That position as of the first of May. She has previously been head of IR and group control, and she has longstanding experience of Resurs Bank. The three of us are here with you today. Moving on to slide three then. I'm going to begin by giving you a summary of the first quarter with some numbers, and then Claes will tell you more about them in detail. To sum it up, we've seen a 1% increase in lending compared to last year in local currency, up by 2% in terms of the increase. We see that the lockdowns to reduce the spread of the virus during the pandemic mainly impacted our Danish and Norwegian markets. Activities carried out to turn this lower new lending around were things we saw signs of positive improvements towards the end of the quarter. All in all, operating income down by 5% to SEK 850 million, we're counteracting this partly by low costs to the tune of approximately 3% lower than previous year. In spite of the continued pandemic situation, we see no changes in the payment patterns with our customers, the credit loss level is stable at 2.5%. We also have a very strong total capital ratio, 17.1%. The operating profit for the quarter is up by 12%. If you want to look at it from the other angle, adjusted for non-recurring provision made during the first quarter of 2020 of SEK 75 million, we saw a drop, of course, by 12%. We're happy to note that during the month of April, we had an upgraded credit rating by the credit company NCR from BBB- to BBB on the basis of our ability to attract new collaboration partners and also the improved Nordic consumer credit market. We're very happy about this. Moving on to slide four then. Our journey of transformation in the company is a fact. Of course, we've talked about it before. We're in full activity throughout the Nordic organization, and during the first quarter of 2021, we've started to transition Resurs Bank into a much more data-driven and tech-focused financial player offering to the entire Nordic market, innovative solutions and services. That is the main focus on this journey of transformation. Since we begun this journey in the autumn, we've created a much more effective organization. This has, amongst other things, resulted in us being 43 individuals fewer than we were in the company in Q1 2020. At the same time, we're performing a skills shift where we're hiring more people within, for example, IT and other relevant areas in order to be able to build an even more data-driven organization so that the benefit to our customers can increase. The work is ongoing to implement a number of important investments in business driving IT projects and technical solutions. This is ongoing, and at the same time, we're going to increase our ratio of cloud-based systems in the group. These changes will make us considerably more rapid in our ability to develop new and better services to our customers. During the quarter, we've carried out a 360-degree survey where we've interviewed investors, customers, partners, employees, the general public, opinion makers. We've found out about their approach and their expectations, their stance when it comes to our business, and we've taken these insights to heart. We wanted to know what they think of Resurs and the industry today and the future. We're using the insights to deal with our expectations and their expectations on us as a bank. It's going to be the foundation for our ability to become a more attractive and relevant financial player, and we're going to have a much clearer and more active role in what's generally referred to as a more sustainable society. Moving on to slide five. COVID-19 has changed patterns of consumption in the market in its entirety. We see the shift to e-commerce. It's been speeding up still more. We also see the same thing in Resurs, where e-commerce-based sale compared to the same quarter last year is up by over 20%. Today, currently, this means that about 40% of our retail finance sales is covered by e-commerce. Our offering, combined with flexible financing solutions, has meant that we gain many new partners and cooperations within e-commerce in particular. As I mentioned earlier, we saw a negative impact and adverse impact of new lending as a result of lockdowns, in particular in Denmark and Norway, we've seen that impact. However, we do see better sales in March, and all in all, compared to last year, lending was up by 1%. The negative development in Denmark and in Norway can be compensated to a very large extent by the positive development we've seen in Sweden and Finland. There is a difference between the different markets where we operate. Competition in the Norwegian market is seen to be high, extensive, and at the same time, the market shrunk somewhat since the introduction of the new rules in 2019. However, during the first quarter we've seen good sales growth in new lending in Norway, that is a new trend, we've used some new marketing channels and effective internal tools. We're now able to provide a competitive offering in the Norwegian market. However, we continue to work to be able to deal with the customers who decide to cancel their loans early in that market, we work among other things with different types of data-driven predictive models in order to identify the customers who are highly likely to leave us. If we move on and just look at the insurance operations, we began the year with a very strong performance, premiums earned up and several new partners. Still no signs to suggest that customers' payment patterns have been impacted by COVID-19. We're going to stick to the more restrictive credit assessment we introduced during the first quarter of 2020. It's going to remain in place, and that obviously is going to have a negative impact on our growth. At the same time, the measures are in line with the sustainable credit process which is the very foundation for our operations and which assures that the customer will never borrow more than what that particular customer's private finances will permit them to do. Slide six, looking at the business area starting with Payment Solutions. During the quarter we see that there was a great deal of variation within the different markets and payment solutions and the different industries concerned. We still see that there's a broad diversification in Nordic retail and it's building our resilience. We have a good ability to compensate for industries with a decline in demand by also working in other ones where there's a stable demand or even an increase in demand. In Sweden, all in all, we see good growth, good demand, in particular with major partners. They've seen a real tailwind during the pandemic and they are very well-positioned. This is our largest market and it is stable. In Finland, we've seen good increase in sales with many partners in several different industries, so demand is stable, looking good there as well. During the quarter in Denmark, we've seen major impact on our operations by new lockdowns in society during the quarter and this has obviously impacted us. In Norway, we're starting to see some positive signs based on the changes we've made, which means that we now see new sales taking off again to some extent. At the same time, the lockdown situation in Norway has a negative impact on physical commerce. Furthermore, in this business area during the quarter we've worked with Gekås Ullared. We've launched a solution and it has received a great deal of interest. Number of cards issued amounts to as many as 15,500 and we see good use of this card. Gekås, as you know, is one of Sweden's largest retail outlets with over SEK 5 billion in turnover. Shortly you could say that the main offering consists of a Mastercard which gives you bonus points wherever it is used. The points can then be transferred into discount vouchers which can only be redeemed in Gekås in Ullared to drive customers back to the store and build loyalty. Clearly this is very popular. We're also assisting with the CRM processing in general to build a really good customer experience with the help of offers and customer adapted communication. Briefly, I could also mention that this solution has been integrated in the cash register system which simplifies a lot for them when it comes to applications and the buying process, even without a physical card. We're also helping them with the so-called reverse e-commerce in Gekås. They have a major investment in outdoor furniture, garden furniture, where as a customer you can buy from Gekås and it's then being transported to your home afterwards. Checking out is very simple and smooth on site using their digital screens. Once again using the Gekås card as the focal point. You can also do it with traditional invoicing and payment by installments of course. During the quarter we've also launched a cooperation scheme with several different new partners, 20 or so new e-commerce players and also in addition physical partners, such as for example Hageland in Norway. This is sort of the equivalent of Plantagen in Sweden or Harvia in Finland, a global market leader in the segment saunas and spas. Much of our success is due to developing cooperation with existing partners where we assist them to drive sales and improve credit penetration through simple and safe and quite flexible payment solutions offered to customers. Furthermore, I could mention that during the quarter, we've launched what we call the Partner Success Program, which is one way for us to take the development of cooperation with existing partners to a completely new digital level. As of now, Resurs will be able to be much more present, helpful, and quick off the mark when interacting with partners. The onboarding process is automated, communication is digitized, sharing of knowledge can be done and will be done much more using webinars and digital and automated training setups. You could sum up by saying that this is a practical way of giving us the chance to reach out to more of our partners in a more effective way as far as Resurs is concerned. Supreme Card still has challenges. Travels and restaurant visits are down, as you know, but newly launched functions such as bill paying and the Flexible account are things we're using to drive communication towards DIY, staycations, et cetera, since there's such a drop in the travel component. That was this business area. Moving on then to slide seven, consumer loans, the next one. Consumer loans saw stable lending growth during the quarter. Growth was most extensive in the Swedish and Finnish markets, somewhat more challenging in the Danish and Norwegian markets. We remain with our more restrictive credit assessment, and it did put a hamper on growth in consumer loans to some extent. In the Danish market, we've seen a negative development in new lending during the quarter as a result of the lockdown in Denmark. One activity to try and mitigate the negative development in Denmark is that Resurs during the quarter launched the possibility of loan consolidation for consumers. Loans in other banks in order to reduce the monthly and/or interest charges paid by consumers. The Norwegian market has remained challenging, but we do see a positive trend of new lending since the previous quarter. It's still there. Generally speaking, the landscape for us in terms of financial services, it's changing quite rapidly as a result of digitalization and open banking. This is part of the ongoing shift in the financial sector from closed to more open business models. Open banking opens up major opportunities for Resurs to offer better value and simple solutions to customers. During the quarter, we've launched what is called income verification in the Swedish market, a first functionality which is benefiting from the open banking technology. It's a smoother journey for the customer. It's easier, more automated administration for Resurs, and it also gives us much better precision in the income verification. Income verification is scheduled to be rolled out in the entire Nordic market during this year, and this is the start of all the various opportunities available through open banking, building great customer value. Moving on to slide eight, our third business area, Solid insurance. Solid begun the year with a strong operating profit and growth in premiums earned. In total, the technical result is up for Solid by approximately 1% during the quarter. The ongoing pandemic has had a continued negative impact on the travel industry, and that, of course, has an impact in turn on the smallest business area of this area, insurance travel, and has a negative impact on travel, of course. It is our smallest area, and during the quarter, Solid signed and launched several partner cooperation. One that I would like to mention is Intersport, with approximately 100 stores in the Norwegian market, and launch is scheduled to be implemented during the next quarter. Intersport have chosen to go with Solid because they feel that we have a strong and simple offering and longstanding experience in the market. We've previously mentioned Elon. The launch of Elon, which was signed during the fourth quarter, was then implemented during the past quarter in Q1. There's also a developed cooperation with an existing partner in business area Motor is ongoing, and it's going to be ready for rollout in Q2. During the quarter, we also have insurance car guarantee products who've continued its strong growth. Very nice to see indeed. In the segment, we continued the work we've put in to increase our digital presence a great deal more. With those words, I'm going to hand over to Claes now, and he's going to tell you more about the numbers. Go ahead, please. Thank you, Nils. Let's start by looking at page 10. Nils has already said that the loan book is up somewhat compared to last year, and amounts to 31.6 billion SEK at the end of March. Growth has been negatively impacted by currencies, but in local currencies, growth is 2%. Compared to previous year, the sales of the NPL portfolio that was done in 2020 has an impact with about 1%. The measures that were taken about a year ago with a more restrictive credit assessment stays in place, and that limits growth. Compared to fourth quarter last year, the Swedish krona has weakened, which has an impact on the loan book. Excluding currencies, it's gone up 0.3 percentage points. As Nils has said, during the quarter, we have had the challenges having to do with lockdowns. That mainly has had an impact on the Danish and Norwegian markets within Payment Solutions. A higher proportion of loans in Norway have also been ended compared to earlier. Slide 11. The quarter shows a decrease in operating income with 5%, amounting to SEK 850 billion, compared to SEK 897 million last year. The lower income compared to last year are explained by the weaker Swedish krona, the decreased loan book in Norway and Denmark, and also mix effects within Payment Solutions, where many of the bigger retail finance partners have managed well during the pandemic with unchanged or maybe increased demand. At the same time, these collaborations have a lower margin, and that has a negative impact on the NBI margin. Net commission income is still impacted by COVID, with lower sales within factoring and credit cards. In the quarter, the recovery continued in the capital market, and the market values of stock and bond portfolios increased, which meant a positive outcome on the net financial transaction with the SEK 25 million. You should note that this is not included in the calculation of the NBI margin. The NBI margin was down compared to last year and last quarter because of the mix of changes within Payment Solutions, lower new sales in Denmark. That means that we have smaller setup fees. This also was impacted by a higher proportion of customers in Norway canceling their loans compared to higher interest on new lending. Next slide. Operating expenses amounted to SEK 355 million, which is a reduction with 3% compared to the equivalent quarter last year. This is because of the continued cost focus in the group. Relative to the income, the CI ratio, excluding insurance, amounted to 42.4%. The higher CI ratio is a result of the lower income. If we continue with slide number 13. In the quarter, credit losses amounted to SEK 195 million. The increase compared to last year is an effect of the historically high loan book growth. Compared to Q4, credit losses are unchanged, and that means that credit loss ratio stays at 2.5%. Basically, we still do not see any negative changes in our customers' payment patterns. The insecurities for the future have decreased, but we still have uncertainties relating to increased unemployment with a risk of reduced payment capacity. Overall, we have no other evaluation compared to Q1, which means that the previous credit loss provision, SEK 75 million that was done in 2020, remains unchanged. If we continue to see a stable development, this provision will be released over the year. If we continue with slide 14. Before I continue with telling you about the developments in our segments, I want to summarize the operating profit. Overall, it had a slight decrease because of one-offs, and if we put them back, we had an increase with 12% compared to previous year. Then we will continue with slide 15, where we start with our segments. On this page, we see that the loan book of Payment Solutions was down with 3%, 1% in local currencies. Payment Solutions is the segment that has been more clearly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the generally speaking, lower growth in all markets due to lockdowns, and the quarter was particularly challenging in Denmark and Norway. The relatively speaking lower income are explained by mix effects in Payment Solutions, where many of Resurs's bigger retail partners have managed well during the pandemic with unchanged or sometimes increased demand. At the same time, the collaborations with these big retailers means that we have lower margins, which has a negative impact on the NBI margin. Due to the pandemic, we've also seen growth in certain sectors where we have lower margins, whereas others with higher margins have not done just as well. The lockdowns in the Danish market has also had a negative impact because the Danish market has relatively high setup fees, which means that with lower new sales, that has a negative impact on the margins. Risk-adjusted NBI margin ended up at 10.3%, a reduction with 0.4 percentage points compared to last year. The NBI margin loss is compensated by lower credit losses due to the extra credit loss provision that was done first quarter 2020. Then slide 16, we have consumer loans. The loan book was up 4%. Again, it's Norway where we see a continued negative development. Nils has already talked about this, that new lending is positive, but we have a high proportion of customers that cancel their loans early. In Denmark, we have lower new sales due to lockdowns, and that has an impact on income and also due to lower interest rate revenue and fewer startup fees. The risk-adjusted NBI margin is lower due to the lower income in the Danish market and lower margins in the Norwegian market. We continue with slide 17 where we have the smallest segment. Here we have insurance and Solid Försäkring. The premiums earned was up 3%. This is mainly due to the business area Motor that had a positive development in the used cars market. Technical result was up 1%, whereas the operating profit was up due to the positive outcome that we had under net financial transactions with SEK 21 million. Slide 18. Our capital position is here. It is strong and we still have a very strong capital base, CET1 ratio, capital ratio with a good margin there above regulatory requirements. The total capital ratio amounted to 17.1%, strengthening with 0.9 percentage points compared to last year. This should be compared to the regulatory requirement that is 11.6%. In 2021, we expect the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority to decide on additional Pillar two requirements. We estimated that there will be an increase with 1.0-1.05 percentage point due to the EU banking package. The effects on Resurs are still not known. Next slide, we have our funding and we have a good, well-diversified spread between different sources and continue to work actively with our funding. We see that we have stable funding flows and funding opportunities are good. Liquidity is strong, which means that we have growth opportunities and we feel that we have a strong confidence in the market. Particularly gratifying is that credit analysts share our opinion. In April our credit rating was increased to BBB flat with a stable outlook. That will mean that we'll have even better funding opportunities in the future. Here I hand back over to you. Thank you, Claes. Now, by way of conclusion, let's have a look at slide 20. We're leaving the first quarter behind us now, and we feel that we have a stable situation when it comes to the markets in the Nordics following the pandemic. We'll keep our focus on an improvement of our margins and improving the revenue flows, of course. We have good control of costs. What we're focusing on is revenue and margins. We're going to keep focus on sustainable credit processes, providing wise loans for consumers and for the bank. Furthermore, we've scheduled in the 29th of September for a Capital Markets Day. We'll be inviting everyone to present our strategy and financial targets. Hopefully there will be less volatility in the market than we currently see. In Q2, we expect continued effect from the pandemic, even though, as I mentioned today, we're seeing positive signs over the past month and the last month of Q1. That's a very good thing. All in all, we're looking forward to the next quarter. With those words, we would like to thank you for your attention, and we'll now open up for a Q&A session. Thank you. The first line comes from Patrik Pertoft from ABG. Please go ahead. Your line is open for your question. Hi. Thank you. I think I'm going to put the questions in Swedish since the presentation was in Swedish. In the Norwegian market for lending, according to the annual report, we see a certain% more than the drop in the market. In fact, could you tell us a little bit more about what you're seeing there? What's driving the drop in Norway? Do you have some big loans that can't be refinanced perhaps, or Or would it eat up too much of the margin if you try to focus on some sort of market share gains in Norway? What's the situation like? "Correct," says the CEO. "We do see a challenge for us in the Norwegian market. The stricter rules introduced over the past while has put additional pressure on the market and on us. We're quite restrictive in our credit process. We're losing customers who are currently part of our lending with higher interests who succeed perhaps in finding another offering with a lower interest rate. We lose revenue. We see a drop in our margins as a result. That's really basically the challenge we're faced with. It's not new. We've had it and lived with it for at least a year or so. That's briefly what we're seeing right now." Okay. Could you help me understand how I should look at the situation? Because right now I get the impression that the drop in net interest income is accelerating, where the reduction in Q1 compared to Q4 was greater than what we saw during 2020, and I see that you're writing here that you do not expect any shift in trends in the coming period. Do you expect a continued drop in margin, or what do you expect to see stabilizing in the future? Well, we see that we're affected by the current lockdown, in particular in Payment Solutions, if we look at the segments. It is a driver for how it's impacting us both in Norway and in Denmark. I think Claes mentioned earlier, we touched upon it earlier, that when it comes to our margins, we do see a major mix impact in Sweden, not least where we have very large volumes in larger partners, for example, giving us lower margins. We believe that this will shift to some extent when the market where we operate becomes more normalized again. We also see that the credit cards are not being used very extensively, very little in terms of restaurant bills and travels. We see that to some extent in cards. I believe that we'll have a continued impact from this also in Q2, but there's quite a lot of uncertainty in the market right now. Okay. This was in fact the lowest commission income that I have seen posted by you, in my model at least. Could you tell us a little bit about what specifically happened in Q1? Is this also something that we can expect to be a new level for the future? Is it exceptional? Well, what you're seeing is the result of lesser use of credit cards, but also the fact that we have a much smaller component of factoring business. What we've focused on during the past quarter is to implement a new system for the factoring services and our B2B business, really. The focus has been to automate that flow because it's been far too manual earlier. That's part of the impact you're seeing on that line. Okay. Thank you. Nothing more from me. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jens Saltin. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thank you and good morning. Just a follow-up regarding the Norwegian loan book. Could you say something about the proportion that is, so to say, at risk? No. We do not provide any such type of external information. That is really what you're asking about. We have high levels of churn regardless of where you look, what actor you look at when it comes to consumer credit. What has impacted us in Norway is, of course, that new lending has been flat for a couple of years, which means that we have a bigger impact when we have an outflow and inflow that is not working the way it should. That is what we reported. We reported in Q4 positive trends in new lending, and we see the same thing in Q1, where the trend is positive, and I feel that is really great. Okay. Well, I understand that you cannot provide any exact figures, but what can we expect? Could we expect that the impact of this on the total will be reduced? Thinking about the decrease in the interest rate net, what can we expect in the next quarters? Well, what we've seen the last few years is that. Basically, we have had very small new sales and an outflow at the same time. Now we see that things are looking more positive when it comes to new sales. Okay. The mix effect within Payment Solutions, that is also something that you have been talking about last few years. Thinking about that portfolio and what you have in there, you say that the big customers continue to grow, but what about the smaller customers? Do you begin to see at least a stabilization there? Lower impact on margins due to the mix effect? Well, as you have rightly said, we have bigger customers, and they have been doing extremely well during the pandemic, and that has an impact because of the lower margin. I think it's gratifying to see that we're really involved in the increase that we see in e-commerce in Sweden and in the rest of the Nordics as well. That is something that will drive developments longer term, and that is basically what I can say. Okay, thank you. Just one question about the transformation journey. What you have reported before is very positive. Should we expect to see major investments or is this something that we'll hear more about in December, something that will start Q4? Well, what is happening now is that we are negotiating with a number of suppliers discussing a new platform, and we're therefore very careful. We do not want to give any guidance figures or a time schedule because that will reduce our negotiation position. We will be much clearer and give clear information during the summer or shortly after the summer with time schedules, strategies, impact, et cetera. Right now, we're working with this, and it will give us a much more competitive technology platform and will also have much more automation in the internal activities, which means that it will be able to truly provide simple customer journeys for our customers. Okay, thank you. That was all from me, and thank you for highlighting the Payment Solutions more than what you've done before. Thank you. Once again, if there are any more questions, it is zero one on your telephone keypad to register. Unless there are no more questions registered, I hand back to our speakers. Thank you very much. With those words, I would like to wish you a continued pleasant day, and don't hesitate to get in touch with Claes or myself if you have any further questions. Thank you all for your attention. Have a great day. Thank you for our conference. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines. Okay, we are now back in the private speaker area and no longer broadcasting.
Loading workspace