Hoist Finance AB (publ)

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Hoist Finance earnings call for the third quarter. I'm Harry Branjes, CEO of Hoist Finance. And next to me, I have Christian Valentin, our CFO. And in the room today, we also have Karin Tycke, our Chief Coms and Investor Relations Officer, who joined us just before the Q2 report. As usual, before we dive into the report, I just want to talk a little bit about who we at Hoist Finance are and what we are. And I think in short, we are a performing financial institution working with non-performing loans. We are different compared to other peers in the industry. Hoist Finance is a regulated credit market institution supervised by the Swedish FSA. We therefore have a different regulatory environment than most of our peers. And we also have a different funding model. As you know, our main source of funds, some 75% savings accounts from the public. We have savings accounts in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Poland. We recently opened up Austria and Ireland and in the UK. allowing us to match our currencies between the asset and the liability side. The remaining 30% of our funds comes from bonds of different character that we've balanced and make sure that we have a sort of reliable access to the debt markets. So this gives us a considerable funding cost advantage compared to the industry. And of course, this status also gives us stability and benefits going forward. Now, many peers in this situation are now going capital lighter, focusing on third party servicing. We are, and we want to be capital heavy. We have the setup, the access. and the balance sheet for it. Now, as you have all seen, on the 30th of September, the Swedish FSA, Finansinspektionen, published a legal position providing guidance on weights that should be applied to deposits taken in via digital platforms when calculating LCR and NSFR. Now, we use digital platforms. for our savings accounts offerings outside sweden now you can use digital providers in many different ways we do not use any services that aggregate deposits or or broker deposits and we do individual kyc on each and every one of our savings customers so Based on how we use our digital platforms, we do not see that we need to make any adjustments to the way we report LCR and NSFAR as a result of the legal position. Now, we have initiated a dialogue with the Swedish FSA, and it is constructive and ongoing. Now, regardless how you count LCR and NSFAR, we are above regulatory limits. and we are on a good way to meeting our financial goals regardless of scenario. We will still target more than 15% ROE, 15% EPS growth, and a CET1 ratio of 2.3 to 3.3 percentage points above regulatory requirements. So with that, now let me take you to the key highlights of the third quarter. So, as you've seen, profit before tax came in at 369 million SEK. We made a larger positive revaluation in Poland, and we've taken costs for a large transaction that in the end didn't happen. So if you adjust for those positives and negatives, we think a reasonable representation of the underlying business would be some 314 million SEK for the quarter. Kristian will take you through the bridge later in this presentation. Return on equity came in at a strong 16%, now driven lower by a high tax rate for the quarter. As we communicated in Q1, we have restructured some of the daughter companies in the group, and the tax effect has come through now in Q3. And on investments, a very strong quarter, a record quarter, in fact, for finance, we closed portfolio investments of 4.3 billion SEC with a very good geographical spread. And before the questions come in, no, this is not the new normal level. As we buy larger and larger portfolios, the volumes get lumpy between the quarters, as we previously communicated. We still see significant activity on the market, as we are now one third into Q4. And just last night, I had the privilege of signing off our first transaction in Portugal, a medium-sized transaction that we are very enthusiastic about. Now, so far during 2024, we've invested 8.7 billion SEC. bringing the total book value to 29.9 billion, just shy of 30, after a growth of 25% quarter on quarter. We still see fewer participants in the auctions, and we see new consortiums forming around Europe, sometimes opportunistically, deal by deal, and sometimes strategically. Now, we at Hoist, as we previously communicated, are also open to co-investing with partners, especially if it gives us access to new volume or in cases of really large transactions. We have an ambition to grow our portfolio to some 36 billion SEC by the end of 2026. We do that through combining our internal capabilities with outsourcing partners, We expect direct costs to grow in line with portfolio growth and indirect costs to grow slower. This operating leverage we can see again now in this third quarter where the portfolio grows 25%, profit before tax grows 31%. Now the operating leverage is less pronounced this quarter as most of the portfolio growth was booked at the end of the quarter but if you look at this on a year-to-date basis you'll see the trend more more clearly and christian will take you through this in more detail later in the presentation um collection performance solid at 102. uh it was uh you know q3 is always seasonally slower But this year it seemed like Europe refused to come back from holidays. It was a slower Q3 than usual. However, this gave our business units time to focus on onboarding this record amount of new portfolios that we acquired. So in the end it worked out quite well for us. We expect collection performance to bounce back up in Q4. And we got a ratings hike from Moody's, very happy about that, moving us one notch higher up in the investment grade bracket. We see this, of course, as a great confirmation from an external source of the way we manage our balance sheet and our risk management in general. We were active in the bond markets during Q3 and we issued Senior unsecured or senior preferred for about 1.45 billion SEC and then also a senior non-preferred, a first for Hoist Finance at attractive pricing. Our capital and liquidity position remains strong. The high investment volume brought the CET1 ratio to more normal levels than before, still well above our internal limits and significantly above regulatory limits. Now, looking at liquidity, that's possibly even stronger. As we are building up to SDR, we're also building up our liquidity reserve. And it is now 15 billion SEK, a little bit more than 15 billion SEK, basically half of our MPL portfolio value. So all in all, very happy with this solid third quarter. And now I will hand over to Christian to take you through the quarter in more detail.

Over to you. Thank you, Harry. Good morning, everyone. Quarter three was a really strong quarter for us. And we had record investments and solid returns on top of that. So we had invested 4.3 billion in the quarter. We saw that ROE was above 16%. The year to date, ROE is above 18%. And we are good. We are well on track to beat the financial target that we have for the year on 15% plus. If you look at the P&L overall, we have strong growth across all key metrics. We have 33% interest income, and that's driven by the larger book, so 25%. And given that the interest income is growing quicker than the book growth, that indicates that the pricing that we've done is really supportive. So we've been seeing higher returns than we did a year ago and two years ago. So it's highly supportive pricing in the market currently for us. if you look at the the collection performance it's continued to be stable and strong it's one or two percent for the quarter and year to date it's roughly 104 percent it was a slight drop over the vacation months and this is normal this happened last year as well and we see as harry pointed out things bouncing back to more of the steady state in q4 as well Cost growth has been 14% versus the 25% portfolio growth. And I'll get back to the underlying growth of the book in a later page for Earnings Before Taxes Bridge to see the like-for-like growth year over year. Net profit, 257 million, and that led to the 16% ROE. And we look at, for the full year, we expect an effective tax rate of 22% to 24%. As mentioned, this was the highest quarterly volumes on record with 4.3 billion during the quarter. This is leading to a book value of 29.9 billion, so almost 30 billion. This will likely lead to the highest year in Hoist history for the full year. And we have invested across most markets, mostly in Spain, France and Italy. That's where we've seen the largest volumes. But this has been across many of our geographies in Europe. The pricing has been really supportive. And if you look at the last two years return levels, we haven't seen these returns since pre 2015 levels, which is highly encouraging. During the last three years, Two thirds of the book has been, the last two years, two thirds of books have been invested. So we have essentially repriced the asset side the last three years, which is great because we have moved into a new interest rate environment. We are not deviating from our risk profile that we want, so it's all granular risk. We have no single risk exposure which is relevant to the size of the book. It is still only roughly 20 million, the largest exposure we have in the group, and that's compared with almost 30 billion of total book value. So we've been really disciplined. And this year in Q3, we had a really strong investment quarter. Last year, we had a slightly weaker one when things didn't go fully our way. And this quarter, we've seen that we've been managing to win all the opportunities that we almost wanted. When we look forward into Q4, we have a strong outlook. We believe that it's continuing to be a really supportive market. And seasonally, Q4 tends to be the strongest of the year. We don't see a level of four billion. However, we do see a strong quarter. The last few years, we've been working very actively to diversify the book across geographies and assets. And now we see that we have a nice mix across geographies. There's no country above 20%. If you look back a few years, we saw that Italy had a weight of 25%. Now we have almost, let's say, four between 15% and 20%, which is exactly where we want to be. And on the secured side, we keep growing the share of the secured book. So now it's 34%. It's been hovering for a while around 30%. This is not a goal in itself, but we do want a diversification effect between assets as well. We are very pleased that we are now, which is classified under the region. However, this is not reflected in Q3 numbers because this happened in Q4. We're really pleased that we have now entered into Portugal as a new market, and we look forward to having coverage of the full Iberian Peninsula. This is a page that we also presented on our Capital Markets Day a month or so ago. And it is updated for Q3 numbers. And in this you can see that our growth journey is very well on track. And this is combined with attractive risk and attractive return, which is really, really pleasing. We've been really focused on getting the right returns and almost always looking for this granular risk that we really like. backed by consumer or a clear asset side. You can see that we wanted to grow starting end of 21 with 18 billion to the end of 26. And we are 66% on the way of that. So 66% of the 18 billion growth we have now achieved in Q3 24. And this is taking us to 83% of the 36 billion overall goal, which is encouraging to us. And we are not growing at the expense of profitability. We are very disciplined. So it is a good situation where we see right risk and return and also very sound and healthy growth. You can also see in the geographies, for example, in Q3-24, it's a really nice mix between the different markets in Europe. We have now new markets. If you compare with two years ago, Sweden, Portugal and a few others, this leads to a larger pool of deals. And we have taken on really strong people that are leading the new markets. We're very pleased with the expansion to new markets in Europe. These are core markets. They're very close to home and they make a lot of sense to enter. Here we're trying to give you a view of the underlying profitability in quarter over quarter. So we have seen a robust online performance and the key message is at the center of this page. So the 59% underlying earnings before tax growth. And this is the 197 to the 314. We have on the left and on the right items that you could call more non-recurring in nature. So starting from the left, last year we had a 282 EBT and we had a joint venture income, which we do not have anymore. We don't have that joint venture anymore. And then we also had non-financial transactions in the P&L. And clearly we did rejuvenation, which ended last year at this time. And that led us to, if you will normalize for these numbers, 197 million underlying EBT in Q3 23. The book has grown and also the profitability of the book has grown and that leads to the growth to 314 million. And then we have a positive revaluation in Q3. I think we're slightly unfair to ourselves. This is part of the core business. We do see that our healthy book will lead to or potentially could lead to revaluations as well. And this is what we see here as well. This is a Polish revaluation. It's one of our best performing markets currently. And when we have such strong collection performance, it's also necessary at some point to take positive revaluations. We don't see that this will impact collection performance anyway. We see that this will continue very strongly. So this is a really strong addition from the healthy book. And then the minus 22 is a project cost that we had for a an investment project that we cancelled during the quarter. So we take that as well in this quarter. And that leads to the reported number of 369 for the quarter. Now zooming out slightly to year-to-date, so January to the end of September. The year-to-date numbers look equally strong in our view. We've been growing the portfolio book value by 25% year-over-year. That has led to operating income growing by 27%. It's driven by repricing, growth of the book, and also the underlying health of the book, which adds collection performance above management expectations or management forecasts. We are continuously incredibly focused on cost discipline, and that has resulted in that the underlying indirect costs, so the central cost, the management team, IT, has been very stable year over year. So we're not growing that in any significant manner. If you look at the numbers, we have some slight growth, but that's largely driven by this 22 million of project costs that I pointed out on the previous page. Direct cost, on the other hand, grows with the book. And this is where we get the operating leverage. So the total cost base is not growing in line with the book. It's only the direct cost base. So total cost grows slower than operating income, and that gives operating leverage and a profit growth of 37% year over year in the reported numbers. Looking at the capital, we have clearly deployed capital in new investments during the quarter. It's a record investment quarter. That said, we still have a very strong capital position. We're significantly above regulatory requirements and also above our own target range that we have set out. And this enables continued high investment capacity, which we intend to use. It is a really attractive investment market currently. And we see a lot of attractive investment opportunities going forward as well. An update on the the SDR and liquidity. So we have a strong build-up of liquidity. So NSFR is long-term liquidity and LCR is short-term liquidity. So the build-up of liquidity overall to qualify to become a specialized debt restructurer is ongoing. We see that the liquidity portfolio have more than doubled last 12 months which is 7 to 15 billion SEK. And this is in relation to the MPL portfolio of 29.9 billion. So it's an exceptionally strong liquidity position that we have currently. This is exactly in line with our role in society, that we should be very stable and predictable in terms of being there in ups and downs in the economic cycles. Net stable funding ratio is increasing in line with the plan to meet SDR requirements of 130%. now we're at 128% and we see that we are increasing steadily and in line with what we wanted and thought. The liquidity coverage ratio is exceptionally strong. You don't see really how strong in the 750%. It's already there strong but that's an average of the last year on LCR. NSFR is more of a quarterly spot rates because it's long term, but the short term we use as per the template from EBA, a yearly average. So if you only look at the Q3 number, we have almost 1200 percent of LCR, which is incredibly strong if you compare that with 100 percent regulatory requirements. We're really pleased to note during the quarter that Moody's upgraded us to BAA2, so one notch up in the investment grade bracket. We are the only investment grade rated company in the industry. We're also very active issuing market funding in the quarter, so 1.65 billion SEK. We have a very stable funding base. It now consists of 77% of the funding overall. And we are in the market, as some of you might have noted this morning, with a four-year floating rate note seen on preferred 500 million. We're testing that market now after the Q3 report. Now I'm handing back to Harry again to sum things up before we go into Q&A.

Thank you very much, Christian. Thank you all for listening in today. And before we open up for questions, then just let me add some final commentary. So our goal is to become the leading investor and manager of non-performing loans to consumers and SMEs. And this is not some lofty goal or vision statement on a PowerPoint. This is our sincere ambition. And we are working very, very hard to make that happen. With the whole industry repositioning, substantial changes are happening across Europe. Actors are trying to find their optimal positions. We have found our position, a capital-heavy institution with solid industry experience and track record. Investing in MPOs is a long-term business. Portfolios generate cash flows for 10, 15, 20 years. And this is also the way we are building up Hoist Finance. We will gradually grow our portfolio from a quarter to quarter. It can be a bit lumpy, but we will constantly keep looking at the returns so that the back book will support us in good times and in bad going forward with sensible investments, solid loan management and an iron grip on the balance sheet. We strive to deliver increasing shareholder value for many years to come. And with that, thank you for listening and let's open up for questions.