Enento Group Oyj (ENENTO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, all, and welcome to Enento Group's Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Webcast and Conference Call. My name is Pia Katila. I'm Enento's Investor Relations Manager. And I'm today joined by CEO, Jeanette Jager; and CFO, Elina Strahlman. We will open this news conference with our Q2 presentation, followed by Q&A session. And what comes to the agenda. CEO, Jeanette Jager, will start with the topicals of the second quarter and then have an overview to our ongoing strategy work, growth opportunities, new services and sustainability. And after Jeanette, Elina will continue with the results and the development of the second quarter. And for your information, all the presentation material is now available on our investor pages. And this webcast recording later today. And at this point, I have pleasure to have pleasure to hand over this to CEO, Jeanette Jager. Please, Jeanette.

Thank you very much, Pia, and a warm welcome to all of you. I hope you're enjoying your summer wherever you are. Here in Helsinki, we're having a beautiful day with about 22 degrees. So Enento continued its solid development in the second quarter. Despite high comparison figures, our net sales grew by 4.8%. Net sales increased in all 3 business areas. Profitability continued to weaken following higher costs in IT. We have actions ongoing that are aimed to secure better profitability in the latter half of the year. Macroeconomic challenges continue and risk of recession in the Nordics has increased. Although higher interest rates and inflation do not necessarily have significant direct impacts to our business, indirect impacts through economic activity levels may be material to us. So far, consumer credit business has continued to perform strongly, while low growth environment has kept demand for our business information on a stable level. On real estate side, we have already seen significant decrease towards end of the quarter in housing transaction levels. Future performance is dependent a lot on what happens to the activity levels and how it impacts consumer and business behavior, but we are preparing us for various scenarios and are adjusting our plans accordingly. Now we do have a strong management team. We had a lot of experience with whom we work on the plans for short and long term. The newest member of the management team, Andreas Darner, will start as Director of Strategy and Transformation in mid-August, and he will strengthen our capabilities to drive transformation and execute on our strategy going forward. Let's then continue with a few words on the strategy and future direction. According to our strategy, we continue to aim to strengthen our leading position within credit information business, become the leader within business information and #1 choice in data-driven business process services. These targets continue to be valid. And in the long term, we believe we can deliver 5% to 10% profitable growth. The new services are the key driver for our future growth, and our aim is to increase the share of new services on a continuous basis. In addition, we will focus even more on sales efforts to increase market shares. We have revised our actions for the next coming years in order to decrease our emissions, now towards carbon neutrality by 2023. To navigate in a rapidly changing world and increased uncertainties of macro development, it's more important than ever to be smarter, faster and more agile. In recent years, we have also made significant investments into modern capabilities and enablers to support future growth, but this has come with increased costs. Now as a direct consequence of the changing outlook and challenges around us, we are carrying out extensive work to prioritize initiatives, redistribute resources and ensure continued good profitability. The results of this work will follow during the fall. Simultaneously, we will continue to focus strongly on continuous improvement of the customer experience and quality. Customer-driven innovation and making it more easy to sell, easy to buy and easy to use, will support both the growth and profitability going forward. As examples of ongoing work, we are looking at possibilities to optimize our product portfolio and possibilities to discontinue low-value services. We are also looking at our operating and sourcing models in IT. As a concrete example, we have signed a frame agreement with a new IT partner, TCS. We are still in exploring phase and more information will come when the cooperation proceeds to more tangible level. The cooperation gives us access to technology solutions and competence. And it could, for example, be from a cost reduction, consolidation or increased speed in delivery. But as said, we are still only in the investigation phase, and the work on this area continues. Regarding opportunities for growth, we continue to see high growth potential in Nordic business information markets and continue to implement the strategy accordingly. In May, Enento decided to increase its ownership in Goava to 48% to support our ambition of becoming the leading provider of business information by growing in the sales intelligence domain and strengthening our capabilities within our structured data. Goava has so far successfully met the targets that have been set to the business as prerequisite for our additional investment. The next phase in the business plan is to scale up the sales organization in the Nordics and to continue to increase sales and develop the existing offerings. Our plan is to make additional investment next year if targets continue to be matched and acquire all outstanding shares during 2025, if Goava's business develops according to the set targets. Our model in the business information is to grow together with our customer needs and on the other hand, build highest-quality services with highest-quality data that we can scale to different customer needs, starting from limited free data up to highly advanced and intelligent services for strategic customers. From customer end, we have around 7 million unique visitors in our premium sites monthly. And those visitors, we aim to convert to buying customers and into our recurring subscription base. And when customer grows, we offer more advanced services for the growing needs. From service point of view, our focus is on building most advanced intelligent services for our strategic customers, such as financial sector who are the most demanding customers when it comes to data sources, quality and intelligence on top of the data. These high-quality services we then repackage to fit the needs and buying behavior of the SMEs. And let's then have a review also of our new services development as they continue to be one of the key drivers for the growth. The share of new services was 5.1% in Q2 and declined somewhat from previous quarter and last year's levels. Despite the decline in revenue share, we launched altogether 15 new services. So a number of services launches has remained on high level. The decline in the share of new services is largely explained by the fact that we had some larger vintage services from 2020 that dropped from the baseline in the beginning of the year. In addition, our focus in 2022 is very much on the launch of strategic services such as daily credit register and ESG report in Sweden. We are also planning on launching consumer credit service for e-commerce sector in Sweden and develop Nordic offerings for compliance services to name a few of the strategic launches done and expected. The sales cycles and customer integrations for these kind of services tend to take longer time, and this may impact the KPI negatively throughout the year. However, the long-term potential for this kind of novelty type of services is great. In Q2, we also had interesting launches to strengthen our real estate offering launched forest and farmland valuation for Finnish market. We also continue to develop our real estate valuation services in the Swedish market and introduce a climate risk classification for buildings. Now to concentrate a little bit more on the improved Corporate PEP and Sanction Report to supporting compliance need. We have now launched, as mentioned, Corporate PEP and Sanction Report with new functionalities in Finland. Following the Russian sanctions, the demand for the service has been high, and we supported our current and new customers throughout the crisis with their compliance needs. This, we, of course, want to do all the time better, and therefore, we develop our services continuously and introduce better features and functionalities. At latest, we have, for example, further developed search functionalities to improve customer experience and make service more easy to use. Moving over on to the ever so important sustainability theme. As we have many times mentioned, sustainability is at the core of our operation. And as a part of our sustainability work, we are also aiming to reduce our own carbon footprint. And for that, we have committed to a green transition plan that was finalized and approved during Q2. We have learned a lot during our sustainability journey and the green transition plan includes our revised actions for the next coming years in order to decrease our emissions. We aim to be carbon neutral by 2023. We have also decided on long-term ambitious target to decrease our emissions by 80% since our base year 2019 and to be net zero by 2030. Our purpose is to build trust in the everyday. Our services support in preventing our indebtedness and making sustainable lending decisions in the society. By our offering, we promote the availability of unique data and expertise on positive credit information and turn that data to intelligence and quality decision. Our positive data in Sweden is very comprehensive and already covers more than 98% for the consumer loans. During this year, we also introduced a daily credit register in Sweden to provide on time positive credit data for decisioning purposes. In Finland, the government made the decision to introduce positive credit register in 2024. We are preparing for what may come in connection to credit register. There is, for sure, a high need for our type of services provider in the markets also in the long term. Governmental register will not support customers with data quality verifications, scoring, decisioning and various data intelligence as well as combining positive data, for example, with negative credit information. We strongly believe that our competitive advantages will continue to support us also throughout the regulatory changes. Now I would like to welcome Elina, our CFO, to continue with our numbers, and I will be back shortly.

Thank you, Jeanette. Very warm welcome to this Q2 results review on my behalf as well. So let's start with some key figures and highlights. In terms of growth, we had a solid quarter, and we can be especially happy that all our business areas grew, especially when taking into account the market uncertainties and record high comparisons that we were facing. Revenue grew by 4.8% and totaled EUR 43.4 million, thanks to strong performance in Consumer Credit business in both markets, Finland and Sweden. Following the war in Ukraine and Russian sanctions, very strong demand for the Finnish compliance services also continued and supported the growth. On positives, the performance in business information side also improved from Q1 levels, although the growth was still modest. Adjusted EBITDA development, on the other hand, was negative and declined by 2.2% from last year to EUR 15.5 million, following the continuing high cost burden from IT and Tambur likewise. Profitability was also impacted by the changed sales mix and record high comparisons. What clearly puts pressure on our profitability are the platform-related activities that have come with increased costs in the form of higher license, maintenance and capacity costs. But as Jeanette already mentioned, we are taking actions to secure better profitability development, both for the coming quarters and longer term. Now let's then continue with a few more key figures before going into details about revenue and results. First of all, adjusted EBIT development was in line with the adjusted EBITDA and same applies to official EBITDA and EBIT since we didn't have any material items affecting comparability. Another key figure, share of new services was at 5.1% as Jeanette already covered, and the decline is explained by the normal variance between periods as well as the fact our focus this year is very much on the strategic launches, where sales and customer implementation cycles are long. What the what comes to the variance between periods, the revenue is included in the new service KPI only for 2 years after the launch of the service. And this year, we have had some bigger new services from 2020 vintage dropping off from the baseline. And that clearly impacts the development of the KPI. What then comes to the strategic launches, we do have good pipeline. And as already mentioned, have already had a couple of very interesting strategic launches this year, such as the daily credit register in Sweden, where implementation actually is ongoing with several customers. As I said, with this kind of novelty type of services, it tends to take longer time to get larger scale benefits. And this fact will pressure the KPI during this year going forward as well, although longer term potential is expected to be great. If we can continue with the revenue highlights and more details on the revenue development. So we continue to see strong development in Consumer Insight with 6.8% growth despite extremely high comparisons. And this was with some double-digit growth in Finnish Consumer credit business and high growth also in the Swedish business. Finnish Consumer credit business was positively impacted by removal of temporary 10% interest rate cap late last year. The development in the smaller business lines in direct-to-consumer and consumer marketing was more modest and continue to be impacted by the macroeconomic situation. Also Digital Processes business developed well and continued in strong growth path with 6.3% growth, even though housing markets started calling down. The declining trend in real estate was well covered, as said, by the high growth in compliance services in Finland, where the Ukraine war and imposed sanctions continue to boost the demand for the know-your-customer type of services. Finally, the Business Insight development was also slightly more on the growth side compared to Q1. And there development in Finnish enterprise business that was pretty much flat. And despite moderate development, the good thing is the trend has been slightly positive as the business still was declining in Q1. Development in premium business was good. And in premium services, we saw double-digit growth. Overall, as we have discussed many times before as well, when it comes to enterprise and risk management services, this kind of stagnated economic situation is the worse for us when both level of economic activity and need for credit risk management remains on a stable level. But let's then continue with the profitability review in more detail. Adjusted EBITDA, that development, as said, was negative and declined by 2.2% from last year. And the key reasons behind our other operating expenses were both higher IT costs and Tambur expense development are visible. But if we start to go through the cost line by line. So first, materials and services, i.e., data acquisition costs, they increased by EUR 500,000 and grew slightly faster than revenue. Gross margin development was pretty much flat. The cost increase is related to high growth in consumer credit business in Finland, which comes with reliable data acquisition costs. Personnel expenses increased. On the other hand, by EUR 100,000 following higher amount of FTEs. But as also discussed before, we have accelerated our efforts related to platform transformation and driving future growth initiatives with recruitment in IT and business development and therefore, also the production for ones increased by EUR 100,000 simultaneously and basically mitigated the cost increase coming from the staff cost. Then finally, as I said, other operating expenses, those increased by EUR 1.8 billion. And the main reason behind the increase are higher costs in IT. IT costs increased following the double cost environment and new capabilities and enablers that have been taken into use following the platform transformation. Also, we did have some pre-studies and expense projects that increased the cost burden for the second quarter. In addition, some EUR 300,000, of course, altogether related to higher Tambur expenses due to the fact that it takes some time to ramp down the development capacity, while at the same time, we also want to continue to deliver services on good level. Sales commissions increased also during Q2, but that was following the growth in premium and freemium services. In addition to that, had some higher cost in relation to our own activity in relation to traveling events and similar after the previous years' COVID comparisons. But now -- this was about the profitability and let's then move on to the cash flow. And in free cash flow, the development was very positive. Free cash flow was EUR 6.4 million and developed positively despite the slightly lower EBITDA and cash conversion that improved to 41.5% from previous year's 27% level. The cash flow was positively impacted by the change in working capital and timing of invoicing mainly as well as then some high payments occurring in the comparison period related to long-term incentives. Also, investments were on a slightly lower level than previous year, and that mainly related to timing of some hardware investments in the comparison period. Then moving on to the financial position. That also remains pretty much unchanged and continued strong. We have around EUR 10 million of cash at our hands after the dividend payment and second Goava investment that took place in Q2. And we also have some EUR 35 million of unused credit facilities available. Net debt-to-EBITDA remained well behind defined maximum level of 3 at 2.6x and gross investments, as already mentioned, were somewhat lower than previous year due to the hardware investments in the comparison period. Then finally, we have a few words on the outlook and guidance. I invite now Jeanette back to the stage to discuss about the future figures and outlook.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Elina. We continue to target around 5% growth and somewhat improving adjusted EBITDA margin. However, we do see that the macroeconomic uncertainties have increased in the whole Nordics and that might also increasingly impact demand of our services. But so far, demand for consumer credit services remain strong. And at this moment, we don't expect any immediate decline in that amount. Consumers want to find the cheapest loan providers and run tendering processes and the high inflation may also increase need for short-term unsecured financing. On the other hand, current macro development does not indicate that the demand for business insights, Enterprise services would be picking up in the short term. Nevertheless, we do have various actions ongoing to support the sales development in short and long term, including upgrade of the graphical user interfaces to make it both easy to buy and use. We communicated in March about the transfer of the Tambur housing transaction platform agreement to the Swedish banks. The transfer of the platform is currently expected to take place earliest in April 2023. And then to continue to provide services based on the platform until the final handover date in 2023. Final conditions related to the transition period and timing are still being negotiated but discontinuance of the service development and related sales will impact revenue and profitability more negatively from third quarter onwards. This, combined with a declining trend in housing volumes will negatively impact the performance in Digital Processes, and we don't believe that the impacts are fully mitigated by the high demand for compliance services. Based on the profitability performance in H1, we do have a need to decrease our cost base from H1 level. We have taken and do have actions ongoing to support the profitability level for H2. These include price increases in certain areas, infrastructure consolidation products in Sweden and in investigation on sourcing opportunities and discontinuance of low-value services to name a few. And this was the summary of our first half performance and views about the future. So now we will have time for some questions. And I'm also welcoming back Elina. Please join me to take on questions.

Yes. Now we are ready for the questions, and we start with the questions over telephone conference line. Please, operator.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question.

Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. I have just a couple of questions. So I guess my first question is about Consumer Insights. So what you're thinking here in respect what is driving the demand? And there is growing inflation, which is putting the higher pressure on the consumers. And do you also see a risk that this sort of elevated demand in this category would put the [ regulatory ] pressure back on here because -- or what we saw in the beginning of pandemic, the interest rate cap and some people are financing their pricing inflation by taking consumer loans.

If I got to your question right, and maybe you can help out if I didn't. If I got your question right, your question was connected to whether inflation and higher prices could -- would lead to new consumer loans. That would not, of course, be impossible even though we, as mentioned earlier, would, of course, see that it would be unfortunate if we need to actually handle higher costs as a consumer, we're taking on new loans. But please, if I got the question right, continue Elina.

No. I believe you got the question right. And then what comes to the regulatory part. So -- as we know in Finland, the government is already planning adjustments to the current interest rate cap more permanent ones, and those are expected to impact then from probably next year onwards. So at least at the moment, we are not expecting any fast moves on that side.

All right. That's helpful. The second question is about the Business Insight. And I guess, the issues with the enterprise customers that seem to be continuing here. Do you have any potential trigger what could turn this development around in terms of the volumes, I think about the development in the general economy? Or is it more of an issue with your current products and offering, how would you describe this?

Well, the development of the enterprise revenue and the moderate, I would say, growth in that. I think that has a number of different -- not from different issues to connected to it. One was that we had lost a larger client earlier -- and we can still see that our comparison numbers are then connected to in decline connected to that we have lost one of those. Now in addition to that, during the pandemic. There was a change in buying behavior, so that the cost consciousness during the pandemic also introduced a new buying behavior where you were actually buying exactly more or less what you needed at the time. And that in combination that we still haven't seen the kind of change in the macroeconomic situation as of now towards more risk where you actually buy more risk decision-based reports, et cetera, for the business part means that we are not seeing the change yet. But in addition to that, I would like then to say that we are doing efforts both on the sales side, meaning that we are working on new customers. Of course, that is not a short solution. That is something which takes this long sales cycles within this. In addition, we are also doing some packaging of solutions, which we also have a good hope for how this will actually then pick up. In addition to that, of course, it's also connected to the volumes depending on how the macroeconomic situation develops and where this kind of risk-based data is of more interest ahead.

Okay. That's interesting. I guess the final question is about the Digital Processes, which grew quite well despite the housing transaction volumes moderating. You said that you don't expect these compliance services to fully mitigate the decline volumes here. But overall, do you see these compliance services and now your customer services being in prolonged on the elevated level after the Russia-Ukraine war started? Or was this sort of a one-off that we saw during this quarter?

I would say I have 2 answers to that. One is that I think that we did see a peak when it came to the data that was both at the moment that sanctions were actually coming in. So in that sense, I think what we will see now is that you move over to verify that you have the right data. It means that you're not keeping on the same high level, but you're actually coming back and verifying that you also regarding new data that you have that you are according to the sanctions. So in that sense, I would say that it might not keep on the same level as it did initially but it will continue to be an increased area of volumes for us. In addition to that, in the more long term, we do see that the compliance area will continue to also have an increase in growth potential for us. We should also remember that we haven't yet launched the full services in Sweden which, of course, also is a growth potential for us further on. I think we will see sanctions like this being a part of the need for new data also going forward.

We will take our next question.

It's Matti Riikonen from Carnegie. A couple of questions. First of all, I would like to continue on the compliance demand question that was posed in the previous question. So if you compare the revenue from compliance-related services in early March, let's say, when the Russia's attack on Ukraine started, and then at the end of June, how big a difference are we talking about in terms of escalated growth and you somehow give a magnitude to that change?

Would you like to pick this on?

Yes. So obviously, the March was the peak month and the highest month for the revenue. But it has -- the revenue has continued on high levels throughout the Q2 as well. There has been some decline, but not significant, yet. Of course, when the sanctions keep changing, this also triggers continuous need to update and know your customer type of information. So obviously, that also keeps the attraction rather solid. But -- we have seen ever since March, very high demand, only slightly lower demand for Q2 than what was the March peak, so to say.

Okay. Good. That clarifies. Then the second question is related to the Business Insight and the Enterprise segment where you have had fairly let's say, stable or even declining top line growth for some time now. And I think we discussed at some point that there was a big customer loss in the previous year that would be kind of affecting to this year's growth numbers. Could you describe that event and its impact on the numbers that we have seen this year? And what kind of demand change are we talking about? So is it going to be a kind of total lack of those volumes in 2022? And then basically from next year on, you would have a [indiscernible] in a comparable base, at least in the latter part of 2023, so that it would no longer affect your growth rate? Or can the situation be worse so that you would continue to lose volumes from the same particular client. That would be -- yes, that's basically my question.

What comes to this one customer that was a customer from, let's say, nonfinancial sector. And they basically changed the service provider as a whole. So that means that the impact of that one customer will not follow us for '23. They did decrease the usage of our services gradually during last year. And then it means that during this year, still, we will see impact on that, but then it will not follow for the next year. That said, it was not -- of course, when we talk about larger customers, they always make a difference, but that has not been the only reason behind the declining trend. Have had some impact, of course, but then also, as Jeanette already mentioned, their cost consciousness and overall volumes have also been declining. But what we saw now in Q2 was actually flat development in Business Insight, Enterprise services, which basically means that the volumes were able to mitigate the impact of this one customer loss already in that. So there has been slight positive trend now in the volumes as well.

Okay. So basically, by the end of this year, you would no longer have the kind of comparability problem burdening on your growth numbers in that segment. Could you just give an idea how big a difference it has made during this year on the growth rate in Business Insight? Are we talking about perhaps 2% impact? Or just any kind of quantification of how big an issue we are talking about so that we could relate that information to the other drivers that you have seen like the more competitive buying, et cetera, and basically some changes in the demand.

Yes. Well, of course, we are not able to give exact impacts, but it has been somewhat less than 2%. So not that high impact in that sense.

All right. But if we are talking about less than 2% then it's -- in your numbers, it's fairly significant in any case.

Yes.

Yes.

Have you experienced similar customer departures recently? And as the customer buying has become more intense or competed, do you think that it's possible that you could lose more customers going forward?

We don't have any signs of that at the moment. No. Of course, that is always a risk. And I think you should always be humble to that one. And make the most out of your deliveries and make sure that your customers are really happy with your deliveries and the value of those. But no, there is no -- there is no information about that at this point.

All right. Good. And regarding the IT costs that you mentioned, they have increased your cost this year. And I was just wondering, do you think that the costs will still grow next year so that they wouldn't -- it would be an increased level of course, until you then finally launch the Nordic platform and gradually the costs start to come down and not increase anymore. So is next year still going to be an increase in IT costs?

Well, as mentioned, just to take one step maybe also for me to reason logically in how I'm answering. Yes, we have seen increases as we have now developed, and we need to also maintain new and modern technology as well as enablers for growth. And when you do develop these kind of new and also in addition to that an additional platform, then, of course, your costs are inevitably going up. At the same time, and this is a little bit too soon to say, we have also communicated that we are doing a number of different activities in order to decrease our IT costs in short, mid and long term. And so if I would say that next year is midterm, I think that we still need to investigate what we can do in order to give any promises. What we -- when we what can we do, then you can look into everything from how do you actually work with sourcing, how do you work with your vendor capabilities, can you decrease the number of vendors you're working with, is it possible to decrease the number of the following also application licenses, et cetera, with that. So that was maybe a big answer, but the fair answer under the condition that we are still working on the investigations on what we can actually do and what effect that can have, and we will come back to this in the fall. Is there anything you would like to add to that one?

Yes, I think that was well [ booked ].

Right. And I think, Elina, you mentioned regarding the IT costs that there would be also license and maintenance costs involved and not just kind of consulting resources that build your new systems. And of those, naturally, the license and maintenance costs, they will continue to run also for the new services. So what is the kind of split between the IT cost types in a way that is there a consulting element or changing element that will perhaps decline or move more in a volatile manner? And then, of course, license and maintenance cost is something that is there on the bottom, and it will stay there as an additional cost. How are these different cost types behaving, let's say, this year? And do they change somehow next year?

Yes. Of course, license costs are more difficult to change. But when it comes to maintenance costs, and, for example, the vendor consolidations or sourcing models, those will impact also directly to the maintenance cost burden. So we are definitely, definitely aiming to also look at how we can better manage this increased maintenance costs, which is a significant part of that IT-related cost increase.

All right. And knowing that so many IT companies are struggling for talented people and there's huge attrition and wage inflation at the moment. Have you experienced major price hikes when it comes to kind of hourly pricing, et cetera, from your vendors?

Well, not really. We have fixed costs, basically fixed contracts for this year. So in that sense, when it comes to vendors, we haven't seen price increases at least yet. But definitely, we do realize that the war of talent is out there. And the impacts that we then see is that also -- the consultants on our vendor side are changing constantly. And this, of course, causes also difficulties for our development operations, when new people keep coming into the ongoing projects. So in that sense, we do see impact -- direct impact of this talent war as well, but not through prices, more like in how it might then cause delays, for example, in the projects.

Right. Good. Then one technical question related to new services. The share of sales was again lower than previous quarter and some wording in your report said that there was some seasonality impact affecting. I was just wondering that do you really mean seasonality impact in the sense that there would be a typical decline in new services in Q2? Or did you just mean that quarters are very different and there might be different launches, different kind of activities going on in different quarters, and that's the kind of seasonality that you mean. So which one is it?

A very, very good question. And I think we try to revise the wording at least for partially, but apparently, we were not that successful in fully revising the wording throughout the document. But you're absolutely right. We are not talking about seasonality between quarters, but more, let's say, variance between periods when it comes to the fact that the KPI, how it is measured 2 years' revenues from new services and then when bigger services drop from the baseline, that is, of course, it might cause a big volatility in the KPI between periods.

But what we want to say and what we also want to give us an expectation now is that seasonality in this case is not connected to a quarter, but rather to -- it could rather be a longer period. And as mentioned earlier, in combination with what Elina mentioned and also that we are now very much focusing on strategic service development which has longer sales [ cycles ] and longer time for integration, we can actually expect that we will see a continuous level around what we have seen now in Q1 and Q2 for the rest of the year.

Right. So knowing that your pipeline of new products look so that the first changes in the current share of new services, we would start to be seeing in 2023, did I understand correctly?

Yes. Some along that. Some of them are taking longer time, and some of them are also coming in already in maybe the end of this year. But -- we are, all in all, a bit careful about raising expectation too high. We see it as that we will keep on the lower pace than what you have seen a year ago when it comes to presented share of new revenue this year.

Yes. And concrete examples, we can see that, for example, the daily credit register, we have implementation ongoing with various customers, but those customer implementations have also clearly taken longer time than what we were originally expecting. So this is a concrete example of this kind of delays.

Good. Then final question for me. When you think about positive and negative drivers for your business for the second half, what are the kind of positives that can basically surprise you on that side? And what are the negatives that would basically be the opposite?

Well, I think we have already started to see a negative driver in the real estate housing markets, meaning that we have already seen that the real estate market in Sweden are actually about to have a decline in the need of data. Finland has so far been quite stable, but I think that, that is a very probable actually a negative driver for the next H2. We could, but that depends on how the macroeconomic situation continues. I think we are seeing a very positive driver now in the consumer credit info. Depending on how the macroeconomic situation could develop and maybe not in the way we all would like to, there could actually be and also a shift into more volumes on the risk decision. But I'm also -- this is my first year. So I also like to see what Elina would complement with on that one.

No, I think you had a quite good analysis. So of course, the consumer credit business, it has continued to surprise us positively, and that remains to be seen then that will this kind of very positive trend continue throughout the year. And of course, then if the risk of recession increases that might -- that could impact positively the demand of risk management services also on the business side. But as said, we don't currently expect this kind of trend to happen. With real estate, we clearly expect that housing markets will continue to cool off and that will be visible in the real estate-related revenues. When it comes to the compliance side, so we have good, but I would say, somewhat moderate expectations for H2. So we do understand that when these sanctions have been constantly revised and companies have been waking up to this situation, it has increased the demand for the whole Q2, but we expect that the development will be somewhat more moderate in H2. Of course, if something happens in relation to this need, again, further biggest sanction changes, for instance, that could trigger more revenues also for us.

Good. So if I just clarify, when you say that if there's a recession in Finland and in Sweden, it would be positive? For your volumes in consumer information? If that's point right?

I actually was referring there to business information, enterprise type of services. So if the bankruptcy rates, payment defaults would start going up, as we have seen in previous crisis, at least, that has also increased attraction towards our services and increase the demand for risk management type of services. So that could be something that could impact positively. But as I said, we don't expect that kind of development to appear this year as of now.

So you're basically referring to the [indiscernible] type demand that you have talked earlier, so that if the times are extremely bad, then it's actually good for you and if the times are extremely good, then it's also good for you, but in the middle, it is at the weakest.

Yes. The only thing we don't want to see is that nothing from a business point of view. So yes, wherever there is a reaction in the market, which our customers are acting upon, then doesn't matter if the economic situation is going up or going down, but then the data is required, needed and asked for and our volumes go up.

We will take our next question.

Felix Henriksson from Nordea. I have a couple, will go one by one. Firstly, related to your sort of access to secure improved profitability in the second half of the year. A couple of things stuck out to me, one being the sort of simplified operating model and the other being the decommissioning of sort of legacy low-value products. So could you just perhaps explain in a bit more new detail what for you would mean a simplified operating model? And secondly, what kind of services are you referring to when we talk about sort of low-value legacy products?

Well, actually, I would say that both of these. If everything works very well, it could have an impact already in autumn in H2. But -- those are also to prepare for next year. When it comes to services, it is too soon to say. But what we are doing now is that we are setting up the process to look into all our services and products in order to actually then make the analysis and identify what products and services we see don't have the profitability or are driving too much costs. So I don't have an answer at this point, which ones they are. We are actually at a stage that we are setting this process up. And as I see it, this should probably be an ongoing process for every year that we are looking into end of life of products and services and not a onetime shot. So that's the way we should work with our product and service area moving ahead. Operational model could be everything, a way of working to actually also how we develop new services. And we also see there that we have significant -- or I shouldn't say significant yet. We think we have upsides in how we can work with the operating model as well. But also that one is more connected to midterm, I would say, rather than short term. On short term, I think, to actually get the effect already now in H2, then we need to look into what initiatives to prioritize, which initiatives, projects, we need to reconsider, when to commit and conclude on those fully, et cetera. And of course, all the variable costs that you usually look into on the shorter term. So we are looking into both actions now in short term and midterm. And of course, also long term, but that is something we are coming back to in the fall.

Okay. That's helpful. And then secondly, on the positive credit register to be introduced by the government in 2024. Obviously, a competitor for your own positive credit solution that's based on sort of voluntary consumer survey. I'm wondering, is there any way, that you yourself sort of utilize this data and package it differently and sell it to your customers and actually benefit from this. Or is it completely an incorrect suggestion?

It might be that I'm not giving you the right answer. I can see that Elina is already looking at me. But actually, to us, it is -- I mean, we have the decision now that is clear. To us, it is not totally clear, though, how we will -- how do you say, how we will work with -- it is clear to us that we need -- that our customers still needs the intelligence built on this. And that we do need to continue to develop, to stay competitive. But whether we can also repackage and so further on, I don't know if there's any new information the latest weeks on that one, which I don't have because it is a couple of weeks ago now since we did the last work on the credit register. But we will, for sure, keep very close to the development of this and look what data regarding what kind of credits and also, again, what kind of intelligence we build from this. Do we -- are we a part of the chain? Are we repackaging? Everything should be up for consideration in order to make sure that we can bring as much value to our customers as possible and stay competitive, of course. So we are keeping a very close eye on this. Do you want to complement?

No, no. You nailed it, I think so. So yes. We are very much in the investigation phase. And of course, aiming to also start looking in more detail with our customers that how to operate in this kind of new environment, but definitely not something that we would at least exclude as an option.

Okay. That's clear. And then a final quick one for me. Jeanette, you've been now in the role for a bit more than half a year, anything more you can share on a time line for a potential Capital Markets Day?

No, not yet. I think we actually need to get our plans together, which I hope to be on a better view after the summer. So it will probably be the later part of the year.

There were no further questions at this time.

Thank you. Do we have any questions in the chat, Pia?

Yes. Actually, we have received a couple of questions from our webcast audience. With the lower share price, will the company be considering to buy back shares?

Well, of course, we all the time look how to optimize our capital structure, but that is then something that is a decision by the Board if that might ever happen.

Okay. And the second one is, you mentioned redistribute resources and focus on profitability in coming quarters. How long for this process period for optimization to play out?

Well, the processes for the optimization to play out, that depends on if the question is asking for so when can we see an effect of that one? Because I think actually, I think we will work with prioritization, re-prioritization and how we make -- optimize the effect of resources for quite a long time ahead. But effect? You can have effect quite instantly. I mean we are planning for it as we are also saying that this is a part of our H2 work. So yes, this should have effect in H2 this year.

Okay. Good. Thank you. And that was all regarding the questions this time. I check once again. Yes, no more questions.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, and have a nice summer, everyone.

Yes. Have a nice summer.