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Good day and welcome to the TCS Group Holding Quarter 2021 IFRS Results Investor Call. Today's call is being recorded. And on today's call, we have Oliver Hughes, Group CEO; and Ilya Pisemsky, CFO. And at this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Oliver Hughes. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much and hello to everybody. Thanks for joining our first quarter 2021 call. I'm pleased to report very strong results for this quarter as we delivered RUB 14.2 billion of net profit, up 57% year-on-year and amounting to an ROE of 43.7%. The positive momentum with which we ended 2020 has continued into this quarter, and this makes us optimistic about the remainder of this year about our ability to comfortably meet our guidance. The growth of our customer base has been unstoppable in the first quarter. We added 1.5 million total customers to reach 14.8 million, representing an active customer base of more than 10 million. This is our fastest customer addition pace ever. The users of our apps have grown in parallel. Our MAU surpassed the 10 million mark to reach 10.7 million, and our DAU reached 3.6 million. Key to this is our viral growth in Tinkoff Black debit card customers. We added 1.4 million total customers to reach 8.9 million Tinkoff Black. And in Tinkoff Investments, we added over 500,000 total customers to reach 1.8 million. This pace of growth is testament to our superior product quality, our unparalleled level of service and targeted marketing efforts. This puts us well on track to meet our 2023 strategic targets of 16.5 million active customers and 1.7 products per customer well ahead of time. Before getting started with a review of our business performance during the quarter, I want to touch on 3 key developments that happened shortly after the close of the quarter. First, at the beginning of April, we launched Dolyame, our buy-now-pay-later service that enables customers who shop online to split their payments into 4 equal parts and repay them every 2 weeks. This is the first product of its kind in Russia, and we believe it will be a great service for customers, who will have a much more convenient and seamless checkout experience, and for merchants, who can leverage this technology to increase conversion on their average ticket. Second, also in April, we announced the acquisition of Koshelek, spelled Koshelek. I'll touch briefly on the business model and then the deal rationale. Koshelek is Russia's largest mobile wallet app that aggregates bank cards, loyalty cards and coupons. In a relatively short period of time, they reached meaningful scale with over 20 million total customers and almost 11 million MAU. These customers have digitized more than 300 million loyalty cards, including 19 out of the 30 largest loyalty programs in Russia. Koshelek's business model is composed of 3 pillars: digital loyalty card issuance, advertising and lead generation and Koshelek Pay, a payments solution to tokenize bank cards for contactless payments. We really like the synergy potential of the union between Tinkoff and Koshelek. Given there's only a 20% overlap between our respective customer bases, we see this as an exciting channel for our credit products and our transactional products. This will also strengthen our relationship with merchants through products like co-branded cards, BNPL and Tinkoff Target, our merchant-funded offers and loyalty platform. We can provide financial infrastructure for Koshelek to further monetize its customer base and grow its revenue per user. We'll keep the markets updated as we unlock these synergies. Third, as part of our ongoing corporate governance enhancement program, we announced 5 new members of the TCS Group Board of Directors. We're excited to welcome Ashley Dunster, Masha Gordon, Margarita Hadjitofi, Nick Huber and Nitin Saigal as independent nonexecutive directors. We believe that the diverse background, experience and skills of our Board will strengthen the Board's oversight and strategic input. To that end, we're also pleased to announce that we're formalizing 2 new committees: a Risk and Emerging Risk otherwise known Sustainability Committee, and a Strategy Committee. Please be aware that we expect more Board changes throughout the year, and we'll inform the market in due course. Tinkoff also became a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Banking, a logical step for the group and proof of our commitment to continue developing our business sustainability. Moving on to the business highlights for the first quarter of 2021. Tinkoff Black continues to take the market by storm. Record high customer acquisition is testament to the aspirational brand and superior user experience that we've created with this product. Despite the seasonably slower first quarter, our total TPV grew sequentially and exceeded RUB 800 billion during the quarter, giving us record revenue of RUB 7 billion. As almost 90% of all acquired customers come through cheap viral or cross-selling channels, this business continues to provide very low-cap customers, improving the unit economics of all of our other businesses. Customers love using their Tinkoff cards. And even if they receive their salary at another bank, they take the conscious decision to transfer money to their Tinkoff account each month, a clear sign of loyalty towards our brand, and the customers want to make Tinkoff their primary banking relationship. Our InvestTech business, Tinkoff Investments, had another very strong quarter across all metrics as Tinkoff Investments further established itself as the go-to platform for retail investments in Russia. Our market share of all active customers on the Moscow Stock Exchange was almost 70% in the first quarter. And we managed to grow our assets under custody by more than RUB 100 billion to over RUB 400 billion. We maintained our leadership as the pace of our product development stepped up. We launched an ECM and DCM business line with a focus on new-economy companies, helping us to offer our retail investment base more interesting and exclusive investment products. We opened up access to the derivatives market of the Moscow Stock Exchange for qualified investors. Our asset manager, Tinkoff Capital, launched Tinkoff [ Index-Backed Fund ], which allows retail customers to invest in SPACs. Our social network, Pulse, the largest of its kind for investors, reached more than 1 million registered users. Tinkoff Investments accounted for 8% of our total revenues in the first quarter, with notable bottom line contribution in spite of it still being in investment phase. Our SME business continues to print good numbers. Because we offer SME services that not only help them manage but also to grow their businesses, we're able to steadily increase our SME customer base and revenue. We're also able to improve our SME business line unit economics. Our total customer base exceeded 500,000, and revenue grew by almost 1/3 year-on-year. We'll galvanize growth in this business line over the coming years as our pilots of SME lending provide encouraging results and as we develop more software solutions to increase retention and monetization of customers. Our SME business is increasingly building a synergetic relationship with our acquiring business, thanks to cross-selling and joint product development. As e-commerce takes off in Russia, we're riding this wave through a fast-growing, active merchants base and via the growth of large e-commerce players. TPV through our C2B payments platform rose 84% year-on-year and exceeded RUB 4 billion of quarterly revenue. This acceleration is in part driven by the ramp-up of our newly launched Tinkoff Checkout product, a one-stop solution that allows businesses to integrate all payment methods online and offline. We're confident that these positive dynamics will continue as more and more merchants move online and attach increasing importance to payment methods that are easy to integrate into their checkouts with high conversion rates and low fraud. Our noncredit businesses serves as a major source of growth for our credit business lines, which performed superbly in the first quarter. We grew our net loan book by 14% quarter-on-quarter driven by significant increase in cross-selling activity, improvement in the overall economic environment, pent-up demand and increasing precision in predicting customer behavior. This resulted in a notably low cost of risk of just 4.5%. Our custom lending approach enables us to find new ways to increase our disbursements through new NPV-positive channels or through adjustments to pricing policy which are NPV enhancing. We think we're comfortably on track to meaningfully exceed our 30%-plus loan growth guidance for 2020 -- 2021, sorry. And we're pleased to see the growth in bottom line contribution of our highly profitable and highly resilient credit business. We still have huge scope to both deepen the market and take a bigger market share within that market given that we only have a 2% market share of all retail loans in the country. With that, I'll hand over to Ilya to take you through our financial results in more detail.
Thank you, Oliver, and hello, everyone. I would now like to describe some of the main trends that we observed in our business throughout the first quarter of 2021. Traditionally, I will start with the balance sheet composition on Slide 8. Total assets of the group grew by only 1.6% (sic) [ 1.7% ] in the first quarter. But there were important changes within the asset composition. Substantial cash balance accumulated during the fourth quarter of 2020 was partially utilized to fund credit portfolio growth in the first quarter of 2021. As a result, cash balance in the percentage terms reduced back to 8% of the total assets while net loan book increased to 49%. Our net loan portfolio showed solid 14.4% growth in the first quarter. This growth was driven by several components of the trade book, which I will discuss later in detail. Our funding base is depicted on Slide 9. Seasonal slowdown at the beginning of the year across retail and SME client segments resulted in a moderate growth of 1.7%, nearing asset growth. From April statistics, you may see that growth on the funding side starts picking up in the second quarter. On Slide 10, you can see shareholders' equity increased by 4.1% in the first quarter to RUB 132.3 billion, thanks to strong quarterly profit, partially reduced by the negative [ valuation ] of the bond portfolio. Our Basel ratios were flat for the quarter at very comfortable levels. Statutory ratios came down a bit on the back of the credit book growth. The N1.0 and N1.1 came down to 12.6% and 10%, respectively. Going forward, we target N1.0 above 12% and N1.1 core capital adequacy above 9%. Now I will turn to the income statement starting on Slide 12, where you can see the breakdown of our revenue by the major business verticals. It's a graphical representation of what you can see in more details in Note 4, Segment Analysis, of our financial statements. You can see that the split between credit and noncredit components of the revenue remained the same from the previous quarter, despite some seasonal slowdown in transactional components such as debit cards and SME. In total, revenue grew 6.8% to RUB 56.7 billion (sic) [ RUB 56.8 billion ] . Our next slide is on cost management, where you can see that our costs started staying on a plateau after substantial growth in the third and fourth quarters of 2020 as we have reached a certain level of customer acquisition expense and -- expense sufficient to continue growth at a reasonably high pace and, at the same time, revenue started picking up accordingly. On the growth of nonacquisition admin costs, I should mention hiring into head office, mainly IT and analytics; salary increase in the fourth quarter of 2020; and an increase in the remuneration of top talent through equity incentive programs. Slide 14 shows the dynamic of our net income and the contribution that credit and noncredit businesses give to that growth. You can see that the first quarter net income picked up significantly more on the consumer finance side, thanks to low credit risk and growing revenue. Noncredit part also added nicely despite the seasonal transaction slowdown. On the next few slides, I will cover the results of each business segment one by one, starting with our bread and butter credit business on Slide 15. Our loan portfolio showed solid 12.4% growth during the first quarter on a gross basis and 14.4% growth on a net basis. As we were hinting during 2 preceding investor calls, we see that the opportunity for healthy growth is there. And barring any serious dislocations in the market, we will grow fast. Growth in the first quarter was driven by several components of the credit book, including unsecured and collateralized loans. All segments contributed to the growth. Therefore, the composition of the book remained almost the same as it was in the second half of 2020, except the share of credit cards is slowly but gradually falling towards half of the loan book now representing 54% of the total. Still, credit cards remain a key core product for us, and we still see huge potential in this market. In the first quarter, we added 845,000 new activated credit cards. SME is not yet visible on the chart top right, but growth is at relatively fast pace of over 50% during the first quarter. The economics of our credit business is shown on slides 17 and 18. In the first quarter of 2021, interest income amounted to RUB 35.3 billion. It's 11% growth year-on-year, but the growth really happened from the second half of 2020. Our loan gross interest yield on the credit card -- on the credit portfolio decreased from 29.8% to 25.6% year-on-year mostly due to a growing part of noncredit card loan portfolio. Comparing to the fourth quarter of the year, the reduction in gross yield was 80 basis points, which is in line with our expectations. It is safe to assume that during 2021, gross yields will continue to gradually move down to the 24 percentage area as a result of the changing portfolio mix. Our blended cost of borrowing declined from 4.8% to 3.2% year-on-year and was lower, thanks to large inflows of cheaper SME retail and brokerage accounts. Despite the recent increase in interest rates worldwide, we are optimistic about our cost of funding remaining at these low levels. Net interest margin declined year-on-year by 4.2% because of the reduction of the gross yield, softened by the reduction of cost of funding. Cost of risk continued to improve in the first quarter, continuing the trend of the second half of 2020. The reduction in issuance of credit products during the pandemic period played its important role in cost of risk decrease as the portfolio statistics is -- now largely depends on the sort of best of the best vintages. And now we are issuing much more and may expect certain manageable increase in the cost of risk towards the second half of the year. Therefore, it's a bit premature to change our guidance on this element. The improvement in cost of risk allowed our risk-adjusted net interest margin to get to 13.3%. The next 2 slides give more granular information about the unsecured and secured parts of the loan book, including gross yield and cost of risk. Slide 19 shows the unsecured loan book where you can see a continued improvement in asset quality and still very attractive risk-adjusted margins. Slide 20 shows the secured part of the portfolio split by car and home equity loans. The average yield is stable at about 14%. And cost of risk slightly picked up on car loans due to the front-loading effect as this sub-portfolio grew 24% in the first quarter. Now some comments on our noncredit businesses on slides 21 to 25, starting with our debit card business. It was another record-breaking quarter in terms of customer acquisition as we added 1.4 million customers to get to almost 9 million in total and 5.8 million active. TPV and balance did not grow significantly due to seasonality, but revenue has slightly increased to RUB 7.1 billion, net of the cashback that we returned to our customers. We continue to develop this product as the cornerstone of subsequent cross-sell opportunities. We see more value in growing the customer base and the potential synergetic effect with other business lines rather than as a source of pure net income. Our SME business is also not exempt from the seasonal effect of the low season, so balances on accounts and revenues of this business line did not grow in the first quarter of 2021. Nevertheless, we continued to grow this business in terms of number of customers with focus on per-client profitability. And at the end of the quarter, we had 507,000 total customers and 311,000 active. We earned revenue of RUB 3.4 billion in fees, treasury income and some interest on SME loans. Our investment business had a solid quarter both in terms of growth and profitability. 1.8 million customers utilized brokerage accounts on our Tinkoff Investment platform, and all 1.3 million were active in March, which is 3% quarter-on-quarter growth. We are a clear #1 in the country both by registered and active customers. But the retail brokerage market itself is only starting to develop, so there is a lot of room to grow. Our customers do over 1.3 million deals daily and hold over RUB 415 billion in assets under custody. No surprise, revenue of this segment grew over 30% quarter-on-quarter, and quarterly profit is now close to RUB 1 billion. We will continue to develop our platform, product proposition and grow our customer base in 2021, as always trying to find a fine line between the profitability and growth. If you could please turn to Slide 25. Acquiring is a business line which is benefiting from the accelerated transition to e-commerce. Our Internet acquiring business is the second largest in Russia, providing best-in-class conversion metrics for our merchants. Including our off-line acquiring business, we processed RUB 235 billion of TPV in the first quarter, which represents 84% growth year-on-year. Combined with a stable commission of 1.7%, this led to revenue of RUB 4.1 billion for the quarter. And this business works both with large aggregators as well as individual merchants in roughly a 50-50 split. It's also an important part of value proposition to many of our SME customers. Now to the final slide of my presentation. You have already seen our quarterly product number. To reiterate, it's another quarterly record of RUB 14.2 billion. Return on equity is over 40%, which in part justifies our decision not to pay dividends. And return on assets went up to 6.5% as we were utilizing extra liquidity obtained before the year-end. And now back to Oliver for closing remarks.
Thanks, Ilya. So just round this off, first quarter of 2021 was a good example of what investors can expect from Tinkoff for the rest of the year and beyond, in line with the 2023 strategy that we presented on April 7. We'll continue to grow our customer base by creating the most comprehensive, engaging and innovative financial and lifestyle ecosystem. And we'll continue to do this while producing substantial and sustainable profitability. We see huge growth opportunity ahead of us, and we're investing to capture this. We're hiring some of the best talent Russia has to offer. We can do so because we're one of the top tech employers in the country and because we're objectively producing some of the most technologically advanced products and solutions for retail and SME customers. This means projects with serious pulling power for prospective employees. We're investing into a highly NPV-positive acquisition channels to grow and monetize our customer base. While this may have a near-term effect of slightly dampening the earnings, this will compound earnings at a healthy pace for years to come. We'll also significantly grow the size of our business by unlocking ecosystem effects as more and more customers spend time on Tinkoff platforms and use Tinkoff services and products. We have a very comfortable capital and liquidity position to capture this growth, further enhanced by our high levels of profitability and the temporary dividend suspension until year-end. Our 2021 guidance stands unchanged for now. We expect at least 30% loan growth, with the potential to do significantly more. We expect our cost of risk to be 7% to 8%, our cost of borrowing to be 3% to 4% and our net profit to be more than RUB 55 billion. While some of these targets may look conservative given the strong first quarter performance, we prefer to wait a few more months before we update guidance. And with that, we're ready to take your questions. Thank you.
[Operator Instructions] We'll now move to first...
Aman, we're ready to take some questions from...
We'll now take our first question from Elena Tsareva from BCS.
Congratulations with the robust set of results. My first question -- oh, actually, I have several questions. I will ask them one by one. First question is around your plans in IB. So whether this format will be welcome, of course. A new player in IB [indiscernible] great for the market. So this is a plan to have a full house or just more -- some kind of specifics in accordance with retail broker strategy? Just if you can provide some color on this. As well as, new-economy potential companies you're working in, which sectors? Second question is, given recent comments today on dividend resumption, should we assume TCS may provide a dividend? We start -- resume it to next year -- for the next year? And also, my third question is around your cost-to-income more or less sustainable level. Is it -- should be 50%, around this mark, while there is like investment trade-off for now?
Sure. I'll kick off, Elena. I think we've got Sergei Pirogov on the line as well. Sergei, can we hear you? Or can you hear us?
Yes. Yes. I'm here.
I'll kick off on the IB thing and then maybe hand over to you on -- for the second part of the first answer on IB. Then dividends, we'll hand over to Ilya and cost to income to Ilya as well. So IB is probably a bit of an overstatement, to be honest with you. It's what everybody refers to what we're doing. They use the term IB because it's kind of shorthand for what we're doing, but it's not IB in the classical sense. So your question is an interesting one, Elena, because our idea is obviously to build a capability in-house within Tinkoff, specifically within Tinkoff Investments, which leverages experience that we already have, expertise that we already have inside the group. We're also bringing, obviously, people in. So Anton Malkov recently joined us from Sberbank CIB to basically build this division, which will deal with DCM and ECM. The rationale for doing this is not to compete with the traditional investment banks, obviously. It's to help us build a product which will enable us to build the balance of existing customers inside the Tinkoff Investments customer base and also to attract new ones, especially on the premium side and, let's say, on -- more on the wealthy side of the market. And this will enable us to bring new products, new offerings to our customers in terms of equity offerings, follow-on offerings, bonds and other instruments, which our investors are already taking, yes? So they're not taking it with us at the moment, they're taking it through the brokerage solutions, a lot of them abroad. So on the demand side, the internal demand of Tinkoff Investments, I think that's pretty obvious. On the supply side, there's lots of interesting names out there. So there's names on the bond issuance side, and there's actually quite a queue of names on the equity issuance side. And we say new economy is quite a broad catch-all term, but a lot of them are from -- let's say, from industrial sectors where they don't get stuff out the ground. So these are technology companies, online companies, companies with a new way of doing business, a new way of tackling old businesses. And they like the retail element of what we have to offer. So we probably can't initially offer them a complete solution, but we can do a lot of distribution through our customer base and, obviously, over time, maybe take a substantial portion of what they have to offer. So that was the thinking behind it. Sergei, do you want to add something to that?
Yes. I think all Oliver covered most of the arguments for us trying to put our feet into this water. But just to add to that a couple of thoughts. We see that the shape and form of the local capital markets is -- they're both developing quite fast both on the investor side and on the issuer side as well. So we think that on the issuer side, we come across quite interesting customers of ours on the SME side because we're usually thought of as a provider of choice for micro businesses and individual entrepreneurs and really small corporates. But interestingly, we're gradually moving towards the medium side of the SME equation, and some of the corporate customers of ours among those happen to be quite interesting stories. They're fast-growing, high-tech companies whom we think will understand potentially better than the rest of The Street and whom we are prepared to help make first steps into the capital markets. As Oliver said, it's some basic DCM products and potentially deeper into the capital structure, all the way to the IPO. So I want to be there for them at each and every stage of their entrance into the capital markets. This will enable us to secure interest in asset classes for our captive retail customer base. And we'll play with the various distribution strategies, including our base and some structured products. There will be some tests over the next 12 months on the distribution side. And depending on the outcome of the test on the origination side and distribution side, the shape of our capital markets business will be developed in one direction or the other. So we need some time to run those tests and then we'll report back in a few quarters' time. But we're extremely excited about the opportunities. Oliver?
Right. Yes. Yes, Sergei, thank you. I will try to answer like 2 questions. One is on dividend distribution. And we do not pay dividends for the first quarter of the year, and I'm almost certain we won't pay any dividends for the second and third quarter. And we'll probably announce later what we decided on the fourth quarter of the year, which are usually due a few months into the next year. So the rationale for not paying dividends, I will reiterate once again, was that we have ambitious goals to grow our balance sheet. We see very good opportunities on the lending market. And therefore, we will need capital to grow this -- to grow there. Second rationale for that is that we see certain opportunities to acquire businesses which are supplement to ours. And the first one was Koshelek. Again, it's the biggest business of this kind in Russia. And obviously, it's not the cheapest one, but we do not disclose the exact amount that was spent. We're also spending some money on the repurchasing of our stock to fund our management long-term incentive program for this year. So this is also disclosed in the supplements of our financial statements. So that's the rationale behind not paying dividends. On cost-to-income, there was some line breaking, and I probably did not hear the full question, but I understand it's again about the level at which we see our cost-to-income going forward, right? Because you can see from the presentation that we had a pretty fast growth of our cost-to-income ratio from the pandemic slowdown through the second half of last year. And now it's sort of more or less stabilized. It's -- the level at which it stabilized is through -- is close to 50%. But again, several things coincided here. So we've spent a lot on customer acquisition recently, and these customers will -- the revenue growth from this customer acquisition will have a more prolonged effect. So it's a delayed effect in a sense. And if you see -- in the absolute numbers, you'll see that we spent in this quarter more or less similar amount we did in the fourth quarter of last year. So that's what I was referring to sort of reaching a certain plateau in customer acquisition. I would reiterate once again that on a per-customer basis, our customer acquisition costs are not growing. And in most of the segments, they are going down actually. Obviously, we spent a lot on general marketing. But again, we do not have anything here sort of where we will increase this general marketing advertising cost significantly. And again, it's -- this high -- sort of high level of customer acquisition expenses coincided with an increase in nonacquisition part. As I said, that's because we grow our staff. We intend to hire another 1,000 people this year of talent and, therefore, quite expensive people in the IT industry, in analytics and data science, et cetera. So we need them to develop our products to continue our business growth. And we also increased salary recently in November -- starting November last year. So it was the first quarter after that increase when it was sort of in full expense mode. And we added more people to our incentive programs. And again, that goes through our profit and loss statement, so we -- so that we don't push it into some kind of adjusted EBITDA numbers. You can see it all as we disclosed. Hope I answered your question, Elena.
Yes, very detailed answers. Just a quick follow-up on what you said about dividend and M&A. If there is any approximation like how much percentage point of equity. Or are there any other ideas you can target for M&A this year? And just a small technical question. So we assume that Koshelek will be consolidated effective second quarter this year?
Yes. Basically, Koshelek will collate from the second quarter, and we don't have any estimation of how much will go into spend. It's -- actually it goes to the opposite direction. We look at the businesses that we want to partner or acquire, and we see if there is a rationale for a certain price to pay for that. So as said, it not comes from the end where we just have a certain amount of money which we want to spend. No, it's not like this.
But just to make sure that -- for the sake of clarity, that nobody draws a conclusion that we have kind of a bottomless pocket here, these are all -- all the things we're thinking of in our pipeline in terms of M&A are all relatively small deals. So there's nothing that's going to significantly impacts the capital positions of the company as a result of doing this.
We'll now move on to our next question over the phone, which comes from Andrew Keeley from Sberbank.
First question from me is on your cost of risk. And I maybe missed, Ilya, the kind of explanation for why you're not really changing the guidance at this stage. I'm interested also just why you think there wasn't this kind of usual seasonal kind of pickup in risk costs that we typically see in the first quarter. We're still coming off a fairly kind of tough year last year and just would be interested for what your thoughts are on that. And also, given that we have such strong credit growth in the first quarter, that would also kind of imply front-loading of provisions under IFRS 9, which again doesn't seem to have come through that strongly. I'm wondering whether there were kind of macro releases in there. So that would be -- yes, any additional color on that would be great. And then I'll ask another one after that.
Right. Yes, the situation with credit risk is somewhat different from what we observed previously, where first quarter was usually the worst during the year and the fourth quarter was the best. This time, we see a continuing trend of cost of risk going down in the first quarter. And I think personally, without giving any guidance, I think it's keen to [indiscernible] in the second quarter. So I don't expect second quarter to be better -- significantly better than the first in terms of cost of risk. So several things sort of going in opposite direction. You are absolutely right that we are charging a bit more because of the front loading in IFRS 9. It's actually the most visible in car loans, which sort of grew by 24%. And there the front-loading effect is very visible because car loans were not affected by the problems of the first half of last year. In other segments, this front-loading effect is not that significant, though it's obviously there. And it's sort of opposed by the change of statistics that we have on the back of last year. So we -- our risk simulation models were adjusted -- yes, sort of adjusted for better statistics that we have on the second half of last year because, for one reason, we've provisioned last year. For another reason, we were issuing a really, really small amount of loans, and these were sort of best customers that we might find. So we cut our approval rates to the very minimum. And therefore, this statistic as the recent, it's a relevant one. And actually, that goes further into the third quarter of last year. It's allowed us to rebalance our credit models. And therefore, we are showing less loan loss provisions. And then, as we are unscrewing our approval metrics starting from second half or third quarter last year, so the fourth quarter through the first quarter this year, we will inevitably see the increase -- a certain increase in cost of risk. It's definitely manageable. That's, in my view, nothing to worry about simply for the fact that, again, the profits that we're getting from these new vintages, they -- based on our NPV approach, they justify certain increase in risk. And that's the reason why we're not changing the guidance about this time. I would say that this 7% to 8%, they've sort of -- it should -- my expectation is that it should be towards the low end of this range, maybe a bit better. But again, we will -- we need a few more months to hopefully adjust this part of our guidance down.
Okay. Ilya, so were there any of the macro kind of buffers released -- additional kind of macro provisions released in the first quarter or not?
No, nothing significant. We still have about RUB 5 billion of this macro buffer. And this -- on one of the slides, I actually show -- it's Slide 15 -- I show -- on the left hand of the slide, on the chart, you can see the blue line which shows as a macro factor the percentage of our gross loan portfolio. So while it's still a big number of about RUB 5 billion, as I said, it's reduced by approximately 50% compared to the portfolio. So it's only 1% of the portfolio. Again, it could be split into 2 parts. Approximately RUB 1.2 billion is a sort of true macro factor, which is based on some macro matters like MOEX or leverage of our customers through -- which we gather through the credit bureau. And another 3.8 is an adjustment that we made during the coronavirus pandemic crisis, which is -- it's an adjustment of our recoverability of our efforts. So we have a certain rate at which our Stage 3 loans -- we recover money on our Stage 3 loans through the courts, through the collection, et cetera. And we made -- last year, we made certain adjustments for that recoverability, adjusting it down. So we had an expectation that we'll probably collect -- because of the pandemic, we will collect less on Stage 3 loans compared to what we have in actual statistics from previous years. And it's a very long indicator, so to say. So the collection takes time and court -- dealing through courts takes time. And therefore, we are sort of reluctant to change this parameter of the macro factor back. So that is why we're still keeping the macro factor of about RUB 5 billion. I hope it helps.
So maybe if I could just step in now. When you -- if you take a step back from what Ilya has just been explaining in great detail here. So your question initially, Andrew, was given the cost of risk that we saw in the first quarter, where you'd expect it to be seasonally higher, why aren't we changing our guidance? But if you look at this from a slightly different angle, the long-term trends that basically you see in our consumer lending businesses, so there's kind of also good news that comes out of this year. Number one is that the depth of the crisis was actually quite mild. And you can have a mild depth -- sorry, [indiscernible] is quite shallow in terms of the effects of last year and how quickly Russia rebounded and how resilient the economy has been and how resilient the consumer has been. That was the first kind of conclusion I'll draw from this. The second is that we haven't used -- released the macro factor, as Ilya explained. So that doesn't explain why there's been a lower cost of risk in quarter 1. There's been a lower cost of risk because the economy is performing well, the consumers are looking remarkably good considering what we've been through and the world has been through over the last 12 to 18 months. And also the internal workings of our portfolio management, our underwriting and how we've been managing the risk in the new -- relatively new credit business lines as well. So in secured lending as well as the older vertical, those older business lines on the unsecured side. And there, obviously, some of the indicators move around. First payment, second payment default, they move around depending on what we're doing, tests, the seasonal reasons, speeding up, slowing down a little bit [indiscernible]. Now the underlying bellwether for the health of the portfolio and our credit quality is delinquency rate. In all of the business lines, the delinquency rate is near flat. It's not deteriorating or it's actually still slightly improving. So when you look at this through the COVID crisis on the horizon of -- that is on a horizon of 2 to 3 years, the delinquency rate is coming down. So that just shows that we manage the portfolio and manage the underwriting better and better over time.
Okay. Great. Thanks, both of you. Those are really helpful answers. And second question is on your costs. Obviously, in fourth quarter, we saw the kind of the jump in acquisition costs. In the first quarter, it was in the kind of staff costs. I'm just interested that given it seems like everybody is racing now to build the kind of online ecosystems and you've got banks and you've got tech companies, and I'm just wondering how much you're already seeing this come through in terms of wage inflation for kind of IT staff and data analysts and such like, whether there really is kind of a step change going on. And also, how much does your kind of investments in higher education programs, regional hubs, et cetera, allow you to kind of bypass that and basically capture kind of good talent, more kind of affordable rates than perhaps others can?
Yes. It's a big question, Andrew. So in Russia, we're very fortunate to have a rich and pretty wide talent pool in terms of tech talent. And basically, what we're talking about, why [indiscernible] tech talent, yes? So 3, 4, 5 years ago, maybe there was less -- it was still pretty competitive, but there's less competition for this tech talent. Now, as you say, an ever larger number of organizations are embarking on digital transformations, as they call it in Russia. And so people are throwing money at recruiting IT guys. So we're ahead of the curve in that respect, that we're well positioned as an HR brand for recruiting tech talent. As I said in my opening remarks, we have a lot of interesting projects for them, we've got a lot of R&D in the area of AI, in biometrics, all sorts of stuff that we're doing. So we find it easier to recruit developers, data scientists, designers, analysts, these kind of guys, this kind of the people in the market, but it's getting tougher. And it's not helped by the demographic dip as a result of the drop in the birth rates in the '90s and also by COVID, which has basically changed the rules of the game in that you don't need to hire people in the country in which you work. With room -- with a big boost to remote working, it means that unfortunately, in Russia, we're competing a lot more with other markets, not just Silicon Valley as we were before. So you can be a developer, a Java developer in Chelyabinsk and work for a company in Seattle, which wasn't something you could see to any great degree basically back in February of 2020 before COVID hit. So it's changing and it's getting tougher for sure. But as you can see, we're able to hire, and we hired 1,000 new people into HQ and the 11 development hubs last year. This year, we'll hire probably 1,500 or so. And these are -- this is top tech talent. A lot will be going to the development hubs, which is part of your question, Andrew. But this is expensive and it's getting more expensive. And the wage inflation in the tech parts of the job market is actually pretty fierce. But it's something we've got to go through because we can't just kind of [indiscernible] and not hire and not bring in the talent that we need in order to build our business, build our interface, build our platforms, our back end to make sure that we remain competitive and attractive to customers for the next 5, 10 years. So it's something we've got to go through. Eventually, the market will settle down. But right now, it doesn't mean that there will be a bit of a kick to our cost-to-income as a result.
We'll now move to our next question over the phone, which comes from Gabor Kemeny from Autonomous.
A couple of questions from me. First one is on loan growth, which is trending strongly. And you mentioned briefly that the 30% indication is probably a low bar for this year. So could you help us scale growth for at least the next few quarters and whether you expect some further catch-up in the growth of credit cards, which had been accelerating recently. And another question is on brokerage. Can you give us some color on margin trading? You show an interest income from margin trading of, I think, RUB 1.7 billion in Q4, and I was wondering how the margin trading operation is trending as you onboard brokerage clients at a quite rapid pace. Some color on that would be helpful.
Well, thanks, Gabor. So Ilya will take loan growth. And I think you phrased it interesting, the catch-up of credit card growth, so maybe I'll kick off with that. And then I'll start off with margin trading in the brokerage business and maybe Neri will add something to that.
Yes. Well, we're guiding that our loan growth will be at least 30%, more than 30% actually. And it -- in my view, we'll have to probably, at some point, adjust this guidance up as well. So we are absolutely sure that we will be able to grow our portfolio 30%-plus. But again, the world now is an unstable place, and we just want to be on the safe side right now because we don't see about the -- maybe any kind of additional waves of pandemic crisis, for example. So we see what happened recently in India and even in Europe. So yes, we will be on the conservative side for -- again, for a few more months. In terms of the components of this growth, we -- again, we're setting specific targets for each lending business line. There are separate teams with very ambitious targets. Each of them are sort of growing their own segments. So that's -- it's not like one component grows instead of the other. So they all have to grow, in our view. In terms of credit cards, it's an old, established business line. We are constantly finding new channels through which we acquire customers. And cross-sell is obviously the most recent one, and now it's getting more and more visibility as a major acquisition source for us. But at the same time, as our clientele for the credit card portfolio is changing and is changing towards more rapid and more transactional part of Russian community, and, therefore, even if we issue a lot of credit cards, that increases the turnover on the credit card portfolio but not necessarily the amount of loan portfolio as it used to be, I don't know, 5, 10 years ago. So it's -- the acquisition also is in a more transactional part of Russian society right now. So that's one of the sort of considerations that should be taken into account when we talk loan growth in the credit card segment.
If that's all right for the first question, then, Gabor, we'll move to the second part, on margin trading. So this is a facility that we -- or a feature that we offer to mainly qualified investors, people who do active trading who are in our customer base -- have been in the customer base for a while. We can see that they know what they're doing. We currently have around 90,000 people with positions in our customer base. It's actually very -- quite deep inside the app and is switched off by default, obviously comes with health warnings that you'd expect to see. And we give our -- because -- the investors with margin, we give them very low limits. So it's something we're very cautious of, but it's something you need to have as part of the trading offering because it's actually quite a competitive part of the market for those active traders. Neri, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that. Or if you have any specific questions, Gabor.
No. No, that's all very clear. I would have just another question on brokerage. Do you see any actions taken by your competitors? Obviously, another quarter of market share gains, and you are getting close to 70%. It would be interesting to hear whether any competition might be shaping up. I think you mentioned earlier that one of your competitors is working on revamping the brokerage app.
Sure, yes. This is -- so this -- it will become a competitive market over time. So the old style of brokerage was pretty competitive before it was disrupted. But then there was probably, I don't know, maybe 0.5 million active brokerage accounts. So it was competitive but in a very, very small pond where there are lots of people fishing. Now the size of the pond has obviously been significantly expanded by ourselves predominantly. So now it's a big lake and there's lots of space between the fishermen. So there's plenty of room for everybody to fish. But over time, obviously, it will change. And so we've seen things happening. Obviously, Sberbank, they've got a very large part of the market, slightly different approach. And they've got a good mobile app. And if I understand correctly, they're revamping what's called Sberbank Investor. Alfa Bank have relaunched their brokerage solution and done a new mobile app, and they've shown quite a bit of growth recently. VTB are our closest competitor, and they've done a lot of good stuff recently as well with a pretty good app. So we're by no means the only people doing anything in the market. Everybody is growing in the market. But it's something where all the boats are racing and there's tons and tons of room for everybody to grow. So we see it as a bit of a, for want of a better description, a land grab at the moment where we want to get as many customers into our -- onto our platform as possible. And then over time, well, in an accelerated way, we're expanding our product offering. The number of different services, features, informational resources, social networks, podcasts, you name it, we do it. We've got a YouTube channel as well. So there's tons of stuff that we do to offer, as well as what we mentioned before, the DCM, ECM piece and expanding our brokerage platform in ways which we'll explain to you in the coming months. So there's tons going on there. So really, it's a battle to get customers onto our platform. And then something we've been doing, obviously, for a long time, which is segmenting so that we're offering the right sets of products and tools to different segments who have obviously very different needs. You've got your starter retail investor, you have your higher-frequency trader who's probably got several brokerage accounts and has been an active trader for a long time, and then you've got your high-net-worth customers who want wealth management and more personalized service and access to primary and secondary. So we're doing tons. But I think as well as the technology aspect to this, we are leading in terms of education. So we're doing -- I mentioned that we have a YouTube channel, we have podcasts, we have more personalized seminars and tons of materials and resources in the app itself as well as available through personal managers to wealthy customers. This is where we're way ahead of the game in the Russian market.
We now move on to our next question over the phone, which comes from Olga Veselova from Bank of America.
Three questions from my side. The first question is about average yield, which you discussed on Slide 20, I think. You mentioned that the yield will likely move to around 24% over time from current 28%. Did I hear you correctly? And if yes, then over what period of time do you expect this to happen? So this is my first question. My second question is about deposits, repricing of deposits. Could you remind us your average maturity of term deposits? And also, could you remind us what's the pricing differential between the yield on deposits and on call accounts currently just to help us understand how quickly high interest rates will feed into your P&L if and when deposit rates will -- because rate hikes will commence in Russia. And my third question is again about costs. But still, my question is about the future evolution of acquisition costs. You mentioned the word plateau when you were answering the first question from Elena. Shall we assume that this is the new run rate for your acquisition costs which we see in the first quarter and which we saw in the fourth quarter of last year?
Okay. I guess all the questions go to me this time. On yield, well, you see that the change in composition of our portfolio is affecting our gross yield, and it goes down. Sometimes, well, it's not a sort of in even increments. So this quarter, it went down more significantly than the previous one, for example. Still we're not guiding on the yield, let's say, because, again, it's affected by the speed of growth in every segment and the composition. But my personal expectation there is probably 50 to 100 basis points per quarter. And that's why I think by the end of the year, we will come to a number of something close to 24%, I think, maybe between 24% and 25%. At some point, there should be a flattening of the curve -- of this cure of yield -- gross yield. And therefore, at some point in time but definitely not in the nearest couple of quarters, it will start to flatten out, I hope. But again, it will depend on our plan of developing our credit franchise. And I hope it helps. And again -- once again, I will reiterate that the yield itself is not sort of the end game for us. So products which are significantly less yielding -- yielding significantly less, they are still on the bottom line. They have the same profitability, the same return on portfolio, similar return on portfolio. But at the same time, they have a -- they're less vulnerable to sudden shocks and increasing cost of risk, for example. So that should be taken into account. So the yield going down is not necessarily a bad thing for us. We see it as a neutral thing. It's just the way business goes. On -- you have a specific question on our deposits. So it's -- usually, people put money on 12-month maturity. And many of them will just have a prolongation -- smooth prolongation after those 12 months are over. And there was also a question on differential between the deposit -- cost of deposits and cost of current accounts, I think. And to be honest with you, there is -- it's almost 0 right now. So from time to time, we give a high interest on deposits. But it's -- right now, it's pretty much even, right? I think...
Yes.
Like maybe 0.5% difference on different products. Dilution of acquisition costs. We never guide on our acquisition costs and cost-to-income ratio because -- and again, I have to reiterate here if we would see an opportunity to spend more on customer acquisition, we will profitably. We will do so. It's -- we see -- we invest into the NPV-positive products, clients. Or we invest where we see the potential high cross-sell such as current account business. And right now, when I said about a certain plateau, that's where I see that we -- right now, we spend on customer acquisition per quarter sort of to reach a certain level of acquisition, after which we have -- we will have a sort of diminishing returns on every next customer. So we utilize our channels fully to basically -- how we want to utilize that. And if the economics will change for some reason, so, for example, there will be a another crisis or we will find another great channel of acquisition, then this -- then in this case, I will be wrong in my assumptions and our customer acquisition will change up or down. And that is why we're not guiding for it. And another thing to say is that we spent on customer acquisition more or less in line with what we planned when we were building our business plan for this year. Hope how it helps without giving any kind of specific guidance.
Yes, it does. And maybe just one clarification on the costs. From your answers today, did I understand correctly there were no one-offs in the costs -- in acquisition cost. So in remuneration, no one-offs at all in the first quarter. Is this right?
No. Except where I mentioned that we've included more people into our long-term incentive programs, there was no one -- specific one-off I would recall. We had a pretty heavy marketing campaign towards the end of last year, in the fourth quarter, because it's a high season with a lot of money spent on acquisition in InvestTech. It sort of spilled over into the first quarter of the year, but I wouldn't call it a one-off. And you can see that sort of our -- the profit of InvestTech ticked up in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter of last year. So it's -- this heavy marketing campaign is now over. So no one knows.
We'll now move to our next question over the phone, which comes from [ Stefan Paquetter ] from UBS.
I have a couple of questions, the first one on the brokerage business. Just looking at the fee income evolution in this quarter compared to the fourth quarter of last year, it sort of flattened out but still growing quite significantly. But the growth has slowed. But you showed on the slide that the total revenue is continuing to grow very significantly. So I suppose more and more revenue coming from net interest income. Would that be the case? And what would be the reason for the slowdown in fee income generation in this quarter? You can maybe just unpack also the net interest income aspect of the brokerage business. So I assume these are just the float. So deposits play in that you then invest? I suppose you don't pay any interest on these deposits. So that's the first question. And then second question is just on capital and the proposed changes in macro prudential measures, again, where there's a benefit coming through soon in terms of the elimination of previous macro prudential measures and then introducing new add-ons again, I believe, from July. Would that sort of cancel out in terms of the benefit initially and then additional requirements going forward? Or could it be -- could you see more capital requirements in the medium term? And yes, so those are the 2 questions.
Well, on the first one, on fee evolution, actually I don't see it's flattening. I think it grows pretty nicely, and it seems our revenue in this business is growing 30% quarter-on-quarter. The only thing I might think about here is in the first quarter of the year, there are less trading days. So there were long holidays in January, for example. And then a few more holidays in Russia again in February with a shorter month. So less trading days is probably the thing, the only one thing which I can think in terms of fees -- or getting less fees on average. But otherwise, it grows nicely. Second question, I think is on capital.
Yes. So if I understood correctly, [ Stefan ], so this has to do with the changes which was signaled by the Central Bank. So this obviously affects our RAS capital position, which -- so assuming it will be implemented as signaled, this will happen, if I recall, in June or July -- 1st of July, and there'll be an easing of risk weights on various buckets of consumer loans. And I think that's been announced, basically, which means that it's unlikely to be canceled. So I think that's going ahead, if I understood your question correctly. And then the second part of the question is, are there any other changes or increases in terms of capital requirements, risk weights signaled by the Central Bank? There's nothing that's been signaled. Well, my expectation would be that if the market continues to grow strongly -- and it's growing fairly strongly, as you can see. It's not just us but other players -- some other players in the market are growing as well. And if the Central Bank starts to worry about some signs of overheating or future problems down the road, then they are likely to introduce cooling measures. One of those could be risk weights. It's what they used in the past several times, which is why it's good to have extra capital to grow, as Ilya mentioned right at the beginning of this call. But it's too early to call on that one. I've certainly not heard anything.
Maybe just to follow up on, firstly, the brokerage business. If you can just comment on the net interest income generation aspect of it as well. And then I could maybe just follow up on the capital issue once you've answered that.
Ilya, on the, sorry, yield.
Sorry, could you repeat the question, please, [ Stefan ]?
Yes. So I was just asking about the brokerage business. Increasingly, in its overall revenue growth that we're seeing, a lot of that is actually net interest income and not brokerage fees. And that's, I assume, on the float that you have. And I suppose you pay 0 interest rates on this float, is that correct? And then do you obviously invest that in -- you make a margin by investing in an investment portfolio.
Well, I hope I understood your question. So we -- true, we pay 0 -- we do not pay interest on the money that people hold on brokerage accounts. So when they transfer money from current account to brokerage account, they -- basically we -- they receive no interest. And that's a bit over that RUB 70 billion right now in our liability base. At the same time, this money -- a significant portion of this money are in U.S. dollars. And therefore, people wouldn't get any significant interest on that -- on their current accounts anyway.
And another question was do we invest that in securities.
Well, that's -- well, basically, it's still the money on our accounts and then they are in the total pool of money, which are either held on our corresponding account with Central Bank or invested into debt securities most likely at the state or quite state bonds. Some of our liquidity pool is invested into the shorter end of our loan portfolio, such as point-of-sale loans, such as credit cards, because a lot of them are right now in a transactional mode and they turn around faster than 30 days. So that's -- so we don't have any kind of specific and it's impossible to have any kind of specific lead of our cash pools.
No, that's very clear. Maybe just to circle back on the capital or macro potential measures. My understanding was that the proposal is that there will be then add-ons again or increased capital requirements that are being proposed from July onwards. Maybe I misunderstood that. If you can maybe just clarify that. So you are saying there are no additional macro potential measures that are being proposed?
I think -- yes, I think it's already decided. So I guess from the 1st of July, the risk weights for new loans, there will be an increase. And at the same time, the risk weights for the loans issued before 1st of April 2020, that will go down, yes, so [indiscernible].
So if you sort of cancel out in a sense, that you have a benefit and -- but I suppose your back book is much bigger than the new business. And so the benefit, will it be as much [ big ]?
Either way, it's more or less neutral for us. I think it's both. Maybe we'll have a benefit, but it's not significant to -- basically to pay attention.
We'll now move to our next question over the phone, which comes from Mehmet Sevim from JPMorgan.
Just 2 questions from me, please. One, on BNPL. I appreciate it's early days, but could you please provide some color from your initial experience with the business and products so far? And more generally, what does the revenue model look like so -- in terms of the margins that you're charging and also the credit risk levels that you'd expect through the cycle? So any color on that would be very helpful. And second question on InvestTech. So could you please share some color on how customer behavior is evolving as you're adding all these new customers given the market is still at an early stage? For example, are people still engaged as before? Are they trading incrementally more frequently? Are volumes per customer growing or staying stable? I'm also asking because the share of the active customers seems to have dropped just marginally this quarter. So just trying to understand if this is a natural consequence of the strong growth or if there are any changes in the trends.
So I'll kick off with BNPL and ask Ilya to carry on with that one. We'll move on to trading trends. So first of all, I thought you said that NPL was an interesting question to predict for the future. No, BNPL, not to be confused. We also don't have any statistics yet. So we've got a few working assumptions. But basically, we expect the risk on this product to be very low. We have a benchmark, which is point-of-sale loans, where risk is very low. And 80% of the volume that we do on point-of-sale loans is installments. Those installments are longer in duration. So it's a different product and a different philosophy of disbursement. But it's still a benchmark, which is -- so you wouldn't expect the BNPL cost of risk to be higher than the cost of risk of point-of-sale lending, which is very low and which has a high proportion of installments we've got on those loans. So BNPL product is basically a deferred payment product where the customer pays a -- make a down payment of 25%, and then the remaining 3 installments pays every 2 weeks and pays everything off fully in 6 weeks. So it's a deferred payment which is integrated into the checkout process of the online partner, the retailer. So there's a -- it's a small amount. It's a very, very short duration, 6 weeks, and there's a down payment of 25%, which means that the risk on this is going to be extremely low. And that enables us to have very high acceptance rates, approval rates, which is part of the value proposition to the partner. The margin is -- because it's not a lending product in the sense that we understand, so you can't really talk about margin. You talk about what the partner will pay to us to cover the costs, which are basically cost of funds through a brief period of time, some OpEx and the cost of risk. And it's a bit early still to talk about this, where exactly the market will come out. There are some precedents in the market because there are some installment products out there, very different installment products as an installment card. There's the point-of-sale installment product that I mentioned before. And there's a few off-line, slightly longer duration installment products as well. They all have different rates which are paid to the lending -- the creditor by the partner. But I think you'll probably come out that -- and maybe I don't want to put this number in the public domain. I won't, just in case. But I thought we'd come at a number once we've demonstrated the value of this to our partners. So in the beginning, we're in promotion mode where we'll be giving teaser rates, and it will be 1.5% to 2.5%. But over time, once the volume starts going, we will mop those teaser rates, we'll move on to a different rate which will cover our costs. That's the thinking. This is not a product or business line which will be driving bottom line contribution to the group. This is a way that we'll be bringing in hopefully hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new customers into the ecosystem and cross-selling them on to other products, which is how we'll monetize them. Ilya, maybe you've got some more specific concrete thoughts about the economics of this.
Okay, yes, then I guess it's too early to talk about the model, how successful it is. For now, we only have our assumptions.
But we like the start on obviously the potential. On trading, I'll just kick off with this, so you saw, quite rightly, that the active rate versus the onboarded rate of customers, so utilization versus activation, dropped ever so slightly. And the reason for that is because we've been doing a big marketing campaign. And there, you've got a lot of customers who come in as a result of various tasty offers that we're making, and then they -- some of them don't actually go further down the conversion for turning to an activated card -- I'm sorry, a brokerage account or into a funded brokerage account, which is what we're interested in at the end. So you've got some dropping off, but you've got a wider funnel at the top. So you've got more people coming all the way through. So in other words, the conversion rate has slightly deteriorated, but the overall number of customers coming in has increased. Do you want to add anything to that, Ilya?
Well, the question was really about the segmentation of this group of people who use our InvestTech solution and how it evolves over time. There are no tectonic shifts. Recently, I guess that -- and again, because of that marketing campaign, because of our increased acquisition effort, I think more people came with -- more people came sort of who are -- sort of -- they're new to investing. So we're sort of increasing the investor base. And that is why we are sort of atop of the market right now. But otherwise, I don't see any tectonic shifts.
No. So just to add a little bit more color to that, so we -- the key metric for us in terms of front-end stuff is the number of investors who open brokerage accounts and fund those brokerage accounts. So there's, as Ilya says, nothing particularly moving apart from what we just explained. It's about our marketing campaign. Then very important for us is how the balance on that account develops over time. And the balances are growing. So the number of customers with funded accounts is growing, and the number of -- and the balance on that account is growing. So -- and especially as we do more on the wealth front of things. So that's something which is all going in the right direction and no negative signals. We'll be telling you more about this at the end of May when we have our deep dive into investments as part of the Strategy Day series. Looks like that's it. So we'll say thank you very much indeed for your time and for your questions and your support, and we'll keep you updated. Have a good day or evening.
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's call. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.