Turkiye Garanti Bk

Hello and thank you for joining us in Guaranteed BBVA's 2024 Financial Results and 2025 Operating Plan Guidance Webcast. Our CEO, Mr. Mahmoud Aktan, our CFO, Mr. Aydin Güler, and our Investor Relations Director, Ms. Handan Saygın, will be presenting today. As always, there will be a Q&A session following the presentation, and you will be able to ask your questions either via raise hand button or by typing them into the Q&A area. I now leave the floor for presentation.

Good afternoon, everyone. It's an honor to be with you on our earnings call, presenting another set of unmatched results. Despite the ongoing market complexities and tight regulations, we delivered further improvement in our net income. But before getting into the results, let's, as usual, quickly go over the macro backdrop we're in. Rebalancing in the Turkish economy continues with a gradual moderation in domestic demands. Economic growth in the first three quarters were 3.2%, and we also expect the 2024 growth to be 3.2%. With the continuing restrictive monetary policies and expected fiscal consolidation, we expect GDP growth to come down to 2.5% in 2025. Monthly inflation trend is further in December to below 2.5%. We expect, well, actually in the year 2024, we finished the year with a CPI of 44.4%, and we forecast 25.5% CPI for year-end 2025. As for the policy rate, it was 47.5% at year-end. In January, there was a further 250 basis points cut, bringing the policy rate to 45%. We expect the easing cycle to continue with 250 BITS cuts in March and April and smaller cuts thereafter, ending the year with 31%. As for the current account deficit on slide 4, We expect the deficit to be only 0.7% of GDP in year 2024, driven by moderating domestic demands, normalization in gold imports, strong tourism revenues, and improving core trade deficits. We forecast the current account deficit to be 1.5% in year 2025, taking into account some of the risks on external demand. On the budget deficit, the latest medium-term program suggests a clearer fiscal consolidation in 2025 with savings and capital expenditures and transfers suggesting further improvement in budget deficit to GDP. We expect the ratio to decline from 4.8% in 2024 to 3.5% in 2025, including the earthquake expanding. Excluding the earthquake spending, budget deficit to GDP will remain within the Maastricht criteria. Now, the financials for year 2024. Guaranteed BBVA ended the year 2024 with a clearly unmatched earnings performance. With the addition of 25.2 billion euros of net income in the fourth quarter, annual net income reached 92.2 billion euros, representing a clean 17% year-on-year earnings growth, when adjusted with the last year's provision reversal. The level of earnings suggests we succeeded in delivering what we guided in the beginning of the year, as well as delivering a significant outperformance. Return on average equity of 33% and return on average assets of 3.5% are the highest among peers, underscoring our dynamic balance sheet management, sustainable revenue streams, mainly our strong core banking revenues that you see on slide 7. The core banking revenue growth registered even in a year of increasing interest rates and regulatory pressures was an outstanding 62%. Our core banking revenue generation as a percentage of assets not only shows the highest level and the highest improvement, but compares very favorably to that of the peer average. Largest differentiation lies in the core net interest income performance backed by our high weight of customer-driven asset mix, closely managed pricing, and duration. As you can see in the asset breakdown on the next page, performing loans share in assets is a high 58%, whereas securities share in assets is at its two-year low and lowest among peers with 14%. Our fourth quarter Turkish Lira lending growth of 11% brought 2024 Turkish Lira loan growth to 52%, a level pointing to a high single-digit real loan growth for the year. This growth is achieved while sticking to the imposed loan growth caps and looking higher growth in the preferred areas such as investment, export, credit cards, and earthquake-affected area loans. In foreign currency lending, our annual growth ended to be 13% in dollar terms after no growth due to redemptions in the last quarter, similar to sector trends. On the securities front, we're typically opportunistic and grow for either hedging purpose or regulatory driven. In the fourth quarter, we did replace our redeeming Turkish Lira securities and added to our long-term fixed rate portfolio. Accordingly, our annual growth in Turkish Lira securities reached 42%. In the last quarter of the year, we sustained our market share gains in Turkish Lira lending and thus solidified our leadership in Turkish Lira loans with near 22% market share among private banks. Last quarter's gains were across the board with continued focus on extending maturities. We finished the year with a 1.1 trillion lira-sized Turkish lira loan portfolio, driven by a 74% growth in credit cards, 55% growth in consumer loans, and 35% growth in business loans. Our market share in consumer general purpose loans among private banks is near 20%. In consumer mortgages, we gained in just one quarter 130 basis points market share, and now our market share is near 28%. In credit cards, our market share gain in the quarter was 160 basis points, bringing our credit card market share to more than 24%. And in business banking, our market share exceeded 20% as of the year end. As for the quality of the total loan book that you can see on slide 10, of 1.8 trillion liras of the total loan book, 11.4% is in stage 2 and 2.1% is in stage 3. The anticipated increase in Stage 2 relates predominantly to the increase in the SICR portion, namely small tickets, size, retail, and credit card loans. Isolating the currency impact, the quarterly increase in Stage 2 was 34 billion liras. Since the coverage for the SICR is relatively low, it did not pressure the Stage 2 provisions much, while the recovery of a few highly provisioned wholesale files in Stage 2 diluted the foreign currency coverage portion of Stage 2 from 38% to 30%. And we had a similar impact on the Turkish lira side that lead to coverage dilution to 6% from 8%. And regarding the NPL formation in the quarter, we can see on the next slide. The net NPL inflow in the quarter was less than half of the prior quarters with 3.2 billion liras, owing to strong collections, NPL sales, and write-down. Excluding the NPL sales and write-down, the net NPL inflow was 8.8. showing the deterioration we all expected after last year's robust retail growth. 85% of the new MPLs related to the retail book, half alone was from the credit cards portfolio, and MPL inflow from commercial sides was quite muted. The ratio post-MPL sale and write-downs stayed at 2.1%. If we had not done any MPL sale or write-down since 2019, our MPI ratio would have been 3.1%. During the year, we sold about 10 billion euros of MPLs for 3.3 billion euros, as they presented a good opportunity in this inflationary period, with positive spread versus the legal process time cost. Our total provisions on balance sheet, including the written-down portion, is at 78.6 billion liras. This is the highest provision level among the private banks and represents a 4.3% total cash coverage. On the next slide, let's see how this translates into cost of risk. Net provisions... excluding currency and the earthquake-related provisions of last year, spiked almost three-fold year-on-year. It actually could have been much higher if we had not had the big-ticket wholesale collections as well as the reclassification-related provision release of a loan hitting the last quarter of the year. The reclassified portion of this specific loan alone had a 15-bibs positive impact on net cost of risk. Also during the year, the two sovereign rating upgrades received added to the positive impact versus budget. Accordingly, the cumulative net cost of risk at year-end recorded was 78 basis points, which is a level lower than our annual guidance of 125 basis points. On the funding side, customer deposits funds more than 70% of the assets, 71.8% to be exact. The high share of demand deposits funding assets, in spite of the high interest rate environment, remains to be the key financial differentiation supporting margin outperformance. Borrowing's share in funding assets, despite our new Tier 2 and some MTN issuances in the last quarter, remains low at 7.3%. Total external debt as of the year end was $5.5 billion. Of this, one-third relates to sub-debt, Another one-third relates to securitizations, 15% to syndications, and 13% to MTN programs. $1.8 billion of the external debt is due within a year, and against that, we have $3.5 billion buffer in foreign currency liquidity. The quarterly drop in foreign currency liquidity is due to higher reserve requirements and continuing de-dollarization. Overall, our leverage remained low at 8.1 times the equity. Conversion to standard TL deposits continued in line with the regulation targets given. We recorded another 6% growth in Turkish Lira deposits, bringing the annual Turkish Lira deposit growth to 36%. Turkish Lira deposits now make up 57% of total deposits. On the foreign currency deposit side, de-dollarization continued in the last quarter at an increased pace. Even though there seems to be an annual 4% growth in dollar terms, it relates to non-retail foreign currency deposit volume growth at our foreign subsidiaries, namely Garanti Bank International and Garanti Bank Romania. Even though we manage the most sizable Turkish dollar deposit portfolio in high interest rate environment, we continue to lead in customer demand deposits share in total. On a bank-only comparative basis, demand deposits share in total is 40% at guarantee versus the average of private peers of 33%. Also, within the time deposits, we continue to have the highest share of foreign currency protected deposits and TL time deposits with relatively lower funding costs. The significant funding advantage provided by these factors support our superior margin performance. Accordingly, On slide 15, our margins remain the most resilient throughout the year, despite the continuing tight stance in monetary policy and additional macroprudential measures. And we could book not only the highest core net interest income, but also the highest improvement in core net interest income of 41% year-on-year. As for the margins, the last quarter of the year, in the last quarter of the year, we started seeing the reversal of the margin suppression. As you can see on the top right-hand side, the Turkish Lira loan to Turkish Lira time deposit spreads are on extension trend, with deposits repricing faster than loans. As a result, we could register 67 basis points quarter-on-quarter improvement in our core margin in the last quarter. Combined with the CPI adjustment impact, quarterly expansion was 71 basis points. On a cumulative basis, our margin ended to be 4.1%, suggesting a level 92 basis points lower year-on-year versus our flat margin guidance in the beginning of the year. The difference can be explained with the rules of the game changing midway in the year. The increased reserve requirements net of remuneration alone had 80 basis points of negative impact. So the level of our core net interest income and margin remains to be our legacy and will remain intact owing to our customer-driven asset mix. Notice on slide 16, what ensures the sustainability of our strong banking revenue generation can be explained with our leadership in Turkish lira loans and Turkish lira deposits. In our Turkish lira assets, the share of Turkish lira loans is 62% versus the securities share is only 16%. In a period where loan yields are increasing, were about one and a half times higher than securities, and there are low growth caps, this presents a significant and sustainable revenue advantage. And our assets, as I said before, are funded largely with customer deposits. Turkish Lira time deposit share in Turkish Lira liabilities is 66.6% and presents a funding cost benefit versus repos. In the meantime, we are, as always, actively managing not only our pricing but also the duration gap. Nowadays, our Turkish Lira balance sheet duration gap is around 4 to 5 months and increasing at a time of declining interest rates. As for net fees and commissions on slide 17, there is 11% quarter-on-quarter and a robust 2.2-fold year-on-year growth led largely by the payment systems business. Of the 97 billion euros of net fees and commissions booked in year 2024, two-thirds still relate to the payment systems business, owing to our number one rank in that business. Also, our number one rank in Turkish Lira cash loans, Turkish Lira non-cash loans, as well as money transfer fees, non-life and life insurance were all supported in our net fees and commissions growth. Key reasons behind our robust fee performance are the strength in relationship banking leading to significant cross-sell and increased customer penetration, and digital empowerment. Our digital active customers now reached 16.7 million, and digital sales share in total is 89%. Moving to our operating expenses performance, as expected, we had an inevitable operating expense growth due to the accumulated high inflation impact. Quarterly growth was 23%, and annual operating expense growth was 84% when adjusted with the currency. This above-inflation growth can be explained with operating expenses relating to higher current and potential revenue generation. In the end, our efficiencies remain best in class, such that our cost-income ratio, with 44%, suggests the highest efficiency among peers in this period. Fees coverage of OPEX also suggests a very strong 91%. As for capital, consolidated capital exchange ratio without the BRSA's forbearance went up to 18.2% and core equity tier 1 to 14.7%. Our capital generative growth strategy continued to support the solvency in the quarters as well as for the year. The foreign currency sensitivity on our capital X ratio is a low 20.5% negative for every 10% depreciation, owing to our total of $1.25 billion of tier 2 issuances in the year. In summary, what I can say with these outstanding and rather unmatched results is that we added to our strong track record of delivering what we promise, what we guide. Since I went over each line throughout my presentation as how we fared versus budget guidance, I don't want to do a repetition and rather jump into what our guidance is for year 2025. So let's jump to slide 22. And start first with the assumed macro backdrop. In 2025, we project a lower GDP growth of 2.5%, year-round inflation to come down to 26.5%, policy rate to ease down to 31%, and unemployment to rise to 10.5%. We expect a Turkish lira lending growth that is above average CPI and that is about more or less even across the board in terms of consumer credit card and business lending. And about even pace throughout the year, we can say. A foreign currency low growth that is in the low teens, we expect. Net cost of risk to rise up to 2% to 2.5% levels in the absence of the heavy wholesale collections we had seen in 2024. Offsetting this, we expect a margin expansion of total 3% by year-end. A fee growth that can be sustained above average CPI, however, with a much normalized payment system fee growth, of course. and accordingly a fee coverage of OPEX ratio normalizing to 80 to 85 percent levels. These all should suggest a return on average equity for the year that is in the low 30s. Please keep in mind that these expectations are built on the assumption that the current regulations will remain intact and no new regulations will be introduced. Any change in these may lead to either an upside or a downside on the guidance. In conclusion, these are the messages we wanted to share with you. It's now time to take your questions. Thank you for listening.

Hello again for the Q&A session. You can ask your questions by typing into the Q&A area or by using Raise Your Hand button. And once your name is announced, please unmute yourself and ask your question. Our first question is coming from David Taranto. Hello, David. Please go ahead.

For the opportunity, I have three questions, please. Your Turkish Lira loan growth guidance at above average CPI levels probably indicates something close or above mid-30% levels. This is above the annualized level of the existing growth caps, so we appreciate there are flexibilities around these caps considering these segments that are exempt from regulations. Could you please elaborate a bit on your growth expectations? What percentage of your loan book is exempt from the existing growth caps? On the retail side, it is easier for us to calculate, but it is a bit more challenging to calculate that for the business side. So any color would be appreciated. My second question is on NIM. Lower policy rates spillover on repo and swaps are technical, but my question is what's your expectation for local currency deposits? Your year-end policy rate expectation is around 31%, so do you see average time deposit rates reaching close to that level by the end of the year? And my last question is again on NIM. Could you please elaborate a bit on the quarterly NIM dynamics? Given the direction of trades, should we expect NIMs to peak in the last quarter of the year? Full year guidance is clear, but where do you see the exit NIM from this year? And sorry, one more quick question on cost. Your cost or fee guidance is based on solo numbers. Could you kindly share some color for the consolidated cost growth as well? Thank you.

Thanks, David. This is Mahmut. Thank you for detailed questions on four areas. my colleagues will add up where I'm short. But first of all, as you said, we are expecting slightly above CPI growth by year-end, which is, as you mentioned, around 30% or so, given that our projections for year-end for CPI 26.5. And I don't have the exact from top of my mind, but first of all, as you know, credit card overdraft on certain segments are exempted from the from the limits. Therefore, we can easily grow beyond the approximately 2% limit on certain segments like, you know, general purpose loan on consumer side and on business loans as well. And recently, on SME side, central bank has released the pressure a bit for the growth to 2.5% anyway on the SME segment itself. On credit card, it is higher growth anyway so more than 50% of our loan book actually probably close to 60 roughly don't quote me on that but is exempt from these limits and certain product as we have seen like credit cards grows more than any other product for different reasons number one is in Turkey the usage of credit card has significantly picked up over the last two years. Just like many other countries, it evolves to do transactions more through card than the effective cash, partially because of the inflation, partially because of the less use of effectives and higher interest. highest, how do you call, banknotes, no? We had the highest banknote is 200 lira, so consumers switched to more credit card for day-to-day activity. And on a high interest rate environment, on top, our affluent customers prefer to do the transactions or any consumptions by credit card because, you know, paying cash is expensive, there is a carry cost. So roughly, the consumption percentage on credit card moved from low 40% to 60%. This has been a big shift. And some of them, you know, turns to be also one-third of it turns to be also interest-bearing receivables on credit card. When you add it up in an inflationary environment, 26.5%, which I think is a reasonable assumption, plus-minus, to 3% for the year end, slightly above 30% is reasonable and in some cases conservative. And we also expect maybe toward the end of the year, these limitations will be less relevant when the inflation comes down and there is significant deferral of investment in the business segment as well. As interest rates, TL interest rate comes down, there will be more investment and which means there needs to be requirement of loan. So overall, we feel very comfortable with the above average CPI loan book growth. I will say that. Number two, and please interrupt me at any time if this doesn't answer your question. You asked about NIM and local currency deposit and average. Now, in one of the pages we have shown, policy rate and average funding cost is very relevant, is very linked to each other. In a very stable environment, and you might count this year a transition year, but for many months we had the same policy rate. We had 4% difference between the policy rate approximately and time deposits. So if we assume low 30% interest rate at the end of the year, you might expect below that deposit rate. And throughout the year, then slightly above 30% deposit rate is probably meaningful funding rate through deposit, and URL should be low 30% based on our expectation for the moment. so and true transition like uh this is related to your third question as well in terms of new dynamics from one month to another from one meeting to another when the policy rate comes down we see immediate impact on for sure use of repo right and overnight deposit especially used by commercial clients but also on retail side Majority, more than 90% of our funding is 30 days. So immediately adjust. And I can tell you this without getting into the specifics of the numbers. In January alone, we had made more improvement in NIM than the full quarter of Q4. So the speed of NIM adjustment is very high. and you might expect probably mid year the highest name performance because credit comes down slowly especially on the consumer side where there's a lot of installment on gpl and in auto and in other products So in business side, maybe it is slightly faster, but we increased our duration over the last year. We almost doubled our duration in balance sheet. So you should expect slightly lower every month credit yields, but it's not going to come down as fast as deposit and overall funding. So we are expecting a NIM peak point in mid-year and then correcting and coming to a more sustainable level, but for sure significantly higher than today.

In terms of cost, I'll ask also Aydin and others to help me, solar versus... Probably it will be 10% lower than the bank-only figure, so it should be around 70% to 75%. As Handan mentioned, 85%, right? Yes, 85%. So probably it will be 10% lower than...

Cost goes up slightly above the inflation number because of the last two, three years, especially personnel costs for our bank and overall for our vendors. In a high inflationary environment, there has been adjustments throughout the year at least twice, which reflects a rollover impact from one year to another. And we also expect that to smooth out in the following years as inflation comes down. It will be less likely to see price adjustments from vendors as well as salary adjustments. At least if it happens, it will be slight adjustments. So the cost inflation will be less of an issue going forward as well. I don't know, David, it was a different question. Thank you very much for the detailed answer. Thank you for helping us. Thank you.

We are taking the next question from Simon Nellis. Hello, Simon. Hi. We cannot hear you just yet.

Okay, how about now?

That's perfect. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much. Yeah, just elaborating on the margins. So could you just repeat what you said? You're saying that by mid-year you think the margin will peak? I didn't quite catch that. And just to clarify, you're looking for margins to expand by 300 basis points, so from 3.7 reported last year to 6.7. Is that right? That would be my first question. uh and then second i'd be interested in uh if you could elaborate on the two to two and a half percent risk cost you know what what what are you worried about what where where do you see deterioration and then maybe looking out beyond this year um do you expect that to to normalize at a lower level or what's your expectation longer term uh and then Maybe just last, could you give us an update on regulation? We're hearing about potentially new taxes on deposits, how you expect that to impact customer behavior. When do you think these loan growth caps will be removed? When will you be able to get rid of all of the KKM deposits and any other things that we might not be aware of on the regulatory front? Thank you.

Hi, Simon. First of all, let me clarify. I had a question about the cost of funding. So when I transition to NIM, let's clarify. We expect the balance sheet NIM to improve every quarter, as you said, 300 pips above by year end. But in terms of loan-to-deposit spread, we expect that it will be in third quarter, will be peaked. But still, we will finish the year on balance sheet NIMH higher than the third quarter. Like July or August, we expect our loan-to-deposit ratio spread will be the peak. So there will be improvements quarter over quarter without much of an issue. Asset quality, when it comes to that, I think we'll start to see normalization already. We start to see a bit. There has been high growth, especially on credit cards and every front. But in high interest environment, we start to see on the third quarter, on the consumer side, There is a bit of deterioration, but compared to the prior years, but if you go back to 2018-2019 normal years where interest rates and inflation link was different than the 2021 to later years where the interest rates were low, we start to see the normalization in asset quality and MPL. So the ratios we have seen in September to December was more normal compared to 2019, 2020. As you remember, the prior years, we had very low interest rate. Therefore, it paid itself and there was no issue. But now the last two, three months, we have seen also more of a flattish performance on rollovers or gross NPL in the consumer side as well. And as in January as salaries increase, especially on the consumer side is more relevant where we had a bit more challenging time. And when the interest rates are coming down, we will see further improvement from here. But below 1% cost of risk is abnormal for any market, I assume. And it has been in 2018-19, it was more like 2 plus percent. So we are coming back to those levels. But I think we will have more positive upsides on those numbers. Therefore, it might be below that. But it's our current projections. So before 2026, I believe you will see further improvement in NPL flow. There were third questions about regulations in general. There are a few items you mentioned, I think. One is on taxes on deposits that I picked, right? Yeah. Withholding tax. Withholding tax. Withholding tax, yeah. If any changes happens, it's 10% to 15% on funds or deposits, I think it's not – it will not have much of an impact. I mean – Just because we have such a high real interest rate still, if you look forward, the inflation expectations, 10 or 15% tax will not change the customer behavior whatsoever. Still, a money market funds or tl time deposit is very effective from the customer standpoint is significantly above inflation therefore limiting the consumption and still supporting the uh supporting the time deposit and and overall savings so um on kakami or kakami deposits uh the link deposit to fx We see a significant reduction in the volume, in the balance in the sector, as well as ours. And we do expect at some point, central bank is gradually changing the regulation, which is, I think, a good thing, you know. Sudden changes always create a bit of volatility, although in Turkey we are always used to the volatility and very agile to take actions. And as you have seen, we have grown our time deposit in TL substantially in the fourth quarter. and reduce our REPL funding significantly. So from our perspective, there is no issue. From customer behavior perspective, doing this over time is no problem for the banking sector or from the customer perspective. We are giving the option. It's very high. time deposit rates for the customer whenever they want to switch to Turkish lira or they want to switch back to FX and close their account. So I would expect maybe later during the year, Kalkami will be ending. It will not find the end of the year, I suppose. On the removal of the limits on credit, Although as a banker, I would love to have no limits. It has very high correlation with the inflation. So it makes a lot of sense to have certain limits on certain segments. And they release some of the pressure on SME has increased the limit from 1.5%, 2% to 2.5%. So it helps on the SME side. But I do expect throughout the year, very likely, these limits with slight changes will stay there and will be able to still continue to grow on inflation level or above inflation as we talked about. But from regulation standpoint, I think the last six months has been relatively non-eventful with few changes along the way, but it was manageable. And as you look at it, every month or every other month, there were few changes. But as opposed to the past, this is really very manageable and easy, right? Yeah. Did I miss anything?

No, you hit everything. Thank you very much. That's very helpful.

Thanks, Simon.

Our next question is coming from Mehmet Sevim. Hello, Mehmet.

I just had one more question on NIM, if I may. Mahmoud Bey, you obviously mentioned quite a lot about the trajectory from here. I just want to understand, given this is such a substantial improvement in NIM that you're guiding, particularly considering your best-in-class starting level among the peers, If you could help us understand the trajectory better, would you be able to guide where you see the peak NIM and where you see the exit rate at the end of 2025, if possible? And related to this, What do you think are the biggest risks to your NIM outlook, especially on the regulatory front, maybe connected to the previous question? Given, obviously, last year there were many surprises, especially on the reserve requirement front, etc. Would there be anything that is not baked in that could derail this trajectory? Thank you very much.

I mean, this is a transition year where we are expecting our NIM to go up significantly because of the loan deposit dynamics and overall balance sheet dynamics. But in a sustainable time, we would expect 4% to 4.5% NIM, right, Aydin? This is more when you look at long term.

Well, normalized way, so four to four and a half percent.

But along the year, we expect NIM expansion because of our duration increase. But over time, it will adjust itself back to the normal level. But after that, it will be normalized a bit as we increase our duration significantly. But at some point, the credit prices will adjust or credit yields of the balance sheet will adjust itself. In terms of risk along the way, I think overall when we look at it, any adjustment recently that has been done as well on whether it's reserve requirements or other fronts, there has been always pluses and minuses, especially, for instance, if you think about the last adjustments on KKM for new KKM. zero numeration, for instance, but then there has been adjustments on FX and TL standard time deposit reserves. Since reserves has been a bigger portion of our balance sheet versus past, there's a higher sensitivity to these type of topics, but at the same time, central bank sees that sensitivity for all the banks, and I think it's a balanced adjustments when they do regulationally change. I see less of a risk, but if there will be any changes, we continue to expand our customer base, build our deposit base, and number of our customers, both on credit cards and overall, our customer numbers came up to now almost 17 million mobile customers and 27 million total customers, which is significant. um we are uh we prepare ourselves for any scenario or whatsoever and we continue uh to perform uh better than the peers and that's our pretty much benchmark so in the long run i think everything corrects itself but overall for the last six months or more we see that any regulation of regulatory changes are sensitive to the dynamics of the sector Therefore, we didn't see any big impact on our results. And as you see, throughout the year, we had a consistent profitability, very much balanced quarter over quarter. And we see more upside, to be honest, going forward than the downside. There's always geopolitics. There's always other things. But as you see from the bond market, as well you know the securities that happens to be significantly less yield yielding instruments in our balance sheet will be better positions going forward as well even the last three four weeks do you see that two years five years ten years came down uh 200 pips to 500 pips we all have all the bands have significant fixed assets as well so There is a lot of positives as well to balance any potential negatives, as I see. And from customer standpoint as well, we don't see significant flow in asset deterioration from SMEs. Commercial and corporates have strong balance sheets anyway. And there were a lot of deferred investments. So if inflation comes down on time, as we projected, and there's no reason to believe otherwise. I think overall, this will be one of the very good year transition to 2026, I believe. That's very helpful. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Seems like we don't have any more questions, so this concludes the Q&A session. I now leave the floor to our presenters for closing remarks.

Thank you all for your participation. After an incongruent 2024 results call, I'd like to highlight again, as Garanti BBVA, we have a very solid commitment to our customers for long-term capital-generative sustainable profitability. And despite a relatively challenging year in which we all transitioned to a better year at the end, we successfully maintained our leadership position. As you see from the presentation, pretty much in every product, we gained market share, increased our customer base. And in a very diverse way in all the segments, we believe that we are ready for 2025 to perform even in a better year, even better performance relative to our peers as well. So we are comfortable going into next year. And looking ahead, as I said, we'll continue to prioritize customer focus and agile business model, and we'll continue to deliver value for all of our stakeholders. And thanks again for listening to us and sharing your thoughts and questions. Have a great evening.