us confidence that NIM pressure will ease as we go forward into our next financial year.

Property impairments have been elevated in the year. This has been primarily concentrated in historical cohorts, particularly those originated pre 2020 and on 2nd charge loans that are no longer offered. We believe that by managing the risk on the legacy loans and being proactive on recovery we will protect our long-term financial health and demonstrate that these are isolated events putting us on a path to our medium-term goal of delivering sustainable, double-digit ROEs.

The cost-of living crisis and higher interest rates have put pressure on customer affordability. As a responsible lender, we have continued to support our customers during these difficult times. In Property we enabled customers to fix in rates earlier in the lending process to give peace of mind and in Omni we continued to provide the majority of our loans via interest free credit and where we provide interest-bearing loans continue to complete rigorous affordability checks on all customers. In Savings, where possible, we passed on interest rate rises to our customers and this has shone through in our latest strong NPS scores.

In short, we were able to look after our customers and deliver a strong business performance. Our continued investment in digital capabilities mean that we are now well placed to benefit from enhanced products, pricing and scalable capabilities across our product ranges.