Sparebanken Vest

A warm welcome to the presentation of the three quarter figures for Sparbank Invest. As before, we will have a question and answer sequence after my presentation. If you have any questions that you would like to be addressed in that sequence, send them to this email address so we will be able to answer the questions in the sequence after the presentation. If we go by the numbers, then the third quarter is a very good quarter for us. We have no special one-time effects. There is also an advantage in the loss process, but we have a stable and high capital loss over time, and also a good capital loss in the third quarter with 13.8%. Here you can see the one-capital return from 2012 to the third quarter of 2021. In all these years, we have largely exceeded our one-capital return target, which is 12%. One year we were at 11%, and one year we were just below 12%, with 11.9% in 2018. Then we have also used the full power that the board received from the General Assembly in relation to the sharing of exchange and gifts, part 2, in relation to the surplus disposal for 2019. This was carried out and this contributed to the one-capital certificate holders receiving an additional 1.80 kroner per one-capital certificate, paid out in October. And we have also put 290 million kroner in gifts for 2020 in the second part of the exchange disposal for 2020. Det betyr at vi i samlet har betalt ut et utbytte for 2020 på 4 kroner, og vi har samlet i forhold til samfunnskapitalen, delt ut kundutbytte på 354 millioner, og gaver nå på 290 millioner kroner. Gaven her skal vi komme tilbake til senere, men det er jo også en formidabel verdi for den region vi opererer i, at vi har en sånn gavekapacitet, og særlig i en periode der disse inntektene har vært mer kjærkomne enn noen gang i lyset av inntektsportfall gjennom pandemien. Vi er en bank som beveger oss litt nordover. Vi er Norges nest eldste sparebank, for de som ikke kjenner oss fra før. Vi er etablert i 1823, vi nærmer oss 200 år, og har nå også definert Møre-Romsdal som satsningsområde, og starta der med Ålesundregionen, som jeg skal komme tilbake igjen til i presentasjonen min litt senere. For us, it is important to have a strong course, deliver good and stable deductions over time, and also work in accordance with the same things over time, and be good at what we have the conditions to be the best at. What we have said to the capital market, which we are very disciplined in relation to, is that we should be a bank with low complexity, we should not deal with business areas that we do not have the conditions to be among the best at. We are going to be at the forefront of the digital shift, because that affects banks and is so central to the business we run. We are also going to be conservative in relation to our payments. We are not going to sacrifice margins and risk for growth. We are going to be a bank that has a good credit culture and also delivers low losses over time, and we will get back to that in the presentation. This is going to help us reach the top. and among the best in one-capital issuance in our sector over time, and also being a bank that has a moderate risk profile. So we will deliver a good risk-adjusted issuance in Sparbanket Vest. And to get into these three points a little more in depth in the presentation, these are our business areas. The personal market is the business market. The personal market includes Bulder, with a slightly different geographical approach than what we have on the rest of the personal market in the bank. Foreign insurance is incredibly important to us. One of the most important and will become even more important, we work on scaling up that business and have very clear goals on how we are going to make it bigger. And then we have Brage Finance, which is also important and is in a very good development and has had very good growth in recent years. This is our primary business area. There are few better tests than Google Play and App Store rating when it comes to our mobile bank. Over time, we have been the best and are still the bank that has the best rating on the mobile bank in Google Play and App Store. We are also proud that we in the third quarter received an upgrade when it comes to Moody's senior rating on the bank. Now we are among the best Norwegian savings banks also when it comes to Moody's rating of the bank, and we take it as a good quality point, both in terms of how we operate, but not least also a quality point in relation to our loan book. Over time, we have been at the top and among the best when it comes to one-capital issuance in the period 2012-2020. Here we are in the first half of 2021, and we also hope to be at the top when we put behind us the half-year we are now in this period. What we are most passionate about at Sparbank is to do so well that we have space for action, that we can think long-term, and that we have access to capital if we need it, because we have a good standing in the capital market. Then a little more to the numbers for the third quarter. I will share my presentation in three. A little about banking, a little about our credit risk release book, and a little about why we believe that we have a good starting point to also reach our one capital release target of 12% in the period we enter. If you look at our one-capital withdrawal in the third quarter, it is a 13.8. We had 13.6 in the second quarter, and then we had 13.1 in the first quarter. Stable and good one-capital withdrawal. If we had had full supply available in connection with the General Assembly earlier this year, we would have had a one-capital withdrawal of 14.2 during this period. It can be worth noting. that the underlying trend is very good, and that we have kept a little more capital than we actually wanted for a period due to the uncertainty around the pandemic, but we delivered 13.8, and had we not had that capital, we would have put 14.2 in this quarter. Good capital coverage, we will come back to that, 17.7. We have a recorded value per capita proof now at 67.80 kroner, and the result per capita proof in the third quarter is 2.31 kroner. If we look at the result development from Q3 last year to Q3 this year, there is good progress and a lot of areas that contribute to good result development in this quarter. We are ahead on net income. We have production revenues that are a little ahead. We see that travel businesses in Færma are rising, short-term revenues Increases slowly but surely. We had a good quarter last year also when it comes to business. Will come in on the results from those companies later. Last year we had a negative result contribution from finance. In this quarter we are a little positive. We have good cost development. We have a cost income ratio of 33 for the companies in this quarter. A little up on the companies, a little down on the mother bank. Will specify that later. And then we have an advantage in the loss period in this quarter, which we also had last quarter. And that means that we have a result in this quarter of 636 million kroner for the third quarter. The interest rate net is improving and maybe a little extra good in this quarter due to interest rate fixing, but we have a good underlying growth. We have lower financing costs and we have an extra interest rate day, which makes the nominal interest rate net have a very good development from the second quarter last year to the third quarter this year, 849 million for the third quarter. The interest rate net in percentage of the administrative capital is at 1.46. Higher Nibor reduces the foreign margin and increases the income margin, so I'm a little unsure of how much value this picture gives, but it is a good expression of, first and foremost, that Nibor has changed over the last few quarters, as you can see. Foreign margin a little lower and income margin in improvement. We have a very good outlay growth, and that illustrates that we have a good organization, an incredible number of talented people who fight every day in the customer base to ensure that we have a good development in the bank and get leverage on the cost base we have. We have a 12-month growth now in the personal market, including bulls, at 10.4. Very pleased with that. The underlying growth in the bank is in good development, and we believe that we will be able to reach our goal of 5% foreign growth, at least on the personal market, which is the target for this year. We also believe in the operating market. There is also an incredibly good development in foreign growth in the operating market. The 12-month growth is now at 7.4%, which is up from what we reported in the first quarter, and also up from what we reported in the second quarter, I would like to point out the work that is done in the PM and BM divisions, which makes us have a very good development when it comes to top line, net income and growth to report in this quarter. Our income growth in both segments is also growing well. 4.7 in the personal market segment. The bull market growth today is significantly greater than the income growth in the bull market. We will come back to that, but we have very good development plans that make us think that we are quite fast now. To a much greater extent, we will pick up the entire customer base from the customers and not just withdraw. We will come back to that. And then we also have a very good income growth in the business market right now at a 12-month growth of 16.4. We also strengthen our saving and placement. We are currently working on strategic thinking on how to move forward and discuss this, among other things, with the other foreign banks. But we have a solid increase in maintenance value in our saving and placement portfolios that our customers have placed through us. Over 18 billion at the beginning of the third quarter and a fine net growth in net renewals every quarter in the last quarter. Cost development is important for us. We are focused on being at the forefront of cost income. Now Morbank is at 28 in this quarter and the company is at 33. We have said that Morbank and the housing credit company will also have flat cost development this year. And as illustrated on this slide, we had a decline in costs in 2020 compared to 2012, despite significant investment in IT in this period. And then we have specified the cost development so far this year, to the right here. There you see that we have a decline in mother bank and housing credit, then we are concerned with increasing the size of the real estate agent. Of course, that will increase the cost a little and also cost income, because the real estate agent has a higher cost income than the bank. So there we have a growth plan that we have broken down into quarters, where we are going to employ several employees in the coming quarters. And then we have an effect of the single sale that makes the costs to the locals of the bank a little higher than it has been before, as a consequence of that we sold our main office to KLP not so long ago. So the company has also collapsed compared to last year. But we are incredibly busy, and also at Morbank and Boligryt, we are able to deliver flat cost development further despite price and wage growth. Yes, we are well capitalized, we have gone over the minimum requirements, we have also gone over the requirements if all buffers had been locked on, and we have also gone over the requirements regarding the unweighted core capital share. We have a good starting point to be able to develop and grow further within the framework of the capital base we have, at least from a short and medium-long perspective. Frende and Brage, and it could also have been the Nordic countries, are in very good development. We see that Frende is incredibly important for us. It has an advantage in the process when it comes to damage percentage, with 67.9% so far this year. An annualized one-capital reduction of over 25. We are very pleased with that. It works incredibly well in Frende life and Frende damage. In Prague we have a slightly shorter history, but Prague has had an incredibly fine development. We have had portfolio growth of 20% in the last 12 months. We see it happen a bit in the leasing and financing market, which allows us to take new positions and develop the company further. We are also very pleased with the cost efficiency in Prague, a cost percentage of 24%, not to be underestimated, down 2% from the same time last year. In this quarter, Brage delivers its best quarter ever in relation to underlying operations and has a one-capital return of 13.2, which is above the long-term goal we have said, which is in parallel with the bank's goal, which is 12% one-capital return. To summarize the main figures, we have a net capital reduction of 13.8. The net income is in good development. We have increased costs at the corporate level, as I mentioned earlier. The loss period is pre-planned. We have a return of 22 million in this quarter, in comparison with a loss cost of 76 in the same quarter last year. The result is good, and we are also well capitalized, as I mentioned earlier. A little about our loan book and credit risk. We are a bank that has over time had a conservative loan book, also a relatively conservative approach to the balance between the business and the personal market. We have 24% of our loans for the business market and then we have 75% of our loans, or 76% of our loans for the personal market. And now it's like this, if you look at the total of our loan book, then 20% of our loans are for the Buller concept. We have been very careful not to move out of what some have called the church tower principle. And we still hold on to that for our basic business. But we get a little more exposure outside of Vestland and Rogaland and eventually Møre Romsdal, in light of the fact that we go to the whole country with our Bulda concept. DOG is a transparent LTV with a Bulda concept of 40%, so what we do outside of these three counties now is with a very moderate risk profile. And that is important for us in relation to still being a bank with a low relative loss level. Our loss costs during the pandemic have been low and could have been even lower as well. 72% of the loss costs through COVID-19, from the first quarter last year to now, is model expenses. And we see that the last two quarters we have had a net return as a consequence of being conservative through the pandemic and also earlier, and we will come to the same level of spending in the bank afterwards. But relatively low, or actually very low individual spending and low confirmed losses we have had through the pandemic and also now out of the pandemic. Offshore has been a topic that most people have been interested in, linked to Norwegian bank exposure. We have been conservative over time. We have a clear portfolio with six engagements. We have an exposure of just under a billion, and we have a return on this portfolio of 24%, which we think is robust and sufficient. So we are not very concerned that we in this area will have significant costs in the future, as the world looks like right now. So we have five engagements that either pay full fees or pay reduced fees, and then we have one engagement that is still under restructuring. Top-sourced and lost loans over time are on a low level, and we have a decline, especially in the business market, on this portfolio, which accounts for 78% of the exposure you see in the figure. So the cost of losses in the last two quarters is an income of 320 million, an income of 22 million, and as I have been talking about and repeated now, we have low losses over time, and as the world looks now, we also expect that we will have low losses based on what we see in relation to the bank's foreign book today. And then we have chosen to take this slide that shows our foreign losses over time in relation to our balance. And here we have taken a selection of the largest banks in Norway compared to relative losses for Sparbank Vest. To illustrate what we have suggested for a long time, namely that we have a good foreign book, we have a lower loss rate than than the banks we usually compare ourselves with. And we also have a very good turnover, a good level of turnover compared to the same banks. The point in this slide is that the turnover level has increased, and the level of turnover we have in lost and failed engagement is not necessarily reflected in the risk we have in the foreign book, so we mean that we have a robust level of turnover, a real level of turnover, and we have shown over time that we are able to have lower losses over time than the competitors naturally compare themselves to. We also mean that the fall height, especially in our personal market portfolio, which is dominant for us, is moderate. We have 95.3% of our payments within 70% LTV, and we are also a region in the country, we mean that we have a lower fall height than some of the other regions in the country, where the payment growth from 2014 to the present day has shown that the housing loan or price development has been completely different from what it has been in our region. The Oslo region, for example, has had a price increase in housing from 2014 to 2021 at 63%, while we see, for example, in Stavanger in the same period, the development has been 9%, and that gives another fall height if it were more demanding in the housing market, is our assessment. Finally, about our market position. We think we have a good starting point to deliver a good and competitive one-capital transfer. I will touch on some of these points, as you can see on this slide, in the last part of the presentation. We see that we are a region with very fine development. We also see that the result index in the Vestland index, which we run quarterly, where we interview large parts of the business community in our region, is back at the level it was in the fourth quarter of 2019, i.e. before the pandemic. And if we look at the expectation index, it is actually above what it was before the pandemic. We experience that it goes very well with business customers in our region. Business customers in our region have a unique ability to adapt. We have been used to having cyclical businesses, we have cyclical businesses and therefore we see over time that we have a business life that is well trained to adapt to the changes that have been and the changes that will come. The expectation index is at a very high level, which illustrates that the optimism in relation to the business life in the region is very good and that we are in a very attractive region. Then we also mean that the value proposition we have, which consists primarily of these four things, these four things should differentiate Sparbank the most. We should be good at a lot of other things, but especially these four things we should stick to and be extra good at. And we experience that this value proposition has stood especially well through a pandemic, where customers may have been a little more uncertain about their future than they were before the pandemic. We will be a bank with a good distribution network, a personal signature in our council, which is better than those we compete with. We will be at the forefront when it comes to digital services. We will have a community engagement for the region, and we have unique tools there through the public sector, which is larger than our competitors. And then we will have customer exchange, which is also unique, far on the way for us in relation to the competitors we have in our region. We have worked very carefully to define what customer orientation means in practice in SparBankenVest. We have been working on these six things for a while now, and we are even better at showing these six things and delivering these six things in our customer range, both in the business market and in the personal market. And that has given results. If you look at customer satisfaction metrics that we have in Sparbank Invest, where we started with customer satisfaction metrics back in 1997, then you see on this slide here that for the second quarter, we do not have it for the third quarter yet, but for the second quarter, we have an all-time high when it comes to customer satisfaction, both on the personal and business market. I think that is a very good starting point to be able to grow with reasonable margin and reasonable risk in both segments, also in the coming quarters. We work with digitalization as a starting point for good customer experiences, but not least to be cost-effective and have a low cost-income. One of the examples we have worked a lot with in the last 12 months is to ensure that customers send in and make us as good as possible to conduct a good consultation with the basis of digital transmission of everything we need to be able to advise the customer when the customer comes in. Use more time to advise customers, use more time to see customers, less time on the things customers could have prepared us for. 95% of the loan transactions we carry out in the office network are based on full digital transmission from the customer before the consultation. We are also very pleased with the way we have started in Møre Romsdal. Torstein, who is the leader of this investment, has been in place for a while, but his team came into place just a week ago. We have already signed 200 million in short time in mid-term locations in the pension market, and we have 1 billion in the pipeline towards the business market with good business customers, which we are very happy for, have been willing to evaluate the savings market the most, and our new establishment in Ålesund. Very confident that we will get this done, and so far this office has been running in medium-term locations, but we have received very good locations in Ålesund with very good availability, which we are looking forward to being finished in the first half of 2022. So far, it has been running in medium-term locations, but has come very well. Buller Bank is also very well off. We thought we were very healthy when we set ourselves the goal of growing in a two-year period with 20 billion kroner. It is a formidable growth on such a type of concept. And we are incredibly pleased that this week we passed 16 billion abroad on Bull. That we have a very moderate risk in this portfolio with an average LTV of 40%. We have passed 20,000 customers, and the knowledge of the Bulder concept in the Norwegian banking market is at 25%. This is incredibly good in terms of how much money we have spent on marketing, but we also have some of the revenue dynamics with us. We see that every time things happen on the revenue side, the banks put up revenue, it is communicated in the media, and as a rule, Bulder comes out very well when it comes to traffic, every time revenue is a topic in the media. And we also see that the Bulder concept, Lille Bulder, is now in sixth place in Amedia's survey on what choices customers would make if they were to change banks today. And that is a very good starting point for this concept to also have a very good growth in the coming time. We are still working on developing our app to become even more complete in terms of being able to be a bank that provides the most important service spectrum within the bank on our mobile-only platform. And what we are working on right now is fund saving, credit cards, and the fact that Buldar Bank Concepts also distributes bank IDs for their own accounts, so that we are not dependent on the fact that the customers have bank IDs from another bank before they come to Buldar. And we are working intensively to increase the conversion rate on what we have already launched. And we also believe that in the short term we will also be even better at getting the customer to end the bank relationship where it is today and use Bulder as a total bank connection. And we see that many have already done that. And we see that we are very focused on how to develop the service spectrum so that there should not be any reason to have another bank next to Bulder than the Bulder bank concept. Frende, as I mentioned earlier, has a very good result development. An annual growth of 25.4% so far this year, and also placed behind in 2020 and 2019 with very good one-capital spending. Frende is in good development. We have set up new distributors through the Local Bank Alliance and these retail fire boxes that came from Jensidie. We have also made a strategy revision in Frende recently, where we have chosen to focus on what we think we can do best in relation to what Frende should be further. Therefore, we have developed the franchise channel, which was big back in time for Frende, because we saw that the damage percentage was too high and we did not have enough revenue. We have also developed pensions, because we saw that the rise on the IT side would be too big in relation to the potential for future profitability. Therefore, we have engaged in cooperation with Nordea Liv. And then we are ready to develop what we have defined as the partner channel, and then we will be super good in the other areas and prioritize our resources, where we also have the best conditions to create profitable growth in the future, in the coming years. Brage is in good development. 22% annual growth in the last two years. A significant improvement in results and a very good one-capital-discount with 13.2% in the quarter. Very pleased that we are gradually building increased one-capital-discount in the concept, that we are able to take a growth and take advantage of the changes in this market, and I think we have created an incredibly good team that is targeted, commercial, and has managed to develop this company very well without increasing the costs of foreign growth in the last quarter. Cost percentage at 24% is very good and attractive, and Borg has made a profitable development further for Brage Finance. Especially the Local Bank Alliance, we are very happy to have chosen the entire product range in the Frende platform, with Brage, Nordne, Frende and Værd Boligkredit. As I said earlier, it will be built stone by stone in Nordne. Nordne has an incredibly fine development and shows positive results, and I see that they are still taking new positions, and I am sure that we will also get a lot of joy from Nordne in the coming time, in addition to Frende and Brage Finance. We are focused on being on the front when it comes to taking into account the social trends we see. Not only digitalization, but also what is happening in sustainability. We have set a fairly strict goal that our business, including our foreign books, will have net zero before 2040. In the same way as the Bank of Trade has said, that should the nation be climate-neutral in 2050, then the companies must move forward and be climate-neutral earlier. Our goal is to be climate-neutral in 2040 when it comes to our business. We are working with a wide range of measures on all the areas we can work. We work with Feif and Egendør, we work with our own emissions, we put demands on suppliers. All our suppliers, except for two, have accepted demands that they should work to become climate-neutral and be climate-neutral at a given time. So we work on several levels, and now we are also working, as we will come to, very well aligned with our business market portfolio. This has given results, and we are in relation to MSCI's rating, one of nine banks in the world with AAA rating, and we are going to work hard to also be at the forefront when it comes to the green shift, and be the one where others are general, that is one of our goals. The goal is to break this down and have very specific goals for the coming years, not only in 2040, but for example what our business unit portfolio will consist of in 2023. We have broken these goals down to a very close time frame. We are also very concerned that not only Sparbank Invest, but also the companies where we are a large owner, should be frontrunners when it comes to sustainability. In the third quarter, we have decided that the Frendes investment portfolio will also be net and net-free at the latest in 2040. We have also said that we will demand from all our administrators that they at the latest before the start of 2022 have committed themselves to a net and net-free ambition at a given time. For those administrators who do not have the ambition to get there, we have said that we will find other administrators in relation to managing the money that foreigners have in the capital market. We also work with the taxonomy towards small and medium-sized companies. We see that there is a significant knowledge gap when it comes to small and medium-sized companies in terms of understanding what the taxonomy means to them. Here we also use Agenda Vestlandet and the Almenyttige to be part of securing a competence boost for the SMB segment, where we see that there is a great hunger for knowledge and a great knowledge gap that will be tightened in the coming years. What we do at Agenda Vestlandet is an example of the measures we have in relation to working with competence management on behalf of our customers also in this area. And then it's incredibly fun to see that we manage to build an ecosystem with very good people around the bank, which is crucial for us to deliver good revenue and so on. When we moved into our new headquarters in 2015, there were many who said to me that you really need 200 jobs. Digitalization will mean that Sparbank Invest will have a need for fewer jobs, not more jobs in the coming years. But because we have done well, because we have taken positions, because we have been able to think long-term through good employment, then this ecosystem that we have at our main offices, around our main offices, today consists of 900 years of work, not 700, and not even less than maybe many thought in 2015. That is important for us, because having strong financial competence, having an internally strong working market, and the fact that the best people want to work in this ecosystem, is also what it is about for us, in terms of ensuring that we are a bank that is on the front line in the coming years. It will also come to the forefront in terms of people, and to have a value and an attraction for the best people in our region, which makes us get good people to work in Sparbanket Vest, is also the foundation for good one-capital spending in the coming time. That is why we are extremely happy that we have put the pandemic behind us and that we are back again and can work with what has been the foundation for good performance over time in Sparbanket Vest. That is the strong team we have and the organizational culture we have. Now we are back and we are very focused on the leadership side and on the employee side to get the energy back, the feeling of team play, diversity and creativity and innovation back to the level we had before the pandemic. There is no doubt that Some of these points are what we have lost most through the pandemic. We have learned a lot that we will take with us further, but we have also lost a part that we are now busy speeding up on the leadership side in the course of the autumn. And we also think that one of our foundations for delivering good one-capital deposits in the coming years is our business model. When we did this sale, I think we hit the mark in terms of new ownership. 40-60 makes us have good liquidity in Sveggen. We have a significant ownership in the bank from the capital market. At the same time, we have a social capital that can contribute to customer exchange and social exchange, which makes us differentiate ourselves in a different way as a savings bank than a part of the business banks. A small video that I think illustrates this in a good way.

Sparebank Invest is not like other banks. The biggest difference is that it is you and all the other customers who own this bank, and therefore we also share our surplus with you. Customer exchange for you and yours, and social exchange for the local environment where you live. In the last ten years, Saman has created over a billion in support for small and large projects, for the best for the region. For the best for all of us here in the west. We will keep that up. Saman. Because Saman, we make it better.

In an era where sustainability is extremely high on the agenda, and will be in our school in the future, we believe that the business model we have, and the ownership we have, is one of the most sustainable in finance, and therefore we also believe that our business model will be extremely attractive in the customer range, also in the years we go through. And we see that through the pandemic, these gift grants that have cost 0.5 billion over two years for Sparbank Invest, through Sparbank Invest or our foundation, have meant an incredible amount to teams, associations and organizations that have had challenges through the pandemic. And this is just enough of a picture of many of the departments we have had that creates a footprint in our region that is unique. So with that I have gone through a little bit about our foreign books and a little bit about why we think that we have positioned very well also to deliver good withdrawal in the coming years. And just to repeat that, we have delivered good one-capital withdrawal. We are extremely dedicated in terms of being completely upfront when it comes to delivering withdrawal, despite the fact that we define ourselves to be a bank with some lower risk than a number of other banks we compare ourselves with. And we also believe that the swing can be an exciting investment further. We are a bank with low risk and low complexity. We are completely ahead of digital development. We have customer exchange, which we also mean is attractive for our investors. We have two owner groups, where one owner group uses share of their turnover to build customer loyalty. That has value for both. We are far ahead of the mega-trend, which is sustainability and ESG. Over time, we have built a strong performance culture. If I point out one thing that is the reason why we deliver 1380 this quarter, it is our people and the culture we have built over time. It is not done overnight, but it is long-term work over many years, which makes us very concerned about income, we are very concerned about margin, we are very concerned about performing well. And then we are a bank that I have a clear ambition to be on target, or above the target we have set ourselves, which is to be among the best in one capital allocation, and to be over 12%. So with that, I would like to wish Frank Johannesson, who is our CFO, and Hans Olav Ingdahl, who is the Director of Economy and IR in the bank, to take questions and answers as a conclusion to this quarter's presentation.

Thank you, Jan-Erik. And to those of you who follow us, I remind you that there is still the opportunity to send in questions to the email address of investorrelations.spv.no. We will answer as many questions as we can here. There will also be the opportunity to get answers to questions after this session, if you do not wish to. Very good quarterly results from Sparbanken Vest in Q3. Can we start with the interest net? Can you tell us a little bit about the franc, how it has developed in the quarter and what we can expect in the future?

As we have said, we have had a positive effect in the quarter, among other things, a lower fix on our market financing at the end of the second quarter, which has given a positive effect. We have also worked to trim a part of our balance, which has low declines, such as the liquidity portfolio, which has also had a positive effect in the third quarter. When we get into the fourth quarter, we see that Nibor is on its way up, and there are still expectations that Norges Bank will raise the interest rate in December. It will probably have a negative effect in the fourth quarter, until we get a positive effect from the interest rates we took in September, with an effect from mid-November. So it will be exciting to see how it will be in the future. It will of course be a certain timeline for when we can make changes on the customer side, up against the changes in market rates.

Bulder is now approaching the magical 20 billion that we have talked about for almost two years. Can you tell us a little about how Bulder thinks now and what is the next step for Bulder?

It's the same answer we've had before. We are very focused on reaching our short-term goal of 20 billion. But what we have to worry about is that we have verified the value proposition for Burda. We see that this is flying. We see that it is an attractive value proposition. We see that the position to take such a concept out into the market is even greater with what is happening around S-Banken. So we have started to think about what is the next step, what is the next goal, but we have not come so far that we have something we communicate to the market. But it is clear that we are entering a period now where we will consider what we should do in the long term with Bulder, how we can further develop it. And what we are working on in the short term is to become a full-fledged banking connection on mobile only. and ensure that we get the customers to become total customers, not just loan customers. And that we also get the approval sign. It is important to calm the concept over time. And then we may also have to think a little longer at some point. For example, this concept could also be carried out in a Nordic context. So we are going into a phase without having thought so much about this so far. We have concentrated on the short-term. But as Bulda has developed, it is obvious that we have to look at the possibility of escalating this further.

Sparbank Invest also has some associated companies that deliver quite well. Can you say a little about the development of the associated companies and why it is important for Sparbank Invest?

We have defined that we should not spread too widely on other incomes. We have been very concerned about that we are doing good and profitable what we have. And Frende is a very nice development. Now the local bank started the insurance company this week and started very well the first few days. Varig looks very promising. I am sure that we will be on the front line when it comes to creating revenue and good growth in Frende. We have also had a significant escalation of the digital investment. I hope that over time we will sell more digital insurance through the bank and more digital insurance directly through Frende. So there I experience that we are better positioned than for a very long time through the strategy choices we have also made, which makes us spread the focus less and also takes away some unprofitable stores through the franchise channel where the frequency has been too high. Brage, where we are also very happy that Lokalbank has come in and sees that it has an incredibly fine development. What is incredibly good about Brage is that they are much less dependent on bank distribution than foreigners. A very large share of portfolios now on the new sale, actually around half of it is now direct distribution from Prague that does not come through the banks. This means that we are ready to develop a financing company that can take positions well beyond the geography that the banks have and which is in very good development, which is cost-effective and has a good foundation also through new distributors. that will lift Brage further. Nordne is a business that may not be the largest in the bottom line, but is also in very good development. It is building stone by stone, and in the long run it must get more and more credibility when it comes to taking positions. I am also impressed with what they have achieved in the last quarter and the last 12 months. is in good development, and there we have also opened up for some employee ownership in relation to the costs we have thought earlier, which I think is also part of motivating and incentivizing the employees in the Nordic countries to really stick to it in order to get it to be good in the long term.

Costs, i.e. low costs, are important for Sparebanken Vest, and the bank now delivers a cost percentage of a low 33% in the quarter. Can you tell us a little about how we see cost development in the future?

We have a clear ambition to be the best in the Norwegian market in the future. As far as we can see in 2022, we have an expectation that we will try to keep the cost level for what we call the mini-concerns, which are MoBanken and Boligkredit, at the level we have had in recent years. If we manage to do that, it will mean that we have had a flat cost development for Mobank and Boligkredit in the last ten years.

I would like to add that one of the biggest cultural changes we have had in the bank is that it has been a long time since we have had a large down payment program, it has been a long time since we have cut in our office structure. We have done this, and the cost development The way we now work with the cost side without ending up in these large ship attacks, I think is our foundation to be able to be cost-effective and so on. We have almost ended a must-in-battle period, where revenue and cost-generating measures were one of the measures you led. Vi klarer å kutte kostnader uten at vi går direkte på disse schablonkriteriene som er kontorer og årsverk, som vi gjerne har gjort før. Vi er ekstremt bevisste på nye årsverk inn. Vi er ekstremt bevisste på at vi må prøve å områkere inn på de årsverksrammene vi har når vi trenger noe nytt, sånn at vi unngår å komme i skipartak. Siste vi var i et gigantisk skipartak var i 2016. Jeg vet at hele organisasjonen ikke ønsker å se tilbake igjen dit, og de aller fleste av oss husker det prosjektet. Derfor har vi kulturelt kommet et annet sted når det gjelder jobb med kostnader.

Good. One last question. Sparbanket Vest raised some money in the bond market on October 1st. Frank, can you tell us a little bit about how you experience the bond market at the moment?

Sparbanket Vest finances about 50% of our balance in the market from in and out of the country. And what we see is that we are experiencing very favorable conditions in the market, and that is probably a combination of the fact that the bank is doing well, as Jan-Erik mentioned earlier today, that we are far ahead in terms of sustainability, and we see that, especially among foreign investors, there is a greater focus on having a sustainable business and developing in a positive direction in this context. And the third element, and I would like to point out to our people as well, is that we have talented people at Fundingstilningen Banken who are trying to find the right spots to get funding from the bank.

Thank you for that. That's what we had for today. Thank you to all of you who followed us from all around Norway. We are happy to answer questions in the future as well, but otherwise we would just like to welcome you back next quarter.