Alior Bank Sa Unsp/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, Dominik Prokop, Investor Relations. I would like to welcome everyone on this wonderful day for Alior. Let us present our results for 2022. The results conference comes in two parts. The first section will present, or it was announced yesterday, comes back to the VIG20 index. We talked about it last year. We were preparing for this last year. We were working on it last year, and now we have achieved it. We're not talking very loudly about trying to get back to VIG20, but we did it. And apart from some one-off events that impacted our results, we indeed made it. So let us move on to the presentation so that we leave enough time for your questions. 60 million. That was our result. A very good quarter. That goes to show how much potential Aliorbank has. If you exclude extraordinary increasing interest rates, we didn't expect that people will be able to suspend their loans, that they'll get a credit vacation. As I said, we changed a lot in our bank in the retail division. And we are trying to get back to higher volumes in enterprise and business customers. Our NPL is less than 10 percent. That was the goal that we set, and that's something that we managed to achieve, because we expect that the economic situation will deteriorate and cost of risk will grow. Maybe not drastically, but still. So this NPL being below 10 percent, this is something that we want to maintain at the level of below 10 percent, especially that when interest rates come down, we want to have more space to activate lending. This is very important for us. We've been concentrating on building a strong foundation, so we were working both on the enumerator and the denominator of this whole equation. So let me talk about our efficiency. We are one of the most efficient banks in the sector, ROE, over 11 percent. And take a look at NIM. That's something that's, well, it's one of the higher results that I've seen out there, 5.92 percent for the whole year, 4.64. Sometimes you tend to ask whether that's the peak. Of course. Well, we are under pressure. Probably our potential for growth is sort of petering out, but we are a leader. So the level that we got to, this is something that really makes us stand out in the whole sector. On this slide also, let me point out look at the graph on the right-hand side, gross performing loans and how people overpay their mortgage. And right now, the volume of performing loans is at a stable level, which really is relevant from the point of view of high interest rates. And, well, our asset mix can really work in our favor, and it does. And you can see that on our interest results.

So let me start by talking about

business customers, because I want to show you how much work and how much effort we've put in to the small, medium and large segments. Look at our asset balance, it's grown by 6%. We have been saying all along that we wanted to increase or get back to the path of growth with business customers. Our NPL grew by or NPL fell by 4.1 percentage points, which really matters from the point of view of the future, from the point of view of credit risk. Sometimes you ask whether we open up to business customers. Do we know how to do it so that it doesn't come back and bite us? In terms of cost of risk, we can. We know how to do it. We have certain preferred industries. Preferred industries, meaning ones that we understand, meaning ones that we have figured out, and meaning ones that we understand the customers that we are going to fund. So the share of sales to preferred industries grew to 20%. So we are... developing the culture of risk in business so that our customer managers not only process applications, but in a way that's knowledgeable and reliable, but also later the way they work with customers. should also be very competent to build this culture of risk. So we will continue to do this. 20%, nearly 20% growth of our asset balance, the asset balance that we serve.

And also,

I wanted to show you the direction that we're going because, well, the share of factoring in new sales also changes. So we are dynamically improving, enhancing the quality of our portfolio. in business customers. It's a very, very deliberate policy. We have some preferred industries that we want to work with. So, of course, it will not be effective unless we build a strong relationship with customers. Bank Connect is one of the services that helps us do this. So we're building a strong relationship, but not only through offline branches. And we increased the share of automated decision-making processes. This all goes to show that we understand customers better, and that's why we can automate credit processes. When it comes to technology and projects that we've been implementing, it's been a very good year. We signed with Comarch to introduce new online banking, the online banking concept. It's one of the pillars. in our strategy, and this contract has been signed, as I said, so we are now entering the implementation phase. We've also implemented a process for opening a new bank account with us. We estimated it at the level of two minutes that this would be the time that it would take to open a new account. Right now, the shortest time, the fastest one we've recorded was five minutes, 40 seconds. But it's still fast enough. In this area, we will focus on acquisition. We will focus on transactions, on building relationships. And this would be our starting point to start building volume. Knowing our customers better, we will be able to build better quality assets. So now let me move on to retail customers, mortgage loans. sales of mortgage loans. Well, you all know how the market has been falling. We fell a little bit less than the market, which is not much comfort because the volume these days is simply quite low. But still, our market share in new sales, it's over 6%. And market share overall is around 3%. So there's two reasons why we want to build on what we already have. We want to increase our portfolio, diversify it, and of course, again, build relationships. But at the end of the day, I believe that this product or mortgage loans, well, that's an important starting point when you want to build relationships with customers and, of course, profitability of other products because that's the relationship we want. We want customers using many products, staying for many years with our bank. When it comes to cash loans, That was a year of strong pressure.

We are getting to the level of what we have.

I mean, nearly half of sales of cash loans is happening via online channels. This is really

important.

And in this strategy, we are going to focus very strongly on building omnichannel capabilities so that we can generate offering and quickly wrap up the process, pay out the cash loans to make it all very efficient and quick. Consumer finance. Well, in 2022, we have clearly shown that we were the leader of consumer finance. We are trying to anticipate trends. We have started working with RentUp and Computronik. retail chain, Computronik, you can go there to their stores and you can lease their equipment, computer equipment, and then replace it with new equipment in 12 months' time. So that's a service that's developing. It's developing all around the world. So probably, actually, apart from buy now, pay later, leasing of computer equipment will become something very popular, especially that we are very strong with younger demographics, with younger clients. So now let's talk about our relations and relationship with our customers. We have a growing number of customers who treat this bank as their number one bank, and this is where they receive regular credits. So we're using bleak transactions. We're using value-added services to build this relationship. And, of course, we want customers to not only download our apps, but to be active and actively use them. And we have 1 million customers already. So we see this trend that customers tend to get redirected from online banking to application, and it is a trend. It, of course, is reflected by our capex, and it's one of the dominant channels, or we want the mobile app to be our dominant channel when we're talking about remote channels. As we go back and think about 2022, we need to mention one important project. We're developing what we call InfoNina, which is a bot that helps serve our hotline which really allows us to cut down the time of serving our customers. If a customer uses the mobile app and they have a question, they have a concern, a lot of these customers really want to contact Infonina, they do, and they get their issues solved. Infonina is really special in terms of Infonina and in terms of the quality of its app. If these two processes continue working together well, then the NPS we're going to get among mobile customers is going to be even higher than it is right now. And one of the main drivers of the quality of service and the time duration of service is automation. InfoNina has been serving the non-transactional processes, but this year it will also start serving the transactional processes that are right now still served by human beings. Alior Pay, that's another of our implementations. Buy Now, Pay Later, that was a response to this trend. And according to the Polish Economic Institute, the value of this market is 3.5 billion zlotys, and it could grow at the level of... several hundred percent annually. Over 60 percent people have already used that capability. That's the highest rate in the entire European Union. Some of you are asking, where do we see the potential in that? I told you about the BNPL market. It's a big one and it's growing. We've introduced this service for some of our customers and we can see that NPS is really high with this one.

We're very happy about it.

We're working on this product. We have some initial... applications coming in already, we have some feedback from customers, so we are planning to roll out somewhere in the middle of this year so that it's available for all customers.

Our customer base is growing and

our model actually covered the whole market. Eighty percent of the transactions are outside of e-commerce, and 20 percent of these transactions happen in e-commerce. So there was a niche that we decided to use. We told you about it when we presented our strategy. It turned out, really, successful. And this product is very much in line with what customers want and need from the point of view of ESG, from the point of view of inclusion, from the point of view of, well, if over 60 percent of customers in Poland have used this service, and if they were to stay outside of the banking system, that wouldn't be so good. We actually report our data to BIK. the Polish Credit Information Bureau. We do this absolutely responsibly. So now let's move on to ESG. 2022, this was a year that saw us working with NGOs, working with the government to help and assist and support those who came to Poland over from Ukraine. That's a very big step in developing the S in the ESG mix. After we presented our strategy, some of you were asking us what was our ESG concept. First of all, supporting micro and small businesses in the energy transformation. Actually, some of our customers are right now using our eco products. So I would say green products, developing the S in the ESG mix, which will help us, of course, build good relationships with our customers and which will create an image of us as a responsible bank as well as a good employer. We've introduced reskilling services. We have a very good healthcare offer. There was a study done among employees of the Polish financial sector and Alior was number 22 in the whole country. So maybe we sometimes don't do a lot of things with fanfare, but we certainly do things and we certainly get things done.

It's also a year of initiatives which support a healthy lifestyle among our customers, supporting people in need, for instance those with cancer. It's also various actions to prevent those diseases, health prevention. outcomes when it comes to our employees, and we would also like to promote these things among our customers. Gaming, we're also a sponsor of one of the teams in the gaming league. This is where the young customer is these days. We are the number two bank. for the young generation, including thanks to our TikTok and Instagram campaigns. It's a strategy not just to acquire young clients, but also to educate them so that they do their banking responsibly with us. They learn about financial services and tighten their relationship with us, which will later translate into better results for the bank. That's it from me when it comes to summing up our business and CSR for last year. We'll now go to credit risk with Tomek. Thank you very much. Hello. As Grzegorz said, the most recent period for the whole capital group involved working on our loan portfolio. And despite the fact that the economic and macroeconomic Situation last year was much more difficult than in 2021. We can still boast of very good outcomes.

The NPR level dropped below 10%, 9.8% at the end of 2022.

It's an improvement by 2 percentage points over the course of a year and almost 5%. over the last two years. COR itself is at 1.51%. This is below the expectations which we conveyed to you a while ago, 1.6, so 57 million less than in 2021. The economic situation itself has limited impact on Alior's loan portfolio. At the same time, In the coming quarters, we are expecting a downturn. However, we don't think that costs of risk will be over 1.9 percent next year.

Looking in more detail, NPL, we see a dynamic drop. The NPL provision coverage was stable last year with a small drop in the quarter four.

CUR was stable over the quarters, 157 over Q4, quite close to the year average. The different business lines, retail customers here, the NPL was just over 5%, a very good score.

very good levels for various products.

However, for business clients, we have a strong strategy of reducing NPL over 4% less over the year, stopping at 16%. Liquidity ratios stable over time and cost of risk for business clients as a consequence of what we did. This is dropping just over 1.1% by the end of the year. Moreover, this portfolio is quite resilient.

within the current microeconomic circumstances.

We have some rise of COR in retail customers due to rising interest rates and different burdens on our clients.

However, as you can see, the last two quarters saw stable results with quite a good level.

In other areas, Tier 1 13% at the end of the year, TCR 13.14.2. This is much below the regulatory limits, over 2 billion zlotys of reserve. As a capital group, in 2022, we did not add profits to our capital.

If we were to add it, then TCR would rise by an additional 142 points. As for important information in that area, in Q4, the Financial Commission lowered the capital

requirement from 1.47 to 0.15.

It's one of the lowest rates in the sector, which tells us that the bank is in a good situation and we are prepared for any potential risks should a crisis come. Like capital, liquidity has been very stable. 166 percent, NSFR at 133 percent. So summing up the risk area, we see improvements, NPL lower than 10 percent, a stable capital situation, a very good liquidity with full awareness, with full certainty I can say that we are prepared for the year to come. Thank you, Tomek. Good morning. Maybe very briefly about the outcomes for Q4 and the last, the previous year. So maybe starting with profits and losses, 360 million, like Grzegorz said, in Q4. That's over 2.5 more than in Q4 2021. As for the whole year, 683 million. That's plus 42% versus 2021. So this quarterly result is somewhat lower than the market consensus would have it, largely due to the points that you see at the bottom of the slide.

So, number one, creating

additional reserves for foreign currency mortgages.

So the first 22 million, and for the second one, an additional 44 million. This is the opinion of the Ombudsman, which is not binding yet because we're waiting for the ruling.

However, in our opinion, looking conservatively at our portfolio, we can expect a bigger share of

of court cases. I'm thinking of our CHF portfolio, which is currently worth 134 million zlotys, and half of it is reserve-based.

So looking at our Swiss franc loans, This is quite a conservative level.

Other factors which have had bearing on Q4 results was the so-called little TSUE plus accounting for the 4 million contribution One more key piece of information on this slide is the capital return ratio. It's one of our key metrics within our strategic perspective over the course of the entire quarter. It was quite high. The 24% is the annualized figure, and over 12% across all of 2022, which again had various burdens, was burdened by certain events

were not foreseeable, such as mortgage vacations or the cost of supporting the system to protect commercial banks or the EWK contribution.

The next slide, the interest rates, profits, the bottom of the slide shows that this figure is growing.

In both cases, it's around 50%. And we see that this portfolio is slowing down in terms of repricing.

And on the profit side, the interest is doing better and better, which bodes well at the interest margin. is the yellow line in the upper right-hand corner at 5.92%. 2.2% was the financing cost in Q4, so we always have to look at these in parallel. Here we're talking about a plateau. We've climbed up to a certain level, which will now depend on the shape of the dark red line. So as the reference rates and VBOR go up, this has also gone up.

competition on the market, competition for savings accounts, deposit accounts.

What we see in the last two months is a sort of stopping of the market, a slowing down of the market, looking at credit and the need to get deposits, we've lowered certain requirements.

So for that indicator, it currently looks – the outlook is currently positive, but there is another factor, customer migration.

from current savings accounts to long-term accounts. It's somewhat slower than the level that we saw before the pandemic in terms of deposit structure, but it will also be a decisive factor. for COF. Loan slash deposit ratio, still around 80%, a very good figure given the economic environment because we want our assets to be working. as a loan portfolio. Moving on, the fees and commissions income.

So this title tells you all there is to know.

On the left, year on year, it's risen somewhat, which is good news. And we've said many times that our ambition is

around 200 million per quarter.

This remains our minimum aim.

However, we see a slight quarterly drop, a single digit, a queue on queue. Like the title says, it's not easy on the retail side.

to offer paid services to customers.

Although we do do that, we have a number of initiatives, including strategies.

Similarly, on the business side here, we're counting on higher transaction volume, more transactions, which should produce a higher figure in the future.

Here we saw the biggest drop in the quarterly result for currency exchange.

This is more of an accounting result, an accounting phenomenon. It looks a bit better in terms of the economic outlook.

We're also glad to see more currency exchange transactions or credit cards. And these are products which are growing.

operating costs. So here, starting with the key indicator, cost-to-income ratio, it's doing very well in Q4.

Same for the whole year.

It's quite close to our target. It was also impacted by the numerator and denominator, like the mortgage vacations and the EWK contribution and other factors. So we should look at this both within the context of inflationary pressure, which definitely exists and will be around this year and next year, and our strategic ambitions, which we talked about at length a month ago. We see tech development, which is costly. So moving on to quarterly costs, what you see here is the salary costs, which is over what we had declared 10 percent year on year. However, in quarterly terms it's 19%, but it contains both the time of reserve and reserve for premiums and benefits. As for the results for management costs, it's as anticipated. Marketing, training, development costs, largely IT, these are growing.

And as we said, they will be higher due to the implementation of our strategy and the prices on the market.

If we were to sum up costs. We are on a par with the inflationary levels, looking both at pressure and the fact that this pressure

exists on the costs side, plus strategic pressures.

So looking at our targets for the end of 2024, again, we are on our way to plus 13 percent, which is very good news despite the events in 2022, the rise of ROE, 11.3. So, we consider this a solid and satisfactory result, given the event's cost to income slightly higher.

However, again, I think that we're able to effectively manage the process of both our changes and our operational activities. to bring you that result below 45% by the end of 2024. Tomek talked quite a bit about capital.

These are also good results, which bring us closer to our goals, including REL requirements, cost of risk. That's also at a very good level.

and NPL as well. We want to get it below 10%. So just to conclude, why Alior? Just like Grzegorz said, we have come back to VIG20, which is very good news.

Thank you very much for this.

And let's move on to our Q&A.

So the first question, what about the AliorPay service?

How popular is it and how much is it? are customers able to pay? Well, when it comes to Alirpay, definitely I have to be very careful because, well, our competitors don't sit and wait, but we are happy with the initial phase of implementation. We have offered this product to a pre-selected group. Of course, we offer it to more and more new customers. Around 80% of people successfully paid their outstanding balance within the 30-day period, so the free of charge period. Twenty percent of the portfolio is paid in installments and is being serviced on a regular basis, but these are not large amounts.

So when it comes to what we planned and what we expected, we are positively surprised by a

high share of non-e-commerce transactions. So many customers use this balance to defer bills or POS purchases. So actually, we're seeing that maybe, probably somewhere mid-year, we should try and offer a complete, comprehensive product for everyone, and we see it's a good direction. Well, 20% of payments in installments. Is it something that we expected from the point of view of our results and how it impacts our results? Yes, it's something that we expected. It's something that's very much in line with what we anticipated. When it comes to the results, we are above our initial expectations and assumptions. We're really looking forward to full comprehensive rollout. Thank you so much.

The following question.

The level of administrative and overhead costs from Q4, should it be treated as the baseline for 2023, or are there some seasonal effects or some extraordinary occurrences that inflated. Well, Q4, as I said, I've mentioned it briefly. In Q4, we usually observe certain effects that tend to inflate these costs. Like, for example, last year, higher intensity of marketing campaigns. We have also accounted for some of our R&D efforts.

So we look at it at an average.

We will look at it as an average, so it would be a lower number, somewhere closer to 430 million, including inflation.

And the following question, what about cost of risk this year?

What will it be in different products and segments like cash loans, business customers, mortgage loans? Thank you for this question. As I said before, for the entire earlier group, we expect that cost of risk will not be higher than 1.9%. In terms of business customers, we, for now, haven't observed any negative impact of the current economic situation. This segment seems to be quite resilient. When it comes to mortgage loans and retail customers, we do expect a certain worsening because the mortgage slash credit vacations are petering out. Last year, people could take two months off their mortgage payments. This year, one month. But I don't think it will have a huge impact on the result.

Thank you. The following question.

It's about hedging. Negative impact of hedging on interest costs has increased marginally in Q4 2022. So can you believe or can we say that the impact of hedging will not change all that much if interest rates don't change much? Well, let me go back because at the beginning of last year we were saying that the impact of hedging is significant.

And as you know, it's becoming less and less significant.

And, well, you were asking what should happen assuming that interest rates don't change. We've presented it when we presented our strategy. Definitely, I would say, Our portfolio is amortizing. There is a certain attrition.

So I would say in the second half of this year, we are expecting a significant reduction of this cost. But again, let me stress,

In its entirety and in the entirety of our hedging strategy, we, of course, run a systematic policy to reduce the sensitivity of our interest costs. So we are involved in hedging.

So both in 2022, 2023, these transactions are with higher interest rates.

So in the future, situation should improve or this particular line of our results should improve. Thank you so much. And the following one about MREL.

Is Alior planning to issue MREL

What amounts are we talking about? Sure, of course. We do have some needs that amount to around 1 billion zlotys, so we will issue gradually throughout 2023. Now, what's the balance sheet value of mortgage loan, CHF denominated mortgage loan, gross value? Well, balance sheet value gross, 134 million. I think it was note 14. Yeah, note 14. This is where you'll find more about it.

Thank you. Thank you.

Well, does the bank believe that the reserve for the cost of credit vacation is sufficient? Is there any adjustment in the plans? 502 million zlotys as the total cost of credit mortgage vacation. And in Q4, we did not establish any new reserves. And we do not see any special threats that would call for creating a new reserve. 502 million with 67 percent participation.

Thank you so much.

We are done with questions for now. Of course, please contact investor relations at any point. If you have any questions, we will be happy to oblige. Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentation.