COMFI — SANJAR SAMIEV & DENIS GAVRILIN — TRANSCRIPT

Speakers: Jamie (host), Sanjar Samiev (co-founder), Denis Gavrilin (co-founder, CFO).

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[00:00] COLD OPEN

The difference between consumer BNPL and B2B BNPL? The only similarity is the name. Sixty per cent, statistically, of invoices in the GCC region are delayed. The amount of capital needed in the SME space in KSA and the UAE is around $120 billion. We can underwrite a company and get you a payment within a couple of hours. I've survived 2008, and it's only been an upwards trajectory since, which is very dangerous, to assume it's always going to be like this. How do you react to the black swans out there? The key is that you cannot react. So why aren't banks doing this? I believe they do.

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Jamie: We're generally familiar with BNPL regionally, on the consumer side. Tabby and Tamara are pretty ubiquitous, everywhere you look. But I think it's worth explaining, before we kick off, exactly what BNPL entails on the B2B side, just to make sure we're all on the same page and definitionally sound before we launch off into a million different tangents. [01:00] So, with that in mind, who would care to explain exactly what we're talking about here?

Sanjar: They're very different, and the only similarity is the name. In B2B BNPL you're serving a different kind of need. You have more frequent, repetitive trade cycles, the same kind of deal over and over again. The cheque sizes are different too, much bigger, even though we, as Comfi, tend to go for lower cheques. We like lower cheques, but very diversified, because we want to do many more transactions by volume. And consumer BNPL is emotion-driven, it happens at the checkout. [02:00] Most of the decision is taken right there at the checkout.

Jamie: It's a conversion mechanism as much as anything else.

Sanjar: Exactly. But B2B is a more pre-thought, pre-decided process. Merchants agree, suppliers offer the service to their long-term partners, and they make those repetitive purchases with BNPL.

Jamie: Has the BNPL framing been helpful or harmful, in terms of misconceptions? Because historically, maybe not so much regionally, BNPL has had a bad rap in certain quarters.

Sanjar: It's a great question. In this region it only helped us, because BNPL here has done so well. Tabby and Tamara have done a great job, and they're still growing. So it sets a path for us, and the common naming helps a lot. When we say we do B2B BNPL, it's still understood as BNPL, and that helps.

Jamie: Can we have an example of what this looks like? You mentioned a preference for smaller ticket sizes. I was looking at the website, and I think there are maybe eight different verticals you're focused on. [03:00] Give me one of the most popular.

Sanjar: Take a company that sells roasted coffee to lots of coffee shops and restaurants. They're purely B2B, specialised in their job, they've done it in other countries and they're doing it here successfully. They sell through their website and offline. Before Comfi, they'd be selling on credit terms, because B2B mostly happens on credit terms, and that's painful for the supplier. On top of their main speciality, they also have to manage credit. It's a finance job.

Jamie: A headache they don't need. They've enough on as it is.

Sanjar: Exactly, it's a completely different part of what you should be doing as a company. You want to be focused on your product and your customers. But suppliers and buyers also have to manage this finance piece, [04:00] and we understand that around 60% of invoices get delayed. That's a significant amount. It puts you in the shoes of a financier, a person you don't want to be. You want to sell a product. What we're looking for is SMEs on the supplier side who are struggling to provide credit to their customers. We fit there perfectly. We come in, they can offer credit terms of up to ninety days, which is great, because the alternative is painful: they either have to fund their own ninety-day credit, or shorten their terms. And if they shorten their terms, they're no longer competitive. With us, they can offer up to ninety days, increase their sales, and free up their cash to grow the business. They also have the problem of managing collections, and we do that too. Once we pay the supplier upfront, it's not their pain anymore.

Jamie: And initially it was more SaaS-focused, I believe?

Sanjar: It was. When we first launched, we wanted to validate, [05:00] so we looked at where we could go in with very small cheques. We didn't have the funds to fund businesses ourselves, and this is a very capital-intensive business, so we needed traction to validate the MVP. We approached a few SaaS companies and said, we'll finance your product to your customer, take our commission, and you don't have to heavily discount. They get the annual payment upfront, and we break it down for the customer over up to six months, we even had plans to go to twelve. That validated the need, but it's a completely different sector from traditional trade. [06:00] We always knew the real problem was in trade. With my background, having done different businesses in the UAE, I know the pain from the inside, from the business side.

Jamie: I wanted to ask about that. You can approach a problem as a consultant, from the outside, but we generally find it's the founders who felt it most acutely, on the ground, in person, who go and solve it. So how did you first encounter the problem?

Sanjar: It's a simple story. I've been in the UAE for twenty years now, I came in 2006. I worked several years in a corporate job, then saw friends quitting theirs to do startups. My partner and I decided to start a logistics startup called Wing.ae. [07:00] It got noticed quickly. It was a last-mile delivery aggregator, a pure tech company, we had no fleet, but we'd aggregate all the last-mile courier companies into one. The market was very saturated then, each company had ten or fifteen bikes, which was hard to manage for big e-commerce platforms. In the end, we exited to Amazon when they entered the market here. A very successful experience, I learned a lot from it. After that I decided to go into traditional business, and we built a manufacturing facility with my partners.

Jamie: Why is that, can I ask? Going from a tech company to manufacturing, that's a departure.

Sanjar: It was a food-related product, a poultry business. A very different niche we saw. [08:00] Building a manufacturing business teaches you a lot, you go through every phase: construction, setting up, launching the brand and the marketing, signing contracts, and the trade itself. We spent several years making it profitable, and then I moved on, as I always do. I wanted to do something different, and that's when I saw the opportunity. That manufacturing experience gave us the insight. We were a new company, and approaching the traditional ways of getting financial support was very difficult. I saw many other companies struggling the same way. It was in the back of my mind that we should do something about it. So I started talking to and interviewing lots of similar companies, and I called up some of the friends I'd worked with at Wing.ae, [09:00] and we decided to set up Comfi. It was a year or two of brainstorming, talking and validating the problem.

We decided to start with SaaS businesses, an obvious start, but we quickly realised there aren't many SaaS companies in the UAE. The market is very limited, the US dominates SaaS globally, and although that may change, our research showed the regional market between the UAE, Saudi and the other GCC markets was small. And market size matters for future success, especially if you want to build something big. So we went back to traditional business, which is where I'm familiar with the process. We validated quickly, onboarded five or ten companies, and there was no problem selling, because companies needed it. We started designing and digitising the product [10:00] in parallel, doing it semi-automatically at first, with a lot of phone calls and handwork. Once we'd validated, that gave us a strong base to approach financiers. I did that through people I knew from my professional past, a family office based in Abu Dhabi. I pitched them the idea; they understand the local market very well, and that's where we got our first debt facility. In parallel, we got equity funding from 500 Global and Sanabil Investments. That was amazing validation, they loved it from the first interview, and I'm very grateful to the team. Amal Dokhan and the whole team there have been amazing. We went through their accelerator programme in Saudi, which helped us a lot and got us familiar with the Saudi market.

Jamie: Denis, maybe take a step back and contextualise the wider landscape, why Comfi needs to exist in the first place. [11:00] I've written ad nauseam about SME financing and the gap in the UAE and the GCC. What is that issue? Why is Comfi doing this, and why aren't banks capable of something similar?

Denis: When you talk about SME finance in the UAE, the GCC, and worldwide, there's a huge need to finance SMEs precisely, because they're the driver of economic growth in every country. You see it in Europe, in the States, in the CIS region. These are the small businesses that help us every day. What differentiates Comfi is that we believe in them from day one. If you're a company that's been on the market for a year, doing small transactions with your counterparties, that's all we need. We just need to know you're there and doing genuine business, and if you are, Comfi welcomes you and tries to solve your problems. [12:00] And those problems are the ones we discussed, the cash-flow gap, the collections. We want the SME focused on selling their goods and services, not on the finance side. That's what we're for.

Jamie: Something that keeps coming up is credit intelligence and underwriting, and AI has supercharged all of this. Can you speak to that?

Sanjar: Of course. Underwriting is our secret sauce, it's what lets us be fast. We can underwrite a company and get you a payment within a couple of hours, and automation helps us a lot. When we were building Comfi, we were thinking about exactly that: how can we be fast, solve customers' needs right away, so they're not waiting weeks or assembling an enormous set of documents? [13:00] We're very light on the documents we request. If you have a bank account and statement, an ID and a trade licence, that's basically all we need. Everything else we rely on open public data, which you can request online or through partnerships with ministries and other providers. We built our underwriting engine on that, and there's almost no human interaction when we assess an application. [14:00] That's what lets us be fast. We use AI heavily, computer vision, document processing, and a few tweaks make us very efficient and able to serve a lot of SMEs. We've served more than a thousand SMEs in two years.

Jamie: And why aren't banks doing this?

Sanjar: I believe they do. Banks do an amazing job financing the economy. We just pick up customers at a very different point in their life.

Jamie: Is it risk tolerance? Are they overly reliant on credit-bureau scores, or do they not have that same capacity?

Sanjar: We rely on very similar things, and they have access to the same data we do, we just process it differently. And we serve the same customers, we just pick them up a bit earlier, and on smaller cheques.

Jamie: What are we generally talking about? Up to 2 million dirhams, or am I way off?

Sanjar: It depends on the company and what we assign. We look at their financial health, but for now we want to stay at a much lower limit, around 700,000 dirhams. [15:00] That's our limit, but we can always raise it, that's not an issue. What we want to do is learn on the small cheques.

Jamie: Presumably the more that comes in, the better the feedback loop.

Sanjar: Exactly, and we do thousands of invoices a month, which gives us a lot of data on how SMEs behave. We like to focus not on the upper end but on the lower end too. We don't have a limit on how small you can finance. If you have a 100-dirham invoice, we can process it. [16:00] It's never a question of you being big enough for us to be interested, we're interested in everyone, and we can pick up companies right when they start, with very small invoices. We can also process them in bulk: some customers send us two or three thousand invoices in one go, at 100 or 150 dirhams each, and we still process them within hours. So we're not discriminatory about which clients we take, we're inclusionary.

Denis: That might answer your earlier question, Jamie, about why banks don't do this. Banks concentrate on the next level up, bigger tickets. For them it doesn't make sense to serve everyone, it takes resources, it takes people. When you have a huge pool of big customers, why would you go after the small ones?

Jamie: Is it worth the time investment?

Denis: They'd have to spend much more attention and resources on those small cheques. So we concentrate on them, designing the product and automating the process so we can serve those customers automatically. [17:00] Most banks have set processes they have to run for every customer, which just doesn't make sense for the small ones.

Jamie: And the ambition for Comfi is that those clients scale, and you scale with them, because you got in early. Talk to me about distribution, where you actually pick up your customers. You mentioned tapping into pre-existing networks. There was a phase a couple of weeks ago where I'd clearly spent too long on a Comfi Instagram ad, because I kept getting them, and I only wish I could use your financing, though I don't think there are enough invoices coming in to justify it. But talk to me about it.

Sanjar: We have a very diversified go-to-market strategy. There are the standard channels, a sales team that approaches customers, and then referrals, [18:00] professional consultants like outsourced accountants, tax and financial consultants who advise SMEs. We have partnerships with them and they refer businesses to us, which works great. But more interesting is the network effect: we serve a supplier, the supplier likes us, and they recommend us to other suppliers. Or it goes the other way, a supplier does a deal with a buyer, the buyer likes the experience, and since the buyer is often also B2B further down the supply chain, they come to us as a supplier too. So we onboard them, and that's practically free acquisition.

Jamie: That reduces the CAC pretty significantly.

Sanjar: Significantly, in combination. Beyond that, we're now focusing on digital, product-led marketing. We have a fully digital, fully automated flow where you can go from A [19:00] to Z, apply, upload your documents and get a decision within minutes, which is great for businesses that find us through digital channels. And we're focusing more on embedded channels, which I personally believe will scale much bigger: partnering with e-commerce platforms, marketplaces, the kind of companies that host the SMEs we need. We have partnerships with several ERP platforms too. Those channels are very promising, they've already jumped up to almost the same level as our other channels, and we plan to grow them significantly.

Jamie: Was building that hands-off, seamless onboarding difficult? There must have been a lot of friction, [20:00] with all the documents involved.

Sanjar: It depends. With startups approaching us, it's much easier, because they've built the strategy into the company, they understand it, and we just agree commercial terms and kick off. We've had those, and they went smoothly. But businesses focused on their core operations, who haven't thought about introducing lending instruments into their platform, are more challenging. But we like the challenges. We want to talk to them and explain, because there's a lot of upside for them too.

Jamie: What resonates most? Give me the pitch, pretend I'm a platform.

Sanjar: First, there's a monetary incentive for all parties, that's the biggest motivation.

Jamie: Money talks.

Sanjar: [21:00] Beyond that, it's customer stickiness. If they provide financial infrastructure within the platform, it helps the SMEs.

Jamie: The lock-in.

Sanjar: Absolutely. There are different kinds of platforms. Some route transactions through themselves, others are more like classifieds. The classifieds-type companies can only really refer, they can't implement it, because there's no checkout. The ones with transactions going through them are a great opportunity to bring in Comfi and add convenience and value for their merchants and their merchants' customers. So that's how we pitch. [22:00] And we understand every company has its own development pipeline and is focused on its own business. I've never seen a successful startup say they have lots of free time for new initiatives, everyone says they have so much going on, which is a good sign. So we break it down into stages. We believe in starting small. If there's friction to full integration, we offer a phased approach: phase one is very light and doesn't require many resources from either side, phase two is a deeper integration, [23:00] and phase three is full automation. That works well, partners need time to plan and allocate, but meanwhile we can start small, validate, and move to the later phases.

Jamie: We've managed to get this far without me bringing up the funding, so we may as well touch on it. $65 million pre-Series A, a striking number. There's an equity element, with Iliad Partners, congrats to Christos, great guy, big fan, and Yango as well, their first regional investment, which is awesome. And then the debt component and mezzanine structure, with PFG, Amina, who's great, and Shorooq. Talk me through how it came together. Denis, you're the finance man, break it down for us mere mortals.

Denis: They were two very separate but very close tracks. We worked the equity side and, in parallel, the debt side. We're very happy with the investors we brought on board. [24:00] The process took us six to eight months from beginning to signing and receiving the last amount. On the technical side, I wouldn't say the due diligence was out of this world or especially hard, it felt natural. Our numbers are good, and that helps a lot, if you're growing, you can have everything in place. On the debt side, we started earlier. The first were Partners for Growth, who are amazing, very flexible, very supportive, and they've backed a lot of good companies. We started with them a year ago for a testing phase, the first couple of tranches, and after that we grew a lot with them. [25:00] Now we're proud that, on top of that, we've introduced Shorooq to our debt stack, because we need to fund growth in the UAE and in KSA, and Shorooq are very supportive and helpful. That was the idea behind combining equity and the debt structure. With all these investors on board, we'll be able to accommodate more and more SMEs in the region and support the growth of the economy, which benefits not just us and them, but everyone.

Jamie: What are you going to spend the equity on?

Sanjar: That's a good question. We have big, ambitious plans for the future.

Jamie: How big is the team at the moment, sorry?

Sanjar: We're at 55 people. We want to grow the team as the operation grows, and the funding helps us do that. [26:00] Part of it goes towards geographic expansion, we're planning our Saudi expansion. Saudi is a very interesting, very different market, and we want to be careful about the move. Many companies have done it, some succeeded, some didn't.

Jamie: You want to get the licensing right.

Sanjar: Yes. There are a lot of differences. People make the mistake, especially from outside, of thinking it's a very similar market. It's not, it's very different. I've been travelling to Saudi for many years. So, expansion to Saudi. And equity funding also helps us unlock more debt facilities, it's an interesting setup. We're lucky, in air quotes, because besides equity fundraising we have to do a completely different kind of fundraising, debt funding, [27:00] which is a very different process. We combine and announce them together, but they run in parallel and look very different. Equity helps us unlock more debt facilities, the ratio has to be there, a kind of skin-in-the-game logic, and it unlocks future upsizes with existing lenders. PFG and Shorooq have supported other businesses very successfully, they know how to do it, so we learn a lot from them too. I remember meeting Amina at a conference a year ago, by accident, she was heading into another panel, we clicked, she liked the conversation, and we met a week later and started talking about the deal.

Jamie: She's amazing.

Sanjar: She definitely is. All our investors are amazing, and we're lucky they've been so supportive. When the recent regional tension started, [28:00] everyone reached out. We'd just brought Shorooq on board, and even before the deal closed they added us to their founder community because of the situation. I love that they gathered all the founders to discuss how founders can help each other. Joel and Nathan were very supportive, and Shane too, he's been great to us.

Jamie: And it's not the first time on the BNPL side for either Shorooq or PFG, having done, I think, Tabby and Tamara between them. Speaking of Tabby and Tamara, they both have business offerings as well. Is there any crossover there? Both are supposedly gearing up for IPO at whatever point that happens, [29:00] I'm sick of speculating exactly when, because every time I nail my colours to the mast it moves out another year, and unfortunately, with everything going on in the world, it'll probably be pushed further down the road again. But is there competition there?

Sanjar: I think we have very different products. We mostly serve traditional businesses and have a different kind of offering. Maybe in future our paths will cross, but we know the guys very well, we're very friendly, and they're focused on B2C, the consumer is their main focus, while we focus on our merchants and business clients. So for now I don't see any crossover, and I'm not worried. But competition is always good, [30:00] it drives progress. If we ever share a space, it'll only be better for the merchants, for the SMEs. Eventually the SME wins, and that's the great part.

Jamie: It's a good point, the size of the pie is colossal. We're in a proliferation of SME-financing startups, and people ask how there's capacity for so many of them. I think they underestimate how huge the gap actually is. There's plenty of room.

Sanjar: Yes. Some of the numbers say the amount of capital needed in the SME space in KSA and the UAE is around [31:00] $120 billion. So the market is enormous, and it's certainly not winner-takes-all.

Jamie: You mentioned that's not keeping you up at night. Is there anything that does?

Sanjar: What keeps me up at night has already been happening for the last three weeks. The funny part of the story, and there's nothing funny about it, is that we were discussing with one of the investors how economic downturns are very damaging to startups, and especially to lending companies. It's a big challenge for them. We were discussing this, and a week later it started, in March. [32:00] It's something we've always tried to prepare for, I wouldn't say we were ready, but we always model different scenarios, and Denis is responsible for that on the finance side. I keep pushing on it too, even though I'm a very optimistic person. I've survived 2008, I've lived through some of the downturns over the years. I see a lot of startups that have come up in the last five or six years for whom it's only ever been an upwards trajectory, and that's very dangerous, to assume it's always going to be like that. So it's good to be prepared. That said, I don't think it'll be a long downturn, and I hope it's short. We already see businesses recovering. As soon as it happened, we introduced certain measures, talked to our customers and interviewed them to understand the industries, [33:00] and we see them adapting. They're not closing down, they're still bullish on growth. Some sectors are hit harder than others, but most of the SMEs we see are adaptable and flexible. On modelling those bad scenarios, Denis is the expert, he has personal experience.

Jamie: Why are you such a pessimist, Denis?

Denis: It's part of the job. Someone should be an optimist, someone a pessimist, that's where the balance comes in. If Sanjar ever put on the pessimist's hat, I'd step in and say no, no, no, so now I get to be the good guy. I've had different experiences, in consulting and in banking, with different problems in different parts of the world, COVID, logistics shutting down, the economy readapting. That experience helps a lot. [34:00] It's actually what I teach my students at the new economics school, how to react to those crises, those black swans. And the key is that you cannot react. Even if you've prepared, if you've invested in your people, your processes, your tech, and you're transparent with your investors and manage expectations well, if you wait to react to what's happening out there, you'll be too late. The same goes for any startup, any company. So yes, we were thinking about different scenarios, though we never truly anticipated this, because the UAE economy is so strong. If you'd seen what we've seen in the market, [35:00] and how the UAE economy reacted to everything happening, you'd be amazed at how strong it is. That honestly gives us a lot of comfort. We're very happy with how it's bouncing back, some companies are even starting to grow more, because the government support is there. Everyone believes this will be resolved efficiently, and everyone out there is standing very strong.

Jamie: If someone could tell the orange man in the White House that, it would be helpful. You mentioned Saudi is next on the list. Is the ambition wider than that? Is there any reason it couldn't be?

Sanjar: Absolutely, there's no reason we can't go global. We have near-future plans and longer-term plans, and our ambitions are big. We believe Comfi can be one of the global players coming out of Dubai, out of the region, [36:00] and very strongly positioned globally. The initial phase is Saudi Arabia and the GCC. We'll focus on those regions thoroughly for some time, and then, beyond two years, we're considering Latam, for example. Lending products in Latam are doing very well, the economy is emerging and growing, it's a great place to be. Europe is interesting too, we've had very interesting conversations with European partners. The product might be slightly adjusted to the local market, but we see big demand, SMEs are underserved globally. It's not a local problem.

Jamie: I love the Latam angle, that's really interesting. Sometimes you think you have to look eastwards, that geography limits you, [37:00] but Latam makes a lot of sense, just in terms of the similarity in demographics.

Sanjar: Any economy with good, growing, young demographics is a good place to go. In that sense Latam, Asia and Africa are very interesting regions for us. And a market like Europe is interesting because it's mature, with so many data sources you can apply quick fixes to, and your go-to-market is very strong. So we're looking at very different areas. There are long-term plans, but tactically Saudi is our closest target, and we re-evaluate the longer-term plans as we go, factoring in new data and new interest from partners.

Jamie: Sorry, I'm getting overly excited on your behalf. Maybe we'll end on a positive note, because I put a slightly negative spin on it a moment ago. [38:00] What are you most excited about over the next few months? We've covered the expansion, so I'll push you to say something different. What's keeping you going?

Sanjar: For me, it's what's happening in our underwriting. I believe that in a short time we'll be able to serve even more customers, be even more inclusive than we are now, and be even faster. My dream is that we evaluate you while you onboard onto the platform, that's our ultimate goal.

Jamie: You can adopt the quick-commerce tagline of fifteen minutes.

Sanjar: Fifteen minutes to fifteen seconds, that's my dream. I think we'll achieve it within a year, year and a half, hopefully.

Jamie: What's enabling that step change? Why the conviction you'll get there?

Denis: First, we'll grow the team and invest in R&D. [39:00] There are things we're doing right now, and the releases are coming. As we do, we include more and more customers, because if we're very precise in how we underwrite, precise on the terms and the customers, we won't be conservative by default. If we're talking about risk management, that's the ultimate goal. Everyone thinks the essence of it is to be conservative enough, but for me it's a very different thing, the main goal is to bring added value to the business. The other thing I'm hoping for in the coming months is our expansion, because we can deal with different products and different operational difficulties and tackle those problems. We want to expand and grow.

Jamie: And for you, Sanjar, maybe something else?

Sanjar: Spending all that money we raised.

Jamie: Straight into your pocket.

Sanjar: [40:00] In a very efficient way, of course. Everyone thinks spending the money means Rolexes and Porsches, but that's not what entrepreneurs do. When you say spend the money, it means hiring people and investing in technology, hoping it takes you further towards your goal.

Jamie: No Adam Neumann, WeWork-style parties.

Sanjar: We'll avoid that as much as we can.

Jamie: Keep that for further down the line. Wait for SoftBank for that.

Sanjar: We're not those kinds of people. For me personally, even the excitement is work-related, my family complains about it. When they see me on the phone about a good initiative, I start smiling and get excited, and they tell me about it. But yes, I'm excited about the global plans. [41:00] Once we take Comfi global, across several continents, that would be amazing. In a sense we're already on different continents. During our last marketing campaign we tried to understand where our customers come from, and, surprisingly, we have customers from every continent, entrepreneurs born in very different parts of the world, Australia, Africa, Guatemala, you name it.

Jamie: They could be your ambassadors.

Sanjar: We hope so.

Jamie: That's what's interesting about the region in general. If you sliced Dubai in half, you'd get a representation of nearly every country in the world.

Sanjar: That's the beauty of Dubai, the melting pot, and we love it. [42:00] We talk to our customers, and sometimes they send gifts on holidays, all kinds of interesting desserts, and we send ours back. It's great to talk to people from Australia, South America, literally every continent, we counted them. That's a great thing about being in Dubai.

Jamie: You keep mentioning food gifts, and I haven't had lunch yet, so I'm starving. We'll have to edit out a few stomach rumbles. But something you touched on is this idea of obsession. Do you think you have to be obsessed with the problem space? How does that manifest, just constantly being switched on?

Denis: I think what people don't understand about being an entrepreneur is that you don't get time off. [43:00] And it's not because you're sitting at a desk or in the office. It's that you think about this thing 24/7, at least I do. I'm really into this project, this space. I've been doing finance all my life, and it's my passion. I'm grateful we have the opportunity to do something interesting, to help others, to support SME growth. If you're not obsessed with it, it raises the question of why you do it. It's the same at home, my wife says, put your headphones on, I'm tired of hearing about all this 24/7. But that's what we do. Sanjar and I are constantly on calls late in the evening, not about where to party, but about what to do next, which problem to tackle. And it's amazing. I'm confident the whole team, Ali, Amal, Sanjar, are also keen to move it forward, and it's on their minds 24/7, the same as mine.

Jamie: Denis, Sanjar, thank you very much for your time.

Sanjar: Thank you, Jamie.

Denis: Thank you. Let's stay in touch, this has been great.

Jamie: This has been really great.