Multitude AG (0R4W) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning, and welcome to Multitude's 9 Months 2024 Results Earnings Call. I'm Lasse Makela, Chief Strategy and IR Officer of Multitude Group, and I will be your host during this call. Today, we will be hearing a presentation regarding our 9 months 2024 results by our CEO, Jorma Jokela; CFO, Bernd Egger; and the CEO of Multitude Bank, Antti Kumpulainen. Afterwards, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would like to hand over to our CEO, Jorma Jokela. Go ahead, Jorma.

Thanks, Lasse. And I hope everybody hear me well. So hello, everyone on behalf of myself as well. So my name is Jorma Jokela, I'm the Founder and CEO of the Multitude. And today, I will walk you through Multitude's preliminary results for the first 9 months of 2024 and share some excitement, development and news. Joining me are my colleagues, our CFO, Mr. Bernd Egger, and our bank CEO, Mr. Antti Kumpulainen. Good, but what amazing year we have had it. So today, we have a lot of great news to share with you. Our call is to leave for you the 6 key takeaways. I know it's quite many, but I hope we all share. So the first one, we achieved a strong 15% growth in revenue; second, we delivered an impressive EBIT growth, over 42%, driven by improvement in credit loss; third, we successfully completed our strategic investment in Lea Bank; and fourth, me, as a founder, will focus the more strategic project in future, and Antti Kumpulainen appointed as a new CEO of the Multitude; and fifth, we are confirming our EBIT guidance of EUR 67.5 million for this year and turning our focus to achieving a net profit of EUR 23 million in next year 2025 and EUR 30 million in 2026; and lastly, we launched new share buyback program. So lots of good news, but before we dive in this year performance, I would like to briefly remind everyone who we are, where we come and where we are headed. We have impressive nearly 20-year track record as a profitable global fintech company, focused on helping the customers often overlooked by traditional banks, deliver outstanding and fully digital customer experience. We originated in Finland in Scandinavian and now operate in the full EU-wide banking license and listed in Frankfurt Stock Exchange in the prime standard. Multitude people's inspiration comes from our vision to change the world to build the most valuable financial platform, give amazing experience for customers who are often overlooked by other banks. We want to democratize financial service through digitalization, making them fast, easy and free. Our fintech growth platform is built around the idea that Multitude serve as a core platform holding all scalable components. And currently, we have a 3 business unit on the platform; Ferratum, specializing in digital consumer banking, CapitalBox, focused in digital SME banking and wholesale banking customers under the Multitude Bank brand. On the Multitude platform, our focus is twofold enhancing scalability and constantly looking to new opportunities. We are a unique fintech company guided by ESG principles contributing to growth and profitable designs day 1. We have a strong confidence in our business model, which has consistently enabled us to meet our profit targets year after year. Along with commitment to high dividend payout ratio, and finally, we are excited to share our dream to building a company valued at EUR 1 billion by end of 2028. All right. Let's dive into our performance in the first 9 months. So it has been an outstanding year with a strong revenue growth over 15% and impressive EBIT growth of more than 42%. Although we faced a higher credit loss earlier in the year, those have normalized, thanks to our skilled team and robust business model. Each of our 3 business units hit a different stage in their life cycle and all are delivering remarkable revenue growth. The current market environment is also very favorable for us. Credit demand and payment behaviors remain strong. New customer segments are entering in the market, and our total addressable market continue to expand as traditional banks struggle to meet customer needs. This year, we also completed our first share buyback program and are advancing our headquarter relocation to Switzerland. Looking ahead, we have a clear priorities. First, we are committed to deliver a profitable growth through 3 main drivers of organic growth, partnerships and acquisitions. Second, we are focused on enhancing scalability by investing in the risk and AI. The third, we confirm our EBIT guidance for this year, and we are ready to announce our coming year net profit guidance EUR 23 million in 2025. Good. But let's take a closer look at the Ferratum business. Revenue grew by 8.3% and EBIT by extraordinary 44.6%. This year, we focused 4 key areas: improving the credit risk, integrating the Sweep mobile bank app for customers in Finland and Latvia, optimizing our digital marketing and building up our partnership network. All 4 initiatives has been the highly successful. Credit loss have improved significant, which Bernd will present it later. The Sweep app in the trading is complete, and we will continue optimizing it. Our digital marketing efforts have doubled our return on advertising spend for us, which is outstanding result. And lastly, we are excited to announce our first embedded finance partnership in Poland, expanding both our distribution network and market presence. This partnership allows seamlessly to integrate between our system, enabling our partners to offer a financial solution directly to pay end users. Looking forward, we plan to scale a Sweep mobile bank app to Ferratum customer in other countries. We will continue on driving profitable approach through organic expansion partnership and acquisitions, while enhancing scalability through automation, data and AI and risk management investment. With total addressable market of EUR 24.9 billion, and our current 2.3% share of that one lead us to lots of growth potential ahead. We are also confident about exceeding Ferratum original EBIT target for this year. But let's dive in the CapitalBox. So this year, we focused on accelerating growth, resulting to 44.6% revenue increase. EBIT was minus EUR 2.7 million due to higher credit loss reservation mainly from the strong portfolio growth and lower recoveries in some industries at the beginning of the year. Our team made excellent amusement to collection underwriting and risk parameters, which lead to strong improvement by Q3. We expanded sales channels, improved customer retention, improved digital marketing and scale our secured lending product. In early 2024, we completed the acquisition of Omniveta, a digital factoring company based in Denmark. Throughout the year, we have leveraged our AI and data expertise to enhance customer experience and efficience. We see a huge opportunity in digitalization SME banking with a target market of EUR 14.8 billion, and we hold just 1% share of that. Looking ahead, we will focus to integrate Sweep mobile bank account and credit card in the CapitalBox offering and customers, driving growth through organic sales, partnerships and acquisitions, and we also enhance profitability through automatization, data and AI and risk management investment. Our initial call for 2024 was EUR 10 million EBIT, but we are offsetting the lower EBIT to take advance of strong growth opportunities, backed by, of course, the group strong profitability. Good. Let's look at our newest business unit, the wholesale banking. The first year has been incredibly strong with the revenue and lending portfolio growing over 170% year-over-year, generating EUR 4.5 million EBIT by end of Q3. Our business unit CEO, Alain Nydegger, he joined in the Q2 on the team and has been expanding our specialized team from 4 people to 15 people during this year, and we continue investment this further. We have focused on building high-quality customer pipeline of our secured debt and payment solution product through the targeted marketing. We have also strengthened our operational and risk management process blended in AI and data insight. And today, our team is working with the client in 7 countries, focusing the both product payment platform and secure debt. This year, we successfully onboarded 2 major customers in our payment platform and over EUR 100 million in secured debt clients. Both products now have a strong pipeline of the new customers. Looking ahead, the wholesale banking team is focused on accelerating customer intake, implementing a smart and disciplined underwriting process and enhance scalability through automatization, data and AI and risk innovation and investment. We are confident in our ability to drive profitable growth with a strong risk, which is why we confirmed our goal to achieving over EUR 6 million EBIT in this year. Good. As a part of our ESG program, we have set the call for each area to achieving by 2025. This year, we have worked hard to strengthen our ESG effort and made the trade progress. In the last quarter, we focused on enhancing our materiality assessments across the entire value chain, upper and the lower downstream, and assessing the key risk impacting as a part of our CSR D readiness call for end of this year. Our key ESG metrics are on track to meet our targets. This year has been a special busy for us and our shareholders with our registered seat moving from Finland to Switzerland. Naturally, we have received many questions from shareholders about the reason for this change and the additional shareholder meetings. This slide provides an overview of what happened and what's still ahead. To give you some context, we had three main reasons for this move: First, we want to bring company closer to our investors; second, we need to simplify the process for informing shareholders to participation in our shareholder meetings; and the third, we wanted to open up investment opportunity for Finnish shareholders to invest in Multitude shares. We are not planning to relocate people or change our tax resident. Our aim is to keep things as they are with minimal disruption. We started planning this process over 2 years ago. Early on, we learned that the direct move from Finland to Switzerland was not supported by local legislation. So we need to do an interim step in the country that allowed the transfer. We've chosen Malta as that step, transferring the company to Malta first, and then to Switzerland. Additionally, we had to change our legal form from European SE to public limited company and update our Article of Association to meet the local requirements. We also need to complete 2 annual closing over a year, first in Finland in June and then again in Switzerland in coming December. Although this process has required 4 shareholder meetings so far with the fifth meeting planned for December, and normally, we will have just 1 meeting a year. So it's certainly been an intensive period. However, the process has been well managed and things should normalize next year once the final transfer is completed by year-end. Good. About Lea Bank. Our M&A team has been executing our acquisition plan, successfully closing at 18.6% strategy investment in Lea Bank. This investment aligned well with Multitude products, which fully complementary each other. We see these investments from 2 perspectives. First, from a pure investment standpoint, Lea Bank is a well-managed listed company with a full automated and digital customer process, strong profitability and cost to income ratio with significant market potential. In our view, their share price is also considerably undervalued. Second, we see the many attractive opportunities for cooperation. Just a payment platform, cross-selling products and boosting profitability through the shared activities. We respect that the Lea Bank is independent. So any collaboration will be pure transparent and arm's length. We are excited about this opportunity to increase shareholder value for both companies through this strategic partnership. Lea Bank, they offer the lending products mainly in Scandinavian and an additional deposit product in Central Europe. We understand they are currently transferring their banking license operation and listing from Norway to Sweden, which may temporarily impact profitability. However, we see the strong benefit in this move and believe those advantage will soon be evidenced to broader investor community as well. Good. This is my last slide, and I need to chip the water before that one. So -- but maybe this is the most important slide for myself today. So I found Multitude about 20 years ago with a few colleagues. And since then, I have had the honor leading the company as CEO. And in the early days, my focus has been on our product, improving the customer experience, automatization of the process. And I also spent a lots of time working closely with our team, discussing how we could grow and innovate. This hands-on approach has allowed me to share my experience across the organization, helping colleagues overcome challenges and bring the new ideas forward, something I have truly enjoyed. Over the years, Multitude has grown significantly. We have expanded our country network, our team and our product flowing from small start-up to company with over 70 people serving customers in multiple countries across 3 customer segments. We have hit key milestones along the way, like a banking license in 2012, going public in 2015 and scaling effectively after COVID. But this growth has also added complexity to our management and governance with the rising regulatory requirement taken more and more my type. Because of those demand, I have less time over the past year to focus on what I'm mostly passionated about, business and strategy development, mentoring and product innovation. In November 2023, we launched a bold new strategy with a dream to reach a EUR 1 billion market value by end of 2028. We have outlined the 3 drivers for this, organic growth, partnership and acquisition, which will need more and more CEO focus as well, especially in -- on the later two ones as they are the new things for us. After careful thought, I have a proposal last week to report that I stepped down as a CEO by end of the -- by year-end to focus on full time a new role, the founder and strategy projects. And in this role, I will drive the strategy initiative, mentor our top talent, building the partnership and leading acquisitions. I would also continue on the Board of Multitude plc and Multitude Bank plc to drive our strategy direction. For my successor, I respectfully recommend to the Multitude Board that Mr. Antti Kumpulainen, CEO of subsidiary Multitude Bank, also serve as the CEO of Multitude. And as Ari Tiukkanen, our Chairman of the Multitude Group said last weekly, that he is confident that Antti's deep knowledge of our company, his strong performance over the years and his experience as CEO of Multitude Bank, make him the right leader to guide us in the next phase. I have a personally worked closely with Antti many years now, and I know we share the same Multitude values and vision, and I'm 100% confident this transition will go smoothly. And I have to say, personally, that I'm very excited about this change. I'm really, really excited about that one. And as it's allowed for me to focus fully on the value creation and dedicate all my energy to strategy project. Antti and I, we have agreed, that we will jointly lead our full year earnings call in Q1 of the next year. And after that, I will remain available for investors and stakeholders as needed. We'll also be meeting many investors in the next 2 weeks as we are on the roadshows, and I really look forward to connecting with you all. And maybe, Antti, you can say some words from here as well.

Thank you. Thank you, Jorma, for your kind words and trust given to me from yourself and also from the Board of Directors to start in the CEO position of Multitude. Hello, all. My name is Antti Kumpulainen, and I've been working now 9 years in Multitude, and I work as CEO of Multitude Bank. I'm really excited to take one of this opportunity to work as the CEO. I share the same vision and values with Jorma and the rest of the leadership team, and I expect the transition to be smooth. And we will continue working together towards our common goal to be a EUR 1 billion valued company. Having said this, I am not Jorma, and my leadership style is different from Jorma's style. Still, the company vision and goals remain the same. As the CEO of Multitude, I will continue focusing on four major areas. Leading by data. I will prioritize data-driven decision-making to make our operations more efficient and responsive -- driving both operational excellence and responsible growth. Accelerating digitalization. I am committed in digitalizing our operations to improve efficiency and reduce costs while also minimizing our environmental footprint. Enhancing customer experience. Creating an outstanding customer experience is really central to our growth strategy. By focusing on transparency, responsiveness and ethical practices, we aim to build trust and loyalty among our customers who value responsible business practices. And the fourth one is improving the cost-to-income ratio. I am focused on improving our cost-to-income ratio by optimizing processes and using resources efficiently. By implementing targeted improvements, we enhanced profitability while supporting sustainability, ensuring strong returns for our investors. I hope that I can meet many of you investors during next week roadshow. And should we not have a chance to meet in the next coming weeks, I hope I will meet you in the near future. Thank you.

Good. Thanks, Antti. And now I want to hand over to Bernd for the 9 months financial performance deep diving. Go ahead, Bernd.

Good. Thank you very much, Jorma. Good morning to you all. I will maybe have a less exciting topic than we just had. But still, I think our 9 months numbers or 9 months result is pretty exciting. So it is definitely worthwhile staying on the call and listening to my presentation as well for a couple of minutes, at least. What I will do is I will present to you the financial performance, obviously, for the last 3 quarters. We'll deep dive a little bit into financial balance sheet metrics. And then, are two topics that we normally don't have on the agenda, that is a deep dive on credit loss development during 2024. Those who have attended the Q1 results presentation will have noticed that we were not one percent happy with credit loss performance. So we thought it would be fair and interesting for all of you to do a deep dive on credit loss performance over the last 9 months. And secondly, capital market guidance. We'll elaborate a bit on historic performance where we are, what our expectations back then were and how we, from today's perspective, see the upcoming 2 years. Let's start with P&L. I think I have 2 key messages that I would like to bring across. Number one, the financial performance 9 months is characterized by strong growth dynamic. Essentially, this is the continuation of the H1 dynamics, so quite positive. Secondly, the actions taken to improve credit risk, credit losses, credit risk performance are yielding really strong results. So these are the 2 key metrics I want to bring across. When we take a deeper look into the key performance metrics, starting with interest income, a very significant increase plus EUR 25.5 million to almost EUR 194 million, that's an increase of more than 15%. The composition of top line growth looks so that 8.3% growth in consumer banking, 45%, almost 44.6% to be precise, in SME banking and a really remarkable increase in top line development of the wholesale bank business of 170%. Net interest income. In order to talk about net interest income, it is inevitable to have a look at interest expenses. They have increased throughout the year on 9-month level. We are now at EUR 30 million, were at EUR 27 million adjusting for one-offs, which compares to EUR 14.2 million 9 months last year. There are essentially 4 drivers. One is higher reference rates, especially beginning first half of '23, we have seen reference rates being in the range between 2, gradually going up in the direction of 3, but on average for the full year, significantly lower reference rates, which have an impact on funding costs in '24. Of course, secondly, expiring of relatively cost efficient term deposits during this period. Thirdly, which is a positive message per se, but has an impact on funding cost, we now have a significantly higher business volume. So business portfolio, loans, investments have increased by more than EUR 110 million compared to the same period '23 and hence, the volume that needs to be funded has increased significantly driving funding costs up. And finally, we have some EUR 3 million one-offs in '24, expenses related to the replacement of the old bond core premium for replacement, accelerated write-offs, some noncash events as well, plus some EUR 200,000 also related to the bondholder consent as a consequence of the relocation of the registered seat out of Finland. So factoring in these one-off gets us to EUR 27 million. This is pretty much in line with our expectation for the first 9 months of this year. Nonetheless, the ambition, obviously, is to bring funding costs down going forward. All of that growth and financial expenses result in net interest income of close to EUR 164 million for 9 months, which compares to EUR 154.3 million last year. That's an increase of almost EUR 10 million, an increase of EUR 9.5 million to be precise, or plus 6.2%. After hedging costs and FX results, EUR 1.2 million lower than last year, which is positive contribution to profitability. And after other income, this results in a net operating income of EUR 161.4 million plus almost EUR 11 million, EUR 10.8 million, or 7.1%. Let us move on in the P&L and focus on operational expenses and expenses incurred from credit losses. And yes, the topic of credit loss was a focus area also related to the questions that investors have raised. I would like to start with a deep dive, taking a deeper look into credit losses first to set the scene a bit. EUR 73.6 million credit losses first 9 months, this is EUR 14.3 million, or EUR 9.2 million above last year. But what is extremely important to understand from our perspective, at least is the trend. So where are we in comparison to Q1? How does the trend look like compared to last year? For that, I would suggest that we briefly go to a separate slide reflecting credit development '23 compared to '24. And to recap the credit loss performance. Beginning of last year, we had some EUR 28.3 million -- this year, EUR 28.3 million credit losses first quarter, which was, let's face it, not the target level and is also significantly above '23 level. You can see that on the left-hand side of this chart. The drivers behind that were higher growth dynamics, also exceptionally low credit losses at the beginning of '23, I have to add. And finally, loan quality was not on expected level in a limited, but still number of markets, both geographically, but also industry specific, when we talk about CapitalBox, for instance. Now from Q1 onwards, business teams and risk teams have put a lot of effort and emphasis to reduce credit losses. We have seen a strong impact already in Q2. Credit losses going down by EUR 4.5 million compared to Q1 to EUR 23.8 million. This is a quite remarkable reduction of almost 16% in one quarter already. And during Q3, this positive trend, as you can see on this chart, has continued. So Q3, EUR 21.5 million, almost EUR 7 million less credit -- lower credit loss levels than in Q1. And this actually means that Q3 credit losses consolidated are below Q3 levels '24 -- '23, sorry. The key drivers behind these substantial improvements are as follows. In Consumer Banking, integration of new data sources, refined underwriting models. Those of you who know us better know that we have a data science and modeling team of more than 10 people who do nothing but refining, recalibrating, formulating hypotheses on descriptive power of all sources of data for the underwriting quality. And that has really helped significantly to reduce probability of default and increase the asset quality. On top of that, in Consumer Banking, we've seen a lot of operational improvements in all areas, payment processing -- payment process related to customer interaction as well as collection processes. Similar pattern in SME banking. You will see that also here, we have reduced credit losses by 1/3 within the last quarter, despite the fact the portfolio has increased significantly, so even more so is this trend very remarkable and positive. The drivers for SME are the proportion of secured business is going up. Now we're in the region of some EUR 20 million, 13, 14 percentage with an increasing trend. We've actively underweighted industries that were affected and are affected by a challenging current economic environment, which has had a positive impact on credit losses. Also here, we have increased and improved the collection efforts and processes significantly. I will not go into detail, but a lot of actions taken. And finally, also in SME business, refined scoring models have reduced, yes, essentially, probability of default by a number -- by a couple of percentage points also reflected in lower credit losses. And that's the key message on credit losses. We've achieved remarkable improvements of risk KPIs during the year '24. Good. After this deep dive, let's say, I would like to ask you to go back to the P&L, just for a second, I will reprieve on the rest of the P&L. Personnel expenses up EUR 2.3 million compared to last year. This is essentially the same level as H1, actually increased lower than in H1. The key drivers here are business. So in the end, it's about the new business added to CapitalBox, the Omniveta factoring business in the SME space and in the new business unit, Wholesale Banking, naturally in order to enable this 170% increase of top line, we need to build up resources to make sure that we manage that properly. Almost all of the personnel expense increase is offset by lower depreciation expenses. In terms of general and admin expenses with an increase of around about EUR 3 million, a number of drivers, has to do with relocation, of course, but also with a number of strategic initiatives, projects, M&A transactions, also the additional audit process that we needed to complete for the consolidated financials H1 as part of the relocation out of Finland. But the big picture in terms of cost management is that we are managing cost pressure well. There is a lot of investment in future growth. And the objective overall is to achieve efficiency gains that kind of soak up, that compensate for cost increases. Now let us look at how these developments in revenue, financial expenses, OpEx and credit losses are reflected in financial performance. EBIT up to EUR 47.2 million. This is 9 months all-time high. And by the way, it's also a full year or would be a full year all-time high already now. This is an increase of 42.2%. Profit before tax, similar levels in 9 months, last year, EUR 14.6 million. Lower tax expenses, EUR 1.9 million, that is equivalent to an effective tax rate of 13% roughly. That's the target range, 13% to 14%. And finally, net profit, EUR 12.7 million, slightly above 9-month '23 level. And this is essentially equivalent, if we adjust for the EUR 3 million one-off that I referred to earlier of EUR 15.7 million net profit. Yes. Let's, on the next page, have a very short look on assets. Actually, I think you can -- or we should spend only 30 seconds on that. There are 2 key drivers in terms of asset growth, that is on the one hand, essentially one, that is the increase in nonportfolio and also investments, whether we call it or refer to two or one doesn't make much of a difference. This is the driver, more than EUR 100 million compared to last year at the same time. Cash balance enables us to actually accelerate growth also during Q4. Next page, balance sheet, equity and liabilities. You are familiar with that already. We have issued a new debt capital market instrument. This is reflected in this balance sheet, largely instrument at lower cost. Deposit base increased logically with the increase in business volume. Equity stands at close to EUR 188 million, and that is equivalent to a net equity ratio of more than 23%, so very solid. Let us finally take a look at segment performance. I've covered a lot of topics already, so we will not repeat too much, especially about credit losses. Let me kick off please with Ferratum, the Consumer Banking business. In short, same message as H1, still a relatively high growth, 8.3%, compared to last year, a very scalable operating model, significant improvement in terms of credit losses, EUR 6 million -- almost EUR 6 million. In Q3 in comparison to Q1, really outstanding performance. Not much to add these results in a very high revenue of EUR 460.6 million, EBIT up EUR to 45.2 million, an increase of 45%. So really excellent performance. Profit before tax more than EUR 23 million. So really, really top performance. I would like to continue briefly with CapitalBox. As also in the H1 presentation, we are super happy with top line performance revenue growth, 45% really strong, up to EUR 24.7 million. So I think it's not -- don't take it as a guidance, but it would not surprise me if we would achieve all-time high revenue in CapitalBox for the year '24. Credit losses, turnaround, there's no need to repeat what I explained already, but reduced by 1/3 over the last quarter, so really good. Naturally, this remains focus area also going forward. Costs. Naturally, with almost 50% revenue increase, this requires some increase in resources. Personnel expenses up by EUR 1.6 million, which I think is quite moderate. This is above all to do with the team that we've taken over from Omniveta. General and admin expenses also up by EUR 1.8 million, but we are looking at that as an investment to keep the growth engine running. As a consequence of that, EBIT, negative at EUR 2.7 billion, but clearly, expectation is to see breakeven very soon and to see significant positive profit contribution going forward. And based on today's state of the improvement in credit losses, the relatively low increase in cost, we think this is absolutely doable and realistic. Finally, Wholesale Banking, what I can say growth factor, 2.7. From '23 EUR 3.2 million up to EUR 8.7 million, so excellent top line performance. Credit loss, no issues whatsoever, a fully collateralized business, no payment issues. So that's all good. It is an early-stage business. So naturally, personnel expenses, operational expenses are increasing by EUR 1.3 million, slightly above 50%. But again, that is required to build up the resources to knowledge to make sure that this business runs smoothly and produces profit, and it does. So we are at an EBIT level of EUR 4.5 million already. Jorma indicated in the H1 presentation that we expect EBIT contribution from this business of EUR 6 million. And based on these numbers without promising too much, again, I think this is absolutely realistic, achieved breakeven on a profit before tax levels, so really top performance. On the next slide, asset quality. You are familiar with the trend, at least those who join us kindly frequently to our earnings calls, clear downward trend, especially Q3 and Q2. Q3, even more so, first time below 3%, so not much more to add, a really strong trend. Slide #6 and 7, I would like to combine both on 6, just a statement, cash is on the target level. Also factoring in the growth ambitions that we have, that is, I think, the key message on this slide. And on the funding side, I would also like to emphasize that we are in from a pure funding structure perspective in a comfortable position. No repayments upcoming over the next 3.5 years. We've issued a new instrument expiring in 3.5 years at 100 basis points lower cost than the previous one. Naturally, the ambition is to reduce weighted average cost of debt funding from around about 4.5% going forward. That is the plan. And finally, on my last slide before I hand back to Jorma, I want to share our view and rationale on financial guidance. The current view on '24 is we are on track again to achieve our capital market guidance of EUR 67.5 million EBIT. We expect EBIT to land somewhere in the range between EUR 66.5 million and EUR 68.5 million. This is the target range. And this would essentially mean that we've achieved back to growth, Volume or revenue guidance for '21, EUR 20 million EBIT guidance for '21, EUR 30 million EBIT guidance for '22, EUR 45 million EBIT guidance for '23 and EUR 67.5 million EBIT guidance for '24. This is, in our understanding, at least quite a remarkable track record. You are familiar and Jorma has also pointed this out. A year ago, during the Capital Markets Day, we have shifted focus from EBIT guidance to net profit, which definitely is in our understanding, but also in our own interest, much more meaningful when it comes to financial performance. So net profit is the name of the game. And we have given a net profit guidance for '26 on that basis. Logic was to increase by factor 2.5 within 4 years from EUR 12 million in '22 to EUR 30 million net profit in '26. And now that we are finalizing our EBIT guidance cycle '24, we want to issue also net profit guidance for '25, which is a gap that we want to fill as there is no capital market guidance for '25 yet. And the logic for '25 guidance is as follows: We are aiming at a significant profit increase. And profit in this context means net profit. To put that into perspective, if we extrapolate the 9-month profit of EUR 12.7 million to the full year, this would result in EUR 16.9 million net profit for the full year '24. Putting that into perspective on a EUR 23 million guidance for '25 into perspective of this extrapolation, the implied net profit increase '25 -- to '24 would be almost 36%, 35.8% to be precise. And finally, we think that this EUR 23 million net profit guidance fits very well and supports our EUR 30 million guidance for '26, which we want to confirm. With this outlook, I would like to hand back to you, Jorma.

Good. Thanks, Bernd. What amazing numbers. So I want to repeat a little bit my first slide. So we want to leave for you with the 6 key takeaways on today. And like you can see, we have a lot of great and amazing news. The first, we achieved a strong 15% growth in revenue. Second, we delivered impressive EBIT growth of over 42%, driven by improvement credit loss. Third, we successfully completed our strategic investment in Lea Bank. Fourth, me, as a founder, will focus more on the strategy project. And Mr. Antti Kumpulainen, appointed as a new CEO of Multitude, effective 1st of January. And fifth, we confirm our this year guidance and turning the focus on achieving the next year guidance, EUR 23 million; and 2026, EUR 30 million as a net profit; and lastly, we will launch the new share buyback program what we have decided on the yesterday evening on our Board meeting. Good. And ending on that one, I think we are ready to -- ending our presentation, we're ready to take all the questions.

Thank you all speakers. And as Jorma said, now we have time for Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Any questions yet?

At least in my Q&A box is empty and rather it's good or bad news?

I think we got the first question here. Maybe, Bernd, you can take that one. Do you -- Lasse, do you want to read it at or -- is it Frederik, do you want to like ask that audio -- or do you...

I can take it right away and answer. Frederik Jarchow, do you have already any visibility on Q4 credit losses? Because it looks like that financial year '24 EBIT guidance strongly depends on Q4 credit loss performance? In terms of -- let me start with credit loss and then elaborate very, very quickly on EBIT and our view. The credit loss performance, what we wanted to do is to present the trend. Now naturally, the expectation is that we see -- that we don't see elevated credit losses that we have seen earlier this year so that this trend essentially continues or at least stabilizes on a relatively low level. That is the target. You will understand that it's not the time to give a specific guidance on credit losses, but this is naturally the ambition. And I have to say that the fact that credit losses have improved so significantly over the last 2 quarters is not driven by any one-offs related to transactions. There were some positive impact from credit sales -- from loan sales, but they are in the region of less than EUR 1 million, so they are not the driver. The driver here is structural, fundamental improvement of the underwriting, the collection processes, operational process, really, really hard fact and not to look almost. From that perspective, I'm optimistic that we see a good Q4 performance. Naturally, it's not realistic to assume that the linear trend will continue to go down forever. Having said that, on the guidance, I think there are more drivers than only credit losses. Credit losses is one. We need in order to get exactly to EUR 67.5 million, we need EUR 20.3 million in Q4, which is EUR 6.8 million or EUR 6.77 million per month. That's realistically achievable. Naturally, what is more important for us than EUR 67.5 million versus EUR 67 million or EUR 66.9 million or EUR 68 million, that's not so relevant in our view, to be super honest. What is relevant is that for 4 or 5 years now, we have demonstrated that we are able to increase EBIT profitability by 50% year after year. This picture doesn't change even if the year ends at EUR 66.9 million. This is the key message that we want to bring across. And the key message that we want to bring across on top of that is that also on a net profit perspective, we are able to achieve a similar pattern. So the increase from EUR 12 million net profit in '22, gradually up to EUR 30 million in 2016, and this is still, as I said, the logic behind the EUR 23 million guidance for next year. And that definitely also requires high quality of underwriting, credit loss management, portfolio management of the whole team business and risk management going forward as well.

Good. Then we have a next question is coming from the box. Unfortunately, some reason, there is no means to see the name or who has make this question, just read anonymous. So it is Mr. Or Mrs. Anonymous, who'll make this question. And there was 2 questions. The first question is, could the company reported return on equity and return on asset of business unit focus on the ROI and the ROCE make a result comparable to other financial institutions? That's the first question. And second one, you have stated have been undervalued, should it be logic to buy and cancel a lot of shares that will drive the up earning per share, net worth per share and dividends per share? I think it's really great and good questions. Maybe Bernd, I can answer the first one, and then you can add it there. So of course, our internal metrics is that we look into return on asset and return on equity, a little bit depends on the product, but our database, our business management model, our whole business concept is based that we look at return on asset and return on equity is a product channel base. So we got a very deep dive when we look at -- we want to understand the Sweden customer and the consumer business in Sweden and this project was channel. We typically look into all our investment decisions based in the very deep diving as a return on asset or return on equity base, depends a little bit on product, because the equity requirement is different. We have not really want to build a lots more like a wider opening of that one. So far, we did not want to do in that one. But of course, we are always happy to considering the different reporting opportunities. But so far, it has not been the very in our agenda. Of course, the return on equity is a little bit challenged as a reporting point of view because then you have to like -- you have one equity requirement bucket, and then you have to allocate different things. And then, of course, the share resource, it might complicate things. But maybe, Bernd, do you want to comment and add anything on this first question.

No, I agree. I mean, return on assets, it's a simple exercise. All data is reported already. And of course, we can -- and happy to do the calculation. That's not -- return on equity, as Jorma pointed out, it's a little bit more tricky, different regulatory regimes, allocation of equity, something like that, but we will look into it and get back.

We'll look into that. Exactly, good. And then the second one is about the question, the share buyback programs. And I think actually, I want to remind that my comments about the undervalued shares was related to the Lea Bank and not actually our own shares. I mean, I haven't tried to pull my, the CEO, barrier, try to avoid the comment at our own share price and leave it this for the shareholders, and I have to try to focus on driving the business performance further. But I personally believe, and our team is believed that the Lea Bank share value is undervalued, and that's one of the investment decision behind why we want to do in that one. But of course, we think about -- or I think about as personal now that our share price is undervalued as well. And of course, a little bit indicate other people feel as well that we want a second share buyback program launching in this year. And definitely it's what we have done typically those -- the first share buyback program shares what we bought, we have allocated a lot of those shares on the matching share program and our key people like a conversation package there. So we have tried to like buy the shares from the market as we see it's undervalued, and allocated this for our key people as a part of the motivation package there through our matching share program. So happy to think about the constellation that the share topic as well. It's -- currently, my personal view is try to driving the motivation there further. It's that we can boost in the value creation there.

Good. I think we have one sort of audio question here from Adam Zareski. Sorry, hopefully, I said that correctly.

Adam speaking. First of all, congratulations on the performance so far and bringing cost of risk back on track as I see from the results. And of course, congratulations to Antti for his new appointment. My point is more about the external factors. What are the, let's say, external, the most important attention points that you see right now are coming into force going forward, if it comes to the potential impact on the business model and the performance? Do you see any type of significant, let's say, obstacles -- potential obstacles to be tackled or are being tackled by the company right now?