Intrum AB (publ)

And welcome to the presentation regarding the results for the fourth quarter of December, fourth quarter ended December 2023. I'm here in Stockholm with Anders Blomqvist, our interim CFO who came in in December, and also Emil Fokkesson, who is the head of the CFO office and investor relations director. Before I get into the details of the presentation, I just wanted to give a little bit of an overview from my perspective as to the quarter. I think that the fourth quarter and also the conclusion of 23 was a very strong end to what was a challenging and transitory year, despite a very difficult comparison with a very strong 22 and particularly fourth quarter 22, and also the overall economic backdrop and difficult in collectability, which I'll get into more detail later in the fourth quarter. we had a very positive result and it shows the strength and resilience of our business and also the drivers of our business. At the top line, we've had growth driven by acquisitions, but also organic growth in the middle and north of Europe and our profitability figures of adjusted EBIT and EBITDA are essentially flat, only slightly down despite the significant headwinds. Just as importantly, We entered with significant momentum in combating our two main headwinds. Inflation continues to impact our costs. But during the quarter, we hit 800 million of run rate on our cost reduction program. And we will expand upon that. And also on deleveraging, despite the fact that we paid the final installment of the dividend and we completed an acquisition, we were still able to reduce our net leverage and continue on the path of deleveraging. So if we can go to page Three, please, the just highlights. So on the top left, you can see that we continue to perform on all our key strategic initiatives. In 23, we shifted a significant focus and coordinated focus on the commercial development of servicing. That resulted in an all-time high in the annual contract value of new business. We hit the $800 million on a run rate basis I've already mentioned on the cost base. And we've also rolled out client profitability tool to three new markets during the quarter, all of which are important initiatives to continue to add to our profitability and to our top line. The quarter on the top right, as I said, top line growth. And right now, I think it's a wonderful environment for our top line. There's going to be increased demand for our services going forward, and the quarter certainly demonstrated that. It was driven by M&A, but it's also driven by organic growth in the middle and north of Europe. The cash EBITDA and EBIT in line with what was already a strong Q422, so very good comp despite the more difficult environment. On the investing side, our strategies to extract cash, we extracted $5.4 billion from investing, and also our leverage ratio remained stable. Specifically on the businesses in the bottom left, you get into a little bit more of a detailed picture as to the trends as well as the challenges. On servicing, our assets under management are growing substantially, not surprisingly. Our ACV signings are already high or hit a record for the year, but also we're significantly up quarter on quarter. Our external income, which is our client service business, is up significantly, driven by M&A primarily. And our servicing adjusted EBIT is down. And that's where we have one of our prime challenges, which is inflation continues to increase our costs. That manifests itself in our servicing business, which is the operational element of our business. And we need to continue to combat that. In the quarter, we had a very strong 23% margin, but last year was 27. For the year, we had 16, but last year was 21. This is one of our headwinds, which we are combating head on. On investing, collections performance, not surprisingly, is down. at 103 versus last year in 111. That's just a reflection of the environment. It is more difficult to collect on these claims today than it was a year ago. But despite that collections headwind, and despite the fact that we scaled back investments to extract cash and de-lever as of the middle of the year, cash income and cash EBITDA are incredibly resilient and perform very, very well. And our investments, albeit at a lower level of half a billion for the quarter, consistent with our 2 billion annual run rate, was at an all-time high IRR of 19%. And then in the bottom right, we continue to deliver on everything we're telling the market we're going to do over the near term. We want to reduce leverage and de-risk. We have lowered our investments down to the $2 billion level, as I mentioned. We have exited five markets and are evaluating the additional exit of three other markets. We announced earlier this week, and I'm sure there's going to be questions later on, on the sale of a very large portion of our back book to raise liquidity, to meet our maturities, and to cement our relationship with an already important client in the form of servers. And we are hitting on our cost reduction, but we're not fully there yet. We will continue to add to that $800 million, fully realize it, as well as add to it during 24. Next page, please. The environment continues to be favorable for our business in that our clients are going to continue to need us. Not surprising from top down, all of the support programs that came in during the pandemic are starting to effectively come due. There is a general view in the media and amongst people in the financial system that a very large portion of that $1 trillion is going to default over the near term. That's going to put pressure on not only collecting against those assets, but collecting on other assets from the same individuals who are defaulting. The UK continues to be a jurisdiction which is almost, as I say often, leading into the next crisis, whereas every market operates at their own speed. But the UK in particular, consistent with our published European consumer payment report in November, consumers are having a very difficult time with a recent report that 56% of UK consumers ran out of money as of the 20th in this month. A very significant pressure on the consumer, which has to manifest itself in additional credit, additional wage rises, which adds to the inflation, which will eventually turn into and many in the financial system of the UK believe that we're going to see an increase in consumer credit defaults in the coming years on par with the great financial crisis. And then you overlay on all of this the fact that our industry is becoming more regulated, which, as I've said in other public forums, is a positive for us. We are an established large player. We've been in this business for over 100 years in most of our traditional markets. We have a very large investment in compliance and legal. What that means is that in a more heightened regulatory environment, companies are going to turn to us more than others, in my opinion. Next page. Let's talk about servicing. Here you see the ACV year over year, 50% up on a gross basis. When you look at churn, obviously what we primarily focus on, you see it well above 200%. So a great year on the commercial side. And this is a function of many things. It's a function of putting George George Acopolis as the head of servicing as of April, which never existed before. It's a function of focusing on underwriting at higher margins, which I'll talk about later on. It's a focus on every single member of our platform going out there and find new business. And we had a record year and a record quarter. And we're going to continue that into 24. Commensurate with that on the bottom and also the general environment where our clients need us more than ever. Our assets under management are almost at 2.1 trillion. And you can see the actual signed quarter by quarter, actual signed business is significantly growing. We've had some key commercial wins. Two large wins within the financial sector in the UK, adding to that business, which now has a much larger base as a result of the Arrow acquisition, and also a key commercial win with Elias ASF and TF Bank in Norway. So we continue to win both in individual situations, also overall. Next page. Continuing with servicing, here you see the commensurate with what I just described. The revenue picture is quite robust, and I believe that that demand for our services and the revenue impact of that will continue going forward here you see clearly the 21 versus 16 which i mentioned earlier that is the challenge we have a headwind in terms of cost we are trying to address it that impact is already being seen in the fourth quarter and will be seen even further in 24. on the bottom you see an important point about our servicing business broken up into our three main regions north middle and europe organic growth was positive and very meaningful in the middle of europe and positive in the north of europe that's a reversal of prior trends And it was negative in Southern Europe, but that is a function of both the environment as well as our Southern European businesses, our very large businesses that manage very large stock, which doesn't renew as much, which inevitably is going to have some revenue headwind as we go through the cycle. But what you can see here to margin, you can see on the gray, you can see the SLE margins for 23. And you can see in the more turquoise or blue, the SLE margins of the new business signed in 23. In North and Middle Europe, more than double. And in Southern Europe, maintaining the very high margin, which is the reason that we believe that not only our tactical cost reduction measures, plus this fundamental just underwriting and costing out our new business in servicing better and the focus on that business and the commercial results will all translate into a reversal of that margin trend starting in 24 and ultimately hitting our objective to hit 25% by 2026 next page shifting over to investing this business is incredibly resilient you can see that we extracted 5.4 billion in the last 12 months and versus an average of 2.7 over the last three years and We can see a lower rate of investments here. And what this tells you is that it tells you that we are very good at collecting. It tells you that we have a very high quality book and that our industrial, the combination of our industrial capability to collect and to extract cash from our book is combined with our ownership of these assets yields this kind of cash extraction. But next, on the next page, you see it even more evident, which is the top line, or sorry, the gross cash collections continue to increase. against what is a decreasing book. And so again, it's resilient, it's a high quality book, and our industrial capability to apply resources to extract collections from a very large underlying nominal asset base continues to bear fruit. You can see down below the headwinds we have on collectability. It is the lowest at 103 versus any one of the last three fourth quarters, so 112, 113, and 111 down to 103. Our underlying forecasts are also showing signs of not increasing by as much and actually moderating in some markets. So overall, it is a more difficult time to collect. But what I gain comfort on is the fact that that is 103, despite it's probably the most difficult quarter to collect we've had in many, many quarters. When you look at our 20-year history or 19-year history, we've only dropped below 100 once. So I think this is very resilient and also is reflective of our capabilities as an industrial collector, and it manifests itself in the performance index as well as the aggregate collections. Next page, this is one of my favorite pages. You've often heard me say, you know, you have to have a purpose. You have to have a why, why we get up in the morning, why we work hard collectively. And that first point there is one of the key drivers of our motivation, which is we helped in the last 12 months over 5 million individuals become debt-free with us and reintegrate into society. That shows how important we are to the financial system. That shows how much of an impact and how important we are to society as a whole. Consistent with a difficult environment, consistent with a large-scale activity, we continue to get very positive scores from our customers as well as our clients, and we continue to grow our activity where we collected $105 billion during the last 12 months, with 14 of that being from our own portfolios. Transitioning to page 10, we did announce a very important milestone a couple days ago. We announced a very significant back book sale to servers. This is a large transaction. It is a financial transaction which raises liquidity. and foregoes future profit on these assets to raise that liquidity to make sure that we can address all of our maturities in 2024 and 2025. Combined with this liquidity and our organic cash flow, we can meet all of them without relying on market access. That's a very important step in de-risking our near-term financial profile. The portfolio, the transaction specifically is a broad-based transaction in large, $11.5 billion across 13 jurisdictions, 10,000 portfolios, nominal value of $382 billion. The transaction price is 98. Again, a very important validation of our curves and our book values. We retain the servicing. Very big statement of confidence on the part of Cerberus, who already has a very large book of business with us, to add to that significantly and allow us to retain the servicing for at least five years. And bottom right, we're using all the proceeds to reduce leverage. Pro forma for that, we're going to get down to, this is a Q3 pro forma, but if you pro forma our Q4 number, we're down to $49.1 billion. You have to go back to 2020, the last time we had that lower level of debt at a year end. The leverage ratio, and I'll talk about this a little bit later on when I talk about targets, but the leverage ratio is slightly negatively impacted because we are foregoing profit as well as gaining liquidity. The target of three and a half has slipped from year end 25 into 26. There have been some reports that it switched to the end of 26. That's not correct. It slipped into 26. We are taking other active measures as obviously we are a management team and this is a dynamic equation and we have two years until that time frame at the end of 25. We are taking other measures to regain profitability and to bring that three and a half target back into hopefully year end 2025. The benefits of the transaction are manifold on page 11. It raises liquidity, accelerates deleveraging, reduces risk. It validates our curves as well as our book values on a very significant and representative portion of our investment portfolio. It cements our relationship with Service, who was already a top five client, has now cemented their position as one of our top clients. And very importantly, they're a different type of client than others. They are a financial client, not a bank client. They're a financial fund. And they are going to grow. They're one of the top MPL investors. So not only do we have a large book of business today, but as their activities grow, we can grow with them. This is an acceleration of our strategy, taking $11.5 billion of assets that sit in one pocket, which is our investment portfolio where we 100% own it and 100% fund it, over to the right pocket, which is our third-party servicing pocket, gaining liquidity but also gaining a very important growth to our external servicing perimeter. And it also provides a foundation for the next step. And I'm sure there'll be questions on this going forward where we want to not only take this back book and move it into third party servicing and actually keep a minority interest. But we want to do that going forward in a larger volume of new investments. We've reduced our proprietary investments to two billion. And today, if we have we fund two billion a year. But what we want to do is increase that overall investment activity from two billion up to our prior levels of seven, eight, nine, ten billion. keep our $2 billion from a funding perspective and own that percentage, but the remainder funded by third-party capital. This tactical backbook sale provides a foundation as a logical step towards that. And all of that is an important step, as the last point on this page, towards the ultimate goal of becoming a very high profitable servicer, but also more importantly, a capital-like asset manager in the consumer NPL space. When you look at page twelve, I'll wrap it up and then I'll hand it over to who is going to handle the financial pages this morning. But twenty three was, as I said, a very challenging year externally. There was a lot going on internally. There were tremendous amount of challenges changes changes in management changes in strategy, but it was also a year of tremendous accomplishments. We acquired two technological platforms that long-term are going to assist us in becoming more technologically intensive and driven and where we can specifically lower our cost to collect and increase our ability to collect against the same level of nominal claims. We've dramatically improved our servicing franchise. You've already seen the numbers over the last few quarters. I think this will continue to accelerate into 24. Our cost-saving target was achieved, the 600 originally, expanded to 800. We've now hit the 800 on a runway basis. We're going to continue to expand upon that and add to it. to have a mentality and a culture of continuous improvement, specifically addressing one of our major headwinds, which is inflation. We did two other acquisitions, which are consistent with our strategy of market leadership in the UK and Spain. Being number one is important. Being the largest is important in our service, in our industry. It accrues significant benefits over the long term. These two acquisitions made us number one in UK and Spain. And then we did, obviously, as I just mentioned, the material asset sale to accelerate our strategy and to raise important liquidity. So it was a year of significant activity, significant accomplishment. And I think we've laid the foundation of the base to enter into 24 in the best possible fashion we could, given the environment and given our development as a company. With that, I'll hand it over for the financial overview to Emil, and then I'll give some wrap-up comments at the end, and we'll turn to questions. Emil?

Thank you, Anders, and good morning. My name is Emil Folksson, and I've been at Interim for the past eight years and are now primarily looking after our investor relations functions. Turning to page 14. The trend of growing adjusted income continues for the fourth consecutive quarter, up 8% to 5.5 billion compared to last year. The full year adjusted income is up 5% to 20 billion flat. The growth is primarily driven by M&A activities in our servicing segment. The increased cost that we have discussed throughout the year are affecting our profitability with our adjusted EBIT down 1% for the quarter and 13% for the full year. Adjusted net financial tax came in 3% lower in the quarter. And for the full year, net financial tax increased by 23% to 4.3 billion, which reflects the higher interest rates, as well as increasing in the gross debt of circa 6 billion on average throughout the full year. The leverage ratio remained at 4.4 times during the quarter, despite us paying the dividend and we're closing all the eCollect platforms. In the quarter, we also had a positive impact on leverage from the FX movements. Now looking at page 15 and the progress of our cost program. To date, we have achieved the majority of the runway cost savings targets. The majority of these savings are relating to the redundancies, adding other efforts such as IT contract renewals and termination, plus reduction of general spending. It stacks up to run rate savings of 800 million by end of 2023. Of this, 300 million is visible in the full year's result. In the graph, we're trying to visualize the effect. So we're starting at the baseline rolling 12 months cash cost by the first quarter of 2023. The first bar represents the actual savings by year end of 300 million. second bar shows that with organic decreasing volumes we managed to further reduce our cost base with 400 million as you can see in the third bar these savings are reversed due to our mna activities which increased our costs by circa 800 million the fourth and the fifth bar represent the inflation and currency effects which are both out of our control and they are adding 1.1 billion in increasing costs all in all uh the total cost increase of 1.1 billion compared to the baseline, baseline cost based on the first quarter of 2023 for the full year 2023. The cost to achieve today is 230 million, and we expect the full cost to achieve will come in below one times the total savings. I'm now looking at page 16 in our servicing segment. In the fourth quarter, we saw significant increase in external income amounting to 3.4 billion, a 17% increase in the quarter versus 10% increase in the full year 2022. This is driven by acquisition as well as organic growth in Northern and Middle Europe. As you saw on page six, we are seeing organic growth in these two regions, also at significantly higher margin. As Anders mentioned, the southern European region is a different environment where you essentially work out the stock. And that stock is by nature leading to a natural organic decay. In addition, last year we lost this REB contract and towards the end of the year we accelerated the cash income related to a specific contract in Italy. If we're adjusting for this effect, the total organic growth for this segment will be close to zero, both on a quarterly and yearly basis. As you can see, the elevated cost in segment affects the segment's profitability with adjusted EBIT down 8% in the quarter and 7% for the year. Regarding our investment business, now looking at page 17, as a function of the slower investment pace, we will have a natural reduction in our adjusted income and adjusted EBIT, which increased 4% and 5% respectively during the quarter. However, we do continue to have the resilient cash collection versus our forecast. The collections came in at 103% and 102% versus active forecast for the quarter and the year respectively. The segment delivered a stable ROI of 14% for the quarter and for the year. During the quarter, we made new investments of 532 million at an underwriting ROI of 19%. In the full year 2023, we deployed 5.5 billion versus new or in new portfolios, and these are expected to deliver 16% unlevered IRR. In line with our target to extract cash from our investing segments, we had a net cash extraction of 2.2 billion in the quarter and 5.4 billion for the full year. And we expect the cumulative net cash extraction to increase in 2024 as we have reduced our on-balance investment base and our collections remain extremely resilient. Looking at my last page, slide number 18, you have the net debt development in the top left corner. As illustrated, the 2 billion of net cash flow in the fourth quarter has by and large funded the dividend as well as our investment activities and M&As. In addition to this, we also have a positive currency effect on the reported net debt of 1.7 billion. In the bottom left corner, you can see the return gap between our underwriting IRR, average underwriting IRR on balance, and our average cost of funding, which remains at the healthy level above 10%, despite the fact that our average cost of funds is increasing with higher market rates. If you look at the maturity profile, so the graph to the top right, it's in principle unchanged compared to the third quarter. But with the announcement made on Tuesday night, we expect to repay a portion of the drawn RCA. And we will be able to address the maturities in 2024 and 2025 with liquidity and organically generated cash flow as they become due. With that, I'll hand back to Anders for some final remarks.

Perfect. Thank you, Emil. I am now on page 20, where we look at our starting point, how we've done in the quarter, and then our targets. So the top is the starting point. The middle is the quarter. The bottom of the target is left to right on servicing income or revenue growth. You can see we had a very good quarter. I'm not worried. Given the dynamics in the marketplace, I am not worried about top lines. We started off the 18 percent margin. We have a target of 25. The quarter is at 16. These are the headwinds of the specific factors I mentioned earlier. We're addressing that in many different ways with the tactical cost cutting measures plus the increase focused on higher underwriting margins in that business that will reverse in the coming periods. The investment portfolio is at 41 billion. We have a target of going down to 30 billion. It is at 37 billion officially but pro forma for The transaction we announced a couple of days ago were already below $30 billion. So that target, at the very least, based on the completion of that transaction, is achieved. And then the leverage ratio, as I explained earlier, we started at $4.6. We're now at $4.4. The $3.5 as a result of that transaction that we announced earlier does get pushed into $26. We are taking other measures to bring that back sooner, and hopefully as soon as restoring it to the end of 2015. On page 21, just to recap over the near term tactical measures, we said we were going to lower investments. We did it. We said we were going to exit certain markets. We exited five. We're evaluating an additional three. We said we were going to exit a part of our back book. We did so in, I think, as positive a fashion as possible with the announcement earlier this week. And we're already well on our way to achieving our cost reduction targets. But I think cost reduction needs to be something that needs to be continual. So reducing leverage and de-risking the platform, we are delivering everything we said we were going to as of the middle of last year and in particular in September at our CMD. Long term, our goals are the same. We want to grow profit, we want to be the leading servicer, and we want to be a capital light asset management platform in the consumer NPL space. Part of the acquisitions we made of the tech platforms in 23 Part of what we did, we planted the seeds as part of our tactical back book sale for third party capital going forward. All of that is moving in that direction. And I think it's going to help us achieve the targets I outlined on the prior page on or sooner than promised. And with that, I'll just conclude. Again, good quarter. Very strong end to what was a challenging year. We've created, I think, the foundation to enter 24 on a very strong basis. And now we're happy to take your questions.

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Jacob Hesselvik from SEB. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Good morning, everyone. How are you doing?

I'm good. By the way, I'm going to worry next time you're not the first person in the queue because you're consistently the first person in the queue. And I thank you for that.

We need to keep some type of order, I guess. But let's start on the cost program. Andreas, you mentioned you expect to exceed the 800 million and do additional cost savings. Could you quantify these in a bit more detail, please?

Well, again, our cost program was originally 600. as you know, then we revised it to more than 800. To be very clear, our nomenclature that we used or the wording we used was more than 800. We've hit the 800. It's going to have a full effect, plus we're going to expand it. My personal view is that we'll get well above a billion, but that is just on the original perimeter of the original cost-cutting program. We are then obviously on a continual basis looking at everything we do and figuring out how we can be more efficient But also at the same time, how do we become more effective? And efficiency is additional areas where we could potentially reduce costs without impacting revenues. Those always present themselves, and we always try to pursue those. We're going to do that in 24. But then more effective means lowering my cost to collect while increasing my collections rate and delivering a better result for our client. That's more about long-term impact of Ophelos, eCollect, and also just in general, improving our technological platform as it relates to our collections systems architecture. So that's my overview of the cost initiatives, Jacob.

All right, very clear. But given your earlier comment that to execute the cost savings program, you will have to take upfront cost relating to less than one times the savings, then we should expect additional IAC in H1. But do you have any comment on how front-loaded you expect these costs to be?

It's a good question. Unfortunately, a big part of the cost-cutting measures are reducing platforms of people. That has to be done market by market. Some of them have shifted into 2024. We will have additional one-time costs related to that. We've taken a big part of it already, but we will have additional costs to that. I don't have the exact figure at hand right now.

All right. But if we look into 2024, then how do you expect your M&A agenda to look, which also brings quite a bit of cost for you?

Well, I want to be clear about that M&A cost. That M&A cost comes with a much bigger revenue perimeter and client perimeter. So let's be clear. It does add cost, but that's just one dimension. It obviously adds revenue and clients and other things. But your question is a good one. Our agenda right now is that we are assuming we're not doing any M&A for the foreseeable future unless it is highly attractive and highly tactical, which I don't see on the horizon. You can imagine we need to digest what we have. We need to ultimately extract the benefits that we're expecting to extract from our current perimeter of businesses. But at the same time, the environment is evolving. The sector is consolidating. We are the first call as the leader in the sector. We're the first call in all processes. But what that means is that we can be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly selective and disciplined, but I don't foresee M&A anytime soon.

Okay, that makes sense. And if we move over on a slight different topic, we do see MPLs increasing in the niche banks in Northern Europe, and I would guess the same is happening in the Middle and South of Europe. And waiting for the financial claims have been a lot like waiting for Godot. But are they finally within reach for you in interim?

Listen, you're absolutely right. And I've been through these cycles two or three times in my life, both in Europe and in Asia. And it never comes exactly as you expect it, but it does come eventually. It's inevitable. It is coming. There is no doubt about it. Up until now, you've seen stage two loans basically explode. You've seen anecdotally with banks talking about the fact that they're coming. You now see things like out of the UK, which is, again, as I always say, seems to be the market that is always leading the cycle, the progression through the cycles. You see banks, they're very worried about their consumer credit portfolios. It is coming. It is coming over the next one, two, three years. I think what's good, and I've said this before in this forum, is that the industry is established now, not like the great financial crisis. So there's no stigma about sellers. Sellers are sophisticated. There is a whole apparatus, including us and advisors, et cetera, to facilitate sales. What you will see is these assets will come first into our servicing business. And then as the holders of these assets, principally the banks, but also others, get a handle on what volumes they're getting. And then also get a sense of what price the market is willing to give them. You'll see that price discovery take place. And then ultimately it will manifest itself in investment volumes. That with a lag, but servicing first, then investing. But the volumes are coming. I'm certain of that.

All right. So I guess that would be supportive for your EBIT margin then to develop positively in servicing in the fairly near future.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And if we do any investment partnerships, for example, and we scale up our investment activity, that will allow us to make more investments but fund fewer, but more importantly is purely additive to our servicing projections. And that's in none of the numbers we've shared with anyone yet, Jacob.

Okay. But do you expect on servicing EBIT, do you think it's going to be driven by higher margin on collection or will it be that indirect cost will develop favorably going forward?

I think it's both. Actually, I think it's both. I think we're going to have a primary margin benefit of the new business coming in and focusing more on our collections activity, being more intelligent around our collections activity. I mean, we took almost somewhere, almost 160 million activities last year. I think we can significantly reduce those and still collect more. But I also think we have indirect costs. We need to be more efficient, particularly in selected markets. I think it's both, Jacob.

Okay, very clear. Just one final question for me. So we move over to investing side. You have now resized your back book, and then I guess we should begin to focus on the front book, which you also mentioned before. But let's say Interim invests $2 billion in 2024, and then Capital Partners invests $8 billion, i.e. a total of $10 billion. Then assuming we have no leverage, your income in investing division should be similar as if you only invested $2 billion, right? But on servicing, you will now do internal collections of $10 billion instead of just two, i.e. five times as much? Or am I misunderstanding the potential setup here?

No, you are exactly understanding the correct phenomenon. The investing business will continue at its run rate of $2 billion, so it will continue net taking out cash because it's below replacement. But the $8 billion, which is the incremental perimeter, all goes to servicing.

Okay, very good. No wonder you're not worried about top line then.

Okay.

Thank you, Jacob, very much.

The next question comes from Patrick Bertelius from ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Patrick. Thank you. Good morning. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you perfectly.

Perfect. Thank you. First, a question on tax here in Q4. It was much higher than what I had expected. What happened there?

When I hear tax, I ask Emil to respond.

The reason for the effective tax rate is because we have earnings in countries where we don't have corresponding tax assets to counterbalance them. So that will fluctuate, but over time it will call it normalized and be in line with the guidance of about 25% over a full cycle.

Yeah, so we have earnings, obviously, in different jurisdictions vary from period to period. This quarter it happened to be where we had more earnings, book earnings, in places where we didn't have offsetting tax assets, and therefore it increased our effective tax rate. That, through the cycle, as Emil said, should be should normalize and should offset, and we should be at roughly a 25% tax rate through the cycle.

Thank you. And for future reference, which regions are these?

It's market by market. It's literally market by... It's not about regions, it's about market by market, and it's way too... I don't think it's worth getting into what markets are not, because there's no regional focus. It's literally market by market, and it's quarter to quarter, so it can shift.

Okay, fair. If we go into the collectability, you highlight, and we also saw that in the slide, that it has trended down. Do you see that this is negatively accelerating, or how do you perceive this will progress the coming quarters?

See, I think, I mean, obviously, our active forecast gets adjusted for expected collections. That's an important thing that everyone should realize. So, in theory, we should be close to around 100, but there's always somewhat of a lag. There's always more overperformance in individual quarters. But we have never in 18 years gone below 100, except once. It went down at the pandemic to 99, and it popped right back up. But what's interesting is it not only went from 111 to 103, so we outperformed by less, but also our underlying active forecasts are not being increased by as much, both of which indicate that there's a more difficult collections environment. We will continue, what's beautiful, beautiful may not be the right word, but what's good about us is that we have the largest and the most capable industrial collections capability in the industry. So we can deploy resources where we see underperformance in order to address it and we consistently outperform. So that industrial capability, that experience in history allows us to manage this figure. But it is inevitably, and obviously becoming more difficult to collect. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

If you look at collection performance versus the original underwriting forecast, we came in at 111% for the full quarter and 108% for the full year last year.

Exactly. Showing that we have adjusted those original forecasts, obviously, over time.

But the delta here, do you foresee that you highlighted some negative aspects in the UK, but do you believe that the falling rates will help the disposable income and will help the collectability in the second half of 2024? Or how do you view that from the macro perspective?

Obviously, falling interest rates will help. But I don't think we've felt the full impact of the increase in interest rates that we've envisioned. particularly in the residential mortgage sector, which will have a knock-on effect into our assets. So I think that equation may turn, but the manifestation of higher interest rates on the credit quality of banks and, in turn, the creation of MPLs has a significant lag. The environment could be getting better as of next year at a rate that in the rate environment could be getting better next year, but MPLs still could grow for two or three or four years. As evidence, the great financial crisis happened in 2008, But MPLs continue to grow in Europe through into 2015.

Thank you. That's fair. My next question is a little bit on the topic that Jacob touched upon. And I know you answered, but I will try to format it in a different way. But you had like 250 million in adjustments affecting comparability in this quarter. You've had different adjustments for a number of years now. How should we think about these adjustments looking into 2024, which will be the driving forces? Do you think it will accelerate? And any color on this will be very helpful, please.

We estimate it to come down in 2024. Presently, we're expecting, which includes the cost-saving programs and other larger projects, but the estimate is that we'll have roughly one billion switch-crawling IDCs during next year, and they are expected to be a bit front-loaded. I mean, back to the So the comment Andres made that a lot of these are coming from redundancies in the cost-saving programs, which then naturally comes earlier in the year.

Thank you. Very helpful. And my last question is a little bit more regarding strategic thinking. If Cyprus were to come back and ask for you to divest an additional 11.5 billion at the same terms, Are you then a seller or how do you think about that? Or are you satisfied with the back book you have?

The short answer is no. We did this tactically and in this size to satisfy servers, satisfy ourselves with liquidity. We have reduced to under 30. My point is not to go to zero on proprietary investments, to be very clear. It is to bring it down to a level and then to grow our investing business, not with my balance sheet, but with third-party capital. This was an important step towards that. I would like to maintain the circa $30 billion investment portfolio, but grow our overall investment activity to well beyond that with third-party capital. That's part of having an asset management model vision. But the answer to your question is if they came back and said they want to do an equivalent deal, I would say no.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Patrick.

The next question comes from Ermin Kerik from Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Hi, Andres. I liked the bridge you gave us on cost. Could you just help us there? How should we think about the salary inflation for 2024? How are you thinking there?

That's a very good question. The salary inflation in 23 was very elevated by selected markets and overall higher than anything on the history. We do think that that is moderating. There's no doubt about it. But also inflation doesn't just impact salaries. It impacts lots of third party servicing, contracts, et cetera, for services we receive. As I said in my opening comments, as I said in various media interviews, inflation is a headwind we need to attack head on. We're doing so in a variety of ways. The cost-cutting measures most directly, and we need to continue to add to and expand our cost-cutting perimeter such that we continue to force efficiencies and offset, if not exceed, the impact of inflation. But it is going to be less than 23, but it's still going to be meaningful. We need to continue to be mindful of it.

Thanks, Esther. Then on Southern Europe, you mentioned how you have kind of stocks on servicing would just have a natural decay over time. I mean, more conceptually, how should we actually think about servicing in Southern Europe? Is that really as capitalized as it is in the rest of Europe, since you kind of need to reinvest in these contracts or buy the units from time to time?

Okay, well, let me explain. There's two elements to your question. First off, in Southern Europe, the Southern European businesses are very large. They were created... in Spain originally, then in Italy, and then more recently in Greece, with a large one-time transfer of assets from bank balance sheets to servicing balance sheets, to external servicing, and in some cases purchased by us, which means there's a very large stock that collects, call it circa 5% a year, and it's going to continue to be collecting for a very, very long time. New inflows, because such a large stock was transferred, new inflows are still not accelerating. They are somewhat. but they're not accelerating sufficiently to offset the decay, which is why on a net basis that business's perimeter is declining. But that will turn, okay, to be very clear. And that's why you see the phenomenon, and it's also our highest margin business. So even flat in our highest margin contracts is actually a very important contributor to our bottom line. The second point is what you said about paying for contracts. Historically, that is what happened. It started in Spain. where banks needed the capital and then it was done in Italy and most recently it was done in Greece. What's interesting is going back to Spain is a perfect example of it's the most advanced market in this regard, where you go from financial and industrial transactions to purely industrial transactions. That market doesn't do the whole selling contracts anymore. At least we won't do it also, but our major clients, we have every major client in Spain. We've already renegotiated some of our older clients. older contracts that had financial elements down to slightly lower margins, longer term contracts without any upfront payment. So you would think of it as still very high by our standards above the 25%, but also an industrial margin as opposed to an industrial plus financial margin. Spain is by far the most advanced. And a more recent example is the contract we got from building center last year, which there was no, it was tender. It was a competition, but we wanted on our capability, not on our ability to our willingness to write a check. That is going to flow into Italy and is flowing also into Greece. And the new inflows aren't sufficient to reduce the decay on the net or to offset the decay. But I wanted to make sure to distinguish these two things. That's the dynamic on the top line. Also, these markets are evolving and becoming much more industrial, which is to our favor, by the way, and will eliminate this phenomenon of having to pay for contracts.

Thank you very much. That was a very helpful color on that. Then maybe just lastly on capital partnerships, I 100% agree that that sounds like a very lucrative setup over time when it grows, but just to not get ahead of ourselves or if I'm thinking about it the wrong way maybe, but when you talk about adding maybe 8 billion of capital partnership, you deploy 10 in total, you are doing 2 billion and then 8 billion from a partner. I mean, if I look at your total AUM on servicing, that's like 2,100 billion. So that would add less than half a percentage point. Am I thinking about it the right way, or is it a higher margin on this, or how should I think about it?

You're not thinking about it wrong, but let me give you a little bit more detail and a little bit more precision. If you think about your example, that doesn't start day one. It didn't start January 1. It most likely is going to start, I would assume, sometime in the second quarter, so you have a partial year. Then your first year, you're correct and that this is not a big percentage but it actually will be purely additive but we're talking about you know tens of millions of ebit impact in the first year what's very important is that it starts compounding so if you have eight billion now and then another eight billion next year or partial year of eight billion now and a partial um uh another new eight billion next year and thereafter it really starts compounding and then you have you know significant increase um significant increase in financial impact. The other point I will make for you is $8 billion is purchase price, whereas $2 trillion is nominal value. Those are apples and oranges. $8 billion of purchase price could mean 30 times that in nominal value. So you need to make sure to put that in context. The $8 billion of purchase price is small relative to our AUM but one is purchase price, the other one is AUM. The $8 billion will represent potentially 20 to 30 times that in actual AUM.

Got it. That's very clear. Thank you.

Thank you, Herman.

The next question comes from Wolfgang Felix from Soria Limited. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Oh, hi. Hello. Good morning. Thank you very much for the call and congratulations on the back book sale. I just have a few questions remaining. With respect to that back book sale, could you tell us a little bit more about what kind of assets are in there, whether maybe by region or are they more forward flow or are they new assets or how should we think about those? And will that sale, I guess, count towards the 3.9? leverage target and then um the other cash EBITDA leverage target I guess and and um I was wondering about the relatively what once more the relatively sudden deterioration in um the collectability uh I mean obviously it's been sort of going tough through last year already but um Do you feel we're at the nadir here? Is it going to be another quarter like this before there's going to be an improvement, or do you, and I realize you've sort of said this a few times already in various ways, but it would be good to hear one more time how long you think this valley will last. And then the lower servicing earnings, Can you remind me again why the margin on the servicing earnings has been falling and how you're turning that around?

You've thrown out three things. Let me address them, and if I forget them, remind me, please. So the sale, and thank you for your congratulatory words. It is a very widespread portfolio. As I said earlier in my comments in the presentations, 10,000 underlying portfolios in 13 out of our 20 countries. These are seasoned assets. They're not fresh assets. They're seasoned assets. Thus, the low purchase price relative to nominal value. And they are very representative of our older portion of our book. So there's, you know, that gives you a little bit more color. on the type of assets, and they're all basically, with very few exceptions, consumer unsecured assets, to be clear.

Sorry, go ahead, please. I was just wondering, should I think of these assets as mostly worked out at this point, or mostly still sort of untouched and outstanding?

Well, I mean, to be clear, there's 382 or 392 billion of nominal value. As long as a claim has a nominal value, it's not been worked out, to be clear. When something's worked out, it gets put out. So it still has 30 billion euros, more than 30 billion euros of claims, which means we haven't. And we're only assuming we collect on this, you know, sub 10%. That's the beauty of this business. I mean, that's the beauty also of holding long tails as well, because you can collect for a very, very long time. These assets are not worked out.

Okay, thank you. Yes.

Then the second question you asked is about collectability, and are we at the nadir or the valley, and how long does – I mean, again, over 18 years, we consistently exceed our underwriting. We consistently exceed our active forecast. We adjust our underwriting into our active forecast for current changes in the collections expectations. That will continue. Okay. As you correctly said, I mean, you said sudden, but then you recognize that it's been that way for the last year. The last three or four quarters have been hovering just above 100. So we haven't been outperforming by as much, which is reflection of the environment. But we don't expect to hit below 100, to be very clear. We expect to actually hit our active forecast. And also the process lends us towards getting towards 100 because we continually adjust our active forecast. What I will say also is that while we've historically adjusted our active forecast very meaningfully up We are adjusting that less up recently, as you can imagine, because the curves reflect the environment. You can't get away from that. Are we in the valley? You have to recognize that this collectability is going to then feed into assets that come into the system, which then later on accumulate, which we're collecting against and potentially own, which then when the environment improves, which is the leading indicator, the economic environment, and these assets have already been accumulated, the collectability improves. That's the beauty of the cycle. Collectability comes down. Assets accumulate with our clients. Our number of cases increase, but our collectability comes down. We buy assets. Then the environment improves. Collectability improves. And we collect more for our clients and more for our own investments. That's the way the cycle works. So are we at a valley? Will this continue? I suspect that the challenging collections environment will continue. I can't tell you for how many quarters, but it will continue. And I think eventually we're going to see higher investment volumes. then ultimately higher collectability to really uh provide the return on those investment volumes okay thank you i understand then the last question i think you asked was about the servicing margin the servicing margin is a challenge because we have been growing as you saw in our lower margin areas we've been growing in middle and northern europe and that's our lower margin areas and we've been stable to slightly down in our highest margin area, which is Southern. That's math. You know, that's the weighted average obviously comes down. Also, we haven't had the focus that we had in 23 previously on margins, direct margins on this business. You saw that all our new business is at significantly higher margins. And also on indirect costs, our cost cutting measures are largely targeted after that. None of this includes our primary cost to collect minus conversion rate. So ultimately, long-term, we're going to fundamentally improve our primary margin. But for now, we have a weighting average, which is bringing down the margin, which we're going to reverse. This new business is going to flow in, and our tactical cost measures are going to take effect to reverse this impact. I'm confident we're going to hit the 25 within the committed timeframe.

Okay, thank you very much. I just have maybe one tiny last question, and that is the – whether or not the back book sale will be counting towards the target at three and a half times cash EBITDA leverage?

I don't really understand the question of that, but what I think I'll say is, yes, it obviously factors in. It impacts cash EBITDA and the leverage, all of the liquidity we're getting from it will lower our leverage. But ultimately, as I said earlier, Because we're foregoing future earnings in lieu of current liquidity, and we haven't factored in the returns we're getting into from the retained 35% stake in 24-25, ultimately, that 3.5 target has been pushed out into 26. We are taking other measures, as I've said a few times on this call, to improve profitability, to regain profitability, to regain cash EBITDA that will bring it back sooner, with the goal of bringing it back to the end of 25.

But very technical. We have performed out the effect of this parameter. Correct. Andres mentioned that with this transaction, we increased the performer leverage to 4.6x.

Yes. We talked about that on Tuesday's presentation. Thank you, Wolfgang. Okay. Thank you.

The next question comes from Harris Papadopoulos from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. Hi, good morning. Three questions on my side, please. The first one, you have mentioned a few times that following the Cerberus deal you can cover your debt obligation between 24 and 25 with liquidity. This is in case the market doesn't reopen for you. But I was wondering if you did not end up with enough liquidity to cover them and the market remained closed for you, What other liquidity levers do you have to pull in terms of like some ordinary capacity, for example? Or you've mentioned NPL spending is guided for like 2 billion SEC. This is foreclosed. These are contractual agreements. But could you go below perhaps? Or any other liquidity levers you could discuss, please?

Well, obviously, there's a whole host of potential levers. Thankfully, we did get the back book deal done. So we have it just based on that plus organic cash flow. We have met these maturities. Although I want to be clear here, it doesn't mean we're not going to be in the market. What it means is we don't have to be in the market. We are likely to remain in the market to some degree to get even more flexibility going beyond 24 and 25. But we have other levers. We could go from two down to zero. We could put in additional cost-cutting measures. We could, in an extreme case, raise equity, for example. There's a whole host of other levers we could pull. if for whatever reason that back book sale liquidity wasn't available to us, which thankfully it was, and it is, and it has been, and on very good terms, actually. So that's how we look at it.

Sorry, the subordination capacity now, how much further do you have?

This transaction actually doesn't consume any subordination or security capacity. So we still have... We still have the ERCF.

The ERCF goes down in capacity, but I was wondering, within the DOC, how much more availability could you raise?

That's not subordination, to be clear. The ERCF has to come down because it's a function of ERC. Emil can explain that. But that's not subordination capacity. Those are two different things, to be clear.

Yeah, but the ERCF DOC has a limit. Yeah.

100 million euros in additional secured funding capacity. And that's under the credit. It's 35% of 84 months is the RCS capacity. Thank you.

And then for the three countries that are under review, what sort of like evaluation would you look there?

I don't discuss valuations on individual countries. Those three countries, we continue to evaluate the potential exits. What's great, as I mentioned on Tuesday, about the fact that we now have the liquidity covered, not only in what we're getting from Cerberus, also we have $4 billion of cash on hand, and we have the organic generation potential over the coming months. But not only do we have, thanks to all of that liquidity, we can now look at these exits with a more disciplined eye, not focusing on the need to raise liquidity, but to focus on making sure that we get the right value relative to their cash generation potential. which is a factor of the risk environment. And we will come back to the market as we develop our thoughts and have some conclusions there. Makes sense.

And then the last one is on your cash flow statement. I see cash interest actually significantly lower than fourth quarter of last year. Could you explain why? I was surprised to see that.

So the cash was lower this year. I think that's pure decisionality effect. I mean, you have when the cash and coupons are actually paid. But happy to walk you through the cash flow statement offline. I mean, to go each individual line.

Okay. And then perhaps the very last one in terms of like the score investment partnership, you mentioned you're going to announce something this year. Is that correct? Like perhaps any more color on the partnership or the timing, please?

No, I mean, I think I've already said the timing, which is, you know, as soon as we can in 24. I'm not going to give a more precise calculation than that, but we're working on it, rest assured. It's going to be a partnership where we increase our investment activity without increasing our own funding. We're going to keep our funding at around $2 billion, plus or minus, but we're going to increase our overall volumes to something in, for example, in Ermin's example, 8 to 10, with the difference coming from a third-party capital partner or partners. We're working on it soon to come. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ermin.

The next question comes from Angeliki Bayraktari from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for taking my questions. First of all, you mentioned a few times in the call today that you're finding much harder to collect today. So I was just wondering, does that mean that there could be any risk of future write-downs also in your investing business? portfolio in your investing back book or is that not the case? Second question with regards to the cost savings, can you give us an indication of sort of the absolute cost trajectory we should have in mind for 2024? The chart that you showed in your slides today, you know, all of the cost savings have actually been offset by inflation and other sort of M&A costs, etc. Should we expect a reduction in absolute terms in the costs in 2024 or would that be too optimistic? And a third point with regards to the debt maturities in 2024 and 2025, I estimate something around 21.5 billion krona of debt maturing those two years. We know that you have 8.2 billion in net proceeds from the sale you announced two days ago. Can you remind me, please, in terms of the organic cash generation, is that expected to cover the entire sort of difference between the 21.5 and the 8.2? And if yes, how much of that is coming from servicing and how much is coming from investing in your plan? Thank you.

So thank you for the three questions. Let me go back to the first one, which is it is more difficult to collect, but we have consistently hit at or above 100. What's very important about write-downs is, remember, we're well above our underwriting forecast. So the active forecast and the underwriting forecast, we only adjust relative to our forecast. I don't anticipate any write-downs. in our investment book, to be very clear. And I think that what we did with service is a validation of that fact and that we made a very large transaction of season things at close to our book value, to be clear. And that is not a function of curves. It's a function of the risk environment. So there's a slight delta in the risk environment that led to that 2% discount on that deal, not the curves, to be very clear. Second, cost savings. You saw on page 15, 11.8 goes to 12.9. That doesn't fully reflect the full cost program and the progression of the business next year. But I believe you should see a reduction in that 12.9 during the full year 24. As we start delivering on the quarters, we can give you more visibility on that trajectory. Third, on your liquidity point, you're correct. It's a little bit over 20 billion for two years. I'm not sure if it's exactly 21 and a half billion, but it's roughly 20 billion in my head. We have 8.2 billion that we're getting from servers. You need to remember from the deal with servers, you need to remember that we have 4 billion of cash on hand. That's actually an important figure. So that gets us up to about 12. And then over the next two years, gross cash flow minus cash taxes, cash interest, and our 2 billion a year of investments should make up the difference. But I want to emphasize that we will still be in the market, and to the degree we still issue in the market, even if we downsize and push out and refinance and push out some maturities in some of these, that will give us even additional liquidity and additional flexibility, which we can then apply subsequent to the 24-25 period.

Just an additional comment to the cost. If you're looking at operation today on a like-for-like basis and stripping out M&A, so everything that's within our control, less M&A, we actually have a lower cost.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

Does that answer your questions, Angeliki?

Yes, yes, thank you very much.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Lancelot Belmont from HIG Capital. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking our questions. So the first one I just want to ask you is, you had this helpful cash flow bridge to 2025 in the CMD presentation. Given that you now have more visibility on the back book proceeds, do you think you could provide perhaps an updated version of this or walk us through it? And the reason why I'm asking is, given the disposal is slightly larger than what we initially thought, We are trying to reconcile the impact on the cumulative cash EBITDA and all the other related impacts.

I think that the question is very similar to Angelique's, where Anders actually walked through the components on the cash flow bridge we showed on the… I mean, again, the components are 8.2 plus 4 billion in cash plus organic cash flow on the growth spaces minus net financial interest and taxes. minus the $2 billion a year in investments gets you to in excess of $20 billion. So the math is not that different, by the way. Relative to the CMD, I can see perhaps slightly higher interest in there and perhaps slightly lower organic cash flow because remember, this is a dynamic equation. The more we do on the back book, the slightly less we'll have on organic gross cash flow and it flows. So, but we're the end state is that we're getting there and we are there now because the big question in September is, are you going to get the 6 billion done? Well, we got 8 billion done. Um, that does impact earnings a little bit, but we got two more billion and we do have two more billion of cash starting point now, which we had 2 billion back then. So these are things are offsetting, but largely speaking, we are now there and we're there with certainty, which is important.

Okay. That's understood. Um, and then the second one is, and I know it's been slightly, uh, asked before but I just wanted to ask on the cost saving program just to clarify that we really understand everything to the fullest so you've incurred 230 to date and then you say that you expect the program to be one times the savings so that means in the financials we can probably expect to have 230 that have flowed through but on a run rate basis it already represents 800 billion seconds And you expect this to grow next year onwards. Is that sort of I was just trying to reconcile really well. I mean, I think today you're understanding.

Yeah, I think your understanding of what is roughly correct. We've done 230 against realized point three. We do think it's going to be below a one, but we have yet to realize the remaining 500 on a full year basis. And that's going to incur costs. Um, and so that's why the, the number that Emil put out of roughly a billion expected during 24 more fun and loaded is mostly coming from that. And the 800 is going to be exceeded. So that will have come with some one-time cost as well to create a recurring benefit. So I think you're understanding it correctly.

Okay. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. And then the last one is again, it's a point that we touched upon already, but it's, uh, given the back book disposal. will impact your ERC figures. You're kind of effectively, from what we understand, reducing your RCF capacity. Now, what are the, and that kind of doesn't really help your liquidity, what are the other levers that you think you can use there to kind of alleviate that?

Again, I mean, we have a strong underlying organic cash flow. We have, to your point, the RCF capacity will be impacted by selling ERC. But we have, Anders went through the levers. I mean, we can look at our investment volumes made per year. We can look at additional cost measures. But with the plan, including the 2 billion of investments per year, we will meet the upcoming maturities in 2020?

I mean, if we hadn't, as I answered earlier, if we had not done the back book deal or for whatever reason it didn't, it was smaller or not happened, we have other ability to reduce, to increase liquidity, which is lower our investment volume, cut more costs and increase our cash flow from organic cash flow from servicing in an extreme circumstance, raise equity, et cetera. So there are other levers. Thankfully, we don't have to look at those levers. We can continue investing a meaningful amount, which is 2 billion. We have the back book. We have more cash and we have slightly less organic cash flow than we projected in the CMD because our back book deal is bigger. But we are now meeting our 20 billions over the next two years with certainty, to be clear. And we will be in the market. I'm not sure we will be refinancing these upcoming attorneys in full. We'll probably be reducing them and pushing them out in maturity, which will give us additional flexibility and additional liquidity.

Okay. And there's no, in terms of other levels relating to specifically the capital structure and not whatever you can do with the business, is there any other secured capacity that you think you can use?

Well, I mean, we have, as Emil said earlier, we do have under our governance additional secure capacity of 100 million, but that could be used if we needed to. Like, for example, last quarter, we did one on a bilateral basis with a bank in Southern Europe. And we could pull that lever as well. But, I mean, largely speaking, the levers are the ones I described.

Okay. Okay, that's understood. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Antoine.

The next question comes from Lars Christian Dueser from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning, guys. A few questions from my side this morning. So first of all, on the Cerberus JV again, can you confirm there that on the one hand, you will receive 8.2 billion net proceeds? That's what you have disclosed. But then at the same time, on the last call, you said that the RCF availability pro forma for it will reduce by call it 7 billion to 13 billion.

Yeah, that's, again, the technical implications of our super senior leverage in our bond covenants.

Okay, so net basically existing liquidity improves by a billion, right?

A bit more than a billion, actually, to be clear. A bit more. There's required reduction in the RCF, but there's still, I think it's almost two billion, if I remember correctly, the incremental liquidity.

Got it, got it. Thank you. And then the second one, if I look at your cap structure now as of Q4, I get actually to 22 billion Swedish kronor of maturities in 24 and 25. It depends a bit if you include the CPs. You clearly should include this new term loan you raised in Q4 last year. So against the 22 billion of METs, we have 8 billion roughly of net proceeds from the sale. And then to be fully covered by organic cumulative free cash flow. At least, you know, my take is you really have to deliver on obviously the servicing growth, right? The 10% CAGR you have communicated at the CMD. Now, given that is so important, otherwise the operating, the leveraging we see on the investing side is quite high and painful. Can you not give a bit more color maybe on that external servicing growth for this year? How much of the 10% CAGR will be already achieved this year? Can you maybe even, like you did on cash EBITDA, give a range, a guidance range in terms of year-over-year growth rates for that?

Sure. Sure, Lars. I just want to, before I get into some description around my confidence on servicing, I want to just make sure that we have the numbers right. And I've said it a couple of times on the call. There's $8.2 billion of proceeds that are coming from the deal. There's $4 billion of cash on hand. Then you look at gross cash flow, which will be slightly less than the CMD plan because of the larger perimeter on the back book deal. Gross minus cash taxes, cash interest, and minus the $2 billion a year of investing. gets us to the roughly 20 plus or minus billion, okay? That is the analysis. You are correct that to achieve our organic cash flow targets, we are assuming servicing growth. Part of that servicing growth comes from full year impact of the M&A we did. Part of it comes from organic growth, which we're witnessing, as I said earlier, between middle Europe and northern Europe. And part of it comes from expansion of our margin, which I've already talked about and addressed several times here. We are confident in the top line. Everything we presented earlier should give, I think, you confidence that the top line is not the issue. We are confident we are addressing the bottom line. And I think we would not have put what we did in front of you at the C&D if we weren't confident in it. If anything, I'm more confident in it today than I was back then.

OK, fair enough. I mean, with the only caveat under stress that maybe the $4 billion cash on hand is not excess cash, right, in the truest sense, because you also have clearly minimum cash needs at around $2 to $2.5 billion or so.

No, that's fair. That's fair. That's fair. But the $2 billion, you could say the same thing about the $2 billion we did at CMD, and you can argue that this is really a theoretical exercise because we are going to be in the market. But it is a risk metric that we were very keen on achieving, to be clear.

Okay, but I understand that you want to be in the market, but given the servicing growth is, you know, so vital for regaining market access, why can't you not at least tell us, you know, will this 10% CAGR be achieved in 24 already? Will it be front-end or back-end loaded? I would just love to get a bit more, you know, color on it. That's what I would have hoped for.

Let me give you some color. You can look at the servicing, the projection we showed in the CMD. And you can assume that servicing will be slightly better, PI will be slightly worse in 2024 by virtue of the larger back book deal. That's a simple way to look at it. And the underlying organic growth acts this switch from one pocket to the other we're extremely confident in and we're going to achieve. What this deal does is that it makes PI or investing slightly smaller and it makes third party servicing slightly bigger because we've shifted from one pocket to the other. That should be, I think, between these comments and you looking at that page in our CMD, you should get more than enough color. Okay, okay.

I will follow up with you guys. I mean, it's, you know, obviously, yes, an important one in the puzzle overall. But I appreciate your answer on that. And then maybe, you know, the other one, RCF and the bank discussions. That's a maturity, I think, Gen 26. It's now drawn pro forma probably for the back book sale around 5 to 6 billion. So clearly it has come down, but then given the availability, it comes down. On a percentage basis, probably drawn around 40% pro forma. So what I would like to understand a bit, how do you think about that RCF? You now become also increasingly a very asset line business. So, you know, how can we think about the negotiations you have with the banks? What do you try to achieve on that one?

Lars, I mean, I'm not going to discuss any negotiation tactics or how they progress here and now. I mean, we have an active dialogue with the full set of banks in our CF and they are supporting our business. I mean, in the transition from a more capital intense to a capitalized structure. So that is progressing well, I would say. I think it would be realistic to assume a similar amount of the capacity, so call it 1.1 billion euro in the upcoming refinancing of the RCF.

Yeah, I mean, I think if anything, this measure we've taken on the back book makes it, gives us greater confidence that we're going to be able to extend and negotiate and extend an RCF on a reduced size, which is commensurate with the way we want to manage the business.

Got it. Got it. And then last but not least, appreciate you take all these questions. On the Eastern European exit, you are still working on in Q2 last year. And that was, you know, back in the day, Michael LaDorner, he basically disclosed that it's roughly 80% of groups book value. So back in the day, it was like around $3 billion. Can you give an update on that number as of Q4? And then maybe can you also share a bit color on the NPLs in these Eastern European markets in terms of maybe age, average balance, and so on, compared to what we have seen in the new Cerberus JV?

So, sorry, I don't follow your question, Lars. Do you mind repeating the first half of it?

Yeah, sure. So when this Eastern European exit was initially brought up, I think it was in Q2 last year, Michael on the call back then shared that these are NPLs accounting for roughly 8% of your book value back then.

And I remember now, sorry, Lars, I remember now. And roughly at the CMD, the 6 billion that was espoused was roughly half market exits, half back book sales, to be clear. That book value in those markets is still roughly accurate, yes.

Got it. And when we compare it to the Cerberus JV, where you achieved a value realization in the 90s relative to book, And these were very seasoned assets and obviously a diversified pool of assets with high average balance, right? I think 9,000 euros or so. How does it compare to what we have in Eastern Europe? Like, is this a very similar kind of book in terms of this? Yeah.

No, no, it's a very good question. I don't mean to cut you off there. I apologize. It's a very, very good question. It's part of the reason that we now, by virtue of having done this, deal can look at those with a sharper eye and a more disciplined view on are we getting the right value in that process, which are ongoing. Those assets are, I would argue, probably around same mintages to slightly fresher. They're obviously specific to those geographies and those geographies are higher risk, higher return. So the value would imply a higher return if we just sold one of those countries, for example. And that's why I'm happy that we can look at it with a little bit more of a disciplined eye to cash generation as opposed to necessity of liquidity.

Got it. Got it. So you won't be a seller in any event. And if this is a deal which would be too re-leveraging for whatever reason, you wouldn't just trade again liquidity for leverage. Let's put it that way.

I think that's a fair description.

Got it. Thank you so much. Very helpful.

Thank you, Lars. I think that's it. I'm not sure.

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Thank you all for listening to us and also for your very, very good questions. As we've mentioned a few times with some of you, we're always available offline to bilaterally discuss with you any elements of this. I know some of you listening we're meeting later today and in the coming days, so we look forward to seeing you. Thank you for listening and have a great day.