Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (publ) (SEB_A) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SEB Financial Results Q1 2026 webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to speaker today, Johan Torheby, President and CEO. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to SEB's first quarter result presentation. First, I'd like to just comment on a pretty unusual quarter. We've clearly seen some turbulent times with some macroeconomic sharp turns during the first quarter of this year. After a very constructive start in January and February, we had the trigger of the military conflict in the Middle East, where we saw interest rate expectation significantly increase following higher energy prices and the risk of higher inflation. fairly sharp drops in some of the equity markets and also a widening of credit spreads. What's good to see is that April has really contrasted to this development and things have clearly stabilized. The highlights of the first quarter is really around the sentiment that ended positively and came out weaker during March after stabilizing in April. We saw some areas really benefiting from the market volatility that increased and we saw higher demand for commodity hedging supported by high activity in the secondary equities market. This quarter we can also clearly see the cost consolidation at work and this really creates the freedom degre...