Intesa Sanpaolo S/Adr

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the conference call of Intesa Sanpaolo for the presentation of the third quarter 2026 results hosted today by Mr Carlo Messina, Chief Executive Officer. My name is Razia and I will be your coordinator for today's conference. At the end of the presentation there will be a question and answer session. To enter the queue for questions please press star 1 1 at any time. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1, 1 again. You are kindly invited to ask no more than two questions to leave room for other participants. In case of additional questions, the IELTS team will be at your disposal after the conference call. I remind you all that today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Carlo Messina, CEO, so you may begin.

Thank you. Welcome to our nine-month 2026 results conference call. This is Carlo Messina, Chief Executive Officer, and I'm here with Luca Bocca, our CFO, and Marco Del Frate and Andrea Tamagnini, Investor Relations Officers. We have just delivered our best nine months ever, with net income of €8.2 billion, including more than €2.6 billion in the third quarter. making it our best third quarter ever. Our return on equity reached 21% with a return on tangible equity of 26% while earnings per share increased by 10% year on year. These excellent and sustainable results reached despite an almost 1 billion euro impact from the budget law for 2026 allow us to upgrade our 2026 net income guidance to well above 10 billion euros. In the first nine months we delivered record high revenues and customer financial assets grew to more than 1.5 trillion euros showing continued commercial momentum. We further reduced costs and asset quality remains best in class with no sign The execution of our business plan continues at full speed, and Italy's economy continues to demonstrate strong resilience and has performed better than expected with GDP growth forecasts revised upwards. Our offer for Montepaschi di Siena is well on track. We are fully convinced of the strength of our offer and the outcome of the Montepaschi di Siena EGM reinforces our confidence in the success of our transaction. Our shareholders have also demonstrated their strong support for the transaction, clearly recognizing its industrial and economic value. The acquisition is fully consistent with our disciplined approach to growth and value creation, and it will accelerate the execution of our business plan with zero integration risk. We have demonstrated our ability to successfully integrate banking groups many times, delivering synergies ahead of schedule while maintaining strong commercial momentum. Inter Sanpaolo continues to offer one of the highest and sustainable dividend yields in the European banking. This year we are returning 9.4 billion euros to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, including the 3.8 billion interim dividend to be paid in a few weeks. I'm proud of our results and thank our people for their excellent contributions. Now let's turn to slide one for the key achievements of the first nine months. In the first nine months, we delivered record high profitability, excellent asset quality and high sustainable and increasing value creation and distribution. Slide two. In this slide, you can see that net income has more than doubled in five years. Slide number three. In the first nine months, we delivered a significant increase in annual per share, dividend per share, and tangible book per share. Our interim dividend per share is up 18% year on year. Slide number four. As you can see in this slide, we are on a solid growth path. Loans to customers increased 4% yearly. Customer financial assets are also up with customer deposits growing 8% year-on-year. Slide number 5. Revenues increased more than 1 billion euro year-on-year while we managed to reduce costs by over 1%. As a result, the cost-income ratio was down 2.4 percentage points. Slide number 6. As already said, Thanks to our nine-month performance, we are in a comfortable position to upgrade the 2026 Net Income Guidance to well above 10 billion. Slide number seven. Our excellent performance allows us to benefit all our stakeholders, sustain the real economy, and strongly support the fight against poverty and inequalities. All this despite a 900 million impact from higher tax due to the budget law for 2026 and considering that at the end we will pay in nine months 5.2 billion euros in terms of taxes. Slide number eight. In this slide, you have a recap of the three pillars of our business plan presented in February. The plan is proceeding at full speed with all initiatives launched and the Montepaschi di Siena transaction will be a strong accelerator of the plan. In the appendix you have an update on the progress. Now let's move to slide 10 for a closer look at our nine-month results.

Slide 10.