Finecobank Banca Fine Spa

Good afternoon. This is the Coral School conference operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Finneco Bank first quarter 2022 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Alessandro Foti, CEO of Fineco. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter results conference call. Before having a closer look to our results, let me please underline that in the recent months, there has been a huge change in the structure of the market, which is further enlarging our growth opportunities. As you know, our new dimensional growth is underpinned by the recent acceleration of the structural trends reshaping the society. This has been further strengthened by the dramatic increase in the interest rates scenario since the beginning of the year. Our business model as a one-stop shop quality platform is benefiting by the new market structure as we expect and strong increase in our net financial income thanks to the strong gearing to the interest rates of our quality and capital light and net interest income which is driven by our clients valuable transactional liquidity and not by lending as for the for other banks on investing we expect strong results despite the challenging environment with a robust inflows driven by structural trends and by their growing contribution by FinEco asset management. On brokerage, we expect a structural higher floor compared to the pre-pandemic levels thanks to our quality target market based on wealthy and financially aware clients and to our business model. The main outcome is that Fineco is becoming more and more a fast-growing and capital-light business with a structurally higher profitability and a structurally higher room to dispose of it, as the leverage ratio is no more a point of attention. This will allow us to distribute a higher level of dividends and at the same time to be in the position to invest more on our growth.

Let's now move on slide five.