Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Montega, welcome to the JDC Group earnings call regarding the Q3 figures of 2022, which will be presented by the CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier, and the CFO, Ralph Konrad. The floor will be opened for upcoming questions following the presentation. Let me now hand over the floor to you, Dr. Grabmaier.
Yes, thank you very much for the introduction. Welcome on our behalf to our earnings call for Q3 for the first nine months in 2021, and we subtitle this Growth in a Challenging Environment. My name is Sebastian. I'm CEO of JDC Group. I founded the company together with my partner Ralph Konrad 21 years ago, responsible for strategy, sales, products, IR, and data security, always very important. Ralph has some more topics.
Yes. Hello from my side. Ralph Konrad is my name. I'm CFO of the group, responsible, and besides the financials for IT and operations, and always if you buy some companies, I do the M&A section as well.
Excellent. I see we have some new investors on board, so let me have a really short introduction on who JDC is. We are now a typical digital platform, meaning that we have the connections and the interfaces to all the insurance groups in the market, all the asset management platforms, alternative product providers, and the mortgaging banks. We take in the data, standardize it, and process it, and then we make it visible in different visualizing systems, either to intermediaries such as other brokers, general agents, IFAs, other fintech companies, the insurance companies themselves, the banks, exclusive sales organizations, or via our smartphone application, Allesmeins, also to more than 200,000 direct clients.
Right now, we have more than 4 million contracts on the platform and we are gathering and aggregating as many contracts as we can, earning the trailer fees on the investment fund side and the recurring revenue on the insurance contracts, which amount to on average 35 EUR per contract. If you want a little aggregation model or chipmunk business there, we collect a huge number of small contracts, resulting into a nice stream of recurring cash flows. You can see the first three months, the first nine months in 2022.
You can see that the AdvisorT ech business, despite the very challenging environment after Ukraine war, inflation, and a big insecurity of customers here in the German market, we have a strong development in the AdvisorT ech business. Also we can feel in the advisory business especially that there is some reluctance or insecurity of the customers to buy new financial products. You can see that the retail markets in Germany are down in furniture or retail clothes shops 25%-45%. With these results, we're happy that we have even some growth in Q3. For the first nine months, this results in an overall turnover growth of 12% to EUR 115.8 million.
Also we've a rising EBITDA from EUR 5.3 million to EUR 6.2 million, which is a plus of 16%. You can see that both turnover and EBITDA are growing, even if not as fast as in the first half year, which was surprisingly positive. We now have to face the reality of very challenging markets due to consumer insecurities or a lack of consumer confidence. There you can see the composition of our turnover growth. Where does it come from? We're talking a lot about the banking side and the very major, the very big customers, the major customers.
As you know, we have quite some way to really take up these customers so that most of our major clients are in a ramp-up or rollout phase. The core of our business still comes from the breadth of our IFA business. That's more than 16,000 IFAs, which are growing, in a growing number and with always more share of wallet. You can see that the IFA business is still the biggest driver for growth with EUR 10.1 million in the first nine months. It's up 16.8%. All these major customers are up 17.5%. That's EUR 3.8 million numbers. The advisory part that's maybe a little bit disappointing in Q3.
Overall, it's still a plus 1%, but it's not doing much as to all these, you know, market conditions. We are always talking about the direct customers, which is by far, and that you can see on the right side, by far the smallest segment, where it's in this B2C environment, we do not spend much or at all in marketing and advertising. It's no surprise that this is going down and has some churn. But you can see on the right side that these major customers we are focusing on already contribute more than 20% to our turnover in the AdvisorTech segment with a growing number.
If we talk more later on this very big contract with the savings banks or the cooperative banks, that you will see that this green part of the pie will grow the strongest and at some time down the road will be larger than the IFA business, which is now still 75% of our business.
Okay, let's go into the figures. As Sebastian mentioned, the third quarter was maybe a little bit disappointing compared to the first half year, with an overall growth of 1.1% from EUR 34.4 million to EUR 34.8 million. If you look at the AdvisorTech business, we still see a strong growth with approximately 10% in this really difficult environment, and that's a very good news. In advisory, we see a little decline with 6.3% from EUR 8.9 million to EUR 8.3 million euros, which is a result of the customer confidence or the missing customer confidence.
If people don't know how to pay their bill for energy, or rent, or how to face inflation, of course, this has an impact on the sale of financial products. Gross profit is up 10%, which is a good number. EBITDA in the first quarter is declining by EUR 200,000 from EUR 1 million to EUR 0.8 million. Over the first nine months in total, still there's a revenue growth of 12.5% and an EBITDA growth of 16%. Let's go into the two segments, AdvisorTech and advisory, with some more information for you to understand the situation a little bit better.
AdvisorTech business grew by 9.5% from EUR 27.9 million to EUR 30.5 million in the third quarter over the full fiscal year or the first nine months with 16.2%. A very good development at a stable cost base. We see the development from the EBITDA from EUR 1 million to EUR 1.5 million in the third quarter, which is a plus of 41%. Stable cost basis because we have still a consolidation issue.
MORGEN & MORGEN, the company that produces all the comparison tools for JDC was not consolidated in the third quarter 2021 for the full quarter, so you cannot compare the figures in total. If you look one step deeper, you see the stable cost basis. Over the first nine months, the AdvisorTech business grew by 16.2% to EUR 98 million, with a nicely growing EBITDA from EUR 5.5 million to EUR 6.8 million, which is 22.1%. One step deeper, again, we decided to give you some more information on the development, the historical development of recurring and one-off commissions.
The left box shows you how the first nine months overall of the last five years or six years went. You see that the blue line, the one-off commission, is growing year-over-year. The green line, the higher line is the recurring commission, is even growing stronger. What you can see in the right boxes is the annual increase of one-off commission measured in euros. There you can see that we had good years, 2018, 2019 or 2021, where we grew in the one-off commission between approximately EUR 6 million-EUR 7.5 million. We had worse years like 2020.
This was the corona lockdown year and 2022 with the Ukraine crisis and all this discussions about inflation and energy prices, where of course we see an impact on the one-off commissions. You see, if you look at the box below with the green color, you can see the annual increase of recurring commissions. There we can observe that recurring commissions are increasing year-over-year. It doesn't matter if we have a good or bad environment, they increase year-over-year. The good news is with an increasing speed.
Last year in 2021, our recurring revenues grew in the first nine months by approximately EUR 6 million and this year by more than EUR 7 million, or approximately EUR 7 million, sorry, by EUR 6.9 million. Let me give you some more information about how will this develop. We have two sources of recurring revenues. The first is the insurance business, it's the left side of this slide, and the second is the mutual fund business, where we gain the trailer fees. In the insurance segment, we can see that the number of initiated contract transfers onto our platform is growing dramatically in 2022 by approximately 90%.
As Sebastian mentioned, we know that every contract on our platform pays a recurring revenue of EUR 30-EUR 35 per contract and year. This is why we know that in the next year, our recurring revenues again will increase and will increase higher than in the year 2022. We think and hope it's the same in the mutual fund business, because if you look at the development of the MSCI in the last 12 months, you can see MSCI was down approximately 20% and JDC assets were approximately 10% down. The reason is that, of course, we still have inflows from one-time investments and savings plans on our platform.
We all don't know when the market will recover, but we know that once in the future it will recover, and then the rebound will be on a higher asset base. We are very optimistic in this segment and this will be a driver for our future growth, definitely. Okay, let's look into the advisory segment. There we saw a decline in turnover from EUR 8.9 million to EUR 8.3 million in the third quarter, which leads still to a growth of 1.1% over the first nine months. This is not satisfying for us, but as Sebastian said, it's a result of the customer confidence at the moment, and that's the situation we have outside.
We have a very stable cost basis in this segment leading to an EBITDA decline from EUR 0.7 million to EUR 0.3 million in the third quarter, and still a growth of 12.7% from EUR 1.6 million to EUR 1.8 million over the first nine months. Again, some more information on the advisory business, if we look back the last years, that's what you see here. We have stronger years and weaker years, and they are all driven by customer confidence. If you look at the year, fiscal year 2020, we had the COVID crisis with the lockdowns and, of course, this affected the advisory segment.
If you look at the year 2021, we saw a strong rebound after the COVID crisis because people buy financial products not for fun, but they buy them because they need them like a disability insurance or like their pension plans. We will see catch-up effects in the next year or in the next period when markets recover, as we saw catch-up and rebound effects in the past. Okay. Here you see the development of liquidity. We started with EUR 21.9 million cash on hand, leading to a net cash position of EUR 2.4 million plus. Net cash position now is minus EUR 1.9 million, but that does not mean that we burn cash.
We had a lot of investments this year in the first nine months. EUR 3.1 million was the cash out for deferred payments for acquisitions that we did in the past, mainly the MORGEN & MORGEN platform. Another EUR 1.6 million was invested into the share buyback program within the first nine months. That leads to cash on hand of EUR 17.7 million. At the end of September, the cash on hand last Friday was EUR 23 million. Some more information on bonds and share price that you can observe by yourself.
The bond still trades with more than 100%, which is good for us. To remind you, the bond has a volume of EUR 25 million. EUR 5 million of this we hold on our own book. This is a financing reserve for us that is not necessary right now. The result of our share buyback program is that we now own 637,000 shares that we purchased at an average price of EUR 8.55 per share. The value of all shares in our hands now is EUR 11.4 million with hidden reserves of around about EUR 6 million. Sebastian.
You can see our shareholder structure here. As you know, our very big shareholder is Great-West Lifeco, that we picked in a beauty contest when Ralph and I deleveraged our leveraged buyout. You know that VKB, the big public insurer behind the savings banks, acquired 6%. Ralph and I are holding still 11%, and already 4.7% are held by JDC out of the share buyback program. If you want to look us up at Bloomberg, you know that our other shareholders, like the who's who of small cap investors, many small cap funds, U.S.-based, Scandinavian, Danish-based, or as well as U.K., the Netherlands, Israel, South Africa, Singapore. Big mix and broad base of shareholders.
We want to give you some spotlights. What you always ask us is how are the very big projects going, especially the roll-up of the platform that is the S-Versicherungsmanager or Savings Bank Insurance Manager app in the region of the public insurer Provinzial. This is the project where we expect EUR 100 million additional turnover by the year 2025. Also we published that we entered into a joint venture with Bain Capital Insurance and Great-West Lifeco. Also, I think very good news for our company that after a long process of a new tender offer done by Lufthansa Albatros we just entered into a new five-year contract with Albatros, who's still our biggest client. Yeah. Let's start with the savings banking, Ralph.
Yes. As you remember, we won the tender of Provinzial to deliver the back-end platform behind the S-Versicherungsmanager. The S-Versicherungsmanager is a software that belongs to the Versicherungskammer Bayern, the S-Versicherung, and Provinzial. The biggest public insurers in Germany decided to use this as the insurance platform for the German savings banks. We are connected via the API to serve this S-Versicherungsmanager in the third party insurance area, especially to gather contracts by contract transfers. The result that we see now is today we have more than 40 savings banks that have signed the agreement with us or with the EGV. EGV is the joint venture with Provinzial that we run with 25% and Provinzial with 75%. 40 savings banks have signed the contract. Let me add the comment that this is more than any other competitor by far.
We are happy with this development. More than 30 savings banks now are onboarded in a technical way, so they can use this S-Versicherungsmanager and five savings banks right now have rolled out the S-Versicherungsmanager in their branches. That's a necessary step to do business, and that's what we see right now. We have the first 4,000 in transfers initiated via the S-Versicherungsmanager and our platform. This confirms the very positive feedback that we receive from the savings banks that are participating. They look at the S-Versicherungsmanager as a very useful platform to make their insurance business and we receive very positive feedback for the service performance of our joint venture, EGV, where the end customers are serviced or served when they have questions. That maybe from my side. If you want to add something, Sebastian, feel free.
No, it's fine. It's just up and rolling and maybe to add also our other project with banking groups, especially the cooperative banks, that's just on a good way. As you might remember, we are in a pilot with the cooperative banks. The first four cooperative banks are starting their business with us this year, and right now, the feedback is very positive. We just got the confirmation of the CEO of ERGO Versicherungen, which is the second biggest insurer in Germany, and the big insurer behind the cooperative bank. This is up and running, and we will have a final decision next year to roll the platform out on the other 800 cooperative banks in the German market. Maybe on next page.
Yeah, this is an interesting project. As you can see, private equity is coming into the German market with force. There is a lot of platforms being bought. Two of our biggest competitors are bought, one by Hg and one by Warburg Pincus. There is now a lot of capital available to buy broker businesses. If you are from the U.S. or U.K., you know that the market is consolidating fast, because these companies buy a huge number of insurance brokers with taking up leverage. We could bring together two very important players on the platform. That's Bain Capital Insurance with a shareholding of 65% in joint venture company.
Our parent, Great-West Lifeco, has a 25% stake, and JDC has a 10% stake in a company called Summitas Gruppe. The Summitas plans to buy big numbers of brokers with EUR 700 million. It's an initial commitment of 150 million in equity, but then there could be debt, up to 8x EBITDA. In a similar case, Bain Capital took up on a 70 million investment in equity, took up more than 300 million in debt. There is firepower of EUR 400 million-EUR 500 million, and it's our aim to buy 20, 30 brokers in the course of the next two years. The nice part about this is that we have an exclusive platform contract.
That means that all these target companies will then transact their business via our platform at normal platform margins. The first acquisition we plan already short term, hopefully before Christmas, let's see how it is. To do so, we could hire an excellent management team. The new CEO is Michael Schliephake. He was the head of the broker business at Allianz for the last 10 years. The president of the board is Markus Nagel, who was the CEO of Zurich Group in Germany until four years ago. We expect that we buy at least EUR 50 million-EUR 60 million in turnover with Summitas and this will lead to earnings of EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million within JDC Group.
We're happy that this goes forward strongly and we'll see the first acquisition soon. Another growth case parallel to what we do with the cooperation with these very major customers. That's another good sign. I mentioned it really quick before. Lufthansa has this internal obligation with any important contract. They go into new tenders every five years, so that's their corporate rule. That's also what they did. Maybe some of you caught up some message in the market that some of our competitors were positive in winning this contract, but after having looked at all the others, they are happy with what they have.
It's now clear that for at least the next five years, Albatros continues to use the JDC platform at the same economic conditions that we had before. Only that the contract in the beginning was a little bit bumpy as there were some specialties inside which we didn't not like on our side, so we could have now a contract which is very beneficial for both sides. We expect a turnover in the next five years of EUR 75 million-EUR 100 million, not every year, but together as a lump sum for all the next five years. Another growing customer, and as Albatros still our biggest customer, it's good to have them on our side for the next years. Guidance, I think important thing.
You might ask us, if Q3 is in a way that's maybe not good, but also not bad, why change now our forecast for the entire year. The reason is solely that the market sentiment is very negative in Germany. If you talk to consumers, as I said in my introductions, consumers are very reluctant to buy or to have big investments or buy big. You can see that all the retail figures are down, and normally year-end business starts now in this week. November 15 until December 20 is normally our high time in sales. Still, if we have a normal year-end business, we would reach the old guidance.
We could have left it open and then told you last year that it happened or not. I think out of caution, it's more honest to just take into account what we see in the markets. Now we see that we feel more conservative and more confident with a new guidance of turnover of EUR 155 million to EUR 165 million, so that's EUR 10 million down, and still a growth in the upper single-digit number, and also have a broader range of our EBITDA guidance. I still think positively that we can grow from last year, but we now have a broad band of EUR 7.5 million-EUR 9.5 million, depending on whether there's no year-end business at all or whether there's a good year-end business.
As I said, if this would be as it was last year, it would look much better. This is what we think that year-end business might not be as it was last year. We still stick with our long-term goals, which we think now as we added more contracts to this, our goals 2025, which we gave you two and a half years ago, are still very valid. I think in 2025, we'll have a turnover of more than EUR 250 million, and we have an EBITDA of more than EUR 20 million. Midterm, no change at all.
I think this is conservative because if you only would take one of our projects, if you only take the Provinzial project, if you only take the Bain project, if one of these big projects works out, then this is good to be reached. As we tell you from time to time, there's a lot of a big number of more new customers coming to the platform. One is Ecclesia, the broker of the Catholic and Protestant churches. One is Buta, the first sales representative networks of more than 1,000 agents. There's a lot of rockets we can shoot and we are very sure that some of them will hit target.
If you look at our goals for 2020, 2022, you see that the successful rollout for the savings banks is in progress. Ralph Konrad explained the figures there. Yeah, the onboarding of other public insurers has not been done yet, so that's the only green mark missing. We're very positive that both VKB and maybe one other public insurer will decide to sign a sales contract in the course of the next week. Also here we will fulfill our goal. Yes, so we are quite successful now to not only onboard these major customers because the ones who are in an organic growth phase, such as Albatros, such as Rheinland, such as Bavaria, but BMW, they are growing.
BMW, for example, with more than 30%, very successful, but also the others. We can increase our profitability with these major customers. As I said, we're also adding further major customers, Bain, Ecclesia being only two of them. Our technical platform grows and that's always what we're saying. We still think that in the insurance processing part, we have a window where we're leading the pack and our tech stack is advancing in an 18-24 months time window where the others have to do their IT homework until they are where we are today.
Saying this, knowing that we are developing further and putting more resources, more than 100 IT people working on our platform to become even better, so to keep the distance from our competitors. Because it is our aim not only to take part and win these tenders that are in the market, but also not to have any other company win a tender because we want to be the leading platform providers for these institutions and these bigger customers. Yeah. Also, there's a caveat, and this is also why we are having these changes in guidance.
I think JDC is performing really well, and we're really proud of our team, but there's one thing we cannot change, that's the extrinsic factors of the market, and we are dependent on the further development of the economic environment, the global, but also the national one. If you read German newspapers, see German television, what's up with gas prices and how the government they quarrel over when it's done, how it's done, whether it comes in December or in January. People on the streets are insecure about whether their money is enough to pay their bills.
Up until this, consumer confidence is down, and driven by inflation and the current energy crisis, we just are not sure what comes in Q4, and therefore, this step to adapt our guidance. On the midterm, as we said, we're very confident and optimistic that we can keep our targets, and we'll reach these goals 2025 and also maybe with a margin.
Maybe let me add, Sebastian, one sentence. We have talked about inflation, and inflation, of course, gives uncertainty to the consumer. But for our assets, inflation is also good because inflation leads to the fact that the premiums will increase over the year. We know that in the P&C business, the prices will be up, and this will lead to the fact that our recurring revenues again will increase because the commission is always linked to the premium. If the premium increases, then our commission rises as well.
Yes. Let me give you an example. For example, in building, the insurers now publish that they will bring up the premium 5%-6%, which you would say like maybe inflation is more than that. There is the pricing index for the housing, and this is what they calculate on top. When customers get their bill, they will see a 12%-15% rise on their insurance premium, at least in building. Car might be very similar, so maybe double-digit raise in premium next year in the German market. With some delay, this is a very nice inflation protection for our system. All right, happy to take your questions now.
Thank you very much, first of all, for your presentation. Dear participants, please submit your questions either via chat, and we will read out your questions, or alternatively, directly address it to the board of JDC by raising your virtual hand. You can use the hand button on the lower part of your screen. We would first of all start with some questions from the chat. Does the interest rate increase reduce the incentive and appetite of savings banks to step up their insurance business?
Ralph, do you want me to answer or?
We can, as you wish.
Maybe I start. We don't think so at all because the core of the S-Versicherungsmanager, so the Savings Bank Insurance Manager, is the transfer of these very big number of small P&C contracts. They have nothing much to do with interest rates or inflation. That's the core and there is no difference in the business planning there. When it comes to and that's I think what the background of your question is to one-off investments, then you will see that there's more banking products now in banks than insurance products. Still, this is not the aim of our business relationship with the savings bank and it's not in our business planning until now, Ralph.
Absolutely right. In the past, there was one insurer very strong in the savings banks, that was Allianz, and they sold this one-off insurance product because of the guaranteed interest rate. This was better for the customer compared to a fund investment or to other investment and this will change. That's what savings banks see, that Allianz gets less money than before, and the money is back into normal forms of savings banks products. That is not the aim of the S-Versicherungsmanager. That's not our business.
All right. Thank you. There are some questions from Benjamin Kunke. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Can you hear me, guys?
Yes, sure.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions, a few please. First of all, Ralph, could you maybe just outline the main drivers for the significant improvements in gross margins in the AdvisorTech business? Second one, on guidance, the one thing I'm a little puzzled about is you're essentially guiding for EUR 10 million lower revenues at the midpoint, and then for around EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million lower EBITDA, which seems to indicate a significant operating leverage in your business. Is this the right way to look at it, or rather deleverage in this case, but leverage if it goes the other way around, I guess.
Is that the right way to look at it, or are there any other sort of factors that we should be aware of? The third question would be just a more general one around onboarding times of new large customers. I mean, I think we all understand why it's taking so long with the savings banks, and you indicated that and it's no surprise. Just wondering about the, you know, companies like Ecclesia, for example. Would it be right to assume that this is significantly faster and could already contribute significantly to your earnings from, let's say, the first quarter next year, on, and yeah, I guess Ecclesia or companies similar to Ecclesia like Gothaer, for example. Thank you.
Okay. Sorry, I have to switch the screen because I wanted to write down your questions not to forget one. Main drivers of margin in the AdvisorTech business is that we more and more are able to charge fees for our software that we don't have to pay out to anybody. You know, commission is always driven by brokers or intermediaries, and we always have to pay out a portion, and the bigger the intermediary is, the higher is the payout. We are now able to build more and more fees for our IT platform that we can keep at 100%, and that's what you see in the figures.
Second question was we guided the turnover EUR 10 million lower, and EBITDA EUR 4 million lower. Why is that the case? Yes, that's a cautious guidance because we don't want to disappoint if we lower our guidance. We definitely want to reach what we promise and, of course, we expected a higher growth in the third quarter and the fourth quarter, and for this, we increased the cost basis. If you want to transact more business, you need more people.
Yes, we are automated and we increase our automation day by day, but nevertheless, we need people, and you have to hire them in advance, and that's the reason why we now have a cost basis that is a little bit higher, as business in Q3 would need it, and that's the reason why our EBITDA guidance is going down a little bit more than the turnover guidance. As Sebastian mentioned it, the range is very broad, from EUR 7.5 million to EUR 9.5 million. The reason is that we just don't know if we have a year in business or not. If we have a year in business, we could be very near to our original guidance. If not.
Maybe the last question, Ben. Yes, it take quite a while to make up these very large customers and you have to differentiate between customers that already have existing insurance business, such as Ecclesia. Ecclesia will just transfer their whatever 35,000 contracts, and this will be immediately a EUR 1 million plus or so in our top line. As compared to this, the banking business is coming from scratch, so most of the business comes as the individual transfer of contracts, so customers have to be converted to the platform. The business with Albatros or these big brokers bring immediate effect, and the banking business, for example, brings like a step-up effect over the years, right?
Thank you very much.
Thank you for your questions. We will continue with the questions from Brett. Your line is now open.
Hey, Brett, you're on mute still.
No, I actually didn't quite hear if that was definitely me or not. Anyway. Thanks for the time, guys. I guess, you know, understanding the near term is, you know, challenging and out of your control. I'm not as concerned about that. I'm a little more curious about the midterm. These obviously. You know, you have multiple business lines between Provinzial, VKB, Summitas, which eventually could be, you know, close to, let's say, EUR 100 million in revenue, give or take, a lot.
When we're talking out to 2025, we're only still talking about an incremental EUR 100 million, you know, less than EUR 100 million from today. You know, I guess I'm trying to understand that bridge because it feels like. You know, I know that, you know, you may be being cautious midterm guidance, but it feels like there should be a lot more flowing in over the next three years.
Yes. Hopefully, not only one rocket hits, but on top of Provinzial, there will be VKB and one other big public insurer that will take part. Also there's business coming from the cooperative. I think what we got used to and make you get used to is that we just guide on things that are really tangible. Right?
We are v ery secure about things. There's some things which are extrinsic factors we cannot do anything about. Everything what we can see inside, we will definitely get there, because as I said. Then with the Bain Capital, there's not EUR one we calculated in our vision because first the targets have to be bought. This we have in our hands, at least in part. We will just add the platform planning as soon as one of these targets is bought. We will add happily on our yearly planning sheets, but not the turnover that it's bought over the years, you know, in some years distance. Ralph?
Yeah, definitely. Maybe we take this hint and this discussion, Brett, to think about a new midterm guidance, and maybe come back to you later on. Not today.
You're not gonna calculate around? All right, thank you both very much.
Okay.
Thanks for your questions. There are further questions in the chat. For instance, if you could give some color on how the competition is coping with the difficult environment.
Yeah. You can see that there was just some drastic decreases in valuations. One of our closest competitor insurance field, but also actually a role model in the platform business is a company called Hypoport, which just canceled the guidance overall and said, "It's so insecure, I don't give you a guidance anymore." This is what we're trying to avoid. Their numbers are not that bad either, but still, they don't wanna say something about the future. This is, like, the balance we want to find that, yes, we see insecurity, but we want to also give you our best guess on what can happen.
As Brad said right now, it's just a very short term, yeah, storm or stormy weather. I think starting next year, we will see that there will be more security on how everybody pays its bills, and there will be rather normalizing markets in real estate and mortgage. We think and we also hope that next year will be more quiet. Well, the advantage of many of our competitors are that they are not listed, and they don't feel it yet because private equity is flooding them with monies. This will be the easy way. I think we have a more professional stance on this.
All right. Thank you.
Maybe we have another question from from Edwin de Jong. Hi, Edwin. That we have skipped. He's asking if we can give an idea of the mix between AdvisorTech and Advisory in our guidance, and he says that if we take the nine months figures and interpolate them to Q4, then we would arrive at EUR 167 million turnover and not at EUR 155 million-EUR 165 million. In general, we think that the AdvisorTech business will do very well in the fourth quarter, because a lot of these new brokers begin their work. We are live with Ecclesia, for instance. They begin working on the platform and others as well.
You have to keep in mind, Edwin, that last year we had a very good year in business, coming from the lowering of the interest rate, of the guaranteed interest rate, of the insurance companies. There was a strong year in business last year, and today we tell you that we are unsure if there is a year in business or not. That's the reason why you cannot interpolate or look at the last year and do the math for 2022. Sebastian?
As we said, you know, if we have some normal year in business, then yes, you're right. This is exactly the fact we don't know, and we don't want to disappoint you last year. Next year, sorry.
Okay. Next question from Edwin is: What does Lufthansa deal mean for the revenues going forward? How much additional revenues should we expect from this contract? I question your answer.
As I said, we, Lufthansa is our biggest client, and, it's their own business planning that they will contribute at least EUR 75 million over the next five years. Up to EUR 100 million, so you should expect EUR 15 million-EUR 20 million next year.
Yeah. There are some questions in the chat. The first is: What was the reason for the big difference in liquidity at the end of September and today or last Friday? Good question. We pay out commission three times a month. We have ups and downs every day. The reason for this difference was that beginning of November, we received trailer fees. It's always six weeks after the end of the quarter, we receive the trailer fees for our mutual funds. This is always the time where we have a very good liquidity.
In addition, I think the 30th of September was the lowest point of the year of the liquidity. The difference seems to be bigger than it is on a rolling basis. The following question was. Given the adjustments in forecasts, what do you expect the year-end balance sheets to be in terms of net cash debt? What was the cash flow for the first nine month period? At first, I apologize that we didn't provide a cash flow statement. We provide the cash flow statement for the full year and the half year. We decided to provide a cash flow statement on a quarterly basis in the future, so I cannot give you the exact details because it's not provided. Let me answer this way. Cash flow will definitely be significantly positive and year ends we will see cash and debt cash positive. Net cash positive, sorry.
There were two more questions we just received. Can you please comment on the pipeline of other potential corporate customers such as Lufthansa, or does the difficult environment change their propensity to use your services?
Yeah, we could tell you a lot, but we are not allowed to. Yes, there is a pipeline. We cannot name any targets. You know, that's long-term projects and, you know, sometimes there's a little delay of a month or two, but these are, like, big tender projects that go over normally more than a year. This will neither be sped up or slowed down by some market events that happen in a quarter or not.
All right. Thank you. We have one question left in the QA, so if there are still open topics you would like to address, please feel free to submit your question by chat or by audio line. Can you please comment on any potential further share buybacks?
Yes. Maybe at first, let me give you the information that until Friday we have bought 130,000 shares out of our second share buyback program, which is limited to 200,000 shares. We have another 70,000 shares that we can buy until the end of the year. The share buyback program is limited to the end of the year to 200,000 shares and maximum of EUR 5 million. That are the facts. Until the end of the year, I think, we will be active in share buybacks and we did not discuss future share buybacks with our supervisory board.
As long as the development at JDC is good and we are facing a positive future and we're producing cash, you know, we think it's a good investment to give money back to the shareholders with the share buyback program. As management, we are positive, you know, and legal framework is also there. We have all capitals, all regulatory things that we need. Yeah, we are positive but there are no decisions yet.
Great. Thank you. We did not receive any further questions in the meantime. I assume that everything is answered for the moment. To all participants, thank you very much for participating and listening and of course to you, Dr. Grabmaier and Mr. Konrad for your presentation and taking the time. I hand over to you for some final remarks before we round off this earnings call.
Yeah. Thank you very much. I hope we made clear that we are quite happy on the the internal development of the company, how all our projects are developing, our new chances by projects such as Bain Capital or the savings banks, the cooperative banks, all these other new clients. On the other hand, this is what we have to admit, is that we have not much visibility on what's happening in the next six months in the market. Again, as Edwin stated, if this would be a normal business, then would be fine with our old guidance. This is exactly the point that we cannot give you any clarity. Hopefully it is as so as we are optimists that business is much better than it seems right now.
Like this, we are on the safe side, and we are conservative, as you know us, and so we will not disappoint you after bringing our Q4 figures because that's basically the bottom we can think of right now. Thank you for your attention, thank you for your trust, and yeah, stay with us. As Ralph says, supervisory board, we as management, we are positive. We think that this stock is something that is that can be bought and we buy more of it. Thank you.