VZ Holding AG (VZN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Full Year Results 2021 Analyst Conference Call. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Matthias Reinhart, CEO of VZ Holding. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks a lot to the operator for this kind introduction. And I would like to start presenting the 2021 results and I will go along the report that you might have been able to download of -- that we have put on the Internet side. I start with Page #3, the summary. And on the left side, you see the business development; on the right side, the financial KPI development. And I would stress the business development at the beginning. And it's very simple to say, well, we grew basically in all business lines and did see improvements along all KPIs in the client journey. And that's a very important element. Starting with marketing response that increased, which was targeted on our core themes like retirement, tax, estate planning, real estate financing and so forth. The marketing response was -- has been turned into initial meetings and the initial number of initial meetings increased with new clients. And as a result of that, the consulting project, number of consulting projects increased that we were able to conduct. And as a result of that, we increased our consulting client bucket and we're able to increase the conversion of these clients into platform clients. This was specifically or needs to be stressed specifically because there, we have seen an increase of 27.4% to 8,100-plus new consulting clients converted into platform clients. This is, in our view, quite remarkable and shows that we are on the right path. Of course, supporting was the development that we have seen on the financial markets. The positive stock market supported that development and also turned our target clients into a positive sentiment and -- that was helpful, of course, but that was not the crucial element. The crucial element is that we see that we basically depend on the demographic development. And this is the underlying topic that is important and the demographics clearly speak for -- going forward into the next years, coming years that we see -- that we should see an increasing demand, not only by the -- driven by the demographics, but also driven by the increased and increasing complexity that is associated with pension fund reforms and which are really -- it's getting more complicated. And as a consequence of that, the insecurity amongst our target clients increases and this is a very good bedrock to develop our future demand. As a consequence of this growing demand, we need to increase our consulting capacity. And last year, we were able to increase it to 188 FTEs. We measure that number in FTEs, which reflects 9.3% growth rate coming from 2020. And if we look into 2022, we see more or less similar development that we foresee going into the current year. And this is the prerequisite to increase our net new money number. And as you might have seen, the net new money number came in last year in 2021, quite remarkably high. And if we divide the net new money number by the consulting capacity, we reached 25.6 million net new money number per consulting FTE, which is clearly above our target range of CHF 17 million to CHF 20 million. At the moment, I'm not really sure that we can keep that number going forward. So if I -- if we project the business going into the future, we still stick to the CHF 17 million to CHF 20 million target range. But if we see the CHF 25 million number or somewhere in between, if we see that confirmed over the next years, then we have to change our target range and move that up a little bit. But at the moment, this is not the time to do that and to communicate that. So far, the business development on the core side. And then, of course, we have seen the U.K. business starting in May, June. At that time point, we completed our acquisition. We did not acquire 100% of the Lumin Group, we basically acquired 50.1% of the Lumin Group and agreed to buy the remaining shares in 2026, 5 years after completion of the first step. In the meantime, we experiment with the Lumin Group in order to integrate as many processes and experiences of our existing business model here in Switzerland into the U.K. market. And we have already done quite a substantial amount of things. And we are -- at the moment, we are really positive that we see quite an interesting opportunity there by using our business model and implementing our experiences out of Switzerland into the U.K. market, especially on the marketing side, but also on the side of developing an increase and increasing the consulting workforce. Another element that we worked on last year was our financial portal, which is the digital interface vis-a-vis our clients, a very important element going forward, not only -- it's not only a prerequisite. It's basically the element that will help us to increase the penetration of our existing platform clients in terms of platform usage. What we did last year, we successfully migrated our existing clients onto an upgraded version. That was quite a cumbersome task. But it -- the result is really promising. We basically exchanged our e-banking technology provider and platform to a much more elaborated version. And this will help us to be not only to increase the performance vis-a-vis our clients in terms of speed as an example, but also to be much more agile in terms of implementing new features much quicker and just to be much faster in developing that platform. That's also an element that will help us going forward. For example, this year, we will introduce quite a substantial number of new features. I will come to that point at the end when we go to the outlook. On the financial side, very quick, top line, plus 18.3%; operating expenses, plus 15.8%, resulting in a slight leverage, increasing the EBIT margin to 43.1%. Bottom line increased 22%, coming to CHF 143.2 million. Net profit, which reflects a margin of 36.8% on the top line, yes. And the balance sheet, very solid, go to that a little bit more in depth afterwards, and net new money came in with CHF 4.8 billion, already mentioned that before. And assets under management reached a level of CHF 39 billion, coming from CHF 31.5 billion a year before. Page #4, you see the development of the revenue streams over the past 6 years. And we did see quite an impressive increase of 18.3% on the top line. And if you go into the different components, the 5 most important components, starting with the largest one, that's the dark blue one, shaded one, management fees on AuM, which make up roughly 2/3 of total revenues, increased 24.4%, more or less in step, of course, with the AuM development, which we discussed later on. The next element, other management fees, that's the light blue shaded of CHF 27.3 million, increased 12.8%. Other management fees are not depending on the AuM development. They are typically associated with managing corporate clients and pension fund schemes of corporate clients or insurance portfolios of corporate clients. And there, we do not charge -- are not getting revenues on a certain base. We basically charge either on a per employee basis or a charge on an hourly basis. Then the net earned premiums, which is our -- reflects our insurance, property and casualty insurance business, net earned premiums reflects the net earned premiums after reinsurance charges increased 23%, and it goes more or less in step as in the years before. And the next element is the gray shaded one, and that's our only component that we are not really happy with because we are not -- we cannot -- we don't have a great visibility into the future. As you remember, banking income encompasses interest rate business. That's easy to understand and it's also easy to foresee into the future. But it also includes commissions and trading activities. I will go a little bit more in-depth afterwards into that point. And this is the element on our total revenue stream, which is not really growing. It's basically decreasing going forward. But all in all, banking income, including interest rate business, is quite stable. Then the last component, the consulting fees. These are the revenues generated out of our -- of the pure consulting business basically charged on an hourly billing. And that element also increased by 10%. And this is -- goes more or less in step with the increase of our initial meetings that we measure, increase of our marketing responses that we achieve. So that's the very front end, out of which we generate our platform clients. So far to the revenues now, I would like to go a little bit more in depth or deeper into the banking income, Page #5. As already discussed, overall, they are quite volatile and difficult to predict. And we see 3 components. Actually, the component of the interest rate business, this is not so volatile anymore. And it's -- this is really predictable going forward. And it's also growing basically in line with the overall balance sheet total. So there, we don't have the predictability issue. But on the other 2 elements, the trading result and the transaction fee income, there, we do have the predictability issue. Both of these 2 last components basically decreased over the past couple of years. And -- but overall, they do not make up a real big portion of our total revenue number anymore. 6 years ago, that was completely different. Now it is really not neglectable, but it's at least not an important element anymore. Nevertheless, we see the trading result overall stabilize going forward because, I mean, we see more volume but less activity. And in total, that should be result in a stable development. And on the transaction fee side, the dark blue shaded component, there, we foresee a still ongoing decrease. But overall, if you take all 3 components together, we basically calculate with a more or less stable number. But all other components of our business and revenue components should basically increase going forward, in line with more clients and more penetration of our existing clients. Now #6, you see the net profit line on a long-term basis comparison. Here again, you see the 22% increase from the 2020 level. And already in 2020, we did see a 15% increase from the 2019 level. And overall, the long-term target is a 36% net profit margin. We are slightly above that level and are not -- I think we are not in a position to change that. We still believe that we don't see going forward a much greater or bigger leverage, we are basically more inclined to if we see scaling effects, we are much more open to use these productivity gains and scaling effects to use in order to increase our attractivity vis-a-vis our clients and to increase and -- so that it is helpful to increase our client growth, so that the client number can grow going forward and also to increase our attractivity on the job market to gain as much talent as possible. Therefore, we are -- going forward, we are basically planning with a stable long-term net profit margin of 36%. Now on Page #7, some information on the operational business in terms of what happens at the front end. On the right side, you see the net new money development, CHF 4.8 billion, upper right corner of that chart #7, it's #7. And if you divide the CHF 4.8 billion by the 188 FTE capacity at the consulting front end, you get on the lower right and the CHF 25.6 million net new money per consultant FTE. And that number is clearly above our CHF 17 million to CHF 20 million target range of net new money per consultant FTE. As I mentioned already at the beginning, it's -- at the moment, it's questionable if we can really keep that number at this high level. It is possible. Of course, we do have the ambition to reach that again. But before we can really set that new level as a target, we have to confirm it not only 1 year, we have to confirm it 2 years in a row so that we can see -- well, we can calculate and measure with the new metrics. But at the moment, I would still stick to the former range of CHF 17 million to CHF 20 million per FTE and calculate -- take that as a basis for the future development if you project the business into the future. What is clearly -- what can clearly be said is that the capacity development there, we see a development from 188 FTEs to 204 FTEs. This is -- there, we have a lot of visibility of what's going on because we do the training internal of all these new consultants and that's why we know exactly what -- more or less what the development should be going forward. Now on Page #8, you see what happens on the wealth management side. Again, we see the AuM development of plus 24% coming from CHF 31.5 billion going to CHF 39 billion by the end of the year. So that's a 24% increase. Of course, the stock market helped. But one has to bear in mind that the bond markets basically were negative. So it's not only clear sunshine. It was not only a clear sunshine. As you may know, it was -- there were also shadows on the financial market but it was very helpful that we've seen the stock market increasing that considerably. And if we break the AuM total down into PM mandates and the other line, we see that the margin -- the margin-heavy line, the PM mandates increased even stronger than the other line, which typically bears lower margins. So that's helpful going forward to keep the margin level at the existing level. Net new money in the longer time line is it constantly increasing from starting in '17 with CHF 2.3 billion going to CHF 2.6 billion, CHF 2.7 billion, CHF 3.2 billion and now reached CHF 4.8 million. If -- as I said before, if we can keep the net new money per consultant at the same level, we should even be able to overshoot that number in '22, but I would be a little bit more cautious and calculate with a slightly lower number than the CHF 4.8 billion just because of the reasons that we just discussed before. What is very helping and what is basically the crucial element is the development of the clients, the number of clients has represented in the 2 last lines on that chart. And very positive was the delta, basically the net new client number that we gained over the '21 period or during the year of '21, reaching 8,179. This is really remarkable compared to the last year, which was already quite good. And as we look into the future, we believe that we can keep that number at least on that level. So it's not that we -- that's not a -- whatever a data point that is completely out of scope. It's really -- it's going that line further up, we believe, because demand is just increasing. And it's really -- and also our front end is increasing. So everything helps to increase that number going forward with the result that our bucket of clients on the wealth management side increases -- will increase steadily going forward and reach is now 57,000 or a little bit more. And if you calculate that over the next 5 years, it's easy to understand that we see sometimes not only 5 digits but 6 digits on the number on the second last line. Page #9. If we're talking about the wealth management clients, the total of the wealth management clients, we work on increasing the penetration -- the cross-selling of our 5 or 6 -- 5 platforms that we work on. That's a very important element going forward, not only to bring in new clients and bring them and convert them on one platform. But as soon as you have a client on one platform, we start trying to cross-sell our other platforms. So for example, if you start with the portfolio management mandate as a client, that's a typical situation. Then you start cross-selling the mortgage platform, the insurance platform. And if he is younger than 65, you start cross-selling the third pillar platform, the second pillar platform. And also, basically, the banking platform, we understand on the banking platform, the basic services of a bank on payment, transactional side and custodian side as services. Right, and doing -- our targets are or the target is, overall, that we bring 33% of our total wealth management client bucket or silo to the situation that they use 3 or more platforms. Now we are at -- on the right side of the Page #9, you see that on a number of 21.6%. So we increased that number every year, somewhere around 2 percentage points. Bearing in mind that if you add new clients, of, let's say, 8,000, these 8,000 do typically start with one platform. And it takes at least 2 or 3 years until you can cross-sell the second or the third platform. So it takes a lot of time. So -- and if we increase the number of clients every year with a higher absolute number, it's getting more and more difficult to increase the -- to increase the 3-plus platform clients. But nevertheless, we try hard and we are optimistic that we can -- that we achieve the 33%, at least midterm, if you calculate it midterm, then you basically should reach the 33% in 6 years. Yes, let's see. It's a long time, but we are optimistic that we reach that target. Then #10, that's an important information also supporting all our cross-selling efforts, by the way. It helps to understand how satisfied our clients are. And as I already mentioned in the last reporting season, or seasons, we measure this client satisfaction with or along the methodology of the Net Promoter Score, and we have different measurement points. And one measurement point is as soon as a client went through a consulting phase, so basically concluded a consulting project. He -- he's basically asked the question whether -- or what's the likelihood that he is going to recommend our service to a good friend. And there, he can basically tick the box from 0 to 10, 10 and 9 -- 10 is extremely likely and 0 is not at all likely and the 9s and the 10s are the promoters. The 7 and 8s are basically neutrals or passives. And everything below 7, basically 6, 5, 4 and so forth are -- is a detractor. And then you take all the promoters as a percentage of the total ask population as a percentage point, minus the percentage points of all detractors of the total ask population, and that gives you the NPS, the Net Promoter Score. So mathematically, the score can go from plus 100 to minus 100. And if we look at our consulting clients on the left side of the Page 10, you see we reached a Net Promoter Score in '21 of 72.1, which is extremely high. Same thing in the middle of some portfolio management clients. Here, we ask all clients in a regular process every 4 year basically to answer that questions, along with other questions, of course. And there we reach an NPS of 83.1, which is also extraordinary high. And the third measurement point that we illustrate here is the financial portal. And that's a somewhat different measurement point because that's a measurement point where we ask people that have an issue with the financial portal, when they want to reach our hotline, our -- basically the first support line, and then they get whatever advice on how to solve the problem on the financial portal, typically handling problems or technology problems, either with smartphone or tablets and so forth. And at the end of the process, we ask the same client the NPS question. And there, we reach typically a lower number, of course, but still that number is very high compared to other industries or other competitors as far as we understand it. But that gives you an idea. I mean, what's the sentiment amongst our clients and also gives you an idea on what the impact is of our service to these clients. Then on Page #11, you see the branch office network developing on -- yes, in Switzerland, we will open 3 new branch offices over the next 24 months, so 2 years. So it's a time line, not only 1 year, it's the 2-year time line. We will open one in Bellinzona, which is the second one in the Italian-speaking part. Another one in Nyon, that's the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and in Wil, that's the Swiss-German-speaking part of Switzerland. So 3 new branch offices in Switzerland foreseen over the next 24 months. Nevertheless, the focus will be not only to increase the number of branch offices. That's not the idea, of course, but to increase the total front-end capacity. And doing -- by doing that, we basically increase our existing premises -- the existing branch offices in terms of capacity. That's much more the focus rather than -- I mean going forward over the next 5 to 10 years, we don't see a doubling of our branch office number. It's much more that we add on some other locations. But overall, the focus is much more to increase our existing branch offices in terms of capacity. Then on the Germany, the German side, we will open doors, are in the process of opening branch offices in Lörrach. That's in the border region to Basel. It's a very attractive region in terms of cross-border issues because there are many Germans living in Lörrach, on Freiburg im Breisgau in that region and working in Basel, especially in the pharma industry. It's about 50,000 people working out of that region in Basel. And they -- all of these potential clients basically fill -- do have the pension -- a pension plan, a Swiss pension plan, and they have a lot of tax issues on the cross-border side. And there, we are basically helping these clients to basically plan their retirement and do the right -- take the right decisions on the tax side and everything. And it is a very interesting entry point for new clients in that border region. That is -- that has already started, and it's quite positive, the development and so forth. And then in the United Kingdom, we started last year out of St. Albans, a new branch office in London, in the city of London, and that's very important to have a premise, an operator premise in London itself, in the center of London, and that's done, and we are going forward in United Kingdom and see quite interesting development, hopefully. Then on the financial side, you see Page #3 (sic) [ Page #13 ], there, again, the 5 basically -- or 6 different revenue streams totaling into the operating revenue number of CHF 388.9 million, increasing by 18.3%. And then you see the 3 cost lines, personnel expenses increasing 12.3%. Other operating expenses, significantly higher increase, 25%. I will go to that -- come to that later on more in detail and then the expenses of insurance contracts, that's basically the claims that we pay on the property casualty side that we take on our books. And this increase, that number increased substantially, but that's a base effect because in 2020, we have seen almost extremely low claims number, whereas in 2021, the development of the claims normalized and came back to the levels that we have seen in '19 and '18 in terms of the KPI. So that's not a disturbing number. It's basically a normalization of the situation. That's okay. EBITDA, next slide, 14 -- Page 14, going from EBITDA number down to the net profit number. EBITDA is not so meaningful. Much more meaningful is the EBIT number because of certain IFRS methodology that has changed. It's -- today, it's much more the EBIT number that is really meaningful. And then you go down to the profit before income tax and income tax, which increased slightly higher than in the year before, and then we come to the net profit, plus 22%. Page #15, some more insights on the personnel expenses. As you know, we have a long-term personnel expense ratio that we target or that we basically envision at 39%. We are below at 37.2%, if this is -- if that long -- if the -- if this 39% target is too high, needs to be scrutinized and monitored, maybe we will change that going forward. It's -- between the personnel expenses and operational expenses that might have -- there might be -- might come some structural changes because we are outsourcing more and more services that we do not execute internally, and then you have a shift from the personnel expense line down to the operational expense line, which happens over time. So it's -- that's not a jump or a leap. Typically, it's a smooth development of these effects. In total, we have 1,142.5 FTEs employed. This translates into headcount we are -- on average, we have 85% [indiscernible] or average employee ship. So that translates into 1,340 employees or headcount. Going forward, going to '22, we -- to increase the head count at least at the same speed that we have seen last year, maybe a little bit more compared to last year. Next slide, Page 16, other operating expenses. Our long-term target here is that we are landing somewhere between 11% and 13% with our operating expenses on the top line. We came in with 12.6%. But it's quite obvious that we have seen a substantial increase of 25% and coming from CHF 39 million up to CHF 49 million. And the major impact is -- happened basically on the general and administrative expenses. They include all IT-related investments and IT-related costs. And one important driver last year was the installation of that new e-banking technology. I already discussed that before, where we migrated our total client base on a completely new platform, and this was quite costly, but the effect will be seen going forward. I already explained that. And it also includes the U.K. acquisition, all onetime or one-off effects of an acquisition, it's included there. And it's also -- it does also include, as I've said before, all upgrading elements of our financial portal. Going forward into '22, we clearly don't see such a strong development. Again, we foresee basically an increase somewhere between 3% and 5% of the CHF 49 million, so that we see a certain normalization of that. And also importantly, office space, there we have also seen quite a substantial increase of 19%. And there, the reason behind that is in Zurich, we have a reshuffling. We see a reshuffling of our total space usage. And there, we still have -- we still pay to double rent because we have a double -- still the double size of space that we rent. And this will be cleared by -- in the second half of this year. And all the work has -- should be done. And afterwards, we also should see a normalization. So this is not -- this is really extraordinary, the 19% increase in the office space line. #17, EBIT margin. Long-term target, 42%, we came with 43.1%, so above our long-term target. At the moment, we still believe to keep at that level, at the 42% level as a target level, although we see an overshooting of that number last year. If we see the same picture in the second -- in the 2022 numbers, then we can think about of changing it. But at the moment, we keep it at that. On Page #18, you see the balance sheet, a very simplified form of the balance sheet. It should reflect basically the simplicity of our balance sheet, especially of the left side or the asset side of the balance sheet. Because if you look at our balance sheet, we basically invest our client's money -- the client -- the customer deposits. Either they are allocated to the account that we operate with the Swiss National Bank. That's the first line or we allocate these funds into a highly diversified residential mortgage portfolio in Switzerland, or we allocate it into an -- in a very highly liquid asset bond portfolio, basically marketable securities, but HQLA-profiled bond portfolio, which can be very simply liquidated and turned into liquidity. These are the 3 buckets that we basically operate and it's very simple and very transparent and as low risk as possible. The balance sheet total increased from CHF 5 billion to CHF 5.8 billion, and the increase is primarily or almost only driven by the increase of the customer deposits and new clients, basically. Then on the Page 19, you see the payout ratios developing from 40% up to 44%. We will increase the dividend per share from CHF 1.23 to CHF 1.57. This is reflecting an increase of 28%. So quite substantial to be attractive for the capital market. And on the right side, you see some risk ratios, important risk ratio, total equity of CHF 700 million leads to an equity ratio or leverage ratio of 12.1%, which is very sound and core capital ratios of 25.2%. They decreased slightly, and this is basically only because we have executed the acquisition in the U.K. So there, we not only have considered the 50.1% stake. We basically considered as 100% stake, although we did not take the 100% now, but since we have an option to take over 100% until '26, we have to consider this acquisition as a full 100% acquisition. That's why the ratio of -- core capital ratio came down a little bit to 25%. Outlook on Page #21. On the business side, there is not much changing. We are working on our -- on developing our existing business on making the business greater, bigger, more -- even more profitable, hopefully. And we continue -- that means that we continue to work on and be more attractive to our clients to increase client inflow, to increase the consulting capacity to work on the conversion side from consulting clients to platform clients. And within the platform client bucket, we work on increasing the platform usage per client. So that's the core on which we work. And then the second element, which is very important, that should support the whole process, the whole client journey is to develop the financial portal, our digital interface to our clients and bringing and add additional features, and we start with trading, the e-trading desktop, which is getting live to all clients by mid-March. Now we are in a friends and family program, and we will release that mid-March to everybody. At the same time, we will introduce an SOB process, which is a self-onboarding process, fully digitalized, which is very rare here in Switzerland. We are one of the first provider that it has a fully digitalized self-onboarding process to new clients but also to existing clients. So your new client can open very simply a new account, but also existing clients can open newer clients very simply. And then another element is the cryptocurrency trading. It's now -- it's already open via a telephone trade. Now we are opening and developing that and providing it via the financial portal. The digital interface so that you can digitally trade online the cryptocurrencies. But be aware, we don't open all cryptocurrencies to everybody, we are very restricted to maximum 10, a selected number of 10 cryptocurrencies and that should also be released by mid-March. Then in the second half of '22, we will basically introduce on the digital platform, on the financial portal, introduced all functionalities that a Revolut or Nyon Bank offers to its clients, which is -- it's basically payment services, card management, card services. And there, we integrate all the functionalities that the Revolut platform does provide and integrate that into the financial portal. That makes it very strong and it simplifies many things. That includes, for example, peer-to-peer payments, overview of all transactions on your -- on the payment side, physical card but also virtual card management and so forth, right? That should be introduced in the second half of '22. We are working on that, and it looks quite positive that we should reach that level. And being able to introduce all these services, the prerequisite was that we had needed to migrate all clients last year on that new state-of-the-art e-banking platform. Then in Germany, of course, we work on the marketing side very intensively. That's the core theme there. And in U.K., we intensify the integration work. We put a lot of efforts to introduce our marketing experience out of Switzerland into the German -- into the U.K. market. We work on installing an internal adviser trainee program, which is already ongoing. By the way, we have already 5 participants. So it's a very small number. But nevertheless, it shows you that something is going on there. And we also work on further integrate smaller IFA organizations. So small IFAs, it's an interesting element to add on and to grow a little faster than if you just do it in an organic way. Then as I might have seen in 2023, we do envision some personnel changes at the top of the organization. Me, myself basically is moving out of the current position of the group CEO by the end of this year. So 1st January of next year of 2023, Giulio Vitarelli will take over from me as Group CEO. Giulio Vitarelli is a very experienced person, and he is already since 1998 part of the team and led for, since 2012, the Swiss front organization, including all the consulting activities in all -- leading all the branch offices. So he's very experienced and will take over from me and stands for continuity and stability in that way. And me -- myself, I will take over as Chairman by -- that should take place in April 23, and I will take over the position from Fred Kindle. Right. And on the financial side, coming from the situation that we basically increased our client number every day or every week and every month, we should see a constantly increasing top line and a constantly increasing bottom line. If, of course, we don't see complete disruptions on the financial markets, which are -- which can really distort the situation short term. But in the longer term, the effect is quite negligible. And given the situation that we have a stable market going forward, we should basically see a development on the top and the bottom line that we have seen on average in the past years. And I mentioned that already, the transaction-based revenues on the banking platform is unpredictable. And I explained that before. EBIT margin and net profit margin should basically leveling at the target levels and dividend payout increases to 50% over the next coming years. So far to the presentation, now I hand over to the operator to organize the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Andreas Venditti from Vontobel.

Maybe can I start with the actual situation in the Ukraine? Can you maybe confirm that you don't have any exposure to that, which I think, but maybe you can confirm that? And what other impacts you might see from the whole situation, if any, on [indiscernible]? Then next question will be on the margin development, whether you can provide some updates there, mainly the mix shift that we discussed over the last few years, how you see that going forward? And maybe one question on one slide that is not in the pack that used to be in the last few presentations, which is related to some indicators of activity on the financial portal, is the reason that we had this significant migration, and that's why you decided not to show these indicators on the slides? Or is there another reason?

Thank you, Mr. Venditti. To your last question, actually, we exchanged that chart with the NPS, the Net Promoter Score information, which we thought might be more informative to the audience because the financial portal, of course, I mean the activities are getting higher and higher. I mean, you see quite a positive development there. We can add that if you like. I mean you can -- that's no problem. But at the moment, I think it's not so informative. It just goes up every month. That's okay. But we can -- going forward, we can basically add that information or some similar information to the financial portal just to give you an idea on what the activity status is there. Then to your first question, Ukraine exposure, no, we don't have any exposure. We don't have any clients stemming or coming out of Russia or Ukraine or Belarus or somewhere. As you know and assumed, the -- our target is always the domestic market, we don't focus on any cross-border situation except new -- that's new that we are focusing in a very small region in Lörrach, Freiburg, Basel -- sorry, in that region, we -- we are developing the cross-border situation, but that's a completely different question. There we are basically onshore -- consulting onshore in Germany and supporting out of Switzerland but from a technical edge. So it's not the classical cross-border situation. And the impact on -- of the Ukraine situation, well, we don't see any greater impact except, of course, what we -- as everybody, but we are in a certain way, affected by the stock market and interest rate market development. There, of course, we have a certain impact. But the sentiment amongst our existing clients, the sentiment amongst the new clients is, at least how we see it today, is not changing at the moment. So the client inflow is going fine. And at the moment, we don't see really a disruption. I hope that remains that way. Then the margin development and mix shift, you're right, we discussed that many times. Overall, we left a lot of basis points on the table over the past 6, 7 years. And if we look now at the situation in the '21 numbers, we see basically a stabilization of -- compared to the 2020 numbers. And they came in at -- excluding the banking revenues, came in at a level of 72 or 71.5 basis points. And if you include the banking revenues, you end up overall at 90.6 basis points. So it's -- that was the same number more or less in 2020. And if you go back to 2019, that number was 97; in '18, it was 104. In 2015, it was 123. So we left 33 basis points on the table over the past 6 years, which is remarkable. And at the same time, we grew the total business. And we believe, at the moment, that we are in a stable situation. Of course, you have certain shifts amongst the different buckets, second pillar, third pillar and free money that is invested and mortgage and everything. But overall, we don't see a big shift anymore, not -- certainly not such a big shift that we have seen in the past 5, 6 years. We internally calculate with a -- going forward with that we leave, let's say, 1 or 2 basis points on the table going forward, just to be on the safe side. But see, I mean, it's -- but we don't see that such a harsh reduction that we've seen in the past. Hope this helps.

[Operator Instructions] Sir, there are no more questions.

Good.

Sorry to interrupt. We have a follow-up question -- we have a question from Mr. Michael Schulz from JMS Invest.

I have a question regarding the margin, too. So you -- in your presentation in the conclusion and the outlook, you said that you see the net profit margin and the EBIT margin going back to the -- basically the guided or longer-term guided range. However, you also said that general expenses would be not declining, but not growing as fast as we saw it now. The difference would then -- and the top line margin basically also is not declining further. The difference to bring them back to the longer-term range would then come from the personnel expenses that would have to grow faster than your top line. I mean, is that a new ambition to grow your capacity faster basically or how do I have to understand that? Otherwise, I would assume a certain leverage going forward if your top line margin has stabilized more or less. Yes.

Yes. I understand. Thank you, Mr. Schulz. Of course, I mean that -- what I've said does not really match. I understand that. And that's also clear. But I want to be on the cautious side. If we are talking about targets and target levels. And that's not the target level for the current year. It's basically a -- basically talking about target levels of, let's say, 3, 4, 5 years. And there, we don't see them, of course, you're absolutely right. I mean if I add up all what I've said, then you should basically -- that should basically lead to higher net profit margins. And -- but just to be on the cautious side, we would like to keep it at the 36% level. And this is the major number that needs to be considered. And yes. And I mean, of course, this year, it could be different. This year, it could be higher if everything goes well. But in the longer term, I'm not so sure because we want to be -- from a strategy point or a strategic point of view, it would make going forward and to grow the business sustainably longer term substantially. It would make a lot of sense to keep some reserves to be flexible on the price side vis-a-vis on your products or on your offerings and to be more -- to stay and to become more attractive on the labor market. And that includes, of course, more attractive salaries at the end of the day. And combining all that together with the productivity gains, which we will attain, we clearly reach and gain productivity improvement. And that leads to a scalable effect. But if you add that all up, I've always said that we do not target a leverage primarily. We primarily target to develop and grow the top line. And if you look at that in the longer term, then -- then you're just on the safe side if you keep the net profit margin at the 36%. And we have already increased that from 35% last year or the year before, I believe, yes, before.

May I ask another 1 or 2 questions?

Sure.

One, regarding the PM mandates and the share of assets under management in mandates, that increased to 63.6% this year. So from the 60% level. How does that work usually? Are these new clients that come in with a mandate or basically start with a mandate with you? Or is it the conversion of existing clients from self-managed money to mandate? What's the biggest driver there? And how do you see that going on?

Yes. The biggest driver is the net new client inflow, clearly. I mean that's the #1 driver. Number 2 driver is the cross-selling efforts with -- amongst our existing platform clients. But the clear -- I mean the absolute top driver is the ability to attract new clients. And that...

Yes. So the new money -- the penetration among the new clients is, say, around 80%, 90% or so in order to -- or just higher than the 60%? That's why -- that's basically what you're saying. I mean the new clients, they come mostly in with a new mandate?

Correct. Correct.

Okay. So this should go on going forward and the...

Of course, the older, right? Because you must understand, many of our clients, of our existing portfolio management clients, when they are retired, they use their money on -- at least they take out on average, I would say, some 3%, 4%, 5% of their monies. And others add to the portfolio that also happens, of course, but the typical client situation is that they live out of their funds over -- after retirement. So that's why the largest chunk of the net new money, I'm talking net new money, is driven by new clients.

Okay. And just maybe one last question. And is there a -- would you have figures on how your performance on the mandates is in phases like last year where we had kind of a booming market and maybe this year where we have more difficult markets compared to individually managed funds?

Sure, yes. Absolutely. That's one of the key task. The asset management has to undertake while measuring the performance vis-a-vis the competition and vis-a-vis the benchmarks. And there, we clearly can say that we are at the top of the list compared to every bank here in Switzerland. And we do that on a very -- in a very systematic way. Typically, what we see is that the best measurement of comparison of your own performance is if you compare the performance of your clients, of your offerings vis-a-vis the strategy fund at, let's say, Credit Suisse or UBS or Raiffeisen or Migros or whoever is offering because those offerings within these banks are typically better or better developing than the individual mandates within these institutions. So if you take, for example, UBS, the UBS strategy for the balanced profile is typically better performing than a UBS individually managed VM mandate with the same risk profile. That's what we can prove because we have thousands of portfolios that we analyze of the competition. And if we take our performance of our mandates, we have 5 different mandate types. One is very simple executed via ETFs and index funds stick -- very sticky to the strategy, the overall strategy and the profile that is given. And that's an extremely performing mandate which is also quite inexpensive. That's very attractive for our clients. Another one is much more geared or leaned at the asset allocation of the pension fund system, that's also performing extremely well. These 2 mandate types are clearly at the top. And if you -- we changed that by mid-'19, the way of how we manage the assets, they are from the beginning at the top. And that's why they are also chosen by every -- by -- mostly by all consultants to recommend to their clients.

So that's a big selling driver for you basically.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay. Can you just remind me how much is the average assets under management? How much is still -- is the equity portion at the...

At the -- overall, if you take the CHF 39 billion, let me see, I believe, 30%, 30%, yes.

In equities?

Yes, 30% equity exposure, right. If you just take the CHF 39 billion, the total AuM.

And the rest?

The rest is basically interest rate linked. And some of it is also mortgages. So CHF 7.5 billion is basically mortgages. And there, you don't have any price effect that you don't see any fluctuation of the prices.

The next question comes from Christian Schmidiger from ZKB.

I would have 2. The first one is regarding the U.K. market. You're right that you work on further small IFA acquisitions. Could you define smaller in that context, maybe in comparison to the Lumin Group, smaller or similar sized? And my second question would be regarding the management change in 2023. Can you already give some visibility on whether you have the intention to reduce your 61% stake and thus increase the liquidity of the VZ share?

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Schmidiger. No, to your last question, no, I will not reduce my 61% stake. I think there is no better investment than your own company. That's number one, just to keep that clear. And of course, the management change happens. That's a demographic impact reflecting my age, and that's normal. I will out of the Chairman position. I will oversee the development very thoroughly, of course, and lead also the strategic developing going forward. And we are very happy, by the way, to be able to organize the succession planning internally in a very positive way. All these changes are basically a result of intense discussions amongst the 2 bodies of the Board and the Board of Directors and also the Executive Board. And all individuals are basically standing behind that solution. And that was, for me, very important. Right. That's to your second question. Now to your first question, U.K. U.K. is -- if you look into the acquisition methodology or strategy that we follow, we do not envision large acquisitions. What happens in the U.K. is, overall, it's a consolidation phase that we see over the next coming years and many small IFAs, we are talking about 3, 4, 5 people IFAs, so very small organizations are seeking a succession and are seeking an integration into a larger institution, such as we, to represent one. And that's the strategy. And you typically buy such a smaller organization at an EBIT multiple or EBITDA multiples. Well, the difference is not really big between EBITDA and EBIT because they do not have any depreciation on average. You purchase that at a level of let's say 3 -- somewhere between 3, 3.5, maximum 4. That's what you pay for it. and many consolidators, typically private equity led or consolidators, do exactly that game. Buy for an EBITDA multiple of 4 and sell the whole organization for an EBITDA multiple of 12, that's their game. And the whole thing is leveraged. So that's the idea. But we don't have that idea. We actually have a very long-term idea. We use the small additions to enlarge our customer base and grow out of these customer bases with -- on the one side with referrals, but also with getting new addresses for our marketing efforts. So we try to combine in the U.K., our marketing experience that we have out of the Swiss market with the acquisition strategy of small and very small IFAs. But I cannot give you today -- for example, this year, we will maybe add 2 or 3 smaller IFA organizations. And we already have -- we have a pipeline of quite a substantial number that we could add. But we have a limited capacity, not only on the fund side, but also on the personnel side, and that's why we have to balance all these efforts. But it's very low risk at the end of the day. And that's the nice thing behind it.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from Mr. Andreas Venditti from Vontobel.

Yes. I would like to know the interesting approach you're taking on the Lörrach branch because I think there might be other opportunities, obviously, if you think about Geneva, where you also have quite a large space of French domiciled people working in Geneva. Would that be something that, let's say, if you're happy with developments in Lörrach, would be possibly something that you're looking at?

Yes and no. Lörrach is basically a very simple play because we already have in Germany the full organization. We have a bank and everything. And we are basically fully operational in Germany. That's why it's so easy out of -- working out of Lörrach also from a regulatory standpoint. If you look into the Geneva region there, it's much more complicated because we could do it. We are -- I mean, we could basically -- we could move the license that we have in Germany into the France territory and then start working there. But I'm not really sure if that is a good idea at the moment. But it's -- we have to think about it, definitely. And there is -- you're right. I mean many, many -- in Geneva, you have, I mean, a huge workforce working on the territory of Geneva, but living in France. That's right. I don't know that's at least 100,000 overall in that region. It could be an option, but it takes much more effort to do that. The same thing is going on, on the Italian -- I mean in the Ticino region, which is -- which could be even more attractive because the Milano region is extremely -- itself is extremely attractive. So these 2 regions, we are following very closely and think about it. But at the moment, very -- I mean it's basically quite a low hanging fruit in Lörrach. That's what we want to pick and try to develop that at the moment.

There are no more questions, sir.

Very good. Thanks a lot for all the questions that you have asked and hope it was helpful for you. And wish you a good day, and bye-bye. Thank you.

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