Moltiply Group S.p.A. ($MOL)

Good afternoon. This is the conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the presentation of Moltiply Group Full Year 2025 Results. [Operator Instructions] After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marco Pescarmona, Chairman; Mr. Alessandro Fracassi, CEO; and Mr. Francesco Masciandaro, CFO of Moltiply Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everybody. We will rely as usual on our presentation published on our website. And as a forward, this year, we decided to make some changes to the format of the presentation. And this is basically because the group has changed significantly in recent years. And so we felt that the description that we were providing was no longer adequate, and we decided to update it a little bit. So this time, rather than just commenting the results, we will also make some comments on the structure of the revised presentation. So we will start from Page 5, where here, everything is unchanged. We still have two divisions that are separate businesses, both very nice businesses. But then the description of the divisions, as you will see, will be slightly changed. Group structure is on the next slide, there is nothing relevant. I think I'll start commenting on Page 7 with a description of what Mavriq does. First of all, Mavriq, now we will look at Mavriq through the lenses of four business lines, Energy & Telco, insurance, banking and shopping, and it's pretty clear what's inside these business lines. And this is across all the geographies. So Energy & Telco will mean everything that we do in Energy & Telco in Italy, Germany, Spain, et cetera, in other countries where we are present. In terms of weight, and you have at the end of the presentation in the historical figures, you have the relative weight of the business lines. Energy & Telco is in 25%, 40%, roughly speaking, of our revenues. Insurance is 30%, banking 20% and shopping 10%. So this is very different in terms of also product mix of the old mortgage broking business we had in Italy years ago. In terms of countries, these are with the flags the countries where we are present. What is important is that there are some products like insurance that we have in every country, others that we have in most countries. And then banking products, which is mainly mortgage or personal loan intermediation, this is mostly an Italian and German business with only start-up level initiatives in the other countries. And shopping, which is Trovaprezzi, we have it only in Italy. So this is like the map to understand how we see Mavriq and how we will comment on Mavriq going forward. On the following slides, we still have our brands. We have simplified it a little bit, especially the Italian brands. Here, it's only worth mentioning Switcho. Switcho is our digital energy business, which is a fully automated service, not an auto-switch, but a service that allows you to change energy provider without having to talk to a call center, which is a distinctive advantage in Italy, and this is a business that has done very well in '25. For the other countries, there are no changes. This leads us to the slides on the BPO division, that's for which Alessandro will take the lead.

Yes. And here on the BPO division, we have decided to simplify. Also considering the different dynamics, the former six business lines plus other that we had into three major business lines, which are probably also easier to understand. One is banking. And within banking, you will find basically everything that was relating to credit. We had the loans, the mortgages and also the activities that are -- that we were doing in real estate, all those that were strictly connected with credit. And also the line of -- that we had called wealth, which has inside Wealth Management Services and Investment Services, all of this is now included in this business line that we call banking, where obviously, the target clients are banks, consumer credit specialists, asset gatherers and asset managers and also NPL specialists on the servicing side, but also banks who do it in-house. Then we have the vertical of lease, lease meant in, let's say, the [ Anglo-Saxon ] sense where you will have all the forums that help you use an asset where you don't own the property, and this could be through a leasing contract, so what is in Italy a regulated contract or long-term rental, which is a nonregulated way to use an asset that you don't own. Here, the target clients are obviously the rental companies, also the rent-a-car companies, the leasing companies and the dealers within the automotive distribution channels. The last vertical is insurance, where, as you know, we mainly do claim processing. But as we look at also extending our services, we felt it made sense to look at these as the insurance vertical. Here, the clients are insurance companies and self-insured entities, meaning corporations or public entities that decide to carry their own risk, but still need processes to manage the way that damages are managed. The key services that we have here are claims management, so the third-party administration of policies and loss adjustments, what we call in Italian Perizia, meaning assessing what is the damages that happened to assets or people within an insurance contract. And then we also want to underline because it's growing the other revenue piece, where basically we are creating and growing services in a B2B2C model, where the clients are the clients of the previous business line, so mainly banking customers and insurance customer. And here, there are basically three areas of services. One is advisory for pension and social security. This is connected to the Mia Pensione acquisition that we did last year, actually in '24. At the end of '24, the management of inheritance and estate for, let's say, the inheritance of the -- in a inheritance process directly to the people involved. And finally, sustainable value real estate asset services, sustainable value real estate services. This is somehow all the new life that we are giving to our capabilities and capacities in -- that we were able to build during the Superbonus phase, meaning, as you know, there were incentives to upgrade the real estate assets, and we built the capacity to help people doing this kind of investments and also then banks purchased the credit -- the tax credit that came from these investments. And we feel like looking forward at the new regulations that are coming to play in Europe, this will be a services that most banks and insurance will be interested to selling to their own customers. So it's a pattern that they're already doing. And therefore, also here, we have started offering some of these services through banks. And so again, with a B2B2C models, and this is the part of other revenues. Here, there are some pages which I will not go through, but that help you get some numbers on the size of this market that we feel. On one side, they are interestingly large and also complementary. And then on the other side, which is what you see on Page 13, they -- all these three markets show a significant underdevelopment relative not only to the best-in-class in Europe, meaning the best-in-class countries in Europe, but to the European average. And therefore, there is still an untapped potential of growth in this markets, which we believe to be perfectly positioned to capture -- to be in the perfect position to capture. This is what you -- there are some indicators here. I won't go through them. Maybe just look at the last column on Page 13, the one on the right, and you see the gap in terms of percentage of that particular metric relative to the European average. And it tells you really the growth potential that is embedded in these three verticals that we are pursuing with a model that, as you know, is a model of technology-enabled BPO services where what we target are noncore processes, but critical processes, meaning processes that impact the performance, the business performance of our clients. Now on Page 14, again, a section we will not go through in detail. But in interacting with investors, we got a lot of questions about the impact of AI. So we decided that it was good to have a meaningful conversation going forward with our investors and analysts in general to put down in a very structured way our thoughts on the impacts of AI. So I won't go through all the presentation, just basically the headlines. The idea is that we believe that on the -- both business lines are very well positioned on one side, the business model of Madrid, we believe to be very resilient to whatever is perceived as AI threat. And actually, there are also upsides that we will be able to capture in terms of expanding our services using AI with the end customer. And then if we move on to Page 16, and this is part of -- you will find here things that both in meetings and in some of these earnings calls, I've covered. You will see relative to the BPO and Tech business line -- sorry, the BPO and Tech division, you will see on -- here, we believe that AI is actually not a threat, but an opportunity for structural growth. And here again, on the top of the page, what are the perceived risk of the market in our understanding of the AI disruption. And then here, you see on the left, what are, in our view, the defensive modes for multiply against the threat. But most importantly, how instead AI is for us an opportunity and what are the engines that we can use to actually even increase our growth pattern, thanks to the use of AI. This is obviously true for us and other players in the industry. But we believe that our position is what you see on Page 17 is of having different assets that compound in looking forward being able to capture this opportunity. And this go from having tons of digital data to having platforms that are already embedding -- starting to embed AI in the processes and to having the skills and the client base that are perfect for the kind of services that we can offer and that can be made much more powerful and effective through AI. And with this, we get finally to the business update, and I leave the floor again to Marco to start going through the full year highlights for the group, and then I'll catch you back on when we discuss the BPO division. Thanks.

Thank you, Alex. So on -- back to Page 19, we have the full year highlights. This is where we normally start our presentation. And we are very pleased with the results of 2025. In '25, we had revenues of EUR 674.1 million, which is up 48.6% year-on-year. This is, of course, also due to the acquisition of Verivox, which was quite sizable. But even without that, we would have seen a very nice organic growth. The EBITDA for the full year is EUR 177.4 million, and this is up 44.5% year-on-year. The EBITDA margin is 26.3%, which compares to 27.1% of the previous year, meaning that the dilutive effect of the Verivox acquisition was limited. The EBIT is EUR 103.4 million. That's up 40.8% year-on-year. Here, on the EBIT, we will comment later, but it's important to remind that this is also affected by -- and this is quite different from the EBITDA because of the amortization of the purchase price allocation to amortizable intangible assets that we have in the numbers. And so we'll try in later slides to give you some sense of how to normalize that. The net income, the net income is EUR 29.4 million. This is minus 33.2% year-on-year. The explanation of this minus compared to the very strong performance in terms of operating results is two things. One is that there are, of course, higher interest costs compared to the previous year. And the second is that we have in the full year of '25 EUR 31.9 million of negative effect of adjustments to put & call liabilities on minority stakes. Basically, for us, it's quite a common pattern to make acquisitions where we buy, say, 80% of the company. And then we keep the management involved and with a stake of, say, the remaining 20%. And then they have typically put & call options over three to five years with typically a multiple. This could be a multiple of a single year, but more commonly two or three years of results. The multiple could be fixed or could have a range depending on growth or other parameters. But in any case, what we had in 2025, which was a very strong year was that, in particular, one of these participations, I mean, all the companies did well. But in particular, we have one in the energy sector in Italy that did much, much better than what we anticipated. And so we basically -- it contributed to the results. We are very happy, but also what we need to pay has gone up. And this is not only a function of the performance of the year, but also of the expected performance of the future. And so this is what leads to this adjustment to the put & call liabilities, which are a reflection of a very favorable acquisitions that we made. And going to the next page, we see the numbers for the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter, we have revenues of EUR 207 million. That's up 57.3% year-on-year. By the way, you see that the proportion between the two divisions is now 2/3 Mavriq, 1/3 Moltiply DPO and Tech now. And the EBITDA was EUR 56.6 million in the fourth quarter. This is up 49% year-on-year. And here, the proportion is similar to the proposed revenues. In the Q4, the EBITDA margin was 27.4%, which is, again, a small dilution compared to the 28.7% of the previous year, keeping in mind that we acquired Verivox that was running at lower EBITDA margins. Now again, on the EBIT. Here, in the EBIT, what I mentioned before that this is affected by PPA amortization. It's important also to be aware of the fact that when we do an acquisition, we do the purchase price allocation at the end of the year, and we put all the amortization in the last quarter. So the EBIT is here almost -- I mean, EUR 27.9 million, only 14.3% up year-on-year because here, we have put in only one quarter all the Verivox PPA amortization, because the exercise of the PPA is completed only at the end of the year. And finally, the net income. Net income is again the same story in the quarter, by the way, the EUR 30-plus million of put & call adjustment for EUR 20 million in Q4, again, because that's when we had the visibility and because also it depends on the revised expectations for the future that we were able to have with clarity only at the end of the year. So this is in terms of the overall performance of the business. Then when we look at the two divisions, when I comment for Mavriq, Mavriq the EUR 406.4 million, that's up 83.8%. I mean these are very, very, very big growth. So it's -- of course, a lot of it is Verivox, but a lot of it is also organic. EBITDA is EUR 116.6 million. That's up 74.5% year-on-year. The EBITDA margin is 28.7% in '25 compared to 30.2% in the previous year. And what is new that we didn't have in the past presentations is this box at the bottom left, where we show the EBIT adjusted for PPA amortization. Basically, we add back the amortization of only the PPA, not of, I don't know, other investments, capitalizations, IFRS 16. That's all included only what comes from this, let's say, maybe it's not the right word, [ cigulative ] effect of the PPA exercises. And we think this is more meaningful way to look at the EBIT. We were before providing always the figures to do the normalization, but we thought we figured out that it could be more convenient just to show also the result. And you see this is very similar in terms of dynamics in this case to the evolution of the EBITDA. And we try to keep this data also in future presentations. So this EBITDA adjusted for PPA amortization is EUR 102.3 million, and that's up 72% year-on-year. Then there is the EBIT as it is reported, which is EUR 72.9 million, which is 66.8% up year-on-year. Looking at Q4, well, in Q4, revenues more than doubled at EUR 138.2 million. This is up 115.6% year-on-year. EBITDA was EUR 38.5 million, up 87.6%. This EBIT adjusted for PPA amortization had virtually the same growth as EBITDA, and it was at EUR 30.6 million in Q4. And finally, EBIT was at EUR 18.5 million, up 35.5% year-on-year. So these are the figures for the past performance of which we are very pleased. Now we will comment a bit more at the level of the business lines and also in terms of outlook. And well, we had very nice organic growth in all Mavriq business lines with the exception of shopping, which was down a little bit in terms of revenues, down a bit more in terms of EBITDA contribution. But let's first of all, say that the consolidation of Verivox was I mean, significantly changed the scale of the division, the geographical reach and the product breadth. And basically, this made the group look very, very different, at least Mavriq from what it was before. And this has led also to this change in how we present things, of course. And one thing that you remember is that Verivox. For Verivox, we had an earn-out. And here is -- you see it in the annual report, but we decided to put here as well as the answer that you don't have to ask. The earn-out liability that we estimate for now is EUR 5.3 million at the end of December. This is subject to potential adjustments. So it could be higher, could be lower. This is our current estimate. And by the way, this doesn't go into the put & call adjustments because it doesn't go in the net financial position. Anyway, we will have, I'm saying things that are obvious, very strong year-on-year growth also in Q1 of '26, in part because the business was, as you will see, was doing well, especially energy, but also simply because Verivox was not consolidated yet in Q1 '25. For the rest of '26, the outlook is, as you will see based on the comments below, of moderate growth, organic growth, because we don't have any acquisitions for now announced or anything. But there is potential downside risk because of the situation in the Middle East. We said energy is our biggest business. This has been positive in '25. But now that there is war in Iran, this is also a potential source of uncertainty. Let's start, in fact, with Energy & Telco, commenting more in the details. So here, we put all the utilities. And -- this is electricity and gas. These are the predominant -- the main products. And then there is broadband. But broadband is a nice product, but the bulk of the business here is electricity and gas. And this is in all the markets where we have these things. And revenues were up 5x. Even if we already have a nice energy business in Italy, but we had the addition of Verivox, but we also are developing an energy business in Spain. So this grew both very nicely organically and thanks to Verivox. Verivox started '25 with a very weak demand. Basically end of '24, early '25, it was weak, and we were a bit concerned and then it improved and accelerated. And in the second half of '26, we already said it many times, there were better conditions to save money on energy in Germany. So we saw a lot of switching behavior. And this continued also in early '26. So January, February were nice months. And then, of course, you know what happened. They started bombing Iran and energy prices have rapidly increased. And it's an interesting situation. It has some parallels and some differences to the war with Ukraine, because also the war with Ukraine also triggered an energy shock. Here, it seems to be a bit more contained. Basically, there were no major disruptions to supply so far. So in our business, we match demand and supply. And we -- of course, people will switch more if they can save more money or get better conditions. But after the war in Ukraine, there were situations and markets where a large portion of the supply disappeared from the market. Energy companies were not willing to acquire new customers. Energy companies were going bankrupt. Only variable price tariffs were available. So those were very serious disruptions. For now, we are not seeing anything like that. Apparently, the system has been made more resilient also from a regulatory standpoint. So suppliers are still in the market, still happy to acquire new customers. The only problem is the offers today available are much less attractive. So people find it difficult to save money in many situations. So today, we have a functioning market, but with weaker benefits for consumers and so a lot of interest and then less transactional interest. So it's okay, but it's not as good as it was before. And again, and if here something really bad happens in terms of the hostilities or anything, then we could go more towards a Ukrainian style situation. On the other hand, if the situation resolves, this will have generated so much interest again on energy that we will have booming demand. So this could go both ways. And this is our uncertainty for now. And then for the other business lines, it's a bit more usual things. So insurance, we had double-digit organic growth in '25. We had the acquisition of Verivox also. Growth continue in '26. We are seeing maybe some slower growth, still growth in some more established markets. This is possibly linked to how the premiums are moving. So we don't worry about that, but we think there will be growth, but possibly a bit more moderate than in previous years. And then there is banking. Banking for us is mortgages in Italy and consumer -- also in Germany, but Italy is the main country for mortgages and consumer loans, where Germany is bigger than Italy and then also some business with bank accounts. And we had solid growth in '25. We saw the acceleration of Italian mortgage demand in the second half. But overall, for the year, it was very nice organic growth. And then, of course, we had in the year the benefit of the Verivox consolidation. What is the outlook here? We sit down for mortgages in Italy, especially the mortgages are down significantly in the first half, and then we don't know for the second half. On the other hand, we think we could see a positive contribution from growth potential from personal loans, both in Germany, where we have a nice business and in Italy. Finally, shopping. Shopping, this is mainly comparison shopping, and then we have an online review business in Italy, like the sort of Trustpilot, but it's only in Italy. And the business contracted, as you see a little bit because minus 1.7% year-on-year in terms of revenues compared to '25, but it was worse in terms of EBITDA. And the situation is the same. We are still competing with Google's own comparison service, which is embedded in the search result. Google continues to operate like this despite the antitrust decision, the Google Shopping decision, but more importantly, despite the fact that at least preliminarily, the European Commission found this embedding of, of Google's own services in search in violation of the DNA and in particular of Article 6.5 that prohibits self-favoring. But two years have passed since they opened an investigation, a year has passed since they told Google that they found evidence of noncompliant behavior, but no decision has been issued and nothing has really changed. So the outlook for now is that we continue to see more of the same stability to moderate contraction in '26, if nothing changes. Then if the commission finally decides on this matter and maybe issues a prohibition decision or does something effective, then we could have a relief and actually could have potential upside on this business as well. So this ends the comments and outlook for Mavriq, and I hand it back to Alessandro for Moltiply BP and Tech. Thank you.

Thank you, Marco. We are on Page 26, and we'll start with the results for the overall year. Again, we look at this as a strong performance from the Moltiply BPO and Tech division. We have a top line growth of 15.1% year-on-year. It's still double digit also if you take out the acquisitions of MiaPensione, which contributed to this growth. On an EBITDA level, we are at 8.6%. Here, and I can comment -- so we grew from 56% to 60.8%. The margin slightly decreased from 24.1% to 22.7%. As I have commented throughout the year, this dilution effect is -- the reason for this dilution effect is twofold. On one side, we have the significant impact of para-notarial services that had a price effect with the unit margin in euros remaining constant and with the cost of the notaries becoming almost double. So that creates an inflation in revenue, while which impacts -- which creates a dilution in the EBITDA margin percentage-wise. And the other reason is that impacts, especially in the fourth quarter, the numbers are on the following pages. You might remember that we had an incredibly strong quarter in '24, and that was mainly due to the closing of most complex claims on the insurance vertical. Those claims were connected to the events, the weather events of the summer and the fall of '23 and the longer ones took over a year to finish the processing and those claims are normally the ones where we have higher margins because it's a more professional job that we do on those. And therefore, there is a higher margin. If we look at the performance in terms of EBIT, both adjusted for PPA and EBIT. They tell a similar story, although here, there is a negative impact, and that's the reason why the numbers are lower in terms of growth of increased amortization, immaterial amortization in connected especially software development and especially in the lease vertical, where, as you know, we had acquired Trebi, which we have renominated -- renamed as Moltiply Tech. That was mainly a legacy system, which is very predominant in the lease vertical. And we're basically doing two things. On one side, we created a brand-new future-proof platform on the rental part of the business, which we started selling during 2025, actually at the end of 2025. And also, we started investing in renewing the platform for lease. So that's the reason why then we have an impact on the amortization here. And that's true. Basically, there is no -- in showing the PPA -- the EBIT number adjusted for PPA, there is here no significant change in PPA between '24 and '25. And therefore, the different -- the numbers just shift downwards when you consider this noncash effect of PPA, but -- and the percentage change because they are obviously on smaller numbers, it's just a mathematical factor. But more or less, the growth over the year is in absolute terms similar. Now the comparison for -- with Q4 is here, it seems to tell a story, which is not good, but to us, this is actually a great quarter because it's -- the comparison is relative to a quarter that was incredibly strong in '24 and the ability to beat that to having reached that -- top that result to us is actually very, very significant, also because we substituted a very, very extraordinary quarter with something that still has some one-off effects, but definitely not as major as the ones that we had in '24, but it's mainly organic. So here, really, we should not see this as a slowing of growth, but just as a comparison that was particularly difficult for '26. And I believe that having topped the '24 -- for '25, sorry. And I believe that having topped the '24 result is actually a great performance. So moving on to the next page, on Page 28, a comment on the outlook at the division level. Well, first of all, on the '25 results, most of the comments I've already made. What is -- let me see if there's something else. No, I guess that we basically said everything already commenting the numbers. Then let's look at the outlook in '26. We expect to be able to continue to deliver the organic growth as you have seen us doing in the last couple of years at a revenue level. We actually do expect to expand EBITDA margin. This is also because we'll see on one side, efficiency brought in by all the efforts in technology and AI that we are doing. And on the other side, also the mix effect of mortgages will taper off as para-notary services and especially refinancing will reach maturity and start declining, as Marco has already commented during '26. So the growth will come mainly we expect from banking and insurance, at least an EBITDA level. And then we expect lease to be able to replicate organically the results of '25 which let me say, again, those are record results. And again, the lease vertical has been consistently delivering organic growth in -- on average through the years at a double-digit pace, and we are very pleased with this vertical and with its management. Again, technology investments will continue both to renew our platform, but significantly to better our processes and to include and continue working on AI. As you will be able to read on the pages dedicated to AI, I believe that putting AI within regulated financial processes is not just about technology. So it's not just a technological investment. It's something that is instead at the same time, also an effort in designing processes, in putting in governance, in putting in the right KPIs and in deciding where the human should remain in the loop and how the human control is impacted. As I -- as we reason on these things, we saw a very clear parallel to the efforts that we have done in the early 2010s when we started using nearshoring. Also there moving things from Italy to Romania was not just about copying processes or actually cutting processes from Italy and pasting them in Romania. It meant changing it, deciding which pieces should remain in Italy, which businesses could go to Romania, deciding where the performance of our Romanian colleagues was actually more efficient or as efficient as the Italian and so on. I mean all of these, it is very, very similar and it takes time, and it's not just very similar when you think about moving processes and having AI embedded in those processes. And this is what we will continue to do. And I think we will continue to see results in the growth of our EBITDA margin. Now commenting the different business lines. Relative to banking, I'll still give a flavor of the different parts within banking at least for some time and each time it's necessary to explain the trends. So banking, it's our largest revenue contributor, and it was up 36.9% year-on-year. This is all organic growth. Mortgages were the main driver of this growth. Actually, they basically we basically doubled our revenues here. As I have commented already, a lot of this came also from the para-notary services and the price effect of the increase of notary fees, but also the quantities went up very significantly. Wealth Management grew and grew significantly, 18%. This was driven mainly by tech offering and also some client expansion. Real estate instead, loans, what we used to call loans remained -- showed a little bit of growth, but they were basically stable. And real estate instead, as you all know, went down, went down in revenues 21%. This is the end of the Superbonus phaseout, and we think now we are at a structural post incentive base line, now we expect to stabilize and be able to grow over this. Where will the growth come in '26? This will be mainly growth with existing clients, either because they increased their market share within a market that we do not expect to be particularly growing in '26. So we expect our clients to increase their market share and our market share to increase within services of clients. There are some clients that are switching to us from other providers and will continue to do so during the course of '26 and some clients where we are increasing the services that we -- the number of services that we are selling them. Then let's move on to [indiscernible], which will present as the second business line. This is because it's the second contributor in terms of revenues, but it's actually the largest contributor in terms of EBITDA and the contribution, it is very significant. It is much larger than the one of revenues. I mean, not the double, but close. By the way, on Page 42, you will be able to see the reclassification of our revenues in the different verticals historically. And if you look at '25, just to mention these numbers because I didn't do it before, 52% was coming from banking, 27% is coming from lease and 70% coming from insurance and the remaining 4% is our B2B2C initiatives that we classify as other revenues. So Moltiply Lease had a record year. Again, it's a growth of 11.1% year-on-year. This growth includes the revenues of Evolve. Without Evolve, we would have grown 6.7%. Now I wouldn't worry too much on the EBITDA level because Evolve was not an acquisition that was done basically to increase our EBITDA. This is a company that was kind of captive in terms of services, meaning these guys do document management and document handling. And we were already representing basically half of the revenues. They were located near our offices in Veneto, where most of our business line is located. And we felt that we would have a more significant control here, and we would be able to optimize it better if we owned it. And that's the reason why we decided to buy it. And that's why it's now in the perimeter. But again, it was not a significant contributor to the growth, therefore, you can expect the organic growth here to have been more closer to the 11% number than to the 6.7% number. Okay. Within the lease, anyway, Agenzia Italia is the main contributor and also the main contributor to growth. And we believe that in the long term here, all these services to fleets have the possibility to continue growing because even if there is a stable market for new vehicles, the percentage of vehicles that are owned by fleets, either to use in corporations or to then be given to retail users will increase, and this will be also driven by the increased penetration of hybrid vehicles. By the way, hybrid and electric vehicles. By the way, these electric vehicles also bring with them complexity in the administration. Just one, for example, to quote one, electric vehicles don't have to pay the annual registration fees with the [indiscernible], but only for some time and the time depends on in which region you use the vehicle. So it could be two years, it could be three years. All of this, as you can imagine, is an nightmare to manage. And it's what we do on, for example, on behalf of the long-term rental companies. Q4 was particularly strong. The reason why it was strong, it's because we were able to start selling new services. When you sell a new services to such a significant client base, you obtain one initial effect of basically catching up on the complete fleet that you're managing with them and then you sell it in the following years only on the continuing new business that you come in. So it is structural, the fact that you sell new services. But the moment you sell them to one client, you have a one-off effect that is not replicated afterwards. We were able to capture some of them in '25. We'll capture some of that also in '26, but that was particularly significant at the end of last quarter. It was obviously a pleasant surprise for us. We hope and we aim at replicating these results in '26. I do realize that this is something that when we meet in March like now is something that I always say that there were some interesting one-off effect in lease that boosted our performance and that we hope to replicate them and make them organic in the following year. And I say it again, and then we normally do better. But as of today, we aim at replicating the strong performance, especially at an EBITDA level. And there is potential for upside, but this is today the expectation. Finally, insurance here, there is a minus sign in front of, obviously, the numbers. We went down from 52.2% to 45.7%. This is what we expected and we told investors all along during the year. But this -- we basically we have a normalization of the extraordinary claims volumes that we saw in '23 and in '24. Anyway, current rate, as you see, structurally above '23 levels. So we continue growing here. Long-term average organic average is all the way close to double digit. And as you know here, there is a secular trend that will help us -- a regulatory change that will help us continue growing even more in the following years is the impact of NatCat insurance obligation that went in effect on March 31 for large enterprises and October 1 for small [indiscernible]. Obviously, we will see the impact in '26, but probably more in the following years. And the majority of the impact will come when there are weather events that are covered by this NatCat insurance. So we expect it to be a growth engine -- but the timing of this growth will be obviously depending also on when the events happen. In terms of our platform, we are -- we finished the investments basically in 2025, and we are now starting to roll it out. This has been a long investment through the years, stable but long. When we acquired GruppoLercari, one of the value that as a company we brought to the table is technology and we [ owned ] completely their systems. That was absolutely necessary to do. They were legacy systems part of that was based on [indiscernible] technology, just to give you an idea. So we had to [ reorder ] them completely, and now we are finishing by the half of the year '26, we'll finish the rollout. That also depends on, obviously, our partner insurance companies because there are some interactions with their own systems. This is important, not just technology for the sake of technology, but it's also important because this is a technology that is ready to embed the AI improvements. AI improvements in this case are more about increasing capacity more than necessarily spending less with the loss adjusters, which are an external workforce. The point here is that this external workforce is actually a constraints in quality and quantity for growth, and we have fit when there are big events that impact. So the ability to increase the productivity for us is mainly a competitive advantage in being able to capture more market share in a way that otherwise would not be possible. So this completes the outlook for the BPO and Tech division, and I hand it over again to Marco for the last comment on the net financial position and dividend.

Okay. Thank you. So we are on Page 32 with the net financial position. The reported net financial position is negative EUR 441 million. And basically, this is the result of our acquisition of Verivox during the year. And on the other hand, of the strong operating performance of the business throughout the year that, of course, generated cash. You'll see the cash flow statements in the documents and the comments in the annual report. So I think that's the best way to -- if you want to go into the details. But there is -- nothing particular. Most of our already know this of our indebtedness now is long term. In terms of reading this net financial position, what you see in line see other current financial assets are simply exchange-traded funds, money market ETFs, they pay a little bit more than back deposits. And -- and then again, the only thing to point out is that the short-term component is much better than the year before. And what I said before about the balance. Now for most of our banks, what is relevant is the statutory net financial position with some adjustments. So we have some little adjustment, but this is basically, the reported number is indicative what the banks would look at. We used to have -- we still have with one bank also net figure net of the money shares as of December 31. We had shares in many worth EUR 109 million -- EUR 110 million. Now that was a bit less, but based on those figures led to a net financial position adjusted for this of EUR 331 negative million. And the only comment we have is that we are quite comfortable with the current situation. The little ABB that we did in '25 allow us to move to the favorable setup of our biggest loan basically it has like things that varied both in terms of rates and in terms of constraints, depending on the leverage, it allows us to move faster in that direction. Then -- of course, you also know that, especially since the stock price started going south for these concerns about AI, et cetera, we resumed our buyback. And today, we have put back a good chunk of what was sold in the ABB. So these are the financial comments. The dividend payout we are proposing as a Board a dividend of EUR 0.15, which is a bit higher than last year -- this is to take into account our strong performance. But the reality is we still have significant leverage, and we might also have interesting M&A opportunities in this, in general, uncertain setting. And so we will stick to limited payout. This ends all our comments and we can open the floor to questions. So operator, please go ahead.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. The first question is from Gabriele Venturi, Banca Akros.

I have 4 questions. First, it appears that your two division will be exposed to AI-driven changes in very different ways over the coming years. Given the operational synergies between them, does it still make strategic sense to keep both divisions within the same group structure over the long term? Second, could you provide an update on the digital service tax across your European footprint? From 2027, you could become a liable for the tax at least in Italy probably. And there have been recently been a proposal to introduce a similar framework in Germany. Do you expect this to become a material financial buffer over the medium to long term? And third, could you give us more color on the slowdown in the BPO division growth in the last quarter and the main factors that drove this deceleration? I know you said the difficult comparison with last year, but just if you can give us some more info. And finally, regarding the moderate growth outlook, should we interpret this as implying a mid-single-digit organic growth? And could you share indicative revenue and EBITDA figures for [ box ] for the year or at least the total M&A contribution?

Okay. Thank you. Well, I'll try -- this is Marco. I'll try to give at least a partial answer on the first question. Alessandro, please jump in. But this is the same question that we get all the time. There are no synergies between the two divisions today. There used to be capital allocation synergies for a number of years. Now that we have more M&A opportunities for both divisions, this is no longer the case. Actually, we have conflicting opportunities, and we have to figure out what is best. And if we do something for Mavriq, we don't do it for Moltiply BPO and Tech and vice versa. So... I think there are reasons to look at a potential split. One of this is the digital service tax, as you all know, because this is a tax that is payable by groups that have consolidated. We consolidated means in the annual -- in the consolidated annual report, revenues of more than EUR 750 million, and we are not far from that. So we could get there with maybe one year of organic growth or we can get there faster with just one acquisition. So the digital service tax is on digital revenues. The threshold is for the entire revenues of the group, even if you have a chain of supermarkets, it counts, but you pay the DST only on digital revenues. There is a little bit of uncertainty as to the definition of digital revenues. If you -- it could be all the Mavriq revenues in a country or could be only, let's say, the ones that are not from regulated businesses depending on the interpretation. But our estimate is that now this is in force in Italy, Spain and France. And our estimate is that this could cost us easily EUR 3 million, EUR 4 million a year. And the problem also is that they are talking about -- there is a lot of debate about introducing this in Germany. And in Germany, by the way, energy is not -- I mean, it is possible, quite possible that the energy business or the telco business would be subject to this. So this would be quite a lot of additional money to pay. So maybe another minimum EUR 3 million, EUR 4 million, it could double the potential bill for this if we reach the threshold. So this is certainly a reason to consider a potential separation. On the other hand, it depends on the right timing, the right opportunity. And until we are at the threshold, we have another couple of years at least of time to do it, depending -- or we could do it in many ways, by the way. So I think it's something that we are very, very clear in mind. I'll also answer the fourth question about the moderate growth outlook for Mavriq. Yes, I think you could read it as single digit and maybe mid-single digit. The reality is we have this big uncertainty on energy. So I think in a few months, we should be able to give either a more bullish outlook or say that for a quarter or 2, the results will not be great. I think this is more important than this overall expected rate, but I think like a mid-single digit for now could make sense in interpretation.

Okay. Just to answer the -- your question on the slowdown of growth. Again, I really don't see this as a slowdown, but just as the wrong comparison. For example -- and you can reconstruct this easily if you go and look at numbers of other -- take another year. If you go back to '23, I'm just watching and looking at the numbers of '23, the EBITDA for the BPO division in '23 was EUR 13.2 million. The EBITDA in '25 is EUR 18.4 million. So it's like a 38% increase over 2 years, you calculated the [ COGS ]. I mean, there is really no slow -- no slowdown in growth. We are just -- it's just really that Q4 of 2024 was particularly strong, but and it's not strong because of seasonality. It was really strong because, again, the weather events of '23 were so significant that they created this big blip that it impacts the way you see things. But do the exercise of looking at growth, the average growth over 2 years, and you see no slowdown going back to '23 and seeing an overall growth, which is strongly double digit, so at an EBITDA level. So I seriously don't see this as in any way, I would not read anything in a growth. If you look at Q4 compared to Q3, again, here, you see significant growth. So I don't have a comment more than the one I just did.

The next question is from Tommaso Nieddu, Keplex Cheuvreux.

I have a few. The first one is on Verivox. You have given already some color on top line. So could you provide more detail on the underlying profitability and how is it tracking versus your initial expectation, given also that you said there was a low dilution. The second question is on -- again, sorry, on the potential spin-off of the two divisions, if the transfer of the money stake from Moltiply to Mavriq goes into this direction and that is the rationale -- and the third one is more on AI, and it would be if you are seeing any evidence of traffic coming from AI-based channels? And if so, how does that traffic behave versus traditional channels?

Okay. Well, on money, we -- in Germany, for some reason, our competitors don't even publish their annual report, and we don't do this and we don't either. So we are not able to give very detailed information regarding variables. I would say it started weak in '25 and then it improved throughout the year. Part of it because the market improved, part of it because maybe we improved some stuff. And we are happy of the acquisition. It's a company that has a strong trademark. It's a company that requires work. We are dedicating a lot of attention to it. And I think we'll be happy. In terms of the margin -- limited margin dilution, this could be that Verivox improved a little bit. It could also be that our existing business has improved, and we are not providing the details. And it's possibly both, a bit of both. In terms of the potential separation of the two divisions, this could be done in many ways, could be split, could be with an M&A transaction, could be share split, many different things. What you referred to the fact that you saw that we had some money shares with Mavriq was, in fact, just a temporary effect because all the Mavriq -- the money shares are now multiplied. So this is not indicative of anything.

And it's connected to the tax reasons, right? So.

Yes, it was more like optimization of things. And AI traffic is a very interesting question in general because there are two things to say. One is your question, but one is, I think, broader. To your question, the traffic from AI chatbots is limited, is very few percentage points. And this is across all businesses, and this is also for other companies. So we think this is representative. And the traffic is good quality. It's a sort of organic traffic. So it's a small portion of organic traffic. And the reason why it's not bigger, I think, is everybody is using these systems. But the reason why this is not big is that all the chatbots are keeping users within their interface. It's very difficult to click out of ChatGPT or cloud or anything. They're not designed like that. I think this is going to change a lot when advertising will become available in ChatGPT, especially because if they want to monetize, they want people to click on the ads and advertisers are going to pay if these ads to people to their websites. So I think this will change a lot. The other question -- the other point about traffic in the last 12 months, is that I think if you ask anybody who has an online business, they will all tell you that, for instance, organic traffic has dropped significantly. And this is in part due to the AI, but in an indirect manner. What is happening is that Google has changed significantly its interface. They have embedded what they call AI mode in the answers that leads then to a separate AI -- sorry, they have embedded AI overviews, which then leads to AI mode. And a lot of people are finding answers to informational queries directly on Google, and this is reducing organic traffic, particular traffic that was not converting much. So the impact of business is much less than what it looks like if you look at the traffic numbers, but it is there. And by the way, this is not so much a matter of AI changing the way things operate, but just Google changing its interface, which is a different story. And by the way, could also be linked again to the issue of favoring of shopping and so on. So you have Google that has the dominant search engine that has bought all the defaults in the browsers. And now what they do is they send people -- they embed their AI system within the search results and now they are, in a way, favoring their AI systems as they were favoring shopping. So this is not something between a business decision that could have some other implications more than -- that has to do with technology, but it's not a consequence of technology. It's a consequence of a business strategy. So this is to give more color on AI traffic.

Next question is from Aleksandra Arsova, Equita.

Some follow-up questions on my end. So on Money Group, you mentioned that you increased the stake slightly. So maybe some, let's say, some color on the reason behind this and if it still remains a financial investment rather than a strategic one. The second one is on M&A. Again, you said that you're keeping, of course, leverage under control and dividend and everything also to maybe take advantage of any opportunities on the M&A side. So just to have an idea what kind of target size and firepower you are willing to put into this in the coming quarters? And then the last one, maybe a more qualitative one, more than ones during the conference call, you told that maybe in the BPO, there were some clients switching to Moltiply vis-a-vis some of your competitors. And also the organic growth we saw in the Mavriq division in insurance, but also in other products is definitely higher than the, I don't know, the average premium in insurance in car insurance. So I was wondering how the market shares are moving there if you are taking some market share over your competitors in Italy and also abroad?

So the money stake remains financial investment. We increased it from 8-point-something percent to 10% at the end of the year because for you that live in Italy, those of you that live in Italy will remember, there was a lot of talk about changing the taxation of participations in companies. Historically, the capital gains on participations held by a company were tax exempt, full participation exemption. And then to find some tax money, the government started saying that the requirement to have this exemption would be to have a participation of 10%. And we actually passed the draft of the law saying that participations were exempt on both capital gains and dividends if they were of at least 10%. We were at 8.5%. So we thought it's not far and money is trading at still an attractive price. And so we decided to get to the 10%. Then at the very end, like two days before the end of the year or very close to the end of the year, but we had already done this. They changed the law and they put the threshold finally at 5%. So this was not needed. But this is the reasoning we have done. And so we still see there as a financial investment, and this is the explanation of increase. Then of course, we see our stock price. I mean, I cannot maybe judge, but we see a lot of companies, including many as having very depressed stock prices despite having business models that we think are not particularly at risk. So it's a tempting investment, let's say. But we already have a significant stake, and it's a financial investment. In terms of M&A, I think. We can look at things of the size of what we did in the past. So from medium, small to more sizable depending on the timing. And we'll be a bit opportunistic. We are very busy working on our businesses. We are busy working on integrating the international assets, in particular Verivox. We are busy delivering on AI, both in BPO and within Mavriq. So there are many things to do. But if we have the right opportunity at the right time, we will consider it. And again, the size could be up to what we did in the past, I would say. Then for the BPO clients, et cetera, I think Alessandro is the only one that can answer.

Yes. And just a small comment to say that on M&A that as you have seen, I mean, Marco explained very well before, the capital allocation synergy that kind of went away when we started having very significant opportunities also on the Mavriq side, opportunities that we have captured, and we are very happy to have captured them. But we have continued on the BPO side to do small bolt-on acquisitions. We still have a pipeline there. I mean it's a small things that to me, I would not even consider them inorganic growth. They are more like investing in a product and deciding that it's best instead of developing it in-house to, to just get it on the market or a number of contracts. I mean these are things that we have a pipeline there, and we continue to do it. These are small ones. Then obviously, we would also have opportunity on the larger opportunities, but this is where all the things that Marco finished saying are true. And so we are focusing on AI and on the integrations and the efficiencies and -- but we will still be very, very tactical. And if good things appear on both sides, then we'll see if we can consider them. The market share, yes, we -- we do track -- okay, first of all, saying that we will be able to capture volumes from a competitor is a sensitive information. So I cannot give too much color on this. But let me say, I mean, differently from maybe the Mavriq side here, the competition is focused on single clients, right? And it's a step effect. It's not something like it happens slowly. What happens is that the client might take the decision that it will increase volumes to you. And then basically, as you start building the capacity, it will start giving it to you. We first build some capacity, it will give it to you and so on. So there are players in the market that try to treat banking clients as cash cows, trying to leverage the stickiness of clients. And the reality is that the stickiness of clients is such up to a point, Aleksandra. So -- and you talk to banks every day, and you can imagine what I'm referring to. So there are points where banks get set up of being treated as cash cows and they start looking at opportunities elsewhere. This is good news and bad news on the other side, it means that there is a limit to pricing power, obviously, and you can exercise it for a bit, but it's not really the big leverage here. The big leverage here is providing better services at a more competitive price, thanks to technology, is endearing your customers to -- thanks to the quality of the things you do and avoiding to mess up.

[Operator Instructions] Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you, and thanks, everybody, for participating to this call. And -- as always, we are available for one-on-one, if you have any follow-up questions or anything. .

Yes. Thank you. We've given you more information to digest at this time. So we'll be happy for any follow-up in discussions and the things we've written about AI, we'll be happy to discuss them with you. So thanks again and see you next time. .

Thank you. Bye-bye. .

Ladies and gentleman thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.