Yes, hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. As usual, we are presenting today our nine-month results as of September 2025, which have been examined yesterday by our board of directors and validated for publication. I just want to make the remark that this financial information is at the group level and it is not audited for the time being. So, as usual, I will start with the introduction and the executive summary of our results, then pass to my colleagues who are going to deep dive into the results. What can we say about our nine-month results? They are good, I would say, especially given the not easy macroeconomic situation on our market. However, we managed to keep in the third quarter a very good speed in our commercial activity, which actually led to very good financial results.
On this slide, you can see the key performance indicators, first related to the commercial activity. Our loan activity grew by 14% year-on-year. What I mean here is the outstanding amounts. Outstanding amounts both for corporate and retail this quarter, year-on-year, actually grew almost the same, around 14%. Regarding the production, which we normally communicate separately, in the retail area, we have more than 10 billion loan production in nine months, which is 26% above the production for the same period last year. As I mentioned, the lending portfolio grew the same as the retail, around 15%.
The financial transactions, which we concluded on the ESG front, where we are continuing to finance the green projects of our clients, amount to more than EUR 500 million new sustainable financing for the first nine months, which would add to a total of EUR 1.9 billion of this type of loans since we started granting them. And it's well ahead of what we have committed to. In terms of deposits, we grew with 10% year-on-year in order to support our growth lending activity. Regarding the digital channels, here I would like actually to talk more about our achievements until the end of September, but I will leave this pleasure to my colleague Mădălina Teodorescu, who will after that describe the commercial activity. But I can now say that our YOU users, this is our mobile app for retail, increased by 15% year-on-year.
Our cashback loyalty program, we have already more than 900,000 customers enrolled. There are other highlights in the digital front, but they will be displayed later. On the GOI front, we grew by 10% year-on-year because our positive growth led to this result, comparing the growth of NBI with the growth of OPEX. NPL ratio stood, as usual, below the average for the banking system at 2.4%. The coverage ratio, as well as usual, was about the average rate for the average one for the market at more than 70%, 71.3%. Net cost of risk for EUR 195 million for the first nine months. The net profit grew by 6% versus the last year. With these results, we achieved return on equity of around 16%.
Before I give the floor to my colleague Claudiu Cercel to talk about the macro, one additional remark I want to make on the ESG front. You know that we are organizing every year now for the fourth time the Climate Change Summit, which is one of the most important events in our region, related to discussions about sustainability. This year, we had more than 2 million online participants and 2,000 people who have participated physically to the event, which we founded actually four years ago. There, our bank has presented also a very important new scheme of financing the supply chain of one of our important retail clients, which confirms not only our commitment to supporting the green transition of our clients, but also their suppliers, the smaller companies, and shows our innovative approach in this area.
So now I'll stop with the executive summary and give the floor to Claudiu Cercel to talk about the macro.
Thank you, Maria, and good afternoon, everyone. Indeed, good results for our group, and that in spite of a context marked by headwinds, both on the economic growth front and inflation front. On the economic growth, in the first half, the Romanian economy grew by 0.3%, below the average of the European Union. And we know that at that time, the environment was marked by the complex election context, and the actors somehow anticipated the measures to be taken by the government on the fiscal consolidation package, and they were also anticipating an end to the caps on the energy cost, which happened starting July, August, and September. These measures also influenced inflation, tax hikes, and energy costs. That's why Romanian inflation is now the highest in the EU, approaching 10%.
The central bank, for this reason, revised upwards its trajectory on inflation, so not actually more than 8% year-end, even approaching the 9%, to only be close to 3%, so lower digit figures at the end of 2026. In this environment, the central bank decided to not alter its monetary policy rate. It stays at 6.5%. It will probably stay here for the forthcoming period. They will most probably revisit the topic not later than second quarter 2026, after having seen the fiscal consolidation measures producing impacts. You remember last time when we discussed, we were mentioning a tight liquidity situation in the banking sector. It, in the meantime, improved. So from a deficit in liquidity in June, we are again now in excellent, at slightly above EUR 20 billion on the back of Eurobond issues of the government and European funds absorption.
This helped with the stabilization of the money market rates. ROBOR is now around 6.5%, not very far from the level where they were before the election context. And wrapping up with the banking sector indicators, the prudential indicators remain comfortable, both balance sheet-wise and risk-wise. Capital levels are comfortable at 24%. LCR is comfortable also. And the country, despite the gradual increase in NPL ratio, still stays in the EBA low-risk bucket category with an NPL below 3% and a coverage ratio of above 55%. And let's wrap up and deep dive on the commercial. I will hand the microphone to my colleague Mădălina. Thank you.
Thank you, Claudiu. Hello, everybody. As Maria mentioned, the third quarter was a very good quarter in terms of commercial performance across all segments, but we are very proud, actually, to mention that this third quarter marked an important milestone in our digital enhancement in our offers. We actually proposed ourselves to be innovative in the digital and to catch up with the commercial daily banking into the digital, and this third quarter is actually the most important proof, so in terms of catching up with the market, again, double-digit across the segments in daily banking, 26% increase in number of transactions for retail customers, 25% in acquiring transactions for companies. Majority of the transactions, as you can see, actually are developing in our digital ecosystem.
Deposit savings accounts above 80%, letters of guarantee and letters of credits above around 70%, slightly below 62% the LGs, 74% the letters of credits. So this is actually confirming that our digital ecosystem is maturing. Our systems are actually providing most of the services for the customers. And this is fully supported by new initiatives. As I mentioned, we actually support many deployments in the digital ecosystem. We mentioned here some of them. I would say probably the most important ones: partial early repayments of loans into the new applications for the retail customers in order to support this engagement in digital channels. And two very innovative solutions. One is actually our interconnection, BRD, the first bank in the market that interconnects in real time with Evidența Populației. It's actually the entity that is governing the IDs belonging to the Ministry of Interior.
This actually offers ourselves, I would say, a 360 benefit for the customers in both commercial and control functions, prudent to eliminate fraud and to make our customers' life easier in interaction with the bank. The second, I would say, feature that is also very innovative in the market. BRD is the first bank across the traditional bank in the Romanian banking industry launching multicurrency. I would apologize for the ones that are familiar with this feature. I would mention we are so proud of it. It's basically bringing a huge value for the customers, paying wherever they want in the world, either in Europe or in the United States or in the U.K., with the same card while the card is debiting the associated currency account. So this is convenient, I would say, bringing convenience for our customers, optimizing the cost because they don't need more plastics.
And also, under the pillar of ESG, we actually support the reduction of plastic consumption. And at the same time, we launched the recycled plastic cards. So actually, with this, we support customer first, our ambition. We support efficiency as well as ESG. We are very proud to have all this deployed in the third quarter. We expect the fourth quarter also to bring some novelties in the digital ecosystem. So this is basically a strong confirmation of our strategy for the bank. In terms of network footprint, we continue to optimize, of course, being complemented by the omnichannel strategy. We optimized the number of branches, around 10% decrease versus September last year. And of course, a significant decrease in the last 10 years, confirming the trend towards omnichannel.
Cashless is expanded now in more than 60% of our network, giving customers access 24/7, while contact center is keeping their performance in servicing the customer with a good service level, 76% of the calls being taken in the first 20 seconds, and with a very efficient 19-second average time for taking a call. Moving on to the lending, as Maria mentioned, is the quarter in which we are looking at a very well-performed, very well-balanced between the segments, above 14% increase in portfolio in our net outstanding in both corporate and retail segments. All the optimization that I mentioned earlier into the digital ecosystem are happening as well in our back office and straight-through process improvement.
This is why, if we look at the individual loan production, we notice that in two years' time, if we compare the first nine months of 2023 with the first nine months of this year, we doubled the production with less capacity, leveraging more on omnichannel approach as well as a straight-through process digital optimization that we have in our back office. A strong dynamic lending into the legal entities, double-digit growth in large corporates, almost 20%. SME as well, above 8% increase in the loan outstanding. Diversification is at its right place. We have a consistent demand on leasing. And I would say a remarkable sustainability financing, above EUR 500 million in these first nine months, in which major contribution from legal entities as well. In terms of deposits, we actually continue to grow, 10% year-on-year.
Here, the major contributor is actually corporate in a current environment that is actually facing challenges on one hand from the inflation, on the other hand from the state competition with different instruments to attract liquidity. Still, we have a very good performance, 10% year-on-year on the deposit base, while continuing our aim to diversify and to remain number one player in assets under management diversification for the population, which is basically supported by the consolidated number one position of BRD Asset Management with reaching above 8 billion assets under management and 25% market share at the end of September. I will pass the floor to Vladimir to talk about the liquidity position and further on.
Thank you, Mădălina. Good afternoon from myself as well. I will continue with the liquidity position. Despite all the challenges which Mădălina described on the deposit side, we were able to stay safely within the range of our loan-to-deposit at roughly 74% ratio in September 2025, being very safe in terms of all our regulatory indicators and having sufficient liquidity resources to continue our growth on the lending side. We still rely on our very robust deposit or balance sheet structure with more than 34% of our total assets in high-liquid buffer. Now moving to the following page and speaking about the revenues. All these commercial activities, which were described already, led to the growth of the NBI by 9% year-over-year, driven by the growth of net interest income by 7.5%, which is driven by the very positive volume effect and the growth of the balance sheet by 13.7%.
Slightly offset by the negative spread effect, mainly on the retail part of our portfolio, as we see the competition on the market and as well as the index rate of IRCC on the market went slightly down year-over-year by almost 30-35 basis points. A very good performance on NII was accompanied by good dynamics as well on our fee side. We are benefiting from the higher activity of our clients in the transaction field and as well from the fees which are linked to the lending activity, which we have provided starting from this year. As you know, last year, we have concluded the SRT transaction, where part of the fees are consumed by the cost linked to the SRT transaction.
For the other income, the growth is roughly 13% year-over-year and staying roughly flatish quarter-over-quarter, while the growth was supported by the one-off income from the dividends and very good performance with our corporate clients in the financial markets. Moving to the OPEX part, the OPEX quarter from the OPEX point of view was quite difficult as we had these changes in the regulatory environment and the doubling of the tax on turnover effective starting from 1st of July. So our OPEX was growing 8.4% year-over-year and 11% quarter-over-quarter. This growth year-over-year of 8.4 was from this part influenced by this additional cost linked to tax on turnover, which represents year-over-year additional RON 40 million. And without this effect, our tax base would be growing 6.2% year-over-year.
So comparing to our NBI growth, still having very positive growth, including and excluding the tax, and improving therefore visibly the GOI. If I look more on the drivers of our cost base, the staff costs are growing by 3% year-over-year and declining quarter-over-quarter, which is the result of the adjustments of the salaries, which we did in the first part of the year, which is more than offset for the third quarter by the volume effect and the ongoing transformation and reduction of the headcount, which we recorded. For the other expenses, the other expenses are growing 9.5% year-over-year and 17% quarter-over-quarter. It's worth to mention that the growth of the other expenses is very much influenced by the lower base of the last year, where we had the positive income from the sales of our properties, which is distorting the comparison quarter-over-quarter.
This sales was in the amount of RON 12 million in Q3 2024. If I look from the overall perspective, we were able in the first nine months to reduce our cost-to-income ratio by 126 basis points, net of tax on turnover and regulatory charges, and to improve our quarterly cost-to-income by almost 100 basis points to 43.4% in Q3 2025. For the cost of risk, I will hand over the floor to Philippe Thibaud.
Thank you, Vladimír. Hello, everyone. So we can see on the slide an improvement. Actually, it's a much better improvement than what you see graphically on the slide. So we show a cost of risk of 39 basis points for Q3, which is reflecting the release of provisions on corporate files that were actually impacting the first half of the year and where we found out good restructuring with the clients and the other banks. So basically, we had in Q3 this very positive news on corporate provisions being quite low as usual, mortgage portfolio being very resilient as usual. The driver of the cost of risk is limited to the consumer loans. But still, compared to the first half of the year, where we saw that the markets were very disturbed in the first half of the year, in Q3, things went back to a more normal situation.
On the smaller companies, we also have seen a significant improvement in Q3. So basically, in Q3, very much improved trajectory, which allows us also to confirm that we are confident with the guidance on the cost of risk that we gave for the year. So again, we should be low in the 40 basis points that we see in Q3. Looking at the NPL, you see also that NPL deteriorated very slightly from 2.3%- 2.4%. It's much better than what we see on the market because on the market, we were at 2.8% in H1 2025. Also in terms of coverage, so we have a 71.3% coverage, which is also still well above the average of the market, which was at 64% in H1. So all in all, positive news from the cost of risk point. I think we will go back to Vladimir.
Thank you, Philippe. I will continue with the capital position. Our capital requirement stayed at 21.9% in September 2025. The development between September 2024 and 2025 is driven by the growth of our loan portfolio, which is the main driver, and as well by the adoption of the CRR3 in the first half of the year linked to the operational risk. We are well in line with the capital requirements and this umbrella requirements on our capital position. The bank stays resilient and confident in the further growth of the loan balance sheet. I will hand over the words to Maria for the final remarks.
Yes. So to repeat once again, the economic situation on our market is not easy. However, for the first nine months, we have performed very well commercially, keeping a good speed both on retail and corporate portfolio, which led to a growth of our loan outstanding by 14% year-on-year. The ESG part or the green part of our lending was around slightly above EUR 500 million. The deposits grew by 10%. The adoption of our digital channels is growing, most important in the retail segment, where it is contributing to improved efficiency as well. This led to very good financial results, despite the newly introduced 4% of the turnover tax, which was until end of June 2%. And we were able to keep positive growth for our nine months.
This led to good GOI and with relatively good development of the cost of risk, also a good net profit, which grew by 6% year-on-year. It resulted in return on equity of 16%.