Avanza Bank Holding AB (publ) (AZA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Avanza Bank Holding Interim Report January to June 2021. [Operator Instructions] Today, I'm pleased to present Rikard Josefson, CEO; and Anna Casselblad, CFO. Please begin your meeting.

Okay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for listening in. About the second quarter, I will start off by commenting on what we call the Facebook incident where we have ourself reported to the authorities for maybe breaking GDPR for IMY authority and then for the finance inspection also in Sweden. The status is that we have, we are in process with a good dialogue with the authorities. We do not know when this will be finalized or the consequences. But one thing to be reminded is that we can see that the data that we, so to speak, leaked to Facebook was deleted and that is confirmed by Facebook. They could not use the data, which was mostly telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. And we also are very comfortable that no customer had any bad experience or any damage due to that it happened. And also, of course, we have spent a lot of time trying to understand what actually did happen and how could we have a setting with Facebook that was not suitable for a bank. And the investigation shows that this was human error from our side. And of course, we are improving processes, making sure 2 people do change shifts and so forth. So we are learning a lot from the incident. And of course, we are also looking at all third-party integrations that we have within Avanza. And this is a relationship that we have had with Facebook since 2013. So it's a long-lasting relationship. But of course, that relationship, in this respect, is now terminated to make sure that nothing of this kind will happen again. Moving a bit more over to the business side. If you look at the customer growth, I will spend some time looking at that, we gained for the first half year 240,000 clients almost to Avanza. And just to give you a bit of perspective, if we look 18 months back in history to the 1st of January 2020, we added about 500,000 clients. We have 375,000 more clients generating brokerage income in the stock market and so forth. But we also have 365,000 more clients generating mutual funds income or are investing in mutual funds. So that's been a very satisfactory growth of the company. And a bit of flavor to that is that if you go back 30 months to the 1st of January 2019, 45% of the customer has been added to the platform in the last 30 months. So to put it a bit simple, you can say it took us 19 years to build one customer base and 30 months to almost double that customer base, which is, of course, very good news for the future. And the next slide, we are showing a bit the profile of our customer base compared to, so to speak, the population of Sweden because now we have about 12% of all people in Sweden as customers of Avanza, and we have 6.2% market share. And one explanation is, of course, that our customers are younger. The median age of a customer in Avanza is 38, and the median age in Sweden is 48, which implies that our customers are younger. They are doing careers. They're making higher income. They also be generating understanding importance of savings. And there's also the generation that will be benefiting from the wealth transformation that will take place in the next couple of years or for a long time in the future. And given that we have a churn of about 1%, it means that if we keep on focusing on keeping our clients satisfied and happy, I think with the customer base that we have, the growth in the customer base are very well positioned for the future and have a great potential. One other note with the customer base that has surpassed 1.5 million now is also that when we look at it, in more than 500,000 customers, that means 1/3 of the customer base are actually daily active users. That means that they interact with us 7 days a week all year around. And that, of course, creates stickiness. It creates a very close relationship with the customers. And in my opinion, to have 1/3 of the customer base as daily active user is -- implies that you're doing something that is appreciated by your clients and that you're part of their life in a very natural way. Going to the net inflow, which is, of course, something that we like to highlight. Because now we have for the first time in the quarter over SEK 700 billion, over SEK 714 billion in AUM or asset under management. And we had net inflows for the first 6 months of SEK 53.5 billion. And to remind us a little bit what that implies is that last year, it was a fantastic year for us Avanza. I think we had in the excess of SEK 76 billion in net inflows for the full year. And comparing that a little bit on a historical level, 2019, I think it was SEK 32.4 billion in net inflows. So of course, the net inflows has been very, very strong during the year. And also looking at market shares that we got during Q2 for Q1, we know that we now have 6.2% market share in the savings market. But more important is that during the first quarter, we took 25% of the net inflows in the Swedish savings market. That means that 1 out of 4 new kroners in the market came to Avanza. And looking at that figure on a rolling 12-month basis, it's around almost 20%. So that means that the last 12 months, 1 out of 5 new kroners into the savings market came to our platform. And also in the net inflows, we had a great year, great quarter when it comes to mutual funds where we have an AUM now of SEK 195 billion, up 71% year-on-year, which is also on a high level. Looking at inflows on monthly savings, it's now in the bank, SEK 880 million, up from SEK 615 million last year. And we had almost SEK 270 million in occupational pension on our B2B business at net inflows. So that means that over SEK 1 billion each month is automatically, so to speak, generated net inflow, which is a focus area for us, of course. When it comes to transfer of pension and the pension business, of course, we see huge interest, huge activity of customers who want to transfer pension to Avanza. But you have to take into account that the process between insurance company or life insurance company is quite burdensome still for transferring pension. So I don't expect to see any AUM signs of that, maybe in Q3 and Q4, because it still takes 60, 80, 90 days to transfer a pension and a lot of the other companies are actually doing things to hinder people from moving their pensions in my way, not a very customer-friendly way. But we see as it a great opportunity, and we see a lot of positive signs. But we want to see the figures in the balance sheet, so to speak, before we can conclude how successful we are, even though the signs are positive. The next slide shows a little bit brokerage-generating turnover per trading day and it's still on a high level. If you can see this, we have taken out 3 years, '19, '20 and '21. And of course, '21 has been a fantastic year when it comes to turnover. We saw in the second quarter that volatility went down. Stock markets moved sideways. Activity went down, but still the activity was on a very, very high level given that the Q2 was not as good as Q1 but still a very, very strong quarter. And just looking at -- if you look at Q2 2019, we go back 2 years, more than 400 -- more than 400,000 clients are generating brokerage income. So of course, the resilience of the business that we are conducting in Avanza has improved quite dramatically. The next one is, of course, the market shares in transaction turnovers. And we will just look at these pages, slightly down for us. But still we are, by far, the #1 player. We see more foreign institutions taking part of the trading, which is not a head-to-head competition with us. But also the fact that our clients are trading more and more, relatively speaking, in foreign markets and very much so the U.S. market, which is not shown in these figures. But it's important for us to keep the size and keep the distance to our competitors, which we are comfortable with. Looking at launches. Before we go into that, I think it's important to understand that not all things we do is about new products, new services, new asset classes or might be. It's also a lot about redoing the things that we do, improving information about stock, improving how to put orders, improving how you navigate on the website and the mobile app and so forth. But we have done some things that has been very appreciated by clients. For example, milestones, which we can see in social media, it's very popular to spread the word around when you reach certain milestones in your savings. And it also helps customers be motivated to see how far can they go with their savings on Avanza. And we also launched savings targets, which is newly launched. And I think it's over 100,000 clients that have used the services for savings target. And then you can visualize your goals. It could be buying a summer cottage, buying a car or whatever it could be. And you also can see how you can slowly or maybe hopefully quicker reach targets, and that is visualized in a very friendly way, which also motivates people to keep on saving, and in my opinion, also motivate people maybe to have a larger share of wallet on the platform. We also did for our customers and which is more and more who wants to make sure that their assets are sustainably invested. The Nordic Swan EcoLabel, which is a classic ecolabel in Sweden, which is also now integrated into the platform. So it's all about UX. We made a lot of improvements. And I think we have -- still, everything we do, as I always say, we can do it even better. Finalizing that, of course, employee engagement is at a high level. I'm impressed with the people working in Avanza. We're still working 75% of the staff from home. Hopefully, that will be more in the office in the fall. But who knows given all the information we got about delta viruses and so forth. But employees have done a fantastic job. The focus is, of course, growing the company, customer satisfaction and keep the strong innovation. We had our rainy days in May, and I'm very comfortable that the ideas and the pace of innovation is looking good for the future. We were also both the fourth most admired company in Sweden in Kantar Sifo survey. And by far, we're #1 in the financial industry. And we just came out also from YouGov's recommendation BrandIndex where we are the only financial institution on the top 10. So finalizing that, I think we have the size, we are well positioned and we have the customer base and have the right stuff to looking at the future with a very positive view. And having said that, I would like to turnover to Anna to go through the figures.

Thank you, Rikard, and good morning, everyone. So let's start with a short overview. Although the activity in this quarter has been lower compared to Q1, it is still the second strongest quarter and the strongest first half year we have ever seen. Due to lower transaction-related income, operating income declined by 21% compared to last quarter. I will come back to that. Underlying costs increased somewhat, up 2%, excluding the positive one-off in Q1. Remember the reverse write-down related to the premises of Vasagatan. All in all, operating profit dropped 29% in the quarter. Although looking at the accumulated figures for the first half year, I am proud to report an increase of 86% compared to same period last year. The net profit is now over SEK 1 billion, which is only 19% less than the full year profit of 2020. Return on equity was 59% in the first 6 months to be compared to a long-term target of 25% to 30%. As Rikard mentioned, we have initiated a process to review our long-term targets. An important part is, of course, to get a better understanding of the implication of our strong growth, both in terms of customers and savings capital, but it will also be a part of our overall business planning process, which will take place this autumn. The outcome of these discussions will be announced when disclosing the Q4 report in January. Earnings per share for the half year period were close to SEK 7, 83% higher than the same period last year. Stock market turnover and volatility decreased in the quarter compared to Q1, which was reflected in customer activity. Consequence, the transaction-related income was lower, but still strong. Other revenue streams increased. Net brokerage decreased by 24% in the quarter, a result of around 20% lower brokerage-generating volume and transactions. Also, brokerage income per SEK of turnover decreased from 12.2 to 11.5 bps due to a larger share of trading within the Private Banking and Pro customer segments. Foreign trading activity also decreased from the record level in Q1 and stood for 16% of turnover, which can be compared to 23% of turnover in Q1 and 12% a year ago. Please note that we, as from this quarter, have separated the net currency-related income from other income and not reported as a separate income line. Fund commissions increased by 7% compared to Q1 and 83% compared to Q2 last year, mainly due to higher average fund capital. Net inflow amounted to SEK 8.4 billion. Income per SEK of fund capital, however, decreased to 35 bps as indicated already in the Q1 report. This is due to a larger share of capital invested in index funds. Net interest income increased by 5%, mainly due to higher return on surplus liquidity and higher volumes and margin lending. Other income, which now mainly consists of revenues from about the markets and corporate finance, increased with 13% versus Q1. Corporate Finance showed another record quarter. Over to costs. Excluding the reversal of the write-down on SEK 10 million in the first quarter, which affected other expenses positively, the cost increase was 2% in the quarter. It was mainly related to personnel and in line with our recruitment plan and growth strategy to improve our offering. Average number of employees increased by 5% to 545 in the quarter. The cost guidance for 2021 remains at about 15%. This also goes for a long-term guidance of 9% to 12%. To sum up, the business development during the quarter resulted in an operating margin of 71% or 76% for the first half year. This can be compared to 65% in the first half of 2020. The income savings capital was 53 bps for the first half year, slightly higher than the same period last year, while the cost of savings capital ratio decreased from 18 to 13 bps, proving the scalability in Avanza's business model. As from end of June, Avanza's capitalization is governed by the leverage ratio requirement of 3%. Today, we are at 4.7%, to be compared to our internal target of 3.8%. We're still waiting on the clarification on the FSA bank-specific Pillar 2 guidance, which is expected at around 0.2% to 0.5%. The Pillar 2 guidance will be announced next year. Our capital position is strong, meaning we still have room to distribute another SEK 2.95 per share of last year's profit. And which already communicated, the Board has plans to propose to an extraordinary general meeting later this year when the Swedish FSA's recommendation is repeated, which is expected to be in September. Okay. To sum it up from a financial perspective, I would like to highlight a few things. We have a very low-risk balance sheet, which we intend to keep. Avanza is well capitalized with additional distribution capacity and with the policy to distribute 70% of the year's profit. Growth in savings capital and growth in revenues are highly correlated and makes us well positioned for the future. Here, our strategy is also to grow recurring income, which we have proven in the high growth of fund capital. High cost efficiency makes about the resilient in various market conditions. At the same time, it gives us an important competitive advantage. One of management's most focused areas is also the cost-efficient culture while low cost of savings capital ratio is so important. And with that, I would like to hand back to Rikard.

Okay. Thank you very much, Anna. And with those words, I think we will open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Patrik Brattelius from ABG.

A few questions from my side. I would like to start a little bit regarding customer activity. I know we have talked about this before. But could you again help to shed some light and help me understand how the customer activity is a little bit divided among your customer base? For example, you have had a very strong activity in Q1, while it fell now in the Q2. How much of that delta is driven by old customers to spend on the platform for many years? And how much of that is perhaps driven by new customers that have joined the recent years? Is it -- are you seeing the big changes and swings in the new customers and the old customer activity is more or less the same? Or is it equally divided between both new and old customers, please?

I think we looked at that and I think we discussed it before. I think the -- when we looked at it from a general point of view, it seems like we can say that the new customers behave like the old customers. So we cannot see any differences in that respect. And also, of course, that it's not like customers are active Q1 and do not in Q2. I think a lot of our customers who were active in Q1 were still active in Q2, but on a lower level. So the customer base is basically not showing -- or the new customers is not showing any other kind of behavior than the older clients have done. And if you look at, for example, the net inflows in Q2, which also sideways quarter, it was 51% from old clients and 49% from new clients. So I wouldn't say we can see any differences in that.

Okay. And this -- you mentioned 1/3 is daily active users. How has that developed? Like how did that look before the pandemic? Do you have that top of mind?

I think in Q4, it was like 400,000. So it has increased this year. I don't know -- I don't have the figure before the pandemic.

Okay. And you mentioned and talked a little bit about the occupational pension transfer. Did I understand you correctly that it's perhaps a little bit too early to evaluate if Q2 was -- is performing according to plan when it comes to pension inflow and you want to see some more data?

I think because you initiate a lot of transfer of pensions in Q2. But since the other life companies are so extremely slow, we don't get the AUM. It can take 90 days, 100 days, 60 days. So that will study -- the real proof is in the pudding. So when the money comes into us, it will be in Q3, Q4. So that's why it's a bit early days. So what I have said is that we see a lot of interest, a lot of activity, which is very positive signs. But I will not say that we are successful until we see the money into the accounts, so to speak, and that will be Q3, Q4.

At which level of inflow would be in line with your own thought regarding pension for Q3 and Q4 in pension?

That's a good question. But as you know, we never disclose any forecast of what we believe when it comes to results or volumes and that kind of things. We will look at those figures when we see them in hindsight and what has happened. So I don't make any projections on that. I see interest in it.

Yes. Okay. And my last question is also something we touched upon numerous times regarding geographical expansion. You have a very popular customer offering, obviously, given the strong customer inflow we have seen. Are there any other geographies that would be interesting to explore if you look a few years out? I know that we have talked about historically a few years ago that the Netherlands and the Canadian markets had aspects that would be interesting from Avanza point of view.

I think that's always a debate that we have. But I would say, for the next couple of years, we are very focused on staying in Sweden. My personal belief is that we can triple or quadruple the size of Avanza given the Swedish market. We have 6.2% market share. We have a lot of things to do in Sweden. So when we reach just visionary 20% market share or 15% market share, I think that debate will be more suitable. But I would point out that there are -- just to give you one, it's not given that it's Nordic countries that would be the next country for Avanza, but I think it's a few years down the road before we take that discussion.

Our next question comes from Robin Rane from Kepler Cheuvreux.

So about, I guess, 5% of the Swedish population is using your app every day, which is quite impressive. How does it look -- if we do the same calculation but on weekly users or monthly users, how does that look?

I don't have that figures. We were just looking before and took out the daily active users, but -- or 1.5 million clients. Of course, it varies how much people are active and so forth. But we want to be to inspired to look after your savings. So I don't have that number.

All right. And then on the currency-related income, what's the split there between income from securities trading and fund investments, please?

Sorry, could you ask that question again?

Yes. On the currency-related income, is that only -- as I understand, it's related to both.

Yes, okay. It's actually the main part. It's other securities and then funds. Fund is a very small part of it.

Okay. All right. And then I was just curious if you had any reflections on competition. So both SAB and Swedbank have said during the spring that they want to put their savings offering and that they are using third-party providers for this. And do you have any thoughts on maybe incumbent banks closing the gap in terms of user-friendliness and what they can do with their own savings platforms to that of Avanza?

No. I welcome competition, it's good, keeps us on our toes. But I'm comfortable that when they move forward, we will move on. So I think improving everything that we do is the way to react to that. So it's always good with competition. But I'm very comfortable that the in-house culture of doing it ourselves and the quickness that we can do things is the competitive advantage that we will work very hardly to keep.

All right. But does it change your view in -- on sort of how much longer can grow in Sweden and the market share that Avanza would be able to attain if competition from the big banks increases?

If competition from the big banks increase, it only implies one thing, we have to be even better, and that is our ambition. We're going to be better.

Our next question comes from Nicolas McBeath from DNB.

So first question on customer activity. If you have any thoughts on the activity trends you're seeing into the second half of this year? What, in your view, are the most material drivers? I know you, Rikard, were cited in an interview in Swedish media earlier this week, that you expect volatility to come down a bit in the second half. Does this mean that you also anticipate a further decline in the activity levels, please?

It's always impossible to say. I don't think we will see anything like the first quarter this year the rest of the year. And I think that if it will be like Q2, who knows? But I think that we will see -- I'm not -- it's my personal opinion, I'm not very optimistic that asset prices can keep increasing the way they have done for this year. I mean I think the Swedish Stock Exchange is up over 20%, and I don't think it will be up 40% for the full year. So I think we will see lower activity than Q1. And then will it be lower than Q2, who knows? It's very, very hard to have any predictions. My personal opinion also is it I think there a lot of people will have their eye on the inflation figures coming out and with that, will affect the market win.

Okay. And then looking at June activity levels, in particular, there was a decline in June, quite marked decline versus the previous month. Do you have any thoughts on what explain that? Do you think it's -- can you see some trends on kind of a daily basis that's giving you some insight to what's driving that decline? Is it good weather? Less restrictions in society? The Euro championships? Or do you find it more kind of unexplained, the decline you saw in June?

I would say that part of weather, part of Euro championship probably has a marginal effect. But I would also say that if you look at June from a market standpoint, it was quite a boring market, low volatility, things moving sideways, people being a little more hesitant, waiting for the Q2 results. This week, I mean, it's a massive number of reports. So I think people were positioned, so to speak, for a little bit more wait and see what will Q2 bring to us, and then we will see how the July figures will come out.

Okay. Then if you could please elaborate about which revenue lines or line are you the most excited about growing over the next few years? I mean noting the very strong growth you had in brokerage in 2020, 2021, how do you look on the growth outlook for the various revenue lines over the next couple of years?

And I think that one revenue line that is extremely important for us going forward is the mutual fund, and that's why I listed that we have more than 365,000 new clients the last 18 months investing in mutual funds, and we have a record AUM of SEK 195 billion. So I think we have a lot of work to do to grow our mutual fund business, which is in line with creating more recurring income. But then, of course, the stock interest and the number of clients that are interested in equities, which implies also that brokerage will be, of course, important. But what we can control ourselves a lot is to inspire clients or long-term savings in mutual funds. So that is a big focus area for us.

Yes. And then I was just wondering if you see any potential to expand the investment opportunities offered to your customers. Yes, for instance, adding new equity markets in new geographies or trading in or investing in cryptocurrencies or anything else that you see as a potential.

I think that cryptocurrencies, I think we trade 13 certificates with underlying crypto assets, and I think it's been very popular with our clients. So without saying anything, I think the crypto development is something that we follow, is of interest. Then that doesn't imply say we're going to do something, but it's something we follow quite closely. And then of course, if you look at online trading, we have 11 markets. But we know that we have clients who wants us to expand that. But that is something we look at, so to speak, always if we can do it in a cost-efficient way and also if there's enough clients that are interested in it because we cannot invest money and time in corner cases for a few clients. We have to take into account the 2 things that will impact our -- most of our clients in a positive way. But that's always a debate that we have internally and also with external parties.

Okay. And then I was also thinking about your Bolån+ platform now has beyond, yes, SEK 17 billion in business volume. Any comment on the revenue generation from this business volume, please? It's been a bit difficult to track, as you know, from the outside. Is there anything you could say here that gives an idea of how much revenues this platform is bringing in to you currently?

No, we have not disclosed that figure and that's still the same reason because there's a lot of activity in that market. We want to keep our business model with our partners close to us, so to speak. So we are not disclosing that. We will disclose it someday in the future. But I think that just to comment on the mortgage-plus offering that is over SEK 17 billion at the moment is that we have been in that market for 3 years. We added Landshypotek to our second partner, which has been a great success for us. But I also think it's important to understand that Landshypotek owned 2 apartments. Stabelo is not in the new market, so to speak. When you buy a house, it's just refinancing. It's 60% LTV, which is, of course, something that's not as good as it could be if it was 85%, which is our ambition to land it because we have a lot of young clients that need to borrow more than 60%. So given the limitations that we still have in the offering that we will work to close the gap, so to speak, I still think it's quite good number to -- with that limitations create for a 3-year period time, SEK 17 billion in mortgages. So we're looking at that. And as I said before, we would like to add on more partners on our platform because we have an ambition to be a mortgage platform for more than just 2 partners going forward. But then we have to have -- that's something we're looking for in the future.

Yes. I mean I appreciate that it's been a good development as a new kind of player in this market for you, and you've been able to grow the business volume quite rapidly over this year. But do you have any idea of when we can actually start noticing this business in your P&L as well so we can kind of get an idea of what this means for you in terms of business case.

I will not give you any promises, Nicolas, but it will not be 2021.

Okay. And then final question on costs, please. So how do you think about your cost plan now for 2021 given the continued high growth in customers and also potentially, I don't know how you think about the personal data incident on Facebook, if this is having any implication for your costs? And also noticing that, yes, the average number of FDA was up, I think you mentioned 4%, 5%. But looking at the kind of Q-on-Q development for how many employees, and at the end of the quarter, it was up 7%, then it's up 19% year-over-year, is this increase in line with your plan for 2021? Or has there been any unforeseen needs for -- to add more employees that you intend to offset later this year?

I would say it like this, I think that we have made some extra increases when it comes to back-office customer services because I have to be honest and say that we didn't anticipate the number of clients to grow that fast as it has done this year, which is all positive news. But we have different costs within the company, so we are comfortable to getting around 15% as we have communicated. But if something happens in the market and the growth would be phenomenal in the next couple of months, which I -- then, of course, if that will make us, so to speak, not taking care of our clients and we need to add more people, then of course, we will do that and communicate that. But knowing what I know today, we are just executing on our -- on our recruitment plan, and we intend to do so. That could be offset by an enormous growth in number of clients and AUM. But that, in my opinion, will be a positive problem. So the 15% or around 15% cost growth for the full year of 2021, with what I know today, stands.

So the personal data incident doesn't have any implications for your cost? It doesn't require to invest more resources or anything like that?

No.

Okay.

No. It's -- that's the good thing. We're having a lot of internal competencies and internal people. And of course, we have done investigations and so forth, but it will not imply anything on the cost basis.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Maths Liljedahl from SEB.

Yes. A few follow-ups maybe from my side. Rikard, you said that new clients are a lot behaving like the older client base as well. Do you have any data or indications how has the historical client base behaved? Let's say we get the stock market, it's up 25% now. Let's say it comes down 15% and we get a sharp drop. How has activity been in that kind of period? Initially, I would expect high, but has there been people got scared or investors got scared or -- and do you have any sort of trend on that or indications?

Sadly enough, my answer will be that if you get a sudden drop of 15% in the stock market and after that you get a period of sideway moves, it's always high activity in the drop, so to speak, and then it's people sitting on their hands with cash waiting for new opportunities to invest. But I think that our communication is always diversify long term and don't sit still in the boat a little bit. But usually, when we saw that especially in March last year when the market dropped, that there was a lot of sell-offs among especially equity clients.

Yes. Okay. And then perhaps a follow-up on costs and on Nicolas there. I mean you have had quite a high -- or higher cost than we anticipated perhaps in the first half. Does this mean that you need to hold back on some investment that were initially planned for the second half year in order to meet the 15% guidance?

No. No, I think that we will do what we want to do. I said -- as I said to Nicolas, what could offset that is if we get above-expectation growth in the fall, and that would be in my ingredient positively. Because we have, according to the plans we had for 2021, we have increased number of back-office people, customer service people, developers and so forth. And we have a people plan that's very detailed, so to speak, and we're following that. And we are comfortable with the cost guidance given the information that we have today.

Our next question comes from Jens Hallén from Carnegie.

Perfect. I have 2 questions. First is just looking at the savings capital for customers. I mean you always used to run with about SEK 400,000. Now it's up to SEK 470,000. So my question is, have we've now reached a point when sort of adding new customers is not diluting the value increases that we see in the market? What do you think that number is going to be? Or has there been a trend shift in -- yes, I guess that's the question then.

I think the trend, that we have improved it from SEK 400,000 to SEK 470,000, it has to do with asset prices and that the stock market and the value of people portfolios have increased quite a lot this year with the stock exchange up over 20% in Sweden. But I would say, on the other hand, we're still adding a lot of young clients into the bank with far less than SEK 470,000. So I would say that, that affects it. And then, of course, long term, what would be beneficial is, of course, to transfer our pensions. So it's difficult to say. We track the number. But at the same time, if we're getting a lot of 20 years olds with SEK 5,000 and the [ General Council ] gets going, that has a negative effect on the average. But at the same time, when we look at it, we can see the pension transfers, and of course, a lot of the increase has done with asset prices.

Okay. Makes sense. Second question is just looking at FX. So of course, I mean, Q1 was exceptional. If we are looking at the volumes now in Q2, they were down, of course, Q-on-Q, but they're still very strong compared to 2020. So my question here has to do with what you think about the run rate or the current volumes is something you think is sustainable given the new set of customers that you have?

No, I would say what I think is sustainable is that more and more clients see it very natural to trade in more markets than Sweden. And we can see that going to back 2017, and I think it was like 4%, 5% was foreign trading. And then it was a record number in Q1, still quite high in Q2. So that's -- what I believe is that going forward, even in a boring environment, we will see, relatively speaking, more customer comfortable trading abroad. But is that number is going to be 15%, 17%, 25% or 10%, impossible to say. But it will be, relatively speaking, on a higher level.

Next question comes from Roberto Casoni from Otus Capital.

Most of my questions have been answered already. I have one -- actually 2, one very little detail on ForEx as well again. I'm just trying to understand a bit what happened in Q2 in a sense that apart from the natural drop in million SEK, I also noticed that, in reality, if you look at volumes, they're only down 30%. And you release volumes on ForEx-related trading on a monthly basis. And if so, why commissions have dropped almost 50% while volumes were down 30%? I also very interesting in understanding if there is any particular stock or market where those trades referred to. I'm talking about the Tesla of this world. Is there any single stock or cryptocurrency that is actually impacting materially into these numbers?

Let's ee. I would say you started the question about what kind of stocks it is. I would say it's always popular stock. And then if you look at the Q2, it was a bit Tesla, NEO, Coinbase. The tech stocks in the U.S. is also very, very popular. So it's nothing out of the ordinary. But of course, in Q1, we saw a lot of trading in GameStop and so forth, but nothing that had any great impact, even though it had some impact to the figures. And the reason why we dropped -- I'm looking at Sofia a little bit to get the right answer to your first part of your question.

The reason why we dropped in volume compared to -- I didn't really catch what you were referring to...

Sorry. If I look at your monthly reporting, I can see that you mentioned foreign trades in SEK millions on a monthly basis dropping at around SEK 0.9 million per day or SEK 0.8 million, SEK 1 million per day in June versus an average of SEK 1.3 million in the first quarter. So I would say the volumes have dropped between 30% to 32%, whilst commission from trading activity in ForEx trade has drawn down more than that. It's gone down almost 50%. So I was wondering, what was the reason behind it? And if there was anything to do with cryptocurrencies, that cryptocurrencies are also included.

Cryptocurrencies doesn't affect the foreign trading at all because they are traded in certificates denominated in Swedish SEK. So that doesn't affect it at all. So I would say it's rather the size of the trades and so one that affects the income.

Okay. I understand. So the average size per trade was higher, so lower fees?

Yes. I mean if you buy your stocks for where you are exactly where you get the best prices dependent on the size of the trade and according to what was done in the month or the month before. That's what could affect it. I don't have a more precise number.

And there appear to be no further questions, I'll return the conference to the speakers for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you all for listening in, and I hope you all are vaccinated now so that you can travel and have a great summer. Take care of yourselves. Thank you very much. Bye.