Thank you, and welcome, everybody, to this Q4 presentation. My name is Johan Prom, and I'm the CEO of ANSYS since November. I would start by giving you a business update. And after that, our Chief Financial Officer, Birgit Horje The overall key messages that we like to go through in this section is that we had a very good and strong performance in 2016 on our journey to make Avanza even more Avanza. And the first of all major is that we had a very high business activity.
And the this all comes from unique innovation culture that we have at Alanta, and I will talk to you through that in a minute. The second major is also to a couple of key targets and the outcome of those in 2016. And the conclusion is that we had a very strong performance on our major KPIs. 3rd, we will discuss how we are developing according to our business model that is really less and built on scale and especially how we have developed our cost position during the year. And then 4thly, we will go through a little bit what will happen going forward and how we will maintain the growth momentum in both customers and in capital and how we will play and have a core focus on core in 2017.
So those are the 4 majors, and I will start to take you through the first. If we look at what we have done from a business perspective, we have focused on further improving the customer experience in 2016. And it's been quite an eventful year, an exciting year, both in politics and in the stock market and also here at Avanta. As you know, our strategy is to have a less expensive and better and easier offering than anyone else. And I think we have delivered exactly according to this strategy.
And what we are doing are really in a very precise way following that overall thought. We had close to 40% more improvement on our website in 2016 versus the year before, and this is very much driven from direct feedback from our customers. And we are extremely happy to work so close with our customers and have such direct dialogue with them on how to improve our business. We have radically improved our mobile offering and received very well thoughts and feedback from our customers on that piece. And we were also the first to offer free stock trading on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.
Another example of what we do in order to always become less expensive, better and easier is that we have worked together with Trustly to launch real time transfers. And we have now 100,000 customers that use Trustpay year in the year. Also in our Private Banking and Pro segment, we have improved our offering and I will get back to later on that we have quite a good momentum and inflow on Private Banking customers. If we then talk a little bit on the very exciting piece on new decision support tools, we are have had a couple of major developments during the year. We have the savings calculator where customers can see how their savings grow over time, for example, by adjusting contributions and investment horizon and returns.
We had the stock lift, making it possible to quickly select stocks to match a desired investment strategy. And we also launched Amappa Play, that is a new digital decision support tool with videos where we can educate customers and inspire them and encourage them to save. And we have had 250,000 views of that since we launched it, which is quite a good number, and we're satisfied with that. And as an addition, just a couple of days ago, we launched a stock generator where we're targeting customers to require support on their investment decisions, just making it easy for them to select Fox. And I think all of this in the area of decision support is a very good description on our continued evolution on developing customer offering.
And we actually launched improvements on our websites and on our mobile platforms every 2nd week. And I think this is exactly what it's announced is all about, to continuously fine tune and making sure that we always push ourselves forward to deliver customer value. Then if we work on if we turn to the unique innovation culture and that we think lays behind all of this, I think that we have had quite a high innovation pace year in the year. And as you can see, this has also been the case in years before because we can see that we have had quite a good journey on in recent years on developing new innovations in all years. In current market conditions, we really believe it's really, really important to continue to drive innovation.
And we are here in the 100 years to come, and we have a constant customer focus. And we really see a good tailwind in both digitalization, and we see the savers are continuously looking for lower fees and more value in their offerings. And also, we see regulatory frameworks changing. And in all of that, we see that it will be really, really important that we have a high innovation pace given all of the interesting things that are happening in the industry and that we never ever lay back and that we are constantly challenging ourselves and questioning and finding new solutions. So actually, overall strategy will remain exactly the same and the same route that we have taken for the last couple of years.
What we will try to do is to actually increase the speed and the preciseness in order in how we follow that route. But the strategy will remain same, but we will try to make it even quicker get there and in a more precise way deliver on that overall strategy. Then talking on the next major, we will discuss a little bit on the strong performance that we had in 2016 and elaborate a little bit on the overall targets that we set out for the year. If we look, we have basically 3 overall targets that we focus on. We focus on having satisfied customers, satisfied employees and satisfied shareholders.
And we do it in that order. We think that if we have happy customers, that will help us to we will have that because of our satisfied employees. And those 2 in combination will deliver happy shareholders. We're extremely satisfied to conclude that we delivered on all of those major KPIs during the year. We won the SKI for the 7th consecutive year, which is a major thing for us, and we are really proud of making sure that we always focus on our customers and that they view us as a really, really good partner to work with.
We have a Net Promoter Score of 70, and we are very happy that the majority of our customers really come on recommendation, which is a major thing for us. And we're also the most we were also the most recommended Swedish brand according to YUGO Brand Index. Then secondly, we are very proud that we have so committed employees and we have an employee Net Promoter Score of 51, which is radically higher than the rest of the industry. And then we had a very good development when it comes to both customer inflow and net customer inflow and net inflow. When it comes to customers, we had 103,000 new customers floating in last year.
And we had a very strong inflow on where we managed to get 9.9% market share on a rolling 12 month basis. And I think both of those 2 latter dimensions, we will then raise our ambition for the year to come and years to come, where the new target is to have 1,000,000 customers by 2020 in terms of customers. And in terms of net inflow, we have raised the bar to have a decent 9% on the net inflow on the Swedish market. Now we will do a deep dive in 2 years, 1st on customers and on inflow. But just before we do that, I think it's important to conclude that what we have achieved by delivering so good on those targets, it's also that we managed to get a market capitalization to move up large catalyst.
I think that is a very good proof of that we are on the right way and that we now traded on the large catalyst as of January this year. Talking about our customers, I think many of you have seen this chart before, where the red line is the existing customer base and the blue line is the intake that we have. And as you can see, we had quite a good intake in our customers in their mid-20s. And this is not a new phenomenon, but it's been the same pattern for the last 10 years. But China has really intensified in the last 5 years.
And I think it's also important to note that we managed to get new customers in basically all age classes during 2016. Then you can see the green shaded area is the average capital per customer that is developing really a lot over time as the customers get older. And given that we have a churn of only about 1%, which is roughly the mortality in Sweden, the long term 100 gs perspective on Avanza is, of course, extremely valid when you look at this slide where we have a very nice intake of young adults and that the average savings capital is increasing quite a lot over time when we're holding the customer's hand for a long period. I think the second thing that I want to highlight here is also how we manage to get quite a good market penetration on certain market segments. We have roughly 5.6% market share of the total Swedish population, but we are in certain segments.
If you take men in the mid-30s in Stockholm, we're up over 20%. And of course, we will now look at how we could get that a strong position even in other segments working together, working, focusing, for example, on women and other age classes to make sure that we have a very good and healthy continued growth when it comes to customers. I also previously spoke a little bit on the private banking offering, and we managed to get 1,000 new customers on the private banking side, and we managed to increase savings capital within the private banking business with 25% in 2016. And we also managed to get 3,000 new corporate customers within our pension business. So I think overall, we had a very good intake when it comes to customer growth.
The second area we will deep dive into is the inflow. And if you can if you look at the inflow, I think we had a we can see that we are on a rolling 12 month basis, and this is lagging 1 quarter. We had 9% to 9% intake. And here, we will also increase the target going forward from 7% to 9%. And given that we have such a that scale is so important in our business model, the combination between customer intake and savings capital growth is enormously important for us.
And that's why we are so happy that we managed to achieve both of those 2 major targets in 2016 with 103,000 new customers coming in and EUR 26,500,000,000 inflow in The 3rd major that I will elaborate a little bit on is our business model and where scale is so important and also how the cost position is a key in that equation. If you look at our cost position, we are now down at 22 basis points, and this is the key for our operating model, where this unique cost position will enable us to have a strategic freedom in playing in various ways. As you can see, over time, we have pushed it down and we think that we will, with increased scale, manage to decrease it even more where our long term goal is to reach to 20 basis points. Over time, we have also managed to, given this low cost position, launch new products and attract new customer segments and price our products in a way so that we could have a lower income to savings capital ratio. You can see that fall into 44.
And the whole idea behind our business model is then to get a massive outplay in terms of scale, and those are the green bars. And as you can see, we've managed to increase the savings capital also in 2016. And this chart is just showing that our business model is timeless, but also we are playing exactly according to our long term strategy to earn a little bit less money on each customer with a true and genuine cost position where the scale is the key thing to make our economical model to come into play. And we're also happy that we, given this, have an operating margin of 51%, and that is roughly in line with our ambition to have it around 14. Around 50.
Thank you. If you then look at the relationship between long term savings capital growth and revenue growth, I think it's notable that we managed to, in Q4, have the same type of correlation between savings capital and revenues. Moreover, it's interesting to note that we have a very high interest rate sensitivity. We're roughly 100 basis points equal, dollars 170,000,000 to $220,000,000 on our P and L. And of course, given the current interest rates, we are very much suffering from that.
And therefore, we are even more happy to manage to get the good and healthy correlation between revenues and capital in also in this quarter. Then moving over to the 4th major, we could just conclude that we had a very strong momentum on both customers and capital and basically all of our key targets in 2016. And then we'll be moving to 2017. Our ambition is to focus on continued focus on core and make Avanxa even more Avanxa. The way we will do that is that we will continue to attract new target groups with more and that requires a little bit more support in our mobile offerings.
We will maintain to keep our current customers happy with everything that they need and they want and then, of course, working massively with our scale. When it comes to the customers, it's a combination of new innovative products and continued world class customer offerings like the one we've seen in the past, but also world class user experience, both on the desktop and mobile side. When we come to scale, it's tremendously important for us to maintain our cost efficiency profile, but also making our quality improvements better and reduce our operational risks. And we also want to automate as many internal processes as possible to get closer to 100% and to make sure that we continuously push down the cost position as we said was 22% this quarter. And we're trying to get to we will get to our long term goal of 20 basis points.
And I think it's very hard if you want to become a true leader to compare yourself to that position. And that's why you need to take an own stand in how you want to get there. And this is our view of how we will over time make Avanza even more Avanza with a combination of focusing even more on new target groups, maintaining our existing core client capacity and also in addition to that increased scale as much as we can. Just to sum things up, I think that we've just been through that 2016 with what's a very high business activity year for Avanza. And the reason for that was that we could hold that speed.
It's a unique innovation culture that we have in the company. We would say that we had a very strong performance on our key targets, but when it comes to customers, inflow, employees and in 2016, and we're happy that we managed to reach all of those long term all of those targets in 2016. We were told that we have a timeless business model where the cost position is key, and we managed to get the scale out of it in a very nice way also in 2016. And the way to continue to have the growth momentum in both customers and capital in 2017 is a combination of focusing on new and existing customers and also get the scale of it. And if I just put a couple of personal reflections to it, given that I am now almost 3 months into the job.
I think that we have both the vision and the will, and we are all passionate about this at Avanxa. And I think that's a key component to continue to deliver on our journey. Furthermore, I think we have the customers, the knowledge, and we have a unique cost position that is very hard to copy. And we have quite a sweet spot in that perspective when it comes to the rates for the customer and a proposition in winning that race. We have the speed and the flexibility in the organization and the insight of the need of high pace to change.
And I think that will be even more important going forward as we feel that the entire society and not least the financial industry will need to adapt very quickly to changes going forward. And furthermore, we have the tailwind from digitalization in the entire society. We have savers that are really asking for our type of value based offering, and we have regulatory changes that we could explode even more. And given this, I think it's right that we are stepping up our ambitions. Last quarter, we raised our cost guidance for 2017 and we also flew through our increasing our long term targets.
And I think this is exactly what we should do and what we will do. Our ambition going forward is to make Avanza even more Avanza. And what we have done in 2016 and what we'll do in 2017 is in a very precise way following that route, but making it a little bit sharper and a little bit quicker so that we will continue to be the best offering for our customers in a 100 tier. Year. With that, those words, I now hand over to Brigitte to run through the financials for 2016.
Thank you,
Johan. So the operating profit was strong in 2016, although the income was pressured by the lower deferred rate in February and by lower trading volumes. However, our strong market share in Avanza Markets and increased trading in foreign securities contributed to a higher other income. Operating income amounted to $909,000,000 a 2% increase from last year. Compared to the Q4 last year, operating income was mainly affected by the exceptionally high trading volumes in Q4 last year.
As a result, operating income decreased by 2% year on year. Compared to the Q3, however, income was 12% higher, improving in all income lines. Costs increased by 8% for the full year according to the guidance and as a result of higher personnel costs, mainly within IT, compliance and legal. Our cost position, however, was further strengthened as a result of our scalable business model. The cost to savings capital ratio decreased by 3 basis points year on year to 22 bps.
And our ambition to reach below 20 basis points within a few years remain despite our raised cost guidance for 2017 of 15% to 20% year on year. Compared to the Q4, operating expenses were up 16% year on year, mainly due to increased staff costs. This increase was slightly lower than our guidance of about 20% year on year as a result of lower IT costs than anticipated. Compared to Q3, which is seasonally low cost wise, expenses were up 33%. All together, this gave us an operating margin of 51% for the full year, in line with our ambition of around 50 and resulting in an earnings per share of SEK 13.45 for the full year.
Total revenues for the 4th quarter decreased year on year by 2 percent to $247,000,000 but increased by 12% quarter on quarter. The decrease compared to last year was mainly due to record high brokerage income in 2015. Brokerage income in Q4 decreased by 17% to $122,000,000 year on year. This is mainly a result of lower trading volume even though the number of stock transactions increased by 24% year on year and the number of commission generating customers rose by 32%. The number of trading active customers has increased due to our stronger customer inflow, but the trades are smaller due to volume.
This means that more customers are trading equities, but at lower volumes and also in lower brokerage fee classes more suited to their trading patterns. In comparison with last year, the trading volume was also particularly high in a few trading intensive stocks. Compared to the Q3, brokerage income rose by 8% due to higher overall volumes and number of trades, even though the activity per customer was a bit lower. When comparing brokerage income year on year, you should also bear in mind that trades in ETPs are from 2016 the largest to the largest extent done in about the markets, meaning these revenues are shown as other income instead of brokerage income. Net interest income, which is the light blue line, was flat compared to Q4 last year and increased by 24% quarter on quarter.
NII was strengthened, thanks to investors' increased risk appetite and our attractive mortgage offering. The repo rate, however, continued to put pressure on NII. The repo rate was, on an average, 15 basis points lower during Q4 compared to the same period last year and 23 basis points lower for the full year compared to 15. All else equal, disregarding changes in customers' behavior, a 1 percentage point interest rate change would at current volumes imply an effect on net interest income of €170,000,000 to 220,000,000 During the quarter, customers invested further in investment funds, which together with the positive market, resulted in 25% higher fund commission, which is the green light green line. Other income, the dark blue line, increased year on year by 24%, mainly as a result of increased FX income due to increased interest for trading in foreign stocks but also higher commission income from Avanta Markets.
Avanta Markets part of other income amounted to 26% and FX income to 52% in the 4th quarter. Corporate finance revenues were continuously strong year on year, and the good corporate climate seems to continue in 2017. Compared to the Q3, other income increased by 24%, mainly due to higher revenues from corporate finance, but also as a result of increased trades in foreign stocks. About the market share in terms of number of transactions on the stock and stock exchange and First North for the 4th quarter was 14.6%, which is very high even if it was down from the record level of 15.2% in Q3 but up from Q4 last year. The market share in terms of turnover was down to 6.5 percent in the 4th quarter compared to 7.5% in Q3 and 8.7% in Q4 'fifteen.
In this graph, you can see the exceptionally high trading activity in Q4 last year. The overall activity on the stock and profit change and personnel measured in turnover was down by 8% compared to last year and up 12% in terms of trades. At the same time, turnover at Avanza was down 2% and trading activity in terms of trades rose by 37%. Looking at brokerage income in relation to turnover, this has increased slightly during the year and also compared to Q3. Total operating expenses in the 4th quarter increased by 16% year on year to 130,000,000 dollars Personnel costs, which is the dark green line, increased by 11% year on year.
This increase is, as mentioned earlier, mainly due to expansion in our IT development department but also an effect of increased regulation and more personnel costs within compliance and legal. Compared to last quarter, the personnel costs increased by 34%, which is seasonal effect due to summer vacation in Q3. Marketing expenses, light green line was up 80% year on year and 120% quarter on quarter. We increased our marketing in Q4 due to the growth momentum we saw and ahead of Q1, which is historically a strong quarter since the net inflow. This was a one off, and in 2017, we plan to go back to normal levels.
Depreciation, the light blue line, are about the same level as last year and compared to the 3rd quarter. Other costs, dark blue line, was up 18% year on year and 16% quarter on quarter, and this is mainly due to IT costs. The operating expenses for the full year increased by 8% compared to last year. As mentioned earlier, expenses are expected to rise in 2017 by 15% to 20% before returning to growth rate of about 8% to 10% per year. This is due to increased efforts to maintain or even further improve our growth pace.
The cost increase in 2017 will affect personnel costs as well as IT costs and other costs as our efforts going forward, for example, will include larger premises and increased IT development. Operating profit in the 4th quarter decreased by 17% year on year to $117,000,000 Compared to the 3rd quarter, the profit decreased by 4%. Operating margin was 47% for the quarter. For the full year, the operating margin was 51%, in line with our ambition of a margin of around 50%. Profit after tax in the 4th quarter decreased year on year by 15% to 101% and decreased by 4% compared to Q3.
The income per savings capital for 2016 was 44%, a decrease of 4 basis points compared to last year, that was slightly up from 42% to 44% during Q4. The cost of the other hazardous savings capital decreased by 2 basis points year on year 2, 2023, and was 22 basis points for the 4th quarter. Altogether, this is in line with our scalable business model and overall strategy to attract more customers and more savings capital by price leadership. Given continued strong growth in customer and savings capital, we still see good opportunities to lower the cost to savings capital ratio to below 20 basis points in a few years despite the increased cost guidance for next year. The total lending was up 9% during the quarter and 25% since year end and amounted to SEK 8,200,000,000 where 50% are margin lending and 50% are mortgage loans.
Margin lending was up 5% during the quarter and up 8% since year end and now amounting to $4,100,000,000 We see great demand for our mortgage loan offering, and mortgage loan lending was up 13% during the quarter and up 49% since year end to $4,100,000,000 dollars In the quarter, we extended the vending ceiling somewhat to meet customers' demand. Total lending amounted to 3.5 percent of the total savings capital. Deposits, including external accounts, increased by 1% in Q4 to SEK 35,000,000,000 and has since year end increased by 16%. Deposits stood for 15.2% of our total savings capital by year end compared to 15.5% at the end of September. Our covered bonds portfolio decreased by 2% to $13,200,000,000 during the quarter.
However, compared to year end in 2015, it has increased by 12%, in line with increased deposits. We still have a very strong capitalization, and the total capital ratio in the consolidated station was 19.9% compared to the requirements, including buffers of 12%. In June 2016, the contra cyclical buffer rose from 1% to 1.5% and will in March 2017 rise to 32%. The liquidity coverage ratio was 3.02 at the end of the period compared to the requirement of 0.7. From January 2017, the requirements will rise to SEK 0.8.
To ensure an adequate level for further capital requirements, the Board of Directors proposes a dividend of SEK 10.5 per share at the same level as last year and corresponding to 79% of our total operating profit in 2016. Our policy, as you know, is at least pay out 70% of our operating profit long term. This strong capital situation entitle us to keep on growing also at a quicker pace. And there you go. I think we could hand over for questions.
Absolutely. Do we have any questions from the audience?
We have a question from Peter Wallin from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes. Thank you and good morning. I would like to start with a kind of big question to or big picture question to you, Johan, now being 3 months into your new job. Considering your background and your in-depth presentations and the slide kit, it seems that as very much like more of the same. I mean, you're going to stick to the well, I mean, most of the targets previously outlined.
3 months now into the job, is there anything considering your more consumer tilted background that's any kind of project you've accelerated? Or anything else that you might have said that maybe we shouldn't focus so much on this? Or I mean what kind of what difference is I mean how will Avanza look differently 1 year from now compared to before you joined Avanza?
Thank you. Very good question. I think overall if I compare the retail industry that I know quite a lot in-depth, I think that the financial industry has quite a lot to learn from that. In the retail industry, you have to be even faster and even more quickly adapting to customer behaviors and formulate your customer offerings and your products in a way so that people like them every day and are willing to pay for them and making them transparent and easy to love in a way that I think the financial industry haven't been that successful in up until now. And it's also interesting how you view Avanza.
I view Avanza as a very sharp consumer company. And in that way, I've been spending 20 years with consumers, and I think that's the future for Avanza. If I look on how I will contribute going forward, I think it's exactly that. We have focused a little bit more lately in our development pipeline on things that are really easy to understand, easy to love and transparent. And I think over time, that will deliver an even broader footprint when it comes to customers.
I think we will expand our portfolio of products. And I think we have a lot to learn from the retail business in being on your toes every day and making sure that you don't have happy customers because they're locked in, but because they choose you every day.
Okay. Sounds good. And then for some more maybe not equally fun questions, but just rather technically on the cost progression, you're reiterating the guidance of growth. But since now you came in slightly below your previous guidance, the base is a bit lower. I mean should we have seen that previously maybe you were aiming for the high end of the interval and now you have a bit more room and now you have a bit less room, but you still think you can stick within the 15% to 20% or is it in absolute terms that you're actually thinking that you will have slightly lower cost by 1 year from now than what you thought 3 months ago?
I think, yes, to understand the question correctly, you're referring to our cost guidance for the next year? Yes. Yes. I think just to have a step back, I think that we could run our extremely tight and well operated business model as it is right now on a lower cost base. But I think when we look out through the window, we see a couple of opportunities that exit here and now.
We see a lot of regulatory changes that I think will go for example, more transparency that is extremely interesting for us to act upon. And we see all of those changes as possibilities, and I think that's the difference between us and some other players in the industry. Secondly, we see a lot of digitalization coming on. We see the entire fintech but also digitalization on a broader note where young people have a different type of sort of approach and lifestyle to digitalization as opposed to heavily age classes. And we see a massive opportunity to work with that.
And thirdly, we see that there's a wind blowing among savers. They're yet tired of giving too much money to the bank and too much pay too much in fees. And yet people start to understand that if you choose the Avanza pension model, you would have SEK 1,000,000 more when you retire, not given that you have that investment, but just in lower fees, that is extremely rewarding for consumers. And if you put all of those 3 together, the digitalization, the how savers are thinking and also digitalization of savers are thinking and the regulatory changes, we have seen opportunity to act. And that's why we will invest more in more products and in user experience and also in making sure that we are truly scalable.
And we see that as a onetime effect in 2017, and that will get back to our normal cost development. But it's important to say that this is not additional funding that is needed for our existing business. This is additional funding because we see more opportunities out there right now and we see a need to act in order to really maximize the value of Avanza for our shareholders.
Okay. And then another thing that you touched briefly on it in your interim report on the pending potential extra payroll tax that Swedish Financial Services Companies might get a year from now. Do you have an estimate for what the impact could be? And also is it possible I mean you mentioned in the presentation that part of these investments are also going to be like increasing the level of automation and many things that your the investors will meet. I mean, this is it anything on the investments you're doing that actually could mean to lead to you being able to lower some headcount after those investments are done?
Well, I wouldn't expect us to lower the headcount. But if we can continue to grow in the same pace that we are doing right now with another 100,000 new customers per year for some years ahead without adding too many heads, I think that would be a tremendous story for us as well. So those efficiency works that we will do in the future is more not having to add even more personnel in at least in some places of the business and mainly within the administration, of course. So that's yes. And if you look at numbers of that tax, I really do hope that, that tax will not come in place.
And today, the Allianz has told us that they will not support it. So hopefully, that part will not be but of course, we will have some kind of tax on the financial industry. Let's see what that is when it comes to that.
Okay. Great. Thank you. I think that was it for me.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We have a question from Monica Hanifelt from SEB. Please go ahead, madam.
Hi and good morning. Short term, we could see in the quarter that the costs were better than what you had guided for. I'm just wondering what costs have not been realized in the quarter? This is my first question.
Well, it's different kind of things, and we didn't really get the personnel in place that we would hope for. Some of it is IT costs that will spill over to the next year, and it truly will be pushed forward. So we still believe that we will have the same cost guidance for 'seventeen, but we have pushed some of the costs forward instead.
Perfect. And coming back to Peter's question. When we talk about the bank tax as the proposal is right now, do you have an estimate on the effects? And on if realized, would this in some way alter your investment plan for 'seventeen?
Well, from the estimate, I would say that the tax would be about DKK 35,000,000 to DKK 40,000,000 for 'eighteen. And then of course, it depends on how many new personnel we add to the crew. When it comes to how we will handle that tax and what that will have impact on our business, we haven't really discussed that yet, and we will have to come back on that.
Perfect. And then you've raised your ambitions in a number of targets, but you've kept one you've reiterated one saying that cost increase should not exceed income growth. What is the time perspective on this going forward?
Well, I mean, these are long term goals and should not seen from one year to another. Now we're increasing the costs for next year, and we'll see what happens about the revenues. As you know, this is weather for us. It's not something that we really could or can have an impact on. So you probably will see a cost increase larger or maybe you will find a cost increase larger than the revenues in 'seventeen.
But after that, of course, our goal is to have a cost per savings capital not growing faster than the revenues per savings capital.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have a question from Nicolas Macbeth from DNB. Please go ahead, sir.
Hello and congratulations to the good results and also interesting with the inspiring new growth targets. I had a question on the targets. You raised the ambition to have 9% of the inflows into the service savings market from previously 7%. So my question is why you're kind of settling with 9%. I don't think you've had lower inflow or market share of the inflows than that since 2013.
Wouldn't it be possible to aim even higher in that sense?
Well, I think we try to set our targets from a very long term perspective. And of course, we want to deliver even more than that. But I think when we have looked upon it, we want to have targets that we could live with under different weather conditions also in the long we think that we think that, of course, we'd like to grow as much as we can going forward. But we just want to outline that the targets should be long term and that or the different value conditions, we should be able to maintain the same target.
Okay. Could you elaborate which of the 2 targets you raised now that you think will be more challenging, meeting the customer target level of the $1,000,000 by 2020 or kind of reaching more than 9% of the inflows into the Swedish market?
Very good question. I think they are somewhat interlinked and somewhat different. Of course, if we manage to get a very good customer inflow, that will help us to get the right inflow. And I think in terms of the difficulties in terms of customers, it's to make sure that we have a tailored offering to the new target groups that we will go for. I think we managed to do that in 2016, but it's important that we when we have a broader footprint that we will be able to maintain that preciseness in understanding the new customers and what they want.
I think that is a challenge in that aspect. When it comes to the inflow, I think it's both getting new attractive products that new products so that new customers actually give their money or pay their money EBITDA, But it's also making sure that the existing customers really utilize all of the offerings that we have. And I think we have a potential in activating the existing customers even more. So I think I wouldn't say that one is more tricky than the other. I think they are both challenging.
I think they are challenging in different ways. That will be my answer to
it. Okay. And then I had a question on inflows into occupational pension savings. I think the inflows increased by relatively low 13% in the quarter, which is lower than the increase you've had at least in other recent quarters. Is there any special reason why you see a slowdown in the growth and inflows in occupational pensions?
And do you have any initiatives there to accelerate growth again in occupational pensions?
Well, we are not investing in further sales force or doing anything like that within the pension business. So I would say that this depends, of course, from quarter to quarter, and we have some personnel issues leaving and coming in Malmo and Gothenburg that has probably given, in some extent, effect of the growth. But we will see we believe that we will still have great growth potentials within the occupational pension as well.
Okay. And then I think, Johan, you were quoted with some quite upbeat comments on new product launches from Avanxo here in Swedish Medjurg in Q4, mentioning you expect some of the products currently under development to become among the most popular ones in a few years' time. Could you say something about the timing of these products that you are very excited about? When should we expect them to launch to the market?
So I think, first of all, I think given my background in retail and also when I view Avance as a really sharp consumer company, I think it's extremely natural that within 5 years, some of the new launches will hit that list. I mean, the average in retail, I think that half of all of the products are dead within 3 years. So I think we just have to adapt to a different type of speed in this industry. So I think it's extremely natural that a lot of the things that we have in pipeline will hit the top 5 list in a couple of years' time, and I think it was 5 years' time in that question. So first of all, I think that's extremely natural.
Secondly, we have a lot of things in our pipeline. I think what we have said this went through when it came where we discussed the decisions to support area, it's a little bit on how we work. It is not one individual launch, but rather I think we worked through 4 sort of gradual updates that we have done in the recent period. And that is a little bit on how we work with it. And that is exactly what our customers like and appreciate that we constantly every second week make updates to our offerings and we have to do in the presentation what they've done in the decision support area.
And then of course, we are constantly challenging a couple of big areas. And when and if we have things red in that, we will definitely go after that. I think what is necessary for us to launch things in the market is 2 things. 1st of all, that when we find a solution to a sort of a new product, it should really be a wow feeling among customers that this is a fantastic product. You take it to your heart and you really adapt to it and like to have it.
We don't want to launch a me too product that has unclear benefits. And I think the second prerequisite is a sort of feeling internally that we've done it in an Avalta way coming back to the true scalability, no other flexible cost or variable cost combined to it and that we've done it in a really, really smart and cost efficient way. When you combine the wow and the that's the advanced that is. And we have a lot of things in the pipeline. But exactly when we will launch things, I think we have to get back to when we bring it to the market.
Okay. Thank you. And yes, someone had something to add there?
No, I just said nice try.
Okay. Yes. Final question, probably easier to answer. The tax rate for the full year in 2016, I think it was close to 14%. Could you remind us or perhaps update us on your expectation for the tax rate on a forward looking basis?
Well, the tax rate was a bit up. And I mean, the major changes is when our more customers are choosing the ISK account instead of the endowment insurance. So more capital coming into the bank instead of the pension company, that's what's driving the tax percentage up.
Yes. But I mean, it's still rather low. It's still in my expectations here, I think it was relatively flat to the previous year and down a bit compared to 2014. But do you think like 14%, is that your expectation for
the tax rate? Well, 15% to 15%, I would say it was
Okay.
Yes.
Okay. That's all my questions. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. We have a question from Matti Gudent from Nordea. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes. Good morning. I think all my questions actually have been answered. The main thing was on the bank tax and if you had any sort of actions, actual actions planned to offset it. But I think you answered that you will get back on that.
So I think I'm fine. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Please go ahead, speakers.
Okay. And I'd just like to thank everybody for a rewarding hour, very interesting for us, and we are very happy to convey a good 2016 and what we've been doing. Thanks also for all the interesting questions that were approached to us. Always, we're very happy to have a dialogue with all of your insights, together with your insights, all the questions and thoughts on how we could explain and elaborate on our future. And I'd like to reiterate a little bit on my personal notes that I think we have the vision and the will and the passion to bring out Avanza and going forward and make Avanza even more Avanza.
I think that we have a full position in the race for the customer. And I think we have a couple of tailwind things coming from digitalization, service and regulation. And what we work through today, I think, is a good description on what we will do forward and our journey to bake Avanx even more Avanx done with the high business activity that we had in 20 16 and given our unique innovation culture, we went through that we delivered on our key targets, but we're very happy about that in 2016 that we are delivering on our long term model with a 2 leading cost position as a basis for that. And finally, that the momentum going forward will continue given that we will focus on both attracting new customers, keep our existing customers happy and focus on the true scalability that Avanza is all about. So given that, I'd just like to thank everybody for participating and wish you a good day.