Welcome to this third quarter presentation. My name is Henrik Källén, acting CEO of Avanza. I will start with a business update, and after this, our CFO, Birgitta Hagenfeldt, will take you through the financials. The presentation will take approximately 20 minutes, and we will open up for questions afterwards. You can also post questions through the system during the presentation to be answered afterwards. The third quarter 2016 gave an operating profit of SEK 122 million. This was 10% higher than in second quarter, a result of higher commission income and seasonally lower costs. Compared to third quarter last year, higher other income due to success of Avanza Markets and higher fund commissions contributed positively, and the result increased by 13%. The stock market picked up in the quarter with SIX Return Index increasing by 10%.
The positive market contributed to higher risk appetite among our customers who were net buyers in the stock market and increased their share of equity funds and mixed funds. Also, the share of foreign equity trading increased somewhat, which affected FX income positively. Corporate transactions were at normal seasonally low in third quarter, but we think they are expected to increase later in the year if the investment climate remains. Our work on digitization and internal efficiencies have continued with, for example, improved handling of ISK transfers and by optimizing our fund flows. This has resulted in a strengthened cost position. The cost to savings capital decreased from 25 basis points to 21 basis points compared with the nine-month period last year. This resulted in an operating margin for the first nine months of 52%, which shows strength in this low rate climate.
Together with our strong cost position, this gives us room for further investments. We see plenty of opportunities in the market due to the change in customer behavior, increased digitization, and new regulation coming. All in all, these play in our advantage and open up for new possibilities for us to further strengthen Avanza's position in Sweden. Therefore, we will invest in more resources and are guiding for higher costs during 2017 with a cost increase of 15%-20% compared to 2016. Thereafter, we will return to an annual cost growth of 8%-10%. Our estimated growth for 2016 of 8%-10% remains. During the year, we have upgraded our customer offering further, which together with our existing offering and our strong brand attracted 24,500 new customers in the third quarter.
During the year, as many as 73,700 individual savers chose Avanza, and already in the second quarter, we exceeded our customer growth targets. Altogether, our customers generated a net inflow of close to SEK 6 billion in the third quarter, and the savings capital now totals to SEK 223 billion. The portfolio generator had, by the end of the quarter, attracted SEK 1.3 billion in fund capital, an increase of 30% from the second quarter. This shows we are on the right track and encourage us to continue to develop these decision-making tools. Since our business model is built on scalability, customer growth and growth in savings capital is very important, making customer satisfaction one of our key priorities. During the year, we have launched 1,800 improvements in our channel, of which a large part as a direct consequence of our customers' feedback.
We have done several improvements to user experience to make our digital tools easier to use and making them more intuitive. Therefore, I'm very happy that our customer satisfaction has increased further to an NPS of 70, compared with 68 for 2015. NPS or Net Promoter Score, also known as Ambassador Index, shows our customers' recommendation rates, and a result over 50 is extremely good. The vast majority of our new customers come on recommendation from other Avanza customers, which shows the strength in our brand and the importance of innovative product development and improvements. Avanza's market share in terms of number of transactions on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and First North the third quarter was record high at 15.2%, up from 13% in the second quarter and from 10.8% in the third quarter last year. This is a result of strong customer growth.
The market share in terms of turnover was up to 7.5%. The overall activity on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and First North measured in turnover was down by 15% compared with the third quarter last year. In terms of trades, activity rose by 4%. Turnover at Avanza, however, was only down 5%, and trading activity accounted as number of trades rose by as much as 47%. The increased trading activity is a result of strong growth in number of commission-generating customers. The average transaction size has gone down, and also income per commission note. This is in line with our price leading strategy and also a result of our customer base getting younger and that more customers trade in lower brokerage classes. Looking at our customers' activity and the number of commission notes per customer, this shows a positive trend.
Brokerage commission income is on high levels, although it has fallen from the extraordinary high levels at year-end. This proves our business model, which is designed to give our customer a better, easier, and less expensive offering than others and thereby attract more customers and increase revenues. Even though we have seen and also contributed to price pressure in the stock market, our growing customer base and our customers' trading activity are increasing total brokerage income. Attracting new customers was the aim with both the launch of our new price plan in fourth quarter 2014 and with Start for commission-free trading in May this year. Start should be seen as an entry product, an Avanza Zero for equity trading. Avanza Zero's customer have 90% of the savings capital in other revenue-generating products, and in third quarter, 70% of our Start customers were commission-generating.
As already mentioned, both customer inflow and inflow of savings capital was strong in the quarter. Net inflow in 2016 is even ahead of last year's record inflow, up 5%. After last quarter's record inflow boosted by inflow from Remium of SEK 2.2 billion, we saw a decrease of 37% in third quarter. During the quarter, most of the inflow came from new customers. Customer growth was 20% higher than in third quarter last year and up 6% from second quarter. Looking at the customer base, we continue to attract a larger number of younger people, which is shown by the red line in this graph. As we see savings capital grow substantially with age, we see great potential in our customer base. We divide savers into three different groups: do it myself investors, help me do it investors, and do it for me investors.
To increase growth pace and to attract broader customer groups with younger savers, as well as those who want and need more support, we will continue to improve our mobile offering and further develop digital decision support tools. Today, we have a market share of 3% of the savings market, but looking at the entire Swedish population, our market share is 5.4%. Our market share has grown steady during the years, and in the light of coming regulation and new customer behavior, we see an opportunity to grow faster. This is also important in the light of increased competition from new fintech players. Looking at customer behavior and choice of device, the visit from mobile devices to Avanza's platform have increased during the last three years, but without cannibalizing on the visit from desktop.
This clearly shows the importance of a high customer experience in all devices and encourage us to hurry up the innovation pace. This slide shows our new product launches during the years and the growth in savings capital and number of active customers. As you can see, customer growth picked up from 2013, which is when we launched our new platform and our product offering development took off again. These product offerings are of different nature and range from price reductions to more innovative launches. Important when it comes to new products, it's not only to attract new and broader customer groups, but also to maintain satisfaction among our core and more trading-intensive customers, the do it myself customers. To speed up growth and to make sure we keep momentum, we will increase our efforts, especially when it comes to user experience.
Avanza is bursting with innovation and the many ways we want to improve our offering. Our business model is built to attract customers by giving them more money left in their pockets with us than with any other bank due to low fees and better tools. That's how we build customer value and growth for a sustainable business. In the long run, a highly competitive cost savings capital ratio is tremendously important for our ability to maintain price leadership while maintaining high profitability in any market condition. We strive for cost position where it's hard for others to follow. This is also shown in the resilience of our operating margin, which was 52% for the first nine months, a slight decrease from 53% from last year.
To sum this up, we see a lot of opportunities going forward, and to maintain growth momentum and our strong competitive position, we are focusing on three specific areas going forward. First, attracting new customer groups, including younger savers and those who require support. Second, maintaining our core customers happy. Third, further increase scalability in our business and continue to strengthen our cost leadership. To achieve this, we need to focus on a number of core activities to keep up growth momentum. These activities will revolve around developing our product offering with new user-friendly innovative products and to make our revenues more resilient to different market conditions, where increased growth in our pension business is one example. The upcoming regulatory changes with MiFID II and other regulations will make it increasingly more expensive for the incumbent banks to offer financial advisory service the coming years.
While at the same time, the price and sensitivity among the retail segment becomes clearer. Consequently, we believe a growing part of the retail market will be forced into digital services for their savings and investments. This is a great opportunity for us to capture growth over the coming years. We will therefore further improve and simplify our digital experience, including our mobile solutions for both Android and iOS. Platform evolution is, as always, ongoing with regular improvements every nine days. In the light of income pressure and higher costs due to regulation, together with our increased investments, our internal efficiency projects to increase scalability is vital. Therefore, we are continuously increasing scalability by searching for efficiency measures in our processes, improve stability and quality, as well as reduce operational risks. Our aim is to automate as many internal processes as possible to get closer to 100% digital.
This, together with further growth, will continue to decrease the cost to savings capital ratio from current 21 basis points and making us reach our long-term target below 20 basis points despite increased investments guided for in 2017. A prerequisite for all these activities are engaged colleagues that feel they contribute to something meaningful and enjoy coming to work. Overall, this will contribute to create customer value and to maintain and enhance our industry-leading customer satisfaction. This also keeps customers talking about Avanza and recommend us to their friends and families, creating growth and shareholder value long-term. Thank you. Now, Birgitta will take you through the more detailed financials.
Thank you, Henrik. Operating profit increased slightly by 1% compared with the nine-month period last year, giving an operating margin of 52%. Operating income increased by 3% compared to the last year, driven by higher income from Avanza Markets. Avanza Markets was launched last summer for commission-free ETP trading and are trading on both NDX and OMX. This has been a very successful launch, and Avanza Markets accounted for 61% of the total turnover on the ETP market during the nine-month period and 67% in Q3. Operating expenses were up 5% year-on-year, mainly due to increased staff costs. Costs to savings capital ratio for the nine-month period decreased to 21 basis points, which strengthens our competitiveness further. Altogether, it gives us earnings per share of SEK 10.06 for the period, a decrease of 1% year-on-year.
Total revenues for the third quarter increased year-on-year by 9% to SEK 220 million, a decrease by 2% quarter-on-quarter. Quarterly brokerage income was stable year-on-year and rose by 3% compared to the second quarter. The number of stock transactions increased by 43% year-on-year, and the number of commission-generating customers rose by 30%. At the same time, the size of the transactions was smaller. Taken together, this means that more customers are trading equities, but at lower volume and in lower brokerage fee classes, more suited to their trading patterns. The repo rate cut in February, coupled with lower mortgage rates in the second quarter, kept pressure on net interest income that were down 12% year-on-year. The repo rate was on an average 16 basis points lower during Q3 2016 compared to the same period last year.
STIBOR 3M showed the same trend and was on an average 27 basis points lower year-on-year. All else equal, disregarding changes in customer behavior, a one percentage point interest rate change would, at current volumes, imply an effect on net interest income of about SEK 180 million-SEK 220 million. During the quarter, the customers took on more risk and invested further in investment funds. Along with a positive market, this resulted in 18% higher fund commissions year-on-year. This is also the result of mix effects, where our customers have invested a larger proportion in funds with higher fees. Other income increased year-on-year by 58%, mainly due to higher market share in the ETP markets, but also due to customers trading more on the foreign stock markets, leading to increased fee income. Avanza Markets' part of other income amounted to 36%.
Corporate finance income was on seasonally low levels. Compared to the second quarter, other income decreased by 24%, mainly due to corporate finance. Total operating expenses in the third quarter increased by 4% year-on-year to SEK 98 million, but decreased quarter-on-quarter by 13%. Personnel costs, the dark green line, increased by 6% year-on-year. This increase is, as mentioned earlier, mainly due to the expansion in our IT development department, compliance, and legal. Compared to last quarter, the personnel costs decreased by 16%, which is a seasonal effect due to summer vacations. Marketing expenses, depreciation, and other costs are at about the same level as last year and compared to the second quarter. The operating expenses for the nine-month period increased compared to last year by 5%.
Our cost guidance for 2016 remains, with an increase by 8%-10% compared to 2015, which means that the operating costs for the last quarter will increase by close to 20% compared to Q4 2015. As Henrik already mentioned, expenses are expected to rise in 2017 at a rate of 15%-20% before returning to the rate of 8%-10% per year. This is due to increased efforts to further improve 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 third quarter increased by 13% year-on-year. Compared to the second quarter, the profit increased by 10% due to lower costs.
The operating margin was 55% for the quarter, and for the nine-month period, the operating margins was 52%, which is slightly lower than the average level during 2015 on 54%, a result of further investment in growth, the market environment, and a broader customer base with younger customers. Profit after tax in the third quarter increased year-on-year by 13% and increased by 12% compared to Q2. The income per savings capital for the nine-month period was 45 basis points, a decrease of 9 basis points compared to the corresponding period 2015, which is in line with our business model and overall strategy to attract more customers and more savings capital. Income per savings capital for the quarter was 42 basis points. The cost per savings capital decreased by 4 basis points year-to-year to 21, to be compared with 25 at year-end and 23 in Q2.
Cost per savings capital for the quarter was 19 basis points, a decrease by four basis points compared to Q3 last year. Given continued strong growth in customer and savings capital, we still see good opportunities to lower the cost to savings capital ratio below 20 basis points in a few years, even though we increase our cost guidance. Lending is still on low levels in spite of increased stock market activity, even though total lending was up 14% during the quarter and 15% since year-end and amounted to SEK 7.5 billion. Margin lending was up 9% during the quarter to SEK 3.9 billion and is amounting to 1.8% of total savings capital. We see a great demand for our mortgage loan offering and mortgage lending was up 19% during the quarter to SEK 3.3 billion.
In the quarter, we extended the lending ceiling further with another SEK 0.5 billion to SEK 4.5 billion to meet customers' demand. Deposits, including external accounts, decreased by 1% in Q3 to SEK 34.5 billion, but has since year-end increased by 14%. Deposits stood for 15.5% of total savings capital by the end of September, compared to 17.8% at the end of June, which is two percentage points lower as a result of our customers' increased risk willingness to invest in stocks and mutual funds. As a result, our covered bond portfolio decreased by 2% to SEK 13.5 billion during the quarter. However, since year-end, it has increased by 12%. The total capital ratio in the consolidated situation was 19.5% compared to the requirements, including buffers, of 12%. In June, the countercyclical capital buffer rose from 1% to 1.5%.
The liquidity coverage ratio was 4.34 at the end of the period compared to the requirements of 0.7. This strong capital situation entitle us to keep on growing, also in a quicker pace. Our dividend policy to distribute at least 70% of the net profit to our shareholders remains. There, Henrik, I think we could turn over to questions.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please dial 01 on your telephone keypad now, and you'll enter a queue. We have our first question from Peter Malan of Handelsbanken. Please go ahead, sir. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. Good morning. I would like to start with a question regarding these additional investments as you informed about today. How far are you into this process? Is it reasonable to assume that the steep cost growth you're guiding for in Q4 is the initiation of these investments?
Yeah, you could say that we are starting at. As you know, we have already added a lot of IT development personnel and so forth. Yes, you see a start in the Q4, going on into next year.
Okay. How well-defined is this investment in terms of how confident are you that the guided cost range as well as the timing of this being more or less completed than a 2017 investment phase, and that will actually be the case?
I wouldn't say that the investment will be completed during 2017, because what we are doing is adding a lot of additional personnel that we continue to deliver even in 2018. This is a start where we accelerate the growth pace, and we believe that we will deliver a lot of interesting things already in 2017.
Okay. How the investment process here, how flexible is it in the sense that if the markets were to turn, take a downshift, and your income momentum would slow down more than expected, would you then change the investment process, maybe slow it down a bit and take it over a longer period? Is this like an investment you need, do you think you should do it for competitive reasons regardless?
We think that we will do this regardless of the market conditions, but, having that said, we could also decide during the way to slow it down or even on the other way around. Of course we could make decisions during the way that could change this, but this is not an investment that we are doing due to the market conditions. It's a long-term investment.
Yeah. Thank you.
This is to keep our momentum in our growth pace that we've been seeing during this year and before also, and to accelerate our position in the Swedish market. We've been working with our strategy going forward and the possibilities that we see ahead quite a long time now. Now we have put down the numbers so everybody can know what we are going on, what it's going to cost. We are here for the long term.
Yeah. Okay, thank you. If you could give some information about the positive development for the digital advisory or digital support services that you've launched so far. What kind of clients are using these services, and are there any specific characteristics to these kind of clients in terms of, well, I guess anything that stands out?
Okay. Good question. As I mentioned, we have divided our customers in three different groups. Do it myself, help me do it, and do it for me investors. Having said that, do it for me investor can also be a do it myself investor, depending on what kind of savings they are looking at. For example, the pension savings, a customer that normally do the savings themselves don't necessarily have to do that with their pension savings. Saying that these digital decision tools that we have offered for the portfolio generator can be used by all of our clients. We see also a demand from new customer groups coming in that they need more help to start at Avanza. It's for both groups, so to say.
Okay. Thank you. Just a final question before I leave to the next person would be, now we've had a very strong market recovery, and generally there's a much more positive sentiment and inflow. Is it reasonable to assume that the trend we've seen of lower transaction values and smaller ticket sizes on average, that this trend could turn for the better if this positive momentum and market development stays?
What we see is that we have record high customer generating commission. The income per commission note is lower. This is due to our growth in younger customers. Also that we have changed our price plans. If you look at our total customer base and savings capital growth with age, we believe that their savings capital will grow with age and also the trade they do on the Stockholm Stock Exchange long term. Which we think will continue to grow with younger people and those who need some more support and so on, it is probably going to be on this level, maybe a little bit lower.
All right. Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Monica Handfeld of SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Just following up on the investment and cost guidance, how do you see this increased cost increase distributed over, will there be a tilt toward increased personnel costs or mainly IT development?
Well, the cost will increase in different parts of our P&L. It will be both personnel costs, it will be IT costs and other costs as well. This is not only due to more employees.
Right. We should see an increase in the number of employees that's larger than history.
Yes.
Okay. Cool. Then a question on the competition. I'm just wondering how you perceive the competitive landscape now that Swedbank will initiate a venture with SprinkleBit.
So far we haven't seen any competition from that bank. Of course, as we said, the market is more competitive now than before, which we think is good because that means that we need to be even better to get our customers. We like competition.
Then a bit more nitty-gritty perhaps, on page five, you had a graph on the brokerage-generating customers compared to the notes per customers. We can see that the brokerage-generating customers are growing on trend. There's been a decoupling with the correlation in the recent quarters where notes per customers decreased. Do you have any explanations for this?
Could you please take that question again?
You can see that notes per customer and the brokerage-generated customers have been growing, exactly on page five, has been rather correlated, and you can see that it's been a decoupling from this correlation in the recent quarters.
Yeah.
Do you know any factors that explain this?
Yeah. We had extraordinary high trading activity during last quarter 2015 and first quarter 2016, and that was the, what you say, biotech stocks that was highly traded then. I think that's why.
All right, the fingerprint factor.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Peter Kessiakoff of SEB. Please go ahead, sir, your line is open.
Yes. Hi, Peter Kessiakoff from SEB. It was not my intention to take the questions right after Monica, just a follow-up questions from what she asked. Just in terms of the customers where you're growing, you're saying that you're now growing going forward in customers that need more help or that want you to help them fully. Does that mean that we should expect that the cost that you need to invest for every new customer that you gain going forward will be more expensive than in the past? Is that one of the reasons why you need to do these investments? That's my first question.
My answer on that is no. We don't think it's going to cost more to get these kind of customers into Avanza. It's the same. Seven out of 10 new customers come through recommendation, we're going to continue to work with that continue to have a very high Net Promoter Score and good service and good product. It's going to be the same, I guess, I think.
Just in terms of, you mentioned that you want to see more stable revenues, and the pensions were one example. Could you give any other examples where you would want to increase your exposure so that the income becomes more stable over time?
As always, we will inform the market when we launch new products. We never do that ahead. We'll be looking into a lot of different areas, and when we're going to launch them, we're going to inform the market.
Are these new investments that we should expect to see, say, during second half of 2017, or will it be fairly evenly distributed over 2017, or how should we look at that?
We never say when we're going to launch or what to expect. As you know. When we have the new products or features ready, we're going to inform the market.
Okay, fair enough. Just in terms of the impact from higher interest rates, you mentioned that, well, 100 basis points higher interest rates in Sweden would improve your NII quite significantly. I think over time you said that you want to have an operating margin around 50%, implying that if you of course see higher net interest income from higher rates, you will invest more. Is that the way we should look at it over the longer term as well?
Well, at least it means that we could invest more, and that we have the opportunity to look over either our price plans or our costs or our investments. It gives us the opportunity to make decisions on what path to choose.
Okay. Simply expecting that impact to fall straight down onto the operating profit is not a fair assumption given how you comment around margins over time.
Well, that's quite hard to say because what we are trying to do is deliver on our promise, more to you, less to the bank. Having a too high margin doesn't really rhyme with that promise. I would say that we never will deliver a higher profit margin than so, but at least it will give us the opportunity to rather continue to grow and to increase our efforts on the growth instead.
Just one last question in terms of the mutual funds where you saw a good income uptick during this quarter. I think if you calculate the average margin that you saw on your mutual funds, about 34 basis points on an annualized basis in this quarter, which is up from roughly 32 basis points seen the last couple of quarters. Is there anything in particular in this or can we expect a similar level going forward or should we see a small decline? How would you view the margin there?
What we've seen this quarter is that the risk willingness by our customers has gone up some, meaning that we've seen that the customers that saves in funds choose more stock funds and mixed funds compared to second quarter. We see a good inflow in the fund capital coming from the pension business, but also from our other customers. Going forward, that's very hard to say, but we see a higher risk willingness now in our customer base. Seeing that when they are trading more stocks and also in foreign exchanges, seeing that the FX income has gone up also. Is it to term? I don't know, but that's what we see right now.
Okay.
You can see that our customers are acting pretty fast when the market condition changes. This increase is due to both more risk willingness but also due to the market going up. We can see pretty quick how customers changes when the market condition changes.
Just one final question. You mentioned that the income per trade that you earn on the younger customers, which is where you're growing the fastest currently, is lower than the average. Could you say anything about how much less you're earning on the younger customers than you are on the average? Taking for instance that you now are growing the fastest within those that are around 25 years old. Just what's the average commission that you earn on trades on them, for instance?
Well, we don't calculate income per year or for what age our customers have. What we can see is younger customers usually have less capital, which means that they usually chose one of our price plans, Start or Mini as the first entry product. As we have said in the report, we can also see that these younger customers or those who have actually chosen Start is not only trading on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. We are still generating commission from other trades. I believe more younger people chose the Start and the Mini price plan.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Niklas MacBeth of DNB. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hi, congratulations to a strong quarter. I think it was very encouraging to see the strong customer growth sustained in Q3. I think the net inflows on the back of the strong customer growth could have been somewhat higher, and you mentioned that most of the net savings came from new customers. Do you see any potential to increase net savings from existing customers here over the coming quarters? That's my first question.
Absolutely. As we said in the webcast, we have three focus areas. One of them is to maintain our core investors happy. Going forward, we're going to work with products and services for both new customer groups, and also for our existing customers. In this volatile market, we have seen before that existing customers net inflow fluctuates over years. Also we've seen that the share of deposit on the Swedish savings market have been growing during the last years. Our existing customers usually not put in more money when it's quite turbulent. They stay on their salary account, savings account. It fluctuates quite a lot between new customers and existing customers net inflow. We think over time it's going to be average 50/50.
You would assume that if markets become more stable here in Q4 and maybe also into next year, that the net savings from existing customers will increase. Is that your expectation?
Yes.
Okay, thanks. On the cost growth again for 2017, it seems like the cost guidance you gave last time in Q2 that also should enable investment in innovation and new product offering and user experience. Can you say something about what has changed since the end of second quarter when you guided for cost growth of 8%-10%?
Well, if I would start. We've been seeing during the quarter, the last two quarters, that what we have done, what we have developed in product offering and services has been very positive taken from our customers. For example, the portfolio generator was growth with 30% since second quarter, also what we've done on the mobile offering, seeing that 60% of the customers who come to us uses mobile devices. These are things that we have followed for quite time, now we see that we have a strong momentum and a great potential going forward. Therefore, we see the possibility now to speed up our growth pace. We've been following this for quite time, we've also done quite large strategy work during the year, now we see a great potential going forward. Therefore, we have guided for this for 2017.
Okay. On Avanza Markets, I think Birgitta mentioned how much Avanza Markets contributed to of the other income. Could you just confirm or repeat that number and also say something about the outlook for further growth in revenues from Avanza Markets?
Well, Avanza Markets was 36% of the other income for the Q3. You should remember that corporate finance revenues were very low this quarter. I would say that Avanza Markets started in the end of Q2 2015 at very low levels, which means that compared to last year, the growth is significant. Avanza Markets did grow very fast for the first six months or the first nine months. I wouldn't expect it to have the same growth compared to the last quarter, but it will still continue to grow compared to last year.
Okay, thank you. My last question, a bit more specific on the net interest income. It fell a bit further here in the third quarter, I suppose because of the lower interest rates. If we assume that interest rates or market rates would remain at current levels, could you give us a bit of insight on the outlook for net interest income for the fourth quarter? Also assuming that deposit volumes and the size of the liquidity portfolio would be roughly at the same levels as they were by the end of the third quarter. Really, if the fall in interest rates have been reflected in the NII in the third quarter, if there should be some more pressure.
Well, if you will compare it to this quarter, I would say that there won't be any more pressure since the interest rate level has been about the same Q3 as if that's what you expect for the next quarter. What we will see though is that our lending has gone up during the third quarter, which hasn't gone through the P&L fully. You probably would see an increase in interest income from our lending portfolio.
Okay, that's all my questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that if you wish to ask a question, you will have to press 01 on your telephone keypad now. Once again, any further questions, please dial 01. There are no further questions at this time. Please go ahead, speakers.
Okay, thank you very much for listening in. I hope you get the information so you understand Avanza going forward.
Thank you. Goodbye.