Lesaka Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:LSAK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rob Fink: Great. Another question from Judd and this is for Lincoln. Congrats returning the consumer division to profitability. How should we look at the growth outlook of the consumer division over the medium term? Would you say that you now have fixed the cost structure in place to drive operating leverage from here? How do you think about the long-term stable margins in the consumer business?

Lincoln Mali: I think that if you look at the guidance that Chris has given, we can now see that this business is stable. That this business now is planned for growth and that all the cost initiatives that we’ve taken we will now reap those benefits. And then all of the work we’ve done in preparing our clients for new propositions, we will now be able to kind of build on that. And I think that in terms of the guidance, you now will have a business that is growing profitably quarter-on-quarter to be in line with the guidance. So we’ve done a lot on the cost in terms of the bulk of what we need to do. But obviously, there are still some tweaks that we need to do. But on the own, I think that those phases of firefighting are gone, we now can start to think about what are the innovative things that we can do with our clients, what value propositions can offer them and what can we do to compete with other players in the market.

So that’s how we look at the future from the consumer division.

Rob Fink: Well, great. Thanks. We’re running short on time, but we do have three more questions that I’d like run through before we close-up, has there been a notable increase in SASSA beneficiaries after the major glitches experienced with Post Bank since November 2022? How do you guys — have you guys’ plan set up aggressive acquisition of customers currently served by Post Bank?

Lincoln Mali: Yes. We have great plans around that. We are actively encouraging customers to join us. We are also making sure that we have more presence in terms of marketing. Telling people what we offer and what alternative we have. But what we’re trying to think about going forward is not just the mistakes of the Post Bank or challenges that they have, but to work on our value proposition and make sure that our value proposition is quite competitive and enticing for customers to join us. And those are some of the things that we’re working on. What can we put in the table that makes customers excited to join us regardless of the challenges that SASSA and them are facing.

Rob Fink: Great. Thank you. This next question is for Steve. Steve, there are a couple of players in the merchant credit provision space such as retail capital, habitat, who have been in the space longer. Have large data set provided by Yoko and others or large balance sheets? How do you plan to differentiate yourselves from them?

Steven Heilbron: So let me at the outset, let me say I’m just so impressed with some of our young folk in the business who just perpetually innovate and bring good solutions to the market. So if we look at the Capital Connect business, I mean, the differentiator in that space is hassle free credit. Between the time of applying and it’s all preloaded, our customers can have credit approved and money in their account within a few minutes. So I think that in itself is a major differentiator. Remember, we are well positioned in that business. We process close to ZAR10 million a month through our vaulting infrastructure. And we process close to — if you look at Q2, well Q2 and in fact December, we did about ZAR1.3 — just under ZAR1.3 billion in our card processing business.