Gentlemen, good morning and welcome to the BRD Group Q3 and nine-month 2022 financial results conference call and webcast. This conference call will be recorded. We have just a few announcements before we begin today's presentation. The event will last for approximately one hour. The slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. At any time during the webcast, you can press zero one to enter the queue for the question and answer session. Your hosts today will be Mr. François Bloch, CEO, Mr. Claudiu Cercel, Deputy CEO, Financial Markets, Mr. Radu Topliceanu, Deputy CEO, Retail, Mr. Philippe Thibaud, Deputy CEO, Risks, and Mr. Etienne Loulergue, Deputy CEO, Finance and Treasury. I will now hand over to François Bloch. The floor is yours.
Thank you, and hello, everyone. We will be presenting today the results for today for the period ending September 30. Results which were reviewed by the board of directors last week on November 3, and as usual, at this period of the year, they are not audited. If we move straight to the main figures, and I believe that you can follow the slides as well on your side.
You see, first of all, that we point out the very dynamic activity during this period, with a very important growth of our portfolio, 12% year-on-year, but notably on the corporate loan, and you will see later when we will go in the detail that this is mostly due to the SME sector, while the large corporate was active as well, but not as much as the SME. On the retail, the dynamic is to be found mostly on the mortgage loans. We speak a lot about digital since now a couple of years.
I'm happy to say that at the end of September, we were nearing the one million mark for the number of clients active in our new application You BRD. Since then, of course, we crossed this mark, and we are above one million customers mark today. With new features being implemented, but more than a new feature, I will let Radu Topliceanu speak about this later, it's the usage that is picking up, and this is very, very important for us and comforting in the approach that we have in this offer.
The overall revenue grew by almost 10%, and at the same time, if we exclude the specific part on the guarantee fund, the OPEX grew only by around 5%. Therefore, the gross operating income is 13% higher to where it was last year. With the cost of risk, which is still moderate, thanks to a low NPL ratio at 2.6%, we therefore are above the RON 1 billion mark in terms of net results for this nine months, with the return on equity around 17%.
Good result in an environment, as you will see, which was on one side difficult given the overall uncertainty, but Romania is still enjoying a strong growth, as you know, and to some extent, better than the countries around us. One last point that I would like to mention before moving to the macroeconomic environment is two words on ESG topics, which, as you know, are becoming more and more important in all sectors, but also in the financial sector. You remember we spoke about this couple of months ago about the fact that we are developing our green financing offer with some success, and we are amongst the leading players in Romania.
In order to consolidate this position, we have organized in October, at the beginning of October, a very important event in Bucharest, a two-day seminar, two-day summit where we had people attending the Odeon Theater, but also online, with various speakers and with interaction with the public to speak about all subjects related to ESG, and not only the banking side, of course, also the banking side, but not only. We did this in order, again, to place our name on the ESG map in Romania, but also to raise the overall awareness in front of all stakeholders, including, of course, our clients and the authorities. This is important because we are. It will help us further build our franchise for the future. I will let Claudiu speak about the macroeconomic environment now. Thank you.
Thank you, François, and good afternoon, everyone. As usual, o ur short dive into macroeconomic evolutions and indeed the country is still enjoying quite a strong economic growth. We have not yet received the release in GDP growth for the third quarter. We are still having the figures for the first semester quite impressively at almost 6% for the first half. We do indeed see some deceleration in activity and a lower economic growth in the second part of the year seems to be acknowledged also by the National Commission for Strategy and Prognosis, which expects the whole year 2022 growth at 4.6%. Still higher than in their spring forecasts when the same figure were put at 3.5%.
Maybe a short dive also in 2023. Their new expectations for 2023 GDP growth rate is now at 2.8%, slower than their initial forecast at 3.5%, but still apparently the country will be enjoying the growth, so we'll have an inflationary growth, but not the stagflation. Continuing with inflation, we are still in an inflationary environment, but quite a strong one as all the other countries in the region and in Europe, widely speaking. We expect the figure for October, but expectations are for the inflation to still continue growing a bit, and maybe approach 16 or 17%, where apparently we will be at a peak. Obviously hikes follow this trend in inflation.
The central bank here continue performing the increases in rates, the last one in September, 75 basis points. With the official policy rate at now 6.25, still below our peers in the region. We expect tomorrow at the forthcoming monetary policy meeting the central bank here to operate a new increase, even though the analysts are expecting an increased step of 50 basis points this time. Even though the central bank increases rates, it continues supporting the banking system in liquidity. We see banks still making use of especially the Lombard facility, even though we noticed a decrease in the liquidity deficit compared to the spring.
It roughly helped in the meantime so that suggests the Ministry of Finance is injecting money into the economy, not least through their various supporting programs. Interbank rates are following the central bank decisions with the most followed benchmark ROBOR 3M still at peak compared to the past. In September, it was close to 8%. Now it's a bit above that at 8.15%, and it will most probably continue to follow the official policy rates of the central bank. I mentioned briefly the government supporting the programs.
I'll not be entering into detail, but I just want to pinpoint some new schemes having been approved in September 2022. Based on European money to compensate energy-intensive companies for indirect emission costs and also to support Romanian eligible companies that have been affected economically by the Russian invasions in Ukraine. Finally, wrapping up with the banking sector, as previously, it continues to be solid, showing robust capital and liquidity positions, even though the capital positions continue to be challenged by the evolution in interest rates via the OCI impact coming from the banking book government securities portfolio.
The risk profile continues also to be strong with lower non-performing loans ratio at below 3% in August 2022, and with coverage ratios at close to 67%, still above the average of the European Union. To mention though that prior the FX loans weight decreased quite substantially, we noticed a stop in this trend with even slight increases now in the weight of, In exchange, loans in the banking sector, obviously due to the more favorable interest rates in an environment of stable foreign exchange. I will be now passing the floor to my colleague, Radu, to have you navigate it into the commercial performance of the bank. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody. We are now on slide 12 and we're discussing a bit about our progress in digitalization and the improvement of the efficiency of our activity. As François said, we continue to work hard on enhancing the remote experience for our clients, and here there are several new features that we made available for our clients. The very important one is the fact that we can now issue a credit card 100% online, and this could be done by our clients either from our website or from our mobile application You BRD. We also adhere to the Instant Payment Scheme.
We can see in terms of the usage of the digital channels by our clients an increase in the usage of online consumer lending by our customers. Meanwhile, we continue to expand the activity of the contact center. We are having some numbers there about the packages that we open end-to-end via the contact center and Flo which is available starting with March, but also the very good level of service level that we are offering via our contact center. 71% of the calls have been answered in the first 30 seconds. Speaking about usage, François already mentioned that we reached 962,000 clients as You BRD clients, a very strong number, a very strong increase compared with the previous year.
Not only the number of the user increase, but also the number of transactions performed by our digital channels by 16% year-on-year. This is when we're speaking about individuals. Now, if you're looking at our corporate clients, we continue to have a very strong usage of digital channels. You can see 99% of the large corporate clients, 97% of the SME transactions are performed via digital. Also, very important, shares of various instrument like Letter of Credit or Letter of Guarantee. Last but not least, a very significant increase in acquiring transactions, 17% year-on-year. While developing the digital channels, we continue to optimize the network.
Since last year we closed another 55 branches, reaching a number of 470, which you can see it's a decrease of 42% compared with the number in 2016. It is important to mention that it's not just reduction of branches, but also consolidation, merger of branches, in order to end up with a network which is more efficient. In the same direction, we continue to expand our cashless points. You can see 14% increase year-over-year on the number of 24/7 banking points. Now moving to the next slide. This showing the evolution of our lending activity, which is very strong across the board. First of all, the corporate lending grew significantly, driven especially by the SME, 41% year-over-year.
Of course, here we've been active users and promoter of the governmental programs, which contributed to this significant growth. Also, the corporate loan portfolio grew by 22%. Again, a very strong increase. While on the retail, we continue to see very strong numbers. Increase of portfolio and increase of production of housing loans by 21%. We are seeing the first signs of a slowdown. Looking at the deposit, we continue to have a very strong liquidity position. We increased the deposit both on the retail side and the corporate. This increase is offering us a low deposit ratio, which is at 16.1%, a very comfortable ratio, with also a very high liquidity buffer.
We continue to focus on the asset management side of our business. We are the fourth largest asset manager. Beyond the numbers, it's very important to show the qualitative part. We launched four new funds in August with BRD Horizon 2035 and BRD Horizon 2045, which are a novelty on the local market, being target date funds. Last but not least, we continue to support the government, and we continue to have a significant market share in the government bond issuance, 40% in the first nine months of the year. All in all, I think it's a very solid commercial performance, and I will pass the microphone to our colleague, Etienne.
Thank you. Thank you, Radu. Good morning, everybody. I'm very glad to comment the P&L. We're starting a very good performance across all categories of revenues. Indeed, it's another great quarter, posting an acceleration of revenues with RON 900 million, meaning +14% on a quarterly basis, and leading to more than RON 2.5 billion on a nine-month basis with +10% compared to the same period last year. This accelerated growth in NBI is mostly driven by a spectacular growth in net interest income. Itself supported by, of course, a very dynamic volume effect, and also a growing interest rate effect. Indeed, the average for about three months in the period of the first nine months gained approximately 900 basis points versus last year.
This is really supporting the growth in the revenues. Nonetheless, we have to mention the fact that the cost of funding is also increasing, as we mentioned, by the way, during last quarterly webcast. The good news is we are able to keep it under a very good control and diversify and increase our commercial base of deposits. We can also signal one fact that we commented last quarter. We were a bit concerned with the risk of a massive shift from ROBOR to IRCC index in our portfolio of loans. It is indeed materializing, but with a magnitude and a speed that are much less than we thought. This is a good news.
Second driver for our growth of revenues is, of course, the net fees and commission. We have here a mild growth, mostly driven by the volume of transaction, especially on card activities, especially acquiring and issuing. Also interesting to mention the fact that our penetration of insurance products, loan-driven and non-loan driven is increasing. As far as the development of the new packages are growing. We have in fact balanced the revenues in terms of fees as the new packages are free of charge, so we are a bit losing on the e-banking services revenue.
Last, but not least, the excellent Q3 for trading and sales businesses with a growth of +43% on a quarterly basis and plus more than 13% on the nine-month basis. This is especially driven this quarter by an excellent performance on FX, especially during the month of September. If we move to next slide 16, to comment on the OPEX. We maintain our rigorous spending discipline in order to keep our costs under a good control. The growth on the nine-month basis is only +5%, if we exclude, of course, the contribution to a deposit guarantee fund and resolution fund.
Nonetheless, we have to observe the fact that OPEX are indeed a bit accelerating on a quarterly basis, and the growth this quarter is almost +1 0%, especially driven by inflationary pressure. If we focus on staff costs, the evolution on a nine-month basis is + 5.2%. It is especially driven by the wage increase that we naturally have on a yearly basis, but also the increase of other benefits, especially the meal tickets recently increased. This is nonetheless a little bit balanced or partially offset by the fact we are still declining trend in the total number of FTEs as we resize the network and we gain in efficiency across the bank.
Other expenses are growing, especially due to external servicing costs that are growing due to inflationary pressures and also on IT, where we continue at a steady pace to deliver our digital roadmap. The gross operating income is posting a significant growth, even accelerated with +18% on the quarterly basis and +13% on the nine month basis. The cost to income ratio is also visibly improving with a positive dual effect. We are at a cost to income ratio of 47% in Q3, and on a nine month basis, including the contribution to a deposit guarantee and a resolution fund, slightly above 50%, which is an excellent performance from our point of view. Now I pass the floor to Philippe Thibaud for the cost of risk.
Thank you, Etienne. From a credit risk point of view, it's a pretty much uneventful quarter. Even though macroeconomics are flat, we see the horizon is still growing. As of today, we had kind of RON 0 or -RON 8 million on net cost of risk, which is more stable than we could have hoped for. We see no signs of deterioration based on the days past due. When we look at the structure of the days past due, we see that it is very stable. Clients are not paying later than we could have feared, and we don't see any new inflows or very little inflows of new NPLs. In total, we have a quasi zero cost of risk for the quarter.
You see the quality of the portfolio also for the sector, you see that we have a very good performance at the sector level. NPL is, we have reached a historical level that we have not seen for the last 20 years with the NPL, which is at 2.6%, and also with a very comfortable NPL coverage of 78%. On this, I give the floor back to Etienne.
Yes, thank you, Philippe. To comment briefly on the capital position, as of end of September, the capital position is solid and comfortably above the requirements with a 21.9% for the capital adequacy ratio. The difference between September 2021 is mainly explained by several events already commented in the previous quarters. I remind you briefly the exceptional dividend distribution at the beginning of this year, the negative revaluation of OCI due to the significant increase in interest rates, and the fact that we partially compensated this decrease thanks to incorporation of the H1 profit 2022, and we issued some tier two instruments at the end of December 2021 and June 2022.
The changes compared to the end of June are very limited. In terms of OCI, the difference is minor. The main item is the growth in RWA driven by the growth of the portfolio of loans. We have a solid capital position at the end of September. I pass the floor to Mr. Bloch for the conclusion.
Thank you. Thank you, Etienne. Very quickly to sum up what we have discussed today. Overall still strong economy in Romania, despite again many uncertainties for the quarters to come. Very good level of activity across the board on the corporate and on the retail for BRD. Continuous improvements on the digital side, and we could have added as well on the ESG. Therefore, revenues are increasing significantly, again driven by both volume and rate effect, while we see, of course, the first impact of the inflation on the OPEX.
As Etienne mentioned, we were still able to improve our cost-to-income because, of course, the impact on the rates and volume is much bigger on the revenue side. With a very good portfolio and a low risk portfolio, thanks to a very strong risk policies in the origination side of the previous year that allow us to close again these nine months with a high profitability and a good ROE.