Avanza Bank Holding AB (publ)

Good morning. With me in the room in Stockholm today, I have Carolina, Head of Investor Relations, Adnan, who has been our CFO during the interim period, and last but not least, Jonas Svärling, our new CEO, CFO, sorry, I hope not CEO, who will go through the financials after my initial presentation. So warm welcome to you, Jonas. The best news of the quarter was that Avanza for the 16th year in a row had Sweden's most satisfied savers, according to the Swedish Quality Index. It's also fantastic that we again ranked number one in every subcategory. Avanza's overall score was 77.6, which can be compared to the industry average of 70. Avanza's net promoter score remained highest in the industry at 41, while the industry average was at three. I'm especially proud of this achievement considering our scale and that we're growing, which makes it increasingly challenging to maintain high customer satisfaction across a customer base of over 2.2 million. We were also recognized as an employer where we were ranked as one of Sweden's most attractive employers by both Karriärföretagen and Universum. And attracting and retaining top talent is, of course, essential to execute on our strategy 2030. In Universum's survey, we also ranked 11th among those with over eight years of IT experience. This is fantastic since the market for senior IT expertise is limited and highly competitive. It is also impressive that our savings economist, Felicia Schoen, was honored during the quarter as Savings Profile of the Year and Digital Rising Star of the Year, which is a confirmation of our influence as a powerful voice in personal finance. On top of this, our new podcast that was launched this year called Inga Dumma Frågar om Pengar ranked top 10 most listened to podcast on Spotify during 2025. We have also delivered new products at high speed with several long sought after features now launched. With a focus on stock market enthusiasts, we now allow unlimited switches between brokerage fee classes, which is benefiting active traders who make transactions of varying size during the trading day. It was previously possible to switch brokerage fee class once a day. Customers who use manual currency exchange features are now paid dividends in local currency instead of automatic exchanges to Swedish krona. Also, the analysis tab on the stock pages now include forward-looking estimates. For our private banking clients, savings for children was improved to allow policyholders of endowment insurance to set the age for transferring their wealth to an heir, which private banking customers in particular have asked for. Something that we have wanted for many years is to be able to offer mortgage insurance LTVs of 85%. The way that the Swedish mortgage market is currently structured, many customers find their savings locked in with other players in order to get a better mortgage rate. I'm therefore very pleased that we as of this quarter now offer mortgages with an LTV of 85% through both our external mortgage partners, Stabelo and Lantz Hypothek. And as our CTO, Fredrik, spoke about in the Q3 presentation, Our target for 2025 within the cloud journey is to have migrated at least one production service to the cloud environment. And we reached this important milestone this quarter. And while this may seem like a small step, it means that everything is now in place for a broader migration. And last but not least, now adding the Q4 results, we can conclude that we are at all time high full year results. 2025 turned out differently than many of us had expected. I started the year with high hopes for the future, which was quickly turned upside down in the light of geopolitical turmoil and tariff chaos. The stock market climate with rapid and unpredictable turns has been tough for many customers to navigate in, and market statistics for the first nine months of the year show that Swedes deposited more than twice as much in savings on a net basis, but invested significantly less in equities, fixed income securities and funds compared to last year. This suggests that the large share of savings was stuck in current accounts with the universal banks during the year. We welcomed over 170,000 new customers and had a net inflow of 54 billion, despite these challenging markets and despite the wind down of our external deposit products. The lower rates and the expansionary fiscal policies speaks for a turnaround for the Swedish long-term savings market in 2026. And although long-term savings might not have been accelerating the way we would have hoped during 2025, trading activity did increase compared to 2024. As always, well connected to market volatility as you see top left. Bottom left, you see that the number of brokerage generating customers increased going into the year and have kept stable at the high level, showing a broad participation in the markets in 2025. Top right, you see the increased appetite for foreign securities trading. And bottom right, you see the need for our customers to further reduce their big home bias, which speaks for a continued trend towards foreign securities. When comparing our performance with the target, we have overall done a good job. We did have Sweden's most satisfied savings customers. Our colleagues showed a strong engagement with an ENPS of 57. We produced return on equity of 40%. The board is proposing a dividend of 76% of the profits. And the cost to savings capital ratio was further reduced from 14% 14.5 to 14.1 basis points. Our savings capital growth of 13% just fell short of the 15% target. The cost increase of 10.4% was in line with our indication of 11% for the year. And on the sustainability side, our sustainability score was improved during the year, but we still have large potential in helping women to save more. With respect to our target to grow savings capital by an annual average of 50% through 2030, we felt slightly short with a growth of 13%. The target was set knowing that growth will be lower in certain years, and this year our net flow contributed less than we had wanted. One reason is the ongoing process to close the external savings accounts. where we started the fall to close accounts belonging to partners that are actively migrating the remaining deposits to their own platforms. In early 25, just before we announced this move, there was nearly 43 billion of our savings capital in these accounts, of which over 26 billion now has left the product. We estimate that 55% of these, sorry, 26 billion has stayed with Avanza. We also expect to retain approximately the same share of the remaining 16 billion. Retaining more than half of the volumes we decided to phase out says a great deal about the strength of our brand and that customers want to consolidate their savings with Avanza. On the other hand, it also means that we expect our net inflows to continue to be offset by around 8 billion in outflows due to the wind down of external savings accounts. until the process is completed in late May 2026. During 2025, we have progressed well with executing on our strategy across all five pillars and the target fulfillment I discussed earlier. I think there's strong engagement and energy among my colleagues for the way forward, which is important. Jonas, you have been with Avans exactly two weeks, so I'm certain that you know every financial number inside out by now. Over to you, Jonas. Of course. Thank you, Gustav.

And good morning, everyone. Great to finally be here. Before we move on to financials, I thought it would be good to just briefly introduce myself. As you said, Gustav, I joined Avanza as CFO just two weeks ago. And joining now is really exciting, given what has been set out in our strategy 2030 and the quite ambitious growth plan. And if you add to that, Avanza's market leading position in Sweden today, and also its great culture. It was not difficult to say yes when you offered the job, Gustav. So my views on operation efficiency, scalability and volume and customer growth ambitions, et cetera, are a little bit too early obviously to talk about. However, what I have experienced in the first weeks is the culture. I think I've never seen such joint or common and clear commitment, or I should rather say passion, for savings and investments and actually bringing that to customers and that goes across the whole company. And that really stands out to me how people here love making great savings products and also helping each other. I joined from SEB where I spent more than 21 years in different finance risk and treasury positions as well as in different Swedish and Nordic CFO roles. Most recently, however, I co-headed SEB's retail and business banking operations in Sweden, including the branch office network, the telephone bank and the digital banking app and web channels. I hope I will be able to add some knowledge from being responsible for all Swedish private customers, including the smallest private banking segment and also smaller corporate. And before SCB, I co-founded an IT consultancy firm and also launched a hedge fund. So I originally actually worked as a programmer, giving my engineering background. So I look forward to meeting and talking to all of you later. But now let's get into the financials of Q4 last year. And speaking of joining at exciting times, of course, it is extra good to be here presenting the financials as we're reporting record full year results with both trading and interest related income streams contributing to that. We're also reporting quite a strong Q4 with operating income in line with previous record levels. However, as we have planned for and also guided for, we're also increasing the cost this quarter, resulting in an operating profit of 733 million. which is still strong, although 10% lower than Q3. If you look at the full year costs, they came in at a 10.4% cost increase, 7 million or slightly below our guidance of 11%. All in all, net profit is up by 17% compared to last year, and return on equity at a healthy 40%, meeting the road target of at least 35%. Earnings per share is at 16.57, up 16% compared to 2024. Now, let's look at the income side. And here we still see a stable and healthy income mix with some underlying trends that will begin to. It's been, as I said, a little bit of a special year with quite volatile markets. And as usual, volatility correlates quite well with custom activity. And as a result, we're seeing trading-related income accounting for an increased share of revenues compared to last year. At the same time, NII has remained stable despite lower market rates. Altogether, this has resulted, as I said, in all-time high revenues in 2025. If you look at Q4 specifically and start with brokerage income, trading activity held up well, although we saw a little bit of a slowdown in December, where we also had quite a few days when the stock market was closed. There were actually 4.5% fewer trading days in Q4 compared to Q3, which contributed to a 4% decrease in brokerage income. Adding to this, the brokerage margin then decreased slightly to 11.2 basis points down from 11.4 as private banking and pro customers had a higher share of the brokerage, 26% compared to 24% last quarter. When it comes to foreign trading, that high interest remained throughout the year, apart from a shortly dip in April. And in Q4, the turnover in foreign securities accounted for 30% of brokers generating turnover. And in absolute numbers, it was the second highest turnover in foreign securities ever, resulting in a strong FX income in Q4. Moving over to fund commissions, we're seeing some margin pressure this quarter with the share of index funds increasing to 50.6% by the end of the period. The fund margin decreased to 24.4 basis points on average and was at 24.0 basis points by quarter end. And when it comes to the margin, the split between active and passive funds is one explanation, but also what type of index funds our customers choose to allocate their funds in can also have an effect. As you talked about, Gustav, we hope for a stronger Swedish economy in 2026, and we also see that in science in terms of fund savings, where we're seeing Swedish index funds among the most net bought during the later part of the year. These are in general priced lower than those with international exposure, thus lowering margins. However, when it comes to funds, volumes are growing and despite the negative margin development we have an all-time high fund commissions both for a single quarter and for the year. Lastly other income was weaker in Q4 explained both by decreased income from several smaller and different income streams and on the other side as well several other smaller commission cost lines that are not reported separately. Part of this is related to the income from external savings accounts, which is a volume-based distribution income, which naturally then decreases as we are closing down these accounts, as Gustav highlighted. Also, costs for payment commissions increased as a result of more people logging in when markets were quite shaky, which means increased costs for bank ID usage. Income from corporate finance also decreased, while the income from Avanza markets increased. If we move over to NII, the importance of our growing volumes is once again demonstrated. Despite 100 basis points lower policy rate today than going into 2025, full-year NII remains stable compared to 2024, thanks to the increase of both deposit and lending volumes. This applies for the quarter, where we are seeing a volume-driven increase of NII despite the latest and possibly last policy rate cut on October 1st. If you first look quickly at the lending side, we reduced the rates on margin lending by 13 basis points following the latest policy rate cut. The mortgage rate, however, is directly tied to the policy rate and was consequently reduced by 25 basis points. The combined effect of these two rate changes led to the average rate for internal finance lending decreasing to 2.81% from 3.01%. We believe we have a quite an attractive offering when it comes to the mortgage and we have also done some extra marketing as you can see later in the cost part towards private banking clients and we're seeing some quite nice results of that in mortgage volumes that increased by over 1 billion in the quarter mainly related to private banking customers. Moving over to the interest cost side, interest expense for deposit increased some due to the higher internal deposit volumes and an increased share of deposits that are on interest-bearing accounts. That was at 58% compared to 54% last quarter. This was to a large extent an offset, however, by the lower deposit rates, which was a decrease with the policy rate cut on October 1st and the average annualized rate on deposits was 0.76% for basis points low in the last quarter. To summarize, NI remains a stable contributed income mix and as said, the volume is the key driving factor. The Riksbank is estimating unchanged policy rate going forward unless there are changes to the outlook for inflation and economic activity. This would indicate a more stable rate and thus margins going forward all else equal. Moving over to costs. The full year costs increased, as I said before, by 10.4% compared to 2024, meaning that our spend has been 7 million Swedish kronor lower compared to the guidance of a cost growth at 11% in 2025. The slightly lower costs are explained mainly by us being able to keep the cost for the cloud journey below budget, and to some extent also by our work on operation efficiency, where we've been quite successful in reducing external spend during the year. Looking specifically at Q4, we are at 24% higher cost than Q3. That's an increase we flagged for when reiterating our guidance in the last quarterly presentation. As I'm sure many of you know by now, our staff costs are season low in Q3 due to vacation debt being reduced and as a result are now comparatively higher. In addition to that, we had more consultants on site mainly tied to the cloud migration. And on top of that, the marketing costs are up quite substantially this quarter compared to the very low levels of answers you should add. Our very strong brand and our customers' high willingness to recommend us is typically how we drive inflow through word of mouth. However, we do not have the same brand recognition when it comes to private banking and occupational pension. And that is why we increased our marketing initiatives towards these segments, which, as we saw earlier, improved, for instance, lending to the private banking sector. It is quite important though to note that this quarter's cost level should not be seen as the new quarterly run rate for marketing costs going forward, although we will continue to work to build brand awareness as part of our efforts to grow within private banking and pension. This reasoning also applies to the full cost base where not all of the cost increases in Q4 are recurring running costs. If we look into the future in terms of costs then, Our long-term target is as communicated before an average annual cost growth of 8% up until and including 2030. And I said this cost growth will be higher at the beginning of the period as we're investing within our Swedish growth initiatives with the aim to reach 5% by 2030. This implementation or strategy that continues at full speed and we forecast cost increase by 9% in 2026 driven by continued investments in Accelerate Growth in Sweden. The planned investments include work to develop our private banking business and the launch of our new discretionary portfolio management product, as well as investing in our pension business. It also includes all the continuous work within our core business to make sure Avanza stays in the forefront when it comes to offerings and user experience. The cloud journey also continues, where you mentioned that, Gustav, that we reached quite an important milestone during the quarter when we migrated our first production service to the cloud, meaning that everything is now in place for broader migration. And in 2026, the work will be focused on migrating services that we find suitable and easy to move at a controlled pace. We are, of course, not immune to inflation, which will drive some of the cost growth as well. Our work on improving our internal efficiency is quite important to offset this. Total salary adjustments are expected to amount to around 4%, which when you consider staff costs as a share of total cost, yield a cost increase of somewhat above 2%, as illustrated on the slide. Our cost increase is related to investing in further growth and we continue our work to improve internal efficiency to be able to meet the planned volume growth with an improved platform. Avanza is built on scalability and we are the leading position when it comes to cost to savings capital ratio and we intend to maintain that position. The target is to decrease the cost to savings capital ratio over time and in 2025 It decreased to 14.1 basis points compared to 14.5 basis points in 2024. Finally, I'm concluding a note on capitalization and the proposed dividend. Avanza is well capitalized with prudent margins, both the leverage ratio, including PILA 2 guidance and the total capital requirement, including risk-based PILA 2 requirements. The binding constraint is the leverage ratio, and even though our deposit volumes on balance sheet has increased substantially during the year, largely driven then by the closing down or external savings accounts, we still have a healthy margin to leverage ratio requirements, which should be stressed very poorly, captures the extremely low risk profile of Avanza's balance sheet asset side. Taking this and the strong result into account, the board has decided to propose a higher dividend per share compared to last year of 12.75 krona per share. This corresponds to a payout ratio of 76%, which exceeds our target of 70%, but also leaves us with capital flexibility going forward. Concluding, and maybe repeating myself a little bit, as you can see, we still have good headroom to the total leverage ratio requirement of 3.5%, including the pillar 2 guidance of 50 basis points, which, as said, is the most constraining requirement for us This gives us a position where we can handle increased deposits of 32 billion Swedish krona before reaching it. And with that, I will hand back to you Gustav for some closing remarks.

Thank you. I again start the new year optimistic about the future. May sound strange given what's happening around us with Greenland, but we have received positive signals on inflation and that personal consumption is starting to grow. The Riksbank's policy rate of 175% is a whole percentage point lower than that at the start of 2025. And this is important for Swedish households who are more rate sensitive than in other countries where we typically own our homes and we often have variable rate mortgages. The government has issued an expansionary budget for 26, which is likely to help the Swedish economy to finally gain momentum despite continued global uncertainty. I believe and hope that this leads to 2026 being a year when households actually have more money left in their pockets, which should be positive for the Swedish savings market and for Avanza. Now we're happy to take questions from you.

Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 1 on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. To answer your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please compile the Q&A queue. This will take a few moments. And now we're going to take our first question. And it comes from Martin Edstedt from Handelsbanken. Your line is open, please ask your question.

Thank you and good morning. Jonas, first, welcome on board. Could I direct my first question to you, please, and ask what will be your first priorities as CFO, including, I'm sorry for making this sound like maybe a job interview question, specifically in relation to finding a new home market for Avanza for 2030. What is your experience of cross-border M&A, and for that matter, establishing new markets organically?

Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Lots of questions in one go. Maybe disappointed in saying that as joining as CFO, I would initially dig into all the numbers. For me, the most important priority right now is listening to customers and meeting all the staff at once and really understanding where we are right now and what is needed. Then based on that, I will spend more time on digging into the financials and what can be done related to that. Then you also asked about the experience in terms of M&As and international expansion, also where we stand on that. In general, when we have something more to communicate related to our international expansion, we will do that. I cannot add more related to that. Other than it's part of our strategy in 2030 to grow internationally. That's also one really exciting thing about the Avanza growth case that attracted me to Avanza when Gustav and I had conversations related to that. Having worked in S&D for 21 years, there have been numerous occasions where I've been involved in different cases in terms of both buying or divesting different types of businesses. Some have happened, some have not happened. Those that haven't happened always I can comment on, but there have been a few acquisitions that have been disclosed publicly where I've been working behind the scenes. On top of that, I was CFO for a Nordic business, the Nordic SVK banking group for a couple of years. So I have some experience running across Nordic business as well.

Hopefully that answers some of your questions. Loud and clear. Thank you. And then for my second question, this quarter you actually for once reported material long-loss provisions, 4 million, which looks like five basis points of lending annualized. That's not exactly low for a portfolio of Swedish private banking mortgages, so I just wanted to ask for some further clarity on that one. Doing some archaeology around these numbers, it looks like you haven't reported provisions on this level since 2011, and your report still states that you have no realized credit losses attributable to events after 2011, end of quote. so i assume it's the no realized part of this statement that is key right i.e this is a new provision and not the realized loss is that correct and could you just give us some more added comfort around this that it's not the start of the more pronounced peak in credit losses thank you yes i can comment on that and if it is exactly as you say it's related to expected credit losses not realized credit losses and it should not be seen as an indicator and generally increased

Losses or risks in the credit portfolio, stable and healthy low. This is related to one single stock reducing in estimated values related to Intelligo technologies and related to margin lending related to that stock, which explains almost everything of the increase in expected credit losses.

Okay, so it's on the modern lending side. Great. And we make very good estimation of all of that. That's all from me. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And it comes to the line of Jakob Haslavik from SEB. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Good morning. Let's start with the net flows during the fourth quarter. If we take your 55% take rate on external deposits, it means roughly 11.7 billion has left the platform. And if I remember correctly, 3 billion had left as of Q3, meaning that outflow accelerated during the fourth quarter. In October, you had strong net inflows of above 5 billion. Does that mean that the majority of the outflow occurred during November and December, where the numbers were a bit weaker?

Jakob, I must admit I don't have the monthly numbers of the external deposit account flows in my head, but November and December were weak. They were clearly weaker than we hoped and planned for. 2025 was a very challenging year for long-term savings. A lot of deposits were stuck with the universal banks that I mentioned, and the And during the fall, some of the partners have had less appetite to retain volumes and some partners have fought for it more. Let me put it that way. And the latter of the year was more challenging partners from our perspectives.

Yeah, but Gustav, if we think about it in this way, in total roughly 12 billion has left your platform, correct? And in Q3, you wrote that 3 billion had left. So it's 9 billion during the fourth quarter alone. And if we assume that Avanza usually have natural net inflows of roughly 5 billion per month, we see that in November, December, you had roughly half a billion. But if you divide up the 9 billion that you had in outflows, it's 4.5 per month. And 5 billion in natural net inflows less the 4.5 outflow gives you the actual monthly data that you reported for November and December. Is it correct to assume that the majority of those 9 billion went out in November and December and that's why you only reported half a billion in net inflows?

My recollection is that I was disappointed with November and December also taking the external deposits into account, so to say.

Okay. But if we then move forward looking at that, you have roughly 16 billion left on the external deposit platform. With your 55% take rate, it means that just above 7 billion will leave up until May. Can you help us understand if these 7 billion will be more front-loaded or back-loaded, or should we expect it to be equally spread out per month?

I think we've guided eight. I mean, it's a rounded number. But no, I don't want to stick out my head and say which months. And so it's It's an ongoing dialogue with our partners. We want to make this, as I think we've done in 2025, a good experience and controlled experience for our customers, but also for these partner banks who, to some extent, are dependent on this funding. So we still stand with the view that we will be done with this closure by the end of May.

Okay, but if we have so little visibility on these outflows, I think I speak for all analysts on this call when I say it would be very helpful if you could clarify and show in the upcoming monthly statistics per month how much of the net inflow number was affected by outflow from the external deposit platform.

It's noted, Jacob. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Now we're going to take our next question. Just give us a moment. And the next question comes in the line of Patrick Bertellers from ABG. Your line is open. Please ask the question.

Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Perfect. So my first question would go to Jonas, who is the new kid on the block. As you were announced quite much earlier than you joined, I reckon that you have followed the company from the sidelines. Could you talk a little bit from your point of view, which are the biggest areas of improvement potential that you see now entering the firm?

Thank you, Patrik, and also for calling me a kid. It feels always good for a 47-year-old man, so thank you for that. Yes, it's been six months on the sideline. However, I did stay and support S&B a little while. So it's actually only two months fully on the sideline. But still, I'm only having access to public and external data. And previously than competing with Avanza in my previous role, it was always with a little bit of envy how Avanza attracted so many customers and so much saving capital. And what was the secret source behind it? Was it the user experience itself, maybe a function of culture or whatever was it? So that was, I was also always then wondering, how can it be improved? Because when you look at it from the outside, things look quite well in terms of both financials and flows, etc. So that was maybe my sort of key questions on what What are the efficiencies? What are the changes that can be made to further improve this? Because if you listen to Gustav, if you listen to Sven, how they talk about the company, there are still lots of things to do, both with the core business in Sweden and when it comes to international expansion, which is obviously a separate and interesting growth case. And then when you come inside, you see that we are not done. There are things to do. I think you, Gustav, highlighted that. in earlier calls that there are things we can do on the inside in terms of operation efficiency. I think Avanza has been quite good at making user experience and flows for customers strong and attractive, and I think those customers have experienced that. There are some processes and systems, et cetera, on the inside that are maybe not on par with what customers experience on the outside. So I think there are improvement opportunities in that area, I would say.

Okay, great. Thank you. My next question is following up on the topic of the savings capital left on the external savings account. How do you view taking potential actions to get the larger share of the remaining capital to stay on the platform? potentially raising savings rate on your own account temporarily to keep a higher share or how do you view that or any other actions potentially?

Patrik, I mean we really want our customers to consolidate all their savings with us. So we want our customers to retain all of their savings with us. With the last rate cut, I think it was announced late September, we did not reduce the rate on our savings account fully, left a little bit extra on the table for customers, partly because we thought that this may be the last rate cut and let's share it a little bit more with customers, but also with the extra on the savings account. accounts in mind. No, I don't have any, we don't have any concrete things in mind here. And I think we're doing a pretty good job to guide our customers to make the right choice. And I think we have an attractive internal savings account.

Okay, fair. I understand. And my last question, if I squeeze in a third one, is that the other commission income line is down quite a lot sequentially. You talked about the drivers here, but can you elaborate if any effects here are temporarily or is this the new base level as it is like minus 26 million in the quarter?

All except one important factor are not a trend, but rather this quarter. But one is clearly a trend, and that is that we have and we will continue up until end of May book the income we get from our banking partners for distributing their external savings deposits. And that, of course, naturally goes down as volume goes down. But the other ones are more fluctuations in market. We saw more interest from customers to log in, which increased the cost for bank idea, which shows up as a negative income on that row. So I would say the savings account effect will continue and will be there forever. But the other ones are more market related.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from Marcus Sandgren from Capital Chevron. Your line is open, please ask your question.

Morning, guys, and congrats, Jonas, on your position. I was actually looking a bit more on the longer-term trends. If you look at the transaction activity in relation to savings capital, it's clearly going down over the years. On the other hand, it has been both much higher volume traded in foreign currencies and also the price per trade is going up steadily in the last couple of years. Can you talk a bit about the dynamics for the coming years? What do you expect in terms of pricing dynamics and trading in relation to savings capital?

I mean, if you take a long time series, I mean, I've also started directing towards the very trading-oriented, trading-interested suite. Today we have more than 2.2 billion, million, sorry, customers, which of course some are very interested to be active on the exchange and some are, they want to buy a fund or a few funds and then be very happy with that allocation. So the mix of customers have changed if you look over many years. Looking out in the future, I think it's very challenging. It is so market dependent. The only trend that I dare to be clear on that is foreign exposure. I mean, our customers have a way too big home buyers still today. Almost 80 percent of their securities portfolio is exposed to Sweden. That is not a good geographical diversification. We will see over time further interest for foreign securities. That is my view.

Okay. And if I put the question like this, then the reason for higher average price per trade, is that driven by larger volumes per trade or by a higher share of foreign securities? Or is there anything else?

I would need to dig in and get back to you, Mark. I haven't thought around it from that angle.

Okay. Very good. Thanks.

Thank you so much. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from Andrew Lowe from CTO Line is open. Please ask your question.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. The first one is just on your net brokerage margin and particularly on the expense part of that equation. So your brokerage fee expense was 15.3% of brokerage income having previously been between sort of low 14s and the mid 14s in the prior year. So it had been quite steady and it jumped up a lot in Q4. Could you just explain what drives that uplift and whether that uplift is recurring or we should expect it to come back down again? The second question is if you could maybe just provide a little bit more detail on the queue-on-queue drag from other income from your lower external deposits, or maybe just if you could give us the fee margin that you earn on those deposits, that would be really helpful. And the final clarification is just how much of your 300 million of transformation costs that you called out a year or so ago was spent in 2025. Thank you.

Hard questions, Andrew. On the first one, I need to get back to you. The second one was around... Other income and the... We would like to give you transparency on this, and we would like to have done that already in early 2025, but our hands are tied with the agreements we have with our partner banks. So we have not, and we will not disclose the margin that we earn on that product. But what can we say on the other income line? It's hard to, I mean, with the hands tied there, it's a little bit difficult, Andrew.

The third question was... How much of the 300 million transformation cost was spent for 2025?

Oh, yeah. I mean, we indicated in going into 2025 how our cost increase of 11% would be distributed. And you can use that and also what Jonas said that we are slightly below our budget for the cloud journey for this year. I haven't that number in my head, but it can easily be calculated backwards by those numbers, Andrew.

Okay, great. I understand about the ability to disclose, but worth a try. Thanks so much. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from Hayley Tam from UBS. Your line is open, please ask your question.

Morning. Thank you very much for taking my questions and I add my welcome to your list as well. Hopefully you can hear me okay. My first question, I'm afraid, is just to follow up on the external savings accounts, but perhaps a different way. The 55% retention rate, thank you very much for giving that number and also I would really be interested to understand what underpins your confidence in that 55% going forwards. because I might have anticipated that some of the earlier volume changes might have been from partners who did not intend to keep the deposits. So really any colour you can give on the mix of the types of partner going forwards or measures, as I think was previously asked, would be helpful to understand the confidence in that 55%. And then the second question really was just a follow-up on what you said about the foreign trading and then how that should continue to increase going forwards. I just wondered whether you've seen any sort of short term impacts as likely this year, given the current geopolitical tensions, whether you see any evidence of any kind of shift in attitude amongst your clients since the start of this year towards US stocks in particular? And then the third and final question, if I may, was just about the launch of the discretionary mandate solutions. I just wondered whether you could give us any update on the feedback you've had your private banking clients, what kind of expectations you have for uptake and speed of rollout once you start that, I think, this quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, Hayley. Now, first question was around savings account. So, I mean, you and your colleagues pushed us already a year ago to guide more on how much the volumes would would Avanza retain and we didn't dare to do that we don't want to guide unless we are fairly certain we feel fairly certain enough to guide you now on that we will we expect to retain slightly more than half of this retaining 60 billion what is that based on it's based on a closed dialogue with all the six out of seven partners who still have volume in this product and The data we have on client behavior, data we have on clients that actively take a choice, data we have on clients who do not make a choice, i.e. there comes to an agreement between us and the partner bank what happens with those volumes. So we feel fairly comfortable. It's always a little bit scary to stick out your head looking into the future. But unless we were not certain enough, we would not guide you. The second question was around, help me here. Foreign trading. But you asked a little bit for now, right? Of course, we have a lot of insight what's happening right now, but I think we are very transparent with our monthly statistics. What I can say and what I think we published out of the five most traded foreign securities, four of them are net sold year to date. In general, volatility is good for trading. Do we see volatility in the US? We typically see more trading in the US. What we saw, though, in April with the Liberation Day, we saw a little bit of flight from US exposure into European exposure. So we saw that effect. We try to be close to customers and guide them and help them in this challenging time. I think there was a third question.

On the discretionary mandates.

It's too early to say. I think we have a number of customers who are willing to develop this product with us. And a lot of customers have wanted to participate and The feedback we have gotten so far is very positive. But the product is not out on the market yet. We're working according to plan with it.

I look very much forward to market launch later this year. That's very clear. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from Herman Terek from DNB Connect. Your line is open. Please ask a question.

Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. Maybe if we start on the net flows, but disregarding the savings plus, more in general, what do you feel that you could do to drive the underlying net inflows to be stronger? And do you see any indication that competition has impacted it? Again, underlying disregard the savings account plus.

I think there's a lot we can do. I think there's a lot we do, but there's a lot of things we can do better. I think a lot of volumes have built up with the salary accounts with the big universal banks. I think we can improve in trying to activate these customers' savings. There's a lot of pension money that sits with inexpensive solutions. I think we can do a better job to help our customers to move into more cost efficient solutions, which they can find with us. We had a very good pilot on the occupational pension side in Q4. It's not seen in the numbers yet because that takes a little bit of time. But yes, so the short answer is yes, there's a lot of areas where we can improve and where slowly but surely doing that. There was something connected to that.

Yeah, I suppose, like, do you see that there's been competition impacting it being a bit slower than you expected for 2025 generally? If I just take one example on Pro, it's not major numbers, but now you've had outflows for three consecutive months, for instance.

If you take the pro segments in general, we don't see increased competition for that segment. I mean, this is a client group who they don't have a normal job, normal within brackets. I mean, they live out of this trading, so they will always have an outflow. So unless they put in more money, we will always see an outflow, but we will only see an outflow. But they live from this, so they need to have a better return to be able to do this. And if you look at the savings capital development, it's still pretty okay for the pro segment. In general, we see that some customers test new players with part of their money. We saw that with Saver when they were new. We saw it a little bit with Leveler. We see it with Montrose. But in general, I would say no, Armin.

Okay, thank you. And you introduced that you could switch brokerage class more frequently now. Why didn't you just introduce automatic allocation to commission classes? Wouldn't that be the most true to kind of your DNA, making it the simplest for the customer?

I think we've done a clear improvement in Q4 for... customers for the ones who do want to change brokerage class it's very few of our customers who want to actively do that it's something that been sought after for for quite a while it was actually a little bit tricky to do technically and that's why it also taken some time when it comes to pricing in general I think we have a very attractive offering. I think the average cost for a trade done with us in 2025 was like 11 krona. I think it's very cost efficient to run your portfolio with us. Having said that, of course, we want to constantly improve the offering towards customers, either through better functionality or to even more efficiently run their portfolio.

Got it. Then the last question, just On the mortgage side, we see that on your internal private banking mortgage, you've seen growth ramping up per quarter now. You mentioned you've done some marketing. Is that what's already driving it? Is it the market? What should we expect from here in terms of growth on that product?

I think it's a combination of... us being more visible with our private banking brand. I mean, for the whole group here, our own mortgages are only available to our private banking customers. So that is one factor. The other factor, which is not quarter to quarter, but if you look a year or two back, I mean, the funding cost relation to the universal banks has improved for us. I mean, in relative terms, our rates are more attractive today than a year or two ago. So I would say it's those two combinations.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And it comes in the line of from JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

good morning thanks for taking my question so if I look at your customer growth has become a mid-to-high single-digit analyze growth on a monthly basis roughly while historically you grew you grew much stronger if I look at your target of growing saving capital by 15% in Sweden over time conscious of these in a way, deceleration in customer growth, can you please help us to break down the 15% in its key components? By that I mean, could you tell us how much you expect in saving capital growth will come from new clients joining the platform, how much from market appreciation, and how much from flows? And lastly, a bit of a, I mean, I try, I'm not sure if there's an answer to that, but going back again to the customer growth, do you have an idea of your market share of customer growth when it comes to clients that in Sweden, every month, every quarter, every year, open an account with a digital platform like yours. So just to get a sense of how much of the front book growth you're capturing in terms of customer growth. Thank you.

So if your last question was our market share among new customers, with the sub-segment of the Swedish savings market, i.e. only the digital players, then I don't have that number, we don't have a market number, so it's hard for us to estimate, but I would say it's aligned with our market share on the existing customers, and then it's very high. But we don't have market statistics on that sub-segment, Enrico. The first question, All right, so what we have said, which we still stand by, is that the 15% is decomposed in market depreciation of 5%. It is then 10% remaining in net inflow. And of those net inflow, we estimate that the Swedish savings market will have net inflows of 3 to 4%. So we will capture those, and then we will need to steal Market share from competitors equivalent to 6% to 7%, adding up to the 15%. We know that we have a big potential to have our customers move a larger share of their financial wealth to us. And on top of that, we have the growth of new customers, which was 8% this year.

Thank you. Thank you.

Dear participants, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad. And I will proceed with the next question. And it comes from Philip Moe Moorman from SB1 Markets. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

good day and great to see you in place welcome and thanks for taking my questions uh firstly following up on the admin's first question what can you do to activate the money sitting in current accounts and are not deployed in the markets what are some triggers you see available to you yeah that is a it is a tricky one uh but we we and i think it boils down to um the swedes

belief about the future, if it's bright or if it's scary. And if it's believed to be scary, then you don't take long-term decisions, which long-term savings is. But I think there is a clear opportunity for us since we believe that that volume has piled up with the current accounts with the big universal banks. So that, of course, is reflected in how we communicate with our customers and with the market now and going forward. But I don't want to go into the details to hand that to our competitors, how we're planning to do that.

Sure, sure. Makes sense. My second question goes to you, Jonas. It may be a little bit too early, but we'll try. With the increased deposits on your balance sheet, you state that you can now take on additional 32 billion of deposits before reaching your requirement. My question is, would... Both the remaining migration, we expect around 8 billion of inflows. And with the continued growth of savings capital, how do you think about your capital position going forward and long term as well?

when the board proposes the dividend as indicated here then we have taken into account volume growth both from the underlying business as well as the inflow of additional deposits from the closing down the savings account so that's already included We also, throughout the year, obviously will have, if things go according to plan, a growth in capital due to growth in income. So the accumulation of capital from profits will help offset to a large extent the increase of planned deposits, both organically and then those from the close down of the Sparkonto Plus product. Then we're obviously continuously looking at optimizing the capital structure of the group and the different companies within the group. We will continue looking into that in 2026.

My final question is on NII. With the increased internal deposits that initially goes onto the balance sheet, with an increase in NII quarter over quarter in the first quarter that fully reflects all rate cuts, which is great. While other income were the distribution fee. It had some noise as well, but are reduced by the less distribution fee from partner banks. How should we think about the relationship between lower fee income from partner banks and higher NII going forward, both in terms of numbers and in terms of positive income streams?

The only thing that I want to say there, Filip, is that the decision to close down the Exxon Deposit product was mainly driven by the fact that the product had passed its due date because of the new view from the Swedish FSA. Having said that, and what we have said, what we have seen during 2025 and what we expect for 26, it is net positive for Avanza's P&L.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Thank you. And now we're going to the last question for today. And it comes from Andrew Lowe from Citi. Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Hi, thanks for taking a follow-up. A quick one. Could you maybe just elaborate a little bit about how you're feeling about crypto and sort of potential to do something that lots of your peers are implementing stuff. So it would be helpful just to have a recap of what you're thinking is with this asset class. Thank you.

If I start with looking back at Q4, I mean, we offer exposure to cryptocurrencies through ETPs. We saw the activity being modest when I compared to previous quarters having said that we continuously look at our overall offering and of course this one your question is on our table me personally I'm a bit divided as I've said before there is clients demand on the other hand I've been educated my whole career to look at investments from a cash flow perspective but it's on the table and looked at

Thank you. That's really helpful. Thank you.

Dear speakers, there are no further questions for today. I would now like to hand over to Gustav Unger for any final remarks.

Many thanks for taking the time, all of you, and I hope you have a great day.