Banca Transilvania S.A. (TLV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome. I feel myself as being a small child because when I see a lot of people in front of me, I realize that we have all the possibility of having a successful 2 days here in Cluj and with the capital markets as well. So thank you, everyone, for being here and also for those in online. For obvious reasons, I begin my short speech, my short intro by telling you that we are also in line with this event, just for you to know. We are not searching for any of you to appear on the screen, but it might happen. Aurel Bernat is my name, Nice to have you here. I feel like we are among friends and family because during the last 3 years with a very small team of IR, we managed somehow to cover all our investor base, and we are more than happy that for the first time we are having more than 100 participants. We will be during the 2 days more than 170 actually. For the second time, we have in Cluj because this is the third Investor Day that we are organizing. The first one has been here in these premises. The second one has been at [indiscernible], our outstanding project of micro financing. And while we were there, all of you folks were asking whether we return to Cluj or not. And this time, we made it happen. Just a couple of words about who will attend. I would like to thank from all of you coming from 16 countries. We will be having approximately 90 analysts. 24 institutional investors from abroad and 26 from Romania will be gathered during these 48 hours plus in Cluj. So once again, thank you for that. Today, we will be talking about Banca Transilvania. You will see the speeches of the top management. And tomorrow, we are also hosting the CE most wanted companies meaning that we gathered 15 local issuers and 5 issuers from abroad. And you will have the chance to talk to them here in the heart of Transilvania in Cluj-Napoca. We have special guests. I won't be taking now your time to present them, but I highly appreciate all our investors, it's local institutionals and from abroad, also high-level financial supervisory authority representative National Bank of Romania and so forth, you will be also discussing with them and having a good time, hopefully. With this, I conclude my short introduction, and I give the floor to Omer Tetik, and let's have an enjoyable day-to-day altogether. Thank you.

Good morning, and welcome. Aurel was saying that he feels small after him, I'm indeed smaller. But we will try to speak big, big numbers, big ambitions, definitely we want to explain about what we did, definitely that's my part as the CEO to break about our success and growth so far. And then I will be throwing my colleague to lions den so that they can explain what is next, and we will be all assuming in front of you. Thank you, Aurel. But definitely, we have a very strong starting point in terms of customer numbers, in terms of diversification of products and services industries that we are in terms of favorability liquidity capital ratios. We have been building a strong franchise, a strong financial group in the last 3 decades but the ambitions are getting even bigger. If you had the chance to look at 0 financial today, you will see also how we named our ambition. And hopefully, we will be able to convince you in this very difficult times. Our optimism doesn't sound naive, but pragmatic to you because now if you open Reuters, Bloomberg, any newspaper, any TV channel, definitely, it's very difficult to find something very encouraging about business growth. But on the other hand, it also it's -- when I look at BT's story, when I look at Romania's story, we didn't have in this last 35 years to more than 30 years, only stable periods, only stable years. So I would like to -- sorry, when we speak about predictable growth in volatile times, it is always mistaken, I mean predictability with stability. It doesn't mean necessarily stability. If you look at even to our last 6, 7 years, and I would like to make a panties here. I guess it was 2017, I was at the conference at the organized by financier and 2 bankers, us and our main competitors on the stage, we were complaining about regulations about all the, let's say, bureaucracy being created about challenges politically fiscally and so on. And one of the other panelists said that you are just obviously very spoiled new generation. You didn't see a wall, you didn't see a big crisis. You didn't see anything drastic happening in your lives and you are just complaining about small crisis, which happened in 2008. So since then, we have pandemics, we have more inflation, fiscal consolidation or challenges everywhere. We are reading every day that the bond yields reached all-time highs for the last 20 years, 25 years, even for the developed economies. So but all these, let's say, hard visits, including for Romania, are opportunities for growth. We are definitely optimistic. We cannot open our shop if we are not optimistic about Romania but we are also knowing very well as many of you, as the potential of the country. We will be trying to give you some insight. In terms of BT, our growth definitely comes from a couple of dimensions. One is very diversified and big customer base. Another one is, as I said, a strong capital and liquidity base. Another one is very strong shareholders and partnerships that we have. From the very beginning of the bank, we were enjoying interest institutional investors, from flash institutions, but also retail investors. This gives us the strength and the courage to go ahead. But also I guess, I cannot be elegant enough about our execution power because when we look at our -- when we started counting only the mergers and acquisitions, integrations that we did, not only in banking, but in other segments -- in other industries as well in financial sector. We have reached over 25 acquisitions done in Romania and Republic of Moldova, all of them successfully integrated, while it was wasn't the choice for us between integration and organic growth, each time when we had an integration in Romania where a broad, we have been also a market leader in terms of organic growth. So it's -- I guess, our execution capability people you see in this nice building in Bucharest in our network are doing a great job, and they will continue doing the great job. Yes, this is the ambition. It's not just a number, it's for growth. We are naming it BT 100. It's about BT Group. We are saying that at the core of this BT 100. It will be the bank, BT, Banca Transilvania, is the core of it, supplying platforms, customer base, brand image, the strength, capital and liquidity, but also all the subsidiaries around the bank will accelerate, amplify our growth. We will continue our focus on organic growth. Definitely, we also see that in terms of market share, we are reaching some certain limits maybe at least in Romania. But we will continue selective mergers and acquisitions in banking and outside banking, especially in leasing, asset management pensions, there are also participants here or online from our competition, the main competitor. So if anybody has an idea of how doing deleveraging let me tell it more politely. We are here to discuss. And definitely, we want to accelerate the development of BT Group at a faster pace. I will show you in a couple of slides how much our subsidiaries have been contributing to our growth, our business. And as it is in our case each year, the good results that you deliver are becoming responsibility and almost a burden for the next years because the budgets are only increasing regardless of the macroeconomic or fiscal conditions in Romania or abroad. We want to reach 7.5 million customers, and this will be mainly Romanian customers. We are not including any international expansion plan in what we are presenting here for the moment. And we would like to benefit from our operational efficiencies from our network effect and create benefits, more benefits for our customer base in all the segments that we are in. If I look at the, how say, growth in order to -- we had been doing a lot of -- as any other cooperation and other institutions, we do management with treats. We look at our numbers you see if our ambitions are ambitious enough. And when we look at the numbers, actually, we see that in the last 4 cycles of 5 years, every 5 years, BT has doubled group, its asset base. And we have grown our market share much beyond the GDP growth much beyond our competition. We didn't I'd say, anchor our growth only to GDP of Romania. We didn't get blocked in the statistical noise that financial inclusion in Romania is very low because we are always looking at the loans to GDP ratio comparing it. But actually, financial sector in Romania is not growing only in lending and in the segments that banks cannot attack finding solutions through our leasing company through our micro-lending company through our consumer lending company. So that the group had been growing much about the market and GDP growth of Romania. Only 1 year here in the chart, as you see only in 2022, we didn't outperform the market. It was a strategically good tactically bad decision done because when everybody was doing MREL and capital-based funding and transactions, inflating the balance sheet, we decided that the interest rates done, they seemed too high and we postponed -- we resisted the urge and we made our -- let's say, use our capital much more efficiently. Then revert back to the market, definitely paying the price for it. And when I look at the, I would say, our cosmos, I would say, to our subsidiaries. Some of them are having actually years or 3 years, especially in the pensions business. But when we look at the numbers of contribution in terms of customers, in terms of profitability, in terms of growth, we see that diversification was 1 of the best strategic decisions that BT has taken in its own strategy in its own business model, an operating model because we didn't just sit down and complain about low demand -- loan demand but created different ways to address the needs of a population, Romanian companies, small entrepreneurs. When we look at beta asset management, beta asset capital partners and capital markets, our foothold is increasing not only as an issuer but also as an active participant and intermediary. We have also competitors here. I would like to thank again Financial Services Authority being presented here at the highest level. This shows that what we do is visible, hopefully appreciate it. But also it is -- as we still say, it is just the beginning of next chapters to be written. The bank still remains in the core. We are not saying that we will be slowing down in the bank's growth in the balance sheet growth of the bank or lending growth. We were still aiming and willing and will be growing above market averages in terms of lending. But obviously, the contribution of the subsidies will grow each year to come. In 2020, I'm speaking about BT Group and our subsidiaries a lot, maybe stealing the show from Aurel and Bogdan as well. But in 2020, in total assets of the group subsidiaries were around 6%. Now they are 11, and we are seeing that in 2030. When we reach BT 100 they will be around 21% of our total group balance sheet, contributing to more than 35%, almost 37% of the profitability of our group. This is also, how say, a message for the investors, for the analysts is that while we are pose continuing ambitiously in traditional and universal banking, we are also creating further a business model that offers fee-based, less capital-intensive income stream for the bank, for the group. And also, it creates more loyalty because when the customers have more products, more contracts with us, definitely, they become -- the engagement increases. It increases also back the business in the bank as well. BT Asset Management in 2015 was having 10% was market share. The market grew aggressively, especially on the wealth and asset management. Romania is growing very fast. But meanwhile, BT Asset Management increased its market share to almost 23%. BT Capital Partners from a small broker small intermediary became a very strong retail franchise, a very important investment boutique investment banking boutique, taking part of -- in most of the large transactions, not only BTs, Banca Transilvania, bond issuances, but also a lot of IPOs and other fixed income instruments. BT Leasing has copied -- actually, they learned very well from the model of BT, organic growth plus M&A. And actually, they overdid what we had been doing. They did better than we did lately, acquiring 3 at leasing, acquiring Bancpost, rebasing from Bancpost and OTP leasing, but also growing very fast organically. They are already -- almost 20% market share. BT Mic or BT Microlending, micro finance, almost created its own markets. I mean when we speak about 52% market share, this was a market untapped, uncreated companies, small companies who were not able to access even BT's products have found a partner of growth. BT Mic in Romania mean small. So the small BT is growing faster than the big BT and bringing bankability eligibility to smaller businesses. And BT Pensii, which is our latest venture and strategic growth path has already reached 21% over 21% market share in Pillar 3. We want to use our customer base, both in the companies, but also in the retail business. very actively to promote better pens and products, Pillar 2 and Pillar 3. When we look at the -- as I said, when we were looking at our numbers respectively, actually, from 2015, 2016, we see that our assets grew almost 5x, 4.7x asset growth. Again, both M&As, growth of subsidiaries and organic growth of all our businesses. And from RON 48 billion, the group assets reached end of last year, RON 225 billion. And when we say BT 100, actually, at the current exchange rate, we are saying that we will be reaching in 2030, end of 2030, almost RON 520 billion lay of assets totally as a group. And we didn't give up. I mean, it wasn't a choice, as I said, M&A. It wasn't M&A versus organic growth. And growth itself didn't block our profitability. We are very conscious of our cost base. We are very conscious of our profitability and margins. So we have been delivering, on average, 20% or more return on equity to our shareholders, to our investors in all the years to come, with the exception of 2020 when the pandemic has definitely affected badly our bottom line, although we are still happy. I mean, we have learned a lot from all these events. And if I look back, I guess it was one of the best moments that we invested shareholders' money by postponing installments by asking customers to stay atom and safe instead of coming to the bank or instead of being concerned about paying their installments to the bank. So I guess, obviously, it was a very good financial decision, not just a human decision. And as you know, and every 3 months, as we are discussing about our financial results, we are very, let's say, attentive to our capital adequacy ratio. We have an interesting story, I guess, for European Banking Authority for European Central Bank, not only for Nation Bank of Romania because we don't have a mother bank. So everybody is very much paying attention, high attention to our capital base. Our capital adequacy ratio, as you see, had been always about 20%, and this is in the bad days or good days. and our cost of risk, except one-offs of the period when the world started or pandemic hit, we have been at around 90 basis points cost of risk every year. I'm reiterating when we are focusing on growth, most of the concerns are that if we will be, obviously, delivering the same shareholder return, if you will be delivering the same profitability. So it's -- again, I'm underlining it, it's not a choice, and we want to continue offering being an attractive investment for our shareholders. We're offering good yields and returns with a very strong risk management, liquidity and capital management. being active in the markets to preserve, to defend and hopefully, to grow our margins. In the numbers you would be seeing also in the presentation on our website, so we had been offering 21.4% return on equity on average, with 15% compounded growth of earnings per share, 90 basis points of cost of risk with 360 basis points of net interest margin. And here, I would like to mention that net interest margin, 360 basis points on average, we will be seeing, I guess, in a slide afterwards. We have been delivering when the interest rates were 1.75%, and we are delivering when the interest rates are 7%. So that our business model, our pricing model is very much adapted to the changing market conditions so that we can maintain our bottom line when the interest rates are low or they are going higher, definitely for the economic growth and let's say, better life standards, we want inflation interest rates to be low. But on the other hand, there is also a strong debate I see between central banks recently. What is the minimum level of inflation that can really encourage growth. I mean it's 0 inflation, as has been seen in many developing countries is not very attractive for growth in the medium and long term. Our return for the investors have been almost more than 360% in the last 6 years. And we had attracted EUR 4.5 billion of capital through the instruments that we have issued in Europe and in Romania from shareholders supporting our capital base. and supporting the dividend payout dividend payout ratio. We are committed as long as the markets as long as the regulations allow us, we would like to maintain the equate balance between cash payout and share distribution almost 50-50. Hopefully, both the markets and our business growth will allow us to do so further. Now we have 6.1 million, actually 6,150,000 customers. And this is -- these customers are they are doing their daily banking. They are doing their investments. They are doing their spending investment decisions and recently also their path decisions through BT Group. We have created this ecosystem of the network of companies, which addresses actually is a one-stop shop here, also our very strong applications, BT Pay, BT Go and our very strong network as we are still very much keen on maintaining the digital banking, the best digital apps accessible at any time for any transaction meanwhile, maintaining the network at a very efficient level to offer face-to-face advisory consultancy, sales and help to our customers. Romanian diaspora is also paying a very important part in our strategy. Now, around 5.5 million Romanians are living abroad. They are not only in Italy, they are not only in Spain and Romania diaspora is not just collecting harvesting cultural products. They are investing in businesses. They are becoming executives in businesses in -- especially when we look at Spain, Italy and U.K., we see a huge potential of small and mid-sized enterprises -- started up by Romania diaspora, and they are already with us. The good thing is that there are the ones banking with BT. They have a very strong Net Promoter Score, 71 points, which is very close to our numbers in Romania as well. And we are the parts that we are the company where the institution that brings part of home to them through our applications, through our services, through our connections. And we try to make their lives easier. Now we learn more about them. We are trying to be more active 1 of the dimensions of our growth -- strategic growth from now on will be Romanian diaspora. Our competitors are also speaking about this, and we are happy, but we are as we say, almost, we are very much focused. We are a Romanian bank with the Romanian borders, we know the needs. And also when we make our strategy, our business model, our budget, we don't really need to read newspapers. We understand Romania better than anyone else. And we are very proud of where we reached with our online platforms. 45% of the onboarding, account opening, first interaction with the bank is happening online. BT Go, which has followed the footsteps of BT Pay became one of the most bill out and highly used applications on app stores of different operating systems, and growing very fast. Actually, BT Go itself, like beta became a reason of acquiring customers. It's not just it they help the customers who are coming to BT to do, let's say, easier transactions, easier onboarding, but people come to us, people are being referred to us, thanks to our digital platforms. And in Romania, when we say about 6.15 million customers, actually, it means 35% of the bankable population has an account already with BT, and 25% of the bankable population uses BT as primary bank. This is a bold, it's an encouraging point, but also it creates another ambition for us because it means that we have still a few dozen percentages to grow our customer base and to make sure that all -- everyone having an account at BT uses BT as the primary account. And here, as I said, the combination of very strong digital applications available and functional, relevant, good user together with a very strong network that we still develop in Romania will help us to grow our definition. Here, you see also in the lower part of the slide, the NPS, Net Promoter Score of each business line. I'm always saying this banks are not very much beloved by the population, by the politicians, but we are very much trusted. But in our case, I will say that at least we are more liked than our competition, and this gives us a very strong favorability for growth further. Then we will be reaching EUR 100 billion as a group. I mean, it's more than doubling our total asset base. And this was actually, again, as we were discussing internally, we said if we managed to grow our asset size is BT Group, doubling it every 5 years, doubling it in the next 5 years, it's not an ambition enough. It's just business as usual. So we have to -- from EUR 44 billion, we have to go to EUR 100 billion. And this is a commitment, not just the number thrown here because hopefully, we'll be in front of you and addressing you where we are, how we are staying in the next quarters, several quarters to come. And we want to maintain our leadership in not only as BT, but also in asset management, in capital markets intermediary pensions, microlending and any other financial business that we will be venturing to. Meanwhile, we want to maintain our cost of -- cost-to-income ratio, bringing it down to low 40s, from 45%, 46% currently, which is being affected, as you know, by the banking tax as well, but still hoping that authorities, politicians will keep their promises giving up on the tax plus our own efforts of finalization of automation, using more AI will help us to bring the cost-to-income ratio to low 40s or even below, while maintaining over 20% return on equity and maintaining our favorability number, let's say, the most below trusted bank in Romania. I'm saying this, it looks like a sales pitch, but on the other hand, this is also what we have done in the last 30-plus years. That's why I'm comfortable mentioning them. knowing that, as I said, we will be answering your questions every quarter from now on in these numbers. And we come back to Romania. I mean, definitely, as I said, when you read newspapers when you look at TV, when you listen to our leaders, there's a lot of short-term noise, but maybe we should treat Romania as adults. We shouldn't treat Romania is my teenage daughter treats herself when she has a pimple. I say, Romania has huge potential, especially when we look not only what we have but what we are about to have in the next few years, we will be doubling our highway structure by 2030. I guess in Western European countries, if the highway structure will be doubled, you will not see much of an effect because it's already there. The margin impact will be quite low. If in Japan, the trains will go 10 kilometers faster. I guess it will not be news, but if it will happen in roaming, it will mean that we will be growing 25% faster. So it's -- in energy, we are about to announce, become energy-independent, producing from renewable sources from -- also from natural resources, our own energy, investing heavily in distribution, storage capacity already. We all know the numbers that Bulgaria has 6x storage capacity of Romania. But Bulgaria will not be able to -- or it will not be efficient to double its storage capacity. On the other hand, Romania this year is growing fastest in the region in terms of storage and production. So we are also I guess, in the traditional economy, in the old school economy, I can say with the new technology, Romania is the leader of corn and sunflower production in Romania. When we look at European map, you cannot do many of the things by jumping over Romania, including, hopefully, soon when the reconstruction of Ukraine will start. I mean, there are very few countries who has access to all transportation facilities to seaports and roads, having the logistic capacity, which is heavily being developed, you will see in the numbers presented by our corporate teams. In the last 2, 3 years, we have been growing a lot in corporate banking, thanks to the investments done also in logistics and infrastructure. And although we are complaining a lot about EU funds absorption rates, which is indeed, which could have been better, even in the last exercise between 2021, 2027. Romania is over 20 -- over 35%, while European Union average is 27%. So at least relatively, we did better. Maybe it was too much money to with too many conditions and regulations towards European countries. But in the previous, let's say, programs, Romania reached 90%, 99% absorption rate -- and these funds about to come back. The new programs are to be announced and Romania definitely the beneficiary. Every euro invested in Romania will bring more impact to Romanian economy, but also to European economy as compared to veteran developed countries. I would like obviously Catalin will be here during the breaks as well to answer your questions. you can check if you are too ambitious to naive or delusional about the future, we are -- as I said, there is a lot of short-term noise. A lot of structural problems, but Romania is passing through a very critical juncture where from consumption economy, we are trying to move towards or back towards production and industrial economy it could -- any change, I mean, each of you in your companies passing through transformation programs, modifications or restructurings, I don't see any of these programs without pain. -- without noise. So indeed, Romania is also adjusting itself socially, financially. But on the other hand, is a pro-European economy, pro European country. And an important demographic partner of Europe, I think the potential is here. We have learned a lot our lesson tapping this potential so far. And we are here to both benefit and also amplify this potential further. I hope my colleagues after I through the numbers, my colleagues will convince you even more about what and how we will do it. On the other hand, as I said, in the breaks or at any time through our Investor Relations, we are happy to answer your questions further. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, Omer. I will build on what Omer was saying on my presentation, but for all good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and colleagues, friends, I see so many of you here, and thank you for joining our event. For those of you that are here for the first time and some of you are. Welcome to Cluj, hometown of Banca Transilvania. My title of my presentation today is adjustment Dow convergence ahead. And somehow, it captures the essence of my message that I want to send to you today. And this is because Romania has been through adjustments for some time now. Growth has been modest, inflation, high deficits are still there. But on the other side, what we are looking at is the data shows us that the economy is at the bottom or about to be at the bottom of the cycle. And what we are seeing from here on is growth. Moreover, the type of growth that we've seen so far is changing. Romania was the growth so far was mostly based on consumption and deficits. Now what we see is that model is changing into investments and productivity which, again, is much healthier model. And this is what we are going to -- we are going to anticipate to see in the economy. This is what I'm going to talk to you about in the following minutes. Now if you look at Romania for a longer period of time, long picture of Romania for the past 10 days. the convergence towards European average has been amazing. In the past 10 years, the GDP per cap tide PPS increased from 56% 10 years ago to 78% last year. A few countries around us managed to do this in that short period of time. Moreover, if you look at the GDP itself, EUR 380 billion. GDP means size. A size that means households means entrepreneurs means companies means that the economy is growing. And this figure, EUR 380 billion, it places Romania at the second in the CEE. Now if you look at the shorter period of time. We are looking until the end of this year. Our expectations are to see the GDP into a small connection debt of minus 0.2%, debt to GDP increasing but at a slower pace. We are looking at 61.8%. And budget deficit is decreasing and latest results for us an even better performance of the deficit and a stable currency. -- short-term pressure is here. And we still have the high inflation that practically as the purchasing power of the consumers. We are looking at a weak external demand, meaning that companies that export that exports are affected by this. And also the fiscal consolidation that puts pressure on the economy overall. On the other side, if you look at the medium-term anchors, they are still there. And these are the anchors that will move the economy from here on. And we are looking at e-funding investments and Omer was just showing on the screen the track record that Romania has into implementing funded investments. Even the latest data shows that we are above the average, infrastructure pipeline, the same -- the investments that had been in this sector and still are pushing their economy with a higher added value. And also the income convergence that help us in the following period of time to also for the consumer to increase their spending. Now if you look at the fiscal consolidation because this is the term when we've been talking about for the past period of time, we'll be talking about. The fiscal consolidation will be the key element from here on in Romania because it builds the credibility of the economy of the whole country. Now if you look at the deficits, progress has been amazing. We managed from 9.3% to go in our estimation to 6% this year, maybe even lower than this, and next year to 5.3%. That means that we are on the right track. If you look at debt to GDP Debt to GDP indeed is decreasing. We still have for financing but at a slower pace. We still have the FX reserves of the national bank that offer the of liquidity buffer. Again, the EU funded that -- the funds that will fund the economy from here on and all the credibility that it's around the rating. When we look at the GDP below the number, what we see, it's very much related to my message that I want to send to you today is that the model is changing into a much healthier growth model. What we've seen, and we're looking at until the end of 2024, the blue bar, the blue part, it shows that consumption was the main driver. What we see from here on, the black part, is the investments are driving the economy. It will drive the economy from here on. We are also looking in the numbers and latest numbers in terms of the structure of the GDP shows the investment of plus 2.4%. And we see it increasing and contributing to the GDP from here on as well. We are looking at the same GDP but from the supply side. we see the sectors that have been contributing to the economy. And especially if you look at the construction especially the investment that has been in this sector that performed very well and again, have a higher added value for the whole economy. Agriculture as well, the drag that comes from services that practically is the result of the fiscal consolidation and the less purchasing power of the consumers. Investments. This is a new growth model, and this is what I want to showcase to you in the next slides. And we are looking here at the comparative price levels for investments, where average is 110. We are looking at Romania 75.8% price level. That means what, EUR 1 invested in Romania brings a higher contribution. We are the 24.2% below EU price level and the second lowest in Europe. This brings an advantage for the economy especially now when we are talking about a new growth model of investments in the economy. Moreover, if we look at several sectors from the same perspective, of the comparative price levels. Besides the overall investment that we're just talking about of 75.1%, -- if you look at the software -- we've been saying for software industry. We've been saying for a long period of time about the software industry and the capacity of Romania. Romania has the lowest price level in Europe still, 94.2%. That means, along with -- we are in Cluj, the universities that are here and all the skilled labor force, Romania will still be on this sector, 1 of the main drivers. If you look at construction, I showed you previously the how -- the input of the construction in the GDP. In terms of construction, you see also the comparative price levels of our overall construction in Romania. 62.1%, 1 of the lowest in Europe. When it comes to residential buildings, the lowest 47.6%. Also, when we look at civil engineering and especially we've seen around us in the past 1.5 years, how much investment was in this sector. And again, the added value that brings to the economy for a longer period of time. So investment does have this cost advantage. We are aware that cost alone doesn't guarantee a successful investment. But if you look around us, skill labor force, trained people governance infrastructure, it offers exactly what is needed for the economy to grow further on. untapped potential. At the very beginning, I was showing to you the 78% of GDP per capita and how much Romania managed to increase in the past 10 years. Now we are looking at the same 78% [indiscernible] among the regions in Romania. Now it's striking to see that if you look at a Bucala, it's 188%. So over the EU average, -- we are looking at 71 where we are now, right, in Transilvania. But if you look at the East part 48%. What it means from our perspective as economists, we are looking at internal convergence. If so far, most of the conversion was toward you. Now what we expect to see is more internal convergence, meaning that all the investment that we've seen so far, and we will see from here on, we'll bring the east part of Romania much closer to the average. That means, again, investments. All the infrastructure that already is getting us closer to that is part of Romania. We have we help future investments towards those regions. So again, another reason to look at investments is the main driver for the next period of time in the economy. Not to mention that we have the financing for -- from all these funding and coherent mechanism safe and the next funding. Now before I close my presentation, we need to look at the 5 signals that will determine the next move. -- and it will -- they are very important. First of all, budget execution. And I was saying this budget execution is what builds the credibility for Romania for the economy from here on. And so far, the results show better expectations of the results so far, then we, as economies forecasted. EU-fund absorption, strong track record shows us over 90%. Also for the RRF so far, the data shows that we are above the EU average. Inflation and wages are stabilizing, that finally can give the economy some push. Current account financing, again, stabilizing and ratings improving perception. Again, these 5 signals will be very important that we will determine the track for the economy of Romania for the next period of time. Now, if you look for the next year the data that I showed you and presented you so far, we'll see the impact from all these investments into the economy, moving from low growth to 2.3% expectation for 2027. Unemployment, stable. Budget deficit decreasing, 5.3%. So on track with EU agreement. Public debt, again, I talked about public debt and the currency stabilized without higher volatility and as well for a decrease in that. Yes. Yes, apologize indeed. And as a final message -- as a final message for me is that Romania is now in a changing period for the growth model of the economy. And the economy that is growing within the data. And Banca Transilvania is here to support that growth. Growth of the economy means companies, means entrepreneurs, means households that need financing. And Banca Transilvania is here along has the knowledge as the infrastructure and as the team to finance the future growth of Romania. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ionas. I look forward to discussing with you later in the break. I was about to say the same thing. So don't take my speech, but anyhow, thank you very much for all the optimism you heard, Omer and also Ionas, with a very, I would say, more optimistic view, but it is our duty to have it as well. I would like to tell you that we don't want to make this conference as a mono on the back of each of your badges, you have a QR code from which you can download our app and also address questions. After you Ioan Nistor, you will have the business lines headed by Oana Ilas, the Head of Retail. You will also have a glance for the corporate and large corporate business as well. And at the end of these 3 presentations, more to go, you will have a Q&A session, so we are looking forward to receiving all your questions. I will be addressing them. And afterwards, my colleagues, the entire management team will answer them. So be aware of this occasion as well and thank you very much. Big applause for Oana. Thank you for joining.

And I'm very happy to see all of you here. Good morning to everyone. Yes, retail now. Retail, yes, it is a very important level of mine. And for sure, I can talk about retail for hours. But of course, today, I will try to make it briefly. And basically to show you how retail banking will contribute to this ambition that we have with BT 100. But first of all, last night, I remember something that last year in Bucharest when we had the Investor Day, I mentioned that I see retail in BT as a strong river. And I thought a little bit about that. And I said that this is a very strong leader that has been built step by step. Over the years, gathering energy from our customers from the communities that we have brought together with us with the help of our technology but also, of course, with our people. And I thought a little bit about this metaphor and if it still works, and I think it still works, but it has a different dimension now. And I see that this river has become stronger and broader but most of all, I see it as it has become deeper. And this is really the story that I want to share with you today. And today, I want to share about the depth of the river, because the next chapter of BT on the retail side or I would call it rather the volume, the next volume, because we have so many plants ahead. And although the context is always challenging, we keep the positivity and the good energy and the passion into everything that we do. And we are optimistic that here in BT with everything that we have gathered along with the partners, with the customers, with everybody trusting us. And this is very important. We have a great future ahead, and we can deliver much more. And basically, it's what we want for the future years, it's not just to grow the customer base, but rather to become more relevant in each interaction have with our customer more relevant in their everyday banking, more relevant than they need financing. They want to save when they start to accumulate to West and they want to invest or to think further to their pension funds when they need to take care of their family and to bring the family into our ecosystem. And increasingly, what we want is to build on the top of it more on the nontraditional banking. And yesterday, I will talk about the scale because scale it is important but more about the debt and how we intend to transform both into sustainable growth for BT Group. And that gets me to the first slide of my presentation, to where we are today because, of course, in order to build further on, we have to look into our new foundation, basically the future of yesterday that now is our stronger foundation for what we have had. And we have 4.5 million active customers. And this is a very important distinction here because here, we are counting only very active customers. And what's more important than this number basically for me is that we have the highest percentage of customers who use BT as the main bank. And that's very important. Probably the most important number because having an account somewhere is not so complicated, but choosing a bank, a financial group to have your main relationship with it what is more relevant into continuing in a sustainable way, the growth that we commit ourselves to. And this means basically trust. And I think that, as Omer mentioned several times, trust is probably one of our most important assets, and this is what we want to preserve further on. So the real question now is now how we build on what we have the scale, but what we build on the top of this scale. And we have now 1.6 million loans in our retail portfolio, which keeps us in the position of being the largest retail lender in Romania. And although we have experienced this year, challenges in the demand, especially on the mortgage side. The mortgage side was more challenging as compared to other years. We have kept our momentum. We have managed to grow steadily also on the mortgage side, but the consumer lending somehow completed the loan book, and we consolidated further on our market share on the lending side in the retail. We have, on the other side, 1.2 million customers saving with us, saving with us in the bank. But what I see even more important at this point in time that as we promised in the past, they started to diversify more and more and to access complementary savings and investment products from the BT Group. And also that got us to 700,000 customers of BT using our ecosystem and our network to access BT Asset Management products, better pens product, better capital partner products. and that is very important for us because diversification comes naturally, and we think -- we look at it as a very healthy perspective for our customers to further on diversify, but we want, of course, most of them to diversify within the group. And on the other hand, when I look at mortgages, again, I see that we still have future potential in Romania because at this point in time, mortgages account for 11% of the GDP and looking to our neighborhoods in Poland, for example, there, they account for 28%. So we think that we have good perspectives into not just gaining market share but to grow also with the potential of the market. And here, we can further grow also when we look at the financial inclusion because although we have good progress, still there is a lot of room to grow with that as well. So looking at these 700,000 customers that we have with investments and pensions linked to the products that we have, we have a 60% year-on-year growth. and this is significant. And on the top of it, what makes me even happier is that looking at the BT Asset Management portfolio of the customers, we see that 65% out of these customers have chosen our direct invest product. So basically, they are recurrently investing. And why is this important for us? It is important because it's a very good foundation for generating a habit. So it's not a just one-off investment. But basically, they generate monthly investments and putting money in a different pocket. And that brings us to our commitment to have a better financial planning in place for these customers and to contribute as much as we can to their financial education. And when I look further on, and I see that our customers are banking with us every day. They borrow with us. They save with us. And increasingly, the for the future with us, this is what I mean when I was talking that I will move from scale to the debt, and this is basically the result of it all. And we have very big 4 distinctive advantages that I want to touch here. we have the scale in all its dimensions, the scale in terms of number of customers, the scale in terms of network, in terms of our digital ecosystem base, the scale in terms of employees of terminals that we are equipped with. But we have also a very good enlarged and strengthened togetherness of the group out of this constellation of subsidiaries that we have around us. And also, we have this digital model that we are very committed to keep and to make it further on much more relevant into servicing better and better our customers. And this brings me to where we go from here. And it's a very good thing to have a stronger foundation because you definitely can look to a brighter future and you know that you can build on the top of that stronger foundation. And looking at that, I see that the strong foundation is valuable only if we know how and what to do further on with it. And here, what we intend to do is rather to become more intentional and to look at the different life moments rather than to products and services. And here, we have very strong propositions in several segments. We have 800,000 customers, young customers. And this is very encouraging for us. And this segment of customers has a market share penetration higher than other segments in our portfolio. And we look at it and I think that this segment keeps us younger. And Peter and with even more energy ahead of us because looking at it, and this is something that we touch very carefully for the communities that we have built around them and we connected with the festivals with the Formula 1 and with everything that we have built there and it's a proven success. We have hundreds of thousands of specific cards issued for these communities, and they are very much connected one to another, and that's very encouraging. And looking at this specific age, we see there that the customers first begin, maybe with a card, maybe with BT Pay. And then they grow, they finished school. They gathered for salary and stay with us. and maybe they get a loan, they start to accumulate a little bit of wealth. They start to invest. They put money and then they maybe buy a house, they have a family and the relationship expands. And this important segment of customer. It's another strategic segment that we are looking forward when we see the future of our retail strategy. Also, we have this broad offering from all financial needs. And here, I'm talking again about the group. And we have gone a long way with the group integration in all the channels that we have. in the digital ecosystem, in the network, in the contact centers because all the channels are working better and better together. And this has been one of the best moves that we have done so far. And now this puts us in the situation that we can really, really expand this kind of interactions. On the foundation we have created the largest payment ecosystem in Romania as a differentiator with 8.6 million cards, with more than 300,000 acquiring terminals, with more than 50,000 star locations and more than 30,000 online stores equipped with Pay with BT Pay, which is -- if you remember from last year, it's our ecosystem payment experience, and it's having a lot of traction within our online stores. And we have the digital model. We have BT Pay on one side. We want to connect it more, and TB probably will touch that as well with the legal entities side. We have the broad physical presence in our communities. And we have the AI augmented human touch as well contact center, where we have done a lot of things, technology-driven and connected as well. So where we had here from here, deeper relationships, higher value. How moving from product and services towards dedicated propositions, capturing moments in our clients' life focusing on youth on family, on wealth, on the sport, on home and many more. And we want to BT as a lifestyle ecosystem with integrated experiences beyond financial services for key life moments. We want to move just from traditional banking and to capture more revenue streams from entertainment from wealth, from travel and so many other dimensions. Another very important thing is based on our foundation with very good and talented people onboarded in BT, and I'm so grateful to have such an amazing team that supports all our ambition Romania and BT here was on the stage in Paris this year with first AI augmented transaction, agentic commerce. And I'm glad to say that it was hard work. It was an ambition, but we were in this position only because we captured everything. We have all the dimensions in the payments ecosystem. We have issuer on one side. So we were able to capture the issuing perspective with also equipping one of our merchants with AI readiness in order to perform this kind of transaction. And this was just a proof that we are ready for what's next in this payment landscape that we have ahead. Also, our focus is to capture it all and to have a more harmonized channel mix with BT Pay as an orchestrator. On the other hand, to ramping up the capabilities of the network in which we believe highly as a differentiator for us. with advisory-focused network enabled by technology and with this predictive AI augmented human contact center, we are investing a lot in and they are very committed to put all the effort to provide better and better service for our customers. Also, what is very important, what is very important here is that we have specific segments of customers that we are focusing in. And it's not just the young stars. We have grown more than in our segments on our premium banking customers. We have now 125,000 customers on the premium segment. Our Private Banking segment has done a great job. And earlier this year, they received from Euromoney, the best private bank in Romania, something that we are very proud of. And this proves that the team there is very well equipped what's ahead of us. And also, what we see is that we have diaspora ahead of us. And I will talk about the diaspora more because the diaspora is a strategic [Audio Gap] customers on the retail digital ecosystem on diaspora mention. And this matter is still valid, only that dimension got bigger with integrating even more of the subsidiaries and of the partners into this mention. And the number itself -- in 1st of September, actually, it was day we exceeded 5 million active users in BT Pay ecosystem and we have a very steady growth further on. So just from the beginning of this year, we grew with more than 450,000 customers onboarded in this ecosystem, and we see a huge potential ahead, especially with the integration of all these complementary needs that we plan to do. And here, basically, we want to position it even more in being an experienced orchestrator, our authentication layer, and this is a proven track as well. At this point in time, more than 90% of our contact center interactions are authenticated by BT Pay. So the customers are authenticated like this and then further on, use the engine connected to identifying proactively the issues that, that customer can have and helping our colleagues in the contact center equipped with support from AI agents to identify better the needs and to give upper resolution for our customers in a quicker time. And also talking about BT Pay and about the proven delivery as we have integrated more and more journeys from our financial group subsidiaries, we see that now new subscribers for BT asset management come from BT Pay. More than 370,000 customers of BT Asset Management now are using actively BT Pay to do transactions, to perform transactions to onboard a 2-year-old to the direct invest and to have a look on their portfolio and to diversify their investments there. BT Pensii, which has joined later on. Now 30% of the new subscribers come via better pay. And then we expanded the power with BT Capital Partners and the first ETF launched in April this year, brought 23,000 customers directly via BT Pay. And now we also redefined the investor onboarding in BT Capital Partners, and we connected to BT Pay and discounts for 95% adoption among new investors just in the first 3 months. But the broker joined the BT Pay ecosystem. We have a home insurance there. We have the pits, and we are planning a heavy road map. In terms of our bancassurance products to go fully digitally, not just in terms of origination and visualization, but also heading towards connecting it to our valuable partners into having the claim management and everything connected there as well. And also, we expanded BT Pay and the group togetherness, as I mentioned, beyond the borders. So diaspora is a real focus for us. but we have started the journey. And even this year, we enhanced and we improved significantly our onboarding process for our diaspora citizens, and we are allowing now for them to onboard digitally just with the passport. We created a package of a value proposition for dedicated for them. And recently, with the help of our colleagues in the investment subsidiaries. We manage and with the support of our partners from the authorities managed to allow also nonresidents to be onboarded in battery and to access our investment funds in BT Asset Management. And this is something that the customers are really appreciating, I can provide you very, very good feedback about it. And because we are not just saying I can talk a lot about retail, but I'm much more obsessed with execution. We have started this journey later last autumn and we conducted several projects and part of this project started to deliver already and BT Pay has a new redesign and why it was so important for us to have this foundation layer ready for what's to come. And I will tell you about a more important program, which is the retail entire transformation. We wanted to have this foundation. We wanted to prepare the new shop and now we are preparing better products, better bundles and better everything to put in it. And as we speak, all the employees of the group have access to the new application and the customers will be ready to use it early this month. I will not talk about the identic because Rel is already telling me that I don't have enough time, but I will be very happy to answer any kind of questions after that. This moves me to something very important. And here, I will spend several minutes. Everything that we prepared, everything in our foundation allows us to the big ambition that is the ambition to support the BT 100 and we have the scale. We have the ecosystem. We have the financial group, and that is why we created RISE. And RISE is the retail transformation program, which touches everything. So not just a digital ecosystem or the network or the contact center, but also all the relationship with the partnerships that we have, the very valid partnerships that we have. And it has 6 specific dimensions. One is the segment. So we looked deeper into the segments, and we identified properly how to serve better the segments that we have with a focus on the premium, on the private banking, but also on the young stars, has the families also on the emerging affluent customers that we identified. Second, we are moving towards these winning propositions where we want to give different perspectives, not related to products and services, but rather to the customer needs. And here, we are focusing on everyday banking, on travel, on home, on the spot and many more. Third, seamless journeys because the customers don't care which department owns a different process in the bank or which subsidiary owns a specific process. And here with the seamless journeys because we saw this as a matrix, combining the winning propositions also with the seamless journeys, we included everybody. This RISE program is not a program that we develop in one vertical. It's not the retail program itself. It connects everybody. It is a program sustained by the entire Executive Board and not just on the Executive Board of BT, but also from subsidiary side. Fourth, the orchestrated channel mix. As we said, BT Pay as an orchestrator, the network will be lifted up and we see a lot of changes there. And we will link a new phase with more seamless journeys in the network as well with more modularity. But of course, it has to be paperless. It has to be light harder. It has to be lower level of cables there. But we have a very, very tough plan on how to execute this in a very well-driven model. And also with the contact center becoming more and more important, both in the inbound and on outbound activities. And five, the customer value management. We are taking it to the next level, and we are creating these layers of data and AI-enabled customer value management engine to target customers with the right offer at the right time through the right channel. And sixth, we would not be able to do this without strengthening our partnerships. And when I talk about partnership, I talk about partnership with merchants, partnerships with companies that we work with. And this is something that we are very, very committed to work further on with and to enhance our relationships because we don't have to own everything that you want to attract in the ecosystem, but to make it the same space where our valued partners want to be. And this gives -- gets us to the final ambition. Our retail journey towards BT 100, where we aim to have more than 6 million active customers, when we talk about BT Pay, we want to have even more because in BT Pay, we are connecting even noncustomers, doubling the retail loan book, increasing the share of non-risk income and increasing the revenue per customer. And when we talk about increasing the revenue per customer, we don't mean that we will introduce new fees or that we will put a product on the shelf, and we will try to find whom to sell it to, but we will do this by increasing the relevance that we have and the meaningfulness of our relationship with the 360-degree customer of the group. And this is basically our promise into delivering the retail contribution to BT 100. [Foreign Language] He's very, very, very diligent. Thank you, Relu.

Thanks, Oana. I wouldn't come on the stage with you. I give all the applauses only to you. But next in line will be Tibe. Oana, thank you. You were gorgeous.

Thank you. I'm here for questions.

Hello, everyone I need a bit of set up to do -- thank you. So next, we are going to walk through the landscape of what we call entrepreneurial segments. So on presented you our retail business with individual clients. I'm going to show you what we do and what we are going to do with our entrepreneurial segments and by entrepreneurial segments, we mean from the early days of setting up your own company, so from the very, very small ones going through the SME cycles of businesses up to medium corporates of about EUR 50 million turnover. So we call this entrepreneurial segments because typically, these businesses, they still have a dependency, they still depend on their founders. Most of the times, the founders of the businesses are also the persons that are also managing the businesses. So there is this dependency, and this is why we like to call the material segment, Later on after my presentation, my colleague, Cosmin will show you also the big ones, the elephants. Of course, they are also in a way entrepreneurial, but they are less dependent. They are already big enough less dependent on the initial founders. So though I typically say size does not always matter, this slide contradicts me immediately because when it comes -- when we talk about numbers of customers, the size of portfolios, obviously, this makes a difference in size that does matter. So you see -- we start by showing you where we are right now, 680,000 legal entities customers or small companies, medium-sized companies, medium-sized corporates. And well, it's not an official figure, but these days we're celebrating the next round number. And this is really important to us in this number, we also have the new bond company. So the company -- the rate that the very young companies of Romania. And this year, even above our expectations, almost 1 out of 2, so 45%, almost 1 out of 2 new bond companies in Romania opened their first business account with BT. And maybe some of you remember, if you attended the last year, the better Investor Day in stop, we were showing you 1 out of 3. So we are almost at 1 out of 2 this year. we have various kind of explanation for that. Maybe the bank got a little more attractive to them. Maybe they are more comfortable to us. We have, like I said, different explanations. We love all those explanations. But the thing is that we -- for us, it is essential that we remain like a central point for the newborn companies because once these companies are growing, and we know because we studied the behavior of small companies quite a lot. We know that actually, the majority of those companies will stay small, but some of them, some of them will grow and changes that they will grow still with BT. Next to these, we have reached 100,000 companies that have some sort of financing from the BT Group. Obviously, the big chunk of it comes from the bank, but we're also having subsidiaries contributing to this number like BT Leasing or BT Mic or other subsidiaries. Nobody in the financial system in Romania has that reached in terms of the market, in terms of financing solutions. And obviously, this also gives a glimpse of the potential as we manage to do better and better all these group synergies. And of course, this year, we are again almost EUR 30 billion in terms of the loan stock in the bank. Here, the thing that we think it's the most important is the fact that our base -- our dynamic was about 10% this year, which is higher than the market dynamic. We always follow the market dynamic, and we strive on every year that we are slightly above or always ahead the market dynamic. And one I told you lots of amazing things that they are working on, on the retail side of the bank. Now you can imagine that all those businesses thinking about synergies, thinking about real synergies, all those businesses behind all those businesses are people, real people and real people will create the new businesses. So it's -- if I can use a line from my favorite movie called Lion King, it's sort of the circle of life. I had to see that more than with all of my kids. So it's like the circle of life. And I think it's one of the most interesting assets of the bank that we don't really talk enough. Now again, some of you who were present in our last year presentation, heard me talking about the fact that we're starting this big transformation thing, this big transformation project, which we did, we didn't give much details about it. We did -- we spent last year drafting the business case, formalizing the business case, starting reaching the business case. And this year, we are now fully working to implement the business case. And probably somewhere next year, second quarter or around the second quarter, we are going to deploy a full new commercial model for every business segment. So of course, these days talking about transformation, it's like a cliche. It is a cliche because transformation should be normal for every businesses. However, in fact, transformation is never normal because it never comes naturally. Organizations, businesses don't just transform because they need to transform. It always takes time. It always creates anxiety because it affects the roles and the lives of everyone one involved. So in our case, transformation or in any case, you need to have the sort of mindset that pushes for the transformation. And to add to add something to something to the table. Again, in theory, transformation happens best where organizations are doing okay. However, you have an additional challenge when the organization is doing okay because you need to do a lot more explain why changing something that is doing okay. As strange as it may sound, sometimes, people accept faster and they react quicker when they know the organization is not okay because they just realize that there's no other way to do it. So we had a lot of pricing and communicating and explaining the why and why it makes sense and why we need to do this all the time. And we have this -- we also have these ambitions, and we have milestones, but we know that if we do this right, actually the process never stops, and it's going to be a permanent process. And like I said, we spent last year, a good part of this year doing a lot of internal communication and a lot of preaching and preaching and pitching sometimes I find myself talking in a weird way with bank it at home. Fortunately, they're not that interested. But I think with all the reaching when I retire, I can go to a village somewhere, find an empty church continue preaching. So this transformation is not an incremental thing. So basically, we are redesigning everything and writing, again, commercial models, and you have here a few examples about that. So from thinking in terms of our new segments, again, we developed -- we are developing 4 segments within this entrepreneurial landscape of businesses. And then we recreate financial ratings, we do, again, the modeling we do all the processes around it. We rethink the way we use data, we upgrade the management capacity of our team, and we're also reshuffling our entire team and our entire sales team in the head office and in the branches. So it's basically involving everyone. I would like to now talk a bit about our digital dimension. And I'm showing here 2 examples. These are examples of very recent examples. They all happened this year. We improved quite radically our onboarding flow of companies. So the way a business can open a business account with BT solely using the digital application. And secondly, a full online SME loans. So from end to end within less than 10 minutes, you are able to actually get the money and use the money and make a payment as an SME. So I'm showing these examples, not necessarily because, for example, the online onboarding, I think I'm not sure whether this is the best available onboarding online in the market, but certainly, it's one of the best, and it's available 24 hours. So you can do that in your weekend if you don't have enough time. That's a feature. It may sound strange, but there are not that many banks that are offering this service for companies, 24 hours. The online loan I think, was responsible for more than 25% more than 30%, actually, of our total number of SME loans this year. So it helps a lot building the client base. But I chose these 2 flows, not necessarily because they are okay. They are okay and I'm sure they will become even better in time. But it's about the continuity about the experience in itself and the way we think about our digital dimension. Because you think about you set up your company, you onboard your company to the bank, you run your company, you manage your business and you borrow money or you fund your business everything in the same application. So that's the idea behind the BT Go application. And still on BT Go, I also have the next slide, of course, some figures about the scale, the current scale of the application. We're quite happy and proud not only with the number of customers, more than 600,000 customers enrolled on the BT Go, but these are -- for 86%, these are active customers making real transactions on a monthly basis, not just because of the volume of the transactions. But because when we develop the app. We were trying to have in mind the perspective of the business one of the person managing the business. So we thought about it. It's so it's like BT Pay that Oana presented to you for businesses. It's like BT Pay for businesses, but with a perspective in which it's extremely important how you make payments, how you do accounting reconciliation that's an endless nightmare for people, how you do -- how you get your account statements in multiple formats, how you can actually do a lot of things, see a lot of products from your sales, on your POS machine devices and everything, all available quite easy in one app. And because we love that going, we just go for the market practice, the market practice makes. So when you develop a business up -- you call it BT Pay for business or Georgia for Business or ING Business or whatever name you can think of. We just love the way this go particle reflects actually the very nature of businesses being always on the run, always on the move, not having enough time where you actually in a hectic way, tirelessly on a daily basis through your business struggles, you need to just connect and do your thing. And this is why we were stuck with this BT Go. And we're quite happy right now, we are 3 years from the launching. We're now starting to see the benefits of what we've done on a quarterly basis, we're publishing any leasing new and new features at some point, probably it's going to be difficult for anyone to just keep the base of all those new things that we are putting. But hopefully, for everyone, there is going to be a very clear way available in the application that will help you and support you to run your business. Now I mentioned at some point that -- through this transformation process that we are working on, we're actually redesigning the value proposition and our commercial models for each and every segment. And for each and every segment, we would like to be -- because if you think about these segments in the sense of the stages of growth of any business, actually, our segments are following the process of growing a business. So we would like to be the best partner for growing your business. And of course, many banks talk about that. And we're not the first bank to say that we would like to be the partner for developing a business. However, I think that the difference is going to be the difference is going to be in the level of commitment to watch degree how deeper you are going to go, how deep are going to be your business insights in supporting those businesses. Because we banks sometimes say all those things. But actually, what we're doing in the end is in an efficient way we are selling and pushing our products to our companies. So we're going -- this is our commitment. We're going to the next level. And again, some of you were with us last year in Stup. And maybe some of you remember, I tried to tell you the story of that place. which is basically a place designed for young companies for newborns, for which like maternity, for start-up companies where you can find practical advices and recommendations on how to run your business. And of course, if you just opened up a coffee shop, you are not going to find a better recipe of coffee in the place in stop, but you are going to find practical advices on how to run your coffee shop. So that you don't have -- so that you don't have problems and you can actually dedicate all your resources to make that special coffee. Now some people asked us, well, you're doing that we don't -- it's basically like an advisory hub for very, very small companies. What about the larger companies, what about the more established businesses. So we have started from the ground, and now we're scaling up, and we're building in Bucharest, I think the strongest hub for the SME businesses and the strongest and the largest hub for medium-sized corporate businesses. And that's the level of commitment because gradually, step by step, by upgrading also the skills and everything of our entire team, we would be able to support those businesses, not just with the typical banking products but also going multiple layers in terms of business support. And that is going to be different, and that is going to feel different. So micros and even smaller than micros, the SME hub, the corporate hub, that will be a next level in terms of business support that we are building in Bucharest, why starting with Bucharest, for obvious reasons, is where you basically have 40% of all businesses in Romania, if not more in some areas. And again, thinking about our value proposition, the fact that we would like to be the best partner for every stage of growth of these companies. If we start doing that from their early days, and then with the micros and then we continue with the SMEs and then with the corporate businesses. And we do this well in time, I think we will achieve amazing things. And not only that we are going to achieve our business potential, but I think we can create new potential for ourselves because that happens when the bank acts as a true enabler for the economy. And I don't -- I cannot really honestly think of any better mission than this. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon. Also from my side, we're very welcome to close. I'm the closing act for today in the part of the business. So the conclusion is that after Oana presented all the major things and the magic that they are doing in the retail and Tibe the growth path of the company from the nano towards the mid-tier, we are concluding with the larger tier. So my name is Cosmin Calin. I'm handling Transilvania the large corporate business, the project finance and the factoring. Within the project finance also, you will see also during the presentation, the syndication desk in which we have some major achievements during the years. So as mentioned previously, one of our main aim also in the large corporate business was to position as the prime financier and the price supporter of Romanian economy. And during the last couple of years, with all the challenging environment, currently, we are proud to say that we are the prime financier of all the strategic projects in Romania, either infrastructure, either oil and gas or energy efficiency or energy strategic projects developed by private or public institution. So all this together resulted in a very strong growth in the last couple of years. double-digit growth in the last 5 years, primarily driven by the fact that even though there is a challenging environment, the strategic projects in Romania continued. And even though that sometimes we are not noticing many of the strategic things that were planned for Romania are already implemented, and we are proud that we have been part of this success story. So briefly, very briefly, there are a couple of points about the evolution also as of June. The evolution is double-digit growth with a very strong growth also this year. growth driven by many, let's say, sectors, there is a particular sector in which we have secured this growth. But what I would like to pinpoint is the fact that currently, there is a cash-driven economy and the fact that cash is becoming the king. Factoring is becoming also a very important tool. So in the last period, we have developed factoring as a platform in order to create liquidity in the market and also support the mid-tier, the small companies accessing liquidity and accessing liquidity at premium rates based on the credit rating and the credit risk of, let's say, the main clients, the big corporation. So in factoring, you will see we have managed to do some very strong results, and this is good because factoring was a platform for the growth of the small companies and also the mid-tier companies. Structured financing, structure finance as mentioned in the beginning, syndicated desk. In the syndication, we were quite new in the market for the last 5 years. We have been positioned as a player and then as a player in the syndicated market. And currently, in the last years, we have positioned as main arranger of most of the, let's say, I will say, strategic syndicated loans that were ranging on the Romanian market. Having in mind that we are nonaffiliated and the fact that it's a local, let's say, team and local expertise built and also constructed from taking expertise and skills from various other players. The results are more fantastic in the sense that we are proud and let's say, we are very glad that we have developed such a skill in Banca Transilvania position, Bulgarian such a player in the local market and also potentially in the region. Going a bit further, these are the main takes that, let's say, we have for this year and also for the next year, as mentioned, we are the first finance, the prime financier of Romania strategic projects. And we are proud that from the top 100 blue chip companies in Romania, we have a big stake being our, let's say, home clients and another stake of being clients that are going to be and we are proposing to be, let's say, home clients. In terms of the performance, large corporate has been one of the drivers in the growth of the lending and one of the drivers also in the growth of the profitability, as we'll see in the further slides we are aiming for cross-selling and a very profitable business. So large corporate, even though traditionally, this perceived a low margin we are perceiving large corporate as a platform first. And secondly, our main platform for cross-sell and for development of all the other in conjunction with all the other business lines in the bank. So in terms of the skill sector, as mentioned also previously, 18.2% of the portfolio is project finance, but here is also syndicated long. And this is why we have built and we have invested a lot in the syndication desk and syndication became one of our main skill that we are very proud of. Energy, not only energy efficiency or renewable but also energy from distribution supply also is part of a strategic segment. And retail, you will see this year, we have done the biggest M&A financing, the biggest, let's say, acquisition of local -- from a local company to offer international chain. So talking about the potential, here is a snapshot of the key deals that were executed this year. As you can see, there was a lot of activity. And what I will pinpoint, there are a couple of major deals that we're present in Romania and, let's say, we have been involved in structuring ranging or fully underwriting them. Out of them is the major acquisition of Carrefour chain that was one of the landmark deals in the M&A market in Romania. But besides these also deals in the energy infrastructure, health care and so on. So here is a very brief snapshot of the main deals that were executed in the first half of 2026. Talking about -- briefly about the future. So what we are aiming is to continue this growth and to continue this success story also in the next couple of years. So we are planning, let's say, a conservative 10% increase for 2027 in terms of loans and 15% in terms of deposit, while forecasting a very, let's say, robust NPL rate of 1.5% or even below. And factoring, as mentioned, we are factoring as one of the key drivers of, let's say, our support in the economy and factoring its targeted to have more than EUR 12 billion in terms of volumes. So very briefly, we are pinpointing some of the skills again and some of the takes that were seeing also in 2027 and 2028 to be one of our major contributor to a balanced growth and let's say, in our support in the overall economic ecosystem of Romania. Talking very briefly about the model. So the model is based on 3 pillars. The main pillar as mentioned, is not only about the placement, not only about leveraging into the economy but also creating value added in the economy. And from this value-added in the economy creating let's say, site business and creating a platform for the other business lines and large corporates, we are seeing as one of the key driver in supporting the SME and supporting the mid-tier clients during, let's say, the rainy days. This is what we have done it also in the pandemics. This is what we have done in the hyperinflation during the Ukraine conflict. So we have gradually built a kind of ecosystem in order to support, let's say, the full economic ecosystem of Romania. Capital efficiency, it's one of the, let's say, main KPIs that we are following. Large corporate means large deals large deals means large capital and capital deployment. So therefore, we have been pioneer and we are pioneering one-off and accessing and even constructing together with the help of either supernational insurance companies, great insurance companies in developing kind of risk sharing, risk mitigating instrument that we are largely using at this moment, and we have the support, and we thank all our partners in this venture. Also on my presentation, capital is one of our main, let's say, point of interest and one of the things that we are waiting in arranging each and every large deal. And last the future in scaling us the business proposition and the value proposition. We have a couple of sectors that in Romania that are accelerator key drivers for GDP growth, and we are planning to finance of this sector infrastructure. We are, let's say, deep in infrastructure, and we are seeing infrastructure as the main strategic sector for the development of Romania in the next couple of years. And here, we are coming with a big support, let's say, for the clients, for local clients. Also, what we have started and we have started to see a lot of Romanian entrepreneur also Romania and mid-tier or large tier clients going regionally or trying to go originally. And here we're offering the full support from the advisory support that Tibe mentioned to, let's say, the financing package in order to, let's say, help as many local companies go regional and have a successful M&A on a reverse, let's say, note, we have a lot of well-established global companies in Romania that they are taking the decision to further finance Romania from let's say, their home treasuries. So for this also, we started the kind of regional cross-border approach the main strategic companies that are also present in Romania, and they have a strategic project for Romania investment project, Oromia by financed from our side. So as gradually, we are coming to be part of this financing package from a cross-border, let's say, perspective. Last but not least, we have a very strong emphasis on ESG projects and projects are either with a strong sustainability component or sustainability-linked component. Very briefly in, let's say, in a nutshell, you saw the evolution of the loans and the deposits. Here, we have added also some of the other 2 ratios that were following is the NPL rate and the amp rate had a sharp decrease, showing a strong origination and the strong credit quality of the originated deals despite the fact that all this period was a period full of challenges and full of volatility. So you can see that the NPL rate is decreasing sharply all through this period, while the cost-to-income ratio also it's one of the KPIs that we are following quite closely and on the KPIs segment, we have some positive results. So thank you very much from my side. This is all. And for any type of question I will be more than glad. Thank you.

Thanks a lot. He was giving only good news because it's not over yet. So we still have to sit for 3 hours for the next 3 hours as well. This is just a joy at leaving aside what we are going to do. Until now, we had the monologue we presented you the positiveness of our business. But now on the stage will be the top management of Banca Transilvania and it's your time. I mean you already sent several questions to me, I will be addressing to my colleagues as well. But at the same time, you well to address them directly, if you wish. We'll have a microphone. We are spreading it around, so be our guest to put the questions. The second, we already have 5 million customers in BT Pay, but we still want to have 170-plus in our app. So if you download the app that we are having, There, you can also find our presentation. I saw several of you making pictures, taking pictures of our presentation. So use it, it's for your own sake. And it's free, it's free. Those small things that are free because usually, we charge everything and now I'm taking a close look to all of our investors to assure them that our ROE will be strong in the future as well. So thank you once again for bearing with us. It's quite relaxing once again, I'm telling you to having you on the stage. I already have all the questions prepared. Thanks for addressing them, huge amounts. Most probably we will not be able to address all of them, but I will make a short list of those who matter. So colleagues of mine and the hours, you are more than welcome to join. Thank you.

I will find myself a place here so that you can see all of them. And I will also try to address each and every one of them a relevant question from all that you have sent. You look nice. I would start with Oana because you were mentioning that I was rushing you, so now you have the entire floor. The first question towards you would be, is it possible for the diaspora to have a mortgage loan in BT in order to buy property in Romania and Romanian citizens to buy property outside of the country?

For diaspora, in order to have a mortgage to buy something in Romania. First of all, it is possible for them to enroll in our community from the distance. Now with the passport, as I mentioned, we also have remote advisory for them so they can benefit from remote advisory, the full online mortgage lending is not possible yet in Romania for any bank. But what we are targeting here basically is to digitize as much as we can out of the process. And also, we have in target, of course, to facilitate the access to financing properties abroad for our Romanians living in diaspora.

We have these kind of questions quite...

Yes. We are trained by compliance and governance, not to give very direct answers. It is possible, but it's not online. I mean it's not a process fully online. As long as the income revenues are registered fiscalized in the country of origin, we can accept and do. We already have some transactions like this.

Since you have the microphone, Omer, I will address you the next question. It is a very easy one. So compliance won't be complaining about it. But in a nutshell, people are asking about BT 100. So could you give us the 3 most important ingredients to reach that point?

The 3 most important ingredients? I mean, it will sound very much of corporate/banking cliche, but definitely, I'll start with our people because during the presentation, I mentioned our execution power. Whatever we do, we invest in technology, we invest in organic growth, new products, platforms network and growth of business as usual. We cannot do it without our people, and we want to maintain the culture of the spirit of BT in this sense. Second is the said, diversified and strong shareholder base because during good times, bad times in order to -- as they go forward, you need to have the backing of the names that already are in this on fitters or in our shareholding base and also to not only to maintain but to accelerate our approach in technology, we are as one. As Oana was saying in her presentation, we were a pioneer in agentic AI payment in Europe. We are being shown as a case study to other banks. Our motto in technology was the best early adopter. Whatever happens somewhere in the world. We should be the best early adopter of it in Romania because we were bank, we don't have the time for R&D to make proof of concept and to invent new flows processes. But now has a very strong team on IT and a strong delivery team. we should also assume this also say, as I said, the traditional pillars of people, technology and our shareholders.

Thanks, Omer, for that. And since you were taking a look to Andrzej, then I jumped with my questions directly to you because we have some questions concerning cybersecurity protocols, what do we have in place to protect the sensitive data about our customers? And the second question would be how is BT Pay integrated within the secure infrastructure?

Okay. So let me start with the cybersecurity. I think it's a very hot topic for everyone, made a lot of our discussions about that, especially in the time of AI. So it is equally benefit for all of us, but also it's generates. So cybersecurity is one of the topics. We work on cybersecurity topics with our partners, key partners on technology delivery also partners of the delivering the platforms like cloud solutions. So the hot topic for all of us is looking for the future rather than now. We did winking at the assessment of our infrastructure. It looks we can confirm that was also done with in -- based on the regulator's request. We acquired secured -- we are secured on border lines. We still have a lot of things to do internally to make it improved but we are on the edge of the top of the security topics. We are looking for the future also. And we are speaking about the post 12 security with engineers from other partners, which is also a topic for all. So that is the main focus for us. Having the basic security, we are working on improvements going forward. About the integration of BT Pay Road, that was the question with Yes, indeed, in this infrastructure. So BP is integrated with the rest of the platform. in the way that we are trying to make these functions which are exposing to BT Pay available for all channels. So we are creating the layer on all these benefits, as Tibe mentioned in his presentation, when we are trying to build synergies between different products and business lines, we are trying to be the same layer of integration to expose services to our platforms, which means BT Pay will be one of the channels for clients within all benefits from the group. This is the future of the region layer when we want to add more components, including then our subsidiary services, one service, serving all reusable components to all channels, which leads also to the efficiency of the delivery. That's our plan.

Thank you, Andrzej. Since Tibe is right next to you, I will go with a question towards him because there is a very qualitative question here from the audience. Could you elaborate more on the NPS from the SME clients acquired during 2026?

Yes. I think I can I can do that briefly. So without going into many details, some of the details, I need to check them again myself. But we do measure that on a monthly basis. For the first 6 months of the year, our SME onboarding flow had quite a high score around 82, 82-something reach in the language of NPS, it's quite good. it's quite good. So we are happy with parts of the flow. We are happy with the fact that, again, is available all the time, 24 hours and you can end-to-end get your iBond and make your first payments. There are parts of the process, which are not optimal. I can give you some examples in banks have all these packages. So you open a business account and you get this package and you have a number of features and a number of payments. And if you do, I don't know, car transactions, you get why I don't know, another feature, it's pretty complicated. And even though we've got, I think, one of the best packages on the market in terms of this combination between what you pay versus what you get. I still think we need to be, for instance, way more clear and with a value proposition way more straightforward so that when you get your current account package, you don't have all these smaller prints somewhere saying that Well, if you go beyond a certain turnover on your account and or a certain number of payments, that's a bit complicated. So that's a part which is not optimal. Another part, which is not optimal and we're working on it. Like I said, on BT Go, we are releasing on a quarterly basis, either new staff or improving existing features. So something that we're not yet 100% happy and probably, we will never be for some business accounts when the structure of the company is slightly more complicated. So not like the typical SME structure where you get I don't know, another company being shareholder in that company. And in that company, another structure of companies and so on and so and forth and so forth, there is usually difficult to ensure it end-to-end. And there we have a separate flow where we pick up those customers, we take them from the online queue and deal with them on an all school basis. So that's the limit so far of the online flow. It goes best with the small -- with the simplest form of organization of companies. But in time, with so much technology and artificial intelligence and everything around us, I'm sure we will have solutions for those sophisticated companies as well.

Thank you, Tibe. I have a question regarding ROBOR but I would start with George to put you the question in terms of decisions and how it will be paid. So I will quote, now that you received the recent ROBOR decision, will it be paid in the fourth quarter of 26%? Or will you be seeking suspension?

Thank you very much. Short answer we will be seeking suspension and pending a decision not to allow a suspension will be seeing the late payment via letter of guarantee. This is something that we've done before with amounts due to the state, and it was accepted by the fiscal authorities. And we will be seeking a day in court because we think we have a defendable case against a decision of the Competition Council.

Thanks a lot. Omer?

As I say, the motivation or the decision, the details didn't bring anything new from our point of view. We have made our position very clear and there is no -- I mean, it's not the case, but also there is no evidence of deliberate, let's say, manipulation or intervention in the function of the market, but positive everybody, including the authorities confirming that Banca Transilvania comply with the actual regulation. And although my personal opinion, I mean, excess transparency is considered to be, how say, manipulating factors, then we should really start questioning the functioning of whole economy, oil pricing mechanisms. But as George has said and as we already mentioned, we will defend ourselves and also make our kids explain to the authorities and public the details. And I'm hopeful that it will be, let's say, common sense and good results.

Omer, I will still stay at you because I can take several questions which are repeating themselves. And they regard the bank, future development going into foreign markets, how we see deeper market penetration, regional diversification, entering other countries, as I mentioned, about organic or even M&A growth? Just take us through the story because it helps me a lot.

I mean, first, as I said during my presentation, indeed, in terms of organic growth and M&A, we will, I guess, come to certain limits soon in Romania. But on the other hand, we still think that the Romanian economy will grow when we say -- we are not saying that we will do it somewhere else. We will do it in Romania. So I'll say, focus will remain Romania. But on the other hand, we speak about -- I mean extension abroad is not similar to when I start to banking 30-something years ago, I mean, you don't just go with banks, you go with your apps, you go after the sport, you go with transactions. Company's growth by our large core business line, having needs in European Union. So we can be partnering with them. That's why there are several dimensions. In most of them, we are either active or willing to be active. As regard to obviously acquiring a bank or a financial institution abroad, what I can tell you is that until now, we were saying that we are not interested at all now, we started reading macro analysis, we started reading bank reports. But there is no ongoing process, there is no discussion for any geography, any country. And especially when we look to a year or 2 to come, our focus will remain Romania or the geographies where we are already.

Thanks for that. In terms of business, going back to business, Cosmin, I'm looking at you for the next question. recently, I mean, a couple of seconds ago, a minutes ago, you said that corporates were assessing their budgets and the local situation before bigger investment. Yet, we demonstrate that we can grow at around 10% to 15% in terms of large corporate. Since the political uncertainty is still there for longer our customers postponing their investment pipeline, how do you see the future?

Yes. So okay, challenging periods are for the last years. So each and every year had a certain challenge, but in the same time, each and every year, both the GDP and, let's say, the economy had a steady growth. Yes, some of the clients are postponing their investments planned. Some of the clients are accelerating their investment plan. So on the average, I would say that there is demand for investment. There is still a strong CapEx program. There are investments in, let's say, also here, it was discussed about agentic, about AI, about digital, about robots. So everybody is considering to get more and more efficient these days. So if a couple of years ago, it was the energy efficiency or energy independence right now is technology independence or technology efficiency or cost efficiency. Investments we are seeing that they are continuing.

In terms of how we differentiate ourselves from competition, I would go towards lab -- we have the digital that Oana was explaining. And meanwhile, we are handling cash, we do operations that other banks are not active in the market. tell us a little bit more about this differentiation in terms of operations overall?

Yes. in terms of integration of, let's say, all needs of the customer, it's important to have a layer in which you can offer speed, control and customer experience, how we -- it's possible to offer much speed -- it's integrated all. As we discussed with cash, we're not working with external suppliers, we try to internalize because it has a lot of needs for cash collection for the customer needs to be prompt and to solve the issues. And as I detailed in those examples, it's important to have not handling in between bank and suppliers to being able to have internal less system involved less person evolved and to have faster decision and to see how quick is delivery of the expected results. Second, control. The customer have different needs. And we have to see which is the final outcome. It's in accordance with the customer needs or it's solving partial the problem. And for that, with a much better, let's say, integrated process, it's possible to see the quality of the delivery, and it's also possible to tune delivery to be an expectation with the customer needs and the future to learn from this lesson. And last but not least is regarding the putting together data, putting together decision, putting together process, it's possible to have intelligent approach. That means intelligent approach. If in the past, it was automatic step by step. Now it's possible to have entire look of the entire flow, entire customer journey and to -- for that to see what is necessary to June and how can be end-to-end, let's say, reshuffle and end-to-end for the ability for simplicity. In natural putting on the same roof, all of this is not putting on the, let's say, theoretical roof is reseting shuffling and yes, somehow to offer fast, simple and custom-centric delivery for outcome because this is the expectation. And last but not least, how we can learn and return to improve.

Aurel, I want to add something. In terms of many things like while our competition is going out of cash processing. We are investing in cash processing centers. When they are outsourcing ATM networks, we are buying ATMs. Now I was checking the number. I was even behind we reached 320,000 almost POSs, soft POS and the real ones. These are not things that is kind of happening to us. We are -- although it doesn't look a good tactical decision coming back to what I said about MREL issuance, it is strategically a very important decision for us because once you start doing it, you start working with a big retailer with POS network, retailer brings salary accounts. You service those salary accounts. They get also retail loans from you. because obviously, they spend this money in our SME banking department or our customers from a semi banking portfolio. So we create an ecosystem, and we are filling the gas. So we are always going to extent we are somehow living in the world. Everything is either black or what ration and usage of cash doesn't mean that if there's high usage of cash, things are not fiscalized. But on the other hand, it's obviously, as we bring convenience and comfort to our customers, they will start working more with us. And that's why, obviously, especially on the operations side, all the efforts we did to the things others started giving up closing network shutting down POS networks, as I said, externalizing, they're actually helping our business growth. And in our case, I will just continue saying the same thing, as Winston Churchill once said, never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. So we are very happy about our competition strategy on that.

Nice indeed. Well, your message is positive. I'm fine-tuning my questions as well because your question seem to be very positive. I mean, I think the noise that is around us by putting all our answers in a very positive manner. So will be fine-tuning it through Bogdan, for instance, because some of you addressed the question about NPLs, about the workout activity, what signals do we have? So if you could continue from here, it would be great. With positive, yes. Positiveness, all day long.

Okay. I will try to be positive on this. Actually, looking on the portfolio, -- and I will structure the answer into a first is regarding the portfolio and NPL portfolio of the bank. And I would say that comparing with the peers and comparing with the banking sector. And despite of those political turbulences, geopolitical aspect, inflation, fiscal interventions -- what we have seen in our portfolio that is the resilience of our clients and the fact that these external factors do not influence a lot our NPL portfolio, which is a good, let's say, signal for the underwriting and also a good signal for the way we are targeting our clients. The second fact is that looking because -- and the NPL ratio is units around -- it's around 2.4%, which is, again, very good looking to the banking system and looking to the -- our peers -- this is triggering also the fact that we are very conscious in the way we are doing first of all, originating and targeting of new clients and also we are very cautious on the way we are structuring the restructuring and workout activities, collection activities if a client has problems. Looking to the new NPL, the formation of the new NPL, we do not see structural problems. We do not see sectors which are affected in our portfolio affecting in more substance than individual clients having some issues, especially one-offs with some big clients feeling some issues, which are affecting our NPL ratio on different sectors. But looking generally, we do not see that there is a specific sector where we encounter partners. Even in the agriculture sector, where most of the -- due to the draw most of the banks are having issues with agri exposures due to the latest agri season and the latest forecast we are optimistic that those NPL ratios and our NPL exposures, which we have in our portfolio, might have chances to heal in the next period of time. And going to the second part of the answer. So one is the portfolio. And the second, it's the infrastructure and is the platform of the workout and recovery platform. And we have invested in the last 13 years, a lot in this platform. And when I'm speaking about workout platform, I'm not speaking only about the systems, but I'm speaking about the human working in this environment ecosystem. So we have very, very steady team working for working with us in this workout and restructuring platform, developing new ways of doing restructuring and of doing collections with our clients. And this is the one -- I think this is the thing which brought us these results regarding the extremely well NPL ratio, which we have. And when we are speaking investment in this workout and recovery platforms, we have to think that -- we invest a lot in the collection tools, and we have the best-in-class, I think, tool, which is Capone dedicated collection tool where we have the client from 1 DPD until the moment is recovering -- we are recovering the exposure or we are sending the client throughout the Bali foreclosure procedures. And recently, we have invested and we are helping our, let's say, collection teams with AI tools. And we implemented some AI technologies complementary to this component tool in order to help increase our productivity. So whatever an agent, a collection agent has been doing upon last year doing manually or doing with right now with the help of AI, we managed to triple ruble the productivity of such collection agents. So I'm very thankful to this platform and the way it is functioning and I really look with optimism throughout the future of the evolution of portfolio because whatever we are managing to collect throughout our portfolio actually is offsetting whatever new inflows are coming from NPLs, which is a good signal. And of course, our portfolio and our business colleagues are providing and are increasing their portfolio, so it's normal that also the NPLs do as the number to increase, but as a percentage to remain steady.

It's perfect, but then that you gave so many details because in our roadshows, nontrashows we have asked quite frequently. So now, I guess, all of us have the details from the sort you being on the stage. There is one person who haven't got any question addressed yet. Catalin towards you, it's the simplest question. and it sounds like this, the probability of rating downgrade of the sovereign?

I was ready to say that as a CRO, when you are the last one and you are not flooded these questions. This is the good -- the best sign of having the things under control. but you destroyed my speech with your question. Yes, in risk management, we are working a lot with probabilities. But unfortunately, when you talk about politics, probabilities does not make sense anymore. So then we start playing with hope. And as I said last year, playing which still remains a good risk management practice in the current times. So to be honest, I wouldn't say the probability most probably is the same like before that they -- before yesterday, I don't think that the probability changed too much. over rating downgrade. What I can say that we are ready to face it in case it's coming, but we are also ready to overpass the moment when it will not come. And this stays in our philosophy about risk management, and I'm saying about our philosophies, the BT philosophy in such way that we are calibrating our risk appetite to a level to be able to walk through good times as well as shaky types. And what do I mean by this? Is that all the tools that we are having -- and I'm talking about tools, I'm referring also to the way that we are strengthening our balance sheet position and capital positions are ready to absorb both business growth and downtimes. And why do I use these work downtimes? Because the currents cannot linked only to the potential sovereign downgrade are linked also to potential weakening of the credit portfolio. And of course, most of the -- I'd say, the highest risk at the horizon, which are linked to the financial crime. And here, I'm talking about fraud, cyber and money laundering. So I would say that this is the answer on the sovereign.

I will give a question to any of you who would like to answer it. It's perhaps clichestic, but it still remains relevant. What keeps us awake at night. But I will reshuffle it a little bit what is actually -- what are the things that keep us growing and wake during the morning? So what are those targets? Because once again, every one of you told us that we are positive, optimistic, [indiscernible] even had a couple of questions here. You don't have the microphone prepared, but if you want to jump in, you can. What makes us to be so optimistic? So I would try with any one of you. Let us know what you think that in your line is the thing that will make the difference and which will make the bank grow as we did until now.

As I took the microphone, I will start. And hopefully, we will not model in our strategy, hoping and praying. But first of all, we are looking at indeed, potential of the market. It's a -- it's indeed wrong to take a picture of the country every day. If you look at where Romania arrived in the last 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, it's a huge progress. I came in December 199 in cures first time. So when I look at the city then and now, it's indeed a European city. When I look at [indiscernible] during my first visit in February 2000 and close now. There are two different cities Romania still has nature of resources, energy resources. As I said, it's open to [indiscernible]. So making a macroeconomic analysis puts Rowan in a very good shape. Indeed, political instability is a persistent thing pricing. But also, demography is still very strong, well educated. We have deferred by doing, we are also charging ourselves our mental batteries or emotion batteries well because you have -- you see the impact. I mean when we are speaking about what impact we create, be it on [indiscernible] on the large corporate or in the nano businesses or retail customers. We see what we do. We are not in capital 1,600, 2,600 kilometers away from [indiscernible]. So we see what impact we create. It's definitely encourages us. It makes us happy about going further. And also, we have a very strong business culture coming back to what [indiscernible] was also saying, besides investing in technology, customers know that we are not acting very aggressively against them as long as there is communication transparency. We try to find solutions. We try to share burden. That's why we don't come to the market with -- from time to time with [indiscernible] of NPL portfolio. We try to solve problems when they are fresh, we try to assist and guide customers sometimes even increase our exposure. That's the -- if you find if you trust that we find solutions. So it's a bit of combination of many factors. But I start with Romania, the potential of Romania. We are very critical of ourselves, highly critical of ourselves. You have been more about you, Diana, Vlad has been on the road this year. I don't know how many cities, how many road shows, how many investors you have seen. [indiscernible] say, the demand we had in our last bond issuance. I mean, I think from our side, we look better, it's not from distance. It's more from outside. And definitely leaving day-to-day, yes, I go to [indiscernible] complain about the traffic and all the problems. But actually, yesterday, I was having a meeting with the mayor. He said, if you want peace and calm, indeed, you voted for the right -- for the wrong person, but if you want your kids to have subway, to have, say, better roads and infrastructure, that's it. Now we are investing as passing through this cycle. Many things postponed that makes us feel the burden. But again, we have been complaining 2 years ago, we had been completing 5 years ago, we had been complaining in 2006 and 2007 about positive about the fact that Romania doesn't reach its potential and look where we are is BT and some of our customers as the country. The only thing that bothers me is the nation football team's results.

Agree the truth is that all of us is much better than 100 years ago seems. So we should enjoy this. And with this positiveness, I would say, to give the floor also to you who want to address direct questions, live questions please be our guests just raise your hand and we'll be there. Also, if you want a credit card do the same, I'm not sure whether you want the card or the mic, but we start with the mic.

Hello, everybody. Thank you for taking our questions. I have more specific questions, so not that general First of all, regarding the staff evolution, what I noted that BRD, for example, this year, they realized that cat had a steep cut down of headcount. Now taking into consideration of the [indiscernible] and going forward, are you going to do the same thing?

Can I just jump in with something we'll be having also panels after the break. And one of the topics we already thought about this question because it was a kind of obvious question that will appear. And [indiscernible] will be leading the answer. But meanwhile I look at my board.

I will try to be sure. Definitely, I like telling the show from my colleagues. I want to start with something that I truly believe. I don't have many good examples of businesses doing better [indiscernible] becoming more possible by doing restructurings. I'm not speaking about on the financial sector, I'm not seeing about our competition. But on the other hand, technology helps us to make things more efficient. I mean, I still think when I look at profitability per employee assets per employee, are quite efficient at least in Romanian financial ecosystem. On the other hand, all our plants are having certain dimensions then I will try to leave it to you to give more details, but when we grew our assets 5x. We didn't double our headcount. On the other hand, when we look from now on, when we look at VT100, EUR 100 billion. The ambition is a very slight increase or no increase in head count, but reskilling our personnel using more technology, adding more assets than profitability. Again, I don't know the reasons or strategy or the plans are not just behind it. But for us, yes, we are also closing locations because we want to invest in existing locations more or maybe open new locations. We are giving up certain activities because you can do it just by AI or by technology itself, I mean not only , but we start new business lines. I mean [indiscernible] was mentioning that we are opening a corporate hub recruitment actually we are growing, but it's for business. And we don't start with the head count and also BT has benefited a lot from its human capital. So we don't want to take decisions. I mean in 2019, '20, everybody knew that everybody was sold that nobody will work from the office. Everybody will work from home. BT in our head office, 85% of the personnel is coming to office. And as in our network, everybody is in the offices. So obviously, we don't want to go after the fashionable words. We want to invest in technology, but not for the sake of head count going to increasing investment technology in order to increase our policy. So basically, you will not see high increases in headcount. As Jonas was seeing inflation on the wages -- wage base or lead inflation started to stabilize a bit, which is good for all businesses for our customers as well. But our target is not having a certain number of employees who want to have hard working and competent people will further help us miss it. I mean in 15 years, having more than 25 integrations, indeed, it shows the, let's say, quality of our personnel and execution power from front office up to the people that you see around you.

Okay. The other question regards [indiscernible] so as an analyst, I should make a provision for this year or no?

[indiscernible], you can factor it in. And hopefully, numbers will look still good as we also consider. But as we said, I mean, how do we see provisioning depends very much on the probability of winning or losing the case.

Definitely, it's a discussion with our external auditors as well. But we -- we are very confident about our key Georgia reply the question please? So currently, we're in the process of preparing the court defense, taking the lowest external lowers opinions regarding the probability of losing or winning this the case. And based on these probabilities, we'll discuss together with auditors, but our strong oil as a in-house lower and our stronger resi showing that the case is weak for the competition currency we have chances to gain.

Okay. And the next question, the last one. You put aside the EUR 700 million in retainer earnings. So do we expect a special dividend this year?

I can say that all my colleagues are very stressed now of about what I can say. I can say that this calendar still it's not possible. So there was -- I mean it was a one-off event. It might be a certain period in time. But we will not go to, let's say, more American and Saxony of quarterly as the dividends on this. We will make wonders in our, let's say, maybe an M&A and huge bargaining some big one-offs otherwise, we would like to, as I said, to flow predictability. Any other question? Who would like to be responsible for not having lunch?

Yes. This is perhaps a quick one that.

No, I was just joking.

So I just wanted to ask to what extent is your position in payments competitive edge? Maybe you can help us understand that a little bit better, I guess, like issuing merchant acquiring and like what the potential data you might generate and the sort of increased customer stickiness.

[indiscernible] very much for that question because it's something very dear to me and something that we invest in a lot, and it's that part where we significantly exceeded the market share as compared to other segments for many years. So in our case, as Omar mentioned, it was a lot about the decisions that we have taken. So that we kept the entire record payment ecosystem basically. From the issuing side, we also invested a lot on the acquiring side, not just on the physical premises, but also in e-commerce, and we have invested a lot in the car system. So we have internally front end, the back office, a very strong e-commerce service that we offer to our customers. On the top of this, because your question also touched the stickiness, and this is something that we started -- we have started to create more actively since 2011. And I hope that it's also attractive on me when she joined the bank as well. We understood even back then that unless we are doing something to capture the value proposition that we are offering combining this bundle of both sides into one thing and then we created our multimode trans loyalty scheme. And that something that has been developed day by day, every year up to this 50,000 merchants that I mentioned that are part in the ecosystem, and they are contributing to the togetherness that we are offering there also based on this ecosystem that we created we were able to create the Pay with BT Pay experience, which would not have been possible unless you would have had a very strong position on both issuing and acquiring because regardless of how would you can be on the issuing side or in the app in terms of creating the best-in-class user experience, unless the customer is able to patch it recurrently, it is irrelevant. And further on, exactly on the top of everything, we feel that we are in a good position. We are very good -- well positioned for what's to come on the identic shopping because having all these building blocks having the issuing, having the strongest cards portfolio in the market, [ bandoning ] together all the account to account, bill payments, everything because we are not talking about just card payments. Now everything is in the ecosystem, bundled with the building block from the acquiring side and having the capabilities and the talent inside of us, having a very good data engine that is evolving. We are enabling ourselves with greater capacity to create the marketplace so that we can connect and equip our merchants also with agenticness readiness in order to capture the future of payments in a responsible and still custom led interaction.

So it's in the basic value proposition of the financial institutions, especially bank is current account and payments. It starts with that. I mean my kids don't need a mortgage loan or they don't really look at the let's say, working capital loans of the bank, but they want to pay their status. They want to pay to Uber. So it's positive. We know that the customer -- for customers is important to have good performance, convenience and good cost. Here, I will say that so far, we are successful in good performance and convenience. Compensating for not being the good [indiscernible] maybe in the market. But post we are very much attended that if you are not covering all aspects of payment ecosystem, anything else you do doesn't count much and you become a [indiscernible].

I would like just to add, it is about preparation, execution and the results. How during the merger and acquisition, very quick, the portfolio of your customers so that we was prepared before and in execution and after the scalability was there. In Black Friday, a lot of merchants and big merchants are coming and seeing what's happening in the gold segment. We grew from, as an example, 150 after that 350 and the last Black side, we have more than 150 transaction in one second. In one second, if something is not functioning 2 planes to be planned of the passenger it's suffering. And also with the POS, when the law has been changed, we was able to execute and to deploy very fast at the POS in the market. Physical POS, [indiscernible] POS and other, and we reach more than 120 and also the ability to maintain to have day-to-day maintenance and being able to run. That's predictability, invest now for future being ready and when something happening to fortify the why not the orderability.

Any other questions if you have? If not, I must say that we can execute. I mean we were promising you that at 1:00 p.m., we -- we still have 6 minutes left. So we did the brains, we executed well. We have a strategy to implement and we remain positive. Nevertheless, what I would like to say is that we continue this type of discussions during the afternoon. Because from 2 p.m., we'll be having two separate panels. The first of them will be for investment subsidiaries. You will have some details about our brand invention, asset management and Rocker side. And the second panel is a late continuation of what we were doing actually here, talking about the bank as business as usual. You will be having [indiscernible], the HR Manager of [indiscernible] and also two other colleagues in [indiscernible], the Head of Marketing, and [indiscernible] coming back on the stage for the digital price and technology. So hopefully, you enjoyed it until now. I will have some several other messages to send you but later on because otherwise, I will lose your confidence. So we still have some surprises for you. Everybody will be around. [Break]

It was nice. Looking forward to further develop the discussions today regarding the evolution of BT and to have like primatic discussions about BT 100 because earlier today, we have discussed about our ambitions to become to about B100 to have EUR 100 billion in assets in 2013. And the colleagues before have discussed intensively about the importance of the subsidiaries in achieving this goal. So you have seen in the presentation of Omer that 2 years ago, the contribution of the subsidiary was around 6% in the total profit of the group. Lately, it almost doubled to 11% and ambitions for 2013 is to double again to 21%. So there is no pressure on subsidiaries about this. So we'll take it -- yes, we'll take it very positively about this target. And we are very optimistic that the contribution of subsidiaries, the total profit of group is the things which has to happen and we have placed were to increase the synergies across the subsidiaries. However, for today, we have decided to not to cover the full ecosystem of subsidiaries were to present to the activity of the full subsidiaries but to cover only -- only a part of the subsidiaries and the part related to the investment ecosystem of our group. And we have invited to today among us, 3 dear colleagues of ours covering the pension, the capital markets and asset management. So we have today done. We have Dan, Corina and we have Daniela discussing with us the potential and of the subsidiaries and the trends of the activities they are covering within those subsidiaries within the BT Group. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for making time for having this discussion. And I will start with the pension fund, Carina because it's a new baby in our ecosystem. I still consider it a new baby, even if the better brokerage newer, let's say, it's younger. But [indiscernible] investment, sorry, ecosystem, you are a new baby. And we are seeing a lot of potential. We are seeing on my presentation that your business grows very, very fast. You are overachieving the market. And we are also seeing some operational issues regarding the, let's say, the challenges to happen next year. So if you can touch a little bit about the operational development and how are you preparing this [ paying agent ] business for the next year to come.

Indeed, thank you for having me. Romania's private pensions industry is about times ago, major change in the coming year. as it sets into a new phase in its development, and that is transitioning from accumulating retirement savings to paying retirement income. And this is a natural chapter in the industry's evolution of 19 years. And it aims to provide the exact purpose for which the industry was created, and that is a private monthly retirement income. So right now, private pensions funds in Romania managed assets in the equivalent of roughly 11% with GP. On behalf of less than 10 million people, and out of more than 300,000 are already aged 60 and above. So they're expected to retire in the next few years. So to that end, we are preparing our payment agent, our passion payment agent business that will become operational next year. And this way, we are focusing on 3 verticals and that's customer readiness, operational readiness and investment revenues, we aim to provide a seamless customer experience digitally in a bit. I bought the word from Juana and we aim to have processes that are both scalable and robust. Now the strategic importance of this type of business is quite clear. Until now, private pensions accompanied customers during their retirement savings journey. But from now on, we will accompany them during retirement as well. So it's not just a simple business line, a new business line. It completes the pension customer life cycle and it allows us to create a deeper and longer and more valuable customer relationship.

Okay. So this is purely operational. But now we have Pillar 2, Pillar 3, we are still in our portfolio. We know that the importance of the private pension for an individual. How do you see the growth? So a part of this on issue where we have to see the switch throughout the -- how to pay the private pension, how do you see the future of the individual pension private pension in the -- for better [indiscernible] ?

Well, indeed, we have two separate businesses right now within Banca Transilvania, and that's [indiscernible] that manages the Pillar 3 pensions and [indiscernible] which manages the Pillar 2 pensions. And together, we manage approximately EUR 12 billion on behalf of more than 900,000 customers. And what we want to do next is to gather the Pillar 2 business, and that's the mandatory private pensions, plus the Pillar 3 business, which is the voluntary private pensions plus the new paying agents that we're developing under the same roof, we want to gather with them under the same roof and to create a true retirement platform. And obviously, this has very straightforward benefits ranging from strong customer value proposition to operational scale and increase efficiency but also deeper integration into a better ecosystem. But most importantly, it takes us from managing pension products to managing lifetime customer relationships. Okay. So we have seen that we work together, let's say, in some projects within the employees of the bank trying to educate them to understand about the pension business and about the importance of having private pension. And we have seen how difficult it was even inside within our -- within the bank to bring this education to our own employees, how do you envisage this education program, to go outside of the urban to make more attractive to the public and to make -- to increase the education program for our public and for our clients in such a way to be better aware about the advantages of the private pension.

I think if I were to scale the pension risks that are shaping the business right now, I would place on the highest stage the lack of participation and the insufficient savings that people have accumulated for retirement. So to that end, this is where financial education kicks in, and this is where it can truly make a difference. And we are focusing in this area on retirement literacy, on employer adoption as well as on digital education. And fifth, our leading financial education program that we have in Banca Transilvania is doing a very good job to this end and educating people in terms of investing pensions, retirement planning and savings. And what is -- what we also do is we -- I understand that education is much simpler when -- it is embedded in everyday customer service or customer experience. And that is why we have included a pension balance into better pay so that people can now check how much savings for retirement they have alongside their everyday finances. And in doing so, retirement savings no longer feel is something very remote, but something very relevant and present right now. And what really starts to stick is the fact that retirement planning doesn't start when you turn 60, but rather it starts with the first contribution and it compounds over decades. So I think for us, financial education is not a near CSR activity, but it is embedded in our long-term financial strategy.

However, in the market, we have well-established players doing this business. And the natural question is, okay, will the new entry into this market? How will differentiate among the well-established players, what would be the, let's say, our advantage, what it would be the benefits of our products comparing with our main competitors, if you can share with us some ideas?

Yes, of course, to get to that, I think it's important to highlight some of the results that we have seen in our business that we have been developing throughout the year. For example, in the Pillar 3 business that we have been developing for 6 years now, during the last 3 years, the industry has attracted more than 450,000 participants. To that 450,000 people, Banca Transilvania contributed 44%, so that 200,000 people came in the last 3 years through Banca Transilvania. If we look at this year alone, out of all people who have started this year to save for retirement through voluntary pension funds. More than half shows Banca Transilvania and came into the system through Banca Transilvania channels. So speaking of competition and market growth, we now see each other as purely market growth beneficiaries, but rather as market growth creators. And this market, although it has doubled in size in the last 3 years is still so much under-penetrated as compared to more mature markets, of course. [indiscernible] currently manages around 9 billion, and that's roughly 4% of private pension assets. That is little, but looking at these numbers shows us that the potential ahead of us is very high. And not only this number shows not only the numbers show us the potential is quite high, but also the key drivers, the key growth drivers in the market. And when I say that, I'm referring to rising household income or to employer adoption, which is also increasing or through greater awareness from the retail in terms of retirement adequacy. So all of these forces have determined us to set up a very ambitious goal for our voluntary pension business, and that is to double our size within the next 3 years. It's a bit more ambitious than the bank's overall objective Mission products, we will be managing -- or we are managing a pension platform. And within this platform, the other two is the base. So it's the base of retirement savings and then comes which allows customers to build on that foundation and to contribute voluntarily to their retirement through investment profiles that reflect their risk preferences whether they're more conservative even with guarantees, but also are more growth-oriented. And on top of that comes the new paying agents that we talked about earlier, which is actually the payment of the pension when we retire. So why this makes sense is because it's simple. A customer can stay and can remain within the same ecosystem, the same trust from their first contribution until they receive their first retirement payment and of course, carry on. So I think our mission is quite simple, and our diversification is quite easy to understand. And we are uniquely positioned to capture growth because we have in Banca Transilvania, our pensions business, we have the youngest customer base in the Romanian presidential system and adding on that young customer base, our customer life cycle proposition that we've talked about and adding to that the Banca Transilvania's digital capabilities and scale, that positions us uniquely to capture substantial growth in the next few years. And that's why our goal is quite simply to become Romania's preferred lifetime partner for retirement.

Yes. And we know that in the last 2 years, we have worked together, and we have seen the importance of having such a large network sales force within Banca Transilvania. And as [indiscernible] also mentioned in her presentation, this is the huge competitive advantage what we are having because we are -- we can sell pension products through our sales force. And more than that into this application to better pay the clients to see their contribution and to see lively the contribution into this fund, which is a huge advantage comparing with the other players. So thank you very much for, say, describing some of the activities and some of your plans regarding the pension. I will turn now to Daniela. And I will jump directly to one hot topic, which is individual investment accounts. And how do you see this in the capital market developing in the next months, years to come?

Good afternoon, everybody. A warm welcome to [indiscernible]. How do we see it in the next years? Looking at the capital markets and Romanian capital markets, we see, for example, in 2019, the overall capital market had around 50,000 accounts opened. Now when we're talking half year this year, they are already over 3,000 accounts overall in the capital markets. Out of which BT Capital Partners has 30% of the market. So 30% of the accounts are within BT Capital Partners. What we're seeing into the market, we see more and more interest in capital markets, either we're talking about the stock exchange, international markets or -- and we see that people -- so [indiscernible] talked a lot about pension and what we're doing with the money so that we have money after we retired. Looking at the investors right now, retail and individual accounts, they are looking to invest their economies so that they diversify during deposits, investments and if one told you to download BT Pay, until I finish my answer, I would tell you to access BT Pay or open an account via BT Pay, it's less than 2 minutes. And this is something that got us also a lot of clients since being integrated in the BT Pay ecosystem, more and more clients found it more easily to open the account. Capital markets and have become more, I would say, even sexy for investors and for Romanian people to invest in it and to protect somehow their economies in now and in the future.