Avanza Bank Holding AB (publ)

and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Avanza Bank Interim Report, January-September 2026, Webcast and Conference Call. 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. 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, Gustav Anker, CEO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of Avanza's Q3 report. My name is Seth Gustav Unger. I'm the CEO of Avanza. And with me in the room in Stockholm today, I have CFO Jonas Svärling and Carolina Johansson heading investor relations. Q3 was another strong quarter, both operationally and financially, reporting our second highest operating profit ever. It is also gratifying to see that Avanza continues to grow at a strong pace adding 53,000 new customers in the quarter and a net inflow of 23 billion. Customers are continuing to invest and once again we're noting new record inflows to fund this quarter of 18 billion. The Swedish fund market is also reporting strong net inflows and a fair share of that 32% is driven by Avanza customers. We have entered the autumn with great momentum across the organization, and I'm very pleased that we on August 31st broadly launched Avanza Sigma to the full PD and Pro segment with great success, having reached 710 million in only a month after the broad launch. As part of the continuous effort to enhance the offering for customers with a strong interest in equities, pre- and post-market trading in the U.S. market was launched, enabling customers to act on corporate reports, macroeconomic data, and other market events outside regular exchange trading hours. Last but not least, I'm very glad that we have recruited Christian Silessen as our country manager for Avanza Denmark, and that he assumed his position this Monday. Christian brings valuable experience from the Danish savings market and from building and scaling customer offerings from scratch. He has a strong commercial drive and entrepreneurial mindset and shares our passion for challenging the market and creating customer value, which makes me convinced he is the right person to lead our venture. Despite ongoing global uncertainty, we are seeing signs of a better and brighter macro environment in Sweden, where GDP growth slowly but surely has gained speed. This is also evident in the savings market statistics. Last year, a disproportionately large share of net savings was parked in deposits with the incumbent banks. But now we're finally seeing an increase in capital directed towards stock market investments. This points to stronger confidence in the financial market among Swedes Something that is also reflected in our growth figures. During the quarter, we welcomed as many as 53,000 new customers and the quarterly net inflow increased to 23 billion. Avanza stands well positioned to capture a fair share of the savings market growth. At the same time, I remain mindful of the uncertainties that remain in the world around us where geopolitical tensions are affecting global markets and the probability for rate hikes in the near future has increased. However, I also stand positive that the economic pickup that is finally affecting Sweden will not be slowed by a possible increase of the policy rate. We know from experience that our customers are good at adapting to current macroeconomic conditions and at prioritizing savings. At Avanza, our focus on supporting our customers to good savings and investments remains unchanged. The improved sentiment is also reflected in the risk appetite among our customers. We see clear signs of higher willingness to invest in the stock market, not only in the market statistics, and by our growth figures, but also in the behavior of our customers. As mentioned before, the net inflow to mutual funds reached yet another record level this quarter at 18 billion, and our share of the mutual fund market inflow was 32%. The net investing is also reflected by the share of deposits of the total savings capital that continues to decrease. We have also, during the quarter, seen margin lending volumes steadily increasing. Although customers have a willingness to invest, the trading intensity is, as usual, closely connected to volatility and stock market development. Volatility decreased during the summer and naturally so did the trading activity. At seven and a half more trading days in the quarter, this did not fully offset the effect from the lower daily turnover volumes. In a market environment with lower volatility and quite a few red days on the stock market, It's not uncommon that the broader customer base can become a bit more cautious, while our most initiated customers continue to trade. This happened also in Q3, and we saw the number of brokerage generating customers decrease. Private banking and pro customers generated 30% of the brokerage income, an increase from 26% in Q2, which pressured our income margin, both in terms of brokerage income and FX income. As briefly mentioned on August 31st, we launched Avanza Sigma broadly to all of our private banking customers, thereby making tailored algorithm driven equity management available at half the cost compared to traditional alternatives on the market. And as I've mentioned many times before, I'm very excited about this product and confident that we have created something unique in the market where customers are able to tailor a bespoke stock portfolio based on their preferences and where they are even able to exclude certain single stocks if they would like to. Once they have their portfolio in place, they are able to track both the aggregated portfolio performance and can also view their portfolio in detail and follow the performance of the underlying single stocks. I'm very happy with the reception where the capital in Avanza Sigma at the end of the quarter, just one month after the broad launch, amounted to 710 million. We now maintain full focus on continuing to challenge the traditional discretionary portfolio management market with our new, unique and digital solution, a market estimated at 1 trillion Swedish. The high level of employee engagement at Avanza is a unique strength that lays the foundation for our strong customer satisfaction and our innovative corporate culture. In September, we held an internal culture week at Avanza where we launched updated guiding principles for the organization. Customer first always, better for real, and smarter together. The week included everything from external lectures to internal daily challenges and a live interview with our chairman and founder, Sven. My main takeaway from the week is that our strong culture is not static, but rather one of our absolute most important assets that we must continuously and consciously develop. It is through our culture and our guiding principles that we constantly create new and good solutions for our customers and help them towards better savings. This, in turn, is what creates shareholder value. With that, I will hand over to you, Jonas, to dig deeper into the financials.

Thanks, Susann, and good morning all. As you said, we are concluding yet another strong quarter. We are still seeing a healthy income mix. However, our income did decrease slightly compared to Q2. The lower volatility in the market during the summer affected our trading-related income streams negatively, while deposits also decreased, which pressured NII. However, we have a seasonally low staff cost in Q3, meaning that costs were also lower, and all in all, our operating profit came in at $920 million, is quoted operating profit in the history of Avanza. This resulted in an EPS of 4.9 and ROE was at 44% for the quarter again well exceeding our target of at least 35%. If you move further into the income side and as mentioned before market volatility has decreased during the summer, and as a natural consequence, daily trading activity also slowed. This was partly but not fully offset by seven and a half more trading days compared to Q2, and our trading-related income decreased as a consequence of the lower brokerage-generating turnover and trades. Additionally, the market environment in Q3 resulted in our private banking and pro segments accounting for a larger share of the trading. This is in line with what we've seen before with lower market volatility and negative stock market development. In such times, the broader customer base can become a bit more cautious, while our most initiated customers continue to trade. Pride Banking and ProCustomers generated 30% of the brokerage in Q3, which is an increase from 26% in Q2. At the same time, we saw a higher turnover per trade, especially in the 6B class, and this resulted in a lower income per turnover. Krona and our brokerage margin decreased to 10.3 basis points from 11.0 last quarter. The strong interest in foreign trading held up also in Q3, and the share of foreign turnover was stable at 31%. This meant that it is not having a positive effect on the brokerage margin this quarter. However, strong foreign trade is always positive for the overall income mix, where Essex income is growing as a share. And if you look back and compare it to only three years ago, the share of foreign trading is more than twice as high today. And although that share of foreign trading was stable this quarter, the overall trend has for many years been a steadily increasing share of foreign trading in line with Swedes reducing home bias investments, and we expect that to continue. However, in the quarter FX income was also affected by the trading mix with a higher share of also the foreign turnover generated by the private banking and pro segments. Pro customers have lower FX fees in general and private banking customers as well through the FX account, meaning that the FX margin is also negatively affected when these customers account for a larger share of trading. Looking at fund commissions, these increased by 8% in the quarter driven by higher fund volumes. Although trading intensity is very much connected to volatility and market sentiment, customers' willingness to invest has clearly increased, once again reporting a quarterly record inflow to funds with a market share of 32% of inflows. Share of index funds continued to increase by 1.7 percentage points to 55.5 at quarter end. This impacted the fund margin, which was at 22.2 basis points on average and 22.0 at quarter end. Hence, the effect of higher volumes continues to outweigh the lower income per fund krona resulting from higher share index funds. Other income increase primarily as a result of higher income from avanza markets. Other commission income also increased, which was both the result from higher income from stock lending as well as several other smaller income lines that are a bit too small to disclose separately. Corporate finance should be noted. Its income is also seasonally low in Q3. If we look into more details of NI then, deposit volumes decreased compared to Q2, which resulted in a slight decrease in interest income for the first time in a year. Income from surplus liquidity decreased to $499 million as a result of lower volume. At the same time, we increased lending volumes, both when it comes to margin lending and mortgages. all interest rates should be set both on deposit and lending signing kept stable during the quarter but just like in Q2 the average rates for both deposit and lending did change slightly due to the mixed effects in the lending and deposit volumes respectively. Average interest rates for deposits increased to 0.81% with the higher average deposit volumes on the savings accounts. This had a slight effect on the deposit expenses which increased by 2 million. The average interest rate for lending decreased to 2.68% from 2.7%, both as a result of volume mix changes within the different mortgage lending rate levels, but also because of the mortgage portfolio growing at a faster pace than margin lending. Our mortgage offering is highly attractive and we have seen fantastic growth. Compared to a year ago, the mortgage portfolio is today 44% larger. To manage the extremely high demand and we're still As we're still keen to not allow our mortgage to deposit ratio to grow significantly, we have now in October temporarily paused new mortgage applications for customers with a savings capital between 3 and 10 million Swedish kronor. And we're also increasing the interest rate within this segment by 10 basis points as of the 1st of November. As always, NRI development going forward will reflect the market rate environment. Geopolitical tensions are affecting global markets, and the Riksbank confirmed in September that the probability of near-term rate hikes has increased. This would have a positive effect on our net interest margin, while we hope at the same time that a slightly higher interest rate environment will not slow the economic pickup that has been long awaited and is finding effect in Sweden. We know from experience that our customers are quite good at prioritizing savings and we will of course continue to do everything we can to support them in that. When it comes to interest rates and changes going forward, our structure remains the same. We will continue to make decisions in relation to each policy rate decision, giving us the flexibility to take customer behavior as well as competition in the account when adjusting rates.