Lion Finance Group PLC (BDGSF) Q3 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello, welcome everyone to Bank of Georgia Group PLC's results call. Today we're presenting the group's consolidated results for the third quarter of 2024. As always, I'm joined on this call by the group CEO, Archil Gaciciladze, and we'll start with our presentation, discuss the key developments as well as the highlights of the quarter, and then we'll open the floor for questions. Please be aware that this call is being recorded, and Archil, you can go ahead now. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining this call. We had a record profit in the third quarter of this year, 509 million lari, which is up 42.5% versus last year, although this year obviously includes Ameriabank from Armenia, which is a leading bank in Armenia and is progressing very well. Return on equity was 32%, with a very low cost of risk of 0.2%, and cost income was just shy of 35%, which we feel comfortable with. With this, there's one other small good news that I wanted to share, which is that we have been named by Global Finance Magazine as the best digital bank in the world. Global Finance runs a lot of different prices, but Best Digital is their top price. And the regional winners were Citibank in North America, Santander in Western Europe, and DBS in Southeast Asia. Asia and several others, but those are very prominent global banks. And in Central and Eastern Europe, it was Bank of Georgia, obviously. And then we became the choice of the committee that chose the best stock bank in the world, which is recognizing the capabilities, the user experience, sales mechanics and all the rest of it that we have in our digital bank, which I think I would like to congratulate all of our staff members and team members with this achievement. And it's recognizing that even in a small country like Georgia, we can...