Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Coface Xavier Durand 2024 results presentation. 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 one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Xavier Durand, CEO. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good evening to all here in Paris. It's 6:00 P.M. Thank you for joining. We're happy to report our Q3 earnings today. You will have read from the headlines that this was another strong quarter of execution for Coface. We're reporting EUR 207.7 million net profit in the first nine months, which means EUR 65.5 million in the third quarter. I think if you read through this report, you'll see the continuation of some of the trends we discussed in the past quarters, but also, I would say, some better news on the growth side as we're seeing the inflation cycle playing through. You've seen insurance revenue decrease by about 4% at constant effects without any contribution from client activity. The total revenue for Q3 has actually stabilized at just slightly below zero. We're coming from the same number in Q2, which would have been minus 4.6. Revenues from other activities are actually up 6%. What you see, which is pretty consistent with the prior quarters, is client retention still at a high level at 92.7%. It's down from the record of 23, but pricing is also minus 1.4%, in line with the historic trends. I think good news on the business information side, where you're seeing double-digit growth at 17.2% in the first nine months. Same thing we'll talk about, debt collection and then factoring is down 3.6%. That's mainly on the back of slow industrial activity in Germany. Continued very strong performance from Coface on the loss side in an economic environment which is hardening, I would say. You see the nine-month net loss ratio at 35.5%, which is almost five points better than last year. The net combined ratio at 64.4% remains very strong. The gross loss ratio is better by six points. You'll see that in the next pages where we're continuing to open the new year at a pretty high level, and we have continued benefit from strong reserve releases on the past vintages. The net cost ratio is actually going up by 3.2 points to 28.9%, and we'll explain how that's being impacted by lower revenues and the continuation of our deliberate investment strategy. Actually, we continue to invest in growth and technology, and that's really the constant since we've published our new plan, Power to the Core. So overall, I would say another strong quarter. The annualized ROATE at almost 15%, I think, is the highest we've had in the last nine years. So if we go into page five, we wanted to give you a little bit more color on the services business that we are building, as you know, as part of our Power to the Core plan. It's been intensifying for the last four years, and we believe we're developing a unique set of services to serve clients in what is now a hardening cycle. On the left here, we describe some of the value propositions that we've been building on the business information side. We're building supply chain risk management capabilities, customer risk evaluations, including portfolio monitoring, credit decisions, risk model improvement, portfolio due diligence. We're investing significantly and constantly in our data patrimony. We have now almost 220 million companies referenced in our database, which cover 200 countries. We're digitally connected to more and more information providers at this stage, 56. We've got about 15,000 clients, two-thirds of which are non-insured, so that's considerably expanding the commercial reach of Coface, if you will, and just some benchmark numbers here. We've got about 20,000 credit decisions, which we think are being taken by our clients on a daily basis, and that's growing strongly, so we've also been building more recently capabilities around debt collection. This is really based on the fact that we have one unique system now that's serving many, many countries around the world, that we are known for collecting for ourselves. We have the brand, we have access to the market, we have teams, we have clients who also need those services, and we do this at a time in the cycle when the need for collections is increasing, as you know, insolvencies are rising around the world. On the top right hand, I mean, give you some numbers here. We're 566 people at the end of the Q3 dedicated to business information. For Coface, being a 5,000-employee kind of company, this is quite significant. We are building that up. There's 220 people that are dedicated to sales. There's another 50 we've hired actually in 2024. So we're continuing to invest and expand. We're tripling in two years the FTEs that are dedicated to sales on the debt collection side. And you can see that we're making progress on the revenue side, where we have about EUR 58 million worth of revenue out of these two businesses for the first three months of the nine months of the year, sorry, with strong double-digit growth, and this is profitable. I mean, we are doing all these investments at no cost to the P&L, but the gross margin in business information that we work with is something north of 60%. So this is really building for the future, and we thought it would be helpful to give you a little bit of a read on what we're trying to do here, expanding both the capabilities, the commercial reach, and validity of Coface, at the same time building really interesting data capabilities, which will help support the insurance business. On the next page, you're very familiar by now with all the next pages. Page seven, you see total revenue down 2.1%, with services up 6%. We have trade credit insurance, as I said earlier, at minus 4%. We're not yet seeing a rebound in client activity. It's not negative anymore, I guess, but we still have weak economy and lower inflation playing through. The other revenues, as I said, is up 6%, of which business information up 17.2%, third-party debt collection almost 19%. That's a much smaller business, though, and then factoring down, mainly driven by German industrials. Nice pickup in insurance fees, which are up 8.3%, all things equal, for the quarter. On the next page, we describe the growth by region, as we usually do, and what you see on this page is really more or less the state of the global economy. Western Europe down 3.1%, improved, I would say, from Q2. Northern Europe, which is for us a big part of this, is Germany, being probably the tougher part of the world right now, with low growth and slow industrial activity. Central Europe at -3%, the exception being Med and Africa, still growing at about 5%. North America at -6%, starting to feel a little bit better. Asia-Pacific at -8%. And Latin America, improving from the past at 2.3% growth. So really not a whole lot of news. You see some of the same trends actually playing out in the different regions, compounded by the state of the economies. On the next page, nine, some better news, as I said, on the growth side. You see new business up 8% from last year and 17% from 2022. So picking up some speed here, there's more demand, I guess, in this market, which is a little bit more stressed. Retention is improving, even though it's not as strong as it was in 2023. Price is negative, but less negative, as I said, than the two prior years. Volume effect is not negative anymore. It's just kind of flattish. So we are not benefiting anymore from inflation. The world economy is kind of flat. I wouldn't call this a rebound yet, but it's certainly better than having negative activity. On the loss side, on page 10, you see the loss ratio before reinsurance, including claims handling, at 33.7%, so very much in line with the prior quarters. I think clearly, when you look at the market and you see that insolvencies are well above 2019 in most countries. So clearly the cycle has hardened. We see the number of claims continuing to increase. We see bigger insolvencies than before. So clearly this is a market which is getting a bit tougher. The economy is kind of slow. The monetary policies are tightening and companies' treasuries, and you probably see it in the earnings reports that have been released over the last few weeks. Companies' treasuries are being put under more pressure. There's no change in our reserving policy. You see we opened the year at 78.4. We still benefit from 45% reserve reversal. So past claims experience remains strong, and I think we continue to execute in a tougher market. You see on the next page the total years, 2021, 2022, 2023, and then the first nine months of 2024 by region. There's really not a whole lot of news, quite frankly, on this chart. Very stable, and improvement in Latin America, which had been the subject of our attention last year, probably the smallest and most volatile region of Coface. But pretty much everywhere else, the story is pretty much in line with historic trends. On page 12, we describe the same numbers, but this time by quarter, and the four largest, more stable regions of the world at the bottom are kind of pretty much, again, in line, so not a whole lot to talk about. Same above with more volatility, as I said, in Latin America, but that's under control, and in Asia doing actually very well. On page 13 is a cost story, so if you recall, at Q2, we had shown more than 6% growth in the cost base. Q3 on Q3 last year is up 3.3%, so there again, better, I would say, comparables to last year. We see the gross cost ratio before reinsurance at 33.7%. You see that on the top right. And if you go to the bottom right, you see that the gross cost ratio between 2021 and 2024, after reaching a record in 2023 at 30.5%, is now up from last year. Now, the increase in the cost ratio, pretty much like the last quarter, is driven by three things. One is we have negative premiums, so that's impacting about a third of the mix. We continue to invest deliberately in BI and in other services and in our development, so that's also 1.7 points. And then there's cost inflation that stems from the last couple of years of inflation, particularly on wages and outside services, which is partially offset by the product mix and the increase in sales and services. So better news, I would say, but still a situation where the costs are growing higher than the revenues. We think it still makes a lot of sense for us to continue to invest and to build for the future, so that's what we're doing on the back of a strong performance. Now, I'm going to turn it over to Phalla to take us through the next few pages, as we usually do. Thanks, Xavier. Good evening, everyone. So let's go to page 14 on the reinsurance side. Honestly, it's very, very similar to what we saw last quarter in terms of cession rate. So with the premium cession rate at almost 28% and the claim cession rate at 22%. And here, again, I think for this quarter, almost EUR 30 million pre-tax is going back to the reinsurers with a total of EUR 95 million year to date. Net combined ratio of 64.4%. This is an improvement compared to last year, the same period, with an increase in net cost ratio, as Xavier explained, and a decrease on the net loss ratio. If we move to page 16, so financial portfolio, the mark-to-market of our investment portfolio is now reaching EUR 3.2 billion. The asset allocation has slightly changed. We have increased a little bit the allocation in bonds with a higher duration and higher yield, while I think investment in real estate is exactly the same at 5%, equity as well at 3%. If we look at the recurring income, which is almost EUR 71 million, this is what, 50% more than what we had last year. And I think that at this stage, we are benefiting fully from the interest rate increase since two years. The new money is now invested at 4.3, which is slightly below what we had in Q2, but still at a very comfortable rate. In terms of realized gain, 8.4, what needs to be highlighted here is, of course, the investment in real estate. I think up to Q2, we booked some negative mark-to-market. What we saw in Q3, that we haven't booked much. I think it's very, very small amounts of negative mark-to-market, so on this front, we think that it's stabilized in terms of the value of our investment in real estate. The IFE expenses at minus 25, and of course, we booked additional almost EUR 2.8 million of hyperinflation, especially in Turkey and Argentina. This leads us to a nine-month net income of almost EUR 208 million, with an operating income up 15%, moving from EUR 273 million to EUR 315 million. On tax rate, 27%, very stable with what we had in Q2. What we are highlighting here is that we expect limited impact from the French budgets of the fiscal bill, even if it's not final yet, but at this stage, we will not be impacted, and this leads us to a net income increase by almost 10% compared to last year, with a comfortable, I think, Q3 net result. Book value at 14.1. I think we're now trading above the book value, which is good news. If we move to the next page, page 18, so return on average tangible equity, we look at the IFRS equity moving from EUR 2.05 billion to EUR 2.1 billion. Of course, we paid our dividend. We accounted for our nine-month net income. And then we have a positive mark-to-market, especially on our bond portfolio, due to the interest rate decrease. This leads us to a return on average tangible equity increase from 13.4 to 14.8, with a strong contribution of financial results. Xavier? So just to wrap it, I mean, it's pretty short because I guess the story is pretty straightforward this quarter. Another set of strong results, I always qualify it that way, I guess, as the credit cycle continues to harden. 64.4 combined ratio is well below or through the cycle targets. We continue to invest deliberately. I try to show that on the second page of the pitch. The Q3 revenue is now almost stable versus last year, as the biggest part of the disinflation headwind is behind us, and we continue to see some really nice growth on services. You saw that we now fully benefit from the uptick in the rates in our investment income. We've been talking about this for a couple of years now. I guess at 14.8%, our ROATE is the best we've had so far. So really strong, I would say, first nine months of the year. And I think what's encouraging is the services strategy continues to deliver double-digit growth in what we consider to be a structurally profitable business. I mean, clearly, we're doing this at no cost to the P&L and obviously no profit to the P&L, but it's really an investment for the long term. We're seeing double-digit growth again for BI and for debt collection. And we continue to expand our patrimony and our assets of being technology or people or knowledge or expertise in the space. So that's pretty much the story for today. Shorter call, I guess, than usual. We're very happy to take questions you might have, and I'm going to turn it back to the operator to open up the lines. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. We will now take the first question. From the line of Michael Huttner from Berenberg, please proceed with your question. Thank you very much, and congratulations on the outstanding results. It's amazing. I had lots of little questions. But the main one, the two main ones, the first one is the insolvencies are higher now than 2019, but your loss ratio has never been better or has been better, but it's certainly better than back then. I mean, I can understand where the numbers are today, but there's a good disconnect between the market as a whole and Coface. Can you maybe remind us or remind me what's driving this? And then my second question is on the business information. The gross margin of 60% is fantastic. I just wondered, can you explain, and you say it's no cost to the P&L, so my guess, and this is a very rough guess, is there's a roughly EUR 50 million gross margin, give or take, for the year. We have roughly 560 employees. If I do the math, I get to an average salary, one covering the other of EUR 85,000 or something. Is my math correct, or are these employees also doing work or allocating costs to other parts of the business? I just want to understand if there's at all any overlap between these two activities. Thank you. All right. So I think I'm going to take those two questions for you guys if you don't mind here. On the first one, look, we've been describing our stance, our strategy, our execution for years now. I'm almost nine years complete in this business. So we always said we're going to take a very value-creation-oriented approach to underwriting. We are going to underwrite with courage and discipline, and we are continuously improving our tools and processes, right? So it is true that we continue to deliver strong risk performance. The market is hardening. It is what I call normalizing. I've been describing this for three and a half years now. But it's normalizing in a slow and continuous way, which allows us to manage, I would say, the risk in the manner that you've seen. So that's pretty much all I can say is it is good to see the performance of the business in that environment. Another environment could also lead to a different outcome, but I think that's what we've been able to achieve. On the BI side, I mean, the math is not completely, what can I say, disconnected from reality. You have to factor in the fact that we have technology costs as well and services that we buy from the outside. But essentially, we do employ about close to 600 people. They are mostly employed, not completely, but there's a mix between mature markets and some developing markets. So I don't want to get into a nitty-gritty discussion on the P&L, which we're not willing to disclose here, but basically, with that gross margin, we're paying people, and we're paying some technology and some fees to outside services. And that's basically the way it works, right? Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Amalie Zharkovic from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Yes. Hello, good evening. This is Amalie from Deutsche Bank. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I was just wondering, I have two. First, sort of do you have any color on costs going forward? And I'm thinking here in particular on the sort of cost inflation side and the premium growth component. And then second, I mean, sort of what, if anything, are you expecting as a result of the sort of U.S. election on your business model? Are you sort of thinking about anything related to the tariffs? Or yeah, I was just curious to get your thoughts on that. Thank you very much. Yeah. So thanks for the question, Amalie. I mean, I guess we've been very consistent in this call about not giving forward-looking statements. So unfortunately, that will apply again, as frustrating as it might be. I mean, I think what we're trying to describe on this call is how the cycle plays. And I'll just qualitatively here describe. We had a surge in inflation, which the way we bill our clients is we bill them a percentage of our turnover of their turnover, sorry. And so when the inflation strikes, the first thing we tend to see is actually an increase in our revenues. And then, like every business, we have to pay people and buy services from the outside. Then we get hit by inflation in turn, and that drives our costs up. And they tend to be sticky because those increases cannot be reduced further. At this stage in the cycle, what we've seen is clients' turnover has actually started to decrease because commodity prices and things like this have started to come down. We're not seeing the top-line benefits that we used to see, say, a year ago or a year and a half ago. At the same time, we still have the costs incurred from the inflation years that are still hitting us, but the comparables are changing as time passes and inflation comes down. The same elements are going to play through in the cycle. I think that's really what you see at play in our numbers. In terms of the U.S. election, look, anybody's guess here in terms of what's going to happen, both in terms of the election result on one hand, and second, in terms of what that means for economic policy. So I would not try to design a scenario. I think we have to look at a range of issues, at a range of scenarios, at a range of possibilities. So could there be more tariffs? Yeah, there could be. Could there be more geopolitical stress? Yes, there could be. Could there be resolution of some conflicts? I guess there could. But at this stage, we're less trying to plan for one or other thing than trying to stay very close to the action because in our business, we're able to affect the level of risk that we take on a, I would say, four- to nine-month basis. And I think what's important for us is to stay very close to the action and help our clients one by one steer through whatever's going to happen. That's what we do. That's why we collect millions of data points, and we make about 13,000 credit decisions per day, just to give you the nature of our business. So tomorrow, we're going to make 13,000 credit decisions, and the day after tomorrow, we're going to do 13,000 again. Depending on what happens and what policies are being put in place, it's going to take a little bit of time, clearly, right, for the world to change. We will alter those credit decisions and positions we have on different companies as we see fit. And our ability to do it in a timely way, in a detailed way, in a granular way, sticking with the reality of whatever is going to happen is what's going to determine our performance. So I hope that helps. We're not trying to paint the world with a big brush because I think if you try to do that, you're probably going to get it wrong, and you wouldn't even be able to determine the timing anyways. So many, many things can happen out there. Thank you. I hope that helps. Yeah, thank you. Not an easy question to answer. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Benoit Valleaux from Oddo BHF. Please go ahead. Yes, good evening. Thank you for taking my question. A few questions on my side. Maybe the first one is regarding to client activity, which is still close to zero. You mentioned the fact that inflation headwinds is now over. What can we expect, Amalie, for next year? I mean, based on what you see from your client, based on view of your economist, I mean, any color, any comment on that would be very helpful. And second point also, maybe in terms of pricing trends, do you see any reason why price decrease, let's say, should be, I don't know, higher than usual next year or, well, you're still stable at minus, well, 1.5%? The second question is regarding reinsurance. So you've been very profitable this year. It may be a bit too early, but what do you expect in terms of pricing for the next renewals in terms of reinsurance, and my last question is related to Western Europe. If I look at your slide, I think it's slide 12, your loss ratio is still excellent, but I mean, there is a slight deterioration in Western Europe in Q3. Just wanted to know if there's any specific things to be mentioned in terms of country, sector, certainly frequency. I mean, okay, just to understand if there's something specific beyond that. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question. This is usually the time of the year when we start getting questions on reinsurance. The only thing I would tell you is it's a bit early because the negotiations take place at the end of the year. You're probably well aware of the stuff that the reinsurance market's going through right now with storms and floods and rain and all sorts of stuff. So part of that plays into this. The credit cycle plays into this, all sorts of stuff. So that's an end-of-the-year discussion that we haven't had. In terms of your two first questions, and then I'll pass it over to Phalla for the last one on the Europe loss ratio, but where are we going in terms of client activity or pricing? I think we've described this. I mean, again, we're not going to make forward-looking statements here, but we come from a high-inflation world with obviously high client activity to a lower-inflation world with actually negative client activity for some time to kind of zero in the last quarter. I think what you're seeing here is some of the world economics playing through. It will depend on price of commodities. We tend to be a little bit more skewed towards commodities than the general GDP mix. It will depend on industrial activity because we tend to be a little bit more focused on industrials than on services. It will depend on Europe because we tend to be 50% Europe-centric. So there's a lot of moving parts, I would say, in the mix. We see the world economy kind of slowing, but as you know, this is the delicate phase of monetary tightening where it's now coming to reality. The economies are starting to slow. The central banks are starting to ease the endgame, and the governments are running a bit out of money. So you've got all these factors playing against each other, and we'll see where that lands. So far, it seems like they've managed to engineer some kind of a soft landing, and we already talked about the geopolitical uncertainty, the social unrest, or uncertainty in different countries. I think there's a lot of moving parts. But these are the things that will drive, I think, the level of client activity. When it comes to pricing, I think the market's hardening a bit, and you see that actually in the last three years' history of pricing. We went from very negative last year to this year, a little bit better. We're pretty much on the, I'd say, long-term mark here that we've observed for the last 10 years. Minus one and a half is kind of what this industry has been doing year after year. So nothing exceptional. It's also a factor of the level of competition, which remains very strong, and the level of demand in the market, which is improving. So I mean, anybody's guess as to where this is going to go, but we're pretty much on the long-term historic trend here. Phalla, you want to? Yeah, I'll take the first one. I think on the Western Europe, we don't see the risk increasing. It's just the fact that in Q2, we have released some reserves related to this region for cases for which the risk has disappeared. So we released some reserves, and this is why you see this increase, which is much more related to the Q2 reserve release than the risk really increasing in Q3. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Michael Huttner from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. Just a little question. The first one is, but the first one's not so little. Hannover Re, about a month ago, held an investor kind of afternoon, and they highlighted the growth in their insurance-linked securities business, effectively where they're providing clients with reinsurance cover but tapping outside capital, so not using their own capital. I thought many years ago, 10, whatever, 15, when they started this business, that they were kind of cannibalizing their own business. In fact, they're not. They're kind of the core and the new business grow together. Is this how you see business information services? In other words, that although the way I understand it, a client can have a choice of doing it yourself by buying the information or relying on Coface, in fact, the two are kind of complementary? Just to get a feel for it, thank you. And then the other question is just on numbers. I didn't catch there was a figure on Turkey and Argentina, and I really didn't catch it. Sorry, Phalla. Thank you. Yeah, the second one will be Phalla's to answer. But while she thinks about the answer, let me—I mean, we've heard a lot of people say business information is actually competing or will compete against insurance. I don't think so. Of course, it serves the same purpose, but not everybody needs or wants insurance. Not everybody can deal with the information. You've got different market needs. The penetration of insurance in the world is still very limited. I mean, we're talking about covering 5%-7% of the global receivables, so there's plenty of space, which means that most everybody is actually not using insurance and doing something else, and most everybody is somehow buying information or using information to watch their book. So to me, these two things are complementary, and plus, we use the information for insurance. Getting better at information makes a ton of sense if you want to do insurance yourself. I hope that that's the way you - that answers the question you were asking. I'm going to turn it to Phalla for the Turkey and Argentina point. Yeah. Michael, this is not new news, right? It's the application of IAS 29 on hyperinflation. So we already used to book some negative impact since last year. What I'm mentioning in this quarter is that, of course, the inflation is coming down. So what we booked in Q3 is probably less or probably less significant amount or negative amount than we used to book in the past quarters. I understand that. It's just I didn't catch the numbers. Okay. I'm sorry. I think the total amount for year to date is EUR 10 million, and we booked for Q3 only EUR 2.8 million. Thank you so much. Thank you, Phalla. Sorry about that. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone. There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Xavier Durand for closing remarks. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for logging in. Thanks for taking time out of your schedule. I mean, you're giving us 20 minutes back, which we'll put to good use, so that increases our productivity. We will be, again, meeting on, I think it's February 20th. 20th. For the full-year results. So looking forward to that discussion, and I wish all of you a great fourth quarter. Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.