Hello, everybody. It's 10:00 and the 29 of October. Welcome to Nordnet and the presentation of our financial report for the third quarter of 2021. My name is Johan Tidestad, and I'm the Chief Communications Officer at Nordnet. With us, with me today here 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 Q3. That will take something around 20 minutes, and after that, we will have a Q&A session. During the presentation itself, all participants are muted, and we will let Lars-Åke and Lennart go through what they have to say first. Then when we come to the Q&A session, you have two alternatives to ask questions.
You can click on the button at the bottom of the screen that says raise hand, and that will then enable you to talk, and you can ask your question verbally. You can also send in your question in writing, and if you want to use that alternative, you just use the Q&A function, write your question, and I will read it out loud to everyone. I'll come back to that later as well. Of course, the presentation itself will be available on our corporate website, nordnetab.com, together with a recording of this session. Okay then, let's start the presentation. Lars-Åke, please go ahead.
Thank you, Johan. We can move to the next slide. Start with some key highlights. Nordnet, we turned 25 years in August, and we've grown from a small Swedish online broker to being the leading Nordic digital platform for savings and investments. We took in more than 60,000 new customers during the quarter, and the annual growth has been 37%, and we now passed 1.5 million customers across our Nordic footprint. We also had new record levels for savings capital and lending, savings capital of SEK 730 billion and lending portfolio of SEK 24 billion.
We also see higher revenues and stable cost level has led to an adjusted profit increase with over 40%, and profit before tax is slightly over SEK 500 million for the quarter. Nordnet is also the first fund platform now in the Nordics to include information from EU's disclosure regulation about sustainable funds. You can see if a fund is Article 8 or Article 9. That means a light green or green fund. We also handed in an application to start a fund company to the Swedish FSA, and will probably take around six months of handling time before that process is concluded. We also received a very prestigious prize from the Red Dot Design Award regarding our app. Go to the next.
Some financial highlights for the third quarter, and as I touched upon, very good growth in the customer base, 37% year-on-year, and we grow the customer base with more than 400,000 customers in one year. Also very good growth in savings capital, up 50%, versus Q3 last year, both from very strong net savings, but also underlying market growth. We also see an increase of number of trades with 16%, but we see a decline in trades per customer, but that's well compensated by the large growth in the customer base. Revenues increased 29%, and we see a good growth in all revenue streams. This quarter, especially the fund growth sticking out, we grow the fund revenues with 60% year-on-year.
We're also stable on cost. We see slightly up due to this huge increase in customer base and also that we spent a little bit more on digital marketing than last year. We are in line with the full year updated guidance on cost. As I mentioned, the profit then increased 40%, and net profit before tax of more than SEK 500 million for the quarter. Go to next. We see a continued acceleration on the customer growth and savings capital growth. We've grown the customer base on average 29% per year since 2018, and the savings capital base 41% per year since 2018.
A few reasons for this, our brand promise is to build the best platform for savings and investments, and that's something we work hard with every day, and that leads to continuous improvement of customer experience. We also see that, we discussed that before, that we reached critical mass now in all the countries in our footprint, and that allows for very strong word-of-mouth growth. We continue to see a strong interest in savings and investments, and of course, it's a very strong digitization trend. Go to next. Here you see the customer growth per month versus last year, and also net savings growth per month versus last year, and it's good on both fronts.
We grow the customer base for the quarter with 60,000 customers, and for the full year, so far it's more than 300,000 customers. When it comes to net savings, it's SEK 15 billion for the quarter and SEK 65 billion so far this year. It is quite a bit up from last year, which was also a strong year. September was a little bit lower than July and August, and that was due to some very large Swedish customers taking out money for other business they needed to do. The inflow was very good. We also initiated a customer clean-up project. We have 1.5 million customers, and for a small part of those, we have incomplete KYC information.
It's mainly customers that's been with us for a longer time, and that we really try to get the information, but we haven't. They are inactive and have limited savings capital. The customers with this incomplete KYC have been blocked from trading since before, not due to any suspicious transactions, just because they haven't had complete KYC. The new guidelines from Swedish FSA stipulates it's not enough to block them. We also need to terminate the customers fully from the bank unless they complete their KYC data. That project has now been initiated. We don't see any material impact on revenues or profitability, but we will see an impact on the customer base. At most six.
75,000 customers will be terminated and max SEK 7.9 billion of savings capital. We know also from experience, once a customer with especially savings capital receives a termination letter, they normally act then try to complete their data. I think a lot of the savings capital especially will be saved. We started this project in September, and we will complete first half of 2022, and then we will update on the final impact on the customers and savings capital. We also will update on the customer impact in the monthly reporting that we have.
We really leverage from our Nordic footprint being the leading platform for savings and investment, a very well-diversified revenue, 37% of the revenue coming from Sweden, 24% now from Denmark, and 20% each from Finland and Norway. When it comes to customer growth, we see a fantastic growth outside of Sweden due to now we have critical mass and really strong word-of-mouth growth. We're clearly growing in the countries, as you see to the right, also with the highest margin. We have higher margins outside of Sweden, but we also have the highest growth. The reason for that is it's a higher share of cross-border trading in the countries outside of Sweden, where we have a higher margin overall. You can go to next.
This is customer growth and savings capital growth per country and starting with Sweden. We see a pickup in the growth in Sweden. We have increased the growth in new customers with 50% versus last year. We have overall a very strong customer base in Sweden, and we see that they have a fantastic growth also in the savings capital and also good income per customer. In Norway, Denmark, and Finland fantastic customer growth, 30% Finland, 50%+ Norway, and 80% in Denmark, but also strong growth in savings capital. You can go to next. We also see very good growth in all the revenue streams.
The light red here is net interest income, the dark blue is fund revenue, and the light blue is brokerage revenue. We see the average growth rate since 2018 being around 35% for net interest income in the fund business and around 60% for brokerage. This quarter especially, we've seen a fantastic growth in the fund business with 60% year on year, like I mentioned in the beginning. Funds area is a very prioritized area for us. There's been a lot of focus on that, and we also see strong growth, which is very positive. Revenue margin by product, net interest income, you see that down to the right, is stable. The fund margin is also stable.
You see a slight decline on the brokerage margin due to less trades per customer. We're gonna talk a little bit more about the trading on the coming slides. You can go to next. We still see in the graph to the left there a high share of trading customers. We have 45% more customers trading in quarter three versus quarter three last year. That's following the customer growth. We do see lower trades per customer due to seasonality and also lower market volatility. The share of cross-border trading is still high, and that's also due to the country mix where we naturally have higher share of cross-border trading outside of Sweden. Go to next.
This slide we showed also last quarter showing the trades per customer per day over the year. It's clear that we have a trading seasonality that's V-shaped. The highest trades per customer per day in the beginning of the year and at the end of the year with a low point in July. The red line you see here to the left is 2020 numbers. The light blue line is 2021 numbers, and the dark blue at the bottom is average 2015 to 2019. If you look at the 2021 numbers, it follows the trend line, slightly lower trades per day compared to 2020 due to lower market volatility, but it's higher than the average trend 2015 to 2019.
To the graph to the right is basically the same story. It's just the full year trades per year the monthly trades versus the full year trend trades. But that's also impacted by trading days and customer growth during the year. Go to next. Continue to see very strong customer satisfaction across our footprint with the number one position in Denmark, Norway, and Finland, and a strong number two position in Sweden. This allows also for us to take market share when it comes to trading in local markets. We're up in all countries except for Sweden was slightly down, but it's also a little bit seasonal variation on that one. Go to next. Also continue strong focus on cost.
We continue to see very strong operating leverage. If you see the graph to the right, you see they've basically been flat on cost in absolute terms for now almost four years, in spite of growing the revenues on average with 4%-5% per year during that period. It's a very scalable business model, and that means also cost versus savings capital. The cost margin has gone down from 30 bps down to now 18 bps. The focus areas for us when it comes to cost is, number one, of course, cost governance, that we follow up the cost initiatives that we have, but also we continuously find new initiatives. The largest area for cost improvement for us is process simplification automation, basically to automate everything we can.
That's a win-win because it's increased the customer experience quite a lot, but at the same time, it improves our scalability. Our marketing, as you know, is mainly word-of-mouth marketing. We can do that now since we're critical mass in all countries. Our customer acquisition cost is low, around 270 SEK per customer. Lifetime value for customer versus acquisition cost is around 80x , which is a very high level. We work actively with all third-party spend and all the procurement that we're doing. You can go to next. Some product highlights for quarter three. We're the first on the platform where you can see Article 8 and/or Article 9 sustainability ratings for funds. If they are light green or green.
As a customer, you can also sort on this, you can search on this as well. Very appreciated by our customers. We also handed in a fund company application, because we see now that allows. This fund is a really highly prioritized area for us. We see the next step in that strategy to have a fund company, and that allows for higher flexibility and in our offerings, fund offerings to our customers. Hopefully, we can launch very exciting and interesting products over time via the fund company. The other part is that we also get full control of fund value chain, and that allows us to optimize also fully when it comes to value creation. We continue to launch a large number of new features in the app and web.
We have a launch rate in the app now of five days. We launch a new app version close to every five days. There's a lot of new things happening there. Also, the Nordnet app won the Red Dot Design Award for the app, and we're really proud of that. With that, I hand over to you, Lennart, to talk a little bit more in detail about financial performance.
Thank you very much. My pleasure. We can go into the next slide already. First of all, I mean, this is a great quarter, one of the three best ever in Nordnet's history. The foundation of this, as I've been telling you before, is really the number of customers and the savings capital. We're now up at 1.5 million customers with a 37% growth year-on-year, and also SEK 728 billion in savings capital, which is about SEK 100 billion is actually net savings year-on-year. It is not just valuation increases, it's really the net saving. The customers gives us their trust with the money, and that's really what drives the results for us. We can take the next one.
That is, we have now a revenue of SEK 3.5 billion for the last nine months. That is more than double same period, or rather the full year of 2019. What we see here is that in 2019 we had a level of SEK 300 million-SEK 400 million, and in 2020 we had around SEK 600 million, and now we are about SEK 800 million, with of course spikes and downs, but that is where we are. It's really getting a ladder and climbing on it, increasing it all the time. Very pleased with that. But also pleased to see that it's within all revenue streams. It's not just transaction related. It's really more into the non-transaction return recurring revenue. We can take the next one.
At the same time, we have good cost control. That is to say, yes, stable cost since 2019 or rather even earlier. We have been hovering around SEK 270 million in cost, now SEK 280 million. But on a quarterly basis, I think that's very stable. Deviations, yes, those occur, but there is no trend in it. It's really that this is the level where we are at. No need to increase very much, no need to decrease. It's a stable, consistent level of cost which is in control. I think that's the main thing here. They can increase, but they must be in control. We can take the next one. All this gives us of course the operating leverage. That is how we can do this.
High revenue, high customer growth, stable cost, that ends up all in the PBT. Compared to last year, we have SEK 1.9 billion in PBT. Compare that with SEK 1.1 billion last year, nine months. This is really a good development. That is where we are. The operating leverage is good. We have the critical mass in each country. We are profitable in all countries. We are really accelerating this one. We can go to the next one. It's also very important for us to see how the savings capital is distributed over things and how it's allocated into our balance sheet. As you said, we have SEK 728 billion in savings capital, whereof about 10% ends up in our balance sheet. The rest is off balance.
That's the business model, that's the capital light model. Of those 10%, that is about SEK 70 billion. This morning is not very easy with a million and billion, but my excuses for that. However, SEK 73 billion with deposit and liquidity, of which we do lend about one third. The rest is in a liquidity portfolio, which we place and invest in high creditworthy investments, interest bearing, and also with high liquidity, so our customers can get access to liquidity quite easily. Within the lending part, those SEK 24 billion, we have this unsecured lending, which we say, yes, that's a portfolio, but it's stable and we do not intend to grow it. It's on SEK 4 billion. We have the mortgage, which is supportive of the customers' savings.
It's really having good increase of up to SEK 8.2 billion. Then we have the margin lending, which is really the funding of the equity situation for our customers with almost SEK 12 billion now. Those all ends up, of course, there's credit risk within this one, but we had no credit losses whatsoever in the mortgage. We have had no real credit losses in the margin lending. The increase is the result due to the higher volume. The only thing that causes us credit losses is the unsecured, which is well within range and planned and on a stable level compared to last year, a little bit lower. As I said, with the cost, it's a stable one. It's no stick outs to say.
We're pleased with the situation of the asset quality. We can take the next one. Also, we have the regulatory requirements regarding capital, and we have the risk-weighted part, which is 71.8% of total, with a requirement of 17.1%. We're well beyond that requirement. The new requirement that we had was the leverage ratio with a minimum requirement of 3.0% in the summer, and then added on a guidance from SFSA in late September, which we published, and that was 0.9, little higher than we expected, but we have a leverage ratio of 4.4%, so we're well above that as well. We can go to the next one.
Just to give you some flavor of this one is that, yes, we have the capital base. If we transform those capital requirement into capital base, we have a capital base of SEK 3.5 billion. We have a leverage requirement or not requirement, but including the guidance of SEK 3 billion, which is higher than the risk-weighted of SEK 2.7 billion. That is how it looks, the way. All we must say, okay, where are we most afraid? Or rather, where is the SFSA most afraid? Of course, that's the leverage ratio. To say with a leverage ratio of SEK 4.4 billion, our risk within that one is that our deposit increases, not that the credit losses counts because that's not where in the business we are.
We have the capacity to bring on SEK 37 billion more in deposits and still being able to handle the minimum requirement of 3.0%. That is to say, about 65% extra deposit. As of today, we have 66% in the bank. If you look on the right side, you can see that, yes, we had one squeeze since 2007. I can go back to 2001 actually, within a very high growth rate of deposit. That was first quarter of 2020 when we all know what happened. We had a growth rate of customers, but we also had a lot of new customers coming in with net savings, but a lot of customers selling off. That is what happened here.
That increase was about SEK 22 billion. It was a 47% increase. I said that, yes, we can handle SEK 37 billion and a 66% increase. No, we're not very scared of this one, but we need to look at those all the time. The good thing here is that, yes, we had, at the same time, a good increase of new customers. The customers came with net savings, but they also invested. Deposit per customer decreased while the deposit nominal level remained. We can take the next one. Maybe I hand over to you, Lars-Åke Norling. You're on mute, yes.
Yeah. Short on financial performance versus targets and the KPIs we talked about, the customer growth stayed well above the midterm guidance of 10%-15%. Also, average savings capital per customer looks very strong versus the guidance. We're especially happy with that since we have such a high customer growth and new customers come in with lower capital. In spite of that, we see a good growth in savings capital per customer. Income and savings capital also good versus guidance. We see decline in brokerage, but stable in net interest income and fund business. Operating expenses, we provided a new guidance of SEK 1,140 for the full year in 2021, and we're well aligned to meet that guidance for the year.
The dividend ratio, that's still in the midterm is 70% of the net income. Can go to next. Just the final our key focus areas. You've seen this before, starts of course with the customer where our ambition and aspiration is to be the number one choice for the Nordic savers and investors. We wanna have the best one-stop shop for the private investor. Private investors should find everything they need when it comes to savings investments on our platform. What we focus on, what we work hard with every day is to build the best platform for savings and investments, everything from new features and app, web, new products and automating journeys. Of course, we wanna see a continued high customer satisfaction and retention.
Then we know also, we can never have happy customers unless we have happy and skilled employees. We want to see continued upward trend on employee satisfaction and also that we can attract and retain top talent. A sustainable business. We are in a trust business. We need to earn that trust every day. We need to manage our risks, both compliance and other risks in a good way, and be overall a trusted and liked brand. The last part is profitable growth to really leverage our scalable business model and capture the Nordic growth potential. We have 6% market share of the addressable savings capital in the Nordics today, so we have ample room to grow for many years to come. With that, we conclude the presentation and open up for Q&A.
Yes, we do. It's time to open up for questions. Like I said before, you just raise your hand digitally and I will enable you to speak. I will announce you by name, and when I do that, you also need to accept to be unmuted. It will show up a request on your screen that you need to click on. Or you can also send in your question in writing by using the Q&A button. The first question comes from Patrik Brattelius from ABG. Hello, Patrik.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, sir, we can.
Great. A couple of questions from my part then. I thought we could start off by talking about cost looking into 2022 and 2023. Your cost guidance only goes into 2021 for now. But can you talk about a little bit what we can expect for cost in 2022 and 2023, how that will develop? I can see that the number of employees has grown quite rapidly, more than almost 100 new employees over the last year, up 16%. How should we think about this, and cost going into the next two years?
We see now, I mean, we had a cost increase in the beginning of the year due to the extreme high customer inflow. We see now when the customer inflow is reducing a bit that we still have a very good scalability in our business. When we look forward, you know, we're gonna do a full re-guidance and when we report quarter four in February. What we're looking at now is mainly the tech area since we have super exciting roadmap ahead of us. The question is, should we speed up delivery on that roadmap? To do that, we need more tech. If we increase cost going forward, it's not gonna be in operational units, it's mainly gonna be in tech. Like I said, we're gonna come back with a full guidance on the cost together with other targets when we present quarter four.
Okay. Staying on that topic, hiring within tech, does that increase the cost per employee?
Not necessarily. We also scaled up. We've done a little bit under the hood changes also in 2021, where we scaled up tech and tried to also limit the other areas. It won't dramatically change the cost per employee.
Okay. Thank you. I was thinking about these 7,500 customers you talked about. What have they contributed in total income so far in 2021? Can you?
It's very limited income. They are blocked, so they don't do any trading and can't use their accounts. When we clean this up, it's gonna be no impact on revenue and profitability, but it's gonna be an impact mainly on the customer numbers. That's why we're also gonna report the impact on the customer numbers also in the monthly reporting every month. Of course, we're gonna sum it up at the end.
Okay. Fair enough. Thank you. You quickly showed the margin difference in the different countries there. Is that solely driven by the fact that in other countries, perhaps outside of Sweden, the customers trade more on foreign exchanges, or is there any other difference that drives the margin difference between the countries?
The main difference is the share of cross-border trading. Clearly, where it's a lot higher share outside of Sweden because their local exchanges are fairly small, so they trade locally then, but then they trade in Stockholm a lot, and then in the U.S. and in Sweden, you mainly trade in Sweden and the U.S.
Okay, fair enough. Just a last question for me then. Looking at other income, it was very strong in Q2. Still quite decent here in Q3.
Yeah.
Looking into the next quarter, it's usually seasonally strong with a lot of IPOs coming. How do you view your IPO pipe looking into the coming quarter if you compare that to what you saw in Q3 and Q2, please?
Yeah. There is still a strong IPO pipeline. Of course, that can change if something happens in the market, but we see a strong pipeline in quarter four. Of course, it was a little bit slowed down over the summer, but this full year has been very strong when it comes to IPOs. Which we're very happy with, we are part of most IPOs as a retail distributor. Here we also benefit from our Nordic footprint that we can offer them a Nordic retail distribution. We can also retail distribution outside of Sweden.
Okay. Is it stronger? Do you view pipeline as strong as Q2, or was that extraordinary?
I can't go into the details, but it's strong. I don't know exactly if it's stronger or not than quarter two, but it is strong.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. That was all for me.
Thanks.
Thank you. Thank you, Patrik. Next person up is Nicolas McBeath from DNB. Hello, Nicolas.
Hi, good morning. First a question on the NII, which fell quarter-over-quarter, despite pretty good growth in the lending volume. If you could please help us explain the headwinds here that impacted the third quarter and maybe NII drivers that you see for the next few quarters, please?
Just a minute. Yeah, you can double-check. I don't know if it went down, but I mean, we see still a very good growth in our lending business, as you know. Good growth in margin lending, also in mortgage, very stable on personal loans, but that's according to our plan. Of course, treasury can impact a little bit up or down. Here, going forward, we're gonna also have the benefit of Norway increasing, or they've increased the first step the interest rate, they might increase further. That will help the treasury portfolio. On the other hand, they lowered in Denmark, but there we can charge negative interest rates as well, so we compensate it that way. I would say the margin is gonna be fairly stable, a little bit helped with Norway.
Okay. If you could also provide any assessment on the NII impact from the planned bond issuance that you mentioned in the report?
You can comment that, Lennart.
Yes. There's no impact on the NII except that we have the liquidity from it on the investment side as the cost for this actually distributed directly through the equity or share capital.
Okay. If you could please comment on the net commission per trade in the third quarter. It went up by 5% quarter-on-quarter if you exclude currency. Anything in particular that you can point to that explains the uptick in Q3?
I think it's a slightly stronger cross-border trading, and also it's a little bit the mix between retail and heavy traders.
Okay. Then, if you. Yeah, could you please provide an update on the key product development pipeline and launches that you've made in recent quarters? Also, I think looking back to the product pipeline that you communicated ahead of the IPO, I think you mentioned mortgages in Norway and Finland. I don't think we've seen those coming online yet. Yeah, you know, what's the plan there? Yeah, I think you also mentioned some new accounts in Denmark and yeah, possibly adding also some exchanges in Asia that you wanted to add to your brokerage offering. Yeah, update on those, please, would be interesting.
Yeah. The products launched this year in the beginning of year was the pension product in Norway, Egen Pensjonskonto, where we've seen now more than 10,000 customers and more than SEK 3 billion in savings capital. Ahead of our expectations. We're gonna launch also the ASK, the Danish savings accounts in November. We're looking forward to that. You know, we're planning for a fund company. We've done a lot in the fund area. We launched new funds, and we also ESG enabled our existing index funds. When it comes to mortgage in Norway, we've started working on that. We see that we're gonna launch that next year. Finland, we also start looking at at least a pre-study. We have new changes.
I think we're gonna turn on that as well, but I think we start with Europe as a first step. Because a lot of the Asian shares that are interesting for customers, you can still trade in the U.S. Then there's, of course, the pension area, which is big in the other countries as well. We will look for an endowment product in Finland and also this livrente product in Denmark. We're gonna start looking at those during next year.
Okay. The growth trends have been diverging quite a bit if you look in Sweden versus outside of Sweden, and that continues in Q3. Do you think this is partly a consequence of you prioritizing the non-Swedish markets, because you see better returns here and that you invest more into product development, marketing and branding outside of Sweden? How do you think about those divergences that you see in Sweden versus like, yeah, in particular Denmark, but also Norway and to some extent Finland?
Yeah. I think starting with Sweden, we do, like I said, see a pickup. We have 50% more new customers this year compared to last year. As you know, we have a very good customer base in Sweden, so we're strong in this investor trader segments, with high income per customer and also high savings capital per customer. The savings capital has really developed nicely, almost 50% in Sweden last year. We're happy with the customer base we have, but we especially want to expand into this saver segment, the broader segment, customers mainly saving in funds on a monthly basis. That's where we also see the fund business as a really big priority area for us with the growth potential, not just in Sweden, but in the other countries.
When it comes to marketing, I mean, we mainly rely on word-of-mouth marketing in all of our countries. Of course, the big pickup is outside of Sweden also that we have critical mass now. Word-of-mouth marketing is really taking off. Being in four countries, of course, we need to go for the biggest opportunities across our footprint. We can't just spend all the focus on one country. We see that still as an upside since we get by being in four countries, we have 2.5x larger, addressable market than just being in Sweden and also more well-diversified revenue footprint which I think is also beneficial.
Okay. My final question on activity. Do you have any comments or anything you can share what you're seeing in terms of customer activity so far in Q4 in October?
I mean, normally the trading pattern, like we said, is V-shaped. The highest quarters when it comes to trading is normally quarter one and quarter four. It's also a little bit dependent on market volatility. There was a little bit, I think it was a lot of customers on the fence in the beginning of the month. It's definitely picking up more now. It's too early to tell. Normally, I mean, quarter four is a higher trading quarter.
Okay, perfect. Thanks.
Thanks a lot, Nicolas. Great questions. Next person up is Maria Semikhatova from Citi. Hello, Maria.
Yes. Hi. Hello. Thank you for the presentation. Just a couple of questions. I will ask them one by one.
Mm-hmm.
First, if I look at fund margins in Norway, there was a step down over the quarter. Just wanted to check if you can flag what the drivers were and if there's anything you can say on the outlook?
No, I mean, we haven't made any changes in Norway, so it's probably fluctuations how we get payments from fund companies, etc . It goes a little bit up and down, but underlying has been stable.
It hasn't been affected by the EPK savings capital, right?
No, it's basically the same margin there. No, it hasn't.
Okay. Just to clarify that I understand correctly on this, customers with missing documentation. Most of their savings capital is in deposits since they couldn't trade?
Yeah. It's mostly in deposits or funds, but it's very limited revenue from that customer base. The impact you will see is gonna be on the customer base, not on revenues and profitability.
Okay, it's clear. On just customer inflows, there was a deceleration in the third quarter. I understand that it has to do with seasonality. Just wanted to check with you that you still expect a pickup in new customer acquisition in the fourth quarter.
Little bit seasonality in quarter three. Let's see how quarter four plays out. It's also a little bit since you will see effects of the cleanup in quarter four, but the underlying hopefully okay.
Okay. Just finally on your sensitivity to a rate hike in Norway, is it a simple just look at the deposit base in that country or you can provide any other sensitivity to a 25 basis point move?
I think, I mean, the sensitivity to the deposit level, we and no one else is actually increasing the deposit rates. It's rather that the investment environment might increase further, but it was all priced in most of it at least.
The impact, I mean, we get the 25 basis points on the deposits in Norway. We have mostly floating rate notes and short-term notes. We get the effect fairly quickly.
Okay. Understood. Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot, Maria. Next person up is Mr. Jacob Hesslevik from SEB. Hello, Jacob.
Hi. Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Perfect. I just have a quick question on the extra dividend on the remaining set-aside 8% of 2020's profit. How does the timeline look for this? I guess you need to call for an additional EGM, or was it decided on the EGM last night? Can we expect the dividend to be paid out during the Q4?
The plan is to pay it out in quarter four. It needs a new EGM. Right now we investigate in the room we have, and then we're gonna call for an EGM in November. That's the plan.
All right. Thank you. Just one more question. You're the sole distributor on the Volvo IPO on the retail segment in Finland, Norway, and Denmark.
Yeah.
Have you seen any unusual customer growth as a result of this, or has it been mainly current customers who have shown interest?
We've seen customer growth, especially in Finland. Overall, I mean, 50% of the sign-ups came outside of Sweden. It's interesting across Nordic, but especially in Finland, it's been very strong.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you, Jacob. Now we have Ermin Keric from Carnegie. Hello, Ermin. Ermin, you need to accept my unmute request on your screen to be able to talk.
Good morning. Do you hear me now?
Yes, we can.
Yes.
Please go ahead.
Now I don't hear you instead. Okay. Too bad.
Can you hear me or Ermin?
Do you hear me?
Yes.
We hear you.
Okay. I don't hear you. I see you nodding, but I don't hear you, so I'll just jump back in the line.
Okay.
Okay, Ermin. You can write your questions in the Q&A function, and I will pick them up so you can actually-
He doesn't hear you.
No. No, he doesn't. Sorry. We'll move to Mr. Gurjit Kambo from JP Morgan. Hello there.
Hi there. Can you hear me, Johan?
Yes, we can.
Yes.
Please go ahead, sir.
Excellent. Brilliant. Yeah, thank you. The first question is on the the fund management company launch. Firstly, are you seeing any sort of feedback from, you know, I guess, existing fund providers, you know, how they think about you guys launching your own sort of fund management business? And how many sort of funds are you looking to initially start with, on that business?
No, we haven't really seen any. The only thing we received is basically a lot of inbound interest also to perhaps be part of some special funds that we need to plan to launch. We mainly look at complementing the offering that we have on the platform today. We have SEK 25 billion already, as you know, in Nordnet-branded funds, and part of those will of course be moved into the company, especially the Öhman funds that we have now. Öhman is still gonna do the management on funds, but we are gonna have them in our company. What we look for when it comes to funds is more broader index funds and active allocation funds. Nothing strange.
We might spice it up with some corporations with some really interesting local fund companies or funds. The exact number I don't have off the top of my head, but it's gonna be, of course, limited versus the 2,000 funds we have elsewhere on the platform. It might be 20-ish.
Okay. Thank you. The second question was on the income over savings capital. I think you're guiding for 40 basis points going forward. I think, you know, this year you're averaging around 60. Last year you were at 60. The year before that you were at 44. You know, at 40, does that seem. Is that just being conservative or, you know, it just feels like does it take long to get to that 40? Can it be higher in 2022?
I mean, that's why we're gonna cut back with the guidance then on all the midterm targets and when we report 2024 then in February. We wanna see a little bit how especially the trading plays out during the year.
Okay. Just on the categorization of the sustainable funds that you provide, you know, Article 8 and Article 9, you know, is that classification done by the fund management company, i.e. the fund, and then you show that on your website? Is that what's happening or are you classifying it?
No, no, it's the fund company that classifies.
Okay.
That can be then inspected also by the SFSA to really check, yeah, that it's okay, so they're not just greenwashing.
Okay.
As a fund company, you can't just do this. Yeah, you need to be able to sustain an investigation about.
Okay. Like Avanza's not doing that at the moment. Is that they're not doing something similar?
Correct. We are first out. I don't know if they turn it on now, but we were clearly first out with that.
Okay, fine. Brilliant. Okay, thank you. That's all I had. Thank you very much for that.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Gurjit. We'll make another try here at Ermin. I ask you to unmute now, Ermin.
Do you hear me this time?
Yes, we can.
Yeah, we hear you.
I even hear you. Fantastic.
Oh, that's great.
Wonders of technology.
Exactly. Thanks for taking the questions again. The first one was just on the fund company. Do you expect that to have any direct P&L impact? I mean, apart from if you add additional products, but just from the moving it to your own fund company?
No, no major impact to start with. I mean, of course, we have some additional costs, but moving also funds into it, we have some savings, so it's not gonna be any material impact. Over time, of course, we see a very good case with having a fund company.
Thanks for that. When you talked about the product pipeline, you mentioned the mortgages, etc . One thing that wasn't really mentioned is integrating Shareville more to the kind of core Nordnet platform.
Yeah.
Is that still something you're working on?
Yes, it is. It's a very interesting area for us. We've done a lot of thinking and also discussion with customers on how this should look and feel. We have a pretty good idea.
Do you have any timeframe when you think that could be?
I won't comment on the time plan, especially when we start working on it now. We'll see. It will probably be step by step, but it's yeah, looks quite interesting.
Perfect. That was all. Thank you.
Great. Thanks a lot, Ermin. That was actually all verbal questions. We have a couple of questions that have come in by writing as well. Starting with Mats Liljedahl from SEB, I think you commented on this, Lars-Åke already, but you can sum it up. How do you see the cost outlook going into 2022, considering that the main peer raised its guidance significantly?
Yeah. Now for us, I think, unless we have another explosion in customers, which is of course good, like we saw in quarter one, as we see that we can maintain operational costs. The area we're looking into more is if we should scale up tech more to be able to deliver faster on the roadmap. That's not decided yet, but we of course will discuss that during the re-guidance in February next year.
Yes. The second question from Mats Liljedahl, I think you answered that one already. Do you need to have an extra general meeting in order to distribute the remaining dividend? The answer is yes.
Yes.
Yes. Question from Alexander Eliasson. How does pan-European discount brokers such as DEGIRO affect existing and potential customers?
I mean, DEGIRO have been in the Nordics for quite a number of years without any impact. I think we know from our experience it takes time to build a strong brand that people trust, especially if the general population is gonna put a lot of money on the platform, the trust factor is highly important. But also you need to have all the local adaptations, all the local ISA accounts and connections to exchanges and payment institutions, etc . DEGIRO has not impacted the business in the Nordics.
No. Last question today, I think, comes from Janne Leppänen, asking, Do you have any plans for expanding into the Baltic markets? How do you see that, Lars-Åke?
I think the midterm we've discussed is really focused on the Nordics and the footprint we have. We have the 6% market share of the addressable savings capital market within the Nordics. Our focus now is to really grow within the footprint we have. That's number one.
Thanks a lot. With that, I think we answered all questions that have come in to us. Before we close, I can say that the next thing that happens when it comes to reporting from Nordnet is that we publish our monthly statistics for October next week on the second of November. As usual, on our corporate sites, everything is available when it comes to Nordnet, nordnetab.com. Until we see you again, thanks a lot for joining in today and for your interest in Nordnet. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everyone.