Multitude AG (0R4W) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Multitude’s 2023 9 Months Results Earnings Call. Today, we will hear a presentation regarding 2023 9 months results by CEO, Jorma Jokela; and CFO, Bernd Egger. We also have Chief Strategy and IR Officer, Lasse Makela, available on the call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand over to Multitude CEO, Jorma Jokela. Please go ahead, Jorma.

Thanks for you, and hello, everyone. So my name is Jorma Jokela, the CEO and the Founder of Multitude. Today I will take you through Multitude's result for the first 9 months of 2023, alongside my colleague, our CFO, Mr. Bernd Egger. I am thrilled to share that our success story remains strong, and I attribute this achievement primarily to our exceptional teams and amazing customers, really, really big thanks. But let's turn to the first slide. Today, our call is to leave all of you 4 key takeaways. Strong financial performance continues. EBIT 50% up to EUR 32.5 million and profit 103% up to EUR 12.4 million. Strong cash position, payment behavior stay robust, and we confirm our earlier, the communicated EBIT guidance of EUR 45 million. And please, don't forget our Capital Market Day is already taking place in the next Tuesday, 21st of November, and it will host it virtually. And if you have not yet registered, please do it now on our website, multitude.com, by clicking on the Investor Relation, and you will receive the invite to CMD at the top of the page. On this call, we would like to share our view on coming year on the market development and how we are planning to navigate to increase Multitude shareholders' value. Before we delve in the numbers, I would like to take a moment to provide a short overview of Multitude. We hold an impressive 18 years track record of establishing a successful and profitable global FinTech ecosystem originating from Scandinavia in Finland with a full EU-wide banking license and listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in the Prime Standard. Today, our operation is across the 3 business units, collectively serving more than 400,000 customers across the 16 countries with over 700 colleagues. Multitude people's inspiration comes from our mission to change the world, giving amazing experience for our customers who are often overlooked by other banks. We want to democratize financial service through digitalization, making them fast, easy, and green. This is where all our product logic base as well. We want to build something unique or extraordinary, something where everyone can be proud of. Our vision to create the most valued financial ecosystem gives our people one call and direction. We have got a pretty impressive track record, 18 years of consistently delivering profit, growth, and dividend to our shareholders. And that's the path we are planning to stay in the future as well. Our FinTech growth platform is designed around the idea that Multitude serve as the core platform, hosting all our scalable components, different business units will benefit strongly from this, and they can focus on improving the customer experience and own sales activity. Currently, we have got the 3 distinct business units operating on the platform. SweepBank, which concentrate on shopping and mobile banking, Ferratum specializing in digital consumer lending, and CapitalBox focusing on the digital SME lending. On the Multitude platform, our focus is twofold. First, we are working enhanced scalability across the Board. And the second, we are constantly on the lookout for fresh opportunities. On the upcoming Capital Markets Day, we would like to give you insight how we would improve the growth platform and this design further. All right. Let's dive in the Multitude performance and achievement at the first 9 months. We have seen consistent growth in both EBIT and revenue over multiple consecutive quarters. The current market situation is providing the robust support to our business initiative in several ways. Credit demand and payment behaviors remain robust and the ongoing digitalization trend and investment in AI industry is pushing us even further. New customer segments are coming in the market when the number of banks and financial companies struggle to handle customer in this special situation. This is something that our product and competence works really well, and we will highly benefit for that. Ferratum has again been delivering solid performance, showing revenue and EBIT growth quarter after quarter. CapitalBox, we are seeing positive results from turnaround efforts. As for SweepBank, the original offering was shopping and mobile banking is still in the startup phase, technology working amazing, but distribution is still in the challenge. Sales growth is strong, mainly from the warehouse lending product. Looking ahead, we have got clear focus. First, we are all about leveraging our agile organization to build scalability. Then we are aiming to speed up profitability in the short and mid-term. And let's not forget, we are working on building the strategic value through our growth platform, and we will share more about this during our Capital Markets Day event. Lastly, I want to emphasize that we are committed to confirm our EBIT guidance of EUR 45 million for this year. But let's take a closer look SweepBank. We have seen the strong net revenue growth, mainly driven by the prime lending in Latvia, credit card sales in Finland, and the success of our allocated warehouse lending in this segment. We have been making great progress on mobile banking and shopping development roadmap, although is still in the early stage and small. It show the potential and the readiness to scale further. We have been managing the cost effectively. We are a cost reduction program. However, it's important to note that credit loss has been higher than anticipated due to higher credit loss in discontinued markets. We understand that reaching this year EBIT target for SweepBank is challenging, but we maintain a positive perspective on the value SweepBank trade for both customers and shareholders in coming years and achieve positive EBIT by 2024. We are focusing on growing prime lending, credit card offering, and risk-free product in the current markets, while also working on improving our scalability. Accelerating warehouse lending sales is definitely one of our key focus. In the future, we are considering strong collaboration with the Ferratum and CapitalBox business units. Again, we will talk about this more on Capital Markets Day. Good. Let's take a closer look at Ferratum business unit. We have made some strategy shift focusing on offering digital credits in Europe market and step impact from several non-Europe ones. This move has allowed us to concentrate our effort and it's paying off well. Our net revenue has been showing a small growth. More importantly, we recorded strong growth in all our focus market. This is thanks to the hard work our team who have been dedicated to improve our digital marketing and customer onboarding process. When we're analyzing our first 9 months numbers, it's important to remember that we have to compensate for revenue loss from the markets we have exited by increasing revenue in European markets. During this year, we have been busy with many technology development and new AI tools implement. Our priorities have also included improving our collection and credit risk technology, along with enhancing process to ensure stable credit loss performance over time. When we're looking ahead, we are focusing on higher profit countries in Europe. Our plan is to strength marketing, risk management, and collection expertise in those regions, while, of course, keeping the tight grip on core and AI automatization process. We are also aiming to expand our product portfolio and country portfolio, whatever that's organic or through acquisition to support our future growth. And we want to confirm Ferratum financial targets, we are committed to deliver over 5% EBIT growth year after year. Through the first 9 months, our EBIT has grown over 7.8%. So we are well on target. Last one, let's dive into CapitalBox business unit. Over the past 18 months, CapitalBox has pulled off the real turnaround. You know the traditional income. Back to growth and profit track, we saw the huge opportunity to improve the digitalization of the SME banking industry. Both revenue and EBIT are on the rise, thanks to steps we have been taking about our previous earning calls. Net revenue grew 11.1% and EBIT EUR 3.9 million. Our team spirit and customer happiness have really come up as well, which is an important for us in the term of progress we have made in the long run. So what we have been up. First, we kick it off the expanding our distribution channels. We brought in the new sales partner in all our countries and investment heavily in our own digital market. It has been the success and our corporate new customer has improved as well. Next up, we rolled out the new product in our existing markets. For example, we leveraged our digital onboarding process and big database to launch the secure lending up to EUR 3 million for the larger SME customers. And this new product was very well received on the market. And the third piece of puzzle, we automated underwriting and sales process even further. This shift has freed up the time for our team to focus on giving customers an even better service. Due to the delay in the sales growth, 2023 EBIT target can be the challenge to reach, but we stick to the 2024 EBIT target of EUR 10 million. All our 3 business units are hitting their stride and we are so excited to keep pushing forward. Good. But hello, I would like to give a short update on our ESG matters as well. As a part of our ESG program, we established our cost target and metrics for each ESG element by 2025, which you can see the left side of this dashboard. On the right side, you will find our main ESG actions for the first 9 months of this year. We have made our Scope 2 and 3 emission public and set target to publish on Capital Markets Day on the next week. We have also committed to partnership for Carbon Accounting Financial to better align with industry on finance emission measurement. Our responsible Lending Index score has held strong. Ferratum net promoter score has remained strong. We've been coaching our team to treat customers with extra care. The eNPS score remain at 19, and we are well on track to reach our target of 25 with multiple initiatives, including the recent wellness training for all our employees. And the last one, we continue striving to improve group diversity. Now I would like to extend a big thank to those incredible first 9 months. And with that said, I will now hand over to Bernd, who will guide us through the financial performance.

Excellent. Thank you very much, Jorma. Good morning, everybody. My name is Bernd Egger. I have the pleasure of running you through the 9-month results for Multitude Group. First of all, thank you very much for your interest in our presentation. I will present to you details on financial performance. We'll go through financial and balance sheet key metrics, talk a little bit about the asset quality in a form that, I guess, you are already familiar with and give you a little bit of an update on funding and cash. Let us start on the next slide with P&L overview. The key message is relatively simple. The financial performance can be described as really positive in a market environment that can be considered as challenging. At the same time, it offers quite a number of opportunities that we are trying to capture. Performance metrics present themselves as follows: Revenue up by EUR 10 million compared to the first 9 months of last year. This is an increase of 6.2%. In fact, to look at it from an economic perspective, we should also take into consideration though, that during 2022, some EUR 4 million in revenue were still generated in markets that we consider as discontinued, which means that economically, the revenue increase is EUR 14 million or a relative increase of extremely strong 8.8% compared to last year. As in the last 2 earnings calls, I'm happy to confirm that also credit losses, credit loss impairments are in good shape. We see an increase of EUR 3.5 million, EUR 3.6 million to be precise, which is an increase of 6.2%. We can see that revenue and credit loss impairments are showing similar pattern. And this is from our perspective, quite satisfactory given the somewhat challenging market environment. So really great performance of the underwriting and portfolio management teams. Cost management worked extremely well during 2023. To give an example, start with personnel expenses, not only behaving degressively, but actually also in absolute terms on a lower level than in 2022, resulting at a minus of personnel expenses of 2.7% to EUR 25.2 million. Also, general and administrative expense is down significantly. Sweep and CapitalBox being the main drivers here. For both business units, Jorma has highlighted already in the past and the past couple of earnings calls what the actions are that we want to take and now we are seeing the impacts of that, as Jorma has pointed out correctly. Finally, other expenses, including movements in marketing and depreciation and other sundry expenses, largely neutralizing each other. This means other expenses essentially flat. And in its totality expenses, excluding credit losses, a very strong EUR 5 million lower level than first 9 months of 2022, confirming the high scalability of the organization. I have to say, not only the people on the call, but the whole organization has done a lot to actually improve the scalability of the whole organization. Now how do these developments in revenue in cost of credit risk operational expenses translate into profitability? We are exactly on target, ambitious target, I have to say, but still we are on it. EBIT up 50% to EUR 32.5 million. Taking into consideration finance expenses, which are, again, pretty much exactly as expected, in fact, slightly below the expectation, I have to say. This results in profit before tax of EUR 15.2 million. Finally, and this is really something I have to say we as an organization are proud of, net profit more than doubled to EUR 12.4 million. Let's move on and take a quick look at assets, nothing spectacular. Obviously, the key drivers here, plus EUR 22 million non-current assets driven by increase in loans to customers and other financial assets. Other financial assets is essentially a business that we refer to as warehouse lending or going forward as wholesale banking. So the beauty of this business model is that it's largely collateralized, which has also a positive impact from a P&L perspective. The corresponding accounts on current level, up EUR 32 million, so in its totality plus EUR 54 million loans and investments in wholesale banking. Also worth mentioning, talking about assets again and still and very sustainably a very strong cash base of some EUR 167 million. Overall entities is an increase of some 10%. On the one hand side, this is in line with the business development. On the other hand side, it also means that we have sufficient cash resources to finance the upcoming -- the expected upcoming growth for the remainder of the year and, of course, also 2024. On the next slide, balance sheet, liability and equity development here has been perfectly in line with the strategy that we're pursuing over the last couple of quarters, deposits are, as you know, the main source of funding, increase in deposits of 9% or EUR 46 million to a little bit less than EUR 550 million, reflects exactly the business volume increase. It is from the perspective of the composition of liabilities worth mentioning that we have also made progress in shifting deposit structure to longer maturities. We've continued to put more weight on longer-term deposits, and this explains the shift from current to non-current liabilities that you can see on this slide. Finally, equity up to EUR 184.4 million. So a very strong and solid equity base. This, by the way, translates into a net debt equity rate of 2.5 hold of old bonds. This is way below the historic covenants that we had on our bonds and also the net equity ratio that we are currently having with some 28%, extremely strong. Let's move on and take a quick look at the portfolio movements on the next slide. The key message on our lending and investment portfolio is super simple. All portfolios are growing. Ferratum shows portfolio increased from EUR 290 million. And this perspective is a 12-month comparison to 9 months last year to 9 months this year, up from EUR 290 million to EUR 330 million, so an increase of EUR 40 million during the last 12 months. CapitalBox in the SME segment, the portfolio has been growing as well from EUR 82.4 million to a little bit more than EUR 93 million, an increase of EUR 11 million, especially in September, we've seen a quite increasing dynamic also in loan sales, which is a very good sign. SweepBank, including the warehouse lending and wholesale banking business, a significant increase from EUR 120 million last year to EUR 168 million this year. This is an increment of EUR 48 million. And also revenue, we will look at the segment performance in a minute in more detail, but what I would like to highlight right away is that only portfolios are growing, also the reflection of our in revenue looks pretty much the same. So we see increasing revenues in all businesses; Ferratum up EUR 3.7 million, CapitalBox up EUR 1.7 million, and Sweep up EUR 4.5 million. Let's take a closer look at the Tribe performance, and I would like to start with Ferratum. In short, Ferratum has been performing very well during the year. Ferratum is showing growth. It is showing excellent scalability and a very high level of resilience throughout the year. This is reflected in Ferratum numbers as follows: Revenues continue to go up, an increase of EUR 3.7 million, 2.8%. But again, I would like to highlight here that in Ferratum last year, the business still incurred those EUR 4 million of revenue that I've referred to already, from discontinued ventures, I'm talking we're referring largely to non-European ventures. Adjusting for these, the real growth performance is even better, plus EUR 7.7 million in Ferratum, which is almost 6% increase. So really an excellent performance. Credit loss impairments, these are essentially flat in absolute terms, which logically means improving as a percentage of loan book and also as a percentage of revenue, for instance, as a percentage of revenue, impairment losses down 1 percentage point in credit losses of revenues. So also from a risk perspective, a really strong performance. I've highlighted already the high scalability of the Ferratum business. This is, again, as in the previous quarters, demonstrated by essentially flat overall cost development, really well done to the Ferratum team. In the end, this means that EBIT is increasing further from EUR 39.7 million last year to EUR 42.7 million, so an increase of EUR 3 million within this year. I would like to continue with Sweep. We are -- to start with a positive note, we are quite satisfied with revenue performance. We see a top line growth of 44%, driving revenues up to almost EUR 15 million, EUR 14.7 million to be precise. Credit losses, Jorma has pointed out already that we are not 1% happy with the credit loss performance over the first 9 months. This is just a fact. But we have taken action earlier this year. We're focusing; a, on profitable market when it comes to prime lending; and b, the composition of the portfolio; c, is a positive movement towards replacement of uncollateralized portfolios to collateralized portfolios, which is going to help us also going forward from a credit loss perspective. Costs. We have indicated in previous earnings calls that we will focus heavily on the cost structure of the Sweep business. We've done that. We've taken massive action to address the cost base in Sweep and these restructuring efforts have resulted in a cost decrease of 4.5 million compared to last year. And as a consequence, negative EBIT contribution has reduced by EUR 4 million, which actually is, of course, good. Having said that, with the EBITDA of minus EUR 12.5 million for this year, we are not exactly where we want to be. But to highlight one positive aspect, the actions are paying off and the EBIT trend is showing in the right direction. Let me conclude on the business unit performance review with CapitalBox. CapitalBox up to EUR 16.8 million, which represents an increase of a tick more than 11%, which is good. And as highlighted already, especially in September, we see performance going in the right direction. Credit loss performance in absolute numbers, a drop of EUR 1.5 million, with an excellent performance in the first quarter and very solid performance in second and third quarter on an aggregate level, as pointed out, EUR 1.5 million lower credit losses than last year, which in combination with a substantial revenue increase is actually also not too bad. And a lot of emphasis, as with Sweep, a lot of emphasis has been dedicated to cost management. Personnel expenses reduced by some 600,000, total savings of 1 million. So in the end, this means that CapitalBox now has a leaner structure, better credit loss performance and positive revenue development. So these are the main conclusions that how I would like to summarize the performance. In terms of EBIT, an improvement by 4 million compared to last year from minus EUR 1.7 million to EUR 2.2 million, positive this year. And I would also like to repeat what Jorma said in that respect, the target for 2024 still is and remains and will be to achieve the EUR 10 million EBIT in CapitalBox business in the next year. So these are the main conclusions. And I think as a very positive takeaway from our perspective, at least is that in those 2 businesses, both in Sweep and also in CapitalBox, quite significant actions that were taken about a year ago, starting about a year ago in CapitalBox about 6 months ago in Sweep are really paying off financially. As always, on the next slide, I like to give you the opportunity to have a look at asset quality. Again, key message is simple and very positive from our perspective. Asset quality continues to be strong. Credit losses relative to net portfolio size, very stable, on a much lower level than in the past. The lower level of credit loss to portfolio size is reflective of continuously improving asset quality. This in itself is good news in these economically challenging times. Why is that? How has this performance been enabled? We see a very high quality of underwriting systems and process is a permanent improvement process and also a strong portfolio management performance. In the end, for several quarters in a row, to be more precise, again, all quarters in this year, the quarterly credit losses of net accounts receivables or portfolio -- non-portfolio remained below 4%, which is a strong performance. Next slide, cash EUR 167 million, not much, very stable, very solid, very well under control. This will enable us to grow going forward. And with that, let's move on to funding. Currently, we largely do have the target structure in place. This means that the concentration on deposit funding with some activities in the capital market, this is the overall a little bit simplified, but that is the overall strategy of the organization. Naturally, the significantly increasing interest rates have an impact on financing expenses, but still the net finance expenses also this quarter below EUR 6 million, which is actually below the level that we had anticipated. This is, of course, going to be a challenge also going forward. But I think up until now, we are managing very well. We are currently evaluating market conditions for both Tier 2 transaction on the level of Multitude Bank to supplement the regulatory capital of the bank and/or [ a tab issue on holdco ] level on the 2022, December 2022 instrument. But this is nothing that cannot wait until 2024. So we need to understand the market circumstances, the receptiveness of the markets, and then we will decide whether or not the transaction at this stage means still during this year makes economic sense for us or not. Good news, as you know, within the next 2 years, we do not have any upcoming repayments, so a very stable picture from a funding perspective. I do hope you found this update of interest. Many thanks for listening. Jorma, I hand over back to you.

Perfect. Thanks, Bernd. And yes, I think we are ready to take open question. Maybe just a short key takeaways. I want to repeat those. So 4 key takeaways, but we really hope that you will have an opportunity to take with us on this call today. It was a strong performance, continued EBIT 50% up to EUR 32.5 million and profit up 103%, EUR 12.4 million, strong cash position, robust payment behavior and confirm our guidance. Yes. Good. I think that's it from our part. We managed to make this in 31 minutes. I'm happy. So we are ready to take the questions.

[Operator Instructions] And we already received the first virtual hand by Marius Fuhrberg.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear well.

Three questions from myself, please. The first one, if we look at Ferratum and it appears that revenue growth many stemmed from higher volumes, as revenue to loan ratio showed a slight downward trend over the past quarters. Shouldn't you be able to forward higher interest rates in this segment as well? And why is that not the case? The second question is I understand that you experienced higher losses in especially discontinued markets. How much exposure in terms of total loans is still remaining in those discontinued markets? And the last question with regards to impairment losses to NAR ratio. Should we expect this to decline further? And what is your desired sustainable level there?

Good. Thanks, Mario. About the first question, can you repeat exactly your -- I'm not so sure I really get that point. So it's Ferratum revenue. What was exactly the question there, is it the Ferratum revenue itself?

Yes, sure. If you look at revenues to total loans, so basically net income margin, we saw that this declined from 14.8% to 14.2% from Q1 to Q3. And in light of the year rising or rising income interest environment, I would have expected a more stable, if not slightly uptrend development.

Good. Bernd, do you want to start? You're in mute, by the way, Bernd.

I can try to answer both the questions. The first one on Ferratum and the interest income trend. I mean, there are a number of factors. One is the rising or increasing interest rate levels or increase, let's see whether the increase will continue or not. Of course, we try to pass on as much as we can. At the same time, we need to make sure that the asset quality remains stable and actually is improving. So there's a little bit of trade-off. We definitely want to make sure that we don't buy in too much risk. And this is why the attempt of balancing passing on interest rate increase is trying to maximize revenue and at the same time, improving profitability brings us in the end to a slightly decreasing ratio in terms of net interest margin. But in terms of profitability, we think we are on the right path. This is actually confirmed by the credit loss development. So in absolute numbers, flat credit loss development despite the fact that we have 8.8% revenue increase. So this is quite strong. The 8.8%, as you rightfully pointed out, is now the economic comparison between the existing markets today versus the markets that we have discontinued last, it is a delta of EUR 4 million. Those businesses are technically not all of them exited yet. So in 1 or 2 cases, we do still have legal entities but are in the process of winding them down. We do not expect that this exit will have a significant impact on EBIT. Of course, it comes with some costs. There will be a little bit of a reclassification from equity to P&L when it comes to FX treatment, but these are more technical aspects and they will not have a significant impact. Running costs for those entities or for those businesses are minimal. So this is not really worth mentioning anymore. And then you had a third question, which…

Yes. There was a 3 question, first on revenue part. Then it was a discontinued part from the SweepBank is on the credit higher credit loss in the discontinued countries. And then it was a general credit loss question. I think those was the 3. I think maybe this discontinued countries, I think maybe you remember in the earlier earnings calls, we have announcement that especially the SweepBank and the prime lending, we have stopped some the new loan origination there. And this portfolio management is what we are referring now in this one. And this wasn't mainly happening in the Sweden and Germany and Finland or 3 countries. And it's always a question on the -- it's always a question to hold our or like a collection process and which point of the collection process you are, due the reason that it's a typical those countries. The collection process are working really well. But of course, it's always working what point of the process you are and how many overdue days you have it on that one, and then you have to value that as well. So that's the part of the change what you can see over here as well. Bernd, I don't know, do you want to adding anything to that part? So I think what I tried to say here, maybe I should be more clear and simple in my answer. So what I tried to say that it's not the full final credit was what we have talked about here. It's more the reservation part is when our collection process and portfolio management process is still middle of the -- we are still under working on that one.

Okay. And maybe on the last one, the ratio impairment losses to NAR. Is it to decline further? And what is the sustainable level that you desire?

Excellent question. I mean we need to factor in that this 3%, 3.9% over the last quarters annualized. Obviously, this is between 15% and 16%. Actually, Q1 was the first time ever that we managed to remain below 4%. And then we could repeat this performance in Q2 and in Q3 now. In the end it weighted average of the whole business. And we have pointed out that we are not 1% happy with the credit loss performance in some of the businesses or in one business, happy with the other 2. Now assuming this is not a prognosis. It's just an assumption, assuming that we managed to replace those higher-than-expected risks with lower risk categories and businesses. Then I would be optimistic that this is not the end yet that we are able to stay there and ideally decrease it a bit. If you look at the last 6, 7, 8 quarters, you will notice that it has improved slightly, but we are on a very stable level, slightly above where now this year, slightly below 4%, 3.9%. This is the target #1, to make sure that we managed to get through all the challenges that we have from a market environment perspective, that we avoid negative feed. Up until now, this has worked perfectly well, I have to say. So should we be in the position to keep the stability and replace some of those portfolios by lower risk losses, then I'm optimistic that we can go down a little bit also going forward.

[Operator Instructions] So in the meantime, we received another virtual hand by the person who's dialed in with the ending 350.

Yes. This is Philipp Häßler with Pareto. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you well.

I have 3 questions. Firstly, on Ferratum, loan growth was very strong in Q3. I was positively surprised it was EUR 24 million, I think, quarter-on-quarter. Have there been any specific reasons for this? Maybe you can comment on this and maybe you could also give an outlook for Q4 and maybe next year. So where did the growth come from? And how do you expect it to develop in the next quarters? Then cost management was also very good for the first 9 months, particularly if taking into account the high inflation rates, probably also most of the countries you're operating in. Maybe you could give an outlook for 2024. And last but not least, on warehouse lending. Could you give us some additional details on revenues you generated from the warehouse lending for the first 9 months in Q3?

Bernd, do you want to start with the Ferratum part?

Yes. I mean in the Ferratum part, I think there's no magic. It's just excellent execution. We have to take in consideration that in the end, a number of actions taken the parts are paying off now. So we have also in Ferratum business reduced a number of markets. Now we are in the markets in which we want to operate. All of them are largely where they should. This enables us to focus on the execution. Execution means improving customer experience, improving the stickiness of clients, making sure that the underwriting processes and collection processes that are already on a high level, are improved further and ideally managed to do that on a flat cost base. And that has worked well. There is no magic. There's no M&A. This is pure organic growth and internal execution.

And I think it's very important to understand here as well that when we have discontinued the lending operation in the non-European countries and those impact is coming a little bit smaller as well, and we can start to see better and better impact on this change, what we have done in the last 2 years then. So I didn't like Bernd say there's no any surprise. It's more like evolving and multiple actions behind them. So team has really -- working really well there.

So looking forward, we can expect the growth to continue, maybe not with this speed, but…

Yes. And I hope that you have the opportunity to join our Capital Markets Day the next Tuesday, we will -- I don't want to use this opportunity and this forum over here, but we like to do a little bit open more than our pro drivers and how we see the Ferratum and CapitalBox both is growing on the [ further there ]. So we have some positive news there as well. I hope so.