Thank you operator. A very good morning to this fourth quarter presentation. With me today, as usual, our CFO, Christer Johansson, and our Head of Investor Relations, Andreas Lindblom. Good morning. Good morning. Moving to page number four, which is the highlights for the fourth quarter. Let me just use this opportunity to say that in a year very much dominated by the pandemic, I am extremely proud of the work and the progress that's been made in Hoist Finance. Of course, most importantly, we have been able to continue to support our customers with literally all employees working from home in basically almost a year now. We have a lot of personal best or all-time highs in terms of operational improvements over the last year. Let me just call out a few of them. We have a self-service ratio at 20%, and we have increased output productivity, and reduced salary cost per FTE. We have improved employer engagement quite a lot, increasing the score in our Great Place To Work survey from 68% in 2019 to 77% in 2020. That's actually a significant increase. We are not only an asset-heavy business, we are also a people business. I'm very happy and very proud of this improvement. Perhaps needless to say that the most important thing that happened in Q4 actually happened in Q1, when we, last week, last Friday, announced our partnership with Magnetar Capital, and by that also launching the next phase of our securitization program. Have in mind that this scope is for new acquisitions, so it's forward-looking, and it's Pan-European, and basically fixes and cures our regulatory challenges. I will talk more about this on a separate slide. In terms of financial highlights, you can see to the right on that slide, let me mention a few things. Our balance sheet is robust. Our CET1 is at 10.8%. Our collection performance in the quarter remains resilient at 105% versus active forecast. With the current pandemic and the slow throughput in the courts, we do find it prudent nevertheless to do some extra impairments. As you will see in a second, the cash flow remains very solid and also close to all-time high levels. The portfolio acquisitions were lower than we expected, perhaps, but the market outlook is very positive going forward. I will comment on this in a separate slide. Moving to the next page, page number five in the deck. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this slide, just underscore that, as you clearly can see, that the fourth quarter do show strong cash flow generations. Page number six is kind of a slide that we used before, and on the green slides, you will see profit before tax, adjusted for impairments and items affecting comparability. As you can see, the underlying earnings is very stable. Actually, despite a shrinking book, the fourth quarter is even better than the third quarter. My view is this is a very robust and resilient picture. Page number seven talks about how we're executing on the four pillars of our strategy, and you can see the four pillars to the left. Let me just say that in 2019, we made huge strides in France and Poland with significant increased market share in those two very important markets. It's very good to see that in 2020, we're able to improve our operations in the very important German market. German actually became our most active market in 2020. On effective and efficient, we have ramped up our nearshoring during the year, and currently we have 150 competent and passionate colleagues in Romania. In digital, we are certainly getting our house in order as far as infrastructure simplification, integration, and industrialization is concerned. Right now, 85% of our systems and data is in the cloud. That's a significant achievement during last year. On the banking platform, the securitization is of course, the key achievement. I will talk more about that on a separate slide. As you can see from slide number eight to the left, you can see the transaction volumes from banks in Europe, as far as non-performing loans is concerned over the years. As you can see, 2020 was really a low year, almost down to or actually below the 2013 levels. We know that, of course, the provisioning and level of provisionings are increasing in banks during the pandemic, and the market outlook is quite healthy. On the right-hand side of this slide, page number eight, is the underwritten IRRs calculated as 12-month averages. As you probably can work out from the graph, 2018 was the low point, but there has been an improvement since. Having had the two years now in a row with relatively low investment volumes, 2019, of course, with the regulatory headwind and 2020 with the pandemic, we have had two low years with investments. Consequently, the 2018 vintage is having a heavier impact on our returns and otherwise would have been the case. Out of our total book, the 2018 vintage accounts for almost 25%. Yes, I would agree 2020 investments is low, but for us, of course, it is more efficient now to use our new securitization structure. With a positive margin outlook in the quarters ahead, that's also important to have in mind. Let's move on to page number nine in this deck. What I really want to say here is that we are making really good progress on our cost savings. Rather than talking about individual projects, I thought I could bring out the development in three markets. As you can see here, France as a country used to be loss-making. Now earnings before tax is at a strong SEK 106 million. Strong improvement also in Germany, and more than doubles the profits. Really happy with those two markets. On the other hand, what is also equally clear is that we are struggling in Spain. We are not alone with the challenges in the Spanish market, but let me also say that we believe in the long-term opportunity in Spain, and that we can turn things around the way we have done with other markets before, and which is clearly seen from this page. Let me move to the next page, which is about helping businesses survive and our commitment to ESG. We have a partnership with TEAM U, and TEAM U is a nonprofit that supports SMEs in preventing bankruptcy and support bankrupt entrepreneurs to rebuild their lives. This partnership is two-folded. We help reducing the impact from financial exclusion in society, but we're also helping our SME customers by channeling them to TEAM U where they can get specialized support. The partnership and the commitment to TEAM U is for the long- term. In Q4 specifically, we supported the development of a TEAM U online platform. Page 11. I promised a couple of times today that I wanted to talk you through securitization. Let me start off by taking you through the timeline. In December 2018, the Swedish FSA implemented a new interpretation of how risk weights should be applied for unsecured NPLs, increasing the risk weight from 100% to 150%. This, of course, wiped out part of the equity, and our CET1 was reduced from 13% to 9.7%. In the first week of January 2019, it was announced that EBA was about to introduce a so-called NPL prudential backstop, which of course, put our growth at risk. A couple of weeks later, we communicated in our Q4 earnings call, basically two years from today, that we had identified securitization as a key solution to mitigate the negative consequences of these two important regulatory changes. In the second quarter of 2019, we announced our first unrated back book securitization, and in the third quarter of 2019, we announced the second structure. In the fourth quarter last year, the Swedish FSA assessed and concluded that significant risk transfer was achieved in Hoist Finance's securitizations. Now in the first quarter of this year, we are launching a cross-border front book securitization structure. Let me be clear, this new structure ticks the right boxes. In my view, this removes NPL backstop challenge. It resets risk weight to around 100%, hence being ROE accretive. As a point number three, sets us back to a path to growth. The key elements in the structure should be no surprise. Magnetar Capital acquires the mezzanine and junior notes, and Hoist Finance will retain the senior notes. Magnetar's EUR 150 million commitment translates into an unsecured NPL purchase price of EUR 1 billion over an investment period of two years. With that important news, I hand over to Christer for the next section. Good morning. Turning to page 13. Obviously, as we close out 2020, there's no denying that this year was severely impacted by COVID. Not only did our results suffer from impairments amounting to more than SEK 450 million, they also suffered as a result of acquisitions being postponed, which mean we closed the year with a book that is 13% lower than at the beginning of the year. Had the book been flat, we estimate that results would have been around SEK 140 million higher. Although obviously a theoretical scenario, one can see that adjusting for this, returns in 2020 would have been more or less on par with 2018 and 2019. With that context in place, let's have a closer look at Q4, starting with the P&L adjusted for items affecting comparability on page 14. I mentioned the smaller book. This comes through on the income line. Despite solid collection levels, the quarter came with impairments of SEK - 49 million, and I will explain this apparent contradiction in a minute. Within net results from financial transactions, we saw a sizable positive effect from FX hedging. This is partly a reversal from previous quarters. On the back of increased legal activity, we did, as expected, see an increase of total expenses versus Q3. Taking a longer perspective, the favorable trend is sustained, as we will illustrate on a later page. All in all, profit before tax in the quarter, adjusted for items affecting comparability ended at SEK 108 million. Similar to the full year results, this is a level significantly impacted by COVID-19. Turning to page 15 and our reported figures. Q4 was low on acquisitions, but it was quite busy in other ways, and this level of activity came with a few items affecting comparability. Adding to my comments on the underlying results on the previous page, I want to highlight three such items, which are included in the reported numbers. First, we had a SEK 22 million negative impact in connection with restructuring the 2021 bond. I view this as good cost because as you will see, this sets us up well for 2021. Secondly, we took a provision of SEK 9 million related to a legal dispute in Spain. Thirdly, the signing of our partnership with Magnetar, which Klaus-Anders described, mean that we currently don't expect to pursue further securitization of the back book. We had accumulated SEK 9 million of costs on the balance sheet related to such efforts. Thanks to the good progress on our front book program, those costs now seem redundant, and they are being written off. This adds up to SEK 40 million in negative items affecting comparability. With those included, reported profits before tax amounted to SEK 68 million in the quarter and SEK 82 million in the year. Moving on to page 16 and looking at collection performance. The gradual recovery has continued for the unsecured book, which is what we show here. Q4 collection corresponded to 103% measured against the active forecast. The total book came in at 105%. In many countries, December was actually the strongest month in the quarter, and this is normally not the case given holidays, so I read this as a good sign for 2021. As you remember, overperformance is accounted against the total impairment line. Collections at 105%, you would, all else equal, expect to see, say, SEK 70 million on that line. The other component, which is also accounted against the total impairment line, is portfolio revaluations. Those reflect changes to the future projections. With a net amount of SEK 49 million for those two items combined, you will understand that we have a negative contribution from revaluations in the quarter. This is more about timing of collections than the total amount of collections, with legal throughput being a key factor. We had anticipated that the court systems would be operating at close to full speed by now. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as illustrated on page 17. I should mention that legal throughput is not an area where statistics are easily found. As one of Europe's biggest DP companies, we can obviously monitor how our own cases progress through the various legal systems. Taking that approach, we estimate that the throughput is still some 40% below normal levels. This obviously means a delay in future collection, and this is particularly true for secured assets. Considering the time value of money, those delays translate into impairments, which in Q4 amounted to a total net amount of SEK -49 million. Turning to page 18. In the cost program, Q4 has not been about starting new initiatives. We have a large number of projects going, more than enough probably. Our focus in Q4 has therefore been to extend the rollout across the group and to capture benefits therefrom. To give two examples, we have in Q4 ramped up the staffing in Bucharest, allowing for a further shift of workload. We've also expanded the functionality within our self-service portal, and we've rolled this functionality out to additional markets, supporting the good improvement in digital collection rates that Klaus-Anders mentioned. These are both topics that we will come back to in our Capital Markets Day in a few weeks. Turning to page 19. Expenses in Q4 totaled SEK 592 million, and SEK 570 million after adjusting for items affecting comparability. As mentioned already in the Q3 earnings call, a pickup in legal expenses was expected, and legal expenses came in SEK 24 million higher versus Q3. Had all courts been fully operational, this would probably have been even a bit higher. Now, leaving legal expenses aside, the underlying costs remain close to Q3 levels, and we see a continued favorable development in staff cost, where our mix of staff is moving towards lower cost countries. In the quarter, that saving was partly offset by SEK 5 million temporary increase in depreciation. Moving on to page 21. When it comes to funding, a key event in the quarter was the new issue, which we did in November. The primary purpose of this exercise is not to add funding. It's about proactively managing the maturity profile. We issued EUR 200 million under our EMTN program. This had a four-year duration. The issue was done at par with the 3.375% coupon. This issue attracted a good mix of European investors. Although yields have come up since our previous issue, we note that few, if any, of our peers can issue at this level. In connection with this new issue, we also tendered a bit less than half of the 2021 bond. That triggered a bit of cost as mentioned. With this exercise done, we are all set for delivering on the 2021 business plan. Zooming out one step on page 22, we illustrate the complete funding, including the deposit side. As you can see, total funding volume is flat. The increase in cost levels stem from the larger share of market funding, which of course cannot match the very low cost of deposits. On the other hand, we see great value in having a broad toolbox, and this gives us a lot of flexibility in matching assets and liabilities. At the bottom of the page, it may seem contradictory that interest expense to book was flat, but one should remember that the new issue was done late in the quarter. Had we had a full quarterly effect, the interest expense to book would have been around 2.7%. Finally, a word on capital and liquidity on page 23. As Klaus-Anders commented upon, new volumes in Q4 were low. That boosted the current capital and liquidity position somewhat. That's fine. We have good reason to remain confident on future supply, and we are well- positioned to capture our fair share of those opportunities. With that, I hand back to Klaus-Anders for summary comments. Thank you, Christer. Let's go to the summary page and key takeaways. Two years ago, I shared with you the tough news that two regulatory changes were wiping out parts of our equity and questioned the validity of our business model. We have now established robust and sustainable structures that show that our business model is intact, relevant, and competitive. We have improved our operations over the last couple of years, and we are leading the way in digital. Now we are using the tools that the banking license provide and are offsetting the negative consequences of these regulatory changes. In short, we remain the company in the industry with the lowest cost of funding, and we are embarking on a path of growth at a point in time where the market outlook is the most promising that I've seen as a CEO in this industry over the last seven years. With that, we are so much looking forward to talking to you again shortly and showing you our developments at our Capital Markets Day on the 25th of February. With that wrap up, let's then move on to Q&A. Over to you, operator. Thank you. If you wish to ask an audio question, you may do so by pressing zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Once again, please press zero one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. There will be a brief pause as we wait for your questions to be registered. Our first question comes from Borja Ramirez from Citibank. Please go ahead with your question. Apologies. Our next question comes from Ermin Keric from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. Already now apologies, it's not only you having technical issues, so I also dropped out for a while if any of the questions are sort of coming back to things you've already touched upon. My first question was on the deployment you expect for 2021 and partly 2022. Do you expect to deploy more of the, than the EUR 1 billion over the coming two years? How much could come in 2021? Right. I guess what I can say there is that, of course, the program with Magnetar is for unsecured NPLs. On top of that, of course, you got secured NPLs and performing loans. In 2018, we invested for SEK 8 billion, and I see no reason why we cannot get back to a level, call it similar to that level. Do you expect to see a pickup already in the start of the year, or do we need to wait until the second half of 2021 before we see a pickup? Yeah. The market outlook going forward is very promising, and I think everybody is seeing that, and I can see that our competitors are sharing the same view. The market opportunity is there. I think it's a little bit hard to gauge exactly when more of the volume is coming to market. I think the Q4 was a low quarter and a slow quarter for us, in many ways. We were kind of aiming for replacement CapEx, but with the knowledge that we were about to get in place our securitization structure, we didn't push it too hard because we felt it was more efficient to use that new structure. Currently, I would say the market is all right. Some of the deals that were pushed out from Q4 were pushed into this quarter, so hopefully even this half year that we're in now will be better than what we saw towards the end of last year. Got you. On the cost side. When you presented Q3 numbers, you also gave us an outlook of how much restructuring charges you would book for the full year 2020. I just noticed you didn't book the residual now in Q4. Should we read in anything in that things are progressing a bit slower or that you won't require as much restructuring costs in total? In long- term, we've not changed our assessment of the potential in the program or the cost associated with it. In Q4, our focus was to leverage the work that we had already done. There wasn't a lot of new items coming onto the agenda. For 2021, surely we have a lot of work to do, and some of that will come with one-off costs. Okay. I got you. On the Magnetar agreement, could you share any color on how much the transaction cost will be in Q1 related to that one? Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, we've just entered into this partnership, and we are looking forward to deploy it as fast as possible. To what extent that will be the case in Q1, I think that's a little bit early to tell. One should remember that a fair share of the transaction cost associated with this would also be capitalized on the notes. It's not necessarily that it would all hit the P&L immediately. If I could add something here, Christer. Of course, this is a significantly more cost-efficient structure than the previous one. The first one was more expensive. It was the first, and now we have been able to build on our knowledge and expertise and use our own team to a much higher degree. The costs here are significantly lower, and the structure is much more cost-effective than the previous one. Okay. Thank you. Perhaps just one last question. You mentioned the 20% self-service level. Is that on the group? And you also mentioned some promising digital collection strategies in U.K. and France to be rolled out. Is that in excess of the previous self-service portal you've been talking about? Yeah. The digital collection or the self-service ratio, as we prefer to call it, is 20% for the group. It's, of course, for the amicable unsecured NPL portfolios. It's not for secured NPLs, and I think we have showed you that funnel before. We are really happy about this improvement, specifically because 2020 was a year where we acquired much less, and it is harder to convert, call it, analog customers to become digital when they haven't been digital from the beginning. It's actually what we see is that we are acquiring new portfolios. It's easier to start off with the customers going digital from the very beginning. We see some very promising, call it, all-digital portfolios, in the U.K. specifically. The U.K. is certainly our most advanced and mature market. Basically what we mean by that is that it's basically digital only. There is basically very little manual work at all for those portfolios. We are definitely looking forward to share more about this at the Capital Markets Day, and I'll keep some of the goodies until then and looking forward to share. Great. That's all from me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next question comes from Rickard Hellman from Nordea. Please go ahead. Hi. Rickard Hellman here. Thank you. One question. It's perhaps a little bit of clarification around your Magnetar SPV. The initial investment is stated to be 24 months. That does mean that you have a mandate to invest in 24 months, or does it means that you need to refinance in 24 months? It means that the capital committed is expected to be deployed within that timeframe. There's no need to refinance it after that. Oh, okay. The investments are done with sort of a lifetime perspective on the investments. Yeah. Okay. Oh, that's great. Makes sense as well. On back of that, if you would pursue with your internal risk weights and get approved from the Swedish FSA, will not this be a drag to have this set up? Yeah, good question. Sophisticated risk modeling will always make sense for us. Specifically for IRB, we do believe that there's a great upside on the back books or on the sort of the risk weights applied to the existing portfolios. That said, we don't see IRB as a solution to the backstop regulation in itself, and hence the workforce to get the securitization structure up and running is really key for us. Okay. In that sense, it's a little bit targeting different problems. Exactly. Yeah, you could say that. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you. My last question is about your rating currently on negative. You have earlier been quite clear on the importance of having an investment grade rating. Is that the same? Correct. There's been no change in our view on that, and I think the year of 2020, of course, has been a challenging one. As we look into 2021, I think there's reason to be optimistic for the business in general, which at some point should also come through in the rating outlook. If I can add one thing there, which is that, with this announcement that we made last week with the Magnetar transaction, it significantly reduces the risk with Hoist. With that transaction, we basically, in my view, leave regulatory risk behind. That is the importance of that transaction. Yeah, I totally agree, at least the current regulatory regime. You know credit analysts. We are [audio distortion] analysts. Yeah. That's true. Probably see more regulatory changes going forward. I agree on the current. Thank you very much for your questions. Very clear. Thank you. Our next question comes from Joakim Svingen from Arctic Securities. Please go ahead. Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. I have three questions as well. The first one is related to CapEx. How soon can you invest through the announced SPV with Magnetar, and how large a share of CapEx in 2021 do you think will go through that SPV? Soon means now, basically. We will start using that p ortfolio of investments into that structure basically immediately. There's nothing stopping us there, apart from formalities, setting up the legal SPVs in the different markets, et cetera. That's immediate. That will be used right away, basically. When will we be deploying CapEx this year? I think it's a bit tough to give a guidance on that. I tried to comment on the total CapEx in a previous question. I think I will just refer to that. Okay. I was wondering if you could shed some light on the challenges you see in Spain. What are the main issues you're encountering there? Yeah. I think I said that before, that we did made an acquisition in a platform back in 2015, and we have basically struggled. With my previous experience in the company in Spain, I like the Spanish market. I think it's a pure market. It's professional sellers, pretty consolidated, several banks that know what they're doing. The market dynamics in Spain, I like. Having said that, it's not like the industry is making a lot of profit in Spain these days. I think basically all competitors are feeling a bit of the competitive pressure that's been around in Spain in the recent years. What we are doing now is turning things around. Basically, we are turning every stone. We have changed the full team there. We are introducing new collection processes. We are shifting our best practices to the market, and we are starting to see if there are portfolios to acquire. It's down to the basics, and that's also why I wanted to show today that we have done this already successfully in some other markets. France, from a loss-making position to a very profitable position, Germany from being very slow and to now being very dynamic and, again, at a totally different level in terms of profitability. That's what we're set out to do also in Spain. I happen to think it's better to know where the problems are and deal with those than to have problems all over the place. That's also why I wanted to bring that out today to say that, okay, there are a couple of issues. We know where they are, and we're dealing with those. That's great. Thanks. The final question is just which are the markets you see. You showed the graph showing the front book IRR increasing. Which markets do you see portfolios and attractive IRRs at the moment? Well, the good thing is that we are diversified over the markets that we are in. That means that we have 12 markets to acquire in, and we are diversified across asset classes. That means that there is enough diversification to always be able to do the best deal. We see that there is attractive opportunities within, I would say, basically all jurisdictions and also across asset classes. I cannot single out one or two countries that are more interesting than others, but if you was to force me to pick one, I would pick France, and I would pick secured, because that's where we've been really successful in the last couple of years. Certainly if we can deploy more money that way, we will do so. Sounds great. Thanks very much. Thank you. Just as a quick reminder, if you wish to ask an audio question, please do so by pressing zero one on your telephone keypad. Once again, please press zero one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. Our next question comes from Borja Ramirez from Citibank. Please go ahead. Hello. Good morning. Thank you much for your time and for taking my questions. I have two quick questions, if I may. Firstly, on the agreement with Magnetar, congratulations on the announcement. If I understand well, the IRR for Magnetar is 14% on the junior and mezzanine tranches. I would like to check if you could please provide more details on the potential return for Hoist Finance on the potential investment in these securitizations. My second question is if it could be possible to provide any details for potential capital return in 2021. For example, if there could be any potential for dividend or share buyback. Thank you. Maybe I can comment on the first question, and Klaus-Anders can add to the second. The portfolios that we expect to invest into with the structure, they're similar to the portfolios that we would invest in elsewhere or that we've invested in 2020, for that sake. The underlying return level, you should expect that to be similar. Now, obviously, in the structure, there is a mezz note, and as you correctly point out, the return is 14%. One should remember, and this is quite important, that this structure is more efficient from a capital consumption perspective, and that actually more than offsets the additional cost involved with the mezz notes. From an ROE perspective, it will be as efficient or probably even more efficient to invest in this structure than to invest in the way that we've done historically. From an ROE perspective, the structure is accretive. Yeah. Thanks, Christer. On your second question about capital returns, I think I will just refer to our financial targets and the dividend policy that we have there. Of course, we are going to give you an update on this at the Capital Markets Day. If you can save your question until the 25th, we can discuss it further. Of course. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. There appears to be no further questions, so I'll hand back to the speakers for any other remarks. Thank you. Thank you all for participating on this call. Two years ago, we had bad news. Today, I feel that we have a lot of good news. It feels good to leave regulatory challenges behind and be able to concentrate on the business profitably. With that, thank you for your participation and your engagement. We will talk to each other soon again. Bye-bye. Have a great day.
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