Noba Bank Group AB

Noba Bank Group AB

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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 4, 2026

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the NOBA Year-End Report 2025 Conference Call and Webcast.

At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be the question-and-answer session.

To ask a question during the session, you need to press *11 on your telephone keypad. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised.

To withdraw a question, please press *1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jacob Lundblad, CEO. Please go ahead.

Jacob Lundblad

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Q4 presentation.

I will take you through some introductory slides, and then I'll hand over to Patrick for more financials. Let's dive into it.

Key events during Q4 '25: Q4 Q4 marks the end to an eventful 2025, where we have managed to deliver attractive financial progress, good business momentum, whilst at the same time delivering all-time-high employee and customer satisfaction. In Q4, we also managed to acquire DBT Capital.

This is very much in line with our previously communicated ambitions to expand into the SME space. We'll come back and double-click on DBT on our next slide.

During the quarter, we saw continued positive NPL disposals above back book value, again confirming our asset quality. We improved funding spreads and improved our rating outlook, doing both AT1 and unsecured bonds during the quarter at lower spreads than previous comparable issuances.

We got a confirmation of our BBB rating from NCR, and furthermore, we got an outlook that was raised to positive. Looking at financial development for the quarter, we saw an adjusted core operating profit coming in at 1.3 billion Swedish krona, up 38% year-on-year.

Core ROTE at 25%, or actually 27% when you exclude accrued dividend, a significant jump up year-on-year. Growth came in at 10%, reported numbers negatively impacted by FX.

Cost/income ratio came in at 24%, as expected, and we want to reiterate the outlook communicated last quarter. In essence, cost growth is expected to remain somewhat above historic trend in coming quarters.

Cost of risk continued to develop positively, 2.8% in Q4. Underlying trends continue to be positive.

Our capital position is strong. As a consequence, the board of directors is proposing a dividend of 1.6 krona per share and an extra dividend of 1.5 krona per share.

If we then turn page, we'll give you some more color to our acquisition of DBT. This is exactly in line with the ambitions we have communicated in the past.

We see the SME market as very attractive. The market is large and underserved by traditional banks.

Specialists are expected to take market share going forward. We have outlined SME as one of the building blocks to reach 250 billion Swedish krona by 2030.

With other new initiatives, we expect this block to amount to some 10 billion by 2030. DBT offers collateralized term loans to Swedish SMEs.

Target loan size is 3 to 35 million kronas with an average term of 4 years. I think DBT is a highly regarded brand in the market, offering speed, flexibility, and I think they've built strong relationships in the market and a very professional operations.

In terms of sourcing, which is cost-efficient and multichannel distribution, which is great. Why is this then a good match for NOBA?

We see this as a great platform to expand from, highly digitalized and automated, built by a strong team that are committed for the future as well. Becoming part of the family, DBT's future growth will obviously benefit from NOBA's strong balance sheet, and also, I would like to think, our experience in terms of scaling up businesses.

Short-term impact is of course very limited. DBT is less than a percentage point of NOBA by any metric really, but a very nice addition to our business for the future.

Let's dive into the segments. Let's flip page and look at private loans.

Year-on-year growth of 10% in local currencies. Strong growth continued in Sweden and Denmark, somewhat softer demand in Norway.

Some signs of increased competition. We've seen expanded margins earlier.

We expect we expect this to be more neutral going forward. Operating income of 2.1 billion Swedish krona, 10% year-on-year growth driven by high lending volumes and and improved NIM.

Adjusted cost/income ratio coming in flat at 21% year-on-year. Cost of risk performing well, with continued positive outlook, came in at 3.3% compared with 4.6% prior year.

Adjusted ROTE at 22%, also a good pickup year-on-year. Then let's flip to credit cards.

The portfolio is now amounting to 19.6 billion Swedish krona, a year-on-year growth of 12% in local currencies. I think good momentum across geographies, however, some obvious FX headwinds.

Operating income grew 10% year-on-year. NIM developing positively, underlying improvements of revolver rates and also seasonally high revolver rates.

Adjusting cost/income ratio of 28%, down from 31% in Q4 2024. Cost of risk up at 3.8%.

Here, we see no underlying deterioration. This is high due to a one-off model update.

Then lastly, adjusted ROTE at 34%, impacted by temporary and seasonal factors. Underlying, we don't see any real negative shifts in the segment.

Then let's flip to mortgages. The segment amounts to 19.2 billion Swedish krona, year-on-year growth of 8% in local currencies.

We saw a pickup in H2, especially in Q4. We see that the Swedish and Norwegian mortgages are gradually picking up during the year.

We expect that to continue. Operating income of 179 million kronas, essentially flat year-on-year, and we see that the high lending volumes was offset by slightly lower NIM.

Adjusted cost/income ratio flat year-on-year. Cost of risk came in slightly higher.

However, no significant shift there either. The totality takes us to an adjusted ROTE of 39%.

With that flavor of the segments, I'll hand over to Patrick for more financials.

Patrick MacArthur

Great. Thank you, Jacob.

I'll start going through the overview of the financials. Starting off on the top, we have another quarter of solid loan book growth, with 10% FX-adjusted growth year-over-year year, in line with our communicated growth targets.

Underlying growth is, however, partially offset by FX, which resulted in 6% reported growth. Moving down the P&L, moving down to the P&L, we also have another quarter of revenue growth outgrowing loan growth, with reported revenue growth of 9% versus the 6% reported loan growth.

This outgrowth is really driven by a continued NIM expansion and also strong growth within fee income. Moving down to costs, when I go through the P&L, we have a flat cost/income ratio compared to a year ago at 24%.

This is impacted by 15 million SEK of DBT acquisition costs and would have been 23% otherwise. On credit losses, we continue to see very strong underlying trend, with cost of risk reduction cost of risk reduction and have a and have 2.8% in the quarter.

There is around 0.2% positive impact from NPL sales here, but also excluding this, there is a very strong underlying trend here given that Q4 is usually a seasonally weak quarter. Tying all of this together, we move on to the ROTE, and we see that we have a 25% ROTE, and excluding the accrued dividend, return on capital employed was 27%.

Looking at capital, we have a strong capital position. We have a CET1 ratio of 13.7%, where the proposed dividend has been deducted from the capital base.

We move on to next page, please. Yeah.

Breaking down the loan growth by segment, as we have on the page, there is some FX impact here due to a depreciating SEK, but overall, we have all segments delivering well towards our growth ambitions. Starting off at the bottom of the table, secured, which has had a period of weaker growth, is now really starting to pick up and has 8% year-over-year growth and 10% in the quarter.

Growth in equity release is still a bit weak, but growth in mortgages have really picked up. Credit cards, we continue to see strong growth both in the Nordics and in Germany.

Private loans continuing continuing on its solid growth trajectory, with 10% year-over-year growth. Move on to next page, please.

Moving on to NIM, we have a NIM of 8.3% in the quarter, which is margin down versus Q3 and slightly above Q4 last year. We have we've had a very strong development of on NIM through 2024 and 2025 driven by positive effects from base rate reductions and our strong new lending margins in private loans.

We have we have, however, largely seen this effect having been realized now, with the base rate lowering cycle largely expected to have come to an end, and front book margins now largely in line with back book margins in private loans. Move on to fee income, next page.

We've had a very strong momentum on fee income through 2025, with a growth of 30% compared to 2024. Q4 in isolation, we also have a strong quarter with a fee income of 200 million SEK, continuing the trend we have seen so far in 2025.

I would reiterate that this is a line item where we do expect to see some volatility, as we have variable components in our main agreement here, which gives some quarterly fluctuations. Next page, please.

On operating expenses, I think we very much follow the trends we outlined in Q3 here. We do expect this transition to see a bit higher cost growth than what we have seen in the last few years.

In Q4 in isolation, we came in at a cost/income ratio of 24%. As I mentioned before, this includes the cost of DBT acquisition, and is 23% excluding those costs.

In the quarter, we had very limited transformation costs of 4 million SEK, that is really related to some cleanup costs from the IPO. As communicated before, we don't foresee any transformation costs going forward.

Moving on to next page on capital. Yeah.

We have a very solid capital position, with CET1 ratio of 13.7%, which is 3.5% margin to our requirement of 10.2%. The proposed dividend of 1.55 billion SEK has been deducted, and we also continue to have strong and stable liquidity ratios, with LCR 151% and NSFR of 111%.

I'll hand off back to you, Jacob, to Cost of risk. Cost of risk.

We missed a page here. Cost of risk in the quarter: we've had a strong cost of risk development with 2.8% cost of risk for the quarter, which is then, as I mentioned before, has 0.2% positive impact from NPL sales.

Here the trend is very clear, with a falling cost of risk with seven straight quarters of falling cost of risk year-on-year. We really see a positive trend on cost of risk here.

I'm sorry, I dropped one page there. Capital position I would have covered, and then Jacob, you can take that.

Jacob Lundblad

Thanks. Let's wrap up with this one.

You've seen it before. Briefly looking at performance versus financial targets, loan book growth came in at 10% on a like-for-like basis, in line with financial targets.

The addition of DBT is obviously small, but one of many initiatives that will support our long-term target to reach 250 billion Swedish krona by the end of 2030. Cost/income ratio came in at 24%, as earlier communicated.

We expect the trajectory to be somewhat lumpy, but remain committed to our target of getting below 20% in 2027. Core ROTE of 25%, a good pickup year-on-year.

We expect continued improvements from operational leverage and normalizing cost of risk. CET1 at 13.7%, well in line with our CET1 target of 13% to 15%.

Finally, the board of directors proposes a normal dividend of 1.6 per share in line with the policy, plus the addition of 1.5 as an extra dividend. With that, I think we will open up for Q&A.

Operator

Thank you so much. Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press *11 on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced.

To withdraw a question, please press *1 and 1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A queue.

This will take a few moments. Now we're going to take our first question.

Just give us a moment. It comes from the line of Emil Jonsson from DNB Carnegie.

Your line is open. Please ask your question.

Emil Jonsson

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions.

Starting off on the private lending competition, could you elaborate a little bit on what it is you're seeing that differs from what you've seen before? Is it lower win rates in external channels?

Is it any particular country that sticks out? Any color on this would be helpful.

Jacob Lundblad

I can start with sort of the overarching theme here, which I think is a normalizing macroenvironment, which triggers more competition, obviously. The industry has been through a tough period, and as life is stabilizing, I think the ambitions are increasing with competition.

Then obviously, and perhaps needless to say, I think our IPO has become quite successful, and I would assume that that triggers more interest for the sector and more capital allocation into the sector. That is visible in our new lending where competition are tougher on price and more willing to lend money.

Patrick MacArthur

We are not overdramatizing the effect of what's happening here. We are in a competitive product.

We do see some increase in competition. We're not surprised by seeing the increase in competition, necessarily.

I think everyone sees the same. We have an improving backdrop.

It's clearly improving. We see that in cost of risk, and really, I think most people price across risk-adjusted margins here, and we see cost of risk improving kind of have a very positive trend, and not surprised to see that resulting in slightly higher competition on the new lending side.

As kind of we mentioned, we have historically had front book margins quite a lot above back book margins, and we kind of are around the neutral area now. Not very dramatic here, but somewhat increased competition.

Emil Jonsson

Right. Is it fair to say then that as far as you can tell, this is not to do with customers becoming, to speak, more price sensitive.

It's more that

Patrick MacArthur

No, no, no. It has to do with the fact that macro outlook is good for consumer lending, and I don't think we are the only ones that seeing that.

I think that's driving a bit of increased supply and improved pricing because simply we, as many others, look at this on a risk-adjusted margin. As we see risk clearly coming down, one really need to look at the combination of credit risk and margins, where we see kind of credit risk having a very positive trend, and not surprising that that also results in somewhat increased competition on the margin side.

Jacob Lundblad

For the avoidance of doubt, we don't see any shift in consumer behavior.

Emil Jonsson

All right. That's very helpful.

Thank you. Continuing a little bit on growth, as far as I can tell from government statistics, as of right now, most of the Nordic consumer markets are growing at sort of low single-digit percentage rates year-on-year or in some cases even declining year-on-year.

If market growth were to remain low, say through 2026, do you think your double-digit lending growth target is still a sort of reasonable target for this year?

Patrick MacArthur

If you look over time, the market tends to grow at around nominal GDP. Individual markets have diverging growth when you look at individual years, but I think we have a very clear consistency of delivering growth across slight differences in underlying market growth.

I think we feel very confident with the growth target at kind of current and expected market growth rates.

Emil Jonsson

Okay. In terms of your funding, have you noticed any change in competition on either your Nordic or Central European funding channels, to do with the increased sort of growth ambitions among competitors?

Patrick MacArthur

I think we already communicated earlier, I guess around Q2, that we sort of saw growth picking up somewhat on deposit competition, and it hasn't changed from that. Kind of through H1 we saw somewhat increasing competition with deposits, and that's been stable since then.

There's no big shifts here, but we did see some increase in the beginning of the year in competition rates.

Emil Jonsson

Okay. One short question on credit cards, on the higher loan losses in credit cards: just to be clear, should we expect the loan loss ratio to remain around 3.8% in the next quarter, or should we expect it to drop down to around 3% again?

Patrick MacArthur

We're not going to guide on specific loan loss in a specific segment, but the kind of the increase in Q4 that we saw is really driven by seasonality aspect, which is Q4 is a seasonally weak quarter. I think on a totality basis, that hasn't really shown thanks to the cyclically very positive trend, but in individual segments, it can clearly come through.

Q4 is a seasonally weaker quarter, that's number one. Number two, we do model updates regularly.

They tend to be overall neutral, but when we come to the small segments like credit cards, it can have a negative impact, and that's what we've seen in this quarter. What we are clearly saying is that we don't see an underlying trend divergence in credit cards, but driven that the cost of risk is driven by kind of a one-off factor in combination with slightly seasonally weak quarter.

We're not going to guide to a specific number in a specific segment.

Emil Jonsson

Okay. That's clear.

Thank you. Just one final question, and then I'll hand it over to the next speaker.

Continuing in credit cards, if we look out say two or three years into the future, credit markets are pricing in that we'll probably start seeing rate hikes by 2027 or '28 from both the Riksbank and the ECB. Based on this, is it a reasonable assumption that we should expect to eventually see lower net interest margins and higher credit losses in credit cards, or is there some other significant offsetting driver that I'm not considering?

Patrick MacArthur

I think what you need to pick those out of credit card. Across credit losses, it's not a lot of correlation with the interest rates there in credit cards.

I don't see any impact of kind of types of rate movements that are expected. Then clearly, it's been pretty clear that falling rates that's been quite good for us.

Rising rates that's kind of was negative for us historically. Then keeping in mind that 45% of the credit card portfolio is in Norway, which is a very different rate environment.

In isolation, credit cards is better below rates, but it's sensitivity is not very high. Keep in mind, 45% of the portfolio is in Norway.

Then the last point around credit cards, the base rate is one component. Clearly, the other very big component that we can impact is revolver rates.

I think when we have said clearly before that we have as a strategy to continue to bring revolver rates up across the credit card portfolio, and that's been good for margins. You have to isolate those points and say with the rate outlook credit losses wouldn't see any sensitivity to it.

In isolation on a margin basis, yes, somewhat negative for credit cards with increased rates, but keep in mind that 45% is Norway. Lastly, the offsetting credit cards from a rate perspective, that is clearly to bring revolver rates up, which is something that we continuously work with and continuously have been able to do as the portfolio matures.

Emil Jonsson

All right. That's very clear.

Thank you very much for taking my questions.

Operator

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question.

It comes from the line of Patrik Brattelius from ABG. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Patrik Brattelius

Thank you. Can you hear me?

Patrick MacArthur

Yes. Yep.

Patrik Brattelius

Perfect. My first question is regarding SME in connection with this acquisition that you have announced.

Can you talk a little bit as it was a relatively small acquisition, I have to assume that it's a little bit of a subscale at the moment. Can you elaborate a little bit how you think about further growth through M&A the coming years in this subsector?

Jacob Lundblad

We don't have any immediate plans for further M&A in the SME space. Let's see if that happens anyway in the future, but right now we're focused on the acquisition that we just closed a day or two ago, and which we're very happy about.

Yes, I think it's subscale as most SME players are. I think scale is important and it's clearly one of the ambitions we have with the platform to ensure that we actually can scale it.

One of the constraints that DBT has had in the past is obviously limited funding opportunity, and with a bank balance sheet and an effective bank balance sheet, I think we can take away much of that constraint, and that will open up for more business, and I feel confident that we can do good business together with DBT and actually reach scale. We have outlined that SME is one of the building blocks to reach 250 billion.

We've said that new initiatives will amount to some 10 billion. DBT will be a good part of that, I believe.

We're also looking at organic initiatives when it comes to the SME market. We're not there yet, let's come back to that in due course.

I think this is a good playbook, perhaps worth reminding everyone about the acquisition of Svensk Hypotekspension back in 2018, '19, where we managed to acquire that business, simultaneously we set up our mortgage business in Sweden, and I think the benefit of that was huge. We could cross-fertilize those two workstreams and cut a lot of time in terms of getting to market and in terms of reaching scale.

We feel very positive about this first baby step. It is small, but it's very good for the future.

Patrik Brattelius

Thank you. To elaborate further on the subject, could you talk about the potential in SME vertical in Sweden versus rolling it out in the other Nordic geographies?

Is it Sweden first-hand and over time in the other, or is it going to be launched bigger? How do you foresee this?

Jacob Lundblad

I'm sure that we will think about other markets in due course. We're very committed to have a first go in Sweden, which we believe is the more mature market and also the market that we know the best.

It makes a lot of sense for us to start out in Sweden. Then obviously, also, we managed to acquire DBT, and as a matter of fact, it is a Swedish company.

That is helpful. Right now we're not looking into any other markets, but I'm sure we will return to it at some point in time.

Patrick MacArthur

I think we've assessed before that the relevant SME market across the Nordics that we could target is 400 billion plus, and clearly this is a step of getting into that market. Going into Sweden first in this specific segment, but clearly that's a platform for growth.

DBT is a platform for growth, and we can also complement that with kind of organic growth initiatives. I think it's a clear step into the SME segment.

Jacob Lundblad

We're quite keen to stay close to home here. We spent 20 years doing retail lending.

We're taking a first step out in the SME market. It's important to do that in a controlled fashion, and being close to the market is quite important.

Patrik Brattelius

Sounds good. A little number question from me.

I saw that transformational costs were much smaller than I expected. I had expected, given the communication from Q3, that the transformation costs would be closer to 50 million following the IPO, and I thought we would see some costs of transformational status connected to this acquisition, but it seemed to be only 4 million.

What was I missing here?

Patrick MacArthur

I think the first point is we guided that we did expect some IPO rollover costs, I think in the region of 10 to 20 million. We ended up with only 4 million IPO rollover costs, which is obviously great that we kind of managed to keep those costs down during the quarter.

We had 4 million of kind of cleanup costs related to the IPO. We thought we would probably have a little bit more, but great that that wasn't more.

Then DBT, we had 15 million of acquisition costs for DBT. We have not classified that as transformation costs.

We have been very clear, I think, in saying that transformation costs, that's specifically related to the kind of IPO project and the strategic review project that we've done historically, the Bank Norwegian acquisition, like the typically normal M&A that we're going do going forward, we just take as normal costs and explain it as part of the cost developments. The 4 million, that is pure IPO rollover costs, and then we have 15 million of DBT acquisition costs, which have not been classified as transformation costs.

Patrik Brattelius

I see. Thank you.

Jacob Lundblad

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question.

The question comes from the line of Andreas Håkansson from SEB. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Andreas Håkansson

Thanks, and good morning, guys. I'll try to be a bit quick here.

Just looking at slide 8 in your presentation pack, it looks like the secured constant currency in Q4 is picking up compared to the full-year growth. The other two segments, private loans and credit cards, seem to be slowing, and secured picking up growth.

Then I see that the difference between reported and constant is also lower in secured. It makes me believe most of that acceleration comes from Sweden.

Do you here see an impact from the changed tax deduction rules that drives a bit higher growth in secured? That's my question.

Patrick MacArthur

No, kind of it's absolutely clear that in Q4, secured was the fastest growing segment on a constant currency basis. Kind of why is that?

Credit cards is seasonally a lot of Q3 growth, not surprised by that. Private loans impacted by the NPL sales in Q4, which kept down the growth rate in Q4 in isolation.

Secured, we pretty much expect the growth to pick up here, and I wouldn't say that the main driver here is really the property market in general picking up, and kind of broader utility market is improving in a lower rate environment. Then your last question, why is it much less difference between constant and reported in secured, and that's purely because secured, to a very large extent, is Sweden.

Equity release is only Sweden, and the non-equity release part of it is kind of 50% Sweden, a bit more than 50% Sweden, less than 50% in Norway. Kind of 75% plus of the secured segment is Swedish, whereas if you look at other segments, the proportion of Sweden is less.

Jacob Lundblad

On your question on tax deductibility that is changing: no, we haven't seen a change in customer behavior due to that.

Patrick MacArthur

No. We don't expect to see any customer behavior changes due to tax treatment, and we haven't seen any customer behavior change across any of our products.

Andreas Håkansson

Are you advising people to go from your unsecured loans to secured in order to solve that problem?

Jacob Lundblad

I think that tends to be a different use case, generally no. Because

Andreas Håkansson

I think you historically said that what is it, 60% of your clients in the private segment in Sweden, for example, also has a mortgage. I would assume that now with a higher LTV ranges and so on, it could be an opportunity.

Patrick MacArthur

The LTV rules actually go the other way around, because the LTV rules obviously raise it to 90% on new purchases, but it's 80% on refi. It's kind of if anything, new regulation there is going the other way.

I would take a step back, which is our customers buy the products they have need for, and clearly if they feel like that secured loan is the right thing for them, they will get a secured loan. Typically, a secured loan will be cheaper if you have the kind of capacity in your property to take it on.

The kind of change in tax treatment not really making a difference there, and with regards to the LTV changes, clearly new acquisition LTV levels are raised, refinancing is actually lowered.

Andreas Håkansson

Okay. That's good.

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question.

The question comes from the line of Shrey Srivastava from Citi. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Shrey Srivastava

Hi, and thank you very much for taking my question. Just one for me, please.

Looking at, again, the competitive dynamic for private loans in the Nordics, obviously, as you've become an increasing percentage of the market, you will sort of find it harder and harder to grow above market. Is the sort of expertise and the underwriting ability that you have translatable to other regions apart from the Nordics?

Are there any plans here that you've brought forward in light of this increasing competition? Thanks.

Patrick MacArthur

The first thing, I think the increase in competition, there are no dramatic shifts here. There is slight increase in competition in the Nordics.

I think a lot of it is driven by the fact that the credit cycle is looking very benign. That's the first point.

There's no dramatic change in competition, but clearly we see a slight increase in it. I think a lot of that is just driven by us and others doing the same calculation of risk-adjusted margins, which look a lot more attractive now than they did one or two years ago.

That's kind of the first point. Then the second point on kind of are we looking at non-Nordic markets for private loans?

The answer there: no, we're not actively looking at non-Nordic markets for private loans. We still see a good and a lot of potential to grow in the Nordic market.

Yes, we are the largest player, but we still have a fairly low kind of market share that absolutely allows us to continue to grow and outgrow the market.

Jacob Lundblad

Your embedded question whether our capabilities are transferable to other market, I would argue yes, they are. I think we've built an ecosystem, I think we have a competence that is quite unique that would clearly be transferable, but then you need to find the proper market with the appropriate dynamics, etc., etc.

Yes, our ecosystem is something that would be transferable. Not exactly the way we do it in Sweden or Norway, there's differences between local markets, obviously.

It's not a global recipe, but it's a global capability, I would argue.

Shrey Srivastava

Understood. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you so much. Now we're going to take our next question.

The question comes from the line of Johan Ekblom from UBS. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Johan Ekblom

Thank you very much. Just a few, hopefully, quick questions.

Just coming back to the growth side, am I understanding correctly that the 8% quarter-on-quarter annualized growth in private loans is post the NPL sale, which I guess would be about a percent impact on that? Then secondly, just in terms of coming back to your comments on improving macro and risk-adjusted pricing, etc.

If we look historically, you've shown cost of risk, I think, as low as around 150 basis points. I think when people look at macro trends across Europe, Sweden is a clear positive outlier in 2026.

Why should we not expect a significantly below through-the-cycle cost of risk in 2026? Then the third point I wanted to just touch on is funding.

Continuing to see loan growth materially faster than deposits. How do you think about funding your balance sheet in the medium term if deposit competition or deposit growth is not sufficient to fund your loan book?

Patrick MacArthur

All very good questions, let's kind of try to break those up. The first one, the private loan growth: correct, the kind of 8% growth constant currency, that is post the NPL sales done during Q4.

I think when you look at NPL sales and growth, it's clearly part of our business to sell NPLs. Kind of we sell the back of loans, we will continuously sell.

When you look at a year-over-year growth, usually it's always going to be impacted by NPL sales, it's not something that you should kind of take into account there. When you look at individual quarters, NPL sales matter, because we don't sell NPLs every quarter.

We tend to sell in kind of lump. When we look at Q4 '25, the growth in private loans in isolation, that 8% is impacted by the NPL sales, and it's closer to 2% impact rather than the 1% you said, Johan.

If we adding that back, we would have actually been at 10% in private loans on growth. That's the first point.

Your second question was Cost of risk historical trending at 1.5%, but I think that's in a very different context going back at Nordax, obviously following the acquisition and merger with Bank Norwegian. I think our profile has shifted, we believe that 2.5% to 3% is where we should be in a normalized cycle.

With that said, yes, we do see good underlying trends here. Yeah.

That's we see very good underlying trends. Kind of let's not take out victories in advance, but clearly this is a year this is a year where we know we would kind of

Johan Ekblom

It must be fair to say that on a forward-looking basis, it's hard to find things aligning so much for the slightly weaker-than-average consumer as much as they are in 2026, right? Yeah.

Patrick MacArthur

In Sweden, it's obviously closer to a perfect match of positive factors, I would say. Yep.

You can't figure out the bad one, and quite easy to see the positive ones. You have an appreciating currency, you have reduced amortization requirements, you have an expanding fiscal budget, and you have lowered rates.

It's a little bit difficult to see what's the bad thing here. It's all positive.

Clearly, we are across four markets, and the dynamics are not same across everywhere, but the external macro factors in Sweden are clearly positive as far as we can tell them. There are a lot of positive factors going into 2026, in particular in Sweden, but yeah, we've set 2.5% to 3% as a normalized level, and currently, on an underlying basis, we're at the top of that range.

Hopefully, we should move at least downwards within that range during the year. Then the last question about funding.

Deposits, yeah. We don't foresee changing our strategy here on deposits, which is on the funding side, we will grow deposits pretty much at the same rate as we grow the loan portfolio.

Last 12 months, if you look at it on a constant currency basis, I think we've been around flat. We've obviously been growing faster on the loan side than on the deposit side.

I think partially that's driven by kind of replacing the Avanza deposits with various different sources of funding, both deposits and other sources of funding. The Avanza is now 4% of our total deposit base, is 4 billion 4 billion SEK.

We have one migration left to do, it's kind of right now very small part of the portfolio. I really see that the aim for 2026 and expectation is to have similar growth across deposits and loans on a kind of underlying currency basis.

Johan Ekblom

Thank you. Maybe just one one quick unrelated question.

Following Swedbank taking out the remainder of Entercard, they've talked about looking at strategic options again around the private loans portfolio there. I'm not asking for comments on a specific hypothetical transaction, but in the private loan market, does it make sense to buy a portfolio for you, or is it you need the whole legal entity, right?

I'm assuming there would be a lot of customer overlap, etc., but does it financially make sense?

Patrick MacArthur

In principle, it financially makes sense to buy portfolios. It's the equivalent essentially of originating out a new loan, but everything has to stack up with regards to the kind of friction costs of doing it, the acquisition price, and the total economics.

When looking at portfolio acquisitions, it's clearly something that we do consider, and it has the potential to be accretive to do it. Far, we haven't done any stand-alone portfolio acquisitions, not because we are against it in principle, but simply because we haven't viewed the business cases as attractive enough.

Jacob Lundblad

Size matters, and asset quality matters.

Patrick MacArthur

Yeah.

Johan Ekblom

Is it a strategic thing to say, "I get access to new customers," or does it make sense financially to buy it as a run-off portfolio? I guess I'm thinking just how do you look at the financial metrics of such a potential transaction?

Patrick MacArthur

I think you get access to new customers, which is great. On the other hand, if you buy a portfolio, typically don't get kind of a new distribution side outside those existing customers.

It's a run-off plus scenario, I would say.

Johan Ekblom

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Patrick MacArthur

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question.

It comes from the line of Sofie Peterzens from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Sofie Peterzens

Hi. Here is Sofie from Goldman Sachs.

Just going back to the deposit growth, deposit were down 5% year-on-year and 3% quarter-on-quarter. Could you just kind of walk us through what drove this decline?

Was it any specific countries where you saw bigger deposit declines or kind of was it more on the term deposit and savings side? If you could just give us a little bit of details around the deposit decline that you saw in Q4.

Patrick MacArthur

I think I'll comment on it Q4 and So year-over If we look at if we look at the deposit growth over the last 12 months, and also Q4, we kind of we have a pretty on a underlying currency basis, deposits are flat Q4 '25 versus Q4 '24, and it's slightly down compared to Q3 '25. I think the down in Q4 '25 is very much kind of as expected.

We did a kind of we we've planned we we obviously migrating the Avanza deposits, as you know. We've did we're doing it through two migrations.

The first one we did in Q3 Q3. The second one we're doing now in Q4 sorry, now in one we did in Q4 sorry, one we did in Q4 last year, the second one we're doing now in Q1 '26.

The reduction there is really kind of as expected. We lost around 50% of the deposits when we moved that book in Q4.

That's driven the deposits slightly kind of looking slightly weak in Q4, but it's kind of very much as expected evolution there.

Sofie Peterzens

That's clear. Then my second question would be around the cost growth.

You're delivering

Patrick MacArthur

on costs was

Sofie Peterzens

very good this quarter. How should we think about the cost growth and wage inflation and IT investments in 2026?

Patrick MacArthur

Just to make clear, on a constant currency basis, deposits are flat year-over-year. Okay.

Then cost growth, I think what we communicated is that you should expect temporarily higher cost growth kind of the coming quarters, but on the other hand, we don't expect cost growth to outgrow loan growth. That's the logic that we have.

We'll have higher cost growth, but not higher cost growth than loan growth is kind of the expectation. On a constant currency basis, then clearly the other aspect there is that costs is heavier towards SEK, whereas the loan portfolio is heavier towards other currencies.

We expect higher growth than we've seen historically, but growth rate on a constant currency basis below the loan book growth.

Sofie Peterzens

That's very clear. Then my final question: just on Entercard, Swedbank has said that they want to derisk the portfolio quite significantly.

I know you mentioned on the previous question that you could potentially also buy the portfolio, but kind of do you think there is also scope to just organically get some of the customers from Entercard given that Swedbank will kind of derisk the book quite significantly?

Patrick MacArthur

I don't think we're commenting on specific portfolios. It was kind of a general comment on how we view kind of private loan portfolios.

Clearly it's Swedbank decision, what Swedbank does. We notice what they've said, and yeah.

Jacob Lundblad

Generally, we take market share, yes, Entercard customers are likely to become NOBA customers.

Patrick MacArthur

Yeah.

Sofie Peterzens

That's very clear. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you so much. Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press *11 on your telephone keypad.

Now we're going to take our next question. Just give us a moment.

The next question comes from the line of Ulrik Zürcher from Nordea. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Ulrik Zürcher

Thank you. Just two one.

On the small signs of increased competition, is this broadly based across all types of lenders, including specialists and traditional banks? Second question is, just wondering what kind of return on tangible equity you are seeing in the SME segment once you have scaled it, and if you have any thoughts about how big the loan book needs to be at scale?

Thank you.

Patrick MacArthur

The first point, I don't think we're in a position to split up exactly where. Overall, kind of we see some signs of increased competition on private loans, but it's not going to comment on if it's specific institutions driving that.

That's the starting point. Then the second point around the SME, I think that on a marginal basis, we expect to be able to deploy capital in the SME at similar type rates as we do in our overall business, and for it not to be negative to our return on tangible equity goals.

Then I think we would clearly need to scale up from where we are today on SME to make it kind of on a total cost basis attractive. Again, I don't think we're going to give an exact number on it, but I think it's maybe a couple of years out before we have the full scale in SME, but you don't need 20 billion for it to be a scalable platform, but you clearly need a bit more than the 1 billion that we start off with.

Ulrik Zürcher

That's helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you so much. Now we're going to take our final question for today.

It comes from the line of Sheel Shah from JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Please ask your question.

Sheel Shah

Great. Thank you for the questions.

I've just got two, please. Firstly, coming back to the competition in private loans, thank you for the color.

Could I ask, what are the implications for NOBA? What is your strategy around this?

Would you still be looking to hold market shares on the front book at around that 28% and then maybe see a bit of a margin impact come through, or are you more focused on maintaining the margin and maybe giving up some of that front book market share and therefore maybe a lower level of lending in this business going forward? Then secondly, on capital, I can see that you've paid down to 13.7%.

Can I ask, what were the decisions or the board discussions that sort of resulted in paying down to 13.7? What would give you more comfort in paying down to maybe 13%?

Thanks.

Patrick MacArthur

I start off with the first one, which is growth and margins. If you look back, we've been growing at 10% plus in private loans while having expanding margins, we've had front book margins above back book margins.

I think we are now in a position where we are growing private loans 10% 10% while having flat front book margins versus back book margins, and is our expectation to pretty much be able to continue in that position. Growing at our target rate of around 10%, which implies holding kind of high 20s new lending market share, while keeping front book margins at a similar level kind of pretty much the same level as we have the back book margins.

Which I hope answers your question, that we think we can keep our growth rate and maintain our margins in private loans. That's question number one.

Question number two, Jacob, you can start off on that? Sorry.

How did the board reason around the dividend level?

Jacob Lundblad

Clearly the 13% to 15% CET1 target was set in a slightly different environment, and I think the board feels very confident about giving the extra dividend to take us down to 13.7%, which is it's not the lower end of the range, but it's lower than the midpoint. It feels like a good step and a reasonable position to be in right now.

Patrick MacArthur

I think the board will always assess all considerations, and have assessed that this is currently a good level. We're going to generate a lot of organic capital every quarter, the board will continuously need to assess exactly where we are in this range of 13% to 15% they think we should be, keeping in mind that the 13% to 15% was clearly set before we had an actual P2G decision, which we now have with a separate P2G.

I don't think we can add much more color to it.

Operator

Excuse me, Shailesh, any further questions?

Sheel Shah

No, that's it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you so much. There are no further questions for today.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Jacob Lundblad, for any closing remarks.

Jacob Lundblad

Very good. Thank you so much for listening in and for the questions, and have a good day.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating.

You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.