Now even if we refinance, now the question it becomes, it all depends on the capital structure that we have chosen. There are capital structures. To give you a simple example, let’s say, we had a successful IPO or we had — we launched our IPO. Now, our net interest costs are going to be relatively low, simply because we would have raised money through equity which doesn’t have any cost associated with it, and whether you keep that money in a bank, earning interest or whether you use that to pay back — pay — reduce your debt, in any way, meaning, it ultimately results in a net reduction in terms of — pretty substantial net reduction in terms of interest costs. So our — on a long-term basis or — it all comes down to how soon can we get our IPO done.
If we can get our IPO done, meaning a lot of these costs will reduce dramatically. Now having said that, in the meanwhile, we have delivered what we have and we have to make sure, we strive for every option out there to obviously pay our banks and refinance in the meanwhile. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. And for that, you — Steve already talked you through the cost of interest that are presently being incurred.
Jeff Van Rhee: Yeah. Fair enough. Got it. Thanks for taking the questions.
Robin Raina: Thank you, sir.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Chris Sakai with Singular Research. Your line is open.
Christopher Sakai: Yes. Hi. I just had a question on the annuity exchange. What were the main drivers as far as the increase in carriers and distributors in 2022 and what can we expect in 2023?
Robin Raina: Ash, please go ahead.
Ash Sawhney: Sure. Yeah. I can take that. So the economic climate right now, especially with the high-interest rates, that is a big factor, obviously, because annuities are paying higher interest rates. There’s more annuity sales happening in the industry. Some more carriers that were not previously in the annuity space are jumping in. Another big factor for us over the last, I’d say 12 months to 18 months was the onboarding of JP Morgan, who is one of the largest annuity players in the industry. And when you bring somebody like that onto the platform, all their carrier partners have to start participating on the exchange. So, we’re seeing higher volumes across the board, because of the economic climate, we’re also seeing new entrants come in.
And, like I outlined about half of the growth actually came from more volume from existing customers. And the other half from these new entrants. In terms of 2023, I would say, we expect as long as the interest rates stay where they are, we’re going to continue to see fairly healthy growth in fact for the first two months of this year, we have continued to see the same pattern that we saw in Q3 and Q4. So the volumes are way up there.
Robin Raina: So, Chris, I want to add to what Ash said. I think, we’re also at a pivoting point. What has happened is that our dominance, if I’m allowed to use the word dominance, has continued to grow in this field. We’ve continued to grow our market share in this area. And what that has done is when you have that kind of dominance on market share, it leads to a networking effect and it leads to some of the larger distributors who may not, let’s say, there is a distributor ABC, who might be on your competitors’ platform, there is every reason for now for that large distributor to come to you, for many reasons. One, you have all the networks sitting out there, which is the network they want to address. On the second side, we have the volume.
