TBC Bank Group PLC

Recording in progress. Welcome everyone to the TBC Group First Quarter 2026 IFRS Results Conference Call. My name is Lucy and I'll be your moderator today. If you wish to ask a question during the webinar, please use the raise hand button if you've joined up the call via Zoom. If you've joined us on the phone, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Alternatively, you can use the Q&A chat box to submit a text question. It is now my pleasure to hand over to Andrew Keeley, Director of Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Thanks very much, Lucy, and thank you, everybody, for joining our first quarter results call today. As usual, I'm joined on the call by our group CEO, Vakhten Boutskere-Kidze, our group CFO, Georgi Magrilishvili, and our head of international, Oliver Hughes. We'll start with a presentation, and then we'll go to Q&A. And with that, I'll hand over to Vakhten. Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today. I am pleased to present our results for the first quarter. We made a good start to the year delivery. Group's net profit of €365 million up by 15% year-on-year, with return of equity of 23.4%. Georgia had another strong and consistent quarter, with net profit of €362 million up by 14% year-on-year, and return of equity of 24.1%, helped by a decent start to the year in lending as loans rose by 2% year-on-year. In Uzbekistan, as we had previously guided, we continued to recalibrate our loan book in the first quarter, which impacted our revenues and overall profitability, but that profit was still up by 14% year-on-year, with double-digit return of equity. But we continue to successfully diversify our loan book, including building out our business lending with more than $150 million portfolio and it is a very good momentum across our core verticals and product pipeline. Overall, following the first quarter, I believe our growth outlook for the full year remains on track. Turning now to Georgia. Georgia's economy continues to post dynamic growth, with real GDP growth accelerating to 9.5% in the first quarter. As elsewhere in the world, the Middle East conflict has impacted inflation, which has ticked up to 4.3% in March. In response to today, the National Bank of Georgia has raised the refinance rate by 25 bps to 8.25%. Reflecting the strong start to the year for the Georgian economy, we can revise upwards our GDP growth outlook to 7.4%. Slide 7 simply highlights the consistently high profitability that our Georgian venture generates, with many serial quarters of return of equity around the mid-20s. One additional observation is that you can see the first quarter is typically a bit softer than following quarters, which is something we expect to see this year as well. We continue to be a leading player across most key banking segments in Georgia with 37% share of both loans and deposits. The first quarter saw decent growth with gross loss up by 2% quarter on quarter and rising by 12% year on year. Cash loss continued to show strong growth while we also had a very decent 15% year on year growth in CIB business. Meanwhile, our customer deputies are up by 40% year on year. Slide 9 shows how digital engagement among our retail customers in Georgia continues to grow. With digital monthly active users up by 90% year-on-year, and our Dow-to-Mow ratio now standing at around 50%, a good achievement as more of our customers interact with us on a daily basis. We also continue to see the high share of unsecured consumer loans and retail deposits issued fully digitally. Now I am pleased to share that we have been received increasing recognition from our innovation, technology and digital customer experience, including recent awards from The Banker, Global Finance, Euromoney and The Digital Banker. These awards reflect the efforts we have made to provide the best possible customer experience for our customers. Now let's turn to our Uzbekistan business. to post remarkable growth, with real GDP growth of 8.7% in the first quarter. Inflation moderated to 7.1% also as of March. However, recent increases in global commodity prices are likely to push inflation in the near term. On the slide 17, we continue to see very strong traction across the businesses. Our daily banking project continues to scale. We sell our card issuance now at about $1 million, and those from credit card issuance at about $180,000. We see high activation rates across both projects, and both are starting to become more material contributors to our deposits and loan books. Payments' total value in the first quarter reached $2.6 billion, up by 40% year-on-year, as more customers use PayMe and TBC for a range of daily payment activities. Indeed, we now have 1.1 million active customer subscriptions across TBC Plus and PayMe Plus. On the lending side, our loan book is diversifying and business lending is becoming a larger part of the portfolio, with over 185,000 business loans issued to date, and business loans now representing 18% of the total loan book. We expect this year to continue growing, helped by the upcoming launch of collateralized loans in the next few months. On this slide 14, we see that the strong momentum across our core verticals is supported by an active project development pipeline. In the first quarter, we launched TBC business application and this slide also sets out several planned launches in the coming months, including collateralized loans and auto loans. We have also rolled out new features in Payme, including BMPL for Payme travel. We continue to build out a proprietary AI infrastructure with the recent launch of AI assistant Lola inside the TBC Bank mobile application. This launch led the foundation for the further development and intelligent financial services. And there will be more to come in the coming months as we expand Lola's capabilities. Now, my final slide looks at some of the key core metrics of our Uzbek business over the past three years. As you can see, while user numbers remain very impressive, long growth and profitability have taken a hit over the past couple of quarters as we have adapted the business to regulatory changes around the consumer lending. While this process has not been easy, it is laying the foundation for a well-diversified business over the next few years. As we also expect to see, long growth is recovering in the second half of the year, which should be good to see. Thank you very much for your attention, and I will now hand over to Giorgi.