PagSeguro Digital Ltd. Class A Common Shares

Good evening. My name is Algir and I will be your conference operator today. Welcome to PagSeguro Digital's earnings call for the second quarter of 2025. This live presentation for today's webcast is available on PagSeguro Digital Investor Relations website at investors.pagbank.com. Please refer to the forelooking statement and reconciliation disclosure in this presentation and in the company's earnings release appendix. Finally, be advised that all participants will be in listen-only mode. After the presentation, to ask a live question, please use the raise hand button to join the queue. Once you're announced, a request to activate your microphone will appear on your screen. Please ask our questions at once. Alternatively, you can also write your question directly into the Q&A icon located on the lower part of your screen. Today's conference call is being recorded and will be available on the company's IR website after the event is concluded. I would now like to turn the call over to Gustavo Sequin, Head of IR. Please go ahead, sir.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to PagBank earnings conference call for the quarter ending June 30th, 2025. I am Gustavo Sequin, PagBank's Investor Relations Director. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. We will begin by sharing the highlights for the quarter, followed by our live Q&A session. Tonight, I am joined by Ricardo Dutra, our principal executive officer, Alexandre Moiani, our CEO, and Arthur Schunk, our CFO. Now, I would like to turn it over to Dutra. Please, Dutra.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter 2025 earnings call. I will begin with slide four, which summarizes our key operational and financial highlights. This quarter, We continue to execute our strategy with discipline, navigating a more challenging macroeconomic environment, while maintaining our focus on long-term value creation. We ended the quarter with 33.1 million clients, growing 1.5 million clients year over year. Despite facing a tougher economic environment and harder comparison from 2Q24, which made top-line growth more challenging, we managed to grow and preserve profitability. Total payment volume, TPV, in our payments business reached R$130 billion, a 4% year-over-year growth. Our credit portfolio and funding base continued their double-digit growth, with highlights to the lower APY and the gradual acceleration of unsecured lending, reflecting the strength of our ecosystem in our commitment to broaden access to financial services prudently. Going to financial highlights, our net revenues increased 11% year-over-year, reaching R$ 5.1 billion. When excluding costs related to interchange fees, net revenue increased impressive 18% year-over-year, capturing the repricing efforts implemented in the period. Our non-GAAP net income was R$ 565 million, a 4% growth compared to Q2-24, while diluted EPS on a GAAP basis reached R$ 1.79, 14% growth year-over-year, supported by consistent cost discipline and capital efficiency. Reinforcing our balanced approach to capital allocation, announced in May 2025, we returned 1.1 billion in excess capital to our shareholders here to date, with 700 million reais in share repurchase and over 400 million as dividends. In conclusion, our results reflected a business that remains solid, profitable, and resilient. Since our IPO, we have consistently delivered positive earnings every quarter, a track record we are committed to maintain through continued execution efficiency, and strategic discipline. On slide five, turning to the market environment, we continue to see signs of broad-based economic cooling in Brazil, which may represent an additional challenge going forward. Consumer confidence has weakened, leading to a slowdown in discretionary spending, especially in sectors sensitive to interest rates and inflation. GDP growth has decelerated to about half of last year's pace, largely due to the loss of momentum in services, which had previously been a strong driver of economic activity. As a result of this softer backdrop, we observed a contraction in credit origination in the market, as both consumers and financial institutions adopted a more cautious stance. Risk aversion increased and lending standards became more selective, especially for unsecured products. In this context, Q2-25 results is a testament to our ability to manage the company despite economic cycles. It is important to mention we expect the current market backdrop to remain. Going to slide six, despite this more cautious economic backdrop, our track record demonstrates the resilience and consistency of our business model in creating long-term value. Here, we showcase the resilience and consistency of our business model in creating long-term value. Since our IPO in 2018, we have grown our GAAP EPS by approximately 2.3 times, representing a compounding annual growth rate of 15%, even amid this change in industry dynamics and events like the COVID pandemic. Along the way, we've achieved several strategic milestones that expanded our addressable market and strengthened profitability. These initiatives have laid the foundation for sustained EPS growth, supported by operational leverage and discipline execution. This performance is a result of our strategic focus on recurrent earnings, which have supported predictability and long-term value creation. A disciplined capital allocation, combined share by bags and dividend distribution, with a total yield of approximately 18% year-to-date, and a robust capital position, which continues to give us flexibility to pursue value-accredited initiatives. Moving to slide eight, here we see how we've been building the company with a clear long-term vision. Our fully integrated ecosystem, combining payments and banking, allows us to create a strong synergy between the two, using one to reinforce the other. By offering a broad and complimentary set of products, we've been able to increase client engagement, improve monetization, and capture a larger share of wallet positioning ourselves as the primary financial partner for our clients. Moving to the next slide, beyond the solid results we delivered so far, there is still significant room to growth across our platform. In some areas, our banking business, our market share is still below 1%, which reinforces our view that we are only beginning to tap into the full potential of what we can build. As we continue to scale our banking operations, we unlock new growth opportunities, whether by deepening cross-sell, strengthening our deposit base, or expanding and diversifying our credit portfolio in a disciplinary way. With that, I will hand it over to Alex, who will take you through the operational highlights for the quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, Ricardo. Hello, everyone. In this section, we walk through the performance of our business units for the second quarter of 2025. Before we start, just a quick catch up on slide 11. As announced last quarter, we adopted new client segmentation starting in first quarter 25 to better reflect the dynamics of our business. Merchants with TPV up to 3 million per month are now classified as MSMBs compared to the previous threshold of 1 million. Merchants with TPV above 3 million along with all online merchants, including commerce and cross-border, are now grouped under the large retail and online segment, previously referred as LMAC. This change is fully aligned with our strategic focus on the MSMB space and gives a clear view of how we are growing across clients' profiles. Moving on to slide 12, We ended second quarter 25 with 33.1 million clients, adding 1.5 million new clients over the last 12 months. Our active client base reached 17.7 million supported by a healthy 3% year-over-year growth in banking-only clients. Consistent with our prior quarters, Our focus has been on activating higher value clients with an emphasis on monetization and profitability rather than pure volume growth. Now on slide 13, we show that our merchants acquiring business keeps growing in all segments. TPV reached R$130 billion in Q2 2025, growing 4% year over year, with TPV per merchant growing to 7% on a yearly basis. to the macroeconomic challenges that we mentioned earlier. Since the fourth quarter of last year, we have been implementing repricing initiatives focused on profitability rather than net additions. These efforts were designed to mitigate the impact of rising financial costs. In 2Q25, MS&B segment grew 2% year-over-year supported by stable activity in the physical POS channel. Meanwhile, large retail and online segment, which includes merchants with monthly TPV about 3 million reais, as well as e-commerce and cross-border operations, grew 10% year-over-year, showing our continued focus on attracting merchants with higher presence in the digital space. Within the online segment, TPV grew 50% year-over-year, driven by stronger penetration in both e-commerce and cross-border. We have onboarded new clients in marketplace, gaming, and other digital goods verticals, further reinforcing our position in this fast-growing space. On slide 14, we show that our strategy to deliver a seamless digital experience by integrating payments, banking, and value-added service drove cashing levels to 91 billion reais in the PEC Bank accounts, mainly to do a higher transactionality across our client base. Importantly, this growth is underpinned by sustained high penetration of our insurance and investment products, which contributed to a stronger deposit franchise during the period. As a result, cashing per active client, a key metric of our client engagement, grew 18% compared to Q2 2014, reaching R$5,200 per client, showcasing both deeper client monetization and the ongoing expansion of our active client base. On slide 15, we show our strong deposits performance, combined with a cost of funding reduction. The total deposits reached R$37.2 billion, up 90% year-over-year. This growth is particularly net-worthy, given our ongoing efforts to reduce the cost of funding. It shows that we are successfully managing customer deposits while improving the efficiency of our funding base. The APY for total deposits decreased by almost six percentage points in the last year, reaching 89% of the CDI. This performance is mainly due to a lower remuneration on checking accounts, slightly lower yields on certificate of deposits, and funding costs optimization initiatives that we implemented in response to the current interest rate environment. When we include other funding sources, such as borrowings, certificate of deposits, with related parties and senior quotas of FDICS, total funded reached R$42.9 billion in the quarter, an increase of 15% year over year. This performance reflects both the increase in total deposits, and our continuous effort to diversify our funding base, supporting a more balanced and efficient capital structure. Finally, this quarter, we have successfully completed 920 million reais issuance of financial letters with a two-year maturity and no early amortization. The transaction was well received with a book building multiple times the transaction size. The notes were priced at CDI plus 45 base points, or approximately 103.5% of the CDI. Proceeds will be used to support the growth of our acquiring and credit operations. It's important to remember that our deposits are primarily utilized for funding prepayments to merchants and our loan book. As of December, our lower to total funding rate, which measures our total funding against our expanded credit portfolio, stood at 112%. On slide 16, we highlight the continued and sustainable expansion of our credit portfolio. In the second quarter, our total credit portfolio reached 3.9 billion reais, a 35% year-over-year increase primarily driven by origination of secured products, which now accounts for 87% of our book loan. Since second half 24, we have been gradually resuming credit underwriting for unsecured products with focus on working capital loans for merchants. This movement has been supported by ongoing improvements in risk assessment and collection process. This gradual expansion, although conservative, already shows its first sign in our loan book. Consequently, there has been a 38% increase in working capital loans quarter over quarter. If we include financial operations linked to merchants' prepayments, facilitated by our instant settlement feature on the acquiring side, our expanded credit portfolio surpasses R$48 billion, up 11% in the last 12 months. Finally, looking at the bottom right of the slide, our NPL 90 ratio reflects meaningful improvements in asset quality, decreasing from 3.2% to 2.4% in the period, a level two times below the market average. Now, I turn over to Arthur for the financial highlights of the second quarter of 2025. Arthur, please.

Thanks, Alexandre. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to present our consolidated financial results for the second quarter of 2025. Turning to slide 18, total revenue and income in Q2 2025 reached 5.1 billion reais, marking an 11% year-over-year increase. This growth reflects the positive impact of repricing strategies initiated in Q4 2024. particularly across our acquiring and asset side products. These initiatives were designed to mitigate rising financial costs and ensure sustainable revenue in a more restrictive growth environment. Excluding interchange and network fees, total revenue net grew 18%. Importantly, revenue growth outpaced the TPV expansion this quarter. underscoring the effectiveness of our repricing efforts and improved unit economics. Looking at the charts on the right, payments revenue, net off interchange and network fees totaled 2.6 billion reais, supported by successful strategy execution. Banking revenue reached approximately 700 million reais, a robust 61% year-over-year increase, driven by higher engagement, larger deposit volumes, credit portfolio expansion, and increased fee generation from cards usage and account transactions. Moving on to the next slide. Slide 19 presents our gross profit performance over the last 12 months. Strong banking results and repricing strategies help it to mitigate the negative impact of interest rates, which rose more than 400 basis points during the period. Gross profit totaled 1.9 billion reais, growing 7% year over year, in line with our annual guidance despite macroeconomic challenges. This result was impacted by buybacks and dividend distributions, which introduced additional financial expenses. Excluding these effects, gross profit would have increased 7.7% on a yearly basis. On the right, we highlight the exceptional performance of our banking segment, which is increasingly becoming a strategic pillar for the company's future. Banking gross profit grew 97% year over year, now accounting for over 26% of total gross profit. This growth was accompanied by a margin expansion from 60% to 74%, reinforcing the strength of our platform and our ability to scale complementary products efficiently. Slide 20 provides a deeper look into our cost and expense evolution. Our continued financial discipline, key to balancing growth and profitability, was instrumental in mitigating pressure from rising financial costs. Transaction costs fell 1% compared to Q2 2024, driven by increased PIX product penetration. Financial costs rose 48% primarily due to higher interest rates in the country. This includes 25 million reais in quarterly costs related to capital returned to shareholders. These effects were partially offset by funding initiatives aimed at diversifying sources and reducing interest rate. Total losses declined at 14% year over year, reflecting improved asset quality and stronger QIC and onboarding processes, which led to fewer chargebacks and lower ECL provisions. Operating expenses increased at 6% year over year, in line with inflation. As a percentage of total revenue and income, we achieved 80 basis points of operating leverage compared to the same period of last year. Finally, tax efficiency remains a core pillar of our strategy. We continue advancing tax optimization initiatives that support profitability and long-term value creation. Moving to slide 21, this quarter was marked by resilient operational and financial performance. We achieved a non-GAAP net income of R$ 565 million, a 4% increase compared to Q2 2024. Diluted GAAP earnings per share reached R$ 1.79, reflecting a 14.2% year-over-year increase. On the right, we highlight a 120 basis points improvement in our annual return on average equity. rising to 15.2% from 14% in Q2 2024. Despite maintaining a conservative capital structure, the company continues to deliver consistent returns to shareholders. Next, we will explore our capital allocation strategy. Slide 22 outlines our initiatives to strengthen capital structure and create shareholder value. We remained consistent in executing our buyback program throughout 2025, repurchasing over 15 million shares. In Q2 2025, we completed the full amount of $200 million repurchase authorized under our second buyback program. Following this, our board approved a third repurchase program, authorizing up to an additional $200 million in outstanding shares. Additionally, following our first dividend announcement in May 2025, the board approved a second cash dividend of $0.12 per common share, payable on August 15, 2025, to shareholders of record as of July 16, 2025. This reflects our commitment to capital strength and shareholder value. Let's now review our guidance for the year. Our first semester results are well aligned with the company's outlook, despite a more challenging macroeconomic environment. Gross profit, excluding additional financial expenses from capital returns, grew 7.7% year over year, landing within our guidance range. Diluted earnings per share calculated using the December 2024 share count, excluding repurchased shares and long-term incentive plan grants, grew 14% year over year, demonstrating business resilience and disciplined execution. CAPEX is tracking in line with expectations and currently performing at the bottom of the guidance range. Despite remaining cautions about elevated interest rates, we are maintaining our full year guidance. Note that this does not include additional costs from capital structure initiatives. Over the last 12 months, our capital return yield reached 18%, as Ricardo mentioned earlier. Now, I will turn it back to Alexandre for the closing remarks.

Thank you, Arthur. Before we wrap up, let's move to the next slide for a few closing thoughts. Overall, our second quarter results reflect the discipline execution of our strategy. focus on diversifying revenue streams while preserving profitability in a challenging macroeconomic environment. I want to once again highlight the growing contribution of our banking business, which now accounts for 26% of total gross profit. Looking ahead, our priorities remain clear. We will continue to mitigate macro uncertainty through consistent execution and strong financial discipline. We are also committed to strengthening our capital structure, moving forward with the initiatives we recently announced. And finally, I want to reiterate our long-term ambition to become the primary financial interface for our clients, capturing the significant growth opportunities we outlined through this presentation. With that, I now hand it back to the operator so we can begin the Q&A session.

Thank you. There's also the possibility to ask questions throughout the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. You may select the icon and type your questions with your name and company. Written questions that are not addressed during the earnings call will be returned by the investor relations team. Wait while we'll pull for questions. First question comes from Caio Prato from UBS. Please, Mr. Prato, your microphone is open.

Hello, everyone. Good evening. Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions here. I have two on my side, please. The first one would be on TPV. Please, if we look to your numbers, we see that overall TPV was flattish, Q&Q, which probably implies, again, some sequential losses in market share. And looking to the MSNBs more specifically, there was a drop of 2% Q&Q. I saw that you mentioned about lower macro and the effects of repricing, but still it seems to be somewhat below the industry. So having said that, if you can share a little bit more details around this performance, I don't know if there is any specific sector that is more impacted within MSNBs or if it's more linked to, I don't know, competitive pressure, any more detail here would be helpful. So first is your view about what's happening and going forward, What can we expect if there is anything in your strategy that you are going to change to address that? And the overall expectations around TPV, both on MSNBs and on consolidated level as well. And finally, if I may, on capital, we are witnessing the company distributing more capital recently, as you mentioned in the presentation. So we saw some buybacks and also they recently announced special dividends, but still the company remains with a solid capital position close to 30% Basel ratio. So my question is going forward, after this special dividend, how can we think about capital distribution if there is any recurring level of payouts that we can work with? That's it. Thank you.

Hi, Caio. Thank you for the question. Good to hear. Let me elaborate a little bit more about TPV and give a little bit more broad overview about TPV in our view and what you're seeing inside the company. First of all, we always say that we drive the company to improve profitability. TPV could be a consequence of that. The TPV definitely is not one of our main goals. And market share also is not in our main goals. we are driving the company more and more focused on the client-oriented approach, looking at the client as a whole. And part of that, if you look at the flow that we have, not only TPV in acquiring, but if you look at the flow, our cash-in in PIX grew 19% year over year. This is strong. The participation of this PIX cash-in in the whole flow of the company is growing quarter over quarter so we are looking at the the decline as a whole not only the tpv from cards or for peaks that we we have some in the art but also the caching from peaks that you get from from this client that could help in in deposits could help in funding and so on so the guidance that we gave to the market is gross profit we think gross profit better captures the performance because it considers everything that i said before the cash in, the funding, and all the things that I mentioned before. It is also important to say that in 2024, we had a very, very strong growth. So we are having a hard comp here compared to Q2 25 versus Q2 24. We grew 34% in Q2 24. So it's a hard comp. And in addition to that, We had two less working days and one more holiday in 25, which could help us in approximately four to five percentage points additional growth. So that's why TPV was in the levels that you saw, growing 4% year over year. In terms of MSNB TPV, we see some clusters that we can get some actions to take TPV back. We've been doing repricing as well, just like the other players of the industry. So we are seeing that part of the, it's a mix of many, many characteristics. There is no silver bullet here. It's the hard comp, repricing, macroeconomic, that doesn't help definitely. And it also creates churn for part of the client. So that's why we see TPV. as a important metric but not the most important metric for us we we really look at the companies uh as a gross profit and then eps that we look in the pnl more and more and focus more and more so just to finish here if you look at the the the car tpvs is still relevant but comparing to the whole uh flow of the company is less than 50 percent so Of course, we are looking at TPV as well, but the most important metric for us is growth to profit, and that's what we are focusing on at this point and try to get the best of the whole ecosystem. So, I mean, there are many, many reasons that TPV was growing 4%, hard comps, macroeconomics, repricing, and so on. And regarding the capital, definitely it is in the agenda, the 29% BIS ratio that you mentioned, it is in the agenda. we expect to have some new soon but we are looking at that to improve capital to to have a better uh more balanced capital structure and of course to get that we are talking about sharebacks share buybacks dividends uh expectation of growing the the credit and remember that we are at returning 1.9 billion reais to the shareholders the last 12 months but even with that, I know we are close to 30% in this ratio, but definitely that's something that it is in our agenda at this point.

Okay, Dutra. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Antonio Ruetti from Bank of America. Mr. Ruetti, your microphone is open.

Hi, team. Thank you for your time. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two on my side that are actually follow-ups to Caio's questions. So first on TTV, not sure if you could elaborate on PIX here, if how much of PIX came on the large merchants and how much came on SMEs. Just trying to understand here your performance compared to the industry and also in terms of capital. If you were to distribute this capital today and remain only with the capital that you believe to be required to operate the business and the required excess capital that you need, how much could you distribute in dividends today? I would say, how much is the excess cash that you see at the business today? Thank you.

Hi, Antonio. regarding if you were not disclosing the breakdown between peaks and cards in these different segments, but I'd say to you that definitely the cards decreasing more in LMAQ than in MSNBs, which is a good news. The other thing I would say is important to say, when you look at the clients, the merchant clients that you have in short term, not in 12 months, but in 90 days, in 30 days, it is stable and growing a little bit month after month so it shows us that we when you think about msnb we are talking about clients between one reais to three million reais per month so we have different size of clients in this in this um cluster msnb and we see that we are not seeing a higher churn what might be happen to some of the clients is to move in part of the volumes away What I mean here is that we have the opportunity to go back to these clients. They are still working with us, and then we can get part of the volume back. So that's the call that I can give on TPV. So client is stable, and then we still have the opportunity to get part of this TPV back. And again, remember, we have 34% growth in Q2-24. So we have a really hard comp, and two less working days and one more holiday. Regarding the capital and the amount we can...

return to shareholders i'll pass the word to arthur hey uh good to talk to you antonio in terms of capital excess of capital and and also cash as you mentioned cash it's important to clarify that we don't have cash available to return to shareholders but we have excess of capital that means Any amount that I will return to shareholder, I need to go to the market, take this funding from the third party, and then distribute. This process will impact our financial costs as we are already communicating in the gross profit slide and the guidance that part of the the financial expenses is related to dividends and buyback in 2025. In terms of amount, to be comfort here, I can give you some color that we could distribute more 2.5 and 3 billion reais after what we have already announced. And we are working hard always to balance growth profitability, that's important because financial costs increase on that process, and return to shareholders.

Thank you for the numbers. I appreciate that.

Thank you for the numbers. I appreciate that. Thank you. Our next question comes from Yuri Fernandes from JP Morgan.

Mr. Fernandes, your microphone is open.

Hello, good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity of asking questions. I have a question regarding your deposit mix. I think maybe this is related to the buybacks and the need of cash you mentioned, but Interbank was growing a lot this quarter, like 30%. and still you were able to improve your funding costs. I tend to imagine that Interbank deposits tend to be more costly than some of your other lines. So just trying to understand if this is a trend that we could continue to see, you know, you continue the buybacks and the capital distribution and maybe, you know, you could have a little bit of more expensive funding. And I would like to understand if this could, you know, limit the improvements here because it was a good quarter for funding. And I don't know if we start to see, you know, a little bit of more expensive interbank deposits, we could see this reverting the trend. And then just a question on the banking gross profit. It was a pretty good quarter for you on the banking side of the operation. If you can comment a little bit more about low growth, what you see for deposits, just trying to understand how the bank can help you to offset part of the weaker gross profit we are seeing on the payments.

Thank you. Hi, Yuri.

I'll start with your question about the funding, and then Arthur can complement. Regarding the trend, we don't see that trend changing. We don't see that because of more participation of interbank deposits in the mix, our total deposit APOI would change. As you could see in our slide 15, it's going down from 90% to 89%. 90% to 89% CDI. So we don't see that reverting in a structural way that could hurt the P&L of the company. We also try to balance to get the best cost for the company comparing what you have in checking accounts, deposits, and interbank. And so going back to your question, I don't see that trend changing. I guess Artur can give you more color about it. Yeah.

Well, in terms of deposits and the mix that we have there, Interbank is part of the funding products that we are using to fund the expanded portfolio that we have. And Duta have already mentioned the cost that we have today does not change too much going forward because we have competitive costs in many different products that we are using.

regarding the banking gross profit. We see, we have three pillars here in the company, in our view. It's the banking, the payments, and the credit. We see banking and credit, two main pillars that you see here. We see a huge opportunity for banking. It's still working on, if you could see our, the growth in portfolio in our working capital is still, credit portfolio is still small, but it grew a lot in this quarter. And we see an opportunity in this product as well. As you know, we have 130 billion reais in TPV per quarter, and we're still scratching the surface in this product. And when you have some test and good return in some of the credit products, you can accelerate. So we see some opportunities also in the working capital, which will help the bank P&L. And the banking still today is 21% of the revenues and 26% of the gross profit. So we always try to say here, that's the power of the ecosystem. We are not only a payments company anymore. That's the beauty of having this ecosystem. And we expect that bank will keep growing and gaining share from the total revenue and gross profit looking forward.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Pedro Leducchi from Itaú BBA.

Yes, Mr. Leducchi, your microphone is open.

Thank you, guys. Good evening, everybody. Two quick questions, please. The first one here, I'm going to take a step back into the last few years when you started, when you went successfully into larger merchants than you were in before. But this seems to be the first big pricing wave that you did since more present with this Smith Merchants, right? Now that you've gone through it, we're discussing here, you care less about TPV or client count, more about gross profits. But at the end, you will care about the clients, call it NPS. Now that you've gone through this pricing cycle with the larger clients and you're observing their NPS, their reactions, Do you have a diagnosis of what else you could add to either services or products that would help reduce churn or help NPS be high, even though you increased prices? That's the first question. And the second, a little bit less related, but has to do with the income tax rate, remains on the low double digits. If you guys have given any thoughts on or any already alternatives to the proposed taxation changes for offshore funds that was discussed by the government a few months ago. That's it.

Thank you. Hi, Pedro.

I'll let Artur start with the last one regarding the tax rate, and then I'll get back to the first one.

Okay. Good evening, Pedro. So in terms of tax reform, we are pretty close to the government and following all the changes that they are promoting. And so at this point, I don't have any information, any number to give you. And we are working hard to... mitigate that impact or those impacts in the social contribution that is moving from 15 to, sorry, nine to 15. And also the changes to income tax abroad in the, in the shares that we have from our FDIC in our legal entity abroad. So the good point is we have only 20% of the FDIC abroad, so the impact could be limited. If we had much more, the impact would be worse. But that's the idea. We are looking for alternatives to mitigate that impact. As soon as I have something more concrete to communicate, I will do that accordingly.

Regarding the first one, Pedro, we've been increasing or repricing our clients since October 24th. so nine months now, the repricing was exclusively to offset, even partially, the increasing interest rate in the country. As you know, we also have part of our clients, they have default MDRs that we have in our website, and we did not increase for these clients. So in a scenario where the interest rates would go down, we will also take advantage because we didn't increase the price for the default MDRs, and we still take advantage temporarily from the clients that we increase the price that we will not decrease in the next following day. So we've been following, yes, the NPS with these clients. As I said before, the base, the active merchants base in short term, when you look at 90 days or 30 days, it is growing month after month. So it's not that we are losing the client as a whole. As I said before, we are looking for the client in total, looking for the payments, deposits, the products that they use here. If you go to slide 14, we see clients using more and more of our products, our banking products, and get more engaged. So it's It's part of the back and forth that you need to make this repricing and then retest and so on. So we don't see, let's say, deterioration in our relationship with the whole base of clients. But of course, when you have some repricing, and again, MSNB, we have clients from one real per month to three million per month. So two million per month is something, is some company that already have some more price sensitive. But we've been following that very closely TPV, as you said, didn't grow that much, but the profitability is coming, net income is coming, gross profit is coming, EBT is coming. So going back to your question and wrapping up here, we don't see a structural problem in the company. We are looking at the client as a whole. The active base is growing, and we'll keep working with the pricing and try to preserve profitability in this scenario where the macro is not helping at all.

Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Arnaud Shirazi from CT.

Please, Mr. Shirazi, your microphone is open.

Hi all, thank you for the opportunity. My question is a follow-up from Antonio's question. First one is related to financial expenses. As you mentioned, it was negatively impacted by buybacks and dividends. Could you share what would be expenses excluding this effect? And also, my second question is also on the line of Antonio's own and its own potential ROE after leveraging the balance sheet, which could be the ROE level that is feasible for the company in the long term?

Thank you. Good evening, Adam.

Thank you for the questions. Regarding the first one, financial expenses, in the second quarter, we had 25 million reais of impact coming from funding expenses related to buybacks and dividends. So our growth of 7% in a yearly basis would be 7.7%. And regarding the second question, ROE, we are not guiding exactly the number that we are looking for in the future, but based on our analysis, there is no reason to be different than other companies in the country.

Super clear. Thank you. If I may compliment here. Okay. Thank you. Please, please go ahead. No, no.

We are talking about a BIS ratio of about 30%. We see some other players similar to ours, our peers, working in a lower BIS ratio. And of course, that means that we can increase ROE because of this. Once you give it back to our shareholders through dividends, buybacks, or increase in the credit portfolio, we will also decrease the equity and then this ROE will be higher as a mathematical consequence because the denominator of the equation is going to be lower once we decide to accelerate giving back to shareholders and have a BIS ratio close to what we see in our peers.

So that's the... We have two items here. The first one is the level of BIS today and the second one is the margin from the banking products are good. As soon as we scale more, definitely the ROE should be better.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Daniel Vaz from Safra.

Mr. Vaz, your microphone is open.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity of making questions. The gross profit from acquiring has been falling in nominal terms and losing relevance when compared to the banking business, right? So the banking business is growing almost 100% every year. And I wanted to pick your brain about the link between both business. At some point of the presentation, you described banking as a complementary offering, right? Somehow, right now, it's hard to see this link beyond better funding or prepayment, right? So the credit portfolio is essentially a consumer base right now and deposit growth is now growing more in the off platform, right? So account balances has been flat for a while. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem excited on the banking side and kind of disconnected to the acquiring story right now. So I guess the question is, when should we see a more connected business, right? So maybe you start offering working capital lines, other value added services to the small business to bridge that gap between the both.

Thank you. I don't know.

When you think about the gross profit in the acquiring, remember we had this 48% increase in financial expenses year over year? That definitely doesn't help. So when you compare it, it's a huge impact. And as I said before, part of our base, we did not increase the prices for the clients that you have a default MDRs and default prepayment rates. So we have this huge headwind about the financial expenses. You're right when you say that today, the majority of the portfolio, it is based on consumer, but The credit card, part of this portfolio of credit cards, it is based on merchants already. And working capital, of course, is 100% on merchants. The working capital grew 38% quarter over quarter, although it's still small, but it is growing. We originated in July the same amount that we originated in almost the whole Q2. So that's definitely a product that we see some traction and we see some NPLs under control and we see some space to grow here. We also see in the industry other players taking advantage of that. So it would be no different for us, although we may be a little bit late in the product when compared to the other players we are catching up. So we see opportunities to grow working capital, definitely. We saw that in the second quarter. We'll probably see that in Q3 as well. And then maybe by doing so, it's going to be clear more clear the link between banking and payment that you mentioned before. But still today, it helps a lot in terms of funding. It helps a lot in terms of getting the collateral for us to offer, for instance, credit card for merchants. And we are extremely confident about this working capital looking forward.

Thanks. Very straightforward. And if I may follow up quickly, any guesses where penetration on your your client base about the working capital product? Have you been conducting any sensitivity on that?

I would say to you that our base is more taker of credit than a saver, so to say. So there is a huge opportunity to grow there. You just want to make it step by step. Because, you know, consistency is more important than back and forth when you think about credit products. So it's still very small, the penetration. And as I said before, the origination that we have in July, it was almost the whole origination we had in Q2. So definitely it's a product that is growing. I don't want to give you any guidance here because we are still, although we are growing very fast, it's still baby steps or very small. but definitely something that we will grow in the future and see in the industry that we have this opportunity as well because other players are growing this product and have a credit portfolio bigger than ours.

Very clear. Thank you.

Thanks again. Thank you. Our next question comes from Niha Agarwala from HSBC.

It's Mrs. Neha, your microphone's open.

Hi. Thank you for taking my question and apologies if I'm making you repeat anything. The slowdown in the MSMB-TPV is quite material. So just wanted to double-check on that and see if maybe part of that is because some of your peers, as you mentioned, have been more active on the financing, working capital loan side. So do you see that as part of the reason why with the repricing churn, your repricing churn was stronger than maybe what we otherwise expected. And how should we think about MSNB TPV growth in the coming quarters? Should we see a pickup? Was there any one of this quarter which it reversed? Or is this the kind of level that we should expect for the remaining part of the year? And my second question is on the unsecured loan portfolio. I mean, thank you for the clarification about the origination in July. That's quite promising. But still, as you mentioned, it's a very small portfolio. So can you give us a bit more details about how you're pricing the product? What collaterals are you taking? Are you just using the receivables, or are you taking any other collaterals? How have you designed the product in this acceleration that has been happening in the last month?

Thank you so much. Thank you for the question.

We'll start from the last one. In terms of working capital products, it's very similar to what you see in the market. I guess the advantage that we have here is that we have a base that is very very engaged within our app to use our labs very often as we can see in slide 14 the user all the time they are using our app and remember we only have one app for the merchants for the consumer for for everybody so it's the same app and we take advantage of this digital distribution in order to to get more product to the market in terms of uh collaterals we use the future receivables So part of the principle, we use the feature receivables, and then we're going to follow the activity of the merchant throughout the month. So it's very similar to what other players do in the market in terms of the product. But in terms of distribution, definitely we have a huge advantage, I would say, because of the, again, the way that our clients use our app and the frequency they use our app. So that's about the working capital. The other question is about churn. And TPV looking forward, we are not guiding the TPV looking forward. But I'll tell you that in Q2-24, we had a 34% growth year over year. In Q3-24, we had a 37% growth year over year. So definitely it's going to be, again, a hard comp. And we are looking for the profitability of the company and profitability of the client. The number of active clients, as I said, when you look at short term, 90 days and 30 days, we do not disclose the exact number, but it's very stable and growing in the last month. It was very stable and now growing in the last month. So we see that they have the opportunities to take it back part of the TPV as part of this negotiation and so on with the client. So we are monitoring that very close. EPV, again, is not the main metric. We are looking for gross profit and EBT. In this situation, the macroeconomic environment, as you said in the second slide of the presentation, it may be hard. But to be honest, definitely doesn't change the trajectory of the company. Doesn't change the trajectory of the company. The trajectory of the company is growing. generating shareholder value, growing EPS, growing net income and EBT in absolute terms. We did that with the higher effective tax rate. So we are managing the company in this, I would say, complicated macroeconomic scenario, and we are delivering the results. But TPV definitely is not the main metric. And going forward, I will not give you a guidance because we don't have it here right now. But I would say, too, that we are looking for the profitability of the company and the profitability for each client. And going back to our question, working capital is doing well up to this point.

Dutra, if I can just follow up on the working capital. Your focus is more on the S&B segment for the working capital loans, or is it lower income and long-tail merchants in that segment? And also S&B investment.

I guess I'm not hearing Nika, but I got the beginning of the question about the profile of the merchant. Yes, we are focused on the small and medium business, not in the long tail, not in the nano client. We are focusing more in the small and medium businesses. SMBs, not the M of the SMBs. We are focused more in the small and medium businesses.

Understood. Thank you so much, Indra, for your comment.

Thank you, Neha.

Our next question comes from Bruno Bonfim, from Santander. Please, Mr. Bonfim, your microphone is open.

Hi, actually, this is Henrique Navarro speaking. My question is on competition. Can you guys give some color on how do you see competition recently? We heard that maybe Mercado Pago, some of your competitors, could be gaining market share. I mean, do you see competition more rational on pricing, et cetera? I mean, any color you could share, I would appreciate. Thank you.

Well, thank you for the question. I'd rather not comment about any specific competitor because, of course, each one has its own strategy. We also have ours. I would say to you that everyone is looking for profitability at the end of the day. When you look at the companies that I read, released their results, even the acquirers that are part of the incumbent banks, you see that everyone is looking for the profitability. Remember, in Brazil, we are with 15% basic interest rate of the economy. So everyone is looking for profitability, being more defensive. And we are not different. That's why we said that it was a quarter that we focused on profitability and we did deliver. But I don't see any rational movements. And sometimes you see some promotions here and there, but that's a movement that back and forth and appears and disappears, but I don't see structurally someone being irrational or taking advantage to gain market share because again, When you have 15% base interest rate of the economy, you cannot be that aggressive and losing money. Or you do that for a while, and then you make math and get back to the rationality. But again, I don't see that happening at this point. So competition is rational. Everyone is looking for profitability, and we are doing the same here. And looking at the client as a whole, I want to highlight that. We are looking at the client as a whole. we had 130 billion reais in tpv and 90 to 1 billion reais in peaks cashing 19 percent increase over a year that is important that is important and uh we've built the bank with the most difficult part which is to uh create deposits right that's the most difficult part of the bank to give credit is a consequence of us having the the right products the right models the right credit risk and so on but to get the deposits which is hard That's something that we've been building the last year. So I'd like just to take advantage of our question to highlight that.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Renato Meloni from Autonomous Research.

Mr. Meloni, your microphone's open.

Everyone, thanks for taking the questions. So first, I just wanted to go back to the funding strategy here and deposits, right? So we saw checking accounts going up 2% quarter on quarter. This is normally a positive, like in terms of seasonality for checking accounts. So I wanted to understand something if something happened here. And then picking up on your earlier comments saying that you might rely more on interbank deposits and understanding how competitive rates there, but just given here by the differential of rates, I would just be surprised that that doesn't impact cost of funding and if we should expect that. to pick up in the upcoming quarters. Then just if you allow me for a second question, just looking here at gross margins over TPV, I think you've achieved a pretty healthy level helped by the repricing. So I wanted to know, I was just wondering what do you expect for the second half of the year? I mean, there's more competition, potential worse economic scenario as you were describing, but at the same time you might still have the, can be carry on some benefits from the repricing. So trying to understand if that's stable for the second half, maybe up or down. Thanks.

Renato, I'll start with the last one. We have been doing the repricing since October, 2024. And it was exclusively to offset the increase in interest rate of the Brazilian economy. So that today is 15%. So it was to offset this increase. If we don't have increased interest rates looking forward, I guess structurally we will not have increase in our price for the merchants. Of course, there is always some customization in some of the price for smaller merchants here and there. But I mean, it's more negotiation, it's more clusters. Structurally, we don't see that happening if we don't have increased interest rates. And it seems that interest rates should go down in 2026. So if that scenario doesn't change, there will be no big waves of repricing in the following months or in the following quarters. Going back to deposits, I'll pass the word to Arthur.

Good evening, Renato. Thank you for your question. And so regarding our funding strategy, I think the main point here is we have all the company and the management team focus on increased checking accounts, all the deposits, not only checking account, but all the deposits. On top of that, we are working in our treasury to diversify in a different perspective, like many counterparties, many different products, On that way, we could have a competitive cost on those players. We also can work in a more longer duration. So we have a broad view on how to operate our our funding structure and always boosting costs down. Regarding to this checking account, we prefer to combine checking account and certificate of deposits because everything that we see in deposits are in line of our expectation. even considering the macro scenario that also affects our clients and their financial activity. But it is in line what we see, checking accounts growing two, certificate of deposit growing six, and you need to combine those two things to understand the activity in the engagement of our clients in the base.

And I guess the most important, Renato, is to manage the APY. which went down quarter over quarter from 90% to 89%. So that's part of the science to get the best deals that you have in the market, being checking accounts, certificate of deposit, and interbank, manage this cost of funding. At the end of the day, that's what matters.

Perfect. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Marcelo Mizari from Bradesco BBI.

Hello, everyone.

Thanks for the question. So my question is regarding the strategy of the company looking forward. So what the company are planning to do in this environment with soft economy and with this? So I understand that the strategy is to try to bring back But how to do that? So do you guys are planning to use the marketing to bring these clients? Do you guys are planning to offer credit to them? So how do you guys plan to bring back these volumes in the next quarters? Thank you.

Marcelo, there are many tools that you can use here. Once you have the relationship with the client, there are many tools that we can do with these clients. We can get promotions. We can get specific deals for specific payment methods. We have Salesforce in the streets. So there are many, many ways to get these clients back. Definitely, I don't think that credits would be a tool to get clients back because we try to get the client because of the whole package of the company, including banking and payments. And credits are a consequence of the activity that we see the client here. So we will not make irrational movements. Of course, if you have a client that has a decent volume with us, we can offer credit. But there are many, many tools that you can use to get this client back. Looking forward, the strategy of the company, as we've been seeing in slide 19, it's to grow banking more and more. I said before, we did the most difficult part of building this balance sheet of the bank, which is to build the deposits franchise. That's the most difficult part. To give credit in the asset side of the balance sheet, it is something that if you do it right, you can keep growing in a very consistent way. But the most difficult part is to get the deposits from franchise. And we've been building that in the last years. And banking is gaining share. It's 21% of the revenues, 26% of the gross profit. that would be no different looking forward. And again, we look at the client as a whole and we look at the whole volume of the company, 130 billion from cards and PIX QR codes and 91 billion from PIX cashing. So we need to look at the whole cash flow that you have from the client here and take advantage of that in different ways.

Thank you. That's all the questions that we have for today. I will pass the line back to PagSeguro Digital's team for their concluding remarks. Please, go ahead.

Thank you, everyone, for the time. Thank you for participation and for the questions. See you soon. Thank you.

This does conclude PagSeguro Digital's conference call. We thank you for your participation and wish you a very good evening.