This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk08: earnings call for the first quarter of 2022. I am Andrea Martins, the head of investor relations. And on behalf of the company, I would like to thank you all for your interest in this call. Today we have with us Thiago Mafra, our CEO, Bruno Constantino, our CFO, and the investor relations team, myself, António Guimarães, and Marina Montemur. We will be all available for the Q&A session, which is going to happen right after the presentation. And you can raise your hand on the Zoom tool to ask your questions. We already have seven raised hands already. We have the option of simultaneous translation to Portuguese. You just have to click on the glow button on the Zoom. Before we begin our presentation, please refer to our legal disclaimer on page two of our earnings presentation on which we clarify the forward-looking statements and their definition. The documents which explain why forward-looking statements might differ from actual results can be found on the SEC filings session of our website. Now I'll pass the word to our CFO, Bruno Constantino, who will deliver our initial remarks. Thank you all.
spk10: Thank you. Thank you very much, Andrea. Good evening, everyone. Are we going to have the presentation on? So I can get it started. I will be brief. We have already seven hands raised. So I will be brief so we can go to the Q&A. So we have basically two sessions here, the highlights and then the financials and KPIs of the first quarter. Going to the highlights, we have segregated here those five topics that we would like to share with all of you. Number one, I will not spend our time talking about the macro environment, everything that happened in the first quarter. All of you are pretty much familiar with it. So jumping directly into the results, I believe the first quarter shows the resilience of our business model. Gross revenue grew 17% year over year, and we kept our just net margin above It's worth mentioning in this first highlight that a quarter, of course, is made of three months, and we had very different months in the beginning of the year. Just to give you one data point, if we compare the gross revenue of March with an average of January, and February, March was more than 45% greater than the average of the first two months of the quarter. So very different months that resulted in the 17% growth year over year in the quarter of 22. The second point that we always reinforce as well is this portfolio effects. two segments that did not perform well in the first quarter because of the macro conditions, everything related to capital markets and also equities and futures. On the other hand, we had some records, for example, in the institutional revenue that beats the previous record in the second quarter last year by 46%, mainly driven by the war, a lot of hedge protection and derivatives being used by our clients in our trading desks. And also the retail fixed income platform that on fourth quarter last year, had hit a record in terms of volumes being traded. And the first quarter of this year was even greater than the fourth quarter, considering that in this year, we didn't have the tailwind of primary offers coming to the market because of very weak capital markets activity. Number three, it's our distribution network. As you know, we have a unique distribution network, especially when you look at the IFA network and we keep growing. We have grown by when you add the IFAs plus the B2C more than 5% quarter over quarter. We always like to remember that when we think about the IFA network, we have almost 11,000 IFAs, entrepreneurs working 24-7 to succeed in their profession. Of course, we are helping them as we can. But when we compare to the world of bank managers, more than 50,000, we believe there is still a lot of room to keep growing here. Number four, of course, the new verticals. We decided last year to share with investors those new verticals. They are what we call internally expands the core, being the core investments, and they will reinforce the core. But when we look at them standing alone by themselves, they can become really big, important. And when we look at where we are in each of those verticals, I will talk a little bit more about it. We are at very early stage. So the growth exponential year over year, threefold, and they represented 7.6% of total gross revenue this quarter. Just to give you a comparison here, first quarter 21, they represented less than 3%. And finally, but not less important, we received the reward of the best advisory for the fourth consecutive year, something in investments. So being investment at our core, this kind of reward is something that we are very honored to receive. It's an indication that we are going in the right direction. And especially when we look at the first reward that was given in 2019, we had five points in advance compared to our closest competitor. You fast forward four years, 2022, now we have eight points of distance to our closest competitor, which is a very good indicative. But on the other hand, when we think about investments, we are not number one in custody and revenues. So we still have a very long journey ahead of us in investments. Now we're gonna share some freebies. We never talk too much about developments in the investment world. We've been talking about the new verticals and developments. So we brought here some examples of what we have delivered in the first quarter in investments, the automated equity portfolio. It's really simple to navigate and push buttons and decide. for the clients to decide which portfolio the client wants to follow on a monthly basis, more than 20 portfolios available. And it was something that our IFA network demanded a lot in our ecosystem. A good thing about having 11,000 IFAs, we get input on a daily basis and of course we have a roadmap and we are always focusing to serve the IFAs better and more than 70% of the IFAs office already using this tool in the first month. On the bottom we have the alternative fund secondary trading that we launched this year is just an example of innovation. We are very positive about the alternative asset class, especially in Brazil, where the penetration is too low. And we are believer that for any secured or asset class to perform well, it's important to have liquidity in the secondary market, as we have done with bond market with REITs and with all tax exempt fixed income instruments in the secondary trading. We also plan to bring liquidity with a platform with a tool for alternative funds to be traded in the secondary market as well. On the right hand, on the top, XP Future is just our DNA. We launched XP Future. What is it? It's an educational program using all our knowledge to help new professions to get the qualification and the training to become new advisors. Those are not bank managers that decide to leave and become entrepreneurs. Our new people come into this new profession and we train them, we qualify them to make sure their probability of success is even greater. And finally, last week, it was on the local news, we launched our first flagship store. It's basically, it's in Manaus, Amazonas, in Brazil, in the north of Brazil. It's to create a new experience with our clients. A hub to have a sense of the digital world together with the traditional world. Too early to tell, but so far the feedbacks that we have gotten are very good and we're going to have more of those flagship concept stores around Brazil. Now moving to the new verticals update before I jump in into the financials, I'm gonna just touch point in the four new verticals that we have. So the credit business, we had a revenue growth of year over year more than 200%. So growing a lot. You've seen the KPIs, 11.5 billion of credit portfolio. But here is just an announcement of our partnership with Direto. It's in pilot phase, but it's going to be a marketplace for the mortgage and real estate business. Direto is a joint venture between XP and Direcional, a listed company in B3 that has decades of performance in the real estate world in Brazil. So this marketplace is something that can provide a good experience without carrying the balance sheet to provide the credit. Also, we have developed the collateralized credits end-to-end, 100% digital. It was something that was in our backlog and now it's up and running, improving the client journey. In terms of the credit card, we have announced our KPIs of more than 300 active cards. Here is interesting because we only have credit card in part of our XP clients. So we do not have that Ricoh or Clear brand. But when we look at the 3.5 million active clients that we have in the group as a total, we have less than 10% penetration. So there is a huge potential for cross-selling. And of course, this will happen over time. But we already have some interesting data points about the credit card. One of them is all the cohorts, they look pretty much the same so far. And as time goes by, the usage of our card until it becomes the primary card is happening with all the cohorts. And we have already more than 50% of our active cards as a primary card. Number two is that for those clients that really use the banking parts, the credit cards specifically, and then the digital accounts, the churn is four times lower, which is also a good indicative of the strategy of developing new services products for our investor clients so we can increase the loyalty, the stickiness with the platform, reduce the churn, increase the LTV, and then you create this positive loop that reinforces itself. And then the roadmap, it's on track. Until the end of this year, we are gonna have all of that, digital accounts, debit card, cash withdrawal, credit card for Ricoh clients as well. Remember that we have everything as a service with one foundation to be 100% scalable. And we plan to have Ricoh clients at the end of this year. Now moving to the last two new verticals, private pension and insurance. Private pension. I like this chart very much because it shows that the growth of the business is doing just fine. What is in this chart is the net new money of the private pension world for the first quarter. So XP. Vida and Previdencia, we are talking only about our insurance company, not the third-party insurance companies that distribute beyond our broker insurance. So our insurance company got 3.2 billion reais of net new money in the first quarter. And when you look at the incumbent because those top five players, they belong to the same top five commercial banks in Brazil. They lost more than 4 billion reais. And here we have a portability as the case. We do not take into account recurrence. So it's basically portability. So we are getting 50% of the market share of net new money. But when you look at the market share that we have, as AUM in our insurance company is less than 3.5%. There is a huge space here. It's more of the same. We just need to keep improving, bringing more products, the experience better, cross-sell internally, and then this market share, it's our expectation, will keep growing over time. Now, insurance. Mainly, we are focused on life insurance for now. We have launched our digital life insurance experience at XP. The growth is 69% in terms of revenue year over year. But there is a lot to come. When we think about the insurance world, for example, we have a small revenue of health insurance using insurance. our balcony, our platform. But there, just health insurance, there is a huge opportunity to grow. We have other types of insurance as well that are really small. As I said, the focus right now is life insurance, but we are going to keep scaling to other insurance products. And when we look at the insurance market as a whole, the revenue that we get is less than 0.1% of the market share. So it's nothing. So now we can move to our KPIs. I talked already about the new verticals. The new verticals added together, they had a revenue growth of 205% year over year. Our highlights of the KPIs, 3.3 billion gross revenue, a 17% growth year over year, already talked about it. Gross profit being greater, a 25% growth year over year, 2.2 billion, so an increase in gross margin. much to do with product mix. As you migrate away from products that have a higher commission to products that have a lower commission, this has an impact in the COGS and increases the gross margin. And also, of course, the floating parts as well has a role in the increase of gross margin. The adjusted EBITDA growing 14%, 1.2 billion reais, so lower than the gross revenue growth, mainly impacted by the growth of SG&A year over year. We have another slide, I'm gonna talk about the headcounts, but basically year over year, our headcounts, our main, expense line grew around 60% in terms of personnel. And of course, this has an impact in SG&A, but we're going to see that quarter over quarter the personnel expense at the end of the day has decreased, but year over year, it has this impact of margin compression in the adjusted EBITDA. And then when we go to the adjusted net income, the lower effective tax rate plays a role and then goes back to the same growth as we had in the gross revenue, 17%, keeping a margin of 31.6% in the first quarter. The KPIs, The investment AUC, $873 billion, all-time high. This also has an impact in the take rate because, of course, especially if you, instead of looking at the last 12-month take rate, as we do, where you have five data points of AUC, when you look at only the annualized quarter and try to get the take rate, this higher AUC as a denominator will have an impact there, but a growth of 22% year over year. Pension fund, $50 billion, out of which it is worth mentioning the pension of our own insurance company. So we had the 50 billion is a 45% increase over 35 billion one year ago. But when we look at our insurance company, 36 billion out of that 50 billion belongs to our own insurance company. Out of the 35 billion first quarter last year, our insurance company represented 17 billion out of the 35. So the growth of our own insurance company in terms of assets under custody is 112% year over year. So a very strong growth. And finally, the credit card, 4.5 billion, but revenue of the credit card growing much higher than this. Around... Roozbeh Gharakhloo, Revenue brew it's better to compare quarter of a quarter, to be honest, because the first quarter last year we launched in March right so quarter of a quarter. Roozbeh Gharakhloo, The revenue of credit card increased 14% and the nps close to all time high 76 very important for us. Total revenue, so we talked about total gross revenue already, 17% increase, a decrease compared to fourth quarter 21. You have a seasonality there, performance fees and um more capital market activity but uh yeah we had a decrease and what explains that mostly is the capital market activity uh we had a in capital markets generally uh a decrease of 55 percent quarter over quarter if you look at issuer services revenue related to capital market It's a 48% decrease year over year, 55% decrease quarter over quarter. It's also important to highlight the three months of the quarter. Why am I going back to this? Because I think it's important to understand that the year, January, was really a very weak month on all metrics I can think of. And then we start to see recovery in February and March much stronger. When we look at the capital markets activity and getting all the revenues that we get from their issuer services, retail channels, REITs, and compare the revenue of March to the average revenue, again, of January and February together, March was 260% greater than the average of the first two months of the year, given a sign of recovery ahead. And that's exactly what you can see in the breakdown of the total revenue here. So retail keeps the three fourths of the total revenue, but then you have institutional, increasing the relevance basically because of the record that we had this year because of the war, the trading desk, everything that I explained already going to 17%, which is unusual. Usually it's like 11, 12%. And then we have issuer services that usually is like eight to 10%. going down to 4% because of capital markets activity. So this slide explains very well what happened in the first quarter in terms of mix, but it shows the portfolio effect at the end of the day. Revenue grew 17% year over year. Moving to retail revenue. So retail revenue year over year grew together with the total revenue close to 17, 16%. Take rates on last 12 month metric kept the pace stable at 1.3%. Again, if you go to the annualized quarterly take rate, it's lower because of what I just said, because of the Weak start of the year in January and February together. If we had the margin would be totally different. Plus, the increase that we had in the assets under custody, market appreciation that happened in the beginning of the year. helping the custody to grow as well, not necessarily contributing to the revenue, having an implication in the take rate there. But when you look at the last 12 months, pretty much stable, no matter what the interest rates are. So going 4.5 to 2%, back to 12%, and we keep our take rate pretty much stable. And that's, again, resilience and portfolio effects that I talked already about. And adding new products like the new verticals, so forth and so forth. And finally, our last slide, so we can jump into Q&A. The adjusted EBITDA growing to 14%, so there is a margin compression from 39.7 to 38.2, still a very healthy margin. You have the number of total head counts at the end of the period. So you can see that we jumped at March 21 from less than 4,000 employees to more than 6,300 employees. That's almost 60% increase. And that's what I talked about the natural pressure in our margins in SG&A because we are investing a lot in new verticals. We are building new products, new services that will more than pay off in the near future as they already have shown in the growth of the revenue of the new metrics, the new verticals. Another interesting thing to look at when you compare the adjusted EBITDA on a quarterly basis as well, that you capture on the fourth quarter part of that growth in the headcount, not 100%, because we still are growing. As you can see, we ended the year with 6.2 thousand employees and we ended the first quarter at 6.3. So we kept growing. We have a lot to deploy at, to develop, but If you take out of the EBITDA, the net other operating income that has a seasonality there, because most of it are incentives that we receive in one specific quarter related to the whole year, but you only can recognize once you receive it, mainly between incentives, visa, and et cetera. it has an impact. So if you take that, and in the fourth quarter was 233 million. If you take that out, you're going to see that you adjusted a bit that in the first quarter was pretty much flat, a little bit greater than fourth quarter without the benefit of the capital market activity that we had in the fourth quarter. When we look at the adjusted net income, It has the contribution, the additional contribution of the lower effective tax rate because of product mix. So we had a tax rate of 17.4 in the first quarter last year, and our effective tax rate was 16% in this quarter, making the growth of our adjusted net income equal to the growth of the revenue at 17%. With that, I mean, I think I don't know how many hands we have already raised, but it would be better to go to the Q&A. Mafra will be here helping me out. So we are at your disposal to answer any questions you might have. Thank you very much.
spk08: Great, Bruno. So let me just organize. We have a lot of hands raised. We are going to answer them on a first-come, first-served basis, starting with Thiago Batista from UBS. So we ask you kindly to restrict to one question so we can address the more than 10 questions that we have here. So the first one is Thiago from UBS, as I said. Hi, Thiago. Can you hear us? Yes.
spk12: Hi, guys. Are you hearing me? Yes. I have one question on the take rate of XP. Take rate was super resilient up to last Q, but this quarter we saw a big decline. Do you see this decline as a kind of temporary event or this lower level should continue for a while?
spk10: No, I see it, Tiago, as I tried to put in my speech at temporary. We had, again, just to be clear, January was kind of awkward start of the year because of Omicron and third phase. We had basically no capital market activity. It was very low. So the numbers that I gave in terms of comparison between March And the average, not only taking because against January would be even higher, but only the average of January plus February, the everything related to capital markets activity, investment banking March was to be exact, like 267% greater than the average. So it's, I mean, the tick rate, it's the animalized one in the quarter. It is what it is. So you take the retail revenue, which grew year over year by 16%. We also have the impact of the custody. So when you take the tick rate To be honest, I don't like that metric. I understand you're trying to get the sense of what's going on on the margin, but it's tricky. You can get it wrong if you take that because there is an impact of the custody as well. We ended last year with $815 billion, if I'm not mistaken, of assets under custody, and we ended the first quarter $873 billion. It's a high custody that you're using as denominator, a retail revenue that has grown 16% year over year, but had a huge impact in terms of specifically capital market activity. And the benefits of the portfolio effect helped in fixed income and helped in institutional as well with derivatives that does not impact the take rate as well. So I wouldn't take this take rate as the trend for the rest of the year.
spk12: Very clear, Bruno. Thanks for the answer.
spk08: Thank you. Thank you, Thiago, again. Next in line is Mr. Jorge Cury from Morgan Stanley. Good evening, Cury.
spk01: Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Good to see everyone. I wanted to maybe talk more about those metrics that you provided for March, which I evidently think show that indeed the quarter was pretty odd. You said 45% March net revenue above the average for January or February, or that 45% is for the retail revenue?
spk10: Total revenue.
spk01: Total revenue, okay. And so then I wanted to ask you about how does that look for the retail revenue specifically? And I guess this will probably also help answer the previous question.
spk10: Yeah, for retail revenue, it's even a little bit higher, pretty much the same, but higher.
spk01: You mean higher than the 45%, that's what you're saying? All right. And so if, and again, maybe I'm asking too much, but for April, how does April look like? I mean, have you continued to see, have you continued to see an uptick on April versus March or, you know, how are things trending so far? Yeah.
spk09: Jorge, the way I like to see it is, as Bruno already mentioned, January was like a... a really bottom of everything because the activity was very low because of all the reasons you guys know very well. But when you look the trend for February and especially for March, they're much higher. They're in normal levels for the year. And we expect the rest of the year to be on normal levels, not to general levels, okay?
spk01: Got it. All right. Thanks, everyone.
spk08: Thank you so much, Cury. Next we have Jeff. Jeff from Autonomous. Hey, Jeff.
spk03: I'm gonna have to work on my reaction times. I need to move my finger a bit faster. So we've spoken quite a bit about revenues and clearly the revenue environment was more difficult than most of us would have expected, at least at the start of the quarter. But it looks like you took quite a lot of action on the cost and expense side to try to absorb as much of that as possible. Can you go into a bit more detail about what you've been doing there to try to keep costs and expenses down and then how you balance the short-term benefits from doing that against any long-term implications from lower growth, for example? Thank you.
spk10: No, sure, Jeff. Thank you. You are 100% right. Let me start saying, I don't think that having the costs really under control will impact the growth in the future. There is nothing to do with that. But if you think together here with me, a company like XP that grows exponentially, Last year, we had an amazing year in all ways you look at it. We had in our budget a number of 4,200 people at the end of the year. We ended the year with more than 6,000 people. We decided to do so. We want to do so many things. We are at very early stage in different segments that we have a lot to accomplish yet. That's why Mafra, whenever he has his letter, he keeps saying, we are at very early stage of our journey. And that's true. So whenever you double the number of headcounts in your company in one single year, no matter how diligent you are with efficiency, and we are, you're going to lose some of the efficiency. You're going to spend much of your energy in the tailwinds, in the new project, everything you want to do. That's where your energy is going to be. And you lose part of your energy in other important stuff as well for the company. Then we had this start of the year that at the end of last year, we had already a lot of indications that we should adapt and we should focus on the more than 3,000 new employees that we brought to XP and make sure we have the right people in the right place, 100% integrated in our culture that we believe is a strong competitive advantage that we have. So what you can see in terms of cost control in the first quarter this year, compared to the fourth quarter last year. And for example, if you go into our expenses accounting in personnel, you're going to see that we had a decrease actually in the first quarter, despite increasing the number of headcount, around 5% of decrease in personnel expenses. If you look at the total of administrative expenses, same thing, 3% to 4% decrease quarter over quarter. that has nothing to do with compromising the growth in the future. No, it's the right thing to do as entrepreneurs to make sure now that more than 3,000 people that we have, they are 100% adapt to our culture at the right place, sorry, and so on. So that's what explains this reduction of the pace in terms of hiring in the first quarter that we believe it's gonna continue in the following, in the next quarters of this year. And just to finalize, We're going to deliver the whole thing. You saw the roadmap of the credit card that I mentioned, digital account, withdraw, debit card, RICO with a credit card. We're going to do the whole thing. There is not one single project that we gave away or we postponed because of this cost control in terms of personnel and everything else.
spk09: Yeah. Another way to think about it is if you remember the last earnings calls, some of them we mentioned that we start to see the peak of investments because we doubled the number of people in the last two years. So we believe that we have the right amount of resource to deliver all the new verticals, all the new products. Of course, we'll have to grow in the future, but We are not compromising any of the projects this year because of cost control or this kind of stuff. We are going to deliver everything because we are organizing all the resources we have to deliver the same thing with the same people. But of course, you guys will see new hires along the year. But we believe we are not compromising anything for the next years. We are not compromising growth.
spk08: Thank you.
spk04: Thanks, Jeff.
spk08: Thank you, Jeff. I guess it's very late in London. So thanks for your participation. So our next question is from Otavio Tanganelli Bradescu. Hi, Otavio.
spk07: Hi, Andrea, Bruno, Mafra. Thanks for taking my question. Real quick one on my end. Everyone already asked about the revenues. I wanted to get a little more color on the gross margin trends, especially because if March was that much better, can we think of margins improving something closer back to 4Q levels or even higher than that now that you're going to have a better mix of higher interest rates and other products that benefit probably don't share that much commissions with the IFAs?
spk10: Yeah, I think it's a fair assumption, Otavio. The gross margin, it depends a lot on the product mix, as I have said, but I think it's a fair assumption. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Otavio.
spk08: Thank you, Otavio. Have a good one. Tito Labarta from Goldman Sachs. Oh, sorry. Hey, Tito.
spk06: Hi, good evening, everyone. Can you hear me okay?
spk10: Yeah, hi, Tito.
spk06: Great, Bruno, Mafra, Andre, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Sorry, another follow-up on the revenues. Just want to, I'm still not clear exactly, like what specifically happened in January that made it such a weak month? Just to understand, because I mean, it looked like Ibovespa was up, I mean, war broke out more in February. Was it, I mean, rates have been rising since last year. So like, was there something specific with just your clients stopped trading in January? Whether you didn't get a lot of inflows in January? I don't know if you have like the monthly inflow numbers, but like, was there something specific in January, particularly on your retail revenues, right? Because the capital market activity, if I understand that, that would be more on the issuer services revenue, right? Not on the retail.
spk10: No, but there is an impact in retail as well because of the channel fees that you have whenever you have offers, primary offers in the market. Any retail channel fees goes into the retail revenue and depending on the capital market activity can be relevant. And that was one of the detractors. of the revenue on the retail side in general. But it's not one thing specifically. Net new money played a role as well. When you look at the $46 billion of net new money, and even not considering the concentrated custody, the $30 billion, that it's at the low range of our soft guidance between $10 billion to $15 billion per month. That is an average of the quarter. January was like half of March, just to give you another data point. So it was really, really a weak start of the year that, as we said, recovered in February and kept recovering
spk09: And sorry to interrupt you Bruno, but we always have seasonality in January. If you go back, I believe we have two January now or three with this one. So there's always seasonality, but this year was even worse than predicted for January. If you remember what happened in January, the stock exchange around the globe, they went down 10, 15%. We have vacation in Brazil. We have the peak of COVID in January. So for us, it was similar to what happened in 2020 with the first month of COVID. And usually every two years in Brazil, something happened. OK, we have some of these months and what we see is goes down a lot one month, but it recovers really fast. Okay, it happens in the COVID 2020, it happens with human impeachment, it happened with Joesley Day and truckers, the strike. So it happens many times in the past and we have like one bottom, but it recovers really fast.
spk06: Okay, great. That's helpful. If I can just one follow up then. So should we pay attention more to kind of the global market as opposed to, because Ibovespa was up in January, right? But it was, you're saying more because global markets were down, that impacted activity more for you guys than Ibovespa going up?
spk10: No, I would look at the Brazilian capital market activity. Again, you saw the quarterly revenue, total revenue, issuer services that usually represents, as I said, between 8% to 10%, going down in relevance to 4%. On the other hand, institutional went up to 17%. It's, I mean, whenever you have a very weak capital market activity, there is an impact in retail and there is an impact for sure in insured services. But on the other hand, depending on the reasons for that, you have other parts of the business that compensate that. And also it's worth mentioning that capital market activity, except for ECM, especially when we think about BCM, we do have a huge pipeline here. And at some point it will resume in the market because companies, they need to... to fund themselves. And so I would see it, Tito, to be honest, as transitory. It is what it is. It's a weak start of capital market activity in the first quarter. Hopefully, other quarters will more than compensate this weak start to be seen. OK.
spk05: I don't want to hog up the questions, but that's helpful. I may follow up with someone afterwards. I appreciate the call. Thank you.
spk08: Sure. Thank you, Tito. Our next question is from Marcelo Telles from Credit Suisse. Hi, Marcelo.
spk00: Hi, guys. How are you? Hi, Marcelo. Thanks for the time. I have two quick questions. The first one, you know, I was looking at your, it's kind of a different question from the rest of the peers, but I was looking at your cash flow statement and you show your adjustment, you know, adjusted net cash flow from operating activities. And I see it was significantly negative in the quarter. I think it was 1.2. Beno Rea is negative. And it looks like it's the first time, at least look over the next four or six quarters, that this number is negative. And it seems that was a very big change in your working capital. about 1.25 billion reais. And given this is the cashflow pretty much just for, you know, from your recurring business, you know, does not include securities or anything. I'm curious to understand what, you know, what happened there because it seems a very significant move there. So that's my first question. And the second question is with regards to your institutional revenues. there was a very big increase quarter-by-quarter. And you mentioned in the press release that there could be some kind of one-offs that might not repeat in the future, maybe some derivatives, client derivatives that you guys have done. How should we think about that line going forward? Because it was, I think, almost a 200 million reais increase quarter-by-quarter.
spk10: Sure, sure, Marcelo. Regarding the cash flow, I mean, we can go later offline with you because I wouldn't see the operational cash flow as you look at an industrial company or something like that. So I would read the whole thing because, for example, there is the bond, the FX in the bond that goes in there, and you have compensation for that in other line that does not go in that cash flow variation. Okay.
spk00: But does that go in the, because this is cash flow from operating activities. It doesn't include securities, repos as per your disclosure. So it doesn't seem that would be the case.
spk10: No, but there is, for example, some hedges that do not go there. So there is a mix between. And yes, it goes in. Our operating activities, you know, financial instruments. So it goes in there, part of it as well. So we need to get the whole detail. To be honest, I mean, that's something that you go through the accounting, but that's not how we look at our operating cash flow. So it's a different way we look at our, for example, net operating cash, the gross cash that we have, and the cash deducted out the debts that we have. And that has increased a quarter over quarter. So it's not a reduction there. But I mean, if we go- Yeah, no, that'd be great if we can follow up because I'm looking-
spk00: Yeah, because I'm looking at our adjusted cash flow, the one that you, I think, use managerially, and it shows a very negative number. But we can follow up after the call.
spk10: There is a cash, for example, every first quarter and third quarter, you have an impact of cash flow reduction because of the bonus payment, because that's when we pay bonus. So everything that is already recognized in the P&L, uh you pay in in february and august and then there is an impact in the first quarter and third quarter so again we we can i'm more than happy to go line by line and explain to you uh but i wouldn't you know look at operating cash flow and take for granted that the operating cash flow is reducing or increasing because uh of that that's that's the only point Sorry, Marcelo, your second question.
spk00: No problem, Bruno. No, my second question is in regards to institutional revenues.
spk10: Yeah, don't give it off. Look, Marcelo, that was mostly the increase, and you're correct. As I said, it was 46% higher than the previous record in the second quarter last year. And what happened is because of the war in February, we had a lot of activity in our trading desks using derivatives, fixed income, and so forth, protections. And the volume was really high. I would not expect the same volume going forward because the protections are done, right? The war is there, but I wouldn't expect the same activity that we had in the institutional trading desk in the first quarter because of that.
spk09: But on the other hand, retail should be much higher. Oh, yeah, yeah.
spk10: Just answering the question of Marcel about the institutional line. But yeah.
spk00: Thank you. I appreciate the answers.
spk08: Thank you, Marcel. Thank you, Thales. Next is Mario Pierre from Bank of America.
spk11: Hi, guys. Mario. Can you hear me?
spk10: Yeah.
spk11: Oi, Mario. Thanks for taking my question. Let me ask you the question. On this new revenue lines that you have, right, this new growth avenues, you talk a lot about the revenues there, like 247 million reais. Can you help us understand what are the costs related to building out these revenue lines? You gave a target at your investor day of reaching 10 billion reais by 2025 in revenues. But I was trying to understand what is the right cost to income ratio for these new verticals? Also, like we read recently, right, that you're opening points of services in Brazil. So, you know, again, are those related, you know, are these like investments necessary to build out these revenues? And also, you know, when I think long term, 10 billion reais coming out of these lines, how many clients do you think you need to have to get to that level? Because when I look at your net client ads, you only added 88,000 clients. It seems like the trend is going against you. So can you also help us understand how big do you think your client base needs to get? Why we're not seeing the client base growing up faster? What are you doing to grow the client base? Thank you.
spk10: Sure. Well, going to your first question, Mario, when we look at the cost, I mean, the company is one, okay? We have all the P&Ls divided by segments, businesses, but we do have a lot of costs being shared inside the company. So that's why it's hard to give you that kind of detail, specifically because also is strategic. But when I look at the margin, a bit the margin, for example, I think that the big hit we already had, the reduction this year compared to last year because of the increase of headcounts. We invest a lot in technology, but the biggest investment is in people. And as you can see by the first quarter number of head counts, we kept increasing, as I said, but at a very much lower pace. So I wouldn't expect any different impact in margins going forward. because of the new verticals as they keep growing. Of course, if you look only at credit cards, there is a different margin there because we have the main revenue is interchange and there is the invest back that goes into COGS. So credit card growing, you have COGS growing at the same pace of the credit card revenue because of the invest back. But when we look at credit or private pension or insurance, that's not the case.
spk09: Another way to answer your question when you think about number of clients is the way I like to see here is when you think about investments or segment targets, we have about 15 million investors in Brazil. And once we start to add more financial service like a credit card, banking, insurance, and so on, we can increase that to 30 million clients. I'm talking here about high-income people with no savings, okay? So I would basically say that we have like 30 million possible clients. clients in Brazil. So it's not like a hundred million, 150 million. So you'll not see like us edging like a million people a month because that's not our play. It's not our segment. It's not our target. Okay. And another factor that some people miss about XP is the cross-selling, because we are adding more and more products. Imagine that two, three years ago, our business was, let's say, only, it's not only, but it was mainly investments, okay? and now we have other products to sell okay so when people ask about take rate okay take rate should go down i say it depends because if you consider all the products all the cross-selling that's possible because we are we are adding more products take rate should go up okay because we are adding more products that are not correlated to AUC And that's the way of thinking for me. When we look at some internal metrics, the number for cross-sell is still very low. Imagine that we have 10, 15 products, assuming that we have investments as one product. the cross-sell is still very low. So we have a big opportunity to grow with the customer base that we already have, okay? So if we don't add any client, we should be able to add a lot of revenue, okay? So you can think about like a revenue growth, new clients, and... clients that we already have. Of course, in investments, that new money can come from both clients. But even if we don't bring any new investment for the customers we already have, we should be able to generate much more revenue. Because when you look at our pool by client and by number of cross-selling products, it's exponential, okay? So... that's something that we only have been doing for like a year with credit card insurance and all these products and credit. So it's something very new, but we already see they are increasing really fast.
spk10: Yeah. And now just just follow up, Mario, because I think it's a good opportunity to clarify a little bit the way we think as entrepreneurs. I know, you know, I understand your question about, OK, 10 billion, 2025. You're going to need more clients. I don't see that growth coming. So what's going on? How are you going to achieve that? The way we think as entrepreneurs is linking the dots. There is a right sequence for that. So think about the credit card. We have 388,000 active cards. We have 3.5 million clients. We don't have the credit card at the Ricoh brand, for example. We will have. So there is a sequence there. We could open up the digital accounts and say on board on XP, we would have many millions of new clients on board in our digital bank. The number would look good, but we don't think it's the right sequence. We might get there in the future, but before we get there, there is a lot to be done with our existing client, adjusting the experience, make sure we have not 50%, but 100% of our active cards using our cards as a primary card. And that's how you keep evolving over time. So there is no right or wrong here, but there is the way XP works. If, as an entrepreneur, you look at our history, that's exactly what we've done since the foundation of the company in 2001. You could ask when we were number one broker dealer in 2009 in retail, why only retail? Where is institutional? No, because we want to conquer retail. Then we went to institutional. So it's linking the dots. Yeah.
spk09: And also imagine that we have three brands. We have XP, Hiko and Clear. it's easy to imagine that when the stock exchange activities are very high, the number of clients that we can add to Clear, it's very high, okay? So if you, we don't disclosure this number, but if you look the numbers for XP, they are growing, okay? So if you exclude the Clear brand, for example.
spk10: No, that's clear. Regarding the point of services, I mean, it's an experience, a hub experience, our first flagship. It's not related to the new verticals, anything like that. It's basically, I mean, to simplify, here it's like digital companies that decided they need to have some experience in the real world with the customer that would enhance the digital world as well. It's same thing here. We have this first trial in Manaus. Last week, we don't have the data yet. I mean, we have the data, but it's very short term. So give us more time and we will come back with the feedback. We have another point of sales that we want to experiment as well, but it's a bet. We think it makes sense. We did a lot of survey. We will see. It's not very much money that we're spending on that.
spk11: Do you have any specific targets, Bruno, of number of stores that you want to have? And also, if I follow up there, like as you're building out these new initiatives, can you talk about how Modal could help you accelerate?
spk10: Look, the number we do have, for strategic reasons, we don't want to disclose that. What I can tell you is not going to be material in terms of expenses. It's not going to impact the margins, anything like that. And of course, we are very data driven. We are measuring the whole thing. If we see very good data really fast, we can accelerate. That's the way we are as entrepreneurs. If not, we're gonna get less.
spk09: The point here is we believe that we are in a competition for the best customer experience. And we believe we have a hypothesis that's not proven yet, as Bruno mentioned, because we don't have the data, that having some physical presence, it's part of this experience. So it's not a bank branch that people will dare to do transactions or something like that. It's not that we will not have thousands of customers uh xp space around brazil uh but it's for us the hypothesis it's important to have like uh a very immersive experience with our customers. Because when you go to affluence and high net worth clients, it's important to have some touch base point with your customer. And that's what this space is about. It's about education. It's about having some time with the clients, having time with customers.
spk11: uh employees and so that that's it's all about experience okay so that's the concept okay uh and and just you know sorry for you know it's related but like the acquisition of modal and how that could accelerate your growth in this new segment?
spk10: We need to wait, Mario, for all the approvals and regulatory approvals to give you a proper answer to that question. Of course, we believe the acquisition of Bondal can accelerate many segments and initiatives that we have when we are together. But we are not. We still, I don't know if you saw, we filed our F4 this morning related to this transaction, but it's still pending approval of Central Bank and CAGI. And only after that, we can give a better answer regarding how it's going to be modal plus XP together. Before that, we'll have to wait. Okay, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mario. Thank you, Mario.
spk08: Thank you, Mario. Our last question is from Carlos from HSBC. Hi, Carlos.
spk02: Hi, and thank you for taking the last question. Two brief questions. The first one, you say you're at the beginning of the journey, but you have been at it for a year or two years. What have you learned? What changes would you make compared to how you started going outside your core business? What adjustments do you think you have made or you would have wanted to make to your business? to your strategy. And the second one refers to the Itaú acquisition that was completed or announced yesterday. That's a large stake, which is there. It's clearly an overhang for the market. Is there anything that you can do about that stake or do you have a dialogue with Itaú as to what you could do with it? Thank you.
spk09: Yeah, I can take the first one, Bruno, and you take the second part. So, Carlos, the way I see it is... XP has always been on the edge of innovation. Okay. So we started as a education company, monoline, monoproduct, only equity clients, one product equities. And you can imagine what happened in 2008. So we have like to reinvent ourselves. So then we built the first open platform for investments in Brazil, like a, uh investment shopping in brazil as you guys know very well uh in the us it was the first one in brazil uh 10 years ago and we have been innovating since then we have like uh helped to develop the the the capital markets in brazil in many products reads uh asset management everything in brazil so we have been innovating for 20 years okay Now we are going to new verticals, as we already mentioned many times. And that's our DNA, how we keep innovating, how we keep disrupting the markets in Brazil. Something that I always say here internally, for example, it's not in the numbers that we show, it's nowhere, but how we disrupt the credit market in Brazil, how we do that, we don't know yet, but We have smart people working on that and we'll find a way to develop the capital markets in Brazil. Because if you imagine the credit market in Brazil, it's all on the balance sheets of the banks. it happened to change like 20 years in the U.S., 20 years back in the U.S. in this market, okay? So I believe we have many, many room like to keep innovating, to keep disrupting some business lines and insurance and credit and so on. And if you ask me, what worries me for the future is how we keep our culture, how we attract the best talents for the future, because it's all about ourselves. If we keep our culture, if we are able to keep the best people working with us in Brazil, I'm sure that we are going to to do amazing things in the future and have amazing results and growth for the future. So for me, it's all about people, culture, and management. So that's the tripod that we like to work here.
spk10: Yeah. And regarding Itaú question, Carlos, it was something already contract back in 2017. mostly of the transaction with General Atlantic, but also including XP Control and Dynamo. And yeah, we have started conversations, not only with Itaú, but Itaú as well, to see how XP-Ink can participate in any block. They want to come to the market. We have interest to participate. We don't have specifically formats and how to do it yet. And of course, we need them to, you know, want to sell the, it's their shares. So, but we are going to keep talking to them for sure.
spk02: Okay, if I may ask, because that is new. In the past, you have not expressed an interest in buying back the stake, but it seems to me that at this price, you would be willing to contemplate buying perhaps a package?
spk10: Yeah, we are talking to them, as I said. We don't have anything agreed in how to participate in those potential blocks that might come to the market. But yeah, we would like to participate if possible. But that's just the beginning of conversations.
spk02: Very clear. Thank you so much.
spk10: Thank you.
spk08: Thank you. Carlos was the last one, actually. I now pass the word to Bruno first for closing remarks and then Mafra, and then we can finalize the call.
spk10: I just would like to thank you all for staying till late and the interest here in our 10th quarter. It's a long journey. I will repeat myself. On a quarterly basis, we have ups and downs. And I hope that, you know, the next quarters, we are going to, you know, keep growing and show you how resilient and consistent our business model is. And Maffre, if you want.
spk09: Just to finish and to add to what Bruno just said is, as I always say, and here, XP is our life. We love what we are doing. We love what we are building. And we always like to mention that we are building something for the next 10, 20, 30 years. We are not here for the next two, three years. We are not like executives. We are owners of the company. This is our life. We always say that most of our worth, like it's XP shares. So we are more committed than ever. And we are committed. very excited about the other three quarters that we have ahead for the year, because as we mentioned, we start to see very good numbers for the year. So we're still very excited and very committed to the goals that we put ourselves last year, so for this year. So We're still very excited and we're still very committed for the next 10 years. Okay, so that's all. Thank you.
spk08: Thank you, everyone. Have a good night. Thank you.
spk10: Bye-bye.
Disclaimer