Morrow Bank AB ($MORROW)

Good morning, and welcome to today's presentation with Morrow Bank. We'll start with the presentation followed by Q&A. [Operator Instructions] And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation.

Thank you very much, and welcome also from our side. My name is Oyvind Oanes. I'm the CEO of Morrow Bank. And with me, as always, I have Eirik Holtedahl, the Bank's CFO. And as you heard, we will start, as usual, with a presentation and obviously open up for questions at the end of the presentation or after the presentation. So let me start by flipping to the first page. Looking back at our first quarter as a Swedish bank, it feels like ages ago that we moved the Bank from Norway to Sweden, but it was actually in the first quarter. So this is the first report then as a Swedish bank. Overall, looking at the results and what we have delivered in the first quarter, I'm actually very happy with the quarter. In addition to the numbers that you see on this page, sort of the main KPIs, financial KPIs for the quarter, we have delivered on some very important transformative strategic initiatives for the Bank in the quarter. But let's look at some of the numbers here first related to the quarter. We saw strong organic growth in the quarter. We reported a growth of 7%. Looking at year-on-year, we grew around 23%. So we continue to deliver good growth -- organic growth in the quarter, now reporting a total loan book of SEK 18 billion. And as you can see to the right-hand side of this page, it's fairly evenly distributed now across Sweden, Finland and Norway. Profit before tax came in at SEK 87 million. That's roughly up 10% versus the comparable quarter of Q1 last year, which again is a solid result, we believe. And as I said, for us, the even more important things that happened in the quarter was actually some of those strategic initiatives that we have been speaking about for a couple of years now in terms of securing level playing field for the Bank with our Swedish peers as in moving the Bank from Norway to Sweden, activating our Swedish banking license and actually then becoming then a fully licensed Swedish bank. In addition, we also moved -- as most of you would know, we moved our listing from the stock exchange in Oslo to the main list of Stockholm or in Stockholm of NASDAQ. This is also an important move as it does indeed strengthen our access to the Nordic's largest capital market, which we will -- we're about to tap into as we go forward now and look at the other big strategic things that happened in the market with the announcement of our acquisition of MedMera Bank. Again, maybe one step back, when we moved the Bank to -- or one of the main reasons why we moved the Bank from Norway to Sweden was to, as I said, secure level playing field also in terms of the regulatory environment. And what that actually means is that we have now a set of different regulatory requirements also when it comes to capital requirements. When we became a Swedish bank, we managed to free up quite a lot of capital. We talked about our excess capital for a few quarters now. That excess capital is now in the same quarter as we actually managed to free that up and deployed directly into a very strong strategic acquisition with MedMera Bank. What MedMera Bank will do to the combined Bank going forward is to actually increase our loan book by around 65%, which again then will take our lending book, post-integration of MedMera, to close to SEK 30 billion, which will kind of position us in the -- as a top 3 player within consumer loans in the Nordics. As I alluded to, we will be tapping into the capital markets with a new share issue. We are currently planning to do that in June alongside with issuing of both AT1 and Tier 2 bonds. We'll come back to that in a minute. With the integration or the acquisition of MedMera Bank, we have lifted our medium-term ambition in terms of EPS growth. And we are quite confident when we are now communicating an ambition to more than doubling the EPS by 2028. Looking at some of the other KPIs across this page, you would see -- I already mentioned we grew year-on-year by 23% organically. We had a cost/income ratio of roughly 25% if you take out some of the one-off costs related to both moving the Bank to Sweden as well as acquiring or the process of leading up to announcing the acquisition of MedMera Bank. Eirik will come back to that in a minute. Looking at our credit risk and loan loss levels, we've always communicated that we have a target to be somewhere between 4% and 4.5%, which is also where we have been the last few quarters, and we came in with a solid 4.1% loan loss ratio for the quarter. Earnings per share is a mathematical thing, obviously, but came in then at SEK 0.26 for the quarter. Now moving on, for those of you a bit new to the case, what is it that actually Morrow Bank does? We are a focused product specialist within the Nordic consumer lending sector. We provide consumer loans, credit lines, credit cards and also savings and deposit accounts across the Nordics. Our typical customer would be somewhere in the 35- to 50-year-old, have above-average income. And the loans that we give out would typically be around an average of SEK 150,000, SEK 160,000, again, typically used for type of home improvements, a new kitchen, refurbishing the bathroom, even some used car in terms of how the customers use the loans from us. Looking at the market we target and the market for unsecured lending across the Nordics, and when I say Nordics, I refer to Sweden, Norway and Finland, is around SEK 600 billion. So it's a large market for unsecured credit. As I said, we -- with the acquisition of MedMera Bank, we will be at around SEK 30 billion in terms of our own loan book, which then translates to a 4.5%, 5% market share. So still, it's a good market share, but still quite a bit of room to grow within our existing products and markets. Now taking a bit of a sort of longer perspective, looking at the journey that we've been through with the Bank, also a bit repetition here for those of you who know us well, but we know that there are quite a few new interested parties listening into our calls now as we've moved to Sweden. Taking a bit sort of a historic view, the Bank was initially listed in Oslo back in 2017, had some good growth in the start, went a bit sort of sideways, especially during the pandemic. But since, now about 4 years, we have restarted quite a bit around the Bank. We have built a very scalable banking platform, which is then demonstrated by the fact that we have almost doubled our lending book. We have also done -- managed to take on acquired volume through acquisition of performing portfolios. We've done very much around sort of building a much more scalable platform, which then enables us to deliver strong growth in terms of lending, but as we will see on the next page, also very strong results in terms of actual returns. Now we put now MedMera -- the acquisition of MedMera as well on this page. That is a -- we would see a strategic natural next step. We have always been talking about the fact that size matters in this sector. That's why we've had so much focus on growing the Bank over the last few years, both organically and inorganically, and also a lot of focus, obviously, on doing that as profitably as possible and as efficient from a cost perspective as possible. Now MedMera will be a leap step forward for us where we add on about 65%, as I alluded to on the previous page, in terms of lending book growth when we complete that acquisition. So it's a natural next step on our growth and development journey. As I said, we -- one thing is to deliver lending growth and growing our lending book to close to SEK 30 billion with MedMera, but if we look back at the same period and look at what we have also managed to then deliver in terms of bottom line results here, illustrated by earnings per share, we see that we have definitely outperformed the market also in terms of earnings per share development with a CAGR of 42% over the last 3 years versus a peer average around 15%. That is obviously then, as I said, driven by the fact that we've seen a very strong loan book growth. We have managed to also do 3 acquisitions during the period of a total around SEK 3 billion that we've added on to that growth as well as worked very hard on streamlining and building the scalable banking platform, taking the cost/income ratio from far above 40% in 2022 to now around or just under 25% as we reported for the quarter, again, demonstrating this scalability where we are able to grow organically -- grow inorganically through acquisitions without adding too much cost to the platform. And obviously, the result is then that we are able to deliver a fairly strong EPS growth over the reporting period. Now I guess with everything that's happening in the world, we need to say something about the macroeconomic environment across the Nordics and the outlook and here represented by the Nordea's economic outlook and their numbers. Obviously, we all look at the same window and see that there's a lot going on in the world and a lot of uncertainty. I think we're lucky to operate and live in the Nordics where we currently see a stable outlook across the macroeconomic KPIs that matter most for our type of business. That's represented here through looking at growth -- GDP growth. There is a positive outlook for the markets overall with about a 2% growth. Growth is definitely good for our business. That means that demand will stay strong, demand for our type of products to finance some of what drives the growth. So we look positively on the graph, the growth outlook. Interest rates, we obviously have 3 different markets. Sweden and the Euro area moving fairly aligned, whereas Norway continued to be quite a bit above on interest rates. What we have seen historically is that when interest rates go up, we are able to compensate that through interest rate adjustments on our products. So the fact that even in Norway, it was announced a 25 basis point increase in interest rates last week, we don't -- we're not too concerned about that. We do believe that we will, over time, manage to even that out. Euro and Swedish interest rates also moving slightly up. But with these levels, we are quite confident that we will be able to protect our margins over time. Unemployment is, for many industries and definitely for our industry as well, an important factor to monitor closely. Unemployment, over time, obviously could -- if unemployment goes up, could impair some of our customers' ability to repay their loans. But there, again, on the outlook, we do see a stable to actually somewhat positive trend in Sweden and Finland on employment. Again, this is the picture today. Things could definitely develop globally and things could sort of also impact the real macroeconomic environment in the Nordics over time. But as we see it now and basically based on the feedback that we -- or the data that we have, we're not concerned about sort of the macro at the moment. We believe it's a fairly stable environment for our type of business. Now we actually believe that the biggest thing that happened in the first quarter was the acquisition or the announced acquisition of MedMera Bank. So we'll spend a few pages on that together with Eirik. We have -- we've been out obviously talking quite a bit about that in the market. But again, as I said, we know there are quite a few new people listening in today. So let's recap a bit on why we believe the acquisition of MedMera Bank is a very important and transformative strategic move for the Bank. Now I guess I've already alluded to some of this, but the acquisition of MedMera Bank is a natural continuation of our M&A strategy. Over the last 1.5 years, 2 years, we've gone into the market and done some M&A. We have had focus on Sweden already. We have acquired performing portfolios here represented by the 3 acquisitions, Qliro, Lunar and Moank of total SEK 3 billion that has lifted our growth and had a very good and solid impact on our overall KPIs. That made us actually quite confident to now go into the market and do our largest acquisition to date with MedMera. Obviously, slightly different. The 3 first acquisitions were portfolios, performing portfolios that we acquired. But the way we managed to onboard that and make that actually accretive to our overall business performance made us quite confident now to go in and do a bigger thing with the acquisition of a full bank. So MedMera Bank, we'll come back to that in a minute, what is MedMera Bank? But what it will do to our performance is lift our size by about 65%, both in terms of lending balance sheet as well as bottom line results. So again, a very important strategic move for the Bank. Now I think it's important also to say a few things about what is MedMera and why does that present an attractive strategic fit to us. MedMera Bank operates largely in the same segment as us. It's unsecured lending, but I'll come back to -- there's still some differences. And we tried to lay that out on that page. It is, as I said, a market we know, Sweden. It is a segment we know, unsecured credit. But what MedMera has built is a pure Swedish bank and a Swedish presence. We have moved our Bank from Norway to Sweden. What MedMera gives us is obviously a larger, deeper, broader Swedish footprint and solidifies our presence in the market. Morrow Bank, as you know, has presence across Sweden, Finland and Norway. So we are broader in terms of market reach, but MedMera is deeper in terms of the penetration into the Swedish market, which is a strategically important market for us. We both provide consumer loans. Morrow Bank does have credit cards. In addition, that obviously presents a potential opportunity as we get access to MedMera customer base. Looking a bit at segments, this is important as well. Even if we target or we operate with -- in the same market with roughly the same products, we have been targeting slightly different segments. We can call the MedMera targeting more against the prime consumer lending target, whereas we have been focusing mostly at Morrow towards what we call a near prime segment. So adding MedMera to our mix will broaden the reach also in terms of segments in our sector, especially in Sweden. And that's reflected again with the next couple of parameters here. When you look at the average interest rate, they price lower. We price somewhat higher here, represented by 6% and 10%. But again, what matters most in this industry is obviously the risk-adjusted margins, and we look at credit losses at Morrow Bank, as we just reported, around 4%, whereas the risk appetite has been lower in MedMera, and they've been operating with a risk appetite around 2%. So again, that's just illustrating that we have been targeting slightly different segments. Combining these 2 banks together, it's very important to understand as well, we will continue to operate MedMera, the MedMera value proposition, the brand as is, and with the intention then to broaden our footprint in Sweden and organically grow both in terms of Morrow and MedMera. So with that, Eirik, you can take over and talk a little bit about the numbers at -- around Morrow or MedMera.

Thank you, Oyvind, exactly, into the numbers. The nice thing with MedMera is that it adds substantial size to us. And you can see it here. Based on our 2025 figures, our combined total income would actually have been almost SEK 2 billion. If we're looking forward into 2028, we will continue to grow both banks' loan books. And thereby also, we should see a further lift on the total income line. Now as to the OpEx, we -- there are clearly synergies between the 2 banks. We are looking at a couple of different alternatives as to how to achieve them, but what they have in common is that they both will expectedly give us synergies or cost reductions in 2028, that will be around SEK 150 million or more. So if you combine that, you can see that with the lower -- with the larger loan balance and lower cost base, we will see that we will be at the cost/income ratio, which will be down to 20%, and which is obviously better than both banks are today. Now bringing that into the bottom line performance of the Bank, you can see that with this increase in both scale as well as a relative cost reduction, we will now target a return on target equity, which will exceed 20% when we come towards the end of 2028. And this also will translate to an earnings per share, which in 2025 was SEK 1.1 per share for Morrow Bank. On a combined basis, this will be now more than doubled. You could do the math, you can see that there is plenty of space above more than doubling. And finally, combining the Bank and with the capital -- with the financing, which I will come to very shortly, you can see that this will also optimize our capital structure with a CET1 ratio in 2028 of 13%, which we believe, given our requirements and the risk we are operating with, is pretty much an optimal level. The total capital ratio will be 17%. Now looking at the financing structure of MedMera, we are paying SEK 1.96 billion for MedMera Bank, with an expected closing in early July this year. We're financing that by having issued SEK 392 million worth of shares to the seller. We are raising around SEK 600 million as new equity. We're planning to do that in June, so basically a few weeks from now, as well as leveraging the bond -- the possibility to issue bonds and thereby not diluting the shareholders. That's around SEK 500 million. And finally, from spare capital that we have coming to that as well. We have around -- we will also be spending SEK 470 million. And in a way here, you can see that we are financing a deal with -- which is amounting to SEK 2 billion with just new share issue and dilution of the shareholders of only SEK 1 billion. So in a way, this will be accretive to the shareholders in the Bank. Now from this prospective view of MedMera and Morrow Bank combined, we will take a retrospective view on how Q1 was on the financial side for Morrow Bank on a solo basis. Now starting with the normal loan growth. Even if we have been spending quite a bit of time on MedMera in this quarter and, obviously, now going forward, we still have maintained the growth. As Oyvind has described earlier, our loan book ended at SEK 18.1 billion. That's up SEK 1.2 billion or 7% during the quarter. We were a little bit helped here by the foreign exchange in the sense that the Norwegian kroner, in particular, became stronger towards the Swedish. But also here, we had a good demand from our customers, and that also enabled most of the growth. Year-on-year, we have increased by SEK 3.2 billion on consumer loans and almost SEK 200 million on credit cards. We have announced an NPL sale of nonperforming loans in the second -- in the first quarter, we announced it. This has taken now place in April. It is included in the gross figures you see here because that is as of March 31. But in April, that has gone out on our loan books. And as you know, this was an accretive sale and also this will improve our capital -- our asset quality as well as the capital ratio. And going forward, we will continue with our organic growth. And we also will -- as Oyvind had said, if there are opportunities on M&A, we will also look at that. Now on the margin side, we're seeing that it's a bit of a more combined picture. The loan -- the yield on the performing loan has gone down quarter -- if you look on the -- from the last year's quarter to this one, it was fairly stable versus the Q4, but this is a result of the overall decreasing rates in the market, which is also impacting us. However, what has also impacted us this quarter is the fact that we had to increase our funding cost, and that is more based on -- it's more on the technical side. First of all, most of the loan growth took place in Norway. And as you know, there, the Norwegian rates are much higher. They're double more or less than what they are in Sweden and Finland. And as such, we need to raise more deposits to fund that. In addition, we have an accounting technicality. When we moved to Sweden on the 2nd of January, we needed to convert our equity from Norwegian kroner to Swedish krona. That implied that we needed to replace the funding on Norwegian loans with customer deposits instead of equity. And as I mentioned, the rate on the Norwegian kroner is high, twice as the Swedish krona, and that has also impacted our funding rate. And finally, we needed to raise more Norwegian kroner as well as Swedish krona because we need to fund the MedMera acquisition. And that has led us to us being more aggressive in the deposit market, thereby -- by increasing our rates, and that has also contributed to a higher rate. This now has -- we have now achieved this liquidity buildup, and we are, therefore, softening our rates actually in both the Norwegian kroner and the Swedish market despite the increase in the Norwegian kroner underlying rate. And one word on the Norwegian underlying rate. Yes, that has increased now. It was announced last week that the Bank of Norway -- Central Bank of Norway increased the rates. We have also increased the rates on our Norwegian -- most of our Norwegian customers. We have announced that, and that is also taking place with the normal warning times that will be effective as of July. If we look at -- or one more thing here. When we look at MedMera, as we have seen earlier, the yields on the MedMera loans are lower. That will also contribute to a lower lending or lending rate, but will also give a lower deposit rate because we're now funding that in Swedish krona. And as also seen, the risk-adjusted margin will be protected because the loan losses on the MedMera loans are lower. On the total income side, combining the loan balance growth as well as the net interest margin and other items, you can see that we had an increase year-on-year of 11%, where the -- and where also the total -- the other income was SEK 22 million. As usual, that is net fees and gains on securities and certificates and also the commissions, as you can see here. On the OpEx side, we're seeing that we had a slight nominal increase in this quarter here. And that is compared to last quarter. And that is essentially driven by the fact that we are -- we have spent quite a bit of resources on the MedMera acquisition as well as an overlay from the move to Sweden. The last thing we announced when we presented our Q4 figures that we had costs related to that from the move to Sweden. And now on top of that, we have a cost related to the acquisition of MedMera. So in total, we have one-offs here of SEK 13.5 million. So basically, we're down to roughly SEK 90 million in underlying OpEx. Also, we had a small hit on the -- by the FX because most of our costs are still in Norwegian kroner. And as the Norwegian kroner strengthened, that also had an effect of roughly SEK 2 million. But overall, we are having a good cost discipline. Our cost base is stable. The cost/income ratio is a little less than 25% when you exclude the one-off. And as I said earlier here, combined with MedMera, we are looking towards going down towards 20% once the integration has been completed and we've grown a bit further. Now as to the loan loss side, we're delivering in where we basically have been guiding. We have been guiding that we would -- that we probably would be between 4% to 4.5% in loan losses. We landed this quarter at 4.1%, which we're quite happy with, slightly up from previous quarter of 3.9%. But again, first quarter in consumer finance is usually a bit softer than the remaining quarters. So in essence here, we're -- the loan loss picture is stable. When we add in the MedMera, you can see that the low risk of the relatively large MedMera portfolio will bring down our average loan loss ratio, and we will, therefore -- would have -- in 2025, on a combined basis, had a loan loss rate of 3.2%. Now combining these factors, total income growth, costs and loan losses, you see that we have an increase in the pretax profit to SEK 87 million year-on-year. Now as you know here, we also had SEK 13.5 million in one-off investments. And if you disregard that, we would have been above SEK 100 million. The after tax now with the one-offs is SEK 68 million, so an earnings per share of SEK 0.26. And return on equity is 10.7% or as we like to talk about the return on target equity, we'll come to that in one slide, 14% almost, demonstrating that we are essentially spending our capital wisely and growing our business well. Going forward, we will more than double the EPS. That's what the expectations are, given the increase in income and the cost improvements and loan loss development and also thereby, achieving a combined return on target equity above 20% when we come to the end of 2028. Finally, a word on our capital situation. As you can see here on the blue part of the bar, that is the CET1 requirement. You can see that moving from Norway to Sweden has given us a nice decrease in the requirement. At the same time, the overall CET1 ratio has decreased. That is because we're actually growing quite healthily. We had a 23% increase in our loan book growth year-on-year as well as we made a dividend payment in 2025. So therefore, our total capital ratio has decreased. But given the fact that we now have lower capital requirements, you can see that our headroom has increased from 5.4% to 5.7%. And of course, as mentioned earlier, we will employ quite a bit of that on the MedMera acquisition. And from -- with that in mind, we maintain our view on capital allocation. Number one, organic growth; two, accretive loan portfolio acquisition as they occur from time to time, with MedMera being a very good example of that; and then three, if -- once we pass that, if we have something left, we will return it to the shareholders. Obviously, as we announced, given the MedMera transaction, we will -- we're raising capital. We're not paying a dividend in -- we did not pay a dividend in 2026.

Thank you so much, Eirik. Before summing up and opening up for questions, let me just fly by on this page. We're quite competitive at the Bank, and we like to compare ourselves to our peers and stretch ourselves towards the best in class. And just quickly on the table here, we've sort of used this page for some time now. And as you would see, we're now at SEK 18 billion loan book, peer average slightly higher than that, driven by one big player in this space. I won't mention the name. But maybe more importantly, if we look at growth then in terms of the loan book, we see that the last 3 years, we've delivered a CAGR growth of 24% in terms of loan growth, whereas the peer average is around 15%. Cost/income ratio continue to be very, very strong at Morrow Bank. And as we heard from Eirik, we haven't stopped here. We continue to work that towards 20% over time. Even if it does represent, if not best in class, we're not far off. EPS growth, again, I had a separate page on that earlier in the presentation. Looking at that also and benchmarking that against peers, we do outperform. We have delivered an EPS growth average of 42% over the last 3 years. So again, what we have -- what we've seen by moving the Bank to Sweden, we have secured a level playing field with our peers. Now this is a fair comparison, Swedish bank to most of the other Swedish banks, and we still continue to perform or outperform when we compare. Now last page today, it was a longer presentation because we have much to talk about, especially around our M&A and announced acquisition of MedMera. But let me try and summarize. As I said initially, a very exciting quarter for the Bank, a transformative quarter for the Bank where the fact that we free up capital as we now have redomiciled and listed on NASDAQ Stockholm, we did get lower capital requirements and hence, freeing up capital that we can deploy into accretive M&A, which we already did in the first quarter with the acquisition or the announced acquisition, I should say, of MedMera Bank that will lift our lending or loan book by 65%, and also, as we've seen through the presentation, improve our financial KPIs significantly. Looking at the more sort of in-quarter performance, we see that we continue to deliver strong organic growth with about 7%, 23% year-on-year. There is a continued healthy demand for our products across the Nordics. We are optimistic that we can continue to deliver on our growth trajectory. And last but not least, when looking a bit further out, especially also taking in the MedMera acquisition, we believe that our ambition to deliver return on target equity above 20% in the medium, long term, that is, by end of 2028, is now even -- we're now even more confident that we will be able to deliver that with the M&A initiatives. And last but not least, what that will actually do is to continue to grow our EPS and more than double our EPS, we believe, by end of 2028. So that's all we had for -- in terms of presentation. And I guess we will now take some questions.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll start with a written question here. Could you provide more details regarding the planned equity raise and what that means for existing shareholders?

We are planning to raise -- or to put it this way, the seller of MedMera, Kooperativa Förbundet, will have a new share issue as part of the settlement. So we don't need to pay cash for that for SEK 392 million. That is already agreed. But we're also planning to raise another SEK 600 million. This will most likely be part -- be taking place as a so-called private placement where we're seeking out larger investors. And there, there will be -- there, we will raise the amount. But again, here, this acquisition is what we consider accretive. We're paying to -- we're getting a company which is valued at SEK 2 billion at book value, and we're only paying SEK 1 billion for it in equity.

When you are guiding a 100% increase in EPS by 2028, does that apply to the whole year of 2028 or only Q4 in that year?

That's to the whole year, and more than 100%, I would like to add.

Could you give some more details to the SEK 150 million synergies take-up path and how much we should see in 2027?

I'll just start with the last part of the question. Now in 2026 and 2027, there will -- those will be transformative periods, meaning that we will probably not see as much synergies there. We'll be spending the time and money in order to rearrange our business. As to end of 2028, when we have achieved this transformation, there will be efficiencies arising from doing -- from the combination. That means we will see more efficiency in relation to employees. I mean we will need less employees to perform the same job. We will have efficiencies related to the fact that we will be having less systems, less overheads, less costs, less administration, et cetera. So it's combined of all those items.

You show a weighted average 2025 loan loss ratio of 3.2%, including MedMera. But you do not appear to have updated your loan loss ratio guidance. Is there a reason for keeping the guidance unchanged despite the lower-risk MedMera book?

To put it this way, we did not give any guidance now for ourselves. That was the guidance that we have given that was before the MedMera acquisition, and that was on a solo basis for Morrow Bank. Obviously, when you combine MedMera and Morrow Bank, we will provide a new guiding. It will, by all accounts, be lower, given the risk of MedMera transaction, but we have not yet, as such, given a formal guiding. The 3.2% is pro forma for the 2025 combined.

Based on your scenarios, how much additional scale or M&A in terms of loans would be needed after the MedMera acquisitions for Scenario B to become relevant?

Good question. I think we -- the question relates to a page that we didn't bring up, but it's in the appendix, and we talked about the various scenarios previously in terms of what we could deliver in a scenario where all excess capital go to dividend and take it out of the Bank versus if we deploy it to accretive growth. And now we've basically taken all the excess capital that we had -- yes, we'll bring up the page. You flipped, you jumped over it, there you go. So again, I mean, with the acquisition of MedMera, we are obviously getting much closer to Scenario B. We do believe that both banks have the potential to grow organically going forward. Obviously, we will be generating excess capital as we go along. And Eirik communicated our capital priority. That remains the same. If we do see accretive M&A as in buying or acquiring performing portfolios, we will deploy capital against that. So the more we deploy of the excess capital towards accretive growth, the more we will realize against what is an illustration on this page labeled Scenario B. So we're executing on a Scenario B rather than a Scenario A, especially with such a large acquisition as we've seen this quarter.

And how many shares roughly will be outstanding after the deal with MedMera is done in early Q3?

It obviously depends a little bit in terms of how the placement will be priced. But rule of thumb, I think the number -- the amount of shares will increase by roughly 30%.

How do you see the competitive environment across your markets currently? Because you mentioned that growth in Norway dragged down margins due to structurally lower yields. Given this and the MedMera acquisition, where do you see the most attractive risk-adjusted returns to allocate capital currently?

Very good question. And again, I think what we have demonstrated over the last few years is that we have been able to deploy the capital available to growth to where we see the best returns. We have had a focus on the Norwegian -- especially the Norwegian refinancing market in the last year, almost a year autumn into this year. We've seen good results out of that. We've seen that competition has picked up a bit in Norway recently, and we've seen nice growth again in Finland. With the MedMera acquisition, we obviously, as I said, triple our lending book in Sweden and can broaden also the segment reach in Sweden. And I should also say that, with the MedMera transaction, we also get an exclusive distribution agreement with [ Coop ] to sell our type of products to their membership base of 4 million customers. So I do think we will see more growth in Sweden going forward, especially as we onboard MedMera. But both Finland and Norway remains an important market for us, and we will deploy capital always where we see the best bang for the buck.

I will take one -- another question here. I understand that the shareholders can't expect dividends in 2026. But can you give some details about when and if we could expect dividends?

Good question. This -- we have given our capital allocation priorities. Now we're raising capital in order to acquire MedMera. We will be quite well set in terms of capital for that. Should our development after the acquisition of MedMera just be on an organic base, there could be room for -- to make a dividend payment in 2027. However, there are many unknown variables at this time, being that we need to see that -- how the MedMera acquisition lands. There could be also other opportunities. There could also be that the market prospects for growth are better. So this will be a decision that we will have to look at in early 2027.

How much does a 0.25% rate increase in Norway affect your interest income and also your interest expenses?

If I remember correctly, we have about NOK 5 billion in deposit now in Norwegian deposits. And the 0.25% there is [ NOK ] 12.5 million, if I do my math correctly here on the fly on an annual basis pretax. If you are alluding to the rate that we have that was increased by Bank of Norway, we were already quite well placed in terms of -- on the competitive scale when we look at the others. So if the others now increase, we'll probably be at the same rate. So there's not necessarily given that we will see an increase in the funding rate in Norway going forward. But again, this will be driven by the market.

And that concludes the Q&A session. Thank you very much both for presenting with us here today, and thank you for everyone who tuned in to this presentation. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.