JDC Group AG ($JDC)

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the preliminary full-year figures for 2025 of the JDC Group Aktiengesellschaft. The company's CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; and CFO, Ralph Konrad, will guide you through the presentation and the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. Having said this, I'm handing over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much for the charming introduction, Judith. Very warm welcome from the Board of JDC Group, and we are very happy to present to you our results of the full year 2025, as always, still subject to the comments of our auditors. Yes, so you can see there's record results again for the group. And after a very strong quarter, we're happy that we could reach our -- at least most of our goals. My name is Sebastian Grabmaier and together with our team, I'm responsible for product strategy, IR, PR. And next to me on the mic is my partner and Co-Founder, Ralph Konrad. Ralph?

Hello, and welcome from myself as well. Ralph Konrad, responsible for the figures, the IT stake and M&A, and very happy to have my 2 other Board members, Marcus and Ramona. Ramona is not here today. She has an alternative appointment today, but Marcus is here. So we're happy to be on the call here.

Hello, all together. Yes, if there's a special question on distribution, Marcus is also happy to answer later in the Q&A session. Yes, we are looking back to a very emotional event. Actually, there was last November 25, we had our 20 years anniversary on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Yes, it was more an emotional part because you ring the bell after 20 years, it was very great event. And we're very happy that many of you just came from all parts of the world, actually from New York, U.K., Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Scandinavian. Yes, there was a very good turn up and there's a nice picture of this great day. Yes. So JDC Group at a glance, you all know what we do. We are a typical platform company for financial products. So we take in the data of all the producers, the insurance companies, the platforms for investment funds, the mortgaging banks. We standardize the data and we show it in our visualizing systems. To give you some KPIs, we now have more than 2.5 million customers on the platform, that's 520 employees, 400 that translates into 400 full-time equivalents with more than 16,000 brokers that use our platform. And yes now also FiNUM comes closer to the 100,000 client mark. Yes, and we have in our FiNUM company, more than 300 advisers now that give advice to more challenging and affluent customers. Strategic focus and geographic focus is DACH. So that means mostly Germany and Austria. Yes, you can see on the next page that Q4 was quite a great finish of the year '25. We told you that we were not too happy on the Q3, as we talk more about consumer confidence here in Germany, that's at a historic role. But nevertheless, we could reach our targets with a fulminant, yes, [ EUR 9.8 million ] EBITDA -- well, let's say, contribution of Q4. And therefore, you can see that our turnover of the entire year went up to EUR 250 million, so that's up 13.2%. It could have been a little bit more actually, but Q3 was -- yes, we were too far behind after this little dip in Q3. And also here, you can see EBITDA is up 36.3%. And if you deduct the one-offs that we had out of the -- mostly out of the acquisition of FMK, EBITDA is up 47% if we take out the one-offs. So very good development as we think, and we talk more about our guidance and it depends how you look at it, at least, it's in the reach of the guidance. If you take out the one-offs, it's around on the lower end, but if you take the one-offs, then we are rather on the upper end. So we're very happy with these results of this year '25. Yes, you can also see how this translates in the development over the last 10 years. You can see our CAGR for revenues is up 12.2% and EBITDA growth, as you can see, is up 35%, because we can see growth, we are not only growing, but growth is growing. And you'll also see that the margins are expanding, so that's up 6.3%. So we're happy about these developments. You can expect more. We'll show you some guidance later for the year '26. And you can see that, yes, this curve is basically not only increasing, but also scaling up. Yes, this is what we showed you last earnings call for Q3. Yes, we can see that there was quite some disappointment on the German government. There was big projects and big budgets that, especially this EUR 500 billion investment budget, but consumer confidence did not go up immediately. You can see that, yes, recession is ending, but still consumers didn't feel it. And now obviously, the backdrop is still quite challenging. We're all marveling on the markets, what's the impact of the Iran war. But actually, you can see that, yes, most of the consumers just take it as it is. And even if not really structurally or fundamentally, there is a big change. Consumer confidence goes up a little bit. And for the first time, we had these turnaround in the confidence of the business leaders in Germany. So there is a really slight light on the end of the tunnel, basically, at least the confidence comes back to the market. So we are quite optimistic also that there might be some impact in '26.

Okay. Before we go into the figures, please let me explain the adjustments that we made. Adjustment one is the elimination of the reorganization within our segments. This is necessary to observe the development of the segments and compare apples-to-apples. To remind you, we now have only 1 and not 3 liability umbrellas in the group, what saves us annual cost of around EUR 250,000 a year. As a result, EUR 12 million in turnover and EUR 200,000 in EBITDA are now allocated in the Advisory segment and not in the Advisortech segment for the year 2024. That's important to compare the development of these 2 segments. That does not have any impact on the consolidated group figures, but it's an intra-segment there. In the following slides, this effect is shown in the light green color as Adjustment 1. Then we have another adjustment. It's Adjustment 2, is the elimination of Sebastian already mentioned, the M&A-related costs regarding the FM&A transaction was EUR 1.6 million. These consist of transaction costs, lawyers for the SPA and the negotiation, W&I Insurance and not at least notary costs. Just to give you a feeling, we had alone EUR 200,000 for notary costs for the purchase agreement of FMK, and the provision of the collateral for the bond. So buying companies is an expensive hobby. On the following slides, I will comment and focus on the adjusted figures. You will see that makes it easier to follow. Yes, revenues increased in 2025 by 13.2% to EUR 250 million. The Advisortech segment grew by 14% to EUR 210.8 million and the Advisory segment by 11.1% to EUR 56.4 million. Gross profit increased by 12% and you can see that gross profit is growing more slowly than turnover. And that shows you that our environment is very competitive. There's a lot of private equity money out there in the industry. As you know, our competitors were bought by private equity companies. The most recent transaction is the acquisition of [indiscernible]. And yes, as you know, piggyback companies, they have to grow for a good exit and that's the reason why our piggyback competitors try to grow very fast and thus, compete primarily on price. And of course, this gives margin pressure. And this makes it all more gratifying to see that we can still scale our EBITDA through efficient cost management. So EBITDA increased, as Sebastian mentioned, by 47% to a very strong number of EUR 22.2 million. Although the economic environment in Germany was slowing down, we saw this in the third quarter and in our third quarter numbers. We could achieve the best Q4 in company's history. And in addition, the best quarter ever since inception of JDC with a turnover of more than EUR 70 million and an EBITDA of approximately EUR 10 million in only one quarter. EBITDA margin in Q4 was more than 13%. And if you put EBITDA in relation to gross margin, what is the better way to measure our performance, we had an incredible EBITDA margin of 42% in the fourth quarter. This is outstanding and record high for our company. Yes, when you buy companies, it's always important for investors to compare apples-to-apples. So of course, a lot of you want to know what is the impact of the FMA transaction to -- on to the group's EBITDA. And that's what we want to show with this staircase graphic. Reported EBITDA amounts to EUR 20.6 million. Then you have to add the already mentioned M&A one-offs of EUR 1.6 million, you end up at EUR 22.2 million EBITDA. FMK contributed EUR 4.5 million in EBITDA. And if you deduct this, you would -- if you would deduct this, you would end up at EUR 17.7 million of Group EBITDA would -- which would have been a plus of 17.2% compared to the previous year, where EBITDA of the group was EUR 15.1 million.

Yes. In this slide, we want to show you the turnover development for the full year 2025 as to product groups. First was a nice growth in the investment side. As you know, for capital markets have come back after Liberation Day quite a bit, but nevertheless, as our funds develop after -- basically, it's a little bit MSCI in dollar terms and then obviously, the lower dollar compared to the euro means that we took this exchange rate loss basically. So trailer fees and investment funds and also portfolio management fees went up by 9%, which is a very good development over the last year. The insurance business went up 6%, which was good against the backdrop that we said that especially Q3 and the low consumer confidence, especially in the life insurance market was a more flattish development. And so the growth came by the big number of P&C contracts that are new to the platform. And then obviously, Ralph explained that quite a little bit comes from the new contributions of FMK, and other segments. So we are happy to reach this EUR 250 million goal. Then on the next page, we see the development as to our customer groups and sales channels. And you can also see that our IFA business is just what we saw before, is up 5%. So it's good that growth comes from all these segments. And major customers are still growing faster, obviously, right? They are now about 1/4 of our production. And there's a nice contribution also into turnover from FMK Group. So you can see that FMK fulfilled all the plans we had and we offered to you after the call on the acquisition. So it contributes about -- you have to divide this by EUR 4 million to EUR 3 million a month in turnover, and it contributes about EUR 1.1 million a month in EBITDA. So very happy with this transaction. And we also had a quite nice growth in Advisory. And you can see also here, this is the pro forma view. The 45% sound much better, but this is why -- this is because we merged the liability umbrella business into the Advisory segment. So on organic terms, it's 11%.

Okay. I just had to mute my microphone because Sebastian was talking, but you were looking at my face. So yes, back to the figures and start with Q4 in the Advisortech segment. Please let us look at the adjusted figures on the right so that we can better compare the years and see the development more clearly. The turnover was up by 20.2% to EUR 62.8 million. Gross profit increased faster because of our new subsidiary, FMK. FMK's gross profit is calculated from revenues generated from the sale of leads minus marketing expenses. And this is in present significantly higher than the gross margin of the platform. So we have opposing trends. The platform's gross profit from commission income, minus commission payments is falling a little bit due to competitive pressure, but this is offset by the increase in gross profits from the new FMK business. Overall, positive development. The personnel costs, our biggest cost position, only grew by 2.8%. Other expenses grew by EUR 900,000, thereof EUR 200,000 FMK and the rest was around -- of the rest around 50% were related to the whole year, but we received the invoices in Q4. So the minus 30% look not so good. But if you look in more detail, that's a very normal development. This all led to an increase in EBITDA of 65.5% to a very satisfying number of EUR 8.5 million for the fourth quarter in the Advisortech segment, sorry. Total revenue in the full year '25 increased in the Advisortech segment by 14% to EUR 210.8 million. Depreciation remained relatively stable and personnel costs only grew by 2.3%. And by the way, not only but also is this a result of our AI ambitions, we will come to this later on. That help us to work more efficient and save costs and a growing platform. Yes, we will come to this later. EBITDA increased by 35.9% to EUR 20.2 million, a very good development in our point of view. In the Advisory segment, the fourth quarter here, the pro forma revenue rose by 9% to EUR 15.8 million. Nevertheless, gross profit was declining. At the first glance, this looks wrong, but if you go 1 step deeper, you see that there was a number of one-off effects in 2024 that significantly improved the gross margin of the fourth quarter. For example, the reversal of provisions for sales representative compensation claims, complex word in English. In Germany, it's [Foreign Language]. It's even more complex in German. Yes, and that's why the fourth quarter 2024 look better as it was. So very normal development costs have hardly changed in 2025 in the fourth quarter and have even decreased overall, which demonstrates the great cost discipline of our colleagues in the Advisory segment. And because of the decline of the margin, EBITDA decreased from EUR 2.1 million to EUR 1.8 million. Looking at the full year of the Advisory division, we can see a very positive development with pro forma revenues rose by 11% to EUR 56.4 million. We had a very stable cost development, which led to an increase of EBITDA of 14.6%. At the end, a very solid development in a very challenging environment. Yes, cash flow statement, that is significantly influenced by the FMK acquisition. We had this in the Q3 call as well. The operating cash flow increased from EUR 15 million to EUR 16.5 million. In mind, you have to add the M&A cost of EUR 1.6 million, which have been paid in cash. Cash flow from investing activities relates almost exclusively to the acquisition of the FMK Group, EUR 66 million out of the EUR 71 million. The cash flow from financing activities is a bit more complex to explain. I already tried this in the Q3 earnings call. But again, at the initial time of consolidation of FMK, the group had approximately EUR 60 million in cash on its accounts and EUR 13.9 million of this didn't belong to us because it was not acquired as it's related to prior year profits, and we had to distribute this cash to the sellers before closing. So it was on hand when the deal was done, and it was gone when the deal was closed. And this is why we have this rather difficult lookalike here. Cash flow from financing activities is EUR 15.9 million and change in cash and cash equivalents due to consolidation scope that's what I explained today is -- what I explained right now is EUR 15 million. We ended up at EUR 36 million in cash at the end of the year, a good plus compared to the previous year. And cash on hand, very actual is EUR 35 million plus EUR 7 million on FMK, so in total, cash on hand is EUR 42 million. Yes, platform activity is also developing positively. The number of orders increased slightly by 1.9%. The number of contracts transferred by 25.5%. But let me mention from an already very high base, the assets under administration and roughly EUR 2 billion of this under our own management increased by 10.3% to a very good number of EUR 8.3 billion. And the annual net premium, and this is really an impressive development in the insurance segment, grew by 16% in only 12 months and exceeded for the first time the mark of EUR 1.5 billion in the history of JDC. Please let me remind you, we here only show KPIs that earn us money. We don't show any contracts that we have stored in the platform, but they don't pay commissions. Some of our competitors do this the other way around. So if you look at such KPIs, be careful with your conclusions. Yes, to summarize this, we see a further continuous development of our KPIs, and I'm again happy with this development. Yes, some short information on the bonds and the share price. We have 2 bonds, the SME bond under German law for EUR 20 million and our Nordic bond was EUR 17 million, which we issued for the financing of the FMK transaction. With regard to the SME bond, we have the first call in November this year at a price of 101.5%. We have not decided yet whether to redeem the bond or whether or how to refinance this. This depends on our further development during this year, depends on investment opportunities that we have and our liquidity then. So we will decide in the course of the year. And yes, share price, our share price shows a very long-term upward trend since years. But even though we experienced significant setback at the beginning of the year to around EUR 21, due to the investors hear about AI and its influence on insurance brokers, we will give you some color on this in the next minutes. The price has recovered. And with the start of this earnings call, we were around EUR 26.3 or EUR 26.4. We continue to hold 147,000 treasury shares, which we purchased on an average share price of EUR 19.89 per share. Shareholder basis is very stable. No changes in the holdings of Great-West, BKB, Provincial and the management. The only new name for some of you is Teslin, the Dutch investor, that focuses on high-quality companies with growth ambitions and strong management. That's not meant to be self-brace, but that's what they write on their website. They now have acquired 6% of the shares and an important shareholder to Teslin, for sure you're on the line. Always good to talk to you.

Yes. Thank you. As Ralph said, we asked a little bit more of your time. This is earnings call is now scheduled for 90 minutes instead of 60. And the reason is we want to give you more insights how AI is shaping our industry. We do think that, this is the most important change in our industry since the invention and introduction of the Internet. And also, it will take a little bit, but this will fundamentally change what we see in the markets. But we will show you that we at JDC, we have all that it takes to be an absolute AI winner and we're only saying this, but we mean it. And we'll show you that we have all that it takes to be the benefit of these changes as we have everything that's needed for AI in place, and we're basically in the proposition to develop the first -- be the first mover, develop the fastest into these markets. Not only when it comes to efficiency of our back office, but also on the customer side. So let's look at what is really needed to use AI really. And if you use ChatGPT or any other large language model, you will see that the results are extremely dependent on where you are and what data bank and what data these models are approaching. And in insurance, if you have simple questions, a lot of these prompts are going far or are having very bad results because the data is not readily available. And that's very different with JDC. What we show you that we own the data already with the MORGEN & MORGEN data bank. First, we want to start with a study of the Research Center for Financial Services what they call CIFIN impact study. And that's quite provocative and brings them some consultancy fees, I hope. You can see that the sales channel mix in Germany is expected to, yes, move and to change dramatically. So you can see that right now, almost 40% is still the own exclusive agent networks of the insurers, 25% is the brokers, 12% is now direct sales, 10% is platform sales and 15% is others. So you can see for platform, shouldn't change much. In 2035, the study thinks that 45% of all sales go to AI. I think that's very provocative and we'll see how this really develops. But for us, JDC it's very important that we don't care where the contracts come from. So we're agnostic as to the sales channels. We're not only that's where we come from, from the broker side. But as you know, we expanded quite nicely into the banks and into the insurers trade agent networks that now start to use our platform. And even if it's AI agents, they do need a platform. They need transaction and they need data, and that's what we own already. And therefore, if anybody uses AI agents in the market in the future and regulation is approving, then the JDC platform is the #1 platform to turn to because there, you cannot only choose products, but you can transact these products and you find the data for these AI prompts and searches. So again, right, we think this will change. It will go in the direction of AI agents. We see how fast this goes and how thoroughly. But again, we don't really care whether products are sold via human agents or the agents that are artificial. So -- and to show you this in more in detail, we added some slides on 2 things. One is data, right? Everybody talks about AI but no one about the necessary data. And some of you were not easy when we bought MORGEN & MORGEN at quite a price, but we said this is basically our stronghold. That's the base for our future business development because it gives us not only the comparison tools that are very scarce in the market, but also the database that's 84,000 different tariffs for insurance for the last 20 years, where we can build on all the tools we are building for the future. And the GDPR, so that's the data protection, European data protection directives, as a result that other than in the stock market investment markets, data is not readily available. But to the contrary, it's securely stored into the insurance back-end systems or in the paperwork or the minds of the insured clients. So we do collect all these relevant data. We have -- as Ralph showed you, we are the #1 platform for the transfer of contracts. So we have the biggest data bank, not only for the actual contracts, but also the contracts of the historic development over the last 20 years. And this is important when you ask whether my contractor or whether an AI agent finds a better contract, I do need all these data of the old contracts. That means all the data available in the market and no other company has this information. So we are here in the pole position when it comes to data. And the second field is the transaction side, right? So whenever you talk about transactions in insurance financial products, you need the infrastructure. And we, at JDC, we're not a front office company with shiny, blinky websites, but we are a machine room with a huge back office and we access the insurers back and draw out the data or pull it out. And you need hundreds of APIs to these insurers to get all this data out of these insurers and then standardize it and also to fill in your front-office system. So we do deliver this for all kinds of intermediaries and also in the future for all the AI brokers that might come or not.

Okay. So let's look at the value chain of our industry. The key value propositions and how our point of view AI will have an impact. We have the product suppliers, the insurance companies, then we have the platform, JDC. We have the intermediaries from the single broker to the bigger brokers, the corporates, the banks and maybe in the future AI brokers, and we have the customer. We, as a platform, we connect product suppliers and intermediaries. We have interfaces to all the product suppliers and the intermediaries. We deliver the Advisory IT, the processing infrastructure, we manage commission and billing, and we continuously, as Sebastian mentioned, update customer and contract data. And in our stage of the value chain, we think that AI is mostly impacting efficiency. We saw a lot of improvements, and we will see more improvements. We will be the, let's say, service and data hub and infrastructure for AI applications across the broker industry. So I think we will see a new business model, rather as customer of JDC than as a competitor. And on the platform, we think there will be a very limited disruption, yes. Because of our barriers to entry, we think we have a very good position. It might be different with the intermediaries because intermediaries provide advice to the customers and they are the center of customer trust. And there, of course, we will see improvements in efficiency as well, like customer communication or automated documentation, but we will also see disruption through AI brokers. But, and that's what we want to show you or give you information, you have to keep in mind that we are in Germany. We have regulation data protection, and we have Advisory liability. We, at JDC, we are AI believers, but Germany would adopt slowly because Germany operates under the most strictest GDPR in the EU and it restricts the insurer's ability to process, store and analyze personal data. So they cannot act as freely as competitors in more flexible regimes. And the most unclear issue is the Advisory liability because Germany places a very high responsibility on the Advisory to provide a suitable individualized and compliant recommendation. So who is liable for an incorrect advice given by artificial intelligence? And what does the German supervisory authorities say about this? Will there be further regulation? Or will there be some -- even some bans? We don't know today. And we even don't know how German courts will deal with such incorrect advice, as we know that courts tend to rule in favor of the consumer and not in favor of the adviser. So a lot of questions. Last not least, we have a cultural and legal emphasis in Germany on human advice. So we will adopt here. Germany is AI ready, but not AI-only ready compared to the United States. And that's, I think, what you have to keep in mind when you think about how AI will affect our industry at JDC. Yes. We have been working on AI applications for several years now, initially with external consultants and core programming with our people. But now with our own growing AI team, we already use AI in many areas of our day-to-day business. In the area of operations, for instance, in automated document understanding, we extract structured data from these documents. We classify the documents. We normalize and validate the data. And that's the reason, as I mentioned, why our personnel costs have only risen slightly by 2.3%, while our database is growing much faster. In the consumer acquisition, we already use AI in the automated campaign optimization in the AI generated marketing content for the FMK campaigns and in lead generation via the LLM models, we'll come to this later on. And furthermore, we use AI to bring our product intelligence seamlessly to the broker. We evaluate insurance products. We interpret the conditions, and we have a very new products, which we showed our progress for the first time yesterday. It's the MORGEN & MORGEN companion and this is the really amazing piece of software. You can see it here because we are able to answer almost every question for more than 80,000 insurance tariffs in Germany. That's 90% of all insurance products sold over the last 30 years. Imagine there is a broker that has 500 customers with an average of 3 contracts each, means he is managing 1,500 contracts. For him, it is impossible to answer all the customers' questions about these contracts. For example, before going on a vacation, the customer might know whether his expensive surfboard is covered by his liability insurance. The broker doesn't know. Nobody has to answer. And in this case, he calls the insurance company, the insurance service department to find out the information because he does not have the insurance conditions at hand. He waits on hold in the line and then he calls the customer back, takes them 40 to 60 minutes, and not only once a day. This is the normal situation a broker faces. And tomorrow, which is today with a MORGEN & MORGEN companion, he will simply ask the question, copy the answer and send the customer an e-mail or he will answer immediately at the phone and all this for more than 80,000 tariffs. So that's -- we think that's really cool, and feedback of our brokers yesterday was they think it's cool as well. Okay. Two more slides on FMK, because a lot of you asked what is the impact of all the AI development on the FMK business. Yes, what does FMK? We have users that are searching for products on classical search engine school being more now on social media, Meta, TikTok and what's new, they also want to have answers from the LLM models, Copilot, Gemini and the ones and FMK then. We target these customers. We do the performance marketing, we generate the leads and we monetize the traffic because we sell the leads to banks, insurers and so on and so on. So the question is, does AI influence the business model of FMK and if how is the influence? So -- and that's what we think we can tell you, similar to search engine providers, LLM providers have 2 models for monetizing the traffic. The first is subscription and the second is advertising. And since we know that the leading search engines like Google did not become successful as subscription models, it's not really surprising that free LLM models such as free ChatGPT are now starting to sell advertising. ChatGPT started in the U.S. 4 weeks ago. And that's what we expect it. It was one of our central investment thesis in the FMK transaction. Yes, and because we were involved here very early in user groups, we already knew at the time of our investment that advertising in LLM converts better than search engine advertising. We have some figures here. The click-through rates are 1.8x higher, conversion is higher from 1.5 to 2.4x. The consumer decides much faster and FMK internal number. The ROAS means return on advertising spend in AI is 5x higher compared to FMK's total ROAS. I have to put a disclaimer because these are very early figures. They need to be validated as the volume will increase in the future. But we can say today that AI advertising is another channel for FMK for lead generation and it definitely offers great opportunities. So what's our conclusion? What our takeaways? As Sebastian said, AI will change the market, but it's definitely a major opportunity rather than a threat for JDC. I think we could -- I hope we can make clear that we have a good opportunity to be the hub for data and infrastructure and enable AI applications all over the broker ecosystem. In the platform, it will drive efficiency and lower costs make us better, faster, cheaper. And in terms of distribution model in the future, we think that there will be some AI-only applications for very simple products where you don't need a broker anymore, but the more complex the product is, the more is the human in the loop, then we will see AI-assisted tools, but not AI-only tools. And that's our view. The hybrid model will still be the model of the future. Last slide from my side. We see ourselves in the pole position for the transition towards AI because we have all what it takes. We own the data. We own the infrastructure. We have the operational know-how to connect all this together and with FMK, we have the customer access. So this is a big opportunity, and this is why we are already building. As you can see here, under cover, we will not publish today but stay tuned. I think we will show some nice applications in the near future. Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you, Ralph. I think this is -- we will include in future calls as well because that's one of the big factors driving our markets. And obviously, sometimes also our share price. Yes. So we want to give you a new guidance for the year 2026. And first, we have a look back on the guidance on '25. You can see our figures on the next slide, Ralph, we see that we guided first EUR 245 million to EUR 265 million turnover. After the acquisition of FMK, we increased this guidance a little bit up to EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million. We then achieved EUR 250 million. It was well in the range of our first guidance, but we missed our guidance aims then a little bit on the updated guidance. But I think the more important figure is on the EBITDA side. So we first guided EUR 18.5 million to EUR 20.5 million, after the acquisition of FMK, EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22 million. And many of you ask me why, just EUR 2 million. Yes, that's the consumer confidence part. And we're very happy about the Q4 because, obviously, we could reach the guidance with just, yes, EUR 9.8 million in Q4. And also, if you not adjust, not take out the one-offs, we reached this guidance with EUR 26 million, but if you add -- or if you deduct the one-offs this way, then adjusted, we are with EUR 22.2 million. We even exceeded our then updated guidance that we gave you end of '25. So we're happy with these results. And also, our goal for '25, we have quite a complete clean sheet here. We integrated M&M into the JDC platform. You could see Ralph showed you the first results that we now have also product offerings that you get these little donuts where you see what's the performance of my old contract and what's the better contract. And you can then very easily choose the new contract at the next due date. And also, as you could see this implementation of the companion, that's big steps in the world of the broker management. And also, we could develop more asset management platform, Deutsche Finanz Portfolioverwaltung, DFP. We announced that at EUR 2.4 million -- billion -- sorry, EUR 2.4 billion in managed assets out of now more than 8 -- EUR 8.4 billion in all assets. And also Summitas is growing, and it's profitable, and we could buy more brokers here. And also, you could see that we developed the IT platform with great step further. The new AI team will push growth. The programming will be much faster and will scale up the JDC platform. And also, you can see that our costs don't grow as much as our data size and also our revenues. And this means, yes, this comes to more efficiency, more cost reduction and economies of scale. Yes, here, if you see at these columns, I think quite nicely, the new guidance for 2026 will be the range of EUR 300 million to EUR 330 million. I think, yes, conservative as we still don't know what the outcomes economically for Germany out of the Iran war. And EBITDA, no surprise here. We gave you a range of EUR 35 million lowest and to EUR 38 million EBITDA. I think also here, quite cautious as -- if you add the figures, I think we get a long way just by adding the FMK numbers. And also, the goal for 2026, yes, the key initiative we showed you is these rollout of our AI tools that we introduced yesterday to our brokers, the general condition companion and also new II tools if people, yes, speak about AI agents, yes, let's see what we can do there against the backdrop of German regulation, from the tech side, obviously, owning the data and owning the infrastructure, that's not a big problem for us. So yes, and there's always the disclaimer, all we do tell you about the future as always, depending on all the other developments in this world. Yes. Thank you for your attention. We are happy to take all the questions you might have.

Thank you very much Sebastian and Ralph. Ladies and gentlemen, now it's your turn. We are opening the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] You are guiding EBITDA of EUR 35 million to EUR 38 million for 2026 before minority interest. What would this number be excluding minority interests? Would you consider guiding going forward with numbers also excluding minority interest? And would you consider reporting a guiding for free cash flow?

Yes. Thanks for your question. To be honest, the situation is new for us because in the past, we only had 100% participations. And please keep in mind that we have a call on FMK's 40% share in 4 years or 5 years. I don't remember exactly. I think 4.5 years now. So it will be 100%. But until now -- until then, you're right, it's before minority interest. And the other question was -- just a second, I have to read it. FMK is about EUR 10 million earnings after tax. So we have EUR 4 million minorities in 2025. So we didn't decide about changing our guidance, but it's a good hint. Thank you very much. We will discuss about.

Thank you. Going on with 3 more questions. Congratulations on yet another solid quarter. The first one, during the Q3 call in mid-November, you reiterated your 2025 revenue guidance and also said you had a good visibility on reaching it. What went different than expected given you didn't reach the floor of the revenue guidance of EUR 260 million? And what assumptions are built into the 2026 guidance? I will take it step by step. One question after another.

Yes. If you see this quarter-by-quarter earnings and revenues that Ralph showed, you can see that we are always on this hockey stick development. Why is this? Because Germans used to buy life insurance, pension plans and health insurance in November and December of each year. So although about 82% is -- of our revenue is recurring or reoccurring, there is still the remaining 20% and a lot of it, yes, 10% plus comes in these life and health insurance plans or not. So it's very hard even in November to tell you what the result of the entire year will be because it's a lot dependent on this consumer confidence level whether also big companies have new pension offers to their employees that also happens end of the year, or whether they move it out or postpone it by a quarter or 2. And this happened to most of the German industry and also to a lot of private clients that thought, well, it's an insecure world. The government is shaky here. And also the development is not right. So a lot of investment decisions are moved out to the year '26. As you know from the past, it all goes in waves and everything we don't get in year 1, we get at year 2. So that's the flow of the business, yes. But as we get the revenue figures is always 6 to 8 weeks later, then this is also why we only report now our figures, then you cannot tell -- we cannot tell you in November how the year would be. So we still against the backdrop that, yes, if you were here in Germany, you could see that the overall satisfaction with the performance of state and government was very, very poor, very bad. We still think that's a good -- it was an okay-ish to good year-end business, but obviously not as good as it could have been. And EUR 10 million sounds much, but in life insurance, especially as we earn -- yes, about 30x more in one-offs in life insurance than the recurring revenue or income stream is on a normal P&C contract, it's just basically a glimpse.

Maybe one comment from my side. It's always -- it sounds weird if management says in November, I don't know how the year will end, but you have to see that we received the commissions for December in February. And there's a relevant portion of commissions that we don't know before because the brokers send the applications directly to the insurers. So there's some -- it is -- yes, it is plannable, of course, but it is, let's say, 85% to 90% plannable. And yes, that's what we can tell you.

Can you give us an update on how the new lead insurance campaigns are going with FMK Group, where you are funneling the leads in-house?

Yes. I can do this. We started to set up the internal sales team, and we hired the heads, the team leads and another 4 salespeople. We started implementing this, and we are now scaling up the number of leads that we generate and that we sell. The conversion rate is around that what we expected and the commissions per contract that we sell is higher than expected. So in total, it's Ramona's business. She's not here today, but that's what we discussed in our Board meetings that is -- yes, we are in plan or above plan.

And when extrapolating FMK's revenue growth very conservatively compared to previous years, it seems that it's stalled in 2025. Also, we know the focus has been changed to reoccurring contracts. Can you just elaborate a bit more here on the performance in Q4 versus expectations?

That's right. There is no relevant growth at FMK in the year 2025. It's a small company with 12 employees. And in such a company, if you have a shareholder change and a structured process, then management is doing nothing else for, let's say, 6 months. So I've never seen a small company in such a transaction and in parallel, bringing best results ever. But that's what we expected. We expected the company to stay at this level to bring the profits that the company brings and FMK in 2025 made it as we thought it would happen. Sebastian?

Yes. So also, right, FMK runs on German consumers. And now we have a very early KPI that shows us what they think. And in November and December, we could see that click rates on certain insurance and financial products went down 15% to 20%. And obviously, right, that's -- but actually, we are happy, as we said, right, with the FMK does exactly how we planned it. And we have great times ahead with them, taking into account all the news that Ralph gave you that we're now in the position of all these very interesting ad spaces under the LLM model prompts.

Thank you very much. You already mentioned the merger of Netfonds and blau direkt by Warburg Pincus. Could you please elaborate on how that is going to change the competition landscape for the broker market, for insurance and investments? And how does it affect the JDC Group?

So the summary is not really much, right? They're all valid and valuable competitors now with a very strong focus on insurance. Their investment business was quite rather small with about EUR 500 million in assets, so far away from ours. And Netfonds, I know they published a lot on insurance, but actually, we never had a big competitive clashes with them on the insurance side. And now I think it makes a lot of sense for Warburg. But on the competitive side, it's either one or the other. So for JDC, there's not much of an effect.

Thank you very much. And also regarding the situation, the next question. Sebastian, great figures and summary, congratulations. I have another question. Can you transfer anything from the valuation of Netfonds, which is now being paid for by Warburg to JDC? Where do you see the true value of JDC? And to Warburg -- would you like to answer it first?

Yes, it's a very tricky question. As a Board member CEO, you should never talk about the value of your company because obviously, it's on the -- it's the stock price times the outstanding shares. But yes, if you read the last analyst reports of Netfonds, they're expected to do EUR 12 million to EUR 12.5 million and are now valued at the -- if this price for the shares for the outstanding shares is also the price for the first stacks of stock. Then this calculates up to EUR 182 million. So that's at least 15x if they have some other impacts as we had in Q4, even whatever, 16, 17, 18x, yes. And obviously, you can calculate yourself. Now JDC trades at maybe 10x expected EBITDA, okay? You can talk about the minorities, then it's maybe 11x, then you can make your own deductions of this. Obviously, private equity, and this is also what we see with commercial brokers within Summitas is open to pay much, much more than public markets. Is that good or bad? It's -- we have to take it as it is. And this was the development over the last years where there's a lot of private equity money out there, but not as much small cap public investors.

And to, Warburg Pincus with blau direkt and Netfonds, is this just the beginning? Do you think Warburg will continue to look around, especially in Germany?

We know that they do. That's basically their business model to buy as many of these bigger players that they can and then package it and then sell it off to some -- in some secondary or to some strategic buyers. So yes, so Netfonds is not a small fish. It's at least #5 in the market. So yes, there is not much more of the big fish left, right? So there's only 1 or 2 in this EUR 100 million range, and then it goes down quite quickly. If you recall the study, we also showed you in former earnings calls, you can see that then on this algorithmic scale that we built in that then the competitors become really small, but that was our prediction is our prediction that the smaller 20 broker platforms, they will go and be bought basically. Yes, that's just within a big consolidation phase of the market, which is good for us because, obviously, we are one of the big buyers also.

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, let me shortly mention that there are a lot of questions in our chat box. And now we have a hand-up for audio question. We will jump there for a moment. Mark Westening, you should be able to speak now.

Congratulations for the results. I'm Mark Westening from the Netherlands, not from Teslin, by the way.

Happy there's more than one Dutch investor. So...

The '26 guidance indicates an EBITDA margin of approximately 11.6%. The 2030 guidance that you shared around a year ago, guidance indicates around 9.5%. Why is it breaking the gradual improvement of the past years?

The answer is easy because when we gave the old 2030 guidance, we didn't know that a company like FMK even exists. And this was how we thought that JDC would scale in EBITDA margin without FMK as very profitable lead generation company that hopefully gives us not only profits, but fuel to run the platform. So that's the difference.

And can I [indiscernible] you to update your guidance for 2030?

Yes, we're working on it. It was just the short term. Obviously, as we explained, we get the data quite late from the insurance companies. Everybody in the finance department is working quite hard to give you the figures as preliminary as fast as we can. But I think when we publish the final figures, we can also give you a new vision for 2030.

Thank you for your questions, Mark. And we will jump back to the questions on the chat box. What contribution of FMK is expect into the 2026 guidance?

Yes, I can answer this. If you compare 2026 to '25, then the additional contribution of FMK will be between EUR 30 million and EUR 35 million of turnover and like EUR 10 million in EBITDA. You have to consider that -- we had 4 months already FMK in our consolidation in 2025. And the figures I mentioned were what you can add on this. So another EUR 30 million roughly in turnover and another EUR 10 million in EBITDA.

Do you expect the productivity gains enabled by AI and your back-office operations to lead to pricing pressure from your clients?

Not really. So the beauty is that the commissions are calculated in a manual world, right? And as long as 85% of the markets are not digitizing or not digitized, right, then we don't expect commissions to go down substantially. So we get this digitization premium where we are more efficient being digital as compared to all the rest of the market being nondigital, we can benefit from this trade-off. And it's the same with AI because AI is -- yes, that's new, but it's a very, very, very, very small part. And even if you look now at U.S. markets that celebrate a comparison tool that has been in the market in Germany for the last 15 years, it's still a very small impact. So this will take quite some time until the entire market changes and there is more digital than manual offerings.

Thank you. What is the main reason why revenue guidance fell short by EUR 10 million, but the earnings forecast was comfortably met. Was there a nonrecurring one-off effect?

No.

No, one-off besides the EUR 1.6 million M&A that we talked about, the EUR 20.6 million are recurring. We just were more profitable than we expected. And the shortfall, I tried to explain is we are paid net by the insurers means they take the positive commission from our applications. And if there are cancellations, they are -- they deduct the cancellations and send us the net revenue. So if cancellations increase, then the net revenue declines. And that's what Sebastian mentioned because of the economic environment, we had more cancellations and that reduced the turnover. And maybe this is not explaining the total gap, but it's one part of the explanation. Sebastian?

Yes. And the other half is basically that we always give you average commission -- commissions, right? But what we didn't lay out in detail is that the recurring part of the commission has a higher margin than the new business. So on average, it's rather 25 percentage on the recurring base. So if we get in EUR 40 from -- for a small contract, we pay out EUR 30 on average. So we keep 25%. But for these bigger life insurance contracts, especially, the margin is rather 10%. So on the plan, that's very high volume revenue on low earnings, and this is also why the EUR 10 million hurt on the revenue side. But if you translate this in earnings, it's not much earnings contribution that is missing by this EUR 10 million in new business.

Thank you very much. How is the lead generation going for FMK in the insurance market? I recall the business not doing anything or very little in the insurance compared to investments. And what percentage of FMK's current revenue comes from insurance leads?

Very little still because we do not sell the leads, but we try to convert them into own assets. And that's what I mentioned is what we are setting up now. We still generate leads in -- we are setting up the lead generation in -- mainly in -- in work disability and pet insurance that are the first parts that are starting now and are scaling up day by day, week by week. But if you look at the P&L now, it's still not relevant.

Thank you. Would you consider reporting and guiding for free cash flow?

Yes. Other colleague asked as well. We would love to. But to be honest, that's really complex. And you have so many circumstances and impacts we would think about it.

But as a rule of thumb, like from the non-CFO answer, it's very close to EBITDA minus minorities, right? So if we guide for EUR 36 million and deducting minorities of EUR 4 million, you usually expect the free cash flow plus or minus EUR 30 million, right? As Ralph said, there's about 70 different factors, but that's my management rule, if that helps.

Thank you very much. And let us shortly jump over to Yannick Glatthard with an audio question. Yannick, you should be able to speak now.

Yes, great numbers. I have 2 quick questions. The first one is quick. Could you maybe address the development of the Summitas Gruppe and maybe like the major clients such as VKB, [indiscernible] and others, just maybe in a sentence? And then the second is regarding what you just said regarding the FMK insurance lead generation. How are you experiencing the difference in fully digital leads such as maybe a bank or credit card that can be just sold online in comparison to more complex insurance products where the lead leads to personal exchange. Are you seeing any differences there? Is it working the same? Is it more complicated for the lead generation?

Sebastian, can you take the first question, please.

Summitas. Yes. So well, Summitas has developed quite nicely. Obviously, we bought BVUK, the biggest pension management platform at the end of '24, and this was consolidated in '25. So BVUK also was integrated well. But on the other side, always, they had to fight with these life insurance pension business, occupational pension business postponements. And for them, 6,000 contracts that should have been there in Q4 were postponed to Q2 this year. And therefore, there's a little bit minus on the BVUK side. But overall, Summitas could grow revenue and earnings to about -- we don't have the final figures yet. So it's about EUR 55 million in revenue and about EUR 15 million in EBITDA, if that's the last what I heard. And so it's very happy with this engagement and important for us as a platform. It contributed rough EUR 1.7 million last year, I think, in EBITDA to the platform business. So happy about that as well. And major clients, yes, so obviously, you saw that they are up 15%. This could also have been steeper, obviously. There are some partners that develop nicely, especially the Provinzial savings banks. We are now at almost 100 savings banks that could use the platforms, but also there, it's a roll-up stage still. And then yes, development is slower at Sparkassenversicherung and VKB. And yes, but we are very happy that the corporate brokers are just in line -- Algotrans, BMW, Boehringer, which good developments.

Yes. Your question regarding the leads, it's a different business because FMK in the past didn't sell leads to Trade Republic and Co, but they send them customers, and they were paid not lead by lead, but for the successful business transaction. So the conversion rate from leads to contract was not so important as they were paid by business and not by leads. In the insurance business that we now start we planned with a conversion rate from 10% to 15%, and that's what we see. So no negative surprises. There is a positive surprise, and this is that the average commission per sold contract is much higher than we expected because the leads are at a good quality. That's what we can say at this stage. But please, this is still very young. The company -- we bought the company in July. It was first consolidated in September, and we hired the head of our sales department for the FMK leads in November, I think, and she started working here 1st of January. So it takes time, but we are within our plans.

I have one more comment, maybe thanks. I see an analogy. I think like 2 years ago or maybe even further back, you were talking about major clients that you were winning, and you were saying if we win one of these, then we'll have a good way of going. And I feel like it's the same way right now, not just with like the major clients, but like even like a level higher. There's the major clients that are going well, then there's FMK that's going well and the Summitas Gruppe. So very happy with the development.

Thank you very much, Yannick.

Thank you for your questions, Yannick. And we're going back; how do you perceive the takeover of Netfonds by Warburg? Is that a positive development for the leading companies in the industry?

Yes, we talked about this a little bit already. Well, it's just happening what we told you in the last 3 years. We see that consolidation is picking up. We are buying, they are buying. So there will be at least 3 conglomerates. One is led by Warburg Pincus. That's blau, Netfonds. One is Hg Capital's, GGW, Fonds Finanz, also PMA. So -- and us, 2 are private equity owned, which means there will be secondaries or strategic sales. We are publicly listed with very strong shareholders. So people when they come to us, they know where they will end up. That's a very stable shareholder structure there, and then they choose whom they want to partner with. So that's the only, let's say, reflex in the end, the competition has been fierce and is fierce. So it's good sports still.

Considering your pole position in AI and German insurance, have you been already approached by AI firms for potential partnerships?

Smaller daily because everyone tries to tell us that we have to cooperate and -- but if you look at the MORGEN & MORGEN companion, we could have done this tool with a third party, but then we would open our data, and this is the gold of nugget. So we decided to do it ourselves. And our plan is to internalize as much AI applications as possible and not work with all shiny blinky start-ups. We will do it our own.

Then how did FMK's revenue and EBITDA change in full year 2025 compared to 2024?

As mentioned, it's more or less comparable. The revenue is a little bit more or less the same, plus/minus EUR 500,000.

Thank you. What is your view on the merger of Netfonds and blau? Do you expect any change in the competitive dynamics?

I hope we answered this. No, there will be the same fierce competition that's out there already.

Yes.

Can you give an update on Summitas and its M&A activities?

Yes, we had a question on Summitas already. Yes, we still have a full M&A pipeline there. So we're still buying brokers. And yes, we will be -- spend all the initial commitment most probably in the half year. So yes, quite a good active contribution to the market.

Maybe we -- as we run out of time, we can skip the questions that are double. The next one, Sebastian answered as well. And #4 is can you...

That's the second part. Do we expect any new logo wins?

Okay.

We wouldn't tell. So that is not signed.

On existing strategic partners, can you share comments on the development of the rollout penetration of clients, any change in dynamic driven by the new AI opportunities?

You saw that major clients were up 15%. So that's a good number. And of course, when we show AI applications, then our customers, they will test them and decide to use them or not. But I don't think that this will influence the speed of, let's say, adoption at our bigger customers. I think you have to be on the very innovative side, you have to provide new tools. You have to make business more efficient for your partners, then they will be happier. And of course, then the turnover will grow, but that's hard to measure.

In which AI models did you test FMK's higher conversation rate because advertising is just getting started, and that's in the U.S.?

I was laughing when I was reading the question because it's a good question. When ChatGPT started 4 weeks ago, how can you know how do you have figures? What I know, Florian is unfortunately not at the call, the founder of FMK. What I know is that FMK was in very early groups with Google as the CEO of FMK, Anna is a former Google employee. And so they were very early in testing advertising in Google Gemini. If you look at Google, you can use the AI view. And there today, you can see advertising, not at the free ChatGPT that started in the U.S. 4 weeks ago, will come to Germany. You're right, the figures cannot be from ChatGPT advertising.

But it also comes from Bing and Copilot.

Yes.

And they started earlier than -- so ChatGPT is basically the last mover to add advertising to their large language models or the big ones.

Thank you very much. And we have 3 questions left. Could you perhaps tell us something about the current market and market consolidation following yesterday's purchase of Netfonds? Does JDC still have any potential targets in mind? And what are the approximate sizes?

So we answer the first half. But the second is, yes, we talk to everybody in the market, and there's a number of smaller ones out there still, but we'll see how the market now moves. Maybe prices now moved up as we think it was a very attractive -- Netfonds was really a very attractive trade-off for existing shareholders.

Yes. Congrats to the shareholders.

And can you update us how the large customer business is doing? 2025 seem to have been a good year.

Yes, we've answered this already. There's one question regarding the cash flow. The colleague asks if our cash flow tends to be higher than the reported earnings after tax. The answer is yes. And the reason is that we have high depreciation and amortization for the portfolios that we bought in the past. So we have like EUR 4 million or EUR 5 million amortization, and that's the reason why cash flow is definitely higher than net earnings.

Wonderful. And one more question came in. Are there any other German insurance companies besides Provinzial and VKB interested in acquiring a stake in JDC?

Well, what we told you 3 years ago when VKB, Provinzial bought 4 years it's not our interest to be owned by a group of insurance companies. So we're happy that they are giving the shareholder base stability. But now in our view, 40% in insurers is okay. But if the majority is owned by insurers, there is an example for that, a company called BCA in the market where there's, I think, 11 insurers owning companies going nowhere because obviously, if you are in a department of a one big insurance company or many, then the entrepreneurial thrust is gone, and this is what we don't want. We want to be product-wise independent, and this is what the shareholder -- the cap table now shows. And therefore, it's not in our interest to sell more stakes to insurance companies.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. And with no further questions, we have come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in the DC Group AG Aktie verzeichnete. A big thank you also to you, Sebastian and Ralph, for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. We will also post the recording of this call on the AirTime website. I wish you all a successful day and handing back over to Sebastian for some final remarks.

Yes. Thank you again, Judith. Yes, Ralph and I and the rest of the Board, we're very happy about the results and very happy that the Q4 was showing such good impact. Also, yes, you could see that we grew earnings by 36%, adjusted even by 47%. If we now go EUR 36 million plus, you will see that we grow even by 70% in the earnings in '26. So you can really see that now really we have already reached this inflection point and really now can scale the platform and earn real money for you. So we are very happy to show more of this. And then also we see a huge tailwind by AI developments. And it's still very, very early and very, very small. But as you could see by Ralph's explanations, we use it in many parts of the company already, and it's driving our efficiency. And now when it comes to the customer side, where really people use ChatGPT or other large language models for their insurance advice, there is a huge gain, maybe not immediately in an AI agent that really does the buying for the customer, but more in getting the information, gathering all the conditions and also answering the questions and making the life much easier for the existing intermediaries. And again, we have a huge demographic problem in the markets where half of the intermediaries will go out of the market anywhere and someone has to do the job and AI is the perfect replacement for these brokers going into their retirement ages. So we're very happy about these developments. We have what it takes, again, data infrastructure, operational efficiency and know-how and now via FMK, also the customer access. So there's a lot of us to be expected, and we will be in the pole position and stay in the pole position. Thank you for your interest and trust.