Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Vasilios, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Banca Transilvania Conference call to present and discuss the third quarter 2024 financial results. Please note that the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. You may submit your written questions using the Ask a Question window. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ömer Tetik, CEO, Mr. George Călinescu, Deputy CEO/CFO, Mr. Cătălin Caragea, Deputy CEO/Chief Risk Officer, and Mr. Aurel Bernat, Executive Director, Financial Institutions and Investor Relations. Mr. Tetik, you may now proceed.
Hello, thank you for joining us. We are glad to be hosting you online. Actually, this week we will be having two events. Besides the investors' video conference that we are having now, also on Wednesday, we will be having our first Investors' Day in Cluj for Banca Transilvania. In case you didn't receive the information or you didn't manage to get the connection details, please do not hesitate to contact our investor relations colleagues. Maybe some of you will be also visiting us in person in Cluj, so we will be happy showing our city, plus also our team, because Investors' Day will be more about our plans, about our strategy, about our business lines and people, our culture. You will be the ones participating. You will listen to our Head of Retail Banking, Head of Corporate Banking, Head of Treasury, and Head of SME Banking separately.
We will have also a presentation, a panel also with our subsidiaries, where you will have the chance to listen to their plans, their challenges, and we will try to give you a complete picture of Banca Transilvania Group, which is, besides a successful leader bank, also is the sole shareholder of several subsidiaries which are leaders in their own segments. Today we are here also with Cătălin. Cătălin Caragea joined us officially, formally, on 1st of August 2024. He's our new Chief Risk Officer. This is his first call, and also the ones joining the Investors' Day on Wednesday or visiting us will also have the chance to meet him in person. He's bringing a new, let's say, fresh air and new ideas. He's a great asset that we have acquired recently to support our growth strategy.
The first nine months' results are indeed comfortable record level of revenues, which come from actually an increased number of customers and an increased number of transactions. As we have sent with the teaser also, our number of transactions in the first nine months reached 1.8 billion online and on-site through our network, and customer numbers are ever-increasing. So we are further investing in our growth of digital channels in order to be able to service the new increase in the customer numbers, but also OTP integration will bring in more than 400,000 new customers into our ecosystem. We are very happy, and we are looking forward to meeting them. The integration is recent. We have celebrated the 100th day of the integration project.
We are still committed to finalize the full merger of two entities so that it will be only a single entity, Banca Transilvania, at the latest until the end of the second quarter, hopefully end of the first quarter of next year. And we are now also even OTP Asset Management is part of BT Group, so on several fronts with different teams we are working for the integration. But also, as you may know, for BT, but also for the Romanian market, for most of the banking markets actually, the last quarter of each year is one of the most productive quarters. So it's a very hectic period. We had a very interesting Black Friday last week. Numbers were showing strong customer appetite and sentiment.
There were, I mean, ticket sizes, number of transactions, number of customers who tried to benefit from different offers were 20%-25% higher than last year, so this shows that Romanian retail customers have strong confidence further, and this also encourages us to do what we do. Hopefully, we'll do it better and more efficient, and we will be continuing the discussion with a brief intro from Aurel in regard to the macroeconomic situation, and then we will go to the financial results and risk presentations. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Ömer. I will jump in presenting the Romanian macroeconomic landscape, let's say a helicopter view, despite the fact that my first few messages are somehow the same with the previous ones due to the fact that we always start with Romania and its positioning in the CE region in terms of population and GDP growth. Why it is relevant for us is that among Poland and the Czech Republic, we are the largest in terms of population, which is a main driver for consumption and obviously for GDP. In terms of GDP, we have a very strong dynamic during 2015-2023, positioning us in the top five economies around Europe. Despite the fact that during last year and this year we had a lower level of GDP increase, nevertheless, it is higher than the European average.
Talking about the European average as an opportunity, we see the real GDP per capita as being one of the drivers which will close the gap considering the three Central and Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary. And if we take into account the European 27 average, then by all means the gap is more than double in terms of real GDP per capita. This gap closing must and can be supported also by the relatively lower debt-to-GDP since Romania has slightly above 50% debt-to-GDP ratio in line with, let's say, Poland, Croatia, lower than Slovakia, for instance. In terms of inflation, we see a decline of inflation. At the end of September, we had 4.8%. It goes hand in hand with the European downward-sloping trend for inflation.
And this might also represent a stabilizing factor for the economy since usually Romania is used to higher inflationary periods and the environment, and the 4.8 begins to be a comfortable one. In terms of the banking sector, the Romanian sector, as competitors, is represented by Banca Transilvania having 20% market share before the acquisition of OTP. And the rest of the four competitors of ours have between 9%-13% market share. Some key highlights in terms of the banking sector: we have a very good liquidity coverage ratio of more than 280%. This refers to the entire market. Also, on the non-performing loan side, the ratio is 2.49, and you will see the rest of the details concerning Banca Transilvania later on, which are below this threshold.
In terms of cost-to-income ratio, the market is located at 47% at June 2024, and the return on equity is above 20%. Same strong levels for capital and equity ratio 24% and above, as well as the NPL coverage ratio 65% for the entire banking sector. Now, going towards lending and deposit growth, as well as NPL, we see a strong demand in terms of corporate loans: 7.2% and household 7.8%, which are at much higher and better levels than those compared with the European Union. Obviously, in terms of deposits, we see the same trend: 6.1% for corporate deposits and the households with an increase of more than 11%. This somehow also reflects in the NPL ratio, Romania having the second largest NPL ratio among the Central and Eastern countries, as mentioned before: Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary: 2.49%.
As for the capital adequacy ratio, we are higher than the European average, as mentioned in our previous meetings, having 21% and above for Tier 1. I will give back the floor to George for the business performance. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Aurel. Indeed, like Ömer was mentioning a little bit earlier, the bank shows a very strong performance in the first nine months of the year. This is both at the level of individual results but also at a consolidated level. At a consolidated level, of course, being helped by the fact that we have reported for the first time the entities purchased in the OTP Group in September of this year. So coming back to individual performance, net interest income increased of 32% in the year 2024 compared to last year. This is coming on the back of the increase of net interest margin of 0.37 percentage points to 3.47, as we mentioned a little bit in our presentations in the previous quarters.
You'll see later on when we analyze the trends in income, we managed to keep quite a nice and constant net interest margin throughout this period, even though we have seen fluctuations on the local market due to the good management that the bank had in terms of assets and liabilities. In terms of net fees and commissions income, an increase of 15% versus the previous year. Indeed, this is the same level of increase in consolidated level. This is coming on the back of the increased number of transactions that are routed through the bank. We'll see a little bit more details, but the good evolution encourages us for very good results until the year-end. Operating expenses, with almost a 28% increase year-on-year at the bank level and 34% increase at consolidated level.
This is reflecting, on the one hand, the one-off charge that we have this year through the tax on turnover. That is a 10% increase, 10% of that increase, so if we didn't have this, the increase in operating expenses would have been 80% in the first nine months at the individual level, and of course, at consolidated level, we do have the expenses coming from the OTP companies that are presented for the first time in the consolidated results. Coming back to our evolution in terms of net results, with RON 2.7 billion by the end of the year, we are 45% over the last year, and also, we are above the budgeted amounts. Of course, at consolidated level, with the RON 3.9 billion result reported, we have a 70% increase.
And that's reflecting also the bargaining gain from the acquisition of OTP in September, as we have detailed in our financials, but also at the beginning of the year from BCR Chișinău. Cost of risk stays at a comfortable level with 0.14%. This is a decrease versus the same period of last year. We believe that we will be, by the end of the year, slightly below the guidance that we have given for the year-end in our case, which was 60 basis points. In terms of overall evolution, total assets of the bank increased by 9.1% at the individual level. And consolidated level reflects also the new companies from OTP Group. This was driven primarily by the gross loans, which have increased by 9.1% as well.
This increase is in line with the growth of the loans on the local market, as was presented a little bit earlier by Aurel. The increase is done in, let's say, in a way that is prudent. Our NPL ratio in terms of EBA definition stays at 2% and is below what we have seen our peers reporting and averaged for the local market, which was at around 2.4% from the previous slides. At a consolidated level, loan-to-deposit ratio has increased quite nicely due to the acquisition of OTP companies with almost 4%, whereas this ratio increased also at the individual level by almost 1.6% in the first nine months of the year.
The bank is very well capitalized, with overall 26% capital ratio at the end of September, well above the average for our peers, which was staying around 24% for the same period. Now, looking at the trends in income, you see net interest income increasing at the individual level by 32%, as I mentioned. And that's due, on the one hand, to the very nice increase in terms of loans throughout the year. The management of the liabilities, where we managed to decrease and we lead the market in terms of the adjustments on the interest rate for deposits, but also due to the money market activities, where we have increased our share of interest-bearing assets due to the high liquidity that the bank has in its portfolio. Net fees and commission, the increase of 15%.
Ömer was mentioning a little bit earlier, 1.5 billion transactions passed through our bank in the first nine months of the year. And some of the details behind the transactions that happened on Black Friday were showing us that we have exceeded, I think, 400 transactions per second at a certain point in our day on Friday. So this shows that the bank is increasing both the number of clients and the number of transactions, which brings an increase in net fees and commission income. This is something that we expected, even though, as we have mentioned in previous quarters, we managed to adjust the fees and commission structure to reflect better the realities around us and to reduce or even eliminate the fees for basic services and to adjust value-added services and the fee structure according to what we see on the market.
Net trading income, the evolution of plus 4% is due to the evolution on the market, as well as net gains and losses from financial assets. I was mentioning a little bit earlier the evolution of net interest margin. You see the bank's evolution in terms of net interest margin with blue, and I was mentioning that we managed to keep quite a constant rate for net interest margin, even though we have seen the policy rate in terms of NBR, also ECB, varying quite a lot throughout this period. Of course, when we look at the income, net interest income presents almost 67% of overall revenues, with net fees and commissions almost 16%, and the rest of the types of revenue making up the rest until 100%.
In terms of OpEx, personal expenses present the highest part of the overall operating expenses, where we have an increase of 19.6%. Indeed, this is due to an alignment in terms of both number of people, skilled people in the bank, and also the salary that we pay to our employees. If you take a look, however, at the evolution of the productivity of the personnel in terms of active employees, you see that even though the number of active employees increased throughout the year, we do have an increased productivity, which is 20% if we go back over the last five years and 1% since the end of the last year. Other operating expenses, which present the biggest increase in terms of relative numbers, 53%, are reflecting, as I mentioned, almost RON 200 million in terms of turnover tax in the first nine months.
If we didn't have these operating expenses, other operating expenses would have increased by 22.3% in the year. We go further in the presentation, and we talk about the portfolio growth, and from this point on, I give the.
Thank you, George. I would say this is our third call this year, and as you may recall that in the first call, first quarter, you were mentioning that demand was low and slow, but in the second quarter, we have seen that it started picking up. In the third quarter, we have seen, actually, as mentioned earlier, a strong change in the consumer sentiment, in retail sentiment, but also corporate loans started growing or continued growing strongly. When we look at the total portfolio growth, we have seen that our loan book grew 9%, almost 6% from retail, and 11.5% from loans to companies. Loans to companies, we will enter details a bit later, but are being affected partially with the, I would say, strong investments in infrastructure coming with European Union Recovery and Resilience Funds or local programs, IMM Invest, SME Invest program.
On that land, we have seen a fast increase in the market in general in consumer loans in retail. We have been more balanced, I would say, in our approach. We wanted to focus continuously on mortgage loans, where we see more value, cross-sell opportunities, and customer loyalty. Our mortgage loans increased almost 5% as compared to 2.5% of the market, almost double the speed. We see that this demand continues with the consecutive, sorry, reference rate decreases by the National Bank of Romania, showing the trend of the monetary policy and where the interest rates are going, plus the, I would say, the need of housing and increased lifestyle or living standards of Romanian citizens. We are also happy to see that our cards portfolio has grown further, almost 10%. We reached 6.6 million cards, debit and credit, by far the market leader.
This puts a strong foothold for us in the payment systems with our vast ATM and POS network. Our deposits were also growing in line with the market trends. We were not very aggressive in the pricing. The impact you have seen also in the net interest margin change, net interest income stability and growth. We are benefiting from high liquidity already. So we didn't want to have aggressive pricing to, I would say, to decrease our bottom line. On that front, as we are the main, let's say, salary payer and pension payer of Romania, this gives us still a strong current account deposit base at zero interest rate, at zero funding cost, besides the fact that it helps us with the transactional volumes and the fact that one out of three payments in Romania are passing through BT.
In retail banking, our new production was RON 6.2 billion, quite, as I said, balanced between mortgage and mortgage loans and consumer loans, including cards. Our customer numbers had been also increasing. We are already close to 4 million customers in retail banking. And this increase, although challenged due to definitely also demographic factors, is continuing. And the good thing is that we are expecting 420,000 new customers to join us from OTP once the integration will be accomplished. SME and corporate banking new production was over RON 17.5 billion so far this year and this quarter, sorry. We started also taking over partially portfolios of other banks and also OTP. Some customers voluntarily transferring their businesses to BT as they're expecting the merger to happen. BT Go, our digital platform, exceeded 150,000 customers so far.
We are doing heavy investments there for the performance and for the new features of the BT Go. But the main aspect or the main, let's say, feature, the anchor feature being the e-invoicing, where we have issued already a few dozen thousands of invoices through BT Go, helps our small and medium-sized customers to manage their e-invoicing challenges in Romania. We also managed to tap almost RON 1.6 billion from Recovery and Resilience Funds. There are ongoing discussions in the pipeline. We see more volumes to come. Our healthcare business, our medical sector, Divizia Pentru Medici has reached almost 40% market share.
One of the positive aspects that we see in our portfolio, where we have a very strong presence in the agricultural sector, despite the, let's say, ordinance approving the moratorium, most of our customers do not opt because due to other government programs and facilities offered by BT and other financing institutions, they prefer to continue their business under business-as-usual terms. I will leave it to Cătălin here for his first presentation.
Thank you, Ömer. Thank you for having me here. Good afternoon to everybody. When coming about risk side, we will start with the credit risk part, where we can probably say that we are experiencing a very low level of the risk-cost ratio. This is on a base of good portfolio quality and also prudent risk management practice. And our estimation is that by year-end, we will stay within an adequate range of risk-cost ratio for both individual bank and consolidated level, group level. When coming about stock of provisions, we are seeing throughout the year an increase of around 7.5%. But it should be mentioned that this level is below the loan book growth, which is also on the back of the good portfolio quality.
When coming about dispersion or the distribution on the provisioning stages, what we can observe for the last period of time, we are observing a very steady distribution, so basically reflecting the provisioning levels. When coming about the underwriting standards and the NPL portfolio, what we can say is that the prudent underwriting standard that Banca Transilvania is pursuing is mirrored in the NPL ratio. However, since the beginning of the year, we saw a slight increase in the NPL ratio. This was observed also in the market. We succeeded to keep the level of the NPL ratio below the market average. Where did we see these steady increases? These were on the SME side and unsecured loans on private individual side. This is within the acceptable level and within our risk appetite.
Going further, when talking about capital position, Banca Transilvania has a very strong capital position as of September, going with a total own funds ratio at 26%, again, a level which is above the market average. This corroborated with the very strong own funds distribution of fund structure. This is kind of, we could say that this is covering any future growth that we might envisage for the upcoming period and also for any regulatory changes that might come either expected or unexpected. If we are looking to the own funds, we can say that when compared with the 2023 year-end, the own funds grew by around 24%, this showing the self-capitalization capacity of the bank.
If we move forward at the liquidity level, Banca Transilvania, on a base of its strong capital base, but also on its capacity of attracting funds from the market, is showing more than adequate liquidity ratio levels, LCR and NSFR and immediate liquidity ratios being much above than the regulatory standards and also within our risk appetite. What we can say, and this is, you will see here a few bullet points which are depicting the characteristic of the last bond issuance that we have undertook under the EMTN 2023 program, which puts us proudly in the position to say that we are in the market seen at the level of large groups, banking groups from the region and not only. If we move forward on the sustainability aspects, I would like to emphasize here a few topics which are part of our ESG strategy for now and further.
We can proudly say that we have issued some new reports, which can be seen by all the investors on our website, where you will see our efforts when coming about the ESG efforts, which are going on all angles. And I will start first with the environment, with the environmental field. And for example, just showing you some highlights from this slide, you will see that we have successfully allocated our 500 million sustainability bond with a ratio of 40-60 between green and social eligible projects. If we look to the green categories and social categories, total investment amount or loan book, you will see that this is a multiplier of the resources that we have been attracting on this field. And this is basically supporting our commitment towards ESG strategy that we have been designing.
We can also proudly say that we are the first bank in Romania which designed and opened a new unit dedicated for the people with disabilities, and here, we offered the facilities for these people in order to show and also support our commitment towards this category. We can also, you could most probably have seen also in the media the news about the anniversary of two years of our STUP community, which is linked with our subsidiary BT Mic or BT Microfinancing, which we can, and we could celebrate together with our customers and with our partners many and many achievements that we have been doing in the last period of time and also to put the basis for the future. STUP is one of, it's one of the icons of what BT is doing in this area.
As I was saying at the beginning, we can probably say that we launched the first impact and allocation report, which, together with a reputable partner, and in there, you could see some benchmarks and some figures that are showing things which are standing behind our strategy, our ESG strategy.
Going further in terms of digital, and thank you, Cătălin, we can name two super apps of ours. One is BT Pay, the other one is BT Go. The last one was already presented by Ömer. It has a very good hype in terms of legal entities, more than 150,000 already registered. And the e-factura, which is the electronic invoicing, it's a real hit in the market, being the only ones having it. For BT Pay, in terms of number, it is relevant that we reached 3.7 million customers already. We have increases in payments and also in funds transferred. And the new key features, which are relevant also for our core business, are the loan origination, because it means 100% digital personal loan sales through this app.
The second one is investment fund, the introduction of BT Asset Management offerings into the digital world, fully digitalized origination, so customer onboarding, as well as transaction sales and the sales side, the redemption side, and also the investment side for all these funds. Along with also what Ömer mentioned with the integration of OTP Asset Management, we truly believe that also through the apps and digitalization of the capital markets, investment funds, brokerage, pension funds, and so on, we can increase the non-core business of Banca Transilvania, obviously through its subsidiaries. Going further on, I will switch to either George or Ömer for the financial group of ours.
Thank you, Aurel. BT Group overview. I will reserve most of the time allocated to talk a little bit more about OTP integration, just mentioning a little bit the most important things that happened in the first nine months for our other companies. I think it's important to mention BT Asset Management, joint runner for the EMTN, sorry, BT Capital Partners for the EMTN bond issue for Romgaz. BT Asset Management had the investments part, including BT Pay, which we helped that increase the sale of investment products. In terms of BT Leasing, they are moving forward with the integration of OTP Leasing, which is their biggest project for the last part of the year. BT Mic celebrates two years of STUP. BT Pensii, even though they do have negative results, we can mention that they are growing quite handsomely.
In September, for example, 40% of the new participants to the optional pension plans choose BT Pensii as their pension fund, with 24% assets under management increase in the year. Salt Bank, the other company which has a negative contribution to the overall results, is on growth path as well. Salt Bank, since opening up the new app to the clients, already has 275,000 clients. We can say that the profile of the clients that Salt Bank has is very encouraging with young people, people from big cities. The usage of the app shows that actually the app is used for day-to-day activities, which will ensure the future consolidation of the usage in the future. Now, coming back to OTP, OTP, you've seen some of the highlights in terms of the result that we have shown. There is a separate note in the financials.
I want to point out, bargaining gain of RON 675 million reported for the first time in Q3 at consolidated level. This is a value that has been calculated and is prone to variation in the last months of the year while we finalized fair valuation reports for the entities. This is recognized only starting with September in our financials at consolidated level, and it's non-taxable. So there is no issue like we had in the past, previously with other acquired businesses. Since then, the legislation was clarified, non-taxable revenue. Now, when you talk about how did we get to this amount, we have some details presented in the presentation. I will not go into the details. If you have questions, we're happy to answer them.
But what I want to point out is the other impact of OTP and the fact that OTP has a big contribution to the overall both position and results of the bank with 7% of the consolidated total assets. And if you take a look at the P&L, leaving aside the bargaining gain, we do have a 4.2 contribution to overall results if we were considering the acquisition as taking part at the beginning of the year 2024. The two months in the year since we have closed the business, the two months in Q3, we do have RON 92 million contribution. What's the impact in capital? We were asked often this question. So if you take away the bargaining gain, there is a negative impact of a decrease of almost 2.4%. It's well within our guidance when we were asked before how we expect this to be.
But if you take also into consideration the bargaining gain, we will have an impact in CET ratio that is less than 1%. Loan to deposits increased, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, with 3%. And also earnings per share impact is accretive. We do have an increase of 0.8 in terms of earnings per share in following up the acquisition of OTP. I want to clarify one thing because we've started already to receive some questions, and I want to put it out for everybody. Since we will not be doing the consolidation, the merger with OTP in this year, the impact of the bargaining gain will be seen in the P&L only at consolidated level. We will benefit from the impact of the bargaining gain at the level of the bank in terms of the equity available next year once the merger is finalized.
But we will not be seeing this bargaining gain in the P&L of the individual entity because that will happen next year. Having said that, I think we've reached the Q&A sessions, and I give the word to Ömer.
We could. Thank you very much. I guess, perhaps we should also allocate some time for Q&A. We have some questions already posted at the website on the app. We will ask Diana to help us to read the questions, and we will try to answer. In case we will not be able to answer any or skip any by mistake, please come back to Diana and her team.
Thank you. First question comes from Swiss Capital, Daniela Mundru. Beyond 2024, how do we expect the net interest margin to evolve over the medium term at bank level? How do you foresee lending activity evolving across the sector? Should we continue to anticipate high single-digit annual growth rate? That was the first question about the business activity. In terms of Basel IV requirements, effective 1 January 2025, in the previous conference, the bank mentioned that it does not anticipate any impact on its capital ratios. Do you still maintain this position? And finally, the last question, would it be reasonable to anticipate a higher cash dividend payout ratio from the 2024 profit?
Thank you, Daniela. We are, I would say, although we are now in the period of drafting or finalizing our budget for next year. I don't want to give a, let's say, misguidance with some numbers declared, but at least what I can say is that even if some of the results are not as we would like it to be, personally or individually. Still all the elections around the world create an environment of less uncertainty. On the other hand, we have strong results, and we are quite optimistic about next years of Romanian economy, economic growth, so what I can tell you is that in terms of percentage allocation, we don't see any reason to decrease the percentage of profits allocated as dividends.
If there will be further, let's say, good surprises or stronger results, we don't want to aggressively change our policy because we are a high-growth institution. As you said, yes, also answering your question, we are expecting the last quarter of this year to be at least as strong as the third quarter. And next year, unless there will be any black swan events, hopefully in a more peaceful geopolitical environment, we might have also a good opportunity to grow, I would say, high single digits, or maybe we'll even touch double-digit growth. When we will announce our budget in a few months, you will see how we foresee our stance in the market as well.
I will take the questions on the risks side on risk cost and Basel IV impact. Risk cost ratio, we are estimating to still stay at a low level when compared with the market or with a normalized risk cost ratio. And we might see maybe a slight upward trend, but still will be within the guidance. So we don't expect any unpleasant surprises on the risk cost side. When coming about Basel IV, we still keep our opinion and our estimation that we will see a neutral impact. However, you should also see this in our capital ratio, which is at a level which can absorb also unexpected events in case that this will go out of the implementation of Basel IV accord.
Okay. Next set of questions come from Miguel Diaz, Wood & Company. How many cuts from National Bank of Romania are you anticipating in 2025? And what is the trajectory you see for the net interest margin? Second question, have bargaining gains already been recognized in capital at the end of third quarter 2024? This already includes the first half profits. Is that correct? And last question, any one-off costs related to the integration to be booked this year?
I will try to answer, George. You can complete if I miss anything. So as regard to net interest margin, we think that with a maybe slight decrease of 20-25 basis points, we will still deliver net interest margin over 300 basis points. We are comfortable saying that. It's a bit difficult to guess now the monetary policy decisions because there might be some changes starting with the U.S. So we don't expect very aggressive rate cuts. Actually, we were saying this also at the beginning of this year that there won't be very frequent rate cuts by the National Bank of Romania. We maintain more or less this opinion. Most probably, the reference rate will remain above 5% at the end of the next year.
But I would say, as I said now, all the central banks around the world are settling down after Fed's potential decisions and changes in U.S. policy. Sorry if I missed. There was a question regarding the.
Bargaining gain.
Bargaining gain. Yeah, bargaining gain, as George was mentioning, it is, I would say, at the consolidated level. It's not booked as BT individual profits. It's not included in our numbers that we present as our individual financial data. It will be recognizable only after the full merger of two entities hopefully next year. But definitely, they impact consolidated numbers, and they give us some comfort in order to build our business plans because at the end, it is group's equity, group's profitability.
There was another question on the integration cost, and then indeed, we can say that we started to book part of the integration cost in the P&L of OTP Bank this year because, like Ömer mentioned a little bit earlier, the program is already ongoing, and we have the first 100 days of integration with OTP already done. We expect most of the expenses to be booked at a level of OTP, maybe this year, majority of them, part of them next year. What is important to note for the investors is that whatever the P&L of OTP will be for the next months of the year, next year will become our P&L in the year 2025.
This is something that we need to keep in mind that once we merge the entities, whenever the merger will take place, we will put together the P&L for the new combined entity, including the P&L of the OTP Bank until the merger date.
Next question comes from Odir Bagawo, Consilium Investments. What are the main changes done to maintain net interest margin at high level? Are they only addressing the deposit base or also adjusting the loan book?
Odir, also I guess you were asking about if it is what is the sustainable net interest margin. But the thing is that we have quite a strong margin, I would say, at about 300 basis points. We think that it's sustainable, maintainable. Our actions are very much the same. Actually, we didn't invent anything very recently. We had been investing a lot in the payment systems that we have in the cards business, salary accounts, current accounts development at low yields. Our network is a huge attraction. I mean, although many banks are avoiding physical networks, we think that for customer trust, confidence, and deposit relationship, it's also very important. So we are addressing on both sides. I mean, on the one hand, we are very careful. I mean, we were the first bank in 2021 after the war started.
We were the first bank in Romania having the lowest loan-to-deposit ratio. We were the first bank to increase our deposit interest rates because we thought that we guessed well where the market will go. We are very careful about our liquidity position, liquid assets. But on the other hand, we don't chase only high-interest lending products. That's why also we were not as aggressive as the rest of the market in consumer loans. And we preferred safer and also, how to say, much more cross-sell platform-based mortgage loans. I guess actions are all around. Our treasuries also had been performing very well, especially in the last couple of years in terms of liquidity management, portfolio management.
That's why we don't focus on only one part, but also our business model itself, the phygital model, online lending, but also on-site network lending and deposit activity, account opening activity helps us to maintain this strong margin.
Next question is from Simon Nellis, Citi Research. When do you expect SALT to be break-even?
That's a good question. We are expecting SALT to reach break-even only, I would say. I mean, our colleagues are very ambitious. They are trying to do it. They say that we may reach monthly break-even at the end of next year, sorry, at the end of 2025. I would say that first quarter of 2026. We have a lot to invest there. The good thing is that we have 275,000 customers, and it's growing. New products, new services will come in. But now, at this moment, we are in the investment phase in the applications and the people. We are very, I mean, you have seen it's only 300 people, but they are expensive or valuable 300 people in terms of salary expenses.
So, I would say our first target there is that we want to learn, and we want to be relevant for the customers, and also we want to grow the customer numbers. At the existing level, although we don't like to see any subsidiary losing money, the investment or the losses they make are affordable for us.
Question from Jennifer Passmore, HSBC. Do you have a target figure of synergies or cost savings that can be gained from the combination of BT Group and the OTP companies? And in addition to that, does the acquisition of OTP Romania change the outlook for loan growth? Post the acquisition uplift to the group?
I mean, thank you, Jennifer. We have also said, I guess, in the last conference that, I would say, from the portfolio or business that we acquired from OTP, we are expecting at least 60% lower cost synergies. But also we will be knowing and testing the customers more, definitely, as we have done with Volksbank, Bancpost, Idea Bank in Romania. We are not, in our calculations, we are not very, I would say, aggressive or excessively positive about cross-sell opportunities to OTP customers. But it will be also, I would say, a good opportunity to grow on the revenue side. In any case, as you know, it's a very good placement of our liquidity and excess capital so far, as it is seen also by the numbers.
As for the outlook for loan growth, maybe it was putting some pressure and ambitions on our network and business lines. The years that we had integrations, we had also usually the highest organic growth. I would say because maybe the engine is running, everybody is very well trained, the opportunities are being well addressed. We are not acquiring banks or portfolios or leasing companies to compensate for what we cannot do. Both we see are independent of each other, although they put pressure on each other in terms of project management. The numbers that I said, I would say, high single-digit or maybe next year low double-digit loan growth numbers are going to remain, and they are remaining on the organic growth.
Coming back to Miguel from Wood, an additional question around digital initiatives. Is it already possible to take on a mortgage loan 100% through the applications?
I would answer this also. It's our pain point, Miguel. I mean, you found what we cannot do. Unfortunately, also due to lack of digitalization at the local administration's level and land registry, we are not there yet. I mean, at BT, you can open an account, you can get a consumer loan, a card, credit card fully online, but mortgage loan, we are not there yet, and I don't expect it to be fully online, 100% online, neither next year.
Next question comes from Raiffeisen Bank International, Ruslan Gadeev, concerning the OTP acquisition. Being formerly part of OTP Group, the acquired bank had significant related party funding. Can you please clarify what happened to these funds upon the acquisition? It is right to assume that these were repaid upon the deal?
I will take this question. The answer is quite straight. We have been taking over the funding, and after the merger, this will be part, basically. This will not be anymore a question about funding because this portfolio will be part of BT and will have to comply with the requirements of Banca Transilvania.
At this point, we don't have any further questions that we haven't addressed. I will turn to management for the final closing remarks.
Thank you very much for joining us, listening to us, either throughout our presentation or at the presentation which our colleagues already posted at the investor relations page on our website. If you need more clarity or if you have any observations, please contact us. Our colleagues will try to answer all the questions or try to address necessary information immediately. For those of you who had been with us, following us, commenting, putting questions, we are very grateful because you had been offering us the best consultancy that we could have. I guess the quarters, years to come will be slightly different as compared to last years. But now, at the current position that we have, liquidity, capital, market, how to say, brand image and market positioning, I think we have all the ingredients to do more of the right things.
Hopefully, we will go through this journey all together. Wherever you are, whatever you do, we wish you all the best with your endeavors, and looking forward to meeting you either this week at our Investors' Day or later in our next video conference. Thank you very much.
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