Van Lanschot Kempen NV (VLK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to today's Van Lanschot Kempen Analyst Call 2023 Annual Results. [Operator Instructions] This meeting is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to hand the call over to Maarten Edixhoven, Chair of Management Board. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Sergey, and a warm welcome to the Van Lanschot Kempen analyst call with a focus on our 2023 results as released earlier today. With me are Jeroen Kroes, our CFO; and Judith van Tol, and a special welcome to you, Judith, being our new Manager, Investor Relations. If we move to the next slide. Looking back at 2023, I think 2 words come to mind, resilience and growth. It was a turbulent year in which we continued to deliver on our customer centric growth strategy. Also, we made good progress towards achieving our medium-term financial and nonfinancial targets. Despite a volatile environment and an uncertain and disperse economic outlook at the beginning of the year, we managed to grow our fee-generating assets under management last year by 18%, above our ambition of 10% growth per year, whilst keeping our margins. It's good to note that all 3 pillars contributed to organic, inorganic as well as market performance. We posted strong 2023 results with a net profit of EUR 125 million, up almost 50% from last year, resulting in ROE slightly over 14% and a proposed dividend of EUR 2.00 per share, up 14% over the year. Jeroen will elaborate later in more detail on the results per segment. We continue to invest in the attraction and retention of talent. Corrected for the new colleagues from the acquired Robeco online investment platform, the number of staff remained flat in the second half of the year as we continue to focus on increasing our efficiency. By the way, by now, over 70% of our staff is also shareholder, ensuring long-term alignment of interest. Let's move to the next slide. The 18% growth, as mentioned before, in assets under management to [ EUR 127 million ] was evenly caused by market performance on the one hand and acquisitions and autonomous growth on the other. We continue to attract new clients in all segments and countries as clients recognize our distinctive services and solutions. We continue to execute on our disciplined M&A strategy. We finished the integration of our Belgium operations, launching the brand Mercier Van Lanschot and being a real challenger in the Belgium market. We are on track with the integration of the Robeco online platform into Evi and have successfully launched a savings solution from the former Robeco clients that attracted almost EUR 400 million in savings by year-end. We recently announced the acquisition of Accuro, a wealth management boutique in Belgium, which we expect to close later this year. We continue to explore disciplined bolt-on acquisitions. From a capital management perspective, we returned as promised EUR 85 million in excess capital in 2023 on top of a regular dividend. With our CET run rate at 19.6% at the end of 2023, we remain committed to return excess capital above 17.5%, subject to M&A opportunities, regulatory developments and approval. Let's move to the next slide. Also, we continue to make progress on achieving our sustainability goals. We focus our sustainability efforts on having impact for our clients and staff on climate change and living longer, healthier. Whilst being committed to achieve net 0 in 2050, we strive to reduce the impact of our clients' investments, balance sheet and our own organization every year by taking specific measures. Also, we strive to increase the share of our clients' sustainable impact investment every year. We have reduced the carbon emission of our organization by 42% per FTE compared to 2019 and are committed to be net 0 for our own organization in 2030, minus the hard-to-abate emissions. By now, also about EUR 400 million of both institutional and private clients money is invested in our sustainable farmland fund -- our global sustainable farmland fund, one of our alternative investment solutions focused at living longer, healthier. Next slide, please. We are committed to reach our medium-term goals, 3 out of 4 were met in 2023. In this inflationary environment, reaching our cost/income goal consistently remains an attention point. We remain committed to achieve this medium-term goal by cost discipline. As we are growing our client base and fee-generating assets under management, we ensure our growth is done in an efficient way by integrating our acquisitions and reducing complexities in the organization. We will organize an investor update in June 24 to further elaborate on our strategy and financial targets. In the meantime, you can trust us to keep the momentum we have. We see, and we continue to see nice inflows as a specialized independent wealth manager. For more details on our financial results and disclosures, I now give the floor to our CFO, Jeroen Kroes.

Thanks, Maarten. Let's move to the figures, and let's start with an overview. Our net result came in at EUR 125.2 million. It's a nice increase compared to 2022, and it's amongst others due to higher commission income, higher net interest income and a higher result on our portfolio of participating interest. Over the year, we saw good inflows of assets under management in both private clients as well as in wholesale and institutional clients segment. The total net inflow amounted to EUR 5.3 billion, with EUR 2.3 billion in private clients and EUR 3.1 billion in wholesale and institutional clients. Then looking at the segments. Our largest segment, Private Clients, performed very well in the Netherlands, in Belgium and in Switzerland. The other segment had a more challenging year. Within Wholesale & Institutional Clients, we have taken measures to improve profitability amongst others by simplifying the organizational structure and cutting costs in 2023. In Q4, we saw good inflows in this segment, providing us with a good starting point for 2024. Then the investment bank. After, I would say, a challenging first half, we saw an upward trend in the second half of the year. So based on the results, based on our strong capital and liquidity position, we are able to pay a dividend of EUR 2.00 per share. Next slide shows our performance. A lot of it has already been mentioned, but it is always good to look at the second block of this slide where you see our commission income and our interest income. And as you can see, interest income grew, but it's still less than 1/3 of our total income. Most of our income is made from commission income, which is something you would expect from a wealth manager. Then let's move to the bridge from the results of where we go from 2022 to 2023. First, you can see that the commission income came in EUR 19.4 million higher. It's a combination of strong growth of securities income, also caused by the 80% growth in assets under management on the one hand side, and on the other hand, a decrease in securities or in commission income from the investment bank. The net interest income grew by EUR 33.8 million and it has everything to do with the rising interest rates during the year. I will get back to that at a later stage in the presentation. Then at other income, you see the EUR 10 million. This has everything to do with the sale of one of our participating interest, to be more specific, Movares, where we also reported a book profit. In line with our growth and as a result of inflation, our operating expenses increased. We will provide some more background on this later. Then there is the block of EUR 28.5 million that relates to the accounting treatment of our acquisition of Mercier Vanderlinden. In 2022, we acquired the remaining 30% in Mercier Vanderlinden. This acquisition led to one-off charges in our P&L of 2022, and these one-off charges did not occur in the year 2023. Then I would like to move to Page 11, where we focus on the segment, and we start with the Private Clients. Assets under management at the end of the year stood at EUR 52.4 billion, which is a good growth from the starting point of EUR 40.5 billion 1 year ago. We saw strong inflows throughout the majority of the year, and particularly in Q1, and clients invested savings money in -- amongst other fixed income instruments. In the fourth quarter, we saw our Dutch clients shift back from investments to savings as some clients in nondiscretionary management did not reinvest bonds that matured. We expect to see a reverse trend in the first month of 2024. Then the profit before tax of this segment came in at EUR 165.9 million, which is a nice increase compared to last year and has everything to do with the increased commission income and the increased interest income. Part of our Private Clients segment is also our business in Belgium. In 2023, we integrated our activities. And as the 1st of January, 2024, we continue as Mercier Van Lanschot. Given the strong growth momentum of Mercier Van Lanschot within the group, this activity will be reported as a separate segment as of this year. So as of this year, we will report 4 segments instead of 3. Even though our Belgium colleagues had to spend a lot of time on the integration, our activities had a very -- had a good year and with a very strong inflow of EUR 0.8 billion and a solid cost/income ratio. Last December, we announced the acquisition of Accuro, the Belgian investment adviser. We will complete this transaction in the course of 2024. Then another part of our Private Clients segment, Evi Van Lanschot. In 2023, we finalized the acquisition of Robeco's online investment platform, and we have included this activity in our figures as of July, 2023. So, they are included in the second half of the year. Integration will take approximately 2 years, and it is well on track. The combined activities now have EUR 6.4 billion in assets under management and are expected to break even in 2025 and contribute to the bottom line after that. Good to mention is that in the past months, we already have taken steps to strengthen Evi's proposition by launching a pension product and also launching a competitive savings proposition. Then, let's move to the Wholesale & Institutional Clients segment. We saw a net inflow of EUR 3.1 billion, mostly from our fiduciary management activities, where we saw inflow from new mandates and existing clients. Our wholesale business, where we saw our own investment funds to third-parties reported a small net outflow over the year. The main reason for this live in the beginning of the year, where we saw a part of the small-cap team leaving VLK. We managed to quickly rebuild the team to full strength, and we see demand from new and existing clients in the product again. Besides our small-cap team, the other strategies like credit performed well during the whole year. And if we look at the first quarter, we saw a return to net inflows, which in total amounted to EUR 0.4 billion and included inflow in the small-cap strategy. With a negative operating result before tax in this segment, we took further measures during the year to return to profitability. We completed a reorganization to simplify the organizational structure and to cut costs. Combined with inflow and market performance in Q4, this leads to a good starting point for 2024. Let's now look at the margins. We managed to grow our assets under management with stable margins. At Private Clients, the margin is 63%. Underlying this figure, there are 2 developments. First, the margin of our advisory proposition rose because we increased the price earlier in this year. If you would only take this into consideration, this would have led to a growth in margin to 65 basis points. However, we are at [ 63% ] because of the other elements to mention, and that is the business of Robeco that we acquired. That came in at around 30 basis points. So, on balance, we kept the margin exactly the same as last year. Then the margin at Wholesale & Institutional Clients. It is slightly lower at 11 basis points, and this has everything to do with what I call a mix effect and the higher weight of the fiduciary business compared to the wholesale activities. Then we have the graph on the left of this slide that shows the annualized recurring fees. So, in December or year-end 2023, you see the number of EUR 414.7 million, and that is the amount we would earn as a securities commission if our assets under management would remain stable for the next year and if markets would not move. So, as you can see, we start 2024 at a good level, which lies 22% above the level that we were at 1 year ago. Then towards the investment bank. It's been a challenging year for the investment bank. And in fact, it's been for the first time in more than 15 years that we report a loss. And this was mostly due to the first half of the year where market conditions were challenging for mergers and acquisitions and capital market transactions. Our largest client group, the real estate sector, was particularly impacted by the rising interest rates. We adapted the organization to the market conditions focused on limiting costs, but also kept the teams ready for a better market. In the second half of 2023, we saw the first signs of improvement, and we were profitable, albeit a small profit in the second half of the year. Now let's go to NII. And before we really dive into the NII numbers, it's good to take a view at the development of client deposits on our balance sheet. I would like to refer you to the table on this page where you see the situation at the start of '23 for half year and at the end of '23. A couple of things stand out. In the first months of the year, clients converted savings into assets under management, leading to a lower amount of deposits. Secondly, we saw client demand for term deposits growing with a further acceleration in the second half of the year. Thirdly, in November, especially December, we saw our Dutch clients switching back from assets under management to savings again and savings grew. So, savings grew at the end of the year. And as an extra, we also saw savings coming because of our offering at Evi Van Lanschot. For this reason, total savings for end of 2023 are almost the same as for the end of 2022. However, in between, we operated at a lot smaller balance of client deposits. This is relevant when looking into our net interest result and interest margin, which we are going to do on the next slide. As you might recall, we, during our presentation of the half year figures, mentioned that H1 was the peak in our net interest income. In the second half of the year, we have seen our interest income stabilize on a lower level. Yet, it's important to note that we operated with a smaller average balance sheet of client deposits in 2023, if you compare it to 2022. So next to interest margin, the total balance of savings also has an impact on the total NII. Then looking forward to 2024, we expect net interest income to remain stable compared to the level it had in the second half of 2023. Underlying, we expect conversion from savings to assets under management in the first month of 2024 and a limited further shift from current accounts to term deposits. Then let's look at our other income. There's a lot of figures in this table which I will not go through all in all, but I will only look at the total, where you see that it is EUR 10 million higher. This was due to the higher income of our participating interest. As mentioned, we sold our stake in Movares. It led to a book profit of more than EUR 23 million. In 2022, we also had a book profit but at a lower level. So, selling participating interest is part of our business. Sometimes, the book profits are higher than others, and this is a reason for the delta in the figure. As can be seen from the table, and that's may be interesting to point at, is that the book value of our co-investments in own funds decreased compared to last year. In anticipation of Basel IV, we have decreased the size of our co-investment portfolio. Then operating expenses. Our operating expenses grew driven by a higher number of FTEs, inflationary pressure and of course, the fact that Robeco is part of the cost in the second half of the year. With respect to the number of FTEs, we saw most growth in the first half of 2023, where we hired new staff in private banking and in our digital and technology teams. In the second half of the year, growth in FTE stabilized, while we continued growing our business. From 2024 onwards, we intend to grow from this [ stable ] organizational basis, and we want to keep FTE growth limited. Important to say for 2024 is that the general salary increase will be 3.15% as of January 2024 for our Dutch employees. In addition, we start the year with more employees than 2023, which will lead to a higher average number of FTEs during 2024 if you would compare to last year. Then with respect to other costs, there will be some inflationary pressure also this year. Some contracts are not renewed every year and therefore, the indexation will only hit for some contracts in 2024. Also for this reason, but also in general and since we're not yet at our cost/income ratio, cost control remains a key focus. Our loan portfolio. It's relatively stable. Still almost 70% consists of mortgage loans with an average LTV of 64%. We saw a decrease from around EUR 2.4 billion to EUR 2.2 billion in the other loans, and that's mainly because of lower current accounts. What is interesting to mention is on the next page. It has to do with the additions to loan loss provision. And other than the last years, we had to make an addition to our loan loss provisions in 2023. We see this as a return to a normal situation. The addition to the provision is mostly caused by specific cases and the general condition of our loan book is sound. Looking at our capital ratio. As Maarten already said, it stands at 19.6%. It's 1 percentage point lower than 1 year ago, and this is explained by the capital return that we did in December, 2023. At 19.6%, our ratio is above the target of 17.5%. Then looking forward towards Basel IV, a couple of things we can say following on the development of our CET1 ratio. Based on our current balance sheet and our current interpretation of Basel IV, the CET1 ratio according to Basel IV fully loaded would stand at around 21%. But then it's important to mention that should DNB's risk weight floor for residential mortgages still apply during phase-in, our phased-in CET1 ratio at the 1st of January, 2025 will be around the current CET1 level, so around the 19.6%. Then a last thing to mention is that during the coming year, the intended acquisition of Accuro is expected to lower our CET1 ratio by 0.4 percentage points. In May 2022, we had a Capital Markets Day, and we announced that we would repay EUR 145 million of capital to our shareholders. And as you can see from this slide, that's exactly what we did over the last 2 years. Going forward, our intention is and remains to return excess capital above 17.5% to our shareholders. Then [ revenue up ]. Again, the targets and -- the targets over the year, you see that we make good steps. We reached our targets for return on CET1. On the CET1 ratio, we have a dividend payout in line with our policy, and we made a further step in cost/income ratio. So looking back at the year, I think that it's -- that we made good steps. And with that, I would like to return it to Maarten for some final remarks.

Thank you very much, Jeroen. And allow me to summarize before we head into the Q&A. In our almost 300-year history, I think we can conclude that 2023 was a good year for Lanschot Kempen and our stakeholders as well. Strong growth in fee-generating assets under management, in our net profit as well as in our dividend, but I think most importantly, also in the number of clients we serve. We continue to see this commercial momentum. So, we also look forward with confidence towards 2024. And with that, Sergey, I would like to hand over to you to start the Q&A. And before that, allow me one remark, and that is to apologize to the analysts that we do this call in the Dutch holiday season. So, even more appreciation for all of you for dialing in and being with us today. Sergey?

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from Cor Kluis from ABN AMRO.

Congratulations with the results, especially the commission income, obviously. I got a few questions. Maybe first on the net interest income. You basically guided net interest income for full year 2024 of around EUR 177 million, which is 2 times the H2 results. You already said it's a small -- only a small increase of term deposits. What are your other assumptions for that EUR 177 million? What ECB rate development do you assume? What do you assume on the deposit rate on the EUR 5 billion savings accounts? So, could you give your framework a little bit? Because, of course, it depends on a lot of circumstances what the NII would be. That's my first question. My second question is about the loan losses. The loan losses were somewhat elevated in the second half of last year, I think EUR 4 million or something. So, could you [indiscernible] 18 basis points of RWAs? Could you elaborate on what it exactly was? And my last question is about other expenses. If you look to other expenses, excluding regulatory levies, I think that was EUR 66.6 million, which was somewhat higher than before, but you explained it's due to inflationary pressures. Could you help us a little bit on what to expect with that line, other expenses, excluding regulatory levies going forward? I feel that you basically say there might be more inflationary increase, or was there some one-off in that figure in H2 or should we just work with this as a run rate going forward? They were my questions.

Thanks, Cor. I will take these. First, on the NII. You asked what more is underneath there. We have based this NII guidance on the current view that markets have with respect to ECB rate developments. So, we have taken them into account. We did not take a strong view on either a fast decrease or a slow decrease. We based it on current market expectations. And with respect to savings rates, you know that we -- I must be honest, as a relatively small player in this market, we are a follower of what happens in the market. Our expectations are that if rates would decrease, that savings rates would not decrease as fast as that ECB rates might come down. So, we took that into account in this figure as well. Then going to the loan losses. Yes, you said -- I also mentioned, it's breaking a sort of a trend. You know that if you have a provision and you release it year-after-year, that there is a moment that it will come to an end. And this moment it came in the second half. It had to do with specific client cases. So, it's really important to know that our portfolio is healthy and is doing well. And being a private bank, we have specific -- we have clients with specific cases. And if we have some specific cases coming in, that could lead to loan losses. But if you look at the level, it is -- we feel that it's still a limited number for the year. Then the other expense...?

And -- so sorry, is this -- could you at least elaborate if this is a real estate or not? At least that we have an idea object-wise?

Yes, it's not connected to real estate. So, it's not the commercial real estate type of things, no. Okay. Then let's go to the other expenses. A large part is having Robeco in the figures. So, it was not there, of course, in the first half. In the second half there is. Then there's the inflationary pressure that you mentioned. And yes, that's something that we did see. We also -- going forward, there are a couple of things to say. As already guided, not all of the inflationary pressure is gone. So, we will have some -- let's say, we will see some inflationary pressure also in 2024. Next to that, we are working on keeping a tight cost control, and we have done that over the last year and are continuing to do that, meaning that also, even though we see inflationary pressure on some cost elements, we are continuously looking at how to be as strict as possible.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Benoit Petrarque from Kepler Cheuvreux.

So a few questions on my side, please. So yes, the first one will be on the recurring management fees, the EUR 415 million end of '23. It will be useful to get the figure as of, let's say, I don't know, this week or last week. As we've seen a stronger market performance year-to-date, I guess this figure is a bit higher? So that's question number one. The question number two is on the CET1 ratio on the Basel IV. So, it's 160 bps at least Delta versus Basel III. So yes, based on your discussion with the DNB, do you know which direction that might take? Do you have any body language from DNB on what they might decide to do on the floor? And also, how do you want to formulate your capital distribution policy going forward, taking into account this uncertainty? So, I was just curious about that one. The next one is on the wholesale and institutional clients. So, you've taken measures to improve profitability. Could you help us to understand how much maybe cost cutting you might expect in '24 versus '23 from that? And do you expect this segment to be profitable in 2024? And then the last one is on the shift into AUMs from savings in Q1 and then back into savings again in Q4. It sounds a bit like tax optimization. So just wanted to make sure that you are well covered from a -- also, well, litigation point of view, you have nothing to do with that. And that's all kind of -- it's basically a decision taken by clients. And yes, it's just you executing what they want to do?

Thank you, Benoit. Excellent questions. We'll evenly divide the task between Jeroen and [ my ]. So, I'll take the CET1 ratio and the development of the off and on balance sheet in -- of the year. With regard to the CET1 ratio, as you mentioned, on a fully loaded basis it's 21% CET1 ratio. At the moment, there are still unclarities around the Basel IV implementation as well as the implication of DNB around the floor. So we hope, but are not sure that we can give a further update on how that affects our excess capital and dividend policy moving forward in our investor update in June. So that on that one. With regard to the development of the off and on balance sheet, I think that's an important point. Of course, we look at it from a normalized annual level. As you may have noted, DNB has also issued a report that in total they saw EUR 4.5 billion in the last quarter in terms of Dutch citizens selling investments. So that was also part of our business. As DNB also indicated, there will probably be different reasons. There will be reasons in terms of taxes, there will be reasons in terms of taking profits. And all those are fine. We don't give tax advice. So, from that perspective and the litigation perspective, as you mentioned, we feel extremely consequent that our clients are, of course, also behaving rationally in terms of investments. We always focus on the long-term side of investments. That's the one thing. And that's also why we focus on the -- yes, the annualized inflows, which came in over EUR 2 billion, which I think is a very good result, and we have no reason to assume that, that will be different moving forward. So, with that, I would give the other 2 questions to you, Jeroen.

Yes. I will say something more about the recurring management fee. Yes, Benoit, you're absolutely right that when markets go up, this recurring management fee moves along with it. I'm not going to give you the precise figure. What is important, this figure is driven by what markets do, how our margin behaves and what our inflow is. And what we can say is, you know the market, we've -- I've said something about the margins that they are stable. I think that is a fair -- also fair to think that they will stay there. And when it comes to inflow, the thing we can say is that we see that the momentum that we had in 2023 with inflow has not changed in the beginning of this year. Then with wholesale and institutional clients, how much cost-cutting did we do and what does that say for 2024. The reorganization that we did, involved more than 20 FTEs in 2023. And these were, I would say, more senior people within our organization, meaning that also the -- it also had some impact on our salary costs. At the same time, we've done a lot to improve our systems and our efficiency, making this part of the business a lot more scalable. With the inflow of the last month, we see that we can handle that without further cost. That all being said, we really strive to see black figures in 2024 for this segment.

And we're taking our next question from Jason Kalamboussis from ING.

A couple of things left at my end. On the private banking, you had inflows in the Netherlands that seemed to be around the EUR 600 million mark in the fourth quarter. How much of it are you going to -- do you expect to recover most of them because this was around most [ your tax ] issues? So, do you expect to see most of it come back in the first half? And also, there were some movements in the first quarter of 2023. So, could we have an idea net-net how do you see the net inflows developing in 2024? And notably, what should be our clean basis, if you want in 2023? The second thing is on costs. You have done very well. So, you are beating your midterm target. So, is it something that you -- so below 70%, do you expect that it's something that you can manage to do also this year even with current inflation? The third question is around the ordinary dividend. I mean, there is a very nice step up. Is it -- so, can you tell us a bit more about how do you see that developing? Do you see yourself going towards the upper end of your payout ratio? And any comments there would be very helpful.

Thank you very much, Jason. I'll take your first question, and then Jeroen will take the other 2. A less even division of task, I would say then with the last question. With regard to the private banking [ flow ], I think it's best to assume that it's a kind of similar pattern as we have seen in the last 2 years from where we are right now. That's -- I think we feel confident that we still have the commercial momentum as I mentioned before. As -- There were specific tax situation in the Netherlands related to Box 2 for entrepreneurs changes, which is probably kind of one-off element as our clients also pay taxes in that regard. So, we expect that -- a bit of a one-off that is expected to also return in the first 2 quarters of the year in terms of inflows. So -- but on the basis, I would assume a bit of a similar pattern as we've seen for the Netherlands in 2023 or 2024 as a safe assumption.

Then your point on the cost, yes, second half of the year was -- I think our cost income was very decent. And please bear in mind that the second half of the year, regulatory costs are lower, and we had the sale of Movares which helped us. But that being said, we are making the right steps. Something to say about that. I already mentioned the tight cost control, but also the fact that we really budget our cost very strictly. So, everyone within the firm knows at which cost base they may operate. And that combined with good and solid growth should take us to the next step in getting to the 70%. Then the dividend step-up. Yes, we are at the upper-end of our payout, the 50% to 70%. It is our intention to pay out capital if possible and if not needed. So yes, if going forward, this is the situation, we will be at the upper-end of the payout ratio or the payout percentage. Then of course, this has everything to do with the opportunities we see in bolt-on acquisitions, for instance. But yes, you're right. It's possible we will be at the upper end.

Thank you. And I don't see any further questions at this time. With this, I'd like to hand the call back over to you, Maarten, for any additional or closing remarks. Over to you, sir.

Well, thank you, Sergey, and thank you for the great questions. I hope to see you soon also in-person and in any case, look forward also connecting on June 20th. I hope that fits your schedule with our Investor Day where we continue to tell our journey and very much looking forward to you -- to that. And I would also like to thank all the colleagues in preparing the work for today and wish everybody a very nice day. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Maarten. Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.