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Beforepay Group Ltd
ASX:B4P

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Beforepay Group Ltd
ASX:B4P
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Price: 2.63 AUD -0.38% Market Closed
Market Cap: 130.2m AUD

Q4-2025 Earnings Call

AI Summary
Earnings Call on Jul 28, 2025

Record Profit: Beforepay delivered a record pre-tax profit of $2.4 million this quarter, up 76% year-on-year and more than 100% sequentially.

Strong Credit Outcomes: Net default rate dropped to an exceptionally low 0.56%, reflecting improvements in credit risk models, though management expects this to revert to more normal levels.

User Growth: Active user numbers increased 12% year-over-year to just under 270,000, with advances and average advance size also rising.

Carrington Labs Momentum: Significant commercial progress with Carrington Labs, including new paying U.S. clients and several platform partnerships.

Solid Balance Sheet: Equity stands at $40.3 million and cash at $19.2 million, with ample available funding and a new $7.5 million revolver for greater flexibility.

Positive Outlook: Core trading is in line with expectations; management remains confident about future growth in FY '26 and beyond.

Profitability

The company reported a record quarterly profit before tax of $2.4 million, representing a 76% increase over the same period last year and more than doubling the previous quarter. This performance was attributed to strong credit outcomes, disciplined cost management, and top-line growth, with most of the profit coming from the core Pay Advance product.

Credit Performance

The net default rate fell sharply to 0.56%, down from 1.24% a year ago and 1.26% last quarter. Management credits ongoing enhancements to credit risk models and better limit management, but cautioned that this low rate is unsustainably low and should normalize in future periods.

User and Loan Growth

Active users grew by 12% year-on-year to nearly 270,000. The number of advances increased 13% to 539,000 compared to the previous quarter, and average advance size rose 4% to $390. Quarterly advances reached $210 million, benefitting from optimized performance marketing.

Carrington Labs

Carrington Labs showed strong commercial momentum, signing new paying clients in the U.S.—including a bank and a specialty lender—and launching partnerships with several decisioning and origination platforms. The pipeline is described as very full, with a diverse mix of prospective clients mainly in the U.S. Management expects the business to be high-margin and strategically significant over time, but current revenue is not yet material to the group.

Funding and Balance Sheet

Beforepay maintains a strong balance sheet, with $40.3 million in equity and $19.2 million in cash. The company has set up a $7.5 million revolver within its existing $55 million debt facility, providing more funding flexibility and enabling greater use of excess cash to grow the loan book. Drawn debt stands at $31 million, with $24 million undrawn.

Personal Loans

Personal loans are still in early phases, with volumes and eligibility increasing among the existing user base. While not yet material to group results, management is positive about the direction and continues to develop operational and credit processes for this product.

AI and Automation

AI is used extensively, especially in risk modeling and coding efficiency, but the company relies on deterministic processes for core lending to ensure reliability. Management sees AI as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for mission-critical automation, and claims no direct competitors offering a product like Carrington Labs.

Guidance and Outlook

Trading so far in the current quarter is in line with expectations, with some seasonal softness expected in Q1 due to tax refunds. Management remains confident in both the core business and Carrington Labs, expecting further transformation and growth in FY '26 and FY '27.

Profit Before Tax
$2.4 million
Change: Up 76% YoY and over 100% QoQ.
Net Defaults
0.56%
Change: Down from 1.24% YoY and 1.26% QoQ.
Guidance: Expected to revert to more normal levels in coming periods.
Quarterly Advances
$210 million
No Additional Information
Active Users
Just under 270,000
Change: Up 12% YoY.
Number of Advances
539,000
Change: Up 13% QoQ (from 516,000).
Average Advance Size
$390
Change: Up 4%.
Net Transaction Margin
$7.7 million or 3.68%
Change: Up 48% YoY.
Operating Expenses
$5 million
Change: Up from $4.4 million QoQ.
Equity
$40.3 million
No Additional Information
Cash Position
$19.2 million
No Additional Information
Free Cash Flow (Full Year)
$6 million
No Additional Information
Debt Facility Drawn
$31 million
No Additional Information
Undrawn Debt Facility
$24 million
No Additional Information
Profit Before Tax
$2.4 million
Change: Up 76% YoY and over 100% QoQ.
Net Defaults
0.56%
Change: Down from 1.24% YoY and 1.26% QoQ.
Guidance: Expected to revert to more normal levels in coming periods.
Quarterly Advances
$210 million
No Additional Information
Active Users
Just under 270,000
Change: Up 12% YoY.
Number of Advances
539,000
Change: Up 13% QoQ (from 516,000).
Average Advance Size
$390
Change: Up 4%.
Net Transaction Margin
$7.7 million or 3.68%
Change: Up 48% YoY.
Operating Expenses
$5 million
Change: Up from $4.4 million QoQ.
Equity
$40.3 million
No Additional Information
Cash Position
$19.2 million
No Additional Information
Free Cash Flow (Full Year)
$6 million
No Additional Information
Debt Facility Drawn
$31 million
No Additional Information
Undrawn Debt Facility
$24 million
No Additional Information

Earnings Call Transcript

Transcript
from 0
D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. Good morning, and welcome to the Beforepay Fourth Quarter '25 Investor Webinar. My name is Danny Younis, and I handle Investor Relations for Beforepay. With me this morning, we have the CEO of Beforepay, Jamie Twiss; and the Interim CFO, Shreya Prakash. Before I hand over to Jamie, just to note that we will be having a Q&A session at the end. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to hand the webinar over to Jamie. Please go ahead.

J
James Twiss
executive

Thank you, Danny, and good morning, everybody. Thank you all for joining us. As Danny said, I'm Jamie Twiss, I'm the CEO of Beforepay Group. Shreya Prakash is our Interim CFO. We -- as many of you know, we have a permanent CFO joining us in mid-August, and Shreya has been looking after the function in the interim. As Danny said, I'll start off with a few highlights. Shreya will take us through some of the numbers, and then we'll go to Q&A. And as Danny said, you can put in your questions at any time, and we'll go through as many as we have time for.

So first of all, I think we've had a succession of very strong quarters in a row, as most of you would be aware. And I think this was a very remarkable extension of that strong momentum. And -- as again, those of you who have seen the result, the ASX announcement that came out will know that it was a very, very strong quarter. We -- 2 particular highlights. We delivered a record profit, record by a wide margin in the quarter, profit before tax of $2.4 million. That's a remarkable number. And so many different things contributed to it, really remarkable credit outcomes as a result of the work in the IP that we continue to do around our risk modeling and how we think about credit and how we think about lending more broadly. But at the same time, also good cost control, good top line growth. So very, very pleased with that profit outcome.

If you'd ask me 2 years ago, if we would be at $2.4 million profit before tax in 1 quarter, I would have said that, that is well beyond the realm of possibility. So a very, very strong quarter in terms of profit. And I think it's worth noting not because of any particular outlier or surprise, just strong performance across all areas of the business. I think the program of work that's been underway for the last several years, just over the last several quarters, we've seen all of the benefits of that falling into place. And I think this quarter just really shows how powerful our model is and all of those things come together.

So very strong profit outcome. And then the other real standout of the quarter for us was the tremendous progress on Carrington Labs. And I'll talk a bit more about that at the end in terms of our growth initiatives and where we're at and where to from here. But without stealing too much of Shreya's thunder about the strength of these results, Shreya, please.

S
Shreya Prakash
executive

Thanks, Jamie. Firstly, I'd just like to echo what you said in that we are extremely pleased to be presenting these results today. It's been one of our strongest quarters to date and definitely a great way to have ended the year. Some of the key highlights from quarter 4 FY '25 were, firstly, as Jamie mentioned, record net profit before tax of $2.4 million. Now that's up 76% from the comparable period last year and over 100% from the previous quarter. Now this really is a reflection of strong top line growth as well as strong -- and continued profit and margin discipline.

Operationally, we saw strong fundamentals across the board. We had quarterly advances of $210 million, and this was a function of a number of different things, including optimized performance marketing campaigns, and we've seen good traction off the back of it. So we had a 12% year-on-year increase in our active user numbers, just shy of 270,000, a 13% increase in our number of advances to 539,000 compared to 516,000 in the previous quarter as well as a 4% increase in our average advance size to $390. The key metric that stood out, however, was our net defaults of 0.56%. Now that's improved quite significantly from last year, where we had 1.24% net defaults and 1.26% in the prior quarter.

Now while this definitely reflects continued improvements and enhancements to the credit risk model as well as better limit management and good recoveries, we do note that this is an exceptionally low number, and we expect that to revert back to normal levels in the coming periods. Strong volumes and good credit performance has given us a net transaction margin of $7.7 million or 3.68%, and that reflects a 48% increase year-on-year. On the cost front, our operating expenses came in at $5 million compared to $4.4 million in the previous quarter. And this reflects continued operating leverage as well as targeted investments in our growth and strategic initiatives. Our business continues to rest on a very strong balance sheet. We had an equity position of $40.3 million and a cash position of $19.2 million. And as we've mentioned previously as well, our total cash really reflects cash at bank of $14 million and cash in our third-party settlement accounts of $5.2 million.

Now you will see a slight decrease in our cash balance, and that really is the setup of our $7.5 million revolver facility within our existing $55 million debt facility. Now what this really offers us is more flexibility with our funding and enables us to deploy excess cash when that becomes available to us. It also means that we're working our cash harder, not just to fund BAU expenses, but also to grow the loan book. So as of today, our drawn balance on the debt facility is about $31 million and the undrawn portion is $24 million, and that reflects good availability of funding in order to continue our growth momentum. To sum up before I pass it back to Jamie, I think we've had an excellent quarter, and it's been a great way to cap off what's been a transformative year for the business, and we continue to fire on all cylinders. Back to you, Jamie.

J
James Twiss
executive

Thanks, Ray. So as Shreya said, it has -- FY '25 was a transformative year for our business. And we expect FY '26 and FY '27 to also be transformative years. The business continues to develop and grow and improve at a rapid rate. If I think about where we are now with our strategic growth initiatives that we've been talking about over the course of the last several quarters. On the personal loan side, so we continue to issue those larger, longer duration loans. I think we're pleased with how that's going. We continue to work on the operational elements of how that goes. We continue to think about the credit very carefully. And at the right time, we'll start to scale that up further.

We have increased the eligibility within our existing user base. We have increased the volumes of originations. It's not yet material to the overall group, but we're very pleased with the progress and direction of travel there. And then as I mentioned at the beginning, Carrington Labs, I think, has really kind of burst out the other end of that sales pipeline that I've been talking about for the last few quarters. As many of you will recall, we've been saying for several months now that we feel very good about the pipeline, and we would make announcements when we have things to announce. And that time is now.

So in the quarter, we announced a new paying client and -- which is a U.S. bank. So fantastic to have an announced banking client based in the U.S. And then a few days after the end of the quarter, we also announced an additional paying client, a specialty lender also out of the U.S. We also announced a number of partnerships with decisioning platforms and origination platforms. So I think what we've seen is a lot of the work that we've been doing over the last several months, we're seeing those start to sign and announce at this point. And as you'd imagine, we're in the process of getting those clients up and running and live, getting those partnerships embedded in those integrations done. And at the same time, continuing to be very active in terms of moving other prospects to the pipeline and indeed generating new opportunities.

So very pleased with where Carrington Labs is at from a commercial momentum standpoint. Also very pleased with the work we continue to do on the product side. Carrington Labs, as many of you know, the product is based on that same IP and capability and credit risk management and skill that we have coming out of that -- the core Beforepay business. And that continues to go from strength to strength, and we are always working on that and pushing the boundaries to do more and to do better there. In addition, obviously, we continue to build out the product side of the Carrington Labs product in terms of how we make that available to clients, standing up capabilities in the U.S. for the U.S. clients there, getting our APIs up and running properly. So the product development side of that has also been very promising.

Looking forward, I think in the core Pay Advance business, as we note in the announcement, trading to date has been -- this quarter has been in line with expectations. As those of you who have been on the journey with us for a few years would know, Q1 of each financial year does tend to be slightly subdued demand off the back of people getting their tax refunds and just kind of the seasonal shape of the economy. But we don't see anything that gives us any particular cause for concern in terms of that core trading to date. I think personal loans will continue to move forward with that as we have been doing. And then Carrington Labs, the nature of the business means that it's a bit unpredictable as to when we will have something to announce given that some -- that the timing and the pace at which prospects move through the funnel can be a bit unpredictable. But we continue to feel very, very confident about the prospects of that business.

And as those of you who have been watching the business for a while would have heard me say, we wouldn't be talking about it nearly this much if we didn't feel that it was a very, very promising opportunity and that we are well set up for success. So I think we've had a fantastic year. We're looking forward to a great FY '26. I do want to say before we close and move to questions, I do want to thank Shreya for stepping into the interim CFO role. She's done a fantastic job at a busy time of year for the finance function. And so I'm grateful for that. And more broadly, of course, the team continues to work very, very hard. It is a small team. We are writing an average of about 40,000 advances every week with a team of about 50 people. So the efforts and the hard work that go in keeping everything moving forward and delivering the kind of successes that we've seen in recent quarters and particularly this quarter, I'm very grateful for all of that as well. And with that, let's -- very happy to take some questions.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Thank you, Jamie and Shreya. So as Jamie said, we will now move to the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]. We do have a few questions coming through. and I'll try to pull them where they overlap. But the first 2 questions are from Larry Gandler at Shaw and Partners. The first question is around the full year free cash flow number, okay? So there's a few numbers here that I'm going to give you. So on Larry's numbers, Beforepay income around $40 million, less payments of suppliers at $7.5 million, less funding $4.5 million, less losses of $8.5 million, less CapEx of $3.5 million, comes up with a free cash flow number of about $6 million. Can you please reconcile? Yes.

J
James Twiss
executive

So I'm not sure what the right -- what -- you mean the reconciliation back to the profit number?

D
Danny Younis
executive

No, in terms of what that free cash flow number is, is $6 million around the right number?

S
Shreya Prakash
executive

Yes.

J
James Twiss
executive

Shreya?

S
Shreya Prakash
executive

Yes. That would be about right. So Larry is exactly right in saying that if we take our cash position from sort of end of last year, we deduct all those little things that does get us to a $6 million movement in our free cash flows, yes.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Yes, great, fantastic. Thank you.

J
James Twiss
executive

Factors could be a bit difficult to work out. One of them is just the accounting treatment of some of the share-based staff incentives, which are noncash. And those can move around a little bit and it's just accounting issues. The other thing that depending on what measure you're looking at, at what time, the timing of when cash moves between the settlement account, what we call our lockbox account and the bank account and which cash measure you're looking at. So those can swing those around. But I think the -- yes, Larry, I think the core of how you're thinking about it is correct.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. The next question from Larry is around net losses. And as expected, there's a couple of questions about this. Are the net losses in fourth quarter an anomaly? Or is this low level of losses within expectations of the risk model for a June quarter?

J
James Twiss
executive

So let me think about how to answer that. I think if the question is, do we think that 56 basis points of net defaults is going to be the go-forward number. I think as Shreya said, I don't think so, and there are a couple of reasons for that. There wasn't any particular anomaly. It wasn't as if we had some big lumpy thing that came through or change provisioning or a big write-back or anything like that, it was simply the result of, I think, really sort of like tight high-quality credit assessment with some recoveries as well, these are net figures as well. So there's no kind of like surprise or kind of one-off flavor to it.

It is strong for a Q4 result. Q4 is often kind of the most normal quarter for various reasons. So I do think in that respect, it's probably, I don't want to say a one-off because that implies that something unusual happen that wouldn't be repeated. I will say that everything kind of went very, very well this quarter. So I think we're combining what continue to be, I think, a pretty fundamentally distinctive credit analytics capability that flows through into the broader model and lending system. So you're combining that, I think, very significant strength, which continues to improve and then just kind of things that went well this quarter as well.

The other thing I would say on that front is, as many of you would have heard me say, the way we think about -- we don't target a specific default rates. We think about as each customer comes before us for in advance, what is subject to, obviously, eligibility, regulation, the values test that we do, what's helpful to the customers, subject to those various constraints, we will make an offer or not and set a limit based on how we calculate the value maximizing decision in that moment of time. And so what that means in practice is we will think about the propensity for that customer to default and to accept or not accept the loan at different potential limits we could put in front of them, and we will balance that revenue, that limit, that ability to kind of put money responsibly in the hands of consumers in a way that generates value for us with the default risk and its elasticity with respect to that limit change.

That will unfold, however, it folds based on our elasticity modeling on a case-by-case basis. And the net default rate will be largely an output of that process. When the default rate falls down to 50 as low as it has fallen this quarter, that probably means the model has improved faster than we anticipated, and it's time for us to go back and look at that limit balance of that limit setting process and reassess. So in some ways, I know this sounds odd, it's almost too low a number, and it means that we should have actually managed our limit matrices a bit differently.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Thanks, Jamie. There is a follow-up question from another investor in regards to the default rate, but I think you've actually answered it. But I'll just -- I'll take a bit out of it just in case Jamie, you wanted to add anything else. Why do you say it will likely revert back to normal levels?

J
James Twiss
executive

Yes. And Danny, as you should know, nothing pleases me more than talking about data driven credit analytics. So the more questions we can get on that, the better, it would be great, I've enjoyed a great deal. So I think there are 2 elements. One is just -- again, the core capability is strong now and will continue to be strong and get stronger over time. So that doesn't revert to that kind of the skills and the systems and the software and the data that we have, that continues to strengthen. Again, things just did break right for us in all sorts of ways this quarter. And I think we can't always expect that each one of those things will go as well as it did.

Then the perhaps slightly bigger point is at that level, I almost look at that and think, geez, we probably should have done the limit review a bit differently, and we should probably expedite the next one or something like that. So -- we do everything judiciously. We won't do anything half baked, but we will go back and look at that limit setting process in light of that number and think about whether we want to make any adjustments there.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. The next question is around net profit before tax. Thanks for another great quarter. Am I right to say all of the NPBT of $2.4 million for this quarter comes from the Pay Advance product only?

J
James Twiss
executive

It's not 100%, but the very significant majority, yes.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. Now we've got several questions around Carrington Labs. So I'll do them separately. So the first one is, congratulations on the progress. Can you comment on the Carrington Labs pipeline and the nature of the prospective customers in the future?

J
James Twiss
executive

Yes. I think -- so I'd say the pipeline is -- it's plenty full -- sorry, it is full, plenty, full. If I think about where -- if I think about how the pipeline works, let me start there. The marginal effort for us in starting a conversation, having the first meeting, having a second meeting, that's not too difficult. It then -- when it progresses, then that's when we start moving towards a proof of concept with the clients, different clients do different ways, but assume there's going to be some sort of pilot or proof of concept. And that becomes more effort intensive on our part, not so much because of the model training.

And as we've said, the Carrington Labs model training pipeline is very heavily automated. But partially because of the data ingestion, you've got to work out, hang on how does -- are these dates month, day, year, or day, month, year in the American style. You've got to do that sort of stuff. You've got to actually physically move the data from them to us. And actually, probably the most time-consuming part is just the papering it up, right? So working out the NDA and kind of like making sure from their policy standpoint, they can transfer the anonymized data to us and so on. So the top of the pipeline, I think, is -- I mean, if anything, over full. We have quite a lot of conversations there.

And then basically, for any given client, they may proceed faster or slower or not at all through that pipeline. But for us, what we're always thinking about is the capacity to do that heavier lifting in that sort of middle and bottom of the funnel. So right now, the top, I'd say is very full, if anything, too full. In the middle, I think we're doing about as much work as we can and think how can we expand that capacity and get kind of the right people and more people on board to help us move clients further through that. So there's lots in there.

In terms of who's in there, let me start by saying, again, you never know for any individual client, will it progress, will it progress from the top, middle, middle to bottom? Will it actually get signed? Things fall over for all sorts of reasons. Some folks move very, very quickly, some folks move very slowly. So it's hard to kind of say with too much confidence like, oh, the next 3 to come out will be like this or like that. If I think about who's in the pipeline right now that is closer to the potentially coming out the other end. I think there are a number -- again, mostly U.S. -- not entirely U.S. clients, but mostly. Again, that continues to be the priority market. I'd say it's a mixture of some, what I call sort of specialty lenders, a fair number of fintechs. There certainly are banks in there. There are professional service firms of various stripes.

So it's a pretty diverse pipeline. I think it's more a question of who can actually -- the biggest obstacle actually is that sort of their internal decision-making process, kind of like getting the deal negotiated, the lawyers kind of ticking and tying on the agreements and so on. So again, I don't know what the next 3 deals will look like, but it's a pretty broadly diverse pipeline in terms of who's in there right now.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Thanks, Jamie. That was very comprehensive. And on the similar light, there's a question that sort of probes a little bit deeper. So congratulations on a fantastic result. Carrington Labs, clearly gaining momentum. It seems one of the most exciting parts of the business. Can you outline how it's going to play out in terms of the opportunity, i.e., addressable market size, execution milestones and what a high conviction versus more conservative outcome might look like for this facet of the business?

J
James Twiss
executive

Yes. So let me -- there are probably parts of that, that I can kind of give a fuller answer to than others. So in terms of addressable market, I think really, we can provide a pretty fundamental core capability to almost any lender. There's a minimum efficient scale where it just doesn't make much sense. There are some lenders who for various reasons, it is not the right thing for them. And then obviously, kind of -- it's a big world we have to get out there. But there are thousands of banks in the U.S. and thousands more globally and then thousands of nonbank lenders. And I think the opportunity, if we ever got anywhere near the point where the opportunity was constrained by the size of the market, then we -- that would be an unbelievable success. I mean if you think about kind of like the number of clients that would imply, it would be just an amazing, amazing outcome if we ever had to really worry about the TAM. The TAM is very significant.

If I think about kind of the last bit of your question in terms of like how big does it get in what way? I'd start by saying we don't put out forecasts. And I think particularly in the case of Carrington Labs, it is quite difficult to say some of the things we're looking at might sign soon or might sign much, much, much later or might never sign. I mean it's very difficult to be too definitive about that. I guess, I think given the traction that we've got, I think the comments that we've made repeatedly about our level of confidence in the expected value of the current pipeline, we do think it will be pretty material and meaningful to the group in over the long to medium term. Danny, did I miss -- the question had a few different parts so much as I...

D
Danny Younis
executive

Yes. And I think you actually sort of covered it. It was about the -- what a high-level view looks like versus a conservative view in terms of the potential of the opportunity.

J
James Twiss
executive

Yes. I think it's a bit difficult to say, both in terms of not giving a forecast, but also in terms of -- we genuinely don't know kind of what the next quarter will look like and which ones will pop when and so on. Over the very long term, if it is sort of successful and anywhere near the scale where TAM becomes relevant, then I think any back of the envelope math you would do making any reasonable assumptions would show tremendous upside. So use whatever total lender number you like, use whatever kind of penetration share, like any assumptions you make would show that as an enormous success, yes.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Thank you. Okay. I'm pulling the next 3 questions because they're all around as expected, revenue contribution and profitability of Carrington Labs. So in general, the question, Jamie, is, can you maybe provide a high-level view of the expected revenue from Carrington Labs as well as the business profitability in the near term?

J
James Twiss
executive

So the near-term part -- so starting with the second part of the question, the near-term makes a bit tricky because, again, Will we have something big kind of kicking off soon that we haven't talked about yet? I genuinely don't know. I don't know how long some of these conversations will take and then the process event of onboarding the client getting revenue flowing. I think in terms of profitability from a margin standpoint, I can say that it's a fairly high-margin business. So it is volume -- it's a SaaS product, it's volume-based is the way we tend to price it.

And the marginal cost, it's not the sort of thing where you have a big operational team supporting the process day-to-day, I mean it's a software business. So we do expect that it will be fairly high margin. The incremental OpEx really is more about getting more people to help with the sales process and sales funnel. And you can always do more work on the product as a whole, but the variable costs associated with an incremental client are not all that high. So we do expect it to be reason -- we do expect the underlying unit economics to be very attractive.

I don't think I really have a comment in terms of the size of the revenue. I think if it gets -- you got -- if and when it gets to the point where it's material enough to the overall group that we think it is necessary to break that out, then of course, we would do so. As you can imagine, we've had a handful of announcements so far. And on reasonable assumptions, you probably assume that's not yet material to the group. So we do think that it's got a very bright future over a period of time, but we don't have any particular comment on revenue right now.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. And the flip side to revenue is around costs. So there's a couple of questions here. So I'll just ask it in one question. So is Carrington Labs generating enough cash flow to fund its own growth? And how do you plan on funding its future growth?

J
James Twiss
executive

Yes. So the nice thing about Carrington Labs is that unlike the lending side of the business, it's not capital intensive. So we do -- so let's assume the Carrington Labs continues to go very well, and let's say we continue to add clients and get momentum and so on. We would be adding another data scientist here, maybe kind of a client relationship person there, maybe sort of a sales engineer there, but it's not the case that you need to kind of be going back to the well to raise enormous sums of money in order to be able to fund additional disbursements or anything like that. So obviously, as we always do, we will make decisions off the back of the results we're seeing at the time. I don't think there's an enormous cost constraint right now. Right now, the constraint is really kind of like -- the number of people who can do this work well is very, very limited. I mean, really anywhere in the world.

And so the constraint is kind of finding those people who can help us move even faster on the product and then just sort of the natural sales cycle and folks getting stuff documented. But I don't anticipate that Carrington Labs growth will be hugely capped by sort of a funding challenge of the best I think.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. We're down to the last 2 questions. [Operator Instructions] Okay. So the second last question at the moment is around the financing of the business, noting there has been a $7.5 million debt paydown. What will be the funding mix look like going forward? And how much capital do you expect the personal loan product will need?

J
James Twiss
executive

Why don't I start with that and then, Shreya, feel free to jump in. So I think if we're thinking specifically about the funding of the balance sheet and figure the loan book, I think the question is spot on that makes sense to think about the Pay Advance business and the personal loan business separately. On the Pay Advance side, I think it's a short duration product. And obviously, the average advances are relatively small. So the book is not terribly large. And I think we have an existing facility with ample capacity. I think if and when we fill that up, that would be a good problem to have. I think we'll be able to find more funding existing facility, we've currently drawn about $31 million, I think you said. We've got capacity of $55 million. And I think if we needed to add another lender, potentially expand extend that or expand it, I think we would be able to do so.

On the personal loan side, I think that can be significantly more capital intensive. On the debt side, I think at some point, you would expect the personal loan product to potentially quite significantly outstrip that $55 million facility. And of course, we would have to then arrange something else, whether that's an expansion or an addition or a different way of thinking about it. Of course, we would need the funding to be able to provide that. I think it goes without saying that as highly data-driven and analytic people, we will make sure that any changes to the funding mix are consistent with creating value through the unit economics of the product. So I don't think it will be something that should be a source of concern. We wouldn't put in place funding that was costly past the point where the product was value accretive to us.

It's very likely that any additional debt funding will have an equity element to it. I think the business is currently profitable at a rate where we've actually, if anything, as shown by the $7.5 million paydown, have been able to overfund those equity slices pretty significantly. If that changed over time, then we would make the kind of value-creating decision when we got there based on the cost of capital and the returns in front of us. But as Shreya said, we are quite focused on working the existing capital base pretty hard, and we're very cognizant of shareholder value. And I think we feel very comfortable that we would make a shareholder value maximizing decision at the time based on the different sources of funds, the cost of those funds and the economics of the opportunity in front of us.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. And the last question, it's actually 2, but they're both on AI. So it will be one question. So are advances in AI allowing you to further automate business processes and reduce OpEx? How do you think this will pan out in the future? And are you seeing new competitors coming into Carrington Labs space?

J
James Twiss
executive

Yes, both interesting questions. So let me take them each in turn. So I think with AI, and this might be a slightly broader question than the answer to the question. So our general approach is we use quite a bit of AI in different areas. I think I wouldn't advise any financial services business to have AI be the primary tool for automation. The reason being that our core lending processes, in particular, are completely fault intolerant. So we don't want something that's 99% or 99.9% correct, but could be a bit unpredictable. So we have a very heavily automated lending process.

So we average about 6,000 loans a day. Most of those -- the vast majority of those have no human interaction whatsoever. But we do that through more traditional deterministic statistical approaches on the risk assessment side, and we do that through deterministic code on the automation side. Now AI helps us build those systems much more quickly, both on the risk modeling side and in terms of writing code and it provides a range of other benefits as well. So we are significant users of it, as you mentioned, but we do so in a very kind of risk-aware way to avoid creating uncertainty or a lack of guardrails or additional risk in the business.

In terms of competitors in the Carrington Labs space, it's -- so it goes -- the space that we're in goes by different names in different markets. Often in the U.S., they talk about alternative data, credit risk models and talk about cash flow underwriting. There are a number of companies that are kind of -- sort of in a similar space. So I wouldn't view any -- I don't think we view any of them as sort of direct competitors of what we do. If you think about the core of Carrington Labs, it's the ability to take a wide range of disparate data sets, build a tailored machine learning-driven model specific to a client's own lending experience, product unit economics and so on and flow that through to a loan configuration and pricing recommendations.

There's still nobody else that we're aware of doing that work. There are perhaps consulting firms that could do it on a custom basis, but it will be a very, very different proposition with very different economics. There are other folks doing little pieces of that. The credit bureaus do have kind of transaction-based scores. I think there are -- in some cases, that will be a fine solution for a client. There are other folks doing kind of this piece or that piece. I think what we find the biggest constraints to growth from the client side, the biggest constraint is probably that operational capacity, but from the client side, the biggest constraint is not that they're looking at a competitor.

In fact, I don't think we've ever been in a kind of competitive situation in any of these conversations. The biggest obstacle to them sort of getting their head around is different and better way of doing things, but kind of getting their head around the change management and then their own internal decision-making processes. So we're never complacent about competition, but we have not yet seen it as a factor that's had a meaningful impact on our ability to grow the business.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Okay. There are no further questions. So that concludes the Q&A section. So I'll hand over back to Jamie for any closing remarks.

J
James Twiss
executive

Well, I'll just finish where I started, which is to say thank you all for joining us today. And thank you, in particular, I know many of you have been on this journey with us for quite some time. And obviously, the company is right around 6 years old. We've been public for about 3.5 years. And for many of you who have been investors for quite a while, it is enormously gratifying to be able to be consistently delivering these kind of results for you. So we're grateful to all of you, whether you joined us on the journey when the market opened 9 minutes ago or going back to the very earliest funding rounds.

Thank you for your support. We're really pleased with how the business is performing for you, and we are grateful that you're on this journey with us. We look forward to seeing you all at the full year results in about a month.

D
Danny Younis
executive

Thank you very much. You may all now disconnect. Thanks.

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