Aareal Bank AG

Welcome to the Arial Bank AG full year 2025 investor and analyst conference. I'm Moritz, the call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in the listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Jürgen Junginger, Head of Debt IR. Please go ahead, sir.

Our agenda covers our results for 2025, our outlook for 2026, and an update on our strategic plan, our real ambition. I'm joined today by our Management Board, our CEO, Christian Ritten, Nina Babic, our CRO, CFO, Andy Halford, and Chief Market Officer, Christoph Winterbaum. Christian and Andy will take you through our presentation, which will be followed by a question and answer session. I'm pleased to hand over to Christian. Christian, the floor is yours.

Yes, thank you very much. Good morning to everyone. And thank you very much for attending today's call. Before turning to today's presentation, I would like to refer briefly to the recent events in the Middle East. There's no doubt that geopolitical uncertainties have increased. Tensions have escalated. There is heightened caution across most business areas. We are aware of that. As a result, investment activity in many sectors may slow or become less predictable for some time. So far, Areal has not been directly affected by the events of the last week, nor more broadly by geopolitical events over the last year. However, we are, of course, monitoring the situation very closely. Now let me turn to our results for 2025 and our outlook for 2026. And I will also provide you an update on our strategic plan ARIA ambition. Starting with slide three, first our results for 2025. And as you can imagine, this slide, this chart has become my actual favorite chart because It's a very well reflection of the delivery of the bank. We targeted adjusted profit for the year of over 375 million euros, which we comfortably achieved. On the basis of this good result, the management took action, incurring an additional charge of 55 million euros to support the repositioning of our U.S. business. The adjusted operating profit after the additional 55 million euro charge was 326 million euros, which is very similar to the equivalent profit in 2024. Turning to our two business segments, both achieved strong results for 2025. Banking and digital solutions made a significant contribution to group profits and Q4 average deposits including retail rose to 17.8 billion euros. New business and structured property financing reached 12.4 billion euros for the year, which was a record result. Much of this volume came from Europe and I will say more about our regional approach later. By the end of 2025, we had reduced non-performing loans to 1.1 billion euros. We are planning to bring this balance below 1 billion euros in the current year we are confident we can achieve this in the first half of the year. Our capital ratio continues to be solid with our CT1 fully phased ratio at 15.5% at the end of 2025. At this conference last year, we introduced our new strategic plan, Areal Ambition, and I'm pleased to report that we are well on track. As a result, We are well-placed to reach our target of around 13% adjusted post-tax return on equity in 2027 still. Our increased focus on banking and digital solutions and our repositioning in the U.S. in structured property financing underpin this progress. I will provide further comments on our Areal Ambition Plan later in this presentation. Before moving into the details of our results, I wanted to illustrate the importance of both of our business segments to the overall results. I'm on slide four now. As you can see, banking and digital solutions has contributed significantly to the group's operating profit in each of the last three years since the return of, as I would call it, normal interest rates. BDS deposits, including retail, rose to an average of 17.8 billion euros in the fourth quarter of 2025. The business has around 4,300 clients and currently executes payments transactions amounting to 167 billion euros every year. I would like to thank the staff in this business for their efforts in 2025 and their continued commitment. In structured property financing, The loan volume is over 34 billion euros spread across over more than 20 countries and five property types. I also would like to thank the staff in this business for their diligence and care as we have grown by taking a conservative approach to risk. I will now hand over to Andy who will provide further details on our results for 2025. Andy, over to you.