Morrow Bank (Stockholm:MORROW) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

0:00 Hello and welcome to today's webcast with Moro Bank, who will be presenting the report for the second quarter of 2025. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A, so if you're calling in and wish to ask a question, please press star 9 to raise your hand and then star 6 to unmute your line. You can also submit in questions using the form to the right. And with that said, I hand over the word to you guys.

0:20 Thank you very much and a warm welcome also from Erik and myself to this results presentation for the second quarter of 2025. And as you heard, my name is Øyvind Ruanez. I'm the CEO of the bank and with me as always, I have Erik Hortedal, the bank's CFO. We will start today with a short presentation as usual, and then we'll take the question and answer session at the end of the presentation. So moving on to the actual presentation, a quick recap for those of you new to the case. Morobank is a centralized, fully digital Nordic niche bank with focus on consumer lending. We offer a range of consumer loans and credit cards, as well as deposit or savings products to credit worth individuals across Norway, Sweden and Finland. In total, the market for unsecured lending across these three countries is around 600 billion kroner of which we have currently about 2.5% market share.

1:27 Turning now to page four, we can report another strong quarter with pre-tax profits of 91 million kronor. That's up 35% on Q2 last year. We saw solid loan growth in the quarter of around 4%, driven by strong performance specifically in Finland. and our gross loan book has now surpassed 16 billion kroner, well diversified across the three countries in which we operate. We also launched a new refinancing product in Norway towards the end of the quarter and that is now giving us good speed as we move into the third quarter of the year. Looking at the main KPIs, we are happy to report that we have achieved an improvement in the net interest margin in the quarter, a very competitive cost income ratio of around 26% and a solid loan loss ratio of 4.3%.

2:27 Erik will review these in more detail in a few minutes. Ultimately, as a result of improving performance, we continue to see profitability going in the right direction, with a reported return on target equity for the quarter of 12.2%, a significant improvement both over last quarter and last year. Based on this continued strong performance, we are now confident to make positive adjustments to our end-2026 targets, as well as stating our long-term ambition of achieving return levels above 20% on the back of our highly scalable platform and the upcoming redomiciliation to Sweden.

3:14 And talking about Sweden, turning to page five of the presentation, the next page here, we wanted to give you just a quick review of our progress on becoming a Swedish bank. And as a recap, it was our fully owned Swedish subsidiary that applied for and now has obtained the Swedish banking license. In the next phase, we will seek to merge the current Norwegian Morobank with a Swedish subsidiary in a cross-border merger. The Swedish entity holding the Swedish license will become the surviving entity of this merger and the Swedish Morobank will then start operating. The merger plan has now been approved by both the bank's General Assembly and the Norwegian regulator.

3:59 In addition to the actual merger, we will also transfer the listing of the bank from this stock exchange in Oslo to Nasdaq Stockholm's main market. We are targeting to complete both processes, merger and relisting in January next year. and all current shareholders will receive detailed information about the change of listing venue in due time. And you will also find more and updated information about the move on our investor relations website. Turning now to page six, and as already indicated, we are now confident based on current performance to make some positive adjustments to our year-end 2026 targets for both loan balance growth and returns as follows.

4:50 growing the loan book organically by 5 to 10% per year to above 18 billion. We have previously communicated 17 billion, so we're adding another billion on top of that. And as we have now clear path to becoming a Swedish bank, we've also increased our return on target equity target to around 17% based on the estimated Swedish capital requirements. Additionally, we confirm our target to drive the cost income ratio further down towards 23%, as well as delivering stable and solid loan loss ratio in the range to 4.5%. As you hear, we are happy with the strong progress of the bank and comfortable with our targets. And before handing over to Erik to review the financial results in more detail, I wanted to come back to this slide, actually one of my favorite slides, benchmarking us to our Nordic peers.

5:52 As you can see, we continue to outperform on the key drivers that we have had full focus on over the past few years, growth and efficiency. As for profitability, we continue to move up the list with reported improved return on equity of above 11% in the quarter. And remind you, this is still as a Norwegian bank. As we become a Swedish bank and obtain a level playing field with our Swedish peers, we believe that we can achieve return levels in line with the best of them. Now over to Erik.

6:27 Thank you, Eivind. We'll now go into the financial review and as always we'll start with the development of the loan balance. We're happy to confirm to you that growth is back. As you can see here, we grew the loan book by 4% in the quarter. That's a gross loan book. and most of the loans took place in Finland. Again, this is our largest market and you can see it from the graph that this is taking a larger and larger relative share of our loan book. But also we're happy to see that we have introduced some new refinancing product in Norway and this is showing initial promising results and this will continue into H3 and from that perspective we should also see some more growth in Norway coming in the next quarter and so.

7:18 And also we will take these product features and apply them to some degree as well Sweden and Finland. and as always when we look forward for our growth in our loan book we are aiming now to achieve around 18 billion at the end of 2026 it's an approximate target because we also foresee that we will make some NPL sales and that will also impact our loan book ie it will become lower but the 18 billion remains are now our rough estimate for the end of the year and as always we will continue to pursue structural growth opportunities if these are value creative and of course if they're available. Now jumping to the total income picture, we can see here that we grew this 15% year on year.

8:10 There was also a small growth in the current from Q1 to Q2 and this is driven by the fact that we have, which we'll come to in the next slide, that we have increased our interest margins and also the loan book is growing. In addition in this amount here there's also some other items such as other income etc. and these are a bit fluctuating a bit up and down quarter to quarter influenced by one of that go has some impact. Now looking at the margins we have here, we can see that first we're happy to say that our lending rate has flattened out. It was 13.5% in Q1 and 13.5% in this quarter.

9:00 but at the same time we've been able to decrease our funding rate i.e. the deposit rate and you can see here the difference between what we receive on our performing loans and what we pay on our deposits and therefore increased from 10.5% to 10.9% in the quarter and this margin expansion is contributing nicely to our income going forward we expect to have either a stable or slightly positive net margin outlook Also we're happy to see here that our loan loss ratio is at the stabilizing level. This ratio has been decreasing for the five consecutive quarters. This is driven by the fact that we have improved our we are improving and continuously improving our credit risk management both in terms of which clients we accept and also how we manage delinquent accounts and this has given results and we're now stabilizing at around 4.3%.

10:02 This is in line with our guiding that we said that we expect to have a loan loss ratio in the range of 4 to 4.5% and we maintain that guidance going forward. Now, looking at our cost level, we're also happy to demonstrate that we're able to have a stable cost base. The dark turquoise bars are our underlying OPEX costs, and then the light green on top are the one-offs related to the move to Sweden. And as you can see, the dark area remains quite flat from quarter to quarter. we're also seeing that we had a little bit lower expense for our Sweden cost in the quarter namely 6 million kronors approximately and this leaves us in all including Sweden that a cost-income ratio of 25.8% There will be, as we said before, some more costs going forward, but these costs will eventually come out and we will expect going forward to maintain our efficient cost base. And therefore, we also maintain that we have an expectation at the end of 2026 of a cost-income ratio of around 23%.

11:19 Finally, combining these items together, you can see that we had a nice jump in our profit before taxes of 8 million kroners from 83 to 91 million kroners this quarter. That's also a 35% growth year on year. the return on target equity is now 12.2% and this has continuously gone upwards for seven consecutive quarters. We therefore revised upwards our return on target equity to 2026 for around 17% and this is driven by the fact that we expect this development to continue going forward. and the main drivers is that we foresee that we will have a continued loan balance growth as well as the other operating metrics will be stable.

12:12 A word on our solidity. It is strong. We have been growing considerably. That's why you see the fact that we've gone down in overall capital ratio from year on year from 19.6 to 17.9 on CET1 ratio. But at the same time, also the regulatory requirements has easened also on a Norwegian basis. also on a Norwegian basis and you can see here that now our CET1 requirement is 11.9% and which gives us a headroom of 6% or roughly 400 and 700 million kroners. We also use a 2% buffer on top of our target or our requirement so that our target is 2% above that and then the buffer is 470 million kroners.

13:04 We are also happy to announce that we raised 275 million kroners in 81 months to refinance an old one at 200 million and with that we also had a better pricing where the margin went down from 8% to 6.9%. Going forward as a Swedish bank as you know we already have ample capital and we will get further capital release and in going forward we will need to decide how to allocate this or prioritize this capital allocation and first we will focus on organic growth and grow that as much as we reasonably can find the impossible. The second priority will be portfolio acquisitions or M&A if we can find these, if these opportunities occur and that they are accretive.

13:54 And finally what we do not spend on that we will return to our shareholders. And with this I'll leave the word back to Eivind.

14:04 Thank you very much, Erik. And as you have seen in this presentation, the bank is on a very good trajectory, both when it comes to organic business performance, as well as on the process to become a Swedish bank. We have therefore made positive adjustments to our end 2026 target as shown and taking a little longer view excuse me we believe that we have all the building blocks in place to compete with the best in the sector. We've demonstrated that we have built a highly scalable platform doubling our loan book size while driving costs down. We have secured a Swedish banking license and will be able to operate under the same regulatory capital regime as our Swedish peers from next year.

14:58 The reported 12% return on target equity in Q2 will actually translate to 15.5% as a Swedish bank. adding continued improvement and growth to the picture should enable us to achieve return levels above 20% in the long run, as illustrated on this page. So to the last slide of this morning's presentation, trying to sum up the key takeaways. We have delivered another strong quarter with solid growth and improving returns. And we are progressing on our plan to read on missile to Sweden early next year. On the back of this, we have made positive adjustments to our end 2026 targets with return on target equity expected to come in around 17%.

15:48 And we have ample room for more growth and further value creation as we move forward. With that, I would like to thank you for calling in and listening this morning. And I guess we will now open up for questions. Thank you so much for the presentation here. As you mentioned, now we'll carry on with some questions. And the first one is, how sustainable is the 35% year-over-year profit growth and what are the main drivers behind it?

16:20 Thank you for the question and it's a good one. The 35% growth year-on-year, this is a combination of several factors and one of the most contributing factors is obviously that we've grown our loan balance considerably over this time period. and also the fact that we have improved our loan loss ratio as well as we kept our costs stable and maintained our margins and the combination of all these items have given in this for this last year the growth that you've seen now the exact growth going forward it's difficult to predict but we as you do see that we expect a higher return on equity going forward there will obviously be some growth and that is because the same drivers that I discussed just now they will also continue to develop positively.

17:14 Thank you. Has your view on net margins improved during the quarter?

17:21 There's a slight, we have gotten a confirmation that we're able to actually increase our margins. And from that perspective, we expect that we also should be able to at least maintain it. So yes, we're confident that our margins will remain strong going forward. Thank you. How do you expect repricings to be given the first rate cut in Norwegian markets?

17:47 the Norwegian loan book and the funding accordingly is now quite small as you saw there on our loan balance only 14% of our loan balance so that will impact us positively because we will have lower funding costs and the rates on the loans will usually will not usually that be much affected so we will have a margin increase there but again our Norwegian loan book is not that big so the overall bottom line effect will therefore not be as large either Thank you. What are some key downside risks to your target ROTE?

18:25 The key downside risk is if we don't achieve the growth we expect, if we get an unforeseen margin squeeze and also if the loan losses should develop negatively that could for instance be driven by an external macroeconomic shock. On the cost side we're quite confident that we have control so we should not foresee to see any large impact from that. Thank you. What impact will the relocated Sweden and Stockholm listing have on regulatory costs and investor access?

18:59 You know, as we've indicated, I believe in the last few quarters as well, and one of the sort of core drivers for re-domiciling to Sweden is one to achieve level playing field with the Swedish peers. There are mostly now Swedish niche banks competing in our space. and they do have lighter capital requirements than we have today in Norway. So we assume and plan for achieving the same level of capital requirements as the Swedish peers. And as we've shown and demonstrated also in the presentation, that will give us an uplift on our returns and our pricing. Secondly, in terms of capital markets, we also do believe that that is a strong driver or motivation for moving the bank to Nasdaq Stockholm.

19:50 There is a larger cluster of niche banks, fintech in Stockholm. That's a fact. And we want to tap into that. And we believe that becoming a Swedish bank listing on Nasdaq Stockholm helps us tap into the capital markets in Sweden. Thank you. Could you give some details on why the Finnish market appears more attractive at the moment?

20:16 Yeah, I mean, again, something that I think has come up as a question a few times before and the answer continues to be the same. We do deploy capital to where we see the best return for that capital. And over the last couple of years, that has been Finland, growth in Finland. And that is driven by the fact that we have seen better margins, i.e., the interest rate that we are able to charge to the customers are slightly higher in Finland compared to, for example, Sweden. The funding rate has come down quicker on Euro. I mean, Finland is a Euro country and we continue to drive Euro down and Euro has come down faster than the other currencies in the region.

21:02 And there's been some lighter or lower capital requirements Thank you. Can the bank maintain its industry-leading cost-income ratio as it scales and enters new markets with new products? Absolutely. It's actually scaling is actually a key to drive a cost income ratio further down. As Eric has explained as well, we have demonstrated over the past many quarters that we are able to keep cost stable. We're actually taking cost down as we've grown. Taking three years back view, we have actually doubled our balance while driving costs down. So as we continue to grow and do that with a stable cost base, our cost income ratio will actually continue to go down. So definitely, as we've indicated also in the presentation, we are quite confident that that cost income ratio will continue down towards the 23% level by end of 2026.

22:24 Thank you. You may have already touched upon this, but with 4% organic quarterly loan book growth and successful refinancing loan in Norway, how sustainable is the growth and what will drive your 5% to 10% annual target?

22:37 Well, I mean, the 4% growth in the quarter is an organic growth that we are obviously happy with. If you do an annualized number out of that, that becomes a pretty significant number. But as we've indicated also throughout the presentation today, we have seen, especially towards the end of the quarter, that growth is picking up. There is good demand in the market across the three markets. We've launched a new product into the Norwegian market, into the refinancing space of the market that is giving very, very positive initial results. And as we go into Q3 and further into the next few quarters, we will ramp that up and definitely believe that that's going to help us achieve the 5-10% organic loan growth that we've indicated or communicated in today's presentation.

23:35 Thank you. And another question in the same subject here. Given the improved loan loss ratio, how does Moro Bank plan to manage credit risk as it targets higher organic loan growth of 5-10%?

23:51 We expected to handle it in the same way that we have. The development that we've had is driven to improved credit management, as I mentioned earlier, that is better credit risk analysis, better follow up on delinquent accounts. Also, we will apply that going forward to our new loans. and also it's also math comes into the play here and a couple other effects. First of all initially you will bleed out the bad loans in the beginning but then secondly our loan book is now quite large 16 billion and growing and as we add here the relative amount of new loans will therefore be quite small so that will also help us maintain our or limit our overall loan loss ratio for the whole book.

24:41 Thank you. That was all the questions we have received. So thank you so much for presenting here today and answering all the questions. And thank you all at home watching today.

24:51 Thank you very much. I guess if there are no more questions, as always, we would just say that if you do have questions after the call, we're always available. You can contact us through our investor relations pages. There's an email address there. There are also some phone numbers. So feel free to reach out. I reckon myself will always be happy to answer your questions or go on a call with you if that's what you would like to do. So always available for more questions after the call today. With that, I think we will just say again, thank you very much. I hope this was fruitful, helpful for you.

25:38 And we'll see you at the next Crossroads.