AS LHV Group (TAL:LHV1T)
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At close: Apr 27, 2026
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Earnings Call: Q4 2025

Feb 10, 2026

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

Hello and welcome to LHV Group's Q4 and full year 2025 results presentation. My name is Mihkel, and today I have with me Meelis Paakspuu, Group CFO; Kadri Kiisel, CEO of LHV Pank in Estonia; and also Erki Kilu, CEO of LHV Pank in the United Kingdom. I will start with group-level highlights. It has been a challenging year for us, but on the other hand, our net income was EUR 305 million, net profit reached EUR 117 million, and also our loan portfolio had a significant growth during the year, 20%, and also, which is very good news, is the deposits which have grown 18% year-over-year. On a group level, we have reached 16% return on equity.

If I talk about the subsidiary highlights, then in Estonia we have increased our loan volumes and deposits both by 11%, and in the UK, where we have quite recently also started our retail offering by the year-end, we have been able to reach 5,000 retail customers. Having said that, also we have seen a significant growth in our loan portfolio, which has more than doubled to EUR 782 million worth. On a group level, looking at our other subsidiaries, our asset management has done, has performed really, really well. They have obtained the best performance with their second and third pillar pension funds on the Estonian market, which is a significant result. Then also our insurance business has grown quite significantly and doubled the net profit, while the premiums were up 13% versus small market decline in Estonia.

Then we are obviously very pleased about the award from Nasdaq, so once again we are the Best Company for Investor Relations . Also, through the year we have obtained quite a few awards, for example Best Bank in Estonia by Euromoney, and also by The Banker. Looking more closely into the Q4 and December results, our net interest income has increased quarter-over-quarter by 8%, which is a very good, let's say, change of trend compared to the quarters before. Also, another significant increase in the net income, increasing 20% quarter-over-quarter.

and yeah, I mean if we look at our group-level metrics in terms of business activity, then both the total loan portfolio, the deposits, assets we have under management in the asset management subsidiary, the total number of customers, and also the number of clients in the financial intermediaries business, and the payment volumes have are the highest so far. And yeah, I mean in December also we saw a good change in the net interest margin, and as stated before, so the pre-tax return on equity in Q4 on a group level was 20% and the net ROE was 16.1%, which overall, I think given the conditions of the market, are very good.

And, as mentioned in the beginning, the difference compared to our own financial plan was it was slightly behind, but nevertheless as we are used to ambitious plans, you know, given the market conditions we are content with the overall result. And now I would like to give word to our CFO, Meelis Paakspuu, who will dig a bit deeper into the financials.

Meelis Paakspuu
CFO, LHV Group

Well, from my side as well, that's first presenting some balance sheet. That's, in LHV we deliberately keep balance sheet structure very, very simple. In asset sides, it is divided between loan portfolio and liquidity portfolio, very small amount of something else. That, and liquidity portfolio keeps always in top-grade assets. That, government bonds or mostly in central bank cash. That, on the liability side, we are looking that the funding is local. That, there is no cross-financing within the group. That the Estonian bank is funding it from Estonian retail deposits, issuing covered bonds, and in very small amount also deposit platforms. UK Bank is currently primarily using platform deposits, but step by step is increasing also its own deposit base. That, as we already have 5,000 customers and around 12%-13% of deposit base is coming from our own customers.

That on the capital side, capital is a key component of the banking. This is the most important item that has to be there, and you can't run bank with very low capitalization. Our internal capital adequacy targets are at 20% levels. As at the end of 2025, we had 22.85%, and this doesn't include Q4 profits yet. We are recalculating capital adequacy backwards whenever there is some kind of new information that either it is including last quarter's profits or there is some miscalculation. And here, there was in 2025 we had first time ECB on-site audit regarding capital adequacy, and this lowered our capital adequacy for the end of 2024 by 150 basis points. We still completed and fulfilled all the regulations.

So, when we're looking as of now, all the changes brought out in this audit are already implemented. So, we are pretty sure that our Capital Adequacy is very strong. We are monitoring it always on weekly basis as well. Another area what is a critical area is liquidity. Another item where we want to be conservative. We don't want to take risk in this that there might be a shortage of liquidity. So, two main items in the form of ratios, LCR and NSFR. LCR is about how much liquidity you need against potential outflows within 30 days. The regulatory ratio is at 100, minimum at 100. We have the ratio of 185. That's much, much higher level. And then another ratio is NSFR.

It is a stable funding ratio that how much stable funding you need against this type of assets that we have. Again, regulatory ratio is at 100%. We are running at 157%. So, both of these ratios are on the same level or better than our competition. That, and also then looking at the balance sheet, loan to deposit ratio. That, then this is a pretty solid state. We don't want to increase or decrease it. That seems to be in the right level. And the risk that we are able to control, and it is the largest risk in the balance sheet, is a credit quality and credit risk that we are taking. That, here, Stage 3 ratio that went up in the Q1 due to two large cases has been coming down to 1.6% level, but this is just one factor.

The more important factor is when we are looking at this Stage 3, that how much, how well this Stage 3 is collateralized. In the table that operates that is shown that so Stage 3 in total is EUR 49.9 million, and from that, 42.8 is well collateralized and 7.1 is less collateralized. That outcome is that this everything that is less collateralized, this is provisioned, so we are having it very, very strong state. This is also presented by the cost of risk ratio that picture is very, very nice. On profitability side, net interest margin low point was in Q3, as we were commenting in October. That and it is starting to pick up, slightly going upwards in Q4. And when we are looking at return on equity and cost/income that so again, things are slightly getting better.

That, in Q4, we were writing down some goodwill, so, this was on a slightly negative side, but from another side we were, earning success from the asset management, more or less netting each other out. And, when we are looking, that the total year then, we ended up with a net profit of EUR 8 million short compared to the financial plan. That, mostly it came from the net interest income, but, this was a, this was that, we were taking interest rates from the market. We predicted how our client base is moving pay and acting based on that. Interest rates did not move exactly in this way. That, so, clients acted slightly differently as well that, all in all, on deposit sides, there were more term deposits than we, we predicted earlier.

And on cost side, there is slightly higher costs due to the personnel costs and also marketing costs. But looking at the volumes, loans deposits are ahead of plan, asset under management more or less in line with this, and the financial intermediaries payments clearly better than our plans. Overall return on equity 16% and profit for 117% comparing with competition, it's very, very solid number. And now giving another table over to Kadri.

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

Thank you, Meelis. I will give some insights about Estonian bank activities and results and the financials in general. So some a bit more information what we succeeded and what didn't go as planned. In total, I would say, and if I have to conclude the year somehow, then I would have to say that there were no tailwinds from base rates, tough competition. We entered the financial planning period last year with increasing cost base, so we had quite many challenges, and of course the market didn't help us to get through them. But I think that we in general, we could say that we did quite good progress, and I will give you some more details about it. The most proud of, of course, in local business, business volumes. So we are here to help companies to grow their business.

We are here to help people to buy homes. So, strong growth in deposits and volumes is definitely something to be proud of. We can almost say that we have 500,000 customers. Not yet the exact number, but we will be there in the Q1 of this year. So increasing the customer base for 8% to 36,000 customers in Estonia is still quite a large number. We financed, helped companies finance the projects, with more than EUR 1 billion, and every fourth mortgage was taken from LHV.

If we look into the mortgage market, then I think it's quite optimistic view to point out that if last year, 2024, the mortgage portfolio grew mostly with our refinancing campaign, then this year we can say that 20% increase in new sales was a quite good outcome, and it shows that the market has activated and we are in a better place. And of course, and also one of the changes that had impact for our revenues is of course the fact that we increased investment services prices almost by half, not doing just for the decreasing of prices, but of course, besides that, was the idea and hypothesis that we have to improve our offering and with that we can activate our customer base. And I will show you later on that this proved to be correct.

So, in general, of course, net income, net profit, there was a decrease comparing to last year, but I'm still very, very happy with the results for growing our business activities and of course business volumes. What I'm not so happy about is of course the 19% return on equity. The bank has been the one who has exceeded the target set from our investor base to meet the 20% ROE target. This year it didn't happen, but still if we compare it and benchmark with the European banks in general, then I think we are still in the top players list with that number. If we talk about the operational activities, and then I think we made quite a lot of improvements in terms of technological improvements.

One main focus for 2025 was to improve our technological capabilities, and of course one main target was to migrate all our systems to the cloud infrastructure, and we managed to fulfill that. We are ending the final migration phase in the Q1 of this year. So we are improving quite in a good pace. Then of course if we talk about the LHV, we cannot talk about the AI. So we've been testing quite many different tools, and I can say that we have equipped our people with the most, I believe not the best ones, but best for us different tool sets, and from this stage we can continue with improving the automation phase. So, probably in quite a good place, but not happy with the results ourselves.

So we are benchmarking this one to our own targets, and we can do better, and we can improve, within this year. And of course rewriting the legacy systems, the LHV Bank has been on the market over 15 years, so we can say that we have of course some improvements needed to done with our technological platform as well. But nonetheless, even if the focus was on technology, then we still managed to make some improvements to the customers as well. So Money Request 2.0 in the beginning of the year, why I even mention it, because it's just a feature that helps us, if we integrate it into different processes, it helps us improve the customer offering and different customer solutions in whatever places where we need to make transfers from other banks, also outside of LHV.

Mastercard Click to Pay, which is a competitor to Apple Pay, not as good as Apple Pay, but still to improve our offerings. LHV Premium offering to premium segment with the value offering; it has been, customers have accepted it quite well. So we started the sales in September and managed to end the year with almost 6,000 customers, who are, and feedback is quite good. And of course, the latest improvement or the new version of the app design; it went live this month, but we started it last year and it's been quite a journey and tested out with a smaller group by the end of the year. I think it's a good thing; we decided to launch it so that we would get them feedback from the customers, and 2,000 customers gave us the feedback.

If we have to divide it somehow, then 60% was constructive feedback, and 40% there were happy with the design and the solution. So we can learn from that, and the feedback was quite good, so we can point out three, four things that we can improve in following months. And of course, Mihkel also mentioned some of the recognitions from the bank as well, and on top of those mentioned, also being a Top Employer and Stockbroker of the Year , and of course, a Bank with the Best Services in Estonia . So look, if to deep dive a bit more into the business volumes, we talked about the customer deposit growth. If we compare it to Estonian market dynamics, then we see that we have grown our deposit base faster than the market. So we have gained a market share.

And if we look at the deposit structure, the below picture on the right, and then this is LHV's deposit structure, then I think we see the improvement that actually helps also lower the funding cost, which was one of the main drivers of the lower interest income, as planned last year. And if we look at the loans, then it's quite a similar trend. We increased our loan base by 11% if the market increased 8%. And if we have to divide it between mortgage and corporate loans, which are the two drivers of our business volumes, then the corporate loans grew approximately 8% along with the market, though a bit lower trend, and mortgage loans approximately 14%. And of course, if to look at the dynamics of the revenue or the income side, then we see the declining dynamics.

But still, I would like to point out if we look at the net interest income, then we see that the low point came in Q3 and the end of Q3 . We see already a rise in the last quarter, which makes the dynamics for this year a lot better. We can see an increase in interest rate base. Also with net fees, there the dynamics show, first of all, the lowering to prices for the investment services in the end of the Q1 . But we managed to increase the base so that there is a slight mismatch from previous year, and we see the growth, growth, dynamics going forward. So I think we're in quite a solid place. Expenses.

So I defined that if we went into a financial planning phase last year, then it was troubling that the cost base for increasing. So our main target was to cut that dynamic and slow or basically kill the increase of the cost base. We managed to do that. And of course, we managed to do that so that we have managed to do also some important investments, for example, the cloud infrastructure. So 60% of our cost base is personnel-related, because we have in-house development teams. And of course, the IT expenses is the second one standing out. And if we look how we have managed to pull the financial plan together, so it's mentioned that we didn't manage to fulfill the net profit target. We missed it by EUR 7 million. And it's mainly driven by the funding cost.

But we see that this year the funding cost is more stabilized. But of course, for this year, there are new challenges. But we can talk about those with already on Thursday, when we are introducing the financial plan. And but still, I would like to emphasize that the business volumes were in target and slightly better. And of course, the return on equity 19% is still a very good number, comparing to different banks in Europe and taking into account the market condition. Thank you. And I will give to Erki.

Erki Kilu
CEO, LHV Bank

Thank you. So a few words about the LHV Bank. It was the second full year for LHV Bank in the UK. And it's good to say that it was another very strong growth year for us. We managed to double the deposits and also the growth in loans were more than 100%.

It's good to say that we did it all with quite a good profitability as well. Net profit was more than GBP 5 million. It gave a bit more than 5% ROE after profit. In LHV Bank, we have three business lines. Banking services was the first line. We started with it already a few years ago. That business line is not growing that much. We managed to increase the payment volumes by 17% in 2025. The deposit base was also a bit higher than in the beginning of the year. But as there is pressure on sharing the interest rate with the clients as well, then I can see it from the next slides that the banking services part in our overall income is reducing year-over-year.

But the good thing is that the second business line, SME lending that we started 2 years ago, is growing very rapidly. That's going through the brokers network. Most of the loans, SME loans in the UK are sold through their broker companies. And our work has been to just have good relationships with the brokers and broaden the network. So that's growing. That's a good thing. And in 2025, we also launched the third business line, which is retail banking. We can say that taking the deposits from platforms was also kind of like a retail banking. We have more than 25,000 customers from the platforms. But it's still using the same platform than other banks are using. And that brings also their own risks with them. So we started with the retail banking in May last year, had the first campaign.

Maybe it wasn't the best campaign of the year, but we learned from that. We had another campaign in November, and that showed very clearly that we can be attractive for retail customers as well. Then we reached around 100+ new customers per day level, which is good. It shows that when we have market-level interest rates, strong marketing support, then we can attract direct customers as well. Everything what we do in retail is pound-based business, opening accounts, making payments, issuing cards, and offering various term deposits, easy access accounts. That's all for the customers who really want to save, who want to increase their savings. We also joined Instant Euro Payment Scheme in 2025. That's important because we now have capability to offer this Europe Payments also directly to our banking services customers. They don't need to go through the Estonian bank anymore.

Some of the clients have been started to use that already. We hope to see more, more clients transferring to that direct connection through LHV Bank in the next years. Not too many awards have been received so far, but still it's good to say that The Sunday Times gave us the Best Places to Work award in the last year. Now, going deeper into numbers, it's sometimes easy to grow from zero as well. But if we take the growth in the last year and compare it to the growth what we had in 2024, then it has accelerated. The pipeline is also very strong. We have more than EUR 100 million worth offers out, which are signed. So, that means that the Q1 , the first half year, should become also very strong in this year. Deposits grow according to our needs.

We can increase or decrease the interest rates there according to our needs. It's good to say that direct deposits form already more than 12% of all deposit base by today. Interest income is mainly coming from the SME lending. That's a result of the growing loan book. Fees received are mainly coming from banking services, directly or then shared with LHV Bank in Estonia. Here you can see that although the volumes grow, then there is still a pressure from the client side to lower the fees and also share the interest income more than we used to do in previous years. Expenses remain almost the same compared to Q4 2024. We can see small peaks here in Q2 and Q4 in marketing expenses. That was exactly what I, what I explained about our campaigns also in these quarters.

All in all, interest income was better than planned, and that's because of the much higher loan portfolio. Secondly, the expenses were also a bit higher than planned, but that's because of two marketing campaigns that we were not planning to have a year ago. But all in all, the result was better by EUR 700,000 in the last year. So, giving back to Mihkel.

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

All right. Thank you, Erki. So I will add some more flavor on our asset management. As mentioned in the beginning, so the two pension funds that they are managing in the second and third pillar were the best, best performers in Estonia, which was definitely an annual highlight. On the other hand, the sales channels were changed during the year.

So the decision was made that all the active sales will be moving to digital channels, and no more in physical channels like retail stores, etc. There were some changes in the concept of the pension fund names. And then, last but not least, also the asset management team launched a new Eurobond Fund, which is basically concentrating on the highly rated debt instruments, so which is available for the public market. And as mentioned, due to the good performance of the funds, the pension fund or the asset management also earned a success fee. So, all in all, the net profit was EUR 4.1 million, which was a significant increase from the year-ago. And both the second and third pillar funds volumes increased quite a lot year-over-year as well. So the second pillar funds reached EUR 1.5 billion.

Then, third pillar funds are growing from a quite small base. Yeah, due to the good result, the return on equity was also almost 20%. And just to highlight once more in detail, so what we see is that the assets under management have started to increase through the year. Having said that, we are not happy with the client number. So, the effort on sales, on making sure that our sales channels are working better, this is a big focus during this year. So we will definitely keep an eye on that to make sure that the great results delivered by the team will be also then hopefully appreciated by new customers as well, both from LHV and broader market. Yeah, so just a quick glance on the financials.

So, as mentioned before, it's, in terms of the group, the asset management is quite small in terms of contribution. But having said that, I mean, we are very happy with the bottom line and the overall result. And last but not least, also a few words about our insurance business. So there was good growth, 13% year-over-year in terms of premiums, and the number of customers also went up quite significantly, 36% year-over-year. And also the return on equity was very good. So it was a good growth year for the business, delivering EUR 2.5 million to the bottom line, which contributes to the group as well. Overall, the insurance market has been challenging through 2025. So the market hasn't done that well.

One large segment is related to cars and car sales. So, yeah, that it definitely has had a dampener and there's been quite significant, yeah, price war in that segment. So overall, challenging market, but the targets were met. So that's, that shows good work of the team. And, yeah, so we're happy with the result on the insurance side. So, summarizing once more, as said, I think the overall group result was good. So we are used to putting high targets. So, yes, we indeed missed the group net income and profit target, somewhat. But overall, it was a very good foundational year in terms of volumes, both on the deposits and loan side, in terms of all the activities that Erki and Kadri mentioned as well in terms of what we have actually continued to build in the background.

Very happy with the results on the UK side, especially both on the lending growth and the fact that we have sort of established ourselves more on the retail market as well and learned on how to increase the volumes. And yes, as mentioned, in addition, obviously, the kicker from the asset management and good results from the insurance as well were highlights in the end of the year. So, thank you very much for listening. And I think we're open for questions.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Yeah, thank you, Mihkel and Meriska Lindqvist for the presentation. Let's continue now with the Q&A section as we have quite a few questions already waiting there. So let's take these bottom up. First question, LHV's lending market share in Estonia barely changed in the second half of 2025. Could you please name the factors behind that?

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

Sorry, repeat the question, the last part of the question, the second part, compared to.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

LHV's lending market share in Estonia barely changed in the second half of 2025. Could you please name the factors behind that?

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

You mean about the market in general or the market share of LHV?

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Yeah.

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

I don't even think that we have the total number of the market share by the end of the year. I think we have the Q3 . So, but I think the main reason is probably our own target of how we wanted to lend out for basically the amortization of our own lending portfolio. So, the market share comes actually by the end of the year.

We can actually compare it, I think, somewhere in May, the beginning of May, because usually the best overview of the total market and the share, how it's defined, is given by the financial inspection or the FSA overview. So, before that, we wouldn't make any conclusions. But in general, I think that our growth in loans was as we planned and even increased it a little bit. Okay, there were dynamics in, for example, we targeted the growth of corporate loans a bit more and mortgages a bit less. But overall, the outcome was as planned and even a bit higher.

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

Yeah, I believe we achieved the composition. I mean, we achieved the result, but with a bit of a different composition, in terms of corporate and retail loans.

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

Yeah.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Okay, thank you. Could you please share your view on stablecoins and how that could be developed into LHV's business line akin to payment infrastructure it already has?

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

Yeah, I mean, we are, quite deliberately, let's say, researching, both the opportunities and also the, risks. But obviously, given the fact that you have, I think, you know, if we think about U.K., if we think about, Europe and, and U.S., quite different concepts in terms of, like legal structure on, on how these are addressed. But, yeah, I mean, we are, we think that the volumes, the, the usage, the application, it's growing quite rapidly. I think the fact that in Europe, it's still quite, underdeveloped. So, yeah, we are, tinkering with the ideas and concepts and, and, yeah, trying to figure out, what we could potentially do there. So, yeah, we are, definitely keeping a keen eye on the developments.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Is it possible to specify from which sector in Q4 impairment reversals came from? Also, what is the outlook for 2026 in terms of impairments?

Meelis Paakspuu
CFO, LHV Group

Outlook for 2026 will come on Thursday, not yet today. But reversal of impairments in Q4, these were mostly model-based. And also, another aspect was that last year we added certain impairments. But with this year, from a different regulatory view, we had to release. So it was a net effect zero, but annually we added some in late 2024 and late 2025 we had to release them as well. That's. I

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

s it possible to estimate cost savings from the use of AI?

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

Yeah, I think I can start. It's actually quite a complex task to estimate cost saving per se. I think the logic or the foundation of how we view this is that how can we grow our business, by not, you know, adding complexity, adding additional FTEs. So that brings the whole AI discussion more into the light. So it's, yeah, so I think the sort of foundation is how can we use it, in order to scale further, how we can, simplify processes, how we can review processes.

But I think the condition there is that, you know, once you start using more AI, once you bring, it actually brings in more costs. So, so it's also a bit of a process to figure out, you know, what's the sort of optimal way. But there's, I mean, there's a, I think, you know, massive development in terms of use cases.

Last, you know, six months again have been, you know, full of news releases, you know, some of the tools that Kadri mentions that, that we are using as well. So it's, I would say that definitely it's sort of built into our strategy, built into our story, to use it in a good way. But I, I think it's really more about reviewing, you know, end-to-end processes and really, really making sure that, you know, we can use the tools in a way that they are managed well and the risks are managed as well. But, I mean, definitely it's a big driver. It's not just for us. It's for, you know, most of the banks, you know, large part of the economy going forward. Or that's the, you know, that's the broader expectation.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Please elaborate on the full year 2025 operational expenses level, which was quite significantly above the regional financial plan. Were there any one-off items and what levers do you have to improve the cost efficiency in 2026?

Meelis Paakspuu
CFO, LHV Group

In general, there was only 1 one-off item. It was about writing off goodwill, partially; it's goodwill related to paytech. So it was EUR 1.66 million. Otherwise, the additional cost base came from 2 major blocks. One was related to FTEs. We thought that we are able to reduce FTEs more than we actually were at the end of the day. We planned to have more automation in place. Yes, we had some, but in the late year. So its effect is not in 2025. This was one. And another one is marketing costs.

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

That both costs in Estonian side and in U.K. side. As Erki earlier mentioned, in U.K., we did another second marketing campaign in Q4, but was not in any of the plans.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

What long growth do you see for the Estonian market and for LHV in 2026? I think for this question, we can come back on Thursday when we will publish the financial plan for 2026. Unfortunately, at this stage, we cannot answer this question. So we will come back to this on Thursday. Has cost of financing on group level normalized based on Q4 run rate, or do you see more room to improve it in 2026?

Mihkel Torim
CEO, LHV Group

This is also slightly partially the question for Thursday, but when we are talking about still looking backwards, 2025, then, yes, markets are way better in 2025 compared to the years before that.

still, at the same time, interest rates have decreased. That but we are still in this kind of 2% level in euros and British pound two times higher rates. That there is still room for changes in the deposit composition. Looking at the funding side, LHV is step by step starting to issue large transaction deals, but also brings a cost down. So there is still room. Do you see expected surge in defense infrastructure spending benefiting Estonian lending market and LHV, as it partly will be financed via loans? I think I can start and if Kadri wants to add anything. I mean, yes, definitely it will have a significant impact to the expected GDP growth during this year. We will hopefully have a part in that infrastructure development as well.

So this is expected to be one of the sort of cornerstones in the growth this year, plus the, you know, consumer. Hopefully consumer is activating more as well. So, short answer is yes. We hope to see that in our business as well. But maybe on the Estonian side if Kadri wants to add anything.

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

I agree with what Mihkel said and definitely create some kind of positive outcome for Estonian economy in general. But rather, if we talk about financing, it depends on the project and it depends on the financial plan. We definitely don't see the defense sector as a sector that we don't want to finance. But we look one project at a time and where we can actually come and help with the financing, then of course we do that. But it depends on the project.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

What are the main challenges currently for the UK business and on what will the focus be this year? So regarding this year, we will again come back to this on Thursday. But Erki, maybe you can slightly disclose what are the challenges from last year that have maybe transferred to this year?

Erki Kilu
CEO, LHV Bank

Yeah, as the main business is still does some year lending, then I don't see too many issues with that. The team is very strong. We can deliver new sales in this year, in the next year with the same team. That's not the biggest risk. I think the biggest risk is still the cost of funds. And by that I mean how we can attract cheaper funding from the depositors. We are active on three deposit aggregators at the moment and onboarding the fourth one.

So that will also help us to take the cost of funds a bit down on the platforms. But still, there is quite heavy competition. So, how to attract customers directly, that's the main question for us in this year and in the following years as well.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Risk-weighted assets grew 2% quarter-on-quarter basis, much less than loan growth. Any particular reason?

Meelis Paakspuu
CFO, LHV Group

Y es, there was a clear reason for that. This is coming from the composition of the loan portfolio. So, in the last quarter, the growth came from the mortgages. And same time, the corporate side was slightly even decreasing. That, so, mortgages risk weight is due to almost three times lower than the corporate ones.

Madis Toomsalu
CEO, LHV Group

Okay, thank you. But for now, we have gone through all of the questions. Thank you for all of the questions. Thank you for the presenters. As mentioned, on Thursday, we have the webinar, where we will present the 2026 financial plan and also the five-year forecast. So, hope to see you everybody there. Thank you for participating and I wish you a beautiful day.

Meelis Paakspuu
CFO, LHV Group

Thank you.

Kadri Kiisel
CEO, LHV Pank

Thank you.

Erki Kilu
CEO, LHV Bank

Thank you.

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