Good morning, and welcome to this fourth quarter presentation for Sbanken. My name is Jørgen Christiansen, and I assist Sbanken with Investor Relations this quarter. Today's presentation will be held by our CEO, Øyvind Thomassen, and our CFO, Henning Nordgulen. We will start by giving you the status of the business and the financials before we open up for questions and answers via telephone conference line. All reports and presentations can be found on the bank's webpages. I now give the word to our CEO, Øyvind Thomassen. Thank you, Jørgen, and a very good morning to all of you. We are today closing the chapter on 2021. We are still awaiting a final conclusion on the offer process with DNB. Just like me, I'm sure that our customers, the Sbanken organization, and our shareholders are eager to learn what the future holds for the bank. Sbanken was created as a challenger bank, and it still is. The attitude of challenging the bigger banks runs in our veins. Internally, we call ourselves the friendly rebels. It's a very strong culture and creates a strong bond with our customers. Going through a process like the one we have been in the last 10 months then impacts both us and our customers. This has hurt our margins. As you have seen, it has also shown our strength. I'm deeply touched by my colleagues' efforts in 2021, as well as by our customers' loyalty. In Norway, the general attitude now is that the pandemic is receding. Although we may still see sporadic surges in infections, we are confident that we have put the worst of the pandemic behind us. This is important for the macro environment the bank is operating in, but also when we consider the development of our own organization. Looking at the fourth quarter, we see that the growth we regained in the third quarter has continued and increased. I think back in November, we guided a growth of about 2%. We achieved a lending growth of 2.8% from the previous quarter, with mortgages contributing with 2.9% and car loans with 11.4%. This is a result of competitive rates in combination with product adjustments. Also in this quarter, transaction-related costs incurred. We classified NOK 4.7 million costs as directly transaction-related, bringing the total transaction-related costs up to NOK 17.2 million for 2021. Our net interest margin was held down by the rate guarantee we gave for 2021. This led to an unsatisfactory cost-income ratio. Together with the suboptimal capitalization, we reached a return on equity of 10.1%. The impact on return on equity is significant, as we have illustrated here, where we have calculated the effects. As you know, we have a very conservative balance sheet with a predominant share of customer lending being in the low LTV mortgages. Asset quality has continued to develop in a favorable direction. In this quarter, we reversed previous losses and recovered some previously written off loans, leading to a positive loan loss. As we've been significantly overcapitalized and had limited growth in 2021, we will deviate from our announced dividend policy. The board has proposed a dividend of NOK 6.60 per share, representing a payout ratio of close to 100% of the 2021 results. Finally, also in this quarter, we received positive feedback from customers. EPSI has for the first time asked Norwegians to rate their suppliers within savings and investments. Sbanken was top in rating in line with what we have experienced in terms of increasing net client cash flow and market share. With that, Henning, I'll leave the word to you to go through the Q4 numbers in more detail. Thank you, Øyvind. In the fourth quarter, the results were influenced by short-term effects of the ongoing transaction process and the actions implemented to retain customers and support growth. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2020, net interest income is reduced and the net interest margin is down by 13 basis points. Net fees and commissions continue their positive development and are up NOK 14 million compared to Q4 of last year. Net financial instruments were neutral in this quarter compared to a gain of NOK 20 million in Q4 of 2020. Operating costs and the cost-income ratio remain above normalized levels to a large extent directly and indirectly related to the transaction process. The return on equity was 10.1% in the quarter, but adjusting for non-recurring items and our significant excess capital, ROE was at 13.4%. It is clear from this overview that 2021 has been an extraordinary year for Sbanken, and the trend shift over the last three quarters is quite obvious. Growth has changed from negative to positive to strong. Profitability is lagging due to increasing funding rates while asset pricing has been fixed by the interest rate guarantee, which was a necessary measure to secure asset volumes last summer. Our aim in the coming quarters is to continue growing, but also to improve profitability, which is what we've always tried to achieve, namely finding balance between profitability and growth. Going more into revenues, interest income is down NOK 40 million from Q4 in 2020. In addition to the pricing effect, this was also due to a shift towards competitively priced and lower yielding mortgage products, as well as a reduction in NOK 400 million in consumer loan book. The deposit ratio remains strong, but the 3-month number has been in a rising trend. The announced repricing for all credit and deposit products will have back book effect from the first of March in this quarter, which means that we will see NIM expansion from that point. As usual, we will not comment on expected key policy rate hikes and associated pricing strategy. On the right-hand side, net fee and commission income continues to trend up. We see a positive development on all product lines, and especially within savings, card and payment processing. With the society returning slowly to a more normal situation, the outlook is favorable, although some seasonality effects between the quarters in 2022 can be expected. Turning to costs, we have discussed over the last quarters our cost target of NOK 175 million in Q4 and why this has been difficult to achieve in the current circumstances. This quarter was also influenced by several one-offs. As Øyvind explained initially, we had the NOK 4.7 million in direct transaction expenses and NOK 7.2 million aggregate for the year. Furthermore, we closed the defined benefit pension scheme for new members in the bank in 2008, but had about 40 employees still in the scheme until the fourth quarter. We have decided to close this apart from a limited number of members being of 58 years of age or more, which is in line with market practice in Norway. This will not have a significant cost effect going forward, but a defined contribution scheme for almost all employees in the bank makes the pension cost more predictable. This also resulted in a positive plan change effect in the quarter of NOK 15.5 million. We also decided to write down NOK 10 million in intangibles in the quarter and thus reduce the balance to NOK 103 million at year end. We would normally give guidance on cost targets in connection with Q4. However, given that we are still in the pending transaction, we have decided to postpone this. In the meantime, we are committed to working with cost control and cost efficiency. Over to asset quality. The cost of risk continues its trend through several quarters and Q4 ended in positive territory following minor loss reversals. We remain well below the former guiding of losses between five basis points. We also maintain a post-model buffer as disclosed in previous earnings call and visible in the notes to the financials. As with OpEx, we have decided not to update on the loss guiding this quarter, but the outlook is positive. With respect to mortgage lending, the loan-to-value levels are marginally up in the quarter, but an average of 51% in the book gives no cause for concern. Deposits grew by 9.5% year-on-year. The deposit-to-loan ratio tapered off a little in Q4 as mortgage growth returned, but still a high ratio and a very efficient funding base for providing attractive returns. Concerning capital, the bank's minimum CET1 requirement is 12.5% and the target ratio is 13%. The actual CET1 before dividends was 16.8%. We have discussed the bank's overcapitalization in several earnings calls. Our dividend policy, as Øyvind mentioned, is a payout ratio of around 50%, but we were not able to employ the capital to growth given the special circumstances in 2021. The board will therefore propose to return more capital to our shareholders, and this will be by way of the dividend of NOK 6.6 per share, equivalent to 95% of the parent bank's net profit and 99.7% of the group net profit. It is ultimately the shareholders who decide on dividend distribution, be it the over 4,500 current shareholders, or if it should end up being only one. In terms of regulation, there will be increases both in the capital in the countercyclical buffer and systemic risk buffer. If you can go back a page, please. Systemic risk buffer requirements during 2022. Whether the increase in the systemic risk buffer actually will be implemented as proposed at year end remains to be seen. As stated several times before, we fundamentally disagree with the unbalanced effect this represents for standardized approach banks. Even after the dividend payment, we do have a solid capital base backing further growth. With that, back to you, Øyvind. Thank you, Henning. We can talk a little bit about savings. We ended the year with funds under management of NOK 33.1 billion. In 2021, funds under management grew with 42.7%. That is a growth of NOK 9.9 billion, of which more than half was net client cash flow. Contributions from saving agreements continued to rise and surpassed NOK 500 million in inflow this quarter. This is a confirmation of strong growth fundamentals in the quarters to come. If we go to the next slide. Due to the ongoing transaction process, our financial targets have not been updated as we have commented on. We will update our targets after the process is concluded and get back to you on this in our Q1 presentation in May. If we go then to outlook, in December, the Norwegian Central Bank hiked the key policy rate again. This decision is expected to be followed up by an additional 25 basis points hike in March, confirming that we are now in gradual hiking cycles, a clear sign that we are moving out of the pandemic. Increasing money market rates in combination with the bank's interest rate guarantee, which was in place until the end of 2021, is likely to lead to some margin pressure in the short term. Looking further ahead, a higher interest rate environment is likely to be beneficial for the industry, but especially for banks like Sbanken with a large share of retail deposit funding. We are still awaiting the final conclusion with regards to the process with DNB and are excited, of course, to find out what the future holds. It is important, however, to emphasize that we remain independent institutions and competitors. The Norwegian Competition Tribunal has until 16th of March to decide if they will overturn the decision from the Norwegian Competition Authority. In the meantime, we are making preparations to exit this process as strong as possible. Customers represent the center of everything we do at Sbanken. Irrespective of the final conclusion of the DNB process, our mission will remain to create the best digital customer experiences of the future. With that, Jørgen, I will hand back to you. Thank you, Øyvind. We will then open up for questions from the conference call. Operator, please go ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speakers, please press five star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press five star again. We will have a brief pause while questions are being registered. As a reminder, please press five star to ask a question. There are no question at this moment in time. I will now hand it back to the speakers for any closing remarks. As there are no further questions, we end this presentation now. Thank you all for listening in.
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