I'm very pleased to welcome you to the Šiaulių Bankas Fourth Quarter and a Full Year of 2024 Financial Results Webinar. Today we're having a team, three of us. My name is Vytautas Sinius. I'm CEO, and I have also two colleagues, Tomas Varenbergas and Donatas Savickas. We all three together will present financial results of 2024. Let's kick off and go to the summary of our performance. Key financial and strategic highlights, I would say, pretty strong year. We exceeded our expectations and outperformed the guidance that we gave for 2024, mainly across all key metrics and also raising our long-term targets.
Along with the strong results of the bank for the last year, we also were working hard on the strategic initiatives and, I would say, all the steps that we're making in line with our strategy, going on the right track and in time. So I'm really glad about that. Talking about income positions, so net interest income, negative impact of Euribor decline was compensated by higher volumes of loan growth. Also, I'm also welcoming growth of net fee and commission income, which grew 44% year on year. And that allowed us to increase our revenue share of NFCI from 10 percentage points to 13 in last year. And that shows that our portfolio of income becomes even more diversified. And that was one of the reasons of a merger with Invalda INVL in 2023, so that investment base offers more diversified commission income.
Also, extremely strong performance in bond issuances last year, so finishing in the fourth quarter with EUR 50 million issuance. And early last year, EUR 300 million of senior preferred and EUR 25 million of subordinated bonds was issued last year, so pretty strong track record built during the last year. And important information for shareholders that we are committed to our dividend policy of 50% distribution of net profit, so that would constitute of EUR 0.061 per share. And that's our plan to make this proposition for the meetings of shareholders. And talking about share buybacks, we also kick off pretty successfully last year with the share buyback programs, making different solutions of repurchasing our shares in the market. And we consider to continue our current buyback program and to intend to allocate 5% of profit 2024 for the future share repurchases.
Talking about figures on the right-hand side, we are reporting EUR 78.8 million of net profit not adjusted, but if we would make some adjustments that would be a bit more elaborated during the presentation later, the net adjusted profit would be close to EUR 85 million and respectively return on equity adjusted 15.1%. We can move to the next slides highlighting key initiatives and key elements of our strategic focus. Replatforming, as we call the change of our core banking and satellite systems, is a key project in the bank and key focus of our organization. I'm really thankful for the team. We're working hard and deliver and wisely managing complexity of a project and its budget.
So we finished an important phase of this project, which is called the discovery phase, when we identify deficiencies or gaps as they are called between the systems and finding out solutions how to cover those gaps, how to work with the discovery gaps. And we entered the new phase, which will continue during 2025. It's an implementation phase, working off functionalities, testing them in the test environments, and preparing for the go-live in 2026. So all those, according to the plan, there are some enhancements in the scope of the project because during the discovery phase, we found that we need some extra solutions like a centralized client database, which aggregates all the groups' client information in one place. So those adjustments are important to have more systemic and even well-functioning group technology structure.
So far, I'm happy about the progress, and we are working hard with the vendors to deliver everything on time and in financial terms within the budgets. Another even more exciting element to announce today is that we've decided there was some information initially that we are considering rebranding. I'm pleased to announce that we will give more information about the new brand on the 7th of March, along with all the package of documents to the annual shareholder meetings. Keep tuned to that, and we will come back shortly with information on the 7th and a bit later in March, explaining a bit more about rebranding. Last but not least is a retail business transformation and development in that field.
So, I'm also happy about things, how developing retail, more focus on our client centricity, developing processes, and also turning the organization from more service-oriented to also sales-oriented, and more utilizing our groups' client base. So that will bring the very solid background for us, also working with the new core banking system and having the right processes in retail banking for the future success. And in the financial terms, as you can see on the right-hand side, we were promising a 20% rate of return for the shareholders. So during the last year, we've been able to deliver slightly higher figures. So it's a 28% of total shareholder return during 2024. As I already mentioned, just to check the boxes about our guidance for the last year.
So we managed to achieve results higher than indicated guidances, actually in all positions, in some larger deviation, in some smaller, but loans, deposits were 3% and 8% above our indications accordingly. Net fee commission, despite the high growth, we've still been able to beat the indication by 8 percentage points. And Cost-to-Income ratio also slightly better than we indicated. Return on equity, instead of 13.7% of our indication, we managed to achieve 14% non-adjusted. And if we would adjust according to the cost elements that will be described later, the return on equity would be 15.1%. And minimum payout ratio, we maintain 50% for the dividends, and 5% is allocated for the buybacks. And return for investors, as already mentioned, we reached an 8% higher result than was indicated before.
With that, I will pass my word to Donatas to continue with other parts of the presentation.
Thank you, Vytautas, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to spend a minute on interviewing the latest state of the Lithuanian economy. Lithuania remains one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe. In 2024, we saw a solid GDP growth of 2.6%, which was a little bit better outcome than we had expected a quarter ago. Growth accelerated and reached 3.6% in the last quarter, as you can see from the chart in the left-hand side. So this growth is driven by multiple factors, including strong domestic consumption, broad-based expansion in manufacturing, and significant public investment in key infrastructure projects such as energy and defense. As you can see from the chart in the middle, Lithuania had the lowest annual inflation in the year in 2024. So this price stability has been instrumental in boosting consumer confidence, which remains among the highest in Europe.
Looking ahead, we'll maintain a confident and optimistic outlook. We anticipate GDP growth of 2.9% for both 2025 and 2026. Inflation will pick up slightly given the increase in minimum wage and the higher excise on fuel tax, but look, it should be manageable. Growth rates will continue, although at a little bit more moderate pace, and unemployment is projected to remain low, and these last two factors are very important for us as a bank because that's what's really driving a strong and sustained credit demand in Lithuania. Look, of course, we are a small and open economy. We're mindful of external risks. We heard overnight that the U.S. is threatening to impose 25% tariffs on the E.U., which is not ideal. However, the primary impact on Lithuania is not going to be huge. Only less than 7% of our exports goes to the United States.
We'll have some offset of impact from weakening euro. Second, on impact, that's where the real risk is. We don't know. We can only speculate. But at this stage, I'll just say that Lithuania is a very diversified economy. We trade with multiple countries and regions, and that's one of the key successes for our economic growth and future resilience. Now, let's get back to our earnings. We're pleased to report another strong year, achieving record levels of revenue and profitability.
Vytautas already mentioned that net interest income remained steady despite the changing rate environment. Net fees and commissions saw a significant increase in 2024. That's the combination of organic and inorganic growth. It reflects the acquisition of Invalda INVL, our asset management business, but also includes a good level of organic growth. The increase in other revenues was primarily driven by trading revenue, good momentum in our life insurance business.
Our operating expenses increased primarily due to the headcount growth, one-off expenses. As we continue our strategic transformation journey, headcount increase was primarily driven from the acquisition of Invalda INVL, one-off expenses, which we'll dive into a little bit later, mainly related to our replatforming costs. Our impairment charges are lower this year, reflecting solid asset quality and strong economic outlook of the Lithuanian economy. And we take it as a very positive development in the context of expanding loan book. All in all, we had to deliver the record net profit of EUR 78.8 million. If you exclude one-off non-recurring expenses, the underlying net profit would be close to EUR 85 million, or 15%. This is a remarkable achievement for our franchise, demonstrates the strength and resilience of our business. Now, let's dive into zoom into each individual line item a little bit more.
On page nine, we have additional information on net interest income, which increased by 2% in 2024 to reach EUR 160 million. Again, remarkable achievement given the declining interest rate environment we're facing here in Lithuania and across Europe. Our NIM contracted from 4.1% in 2023 to 3.7% in 2024. Loan yields have been decreasing year-over-year, given most of our book is priced on floating rates. Cost of funding has peaked in Q3, and it should come down in the coming quarters. At this stage, we expect that the NIM will stabilize. We do not expect it going down further. Moving on to page 10, our loan book continues to grow nicely, and it reached 17% annual growth, surpassing our guidance. That's been a broad-based growth visible across all segments. Our corporate segment traditionally saw the largest growth.
It's primarily driven by growth in manufacturing and renewable sectors, while the construction and real estate book stays flat. We continue seeing a high demand for mortgages in Lithuania as first-time buyers continue entering the market. There's been a bit of pricing pressure in this segment, which is likely to remain in 2025. Overall, we remain optimistic given it's a high-growth product and a high-margin product for us. Consumer credit, we've seen a nice growth throughout the year, and we maintain margins largely intact given it's a fixed-rate product. Moving on to page 11, I already mentioned that NFCI increased by a solid 44% to reach EUR 29 million in 2024. If you exclude the acquisition impact of our asset management business, the growth would still be solid at around 10%, and that's primarily driven by strong fees in our renovation segment.
There is strong activity in the local capital markets, where we remain a leading DCM house in Lithuania. Daily banking revenues remained flat. We had some ATM income loss as we're transferring more and more people to daily service flats, which generates sticky and more recurring revenue for us. And again, we remain optimistic. We believe that the upcoming rebranding will help attract new customers, and this line item will recover. Now, I'll hand over to my colleague, Tomas.
Hello, everyone. Happy to continue our today's webinar, and let's discuss operating expenses, so we have uplift in operating expenses, and let's take a look on the right-hand side graph that explains the key drivers and reasons behind it, so the key increase came from salaries, so more than 70% attributes of that increase for increase of FTEs with our transaction of INVL, which was executed at the end of December 2023, so 2024 was the first year, full year with increased organization, and the rest, 30% of that amount is mainly wage inflation in Lithuania. IT expenses, marketing, and buildings, actually, that increases mainly from expanding organization and organic cost growth. On one-off side, so that's a new metric that we communicate already through different angles.
So the key reason why we started to separate part of our expenses was that we decided to expense our core banking system costs and investments. As we do see that it's a better way compared to capitalizing this cost because in that sense, we can more effectively utilize the capital. In case we would go on the different path for capitalization, so in that sense, we would need to lock in a pretty sizable amount of capital that couldn't be used for organic growth or shareholder distributions. So we have EUR 7 million of one-off in 2024, which mainly attributes for windfall tax in the amount of EUR 1 million, and the rest is mainly our core banking expenses. Going forward, we do see that rebranding and investments into new premises will be also treated as a one-off, and it will have impact on our profitability in coming years.
Moving to the asset quality, so we are growing fast, but we are keeping a good asset quality in our balance sheet. Looking on the right-hand side, we see just in the top right-hand side, we see that a good development in our non-performing loans performance, and especially in the Q4, we have a good decrease in our Stage 3 loans that we have 2.2% on NPL ratio. We've had pretty good and increased coverage ratio. Looking to the beginning of the year, we believe that from the performance of our assets and the clients, that we can get even better these ratios. On impairments during 2024, so the impairments amounted to EUR 11 million, and that constitutes a cost of risk on 35 basis points.
We used to communicate that 50 basis points is over a cycle cost of risk for the bank, but we do see that the last year performance and what we expect with macro environment in Lithuania, that we should focus closer to the 30 or 35 basis points ratio in that metric. On the funding side, again, that was a good and healthy development for the bank during 2024, and the same was in Q4, so in Q4, our key funding source deposits grew by 4%, and it's close to EUR 150 million. We issued AT1 in Q4 that, again, diversified our funding structure. And what is good that during Q4, our cost of deposits started to decline, and actually, the overall cost of funding also is already decreasing, and we see a good trend on getting even better rates on our cost of funding costs.
Deposit rates in a country are decreasing pretty fast. On a capital structure and position, throughout 2024, we went through an optimization cycle, and we made different steps in order to use equity as efficiently as possible. We introduced different instruments. We issued sub debt, we issued AT1. We are planning to continue that journey during 2025. We will increase our additional Tier 2 layer, and we are working on having in 2026 additional securitization instruments. We need to get ready during this year in order to get additional instruments that we think that our capital structure would be more and more efficient. By having a strong capital structure, we can finance our organic growth further and to keep shareholder distribution at a high level.
So as already said, we changed our dividend policy, and by having a strong capital position, we are able to meet and to deliver the commitment for the shareholders, and it's planned and the management intends to propose 6.12% per share dividends for the last year, and additionally, 5% will be directed to the share buybacks. On share buybacks topic, just to clarify that we still have not used fully the permission that we have received last year, so we will fully utilize that permission, so that permission gives us an area of EUR 2 million to buy back shares, and on top of that, we will allocate 5% of the last year's profit for the buybacks, and on the bottom of the slide, we provide a timeline on the dividend payments and baseline scenario for buybacks.
So we believe that by giving time for the shareholders for the reinvesting the dividends, so it's better to plan buybacks starting in May. So that's a baseline scenario. But in case the performance of our share in the markets will give us signals, so we have a plan B and we are ready to replan our baseline timeline on the buybacks. And giving word for Vytautas.
Thanks, Tomas. And now let's look to our projections and our guidance for the future. So the upgrade of our guidance was influenced by, I would say, strong performance in 2024. So that's one. The other one is the macro development of Lithuania. Really strong indicators show that the economy could perform well during 2025. So looking to those indications, we decided to give new guidance, starting with the loan book. So the growth for this year, we're expecting to be in a range of 18%. It's a nice growth. It's fast, but we are also in parallel implementing different types of measures, credit standards to make it the same high quality and taking only those clients which we'd be happy to maintain long-term and to have a strong performance.
So the growth is based also on the very careful selection of the clients that we are selecting to the portfolio. Net fee and commission income, slightly smaller growth projecting for the first years after the jump in 2024, approximately 10% on average of 2025-2027, but we are expecting much faster growth in '28, '29 after the launch of a new core banking system, after the fully completed transformation in the retail banking. So we think that we have much more potential to grow this line of income. As already Tomas mentioned, that we will expense our core banking and some related costs during the current period, so starting from 2024 this year and the next year.
That had an impact on our Cost-to-Income ratio and return on equity, which we expect would be a bit higher Cost-to-Income during those years and return on equity slightly smaller. However, if we would look to adjusted return on equity, it still stands in the level of 13.7%-16.5%, which we as a long-term historical guidance, we're providing to be in a 15% range. More importantly, we are increasing our long-term guidance for our return on equity up to 17%. Also important to mention that we will continue to be focused on our commitment to pay dividends minimum 50% of the profit generated during those years. Okay, and let's wrap up our presentation with the key remarks. Just to memorize that we performed, I would say, stronger than our guidance, as we mentioned in all parameters.
Strong commitment in organization on the strategic initiative development as a core banking, as a forthcoming rebranding, and some of them more that we were described already earlier. So net profit generated adjusted is close to EUR 85 million, and dividend payout ratio is going to be proposed 6.1% per share for the last year. So it's really record results for the one-year dividends. Our commitment to the shareholder value, as I already mentioned, 50% minimum dividend payout, long-term return on equity target 17%, and total shareholder return during the strategic cycle is more than 20%, to which we already nicely contributed during 2024. I will pass word to Tautvydas to give some indications about our future interactions with you.
Thank you, Vytautas. So that concludes our prepared remarks. But I'd like to use this opportunity to invite all of you to our next investing event, which we're going to be hosting on March 18, where we will present our new brand identity. We'll explain our positioning and dive into the rationale why we're changing our bank name, as well as the brand. I'd also like to mention that our team will be in London on March 18- 20, participating in the Morgan Stanley European Financial Conference. And we're going to be in Warsaw at the end of May, participating in Erste's Equity Conference. So if you're also there, please join us. We'd love to meet you in person. Now we'll switch to the Q&A session. The first question is about rebranding rationale. Why are you changing your name? Maybe Vytautas can take this question.
Yeah, sure. For me, the rebranding rationale is, first of all, it's already part of our strategy. We've mentioned that as one of the enablers for us to grow. The same as a core banking system, it's a bit more technological approach, but there are more ingredients for the success. And we think that rebranding is important during this strategic cycle. The main reasons, I would say, is the ability to combine all the subsidiaries under the one umbrella brand. And I think another important factor is that the bank has moved with a current strategy more from the bank, which is focused on the lending side, more to universal bank, including a strong part of the retail banking. So after the merger with INVL retail is to strengthen client base on the retail side.
That, I would say, is really critical to boost our internal energy to give the new wave for the bank to grow in actually both retail and all other sectors in Lithuania. I think timing is perfect, and we are ready for that.
Great. Thank you. The next question, what are the key challenges for growth and profitability in 2025?
Yeah, challenges always around, and some are the local, some are the, obviously, international, so this unpredictability in the current political and geopolitical environment is still in place. It's dynamic, so we're observing, but so far, I would say Lithuania is very resilient to those external factors which are impacting other countries much more in a bigger scale, so our adaptability, our businesses, probably the size of them, allows us to be more flexible and to adjust their markets and product lines, so we're not that much over-investing into large facilities and those which are in Lithuania. They are pretty flexible to adjust. From an internal point of view, I would say there are some political initiatives on legislation related with the mortgage markets, which already started like a move to have ability to more practically to refinance mortgage markets.
It started in the beginning of February, but we don't see the major changes there. We have constant discussions with the clients, which are willing to review the margins, and we're doing that successfully. That gives benefits for the clients, and we also have a chance to interact with them to discuss the questions and if it's needed to review the margins. The mortgage market is active in that sense. The other aspect from the political point of view is pension reform, which is discussed in the political area. That could be one of the areas of dynamics during 2025. But overall, I would say, according to the projections of macroeconomists, the year seems to be pretty strong. On a corporate side, at least looking from now, I don't see major changes.
I think we will be happy to serve our clients and provide financing and other services to those clients. From an investment point of view, we also had a strong year in 2024. I think the same environment remains, and we will try to do our best also working with our investment clients.
The next question comes from Erste. Please clarify if minimum payout ratio of 50% is based on adjusted or reported net profit. For Tomas, the short answer is it's going to be based on reported net profit. And then we have two questions on Temenos Project. One comes from Swedbank analyst Greg. Why did you decide to expense Temenos Project rather than capitalize? Was it for tax purposes or anything else? And the other similar question on Temenos comes from Walter Signet. Can you please provide guidance on expense for Temenos for the next two years? Tomas, maybe you can take those two questions.
Yes, sure. So thank you for these questions. So we decided that mainly from an accounting perspective. So we do see that we can use the capital more efficiently by expensing these costs rather than capitalizing on our balance sheet. And for the next two years, we do see that the investment size will be in the area of EUR 30 million. And we already borne some of these costs in 2024 in the area of EUR 5 million. So the rest will be expensed during the next two years.
Now we have two questions from Wood & Company. Good morning, Miguel. The first question is, what do you see NIM in 2025 continue to compress despite the deposit costs? I can answer that question. We see that the NIM will stabilize in 2025. Cost of funding will start increasing, which will offset any further loan margin impact. There might be some upside scenario, but the base case answer is it will stabilize. We're not going to see any further deterioration. And the next question is about deposits. Could you please provide some color on the strategies to attract new deposits? Maybe Tomas, you can help with that.
Sure. So thank you, Miguel. Hi. So mainly it's surprising. So we compete with a few other large players in the market. And we are paying slightly larger rates for deposits, up to 25 basis points. So that is enough for us in order to have a healthy growth of the deposits portfolio. Just to remind that during the last year, our deposit portfolio grew by 12% while the market itself for growth was below 10%. So we are able, by playing with the pricing, to attract enough deposits. But at the same time, we're working in order to utilize fully the synergies from the latest M&A transaction and, of course, from the current client base that keeps funds in their accounts in the bank.
Great. And the next, probably final question comes from Enlight Research. Good morning, Mattias. Just to double-check, base case is to restart share buybacks in May.
Yeah, so I will take that question as well. So we are paying record dividends for our shareholders. So we believe that to give enough time for shareholders in order to reinvest these funds, it's a proper way to wait till May. So we believe that's a base case scenario. But we're closely monitoring our share price performance in the market. So in case we will need to step in, so we are ready and we are having permission to do that.
Great. Not seeing any further questions. So this will conclude our Q&A session. Thank you, everyone, for dialing in. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to the investor relations team, and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you and have a good day.