Good morning. My name is Leo, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Davivienda fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I will now turn the conference over to Rafael Borja of iAdvize Corporate Communications. Mr. Borja, please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Davivienda's fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Today is only for investors and analysts only, therefore questions from the media will not be taken. Joining us today from Bogotá, Colombia are Mr. Efraín Forero Fonseca, Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Ricardo León Otero, Chief Risk Officer. They will be discussing the results from the press release distributed yesterday. If you have not yet received a copy of the earnings report, please visit www.davivienda.com on the investor relations section, where there is also a webcast presentation to accompany discussion during this call. If you need any assistance, please contact iAdvize in New York at 917-710-4806. I would like to remind you that any forward-looking statements made today by Davivienda's management are subject to various conditions and may differ materially. These conditions are outlined on the last page of the company's press release in the disclaimer, and we ask that you refer to it for guidance. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Efraín Forero, Chief Executive Officer of Davivienda, who will begin the presentation. Mr. Forero, please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Davivienda's fourth quarter of 2020 earnings conference call. Before I start, I just wanted to acknowledge what a challenging year it has been for everyone due to the coronavirus pandemic. Particularly, I want to pass on our best wishes to our customers, to our people in Colombia and Central America, and to all our different stakeholders. During this year, we have been doing our best to support our customers, adapt to the new circumstances, and continue to execute our strategy to deliver results across all our main objectives. In today's presentation, we will discuss the evolution of the economies where we operate. We will also comment on the bank's financial results, the steps we have taken in our digital transformation path, and how we are expecting our business to evolve. When looking at Colombia's economy evolution on slide three, the Colombian economy contracted 6.8% in 2020, the largest drop since 1975. The pandemic had consequences for employment and the economy in general and led to structural changes in the monetary policy. Mining, manufacturing, construction, commerce, and artistic activity also recorded the worst figures in history, registering falls of more than 15%. Through the PMI indicator, we have observed better dynamics in the manufacturing industry in recent months. We expected the Colombian economy to grow by 5% during 2021. The central bank cut its interest rate by 250 basis points during the year, reaching a historical low of 1.75%. For this year, we are expecting interest rates to remain stable considering the low expected pressure from inflation. Moving to Central America on slide four, the situation was not different from the rest of the world. Panama presented the largest contraction in the region, followed by El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica. The latter did not have as severe restrictions as the rest of the region. We expect growth of close to 4% for the entire region for this year. In the current scenario of lower rates and COVID-19 restrictions, banks will have a challenging environment. Moving on to slide five, you can see the main financial figures of the year and some relevant strategy advances achieved in 2020. As we have discussed before, the current environment significantly changed the risk landscape of the bank, impacting the financial results this year closing at COP 408 billion. During 2020, COP 4.2 trillion were established as provision to protect the loan portfolio credit risk, increasing 72.5% and reaching a cost of risk of 3.94%. Despite being a challenging year, we made relevant progress on different strategic fronts. In Colombia, we increased our market share by loans by about 90 basis points, reaching a participation of 16.4%. We remained as the first player in mortgage financing and continued to increase our share in the SMEs business. In Central America, we also had the opportunity to reach more people and companies, increasing our participation to 10%. As a result, our consolidated gross loan portfolio grew 9.5% this year, mainly driven by the dynamics of the commercial and mortgage portfolios. We continue to consolidate our leadership, closing the year with nearly 70.5 million customers in Colombia and Central America. These results come with prudent balance sheet management, thanks to the bank's resilient capital funding and liquidity positions. The total consolidated capital adequacy ratio increased 69 basis points over the year, while the common equity Tier 1 ratio increased by 27 basis points. Continuing to slide six, I would like to share some results of our main business lines. It is important to note that our priority has been support our customer through this crisis and contribute to the economic reactivation of the countries where we operate. We were able to act as quickly as possible, thanks to our people commitment, our technology capabilities, and our strong financial position. Our retail banking portfolio grew over 9% during the year, driven mostly by the mortgage dynamics in the Colombian market. During last year, we were able to provide financial relief to over 1.2 million customers in Colombia and Central America in this segment. We were also able to adapt our mobile credit process in record time to facilitate access to self-employed customers in Colombia to credit lines with the support of the National Guarantee Fund. We disbursed over COP 350 million in this credit line, being the leader in the financial sector. Through DaviPlata, we facilitated payments of subsidies to about 4.5 million Colombians, participating with 68% of the total payments, consolidating ourselves as a strategic ally for the Colombian government financial inclusion programs. As for the commercial banking segment, the bank grew 9.6% over the year. We helped companies and businesses adapt to the current environment, facilitating the access to solutions and new resources that would allow them to resume their approaching activity and maintain their liquidity position. We disbursed more than COP 2 trillion in new lending under government's guarantee program and second-floor banks credit lines. Regarding our wealth management division, assets under management increased above 12%, despite the higher volatility and uncertainty faced during the year. Part of this result is explained by the effort made by our team to improve the way in which they communicate with our customers to help them navigate through these difficult times. As an example, our market share in mutual funds increased 130 basis points in this period. We also launched our first ESG mutual funds to offer new investment possibility to our customers in line with our sustainability strategy. It's important to recall that in 2019, we established a financial corporation through which we aim to diversify the investment alternative to our operation, helping us in the process of increasing our value offer to our customer. In this sense, during 2020, we started to build our portfolio that is expected to be comprised of startups, fintechs, and renewable energy initiatives, among other types of investments that fit our strategy. With this, we seek to stay on the leading edge of innovation and maintain our digital banking leadership position. Please move on to slide seven. We are committed to sustainable and responsible business practice following the higher purpose we share with Grupo Bolívar: to enrich lives with integrity. We work every day to generate prosperity, welfare, and joy in people. In this sense, we have continued working on developing our environment and social commitments. In 2020, we acquired loans for $640 million with multilaterals and international agencies to finance our environmental and social portfolios, while increasing our capital ratio with a portion of these resources. Our sustainable portfolio reached COP 2.8 trillion. We also became official follower of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures or TCFD. We have a lot work ahead of us, but we already started working on these guidelines. In the meantime, we continue to be part of The Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the RobecoSAM Yearbook, along with other initiatives through which we drive the inclusion of sustainability best practice across our different businesses. For the social sphere, we have helped to include in the financial system over 4.2 million people through DaviPlata, contributing to increasing digital adoption and decreasing the use of cash in Colombia. This year, we increased donations to COP 52 billion to contribute mainly to improve health infrastructure and deliver 1 million food packages to the most affected sectors for the COVID pandemic. Please continue to slide eight, where we will review the evolution of our digital transformation. As you know, the pandemic accelerated digital adoption around the world, and we were no exception to that situation. Nowadays, 84% of our customers frequently use our digital channels to do their banking. Digital depositors and loans shown a relevant increase compared to 2018. Outstanding deposit balance grew 3.8x, while loans increased over 6x. As you can see on the right side of the slide, sales through digital channels reached around 50% of total sales, and 52% of total monetary transactions were done in a digital way. This progress is the result of our continued effort to evolve our business' model through investments in technology and innovation. Now please move on to the DaviPlata section. DaviPlata, our digital native bank, consolidated itself as one of the most important platforms during the pandemic, becoming a tool to facilitate access to resources and electronic payments to more than 11.6 million people. In 2020, our platform almost doubled its number of customers, adding 5.5 million during the year. Almost 4.7 million customers out of the total have other products in the financial system and become an opportunity for the bank to offer them all of our services and products. On another front, I am proud to announce our new alliance with Metro de Medellín to create a smart city ecosystem through the Cívica App. This alliance involves creating a unique model for people to commute and manage their money easily. Cívica App is an all-in-one city app that integrates QR code payments for the transport system, store purchases, and money transfer from mobile devices supported by a bank, and specifically, in this case, by the Davivienda platform, becoming a world-class innovation. On the bottom of the slide, you will see some main figures about DaviPlata. The outstanding balance in digital deposits reached COP 521 billion, increasing 352% compared to 2018. During the same period, transactions income fees doubled, reaching almost COP 76 billion. Also, we have been able to process four times the number of total transactions and three times the number of e-cards. As you can see, we continue to gain traction and consolidate DaviPlata as our native digital bank. To end my presentation, I would like to say that there is a considerable uncertainty in this period ahead. However, we have consistently focused on executing our strategy and continue to manage our business. We have a strong balance sheet, diversified funding sources, and adequate capital ratio to support different economic scenarios. We will continue working hard to support the economic recovery of the countries we operate, developing our people's talents, basing our decision on using data and analytics, making alliance with world-class partners, and transforming us to be closer to our customers, enriching their lives with simple, reliable, and friendly experiences. Let me turn the call over to Mr. Ricardo León, our Executive Vice President. Thank you for the introduction, Mr. Forero. Good morning, everyone. Please move on to slide number 10, where we analyze the assets evolution. Total assets grew around 12% in 2020, mainly driven by increases in the investment and loan portfolios. The exchange rate annual devaluation explains around 2% of this growth. During the year, we maintained an adequate liquidity level with cash and interbank funds increasing 14% over the year, in line with the excess of liquidity observed in the market. Our investment portfolio grew 32%, mainly due to mandatory investments in Colombia and El Salvador related to lower legal reserve requirements, as well as movement in our trading portfolio. Gross loans increased by 9.5% on an annual basis and decreased 4.4% compared to the previous quarter. Our loan loss reserves reached COP 6.4 trillion, increasing over 54% annually. In this end, loan loss reserves to gross loans reached 6%, increasing over 170 basis points, reflecting our constant provisioning effort throughout the year. Colombia's assets showed an annual growth of 13% due to higher gross loans, investments, and interbank funds. While our international subsidiaries assets slightly grew 1.5% over the year in dollar terms, and mainly driven by higher investments. Please move on to slide 11. Gross loans grew 9.5% over the year, mainly explained by corporate demand in the first quarter of the year and the dynamics in mortgages in Colombia. The annual growth is also explained by the evolution of the consumer portfolio during the first quarter and exchange rate behavior during the year. During the quarter, the gross loans portfolio contracted 4.4%, mainly due to prepayments of corporate customers for COP 1.1 trillion, write-offs in the commercial portfolio for around COP 640 billion, and the lower dynamic of the consumer portfolio. Excluding the foreign exchange effect, gross loans contracted 2.4% over the quarter. In the international operation, mortgage and consumer loans grew mainly in El Salvador and Honduras. The commercial portfolio decreased due to prepayments and lower credit demand. Moving on to slide number 12. In this slide, you can observe how relief and collection have been evolving since the beginning of the pandemic. By the end of December, around 7% of Colombia's loan portfolio and 17% of the Americas loan book were under some kind of relief. In Colombia, the Debtors Relief Program was extended until June this year. We might see more customers being restructured under this framework, mainly driven by the commercial segments as individual analysis and negotiation take more time to be in place. In Central America, regulatory measures for relief accounting treatment were also extended and will be expiring throughout the year. However, relief and special collection measures might be offered until June if needed. Regarding the revenue collection from the total portfolio, we continue to see recovery, Colombia reaching 91% and Central America to 95% compared to the last February. Of today, around 87% of our consolidated loan book is up to date. In any case, when looking at customers whose relief already ended, we observe that around 2%-3% of them remain with their payment capacity affected. Please move on to slide 13, where we can see the evolution of past-due loans, cost of risk, and loans by stage. You can see on the top left table, PDLs are already reflecting the pandemic effect, with the consumer and mortgage portfolio being the most impacted. There are some factors to take into account when analyzing current consumer PDLs. The first is related to the loan growth deceleration observed since March 2020, which explains around 140 basis points of the current consumer ratios. The second effect is related to relief measures. As we offered over four months of deferrals in the consumer portfolio, loans were kept up to date for a long period, and therefore, write-offs in 2020 for the consumer book were lower than a normal year average, especially in the second half of the year. This effect accounts for around 200 basis points of the ratio's deterioration. Finally, we have the portfolio's reaction to the pandemic, which explains the rest of the decrease. The 90-day PDL for the mortgage portfolio is showing some deterioration. We expect our customers to catch up with their debts and don't see much risk materializing in the 120-day PDL. This portfolio is adequately covered with a loan-to-value of around 45%. PDLs for the commercial portfolio are showing lower levels over the year, mainly due to growth in low-risk profiles, as well as different restructuring process in Colombia under the debtors relief program framework, and some write-offs. At the bottom of the slide, you can observe our cost of risk, which closed at 3.94% for 2020 and at 4.44% for the quarter. Provision expenses for this quarter result mainly from the increase in our stages two and three, in line with delinquencies observed mainly in the consumer and mortgage portfolio. We also continued to strengthen recovery for these stages, as you can see at the bottom right of the slide. We have been taking different measures to establish adequate provision levels for our portfolio by better understanding possible scenarios, incorporating new information about our customers' behavior, as well as adapting our origination policies. It's important to know that the countries where we operate are facing through the second peak of the pandemic, which may have further effects on the bank results. Please move on to slide number 14. Funding sources grew 12.4% over the year and decreased 3% over the quarter. The exchange rate evaluation explains around 2% of the annual growth and almost all of the quarter's compression. This year, we had an increase in low-cost funding sources, as shown by the 31.2% growth of demand deposits, while term deposits decreased compared to both periods, as consumers overall had preference for higher liquidity. Bonds decreased by 11% quarterly, due to maturities of subordinated instruments both in Colombia and Central America. In terms of credits, growth reached 6.3% over the year due to the different transactions with foreign entities and multilaterals by $640 million. Our funding structure has slightly changed by deposits now accounting for 76.4% of total funding, which allows us to take advantage of lower financial expenses, as we will see in the coming slides. I would like to invite you to slide number 15. Total capital adequacy ratio closed the quarter at 12.3%, 331 basis points above the regulatory minimum, increasing both over the quarter and the year due to higher Tier 1 and Tier 2. This is explained by our capital maintenance strategy, lower asset growth, higher provisions, as well as adjustment on the value-at-risk estimation methodology. Since December 2019, we have acquired $775 million in new Tier 2 instruments with foreign agencies to diversify our funding, increase our capital ratios, and improve the quality of our capital. Total equity remained stable over the year and decreased 2.2% quarterly, mainly due to the foreign exchange effects of our Central America entity. On slide number 16, the group financial margin remains resilient, thanks to our liability management strategies and faster liabilities repricing. The current interest rate environment, higher competition, and level of non-performing loans, as well as portfolio mix changes, lead to a loan income decrease over the quarter. On the accumulated basis, however, loan income increased 7.4% due to a base effect as our commercial loan income was lower in 2019. The group financial margin expanded 3.1% over the quarter and 15% on the accumulated basis. 12 months net interest margin ratio closed at 6.29%, slightly increasing quarterly and contracting over the year as a result of higher growth in performing assets versus gross financial margin increase. Provision expenses closed around COP 1.2 trillion in the fourth quarter, reaching an accumulated figure of COP 4.2 trillion for the year, which means a 72.5% increase in compared to 2019. The accumulating net financial margin had an annual decrease of 21%. Please continue to slide number 17. The fourth quarter's expenses increased by 6.4% due to administrative expenses in Colombia related to marketing, IT development, and depreciation. Accumulated OpEx closed the year with a growth of 11%, in line with our guidance explained by the pandemic cost, exchange rate, and digital transformation. When excluding these three effects, OpEx grows around 2% over the year. 12-month cost-to-income ratio closed at 47.1%, increasing over the year. I would like to go to slide number 18 to analyze the bank's profits. During the fourth quarter of the year, operating income continued to recover, increasing by 16.9% due to higher transaction and loan activity, as well as insurance premiums. Net profit for the quarter closed around COP 14 billion, leading to an accumulated profit of COP 408 billion. Our return on average equity for the last 12 months closed at 3.2%, while the return on average assets was 0.3%. To finish the presentation, please move on to slide number 19, where we will share with you the general trends we expect for our business this year. For 2021, we expect our consolidated book to grow between 7%-9%, with the Corporate and SME segment leading the recovery, followed by lower risk personal banking, mainly mortgage. We will continue to see increases in the budget loans during the coming quarters, with 90-day PDL ratio remain above 4% during the year. We should be ending 2021 with a cost of risk around 3%-3.2%, with higher provision in the first half of the year. Please take into account that this outlook depends on the performance of our loan book and the evolution of the economy to new contagion wave and vaccination calendars. Regarding margins, our net interest margin should slightly compress, closing the year around 6%, due to higher competition and changes in asset mix, assets repricing, lower room for an increase in liability expenses, as well as lower income from investments. We will continue to look for alternative income sources through our strategic alliance and other investments and expect operating income to return to pre-pandemic levels. On the OpEx side, we will continue working on our efficiency and cost control while reaping the benefits of our digital transformation process. We expect to end the year with an operating expense growth between 5%- 7%. We have an investment plan of $250 million between 2021 and 2023 to develop new projects and digital transformation initiatives. As a result of the latter, our profits should remain pressured during the year, with a return on average equity around 6%- 9%. Our capital ratios we'll be reporting Basel III numbers next quarter and expect to have increases of around 300 basis point in our ratios, which will leave us with adequate levels to leverage our business growth. In general, these are the results we have prepared for you today. At this time, we can move on to the question- and- answer session. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. At this time, we will open the floor for your questions. First, we will take the questions from the conference call and then the webcast questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the star key followed by the one key on your touch tone phone now. Questions will be taken in the order in which they are received. If at any time you would like to remove yourself from the questioning queue, just press the pound key. Again, to ask a question, please press star one now. For the webcast viewers, simply click the question mark button on your webcast player. A pop-up window will appear, and then simply type your question in the box and click Send. We will pause momentarily to compile a list of questioners. Your first question comes from the line of Thiago Batista of UBS. Yeah. Hi, guys. Good morning. I have two questions. The first one about DaviPlata. We are seeing several banks in Latin America trying to split or at least to have a kind of independent structure for their digital business. Do you see any room to do that with DaviPlata? If you can share to us if DaviPlata would have a positive bottom line if this business become independent. How profitable is DaviPlata right now? My second question is about the medium-term ROE. I know that the situation, the outlook is not so clear yet, but what's the level of ROE that you believe Davivienda could achieve in a couple of years? Hello, Thiago. Thank you very much. I'm going to answer about DaviPlata. Last year was really a fantastic year for DaviPlata. We were able to have new customers, 5.5 million customers. Among them, about 2 million were people that didn't have any type of relationship with the system. About other 2 million were customers from other banks. DaviPlata is giving us a very important value, having the opportunity to work with the base of the pyramid businesses in which we are really very interested. As well, we are having now the chance to offer for about 4 million customers that have products with other banks to offer our banking financial products for them. That give us a really very good opportunity, and it has a lot of value. However, we are working now to develop the ecosystem that we hope to have this year, mainly with the business, with the alliance that we made with Medellín and with the Cívica. Also to work with an ability, an improved ability, to offer value-added services to those people that are going to have the subsidies from government. We are going to pay about 2 million payments every two months, making this possible to pay to those people the subsidy that actually we're giving them in cash. We wanted to work to have different offers to them in term of having the ability to buy some products in better condition for them. We are going to work very hard improving the ability of the bank to develop this ecosystem and these value-added services. Then we will think that we are ready to become an autonomous bank, a native digital bank, and at that time, we will make the spin-off of the DaviPlata business. Not before that. We believe that the value of DaviPlata is really very high, and we will improve it in the moment that we are able to offer those possibilities to different countries, not only Colombia but in other places in Central America or maybe we start to become an international player. Related to your second question about the ROE that we are waiting for the coming years, the ROE that we're expecting for 2022 is to have an ROE around 10%. In 2023, we believe that it's possible to return again our regular ROE with a ROE close to or between 12%-14%. Obviously, it's supported by a recovery in the economy with a GDP growing in a regular basis in Colombia. No, very clear. Thanks, Fonseca. Once again, that is star one on your touchtone phone to register for a question. We will pause momentarily to allow questions to queue. There appears to be no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Forero for any closing remarks. Actually, we do have a question. My apologies. We do have a question from Natalia Corfield of JP Morgan. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for taking my question. It's about the impact of the introduction of Basel III in your capitalization. If you could give a little bit of color, how much are you expecting in terms of increase of your core equity? Thank you. Hi, Natalia. This is David Pedraza. Effectively, we have been working throughout the year in the implementation of the new standard. Considering the different evolutions that the regulation has had, there has been some improvement in the previous guidance we were providing the market about the improvement of the implementation of the new regulation. As of now, we believe that perhaps we should have a positive impact of around 300 basis points of increase by including all of the different changes that the regulation establishes. It is also important to mention that even though we have been working through 2020, at the end of 2019, we were working in obtaining new credits that were considered as Tier 2 instruments. In total, since December 2019, we obtained $775 million for that purpose, and that is the continued process of maintenance of the different capital levels, and that's something that even though we obtained the 300 basis points, we will continue to do going forward in order to guarantee that we have the most adequate levels to leverage the business. Okay, thank you. Then another question, if I can, regarding your existing bond in international markets, do you have any plans of liability management? Sorry, could you repeat the question, please? Yes. Regarding your international bonds, which is a Tier 2, I understand is already losing regulatory capital treatment. My question is, are you considering any type of liability management of these bonds? Yeah. The bonds actually are losing treatment for capital purposes. That's one of the reasons why we were doing maintenance in the Tier 2 instruments, obtaining the new credits. As of now, those bonds have two years left. They are weighting 40% for capital purposes, and it's possible that we could do a liability management transaction. That's something that we are currently analyzing, and it depends on the levels of the interest rates, et cetera. It's part of the maintenance that I was mentioning in the previous answer. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please press star one if you would like to ask a question. We have a follow-up from Thiago Batista of UBS. Yeah. Hi, guys. Just one small question about the PDL. You mentioned that you guys are expecting the NPA ratio to be above 4%, but can you give a little bit more of details on how much NPA should increase during this year? Thank you, Thiago. Ricardo León. At the end of the year, we believe the PDL level will be around 4.2%, 4.4%. This number includes a write-off which will be concentrated in the first half of the year. We believe that in Colombia, we already saw the peak, and that PDL could be closing around 4.5%. In Central America, the peak may happen by mid-year with levels close to 2.7%. Very clear. Thanks. There does appear to be no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Forero for any closing remarks. Thank you very much for everyone for being with us today. Thank you a lot. It's been a really very difficult year for all, the year 2020. We foresee a complicated year for the year 2020. However, it's going to be really very different because we will be expecting the positive evolution gradually in the recovery of the economies in the countries that we are working. We believe that we are going to improve our results, as we mentioned before, for this year. Finally, during the year 2022 and 2023, we hope to be able to increase the ability of the bank to generate profits. Thank you very much for all. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.
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