The financial figures of 2024. I'm delighted to welcome CEO Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier and CFO Ralph Konrad, who will start with the present shortly. After the presentation, you will have time to ask all your questions in the Q&A session. And with this, let's start. Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier, the stage is yours.
Yeah, thank you very much, Franziska, for the warm welcome. Yeah, a hearty welcome from our side, from the board members of JDC Group, with the earnings call for the first nine months of the year 2024. And you see the header is third quarter growth is more than 35%. So it's actually 36.1%. So everybody here on this side is really happy to present these figures today. So let us introduce ourselves. Ralph and I will present you JDC's figures today. My name is Sebastian. I'm CEO, co-founder of JDC. We founded the company 22 years ago, now responsible for strategy, HR products, and also investor in public relations. And Ralph, I'm sure you want to introduce yourself.
Yeah, I'm Ralph. I'm responsible for IT, finance, legal, and M&A. Last time, I also had a responsibility for all operations and as you might remember, our new board member colleague, Ramona Evens, is now the COO and I'm very happy that I now have more focus on the remaining parts.
Right. So just a little reminder who we are. So we're a typical platform. Let's say we are like a gatekeeper or a tall booth between all the product providers in Germany, more than 220 insurance groups, all kinds of investment platforms, investment companies, the mortgaging banks. And on the other hand, we have, yeah, the intermediaries in the market, individual agents, brokers, 16,000 of those, but more and more the banks, insurance companies, other insurtechs, and exclusive sales organizations. So what we do is we take in the data of all the product companies, we standardize the data, we process it, and then we make them visible either in our own systems or in the systems of our intermediary clients, where we load them up via an API structure.
Now we have about 5.5 data sets of contracts on the platform that translates in a little more than 2 million contracts in insurance and some more in investment. And what we do basically, we aggregate as many contracts in the market that are out there and not only the data, but also the commission that comes with the data. Like a trailer fee in a fund, every insurance contract pays us on average about €40 in commission. And that's what you will see later, that we collect as many as we can. So this year it will be around €700,000 this year, 2024. So on the next page, you see that the third quarter is at a record high. So for the first time in a third quarter, the third quarter in a row, we achieved more than €50 million in sales.
So that's especially pleasing as Q3 obviously is the quarter where Germans like to have their big vacation. So sales normally are down, yeah, on average more than 10% in a normal quarter. But you can see that we just down a little bit from a Q1 or a Q2. So the growth as compared to the quarter last year is 36%, which is really a good thing for the quarter. And therefore you can also see that for the entire period of nine months, turnover is now up 29% from EUR 122.9 million to EUR 158.2 million. So a very pleasing figure as well. And you see that also the platform is becoming more efficient. So the earnings are growing even more than the turnover. And EBITDA is up 37% from EUR 6.7 million to EUR 9.2 million.
So, and what we also can tell you that the strong growth is coming from all kinds of business, all business lines, and also all different sales lines or sales channels. So insurance is growing quite significantly, especially in the life insurance sector, but also investment business is back and also real estate, mortgage, and also alternative investment products. So that's a very pleasing environment. You might hear that Germany is getting a new government, which is good news for everybody who does business in Germany. And therefore you can see, although the overall GDP figures might not be really pleasing, sentiment with investors are up again as there will be a conservative government starting next year. Most probably elections will be in February and then the government starting in the Q2.
As people would, yeah, basically anticipate this a little bit, people are starting to reinvest and also invest in both the insurance part and the investment part. Yeah, now you can see that's the whole group in figures. Comparison always on the left columns, that's the quarter versus quarter comparison. Then the year, let's see, nine months versus nine months comparison. So as we said, turnover is up 28.7% and EBITDA is up 37%. We have a little performer calculation inserted here. There's one-off costs both as to M&A and especially the integration of the new company Top Ten. So there's about €600,000 in EBITDA that we did not achieve because we had some layoffs of management that we had to pay cancellation fees for and also some other costs for attorneys basically and also tax consultants.
So if you would look at these or deduct these one-offs, then the figures would look even nicer. But let's stay as the as-is figures. So we're very happy with earnings growth of 37%. So you can see that the Q3 figures are really nice. Revenues being up from 38.3 to 52.1, and also in the nine-month figures, as said, almost 29%. So we were very happy in the management and the entire team. So it's now a harvesting of what we put into the platform for the last decade. Yeah, that's what I said. The growth is stemming from all product groups. You can see that obviously investment and financing is up by 61%.
That looks maybe a little bit nicer as it is because you can see that about EUR 17-17.5 million come from the acquisition of Top Ten, which are almost exclusively in the investment and portfolio management side. So but also if you would deduct this, we have a very nice growth of almost EUR 6 million in the entire investment business as it was for Top Ten was consolidated first time in December of last year. So also growth in the, yeah, big and broadly spread investment business in the group. Insurance is up 15%. That's almost 12%, EUR 12 million in added revenue. And also the others, that's a smaller portion, but you can see that it's up 10%.
That's good news because obviously there was no real estate market in Germany for the last two years as banks were very reluctant to sign mortgages and there was basically no financing. Now, yeah, capital investors also back in the real estate sector as prices are down and are only now starting to grow again. This is also good news for the mortgage business that was, yeah, had a drop of more than 90% with our platform and now is starting to show signs of a rebound. Yeah, the next page, you can see that also it's not only the product lines, but also the sales channels that are growing. That's, yeah, a beautiful number here and good news from our broad IFA business. That's the 16,000 IFAs that are the backbone of our business and they are up almost 30%.
That's, yeah, almost €24 million in growth coming from this, let's say, historic business or business lines with our grown brokers. We like to add major customers and that's what we present you in press releases from time to time. That's about a quarter of our business in the advisor tech segment, but also they are up 35%. That's €9 million marginal additional revenue. That's also good news that the advisory sections, that's our almost 300 tied agents under the brand of Phenom, they are up more than 17%. That's €4 million in marginal revenue. Overall, we're very happy that, yeah, now the growth is not coming from a one-time effect or it's not coming from one single business line, but it's the breadth of our platform business. Yeah, Ralph, quarterly.
Let's look at the quarterly development. If you look at this slide and then focus on the third quarter, you can see that after year 2023, where we had a growth of 10%, we see a really very strong third quarter 2024 with a plus of more than 35%. And for the first time in history, at least as I remember, we have a third quarter that is almost as strong as the first quarter. That's an extraordinary situation. And to be honest, a little bit surprising because before I heard the last earnings call and I told you that we expect a weaker third quarter due to summer season. So no summer at JDC, obviously. But we are happy with this development. But please, as management of expectations, the growth in this quarter really was extraordinarily strong.
It's not given that this will be the fact for every quarter in the next year or in the next quarters. Driven by the insurance and investment sector, as Sebastian mentioned, and for the rest of the year, we foresee a typical year-end business and thus a strong Q4. One step deeper into the Advisortech segment, this also showed an extraordinary good growth. Good performance, revenue was up by approximately 40% to EUR 46.4 million. EBITDA increased by almost 35% to EUR 2.7 million. Personnel costs were up 18%. Only a small portion of this like real cost increase and the rest by the consolidation of Top Ten Group. To remind you, date of first consolidation was December 2023. So we are not comparing apples with apples. The same with the other operating expenses that grew, they grew by 41%.
But as Sebastian mentioned in the third quarter, including like 300K restructuring and integration one-off costs. So if you deduct this, you would see an EBITDA growth of 50% in the third quarter and yeah, 35% growth reported. For the first nine months, turnover grew by 30%, EUR 241.2 million, and EBITDA grew pro forma almost 40% and reported by 31.4%. We are very satisfied with this development and we would like to take the opportunity to thank our entire team for making this success possible. The advisory division has gained power again and its former strength. We had also a very good quarter. The turnover grew by 18%. Sales amounted to more than EUR 9 million in only one quarter and with only a slight increase in costs, which was mainly driven by a smaller broker acquisition in Austria.
This resulted in an EBITDA of EUR 0.5 million, which is a growth of 35%. If we look at the year as a whole, the advisory segment is once again performing strongly. Sales grew by 17.2% and EBITDA grew by 32.9%. Total EBITDA contribution to the group earnings of this segment now is EUR 2.2 million for the first nine months, which is a very nice number for us. Okay, let's have a look at the cash flow statement for the first nine months. We started with cash and cash equivalents at the beginning of the year with EUR 26.4 million, which was a plus of EUR 10 million compared to the start of 2023. Cash flow of operating activities in the first nine months amounted to EUR 9.9 million, which is a plus of 25%.
And the cash flow of investment activities amounted to minus EUR 5.4 million, driven by some effects. The first is that we sold some securities for 400K. We invested into financial assets, which is the capital calls of Summitas, which was EUR 900,000 in the first nine months. And the payments for the acquisition of consolidated companies was about EUR 2 million, EUR 700,000 for the acquisition of the rest, the last 25% of our asset management company, BBVW, that we acquired, and EUR 1.2 million for the smaller broker in Austria I mentioned. Cash flow from financing activities is minus EUR 2.5 million. Main reason is the share buyback program that ended in May this year.
And if you look at the cash flow from financing activities last year, just as a reminder, the main portion of this plus EUR 15 million was the sale of our treasury shares for EUR 13 million to Provinzial, which is since then one of our important shareholders. The quarter ended with a cash balance of more than EUR 28 million and cash on hand at the 12th of November, Tuesday. The last data I have is EUR 34.34 million and a couple of some more euros. As always, some operational key figures. They have also developed positively, like in the last quarters, the numbers of the Top Ten Group. Again, they are not included here because the IT systems have not been migrated yet. So here in this slide, we are comparing apples to apples.
New orders peaked at around 108,000 at the end of third quarter, which means an increase of 12.3% compared to the previous year, coming especially from life insurance business and a very good growth, as Sebastian mentioned, in the mutual fund business. The number of initiated contract transfers is up more than 50% and reached a number of 450,000, yeah, 450,000 contract transfers, which is a very, very good development. And finally, the insurance assets on our platform are constantly growing now, heading for 1.3 billion EUR. And maybe one additional comment here. We expect a very good increase in the next months here because we know that the prices, especially the premiums and especially in the PNC sector, will increase over the year again, like last year due to inflation and higher costs for the insurance companies. And this will give us a boost in our assets.
As you know, our commissions are linked to the premiums. And if premiums are rising, our commission is increasing as well. So that's also a good development for us. As always, some information about the share price and the bonds. The share price developed nicely. We had EUR 22.10 at the close of yesterday. I think now we are at EUR 23, around EUR 23. Market cap is EUR 300 million. And we now have 147,000 treasury shares that we bought at an average price of EUR 19.89. The bond is still valued at EUR 20 million. We have EUR 5 million financing reserve, as you might know there, but we don't need it. And the bond is trading very nicely at a quote of 106% at a coupon of 7%. There's no change in the shareholder structure and the other data here. So no news on this slide.
But at this point, I would like to give some comment on a very important issue, and that is the liquidity of our stock, of our share. We are very satisfied with our operational performance, and I hope and I think that the shareholders look at this in the same way. Nevertheless, we do not currently see the liquidity in the share that is necessary for the share price to follow the operational performance. So operational performance is going up and share price is more flat than increasing. All of us small and mid-caps in Europe, especially in Germany, are suffering from this development because investors are increasingly investing into larger and more liquid shares. And small caps are currently undervalued, and that's the fact for already some time. And we are working against this development in two ways. The first is we have permanent investor meetings, roadshows and conferences.
From my memory, we never had more investor contacts than at the present. In the last weeks, we have been in the Netherlands, in the U.K., and in the United States. We will see a lot of you on the Eigenkapitalforum in Frankfurt in two weeks. Second, and that's more important, is growth. If investors want to have larger companies with larger market caps, then that's where we have to grow. That's what we are working on. We want to increase our market cap to EUR 500 million as quickly as possible through operational performance and also through further acquisitions. Because bigger market cap, the bigger is the liquidity, and the bigger the liquidity, the bigger is the attractiveness of JDC to your investors. The market cap then increases with the attractiveness.
I'm telling you that, or we are telling you that, although we know that you know that, yeah, you investors know that that is the fact. But we want you to know that we are aware of this too, and we are working on that issue. Some spotlights for you. The first is the stage of integration of our Top Ten Group. Again, Sebastian mentioned that 17.5 million EUR of turnover and an EBITDA of 750,000 EUR is what Top Ten contributed. And we had around 600,000 EUR extraordinary costs for integration. So we are exactly there where we have planned. Transaction and closing, of course, is done. The first step, all formal and regulatory requirements are fulfilled. We have now completed the formal integration of the group. That means that the board and the management is merged. It's the same with the employees.
The Top Ten entities are now merged with the corresponding JDC entities. Please keep in mind that from now on, we cannot give you exact numbers on the Top Ten Group because the entities do not exist anymore. So we can give you the exact numbers backwards, but from the fourth quarter on, it's one company. We are now working on two further issues. The first is marketing because Top Ten is no longer existing as a legal entity, but it lives as a brand of JDC, and thus we have to renew marketing presence, CI, and all the documents, and finally we have to finalize the operational integration in the fields of IT, information and data security, and also accounting. But we're happy with the development, and we are on track with our post-merger integration plan. The second spotlight is very important. It's on consolidation of the market.
What you see here is data of McKinsey & Company. And it gives you a look on the age structure and the development of the broker market. Some key facts from the slide. In 2019, the average age of brokers was 52.6 years. And four years later, the average age of brokers was 56.3 years. That means that within four years, the brokers aged by 3.7 years. Seems a dramatic development, but I will give you some different view on this later on. And already today, very interesting, 14% of all brokers are older than the usual retirement age, means older than 67 years old. And McKinsey expects that from now on, up to 2,000 brokers a year will retire. So the market is in a change, in a dramatic change. And what does that mean for us, for JDC or for the market participants? We see mainly two trends.
The first is that we have a huge market opportunity for younger brokers to enter the market because the competition of brokers is decreasing in the future. If you today, the brokers are searching for customers; tomorrow, if the customer wants to have a broker, he has to search for a broker. So there's a good opportunity for younger people, and that's what we see. Also at JDC, a lot of younger brokers with a good growth. Yeah, that's a good development. And second, it's a huge market opportunity to buy assets from brokers who already have retired or who will retire or who should retire. And that's what we can tell you in the future. We will not only focus on the consolidation of the corporate broker market with our Summitas participation, but we will also increase our efforts in the consolidation of the private broker market.
And we will mean that we will buy brokers and we will buy portfolios, private portfolios from brokers, and we will do this as JDC. We did this in the past, but we will increase our efforts, and you can expect us to show here more traction in the upcoming year. The third point is AI. At the beginning of the year, we talked about the fact that we have projects in the field of artificial intelligence and that projects should move our company forward. And we announced that we would not talk about that now, but when there was something interesting and meaningful to report. And that's the case today. What have we done? We have revised our process for processing the insurance documents, and we are now already using artificial intelligence to read out and assign documents in three lines of business.
It's car, it's household, and it's homeowners or building insurance. And that instead of our traditional OCR recognition that we are using or were using for 15 years. The main achievement after nine months of work is that now 90% of all documents, means policies and invoices, are processed straight through. That means from now on, there's no manual interaction needed. That's a very, very big success for us. And in some more detail, means that we have an automated data input, no manual processes needed. We have a broader scope of data. That means depending on the product line, we have up to 100% more product-specific fields that we can show in our CRM. We are able to read them out now. We were not able to show this data in the past. We are much more efficient, and we can show better quality.
We have a correctness and completeness of data of 95%, means the 90% of all data that we read out, it's the right data for the right field, and it's the right data. And this is much better than it was before. Of course, we have cost savings. You can imagine it's already integrated into the JDC platform, but the most important thing beside the 90% figure is that it's absolutely scalable. If we tomorrow get the double volume, that's no problem for us. We just have to send more prompts to ChatGPT. We do not have to hire more people. Yeah, okay. We have to hire some more people, but we do not have to hire the people in the same relation. We will now focus on the rest of the P&C lines, and after that, work disability.
Then we will take a breath at the beginning of next year and think about which will be the next steps to implement AI tools into our organization. Okay, and the last slide from my side, a lot of words from me today is we have a new award. The Finanzwelt Broker Pool Navigator was published some weeks ago. And again, third time third year in a row, JDC gained an award with the outstanding valuation in all six categories. There were 18 pools that participated in this survey, and we were the only one who had this outstanding in all six categories, which were broker orientation, product range, processes, marketing support, software support, and sales support. So that's very encouraging and shows that we are on the right path. So far from me, Sebastian.
Yeah, thank you, Ralph. Those of you who might have questions on the topic of Summitas, there's no slide included as it's now left the startup phase. If you want, you might have seen the press release with Summitas. We bought a very big broker company. That's BVUK. It's the leading pension platform in Germany with more than EUR 40 million in turnover. So Summitas, after closing, antitrust clearance came into the air. So after closing in December, Summitas will be like a real broker company with EUR 52 million in turnover and about EUR 13 million in EBITDA per year. Our stake is still 10% in the JV Summitas, and we will have invested EUR 10 million by the end of the year, and we're not diluted. So it's a very nice progress. They moved out of our offices, so they had their own company by now.
For the value contribution, we will earn a little bit more this year than we planned, about EUR 600,000. Then earnings will go up to more than EUR 1.5 million next year. You will see that we will not consolidate all of these pension occupants, so pension plans, special contracts to the platform, but we will receive quite an amount of service fees. Summitas will have a very nice contribution to our gross margin line and then to our bottom line of more than EUR 1.5 million next year. Also here, company fully on track. Yeah, as when we come to the guidance, you see that our progress is well on track. You see we guided for a turnover of EUR 205 million-EUR 220 million. You will see by the figures we have now with EUR 158.2 million, that's a little bit more than EUR 60 million to go.
This would mean a growth of only 20-something %, 22% of where we are. So I think that we are well on track to also reach the upper end of the guidance. And also on the EBITDA side, coming from €9.2 million, we want to achieve €14.5-€16 million. We're well on track to end up in the €15 million region. So also our individual goals, integration of Top Ten, Ralph mentioned, is well on track. Also Summitas, we will receive more bottom line margin, bottom line earnings than turnover. But at least on the gross margin, we are above plan. And also that's what Ralph said, our big marketing campaign to refocus on smaller IFAs. You can see that the breadth of our IFA base is growing and also their share of wallet is growing.
So also here, we can use our experience from the major customers and have a broad impact on the market. Also our IT cooperation with insurance companies. You could remember about three months ago, we published that one of the very, very big insurers will join the platform with their 7,000 agencies. It's, I think, easy to know who this is. And so we're happy to have a full number of, yeah, there's more than five of the top 10 insurance companies in Germany now having a platform contract with JDC. Yeah, we are not stopping here, but we have high benchmarks and more expectations in our IT platform. We are, I think, in front of the wave, and we will stay there. So we're not stopping to develop, but we want to stay the most advanced tech stock in the market.
Yeah, Ralph mentioned AI is helping us here to save more costs and also become more efficient. A lot of focus on that. Also this leads to a more further reduction of cost per contract. Economies of scale that show that earnings are growing more than our turnover and also as our gross margin lines. Yeah, so very, very delightful that for the first time in history, I think, Ralph, we can report growth in all segments and personal business lines. That's quite historic, and we hope that this development goes as long as we can. Yeah, thank you for your attention. We're happy to take your questions now.
Yeah, thank you so much for the insightful presentation. We're now moving forward with the Q&A session. To keep the conversation engaging, we kindly like to ask you to pose your question via the audio line.
To do so, just press the raise your hand button. You can also use the key combination star nine followed by star six if you dialed in via phone. Or you can use the chat and we received a couple of questions in the chat already. The first question is, would you consider uplifting the shares to Prime Standard? Can you give us insights into the status and scope of the recently announced customer wins? How do you expect the ramp-up curve to look like? And what is the long-term potential for JDC to these contacts? Last question, are there further customer acquisitions in the pipeline that could close within the foreseeable future? Do you expect customer acquisitions to gain pace, or will you have to put more focus on organization to realize the potential of existing contracts?
Okay, Franziska, I have a little different order of the questions, but I might answer the ones I can see. Yeah, so the first question is, could we imagine to change our segment? The answer is yes. As you might know, this is a quarterly call, which we would not be obliged to do in the Scale segment as far as we know. So we do this. We comply with all the reporting standards and basically all other rules, but takeover rules. It would be very easy for us to just move from Scale to Prime. And as Ralph mentioned, it might make sense. We are now becoming in an SDAX region. And if we grow a little bit more, we are like a normal SDAX company. It would make sense to be part of this index. And therefore, yeah, yes, we are talking to our attorneys.
There's no big challenge to do so. Yeah, what we need is in prospectus, and the rest is already done. So we are not preparing this at the moment, but we are prepared to do so when it makes sense. And we both think that will make sense in the future. Okay, now you have to choose, Franziska, what questions go first, right?
Okay, we go now with the second question in that order. So the second question is, will you buy broker pools or contracts from brokers? And what multiple of EBITDA do you expect to pay these deals? Yeah, so as Top Ten, it can be very attractive to buy broker pools and platforms and also brokers. We know if you buy individual contracts, that this is more complicated, basically as to data protection and also as to the practical move of the contract to the platform.
We will focus on broker pools and brokers. The multiple depends on the size of the targets. Obviously, you can see very, very, very high multiples if you buy aggregators. You saw the valuations when GGW was bought by Permira or MRHC was bought by TA Associates. For the aggregators, we see now very, very high valuations, 20++. Normally, you should expect if you buy brokers, €1 million or more to pay like 8-12 times in the commercial space and in the private space lower. The very small brokers with a couple of hundred thousand in turnover or commission income, there are sometimes much lower multiples of 4-6.
Yeah, thank you so much for answering the question. Next question, did you lose tenders? Are you bidding for contracts of significant size? What timeframe can we expect new contracts?
So until now, we have not lost one tender. We will lose one now of a big insurer. So everybody who knows the story will have a smile on his face at least for a short period of time, let's put it this way. So there had to be a first time anyways, but then this is a very, it's a funny story behind that. We don't want to roll out here in the public space. And then new contract, you saw that we signed VGH, which is the number four public insurer in Germany. So it completes the number of the big top five public insurers behind the savings banks. So now we have access to the 300 or the 370 savings banks in the market. So that was the last bigger win.
Now on the insurer side, as I said, we already have the top five of the top 10 and more than 10 of the top 20. So there is room for some more, but not endless. So the next, yeah, the next last market participant to win is there's some more corporate brokers out there and also commercial brokers out there. But otherwise, we feel that we are well positioned in the individual broker space. We have 16,000 of 38,000 under contract from the banking side. There's about 63%-65% of all the banking institutions and their volumes we will have access to once the platform is rolled out. And also, as I said, in the insurance space, there's a market share of our platform with the top insurers of more than 50%. So we're very happy on the breadth now.
So it's more now focused on executing on the existing contracts, onboard all these individual banking institutions or branches of insurance companies, and then start converting clients. So there's a lot of work to do, but contract-wise, I think we are quite far in the market.
Yeah, thank you so much. And next question, how's the progress with R+V Versicherungskammer Bayern and the new European insurance company announced on August the 5th? Is the expected business.
That's what Sebastian said. Maybe I can add here some flavor. In the last years, we added new big customers to new big customers every two months, and we onboarded them all onto the platform, and this happened very successfully. So we have now almost all of the professional institutions on our platform. There is some room for growth, of course. But now we have to make the business happen.
That's maybe the message. The future development of our group does not depend on a new big customer every two months because with our customers, we have enough potential to double or triple turnover. It's a question of realizing the potentials within our customers. We can also be more precise. With R+V, yes, we'll quadruple the number of banks that are using the platform, but it's still a very long, long way to go until we reach the 800 banks. This will still be a percentage-wise strong growth, but then in absolute terms, not yet relevant for our growth figures. Obviously, there's a huge potential behind this banking sector. Same goes for Versicherungskammer, also SV that are just now starting to roll out the platform to the individual banks. Significant turnover can be expected next year.
And also this very big insurer, the platform is working. So there's the first contracts transferred via these links. So also here, the service contract starts next year. So we will have first impact next year. And also here, can it potentially be bigger? So yeah, again, right, Provinzial is the one who gave us their internal business planning. And we said this could be alone EUR 100 million plus to the platform. The other insurance companies are same potential, right? So VKB is even bigger than Provinzial and SV is almost as big. And then this very big insurer is even bigger than every other insurer in the German market. So yes, the potential is the same, but again, we need a lot of patience because it will take years and maybe until it's completely rolled up to a decade until this customer is fully explored.
But we are deeply integrated into the IT systems. It takes a long time, but it will last for a much longer time. That's the good message. Okay, the next question is regarding the AI tools, right?
Yes.
The question is the use of AI tools, what is the impact in terms of absolute EUR savings per unit with onboarding customers? Will this lead to potentially higher margins for the group over the long term? It will not lead to higher margins because, yes, EBITDA margins, of course, but not gross margins because gross margin is commission in minus commission out. You can calculate that on average, we need five-to-seven minutes to read out and type in a document manually. And every time we use AI, we save five-to-seven minutes from one person. So of course, it will save a lot of money.
But you will not see this in the P&L because we will not decrease the number of our employees, but we will be able to generate much more volume with the existing team. So forward-looking, this will save a lot of money, seven-digit for sure. And thus, it will lead to higher margins, yes.
Yeah, thank you so much. We have two questions from the audio line. I would love to take them. So Guillaume, you could speak now. Please try.
Good afternoon. Congrats for a good setup, Franziska. Two questions from my side. First, could you please come back on Summitas and the number of deals you have done this year, the contribution you anticipate, if you mind to come back on this, and the perspective for the upcoming years? And then maybe on the political environment in Germany, which is a bit difficult at the moment.
Is there any potential risk or regulation change that could impact the business? If you could comment on this point, it would be helpful. Thanks a lot.
Did you get the first question off?
Yeah, the question was, what is the Summitas contribution this year? And what are the perspectives? Some more information as you give in this some sense that you told.
Yeah, so Guillaume, bonjour. So the contribution and the bottom line, we had EUR 600,000 this year, 2024, and more than EUR 1.5 million in the top line. How much we receive above the top line, above the gross margin lines, we don't know because we have to see this BVUK broker is a very specialized pension system broker. Whether it makes sense to transfer all these contracts to the platform, we will see. Closing has not been done yet.
So we have a first look at all these processes done there. All we can say is that the service contract stands and we will basically earn gross margin on the gross margin line level and also the bottom line level, which this is what we want. And the top line, we'll see.
But for sure, EUR 600,000 in 2024 and at least EUR 1.5 million in 2025 EBITDA contribution.
Yeah, and then on the political system in Germany, well, that is obviously a very individual and subjective view that we have is everybody who does business in Germany is more or less relieved that this, yeah, coalition that did not really do a lot of good for German entrepreneurs and enterprises is now at an end. And it's now quite obvious that the new chancellor will be a conservative person called Friedrich Merz.
So the CDU is in a lead of 32%-35%, depends what polls you read, as compared to the rest of the last coalition that's less than 30%. So there will be a new stable government in Germany and it will be much better for, yeah, let's say, reasonable and also economy-sensitive government as compared to quite sometimes very ideological and, yeah, agenda-driven moves that led to one of the biggest recessions in Germany ever historically. So the good news is if you turn some measures back, it's very easy to bring Germany back to a growth path. So most of us here doing business are more or less delighted and look forward to elections and also then to a new government that's then again economy-friendly.
Thank you.
Sums it up, right? So.
Yeah. Thank you so much. We have another question from Edwin de Jong. You should be able to speak now.
Yeah, that works. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Congrats with the good results, I must say. It was very good, very nicely. Two questions for me on AI. So you're now using it for three product lines in P&C. How fast is it possible to do the other lines? And another part of that question is, of course, you're doing now like 90% of documents with the system you have. Is it also capable of getting that to a higher level or is that in a way not possible? Second question, completely different, more on the gross margins. In Q3, they were somewhat lower. Of course, there was an effect of Top Ten, but maybe if you could elaborate a little bit on the puts and takes that were there in the development of the gross margin.
Yeah, maybe we can start with the answer to the gross margin question because we have a comparable question in the chat as well. The colleague in the chat asked if there is a price pressure on margins, and the answer is yes, it is, because it's from two sides. The first is competition. We have now three or four big ones like JDC who try to be the winner of all, and of course, in this situation, there is competition also by price, and the second is that we see that our bigger customers grow more than our retail brokers, and that means new business or growth is rather from a low-margin business than from a high-margin business, and that's the reason why gross margin is decreasing.
Last time you asked me what is the right, not you in person, but you investors asked us what is the right rate to calculate, and we would say like 0.5% a year, but not forever, of course, because what we always also see is that our competitors are now very professional-owned by private equity companies, and private equity companies try to earn money, and the payout ratio to the broker or payout to the broker is the biggest cost portion that you have as a platform, and we are absolutely sure that we will see different development here in the future because if you look at JDC, if we would have a gross margin increase of 1%, that would give us next year probably 2.5 million more EBITDA or more. So that's the situation right now.
But I personally, and we think that this will change in the future. And your AI questions, the other lines will already be brought in. They have to connect to the system. The plan is to at least finish at the end of the year or in the weeks of January. Was in January, and we have all the renewals of the P&C business. Yeah, the screen shows me that my connection is stable. You can hear me. And we want to be ready when the tons of policies come to us.
Yeah, we could hear you, but if you could maybe switch off your camera again and then maybe say the beginning of the answer.
That would be a good share. I miss it.
Now your background.
Sorry. Sorry.
Can you repeat the last three sentences maybe? Yes.
Good question. What was the last?
Okay, we will be hearing when we have a bad connection here. Bad connection.
I hope that's enough for now, and I talk to you in person and tell you next week.
Let's go with the other questions from the chat. So we have another question. The share price is stagnant over three years. You already gave some comments regarding this. Could you please be more specific about your plans to grow significantly, organically, not taking acquisitions into account? And why do you not communicate it to the market? Thank you so much for the question. And this.
Yeah, we can see this, obviously, right? That's what Ralph mentioned. All the small-cap companies had to take some hit because of, yeah, the upcoming spread. People invested more in large caps than small caps. And also, obviously, with a rising share price, DCF factors are different.
We're not complaining as compared to all the others. The development was quite okay-ish, but that was part of the problem because, obviously, a lot of small-cap funds had redemptions, and we're just hitting the ceiling there that we are at their top names and hit like the 10% or 20% ceiling. There have to be sales also by funds that really like us. Our plans to grow, I think organically, we always said we target a 20% plus growth. Now Q3 was even 25% if you deduct or more than 25% if you deduct top 10. We were very happy with now quite progressing organic growth. That's also what Ralph mentioned before. The way to top up growth is M&A. There's different areas.
Ralph mentioned the private lines sector in insurance where there is not much influence of the very big private equity sponsors, and also on the platform business, there's not many companies buying platforms like top 10, so this is a very big field, and there's also some big ones out there, but as always, we're talking to many, many, many targets in the market, but then, yeah, you can communicate as soon as it's signed, as always, and therefore, yeah, nothing as specific that we could tell you now, yeah, but basically, as we said, we will be one of the consolidators in the market. We do this successfully with Summitas and Argent Venture with Bain on the commercial broker side, but there's a lot of room to grow on the private line side, both brokers and platforms.
Thank you so much. Then we have another question.
Would you consider uplisting the shares? I know we had this already on the agendas. Can you give insights into the status and scope of recently announced customer wins? And how do you expect the ramp-up? I know we had this question. And then we have some question from Mark Westing. Congrats to the great Q3 question. In a lot of markets, for example, in payment services, we see a trend that continuing digitization, commoditization puts pressure on margins. Do you expect the trends to affect JDC margins in three to five years? For example, do you expect the commission percentage per contract to come down in the future?
Yeah, so as to competition, we see the highest competition, especially among the individual brokers now. So there is a trend to growth.
So you see there's a great study coming out of Ask Compact that shows that the top three players are big, they're growing, and they are profitable. And then the rest of the broker pool platforms that are smaller, they're not growing and they're not profitable. So that tells you a lot about volume. So there was a lot of competition among individual brokers and also when we went to the tenders of the institutional clients, it was not said that we have to win them as there was a fierce competition, especially also on price. So we see that the competition is very hard already, but we see some ease here because now as our main competitors are owned by private equity companies, obviously they are also exit-driven, so they want to earn some money.
So, we'll see that now there's cost cutting at both of our competing companies and also there might be changes in price as we expect the market to become more oligopolistic. I think we will always price competitively, but these overpayments where services are given out for zero or there's like these FROMO attitudes that come to my platform, I pay everything and you pay nothing. And then after two or three years, we'll see what the right price is. That's rather leaving the market. So we think that on the margin side, it will rather we are in a good position to bargain for at least same and in many cases better margins for our platform. And then also as we gain more volume from insurer to insurer, we can negotiate for better buying prices and this will also enhance the margin.
The last comment on this is margin is not margin. So obviously also a small margin can be interesting when it's digital only. We like this execution margin part. That's the first 10-12 percentage points of our margin. That's the decisive one because basically there's almost no additional cost in taking in data and showing it. Then there is the service margin. That's the, let's say from percentage point 12 to 30. Edvin, you have to mute yourself, please. These service margins, they seem to be bigger, but then the earnings on these service margins are lower as we have to hire people to pick up the phone or to answer emails. Also if we have like, let's say an 18% service margin on top, earnings percentage might be 3-4 percentage points on the service margin.
It also depends on the quality of margin. But to answer it, yes, so the margins are as low as they can be and they will rather be a little bit higher.
Thank you so much. Next question. I recall the revenue per contract being around EUR 35. Is the increase to EUR 40 due to the inflation of insurance contracts or a higher price from JDC?
Yeah, so Ralph, I don't know whether you hear me.
Yes, I'm back. I hope you can hear me. I apologize. I'm not able to switch my camera on and the Zoom app now went down, I think, three times, but I'm back. Yes, the average price per contract was around 35, a little bit lower. And with the, yeah, inflation in the premiums, we will see a development in direction 40. That's a right view on this.
Yeah, so the exact term is 38.4 for the year 2023, and we see a price increase of at least 5% during the year 2024. So 40 is a good rule of thumb for our figures. And then just to the system, the price of JDC is just one line below. So this is like the revenue stream is a fixed percentage of premium. So that's inflation protected. And our price comes in on the next line because then we deduct either four or six or eight euros bringing the payouts to whatever, 35 or 30 or even 25 margin dependence, how deep our services are. I think we have one more, Franziska, you're mute.
Last question. We have for Provinzial and others, you administrate their business with third-party insurance contracts. Why are the Provinzial insurance contracts not also on your platform? If you could please elaborate on this.
Because they don't want to pay us commission for.
So in the end, it's about giving the customer a 360-degree view on their entire portfolio. So we can either load up Provinzial data into our system or, in this case, our data into their system. And then Provinzial is very good at processing Provinzial data on Provinzial systems. So they don't need us much, and we earn money wherever we can help. And this is the third-party contracts.
Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier and also Ralph Konrad. And also to you for your attention. We're coming now to an end of today's earnings call. Thank you so much for attending. Should any questions arise in the future, please do not hesitate to contact us or the leadership team. I wish you a beautiful day and hand over now for some final remarks to you, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier.
Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for your trust and attention. So we're delighted that we can present these figures. So we are at the growth path that we always promised to you. And after planting so many projects and setting up so many new clients now, the time of harvest has begun. And so bear with us. I think we will have great times ahead, fueling growth by M&A and also, yeah, platform wins. So I think now will be the best time for investors in our company. Thank you very much. Have a great next quarter and a good year end. Merry Christmas. Bye.