Good afternoon. Welcome to Enento Q2 earnings webcast. My name is Mikko Karemo. Today, I'm joined by our CEO, Jeanette Jäger, and our CFO, Elina Stråhlman. Jeanette will start providing an overview of our second quarter results, highlighting key achievements and updates from our business areas. Elina will then share insights from the financial perspective. Following the presentations, we will open the floor for your questions. Feel free to submit your questions at any time using the webcast tool. And now, I will hand over to Jeanette to lead us through our Q2 results.
Thank you very much, Mikko. Good afternoon to all of you, and warm welcome to this results briefing this beautiful day in Helsinki. Let's first shortly review the Q2 key developments, both in terms of numbers and what we have accomplished as a company. After that, I will be presenting the usual business area update with highlights. Regarding then our key figures in Q2, our operations in Finland, Norway, and Denmark, they continued to show positive development, while the consumer credit market in Sweden remained challenging through the second quarter of 2024. The challenges in Sweden resulted in lower net sales compared to Q2 last year at the group level. We have updated our outlook. We are now giving revenue guidance, and we expect the second half-year revenue development to improve in H2 versus H1, but we will come back to that later in this presentation.
In the second quarter, our organic net sales were EUR 38.5 million, representing a decrease of 2.9% at comparable exchange rates. Our Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 14.1 million, decreasing by 2.5% at comparable exchange rates, resulting in an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 36.7%. The share of net sales from new services improved further and reached a level of 15.3%, an improvement from 13.7% in 2023. Our free cash flow is expected to remain solid, enabling us to continue investing in our growth areas and return capital to our shareholders. During the second quarter of 2024, our operations in Finland, Norway, and Denmark showed positive development, but as mentioned, the challenges in Sweden led to net sales decline on group level
We kept efficiency and cost control in focus, leading to 36.7% EBITDA margin, which we can be satisfied with. It is important to note that the postponement of some planned costs to the second half of the year improved the adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter, but will respectively burden it in the second half of the year. Our EUR 10 million efficiency program progress as planned, achieving over 90% of its target on a run rate basis by the quarter's end. We are happy to share that we keep a high level of customer satisfaction with an NPS level of 36. During Q2, the management team has had dialogues with the decision-makers at our strategic and large accounts.
We can conclude that our customers are very satisfied in our capability to understand their business needs and develop our services accordingly, like the investments that we are now doing in ESG and compliance. Our customer experience and interactions are improving with the deployment of a generative AI-powered bot solution on our websites across the Nordic region. Additionally, the integration of the Enento solution with the Finnish Positive Credit Register on 1st of April 2024 has been successful, and the customer feedback has been positive. We maintained our focus in service development to our core and prioritized, sorry, growth areas, and I will come back to share more about our service development within the business area sections. Our EUR 10 million efficiency program is advancing as planned, achieving over 90% of its target on a run rate basis by the end of Q2 in 2024.
To recap, the main drivers, the further IT efficiencies were realized through voluntary redundancies and transitioning of application services. Now, the main focus is on streamlining, that is third area for now, our IT infrastructure environment with one vendor. This topic will be shared in more detail in a moment. Other ongoing activities include moving to a smaller office space in Finland and decommissioning our legacy company information platform in Sweden. We are now in the early phase of consolidating our IT infrastructure to enhance security and efficiency. To give context, let's start with a little bit of the background. We entered a frame agreement with TCS in early 2022 after a careful vendor selection process. TCS was selected because they had a comprehensive offering that included both offshore and onshore technology and solution expertise that suited Enento's needs, both in the short and long term....
After successfully consolidating our IT workplace to TCS in summer 2023, we have also transitioned certain application maintenance and development services in Sweden, and same is now ongoing also for the application area in Finland. Moving over to the infrastructure consolidation, in the end of March this year, we signed the contract for infrastructure services and project for consolidating 4 environments in Sweden. Project is ongoing, and material parts are expected to be finalized by the end of 2024. Now, we are analyzing the Finnish scope and will soon sign the project agreement for Finland as well. The preliminary plan is to complete the consolidation in Finland in the end of the year of 2024 or early 2025. With infrastructure consolidation, we are moving from the as-is situation with 5 different setups to one Nordic and modern IT infrastructure service delivered and developed by TCS.
The infrastructure services will be delivered from two sites in Sweden. This brings many benefits, like cost efficiencies, improved security, one way of working in Enento with infra services, and the possibility for us to further develop Nordic-level solutions and services to customers. Full impact of the cost efficiencies will realize in 2025. The cost savings are reported as part of the company efficiency program. The infrastructure consolidation and TCS continuous services will improve Enento security scoring. We will have improvements in respect of business continuity, disaster recovery, protection measures, and 24/7 response capabilities, as these are included in the TCS basic setup. For audits and compliance requirements, we will have harmonized security status of IT environment and improved reporting. TCS infrastructure consolidation is key initiative, aligned with strategic themes of Enento, like Nordic consolidation of capabilities.
As we go forward with TCS, we will likely see many possibilities to modernize and transform our IT landscape further, and to develop even better Nordic services to our customers. AI is, and will be, an important part of Enento's strategy for driving efficiency and innovation. During Q2, we reached an important milestone by deploying generative AI bots on all B2B and B2C websites across the Nordic countries. This deployment enables a new, improved way to interact with our visitors and customers. Not only does it improve the efficiency, but it also enhances the customer's experience significantly, from support cases to creating and capturing customer demand. We believe we can shift a significant share of our support cases to channels available 24/7 in the customer's preferred language.
We are now exploring the use of generative AI bots for marketing and sales purposes, and we expect these bots to help drive leads and revenues. We have high expectation of executing our journey with digitalization of sales and marketing with this technology and partnerships. We're also experimenting with several generative AI initiatives in areas such as gathering and refining data, and how to consume our data and analytics in our services, with, for example, question-based interface as for our customers. These initiatives aim to gather data and combination of data faster, and to deliver improved, personalized customer experience. But then, let's move on and review the highlights from our business areas, and we start with Business Insight, whose net sales growth was strong in our emerging markets, Norway and Denmark, and it was great to see Finland maintaining a solid growth trend.
Net sales grew in enterprise solutions and compliance services in Finland, and real estate information services in both Finland and Sweden. Business Insight's organic net sales were EUR 23 million and grew 0.9% at comparable foreign exchange rates. During the quarter, we also launched a new service for a major customer in Finland, combining ESG data with our property valuation model. We see a promising market potential for the service going forward, based on our experience in Sweden. Moving over to our growth area, compliance, our aim is to become the Nordic leader with the strongest offering. With the Q2 launches, we now have our first true Nordic offering. We possess attractive and unique data within our compliance offering in Finland, and we have now signed a supplier agreement to offer similar data in Sweden. In Q2, we also launched the PEP and sanction list screening service in Norway.
Additionally, in Finland, the introduction of improved service packages by Premium Solutions has enhanced the customer experience and facilitated the transition to enterprise accounts, according to our BI customer conversion strategy. Consumer Insight business area experienced another challenging quarter with revenue significantly below the levels of the second quarter of 2023, though year-on-year revenue development improved compared to Q1. Consumer Insight organic net sales were EUR 15.4 million and decreased 8% at comparable foreign exchange rates. In Sweden, despite signs of increasing consumer credit volumes, the consumer lending market continued to be challenging, with low activity levels in the loan broker channel. In Finland, the underlying volumes developed in line with previous trends, but this was offset by successful customer integrations with the Finnish Positive Credit Register . During the quarter, we launched our open banking PSD2 offering in Sweden.
We have a unique market position where we can combine our existing credit information service with real-time information made available through open banking. Together with our partners, we have the ability to guide our customers how they should work to combine information and make better risk-based decisions, as well as streamline lead times and handling of the lending processes. Additionally, we have successfully penetrated the e-commerce market vertical, where customers engage with our core credit offerings, completely independent of our legacy systems. Finally, the process of establishing new legislation in Sweden, aimed for preventing over-indebtedness, is still underway. We expect to have more information by the fall. We are proactively preparing for the different scenarios regarding regulatory changes. We are preparing for how they should work, and what can come out of those, but it is just too early to say anything at this point.
Now we have actually a little bit of a tech problem here. Handled. Thank you very much. Now we could switch pages again. So regarding priorities for the rest of 2024, then to conclude, we continue to focus on our product development and commercialization of our new and improved services in our core and the strategic growth areas. This goes hand in hand with our goal to make it easy to buy and easy to use. The situation requires us to continue to focus on tight cost control and efficiency measures. In addition, we prioritize IT activities that brings us closer to the one end-to-end goal with a scalable environment that increases security and efficiency. We have made great progress with the overall IT consolidation, and the infrastructure project will be a priority throughout the year.
The measures we have taken in executing our strategy support our confidence in our ability to generate value once the conditions improve. That was all for me for now. Thank you, and I'm leaving the word over to you, our CFO, Elina. Please.
Thank you, Jeanette. Very warm welcome on my behalf as well to this Q2 financial release. On my behalf, I at least feel that the Q2 financials turn out to be quite defensive when taking into account the challenging environment we continue to be in, in the Swedish markets. But let's continue with the financials in a bit more detailed manner, and start from the key figures. So, our net sales reached EUR 38.5 million and unfortunately, due to continuing heavy pressure in consumer credit volumes in Sweden, declined by 2.9% at comparable FX rates, excluding the impact from discontinuance of Tambur.
However, the decline was less than in the first quarter, following mainly the already lowering Swedish consumer credit volumes in the comparison period, but also thanks to stabilizing situation in Finnish consumer credit business and overall stable development in Finland and Norway. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 2.5%, with slightly lower rate than revenue, and resulted at EUR 14.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 0.2 percentage points to 36.7%, and this was thanks to both good savings, but also somewhat thanks to timing of costs. We continue to keep the costs obviously well in control, and costs continued to decrease. However, it is good to note, again, that there is limited amount of variable costs connected to Swedish consumer credit business, which then again means that any decline in volumes impacts our profitability immediately.
Adjusted EBIT development, that was largely in line with adjusted EBITDA development, but was impacted also by an impairment of discontinued service development project. Financial position, that remained on good level. Then, let's dig into the revenue development in more detail, starting from the Business Insight. And there, the development of the business area remained on the growth side in Q2, and revenue increased by 0.9% compared to last year. Finnish business continued on a stable track and was supported by strong demand for compliance and real estate, and stable demand for enterprise services. New services supported the Finnish business development, both in real estate but also in premium services, where we had a successful packaging renewal that supported the revenue development. In Sweden, business area was likewise supported by good demand for new real estate climate risk service.
But overall, the business area revenue in Sweden declined, especially due to the development in freemium business. Display sales struggled, following the challenging macro environment still. In Norway, the business continued to grow with handsome rates, both in premium and freemium services. Then moving on to Consumer Insight. There, obviously, the development was driven by the Swedish macro, as anticipated, and business area revenue declined by 8% in Q2. The decline was clearly less than in previous quarter, Q1, due to already lower volumes in comparison period in Sweden, but also thanks to defensive development in Finnish consumer credit business. In Finland, the customer implementations to governmental credit register supported the development, thanks to one-off implementation fees.
The Swedish volume decline continued in the levels seen already in Q4, following the low lending transaction volumes, decreased usage of broker segment, as well as market consolidation and exits. In Finland, the underlying volumes continued on low level, and some lenders continued to have their operations paused. But it is important to understand that in Finland, we do not see similar trend when it comes to market consolidations, nor brokers, for that matter. To mention some highlights also from the Consumer Insight side, so there, the revenue in the small business line, consumer market in Finland, that grew with high rates, and we expect this positive development to continue as well. Let's then move on to Adjusted EBITDA development in more detail.
As already mentioned, Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 14.1 million in the second quarter, and despite the fact that we kept costs under very good control and even decreasing the decline in consumer credit volumes and weaker sales mix turned the Adjusted EBITDA development into decline. However, margin slightly improved, thanks to these declining costs. But as already mentioned, we have limited amount of variable costs connected to Swedish consumer credit business, which means that the decrease of volumes and revenues directly hits our profitability. But looking at the EBITDA development then in more detail, the negative sales mix impact can be seen in the materials and services, meaning our data acquisition costs.
That increased despite the hefty revenue decline, and this is due to the good demand and development in real estate and consumer marketing businesses in Finland that come with variable data acquisition costs, as well as the fact that the heaviest decline in sales took place in Swedish consumer credit business, where variable data acquisition costs are limited. Materials and services were also pressured by cost inflation. Personnel costs, those decreased by EUR 500,000 compared to prior year, mainly following the savings and efficiency actions taken both last year, but especially this year. And, but what is good to note is that we also have several open positions, unfilled at the moment. That impact the quarterly personnel costs decreasingly.
The positive impact was partially offset by the salary inflation, but was supported by the fact that also last year, Q2, according to Finnish labor agreement, there was one-off compensation paid to all employees, and that increased the costs in comparison period. The successful savings actions and cost optimization measures, as well as the timing impacts, are also visible in other operating expenses that declined by EUR 400,000. Behind this decline, we have a mix of permanent and temporary cost decreases, but as said, also some timing impacts, but also negative impacts from cost inflation and OpEx investments or OpEx projects that we have successfully offset with efficiency actions.
It is also good to note that we are planning to invest in future growth during H2, which will increase especially our commercial efforts and marketing efforts from the current level, and we have also launched new services that will continue now to increase our cost base. Then finally, production for own use that slightly improved, and then the currency impacts, those were finally stabilized. Then, moving on to the free cash flow. Free cash flow development resulted at EUR 6.1 million and improved compared to prior year. Results were weaker, change of working capital had a negative impact, and investments were also slightly higher, but those were then offset by lower income tax payments. Following the fact that final tax payments for 2022 took place then last year, Q2, impacting prior year cash flow negatively.
The change in working capital, that was impacted by the timing of customer payments and the fact that the last day of June happened to be during weekend, postponing the payment of receivables to July. Then, cash conversion, both cash conversion and adjusted cash conversion, those improved from prior year levels. Then finally, our financial position, it remains strong. We have some EUR 11 million of cash at our hands, and all the credit lines are unused. Net debt to Adjusted EBITDA was at 2.6, which is clearly below our set maximum level of 3, and then gross investments roughly on prior year level. But thank you on my behalf. Now let's still continue with the updated outlook by Jeanette.
Thank you, Elina. So we have updated the outlook and are giving revenue guidance for 2024. Our Swedish consumer credit information sector continues to face a challenging operating environment, but Enento expects the environment to stabilize during the second half of the financial year. We will continue to prioritize cost control to maintain profitability. We expect the demand to stabilize during the second half of the year. The company's year-on-year revenue development is consequently expected to improve in the second half of the financial year, compared to the development in the first half of the year. For the full year 2024, we expect our revenue to decline compared to 2023, and what this means in practice is that since revenue in H1 declined by 4%, we do not expect H2 nor full year revenue to decline to be any higher than that 4%.
That was our updated outlook and guidance for 2022, and we are welcoming Mikko back, and we now have some time for questions as well.
Thank you, Elina. Thank you, Jeanette. And, we have a question from the audience. So Roni from Inderes, please.
Yeah, Roni Peuranheimo from Inderes. Hi. You now expect stabilization in the Swedish consumer credit information market. Do you see any signs on when it could return to growth? Is 2025 realistic?
I think that we should then, to answer your questions, we should look back to what is it that has actually had the largest consequences on the decline. The largest consequence on decline has been that we have seen a consolidation in the market, that we have seen lenders leave the market, and in addition to that, of course, also that we don't see the use of broker channel to that extent that we have seen earlier. Nor do we have as many lenders using the brokers forward, which actually then has an effect. Then on the positive side, we do see that there is now I would say most likely that we will see further interest rates going down in the autumn.
There is now speculation where it will be actually two, three times, and start already in August. As the interest rates decline, we will then see a positive effect. We already see a positive effect on the housing loans, but we will see the positive effect also on the consumer credits. Then in addition to that, when the lenders also put more focus on new consumers or new customers, rather than deficiency, that will also add to the picture of actually the use of loan brokers. Then your question, when does this happen? That is a question which is very difficult to answer.
You mentioned in your review that, regarding the conversation about the over-indebtedness in Sweden and the possible license-based register for this, you expect to see some news in the autumn. So what is happening in the autumn? Is there already some decisions to be made for that, or...?
That is, not information that is shared, and not information we have. What we know is that they will share, or we, we have been, announced that they probably will share something in the autumn. So that is what we have at the moment.
Okay. Then, still regarding the Consumer Insight, you mentioned that you have successful penetration in the e-commerce vertical. Could you open up how big vertical is this at this stage, and how big potential do you see here?
... Oh, that is a really good question, and actually, I don't know if you would like to also, Mikko, answer that. I can... If you want to add, please do, as we actually have the chief himself here on the sales side. But the e-commerce sector is, of course, important, and what we have done is that we have further developed an offering specially made for the e-commerce sector. And we have now gained additional customers in the e-commerce sector, and starting to be, you know, fairly established in that sector in Sweden. Would you like to say anything more on the e-commerce?
I think it's well said.
Thank you.
Okay. I'm not sure if I missed, you talked about the transferred cost from Q2 to H2, and kind of, like, the amount of this cost. Could you elaborate a little bit on this more?
Yeah, so, I can take this one. Partially it's a timing, but partially it's also that we are planning to invest more in OpEx in the coming quarters. Our marketing efforts continue to be on very low level in Q2, even somewhat lower than before, so there we have some impact. But at the same time, we have and are now launching important services in the coming quarters, including PSD2 in Sweden. We have renewal of the whole Allabolag platform in Sweden, for instance, and the compliance offering, we have new data there. So we are planning actually quite...
Let's say, well, compared to what we have had in previous quarters, we are planning some bigger commercial launches now, as well, in relation to those products, which will impact then our marketing costs increasingly, both when you compare to Q2 levels but also when you compare prior year levels. So that's one part. Also, these new services that we have launched will increase our costs, otherwise as well, in terms of we have new partners, partners in place, both in PSD2 compliance, for instance. And then, when it comes to materials and services, there, we are also suffering from cost inflation. Government is raising prices here in Finland related to population register data. They already did one increase of double-digit.
Now they informed us about another double digit increase taking place in the quarter, so that will also impact our cost base in the coming quarters. And then finally, when it comes to the personnel costs, so, as mentioned, we have open positions at the moment. Then what impacts our cost base as well going forward is to launch LTI programs, where costs actually started only accruing in June, according to accounting rules. So, and then the Finnish salary inflation will only start impacting the coming quarters on the cost base.
So just, you know, if we look at our cost levels, taking into account these additional increases, of course, the efficiencies, but also the increases, and then our plans to invest in growth, we can look more, for example, in the other operating expenses, and more of a flattish development compared to prior year than decreasing one due to these matters.
Okay, that was a good answer. Maybe still regarding the IT infrastructure transformation, do you expect one-off cost increase as well in H2 now that the consolidation starts in Finland?
Yes, we will. It will require investment both in terms of, of course, time, but we have also vendors working with that project. It's a significant transformation that will require significant resources as well.
All right, no further questions from me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The postponed cost issue was also asked several times in from the other audience. There are a couple of questions here that we could take. For you, Elina, gross margin weakened from previous year. What is the mixed effect causing this?
Yes. So, as mentioned, we don't... The Swedish consumer credit business basically has fixed data acquisition costs, so meaning that when the revenue declines, we don't see any decline in our data acquisition costs. But at the same time, we see very good development in Finnish real estate business, in consumer marketing business, which both are connected with variable data acquisition costs. So those impact our costs increasingly, and on top of that, the governmental price increases also unfortunately impact that cost base.
Indeed. Good. Thank you very much. And then, Jeanette, to you, this was actually a little bit touched earlier, but still question: Are there any signs of improvement in the Swedish consumer loan demand?
Yes, there are signs of improvement. I mean, we can now see that the real estate is actually both stabilizing and having positive signs, and I do expect interest rates go down now in the autumn, which of course also then will possibly even affect the consumer credit market and the loan broker market.
Also, another question which is not strictly aligned to this quarter, but interesting question still, is: Look for acquisitions favorable for Enento as the values have, you know, the valuation have been lower during these couple of years? And what would be a good addition to Enento's offering? And there's so even suggestions, perhaps PSD2, or marketing, or compliance. So, what do we say?
PSD2, marketing, and compliance, right? We are, we are continuously scanning the market, and we are having a pipe, which we are analyzing when it comes to marketing acquisitions. But of course, we only go through if, A, we see that there is a value for it, meaning that there is data there that could be valuable for us that we don't have, or there is a tech which can make it easier to either gather or share data, or there could be a customer base that could be relevant for us. And of course, forward could also be an additional geographical market. Though, then, the valuation needs to have, of course, also a good discussion with the seller, or then we always look into if there's an alternative where we can produce this with less costs.
So far, we haven't seen an acquisition due to these conclusions. It is on the table, and we continue to have it on the table.
Good. Thank you very much. These were the questions we had for today.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Elina. Thank you very much, Jeanette, and thank you to the audience.
Thank you.
Thank you. Have a great summer!