Nordnet AB (publ)

Okay, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the presentation of Nordnet's first quarter of 2026. My name is Marcus Lindberg, and I'm the head of investor relations at Nordnet. Joining me today is our CEO, Rasmus Hjelborg, and our CFO, Lennart Krän. Rasmus and Lennart will present the results, and then we'll have the Q&A session. And if you want to ask a question, just click the right hand button in Zoom. Or if you want, you can submit a question in writing, either via Zoom or you can just send me an email. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Rasmus Jarboe. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Markus. And good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us. In the first quarter, we delivered a very strong performance. But before I get into the results, I want to take a moment for an important recognition. As this is my first quarter as CEO, I want to extend my sincere thanks to my predecessor, Lars-Åke Noling. Over his nearly seven-year tenure and our close partnership, we built a solid foundation here at Nordnet. And in most regards, the results we're reporting here today belong to him. And I'm honored to carry this momentum forward. Turning to the quarter in itself, 2026 began with a high degree of optimism. Markets hit record highs and confidence across the Nordic region continued to build. However, as we've often said, things rarely move in a straight line. As the quarter progressed, the macro environment started to weigh on sentiment. Volatility increased meaningfully, driven by concerns of AI-driven disruption in global tech sectors, and more acutely, of course, the conflict in the Middle East. Against this backdrop, Nordic's performance underscores the importance of a scaled, digital-first franchise. While our customers are retail investors, they are increasingly sophisticated. Throughout the quarter, we saw them actively reposition their portfolios, moving between equities, ETFs, and funds to navigate these shifts in markets. Our role is to be their trusted platform during these periods of uncertainty, and the engagement levels we saw this quarter suggest we're doing exactly that. Turning to slide two now for the results highlights. The headline for this quarter and a major milestone for Nordnet is that we delivered a record adjusted profit before tax of 1 billion, 42 million Swedish crowns. This is the first time in our history that we have crossed the 1 billion threshold in a single quarter, reflecting the scalability of our platform. Let's look at some of the key drivers behind these results. An elevated uncertainty led clients to reposition portfolios, driving average trades per day to 302,000. Despite turbulent markets, our funds business maintained growth as customers leaned into long-term investment strategies. Net interest income is back on a growth trajectory now, supported by both rising rates and a higher deposit balance. We achieved our highest net savings and customer intake since the pandemic with 28.8 billion Swedish crowns in net savings. One full quarter after launching our new private banking framework in all four markets, PB net savings have hit a multi-year high. We continue to operate efficiently with the cost growth strictly in line with our full year targets. When it comes to AI, we are elevating our digital experience with AI-powered insights, providing customers with personalized portfolio recaps and macro summaries directly in the app, while on the inside, our tech teams are increasingly agentic first when it comes to coding. Following my appointment as CEO, I promoted our product leaders to the executive committee, creating a new wealth management unit to reflect our ambitions within this important area. And finally, we recorded a six-year high in deposit growth while maintaining a robust 4.5% leverage ratio in line with targets. On slide three now, the financials tell a story of consistent execution. Customer, savings capital, and trades were all up meaningfully year over year, leading to record revenues of nearly $1.1 billion in the quarter, which, with costs growing in line with guidance, meant a record profit before tax of over $1 billion and an adjusted return on equity above 40%. This growth adds further ballast to our performance, reinforcing our ability to perform across market cycles. On slide four now, you can see the velocity of our growth. We added over 77,500 new funded accounts this quarter, reaching an annualized customer growth of 13.2%, which of course is within our target band of 13 to 15% customer growth. Our new customer cohorts are younger and digital native, and they're arriving with a skew towards fund-based wealth creation, which aligns perfectly with our long-term strategy. Net savings was a multi-year high at 29 billion in the quarter, a savings ratio of 10%. Turning to slide five, our top line growth is a direct function of our product velocity. We aren't just shipping features, we're solving for friction and democratizing professional grade tools for the retail investor. This quarter, we launched technical analysis tools directly in our mobile app. We're putting high-fidelity charting and complex indicators in our users' pockets and turning to have the same data visibility on the move as they do at a desk. We've deployed our AI-powered Latest Recap, which is a generative AI engine that cuts through the noise to deliver personalized news summaries tailored specifically to a user's unique holdings. We also rolled out algorithmic execution for our unique ETF monthly savings product, ensuring long-term savers get the same execution quality as professional traders. And underpinning all of this is a relentless engineering culture. We shipped 25 new versions of our award-winning app this quarter alone. This rapid iterative cycle allows us to stay ahead of the curve and respond to user feedback in near real time. Moving to slide six. Operating income has grown across all three of our diversified revenue streams, up 6% year-over-year. Transaction income was strong at $730 million, fueled by volatility-driven flows. Fund-related income hit $186 million, and NII reached $579 million, partially supported by that significant deposit recovery we saw towards the end of the quarter. Moving to slide seven, this really shows the durability of our trading business. Even as we saw some normalization in cross-border activity, revenue per trade remains healthy at 38.8 Swedish crowns per trade. And we continue to see high engagement across all four Nordic markets, but Norway stands out this quarter with a 60% year-on-year increase in traded value as customers took profit on investments in the energy sector. On slide eight, Our fund capital reached 307 billion Swedish crowns. More importantly, Nordnet branded funds now represent 29% of that total. This expansion of our proprietary offering is a testament to our ability to capture our greater share of wallet. Each quarter, the proportion of customers who own a fund edges up a percentage point or two, and this quarter is no exception, with 53% of Nordnet customers now owning a fund. Slide nine highlights our deposit growth, ending at 97.2 Swedish crowns at the end of the quarter. We saw record high net cash savings of 26 billion this quarter alone. This led to a 13 billion sequential increase in deposits from the end of quarter four, which provides a robust liquidity base as we move into the second quarter, which, as you will recall, is the period usually benefiting from dividend season. To wrap up my section here on slide 10 now, our NII turned to slight growth in the quarter at 579 million after a couple of sequential quarters of declines. While the rate environment has been dynamic, consensus IVA rates and our late quarter deposit growth positions us for further growth in 2026. I'll now hand over the call to my CFO, Leonard Curran, to walk through the expenses and capital position.

Thank you, Rasmus. And first of all, I would like to state that, yes, we continue to have this robust discipline over the costs, where we see that we will meet the financial targets of 8% excluding costs for Germany. If we look at the figures for the first quarter, it was 439 million. That is an increase of 8%, but that also includes Germany. Excluding that, that's a little bit above 5% in the quarter-to-quarter basis, from last quarter to say. And the cost for Germany was about 20 million this quarter. As I said, we will meet the targets for 2026 of 8% increase of the cost excluding Germany. And we can now go to the operating leverage. Because of this cost control, we also see that the revenue that will come into the Nordnet all ends up into the profit. Seeing with the new liquidity, the higher interest rate, we see the NII expectation is coming up. And we also see that will also end up in the forward results. So we're looking forward to keeping this operating leverage forward as well. This will also lead us up to the next slide regarding the capital situation, which is very, very strong, of course, but Less on the leverage ratio side this time as a consequence of the high deposit inflow of about 13 billion we asked for this year. So we ended up on 4.5% in leverage ratio, which is in line in the upper level of our targets, 4.0 to 4.5%. Still, this gives us a capacity of 32 billion additional deposits before we reach the regulated limit of 3.5%. Also, this deposit, this is a perfect and very, very healthy liquidity situation, of course, so I don't have to comment on that even further. Regarding the capital structure, we have 81. a bond that has its first call in November 600 million we're looking into how to solve that one if we're going to replace it or if we are going to buy it back or whatever we have also submitted an application for further share buybacks but with this deposits we will look into how to act on those later on but we need the flexibility and that's why we do those applications so a great capital and liquidity situation going forward as well Rasmus