Good afternoon, and welcome to Enento's Q4 and financial statements release 2022 results webcast. My name is Arto Paukku, and I'm the investor relations officer at Enento Group. With me here today, I have Jeanette Jäger, CEO of Enento Group, as well as our CFO, Elina Stråhlman. We will start with an earnings update from Jeanette and Elina, and then we will go over to your questions, which you can present either from the teleconference line or by using the webcast tool. Now let's kick it off, and I'll hand it over to Jeanette. Go ahead.
Thank you, Arto.
Thanks.
Thank you. Good afternoon to all of you, welcome to this results briefing from my part. Let's first briefly review the Q4 key developments and then reflect on what happened in 2022, both in terms of numbers but also what we accomplished as a company. Regarding our Q4 development, our revenue grew in line with our expectations in the final quarter of 2022. The group's net sales amounted to EUR 42.9 million, representing year-on-year growth of 4.1% at comparable exchange rates. Yet again, the net sales development was particularly supported by the strong demand for consumer credit information services in Finland and Sweden. We saw positive development in Business Insight, while Digital Processes was clearly below comparison period following the declining housing markets in Finland and Sweden.
Adjusted EBITDA increased by 13.4% at comparable exchange rates and amounted to EUR 60 million, meaning a margin of 37.2%. Our free cash flow was strong and increased to EUR 10.5 million. We also faced some challenges during the last quarter. One of our IT vendors in Sweden had an IT incident in December, which unfortunately impacted some of our online services for a brief period. However, we can be proud how hard we worked as a team to solve the incident and minimize any damage to our customers. On January 26, we announced an efficiency program. The efficiency program will improve the cost structure of the group, and thereby provide a foundation for future growth. At the same time, we also made a write-down of EUR 10.9 million that concerned the IT platform development investments.
To summarize, we continue to aim for profitable growth over time in accordance with our long-term financial targets, and the announced efficiency program will be a key enabler for this ambition. Let's move to the key figures for 2022. In 2022, we continued to deliver growth and resilient results that were in line with our long-term financial targets. While we went through a significant changes and operating environment continued to be unpredictable, our net sales increased by 5.1% at comparable exchange rates, and our adjusted EBITDA reached a new record level of EUR 61.2 million and increased by nearly 6%. The margin improved to 36.6%. Thanks to our resilient and scalable business model, our business has adapted well to the diverse impacts of the economic uncertainty around us.
Free cash flow improved significantly while the net debt ratio was well below our set maximum level. The share of new services followed the recent development trend and was 4.6% during 2022. We did launch six new services during the fourth quarter and a total of 31 new services during the year. One interesting example from Q4 is the Salesforce plugin from Business Insight. With the plugin, our customers can have high quality, up-to-date business information data in the CRMs with fully automated process. We also continue to develop services in the area of consumer marketing information, and we have launched a service called Consumer Check Search in Sweden. Another example from consumer credit information in Sweden is the UC Risk Blanco, where we have built the value-added service, a scoring model that is based on our daily updated positive credit register.
The board of directors proposes to the Annual General Meeting that EUR 1 per share shall be distributed to our shareholders, which represents a yield of roughly 4.8%. The year 2022 started with the hope that the pandemic would finally be over and that we could start a new and lighter phase in the world. Unfortunately, the operating environment did not become easier. Despite the macroeconomic crisis we are now facing, we have continued our journey to become the Nordic knowledge company. Some of our key accomplishments in the past year include launching several strategic services, such as the daily credit register in Sweden and the new ESG report in Sweden and improved ESG offering in Finland.
We have also increased our Nordic presence and customer base, especially in Norway and Denmark. Our customers are very satisfied with our products and services and the way we serve them. We have achieved excellent NPS scores from both B2C and B2B customers. NPS from our strategic and large customers in Finland and Sweden was very strong and outperformed the finance industry peers with a score of 48. As we strive to achieve greater efficiency and productivity throughout our organization, we have continued investing in modern technologies and processes with the goal of realizing synergies of scale. Additionally, we are again certified as a Great Place To Work in Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and we have implemented frequent pulse surveys and a learning platform called Enento Academy.
These achievements, along with others, have contributed to a strong financial outcome for the year as our profitability started to improve according to our plans during Q3 and continued now in Q4. On January 26th, we made an announcement where we confirmed our long-term financial targets, made a EUR 10.9 million write-down in connection to the platform development investment, and launched an efficiency program. If we start with the efficiency program and what that is about, we are aiming for efficiencies of at least EUR 8 million in total during 2023 and 2024. Full amount of the estimated benefits will be realized in free cash flow from 2025 and onwards. More than half of the EUR 8 million benefits will result as permanent improvement in the adjusted EBITDA, whereas the remaining cash flow benefits materialize as reduced capitalized expenditure and facility costs.
The largest efficiency measures are connected to reduction of number of employees and improved IT efficiency and decommissioning of low profitability products and services. Unfortunately, as part of the program, we also started change negotiations in Finland, Sweden, and Norway in accordance with the respective local legislations to reduce our staff by approximately 40 people. The target is to conclude the negotiations by the end of Q1. As you know, in previous years, Enento has made significant investment into building new capabilities with expectations for substantial future benefits. With current market outlook for the midterm being challenging and uncertain, we do not expect these benefits being realized as initially planned. As a result, we made a partial write-down of the investments made mainly to the platform development. The write-down had no effect on cash flow, adjusted EBIT, or adjusted EBITDA.
One very concrete and topical activity in the area of IT efficiency is the pre-study we have just started. The focus is the application development and application maintenance in Sweden and, to be more precise, the current IT suppliers we are using in the area today. We are expecting a recommendation how we could operate more efficiently in these areas by using another IT supplier or suppliers. The analysis will focus only on the situation in Sweden, as we have there a higher ratio of external contractors and vendors than in our other countries, meaning that in Sweden there is biggest need for improved efficiency and potential benefits connected. Our long-term growth strategy remains intact. We continue to aim for profitable growth over time in accordance with our financial targets, and the efficiency program will be a key enabler for this ambition.
The efficiency program will improve the cost structure of the group and thereby provide a foundation for future growth. Let's continue with the Nordic Business Platform, which we have mentioned that we are reviewing and called the Reshaped Nordic Business Platform. It has earlier been called the IT Platform Transformation, but that can be misleading why I prefer we stay with Nordic Business Platform or even Nordic Business Transformation. This Nordic Business Transformation is about how we gather, store, enhance, and distribute data. That is our core. Our value to our customer lies in our ability to acquire unique data from different sources or to enhance and improve data in such a way that our customers are willing to pay a premium for that. The data can then be distributed in different channels, depending on type of customer use cases.
This value chain can be applied to all our business lines, regardless of data, customers, or use cases. It is therefore logical for us to use this joint value chain and to drive scale across the company. Given the previous slide and that Enento share the same value chain across business lines, we have a vision of a Nordic scalable and simplified production factory or facility. This vision was presented in 2020, and we still think it is very much valid and the right one for the company. This vision guides us in consolidating as much as possible of our production facility into the same Nordic structure to simplify, reduce cost, and to drive scale. It is also necessary for a competitive speed in go-to-market and our ability to grow according to long-term plan.
This does not mean that all services only will be Nordic or that we will only work with Nordic data, but it means that we will work on producing our services in the same way, using the same internal capabilities regardless of market. This isn't only a platform change, but a business transformation in building a completely new facility, redefining our services, migrate customers, and consolidating as much as possible on the way. Last year, we reduced the scope of some and closed some projects that we found not to give the benefits that was initially expected. Our work done so far has resulted in a new platform, modernized approximately 60% of the Mainframe-based data, a brand new Nordic premium system for our business information, new distribution channels such as Nordic APIs, a developer portal, identity, and access management solution.
Some of the new services that are enabled by this are our ESG offering, daily credit register, e-commerce Recheck, CI marketing offering, and our brand new Business Insight API. All of these are brought to the market except the e-commerce solution Recheck that is planned to be launched during Q2. As said, we still hold on to the vision of closing legacy platforms such as Mainframe and Oracle in the long term, but this must be carefully planned and executed. Our Mainframe platform has been integrated into our main customers since 40, 50 years. We are looking into different possibilities which need to take commercial and financial aspects into account besides the technical. We have built new capabilities to be shared between the Nordic countries, and we have started using these to both modernize our current services and innovating new services on top.
This work will continue in the following years as part of our overall strategic agenda. We have new ideas how to consolidate platforms, would like to come back to that as we have verified our thinking. The outcome of the projects we are driving now, like APIs, new ways of data handling, value-added services for building intelligence, our new platform, et cetera, will be valuable no matter what final solution we execute on. Even if we have made good progress, we have not delivered the benefits according to earlier plans and targets. The challenges in the initial plan were that the complexity of transformation journey was underestimated. It is not an IT project, but rather a business transformation. Heavy upfront investments in transformation prerequisites were made that are building OpEx costs without benefit realization. The current macroeconomic effects were putting pressure on margins and investment capacity.
The customer migration planning of large customers directly integrated to Enento services is an obstacle to legacy platform decommissioning. What will we do differently? We will avoid larger infrastructure investments without obvious financial benefits, but rather invest where we see the most potential and pace roadmaps with agile product modernization, which leads to the transformation to be driven by the business. We are not aiming for legacy platform decommission in one big bang, but probably a step-by-step approach. We pursue consolidation opportunities and revenue generation in the mid-term to secure profitability. We decommission application in order to drive out cost through incremental consolidation efforts. We leverage partnerships to accelerate transformation. The pre-study I mentioned earlier refers to this. We gradually migrate away from legacy.
In addition, we are aiming for creating a solution for us to modernize our capabilities without customers needing to change or adapt their systems. This would enable us to start a customer migration planning and customer site integration earlier. Expected results from this are profitable growth in line with our long-term targets, which creates a possibility to invest and make room for new Nordic capabilities and services, and also an extended but de-risked and credible time plan for full value realization. We will also benefit of having a future-proof infrastructure with reduced operational risk level, enhanced security levels, and overall modern IT environment. In summary, building a common Nordic scalable facility is a long-term initiative. We do it in order to reduce operational risk associated with old legacy solutions, increase security levels at an acceptable cost, get access to modern technology, et cetera.
We also see that by streamlining the factory, we will be able to have sustainable operational costs, not just the technical platform, but the number of vendors, the infrastructure, delivery models, et cetera. We do it in order to be able to continue modernizing our existing services, which is expected to drive growth and to be able to build new services. Growth-wise, the benefits are coming gradually, but cost reductions are slower as it takes lots of effort to be able to close down legacy. As mentioned earlier, during 2020, 2022, we have had good results building Nordic capabilities like the new platform and modernized data handling as examples. We look at the future, we have identified a number of KPIs for the transformation forward to follow up the progress.
We believe that 100% of the shared Nordic capabilities will be in place in 2025. That does not mean that the transformation is done, because we still need to modernize the products and services on top of the new assets, which is measured by the availability of modernized services. The next metric measures to what extent we have migrated customers from legacy environments and services into new, as well as to what extent customers have been onboarded to the new services. This is measured through the revenue flowing through the new platform. When doing so, we can ramp down the customer-facing legacy environments and applications, which is measured by the decommissioning metric. We have identified about 200 applications that will be decommissioned.
We are continuing this planning. We need to spend the time it requires since we are not talking about an IT project, but a Nordic Business Transformation program. That concludes the first part of my presentation today. I hand over to Elina to present the CFO highlights. Please, Elina.
Thank you, Jeanette. Let's focus on the financial outcome of Q4 and go through the numbers in a bit more detail. As Jeanette already mentioned, we had a good year and also a good last quarter, and we can be proud of what we have achieved. Despite uncertainties in the market environment and declining real estate volumes, we delivered according to our long-term financial targets and got the profitability development back on the right track. If we now deep dive into Q4, good development continued both on growth and profitability side. Growth was at 4.51%, and revenue reached EUR 42.9 million, despite heavy decline of real estate revenues. The key reason behind the good revenue development continued to be strong performance in consumer credit business in both markets, while also demand for business information services continued on good level.
Even more positively, adjusted EBITDA grew significantly faster than revenue with 13.4% rate, reaching EUR 60 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by 3.2 percentage points to 37.2%. This profitability development was thanks to successful savings and cost optimization actions, and was also supported by more favorable sales mix. Continuing with a bit more detail with the revenue development. We continue to see strong growth in Consumer Insight with 7.1% increase year on year. High growth in consumer credit business in Sweden continued. Also, Finnish business continued to grow with high rates despite the fact that we already had tough comparisons and normalized interest rate cap to compare against. The growth in both markets continued to be driven by increased unsecured lending volumes.
The development into smaller business lines, however, under Consumer Insight, Indirect to Consumer and consumer marketing, was weak and continued to be negatively impacted by the macroeconomic situation. Moving on to the positives. What was also very positive was that in Business Insight, good growth continued at 4.2% level, and all business lines were growing. Modest but positive trend with enterprise businesses continued while premium business for SMEs grew very strongly, especially in Sweden and Norway, thanks to successful sales measures. In Norway, the business was also supported by successful risk management offering launch for SMEs that took place earlier this year. Also, the freemium business, meaning company visibility type of services, continued to develop well despite the macro challenges, especially in the Norwegian markets.
The decline in the Digital Processes business, on the other hand, accelerated and business area ended the year with 12.3% decrease in the last quarter. This was obviously following the very weak situation and low transaction levels in the housing markets in both Finland and Sweden. The strong continued growth in compliance services was not unfortunately able to fully offset that decline. Let's continue with the profitability. Adjusted EBITDA development continued on the strong positive track that started in Q3, and we continued to see significant margin improvement also in Q4. The main drivers behind the strong development were scalable growth and favorable sales mix, as well as successful profitability improvement actions taken. The favorable sales mix, that is visible obviously in the revenue growth, as well as then in materials and services.
Our data acquisition costs on the materials and services decreased by EUR 400,000. That was following the revenue and respective data cost decline in Finnish real estate and consumer marketing businesses. These revenue declines were obviously then offset by growth in areas with higher scalability. Personnel costs, on the other hand, increased by EUR 700,000 despite the flat development in the number of FTEs. Salary inflation, of course, impacted the cost somewhat. The main reason behind the large cost increase is actually the changed collective labor agreement in Sweden that impacted pension costs growingly. The impact that was now realized in the last quarter applies to the full year 2022. The successful saving actions and cost optimization measures, those are then very much visible in our other operating expenses that declined by EUR 400,000.
Behind this EUR 400,000 figure, sales commissions actually continue to increase in line with so, strong sales development, and also IT costs increased due to platform and Tambur-related costs. However, IT cost increase was with somewhat more moderate pace than what we have seen in previous quarters. The IT incident that we had in December didn't impact our costs too much, as those were mostly offset by compensations received from the IT vendor whose environment was attacked in this incident. Despite these cost increases in IT and commissions, the other operating expenses as total decreased, and this was thanks to successful savings measures and cost optimization actions. We saw significant decreasing consultancy costs following both the lower level of free studies compared to prior year, but also following the successful cost optimization measures taken to lean our operations.
Also, marketing costs decreased following the optimization measures taken. On top of that, we also took a lot of actions to decrease any other adjustable costs to secure the profitability development. Finally, our production for own use, that remained on flat level. What comes to the reported figures, the weak Swedish krona obviously impacted the reported figures negatively. Moving on to the free cash flow. Free cash flow development was also on good level. Free cash flow was EUR 10.5 million and increased slightly compared to prior year. Positive profitability development and lower level of investments supported the free cash flow, but those positive impacts were largely then offset by negative impacts from change in working capital following the timing of invoicing. Cash conversion on full year scale improved and reached good level of 56%.
Finally, our financial position, that remained strong, by refinancing our EUR 180 million credit facilities earlier this year, we have secured our financing for the next three plus two years. We have around EUR 20 million of cash at our hands, and net debt to EBITDA remains well behind defined maximum level of 3x at 2.2x . Gross investments, those were somewhat lower than prior year, and that mainly related to more focused investment activity, lower level of hardware investments, and relatively high activity in the comparison period in relation to Tambur development that has now discontinued. Now, let's then invite Jeanette back on stage and continue with the way forward and our 2023 guidance.
Let us then look ahead and focus on the future outlook and guidance and the board's proposal distribution of funds. Looking ahead, we anticipate that 2023 will be a challenging year in terms of both growth and profitability. Our financial guidance for 2023 considers the continuing uncertainty in the operating environment, but our long-term financial targets remain unchanged. In our offering, we have both cyclical and counter-cyclical services, and we have several exciting strategic launches coming during next year that we expect to support growth both during 2023 but also in the longer term. We have specifically highlighted the impact of Tambur handover from Q2 onwards, impacting the growth net sales up to 1.5%. We also believe that there is cost pressure through salary and cost inflation while the efficiency program is aiming to mitigate that impact.
Based on these consideration, we expect the net sales in 2023 to grow between 0%-5% with comparable FX rates, excluding the Tambur impact. On the profitability side, we expect our adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 36%-37%. According to Enento's official dividend policy, our aim is to pay at least 70% of earnings per share as dividends, and we want to retain a stable dividend track. We see that our financial position and ability to generate cash flows continue to be strong and enables us to keep the dividend on the same level as last year. The board of directors is thus proposing a distribution of funds of EUR 1 per share, and that the funds shall be paid in April. Even if we expect 2023 to be challenging, we are excited about the year ahead of us.
We announced an efficiency program to strengthen the long-term value creation, the execution of the transformation program, and to secure profitability development in the coming years. This initiative, together with the Reshape Nordic Business Platform program, is striving for permanent improvements in our cost structure, which are necessary for us to strengthen the foundation for future growth. Maintaining stability and availability of our services is of paramount importance for us, and we are committed to ensure the security of our services. Besides activities around operational excellence, our priority during 2023 is to have customer first in everything we do as we aim for a superior customer experience. We are about to launch exciting new services. For example, now in February in Sweden, the Business Insight API will enable easy consumption of non-credit business information. In Finland, we are renewing the Alfa credit rating.
Our ability to reach scale on a Nordic level will improve as we are focused on developing our Nordic company culture, integration, and offering as one Enento. We also prioritize the development and growth of our employees, aiming to foster a culture of learning and innovation within the organization. This was the summary of our Q4 and 2022 performance. Thank you on my behalf, we have time for some questions. You know, Arto, please, Elina, please join me here.
Let's try to fit in, so Jeanette, if you can fit this way.
Yes.
Okay, good. Now it's time for the questions. We will start with the questions from the teleconference line. Operator, please go ahead.
If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. We will take the first question from line Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. The line is open now. Please go ahead.
Hi, it's Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank. I have a couple of questions. I guess the first is about the Nordic Business Platform timeline and this progress update. Can you give some more color on what this means for these IT-related double costs that have been, you know, growing over the past years? Are we going to see these for the foreseeable future, or can you elaborate this a bit more?
Yeah. At the moment, we see that we will have double cost for a number of years forward. We do have indications that we could probably decrease those after 2025 forward, I would like us to come back to that when we can see that we have confirmed the numbers that we are now working with, as it is updated the program and how we are prioritizing and rephasing the activities.
Obviously, to keep the sustainable profitability development, we are taking then other efficiency actions to mitigate these double costs.
Yep
... And impact of those in connection with IT efficiency.
There you also see how and why we have also focused on efficiency because we see that the investments we are doing and the costs that are coming with those are, I would say, crucial for our production facility for the future. At the same time, what we also see is that we can take efficiency measures on other areas in the company in the meantime. Of course, we are also coming to the decommission side, not only the decommission we have talked about now, decommission of low profitable products and services but also coming into decommission of applications.
Thanks. Maybe if I continue on the topic, I guess, this sort of progress update, it shows quite clearly that you haven't done much progress in terms of the customer migrations and so on. This has been a difficult topic for you. How are you going to tackle this, I mean, issue going into the future, especially with the migrations of the key customers?
I would like to say a couple of different things. Partly what we have in the program does not include customer migrations because it happens behind the scenes, so to say. Partly, of course, you're quite right. When it comes to customer migrations connected to, for example, the platforms, then we have the obstacles which I also told you about, that we have actually customers who have been integrated 40, 50 years and into very many parts of their organization. These kinds of integrations, we need to find another way forward. We think we have some ideas how we could actually do this in a phased way, which we would like to come back to when we have verified those.
In addition to that, of course, in a migration is always where when you need to agree with the customer in the end, on how and when. What we are trying to look for now is something where we decrease the customer effects as much as possible in order for us to proceed without actually taking the customer time and money into account. That will not be fully possible, so that will be a part of it, moving forward, to clarify that as well.
All right. Thanks. Maybe one question about the You note that the demand is weakening on the sales and marketing and direct-to-consumer related services, that will be, you know, causing headwind this year. Can you give us an estimate how many percentages of your sales these business lines represent currently?
Well, as you know, we don't disclose that. It is somewhere around 20% of our revenues.
That's helpful. My final question's regarding this good momentum in the Business Insight, I guess especially in the enterprise solutions, where you once again saw this moderate growth. Have you seen these demand levels sort of normalize yet, or are we still behind the volumes that you would otherwise expect them to see in this current macroeconomic environment?
This is difficult. I mean, we have seen the volumes being on a lower level connected to the pandemic earlier, as we could see that there was a cautionism among the customers to consume costs connected to this. Now we can see that there is a, let's say, a moderate positive development, which we could expect to continue. I think that is very cautious answer, but we don't have that much timeframe to go through until yet. That is why I'm also a bit cautious. I would say that if you see this moderate positive, you know, development and in addition to what we see in the macroeconomic around us, it could be a natural development, yes.
Okay. That's clear. That's all from me. Thank you.
Thank you. Now we'll take the next question from line, Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. The line is open now. Please go ahead.
Yes, good afternoon. It's Jaakko from SEB. About the improved gross margin, I understood that largely came thanks to the service mix. Could you repeat which were the service lines driving this improvement? Should we expect also favorable service mix going to 2023 as well?
I can just start, and then maybe you can continue. We continue to see consumer credit information being strong. In addition to that, we also now mentioned that we could see a slight improvement in BI Enterprise as well. Those are a few of those, I would say when we say a positive service mix. Please add to the picture, Elina.
As you said, the enterprise business overall, that is one of our most scalable businesses. Same applies to the especially to the Swedish consumer credit business that continue to grow with high rates. As said, where we saw decline was in real estate, Finnish real estate services, as well as consumer Marketing services, where we have much less scalability and much higher variable data acquisition costs connected.
Okay, good. Thanks. Regarding pricing, last time I recall you stated that you are evaluating opportunities to hike prices in certain categories. What has been the outcome of this assessment, and have you implemented price hike for 2023?
Yes. Actually, just to start with a little bit of background, we do actually work with our prices every year, just to state that. In addition to 2023, we are and have raised the price announced from January. Also if we now take into consideration inflation, which of course brings this to table, then we don't see that those price increases can fully mitigate the inflation from salary costs mainly. We actually have to work with the cost structure on that one. The price is and will remain an important question for us now forward. We are actually inserting this into all our contracts.
Okay, thanks. Then finally, a bit of a technical one on the interest rate in your credit facility. Is it variable or have you fixed that?
It is variable.
Sorry, I missed that. Variable and, if so-
It is variable, and for the euro part, it was fixed at the time we refinanced the facility. With the Swedish krona related loan, it is based on six months rate.
Okay. Good. Thanks. That's all from my side.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will take the next question from line Matti Riikonen from Carnegie. The line is open now, please go ahead.
Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. I have a couple of questions. The line is actually quite bad, so it's echoing. I haven't heard much of the other questions so far. I might be asking some questions for the second time, so sorry about that. First of all, first question is that, what exactly happened with the Nordic Platform, and why do you write down the investment? What exactly became useless and without future values so that you take the write-down?
To start with, I would like to say that as I mentioned in the communication and in presentation I did earlier, we still have the same vision, we still have the same strategy, we still have the same goal. I would say that we have opened up, at least that is my intention, to open up with the understanding of that this is not only about a platform, this is about so much more. It's about how you take in, how you work with bill intelligence, and how you deliver the data. Back to your question regarding platform. What happened actually? Fair question. What we could say was that part of it was connected to that we didn't see that we would get the benefit that it was initially planned to give. That is what it is.
Other parts we saw also wouldn't give the benefits that we were expecting in the time connected also to how the macroeconomic pressure was put on it. There is, yes, a fair amount of money, which then hasn't been giving the results that we were expecting. I also wanted to clarify to you all, how we see that we work forward differently to kind of, you know, try to regain a bit of your respect and confidence that we know what we are doing. I'm not saying we didn't know what we are doing at that time, I'm just saying that we will drive it differently. One of the things that we will do is that we will drive it more out of a business perspective, less of a tech and IT perspective.
Meaning that every time we put a euro into this, we will also look into, so what does it give and when? It doesn't always mean that we get new growth or that we get decreased costs, because some of the euros has to be there because we are actually upgrading our whole environment, which you need to do now and then. In addition, I would say that part of these projects which we are addressing were still possible to be used, but not to the full extent, to be honest. I mean, for example, we developed different kind of tools. Some of them were very, I would say, on a level which we wouldn't do as of today. We can still use it, but to a much less level. There it is.
All right. Fair enough. The second question is pretty technical. Short one goes to Elina. When you made the EUR 10.9 million write-down, I understood that roughly EUR 5.8 million of that is a write-down in EBIT line, and then EUR 5.0 million is kind of extra cost in EBITDA. What are the EBITDA affecting costs, the other expenses affecting comparability, as you say in the report?
Yes. These were development activities that were still ongoing on the platform program, and we hadn't capitalized those yet. Meaning that we didn't finalize this work fully, but instead, as part of the reshape, we realized that this is not something we want to continue with. Therefore we basically ramped down the work that was in progress.
All right. Thank you. That's helpful. Thirdly, about the write-down related issues, when did you expect the full financial benefits from the continued but reduced platform investment? I think you mentioned that in your presentation, but I didn't quite hear that.
Can you please repeat, Matti? Because I lost you in the end there. Take one more time.
Okay. When do you expect to get the full financial benefits from the continued but reduced platform investment? You talked about something year 2025 and after that, but I didn't quite catch the details in there.
Okay. From the whole program. To start with, I would say it will come gradually. I am not giving any kind of forecast about any sudden profitability hike or growth hike, actually. As I see it, as of now, we continue to work. It will be a gradual effect where we continue to see both that we actually will both increase and decrease costs, and we will also be able to actually put quite a lot of new services into this environment as we go ahead. I am not promising anything either regarding a hike up or down, but actually I would say this is a gradual one. I would not like to say it's a reduced platform.
I would like to say that we are still going for what was the vision, meaning simplify, meaning drive scale, long term also, probably end up in one platform, or at least one which is very much diminishing in importance. That is my answer as of now. I do see that this will be something which drives our efficiency and drives our growth forward, definitely.
All right. Thank you. Finally, how do you estimate the costs related to the savings program that you are now starting?
Yes.
Will there be any additional costs?
Yes, I can comment on that. As you know, we are now going through restructuring related to our personnel. Obviously we expect that as the outcome of those negotiations, there will be some level of termination benefits paid. That will be probably the largest, let's say, restructuring cost item for this year. That will be treated as items affecting comparability. As we have also shared, we have a lot of activities in relation to our IT efficiency programs and depending on how we proceed with those, we might be, for example, in a situation where we occur some double costs in connection with vendor consolidations, for example, have two vendors at the same time and so forth.
These kind of costs we may also occur, but we cannot tell any exact amount of those costs yet.
All right. Thank you. That was all from me.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will take the next question from line Felix Henriksson from Nordea. The line is open now. Please go ahead.
Hi, it's Felix Henriksson, Nordea. Hope you can hear me well. The line has been a bit blurry. I have a few questions. I can go one by one. Firstly, on your top line growth guidance for 2023, 0%-5%. I'm wondering about the assumptions behind that, in particular about the, you know, proposed decline in the Finnish consumer loan interest rate cap, from 20%-15%. What are your assumptions related to this in your guidance? Is that sort of embedded in it, or if that happens, will that come to you as a surprise?
Okay. We have.
I can start that interest rate, possible interest rate cap regulation has been embedded into the guidance and our forecast.
Yep
We expect that to come effective at some point during latter part of the year.
Yep. We have taken that into account. We have taken into account what we see as headwind connected to sales and marketing offering. Of course, we see that we have headwind when it comes to also our consumers as a customer base. At this point, that is quite reasonable. All of these are taken into account. We do see, I mean, we have taken into account when we did this, which is a quite wide guidance if you compare with how we have worked earlier. We wanted to do a wider guidance, which we are ready to kind of narrow down depending on how we see that this year continues.
The reason for that is the uncertainties in the macroeconomy at the moment. We depending on how this develops, we are ready to close down on the guidance as we go along.
Yes. Overall, we see that the current trading overall continues basically on the level that we have seen now in recent months. We see much more uncertainties than when it comes to the latter part of this year.
Right. Thanks. That's helpful. A couple of technical questions. One related to the IT platform write down. Could you just remind us how much of the IT investment is still activated into your balance sheet after the write down now?
The remaining investment is around EUR 8 million.
Thanks. A final one from me. Should we sort of, in terms of financial expenses for 2023, should we sort of use the Q4 level as the sort of run rate for the coming years, sorry, coming quarters after your sort of recent refinancing or should there be a delta going forward?
Yes. That applies now for the first quarter, but then, the Swedish krona-based loan that is tied to six months STIBOR. There, the interest rate will be updated.
Right. Thank you. That's all from me.
Thank you. There's no further question at the moment. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you everyone online. It seems that we don't have any questions from the webcast tool either. I guess we are done with the call. Thank you everyone for the questions. Thank you for participating, and we wish you all a very nice week. Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining today's call you may now-