February 1, 2026
Vanquis Banking Group FY25 Results Presentation Transcript
Our analyst
Read of this earnings call — headline is the investment verdict. Research synthesis, not investment advice.
Hold: Vanquis completed a credible turnaround, returning to £8.3m profit before tax in FY2025 while customer interest-earning balances grew 22% to £2.8bn, but ROTE was only 2.3%.
Management targets low-double-digit ROTE in 2026 and mid-teens in 2027, yet the plan depends on continued cost reductions and balance growth while group NIM falls from 16.8% to around 15.5% in 2026 and 14.5% in 2027; Vehicle Finance also remains loss-making.
- Turnaround
- Rote Guidance
- Second Charge Mortgages
- Vehicle Finance
- Gateway Transformation
- Nim Compression
- Capital Allocation
- Credit Quality
Near term
- Second Charge Mortgage growth should support balances and capital efficiency, but will continue diluting group NIM and risk-adjusted margins.
- Vehicle Finance platform launch in the second half of 2026 is the key near-term execution catalyst; the division currently has a 69.9% cost:income ratio and a £12.7m loss.
- Higher 2026 impairment charges are expected as balances grow, even though FY2025 cost of risk improved to 7.3%.
- Second-half-weighted 2026 profitability creates execution and timing risk against the low-double-digit ROTE target.
Longer term
- The banking licence and nearly £3bn of retail deposits provide a potentially durable funding-cost advantage over non-bank specialist lenders.
- Gateway could structurally improve operating leverage, with management indicating an additional £23m–£28m of savings after completion.
- The growth mix is shifting toward lower-risk, lower-RWA Second Charge Mortgages, supporting capital returns but structurally reducing headline NIM and risk-adjusted margin.
- The core Credit Cards portfolio is improving, with gross charge-offs down 19% and cost of risk at 10.2%, although future growth is expected to moderate.
- Capital remains supportive of expansion: CET1 was 16.5%, or £107m above the stated regulatory surplus requirement, with guidance of greater than 14.5%.
Red flags
- The 2027 mid-teens ROTE objective relies materially on cost takeout as well as income growth; the call provided limited evidence that the full Gateway savings are already secured.
- Vehicle Finance remains economically subscale and loss-making, making the planned second-half 2026 growth dependent on successful technology delivery and automation.
- The deliberate mix shift toward Second Charge Mortgages reduces NIM to 14.5% by 2027 and risk-adjusted margin to above 9%, leaving less margin for credit or funding shocks.
- The coverage ratio declined to 8.4% as ECLs fell despite 21% gross receivables growth; management expressed comfort, but this remains a sensitivity if customer resilience weakens.
- Motor-finance compensation exposure was described as limited, but the FCA scheme’s final scope and mechanics remain unresolved; Vanquis has already booked a £3m provision.
Investor Relations
Vanquis Banking Group FY 2025 Results
Analyst and Investor Conference Call Speech
Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive Officer
Dave Watts, Chief Executive Officer
Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive Officer
Good morning everyone - thank you for joining us for Vanquis Banking Group’s full year 2025 results.
I’m Ian McLaughlin, the Chief Executive Officer of Vanquis, and I’m joined this morning by our
Chief Financial Officer, Dave Watts.
Dave Watts, Chief Financial Officer
Good morning.
Investor Relations
Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive Officer
I’ll start with an overview of our performance in 2025. Dave will then take you through the financial results in more detail.
I will then come back to talk about strategic priorities and Dave will end by covering our financial guidance through to full year 2027.
After that, as usual, we’ll be happy to take your questions.
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If I can take you to slide 4, you can see how our full year performance compares against both the prior year and against the guidance that we set out at the start of 2025.
And the headline here is simple
we delivered a performance that was at, or better than, all of our key commitments for the year.
Most importantly, after the turnaround of the business in 2024, where we delivered a loss before tax of £138m, we returned to profitability in 2025, with a profit before tax of £8.3m.
During the year, we also took the opportunity to deploy capital to accelerate balance growth which will support our future profitability.
You can see that in our customer interest-earning balances which ended the year at £2.8bn, ahead of our guidance of greater than £2.7bn, and therefore well ahead of our original 2025 goal of greater than £2.6bn.
Net interest margin was 16.8%, reflecting a deliberate shift in mix towards lower risk secured lending in Second Charge Mortgages, as we have signalled previously. Excluding this, NIM actually increased by 50 bps, reflecting our continued pricing discipline in Cards and Vehicle
Finance.
Our cost to income ratio was in the high 50s, so again in line with guidance and reflecting our improving operating efficiency.
Return on tangible equity was 2.3%, so consistent with our guidance for a low single-digit return.
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Following the AT1 capital issuance in the second half of the year, our Tier 1 ratio increased to
19.3%, putting us in a strong position to support the next phase of our strategy.
So, while there’s always more to do, we have delivered what we said we would in 2025 - growing in a resilient and sustainable manner, with margins and costs under tight control.
After what is now five quarters of consecutive book growth, and four quarters of consecutive profitability, you can see that the actions that we have been taking over the past two years are translating into more predictable and sustainable financial outcomes.
Slide 5 sets out the underlying actions we have taken to deliver the results I have just discussed. I will step through a few of these.
Firstly, as I have already mentioned we accelerated our balance growth, but did so with discipline, actively managing mix to maximise returns on deployed capital.
Secondly, we continued to make strong progress on Gateway, our technology transformation programme. The fundamentals of Gateway are now substantively delivered and the programme will complete this year.
We also delivered further transformation cost savings, with efficiency gains creating positive operating leverage as the business continued to scale.
Credit quality remains robust, reflecting continued customer resilience and responsible lending across all our portfolios.
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And we continued to develop our customer proposition, a bit more on that in a moment.
Taken together, these actions will allow us to continue to transform the bank.
Slide 6 highlights the progress we made across our customer proposition and risk management during 2025.
We continued to strengthen all our product offerings - balancing growth, risk discipline and good customer outcomes.
And we got busy. In Credit Cards for example we launched 66 new product variants - including credit builder, balance transfer and other promotional offers.
We also expanded our retail savings range, including new ISAs and the Snoop-branded easy access account, strengthening deposit growth, product flexibility and cost-efficient funding.
And Snoop continues to play an increasingly important role in our ecosystem, helping customers with their money management. Active users were up 12% to 328,000, including
43,000 Vanquis customers.
We also grew our partnership with Fair Finance. In 2025, this helped 20,000 applicants identify around £34m in potential annual benefit entitlements - that’s an average of over £1,750 per annum per person – so genuinely helping people transform their financial lives for the better.
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We delivered a profile-raising campaign to refresh and relaunch the Vanquis brand with target customers, including our successful partnership with the Professional Darts Corporation.
We also introduced a new, consistent customer satisfaction measure across the Group during the year, giving us a more data-driven view of customer experience.
Our overall CSI customer satisfaction score averaged 83.7 in 2025 and this is supported by consistently excellent Trustpilot ratings across both Vanquis and Moneybarn brands.
Fundamentally, of course, Vanquis is a risk management business. We have therefore prioritised making meaningful improvements to our risk management capabilities.
In Vehicle Finance we developed a new credit decisioning platform - improving the speed, consistency and quality of our lending decisions. And this contributed to the improved risk adjusted margin performance in the business.
In Credit Cards we made many improvements to our credit risk scorecards and affordability assessments, and we are upgrading the decisioning platform alongside other technology improvements, which I’ll turn to more detail on that on slide 7.
We launched our new mobile app as part of an enhanced digital onboarding journey, underpinning our clear focus on improving customer engagement, conversion and retention.
And last February we centralised around 30 billion rows of customer, product and decisioning data onto a single modern platform, significantly strengthening analytics, insight and decision- making capabilities.
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In operations we expanded the use of digital tools, AI and self-service functionality across key processes, again significantly improving efficiency.
The impact here is tangible. Complaints handling costs, for example, were down 10% and fraud losses fell by 25% in 2025 as a result of these improved processes.
We are applying this disciplined approach across every aspect of our business, a good example is that we have reviewed our property footprint and reduced space at our Bradford headquarters by over 70%, as we modernise and right-size to align with current and future workspace needs.
Finally, all we have delivered is down to the engagement and efforts of our fantastic people and we were pleased to see that colleague engagement improved significantly through the year, up
13 points to 73%.
That improvement reflects growing confidence in the direction and performance of our business and resulted in Vanquis being certified as a Great Place to Work for the first time ever.
As I said earlier there is more to do and we are not finished yet. But hopefully you can see that the progress made in 2025 is tangible, and we are seeing a positive response from colleagues and from customers.
Alongside this internal progress, I should note that the external headwinds of 2024 and 2025 have also largely receded. For example, elevated FOS fees from unmerited CMC complaints.
Dave will touch on that shortly and remind you that our exposure to motor finance commissions is differentiated and any potential liability remains limited for Vanquis.
Overall, the two words I have used most to describe 2025 are discipline and delivery - both these will serve us well as we take the business forward from here.
With that, I’ll now hand over to Dave to take you through the financials in more detail. Dave, over to you.
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Dave Watts, Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Ian.
I am pleased to present our results today given the significant progress we have made in 2025.
Slide 9 summarises my headlines, before I go into more detail.
Our return to profitability was achieved by growing income, reducing costs, and importantly, the non-repeat of the notable items that we reported in 2024. This is evidence that the financial
Investor Relations impact of the business turnaround is firmly behind us, and we were able to focus on sustainable, profitable growth in 2025.
With this backdrop, we accelerated balance growth to build scale and drive long-term profitability.
This was aided by our first AT1 issuance in October last year which freed up additional capital to be deployed for growth.
This growth comes with upfront IFRS9 impairment charges, although credit quality remained strong, and write-offs decreased.
We maintained our cost discipline, delivering ongoing cost savings in excess of our commitment for the year. At the same time, we continued to invest in improving the fundamentals of the business, including our technology capabilities, via the Gateway transformation programme.
Following the new FOS fee charging structure, implemented in April last year, we saw a material reduction in CMC claims to FOS, resulting in much lower complaint costs in 2025.
We also continued to dynamically manage liquidity and funding. We diversified our Liquid Asset
Buffer investments to generate higher returns. We introduced new savings products to provide more stability and flexibility, while lowering our cost of funds.
As a reminder, our exposure to motor finance commissions is differentiated and any potential liability is limited. While the final scope and mechanics of the FCA compensation scheme remain subject to change, we did recognise a £3m provision in 3Q25. You can find further details on why our exposure is differentiated in the Appendix.
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Going into more detail, slide 10 summarises the Group’s performance for 2025.
We generated a profit from continuing operations of £8.3m pounds supported by a 5% growth in risk adjusted income and a 33% reduction in operating costs.
Excluding notable items costs were down 9% meaning the Group generated 11% positive cost: income jaws.
After factoring in tax, the profit from discontinued operations relating to the sale of the Personal
Loans business and AT1 coupon costs, profit attributable to shareholders was £8.2m pounds.
At the same time we grew customer interest earning balances by 22% to over £2.8bn.
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On Slide 11, you can see what this meant for our financial KPIs.
£8.2m of bottom-line profits translated into a return on tangible equity of 2.3%, in line with our guidance.
This was driven by an improvement in the cost: income ratio to 58.4%, again in line with guidance.
As we previously guided to, asset yield, NIM and total income margin all reduced, driven by the deliberate growth in lower margin, lower risk, Second Charge Mortgages.
The reduction in risk adjusted margin to 11% was smaller, only 80 basis points, reflecting a 110- basis points reduction in the cost of risk.
With greater clarity on the cost of risk across our products, we intend to focus on risk-adjusted margin, as a core metric going forward.
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The NIM drivers are set out on Slide 12.
A small 20 basis points reduction in asset yield was more than offset by a 50-basis points improvement from lower funding costs.
This net positive outcome was more than offset by a 170-basis points dilution due to a shift in mix toward Second Charge Mortgages, and a 30 basis points reduction from a larger Liquid
Asset Buffer.
As a result, NIM decreased to 16.8%. However, to highlight the Group’s pricing discipline, excluding Second Charge Mortgages, NIM increased 50 basis points year-on-year to 19.4%.
After factoring in balance growth net interest income rose by 3% in 2025 and, importantly, it rose by 6% in the second half of the year.
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Slide 13 details our customer interest earning balances, which increased to over £2.8bn.
Credit Card balances increased 19%. This reflected both new customer acquisitions and increased card utilisation by existing customers.
Vehicle Finance balances reduced by 8% as we managed new business growth while we develop the new onboarding and servicing platform.
Second Charge Mortgages continued to grow strongly, increasing by over £380m.
Gross and net receivables increased by 21%, and 25%, respectively.
Importantly, we now have established debt sale programmes in both Credit Cards and Vehicle
Finance, with the Vehicle Finance post charge off asset, continuing to reduce, following the completion of a number of debt sales. Further details are set out in the Appendix.
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Slide 14 summarises the year-on-year impairment charge movement.
Bottom line, impairment reduced by 2%, driven by a 5% reduction in gross charge-offs.
Within this, Credit Card gross charge offs reduced by 19%, to a gross charge off rate of 12.7%.
This highlights the improving quality of the portfolio.
Back-book credit risk improved with fewer negative stage migrations and lower impairment releases from write-offs and debt sales.
In summary, the overall Group cost of risk has reduced to 7.3%, with all products coming within guided expectations, reflecting our responsible approach to lending.
As you would expect, we anticipate impairment will increase in 2026 in line with balance growth and have slightly refined the cost of risk guidance, by product, on this slide.
In the Appendix we have included a slide on Expected Credit Losses and coverage ratios.
ECLs reduced by 7% despite a 21% increase in gross receivables, reflecting increased stage 1 and stage 2 balances and a reduction in stage 3.
As a result of this improving credit quality the Group coverage ratio reduced to 8.4%.
We remain comfortable with the current coverage ratio based on a clearer understanding of the credit risk of our portfolios.
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Turning to operating costs on Slide 15.
Total operating costs fell 33% primarily due to the absence of 2024’s notable items.
Costs, excluding notable items, reduced 9%, with transformation savings and lower complaint costs more than offsetting growth and inflation-related increases.
We delivered £28.8m of transformation cost savings in 2025, well above the £15m we committed to. This included an acceleration of some Gateway technology driven savings into
2025.
Complaint costs reduced 44% to £26.6m. This amount includes the £3m provision for motor finance redress.
Excluding this provision, total complaint costs reduced to £7.5m in the second half, a much lower run rate than previously.
As set out in the Appendix the material drop in FOS referrals from CMCs, following the introduction of the new FOS charging structure in April, was the main driver of the reduction.
We did accrue discretionary staff costs, having not paid bonuses to colleagues for the last two years.
This, alongside a 10% increase in customer-focused FTE, drove a 2% increase in staff and outsourced people costs, albeit our outsourced FTE reduced by 28% in the year.
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We have embedded cost discipline across the business. We expect operating costs to reduce further in 2026, and in 2027, driven by both Gateway and broader operating efficiency enhancements.
Let me now touch upon the performance of each of the lending products, starting with Credit
Cards on Slide 16.
The business delivered a profit of £38.2m pounds, up 27%.
This was while growing interest earning balances by 19%, which drove a 13% increase in impairment charges due to the expected IFRS9 impairment provision on origination.
At 10.2%, the cost of risk was at the lower end of the guided range, with 19% lower gross charge offs, as mentioned earlier, highlighting the improved quality of the book.
With the portfolio having reduced 10% in 2024, balances at the end of 2025 were 7% higher than two years ago.
The improved quality has been driven by the actions taken by the new experienced cards management team, following their granular vintage analysis review.
Asset yield declined 80 basis points to 27.1%.
This was driven by the weighted average APR of the portfolio reducing to 33.7%, due to the increased take-up of balance transfers and 0% promotional offers, which increased to 15% of
Investor Relations the portfolio. These offers are effective acquisition tools that are expected to drive further interest income over time.
Excluding these offers, the weighted average APR increased to 39.6%, reflecting our disciplined risk-based pricing strategy.
Combined with lower funding costs, NIM only reduced 50 basis points to 23.3%, while risk adjusted margin was 15.6%.
Overall, we are well-positioned for continued, profitable growth We would, however, expect balances to grow at a more moderate level in 2026 and beyond.
Slide 17 covers Vehicle Finance.
Balances reduced by 8% as we managed new business volumes ahead of the new platform launch, which will be delivered via Gateway, in the second half of 2026.
The business remained loss making, although the loss reduced materially year-on-year at
£12.7m.
Repricing actions lifted the weighted average APR to 29.1% boosting both asset yield and NIM by 0.7%.
Combined with a reduction in the cost of risk to 5.6%, risk-adjusted margin increased to 7.4%, driving a 31% increase in risk adjusted income to £54.2m.
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Operating costs reduced by 17%, to £66.9m However, the resulting cost: income ratio of 69.9% remains far too high.
Post the launch of the new platform, building scale and automating processes will be key to improving efficiency.
Second Charge Mortgages continued their strong growth, as shown on Slide 18.
Balances reached just under £600m, risk adjusted margin increased to 2.8% and the business delivered a profit of £5.4m.
With a weighted average loan-to-value on the combined first and second charge mortgages of just over 70%, the cost of risk remains low.
As a secured product Second Charge Mortgages have a low RWA density driving attractive returns on capital.
We have rapidly become a market leader in this space. Through strong origination partnerships, we remain excited about its growth potential, with the overall market originations growing annually at mid-teens percentages, in recent years.
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Slide 19 shows the streamlined Corporate Centre following the reallocation of both funding and operating costs to product lines.
Excluding notable items, the Corporate Centre has reported a loss of circa £20m in each of the last two years.
It includes returns from the Liquid Asset Buffer, interest costs on unallocated Tier 2 capital and operating costs from Retail Savings and Snoop.
Liquidity and funding remain core strengths, as shown on Slide 20.
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At year end we held £653m of excess high-quality liquid assets over the regulatory minimum.
We continue to improve returns from the Liquid Asset Buffer with £250m now invested in UK gilts.
Retail deposits have grown to nearly £3bn representing close to 90% of total funding.
We have diversified our deposit mix, introducing both fixed and instant access ISAs, as well as
Snoop branded, easy access accounts. The former provides increased stability in the retail funding base, while the growth in easy access accounts provides more pricing flexibility and has contributed to the reduction in the cost of funds over the last 12 months.
We also tendered £58.5m our outstanding Tier 2 capital. This further reduced funding costs and was part of a broader capital optimisation transaction, which is summarised on slide 21.
At the end of the third quarter, we successfully issued £60m of AT1 capital and concurrently, executed the Tier 2 tender.
This transaction had no impact on the total capital ratio, as the Tier 2 capital was replaced with
AT1. The Group retains a significant total capital surplus above its regulatory minimum.
The key to the transaction was that we were able to improve the efficiency of our Tier 1 capital stack, increasing the surplus above the regulatory minimum, which was previously all held in
CET1 capital.
With this transaction the binding capital measure for the Group is now the CET1 ratio. With the regulatory minimum 230 basis points lower than the Tier 1 minimum, the transaction has freed
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The CET1 capital ratio reduced by 2.3% to 16.5% as the 25% increase in net receivables equated to £304m of RWA growth.
This was partially offset by the capital benefit from the statutory profit in 2025 and the Personal
Loans sale. We expect profits to become a more significant, positive contributor to the ratio in future years.
At 16.5% the Group retains a surplus of 5.2% above the 11.3% regulatory minimum. This equates to £107m of surplus CET1 capital.
The Group’s disclosed, and undisclosed capital requirements, were also reviewed by the regulator in the second half of last year, which gives us confidence to reduce our target ratio to greater than 14.5%, which I will cover later.
Ultimately, our capital strength and the expectation of increased future profits supports our continued growth plans and the execution of our strategy.
Finally, before I hand back to Ian, given that Vanquis is now a cleaner, more stable, and predictable business, I would expect the level of detail required in our content to reduce in future presentations.
Ian will now talk you through our strategic priorities, before I return to summarise our financial guidance.
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Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive Officer
Dave, thank you.
I’d now like to take you through the market opportunity and how we will complete what is year 3 of our current strategic plan that will take us through to 2027.
Slide 24 shows how we frame our strategy in terms of our purpose and our ambition.
Vanquis is a specialist bank with a clear social purpose, focused on serving customers who are underserved by mainstream lenders.
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Our purpose is to deliver caring banking, so our customers can make the most of life’s opportunities.
Now that means different things to different people:
It might be accessing credit when it matters most, improving your credit profile to unlock better options, or simply feeling more in control of your money.
Caring banking is about how we show up for customers, whatever stage of their financial journey they happen to be at.
And it means understanding customers’ needs, earning their trust, supporting healthy financial choices and being there for them when it matters most and when they need us most.
Our ambition then builds on that purpose.
We aim to be the UK’s most trusted and inclusive specialist bank, unlocking financial opportunity for underserved customers and helping them thrive.
That ambition is very deliberate.
It recognises the scale of the market we serve and the responsibility that comes with serving these customers.
This brings me to our strategy on slide 25.
This is deliberately simple and practical, built around a new three pillar framework:
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Serve More, Serve Responsibly, and Scale Profitably.
This is not a change in direction for us. It is just a clearer articulation of how we run and grow the business as we continue to move from turnaround towards sustainable growth.
To give some more depth to these 3 pillars: Serve More is about widening access to responsible, affordable credit and deepening long-term customer relationships.
Serve Responsibly ensures that growth is predictable, well controlled, with strong affordability, disciplined risk decisions and consistently good customer outcomes delivered.
And Scale Profitably is how we turn that growth into returns, through the disciplined cost control, capital allocation and margin management that you are seeing us deliver, and as Dave has just discussed in detail.
Gateway underpins all three pillars by providing a modern, efficient technology platform to grow on and supports a lower run-rate cost base.
Together, these pillars link growth, control and returns and provide the framework that guides the decisions we make and execute day to day.
Looking now at slide 26, this addresses one of the questions that I am most regularly asked which is about the total market opportunity we are focused on delivering to.
The UK has a large and persistent underserved adult population.
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Our research indicates that over 24 million UK adults face barriers to accessing mainstream credit.
This is therefore not a niche segment. It represents more than half of the adult population who have an active credit profile.
And importantly, this is a structural feature of the UK market rather than a cyclical one.
At Vanquis we exist to serve this segment responsibly, providing access to credit where it is affordable and appropriate and introducing customers to other solutions if we can’t immediately serve them.
Our existing product set allows us to address a large proportion of this market within our current risk appetite - within Credit Cards, Vehicle Finance and Second Charge Mortgages, as Dave has just described.
On slide 27, you can see how we think about the market opportunity through to 2027 and, importantly, how we grow within it in a disciplined way.
We plan to grow balances across all of our asset products, but that growth will be deliberate and phased.
Credit Cards will continue to grow, but at a moderated pace compared to 19% in 2025.
Vehicle Finance growth is more backended, linked to the completion of our new onboarding and servicing platform under Gateway.
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From the second half of 2026, Vehicle Finance will become an increasingly cost-efficient line of growth, facilitated through the strong broker relationships that we have retained.
Second Charge Mortgages plays a different role in our mix. As you know, this is a secured product with a lower risk weight density. It has become very successful for us, and we expect the rate of growth to continue at broadly similar levels.
As this drives a mix shift over time, our Group risk-adjusted margins will naturally change to reflect this, but the business we are writing remains attractive across all products and consistent with our return targets.
Overall, what you are seeing us do is about balance. Growing but managing mix and quality carefully so that we convert that growth into sustainable returns.
On slide 28, this is where Serve Responsibly underpins our ability to deliver the strategy with discipline.
And responsible lending is not a constraint on growth for us. It’s actually what ensures that our growth is sustainable and predictable.
In Credit Cards, more granular, risk-based pricing allows us to widen access to credit while ensuring pricing accurately reflects individual risk and affordability.
That allows us to grow the book while maintaining credit quality and customer outcomes.
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In Vehicle Finance, you can see we have rebalanced the APR mix and tightened alignment between risk, pricing and returns. Again, this will support controlled growth as the platform scales.
The Second Charge Mortgages product is primarily used for debt consolidation, enabling customers to have lower monthly outgoings, and resulting in improved resilience for them.
Loan-to-value ratios remain well controlled, underpinning strong returns as the portfolio continues to grow.
These disciplines support responsible growth, protect customer outcomes and deliver predictable performance across credit cycles.
Slide 29 shows how we support customers to improve their financial health.
Snoop is central to this as I have mentioned. It acts as a key enabler of our inclusion strategy and long-term growth model.
Using Open Banking data and AI, Snoop helps customers manage everyday money, build confidence and develop healthier financial behaviours.
And for many users, this translates into meaningful savings over time, through better bill management, smarter spending and easier supplier switching.
For those customers who are not yet ready, or we are not able to offer credit to right now, the programme delivered with Fair Finance provides a responsible alternative for them.
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And the Vanquis Foundation and our community partners extend this support, investing in financial education, inclusion initiatives and accessible debt advice to build capability earlier and reduce long-term financial exclusion.
Turning to slide 30, and again building on Dave’s earlier comments, our banking licence gives us a clear and durable funding advantage.
Retail deposits provide us with stable, low-cost funding that many specialist lenders do not have access to.
Through 2025, as you’ve seen, our deposit costs reduced steadily.
This reflects a combination of lower interest rates and a shift towards lower cost savings products.
You can see this clearly in the funding mix on the slide.
This has allowed us to price competitively, protecting margins and improving overall funding efficiency.
We will continue to diversify and optimise our deposit base as we look ahead, expanding flexible savings products and using Snoop as a scalable distribution channel to support efficient, low- cost deposit-led growth.
In short, our funding advantage strengthens our margins, improves resilience across the cycle and underpins our ability to grow profitably over time.
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Coming back to Gateway on slide 31. It has been an underlying theme of my remarks as it is the catalyst that underpins our long-term growth and innovation agenda.
It is a fundamental reset to address the previous under investment in technology which this business was suffering from. It will enable us to operate as a modern, efficient and digital first bank and to scale.
Importantly, as you can see on the left-hand side, the majority of Gateway’s core capabilities have already been delivered, with clear progress across customer experience, control and resilience.
Gateway is now an operational platform with regular feature releases and improvements. For example, we have already launched a Chat channel for customers and are deploying Agentic AI agents to improve service quality and to reduce our costs.
Looking ahead, the last major components of Gateway complete in 2026, and the benefits then become structural - through fewer systems, streamlined processes and improved automation, which in turn means improved resilience, lower run-rate costs and better operating leverage.
In short, Gateway is the strategic enabler of our business, allowing us to complete those three pillars of Serve More, Serve Responsibly and Scale Profitably.
Let me pause there, as we will come back to expand further on our next 3-year strategic cycle at a future date. Our focus for now remains on disciplined execution and delivering 2026 as planned.
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With that, I will now hand back to Dave to talk through our guidance.
Dave Watts, Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Ian.
Slide 33 summarises the guidance we have laid out this morning.
Importantly we remain ‘on track’ to deliver our Statutory ROTE guidance of ‘low double digits’ for
2026 and ‘mid-teens’ for 2027.
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However, I would expect profits to be higher in the second half of this year, compared to the first half, as balances mature and interest income builds.
We now expect balances in 2026 to exceed £3.3bn and to increase to greater than £3.7bn by the end of 2027 as we balance growth, with the improved profits required, to deliver the higher
ROTEs we are targeting.
The balance base and the deliberate change in product mix, that Ian has talked about, including a greater proportion of Second Charge Mortgages, is expected to result in a continued reduction in NIM, to around 15.5% in 2026, and 14.5% in 2027.
Now that we have greater clarity on the cost of risk across our products, and to better align to how we assess the performance of the respective products, we have also introduced risk- adjusted margin guidance. This is expected to reduce, both in 2026 and in 2027, but remain above 9.5%, and 9% in the respective years. Again, this is driven by the increasing proportion of
Second Charge Mortgages.
Alongside income growth, continued cost discipline will be a key lever of the improving profit trajectory over the next two years. This will drive the cost: income ratio down from the ‘high 50s’ in 2025 to the ‘high 40s’ in 2026 and the ‘mid-40s’ in 2027.
Turning to slide 34, the bridge on the left-hand side provides an indicative view of how we expect to deliver ‘mid-teens’ ROTE by 2027.
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As you can see, risk adjusted income growth is a meaningful contributor, but continued cost take out is also a significant lever.
This will be achieved through ongoing transformation savings, including an additional 23 to
£28m from the completion of Gateway, and an ongoing focus on cost discipline driving further operational efficiencies across the Group.
At the same time, we will continue to invest in our business.
As set out on Slide 35, we will continue to deploy capital for growth in the near-term.
As I have mentioned, we are now comfortable operating with a CET1 ratio guidance of ‘greater than 14.5%’. This follows the capital optimisation transaction that we executed last year, the reducing risk profile of the business, and the outcome of the recent regulatory review of the
Group’s capital requirements.
The existing capital capacity, alongside the capital accretion we expect to generate from increased profits over the next two years, means that we are well positioned to deliver the growth we are targeting.
Having achieved what we said we would do in 2025, we remain ‘laser-focused’ on the execution of our plan, and are fully committed to delivering, sustainable, long-term value for our shareholders.
And with that, I will hand you back to Ian.
Investor Relations
Ian McLaughlin, Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Dave.
Turning to slide 37, let me close by bringing together our key messages from today.
Vanquis is built on a set of clear and durable strengths.
We operate in a large and structurally underserved UK market, with persistent demand for responsible credit.
Investor Relations
We have a customer proposition designed to help them to build better financial resilience.
Our banking licence provides a cost-effective, deposit-led funding model.
Gateway gives us a modern, efficient and scalable technology platform.
These strengths are brought together through a clear and practical strategy as I have described:
Serve More, Serve Responsibly, and Scale Profitably.
The strategic framework that we now have in place will allow us to build on the progress that you can see in these 2025 results. We can continue to grow sustainably, strengthening our franchise and delivering attractive long-term returns. That is how we will create long-term value for customers, colleagues and shareholders.
Thank you for listening. I will now hand back to the operator to open the line for questions.