Chris Meyer: So, you know, I think on the whole — the Connect Group, you know, for us has delivered, let’s say exactly what was laid out in terms of the vision and the opportunity for the business. And as seamlessly integrating to Lesaka. So, you know, we believe it’s, you know, a successful transaction in every way. You know, areas where it’s outperformed would be, for example, you know, in the Card Acquiring in the Card Payment space, we had forecast around volumes and growth in that business and have been exceeded. And that’s positive upside. So that’s been a big positive. We’ve seen growth in the — in our merchant numbers ahead of our business cases. So in terms of rollouts of VAS devices, that has been ahead of our original expectations.
So it’s usually positive. But I think what it’s saying to us is it’s just underlying — underlining, rather, you know, the market opportunity, particularly in the informal space. And we’ve spoken about the fact that 1.4 million informal merchants out there as a target addressable market, we’ve got something like, you know, 65,000 devices. We’ve spoken about the fact that 4% of their rebates of merchants in the informal space can accept card payments. You know, we’ve seen our volumes double. Our current pipeline is doubled over the last six months in the informal space. So those themes are, you know, are well understood or have been identified, and I think of the secular themes that drive the Connect Group. Maybe the pace of growth has been a little bit more than we built into our original plans.
Raj Sharma: Got it. Got it. Thank you so much for taking my questions. I’ll take it offline. Thanks.
Rob Fink: Great. Our next question were submitted by Judge of Cloud Penny Partners. His first question is for Steve. Steve, you have a stellar growth rate in the Merchant division, even quarter-on-quarter. And we expect this type of momentum on a quarterly basis going forward?
Steven Heilbron: So maybe just circle back quickly to, you know, the earlier question raised around load shedding and maybe, you know, what I want to remind everybody about is retailers in this country, particularly in the MSME sector and more broadly, if you look at the last three years, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had in the Kaizen area. We had significant flooding. We’ve had riots. And of course, now we’ve got this perpetual load shedding. So the business — the merchants have been stress tested. I think one of the things that we’ll have to watch in — as we go into Q3 is the perpetual nature of this has some form of exhaustive effect on the retail merchant. So we produced a very good set of results as you can see in Q2. Our momentum going into Q3, we are through January, we have very strong momentum and that has continued.
But perhaps some of that slowdown, which we may see, in some of those areas relating to load shedding are offset by some of the innovation that sits within the business. And Chris touched on it already. So as I’ve mentioned before, Kazang Pay was a spin-off of Kazang. And our Kazang Pay advance is a spin-off of Kazang Pay. And some of these ideas and businesses, which we were pregnant with, including our supplier payments businesses, and our capital connect business are starting now to see much stronger momentum than we initially anticipated. So I think whilst we — so I think the answer is we have a well-balanced offering. We are solving and having a lot of fun solving for the pain points of our merchants. And the business is underpinned with very good momentum.
So I think Chris, we’ve given guidance for Q3. And I think we’re relatively confident that, that is — it’s solid and if anything, probably — potentially a little bit conservative.