Okay. Hello everybody. It's 10 o'clock, the third of February, and welcome to Nordnet and the presentation of our financial report for the fourth quarter of 2021. My name is Johan Tidestad. I'm the Chief Communications Officer at Nordnet, and I will be hosting this session. With me today is our CEO, Lars-Åke Norling, and our CFO, Lennart Krän. Lars-Åke and Lennart will make a presentation of our business and our financial numbers for Q4 that will take something around 20-25 minutes, and after that we will open up for questions. During the presentation, all participants will be muted, and we'll let Lars-Åke and Lennart go through what they have to say first. When we come to the Q&A session, you have two alternatives to ask questions.
You either click on the button at the bottom of the screen that says Raise Hand, and I will then enable you to speak, and you can ask your question verbally. You can also send in your question in writing during the whole presentation. If you want to use that alternative, you just use the button that says Q&A at the bottom of the screen. You write your question, and I will read it out loud after the presentation. Of course, this presentation will also be available on our corporate website, nordnetab.com, together with a recording of this session as well. Okay then. Without further ado, let's start. Lars-Åke, please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you, Johan. We can go to the next slide. First some key highlights for the fourth quarter. Currently we have now about 1.6 million total private savers on our platform, and we have 64,000 new customers joining in the fourth quarter. We also see a record level of savings capital exceeding SEK 800 billion in the fourth quarter and also underlying strong net savings of SEK 83 billion. Also very successful launch of Danish savings account. I'm gonna come back to that later in the presentation. We also see two awards in the quarter. One is Årets Uppror. It's a bit hard to translate, but the rebellion of the year. It was against the proposed negative changes to the Investeringssparkonto account in Sweden.
The government really listened to what we had to say in this case. We also received a prize in Denmark for Stock Broker of the Year. We have the second-highest quarter result ever in quarter four with almost SEK 580 million, and also the full year has been fantastic with a profit growth of 56% versus 2020, and by far the best year in Nordnet's history. We have a proposed dividend of 5.56 SEK per share, and that's 70% up from the dividend we had last year. We can go to next page. 2021, a fantastic growth year for Nordnet.
We grew the customer base with 380,000 customers in during the year with 31%. 42% growth in the savings capital, both from underlying market growth but also very high net savings. Overall high activity on the platform, mainly from more customers coming onto the platform and starting trading. We see revenues up 35% year-on-year, and it's been good growth in all the revenue streams, both the lending, fund and the brokerage business. I will talk more about that later as well.
The operating expenses, they're slightly higher than 2020 from the large increase in the customer base, especially in quarter one and quarter two, and a slightly higher marketing, but it's in line with the revised guidance that we presented during last year. Also very good then growth in the profit that we talked about, 56% up. Continued very good scalability in our business. We go to next. A little bit financial highlights for the fourth quarter. Customer savings capital is the same, of course, as the full year. Number of trades is slightly up quarter four 2021 versus quarter four 2020 last year.
Here we see that we have more trading customers following the customer growth, but it's less trades per customer due to lower market volatility compared to last year. Revenue is up 16%. Also here a good growth in all revenue streams. Cost imbalance and profit then increasing to 2%, second-best quarter ever when it comes to both revenue and profitability. We can go to next slide. We see a continued acceleration of our long-term growth, both when it comes to customers and savings capital. We talked before about the reasons for that, but the main reasons is our focus in building the best platform for savings and investment to be this really one-stop shop for the savers and investors.
Every day, we improve the customer experience. For example, we launch a new app version every 5 days. This is of course appreciated by the customers and drives customer satisfaction. The other part is that we now reach critical mass in all the countries. We have enough customers in all countries to drive word-of-mouth based growth, which is the core of our customer growth. We can go to next. Also very good growth then in the customers and net savings. Touched on that briefly before, but we grow the customer base then with 308,000 customers and that's a record by far. Net savings is 83 billion SEK for the year.
Comparing to last year, if you take away some one-offs during the IPO, that was SEK 70 billion. It's up from basically SEK 70 billion underlying. Very strong net savings. For us, that's ultimate proof that the customers like our platform, that they also transfer money, start using our products. Go to next. Then we have a leading position in the Nordics as a number one digital platform savings and investments. We have a very good diversification of revenues that you've seen before. Sweden is still the largest, but we see also growth in other countries, and now Denmark is number two.
Also when we look at the growth, the customer growth, we have the highest growth in the countries outside of Sweden, but we also have the highest margins, and the margins are higher due to its large share of cross-border trading in those countries. Go to next. We see good development in customers' savings capital across the countries. Of course, the customer growth has been exceptional outside of Sweden. Even though Sweden has a little bit lower growth in customers, if you look at the savings capital growth, it's very good. The customer base in Sweden is strong. It's a high savings capital customer and high income per customer. Go to next.
This is a little bit showing the development in our different revenue streams, where the light red is the net interest income or the lending business. Dark blue is revenue from fund business, and light blue is the brokerage business. If you look at this year compared to last year, we have a balanced growth between the revenue stream. We have a 20% growth year-over-year in the lending business and 46% growth year-over-year in the fund business, which is exciting because as you know, fund is a focus area for us and we are also gonna set up a fund company later this year. The brokerage business is growing around 33%.
If you look at the margins then per product, if you look at the lending business is stable, if you look at the fund business, it's also stable. It's in the graph down to the right. But the one you see in the light blue here going down in margin is the brokerage margin, and that's due to less trades per customer from lower market volatility in 2021 compared to 2020. We can go to next. And if you look at the trading in more detail, you see here the light blue here is showing the number of customers that trade per quarter. And that increase in quarter trading customers is following basically increase in our customer base. So the customers we onboard also start to become trading customers.
If we look at the trades per trading customer, we see that we have up in quarter four from seasonality. If you compare to last year, it is lower, and that's due to less market volatility in 2021 versus 2020. We also see that the share of cross-border trading is still on a high level, around 30%, and that is from the country mix that we have, higher share of cross-border trading in Denmark, Finland, and Norway. We also have the largest customer growth. We go to next. Trade seasonality shows this V shape also this year. The light blue is 2021, where we had the top in quarter one, bottom in July, and then it went up later in the year.
Same pattern as we've seen in the previous years. Nothing unexpected there. Normally then quarter one and quarter four is where we have the highest trading per customer involvement. Go to next. We have a very strong position across Nordic being the leading digital platform savings and investments in the Nordics. We have a clear number one position both as a platform, but also in NPS in Norway, Denmark, and Finland, and a strong number two position in Sweden. This is also allowing us to take market share, and this is increasing market share of the full addressable market per country.
We have growth in all countries and in total we have around right now 6% market share of the total addressable market which still gives us absolute room to grow for many years to come. Go to next. Continue focus on cost discipline. Even though we have had great revenue growth the last four years you can see in the graph to the right that we've had stable cost in absolute terms now for four years allowing us to improve the cost margin from 38 basis points down to 17 basis points. The key drivers for our good operating leverage is of course one is that we have a very scalable tech platform so we can onboard a lot of new customers without driving costs. Then it's process simplification automation.
We talked about that before as well, but this is a win-win-win for our customers to take the digital journey for mortgage, for example, where a customer can get a mortgage approved now within the same day. We also save a lot of money because we get rid of a lot of manual tasks. Our very strong word-of-mouth-based customer growth allows us to have a low customer acquisition cost. It's about 300 SEK per customer, and if you compare that to lifetime value, it's a very profitable customer acquisition. Lifetime value versus acquisition cost is around 64 x. We also all the time actively manage third-party spend in all shapes and forms. Can you go to next.
Some product highlights in quarter four, as mentioned at the beginning, we launched the Danish ASK accounts similar to Swedish Investeringssparkonto accounts. Now we have that kind of product in all countries, but it's been super successful. It's currently 46,000 accounts open and 20% market share already even though we only had the product for a few months. We also released dark mode on the web. We've had it, as you know, before in the app, but this has been highly appreciated by our customers. We also launched a new chart engine for the web and app allowing for high resolution of the charts and also longer time series and also more comparisons. Also this has been really liked by the customers. With that, I hand over to you, Lennart.
Thank you very much. You can go to the next slide, please, and actually the next slide, once more. I'm summarizing about the financial performance during the Q4 here, but the foundation of it all is of course, as we already told you, 1.6 million customers across Nordic. That's a great figure. The stable growth with it, which is 19%-31% now year-on-year, which is very, very stable and good continuously. The savings capital, showing the same growth rate ending up at SEK 800 billion +. Those two are the main drivers of the value and the profit of course, in Nordnet as we told you before.
It's also important to see that it's all in revenue, all asset classes that do increases both brokerage and funds and deposits. We really have the foundation for it. You can go to the next slide, please. This is what we can see in the revenue actually coming from 350 + in 2019 revenue per quarter, adding up to SEK 300 million in 2020 and now an additional SEK 200 million. We have actually stepped up each year on a quarterly basis. Also this one is very stable ending up now on SEK 890 million in revenue Q4 2021. It's great to see and that is the result of those new customers, the savings capital growth and the activity level of course.
You can go to the next slide. During this time, in spite of all the new customers, I mean, we doubled them since 2018 and the savings capital as well and the increased activity. We have been able to maintain the cost on a stable level, and that is what we said before. This is the operating leverage of the tech platform, of the services that we do and the business model. It's really good to see that this has been stable throughout the years, not just one year or not just for a quarter, but through all quarters. Of course, some minor deviations, but still on a stable level. We can take the next slide, please.
All this results of course in great increase of revenue, ending up at SEK 3.6 billion in 2021, having the cost of SEK 1.1 billion, leaving all the increase in revenue almost at least at the profits, ending up at year-end SEK 2.4 billion. It's a great figure to see and it's an increase of 56% from last year. I'm very pleased with that. That is to say that's the customer level, that's the savings capital, the net savings, and also of course the activity. One thing that we all should be aware of is it's a cross-Nordic base and we have reached the critical mass in all countries throughout those three years that we have reported here. Please, next.
We also have a balance sheet of course, but mainly our business is off balance. As you can see to the left side, we have SEK 800 billion savings capital from our customers. 70% of those are brokerage equities to say, and 20% is fund business, but 10% of them are deposits and that ends up in our balance sheet. Therefore the balance sheet has increased by SEK 14 billion this year, which we do have as liquidity. We do have to do something with it. We do lend about SEK 25 billion. This is one third of it to our customer. That is to support the other business, the savings and investment business. That is also the parts that has grown. This is the margin lending and the mortgage part.
Those are the main increases. What we do here is also maintain this lending portfolio with very low credit losses. We have seen no increases. It's actually decreased, but I say it's maintained same level and the credit losses are all due from the unsecured part that we have on a stable level, SEK 4 billion going forward as well. The credit quality is the same. I could say maybe improving a little bit, but it's about the same that we have. All other credit losses are just provisions and we have not had any losses on the mortgage since we launched the product, and we don't see any increased risks in it either. We have good collateral and very good customers.
What I usually say is that, yes, we can say when someone is delayed, it's usually one customer, not more than that on a monthly basis, and that is repaid directly. It's really a good credit quality. We can take the next page. Also in capital situation, we have maintained the position that we have with the capital adequacy of 21.6% with a requirement of 17.1%. We have a good room here, buffer for ourselves. The real constraint in the capital perspective is actually leverage ratio, which we have increased from last year, 4.0-4.8 now. The requirement should be 3.9 from the regulators.
Also there we have good headroom to be around. During this fourth quarter, we have done some parts to optimize the capital structure. We did issue a AT1 of SEK 600 million and we also paid out dividend of SEK 443 million Swedish krona. That is the change of structure. It was all done to optimize the capital structure and no other reasons for it. As I said, I mean, what we have the constraints is the leverage ratio. We have own funds of SEK 3.8 billion, and we're required to hold at this exposure level 3.1 billion in equity for that. What we do is see, okay, how are we affected by the leverage ratio?
It's the deposit side, of course, because that is the part that increases our balance sheet and nothing else. We're not afraid of the capital structure going down. We have to measure that in respect of how much more deposits can we take on. As of year-end, we were able to take on SEK 46 billion compared to the SEK 70 billion in deposits that we already had without breaching the minimum requirement of 3.0 in leverage ratio. As you can see, the deposits mainly or ordinary grow with the savings capital of the customers.
There's only one time, and that was March 2020 when we had the corona pandemic coming on, where we had a lot of sell-off to de-risk, but also a lot of new customers and also old customers putting in net savings that increased this dramatically. That is what we have to watch all the time. After that, yes, we held on to the high deposit side, but we also see that deposits per customer went down because we had such an increase of new customers as well. That is what we always watch and have to be aware of. We can go to the next page. Do you wanna go for this, Lars, of course, should I? I think you're on mute.
I can do it just short. I mean, this is the summary of where we are in 2021 versus financial targets and we over delivered on most of them. As you know, we're gonna have a capital markets day next Friday, where we're gonna present updates to the financial targets for the midterm. As you see, customer growth 31% compared to guidance of 10%-15%. In spite of this growth, we see that we still have very good savings capital per customer. Also meaning that new customers coming in are building up capital fairly quickly. And also then the revenue margin 53 bps versus the guidance of slightly above 40 bps. And the operating expenses then is in line with the re-guide as we did around SEK 1,140.
Also then that we follow the guidance of 70% payouts of the net income. More to come on next Friday. Can take the next slide. Just a short update reminder of the focus area, starting of course with the customers. We wanna be the number one choice for the Nordic savers and investors. We wanna be this one-stop shop for savings and investments with a great customer experience. To achieve that, we every day build on our best platform for savings and investments. There's new features in the app and web, new exciting savings products and automation on customer journeys.
Of course, we wanna maintain a very strong NPS position in the Nordics and even strengthen, especially in Sweden, and also see that we have low churn also going forward. When it comes to the employees, we know we will never have happy customers unless we have happy employees. We want to see continued upward trend on our employee satisfaction that we currently do. And also that we can attract and retain top talent. It's really war for talent out there. Then it's a sustainable business. We are in a trust business. We need to earn that trust every day, and it can easily be lost.
It's key for us to manage our risks and not least the combined risks in a good way and that the overall then are a trusted and liked brand. Last area is profitable growth to really capture this fantastic potential we have in the Nordics with 6% market share today. We have room to grow for many years to come. Of course, we focus quite a lot on ensuring that we also have a scalable business going forward, and not least continue to automate the customer journeys. With that, we end the presentation, Johan, and it's time to open up for Q&A.
Yes, sir, it is. Thanks a lot, guys. Time for questions. Like I said before, you just raise your hand digitally, and I will enable you to speak. In some cases, you also need to accept to be unmuted, and then it will show up a request on your screen. Or you can send in your question in writing by using the Q&A button. We actually take a question in writing first. It comes from Jacob Thuesen, Autonomous, and it's about costs. Do you have the visibility on future spending to be able to maintain absolute cost targets? Or are there scale effects that mean we should look for you to move to relative cost targets such as cost income or cost in relation to savings? What can we say about that?
You get the full update then next Friday, but it's not gonna be anything unexpected, and no major cost increases, but we'll cover it in full then next Friday.
Yes, Capital Markets Day on the eleventh. Also from Jacob Thuesen, competitor is launching a pensions portal in Sweden. Anything in the Nordnet pipeline when it comes to that, Lars-Åke?
Yeah, you know, we work extensively with pension in all of our countries, where we launched the EPK product in Norway. We also have the automated transfers in Sweden. We look at opening up the full market, pension market with Livrente in Denmark. In Sweden specifically, we gonna, of course, continue to improve our front end. The main issue in Sweden is not really the front end, it's the back end, is that the transfer process is quite tedious. There's a lot of manual steps. You need to have sign-off from the employer, a lot of shuffling with papers back and forth between insurance companies.
What we also know is very hard in Sweden is to introduce an automatic transfer hub that we have in Norway that manages all the transfers between the parties in a 100% automatic way. It's just to press a button and the basic transfer is done. We also put a lot of focus on lobbying to have also a transfer hub in Sweden. That needs to come from the government or from regulation. I don't think it's gonna happen by itself.
Thank you. We're gonna let the first verbal question in. It's from Jacob Hässlevik, SEB. Hello, Jakob. Are you with us?
Good. Everyone, can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yeah.
Please go ahead.
My first question is on interest rate sensitivity. If rates were to increase 100 basis points, how large would the effect be in your P&L?
You wanna take that one, Lennart?
Yes, I can take that one. I mean, you can have a simple answer, and that is if we don't do anything, we just maintain it on the treasury portfolio, that would be 1% on the treasury portfolio, which is about SEK 50 billion, and that would give about SEK 500 million, of course. It's not that easy, of course. We do have negative interest on deposits in Denmark, which we will increase costs on as well and things like that, and our margins.
What we have is guiding us actually that we set up the maturity structure in the quarterly reports on the treasury portfolio, so you can see how much is fixed and for how long, as well as how much is in different levels of credit risk in covered bonds and governments and things like that. So you can do your own judgment because it really depends on when it's done and how quick it is done as well.
We can say that fairly quickly. I mean, we'll get the flow through in both the treasury, but also likely in the lending portfolio as well.
Yeah.
Also, treasury is very short-term notes or floating rate notes.
Perfect. Thanks. That's very clear. My next question is actually to you, Lars-Åke. In the report, you say that Nordnet will offer residential mortgages in Norway going forward.
Correct.
Is this through Stabelo, or will you partner up with a local bank like, Sbanken?
No, we will set it up ourselves. We build on the fully automatic mortgage journey we have in Sweden, and we're gonna adapt that to the Norwegian market. Hopefully, the most digitized journey also in Norway when we launch. It's gonna be, as in Sweden, directed to the private banking segment, with of course very attractive also interest rates.
All right. Thank you. You kind of answered the question already with Jakob's question before, but on cost, I mean, your peer is guiding for over 20% cost increase.
Yeah
for 2022. I mean, how comfortable are you that you can keep up with investment and innovations with your current cost level? Or do you foresee any large investment need in the short term?
No, I think, I mean, at least half our cost base today is product and tech that we reinvest in the platform every day. We know also that we can improve scalability in the platform, especially with this automation of customer journeys that will take out cost. The areas we want to invest a little bit more is tech resources because we have very interesting, exciting roadmap ahead of us, and of course, we wanna deliver that as fast as possible. To do that, you need more engineers. That we talked about before. You won't see anything unexpected from us when we guide on that, In Cindy.
All right. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jacob. Next person up on the stage is Patrik Brattelius from ABG. Hello, Patrick.
Hello. Hello. Thank you. I also have some follow-up questions regarding the cost, if we dig into the dynamics here. What is the status on runoff of old IT systems and a reduction in the need of consultants going forward?
Yeah. As you know, a large part of our platform is modernized both the front and the back end. What we do now is that we also step by step move the back end to the cloud to get a more scalable and also secure solution. I think last year it was around 40% of the development was on the cloud-based part, and this year it's probably gonna be 80%. We're gonna pretty fast shift to the cloud-based solution. When it comes to consultants in tech, we don't have that many left actually.
We have a handful, and the rest, we have scale up tech, but that's our own resources, and that's the way we focus also going forward in tech to employ our own engineers. Yeah.
Okay. The cost savings from these two actions are. We have seen the majority of that already then?
We have consultancy in other parts of the organization as well, but we try of course to limit consultants as much as possible all the time.
Okay. If I look at the personnel, it didn't increase that much in Q4, but now to earlier question, it sounded like you need to ramp up the staff. Does the increase in savings capital make you see a need for more personnel? And, how many do you expect to-
Um-
will need to increase?
Not really, because it's a scalable model. We needed to increase in customer service and part of the operations during quarter one, quarter two last year because there was such a tremendous inflow of customers. When we now have a more stable inflow, still high, but stable, we can manage with the staff that we have more or less. Where we scale up is mainly within product and tech because we wanna have, yeah, move faster, basically.
Okay. Thank you. Well, I have one more question. It's a little bit. The other income, I guess that is largely driven by IPO fees.
Yeah. Correct.
... here in Q4. How do you view the pipe into 2022? Is there fewer IPOs coming onto the market where you're participating? What do you expect to see there on this line?
I'd say a little bit hard to predict. It has been a strong pipeline also in 2022. It depends, of course, going forward a little bit on the volatility in the market. But if it's become a little bit calmer, I think we're gonna see a strong pipeline also in 2022. It might not be as high as 2021, but I think still a very strong pipeline.
Okay. Thank you. It's all for me.
Thanks a lot, Patrik. Next one up is Ermin Keric from Carnegie. Hello there, Ermin.
Hi. Do you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Cool.
Please go ahead.
Perfect. Thank you. I was just wondering if you could say anything about the behavior of customers now when we've seen quite the volatile markets during January. Do they continue to be active even if they lose some money? Or have people been excessively risk-taking and so on? Is there anything you could share on that front?
No, I think they've been active. I mean, on average, we had 290,000 trades per day in January, which is a high number. Also we know that January normally is high, but it for being January is high. It was only last year's January was higher, but then, you know, the market was off the charts when it came to volatility. So they are active, but they're sensible as well. I mean, they sell some, they buy some, and especially if they see opportunities they buy. So we haven't seen any panic, I would say, in the base so far.
Thank you. That's helpful. Then on the NII, I mean, the NIM is fairly stable, but underlying you have quite big jumps both on interest income and interest expense. Also if I look at the NIM in Norway and in Denmark, both are having quite big jumps, but in different directions. Could you give us any color on that, please?
Yeah. You can probably give the details, Lennart, but I mean overall there's no, the margin lending, and the mortgage and personal loans, their yields are fairly stable. You have the treasury. You have the treasury effect in Norway, which is of course positive since they increased the rate now, also going into quarter four. Denmark, they're I think they lowered their rate, but we also, you know, get compensated. We charge negative interest rates in Denmark, so we also get an income in Denmark. If there's some details you don't understand, Lennart, I suggest you to take that off hand as well.
Yeah, we can take that off. One thing is that the cost for deposit guarantee and resolution fees are increasing for banks like us due to the construction of it. That is also an effect in just Q4, which you can see in the figures as you really analyze them. We can go through that. You can call me later on, and we can look at your questions.
Sounds perfect. Then the last question was just on the leverage ratio. Are you feeling comfortable at 4.8% or is that too much or too little headroom to the 3.9% requirement you have?
Yes. I would say I'm feeling comfortable with that. I said before, I think the main thing to watch here is really how much deposit increase can we take on. With that, I'm very comfortable and also seeing how the development is on a regular basis. We also need to be aware of that it can be an exceptional case once again, you never know that. I feel comfortable with it, yes, definitely.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Ermin. We'll do some questions in writing here before we go in the speaker line. This is from Gurjit Kambo, JP Morgan. Lars-Åke, can you provide an update on the progress in the EPK product offering in Norway? The second question from Gurjit is, can you explain a bit what the ISK product is? What is it and how does it work?
What was the second one you said?
Can you explain the Investeringssparkonto, I-S-K product?
The Swedish product you mean, right?
Yeah, the Swedish product, exactly.
Yeah. Gurjit Kambo, I think you're the best on it. Yeah, the EPK, we have, I think, around SEK 3.3 billion in that now, and I don't fully remember the number of customers, but it's around 12,000-13,000, I think. It's slowed down a little bit since the peak when we launched, but we get a steady inflow and we have customers that actively choose their platform. We are the number one there in market share. We work also very actively with promoting the product and talking about it, informing about it and marketing as well because pensions is a bit slow moving.
You need to be there and remind the customers. When we focus, of course, is the old customer base, where we have more than 300,000 customers we wanna convince to move to the EPK product over time. The ISK product, I don't know, Johan.
Yeah. Yeah, I can take it if you want to. The Investeringssparkonto, that's a product in Sweden that was launched about 10 years ago, which is an account type that makes it much easier to save in stocks and funds because you don't have to do any tax declarations on the separate trades, transactions, and also you don't pay any tax on capital gains but just pay a small percentage every year of the value of the account. This has been the dominant and the most popular account type in Sweden, something about 3 million plus accounts in these 10 years in Sweden. We now have the similar account types actually in all our Nordic markets, and we have launched them as well.
I don't know if you wanna comment that, Lars-Åke, on the market share we have in yeah the other Nordic countries.
We're very successful in the Finnish account, for example. I think we have 70% market share and like we talked about the ASK account in Denmark with fantastic progress in short time and also very strong in Norway. What we talked about in the beginning there was hints from the government that they wanna make changes to the Investeringssparkonto, negative changes for the customers. There was a lot of debate and noise in the market on that. We actively took a position to save the Investeringssparkonto as it is because it's very popular. We had also a lot of signatures from customers that we handed into the finance minister.
I think they listened to what we had to say and it's been quiet since then.
Yes. Okay. Thank you. Next up is Emil Jonsson, I think from DNB, correct? Hello, Emil.
Hi, good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yeah.
Please go ahead.
All right. Excellent. We've already spoken a bit about the costs. I just wanted to ask, has anything changed on that topic lately that has given you reason to think you'll need to invest a little bit more in 2022? Or are the expectations the same as they've been the past couple of months?
Overall it's about the same.
All right. Then on the other income line item, was there anything other than IPO fees that stuck out this quarter?
No, it's mainly IPO.
All right. Okay. That was it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Emil. A couple of questions in writing. One is about new markets, from Alexander. Do we have any timetable for opening up new markets for trading, and which markets will be the first to launch?
Martin, good morning. First, another question on the
We're planning to expand the markets for trading. We're looking at the markets connected to Euronext and also our partner, Citi. One of the first stop is gonna be London Stock Exchange, but then we will also look at a number of other markets in Europe to start with.
Good. Thank you. Interesting.
Yeah, we really benefit from the cooperation we have, especially with Citi. We can reuse a lot of the solutions that we have for the trading in the U.S. and Germany.
Yes. Two more questions in writing have come in. One is about you spoke about the maintained costs level. Is that high or low according to the standard in the industry? Can you say something about the cost level, overall, Lars-Åke or Lennart?
Yeah, I think now we are, I mean, our cost margin is down to 70 bps versus savings capital and the trajectory is down, will continue down. Also our cost to income is, of course, if you compare that to other banks, is also very good. I don't know if we have the latest number on cost to income, Lennart, but.
No.
It's definitely.
Yeah
Very competitive.
Good. And last question today is what direction do you expect for interest income over 2022 and the direction of the interest rates? How responsive are your loans to rate changes? For example, what term fixed are your mortgages on average? Mortgages, hard word.
I'll answer that one, Lennart.
Mortgage.
Lennart.
It's mortgage. I mean, it's four different markets, of course. We have a situation in Norway where they are increasing the interest rates already. We also... Those products are all in a competitive market, especially the margin lending side. It's not automatically we increase it by the increase of interest rates, of course, but some adjustments will be made. According to the mortgages, yes, we follow it, but we're still having the best interest rate in Sweden, and we maintain that one. It's really important for us to do that. It's not a correlation to 100% or anything like that with interest rates.
However, in the treasury portfolio, that will be more relevant to see, especially in Norway when they do the increase. We see a better interest rate in Norway on the liquidity portfolio side.
We don't have any fixed term contract on any of our loans, so it's easy to change the rate if you want to. Of course, you need to adhere to what the rest of the market is doing.
Yes. Okay, I think that was it for the questions. Thanks a lot, guys, for joining us today and a lot of great questions. Before we close, I just wanna say, you're all very welcome to our Capital Markets Day, Friday next week, and you can still sign up by going into nordnetab.com. That is also where you find all the information about Nordnet as a company. Until then, thanks again for joining us today and for your interest in Nordnet. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Thanks. Bye.