Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our results conference call. First half adjusted net profit up by 8% year-on-year at around €343 million.

Revenues up by around 11% year-on-year at €713 million, with all product areas contributing positively. Banking up by 8.5% thanks to higher deposits volumes.

Investing up by 11% thanks to the volume effect. Brokerage up by 15% thanks to the higher stocks of asset under custody and expanding active investor base.

Adjusted operating costs well under control at around €193 million, increasing by around 6% year-on-year, excluding the additional costs related to the growth of the business. Cost-income ratio at 27%, confirming operating leverage as a key strength of the bank.

Capital position confirmed to be strong and safe, with a common equity tier 1 ratio at 23.18% and a leverage ratio at 5.02%. Among the main events, we have signed with CNP Assicurazioni a four-year exclusive partnership for the distribution of life insurance products.

The deal improves both the quality of products and services and Fineco marginality. Moving now to our commercial performance, we are experiencing a material step-up in our growth.

This is driven by our unique positioning, capturing long-term structural trends, and by our execution on several initiatives. The impact of this acceleration is clearly visible in our numbers.

In the first half, net sales increased by 35% year-on-year. In July, estimated net sales at €1.7 billion, around 40% higher year-on-year, with around €0.4 billion asset under management, around -€0.3 billion deposits, and around €1.7 billion asset under custody.

Brokerage clients were very active, buying the dips, leading to very solid brokerage revenues, estimated at €23 million, up around 20% year-on-year. New clients continued to grow at a strong pace, up 26% year-on-year in the first half.

In July, new clients are estimated at around 21,000, up by around 40% year-on-year. Now move to the guidance.

Further upgraded outlook for our 2026 and 2029 plan, confirming the quality of our diversified business model. The better outlook is driven by a combination of better-than-expected net sales, with all the mix components contributing positively to the revenues; combination of deposits net sales and interest rates evolution; slower growth of operating costs going forward compared to the CMD expectations.

We are redesigning the backbone of the bank with artificial intelligence, that is gradually moving into the execution phase 2000 2026. We expect all the product areas contributing to higher revenues thanks to the acceleration of our structural growth.

We expect: net financial income growing thanks to the combination of positive deposit net sales and rates; investing, a solid increase of revenues thanks to the combination of resilient net sales and mix improvement; brokerage, we expect another record year; banking fees stable year-on-year. Costs, we expect a growth by around 6%, not including around €15 million additional costs for growth initiatives and around €5 million for pan-European platform setup.

Compared to the previous guidance, we are embedding a €5 million increase related to the marketing in additional costs for growth, as clients are very responsive to our value proposition, and we see a clear opportunity to further accelerate. I now hand to our CFO, Lorena Pelliciari, to start diving on results.

Thank you, Alessandro, and good morning, everybody. Let me start with slide 7.

Net financial income in the first half increased by around 8% year-on-year, and [unclear] ported by a positive volume effect [unclear] I like is the quality of [unclear] is capital light and is industrially [unclear] deeply connected [unclear] This allows us to generate profitability across our entire client base, including small banking-only clients. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the solid dynamics of our liquidity, despite the significant level of client investments during the period.

Let's now move on to slide 8. This slide provides a deeper view of the nature of our deposit base.

Our liquidity is not opportunistic or rate-driven. As just said, it is transactional, granular, and deeply connected to the daily use of our banking platform.

Clients use Fineco for their everyday financial needs, and this creates a highly stable deposit base. On the right-hand side, we provide a benchmarking based on Pillar 3 disclosures.

Fineco enjoys the highest level of stable deposits, with the median ticket equal to around €4,000. This combination of [unclear] and granular [unclear] on to slide 9 related to investing.

Investing revenues increased [unclear] driven by growing volumes. The growth of asset under management remains consistent with the strong client demand [unclear] solid, with both liquidity coverage ratio and net stable funding ratio well above regulatory requirements and among the highest levels in Europe.

Overall, we continue to combine growth, profitability, and a very conservative risk profile, while maintaining one of the strongest capital and liquidity positions in the sector. Thank you for your attention.

Now I'll hand back to Alessandro.

Thank you, Lorena, and let's move now to slide 14. Fineco benefits from a unique market positioning, fully capturing its long-term growth opportunities.

On the left, we show our market share on the addressable financial wealth, which is still very small. On the right, we summarize the key structural trends that are reshaping the financial services industry and reinforcing our strategic positioning.

First, AI disruption, which is driving for higher transparency in financial services and higher productivity. Fineco is already well positioned thanks to its market positioning and state-of-the-art platform.

Second, the massive generational wealth transfer. New generations are looking for efficiency, transparency, and convenience, all core elements of Fineco value proposition.

Third, the consolidation in the banking industry, with traditional banks not focused on customer experience. Fineco sits exactly at the crossroads of these three big structural trends.

On slide 15, we show a clear example of our distinctive positioning compared to the industry, focusing on the investing business. Fineco is a clear outlier in the Italian market, with a value proposition based on efficiency, transparency, and convenience.

This is reflected in the great quality of our investing revenues, that are driven by recurring management fees based on fair pricing, with no performance fees and negligible amount of upfront fees. This is marking a clear difference in the long-term sustainability [unclear] [unclear] and a

higher brokerage fees. Second, ETFs are very well in demand for securities lending, and it's a strong opportunity for our internalisation engine.

Third, the data platform fee agreement by the beginning of the second half 2026. On the investing, the strong clients' interest means a big volume for our advanced advisory service, resulting in stronger revenues.

Second, Fineco Asset Management is live with its active ETF range for passive ETF, has a co-branding partnership with one leading issuer. Finally, ETFs accumulation instalment plans are now fully available in our investing services, also through the application.

Let's quickly move to the slide 24. The plan for the deployment of our pan-European platform is progressing as expected.

We confirm that by the year-end, we will launch the family and friends phase, with a full launch in early 2027. Moving on to the slide 25, we summarize the deployment of our artificial intelligence on our platform.

Our initiatives are already starting to deliver. For example, PFA constantly using the AI platform saw an increase, as we already said, around 20% of their commercial proposals.

Let me now briefly summarize the most recent artificial intelligence initiatives. First, we are now live with the customer relationship management for our financial planners.

It's a key step to increase their productivity. It is fully integrated with Fineco platform and data, and allows our network to better cluster clients and identify priority actions.

Second, we are already live with the brokerage copilot that will improve the awareness of the engagement of our direct clients. This artificial intelligence tool allows clients to screen securities, analyze portfolios on relevant news, and is fully integrated in the execution engine of the Fineco platform.

We are already start to see the first evidence that this tool is leading clients to the order execution. Now thank you for your time, and I'll hand it back to [unclear].

Thank you, Paolo, and let's now move to slide 26. Guidance: further upgraded outlook for 2026 and 2000 and 2029 plan, confirming the quality of our diversified business model.

The better outlook is driven by combination of better-than-expected net sales, with all the mix components contributing positively to revenues; combination of deposits net sales and interest rates evolution; slower growth of operating costs going forward compared to the CMD expectations. We are redesigning the backbone of the bank with artificial intelligence, that is gradually moving into the execution phase.

For 2026, we expect all the product areas contributing to higher revenues thanks to the acceleration of our structural growth. We expect: better net financial income thanks to the combination of positive net sales and new rates environment; investing, solid increase in revenues thanks to combination of resilient net sales and mix improvement; brokerage, another record year thanks to higher asset under custody and active investors; banking fees stable year-on-year.

Operating costs, we expect a growth by around 6%, not including €15 million additional costs for growth initiatives and around €5 million for the pan-European platform setup. Compared to the previous guidance, we are embedding a €5 million increase related to marketing in additional for growth, as clients are very responsive to our value proposition, and we see a clear opportunity to further accelerate.

Cost-income, we expect it comfortably below 30% thanks to the scalability of our platform and strong operating gearing. The cost of risk was equal to 7 basis points thanks to the quality of our lending portfolio, and is expected in a range between 5 and 10 basis points.

Finally, payout ratio is expected for 2026 in a range between 70% and 80%. Leverage ratio, our goal is to remain above 4.5%.

Thank you for your attention, and we can now open the Q&A session.

Hi. Good morning.

Thanks for taking my questions. The line was not good during the call, I missed a good part of it, particularly the details on the slides.

I'm stating my question on that, specifically on the guidance. You have further upgraded the guidance, which is working business as before, and trying to figure out what could be the implication of the revision, especially on the net interest income [unclear] reported, including all the items, and then the adjustment below with the net of the one-offs.

I was wondering why you present the number in this way and where the remainder of the one-off is included in which line item of the P&L. Thank you very much.

Thank you for the questions, and sorry for the bad quality of the line, so. The upgraded guidance is clearly moving on, is a continuance and steady upgrade that is current with the evolution we are experiencing.

As we explained, the most relevant KPI to look at for having an idea of the possible evolution of our revenues and also profits is the progression on the net sales. Because as we explained during the presentation, the net sales, whatever is the mix, is contributing in a big way to the revenues of the bank.

At the same time, we have very clear evidence that what we are doing in terms of redesigning the backbone of the bank using technology and artificial intelligence is emerging as paying off. We are extremely confident that going forward, we can expect a material impact on the evolution of operational costs.

This is the reason why we also introduce an additional guidance in which we expect the beginning of the deceleration of the growth of operational costs happening definitely before than we presented during the plan. Finally, then there is an excellent combination of evolution of deposits and interest rates, because clearly it's the rates are evolving they are higher.

At the same time, despite the higher rates, deposits are emerging as extremely resilient, and we expect keeping on growing. This means that clearly it's if we put all of these components all of them together, it's clear that we have the evidence of an material improvement of the results we expect to generate throughout the plan.

Regarding the 15% you are referring to the increase of the Lorena, this was the...

In the second quarter 2026 compared with the second quarter 2025.

This is the net interest income.

Net interest income.

Yes, net interest income. Clearly, we cannot give such a precise numbers because, as you know better than me, clearly there is a component that we are not controlling, that is the level of rates.

Clearly, what we are absolutely sure that the continuous growth of the net interest income is going to continue, and this is clearly mostly driven by the quality of our deposits. Because I would like to remind that the quality of our deposits means that the beta of our stable deposits is practically zero.

This is making everything working incredibly well. On the operating costs, as I explained, answering to the upgraded guidance, again, we are extremely confident that the growth of the operational costs going forward is going to keep on going down and more rapidly than we were expecting when we presented the plan.

For the adjustments of net profit, I leave the floor to Lorena. Yes,

thank you, Alessandro. You can see on slide 6 the P&L adjusted with the net profit adjusted, in which we have reported a dedicated lines related to non-recurring expenses, net of taxes, which are equal to €3 million.

We have a detail in the same slide on the bottom side of the slide, in which we have reported the fact that this amount correspond to €4.6 million expenses gross and is related to the termination agreement with an executive occurred in the second quarter 2026, connected to the reorganization of the bank.

Thank you. If I may, a follow-up on another topic, which is the stronger net inflows also in July in asset under custody.

It was probably the second record month in terms of asset under custody. Is this trend of investments by clients that you expect to continue also in the coming months, or was related to some specific reasons?

The reason is related to the unique positioning of Fineco. Fineco is offering the only one powerful brokerage platform available on Italian market.

If you are a client in Italy that you want to deal with a very powerful platforms offered by an robust, significant, and trustful bank, the only place in which you can move is in Fineco. Fineco is offering a unique combination of robustness, reliability, and also quality of the platform.

This is making the most interesting clients interested in dealing directly with the markets moving to Fineco. This trend is accelerating for the reasons we explained, because the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence is making progressively clients more and more aware, more and more demanding in terms of quality, transparency, fairness.

We are observing a very fascinating trend that is now accelerating in attracting directly private banking clients that are entering just for using the platform. This clearly is a signaling and progressively accelerating a change in the structure of the market.

We expect this trend is going to continue and reinforcing.

Thank you.

Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. I have three.

The first one is on the partnership with CNP. Can you provide us more color on the details of the partnership and how much margin accretion we can expect over the coming years?

The second one on the German pension reform, when you report she means that we open the system with a more flexible and I would say market-friendly approach. In light of the upcoming entry to Germany, have you already made any consideration on how to capitalize on this opportunity, and can you provide us with more color on this?

Any thoughts that would be appreciated. The last one on cryptos.

We have seen some operators authorized by regulators in recent weeks. How are the discussion with the regulator progressing, and when do you expect to receive the authorization?

Thank you.

Yes, let me start by the partnership with CNP. Now clearly this partnership, that is a partnership that has an four years horizon, clearly is a partnership that is going to allow us to be more efficient in providing to our clients a higher-quality services.

Second, clearly, according with a decent development of the volumes, is going to generate a higher margins. Because the partnership, it's absolutely great because CNP is an incredibly efficient partner, we have been keeping on working with them by many years.

We are sharing with them the same value proposition, because the insurance wrapper, if they are provided to clients in a way that is a fair, transparent, and efficient, are a great solutions. On that side, we are on the same line.

In our agreement, we cannot give an precise indication of the conditions, and so but clearly it's for sure this is respect what we were doing until so far is going to generate higher margins for the bank. On the German market, I don't know, Paolo, if you want to elaborate.

Because, from honestly speaking, our plan on Germany is not driven by the pension reform. This is an nice to have, but we are not moving there for that reason.

For sure the new pension reforms, they're going to go in our direction. Every time we have something that goes in the direction that you have to use efficient products, you have to use funds, ETFs, asset under custody, that's for us it's perfect, just perfect.

As Alessandro said, we're not 100% concentrated on the pension reforms in Germany. We know that in Germany there is a huge opportunity for not just for us, but for many players.

We know that the majority of the assets are still in the traditional banking system, not just in Germany, but almost everywhere. This is something that for us is just gold.

It's, yeah, that's it.

Crypto. Also on crypto if you want to...

On crypto. The crypto, you are processing quite well.

We are in final talks with the regulators. At the same time, we are organizing the backbone and the infrastructure that will be the platform our clients they're going to use.

I'm quite confident that is going to be live not probably the first months of 2027 or so. We're still talking to the regulators.

Thank you. Inizio?

No no, ci siamo. È prenotata un'altra persona di Intesa.

La prossima è di Adele Palama, giusto? Sì.

Hi. Can you guys hear me?

Anyway, I'll try to ask the questions. One is a follow-up on the NII.

I understand that you don't provide a continuous guidance, but let's say, can you remind us that you are on in terms of rate? Then, which is the expectation for the provision of the NII into the model and the assumption that you have on rates in your guidance?

Then, second question is on the management fee margin. I've seen that quarter-on-quarter there has been a small increase.

I think the margin is stable. I was wondering if you have a guidance there on the evolution of the margin going forward, and if there is only a small increase.

Then the last question, sorry, on costs, again, I couldn't properly hear the answer before. You are expecting to get savings from the implementation of the AI earlier than the CMD, but the guidance here excluding for growth hasn't changed, around 6%.

I was just wondering if the improved guidance is really more to a savings of cost, which is going to be more evident in 2027, or how do we need to look at the total growth of costs, including the cost for the growth initiatives? Thanks.

Sorry again for the bad quality of the line. Let me follow up on the net interest income.

The positive expectation on the future evolution of net interest income is a combination of the expected evolution of rates and also the expected evolution of our base of deposits. Just to give you an example, because there is a very clear correlation: during the month of July, for example, we had more or less an negative deposits for the region of €300 million, that clearly is negative for the evolution of net interest income, but this has been driven by an significant rise of interest rates.

If you put the two components of them together, the month of July, for example, has been definitely positive for the future of evolution of the net interest income. Our expectation in terms of rates are clearly that we are embedding when we are making the fine-tuning of the plan is remaining more conservative respect what you have in the forward rate curve, because we prefer to be cautious.

Nevertheless, this is clearly showing the clear evidence that net interest income is going to continue to progress and is going to keep on growing. Again, the main reason is the quality of the base of deposits.

The presence of such large amount of stable deposits means that clearly, also when you have an significant increase of rates, the impact on your base of deposits tends to be not such as big, on the other hand that you are capturing an interesting chunk of the evolution of rates. On your questions on the management fees margins, yes, this is aligned with the previous guidance, where we were guiding for an relatively stable margins, management fees.

Going forward, considering the kind of actions we are taking in terms of how we are guiding our network of financial planners, we are confident that progressively the mix of our asset under management sales is going to progressively improve. This clearly is boding well for at least the maintenance of stable margins, but clearly we think that we cannot rule out that there is room for also some modest increase of the margins.

On the guidance for costs going forward, as we were saying, our activity driven by the usage of artificial intelligence is progressing very rapidly, because I would like to remind that Fineco is a tech company, for us it's extremely rapid and easy to put at work the dividends represented by artificial intelligence. What it's emerging as a clear evidence that the room for accelerating the reduction of the growth of the operational costs going forward is clearly emerging.

Clearly it's difficult to give you an precise exactly phase-in of this process, but we are extremely positive on that side and probably going forward, approaching the year-end, probably we are going to give an even more precise indication from a numbers point of view. This is on the costs.

So. Sorry, [unclear]...

Excuse me, I didn't... May you repeat your question?

Sorry.

On the NII, the sensitivity to rates, because I didn't catch the answer.

On NII, as clearly we remain positive on the continuous growth of NII going forward. The reason is a combination of the outlook on rates and the quality of our deposits.

Because clearly, when you have rates going up, clearly you can expect some pressure on deposits, but the pressure we expect is clearly pretty low, because as we showed during the presentation, Fineco has the highest percentage among the European banks of stable deposits. This means on the vast majority of our deposits, the beta of these deposits is zero.

This means that you have a significant positive impact generated by the rise on rates. We are using in making our revision of the plan a conservative approach, because we are not using the forward rate curve, but we are using a curve that is more conservative than the forward rate curve.

I don't know, Lorena, we can say by how much is more conservative?

We can speak on average by 30 30 basis points.

Yes, we are on average 30 basis points below the forward rate curve. This is the assumption, yeah.

Thank you.

Can you explain us a little bit what are the indications in terms of EPS growth, because you guided during the plan to double digits EPS growth, where are we looking at now? Can we say are we kind of getting closer to 15% or where do we stand?

This is the first question. Then, do you have an update on the securities lending platform?

How is that progressing, and what volumes do you expect to reach by the end of this year and perhaps by the end of next year? Then a question on the senior issues, senior preferred bonds.

What are the funding needs for the business for the forward? Should we expect to tap the market again, say, once per year, or are you okay for three years now?

Thank you.

I don't know, Paolo, do you want to elaborate both on EPS growth ambition and updating on securities lending platform, and then Lorena, then you will give a little bit more of color on our funding needs?

On the EPS growth ambition, yeah, we are very positive. Of course, we confirm what we said to the Capital Market Day, but we have also new information that we are very positive.

We can probably do even better. The initiatives are going very well.

One of the initiatives that you mentioned, the securities lending, now we are fully operative. Now we are concentrated on one side bringing new counterparties in the platform.

I remind you that the new platform is a new marketplace where we can share securities with external counterparties. The more counterparties we have, the better is for the platform.

On one side, we will keep on onboarding new counterparties, institutional counterparties interested on our AUC. As we mentioned, it's very valuable in terms of granularity and the fact that it's retail AUC.

On the other side, we keep on pushing on having the permission from our clients to use their securities to lend it to the platform, to put them to the platform. We have a very high percentage of permission, almost 40%, that is already quite big.

On the other side, we push on gathering asset under custody from the outside, from new clients or existing clients. We're doing a great job on this.

The more AUC we have in the platform, the better is for the securities lending platform. By the end of this year, we will start seeing some results, and I think we can start sharing some significant numbers.

For now, we are just concentrated in keep on onboarding new counterparties and gathering as much AUC as possible in the platform.

Paolo, I just want to give more color on the Excuse me, EPS or ETF?

EPS.

EPS growth ambition, now, yeah. Excuse me, because I got wrong, I confused EPS with ETF, but your question was not on ETF, clearly is much more relevant, the EPS growth ambition now.

Yes, clearly the ambition has gone up because we made two upgrading in the evolution of our outlook for 2026, and at the end of the story, clearly the final landing point of the upgrading is an improved EPS growth. Yes, clearly it's clear we are not giving yet precise numbers, but clearly the ambition now is definitely higher, yeah, currently with what we are experiencing.

Again, honestly speaking, it's not a surprise, because as we are continuously repeating, if you want to have an proxy that is suggesting to you the future evolution of our revenues and EPS, look to the evolution of our net sales. The more we have net sales coming on board, and the more we are accelerating on net sales, and the more you can expect a continuous acceleration in the growth of EPS.

Clearly now the outlook is clearly higher than we had when we presented the plan. On Lorena, if you want to spend a few words on the senior preferred?

Yes, thank you. As in May we issued €500 million of senior preferred.

This issuance was made because in October the issuance of €500 million of senior preferred issued in October 2021 will not be anymore eligible for an MREL point of view and will be recalled. Now we have on the market €1.3 billion of senior preferred, but in October we will come back to an amount of €800 million.

Our expectation is that this amount is fully compliant for the following years. We will probably issue a new senior bond, a new senior preferred in 2028 for the substitution of the issuance made in 2023.

Thank you.

for taking my questions. I've only one...

Can you hear me?

Senti...

Can you hear me?

...for the extremely important questions you raised, and thank you for joining our conference call, and feel free to make us a call for any follow-up. Thank you again.