Plenti Group reported a remarkable fourth quarter, achieving $407 million in loan originations, marking a 42% year-over-year increase. Their loan book now stands at $2.5 billion, up 19%. The company's profitability has surged, with a full-year cash NPAT of $13.8 million, reflecting a 126% growth. Auto loans grew by 35%, renewables loans by 27%, and personal loans by 58%. Looking ahead, they anticipate increased contributions from their NAB partnership. Overall, Plenti's strong performance illustrates solid operational efficiency and growth potential as they focus on scaling their business.
Plenti Group Limited recently held its Fourth Quarter FY '25 Results Presentation, with CEO Adam Bennett and CFO Miles Drury highlighting a robust quarter and year overall. Bennett emphasized the company's commitment to engaging with shareholders more closely, which is vital in maintaining transparency and trust. The results presented were marked by significant achievements across key performance indicators, reflecting the hard work of the Plenti team.
The standout achievement this quarter was in loan origination, where Plenti wrote an impressive $407 million in loans, surpassing previous quarterly records by 42% year-on-year and 6% sequentially. This remarkable growth indicates the potential for continued expansion within their core business, as the total loan book now stands at $2.5 billion, 19% higher than the previous corresponding period (pcp) and 6% more than the prior quarter.
The growth in loan originations can be attributed to all three business verticals: Auto, Renewables, and Personal loans. Auto loan originations reached $195 million, a 35% increase from pcp. The Renewables sector saw $52 million in loan originations, up 27% pcp, while Personal loans surged to $160 million, representing a 58% growth year-on-year. The company leveraged its competitive pricing and service excellence to drive these results.
For the full fiscal year, Plenti reported a cash Net Profit After Tax (NPAT) of $13.8 million, representing a remarkable 126% growth compared to the previous year. The growth momentum was evident in both halves of the fiscal year, with NPAT increasing from $5.5 million in the first half to $8.3 million in the second. This profitability signals how effectively Plenti has managed to balance loan growth, credit performance, and operational efficiencies.
Looking forward, Plenti aims to enhance its partnership with NAB, particularly through the NAB Auto by Plenti product. Executives expressed optimism about increasing contributions from this partnership to future loan origination numbers. The company is also focused on utilizing strategic technology advancements to improve customer engagement and expand their market reach, especially in the electric vehicle (EV) loan segment.
During a Q&A session, CFO Miles Drury addressed potential growth constraints by discussing capital management strategies that maximize loan book expansion while maintaining a flexible and well-structured balance sheet. Recent successes in securing funding through auto asset-backed securities (ABS) demonstrate both the appetite for Plenti's financial products and the company’s adaptability in volatile conditions.
As part of its commitment to engaging with shareholders, Plenti plans to provide more detailed updates on its growth trajectory and strategic plans in their upcoming full-year results announcement scheduled for May 21. Discussions regarding dividends were also brought up, with current management focused on reinvesting profits for growth before considering dividend payments.
In summary, Plenti Group Ltd's Q4 results showcase strong loan origination, record profitability, and strategic growth plans. The leadership's focus on operational efficiency, partnership expansion, and technology adoption positions the company favorably within the competitive lending landscape. Their financial health and growth trajectory suggest significant potential for shareholder value in the years to come.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Plenti Group Limited's Fourth Quarter FY '25 Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Today's presenters are Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer; and Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer. [Operator Instructions] We will prioritize questions that half broad relevance to all our shareholders. If your question is not selected during the call, we encourage you to e-mail as directly at shareholders@plenti.com.au, and we will respond to you directly.
I will now hand over to Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer. Go ahead, Adam.
Thanks, Glen, and good morning, and thanks for joining the call. It's great to meet with you, our shareholders, to discuss Plenti's Q4 results for the period ending 31st of March 2025. We've not previously held shareholder calls for quarterly results, but we have a focus for the coming years to increase engagement with our shareholders. And so we're introducing these calls as part of that program.
I'm delighted to be sharing such a great set of results, and I know that the extended Plenti team have worked extremely hard on all fronts to deliver them. Since joining Plenti last July, I've been continually impressed with the caliber and energy of our people and their collective ambition for our company.
I'm here with Miles Drury, our CFO, and our plan today is to walk you through the results and then make sure there's plenty of time for some questions. This is a fantastic and balanced set of results that shows an improvement against every measure. It demonstrates the we're making very solid progress on our goal to build Australia's best lender based on speed, service, reliability and value. Certainly for me, the highlight is our loan origination growth. We wrote $407 million in loans during the quarter, exceeding all previous quarter records.
The fourth quarter is typically seasonally weaker due to the January holidays and February being a short month. So I was very pleased to see that Q4 was 42% above pcp and 6% above the prior quarter. We also had Cyclone Alfred in there, which did impact our lending volumes for a week. So I was really impressed by the team's ability to keep working through that and deliver great results. This is exceptional growth but takes our loan book to $2.5 billion which is 19% above pcp and 6% above the prior quarter. This once again demonstrates the when we have everything working well together, including our loan origination, fulfillment efficiency, technology and credit performance, we can deliver profitable growth for you, our shareholders.
It also shows there's significant growth potential in our core business, and that this will also be complemented by partnership with NAB during the coming financial year. As we announced to the market last September, when we launched our NAB Auto by Plenti product, we thought volumes for Q4 would be moderate. We've seen some good growth in March. And looking ahead, we now anticipate that NAB volumes will become a more meaningful contributor to our quarterly loan origination numbers.
Let me add some color to our results announcement. All 3 verticals have contributed to these results. Auto loan originations were $195 million, up 35% on pcp and broadly consistent with the prior quarter. This was a strong performance in a competitive market. We've leveraged our well-priced product and strong service proposition, and we're continuing to differentiate our offering.
You may also recall that we had a Tesla subvention offer, which really supported the Q3 result and showed how we can use or technology offering to differentiate Plenti and work closely with partners. While this continued in Q4, it contributed a fair bit less this quarter, but that was offset by growth in the other areas of our auto offering, which really highlights to me the value of having diverse distribution channels to market.
Renewables loan originations were $52 million, up 27% pcp and 6% on prior quarter. And I'm extremely pleased with the momentum in that part of our business as we once again build on the success of our GreenConnect platform and our key relationships to drive significant growth. GreenConnect facilitated a record number of home battery installations, and we see this as a strong source of ongoing competitive advantage for us. Personal loan originations were up to $160 million, up 58% pcp and 14% on prior quarter.
I'm extremely pleased with the work that the team have done in this vertical to drive increased volumes and growth. We're seeing strong demand, and the ongoing improvements to our proprietary technology platform continues to make our customer journey fast, simple and easy. We're also seeing greater volumes of straight-through processing, delivering a great experience to our customers and reducing our cost of fulfillment.
And something we've not historically been as good as we'd like to is repeat lending to existing customers. So while we still have some work to do, we launched some new technology in the period to drive better outcomes, and we're already seeing some good results from this work. Margins have remained broadly stable through the quarter as we've grown our loan book.
I'll now pass to Miles to speak to credit funding and some other elements.
Thanks so much, Adam. And maybe at the outset just to say how pleased I am to be presenting these results today. It was a quarter or a half -- a quarter where we saw a record after record across a lot of the teams. So my congratulations again to all the team for the effort they put in.
Just turning to credit. Credit has definitely been one of the pleasing aspects of the year so far, and Q4 was no exception as regard with the result of 1.16%. That was slightly up on the Q3 result, but that's seasonally a lower result or a lower loss period, and so it shows ongoing stable position for our credit results.
Even drilling into the detail a little bit more when I look at it at a product level, this was very stable across all of our products and delivering the types of results that we would expect given the credit settings in the business.
And we've consistently talked to the strength of the Australian consumer and their credit over the last little while. And obviously, you've had interest rates flat for a period then coming down. Wages are still being going up. And from the middle of last year, we had the Stage 3 tax cuts, and all of that are definitely contributing to consumer credit and reflected in our stable loss numbers.
Unrealized losses are obviously a backward-looking metric whereas arrears give you a bit of a view of what's coming down the pipe. And in that regard, there's also been slight upside versus our expectations. As you'll see in the release, 90 days arrears came down slightly at the end of the quarter versus the end of December. I mean our 30-day arrears were also down a little bit, which all speaks to that pretty solid consumer credit picture.
Certainly, unemployment levels remain very, very strong across the economy, and there's no doubt that, that is contributing to borrower repayments and supporting credit from us and other lenders' perspective.
I think it will be remiss just to note that given the strong origination momentum we've got and therefore, the faster loan book growth that we're delivering, this does tend to flatten your credit numbers a little bit. The denominator is growing a lot with more new loans on the books. But even if you back out that effect, the results are still very, very strong.
In relation to funding, we had a very successful fourth quarter. And again, my congratulations to the treasury team on that. We came back from the Christmas break well advanced in preparations for our next auto ABS. And with market conditions looking pretty solid, we're able to launch and price that by early February.
That $509 million, it was our largest ABS to date and delivered even results that I probably thought were surprised to the upside. We had 3 investors in that deal who came in with orders each over $100 million within 48 hours of announcing the transaction, which is not something I've seen before in any of our other 8 deals. And based on that investor demand and support and the breadth of investor support, we're able to continue to bring in pricing on that deal and deliver results and pricing that was inside where comparable deals were being done at the end 2024.
Obviously, there's been some pretty significant disruption to capital markets following the U.S. tariff announcements early the month. And there is some way to go in terms of the ultimate impact on that across a range of areas.
I was pleased, though, to see one of our peers, Metro announced an auto ABS on Monday this week. And when I look at the pricing that they've got in market, while not as low as it's been at the absolute tight earlier on this calendar year, they're still pretty attractive from our perspective. So keen to watch that, but definitely a positive sign there.
As you'd expect, we are making plans and have a range of different funding options to support our ongoing growth. That's across ABS deals, across warehouse capacity and potentially other funding structures. But even though markets are obviously a bit volatile, we continue to see good strength and good buying appetite for Australian auto ABS.
I'll pass back to Adam to talk about just the full year and cash NPAT. But again, I should note that I'm very, very pleased with the results that's being delivered there. So certainly a happy CFO here. Adam?
Thanks, Miles. Yes, let me comment on our unaudited cash NPAT result for the full year. So as you may know, we delivered $5.5 million of cash NPAT in the first half of FY '25. And we've built on this with good growth into the second half where we delivered $8.3 million of cash NPAT. So $13.8 million cash NPAT for the full year represents a growth of 126% on the prior year number and shows plenty is starting to produce some substantial profitability.
And this, as I said at the first half is where we showed some really strong year-on-year growth. This result is a consequence of what Plenti's business delivers when you simultaneously deliver strong loan growth origination, manage the loan book, manage margins and losses and drive cost of efficiency in operations, it's starting to throw off some real good scale economies for us.
At the start of FY '25, we set 3 financial objectives for the business: grow -- one, grow loan originations in the loan portfolio; two, continue our profitability momentum to drive year-on-year and half-on-half cash NPAT growth; and three, continue to improve cost efficiency. Pleasingly, we've been able to tick all 3 of these boxes, and I look forward to providing more detail around this when we release our full year results on Wednesday, 21st of May.
So let me close my remarks by saying I'm extremely pleased with the result and also the hard work of everyone in the Plenti team. Everyone has really worked very, very hard over this last quarter to deliver these results. So let me now pause and open up for questions via the moderator.
[Operator Instructions] We will prioritize questions that have broad relevance to all our shareholders. If your question is not selected during today's call, we encourage you to e-mail us directly at shareholders@plenti.comg.au, and we will respond to you directly.
Our first question today relates to lending demand. And the question is, are we seeing any change in demand for loans in the last 4 weeks?
I mean I'd probably -- April is an interesting period because you've got both school holidays and then we had both Easter and Anzac Day. So I think demand across the Australian economy has probably been impacted over the last 4 weeks. But I think generally, if you sort of look at where -- how things are tracking at the moment, there's nothing that's surprising compared to what we might have seen prior to that.
So yes, I don't think -- I guess that question is in the context of global events, and I don't think we've seen any meaningful impact of global events on what's happening to demand. If anything, demand is obviously was pretty strong in the first quarter -- sorry, fourth quarter, first calendar quarter, and we hope to see that continue. So April is a little bit hard to get your head around just because of the various broader impacts on it, but nothing that suggests that there's a material impact of global events.
Our second question this morning, how should we think about balance sheet capacity to support book growth?
Look, obviously, the business does use capital as we've grow. But I think the thing that we've been able to do over the last 5 years, we've taken the loan book from $400 million to $2.5 billion with the capital base that we've got. And what we've been able to do is create some very effective ways to recycle our capital to continue to support the growth in the business.
We continue to have available debt facility, which does scale as the loan book grows. So we obviously don't provide full balance sheet details, so I can't give you exact details. That will be at the May result. We'll give the full balance sheet details and show you where that is at. But the kind of structures and the flexibility that we've created in the business to manage and to support growth, I think, gives us a really good platform to support the growth that we're looking to achieve going forward.
Thank you. We've reached the end of the question queue so far. However, I will offer one more opportunity for participants to ask questions. [Operator Instructions]
Our third question this morning relates to dividends and the possibility of the payment of any dividends. And if so, when that might be?
A good question. I know something that shareholders obviously always have on their mind. I think as I mentioned, this business does use capital as we grow. And so historically, our view has certainly been the application of cash that we've got is best used to support the growth of the loan book. And depending on how much we're able to grow that going forward, we'll determine the extent to which we need to use capital that we've got in the business to support growth versus when dividends may or may not -- may become available.
The relationship of capital use in the business really depends on the scale of the loan book versus the rate of loan book growth. And so our ambition is certainly to continue to grow our loan book. We know that financial businesses are most successful at scale. And so that is our primary focus.
But certainly, as the business gets larger, you've seen over the last few years the way our cash NPAT has continued to grow year-on-year-on-year. And so the more our cash NPAT grows, it does give us the opportunity to internally fund that loan book growth. And then as we generate even further cash, I'm able to deliver dividends. So yes, we obviously -- the Board is very conscious of that. But at the moment, the best use of our capital is growing our business to generate a more valuable business for our shareholders.
And we'll share some more detail on those growth ambitions at the full year in May.
Our fourth question this morning relates to our electric vehicle loan portfolio. How do you think about the growth of your EV book and in particular, growth provided from consumer demand for Teslas?
Yes. So our, obviously, we've been very happy with the strategic relationship that we have built with Tesla and the subvention deal that Tesla ran in -- especially in the third quarter and then came off in fourth quarter, and we've seen very good volumes from that relationship. And so the thematic of EVs is something that we're very interested in. And again, we'll share more of some of our ambitions for that space in May when we do the full year results and talk about our outlook and strategic plans.
But we do like to think of ourselves as well placed generally on EVs. Particularly with our renewable energy, our solar battery plays nicely with EVs. I think the one thing we have been conscious of, which has impacted the opportunity to really lead into EVs over the last 2 years, is the government's FBT rebate, which does for cheaper EVs add some benefit to taking it up our novated lease. So it's made it harder for us. But obviously, at some point in time, that program comes off and that definitely opens up.
But what we've been doing is really using where we can use our proprietary technology platform to deliver solutions like Tesla, like Cadillac to make sure that we're a preferred supplier. And it's an area that we're keen to continue to grow into.
[Operator Instructions] As it appears there are no further questions, we'll now conclude the webinar. Thank you for joining.
I mean can I -- yes, can I just thank everyone for dialing in? We certainly appreciate your support as shareholders, and we want to make sure you're fully informed about your business. So we're very pleased to have set this up, and we see this as part of an ongoing program. So thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone. We'll now conclude the webinar. Good morning.