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Good afternoon. This is the Chorus Call conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the presentation of Moltiply Group First Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marco Pescarmona, Chairman; Mr. Alessandro Fracassi, CEO; and Mr. Francesco Masciandaro, CFO. Please go ahead, sir.

[Audio Gap] that has been uploaded on our website, and we will start from Page 19 with the Q1 highlights. And as you can see from Page 19, the first quarter was a very strong quarter with revenues of EUR 182.6 million, up 36.5% year-on-year with the revenues coming 2/3 from the Mavriq division and 1/3 from the Moltiply division.

In terms of profitability, EBITDA in the first quarter '26 is EUR 51.3 million, which is up 45.2% year-on-year and corresponds to an EBITDA margin of 28.1%, expanding from 26.6% in the first quarter of '25.

Operating income is in the first quarter of '26 EUR 32.4 million, which is also up -- which is up 46.3% year-on-year, and this also means an expansion of the EBIT margin. Net income finally is, in the first quarter '26, equal to EUR 22.9 million, which is up 87.4% year-on-year. So this is a very strong performance in our mind. Of course, this benefits from the consolidation of Verivox. We had organic growth in Mavriq in particular, and then we had a very positive impact of the consolidation of Verivox.

Looking at the 2 divisions. I'll comment on Mavriq. Alessandro will comment on Moltiply BPO&Tech. Mavriq in the first quarter, on Page 20, posted revenues of EUR 120.5 million, up 80.7% year-on-year. EBITDA in the first quarter is EUR 35.7 million. That's up 68.8% year-on-year, with an EBITDA margin of 29.6%, which compares to the 31.7% of last year.

But of course, this EBITDA margin is affected by the dilutive impact of Verivox, which even if we improve things there, it still has a significantly lower EBITDA margin than the rest of Mavriq. And the EBIT is, in the first quarter, EUR 23.6 million. That's up 59.4% year-on-year.

And I would say -- well, first comment is we had, in general, a good first quarter. Everything was doing pretty well, and I'll go into more details. The only business that is -- that was suffering in the first quarter year-on-year was mortgages and also, to some extent, Shopping. Mortgages is something cyclical.

However, this is where I'm getting, Page 21. Q1 is not representative of what to expect for the coming quarters for 2 reasons. One, Q1 was the last quarter of consolidation of Verivox. And second, in Q1, our Energy business, which is today our biggest business, was doing very well in Q1 and then is suffering in Q2. And so Q2 is going to be quite different. The only business line -- because you remember, we changed the definition of our business lines. So they are by product and within a single product, they're cross-country.

So with this definition of business lines, we had growth in Energy & Telco, which is the biggest business line that we have today. In Insurance, we also had growth in credit, even if mortgages in Italy were down year-on-year. And the only business line that didn't grow is Mavriq Shopping, which is in the end the Trovaprezzi, which is only in Italy.

Now going into the details with reference to Mavriq Energy & Telco, yes, we had very, very good beginning of the year in all the countries. And then all the -- we started being affected by the events in -- with Iran. And we already explained the first things that we observed when we announced the full year results in mid-March.

And so at the beginning of March, we saw a spike of demand -- very strong demand because people were trying to fix energy prices before the providers basically changed their tariff. It takes a few days sometimes before a big company changes its pricing. And so people were running to grab the deals while they lasted. And so we have this big spike at the beginning.

And then, however, quite rapidly in the end, all the providers repriced, and they repriced much higher than where they were before. And the good thing, and we already said this the other time, is that the market kept functioning. So there were just a couple of providers in each market that decided to stop taking new clients, and most of that has reversed. So the market kept functioning, which is quite different from what happened with the invasion of Ukraine, but prices went up a lot.

And basically, because of this, consumers started taking significantly fewer contracts. Basically, our idea is that consumers are waiting because they see expensive prices, and they think that they'd wait 1 or 2 months and they'll get more reasonable prices. And so our volumes are down significantly from, say, the second -- from half of March. So year-on-year, we are down significantly in terms of volumes.

And this is in our main markets, mainly in Germany and in Italy. And this is continuing. And we don't know how long this is going to last. And there are many different scenarios, but it's very hard to predict, I would say. If this continues, we will continue to have year-on-year contraction. Maybe the gap will narrow over time because if this is a long-term situation, people will realize that it's better to fix their prices anyway. So maybe it will improve a little bit, but still be negative. So quite negative in, say, Q2, then less negative in Q3.

And I don't know how it could evolve if the situation isn't fixed. Or the U.S. and Iran reach agreement or in one way or another Strait of Hormuz is reopened. And if that happens, then we could even see an acceleration. So we could be back to growth, and maybe if we are lucky, even have a nice spike depending on what happens to prices when Hormuz reopens.

So I mean, today, we are in a situation of uncertainty and the uncertainty is lasting longer than we expected when we announced our results in mid-March. And this is Mavriq Energy & Telco. Telco Is okay, actually. I mean, it's doing fine, but it's a much smaller than Energy.

Mavriq Banking, it was growing in Q1, as we said, but not on an organic basis, basically because in Italy, the mortgage market is down. And so what one could expect for the coming quarters that would be fully organic in terms of comparison is that instead of seeing growth, you could see here a contraction as well.

Mavriq Insurance is growing organically. Growth rates, as we said, were expected to be different in different countries. But in general, we see growth everywhere, just at different rates. So I think this is the strongest that we have today. Mavriq Shopping here, well, on the Google side, we don't have any news. The European Commission has so far postponed any decision. There are press rumors, let's say, I mean, things that have been published, let's say, that von der Leyen is postponing this not to alienate Trump, but this has to come at a certain point.

And we think this is not positive. All this delay is not positive for operators like us, but it's not also positive for the credibility of European institutions because even when we are very clear in our mind, like violations of European rules, if we're not able to impose fines and bring the infringement to an end, basically, people think that they can do whatever they want in Europe. So it's really a loss of credibility.

And now in terms of expectations for Q2, this will be -- the performance will be determined only by the organic evolution of the business because we haven't made any other acquisitions in the last 12 months. And now we are past the first 12 months of Verivox. And so the main driver is really going to be the contraction of Mavriq Energy & Telco because of the Energy business.

Mavriq Banking, we said, is also organically going to be down, then possibly less and less over the year. Insurance is growing, and luckily, we are seeing a stabilization, so no longer a contraction of Mavriq Shopping.

So all in all, we expect for Q2 a decline in the revenues in the second quarter year-on-year and a more pronounced contraction of the margins, significant, I would rate it as at least double-digit contraction of the EBITDA of the Mavriq division. As I said, this could end any time. This totally depends on external factors. And if energy reopens, we could even have a nice re-acceleration.

And so with this binary scenario, either we have a contraction, or at a certain point, they push a button and reopen Hormuz, and we start growing again and possibly with a fast recovery. And we have no control over this. For now, we continue to run the business for the long term. So we are not trying to optimize short-term performance because still the impact is there, but it's not killing us or anything.

And -- but then we will reassess over time, depending on how the situation evolves. Of course, the situation of the energy market appears to us as absurd and unsustainable that we don't see how we could continue. And for this reason, we don't see any reason to have different expectations for the long-term outlook for our business. At the same time, we have no idea of what could happen for the rest of the year.

So with this, I'm done with this outlook for Mavriq, and I hand it over to Alessandro with a more positive message for Moltiply BPO&Tech.

Yes. Thanks, Marco. Fortunately, the Moltiply BPO&Tech is not exposed to the energy crisis or at least not directly as Mavriq. So the results for the first quarter were impacted just by the reduction of the mortgage market and mostly of the refinancing market, the surroga that went down. So as you see, we see revenues in the first quarter declining from EUR 66.1 million to EUR 62.1 million. That's a reduction of 6% year-on-year. The reality here is that it's really significant, the impact of the pass-through notary costs for refinancing.

As you know, we have a significant business in para-notary services. Our services include also the fees for the notary. You will remember last year when we had the growth that I told you there was a significant price effect because with the equo compenso, those costs are significant.

And so this year, as these activities deflate, we see a significant impact on revenues, which doesn't impact significantly the margin. Actually, the margin is growing, as we will see in a minute. But to give you an idea, if we take out the pass-through cost, so the cost that we paid in notary and then we re-charge our clients, the banks, let me just give you rough figures.

Last year, in the first quarter, they were a little above EUR 11 million, and this year, they are a little above EUR 4 million, so it's a reduction of roughly EUR 7 million. And that reduction, if you take that away, you would see that the real revenues of our services, they go up from EUR 55 million last year to EUR 58 million this year. So it's actually a growth of 5.5%, which is much better what we see then on the EBITDA margin. The EBITDA margin this year grows from 14.1% to 15.6%. That's a growth of just double-digit, 10%. And the EBITDA margin grew from 21.4% to 25%.

Again, it's -- this is thanks on -- the increase in the EBITDA margin is basically due to the mix effect. I mean we have obviously a reduction of these para-notary activities, where I've just given you the idea of how significant the revenues with 0 margins are. And therefore, if you take -- if that part reduces, then obviously the margin -- the operating margin in percentage terms goes up.

But the reality is that all the other activities are basically also growing. The overall growth, as I said, is 5.5%, but we also have some margin expansion not only due to mix effect, but also because we're cleaning out this house in some of the smaller businesses, restructuring costs a little bit and with the impact of -- there is also a mix effect of some good margin businesses that are growing faster than others and also the investment in technology and then the use of gen AI processes continues. This is something that we expect to continue to leverage in the longer term.

At the EBIT level, you see that it grows from EUR 7.3 million last year to EUR 8.8 million. That's a growth of roughly 20%. And the EBIT margin grows from 11.1% to 14.1%. So let's comment on the different business lines within our BPO&Tech business.

As you might remember from last time, we had started to comment on 3 major lines. Those are Banking, Lease and Insurance. And then we have other initiatives. In Banking, here we see overall a decline in revenues, because obviously, mortgages are here, but also here, if you take out the notary effect, you would have seen a growth. So actually higher than 5.5%. And basically, what you see, mortgages obviously are declining, but we are happy to see our market share growing. We are penetrating more some of our large existing clients, and we will continue to do that in the rest of the year.

Loans are growing nicely. That's thanks to a more stable and actually a relatively growing market for salary-guaranteed loans, so cessione del quinto. And also there, we're seeing an improvement in our market share. Wealth is also working well. It's growing. This is a little bit one-off, thanks to our technology project. I already mentioned it last year. This is continuously contributing with our -- the project with our main client.

Real estate valuation services are basically stable. It is actually the sum of a mortgage market going down and our market share going up, but the result is basically -- I mean it's a minimal growth. But in terms of margins, this quarter, this is one of the businesses where we were able to regain profitability. Last quarter, we had the impact of the disappearing -- the final disappearing of the Ecobonus effect. Actually, we had negative margins there, but now we stabilized this business and it is contributing to the overall EBITDA.

Lease confirms a very solid business. As I said, this year -- last year, we had an incredible year. You might remember that. So we aim at doing the same result this year and not a significant growth. But the growth last year was thanks to some one-off effects that we hope to substitute with organic growth, and the first quarter is confirming that. I have to say that the one-off effects were in the last quarter. So we'll see in the last quarter.

But we are on the right track, and this -- and Agenzia Italia keeps being the EBITDA engine of our division. And things are going well, and we will be introducing new services. And as you all know, there is a long-term expectation of growth in fleet services and the rental market in Italy as more and more people and companies switch from owning vehicles to having those as a service. And that's our reference market, independent of the fact that this is done with the leasing or this is done with the rental agreement, the long-term rental agreement.

Moltiply Insurance is growing slightly over '25. And we're actually seeing interesting trends in terms of new claims opening, but then as we all know, this will depend on what are the weather events of this year. And when we will have weather events, there will be an acceleration of growth relative to previous year, thanks to the fact that we have now a full effect the compulsory natural catastrophe insurance.

Basically, with March -- the end of March and the beginning of April, now the law is in full force. As you know, it's the law that has not -- this obligation to have insurance doesn't have a straight punishment, if you're not doing -- I mean not a monetary fee or fine, but what happens is that you cannot take part in any of the state aids that are given in any form if you don't show proof of your insurance.

I tend to believe that this is a quite strong way to enforce this in the end because the aids are small, but they are very widespread. So people will potentially not want to lose them. But I cannot say we'll see that. So also here, overall, and especially if you look at the longer-term, we are happy with the forecasted -- with what we expect in the coming months and in the coming years.

Just a word on the other revenues on Mia Pensione, which as you know is the business that we are dedicated to pension advisory services. It is growing nicely. It's a higher margin than most of our business. And we expect to make it grow even faster than what it's doing. And by the way, here, the sector trend is, obviously, all the boomers are going into pension.

So it is really the bulk of the Italian population right now in terms of potential market. And we are working on bootstrapping the B2B2C model. So basically conveying this service is not just through the web, but also through our clients, both banks and the insurance companies or even investment companies. I mean this is obviously a service that is interesting for anyone at different price levels, depending on obviously which segment of the population you are, from the mass market to affluent to even the private market.

If you are employed, and so you expect to receive the pension from INPS, this is a service that interests you. It's very technologically -- it's very technology, very well implemented. It's a great addition to our portfolio. So in the coming months, I think it's reasonable to expect similar trends to what we've seen in quarter 1. So we'll still see, at least for the second quarter, a very favorable comparison to last year for mortgages that eases in the -- starting the second part of the year, but then we'll see that margin expand, I think.

I hope to see -- continue seeing that margin expansion. And so you have seen it for quite a while now, we have been delivering close to double-digit growth, if not double-digit growth, in the BPO, and that has been mostly organic. So I think we'll continue seeing this in the next quarters, and this is kind of our objective really looking forward.

And obviously, we'll keep looking at bolt-on acquisitions as we've done small things that we can fuel up in terms of growth, thanks to our client base or technological addition. These are things we will continue to look at. So all good on this front. And back to you, Marco, to further comment on the net financial position.

Yes. Thank you, Alex. So on Page 26, you have the evolution of our net financial position. Here, we are, at the end of March 26, at negative EUR 427 million. If you look at the evolution over the last year, there has been a steady improvement. Part of it at a certain point was due to the fact that we sold some treasury shares, which generated some cash.

Then from September, October, the stock price dropped for fears of the impact on our businesses of artificial intelligence. And we restarted the buyback, and actually, we have bought back a significant number of shares. And we are now -- and we were not far from here on March 31, more or less where we were a year before. So -- this is -- I mean you would have to check the numbers, but it is really, in the end, keeping a similar treasury share position at the end of March '25 and March '26, but please check the numbers.

And we also have our MONY shares. Here, what happened to MONY is similar to what happened to our stock price. So they were -- basically suffered of derating for AI fears, we believe. And in fact, this is a financial investment, but we found it so compelling that we increased it a little bit in the first quarter of this year as well, so 57 million shares.

And the financial position, net of the MONY shares is EUR 329 million. And the funny thing is that we have more shares. We have 57 million shares now, and they are worth EUR 98 million on March 31. And we had 44 million shares, so much less last year, and they were worth EUR 106 million, and we thought they were cheap at the time.

So here, there is this question mark on -- I mean we don't have a -- I think we have the answers. And we think we summarized a lot of our answers in the initial slides of this presentation. But the market still is uncertain about what will happen for real. Our stock is affected by AI fears. MONY is affected by AI fears. We are not too concerned, but it will take a while before clarity emerges on this and the market develops a final understanding of what will happen to different types of companies because of this.

So this, I would say, ends the presentation with -- I mean -- yes, I would say this ends the presentation, and we would open it to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Gabriele Venturi, Banca Akros.

First, could you please provide some more detail on Verivox contribution rate to revenues this quarter? And additionally, could you give us some more color on Mavriq organic growth rate during the quarter? And second, on a year-on-year basis, could you elaborate on how you expect margins and revenues to evolve in the second quarter on a quantitative basis? I mean I know it might still be early to assess, but if the current environment persists, should we expect high single-digit or double-digit revenue decline in Mavriq?

And finally, regarding remortgages, what is the typical EBITDA margins for para-notary services? And what margin level do you believe is achievable over the medium term for BPO division?

Okay. Let's try to answer at least qualitatively. So Verivox had an impact. I would say you can expect an impact of Verivox in the first quarter of this year, similar to the impact of the third -- the fourth quarter of last year. The winter quarters are a bit stronger.

And I would say -- I kind of said it before, but without Verivox, we would still have organic growth within Mavriq, I would say, in the neighborhood of 10% plus/minus something. So the rest is the addition of Verivox. This is in terms of EBITDA. And what to expect for the future? I think you can expect that -- I said we could lose -- we could have a significant year-on-year decline of the EBITDA of Mavriq. We wouldn't say significant for less than 10%, of course.

So of course, this is only affecting Energy. So I think it's reasonable to expect something, which is between minus-10% and minus-20% for Mavriq, but we really have to see how it evolves. And this is already more than what we usually say. Then do we have anything else in terms of questions for Mavriq? Let me -- or shall we go to...

Yes. On the notary services, roughly 10% at the EBITDA level, maybe a little less. And that's the margin on -- the question was how much is the EBITDA on the para-notary services. And on what's the long-term target for the review, well, let's say, we've been saying in the past that our long-term effort is to get the EBITDA to 25%.

We're there now, at least this quarter. Then obviously, it depends on the business mix. And as you see, there are some -- I am actually very happy when the refinancing explodes because it's true that, as I just said, it's a lower-margin business, but all of that, it's variable.

So it's -- so there's absolutely no problem in scaling down the business. When the revenue goes down, we just don't pay the notaries anymore. I mean our part -- our fixed costs -- internal fixed costs are limited. So there is really -- it's a business that it's really similar to all the others, and it's a great business.

So that -- but -- and so I hope it will be big and to -- but it will impact when it's big, what are the percentage margin. But anyway, in the longer term, I do expect to see some margin expansion, and that will be driven by AI and scale effects as we grow our presence in clients and in verticals.

Then, obviously, a part of that will have to be given back to clients, and this is a positive reinforcing cycle. So we will be able to offer better products and at lower prices, and I hope the clients will want to buy more, as I mentioned last time when we talked about the impacts of AI. So I hope to see a growth that I -- in my mind, I have to see up to a 500 basis points growth over the next 5 years in terms of our margin expansion, but we'll see, okay?

The next question is from Aleksandra Arsova Equita.

So a couple of follow-up questions with respect to what you said before. Just can you remind us what was the speed of recovery of energy business last time in 2022, 2023? So once there was a sort of normalization and decline in energy prices, how many months or quarters did it take to recover the business, just to understand what could be the speed if there's a reopening of Hormuz Strait and the situation is over then?

And the second one is again maybe some -- let's say, some sensitivity to model better the future quarters. So assuming that the energy situation is limited to, let's say, the second quarter, do you believe you will be able to broadly achieve the current consensus of EUR 200 million or slightly above [indiscernible] the consensus EUR 200 million EBITDA for the full year?

Okay. So the speed of recovery, it's a different situation from the situation of Ukraine, because in that case, the energy market in Germany was shut, whereas now it's fully functioning. So the type of recovery is different. The type of recovery we would expect is a situation where we have a reopening of Hormuz, an initial drop in energy prices, and then steadily, they possibly drop a little bit more, but there is a first steep drop when they announced that an agreement has been reached, this Strait is reopened and so on.

And we would expect that we could have a spike not as strong as the spike that we saw in the first weeks of March, but we could have a good spike of demand in the very initial months. So we could even have a strong quarter than when -- so not only growth, but stronger than normal. This is what we would expect.

When Ukraine -- First, typically -- I mean what happened when the energy crisis was over in Germany was reopening of the market that started during '23 and was at the peak in Q4 of '23 and Q1 of '24. And those were really strong, but the market has been closed, and it was more prolonged. Here, I would expect something that is a softer spike, yes, but not as strong and maybe concentrated in only 1 quarter.

And then if they reopen in June, possibly in September, people will have forgotten. And it will be a peak season as originally expected. So here really, the question is how long this will last. My guess is that once it finishes, we are almost immediately back to normal. But how long this will last every month, we lose some opportunity, let's say, or we are not able to run at the normal speed.

In terms of consensus, if BPO is doing well, if it's only 1 quarter, I think that's still feasible. The key question is if we have only 1 quarter of energy disruption or if we have longer. That will be the driver. But if it's only 1 quarter, that's still possibly within reach.

[Operator Instructions] Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.

Okay. So thank you for the participation, for the questions. Let me summarize by saying that we are quite happy with how the business performed. Until the end of February, we are executing, we think, pretty well in all respects. We are accelerating things. We are integrating well our recent acquisitions. We are deploying AI to improve productivity, to improve our services.

So everything is going well from what we can influence. Then now we are at the mercy of external events. And you have to be a bit patient, but we believe we are continuing to be the great company and have confidence for what is in the future. So thank you.

Yes. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.

Good afternoon. This is the conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the presentation of Moltiply Group Full Year 2025 Results. [Operator Instructions] After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marco Pescarmona, Chairman; Mr. Alessandro Fracassi, CEO; and Mr. Francesco Masciandaro, CFO of Moltiply Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everybody. We will rely as usual on our presentation published on our website. And as a forward, this year, we decided to make some changes to the format of the presentation. And this is basically because the group has changed significantly in recent years. And so we felt that the description that we were providing was no longer adequate, and we decided to update it a little bit. So this time, rather than just commenting the results, we will also make some comments on the structure of the revised presentation.

So we will start from Page 5, where here, everything is unchanged. We still have two divisions that are separate businesses, both very nice businesses. But then the description of the divisions, as you will see, will be slightly changed. Group structure is on the next slide, there is nothing relevant. I think I'll start commenting on Page 7 with a description of what Mavriq does.

First of all, Mavriq, now we will look at Mavriq through the lenses of four business lines, Energy & Telco, insurance, banking and shopping, and it's pretty clear what's inside these business lines. And this is across all the geographies. So Energy & Telco will mean everything that we do in Energy & Telco in Italy, Germany, Spain, et cetera, in other countries where we are present. In terms of weight, and you have at the end of the presentation in the historical figures, you have the relative weight of the business lines.

Energy & Telco is in 25%, 40%, roughly speaking, of our revenues. Insurance is 30%, banking 20% and shopping 10%. So this is very different in terms of also product mix of the old mortgage broking business we had in Italy years ago. In terms of countries, these are with the flags the countries where we are present. What is important is that there are some products like insurance that we have in every country, others that we have in most countries. And then banking products, which is mainly mortgage or personal loan intermediation, this is mostly an Italian and German business with only start-up level initiatives in the other countries.

And shopping, which is Trovaprezzi, we have it only in Italy. So this is like the map to understand how we see Mavriq and how we will comment on Mavriq going forward. On the following slides, we still have our brands. We have simplified it a little bit, especially the Italian brands. Here, it's only worth mentioning Switcho. Switcho is our digital energy business, which is a fully automated service, not an auto-switch, but a service that allows you to change energy provider without having to talk to a call center, which is a distinctive advantage in Italy, and this is a business that has done very well in '25. For the other countries, there are no changes. This leads us to the slides on the BPO division, that's for which Alessandro will take the lead.

Yes. And here on the BPO division, we have decided to simplify. Also considering the different dynamics, the former six business lines plus other that we had into three major business lines, which are probably also easier to understand. One is banking. And within banking, you will find basically everything that was relating to credit. We had the loans, the mortgages and also the activities that are -- that we were doing in real estate, all those that were strictly connected with credit. And also the line of -- that we had called wealth, which has inside Wealth Management Services and Investment Services, all of this is now included in this business line that we call banking, where obviously, the target clients are banks, consumer credit specialists, asset gatherers and asset managers and also NPL specialists on the servicing side, but also banks who do it in-house.

Then we have the vertical of lease, lease meant in, let's say, the [ Anglo-Saxon ] sense where you will have all the forums that help you use an asset where you don't own the property, and this could be through a leasing contract, so what is in Italy a regulated contract or long-term rental, which is a nonregulated way to use an asset that you don't own.

Here, the target clients are obviously the rental companies, also the rent-a-car companies, the leasing companies and the dealers within the automotive distribution channels. The last vertical is insurance, where, as you know, we mainly do claim processing. But as we look at also extending our services, we felt it made sense to look at these as the insurance vertical. Here, the clients are insurance companies and self-insured entities, meaning corporations or public entities that decide to carry their own risk, but still need processes to manage the way that damages are managed. The key services that we have here are claims management, so the third-party administration of policies and loss adjustments, what we call in Italian Perizia, meaning assessing what is the damages that happened to assets or people within an insurance contract.

And then we also want to underline because it's growing the other revenue piece, where basically we are creating and growing services in a B2B2C model, where the clients are the clients of the previous business line, so mainly banking customers and insurance customer. And here, there are basically three areas of services. One is advisory for pension and social security. This is connected to the Mia Pensione acquisition that we did last year, actually in '24. At the end of '24, the management of inheritance and estate for, let's say, the inheritance of the -- in a inheritance process directly to the people involved.

And finally, sustainable value real estate asset services, sustainable value real estate services. This is somehow all the new life that we are giving to our capabilities and capacities in -- that we were able to build during the Superbonus phase, meaning, as you know, there were incentives to upgrade the real estate assets, and we built the capacity to help people doing this kind of investments and also then banks purchased the credit -- the tax credit that came from these investments. And we feel like looking forward at the new regulations that are coming to play in Europe, this will be a services that most banks and insurance will be interested to selling to their own customers.

So it's a pattern that they're already doing. And therefore, also here, we have started offering some of these services through banks. And so again, with a B2B2C models, and this is the part of other revenues. Here, there are some pages which I will not go through, but that help you get some numbers on the size of this market that we feel.

On one side, they are interestingly large and also complementary. And then on the other side, which is what you see on Page 13, they -- all these three markets show a significant underdevelopment relative not only to the best-in-class in Europe, meaning the best-in-class countries in Europe, but to the European average. And therefore, there is still an untapped potential of growth in this markets, which we believe to be perfectly positioned to capture -- to be in the perfect position to capture. This is what you -- there are some indicators here. I won't go through them. Maybe just look at the last column on Page 13, the one on the right, and you see the gap in terms of percentage of that particular metric relative to the European average.

And it tells you really the growth potential that is embedded in these three verticals that we are pursuing with a model that, as you know, is a model of technology-enabled BPO services where what we target are noncore processes, but critical processes, meaning processes that impact the performance, the business performance of our clients.

Now on Page 14, again, a section we will not go through in detail. But in interacting with investors, we got a lot of questions about the impact of AI. So we decided that it was good to have a meaningful conversation going forward with our investors and analysts in general to put down in a very structured way our thoughts on the impacts of AI.

So I won't go through all the presentation, just basically the headlines. The idea is that we believe that on the -- both business lines are very well positioned on one side, the business model of Madrid, we believe to be very resilient to whatever is perceived as AI threat. And actually, there are also upsides that we will be able to capture in terms of expanding our services using AI with the end customer. And then if we move on to Page 16, and this is part of -- you will find here things that both in meetings and in some of these earnings calls, I've covered. You will see relative to the BPO and Tech business line -- sorry, the BPO and Tech division, you will see on -- here, we believe that AI is actually not a threat, but an opportunity for structural growth.

And here again, on the top of the page, what are the perceived risk of the market in our understanding of the AI disruption. And then here, you see on the left, what are, in our view, the defensive modes for multiply against the threat. But most importantly, how instead AI is for us an opportunity and what are the engines that we can use to actually even increase our growth pattern, thanks to the use of AI. This is obviously true for us and other players in the industry. But we believe that our position is what you see on Page 17 is of having different assets that compound in looking forward being able to capture this opportunity.

And this go from having tons of digital data to having platforms that are already embedding -- starting to embed AI in the processes and to having the skills and the client base that are perfect for the kind of services that we can offer and that can be made much more powerful and effective through AI. And with this, we get finally to the business update, and I leave the floor again to Marco to start going through the full year highlights for the group, and then I'll catch you back on when we discuss the BPO division. Thanks.

Thank you, Alex. So on -- back to Page 19, we have the full year highlights. This is where we normally start our presentation. And we are very pleased with the results of 2025. In '25, we had revenues of EUR 674.1 million, which is up 48.6% year-on-year. This is, of course, also due to the acquisition of Verivox, which was quite sizable. But even without that, we would have seen a very nice organic growth. The EBITDA for the full year is EUR 177.4 million, and this is up 44.5% year-on-year.

The EBITDA margin is 26.3%, which compares to 27.1% of the previous year, meaning that the dilutive effect of the Verivox acquisition was limited. The EBIT is EUR 103.4 million. That's up 40.8% year-on-year. Here, on the EBIT, we will comment later, but it's important to remind that this is also affected by -- and this is quite different from the EBITDA because of the amortization of the purchase price allocation to amortizable intangible assets that we have in the numbers. And so we'll try in later slides to give you some sense of how to normalize that.

The net income, the net income is EUR 29.4 million. This is minus 33.2% year-on-year. The explanation of this minus compared to the very strong performance in terms of operating results is two things. One is that there are, of course, higher interest costs compared to the previous year. And the second is that we have in the full year of '25 EUR 31.9 million of negative effect of adjustments to put & call liabilities on minority stakes. Basically, for us, it's quite a common pattern to make acquisitions where we buy, say, 80% of the company.

And then we keep the management involved and with a stake of, say, the remaining 20%. And then they have typically put & call options over three to five years with typically a multiple. This could be a multiple of a single year, but more commonly two or three years of results. The multiple could be fixed or could have a range depending on growth or other parameters.

But in any case, what we had in 2025, which was a very strong year was that, in particular, one of these participations, I mean, all the companies did well. But in particular, we have one in the energy sector in Italy that did much, much better than what we anticipated. And so we basically -- it contributed to the results. We are very happy, but also what we need to pay has gone up. And this is not only a function of the performance of the year, but also of the expected performance of the future.

And so this is what leads to this adjustment to the put & call liabilities, which are a reflection of a very favorable acquisitions that we made. And going to the next page, we see the numbers for the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter, we have revenues of EUR 207 million. That's up 57.3% year-on-year. By the way, you see that the proportion between the two divisions is now 2/3 Mavriq, 1/3 Moltiply DPO and Tech now. And the EBITDA was EUR 56.6 million in the fourth quarter. This is up 49% year-on-year. And here, the proportion is similar to the proposed revenues. In the Q4, the EBITDA margin was 27.4%, which is, again, a small dilution compared to the 28.7% of the previous year, keeping in mind that we acquired Verivox that was running at lower EBITDA margins.

Now again, on the EBIT. Here, in the EBIT, what I mentioned before that this is affected by PPA amortization. It's important also to be aware of the fact that when we do an acquisition, we do the purchase price allocation at the end of the year, and we put all the amortization in the last quarter. So the EBIT is here almost -- I mean, EUR 27.9 million, only 14.3% up year-on-year because here, we have put in only one quarter all the Verivox PPA amortization, because the exercise of the PPA is completed only at the end of the year.

And finally, the net income. Net income is again the same story in the quarter, by the way, the EUR 30-plus million of put & call adjustment for EUR 20 million in Q4, again, because that's when we had the visibility and because also it depends on the revised expectations for the future that we were able to have with clarity only at the end of the year. So this is in terms of the overall performance of the business. Then when we look at the two divisions, when I comment for Mavriq, Mavriq the EUR 406.4 million, that's up 83.8%. I mean these are very, very, very big growth. So it's -- of course, a lot of it is Verivox, but a lot of it is also organic.

EBITDA is EUR 116.6 million. That's up 74.5% year-on-year. The EBITDA margin is 28.7% in '25 compared to 30.2% in the previous year. And what is new that we didn't have in the past presentations is this box at the bottom left, where we show the EBIT adjusted for PPA amortization. Basically, we add back the amortization of only the PPA, not of, I don't know, other investments, capitalizations, IFRS 16. That's all included only what comes from this, let's say, maybe it's not the right word, [ cigulative ] effect of the PPA exercises.

And we think this is more meaningful way to look at the EBIT. We were before providing always the figures to do the normalization, but we thought we figured out that it could be more convenient just to show also the result. And you see this is very similar in terms of dynamics in this case to the evolution of the EBITDA.

And we try to keep this data also in future presentations. So this EBITDA adjusted for PPA amortization is EUR 102.3 million, and that's up 72% year-on-year. Then there is the EBIT as it is reported, which is EUR 72.9 million, which is 66.8% up year-on-year. Looking at Q4, well, in Q4, revenues more than doubled at EUR 138.2 million. This is up 115.6% year-on-year. EBITDA was EUR 38.5 million, up 87.6%. This EBIT adjusted for PPA amortization had virtually the same growth as EBITDA, and it was at EUR 30.6 million in Q4.

And finally, EBIT was at EUR 18.5 million, up 35.5% year-on-year. So these are the figures for the past performance of which we are very pleased. Now we will comment a bit more at the level of the business lines and also in terms of outlook. And well, we had very nice organic growth in all Mavriq business lines with the exception of shopping, which was down a little bit in terms of revenues, down a bit more in terms of EBITDA contribution. But let's first of all, say that the consolidation of Verivox was I mean, significantly changed the scale of the division, the geographical reach and the product breadth.

And basically, this made the group look very, very different, at least Mavriq from what it was before. And this has led also to this change in how we present things, of course. And one thing that you remember is that Verivox. For Verivox, we had an earn-out. And here is -- you see it in the annual report, but we decided to put here as well as the answer that you don't have to ask.

The earn-out liability that we estimate for now is EUR 5.3 million at the end of December. This is subject to potential adjustments. So it could be higher, could be lower. This is our current estimate. And by the way, this doesn't go into the put & call adjustments because it doesn't go in the net financial position.

Anyway, we will have, I'm saying things that are obvious, very strong year-on-year growth also in Q1 of '26, in part because the business was, as you will see, was doing well, especially energy, but also simply because Verivox was not consolidated yet in Q1 '25. For the rest of '26, the outlook is, as you will see based on the comments below, of moderate growth, organic growth, because we don't have any acquisitions for now announced or anything.

But there is potential downside risk because of the situation in the Middle East. We said energy is our biggest business. This has been positive in '25. But now that there is war in Iran, this is also a potential source of uncertainty. Let's start, in fact, with Energy & Telco, commenting more in the details. So here, we put all the utilities. And -- this is electricity and gas. These are the predominant -- the main products.

And then there is broadband. But broadband is a nice product, but the bulk of the business here is electricity and gas. And this is in all the markets where we have these things. And revenues were up 5x. Even if we already have a nice energy business in Italy, but we had the addition of Verivox, but we also are developing an energy business in Spain. So this grew both very nicely organically and thanks to Verivox. Verivox started '25 with a very weak demand. Basically end of '24, early '25, it was weak, and we were a bit concerned and then it improved and accelerated. And in the second half of '26, we already said it many times, there were better conditions to save money on energy in Germany.

So we saw a lot of switching behavior. And this continued also in early '26. So January, February were nice months. And then, of course, you know what happened. They started bombing Iran and energy prices have rapidly increased. And it's an interesting situation. It has some parallels and some differences to the war with Ukraine, because also the war with Ukraine also triggered an energy shock.

Here, it seems to be a bit more contained. Basically, there were no major disruptions to supply so far. So in our business, we match demand and supply. And we -- of course, people will switch more if they can save more money or get better conditions. But after the war in Ukraine, there were situations and markets where a large portion of the supply disappeared from the market. Energy companies were not willing to acquire new customers.

Energy companies were going bankrupt. Only variable price tariffs were available. So those were very serious disruptions. For now, we are not seeing anything like that. Apparently, the system has been made more resilient also from a regulatory standpoint. So suppliers are still in the market, still happy to acquire new customers. The only problem is the offers today available are much less attractive. So people find it difficult to save money in many situations. So today, we have a functioning market, but with weaker benefits for consumers and so a lot of interest and then less transactional interest. So it's okay, but it's not as good as it was before.

And again, and if here something really bad happens in terms of the hostilities or anything, then we could go more towards a Ukrainian style situation. On the other hand, if the situation resolves, this will have generated so much interest again on energy that we will have booming demand. So this could go both ways.

And this is our uncertainty for now. And then for the other business lines, it's a bit more usual things. So insurance, we had double-digit organic growth in '25. We had the acquisition of Verivox also. Growth continue in '26. We are seeing maybe some slower growth, still growth in some more established markets. This is possibly linked to how the premiums are moving. So we don't worry about that, but we think there will be growth, but possibly a bit more moderate than in previous years.

And then there is banking. Banking for us is mortgages in Italy and consumer -- also in Germany, but Italy is the main country for mortgages and consumer loans, where Germany is bigger than Italy and then also some business with bank accounts. And we had solid growth in '25. We saw the acceleration of Italian mortgage demand in the second half. But overall, for the year, it was very nice organic growth. And then, of course, we had in the year the benefit of the Verivox consolidation. What is the outlook here? We sit down for mortgages in Italy, especially the mortgages are down significantly in the first half, and then we don't know for the second half.

On the other hand, we think we could see a positive contribution from growth potential from personal loans, both in Germany, where we have a nice business and in Italy. Finally, shopping. Shopping, this is mainly comparison shopping, and then we have an online review business in Italy, like the sort of Trustpilot, but it's only in Italy. And the business contracted, as you see a little bit because minus 1.7% year-on-year in terms of revenues compared to '25, but it was worse in terms of EBITDA.

And the situation is the same. We are still competing with Google's own comparison service, which is embedded in the search result. Google continues to operate like this despite the antitrust decision, the Google Shopping decision, but more importantly, despite the fact that at least preliminarily, the European Commission found this embedding of, of Google's own services in search in violation of the DNA and in particular of Article 6.5 that prohibits self-favoring.

But two years have passed since they opened an investigation, a year has passed since they told Google that they found evidence of noncompliant behavior, but no decision has been issued and nothing has really changed. So the outlook for now is that we continue to see more of the same stability to moderate contraction in '26, if nothing changes. Then if the commission finally decides on this matter and maybe issues a prohibition decision or does something effective, then we could have a relief and actually could have potential upside on this business as well. So this ends the comments and outlook for Mavriq, and I hand it back to Alessandro for Moltiply BP and Tech. Thank you.

Thank you, Marco. We are on Page 26, and we'll start with the results for the overall year. Again, we look at this as a strong performance from the Moltiply BPO and Tech division. We have a top line growth of 15.1% year-on-year. It's still double digit also if you take out the acquisitions of MiaPensione, which contributed to this growth.

On an EBITDA level, we are at 8.6%. Here, and I can comment -- so we grew from 56% to 60.8%. The margin slightly decreased from 24.1% to 22.7%. As I have commented throughout the year, this dilution effect is -- the reason for this dilution effect is twofold. On one side, we have the significant impact of para-notarial services that had a price effect with the unit margin in euros remaining constant and with the cost of the notaries becoming almost double.

So that creates an inflation in revenue, while which impacts -- which creates a dilution in the EBITDA margin percentage-wise. And the other reason is that impacts, especially in the fourth quarter, the numbers are on the following pages. You might remember that we had an incredibly strong quarter in '24, and that was mainly due to the closing of most complex claims on the insurance vertical. Those claims were connected to the events, the weather events of the summer and the fall of '23 and the longer ones took over a year to finish the processing and those claims are normally the ones where we have higher margins because it's a more professional job that we do on those.

And therefore, there is a higher margin. If we look at the performance in terms of EBIT, both adjusted for PPA and EBIT. They tell a similar story, although here, there is a negative impact, and that's the reason why the numbers are lower in terms of growth of increased amortization, immaterial amortization in connected especially software development and especially in the lease vertical, where, as you know, we had acquired Trebi, which we have renominated -- renamed as Moltiply Tech. That was mainly a legacy system, which is very predominant in the lease vertical.

And we're basically doing two things. On one side, we created a brand-new future-proof platform on the rental part of the business, which we started selling during 2025, actually at the end of 2025. And also, we started investing in renewing the platform for lease. So that's the reason why then we have an impact on the amortization here. And that's true. Basically, there is no -- in showing the PPA -- the EBIT number adjusted for PPA, there is here no significant change in PPA between '24 and '25. And therefore, the different -- the numbers just shift downwards when you consider this noncash effect of PPA, but -- and the percentage change because they are obviously on smaller numbers, it's just a mathematical factor.

But more or less, the growth over the year is in absolute terms similar. Now the comparison for -- with Q4 is here, it seems to tell a story, which is not good, but to us, this is actually a great quarter because it's -- the comparison is relative to a quarter that was incredibly strong in '24 and the ability to beat that to having reached that -- top that result to us is actually very, very significant, also because we substituted a very, very extraordinary quarter with something that still has some one-off effects, but definitely not as major as the ones that we had in '24, but it's mainly organic.

So here, really, we should not see this as a slowing of growth, but just as a comparison that was particularly difficult for '26. And I believe that having topped the '24 -- for '25, sorry. And I believe that having topped the '24 result is actually a great performance.

So moving on to the next page, on Page 28, a comment on the outlook at the division level. Well, first of all, on the '25 results, most of the comments I've already made. What is -- let me see if there's something else. No, I guess that we basically said everything already commenting the numbers. Then let's look at the outlook in '26. We expect to be able to continue to deliver the organic growth as you have seen us doing in the last couple of years at a revenue level.

We actually do expect to expand EBITDA margin. This is also because we'll see on one side, efficiency brought in by all the efforts in technology and AI that we are doing. And on the other side, also the mix effect of mortgages will taper off as para-notary services and especially refinancing will reach maturity and start declining, as Marco has already commented during '26. So the growth will come mainly we expect from banking and insurance, at least an EBITDA level. And then we expect lease to be able to replicate organically the results of '25 which let me say, again, those are record results.

And again, the lease vertical has been consistently delivering organic growth in -- on average through the years at a double-digit pace, and we are very pleased with this vertical and with its management.

Again, technology investments will continue both to renew our platform, but significantly to better our processes and to include and continue working on AI. As you will be able to read on the pages dedicated to AI, I believe that putting AI within regulated financial processes is not just about technology. So it's not just a technological investment. It's something that is instead at the same time, also an effort in designing processes, in putting in governance, in putting in the right KPIs and in deciding where the human should remain in the loop and how the human control is impacted.

As I -- as we reason on these things, we saw a very clear parallel to the efforts that we have done in the early 2010s when we started using nearshoring. Also there moving things from Italy to Romania was not just about copying processes or actually cutting processes from Italy and pasting them in Romania. It meant changing it, deciding which pieces should remain in Italy, which businesses could go to Romania, deciding where the performance of our Romanian colleagues was actually more efficient or as efficient as the Italian and so on.

I mean all of these, it is very, very similar and it takes time, and it's not just very similar when you think about moving processes and having AI embedded in those processes. And this is what we will continue to do. And I think we will continue to see results in the growth of our EBITDA margin. Now commenting the different business lines. Relative to banking, I'll still give a flavor of the different parts within banking at least for some time and each time it's necessary to explain the trends. So banking, it's our largest revenue contributor, and it was up 36.9% year-on-year. This is all organic growth.

Mortgages were the main driver of this growth. Actually, they basically we basically doubled our revenues here. As I have commented already, a lot of this came also from the para-notary services and the price effect of the increase of notary fees, but also the quantities went up very significantly. Wealth Management grew and grew significantly, 18%. This was driven mainly by tech offering and also some client expansion.

Real estate instead, loans, what we used to call loans remained -- showed a little bit of growth, but they were basically stable. And real estate instead, as you all know, went down, went down in revenues 21%. This is the end of the Superbonus phaseout, and we think now we are at a structural post incentive base line, now we expect to stabilize and be able to grow over this. Where will the growth come in '26? This will be mainly growth with existing clients, either because they increased their market share within a market that we do not expect to be particularly growing in '26.

So we expect our clients to increase their market share and our market share to increase within services of clients. There are some clients that are switching to us from other providers and will continue to do so during the course of '26 and some clients where we are increasing the services that we -- the number of services that we are selling them. Then let's move on to [indiscernible], which will present as the second business line.

This is because it's the second contributor in terms of revenues, but it's actually the largest contributor in terms of EBITDA and the contribution, it is very significant. It is much larger than the one of revenues. I mean, not the double, but close. By the way, on Page 42, you will be able to see the reclassification of our revenues in the different verticals historically. And if you look at '25, just to mention these numbers because I didn't do it before, 52% was coming from banking, 27% is coming from lease and 70% coming from insurance and the remaining 4% is our B2B2C initiatives that we classify as other revenues.

So Moltiply Lease had a record year. Again, it's a growth of 11.1% year-on-year. This growth includes the revenues of Evolve. Without Evolve, we would have grown 6.7%. Now I wouldn't worry too much on the EBITDA level because Evolve was not an acquisition that was done basically to increase our EBITDA. This is a company that was kind of captive in terms of services, meaning these guys do document management and document handling. And we were already representing basically half of the revenues.

They were located near our offices in Veneto, where most of our business line is located. And we felt that we would have a more significant control here, and we would be able to optimize it better if we owned it. And that's the reason why we decided to buy it. And that's why it's now in the perimeter. But again, it was not a significant contributor to the growth, therefore, you can expect the organic growth here to have been more closer to the 11% number than to the 6.7% number.

Okay. Within the lease, anyway, Agenzia Italia is the main contributor and also the main contributor to growth. And we believe that in the long term here, all these services to fleets have the possibility to continue growing because even if there is a stable market for new vehicles, the percentage of vehicles that are owned by fleets, either to use in corporations or to then be given to retail users will increase, and this will be also driven by the increased penetration of hybrid vehicles.

By the way, hybrid and electric vehicles. By the way, these electric vehicles also bring with them complexity in the administration. Just one, for example, to quote one, electric vehicles don't have to pay the annual registration fees with the [indiscernible], but only for some time and the time depends on in which region you use the vehicle. So it could be two years, it could be three years. All of this, as you can imagine, is an nightmare to manage. And it's what we do on, for example, on behalf of the long-term rental companies. Q4 was particularly strong. The reason why it was strong, it's because we were able to start selling new services. When you sell a new services to such a significant client base, you obtain one initial effect of basically catching up on the complete fleet that you're managing with them and then you sell it in the following years only on the continuing new business that you come in.

So it is structural, the fact that you sell new services. But the moment you sell them to one client, you have a one-off effect that is not replicated afterwards. We were able to capture some of them in '25. We'll capture some of that also in '26, but that was particularly significant at the end of last quarter. It was obviously a pleasant surprise for us.

We hope and we aim at replicating these results in '26. I do realize that this is something that when we meet in March like now is something that I always say that there were some interesting one-off effect in lease that boosted our performance and that we hope to replicate them and make them organic in the following year. And I say it again, and then we normally do better. But as of today, we aim at replicating the strong performance, especially at an EBITDA level.

And there is potential for upside, but this is today the expectation. Finally, insurance here, there is a minus sign in front of, obviously, the numbers. We went down from 52.2% to 45.7%. This is what we expected and we told investors all along during the year. But this -- we basically we have a normalization of the extraordinary claims volumes that we saw in '23 and in '24.

Anyway, current rate, as you see, structurally above '23 levels. So we continue growing here. Long-term average organic average is all the way close to double digit. And as you know here, there is a secular trend that will help us -- a regulatory change that will help us continue growing even more in the following years is the impact of NatCat insurance obligation that went in effect on March 31 for large enterprises and October 1 for small [indiscernible]. Obviously, we will see the impact in '26, but probably more in the following years.

And the majority of the impact will come when there are weather events that are covered by this NatCat insurance. So we expect it to be a growth engine -- but the timing of this growth will be obviously depending also on when the events happen. In terms of our platform, we are -- we finished the investments basically in 2025, and we are now starting to roll it out. This has been a long investment through the years, stable but long. When we acquired GruppoLercari, one of the value that as a company we brought to the table is technology and we [ owned ] completely their systems.

That was absolutely necessary to do. They were legacy systems part of that was based on [indiscernible] technology, just to give you an idea. So we had to [ reorder ] them completely, and now we are finishing by the half of the year '26, we'll finish the rollout. That also depends on, obviously, our partner insurance companies because there are some interactions with their own systems. This is important, not just technology for the sake of technology, but it's also important because this is a technology that is ready to embed the AI improvements. AI improvements in this case are more about increasing capacity more than necessarily spending less with the loss adjusters, which are an external workforce.

The point here is that this external workforce is actually a constraints in quality and quantity for growth, and we have fit when there are big events that impact. So the ability to increase the productivity for us is mainly a competitive advantage in being able to capture more market share in a way that otherwise would not be possible. So this completes the outlook for the BPO and Tech division, and I hand it over again to Marco for the last comment on the net financial position and dividend.

Okay. Thank you. So we are on Page 32 with the net financial position. The reported net financial position is negative EUR 441 million. And basically, this is the result of our acquisition of Verivox during the year. And on the other hand, of the strong operating performance of the business throughout the year that, of course, generated cash. You'll see the cash flow statements in the documents and the comments in the annual report.

So I think that's the best way to -- if you want to go into the details. But there is -- nothing particular. Most of our already know this of our indebtedness now is long term.

In terms of reading this net financial position, what you see in line see other current financial assets are simply exchange-traded funds, money market ETFs, they pay a little bit more than back deposits. And -- and then again, the only thing to point out is that the short-term component is much better than the year before.

And what I said before about the balance. Now for most of our banks, what is relevant is the statutory net financial position with some adjustments. So we have some little adjustment, but this is basically, the reported number is indicative what the banks would look at. We used to have -- we still have with one bank also net figure net of the money shares as of December 31.

We had shares in many worth EUR 109 million -- EUR 110 million. Now that was a bit less, but based on those figures led to a net financial position adjusted for this of EUR 331 negative million. And the only comment we have is that we are quite comfortable with the current situation. The little ABB that we did in '25 allow us to move to the favorable setup of our biggest loan basically it has like things that varied both in terms of rates and in terms of constraints, depending on the leverage, it allows us to move faster in that direction.

Then -- of course, you also know that, especially since the stock price started going south for these concerns about AI, et cetera, we resumed our buyback. And today, we have put back a good chunk of what was sold in the ABB. So these are the financial comments. The dividend payout we are proposing as a Board a dividend of EUR 0.15, which is a bit higher than last year -- this is to take into account our strong performance. But the reality is we still have significant leverage, and we might also have interesting M&A opportunities in this, in general, uncertain setting.

And so we will stick to limited payout. This ends all our comments and we can open the floor to questions. So operator, please go ahead.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. The first question is from Gabriele Venturi, Banca Akros.

I have 4 questions. First, it appears that your two division will be exposed to AI-driven changes in very different ways over the coming years. Given the operational synergies between them, does it still make strategic sense to keep both divisions within the same group structure over the long term?

Second, could you provide an update on the digital service tax across your European footprint? From 2027, you could become a liable for the tax at least in Italy probably. And there have been recently been a proposal to introduce a similar framework in Germany. Do you expect this to become a material financial buffer over the medium to long term?

And third, could you give us more color on the slowdown in the BPO division growth in the last quarter and the main factors that drove this deceleration? I know you said the difficult comparison with last year, but just if you can give us some more info. And finally, regarding the moderate growth outlook, should we interpret this as implying a mid-single-digit organic growth? And could you share indicative revenue and EBITDA figures for [ box ] for the year or at least the total M&A contribution?

Okay. Thank you. Well, I'll try -- this is Marco. I'll try to give at least a partial answer on the first question. Alessandro, please jump in. But this is the same question that we get all the time. There are no synergies between the two divisions today. There used to be capital allocation synergies for a number of years. Now that we have more M&A opportunities for both divisions, this is no longer the case. Actually, we have conflicting opportunities, and we have to figure out what is best. And if we do something for Mavriq, we don't do it for Moltiply BPO and Tech and vice versa. So...

I think there are reasons to look at a potential split. One of this is the digital service tax, as you all know, because this is a tax that is payable by groups that have consolidated. We consolidated means in the annual -- in the consolidated annual report, revenues of more than EUR 750 million, and we are not far from that. So we could get there with maybe one year of organic growth or we can get there faster with just one acquisition.

So the digital service tax is on digital revenues. The threshold is for the entire revenues of the group, even if you have a chain of supermarkets, it counts, but you pay the DST only on digital revenues. There is a little bit of uncertainty as to the definition of digital revenues. If you -- it could be all the Mavriq revenues in a country or could be only, let's say, the ones that are not from regulated businesses depending on the interpretation.

But our estimate is that now this is in force in Italy, Spain and France. And our estimate is that this could cost us easily EUR 3 million, EUR 4 million a year. And the problem also is that they are talking about -- there is a lot of debate about introducing this in Germany. And in Germany, by the way, energy is not -- I mean, it is possible, quite possible that the energy business or the telco business would be subject to this.

So this would be quite a lot of additional money to pay. So maybe another minimum EUR 3 million, EUR 4 million, it could double the potential bill for this if we reach the threshold. So this is certainly a reason to consider a potential separation. On the other hand, it depends on the right timing, the right opportunity. And until we are at the threshold, we have another couple of years at least of time to do it, depending -- or we could do it in many ways, by the way.

So I think it's something that we are very, very clear in mind. I'll also answer the fourth question about the moderate growth outlook for Mavriq. Yes, I think you could read it as single digit and maybe mid-single digit. The reality is we have this big uncertainty on energy. So I think in a few months, we should be able to give either a more bullish outlook or say that for a quarter or 2, the results will not be great. I think this is more important than this overall expected rate, but I think like a mid-single digit for now could make sense in interpretation.

Okay. Just to answer the -- your question on the slowdown of growth. Again, I really don't see this as a slowdown, but just as the wrong comparison. For example -- and you can reconstruct this easily if you go and look at numbers of other -- take another year. If you go back to '23, I'm just watching and looking at the numbers of '23, the EBITDA for the BPO division in '23 was EUR 13.2 million. The EBITDA in '25 is EUR 18.4 million. So it's like a 38% increase over 2 years, you calculated the [ COGS ]. I mean, there is really no slow -- no slowdown in growth.

We are just -- it's just really that Q4 of 2024 was particularly strong, but and it's not strong because of seasonality. It was really strong because, again, the weather events of '23 were so significant that they created this big blip that it impacts the way you see things. But do the exercise of looking at growth, the average growth over 2 years, and you see no slowdown going back to '23 and seeing an overall growth, which is strongly double digit, so at an EBITDA level. So I seriously don't see this as in any way, I would not read anything in a growth. If you look at Q4 compared to Q3, again, here, you see significant growth. So I don't have a comment more than the one I just did.

The next question is from Tommaso Nieddu, Keplex Cheuvreux.

I have a few. The first one is on Verivox. You have given already some color on top line. So could you provide more detail on the underlying profitability and how is it tracking versus your initial expectation, given also that you said there was a low dilution. The second question is on -- again, sorry, on the potential spin-off of the two divisions, if the transfer of the money stake from Moltiply to Mavriq goes into this direction and that is the rationale -- and the third one is more on AI, and it would be if you are seeing any evidence of traffic coming from AI-based channels? And if so, how does that traffic behave versus traditional channels?

Okay. Well, on money, we -- in Germany, for some reason, our competitors don't even publish their annual report, and we don't do this and we don't either. So we are not able to give very detailed information regarding variables. I would say it started weak in '25 and then it improved throughout the year. Part of it because the market improved, part of it because maybe we improved some stuff.

And we are happy of the acquisition. It's a company that has a strong trademark. It's a company that requires work. We are dedicating a lot of attention to it. And I think we'll be happy. In terms of the margin -- limited margin dilution, this could be that Verivox improved a little bit. It could also be that our existing business has improved, and we are not providing the details. And it's possibly both, a bit of both.

In terms of the potential separation of the two divisions, this could be done in many ways, could be split, could be with an M&A transaction, could be share split, many different things. What you referred to the fact that you saw that we had some money shares with Mavriq was, in fact, just a temporary effect because all the Mavriq -- the money shares are now multiplied. So this is not indicative of anything.

And it's connected to the tax reasons, right? So.

Yes, it was more like optimization of things. And AI traffic is a very interesting question in general because there are two things to say. One is your question, but one is, I think, broader. To your question, the traffic from AI chatbots is limited, is very few percentage points. And this is across all businesses, and this is also for other companies. So we think this is representative. And the traffic is good quality.

It's a sort of organic traffic. So it's a small portion of organic traffic. And the reason why it's not bigger, I think, is everybody is using these systems. But the reason why this is not big is that all the chatbots are keeping users within their interface. It's very difficult to click out of ChatGPT or cloud or anything. They're not designed like that. I think this is going to change a lot when advertising will become available in ChatGPT, especially because if they want to monetize, they want people to click on the ads and advertisers are going to pay if these ads to people to their websites.

So I think this will change a lot. The other question -- the other point about traffic in the last 12 months, is that I think if you ask anybody who has an online business, they will all tell you that, for instance, organic traffic has dropped significantly. And this is in part due to the AI, but in an indirect manner. What is happening is that Google has changed significantly its interface.

They have embedded what they call AI mode in the answers that leads then to a separate AI -- sorry, they have embedded AI overviews, which then leads to AI mode. And a lot of people are finding answers to informational queries directly on Google, and this is reducing organic traffic, particular traffic that was not converting much. So the impact of business is much less than what it looks like if you look at the traffic numbers, but it is there.

And by the way, this is not so much a matter of AI changing the way things operate, but just Google changing its interface, which is a different story. And by the way, could also be linked again to the issue of favoring of shopping and so on. So you have Google that has the dominant search engine that has bought all the defaults in the browsers. And now what they do is they send people -- they embed their AI system within the search results and now they are, in a way, favoring their AI systems as they were favoring shopping.

So this is not something between a business decision that could have some other implications more than -- that has to do with technology, but it's not a consequence of technology. It's a consequence of a business strategy. So this is to give more color on AI traffic.

Next question is from Aleksandra Arsova, Equita.

Some follow-up questions on my end. So on Money Group, you mentioned that you increased the stake slightly. So maybe some, let's say, some color on the reason behind this and if it still remains a financial investment rather than a strategic one. The second one is on M&A. Again, you said that you're keeping, of course, leverage under control and dividend and everything also to maybe take advantage of any opportunities on the M&A side. So just to have an idea what kind of target size and firepower you are willing to put into this in the coming quarters?

And then the last one, maybe a more qualitative one, more than ones during the conference call, you told that maybe in the BPO, there were some clients switching to Moltiply vis-a-vis some of your competitors. And also the organic growth we saw in the Mavriq division in insurance, but also in other products is definitely higher than the, I don't know, the average premium in insurance in car insurance. So I was wondering how the market shares are moving there if you are taking some market share over your competitors in Italy and also abroad?

So the money stake remains financial investment. We increased it from 8-point-something percent to 10% at the end of the year because for you that live in Italy, those of you that live in Italy will remember, there was a lot of talk about changing the taxation of participations in companies. Historically, the capital gains on participations held by a company were tax exempt, full participation exemption. And then to find some tax money, the government started saying that the requirement to have this exemption would be to have a participation of 10%. And we actually passed the draft of the law saying that participations were exempt on both capital gains and dividends if they were of at least 10%. We were at 8.5%.

So we thought it's not far and money is trading at still an attractive price. And so we decided to get to the 10%. Then at the very end, like two days before the end of the year or very close to the end of the year, but we had already done this. They changed the law and they put the threshold finally at 5%. So this was not needed. But this is the reasoning we have done.

And so we still see there as a financial investment, and this is the explanation of increase. Then of course, we see our stock price. I mean, I cannot maybe judge, but we see a lot of companies, including many as having very depressed stock prices despite having business models that we think are not particularly at risk. So it's a tempting investment, let's say. But we already have a significant stake, and it's a financial investment.

In terms of M&A, I think. We can look at things of the size of what we did in the past. So from medium, small to more sizable depending on the timing. And we'll be a bit opportunistic. We are very busy working on our businesses. We are busy working on integrating the international assets, in particular Verivox. We are busy delivering on AI, both in BPO and within Mavriq. So there are many things to do. But if we have the right opportunity at the right time, we will consider it. And again, the size could be up to what we did in the past, I would say. Then for the BPO clients, et cetera, I think Alessandro is the only one that can answer.

Yes. And just a small comment to say that on M&A that as you have seen, I mean, Marco explained very well before, the capital allocation synergy that kind of went away when we started having very significant opportunities also on the Mavriq side, opportunities that we have captured, and we are very happy to have captured them. But we have continued on the BPO side to do small bolt-on acquisitions.

We still have a pipeline there. I mean it's a small things that to me, I would not even consider them inorganic growth. They are more like investing in a product and deciding that it's best instead of developing it in-house to, to just get it on the market or a number of contracts. I mean these are things that we have a pipeline there, and we continue to do it. These are small ones. Then obviously, we would also have opportunity on the larger opportunities, but this is where all the things that Marco finished saying are true. And so we are focusing on AI and on the integrations and the efficiencies and -- but we will still be very, very tactical. And if good things appear on both sides, then we'll see if we can consider them.

The market share, yes, we -- we do track -- okay, first of all, saying that we will be able to capture volumes from a competitor is a sensitive information. So I cannot give too much color on this. But let me say, I mean, differently from maybe the Mavriq side here, the competition is focused on single clients, right? And it's a step effect. It's not something like it happens slowly.

What happens is that the client might take the decision that it will increase volumes to you. And then basically, as you start building the capacity, it will start giving it to you. We first build some capacity, it will give it to you and so on. So there are players in the market that try to treat banking clients as cash cows, trying to leverage the stickiness of clients.

And the reality is that the stickiness of clients is such up to a point, Aleksandra. So -- and you talk to banks every day, and you can imagine what I'm referring to. So there are points where banks get set up of being treated as cash cows and they start looking at opportunities elsewhere.

This is good news and bad news on the other side, it means that there is a limit to pricing power, obviously, and you can exercise it for a bit, but it's not really the big leverage here. The big leverage here is providing better services at a more competitive price, thanks to technology, is endearing your customers to -- thanks to the quality of the things you do and avoiding to mess up.

[Operator Instructions] Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you, and thanks, everybody, for participating to this call. And -- as always, we are available for one-on-one, if you have any follow-up questions or anything. .

Yes. Thank you. We've given you more information to digest at this time. So we'll be happy for any follow-up in discussions and the things we've written about AI, we'll be happy to discuss them with you. So thanks again and see you next time. .

Thank you. Bye-bye. .

Ladies and gentleman thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.

This is the Chorus Call conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the presentation of Moltiply Group Third Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marco Pescarmona, Chairman of Moltiply Group; and Mr. Alessandro Fracassi, CEO of Moltiply Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you. This is Marco Pescarmona. And by the way, Francesco, our CFO, is traveling, so he's not able to participate today and we will rely as usual on the presentation that was published on our website, and we'll start from Page 18 of the document and look at the results of the first 9 months. In the first 9 months, the results are quite strong. Of course, revenues are EUR 467.1 million, up 45.4% year-on-year. The EBITDA in the 9 months is EUR 120.8 million, and that's up 42.4% year-on-year. And it corresponds to an EBITDA margin of 25.9%, which compares to the 26.4% of the previous year. And the EBIT is in the 9 months, EUR 75.5 million. That's up 54% year-on-year.

And finally, net income is EUR 38.6 million which is up 25.8% year-on-year. Of course, these numbers exclude discontinued operations, which means the small regulated entities that we used to add that is in the process of being sold. It's very tiny. And if we move to Page 19 with the Q3 highlights, we can see that there are -- the results are very much as we expected a continuation of the performance of Q2. So revenues for Q3 '25, EUR 165.4 million. That's up 55.3% year-over-year. EBITDA is EUR 43.5 million, that's up 52.2% year-on-year.

And by the way, with an EBITDA margin of 26.3% which compares to 26.8% of Q3 of the last year. EBIT is EUR 26.8 million. That's up 60.9% year-on-year and net income is EUR 16.3 million, which is up 64.2% year-on-year. The important thing that you all already know to point out, if we look at the quarter, for the quarter, the year-on-year comparison benefits from the inclusion of Verivox in Germany in the consolidation area.

And so there is not only the numbers solid organic growth, but there is also this enlargement of the consolidation area, which started in Q2, and that's the reason why we said this year rather than focus on year-on-year growth, it's better to look sequentially an evolution because the change of the enlargement of the consolidation area is really quite significant.

If we want to go into more detail on the division -- of the divisions. On Page 20, we have some details of Mavriq, which is our broking division. Mavriq revenues are EUR 268.2 million, that's up 70.8% year-on-year in the 9 months. EBITDA is EUR 78.1 million, which is up 68.8% compared to the previous year. And we also noticed that EBITDA margin is 29.1%, which is not so far from the 29.5% of the previous year despite the inclusion of Verivox in the consolidation area, which means that the EBITDA margin of the traditional perimeter improved in a significant way.

And the EBIT is EUR 54.5 million in the 9 months, that's up 81% year-on-year. It's important to keep in mind, however, that the EBIT figures don't include for now any amortization of intangible asset that will result from the purchase price allocation of Verivox. So we still have a provisional goodwill and probably by the end of the year, we will allocate this goodwill and some of it will be allocated and intangible assets such as software or trade [indiscernible] that are subject to amortization and you'll see all that impact concentrated in the fourth quarter of the year.

If we go to Page 21, we have the Q3 financials of Mavriq, the effect is even stronger. Revenue was almost double. So the EUR 103.2 million, which is up 91.8% year-on-year. Again, Verivox is a very big object. So this makes a significant impact even if we still -- we will also be significant organic growth. EBITDA is EUR 30 million in Q3. That's up 78.9% year-on-year. The EBITDA margin is 29% in Q3. That compares to 31.1% in Q3 of the previous year. And the EBIT is EUR 21.3 million. That's up 86.8% year-on-year.

In terms of comments on the business, there are no particular news. I mean, it's we did strongly even from an organic point of view in all different businesses with the exception -- notable exception of e-commerce price comparison, which continues to suffer from basically the competition of Google, which is -- they're under investigation for noncompliance with the DMA but no decision has been issued yet. And on top of the organic growth, there is the enlargement of the consolidation area, which again prompts us to look at things more or less sequential than on a year-to-year basis because it's -- the change is too big change.

For the coming months, we can expect foreseeable evolution, of course. One is there will be likely a slowdown in mortgage demand, especially for mortgages in Italy because the mortgages tend to be let's say, not seasonal, like are concentrated in periods when interest rates go down, and then may disappear or will slow down a lot for a while and then come back again when interest rates move. So we had a favorable environment for mortgages and that's slowing. On -- so this is on the less favorable side, even if the real estate market remains strong. So it out it's mostly are mortgage effect here.

And on the other hand, we see a moderate recovery in energy demand in Germany, especially compared to the first part of the year. So savings available to consumers in Germany that decide to switch energy providers are better than they used to be a few months ago. So this is a positive, even if we still have to see the entire peak season, so it's still a bit on the side. And for the rest, the other markets are developing continuity. There is nothing new to report. And with this, I'm done with the update on Mavriq, and I hand it over to Alessandro for BPO.

Yes. Thanks, Marco, and good afternoon, everyone. Good morning for our friends in the States. We're on Page 23. As you see, the 9 months financials for the Moltiply BPO&Tech division are strong. We grew 21.2% year-on-year from EUR 164 million to EUR 198.8 million, and EBITDA grew from EUR 38.5 million to EUR 42.6 million. That's a growth year-on-year of 10.7%. This different growth, which is also reflected in a change in the EBITDA margin is basically connected to, as you all know, because I've explained it quite some time this year, the impact of the new law on notary fees.

So we have, obviously, in these results, a significant percentage of para-notary activities. And as you know, we had an increase in prices for the services of notaries which did not impact our absolute margin, but it did impact our percentage margins. So there is a lot -- this dilution effect if you look at the EBITDA percentage relative to revenues. But the growth, which is at least 70% of this growth is organic.

So I think it's a significant good performance in the 9 months, completely in line with what we expected and what we communicated. So we keep this double-digit growth, which is obviously, our long-term target. Looking at EBIT, also here, you see that now the trends of EBITDA and EBIT in terms of growth are very similar and we grew 11.2% year-on-year from 18.9% to 21.0%. And the EBIT margin also here, obviously, you have the dilution effect, went down from 11.5% to 10.6%.

Relatively -- if we go to the next page, we can see the third quarter results. The third quarter has actually been a little better than the second quarter. And in fact, the impact on the overall year and the 9 months performance has been a little improvement. The growth in revenues 18.0% year-on-year. The growth in EBITDA margin is 14.3%. And basically, here, you would have had also a double-digit growth even if you just kept the organic piece of it. So the EBITDA grew EUR 11.8 million to EUR 13.5 million, again, 14.3% year-on-year growth.

EBITDA margin. Again, we have the same dilution effect. 22.4% down to 21.7%. The EBIT margin in the third quarter grew 4.8% from EUR 5.3 million to EUR 5.5 million that is a growth of 4.8%. The -- basically the comments as always in -- when we're talking in the out quarters are reasonably short. But the reality is there is not a lot to comment, meaning that basically what we told you at the end of August, beginning of September in terms of the trends, they're very similar.

The growth is basically driven by mortgages, by the lease business line and also wealth is doing well. although the growth of wealth is connected to a significant and important project on the IT part. So that will -- is not really -- there will not be a significant repetition of that in the next year. And instead, we are seeing obviously a normalization, as we have mentioned a lot of times of claims and real estate. So we expect this growth to continue. Now in the coming quarters, quarter 4 was exceptionally good last year. You might remember, it kind of even turned here around.

So we see how we will compare just looking at Q4, but the trends that we discussed basically continue. What Marco said about slowing down in remortgages will impact also the BPO division, specifically with para-notary activities that I just finished mentioning. So there will be a little bit of that. But or the rest of the trends are generally being positive and in line with what we told you. We keep working, obviously, on the processing efficiency.

And as you all know, technology is playing a more and more significant role in increasing efficiency. And obviously, we will be -- this will be the name of the game looking forward in the next quarter and in the next years. And I think this basically ends my comments. And obviously, I'm very happy to take questions. But before that, let me pass it back to Marco with comments on the net financial positions.

Thank you, Alessandro. And let's finish with a couple of words on net financial position on Page 27. Here, the statutory net financial position is negative EUR 455 million. That's an improvement to the negative for EUR 467 million of June 30, or the EUR 515 million of March 31. And basically, this is -- the improvement is benefit from the cash generation of the business. Just a reminder, we spent some -- we did 2 transactions in Q3, one which is neutral on net financial position, which is the acquisition of the large majority of the remaining stake of Lercari. Basically, we bought the majority of that stake paying cash. Plus we have a prudent call on the residual portion, which I think is 12%.

And -- but the amount of the cash outflow plus the new liability is -- corresponds basically to -- ballpark to the liability that we had already recognized. So this is neutral on the net financial position. What is not neutral is the fact that we acquired -- also the entire minority in our company, with a company with a third-party shareholder that was providing para-notary services and this is an agreement to acquire that for a consideration of EUR 15 million, of which EUR 8 million were immediately paid. So this affected the net financial position, and that's a first point. The second point is the kind of adjustment net financial position, including the value of the MONY shares. That's basically stable year-on-year because the stock price of MONY went down. And this is not so relevant because for the majority of the banks now we have like a custom-made definition, which doesn't take this into account. But still from our point of view, it's an interesting parameter to look at, and we still have a couple of like legacy loans that look at like net financial position, including MONY.

And so with this, again, we are a 355 million. Clearly, you do the multiples our net financial position already is below 3x EBITDA, the statutory work and the, let's say, the adjusted one would be a bit more than 2x of EBITDA. And so we are in comfortable situation. And also, we are benefiting from reduced rates thanks to this lower net financial position more favorable rate on our financing. With this, we are finished with the comments and we can open it to comments. So operator, please, you can open the floor to questions.

[Operator Instructions] First question is from Gabriele Venturi, Banca Akros.

Three questions on my side. First one, we have seen recent rulings awarding significant claims to other price comparison platform in Germany against Google and do you see any positive reduction or increase the visibility for your case against Google?

Second one, following last week, it was on Azimut new banking project. Will you share your view on any potential implication for the wealth segment within your BPO division?

And the last one, could you provide more color on the margin evolution within the Mavriq division and how Verivox profitability is progressing post the consolidation?

Okay. I will take the first and the third question and Alessandro, of course, will handle the second. Regarding the news about -- from Germany, just as a refresher, basically idealo is a smaller price comparison websites as called the success in the German court being awarded the image is exactly for the same thing that we are pursuing against Google. So basically, the growth in Germany, from what we know, confirm the -- that of course, the abuse of dominant position is proven, but this court confirmed not only relied on the proven abuse, but also confirmed that the abuse continued after 2017. And this is how we understand it.

And so in terms of the fact that there were damages and in particular, the use continued was very favorable to the claimants. In terms of the award, the amount is nice, but it is significantly lower than the original claim because the original claim was for more than EUR 3 billion and the awards was to allow something below EUR 500 million. And on one side, I think this is a bit disappointing. On the other side, in Germany today, they just explained to me that the largest claim ever awarded in Germany for a similar situation was EUR 60 million.

So this time, they awarded 8x the largest claim ever awarded in Germany. So it was also a big departure from past very conservative approach by German judges on the quantification of the claims, this concept of prudence and so on. So I don't know, I think it's like done to be favorable to companies in general. So I think the very good news is the general win on the infringement and the continuation of the infringement on the amounts, we hope that we don't get 14% of our ask. We get significantly more.

It's also important to point out that there are other cases that are being ruled these days. And so far, the rulings have been confirming the infringement and the fact that damages are due. So I think it's again good news. This will reinforce the conviction of judges that the [ quantum ] will depend on the work of the local experts. And again, we hope to get more than the percentage that they got. And the other question about the margins of the Mavriq division, the margins were slightly down year-on-year, especially if you look at the single quarter.

But you have to keep in mind that we are now consolidating Verivox, which is a very large entity that has lower EBITDA margin than our other businesses. So the way you should read the margin evolution is we have a significant margin expansion in everything I mean, not everything because like the price comparison goes down in terms of margins, but in almost everything, plus a big dilution from a large object like Verivox, where the EBITDA margin is significantly lower than the rest of the division. So this is how to read it, this is done.

Okay. Relative to the T&D project, obviously, here I have to be a little careful as we're talking about the client in a delicate situation. Well, I mentioned this project last -- when we were, in September, discussing the half year results as I was looking forward. And I mentioned that as something that I still didn't know which way it would go. because obviously, this means the project is basically splitting Azimut in 2. And I know and like the Federal scope as of today as we are providing significant services to Azimut. And obviously, that could be an opportunity, given the fact that the scope of the new bank, becoming a bank, it will increase the number of services that they need.

But still, I'm not in the position to say that we will necessarily continue to be offering services to them. And so the way to look -- as a Moltiply shareholder, the way to look at the news of delays in the launch of T&B kind of connected to what's going on in Azimut right now, it is conceptually neutral looking at the status quo. I mean we will continue to provide the services if the company remains with the current perimeter, if it will split and when it will split some months ahead, I don't know how it will work. And obviously, I'll be explaining to our shareholders and to the market in general, what the expectations are.

Today, this is basically the news is that this thing is being pushed forward. And actually, things about remediation of the things that need to be done. They were not -- if you look -- were not many comments of Bank of Italy relative to the operating model. It was more about the overall governance. And so we -- let's say, we are not part of the problem. possibly in the next weeks and months, we will be part of the solution. So relatively speaking, this is, as I said, a delicate moment for Azimut, but I don't think there should be any read across to us, definitely not something negative on us because of this.

Next question is from Aleksandra Arsova, Equita.

A couple on my end. The first one is maybe a little bit early, but just the sentiment you have on 2026, so how you will enter the year, considering what you already told us about overall trends, a little bit decelerating mortgages, overall positive trend for most of the other divisions. So I was wondering, is it reasonable to assume a sort of normalized growth rates for the BPO in mid-single-digit range for revenues and maybe high single-digit range for the Mavriq Broking division. This is the first one.

And the second one is a follow-up on the, let's say, the Google issue. So maybe do you have any clue idea of what could be the timing of the Italian courts to go on with the case? So just to understand whether we have a time frame for this issue?

And also connected to what you were mentioning before on your expectation to get maybe even more than the amount got from idealo. So if I remember correctly, both you and idealo are requested for roughly EUR 3 billion in damages, maybe idealo a little bit more, but broadly EUR 3 billion. So just to understand better the underlying. So as far as you know, the period covering these damages is the same for you and that for idealo. And so if you can maybe remind us of how you calculated or estimated this EUR 3 billion damages.

Okay. Well, in terms of sentiment, I mean, it's a bit too early to tell. We have now a very diversified business. We have grown pretty well in recent years. And I mean it's really hard to comment on whether the specific figures you quoted are appropriate or not because we don't give guidance. In general, I would say we tend to have analyst estimates that tend to be a bit on the conservative side for the future. So we tend to do a bit better. I would look at to the extent that it is possible to the past to have an idea to what happened in the last couple of years, that's easier for BPO for broking there is the issue of Verivox.

And if we do well, we will be able to deliver performance by being more effective with Verivox. This will be an important driver. Of course, the jury is out to see if we are able to deliver or not. But that's potentially for the next couple of years for broking a very relevant source of performance. But again, even in terms of -- even giving some vague indications, we are not ready for that. We will try to do it with the full year results.

Marc, if I can just add one thing on the BPO. Aleksandra, correctly, you were referring to something like normalized. But I really want to stress out is we will also be clear when you will see the different divisions when we -- the impact of the different business lines when we give the full picture with the full year results. But it's true that we have a very strong -- we had a very, very strong performance on mortgages.

But I think you should not discount that there was really a very significant drawback on claims and on real estate because of, on one side, the normalization of statistical normalization of what has happened in '23 and '24. So when you look at '26, obviously, there will not be anymore this normalization because the whole of '25 has been without Ecobonus and the whole of '25 has been with basically normal weather events.

And then as you know, one of the things that at a certain point, we should start seeing some impact instead is the new law on natural catastrophes. So as you know, the full impact of the law is basically at the end of the year, meaning that everybody has to take on insurance. So I think that the first year, where we will see -- we'll start seeing some impact for BPO is -- for our claim BPO is 2026. So keeping still our qualitative comments, I just wanted to make sure that this is what you're looking at. So as Marco said, probably looking at the past is the best way to see what we can be doing in '26.

And in terms of the timing of the Italian court for the claim, Italian courts are normally take 2 to 3 years to reach decisions. We have no visibility of the exact timing. And I don't think we will be able to provide updates throughout the process. I think before hearing anything about -- from us about outcomes, you will hear a lot of decisions of other -- in other jurisdictions. By the way, all these decisions, if they continue to be favorable to the claimants, we just, I think, reinforce the conviction of our judges. So I mean, don't expect anything in terms of amounts, decisions or anything at least for all of '26. We might have some -- our own feelings, but until we have a judgment, it's all up in the air. We don't know. It could be nothing. It could be a lot of money. Until we have a decision, we are in the dark, let's say.

Okay. And maybe the last one on how you calculated the EUR 3 billion and the number of.

Yes. It's difficult, in fact, to make comparisons between the claims of different countries or different players for a number of reasons. One is exactly how the claim is structured for what you are claiming damages if it's for a certain period, for a longer period and so on. And also, these damages, the contract that we are discussing, the abusive combat that have been observed also have permanent effects. So if I -- I don't know, like if I crush your end, then maybe you don't lose the end, but you'll not be able to manipulate things in the future, and that's a permanent damage.

And this is the same, once a player that has a very strong market position in a market with tipping network effect becomes #2, they will not -- they will be a little bit crippled compared to how they were before. So part of the damages is also that, depending on how you phrase it and so on, it could be done in a way or another. So I would say from what I read, the idealo claim is possibly doesn't have the terminal value, stops at a certain point in time. I don't know what kind of assessment they did on permanent effects or if they reserved the right to do a further claim. So I mean it's really hard to do a comparison.

Idealo is significantly bigger than [indiscernible]. This is important to know. But again, this doesn't mean much. There is a company in Sweden that made a claim just like a couple of weeks ago of EUR 7 billion. So I mean, our claim is well grounded. It's based on econometric models based on -- all these things are done with counterfactual scenarios. So the way it works, this is very general in terms of concept. When you have these abusive conducts, the way you determine the damages is by determining -- finding a counterfactual scenario. Normally, there can only be one counterfactual scenario. This is something that typically the court has to decide -- so exactly what is the counterfactual scenario.

And then in this counterfactual scenario, you have to estimate the economic performance that reasonably you could have achieved. And then the damage is the difference between your actual economic performance and the economic performance in the counterfactual. And then, of course, there is this issue of the permanent component that also has to be determined. It's a bit like a concept of terminal value. This makes sense only if there are externalities and so on, which in our case, we think are very strong. But these are the generic concept, but it's very difficult to make comparisons.

Next question is a follow-up from Aleksandra Arsova, Equita.

Since we have a little bit of time, maybe a more general one on the businesses in France and Spain and the Netherlands. So in past occasions, you mentioned the work you were doing apart from the operating margins was on the top line and on marketing cost on the supply side. So maybe an update on the aspects on LeLynx, Rastreator and Pricewise.

I think we are, in general, very happy of the work that we have done, especially in Spain and France. The Netherlands is a more recent acquisition. So it's still more -- it's a bit more work in progress. I think the key aspect is the fact that we have put in place strong management teams with more and more autonomy. The teams -- the new teams, new people, part existing people because we also have strong people in several cases from the original teams. But basically, thanks to the management teams, these companies are delivering strong performance and with a good level of autonomy now.

And in the Netherlands, we just appointed a new CEO. So we are a couple of years behind in terms of this process. But this is a very important process because it accelerates any knowledge transfer that we might be doing because it improves the execution. First, this improves the execution basically. And then -- and initially, the execution is more like asking as -- as asking them to do things that we think could be beneficial. But then after the easy things are done, the execution will be local innovations or doing things that have to do more with partners or other things that are inherently local.

And with good things, we are in very, very safe hands. And this also allows our core leadership team from Alessio to his closest team to concentrate more attention on Germany because in Germany, we have a very big opportunity. But of course, it's a big organization. And we don't want to -- we want to do a good job, let's say. And so the strong teams in the different countries are delivering. And also, they are freeing up resources so that we can focus more on Germany. So it's -- we are very happy with the overall situation.

Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time.

Okay. Let us make 2 final comments. One, I understand some of the questions you are asking. I mean we will be thinking about how to represent the business in a possibly slightly different way from next year in terms of giving maybe more visibility on the international part and maybe aggregating things in Italy because it no longer makes sense on the Mavriq side, possibly given the relative sizes of the different things to talk about mortgage broking in Italy, insurance broking in Italy and then like one big object, which is international markets.

This is with 2/3 of the stuff coming from international, not exactly representative. So we'll have to think about it. And maybe also on BPO, how we aggregate things, we think a little bit exactly the design of our business lines. So this is first comment.

And second comment, which is a bit stupid, but we -- you saw the stock price on Friday going down like 5%, et cetera, and we got feedback from a couple of people that maybe it was because we had moved the call to another day and what could this imply, et cetera. But basically, this implies that I was going to the seaside and Alessandro that Dennis mentioned, we couldn't match the 2 things together. So I mean, in our case, then we suggest that you don't read too much into the fact that we move a call or anything. It's -- yes, it's really everything for the long term.

And the normal explanation is normally the easiest, let's say, just to clarify that because we found it very funny that because we moved the call, the stock price will go down because maybe you know what could this mean? It meant, again, we had other things to do and we just couldn't make it work. So with this comment, I think we have finished -- thank you for participating to our call. And as always, we are available for one-on-ones. And otherwise, we'll talk to you at the next call. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. [ God speed. ] Bye.

Bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your telephones.

Good afternoon. This is the conference call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the presentation of Moltiply Group First Half 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marco Pescarmona, Chairman; Mr. Alessandro Fracassi, CEO; and Mr. Francesco Masciandaro, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everybody. This is Marco. We will rely as usual on the document on -- present on our website and we will jump straight to Page 18 of the presentation with the H1 highlights.

And in the first half of 2025, the group posted revenues of EUR 301 million -- EUR 302 million, that's up around 40% year-on-year, and this counts for 55% from Mavriq from the Broking division and 45% from the Moltiply BPO & Tech division.

In terms of EBITDA, it's EUR 77 million in the first half, which is up 37.5% year-on-year, and it comes for 62% from Mavriq and 38% from the BPO part. EBIT is EUR 49 million, that's up 50% year-on-year and this comes for 68% from Mavriq and 32% from BPO.

In terms of the faster development of the EBIT compared to the EBITDA, this is due to the fact that we finished amortizing some of the PPA coming from the 2,000 acquisitions. And we have not started yet. We will do it at the end of the year. So it will be visible, I think, in the first -- in the last quarter. We have not started yet amortizing the assets from the PPA of Verivox, which will anyway sizable given the size of the transaction.

But again, we think it's better to understand the current performance, the actual performance of the business to focus more on the EBITDA because of this or at least normalize the EBIT for the PPA effect. The net income is EUR 22 million in the first half of '25, which is up 7% compared to 24% and the reason why the net income doesn't follow the same strong growth of the other figures is that, first of all, we have higher interest also because when we closed -- when we refinanced the old debt, we had to recognize some costs linked to the closing of the old debt.

And also, more importantly, we have almost EUR 10 million of adjustments of put and call liabilities for minorities on some businesses that are performing quite well. One of this is, for instance, Switcho, but there are other things, and these are recognized in the income statement.

The only case when we were not recognizing in the income statement, the adjustment of the put and call liabilities was Lercari, which had a different treatment. Now all the future put and call liabilities, you see them through the income statement.

Looking at the quarter alone on Page 19. In the quarter, revenues are EUR 169 million, up 55% year-on-year. That's 58% from Mavriq and 42% from Moltiply BPO & Tech. Here, you remember, we are consolidating Verivox from an income point of view from the beginning of Q2. So this benefits also of the consolidation of Verivox. EBITDA is EUR 42 million in the second quarter, that's up 46% year-on-year. And it comes 64% from Mavriq and 36% from Moltiply BPO & Tech.

EBIT is up 60%. It's same explanation as before of why -- as to why it's growing faster than EBITDA. And then net income also same story. EBITDA adjustment of the put and call the calculations with the half year when we knew we were able to better assess the performance of our businesses.

Looking at Mavriq alone, Mavriq -- on Page 20. Mavriq in the first half as revenues of EUR 165 million, that's up 60% year-on-year. EBITDA of EUR 48 million. That's up 62% year-on-year, and EBIT of EUR 33 million, up 75% year-on-year.

You see the margins in the first half are expanding in terms of EBITDA. Then if we look at the second quarter, we see it's -- the margins are instead declining because we are consolidating Verivox, which is quite large and has margins that are significantly lower than our average.

In the second quarter of the year, we have revenues of EUR 98 million, that's up 88% year-on-year and an EBITDA of EUR 27 million from Mavriq that's up 79%. And you see the EBITDA margin is 27.4% in Q2 '25 compared to 28.8% in Q2 '24 and so in the first half, the EBITDA margin was expanding, in the second quarter it's declining.

This is basically the impact of the dilution of Verivox and we are super happy of the Verivox acquisition. The only bit is that we were starting to show, as we have explained many times an expansion of the EBITDA margins of Mavriq on an organic basis, and this will be masked by this big dilution from Verivox.

And I would say this is what we have to say in terms of figures, in terms of comments on outlook, well, we had very, very strong growth in the first half, both organic and also because of the consolidation of Verivox.

In terms of comments on the different businesses in Italy, we had credit broking that continued to grow. Growth was quite good also in Q2, but slower than in Q1 as the mortgage market basically peaked at the beginning of '25 and then it's still growing, but slower.

Also the remortgages where the peak demand for remortgages was also concentrated at the beginning of the year. Insurance broking is a much more stable business. So it continues to grow in a very nice way, but at a steady rate. And it's been growing this year also with stable insurance premiums, so without inflation in prices of insurance.

Telco and energy comparison. Here, we had a good performance, strong performance, I would say. But it's benefiting, this is mainly because of the acquisition of Switcho, which was done at the end of Q2 of '24, so until now, it is -- we are benefiting from the change in the consolidation area. It's not only that we acquire Switcho, but also that we were able to combine it with our existing energy business -- Energy & Telco business and this, of course, had some synergies.

Finally, e-commerce price comparison, which is the area where we have been suffering a little bit or at least feeling some pressure is stable year-on-year in terms of revenues with margins slightly down. And no particular news. We continue to have some pressure on the results, not catastrophic as we have seen from the comments, but pressure, yes.

And we are looking forward to a decision by the European Commission on the enforcement of the DMA, which will hopefully open up the market and translate into growth for us.

In terms of our international businesses, we have strong growth on a like-for-like basis, driven by Spain and also by France. Netherlands is doing okay, but it's mainly in Energy business and Energy in the Netherlands as well as in Germany is not being a strong market. Here, one update is that we have a new local COO and that will allow us to move faster and do more things, and it's -- we think we have a good opportunity there as well.

In Q2 '25, we acquired -- actually a few days earlier, but we acquired Verivox and thanks to this acquisition now, more than half of Mavriq's revenues are from outside of Italy, and the outlook is that weight of the international part will possibly even increase as things evolve.

Now also, if we look at the group, especially if you look at the foreign business, the foreign business is mainly insurance and energy. We are doing credit, but we are not doing too much in terms of credit in international markets. Of course, we will develop that as well. But -- so it's basically, our Mavriq division is very diversified, both now in terms of geographies and products.

And we think that's positive because we can go through all sorts of markets with good stability overall. And in Germany, with Verivox, Verivox had, let's say, solid performance, but weaker than -- so we were down compared to the previous year. And this is in a situation or because of a weaker energy market, even if we start to see some improvements very recently.

By the way, we had in our Q1 estimates, and earn-out liability of EUR 15 million for Verivox. We reduced it to EUR 10 million in our current estimates. And of course, this could be a different figure because it's very difficult to know now for a business that has a peak season that is very concentrated in the last quarter, what the end of year results will be. But so far, this is the adjustment that we have made.

We have started working together with the team in Verivox. This is really the priority of Mavriq. And we think we are happy of the acquisition. We think it's a very interesting market, and we are working.

Finally, in terms of outlook, basically, we have had a big change from Q1 to Q2 in the consolidation area and the most reasonable outlook for now is the following quarters will be a continuation of what we have seen in Q2 in terms of numbers, let's say, of course, adjusting for seasonality.

So for instance, typically, Q4 is a stronger quarter, possibly significantly stronger than Q3, but it's easier to make a comparison now and start looking at things and building expectations based on what we have done than on the previous year because of this big change in the consolidation area.

And with this, we are finished with the comments on Mavriq and I hand it over to Alessandro for BPO & Tech.

Yes. Thank you, Marco, and good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, if you are on the other side of the ocean. And we are on Page 23. So our H1 financials for the Moltiply BPO & Tech divisions we saw a growth of year-on-year in the first half of 22.6%, growing from EUR 111.4 million of last year to EUR 136.7 million of this year.

The EBITDA growth is 10%, raising from EUR 26.5 million last year to EUR 29.1 million in 2025. There was a slight reduction in the EBITDA margin in terms of percentage from 23.7% to 21.3%. This is mainly because if we have to comment the difference in the growth of revenues, which, as you can see, it's very strong and in EBITDA, which, again, I believe it's still strong, but it's half of it. And it's due to the dilution effect on percentage margin that we have for the growth of the paranotary business connected to the refinancing.

I have always been commenting about this in the past, but as I mentioned at the beginning, basically at the end of last year, it is currently not only we have the mix effect, but here, we have a stronger effect because there is also a price effect on the notaries because of the new law on the so-called for compensation.

So the average ticket of refinancing for -- in terms of notary fees has grown very significantly, while our margin on the fees that we charge to the banks has remained in euro terms, stable. So that has basically created a dilution effect on our margin. Again, these are all variable costs. So there is nothing bad about this.

No negative read in this factor. But obviously, this mix effect now is particularly significant as the mortgage business and the paranotary mortgage business is also growing very fast. For the EBIT, we have a growth from 13.5 million to EUR 15.5 million. That's a 15.4% growth rate year-on-year. Here, the growth -- and the EBIT margin also shrinks a little bit from 12.1% to 11.4%. The growth here is stronger at an EBIT level than an EBITDA level for the same reasons that Marco commented at a group level that some of the acquisition of 2020 are now getting finished their amortization phase.

So if we now focus on Page 24 on the Q2 financials, we see, again, a growth in revenues that is a strong 25.3%, moving from EUR 56.3 million to EUR 70.5 million in Q2 2025 relative to the year before. The EBITDA shows a growth of 9% growing from EUR 13.8 million to EUR 15 million.

The margins, again, for the reason that I commented on the semester results shrink a little bit from 24.4% to 21.3%. Again, no negative news here in our opinion. The EBIT grows from EUR 7 million to EUR 8.1 million in the quarter. That's a 15.5% growth year-on-year. And in terms of marginality at the net income level, we basically have the same numbers that we have in the semester level. So we go down from 12.5% to 11.5% in terms of percentage margin. So now that closes basically the quantitative part.

Let's get into the comments. Again, I believe these are very positive results. We have achieved a very strong growth in revenues compared to last year. And also, the EBITDA remains in double-digit growth. And this is mainly -- more than 70% of the growth is organic. We -- the part of the growth that is not organic is coming from our business connected to services in the retirement part, the Mia Pensione, the one that we acquired at the end of 2024.

And then there is also a little bit from the acquisition of Evolve, but a very, very small EBITDA contribution. The performance is driven basically by mortgages, lease, which is always a strong contribution and also the wealth business line. Instead, obviously, the claims and the real estate have showed as expected, a gradual normalization after extraordinary peaks of the previous year.

If we -- let me just give the outlook for the overall in the division. Obviously, there will still be various trends and differentiated trends among the business lines. But I think it's reasonable to expect that this -- the positive performance year-on-year that we saw in the first semester will continue also in the second half of the year. Obviously, net of usual seasonal factors. So the presence of August, for example, in the second -- in the third quarter.

So let's dig a little bit more into the different business lines. Moltiply mortgages is obviously one of the growth engines, and this will continue. We have reasonable visibility on the fact that it's continuing. Obviously, it will not be forever, but let's say, for the rest of -- for the remainder of the year. And here, the growth is both in the paranotary business.

I've already commented a lot, but also in some of the new clients that we acquired in previous year, now they are becoming more and more confident in extending credit also through our support. And so they are increasing their budgets and also the results. So we remain positive here. Instead, for Moltiply real estate, we have seen, obviously, at this point at the end of the Ecobonus incentives, and we are seeing a growing business in the real estate valuations also because we acquired new customers and the market is growing, but this growth will not be sufficient to compensate the other effect.

But the second part of the year will be better than the first part. In the real estate business, we also report the business that it's cadastral services NPL servicer and this part also instead is, let's say, cyclically weak, and so it's not contributing positively to the growth of this business line.

Considering this, we are both looking at new forms of growth, new services that we can offer here, but we are also looking at some opportunities to rationalize the cost base. We have already started, will continue in the remaining part of the year. We're not worried, but it's good discipline to obviously have the costs and revenue trends try to go in parallel.

Moltiply loans had a good performance. Actually, it's stable in terms of revenues, but margins are actually a little increasing. Because of some mix effects, we are substituting contracts that had lower margin with contracts that have better margins. So I actually expect this to be even better in the second part of the year. But anyway, substantial stability for Moltiply loans.

Claims, we said that, obviously, both revenues and margins are decreasing. You remember that at the end of '24, we also had the closing of a lot of complex and complex claim processing, which also have very high margins. That thing is not there anymore. But we expect to have results both in terms of revenues and in terms of EBITDA higher than the one we've done in 2023.

So there is a peak in '24, but there is an underlying growth trend, and we continue to invest in efficiency of the processes and speed of the processes also because we expect next year to start seeing some of the impacts of the comps or insurance for businesses in relation to natural events. So that will bring -- we do expect to have more business. There is a little of constraint, and we have seen that when there was a peak in terms of appraisers and loss adjusters in the market.

So it's important to be able to increase capacity. This is a variable cost capacity. So there is no problem in getting ready for it. And that's one of the things that we are concentrating on. Moltiply wealth has a nice growth, and that will continue for at least the next semester. This is also connected, obviously, to good performance in the market, but also to a large IT project that we are doing for one of our main clients, and that will also go beyond 2025.

Having said that, it's also possible -- so it's a positive outlook for the next semester. We will also understand in this semester, what will be the impact on our business, on the announcement of the project that it's called the new bank that Azimut, which is our most important client in this business line as announced. As you know, with the -- in partnership with the FSI fund, and it was announced at the end of May and we still are evaluating timing and nature of the impact of this process. And actually, we still need to understand how this thing will go on. But we'll keep you posted.

Finally, Moltiply lease confirms as a very stable engine of growth contribution and revenues and EBITDA were high in H1, and we expect that to go on also in H2. By the way, we will have to focus a lot during H2 in efforts for next year as there are some new regulatory changes in the way that the -- basically taxes -- circulation taxes what in Italian we call bollo auto are going to be managed.

There are going to be differences between new cars and old cars and existing cars on how this thing gets taxed in terms of timing. So a lot of complexity and each time hear the word complexity in these businesses is actually good news for us because it means that we will have to deal with this complexity on behalf of our clients, and obviously, we get rewarded for managing this. I think this more or less ends my comments. And obviously, then I'll be available for questions.

But before that, let me hand it back to Marco for comments on the financial positions.

Thank you, Ale. So on Page 28, we have the net financial position. I would say, no particular surprise here. The reported net financial position is negative EUR 467 million. And basically, that's an improvement compared to the negative EUR 515 million at the end of the first quarter when we had already acquired and paid for Verivox.

The improvement is the effect of cash generation of the business and the fact that we did an accelerated book building for 1 million shares that many of you have seen. And the proceeds of which are fully available, in particular, for M&A, which is positive effect under our current full financing contract.

The other positive aspect of the current net financial position is that under our financing terms, basically, we go from a spread on the loan -- on the margin on the loan of 2.45% to 1.95% from the second half of the year.

So we've been able to move to a much more favorable bracket in terms of cost of financing. Then we still have the same participation in many and so net of that, we are at EUR 353 million. Just as a reminder, in the past, we had loan contracts, which consider the many shares equivalent as an adjustment as a cash-like adjustment to the net financial position.

This is not the case of the pool financing, but of course, the parameters are significantly wider. And so we are ready with the new setup as well. And something that is going to have a little bit of impact much of it expected to the net financial position is also the fact -- this is linked to BPO, maybe Alessandro will want to add something. But basically, we acquired a 40% minority in our company that was providing notary services. We paid EUR 8 million in July, and we pay -- but we already acquired it -- there is a deferred payment of EUR 7 million in July of next year.

And this was not expected because this was not contractual. This was just negotiated. But -- so we now own 100% of the company. And you see, of course, the cash outflow in the third quarter.

And secondly, in the third quarter, and this was said expected and well known. Basically, we acquired 37.9% of Lercari. You remember Lercari is company that does insurance claims where we have the founding family of 49% with put and call on the 49%. Instead of buying 49%, we ended up buying 38%, 37.9%. And the family still keeps and we keep for another 3 years there at 12% that we will acquire at the end of that period. And basically, some of the outflow plus the future liability is -- I mean it's equal to what we were expecting to pay already at the end of Q1 ballpark. So you...

Yes. Just let me comment briefly business-wise. These are both good news. And especially the second part with the Lercari family, we were able to relaunch to the partnership. We are happy to help them still as shareholders and involved in running the company.

This has been a very positive partnership in the end, a very successful investment. So we are happy that this has been the outcome, and we look for further growth in an area, as I mentioned before, claims where the opportunities are there, and they are secular opportunities given the regulatory changes that are more interesting than just commercial opportunities in other cases. Thanks, Marco.

Thank you. And I think this ends our presentation, so we can open the floor to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Gabriele Venturi from Banca Akros.

First one, if you could please clarify what Mavriq growth rate would have been without Verivox consolidation. And if you could please clarify -- if you can give us an update on when do you expect synergies and efficiencies of Verivox to get to regime?

Second one, in July and in August, we witnessed a strong mortgage market in Italy. So if you can give us some more color if you are seeing a strong momentum also for the third quarter for your business?

Last one, if you can give us more color on your Google lawsuit situation given the recent news flow about Google.

Okay. Thank you, Gabriele. I will address the first and the third, and then we will comment together I and Alex on the mortgage market. Now Mavriq, I would say, well, in the first half report, we disclosed that Verivox did EUR 34 million of revenues in the second quarter. Keep in mind that this is a business with significant seasonality with first and fourth quarter significantly stronger than second and third. But so in terms of revenues, EUR 34 million comes from Verivox.

In terms of EBITDA I -- what I could say is what we said it's weaker, you could make your estimates. But I would say, if you look at the EBITDA growth of the first quarter, which didn't have Verivox, you could expect, based on our comments, the second quarter still had significant -- very significant EBITDA growth, but lower than in the first quarter.

And in terms of when we will see the impact of the synergies and so on? Well, first of all, let's say, this is something that takes time. The contribution to performance of Verivox will change by quarter-by-quarter, based on the seasonality. So like expect normally a strong fourth quarter by market dynamics. So it depends on how the energy market is doing in Germany, especially if people can save by switching energy contracts. It is looking now better, especially in gas than a few months ago.

And finally, it depends on how we operate the company, if we are able to transfer best practices if we are able to, I don't know, improve the efficiency or effectiveness of the company. This last part will take time. So there are many things which we are working. We think it's quite promising, but it's not something we are able to do in a few months.

It's the same that in Spain and France, we are still working. So I think you'll start seeing things -- for this year, you might see a bit of the benefits but not too much of our interventions because it takes time. And -- but you might see benefits of seasonality of market dynamics, if we are lucky.

Next year, progressively, you start seeing also, hopefully, the impact of the work that we are doing. So it takes patience, I would say, to see a good portion of potential improvement, at least the short-term potential improvement you have to wait for a couple of years. And the Google lawsuit, basically, we filed. And then this is in front of an Italian court -- and there are updates, I mean this will have the normal development. We'll meet in front of a judge, we'll exchange memos.

And this will have a lot of steps before we have any visibility of a potential outcome, and we will not be able to comment on these steps because it's very difficult to read anything into them. And until we have a decision, we will not be able to say anything and the decision should come normally in an Italian court for something like this in 2, 3 years.

But we have to see. We will know better the timing when this gets up to speed. So no news and don't expect any news at least from a court for a couple of years, I would say.

In terms of the mortgage market, well, our view is that it peaked in -- but also the market info that we have seen is that it peaked in Q1, and then remains strong, but slowing down in the following months. July is normally also for us a strong month. But I don't know what data you are referring to because I don't think there is anything public, at least regarding July and August. So I don't know if Alessandro has anything to add. But by the way, July is when people close mortgages normally.

Yes. Well, let's say, apart from the news, we had given a positive outlook on mortgages, and we do it not only based on our numbers, but also based on our early signals. So obviously, it takes time before a mortgage closes. And as just -- so we see some weeks, if not months in advance, depending on the different businesses.

And it's true that normally July and, let's say, the first days of August tend to be strong in terms of closings, you can expect, for example, people to move especially during the months where it will not rain on your moving. So that's why there is normally a stronger performance in those months. But again, we continue to be positive and -- at least until the end of the year.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Aleksandra Arsova from Equita.

So four questions on my end. The first one is a follow-up on the Google lawsuit and also the compliance with the DMA. So I know it's a separate thing, the two things are separate, but if, let's say, that the remedy is proposed by the European Commission work and Google complies, do you see that the situation will increase or decrease the likelihood for you to win the lawsuit against Google and get some, let's say, damages in terms of, I mean, monetary compensation.

The second one is maybe a more broader question on the risk on your e-commerce business coming, not more -- not anymore from -- no longer from Google, but rather from the new artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT or others, I was reading that maybe in the U.S., people are starting to search for e-commerce products, not more on Google, but directly on ChatGPT or other chatbots like ChatGPT. Do you see it as a risk for Trovaprezzi? Or do you see some measures that you can take to avoid this risk or to maybe make more money from this?

Then the third one is on insurance premium in the insurance broking business. So I was wondering the growth there was strong also in the second quarter. So just any sentiment on any kind of normalization of the growth in insurance premium in the third quarter or beyond?

And the last one is maybe on the fees you got from -- you get from -- especially from banks in mortgages, both in BPO, but also in the broking business in Mavriq. So now that mortgages are definitely picking up, recovering and banks are in a very, let's say, good shape. Do you see any room for renegotiating upward the fees you get from the banks?

Okay. Thank you, Aleksandra. Let's start in order. So Google, let's -- if with the adjustments that Google will have to do with -- to comply with the DMA, we start making much more revenue and much more money in terms of profits, then potentially, yes, this could have an impact. But this is a market where Google Shopping probably has more than 90% -- well above 90% market share.

And so I think that even with the -- this is a market also with a lot of network effects. So even with very good remedies, I think it will be very difficult to go back to a situation resembling the original situation when the business started. So I would say, yes, the more -- the bigger the improvement, if there is any to the market now with hopefully, compliance of Google with the new regulation, then potentially the lower the final component of the damages, let's say, but again, because of structural reasons, I don't think it's likely to completely revert.

There will be an improvement, but Google will remain because of the network effects structurally dominant. So it will be an adjustment not a change of paradigm.

In terms of second question e-commerce and Gen AI. It's true that, particular ChatGPT, but others as well are working and then getting a lot of attention to e-commerce. So -- by the way, I would say, chat bots are actually quite good or at least make a better job than us in many cases at recommending choices.

So if you want to know, if you want to -- if you need a 5-kilo or a 7-kilo dishwasher, sorry, laundry machine, and then if you wanted, Class A, Class B, Class C, whatever, ChatGPT can give you good advice. So choosing the type of product and possibly the specific product that you want is something that I see these chat bots being able to do better and better.

What is different is, however, once you have selected a specific product, finding the very best offer and the very best offer, by the way, from a reliable provider, someone that will not -- that will deliver, that will accept returns for real and so on. So this is something that I don't see ChatGPT and others able to handle for a long while.

So I think that we could see more traffic from ChatGPT and the likes and reduce our dependency bit from Google. But we are still at the beginning of this. And there is, of course, a risk also threat of ChatGPT trying to -- you have read about that in the U.S., they tried to strike agreements not even with e-commerce merchants, but directly with the producers of the products, so that you compare et cetera and then you buy directly from Nikon or from Apple or from whatever the provider is of that product.

So of course, that will be a threat, but it's -- I think it's a stretch, especially in a market like Italy or where you have lots of small providers, able to source at very attractive prices and where you have the issue of guaranteeing the reliability of those providers, I think we still have an important role.

And again, the diversification of our customer of our traffic could be the benefit. But it's early to say the traffic we're getting from Gen AI is visible, but it's small.

Insurance premium, they are now stable. They've already been stable...

Marco -- sorry if I can comment also 1 second on this. And also, we really don't know what the behavior of the providers of the Gen AI will be in terms of tweaking what the Gen AI does. I mean the whole Google thing comes from the fact that at a certain point, Google from trying not to be evil and giving the best possible results started tweaking the results and putting new things in there and changing the model.

So as of today, Gen AI is trying to deliver the best and controlling the hallucination. But once they start thinking about how to monetize maybe these things, then the behavior is really unpredictable because it will depend on what kind of path they will go under.

So not necessarily, they will do what is the best thing for the product and they might go and diverge into something different, leveraging the fact that people believe that this is the best thing that they -- that the best intelligent answer to the question. We really don't know.

And also the work of Trovaprezzi -- the job of Trovaprezzi is a very difficult job even if it doesn't look like from the outside, but assembling the catalogs of thousands of merchants and just figuring out what is what and if it's the same product, a different product, a different size, different whatever, that's already very difficult.

So it's unlikely that this will be doable with the generic approach. And it's a really country-specific, business-specific with a lot of intelligence and customization, merchant-specific and so on.

So back third question, insurance premium. We have started seeing stability this year in general, at least in the countries that they have at the top of my mind and we have been able to grow despite no longer having the impact of the premium inflation.

And so I think that the outlook is we will continue to grow. Of course, maybe this year, we are growing but maybe a bit less than last year just because we don't have the premium inflation, but we have been able to grow in that environment, and we continue to be able, we think, to grow in that kind of environment.

In terms of fees from banks, I would say, in general, banks are printing money across the board. So hopefully, we should be able to -- we've been able to do this a little bit already, but we should be able to improve our fees or at least try to improve our fees. And hopefully, this is -- I don't know if this is happening, but maybe even for BPO, it will be easier because they're really printing money and so complaining and trying to negotiate things when we are making that much money is a bit awkward. So I think we are all happy that our clients are not under pressure, that they are doing very well, and we'll try to help them to grow and be effective with their operations.

[Operator Instructions] We now have a question from the line of Tommaso Nieddu from Kepler Chevreux.

Most of them were already answered, but I would have 2. The first one is on the performance of Spain and France. So if you -- can you please give us more color on that? And what was the contribution on the margin expansion?

And the second one, if I may, and sorry, maybe we already talked about it in the last conference call. But can you repeat us what are your thoughts on AI, in particular, on mortgage BPO, if banks could start thinking about or internalize the origination? Is it something you are concerned about or maybe perhaps this automatization of the process is just an upside for you?

Thank you. I'll start with Spain and France. Well, we do not disclose our performance for the individual countries. In Spain, we filed public annual report, but that's at the end of the year. And in France, there is no obligation in such a sense, so we don't do it. We don't do it in Germany -- we will not do it in Germany either.

So it's hard to say. To give a precise feedback, I would say Spain is the bigger of the 2 and -- where I would see the strongest performance. We don't know if it's the market, certainly, it's helping the work that we have done. So we see an improvement both in terms of top and bottom line, I would say. But we cannot go into much detail because we don't give that kind of disclosure.

Alessandro, if you want to pick up the last one.

Yes. Okay. Well, here let if we look, it really depends on what is the time frame in answering this question. First of all, we see in a lot of our businesses, AI at the same time, has a big opportunity and at the same time as a big threat. Obviously, there are some banks that are doing things with us, let's take out Gen AI for a second.

Now our -- what we have been telling banks in the last 15 years is that if you come with us, normally, you would save 50% of your cost base, right? And sometimes we were not able to do -- and still some banks have said no, or even if they said yes, they said they were not able to generate the full advantage of this because to generate a full advantage, they would have to integrate their systems with our systems, so that these advantages could all be generated.

So now you have Gen AI, which I understand could generate even larger savings. Still, what are you going to do with the people and how you're going to integrate your systems into these Gen AI models, are you going to do it?

So it's really -- theoretically, yes, then practically, first of all, the mortgage underwriting, it's a complex process. Now I will not sit here and tell you that never is going to happen to Gen AI. But let me tell you, I don't think it's going to happen with you dumping all the documents into ChatGPT and telling them, "Tell me -- come up with the underwriting," that will not work, at least not in the foreseeable future. Then you have to get into and really divide in different steps and then do all that. This is what we are working on. This is where we are starting to obtain results. So again, this is the opportunity for us.

So obviously, there will be some banks that are going to look at trying to obtain this, but we haven't seen any bank succeeding until now while we are starting to generate some results and sharing, obviously, the advantages that we are able to generate with our clients. That's the rule we are on and what we'll try. Then I don't have a crystal ball on ChatGPT 6 or Cloud 5. So we'll see.

But I think everybody that has really tried as we are trying to really scale up beyond proof of concepts has realized that these things are difficult and that the real environment is an environment made of the real ecosystem of IT ecosystem for mortgages, but for a lot of progress, it's an ecosystem where you still have AES 400 mainframes, a patchwork of systems, a very, very complicated environment.

So obviously, if you have a completely -- in a theoretical design, well, the old information is just in one system and everything is there available, yes, it's -- I can see that the Gen AI can be very effective. But that is not the ecosystem that is out there. Again, my comment is always, we have built for 20 years of business based on the fact that we were able to digitalize all the documents at the beginning of the process and have the whole workflow in a digital format that helped us being much more effective than people handling paper.

And digital documents and scanning documents was much easier to put in place than Gen AI, and it took banks or insurance companies like 15 years to do that. So we'll see what the runway for this thing is. We are working very hard on this, and this is really our top priority.

Gentlemen, there are no more questions at this time.

Okay. Then we thank everybody for participating to our call, and we'll be available as always, for one-to-one's or we'll speak to you at the next opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye, everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may now disconnect your telephones.