Lendinvest (LSE:LINV) — Technology teach-in

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the LENDINVEST PLC technology teaching. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the q and a tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself.

0:20 However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to make the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Armen Tamasebi, COO. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for for joining us today. The objective of this teaching is to provide you with a deeper understanding of the strength of LENDINVEST technology. We'll cover the presentation in three parts. Firstly, an insight into the industry problems we're solving for our customers. We'll then move on and explain a little about our technology and how we believe that technology provides us with a competitive edge.

1:07 And finally, we'll take a look at our technology future road map.

1:13 Before we start, an introduction to myself, I'm Armen Tamasebi. I joined LENDINVEST in 2019 as chief operating officer, and I have oversight of the technology and operations teams. I'll now hand you over to to Peter. Afternoon, I'm Peter Wallace, VP of technology at LENDINVEST. I'm responsible for leading our design, product, engineering, data, and DevOps teams. So before I get into the technology content, I thought it'd helpful to find some background on LENDINVEST. Basically, we operate as a two sided marketplace. On one side we have investors and financial institutions, and on the other side we have borrowers and brokers.

2:03 As of March this year, we had £2,900,000,000 of funds under management, and £2,100,000,000 of those have been deployed as platform assets under management. Our technology that we'll talk about today basically ties these two sides together. Across The UK financial services sector, technology is being used to solve problems that customers face and to improve their overall experience. However, the property finance market is well behind others in terms of the level of automation and the use of this technology. So why is this? Why are mortgages hard? To answer this, I'll start by explaining three factors that we see that make mortgages hard, but conversely provide opportunity for us as a business.

2:55 So these factors are complex and opaque operational processes across many parties, rigid or inflexible products, and a lack of capability enabled to bring products to market quickly. So starting with the first problem, as many of you obviously will be aware, buying a home is one of life's major milestones. It's an often infrequent and unfamiliar process for the customer, and one that lenders ought to assist with. Yet many borrowers often feel confused and anxious by this process. Originally a customer would need to visit their bank or mortgage broker, sit down, fill in various paper based forms, and produce physical documents to prove their identity, address, credit history and the like.

3:47 Recently some lenders have improved this process through digitisation, accepting scanned documents for example, using third party services to check identity. However, we think many of these digital advancements are made for the benefit of the companies involved and not for the benefit of the customer per se. Therefore, we've arrived at a place where customers expected to use multiple mobile apps and websites across the broker, lender, and solicitor, resubmitting their core documents multiple times. It's not as simple as just digitizing this process. We need a holistic approach across all parties. We need those comms across all parties to be centered around what the customer needs to know to do next with each individual party as a whole.

4:36 If we don't achieve this, the process will continue to remain opaque and confusing, even though it's digitised. The second problem with mortgages is that although there are many different rates available, with a plethora of lenders out there in the market, the general structure of mortgages is fairly rigid, price dominates. For example, over 80% of residential mortgages are fixed term on a two or five year basis, typically. This severely limits the choice of a customer. In addition, several of our competitors lack diversity in their funding base, which places constraints on the circumstances of the people they can lend to, or the properties they can lend on. These constraints are amplified by inflexible technology, preventing the serving of a more personalised offering.

5:26 The third problem is that the industry is dominated by high street banks and building societies, with their legacy technology, waterfall processes and complexity. And so the ability for the industry to innovate as a whole and bring new products to market quickly is severely limited.

5:46 Over the past fourteen years, we've invested more than £50,000,000 in developing our proprietary technology. That investment has been welcomed by our customers, as you can see from these results from Smart Money People's Mortgage Lender Benchmark for H1 of this year. For those of you unfamiliar with this survey, this is the largest piece of independent research carried out in the mortgage industry, using broker feedback. The colouring comes from the survey with red to green shades, where dark green represents a top quartile score within that category. As you can see within the specialist lender segment, our overall rating was 94%, and it's the highest of any lender in this segment, 3.2% above our nearest competitor.

6:34 Our business development managers over here also rated 94% as the highest satisfaction rating within this segment of the market, underpinning the strength of our service. In fact the brokers also commented that they praised our online systems as being slick, and they mentioned they particularly liked the use of open banking. The same survey also asked brokers who is winning the technology race. Pleased to see that customers rate our technology as top quartile, and ahead of many major high street lenders, such as Halifax, Nationwide, TSB, HSBC, you know, the list goes on, Barclays and Aviva. Again, is validation of that £50,000,000 of investment we made, has been directed in the right areas.

7:28 Before I come on to explain what our technology does specifically, I wanted to explain how we work and deliver technology driven change. So we've built a microservices based architecture for our systems running on best in class secure AWS cloud based elastic infrastructure. This gives us the ability to maintain and scale our products using modern agile and DevOps practices in a much more efficient way than many of our traditional competitors who are constrained by their old banking systems. Now many companies do agile, it's fairly well known in the technology industry, they follow this process and they hope for good results. We believe there's a big difference between just doing Agile and being Agile as a business.

8:18 For us, being agile is something that's ingrained in our approach to product development. So by driving rapid product development iteration through this continuous cycle, measuring the impact and feeding this back in, delivering small incremental changes to our systems, we believe that is what truly makes us agile. But really don't just take my word for it. The DevOps research and assessment team at Google, who some of you may be familiar with, have been measuring the impact of DevOps and Agile practises, and the impact those practises have on business performance over the last seven years. They do this through an annual survey, and last year it went and responded to by 32,000 IT professionals worldwide.

9:08 Now in their own words, it is the longest running academically rigorous survey of its kind, providing an independent view into the practices and capabilities that drive high performance in technology delivery, and ultimately organisational outcomes. These are the results of their survey. As you can see on this table, they measure four metrics specifically, down the left hand side here. So Deployment frequency, or the number of times that you deploy a code change into production. The lead time for changes, or the amount of time it takes for something that is fully tested to actually be deployed into production. The time to restore service following an outage, and the change failure rate, or in other words, the number of times a deployment that you make, so a change in code, results in you having to take further action, so you inevitably break something inadvertently.

10:07 Now, using this benchmark analysis, we are placed in the elite category here, as you can see by the yellow shading. This puts us in the top 26% of companies worldwide. In fact, year to date we deploy on average 14 times a day. So the category is multiple deploys a day, we're at 14. Our lead time for changes is typically about two to three minutes, which is way way better than the less than one hour category. And our change failure rate is closer to 0% than 15. As you can see, the only category where we don't score elite is in the time to restore service. And here we see our data is somewhat skewed because we're reliant on third party services.

10:55 Unfortunately, some of them aren't quite as quick to install their service than we would obviously like, and it can take a few hours for something to come back. Now, if we looked at just the services that we run and are responsible for, so our internal proprietary technology, then we typically find that we are in the minutes rather than the hours, and we're regularly hitting three or four nines uptime availability on our services. So to summarize so far, we've identified three core industry problems to solve. We've invested in technology in a way that resonates strongly with our customers, as borne out by that survey. Our technology delivery processes are benchmarked as within the elite performers worldwide.

11:47 But next I'll come on to what our technology systems do. So here are three proprietary platforms. This is technology we've developed in house, and cannot simply be bought off the shelf, or easily replicated as a whole, by our competitors. We have three core platforms summarised here on the slide: Genesys, for borrowers and brokers, the loan engine, and the investor platform. Augmented here by integrations to over 20 different third party data and service providers. The section here provided, you can see the logos, Equifax, Stripe, Rightmove, Pepper etc. During this session I will talk through our Genesis loan origination platform here.

12:33 I'll cover the digital application process, and then Armen will come on to share how we use data to assess our risk of lending during the underwriting process, before covering the loan engine and the technology roadmap for the next few years. So, Genesis, it's our digital loan origination platform. As you can see, it consists of three main parts, which are highlighted on the right here. So first, it's an intuitive and interactive customer portal, which is the screenshot you can see. This allows the submission of a mortgage application electronically, in just minutes, from our brokers. Secondly, there's an internal administration system used by LENDINVEST staff, which allows us to quickly and efficiently collect data from those third party integrations, driving our assessment of risk and underwriting processes.

13:28 And finally our customised CRM system, again used by LENDINVEST staff, which enables us to digitally process the application from submission through to completion, and provides us with a three sixty degree view of our borrowers and brokers, helping us to coordinate our streamline, our communications to them. So before we get into a more interactive view of Genesis, I wanted to describe the loan origination process that it facilitates. And here it is on the screen. So we start on the left hand side with the initial inquiry from the broker, where they provide the basic details of the borrower, the property, and the products that they would like from us. We're able to provide instant feedback and a decision in principle to the customer, which includes the products and rates that they're eligible for, and a representation of the costs of the loan.

14:24 This step is powered by our products affordability and calculation engines to select the most relevant products in a fast, automated way. All being well, the broker then submits a full application electronically in a matter of minutes, which triggers the next stage of the process. Once received, the application is sent to packaging, which is essentially the process of gathering all the necessary information automatically, in order for the underwriter to be able to assess the risk of lending, and decide whether to proceed to offer, which then continues through to legal conveyancing and funds release at completion. These processes are supported by our proprietary rules engine, thorough risk assessment, and digital integration with a panel of solicitors to improve the conveyancing process.

15:13 So now I'll take a closer look at a few of these steps to demonstrate how the Genesis platform works and materially enhances the customer experience, providing the operational efficiency to process these loans in a scalable digital manner. At this stage, think it's also important to point out that Genesis has been designed to cater for the rapid processing of complex loans, built on the deep experience we have as a company processing these types of cases. Our customers typically have requirements or situations that aren't catered for by the mainstream market, and traditional high street lenders. Now Genesis facilitates the rapid processing of these complex cases without compromising quality, nor the extent of due diligence we need to carry out.

16:04 So before we get into the demo, a quick caveat that due to GDPR constraints, obviously the data you'll see during this demo is dummy data, so obviously we try to make it as realistic as possible. So this is the customer view, this is the broker portal, this is what the customer logs into, they're presented with this view. Enables them to start their application journey, as well as monitoring and managing all their current applications and inquiries. It's been designed and built over many years of insight we've successfully gathered from working with our customers to ensure we're delivering an industry leading experience. Within the portal, we're trying to do all we can to engage and encourage our brokers, hence you can see at the top left here, we're trying to give them insight into the value of their pipelines and commission that can be earned, and to share the details of their key contact they have within LENDINVEST who is managing their business.

17:04 Now if we click on an application here, it will take you through to the application overview page. Here you can see how we are completely transparent with the brokers, sharing and highlighting the progress of their application, as it goes through these various sub stages along the top. We're also showing them who their key contacts are at the different stages, in this case Lauren, who is the case manager, and Jean as the underwriter, who are dealing with their case. One of our core strengths at LENDINVEST is the service we provide as a business. And this personalisation here is a key part of this, dealing with individuals, specifically building loyalty and repeat business from our customers.

17:51 This overview screen, as I scroll down, it provides all of the key details, the loan, the security, and the borrower. So we can see on the right hand side, you've got the core details of the loan that we're providing to them. As we scroll down, can see the security details all here. You can see details and click through to the borrower, as well as seeing the uploaded documents that would have been provided by the borrower to prove their proof of address and driving license their proofs of ID. Up here we have a messaging area where we can find interactive communication with the broker, where the broker can get an update on their application, or we can follow-up on a particular inquiry or aspect of it directly with them.

18:43 A lot of these tasks are automatically raised and assigned to the broker, so driven by a level of automation at the back end of the platform. This is the case admin portal, which is the second part of Genesys on that summary slide. This is the view that the internal LENDINVEST user has. This is proprietary tech that we've built out again. This screen shows the view of the application that our lending operations team uses. This is at the packaging stage, which I described earlier, which first entails assessing what data needs to be gathered, and then collecting it from all the third party services that we use in a way that can be digitally collated and presented back in this screen.

19:30 So if we start by taking a quick look at this application, we can see it's a company based application from Red Brick Property Limited over here. That company has three major shareholders in Aaron, Jim and Ned.

19:46 Now traditionally, to package a typical case like this would be very manual, it would be time consuming, expensive process. Many of our competitors, for example, they would have to run multiple packaging tasks, such as these credit searches with the likes of Equifax or Experian, forward checks with networks such as CERA and CFAS, LAN registry searches, etcetera, etcetera. And they'd have to do it for each of the individuals on the task. They would typically do this by logging into the portals provided by these third party companies, putting in the applicant name, trying to find the right person, the right match, and then downloading a PDF form or multiple PDFs in several cases, and storing them locally on their hard drive, and then reading through reams and reams of paper to try and get a view of exactly who this person is and what is the risk of lending them the money.

20:48 So just the aspect of going to each of these portals, downloading and collating that information could take weeks, certainly for these traditional companies, especially if there's complex company structures involved. Genesys solves this problem. So by integrating our proprietary rules engine with these third party APIs, we're instantly able to assess what information is required for the case, and then go and get it via the API. This API integration drives greater operational efficiency than the previous process of logging in and downloading PDFs. So this is an example of a case where all of these searches have been run, and you can see that as the data has come back, the rules engine has run, and we have ticks summarizing the status of that rules engine process and the status of the search. So in this case, the fraud network's come back clear, there haven't been anything that's been concerning, and various things that get calculated by the rules engine such as the AML risk rating here.

22:02 So to demonstrate how easy and quick this is to do, I'm going to jump into another case and run through this specific process to run the credit and AML checks.

22:17 So this is the first stage, I'll just quickly bring up another case. So you can see on the screen here that we have a case from an individual called Cassandra Berta. This again is dummy data. You can see by the circles here that none of the searches have been run, and this is how the application would appear to the lending ops team as it first enters that packaging process. So before I hit the button to trigger the Equifax search, I wanted to just run through what is happening behind the scenes. So when I press this button, the applicant details are sent up to our Equifax API running in AWS, which then calls four different Equifax endpoints. So four different parts of Equifax to retrieve the credit file for the customer, to check on their AML rating, but also to look at the current account turnover and to validate their banking details.

23:28 So we're effectively doing four different API integrations for this credit file. All of that data, can be considerable running into tens of thousands of data points, comes back and is run through our proprietary rules engine, where we've encoded various things that we want to check on the credit file for this customer. So what is their credit score? Do they have enough verified IDs and addresses on that credit file to pass

24:04 rules that we have. And then the summary of that is provided back. So as I click this button, you'll see all of that running in the background, then we'll go through the results. So the first thing it's doing here is automatically checking the match of the address with the address held by Equifax, and then we get the option to either continue a hard or soft search on the credit file. So I run the hard search, which is now running, you can see.

24:40 And it's now completed. That took three seconds, four seconds. We can now drill into the report here. So this is the core summary of the data that has been pulled back, and where each of these circles appear on the screen, we have run a set of rules against the data that came back and determined whether or not it passes the underwriting and risk rules that we have. So, and the screen sort of goes down through all the typical income, credit worthiness, and count, and KYC data. I'm going to focus on the KYC side, so you can see here that it's come back as a fail on the AML checks that we've done.

25:29 So as we look down here, the reason it has failed is because on the credit file for this customer, there is only one validated proof of UK residency, and in order to take out a mortgage loan, we need two proofs of residency and one proof of ID. It also has no alerts on the file, which is a good thing. If there was an AML specific entry on the file, that would appear as an alert here. So we're instantly drawing the LENDINVEST users' attention to the fact that something hasn't passed on the AML side, and that we need to basically get another proof of residency, another proof of ID in order to proceed with this loan.

26:16 Further down, we can see that the CFAS entry has come back with zero, so this is basically saying there are no CFAS markers on the credit file, so there are no forward markers associated with this customer, which is a good thing, so we get a tick, it's passed the rule, and there are no sanctions associated, so it's checking whether the person is a pet, or a special interest person, or related to those people. So it's basically looking at three different things, and going, if any of those are true, then I would flag this as there are sanctions associated with this customer, and we ought to investigate that further. But this has come back as a rules engine, as a clean pass.

27:00 So if we now go back, now that we've run that Equifax check, we're now going to validate the customer by running an ID verification check with Jumio. Again, I'll explain a little bit about what's happening here. So when I press this button here, we'll take the applicant's call details again, their date of birth and their name and address, and send them to the Jumio service. This will trigger an email that will be sent to the customer asking them to verify their identity, and we'll run through that process now. So the first thing it's doing is saying, hey, the AML risk rating that's being provided is low, and so we're quite happy with that, so we'll continue.

27:47 That is now triggered and sent that request to the customer, as you can see by this ID check pending status. If we now go over to what would be the customer's inbox, which is here, we can see that this email has arrived saying we would like you to identify. So, hey, Cassandra, as part of your mortgage application, we need to verify your identity, at which point the customer would click on the link, and this takes them through to the Jumia system to verify their ID. Before we start, it asks them whether or not they have an accepted form, so in The UK we take driver's license or passport. As we go through this,

28:35 we'll click on Passport, we have the option, which again is a customer experience thing, they can continue on their mobile, which points it will then transfer the process onto their mobile phone, or they can continue on their desktop, So for the sake of the demo, we'll continue here. And here we are, and I'll put up my driving licence on the screen, Check that I can read the details. And now it's asking me to verify my face. And there we go. So what is happening at the moment is, Jumeo has taken a photograph, obviously, of my driving license, it's then performed a whole bunch of AI based checks on that driving license, checking things like the security controls on the actual licence, so the watermark and the various other aspects of it.

29:37 It has parsed all the data out of that driving licence, so the expiry date, my full name, date of birth and the like,

29:45 And it's compared the photograph in that driving licence with the picture it just took of my face. The other thing it's done is it's worked out that I am a real human being, it does a bunch of checks to make sure I'm not holding up a picture of myself, or showing some sort of video. So it attests that I'm a live breathing human being, as well as that my face matches with the ID. And it's done all of that in the time you saw that check to happen, so seeing the point now it says document submitted. So if we now go back to the admin portal, you can see we've already got the results back in here, it basically has failed, and if we click through in here, we can see that basically it's failed because the applicant's date of birth, which is my date of birth, doesn't match that on the applicant, and the name doesn't match the applicant name, which is what you would expect, I showed it my ID.

30:46 However, it has said, it has verified that this is a true match of my driving licence to my face, and so the verification has come back as passed as a valid proof of identity, and it's managed to parse out the details of my driving licence there. The highlighted mismatches to the application form are given as, again, highlighted by the red circles by the rules engine. So this really makes it very simple for the user to go, yep, the customer went through this process, had a valid ID, and that was all fine, but the name and the date of birth don't match.

31:33 So that's the Jumio response. The as we are here, it's also worth just showing you some of the searches and integrations we do on the property side as well. So as you can see, they they're looking for a mortgage against this semi detached house in Fengate in Peterborough. We pre populate the Google map of that street here, and we allow the underwriter and the LENDINVEST users to instantly kind of have a look around and they can see here that there are a number of commercial premises reasonably nearby, those obviously it looks like a fairly busy road, all the way down the street view here, and actually I think the property is whoops, sorry, a bit too far, is this one here. So you can see it is in fact a semi detached house, you get a feel for the road and the surroundings environment.

32:40 Now obviously it's quite easy to Google houses, we can all do that I'm sure, but the key thing here is that we've done it already for the user and made it as simple and quick and easy as possible to check out the property. So by integrating it here, it's driving greater operational efficiencies. The other thing we can do is trigger the Rightmove search. So in this case, we'll ask Rightmove, what details do you have for this property? And it provides both an automated valuation model based rental yields and a value for the property, as well as EPC ratings that Rightmove holds. Again, that integration is done via our microservices based architecture in AWS, calling right move and all comes back again in seconds, allowing us to accurately pull the information together we need on the property.

33:37 I won't run through the land registry search, it just brings back title details. So

33:54 That's pretty much the packaging process, and I hope you found the demo useful at that point. But fundamentally, trying to show that Genesys is turning processes that other companies take weeks and months to do, into minutes and seconds. So having pulled together all the data required for the packaging process, our case moves on to the next stage, the underwriting process. Here is where we're going to assess the risk and affordability of the loan. Armen's now going to walk you through how Genesis provides this detailed risk assessment to support this underwriting process. So over to you Armen. Thank you, Peter.

34:42 The risk assessment screen, which you see here within our Genesys platform, is really at the heart of the underwriting process. The traditional method of packaging, which Peter just described and and demoed just before, would usually result in there being reams and reams of PDF documents, scan copies of bank statements, payslips, valuation, etcetera. And the traditional underwriting process would be to crawl through all of these documents one by one, trying to tick off the the criteria and the the policies as they go. These analog legacy processes are hugely time consuming, inefficient, inconsistent, as you can imagine, and and really prone to human error.

35:36 The automated packaging within Genesys gathers approximately a 100,000 different data points automatically for each case that we process. And to facilitate the decision, Genesys assimilates this information and summarizes it within this risk assessment screen for the underwriter. And here, you can see all the key data and analysis that has been carried out on the case from, say, the the results of the credit rule checks, the KYC checks that Peter just performed, all the way through to showing the borrower's past and current loan exposure to us and their conduct within those loan terms.

36:23 Having reviewed the data against set parameters, our rule engine will automatically give an indication of the perceived credit risk of each case to the underwriter. So let's take a look at this example, which you see on your screens now. This is Red Brick Property Limited case here. And you can see if if you look at the top left, it's automatically being given, a medium risk rating by by Genesys, running through all the attributes through our rules engine. You can see also within the rules and alerts section up here in the top middle that that actually one of the aggravating factors, one of the complexities of this case that we've described before is that Aaron has particular a circumstances around his indebtedness score.

37:16 Now immediately, if you look across to Aaron's details on the right side of the screen, you see the details summarized and, again, an exclamation mark drawing the underwriter's attention to the area where they need to do further discovery. Now this may well be where a traditional high street lender would stop. There's a complexity on the case. There's a, you know, a credit blip on the case. And so the simple answer for some traditional systems and traditional processes would be just to reject the case. However, what Genesys facilitates is a deeper discovery of why this has occurred and to see if we can understand the risk better, get comfortable with it, and progress the case to an offer.

38:08 So within a few clicks from the risk assessment screen, the underwriter can immediately see Aaron's specific summarized credit screen within the Genesys admin portal that you can see on the following slide. You can see within this page at the top right, the 34,000 of income that Aaron declared on the application form has automatically been verified by Genesys using the power of our integrations. You can see that he has 21 active credit accounts with a total outstanding debt balance of a £134,000. Now a credit account can be anything from, say, a credit card or an overdraft facility all the way through to to to a mortgage.

38:57 This is all summarized for the underwriter and is allowing them to begin building a better picture of Aaron's indebtedness risk so that they can appropriately assess it and progress the case. Now should the underwriter wish to see the very granular detail of Aaron's credit, they can go even a layer deeper to see each of Aaron's credit accounts. And as you can see here, you can see a month by month repayment conduct on each of those credit accounts with just a simple click of a mouse. Again, this is so that the underwriter can deal with the complexity found in the case and get to the heart of it very quickly. Furthermore, what Genesys allows, if needed, and we're one of the very first in our industry to really leverage this, is the power of open banking to be able to better inform our underwriting processes.

39:55 Within a very few steps, we can request and the borrower can grant us access to their accounts, which is again consumed and analyzed within Genesys and the detail of which can be easily drilled down into by the underwriter to rationalize for the complexity that has been highlighted by the rules engine and the alerts and to take the case through to completion. And so, hopefully, from here, we're through to offer, and we take the case via our admin portal. We automatically instruct our solicitors, receive the certificates of title, release funds, and we're able to update both our broker customers and the borrower automatically that their case has completed.

40:42 Hopefully, you've seen how our technology is really improving the customer experience, removing friction at every step of the process, even in the most complex of cases. And we see this as a real competitive advantage for LENDINVEST. Next, I'll talk to our internal asset management tool, which we call the loan engine. The loan engine, which you can see here, was built to allow our treasury and finance teams to efficiently monitor, manage, and optimize our fast growing platform portfolio of platform assets. The loan engine has been developed to be aware of the investment criteria of each of our capital sources as well as the attributes of each loan we originate. Therefore, it allows us to have a really detailed view of our returns for any given period, either at an individual asset level or across any and all of our financial partners and institutional investors.

41:53 It's also integrated with our third party service provider as well as our NetSuite general ledger system, which allows further operating leverage within our finance and treasury teams. So next, a view of our road map over the short to to medium term. And and, the technology we've shown you gives a demonstration of of how we are addressing the markets we're currently in. It manages the bridging, development, and buy to let loans for the 2,100,000,000 of platform assets we have under management, and that that's as of our last reporting period.

42:40 With the market shares shown here in the very slim green lines that you can see within each of these sectors. And and this is really to show you that there is considerable opportunity and upside still available to us even in the products and sectors that we currently operate. However, our technology lends itself to to iteration and bolting on new products very easily. And if you've been following us since the IPO, you'll know that we'll soon be launching our specialist homeowner product. And and this, we think, is the next logical step for us. To give some more flavor on that product, a recent survey of 2,000 mortgage applications found that more than half of homebuyers have been rejected for a mortgage due to their nonstandard application.

43:40 Nonstandard can mean anything from the customer's circumstances, including, say, being self employed, multiple income streams, all the way through to, you know, any sort of irregular income. The survey also revealed that thirteen percent of those applicants pulled out before receiving an offer as they found the process too complicated, and 7% say there were just far too many stages within the application process. We believe our Genesys platform is built to handle the additional complexity that these specialist cases bring whilst maintaining a level of quality and service that LENDINVEST is known for. Now in future years, months and years, we'll we'll obviously continue to build on top of the successful implementation of our technology and gain further competitive advantage in our current markets.

44:39 However, we also believe that we can further leverage the proven success of our technology to facilitate the launch of even more products and services. So, you know, on top of the specialist homeowner product that we are hoping to launch at the end of this year, next year, we plan to enhance the customer experience within our buy to let product line with the delivery of our next generation platform. We're also looking to augment our services with better use of automated valuation models to remove the friction within the application process. And, additionally, we'll be looking to leverage the data that we automatically store for each of our cases to to use the strength of machine learning and predictive models to improve our operational efficiency as well as our management of risk.

45:36 Looking a little further out, we'll build upon the work we've done within our loan engine that you saw earlier and our CRM to bring parts of loan servicing in house and evolve our proprietary technology to manage the full end to end borrower experience across the lifetime of a loan. Should market conditions be favorable by 2025, we aim to launch a long term fixed rate product. And, obviously, beyond that, you know, look to tackle that 1,100,000,000,000 of mainstream homeowner mortgage market through offering our platform that Peter and I gave a demonstration of to offer it as a mortgage as a service by partnering with financial institutions that simply don't have the technology or infrastructure to build the Genesys platform as we have and deal with the complexity of cases that they see.

46:42 So hopefully, we've been able to give you a good overview of how we've married our deep industry experience, the customer feedback that we received, and latest technology to drive our business forward, giving our customers and investors a market leading experience as well as delivering considerable operational efficiencies for the business. Thank you very much. And at this time, we're very happy to to take questions. Almond Peter, thank you very much for that. I'll just bring your cameras up now. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the q and a tab situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard. I'm on Peter. As as you can see, we've received a number of questions throughout today's presentation.

47:40 And if I could just ask you to read out those questions and give responses where it is appropriate to do so, I'll pick up from you both at the end. Sure. Thank you for your questions. Starting with Sam e who asks, who would we say is our nearest competitor, and how does their tech stack compare with ours? So as you'll have seen, we're we're we operate across several products, short term and long term, and and largely within that, we we compete against different competitors. On Vitalet, for example, we're we're very much akin to, say, on on one savings bank. On bridging, we'll have the likes of together that we compete with, and on our development, there'll be the likes of Paragon Bank or Close Brothers. So we we we we cover a broad spectrum, and within that spectrum, there are differing competitors who have different technologies. Now, obviously, I don't want to give a subjective view of how we compare against them because as you'll appreciate, I'm extremely biased.

48:48 But as you'll have seen in one of the earlier slides that Peter showed, we do receive feedback and we do look at third party independent studies across all of our competitors. And by and large, as as you'll have seen in the feedback that we received from the presentation that Peter showed, we are very much at the forefront of that with our technology. So the feedback that we receive either directly from our borrowers or through independent third parties really does show that our technology is materially making our customers' lives easier and is therefore giving us a clear competitive advantage.

49:40 The next question from Nick b. From a UX perspective, what's our registration onboarding process for a user? How long does it take to onboard and or authorize a user? So largely, our users at the moment, we are largely intermediated so that these are mortgage brokers that are offering advice to the end borrower. We have a very simple online application form, which they can submit their details to apply to us to register onto the Genesys portal. That will take them no more than a minute to submit. Once they submit that information, we also have APIs into, say, land registry and company's house to verify that information.

50:31 And onboarding takes place in a matter of minutes, after which they'll receive their credentials to be able to proceed and log in to the Genesys portal. Next question from Steve K. What dependencies do we have on third party applications as part of our offering, and what SLAs are in place to ensure that, key service from third provider does not cause an an issue? So where we have single party dependencies, we try to have a backup in place. So you'll have seen in the Genesys admin portal, we have two credit providers, Creditsafe and and Equifax that that we use, and we try to mitigate risk by having backup providers.

51:22 We're also further mitigated because a lot of the time, the API that we integrate with is not linked is to the same API that the third party portals are are linked to. So that means if worse comes to worse, we have a backup to to do things the traditional way, which we try to avoid. But should a disaster recovery situation happen and we need to revert, we are able to revert. But having said that, as Peter said earlier, our uptime of our core systems is extremely high, quite often, you know, 99.999% and higher. And as you'll have seen, where there is downtime, it is few and far between, but where there is, it is less than an hour of disruption between the as third party being down and being able to recover.

52:21 So we see very, very little disruption in our core services. Steve Kaye asked, what does your road map look like? Any thoughts of expanding into different markets? Hopefully, we offered that offered a little insight into that into the last couple of slides. As as we said, the way we build technology through the use of microservices, through our agile processes means we're able to iterate quite quickly and pivot to new opportunities quite quickly as well. And certainly, we see the specialist homeowner sector as a good opportunity for us. And as we said, we're very keen to leverage the the technology that we have to attack the the the high street market using our our technology as a mortgage, as a service, and that what is something we're hoping to do in the medium to longer term.

53:25 How is your green sorry. Sam e asks, how has green mortgage been received by the market? It's been received, in short, very, very well. So we were one of the first to to to to put out a full product catalog with a green alternative at better rates than standard to incentivize and and and reward people who have better energy efficiency securities properties, and who are looking to either remortgage them or purchase better better EPC rated house houses.

54:10 In almost immediately after launching that, over 50% of our applications were on those green products and still continue to be the majority of of the interest that that we see. So it's it's been received very, very well in the market. And obviously, as part of our ESG program, we look to continue to be able to support and incentivize those green schemes. Arm and Peter, thank you very much. I think you've addressed all those questions from investors, and of course, the company will review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the Investor Meet company platform.

54:58 But just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to both, Armen, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Well, again, thank you all for joining us today and giving us this opportunity to show our technology. Hopefully, we've been able to show again the the competitive advantage we have using latest technology to really solve customer problems in this industry that we are continually looking to evolve in and and disrupt further. Thank you. Almond and Peter, thanks once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations.

55:46 This will only take a few minutes to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of LENDINVEST PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.