Yes, thank you very much, Mara. A very warm welcome also from all of the board of JDC Group.

We're happy to present you the nine-month figures. My name is Sebastian, cofounder of JDC Group 24 years ago together with my partner Ralph, who's the CFO.

Welcome, Ralph. You're speaking later enough on figures and

a lot of text today, no introduction necessary.

You might be knowing Ralph. Ramona is with us for more than a year now, and so, yeah, we welcome Ramona in this circle also.

Very happy to be here.

We don't have a picture of him, but the most important part of the company mostly is sales, and this is why Marcus is here. Welcome, Marcus.

Thank you, Sebastian. A warm welcome from my side.

As Sebastian mentioned, I'm responsible for sales, marketing, and product management. Glad to be here.

All right. We jump into the text and see that, well, one introductory slide.

As always, we're a typical platform company, as you might know. We take in the data of all the insurance companies in Germany, that's more than 220 insurance groups, all the asset management platforms, and the alternative product providers, the mortgaging bank.

We process the data, standardize it first, and then we make it visible in our visualizing systems, either our own or we load the data up via an API to the systems of our clients. That's all kinds of intermediaries.

That's 16,000 individual brokers and tied agents, but also more and more the banks, the insurance companies themselves, other fintech companies, insurtech companies, or exclusive sales organizations. Right now we have about 6.4 million datasets on the platform corresponding to almost 3 million contracts.

Our value comes mostly from our JDC tech stack that's leading, and we still win almost all of these pitches out there when it comes to the choice of processing systems for third-party insurance contracts. The next slide we show you we have a resilient business model.

You see, no matter what crises you could imagine in the past, COVID or all kinds of financial crises in the markets, our CAGR in revenue growth is up 12.2% year over year over year. The growth is also growing.

You see our guidance now at €260 to €280 million in revenue, and also EBITDA, as the platform is scaling up, is growing even steeper. We are now at a 31.4% EBITDA CAGR in the past years, and also this growth is growing.

With the acquisition of FMK, we speed up our earnings growth as well. What you can see on the right-hand side is that our EBITDA margin also gradually goes up, and we are now standing at 8% always to the top line, earnings to top line.

As we pay out 75% on average to our intermediaries. As a software company, you would just look at the relative figures compared to the gross margin lines.

Having said that, yeah, we are happy to look back on a very successful quarter as we could close the acquisition of FMK. You can see that also growth is not as steep as you might used to, okay?

We are at record highs, obviously, as we are going from one record high to the other and now stand at more than €175 million in turnover, which is a growth of 11.2% in the first nine months of 2025. Earnings are up considerably higher.

It depends whether we take in the one-offs or not. As you see when we look at the guidance, Ralph will explain later, we will have to report without one-offs.

EBITDA growth is at 19.9%, almost 20%. If you take out the one-offs that we have quite a bit for the acquisition is 35.5% with a very nice earnings growth.

If we deduct the one-off costs, I think it's a very, very nice development. You can see that's part of the problem here.

We always tell you that all our figures are always have one little disclaimer, and that's the, yeah, the development of the overall economic situation. Obviously we're not that dependent on on on the overall economy, but definitely on the consumer confidence.

What we could see that there was a lot of hope into the new government, but as you can deduct from all the news that you're taking, now the actual government, that's a conservative and Social Democrat coalition government, is now at a at a worse situation than this traffic light government in the past. Now we can see that, yeah, the overall business figures, Germany is in a recession for now three quarters.

It seems to be ending, but growth is still very weak, and now unemployment is exceeding. This has a lot of impact on the occupational pension schemes that are not gone, but they're basically postponed to the next year.

You have a lot of big companies that do not see any benefit in spending money for employees because the the labor market is quite, yeah, in a in a in a in a in a better position as you can find employees again. All these sentiment indicators, consumer confidence, is is at a record low.

This is what we feel, that people postpone their investment decisions, their pension planning decisions. After a very, very strong third quarter in '24, we now see a very normal quarter, third quarter in '25.

This means that our growth is not as strong in the third quarter as we expected. Obviously we see already the figures for Q4, which we see much, much better than Q3.

That's the the lowest consumer mood since our new chancellor Friedrich Merz took office. That's a little bit the backdrop of our very good performance of our company herself.

Ralph?

Okay. We have two effects on the figures which I would like to explain before we go into the figures.

The first is the environment. What does that mean for us in concrete terms?

On the one hand, we are seeing a slight slowdown in new business development in the area of retirement provision, especially in life insurance, as Sebastian mentioned. Keep in mind we are comparing to an extraordinarily strong Q3 2024.

I will show you this later on. Secondly, we are seeing a slight increase in cancellation rates.

Cancellation rates are always calculated in relation to new business. If new business goes down slightly, then cancellation rates are higher.

This reduces the reported net revenue in the third quarter. To answer this question in advance, we don't see this as a trend.

It's just a description of the current environment. We know from discussions with our competitors and insurance that this is an industry-wide situation.

Let me add this: we have seen this several times in the past. There are weaker weeks and weaker months, but we have always seen subsequent rebound effects.

Why is this the case? It's the case because people don't buy retirement products for fun, but they buy it because they need it.

If you don't buy them today, you probably have to buy them tomorrow. This is not a very nice quarter, but normal business.

The internal effects in the third quarter come from two sides. The first is what we have reorganized the companies and the liability umbrella.

The second one is we had relevant M&A effects in the third quarter. I will give you some figures on this before we dive into the figures.

It's better to understand this before. Adjustment one is the elimination of the reorganization of the segments, necessary to observe the development of the segments and compare apples to apples.

To remind you, we had three liability umbrellas, and we now have one liability umbrella that saves us around €250k a year. As a result, in the first nine months of the year, €8.5 million of turnover and €0.1 million of EBITDA are now allocated in the Advisory segment and not in the Advisortech segment.

That doesn't have any effect on the bottom line. It's just between the segments.

The second effect, adjustment two, is the elimination of the M&A one-offs. The M&A costs have added up to a very significant amount.

The FMK Group was not only our biggest transaction, but also the most expensive one in terms of M&A costs. The M&A costs consist of due diligence costs for legal, tax, and financial due diligence.

We had legal costs for the SPA negotiation. We had notary costs, which were very high because of the size of the transaction.

We had to pay the W&I insurance premium. For those who are not familiar with the M&A business, W&I insurance is a warranty and indemnity insurance, and that's an insurance that is usually paid by the acquirer, means by JDC, and it bears the costs of warranty violations and incorrect indemnities for the acquirer.

This is now a standard practice in profession and bigger M&A transactions, and in the meantime, precondition to take part in an auction. This all sums up to €0.9 million in the third quarter, and over the year, it's a relevant amount of €1.4 million.

Now let's go into the figures. The revenue rose slightly by 5.6% in the third quarter and 11.2% for the year as a whole.

The Advisortech segment group pro forma adjusted for adjustment one means the liability umbrella by 5% in Q3 and 11.5% for the full year. The pro forma EBITDA adjusted for adjustment two means the M&A costs rose by 50% from €2.3 million to €3.5 million in the third quarter and by 35.5% to €12.5 million for the full year.

Pro forma EBIT rose by more than 100% in the third quarter. To be completely transparent to you, we would also like to show on the next slides what Q3 would have looked like if the FMK transaction had not taken place.

That question is obvious. For the sake of simplicity, we have also taken adjustment one means the internal liability umbrella reorganization into account here.

I will show you this now. Before, let's go into the development by quarter.

That's what I said before. It's important to understand what happened in the third quarter.

You can see here that usually the third quarter is in turnover 6% to 8% weaker than the second quarter of the year. We had in the last five years two exemptions.

The first was 2021. There the third quarter was the rebound of the first German-wide COVID-19 lockdown, not comparable.

The second exemption was last year. We had there no external effect, no one that I know of, but we just had a very strong life insurance business in the third quarter 2024.

There are two ways to look on this third quarter. The first is to view on it in the course of the year, and then we can see it's a very normal intra-year development.

If you compare it to the previous year, then you compare with a very strong third quarter 2024. Having said this, let's go into the figures without the FMK Group, including the internal reorganization.

This would have resulted in the following picture. Total revenue would have grown by 0.6%.

The slight decline in revenue in the Advisortech segment would have been more than offset by the growth in the Advisory segment. EBITDA would have risen by 5.4% to €2.4 million or by 19% to €2.9 million for the year as a whole.

Sebastian? You're muted, Sebastian.

Sorry, sir. Yes, sorry.

You can see that we have good growth in all product groups. Investment is up 9%, obviously, and you might think why is this just 9%?

It's because most of our funds are denominated in US dollars. As compared to the euros, there's about a 10% exchange rate change, and this is what makes these investment figures just grow almost 10%.

Insurance, you can see we're still at a double-digit growth with plus 10%. As Ralph said, in spite of or against the backdrop of a very, very good life insurance business last year with plus 30%, this year life insurance is quite flat, and this means this is basically the transfer of contracts figures, they contribute to the growth, but not life insurance.

We will see better times in Q4 where we can see especially in health insurance a strong increase. The other product groups, which is a small addition, is basically up because we can see that the real estate business is back, the mortgaging business following the real estate business, and all kinds of other revenues are up quite considerably.

All in all, we have to be content with the growth of all these product groups. On the next slides, you can see how this breaks up among the different sales channels.

You can see that also here, the green figures again are after basically the pro forma figures as if these internal reallocations would not have taken place. You can see that the breadth of the IFA business is not as strong this time with plus 7%, and the reasons are the ones Ralph pointed out, especially in the life insurance section, there is a slowdown, and there's no impact of a normally growing occupational pension platform business.

Major customers, they're up 18%. This is due to there's more customers coming to the platform, as we pointed out, many are in a roll out, ramping up or roll out phase, there's more growth coming from this side.

Then new section is FMK Group, and as Ralph said, €2.6 million in turnover is a nice addition to the platform. This is also a good point.

Ramona will tell us more, going now also in the direct customer segments, then this means that we have the lever in our own hand. We are not as dependent on our intermediaries for growth.

Advisory, as said, a tremendous growth after the reallocation of the liability umbrella business, but also just in a natural growth with plus 12% is a very nice development. On the right side, you can see that, yeah, turnover split with a faster growing major customer business, that's already now at 30% of all of our turnover.

The following slides are divided into three sections. On the left hand, you can see the reported figures.

In the middle, you see the figures corrected by the adjustments that I have explained before. On the right side, you can see two graphs comparing the reported figures with the adjusted figures.

To make this a little bit easier to understand, I will focus on the adjusted figures in the following slides. Having said this, let's come to the third quarter.

In the Advisortech segment, the turnover grew, including one month's turnover of FMK, as Sebastian mentioned, €2.6 million and compared to a very strong previous quarter by 5%. Gross profit increased by 13%, leading to an EBITDA plus of 30% and an EBIT plus of a very nice 50%.

One comment on the purchase price allocation of FMK Group. This is important to understand the forward-looking figures.

When we buy a company, we have to do a so-called PPA, a purchase price allocation. That means we have to allocate the purchase price on the customer base, on the assets, and the rest on goodwill.

It's a little bit more complex, but let keep it that simple. Customer base and assets have to be written down over a period of time, and the goodwill is not written down, but has to be tested yearly in a so-called impairment test.

If we look at the FMK Group, then you can see that in the past, FMK didn't produce a customer base. They just produce leads and sold the leads.

As it is a very small company, there are not a lot fixed assets. The vast majority of the purchase price will be allocated or is allocated on the goodwill, and that's good news because that means that in the future, we will see almost no depreciation on the earnings coming from the FMK transaction.

When we look at the first nine months as a whole, the picture is as follows. Pro forma revenues rose by 11.5% to €148 million.

The costs remained relatively stable. EBITDA rose by 21.5% to €11.8 million and EBIT by 33.4% to €8.3 million.

Now let's go to the Advisory segment and look at the third quarter in an isolated look. Here we see a pro forma revenue of €13.8 million, which is a plus of 14.6%.

Gross profit only increased by 5.8%. That's also a result of and related to the reclassification of our liability umbrella.

The costs were very stable beside the depreciation and amortization. This has risen significantly.

The reason is the expansion of our rental space in Vienna. As under the IFRS 16, lease payments, including the rental costs, must be removed from the expenses and must be capitalized in lease liabilities and then amortized over a period of time.

That's what we see here. That's the reason why depreciation and amortization is up more than 30%.

It's just a new office. In total, this development leads to an improvement in EBITDA of 28.4% and an increase in EBIT of 23.3%.

If we look at the first nine months of the Advisory division, we see a positive development. Pro forma revenue rose by 12% to €40.6 million.

Except for the depreciation effect that I described some seconds ago, we have a very stable cost development, which led to an increase in EBITDA of 43.3% and an EBIT of 52.7%. Let's come to the cash flow statement.

This has been significantly influenced by the FMK transaction and the associated financing in the third quarter. Operating cash flow is at previous year's level.

The reason is that the additional profits were almost entirely offset by transaction costs, by the one-off costs. The cash flow from investment activities relates almost exclusively to the FMK transaction, €66 million of the €68 million.

The cash flow from financing is somewhat more complex to explain, but I give it a try. We have acquired FMK.

Closing was the 16th of September, and the date of first consolidation was the 1st of September. The first consolidation was before the closing.

This is the reason for this development. At the time of the initial consolidation means the 1st of September, FMK had a cash of €16 million on its account, and approximately 14 means €13.9 million of this were prior-year profits that we didn't buy, but they were distributed to the sellers before the closing.

After the first date of first consolidation and before closing. This is the reason why you don't see €70 million by cash flow from financing activities, but only €55 million, and you see another €14 million in the next line.

This is the change in cash and cash equivalents due to consolidation scope. Admittedly, it's a little bit complex, but we coordinated all this with our auditor beforehand to be here on the safe side.

Cash at the end of the period was €33.5 million, including €2.8 million FMK cash. The good news here is cash on hand last Friday was a very strong €38.8 million plus another €4 million of the FMK Group.

In total, we had the first time cash on hand of more than €42 million. There's no news on the old bond, volume €20 million.

We have still the first call option 1st November of 2026, and we have not decided how to proceed here. On the right side, this is our new Nordic bond issued with €70 million, possibly up to €160 million.

The coupon is 6.5%, but I would like to remind you it's a rolling coupon. It's Euribor plus 450 basis points.

The bond is due at the 28th of August in 2029, and there we also have call options. The call option starts at the 28th of August in 2027 and from there on can be called every day starting at a price of 102.25% and declining to 100.45%.

Share price yesterday close was €28.60. Today we are a little bit lower, unfortunately, market cap is below €390 million right now.

To remind you, we have approximately 150,000 treasury shares that we bought for €19.89 per share. In the shareholder structure on the right side, there are no changes, still same situation: Great-West Management, Provinzial, and Versicherungskammer Bayern as the biggest shareholders.

That were the figures from my side. A lot of text today, I apologize, but [laughter] it was a little bit more to explain.

I hand over to Ramona.

Thank you, Ralph. I'll give a little update on FMK.

It has been 2 months since the closing of the FMK acquisition. We had a very quick ramp-up after the transaction, and the collaboration between FMK and JDC works very smoothly.

We have achieved quite a lot in the past 8 weeks. All the legal and the financial requirements are all on track and almost completed.

That includes, for example, the integration of the accounting or also the negotiation of the intercompany contracts, as well as all the requirements of the Nordic bond, for example, the collateral agreements or also the setup of the ongoing bond reporting. That's from the legal and the financial side.

From the business side, we already went live with the lead generations for the first insurance products. We picked two pilot products with two different sales approaches.

The first sales approach is like the classical self-service approach online, so that means the end customer can buy the product online without the help of an advisor. We picked the pet insurance as a pilot for this section because it's highly profitable and it has a strong demand online right now.

The second product that is already live is the work disability insurance. It has a different sales approach.

It's a product that usually requires an advisor to help the client pick an insurance product. In this case, FMK provides JDC with the interested clients, and we, JDC, as a broker, provides this advice internally.

This would be the second pillar. Ralph, if you could quickly jump to the next page?

One slide back? Okay.

Both products are already online. Here's an example for the Tierkrankenversicherung, the pet insurance.

The big difference between the previous business model of FMK is that they used to get only paid one-off for a lead or a sale. Now that we went into the value chain as a broker, we profit not only from a one-off commission, but also yearly from the recurring commissions.

For example, if FMK got €100 one-off for the sale of an pet insurance in the past, now we get the same amount annually as long as the contract is going. In 2026, we will roll out further products, and also we already signed key hires to build up the new direct sales unit starting in January.

As Sebastian earlier mentioned, this is also a way to push growth ourselves, and we are a little less dependent on our intermediaries.

Maybe, Ramona, just one figure to add. In the last year, FMK made roughly a million in commission for pet insurance, click-out model, one-off.

If we keep this speed in future, we will do a million, but recurring, year over year. So €1 million this year, €2 million next year, €3 million the following year.

That's a very very attractive progress for us.

Ramona? We could jump back one slide, please.

Right now we are testing and learning with JDC as the broker for the end customer. This is, of course, very profitable because we keep 100% of the commission.

However, and this is the third pillar, we are also planning on distributing leads to all our brokers. That means we are building the infrastructure to channel the leads into our broker platform, and brokers will be able to buy the leads from there.

In this scenario, JDC profits from selling the lead as well as receiving part of the commissions for providing the services as a broker pool like in our regular business model. This is a very large infrastructure project which we are currently setting up, and we are expecting to go live in 2026.

Then if you could go two slides ahead? What also might be interesting for you, that FMK operates the subdomains for Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche for comparison of financial and insurance products.

For those who are not German, Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche are German newspapers. FMK operates these subdomains, and they can decide on what kind of articles are being released, and they can also add advertisement links in the articles.

This is another source of trust building and also lead generation for our new business model. That's on FMK.

Back to you, Ralph.

Thanks, Ramona. As always, we show you the platform activity.

Numbers of orders is a little bit down like in the last quarters, decreased by 1.4%. As Sebastian mentioned, growth comes mainly from contract transfers.

Here we are up 30%, starting from a already very, very high base. The assets under the administration also increased very nicely by 11.4%, by in the meantime, approximately €8 billion.

We are nearer at €8 billion than at €7.5 billion. Which is really amazing is the development of the net insurance premium, which has increased by almost 18% within the last 12 months.

That's a very amazing number, and we're now heading for €1.5 billion in annual net premium. This was the last figure for today beside the guidance, and I hand over to Sebastian.

We introduced a slide showing you how resilient our growth is. We used to go through a lot of multi-crisis environments in the past, and you could see no matter whether it was the COVID-19 pandemic or all the the, yeah, the turn around in interest rates, or now Liberation Day, which we took quite well, and also now we have this consumer confidence crisis, as we call it now.

Still growth is up and growth is growing. We are not afraid of what's coming ahead.

On the contrary, I think together with FMK, we have a very strong position to profit from the circumstances because more and more of our business is happening online. It's also happening on a consumer-beneficial environment.

We're looking ahead with quite some confidence for Q4. Having said that, we give you the slide of the guidance you already know.

We put up our guidance in August after the acquisition of FMK. We think now our turnover will be €260 to €280 million in turnover, and EBITDA will be €20.5 to €22.5 million.

This is what we learned, although we are so for on the stock exchange for such a long time, that we have to give you guidance without the one-offs. That's the good news here.

We think we reach this guidance also if we do not have a pro forma view as for the one-offs. We think we are in a very good condition here to exceed our old guidance by quite a bit that we showed until end of July.

Also all our goals in 2025 are on a very good road. We are integrating Morgen & Morgen platform more to the platform, very good outlooks here for future customers.

Our asset management platform, DFP, was again rated top 20 in Germany. Now we're at number 14.

With only €2 billion in assets under management, we're one of the, yeah, biggest portfolio management companies in the country. Also, Summitas grows profitably, and M&A works like one broker a month.

Also our IT platform will be scaled using quite some AI to bring down costs and and enhance our efficiency. This is what we see, that the costs per contract are reduced step by step by step.

In the end, it's quite a considerable effect here. That's also our caveat.

That's what we said in the beginning. Yes, our business performance is very good, but on the other hand, it's it's still develop it's still dependent on the development of the global, national economic environment.

If you look at all the news in Europe and Germany especially, we could wish for more. We could wish for a government that that knows what it's doing and not quarreling about now the the pension system because this has quite some impact on consumer confidence.

Again, as Ralph said, it's just going in waves. Whatever business we don't do in Q3, we might do in Q4 or Q1 next year.

A lot of investment decisions are just postponed. That's what we see now.

As I said, especially in occupational pension schemes. We have a very good outlook for Q4 and then also a very promising outlook for '26.

We repeat that next year, together with FMK, before minorities, there will be at least an EBITDA of €35 million. I think that's quite some nice earnings growth, which brings us in a very good situation.

Thank you very much until now before we answer your questions. Again, an invitation for next Monday because JDC Group is now on the stock exchange in Frankfurt for 20 years.

That's quite some anniversary, and we invited most of you. I hope we don't we didn't forget many.

Whoever is still a late comer, this will be like a nice, yeah, like whatever, it's a party on the stock exchange. There will be bell ringing, there will be nice pictures, and there will also be a good dinner after.

Whoever is is is late, welcome. Yes, thank you very much for your attention, and happy to take your questions now.

Mara?

Maybe I can take this question. If you buy a company, then, of course, the business plans presented are very optimistic because the sellers want you to pay a very high purchase price.

It's not the first company that we saw, and it's not the first due diligence that we made. We are in line with our expectations with the FMK transaction.

The success, what I can say is what Ramona said, that the cooperation is very compelling, very smart guys, the three ones. A lot of ideas that have to be shaped for the future, and we are absolutely convinced that this will be one of our best transaction we ever made.

We're still in the planning process. I don't know, Ralph, can you say something already?

It's a little bit early there.

It's a little bit early. We will see a big plus, definitely beyond €300 million, but the rest we will show you with the guidance for the next year.

We expected this question, Ralph.

[laughter] You were very fast with your famous last words. Otherwise, I would have answered the question before.

When FMK performs as it performed the last months and if JDC performs not better than last year, but on the same level of last year, and the advisory business is doing as it does, then we will end up, as we announced, in the lower third of our guidance. Then you have to add the one-offs to see a realistic view.

With this one-offs, we think we will end at the upper third of our guidance. The answer is, yes, we have a good visibility.

Yes, we have a good reason why we said we keep the guidance.

Marcus, I will give the next question to you. I just answer this tender question.

Yes, we have not lost a real tender, but there was one that passed us basically. We didn't get it because we were not really invited to take part, and that's Zurich Insurance.

Not a very big one, but we have one in mind now. It had to come at some point.

Yes, we take part in other tenders. Maybe Marcus, you will take the R+V question, which is next.

Mara?

Yes. We have a pipeline with a lot of targets and significant targets.

We are still in dialogue with them. We make the offers and starting some small projects.

I'm very hopeful that we will see next year some new tender, higher tenders, and then, yeah, we can talk more if the contract is signed. I'm very hopeful that we have next year's good announcements.

Obviously for M&A targets, we cannot answer the question because it's signed when it's signed, and before that, it's just smoke. [laughter]

Marcus, maybe you want to answer this as well.

Yeah. As we know, R+V is more in the bank field, and we know that banks are not so pushy in case of insurances.

It cost a little bit more time as we expected. Then for the next 2 years, they plan also to have more grip in the bank branches, and then we expect more insurance business for this.

For the big European insurance company, we started with the pilot phase, and now we opened to more customers. We see the first contracts are coming.

We will do it step by step, but we are still on track with our expectations in this case.

Perfectly.

Yes. Hi, Edwin.

Hi, Edwin. Good day.

Thank you for taking the questions. There's not that much left, but maybe continuing on the last question, especially on the Allianz side.

Hey, there's the pilot now. The contribution is a little bit going to expectations.

What order of magnitude should we think about in the case of Allianz, and maybe also on the other insurer, Gothaer. You mentioned a name that is the secret.

[laughter] This is a big secret. Telling more about the secret volume, maybe you can give something that doesn't hurt our NDA too much, Marcus.

Now,

what we can say that we have learned from our first bigger contracts where we had big plans and expectations and quick ramp-ups. What we see now over the last 3 years that these big corporations are all slow.

That's the reason why we decided to negotiate minimum revenues, minimum margin, platform fees, and so on and so on in all of this corporations. Thus it's nice if volume picks up, but it's not necessary for us to have a minimum profit on these corporations.

R+V, you mentioned it, is very profitable for us even if it's not growing that fast. The savings banks in the meantime are very profitable for us because they are growing.

In the meantime, we are heading eight-digit revenue there. The secret name is already very profitable for us, although they have just passed this pilots project stage.

Maybe this answers your question in detail we are able to give. The growth was still 18%, hey, it's not low, well.

Then maybe for Ramona, hey. FMK is on boarded, of course, since September, I think half of September even.

Maybe on the example of the pet insurance case. Can you maybe give a little bit of an example how that really works, hey.

They are generating leads, and what kind of conversion do you get out of that? Do you maybe have a little bit more detail on how such a process works?

Sure. There are different sales approaches.

As I said earlier, there are a less complex products, and then you have some sort of comparison portal on their website where you can put in all your data, and then you get a recommendation for the best product for you. Then you put in all your data in there, and then you finish the sale yourself online.

That's one part of the business model. That's also what we do in the pet insurance.

Just by getting the sale on our website compared to sending the customer to the website of the insurer, we are getting into the value chain and making sure that we're not getting the one-off commission, but also really acting as a broker for the client also for ongoing commissions, but also knowing the client and making sure that we are the point of contact. That's the first line, you can do this only for the less complex products.

It's like house content, it's like legal protection, pet insurance, accident, something like that. Then you have a second line of products which are a lot more complex and where you make a decision that's very often a decision for a lifetime because you only take out insurance once.

It's for private health insurance or it's for work disability insurance or other sorts of life insurance. It's a very big decision.

Very often customers in Germany, they prefer to talk this through with an expert advisor. In this case, you will have some sort of client interest on the websites of FMK.

They have various brands. You put in your data that you are interested in that kind of project, and then that's what we call a lead.

Then they get in contact with one of our advisors, and then you have some sort of it is an online sale, but there's an advisor involved, and then you finish or you make the sale with the advisor. Those are the two kinds of products or product types that we have, and the process is a little bit different.

In both cases, legally JDC, the JDC Plus, one of our daughters, is the legal partner, is the broker of the client, and also ongoing we will be responsible for helping the client during the entire phase of the contract. In terms of channeling leads to our brokers, of course, we will focus on the products that need advice because if it's a very simple product, it's not very interesting for our brokers to get in and advise on that.

In this second line of products, that's also where we will separate the leads, and parts we will do ourselves and parts we will give into the broker channel.

One additional comment, Edwin, to the pet insurance. You remember FMK click-out model to pet insurer is only a lead and not a customer, yeah?

Tomorrow it's our comparison platform. Tomorrow is today because it's online now or next week, yeah?

If you compare product and you leave your personal data, then you are our customer, and we are able to send you more information, yeah, to advertise other products, yeah. We will build up a customer base at FMK that it's not there for the past.

This is the second potential beside the situation that we do not just click out, but we sell it onto our own portfolios. Yeah.

What kind of conversion do you get on these leads? FMK generates leads for you, and then, well, should we think about 50% conversion, or it's maybe 10?

I have no idea.

That depends very much on the product, of course. If you have very complex products, of course, the conversion rate is much lower versus products that are, for example, compulsory in Germany.

You have some regions in Germany where you have to take out a third legal cover if you have a pet. In this kind of products, you have a very high conversion because you just have to do it.

In other products that are more expensive and where you can take it out or you cannot, they are lower. I wouldn't really feel comfortable sharing conversion rates in this audience because those are one of the best kept secrets in the industry, and it wouldn't help us in our competitive environment if we would share this, sorry.

It's not, Edwin, it's not 50%.

It's not 50%.

Not 50%, unfortunately.

[laughter] There are products that are double-digit, but not all of them. Clear.

Finally, we always get a nice sheet with the annual goals, the goals for 2026 like what's happening with M&A, asset management. What are the priorities for 2026 besides, of course, integrating FMK?

Sebastian?

All these segments have their challenges or also their chances, right? We can see that after a lot of these pension management projects are postponed to next year, we will collect those Q1, Q2.

There's very big companies ahead. We expect a rebound in the life insurance business.

We expect a very strong health insurance business as the premium increases of health insurers are up quite considerably, double-digit figures a lot. That means that we expect very good health insurance business for Q4, but also Q1 next year.

Then also by growing our transfer of contracts business, yeah, we haven't put this out, but these transfers might reach a million next year. On all of these fields we reported to you in the past, there's, yeah, strong growth figures attached.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Edwin.

We are evaluating.

[laughter] We talked about this sometimes. I think obviously now we're in a Q3 call, right, which we are not obliged to do in a Scale segment.

Obviously we are compliant with most of all these regulations in the Scale. It's just the question is, is it, yeah, beneficial, does it help much as spending, yeah, €250k to €300k more a year for the stock exchange listing, and do we have a broader impact?

We are evaluating, yes. Shouldn't be a problem if we decided to do so.

Evaluating positively. [laughter]

Yes.

We've been through this when we acquired Geld.de, that was 2015.

'15. '15,

yeah. Not really.

Now, on the contrary, I think whenever we provide our brokers with leads and our lead auction platform will start in the beginning of the year, I think it's rather more attractive for brokers to come to the platform.

Yeah. Definitely.

Ramona?

Surprisingly, yes, which was a surprise to me. I also did not understand why Germans buy financial products only in the fourth quarter.

It is as it is at FMK. Ramona, please correct me.

We have a strong fourth quarter and a strong beginning of the year, and Ramona will give you the explanation.

It's very interesting that consumers in Germany especially in the beginning of the year thinking about their financial products. It's a little bit, I don't know how to say that in English, if you make good wishes for the next year, and then you feel like, okay, I really have to get my finances under control next year.

Then in January and February, there's a lot of traffic on this. We also see this with one of our large clients, Finanzguru, that also has an end-customer focus, that they also have a lot of interest in the first quarter.

If you're in your summer vacation in August, you probably don't think so much about getting out insurance. In a cold winter if you're staying at home, and then you are thinking about what to do next year, somehow a lot of people are a lot like that.

In the in-customer business and financial services, it's usually around changing the year that you have a lot more traffic than you have in other quarters.

Thank you, Mara. Thank you for your trust, and thank you for being with us now in the earnings call.

As Ralph said, there's a lot of good earnings ahead in Q4, we are well aware that we will reach this guidance taking one-offs or not. We're very confident that we have a good time ahead.

Also looking forward to '26, we are very keen on seeing all these very nice growth figures of FMK and all the earnings figures of FMK in our P&L. Again, right, this is a very great transaction, and it's transforming this company.

Reaching €35 million EBITDA in '26 is a very good outlook that we are looking forward to just execute upon. I hope to see many of you next week at the bell ringing party in the stock exchange.

Happy to answer some more questions then. We're very very happy about the last developments.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you.

Bye.