Grupo Cibest S.A. (CIBEST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Investors Day of Bancolombia. My name is Carlos Baene Raad, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations. We're pleased to have here with us our CEO, Juan Carlos Mora; Jaime Villegas, our COO; Cristina Arrastia, CCO; Cipriano López, CIO; and José Humberto Acosta, our CFO. The event will divide into 2 moments. We'll begin with brief presentations from our executives and then we'll have a Q&A session exclusive for the analysts that follow the bank. Let's begin with this -- the opening remarks of Juan Carlos.

Thank you, and welcome to all of you. I hope you are all well. Thank you for joining us today in this Investors Day of Bancolombia. As Carlos said, today, we will address several topics in depth, and we'll focus on Colombia as our main market, which is almost 75%, 80% of our operation. We'll have an outline, I'll give you our objectives and then we'll look at our strategic capabilities and how we, in turn, have been applied to our business. Likewise, I would like to emphasize our Nequi, which is the development of our neobank. And lastly, we'll talk about the impact of this strategy on our financial situation. Afterwards, we'll have a live Q&A session to develop whatever topics you would like to hear about more. Undoubtedly, we are living in a very, very complex situation, not only because of technology, but mainly it's because of the development or the users, our clients are demanding from us new capabilities and that's what we're addressing. We clearly know that we're here to promote an economic development that's sustainable and seeks well-being for all. And we have 3 fundamental pillars. We want to enhance the productive network of the countries where we operate. We clearly know that we have to help develop cities and communities to make them more sustainable. And that financial inclusion is fundamental, it's core to us. With this strategic mission, therefore, we clearly know that growing is our purpose, but growing keeping our financial soundness. Of course, we've experienced very challenging times, nobody expected what we went through in 2020. And we've known how to face this properly. And today, we have the capability, the strength, our equity to grow -- to grow, focus on those capabilities that we're developing and to see how we move on towards growth. But -- so growth is important in our geographies, along with the development of strategic capabilities, which are not based only on technology, but others that we're developing. For this, we clearly understand that the experience of our clients is fundamental in these times in which consumers are in digital, they're increasingly demanding and so with banks. And for that, we're developing at the bank capabilities that I'll talk about ahead and what we're focused on customer experience. There is something important to us, people, the person, the culture, how culture has to develop. It's got to be agile, open, a culture that attracts the best talent and retains it because there is no doubt that in these competitive times the struggle for keeping talent is one of our main topics to face. So we clearly understand that talent is fundamental. And all of this is framed by a vision, the well-being for all. It's the development of those countries where we operate so that people have a higher well-being. So what strategic capabilities are we developing? How do we this? Next, we'll deepen about these, but I'd like to talk about several topics, special topics. And it's a capability and our distribution channels. Traditionally, Bancolombia has developed the strategy based on a distribution capability that's outstanding. In the past, our network of offices played a fundamental role, yes, as well as our ATMs. Today, those offices and branches are migrating towards more service-oriented services. Today, it's transactional, and we're working on that. Yes, ATMs is needed to providing cash and receiving cash. But today, we have a fundamental tool, and it's more than 21,000 banking correspondents in Colombia, along with the digital capabilities, turns Bancolombia into a unique platform. It's not only the digital capabilities that we're developing in, but how they complement our physical offices that nobody else has in Colombia. So we have -- we're spread out throughout Colombia, and we can make transactions physically and digitally, complemented by digital capabilities, which are more and more and that we'll discuss ahead in Cristina's talk. A deep knowledge of our clients clearly has to do with the experience that I mentioned before, understanding our clients. And that's tied to the use of information. For more than 8 years, we've been developing capabilities to use information to have that knowledge. And today, you'll see some applications of that profound application. How we understand our clients; how we anticipate; how we've turned from being reactive to be proactive in our relations with clients and how this is tied to the experience that I mentioned, which is so fundamental. There's a clear role. And in fact we understand that financial services are evolving, and they're doing so to become orchestrators of additional capabilities. Therefore, we understand that our relation with nonfinancial activities is fundamental. And that leads us to ecosystems in which we will be acting with different capabilities. Sometimes, we'll be major players. Sometimes, we'll be backing major players. But that vision of ecosystems allows us to advance as well. And that's something we'll be seeing ahead. Technology, architecture, our capabilities are fundamental as well, not only these, but that digital transformation that has led us to have capabilities that serve our strategic vision. The experience of a client's growth of being able to compete in a market in which there are new players. We understand that they will also bring new challenges, but we're convinced that we have enough capabilities to compete. I'd like to underscore that Bancolombia in past years or in the past year really has had an outstanding performance acquiring clients. How we've grown, not only with our digital platforms but overall with our acquisition of clients, more than 2 million new clients in the last 1.5 years in Bancolombia. And that shows how our supply is great in this competing market. Today, it's very competing. So this topic of technology is developing. It's assisting us and it's closing that strategy that's fundamental. We're developing for the past 3 years capabilities of design as well, which joined that experience of clients, a relation with clients and design is also fundamental. As you can see, we have capabilities that go beyond the finance, data analytics, the experience in design and the creation of processes, which are closer. And we're there. It's still underway. We're developing this well. And talent strategy, which is one of our objectives. There, we advance to work with agile methodologies. We have to be swifter. We have to provide value propositions, backed by technology with clouds and which allow us with that vision of people working with agile methodologies to develop quickly into the capabilities to serve our clients and their experience. Clearly, we compete in every segment. We have the universal banking experience. We serve the financial -- the basic financial needs of individuals as well as the large corporations with structured products. And we'll continue with that universal banking vision because we understand that, that integration has advantages that others don't because we can integrate the flows, which move from individuals to corporations and so and so on. And Bancolombia is in the middle with those flows, which moves through our organization with all these capabilities that I'm telling you about. So we have a strategy which clearly has a vision, which is developing the capabilities -- competitive capabilities for today's world. We acknowledge there's an increasing competition by traditional players and new players as well. But we're convinced and we hope to show you this morning how in detail we are progressing. And this is a path of transformation that develops, a path in which we have to move quickly. But we have been doing well, and the results are there. So with this, I'd like to end this introduction -- these opening remarks in which I gave you an overview. And now let's look closely at the capabilities -- strategic capabilities of the bank. And for this, let's invite Mr. Jaime Villegas, our COO, who will provide you details about how we've been developing our strategic capabilities that I've given you an overall for. Thank you. And ahead, I'll be available for the Q&A session.

Juan Carlos, thank you, and welcome to you all. As Juan Carlos said, I'm going to talk about several of the capabilities that we have at the organization. The first capability refers -- and I think it's the most important too, culture. Cultural change is very important when it comes to digital transformation. So I'm going to refer to 2 particular topics agile-ism and in-house technology. We started to look at agile aspects in 2015, and we did it initially with the technology team. We made a significant transformation of the organization, and we created more than 300 sales [support] with multidisciplinary teams with 15-day sprints. Throughout this process, to implement this agile-ism, we realized that it was very important to incorporate this to the business areas. So in 2017, we decided to make a pilot in which we integrated for the Sufi business, operations, technology and business themes and created a trail showing very significant results. So in 2019, we made 2 additional pilots. We incorporated the teams, again, of technology, operations and business for the leasing (sic) alliance and ecosystems areas. And this year, we made the decision to spread this throughout the entire organization. Today, we have more than 40 agile tribes that seek excellence working in 4-month terms. Now when it comes to international promotion, in 2015, we had about 80% of the people technologies outsourced. And we made the decision of changing this. Our ambition back then was [indiscernible] we had a path that was based on 3 particular pillars. First, the rotation of outsourced equipment is 3x that of internal equipment. So this implied that we were having a significant loss of knowledge. In addition, we wanted to retain talent. So this led us to take this decision. And today, we have about 65% of the people work in-house and 35% external. Juan Carlos referred to our second capability, advanced analytics and AI. This was begun in 2014 with 3 fundamental principles: first, a robust information governance; second, a centralized analytics platform; and third, federated analytical teams. So these 3 pillars have allowed us to evolve significantly in our analytics strategy today of more than 1.8 petabytes in a platform that covers 4 countries. We have more than 250 sources of sub information entering the platform every day and more than 200 analysts and data analytics, which are interacting with our platform on a daily basis. We've had many examples and many models are being built based on the information that we have in our platform. And Cristina and Cipriano will talk about these more ahead. Something I'd like to underscore here making use of AI. We have our chatbox platform, and we have conversations with clients and employees. The third capability refers to the cloud and open source. Our first approximation to the cloud was in 2014, 2015, when we began to work with Nequi. And we did this, leveraging a technology that was entirely independent of that of the bank. And Nequi was born in the AWS cloud. And for the bank, Nequi began -- turn more into a lab. We began with the technology teams of the bank, which were more traditional. And we started to see the benefits contributed by the cloud to Nequi. And that's why in 2017, along with the AWS teams, we created an cloud excellence center. And for 18 months, we created the foundations for the migration of the bank -- of the bank's applications to the cloud. In 2019, we began the migration of applications to the cloud. Today, more than 30% of the charges are in cloud. And the idea is that in several years, we will have 100% of our applications in the cloud. Our fourth capability has to do with robotics and intelligent workflows. In 2015, we created in customer services area a center of excellence of robotics. And in this center, we built more than 700 robots that have allowed us to reduce up to 450 people. Today are the robots that are making these processes. And along with AI and AWS tools, we've created capabilities that allow us to take information from physical documents, from phone calls to turn that information into [liquid] text, feed those texts into our business models. And with that, we seek to have no human intervention in the processes that we're working on. There's a fifth capability. And Juan Carlos referred to the ecosystems already related to integration with third parties or alliances. And I'd like to say 3 things about this capability. First, the competitive advantage that we seek is the simplicity in which third parties can communicate with us, not only technically, but also communication, contractually. So we've developed -- we're still developing capability so that these third parties can connect with us simpler. And for that, we've had a work plan that I'd like to describe to you. A couple of years ago, we made the decision that all internal teams would communicate through apps and each of the teams has been building apps in their different applications so that the teams can communicate. And those apps have been deployed in more an internal marketplace of apps, which is -- has been available for about a year. And the extension of that marketplace of internal apps is called external apps marketplace. And through that platform, we'll be connecting with our clients. Lastly, and when it comes to anticipating to 2025, there are several things I'd like to underscore: the digital bank, and Cipriano will be giving us information about that and open banking of which Cristina will talk about. When it comes to open banking, we are working hard with the governments and regulators to build a regulation on open banking or open finance, which is being developed right now. Now all of these capabilities are worked following 2 fundamental principles: one, the data privacy and cybersecurity. Privacy and cybersecurity are embedded in everything we do because they are fundamental and they allow us to create the trust we need with clients. Okay. Keeping this in mind, these capabilities have allowed us to develop multiple products and services. Here's a sample of these, I won't refer to them closely, but I do want to point out 3 that are in the right-hand column. And that decision that we took to start to have internal, in-house people. The factoring core has to do with applications that we are internally looking at in the cloud. And to allow to have the autonomy needed. When it comes to our main core banking system, we made a decision to look at the ambition, which is our core. And with this, to make the migration entirely towards the cloud. I'd like to leave you with 4 final thoughts: first, the cloud and open source are key enablers that we have embraced for our digital transformation; second, customers should have more control of their data. And that's why our principles of design around data is important; third, customers will be better served if there is a cooperation between banks and fintechs; and fourth and not least important, we need to promote close collaboration among different industries to counter cybersecurity threats. With this, I end my presentation, and I give the floor to Cristina Arrastia, who will give us more information about how these capabilities are giving good results -- business results.

Thank you, Jaime. Good morning, everyone. As Jaime said, our goal is to share with you how Bancolombia has evolved and how the business has evolved in a world and the market that's increasingly more digital. I want to split my presentation into 3 parts. First and foremost, I would like to share with you the elements of different aspects we have at the commercial level; second, some of the results we have so far; and third, go into digital innovation and some of the big digital strategies we have at Bancolombia to provide follow-up for our clients and customers and their different needs. I'd like to begin [Technical Difficulty] our decision was to have a strategy focused on the relationship with our clients and that implied that we needed to understand who our clients were [Technical Difficulty] real necessity in order to build our dream strategy based on meeting those needs, both for people as well as for business. So we discovered things as simple as a person, for example, doesn't really wake up dreaming of a mortgage credit. Their real dream is to have a house and then the mortgage credit, it's just an instrument. It's just a tool to get to that goal. So we set up what some of those needs were that we wanted to focus and then started going on a journey. In the retail business, we deal with everyday things, mobility solutions. And for companies, we wanted to help them to grow their business, make it more efficient, et cetera. All of those needs we can see on those slides that was the journey we started to embark on. And once we established what is it that we wanted to do and what necessities we wanted to focus on, the next question was how we were going to get there? And here's where our strategy at distribution plays out in Bancolombia where digital channels are an absolutely important solution because, aside from making it scalable, it makes the whole operation efficient and more stable. However, we understood across all this process that people no matter how much adapt -- digital adoption there is, people don't want to remain only digital. What we've seen all these years is that people continue wanting custom-made advice. And here's where our physical channels come into play. Also Colombia is a country where the main payment method is cash, which is why the relevance of our digital -- our physical channels takes place. We have more than 20 physical chains across our country as well as an important ATM network, which help us to have that level of service and to provide an accompaniment for clients and meet their needs. However, the branch network, which continues to be important, has been shrinking for 4 years. And in 2024, we hope to have a 20% less. Actually, this year, we will be closing 40 branches. Next year, we plan to close another 50. And by 2024, we want to get to 228 because we have seen a change in our customers where this, starting from what happened last year, there was a higher digital adoption. So there is a trend change from transactional to relational and that's where we are in this process. And this is something that we will be on top of permanently. So our digital channels, as you can see on the slide, we have 5 fronts, which serve different segments that we serve. First and foremost, Bancolombia a La Mano, and I will be talking about it in deeper detail in a little bit. It's a digital channel that provides services for customers, which inside the bank, we call it the social segment related with everything pertaining to financial inclusions. That's how we serve low-income customers by providing them with a 100% digital offer, according to the needs of that segment. We also have our Bancolombia Super App. It's an app that, besides providing transactions for customers, it allows them to acquire financial products and nonfinancial products through it. Third, we have investors app (sic) [ App Inversiones ]. And it's about understanding our private banking customers because they told us that for them, it was very important to separate their investments from the day-to-day app. So we wanted to start on this journey and build this application, which goes -- which is focused to our affluent customers and our corporate customers to handle their investments from there. Fourth, we are the SME banks -- we are the SME banks in Colombia. And they told us that they wanted to have a digital solution tailormade to their small businesses. In Colombia, they represent 44% of the workforce in this country, and we really have a large number of them as Bancolombia customers. I will be telling you a little bit more about that. And fifth, we have our mid-sized corporate app, which is also incorporating other services serving that segment, SMEs and midsized corporate clients. So how are we going to do it? Where would we start? We started going on that journey, and in this section, I want to get to some of the results that we have so far. First things first, as Juan has said, we've had a large growth rate in our customer base. To date, we have a little bit more 16.5 million clients. This is not Nequi by the way, this is just Bancolombia. And we can see how they're segmented and split across 4 different sectors we have in Bancolombia. Retail banking and SME banking are the fastest-growing ones. They're growing at a rate of 11% annually. And as part of the retail banking, we have Bancolombia a La Mano, which up to date, we have 5,700,000 customers inside our Bancolombia a La Mano platform and is the fastest growing out of them all. It's growing at a rate of 37%. And when we take a look into who are those customers getting to Bancolombia en masse, first, we have payroll customers and retirement fund customers. At the bank, we have a really strong strategy. Actually, we have a market share of 33% of the payrolls in this country and 27% of the retired fund accounts in Colombia. Another very important market are independent workers. And how are they getting to Bancolombia? A little bit more than 2 years ago, we started working on supporting business growth because we wanted to understand what was happening with SMEs and personal companies in Bancolombia. And practically, their own resistivity means the sale was cash, and they didn't have any other card services to make sales. So we understood that one of the first hurdles, one is tax-related affairs, the Colombian -- like law in Colombia. And another one was they needed a solution, which I will be sharing the results with you later, which was the QR code, the Bancolombia QR code, which became a solution for especially personal companies where many of them have joined the banking system, and they have become formalized through this technology, which has caused many personal companies to join Bancolombia to become formalized, and we're helping them grow. There is another important group, which are remittances and subsidies. Out of remittances, we receive at Bancolombia, 64% of the remittances in this country. And our offer is for that to happen in our accounts, which is why Bancolombia a La Mano is a great customer receiver who receive remittances in Colombia. And the other thing are subsidies, which last year, as a result of the pandemic, grew very importantly in a very significant proportion. Now some other topics that I will be sharing with you from other segments. Retail banking, for example, which we will see in across all 4 segments, we have had a very important strategy on everything related to payments and collections from different channels, and that has allowed us to grow in a significant manner when it comes to deposits in savings account and checking account. But also we have [the flows ] customer information helps us bring in more customers. It's creating growth in commissions. And also we have information, very valuable customer information, which means that we will be able to use it in a much more digital strategy. Our second message is we permanently work on deepening the relationship with our customers. As you can see in the graph on the right, some of the figures of that deepening highlighting a little bit more than 2.6 million customers on different financing options. And just 4 years ago, that number was 1.6 million customers, but we have managed to get to 1 million customers. Still, we have a lot of potential. When we say we have 14 million, we can see the opportunities we have to continue delving deeper into this relationship. The other thing is our wallet share, 25%, we hope to get to 30%. In retail banking, we hope to have a 42%. And actually, we are the bank for that segment. Our goal is to get to 30% on the retail banking aggregate. As for SMEs, same thing. Our growth in flows and in commissions, same thing, but 2 messages. We continue working on deepening that relationship and we can see how 1.6 million customers have some type of collection or payment service with us, and that's reflected in our collections. We have 41% market share. We are the SME bank in Colombia, but we have a challenge, and that is to get to that deep relationship deepening in our retail banking. The Bancolombia QR code system is allowing us to have more information on this segment to get to them in a very important manner as well as continue growing on deepening the relationship and our wallet share when it comes to financing our customers. When it comes to mid-corporate companies, this segment was actually together with corporate customers, but we separated them. We understood that we needed to have a different value proposal, and we needed to more custom-make our relationship with them. When we started that, we had a 30% wallet share. Today, we're at 34%, and we've been improving on our deepening of that relationship. We want to get to 5 points above what we have today, and we are on an ascending growth trajectory. And we can see another reflection of the same thing with deposits and commissions. On corporate customers, our relationship is really good, same as our wallet share. The drop in deposits can be explained by term deposits. We separated current account from savings. Behavior is the same, and we can see that in growing commissions. This year, we had an important liquidity that in some way, our customers, especially government customers and financial institutions, when our term deposit rates were low, they withdrew their term deposits, but we continue growing in checking accounts and in savings account. And we can see that in our market share where we can see how we've been increasing checking accounts and savings account numbers being the first bank in Colombia by far. And when it comes to consumption and household last year, because of what happened, we started working more on supporting our customers on refinancing and credit restructuring. And at the end of last year, we started going on another ascending growth trajectory. And we have slowly but surely recovered our market share. When it comes to consumption, we're market leaders. And when it comes to mortgage, where we come second after Davivienda, but we're working on improving our mortgage credit products so that we can continue going up and get to the first place. When it comes to the commercial portfolio, you can see the results there. We do that very well, and we continue getting some more market share. Now regarding some indicators that I think are important to share with you when it comes to digital adoption. First, currently, 74% of our customers use our digital channels to transact every month. Second, what percentage of our digital growth are monetary based? Up to 5 years ago, we know that most transactions were customer inquiries through digital channels, but this trend is changing. Almost 90% of our transactions through digital channels are cash transactions. And this is important to note, Bancolombia in the Colombian market represents 40% of all transactions in the country, both digitals as well as nondigital ones. That goes to show you the power that our strategy holds from payments to collections and to channels because that is where information which is so valuable goes through as part of our digital strategy and also commissions. And we started working on a strategy several years ago since 2017. We wanted to digitalize our entire portfolio. We wanted to make more digital sales. Currently, 40% of our total sales we have are digital, and you can see the growth radar along the years. This is a strategy that becomes more and more materialized as a result of the digital adoption by all of our consumers. Now this is what I was telling you earlier. This is the strategy that we wanted to set up. We wanted to come up with a costless solution, especially for small-scale customers as well as personal companies, which were unwilling to pay a commission and their only payment method was cash. Actually, 3 years ago, when we launched this strategy, we set this challenge for us. Our big ambition was to get [indiscernible] points or retail points. And that was actually ambitious because up to date in our acquisition model history, [we had that's the best]. So we thought that 150,000 was extremely ambitious but the reality is that up to date, we have more than 1 million POS, which take Bancolombia's QR code as a payment method. And that has meant more of our customers have become formalized, more are going into the banking system and more of them are going into Bancolombia. With a QR code, you can use Bancolombia a La Mano from the Bancolombia Super App, but also from Nequi, and that has empowered businesses so that they can grow. And us, it has given us power to attract more information and more customers. We're doing the same thing in the non-present world Bancolombia button because the QR code is real here right now. And it's given us an idea of how clients through digital banking are with Bancolombia. These are some of the main figures that I wanted to share with you. And now I'm going to tell you about the digital strategy. Before going to each of the solutions, I want to discuss what the analysis was that made us make the decisions that we made. First thing, as we all know, our consumers are increasingly more digital and technology has turned business and transformed them in such a way that they're really here to stay and other industries even start to disappear. As part of that analysis, we realized that banking could play 2 roles, being the orchestrator, being the platform where custom-made solutions for your customers are housed or participating in other service providers as bank-as-a-service. Some years ago, we decided that we were going to be a bank-as-a-platform. We wanted to be the ecosystem drivers. And several components of our system were really available. The crown jewels of Bancolombia as we call them, first and foremost, our brand is very powerful, widely known in the Colombian market with a great reputation. Also, we have a large customer base and Nequi is included in this figure. And that gives us the power that from our analytics and expert solutions in our platforms, we will be able to deepen the relationship with our customers and adapt them into our solutions. Also, we represent 52% of the transactions in our country, including cash-based and noncash-based or money-based and nonmoney-based. As I showed you earlier, 47% of our transactions are money-based, which yields information regarding who our customers are, where they move, where they go, and that is one of the big value factors why we, as orchestrators, are so powerful. And add to that, our digital marketing tools to be able to get the results we want. The other thing is we have big traffic. For example, our website, www.bancolombia.com gets a lot of traffic, and that made us make a decision to become a bank-as-a-platform type of organization. And as a result of the demand of our customers who are setting up their platforms and inviting us to participate with our portfolio, we looked into that, and we figured that we could have both models, bank-as-a-platform as well as participating in other platforms. We wanted to overlap rather than fill in gaps. And we wanted to go into the banking-as-a-service strategy, and I will tell you a little bit more about that. In banking-as-a-platform, we have 4 digital assets that we are working on. The first one is related with supporting our customers on everything relating with their working capital management; second, our Bancolombia Super App, Bancolombia a La Mano and Wompi. And I will be telling you more about that. First, Bancolombia Super App. A year ago, we changed the app. We wanted to change the app design because it was a purely transactional type of app. And if we wanted to evolve to our relationship-based platform, we needed to change the design. In the beginning it was difficult. People don't like it when you change things and satisfaction went to 3.97. However, we have been working on improving net satisfaction and that customer experience. Now we are at 4.27, and we continue working towards improving on the design. This is the most transactional digital channel in Bancolombia, 56% of all the Bancolombia transactions go through the Super App, and we are obsessed with keeping customers active by 30 days. We're at 5.6 million so far, and it's been growing every year. Now, I want to share with you the services that go beyond transactions that we are incorporating in Bancolombia. But before that, I want to tell you 2 things. One, this is a topic where, as I said, we're a platform where we're orchestrating both financial and nonfinancial solutions where we have different allies. Jaime was telling us about how we've organized our operational model so that we can connect better with fintechs, with start-ups or with other companies providing solutions so that we can in a holistic way provide a solution for our customers in other topics related to the solutions that I told you about earlier, which were very important and we wanted to work on was retail banking. We wanted to provide follow-up for our customers in their day-to-day activities, their daily consumption. Second, we wanted to provide them with the solutions for mortgage credits. And third, we wanted to provide a solution when it comes to mobility. Now here is something that's very important, when orchestrating these solutions, our corporate customers are midsized customers. And sometimes our SME customers are the ones making the products and services offer. And our personal customers are the ones that help us also. And with that applied knowledge and our digital marketing tools, we can join both the demand and the offer and create the results so that these solutions can reach the goals we have set for ourselves. Now let's talk a little bit about what we're doing regarding daily activities. I'm not going to delve into too much detail, I just wanted to paint a picture of what some of our solutions are Bancolombia Super App. I'm going to talk about some of them at length, is digital platform, providing a lot of information to our commercial clients where they can see who their clients are, when they consume their products, at what time they consume their products, where they consume their products and all of that visibility will help them manage their sales better both at bank and Bancolombia solutions. But starting next week, they will be able to by self-managing upload their product offers and wherever they want to give discounts so that our Bancolombia Super App customers can see them there. That way, we will be joining the supply and the demand, but also we have a customization engine, which allow us to join the offer by that product to the most likely person to acquire that product or service. That's an example. And also to [indiscernible] which is a marketplace that we launched last week and it's part of our Super App. Our customers will be able to use it to purchase electronics, house appliances, apparel, and very soon, travel. They can purchase that through Bancolombia and also Puntos Bancolombia. These are some of the solutions that we are incorporating in consumption as well as payments and others that you can see on this slide. Now let's talk about mortgage. When it comes to mortgage, we have a marketplace where we have more than 1,800 households from our builders so that our customers can get the place where they want to live. Right now, we have new households. Very soon, we're going to have used household -- secondhand households. Our person will be able to find a place where to live in, while also having access to household credits or mortgage credits by doing that. We're incorporating all of the services associated with mortgages and households. So for example, payments, admin fees, everything related to real estate. Third, mobility. We need to understand mobility as the way we help our customers to go from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. To that end, we have public mobility solutions and private mobility solutions. When it comes to private mobility solutions, we have a marketplace where customers can find a car, a motorcycle, a bicycle or a scooter, and they will be able to purchase it if they want to. Or they can rent it, they can rent all of those for a day or for more than 3 years. All of these solutions can be found in this marketplace. But also, our Super App allows our customers to pay public mobility fees, for example, mass transport or different taxi companies, which have been using the Bancolombia QR code as a payment method so that digital payments increase and cash payments go down. This slide is sort of a picture of the ecosystem we've been building with different allies, which are part of the solutions we have at the Bancolombia Super App. Second asset, Bancolombia a La Mano, Bancolombia a La Mano is an app with a completely digital solution for financial inclusion customers. In Bancolombia, we call that segment the social segment. These are low-income populations, and we have people, for example, in payrolls very low income, people receiving government assistance or remittances, as I said earlier, as well as people who are going into the financial system for the first time, especially young people going into the banking system. Personal companies, as I told you before, and that is due to the QR code that Bancolombia has been driving and also customers from the rural side of Colombia, where there's a lot of informality and there's a lot of cash payments. This is an important amount of customers we're capturing as well as customers in the agricultural sector. There are very important customers in this sector, and the graph shows us how we've been growing and how in the last 4 years this process has sped up. Up to date, we have 5.7 million customers. And what we are aiming at is we want to have 6.7 million customers. Now some figures. 55% of the customers getting to Bancolombia currently are doing so through Bancolombia a La Mano. Our growth rate is 35%, as I said earlier. Second, 27% of the customers joining us are joining the financial sector for the first time, especially when it comes to an app aiding into financial inclusion, and 42% of our customers are active at 30 days. We measure their activity every 30 days and that's something we do permanently. And what's beautiful is that we've been able to impact 338,000 people in this segment without having to provide any sort of ID or document because we know from the transactions who they are, and we've been able to deepen our relationship with them. Also, we have cellphone credit, top-up payments, collection solutions, our customers save up and all of that is reflected in the numbers that I've showed you. The numbers regarding this app and the solution. And what's really beautiful and what's really exciting is that from this year, in July, we changed our trend. We started monetizing, and we can see how that is yielding profit in the last quarter of the year, which has been driven by financing. We've been growing the way we're getting to these customers. We started getting income, which allows us to yield profit as well as the digital channels and all the other channels. Now here's how we support our customers, especially businesses to improve their working capital. I'm not going to go too deep into the details regarding the digital solutions you can see on the slide. I'm going to mention a couple of them. For example EDN is a Mexican company. It's a digital platform, allowing customers to enter their ARP, their workplace insurance and connect with their customers. This allows them to manage the working capital better. This is all thanks to analytics, and it helps them under management practices. We also have to Tu 360 Negocias a marketplace we launched. This marketplace is a corporate networking, aiming at helping our customers improve their suppliers and their customers through a platform that we, as a bank with our analytics and our digital capabilities, unite both the supply and the demand so that they can improve their businesses. We also have production chains linking, which is another thing that we drive a lot in Bancolombia. For example, agricultural sector or convenience store owners, we help them as well as their suppliers to have access to financing from the information we have from the large sellers or the large buyers that allows us to offer them financing products and help convenience store owners or small-scale producers to improve their businesses as well as improve the working capital of the big companies. And here are the figures. These figures aren't too big because some of these solutions have been launched during the last 6 months. However, these are solutions that will be more geared towards corporate customers, midsized corporate office customers also, we want to help them become more efficient. We want to help them more agile. And also we have all the information. And also, we have a financial portfolio, treasury, trade, financing, and that will drive the growth of the company's in turn. Fourth, Wompi. Wompi is a platform where we are incorporating all of the Bancolombia payment methods as well as third-party payment methods to get to our customers in a very easy way. We want to get to midsized corporate customers as well as SMEs so that they can consume this platform and be able to access different Bancolombia payment methods. For example, currently, we want to -- we're working on getting a lot of the debit and credit cards out of the system. We have PSE, which is the Bancolombia ACH solution, where digitally, all of these payments are processed. You can get cash. We have Nequi as payer. We have the Bancolombia Botón as a transaction in digital trade between Bancolombia customers. And in the lower line, we have other customers which will be joining our platform soon. Botón Bancolombia, our loyalty program. It's another payer will have Bancolombia QR code, Bancolombia a la Mano, Sufi te presta. Sufi te presta is our consumption financing channel for those who have no financial credits, they will be able to have a preapproved as well as preapproved credit from Bancolombia. It's another financing method. And these are some of the examples making up the Wompi platform. Currently, we have more than 1,700 customers on it. And we believe that this platform is the way we can continue empowering ourselves as a bank who solves our customers' payment and collecting needs. And all of that will be reflected on the growth of their business and the growth of their finances by managing the resources more efficiently. Also, we have banking as a service. We started working on that this year. And we are working on 3 main fronts. These are very powerful fronts. And they are the result of a directive demanded by our customers. Some of them are in construction, and we hope to deploy the first one either in December or in January. We have a solution where Bancolombia accounts become payment as a service type of facilities. And also our customers will be able to use them to pay their mortgage, their mobility solutions or consumption as well as they pass it as a service. This has a big demand by our customers, especially corporate customers who are turning their businesses into platform-based businesses, and they needed to have a complement with financial services. And as I said earlier, it's better to overlap then to bridge gaps at least for us, and we want to provide a follow-up to our customers to wrap up for us, it's really important. And as Juan said it, our goal is to achieve customer loyalty. We measure experience permanently across all 4 segments where the aggregate of the third quarter puts us at 291 We are the first experienced bank at retail SMEs, midsized corporates also. When it comes to corporate, we're second place behind Banco de Occidente which is a niche bank. However, we're still working on that. We have a model that allows us to identify on a by segment basis and on a by subsegment basis, what is it that we have to improve from our experience to capture better value out of our customers but also to keep being the experienced leaders in the Colombian market as we have done in recent years and as we will continue to do. We will continue working on that so that our customers want to stay with Bancolombia. This is all I had to share with you, and I'll leave you with Cipriano. Cipriano is our Chief Innovation Officer, and he will talk to us about Nequi. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Cristina, and good morning to everyone. For me, it's a pleasure and an honor to be with you today. Throughout this conversation, we talked about strategies with capabilities, how we are reaching the market. And we've talked about ecosystem and how we're competing today. This picture shows you are competitive setting, the fintechs in Colombia. Now we have more than 350 companies in these different segments, which are part of the fintech Colombia. 92% of these companies are local, and that shows the talent, innovation and capability of creating and obviously of building a fintech platform in Colombia. Colombia is the third country following Brazil and Mexico, and I'll show you how we're organized. Cristina told you briefly about all of the ecosystem. Various initiatives are made with us with internal and external capabilities. We're making open innovative collaborations. And I'd like to talk about how we cooperate and collaborate with our innovation in this global world. So now I'd like to focus in on Nequi, which is our neobank. What's our purpose to improve people's relationship with money and to empower them to achieve their financial goals and dreams. This is how Nequi was born in 2014 and how we do it easily without [ ties ] and on a daily basis. And let me give you some examples ahead. In 2014, 2015, we sat down and thought, okay, how can we have a different relation with our clients, understanding that we had been in operation for more than [ under ] 50 years. We were a leader in the market. We saw new players coming to the market. So we sat down to build with our clients [ industry ] with them, understanding what they liked and disliked about banks, and we created Nequi, and we launched it in 2015. Nequi consists of 3 pillars: one, the core, this is vital it's our core really because it allows us to attract clients, 100% digital. It has no cost for clients, and as I was to have an effect of a network. And I'll show you ahead how we have grown exponentially. It has no frictions. It allows our clients to make transactions their basic later when we move on to our second layer, the El Armario which is our marketplace. We start to have a close relation with our clients. Here, we have education and financial inclusion, where we work with financial services and nonfinancial business. And we start to monetize our neobank called Nequi. The third layer, the external one is that open world that Jaime showed us, it's that connection with ecosystems that Cristina also showed us. And this is done through banking and service or the apps world. I'll give you some examples ahead. So this is really the core of our new bank. So what's inside Nequi, when we look at the detail, we subscribe or enroll our clients, Jaime talked about that connection with cloud. Our clients connect 100% digitally through like facial [ rec ] and biometric. Remember, Nequi is a lab. We are a lab and will still be a lab to help Bancolombia and to boost our capabilities and to continue competing and providing better products and services to our clients. Once the clients are enrolled, we have a low acquisition cost. We can -- they can start to make transactions, Juan Carlos talked about, the strength of our physical presence in Colombia. Nequi -- it's strength is in Colombia today, we want to export it. We are operating now in Panama, but we want to expand it to other countries where we operate. Colombia is still a country of a lot of cash. But let me show -- I'll give you examples of people around that started with the pandemic and they are routed to Nequi. With Nequi we can say that we are living the and democratization and digital transformation of Colombia. Physical channels are important. Yes. We have more than 4,000 ATMs, which no other competitor has in Colombia. We also leverage with more than 21,000 banking correspondents and more than 15,000 Nequi banking agents. So we have a physical distribution network, which is very important for Nequi. And as Juan Carlos said, we began to launch this and we're competing, and we're #1 in the market in Colombia. So what does the first layer give us? It gives us the core, the cash in to make money transfers and payments. Cristina talked about the QR of Bancolombia, which is interconnected with the Nequi QR. So we're making the best of both worlds. And that has allowed us to attract a number of people which are using Nequi because of the pandemic. The second layer shows payments here, we start to see the daily lives transactions intimacy of the client. So those that have a mobile phone in hand. And with that phone, they can make financial and nonfinancial transactions. Financial means as to do with recharges, and nonfinancial, if we want to have a physician at hand, we can make medical consultation through the Armario. The external connection is very important. How we can be more agile, swifter to connect with the external capabilities within the fintech capabilities. So alliances play a major role in Nequi. Ahead, I'll tell you about the strategies and what we [ dream ] by 2025. But we have to look closer at our financial business as a neobank. Today, we have a product called the safeguard credit for those that reached the end of the month and they need the money for their payroll. And that's why it's called a safeguard. We give loans up COP 500,000 to the people. But this month, we have what's called the Propulsor loan, and that's a big bet of Nequi. It's to really get into the financial world. And later, I'll tell you how, but we build a risk model of Nequi. Within El Armario, we also have the payments, top-ups and other services. Cristina talked about mobility through Nequi. We also connect with mobility. Very important in Latin America, direct selling. We are developing products tailormade products for our commercial allies to be -- to go from B2B to B2C. And these multilevel sales are very important for our clients and also the financial third-party services. We have to get more into insurance. Yes, those are challenges. And the everyday services client need. And the third element has to do with the connection with third parties, which has led to the QR and the Botón's use for payments and with API dispersions. To pay payrolls with our B2B clients and also daily services, making yourselves of the network and to turn Nequi into a verb, we have to Nequi everything. Nequi-ing to digitalize cash in Colombia to fight I guess, poor practices of the everyday loan, which unfortunately, for those that have lower income, they have to pay very, very high loans. The idea is to get into inclusion in financial education for them. So first of all, we have to keep in mind we have a great team. It's a passionate, knowledgeable expert like no other that can reinvent itself, transform itself. We say that a year at Nequi is a dog year, it's 7 years today. Many things are happening in Nequi. Let me give you clear examples. In 2018, we had 800,000 clients. Today, November we have within 9 million users. Of those 9 million, 66% are active clients, what does this mean? That those 66%, which is more than 6 million clients, at least are making 11 transactions a month. I mean, we are reaching that effect, which is very important. Yes, competition will increase, competition is arriving to Colombia, but we have been building critical mass for some time. So Nequi is not only about transfers. We also have a card. We moved from 2020 first quarter, 1,200,000 cards, and we'll be reaching 1 million cards now, and all these capabilities have been built with the talented and passionate team, which have about 500 people in Nequi, of which 85 are in-house. Jaime and Juan Carlos, the challenge is really to promote and attract and retain that talent, whoever will win the race is the one that has the best talent. We're convinced about that and we're working strong on the Nequi culture. This also makes me proud to share with you when we look at the ratings from the App Store and Google Play of all those that have downloaded our application humbly, we say we're #1. The size of the circle is a number of downloads in the app store we have a rating of 4.8 and a Google Play, our rating is 4.5%. We have competition every day. We're improving, but we feel proud of being #1. The #1 bank of Colombia. A big challenge when we grow exponentially, we multiply our growth by 10, it's the NPS that's what Cristina talked about, we have an obsession about our clients, our services. We are 100% digital. So we have to have an easy experience. It's got to be simple. It should be inclusive, and we'll look at this closely ahead in our NPS it's 82%, it's big -- it's challenging to remain above 80%. We do it with passion and professionalism to provide the best services to our clients. Now closing or ending October, we reached COP 1 trillion in -- as our balance. And that turns us into a major role in the financial sector of Colombia, our acquisition cost is low because of that effect of the network, it's COP 1,300 and this has to do with the connection with risk engines, 30% with marketing and the other 30% with technology. So reaching this race earlier and with 10 million clients means another challenge. How is how can we be deeper? How can we provide better services to these clients so that we can help them on a daily basis. Here we see examples. We have our Nequi card, PayPal. And remember Nequi is a lab, we initially connect with PayPal. Many of our clients are professionals that work and live in Colombia, but are hired with companies overseas. So those persons can make use of Nequi added $7,000 a year is our top and also nonfinancial services has to do with charging mobile phone. And today, we have more than 1 million clients that are profitable, and that's a point to us how we moved from COP 5 billion in the first quarter of 2020 regarding our fees and revenues to the third quarter of 2021 of COP 25 billion. The challenge is still high. And next year, we have to double our revenue. This is more about the figures of 9 million clients, 6 million are active, 66%, which on average make 11 transactions a month. In this figure, you see a profitable clients is very -- or users is very important. So who are our users. As I told you, we are democratizing after the pandemic the system. At Nequi, we could surf these waves well. Let me talk to you about Camilo, he is 19 years old. Welcome, and he began with Nequi, he's got friends of the ecosystem. His parents are divorced and his father sends him money on a monthly basis, and he's entering the financial world. So you could say that, that's the first contact with the young people in the financial world. It represents 20% of our customers. It makes 5 transactions a month. Let's move on to Andreas. He's called Nequipanas in the local -- in the trends of Nequi, that's what it means. He is a client that -- in which Nequi is its only account. At Nequi he finds every [ pay ] means financial and nonfinancial. On average, he makes 18 transactions a month with Nequi. This is a person that works sometimes it's independent worker or an employee. And the first and second group want to save. In the way that we've designed Nequi is to promote savings to promote the reaching dreams and goals. Then we have Sandra. Sandra this 35 years old, really active in the social media or social and political convictions are very important to what she uses. She [ taps ] just the financial system, but she feels good with Nequi. How it speaks to her how we communicate to her how it's transparent. But we have a huge challenge because we're not always a her type of first account. She is knowledgeable, She's got credit. So our challenge is to deepen with her. Now let's move on to Magda. She is a young female, active professional. She lives in the outskirts of Bogota with her husband. She doesn't feel good about the financial system, her income -- monthly income allows her to save, to enjoy. We are not a first account, but she use, especially for weekends to travel. She likes to take her motorcycle and visit villages close to Bogota. So where her cash at hand with their mobile phone, but Magda also seeks offers and promotions and which is the best part of the service for her. So this is 25% of our clients. So here, you can see we have a lot of challenges with Magda. And Marlene is that the fifth group which is called a bit apart from us. She obviously wasn't going to be part of the digital world, but because of the dispersion of the government of all the reliefs and aids Marlene does with us because somebody that she knows that has Nequi sent her money. She doesn't have a good education level. She doesn't work professionally. She lives with her husband that's pensioned. She lives up her kids that send her money, which wants to reach her dreams. And she felt far away from the financial system because of the communications. Because the way we communicated to her, how we presented products made her fearful. She is not digitally native. She needs the help of our kids to get to know our products to understand them. So with the last 2 types of clients that are 60% in which we have to work more with inclusion and financial education. Overall, you can see our figures 55% of our clients are exclusive and 44% are shared with Bancolombia. The average age is from 18 to 45 years old. Here's the big [indiscernible]. Here, you can see also that there are people older because of the transformation that are reaching Nequi. And location, Bogota is 30% of the economy of Colombia. We have 21% of Bogota and Cundinamarca. It's like 30% of our clients are in Bogota in the downtown area. We're strong also in Antioquia where it's almost 8%. And when we are on the coast of Colombia, it's 11 million people. They're strong, but we still have to deepen there. And we have a big challenge and is the informality in cash, use of cash. So how can we turn for some of these kinds and to an option using a cell phone and is something that we have to work on. I've told you a great story of 6 years or many challenges have an exponential growth of a passionate team connecting with the client, with the user designing from the [ street ] this, and this is how we designed our Propulsor credit and we started to talk with clients to understand what they needed to understand how we could communicate better and a big challenge is how to sell a credit 100% digitally. So we sat down also to create a strategy, and we saw ourselves 3 years from now. And these are the 6 pillars of Nequi's strategy. First to do the basics well, when we have 10 million clients. And we had 600,000 that enter Nequi a month. We cannot let them down. Stability is very important to have a service that's impeccable is very important. So to be excellent with efficiency, productivity and with very good service. Second pillar, how can we enhance the third layer that open world. We have a big challenge is how to connect with businesses. Many of our clients are entrepreneurs and handle and they keep their personal money in that of the company. How we have designed the Nequi, our pockets gives them facility to have a space for the business and another space for the personal finance. But we have to continue enhancing our B2B, how to challenge the B2B business and a big challenge for Colombia and Latin America is how to formalize these businesses. As we do so, we can provide better financial education. Third layer or pillar, how to strengthen nonfinancial services offers. How can we have that marketplace so that the people at Nequi can find everything they need. Fourth pillar, we are a bank, we are neobank, 100% digital. We have to deepen and consolidate our financial services offer. Later, I'll talk about the proposal but we have a lot to do there. Since we are 100% digital, we saw with our capabilities, we have to keep consolidating our deep knowledge of our client of the data, how to provide contextual solutions, how we can get to know them better. And Colombia is a country of regions. And clients say, you and your El Armario can provide new services and products but they're not applicable to my geography. So we have to continue improving with that knowledge of data. And our sixth pillar is that we are a technology company. And we have to develop to have a better mindset with culture and deliverables. And with this, I end by saying the following. Nequi is growing profitably. We have taken long. Yes, it's true. We've been very careful creating our teams and risk teams that are in Nequi and that we've also leveraged with the capability of the bank adjust to the reality of our users. The users of Nequi changed in the last 1.5 years. But now we are confident, and we're quite positive that what we're doing with our Propulsor loan is doing very well. Only in a month, we've been able to provide more than 5,500 loans. So we're doing very well. We -- this will represent other capabilities that we have to develop like service, collections, how to help clients to understand better what they've hired with us. And this a propeller loan basically is a preapproved and upfront loan which once people enter Nequi they can -- they have this ranges from COP 500,000 to COP 5 million. The term is from 6 to 24 months with an interest rate of 24% annual effective and the expected NPL ratio is 10%. We have big challenges ahead for Nequi but we have more -- we have 1 million clients now that are profitable. This end my talk. Thank you. And now I give the floor to José Humberto Acosta, our CFO, to provide us figures about the company.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this day, Investors Day and Analyst Day. We have analyzed with one, the capabilities that we have developed at the bank with Jaime also and how we use that capabilities in the commercial world for customers for products and for market. And Nequi story is a story of growth. which we have told during recent years. Since the results were just turned in a week ago, I'm going to go over a couple of numbers and figures and my presentation is going to be split into 2 chapters. What you've seen on digital, what you've seen on bank efforts and how that is reflected on the right side of the general balance and how that is reflected in our funding structure as well as how we have transformed ourselves in recent years. And on the second part, since back at the last quarter results meeting, we had some concerns about expenses. I would like to go into detail regarding how the expense managers at Grupo Bancolombia are putting our efforts, especially when it comes to digitalization. Without further ado, let's start with the first slide. We've split this part into 4 big sections. First, this information is just for Colombia, as you will see in all the presentation, Colombia represents 75% of the entire operation. And between current accounts and savings accounts and term deposits that we've split our story during the last 5 years. And most important change has taken place in savings accounts. Since 2017, we started to have larger growth curves. What's the reason behind that? It's exactly what Cristina told us and also the infrastructure that Jaime was telling us about it's about how we, through different channels, we've been able to secure the preference of our clients. And actually, during the last year, this growth became even more dramatic as a result of what happened with COVID and the subsequent closing down of different cities. And between '20 and '21, we've had a combination of 2 factors. We've had many more customers and larger preference by our current customers. On the right upper right-hand side, you can see growth at a 5-year term. Green represents the last year, blue represents the last 5 years, but the story didn't start in 2020. We've been telling this story from previous years, and we have secured more preference by our customers at CASA, a savings account and then checking accounts. That is something that's very significant. Now I want to tell you something that happens in term deposits. Year after year, they've been dropping. That is an absolutely intentional strategy because when banks such as ours, with 20 million, we start to adjust our collection strategy and other colleagues in Colombia started doing the same thing. So we decided to cut down the term -- and the amount of term deposits, which you can see in the margins and in the [ NIM ] defense we have undergone during recent years. Now in the lower left-hand side, you can see the 2 landscapes 2017 versus 2021. And I want you to notice our term deposits. Most of our deposits are CASA. There are stable deposits and these deposits have 3 features. They are stable and granular, they're cheap. And third, in order to comply with [indiscernible] standards, we have to have a lot of granularity. This hopefully solve 3 goals through what we've seen regarding digitalization. Finally, market share, some of you might say, well, Humberto, they went up 23% and 24%, but taking into account the fact that this uptick from 23% 24% is by cutting down on term deposits, which is why, we believe we have a strategic advantage going forward. Our funding is very stable. And further along this presentation, you will see where this funding stability comes from. This is the most interesting part. We have told you we have split deposits by a range Where's the largest transformation? And you can see in different colors, we've split it into 1,000 -- up to $1,000, the first part. On the lower right side, you can see it from $1,000 to COP 40 million, which would be $10,000 and from $10,000 to $1.5 million. I want you to notice how this growth have increased. That is a representation of granularity, stability and low cost. That is one of the very important points because that is a result of the digital penetration of the bank. We've come up with a very different collection strategies, a radical difference from the way we used to collect it before. Now this graph shows us what I've said growth in savings account and in checking accounts. But notice that as part of the bank structure, in the deposit structure, we went from 31% to 40% of the entire retail banking customers. That is because we're a different bank and it's also because we're a bank that's better prepared for the future. Now that sit as far as financial statements. All of this digitalization efforts have caused this. Now let's go to expenses, permanent observation. That's where we've had more demanding guidances and in some chances we've fulfill them successfully. We remember your papers, we've taken them into account, we analyze the expenses, we perform a quarterly analysis growing more than 20% compared to the previous quarter. And we believe that this 2020, 2021. This year can't be analyzed because of the large expenses volatility as a result of the pandemics. We instead wanted to bring you a different vision. This is the annual version January to September. From January to September, expenses grew at 9%, which you can see in the comparison between the red bar and the blue bar. And as you can see in the next 3 column group. Administrative expenses grew at 5%. Payroll expenses grew up at a rate of 1%, the biggest increase regarding expenses were premiums and bonuses for employees because as you remember, in 2020, we completely did away with them. So our growth drew under 69% out of that 9%. I would like to explain 5% of administrative expenses. The 1% expenses on payroll is because of a tighter control and FTEs and the other percentage, it's because a bonus that didn't exist in 2020, but that we did have in 2019. Now let's take a look at that 5%. That 5% in the upper pie, which you can see in green, we broke it down into the lower left pie graph, notice the delta, notice the variation. It is explained at a rate of 36% because of expenses we've gone into when it comes to technology. Jaime Villegas who was here in the second part of the presentation was one of the areas that has gone into the most costs as a result of operational expenses. And these are the 4 or 5 most representative expenses. Cloud migration is definitely a cost that we've been paying for a couple of years now, digital channel evolution and all of the efforts behind apps, APIs developing, developing Nequi, digital platforms, the QR code platform, which has been a resounding success when it comes to compiling customer information. Having said that, these expenses have -- are firmly placed in digitalization efforts, which is something that this bank has been doing consistently for 3 or 4 years. I hope to have provided you with a clear vision regarding what happens with the collection structure and how digitalization has driven part of the expenses. I want to leave you now with Carlos Daniel Raad, our Investors Relations Head and he will be in charge of moderating the Q&A section. Thank you very much for your participation.

Before we start our question-and-answer section, I would like to thank our executives for the presentations. I would like to remind all analysts that if you want to -- to ask a question, please raise your hand using the Zoom chat option. And will be announcing the order of the questions. I would like to invite Juan, Cristina, Jaime, Cipriano and José to join us on stage to answer questions. While they settle in, we're going to break for a couple of minutes. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions]

My first question is for Juan Carlos. When you started your opening remarks, you were talking about strong competitive environment we can see in Colombia. And along the presentation, something drew my attention. You still see opportunities to continue getting some more market share, particularly through the digital strategy that you have so successfully implemented. So I would like to understand from your perspective, what do you think about this balancing act between protecting the market share you have now and getting more market share? And what would you do to get more market share. And combining that with the metrics you showed us on physical branch closing and business increasing what are some of your goals in terms of profitability for Bancolombia in the midterm using the digital strategy.

Andres, thank you for your question, for joining us. As to your first question, I'd like to make some comments, and then I'll give the floor to Cristina, who will provide you more remarks of our capabilities in the competitive setting. And the profitability. And I'll talk about and then José can provide a last comment. The competitive setting, Andres, has been increasing, Andres. Has hit us really hard not only with traditional players but new players and the new players will create more pressure. Why do we think that we'll keep on growing and why will not only defend our first place or leadership in the market in most segments and products. But we also believe we can improve our share. Throughout the presentations you saw today, you saw that we have been developing capabilities. And let me underscore that term capabilities. It's not competences or skills. But instead, we have joint capabilities plus digital topics which are strong, plus the version of ecosystems. And I'd like to emphasize that when we talk about ecosystems, we become part of the daily part of people. And we have major challenges that are significant and it's hard to compete with us. We will have competition of niches, certain products that will lead us to [ acquisitions ]. But overall, with the strategy that we have provided you today leverage and the size that we have, our capacity of having networks plus the digital topics, clearly we know that we have that capability. Indeed it happened, we have been gaining market share. Surely, we will see shifts and some topics, yes. Clearly, we will have market recomposition per se. But overall, we are moving on, for your first question, let's give the floor to Cristina and then we'll address your second question Andres.

To complement what you've said, and we saw through this presentation, we've been building capabilities and very strong because of the information that we have and the number of clients we've been developing in different analytical models and applying knowledge and I think that, that's fundamental. Because it's not that we only have the information and the capability, but the knowledge that we have that has allowed to develop different risk models to reach our clients more effectively. And if that is joined by the digital marketing that we have in the digital channels we have, it's easier to reach many more clients. So if in the presentation, that I provided you, we saw that our wallet share is at 25% and our [indiscernible] is at 75% there, we have a huge path that we can grow in, in our market share, for instance, in individuals. And if you look at SMEs where -- which are very important, in which with the strategy that we are developing and we can have that knowledge, that information to reach easily through tools and digital channels. This takes time to reach the independents. But when you have the transaction, and you can understand the performance, you can reach them differently. So if you look at the figures, we do have opportunity to grow when it comes to retail and SMEs. In corporate and midsize corporates, they're still space to -- room to grow regarding the developments that we're making and in the corporate is more maintaining because our market share is very high today. So that's what I would add to your answer.

Thank you, Cristina. Andres, with regards to your second question, with regards to what do we expect regarding the profitability on a short, medium and long-term basis, Bancolombia. Surely we'll be closing offices. There is a source of efficiency that I want to clarify, but it will take time in Colombia since we -- since cash is used so much. The physical offices are still important, and it's the strength that we have in Bancolombia today. So yes, we do have a plan to make our offices, branch more efficient. But we have to balance this with the service with the physicality that gives us more strength to have places where people can deposit and withdraw cash. But we do believe that there is space to improve our profitability efficiencies. We believe that this year, in 2021, we will have a profitability above 10%, and we can be close to 11%. And we've said that our vision of [indiscernible] on a medium basis is at 12% to 14%. And for 2022, we should be close to that to about 12%. And with the strategy to be at 13% to 14% by 2023 and ahead. José Humberto, do you have something else that you would like to add?

Yes. A couple of things. Andres, firstly, you should understand that part of the expenses that we've shown have an overlap. Let me give you an example, migration towards the cloud is gradually made in which we need to keep the current infrastructure, the physical infrastructure at the computer centers. So it's not something that we have automatically. We have to have those double expenses. And that doesn't allow us to immediately show the growth of expense. And secondly, we have to keep in mind when we come of ROIs, if you look at the balance sheet, that's the line or item that grows most and capital. So there's a lot of pressure on that concept, that item. I don't know if this answers everything that you're asking about.

No. I mean the answer is actually very clear. Just one additional thing. I have a question more for Cipriano around Nequi. The figure shift, that was very interesting, especially when it comes to profitable growth. And how is it that this profitable growth has a linear trend compared to the exponential growth represented by the number of total users? So what's the challenge? What explains the difference between both curves? Is it because of the profile of this marginal customer that's going into the platform?

Thank you for your question. I would like to answer this two ways. First, remember that core of Nequi which has shown an exponential growth? People have received basic services and don't pay for them. So we do not monetize there. Truly, the users, we have a low cost of acquisition. Our challenge is to go onto the second layer, it's called El Armario, in which we have two things: the nonfinancial products for daily services and to make clients use Nequi on a daily basis, to have a bank on their cellphone. And what's coming, and I hope in next meetings -- I don't think it will be an exponential curve, but it will be an uptrend. It's to -- truly as a neo bank, we can have that profoundization of our clients. We can provide 100% digital loans tailor-made in a simple and transparent way. And that's how we can see a more profitable growth. So again, how can we probably have more profitable clients through the daily basis and better loans?

Andres, thank you very much for your question. I would like the next analyst to turn on their cameras and microphones if you want to ask a question. Next question is from Yuri Fernandes from JPMorgan. And then [ Ernesto ] from Bank of America will get ready.

The figures are really interesting. I would like you to provide some more detail regarding expenses. It is clear that you win, there are some expenses, a one-off expense -- not really one-off, but there's an expense overlapping, especially as a result of migrating to the cloud. But you seem to continue having an important percentage of [indiscernible], which is a high ratio for banks such as you with a very important market share across so many lines. So my question is, are you focusing on closing branches and optimizing expenses? But there is also an investment plan. So looking 2023, what should we expect? Should these expenses continue to be high? What about this 50%? When does it start going down? Give us some trends because closing physical branches is really important to help you with digital investment because you will have revenues, but they will be delayed a bit. First, you have the expenses and then you have the revenues regarding this digital growth plan. And I have a second question regarding first at the beginning of your presentation. You told us about a lot of different segments: mortgages, SMEs, et cetera. But I have a question, the market is really concentrated. I think this is a product that continues to grow. So what do you think about those products? Do you have any specific strategies?

Thank you, Yuri. What a pleasure to say hello to you, and thank you for joining us today. Both questions: regarding the first one, I'll answer and then José Humberto will back me up; and then Cristina will answer your second question about drafts. Clearly, Yuri, we're living a transitional period. Bancolombia is undergoing a transformation that implies additional investments, which go against the efficiency that we would like to have because there is overlapping, as we've mentioned. The cloud, we will get a full benefit from it when it comes to expenses in 2025, other initiatives as well. So I believe that while I had a couple of years in which our investments and the capabilities that we've discussed today will create additional expenses. We hope that we have more expenses -- more growth and expenses. So we should see improvements in the cost/income ratio, seeking to be below 50%, but we don't think it will be initially way below 30%. Later, we will seek to end up at about 40, 45s that will be a half. Our strategy to compete in the universal banking, which gives us the strength to be able to be precedent flows into exchange. And to have the strength to be leveraged in different segments allows us to focus on many things and not only in costs. So Yuri, we're looking for a balance. We have to be part of that balance. We understand that we have to work on efficiency. It's a task we have ahead. We're not denying it at all. It's important, but also we had to find that we cannot lose competitive because if we focus too much on expenses, we can have a good year but it will subtract competitiveness on a long-term basis. So our task is to find balance, provided our competitive edge improves and we develop the skills. So yes, we will be closing offices. We're doing that. It will be slower because the cash that we use so much in Colombia, but we do have an optimization in that sense. And we'll be much more efficient as well in terms of handling persons. José, do you have something else?

Look how the administrative expenses grow. But you have to look at the other side of the equation. We have 3 elements, which we'll see -- that these 3 that we have to use have been hurt hard. First, the drop of rates, it's unprecedented globally. You've seen that the rate dropped in the Central Bank, importantly. Also, loans were not big drivers of growth so we didn't attract this to create income. And third, we've had to recalculate Stage 3. So also, if you look at that part of the equation, it's hit hard and aligned with what Juan said. We'll reach this goal in the next years where we'll probably see a growth of accounts receivable that's better. Surely, we'll have higher interest rates in which a bank like ours will be positively impacted in Stage 3. We'll reach another level. So the path is there. And again, that 5% of administrative expenses talks about the control of costs that we have within the bank's operations.

I'd like to share with you when it comes to drafts. We said that Bancolombia handles 35% of the payroll from Colombia. We are a leader in retail, and this leadership has to do with the credit cards and free investment loans. We're not leaders in drafts. So we set out to work to provide a digital and scalable and efficient product. We've launched this product, which is entirely digital, where the clients can access drafts through digital channels, but the line in Colombia demands a control to launch debt. So we -- now we have fully digitalized draft system. And we've been growing since the second half of this year with drafts. We still have a lot to do in this sense, but we think that the number of clients, the payrolls that we have, the digital solution that we have developed, surely, we can have a higher share. And we have it for payrolls and for those that are pensioned. In both segments, we have this solution, and we've been growing in this in recent months significantly. Is that enough?

Yuri, thank you very much for your question. Next question is by Ernesto Gabilondo from Bank of America.

My question is about what other initiatives are you thinking for Nequi. I heard that you are assessing, maybe including some insurance, investment products. And if so, what would be the time line for this new implementation? My second question is, judging by what we've seen in other countries, the intention of developing digital banks and publicly listing them, for example, Brazil, we've seen some banks doing that. I would like to know if, at some point -- wouldn't Nequi out into the market at some point? I don't know if we would have to look at a goal in terms of number of customers or profit margins for Nequi to consider it.

Thank you for your questions. Allow me to make a couple of comments on both items and then Cipriano can answer your questions with more details. Clearly, we see at Nequi a potential platform. As again explained, we began with the basic product easily accessed and free of charge. And that has allowed us to see a very dynamic that's interesting, with 400,000 to 600,000 users a month. So once those users are with us with a high percentage of usage, this is important. So in El Armario, we have products that have to do web instances, bringing money from overseas. When it comes to mobility, public transformation, it connects people with their daily needs. You talked about also insurance and investments. Clearly, yes. And with the strategy, that should have a vision of the bank as a service provider and to provide services, also to be #1 in the market. But today, our main focus, will Nequi has to do with loans? We think the developing capabilities to access loans with our users give us a very important projection. And we're leveraging on the knowledge we have in Bancolombia and the knowledge of Nequi, which gives us a major leverage. In the presentation, we said we have 60% -- our users are both Nequi and Bancolombia. And that allows us with our strategic mission to address them clearly. Cipriano will go -- there's more information about this. With regards to be listed or development of Nequi, clearly, it's a possibility that we're studying. Nequi was conceived initially as being an independent, even with Bancolombia. Although today it's under the umbrella of Bancolombia as a bank, Nequi is independent in many aspects and it has leverage, as Cipriano said, when it comes to the distribution of the network on Colombia. That's great. So this being listed is something we're thinking about. We have to deepen, however, our profitability and strategy. We believe that loans are the path that will lead us to have a better profitability level on our -- with our users. And right then, we will assess if Nequi should be in a different status. But it was conceived, again, to be independent. And we believe that, that development or evolution will come the day, the best day possible.

Ernesto, thank you for your question. Talking about what Juan Carlos just said, I'd like to focus again about the 3 layers of Nequi. The core -- the challenge there is to have the dynamics, to have new users to keep our technological capabilities, that they have to be sharp. They have an excellent service. And with regards to your specific question, let's talk about the second and third layer. Today, in the financial/nonfinancial business, have a lot to explore still in the insurance world. There is a great capability that Bancolombia has. We can learn from their capability, but the challenge is how. How can we do things differently? How can we sell insurance 100% digitally? How can we -- what we'd tell the customer? Simple, intuitively, like we did with the propeller loan. So we'll continue studying and focus. I would say that next year, we'll be focusing on loans and working strongly as well in creating products of investments of insurance. Within the shelf, we have also embedded experiences. And there, I connect the second and third layer is how do that open world or the banking-as-a-service reconnect with third-party businesses, companies of services or telecommunications? We provide that service to have a collection there. But also we have a B2B connection with our ally, but it becomes a B2C with the end consumer. So there's a lot to explore with regards to second and third layer. With regards to the connectivity, today, we have our QR, which is a 2.0 QR, in which businesses will have simpler reports. Still, when we pay with QR, there are some frictions for these businesses. So we need QRs that is much more designed for B2B businesses. And lastly, what we call -- I mean there are different ways of working today. And with what we're living in today in Colombia and in the world, we realized that not necessarily -- like you and I that work for a single company, many of our users work for several companies or will do so. And we have to be able to evolve and provide them a good value proposition. Payrolls will migrate to different sources of income. Those people are mixing their personal and corporate experience. So we've got professionals that are connected to the world and we have to adapt to how they work to provide them a value proposition that's tailor-made and to deepen, to formalize the SMEs of Colombia.

Thank you, Ernesto. Next question is by Tito Labarta from Goldman Sachs. And then Alonso Garcia from Credit Suisse will get ready.

I would like to elaborate on Nequi. When you see the opportunity, Juan Carlos, you mentioned credit or loans. What type of loans are you thinking of in Nequi? Are you talking about credit cards? Are you talking about consumer loans, mortgages? I want to understand that loan or credit part better in terms of income-mixing, also because you're telling us commissions are growing but percentage of the profit would come from credit. And the second part of my question is, in terms of profitable users, which is like 9% currently. What percentage of those customers can be profitable in Nequi? Would be it 50%? Would it 100%? Would you have customers who can't be profitable, but then are worthy to keep as customers? And when do you see Nequi being profitable altogether?

Thank you, Tito. Let's talk about loans. Let me give you an overview before Cipriano can give us more details. Today's focus is on retail, low retail loans from 6-month to 2-year terms which are preassessed and upfront, and the client he or she requested can have a quick response to it. We have technologically developed a loan called a safeguard. It's more for emergencies, very low amounts, and it seeks to complement the income of some are users. Remember, this is a base of users which are independents. Their revenue or income is quite variable, so the idea is to give them an option of loans that will allow them to evolve. But the idea is to understand our clients more, so we are focused today on the propeller loan. We also have loans for independent businesses, with the national guarantee -- with the support of the government that allows businesses to develop. So it's a bench of possibilities dependent of our users' profile. Credit cards, yes, but it's not our focus today. Today, we will complete 1 million users with cards, digital and physical, some have both. But today, it's a card. That's a debit card over their balance, but we have an established basis to evolve towards credit card. So again, I'd say the retail credit cards are there. It's existing and will continue growing. That will be our focus in which we can control the risk properly because, please understand, the challenge here lies not on loan but to have parameters that are within what we expect. So we will see an evolution. Meanwhile, we grew -- well, we have a larger universe of users. We can understand these users better in advance. As to the profitability, it's a process. It's a process that clearly we have to go through. As you said, we are at 9% now, but as the loan is given, we will see higher profitability levels. Cipriano will give us better -- a deeper answer.

Thank you, Juan. Thank you for your question. Let's go back to the second layer which is called El Armario, where we have the loans that Juan Carlos has explained. In next phase, we're going to be talking about the lines made with a third party, and we'll be entering stronger in the central area of Colombia with SMEs. That alliance will allow us to prove the strength of Nequi through third parties. So we'll be entering other regions, but without losing focus to reach 10 million focus, I have to say humbly, we would never have imagined. Let me tell you about how frenetic this is. We closed at December 2019 at 1.8 million users, okay? Then December 2020 with 4.5 million users, and we'll close December 2020 with 10 million. So truly, everything, the digital adoption has been increased because of the pandemic. So we have, today, to provide a better value proposition that's simpler for these users. You do remember when I wrote that there's a big number of clients, some that arrived to Nequi by random because the government has given them an aid or because somebody has entered the network. And there's 35% of people that use a lot of cash in Colombia that want to move on, they want to save but don't have any contact with loans. But there's another group of people, 25%, that know the financial system, but not necessarily. We are their first account. So there, we have to deepen as well, make use of that network. Undoubtedly, while we evolve, we have to reach that 1 million number of cards, the debit card and credit card. And very importantly, if you remember that first group that we called the first ones, we have the Nequi card for online and e-commerce purchases. So in Colombia, when you go to the rural areas 30 or 40 miles away from the large cities, some years ago, you would talk with people and they would have never made an online purchase. Today, people who don't have a high education level are getting into the online purchases. So there, we have a lot to deepen on. And when it comes to profitability, I'd say that we -- in a couple of years, 2 or 3 years, we will be deepening and we can change these figures. In Colombian pesos, it's very low, but -- and it's a big challenge. If today, Tito, if we could make every Colombian every month to use a Nequi service and to have $0.30 a month, we're talking about more or less $3 a year and Nequi would be profitable. It sounds low, but it's a target. I would -- and, Tito, to expect odd percent of our clients to be profitable is impossible. The idea is to have 50%, and that in a couple of years, we can have a profitability. The speed of that profitability will depend on the penetration of profitable products like loans, but those are our aspirations today, Tito.

Right. I would like to ask one more question in line with that. If you're growing in credit PSE has alluded to, which is very strong, really high, if you're growing in credit and you will have customers who can't get credit or loans, how are you going to handle their EPSs to keep it high?

That's a challenge. Clearly, when we have loan offers and there's a client that's refused a loan, that will affect our EPS, but Nequi has been very strong in its connection in communication with its users. We have 2 strategies. We have to be very clear, direct with our answers and explain why. And second is financial education, how we can provide additional financial knowledge so people can understand why. Clearly, it can have an effect on the perception of our users, which we are prepared to handle. But we believe we have the tools through clear, direct communications. Communication that's very fresh plus financial education, but it can have an effect on a perception that's very high today.

Actually, thank you for your question. The next question is by Alonso Garcia from Credit Suisse.

My first question is I want to touch base on Nequi and the way you're thinking of originating credit or loans. What about this do-over law that was just enacted not too long ago. Will it affect any type of credit or loan issuance given that this law took a lot of people out from debt records? And the other question is regarding competition in Colombia. The digital component and the physical component are -- how do you feel about that? Are you feeling pressured? Are you feeling more reactive, more productive?

Alonso, with regards to loans and the amnesty law that was issued recently, let me say the following. We have been preparing for some time now to have enough information of our clients so we won't be impacted from this law. We have to say the law focuses on small loans that are very old. So its effect regarding information is marginal. And what we've been doing, given our position in the market, our share, and the idea is to have our own basis and information about our clients internally and internal models. So we don't have an effect. So we're not worried about this amnesty or the effect that this law could have. With regards to your second question, I think Cristina could better answer this matter.

With regards to our distribution of channels, what we've seen is that we have a strength in Bancolombia. Both I and Cipriano have talked about this as we advance in every digital channel and having customers very increasingly digital. In the case of Colombia, where cash is the main -- still the main means of payments, to have ATMs and offices -- so many offices are stronger. So what clients have to do digitally, they're finding it in these channels. But when they require cash, they also have it at hand in many places. So it becomes a competitive edge that Bancolombia has today versus other platforms of the market which don't have so many physical offices. And we see it because many of the clients that are arriving are asking us to participate with our financial services in their platforms. One of the values they find in Bancolombia are the many physical offices that we have. Why? Clients in Colombia still want to use cash. So today, the strength when it comes to its distribution channels turns into a competitive advantage in the market because of the number of the coverage in the variety of channels. And I would end by saying that we are not followers, but instead leaders. We have a challenge and instead Bancolombia commits in every segment. That's a challenge for us because to have the competitiveness and leadership and to be ahead in every segment is a challenge. They're probably -- we will have to make concessions. But clearly, today, we consider there were not followers or leaders. And I believe that the figures show this, the reality of what I'm saying when it comes to the platforms, the use of Bancolombia, that helped. Today it's growing Bancolombia a la Mano as a platform, we have Nequi. And not only that, we've got segments of the mid-sized corporates. We're gaining a lot of market share because of the strategy used. With SMEs, Bancolombia today is a clear leader and will deepen this adding services. And when it comes to corporates, we have the highest market share of our segments. So clearly, I would dare to say that we are leaders and not followers.

Thank you very much for your question, Alonso. Next question is by Daniel Mora from CrediCorp, and then Katherine Ortiz from Corredores Davivienda will take the next question.

I have two questions. Number one, I want to ask about the commission slide. Specifically, I would like to know what you're thinking of the fees line taking into account the entire ecosystem. I mean banking-as-a-service, different marketplace for different initiatives. I would like to understand where the biggest fee growth would come from because at the same time, a lot of these products are free. What could we expect regarding fee growth in the coming years as well as a fee indicator on operational income? That would be my first question. My second question is regarding open banking. At the beginning of your presentation, there were several comments where you mentioned you are in conversations with the regulator to find out what the best way would be to implement that in the country. I would like you to elaborate on progress made on this front. And how would -- what's your opinion of the banking environment regarding open banking? Do you see there's a big industry change? And how is Bancolombia getting ready for it?

Thank you, Daniel. The first question, let me give you some comments and Cristina to complement. And then the second question on open banking, I'll give you an overview, and Jaime will back me up. Fees. Fees are interesting, an interesting topic and lead to a lot of questions. We've been building strength when it comes to revenue from different products, banking insurance is an important revenue for us, fiduciaries, businesses, every time our investments are contributing more. So fees are not particularly related to this. We have a base there. But indeed, we'll see developments. We understand, when it comes to credit cards, there could be a shift in the composition of the commissions related to that product because of the competitors coming, and we're prepared for that. And precisely, that topic of commissions leads us for some time now to see how we could diversify the source of revenue of the bank in products related to financial and nonfinancial products. So when we talk about ecosystems, which Cristina described, and when it comes to mobility and payments, payments is something very important that replaces a good part and has the potential to grow. And it still does beyond credit cards. Housing, mortgage, how the commissions -- when we joined forces with builders and clients, we have created very interesting dynamics. Mobility, understood as the mobility -- public mobility and mobility related to sustainable topics like electrical. So we start to see consolidations and the ecosystems are designed to grow significantly. Now let's listen to Cristina's answer to move on to open banking.

I'd like to add because I think you've been clear that although it created -- although credit cards are important on commissions for us, we've been working in different fronts to diversify. And many of the commissions will credit through those services that we're incorporating throughout the ecosystem, for instance, in your 360 purchases you will buy a perk. Through that, we will have different commissions. And that's an example for many, so if they preferred us, end marketplace mobility, mortgage. All these are topics which not only sell a product or service but they come with other products and services for needs. So it's incorporating new services where we'll be replacing the fees. Something that we already did on purpose was our QR Bancolombia because people said, if you're a leader in acquisitions in Colombia, how can you provide a service that's different? So we wanted to support the SMEs, but we're evolving now to 2.0, which does provide commissions because that's now added values. Because small businesses, for them, the reporting, the conciliation and other services related are important. So when it comes to the attributes of products where there is a value of clients is something that we're developing more, trying to understand what's valuable for a client and what the client is willing to pay for. And that gives us a view of how we can replace those revenues, and we know that commissions will change as well.

Okay. And the second question is related to open banking. I would like to underscore first it's not open banking, it's open finance because what we promote is access to financial information for people, and it doesn't matter where they are. So the concept is not only -- it's more of open finance. And we think it's strong. And we're preparing for it and working as of now. We're making initiatives with -- before the laws enacted, we have a bill now that's aligned with open finances which lead to an exchange. We see optimistically -- optimistic that bill that will be discussed first in the industry and will set clear roles for everyone and I think will create opportunities to connect and to be able to join capabilities to better serve our clients. Jaime, do you have something else that you'd like to add?

Yes. Thank you. Daniel, thank you for your question. The government is making a major effort to understand open banking, open data, open finance that is rising in different markets. And the desks, the teams that are created have led the government to the conclusion that Juan Carlos mentioned. It's more not open banking, it's open finance. And we see that's a reality, firstly. We can't close our eyes, and we're preparing for that. And what's our share specifically in those teams? When it comes to the business, we have privacy, and I already talked about data privacy. We are convinced that data privacy is a competitive edge that Bancolombia has. Today, customers trust us because we really guard their resources, and we need to have the same trust when it comes to how we handle information because information isn't ours. It's theirs. So they were working strongly, and we're preparing inside to have privacy by design, so our processes and technological processes implicitly embed privacy. And technically, we're trying to seek to have a technical amalgamation regarding standards. And this could be complicated for everyone if there are no standards to exchange information among different players. So we're trying to help the government to determine the standards, keeping in mind the advances made. And today, we're using standards with different third parties, but we want to use them throughout the country, and it's cheaper for everyone, of course.

Thank you very much, Daniel, for your question. The next and last question of the event will be by Katherine Ortiz.

I have several questions. First one is I would like you -- my question is related with the Nequi funding structure. We're starting in the figures you introduced us to this morning. Nequi has been profiting its customer base. And I would like to know if Bancolombia's strategy in terms of funding specifically Nequi, has it changed? That's one thing. And my second question is related with Central America. How is it that Bancolombia is planning to translate this digital strategy to Central America? How are you planning on moving and replicating the same results with the digital strategies in Central America? And is everything you tell us this morning geared towards also replicating operations and results in Central America, the same thing you had in Latin America? And third, what is the customer cost acquisition? Especially I'm asking because if you review some internal platforms -- let me just give you an example, neo bank. You mentioned that their customer acquisition cost is around $5. When you look at Bancolombia, the figure is considerably lower. So I would like to understand why. I would like you to understand what sort of costs are you including in that calculation. And are you taking into account the services that Bancolombia is providing Nequi? Or I would like to understand why there's such a big difference between Bancolombia and neo bank when it comes to customer acquisition cost.

Thank you, Katherine. Let me answer the first two questions and the last one for Cipriano. Funding at Nequi has surprised us positively. Today, we are reaching COP 1 trillion in deposits in Nequi. The average of active users is COP 140,000, which is quite positive. Cipriano already mentioned this, it's not only a transactional platform, it's too for savings, and it was designed like that initially. When we made the process that Cipriano already talked about, talking with people and how they handle money. They had income and they would separate it in different envelopes, placing in each envelope money to pay for public utilities, the lease, et cetera. So it's been positive. Today, clearly, Nequi is a surplus in fundings. Its deposits are higher than the accounts receivable because the placement of accounts receivable is just beginning. It's leveraged the funding of Bancolombia, still on a proportion which is quite small because of the size of Bancolombia, but it has helped the cost of funding and the diversification of the cost. So we see it positive. It is a source of revenue for Nequi since that funding has an interesting value when it comes to -- it's more granular and therefore, it's a funding with accessible cost. Second question, Central America. Clearly, we leveraged the countries of Central America with all these developments that we're making in Colombia. Colombia is a market economically and digitally and in regulations and in competition is much more advanced than the other 3 countries where we operate. So we are ahead, yes, but that allows us to share what we're doing in different countries. In different levels, one thing is Panama, Guatemala and the other one is El Salvador. El Salvador is the one that leads in its technical adoption. They're doing well. The app is very dynamic in El Salvador, the digital services, what we're doing in payments. Guatemala has shortened its distance, its gap. And the idea is that, in Guatemala, we will be smaller. We will be a leader when it comes to digital transactions. And the idea is to enhance and increase our retail composition. And in Panama there's Nequi, and it's a clear way of saying how we're experimenting in other countries. So Nequi not only has the potential, and it's a multicurrency multi-country, it's in Colombia and in Panama now. So that helps us to share these capabilities. And we've been incorporating this in other countries. So clearly, yes. On the other hand, developments that can take place, the adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador helps us a lot to learn about crypto currency. So that would be an interesting exchange. And Cipriano will answer your last question.

Thank you, Juan, and thank you, Katherine, for your question. Aligned with the first answer that Juan Carlos gave regarding our leverage, we see a universe and its great potential of loan clients, of loan users, 400,000, 500,000 users in the next year, which represents COP 900 billion. Today, we feel very comfortable with our Nequi strategy. And it's significant source of income. A big challenge is that those that receive their money in Nequi cannot change that to cash. There is a challenge because Colombia is still a country that uses a lot of cash, a lot of people make cash outs. And that's bad because we're not digitalizing the cash and the other is because our network is expensive. So we have to close that cycle and keep that money digitalized to be able to have a good base. And with regards to the balance, average balance a month, we're talking about $40 or $50 a month per user. Because of the pandemic, it grew because the people have the digitalized money and they make the cash out. And secondly, I think your question is great. And let me answer it. As for those COP 1,300, 40% is when you enroll. And we make a verification of the identity. That's 40% of that cost. 30% of that cost is on the technology. It's behind authentication, visual and voice for our safety and enrollment systems. And third is what sets us apart in the competition is our marketing. The cost of bringing clients through marketing is low. Truly, this will change as there is more competition because many of these clients are arriving to us or enrolling because -- upward a month.

Okay. This ends our Investor Day at Bancolombia. I would like to thank you all for joining us today for your interest in Bancolombia. We've covered our strategy. We've developed deeply what we're doing with specific events and figures, and showing you that we're making a task which we know we have to improve, especially our digital capabilities. It's a process and the results are there. I hope you've received enough information. But if you need more information on something in particular, please contact our Head of Investor Relations. I would like to close this conference saying that we understand that there is more competition, that we are prepared to face that increased competition, that we are evolving in what we have to evolve. And we understand that speed is fundamental. We have to move fast, and we'll be advancing our process. And today, we've got good figures aligned with this. I'd like to close by saying that we're optimistic closing the year of 2021. We expect fourth quarter with positive results, with an ROI of about 11% or even a bit higher. We understand that we have a task with expenses. And as I said to Yuri, it's a balance which cannot focus solely on decreasing dramatically expenses on a short-term basis. We're in a transition. We made the balance. We'll be seeing efficiency results while the digital processes advance, while our capabilities consolidate in advance. There, we know we have a lot to do. We'll be finding that balance, understanding that we have -- must have a good competitive edge, but we have to develop our capabilities to compete in a setting that's changing. Bancolombia is evolving. It's changing. It's present dynamically in the market. We know our challenges and we're addressing them. 2023 is a year in which we'll be consolidating what we're talking about today. So these capabilities that we described that are evolving, that are here today will develop their true potential in 2023. And that's where we will have results, which I hope are better than those that we've shown you or will show you in 2021. Truly, I would hope that our next meeting of Investor Day will be physical, that we can shake your hand, that we can talk not through this digital world but instead personally. And we hope the analysts and everyone to see you and talk with you through our teleconference of results of 2021. Thank you all. I hope you do well, and thank you for joining us in this conference today. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]