Arion banki hf. (ARION_SDB) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning to you all and a warm welcome to our presentation and webcast of our fourth quarter and full year results for 2023. My name is Benedikt Gislason, I'm the CEO of Aerion and here with me today to go through the results is Oliver Høskundsson, our CFO. It's never a dull moment in Iceland. And as we go through this in our headquarters here, we've had the sixth eruption going on at the Reykjanes Peninsula. 60 eruptions since the fire started in 2021. And we will be going through the impact of those to our credit portfolio and the economy and some other details of our results. To begin with, it was a good year and we met all our key medium term targets in 2023 with a return on equity for the full year of 13.6%. The only The kind of financial target that we're not meeting at the moment is a nice one to have. We are grossly overcapitalized at the moment, way above our financial targets, which will enable us to normalize our capital structure further in the coming quarters and years. Here are some of the key milestones of the year, and I will go in more detail in some of those later in my presentation. It was a nice event to receive the Bankers Award, the Banker of the Year, for the third year in a row now. We enjoyed strong momentum in all our business lines, and we've come a long way with our main distribution channel, the digital channel, the banking app, which has been voted the best banking app in Iceland now for seven years in a row. And many of our core products are mostly now sold through that channel, as you can see here. Strong momentum in our markets business. We continue to have a leadership role in equity markets. And we were involved with all of the listings that happened last year in the exchange and continue to... have a leading role in building up...