Banco BTG Pactual S.A. (BPAC11) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Fourth Quarter of 2024 Results Conference Call of Banco BTG Pactual. With us here today, we have Roberto Sallouti, Renato Cohn and Julia Rocha. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Today, we have a simultaneous webcast that may be accessed through the website, www.btgpactual.com/ir and the platform. There will be a replay facility for this call from today. Before proceeding, let me mention that this call may contain forward-looking statements relating to the prospects of the business, estimates for operating and financial results and those related to the growth prospects of Banco BTG Pactual. These are merely projections and as such, are based exclusively on the expectations of Banco BTG Pactual's management concerning the future of the business. Such forward-looking statements depend substantially on changes in market conditions, government regulations, competitive pressures and the performance of the Brazilian economy and the industry, among other factors and risks disclosed in Banco BTG Pactual's filed disclosure documents and are, therefore, subject to change without prior notice. Now I'll turn the floor to Mr. Roberto Sallouti, who will begin the presentation. Mr. Sallouti, please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Good morning to all of you that have joined the call. Thank you for being us for the 2024 results call. If we could please start turning to Page 3 where we would like to mention the highlights of what we thought were the major points of last year's results. First point is we had record revenues and net income for the year, 23.1% return on equity. We continue to benefit from operational leverage. And even though we had a very challenging market in 2024, I think once again, we were able to demonstrate the all-weather business model that we have at BTG Pactual. We had going to point to very strong net inflows for the year, BRL 247 billion of net new money. We reached a total between Asset Management and Wealth Management, BRL 1.9 trillion, an increase of 21% in the year. Going to the third point, our credit portfolio grew 29% in the year. And we were able to continue with attractive net spreads, benefiting from the diversification of products, segments and geographies that we have in the business and also from the ongoing reduction in the cost of funding. So even though markets tightened overall, our cost of funding also tightened and with the benefit of having diversification to allocate risks where we think there are good risk returns, we were able to keep attractive net spreads. Our investment banking franchise had a very strong year, growing 30% year-over-year, and this was with main contributions from debt capital markets and a strong M&A activity. As you all know, we had very weak equity capital markets last year. And finally, we continue to improve our product and service offering, and we did many acquisitions last year, such as Orama, MY Safra, which will become our U.S.-based bank; Sertrading, which is a new line of business; Julius Baer in Brazil, which helps us to increase scale in our family and multifamily office business. So we're very satisfied with the strategic moves we also did last year. And regarding 2025, we continue to expect ROAE expansion this year, the same thing that happened in 2023 and 2024. Turning to Page 4. We see a bit of the numbers for the full year. Total revenues of BRL 25.1 billion, 16% growth in the year. Adjusted net income of BRL 12.3 billion, an 18% growth, a bit above revenues. This demonstrates the operational leverage of the platform. And we finished the year with 23.1% return on equity. And as you can see, this is a sequential increase from '21, where we were at 20.3%, then 20.8%, 22.7% and now 23.1%. Turning to Page 5. We talk a bit about the quarter itself. We had revenues of BRL 6.7 billion in the quarter, 19% growth year-over-year. Net income for the quarter of BRL 3.3 billion and a return on equity for the quarter of 23%. Turning to Page 6. We talk a bit about the investment management franchises. For the fourth quarter, we had BRL 50 billion of net new money. Our Wealth Management business grew 26% year-over-year in assets under management, reaching BRL 901 billion. And our asset management business grew 16% year-over-year, finishing the year at BRL 992 billion. And we're also very pleased to announce that we just recently surpassed the BRL 1 trillion mark in our asset management franchise. Turning to Page 7. We talk a bit about credit and funding. Our unsecured funding base grew 30% year-over-year to BRL 265 billion. We finished the year with equity above BRL 57 billion and a capital ratio of 15.7%. And we grew our credit portfolio 29% in the year, finishing with a total credit portfolio of BRL 222 billion, of which BRL 26 billion in the SME segment. In Page 8, we show the traditional format that report quarterly and annual numbers. So once again, I think not to be repetitive, I'm just going to point out the main points in these pages that were not in the previous ones. So once again, revenues of BRL 6.7 billion and net income of BRL 3.3 billion for the quarter, adjusted net income per unit of BRL 0.86. We have a cost income that remained stable in the quarter, 38.5%, comp ratio of 21.6%. And we finished the year with BRL 647 billion in total assets, as previously mentioned, the 15.7% capital ratio and total shareholders' equity of BRL 57.5 billion. In the quarter, we also announced a JCP distribution of BRL 1.72 billion. And we have a very low VaR in the quarter of 13 bps. This is probably the lowest VaR in a quarter that we ever reported. So it's just a consequence of what we mentioned before of a very challenging macro environment in last year. Turning to Page 9, we talk about the full year results once again. So total revenues of BRL 25.1 billion, BRL 12.3 billion net income, adjusted net income per unit of BRL 3.24. Our cost income for the year once again demonstrates the operational leverage where we finished with an adjusted cost income of 37.5%. And I think important to mention that our shareholder equity increased 16.4% year-over-year, finishing at BRL 57.5 billion, which at the end of the day is basically the return on equity we reported, the net income reported minus the JCP. And for the year, we finished with an average VaR of 21 bps. Finally, turning to Page 9, where we show the revenue breakdown per business unit. We see a very healthy growth year-over-year in investment banking, in corporate lending, asset management and Wealth Management and a more challenging environment for Sales & Trading, where we actually had a decrease year-over-year. This is not something that we expect to continue. Quite the contrary, we think we expect to go back to growth in 2025, even though we still expect a challenging macro market. We just think that what we saw in '24 with the level -- more contained level of activity, very challenging to allocate VaR and the VaR that we allocated was not -- did not produce the returns expected. We don't expect that to repeat itself in 2025. And just one last comment here. If you exclude participations and interest and other, we have basically reached the distribution that we expect to continue growing this wave that we've been signaling to our investors for the last few years. So excluding participations in interest and other, our corporate and investment banking, what global companies report as corporate and investment banking is 41% of our revenues. What traditionally is called, let's say, markets and global banks is 29% of our revenues and investment management is 30% of our revenues. So we always signaled that we expected that over time, investment management and corporate and investment banking would become the most significant contributors to revenues, and I think we're finally seeing that next year. Even with Sales & Trading recovering growth and recovering from last year's results, we expect this trend to continue over the next few years. With that, I pass the floor to Renato Cohn, our CFO. And after that, we can do Q&A.

Okay. Thank you, Roberto, and good morning, everyone. So moving to Page 12. We look at our investment banking results, where we see that we have very strong revenues, reaching BRL 510 million during the quarter, and that represents a 34% increase when we compare with the third quarter of '24. Looking at full year results on the right side of the chart, we see that revenues reached BRL 2.1 billion, which means a 30% growth increase when we compare to 2023 with record revenues coming from DCM transactions in the domestic market and some additional contribution from international markets. Overall, during 2024, we concluded more than 140 deals in local markets and 15 in international markets, all in DCM. And we also saw a contribution from M&A deals throughout the year with more than 60 deals being advised. Finally, we received from Global Finance several awards recognizing our efforts and achievements in sustainable finance. So we won Best Bank for Sustainable Finance, Sustainable Finance Deal for The Year, Best Impact Investing Solution, Circular Economy Commitment Award, Best Bank for Sustaining Communities in LatAm, Sustainable Finance Awards in Brazil and Best Impact Investing Solutions globally. And also, we kept our #1 position in volume and number of transactions in M&A, both in Brazil and in LatAm. And also #1 position in number of transactions and in volume in ECM here in Brazil. Moving now to Page 13. We look at our corporate lending and business banking business, where we can see that we had record revenues, both for the quarter and for the full year with strong portfolio expansion and enhanced asset quality. Revenues reached BRL 1.830 billion during the quarter, growing close to 7% when we compare to the previous quarter and 35% when we compare to the fourth quarter of 2023. And when we look at full year results in the bottom left chart, we see revenues of BRL 6.5 billion during 2024, which represents a healthy growth of almost 27%. Looking at the evolution of our revenues for a longer period of time, we see that since 2020, we increased our revenues by 4x, which means a compounded growth rate of 42%. Looking at the portfolio development on the two slides in the right side of the chart, we see that we reached a total credit portfolio of BRL 222 billion, which represents a growth of 5.4% during the quarter and a 29% growth when we compare to the end of 2023. Important to say here that we managed to grow our portfolio by maintaining the same overall credit quality and stable spreads as we continue to benefit from significant funding cost reductions as well as diversification into new products, new segments and also new geographies. When we look at the evolution of our portfolio for the longer period of time, which you can see in the bottom right chart of the slide, we see that we basically tripled the size of our portfolio, which means a compounded growth rate of 30% since 2020. When you look at the SME, we see that our SME book grew slightly during the quarter, reaching BRL 26 billion, which represents -- and that represents a 27% growth when we compare to the fourth quarter of '23. And we continue to leverage our banking business backed by top-tier service and also top-tier client experience while we continue to enhance our product offering. And our portfolio exposure ex Brazil continues to expand and now represents more than 20% of our total exposure. Looking now at our Sales & Trading. We saw good performance in 2024, supported by -- mostly by client activity as we had our lowest risk VaR allocation, as Roberto just mentioned. Revenues reached BRL 1.550 billion during the quarter. That's a 7% decline when we compare to the previous quarter, but in line with the overall results during the last 4 quarters. And during the fourth quarter, we recorded, again, our lowest VaR, just 13 basis points during the quarter. That's our lowest historical VaR. For the full year, revenues reached close to BRL 6 billion. That's a 4% decline when we compare to last year. And here also, we recorded our lowest yearly VaR, only 21 basis points. Looking at the longer period of time on the right part of the slide, we can see that since 2020, we doubled our revenues, while at the same time, we reduced our VaR by half, showing the importance of our client franchise, increasing contribution to Sales & Trading -- contribution to Sales & Trading revenues. And as we continue to develop our business lines, we closed the acquisition of Sertrading, adding a new service focused on foreign trade solutions and also expanding our client base. Going now to our asset management. Here on Page 15, we see that we had record revenues for the quarter and also for the full year, supported by consistent growth in assets under management and administration and also market share expansion. Revenues reached BRL 661 million, which is an increase of 6% during the quarter based on the increase of management fees, but also supported by the second half performance fees, which we recorded in December. Full year revenues grew 29%, reaching BRL 2.389 billion. And when we look at the longer period of time, which we can see in the bottom left part of the slide, we see that revenues more than doubled since 2020, representing a compounded growth rate of 24%. Looking at assets under management and administration evolution on the right side of the slide, we see that we brought BRL 17.8 billion during the quarter and a total of BRL 96 billion during the full year of 2024. So close to BRL 100 billion of net new money for the asset management during 2024. Most of the flows were directed to fixed income strategies managed by BTG Pactual Asset Management. As obviously, during 2024, we saw the reversal from an interest rate easing cycle to an interest rate tightening cycle. And also, we see that assets under management and administration grew 2.3% during the quarter and 16% when we compare to 2023 reaching a total of BRL 992 billion. And as Roberto just mentioned, recently, we just reached BRL 1 trillion in asset management. And once again, when we look at the longer period of time in the bottom right chart of the slide, we see that since 2020, our assets under management and under administration increased by 2.6x, which represents a compounded growth rate of 27%. And here, we were voted best real estate manager, both for Brazil and for LatAm by Euromoney. Moving now to Wealth Management and Personal Banking, we see that we had record revenues in 2024 with an impressive net inflows throughout the year. Revenues during the quarter reached BRL 964 million. That's a 4% decrease when we compare to the previous quarter as we had a smaller number of business days during this quarter and also a long holiday period with Christmas and New Year, making basically the last 2 weeks of the year with very little client activity along those 2 weeks. And looking at the full year numbers, we reached record revenues of BRL 3.8 billion. That's a 23% growth when we compare to 2023. And if you look at the bottom left chart, we see the evolution of our revenue since 2020. And here, we can see that our revenues increased by 4.4x during this period, which represents a compounded growth rate of 45%. During the quarter, we managed to bring BRL 32 billion of net new money, which demonstrates the strength of our network in attracting new clients even in this very volatile scenario. And throughout 2024, net new money totaled BRL 151 billion, once again, demonstrating the strength of our network and our relationship managers despite the challenging macroeconomic scenario. Wealth under management passed the BRL 900 billion mark, reaching BRL 901 billion, which is a 5% increase when we compare to the previous quarter and a 26% increase when we compare to the fourth quarter of '23. And when we look at our wealth under management evolution since 2020 in the bottom right part of the slide, we see that wealth under management increased by 3.5x, which represents a compounded growth rate of 37%. Finally, more recently, we announced the acquisition of Julius Baer business here in Brazil with wealth under management of BRL 61 billion. And with this transaction that obviously requires the customary regulatory approvals, which we expect to obtain in the next few months, and once we complete this transaction, we will be managing more than BRL 100 billion in family office services. Going now to Page 17, we look at the contribution of our participations. So we see here that EFG contributed with BRL 32 million during the quarter. Our stake in Too Seguros contributed with BRL 64 million. And then we have the three components of Banco Pan with the equity pickup contribution of 150 -- sorry, BRL 149 million for our stake in Banco Pan's profit. Then we have BRL 98 million from accruals related to the portfolios that we acquired in previous quarters. And then we have the BRL 45 million elimination related to the portfolios that we acquired during fourth quarter of '24. So overall, we see a total contribution of BRL 298 million. That's a 37% increase when we compare to the third quarter of '24. Going now to our expenses and main ratios in Page 19. We see that we managed to reduce our cost/income ratio for the full year of '24, underlying the efficiency of our business model. And during the fourth quarter, our cost income increased to 39% due to some year-end one-offs in administrative expenses. But when we look at the full year, we see an adjusted cost income of 37.5%. That's a decrease from the 38.2%, which was the cost income of 2023 as we continue to gain efficiency as fast investments start to mature over time. During the quarter, bonus increased as a consequence of higher revenues and salaries and benefits increased slightly due to the acquisition of Sertrading. Administrative and others, as mentioned before, increased mostly related to one-off expenses, but also some impact of the Sertrading acquisition. And our effective tax rate for the quarter was 19.1%, and that was mostly impacted by the JCP distribution. Looking at the full year numbers, we see that bonus increased 11%, again, related to the revenues increase. Salaries and benefits increased 18% as we continue to develop our businesses with the acquisitions Roberto described in the full year 2024 highlights and administrative and others increased by 10%. And our effective tax rate remained stable at 19.8%, which is a similar level from the previous year. Going now to Page 21, looking at our balance sheet. Total assets reached BRL 647 billion, which is 9.8x our equity, a similar level from the previous quarter. We continue to maintain strong levels of liquidity with close to BRL 80 billion in cash and cash equivalents and an LCR rating of 200%. Our coverage ratio remained stable at 161% as our unsecured funding base grows in line with our on-balance sheet credit portfolio. And our corporate lending and SME lending portfolio now represents 3.9x our equity. And the impact on our equity for the implementation of Central Bank Resolution 4.966, which is similar to IFRS. So the impact is derived almost entirely from our stake in Banco Pan. We will record an impact of BRL 897 million, of which BRL 755 million comes directly from our stake in Banco Pan. And the largest component of the remaining BRL 142 million are also derived from the portfolios that we acquired from Banco Pan during the last few quarters. Overall, the impact on our Basel ratio will be only 6 basis points. Going now to our unsecured funding base on Page 22. We see a very strong growth during the quarter with additional funding of BRL 9.2 billion. That's a 3.6% growth the share of retail funding remained stable at 29% and demand deposits increased 14% to BRL 2.4 billion or BRL 2.4 billion in the quarter. When we look at full year numbers, we see that our funding grew 30%, and that's an addition of BRL 61.7 billion of funding throughout the year. And we managed to significantly increase our funding. And at the same time, we managed to reduce the overall cost of funding and also increase the maturity of our funding. Also, we see that demand deposits increased 62% during the quarter. That's an addition of BRL 7.3 billion of demand deposits and now they represent 7.2% of our total funding base. And when we look at the evolution of our funding base in the right side of the slide, we see that our total funding increased by 2.5x since 2020, and that's a compounded growth rate of 25%. And our retail funding share of total funding increased from 12% in 2020 to 29% in 2024. That means that our retail funding went from around BRL 12 billion in 2020 to close to BRL 80 billion now. So our retail funding increased by 6.5x and that's a 60% compounded growth rate since 2020. This is important because it represents the significant transformation in our unsecured funding base. And in October, we successfully issued a 5-year senior unsecured note in the total amount of $500 million at only 34 basis points above Brazil sovereign spreads. And our -- finally, looking at our basal ratio on Page 23, we see that we closed the year with total basel ratio of 15.7% after the distribution of JCP of BRL 1.720 billion. Our Tier 1 ratio closed the year at 12.3%, and again, as we mentioned a few times during the presentation our VaR reached our lowest historical level at 13 bps as we maintain a conservative risk approach due to recent market activities. So I think with that, we can open up for questions, right?

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Daniel Vaz with Safra.

Congrats on the results. I wanted to touch point on your ROAE expansion that you mentioned on your presentation for 2025. I wanted to picker brain on that. Is it primarily driven by cost to income improvements or higher leverage? I mean given that [ that you've repaid ] the long-term interest rates in Brazil, is high enough to support a payout above the 30%. Are you also factoring this into the ROAE expansion as well? So can you give us color here, it'd be very helpful.

Sure. Thank you, Daniel. No, actually, we expect to continue the trend of growth that we saw in the recent years in Asset Management, in Wealth Management, in credit. We expect sales and trading to go back to growth. And all of these growth, we expect to be higher than our costs. Of course, but there is no -- is it because we expect to grow equity less? No, it's the contrary. We expect our franchises to continue growing. I think, of course, if you look at all the trends that we showed in the graphs, the only one that has not been showing consistent growth is investment banking because that's probably the market where it's harder for us to gain market share because we already had historically a high market share. In all the new markets, and all the other markets we are present, we still have low market shares. So as we continue to grow -- gain market share, we expect to continue growing consistently. We expect to continue benefiting from technology, from gains in productivity, from gains in processes and controls and thus to be able to have costs growing at a slower pace than revenues.

Okay. So there's no leverage indicators here. I mean, if we look at your CET1 ratio at the end of the year, you expect to maintain it at this level?

Yes. What we've always told you, right, the efficient frontier would be to have a total capital ratio of 12% and I say 3% of Tier 2.

Tier 1 at 12%.

Tier 1 at 12% and 15% total capital ratio. That's the efficient frontier. We're never at the efficient frontier. You're always a bit more conservative, but we expect to continue around the levels that we are currently.

The next question comes from Mario Pierry with Bank of America.

Congrats on the results. But let me go back to your comments about ROE expansion of '25. If you can help us with the magnitude of the increase because I think, right, your ROE only improved about 40 basis points in '24. So trying to understand, are we talking about the same type of growth in '25? Or do you think that can accelerate? And let me ask another question as well. I think part of this ROAE expansion in '25 has to come from sales and trading improving, right? As you showed on your presentation, Sales & Trading has been quite weak. Your VaR is quite low. What gives you confidence that the '25 is going to be better than '24? And also, were there any gains related to the Eneva transaction both in sales and trading in the fourth quarter?

Thank you, Mario. So as you know, we are -- we're not very fans of giving many guidances, but we feel very comfortable in saying that we will have ROAE expansion. And we think that sincerely, even if sales and trading does not grow significantly. We will still have significant ROAE expansion. Because when we look at our budget, we're quite comfortable that even though, let's say, some areas don't perform according to the budget, we will still be able to deliver there. As I mentioned previously, we have invested a lot in the last few years. We continue to invest a lot. For example, we have currently expenses in euros and in dollars related to the banking operations that we're setting up, which are still not producing any significant revenues. We have various initiatives where the investment comes upfront. And over time, the revenues come and you gain scale. And since we invested in many new products, many new segments, many new geographies. We have different initiatives at different points of the J curve. And this is what makes us very comfortable that we see ROAE expansion. It can be depending on how things go, it can be closer to what it was this year or it can be closer to what it was between, let's say, '22 and '23. But right now, we're just comfortable in giving the guidance that we expect to continue delivering ROAE expansion. And on your second question regarding Eneva since the results of Eneva and the thermal plants were in line to what they have been in the last few quarters.

The next question comes from Thiago Batista with UBS BB.

Congratulations for the results. I have one question about the DCM or the IB business. One of the -- the CEO of one of your competitors mentioned last week that DCM should contract 30% to 40% in 2025. How you guys are seeing the outlook for the IB, especially for the DCM business in Brazil?

Thiago, I think it's -- obviously, we heard the comments. And I think maybe it's too early to say, right? I think January, it's not the best month, right? It's usually a vacation month for companies and for investors. So I wouldn't take the level of activity in January as the best indication for DCM activity throughout the year, right? What we can see is that DCM has been continuously developing with more transactions coming to the market, new companies coming to the market, larger volumes in transactions longer term. So it's been a market that for the last few years has been developing. Can it be that it slows down a little bit this year? Yes, it can, right? We'll have a new interest rate cycle that obviously put pressure on companies. But I think it's still too early days to call for a percentage number in terms of either decline, stability or a small increase. I think January is not the best month to reflect that.

The next question comes from Yuri Fernandes with JPMorgan.

Congrats for the year. I have a question on corporate lending. 2024 was a great year, but we have this more challenging macro. You have been growing loans around 30%. So just trying to get some color how you're thinking about this line in 2025, we should see some deceleration, how you see spreads? And just a follow-up on the ROAE expansion, why everybody is asking about this, right? Because any 40, 50 bps ROAE expansion for you matters a lot for earnings growth, given you don't pay like huge dividends, right? So your book value grows a lot in line with your earnings. So for you to deliver 50, 100 bps ROAE expansion, you need to have pretty bold earnings growth. So this is why everybody is trying to have some color. And if you can provide any more color here, I think it's going to be appreciated by the market because this can imply some upside risk for the consensus. So thank you, corporate and ROAE.

Thank you, Yuri. So I'm going to start with the second part of your question. Well, at least you guys have a floor of what we're quite confident that we can deliver, right? If we're not very big fans of giving guidance, whenever we give a guidance is because we have a very strong conviction that we can deliver at least that, if not surpass the guidance given. And you're right, right, as our book value increases, I completely understand and agree with you that any 50 bps is a big -- makes a difference in monetary terms. But at the moment, this is the guidance we're comfortable in giving. Let's see as the year develops, maybe we can give something more granular. On the second point on corporate lending, we're still quite comfortable that we can continue to grow, let's say, around 20% for this year. And it's important to say that the growth we showed last year, we had very little growth, especially in the last quarter in the Brazil, let's say, large corporate segment because we thought spreads were too tight, market a bit challenging, interest rates going up. So we were able to grow in the other geographies. Our ex Brazil portfolio is now more than 20% of our total portfolio. We continue to expand. We continue to buy some portfolios from Banco Pan. We continue to expand in SME. So we -- the last thing we want is for our business to be a beta credit Brazil business. So we're very -- it's a beta Brazil large corporate business. So we're very focused on continuing to penetrate new segments, geographies and products so that we're able to continue delivering this size of growth but still have an alpha approach where we just -- we're not targeting market share. We're not targeting total disbursements, but we're targeting to, yes, increase the portfolio, but where the risk-adjusted return makes sense given the environment we are seeing. So with that, we want to continue having the flexibility of having variance to segments, to geographies and to companies depending on the scenario that we are forecasting.

The next question comes from Gustavo Schroden with Citi.

Congrats on the results. My question is regarding -- just a follow-up on corporate lending because, of course, I heard what you said. But what is different here? Because when we compare with the speech from especially large and incumbent banks, we see totally different. So just a follow-up here, what is different? It's only the client profile? Or do you believe that it is a good time to gain market share? So any thoughts here to understand what's different when we compare the BTG's strategy in corporate lending versus incumbent banks or large banks? And my second question is regarding your Asset and Wealth Management business. So another strong quarter in terms of net new money. So could you give us a color for what we should expect for 2025 in terms of net new money? Should we expect the same trends quarter-by-quarter? And if the main market share that you are gaining is still from large banks or different institutions that you have gained market share?

Gustavo, thank you for the question. I think related to the -- our corporate lending portfolio growth that you asked, I think we cannot be compared like-for-like with the large retail banks, right? The large retail banks has a different mix of credit portfolios. They have much more exposure to unsecured uncollateralized individual consumer loans, credit card loans, they have more exposure, larger exposure to SMEs, unsecured loans, and we are much more focused on large corporate credit transactions. Also, our SME portfolio is collateralized. So it's a different type of portfolio mix that we have compared to the large retail bank. So -- and also, our market share is smaller, right? So for large corporates, we already have a significant market share, and we believe that we can grow. For SME, we are still small thinking of market share and the range of products that we cover today. So we feel very comfortable that we still can grow market share within those segments continue to expand in the market with good credit quality, maintaining basically the credit quality that we have. On the second question related to net new money, as I usually say, right, net new money is a battle every day, right? So very difficult to give predictions of net new money. We've been quite consistent on the new money for the Wealth Management segment in the last close now, I think, to 12 quarters, right, with around BRL 30 billion of net new money in the last few years. And in asset management, the net new money has been a little bit more volatile depending on market cycle. So in our view, that shows the strength of our network, the network that we create and then also our relationship managers. And we believe that they will be able to continue to attract net new money. Related to the market share or who we are gaining market share, there's no major difference from the past. I think we are gaining market share from the various competitors. And we have -- when we look at the size of the portfolio of our competitors, it's pretty much aligned with that. There's no specific segment or institution that we see a concentration there.

The next question comes from Renato Malone as an autonomous researcher.

Congrats here on the numbers for the year. So I'd just like to first stay here on the net new money question, right? So you've been gaining you'd be gaining share. You don't necessarily kind of from everyone. But when do you expect this to normalize, right? I think it's been consistent years of growth. But market is more consolidated. I think there is more competition as well. So if you can give us maybe some perspective on that and also kind of like the main risks for this year in terms of attracting new money? And then my second question here, just a follow-up on the question that Mario asked. He was asking about the impact of the Eneva deal in Sales & Trading. I didn't quite get the answer if you're offering a number here. Thank you.

Thanks, Renato. So I'll answer the first part of the question. I'll let Renato Cohn address the second one. So what is the target of the market share and the net new money we can attract? Look, sincerely, it's very hard to determine. But as we all look at the different market shares and sizes of the different players in the region, and until we are the #1 player, we think we can continue gaining market share to reach there. That is always our goal. That's always our ambition. And time will tell if we're going to be able to do this or not. Talking about risks for the net new mining. In our view, I think, clearly, the biggest the risk we are seeing is the competition from the tax-exempt fixed income products that the retail banks are able to offer their clients. With this level of interest rates, and with tax exempt products, this is probably, I would say, the biggest risk both to the wealth management net new money but also, but also to the asset management net new money.

And a related to Eneva Roberto mentioned, is that there's no significant change in the impacts of what the thermal power plants used to contribute in the last few quarters to now the new situation where we have -- we don't have the power plants anymore, but we have a larger stake in NAV. So it was pretty much a similar contribution this quarter than what we used to see from the contributions of the power plant and the smaller stake in Eneva that we have.

So you didn't recognize any gains on the sales and trading revenue related to the deal?

There is a small recognition, but again, it's not significant, right? So that's...

The delta of the results of this complex is not significant to previous quarters. I think that's the point Cohn was trying to make.

The next question comes from Tiago Binsfeld with Goldman Sachs.

We wanted to go back to expenses a little bit. This was another good year for expenses. You've have been gaining operating leverage since at least 2021, so good job on that. But when you look at the quarter, the efficiency ratio picked up a little bit. So first, if you could discuss a little bit what drove this quarterly pickup. Is this related to the recent acquisitions that you made? And second, if you could discuss your expectations into 2025. We know you don't give formal guidance, but just help us understand expectations and main levers behind it.

Thank you, Tiago. Yes. So the -- what you mentioned for the quarter increase in expenses, there are mostly two impacts there. One is the acquisition of Sertrading. Obviously, this adds is the first quarter that we consolidate Sertrading in our numbers. So there is an impact there. And also, there are some one-offs. Usually, every end of the year, there are some additional one-offs there. These are, I would say, the main two contributions for the expense increase. I'm not sure I picked up the second part of the question.

[indiscernible]

Yes, exactly. [indiscernible]

Once again, I think -- we don't give a specific guidance on the contributions, but let's put it this way. The recent trends are probably not be very different than the past trends. both in revenues and in costs. So -- and that's why we're confident to continue to benefit from operational leverage.

The next question comes from Pedro Leduc with Itau BBA.

A question on Wealth Management, please. Great net new money quarter the year. But just on a Q-on-Q basis, revenues did decline, which is a bit odd in the light that you have the maturation effect from the prior cohorts and markets were pretty good. You had more money. So just to help us better understand what drove this volatility in the line, if it's the new nature of a new client profile or new channel that you have that will make this line more volatile. ultimately, how should we think about it in 2025, if revenues here could pace at least with the pace of AUC or there will be more volatility expected?

Pedro, thank you for the question. I think the main impacts there, first, obviously, there is a technical that we had 2 business days less than the third quarter. Third quarter was a very strong quarter with the highest number of business days in the year. So that's one impact. The second impact I mentioned also is the last 2 weeks of the year were very, very quiet, right, with very little market activity during those 2 weeks because of the holiday season, Christmas and New Year, both were at Wednesdays, if I'm not mistaken, so middle of the week. So the entire 2 weeks were impacted there. I think -- and maybe a third is that Third quarter was a strong quarter, right? It grew a lot during third quarter. So the combination of the three resulted in this small reduction in terms of revenues when you compare to the third quarter. But we don't believe that we'll see more volatility related to that. I think there will be a link between the AUM growth. I think it will be aligned with the revenue growth.

That's great. Renato, a follow-up here, if you can help us maybe understand how the mix changed between your AUC 2024 relative to the other years, maybe B2C, B2B, just a rough sense how it changed?

No, it's nothing different from what we've seen in the past. Obviously, the high-income retail segment, where we have a smaller market share continues to grow faster than the ultra-high net worth. It's not that the ultra-high net worth don't grow. It grew a lot also this year. But obviously, because of the size of our market share and the opportunity, our high-income retail segment, which includes the B2C, the B2B channels that you mentioned, they grow at a faster pace in percentage terms than the ultra-high net worth, which is a well-established business for many, many years.

Our last question comes from Mario Pierry with Bank of America.

I wanted to focus a little bit on the capital ratio, the common equity Tier 1 ratio, down 50 basis points quarter-on-quarter, 70 basis points year-on-year to 11.8%. Again, you talked about, right, like having a capital or like a Tier 1 ratio of 12% as your target. So you're very close to that. You are consuming capital, right? Like your risk-weighted assets grew 25% in '24. So how do you plan on increasing your capital ratio? Or could we see an impact on your payout ratio in '25? And can I also ask like you talked about, right, the impact of Resolution 4966 of BRL 900 million on Banco Pan, but that should be effective as of January 1? Or am I mistaken? And can you give us an update what was your capital ratio as of January 1?

Mario, so I think what you saw here in our capital ratios is stability for I think, close to 3 years, right? We've been around this core equity Tier 1 and total and Tier 1 capital ratio for a very long period of time. And during this period, we grew significantly our credit portfolio. What happened this quarter, it's -- obviously, this is not -- cannot be maintained 100% stable quarter-over-quarter. There are some variations there. This year, we grew the credit portfolio by 30%, right? So it's a significant growth of the credit portfolio. And even with that growth, we managed to maintain stable capital ratios. Obviously, there is a small decrease during this quarter. mostly related, we pay the JCP, right? So there is components of volatility there. And -- but we are not worried. I think that the profitability that the overall business provides and the consistency that we see in profitability for the next few quarters are sufficient for us to sustain the level of growth that we expect to have. Regarding next -- or this first quarter, right, I think you asked about the impacts of Resolution 4.966. So they are not recorded in these numbers that we are seeing because the impact will be as of January 1, right? So -- and as I mentioned, the impact will be only 6 basis points for us, right? The impact in the equity is close to the BRL 900 million you mentioned, BRL 897 million. But you remember that there is this phase-in from a decision of the Central Bank that will phase in the impact in -- during the next 4 years. So just 6 basis points of impact. And we have to remember that during the first quarter of '25, we won't pay JCP. So the increase in equity will be higher than what we see and what we saw in the fourth quarter of '24.

And just to be clear, we don't expect to change the payout policy that we've been using, which is 25% of revenue -- of income or JCP, whatever is the biggest one of both. And we think that, that allows us to not only have enough capital, but actually it might even allow us to accumulate more conservative ratios.

That brings us to the end of the question-and-answer session. I will I'll now return the floor to Mr. Roberto Sallouti for his closing remarks. Thank you. Have a nice one.

Thank you, everyone, for joining our full year '24 results call. We hope you all have a great week and look forward to talking to you again at the end of Q1. Thank you very much.