Nordnet Registered Aktie

Good morning, and welcome to the presentation of Nordnet's Third Quarter of 2026. My name is Marcus Lindberg, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Nordnet.

Joining me today is our CEO, Rasmus Jarborg; and our CFO, Lennart Kran. Rasmus and Lennart will start by presenting the results, and then we'll have a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]

With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Rasmus Jarborg.

Thank you, Marcus. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. Looking across the third quarter, our operating performance reflected both expected seasonal patterns and the underlying strength of secular wealth accumulation across the Nordic region. Historically, the summer quarter exhibits a natural moderation in trading velocity across European markets. However, the third quarter of 2026 proved to be our second strongest quarter in Nordnet's history, demonstrating the compounding power of our platform.

While headline equity markets remain elevated and central banks continue to recalibrate interest rate policy, market volatility remains selective. Against this backdrop, our customers remained highly engaged, actively rebalancing their asset allocations and deploying capital for the long term. As we celebrate Nordnet's 30th anniversary this year, our franchise has never been stronger or more diversified. Whether our customers are participating in primary equity offerings, accessing institutional-grade equity research or building recurring ETF and mutual fund savings plans, Nordnet serves as their primary operating system for savings and investments. That multiproduct durability is evident throughout our third quarter delivery.

Turning to the highlights on Slide 2 now. We've summarized the core operational and strategic milestones of the quarter. As you can see, top line performance remained strong, delivering growth across all primary revenue streams in what was our second strongest quarter ever. Operating profit before tax reached SEK 1.1 billion, marking our third consecutive quarter above the SEK 1 billion threshold. Execution across our strategic initiatives was equally pronounced.

Trading held firm through the summer low with robust traded value and a consistent cross-border mix supporting our unit economics. Net savings rose 23% year-on-year to SEK 26 billion, bringing our 9-month net savings to SEK 80 billion and maintaining a record pace year-to-date. As you will have seen, we entered into a strategic partnership with ABG Sundal Collier this quarter to co-create a modern private wealth offering for advised and managed capital across the Nordics.

In partnership with Citi, we launched a dedicated research portal in our Nordnet app and web, giving our Private Banking customers integrated access to institutional-grade equity research covering approximately 1,500 international companies. Back in Sweden, we appointed Britta Rosenqvist as our new country manager for Sweden to accelerate our domestic commercial agenda. Britta joins us on December 1.

Our German rollout plan remains on schedule for commercial launch in November, positioning us ahead of the structural pension reforms taking place in Germany on January 1. And finally, in September, we initiated a SEK 250 million share buyback program, reaffirming our commitment to disciplined shareholder remuneration. As you will have seen, we also announced that we're calling our SEK 600 million AT1 bond in November.

Moving to Slide 3. Our financial results continue to illustrate the structural operating leverage of our digital model. Total revenue reached SEK 1.6 billion, up 18% compared to the third quarter of last year. Operating expenses stood at SEK 450 million, reflecting underlying cost growth in the core Nordic business of 10% year-over-year or 12%, including the investments in Germany.

Over the last 12 months, OpEx, excluding Germany, has risen by 6%, putting us on track to achieve our guidance of 8% cost growth, excluding Germany for the full year. The net result is a profit before tax of SEK 1.1 billion, an increase of 21% year-over-year. We processed 15.8 million trades in the quarter, essentially flat compared to last year's high volume, while our customer franchise expanded by 12% to close to 2.6 million active customers.

On Slide 4, you can see more on the sustained velocity of this customer franchise. In the quarter, we welcomed nearly 64,000 net new customers, bringing our total active customer base to 2.6 million, an absolute increase of 274,000 customers year-over-year. Total savings capital closed at nearly SEK 1.5 trillion, representing an absolute growth of SEK 317 billion or 28% year-over-year. Our annualized savings ratio held firm at 9%, supported by consistent customer growth.

Turning to Slide 5. Product velocity and democratizing professional-grade capabilities remain the cornerstone of our product agenda. We rolled out institutional-grade equity research across 1,500 global companies directly into our mobile and desktop environments.

By partnering with Citi, we're equipping our PB customers with the same fundamental analysis, valuation models and catalyst tracking used by global institutions. We scaled our growth experimentation engine, shipping continuous A/B tests in our activation workflows across all 4 Nordic markets to streamline onboarding, optimize account funding and accelerate time to first trade.

We also introduced social benchmarking capabilities that allow users to check their portfolio performance against peer cohorts, friends and family, set automated corporate action and stock alerts and gain clear thematic visibility across their holdings.

In sum, our talented engineering teams shipped 24 production app releases this quarter, and this consistent release cadence ensures rapid feedback loops, robust security and immediate feature adoption by our involved customer base.

Turning to Slide 6. Here, we detail how this customer engagement translated across our 3 primary income streams. Adjusted revenues reached SEK 1.6 billion, up 18% year-over-year. Transaction-related income remained resilient at SEK 655 million. Despite the typical August seasonal low and lower systemic volatility, revenue was supported by record average trade sizes and a high mix of cross-border trading.

Fund-related income rose 31% year-over-year to SEK 215 million, reflecting asset depreciation, stable platform margins and strong net buying. Net interest income continued its upward trajectory, increasing nearly 20% year-over-year to SEK 687 million, driven by deposit stability, disciplined yield management following the rate hikes in the quarter.

Turning to Slide 7 on our trading franchise. Daily average trades stood at 239,000, mirroring normal summer seasonality across retail investing. However, our revenue per trade expanded 13% year-over-year to SEK 41.4, virtually flat compared to Q2. This margin stability was powered directly by cross-border engagement. Cross-border equity trades accounted for 42% of total traded value and 39% of trades in the quarter as our customers leverage extended market hours and continue to invest in the AI supercycle.

Slide 8 highlights our asset management and fund distribution franchise, which continues to provide stable recurring revenue streams to our business. Total fund capital reached SEK 387 billion, up 37% year-over-year. Net fund buying during the quarter was SEK 12 billion. Crucially, nearly SEK 6 billion or 49% of all net fund flows were directed straight into our own Nordnet-branded fund family.

These Nordnet funds now represent SEK 120 billion in AUM or 31% of total fund assets on the platform, growing 50% year-over-year. Platform fund penetration reached a new high with 54% of all customers now holding a fund product.

Moving to Slide 9. Let me outline our customer deposit dynamics. Customer deposits closed the quarter at over SEK 96 billion. And looking at the capital walk from Q2, we saw gross cash inflows of SEK 20.8 billion from net savings and SEK 3.1 billion from seasonal dividend receipts. Our customers actively deployed SEK 24 billion of that cash back into earning assets, SEK 12 billion of which into brokerage transactions and another SEK 12 billion into mutual funds. Total customer deposits now represent 6.6% of savings capital as our customers are still risk on despite the noisy market environment.

To wrap up this section on Slide 10, our NII delivery remains strong and disciplined. Net interest income rose nearly 20% year-over-year to SEK 687 million with our firm-wide NII yield steady at 275 basis points. Income from the liquidity portfolio stood at SEK 494 million across a conservative portfolio of SEK 70.5 billion. Income from the credit portfolio expanded to SEK 296 million, up 12% year-over-year, supported by balanced demand across our SEK 33 billion loan book, comprising nearly SEK 20 billion in margin lending and SEK 13 billion in high-quality Swedish and Norwegian residential mortgages.

Customer interest expense was SEK 104 million. Based on current forward IBOR rates, we continue to anticipate full year 2026 NII of approximately SEK 2.7 billion, and we continue the strength in NII to continue in 2027.

Let me now hand the call over to my CFO, Lennart Kran, to walk through our expense discipline, operating leverage and capital position.

Thank you very much, Rasmus, and good morning, everyone. Yes, as you can see, we continue with very good cost control and adjusted operating expenses for the fourth -- third quarter were SEK 450 million. Excluding our planned investments in Germany, core Nordic operating expenses grew by about 10% year-over-year. And for the full year 2026, we are reiterating our expense guidance of SEK 1.8 billion, well, SEK 1,790 million actually. And this encompasses the approximately 8% underlying Nordic cost growth, which is alongside our financial targets and except for the German expansion, which we exclude from those 8%. So good cost control during this quarter as well.

And we can continue to the next slide. Showing the operating leverage of this business with a very high growth in adjusted revenue and moderate and cost control, we end up with SEK 4.3 billion for the last 12 months in PBT, sorry. It's too early for me.

But as you can see here, over the last 4 years, Nordnet has delivered a 21% CAGR in adjusted profit before tax against 10% CAGR in operating expenses and just 8.8%, excluding our German investments. And over the last 12 months, our profit before taxes reached almost SEK 4.3 billion. So it's a very good year-to-date and a very good quarter as well.

We can continue to the Slide 13 with the capital situation. And still also here a very strong balance sheet, a very comforting liquidity position. And Nordnet closed the third quarter with a common equity Tier 1 of 18.1% with a leverage ratio at 4.7%. And those are well above our targeting operating band of 4.2% -- 4.0% to 4.5% and our regulatory floor on 3.5%. And this would be in spite of that we started a buyback program of SEK 250 million at the end of September.

And also in addition to this, we also gave notice Monday that we're going to redeem the SEK 600 million AT1 that is first call date in November. And as an effect of leverage ratio, that would have, as of end of September, been a leverage ratio of 4.2%, which is still within our range of 4.0% to 4.5% and gives us still a capacity of taking in SEK 21 billion in further deposits before even getting close to jeopardizing any legal requirement. So a very, very good position.

And to conclude this, given our substantial capital surplus and organic capital generation, we have no intention of issuing replacement of AT1 instrument at this time, just to be clear. And I just conclude, a very good stable liquidity and capital situation.

And with that, I hand over to you again to sum up the quarter, Rasmus.

Thank you, Lennart. Moving to the next slide then. Sorry, I don't know if it's frozen. We're still on the, there we go, medium financial targets. Thank you.

On Slide 4 (sic) [ 14 ], we're reiterating our medium-term targets across all metrics with annual customer growth targets of 13% to 15%, tracking at 12% in Q3. When it comes to the average savings capital per customer, we're approaching SEK 500 (sic) [ SEK 500,000 ] in target. But of course, we're now at an LTM figure of SEK 525,000, surpassing this target. In terms of the margin on AUM, the target is 45 basis points over the cycle and currently tracking at 48 basis points. And as Lennart said, on the underlying cost growth, the target is approximately 8% annually, excluding Germany.

Turning to Slide 15 for an operational update on Germany, our most significant geographic expansion initiative. We've achieved several key milestones in the quarter heading into our planned phase launch in November. As we've announced, Arno Walter officially assumed leadership as country manager on August 1, bringing with him his deep retail brokerage expertise in the domestic German banking market. On October 8, a brand-new localized version of nordnet.de went live with our core positioning, Smarter Investments. And earlier this month, we strengthened our German team, welcoming Dr. Jasmin Groschl as Chief Economist and Leo Gottle as Investment Coach to spearhead our financial education and market inspiration content initiatives.

Everything is tracking towards our phased commercial rollout in November and finalizing our offering ahead of the January 1 introduction of the new German pension account, Altersvorsorgedepot. We are positioning Nordnet to be a premier digital savings destination for German retail investors who demand a little more.

Moving to Slide 16, I want to take a moment to frame our long-term strategic horizon or our moonshot. Nordnet will earn the right to serve 100% of our customers' wealth. By building a single seamless experience across self-directed, advised and managed solutions, Nordnet will become European customers' #1 choice. This moonshot rests on 3 principles. It's earned, not assumed. Customers choose us first when our product interface, service responsiveness and pricing architecture are indisputably superior to competitors.

We aspire to serve 100% of wealth, and this is not a share of wallet ambition. It's earning the right to serve the customer through the completeness of our offering. Make no mistake, this puts massive demands on our product platform, catering from everyday self-directed stocks and funds that we have today to include advised capital, discretionary portfolio management, digital assets, private markets and beyond.

And finally, the European ambition. In expanding beyond our Nordic stronghold into Germany, we're now taking our first footsteps on Continental Europe, significantly increasing our addressable market. And during our recent 30th Anniversary Summit, I framed this moonshot for all of Nordnet's staff to set our long-term direction and anchor our strategic execution.

On Slide 17, our organization is now executing against 4 must-win battles to turn that moonshot into reality. European expansion. As I said, we will successfully execute the German launch to build a repeatable, scalable playbook for Continental Europe. Next-gen trading. We will continuously upgrade our trading technology stack, data feeds and market offering to maintain our moat among engaged on-market investors.

Democratizing wealth management. We will broaden access to guidance, DPM and other tools of Private Banking as exemplified by our partnership with ABG Sundal Collier and our Citi equity research rollout. And finally, winning in AI. We will now shift from exploratory learning to operational scale, embedding generative AI across our core products and back-office pipelines to drive product development speed and operational productivity.

To wrap up on Slide 18. As we reflect on our 30th anniversary, our leadership team remains focused on 5 operational priorities for the remainder of the year. We will execute our phased German launch in November and prepare for the January pension reform. We will continue to invest in trading infrastructure, cross-border market access and platform capabilities.

Like I said, we will accelerate the deployment of AI-driven tools into routine customer workflows and internal processes. We will advance our new wealth management unit, including the work to launch the ABG Nordnet Private Wealth JV and grow our managed assets and own label funds and ETFs. And we will protect our operating leverage even as we invest selectively for the future.

In summary, Nordnet is executing with clarity and conviction. We generated our second strongest quarter ever, delivered our third consecutive quarter above SEK 1 billion in profit before tax and expanded our savings capital to nearly SEK 1.5 trillion. We're well on track to building Europe's leading digital savings platform.

Thank you. And with that, we're now ready to take questions. Marcus, back to you.

Thank you, Rasmus and Lennart. [Operator Instructions] So the first question comes from Patrik Brattelius at ABG.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Perfect. The deposit relative to your savings capital is at an all-time low. What do you think about this ratio going forward and how it should develop?

So the savings -- deposit to savings capital ratio, I think, is around 6.6%, which is low. I'm not sure if it's an all-time low. But it's a function, of course, of how risk on our customers are and how much they're invested into the markets. We see rates coming up and they come up in 3 out of our 4 countries, and we'll see what the Swedish Riksbank does now going forward.

With that, it's natural that a higher proportion of customer assets is kept in cash. And let's remember that we were almost at SEK 100 billion in deposits this quarter, but even so, just around 1/5 of that is sitting in remunerated accounts. So the important thing for us is to onboard the customers and to activate those customers, whether they invest in stocks, funds or keep that money in cash is of secondary importance.

We like to see, of course, that our customers have a well-diversified positioning across the markets. And I think we'll see what the market development holds and where rates will go, but it's nothing that we're worried about.

Okay. And in terms of your customer growth target of 13% to 15%, you've been below it for quite a few quarters despite that many indexes are at all-time high. We see good trading activity. Do you feel that you are dependent on geographical expansion in order to reach this target? Or which actions are you actively taking now in order to see an acceleration in customer growth to be within your target level?

I think volatility may have had an effect currently. And of course, marketing will help. In terms of top funnel marketing, we're seeing all the metrics move in the right way when it comes to brand awareness, brand preference. It's yet to translate into higher customer growth numbers, to your point. At the same time, we're also working, like I commented on, with our activation teams to also activate a higher proportion of those customers our marketing brings in.

And I think that's -- that's on us to help customers to activate and to get both fund their accounts and become invested in the market. We have new campaigns now running in Sweden and Denmark, celebrating our 30th anniversary. We also have reactivation campaigns running in all markets in which initially are giving good results. We're also going live next week with new refer a friend programs, which are built natively into the app for our German launch. So that will help.

And of course, Germany and in time, other European markets will prolong the growth runway over the long term. And -- but there's lots of growth in the Nordics, especially outside of Sweden. Of course, in Sweden, we see digital platforms have a higher proportion or penetration of the population.

But in Norway, Finland and Denmark, that penetration is around half of Swedish levels. So we have plenty of runway for growth. So it's up to us to deliver that growth rate that we're targeting.

The next question comes from Ermin Keric at DNB Carnegie.

Maybe starting on Germany. Could you give us any KPIs on what to evaluate you on into 2027 to get a sense of your expectations so we can kind of track if you're running according to your own plan?

Ermin, that's a very reasonable request. The answer is we will come back with the Q4 results and give you both some guidance and some metrics that you can follow. Of course, initially, what we will try to do is get the product market fit right, tweak the product and the sort of the vertical marketing mechanics in order to have them firing on all cylinders. And once we have the right target customer group in the platform, then we need to get them to understand and use the product, and then we will start reporting on both the number of customers and AUM and the net savings and everything else that we do.

But that predicates both the launch, of course, the product market fit, the acquisition marketing mechanics and finding out which channels work and give us a good return. And then we can follow up on that. It's going to be, of course, very small in the beginning. It's not going to move the needle on a group basis. And so we're discussing a little bit internally on how best to report and follow that. But I understand the question.

Okay. Fair enough. Then I think your moonshot, it's very interesting. Could you talk a bit more about how concrete road map do you have for these things you mentioned, for instance, digital assets going beyond Germany and so on? Or should we still see it more as just long-term vision where you have more concrete plans for some certain parts, but not all of it?

That's exactly how to see it. I think moonshot is -- and the definition of a moonshot is sort of a radically ambitious long-term vision, which doesn't even necessarily have a time line. Even so the reason we're putting so much sort of focus on the moonshot is because it raises the ambition level and it helps us lead the organization that we're all running in the same direction.

The literal reading of the moonshot would create massive demands on the product platform, which is why we formulated that way. But whether each one of those product families or geographies will be added, they need to stand on their own. They need to have their own business case and to be prioritized by the Board and the Executive Committee. But it's more to give both us but also you sort of a sense of where we're headed and where the ambition lies. But as we build out the platform, we will come back to the market and, of course, talk about each of these initiatives in turn.

Great. And then maybe the last one would be very helpful with the NII snapshot as always. If you would extend that into 2027, where kind of do you get to them? And also, if you can get any additional kind of more flavor on how you actually think things will play out given that it's, of course, mechanic exercise on the snapshot?

Yes. I will self-censor not give you that guidance at this point. We will happily do so in the Q4, at which point we will sort of refresh the snapshot for full year 2027 like we've done in the last 2 years. Having said that, you don't require a doctorate in Financial Economics in order to -- like you say, mechanic, we apply the forward IBOR rate curves on our deposit level and deposits being a function of AUM, AUM being a function of market appreciation and customer onboarding. So I think or I know that you're smart enough to work that out until we give you the next snapshot.

Okay. Next question comes from Martin Ekstedt at Handelsbanken.

Can you hear me?

We can now.

Excellent, and I managed to unmute. So I wanted to ask about your new-ish customer tiering. A while back, you implemented new customer tierings, right, with the partly aim being to limit the number of individually negotiated discounts on fees or brokerage, et cetera. But then with the knowledge that more customers would also initially be eligible for discounts. So a few questions now when a couple of quarters down the line, could you give us an update on how this has impacted revenues? As for example, new inflows as customers have gathered more assets on your platform to reach the next tier, et cetera. Has this compensated for that initial drop potentially in margins that you spoke of initially when you implemented this?

Good question. First of all, just to be clear, we didn't introduce a lower band that sort of gave more discounts to more people. We kept the lowest band, which we call PB Gold at SEK 2.5 million and equivalent to the other markets. So there was no sort of expansion of PB customers that received those discounts.

Summarizing and sort of tiering the discounts, as you put it, was only part of the goal. The real goal was to be able to provide a ladder and a tiering in order to speak to customer ambitions of tiering up. And it's sort of a model we borrowed wholesale from SAS EuroBonus. So thanks, Anko and team for that aspiration.

And in fact, speaking to my Chief Wealth Management Officer last night on this exact question, it has more than compensated. It's been a very, very strong performance within the PB segment. We don't disclose those numbers, but in terms of both customers and AUM sitting within PB-tied accounts, that has exceeded expectations, and we'll see whether we can add more color on that in the full year results and whether we will have any disclosure going forward. Of course, as you can imagine, this is a highly competitive space, and we don't want to give too much to our competitors what we're doing and how well it's going, but it is going very well.

Okay. And then a quick follow-up on that one. How does the new joint venture with ABG fit into this tiering system then?

So there is a good -- there's a level there. And again, we are in agreement with ABG, but we haven't disclosed it yet, but there's a pretty clear level where customers will be introduced to the ABG Nordnet Private Wealth JV depending on -- it's an asset level. But it's also on demand. So customers who want or need advice for discretion portfolio management will be introduced to the JV and customers above the level will be actively marketed towards saying you have enough money to qualify. Is this something that you need in order to move in more of your capital on the platform. We will be public with that sort of target segment when we launch the JV, which should be in the spring of 2027.

And maybe just clarify that for everybody on the call because there was some confusion when we launched. Because the JV will be a so-called partner customer of Nordnet, everything will be running off of our partner web infrastructure, meaning that the customer and the customer assets stay on Nordnet, but they will be serviced by the JV in terms of advice and DPM, and that's an important distinction. So it's a revenue-plus event for us as customers will layer these services on top of existing or new AUM. And then as a 50-50 owner of the business, we will get 50% of those profits back into Nordnet.

Next question comes from Enrico Bolzoni from JPMorgan.

Can I follow up on one more -- with one more question on ABG JV, please? And I was just keen to understand a bit better in your thinking. So do you expect that as a result of this, for example, your existing Private Banking clients will top up their existing assets on Nordnet or they will just do things differently with the same amount of capital? I'm just trying to understand what is the selling point here. And also how do you see this product relative to the competition that you currently face in the various markets?

And then I have another question on customer acquisition. In Sweden, I noticed that it slowed down quite a bit, and I appreciate it's a seasonally slower quarter and clearly, volatility might have not helped. But when I just look at some of your competitors, they're still onboarding a multiple of the number of customers you're onboarding with the service is actually very similar. So just curious to hear from you some thoughts on how can you close that gap perhaps.

And then very finally, if I may, we keep seeing and hearing this news about AI finding issues with technology. There is the very latest one, I think, just out of yesterday. Can you please just remind us on how confident you are in your systems on whether you think that you will have to spend a bit more to increase security or anything else that might be relevant because I think it's a theme that's emerging as potentially concerning?

Thanks, and welcome back. It's great to have you with us again, Enrico. Starting with the question on ABG JV, I think it's a win-win either way, right? So either our existing clients will top up their assets, which is the base case, the main case. We know we address maybe 20%, 30% of PB class customers AUM where they're holding advised or managed capital elsewhere because we do not today provide that service. So getting more AUM in is the base case.

But to the second part of your question, it could equally be that they have an amount of money with us, and they will divert a portion of that into being advised or managed through the JV, in which case, it's a margin expansion for us as that will, of course, be a premium service. And in terms of how it stands, I think one of the reasons we were attracted to form this partnership with ABG is that we're very impressed with the offering that they've built in Sweden so far. It's early days, right? So we will now, of course, build and scale that business together, but it's built entirely upon their market-leading equity research in the Nordic region.

So the portfolio management is based on the analyst recommendations and has outperformed all benchmarks, both in the Nordic portfolio and in their global portfolio. But it's no frills. I mean this is not a PB service where you go to sample wine or drive supercars. The events that they hold are with analysts explaining why they're risk on or risk off in certain segments and how -- why they're allocating capital in a certain way, which I think is what serious investors are interested in, and that's also what attracted Nordnet because it's very true to who we are as a firm.

Moving to the second question on customer growth. No, we're not happy with the customer growth in Sweden. It's obviously tracking below our target and below our other countries. But the marketing campaign is still to have its full effect. The product is market-leading, but our brand recognition is not there. We're now trialing different campaigns like the ones we're running now, the 30th anniversary campaign, the new customer campaign, the reactivation campaign. And the focus is also on creating higher customer value, which is our strength and to explain that better to the market.

When it comes to AI and how confident we are with our systems and whether we need to spend more on security, and we have top talent and a top tech platform. We are running, of course, on Google Cloud Platform in most every instance. And that means we also benefit from Google's sort of market-leading defenses. We want to be in the forefront of AI and integrate it into both product and tech and customer-facing. And we have really good prerequisites, like I was saying, by being in the cloud already, it helps us with our data.

It helps us with our capabilities so we can layer on top, but also with security. But make no mistake, I mean, cybersecurity is an issue for the entire industry and indeed the entire world, and we are very focused together with the Security Committee and the Board of Directors to make sure that we are not just adequately, but that we are well protected when it comes to the risks of penetration.

Next question comes from Grace Dargan at Barclays.

One on Germany and then maybe a broader one on competition. So on Germany, I appreciate you don't want to give details and that will come. But maybe just a sense of as other competitors in the German market have been announcing their various pension offerings, has anything changed your view on how you should be approaching the expansion?

And then secondly, yes, the broader question, I guess, is, are you seeing more competition generally in your different geographies or any change in the kind of peers, competitors who have been most aggressive?

Thanks. Starting with Germany then. It's true that since we announced that we're moving into Germany, both some domestic start-ups, but also international interlopers have announced that they're going to be launching in Germany as well. It's going to be a crowded market. It is a very competitive market already. But to a degree, if I want to put a silver lining on that, it validates our business case that Germany is the place to be, and we're at this fantastic inflection point with more and more Germans starting to save in stocks and ETFs and of course, now the government throwing its weight behind that for the new pension reform.

Yes, we've followed competitors and the pension offerings. No, it has not changed the product that we're building, which I think will be very strong in its own right. We believe that there is a Nordnet shaped hole in the German market. Of course, that there are good mobile-only sort of fast platforms and there are very good advanced active trader platforms, but there's not yet a broad platform that has an easy learning curve, fantastic UI/UX, but still a very broad and relevant product set.

And when we do consumer testing in Germany, I think the main feedback has been that they've been very impressed by the sort of the rich data sets that we provide in order to provide better decision support, everything ranging from static and dynamic market data, analyst consensus estimates, price targets, charting, but also, of course, Nordnet Social, our social community of over 600,000 users who are commenting on stocks.

And so I think that positions us in a little segment of our own, but it's -- it will be up to us now to communicate that and to reach the customers to whom this appeals. Zooming out on the full Nordic market, I mean, we're both benefited and we're -- what is it, steel sharpens steel, right? So we're coming from maybe the most competitive market in the world when it comes to savings and investment.

It's been a different nature of competition. Sometimes it's in homegrown, sometimes it's in international, but it's always been very, very competitive. What we are seeing is some of the U.S. firms starting to make more of an impact in Europe, Interactive Brokers, Robinhood and JPMorgan Chase is live in the U.K. and Germany. We've also seen some European hyperscalers in terms of Revolut moving into the savings and investment space and I think Trade Republic sharpening their offering, and that's a little bit different.

And then some of the incumbent banks are not quite getting their act together, but doing a better job of that. So it's an interesting market. It's always been competitive, and -- but we don't mind competition. It keeps us sharp.

Next question comes from Emre Prinzell from Nordea.

So we already spoke a little bit about the ABG partnership, but just some more flavor. After Swedish launch in 2027, how fast could you potentially roll this out in your other markets? And how large is the potential share of wallet that is up for grabs from incumbent banks here? Please, any color really on the overall big picture ambitions, goals and milestones here would be, I think, very helpful.

Yes. No. So the ambition, of course, is to roll this out in all of our markets, including at that point in Germany. The business exists in Sweden today. So that's where the focus is, and we need to make this a success. We're both now together with ABG forming and formulating what the offering will look like, but also building the tech platform on which it will run.

We have said that the next market will be Norway. We've been very clear with that. We haven't put any timing on it. We need to get, first of all, the licenses and then we need to launch, which should be in the spring of 2027. And the business needs to run and prove itself in this market before we launch in another market. But because of the fabulous strength of the ABG brand in Norway and also the sort of target-rich environment that we have there, obviously, Norway is the next market. And then ABG also has a strong presence in Denmark and Germany, and we will see whether -- what the third country is after Norway. But for now, the focus is on Sweden and then the next country will be Norway.

Next question comes from Hannah Leivdal from Citi.

I just had one question with regards to activity levels and customer mix. So Avanza reported that they saw a bit slower retail trading compared to the affluent segments. And so I'm just wondering, did you guys experience something similar? And what else explains the lower commission income?

Yes. Thanks, Hannah. We saw a similar pattern actually play out across our 4 markets. And so there are some indications in the data set we reported today. You will see that the average trade size was up and the income per trade was up, but the brokerage margin was down slightly. So that's indicative of precisely the dynamic that you described. Private Banking and active trader customers generally make larger trades but of course, pay a premium or have a sort of very preferential rates on that means that the margin was down even though the trade size was up and the income per trade was up. But for us, I think it was less pronounced as we still had a very strong net commission income in the quarter.

Next question comes from Jacob Hesslevik at SEB.

Jacob, low down in the stack today on the questions.

Yes. Yes, a lot of conference calls this morning, so please excuse me if you have already answered them. But you will launch your own ETFs early next year. How central are they to the German launch and the Altersvorsorgedepot, yes, something depot offering? With the fund margin already down to 23.2 basis points, how much Nordic fund income could they cannibalize?

Thanks, Jacob. It's a good question. So it's not essential for Germany. But obviously, Germany, as you allude to, is an ETF-first market. There's actually much more AUM sitting in mutual funds in Germany, but they tend still to be distributed through branch offices and sitting with an older but richer population. But we're not just doing ETFs for Germany. We see a trend of our customers across the Nordics moving into ETFs and allocating more to ETFs, and that is a trend that we want to be a part of.

I think we'll surprise the market with some very interesting products when we bring the Nordnet branded ETFs to market in the beginning of next year. How they will cannibalize is actually interesting because looking at average holding periods, they're actually similar. So you're trading commission income on the way in and on the way out versus, of course, a higher -- typically a higher management fee during the duration of the ownership period.

We haven't announced prices yet or indeed finalized them. So that is something that we are discussing internally now, and we'll come back to the market with pricing. But in our models, it's actually neutral on income.

Okay. That's very clear. And then finally, on capital. In July, you said you would come back on capital returns after Q3 once you had a view on deposit and AT1 pricing. I mean your leverage ratio is above the target. You're 6 percentage points above the risk-weighted requirement. Why only SEK 250 million in buybacks? And where does the leverage ratio land after you call the AT1 in November?

The AT1 is part of the answer, but Lennart, take it away.

Yes, absolutely. The AT1 is part of the answer. We will not replace that with the new AT1, and that is why we wanted to be a little bit cautious. But the leverage ratio after that one would at end of September be 4.2% and the capacity for further deposits would be SEK 21 billion down to the 3.5% regulatory requirement.

And we might come back later on with further buybacks. But we -- as I said, this is within our range of 4.0% to 4.5% in leverage ratio. So now we are in the bound, and that has been our plan for a long time, and we see how it develops both with deposits and the capital generation.

Next question comes from Oliver Carruthers from Goldman Sachs.

I just have one question on commission-free trading. So noticed that to celebrate your 30th anniversary, you're launching, I guess, these 2 parallel campaigns on commission-free trading, one in particular for your Swedish customers who join within -- basically within a 4-month window or getting commission-free trading for the first 6 months -- for the first 6 months of next year. I wanted to kind of pick your brains on what are you hoping to learn from this?

And more broadly, like what do you think about this potential industry push towards lower and potentially 0 commission-free trading, particularly in light of some of your non-Nordic European peers now that we're post PFOF ban in -- or PFOF bans coming in Germany, we're kind of seeing a move towards more kind of principle-based models, so building out of systematic internalizers and away from, I guess, potentially agency-based model. So just keen to get your thoughts on this, particularly in the context of this what smells a little bit like a trial in terms of your campaign.

Thanks, Oli. Good question. Let me see if I can pick it apart. So I wouldn't read across too much from the campaign in Sweden to the future of commission or commission-free trading in Europe. It was a way to accelerate our customer onboarding in Sweden. It's early days, so we haven't yet been able to see if it's giving the effect that we want. And depending on when you join in this 4-month window, as you put it, you will actually get commission-free trading until the 30th of June.

So it's sort of if you're quicker, you get it for longer. In parallel, we're actually running a campaign in all countries whereby 30 stocks per venue for 1 week a month will be commission-free. So we started off with top 30 stocks on OMX Stockholm in September and now moved on to Denmark in October, and then we'll do another market per month just to keep celebrating our 30th anniversary for existing customers.

But when it comes to the post-PFOF ban in Europe, we welcome that ban. We think that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And I think that we like to be transparent with our customers on what they're paying for and why. I think we have a very good product, and we don't mind charging for that, and our customers don't seem to mind paying for it.

At the same time, we need to make sure we have a competitive price level across our products. We don't have to be the cheapest in every single price point, but we do need, of course, to the customers feel that we're delivering value, they're getting value for the price they're paying. But price is demonstrably not the main factor. We've seen that historically, incumbent banks have lowered the commissions below us and absolutely nothing happened.

I think also in Germany and in particular, looking at some of the competitors we will face, some have very low pricing or ex PFOF players, others have what we would consider to be higher pricing and yet have fantastic volumes. So I think overall, it's the product set and the usability and delivering an overall good value is key. And we have the scale. So we're not really worried about price. I mean this is a low-margin business and lower prices only make it harder for new entrants into the markets.

I think the world that we operate in is looking more and more at flows. And we -- ourselves, we've been offering customers the ability to place algorithmic orders across some 30-odd dark pools, including periodic auction markets and looking at our own stock and where we trade, only 30% of the Nordnet stock volume is on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm.

So I think we have -- we are very cognizant of that, and we are discussing internally whether we should be working with one of our partners or potentially be developing systemic internalizer of our own. But that is also a market sort of construct discussion that needs to be had within the various industry bodies as well, because if everybody is executing off exchange, but relying on the exchange to set reference prices, then on a long enough time line, you will have an issue where the reference prices won't be set from the majority of the liquidity. But that's a longer discussion.

That was the last question for today. So thank you all for tuning in. Take care, and have a good day. Bye-bye.

Thank you, guys. Bye-bye.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the presentation of Nordnet Second Quarter of 2026. My name is Marcus Lindberg, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Nordnet. Joining me today is our CEO, Rasmus Jarborg; and our CFO, Lennart Kran. Rasmus and Lennart will start by presenting the results, and then we'll have a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Rasmus Jarborg.

Thanks, Marcus. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. The second quarter of 2026 continued to present the dynamic operating environment for Nordnet and our customers. Globally, equity markets showed resilient performance with major indices pushing towards new highs.

However, underlying market volatility remained elevated, driven by persistent deflationary questions monetary policy shifts and uncertain geopolitical developments with United tensions in the Middle East. Against this backdrop, retail wealth creation has proven to be a highly structural secular trend. Our customers are not just trading they are systematically deploying capital for the long term.

This behavior, combined with our strong product execution, drove exceptional results this quarter. A standard moment for our platform was the historic IPO of SpaceX. Nordnet has acted as a Nordic distributor across Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

This transaction highlights our unique ability to provide institutional grade deal flow directly to the retail investor community, reinforcing our brand equity and driving significant account acquisition. Turning to Slide 2. The headline for this quarter is that we achieved record quarterly revenue and profit driven by simultaneous growth across all of our primary revenue streams.

Looking at some of the operational milestones, we officially crossed the $2.5 million customer threshold this quarter, achieving a 13% year-over-year growth rate in line with target. Trading activity remained robust, with record high cross-border trading supporting strong brokerage margins.

For the first time in history recently, we saw a sequential growth in trading income from Q1 to Q2 and an otherwise seasonally weaker quarter with 3 fewer trading days. Net savings rose 78% year-over-year to SEK 26 billion, SEK 2 billion of that was from Danish pension, which had a record quarter supported, of course, by [indiscernible]

This capped off the strongest first half in Nordea's history with SEK 55 billion in net savings year-to-date. Our Nordnet branded funds surpassed SEK 100 billion in AUM, aided by the launch of the first German index fund in the Nordics and this product is a great example of how powerful it is to have 1 platform and a uniform product set across multiple geographies.

When we launch something for 1 market at Nordnet, it benefits our entire footprint. Our expansion into Germany is progressing on schedule. We commenced live production testing this quarter, signed a new country manager and are on track for our H2 commercial launch.

During the quarter, we paid a dividend of SEK 8.60 per share, in line with our 70% payout policy, and we remain committed to continued shareholder remuneration, including further buybacks. Any program in 2026, though, will likely be fairly modest as we want the flexibility to manage the AT1 capital in the most optimal way once the next $600 million becomes callable in November.

On Slide 3, our financial performance highlights the operating leverage inherent in our digital model. Adjusted revenues rose 26% year-over-year to SEK 1.6 billion. Over the same period, adjusted operating expenses grew by 11% to SEK 440 million or just 7.5% when excluding our investments in the German expansion.

The result of this exceptional operating leverages and adjusted profit before tax of SEK 1.2 billion, up 33% year-over-year. Turning to Slide 4. You can see the scale and geographic diversification of our customer franchise. We saw great operating momentum and revenue across all markets.

Denmark and Sweden both reported record levels of cross-border trades, Sweden achieved a 90% customer growth rate, marking its highest pace of new customer acquisitions since early 2022. In Norway, we saw record levels in all revenue streams.

We added 74,000 new active customers this quarter, bringing our total customer base to 2.5 million, and this represents an absolute increase of 280,000 customers year-over-year. Savings capital reached almost SEK 1.4 trillion, up 29% or an absolute increase of SEK 310 billion compared to the same quarter last year, underlying what a machine we've built here at Nordnet.

Turning to Slide 5. Our top line momentum is directly linked to our product velocity. We shipped 21 new versions of our award-winning app this quarter. We launched a conversational AI system in Sweden and Norway to automate routine high-volume customer queries.

We also deployed AI-powered company insights across more than 700 instruments. This AI model extracts and processes complex financial data points directly from quarterly filings, effectively democratizing institutional-grade market data for our retail customers. We expanded our ad management footprint by launching the Nordics first German index fund, offering direct low-cost exposure to Europe's target economy at a competitive fee.

I'm pleased to share that this fund has already attracted over $130 million in assets within its first few weeks, proving the strong client appetite for targeted cross-border exposure. And finally, we launched full premarket trading for U.S. equities starting from 10:00 a.m. European time instead of at 1 p.m. we offered earlier.

This dramatically extends the trading window for our active traders, enabling them to navigate premarket news flow and reposition risk hours before the official Wall Street bell. Already, some 32% of preturning volume is in this early premarket window.

Now Slide 6 illustrates how this product and customer momentum translate into financial results. Our revenue grew across all 3 primary income streams to reach SEK 1.6 billion in the quarter. Net transaction-related income was solid at near SEK 740 million. Fund-related income rose to almost SEK 200 million, driven both by asset depreciation but also high net buying.

NII experienced a sequential recovery to SEK 675 million as higher rates began to fully flow through our liquidity portfolio and credit book and deposits remain high. Turning to Slide 7. We see the durability of our trading business. Average trades per day remained robust at SEK 298,000, up 15% year-over-year as our customer base grows and is increasingly active in the capital markets.

As a result, brokerage income rose 37% year-over-year to SEK 740 million, and our revenue per trade expanded sequentially to SEK 42. This margin expansion was driven by a highly favorable country and product mix, including record high cross-border trading, which comprised 43% of traded value and 40% of trades in the quarter.

Looking ahead, while we're carrying very good underlying momentum, we're now, of course, entering the seasonally slower summer period and it's worth keeping in mind that July and August of last year were fairly strong comparison baselines. Turning to our fund business on Slide 8.

Total fund capital grew to almost SEK 360 billion. We saw our highest quarterly net buying of funds ever at 13.6 billion, with almost 40% of those flows directed to our own Nordnet branded funds. These funds now represent 30% of total fund assets. Providing a profitable and stable recurring revenue stream that acts as ballast against transaction-based volatility.

Our fund margins contracted slightly this quarter due to lower efficacy fees from reduced trading in foreign funds the underlying fund margin remains largely stable. On Slide 9, we have sightline [ deposit] development. As you can see, deposits remained stable and in the quarter at SEK 95.2 billion. Looking at the capital flows, we saw SEK 2.5 billion in net cash inflows and SEK 10.5 million from dividends as dividend season wrap up in the quarter.

This was offset by SEK 31.5 billion of net traded value, representing cash that our customers actively redeployed into the market. This cash sorting is natural and a healthy sign of an engaged customer base. Turning to Slide 10. NII has firmly target growth, reaching SEK 675 million in the quarter, a 12.3% year-over-year increase.

Our NII yield improved sequentially to 280 basis points, reflecting the upward movement of the 3-month IBR curves across all the Nordic currencies. We continue to run a conservative liquidity portfolio of SEK 70 billion with 68% rated AAA and a balanced short-dated maturity structure. Our loan portfolio also expanded with SEK 31.4 billion, supported by healthy demand in both margin lending and mortgages.

I will now hand the call over to our CFO, Lennart Kran, to walk through expenses, capital position and guidance.

Thank you, Rasmus. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Turning to the costs. We can see that the adjusted operating expenses were SEK 440 million, particularly flat compared to the previous quarter. This demonstrates our rigorous focus on cost discipline even as we are aggressively scale our operations.

Excluding our planned investments in Germany and our core Nordic growth cost growth was related to 7.5% as Rasmus showed earlier. This is below our 8% target in the medium term. our 26 item, however, remains stable and will be about 8%, and we continue to budget with SEK 80 million to SEK 90 million for the German expansion this year. Looking to the next slide.

It actually displays the structural operating leverage of our platform. This relationship is driven by our high scale of the platform, which allows us to process record trading volumes and deposit inflows without the linear expansion of our headcount. As you can see in the 7%, 10% CAGR, 10% on cost and then it all ends up in the PBT. So very nice operating leverage on this one.

We can go to the next one. With respect to capital situation, still very strong capital situation also the liquidity is very strong. But as a reminder here, usually, we do not -- as we have not done this year, either audit the Q2 results where that is not included in our reporting of the capital situation.

However, here it is, so what you're seeing here is ended the quarter with a CET1 ratio of 22.2%, which is comfortable 710 basis points above the regulatory requirement and also the leverage ratio with 5.0% is well above our own target of 4.5. The capital position gives us an immense strategic flexibility. And that is very important to have. During the first quarter, actually, we bought back shares for SEK 25 million in the buyback program.

We also gave the dividend, but still have a very strong capital situation. We have generated a lot of new capital for this one. And we have also submitted an application to the Swedish FSA to authorize a new buyback program for shares but we will remain a little bit cautious about this one as we also had the SEK 81 million of SEK 600 million callable in November.

Given that deposit levels can swing as we experienced and our first priority is to ensure the flexibility for the AT1. We did not intend to initiate the next buyback out a little bit later. As we close that in Q2, we will have a much clearer view of both our deposit to get already and one market pricing, and we'll then probably inform you all of our excise on the caterers.

So a strong capital situation and a very solid liquidity position. Finally, we can go to the medium-term targets on next slide. And yes, we remain confident in our target of 30% to 50% annual growth, customer growth. Our last 12 months revenue margin is above 49% which is above the guidance, but it's also interest rates are about the 2% approximate division that we have set out as an assumption for those.

And also, as I touched upon in the previous slide, OpEx growth is in line with guidance, and we are on track to meet our targets for this year. By that, I hand over to you, Rasmus.

Thanks, Lennart. Okay. On Slide 15 now, we lay out the expansion time line for Germany. We've achieved several critical milestones along this journey and especially in the quarter. We successfully executed our first internal production testing live and our Frankfurt office became operational in mid-June. On July 1, we announced that the appointment of Arnaud Walter as our new country manager for Germany, Arnaud is a highly experienced executive in the digital brokerage space, and he will formally take over leadership on August 1.

Looking ahead, we are on track to initiate our Prensa family launch followed by VIP launch later this fall. This is a phased approach that leads directly to the official launch of the new German pension accounts in January, which we expect to be a significant long-term catalyst for our German franchise.

To wrap up on Slide 16 now. Our strategic priorities remain for the year, commercial launch in Germany. We will execute the phased H2 German rollout, as I just described. two, platform and training investments, we will continue investing heavily into our platform and creating features to expand our core most 3 AI adoption we will continue to lead the integration of generative AI into our customer-facing and engineering infrastructure to support nonlinear scale.

Fourth, wealth management. We're now fully utilizing our new wealth management unit to further mature the private banking offering and capture high net worth client assets in a bid to have a higher share of wallet with this attractive customer base. And finally, as Lennart talked about, cost discipline, we will maintain our cost control which has delivered an industry-leading 27% efficiency ratio, which combined with our top line momentum provides us with the flexibility to fund long-term growth opportunities as they arise.

In summary, Nordnet is operating from a position of undisputed strength. We're winning market share, our product philosophy is ever accelerating, and we are structurally positioned to deliver superior shareholder returns.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Jacob Hesslevik at SEB.

A lot of conference call this morning so please let me know if you have already answered any of my questions but first in Denmark, it delivered record net savings of SEK 9.8 billion, and Finland grew savings capital 33% year-on-year. Both markets are showing operating margins of 74%, which is above your group average.

What product would demographic dynamics are driving this outperformance? And do you see a path for these 2 markets to structurally close the savings capital to customer get with Sweden?

Jacob, thanks for that question. So there's a lot of different factors, of course, playing into the margins. As you know, our next question, both customer segment mix, the product mix, but also notably the sort of domestic versus cross-border trading mix now as we all know the domestic sack exchanges in both Copenhagen and Helsinki are smaller.

And that has led to the situation where Danes in particular, are trading a lot more cross-border cross-border trading attracts a higher commission and also generates an FX spread in most instances. And that's what's behind the margin. The leading margins in these countries.

Although the Helsinki exchange has done fairly well of late, it's not done particularly well over the last 10 years, which has also led to a lot of our finished customers being highly active in cross-border investing and so that also supports the cost that margin that you talk about. When it comes to closing the savings capture, that's a possibility, I think, more so in Denmark than lines giving sort of the demographics and how well this distributed in those countries.

But for sure, we're very happy with the geographic diversification we have now that we have 4 very strong countries that are each contributing to both top line and bottom line.

Got it. And cross-border trading reached a record 43% of total trades in the quarter, which has been the key lever, lifting income per trade how much of this is structural versus cyclical in your view? And could you elaborate anything on how much is from the SpaceX IPO.

So [indiscernible] right away. I mean, SpaceX was huge for us in a lot of ways in customer acquisition and net savings and an initial trading on the day. But on a quarterly basis, SpaceX didn't really move the needle in terms of a cross-border. It's difficult to answer the question directly, but I would give you an unhelpful -- it's a bit of both.

I do believe that it is a structural trend. We see that it's driven by 2 major trends. I think, one, is just the mix of our countries where those countries with smaller domestic exchanges have become a larger part of Nordnet. And so that means that we're shifting structurally into more cross-border. That's one. Two, I think that the globe entire world is just getting smaller and smaller, and it's becoming more of a global investment community.

If you want to participate in the AI super cycle, for example, you're having to invest in the U.S. markets, and so that's driving cross-border and we're also seeing a lot of foundries and other chip manufacturers that are not available in domestic markets, of course. And so that's driving cross-border assets European defense so I think that, that is structural.

And once customers realize that it's no harder to buy a U.S. document to buy reader stock, that behavior tends to stay. But then, of course, it's also cyclical. So we talked about the AI super cycle that's been there. There's been a lot of sort of play around defense energy now given the attention in the Middle East. And so that's had an impact also. So -- but it's both.

But over time, I do see the share of cross border ever climbing whether it will be as toppy as it's been this quarter, that's a different one.

And another point on the cross-border where we see that the holdings. Equity holdings of our customers are still very skewed toward domestic holdings. So in Sweden, it's around 70% Swedish stock in Finland and Norway, it's 60-70, Denmark is the most diversified, but it's still a little over 50%. So there's definitely room to diversify over time.

Okay. The next question comes from Patrik Brattelius at ABG.

Great. My first 2 question is regarding Germany. So if we start off by the fact that it seems to be the #1 focus now, but we also saw that your country manager is leading. So has this changed the launch time line in any play or execution risk in your view?

Sure, as you know. Of course, the timing was unfortunate, but we were very lucky to have been working closely with Arnaud as a senior adviser to the initiative even before we hired the previous company managers, Arnaud has been advising us since the is be very close to the project close to our staff, and so he was able to step in immediately taking over formally on the first of August.

So there's no change to our time line. We're still committed to a late H2 launch. And I wouldn't say there's any additional operating risk, either Nordic is always bigger than 1 single person. And under Arnaud's leadership, I feel very secure that we're going to have a good launch and do this well and on time.

Okay. And regarding Germany, can you give us your latest take on the competitive landscape there? Have you seen any ships or changes from competitors in terms of increased marketing or additional new products ahead of this reform that we are going to see in passenger or so?

I mean it's a very -- it's a highly competitive market, to be sure. I mean, it already was before we announced that we're going in. And since we've announced we're going to Germany, a lot of other international platforms that have done the same. There have been some homegrown start-ups as well.

But it really is a very exciting market in terms of being Europe's largest savings market being at an inflection point now where we see sort of an acceleration of the number of Germans that are investing in equities and equity-based funds. And so it really is a very good time to go into the market. Then when the pension reform hits in January, that's another sort of accelerant for the market.

Of course, there are strong competitors locally. We've seen Trade Republic announced a new trading features and products over the last 2 weeks, which is a very good expansion of their product set. I have to give that to them. And of course, there are marketing machines. So that's a strong competitor latexes there. They're a very competent competitor.

But actually, I was on a panel with the CFO of latex just the other month and he was saying in the Germany is a market that's big enough for both of us and for many more. sort of tie this all ship type situation here with the influx of savers into the equity rights in Germany and with this government being very supportive of retail investment participation and not least through this new pension account, which is subsidized and actually highly attractive.

Then my last question is regarding the onboarding issue that you highlighted in your CEO wording. Can you elaborate a little bit more what the issue was and how it has been solved? It would be helpful to hear a little bit about the process improvement when they were finalized, they have been rolled out across all geographies. And will this enable you to hit your 13% to 15% customer growth target in the second half of the year, given these changes.

Yes. So there are a couple of things in there that I highlighted already in my CEO letter last quarter. And I think the issue we identified which is not really something new, but that came back strongly my listening tour is that we make it difficult for especially high network customers to onboard because of all the AML and KYC requirements, and that process can definitely be smoother.

Separate from that. But of course, it's the same flow is that there are a lot of tweaks that canon should be done continuously to the onboarding flow in order to have a higher conversion to active customers. So we measure, obviously, we met every single step, but we measure from the marketing file into the customer becoming a customer and opening account and then from opening that account to funding it and making their first investment

And so there is a new team in our customer journeys area with the sole responsibility of improving that conversion to activation and they're running multiple A/B tests and features. So it's not the fact that they've done something it's going to be done and then we're happy and we move on. But this is a team that has a permanent mandates for me to improve that onboarding experience for customers to improve that conversion.

And yes, you're right, that is going to help us with the customer growth target, but I wouldn't say that it's going to have a meaningful impact already in Q3, Q4, but it's something we're going to be working with all the time over time in order to keep improving that conversion to active customers.

Next question comes from Martin Ekstedt at Handelsbanken.

I wanted to ask first on your income savings ratio. I think it was on Slide 14 in the presentation. It's down to 49 basis points from 59 in 2023. But your medium-term target, as you said on the page is around 45 basis points. But is that 4 to 5 meant as a floor? Or is it more as a kind of through the cycle midpoint, if you see what I mean.

Yes. No, it's definitely -- these are medium-term targets, and they are through the cycle, as you mentioned. So -- and of course, the income to savings capital or the income margin is highly dependent on where we are in the rate cycle as well as that's a blended margin of commission income, fund income, FX and of course, NII. So we're actually printing 49 basis points now, LTM, which is above the target and in '23, of course, that's when we raise for hard and so I would read more into it than that. And again, these are sort of 5 years through-the-cycle targets.

And then on to my next question then. You had a very good customer inflow this quarter, I think 75,000, right? Some of these came into the SpaceX distribution, I guess. Are you tracking this cohort for activity levels compared to normal customers auto growth they stand out in any way? Or are they just behaving like normal customers generally?

No. We are tracking that the SpaceX cohort separately. We have a number of cuts of cohorts, of course, the one that we report on is the yearly cohort. But no, they're trading normally, and they've sort of monetize activate themselves and not just by SpaceX.

So after allocation in the IPO, they've also continued to invest in setting a monthly savings plan and buy stocks and funds and ETFs like any other customer.

Great. And then finally, if I may, just quickly, sorry if I missed it. Have you stated what size buyback program you have applied for?

No, we have not no, we have not -- we will look into that when it comes to what we saw in Q1, we had a client inflows of deposits, and that changed over the time. So we watch this 1 and we can back later on with those statements. So the leverage ratio is a little bit of a constraint as well that you have in mind the leverage ratio is the constraint, yes.

And now we have the SEK 81 million or; SEK 600 million that will be callable in November. So that's also some aspects that we have to take care of in this aspect.

Next question comes from Ermin Keric D&B Carnegie.

Starting on AI, you mentioned how you've increased adoption and you look to increase it even further. Do you see that having any impact on your cost outlook? And then I'm also just thinking about your user growth. So you're now at 13%, and I suppose it's been quite a strong market. We target is 13% to 15% so what would be needed to get you towards the upper end of that range?

Thanks, Ermin. Let's orbit AI. And so at the moment, AI is probably just costing us more rather than saving as cost. We're on purpose not touching the brake on token spend because it's important to us to be in the forefront of experimentation and to not only learn but use technology for the benefit of our customers.

So actually, towards the tail end of June, 60% of newly written code was agentivly co-authored with Quadcode. We are, of course, working that cost base. So we've been able to get a discount on topic by listing to a certain number of tokens and so that we have to work these things smart is you don't want to tie yourself up too long because, of course, another technology may be the one that's prevailing in 6 or 12 months' time.

When I talk to my leaders within product and tech, who had headcount mandates, they said they would rather spend that money on tokens and the new hires, which I think is telling. We also put into the company presentation, I don't know if you've seen yet about a metric, which is the cost of engineering salaries plus the cost of tokens divided by so-called pull requests so deployment of new code can be 1, 2, 3 or more pole quest.

And so we're actually seeing a 14% decline from December to June on the cost and per polar cost. So that is an efficiency gain. But at the moment, we're using that efficiency gain in order to ship product faster and at the more automated rate rather than taking the savings and with a gross margin of over 70% of the that is the right call.

In terms of the customer growth target, of course, it's the law of large numbers. It becomes increasingly difficult as we move beyond 2.5 million customers now to maintain the 13% to 15%. Nevertheless, that continues to be our target. I'm really happy to see that we had the 13% in the quarter.

Like you say, it's been a confluence of good events this quarter with the IPO market with volatility with indices rising. At the same time, our marketing spend is still doing its job, and we also put a new slide on that in the company presentation on how brand awareness, brand preference, brand recall, ad recall, all these things are ticking up as they should now that we're sort of a year and a bit into our marketing push.

So that's going to help support this. Germany will, over time, is not going to move the new deal initially. And then thirdly, like we already talked about it upping that conversion to account open and upping the conversion from account open to active customers, that's also going to aid that growth rate.

And additional customer growth, if you look at our market share outside of Sweden, it's in compared to Sweden where wasn't allowed to have a quarter of the population or so in Sweden and -- the other markets where we are the market leader, we have around 10% market share and those markets are maturing and catching up to Sweden.

So over time, it's not unreasonable to think that we could double the market share outside of Sweden which would give us that customer growth for over the medium term?

Yes, I would agree on that. It was more the case of getting those uses, I suppose. But thank you for the call are very helpful and wish you all a great summer.

Next question comes from Andy Lowe at Citi.

I wanted to ask about your U.S. premarket. So I think you started offering that mid-April I just wanted to check what state did you extend the hours from 1 p.m. Swedish time to 10 a.m. Swedish time? And have you been able to identify any sort of early statistics about increased volumes in the U.S. stocks.

And am I correct in thinking that the fees in the premarket as the same as during U.S. market hours. So is the benefit here just simply a volume benefit rather than benefiting the margins on U.S. trading?

Okay. So actually, the full U.S. market access, this early window went live on the second of July. So you won't see it in the results we're presenting. The pre market was last year, the 10 p.m. premarket. We've done some preliminary analysis. It's early days. And of course, it's tough with the baseline because of market volatility.

But we see strong early adoption. The new early premarket window accounted for 32% of total premarket trading and as a share of total U.S. trading, premarket increased from 7% to 9.4% in terms of number of executed trades. So in terms of curated value, we saw a similar expansion from 4.7% to 6.6%.

And it's really engaging in new segment of investors. So a substantial quarter of customers utilizing these new early hours have never traded in the premarket session before. But it's the same price to your point. And again, it's actually adding those, it's not cannibalizing.

So preliminary data shows that we're adding a couple of thousand trades per day so far. But then again, it's a summer period, and I think that can be increased from there.

Great. And then 2 really quick ones. Last quarter, you had a higher mix of active traders, which dampened the margins on your brokerage, could you just clarify how that mix changed in Q2? And then the second follow-up was just about your Germany offering, specifically your plans for securities lending. Am I right thinking that is likely to be part of the offering? And is that going to be ready by the time that you launch.

Cool. So when it comes to the mix and the margins, compared to Q1, there was really no real change in the mix. Compared to last year, we see probably banking were spending a much larger part of that book due to more trading among PPP customers, but also that the PPP deal.

When it comes to active traders, we do see that retail and PB are growing more than active traders, which is natural, given that equities is a smaller portion of the population and the new customer growth but this really also was it was in every man quarter.

It was a full engagement to the retail base, driven in part by those 10 IPOs, which we participated in. And so it wasn't a market as it was so when it comes to Germany, securities lending today I suppose to the securities borrow is only done under pension accounts, where we are the pension company is a legal owner of the assets, and so we can do a sort of an opt-out solution and so if you're now holding your stocks in either an endowment wrapper or an occupational pension account, we can lend those out and give customers a yield enhancement.

So for Germany, in time, it's something we're looking at that haven't decided. But of course, when we launch this fall, it's going to be a bank account only, so a stock trading account, which means we won't have stock running on it. The new pension account that's coming in January is actually also a bank product, not officially a pension product, and so we won't be able to do security lending on that either.

But in time, if we do open a proper pension account or whether we have an endowment wrapper in Germany, and then of course, we will turn that on.

Next question comes from Nicolas Vaysselier. Can you hear me?

My first question would be on NII outlook for [indiscernible] There's a lot of impact quarter volatility on short-term rates in Q2, a bit less in Q3. But I suppose most of the beaten consensus to be in on the liquidity portfolio.

So I'd like to have a bit more guidance on how to navigate the liquidity portfolio yield into next quarter? What are you seeing right now to make comparison quarter-on-quarter in terms of revenues?

Sure. Let me start and then Lennart can take the question on liquidity portfolio. So I mean this is actually a beat on transaction income on the non-protection related income and on NII. So it really was a beat across all major income lines. But when it comes to liquidity portfolio, let me ensure you have additional color.

Yes. The liquidity portfolio is the main thing is here is the volume, of course, and that is driven by the deposit volume that comes into Otherwise, we see a little increase with interest rate curves that we do the forecast for. So this is just a snapshot of what you see from present market interest rates and applied on the risk weights and the yield that we have and the volume as we have as well.

So this is not a forecast or thing that we say this is going to be. This is mathematically driven.

Okay. And perhaps more different topics, but you were advised on this space. I mean, distributor on SpaceX IPO, your main competitor in Sweden [indiscernible] wasn't, for instance. So I'm curious to know. What has driven the decision there? Why that was chosen rather than then?

If you can help us understand what were the key factors to be working on this IPO.

I think we're the natural partner for given the strength of our franchise across the Nordic countries, right? And so our placing power is unparalleled in the Nordic region.

We also worked very closely with many of the banks that were global coordinators on the deal and we have to give a shout out to our colleague within securities brokerage who really stayed close to that banking group and made sure to pitch hard and to pitch enthusiastically about how we could make this IPO an absolute success.

And I think we did, and so we had distributed expectations, and I think that just cemented our role as the premier platform of choice if there's a broad retail participation in an IPO. I can't speak to why they weren't chosen as a question for [indiscernible]

Okay, sure. And lastly, on I'm looking into marketing spend for next year. Obviously, there is a big push in Germany in the launch. Would you how do you think about your overall marketing budget coming into next year? Should we expect it to grow? Or would you reallocate the current budget more to Germany as opposed to other Nordic countries.

No. So the German marketing budget is actually separate and it's part of the SEK 100 million a year German launch budget to be communicated. Obviously, we haven't spent a dime of that yet, given that we haven't launched. And that's why degree back end of this year. Also just because of where we will be in the year, it's not that smart to spend your marketing dollars and towards the tail end of the year because people are not usually in the mood to start savings and they wanted to spend for Christmas and New Year.

And so I think the big marketing push in Germany will come in January after the pension accounts launched but again, that money is separate from the general marketing budget, the brand marketing budget and the local budgets that we have for our Nordic countries. We actually reallocate and redeploy that into year as we see where the money is doing -- giving us the most bang for the buck, and we follow that very tightly.

We have a lot of tracking on a variety of metrics and it's something that we discussed in the Executive Committee. So at the moment, we've allocated more to Sweden and to Denmark and less to Norway and Finland. But depending on how local markets, how the competitive situation develops, but also how much traction that spend has in any given market along the funnel from top funnel down to low-funnel performance marketing, then we will make that -- those costs along the way.

When it comes to the amount that will be a discussion for me and Lennart in the budgeting planning. So we have a an August Strategy Board meeting with the Board, of course, then we will come back to the Board in December with the final budget for 2017 and beyond, and that's when any such sort of larger changes would be discussed and decided.

Next question comes from Grace Dargan at Barclays.

I guess I just wanted to come back on 2 points. The first one actually is just in response to the marketing spend in Germany. And I guess moving your comments on really ramping up the German marketing spend in H1 '27.

Is there a risk that that's too late compared to some of the incumbents who are already in the market who are ramping up spend now, I guess, are you confident that you'll be able to hit the ground running in January when the pension room grew in Germany?

And then the second question is just around share buybacks. Maybe coming back to some of your comments from earlier. I just wanted to clarify, talking about the kind of Q3 timing you mentioned should we then be thinking of a potential announcement with Q3 results? Or is that a bit later and is it likely or is it possible that you do a more modest buyback and look to top it up? Or is this kind of a -- one and then 1 and done and start executing kind of thing?

Well, let me start with Germany. We have to sort of differentiate between marketing spend and marketing activities. So we have a very good local marketing team that we hired in Germany, but also a very good PR department, including savings economists and so we're going to be starting with a lot of more real marketing PR events already this fall.

As part of the phase rollout, we're going to be holding a number of events where we will find customers that are close to our hearts in terms of early adopters, and we will be working with them as we move into the tail end of the year and the full launch I think marketing spend in Germany, in general, has been high and is at a high level.

So I wouldn't say that it's accelerated much recently. But it's just the fact that we're never going to outspend some of these players in Germany. We're not going to be sponsoring the [ Bundes ] league or plastering our logo across buses and bus stations across Germany. That's just not the it's going to work. So we're going to have to be much more the way we are here, which is sort of working closely with content that marketing low-funnel commercial marketing supplemented by brand marketing, really be smart in who we work with and how we're visible in that highly fragmented but exciting market.

And then lever on buybacks.

I didn't want to disturb your answers. Yes, it's most likely that we'll be around the Q3 results publishing. It could be earlier as well, but we haven't put the stance in here as we are -- have submitted the application for buybacks and the AT1 as well.

So we wait for those to reply for us from the FSA. So after that, we can say much more.

Okay. Great. Next question comes from Oliver Carruthers at Goldman Sachs.

Yes. Great. Just one question for me. One of the, I guess, broader global retail trends that we're seeing this year is the rise of trading of leverage it seems to be more of a U.S. phenomenon, but the trading volume in these products seems to be really high.

I think you do offer a relatively narrow range of UCITS leverage S, but would just be interested to get your thoughts on business rise and trading something you're seeing for your customers? And any thoughts as to how these products grow from here.

They're obviously much easier to understand for retail than, say, margins or trading on margin. From a leverage perspective to at your thoughts on that? We have not seen it to date. But in general, as you know, Europe has been done in the U.S. in terms of ETFs and participation and I think the Nordnet have been behind Europe.

Actually for once because a lot of the European ETF that [indiscernible] traded are, of course, the these echos been and traded in euros. But we definitely see ETF as a growth lever going forward, and it's something we're looking at.

When it comes to leverage instruments, we have our Nordic market suite of products, which bull-and-bear certificates with varying levels of leverage between 1x and 2x. And so this small segment of our customers that are trading those products. When it comes to leverage funds, we actually have our own Nordnet Global 125, which is a global index fund supplemented by 25% leverage, which is a highly popular product and of course, some tasks to have in your pension savings over time.

But when it comes to ETF specifically, we operate in ETF markets like Denmark, which have their own brand of ETFs in these spanning and in Finland, which, of course, is an ETF market because of the euro currency, which means that it's somewhat expensive for them to trade the ETF side of that, et cetera.

And of course, we, as a fund company now with over SEK 100 billion in AUM under new legislation, we're also able to issue fund classes of those existing that should we so choose. And so that's something we're also looking at.

Next question comes from Zachary Wurz at Autonomous.

I've got 2, please. The first, just a general follow-up on the competitive landscape in Germany. As you get into testing, what part of note proposition do you think will be most differentiated in Germany, thinking things like product breadth or platform quality, et cetera.

And then second, the report flags risk from political discussion around changes to ISK tax caps as a key risk. Are you able to talk at all about what kind of scenario planning you might be doing there any? Or how you quantify the risk to the medium-term outlook in Sweden?

Well, so in Germany, I mean there is depends on much competitive you're looking at. Some of the ones that actually have good UI/UX, I think there, our USP is really that we have a much broader and more relevant product set, you can actually trade the real stocks on the real venues where there primarily listed.

But when it comes to where the vast majority of the money is sitting, which is an incumbent banks and some of these new brokers that aren't so no anymore that launched some 10, 15 years ago, there are absolute advantages is UI/UX. I think it's been kind of rebilling and sometimes starting to see the reaction of Germans that we're interacting with only just pick up our app and turn the phone around site across the table, whether that be actually in an IR investor meeting or whether we're meeting market participants, competitors or indeed staff.

And wow, this is -- everybody says the wrap is great, and the UI is great ours really is ours is an award-winning app, and I think that's going to stand out to the ease of use and sort of the elegance and the wealth of information in terms of both static and dynamic market data that we provide.

But we have to find our exact position and that's going to be -- is going to be an iterative game when we launch but now like I say, we are live testing. We have our local staff as customers, which is great for us because we can test the coating great for them because they can see really how [indiscernible] product is -- so -- but I think I'm confident in our ability to compete.

When it comes to the ISK, I mean, yes, there is a risk. And it's more, I would say, the fact of don't want to always stand on the side of customers and the different political parties are all buying to remake the ISK and that in itself regardless of the intention is a bad thing because for an investment account, visibility and predictability is key, and that's what really what we don't like seeing and we're starting a number of actually PR stunts around this because we want to highlight how risky it is to mess with something that's seen as a golden standard in Europe and a way to engage retail investors.

But it comes to us, I mean, obviously, it's a net negative. It's not a big one. Customers would shift the regular trading accounts, which are not tax yielded to the endowment wrappers and you have to remember that in Finland, Denmark and Sweden, the ISK equivalent accounts are nowhere near as good as the one in Sweden, and some of the countries that are fairly new as well.

And so we had a thriving business in those countries even before their version of the ASK existed. But of course, all the things equal, we would like the ISK to remain simple remain attractive in Sweden for the benefit of our Swedish customer base. And as a final point, I'd just like to reiterate that our geographic diversity, as always, is our strength there.

And so Sweden is around 1/4 of our revenue, but it's a small customer base, and we have a strong business and we have 4 legs to stand on soon 5 with Germany. And so that's also supported to the story proponent tax implications for a particular trading account.

Next question comes from Christoph Greulich at Berenberg.

I just wanted to follow up on the German time line. Do you see any risk that you might miss out on a big first wave of pension account openings being fully launched by the first of January. And then yes, on the timing of that launch. Can you provide any more granularity if you should expect that rather earlier in H1 or rather towards the end of H1.

So no, we're not going to miss that. We're going to make sure that we have operational and live on the day the new German pension account opens. So we will be fully launching our prospective. We won't be spinning up on full marketing spend until that we're going to have that coincide with the pension margin as opposed to doing it in December when people are thinking about the kid's Christmas list and other things to spend money on.

So I mean, the battle will not be determined in the first year. This is a long-term effort to really to take out our claim to the largest savings market in Europe to Germany growth equity culture. We want to be part of that long-term growth in Germany.

And I think it's more important to get that right over time than in the exact timing of the launch marketing and just to be full. So when exactly will that platform in Germany be open to all potential clients. Because if I understand it correctly, in H2 is only for, let's say, selected.

No, no, that will be for everybody in H2 tail we just do it face is going to be on the BP and then a full open but not a full launch in terms of marketing spend.

Great. Now we have a written question from Alex Bowers at KBW asking what drove the decrease in deposits in Norway quarter-on-quarter in Q2 follows larger than the other markets? What are the expectations for deposit levels for H2?

So the process is one of those things that's really hard to forecast. It's sort of side effect of how customers are engaging with the market. We saw actually the fall shouldn't be interprets as such because we had a kind of large increase in Norwegian deposits towards the tail end of Q1 as customers in Norway took profits from a successful positioning both within energy and within shipping.

And so deposits in Norway rose by SEK 7.2 billion in Q1, but and then to your point, dropped SEK 2.6 billion but that's because they've been but more in Q2 than the net sold in Q1. So you can say that, that cash is fully redeployed but partially offset then by dividends and other net savings.

And so in terms of redeployment, they're not just simply buying back what they sold, but they're doing selective mutation within energy and a broad net selling and shipping and so there are also some inventive trades. So I'm not concerned at all.

I think it's more effective where the quarter cutoff was and just that we had a large influx of SEK in cash towards the that makes us look much more than this.

Okay. great. That was the last question of the call. So thanks, everyone, for listening. If you have any questions, you can find answers on our corporate website at [indiscernible] or contact me. Have a great day.

That's great. Have a good time, everybody.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the presentation of Nordnet's First Quarter of 2026. My name is Marcus Lindberg, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Nordnet. Joining me today is our CEO, Rasmus Jarborg; and our CFO, Lennart Kran. Rasmus and Lennart will present the results, and then we'll have the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions]

With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Rasmus Jarborg. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Marcus, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us. In the first quarter, we delivered a very strong performance. But before I get into the results, I want to take a moment for an important recognition. As this is my first quarter as CEO, I want to extend my sincere thanks to my predecessor, Laskin. Over his nearly 7-year tenure and our close partnership, we built a solid foundation here at Nordnet. And in most regards, the results we're reporting here today belong to him, and I'm honored to carry this momentum forward. Now turning to the quarter in itself.

2026 began with a higher degree of optimism. Markets hit record highs and confidence across the Nordic region continue to build. However, as Wathen said, things rarely move in a straight line. As the quarter progressed, the macro environment started to weigh on sentiment. Volatility increased meaningfully, driven by concerns of AI-driven disruption in global tech sectors and more acutely, of course, the conflict in the Middle East. Against this backdrop, Nordic's performance underscores the importance of a scaled digital first franchise. While our customers are retail investors, they are increasingly sophisticated. Throughout the quarter, we saw them actively reposition their portfolios, moving between equities, ETFs and funds to navigate these shifts in markets.

Our role is to be their trusted platform during these periods of uncertainty, and the engagement levels we saw this quarter suggest we're doing exactly that.

Turning to Slide 2 now for the results highlights. The headline for this quarter and a major milestone for Nordnet is that we delivered a record adjusted profit before tax of SEK 1.042 billion. This is the first time in our history that we have crossed the $1 billion threshold in a single quarter, reflecting the scalability of our platform. Let's look at some of the key drivers behind these results. and elevated uncertainty led clients to reposition portfolios, driving average trades per day to 302,000. Despite turbulent markets, our funds business maintained growth as customers leaned into long-term investment strategies.

Net interest income is back on a growth trajectory now supported by both rising rates and a higher deposit balance. We achieved our highest net savings and customer intake since the pandemic with SEK 28.8 billion in net savings. One full quarter after launching our new private banking framework in all 4 markets, PB net savings have hit a multiyear high. We continue to operate efficiently with the cost growth strictly in line with our full year targets. And when it comes to AI, we are elevating our digital experience with AI-powered insights providing customers with personalized portfolio recaps and macro summaries directly in the app, while on the inside, our tech teams are increasingly a genic first when it comes to coding.

Following my appointment as CEO, I promoted our product leaders to the executive committee, creating a new wealth management unit to reflect our ambitions within this important area. And finally, we recorded a 6-year high in deposit growth while maintaining a robust 4.5% leverage ratio in line with targets.

On Slide 3 now. The financial to a story of consistent execution. Customer savings capital and trades were all up meaningfully year-over-year, leading to record revenues of nearly $1 billion in the quarter, which with costs growing in line with guidance, meant a record profit before tax of over SEK 1 billion and an adjusted return on equity above 40%. This adds further balance to our performance, reinforcing our ability to perform across market cycles.

On Slide 4 now, you can see the velocity of our growth. We added over 77,500 new fund accounts this quarter, reach an annualized customer growth of 13.2%, which, of course, is within our target band of 13% to 15% customer growth. Our new customer cohorts are younger and digital native, and they are arriving with a skew towards fund-based wealth creation, which aligns perfectly with our long-term strategy. Net savings was a multiyear high at NOK 29 billion in the quarter, a savings ratio of 10%.

Turning to Slide 5. Our top line growth is a direct function of our product velocity. We aren't just shipping features. We're solving for friction and democratizing professional-grade tools for the retail investor. This quarter, we launched technical analysis tools directly in our mobile app. We're putting high fidelity charting and complex indicators in our users' pockets and turning to have the same data visibility on the move as they do at a desk.

We've deployed our AI-powered latest recap, which is a generative AI engine that cut through the noise to deliver personalized new summaries tailored specifically to a user's unique holdings.

We also rolled out algorithmic execution for our unique ETF monthly savings product, ensuring long-term savers get the same execution quality as professional traders. And underpinning all of this is a relentless engineering culture. We shipped 25 new versions of our award-winning app this quarter alone. This rapid iterative cycle allows us to stay ahead of the curve in respond to user feedback in near real time.

Moving to Slide 6. Operating income has grown across all 3 of our diversified revenue streams, up 6% year-over-year. Transaction income was strong at $730 million, fueled by volatility-driven flows. Fund-related income hit $186 million and NII reached SEK 579 million, partially supported by that significant deposit recovery we saw towards the end of the quarter.

Moving to Slide 7. This really shows the durability of our trading business. Even net, we saw some normalization in cross-border activity, revenue per trade remains healthy at SEK 38.8 per trade. And we continue to see high engagement across all 4 Nordic markets but Norway stands out this quarter with a 60% year-on-year increase in traded value as customers took profit on investments in the energy sector.

On Slide 8, our fund capital reached SEK 307 billion. More importantly, Nordnet branded funds now represent 29% of that total. This expansion of our proprietary offering is a testament to our ability to capture a greater share of wallet. Each quarter, the proportion of customers who own a fund edges up a percentage point or 2, and this quarter is no exception with 53% of Nordic customers now owning a fund.

Slide 9 highlights our deposit growth, ending at SEK 97.2 at the end of the quarter. We saw record high net cash savings of SEK 26 billion this quarter alone. This led to a $13 billion sequential increase in deposits from the end of quarter 4 and which provides a robust liquidity base as we move into the second quarter, which, as you will recall, is the period usually benefiting from dividend season.

To wrap up my section here on Slide 10 now. Our NII turned to slight growth in the quarter at SKE 579 million after a couple of sequential quarters of declines. While the rate environment has been dynamic, consensus IBOR rates and our late quarter deposit growth position us for further growth in 2026.

I'll now hand over the call to my CFO, Lennart Karen, to walk through the expenses and capital position.

Thank you, Rasmus. And first of all, I would like to state that Yes, we continue to have this robust discipline of the costs where we see that we will meet the financial targets of 8%, excluding cost for Germany. If we look at the figures for the first quarter, it was SEK 439 million in cost. That is an increase of 8%, but that also includes Germany. Excluding that, that's a little bit above 5% on -- in the quarter-to-quarter basis from last quarter to say. So -- and the cost for Germany was about SEK 20 million this quarter.

As I said, we will meet the targets for 2026 or 8% increase of the cost, excluding Germany. And we can now go to the operating leverage. Because of this cost control, we also see that the revenue that we come into the net all ends up into the profit, seeing with the new liquidity, the higher interest rate, we see the NII expectation is coming up. And we also see that will also end up in the forward results. So we're looking forward to keeping this operating leverage forward as well. This also leads us up to the next slide regarding the capital situation, which is very, very strong. Of course but less on the leverage ratio side this time as a consequence of the high deposit inflow of about SEK 13 billion for this year. So we ended up on 4.5% in leverage ratio, which is in line in the upper level of our targets, SKE 4.0 to SKE 4.5 million, still, this gives us a capacity of SEK 32 billion additional deposits before we reach the regulated limit of 3.5%.

Also This deposit is a perfect and very, very healthy liquidity situation, of course. So I don't have to comment on that even further. Regarding the capital structure, we have 81 million bond, that has its first call in November, SEK 600 million. We're looking into how to solve that one. If we're going to replace it or we are going to buy back or whatever. We have also submitted an application for further share buybacks. But with these deposits, we will look into how to act on those later on, but we need the flexibility, and that's why we do those applications. So great capital and liquidity situation going forward as well.

Rasmus. Thank you, Leonard. Back on Slide 14 now, we are reiterating our medium-term targets. As you know, we aim for 13% to 15% annual customer growth, and while growth in Q1 was at 12.1%, the customer intake in the quarter alone represented 13.2% growth on an annualized basis. Average savings capital is edging up towards our medium-term guidance of around SEK 0.5 million per user. And while our revenue margin is currently at 49 basis points, we do expect some normalization down towards our 5% -- sorry, 45 bps target as interest rates stabilize. And as said, we are managing costs within our 8% growth guidance for the full year.

Turning to the last slide then to summarize. Nordnet is operating from a position of strength. We're winning market share. Our technology is scaling and our expansion into Germany is on track. Thank you.

Great. And let's start the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Patrik Brattelius at ABG.

Perfect. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Correct. First off, I wanted to ask about NII. So you raised your guidance here by 19% in the quarter to SEK 2.8 billion. We also the underlying assumptions with unchanged volumes, and you write out your forecast there on the appendix slide. But nevertheless, do you think this guidance is representative of what you truly believe the NII for the full year 2026 with Lada can you share any additional flavor of what you believe is more reasonable?

It's a good question, Patrick, and thank you for that. I think as we've said before, this is not guidance per se. This is a snapshot. So we're mechanically applying market consensus upper rates to the balances in the various currencies at quarter end. And you have to bear that in mind. So it's a purely mechanical calculation. I've already seen some analyst notes saying that, of course, the market is not going to read all of that into the forecast. So we'll see how that works out over the coming quarters. There are a couple of things to bear in mind here. We have seen sellouts and customers moving to cash. So we're at a higher percentage cash to AUM than we have been for the last few years. But we're also entering into quarter which, of course, is dividend season.

And historically, we've also seen that benefit cash balances. Should we come into a risk-on environment where customers are then reentering the market, they will do so from existing cash balances. And so that may change the numbers. And then, of course, IBOR rates are volatile, even though we have not yet seen central banks make any changes. So it's difficult to give you any -- in a sharper answer, or more guidance than we already have in that snapshot. I think it frames what we expect to see in a pretty good way.

And my next question is regarding Denmark and appear to you, Avanza is entering into the country. So do you expect any material changes to the competitive dynamics? And should we anticipate at an increased investment from your side in terms of marketing, pricing, product changes to defend your marketing positions there?

No, I think it's too early to say any of that. I mean we saw the announcement at everybody else. And of course, we welcome competition and happy to welcome Avanza into our strongest market. I think we are pretty complete in terms of a market-leading product offering in Denmark. We have a fantastically strong brand position there with -- among the highest brand recognition of all companies, all categories. And so we will, of course, rely on that strength on the close contact we have with the Danish customers. We will, of course, as we always do, look over both product offering, pricing and communication, but there's nothing we're deciding at this point. We have a healthy belief in the strength of our own franchise and the position we have in Denmark.

And as a last question. Being with 1 for quite many years now in the operations side mainly. But now you're on top of the company, so to speak. Where should we expect any meaningful change as CEO? And where should we expect to see more continuity?

Thank you for that question. So I've been on the product side for the last 7 years but also Deputy CEO over the last 4 years. So I've been part of the strategy formulation, of course, strategy implementation. As such, the strategy, as stated stands. It's a strong strategy. It's well received by the market. It's a 3-part focuses areas for us now, and that is, first of all, making sure that this German launch is a success over time. It doesn't have to be immediately and it won't be. We are long-term is, and we have patience. We are investing in order to have a strong domestic offering in Germany. Secondly, we are a trading platform at heart, and we will continue to invest in order to have the best trading offering for our customers.

You've seen examples of that come out during the year with algorithmic execution with extended premarket opening times with 10-year trading venues with dynamic FX accounts within tax wrappers and then we will continue to make such investments. And thirdly, and this is something that we have prioritized up recently. We will, of course, harness Agentic AI and lead the ARs as we deploy this groundbreaking technology against both how we work internally but also in the type of product and features we ship to customers.

Thank you, Patrick. Okay. Next question I'll take from Ermin Keric at DNB Carnegie.

Maybe the first 1 would be on kind of competition in Germany. It seems like it's heating up. You're obviously not there yet, but have you changed anything in your assumptions around the customer acquisition cost and how you're thinking about the marketing spend need in that country? Then the second question would be kind of customer acquisition costs in the Nordics generally, given that you've increased your marketing kind of do you have any hard figures that you've been able to track confirming that the increased marketing has a good payoff.

And then the last question would be, you mentioned that kind of the Q2 tends to be a tailwind for deposits from dividends kind of based on the current positioning of your clients, how much tailwind would that be during Q2 in terms of new liquidity to their accounts?

Thanks, Ermin. Those are 3 good questions. I'll try to remember all of them. So starting off with German competition and the effects on customer acquisition cost. We have always known that Germany is tensely competitive market, and that's something new that's was known to us at the outset. We are now a few quarters away from launch, and we will do that in very north organic word of mouth and gorilla marketing style, we're not going to be sponsoring the Bundesliga or plastering our logo across all buses and trains in Germany. We don't have the budget for that. We need to think smarter. We need to work smarter and concentrate on their verticals and customer acquisition channels that make sense for us. Of course, we're watching competition, and we do know that CAC will be elevated initially, and that is within the numbers we have disclosed in terms of budget.

Moving to the increased marketing spend that we have deployed in the Nordics, and that is primarily in Denmark, Sweden. We do see very good traction in terms of ad recall and ad liking as well as meaningful, and we do track this with statistically confirmed numbers meaningful improvements in brand recognition, brand preference and brand consideration. I don't think we are disclosing those numbers, Marcus, but you have to take my word for it that is trending because it's top funnel brand marketing, you're not seeing that those numbers necessarily drop into the customer intake at the bottom of the funnel yet.

But that is the way with brand marketing. And of course, we're supplementing brand marketing with tactical conversion marketing and our best-performing channels as well. And that's why I think we can present 77,500 new customers in the quarter. which, of course, on an annualized basis is within the target band.

And then the last question?

The tailwind from dividends on liquidity.

Good question. I don't think I will say or want to say more than what's already in the snapshot on the guidance. I think the what we saw a little bit was that as we put out the March statistics, some analysts assume that sort of the opening and the closing balances were at that level, that was not the case. We saw quite a sort of uptick in deposit balances towards the end of the quarter. So I think you have that information now. You also have the IBOR rates. And then it's very difficult for you or for us to prognostisize whether customers will pile on back into the market or whether the dividends that they receive in this coming period, we'll indeed stay on account but we'll have to watch and see.

I think the first indication will be in our April monthly statistics.

Last year, it was about SEK 10.5 billion of dividends coming in, in Q2. Obviously, growth with the equity base. And the question is, of course, how much of that they deploy, which is going to depend on the market. Just 1 thing on Germany. Of course, what's increased in Germany is also the opportunity when we decided to enter, we didn't count on any pension reform. So that's going to open up the more -- a bigger portion of the market and the growth of the German market accelerated last year. So over the last few years, about 0.5 million Germans have started investing between '24 and '25 was actually SEK 2 million. So the upside or the whole -- the pie has also grown. So that means it's a lower bar to clear for us and we have a fairly modest case in terms of growth to reach our targets.

Great. Next question comes from Martin Ekstedt Handelsbanken.

Sorry to be diverting focus away from your excellent Q1 results and back to Denmark and Avanza entry there. So Denmark is your largest market in terms of brokerage income at 34%, I think it was of the group in 2025. And this is partially because your commission income per trade is around 3x higher in Denmark than it is, for example, in Sweden, where the 2 of you have been competing for much longer. So my underlying question is perhaps how do you think competition between the 2 of you will play out in Denmark, but this is a bit high level.

So let me break it down into a couple of sub-questions. So the margin compression dynamics seen in Sweden, how much of this has actually been due to the big banks waking up to the threats from you guys of dropping their prices and how much has been done to competition between yourselves and answer.

And then in Sweden, you have at least historically been more of a self-proclaimed follower on price rather than the price set. I don't know if you agree with that still but will implicitly letting advantage lot of the fine-tuning of competitive pricing versus the large banks. But how do you see this playing out in Denmark now where the rules are a bit reversed and you would be the larger layette head start.

And then perhaps finally, a devil's advocate kind of question. Is Avanza coming into Denmark and spending around SEK 60 million per year on marketing. They're not actually a good thing for your own growth. Since the majority of growth will come from taking market share of the large and established banks anyway and Avanza raising awareness in the market of your business model that you have in common will be good for the both of you, you agree with this. That's it.

Thank you for those 3 detailed questions, and it's from to pentificate. Starting with the first question on margin compression in Sweden. I would say almost none of it is due to large banks. Large banks have in different eras tried to lower commission below us, and Avanza here in Sweden, and that's had very nominal to 0 effect on the customer flows. I think both Avons and ourselves have led the prices not to the to rock bottom, but prices to a low enough level where it's no longer the deciding factor for customers on which platform to choose. So I'd say that in large already happened.

Then when it comes to being a price setter in Denmark as opposed to a price follower in Sweden, that is true. And the new market entrant does not automatically mean pricing will change. We are the market leader in Denmark, and we intend to carry that responsibility, and that means we don't need to react as soon as a new player enters the market. Over the last few years, we have seen many new entrants price very aggressively in Denmark without giving traction. So price is clearly not the main factor. For example, Saxo is an established player with a long history in Denmark, strong in the ADHD segment, and they're priced significantly below us for many years without slowing our growth.

We don't know how answerable set their prices. The price levels in the Danish market are higher than in Sweden, as you say. And so there's plenty of room for once to have a competitive price and a good return simultaneously. Of course, we expect the monster to have a few hero products with attractive pricing to drive their business. And this is going to really change the market dynamics though. And even if they dropped all their prices to Swedish levels, we would not have to fall since we have -- they have no brand recognition in Denmark.

And then finally, with the spend, yes, I'm happy you said that have 2. It is an overall good that there is another market entrant. So having 1 more good platform in Denmark will spur us to be even better and also help drive equity culture further, which should benefit all players. And even if France gets any traction in the market in a few years, there is definitely room for more players in Denmark. We only have around a 10% share of the population and 5% of the assets. So there's plenty of share to take for all challenges and the market is still growing, and it's at least 5 to 10 years behind the Swedish market in terms of equity culture and equity participation.

So I think I don't worry about that. We're also very confident in our own offering there and our own very strong position with customers in terms of both brand and and customer satisfaction.

Okay. And just 1 comment on the margins. I saw some writing about Theoretically, if you apply Swedish pricing to the Danish or Danish market, I think what you're missing, you can't really just take the brokerage margin of Sweden and apply to Denmark because a big portion of the brokerage margin in Denmark effect where you have a cross-border trading and that pricing is the same in all our markets. So if you -- I mean if we just take the Swedish pricing applying it to the Danish trading business, it would have had a slightly less than 1% effect or effect on 1% of the overall group revenue in -- so it's -- will not be that dramatic.

And of course, it's all theoretical, so we don't see that changing because of new market entrants.

Okay. Next question comes from Jacob Hesslevik at SEB.

If we start on the fund margin compression, fund capital grew 26% year-on-year. Yet fund-related net income grew only 11%, implying the margin drop to 24.7 bps from 26.6 bps a year ago. Is this compression now structural given the ongoing shift toward index funds? And at what margin level does the trend stabilize versus the floor you are managing toward.

Jacob, thanks for that question. And it's true, what you said in terms of the margin development quarter-on-quarter dropping from 24.8% to 24.3% in Q1. And yes, you're right that it is structural. And we've seen that the trend of active to passive play out over several years now. It did sort of equalize for a few quarters, and we've seen another step this quarter towards more passive investments. This plays well into our strategy of having our own in-house noted funds, which, of course, are all passive in addition to our Nordnet of funds, which invest in our index funds. And so as customers reposition from active -- more expensive active funds into cheaper passive funds, they are increasingly choosing Nordnet branded funds. That's a function of the strong performance in those funds, a strong brand name, but also, of course, the low cost that is associated with them.

And so we see around just shy of 40% of new net buying and funds going into non-net branded funds. And there, of course, we're internalizing the production margin in addition to the distribution margin, so that is helpful. and constructive to maintaining that margin. I don't think we are going to guide any more diesel than where we are on income margin. It's part of our overall margin guidance. But you and I both know that the structural shift from active to passive will continue, and we will continue to meet that by having you and setting non-branded funds in order to catch those volumes.

Your leverage ratio now stands at 4.5%, which is an upper bound of your 4% to 4.5% target range. With savings capital and lending both growing, what is your flexibility to sustain the 70% dividend payout while also funding the Germany launch and having a buyback program. And under what scenario would you consider adjusting either the leverage target or the payout ratio?

That sounds very much like a Lennart question.

Yes, I can give you some flavor on that 1 as well. First of all, I mean, we don't expect the German build up to request that much capital. So I don't think that's a major problem really. But we also -- I mean, we shall consider that we're doing significantly revenue and profit each quarter and only is a moderate word when we say we give dividend of 7% of that one. So yes, we have this one. But it's also an elevated level with SEK 97 billion in deposits right now, which is -- makes us in line with the leverage ratio target. We will see how that 1 works out. And that is also why we have this dynamic level of 4.0 to 4.5 so that we have that flexibility and also how we work out with the presence capital structure for that one because if we do get more deposits, that's just fine because that will make the earnings go further north and be a very good result for us.

But of course, it puts a restrain on how much capital or shares we can buy back and how we can deal with the AT1. But that's no problem for this year. We have a good capital structure, and we will -- we have a plan for that as well. But we always work for having flexibility. We have those increases of deposits in our plans. And that is why we also say that we don't want to buy back too much shares in one time because that limit us with our flexibility. So that is how we deal with that, I would say.

And just a final very quick question. Saxo has previously had marketing campaigns where they offer for you at least very cheap brokers on U.S. trading in Denmark. How has these campaigns impacted you? Have you seen slower customer acquisitions or raised voices for your own clients that you should lower your prices on?

That's been part of the market dynamics in Denmark for a long while. And Sexo has been pricing beneath us for many years without really challenging our growth. Of course, we're always monitoring prices carefully, and we did make an adjustment to just cross-border pricing a year or so back in order to stay competitive. It's an important market for us, and those are important flows that we want to have on our platform. But we haven't meaningfully seen Sexo pricing impact us. And they are targeting partially a different customer base, and their pricing reflects the value of their product and our pricing effects to the value of ours.

Next question comes from Nicolas Vaysselier from BNP Paribs.

First of all, congratulations on the new role and look for your journey. I have 3 questions here. take them 1 by one. The first 1 is, could you give us a bit more color into customer behavior in April and with the recovery of market? Do you see them remaining engaged and perhaps are starting to reinvest that cash pile they have accumulated in March.

I'll be careful here with how much April color I give you, but April started strongly. It's the same dynamic, of course, at the tail end of Q1 and March. We have seen continued elevated trading levels. We have not yet seen customers deploy that cash, which mostly remains on balance sheet as it is at the end of the quarter.

All right. That's very useful. Second one on costs but I was looking into your annual report recently. I've seen that cost capitalized on balance sheet that have increased quite a bit in the last few years. I mean it matches the roughly the rate of increase in your P&L cost base. Still it's quite a bit of an increase and a bit more elevated in percentage terms of the overall cost base versus some of your peers in Europe. I was wondering if you expect this to keep on increasing at the same pace.

And if you could give us some color on -- what is driving this increase? Is it projects you work on for your private banking offering, pension offering in the Nordics? Or if some of it is also related to products you developed for Germany?

I can just give you some top-level color then I'll let you answer the parts on activation and how we manage that, John, I know you do in a very good way. No, so we started splitting out our OpEx growth a few quarters back between maintenance and growth. And I think that is an indication of what part of the cost base is going to just inflationary contract pricing, salary adjustments, keeping the lights on versus the investments we make in growing the future of this business and extending the growth runway that we have. And so what you've seen in terms of where the extra costs are going, it's things like setting up the pension branch in Finland for the SIP and the pension branch in Denmark for the Liver enter product, which, of course, is a SEK 2,000 billion market that we're addressing is also the increased marketing we spoke about here in the Nordic region.

As you know, in the cost guidance, the cost for Germany are over and above the OpEx guidance of 8%. So those are not in there yet. And all the time, of course, we are pushing more engineering teams into more product that we're leasing to customers, and that is the investment into this platform that will keep us at the forefront of the industry. But in terms of how we allocate and how we activate Lennart.

We haven't done any changes to that. I mean it's also in respect of what we are developing are we seeing that will make benefit of those in the future. We always evaluate those activations as well to see if they are still valid or not. But as far as we can see, the profitability and the revenue coming from those developments are there. And thereby, we haven't made any major changes to this but it's always specific depending on what it is that we are developing really but otherwise, the increase is mainly due to that we have increased the speed of development throughout those years. And as long as we do that, yes, they will increase. Longer of the revenue coming in higher speed, that's fine with me.

And keep in mind, of course, that we depreciate the CapEx over the P&L. So you do see it in the OpEx target as well, and this is all included in the guidance. So just different way of accounting for it potentially?

Yes, of course, your CapEx is also -- your D&A is also higher than beggar as well. very clear.

And then finally, the last one, could you just give us a bit of an update on the numbers for the livrente products in terms of customer, customer growth and assets in Doctor?

Sure. The Levante momentum continues. We had SEK 1.5 billion in Danish pension net savings in the quarter. I think that is according to expectation, but it's also very positive. I think it's the same sort of level we have when we first launched the account, when, of course, we were putting some marketing behind it, and it was a new product on the market for us. But Marcus, I don't know if you have more color on the line than that.

No. I mean it's kept a pretty good pace. We when we -- I mean, we had a really good start in Q1 last year with about SKE 1.5 billion of sort of total pension savings. And then We, of course, weren't sure if that was sort of a bit of a catch-up effect or a marketing boost but then we've seen that the pace has kept up pretty nicely, and it's fairly consistent. Net savings in pension was 20% of the net savings. So it's really contributed to continued growth in Denmark?

Sorry, just to make sure I put that number correctly, you said SKE 1.5 billion net savings in Q1 '26 as well?

Yes. total Danish pension, so both the bank and the insurance part because, of course, the customer moves both at the same time. And that's what this really enables too, that now the customer can move all their pension. So it didn't only unlock the leave the party and unlocked the bank pieces that were moved as a bundle as well. So it allows us to take more of that market, too.

Okay. Next question comes from Andy Lowe at Citi.

My question was around your brokerage margin in Q1. The average trade size was higher in the quarter but thinking about this as a share of traded volumes, which you hopefully now disclosed. Could you just talk us through what the drivers were in Q1. I appreciate that there's always a mix effects foreign trading but it seems like there are sort of other effects going on in the quarter. So what drove the margin down? Are there any mix effects? Has it changed in terms of activity between your different customer segments? And if you could give any sort of guidance as to how that behavior may change on a forward-looking basis, that would be very helpful.

Thanks, Andy. So you already nailed it right, it's a mix, and we see mix in 3 dimensions. So it's a country mix where we saw more trading in Norway and relatively less trading in Denmark where margins are higher. It's also a mix effect between cross-border and domestic trading, where particularly then in Norway, again, it was the domestic industries and oil and gas that did very well and where customers to profit at the top of the price range, which is very good for them. And then it's, of course, mix also between the segments where we saw that active trader ADHD type customers as well as private banking, we were more active than retail and they, of course, have more professional pricing.

So while cross-border trades increased in terms of number of trades from 35% to 39% sequentially, it declined as a percentage of traded value, 37% to 35%. And in addition, retail reps had then a smaller portion of trades and PP increased, especially year-on-year but also Q-on-Q. So looking at Norway, for example, which stood for a lot of the increase in the quarter, a lot of Norwegian customers took profit in energy and shipping after oil prices spiked. And is that slightly domestic trading skewed less cross-border. And as you were also saying, and it trades were larger than normal ticket size was up 59% year-on-year, 29% Q-on-Q. So the domestic portion of traded value increased a lot more than the domestic portion of the number of trades. And that had that effect on margin that you saw this quarter.

I'm hesitant to give any more guidance when it comes to the margins going forward. I think the guidance we have will stand, and it's also as you appreciate, difficult for us to pogostasize, which segments and which sectors will trade well in the quarter but the second quarter started strongly.

That's really helpful. Could I just ask a follow-up to that -- on the mix between retail and active. traders or heavy traders, as you referred to them. Could you give us an idea of how that mix compares to history?

Good question. I'm not sure we have that with us. Marcus, you may have it but I can give us some color when Marcus looks up the number there is a correlation, I won't say how much, but between market direction and activity but also volatility and activity between segments. So as markets become increasingly choppy, retail participation declines, retail like to trade in an overall upgoing market, and they need some sort of visibility for them to be engaged at the higher levels whereas the ATHD segment, they, of course, arrive on volatility, especially those taking intraday risk and being risk neutral at the end of the trading day, and they are also happy to be making money in an overall declining market. And that's why we see a heavier participation for those segments with the larger ticket sizes and the lower margins than we do in markets that are mostly benign.

And so that has played into the effect this quarter. And I don't know, Marcus, you looking like you might have done a number or not, looking at the numbers, I think -- it's -- I mean, it varies a lot between the quarters.

I think we saw versus history retail seems to be, I mean, roughly in line if you look at the longer-term average and then just vary between the quarter. So I don't think we've seen a big shift. Of course, we've seen a bit more active trade a bit more sort of private banking as of late since we've also grown that customer base but no huge shifts from what you can see.

And let me also just do like it's fun to get an early down in those mixes. But if we zoom out what we're doing here is building a machine that's onboarding an increasing number of customers. Those customers are monetizing the new accounts and then they're being active in the markets to a larger or lower degree. So as we grow the customer base, we also see trades per day and commission income rising meaningfully over time. And that's, of course, the sort of the foundation of the growth that we're building here in the company. And then we'll have mix effects, we'll have volatility effect in any given quarter.

But for the valuation of this company and the future of this company is based mostly on onboarding and activating a steady stream of new customers.

And even though I don't like lower margins for 1 quarter or for 1 month, we even not even for a day, but still, it's a sign of the diversification that we have because it's -- we did have Norway then it would have less trading this time. So the diversification between segments within retail ATHD countries and whatever it is, it's so important for us to be stable.

Thank you, Andy. Okay. Next question comes from Enrico Bolzoni from JPMorgan.

Congratulations, Rasmus on the appointment. A couple of questions, if I may, on AI from 2 slightly different angles. So One, you mentioned in the report that you are developing using AI in different forms, which is good to know. I was just wondering, in the current context of obviously increasing competition with players but yourself expanding in different markets and perhaps a bit of pricing pressure. How important you think is to have a very good integrated AI offering from front from front offering point of view. So I'm thinking about what the clients can use, what the clients can see and how they can use AI to manage their savings. Is this the key to prevent commoditization or to make sure that you retain your market share when you grow further?

And perhaps, can you give us your opinion on where do you think you stand relative to the offering of some other platforms. There are some others that have been quite vocal in terms of what they're doing with AI proposition that they already launched and others seem to be a bit behind the curve up. So I was just curious to your thoughts on this subject.

And the second angle also related to I perhaps can increase also risk, right? You could have a more happy, more bridges, this is something that we've seen in the press. And at times, it might be completely related by you had some small issues, for example, with your website. I think you disclosed that early in March. You had a more glitch due to very high volumes. And last year, there were a couple of relatively small hiccups. So I was wondering whether you think the platform is ready and is protected enough from that point of view and whether there is a risk there may be a bit more CapEx or OpEx will need to go in that direction to make sure that you protect your customer from a technology point of view.

Colin, very good questions and to speak to AI. First, when it comes to the apart integrated AI from a front offering point of view is, I'd say, very important and it is a key to prevent commoditization. But I think what is really key to prevent commoditization is personalization. So being able to use proprietary data both customer data but also Nordnet data in in the product. And so at the moment, we have a dedicated AI front-facing team that have a pretty broad mandate to explore and innovate, and so the products we've shipped to date have come out of that team's imagination. And so at the moment, we're starting at, as you can imagine, the easier things where we're summarizing public data.

So we're giving new summaries, which has seen use consumption rise by 86%. We've done AI quarterly results summary. There's going to be 1 coming out for us now. But on that particular one, we have markets in the loop, human in the loop before we publish. And we've done also a latest update, which really gives you unique updates regarding the holdings in your portfolio, including macro and what's affecting the valuation in our portfolio. These are exciting products, and we're calling them ANUs and et cetera. And I think that's going to go away just like thing was eye, something IMAC, I watch phone in the 2010s, and how everything including us, was net in the 1990s. So I think it's not going to be an AI product. It's just going to be a product that is better because of AI.

But like I say, we need to move from the summarizing general information into summarizing and giving you insights into your performance into your portfolio and to your concentration risk and make sure that we're getting close to but not overstepping the boundaries into advice.

When it comes to how we stand versus others, I think there was -- 1 of your competitors put a no doubt that actually ranked us #1 among European platforms and AI. I take that with a grain of salt. I always think it's healthy to a little bit paranoid and to be forward-leaning, but we are very forward-leaning and not just in AI when it comes to the customer channels but also AI, how we're developing. So some 40% plus of our engineering teams are now a genetic first in how they build and ship new code. Some 43% of code written to date was co-authored with a genetic AI. So I think also in the kind of the speed and the output we're seeing from our engineering teams, it's definitely been boosted by AI.

And then thirdly, we are using AI selectively in the processes and high-risk operations, including -- for example, scanning for adverse news in terms of extended diligence on politically exposed persons as well as ascertaining and using multimodal capabilities to ascertain identity in countries where there's no central register, and many other such use cases. And so we're seeing efficiency gains. We're taking down risk and we're shortening lead times for customer service and customers. So I think it's very important to be forward leaning all of this. I'm happy with our teams, and I'm proud of what we've done but we're not satisfied. We're going to keep pushing in this area.

And lately, lastly, you asked about the increased risk. And I think we all saw the news on anthropic methos. And of course, we are looking at that as well. We're already on the offense. We're using AI for so-called red teaming today, which means actively deploying the best commercially available AI models to simulate a tax on our own code base and infrastructure, both cloud and what's left on-prem. And so in AI with full access to our outsource code architecture, internal context, we'll always find bugs and vulnerabilities faster than an external attacker working blind, and we don't need my thought specifically to do this. We are using the best tools available now in the development teams and from the platform teams, infrastructure network and agents aggressively. And so we also have a new site reliability engineering or SRE team with the explicit authority to prioritize operational security hardening tasks.

And so you should never be satisfied with cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is and remains our top risk and but we are investing fully into this, and that's within budget, nothing you will see come across the OpEx or CapEx line.

Great. Next question comes from Ian White with Autonomous Research.

Two questions from my side, please. First couple just on Germany. Given some of the commentary there around essentially sort of more crowded or competitive marketing environment, can you just clarify what's your appetite to spend more than initially expected on marketing to build a presence there? Are you sort of completely committed to the original sort of plan that you gave us in terms of expenditure in Germany? Or is there some flex there to go higher if needed?

The second point I tried to clarify something that you said earlier. You mentioned the pension reform, I think, was an incremental tailwind versus your initial expectations for Germany and there's now a lower bar to clear. Does that mean we should expect breakeven performance there sooner now than 2029? Just a bit of clarification on that, I think, would be helpful.

And then finally, just back to AI. Can you provide us with a sense of the efficiency or cost saving opportunity there? You've talked about a shift towards being AI first in a number of areas, particularly coding. So I'm just wondering, is the optimal model still to run the business with nearly 900 people sort of why would 8% remain a sensible medium-term cost anchor given some of the opportunities that you talked about?

Ian, great questions. So let's start with the beginning. When it comes to marketing in Germany and our flexibility to potentially spend more than originally expected, of course, we have the flexibility. It would be up to say otherwise but it is too early to even comment on that almost. And we've always said that within the spend for Germany that we've communicated, marketing is mostly in square brackets because we need to launch first, and I've been talking about getting that product market fit right and we're working on the go-to-market strategy right now. but we won't get it right. We'll get an 80% right, and we need to sort of tweak that go-to-market and that product market fit.

At the same time, as we look at the customer acquisition mechanics and making sure that they're all firing and converting at the rates they should be converting. So I don't think it's wise to throw sort of money at the problem and then sort of boot force the customer acquisition. I'd rather get the product market fit right, make sure we're converting correctly in other verticals, and then we will add more money if we see that we have the traction that we want to have. And at that point, we'll come back to the market with such guidance.

But again, we need to launch first, and that's several quarters away. And then we need to see how that product market fit and that conversion traction works and then we will revisit the question.

When it comes to German pension reform being a tailwind and whether that leads to a breakeven sooner, I think it's so to say. I mean we're there for the long term. So being breakeven even slightly earlier is not as important as building a long-term sustainable business model in Germany and that pension reform certainly makes that project more likely. It also gives us what we call reason to speak. The German government has been very explicit in that they're looking to the Nordic model in Sweden, in particular. And so of course, we speak with some credibility when it comes to private pension savings and that's going to help us in the long term. And -- when I come to the last point on AI cost savings, again, I think too early to say at the moment.

We're really pushing into this area with all the speed and and sort of investment that we need in order to make sure that our -- both engineering teams but also our product remains cutting edge when it comes to using the latest technologies. My gut feels the same as Eurosean. Over time, yes, this will lead to efficiencies. But I think some of the efficiency promises that have been made by competitors, particularly American companies maybe are a bit premature, and rather reflect an overstaffing than a belief in the technology at this stage.

Next question comes from Oliver Carothers at Goldman Sachs.

Others. Can you hear me okay? So I just have 1 question left rents for the very thorough answers. My question is just on the stickiness of the deposit balance in Norway. I think it was up almost 50% Q-on-Q. I think as a proportion of total savings capital in Norway, it's still sub-9%. So it's not a with the other regions. But when I hear your comments earlier on the call about some profit taking for -- from Norwegian customers and shipping and oil and gas. And I guess, given the rate implications of the Norwegian market, just your NII is relatively sensitive to this balance. So any comments you can see specifically about April to date or just the general stickiness of that deposit balance would be helpful.

No, I understand the question. It's an important driver of NII. So it needs to model correctly. But it is difficult for us to prognosticate and the color I've given is that initial balances in this month have stayed at approximately the same levels. But of course, deposits can decline or increase in any given quarter depending on the balance of net cash savings and customer net buying, and that is hard for us to know from the outset. This quarter, we had the strongest net cash savings so far. And so with everything, right, it's always reasonable to assume a return to mean. And so net buying increased in the quarter but only really by $7 billion as customers trend positions.

So with most of the deposits sitting in investment accounts, not savings accounts, we would expect them to be deployed back into the market at some point. And this will, of course, depend on market direction, market volatility, and last year, we had a rise in deposits with that deposit to savings capital ratio that you mentioned, peaking at 8% and then coming down gradually in subsequent quarters. And this year, the rise in deposits was also at larger levels, they may remain higher for longer, particularly as we're entering dividend season now, which should help keep deposits at a high level.

And last year, like Marcus said earlier in the call, we saw some SKE 11 billion of dividend cash flow onto the platform. And this number grows every year as the equity assets grow and as the number of customers grow but again, difficult for us and for you to forecast this with any accuracy.

Thank you. I think that was the last question for the day. So thanks a lot for listening to this presentation. If you have any questions or want more information. You can find the report and presentation on our website, nordnetab.com or reached out to me. Now have a great day, everyone. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much for joining. Thanks.

Good morning, and welcome to the presentation of Nordnet's Fourth Quarter of 2025. My name is Marcus Lindberg, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Nordnet. With me today, I have our CEO, Lars-Ake Norling; and our CFO, Lennart Kran. Lars-Ake and Lennart will start off by presenting the results, and then we'll have a Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] The presentation itself is available on our corporate website, nordnetab.com. Okay. Let's start the presentation. Lars-Ake, please go ahead.

Thank you, Marcus. So let's start with the highlights. We see continued strong growth in our core brokerage and fund business from a growing customer base and also positive market sentiment. Also really good net savings and strong customer growth.

Overall, strong trading activity and another record quarter for cross-border trading, and we see high trading both in the U.S. markets, the European markets and some Nordic markets, not least Denmark with big swings in Novo Nordisk.

We see a decline in net interest income due to lower policy rates, but it's partly mitigated by higher deposit levels. Cost growth is in line with target for the full year, around 8%, excluding Germany. We now also launched a new private banking concept in all of our Nordic countries, and it's been very well received.

We have passported now the German -- or the Swedish bank license to Germany, and that's approved. And the H2 launch in Germany is on track. And the proposed dividend is SEK 8.60 per share, up from SEK 8.10 last year.

Some of the financial highlights. Strong customer growth of 12%, savings capital up 15%, both from underlying market growth, but also very strong net savings. And number of trades up 16% from growing customer base, but also positive markets. Revenues is up 6%. We see a decline in net interest income from lower rates, but a very strong growth in our trading and our fund business.

Operating expenses is up 8% year-on-year, including here, cost of Germany, so underlying cost development was lower, and that's mainly due to phasing of marketing costs versus last year or versus 2024, and continued profitable growth with profit growing 5% for the quarter.

Looking for the full year, customers, savings capital, of course, is the same. The trades is also for the full year, strong, up 20%, both from the growing customer base, but also the volatility we saw around the tariff uncertainty during the spring, but also strong market sentiment in H2.

Adjusted revenues up 6% for the full year, and we have a record revenue of around SEK 5.4 billion. And again, net NII going down due to low rates, but also that we sold the personal loans portfolio in 2024. But again then strong growth in the trading and the fund business.

Adjusted operating expenses is 12%, including Germany, but excluding Germany, it's around 8% as per guidance, and cost in Germany was around slightly lower than SEK 60 million in 2025. And also a record on profit -- profit growth for the year of 5% to around SEK 3.8 billion.

Also very good momentum both in customer growth and net savings. We have onboarded around 255,000 new customers in 2025, same absolute levels as in 2024. Also very strong net savings, SEK 78 billion for the year, up from SEK 73 billion in 2024.

And our geographic diversification de-risks the business model and it enables growth. And we see here that savings capital is growing also more than the customer growth, except from Denmark. But in Sweden, Norway and Finland, we saw both good market development, but also strong net savings. In Denmark, we had very good net savings. But as you know, the Danish market had a very negative year in 2025 due to Novo Nordisk and Orsted and some other shares going down quite a bit.

And looking a little bit on the different revenue streams, starting with trading. We see here in the graph to the left, the blue line, that's the number of trading customers going up with a growing customer base.

Trades per trading customers is fairly stable in the quarter, but the share of cross-border trading is continuing to go up, both from the country mix since we grow more in Denmark, Finland, Norway, where they naturally trade a lot outside the home market because the home market is small, but also that we saw a strong trading market sentiment in both Europe and U.S. and also a lot of trading than in Denmark with Novo Nordisk.

And trades per day, up 20% compared to 2024 and each trade drives 10% more revenue. And if you look to the left here on the graph, since '19, we have more than doubled the amount of trades per day. And that's, of course, since we more than doubled the customer base during the same period from around 900,000 customers to 2.4 million customers. But we also see that the trades per customer per day is a little bit up in 2025, both from the volatility we saw during the spring from the tariff uncertainty, but also a very strong market sentiment in H2, and we see also the income per trade is continuing to go up, and that's due to higher share of cross-border trading.

Looking at the fund business, we see a steady growth in fund capital, and we have more than doubled -- or we have about doubled the fund capital since 2021 from SEK 150 billion to around SEK 300 billion now in 2025. We see also that fund margins are stabilizing as active/passive shift slows, but also when customers buy passive funds, they mainly buy Nordnet passive funds where we have a higher margin.

And over 1/4 of the fund capital is now in the Nordnet branded funds and more than half of the customers' own funds. And we see a slightly lower net flow or net buy into funds in 2025 versus 2024. That's mainly due to the uncertainty during the spring where we saw outflows in March and April.

Looking at net interest income, starting with the deposit level, and here we look at deposit level for the full year, and that's going from SEK 70 billion in the beginning of the year to SEK 84 million, up 20% from strong net savings and also high dividends. But of course, we also see a strong net buy during the year, driving our core businesses, a lot of buying and brokerage of funds.

Looking at our snapshot that we normally do for NII and now it's a snapshot for 2026. Starting with the liquidity portfolio, we see or estimate SEK 1.6 billion in 2026, the same level as 2025. And the main sensitivity here is, of course, deposit volume because with this estimate, we see deposit volumes fixed. But we see a likely upside with deposit volumes with a growing customer base.

Looking at liquidity portfolio in the quarter, it's up due to high deposits and stable lending. And overall, if you look at the interest rates passed on to the right, it's stable or slightly up in Sweden, Denmark and Finland, but it's going to be a little bit lower over the year in Norway, but from high levels.

Looking at the loan portfolio snapshot for 2026, SEK 1.1 billion, also same level as 2025. Main sensitivity here is volume of margin lending, but we also likely will have an upside from customer growth and higher savings capital.

And we see in the graph up to the left, the red bar here, that's margin lending volume that's been dipping a little bit, of course, during the spring with all the volatility, but has recovered nicely in the fall from stronger markets. And overall, we have a very low-risk lending portfolio, loan-to-value both of mortgage and margin lending is around 40% and virtually no credit losses.

And looking at the margins, we've had a full pass-through of the mortgage margin -- mortgage rate with lowering of central bank rates, but we maintained the margin -- lending margin at fairly okay levels in spite of central bank cuts.

Go to next. Looking at deposit interest snapshot, it's SEK 350 million in 2026. So that's a little bit lower than we saw in 2025. And main sensitivity here is amount of money on the savings accounts in each country, and we estimate that will go down when the interest rates are lower, but we actually saw a little bit tick up in the quarter in Sweden due to good growth in private banking.

So in summary, very resilient revenues, bolstered by our diversified revenue streams. Looking at those, we see the red one is net interest income, the dark blue is fund and the light blue is brokerage. And we see strong growth since '19 in all of those revenue streams. Of course, a decline in net interest income in 2025 due to lower rates.

So net interest income is around 40% of the revenue. But we expect net interest income to stabilize in 2026 as we showed due to that we are at the end of the rate cut cycle. And then it will likely start growing again from a growing customer base and thereby higher depositing lending volumes.

Looking at the margins, of course, the deposit margins going down with low rates. We see an uptick in brokerage margin for higher share of cross-border trading but the fund margin continues stable around 25 bps.

And overall, a business model with very good operating leverage. We have a very strong revenue growth, around 25% per year since 2019, but a limited cost growth of around 7%. So most of the top line growth ends up on the bottom line, so really true position of profitable growth. We also continue with high -- a lot of launches for our platform, both features and products. And we have focused quite a lot on the high-end segment during the year.

And just to mention a few things in quarter 4 that we introduced as a first platform that you can have recurring savings in crypto certificates. We also secured same experience when it comes to setting up savings plans for fund savings as pension savings and also a lot more rich data from FactSet, both historic data and forward-looking data for our instruments that's been very well received by our customers.

So with that, I think I hand over to you, Lennart.

Thank you very much. And yes, I'm very comfortable and pleased with the strong capital and liquidity situation that we still have and working on continue to having with a leverage ratio of 5.1%, which is the constraining factor, of course, but also a lot of room for further deposits because that is the risk here.

We also, as Lars-Ake presented earlier, recommend a dividend of SEK 8.6 per share. which is an increase per share by SEK 0.50, but still within the targets that we have of 70% payout of the net result. We have also, throughout the year 2025 bought back shares, and we are continuing our program with that for about SEK 100 million until the mid-March. So a strong capital and liquidity situation, which makes us -- which creates a great flexibility for us going forward.

Thank you, Lennart. A little bit of our strategic focus and you probably recognize our strategic ambitions. We have four main ambitions starting, of course, with having the most satisfied customers by having this one-stop shop for savings and investments with a really good user experience. And then it's engaged employees. We know we can never have happy customers unless we have very passionate and talented staff and that we manage to attract and retain top talent, which we can.

Then a sustainable business. We are in a trust business. We need to earn that trust every day, and most important is to have really a strong focus and management of our risks and also that we overall are a trusted and liked brands.

Last area is profitable growth to capture the Nordic and German growth potential to continue to take market share in the growing savings market in the Nordics and then open Germany in H2 this year, and of course, continue to secure scalability and cost control in our business.

And we have had a very strong growth in customers and savings capital over the years. We have very satisfied customers and a critical mass of customers also in each country and thereby, it works with customer recommending our platform to other customers. And customer growth and savings capital and the savings growth is the most important growth drivers for us. So customers sign up to the platform. They like what they see. They bring money from their other banks and start using our products.

At Nordnet, we are taking market share in a growing savings market in the Nordics, but we still have a fairly low market share. So there's a long growth potential in the Nordics. And at the same time, we get extra optionality when we opened Germany in H2. We have 8% of the population on our platform in the Nordics, around 7% of the savings capital. That's up from 3% in '16. So we're taking market share, and we know also the underlying sales market is growing.

Our highest market share in equities, but it's an area we're, of course, going to continue to focus on, but lower market shares in funds and pension, which is two important growth areas for us.

Looking at the cost, we have a very scalable platform and also good cost control. Underlying cost growth is around 3% per year. But then we have decided to reinvest some of the leverage into future growth, so a little bit more product and tech and more marketing and German launch now also that we have set up a fund company and also pension companies in Denmark and in Finland.

And the medium-term financial targets is reiterated from last year. Looking at the quarter, we are mostly on track or for the year, we are on track with all of those targets. We're only slightly behind on customer growth, 12% instead of 13% to 15%, but we -- and it's mainly due to -- I mean, there was a lot of uncertainty and volatility during the spring that's impacted a little bit the customer growth.

But we see in 2026 that there's a good potential to reach the target level. It's positive markets. We continue to see effects of our marketing spend. We launched a lot of new products in 2025, but also the real income for customers is increasing with lower rates and also lower inflation.

And a little bit the key priorities for 2026. Of course, there's been a lot of focus on the German launch in H2. Transport of the license is done. Most of the organization is in place, and we've really been able to attract good people, which I think is a good sign, and development is full speed ahead now ongoing.

And a positive with Germany is that the government has decided to introduce a pension account from 1st of Jan 2027, where you can save without having to pay tax until you take it out from the pension account, so it's a tax-efficient savings account.

And we know that from Sweden and other Nordic countries, those tax-efficient accounts are really good for attracting capital from customers and also increasing interest to invest in the capital markets. We're, of course, going to continue to -- our strong focus on our fund business and the pension business and not least to realize the potential in the Livrente Danish pension product. And we see that net savings and pension in Denmark overall is up 45% in '25 versus '24, and a big driver of that is Livrente.

We're going to -- we focus a lot also on AI, both how we can integrate that into the products, but also make our internal processes more efficient. And on the product side, we just -- we launched since before AI summaries and news and now we just launched AI summaries of quarterly report, but it's going to be a lot more exciting features to come in the product area.

On the process side, I think the most interesting area for us is agentic coding to see if we can make our development more efficient and get even higher throughput. And then, of course, since we launched our private banking in all markets, we're going to develop and capitalize on that launch, and also continue to release new functionality in this framework over the year. And last but not least, to maintain, of course, focus on cost control, focus on scalability and automation.

So with that, I think I hand over to you, Marcus, for questions.

Great. Thank you, Lars-Ake and Lennart. So now we'll open up for questions. [Operator Instructions] So the first question comes from Patrik Brattelius at ABG.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Yes.

Perfect. Great. My first question is regarding the optimism there on the customer growth that you ended your presentation with. We are seeing that Sweden is taking positive steps and you said that you are optimistic that you will reach your target here in 2026. Can you elaborate a little bit on which geographies you are specifically optimistic about? And when do you foresee Sweden coming closer to the target level?

Yes. But overall, it's a good potential for growth. It's a positive market sentiment. Like I said, we launched a lot of exciting products last year. We have more real income for the customers due to low inflation, lower rates.

So with Sweden, I mean, as you know, we're very strong in the investor segment there, the high-end segment, and we see if we can broaden into the more savings segments. And we see effect in a way of the marketing, the high awareness, higher consideration. And hopefully, that can also spill over to a little bit higher customer growth during the year. It will not be the same as in the other countries because the main focus and our strength is still in the more high-end segment.

But I would say we have a good potential to have a good growth in Sweden, but also in the other countries and not least Denmark, where we saw very strong growth last year in spite of very weak markets. So with the market picking up in Denmark, it's going to be exciting to see that progressing over the year. Finland, we just passed 700,000 customers, really good momentum, but also really good momentum in Norway. So we are positive that we should be able to reach the growth target.

Okay. In terms of cross-border trading, we've seen an increasing share the last couple of quarters. How do you view this in terms of how temporary is this increase? Or are this longer trend that we should see continued increase of share of cross-border trading?

That's a good question. I mean it's part due to the country mix as we grow customer base more in countries outside of Sweden, so Norway, Denmark, Finland, where they traditionally trade more cross-border because they have a small home market. Of course, that trend will continue and drive the cross-border share over time.

But then we also see not least during H2, strong cross-border trading, both in the U.S. but also in Europe. And not least we've also been launching 10 new markets in Europe for trading, which has been good, but also in some Nordic markets, especially Denmark around Novo Nordisk. But I think it's a big potential for cross-border trading going forward. Of course, the share of homebuyers is still strong with around 70% is invested in Nordics.

So I think there's room to diversify more. But of course, is more and more foreign shares on the portfolios, and that in itself will lead to more cross-border trading. So I think we -- over time, we see higher levels. But then, of course, it will go a little bit up and down versus the market sentiment in different markets.

And as the last question is regarding the private banking concept that you have launched now in all geographies. Could you perhaps share some early reflections on geographical differences?

Yes, but it's been very well received in all of our markets. We've been running it the longest in Sweden since we launched in the summer, and we see an uptick in both net savings and customer numbers in the PB segment. I think we have a very big potential in the other countries as well, but of course, they've not been live that long, but off to a good start, I would say, and it's been, like I said, also very well received.

Thank you, Patrik. And next question comes from Jacob Hesslevik at SEB.

So two questions from my side. If we start with the new NII guidance for 2026, I assume that is on a flat or the current existing deposit base. Given it grew double digit, almost 20% in '25 over '24, what is your outlook on deposit development during 2026?

Yes. I think we estimate that deposit will grow in absolute terms from a growing customer base and also strong net savings coupled to that. Of course, deposit versus savings capital is probably not going to take any dramatic jumps unless we have a real downturn in the market, then of course, it will move really fast. But in absolute terms, we expect the deposit levels to grow.

All right. And then finally, the new German pension savings account launching in January 2027 appears to be quite significant. How large do you estimate this market opportunity to be? And what preparations are needed to capitalize on it?

Yes. I mean it's going to be affect all the working population in Germany. And only 70% of Germans today invest in the capital markets. There's, of course, a huge potential to track more capital into the capital markets, and you can buy ETFs and funds in that wrapper. And we know from experience from Sweden and Nordic countries that those tax-efficient wrappers are really good for attracting both capital, but also interest from customers in the capital markets.

So I think over time, it's going to be a very big product, and it's very good that Germany has launched now a tax-efficient wrapper. They haven't had that before. So it's a big, big step forward. It's a bank product, it's not insurance product, so it's not that difficult for us to implement it either. We don't need an insurance company in Germany to do that at this stage. So it's, of course, a product we will secure that we have at launch or when the product is launched from 1st of Jan 2027.

Thank you, Jacob. Next question comes from Nicolas Vaysselier from BNP Paribas Exane.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Just three questions for me. Should we go one by one?

Yes.

In Sweden, I've noticed the fund flows -- I mean, sorry, the net savings have gone down again sequentially this quarter. It's the same as happened for Avanza. Can you tell us what's your view on the momentum in net savings in Sweden?

Yes. I mean, overall, I mean, we see a strong pickup in the savings in Sweden in 2025 versus 2024. It was a little bit down in the end of the quarter, but it's more due to more one-off movements. We have customers in Sweden with really a lot of capital. So it can swing a little bit month-to-month, and especially at year-end, people always adjust the portfolios a little bit. It's nothing strange with that. But hopefully, we can -- with a positive market sentiment also in 2026 we should be able to see good net savings also in Sweden.

All right. And still in Sweden, so the increase in the ISK cap. I mean I understand it was already in force in 2025. Can you tell us among your customers, if you've seen people already making the most of the increase by adding more savings than their usual pattern in '25? Or is it something that we should see more coming in, in '26 or even '27?

Like I said, in 2025, we saw very good net savings in Sweden, both in retail, but not least in private banking after the new concept that we launched and part of that is probably due to the cap -- in retail, part of that is probably due to cap. Let's see how it plays out in 2026, but it should be good for the retail segment, for the flows from retail segment.

Okay. And in Finland and Denmark last year, you had meaningful product launches with the tax wrappers, the Livrente engine in Denmark and the endowment product in Finland. Could you have any update on the customer numbers you've signed up for each product? And what's the savings capital you have under each product?

Yes. So in wrapper, it's around 5,000 accounts and SEK 2 billion in capital, about the same in Livrente, but the Livrente is also pulling with it the bank pension. So in many cases, you cannot transfer your pension unless you can receive both the bank pension and Livrente pension. And before we couldn't do that. So we had lost out a lot of the transfers. So with Livrente, we get both Livrente money, but we then get the bank pension transfer money as well.

So overall net savings in pension in Denmark is up 45% in '25 versus 2024, so around SEK 5.2 billion, I think, in 2025. So we're really happy with the pension development in Denmark. And of course, we want to see a little bit higher level on the wrapper in Finland, but it's building from below because, as you know, you cannot transfer a wrapper to us without realizing tax, which is an issue, but it's mainly built from the ground up in our customer base.

Okay. And just a last one very quickly because the line cut from the previous person asking. In Germany, the pension product, would you be looking to launch it from very early on in '27 for the moment?

Yes. That's going to be a very important product.

Thank you, Nicolas. Next question comes from Ermin Keric from DNB Carnegie.

Can you hear us, Ermin? Looks like you're unmuted. All right. Well, we can let Ermin try again later. Let's go to Martin Ekstedt at Handelsbanken.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Yes.

Excellent. So first question, I saw that fund income coming in above expectation seems to be a matter of fund margins in Sweden largely improving 2 basis points between quarters now. From what I can see at least quickly, this represents the largest trend break, a positive trend break for this otherwise declining margin. I think it's been declining since 2022 at least.

So are we seeing a one-off quarter here? Is there a more sticky change in fund mix among customers? I think you mentioned in the presentation that there is more of Nordnet's own funds in the mix.

Yes. But I think in Sweden, the uptick there is also that -- I mean active funds have been -- become a little bit more popular in quarter 4 with a strong -- and also a lot of movements in different equities. But also, it's probably a little bit uptick from FX also in funds where the customers buy international funds. So I don't think it's going to be a massive shift in margin. Let's see about that, but we are happy to have stabilized and maintained the overall margin in funds in Nordnet overall.

Understood. So there's a currency component to that one as well.

It is a currency component. It's smaller than, of course, in trading, but there is a currency component there as well.

Okay, okay. And then for my second question, just quickly on Germany. I mean SEK 25 million for cost for the German expansion in Q4 is quite a ramp up from just SEK 32 million for the first 9 months of 2025, right? So at least I wasn't personally expecting you to fully reach the '25 year guidance. So I mean, I know SEK 57 million for the year is below the SEK 60 million you guided, but SEK 25 million in Q4 is also clearly a run rate above what you now guide for '26. I just wanted to check if the cost is just lumpy or if there were any particular costs in Q4...

Yes, but it's a little bit -- I mean, both we get more, of course, the organization in place, but also that we're doing a lot of development and some one-off costs also related to development and different agreements and things like that. So is going to be a bit lumpy, but it's also for next year, we got SEK 80 million to SEK 90 million. It's going to be lower first half and higher second half.

But this doesn't represent an acceleration of the plan in any way.

No, no, it doesn't.

Thank you, Martin. Should we try Ermin again, see if you can unmute? I guess not. So I mean, feel free to write your question or try to maybe call in. Let's go to Enrico Bolzoni from JPMorgan.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Just one on Germany. You clearly targeted breakeven in 2029. Can you give us some color on maybe what sort of intermediate KPI you're going to track and whether you plan to disclose them? So for example, I think about in terms of customer acquisition, do you think you might be able to acquire some customers already from this year? Or is it going to be more a 2027 figure? And do you have some sort of numbers in mind that would indicate that you are on track?

Yes. Well, of course, customer growth and net savings and customer acquisition cost is, of course, an important metric when we launch. We plan to, of course, take in some customers this year as well, but it's going to be more growth from 2027. But we don't want to disclose those numbers at this stage. So let's see how we guide on that forward. But we want to launch first and get going.

And related to that, can I just ask, you clearly are a new player going into a market that is completely new. So the retail investors probably don't know you, don't know your brand, don't know your name. So can you just talk about in general terms what is the marketing strategy to become better known with these clients? Is it pure marketing? Is there any other channel that you think you can pursue? I'm just curious from a strategic point of view, what is the approach?

Yes. I mean it goes -- both, of course, are going to work on the PR track, and we're going to have a savings economist also in Germany. So that concept has been really successful in the Nordics. But then, of course, we're going to spend on marketing, but I would say probably less on generic brand marketing, but much more on tactical that we secure, that we reach the right target group in the right digital channel.

And as you know, we don't focus on all markets to start with. It's mainly the investor segments, so customers with already money that's already on digital platforms or with banks, and we want to attract them over to our platform with a good one-stop shop, a good price and also good experience.

Thank you, Enrico. Next question comes from Zach Wurz from Autonomous Research.

Can you hear me?

Yes, yes.

Yes, we can.

I have two. So the first is on private banking. The release said that the focus in 2026 will be on developing the concept further by adding new products and implementing quality improvements. Can you give a little color on the road map here and what kind of products you think are missing that there is real demand for?

I could, but I won't say for competitive reasons. But I think we will work on a few interesting concepts that I think is going to be good, but we will see when it comes. But it's definitely a framework we're going to continue to launch new functionality over time, both in '26, but also in the years to come.

Yes. Understood. Fair enough. I'll try again with the plans to integrate AI into products and -- but also on the internal efficiencies side. Can you just talk through sort of what the plans are there or where you see potential?

Yes. So I mean, I think it's probably the most potential is on the product side. I think we're going to see a lot of things happening on the product side with AI. So far, we have news summaries with AI. It's been really popular. When you open an instrument, you see the summary of all the news for that instrument.

But we also now just launched AI summaries of quarterly reports, but we're looking at a lot of other exciting features that we can do with AI when it comes to products. And of course, over time, it can be more advanced, fully analysis, analyzing portfolios and come up with recommendations and things like that, but there's also, of course, a regulatory component to that. But I think there's a lot going to happen with AI on the product side. That's very exciting.

But then on the efficiency side, I think, of course, you can optimize some operations processes, customer service processes, but I think the main upside for us if you can increase efficiency development with agentic AI coding because our bottleneck is still tech, and we have a long, long wish list of things to do, so if we can become -- we are fast today, but if we can become even faster, we can launch a lot of exciting stuff over the coming years. So we look a lot into agentic AI coding as well.

Is that a project that's underway now? Do you have any kind of timeline on that?

Yes, it is a process. So we have a specific tech team now enabling the infrastructure for agentic coding. And of course, we use AI tools in different shapes and forms already in development or in tech, but I think it's a lot to do on efficiency. If the AI models continue to evolve exponentially as they've done, I think it will be possible to make coding more efficient over time.

Thank you, Zach. And next question comes from Mike Sanderson from Barclays.

Just a couple of ones from my end, if that is okay. First of all, you mentioned in your writing about sort of the payout and then sort of you think you've got the potential for buybacks. Could you sort of remind me of how you think about when you do buybacks and timing and scale given the capacity you want to keep to take on savings?

And then the second question -- sorry, putting it together. Just you did a lot of investment in marketing last year or talked about the investment in marketing. I mean, how -- do you think that you've now got to a level of marketing spend that's recurring? Or are there step-ups that you think will need to go with some of these new products, excluding Germany? I sort of understand Germany is obviously very separate, but within the other existing markets?

Yes. I don't know, Lennart, do you want to take the payout?

Yes. I mean we have -- as you know, the major constraint for us is not risk-weighted capital adequacy. It's rather the leverage ratio. And in that, we have the span of 4.0% to 4.5%. And that's where we're aiming, of course, and we have last -- we have bought back about SEK 627 million of stocks up to year-end and continue and that will be about SEK 1 billion.

We have plans going forward, but we also have this AT1 that will have its first quarter on 6th of November this year. So we are a little bit cautious of how those develop. But we are aiming in the long run to get down to the 4.5%, 4.0% leverage ratio. That's where we're aiming at.

And then we have to look upon how is the deposit developing and what capacity do we need to be able to have that. And of course, Germany is one part that we have to adapt to if there's an increase in deposit or not. So we will come back to this later on with how we will act further on, but the first one is here to look upon the AT1 that has its first call in November this year.

Thank you, Lennart. And also on the marketing, I mean, we see positive effects from the marketing we've been doing now, both in awareness and consideration, not least in our core segment, investors. And I think this new level around the SEK 105 million, SEK 110 million in Nordics is a good level for us also going forward. So we don't plan additional step up from this level right now.

Thank you so much. Next question comes from Oliver Carruthers from Goldman Sachs.

Three questions from me. So first on cross-border trading. So if demand stays at a higher level for cross-border trading, any thoughts on how pricing might evolve for this in your markets over time, given it's currently more expensive for your customers?

Second question. Have you finalized what your pricing strategy is going to look like in Germany yet? And how dependent is the strategy going to be on how the German incumbent shift models in response to the PFOF roll off later this year?

And then final question. Any early thoughts on prediction markets, which have obviously been growing a lot particularly in the U.S. and thoughts around being a distribution layer for those markets?

Yes. The cross-border trading, I think is, like we discussed, the potential also going forward due to the country mix we have, but also that the customers are more diversified now and actually trade more in cross-border shares. But it, of course, then boils down to market sentiment in each market, but the fundamental is there.

When it comes to pricing, we've introduced, as you know, FX accounts on the tax wrappers. We had it on the depot accounts before. So if you trade a lot, you can sign up for an FX account. So that's also appreciated. It's not that many customers that use it, but the ones that trade a lot believes it's beneficial. So we don't see that we need to do anything on pricing except from that.

Pricing strategy in Germany, of course, we discussed that a lot. I can't comment on all the specifics there. But we will see also how the PFOF plays out. The ban is going to be there, but it seems like the platforms and banks in Germany will get some revenue streams from the marketplaces anyway, but in different shape and form. So we need to see how that plays out and how we're going to play that game.

Prediction markets, I mean, it's interesting, is really booming in the U.S. I mean it's something we look at but we haven't decided to do anything there at this stage, and it's also a regulated. I think regulation around that is a bit different in Europe versus the U.S.

Okay. Thank you. There are no more questions on the line, but I have a written question here. So can you say anything of the typical behavior of the German customer group that's already active in the market and that you're targeting? Are they trading a lot of equities, ETFs, et cetera? Are they owning funds, single stocks? Is it similar to the behavior you have in your Nordic customer base?

Yes, for the investor segment where we target is fairly similar. It's more -- I mean they trade a little bit more ETFs than funds. ETF has been -- become very popular in Germany, mainly due to pricing because the funds have had very high price normally. I think we can do a lot of good stuff in the fund business in Germany with our products and our pricing.

When it comes to trading, I mean, some trade, I mean, of course, on the primary markets, if you trade a little bit more, you do it in our primary markets, but some also trade international shares on market-making markets like Tradegate where you have a euro-denominated U.S. equities, for example. So that's a little bit different. But the ones that trade a lot in higher trades, they trade on the main markets.

Great. So I think that was the last question for today. So thanks, everyone, for attending the presentation, and please visit our website, nordnetab.com, or reach out to me if you have any questions. Thank you so much, and have a nice day.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Marcus. Thanks.

My name is Marcus Lindberg, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Nordnet. With me today, I have our CEO, Lars-Ake Norling; and our CFO, Lennart Kran. Lars-Ake and Lennart will start off by presenting the results, and then we will have a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] The presentation itself is available on our corporate website, nordnetab.com. Okay. Let's start the presentation. Lars-Ake, please go ahead.

Thank you, Marcus. We can go to the next slide. So some highlights for the third quarter. It's a stable financial performance with continued growth in our core business, in line with our strong quarter 2. We see positive net savings and also very good customer growth. Overall, strong trading activity with record cross-border trading, both from a growing customer base, but also a positive market sentiment, not least outside of the Nordics in Europe and U.S. We see a decline in net interest income due to lower interest rates and also that we sold the unsecured lending portfolio last year, partly compensated by a growth in deposits.

Looking at the cost, we estimate the cost growth to be in line with guidance for the full year. And as you noticed, we also have a negative impact of SEK 18 million from an error in handling corporate action related to share called Wolfspeed that had a reverse split with very poor external information around that reverse split. The Nordnet app received the Red Dot Design Award and also continue a strong focus on new product launches. And we just launched new currency account for ISK or endowment wrapper in Norway.

We go to next. Looking at the financial KPIs, we see strong demand development, very strong customer growth, 13% up in 1 year, also very strong savings capital growth with 16% in 1 year, both from underlying market growth, but also very strong net savings. Number of trades is also good. It's up 22% year-on-year from growing customer base, but also overall positive market sentiment. Revenues up 7%. We see then a decline in net interest income from falling interest rates, but a very strong growth in our trading business and also good growth in our fund business.

Looking at the operating expenses, it's up 13% year-on-year, but excluding Germany, it's around 9% of cost growth year-on-year. And continued operating leverage in the business with a profit growth of 6% to over SEK 900 million in the quarter.

Looking then at the customer growth and net savings, we've had a very good quarter with strong customer growth, clearly up from quarter 2. So far almost 200,000 new customers joined Nordnet in 2025. Also very good net savings. We had a dip in May, June, because there was a lot of excess capital on accounts, but -- deposits on accounts, but now we see a clear pickup and strong net savings in the quarter, and SEK 16 billion in net savings so far this year.

And we also benefit -- continue to benefit from being diversified in the Nordics that manage market risk but also enables growth and we see good customer growth and savings capital growth across the board. We passed 500,000 customers in Sweden during the quarter, also 500,000 customers in Norway, and we passed 600,000 customers in Denmark.

Go to next. Looking a little bit on the different revenue streams, starting with brokerage. And to the left there, you see the blue line, a clear pickup in a number of trading customers from a growing customer base, but also that overall positive market sentiment. Looking at trades per trading customer is stable, but looking at the graph down to the right, the cross-border trading is really picking up. It's close to 40% in the quarter, both from the country mix where we have more customers outside of Sweden, where they naturally trade more cross-border because the local markets in Finland, Norway and Denmark are fairly small, so they trade a lot cross-border, but also coupled with positive market sentiment, not least in the U.S., but also several European markets have done well during the year.

Looking also at trades per day, we see a clear pickup from 2019 from more than a doubling of the customer base. We also see a pickup of trade per customer this year from high volatility in quarter 2 from tariffs, but also good trading this quarter from a positive market sentiment in quarter 3. And we also see a clear uptake in income per trade and that's due to higher share of cross-border trading.

Looking a little bit on our fund business, we see that the fund revenue margin and also the fund flows and the fund capital as such has recovered from a dip in quarter 2, when we had the tariff volatility. And we see overall a steady growth over time in the fund capital. And over 1/4 of the fund capital is Nordnet branded funds, and flow wise is around 30% of the flow. And we see also a steady pickup of number of customers owning funds, which is now more than 50%. So it's a nicely developing business for us.

Looking a little bit on net interest income. We see that the deposit declined a little bit this quarter from very strong net buy in equities and funds, SEK 21 billion in the quarter in spite of very high net savings of SEK 18 billion. But of course, that the customer is net buy funds and equities is good for our core business over time.

Go to next, looking at the different components of net interest income. We gave those snapshots and they're fairly similar to last quarter. So liquidity portfolio snapshot SEK 1.6 billion for '25. Main sensitivity here is deposit volume, and we see likely upside on the deposit volume over time from a growing customer base and strong net savings in this quarter, and the deposit level was a little bit down due to the very strong net buy but also higher lending volume. Looking at forward-looking market trades, they're a little bit higher actually than compared to last quarter.

Looking at the loan portfolio snapshot, SEK 1.1 billion for 2025, same also as last quarter. Main sensitivity here is margin lending volume, which we expect to increase, increase savings capital and also more customers, and that's exactly also what we see in this quarter with a quite a big pickup in the margin lending volume. Margin lending is good. It drives the business, both the lending business but also then our customers use that for investing in funds and equity. But overall, a very low-risk lending portfolio with loan to value on low levels, both on margin lending and mortgage and no credit losses. And we also managed to maintain the margin on the margin lending on a fairly okay level in spite of lower Central Bank rates.

Looking then at the deposit interest, it's around SEK 400 million. That snapshot for 2025 was about the same as last quarter. But the sensitivity here is volume or deposits on the savings account, which we expect to go down with lower rates, and that's also what we see in quarter 3 versus quarter 2.

So in summary, resilient revenues, and also boosted by diversified revenue streams. And we have good development in all our revenue streams both net interest income, the fund business and the brokerage business.

Looking at the margins, of course, the NII, net interest income margin is a little bit down from lower rates. We see trading margin is up from high share of cross-border trading, and fund margin is fairly stable, a little bit down due to the mix between passive and active funds where we see a little bit pickup in the passive funds again. But overall, the business model with very good operating leverage. We've grown the revenue with 25% per year since '19. Cost has only been growing around 7%. So most of the top line ends up on the bottom line, which is a true position of profitable growth.

We also continue with a high speed on releasing new features and products. And we're very happy that we received the Red Dot Award for our app this summer. And we also continue to launch features for our active customers, latest now with the analyst estimates on the instrument pages, where you can both customize those, but also both historic and forward-looking data. We also implemented, you can see real time -- in real time, the transfer status when we transfer equity or funds from another bank. We launched Spain as a new trading venue and we continue with a lot of different launches or feature improvements in Shareville. And we see here a steady pickup of sign-offs in Shareville, but also posting Shareville is becoming more and more popular forum. And we also continue to launch new exciting features in our partner web for our partner business, partner customers. So with that, Lennart, I hand over to you.

Thank you very much. And with a good customer inflow and very good net savings during this quarter, we still can conclude that the capital situation as well as the liquidity situation is very good, which creates a lot of flexibility. We have a liquidity situation regarding liquidity to deposits of 72%, which is great. And we also have a leverage ratio of 5.4%, which is a good levy from the regulations.

We also received a lower capital requirement on the risk-weighted side from the SFSA during the SREP. They were decreased by almost 1 percentage from 289 to 194. This, however, didn't affect our capital requirement as such because it is the highest of the internal calculated and the SREP that is the meaning for us. But still, it's also that the leverage ratio is the constraint, not the risk-weighted. But a conclusion, very good capital and liquidity situation, which also means that we intend to continue our share buyback program going forward when this ongoing is going out. I think that's what I can conclude on the capital and liquidity.

Okay. Thank you, Lennart. A little bit on the strategic focus. And as you know, we have four key strategic ambitions. And of course, starting with the customers, to having the most satisfied customers, building this one-stop shop for savings and investment, coupled with a really great customer experience and overall competitive price. But we also known to have happy customers. You need to have really talented and passionate staff, which we have and a strong ENPS, and overall, we can attract and retain talent.

At the bottom, there is sustainable business. We are in a trust business. We need to earn that trust every day, and it's important that we have a very strong compliance and risk management and that overall are liked and trusted brands. And the last area is profitable growth to really secure that we continue to take market share in a growing savings market in the Nordic, but also open Germany as a new big opportunity in H2 next year, but also secure that we continue with good cost control and show that we have a really scalable business model.

We've had really long-term nice strong growth in both customers and savings capital. We have critical mass of customers in all countries. We have happy customers in all countries and that's driving word-of-mouth growth. And customer savings capital growth is the main drivers for revenue growth for us. New customers coming in, like what they see, transfer money from other banks and start using our products.

And we're taking market share in a growing savings market in the Nordics, but we still have plenty of room to grow. We have 8% of the Nordic population on our platform. We have 7% of the addressable market, which is a big market, SEK 18 trillion, and it's a growing market, growth over time. And we've also taken market share in this market, up from 3% in '16 to 7% now in '24. And looking to the right, we see we have highest market share in equity trading, a little bit lower in funds and pension, and that's two key growth areas for us where we put a lot of focus.

And also looking at the cost picture, we have very good cost control and a very scalable business model. We had 900,000 customers in '19. Now we're at 2.3 million customers. In spite of that, the cost growth has been limited. But has also made room for us to invest in growth, and we have a few clear investment areas. One is more tech staff to increase development speed. The other one is higher marketing costs to drive brand awareness. The third one is launch of Germany. And then the fourth is what we've done with the new fund company and also pension branches in Finland and Denmark. So looking at the underlying cost growth, it's actually fairly small around 3%, but we decided to invest in select growth areas.

Looking at the actual versus financial targets, we're basically in line on cost growth, capital per customer, income margin and also expenses. It's trending according to targets.

And finally, the key priorities for '25 is, of course, all the work around the launch of Nordnet Germany in H2 next year. But we have good progress. We are recruiting the team in Germany now and a few people are already in place. We're finalizing now the go-to-market offering. We're also doing all of the development that's needed on the platform for the launch. And the passporting of license -- bank license is also going well where FSA in Sweden has now handed it over to BaFin in Germany.

Of course, continued strong focus on our fund and pension business, where we have a lot of room to grow and not least, realize the full potential in the livrente, a Danish pension product that we launched in quarter 4, and we see clear pickup in pension -- net savings in pensions in Denmark since launch, with 50% up in net savings and pension in Denmark since we launched livrente.

And we also continue to enhance our high-end offering for private bank and more active customers, where we now plan to launch also the new private banking offering we launched in Sweden this summer in Denmark, Finland and Norway this quarter. We continue to roll out the brand campaign and do brand burst is one ongoing right now, but we're going to continue that into next year to build awareness around the Nordnet brand. And of course, continue to maintain focus on cost control to ensure underlying scalability but also decide specifically where we're going to invest for future growth.

So with that, I hand over to you, Marcus, for Q&A.

Thank you, Lars-Ake and Lennart. So now we'll open up for questions. [Operator Instructions] So the first question comes from Patrik Brattelius at ABG.

Yes. So you had a new slide on cost there, and we see the operating leverage in relation to savings capital is reducing. Can you talk a little bit what you believe are your medium targets ambitions here in terms of this ratio?

Yes, we don't guide specifically on that ratio, but it's gone down from high levels down to 15 bps. What we guided on is absolute cost growth, which I think makes more sense because savings capital, as you know, can go a little bit up and down depending on the market.

Yes. I understand that, and I know your targets, but I'm thinking that you at least look at peers and you have an ambition that this is a level that we want to reach? Or how do you think about that?

Yes, of course we do that. I think there's room for improving that over time because now we've done quite big investments also in Germany and marketing, et cetera. And with the strong net savings we have today and the growth in savings capital, there should be room for a little bit lower. But like I said, we don't guide on that, we guide on absolute cost growth.

If we dig into the numbers here, it looks like a step-up in the number of new customers in Sweden in the third quarter. Is this driven by the marketing efforts that we have seen here around Sweden and in media. And are you seeing that you started to take a meaningful market share in terms of new customers? Or am I reading too much into this quarterly step-up in new customers?

It's a combination both from increasing brand awareness, I think, but also that we had a specific campaign in Sweden during September to celebrate that we have 5 stars from Morningstar for all our Nordnet 1 funds. So it's partly due to that as well. So let's see how that plays out over time. But of course, with the improvement of awareness over time, that should also spill over in slightly higher customer growth.

Okay. Fair enough. And my last question is regarding your capitalization. You're very well capitalized, and you have a -- continue to have a big buffer compared to your regulatory requirement. You have an ongoing buyback program. But do you see that there is room to increase either the size of this buyback program or pick up the pace in the buyback program or potentially increase your payout ratio as the buffer keeps being quite significant towards your regulatory requirement. How do you think about this?

Do you want to take that, Lennart?

Absolutely. We have a long-term plan. And as you're all aware, we have an AT1 bond that will have its first call in November next year of SEK 600 million. And we also look upon how the deposit develops because that is actually what makes the requirement for the capital. So yes, we do always consider how much should we go on, or should we just continue with the present pace of the buyback program. But the AT1 should also be included because we could either choose to issue a new one or not or we can continue or we can increase. So this is what we evaluate all the time when we're going forward to be flexible for increases in the deposit at firsthand.

Okay. So the takeaway -- should I -- from this is that you're satisfied with the current run rate?

We're satisfied at the current run rate at the time being. But we also do evaluate if something happens or not happens as we plan to. But we expect -- I mean, the ranges of the leverage ratio to be about 4% to 4.5%, and we're now at 5.4%. So we see at the next -- end of next year, this will be a decreased of the leverage ratio. If it's far above those measures, then we might evaluate even further.

But we also want to say that we discussed before, a more continuous program, so we don't spend all the money in 1 year, and there's no buyback in the years after. So we would like to have a program that runs for several years.

Next question comes from Ermin Keric at DNB Carnegie.

So maybe if we just start on the deposit development. Could you talk anything more about kind of what gives you confidence that, that one should increase? I think you've been talking about upside there for a while. And we've had different factors kind of bringing it down. So what gives you confidence now that this isn't the new normal that it should actually grow from here?

No, I think deposit volume is clearly up this year. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Marcus, by around 16%.

Correct.

That was a little bit down this quarter due to high net buy. But over time, we see and expect deposit volumes to grow in absolute terms with a growing customer base and high net savings. How it will develop versus savings capital is a bit more difficult to predict. But I think in absolute terms, we foresee that the deposit volume is going to increase over time with a growing customer base.

Got it. And then on the NII, thank you for the kind of static guidance you gave us for '25. If you would extrapolate it to '26, given that we're now approaching the end of the year, do you think consensus looks kind of reasonable given that you also would probably expect some volume growth, I suppose?

Yes. I think it's reasonable. I think we're going to have a little bit higher deposit volumes, lending volumes. And with the interest rates pass, we see now in this presentation, it's reasonable. Of course, if everything is static, it's is no deposit volume growth or no lending growth with those rates, then it's going to be slightly down next year, but we see that of course, we're likely going to have some deposit volume growth and lending growth.

Excellent. Then maybe I can combine two questions in the last. So both if you could speak a little bit more about the kind of ambition to realize the potential livrente that you mentioned and that you've seen a pickup in net flows in Denmark in the pension side. And if that ties into marketing a little bit to Patrik's question before, if you could talk a bit more broader from the marketing efforts you've done now a year or later, what can you see in the overall brand recognition, brand awareness?

Start with livrente, I think we are off to a good start, and we're up 50% on net savings and pension in Denmark this year from SEK 2.6 billion last year to SEK 4 billion this year. And it's a combination of both livrente and the old product Ratepension because you move everything you have at the same time. And before we couldn't even -- I mean, if you have both livrente and Ratepension, it was difficult to move because we could only accept Ratepension and that made it difficult to move the livrente. So I think it's a very strong product for us. Of course, we'll develop that over time as well. But we're very happy with the start, and has been positively received.

Looking at the marketing effort per se, I mean, we see an increase in brand awareness, not least in Sweden, especially also in the more active segment, the investor segment is even more pronounced, which we're happy about. But over time, of course, it's important this biz over also increased customer growth and that's something we track also very carefully. But I think the campaign is off to a good start in all countries so far.

Is it possible to have any quantifiable kind of effect on the brand awareness, just to get a sense?

Yes. We have the numbers, but it's an increase. But -- and hopefully, that will also continue over time. We do 3 or 4 brand bursts, bigger brand bursts per year. And after each brand burst, we see a positive traction on the brand awareness. So hopefully, this can develop over time. But it also takes time to change awareness to be clear on that. But we see a clear significant and increase in the brand awareness, not least in the investor segment.

Next question comes from Jacob Hesslevik at SEB.

So you have talked about the relationship between deposit growth and trading activity. When clients sell off, deposit increase and vice versa. So do you expect trading activity to not pick up and margin lending not to grow given your earlier remarks around deposit growth?

Yes. I mean we know it is a very big market crash, of course, deposit growing. But we also know that the customers are in a deposit market is net buying. But what I'm saying is that with the growing customer base and high net savings, even though the customers are net buying, we expect to see growth in absolute volumes of deposits. And that's what we've done this year with 16% up. How it develops versus savings capital, that's more difficult to predict. But in absolute terms, it should grow with the growing customer base and high net savings, what we've seen this year in spite of strong net buys.

Yes. But the market has been sluggish across the Nordic. I mean, Denmark is down quite a bit...

Yes, in the Nordic, our customers are -- I mean, buying a lot in Europe and U.S. right now. So it's -- yes, it's been a positive market sentiment, I would say.

That's fair enough. And could you also remind us of the outcome from the IT platform issue you had earlier this year when clients could log into other clients' accounts. And on that theme, is the administrative error now in Q3 related to IT or human error?

There's no relation between those two. I mean, the incident of Wolfspeed was a corporate action event. And as you know, they are complex and manual in their nature and increase likelihood for error. That said, we have very few areas in corporate action historically, but this one's a bit special since it was a two-step thing. Wolfspeed came out of Chapter 11 and needed a new American ISIN. So that was one part. The other part was the reverse split. And the information, especially on the reverse split was pretty poor. So we missed that one, and we were not the only one, with other international brokers that also missed it. So customers ended up with too many shares and some sold, and we need to buy those back and thereby the cost. But it's no IT, it's just handling of a little bit poor information that we got too late that was a Wolfspeed incident. On the incident early this year, there was, as you know, a tech incident with a third-party [ library ] that we have problems with. But it's no -- I mean, we closed that in a short time and stability on the platform has been high this year, 99.9%, also 99% for the previous year. So overall, a very strong availability versus regulatory units, bodies IMY has decided not to do an investigation, and we haven't heard anything from SFSA.

Next question comes from Martin Ekstedt at Handelsbanken.

First question. So it looks like Norwegian trading income was at all-time high this quarter. I mean it's a great testament to your geographical diversification, right? But can you give us an idea of what drives this? And how sustainable it is? Is it like a secular trend, do you think? Or is it more of a temporary thing?

Yes. I think Norwegian trading is -- I mean the Oslo Exchange has been fairly okay this year, and also strong interest. I mean, Norwegian trade a lot cross border. So there's been strong interest in trading, both in the U.S. but also in some of the European markets where we also see good growth in those markets. I would say it's partly sentiment-driven, but the share of cross-border trading, I think, is I mean naturally high and always in Norway because it's a small home market.

Okay. Okay. Understood. And then maybe taking more of a step back with my second question then. So without going into any individual names, there are a few examples of now in Europe or U.S. online brokers knocking on the door and private equity, perhaps taking a renewed interest in your sector. This usually means consolidation or at least increased competition over time, right? But does it impact your thinking around, for example, your German expansion? Does it make you more careful? Or does it contribute more a sense of urgency perhaps to that venture?

I mean we are used to competition. I mean, the Nordics are -- since it's very mature markets and a lot of sales capital here is always high competition. And it's going to be high competition in Germany as well, and we know that. So -- but we're confident in our offering with a broad offering, the one-stop shop, the really good customer experience, overall low price and also the trust part. So nothing has changed, I would say, regarding Germany. But also since we already operate four countries, so operate in the fifth country, we can do that with a fairly limited costs but at same time, create a rather big opportunity, but it's not like we're going to need millions of customers day 1 to be profitable. I mean, we can build this over time like we've done in the other countries.

Next question comes from Ian White from Autonomous Research. .

Just two from my side, please, both around private banking. First of all, what KPIs might you be able to share regarding the revamped private banking offering at this stage? I'm particularly interested in any evidence you have that the revised offer is getting traction with clients. And importantly, evidence that it might be helping you to win clients and inflows that you might not have otherwise won. That's kind of question one, please. And secondly, again sort of taking a slight step back on this topic. What makes you comfortable with the margin versus volume trade-off that is associated with the revamped offering. I mean if I look at, say, just revenue to notional on the brokerage side, the bottom end of the revised private banking offer, the customers pay about half revenue to value traded compared to what you currently earn. So how much additional volume do you expect to get versus the revenue margin you might give up basically if this initiative really succeeds.

Yes. The launch has been successful in Sweden. It was very well received overall. And we see clear pickup in sign-ups of private banking about 3x as high after launch as before the launch. It's partly due to, its also automatic opt-in that we didn't have before, but it's, anyway, a clear step-up of the new private banking customers, but also what's positive is we also see net savings from private banking in Sweden increasing. So they were clearly contributing also to the growth in net savings in quarter 3 overall for the business. And hopefully, this will continue. As you know, we also launched Denmark, Finland and Norway in this quarter. So really looking forward to that. .

When it comes to the business case on this, I can't comment exactly on the volume versus margin. But I mean, of course, we do this because we see a clearly positive business case. And give away versus -- I mean, the existing setup and existing revenue we had in Sweden before we did the shift is not material, but we see clearly that we have an upside on the volumes and new customers.

Next question comes from Haley Tam at UBS.

I have two, please. Could I ask you on first one on Sweden? The net commission income was flat quarter-on-quarter, even though we saw the increase in the number of trades, the trading days, the cross-border trade percentage. So I wonder if you could help me understand the reason for the decline in the net brokerage income per trade. I mean, is it related to private banking perhaps or some other competitive pressure? And then the second question actually was just in Denmark. Could you maybe give us some indication of how much of the net transaction-related income in Q3 was due to trading in Novo Nordisk specifically? And how would you encourage us to think about your Danish customers' appetite for trading and investing from here?

Yes. I don't -- regarding Sweden, was it the income per trade or overall brokerage income...

So it was both. The net brokerage income per trade had stepped down quarter-on-quarter and also net commission income was flat Q-on-Q. So that was really a trend I didn't expect to see.

Yes. I don't know if you have any specifics on that, Marcus.

Not sure actually, we don't have the...

I think we can come back on that specific. When it comes to Denmark in a way, Novo Nordisk, I can't say how much was Novo Nordisk trading, but of course, it's been a lot of Novo Nordisk trading in Denmark, but also outside Sweden and Denmark. Sweden, Finland, Norway has also been trading quite a lot in Denmark.

And then a comment on overall cross-border trading, while we saw, of course, intra-Nordic cross-border trading increasing, we've seen a larger part of the increase was Europe outside of the Nordics.

Okay. Next question comes from Enrico Bolzoni at JPMorgan.

He also put his questions in Q&A.

Okay. Well, let's get back to Enrico. Next question we'll take from Andy Lowe at Citi.

So a couple of points of clarification, if that's all right. Many of your European platform peers are starting to offer private market funds. So could you just maybe sort of outline your thoughts on that product going forward. And just the sort of road map for crypto products and sort of latest developments there as well. And then last week, Avanza's made a comment in the Q&A about the customer churn being sort of broadly flat versus last year despite the increase in competition. So it would be really helpful if you could just clarify some numbers behind your customer churn, specifically in Sweden, but also across the rest of the group if that would be possible?

Yes. We -- as you know, we offer private market as well. The first product was EQT Nexus that we launched in Sweden. We also now have it in Denmark. But we're also building up portfolio of private market funds that we offer on the platform, mainly to private banking. So we have a cooperation with [ Schroders ] as well, but we're going to build out that offering over time. That said, I mean, the investment in the private market funds is they're a bit more long term in nature. It's okay, but it's not a super high flow into those funds. But it's important still to have them on the platform for the segment that wants to diverse a little bit into the private market funds. When it comes to...

Sorry to interrupt. Could you maybe put a few numbers on that, sort of how much of I don't know the net flows are in private markets or total assets under custody?

No, we can't give specifics, but it's fairly -- I mean, versus the full net savings is fairly low. But still it's an important product to have in the mix because some customers really want to have the private market access. So it might be building over time. But I think -- I mean they are more long term in nature. So if you want to -- I mean, if you're not long term and want to sell off before, you are penalized, so that's also a factor to take into consideration. But -- so I think over time, it might be developing, but I don't think any -- I mean, the golden nugget for all the PE firms is unlock all the retail capital, right? .

But I don't think we see very high retail flows into PE yet. It might build over time, but it will be a journey to get there. And when it comes to customer churn, I mean, we don't see any increased churn really. Of course, we keep track on churn, especially versus competitors, not least in Sweden, but we don't see any major outflows or churn. So it's fairly flattish on those 2% level that we've been before.

Great. And just a sort of final thing is just on the crypto as well and sort of remind us what the product offering and what the demand has been.

Yes. So I mean, as you know, we only offer trackers today, so listed trackers, mainly physically replicated Bitcoin, Ethereum, the most popular. It's around 1% of the customers this year that traded crypto, around 2% of traded value, so it's fairly small volumes, but still important products to have for the ones that's interested in crypto. Then we -- I mean, we know in Germany, most platforms there have spot trading in crypto as well. So something we're looking into, if that's needed for the one-stop shop launch in Germany.

Thanks, Andy. We'll try Enrico again. And if you can unmute, I'll just read it, but let's see if you can unmute Enrico, go ahead.

Enrico was kind enough to submit questions in writing. So is this the admin error that led to the SEK 18 million one-off as the loss could have been, he said, can you let us know if you've taken any actions to change the processes, if there were any issues with the processes to avoid this happening in the future given that loss could have been higher if the stock was squeezed?

Yes. I mean it was a single event and a complex issue or a corporate event also with this lack of information. But that said, of course, we studied carefully how we can improve our routines. One is that we're going to work -- I mean, even more closely with our American depot custody institute to really secure, that we catch all aspects of a corporate event. This was two aspects of the event. We caught the first one, but not the second one. So really diligent get all the aspects of the corporate event. We're also introducing AI now to help us not least to go through prospectus and other corporate event information to summarize things. And we also know that some -- I mean we have a huge amount of corporate events, as you know, every year, and so far, we have very limited problems in this area. But we also know that some of the corporate events are more complex and more manual. So to deal with those, we also have for now an expert group that deals with the most complex cases which requires a little bit more hand-on managing.

Okay. Great. Looks like there are no more questions. So we'll end the call there. Thank you so much for your questions today. Thanks for attending the presentation. And please visit our website known, nordnetab.com or reach out to me if you have any questions. So thank you, everyone, and have a nice day.

Thank you.

Thank you all.