This is the Chorus Call conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the FinecoBank Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Alessandro Foti, CEO and General Manager of FinecoBank. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our results conference call. First half adjusted net profit up by 8% year-on-year at around EUR 343 million. Revenues up by around 11% year-on-year at EUR 713 million, with all product areas contributing positively. Banking up by 8.5%, thanks to higher deposits volumes. Investing up by 11%, thanks to the volume effect. Brokerage up by 15%, thanks to the higher stocks of assets under custody and expanding active investor base. Adjusted operating cost well under control at around EUR 193 million, increasing by around 6% year-on-year, excluding the additional costs related to the growth of the business. Cost-income ratio at 27%, confirming operating leverage as a key strength for the bank. Capital position confirmed to be strong and safe with a common equity Tier 1 ratio at 23.18%, and a leverage ratio at 5.02%.
Among the main events, we have signed with CNP Assicura a four-year exclusive partnership for the distribution of life insurance products. The deal improves both the quality of products and services, and Fineco marginality. Moving now to our commercial performance, we are experiencing a material step-up in our growth. This is driven by our unique positioning, capturing long-term structural trends, and by our execution on several initiatives. The impact of this acceleration is clearly visible in our numbers. In the first half, net sales increased by 35% year-on-year. In July, estimated net sales at EUR 1.7 billion, around 40% higher year-on-year, with around EUR 2.4 billion assets under management, around EUR -2.3 billion deposits, and around EUR 1.7 billion assets under custody. Brokerage clients were very active buying the dips, leading to very solid brokerage revenues, estimated at EUR 23 million, up around 20% year-on-year.
New clients continued to grow at a strong pace, up 26% year-on-year in the first half. In July, new clients are estimated at around 21,000, up by around 40% year-on-year. Now more to the guidance. Further upgraded outlook for our 2026 and 2029 plan, confirming the quality of our diversified business model. The better outlook is driven by a combination of better than expected net sales, with all the mix component contributing positively to the revenues. Combination of deposits, net sales, and interest rates evolution. Slower growth of operating costs going forward compared to the CMD expectation. We are redesigning the backbone of the bank with artificial intelligence that is gradually moving into the execution phase 2026. We expect all the product areas contributing to higher revenues, thanks to the acceleration of our structural growth.
We expect net financial income growing, thanks to the combination of positive deposit net sales and rates. Investing, a solid increase of revenues, thanks to the combination of resilient net sales and the mix improvement. Brokerage, we expect another record here. Banking fees, stable year-on-year. Cost, we expect a growth by around 6%, not including around EUR 15 million additional costs for growth initiatives and around EUR 5 million for pan-European platform set up. Compared to the previous guidance, we are embedding a EUR 5 million increase related to the marketing in additional cost for growth, as clients are very responsive to our value proposition, and we see a clear opportunity to further accelerate. I now hand to our CFO, Lorena Pelliciari, to start diving on results.
Thank you, Alessandro, good morning, everybody. Let me start with slide seven. Net financial income in the first half increased by around 8% year-on-year, that supported by a positive volume effect. Highlight is the quality of our revenue, is capital light and is industrially driven, deeply connected.
This allows us to generate profitability across our entire client base, including small banking-only clients. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the solid dynamics of our liquidity, despite the significant level of clients' investments during the period. Let's now move on to slide eight. This slide provides a deeper view of the nature of our deposit base. Our liquidity is not opportunistic or rate driven. As just said, it is transactional, granular, and deeply connected to the daily use of our banking platform. Clients use Fineco for their everyday financial needs, and this creates a highly stable deposit base. On the right-hand side, we provide a benchmarking based on Pillar 3 disclosures. Fineco enjoys the highest level of stable deposits, with the median ticket equal to around EUR 4,000. On to slide nine related to investing.
Investing revenues increased driven by growing volumes. The growth of assets under management remains consistent with the strong client demand. Solid, with both liquidity coverage ratio and net stable funding ratio well above regulatory requirements and among the highest levels in Europe. Overall, we continue to combine growth, profitability, and a very conservative risk profile while maintaining one of the strongest capital and liquidity position in the sector. Thank you for your attention. Now I'll hand back to Alessandro.
Thank you, Lorena. Let's move now to slide 14. Fineco benefits from a unique market positioning, fully capturing its long-term growth opportunities. On the left, we show our market share on the addressable financial wealth, which is still very small. On the right, we summarize the key structural trends that are reshaping the financial services industry and reinforcing our strategic positioning. First, AI disruption, which is driving for higher transparency in financial services and higher productivity. Fineco is already well-positioned, thanks to its market positioning and state-of-the-art platform. Second, the massive generational wealth transfer. New generations are looking for efficiency, transparency, and convenience, all core elements of Fineco value proposition. Third, the consolidation in the banking industry, with traditional banks not focused on customer experience. Fineco sits exactly at the crossroads of these three big structural trends.
On slide 15, we show a clear example of our distinctive positioning compared to the industry, focusing on the investing business. Fineco is a clear outlier in the Italian market, with a value proposition based on efficiency, transparency, and convenience. This is reflected in the great quality of our investing revenues that are driven by recurring management fees based on fair pricing, with no performance fees, and negligible amount of upfront fees. This is marking a clear difference in the long-term sustainability.
Higher brokerage fees. Second, ETFs are very well in demand for securities lending and it's a strong opportunity for our internalization engine. Third, the data platform fee agreement by the beginning of the second half of 2026. On the investing, the strong clients interest means a big volume for our advanced advisory service, resulting in stronger revenues. Second, Fineco Asset Management is live with its active ETF range for passive ETF, has a co-branded partnership with one leading issuer. Finally, ETFs accumulation installment plans are now fully available in our investing services, also through the application. Now let's quickly move to the slide 24. The plan for the deployment of our pan-European platform is progressing as expected. We confirm that by the year end, we will launch the family and friends phase with the full launch in early 2027.
Moving on to the slide 25, we summarize the deployment of our artificial intelligence on our platform. Our initiatives are already starting to deliver. For example, PFA constantly using the AI platform. An increase, as we already said, around 20% of their commercial proposals. Let me now briefly summarize the most recent artificial intelligent initiatives. First, we are now live with customer relationship management for our financial planners. It's a key step to increase their productivity. It is fully integrated with Fineco platform and data and allows our network to better cluster clients and identify priority actions. Second, we are already live with the Brokerage Copilot that will improve the awareness and the engagement of our direct clients. This artificial intelligence tool allows clients to screen securities, analyze portfolios on relevant news, and is fully integrated in the execution engine of the Fineco platform.
Here, we already start to see the first evidence that this tool is leading clients to the order execution. Now, thank you for your time, and I'll hand it back to you, Alessandro.
Thank you, Paolo. Let's now move to slide 26, guidance. Further upgraded outlook for 2026 and 2029 plan, confirming the quality of our diversified business model. The better outlook is driven by a combination of better-than-expected net sales, with all the mix component contributing positively to revenues. Combination of deposits, net sales, and interest rates evolution is lower growth of operating costs going forward compared to the CMD expectations. We are redesigning the backbone of the bank with artificial intelligence that is gradually moving into the execution phase. For 2026, we expect all the product areas contributing to higher revenues, thanks to the acceleration of our structural growth. We expect better net financial income, thanks to the combination of positive net sales and new rates environment. Investing, solid increase in revenues, thanks to combination of resilient net sales and mix improvement.
Brokerage, another record here, thanks to higher assets under custody and active investors. Banking fees, stable year-over-year. Operating costs, we expect a growth by around 6%, not including EUR 15 million additional costs for growth initiatives and around EUR 5 million for the pan-European platform set up. Compared to the previous guidance, we are embedding a EUR 5 million increase related to marketing in additional cost growth for growth as clients are very responsive to our value proposition, and we see a clear opportunity to further accelerate. Cost income, we expect it comfortably below 30% thanks to the scalability of our platform and strong operating gearing. The cost of risk was equal to 7 basis points, thanks to the quality of our lending portfolio, and is expected in a range between 5 and 10 basis points. Finally, payout ratio is expected for 2026 in a range between 70%-80%.
Leverage ratio, our goal is to remain above 4.5%. Thank you for your attention, we can now open the Q&A session.
This is the Chorus Call conference operator. We will now begin the conference question session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may do so by pressing one by touchtone key. To remove yourself from the queue, please press star two. Anyone with a question may press star one at this time. The first question is from Alberto Villa of Intermonte. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. The line was not good during the call, so I missed a good part of it, but you came to it. We have the slides, so I am stating my question on that. Specifically on the guidance, you have further upgraded the guidance, which is qualitative as before. I was trying to figure out what could be the implication of the revision, especially on net interest income. Including all the items and then the adjustment below the method of the one-off. I was wondering why you present the matter in this way, and where the EUR 3 million of the one-off is included, in which line item of the P&L. Thank you very much.
Thank you for the questions, and sorry for the bad quality of the line. The upgraded guidance clearly is moving on, is a continuous and steady upgrade that is current with the evolution we are experiencing. As we explained, the most relevant KPI to look at for having an idea of the possible evolution of our revenues and also profits is the progression on the net sales. As we explained during the presentation, the net sales, whatever is the mix, is contributing in a big way to the revenues of the bank. At the same time, we have some quite clear evidence that what we are doing in terms of redesigning the backbone of the bank using technology and artificial intelligence is starting or emerging as paying off.
We are extremely confident that going forward, we can expect a material impact on the evolution of the operational cost. This is the reason why we also introduce an additional guidance in which we expect the beginning of the deceleration of the growth of operational cost happening definitely before than we presented during the plan. Finally, there is an excellent combination of evolution of deposits and interest rates, clearly the rates are evolving, they are higher. At the same time, despite the higher rates, deposits are emerging as extremely resilient, and we expect they are keeping on growing. This means that if we put all of these components, all of them together, it is clear that we have the evidence of a material improvement of the results we expect to generate throughout the plan.
Regarding the 15% you are referring to the increase of the, Lorena, this was.
In the second quarter.
Yeah.
2026 compared with the second quarter 2025.
This is the net interest income.
Net interest income.
Yes, net interest income. Clearly we cannot give such precise numbers because as you know better than me, clearly there is a component that we are not controlling. That is the level of rates, clearly what we are absolutely sure that the continuous growth of the net interest income is going to continue, and this is clearly mostly driven by the quality of our deposits. I would like to remind that the quality of our deposits means that the beta of our stable deposits is practically zero. This is making everything working incredibly well. On the operating cost, as explained, answering to the operating guidance. Again, we are extremely confident that the growth of the operational cost going forward is going to keep on going down, and more rapidly than we were expecting when we presented the plan.
For the adjustments of net profit, I leave the floor to Lorena.
Thank you, Alessandro. You can see on slide six, the P&L adjusted with the net profit adjusted, in which we have reported a dedicated line item, lines related to non-recurring expenses, net of taxes, which are equal to EUR 3 million. We have a detail in the same slide on the bottom side of the slide, in which we have reported the fact that this amount correspond to EUR 4.6 million expenses gross, and is related to the termination agreement with an executive occurred in the second quarter 2026, connected to the reorganization of the bank.
Okay. Thank you. If I may follow up on another topic, which is the net inflows and the stronger net inflows also deriving in asset under custody. It was probably the second record month in terms of asset under custody. Is this a trend of investment by clients that you expect to continue also in the coming months, or was related to some specific reasons?
The reason is related to the unique positioning of Fineco. Fineco is offering the only one powerful brokerage platform available on Italian market. If you are a client in Italy that you want to deal with a very powerful platforms offered by an robust, significant, and trustful bank, the only place in which you can move is in Fineco. Fineco is offering a unique combination of robustness, reliability, and also quality of the platform. This is making particularly the most interesting clients interested in dealing directly with the markets, moving to Fineco. This trend is accelerating for the reasons we explained, because the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence is making progressively clients more and more aware, more and more demanding in terms of quality, transparency, fairness.
We are observing a very fascinating trend that is now we are starting on accelerating and attracting directly private banking clients that are entering just for using the platform. This clearly is signaling a progressively accelerating change in the structure of the market. We expect that this trend is going to continue and reinforcing.
Thank you.
The next question is from Davide Giuliano of Equita. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I have three. The first one is on the partnership with CNP. Can you provide us more color on the details of the partnership, and how much margin expansion we can expect over the coming years? The second one on the German pension reform. The new reform significantly opens the system with a more flexible, and I would say, market-friendly approach. In light of the upcoming entry to Germany, have you already made any consideration on how to capitalize on this opportunity, and can you provide us with more color on this report? That would be appreciated. The last one on cryptos. We have seen some operators authorized by regulators in recent weeks. How are the discussions with the regulator progressing, and when do you expect to receive the authorization? Thank you.
Yes. Let me start by the partnership with CNP. Clearly, this partnership that has a four years horizon, clearly is a partnership that is going to allow us to be more efficient in providing to our clients a higher quality services. Second, clearly, accordingly with a decent development of the volumes, is going to generate higher margins. Because the partnership, it's absolutely great because CNP is an incredibly efficient partner. We have been keeping working with them by many years. We are sharing with them the same value proposition because the insurance wrapper, if they are provided to clients in a way that is fair, transparent, and efficient, are great solutions. On that side, we are on the same line. In our agreement, we cannot give a precise indication of the conditions.
Clearly, for sure, this is respect what we were doing until so far, is going to generate higher margins for the bank. On the German market, I don't know, Paolo, if you want to elaborate. From, honestly speaking, our plan on Germany is not driven by the pension reform. Is nice to have, but we are not moving there for that reason.
For sure, the new pension reforms are going to go in our direction. Every time we have something that goes in the right direction that you have to use efficient products, you have to use funds, ETFs, asset under custody, that for us, it's perfect. Just perfect. As Alessandro said, we're not 100% concentrated on the pension reforms in Germany. We know that in Germany, there is a huge opportunity, not just for us, but for many players. We know that the majority of the assets are still in the traditional banking system, not just in Germany, but almost everywhere. This is something that for us is just gold. Yeah. That's it.
Crypto. Also crypto, if you want to.
Yeah, the crypto, we are progressing quite well. We are in, I can say final talks with the regulators. At the same time, we are organizing the backbone and the infrastructure that will be the platform our clients they're going to use. I'm quite confident that it's going to be live, probably first months of 2027 or so. We're still talking to the regulators.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Adele Palamà with UBS. Please go ahead.
I can barely hear you. Anyway, I try to ask the questions. One is a follow-up on NII. I understand that you haven't provided NII guidance, but just a question. Can you remind us the NII that you had on improving rates? What is the expectation for the evolution of NII in 2027, in the assumption that you have rates in your guidance? Second question is on the net interest margin. I think that what you reported that there has been a small increase, margin stability. I'm just wondering if you have a guidance there on the evolution of the margin going forward, and if there is like the reason behind that small increase. The last question, sorry, one call for getting NII.
I didn't probably hear the answer before, but so you are expecting to get savings from the implementation of AI earlier than we've seen before. The guidance year-on-year, it's keeping social growth hasn't changed, staying around 6%. I was just wondering that the improved guidance is really more to a saving of because of growth, which is going to be more maybe 2027, or how do you look at the total growth in of course, including the growth for the global initiatives? Thanks.
Sorry again for the bad quality of the line. I'm trying to give you some more. Let me follow up on the net interest income. Clearly, the positive expectation on the future evolution of net interest income is a combination of the expected evolution of rates and also the expected evolution of our base of deposits. Clearly, there is. Just to give you an example, because there is a very clear correlation. During the month of July, for example, we had more or less a negative deposits for in the region of EUR 300 million. That clearly is negative for the evolution of net interest income, but this has been driven by a significant rise of interest rates.
If you put the two components of them together, the month of July, for example, has been definitely positive for the future of evolution of the net interest income. Our expectation in terms of rates are clearly that we are embedding when we are making the fine-tuning of the plan, is remaining more conservative respect to what you have in the forward rate curve, because we prefer to be cautious.
Nevertheless, this is clearly showing the clear evidence that the net interest income is going to continue to progress, and is going to keep on growing. Again, the main reason is the quality of the base of deposits. The presence of such a large amount of stable deposits means that clearly also when you have a significant increase of rates, the impact on your base of deposits tends to be not such as big. On the other end, you are capturing an interesting chunk of the evolution of rates and so on. On the questions on the management fees margins, yes, this is aligned with the previous guidance where we were guiding for relatively stable margins, management fees.
Going forward, considering the kind of actions we are taking in terms of how we are guiding our network of financial planners, we are confident that progressively the mix of our asset under management fees is going to progressively improve. This clearly is boding well for at least the maintenance of stable margins. Clearly, we think that we cannot rule out that there is room for also some modest increase of the margins. This is more or less. On the guidance for costs going forward, as we were saying, we started now our activity driven by the usage of Artificial Intelligence, and is progressing very rapidly because I would like to remind that Fineco is a tech company.
For us, it's extremely rapid and easy to put to work the dividend represented by Artificial Intelligence, and what it's emerging as clear evidence that the room for accelerating the reduction of the growth of the operational cost going forward is clearly emerging. Clearly, it's difficult to give you a precise, exactly phasing of this process, but we are extremely positive on that side. Probably going forward, approaching the year end, probably we are going to give an even more precise indication from a numbers point of view. This is on the cost. Excuse me. May you repeat your question? Sorry.
On the NII, I didn't see the rates, because I didn't catch the answer.
On NII, clearly we remain positive on a continuous growth of the NII going forward. The reason is a combination of the outlook on rates, and the quality of our deposits. Clearly when you have rates going up, clearly you can expect some pressure on deposits. The pressure we expect is clearly pretty low, because as we showed during the presentation, Fineco has the highest percentage among the European banks of stable deposits. This means that on the vast majority of our deposits, the beta of the deposit is zero. This means that you have a significant positive impact generated by the rise on rates. We are using, in making our revision of the plan, a conservative approach because we are not using the forward rate curve, but we are using a curve that is more conservative than the forward rate curve.
I don't know, Lorena. We can say by how much it's more conservative?
We can speak on average by 30 basis point.
Yes. We are on average at 30 basis points below the forward rate curve. This is the assumption. Yeah.
Okay, thanks.
The next question is from Marco Nicolai of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Can you explain us a little bit better what are the implications in terms of EPS growth? Because you guided during the plan to double-digit EPS growth. What are we looking at now? Can we say are we kind of getting closer to 15%, or where do we stand? This is the first question. Do you have an update on the securities lending platform? How is that progressing, and what volumes do you expect to reach by the end of this year versus at the end of next year? The question on the Senior Preferred bonds. What are the funding needs for the business going forward? Should we tap the market again, say once per year, or you are okay for a few years now? Thank you.
I don't know, Paolo, do you want to elaborate both on BPS growth ambition, and update on securities lending platform? Then Lorena, then you will give a little bit more of color on our funding needs.
Yeah, on the BPS growth ambition, we are very positive. Of course, we confirm what we said to the Capital Markets Day, we have also new information that we are very positive we can probably do even better. The initiatives are going very well. One of the initiatives that you mentioned, the securities lending, now we are fully operated. Now we are concentrated on one side, bringing new counterparties in the platform. I remind you that the new platform is a new marketplace where we can share securities with external counterparties. The more counterparties we have, the better it is for the platform. On one side, we will keep on onboarding new counterparties, institutional counterparties interested on our AUC, that we mentioned is very valuable in terms of granularity and the fact that it's a retail AUC.
On the other side, we keep on pushing on having the permission from our clients to use their securities to lend to the platform, to put into the platform. We have a very high percentage of permission, almost 40%, it is already quite big. On the other side, we push on the gathering asset under custody from the outside. From new clients or existing clients, and we're doing a great job on this. The more AUC we have in the platform, the better it is for the securities lending platform. By the end of this year, we will start seeing some results, and I think we can start sharing some significant numbers. For now, we are just concentrating, keep on onboarding new counterparties and gathering as much AUC as possible in the platform.
Paolo, I just want to give more color on the Excuse me, BPS or ETF?
BPS.
BPS growth ambitions now. Yeah. Scott, excuse me because I got wrong, I confused BPS with ETF, sorry about your question was not on ETF. Clearly it's much more relevant. The BPS growth ambition now. Clearly now the ambition has gone up because we made the two upgrading in the evolution in our outlook for 2026. At the end of the story, clearly the final landing point of the upgrading is an improved BPS growth. Clearly. It's clear we are not giving yet any precise numbers, clearly the ambition now is definitely higher. Yeah. Currently, what we are experiencing.
Again, honestly speaking, it's not a surprise because as we are continuously repeating it, if you want to have a proxy that is suggesting to you the future evolution of our revenues in the BPS, look to the evolution of our net sales. The more we have net sales coming on board, the more we are accelerating on net sales, the more you can expect a continuous acceleration in the growth of BPS. This is that. Clearly now, the outlook is clearly higher than when we presented the plan. On, Lorena, if you want to spend a few words on this.
Yes. Thank you.
Senior Preferred.
As you know, in May, we issued EUR 500 million of Senior Preferred. These issuances were made because in October, the issuance of EUR 500 million of Senior Preferred issued in October 2021, will not be any more eligible from an MREL point of view and will be recalled. Now we have on the market EUR 1.3 billion of Senior Preferred, but in October, we will come back to an amount of EUR 800 million. Our expectation is that this amount is fully compliant for the following years. We will probably issue a new senior bond, a new Senior Preferred in 2028, for the substitution of the issuances made in 2023.
Regi.
The next question is from Gian Ferrari in Mediobanca. Please go ahead.
For taking my questions. I've only one.
Please go ahead.
Can you hear me?
[inaudible].
Can you hear me?
Operator, we are not receiving the user for a question. Please press star and one to talk. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press the star and one on your
For the extremely important questions you raised, and thank you for joining our conference call, and feel free to make us a call for any follow-up. Thank you again.