At this point, I would like to hand over the floor to Mr. László Bencsik, Chief Financial and Strategic Officer. László, the stage is yours. Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon, depending where you are, and thank you so much for joining us on this midsummer day. It's very warm here in Budapest and very sunny and unfortunately very dry, we're in a way fighting with the elements. We are going to follow the usual process. We are going to show you the presentation, the presentation is also available on the website, you can download it. First I go through a reasonably brief presentation, then we'll have a question and answer session. We may just start. Going to page two, the kind of high-level features or most important messages, they have not changed, I don't think we should dwell on these. We continue to deliver on those lines. Page three, we try to summarize the situation and make sense of the numbers. In order to be able to understand the underlying business developments, we need to somewhat specify which numbers we are looking at. If we just look at only the reported numbers, that is HUF 306 billion profit after tax in the second quarter, and HUF 483 billion profit after tax for the first half, looking at the quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year developments of these numbers is not particularly insightful. One big problem with these numbers, in order to make some sense of them, is the usual one which we have been facing for a number of years, that this extra profit tax and the bank tax and in general, the supervisory fees across the group, they all have to be booked at the beginning of the year. Since the size of these numbers have grown, unfortunately, quite extensively during the last couple of years, this actually has a huge impact on the quarterly distribution of profits. On top of that, the extra profit tax keeps decreasing throughout the year as we continue to fulfill the requirements in order to reduce or kind of be able to have the discount on the extra profit tax. Therefore, we kind of show you these prorated or adjusted numbers where we show the numbers as if these extra burdens were evenly distributed between the four quarters throughout the year. Those are the numbers what you see on this page in the upper left corner in a kind of darker green color. These numbers are much more meaningful than the reported ones. They also require some further kind of consideration. The first one is due to the fact that the HUF exchange rate moved so much. They have appreciated so much during the last year. Year-on-year, in order to fundamentally understand what's going on in terms of the business performance, it may be better to look at the FX-adjusted numbers, which are not affected by the exchange rate changes. If we compare the first half of this year to first half of last year, this adjusted number shows 2% decline. In an FX-adjusted level, without the impact of the exchange rate changes, in fact, profit went up by 4% after tax year-on-year first half. Taxes increased quite substantially, and there are two sources of that increase. The bigger one, obviously, is the extra profit tax doubling from last year to this year. In the first half, it's almost HUF 30 billion plus tax. The other country where we are subject to increased taxes is Ukraine. In Ukraine, the corporate tax increased from 25% last year to 50% this year. The taxes line, which includes all of these, went up 22%. That leads us to the profit before tax numbers. On that line, again, FX-adjusted, we see 8% growth year-on-year. That's somewhat better. Even this number includes this one-off burden, which we had to book in the second quarter for the rate cap in Hungary which has been with us since the beginning of 2022. Previously, the method applied by the previous government was that in every six months, they extended the program with another six more months. We gradually step by step recognized the potential loss of this. The current situation is that legally there's no end to the rate cap. This we understand as an interim situation because discussions are ongoing between the government representatives and the banking association, and our expectation is that eventually this is going to change, and they will come up with a solution which creates a more fair system on the level of society and the solution which is actually according to the legal requirements in Hungary. We believe that the current solution is not. We have taken legal actions, obviously, and we are going to continue to do so in the future as well. Nevertheless, the best solution is if there's a fair outcome of this rate cap, which shouldn't have happened, but it has, and it should be fixed. It hasn't been done yet. Technically, we had no other choice than booking the full potential loss for the remaining maturity of these loans. That was the equivalent of HUF 30 billion pre-tax, and most of this was booked as a risk cost. If we had not had this, the profit before tax growth compared to last year would have been 11%. This kind of 11% is more or less what can be considered as a business as usual underlying performance improvement. That looks markedly better than the -7% or the -2% or the +4%, +8%. You can pick your number, but we believe that the 11 is probably the closest to the actual developments. Let's have a look at the details of the P&L lines again on this FX-adjusted manner, and this is the middle section of this slide. Net interest income year-over-year has gone up by 19%. That's a pretty solid performance. This is the result of strong organic loan growth. Last year we had 15%, and we guided for this year maybe similar level to last year. The good news is that the first half of the year was 8%, some acceleration, and even within the first six months, the second quarter was stronger than the first. That means that year-over-year, to end of June this year compared to end of June last year, the growth was 17%. Again, FX-adjusted. That's loan growth volume. On top of that, net interest margin also improved somewhat compared to last year, and these two together plus obviously the strong and even more profitable deposit growth, especially in retail, resulted in almost 20% year-over-year net interest income growth. Fees and commissions only 3% and other net non-interest income actually -21%. What happened here? Fees and commissions used to grow faster. What happened on the fees and commission lines? Two reasons. One, the bigger one is that in Russia, fees and commissions actually declined by 17% year-over-year. The other smaller impact came from the fact that we had to delay the legally possible fees and commission increases in Hungary. You may remember that we were strongly requested to voluntarily delay the fee increases by the previous government somewhere last year, and therefore those kind of annual fee and commission adjustments in retail, which we typically do in Hungary, happened only at the end of June, not in January. This has a small impact. The other income line, which was actually negative, -21%, was primarily negative, again, because of Russia. Russia, this line declined by 32%. This reflects the declining volume of this transactional business which we have in Russia, which is primarily coming from European corporate clients who make transactions, and that's reasonably high-margin business. This is declining in line with the overall decline of trade volumes between Russia and E.U. counterparties. That's a kind of external environmental trend, and this is something we are not going to fight. This we accept, and we are not proactively selling this. That in a way, this is okay. Maybe some of you might be a bit happy to see that because that shows that our Russian activity's actually declining in that sense. Our profits are also year-over-year started to decline. That's why the total income growth is only 10%, despite the fact that the net interest income growth year-over-year is 19%. That net interest income is obviously the majority of the That's the biggest part of the total income. This 10% is due to these factors which I just explained. Operating expenses went up 17%, and this doesn't look very good, to be honest, and we are not very happy about this, that operating expenses went up 17% and income only 10%. Again, despite the fact that actually the core part of income, which is net interest income, grew more than expenses, 19%. Certainly on this expense growth trajectory, we are actively working on this. This is one of the management focuses, to slow down this rate of growth and we are working hard to have a materially lower number for next year of the operating expenses growth. On the right side, you see the ratios which are related to the guidance that we have given, and we decided to change the guidance or modify the guidance on one occasion, and that's the net interest margin. Given that the fact for the first half is 461, and considering all the environmental factors, we believe it is actually quite likely that the net interest margin is going to be higher than last year. That's probably not a huge surprise to you. On all the other lines, we haven't felt necessary to modify the guidance, you can see where these numbers lead to. Maybe the risk cost rate requires some further elaboration. As I mentioned, this kind of one-off cost of the interest rate cap extension to maturity, the HUF 30 billion cost, most of it appeared as a risk cost, as a credit risk cost. Obviously that increased the risk cost rate and the risk cost line. Without this impact, the risk cost rate, the credit without Russia, this 42 basis point would have been 21 basis point. That is without Russia and Ukraine and Uzbekistan. This kind of 42 basis points, what you see here as risk cost rate for the European countries was kind of under the fundamental part was actually only 21 basis point, which is not very different from the reference period last year. Page four, it just gives more details of the P&L line. You see the numerical values as well, but I already talked about the most important column, and that is the one somewhere in the middle, showing the year-on-year FX-adjusted growth rates. On page five, you can see the technical details behind this prorated recognition of the extra charges. If you're interested, what we actually booked and reported for the first half was HUF 173.5 billion and what falls on this first half period, if we kind of evenly distribute, was only HUF 75.9. That's the explanation of this kind of difference. Before we dwell into the details of the performance of the group, let me share with you some information and some thoughts regarding the potential most exciting recent development, and that is that we finally agreed with the owners of Luminor of buying the bank. We signed an SPA with Blackstone and DNB Bank. We are obviously very excited about this. The price, obviously we are not able to disclose anything other than what available is publicly. However, we agreed with the sellers that we can actually share this one information, and as you can see here, the purchase price was set below the book value. Again, this is potentially not a new information because DNB Bank already published the expected loss on their investments in their books, and from that, some of the analysts already calculated the price or roughly the price or the price range or something like that. This is what we can tell about the purchase price with an agreement from the sellers. On our side, the rationale is, well, obviously entering three new markets, which are quite developed Eurozone markets, both in terms of penetration, in terms of income per capita, and in terms of banking services. These markets are very advanced in terms of digital services, and that's part of the excitement what we have, to be able to compete in such an advanced market. This acquisition, we have been saying that we like to be, or the optimal position in Central Eastern Europe, in the smaller countries, is to be number one or number two maximum. Luminor is not number one and number two, but we consider this potential acquisition as creating a growth platform in these countries. Obviously our intention or aim is to challenge the market leaders, and that can be done through organic growth, but that also could be done through further acquisitions. This is obviously something we take into consideration when we look at this transaction strategically. Again, we are not able to share with you insights, but we may go as far as that we find the management team very competent and capable and strong. The current management team and the IT developments, what they have achieved during the last couple of years is also very impressive and there's a visible result of that. Luminor actually recently came out with a very new, and we consider it very good and very competitive new mobile app, which we believe will considerably strengthen the ability to compete in the retail segment in these countries primarily. In the next couple of slides, you can see the publicly available information and the pro forma combination of the assets. If we were to combine these assets as pro forma, at the end of the first quarter, because those are the most current numbers which we have available publicly for Luminor, it would be like 12% of the total assets, 14% of total loan book, and 22% of total mortgage loans. Actually, mortgage is the strongest part of the Luminor business activity. Also very interesting, that if we were to combine with Luminor now, actually 50% of the loan volumes would be in the Eurozone. Again, this is potentially important not just from the primary business, but also from this perspective, maybe for rating, and it has wide potentially positive effects on us. On the following page, you see the detailed information on what available is publicly for Luminor and also for the market. You can see from the penetration numbers that These markets and the whole region seem to be more similar to developed Western European Eurozone markets than what we typically have at the moment in our portfolio. That is reflected in the higher mortgage loan penetration and the much lower consumer loan penetration. This kind of around 3.5% is closer to the most developed Eurozone countries like Germany, Netherlands and so on. Specifically, Luminor, the return on equity is not particularly strong. If we look at the last year numbers, 8.6%, this is much less than the comparable two larger and two smaller banks, which you can see on page three at the lower right corner. These are the banks which are active across the region, so directly comparable to Luminor falls behind in terms of return on equity. Why? Just from outside in, if you look at the numbers, in terms of net interest margin, they seem to do well. In fact, it's better than the market leaders. In cost-to-income ratio, they don't compare very well. That not so good performance in some aspect is always a potential opportunity to improve. This is obviously a theoretical, at this stage, opportunity to maybe improve the profitability ratio of Luminor in the future. Page nine shows this kind of the level of digital maturity of the market and the scarcity of branch coverage. As you can see, in all the three countries, Luminor itself has 18 branches only, so it's already primary digital. Again, with this new mobile app which they just came out, it's called Luminor Bloom. We believe that they will be able to compete even more effectively on the digital front. That's what we can say about the story. Obviously, we have to go through the approval process, and that is going to take some time, given that it's ECB and also the authorities in all three countries which are relevant here. It is going to be a process taking some time. We do everything on our side and on the side of the sellers to make it as fast as possible. We very much hope that the process will be objective and fair. In that scenario, we don't see any major roadblock to success. On page 10, we go back to the kind of usual series of slides starting with the story in Hungary. The Hungarian results were even more affected by these one-offs that I kind of explained. I didn't explain the quarterly decline on page three on the group level, I'm going to do it here because the reason for that came from the Hungarian numbers. There were two events or two factors here. One I already talked about, that's the interest rate cap, what we booked. Again, it was HUF 30.4 billion pre-tax and HUF 26 billion after-tax impact. All of this was obviously in the core in Hungary. On a quarter-to-quarter basis, there was another line which impacted the quarterly difference, that is on the kind of other income slide, the fair value adjustment of the subsidized loans. This is a rather large and growing portfolio. It's now more than HUF 2 trillion. It's like HUF 2.2 trillion, HUF 2.3 trillion and growing portfolio in Hungary in local currency, in Hungarian forints. It's getting closer to EUR 5 billion equivalent. We have to fair value adjust this portfolio. Also if there's any kind of swap, interest rate swap related to this portfolio, also those swaps have to be fair value adjusted, because we can only do hedge accounting. I would rather say hedge accounting cannot be done if the underlying asset is actually marked to market and on a fair value adjustment basis. This is a rather big portfolio, if the yield curves shift and change their shapes, the quarterly impact can be actually quite sizable. What happened was that in the first quarter we had HUF 20 billion +, in the second quarter we had HUF 20 billion minus impact coming from this, that created the difference of HUF 40 billion between the two quarters. In Hungary, on top of these two, we also reevaluated negatively some investment in subsidiaries, but that only has impact on the numbers in Hungary, on the local numbers. On the consolidated level, they are eliminated, so they don't appear. They actually appear positively because they create a tax shield in Hungary. The impact of this is actually positive somewhat because of the tax shield on group level. The other two obviously appear on the group level as well, the 26 and the 40, and these two were the reason behind the quarterly decline on the group level as well. They are also the reason behind the quarterly decline on the quarterly level in Hungary. The good news is that in Hungary, in the first six months, if you take the six months all together, this fair value adjustment of subsidized loans had a very small positive impact, a HUF 1 billion or so. The good news is that on a kind of year to date level, there's not much impact, but on a quarterly level there is. The other good news is that actually if you compare the first half to the last year, again, this prorated recognition of one-offs, the increase in Hungary was 15%, even including the cost of the interest rate cap. Right? That obviously comes from, A, from the improvement in the net interest margin, which you can see here on this slide, and also from the very strong growth in the portfolios. I'm going to talk about that. The growth rates of the loan portfolio and the deposit portfolio, both are very positive in Hungary. One more remark on this slide. The credit risk cost rate in Hungary was 55 basis point in the first half, which is much higher than last year. Again, the entire growth here is due to the fact that we booked most of the cost of the interest rate cap prolongation here among the risk cost. If this was not there, if it didn't happen then or it had not happened, then we would have had one basis point credit risk cost rate in Hungary. Pretty stable portfolio. Few more details in Hungary. Page 11, you can see the growth of the Home Start Program. It continues. Second quarter was just as strong as the first in terms of new applications, so far we haven't heard about modifications of the conditions. As far as we understand, the program continues. As usual, when there's a surge in demand, especially when the demand is shaped by availability of subsidized programs and subsidized loans are typically more complicated to process in terms of applications than market-based loans because clients have to prove their eligibility and the structure is usually more complicated. It requires longer and deeper, and more skilled interaction with clients. In these situations, typically our market share increases, and indeed, this happened during the first half of this year. Our market share from new production of mortgage loans went up from this kind of low 30s, which we used to have to close to 40%, which is also something we are quite happy about. Following page shows the other retail segments and how they fare. Okay. Cash loans continue to be strong. The Baby Loan program continues. Again, we haven't heard about changing conditions. There's one interesting number here. It's the market share in retail deposit. As you can see, there is some decline in the second quarter, which also shows up in the year to date numbers. We ended the year last year 41.2%, and now we went down to 40.4%. This is, in our understanding, due to a technical development that a digital bank which is active in the region started to localize its client base and they switched the IBAN numbers of their Hungarian clients to Hungarian. Apparently, in our understanding, they were actually part of the total market number at the end of 2025 and first quarter, which was in fact not quite the case because they were part, but with a zero volume. Technically, this localization and the deposit volumes of this digital player who has clients and Hungarian clients starts to appear in the overall market numbers, technically from most of it at the end of June. We don't know exactly, but our understanding is that most of these volumes appear at end of June, but maybe some part are going to come through in July, maybe August. Certainly by the end of August, we should see the impact on the total market numbers coming from this technical reporting change. That resulted in this decline. Overall saving market share increased. That is just main numbers, that's not true. Okay. Corporate, a few words in Hungary. It looks good. Again, we were probably one of the very few banks last year who started to grow, and the growth rate even last year was quite strong in large corporate and in micro small. The good news is that the large corporate growth continued into the first half. The even better news is that micro small accelerated quite substantially. We have 14% growth in six months in micro small corporate loans in Hungary. As a result of this, our market share continued to increase in terms of loans to Hungarian corporates, and now it reaches 22%. A brief overview of our non-Hungarian operations. These are the foreign group members or outside Hungary group members. The overall performance is quite stable, I would say, in terms of profitability. We will go more details into volume growth in loans and deposits in the coming slides. If just looking at the profitability, it's typically stable with some exceptions. The exception or the biggest improvement we see in Uzbekistan in terms of return on equity compared to last year, and that's due to the fact that the share of consumer loans which have higher margin than other loans increases. Plus, we managed to somewhat optimize the cost of funding, the deposit rates, and the cost of deposits. That translated into better margins, and that translated into higher earnings. On the negative side, we have Russia, where we have a trend-like decline in profitability. This is linked to the fact that what I kind of explained at the beginning of the presentation, that the fee income and other income lines decline in Russia in line with the decline of these overall activities, these transactional activities of our primarily European corporate client base. We also have decline in case of Ukraine, but that is not at all related to the business performance. As you can see, return on equity went down from the kind of high 20s to 17%, but that is due to the fact that the corporate tax doubled. Last year we had 25%, this year 50%. Even with 50% corporate tax rate, we made 17%, which is kind of okay. The other kind of smaller magnitude decline happened in Serbia. In Serbia, there is a not as drastic, but there is also a kind of rate cap primarily for consumer loans, which were introduced last year, and that to some extent it is actually contracted our margins in Serbia. That is why we have somewhat lower return on equity in Serbia than last year. Going back to the kind of cross-section slides, maybe one, briefly looking at the margins. There was not much, but three basis point improvement, at least it is positive quarter-on-quarter in the net interest margin, and you see the biggest components of that. Hungary was unusually in this period negative. The reason behind that was not that product level margins decline, it was because there is a surge in the overall total assets. The nominator 6% growth quarter-on-quarter on the balance sheet, and that came primarily from intra-group placements. Intra-group placements of the subsidiaries in Hungary increased quite substantially, and that is obviously a close to zero margin activity. Also corporate deposits have quite a surge and that also a relatively low margin liability side product, especially compared to retail. This kind of composition impact in Hungary. Uzbekistan was positive and the other four basis point came from, again, composition. The lower margin countries had lower growth, and the higher margin countries had higher growth. Rate sensitivity to the euro rate and HUF rate, they have not changed much. EUR 120 million per 1 percentage point to the euro and HUF 23 billion per 1 percentage point to the HUF rate. Looking at volume dynamics, we are quite happy to see this slide. Slide again, 8% growth in six months and the quarterly increase was 5%. There is acceleration in the growth rate compared to the first quarter. You can see the particularly high performers, highest Ukraine. Ukraine started to kind of turn on the tap and the growth rate is high. You can see the nominal numbers in terms of growth. This 18% growth in Ukraine was nominally less than 10% of the nominal growth in Hungary. I think this shows our commitment to the country, and I believe that business can be done profitably even in this environment, and we also consider this as an investment into the future of the country. Obviously the biggest country is Hungary. Bulgaria did very well, double-digit growth in six months. In Bulgaria, this is the kind of post-eurozone accession impact. In Hungary, this is primarily fueled by the housing loan subsidized program, 17% growth in the first half in six months in mortgages in Hungary, right? The only kind of laggard here is Uzbekistan. I showed you that in terms of profitability, Uzbekistan, Ipoteka already started to improve. In terms of growth, they are not there yet. The new development here is that we changed the CEO. We have a new CEO who is a Hungarian gentleman who joined in 2005, I guess, actually to my team in finance, and he is a very seasoned and very good manager. He has been the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer of Ipoteka since we acquired it. He is taking over the leadership of the bank, and especially personally me, I believe that this is going to give the right boost to the performance. I personally expect visible improvements over the course of even the next six months compared to what we have achieved so far. Deposits year-to-date, 6%, again, strong. Especially strong in Hungarian retail and in Bulgarian retail, which are very profitable. These are potentially the most profitable products across the group, that is certainly very important. Overall, a good picture. Quarterly numbers, I am not going to vow or kind of detail. Again, I think the headline is that 5% first six months loan growth was 8%, second quarter was 5%, there was some acceleration in the growth rate that we have seen. In terms of portfolio quality stable. Coverage also stable. Again, the credit risk cost rate second quarter was higher, that was due to the fact that we booked this one-off charge for the rate cap as a risk cost, most of it. In terms of capital position 17.6% tier 1 ratio. You can see that it is strong. You can see the year-to-date development of the factors and the decomposition. The kind of profit, the normalized profit generated 1.9 percentage points common equity tier 1 percentage point tier 1 equivalent. That shows the capital generation potential. Is it high? Is it low, 17.6%? I am sure there will be questions about this. We believe that this 17.6% is somewhat higher than the optimal. If you believe that the optimal is that we want to be one of the strongest in this pack, in this group of comparable banks, now we seem to be quite an outlier in the higher end. Raiffeisen, obviously, because of the large exposure in some high-risk countries, they may not be the best benchmark here. The good news is that we found a solution, and we hope that we. Not just hope. We believe we found a solution which actually creates value for shareholders, that is an acquisition. The Luminor acquisition, we believe, will bring this ratio to this range that we target compared to these banks. In terms of liquidity. Liquidity remains stable. Loan-to-deposit ratio 78%, liquidity coverage ratio above 200%, and stable funding above 150%. In the second quarter, we made a benchmark tier 2, and now we moved the benchmark up from $500 million to $1 billion. This was our largest ever issuance, and we consider it quite successful. That further strengthened not just our capital, but also our liquidity position as well. Having said that, we are still not very much leveraged. The leverage is quite low. If you look at the total wholesale debt to total assets, it's 8%, which we consider still quite low. In 2008, when the global financial crisis hit us, and hit us hard, that was actually 25%. This is we consider comparatively low still. There hasn't been much movement on the rating. However, we are potentially optimistic in terms of the future coming from two factors. One, that the economic policies of the newly elected government in Hungary are obviously, we believe, rating-friendly. Obviously they also have to deliver, not just set targets and policy frameworks. A good framework is important. Delivery is even more important. That makes us optimistic in terms of potential future rating developments. The other factor is, obviously, buying an asset in three Eurozone countries with a better rating than ours should have a positive impact on this consideration as well. Another outside-in perspective on us. I'm sure it's not a big thing for you because you are investing in many very successful large global companies. But for us, it was actually quite important that our ranking in the Forbes Global 2000 improved considerably, and now we are in part of the elite group of top 400 corporate entities. That's something we are quite happy about. Some more kind of self-marketing slides. There's not much change on this page 26, 27. We have seen these. We continue with green lending. On 28, you can see, you may remember that we set this target to reach HUF 1.5 trillion equivalent of green loan stock. We did that in 2022. We overachieved at the end of 2025, but we did not stop. We didn't want to stop. This has further developed, and now we are close to HUF 2 trillion green loan stock volume. That's getting closer to EUR 5 billion. Maybe a few words about expectations. In terms of macro, There's a volatility, I'm sure you are also very much subject to, coming from the war in Iran and the U.S. strategies regarding that difficult situation. Therefore, expectations are volatile, so to say. Plus, it's the heat and the drought, and the scarcity of water, actually, it's a current issue in Hungary. Nevertheless, we believe that it's not going to have a major material impact on the overall kind of forecast numbers for this year. We still believe that these are the expected numbers. What we see as a kind of regional trend that we have had couple of years when Southern Europe, the Mediterranean, has done better and the kind of Central or Northern Europe has done somewhat not so better, but some normalization seem to happen. The Mediterranean seem to, at least in our portfolio where we focus on, seem to kind of slow down somewhat and Central and Northern part of Europe starts to kind of perform somewhat better. There's some normalization of this growth difference what we have had during the last couple of years. Other than that, we don't see a major impact on the macro, other than what we kind of talked about, that potentially higher energy prices translate into higher inflation and higher rate environment, at least temporarily, as long as the conflict lasts in the Gulf. In terms of guidance, we decided to modify some of the guidance in one respect regarding the Net interest margin. Again, I think now we can reasonably safely predict that the Net interest margin this year is going to be higher, exceed last year, and not just to be around it. On all the other lines, we keep the previous guidance, and you can judge yourself whether the risks are up or down on those lines. There's a bunch of other cross-section slides going through each line of the balance sheet or the P&L, sorry. If you have interest or if your questions will target them, I'm going to talk about that part of the formal presentation. I'll finish here, and I'd like to ask you to ask your excellent questions. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now proceed with the question- and- answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand icon to indicate or press star nine on your phone's dial pad. The first question is from Gulnara Saitkulova, Morgan Stanley. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. When it comes to Luminor, where do you see the greatest opportunities to create value under your ownership? At the same time, what do you see as the key execution risks associated with the acquisition, both in terms of integrating the business and operating in the market where OTP has not previously had a presence? You mentioned that you aim to become number one or number two in the Baltic market. However, the Baltic banking market is highly competitive. There are well-established Nordic incumbents as well as digital challengers such as Revolut. What do you see as OTP's and Luminor's key competitive advantages in this market, and how do you plan to strengthen Luminor's competitive position over the medium term? In addition, on slide eight, you highlighted that Luminor's cost-to-income ratio is materially higher than that of the Baltic peers. What are the main operational levers you intend to pull to improve the efficiency and narrow this gap? Do you think this will require material upfront investment from your side? Are there any areas of the business of Luminor where you can see scope for improvement for the profitability? Thank you. Wow, that was a very detailed question. What I said exactly was that we would like to challenge the market leaders, and if you look at the numbers, they have 12% market share across the Baltics. In terms of loan, the number two player has 21%, so that's quite a big gap. As an aspiration, this gap should be closed or at least should decline. What else would be a target to buy a bank than to grow it, right? Again, I don't think it's a secret that we may look into other acquisition opportunities in these markets to strengthen the position of Luminor through acquisition. It's typically not easy to grow through market shares organically. That's usually a very costly exercise, nevertheless, possible. All of your other questions I have answers to, more or less, or we have strong views on those, I don't think I'm able to share with you. We have a non-disclosure agreement, so I cannot tell you anything where the information comes from other than publicly available sources. At this stage, I won't be able to have an answer because operational levers and so on and so on, and how to improve the cost-to-income ratio would mean to share with you information which I'm not allowed to do. Right? Therefore, I think in terms of communication, we have to remain on that level. If you go to page eight, I think it's very clear that there's an opportunity. If bigger banks and even smaller banks can operate with a much lower cost-to-income ratio, then there may be an opportunity to improve this. I'm not in a position to share with you where, if at all, we see opportunities, right? Because we have not closed the transaction. In terms of risk of integrating the bank, I don't see. We acquired 14 banks in the last 12 years, and many of them were in new markets. Some of them were much, much less developed in terms of the market where they operate, in terms of the supervisory environment they operate, and in terms of their operations or management. I think the risk of integrating Luminor to OTP Group is much less than the risk what we have faced in most of the cases during the last 12 years throughout these 14 acquisitions, either because the country and the entity was less developed and/or because we actually had to merge entities. There's no merger here, right? It's just we only have to include it into our group activities. Again, I think this is you may consider this sensitive, but maybe not because you know the names as well of the management team. We consider the management team quite strong. We consider this as low risk in terms of integration to the group. I'm sorry, I'm just not in a position to answer your very detailed and very pertinent questions, I must say. Indeed, these are the right questions to ask, and these were the questions what we asked ourselves when we did the due diligence and when we did the modeling of the expected financial performance. That's fair. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. The next question is from Gabor Kemeny, Autonomous Research. Hello. Can I please follow up on Luminor? I think the way you phrased it, that you were hoping for a fair and objective approval process here. How concerned are you that this may not be a case. Some of your approval processes in previous M&As like Slovenia, I think, dragged on for quite some time. We saw some press reports about OTP's Russian exposure coming up. Your views on this would be interesting. Secondly, on your point of high or advanced digital adoption in the Baltic markets, what is your point here? Does this mean that you might actually not have too many low-hanging fruits to save on costs? Would this mean that the rest of the organization can potentially learn from the more digitally advanced Baltic operations? Could this mean that, how do you think about the physical branch, the physical network of 18 branches? Is this the optimal level? Your thoughts on that would be helpful. Finally, on the Home Start Program and Hungarian loan growth topic, what are your latest thoughts about the sustainable growth rate here? I think you mentioned on a previous call when we spoke about it, that the mortgages could potentially grow at a double-digit rate even without the subsidies. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts. To what extent are we seeing a front-loading of demand ahead of the market potentially moving to standard rates? Thank you. In terms of the approval process, indeed, put it this way, the nature of OTP Group is somewhat politically sensitive in the Baltics. We openly acknowledge that sensitivity and take it very seriously. I think we have to put effort into transparently communicate what we do, how we do it, and why it should not be a problem for any of the Baltic countries. Somehow communicate the OTP story, our strength, what we have achieved, what we typically bring to a country, and what we could bring to Luminor, and also our commitment and dedication in supporting Ukraine, and taking the risk there and being potentially the most active non-local banks in terms of growth rate and everything. I think we have to make a good effort to create a transparent and fair view of the group and somehow focus on the facts and the objective parts of the story. We cannot and we don't want to be politically involved. As we have seen across Europe, cross-border acquisitions can become part of local political discussions or agendas, right? In case of much bigger countries, we have seen that happening, right? I think this is unfortunate in Europe. This is not healthy for Europe. This is there. We have to take it seriously, and we will take it seriously. Obviously, we have consulted with the local supervisors and with ECB prior to this transaction. These discussions made us believe that objectively, there doesn't seem to be any potential big roadblock to transaction. Nevertheless, it will take time and we have to manage this process or contribute to this process as much as we can. I think this is what I can say at this stage. In terms of the nature of digital development and why I think it's good, because you are as strong as your competitors make you, right? You get better and stronger by competing with better and stronger competitors. Actually, it would be a potential mistake to stay out of one of the most developed markets digitally in Europe, because then you are not part of the real happening, right? Yes, I'm sure we will learn from these markets, learning which we can apply in some other parts of the group. I also believe that we can contribute from a quite broad experience what we have in terms of different geographies and market situations and potential developments. The Home Start Program I think the first question, your question was very good, but even more exciting question, I think is how long this is going to continue. So far we don't see the end of it. We haven't heard any plans to change the structure or the level of subsidy or whatever. This is certainly as far as we can tell, this continues, right? Obviously the longer it continues. Well, if we take this commitment by the government to join the Eurozone seriously. The timeline, what they said was quite short. In four years, so by 2030, they want to be ready to join the Eurozone. That assumes a quite rapid fulfillment of criterias and a normalization of the rate environment quite rapidly. That means that the difference between the subsidized rate, which is maximum 3% for clients, and the market rate is going to be less and less different. Therefore, as we go along in the future, go more into the future, the difference should be less and less between the subsidized and the market rate. In this sense, that means that the attractiveness of the program, if it doesn't change, is going to diminish. Because this relative attractiveness is going to be less and less, and the potential negative impact should the program end or be substantially changed, be less and less. I think it's still reasonable to assume if in a kind of business-as-usual environment, which we should be in a kind of lower teens, around 10%, 15%. Having said that, if we look at what happened in Bulgaria closer to joining the Eurozone and after joining the Eurozone, we have very strong loan dynamics. We have had two, three years of more than 20% growth in Bulgarian mortgages. We are still, year-on-year, we are 35%, as fast as Hungary. Bulgarian mortgages are special because there the benchmark is the deposit rate, and that's on the market, and that's zero. It's very specific and rather cheap, but still strong growth. Bulgarian penetration level is twice as much as in Hungary. Housing goes to GDP in Bulgaria is around 14%, in Hungary is still around seven. If we believe in this accession scenario, policy scenario, then maybe even without this subsidized structure in a few years, we can get to 20-plus percent. That's what the experience in Bulgaria suggests. We'll see. For us, the more immediate question is that how long is it going to continue? We don't know. The current subsidized structure. Yeah. Fair enough. Thank you for all the color, László. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from Alex Kantarovich, Roemer Capital. Alex, the floor is open. Please unmute your microphone. Yes. Can you hear me? Yes. Loud and clear. Yes. My apology. I would like to ask about the Russian situation. You mentioned decline in profitability. I want to check if the bank in Russia handles oil and gas payments from Western Europe to Russia. If you can give some color on this. The broader question is, what are your expectations about a resumption of upstreaming of dividends from Russia? Thank you. We have been clear about this, we do cross-border transfers between European counterparties and Russian counterparties, or counterparties in Russia and European counterparties, typically serving our clients in European corporate clients in Russia within the framework of the sanction rulings and rules, and being extremely focused and rigorous on compliance. Exactly what clients and what details, I probably should not go into more details than this. Strategically, by far the first and most important target is, or goal is to fully comply, and especially to the sanction regulations. Everything what we do is within the context of detailed sanction regulations. Whenever there's a potentially sensitive transaction, we do consult with the relevant authorities outside Russia. That's what I can say on this. Dividend upstreaming, we will submit an application for dividend payments based on the first half results, we are hopeful that they will be approved and we can resume the dividend payments. We are going to try. Yeah. I hope silence means sufficient answer. Maybe we can go to the next one. Yes. The next question is from an attendee joined via phone. I open the line. You will receive an automatic message about it. Please unmute your microphone, press star six. May I ask the name. Hi. The company, please? Hi. Good afternoon. It's Jovan Sikimić from ODDO BHF. Thanks for taking my questions. I was just interested in what about, let's say, your earlier thoughts on expanding the footprint in Central Asia, if it's still valid. After Luminor deal probably will not take as much capital as initially thought, can you give us a bit of an update about the capital returns going forward, in terms of potential new share buyback this year? Thanks a lot. The attractiveness of Central Asia has not changed. We continue to consider the region attractive, and we continue to look into every meaningful opportunity in the region. Sure. That's not a guarantee, obviously, for any new event or transaction. Our interest remains, and we are going to continue to monitor these markets and seriously consider opportunities if they come up. In terms of capital returns, our approach to share buybacks have not changed. We announce them when we receive an approval from our supervisor. I think it's fair to say that we are going to submit application. As usual, we are not telling how much and when. Only on the day when we receive the regulatory approval. The other part of capital return is dividend, obviously. I think I can say as much as that this acquisition does not change our dividend aspirations, so to say, or our views on how much dividends we intend to suggest to pay. Having said that, we don't have a formal dividend payment policy and the payout ratio target. I think it's fair to share with you that our internal thinking and discussions, this Luminor transaction does not change how we think about future dividend payments. Of course. Thanks a lot. If I may add another one. Mmm. Maybe your thoughts or insights if there's something changed recently in terms of how do you see windfall tax development in Hungary by the new government? Very relevant question, indeed. We expect the windfall tax to start to decline next year and then potentially gradually go down to zero. This was a extraordinary measure for a situation which was claimed to be extraordinary. The magnitude is huge. It was just doubled last year. We believe that if the government seriously considers converging with more developed countries in Europe in terms of their economic performance and in terms of their institutional and business environment, then these sector taxes and with this magnitude are out of the question. This is not just a banking tax. There are many other sectors in Hungary which have been heavily specifically taxed. This is extremely distorting and very negative for long-term development of the country. Obviously, there are short-term fiscal constraints. We acknowledge them. We didn't expect anything for this year, but we expect the government to make a commitment during the course of this fall. Because somewhere in October, they will publish the budget for next year, but even more interestingly, the convergence plan, which is a three-year fiscal plan which they have to submit to the E.U. In that three-year convergence plan, we pretty much expect to see a gradual phasing out of at least the windfall tax. Now it's August and very warm, but I'm sure starting from September, there will be discussions between the banking association and the government on this, and I hope these are going to be fruitful and positive. Obviously, these are not our decisions. I think we have very strong arguments, but we'll see. Okay. Thanks a lot, László. Appreciate it. Sure. Thank you. The next question is from Nishchitha, HSBC Asset Management. Nish, the floor is open, you can start. Nish, we can't hear. Yes. No, that was me, László. We don't seem to hear Nish. Okay, let's move to the next question. If you wish to ask a question, please use raise hand icon to indicate or press star nine on your phone's dial pad. Yes, the next question is from Valentina Stoykova. Yes. Hi, good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes, loud and clear. Yes. Oh, wonderful. Thanks a lot for the presentation. I have a few questions on Ipoteka Uzbekistan. You mentioned that loan growth in H1 was mainly due to consumer loans. I was wondering how do you see cost of risk and the ratios migration from stage 2 to stage 3 developing into the end of the year? Also, I don't know whether you can comment on your expectations for next year as well. This leads me to my next question, which is mainly on the growth strategy for Ipoteka. I was just wondering, where do you see the main opportunities, given there is quite intense competition in the corporate lending and various caps on retail loans? My last question is, when do you expect OTP to buy the remaining stake of the government? Shall we expect any dividend distribution from this year's earnings? In first six months, consumer loan, which in our case is just cash loan typically given to payroll clients who have official declared income was 8%. This segment contributes to maybe 20%-25% of the growth in the total market of unsecured lending or lending type activities. Our problem so far has been that we have been targeting only a small segment of the total unsecured lending, so to say, in the country. The good side of that is that our risk profile is actually quite good, and profitability is good and the portfolio quality is good. We are falling behind in terms of growth. We are not capturing the full opportunity from the market growth, because we are not targeting the whole market. We are targeting just a sub-segment, which is a lower risk, lower return segment. I think it has been okay that we have done this because it's learning and we don't want to do reckless lending. Until the IT environment was not there, until we didn't have enough data and understanding of the market, and until the management was not solid enough to start to potentially penetrate riskier segments and higher growth segments, it has been okay. Now we have to broaden our scope and our aim. The acceleration I primarily expect in consumer lending or in non-collateralized, in non-mortgage retail. Which actually includes car lending in that sense. It's non-mortgage. But even in mortgage we should do better. Corporate is tricky. The potential is big, volumes are big, but our comfort level is still not very strong to start meaningful level of corporate lending. However, we should do more because now this volume has been declining, and it keeps declining, as you can see. This is too conservative. This is not the strategy. There should be some moderate corporate loan growth as opposed to decline. We are not going to. Because in corporate you could do very big deals, right? Volume-wise, we could grow very fast, but that we don't want to do. But decline is also not something we want. We have to fix this. The corporate lending and the corporate business line we have to fix. We have two potential areas to expand. One is the non-cash loan, part of the unsecured retail lending. The non-payroll. And that's a big part of the population. Now we believe that we have enough understanding and enough IT capacity and people to do better and try to penetrate that part of the market, which is the bigger part, actually, than what we have been targeting so far. The other one is to do better in corporate, but that doesn't mean that we want to blow up the corporate volumes. There should be some moderate growth, cautious actions to slowly build up that presence, as opposed to just kind of precipitous decline, what we have seen during the last three years. Dividend, yes. We seem to be able to pay dividends this year after last year's results. That's quite good, actually. Yes, we are in discussions with the government to conclude the buying of the remaining part, and we hope to make a deal which is going to be beneficial to both sides and make both sides happy. Because obviously, we have a strong interest to be in a good partnership relation. Well, in a good relationship with the government. Yeah. The next question is from an attendee joined via phone. I open the line. You will receive an automatic message about it. I have opened the line, please press star six on your phone's dial pad. Let's move forward. Let's take another try. Nishchitha, HSBC Asset Management. I have opened the floor. Please unmute your microphone. Hello? Yes. Now we hear you. Hi there. There must be some kind of a confusion. This is Nik Dimitrov of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Hi, László. I just have a quick question. Actually, a couple of questions. Okay. The first one is, I know previously you've said on earnings calls that if there is a larger acquisition, you're going to look to optimize the capital structure and potentially issue an AT1. I was wondering whether Luminor qualifies as a large enough transaction. The second one is, there's been another transaction that I think has fallen under the radar a little bit because everybody's so focused on Luminor. There is a bank in Latin America, in Paraguay specifically, called bank ueno, and I noticed that you increased your stake from 6.6%- 10% in May. I'm kind of curious. First, I was very surprised when I saw it, to be honest, because it's not your natural footprint, right? I was kind of wondering what is the long-term intention there. I guess my last question is, you have different M&A opportunities, and you opted out for Luminor. When you look at kind of Central Asia and the Baltics, and you did say this yourself, that the Baltics are very advanced and blah, blah. When it comes out to growth, it could be limited. What was it in the case of Luminor that kind of attracted your attention to kind of pivot away from Central Asia, which has been talked about previously, and kind of focus back on the Baltics? Thank you. Okay. Well, it's a large acquisition. This is the largest acquisition we've ever made. In that sense, it's large. Is it big enough for us to issue an AT1? No. It's large from our perspective, but not as large to qualify for an AT1. Uh, ueno is very exciting. We are obviously biased because we invested, but we really like the story. It started as a purely financial investment, but we started to talk with the management and go there, and they came, we very much like the story. It's a digital bank. It's a digital challenger growing very fast. 23%. They have public reports, you can look at their numbers and their story. I think it's worth looking at 23% ROE in a phase when they are growing very fast. They have amazing client relationship market share in the country. They are very strong in payments. It can develop into a story beyond even the country. We really like that story, and the more we know, the more we like it. It's a financial investment, right? It's a financial investment, and there's no immediate intention to go beyond 10%. We could consider if they wanted to. We are not a strategic investor. It's financial. We are not involved in managing the business. It also opened a window for us to look into a different continent from a very exciting digital, successful perspective. That perspective is actually quite fascinating. We're quite happy financially that we made the investment, and we're quite happy that we have this window to be able to look into the Latin American market from a purely digital challenger perspective. That's where we are. Baltics, we don't pose this question as either/or, Baltics versus Central Asia. It's not that we lost interest in Central Asia or in any other potential market where we could grow, including the footprint where we are present at the moment. The fact that we decided to buy Luminor doesn't mean that we neglect all other opportunities which come up. It's just that this time, what we saw in Luminor and the deal what we agreed, we believe that this is attractive, we create value, and we see the upside. If you show this page eight, we go back. I don't think it's difficult to see the opportunity in the Baltics, right? Because if out of the top five banks in the Baltics, the ROE is 15.3, 18, the two bigger banks, and the two smaller banks, 19 and 14.6. These are developed Eurozone markets with the Eurozone cost of capital. We find these markets attractive. I think this objectively is attractive. That's the Luminor decision, right? It's just we believe we made a good deal. That doesn't mean that we lose focus or attention on all the other opportunities which may come up in other parts of the world. Again, between 2014 and 2023, sorry. In nine years, we acquired 14 banks. That's the kind of speed of acquisitions and the level of acquisitions we are kind of used to. Not doing anything for three years was rather strange. Now, at least we have one transaction, but there's no reason not to have more. Actually, we would love to have more. Obviously, that is only going to happen if we can have a deal where we believe that we create value. It may not happen, but we keep trying. We continue to keep trying. Thank you so much. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand icon to indicate or press star nine on your phone's dial pad. As there are no further questions, I hand back to the speaker. Thank you very much for joining us today, listening to the presentations, and thank you for your very pertinent questions as well. I hope to see you personally. We are going to the U.S. We are going to the U.K. We are going to be as active as usual. Our CEO, Péter Csányi, will join us in the U.S. and to meet investors there on the two events early September. You can see us there and as always, we are at your service. Anyway, I wish you a very good rest of the summer. I hope you will have more time to relax and prepare for the second half of the year and the rest of the year, and wish you all the best and goodbye. Thank you for your participation. The conference is closed now. Goodbye.