JDC Group Aktie

Welcome to the earnings call regarding the first quarter figures for 2026 of the JDC Group Aktiengesellschaft. The company's CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; CFO, Ralph Konrad; and COO, Dr. Ramona Evens, will guide you through the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat.

And with that, I'm handing over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much, Judith, for the charming welcome. Yes, Very warm welcome from our side, from the Management Board of JDC Group, happy to present to you Q1 figures 2026, another record time despite of very, very challenging times, as we will see in a moment.

My name is Sebastian, CEO, Co-Founder of JDC Group. So together with my partner Ralph in the line, we found the company now 25 years ago, happy to be on the stock exchange for 20 years. And yes, so also Ramona with us. And Ralph, maybe some words, what are you doing with JDC.

Yes. I'm still here, responsible for finance and IT and all our M&A activities, yes. And happy to present to you the figures today, Ramona?

I'm Ramona, I'm the COO of the group, and I always come into the picture of a man and machine works together. So I'm very happy to be here today to also talk about the progress with FMK and our AI initiatives.

Yes, we may exclude or excuse our colleague, Marcus, who is with some important clients today. So yes, full board on board. And yes, we look at our JDC figures at a glance. You know that we are more than 400 employees right now on the next page. We have more than EUR 8 billion. Right now, it's almost EUR 8.5 billion in fund and asset management volume on the platform, EUR 1.5 billion in insurance premium, more than 16,000 intermediary brokers using our platform, more and more now also using AI tools and now end customers stand at more than 2.5 million customers with every basic -- basically every insurance product, fund product available on the platform.

So I think we should look at the macro environment right now in Germany and all of Europe. And you can see that all these arrows on the right side, they point downward, meaning that the consumer confidence is as low as it has been during COVID times. So if you look at all these graphs, consumer climate of GfK for us also enterprise climate, labor market figures, macro economy. So all these errors point downward as the overall sentiment in the market is very, very bad. So especially in retail markets, you see a downward anxiety-driven performance of clients and consumers. We think this is temporary, but still it hinders our new figures, the new business figures, especially. And then when you have a German sentiment, you know the existence of German angst due to Ukraine war and Iran war in the Middle East.

This is very present in German media, newspapers -- so there is a very high sentiment for not buying now. So everybody or a lot of clients postponed their investment decisions, both on the investment and especially also on the insurance side. And this is -- has some major effects on our platform, which we see on the next page.

Firstly, obviously, even if our new business figures are still up 3%, the volume is down, especially the very big pension contracts do not come to the platform right now. Also in the health segment, were very front-loaded contracts are making the business. We see some postponing, and this is coupled with some higher cancellation rates. Yes, so the investment assets actually are doing fine. We'll see in a moment. But -- so we -- the new business definitely has a little weakness, which we can compensate by our strength in the recurring revenue side. But also for FMK, it's rather winter times, and we're very happy that FMK is performing that well in a world where also the search volume for financial products is down, sometimes even 20% with Google and others. And this means that also in a scarce market, advertising cost per contract are up, and this is not really favorable. And still, we see that FMK is performing as planned.

Yes. And you also see less market appetite of financial institutions. We not only see that with FMK, but also for other online brokers that make quite some figures in our contract transfer segment. We see maybe on the next page, if we look at the KPIs, we can see that the first time that we can remember the number of contract transfer is down by almost 10%, and this is dependent on a very big institutional clients and Finanzguru spending less in advertising. And therefore, these transfer contract transfers is down a little bit. As I said, the number of new orders still up, but volume being a little bit down. Those exactly reversed from last year where in Q4, the number of orders was down, but the volume was up.

But we're very happy that -- and this is, I think, what shows the resilience of our platform business is that our assets under management figures are up nicely. So from below EUR 8 billion to almost EUR 8.5 billion. And also, and that's a very good figure, I think, for the future, is the annual net premium insurance up 12% and stands now at more than EUR 1.5 billion. And this is basically, as you know, the source of our future income because 82% of our income comes recurring from these figures, assets under management and annual net premium. So this is why we are very optimistic for the business of our future, but see that we have very temporary weakness in our new business. And this also, you will see in some of the figures we are presenting today.

Yes. So overall, we're very happy to present to you like a strong growth company. You see that the turnover growth stands at more than 20% from EUR 62.2 million up to almost EUR 75 million. So that's a record high quarter, not only a record high Q1, but a historic high figure. And also, if you look at our guidance is EUR 300 million to EUR 330 million, you see that we are right back that 1/4 of it is already in the books. And then also, we see that the -- together with FMK now the platform scaling up with an EBITDA growth of more than 60%. Ralph? You're mute, I think. I can't hear you.

Apologize, I apologize. Now I'm no longer muted. Yes, let's go one step deeper, revenues increased in the first quarter by 23% to EUR 74.9 million. As Sebastian mentioned, record high for our history. The Advisory segment grew by 22.4% to EUR 65.9 million and the Advisory segment by a solid EUR 6.6 million to EUR 14.5 million. The gross profits increased by approximately 25% to more than EUR 21 million, and this is also a record high for the first quarter.

Yes. As Sebastian already said, the economic environment was difficult for our traditional platform. People in Germany are postponing their investments in their own retirement planning, whether in insurance or an investment. And therefore, it's not really surprising that FMK drove the growth in the first quarter, even though the environment was far from easy for FMK as well with a 20% decline in the search volume for financial products in Germany. The increase in gross profits led to an EBITDA plus of more than 60% to EUR 8.1 million.

Overall, I think, really good number. And for those who are interested in a little bit more in detail on FMK's contribution, the turnover of FMK was EUR 12.1 million EBITDA, EUR 3.9 million. And if you deduct this EUR 3.9 million from the EUR 8.1 million group EBITDA, you can see that the profitability of our platform, ex FMK, was at EUR 4.2 million EBITDA and thus below the previous year.

However, it's important to note and understand that people are postponing their investments and not cancel them. You can do without a second watch, but you can't do without a solid retirement plan. And that's why we expect a rebound as the -- once the indicators improve again. And we are very confident on that because we saw exactly the same situation during the COVID-19 crisis and the same situation at the start of the war in the Ukraine as well.

Yes. As for our quarterly performance, I'm suffice it to say that we were able to start the year 2026 with a typical cyclical pattern. The first quarter was more or less on par with the fourth quarter of last year and thus provides a solid foundation for the rest of the year. As mentioned, the broker platform saw a challenging environment. The turnover of the investment business was flat. That's the reason why you don't see an investment bar here. And it was flat in the first quarter. The insurance turnover was up 2.6%, which is EUR 1 million. Others were down EUR 0.2 million. And again, the main driver of the growth was our new business with FMK, which was up EUR 12 million.

When you look at the composition of the turnover and its development by channels, you can see that the IFA business is down in the first quarter by 4%, but this is more than compensated by a very good development of our major customers business, which is up 11%. I think a remarkable figure in this environment and the Advisory segments grew by 11% -- by 7%, sorry. And again, the lead business grew by EUR 12 million.

The pie chart on the right hand of the chart shows that with the integration of FMK, our turnover split by channel is now a little bit better diversified, roughly 50% by IFA business, classical IFA business, 25% major clients and 20% lead business. Yes. Then we go into the Advisortech numbers in detail. The revenues were up 22.4% to EUR 65.9 million. Gross profit rose by 30% better than turnover because, again, lead business has a higher margin than our classical platform business.

Depreciation and amortization is on previous year's level. Personnel expenses and other operating expenses are up 8.9%, respectively, 16.5%, first, because of the FMK costs that are now consolidated and second, because of the overall cost development of the platform. As a result, EBITDA increased by 62% to EUR 8.1 million and thereof, as mentioned, EUR 3.9 million FMK. The Advisory segment performed well in the first quarter, 7% growth is not our target, but it's a very solid figure at this point. The gross profit rose by 6% and with the total costs increasing by approximately EUR 0.3 million. EBITDA was EUR 1.2 million and stable compared to the first quarter in 2025.

Let's come to the cash flow statement. We started the year with a cash balance of EUR 36 million. Operating cash flow was a little bit smaller, decreased from EUR 6.3 million to EUR 5.6 million, and this for two reasons. The first is FMK paid EUR 1.5 million in taxes. And in the first quarter 2026, we had no tax payments because of our tax losses carried forward. The second was -- the second answer or second reason is, please keep in mind that we, as JDC Group, have a negative working capital profile. That means we first received the commissions and then pay them out to our agents. So if we now receive less money due to weaker new business, which was the case in the first quarter, we still have a higher payout for the previous year's period new business, which was higher, then it's normal that this has a negative effect on operating cash flow.

The cash flow from investing activities amounted at a very small negative number of EUR 600,000. And cash flow from financing activities increased due to higher interest payments from EUR 500,000 to EUR 1.7 million negative. And yes, the interest -- quarterly interest for the bonds for the new Nordic bond is between EUR 1.1 million and EUR 1.2 million, so that we ended up at a cash balance of the quarter of EUR 39.4 million and cash on hand last Friday was EUR 41 million before the payment for our buyback program, which will be EUR 5 million.

Yes, as always, some information about bonds and the share price. We have two bonds outstanding, the SME bond on the German law for EUR 20 million and you know our Nordic bond with EUR 70 million which we issued to finance the FMK transaction. Perhaps one more comment on the Nordic bond. We attended the first time the Pareto Securities Annual Nordic Corporate Conference -- Nordic Bond Conference last month. And we met many of our bond investors in person for the first time. We had a very packed schedule and gave a group presentation to the large -- to a very large audience. All in all, it was a successful event for us. And we received a lot of excellent feedback from existing and prospective bond investors. So that's good news for us.

And maybe one more information that is important if you look at our liabilities and our bond liabilities, we have covenants regarding the issuance of new debt, but we don't have any maintenance covenants. So the only risk that we face here as a company is that the interest rates on the Nordic bonds are floating and could rise. We haven't hedged against this yet because we think the costs have been too high, but this decision could change within the next weeks or months. Yes, coming to the share price. Our share price shows a long upward trend even though we experienced, you remember, a significant setback to around EUR 21 in 2026 due to investors' fear about AI and its influence on insurance broker.

The share price subsequently recovered to more than EUR 26, but since then has fallen again over the past three months, most recently this morning to EUR 21.60. We still hold 147,000 treasury shares that we purchased at an average price of EUR 19.89. And I will comment on the result of the share buyback program in some minutes. As the submission period has ended, and the results of the share buyback program were finalized at 11:00 a.m. this morning. So after the release of our corporate news, and that's the reason why we were not able to comment on this topic with our corporate news this morning. So we'll do this in some minutes, shareholder base is stable.

We have only changes in free float. Let's come to the spotlights. We have four spotlights. We want to give you some information about a peer transaction that happened in the last months. We will give you some information on the share buyback program, and then afterwards, Ramona will give you some update on FMK and AI at JDC.

Yes. The peer transaction. Most of you will have read that our competitor Netfonds has been acquired by a private equity firm. It was Warburg Pincus, and it's not a secret, it's widely known in the market that this transaction was completed at an EBITDA multiple of 17.5. And we would like to take this opportunity to compare this to the current valuation of JDC. But before, let me say, we are aware as management that it's not our role to explain to you investors what the company's worth. It's our task to deliver strong operational performance, but nevertheless, the difference in valuation is so striking that we at least want to bring it to your attention.

Yes, let's go into the table. You see the JDC guidance, the lower end with EUR 35 million and the upper end with EUR 38 million. If you multiply this by 17.5, this is the valuation of the peer transaction, then you end up at a EUR 610 million to EUR 660 million enterprise value. If you then deduct the company's net debt, EUR 60 million, the equity value would be EUR 550 million to EUR 604 million. With 13.7 million shares that we have, and we did not deduct the treasury shares, you would end up at a share price of EUR 40 to EUR 44 per share at JDC, and the share price actual is EUR 21.6 when we started the conference here. So you see, there's a multiple discount between 45% and 50% if you compare to the peer transaction. But again, it's not our role to explain to you how to evaluate, we just want to bring this to your attention.

That brings me to my last chart, about our share buyback program because this transaction, the Netfonds transaction, coupled with the fact that the stock performance in the last 24 months has not kept pace with the company's operational performance, prompted us as management and supervisory board of the JDC Group to carry out the share buyback that has just been completed this morning. We think that based on a valuation of EUR 22.5 per share, that an investment in JDC is highly attractive for all shareholders. Of course, for these shareholders who do not want to sell their shares.

And for this reason, we have decided for the first time to launch a public offer rather than a traditional ongoing share buyback program, which we did before because it was our goal to fully invest the planned EUR 5 million and not only parts. In the previous buyback programs that we ran, we were only able to buy significantly fewer shares than the maximum allowed. So we are very pleased and happy that we were able to fully exercise our public offering, and we were able to acquire 222,222 shares at a share price of EUR 22.5 per share.

And we were not drunk when we came up with these numbers, right? It's just like that the price divided by EUR 5 million just resulted in these 222,000 shares.

Yeah. If we would've known that it's so complex to tell this, then maybe the numbers would have been different. We now own 369,335 treasury shares, representing 2.7% of the share capital. Very correct. We will own these numbers of shares because the transaction has to be done within the next days. And yes, we think that's a very good news for our shareholder. For me as shareholder, I think this is a good news.

Yes, then I would like to hand over to Ramona to lead you through some further information.

Thank you, Ralph. And also warm welcome from my side. I'm very happy to be here today to give you some insights on the business build-up with FMK. We have been working very diligent in the past months to bring the vision of a new shared FMK JDC insurance sales engine to life, and I'm very happy to announce that the sales engine is now up and running. As a short reminder of what FMK is doing in their core business, they target customers at the very end of the search funnel and primarily focus on the customer that are about to buy. So they target those customer through paid marketing campaigns. So wherever the customers are right now, currently, that means search engines, social media and AI tools.

And from there, they lead the customers to their own landing pages, for example, Finanzfox, to get the customer data here and to create a lead. So we have launched and went live with three new insurance products in the past months, it's disability, pension, and income protection. And we chose those products because they're very profitable. You get a four-digit commission for each sale. And what's different now in the insurance business and it used to be in the personal finance business, that all those leads go now exclusively to us, to JDC Plus, that's our in-house broker. We hired a new sales team that exclusively deals with those leads and converts them to sales.

We built up a new in lead infrastructure with them. And now this engine of FMK provides those leads to our sales team, and our sales team gives to each and every lead feedback back to FMK how is the quality of the lead, so that FMK can optimize their campaigns and then further focus on more profitable clients. So now this is now up and running. Every sale leads to the next sales, and this is a fully automated feedback loop. And I put in a little edited chart here. As you can see, in January and February we started to build up the infrastructure, and in March it started to scale so that the number of leads went up.

In terms of sales, we already have a six-digit potential with the leads we already created. However, in the products that we have chosen in disability, you have a lead to sale conversion time from six ti eight weeks. So why is that? You usually have, like, two advisory meetings. The customer needs to get their medical records together, and the insurance company has to answer the risk request. So this takes time. So as of now in May, we are getting in the sales of the leads from March. So we definitely have a time lag between lead creation and sale. And then, of course, again, from sale to commission because we only get paid once the customer has paid the first rate.

So you will see the P&L effect of the business always with a few months in delay. However, even though I said that our plans for Q1 have been currently met with 110%, and now over the year our plans grow more and more ambitious month by month, and we are very determined to keep those plans. And so far, it's been a lot of work so far, and the collaboration with FMK is going very smoothly. So I'm very happy that the engine is now up and running, and we will see the fruits of that over the next couple of months. And this is one of the things that we've already started and if Could you go to the next slide, please? But in parallel, we are also building up new income streams. Like the first thing was the direct channel, and the second thing is that we are also building up a platform for our brokers to buy leads and then convert them themselves. We are currently working on this lead -- lead distribution platform.

We deliberately did this consecutively because we first wanted to optimize the campaigns with our internal sales team before we are selling the leads to our brokers because, of course, we want to sell high-quality leads and making sure the brokers are happy with the leads they are buying. And in this business model, we profit from the lead sales as well as from our commission share through the platform. So -- and we are planning to go live with this lead distribution platform in July. And then the third income stream is the transfer of the existing FMK online insurance business from one-off to recurring business. So FM used to be a tip giver. That means FMK in the past was giving a tip to the customer about to take out insurance. And for this tip, FMK received a one-off payment from the insurance company only. And now with us as a broker, we start to build up the new business as broker business. That means we are getting paid a running commission throughout the entire lifetime and the contract and not only the one-off payment. So I guess as a no-brainer, it's better that you get EUR 100 every year for the next 10 to 15 years than getting EUR 200 once. But however, in terms of revenue, this can mean that you get less revenue in the first year of being a broker than to being a person who actually is just tipping the contract.

So we are doing this step by step because, of course, the insurance companies prefer to give you EUR 200 once. So we deligately transforming the business to broker business in a way to make sure that we keep our income streams running. So enough of the very detailed spotlight coming back to a higher level market overview, and there is also good news from that point of view. The global AI market develops -- developments favor the SMK business model that is an advertisement-based business model. And if you remember last year, one of the risk factors of the transaction that we considered was what if in the future, every consumer will only have a paid ChatGPT subscription and there will be no more room for advertisement and searching. So even at that time, we predicted that most probably the Google ad finance model will prevail. And it does, so ChatGPT announced that it will expand ads in other countries and those follow the lead of Google. And Google themselves are already making money with ads in the AI overview. So I guess we can say that the technology has changed from a classical search engine to AI, but the underlying business model stays the same. It's an ad finance business model. And the first test that FMK also did in these AI overviews shows that the conversion in the AI advertisement is even better than in the search engine, because it's more focused on what the user actually needs.

Okay. And then -- and that's a little wrap-up on FMK -- and also a few words on our AI initiatives. We continue as a leader in the AI development in the German broker market.

And besides our internal efficiency gains that we achieved with AI in the last two years, we are also putting out new AI features for our brokers on a very quick path to make their life more efficient. I think last time in the last earnings call, Ralph already introduced the tariff pillow, and that's a feature that assesses the entire portfolio of the broker and shows him or her optimization potential. We also already introduced the AVB Companion. This is a feature that answers in real time terms and conditions questions for, or on the terms of conditions of insurance tariffs of the entire German market dating back more than three decades. It's an absolutely unique feature with a non-public database that only we can access. So it's absolutely unique in the German market.

So our newest development is Chatty. That is an AI assistant that helps with the day-to-day service inquiries of the broker. This is now in a beta phase. Where friends and family can test, and this will go live soon as well. And we have more projects in the pipeline that we will reveal with appropriate marketing measures in the future. And just to give it -- to put this in a larger context, those features are really important in the ongoing consolidation of the broker market, because then in the future there will be fewer brokers with more customers, and this can only work if the brokers and we take off most of the administrative tasks off their shoulders.

So we want to be the favorite help of the broker in the market, and we have shown with our AI initiatives that we will be the favorite partner, and we will keep on bringing new features out to help our brokers to focus on their main business, which is selling insurance.

TThank you. Again, that's what we told you that last earnings call, right? Everybody's talking about AI, but nobody's talking about the data. Nobody's talking about the infrastructure. Nobody's talking about the customer access. We here at JDC, we have all three of them, right? We do have the deepest and strongest and biggest data bank in the German market. That's the Morgen & Morgen data bank. With 80,000 contract entries and tariffs out of the last 20 years.

We're the only ones who can really have these comparison, not only on the modern product, but also on the past products. We do have the infrastructure with one of the most modern platforms in the market. And with FMK, we do have the customer access that all is what you need to run these agentic AI agents in the future. Yeah, just to give you news on the guidance that are not no news. We're definitely staying with the guidance we gave you last time.

On the next slide, that's EUR 300 million to EUR 330 million in turnover, and also EUR 35 million to EUR 38 million EBITDA. If you see, from the turnover side, EUR 75 million is already in the books. We think that there will be only a temporary weakness in the new business. So if this comes just a little bit back to normal, it will be a quite good guess that we reach this guidance and also on the earnings side, we are on track. Also with our key initiatives here, we want to give you the overview on our AI tools. I think, there's a lot to come that helps the broker to be more efficient in the business and also to save costs for us internally, right? Now we are working on a number of projects that also enhance our efficiency inside. So that's all good news inside the company and the rest that's the crying eye is, all of our business definitely depends on the development of especially the German consumer confidence. That's the #1 topic and there, we used as Ralph said, some crises in their mindsets, but normally this comes back in the course of one or two other quarters.

Yeah, that's so far from our side, and we're happy to take any questions you might have. And I see, Judith, that there are some already.

Yes. We do have a few questions already. Thank you very much for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] And the first one is, the capital markets has rebounded strongly in April and May, will this influence the numbers positively the rest of the year? And the second one, why was the tax rate payments so high this year when you still have tax loss carry forwards you can use?

Maybe I can take the question. The connection is not so good at the moment. Yes, of course, Andreas. It wasn't Andreas. The rebound of the capital markets in April and May will lead to higher trailer fees in the following quarters. So the answer is yes, this will have a positive influence. And the tax payments, they were high because they came from FMK and FMK does not have tax losses carried forward. an you hear me? No, you cannot hear me.

Yes, I can hear you.

Okay. Because the colleagues are frozen on my screen. Yes, tax comes from FMK, and so we were not able to use the tax losses carried forward because our participation is 60% and not 100%. That's the answer.

Mr. Konrad, maybe you take off your camera and then the Internet connection, okay? And the Internet connection is lost at this point. Maybe one of you can take over to answer the second question. Right now, Mr. Dr. Grabmaier I cannot hear you, even though you are unmuted maybe miss Evens, can you jump in on that.

Hello. Testing. Can you hear me? Okay. Finally, I'm the only one talking. I think the second, you asked two questions, and I guess both were already answered by Mr. Konrad. So we can go to the next one.

Okay. Thank you very much. As the new business market is weaker, is there any cost-cutting options you can do to offset this to support EBITDA?

Sure does anyone want to join.

No, we cannot share you yet. Maybe....

Sure. Ofcourse, we are also taking the cost side under consideration. Like when it comes to new hires, we only focus on sales, but all the other or the other -- or the other new hires are currently frozen. So we are taking this very seriously to making sure that we are not -- that our cost is not growing faster than our sales. That's for sure. And we started a new cost-cutting initiative where we really look into each and every cost point that we have. And considering is that something that we still really need? Or is that something that we can -- that we can save for the future. And this is something that has been going on this cost initiative over the past few months. So we really want to go ahead of the wave and be prepared in case that the market developments are not coming up in the future as we have planned. And yes, we are looking into that.

Thank you very much, Dr. Evens. Ladies and gentlemen, we are sorry for the technical problems on this slide. The Management Board is on three different parts in Germany. So maybe we can go on, Dr. Even.

Yes, we can go on. I'm here now can hear you again. I'm in the office in the middle of Wiesbaden. Obviously, there are some connection problems. And Sebastian is on the equity forum where he talks to some of you maybe in person and maybe there is some Internet problems. But we're here to answer your question.

Thank you very much, Mr. Konrad, and we're doing our best. What tax rate do you expect for 2026?

Good question. The platform of ex-FMK still has tax losses carried forward, so there will be very little tax rates and FMK as they don't have tax losses carried forward, you should calculate 30%. But maybe in parallel, I can ask my back office that is listening to give a judgment so I can pass the answer by the end of the call.

Thank you very much. And when do you pay the minority shareholders for the Q1 performance.

Yes, that's also good question. All form of profits of FMK have been paid. So there is no duty on paying cash to minority shareholders. And for the first, for the Q1 or for the whole year, there will be one date of payment dividend for the year 2026 will be paid after the general assembly in 2027.

Thank you very much. And we do have an audio question from Edwin Leung.

Yes, a couple of questions from my side. First of all, and so the reluctance of the German consumer made as I said the revenues in Q4 last year and 2025 was already a little bit lower. So in Q1, it didn't really come back and Sebastian already alluded a little bit that is going to get back this year in the same pattern as it was with the Ukraine war and open how should we see that play out, let's say, Q2 data will be more recovery or is it a Q3 figure? And to what extent do you need it for meeting the guidance.

Okay, as Sebastian is still on and off with this internet connection. I take this question, Edwin. To be honest, nobody knows exactly when consumer confidence comes back, what we know, again, is you can do without a second watch, but not without a proper retirement plan. So what we know is that people postpone their investments and they don't cancel them. And in general, the later this -- the rebound will be the harder it will be to match the guidance. That's clear. But from today's point of view, we have a very weak environment for JDC old platform, our existing platform and for the FMK business. And nevertheless, we could generate an EBITDA of EUR 8 million which is times four, a little bit below the guidance and a turnover of EUR 75 million, which is times 4 at the lower end of the guidance. So we are still very confident that we will meet our guidance this year despite this environment.

I couldn't really hear the last part of Ralph [indiscernible]

So we are really -- we are still very confident to reach this guidance because, again, EUR 8 million Q1 EBITDA times 4 is a little bit below the lower end of our guidance. and turnover times 4 is at the lower end of our guidance. And this -- although the environment is very hard at the moment. So we are very confident to reach our guidance this year.

I was also seeing in the presentation that the large clients that they are still growing quite fast even to double digit. That's something that would underpin the revenue growth and let's say the IFAs come behind us or around.

Major clients have grown by 11%. You're right. And the IFAs are the one that are, let's say, the ones that are the most dependent on economic environment because there is no structured system that helps everybody. You need five meetings tomorrow to get your goals, and they are in such phases, you can always see that the structured sales teams like our Finom team or Alberto's or others, they performed better than the normal single brokers.

Thanks, Ralph. And maybe for Ramona, for FMK so great was the first three months, EUR 12.1 million, as Ralph said, and Let say that compares to, I think, almost EUR 12 million in the last four months of last year. So there's quite some growth there. Is that -- is it fair to assume? Let's say, what part of the FMK revenue is really insurance related and what part is on the other business, so to say?

Yes. Maybe Ramona, I can take the question if you don't mind. The insurance portion is still low. As Ramona said, we are generating leads. But with the leads, we don't pay FMK per lead, but with a commission split. And as Ramona explained, there is a time delay, six weeks. There's still not a number, not relevant figure that FMK earned in insurance. Yes, there is a growth compared to the fourth quarter. At FMK, you have to know that, it's not a like the JDC business predictable business because, you know, the first quarter is good, then you have a weak second and third, but a very good fourth quarter. It more depends like if interest rates are rising, then the platforms want to spend money to gather new customers. So it's more driven by external influences. Yes. In general, I would say, they're on a good development, still very profitable. Especially because there were no like these external positive effects in the first quarter. Bitcoin was down, gold was down. Nobody was thinking about doing investments. And so we are very happy with the development in the first quarter.

Yes. I can imagine. Finally, on the AI part, naturally you've got the tariff pillow, so you've got the Chatty here and all that, all these kinds of new AI features. Is there a way that you can monetize it? Or are you already monetizing it or is just, let's say, making more service for your clients, so to say?

We of course, like always try to monetize that so that we have a free version with like a basic feature, and then you pay for the more advanced features. Obviously the brokers are very hesitant to pay extra for the features as of now, it might change in the future. I guess the main impact is really, keeping our existing clients and brokers with us and being attractive for new, young brokers, to join our platform. I guess that's the main -- the main -- the main initiative here with these features, and everything is a add-on. If we just look at the add-on, the, you know, what brokers pay for the additional features then it wouldn't be profitable. So it's more like initiatives to keep and to attract new brokers. Ralph, do you want to....

No, that's fine.

Thank you very much. Good luck in the Equity Forum.

Thank you very much, Edwin, for your questions. We will move on to the Q&A questions.Did you lose tenders? Are you bidding for contracts of significant size?

It's the first time Sebastian, is not able to tell us anything, because his microphone, is mute. That's, very new. Oh, we can hear you. We can hear you. Okay. You can answer if you want to.

We told you about, I think in last or before the last, I just remember one, very one tender that we did not win. The rest of the tenders we won. Is there any tenders of significant size? Definitely yes, we never know when they're signed as all these very big clients take ages to sign and to decide. So no promises here.

Yeah. Maybe I received feedback from our back office. The answer was the same, very hard to calculate or to predict the tax rate. But the best guess is between 15% and 20%, just as a feedback to this question.

Thank you very much, Mr. Konrad. We're moving on. How many shares were you offered at the EUR 22.5 price?

Sebastian, you wanna answer?

Yes. So that was surprising. So this is the first tender we took, and we learned several things about the stock market. One was that there is a lot of people on arbitrage deals. You could see that the stock price rose very fast to the EUR 22.5 figure. That's not surprising, but what was almost surprising that some of our very big institutions told us they put in a very big number of shares to get a small portion of it back in the tender with an expectation of something that's lower than six or a fifth. And then this is what happened. We received more than 1 million shares and are happy to trade all these blocks because we do have a very strong conversation now about people looking for very big blocks. But I would be surprised if these of our investors that we identified are then also selling these blocks. We'll find out in the next weeks.

The concrete figures are published on our website since 11:30 or something like this. And again, we would have commented on in our corporate news, but this was not possible because we received the information after our announcement.

Thank you. And could you please elaborate on your plans for the approximate 220,000 shares repurchased in the Q2? Do you intend to cancel these shares and thereby reduce the total share count, or do you plan to retain them for other purposes such as acquisitions or employee compensation plans?

Not for employee compensation. But the other two options are options. We are allowed to hold them and to cancel them. And we have not decided yet, it will not be used as like a management incentive plan. That's what we can promise. We will do with the shares what's the best for shareholders.

What is the limiting factor for faster onboarding of R+V, Versicherungskammer Bayern, Sparkassen and Allianz? Do you expect onboarding to increase?

That's a very good question actually. Yes, you hear us being impatient about the progress of exactly these biggest clients. We see a lot of progress with the savings banks in the frontal region, but not really much in Versicherungskammer and the Sparkassen regions. It's just yes, some movement in the heads. As we hear from their boards that they are sometimes pretty happy with the projects, especially R+V tells me, "Well, we could double the number of banks," right? From five to 20 and having 800, there's a long way to go. We don't see that there's limiting factors, but we also don't have any big idea how we can really improve the progress and increase the speed of these projects as we basically are in very good project meetings. It obviously takes some time. Do we expect onboarding to increase? Yes, the number of savings banks on the platform is quite high, but it's on the end until you convert clients at the very point of sale in the branch, and this is something we have to get to faster.

Thank you. With Netfonds being bought at double the valuation of JDC, at what time would you consider putting JDC up for sale to get some same multiple? With the stock below EUR 22.5 and more than 1.2 million shares tendered in the program, are you considering doing another tender?

Number one, it's actually you as the investors that can tell you at what price you would sell, right? Obviously, there is a different gap, a huge gap in valuation. We always said, Ralph and I, it's not on us to know the best of the world. If an attractive offer is coming in, we'll ask you all, obviously, right? We'll not be glued to our chairs or whatsoever. Yeah, that's an open market. You can ask us as investors and as we think that we will get to reach this EUR 1 billion in valuation, but not now, but in some years out, right? We also have to consider that money now might be better than money later, but definitely not at the current prices, right?

It's important, Sebastian, it's important to point out that from my point of view, the difference in valuation is not because Netfonds is a better company. We think it's different, of course, yeah. The difference is driven by the fact that private markets at the moment valuate much higher than public markets, yeah. I can remember times where it were different, yeah. That was the reason why a lot of companies want to go public, but now it's different, yeah. The truth is somewhere in between, yeah. Maybe not at the valuation that we have today.

The second part of the question, whether we're considering doing another tender. Well, obviously that's very new information for us, right? Came in Friday night, now this morning. Obviously, right, First we have to talk to the investors that would give and that we identified, whether they would like to sell at all, because that's not so clear at the moment. Then, yes, obviously we think in comparison to buying other platforms at 17.5x a corporate or commercial brokers at 16x to 18x, or private brokers at 11x, 12x, We are the cheapest target in the market. Just by our own interest, it's a very good idea to spend our money in our own shares.

Thank you very much. With an eye on the time, we have eight questions left in our chat box. I will fastly read them. "Hi, congratulations on a solid quarter in the midst of market turmoil. Thank you for taking my questions. First one. There has been a lot of talk about market headwinds and uncertainty to date. Which macro assumptions, if any, are built into reaching in the 2026 guidance? Second. How much of the March leads spike is due to number of campaigns versus campaign optimization? Although early, is the expected LTV still up to expectations? Third. Speaking of capital allocation, would you consider additional bids in 2026?

Yeah. I think answer number three. That's very short. Number one, yes, when we put out the guidance, we just lived through the Q4, which was not good in new business as well. Yeah, some of the headwinds are calculated in. We could not foresee the Iran war unfortunately, but it's not something that we are afraid of. I think we are right on track to reach our guidance in 2026, we are very relaxed on that. Number two, I give to Ramona or Ralph.

Yeah, it answers both. It's, we increased the number of campaigns, and we also optimized campaigns already. And LTV, I'm not quite sure what you mean with that abbreviation, but we are still within our plans and it's pretty much, as I said, we are, like, 110% of our plans that we have achieved. We are still within the expected results.

Thank you very much. You have the goal to reach EUR 1 billion market cap. The share price is weak, the market is not willing to increase the valuation multiple. Through what measures could you grow more than forecasted?

Yeah, that's a question on consumer confidence in the future. We calculate this goal by just extrapolating our growth figures, right? If you, like, get 15% growth for another four or five years, you will see that you come to EUR 500 million+ in turnover and also then to EUR 60 million EBITDA. Obviously at an 8.5 multiple, then, EUR 1 billion is far out. Then, if you have, like, let's say, what was normal platform multiples until now or what private equity pays, that's the way to go, right. So the measures are, take all these AI efforts to make our business much more efficient and have huge cost saving effect, and then top it up with a much faster way to get across to the client by not just having 500 people in call centers calling people, but have a bot calling 40,000 clients in a minute, right? There's so much new potential in these new tools, which we will show you once it's in reach.

Yes. Maybe we can ask one question regarding the Altersvorsorgedepot, because the rest of the remaining questions are already answered, I think. Maybe let's focus on this one.

Okay, regarding the coming Altersvorsorgedepot in Germany, will this pose a chance for FMK to sell leads to banks or a threat to other pension options?

Well, this will be big, right? This is one of these campaigns Ralph was talking about where everybody, all these new brokers, all the fund industry that has now access to, which was formerly a realm of insurance companies now wants to attract the client to have him for other products as well. This, for FMK, will be very big. My sentiment for the rest of the business, right, there was this Riester product in the market that was not sold extensively, this also goes for the other insurance product. There will be some positive effect also for the rest of the platform, for FMK, this could be the thing for the next year.

Yes. If I may just add, FMK is already ready to go. All the landing pages are already created, even you can buy it only from the 1st of January, 2027. You can already put your data in there, make sure you are the first ones to actually able to buy that sort of product. They are ready to go right now. There's very little interest in searching for Altersvorsorgedepot, of course, the next time it's going to be in the news or at the latest at the end of the year, we are ready to get in all the customer interest that there will be.

Yeah. Maybe we take this as the spotlight for the next earnings call because I think it's a very interesting, what are the different effects on our platform. FMK, very positive. A broker platform, a little bit of question mark, we will give you the answers. There's a lot of potential because what most of you might not know is that insurers who offer this very cheap Altersvorsorgedepot, they will also offer the same with higher commissions and let's say try to sell this. There's also a very good chance for the rest of the platform. It's the question was, is it chance or a threat? It's definitely more chance than the threat.

Thank you very much. Very good last words. With that, we have come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in the JDC Group Aktiengesellschaft. A big thank you also to the management board for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions at a later date, please feel free to reach out to investor relations, of course. I wish you all a successful day around the world. With that, I'm handing over to Sebastian for some final remarks.

Yes. Thank you, Judith. Again, we apologize for the technical problems. That's the first time that happened. We'll find the source, and this will not happen again, we hope. Thank you for your trust and it's challenging times, but you can see that the base of our business, that's the recurring business that's growing. That's the core for our future growth, right? This is growing as it was, and it's 82% of our business, so we're not afraid of some weaknesses in a temporary new business phase, because we always know this comes in waves. Normally, these are one or two quarters, and then at the third and fourth quarter, this may catch up. We will see better times ahead.

This also gives us an impression that, yeah, the shares stay cheap and we will definitely discuss buying back more shares and also try everything that furthers our growth. We see a lot of potential in all these AI figures, as Ramona showed you. I think we are market leaders in developing these tools based on the data bank and the infrastructure that we have. Yeah, stay tuned for more good news from our platform. Yeah, we will do our best to achieve our goals. This year we are very positive to reach the guidance and also for the years out. There's a lot of growth ahead. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and a warm welcome to the European Platform Summit. This roundtable is dedicated to JDC Group AG, and we are pleased to welcome their CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier, who will give us some insight shortly. Following the presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask questions directly via audio line and chat.

And having said this, Sebastian, the stage is yours.

Yes. Thank you very much, Judith, for this timing introduction. My name is Sebastian Grabmaier, CEO of JDC Group, and a very suitable format on a platform -- summit as a platform. So welcome to the presentation of JDC Group.

Brief introduction. So yes, we have a founder-led management. This is my partner, Ralph Konrad. Together, we founded the company 25 years ago with the roles, me as the CEO, Responsible Strategy Product and Investor Relations; and Ralph is doing IT, finance and legal.

Yes, our mission is to digitize the German insurance industry, simplifying workflows and especially enhancing back-office efficiency. And this is what we built, a platform that connects the entire financial ecosystem. So most of the leading intermediaries and all the product providers in Germany.

So historically, the roots of the companies go back as far as 1958 when a gentleman called Klaus Jung founded the first broker pool in Germany and the first service platform to sell investment funds in Germany. When we founded 25 years ago, we increased the product portfolio to all products and then also focused on the insurance market after Lehman. So we scaled up as one of the leading platform providers, especially for big institutions, corporate brokers, but also for 16,000 brokers in the market. And the latest 2 years, we are focusing on introducing AI tools as we think the platforms are the most -- the #1 beneficiaries of the AI tools that are introduced in the market.

Yes, so we are happy that we are now listed for 20 years. We had a great celebration last November and many of you out there who came here. So thanks again for our guests from all over the world. We do have U.S. investors that attended, but also Scotland, U.K., Denmark, Scandinavia, it was a great party afterwards. So to give you some figures at a glance. So we now have about 2.5 million customers on the platform with about 400 employees that do the service for the 16,000 intermediaries that are using the platform today. So our fund volume is around now at EUR 8.4 billion, EUR 8.5 billion. And also the annual insurance premium is about EUR 1.5 billion that we are servicing every year.

So you see that over the last 10 years, that was quite an impressive growth path. So we grow about 12% on average year-over-year. And obviously, the platform reached inflection point already. So earnings are rising faster than the growth. So on average, it's a 35% growth rate and will be a big jump up also in the year '26. And you can also see that also the margin is going up step by step. We stand now at 8%, knowing that our reports always show top line the commission in. And then if you compare us with a software company, you have to just deduct commission out.

Yes, so the product portfolio is the core of the company is what we call Advisortech platform. So we take in the data of all the product companies, that's 250 insurance groups, all the asset management companies and platforms, the mortgaging bank, then we standardize the data and then we process the data. And that's the brand Jung, DMS & Cie that then services all kinds of intermediaries from the individual broker or agent around the corner until the very big corporate brokers, biggest one being Lufthansa's broker Albatros. And on the side with almost 20%, we have our FiNUM Group, that's an advisory group with about 300 advanced intermediaries that service more affluent clients for both insurance and investment.

Yes. So here, you can see that this is our core with 2.4 million contracts now or 2.5 million now on the platform. Yes, the business model is quite easy. Basically, if you take out an insurance as a customer, you pay the premium to insurer and what you might not have present so much is that every little piece of insurance pays a commission. So on average, that's EUR 40 per piece of insurance. So we collect these EUR 40. We keep about EUR 10, and we send away the EUR 30 to our intermediaries. So the good thing is the customer comes for free. So we have always negative working capital that growth doesn't cost anything because the commission is first coming, then we deduct our fees and then we paid out our intermediaries.

And you can also see that everything we do is white labeled. That means this is the corporate banks example in the wonderful orange and blue of the German corporate banks, but the savings banks uses in red are standard colors for the normal brokers blue. So you can see all the same tools where the customer feels at home and let's say, this is in the banking website world, but in effect, it's all happening on our own systems.

Yes, we're introducing AI. The most important innovation here is our what we call JDC companion. So based on the MORGEN & MORGEN databank, we can dive into 80,000 contracts in tariffs of the insurance industry over the last 20 years. So that's every major tariff is represented in the databank. So whatever questions you might have as an intermediary or end customer, you can just type it in or you have a chat bot or voice bot where you just asked you questions and it's answered in millisecond. So if you want to know whether your son can use your car, drive to France, take in the nanny and the luggage and then drive home. Is this insured? Basically, AI will give you the answer in milliseconds that, yes, your son is insured as long as he lives in your household and as long as he drives in the EU. If transport of personnel is not commercial then obviously, you can take in the nanny and then also the packing and unloading of the luggage is insured.

And then we also give you these little donuts here that's a quality measure in a traffic light system. So you see in red, there is -- the contract can be improved because it's here in this example, just have maybe 14% performance at the same price, it can give you a modern contract with 85% of performance. And this comparison is not only to price but also to all the individual risks that you have in the databank, in your own databank on you as your customer data. And then I can show you exactly what your cover is actually and what it could be and what different conditions could be met on top. And then you can also have a very quick online procedure where with like 2 to 4 clicks, you can have a new contract. It means the old contract is canceled at the next 2 days and you have a new contract.

So it does work like your investment platform that you are used to, but only for insurance. So you can see a 360-degree view on your product portfolio or as an intermediary on the portfolio of your client. And then you can add contracts, cancel contracts or compare contracts, it works like an investment platform.

And you might have noticed that last year, we bought a new business that FMK, and it's one of the largest and also fastest-growing customer acquisition platform in the market. So FMK is bringing about 40,000 new customers to the platform every month. How would they do it? They are expert in SEA, so that's search engine advertising, not to be -- not to sort to be differentiated of SEO, which is always not really liked because it's dependent on the algorithm. So our SEA platform creates advertising slots on all kinds of platform, marketing platforms such as Google or TikTok, Facebook, you name it.

And also on the large language models, so Bing or Copilot, so if you live in the U.S., you will see that also ChatGPT is starting advertising, so behind the answers to the prompts. You get a lot of advertising slots now and then with a very high conversion rate. So all kinds of product providers find their clients with a bidirectional interface. It's a very good way to create customers. And with our platforms, we are cross-selling, upselling the individual clients, and then we auction out the huge number of new clients to our brokers.

So our sales channels are the normal brokers, the corporate brokers, more and more the banks. So both the savings banks network and the corporate bank network are our clients by their insurance companies. And the new customer groups is the insurers themselves that outsource insurance processes to us as a platform. So we're now servicing the big platforms, tied agent networks of Allianz, [ Gothaer ], Baloise, Barmenia and a number of other insurance companies.

So yes, so the life cycle, it takes quite a while to take up the customers. So the good side is that only like a very small number of our clients are organic growth phase, most are still in a ramp-up rollout phase, and that goes for the 25% turnover of the major customers.

So yes, the market is huge. So it's almost 5% of German GDP. So there's more than 500 million insurance contracts in the German market, paying about EUR 230 billion in premium. There you can see that our market size is roughly like 0.8%. So we can grow, grow, grow for the next 10, 15 years. We do own the big contracts to do so. And what we want is more of this pie of EUR 30 billion that is paid to German intermediaries every year. So every little contract pays about EUR 40. And this is what we try to collect in a little chipmunk business. So total addressable market is almost all of the markets, so we can go up to theoretically 400 million contracts. So there's a lot of blue sky growth.

And the other factor in the market is that the demography that brokers are much older than the average German. Most of them entered into the market in the '80s or '90s. So on average, they're 57 years old by now, and the age grows almost 1 year every year. So that means that most of the portfolios of these brokers are for sale in the next years. And this is also why we have this little aggregator with Summitas. We are buying brokers, and we have a little subsidiary there with EUR 55 million in turnover and also EUR 15 million in EBITDA that we run together with Bain Capital and our big shareholder, Great-West Canada Life. So here you see the market is still quite fragmented, but that's a logarithmic scale.

So there's 4 big companies now dominating the market. Fonds Finanz, blau, Jung, DMS and VEMA. And they are not only big. They're growing fast and that are very profitable, and you see there's a lot of small fish. And what's happening right now is that these red guys are buying the blue and green dots. And yes, so there's only 3 companies Fonds Finanz, blau and us that have more than EUR 300 million in turnover, and the rest is much smaller. You can see most of them are EUR 100 million turnover and below. We talk more about the Netfonds transaction that happened 4 weeks ago, Fonds Finanz also issued that or published that they bought another competitor in the last 2 weeks.

So that's basically the end game of the platform market. So you see here, that's the main competitors, Fonds Finanz one side, blau the other. So we're #2 in both the investment side in the insurance side. And whereas both of the others are owned by private equity companies, Hg Capital or Warburg Pincus, JDC Group has a listing, it's public and has Great-West Canada Life is the anchor or major shareholder.

Yes, just financials, you could see year-end numbers. So we could grow 13% last year in turnover and then EBITDA growth depends whether you take into account the one-offs, 47% after deduction of one-offs and officially, that's 36%. We can also see that all the KPIs are on a record high. You can see right now that the economy in Germany is not running too well, starting from Q3. So new orders is just a little bit plus but we live from these number of contract transfers. You could see that we could transfer more than 700,000 contracts to the platform last year. And also, our asset base is growing nicely by 10% and also the annual net premium was growing nicely of 16%. And for the first time, we now reached EUR 1.5 billion in premium every year.

So we did adjust by some external and internal facts. We merged our liability umbrella. So if you look at the green numbers, and you can see here, again, the growth figures are quite satisfactory against the backdrop of kind of a challenging environment. And there, you can also see that normally, you have a quarterly distribution of turnover. And normally, Q4 is always the strongest. And we look back into a rather weakly Q3, but in a very strong Q4. And this is why also last year, we could reach our EBITDA targets basically last minute.

You can also see investment financing doing well with a plus of almost 10%. Insurance is also growing 6%. So the backdrop of the overall economic environment could be better, but you can also see here that overall, the growth goes over all kinds of product segments and also over all kinds of sales channels.

Yes, we could reach our EBITDA target. So we almost reach our turnover target, but could reach our long-term turnover target of EUR 250 million, that's what we promised in the year 2020. We said we would reach EUR 250 million in the year '25, and that was just a very point landing. And also with more than EUR 20 million, we are right within our expectations.

That's the beauty after the acquisition of FMK, you can see that turnover is growing even more to -- on the medium, that's EUR 315 million in the year '26, we're quite on track. And also the EBITDA is growing to EUR 35 million to EUR 38 million. So you can see that not only we are growing, but also the growth is growing now.

Here, what's our strategy? We want to grab more of the market. We are still quite small with 0.8% of market share. So we grow organically of around 15%. So our growth target every year and also buy in the market. So from time to time, you could see we had acquisitions of top 10 group now 1.5 years ago or KOMM Invest. So we are buying our competitors as well, also product development. So we have cutting-edge technology always trying to lead us and win all these tenders and beauty contests out there in the market and then deliver top operational excellence for our clients, so to become more efficient.

So you can also see that with our growth of 12%, personnel cost just grow 2% or 3%. So you can see that now the platform is scaling up very nicely. So capital allocation-wise, we have always focused on organic growth and also buying competitors. But now what's new is -- we think that, and also the Supervisory Board and our shareholders think that our stock is quite cheap. So we started buying back our own shares. We have a tender out there. It's still running where we buy back shares at the price of EUR 22.5, up to EUR 5 million, and we hope to get as many shares that we can because we think it's quite cheap.

You could see a transaction in the market just 2 weeks ago or 3 weeks ago where Netfonds was sold, that was the only period that was also listed. And they were sold for a multiple of 17.5x. That means there were -- instead of their market cap that were around EUR 95 million before the transaction was published, they are now offering EUR 79 per share, that translates into EUR 183 million in valuation, equity valuation at an enterprise value of EUR 210 million.

So you can see, whereas JDC trades between 8 and 9x, Netfonds was then bought out of the market for 17x. This is also why we think there is quite some difference between private equity valuations and public valuations. So we will, as JDC use our liquidity to try buy back as many shares as we can.

So we can see our shareholder structure is quite a balance between very big shareholders. That's very helpful when we try to acquire more institutional clients and life, that's Great-West Lifeco, one of the top 20 insurance groups in the world owned about 26-point-something percent. Management, will often be almost, 10% to 12%, and then there's Provinzial with 6%. VKB, Versicherungskammer, the 2 are [ insurers ] behind the savings bank and a Dutch group, Teslin, they hold about 5%.

Yes, we have also 2 bonds outstanding of about EUR 20 million plus EUR 70 million. There's cash on hand. So net debt is between -- it depends how you calculate the leasing is between EUR 55 million and EUR 60 million.

Yes. Just on spotlight, we talk more, I think, in the Q&A session about AI, and there's some best guesses or plans that AI agents will be some part of the market. We don't care as a platform provider because it needs 3 things to run AI. Number one is data. We can say number two is data, number three is data, but you need an infrastructure that's what we own as a platform. And the third is customer access. That's what we get via FMK. And then we have a great impact because we don't care whether it's human brokers or it's AI agents that are using our platform. There's a lot of readiness to use also AI tools. And we will now try to call all these 40,000 new customers every month. We love that there will be AI bots ready in the next 1, 2, 3 months also in German language that are modern enough to really give a good impression on telephone to really get into contact with these new customers.

Yes. So this is what we talked about before. So this is why we think we are the #1 beneficiary of AI development in the market because we can use FMK, as an acquisition engine. We could use these MORGEN & MORGEN leading -- Germany leading databank of MORGEN & MORGEN and also have the best infrastructure platform to really perform on these AI tools.

And this is the other questions, number one, due diligence task when buying FMK, what's happening with all these large language models? You can see that all of them are now introducing ads, so that an advertising behind there as answering of the prompt and then you can see that the conversion rate is much better. And then the return on advertising spend is as much as 5x higher than using Google.

Yes. So yes, you can stay tuned what we are developing a lot in this region. And yes, we have a good AI team that will bring you a lot of more innovation into the market.

So thank you very much, and Judith, happy to receive as many questions as we can squeeze in.

[Operator Instructions]. And the first question is, the preliminary annual results 2025 was EUR 8.4 million. What is the preliminary figure after minority interests and how do we expect this influence to develop in the future?

The preliminary annual result for what? That's Q4 or I don't know, of FMK, that's FMK question or -- so yes, I'll take the second question. Maybe that goes to FMK, right? I don't know what figure, so because the overall...

Maybe [ Mr. Jacobi ] , you can clarify that, and I will read out the second question first. Has FMK matched the expectations so far, what unexpected problems occurred with FMK? And is it on track for EUR 10 million EBT in 2026?

Yes. So yes, FMK is just matching our plans quite directly. So I think they have provided -- I don't know, we don't have the final figures for March yet, but I think they are just on track. They plan to have to like EUR 1.3 million to EUR 1.4 million EBITDA every month, and they are quite on track. So we think there will be -- roughly end up at EUR 15 million EBITDA in the year '26. And yes, that's what I can read with these minorities. We only own 60%. So we have deduct 40% of this EUR 15 million. So there will be EUR 10.5 million or something with the -- staying as a cash flow with JDC.

There were no unexpected problems. So they're just delivering as planned. Obviously, we did not reckoned or planned them at a growth rate of 30% that they showed in some years of the past, but on a 10% growth rate. And I think we are quite right on aim and on track. And I think it will be more than EUR 10 million EBT for FMK in 2026 because they have almost no deduction, amortization tax whatsoever. That's before tax. So I'd say, yes, there's almost no amortization. So EBT figures will be at EUR 15 million [indiscernible].

Okay. Thank you, [ Mr. Jacobi ] , for being more detailed. Yes, that's the -- okay, EUR 8.5 million is the EBT question. Yes, they are -- they ended at in their own year at EUR 14.2 million, I think, for the year '25, and that's exactly where we expected them to be.

And the only reason is what you can see is there is a big disappointment on the government and development of the German economy driven by government decisions in the year or starting Q3. And this is what has some depression or decrease in consumer confidence. And that's the only thing -- that's the external factor that influences FMK, but still, right, we didn't expect them to grow more aggressively and same goes for the JDC platform.

If people are really depressed, they just postpone their investment decisions. They also postpone their new pension plans, health plans, and this is why we'll see that this wave of new business that was not really strong in Q4, might come back in Q3, Q4 this year. So yes, we think that now we have Iran war, obviously, and the next energy crisis, which yes, decreased a little bit of customer confidence, but we think that this will improve and be back to normal days, and that's all we need to reach our plans.

So we're very confident that our guidance is quite right and also FMK develops just as we planned them. So next year, we guided for EUR 36 million to EUR 38 million EBITDA, and this means that I think still very conservative. The platform to earn EUR 22 million plus and FMK to earn EUR 15 million plus. So I think we are quite on track quite happy of the developments, which we hopefully will publish soon in the Q1 figures.

Thank you very much. And with an eye on the queue, I see we have no further questions so far, and we, therefore, come to the end of today's roundtable. Thank you very much for your interest in the JDC Group AG. A big thank you also to you, Sebastian, for your presentation and your time.

Ladies and gentlemen, it was a pleasure to have you as guests today at the European Platform Summit. I wish you a successful day and handing over back to Sebastian for some closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you again, Judith. Yes. So quite a run-through through the presentation. So you can see that JDC is very well prepared in the competitive environment. There's a big gap between public market valuation and private equity valuation. So there -- we think that -- and this is also, as you can see, with further share buybacks that we think the shares are comparatively low price. So we will buy as many shares as we can afford.

And also, we can see that both the platform business doing well against the backdrop of the environment. And also FMK is doing really well. So I think we did a very good acquisitions, which has opening -- which is opening up all the benefits of AI as, again, all what it needs to be the #1 beneficiary of AI, biggest or strongest databank in the market, second strongest platform and infrastructure in the market and customer access, I think we will have a lot -- very good results of using these new developments.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the preliminary full-year figures for 2025 of the JDC Group Aktiengesellschaft. The company's CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; and CFO, Ralph Konrad, will guide you through the presentation and the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat.

Having said this, I'm handing over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much for the charming introduction, Judith. Very warm welcome from the Board of JDC Group, and we are very happy to present to you our results of the full year 2025, as always, still subject to the comments of our auditors. Yes, so you can see there's record results again for the group. And after a very strong quarter, we're happy that we could reach our -- at least most of our goals. My name is Sebastian Grabmaier and together with our team, I'm responsible for product strategy, IR, PR. And next to me on the mic is my partner and Co-Founder, Ralph Konrad. Ralph?

Hello, and welcome from myself as well. Ralph Konrad, responsible for the figures, the IT stake and M&A, and very happy to have my 2 other Board members, Marcus and Ramona. Ramona is not here today. She has an alternative appointment today, but Marcus is here. So we're happy to be on the call here.

Hello, all together. Yes, if there's a special question on distribution, Marcus is also happy to answer later in the Q&A session. Yes, we are looking back to a very emotional event. Actually, there was last November 25, we had our 20 years anniversary on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Yes, it was more an emotional part because you ring the bell after 20 years, it was very great event. And we're very happy that many of you just came from all parts of the world, actually from New York, U.K., Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Scandinavian. Yes, there was a very good turn up and there's a nice picture of this great day.

Yes. So JDC Group at a glance, you all know what we do. We are a typical platform company for financial products. So we take in the data of all the producers, the insurance companies, the platforms for investment funds, the mortgaging banks. We standardize the data and we show it in our visualizing systems. To give you some KPIs, we now have more than 2.5 million customers on the platform, that's 520 employees, 400 that translates into 400 full-time equivalents with more than 16,000 brokers that use our platform. And yes now also FiNUM comes closer to the 100,000 client mark. Yes, and we have in our FiNUM company, more than 300 advisers now that give advice to more challenging and affluent customers. Strategic focus and geographic focus is DACH. So that means mostly Germany and Austria.

Yes, you can see on the next page that Q4 was quite a great finish of the year '25. We told you that we were not too happy on the Q3, as we talk more about consumer confidence here in Germany, that's at a historic role. But nevertheless, we could reach our targets with a fulminant, yes, [ EUR 9.8 million ] EBITDA -- well, let's say, contribution of Q4. And therefore, you can see that our turnover of the entire year went up to EUR 250 million, so that's up 13.2%. It could have been a little bit more actually, but Q3 was -- yes, we were too far behind after this little dip in Q3. And also here, you can see EBITDA is up 36.3%. And if you deduct the one-offs that we had out of the -- mostly out of the acquisition of FMK, EBITDA is up 47% if we take out the one-offs.

So very good development as we think, and we talk more about our guidance and it depends how you look at it, at least, it's in the reach of the guidance. If you take out the one-offs, it's around on the lower end, but if you take the one-offs, then we are rather on the upper end. So we're very happy with these results of this year '25.

Yes, you can also see how this translates in the development over the last 10 years. You can see our CAGR for revenues is up 12.2% and EBITDA growth, as you can see, is up 35%, because we can see growth, we are not only growing, but growth is growing. And you'll also see that the margins are expanding, so that's up 6.3%. So we're happy about these developments. You can expect more. We'll show you some guidance later for the year '26. And you can see that, yes, this curve is basically not only increasing, but also scaling up.

Yes, this is what we showed you last earnings call for Q3. Yes, we can see that there was quite some disappointment on the German government. There was big projects and big budgets that, especially this EUR 500 billion investment budget, but consumer confidence did not go up immediately. You can see that, yes, recession is ending, but still consumers didn't feel it. And now obviously, the backdrop is still quite challenging. We're all marveling on the markets, what's the impact of the Iran war. But actually, you can see that, yes, most of the consumers just take it as it is. And even if not really structurally or fundamentally, there is a big change. Consumer confidence goes up a little bit. And for the first time, we had these turnaround in the confidence of the business leaders in Germany. So there is a really slight light on the end of the tunnel, basically, at least the confidence comes back to the market. So we are quite optimistic also that there might be some impact in '26.

Okay. Before we go into the figures, please let me explain the adjustments that we made. Adjustment one is the elimination of the reorganization within our segments. This is necessary to observe the development of the segments and compare apples-to-apples. To remind you, we now have only 1 and not 3 liability umbrellas in the group, what saves us annual cost of around EUR 250,000 a year. As a result, EUR 12 million in turnover and EUR 200,000 in EBITDA are now allocated in the Advisory segment and not in the Advisortech segment for the year 2024. That's important to compare the development of these 2 segments.

That does not have any impact on the consolidated group figures, but it's an intra-segment there. In the following slides, this effect is shown in the light green color as Adjustment 1. Then we have another adjustment. It's Adjustment 2, is the elimination of Sebastian already mentioned, the M&A-related costs regarding the FM&A transaction was EUR 1.6 million. These consist of transaction costs, lawyers for the SPA and the negotiation, W&I Insurance and not at least notary costs. Just to give you a feeling, we had alone EUR 200,000 for notary costs for the purchase agreement of FMK, and the provision of the collateral for the bond. So buying companies is an expensive hobby.

On the following slides, I will comment and focus on the adjusted figures. You will see that makes it easier to follow. Yes, revenues increased in 2025 by 13.2% to EUR 250 million. The Advisortech segment grew by 14% to EUR 210.8 million and the Advisory segment by 11.1% to EUR 56.4 million. Gross profit increased by 12% and you can see that gross profit is growing more slowly than turnover. And that shows you that our environment is very competitive. There's a lot of private equity money out there in the industry. As you know, our competitors were bought by private equity companies. The most recent transaction is the acquisition of [indiscernible]. And yes, as you know, piggyback companies, they have to grow for a good exit and that's the reason why our piggyback competitors try to grow very fast and thus, compete primarily on price. And of course, this gives margin pressure. And this makes it all more gratifying to see that we can still scale our EBITDA through efficient cost management. So EBITDA increased, as Sebastian mentioned, by 47% to a very strong number of EUR 22.2 million.

Although the economic environment in Germany was slowing down, we saw this in the third quarter and in our third quarter numbers. We could achieve the best Q4 in company's history. And in addition, the best quarter ever since inception of JDC with a turnover of more than EUR 70 million and an EBITDA of approximately EUR 10 million in only one quarter. EBITDA margin in Q4 was more than 13%. And if you put EBITDA in relation to gross margin, what is the better way to measure our performance, we had an incredible EBITDA margin of 42% in the fourth quarter. This is outstanding and record high for our company.

Yes, when you buy companies, it's always important for investors to compare apples-to-apples. So of course, a lot of you want to know what is the impact of the FMA transaction to -- on to the group's EBITDA. And that's what we want to show with this staircase graphic. Reported EBITDA amounts to EUR 20.6 million. Then you have to add the already mentioned M&A one-offs of EUR 1.6 million, you end up at EUR 22.2 million EBITDA. FMK contributed EUR 4.5 million in EBITDA. And if you deduct this, you would -- if you would deduct this, you would end up at EUR 17.7 million of Group EBITDA would -- which would have been a plus of 17.2% compared to the previous year, where EBITDA of the group was EUR 15.1 million.

Yes. In this slide, we want to show you the turnover development for the full year 2025 as to product groups. First was a nice growth in the investment side. As you know, for capital markets have come back after Liberation Day quite a bit, but nevertheless, as our funds develop after -- basically, it's a little bit MSCI in dollar terms and then obviously, the lower dollar compared to the euro means that we took this exchange rate loss basically. So trailer fees and investment funds and also portfolio management fees went up by 9%, which is a very good development over the last year.

The insurance business went up 6%, which was good against the backdrop that we said that especially Q3 and the low consumer confidence, especially in the life insurance market was a more flattish development. And so the growth came by the big number of P&C contracts that are new to the platform. And then obviously, Ralph explained that quite a little bit comes from the new contributions of FMK, and other segments. So we are happy to reach this EUR 250 million goal.

Then on the next page, we see the development as to our customer groups and sales channels. And you can also see that our IFA business is just what we saw before, is up 5%. So it's good that growth comes from all these segments. And major customers are still growing faster, obviously, right? They are now about 1/4 of our production. And there's a nice contribution also into turnover from FMK Group. So you can see that FMK fulfilled all the plans we had and we offered to you after the call on the acquisition. So it contributes about -- you have to divide this by EUR 4 million to EUR 3 million a month in turnover, and it contributes about EUR 1.1 million a month in EBITDA. So very happy with this transaction.

And we also had a quite nice growth in Advisory. And you can see also here, this is the pro forma view. The 45% sound much better, but this is why -- this is because we merged the liability umbrella business into the Advisory segment. So on organic terms, it's 11%.

Okay. I just had to mute my microphone because Sebastian was talking, but you were looking at my face. So yes, back to the figures and start with Q4 in the Advisortech segment. Please let us look at the adjusted figures on the right so that we can better compare the years and see the development more clearly. The turnover was up by 20.2% to EUR 62.8 million. Gross profit increased faster because of our new subsidiary, FMK. FMK's gross profit is calculated from revenues generated from the sale of leads minus marketing expenses. And this is in present significantly higher than the gross margin of the platform. So we have opposing trends.

The platform's gross profit from commission income, minus commission payments is falling a little bit due to competitive pressure, but this is offset by the increase in gross profits from the new FMK business. Overall, positive development.

The personnel costs, our biggest cost position, only grew by 2.8%. Other expenses grew by EUR 900,000, thereof EUR 200,000 FMK and the rest was around -- of the rest around 50% were related to the whole year, but we received the invoices in Q4. So the minus 30% look not so good. But if you look in more detail, that's a very normal development.

This all led to an increase in EBITDA of 65.5% to a very satisfying number of EUR 8.5 million for the fourth quarter in the Advisortech segment, sorry.

Total revenue in the full year '25 increased in the Advisortech segment by 14% to EUR 210.8 million. Depreciation remained relatively stable and personnel costs only grew by 2.3%. And by the way, not only but also is this a result of our AI ambitions, we will come to this later on. That help us to work more efficient and save costs and a growing platform. Yes, we will come to this later.

EBITDA increased by 35.9% to EUR 20.2 million, a very good development in our point of view.

In the Advisory segment, the fourth quarter here, the pro forma revenue rose by 9% to EUR 15.8 million. Nevertheless, gross profit was declining. At the first glance, this looks wrong, but if you go 1 step deeper, you see that there was a number of one-off effects in 2024 that significantly improved the gross margin of the fourth quarter. For example, the reversal of provisions for sales representative compensation claims, complex word in English. In Germany, it's [Foreign Language]. It's even more complex in German. Yes, and that's why the fourth quarter 2024 look better as it was. So very normal development costs have hardly changed in 2025 in the fourth quarter and have even decreased overall, which demonstrates the great cost discipline of our colleagues in the Advisory segment. And because of the decline of the margin, EBITDA decreased from EUR 2.1 million to EUR 1.8 million.

Looking at the full year of the Advisory division, we can see a very positive development with pro forma revenues rose by 11% to EUR 56.4 million. We had a very stable cost development, which led to an increase of EBITDA of 14.6%. At the end, a very solid development in a very challenging environment.

Yes, cash flow statement, that is significantly influenced by the FMK acquisition. We had this in the Q3 call as well. The operating cash flow increased from EUR 15 million to EUR 16.5 million. In mind, you have to add the M&A cost of EUR 1.6 million, which have been paid in cash. Cash flow from investing activities relates almost exclusively to the acquisition of the FMK Group, EUR 66 million out of the EUR 71 million.

The cash flow from financing activities is a bit more complex to explain. I already tried this in the Q3 earnings call. But again, at the initial time of consolidation of FMK, the group had approximately EUR 60 million in cash on its accounts and EUR 13.9 million of this didn't belong to us because it was not acquired as it's related to prior year profits, and we had to distribute this cash to the sellers before closing. So it was on hand when the deal was done, and it was gone when the deal was closed. And this is why we have this rather difficult lookalike here.

Cash flow from financing activities is EUR 15.9 million and change in cash and cash equivalents due to consolidation scope that's what I explained today is -- what I explained right now is EUR 15 million. We ended up at EUR 36 million in cash at the end of the year, a good plus compared to the previous year. And cash on hand, very actual is EUR 35 million plus EUR 7 million on FMK, so in total, cash on hand is EUR 42 million.

Yes, platform activity is also developing positively. The number of orders increased slightly by 1.9%. The number of contracts transferred by 25.5%. But let me mention from an already very high base, the assets under administration and roughly EUR 2 billion of this under our own management increased by 10.3% to a very good number of EUR 8.3 billion. And the annual net premium, and this is really an impressive development in the insurance segment, grew by 16% in only 12 months and exceeded for the first time the mark of EUR 1.5 billion in the history of JDC.

Please let me remind you, we here only show KPIs that earn us money. We don't show any contracts that we have stored in the platform, but they don't pay commissions. Some of our competitors do this the other way around. So if you look at such KPIs, be careful with your conclusions.

Yes, to summarize this, we see a further continuous development of our KPIs, and I'm again happy with this development.

Yes, some short information on the bonds and the share price. We have 2 bonds, the SME bond under German law for EUR 20 million and our Nordic bond was EUR 17 million, which we issued for the financing of the FMK transaction. With regard to the SME bond, we have the first call in November this year at a price of 101.5%. We have not decided yet whether to redeem the bond or whether or how to refinance this. This depends on our further development during this year, depends on investment opportunities that we have and our liquidity then. So we will decide in the course of the year.

And yes, share price, our share price shows a very long-term upward trend since years. But even though we experienced significant setback at the beginning of the year to around EUR 21, due to the investors hear about AI and its influence on insurance brokers, we will give you some color on this in the next minutes. The price has recovered. And with the start of this earnings call, we were around EUR 26.3 or EUR 26.4. We continue to hold 147,000 treasury shares, which we purchased on an average share price of EUR 19.89 per share. Shareholder basis is very stable. No changes in the holdings of Great-West, BKB, Provincial and the management. The only new name for some of you is Teslin, the Dutch investor, that focuses on high-quality companies with growth ambitions and strong management. That's not meant to be self-brace, but that's what they write on their website. They now have acquired 6% of the shares and an important shareholder to Teslin, for sure you're on the line. Always good to talk to you.

Yes. Thank you. As Ralph said, we asked a little bit more of your time. This is earnings call is now scheduled for 90 minutes instead of 60. And the reason is we want to give you more insights how AI is shaping our industry. We do think that, this is the most important change in our industry since the invention and introduction of the Internet. And also, it will take a little bit, but this will fundamentally change what we see in the markets. But we will show you that we at JDC, we have all that it takes to be an absolute AI winner and we're only saying this, but we mean it. And we'll show you that we have all that it takes to be the benefit of these changes as we have everything that's needed for AI in place, and we're basically in the proposition to develop the first -- be the first mover, develop the fastest into these markets. Not only when it comes to efficiency of our back office, but also on the customer side.

So let's look at what is really needed to use AI really. And if you use ChatGPT or any other large language model, you will see that the results are extremely dependent on where you are and what data bank and what data these models are approaching. And in insurance, if you have simple questions, a lot of these prompts are going far or are having very bad results because the data is not readily available. And that's very different with JDC. What we show you that we own the data already with the MORGEN & MORGEN data bank.

First, we want to start with a study of the Research Center for Financial Services what they call CIFIN impact study. And that's quite provocative and brings them some consultancy fees, I hope. You can see that the sales channel mix in Germany is expected to, yes, move and to change dramatically. So you can see that right now, almost 40% is still the own exclusive agent networks of the insurers, 25% is the brokers, 12% is now direct sales, 10% is platform sales and 15% is others. So you can see for platform, shouldn't change much. In 2035, the study thinks that 45% of all sales go to AI. I think that's very provocative and we'll see how this really develops.

But for us, JDC it's very important that we don't care where the contracts come from. So we're agnostic as to the sales channels. We're not only that's where we come from, from the broker side. But as you know, we expanded quite nicely into the banks and into the insurers trade agent networks that now start to use our platform. And even if it's AI agents, they do need a platform. They need transaction and they need data, and that's what we own already. And therefore, if anybody uses AI agents in the market in the future and regulation is approving, then the JDC platform is the #1 platform to turn to because there, you cannot only choose products, but you can transact these products and you find the data for these AI prompts and searches. So again, right, we think this will change. It will go in the direction of AI agents. We see how fast this goes and how thoroughly. But again, we don't really care whether products are sold via human agents or the agents that are artificial.

So -- and to show you this in more in detail, we added some slides on 2 things. One is data, right? Everybody talks about AI but no one about the necessary data. And some of you were not easy when we bought MORGEN & MORGEN at quite a price, but we said this is basically our stronghold. That's the base for our future business development because it gives us not only the comparison tools that are very scarce in the market, but also the database that's 84,000 different tariffs for insurance for the last 20 years, where we can build on all the tools we are building for the future.

And the GDPR, so that's the data protection, European data protection directives, as a result that other than in the stock market investment markets, data is not readily available. But to the contrary, it's securely stored into the insurance back-end systems or in the paperwork or the minds of the insured clients. So we do collect all these relevant data. We have -- as Ralph showed you, we are the #1 platform for the transfer of contracts. So we have the biggest data bank, not only for the actual contracts, but also the contracts of the historic development over the last 20 years. And this is important when you ask whether my contractor or whether an AI agent finds a better contract, I do need all these data of the old contracts. That means all the data available in the market and no other company has this information. So we are here in the pole position when it comes to data.

And the second field is the transaction side, right? So whenever you talk about transactions in insurance financial products, you need the infrastructure. And we, at JDC, we're not a front office company with shiny, blinky websites, but we are a machine room with a huge back office and we access the insurers back and draw out the data or pull it out. And you need hundreds of APIs to these insurers to get all this data out of these insurers and then standardize it and also to fill in your front-office system. So we do deliver this for all kinds of intermediaries and also in the future for all the AI brokers that might come or not.

Okay. So let's look at the value chain of our industry. The key value propositions and how our point of view AI will have an impact. We have the product suppliers, the insurance companies, then we have the platform, JDC. We have the intermediaries from the single broker to the bigger brokers, the corporates, the banks and maybe in the future AI brokers, and we have the customer.

We, as a platform, we connect product suppliers and intermediaries. We have interfaces to all the product suppliers and the intermediaries. We deliver the Advisory IT, the processing infrastructure, we manage commission and billing, and we continuously, as Sebastian mentioned, update customer and contract data. And in our stage of the value chain, we think that AI is mostly impacting efficiency. We saw a lot of improvements, and we will see more improvements. We will be the, let's say, service and data hub and infrastructure for AI applications across the broker industry. So I think we will see a new business model, rather as customer of JDC than as a competitor.

And on the platform, we think there will be a very limited disruption, yes. Because of our barriers to entry, we think we have a very good position. It might be different with the intermediaries because intermediaries provide advice to the customers and they are the center of customer trust. And there, of course, we will see improvements in efficiency as well, like customer communication or automated documentation, but we will also see disruption through AI brokers. But, and that's what we want to show you or give you information, you have to keep in mind that we are in Germany. We have regulation data protection, and we have Advisory liability. We, at JDC, we are AI believers, but Germany would adopt slowly because Germany operates under the most strictest GDPR in the EU and it restricts the insurer's ability to process, store and analyze personal data. So they cannot act as freely as competitors in more flexible regimes.

And the most unclear issue is the Advisory liability because Germany places a very high responsibility on the Advisory to provide a suitable individualized and compliant recommendation. So who is liable for an incorrect advice given by artificial intelligence? And what does the German supervisory authorities say about this? Will there be further regulation? Or will there be some -- even some bans? We don't know today. And we even don't know how German courts will deal with such incorrect advice, as we know that courts tend to rule in favor of the consumer and not in favor of the adviser. So a lot of questions.

Last not least, we have a cultural and legal emphasis in Germany on human advice. So we will adopt here. Germany is AI ready, but not AI-only ready compared to the United States. And that's, I think, what you have to keep in mind when you think about how AI will affect our industry at JDC.

Yes. We have been working on AI applications for several years now, initially with external consultants and core programming with our people. But now with our own growing AI team, we already use AI in many areas of our day-to-day business. In the area of operations, for instance, in automated document understanding, we extract structured data from these documents. We classify the documents. We normalize and validate the data. And that's the reason, as I mentioned, why our personnel costs have only risen slightly by 2.3%, while our database is growing much faster.

In the consumer acquisition, we already use AI in the automated campaign optimization in the AI generated marketing content for the FMK campaigns and in lead generation via the LLM models, we'll come to this later on. And furthermore, we use AI to bring our product intelligence seamlessly to the broker. We evaluate insurance products. We interpret the conditions, and we have a very new products, which we showed our progress for the first time yesterday. It's the MORGEN & MORGEN companion and this is the really amazing piece of software. You can see it here because we are able to answer almost every question for more than 80,000 insurance tariffs in Germany. That's 90% of all insurance products sold over the last 30 years.

Imagine there is a broker that has 500 customers with an average of 3 contracts each, means he is managing 1,500 contracts. For him, it is impossible to answer all the customers' questions about these contracts. For example, before going on a vacation, the customer might know whether his expensive surfboard is covered by his liability insurance. The broker doesn't know. Nobody has to answer. And in this case, he calls the insurance company, the insurance service department to find out the information because he does not have the insurance conditions at hand. He waits on hold in the line and then he calls the customer back, takes them 40 to 60 minutes, and not only once a day. This is the normal situation a broker faces. And tomorrow, which is today with a MORGEN & MORGEN companion, he will simply ask the question, copy the answer and send the customer an e-mail or he will answer immediately at the phone and all this for more than 80,000 tariffs. So that's -- we think that's really cool, and feedback of our brokers yesterday was they think it's cool as well.

Okay. Two more slides on FMK, because a lot of you asked what is the impact of all the AI development on the FMK business. Yes, what does FMK? We have users that are searching for products on classical search engine school being more now on social media, Meta, TikTok and what's new, they also want to have answers from the LLM models, Copilot, Gemini and the ones and FMK then. We target these customers. We do the performance marketing, we generate the leads and we monetize the traffic because we sell the leads to banks, insurers and so on and so on.

So the question is, does AI influence the business model of FMK and if how is the influence? So -- and that's what we think we can tell you, similar to search engine providers, LLM providers have 2 models for monetizing the traffic. The first is subscription and the second is advertising. And since we know that the leading search engines like Google did not become successful as subscription models, it's not really surprising that free LLM models such as free ChatGPT are now starting to sell advertising. ChatGPT started in the U.S. 4 weeks ago. And that's what we expect it. It was one of our central investment thesis in the FMK transaction. Yes, and because we were involved here very early in user groups, we already knew at the time of our investment that advertising in LLM converts better than search engine advertising.

We have some figures here. The click-through rates are 1.8x higher, conversion is higher from 1.5 to 2.4x. The consumer decides much faster and FMK internal number. The ROAS means return on advertising spend in AI is 5x higher compared to FMK's total ROAS. I have to put a disclaimer because these are very early figures. They need to be validated as the volume will increase in the future. But we can say today that AI advertising is another channel for FMK for lead generation and it definitely offers great opportunities.

So what's our conclusion? What our takeaways? As Sebastian said, AI will change the market, but it's definitely a major opportunity rather than a threat for JDC. I think we could -- I hope we can make clear that we have a good opportunity to be the hub for data and infrastructure and enable AI applications all over the broker ecosystem. In the platform, it will drive efficiency and lower costs make us better, faster, cheaper. And in terms of distribution model in the future, we think that there will be some AI-only applications for very simple products where you don't need a broker anymore, but the more complex the product is, the more is the human in the loop, then we will see AI-assisted tools, but not AI-only tools. And that's our view. The hybrid model will still be the model of the future.

Last slide from my side. We see ourselves in the pole position for the transition towards AI because we have all what it takes. We own the data. We own the infrastructure. We have the operational know-how to connect all this together and with FMK, we have the customer access. So this is a big opportunity, and this is why we are already building. As you can see here, under cover, we will not publish today but stay tuned. I think we will show some nice applications in the near future. Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you, Ralph. I think this is -- we will include in future calls as well because that's one of the big factors driving our markets. And obviously, sometimes also our share price.

Yes. So we want to give you a new guidance for the year 2026. And first, we have a look back on the guidance on '25. You can see our figures on the next slide, Ralph, we see that we guided first EUR 245 million to EUR 265 million turnover. After the acquisition of FMK, we increased this guidance a little bit up to EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million. We then achieved EUR 250 million. It was well in the range of our first guidance, but we missed our guidance aims then a little bit on the updated guidance. But I think the more important figure is on the EBITDA side. So we first guided EUR 18.5 million to EUR 20.5 million, after the acquisition of FMK, EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22 million. And many of you ask me why, just EUR 2 million. Yes, that's the consumer confidence part.

And we're very happy about the Q4 because, obviously, we could reach the guidance with just, yes, EUR 9.8 million in Q4. And also, if you not adjust, not take out the one-offs, we reached this guidance with EUR 26 million, but if you add -- or if you deduct the one-offs this way, then adjusted, we are with EUR 22.2 million. We even exceeded our then updated guidance that we gave you end of '25. So we're happy with these results.

And also, our goal for '25, we have quite a complete clean sheet here. We integrated M&M into the JDC platform. You could see Ralph showed you the first results that we now have also product offerings that you get these little donuts where you see what's the performance of my old contract and what's the better contract. And you can then very easily choose the new contract at the next due date. And also, as you could see this implementation of the companion, that's big steps in the world of the broker management. And also, we could develop more asset management platform, Deutsche Finanz Portfolioverwaltung, DFP. We announced that at EUR 2.4 million -- billion -- sorry, EUR 2.4 billion in managed assets out of now more than 8 -- EUR 8.4 billion in all assets. And also Summitas is growing, and it's profitable, and we could buy more brokers here. And also, you could see that we developed the IT platform with great step further. The new AI team will push growth. The programming will be much faster and will scale up the JDC platform.

And also, you can see that our costs don't grow as much as our data size and also our revenues. And this means, yes, this comes to more efficiency, more cost reduction and economies of scale.

Yes, here, if you see at these columns, I think quite nicely, the new guidance for 2026 will be the range of EUR 300 million to EUR 330 million. I think, yes, conservative as we still don't know what the outcomes economically for Germany out of the Iran war. And EBITDA, no surprise here. We gave you a range of EUR 35 million lowest and to EUR 38 million EBITDA. I think also here, quite cautious as -- if you add the figures, I think we get a long way just by adding the FMK numbers.

And also, the goal for 2026, yes, the key initiative we showed you is these rollout of our AI tools that we introduced yesterday to our brokers, the general condition companion and also new II tools if people, yes, speak about AI agents, yes, let's see what we can do there against the backdrop of German regulation, from the tech side, obviously, owning the data and owning the infrastructure, that's not a big problem for us. So yes, and there's always the disclaimer, all we do tell you about the future as always, depending on all the other developments in this world.

Yes. Thank you for your attention. We are happy to take all the questions you might have.

Thank you very much Sebastian and Ralph. Ladies and gentlemen, now it's your turn. We are opening the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]

You are guiding EBITDA of EUR 35 million to EUR 38 million for 2026 before minority interest. What would this number be excluding minority interests? Would you consider guiding going forward with numbers also excluding minority interest? And would you consider reporting a guiding for free cash flow?

Yes. Thanks for your question. To be honest, the situation is new for us because in the past, we only had 100% participations. And please keep in mind that we have a call on FMK's 40% share in 4 years or 5 years. I don't remember exactly. I think 4.5 years now. So it will be 100%. But until now -- until then, you're right, it's before minority interest.

And the other question was -- just a second, I have to read it. FMK is about EUR 10 million earnings after tax. So we have EUR 4 million minorities in 2025. So we didn't decide about changing our guidance, but it's a good hint. Thank you very much. We will discuss about.

Thank you. Going on with 3 more questions. Congratulations on yet another solid quarter. The first one, during the Q3 call in mid-November, you reiterated your 2025 revenue guidance and also said you had a good visibility on reaching it. What went different than expected given you didn't reach the floor of the revenue guidance of EUR 260 million? And what assumptions are built into the 2026 guidance? I will take it step by step. One question after another.

Yes. If you see this quarter-by-quarter earnings and revenues that Ralph showed, you can see that we are always on this hockey stick development. Why is this? Because Germans used to buy life insurance, pension plans and health insurance in November and December of each year.

So although about 82% is -- of our revenue is recurring or reoccurring, there is still the remaining 20% and a lot of it, yes, 10% plus comes in these life and health insurance plans or not. So it's very hard even in November to tell you what the result of the entire year will be because it's a lot dependent on this consumer confidence level whether also big companies have new pension offers to their employees that also happens end of the year, or whether they move it out or postpone it by a quarter or 2. And this happened to most of the German industry and also to a lot of private clients that thought, well, it's an insecure world. The government is shaky here. And also the development is not right. So a lot of investment decisions are moved out to the year '26.

As you know from the past, it all goes in waves and everything we don't get in year 1, we get at year 2. So that's the flow of the business, yes. But as we get the revenue figures is always 6 to 8 weeks later, then this is also why we only report now our figures, then you cannot tell -- we cannot tell you in November how the year would be.

So we still against the backdrop that, yes, if you were here in Germany, you could see that the overall satisfaction with the performance of state and government was very, very poor, very bad. We still think that's a good -- it was an okay-ish to good year-end business, but obviously not as good as it could have been. And EUR 10 million sounds much, but in life insurance, especially as we earn -- yes, about 30x more in one-offs in life insurance than the recurring revenue or income stream is on a normal P&C contract, it's just basically a glimpse.

Maybe one comment from my side. It's always -- it sounds weird if management says in November, I don't know how the year will end, but you have to see that we received the commissions for December in February. And there's a relevant portion of commissions that we don't know before because the brokers send the applications directly to the insurers. So there's some -- it is -- yes, it is plannable, of course, but it is, let's say, 85% to 90% plannable. And yes, that's what we can tell you.

Can you give us an update on how the new lead insurance campaigns are going with FMK Group, where you are funneling the leads in-house?

Yes. I can do this. We started to set up the internal sales team, and we hired the heads, the team leads and another 4 salespeople. We started implementing this, and we are now scaling up the number of leads that we generate and that we sell. The conversion rate is around that what we expected and the commissions per contract that we sell is higher than expected. So in total, it's Ramona's business. She's not here today, but that's what we discussed in our Board meetings that is -- yes, we are in plan or above plan.

And when extrapolating FMK's revenue growth very conservatively compared to previous years, it seems that it's stalled in 2025. Also, we know the focus has been changed to reoccurring contracts. Can you just elaborate a bit more here on the performance in Q4 versus expectations?

That's right. There is no relevant growth at FMK in the year 2025. It's a small company with 12 employees. And in such a company, if you have a shareholder change and a structured process, then management is doing nothing else for, let's say, 6 months. So I've never seen a small company in such a transaction and in parallel, bringing best results ever. But that's what we expected. We expected the company to stay at this level to bring the profits that the company brings and FMK in 2025 made it as we thought it would happen. Sebastian?

Yes. So also, right, FMK runs on German consumers. And now we have a very early KPI that shows us what they think. And in November and December, we could see that click rates on certain insurance and financial products went down 15% to 20%. And obviously, right, that's -- but actually, we are happy, as we said, right, with the FMK does exactly how we planned it. And we have great times ahead with them, taking into account all the news that Ralph gave you that we're now in the position of all these very interesting ad spaces under the LLM model prompts.

Thank you very much. You already mentioned the merger of Netfonds and blau direkt by Warburg Pincus. Could you please elaborate on how that is going to change the competition landscape for the broker market, for insurance and investments? And how does it affect the JDC Group?

So the summary is not really much, right? They're all valid and valuable competitors now with a very strong focus on insurance. Their investment business was quite rather small with about EUR 500 million in assets, so far away from ours. And Netfonds, I know they published a lot on insurance, but actually, we never had a big competitive clashes with them on the insurance side. And now I think it makes a lot of sense for Warburg. But on the competitive side, it's either one or the other. So for JDC, there's not much of an effect.

Thank you very much. And also regarding the situation, the next question. Sebastian, great figures and summary, congratulations. I have another question. Can you transfer anything from the valuation of Netfonds, which is now being paid for by Warburg to JDC? Where do you see the true value of JDC? And to Warburg -- would you like to answer it first?

Yes, it's a very tricky question. As a Board member CEO, you should never talk about the value of your company because obviously, it's on the -- it's the stock price times the outstanding shares.

But yes, if you read the last analyst reports of Netfonds, they're expected to do EUR 12 million to EUR 12.5 million and are now valued at the -- if this price for the shares for the outstanding shares is also the price for the first stacks of stock. Then this calculates up to EUR 182 million. So that's at least 15x if they have some other impacts as we had in Q4, even whatever, 16, 17, 18x, yes. And obviously, you can calculate yourself.

Now JDC trades at maybe 10x expected EBITDA, okay? You can talk about the minorities, then it's maybe 11x, then you can make your own deductions of this. Obviously, private equity, and this is also what we see with commercial brokers within Summitas is open to pay much, much more than public markets. Is that good or bad? It's -- we have to take it as it is. And this was the development over the last years where there's a lot of private equity money out there, but not as much small cap public investors.

And to, Warburg Pincus with blau direkt and Netfonds, is this just the beginning? Do you think Warburg will continue to look around, especially in Germany?

We know that they do. That's basically their business model to buy as many of these bigger players that they can and then package it and then sell it off to some -- in some secondary or to some strategic buyers. So yes, so Netfonds is not a small fish. It's at least #5 in the market. So yes, there is not much more of the big fish left, right?

So there's only 1 or 2 in this EUR 100 million range, and then it goes down quite quickly. If you recall the study, we also showed you in former earnings calls, you can see that then on this algorithmic scale that we built in that then the competitors become really small, but that was our prediction is our prediction that the smaller 20 broker platforms, they will go and be bought basically. Yes, that's just within a big consolidation phase of the market, which is good for us because, obviously, we are one of the big buyers also.

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, let me shortly mention that there are a lot of questions in our chat box. And now we have a hand-up for audio question. We will jump there for a moment. Mark Westening, you should be able to speak now.

Congratulations for the results. I'm Mark Westening from the Netherlands, not from Teslin, by the way.

Happy there's more than one Dutch investor. So...

The '26 guidance indicates an EBITDA margin of approximately 11.6%. The 2030 guidance that you shared around a year ago, guidance indicates around 9.5%. Why is it breaking the gradual improvement of the past years?

The answer is easy because when we gave the old 2030 guidance, we didn't know that a company like FMK even exists. And this was how we thought that JDC would scale in EBITDA margin without FMK as very profitable lead generation company that hopefully gives us not only profits, but fuel to run the platform. So that's the difference.

And can I [indiscernible] you to update your guidance for 2030?

Yes, we're working on it. It was just the short term. Obviously, as we explained, we get the data quite late from the insurance companies. Everybody in the finance department is working quite hard to give you the figures as preliminary as fast as we can. But I think when we publish the final figures, we can also give you a new vision for 2030.

Thank you for your questions, Mark. And we will jump back to the questions on the chat box. What contribution of FMK is expect into the 2026 guidance?

Yes, I can answer this. If you compare 2026 to '25, then the additional contribution of FMK will be between EUR 30 million and EUR 35 million of turnover and like EUR 10 million in EBITDA. You have to consider that -- we had 4 months already FMK in our consolidation in 2025. And the figures I mentioned were what you can add on this. So another EUR 30 million roughly in turnover and another EUR 10 million in EBITDA.

Do you expect the productivity gains enabled by AI and your back-office operations to lead to pricing pressure from your clients?

Not really. So the beauty is that the commissions are calculated in a manual world, right? And as long as 85% of the markets are not digitizing or not digitized, right, then we don't expect commissions to go down substantially. So we get this digitization premium where we are more efficient being digital as compared to all the rest of the market being nondigital, we can benefit from this trade-off.

And it's the same with AI because AI is -- yes, that's new, but it's a very, very, very, very small part. And even if you look now at U.S. markets that celebrate a comparison tool that has been in the market in Germany for the last 15 years, it's still a very small impact. So this will take quite some time until the entire market changes and there is more digital than manual offerings.

Thank you. What is the main reason why revenue guidance fell short by EUR 10 million, but the earnings forecast was comfortably met. Was there a nonrecurring one-off effect?

No.

No, one-off besides the EUR 1.6 million M&A that we talked about, the EUR 20.6 million are recurring. We just were more profitable than we expected. And the shortfall, I tried to explain is we are paid net by the insurers means they take the positive commission from our applications. And if there are cancellations, they are -- they deduct the cancellations and send us the net revenue. So if cancellations increase, then the net revenue declines. And that's what Sebastian mentioned because of the economic environment, we had more cancellations and that reduced the turnover. And maybe this is not explaining the total gap, but it's one part of the explanation. Sebastian?

Yes. And the other half is basically that we always give you average commission -- commissions, right? But what we didn't lay out in detail is that the recurring part of the commission has a higher margin than the new business. So on average, it's rather 25 percentage on the recurring base. So if we get in EUR 40 from -- for a small contract, we pay out EUR 30 on average. So we keep 25%.

But for these bigger life insurance contracts, especially, the margin is rather 10%. So on the plan, that's very high volume revenue on low earnings, and this is also why the EUR 10 million hurt on the revenue side. But if you translate this in earnings, it's not much earnings contribution that is missing by this EUR 10 million in new business.

Thank you very much. How is the lead generation going for FMK in the insurance market? I recall the business not doing anything or very little in the insurance compared to investments. And what percentage of FMK's current revenue comes from insurance leads?

Very little still because we do not sell the leads, but we try to convert them into own assets. And that's what I mentioned is what we are setting up now. We still generate leads in -- we are setting up the lead generation in -- mainly in -- in work disability and pet insurance that are the first parts that are starting now and are scaling up day by day, week by week. But if you look at the P&L now, it's still not relevant.

Thank you. Would you consider reporting and guiding for free cash flow?

Yes. Other colleague asked as well. We would love to. But to be honest, that's really complex. And you have so many circumstances and impacts we would think about it.

But as a rule of thumb, like from the non-CFO answer, it's very close to EBITDA minus minorities, right? So if we guide for EUR 36 million and deducting minorities of EUR 4 million, you usually expect the free cash flow plus or minus EUR 30 million, right? As Ralph said, there's about 70 different factors, but that's my management rule, if that helps.

Thank you very much. And let us shortly jump over to Yannick Glatthard with an audio question. Yannick, you should be able to speak now.

Yes, great numbers. I have 2 quick questions. The first one is quick. Could you maybe address the development of the Summitas Gruppe and maybe like the major clients such as VKB, [indiscernible] and others, just maybe in a sentence?

And then the second is regarding what you just said regarding the FMK insurance lead generation. How are you experiencing the difference in fully digital leads such as maybe a bank or credit card that can be just sold online in comparison to more complex insurance products where the lead leads to personal exchange. Are you seeing any differences there? Is it working the same? Is it more complicated for the lead generation?

Sebastian, can you take the first question, please.

Summitas. Yes. So well, Summitas has developed quite nicely. Obviously, we bought BVUK, the biggest pension management platform at the end of '24, and this was consolidated in '25. So BVUK also was integrated well. But on the other side, always, they had to fight with these life insurance pension business, occupational pension business postponements. And for them, 6,000 contracts that should have been there in Q4 were postponed to Q2 this year. And therefore, there's a little bit minus on the BVUK side. But overall, Summitas could grow revenue and earnings to about -- we don't have the final figures yet. So it's about EUR 55 million in revenue and about EUR 15 million in EBITDA, if that's the last what I heard.

And so it's very happy with this engagement and important for us as a platform. It contributed rough EUR 1.7 million last year, I think, in EBITDA to the platform business. So happy about that as well. And major clients, yes, so obviously, you saw that they are up 15%. This could also have been steeper, obviously. There are some partners that develop nicely, especially the Provinzial savings banks. We are now at almost 100 savings banks that could use the platforms, but also there, it's a roll-up stage still.

And then yes, development is slower at Sparkassenversicherung and VKB. And yes, but we are very happy that the corporate brokers are just in line -- Algotrans, BMW, Boehringer, which good developments.

Yes. Your question regarding the leads, it's a different business because FMK in the past didn't sell leads to Trade Republic and Co, but they send them customers, and they were paid not lead by lead, but for the successful business transaction. So the conversion rate from leads to contract was not so important as they were paid by business and not by leads.

In the insurance business that we now start we planned with a conversion rate from 10% to 15%, and that's what we see. So no negative surprises. There is a positive surprise, and this is that the average commission per sold contract is much higher than we expected because the leads are at a good quality. That's what we can say at this stage.

But please, this is still very young. The company -- we bought the company in July. It was first consolidated in September, and we hired the head of our sales department for the FMK leads in November, I think, and she started working here 1st of January. So it takes time, but we are within our plans.

I have one more comment, maybe thanks. I see an analogy. I think like 2 years ago or maybe even further back, you were talking about major clients that you were winning, and you were saying if we win one of these, then we'll have a good way of going. And I feel like it's the same way right now, not just with like the major clients, but like even like a level higher. There's the major clients that are going well, then there's FMK that's going well and the Summitas Gruppe. So very happy with the development.

Thank you very much, Yannick.

Thank you for your questions, Yannick. And we're going back; how do you perceive the takeover of Netfonds by Warburg? Is that a positive development for the leading companies in the industry?

Yes, we talked about this a little bit already. Well, it's just happening what we told you in the last 3 years. We see that consolidation is picking up. We are buying, they are buying. So there will be at least 3 conglomerates. One is led by Warburg Pincus. That's blau, Netfonds. One is Hg Capital's, GGW, Fonds Finanz, also PMA. So -- and us, 2 are private equity owned, which means there will be secondaries or strategic sales. We are publicly listed with very strong shareholders. So people when they come to us, they know where they will end up. That's a very stable shareholder structure there, and then they choose whom they want to partner with. So that's the only, let's say, reflex in the end, the competition has been fierce and is fierce. So it's good sports still.

Considering your pole position in AI and German insurance, have you been already approached by AI firms for potential partnerships?

Smaller daily because everyone tries to tell us that we have to cooperate and -- but if you look at the MORGEN & MORGEN companion, we could have done this tool with a third party, but then we would open our data, and this is the gold of nugget. So we decided to do it ourselves. And our plan is to internalize as much AI applications as possible and not work with all shiny blinky start-ups. We will do it our own.

Then how did FMK's revenue and EBITDA change in full year 2025 compared to 2024?

As mentioned, it's more or less comparable. The revenue is a little bit more or less the same, plus/minus EUR 500,000.

Thank you. What is your view on the merger of Netfonds and blau? Do you expect any change in the competitive dynamics?

I hope we answered this. No, there will be the same fierce competition that's out there already.

Yes.

Can you give an update on Summitas and its M&A activities?

Yes, we had a question on Summitas already. Yes, we still have a full M&A pipeline there. So we're still buying brokers. And yes, we will be -- spend all the initial commitment most probably in the half year. So yes, quite a good active contribution to the market.

Maybe we -- as we run out of time, we can skip the questions that are double. The next one, Sebastian answered as well. And #4 is can you...

That's the second part. Do we expect any new logo wins?

Okay.

We wouldn't tell. So that is not signed.

On existing strategic partners, can you share comments on the development of the rollout penetration of clients, any change in dynamic driven by the new AI opportunities?

You saw that major clients were up 15%. So that's a good number. And of course, when we show AI applications, then our customers, they will test them and decide to use them or not. But I don't think that this will influence the speed of, let's say, adoption at our bigger customers. I think you have to be on the very innovative side, you have to provide new tools. You have to make business more efficient for your partners, then they will be happier. And of course, then the turnover will grow, but that's hard to measure.

In which AI models did you test FMK's higher conversation rate because advertising is just getting started, and that's in the U.S.?

I was laughing when I was reading the question because it's a good question. When ChatGPT started 4 weeks ago, how can you know how do you have figures? What I know, Florian is unfortunately not at the call, the founder of FMK. What I know is that FMK was in very early groups with Google as the CEO of FMK, Anna is a former Google employee. And so they were very early in testing advertising in Google Gemini. If you look at Google, you can use the AI view. And there today, you can see advertising, not at the free ChatGPT that started in the U.S. 4 weeks ago, will come to Germany. You're right, the figures cannot be from ChatGPT advertising.

But it also comes from Bing and Copilot.

Yes.

And they started earlier than -- so ChatGPT is basically the last mover to add advertising to their large language models or the big ones.

Thank you very much. And we have 3 questions left. Could you perhaps tell us something about the current market and market consolidation following yesterday's purchase of Netfonds? Does JDC still have any potential targets in mind? And what are the approximate sizes?

So we answer the first half. But the second is, yes, we talk to everybody in the market, and there's a number of smaller ones out there still, but we'll see how the market now moves. Maybe prices now moved up as we think it was a very attractive -- Netfonds was really a very attractive trade-off for existing shareholders.

Yes. Congrats to the shareholders.

And can you update us how the large customer business is doing? 2025 seem to have been a good year.

Yes, we've answered this already. There's one question regarding the cash flow. The colleague asks if our cash flow tends to be higher than the reported earnings after tax. The answer is yes. And the reason is that we have high depreciation and amortization for the portfolios that we bought in the past. So we have like EUR 4 million or EUR 5 million amortization, and that's the reason why cash flow is definitely higher than net earnings.

Wonderful. And one more question came in. Are there any other German insurance companies besides Provinzial and VKB interested in acquiring a stake in JDC?

Well, what we told you 3 years ago when VKB, Provinzial bought 4 years it's not our interest to be owned by a group of insurance companies. So we're happy that they are giving the shareholder base stability. But now in our view, 40% in insurers is okay. But if the majority is owned by insurers, there is an example for that, a company called BCA in the market where there's, I think, 11 insurers owning companies going nowhere because obviously, if you are in a department of a one big insurance company or many, then the entrepreneurial thrust is gone, and this is what we don't want. We want to be product-wise independent, and this is what the shareholder -- the cap table now shows. And therefore, it's not in our interest to sell more stakes to insurance companies.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. And with no further questions, we have come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in the DC Group AG Aktie verzeichnete. A big thank you also to you, Sebastian and Ralph, for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. We will also post the recording of this call on the AirTime website. I wish you all a successful day and handing back over to Sebastian for some final remarks.

Yes. Thank you again, Judith. Yes, Ralph and I and the rest of the Board, we're very happy about the results and very happy that the Q4 was showing such good impact. Also, yes, you could see that we grew earnings by 36%, adjusted even by 47%. If we now go EUR 36 million plus, you will see that we grow even by 70% in the earnings in '26. So you can really see that now really we have already reached this inflection point and really now can scale the platform and earn real money for you. So we are very happy to show more of this.

And then also we see a huge tailwind by AI developments. And it's still very, very early and very, very small. But as you could see by Ralph's explanations, we use it in many parts of the company already, and it's driving our efficiency. And now when it comes to the customer side, where really people use ChatGPT or other large language models for their insurance advice, there is a huge gain, maybe not immediately in an AI agent that really does the buying for the customer, but more in getting the information, gathering all the conditions and also answering the questions and making the life much easier for the existing intermediaries.

And again, we have a huge demographic problem in the markets where half of the intermediaries will go out of the market anywhere and someone has to do the job and AI is the perfect replacement for these brokers going into their retirement ages. So we're very happy about these developments. We have what it takes, again, data infrastructure, operational efficiency and know-how and now via FMK, also the customer access. So there's a lot of us to be expected, and we will be in the pole position and stay in the pole position. Thank you for your interest and trust.

Good morning, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call for the JDC Group following the publication of the Q3 figures of 2025. The CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; the CFO, Ralph Konrad; and the COO, Dr. Ramona Evens, will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be able to ask your questions. And with this being said, I'm happy to hand over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much, Mara. Yes, a very warm welcome also from all of the Board of JDC Group. And we're happy to present to you the 9 months figures. And my name is Sebastian, Co-Founder of JDC Group 24 years ago together with my partner, Ralph, who is the CFO. Yes, welcome, Ralph. Okay. You're not -- you're speaking later enough on...

A lot of text today, so no introduction necessary.

You might be knowing Ralph. Ramona is with us for more than a year now. And so yes, we welcome Ramona in this circle also.

Very happy to be here.

And we don't have a picture of him, but yes, the important -- most important part of the company mostly is the sales, and this is why Marcus is here. So welcome, Marcus.

Thank you, Sebastian. Warm welcome from my side. And as Sebastian mentioned, I'm responsible for sales, marketing and product management. And yes, glad to be here.

All right. So we jump into the text and see that, well, one introductory slide. As always, we're a platform company, as you might know. So we take in the data of all the insurance companies in Germany. There's more than 220 insurance groups, all the asset management platforms and the alternative product providers, the mortgaging bank, we process the data, standardize it first and then we make it visible in our visualizing systems, either our own or we load the data up via an API to the systems of our clients, and that's all kinds of intermediaries. That's 16,000 individual brokers and tied agents, but also more and more the banks, the insurance companies themselves, other fintech companies, intertech companies or exclusive sales organizations. Right now, we have about 6.4 million data sets on the platform corresponding to almost 3 million contracts. So our -- yes, it's -- our value comes mostly from our JDC tech stack that's leading, and we still win almost all of these pitches out there when it comes to the choice of a processing systems for third-party insurance contracts.

On the next slide, we show you we have a resilient business model. You see no matter what crisis you could imagine in the past, COVID or all kinds of financial crisis in the markets, our CAGR in revenue growth is up 12.2% year-over-year-over-year and the growth is also growing. You see our guidance now at EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million. And in revenue and also EBITDA as the platform is scaling up is growing even steeper. So we are now at a 31.4% EBITDA CAGR in the past years. And also this growth is growing. And with the acquisition of FMK, we speed up our earnings growth as well. And what you can see on the right-hand side is that our EBITDA margin also gradually goes up, and we are now standing at 8% always to the top line, so earnings to top line. But as you know, we pay out 75% on average to our intermediaries. So as a software company, you would just look at the relative figures compared to the gross margin line.

Having said that, yes, we are happy to look back on a very successful quarter as we could close the acquisition of FMK. But you can see that also growth is not as steep as you might use to, okay? We are at record highs, obviously, as we are going from one record high to the other and now stand at more than EUR 175 million in turnover, which is a growth of 11.2% in the first 9 months of 2025. And earnings are up considerably higher. It depends whether we take in the one-offs or not. As you see when we look at the guidance, Ralph will explain later, we will have to report without one-offs. So EBITDA growth is at 19.9%, so almost 20%. But if you take out the one-offs that we have quite a bit for the acquisition is 35.5% with a very nice earnings growth. So yes, so if we deduct the one-off costs, I think it's a very, very nice development.

Yes, and you can see that's part of the problem here. We always tell you that all our figures are always have one little disclaimer, and that's the -- yes, the development of the overall economic situation. Obviously, we're not that dependent on the overall economy, but definitely on the consumer confidence. And what we could see that there was a lot of hope into the new government, but as you can deduct from all the news that you're taking now, the actual government, that's a conservative and Social Democrat coalition government is now at a worse situation than these traffic light government in the past. Now we can see that, yes, the overall business figures, Germany is in a recession for now 3 quarters. It seems to be ending, but growth is still very weak and now unemployment is exceeding. This has a lot of impact on the occupational pension schemes that are not gone, but they're basically postponed to the next year. So you have a lot of big companies that do not see any benefit in spending money for employees because the labor market is quite in a better position as you can find employees again.

But all these sentiment indicators, consumer confidence is a record low. And this is what we feel that people postpone the investment decisions, their pension planning decisions. And after a very, very strong third quarter in '24, we now see a very normal quarter third quarter in '25. This means that our growth is not as strong in the third quarter as we expected. But obviously, we see already the figures for Q4, which we see much, much better than Q3. But yes, that's the lowest consumer move since our new Chancellor Friedrich Merz took office, and that's a little bit the backdrop of our very good performance of our company herself. Ralph?

Okay. Yes, we have 2 effects on the figures, which I would like to explain before we go into the figures. The first is the environment. What does that mean for us in concrete terms? On the one hand, we are seeing a slight slowdown in new business development in the area of retirement provision, especially in life insurance as Sebastian mentioned, but keep in mind, we are comparing an extraordinary -- we are comparing to an extraordinary strong Q3 2024. I will show you this later on. And secondly, we are seeing a slight increase in cancellation rates. Cancellation rates are always calculated in relation to new business. And if new business goes down slightly, then cancellation rates are higher, and this reduces the reported net revenue in the third quarter. But to answer this question in advance, we don't see this as a trend. It's just a description of the current environment.

We know from discussions with our competitors and insurance that this is an industry-wide situation. And let me add this, we have seen this several times in the past. There are weaker weeks and weaker months but we have always seen subsequent rebound effects. And why is this the case? It's the case because people don't buy retirement products for fun, but they buy it because they need it. And if you don't buy them today, you probably have to buy them tomorrow. So this is not a very nice quarter, but normal business.

The internal effects in the third quarter come from 2 sides. The first is what you know. We have reorganize the companies and the liability umbrella. And the second one is we had relevant M&A effects in the third quarter. And I will give you some figures on this before we dive into the figures. It's better to understand this before. Adjustment one is the elimination of the reorganization of the segments necessary to observe the development of the segments and compare apples-to-apples. To remind you, we had 3 liability umbrellas, and we now have 1 liability umbrella that saves us around EUR 250,000 a year. And as a result of the -- in the first 9 months of the year, EUR 8.5 million of turnover and EUR 0.1 million of EBITDA are now allocated in the Advisory segment and not in the Advisortech segment, but that doesn't have any effect on the bottom line, it's just between the segments.

And the second effect adjustment two is the elimination of the M&A one-offs. The M&A costs have added up to a very significant amount. F&A -- the FMK Group was not only our biggest transaction, but also the most expensive one in terms of M&A costs. The M&A costs consist of due diligence costs for legal, tax and financial due diligence. We have legal costs for the SPA negotiation. We had notary costs, which were very high because of the size of the transaction, and we had to pay the W&I insurance premium. For those who are not familiar with the M&A business, W&I insurance, it's a warranty and indemnity insurance, and that's an insurance that is usually paid by the acquirer, means by JDC, and it bears the cost of warranty violations and incorrect indemnities for the acquirer. This is now a standard practice in professional and bigger M&A transactions and in the meantime, precondition to take part in an auction. So this all sums up to EUR 0.9 million in the third quarter. And over the year, it's a relevant amount of EUR 1.4 million.

Okay. So now let's go into the figures. The revenue rose slightly by 5.6% in the third quarter and 11.2% for the year as a whole. The Advisortech segments group pro forma adjusted for adjustment 1 means the liability umbrella by 5% in Q3 and 11.5% for the full year. The pro forma EBITDA adjusted for adjustment 2 means the M&A costs rose by 50% from EUR 2.3 million to EUR 3.5 million in the third quarter and by 35.5% to EUR 12.5 million for the full year and pro forma EBIT rose by more than 100% in the third quarter. To be completely transparent to you, we would also like to show on the next slides what Q3 would have looked like if the FMK transaction had not taken place. That question is obvious. And for the sake of simplicity, we have also taken adjustment bond means the internal liability umbrella reorganization into account here.

And I will show you this now. But before let's go into the development by quarter, that's what I said before. It's important to understand what happened in the third quarter. You can see here that usually the third quarter is in turnover like 6% to 8% weaker than the second quarter of the year. We had in the last 5 years, 2 exemptions. The first was 2021. There, the third quarter was the rebound of the first German-wide COVID-19 lockdown, so not comparable. And the second exemption was last year. We had there are no external effects, no one that I know of but we just had a very strong life insurance business in the third quarter 2024.

So there are 2 ways to look on this third quarter. The first is to view on it in the course of the year. And then we can see it's a very normal intra-year development. But if you compare to the previous year, then you compare with a very strong third quarter 2024. So having said this, let's go into the figures without the FMK Group, including the internal reorganization, this would have resulted in the following picture. Total revenue would have grown by 0.6%. The slight decline in revenue in the Advisortech segment would have been more than offset by the growth in the Advisory segment. EBITDA would have risen by 5.4% to EUR 2.4 million or by 19% to EUR 2.9 million for the year as a whole. Sebastian? You're muted Sebastian.

Yes, sorry. You can see that we have good growth in all product groups. We are -- investment is up 9%, obviously. And you might think why is this just 9%? It's because most of our funds are denominated in U.S. dollars. And as compared to the euros, there is about a 10% exchange rate change. And this is what makes these investment figures just grow almost 10%. Insurance, you can see we're still at a double-digit growth with plus 10%. But as Ralph said, in spite of -- or against the backdrop of a very, very good life insurance business last year with plus 30%. This year, life insurance is quite flat.

And this means the other -- this is basically the transfer of contracts figures, they contribute to the growth, but not life insurance, but we will see better times in Q4, where we can see, especially in the health insurance, a strong increase. And the other product groups, which is a small addition is basically up because we can see that the real estate business is back, the mortgaging business following the real estate business and all kinds of other revenues are up quite considerably. So all in all, we have to be content with the growth of all these product groups.

And on the next slide, you can see how this breaks up among the different sales channels. And you can see that also here, the green figures again are after -- basically the pro forma figures as if these internal reallocations would not have taken place. And you can see that the breadth of the IFA business is not as strong this time with plus 7%. And the reason are the ones -- or the reasons are the ones Ralph pointed out, especially in the life insurance section, there is like a slowdown and there's no impact of a normally growing occupational pension platform business. Yes, major customers, they are up 18%. This is due to there is more customers coming to the platform.

As we pointed out, many are in a rollout or ramping up or rollout phase. So there's more growth coming from this side. And then new section is FMK Group. And as Ralph said, EUR 2.6 million in turnover is a nice addition to the platform. And this is also a good point. Ramona will tell you -- tell us more, like going now also in the direct customer segments, then this means that we have the lever in our own hand. We are not as dependent on our intermediaries for growth. And Advisory, as I said, a tremendous growth after the reallocation of the liability umbrella business, but also just in a natural growth with plus 12%. It's a very nice development. And so on the right side, you can see that turnover split with a faster-growing major customer business, that's already now at 30% of all of our turnover.

****** Okay. The following slides are divided into 3 sections. On the left hand, you can see the reported figures. In the middle, you see the figures corrected by the adjustments that I have explained before. And on the right side, you can see 2 graphs comparing the reported figures with the adjusted figures. To make this a little bit easier to understand, I will focus on the adjusted figures in the following slides. Having said this, let's come to the third quarter. In the Advisortech segment, the turnover grew, including 1 month's turnover of FMK, as Sebastian mentioned, EUR 2.6 million. And compared to a very strong previous quarter by 5%, gross profit increased by 13%, leading to an EBITDA plus of 30% and an EBIT plus of a very nice 50%.

One comment on the purchase price allocation of FMK Group. This is important to understand the forward-looking figures. When we buy a company, we have to do a so-called PPA purchase price allocation. That means we have to allocate the purchase price on the customer base, on the assets and the rest on goodwill. It's a little bit more complex, but let keep it that simple. Customer base and assets have to be written down over a period of time and the goodwill is not written down, but has to be tested yearly in the so-called impairment test.

And if we look at the FMK Group, then you can see that in the past, FMK didn't produce a customer base. They just produce leads and sold the leads. And as it is a very small company, there are not a lot of fixed assets. So the vast majority of the purchase price will be allocated or is allocated on the goodwill, and that's a good news because that means that in the future, we will see almost no depreciation on the earnings coming from the FMK transaction. Okay. When we look at the first 9 months as a whole, the picture is as follows: pro forma revenues rose by 11.5% to EUR 148 million. The costs remained relatively stable. EBITDA rose by 21.5% to EUR 11.8 million and EBIT by 33.4% to EUR 8.3 million.

Now let's go to the Advisory segment and look at the third quarter in an isolated look. Here, we see pro forma revenue of EUR 13.8 million, which is a plus of 14.6%. Gross profit only increased by 5.8%. That's also a result of the -- and related to the reclassification of our liability umbrella. The costs were very stable besides the depreciation and amortization. This has risen significantly. And the reason is the expansion of our rental space in Vienna. As you know, under the IFRS 16 lease payments, including the rental costs must be removed from the expenses and must be capitalized in lease liabilities and then amortized over a period of time. That's what we see here. That's the reason why depreciation and amortization is up more than 30%. It's just a new office.

In total, this development leads to an improvement in EBITDA of 28.4% and an increase in EBIT of 23.3%. If we look at the first 9 months of the Advisory division, we see a positive development. Pro forma revenue rose by 12% to EUR 40.6 million. And except for the depreciation effect that I described some seconds ago, we have a very stable cost development, which led to an increase in EBITDA of 43.3% and an EBIT of 52.7%.

Let's come to the cash flow statement. This has been significantly influenced by the FMK transaction and the associated financing in the third quarter. Operating cash flow is at previous year's level. And the reason is that the additional profits were almost entirely offset by the transaction costs by the one-off costs. The cash flow from investment activities relates almost exclusively to the FMK transaction, EUR 66 million of this EUR 68 million. And the cash flow from financing is somewhat more complex to explain, but I give it a try. We have acquired FMK. Closing was the 16th of September and the date of first consolidation was the 1st of September. So the first consolidation was before the closing.

And this is the reason for this development. At the time of the initial consolidation means the 1st of September, FMK had a cash of EUR 16 million on its account and approximately EUR 14 million means EUR 13.9 million of this where prior year profits that we didn't buy, but they were distributed to the sellers before the closing. So after the first data fresh consolidation and before closing, and this is the reason why you don't see EUR 70 million cash flow from financing activities, but only EUR 55 million, and you see another EUR 14 million in the next line. This is the change in cash and cash equivalents due to consolidation scope. Admittedly, it's a little bit complex, but we coordinated all this with our auditor beforehand to be here on the safe side.

Cash at the end of the period was EUR 33.5 million, including EUR 2.8 million FMK cash. And the good news here is cash on hand last Friday was a very strong EUR 38.8 million, plus another EUR 4 million of the FMK Group. So in total, we had the first time cash on hand of more than EUR 42 million. So there's no news on the old bond volume EUR 20 million. Still, we have still the first call option 1st November of 2026, and we have not decided how to proceed here. On the right side, this is our new Nordic Bonds issued with EUR 70 million, possibly up to EUR 160 million. The coupon is 6.5%, but I would like to remind you, it's a rolling coupon. It's Euribor plus 450 basis points. The bond is due at the 28th of August in 2029. And there, we also have call options. The first call option starts -- or the call option starts at the 28th of August in 2027 and from there on can be called every day, starting at a price of 102.25% and declining to 100.45%.

Yes, share price yesterday close was EUR 28.60. Today, we are a little bit lower, unfortunately. So market cap is below EUR 390 million right now. To remind you, we have approximately 150,000 treasury shares that we bought for EUR 19.89 per share. And in the shareholder structure on the right side, there are no changes, still same situation, Great-West Management, Provinzial and Versicherungskammer Bayern as the biggest shareholders. So that was -- they were the figures from my side. A lot of text today. I apologize, but there was a little bit more to explain. So I hand over to Ramona.

Thank you, Ralph. So I'll give you a little update on FMK. It has been 2 months since the closing of the FMK acquisition. We had a very quick ramp-up after the transaction and the collaboration between FMK and JDC works very smoothly, and we have achieved quite a lot in the past 8 weeks. So first of all, all the legal and the financial requirements are all on track and almost completed. That includes, for example, the integration of the accounting or also the negotiation of the intercompany contracts as well as all the requirements of the Nordic Bond, for example, the collateral agreements or also the setup of the ongoing bond reporting. That's from the legal and the financial side.

From the business side, we already went live with the lead generations for the first insurance products. We picked 2 pilot products with 2 different sales approaches. The first sales approach is like the classical self-service approach online. So that means the end customer can buy the product online without the help of an adviser. And we picked at the pet insurance as a pilot for this section because it's highly profitable and it has a strong demand online right now. And second product that is already live is the work disability insurance. It has a different sales approach. It's a product that usually requires an adviser to help the client pick an insurance product. And in this case, FMK's provides JDC with the interested clients. And we -- JDC as a broker provides this advice internally. This would be the second pillar, Ralph, if you could quickly jump to the next page.

So both products are already online. Here is an example for the Tierkrankenversicherung, the pet insurance. And the big difference between the previous business model of FMK is that they used to get only paid one-off for a lead or a sale. Now that we went into the value chain as a broker, we profit not only from a one-off commission, but also yearly from the recurring commissions. So for example, if FMK got EUR 100 one-off for the sale of in pet insurance in the past, now we get the same amount annually as long as the contract is going. So in 2026, we will roll out further products. And also, we already signed key hires to build up the new direct sales unit starting in January. And as Sebastian earlier mentioned, this is also a way to push growth ourselves, and we are a little less dependent on our intermediaries.

Maybe, Ramona, just one figure to add. In the last year, FMK made roughly EUR 1 million in commission for pet insurance, click-out model one-off. And if we keep this speed in the future, we will do EUR 1 million, but recurring year-over-year. So EUR 1 million this year, EUR 2 million next year, EUR 3 million the following year. So that's a very attractive progress for us, Ramona.

Could jump back one slide, please.

One slide back.

So right now, we are testing and learning with JDC as a broker for the end customer. This is, of course, very profitable because we keep a 100% of the commission. However, and this is the third pillar, we are also planning on distributing leads to our brokers. So that means we are building the infrastructure to channel the leads into our broker platform and brokers will be able to buy the leads from there. And in this scenario, JDC profits from selling the lead as well as receiving part of the commissions for providing the services as a broker pool like in our regular business model. So this is a very large infrastructure project, which we are currently setting up, and we are expecting to go live in 2026.

And then if you could go 2 slides ahead. What also might be interesting for you that FMK operates the subdomains for Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche for comparison of financial and insurance products. For those who are not German Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche are German newspapers. So FMK operates these sub domains, and they can decide on what kind of articles are being released. They can also add advertisement links in the articles. So this is another source of trust building and also lead generation for our new business model. That's on FMK. Back to you, Ralph.

Thanks, Ramona. Yes, as always, we show you the platform activity -- yes, numbers of orders is a little bit down like in the last quarters, decreased by 1.4%. But as Sebastian mentioned, growth comes mainly from contract transfers. Here, we are up 30%, starting from already very, very high base. The assets under the administration also increased very nicely by 11.4% by, in the meantime, approximately EUR 8 billion. We are nearer at EUR 8 billion than at EUR 7.5 billion. And which is really amazing is the development of the net premium, which has -- net insurance premium, which has increased by almost 18% within the last 12 months. That's a very amazing number, and we're now heading for EUR 1.5 billion in annual net premium. So this was the last figure for today besides the guidance, and I hand over to Sebastian.

Yes. We introduced a slide showing you how resilient our growth is. So we used to go through a lot of multi-crisis environments in the past. And you can see no matter whether it was the COVID-19 pandemic or all the turnaround in interest rates or now Liberation Day, which we took quite well. And also now we have this consumer confidence crisis, as we call it now. And still growth is up and growth is growing. So we are not afraid of what's coming ahead. On the contrary, I think together with FMK, we are in a very strong position to profit from the circumstances because more and more of our business is happening online. It's also happening on a consumer beneficial environment. So yes, we're looking ahead with quite some confidence for Q4.

And having said that, we give you the slide of the guidance. You already know we put up our guidance in August after the acquisition of FMK. We think now our turnover will be EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million in turnover and EBITDA will be EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22.5 million. This is what we learned, although we are so on the stock exchange for such a long time that we have to give you guidance without the one-offs, and that's the good news here. We think we reached this guidance also if we do not have a pro forma view as to the one-offs. So we think we are in a very good condition here to exceed our old guidance by quite a bit that we showed until end of July.

So also, all our goals in 2025 are on a very good road. We are integrating Morgan & Morgan platform more to the platform. So we have very good outlooks here for future customers. Our asset management platform, DFP was again rated top 20 in Germany. Now we are at #14. So with only EUR 2 billion in assets under management, we're one of the biggest portfolio management companies in the country. Also, Summitas grows profitably and M&A works like one broker a months. And also our IT platform will be scaled using quite some AI to bring down costs and enhance our efficiency. And this is what we see that the cost per contract are reduced step by step by step. But in the end, it's quite a considerable effect here. So yes, we -- that's also our caveat. That's what we said in the beginning. Yes, our business performance is very good. But on the other hand, it's still develop -- it's still dependent on the development of the global national economic environment.

And if you look at all the news in Europe and Germany, especially, we could wish for more. We could wish for a government that knows what it's doing and not quarrelling about now the pension system because this has quite some impact on consumer confidence. But again, as Ralph said, it's just going in waves. So whatever business we don't do in Q3, we might do in Q4 or Q1 next year. So a lot of investment decisions are just postponed. That's what we see now. And as I said, especially in occupational pension schemes. So we have a very good outlook for Q4 and then also a very promising outlook for '26. And so we will repeat that next year, together with FMK before minorities, there will be at least at EBITDA of EUR 35 million. And I think that's quite some nice earnings growth, which brings us in a very good situation.

So thank you very much until now. Before we answer your questions and again, an invitation for next Monday, because JDC Group is now on the stock exchange in Frankfurt for 20 years. So that's quite some anniversary. And we invited most of you. I hope we didn't forget many. So whoever is still a latecomer, this will be like a nice -- yes, like whatever it's a party on the stock exchange, there will bell ringing, there will be nice pictures, and there will also be a good dinner after. So whoever is late. Welcome. Yes, thank you very much for your attention, and happy to take your questions now. Mara?

Yes. Thank you very much for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation we recommend to ask few questions in person via audio line [Operator Instructions]. And with that said, we have received some questions in our chat box. The first one is, after 2 months, do you expect higher or lower growth due to the FMK acquisition compared to your due diligence, do you generate even new ideas? How to generate growth via FMK?

Maybe I can take this question. If you buy a company, then of course, the business plans presented are very optimistic because the sellers want you to pay very high purchase price but it's not the first company that we saw and it's not the first diligence that we made. So we are in line with our expectations with the FMK transaction and the success. What I can say is, what Ramona said that the cooperation is very compelling, very smart guys, the 3 ones and a lot of ideas that have to be shaped for the future, and we are absolutely convinced that this is -- yes, will be one of our best transaction we ever made.

Thank you so much for your question. Another question that we received is what revenue are you planning for 2026?

Yes, we're still in the planning process. I don't know, Ralph, can you say something already as it's a little bit early there?

Yes, it's a little bit early. We will see a big plus, definitely beyond EUR 300 million, but the rest we will show you with the guidance for the next year.

All right. Thank you so much. We received a rather long question. So just to understand guidance, you guide for EUR 9.5 million to 11.5 million in EBITDA in Q4 or almost up 100% Y-o-Y compared to a strong Q4 2025. You are almost half into Q4 already. So I assume you have good visibility into this. What is the main driver for this strong Q4 outside FMK, et cetera?

We expected this question, Ralph.

Yes, you were very fast with your famous last words. Otherwise, I would have answered the question before. When FMK performs as it performed the last months and if JDC performs not better than last year, but on the same level of last year and the Advisory business is doing as it does, then we will end up as we announced at the lower -- what's the little in English or in the lower 1/3 -- sorry, in the lower 1/3 of our guidance. But then you have to add the one-offs to see a realistic view. And with these one-offs, we think we will end at the upper 1/3 of our guidance. So the answer is, yes, we have a good visibility. And yes, we have a good reason why we said we keep the guidance.

Thank you so much for your question to answer. So far, we have 3 more questions. The first one of those is, did you lose tenders? Are you bidding for contracts of significant size? Can we expect other significant news like acquisitions over the next few months?

Yes, Marcus, I will give the next question to you. I just answered the tender question. Yes, so we -- basically, we have not lost a real tender, but there was one that passed us basically. We didn't get it because we're not really invited to take part. And that's Zurich Insurance, not a very big one, but we have one in mind now, had to come at some point. And yes, we take part in other tenders, but maybe Marcus, you will take the [ R+V ] question, which is next. Marcus?

Yes. So we have a pipeline with a lot of targets and significant targets. So we are still in dialogue with them. We make the offers and starting some small projects. I'm very hopeful that we will see next year some new tender, higher tenders. And then we can talk more if there is -- if the contract is signed, but I'm very hopeful that we have next year's good announcement.

And obviously, for M&A targets, we cannot answer the question because it's signed when it's signed. And before that, it's just smoke.

Thank you. We have another question from the same person. How is the progress with R+V Versicherungskammer Bayern and the new European insurance company announced August 5, 2024. I was expecting even higher growth in the Advisortech segment due to onboarding of contracts. Will the rate of onboarding increase?

Marcus, maybe you want to answer this as well.

Yes. So as we know, [indiscernible] is more in the bank field, and we know that banks are not so pushy in case of insurances. So it costs a little bit more time, more time as we expected. But for the next 2 years, they planned also to have more grip in the bank branches, and then we expect more insurance businesses for this. And for the big European insurance company, we started with the pilot phase and now we went up, opened to more customers. We see the first contract coming. And so we will do it step by step, but we are still on track with our expectations in this case.

Thank you so much. We have received a risen hand by [ Mr. Jong ].

Can you hear me?

Yes.

There's not that much left, but maybe continuing on the last question, especially on the Allianz side. So there's the pilot now, the contribution is a little bit going to expectations. But what kind of order of magnitude should we think about in the case of Allianz? And maybe also on the other insurer...

Maybe -- you mentioned a name that is the secret. That is a big secret. So -- but telling more about the secret volume, maybe you can give something that doesn't hurt our NDA too much, Marcus.

What we can say that we have learned from our first bigger contracts where we had big plans and expectations and quick ramp-ups and what we see now over the last 3 years that these big cooperations are all slow. And that's the reason why we decided to negotiate minimum revs -- minimum revenues, minimum margin, platform fees and so on and so on in all of this -- in all of these corporations. And thus, it's nice if volume picks up, but it's not necessary for us to have a minimum profit on these corporations. So R+V, you mentioned it is, is very profitable for us even if it's not growing that fast. The savings banks in the meantime are very profitable for us because they are growing. In the meantime, we are heading 8-digits revenue there. And the secret name is already very profitable for us, although they have just passed these pilots project stage. So -- maybe this answers your question, yes, in a detail we are able to give.

The growth is still 18%. So it's not low. And then maybe for Ramona. So FMK is onboarded, of course, since September, I think half of September even. Maybe on the example of the pet insurance case, can you maybe give a little bit of an example of how that really works. So they are generating leads. What kind of conversion do you get out of that? Do you maybe have a little bit more detail on how such a process works?

Sure. I mean there are different sales approaches. As I said earlier, there are less complex products. And then you have like some sort of comparison portal on their website where you can put in all your data and then you get a recommendation for the best product for you and then you put in all your data in there and then you finish the sale yourself online. That's like one part of the business model. That's also what we do in the pet insurance. And just by getting the sale on all our website compared to doing the -- sending the customer to the website of their insurer, we are getting into the value chain and making sure that we are not getting the one-off commission, but also really acting as a broker for the client also for ongoing commissions, but also knowing the client and making sure that we are the point of contact.

So that's the first line that -- but only you can do this only for the less complex products. It's like house content, it's like legal protection, pet insurance, accidents, something like that. And then you have a second line of products, which are a lot more complex and where you make a decision that's very often a decision for a lifetime because you only take out insurance once. It's for like private health insurance or it's for work disability insurance or other sorts of life insurance. And it's a very big decision and very often customers in Germany, they prefer to talk this through with an expert adviser. And in this case, you will have some sort of client interest on the websites of FMK. They have various brands. You put in your data that you are interested in that kind of project. And then that's what we call a lease and then they get in contact with one of our advisers and then you have some sort of -- it is an online sale, but there is an adviser involved and then you finish or you make the sale with the adviser.

So those are the 2 kinds of products or product types that we have and the processes are a little bit different. In both cases, legally, the JDC, the JDC plus, one of our daughters is the legal partner, is the broker of the client and also ongoing, we will be responsible for helping the client during the entire phase of the contract. So -- and what we are in terms of channeling leads to our brokers, of course, we will focus on the products that needs advice because if it's a very simple product, it's not very interesting for our brokers to get an advice on that. So in the second line of products, that's also where we will separate the leads and parts we will do ourselves and parts we will give into the broker channel.

And one additional comment, Edwin, to the pet insurance. You remember FMK click-out model to pet insurer is only leads and not a customer. Tomorrow, it's our comparison platform. Tomorrow is today because it's online now or next week. Yes, and if you compare product and you leave your personal data, then you are my or our customer, and we are able to send you more information to advertise other products. We will build up a customer base at FMK that is not there for the past. So -- and this is the second -- yes, the second potential besides the situation that we do not just click-out, but we sell it on to our own portfolios.

And what kind of conversion do you get on these leads? I think FMK generates leads for you. And then should we think about 50% conversion or maybe 10%? I have no idea.

Well, that depends very much on the product, of course. If you have very complex products, of course, the conversion rate is much lower versus products that are, for example, compulsory in Germany. You have some regions in Germany where you have to take out a third legal cover if you have a path. And like in this kind of product, you have a very high conversion because you just have to do it in other products that are more expensive and where you can take it out or you cannot, they are lower. But I wouldn't really feel comfortable sharing conversion rates in this audience because we are one of the best kept secrets in the industry, and it wouldn't help us in our competitive environment if you would share this, I'm sorry.

But it's not Edwin -- it's not 50%.

It's not 50%...

Not, 50%. Unfortunately.

Yes, there are products that are double digit, but not all of them.

Clear. And finally, we always get a nice sheet with the annual goals, the goals for 2026, like what's happening with M&A, asset management. What are the priorities for 2026 besides, of course, integrating FMK?

Sebastian?

Well, we have all these segments have their challenges, also their chances, right? So we can see that after a lot of the pension management projects are postponed to next year, we will collect those Q1, Q2. There's very big companies ahead. So we expect like a rebound in the life insurance business. We expect a very strong health insurance business as these -- the premium increases of health insurers are up quite considerably, double-digit figures a lot. So that means that we expect very good health insurance business for Q4, but also Q1 next year and then also by growing our transfer of contracts business, we will -- yes, we haven't put this out, but these transfers might reach 1 million next year. So on all of these fields we reported to you in the past, there is, yes, strong growth figures attached.

Thank you so much, Mr. Jong for all of your questions. We have 2 left in the chat box. The first one is, are there any plans to switch the Stock Exchange segment from scale to the general standard in the next 2 years?

We are evaluating.

We talked about this sometimes. I think as we -- obviously, now we are in a Q3 call, right, which we are not obliged to do in the scale segment. Obviously, we are compliant with most of all these regulations in the scale. It's just a question, is it -- yes, beneficially, does it help much as spending EUR 250,000 to EUR 300,000 more a year for the stock exchange listing and do we have a broader impact. So we are evaluating, yes. But it shouldn't be a problem if we decided to do so.

Evaluating positively.

Yes.

All right. The other question was with the acquisition of FMK Group, do you foresee any conflict of interest between your direct channel and the intermediaries served through your broker platform? How do you intend to manage the -- mitigate these potential conflicts?

Yes. We have been through this when we acquired Geld.de, that was 2000 and...

'15.

'15, yes. And not really now on the contrary, I think whenever we provide our brokers with leads and our lead auction platform will start in the beginning of the year. I think it's rather more attractive for brokers to come to the platform.

Definitely. And now Ramona...

We have one last question. Does FMK have any cyclicality in earnings? Or is the EBITDA normally spread evenly between the 4 quarters?

Surprisingly, yes, which was surprising to me. But I also did not understand why Germans buy financial products only in the fourth quarter, but it is that it is at FMK, Ramona, please correct me. We have a strong fourth quarter and a strong beginning of the year, and Ramona will give you the explanation.

Yes. It's very interesting that consumers in Germany, especially in the beginning of the year thinking about their financial products. It's a little bit -- I don't know how to say in English, if you make good wishes for the next year and then you feel like, okay, I really have to get my finances under control next year. And then in January and February, there is a lot of traffic on this. We also see this with one of our large clients, so that also has an end customer focus that they also have a lot of interest in the first quarter. So I mean, like if you're in your summer vacation in August, you probably don't think so much about getting out insurance. But like in the cold winter, if you're staying at home and then you are thinking about what to do next year, somehow, a lot of people are a lot like that. So in the end customer business in financial services, it's usually around changing the year that you have a lot more traffic than you have in other quarters.

Well, thank you so much. And thank you for all of your questions and your answers. We have not received any further questions as I can see or risen hands. So we, therefore, come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining for the dynamic conversation and all your questions in the chat box. A big thank you also to Sebastian, Ralph and to you Ramona for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. Should any further questions appear, though, at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. I wish you all a lovely weekend, a week. And with this, I hand over again to Sebastian for some final remarks.

Yes. Thank you, Mara. So yes, thank you for your trust, and thank you for being with us now in the earnings call. As Ralph said, there's a lot of good earnings ahead in Q4. So we are well aware that we will reach this guidance taking one-offs or not. So we're very confident that we have a good time ahead. And also looking forward to '26, we are very keen on seeing all these very nice growth figures of FMK and all the earnings figures of FMK in our P&L.

And again, right, this is a very great transaction, and it's transforming this company. And yes, reaching EUR 35 million EBITDA in '26 is a very good outlook that we are looking forward to just execute upon. So I hope to see many of you next week at the bell ringing party in the stock exchange. And yes, happy to answer more questions then. But yes, we're very, very happy about the last developments. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call for the JDC Group following the publication of the half year figures of 2025. The CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; and CFO, Ralph Konrad, will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your question.

With this being said, I'm happy to hand over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much, Ingmar. A warm welcome from our side to the earnings call first half year 2025. You can see whoever of you already had a look in the figures. We could define Liberation Day trends, and I think we have quite solid and positive numbers to show you today.

My name is Sebastian, I'm Co-Founder and CEO of JDC Group, responsible for Strategy Products, Investor Public Relations, together with my partner, Ralph.

Yes. My name is Ralph. I'm responsible for IT, all M&A issues, and, of course, finance.

Thank you very much. So just on the next slide, very short introduction of our business. We are now a typical platform business. You all know this chart. And so we take in all the data of all the insurance groups that's more than 220 insurance companies doing business with brokers in Germany. All the asset management platforms, all other alternative products, the mortgaging banks. We standardize the data, process it and then we make it visible in our own visualizing systems to all kinds of individual brokers and agents, but also more and more to insurance companies, the banks, Salesforce, other intertech companies and also via our smartphone applications to more than 200,000 clients. So right now, we have 6.2 million data sets on the platforms for 2.4 million customers, and we are one of the leading tech stacks for the processing of insurance contracts in the German market.

Yes. So you see that we're showing resilient growth and margin expansion in the last 10 years. So after our buyout in 2013, you could see that we are growing year-over-year-over-year with new records basically every year. You can see our revenue CAGR annual growth rate is more than 12%. And also, and that's very pleasing for us as shareholders, is that the EBITDA CAGR is much higher, more than 30%. And you can see year-over-year-over-year, we show you higher earnings. And if we do not take in 2025, you can see already that this is a very positive development, and we will show you with the acquisition of FMK, this will be improving much more in the next year.

So EBITDA margin expansion also is a very good trend coming from 2% in 2015, we now guide you at 8% in the year 2025, having reached 7% in 2024. And that's also -- it's up 5.2% year-over-year, also a very positive development. Why are we telling you this? Because you can see and we show you in a slide later that there is crisis all over the world, and there was one in Q2, especially amongst the background of Liberation Day and we are happy that we can present you a stable positive growth with stable rates. So we could grow the turnover with 13.9% and EBITDA by 23.5%. So that's very satisfying.

And with more than EUR 120 million, again, in the first half year 2025 is a new record high in turnover in the first half year, and against a very, very good first half year 2024, yes, we could grow almost 14%. And you will see later that second quarter, especially in 2024 was historically good, and now we are back to a quite normal second year -- second quarter in 2025. But also, you can see with an EBITDA at EUR 8.5 million, with a growth of almost 24%. We're happy and, again, a record high for the first half year ever.

Yes. And one thing is very important. We told you in the last call on the quarter already, we reorganized our business segments. So we have a movement from Advisortech to the Advisory. And the good thing is that saves us money. We have cost savings of more than EUR 250,000 by integrating and aligning our banking licenses, that's what's called a liability umbrella business, where we take over the liability for a huge number of tied agents. This was distributed among three companies, FiNUM.Private Finance in Advisory segment, but then also Jung DMS Austria in the Advisortech segment and Top Ten Austria that we bought 2 years ago was also in the Advisortech segment. This is what we merged now. We have now only one legal entity, and it's FiNUM.Private Finance, Germany, and this is why the business of Jung DMS Austria and Top Ten Austria now goes over to FiNUM.Private Finance. So it's just a technical development.

And so if you're wondering why there is a lot of pro forma reporting. We just show you the growth rates just according to how would it have been if this move had been in the past already. So the good news is now we are down to one banking license, and this is all going through Berlin, FiNUM.Private Finance, and all the liability umbrella business is now united in one segment, and that's Advisory.

Yes. And here, we come to the figures in detail. You could see it's a positive development. Revenues are up 11.2% in the second quarter, and this comes to 13.9% over the first half year, and also earnings and that's important, are up even more at 23.5% as we reported to EUR 8.5 million. And here you can see the difference Advisortech did not only grow by 8%, but in reality of 14.7%, which I think is a good rate. And then Advisory did not grow 43.6% in reality, just by the new reporting standard in the segment, but actually by 10.7%, which is quite exactly the range that we give you our growth. So organically, we want to grow Advisory by 10% plus, and we would grow Advisortech by 15% plus. And after a challenging quarter, we are very happy with these figures.

So then you can choose your figure. Obviously, EBIT is up even more and then earnings are up even more, but you can see this yourself in the schedule. We are very happy that all the growth comes from all the product groups again. We can see that the capital markets started very strong, but then there was a sharp decline right after April 2 Liberation Day, you could see that the capital markets went down quite significantly. And what's happening at the actual consumer satisfaction levels is that also the new business in investment just goes down. So that's a little bit counterproductive.

But as we know, people are only buying stock when they're going up and they're not buying stock when they are low. So we saw a strong decline also in the new business of investment, and this goes further in the insurance sector as there's a lot of unit-linked business. That means wrappers -- so insurance wrappers around asset management products, and that was also quite weak in Q2, but you can see it's still up 12% investment and financing, almost EUR 5 million plus, insurance is up normal, let's say, 16% up, despite of this little decline in unit-linked and the others are up as the real estate markets are starting to grow. And still -- German banks are still reluctant to give up mortgages. This is improving slightly time over time. But still, the real estate markets are still hindered by reluctant German banks. But all over, we're happy of EUR 120.9 million in turnover in the first half year.

So here you can see the distribution among the sales channels. You can see that the IFA business is the stable backbone of our business. It's up 12% pro forma. And again, the missing 9%, it's the liability umbrella business, which went from the Advisortech side to the Advisory side, but the green figures is closer to reality. Major customers, do not have any liability umbrella business. So it's up -- sales up 25%, very satisfying, but also Advisory is almost up 11%. And so you can see now the distribution is that major customers now make about 30% of our turnover, and almost 70% is our IFA business in the breadth of 16,000 IFAs that we have. So as we said, these growth rates are impacted by the restructuring. But otherwise, the IFA business, very solid backbone of our business.

Okay. Then let's go into the comparison by quarter, ladies and gentlemen. If we look at this situation, we have seen a very dynamic development after the impact of the Ukraine crisis, JDC has grown double digits and '25 was the first year in the company's history where we started with the Q1 of more than EUR 60 million of turnover. So best first quarter in history.

The good news is the second quarter is also the best second quarter in history. But you can see that the volume is a little bit below the first quarter. There's a very normal seasonality, as Sebastian mentioned. We have a strong first quarter. We have a weaker second quarter, a weaker third quarter and a strong fourth quarter.

And if you look at the year 2024, the second quarter was almost as strong as the first quarter in 2024. And thus, the quarter-on-quarter growth rate with 11%, seems to be a little bit smaller. But keep in mind, the main reason was exceptionally good second quarter 2024.

And of course, as Sebastian also mentioned, we see some effects resulting from the economic slowdown in Germany and the ongoing tariff discussion for example, we have a little bit higher cancellation rates for existing contracts and some reluctance to purchase new contracts. People are uncertain, and this is -- and reflect this in their purchasing behavior, but on the other hand, we have seen such situations many times before and have always without any exception seen a catch-up effect afterwards in the reluctance to buy.

And this is because financial products are not like a watch or a second car. They bought because you need them. You do not decide to buy one at all. You need these products for risk protection or retirement provision, and so you buy them later or maybe in a smaller amount, but you don't cancel the transaction.

Having said this, let's go into the segment numbers. Due to group reorganization, as Sebastian told you, the segment report also shows pro forma figures for the year 2024 for both segments, Advisory and Advisortech. And the blue columns 2024 show the adjusted figures as the reorganization had already been effective from the 1st of January 2024.

Yes, to compare apples with apples, I will focus on the adjusted numbers in the following slides. Revenues were up 11.2%. Gross profit was up only by 2.1%. That has two reasons. The first is that the revenue growth was driven by bigger partners with higher payouts. That's a smaller part of the explanations. But the main part is that, as mentioned, we had increased cancellation ratios in April and May, and cancellation always reduced the gross margin. And we think that this development, the obvious is somehow related to Liberation Day because if you look within the quarter, then you can see that June was already very strong again, and June provided more than EUR 1.6 million of the EUR 3 million segment EBITDA in the second quarter.

So we think we are in a good way. And of course, we saw some effects in the second quarter because please keep in mind, we compare extraordinary strong Q4 of 2024, with the Q2 '25 and the middle of the market's turmoil.

Yes. If we look at the first half year as a whole, the picture is more positive. Revenues are up 14.7%. Gross profit increased by 6%, and due to good cost management, the total costs declined despite the increased volume, especially in the other operating expenses. And as a result, EBITDA increased by 14.9% from EUR 6.9 million to EUR 8 million, which is an increase of 15%.

Let's go into the Advisory segment. The Advisory division has had a really strong development, although revenues only grew by 3.3%, the gross profit increased amazingly by 14%. This was, to be honest, a little bit surprising, but we double and triple checked this development and the figures are right. The main reason is that we have a big increase in high-margin business, real estate or other asset classes where we just have higher gross margin, and this grew faster than the rest. And as the cost bases remain stable, this increase in gross profit showed a big impact in EBITDA. EBITDA increased by 45% to EUR 1.3 million, which is a very good development in our point of view.

And it's the same with the first half year as a whole. That's also very convincing. The revenues went up by 10.7%. Gross margin even stronger by 12.6%. And this led to a very convincing EBITDA growth of approximately 50% to EUR 2.5 million in the first 6 months. So best regards to our FiNUM colleagues in the line, excellent work. Thank you very much.

Yes. Let's come to the cash flow statement. We started the year with cash and cash equivalents of EUR 24.6 million. We had a cash flow from operating activities of EUR 6.5 million, which was slightly below the previous year. I will explain this in a minute. The cash flow from investment activities amounted to EUR 2.5 million -- minus EUR 2.5 million better than the previous year because we only had some capital calls from Summitas and no other payouts for any other participations. We had a small negative cash flow from financing activities driven by interest rates of minus EUR 1.2 million. And so we ended up with a EUR 27.2 million cash on hand at the end of the quarter. And as always, the very actual figure, cash on hand is EUR 35.2 million.

Yes. Why can an operating cash flow decline when the operating income increases that made the question that some of you have, and we didn't want to leave this obvious question unanswered.

So the answer or the reason is our negative net working capital profile. At JDC, we always received commission before we have to pay them out. So we have two cases. The one is the growth case in the green box, and the other is the case when turnover declines in the red box. And if the turnover increases, then we have a higher cash flow from operating activities because we have today's high commission inflow, and we have the payout for the smaller business to the brokers of the past period. So that's clear. Then the operative cash flow is very strong.

And if the turnover decreases from one period to another for first quarter to second quarter, for instance, then the operating cash flow is smaller because we have the lower commission inflow in this period and we have the higher payouts of the prior period. So that's the reason. And the green box is very normal, for instance, for fourth quarter, which is very strong compared to the third quarter, and the red box is very normal for a second quarter where we have a smaller turnover than in the first quarter. That's just to explain the situation.

Here, we have a very nice development in the share price. You have seen this after the announcement of the FMK transaction. Market cap is now above EUR 400 million. We are very happy about this. And the reason is that we were able to finance this transaction 100% debt base. So very value accretive, no dilution for you, shareholders and for us as shareholders as well. The shareholder structure, thus is unchanged and also no change in the bond.

Yes, let's come to the spotlights. For the investors who could not attend our latest call last week regarding the FMK transaction, we will give you a summary on this. We will show some figures regarding the platform activity. And in addition, we would like to share some general thoughts about the environment and the resilience of JDC and the growth of JDC.

Yes, what's FMK? FMK is a data-driven specialist in digital lead generation. but they do not only generate leads, they generate business transactions, mainly in the area of personal finance, and that means FMK gets paid by its customers. When the FMK customer, for instance, a credit card company earns money, and the company earns money when the consumer signed the contract. So FMK not only generates leads, but takes the conversion risk, and this is very convenient for FMK customers. They have roughly 100 customers. And this is the reason why customers since inception, constantly increased the revenue with FMK.

And that's what you can see on the slide here. Very impressive development. The company was founded in 2021. After 4 years with a revenue CAGR of almost 180%, FMK ended up at approximately EUR 40 million of turnover, a very high-margin business with a 35% EBITDA margin and only 12 employees. So the company is very, very digital and has a very scalable business model. We always tell you that the JDC platform is scalable. Yes, it is scalable, but FMK is even more scalable. We would love to have this revenue per employee figure in the total group, but we don't have.

Yes, you can see in the pie chart that the revenue comes from personal finance mainly. We will not touch this segment. We are happy with the development. The segment should grow. And in our work together with FMK, we will touch the insurance segment, which is now less than 1% of turnover. And in our, let's say, future strategy in some years, the revenue, FMK revenue in the insurance segment will be as high as in the personal finance area.

How does the business work at FMK? If the consumer searches for an online product, then he sees the paid marketing campaign of FMK, and Google or Bing or social media or the GenAI tools. And by clicking on these campaigns, he ends up at an FMK landing page or a comparison portal. They have several of this portals. And if the customer then chooses a product, he checks out to the product partner website, where does the deal.

And it's special at FMK, because we do not only sell the leads or the business to the partners, but we get back a lot of data, did the customer really convert, does he use the credit card in which amount. So all this data are used in a very automized way to optimize the campaigns and to optimize this cycle. So every sale improves the next in a very automated feedback loop, and that's the sort of the secret sauce why the company is so successful.

And yes, why is FMK so exciting for us? Why not only become a customer instead of buying the company. I would like to explain this to -- with the usage of a metaphor. If JDC was, let's say, very powerful hi-fi system, then until now, others have always had the control over the volume control. We were dependent on how much revenues others brought to the platform. And with FMK, we will take more control of the volume control ourselves by generating customer leads, and either converting them with our in-house brokers, which is very profitable or passing them on to our affiliate advisors, especially to our exclusive advisors.

So FMK gives us at the end, more control, and it's a little bit like the missing piece on our JDC platform. And in the future, we will not only provide technology, what we do today, best-in-class technology, but we will also provide consumer or customer access to our brokers. And that can bring really huge synergies and makes the platform much more attractive to brokers. And especially to younger brokers, who don't have a lot of customers.

So in addition, FMK is growing very dynamically and will generate relevant profits for us. So we really believe that this transaction will take JDC on to another level.

Yes, and that's why we told you with the announcement that the EBITDA '26 of JDC will definitely be above EUR 35 million. Then we were asked whether this was more or less a hidden profit warning since we already achieved that figure today on a pro forma basis, if you had FMK and JDC, very funny, but a good question. No, it isn't. We just wanted to show the investors that JDC is now reaching a new level of profitability without setting the expectations too high, and we hope for your understanding. The 2026 guidance will be published with the preliminary figures for 2025. So stay tuned, and we all can be excited.

Here are some more details on the transaction. We bought 60%, the purchaser is Jung, DMS & Cie., which is our subsidiary in the Advisortech segment, so FMK will be part of the Advisory business. We paid an entry multiple of 8x. This is expected to decline below 7x. And the reason is that we have earn-out structure where we pay on EBITDA improvements from 2025 to 2027, but with sharply decreasing factors. So the more profitable the company gets, the better is our multiple.

We've negotiated a downside protection based on the entry multiple. So if the company would not be as profitable as in 2024, then we would get back our money up to a certain amount. And also very important, after 5 years, we have a call option on the rest of the shares, on the 40% of the shares that's still are with the founders right now. And this is a very good situation because they are relevant for the company, and we are happy that we have them on board. But after 5 years, it's our plan to own 100% of this company and fully integrated into the JDC platform.

The figures on the left side shows you how the company would have been if the transaction would have taken place at the 1st of January 2024. So pro forma 2024, you could see that the combined EBITDA would have already been EUR 28.5 million.

So how to finance such a transaction? We decided to finance this transaction on a 100% debt basis because that's very value accretive for equity holders. And this was possible for several reasons. The first is from a net debt perspective, we are still unlevered. We have a EUR 20 million bond, but we have EUR 30 million plus cash on hand. We have a very stable business with a very high portion of recurring revenue. The customer base is very diversified. We have only 25% of turnover that are provided by our top 10 customers, and we only have 7 customers that provide more than 1% of total turnover. So it's extremely diversified and thus very secure.

And we have a very good cash conversion from EBITDA to cash flow. And this is -- these are the reasons why it was possible to finance this transaction on 100% debt basis. We are in the process of placing this bond. And what I can tell you is that we have, from our point of view, overwhelming demand much higher than we've expected. The initial volume that we place will be EUR 70 million, 7-0, out of a framework of EUR 160 million. This is the maximum we could issue, and it's not needed, but it's for us like a financing reserve. The tenor of the bond is 4 years. The interest rate will be paid quarterly and is expected to be around Euribor plus 475 or 500 basis points, and the bond will be listed Frankfurt Open Market and in the Nordic ABM. So a professional Nordic Bond with professional institutional investors. I think we will be able to close the placement within the next, I don't know, 10 days, 15 days.

Yes, last slide from my side. As you see this every 3 months, our KPIs on platform activities. The number of orders are below the previous year, 3% like in the first quarter. Nevertheless, we have a higher volume -- higher contract volume and thus higher commission volume from new orders. The number of contracts transfer grew by 35% on a very high number of more than 350,000, 360,000 pieces in half year. So we will end up at more than 700,000, which is an amazing number. The assets under management in the last 12 months increased by 10.2%, and the annual net premium increased by 16% in the last 12 months, which is also an amazing number. Sebastian?

Yes. Thank you, Ralph. Just to give you a throwback to our last earnings call slides. This is what's happened after a Liberation Day. You could see that the MSCI World, which is basically the amount -- or the index, which our assets are trading. As you might know, we have almost EUR 8 billion in assets, EUR 2 billion are in managed accounts and about EUR 6 billion in standardized funds. And this is what's happening. So from its high, the MSCI World dropped from 3,900 points down to 3,300 points. And now, as you know, it went up to 4,170 points again.

So basically, it went down more than 10% quarter-over-quarter average and now it went up 10% quarter-over-quarter average. And as about 1/3 of our business is investment. Basically, our investment income goes down by 10%, goes up by 10% overall. That's a 3% change just in trailer fees that come in and go out. So the primary effects are quite minimal. And -- but then we have secondary effects as consumer confidence. And this also when you follow this in German data, then you could see that consumer confidence, right, in April, in May were at the lowest levels quite ever after COVID. And now it's going up again, as obviously, there is no much harm done. As you all know, there is an agreement on tariffs among the -- between the European Union and the U.S. of 15% standard, might do some harm to manufacturing and especially the car industry, but not overall in the German economy.

So we see that our figures are quite resilient. Capital markets go down and up, and there's almost now, maybe 2%, 3% in our growth rates. That's the effect on of this Liberation Day market turmoil.

And if you go on the next page, we give you a little mountain chart of what is happening a crisis over crisis over crisis with our turnover. As you can see, over the last 10 years, we could show you increasing turnover rates and commission rates and you can see year-over-year-over-year, we can grow, no matter what's happening in the market. Yes, COVID hit us strongly as well. If advisors cannot go out to the customers, that was quite distressing. But also the energy crisis after the Ukraine-Russia war that hit heavy in two quarters in '22, especially the third and fourth quarter, but then you could see a rebound in '23, so you can see that no matter what's happening in the world, we have a very resilient business model.

And yes, so we will show you more growth and not only growth but also growing growth rates. We see that by now '25. And then '26, what you showed you after the FMK transaction, we will have a rising growth rate and, therefore, much more growth to come. And this is also a good, very good sign. As we're becoming more efficient. This will also increase the earning space and then also the growth rate of earnings.

So just to come back to our guidance. As you could see in our last call last week and also in our press releases and corporate news, we could add up to our guidance. So the old guidance of EUR 245 million to EUR 265 million in turnover, we increased to EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million, conservatively, taking into account the additional turnover of FMK. And also EBITDA, we raised this EBITDA targets for the year '25 from EUR 18.5 million to EUR 20.5 million, up to EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22.5 million by the acquisition of FMK, so up EUR 2 million. What you could see is very conservative, what Ralph showed you. So this will also happen if we can just consolidate the last 3 months of the year. So obviously, 2026 will be the first year where we can consolidate a full year with FMK, and this is what we also gave you as a mid-term guidance at '26, we expect then more than EUR 35 million in the EBITDA already.

This is also an outlook that we gave you last year, our vision, if you may say so, we said that we see the platform becoming more profitable quite fast, and that was our 2030 goals, that with a turnover of EUR 450 million to EUR 500 million, we will come to an EBITDA of EUR 40 million to EUR 50 million. And this is the very good news that we will reach EUR 40 million as it looks now 2027 at the latest. So FMK gives us 3 years in like a turbo speed to speed up the growth levels. And yes, so we have -- we're excited to look in a very profitable 2026 and also in a very profitable 2027.

And driven by the market trends, digitization, where we're one of the players in the market, demography where we see that our brokers become older every year, and every 4 years, the broker base becomes older by 3.7 years, and that's also one of the strong arguments for FMK that now we go to younger customer groups, more digital-oriented customers. And as Ralph said, we have the lever in our own hand. We're not as dependent on B2B business because we can -- if the leads cannot be transacted by our brokers, we can also go to the directors -- to the clients direct.

So also consolidation is one of the topics. FMK, is a very good example. It's not done yet in Germany, but it's gaining drive and speed, and also regulation, is one of the reasons why the smaller market players just do not have any chance to come up with their IT tech stacks to grow and change them as to a regulation that's implemented faster and faster.

So very happy with the development that we can give you good news that this long-term guidance will be achieved much faster than we ever thought.

So thank you very much for your attention until now. We're happy to take any questions you might have. Ingmar?

[Operator Instructions] Please note that management team has another meeting right after this. And therefore, we unfortunately cannot exceed the time set for this meeting. So if there are any questions by raising their hands, I'll wait for the participants. Otherwise, I'll read out questions sent to us while you have the presentation.

So I read it out, when will the first insurance policies brokered by FMK be transferred to the JDC platform?

Ralph, you want to take this question?

Sorry, sorry, I just was -- I'm organizing my desk with a pencil and with a piece of paper. So please, could you please...

Yes, Ingmar. The first insurance policy very soon. So we hope to implement -- have the interfaces done with FMK, very fast, October or November already. So the first little, little, little turnover as we expect already this year.

Yes, definitely. Maybe some more light on this. FMK is already selling insurance. They sold the leads for EUR 80 on average. And then they saw that it's much more profitable to sell these insurance policies themselves. So they founded a little broker, very tiny broker. And within the first year with no effort, this broker generated an EBITDA of EUR 0.25 million.

So this is a very profitable business, and we will start with this very soon. At first, we have to pay, unfortunately, the efforts -- at first we have to pay the purchase price. But our kickoff meeting is already at the beginning of September, so first effects visible in 2025.

And there's one participant raising his hand. You are able to ask your question, Mr. Jong, I think.

A couple of questions on the large clients again, always a favorite subject. But you see it increasing quite a lot. Could you give a little bit more color on the composition of the EUR 30 million that's in the large clients? That will be the first.

Edwin, we didn't really understand the question right acoustically.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

So I was looking at the large clients, EUR 30 million turnover, so growing quite nicely. And I was wondering about the composition. So which part is cooperative banks, which part is savings bank, which part is Allianz, for instance, or a little bit of color on that.

From your question was the development of turnover, what of this turnover is contributed by the bigger partners of JDC, right?

That was initiated. Can you talk about the composition?

That was 30%, right? Edwin, 30% of our turnover we said is major customers, right? And you want to say what customers contribute at what level? It's very heterogenic. So there's some corporate clients that are not growing, but some are really growing fast. And same goes for the savings banks, especially the Provinzial Savings Bank. We're very happy about this business development. And some other savings banks insurers are trailing after the development of Provinzial.

So It's very individual among these around 25 major partners. And obviously, we are under our NDA rules, we are not publishing individual results. But it has nothing to do with segments. It's more individual development of individual partners.

Okay, clear. And then in the last results, I always saw the follow-up commissions. I missed that in this report. Am I right about that, or?

Yes, we had these slides, which we were very surprised because the partner we are placing the bond with Pareto, like gave us some quite insight -- interesting insight in our own business. And especially they added because we always said there's more than 60% of our business recurring, which I think is very big factor for a stable business. But then if we add up the reoccurring business, that means the business with partners that are already there, but it's reoccurring every year, that's basically technically new business.

But as for example, every year, there's new employees with Lufthansa. And obviously, there is a new pension scheme for these partners. So this part of recurring business makes another almost 25%. So we can say that 85% of all of our business is recurring -- or reoccurring. I think that's a very good news also for bond owners that this is a very stable business base that we know at January 1, basically, that all our costs are borne, and it's only the factor how high is our own earnings.

So that's -- so thank you for the question because yes, we have this slide in the FMK deck last week. I don't know why we didn't include it here because I don't know, we didn't want to do too much advertising, I guess.

Okay. And finally, so June was quite nice. So the development in June. Can you elaborate a little bit on how it's going in July and August so far?

We'll be very happy. Obviously, the capital markets are back, right? So you could see record highs, especially in U.S. indices, but also in European indices. So from where we started, 3,900 points that was the high in Q1. Now we had 4,170 points. So we are up considerably. So we can see that this alone gives us 3 to 4 percentage points in growth in the third quarter over the second.

And then also the consumer sentiment slowly becomes better. But obviously, as Ralph showed you, and we expect still the Q3 being the summer quarter, so not too much expectations there, but a very good base for a very strong Q4.

So yes, there is a rebound, and it's very visible from June on.

And maybe a question short to answer. Has the placement of the bond at Pareto already begun?

The answer is yes, this morning, [ 8 05 ] was the sales briefing for the Pareto guys. So they are on the phone right now.

Yes. But maybe, Ralph, you might add that it's not too easy to get bond shares, right? So it's...

Yes, it's a -- it's in professional placement with our prospectus. So only institutional investors that are set up in KYC as professional investors at Pareto, who is the Investment Bank behind are able to buy the bonds. If you are interested, then please let us know maybe we can arrange that through a platform, but minimum investment is EUR 100,000 because only professional investors.

But you might want to add that already the guaranteed part that we did was highly oversubscribed. So just expect -- management expectations, it will be not easy, right?

You said, we should not do so much marketing, so.

Yes. So just expectation, don't be disappointed if you don't get any bond shares because it was highly oversubscribed and we expect it to be highly oversubscribed.

Yes. Yes.

And we move on to a participant raised his hand. [indiscernible] you should be able to speak now. Please your questions.

Great. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Yes.

Wonderful. I'd like to understand a little bit better the newest acquisition. So you were talking a lot about EBITDA that is rising and it totally makes sense because of the positive effects taking place in EBITDA. But after EBITDA, there is going to be interest payments, of course, and we can calculate them quite well. But I wonder what happens about depreciation in HGB and IFRS. So maybe there is some immaterial numbers getting into the balance sheet and I have no clue what's going to happen there. So it would be very nice to get some numbers there.

Yes. Very good question. I just can give you my opinion and the opinion of my finance team. At the end, we have to negotiate or discuss with the auditor. When you buy a company, then you have to do the so-called purchase price allocation, PPA, you decide what of the purchase price allocated on, let's say, the real assets. And what is the customer base? What is, for instance, immaterial asset, software and so on. And the rest is customer base.

And this has to be amortized over a couple of years. And this is why D&A, depreciation and amortization at JDC is very high. We have roughly EUR 6.5 million depreciation and amortization at JDC, but only EUR 2 million depreciation and the rest is amortization of the assets bought in the past.

And as FMK doesn't really have a customer base because the customer has generated one time, then it's sold, there's nothing to depreciate. There's nothing to amortize. So our expectation would be that depreciation or amortization on this acquisition is rather very little, but it has to be negotiated and improved by the auditor, but that's our today's view.

Okay. Do you know when this is -- when this will be like crystal clear? Can you give an update at some point?

Crystal clear after negotiation with the auditor. But normally, this is when the figures are audited, but I understand your point. This is relevant for you investors, relevant for calculation, relevant for EPS. So I will take this task with me and clear it latest until next earnings call.

And we got a couple of questions in the chat box. I will read this out.

First of all, well, hello and congratulations to get another successful quarter, which is pretty cool actually. Although the deal with FMK Group has yet to be formally closed, can you elaborate a bit on how we should think about their business momentum carrying into 2025 based on historical numbers? For example, are there any reasons for why the momentum should continue into 2025? I guess it's 2026.

Yes, of course, there is -- if we would have seen any reason, we wouldn't have bought the company, but of course, that the growth -- the turnover CAGR will come down because the higher the numbers, the smaller is the CAGR. But we think this is a -- yes, it will be a very scalable business and a growing business. Now we have, let's say, base case from management, which is very favorable for us. But as this would be inside information, we are not able to give you this information. But we think that the company will keep on growing, let's say it this way.

Okay. Well, a follow-up question. Can you help us understand how you are thinking about immediate versus medium-term revenue ramp up from the life insurance from FMK Group, considering their low rev base and insurance, but the potential and immediately connecting their customers to your broker network.

Yes. Maybe I can elaborate on this. At first, you have to understand, it's only a question of money. At the moment, they just invest only a little money in advertising to get leads for insurance products. Once this has changed, a lot of leads will be there.

And maybe to give you a feeling in 2024, this company generated 480,000 business transactions. It means credit cards, cash accounts, depots and so on. And if we are only able, let's say, to convert 10,000 life insurance leads into customers. And then you know that life insurance on average pays you an upfront commission of EUR 1,500. We are talking about EUR 15 million in additional commission.

So the synergies are really huge, but we will work hard on generating a long-term cash flow by integrating this business onto the platform without destroying what they have achieved with the existing customers. So this will be the journey.

Sebastian, maybe you can add some clever words.

Well, yes. So we apologize for giving you just a very conservative outlook, right? This is a fast-growing company, and we will not break their growth path. So stand-alone, this will be very, very attractive for all of us. But then obviously, we try to lift synergies as fast as we can. And this is a lot of blue sky operations. So we're very happy with FMK, as it is today. If it just -- yes, just contribute what they do today. It's still a very good acquisition. But obviously, there can be a lot more and especially, we expect a lot more synergies by using all these new clients as a base for upselling, cross-selling on the platform, right?

So our plans are quite big, but we give you just the lowest rim as an expectation pace because I think that's fantastic enough.

And a question in the chat box, which is by now the last one, do you plan to expand international in the next 5 to 10 years? Or do you view the opportunities in Germany are large enough?

Yes. Obviously, so Germany is low-hanging fruits, right? We're one of the market leaders, the tech stack working. Obviously, the platform can be expanded in all countries. It definitely works in Austria. We had it in place or have -- some clients have it in place in Czech and Slovakia language still works as well. But then what we need is a base where we have the ties with all the different product providers. So whenever we would find a team or a platform like not so far away, we looked already at companies in the Netherlands or Italy. This might be a good start to expand into the European space.

We had questions whether we could license it in Canada or Japan, we will not be distracted. So we will concentrate on the German market as our market share is still quite low. So we -- it depends on what the figures you look, at a 0.6%, 0.7% market share in a fast-growing market. So there's a lot of low-hanging fruits where we are. And so we can imagine to expand into normal platform levels to have not only 0.6%, but rather 1%, 2%, 3%, 5% market share. And I think then it's the best way to look abroad. And until then, you will see us focusing on Germany and Austria.

And by now, we have not received any further questions. I'll wait a few moments if it will be the case.

Yes. We, therefore, come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining to all the participants. And a big thank you to you, Sebastian and Ralph, for the presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations.

I wish you all a lovely week and a successful one as well. With this, I hand over to some famous last words to Sebastian.

I don't know whether they are as famous, but I think we could show you in Q2 that it's a very resilient business model, right? So the turnover is hardly not touched by all this turmoil we have in German customer-based markets. And we see that the rebound is very fast also now end of June, July, August, we can see the capital market is up and also our trailer fees up. So I think we're going in a very good year in business. And also you can see by this transaction, FMK, there's a huge base for earnings improvement. We think that our outlook for '26 is still conservative by adding up what's here already, not taking into account what is out there as a business opportunity, but we will not stand still, but we will develop all of this. And I think we have a very good professional young team in FMK that are keen on really expanding and improving and also to earn money on the...

Younger than Sebastian and me.

Much younger. Yes, they are 15 years younger, to be honest. So there's a fresh blood in the company, and we're really looking forward to this journey that is exciting indeed.

Thank you very much for your trust. And so looking forward to seeing you in 3 months the latest. Thank you.

Bye-bye.