Given these conditions and trends, bad debt risk remained higher than normal.

The Financial Services division has completed its design and planning to migrate from a predominantly decentralised risk management and collection model to a centralised and automated risk management model. Pilot initiatives have been successfully completed and final adjustments for migration to a fully centralised environment are in progress.

Further to the tight management of risk during the past year, the Financial Services division completed its migration from a decentralised to a fully automated centralised risk management and collections model. This change is already starting to show significant benefits in productivity and debtors performance.

Whilst we expect a slow recovery in the financial services markets over the next financial year, we are confident that our focus on extracting full value from our new centralised model will reap commensurate business performance improvements.