Earnings Call: Q2 2021

Aug 3, 2021

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Itaú Unibanco Holding conference call to discuss 2021 second quarter result. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Questions can be submitted via telephone by pressing asterisk one, or via WhatsApp mobile app by scanning the QR code provided, or WhatsApp desktop app through the hyperlink provided. If you should require assistance during the call, please press the star key followed by zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and broadcasted live on the investor relations website at www.itau.com.br/investor-relations. A slide presentation is also available on this site. Before proceeding, let me mention that forward-looking statements are being made under the safe harbor of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual performance could differ materially from that anticipated in any forward-looking comments as a result of macroeconomic conditions, market risks, and other factors. With us today in this conference call is São Paulo are Mr. Milton Maluhy Filho, CEO, Alexsandro Broedel, CFO, and Renato Lulia Jacob, Group Head of Investor Relations and Market Intelligence. First, Mr. Milton Maluhy will comment on 2021 second quarter result. Afterwards, management will be available for a question and answer session. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Milton Maluhy. Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us in our second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Well, first of all, I would like to emphasize here the recurring managerial net income. We reached BRL 6.5 billion, which represents an increase of 2.3% versus the previous quarter. The recurring ROE increased 40 basis points in the quarter, and we finished with 18.9% this quarter. I would say and highlight, first of all, a growth of 4.6% of our Brazilian loan portfolio. The credit card book rebounded after a weak first quarter that was affected by the new wave of the pandemic, which translated into lower economic activity and consumption in the period. The payroll-linked loans accelerated and grew 5.5% in the quarter. Now, we believe that this portfolio has a big growth potential, and I will talk about that a little bit further. Mortgage had another very strong performance in origination, which translated into 12.8% as you can see, growth. The stronger credit portfolio translated into a more vigorous growth in the financial margin with clients as it increased 3.9% in the quarter. Credit quality metrics continued to boast very positive trends. The highlight was the NPL 90 days in Brazil, which ended the quarter at 3.6%. It's a decrease of 30 basis points. We also saw an important recovery of our fees and insurance revenues, mainly driven by credit card issuance and capital markets activities. We will present more detail throughout the presentation. Revenue growth, coupled with our cost control, brought our efficiency ratio in Brazil to 42.2%. It was a drop of 100 basis points and is the lowest level in years. We added 4.7 million customers through our digital channels just this quarter. It's an important figure. It's an important growth when we compare to last quarter of this year, was a growth of 27%. When we talk about each, the client acquisition continued to come at a strong pace, as we anticipated. We reached 7.8 million customers at the end of the quarter, and the good news is that out of the 2.6 million customers we added in the quarter, 90% didn't have a current account in the bank. We are attracting a young client base and customers that we were not successfully engaging lately. Moving to next slide 3. I will talk a little bit about our strategy in the retail business. First of all, I'd like to highlight that this is a Project 2030, which is the most important and transformational one happening at the bank's retail unit. Our commitment here is to completely change the customer experience by redefining the value proposition. This is being done across all retail segments, from the traditional retail to our high net worth segment, Personnalité. We expect to have three-quarters already implemented by year-end, and 100% of this by the end of 2022. There is a good ambition here, and we are evolving very fast, implementing all the initiatives. The project had already been under development for some time with a phased structure, but we are prioritizing the main deliveries already for this year. We expect to capture a relevant part of the project value in the short and medium term. I will release more figures about this in the future. We have the ambition to increase 4 times the sales through digital channels by 2025, and this revenue should represent 50% of the total revenues of our retail operations. We are reorganizing the in-person services, unifying the commercial and operational teams, while we are remodeling our brick-and-mortar branches, creating the concept of hub and satellite branches, and redefining the role of each branch, in each micro region. All of this with the aim of creating a better experience and a simple journey for our customers. We have already seen a positive impact of our strategy. I would like to share with you a few figures. We had a 23% increase in the number of accounts opened over the last 2 years, with 54% of new accounts being opened 100% digitally. A greater penetration of credit products for these new customers. In the phygital and omni-channel concept, we have originated BRL 9 billion of business. We call here O2O, it's the online to offline connections. It's important to emphasize that this was entirely by choice of our customers, as they could easily have completed the transactions entirely offline or online. 58% of the sale of new products to individuals were made through digital channels in the second quarter, as you can see. The new investment advisor, we aim to have, by the end of 2022, more than 100 investment offices with over 1,500 investment specialists. A good part of the offices will be established by the end of this year. In the phygital concept, we will bring a whole range of digital services and solutions even to the clients of physical branches, so the client always have someone available. This will complement the offer we have nowadays on our bricks and mortar branches. We understand that the branch network is an important competitive advantage, and recent studies show that countries where digitalization has advanced much more than here, have a density of branches per 100,000 inhabitants greater than in Brazil. We still believe there is a lot of room to create value to our clients through our physical branches. Going to next slide. I mentioned the growth we had in the quarter, for this payroll-linked loan. What I would like to emphasize, that we have two main publics here, three main portfolios. What we call here INSS, it's a very relevant one. It's the pensioners public. We have the private public, mainly coming from the payrolls we have from the corporate clients, and we also have the public market, which, as you can see, is the lower segment, is the most irrelevant segment for us nowadays. It's the most relevant segment, in the market, and here we see a huge opportunity to grow the business. As you can see, we own the bidding process, to cater payroll services for the employees of State of Minas Gerais. If you look only the amount in BRL they have in payroll loans, BRL 8 billion, it's more than BRL 4.6 billion that we have outstanding. Just to give you a figure, when we look to the private and the pensioners public, we have around 25% of market share in both markets, and we have less than 2% market share in the public market. Here is where we see an important place where we can grow the business and bring a very good portfolio and enhance the margin for the bank. Huge opportunity here in this segment. Moving to the next slide. I would like to share with you not only the quarterly evolution of our SMEs business, but also how this platform evolved throughout the last couple of years. As you know, it's a very broad segment that range from small companies that are served by our branch network, to medium-sized companies that are served by our wholesale bank structure. We more than doubled the loan portfolio in this segment over the last 4 years, as you can see. We came out from a portfolio of BRL 60 billion to BRL 133 billion, and we are the market leaders in Brazil. The client satisfaction also grew accordingly as NPS, the Net Promoter Score, increased 20 points over the last two years and reached the mark of over 65 points. This is a result of a sustainable model focused on customer satisfaction. We are also looking to offer products and services that go beyond traditional financial products, seeking to create an ecosystems of partnerships to meet all the needs of our customers. In this context, we launched a platform that is roughly translated as My Business, and in partnership with Omie, a tech company that offers a best-in-class ERP solutions to SMEs, we started to offer business management tool for our clients. Our ambition for 2025 is to grow the customer base by 50% and to increase the results of this segment by 70%. Moving to next slide, talking about sustainable development agenda. Two years ago, you remember, we launched a target of distributing, disbursing BRL 100 billion by 2025 in credit operations aimed at a positive impact sector such as renewable energy, infrastructure, health, and education. A couple of weeks ago, we updated our ambition. Our goal is now to allocate BRL 400 billion to sustainable development by 2025. This involves not only credit operations, but also the structure of operations in the capital market. We have already structured BRL 14.3 billion in ESG-labeled transactions, in the capital markets with the ESG seal. We have already granted almost BRL 110 billion to positive impact sectors as ESG retail products, for example. Now moving to next slide, credit portfolio. There's some information I would like to share. First of all, our individuals portfolio grew 7% in the quarter. As I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, the credit card portfolio is already showing a good recovery, with a growth of 6.7% in the quarter. Given our relevance in the product, this already indicates the good momentum of the country's economic activity. Personal loans growth was more modest at 1.2% in the quarter, but the most important thing is the dynamic within this portfolio, which is very important for the financial margin. As you can see here in the lower right corner, we show the evolution of the average outstanding of each product that make up personal loans. Personalized credit, which contains a portion of loans that were reprofiled over the past year, dropped 6.9% in the quarter, while unsecured loans grew 15.6% in the quarter, and it's already higher than last year. The average overdraft balance grew 3.4% in the quarter, but is still almost 20% lower than in the same period of last year. We understand that both overdraft and unsecured loans have great growth potential and consequently, shall continue with the positive trends of the coming quarters. Payroll-linked loans and mortgage continued to display a strong performance, as I previously mentioned. Credit for SME grew 3.4% in the quarter, and large companies portfolio grew 2.8% in the quarter and 10.6% in the last 12 months, with a lot of emphasis of the corporate bonds portfolio, which is an alternative that our clients use for the funding needs. Our loans in Latin America were negatively impacted by the FX variation, with the sole reason behind the 11.7% decrease in the quarter. The bank's total loan portfolio, adjusted for FX variation, grew 5% in this quarter and 13.8% year-over-year. This expressive performance was beyond what we originally forecast for 2021 in the beginning of the year. I'll tell you a little bit more when we go through the guidance. Finally, I highlight once again the origination of the mortgage and vehicle financing portfolios. Both products came in quite strong, again, with origination of BRL 12.3 billion and BRL 8.2 billion, respectively, in the period. As I mentioned last quarter, the NPS of mortgage portfolio was negatively impacted as we were not ready for the unprecedented demand for our product. We have since restructured the product operation and have already not only seen a significant seven-point global NPS improvement in just 1 quarter, but also we reached 51 points in the mortgage transaction NPS score in June. The transaction NPS is important, and it measures the pulse of the operation almost in real time. In this case, it already shows the improvements that we made, so we expect improvement in the global NPS with time. When we look to vehicle financing, the NPS reached a very high level of 78 points, which demonstrates that we have a very well-structured operation focused on customer experience. Moving to next slide, is slide 8. The good news is that we have seen an inflection in the NIM, both in the consolidated figures and in Brazil. The core of NII accelerated this quarter, as anticipated, with an increase of BRL 600 million. This was due mainly to the growth in the average balance of our credit portfolio by a richer credit mix, and also by a higher number of calendar days. This effect was partially offset by a reduction in the spread of some of our individual loans, basically due to widening of the interest curve and temporary delay in passing through this effect in our loan interest rates. This should be normalized in the coming quarters. The remuneration of our working capital, as you can see, presented a small growth due to the higher interest rate, but it was partially offset by the reduction in the average balance as a result of the XP's spin-off. Moving to slide 9. Talking about the financial margin with the market, it is important to say that we had a very good level in this quarter, BRL 2 billion, but it was a decrease when we compare to the outstanding performance we had on the first quarter. This was basically due to the margin with the market of our other operations in Latin America, which returned to a more normalized level after an extraordinary 1st quarter. As for the Brazilian margin with the market, we were able to reproduce the good performance seen in the beginning of the year. Now, moving to next slide. Credit card. We repositioned our credit card shelf with a new campaign and portfolio simplification, 1 card for each type of client. As an example, Click is a credit card with no annual fee, but which offers the possibility for the customer to choose to access our rewards programs. If they want, for the acquisition, for example, of another product, they can choose and pay separately. The Samsung card has been a sales success since it was launched, with unique conditions for the acquisition of Samsung devices, and the credit card, which has a level of customer satisfaction and user experience in line or even better than what we see from new competitors. Just to give you a few figures, we issued 1.3 million cards in June alone, which means that we more than doubled card issuances when compared to March this year. It's important to highlight that 75% of these cards were issued to non-current account holders. It's a very relevant number. 51% of the sales were made entirely through digital channels. The NPS, as you can see here, is at 69 points. Our credit cards have a 60% market share in the most important digital wallets like Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and Apple Pay, and this is very relevant for the stickiness of the client in the long term, and for the lifetime value of the client as well. We reached 35.6 million credit cards and 30.6 million debit cards. It's a growth when compared to 2020. Also, it's important to highlight, as you can see in the chart here in the right corner, we grew 8.2% in the quarter in the transaction volume, but we see an important growth when compared to 2020. Don't forget, and I think no one will, that we had a very depressed base to compare in 2020. Moving to the next slide, when we talk about fees and insurance, I would like to highlight a few topics. First of all, credit and debit, and as I just mentioned, revenues grew 6% in the quarter, mainly due to our card issuance operation. This is a result not only of the recovery of the economy activity, but also of a new positioning in the product, as I just mentioned in my previous slide. Asset management grew 5.9% in the quarter, driven by better performance fees. We have had very strong quarters in investment banking with a growth of 12.3% in this quarter. It's worth mentioning that we included in this line our stake in XP Investimentos equity income. We do the gross-up, of the profit of XP. As of May 31st, after the approval of the spinoff by the Federal Reserve, we no longer account for this equity income. In other words, we have a month less of this result in this quarter, and the next quarter will have the full effect. Still in investment banking, we highlight our leadership position in all the operations products from M&A to DCM and ECM, equity capital markets, as you can see in the right side of the chart. In ECM, we beat our record with 38 operations in the first half of this year. In M&A, we had a volume of BRL 145 billion and 23 operations in which we participated in the semester. Moving to next slide, talking about credit quality. It's important to mention that our credit quality KPIs continue to paint a benign picture of our operations. Cost of credit grew in the quarter, but it's worth remembering that last quarter we had rating upgrade for some clients in large companies, which resulted in reversals of provisions in this segment, which were not repeated this quarter. When we look to the NPL, 15 to 90 days, I would like to draw your attention to the deterioration of the LatAm portfolio NPL ratio. This is related to a specific exposure of a client in the region, but the risk is booked in Brazil. This operation is 100 provisioned on the portion not covered by guarantee. We currently don't have any concern with this exposure, nor we expect to have additional negative impacts on our P&L in the coming quarters. It's worth noting that the short-term delinquency ratios of the individuals and SMEs portfolios in Brazil showed important reductions in the quarter, and the loan portfolio large companies continues under control at historical low levels. The 90 days NPL ratio continued to show good quality, especially the individual's portfolio, where not only the 90 days NPL ratio continues to decrease and reached, as you can see, the lowest level in our history. Also the NPL formation of this portfolio showed a nominal decline in the period despite portfolio growth in recent quarters. Moving to slide 13, talking about non-interest expenses. The first quarter usually benefits from seasonal effects on personal expenses, so some growth is always expected in the second quarter. Naturally, this year was not different and as a result, expenses in Brazil grew 1.2% in the quarter. It's important to highlight the 2.7 reduction in administrative expenses. When you look at the year-to-date performance, you will observe that the expenses in Brazil grew 0.8% year-over-year, despite the 8.3 accumulated inflation, measured by the IPCA, in the same period. The negative trends in Latin America were largely due to the FX variation. All the banks have their own efficiency programs. Our efficiency ratio in Brazil reached 42.7, as I mentioned previously, which is the lowest level since 2015, and certainly one of the best in our history. Despite this good performance, we believe there is still a lot of opportunities for further improvement in our efficiency ratios, not only due to our cost management, but also due to the potential for revenue growth. Naturally, our continuous investments in technology are, and will continue to be great enablers of this agenda. At the bottom, we segregate the bank's core costs and investments to show that we are not jeopardizing the bank's future. The objective is accelerate investment, in the bank's transformation, business franchise, digital transformation, and increased commercial strength. The gains from our efficiency program more than offset this increase. This is the dynamic we are pursuing. In the end, the increase in expenses was related to greater volume of transaction and business activity of the period. In Latin America, as I said, this growth is entirely related to exchange rate variation. All of our operations in the region are carrying out, as I mentioned, their pro-efficiency programs. Moving to next slide 14. I'd like to go a little bit further in our technology modernization program. For us, technology indicators are a consequence of a strategy to modernize our entire legacy. Our clients' migration project is not simply a copy and paste of our monolithic SIM systems to put them on the cloud. Perhaps this could bring some short-term cost efficiency, but it's not the transformation that we are aiming for and is not our objective here. Our journey is to modernize the bank's platform, bring in a series of advantages in terms of efficiency, and getting more agility in offering new products, services, and features. Every time we say that X percent of our systems are in the cloud, please understand that I mean that they are both modernized and in the cloud. This means moving away from the current monolithic system structure and moving towards a component size, architecture based on microservices, improving the time to market, while increasing the frequency of deployments of new features and updates. There were a record-breaking 6,700 changes in the first semester alone, an increase of 151% against last year. As previously mentioned, our ambition is to have 50% of these 3,800 services modernized and on the cloud by the end of 2022. All of new products and platforms are both born this way, as was the case with íon, as you can see here, each and the credit card and Samsung credit cards, which already run in the cloud. Our Pix pipeline was also born in the cloud. Our clients' transactions already represent 20% of all the volumes transaction throughout Pix in Brazil, with almost 100% availability. We had only a few minor issues until now. Moving to next slide, talking about capital. We practically reached the level of the bank's capital appetite with its 13.5 of Tier 1 capital, which was composed by 1.6% of AT1 and 11.9 of CET1. Moving to slide 16. We had, and this is the main message I would like to share with you. Sometimes we forget the comparison base due to 2020, and I would like to share with you, comparing the first semester of this year with the first semester of 2019. Therefore, it's important to compare our current results. Revenues rebounded and are already showing a good growth over 2019. Remembering that we had two main effects, negative effect or impact throughout this period. One was due to the overdraft limitation in terms of rates we could charge from our clients. The other one was the reduction on the interest rate in Brazil that impact a few lines of business of the bank. It has a negative impact as well, even though we were able to rebound and to recover those losses throughout the period. When we look to non-interest expenses, it grew less than 1% despite the growth of our operation and the accumulated inflation of the period. This is even more explicit in our operation in Brazil, which had a BRL 12.4 reduction in expenses in the period when adjusted by the period's inflation. This has resulted in better efficiency and higher our pre-tax net income, as you can see. Moving up to the last slide, I would highlight that due to the bank's performance in the first half of the year, better macroeconomic projections, and also, as a result, our best estimate for the second half of this year, we changed some of our expectations for 2021, where the ranges were not a reflection of our estimates. We revised the loan portfolio guidance upwards, which is now growing between 8.5%-11.5% in the consolidated book and growing between 12.5%-15.5% in Brazil. Naturally, this brings a positive outlook for our financial margins with clients, but we understand that the original ranges still accommodate our basic scenario for the rest of the year. We also increased the guidance for margin with the market, which is now from BRL 6.5 billion-BRL 8 billion in the consolidated P&L and from BRL 3.9 billion-BRL 5.4 billion in Brazil. We also revised our credit cost expectation, in this case, downwards due to the good performance of the credit quality of our operations. I would like to emphasize, in the credit side, that those expectations here don't take into consideration any reversal or consumption of the provisions we made with COVID-19 last year. That means that we are having a very strong performance in the portfolio as a whole. We still have the BRL 40 billion, which is the reprofiled portfolio that we have in the balance sheet that requires caution and attention. We have seen good figures since the beginning. Also, I would like to highlight. Maybe it's a question that could arise. When we look to the financial margin with clients, we haven't changed the guidance, but it's important to say that we have a 400 basis points range from 3%-7%. We were seeing something much more close to the bottom of the range when we were having the discussions. Now we see that we can deliver a financial margin with clients much more closer to the top of the range. That means that the range still accommodates our best expectations in terms with margin with clients. We see the coming quarters with a positive trend, and I believe we'll be able to deliver this growth. We didn't change the guidance, only because it still fits inside the range. We didn't want to make any cosmetic issue here, if the range accommodates our best expectation. This is basically that. Now, I will open for you for questions. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press the star key, followed by the 1 key on your touchtone phone now. The questions will be limited to 2 per participant. If at any time you would like to remove yourself from the questioning queue, please press star 2. Our first question comes from Mario Pierry with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Good morning, everybody. Congratulations on your results. Milton, I have two questions, and both of them are related then to your guidance. As you mentioned, right, you are now more comfortable with margin with clients growing closer to the 6.5% for the year. Doing the math, right, it implies that your net interest income with clients has to average about BRL 18 billion the second half of the year. This means growth of almost 15% year-on-year. Can you give us why you feel so comfortable that you can grow at a much faster pace going forward? Is it because of the mix of your loan book is improving? Is it because of high rate environment? Is it a combination? Is there any reason why you wouldn't be able to sustain such elevated growth going to next year? The first question is related to margins and why you're so comfortable with growth accelerating so much. The second question is on your expenses, right? You show the slide where your expenses are growing 3.5% year-on-year, in the first half of the year. Your guidance is for -2% to +2%. You're already above your range, and you have in the second half of the year, you have the salary negotiations, right, with the union in Brazil. Normally we see increases of inflation plus 1% or inflation plus 2%, that would imply that personnel expenses second half of the year should be growing almost 10%. I would like to get more color then, why do you think that you can still meet your guidance for expenses? Thank you. Thank you, Mario. Thank you. Good questions. Well, first of all, in terms of margin with clients, as you know, we had a period, in the past of mainly, I would say 4-5 quarters declining the margin with client. In this last quarter, we had an evolution in the margin with client and the previous quarter, we were much more in line with the previous one. That's where we stopped decreasing the margin with clients. I think you went through part of the answer, which is the mix, which is relevant for this margin growth. As you see, last year we had a huge growth in the large corporate client segment, and we had, I would say, a depressed growth on the retail portfolio. This was self-inflicted somehow with the risk appetite throughout the pandemic. Also we had a migration of our portfolio to what we call the Travessia, which was the program that we made for our clients to go through the crisis. That meant that we made important reliefs in terms of the rates we were charging from the client. Also we gave much more time and terms for those clients to repay their debt. This had a huge impact in our margin as well. I think there are two main effects here. One, it's the base of comparison, because we had a depressed year last year in terms of margin with clients. This year, we see a better grow in the retail and the SMEs, even though we still are growing faster in the guaranteed products, as auto loans and also the mortgage. We have been seeing a good recovery of the clean credit since this quarter. We have a good expectation, and we believe we can deliver a good, a decent growth in the coming quarters. I'm positive about the margin. That's why we didn't change here the range, but this is why I'm positioning in terms of geographic, that we should be closer to the top of the range, better than what we expected when we released the guidance. It's very important to have this in mind. This is our best expectation. We've been very active on the commercial areas. We've been very active on the retail side. We have a good expectation that we are capable to deliver a good growth with good margins and good credit quality. This is the assumption that we have today. I hope we deliver that, of course. Don't forget that we still have a range from three to seven. We hope to be much closer to the top of the range, but the range is there to accommodate, if somehow we are not able to deliver that. That's why we still have a range for this figure. Okay? For this line. Talking about the guidance of costs, it's important to say that the most relevant impact here that we had on the non-interest expenses was the devaluation. That's why we delivered the 3.5%. When you look only Brazil, 0.8. You are right that we have GSIJU, that we have to recognize the inflation and even more on the negotiations that we have with the union. It's important to say that we keep very straight here, very focused, in our efficiency program. We do believe that we are able to deliver the guidance the way we are presenting here. Of course, the effects may change or may bring some impact, but don't forget that when we look to our P&L of the bank, even if we have any negative effect of the devaluation in our cost, we have, on the opposite side, a good impact, a positive impact in our revenues. The balance sheet of the bank net is positive in effects. I'm disconsidering somehow a little bit the effects, planning that the core cost of the bank will reduce in the coming quarters, and we will keep the efficiency agenda very, very strong, considering that we have some bad wind coming. This is our goal here, to overcome those bad winds, I would say like that. Okay, we're still positive that we can deliver the guidance for costs as well. Okay. Milton Maluhy Filho, very clear. Just if I can follow up on your loan mix, why do you expect faster growth in retail and SMEs? Can you just give us the color of what you're expecting then? If you break down your loan book between SMEs, retail, and large corporates, what is the implied growth in each segment that you're forecasting? Mario, we usually don't deliver, I would say, guidance and the breakdown of our credit portfolio expectation. I think the figures you have, you can see on a consolidated basis. I believe that we should see still an acceleration the retail business. This is what we are seeing. On the corporate, it will depend on market condition, especially on that capital market. We may be able to put on book a few good credits, in terms of credit quality and also in terms of return on capital. We may be able to deliver and to sell to the market if there is a new window of opportunity. It's hard to give a good guidance on that. Let's see how will be the market and the volatility that we will face in the coming months. I would say good pace on the retail and the pace on the wholesale will depend on market conditions. Our next question comes from Jorge Kuri with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, everyone, and congrats on the great quarter. I have two questions, please. The first one is, again, going back to the guidance on growth versus NII and I guess I'll ask the question a different way. Your new guidance on loan growth 8.5%-11.5%. You said you left the guidance for NII. Sustained sustained as you thought that the range encompasses the numbers that you think are reasonable. I'm assuming you're thinking maybe of 6.5%, which is the high end of the guidance. The part that's a bit odd, and I guess that's what I'm asking, is why would NII grow below credit growth in a year in which Selic rates are going up, which is going to help your asset-sensitive balance sheet and your margins historically have moved roughly in line with the direction of Selic. We're actually going to see a pretty significant increase in Selic rates, not a modest one. Second, you are growing your loan book quite rapidly, so your loan-to-asset ratio should improve year-on-year. Within loans, you're growing in the high-margin loans. You're growing credit cards very rapidly, auto loans, SME loans. It would seem that this is a year in which your NII should grow, maybe faster than credit growth because of the things that I said. I wanted to understand what drives your existing guidance to be below that. My second question is, your effective tax rate, your guidance 34.5%-36.5%. I wanted to see if you have a preliminary view on what will the effective tax rate look, after the ongoing tax reform is approved, based on what you know, what's on the paper now. Thank you. Thank you, Jorge. Thank you for your compliment, thank you for your question. First of all, talking about the NIM, I'll give you some information that I'm pretty sure you know, just to make sure that I'm giving you the whole spectrum of the answer. First of all, we're looking here for the end of period growth. We know that the average balance is the one that really makes the impact here for the financial margin with clients. Separating the two effects here. Talking about interest rate, yes, it's true that we should have an increase in Selic. Actually, our forecast for the year-end is to have a 7.5 Selic. It doesn't benefit our P&L in the same way you will see the enhance or the increase in the interest rate. This is due to the reason that we make hedge of those interest rates in a reasonable period of time, I would say 40 months with monthly installments. There is a shape of this curve. Well, having said that means that we'll get the benefit in the time. In the short term, we won't see a huge impact, but yes, for 2022, we might have a much higher impact than we will see in 2021 due to the profile of the hedge that we have. This is for the working capital, this is for the liabilities that we have, the investments from clients. The overhead has run off, so we won't see major impact here in interest rate for this reason. This is part of the answer. The second one is that, yes, we are growing here in a mix which is better than what we were seeing last year, more retail than wholesale somehow. On the retail, we still are growing the business in some portfolios that don't have the same margin as the credit loans, for instance. If we do a breakdown in our portfolio, you will see the SMEs bring us a very good financial margin. You have credit cards with a very strong financial margin, the personal loans as well, and vehicles and payroll loans, even though they have important growth in terms of moving the needle, in terms of margin, they bring a lower impact, which is relevant for this information as well. The mix, it's positive. I see a very positive trend. We don't believe we will be able to go through the range that we are seeing here, but we believe we should have a decent growth or increase in the financial margin with client due to the growth that we will see in those portfolios, especially the 1 coming from the retail side. Thank you. My second question on the taxes. Yes. Thank you. The effect on the tax is the following. To simplify the math, we see that the interest on capital should have a negative impact, let's say around 6 to 7 points in the tax. You have also the benefits, let's say, of 12.5 in regime of the interest rate, the income tax on profits. That means that we should benefit in the long term of 5 to 6 reduction in our effective rate, I would say, if we take both effects in consideration. 5 to 6 points is our main guess here. Now, depends on the income that we will have, of course, as higher the income, it's different the impact because you reduce the benefits that you have from the interest on capital. Our next question comes from Tito Labarta with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, Milton. Thank you for the call and taking my question. My question is on your fee income. Very strong performance there. Your guidance stayed the same. I imagine mostly insurance continues to be weak. Just to try to break that out a little bit, if we were just to look at just the fee income, excluding insurance which is doing well, any color you can give on how you think that will grow? Not just for this year, but given the competitive environment, what's the sort of a sustainable growth for fee income? Do you expect the recovery in insurance in the second half? My second question is somewhat related, but thinking about your digital strategy, you mentioned earlier on the call that your branch network is still a competitive advantage. Now iti has close to 8 million clients. If you look at the valuation on some of the fintechs out there, based on clients, you can get a high multiple for that. Just to want to think about the strategy. Is the intention always to keep sort of iti inside iti? Ever any intention to spin it off? Do you want to kind of leverage the branch network and at the same time having a digital strategy combined? Just to think about that strategy given the competitive environment. Thank you. Well, Tito, thank you for your question. Coming from the fee income. I think I may address part of the answer to Jorge Kury as well. He mentioned the credit card portfolio. It's worth to mention that when we see here the growth in the transaction of the credit card portfolio, we see that nowadays we have around 15% of the portfolio, of the full portfolio of credit card, pay interest. The other 85% doesn't pay interest. That means that even though we are growing the portfolio, the part that pay interest grow in the coming months, it's not automatically. This, of course, doesn't help in the short term, the NIM, but it helps a lot, the commission and insurance, because it's here where we report the interchange, the annuity that we charge the clients, the fees that we charge the client. Also we have here the cost of our loyalty program. Those are the three main impact that we see here in commission and insurance. The recovery on the credit card portfolio, we will see in the portfolio that pays interest in the coming future. It's not in the short term, and this is what really impacts the margin. Just to clarify the topic for Jorge Kury as well. Talking about commission and insurance, where I see that we should have good deliveries into the credit card for the reasons I mentioned. We do believe that there is a, I would say, hiding consumption, that whenever the pandemic is in a better shape, we may see a boom in consumption, and this will have an important impact in our credit card business. Also we are growing the business, right? We are delivering and issuing an important amount of credit cards every month, and this will help a lot on this commission line. On the asset management, we expect a good semester. It will depend on volatility and our capability of delivering good results. There is a lot of market risk implied, but we are growing what we call the portfolio that really generates performance fees. This has been a movement that we've been doing for the last years, and we are having a good delivery. Nowadays, we have more than BRL 60 billion of products that generate alpha and where we can charge for performance fees. We are having a very decent quarter, and we expect we should have for the coming ones, delivering on performance fees as well. What has been very, very active for us is the investment banking activity. The main topic here is, how will be the volatility in the second semester? If things continues the way we've seen in the first one, we hope that we should still have a good window of opportunity and should keep delivering good results in the investment banking area. Remembering that we have a very strong pipeline and we are very well positioned in this segment. Those are the lines that I believe. It's not different from what we see this quarter. This is the expectation I have for the coming quarters as well. This is from there that we should see a good activity and a good performance. Thanks, Milton Maluhy Filho. I guess maybe just to clarify that, when you say similar to this quarter, fees can remain stable, or this is like a base and you can grow off of this base from here? No, it's difficult to say if we can grow. In credit card, I think we still have room to grow. In investment banking, I think we had a fantastic quarter, so if we are able to deliver another quarter like this, would be good news, due to the great performance that we had. In the asset management, we may be able to deliver a little bit better than what we had. As you see, we are still growing year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. I think we should be delivering something around the numbers you are seeing here, a little bit more, a little bit less. The performance very similar to what we saw this quarter. This is where our expectation is related to market risk. It's difficult to make any estimation, but it's my best guess looking at the figures now and trying to project the future. On the insurance side, as you asked, we hope the losses we had due to the COVID, we believe that it should decrease in the coming quarters a little bit. The results on insurance should be better than what we saw this quarter. This our best expectation as well. We have to see if there is really this reduction, but it's still working on higher levels of losses due to the COVID. This is something that we have to keep focusing and following, to make sure that we'll be able to deliver a better result. Structurally speaking, we are doing an important change, including in management on the insurance business. We have higher expectations that we can grow the business in the coming years. I'm not sure that we're going to deliver these coming quarters, but you may see in the coming quarters a positive trend. Our next question comes from Geoffrey Elliott with Autonomous. Please go ahead. Well, hello, thank you very much for taking the question. When we contrast you with some of the competitors, something that really stands out is your headcount has been pretty stable, maybe slightly higher over the last few quarters, whereas some of the others have chosen to make pretty significant headcount reductions and I guess realize expense saves in the near term as a result. What's behind your strategy there, and what would it take for you to rethink that and get more aggressive on bringing headcount down? Hey, Geoffrey. Thank you for your question. It's a very, I would say, simple answer. We have separate here what we call the bank's headcount and also the technology's headcount. When you look coming 2 years from now, we almost doubled the size of the team of technology. We have 13,000 employees nowadays. We grew 83% in this period. What we have been doing is we are investing in technology a lot. We have 13,000 people working in technology, and this is due to the modernization we're doing in the platform, all the investments and enhancement of the way we approach to technology. This is a huge investment. We acquired Zup, the technology company, last year. We had the central bank approval. We more than doubled Zup since it arrived in the bank. We are making huge investments here, and this is very important to deliver a much more digital company in the future. This is the way we are approaching. When you look to the headcount X technology, you will see a reduction in the last years, the past years, and also you see something more stable this year. This is due to the crisis, to the capability we have to accommodate everybody working in home office, so on and so forth. You are right. We don't see when we go to June 2020, just to give you a figure, only in Brazil, we had 74,000 employees. 2 years later, 1 year later, we have 2,000 less employees. We have 72,600 employees in Brazil, so we reduced 2,000 employees. In the other hand, we grew technology from 10,000 to 13,000, looking only 1 year. Exactly what is happening is we are investing in technology, growing the teams, but reducing the headcount of the bank. Somehow the investment in technology brings the opportunity to enhance the productivity, to reduce some processes that are completely manual. This is the pace. More important than headcount, which is an important quantity, is how we are approaching cost as a whole. The program is delivering very good result. As you can see, BRL 800 million only this semester when compared to last semester of last year. The efficiency ratio is improving. Headcount is an important information, of course, but the mix of the headcount, where we are investing and how it's affecting our investments as well, because we are growing some commercial teams. We are reducing in the core areas, but we are investing and enhancing commercial teams, the investors, assessors, or the investors. We are increasing the retail, the insurance task force, commercial force. We are enhancing some of the agribusiness. We are enhancing headcount. We have to understand internally the mix of this headcount. We are confident that we are in the right way. That growth in technology headcount, clearly very rapid over the last few years. I guess you're always going to need tech people, but are we reaching a point where that growth can start to? Yeah slow down a bit now? Sure. For sure. Completely agree with you, Geoffrey. I think we are getting to a point that we should expect a slowdown. Of course, we have to manage all these people. We have to have projects. We need to have a modernized platforms where they can have more flexibility to work, less dependencies into the journeys. You are right. I don't expect to keep growing the headcount in technology. I think we are getting to a point where we should see some flattish movement. We still studying for 2022. I don't want to give you an information and then needs to change in the coming months. My expectation is that the acceleration will be much, much lower than what we see in the past years. Our next question comes from Thiago Batista with UBS BB. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi, guys. My question is about the cost of risk of the bank in coming years. When we look at the cost of risk now is, I would say, much lower than the past. Do you believe that this reduction in the cost of risk is a structural reduction, and we probably will see a cost of risk below the historical figures in coming years? No, after that, the normalization of the economy, the end of the emergency aid in Brazil, we tend to see cost of risk increasing going forward. Yeah, Thiago, thank you. Good question. We should see an increase in cost of credit in the coming quarters. This is our best expectation. This is due to many reasons. First of all, it's the growth of the portfolio, and as you know, we work with expected losses, provisions. This means that we are always anticipating provisioning when we are growing strongly the portfolio as we are. Also, there is some uncertainty. We have the BRL 40 billion, as I'm saying, the reprofile portfolio. We have to follow very close to understand what will be the behavior of this portfolio in the coming quarters, when you should have less benefits coming from the government, those corona voucher and those Bolsa Família. Let's see where it will be stabilized. This should bring an important impact. The key message here for you is that, even though we believe that the cost of credit should increase on nominal basis and also on a relative basis, growing the portfolio, it should stabilize as we are seeing in levels behind the pre-crisis levels. This is our main view over here. I believe that second and third quarter of last year should make an inflection, and we should stabilize in levels behind the pre-COVID crisis, which is good news and very healthy. We should be delivering more margin with a very well-behaved credit risk, credit cost. Very clear, Renato. Thank you, Thiago. Our next question comes from Natalia Corfield with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. My question is related to your AT1s. You have one of them with a call date at the end of next year and another one with a call date at the beginning of 2023. I'm wondering how you think about those calls, and also you have an instrument in the local market, which I'm not 100% sure of when the call is going to be, but I would like to know as well how you're thinking about this call. This is my question. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Good to talk to you. Natalia, just to give you, in treasury, we are making our capital planning. We are always looking for those calls. You have the call date, but you also have the opportunity to exercise this call later. We are always seeing the cost and the opportunity that we have to exercise the call vis-a-vis the capital needs that we have or we need to grow the business. This is for local and offshore that. I cannot anticipate what's our decision now, but we are doing our capital planning and making some math here to understand what is the best instrument in terms of capital, if it's a need, or if it makes sense to exercise the call, but I don't have the answer for you right now. This is something that our treasury guys are working in. If you want to talk to them as well, feel free. We can give you more detail about that. Okay, sounds good. Perhaps on issuance, do you have an update on issuance in the international market? Any plans? Oh, really, it depends on market conditions, Natalia. We are always looking. We saw some opportunity in the past to issue locally, and we did a pretty decent amount locally. Whenever we saw an opportunity, and we did last year at the very beginning, first quarter, we did a very good issuance. It was a very good moment to do that right before the crisis jumped in. I think we had a very good opportunity to price a deal. We are always looking to market conditions. As you can see in the AT1, we are fully loaded. We don't have a lot of room. In fact, we are a little bit above what would be the limits that we have from the regulators. I don't expect. What maybe we should do in the coming months is some liability management, some discussions on that, some senior notes or maybe Tier 2, but then we will decide if it's better to do locally or offshore. It will depend on market conditions. Of course, we want to have an external curve. We want to be active in the external market as well, to be next to the investors. It will depend on market conditions pretty much. Our next question comes from Carlos Gomez-Lopez with HSBC. Please go ahead. Hello, good morning. Thank you for taking the questions. Two brief ones. One on the tax rate due to the BRL 1.3 billion extraordinary update for the deferred tax assets. That refers only to the current 6 months, and therefore we should not expect a reversal in the next 2 quarters from now. The second one refers to your dividends. I calculate you have paid about 26% of earnings so far. What do you expect for the rest of the year and for next year? Thank you. Okay, Carlos Gomez-Lopez. Good to talk to you. Thank you for your question. First of all, in terms of the BRL 1.3 billion, what we did is, what were our expectations in terms of tax payment in this semester because this increase in social contribution in 5% would impact only six months. We had this recognition, a non-recurrent event of BRL 1.3 billion. Yes, we do expect to consume paying a higher effective rate in the coming months. I would say net-net, maybe a little bit negative, but it's not relevant at the end of the day. That's why we recognized this effect or this event now, and this is only related to our best expectation, what would be our tax income or tax payment in this semester. Nothing more than that. Very focused on this. The second, talking about dividend, we are provisioning. We're still below or very close to our capital appetite, level of capital appetite of 13.5. Maybe I can answer in two ways here. We are delivering, and we expect to deliver a better profit, so this will enhance, naturally, the payment of dividend, as we are seeing as the guidance have implied a better second semester. This will increase, naturally, the dividend payment. In terms of payout ratio. We're still working with the 25% because we have to recover capital, and we will keep the matrix that we provided to the market in the past years, where we will see the risk-weighted assets, and we will see our profitability ratio. This will be the result of the excess of capital of 13.5 we'll be distributing. That means that we didn't change the policy, the idea of distributing the excess of 13.5, or the excess of our capital appetite. More than that, more important is that increasing the profit of the bank, we should have nominal basis, a better payout in the coming dividend payments. Very clear. Thank you very much. Thank you, Carlos. Nice talking to you. Thank you very much. This concludes today's question and answer session. Mr. Milton Maluhy, at this time you may proceed with your closing statements. Well, thank you everyone for joining us in our second quarter results. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Hope to see you during this period, or we will meet again in the next quarter results. We are very positive about all the evolution we had, especially the cultural change that we are doing inside the bank. This is the most, I would say, positive outcome that we are seeing here. Very positive about the numbers we have and very confident about the future. Of course, depending on macroeconomic conditions. Well, be safe, take care, and hope we will see next time in a much better environment. Thank you very much. Good to talk to you all. Bye-bye. That does conclude our Itaú Unibanco Holdings earnings conference for today. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.