Avanza Bank Holding AB (publ)

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the conference call events of interim report January-June 2026. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone keypad. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Gustaf Unger, CEO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of Avanza's Q2 report. Here in Stockholm, apart from me, we have Jonas Verling, our CFO, and Carolina Johansson, Head of Investor Relations. But to start, I think it's fantastic that we are once again reporting a record quarter with an operating profit at 928 million Swedish and we're putting a historically strong first half year to the books. We also saw robust underlying growth during the quarter, welcoming over 40,000 new customers to Avanza. Strong market depreciation combined with net inflows of 19 billion made our savings capital reach a new all-time high, now exceeding 1.2 trillion. A major strategic milestone during the quarter was completing the phase-out of our external savings accounts, which has created a self-inflicted drag on our net flows for about a year. However, I'm glad to say that 60% of the volume has or was retained at Avanza, which truly is a testament to the value our customers find in consolidating their savings with us. During the one and a half years that have passed since the phase-out was communicated, we can note that the number of customers with Avanza's savings account has gone from 390,000 to 700,000 and that the savings account volume has grown from 33 to over 65 billion. Despite the ongoing significant uncertainty, we saw a clear shift in sentiment among our customers who showed a risk on behavior and a strong appetite for foreign trading. The net inflow to the Swedish fund market increased significantly and so did fund flows at Avanza where our customers net purchased funds at records amounts at almost 17 billion. We've kept a high pace of product development throughout the quarter, rolling out several key launches across all our customer segments. And I will walk you through some of these exciting product updates in more detail later on. Avanza Corporate Finance has had an active quarter in which we broke new ground and enabled participation for non-institutional customers in three new issues through ABV. An accelerated bookbuilding is a fast way for companies to raise capital, often in just one evening, where the price is determined based on investor demand. Historically, this short time window has meant that private investors have been excluded from the process. Through this, Avanza continues to democratize savings in Sweden. Also, I'm proud to say that Avanza was once again ranked as one of Sweden's most reputable companies and Sweden's most reputable bank in Variant's annual reputation index. The index is compiled based on questions regarding general reputation, personal impressions, trust, success, and quality. Avanza's reputation index score for 2026 was 67, where a reputation index score above 60 is considered high, and Avanza is one of 12 companies in total with a high reputation according to the survey. Among the other companies at the top are major international corporations such as IKEA and Volvo. Lastly, we have an exciting organizational update to share. Last quarter, I mentioned that we had begun searching for a new CEO to lead Avanza Fonder. Today, I'm thrilled to announce that Maria Wern has officially taken over as the new CEO since May 1st. Maria brings an incredible strong background to the role and I'm highly confident that she's the right person to drive our fund business forward and challenge the market even further. Despite ongoing and significant geopolitical uncertainty, risk appetite in the market has strengthened resulting in record levels on many stock exchanges around the world and also for the savings capital at Avanza which exceeds 1.2 trillion. Also, the Swedish economy is finally beginning to pick up speed, albeit somewhat later and less powerful than I had previously hoped for. Consumers have started to spend, and Sweden's economy now stands stronger than most other countries around us. In June, the Riksbank left the policy rate unchanged for the sixth consecutive meeting. This bodes well for increased savings going forward. and Avanza is well positioned to capture a good share of this growth. The fact that we, with a market penetration exceeding 20% of the Swedish population, have acquired close to 100,000 new customers in H1 is truly a testament to our continued growth capacity. Looking a bit deeper into who these new customers are, we can conclude that the 2026 cohort remains consistent with new customers in previous years. Their median age is 31. They hold on average around 30% funds and 45% shares. And their share of foreign equities is at around 20%. The average recurring monthly saving among these customers is around 2,300 per month. We are seeing a clear risk on sentiment among our customers in the quarter. Although volatility has decreased compared to the very high levels in Q2, Q2 has also been characterized by numerous political statements which created market reactions and major movements in individual sectors and securities. This is a market climate that suits our stock market enthusiasts well, and we can see that they have been active during the quarter, while trading was also broad-based across the customer base, and we're seeing an increasing number of brokers generating customers. The risk on sentiment is also evident when looking at the share of deposits of the total savings capital, which declined as a result of customers net buying risky assets. Since January 2025, the liquidity share has been more difficult to use as an indicator for customers sentiment as we have been in the process of internalizing the external deposits. The strong appetite for foreign trading continues to stand out in the quarter and reach new record levels both in absolute and relative terms as a 31% share of the total brokerage generating turnover. The listing of SpaceX, which took place in June, was a contributing but not decisive factor. Instead, we are seeing a more widespread trend where the desire to increase exposure to the AI and semiconductor sectors is the common thread. However, looking at the allocation mix within customers' equities portfolios, the trend should also be structural and is expected to continue as home bias is still strong with 75% of customers' portfolios exposed to Swedish equities. Stock trading is what we have historically been associated with. and customers interested in the stock market are naturally drawn to Avanza. For years, we have been working actively to broaden the associations of the Avanza brand also to fund savings, and we have been very successful. A higher share of fund income means a higher quality income mix with more recurring revenue. Our fund business is growing strong with record net inflow, resulting in all-time high fund capital volumes as well as fund commission income in the quarter. The shift from active to passive funds has been ongoing for years, and Avanza has taken an active part in fueling this by constantly reminding of how fees affect performance and savings capital development over time. This has resulted in high trust from our customers and thereby volume growth, which is key to also increase fund income. Looking at the levels we are at now when it comes to the mix shift, we're also seeing that fund categories within the index funds have an effect on the margin, where a high interest to gain exposure to global, US and emerging markets acted as a cushion to the continued increased share of index funds. I'm very pleased that we are consistently maintaining a high pace of product development and during Q2 we have made several launches that strengthen our overall offering. On the theme of funds, during the quarter we expanded our fund offering with the launch of Avanza Sweden. This is a broad market-weighted index fund covering 99% of the Stockholm Stock Exchange. With a competitive fee of 17 basis points, it serves as a perfect building block for broad savings and a great complement to our existing house funds. where Avanza Zero is only tracking the 30 most traded companies on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, and in Avanza Sweden all cap, no single company is allowed to have a weight of more than 2%. Furthermore, we launched our new pension portal for corporate customers, which is an important milestone in our aim to become the number one occupational pension company. The new portal simplifies administration for employers, By reducing manual work, we make Avanza an even more obvious choice for occupational pensions, which in turn helps us to secure more long-term sticky capital on the platform. For our most active traders and private banking customers, we integrated Kepler-Chevreau's analysis directly into the platform. This means real-time access to institutional-grade research for both Nordic and international stocks, which significantly enhances the value of our offering and has been sought after for long. Lastly, we took social investing to the next level on Placera Forum, which is already Sweden's largest investor community by far. By enabling customers to link their Avanza portfolio to the forum and thereby sharing their asset allocation and transactions, forum members get increased opportunities for decision support, learning and engagement as well as contributing to transparency among the members. At the end of the quarter, just two weeks after launch, 7,600 of Placeras Forum's users had activated portfolio sharing. All in all, it's safe to say it's been an active quarter with lots of new value created for our customers. While the Swedish initiatives are moving on at a high pace in parallel the preparations for our Denmark launch is also progressing according to plan. On the organizational side, we are in the process of establishing our branch, recruiting a branch manager and other key positions, while also detailing our go-to-market plan. On the development side, the work is progressing at full speed. It's actually truly fascinating how far the team has come in just this quarter. and we have already been down to Copenhagen to test an early prototype with potential customers. Our success in Sweden has been achieved through close cooperation with our customers. We will take the same approach in Denmark to ensure that we solve concrete Danish customer needs and to build engagement even before the launch. I also wanted to take the opportunity to speak a bit about the strategic choice to build a new platform, which was made possible thanks to AI and the speed with which we can now develop software. Looking back a bit in time, the plan from the start was to adapt our Swedish platform, which is completely doable. However, it has been coded to suit Sweden for 27 years and thereby automatically assumes Swedish krona as the base currency and Swedish as the language. This can be changed and it's Not particularly complicated, but it would involve many of our Swedish development teams, thereby risking disrupting the progress of the Swedish business. Therefore, our initial plan was to hold off on the international adaption until later in the planning period. In parallel, our tech organization has embraced AI-driven development from the start. Initially, we didn't see major positive effects from it, but last autumn we started seeing substantial progress in one of our development teams that had been testing an AI-first approach while building our new occupational pension portal. That's when Fredrik, our CTO, came to me with the idea of using AI to build a completely new international platform at a low cost. This would allow us to drive the international expansion in parallel with the Swedish business without disrupting our Swedish teams. I understand that this might raise some questions. Throughout my career, experience has taught me that consolidating technology is a top priority during an acquisition, for example. However, the technological landscape looks drastically different today. and we need to adapt and think differently to emerge as winners in this. We're now deliberately introducing some complexity which goes against what we have previously learned but I'm convinced that this is the right decision. With that I will hand over to you Jonas to take you through the financials.

Thank you Gustav and good morning to all. Repeating a little bit what Gustav said, it's a true privilege to once again be reporting record results summarizing a historically strong first half of the year. Once again, we see strong contributions from all the income streams where income is up 6% versus last quarter and almost 30% compared to Q2 last year. Our costs are developing according to plan and all in all this results in an operating profit of 928 million EPS of 4.97. Return equity was at 43% for the quarter, well exceeding our target of at least 35%. If you take a closer look at the revenues, we can see that the income mix has greatly benefited from the market environment we saw in Q2 with positive stock market development, sustained high trading activity with a strong appetite for foreign exposure, somewhat high interest rates, and on average higher deposit levels compared to Q1. There were three fewer trading days compared to last quarter, which had a slight negative effect on the brokerage income compared to Q1. However, it was still 26% higher than Q2 last year. Looking at the brokerage margin, it increased to 11 basis points in Q2 compared to 10.6 in Q1, driven by the higher share of trading in foreign markets, which reached, as you said, Gustav, a new record level of 31%. Also, turnover per trade in the fixed brokerage fee class declined, which also contributed to the higher margin. And as mentioned before, we saw an increase in the number of brokerage-generated clients. the share of brokerage generated by Pride Banking & Pro was stable at 26% in the quarter. Brokerage generating tournament foreign securities reached a new all-time high and as a result FX income continued to increase and was up 11% compared to last quarter. The positive stock market development and combined them with historically high net inflow to funds as you saw in the previous chart result in a fund capital increase of 19% in the quarter. global US and tech funds, which have higher margins, increase as a share of total fund capital, whereas the share of index funds continue to increase with 1.4 percentage points to 53.8% at quarter end. The combined effect on margins from this was that quarter end fund margin amounted to 22.7 basis points compared to 22.8 basis points at the end of Q1, i.e. an in total relatively stable fund margin. That coupled with volume increases resulted in a new record level for fund commission income. Other income decreased primarily as a result of lower income from Avanza Markets. The trading ETPs is even more driven by volatility than trading in general and trading Avanza Markets was therefore boosted by this extremely volatile environment especially that we saw in the Q1. Also, the phase-out of external savings accounts was completed during the quarter, and these consequently no longer generate income within the other income line. And as usual, there are many small both other commission income lines and other commission expense lines, which are a little bit small to disclose separately, that all contribute to the full picture. Finally, when it comes to NII, let's look at some more details on the next page. NII, as many other income lines, reached a new all-time high in this quarter, mainly thanks to increased volumes on average, although the market rate uptick that we saw for a few weeks in March and April also contributed. Our income from surplus liquidity increased to 534 million, mainly as a result of higher average deposit volumes, although the deposits were lower at quarter end due to customers' increased risk appetite. On the deposit cost side, we have made no changes to our interest rates in the quarter, and the increased average interest rate for deposits was therefore a result of a higher share of deposits on interest-bearing accounts, which amounted to 60% up from 57% in Q1. On the lending side, also lending rates were kept stable. However, the average interest rate for internal finance lending decreased to 2.7% compared to 2.8%. the different margin lending rate levels. However, this was, as before, more than mitigated by high lending volumes that continued to increase. Our private banking mortgage remains very attractive and the margin lending volume increases with higher risk appetite. Going forward, NI development will, as always, reflect the market rate environment in terms of both the risk-time policy rate and then mainly decide the three-month rates, but also, and as well, the behavior of our customers and their allocation where deposit savings will always constitute the share. With the external savings account now being phased out, deposit growth going forward will be linked to our overall growth in savings capital but with some variations of the deposit to the savings capital ratio depending then on customer risk appetite. Although we have received positive macro signals in Sweden so far, the situation in the Middle East does still cloud the future and how the policy rate and market rates will develop is still uncertain. When it comes to interest rates, our strategy is to make the which gives us flexibility to take customer behavior and competition into account when adjusting rates. Moving over to costs, they are developing according to our plan and came in higher than in Q1 as a result of higher personnel costs and other costs, both connected our work with strategic initiatives. Marketing costs were seasonally lower. And when it comes to our international expansion, three million of the Establishment costs will build up over time and the estimate remains that the cost base for 2026 will be affected by a total of 50 million Swedish kronor linked to the international expansion. Our full year 2026 guidance of 9% cost increase for the Swedish business also stands. As evident by the numbers related to the capital position, it is very solid. We also audited the Q2 figures, which has further strengthened the capital base by including accumulated earnings net of expected dividends. Keeping a strong capital position has proven good, not least in the rapidly shifting market environment we've seen for over a year now. And with our current capitalization, deposits on our balance sheet would be able to grow by 43 billion Swedish krona without breaching leverage ratio requirements. Finally, looking at leverage ratio and capital ratios, we see that the non-risk based leverage ratio requirement remains the main capital constraint for Avanza, and it's the most sensitive one as it's highly dependent on customer behavior. At the end of the period, it was at 4.7%, further improved not only then by accumulated profits, but also by customers' increased risk appetite leading to lower deposits and thereby lower leverage ratio volumes by around 8 billion compared to the end of Q1. All in all, we are well positioned both when it comes to both the risk-based and the non-risk-based requirements. Having said that, I will hand back to Gustav for some concluding remarks.

Thank you, Jonas. And to conclude, it's a privilege to once again summarize a record quarter. Having a business model with a well-balanced income mix that continuously take us to new heights is an incredible strength, but it couldn't have been done without our fantastic employees and through their engagement. We have maintained a high development speed and made great progress within our prioritized area during the quarter. In parallel to the Swedish business, preparations for our international expansion is moving forward according to plan. So I would say Avanza stands strong and is well positioned to capture future savings growth and with that we open up for questions.

Thank you. To ask a question you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question please press star 1 and 1 again. One moment for our first question. And this question comes from the line of Martin Ekstedt from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Great. So first question on costs. When you say staff costs are higher due to a strategic initiative, this does not include so much Denmark. I mean, you guided 50 million of costs for the Danish expansion in 26, but you took just 3 million in Q2. and zero in Q1 then. At least I had this bit more spread out in my model. So I just wanted to check, should we expect a very material portion of the remainder to flock towards Q4, i.e. very late in the year, or do you see a more even split between the remainder of the 50 million on the last two quarters? That's the first one. Thank you.

Yes, in Jena we don't guide how costs are split between different quarters. We only guide on the full year cost base. And still for the Swedish business, 9% holds. And when we talk about that we have made investments related to our strategic priorities, that's related then to the cloud journey, private banking, pension, etc., as stated before. Then, as you know, Denmark is completely separate from that, and that was only, if you use that word, 3 million in the second quarter. That is simply due to the fact that we, in practice, from an accounting and disclosure point of view, started having Danish costs not until after we disclosed that we planned to go international, which started essentially from May and forward. And all costs, we always had costs related to preparing for Denmark, expansions they will not classify the Danish cost therefore we expect to see a build-up of Danish cost later during the year and we still believe it will be in the 50 million area so therefore there's a little bit too short of time to build up Danish cost during in particular May and June I hope that answer the question Martin great thank you and then the second question if I may

There was a comment around higher market rates at the end of March contributing to better returns in the treasury portfolio, but with a lag. Could you, given the rates are moving again, could you go into some more specifics on that lag effect and just the dynamics of it, please?

Yes. When we invest or manage our liquidity portfolio, there is a mix of different assets that we invest in, where the bulk is in different types of bonds. and Nordic banks. And there are some quite clear risk appetite boundaries within which the treasury team operates, trying to find the best yield in relation to those risk boundaries. One of those is the tender in terms of liquidity of the portfolio they are maintaining, which we try to keep somewhat shorter than three months. This means that it depends a little bit on when different types of bonds get their interest repricing, but it is within a three-month period. So you could look upon it as a three-month moving average, slowly moving forward. And therefore, when you have the increase in particular in the cyber rate towards the end of March and beginning of April, you can think of it as a three-month moving average Slowly moving across that increase in cyber rates, which gives some positive momentum into Q2.

Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. And then could I just quickly ask one on currency revenue as well, please? and I saw that currency-related revenue margins on foreign trading volumes came down about one basis point or just so at quarter on quarter. Looking back a bit, it's come down now from 25 basis points roughly around the time of the pandemic to 19 basis points currently. Is it competition driving this or is it more of a volume mix pricing strategy or size of trades or mixture of?

It depends on the mix of customers trading. So we saw slightly higher share of private banking and pro trading in the foreign trading volumes. So that's what drove the one bit decline in the quarter. And then looking at a year ago, we introduced the currency account. So I'd say that's the effect of that, which has plateaued now for a few quarters.

Okay, excellent. Thank you. Thank you for that. That's all from me.

Thanks. Thank you. We are now going to move to our next question. And this question comes from the line of Jakub Haselvik from SAB. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Two questions from my side. If we start on cost, you write that this P&L line was slightly elevated this quarter due to less usage of vacation days. Does that mean we should expect a larger seasonality effect in Q3?

We don't specifically guide exactly what we believe the effect will be other than it will obviously relate to the total amount of staff and therefore staff costs that we have. If you use that as a basis for going into Q3 hopefully that could give an indication of the effect of the vacation debt reduction that typically come in Q3. There was a little bit effect of that during the first half of this year as well related to vacations in earlier this year.

And also, can you comment on how you foresee a recruitment pace to look like for H2 as you have increased number of FDs by 9% compared to last year?

I think if I look at last year, I think we were a little bit slow out to the start. in finding the right competences to drive the right pace of our strategic initiatives. I think in 2026, we have found really good professionals early on. So we're a little bit faster in building up the team that we want to have the pace forward that we want to. So we have been swifter to attract the right people this year compared to last year.

Okay, thank you. And just one final question actually. On NII, can you comment anything on how deposit volume was intra-quarters? I mean, we know the end of month volumes, but was volumes intra-month higher as well compared to Q1?

I could say that in general, if you look at End of Q1 versus end of Q2 and take the average of that, you underestimate the average volume. If you use end of month data, which we disclose publicly, you see more clearly that reduction was towards the end of the quarter. If you were to use daily or weekly data, I would say this quarter happened to have somewhat of a little bit more intra-month variation that was not obviously clear when using month-end or quarter-end data. Great. Thank you.

Thank you. We are now going to move to our next question. And this question comes from the line of Patrick Baralius from ABG. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Perfect. So my first question is a follow-up then on NII. It was very strong in the quarter, but could you help us a little bit with the NII trajectory from here, considering that the liquidity portfolio was falling at the end of Q2 and the STIBOR is down here in Q2 compared to the start of the quarter. So should we expect NII to come down here? Could you elaborate a little bit on that?

Patrick, I would assume that you're probably as good as we are in terms of estimating in particular where market rates will go, which will always be an important factor in this, both the repo rate, but then also the cyber rate and possibly bond spreads should those go. We should note that they didn't change that much during this first half of the year. You can always look at forward rates and see where that takes us. And that obviously has an important impact on margins on the liquidity portfolio. Then you will need to take into account the interest rate profile or interest rate reset timings of our portfolio. That's difficult to estimate in detail, but typically we have somewhat less than three months interest. rate fixing them and we don't it's difficult to guide specifically how that margin that would develop going forward but you could see the impact of the cyber rate changes in March and April and how that impacted us in terms of margins and when it comes to volumes hopefully going forward it'll be somewhat easier to understand the development since the external savings account in some way clouded the underlying the deposit rate development now for a few month we have had just our own internal savings account and that will obviously grow in line with total savings capital growth over time but there will be some variations around that growth line based on customer risk appetite basically. So that's I guess the type of guidance we can give when it comes to NRI going forward.

Thank you. Fair enough. And my next question is regarding net inflow. You have a table there in your report where you break it down. And if we look at the net inflow in private banking, it seems to be materially lower in Q2 compared to Q1, and also down year-to-date compared to last year, despite private banking being a key focus area for you. Could you talk a little bit about what is driving this shrinking and are there any actions you are taking to improve this?

That's a good observation, Patrick. I mentioned a few quarters back that we report net inflows not according to market practice. What you see in net flows in the three segments, standard, price banking and pro, is excluding any movement between the segments. So a wealthy customer who becomes a customer with Avanza, let's say seven months ago, and then finds out about, oh, I want to be a price banking customer, that would never show up as a positive net flow on the price banking line. It would show up as a positive net flow on the standard line. So the focus of the team this year has been a lot on attracting new customers, which you say is positive. You also see that the savings capital development is positive, which includes the effect of a customer coming into Avanza first and then becoming a price banking customer. So that is our numbers that I'm happy about and we want to continue at that pace. However, when you look at the net flow numbers reported on price banking, what you can there is our ability to increase share of wallets so I would like that number to go up and I think we should work more also towards our existing customers to attract a bigger share of their volumes which would then show up in the net flows in the numbers going forward but my advice is to look at the savings capital development and the number of customers as a complement given that we report differently compared to the market practice.

Okay, I see. Thank you. That was all for me.

Thank you. We are now going to our next question. And this question comes from the line of Andrew Low from CT. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question. The first one I had was on Sigma stocks. I believe that you're testing at the fee of 55 to 85 basis points versus 170 basis point total cost for traditionally managed portfolios across other Swedish providers. So firstly, what explains the range of this pricing? What do you get at the high end? versus the low end? And then could you share any feedback you've received on the product and how material you think the revenue stream could be over the longer term? And the second question is just on your customer churn. Your report states that the customer churn was 0.8% in the 12 months to June 2026 and that compares to 1.7% in the prior 12 months and 1.3% in the two prior calendar years. So I appreciate these small numbers. But it suggests that your churn in H1 2026 is much lower than it's been in the recent years. And I just wondered if there was anything in particular that's driving that.

Thanks, Andrew. I'll start with the last one because I have it fresh in my head. So if I recall my nine quarters that I have presented, it varies, the customer churn. I don't want to draw any positive conclusion of this even lower customer churn. It varies over time and we track very different measures to find indications of customers leaving us. I'm very happy with the levels we have, but I would want to see some more quarters with these even low numbers before I dare to stick out my head. When it comes to Sigma stocks, I am personally very excited about this. I've been working with this product type, traditional discretionary products in Sweden for many, many years. And I know there is a lot of frustration among many customers that we're trying to solve with this product. We guided the price range, as you asked about, and that depends on the commitment you make as a customer. The more capital you commit, the better price you get. and we're doing a big launch later this year this product is wrapped in a capital redemption product which has tax implications that makes it less optimal to go in with capital just before the end of June and just before end of December so we should look at the numbers when we pass the 1st of July date. This is a new product. It is a new area for Avanza. I think that customers will try it. I think customers will not commit their total capital to it day one. I think they will entrust it with part of their capital and then over time hopefully entrust us with more and more. But this is our way to get into the segment of customers which we have essentially untapped in the Swedish market, which are the ones who want someone else to take their investment decisions for them. So I'm quite excited about this.

Right. What do you think the total addressable market is for that business?

So we're now launching it only to the price banking segment. And I haven't updated these numbers, but when we set the strategy one and a half years ago, the total market for discretionary mandates in Sweden was one trillion. So what could it be now? I don't know, 1.2 trillion or something like that. So it's a big market.

That's great. Thanks so much.

Thank you. We are now going to move to our next question. and this question comes from the line of Ermin Karik from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thanks for the presentation. A few questions if I may. So maybe starting on the cost, how high confidence do you have on the cost guidance given if I look at H1, your cost growth is up 14% year over year and we barely have any Danish cost in there, like that's actually labeled as Denmark. So you need to reduce that pace quite a bit, I suppose, into H2 to get to the 9%. And you also mentioned you've added people earlier this year than last year. I mean, does that change anything on your view? Because I suppose then you need to also pay them salary along your period of the year.

Yes, and you can talk about the Swedish business then. As said before, since we are reiterating our guidance, we believe in it. You could say that 2026 compared to 2025 is the other way around. In 2025, we had quite relatively lower costs the first half of the year and then relatively higher costs the second half of the year, some of which were not recurring and more of a one-time off. 2026, then, if you compare it to 2025, the first half of the year, the increase is larger. And since we reiterate our cost guidance, we expect then lower costs in Q2. So it will be in some way the other way around. Some of the costs that we have had this year, we still believe then that the growth is in line with our plan, sometimes just the timing of the different quarters. But it's according to our plan so far.

Got it. And then you've recruited a new CEO for Avanza Funds. Could you talk a bit more about the product roadmap you see there? You've added all stocks fund in this quarter. Is it more the same or do you think there's anything that's going to be more drastic in terms of changes we should see coming forward?

I think we have done quite exciting stuff on our internal fund side and we have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline. We don't typically talk about things that we haven't launched yet but as you know there's a lot of interesting things happening in the Swedish fund market. We have a new legislation that allows players like us, for example, to issue exchange-traded share clauses of existing funds, making it much cheaper to give intraday liquidity to customers on the fund side. So there's a lot of ideas that Maria has. On the fund side, you also need to focus a lot on quality on the existing funds. It needs to be a balance of new things and making sure that you have quality and performance on your existing offering.

Thank you. That's all for me.

Thank you. We are now going to take our next question. And this question comes from the line of Oliver Caruthers from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Good morning, team. Thanks for the presentation. I've got another question on NAI as a follow-up. Thanks for all the, I guess, color you've given around here. But really, it's just on the averaging comments on the volume through the second quarter, it sounds to me like there were some spikes in customer cash balances. So is that right? And any sense from you, what drove these spikes? Was it Was it people making room for SpaceX at the end of the quarter or was it something else? Any kind of color you could give on that would be helpful.

Yeah, thanks. I wouldn't call it spikes or significant deviations in intramount volumes compared to end-of-month volumes. It's more of a slow-moving changes to volumes in general. It's just that if you look at just quarter-end data and compare that average to month end or even daily or weekly, the difference increases, but it's not sort of substantial daily or weekly variations. There are some variations that contributed to higher average volumes throughout the quarter.

Okay, but is it fair to assume this is fairly atypical and this is not something to expect in a normal quarter?

I wouldn't say it's atypical. What is different compared to before is that Now for the first time the external savings deposit account is no longer with us and we have more of a clean deposit base which it makes it easier to understand sort of trend lines etc. There will always be some variations depending on customer risk appetite but more importantly than the growth of savings capital we expect over time will also grow our deposit base.

But I would say Oliver now I don't have the time series in my head but But I know it's roughly and looking back many, many years, I mean, the money put on the sideline varies between, I don't know, 7% and 12%. So a change of a little bit more than one percentage points that we saw in the quarter is not dramatic per se. I think it really depends on, you know, this risk on, risk off sentiment.

Historically, it's been between seven and ten. 70-12% of savings capital in deposits that are with Avanza, and it was 10% end of Q2. So it's sort of not a substantial deviation from the historical average.

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you. My next question is on customer growth. So you've been doing around 16,000 net customer additions per month this year. In absolute terms, very slightly up on last year with the growth rate. 26 is running below that of 25 levels. I know you talk about your growth targets more on a savings capsule basis rather than on a customer ads basis, but I guess given the strength and equity markets, given the improvement in the Swedish macro that you're calling out today, are these levels of net addition something that you're happy with, or is this something that you'd be looking to drive higher? Thank you.

We always want to improve and be better and better, and I think we have many levers to pull. If your question is if the sentiment and the view of the future improves among the Swedish households, what effects would that lead to? I think that could put even more Swedes into the savings markets. But I also think, which is more important, I think a lot of the net inflows into the Swedish market over the last couple of quarters have ended up in in currency accounts with the big banks because there has been such uncertainty that long-term savings has not been priority one of the Swedish households. That I really hope will change with a more positive view of the future but that would more be seen in existing customers hopefully moving more of their savings to us.

Understood, thank you.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone keypad. That is star 1 and 1 to ask a question. We are now going to take our next question. And this question comes from the line of Amber Princell from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you. So you printed a leverage ratio of 4.7%. and an impressive return on equity of 43% despite the slight overcapitalization. So if you operationally continue to deliver in this manner, continue to build capital, I can imagine that by 2027 or 2028, you will have too much capital to hit your real-world target of 35%. So my question is simply, between your return on equity target of 35% and your dividend policy of 70% payout, which of the two is most important, would you say? Would you commit to 70% of dividend payouts or if it risks missing the ROE of 35%?

I think what you have seen in the last few years is actually a dividend that has exceeded the dividend policy. We don't want to get fat with capital. There is no reason for us to hoard capital. Right now it looks a little bit too high. But we also want to have a cushion for the customer behavior. This leverage ratio capital requirement is a little bit scary because we cannot control it. I mean, we can control it long term by making our deposit offering less attractive through reducing rates. But short term, it's really up to customers. So we need to have a cushion there. On the risk base, it's much easier because then Jonas can just ask his treasury team to change the risk profile of the liquidity portfolio. But if you look at the numbers, MWQ2, they look a little bit too high, I would say.

Thank you. That's it from my side. Thanks.

Thank you. There are no further questions for today. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.