To have the group's CFO, Luisa Gómez Bravo, with us. Luisa, welcome.
Thank you.
It's been very interesting times for you. Now, easier times next.
Christmas, holidays, hopefully soon.
Perhaps if we start with the balance between Developed and Emerging earnings, how do you see things? If Sabadell had joined the group, you would have had more hard currency earnings, which are very welcome. My question is, is management actively aiming for a more balanced footprint, a more balanced mix between Emerging and Developed? If that is the case, what are you doing to get to that point?
Right. Really, the balance between Emerging Markets and Developed Markets, not just now, but in general, is more an output than an input of the strategy. The strategy really has focused on, especially in the past, over the past five to ten years, really, on having very high-quality franchises in the countries that we want to be in, countries where we find that there is potential for growth with, in general, low leverage ratios, which allows us to grow with adequate asset quality profiles.
That has been really the main drive of the strategy, ensuring that the curtailing of the footprint or how we see it really is driven by can we have Scale in those countries, the adequate Scale to compete and get a competitive advantage in sustainable profitability versus the peers, and to allow us to be a top three player in the market to ensure that that is, again, sustainable going forward. Really, that drives the strategy. The exercise that we've done in the past, really, it's been about more exiting markets than entering or doing deals that were different because we really wanted to make sure that we had that high-quality, very large-scale franchises in the countries.
That is why we exited the U.S., Chile, many other countries, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Panama, a lot of things, to ensure that the footprint that we have is the right one because we have those franchises in place. When you overlay on top of those high-quality franchises with the adequate scale and capacity to compete, a global strategy regarding digital banking that ensures that we are acquiring clients around 11 million over the past few years, two-thirds of those are done digitally. You overlay as well a strategy regarding sustainability and sustainable finance, not because it is a good thing to do. It is actually really business-driven because we do see a shift on the commercial side in terms of transition to more efficient sources of energy and how that drives your manufacturing processes.
Those global strategies overlaying under or on top of the high-quality franchises is driving a strategy that is allowing us to deliver today that 19.7% ROT. It is allowing us to deliver that 16% growth of lending in constant terms. It has been allowing us to deliver that 17% growth in tangible value per share plus dividends, which I think is really more the metric to follow in a bank that has this type of footprint. That is why we are very confident going forward when we have communicated our plan in the summer to maintain those ambitious targets in terms of being really a unique story within the European banking system that combines profitability with that terrific 22% ROT on a proforma 12% CT1 ratio, highly profitable business, tangible value per share plus dividends in this new cycle growing mid-teens.
In addition, it provides continued growth versus the peers in Europe in terms of activity growth. On top of it, and I think this is another three of the triangle of the uniqueness of BBVA, is a consistent capital return story to shareholders. As you know, we've stated to the market that over the next four-year cycle, we expect to have around EUR 36 billion of capital available for distribution. This is something that is also adding an ongoing capital return story on top of the profitability story and on top of the growth story. That is why I think that we are quite comfortable in that basis.
Okay. Perhaps moving to Spain, you've been growing much faster than the market for a number of quarters. Only in Q3, your loan book was up 6%. The market was 3%. How are you getting there? Is that through prices? How do you describe your offer in terms of competitiveness? Any insights that you may have on margins, how you see the competitive landscape in Spain would be?
Okay. Let's unpack a little bit the framing of the situation in Spain and why, again, we think that we have really the best franchise in Spain because Spain, I think, is overall sort of a darling banking market now. I think that within that, if you look through that, you definitely see BBVA being, I think, the most profitable and most efficient bank in the market today. That is really not so much on a specific spur of the moment growth in terms of price. I think we are very disciplined in price. It shows that precisely we are losing market share on the mortgage side because we do not think there is value in the mortgage market right now at the current prices.
It is more a focus, again, of strategy and how we have been able to grow in the Spanish market and how we think we are going to be growing consistently going forward and outperforming the market. This has to do, again, with the transformation of your balance sheet. We have been consistently over the past five, six years focusing on growing on the segments that we think are more profitable. That means that we have had a very strong focus on consumer loans. We have a 16.6% market share in consumer loans. Our average lending market share in Spain is 14%. Above our natural market share, we used to have a loan book in consumer loans that used to weigh around 5%. Now it is 10%. Consumer loans in Spain are not that significant, but still, it is a significant change of mix in that proportion. This is a very profitable segment.
Over the past five years, since December 2019, we've grown consumer loans market share 350 basis points. It is not a one-off quarter this year. It is really a consistent strategy on the back of that. I would also highlight our effort on the SME side. As everybody knows, it is a segment that we are very keen to grow in. This has been a consistent effort over the past, again, since December 2019, where we've grown 230 basis points on market share in SMEs. This year, we are growing above 50 basis points. It is a very focused strategy of growing in the most profitable segments. This activity growth really, when you look deep dive, what we are doing that we think is different and differential, it has to do with three things. One, the first one is client acquisition.
It goes back to acquiring clients. Since 2022, we've gained 3 million clients in Spain. This year, for the first nine months, we're growing around 730,000 clients. We've gained 100,000 new SME clients. What we're seeing is that we are number one, number two bank in acquiring clients in the market over the past two years. What we're seeing is that when I onboard a new client, that client within the next 12 months becomes an engaged client. The focus of doing this end-to-end digitally, where over 50% of my clients I am onboarding digitally, is allowing me to see that five years down the road, the clients that I'm onboarding now are going to be three times more profitable in terms of product origination, in terms of cross-selling opportunities. The best way to ensure sustainable growth in the future for us is not through price.
It's actually through client acquisition, very focused strategies on client acquisition and engagement. The second thing that I think is also very important for us, and maybe this is more like a silent revolution, which is your distribution model. Everybody has digital banking apps, but how does that tie into really reshaping your distribution and relationship model with your clients, the branch networks, and the sizing of that? What you've been seeing and what we've been seeing is that we've been increasing productivity of our relationship managers in the branches. Why? Because as we push out our digital banking strategy, our client acquisition strategy, we've been able to have today over 50% of the roles in the branches are specialized roles. We've been able to sell fund growth in private bankers. We've been able to fund growth in insurance specialists.
We've been able to fund growth in deploying product specialists for the SMEs. That productivity growth is ensuring you're seeing that output in outperformance in market share gains. Last but not least, and sorry for the long answer, it's about risk. It's about risk management. It's about your risk models. It's about how you can deploy pre-approved loans fast, quick, and digitally as well. I think that ties into a story where we are very comfortable, and comfortable is ambitious, in ensuring that over the next four years, we have stated that we're going to be growing mid-single digit above the market, so still continue to outperform the market with efficiency ratios that are going to be in the low 30s and an adequate cost of risk.
I think the story for Spain, for BBVA, is going to be a story, again, of outperformance and consistent profitability going forward. On the margin side, I haven't forgotten your question. I think what we're seeing is stability of policy rates going forward, slight uptick on the Euribor rates. Our balance sheet still on the mortgage side is above 50% is floating rate. We need to manage that interest rate exposure. With stable interest rates, you're going to have, I think, the positive effect of activity driving down to margins. I think that we're going to be seeing perhaps slight compression still on the customer spread and going into the fourth quarter.
Going on from then, it's going to be more stable customer spreads in the future and activity growth feeding through supporting growth and the ALCO management, which is also very important and another source of competitive advantage, I think, for BBVA and the way we've managed our ALCO book is continue to be supportive of that NII evolution.
Okay. Following up on your point on customer spreads, is it too optimistic to expect customer spread expansion given that you are focusing on growing in consumer and SME so that mix should add to your margin or you're going to keep things more or less stable and that would allow you to grow?
No. I mean, I think that obviously there's a slight mixed component in terms of the customer spread. I think really the most relevant driver of customer spread is how you manage your cost of deposits. I think that we have currently a cost of deposits of 66 basis points. It's been coming down. I think the important thing is to continue to, again, acquire clients, transactionality, and ensuring that we can have that cost of funding advantage going forward. Our expectation is, again, overall, and we will give guidance next year. I think the important thing is that customer spread should be more or less stable. Maybe at the end of next year, you will see a little bit of expansion, perhaps. Again, it's all going to be depending also on competitive dynamics.
If things turn like the mortgage side, then maybe your mixed effect will be even better.
True. Sounds pretty amazing. Now Mexico's turn.
It's even more amazing.
You've been gaining market share across all products for a number of years. Over the past year alone, you've picked up, what, 60 basis points both in loans and deposits. Do you think that momentum should continue? How are you placing yourself on both sides of the balance sheet and within the different loan books? As we get closer to the end, USMCA renegotiation, what's the mood amongst corporate clients?
Right. I think that we have been and we continue to be structurally positive on Mexico and the growth in Mexico, the banking sector as a whole, and obviously on the capacity of BBVA Mexico to outperform that growth. It really goes back to two basic concepts that I think are very relevant. One is obviously the macro. You're seeing, I think this year, quite a resilient macro despite all the tariff noise. I was here last year in San Carlos and Patricia, Head of IR. The mood with Mexico was challenging, logically so, because of the noise on the tariffs. Not just the noise, actually, the deployment of tariffs in Mexico and Canada before anybody else, before the reciprocal tariffs. When you look back to today, you're seeing a macro that we have and everybody else has upgraded.
GDP forecast this year, we actually were negative 0.4% in the second quarter. We've upgraded those forecasts to 0.7% this year, growing to 1% next year, and from then on, slightly growing ahead. Remember that the growth potential of Mexico is around the 2% level. Still positive evolution in terms of the GDP side in Mexico. What's, I think, very important and more precise there is that when you look at the exports, exports have grown in Mexico 4% since the data of the summer. Within this context of tariffs discussion, you're able to still grow your exports, which I think nobody assumed was going to be the case at the beginning of the year. Sure, there's some front-loading of that because there was front-loading of exports in Mexico.
I think also important is the fact that the FDI in Mexico is growing 8% this year. That coupled with a strong peso is an outlook that I think has turned more positive than the one that we had initially speaking. I said going forward, we're still structurally positive on those macro dynamics being more supportive going ahead into next year. The second factor that's important on why we've always been structurally positive in Mexico with the volatility of the noise, but structurally speaking, has to do with the leverage ratio in Mexico. Again, leverage ratios, when looking at the footprint, are important. The leverage ratio in Mexico, the indebtedness of the private sector is around 34.7%, 35%. That has allowed the banking system in Mexico over the past 20 years to grow at around 1.2x nominal GDP rate.
BBVA Mexico, as you mentioned before, within that period of 20 years, we've been able to grow 1.4x nominal GDP. I think that we were talking about this the other day. I think that there's only been two years where BBVA Mexico has not been able to grow its lending book, which one was the GFC and the other one was COVID. Structurally speaking, we're able to grow because as the economy formalizes and gets formal jobs and job employment, wage dynamics are positive. That is a source of growth, structural growth in an economy like Mexico for the banking sector and BBVA hopefully outperforming that. That's the structural side.
On what's going on with the current dynamics today is, in fact, that if you ask me where the positive surprise has been, the retail dynamics, because going again on a macro graph type of slowdown in the year, job employment concerns, et cetera, I didn't expect the retail portfolio to be growing at 12.5% year on year, again, gaining market share to your point over a good solid growth in the market as well. I think that's been positive. We've been growing 13.5% our credit cards, 14.5% our personal loans. We've been growing 16.5% our SME loan book. That is allowing us to deliver that growth while gaining market share, for example, on the SME side, 200 basis points of market share year on year. Again, an area of focus for the whole group. On the wholesale side, there's been a deceleration of growth.
One of the most relevant dynamics to that is that, and I think it's important to remember, that one third of our wholesale loan book in Mexico is U.S. dollar denominated. When we started the year, we were comparing a Mexican peso that had depreciated within the year versus a first half of last year where the Mexican peso was actually appreciated. When you translate that into local currency, that overweighed growth. As we knew, and that's why we guided for the year, remember we started guiding high single digit. Now our guidance is to end the year at circa 10%. We were already incorporating the convergence because of the FX rate. Even the FX, it's even better today because, as I mentioned before, it's appreciating.
That means that when you look at the growth book in the corporate side, we have grown around 6.7% year on year as of September. When you factor in FX, the loan book in the wholesale side is growing around 9.2%-9.5%. I think that's an element that's relevant. Going forward with these dynamics in place, we do believe that BBVA Mexico will continue to outperform the market. It will continue to grow in the pockets of business that we think are most profitable for us. We will be able to maintain a high single digit growth rate over the next four years in that context. On the funding side, I think the lowering of rates, the rates that are coming down, I don't know, most of you know that rates were at 11.25. Now they're at 7 point over a year ago.
Now they're at 7.25. We expect policy rates to come down to 7% this year, 6.5% next year. As those rates come down, it is allowing us to also manage more effectively our deposits. Deposits are growing also at 10% year on year on balance sheet deposits, while at the same time being able to provide interesting investment alternatives through asset management. Asset management is growing around 18.5% year on year. We are the largest asset manager in the country. I think the expectation that we have in Mexico is, again, high single digit growth in activity, feeding that with customers, again, customer spread stabilizing as rates stabilize and allowing that with a macro environment where the cycle in terms of asset quality is supportive and efficiency ratios of circa 30%. We think that Mexico is going to be a strong contributor to that roadmap going forward.
Just a quick follow-up on that. In terms of funding, are you thinking about keeping the loan-to-deposit ratio stable? Do you work within a range? How do you feel?
I think that right now the loan-to-deposit stable is around 105%. I think that the way we ensure good profitability is that we demand profitability on top of what is your marginal cost of funding. I think that that ensures that as long as we have that in place and as long as we're originating, having loan-to-deposit ratios of around 105%, even slightly higher than that, is something that I think is feasible and actually something that we think makes sense from a profitability point of view because there is no issue, especially for BBVA Mexico, of liquidity. I can pay tomorrow and I'm going to have the liquidity I need. It's really about price management and ensuring that we are not contaminating our significant cost advantage that we have on transactionality with pricing that could put that at risk.
That's more the balance of how we manage pricing on the deposit side and with regards to the wholesale funding costs.
Okay. Very clear. Turkey's turn. I think your strategic plan suggests that Turkey will move past hyperinflation accounting by 2028. How much do you expect Turkey to contribute to the group's earnings by then? I think consensus, at least Bloomberg Consensus, has something like $1.6 billion by 2028. Do you feel comfortable with that number? More short term, how would you describe the dynamics in the country for the next few quarters?
Yeah. I mean, talking about Turkey, unfortunately, means that we have to talk about hyperinflationary accounting, which is not easy. It is important because the macro variables impact, obviously, the contribution of the Turkey franchise. I think in that sense, what has been very clear, and that is the communication that we have had, is that as Turkey continues its disinflationary roadmap, that is going to be positive for the contribution of Turkey no matter what, even if it does not, even if in the next few years you are not exiting hyperinflation, you do not need to wait for that to have Turkey contribute more to the group because of the macro dynamics. The macro, we are expecting inflation to come down this year to around 32.7%. It was around 44% last year.
Going into next year, with the current scenarios that we have, we expect inflation to come down to 30%, sorry, 23%-25%. And the rates also coming down from the 38.5% this year down to around the 30%. If those two things happen with an FX that is, again, depreciating, but depreciating below the forward rate, I think that macro scenario is going to be supportive of contribution from Turkey because inflation coming down means that the drag that I have for inflationary accounting is going to be coming down as well. And the rates coming down because if you see the duration of my assets and liabilities, I have deposits that are in the market, significantly term deposits that are maturing every 28 days. As the rates decrease significantly, it supports better customer spreads and overall better names. Going forward, the macro variables are important.
That we expect should be feeding into better customer spreads in the next quarters and also better NIMs in general as well. I think that aside from the macro, which is very important, sometimes, and that's maybe on me and us, to really highlight the quality of Garanti's franchise in the country. Obviously, it's been shadowed by a franchise that needs to deliver much more. When you look at Garanti's performance in local, in the market against its peers, it's really amazing what they've been able to deliver in the past two years. You look at Garanti, and the first nine months of the year has delivered TRY 84 billion. The next player, I'm talking about the private banks, the next player has made TRY 44 billion. When you look at the NIM of Garanti, it's around 5%. The next player is 2.4%.
We are focusing not only obviously on ensuring that we can manage the process of the contribution of Turkey to the group, but specifically ensuring that Garanti remains being a high-quality franchise. As the normalization of the economy comes through, we have the best-in-class player to be able to compete and deliver the value that we expect from the franchise, which is still today not there. To your point, as to the expectations of the bottom line profits for us, again, whether it comes out of hyperinflation or not, our assumption is that it does in 2028. I think what is relevant is that Garanti pre-hyperinflation accounting, that is in 2022, was already making EUR 1.5 billion. Whether I think that that number that you gave is short on our expectations, it is short on our expectations in 2028.
Okay. Fantastic. Let's move on to capital, which is a big focus at the moment. You have got roughly €8 billion of surplus capital. If you consider the approval of models that is coming in Q4, how quickly is that coming back to shareholders? Is it realistic to expect that you are going to be running the bank with a 12% fully loaded corrected year one ratio as soon as Q1 or Q2 2026?
I sense a nervous laugh around that question. Let me start by the last question, okay? The 12% CT1 target, I think that we've been, and Onur has been quite vocal in trying to explain why we do think and we continue to believe that's the right target for the group. This is a process that is not just improvised. It's very much thoroughly analyzed within definitely my responsibility and Onur's responsibility in the bank. I think the CT1 target, and we keep on saying this, shouldn't be measured on an absolute term. It really is important to understand what the requirement of capital for the bank is and that relative gap that we have against that capital requirement. Our SREP requirement in the third quarter was around 9.16%. We had 284 basis points of a difference between our capital target and that number.
When you look at that number, 284 basis points versus the peers, the average peers, which means there are banks that are below that, the average is around 240. I am one of the top three banks in terms of distance between my CT target and what the regulator requires of me. The regulator does their models, they do their analysis. Why is that? Because the diversification of my footprint allows me to have resilience in terms of profitability to absorb cycles, shocks, adverse scenarios. The requirement that I have is lower than other peers, which gives me that distance in terms of CT1 capital. Not only that, the SREP requirement going into next year is coming down for BBVA. It is going to be 8.97 at the start of the year because of the Aussie buffer from Bank of Spain coming down. That is very important.
I think I encourage you all to look at the SREP requirements of European banks and measure that gap to their capital targets. On top of that, I think that is also, again, on the back of the regulator. The regulator has a say, obviously, in this. I know that we've all forgotten about ECB stress tests. They're still out there and they still do them. It's a lot of work for the banks, by the way. You may agree or not with the methodology. I don't particularly think that the methodology is great, good, or bad. There's a beauty aspect of this, which puts all the banks in Europe at a level playing field in terms of the scenario that they're looking to stress.
BBVA, in the last ECB stress test scenario, in the current ECB stress test scenario, comes out on top of most of the banks in Europe. We are the second best bank in terms of depletion in the scenario. When you look at fully loaded ratios, the fourth best bank with a CT1 ratio over the scenario that is above 11%. We are one of the best banks in terms of stress testing from the ECB. I do not say it. I have my own stress tests. I have my ICAPS scenario. No, the ECB. Every two years they do this. Again, BBVA comes out on top. Third thing, if we had concerns from the regulator about capital, would it have been allowing us to then allow us to recognize 40-50 basis points increase of CT1 from a review of models in the bank?
I think that really it's about the capital requirements versus the CT1 target and the consistency of how we measure that going forward. The second thing that I think is also important has to do with the type of bank that we are, the business model that we have. We are not very sophisticated. We do plain vanilla banking. We have two-thirds of our funding comes from customer deposits. That means that we have an RWA density that is 48%-49%, very much highly above the reference of the peers, which is at 28%-29%. Another thing that nobody, I don't want to say nobody, I'm sure you do, that people also, I think, are encouraged to look at is the leverage ratios. BBVA's leverage ratio is 6.7%. The quality of capital matters as much as the distance to your SREP requirement matters.
I think on that topic, we feel, again, very comfortable on 12%. Moving on to your question, we will return capital to shareholders above that CT1 target. As to the how and when, it is something that, as you know, is ongoing now with the recent requirement that we've done to the ECB and the approval of the significant share buyback that we've requested. I think that what's important here is maybe to also understand that this is not going to be an exercise where you're going to see a one-off boom down to 12% immediately. I can say that that exercise of returning excess capital to shareholders is going to be a matter of months, not years. Again, this is a process that we need to not only get approval from, but then go and execute.
More importantly for me is that commitment to deliver capital returns over 12% and not just the excess capital today that I have, but this bank is going to generate further capital. The profitability of the franchise will generate further capital. And that capital will be returned consistently to shareholders over the next few years. It is a story about returning excess capital today, but ongoing capital returns going forward.
Sounds good. I think we've got a few minutes. I'm sure the audience, I've got lots of questions, but I'm sure the audience will have some questions. Very shy. I think I'm going to keep going then. Going back to the balance between hard currency, soft currency earnings. I know you probably think I'm a bit of a pain there, but investors care. You've been growing fast in what you call the rest of business area. You've got two legs, or 75% is CIB. The other side is your new digital franchises in Europe. Can you talk us through on your strategy on both sides? I think on the CIB in particular, you've been growing very fast over the past couple of years.
Can you explain a bit what's in there, whether we need to start worrying about exposure to private credit and things like that, and yeah, how you envision your footprint in Europe through your digital platforms and if there are any other countries where you think that there are good opportunities to get in?
Yeah. No, yes, I think that we will probably be talking more about the CIB business going forward. I think that's one of the other areas where we've consistently published information on a pro forma basis in our management report. You can see the trends that we've been having there. The CIB business and the bottom line today is around EUR 2.1 billion. I would say CIB and wholesale banking is one of the six strategic priorities of investments going forward because we do think that we need to reshape the investments, not just on the retail side, but actually focus as well on the wholesale side on the CIB business particularly. The rest of business, because our reporting is a geographic reporting, you tend to see rest of business and you identify that with the CIB. Again, CIB is much broader.
The bottom line of the rest of business is significant because in the nine months, it's around EUR 480 million. Again, the CIB business overall is much more relevant. What is the strategy behind that? In the rest of business side, to be more specific, we have the branches of the SA. You have CIB businesses in our footprint in Mexico, CIB in Spain, CIB. Then we have CIB business that is done out of branches in Asia, in continental Europe, in the U.K., and in the U.S. This was already the case before. It's nothing different. This footprint was already there. The strategy going forward really is a strategy that is not aimed at competing against JPMorgan whatsoever. It's really about expanding the scope of what we do well into a larger set of clients. First of all, connecting the footprints.
We are very much client-driven. We have clients that do a lot of cross-border business. We've been growing our cross-border business double-digit in the meetings area over the past few years, and we intend to expand that. Most of the revenues that we achieve in our CIB business have to do with transactional banking. Again, cross-border business there is important. Connecting the footprint in a better way for our clients is important. That is why we invest in these branches, because there are important points or hubs of connection. For example, New York is an important hub of connection with our Latin American and Mexican clients, and also with our Spanish clients as well. It is about focus on clients and focus on expanding that relationship. In addition, I would also add that there are certain areas of expertise that we have, which we can also scope out better.
Particularly, this has to do also with institutional investors, but more of the things that we know how to do. What are we good at? We're good at periphery securities. If you want to buy Spanish bonds, you should come to BBVA to buy Spanish bonds or Portuguese or Southern European. For example, if you're PIMCO and you want to buy Mexican currency, you should come to BBVA to buy your pesos or we're the best bank and the largest bank in Eme Bonos trading. It's really connecting those dots for institutional clients and for corporate clients. That's the basis of the growth. That means that we need to invest because the base of investment was quite low. You will see continued investments in that franchise.
We have committed to grow high teens, the revenues in this aspect, and provide good profitability for the business going forward. I would say that is the CIB value prop. On the digital bank side, the digital banks, I think that it has been a story really of trying to, at the beginning, test the hypothesis of whether it made sense to scale our tech stack in Spain. Again, it is all about scale, Marta. It is about adding scale to your current tech stack. The approach was with the passport licensing system. We were able to, from our tech stack in Spain, invest tens of millions of EUR, not hundreds of millions of EUR, in setting up a business in Italy that does not aim to be the largest market share because that is not the purpose. It is really about scale driving profitable scale onto our tech stack in Spain.
We started operations in Italy back in the end of 2021. I think the expectations have been surprised on the positive side. We have close to 800,000 clients. You see in the data on the deposit gathering. It's still a journey. These digital bank initiatives have long break-even periods. We have been able to accelerate the break-evens maybe by two or three years, but still, it's something that will be not material in this cycle. It may be material from the bottom line from the perspective. In Germany, I think what we've seen is an acceleration of that, actually surprised to the positive. We launched in Germany this year. We've seen a very, first of all, on the deployment timing, much shorter, obviously. I mean, it's logical. Also, we've been able to launch with a broader set of scope, and the reception has been very important.
Why are these digital initiatives important? First of all, because of that scale and incorporating that scale into our platform. In addition, because, and you've seen this playing out, the neobanks are very much a relevant force in the competitive markets where we're operating. Understanding how we operate as a new entrant in these markets allows us also to feed in, because we have a digital banks unit, allows us also to feed in those learnings in markets like Mexico, where we have a very interesting landscape of neobanks. Also in Spain, you've seen the interest in Revolut, the Trade Republics, the My Investors.
That is also important for us in trying to deliver a lessons learned and have a value prop that is different than other digital banks, where we are trying to be a fully universal digital bank, different than other neobanks, which are more mono liners. Why? Because the cost of acquisition is high. The more products that I have to be able to monetize that, the better. And I have the tech stack. That is what we are trying to do. We will see how that development goes. We do not rule out, obviously, taking that to other markets. For now, we need to, again, settle the initiative, especially now in Germany. We will see from then on.
Thank you for those insights. I'm afraid we've run out of time. It's been wonderful to have you. Very insightful, as always. See you next year. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.